From Hell (7 page)

No one around to see us, it was time
to stop skulking and do what I do best: make noise and break
things.

A swift kick to the door split the
wood at the handle and knocked it loose from the frame. The sigil
flickered, burning a reddish-orange before fading to a charcoal
gray. The door swung open with a creak. The tangy scent of charred
metal quickly gave way to something else…something
horrible.

No longer contained by the ward, the
smell of rusty copper and rotting meat spilled from the room in
putrid waves. Scarlett and I covered our noses with our hands and
glanced inside. There on a small cot in the corner of the room was
a bundle of shredded cloth bathed in red. I inched forward only to
realize the bundle was actually a body. My stomach lurched.
Scarlett gagged at the doorway and stumbled off as I just stood
there, frozen in place, staring at the ruin in the bed. There was
no mistaking what I was looking at.

The Ripper had struck
again.

Eight

Up to that point, I’d only seen
photographs of the carnage the Ripper had left behind, the horror
suffused by distance and the grainy nature of the photos. Here,
standing at the foot of the bed just feet from where his latest
victim lie hacked up as if by a deranged butcher, there was no way
to escape the brutality of the act.

Able to tell the body was that of a
woman—due only to the killer’s history and the vaguely recognizable
dress stuck moistly to the legs—I could feel my mother’s disgust
welling up inside me. The woman’s face had been sliced at random
angles, a sharp blade having cut the flesh down to the bone, the
cartilage of her nose hacked away and hanging in shreds. There was
nothing left of her to identify, the damage too extensive. Her
dress had been torn away, her breasts, stomach, and groin cut
apart, bits and pieces scattered wetly about the bed and nearby
floor. A partial set of red boot prints stood out against the
darker shadows of the floor, the toes coming to a bit of a point.
Jack had stood right over the woman as she died.

There was so much blood I could taste
it, so I turned away. As much as it sickened me, there was nothing
I could do for her. She was beyond help. All that was left was
revenge.

Resisting the urge to draw a breath, I
glanced about the room and realized the sigil outside hadn’t been
the only one at work. A number of them had been drafted upon the
walls, but none with the hasty hand of the one outside. The killer
had taken his time inside. Unable to tell what had been done, I
stepped closer to the first and noticed the absolute silence that
enveloped me.

I glanced at the door to see Scarlett
just outside. She held her hand over her mouth, coughing into it,
yet I couldn’t hear a sound. I called out to her, but she didn’t
respond. My pulse thrumming in my veins, I ran over to her. The
moment I cleared the doorframe, her hacking cough slammed against
my ears. She started and spun to glare at me, one of her swords
coming up.

I raised my hands to ward her off.
“Easy, Scarlett.” A glance back into the apartment set a bitter
sickness bubbling up in my guts. “I know how he’s getting away with
it.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of
her hand and hitched her chin at me.

“
He has silencing wards
inside.”

Scarlett’s shoulders slumped, her gaze
rising to the sky. There was no doubt she was thinking exactly what
I was, but I doubted God was on the same page. Turn the other
cheek, and all that.

Able to cut off the apartment from the
rest of the world, the Ripper could do anything he wanted to his
victim and no one would hear any of it, no matter how loud or long
she screamed. A cold chill prickled the skin of my arms. He’d done
just that, slicing the woman to pieces while she lay in her own
bed, just feet from her neighbors on each side and they hadn’t
heard a thing. The other wards had kept the stench of her rotting
body down as she lay there for who knows how long. Jack had invaded
her home and killed her where she lived.

My chest tightened as I went back into
the room. As much as I didn’t want to be there, I still had work to
do. My uncle had sent me here to catch a killer. Up until right
then, it had just been a job. I was there because Lucifer wanted me
to do something. Now, it was personal. Seeing the savaged remains
of Jack’s victim was a greater motivation than anything else.
Anyone who would carve up an innocent like that needed to be taken
out, needed to be offered the sharp end of a knife just as he
showed this poor, young woman.

The silence only amplified my fury.
Unable to hear the breath spilling from my lungs or the creak of
the floor as I walked gave me no respite from my thoughts. While
the ward assured me no one would hear me as I investigated the
apartment, I couldn’t handle the absolute quiet. My heart thumping
without sound inside my chest, I went over to the silencing ward
and sank my fingers into the moist wood. A quick scrape cut lines
through the sigil, pieces of wood and old paint peeling up beneath
my fingernails.

The world crashed into my
ears.

One moment it was utterly silent, the
next, the rumble of distant thunder sounded as though it exploded
in my head. Scarlett’s pacing boots were a cannonade; her muffled
coughs the barks of wolves. The floor screamed beneath my weight
and the clock on the wall droned, every second a snapping
twig.

It was a few, very uncomfortable
moments before the world settled and my hearing adjusted. When it
did, I drew a deep breath despite the stench, just to hear the
sound. My nose hated me right then, but the fetid stink of dead
flesh chased the anger from me, replacing it with disgust. A quiet,
steady hum rang in my ears.

I looked to the body once more, and
then let my gaze slide away. For all the damage Jack had done, the
poor woman wouldn’t be telling me what happened. No, if there was
to be anything useful in the room, it would be there alongside the
wards. They alone were proof that there was more to these killings
than anyone had known.

The papers hadn’t mentioned any
strange symbols drawn upon the walls near the other victims, but
then again they hadn’t been killed in their homes. Maybe Jack had
murdered them elsewhere and only dropped their bodies where they
could be found. If that was the case, he could likely go on doing
it forever. No one would think twice about a man walking along with
a drunken prostitute. He could dump the bodies anywhere and then
just stroll away, never to be recognized. Worse still, if he knew
enough magic to keep his crime scenes from being found, what else
was he capable of?

