Read Darkness Returns Online

Authors: Rob Cornell

Tags: #magic, #horror, #paranormal, #werewolves, #action, #thriller, #urban fantasy

Darkness Returns (2 page)

BOOK: Darkness Returns
12.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Burlowski tried to tug Hoyt along with him, but Hoyt planted his feet and stiffened the arm the security man held.

“I don’t understand,” Hoyt said. “What does it mean?”

The flat stare Ryan gave turned Hoyt’s gut into a cold sandbag. “It means you really should give Shanna that Valentine and tell her how you feel, ‘cause the world’s gonna end soon.”

How the hell did you know about—

Burlowski yanked hard, throwing his three hundred pounds out in the hall, his body the ball, his arm the chain clamped to Hoyt’s bicep. Gravity did the rest, pulling Hoyt off balance so that he had to scramble backward through the door in order to keep from falling over.

He thought about struggling to pull free and get back in there, ask the kid how in the world he knew about the Valentine, let alone his feelings for Shanna. Going back in the room also meant facing Shanna with his secret exposed by a crazy-talking kid diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia even though Hoyt had overheard one doc admit he didn’t really know
what
was wrong, as his symptoms were so erratic and standard treatments didn’t work.

Hoyt let Burlowski drag him down the hall a little further before he finally wrenched himself free. “I got it, Bill.”

“Then quit acting like one of the patients and call the damn doc.”

He did as he was told, then stayed planted in his seat in the Glass Box, thinking about putting in that transfer request after all. And if that didn’t work, maybe quitting altogether, though that would put a strain on Shanna what with them as understaffed as they already were.

Ryan went back to screaming. He kept saying, “We have to stop her. We have to stop her.”

Fucking nonsense
, Hoyt thought while he stared at Shanna’s purse. Then he pulled the Valentine out of his back pocket and jammed it into her bag. What did he have to lose? According to Ryan, the world was about to end.

Damn if it didn’t feel true.

Chapter One

The whole house smelled like blood and shit.

While a few of the cops, and even one of the DEA agents had taken to stuffing handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, Lockman forced himself to get used to the stench. He’d slopped through worse.

He stood in what was furnished like a study with bookshelves lining the walls, a massive desk at one end, behind which a set of French doors opened to a balcony overlooking an Olympic-sized swimming pool lighted this evening both under the water and by a series of ornate lampposts that were supposed to resemble old-fashioned gas lights. As far as studies went, though, this one could have swallowed an average homeowner’s entire floor plan. If not for the plush carpet and even plusher furniture, the mutters from the uniformed officers would have echoed in the massive space. Despite all the room, the study clung to a claustrophobic taint, probably caused by the stink, and worsened by the amount of body parts scattered throughout.

You had heads with eyes gaping into space, arteries dangling from the necks like streamers. Arms. Legs. Both with plenty of exposed and splintered bone. A veritable web work of guts strung the floor like wet extension cords backstage at a rock concert. All of it topped off with a congealing glaze of blood.

Among the flesh remains, lay chips of plaster from the ceiling, paper shreds from the books on the shelves, puffs of stuffing from the cushions on the furniture, and lots of shell casings scattered everywhere. There’s been a hell of a firefight in this room. But most of the dead had not got that way by gunfire—they’d been ripped and chewed apart.

The DEA agent whom Lockman had handed the fancy envelope with the White House seal moved his lips as he read the order he’d drawn from the envelope, which also included the White House seal and corresponding letterhead. Lockman was glad to have it out of his hands, though he could tell from the sour look on the agent’s face that he wanted to shove it right back at Lockman.

“What the hell is this?”

“Plain English, it means this crime scene is ours now.”
Ours
meant his and Mica’s, who stood a step behind Lockman, her hands folded behind her back, spine ramrod, but that white stripe down the middle of her black hair blowing any sense of seriousness she was trying to display. Pixie or not, the girl needed a new hairstyle if she wanted to play covert government agent.

“And who the fuck are you?”

“The answer’s above your pay grade.”

