Well, if I ever needed any more evidence that this place was up to some shady shit, this is it.
I pretended that I was cornered, holding my hands up in a pleading position like I was afraid for my life. Of course, if he got too close to me with that thing I was going to rip it from his hand and shove it in his own neck. I knew I wasn’t going to need to.
Before he got within a step of me Darcy came up behind the doctor and smacked him in the back of the head with a steel tray. He let out a moan and crumbled to the ground.
She smiled at me. “I’m picking our next date.”
We made our way back outside, where Eve still had the guards at the gate locked under her Charm. She had them at each other’s throats for her attention, and they were certainly not capable of looking at the monitors. I caught her attention and she bid farewell to the wrestling suitors.
“What’d you find?” she asked as she caught up with us.
I patted my pocket, where the mystery objects were nestled. “I’m not sure yet. Let’s get home where I could take a closer look.”
We found Sara and Jexie nervously downing tea while awaiting our return. They jumped to their feet the moment we popped out of the wine cellar.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sara so freaked out. “Thank god you’re back, Kurt. There’s a guy—I think he’s a guy—a big guy who’s been trying to get into the house.”
A banging out the front door caused them to jump.
The Night Flail came to me instinctively. “An intruder? Where are the others?”
Jexie nervously watched the door. “Lyanne went around back to try and get a better look after the perimeter sensors warned us about him. She hasn’t come back. Culverton said something about being a diplomat not a fighter and ran to hide upstairs. This, whatever he is, has been beating at the door for a while now. We were getting ready to defend the house ourselves if you didn’t make it back in time.”
Her eyes twitched, a strange flutter, as if she was struggling to keep them open. “There’s something not right about this guy, Kurt. I don’t just mean he’s an immortal or an undead, but he’s … the ghosts all around are screaming about his presence. He terrifies them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Another slam on the door and Sara jumped to hide behind me. “Those fortifications we put up to fight Tandi are still holding up, but that door’s about to splinter anyway. Be careful, Kurt.”
I gave her a confident smile. “Don’t worry. Whatever it is, I’ll handle it.”
As if to challenge the certainty of my statement the door chose that moment to burst open. The most massive man I had ever seen stepped inside. He must have been nearly seven feet tall, and covered in so much bulky muscle he seemed more like a pile of boulders had come to life than a man.
I swung The Night Flail in front of me as I squared off against my home’s latest intruder. “What kind of steroids are they feeding you?”
He responded by charging at me, hands outstretched as if to throttle me. The Night Flail whipped out to meet him, ready to teach him a lesson that no matter how big he was, he was nothing compared to the weapon’s power.
It hit him across the chest with a loud thwack but didn’t succeed in slowing him at all. He continued to barrel toward me, and in my surprise at the failure of the flail to kill, I didn’t react in time to get out of the way. Hundreds of pounds of pure muscle came crashing into me, and I was tackled through the entry hall and into the dining room. I felt myself collide with the table and sensed before I heard the table start to give way under the force of the impact. I fell to the ground among a pile of wood splinters and broken table legs, my head ringing with the force of his bull rush.
I groaned as I picked myself back up onto my feet, ignoring the pain shooting down my back. “Come on. That was an antique. Lyanne is gonna be pissed.”
The intruder pulled back his massive fist for a punch. I lashed out with The Night Flail to deflect it, as I had done with hundreds of supernatural attacks before. A stinging sensation went up my arm as my chain collided with his fist, causing me to stumble on my retraction. My assailant grabbed the chain as it hung in the air and pulled. The chain wrapped tightly around my wrist, so even if I did want to let it go, it would take me some time to detach myself.
Which was why I found myself swinging by the flail in a broad arc over the intruder’s head, spinning around like he was trying to turn me into a helicopter propeller.
“Well, fuck me,” I managed to mumble, whirling through the air like a toy.
He finally let go, and I went soaring across the room like a fired canon, crashing hard against a display cabinet of priceless antique dishware. The world began spinning, and it was all I could do to keep myself from vomiting all over the shattered porcelain and china. I thought I saw three identical clones of the intruder looming over me, raising three similarly massive boots as he prepared to crush in my head.
“Hey, big guy, who are you wasting your time with over there?” It was my voice, but it didn’t come out of my mouth.
The intruder turned around toward the new source of my voice. Behind him I was standing there, hands at my side, looking quite pleased with myself. “I’m over here, Chuckles. Or did you decide you didn’t want to fight after all?”
Darcy. I was going to have a talk with her later about her impression of me. There is no way my smile is that cocky.
Apparently deciding that the standing Kurt was the bigger threat, the intruder turned from me and began to stalk toward Darcy-Kurt, who darted off into the living room.
I used the reprieve to try and steady myself and get back to my feet. Sara grabbed me by one of the arms and helped keep me from falling over as the world rocked around me. I blinked hard and shook my head, and when that didn’t work I gave myself a good slap in the face. That did the trick. As the world came back into focus I separated myself from Sara and prepared to rush after Darcy.