I didn’t really want to know. He
simply needed to die.

I followed the wards from one to the
next, circling the small room to look at each of the five sigils
set upon the walls, a few, faint footprints led the way with
crimson trails. At the last of the wards, a thought struck me.
Turning so my back was against the wall, I traced the location of
the wards with my eyes, sighing as a mental image formed. They’d
been arranged at five points. If I were to stretch a rope between
the points, it would form the shape of a pentagram.

Add that to the ominous room number
and it was clear this wasn’t just some random murder or sadistic
release. It had been a ritual.

I swallowed hard at the
realization. Lucifer might not be involved in any of this, but
given the evidence, I couldn’t be sure someone else from
Hell
wasn’t
involved somehow.
Was that why I’d
been sent
? Had Lou or Baalth
suspected?

My gaze drifted back to
the footprints. Jack clearly hadn’t expected anyone to find his
little abattoir. However, something nagged at me while I examined
the prints. They hovered near the closest wards, toes facing the
wall, but that struck me as strange seeing how he would have drawn
the wards first.
Why then were there
bloody footprints near them?
The sigils
were an early part of the ritual process, placed and forgotten.
Maybe Jack had checked them after not getting a response to
his
message
.

But if Jack had been worried about his
work enough to double check it, what other mistakes had he made? I
looked to the prints near the bed once more and noticed something I
hadn’t earlier. A quick scan of the others confirmed it. There’d
been more than one person in the room.

The prints that encircled the
apartment were broader across the toes than the ones beside the
bed. That’s why the blood had been dragged about the room. It
wasn’t Jack who was worried about the wards, but someone else with
him. We weren’t just looking for one killer, but two. That
realization sunk into my stomach like a stone.

I glanced back at Scarlett. She paced
in a tight circle, her eyes always avoiding the apartment, her gaze
dropping to the ground as she turned past the open doorway. It was
one thing to let her know we were facing someone with magical
ability, but it was something entirely different to mention the
ritualistic nature of the murder or that we were chasing more than
one suspect.

People didn’t spill blood and draw
pentagrams to draw the favor of God or the Choir. No, they only did
that to curry favor with Satan, good ol’ Uncle Lou, or one of the
other lieutenants of Hell. Scarlett might not be the brightest star
in the sky, but she would understand exactly what all this meant…if
I were to tell her.

Before she could work her nerve up to
come inside, I went out and pulled the door closed behind
me.

She stopped her pacing to watch me.
“We need to inform the authorities.”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

She started toward the apartment. “But
you can’t just leave her there.”

“
Scarlett.” I blocked the
way to the door. “She’ll be found soon enough, I promise. There’s
nothing we can do for her, but if we raise the alarm, the bobbies
will shut down the area and we’ll never find
these…
this
guy,”
I corrected. “We can’t have that. He needs to think he’s in the
clear.”

Knuckles popped as Scarlett clenched
her fist about her hilt.

“
We got lucky stumbling
across the killer and forcing his hand.” I gestured to the sigil on
the outside wall. “He drew this in a hurry to keep people from
finding the body. He might not know who’s on to him, but he clearly
suspects someone is.” The fact that I’d caught a whiff of his
presence meant he probably sensed me in return.

“
Won’t he just hide;
hunker down until we’re gone?”

“
I don’t think so.” What I
didn’t tell her was
why
I didn’t think Jack and his buddy would
disappear. Like with most beliefs, the
Devil’s Laws
were passed down from
practitioner to practitioner, the idiocies and blatant falsehoods
becoming canon as time went on. According to the lore, you didn’t
start the process and walk away. If Jack was looking to summon
Uncle Lou, he needed to stick around until he got an answer, not
that he ever would, least not with parlor tricks. You didn’t summon
the Devil, he summoned you.

But if that’s what was going on, why
did Jack run off when we were in the bar together? Even the most
amateurish of wannabe Satanists couldn’t be so dumb as to think
Lucifer himself would pop in for a chat. He had to know my uncle
would send a minion if he bothered to respond at all. Then again, I
couldn’t be sure it was Jack I’d run into. It could well have been
the second guy; the one pacing about the room as Jack did the deed.
It’s not like I’d had time to measure his feet.

Someone had checked the wards in the
kill room as if they didn’t trust them. That paranoia was probably
why the guy had run off and sketched the new sigil on the apartment
wall after he’d spotted me. He was worried I would stumble across
it before they moved the body so he tried to protect their
secret.

A smile crept to my lips. It wasn’t
Jack I’d run across, but someone I could take advantage of. This
guy was the weak link. His fear had led us right to the body, his
abilities nowhere near those of Jack’s. He was how we’d track down
the Ripper.

“
What do we do
now?”

I glanced down at my palm, and then
looked up to grin at Scarlett. “I have an idea.”

Oddly enough, she didn’t seem happy
about that.

Nine

We’d circled through the streets of
Whitechapel for hours, Scarlett asking me over and over where we
were going. I waved her off each time because I wasn’t even sure
myself. Finally she gave up, and I reveled in the relative peace of
the chilly, London night.

The smart folks had fled the streets,
but there were still people out and about, though few and far
between. It made my search more difficult but I knew the general
area so I figured I’d stumble across what I was looking for sooner
or later. It was, unfortunately, later as it turned out.

A quiet giggle floated through the air
as we approached a corner we’d probably passed fifteen times in our
travels. I stopped and hugged the wall.

“
What are we looking for?”
Scarlett asked again. There was no missing the sharpened edge of
her simmering fury.