Hallam sat down next to me again. We watched as the Sons left the attic. Then it was just me and Hallam. And the bodies.
"I'm sorry, Azazel," said Hallam.
"Yes," I said.
"But I'm glad I didn't have to do it," he said.
The statement should have made me angry. It didn't. I didn't really think I had the capacity for emotions right now. "You thought you'd have to kill Jason?"
"I hoped I wouldn't," said Hallam.
I held Jason close to me, still rocking his quiet body. My brain was still putting pieces together, even in the face of this. Would nothing stop me? Wasn't the death of Jason enough to stop me, even if it was enough to stop Jason?
"You've been working for the Sons this whole time, haven't you?" I said.
"No," said Hallam. "I don't work for the Sons."
"You brought them here," I said.
"It's complicated," he said.
"Were they coming to capture Jason?" I asked.
"I don't know why they were coming," said Hallam. "I just know that Weem put me in touch with them."
Right. He'd been talking to Weem. "Why were you in touch with Edgar Weem?"
Hallam didn't speak for a moment. His eyes darted from Jason's head in my lap to my eyes. "Are you sure you want to talk about this now?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Not sure about much of anything right now. But you might as well tell me."
"It's a long story," said Hallam.
"Guess I'm not going anywhere," I said. All my captors were dead or captured. The threat to me had been neutralized. Overall, I guessed I was safe. But the price . . . the price had been Jason's life, and the victory felt empty.
Shouldn't I be crying now? Shouldn't I be a mess? Why was I so calm? Dry-eyed? Was this the price I'd paid for killing my brothers and Lilith? Had I lost my ability to grieve? I remembered just minutes ago, when I'd been crying in joy at the sight of him. Now, when I'd never get to do that again, I was a stone. I didn't understand.
"Tell me," I said to Hallam, not looking away from Jason's face.
"Okay," said Hallam. "In November, you remember, I went to talk to Edgar Weem, to work the deal for you and Jason."
"Yes," I said.
"I arrived in Weem's office that evening after flying to England. Weem was waiting for me. He already knew that I had documents about Michaela, so I figured that he was sure of the scale of what I'd discovered about him. During our phone conversation, he'd seemed worried and confused. By the time I arrived, he seemed even more so. I chalked this up to my impeccable detective skills. But once I got settled and we began talking, he started to tell me things.
"He seemed very contrite and very sad. He seemed very old. He told me that the whole business with Jason had happened when he was a younger man. He said that he'd been stupid then, thinking he could create the Rising Sun. He should have known that he couldn't mess with forces like the ones he'd been intending to mess with.
"I didn't understand what he meant. I told him frankly that I didn't believe in any forces anymore. I had evidence that the entire Rising Sun debacle had been engineered by him, and I wasn't inclined to listen to anymore mumbo-jumbo about ancient powers and magics and whatever other ridiculous nonsense he wanted to spew at me. I told him that I'd had enough of that while I was working for the Sons thank you very much, and I didn't want anymore of it now. I was here to work a deal, plain and simple.
"He said that I was mistaken. He said that yes, it was true that he had manufactured Jason, that he had fathered him. But, he said, I mustn't think that because he'd engineered the entire thing that there weren't very powerful things that had transpired in Jason's creation. He told me that I didn't know what depths he'd plummeted to in the search for that kind of knowledge. Then he went on some kind of extended comparison between him and Faust, about making deals with the devil for knowledge.
"I was starting to tune him out. Look, I said to him, it didn't matter whether or not he thought Jason was actually the Rising Sun or not. The fact was that once everyone else in the Sons found out what he'd done, they wouldn't think that Jason was the Rising Sun. I had the power to destroy the organization and to destroy him if he didn't cooperate with me.
"He laughed then. He said that I shouldn't assume that he was trying to tell me that Jason was the Rising Sun. Quite the opposite, he said. He'd done awful, terrible things when creating Jason. He and Michaela had participated in rituals that were illegal and immoral and repulsive. He told me about some of them. I don't want to repeat much. He invoked powers dark and mysterious, powers that slumber in ancient texts, too horrible to be named, let alone be awakened. He said that he didn't think Jason was the Rising Sun at all.