Jexie caught my arm. “Kurt, that thing in there, it has no spirit. Whatever it is, it is not alive.”
“Undead?” I tried to think back to what I knew about fighting those monsters.
“No, not undead. Undead were once alive, and that life leaves traces on them even centuries later. Whatever that thing it, it was never alive.”
“Well, I’ll go kick its ass now, and we can figure out what it is later.”
In the living room, Darcy was doing an impressive job of keep out of the reach of the intruder’s attacks, and making me look damn acrobatic in the process, at the cost of our furniture. I winced as an 18th century ottoman was smashed by a muscular foot as Darcy-Kurt danced out of the way.
“Leave the furniture alone, dickhead,” I growled. I can recover from punches, but I would never survive a day shopping at vintage stores with Lyanne. There are some things beyond my ability.
I swung The Night Flail over my head, building up momentum. Nothing I had done had so much as scratched the steroid-poster-boy so far, and I decided the solution must be simple: more power. Whipping the flail through the air over and over, I built it to its greatest possible speed.
The rattling of the chain caught the intruder’s attention and he turned his focus back to me. If the flailing spinning around my head intimidated him at all, he didn’t show it. In fact, he didn’t show much of any emotion. His face might as well have been carved from stone.
Opening my sight caused the darkness to show me the creature’s path. I waited until the exact moment he would come into my optimal striking range before bringing The Night Flail down upon him.
All that momentum building paid off, and I was rewarded with a resounding crack as the flail hit the top of his head at full speed. The momentum dug it into his skull, and I could see blood and skull matter spurt up from the impact site. He was dead.
Or at least, logic dictated that he should be dead, but frustratingly he didn’t seem to think having his skull split in two was a matter even worth addressing. He grabbed the end of the chain, still embedded i
n his head, and pulled me toward him, using such force that I had no chance but to stumble in his direction. I couldn’t pull the flail free and was powerless as the creature’s fist came thudding into my chest. There was an audible creak as my ribs threatened to buckle.
I took a gasping breath. It hurt and I was seriously concerned that one or more of my ribs might already be broken. As he brought his fist back for another strike that concern became mute, because I knew one more hit like that and they would all be shattered.
Summoning my strength, I pushed myself forward, getting so close to my assailant I could have hugged him if one of my arms wasn’t being held by the chain. The awkward position made it tough for him to angle a strike and he instinctively pushed me back. I reached up at that moment and grabbed the end of the flail that was sticking out of his head. When I was shoved back, I used that momentum and all the force I could muster to pull on the chain.
With a sickening pop, The Night Flail came free of the creature’s head, accompanied by another spray of gore across my living room floor. The intruder floundered, releasing his grip on the chain, and for a moment I thought I had finally beaten him for good. To my chagrin he kept on his feet and came at me again.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said, my voice ripe with disgust. I don’t know who engineered the big bastard, but they were too good at their job.
He was slower now, though, weaker. Whatever he was, he could not sustain that kind of injury forever, and with my sight I was able to easily keep out of his grasp. I stuck back at his undefended side with The Night Flail, and this time the impact sent him reeling. It seemed as he grew weaker whatever defense his body had against being struck also weakened.
And then, to my surprise, he started to fall apart, like a poorly constructed doll whose glue had started to wear off. First his arm came off and sailed across the room to land in a relaxed position on the sofa after being struck by the flail. Then one of his feet popped off and he left it behind like he didn’t want it in the first place, hopping toward me with that same passive expression on his face. After another minute he was little more than a collection of body parts scattered all across the living room floor. Only then did the light finally fade from his eyes, his body a steaming array of guts and limbs that began to fill the room with the smell of a dumpster. In the sun. In August.
I panted, trying to catch my breath despite the burning in my chest. “Okay, I know nothing should surprise me at this point, but seriously—what the fuck.”
Jexie carefully stepped up to the remains of the creature’s torso and stuck her hand inside. When she pulled it back, she was holding some kind of orb. “I feared as much, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
It took some effort for me to stumble over to where Jexie was standing. “Care to fill me in?”
The object in her hands seemed to be a perfect sphere made of brass and bronze, with odd fittings running around its sides in perfect parallel lines. “A golem.”
I studied the object, but it was as unfamiliar to me as the rest of this. “Golem?”
“Yes. Artificial life, though … well, they usually wouldn’t be made of flesh and blood like this one. He must have been human once, or, at least, the parts used to make him where once human. Then this core was used to animate him. I’ve seen the like before, in my parent’s business, but only on display shelves, never in use. This one must date back at least as far as the 19th century. This was a design that was popular in the Near East.”
“Benazir.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off the golem’s core. “It has to be. Maybe she heard about your meeting with Pembroke and decided to take you out before you could form an alliance with him.”
There was a scuffling and I saw Sara helping Lyanne into the room. Lyanne had big scrapes running down the left side of her body.