“This is total bullshit. That guy…” He swung out an arm and pointed to the body slumped facedown on the desk in front of the French doors. “…is behind one of the Big Easy’s biggest meth operations. I’ve been after his ass for four years. And this?” He did a full turn, taking in the carnage around him. “This is not how I saw this case breaking.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” though Lockman didn’t sound at all sorry, because he wasn’t. As much as he thought he did, this guy did not want to fit the pieces of this throwdown together. He couldn’t handle the picture it would make. “Think of it this way. You got your man. He’s out of the meth business.”

The agent waved the White House letter and envelope in Lockman’s face. “Oh, no. I didn’t
get
anything. This has the markings of a takeover. At least I had tabs on this guy. Whoever’s taking over, I don’t have anything.”

“It’s not a takeover.”

The agent’s eyes narrowed. “Then what? Vigilantes?”

That’s when Lockman tossed a phrase he hadn’t said in a long-ass time.

“It’s classified.”

Once they had all the cops cleared out, they could get to the real work. Lockman hit a button on his smart phone and put it to his ear. After only half a ring, she answered with, “‘Sup?”

“We’re free of pedestrians.”

The line broke without a follow up. A second later, Jessie dropped onto the balcony and came in through the French doors. She was dressed all in black, her black hair pulled back in a bun. Aside from her gray pallor and the black veins prominently running under her skin, she looked almost the same as she had when Lockman first met her on his doorstep in California.

Jessie’s jaw dropped, showing off her fangs, as she took in the sight of the room. “Ho-lee shnikies.” She sniffed. Made a face. “I bet that smell makes you guys sick.”

“I’m over it,” Lockman said.

Mica didn’t bother with an answer. She never said much to Lockman. He had the sense she blamed him for Kate’s death. Which was fine. He blamed himself. The only thing that kept it from overwhelming him was knowing that Kate had forgiven him.

“Yeah, well, it makes my mouth water. All that blood?” She scowled with a bitterness a hundred years beyond the age of her face. “The poop, however, is making me gag.”

Lockman wasn’t sure whether to marvel or worry at this return to her glib self. The last couple years had dried up that part of her personality. Getting turned into a vamp could do that. She had just lost her mother, too. If anything, she should have fallen into a deeper funk. It was hard to tell if she was faking.

A conversation for another time. They had work to do.

“Anybody here believe this was a scuffle between drug lords?”

Jessie raised her eyebrows. “I’m seeing vamp parts. And this guy…” she grabbed the body slumped over the desk by the hair and pulled him up. Half of his face had sloughed off like warm putty. The other half matched Jessie’s pallor with those same black veins. He wore a button-up shirt with about half those buttons undone, exposing the bony, pallid chest underneath, the collection of gold chains around his neck, and the wooden stake jammed in his heart. “I guess you could call him Scarface.”

She let go of his hair and the dead vamp flopped back onto the desk.

“Do vamps deal drugs?” Jessie asked.

“Vamps do whatever they want,” Mica said. “Least these days.”

Lockman did a quick scan of the room, mostly the floor, to confirm his initial thoughts when he’d first entered. “You see some of the torsos with Kevlar?”

Jessie and Mica both nodded.

“Mortals,” Lockman said. “Not one of them with any shots in the Kevlar.”

“Vamps like to use their hands,” Mica said.

“Not all vamps,” Jessie said, eyeing Mica hard.

Mica raised her hands in surrender. “I don’t count you in their company, love.”

Lockman pushed on with his observations. “How many whole bodies you see?”

“Two,” Mica and Jessie said in unison.

“And they are…”

“Vamps,” Jessie said first. “With lots of silver slugs in them.”

“So these are our guys.” Mica picked a path through the room, carefully keeping entrails off her boots. “Looks like they didn’t fare so well this time.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Jessie said and crossed her arms. “Why do you think this scene’s so much worse than the others?”

They had visited or studied the police casebooks of four crime scenes that featured vamp remains since arriving in New Orleans. A couple had mortal casualties, bystanders that had taken a stray bullet in both cases. As far as Lockman could tell, this was the first scene with claws-on vamp casualties. And the one with the highest amount of dead on either side. This little vigilante group they’d been tracking had slipped up, and good.

