God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (18 page)

“My parents.” AJ bolted for the house, paying no attention to the few screams behind him: one Clover, yelling for John, and one was Logan, yelling for him to stop.

He ripped the screen door off that last hinge, flinging it into the rose bed next to the stoop, and rushed in the house.

“Mom! Dad!” AJ heard the radio on in the kitchen and headed toward it. He stopped in the doorway. His mother was standing at the counter with her back to him and she appeared to be chopping up vegetables.

“Mom?” he asked in a small voice. It was all he could muster. She didn’t turn, didn’t speak.

“
Ma
?” he asked, this time a little louder.

The room changed, the temperature plummeted. The lights overhead began to flicker and then exploded.

“What the fuck?” AJ shielded himself from the shower of glass and fluorescent bulb.

His mother turned around and her throat was gone; it had been ripped out, leaving a gaping hole the size of a softball in her neck. Blood covered the front of her shirt and pants.

Then her eyes changed. They turned from their normal shade of light hazel to a cold, dead black that AJ knew all too well. And then she spoke. It wasn’t her soft, kind voice that he heard. It was the voice of a madman, much lower and brimming with insanity.

“Mommy’s not home right now,” the voice said and she charged at him with her knife raised. AJ backed up into the wall, screaming.

Two shots were fired. John Lubbock stood in the doorway, gun trained on AJ’s dead mother, having pulled the trigger mere moments before she--
it
--could run a knife through her son’s throat. AJ sunk to the floor and put his head on his knees.

He had no idea how long he sat against the wall; there was no time, there was only pain. He barely registered a few muffled screams and another series of gunshots as they rang out in another part of the house.

All was quiet and he cried harder than he could ever remember. He didn’t want to cry, he fucking
hated
to cry, but he couldn’t help it.

Sepia-toned floods of childhood trips to the park and snowball fights collapsed all over him. Bittersweet recollections of a thousand beautiful things paraded through his heart with nihilistic indifference, smashing and tearing it, even breaking it in a few places. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw her years ago, walking him to school while they sang “Hey Jude” and the hot tears pushed through his eyes, and then he heard his name.

“AJ? Come in here.” It was Logan. AJ sat a moment longer, not knowing if he could summon the strength or the courage to get up.

-naaa naa naa na na na na...na na na na...Hey Jude-

Then John Lubbock was kneeling beside him. “Kid...we found your father. He’s still alive, but...”

“What?” AJ looked up.

“He’s upstairs,” John said and stood, holding out a hand. AJ let himself be helped to his feet. The tears still wet on his cheeks as he walked upstairs, scrubbing fiercely at his eyes with his arm as he went.

-
na na na na...Heeeey Jude-

His father was in AJ’s old room, propped against the wall with a blanket over his midsection. He had been eviscerated; a suspicious, quivering lump next to him on the floor, a shape under the blood-soaked blanket.

He was dying but wasn’t dead yet. His eyes came to life when he saw his son. The circle of strangers around him parted as AJ knelt beside him.

His father’s breathing was fast and shallow.

“Came. For. It,” he said in gasps.

“For what?” It had been the book. The fucking book.

“Hid. F-from. Them.”

“I’m so sorry,” AJ said softly, tears once more rolling freely down his face.

“Not. Your. F-fault. Ff…fate.”

“Wh-where is it, Dad?” AJ asked, not noticing the others had left the room in respect for a father’s last moments with his son.

“D...don’t you...know?” His father’s voice was getting weaker, but he smiled.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” AJ whispered to his father, whose eyes were still open but didn’t look as if they were seeing anything they could comprehend.

“I’ll find. You. Again. On. Other...side.”

AJ grimaced as his father coughed up a torrent of blood, then grinned through the crimson, cursing his son with fuel for a thousand nightmares and a picture that would never completely leave what he had left of his heart. Then his eyes closed, and his father died.

AJ kissed him once on the forehead and covered him with the blanket.

-
na na na na...Hey Jude-

AJ went to the window and knelt, pulling up the loose floorboard that had always been there. Hidden within it was a secret drawer, enough to keep a small boy amused for a very long time. His father had enjoyed it as a child before him. AJ reached into the drawer and pulled out the massive volume of text that had brought so much ruin down on all of them. As he touched the book, a potent energy slowly filled him. He held the book in awe. It was a full six inches thick and was bound in old leather the color of half-dried blood. A symbol of inlaid ancient silver was on the cover, not shiny and decorative, but instead looking like some decrepit warning from another time. This same, tired alloy ran up the spine of the book, out along its edges, and formed the lock on it as well. While he held it, the sorrow seemed to leak out of him. The book felt a little heavier for a moment, as if it had soaked up his pain, replacing it with a feeling of raw power. AJ looked around his childhood room for what would be the last time and went outside to join the others. When he stepped out of the house onto the front lawn, they formed a rough semi-circle around him, and he looked at each of them in turn. There was Clover, beautiful Clover, with her green eyes filled with tears and concern. There was John, endlessly chewing one of his foul cigars and looking somehow as if he’d just woken up. Logan was, well...Logan. The guy’s emotions were impossible to read. There was Steve, looking exhausted and avoiding any real eye contact, and Terrance, head bowed, hands clasped in front of him as though in prayer. There were two other uniformed cops AJ didn’t know but they were obviously new to the whole living dead thing. Their faces held only slightly more color than one of the corpses they’d been fighting.

“I’ve got the book,” he said simply, holding it out with one hand for all of them to see. The book didn’t seem to weigh that much anymore.

“I was afraid they might have--” Logan began, an actual detectable note of relief leaking through his tightly sealed walls.

