King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (16 page)

“If you’re up to it, I think it’s time to go see the Lord Marshal,” he said.

No, I wasn’t up to it, but I had the feeling that Dmitri was going to ignore my answer if I said as much, so rather than going back to sleep the way my body was screaming at me to do, I tossed back the covers and sat up in one smooth motion.

Big mistake.

The room spun around me like a top and I would have fallen if Dmitri hadn’t come to my assistance, catching me before I could fall back onto the bed.

“Easy there,” he said, as my mind tried to process just how fast he’d crossed the room from where he’d been sitting by the doorway.

I shook him off and then stood on my own. “I’m okay,” I told him.

And somehow I was.

For now, at least.

22

HUNT

As it turned out, I’d been recuperating in one of the spare bedrooms on the second floor, just down the hall from Gallagher’s office. Dmitri went ahead to let Gallagher and Denise know I was coming, and by the time I made my slow way along the hall to the office where they were waiting, they’d dimmed the lights and put out a few candles. It wasn’t something I expected from a hard-ass like Gallagher, so I figured Denise had a hand in it. Either way, I was glad that I was able to see their faces.

I had a hunch this wasn’t going to be an easy discussion.

There were three chairs arrayed in front of Gallagher’s desk, with Denise occupying the one farthest from the door. I let her help me into the one in the middle. Dmitri decided to remain standing just inside the door.

“How are you doing?” Denise asked, upon seeing the gingerly way I was moving.

I shrugged. What was I going to say? Can’t really complain about feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck when people around you are dying, right?

“Good to see you up and about, Hunt,” Gallagher said, but there was an edge to his voice that said otherwise. “Dmitri bring you up to speed?”

I wiggled my hand back and forth. Kinda, it said. “Sorry about Rebecca.”

“Me too,” he said, his voice filled with pain and regret. For the first time since meeting him, I knew exactly how he felt. In the dim light I could see that he hadn’t escaped the battle with the creature unscathed. A bandage was wrapped around his lower left arm and a narrow cut bisected his other cheek. The injuries didn’t seem to have slowed him down any, which was more than I could say for myself.

He went on.

“If we’re going to make any sense of what happened, I’m going to need you to explain a few things. Starting with what, exactly, you did to me.”

I glanced at Denise, who nodded encouragingly. She was one of only three people who knew my secret, so the fact that she approved of letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak, made me feel a bit safer in discussing things.

With her support, I explained to Gallagher about the ritual I’d undergone that had given me not only my ghostsight, but also the ability to borrow the eyes of both the living and the dead for short periods of time. Gallagher made small noises of understanding from time to time, which made me think that Denise must have gone over some of this with him while I’d slept. He’d been immersed in the real world for far longer than I had, so I guess none of it was all that surprising.

With the background clear, I moved on to the events of the night before. “When I realized none of you could see that thing in the room with us, I knew I had to do something. I figured if I could borrow someone else’s sight, then maybe I could loan my own in return.”

In retrospect it hadn’t been the smartest move. If Gallagher had seen my actions as a threat, he could have blasted me into oblivion with the flick of a hand. Thankfully, he’d recognized the real threat and had responded appropriately.

“Once I had control, it wasn’t all that hard to pass what I was seeing over to you.”

I gave them a moment and then asked, “So what was that thing anyway?”

There was a long pause, then Denise replied, “We don’t know.”

Huh.

“You don’t know, meaning you’re not sure or you don’t have a clue?”

I was praying it was the former.

She sighed and said, “We don’t have a clue.”

Not good.

Not good at all.

“So now what?” I asked.

“If you’re feeling up to it, I’d like you to use your sight and take a look at the body, see if you can tell us anything further about it,” Gallagher replied.

Having a close encounter of the dead kind with that thing was not something I was really interested in doing, but I couldn’t see a way out of it, and so before I knew it we were all trooping downstairs, heading for the clinic next door where they had apparently stored the creature’s body for safekeeping.

Despite my long rest, I was still a bit weak, so I used the fact that I couldn’t see anything with all the lights on as cover for my need to lean on Denise as we made our way next door.

As we crossed the clinic floor, I kept my ghostsight in check and did my best to avoid looking at any of the patients. I didn’t want to see the fluttering remains of their souls or think about what it must have felt like to have them ripped out while they were still alive. Two nights ago it had been a bit abstract, but now, having seen the process in action, there wasn’t any way to distance myself from it. These people had died horrible deaths at the hands of a creature most of them probably couldn’t have ever imagined. The sheer terror they’d probably felt during it all set my pulse to beating in my ears.

I was glad this thing was dead, for all of a sudden I wanted to kill it all over again.

We crossed the length of the clinic and passed through a set of double doors. The smell of cooking lingered in the air, and I knew we were in the kitchen. I assumed we were just passing through, maybe on our way outside to another location, but after a few more steps we stopped.

A door opened in front of me with a slight sucking sound and cold air wafted over my skin.

The walk-in freezer?

You have got to be kidding me!

Gallagher said, “The three of us examined the body earlier and didn’t find anything unusual. But that doesn’t mean you won’t. Before we consider this a dead end, I’d like you to take a look.”

“You’re going to need this,” Dmitri said, pushing a heavy jacket into my hands. “It’s cold in there.”

I slipped it on and then followed the cold into the depths of the freezer.

Denise called out one last piece of advice as the door was closing behind me.

“Whatever you do, don’t touch the bedpost.”

Bedpost?

But then I heard the door close behind me and was too busy fighting down a sharp spike of panic as the realization that I was sealed in the dark with a dead thing threatened to overwhelm me. I took a couple of deep breaths, got my heart rate under control, and turned to the task at hand. My eyesight quickly adjusted to the darkness and the place swam into view around me.

