"Thank you," she said softly.
"Did you see it?" Jack asked. "Did you?"
"Yes." She nodded. "I did."
"It can't be right," Jack said. "It's a trick." He shook his head. "I don't believe it."
"It's not. It has to follow the laws." Schuyler said gently.
"I know about the Sacred Language," Jack snapped. "But it has to be a mistake."
"No mistake. Those are the rules of creation."
Jack glowered. "No."
The monster had shown itself for one brief moment, when it had no choice but to obey Schuyler's words. The monster had shown its true form. And it was the face of the authority behind New York, the face of the man who single-handedly changed the city to bend to his will.
The face of Charles Force.
His own father.
CHAPTER 40
Schuyler told Jack everything she'd put together, hoping that it wasn't true. "It's him. He was there on the night Aggie died. I saw him at the basement of The Bank. He was coming out of the Repository. I remember now. It puts him in the scene of the crime. It was him, Jack."
Jack shook his head.
"You can't deny what you saw. It was your father's face."
"You're wrong. It's a trick of the light, something else." He kept shaking his head and staring down at the blood on the sidewalk.
"Listen to me. Jack, we have to find him. My grandmother said Silver Bloods don't even know what they are. Your father might not even realize he's been possessed."
Jack didn't argue this time.
She put a hand on his arm. "Where is he?"
"Where he always is. The hospital."
"What do you mean? What hospital?"
"Columbia Pres, but I don't know what room. I don't know what he does up there. Only that he visits someone there a lot." Jack said. "Why?"
"I think I might know where we can find him," Schuyler said.
Schuyler felt dire trepidation as they shared a taxicab up to hospital, but she tried to suppress it. When they arrived at the complex, the guards joked about her ?boyfriend? as they gave Jack a visitor's tag.
"Who's here? Where are we going?" he asked, as he followed her swiftly down the hallway.
"My mother," Schuyler said. "You'll see."
"Your mother? I thought your mother was dead."
"She might as well be," Schuyler said grimly.
She led him down the empty hallways to the corner room. She looked through the glass window and motioned for Jack to do the same.
There was a man there, kneeling at the foot of the bed. The same mysterious visitor who came every Sunday, whom Schuyler had seen more than once in her mother's room. So that was why Charles Force had looked so familiar to her at Aggie's funeral. Now she recognized the set of the shoulders. He was the man in the basement of The Bank, and the beast who had just attacked her. The dark stranger wasn't her father after all, but a Silver Blood. A monster. She felt a furious rage - what if Charles Force had had something to do with her mother's condition? What had he done to her?