“They’re amateurs,” Lockman said. “And they bit off more than they could chew this time.” He walked over to a fat arm that lay on the floor as if pulled off from a mannequin, except for the stump of bone at the shoulder, and all the blood, of course. The arm had a tattoo of an American flag clenched in the claws of a soaring bald eagle. A thick banner curled underneath the tat with printed lettering that stated,
These colors don’t run.

Lockman pointed at the tattoo. “No self-respecting soldier would get that shit put on his arm. These guys are wannabes.” He toed the AR-15 laying on the floor inches away from the severed arm’s fingertips. “Well armed wannabes. Worst kind.”

Mica lifted a thin shoulder. The tank top she wore showed off a collection of her own tattoos up and down only one arm, all sorts of pictures and symbols fitted together like an abstract puzzle. “What’s the big deal? Recreational vamp slayers ain’t such a fuss.”

“I said the same thing to your boss.”

She didn’t like his tone. He could tell by the way her jaw set and she pinched her eyes. You couldn’t say much about Kress without Mica getting touchy, Lockman had noticed. He wondered if their relationship was more than professional. Not that it mattered to him.

“This falls into our territory because of the mortal casualties. And because they don’t know how to clean up after their damn selves. Since Barrow, the prez has got a bug up his ass about keeping the supernatural on the down low.”

“So we’re the clean-up crew?” Jessie’s lip curled as she surveyed the floor as if calculating how much scrubbing it would take to clean the carpet.

“We’ll set a match to this place when we’re through. But we have to figure out who these jerk offs are before they do any worse. Shining on the local PD is one thing. Laying a gag order on the DEA…” Lockman let them fill in the rest.

“So we’re looking for clues,” Jessie said, “in a big pile of guts.”

“Suck it up.”

Jessie cocked her hip and gave Lockman her disgusted teen face. “Really?”

“What?”

“Suck it up? You think that’s funny?”

Mica actually snickered, yet somehow managed it without smiling.

Lockman caught up. He rolled his eyes. “When have you ever known me to make a pun? Give me a break. I meant, deal with it.”

Jessie cracked a smile. “Nice to see I can still get a rise out of you.”

“Yeah, right.” He turned his head down to start searching the remains, and to keep her from seeing his own smirk.

Twenty minutes later, Lockman found it.

He had moved to studying the vamp at the desk, the DEA’s apparent drug lord whom they had no idea was a vampire. What a shock that agent would have received if Lockman had let him stick around to investigate the scene.

The thing that caught Lockman’s attention was something grasped in the drug lord’s fist, a sprig of blonde held like a flower stem. Death had turned the vamp’s fist into stone. Lockman had to use a letter opener off the desk to pry the fingers open.

The lock of blonde hair floated from the vamp’s hand to the desktop. Several ends of the hair had bits of skin still attached as if he’d ripped the hair off a scalp. The lock, itself, measured about seven or eight inches.

The inside of Lockman’s belly prickled. His subconscious shot out a conclusion he couldn’t tuck away once it bounced around freely in his mind. He was certain a lab analysis—or the mojo equivalent, if that was Kress’s preference—would back up what his instincts told him.

Teresa.

He picked up the lock of hair in his latex-gloved hand and opened his mouth to call Mica and Jessie over, but his phone buzzed against his hip. He pulled it from the clip on his belt.

“Yeah?”

“I need you to bring your team in.”

Kress, his gravel train voice, immortalized by his films, unmistakable.

“We’re smack in the middle of a crime scene. And I’ve got—”

“Drop what you’re doing and bring the team in. Something’s come up.”

BOOK: Darkness Returns
12.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

My Wife's Little Sister by Cassandra Zara
Rodeo Sweetheart by Betsy St. Amant
Not a Day Goes By by E. Lynn Harris
Unleashed by Nancy Holder
A Gallant Gamble by Jackie Williams
Different Roads by Clark, Lori L.
Our Song by Fraiberg, Jordanna