“Yeah? Well they didn’t,” AJ snapped. “They got my mom and my dad. My life. But they didn’t get this fucking book.” He sat down on the step, his voice trailing off at the end. “How did they know?”

“Daed’s powers have grown,” Logan said. “He must’ve known it was here.”

“Or it could still be a leak,” John said flatly but he sounded like he didn’t much believe it anymore.

AJ looked up into the detective’s eyes. “If it’s a leak, I’ll kill whoever it was.”

Clover joined him on the step. She leaned her head against his shoulder and he thought he might cry again.

* * * * *

Logan sat in the backseat of Clover’s car, her behind the wheel again.

Daed’s powers had increased, all right...he had heard His thick, damaged voice when it had come out of Gina Lancaster’s mouth. Until AJ had come out of the house with the book, Logan had been sure that it had been taken, that they were too late. But now that they had it, he was positive that Daed would be stopped again, that they would succeed. AJ turned around in his seat.

“How do I kill him?”

“I told you. You have to get His Core.”

“No, I don’t want to put Him to
sleep
. I want to
destroy
Him.”

“I don’t know if you can.” Logan had heard that same, cold edge that was in AJ’s voice in the voices of those before him. It meant that whatever innocence was left in the boy had finally finished dying. But to Logan, it also meant that another Munroe was finally able to accept what he was and what he had to do. The timeless hunter’s thoughts again turned to his enemy of so many centuries, and wondered if Daed Sixxez, the mad God of the Dead
could
be completely destroyed.

He just didn’t know.

* * * * *

Clover took one hand off the wheel and held one of AJ’s. She hated seeing him this way, but under the circumstances, there wasn’t much anyone could do to help him. She could be with him, though, be there for him. Both his parents were gone, carried away by some great violence that she didn’t understand. Internally she shuddered as she thought of what AJ had told her, about his mother charging him with a knife, her throat mostly gone.

You’ve still got me, if you want me, she thought at him and squeezed his hand. This time he squeezed back.

* * * * *

Somewhere beneath the city, a pair of black, apocalyptic eyes opened, the vision of Munroe and his little whore fading. His mind thumped with pain from still being partly in the cunt-mother’s head when the pig had shot her. But the headache was already going the way of the vision. Daed’s mind slowly bubbled with anger, thinking of the pig He’d gotten to. He had been sure of success but the cop had failed. There were words to be had with this particular officer, oh yes. No one failed Daed Sixxez and lived. Until, of course, He killed them. Then they became soldiers and slaves. He pushed gleeful thoughts of torture aside but wouldn’t forget them. Right now His main concern was that little boy and the book. Daed knew it was
possible
for Him to be defeated again but He thought His time for victory on this level was coming around. If He could get His hands on the book, the circle would close and the dead would clog the streets. The world would become a sadistic perversion of what it was and He would rule it all.

The Dark Lord of the Nexus sat and began to think, to plot. The vile and poisoned specimen that was His mind began to turn, twisting and squirming like a clot of blackened worms, and He began to get an idea.

* * * * *

Lubbock drove in silence. The only other person in the car with him was Peters, one of the uniformed boys that Dean Harris had sent along. He had been too shaken up to drive so Terrance was behind the wheel of the other patrol car.

They had to get back to the hotel, to figure out what was next. They finally had this book, he had seen it. John had sensed the complete power it held, hidden and awaiting release. He hoped Logan knew what he was doing because he was out of ideas, really. He had become a cop for a number of reasons and he was damn good at his job, this job he loved. But this was a little out of his jurisdiction, so to speak. He was used to dealing the lowest forms of life ever to be spat from a womb, but nothing like this. With this sort of thing there were no guidelines, no rules. No set precedent that could give him an angle on how to go about approaching it.

Not even everything he had seen during the Bowden investigation had prepared him for this. Most of that had been deep rumor and hearsay, the kind of stuff you would dismiss as bullshit conspiracy and drunk-talk, if only you hadn’t heard the same thing so many times.

John Lubbock’s thoughts turned to the kid. He felt terrible for him. His life was going to be permanently changed if he managed to get through this alive. John supposed he himself would just go back to being a cop, doing normal cop things, assuming he wasn’t going to be forced out like Jin had been.

He would take his vacation first, he decided. All of it at once. He’d been accumulating a lot of it over the years, and he started planning on going away to somewhere warm and bright where the dead stayed dead and the living brought him margaritas on the beach.

But AJ? His family life was basically ruined. Maybe something would come of him and the girl, and he hoped so. God knew the kid deserved it.

It was now twilight, a brilliant sunset had faded into oblivion. John dropped Peters off at the station house for debriefing and went to meet the others at the hotel. No one would find Peters’s body for three days. After debriefing, he went home and his tired mind snapped under the weight of the terrible things it had been forced to comprehend. He was debriefed and felt fine until he went back to his apartment and hung himself in the closet with his belt. His uniform, badge, and gun were stacked neatly in the center of his bare living room floor alongside a single sheet of paper. His on again, off again girlfriend would be the first to read it before she found him in the other room. All it said was:

I CAN NOT, ANYMORE

* * * * *

John, Logan, Clover, and AJ sat around a shitty kitchen table in a small safe-house that Steve had suggested. The house had been seized a year back during a massive drug-bust from a white-power militia group that financed itself by running guns and meth, and had been used—after intense fumigating and cleaning—as meeting places for undercover narco buys and stings or as a place for a witness to lay low before a trial.

The book sat in the middle of the table but all eyes were on Logan.

“How do we use this book against Him?” AJ asked.

“You can’t,” Logan answered. “It’s not in itself a weapon but the knowledge in it can be used as one.”