The shelves lining the walls were full of the stuff you’d expect to find in a freezer: meat and vegetables and various dairy products, all in industrial-size packages. But it was the body on the folding table in the middle of the space that drew my attention.

I stepped up and gave it a long look.

The creature, whatever it was, looked smaller in death than it had in life, a phenomenon I’d noticed before in my days of working with the Boston PD as an unofficial consultant. The dead always look smaller, as if the departing soul took something else along with it, reducing what was left behind.

What it didn’t look was any less deadly, however.

It was humanoid in shape, with two arms, two legs, and its head all extending from a central torso. Its black, leathery skin hung loosely on its frame and it was easy to see how I could have mistaken it for being a woman dressed in some kind of robe, particularly at night from across the room. But that’s where the resemblance ended.

There was no mistaking the circular maw that served as a mouth, nor the fact that the interior was lined with multiple rows of teeth, all bent inward at a slight angle, designed, I guessed, to pull its prey into its mouth one bite at a time. Its eyes, open and staring at the ceiling above, were pupil-less black orbs that jutted out a good inch from the narrow skull like a fish. Probably had incredible peripheral vision, making it tough as hell to sneak up on.

The winglike membranes that I’d glimpsed the night before were thinner than I’d expected, calling into question my earlier hunch that they allowed the creature to take to the air like some kind of giant bat. They seemed more vestigial than anything else, something that hadn’t evolved at the same speed as the rest of it.

The body was laced here and there with parallel slashes, evidence that Dmitri had gotten in a few good blows with those claws of his, and the business end of a two-foot stake made from a broken bedpost was embedded in the left side of its chest, right about where you’d expect the heart to be if the thing followed any semblance to human physiology.

The bedpost had obviously delivered the killing blow, but it made me wonder why they had needed it in the first place. Couldn’t they have just blasted it into oblivion with their magick?

I made a mental note to remember to ask them that very thing.

Steeling myself, I reached out a hand and poked the creature with my index finger, half expecting it to lash out in response.

Nothing happened.

“Of course not, you idiot,” I muttered, “it’s dead.”

Satisfied it wasn’t going to suddenly sit up on me, I lifted each of its arms and examined its hands one at a time. The fingers were long and narrow, with one extra knuckle on each, and were tipped with thick talons that reminded me of those on a hawk or other bird of prey. An image of the thing perched on the frame of Rebecca’s bed swam through my mind and I knew the comparison wasn’t that far off.

I spent another fifteen minutes examining the creature as thoroughly as I could but didn’t find anything that I would label “unusual.” I mean, yes, the whole damn thing was unusual, I’ll give you that, but that hadn’t been what I’d understood Gallagher to mean when he’d said it, and aside from the fact that the creature existed at all, I didn’t see anything else of particular interest.

I even tried using my ghostsight, to no avail.

If there had been anything of interest here to find, it was beyond my limited abilities to ferret out.

23

HUNT

Back in Gallagher’s office, with a hot cup of coffee in my hands and my body beginning to warm up, I relayed to the others what I’d found, which was essentially nothing. They weren’t surprised; after all, they hadn’t found anything either.

Unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I asked Gallagher the question that had been bugging me ever since I’d seen that bedpost jutting out of the creature’s chest.

“What’s up with that stake? Why not just blast the thing with your Art?”

He stopped his pacing for a moment to answer me. “The room was too small,” he said, with more than a trace of frustration. “If I’d cut loose I would have run the risk of hurting one of you or possibly even one of the family members watching from the hallway.”

“Never mind the fact that using our Art in front of witnesses is generally frowned upon,” Denise added, for my benefit.

I still didn’t see how they’d gone from hammering it with a magickal lightning bolt to stabbing it in the heart with a bedpost, of all things. “What did you do, grab the nearest thing to hand? What if it hadn’t worked?”

“Then we probably wouldn’t be here talking about it, Hunt,” Gallagher snapped.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock
, I wanted to say. That was precisely my point. We’d gone into the situation totally unprepared and had apparently barely escaped with our lives. I wasn’t all that impressed with how things were going.

Which brought me to my other question.

I turned toward Denise and asked, “What would have happened if I’d removed the stake?”

There was a certain undercurrent of amusement in her voice when she answered. “I don’t know, but there are enough creatures out there with the ability to regenerate and heal their wounds that I thought it best to leave well enough alone. Removing it might have started the healing process. I didn’t think you’d want it waking up in the middle of your examination.”

She had that right. Having that thing suddenly sit up? No, that wouldn’t have gone over well with me at all.

“Well, at least we can all rest easy now,” I said, trying to look at the bright side.

Gallagher grunted. “How’s that?”

I gave him a quizzical look; it seemed obvious to me, but if he needed me to explain it … “We saw that thing stealing the soul right out of the little girl. Seems obvious that we’ve got our killer. Things should start getting back to normal.”

Silence greeted my statement.

“Right?” I insisted, getting a bit nervous given their continued silence.

After another long moment, there was a discreet cough from the other side of the room. Dmitri.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Hunt, but there were two more cases reported this morning. Both in different parts of town. And both happened long after we’d killed the one you examined,” he said.

Now I understood the general feeling of doom and gloom. If it had been that hard to take down one of them working alone, then dealing with several at once was going to be a real pain in the ass, to say the least. Never mind the fact that we didn’t have any idea where to find these things …

“Okay, now what?” I asked.

Denise spoke up. “We take what we’ve got to the High Council. They’ve got the resources to figure out what these things are, so let them come up with an appropriate solution, I say.”

More silence.

Even I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

“What?” Denise asked.

“We can’t go to the High Council with this. It…”

Denise cut him off. “Of course we can, Simon! This is exactly the kind of situation the Council was created for in the first place. You’re the Lord Marshal, for Gaia’s sake, they have to listen to you.”