King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (28 page)

“Is Jeremiah all right? What about Simon?”

“The Marshal sent me to bring you in.”

And that’s all he would say. Every question she asked was met with the same answer.

“The Marshal will tell you.”

Arriving at the new location, Dmitri had barely brought the car to a halt before Denise flung open the door and raced across the manicured lawn in search of Simon and some answers.

She burst through the front door and came to an abrupt halt, staring in shock at the destruction around her.

Gomez had said they’d been attacked, but she hadn’t expected a war zone.

There were three body bags laid out in the front foyer, and men were preparing to carry them to the trucks outside even as she entered. Discarded nails and bloodstains were scattered throughout the room, and a section of the hallway just beyond was blackened from the fire that had tried to consume it.

Denise was still trying to come to grips with what she was seeing around her when Simon came down the hallway toward her; someone must have gone looking for him, must have informed him that she and Dmitri had returned.

Seeing her, he rushed over. “Did you get it?” he asked, his expression somehow simultaneously terrified and hopeful.

She nodded absently, her concern elsewhere. Seeing the bodies had made her realize that Gomez had never directly answered her question about Jeremiah.

She glanced around the room again, looking for the one person she’d expected to meet her when she’d arrived.

Where the hell was he?

Simon was still talking, explaining. “A group of Sorrows hit us somewhere around midnight. We were able to fight them off, though not, as you can see, without casualties.”

That last word bounced around inside her head like a pinball, repeating itself over and over again.

No
, she told herself.
He had to be here somewhere. He was just helping out and couldn’t leave what he was doing just yet.

“Simon, where’s Jeremiah?”

He simply stared at her, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to answer.

Dimly, she was aware of Dmitri stepping up behind her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Simon’s face.

She asked her question again, slowly and clearly.

“Where is Jeremiah?”

Simon shook his head. “We don’t know,” he replied, and there was real anguish in his eyes when he said it. “He was separated from us during the attack and we haven’t been able to locate him. I tried scrying out his location earlier, but was unable to get anything, so I’ve had teams scouring the neighborhood ever since. So far, we haven’t found a trace of him.”

Denise wanted to throw up.
Hunt? Gone? It just couldn’t be.

“We have to do more, Simon,” she said, and her voice sounded dreamy and distant even to her. In the back of her mind she knew that wasn’t a good sign, but she’d worry about that later. Right now she had to find Hunt.

“Put more men on the street. Tell them to look for…”

Simon held up his hands, interrupting her. “I can’t do that, Denise,” he said.

She didn’t think she’d heard him correctly. “What? Of course you can. All it will take is a few more people; we’re bound to find him soon enough.”

But her old coven mate was shaking his head.

“We’re stretched thin as it is, Denise, and we’re running out of time. The winter solstice is only a few days away. We have too much to do if we hope to defeat the Angeu.”

She couldn’t believe what he was saying.
He was just going to abandon Hunt? The son of a bitch!

There was only one thing to do.

“I’ll find him myself!”

She spun on her heel, intending to march back out into the streets and search them herself if that was what it took to find Hunt, but Simon caught hold of her arm and yanked her back around to face him.

“Damn it! Listen to me, Denise! Time is running out. We have to activate the knives, have them ready to use in case the Angeu strikes again. Everything else can wait.”

She struggled to break free, but Simon held her tightly and refused to let go. The situation probably would have deteriorated from there if Dmitri hadn’t stepped in.

“I’ll find him.”

Denise spun around to face him, surprised to see him flinch at the expression on her face. Did she really look that bad?

“I’ll find him, Denise,” Dmitri said, catching her eyes with his own, making certain she understood. “Simon is right. We need you to help activate the soul knives. If you don’t, our chances of defeating the Angeu are all but nil. That’s why we went to Chicago in the first place, to get the knives, remember?”

Denise stared back at him.

After a long moment of silence, she nodded. Once.

“Find him, Dmitri. Bring him back to me.”

Her voice was like stone. All at once the sheer depth of her feelings for Hunt were obvious to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see, even to Denise herself.

Dmitri didn’t say anything. He just nodded, gave her a swift hug, and headed out to find their missing friend.

44

HUNT

I drifted in the darkness, unaware of the passage of time or of the steady flow of my lifeblood as it slowly leaked out of me, a drop at a time. It could have been an hour, it could have been a day; wrapped in the comforting arms of that darkness, I neither noticed or cared.

I wasn’t alone, though. My dead daughter, Elizabeth, came to visit me and she brought her friend Abigail along as well. Their presence should have alarmed me, should have clued me in to just how serious my injuries actually were, but thankfully I remained blissfully unaware, unable or perhaps unwilling to face the reality of my situation.

Shock can be a marvelous thing.

The two of them kept me company for a time, laughing and playing in front of me, but eventually the joy fled from their faces and they stood there, gazing at me with solemn eyes.

“What’s wrong, my love?” I asked, kneeling in front of her and placing my hands on her shoulders. “Why so sad?”

She wouldn’t say, no matter how much I coaxed and pleaded with her. She just stared at me with those wide eyes, and I could see fear running through them, fear as I had never seen before.

It broke my heart just to look at it.

“We can show you,” Abigail said suddenly.

Elizabeth’s eyes lit up at the suggestion. She grabbed my hand as Abigail took the other. Pulling me to my feet, they led me deeper into the pipe.

We walked along way, seemingly for hours, until ahead of us I began to see a light. It grew brighter as we approached; then the pipe disappeared and we found ourselves standing on the edge of a vast cliff, looking down into a valley that stretched away from us as far as the eye could see.

In the midst of that valley a gleaming fortress rose.

But it wasn’t the fortress that caught my attention, stunning though it was, but rather the massive army assembled in front of its gates.

An army of ghosts.

They stood in silence, staring not at the fortress, but toward the cliff on which we stood. They seemed unusually solid to me, almost as if they still lived and breathed, but I knew a ghost when I saw one.

Seeing so many of them together sent a cold chill scurrying up my skin.

Something was very wrong.

Elizabeth tugged sharply on my arm. When I looked down to see what she wanted, she pointed out across the valley, and I was obliged to follow the arc of her finger.

Except now the scene had changed.

The fortress was gone, replaced by a shimmering curtain of haze, through which I could see the skyline of New Orleans lit by the light of the full moon hanging just above it. The light washed off the swelling waters of the Mississippi and, far on the other side, the rounded top of the Superdome.

Even as I watched, a rickety old cart rolled forward toward the curtain, carrying a single figure dressed in black. Behind him, the massive army soundlessly swept forward in his wake.

“Don’t let him take us, Daddy,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t let him!”

But when I turned to tell her that I wouldn’t, that she was safe with me and that no one would harm her while I was around, I found myself standing alone on that cliff, with only the wind and the silent dead below me for company.

I frantically turned around, searching for her and for Abigail, but they had vanished.

Only the army remained, marching off toward New Orleans …

45

CLEARWATER

Denise stumbled away from the scrying mirror and threw up violently in the corner. The room stank of vomit, sweat, and desperation, made even worse by the peculiar ozonelike scent of overused magick.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and stepped away from the mess. It was no use: no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t get the scrying to work. It should have been easy. She had spent months in Hunt’s presence, knew how he looked and smelled and sounded. Knew just about everything there was to know about him. She had access to his clothing, his journal, even his toothbrush, for Gaia’s sake! Any one of those items should have been strong enough to allow her to zero in on his location, never mind the half dozen or so items she had piled on the floor behind her.

Something was blocking her efforts, something powerful enough to dispel the energies she was raising, to keep them from homing in on her target.

Unless he’s dead …

Not for the first time, she slammed the lid closed on that line of thought. She wouldn’t believe it.
Couldn’t believe it.
He was out there, somewhere. She just had to try harder.

A glance at her watch told her she’d been at it for close to an hour now. Dimly she remembered Simon trying to convince her to stop a short while before, telling her that she’d kill herself if she kept pushing so hard, especially after the amount of energy it had taken to charge the soul knives and heal the injured, but she’d warded the door before she’d begun and that had been enough to keep him from physically stopping her. In the back of her head she knew he’d been right; the ache in her bones and the worn, stretched feeling inside her head told her that she didn’t have much left.

Still, she had to try.

As she staggered back over to the ritual circle she’d drawn around Hunt’s possessions in the center of the room, a commotion from out in the hall caught her attention. She staggered over and opened the door, only to find Dmitri standing there, Hunt’s limp body held in his arms.

Oh sweet Gaia no!

For that moment, that long, agonizing moment, she thought he was dead, but then his fingers moved and her heart began beating again.

Dmitri spoke up. “Found him crammed into a drainpipe along the canal, like he was trying to hide from something.”

A drainpipe? What the hell?

But she didn’t have time right now to figure it out. There was an empty bedroom next door and she led Dmitri to it, indicating he should put Hunt down on the bed.

“He’s alive, but he’s in bad shape, Denise. Looks like he took a bullet to the back and he’s been bleeding out ever since. He needs a hospital.”

One glance at Hunt told her that they didn’t have time to take him to one. That he had survived this long was a miracle. His body was burning up with fever, which told her all she needed to know about the infection raging inside him, and he’d lost so much blood that he was paler than the sheets on which he lay. Moving him had caused the wound in his torso to begin bleeding in a seeping flow of blood and pus. He wouldn’t make it another ten minutes if they didn’t do something immediately.

She grabbed one of Simon’s people who was passing in the hallway outside and sent her to scrounge any instruments, towels, and hot water that she could find. Simon was out on an errand somewhere, which meant she was going to have to do the healing on her own.

She just prayed she had the strength left to handle it.

“What can I do?” Dmitri asked, standing there looking helpless.

She knew just how he felt. “Stay right there; I’m going to need you in a minute,” she told him.

Several of Simon’s volunteers came hustling into the room, carrying towels, a basin of hot water, and several different medical tools, including clamps and scalpels that must have come from the clinic. Denise pressed them into service as she bent to work on Hunt.

Fifteen minutes later she knew it was no use. Hunt had flatlined once already and she’d wasted precious moments bringing him back from the edge, but that had only temporarily saved him. Dmitri had been right: Hunt had lost too much blood from the bullet wound in his chest, one from a fairly large-caliber bullet, from the look of things. It had entered through his back and exited somewhere near his ribs, which was good, since it meant the bullet hadn’t bounced around inside him doing even more harm, but the wound itself had been exposed to the filthy canal water and as a result sepsis had set in. If they had caught it earlier they might have been able to do something, but at this point his system had used up too much of its reserves and the fever itself would probably kill him before the infection did.

Her healing Art allowed her to stabilize him temporarily, and in doing so she was able to clean out some of the pus within the wound itself and cauterize the smaller blood vessels that she could see near the surface, but she knew there was at least one other artery somewhere deep in the wound that needed to be sealed off. The state of the wound and Hunt’s frail condition kept her from finding it, though not for lack of trying. Her hands were dark with Hunt’s blood from where she had been rooting around inside his abdominal wall, trying to find the problem spot. Each time she did so, though, she seemed to push him closer and closer to the edge. The human body just wasn’t designed for this kind of trauma.

She was going to have to do something a bit more drastic if she was going to save his life.

There were consequences to what she was considering. Dangerous, perhaps even deadly, consequences, not just to Hunt but to herself as well.

Still, she had to try.