The former Succubus did not let her injuries stop her from being herself. “Oh, Kurt, couldn’t you have found a way to kill the thing without trashing an entire floor of the house?”
I shrugged. “Next time. You alright?”
She grimaced for just a second before mastering her expression again. “Just fine. I was caught off-guard, didn’t expect the big boy to spot me when I was trying to get a closer look at him. But don’t worry, I heal quickly.”
That much was true, another vestige of her Succubus power. Likely she would be back at full strength before even I was.
I turned back to the scattered body parts of the golem that were making a mess of my living room. “I’ve now had an introduction to both Pembroke and Benazir, and I’ve got to say, I think I like Benazir less. No one gets to attack my home and live to talk about it. Now we just need to find her.”
Darcy had thankfully transformed back into her usual self to make this conversation less confusing. “Any ideas of how we do that?”
There was one thing that had come to me recently. “Benazir’s trying to take over Tandi’s old network, right? That means whatever Tandi owned, Benazir might have tried to take hold of already, and if she did, then we might be able to use that to find her. We need to look up all of Tandi’s old holdings.”
Sara was already eagerly jumping into action. “I’ll go compile a list! I think I still have all my notes from when we were hunting Tandi. Do you guys remember how hard we were struggling to find her just for her to come to us? You think Benazir might do that, too? Never mind, I’ll go get the list!”
She left the rest of us with the trashed remains of what had once been a well-decorated and comfortable living room.
I exchanged a look with Lyanne. “I suppose while she’s doing that, all that’s left is for us to clean up?”
Lyanne wounds suddenly seemed to affect her more. “I’m injured.”
My grimace matched hers. “Me too.”
Culverton chose that convenient moment to make his way downstairs from his hiding place. “Is all the fun over—wow, would you look at that. You Hunters really don’t mess around.”
I gave Culverton my most winning smile. “Hey, Culverton, you’re not squeamish, are you? I’ve got a job for you.”
He looked at the disaster area around him and grimaced. “You don’t say…”
10
Sara brought in yet another enormous stack of papers, folders, and binders, and plopped them down on the table next to the ten identical piles that she had set down previously. The rest of us sat in a kind of stunned silence at the mass of information.
“Is this a mobile library?” I asked in disbelief.
“Umm, well—I like to be thorough,” Sara said.
“I can tell.”
“Is it too much?” Sara asked.
“No—no, sorry. It’s just a lot to take in. I’m glad you’re so, ahh, enthusiastic. It’s one of the reasons we’re still alive. You don’t miss details,” I said.
Sara brightened at that. “Nope, and this is all one topic.”
I thought about the amount of effort before us to actually sort through it all for something useful and had to resist the urge to run for the hills. “All of this is on Tandi’s network?”
Sara, who evidently mistook my lingering horror for enthusiasm, nodded gleefully. “She might have tried to keep out of the public light, but the companies she ran were all a matter of public record. It was just a matter of tracing the right ones to her! The ones that actually did anything were hidden behind a rotating list of shell corporations to create degrees of separation from her. Doesn’t help that she was around so long, pretty much since companies started being required to keep public records, and in that time many of them switched names, split apart or merged, or just closed down altogether only to pop up again on a different side of the world with different branding. But don’t you worry—I’m pretty sure I found it all, and we get the fun now of making connections!”
“Yeah … fun.”
Again she missed my tone and beamed at my words. “You all can get started already, I’ll go get the rest of it!”
“What? There’s more?”
“Just two or three more boxes worth. Be right back!”
“You know, when I found the flail, I thought it was cool. Then I found out I was going to have exquisite women in my life, and that was even better,” I said. “I did not, at any point, think that the flail meant I would have homework again.” I closed my eyes, rubbing the bridge of my nose as Sara bustled back into the room, groaning boxes in her arms. She was strong when it came to delivering homework.
We spent the weekend poring over Sara’s findings, which included corporate filings, printouts of press reports and online company ‘About’ pages, newspaper clippings and stock market reports, business magazines that ran profiles on rising corporate figures, and more. Sara claimed that each of the companies mentioned was connected to Tandi in some abstract way.
Jexie had found an excuse to leave us that seemed all too convenient to me. Apparently she had ‘family’ issues to deal with, though she was vague about the details. I was suspicious that she just didn’t want to spend countless hours performing tedious reading. Not that I could blame her. My eyes were glazing over just sitting close to that much printed research, let alone reading all of it.
Fortunately, Darcy decided to spend some time with us so we had that one additional set of eyes. She turned out to have an impressive talent at speedreading that helped us clear stacks that would have taken the rest of us twice as long, though like the rest of us, she could only summarize her findings. Finding the right connections fell on the hands of our resident researcher, Sara.
It was something Culverton found that sparked the wave of excited rambling by Sara. The obnoxious vampire worked at his own pace, taking frequent breaks, spending hours pretending to read the same page while he tried to sneak a nap, and at one point even tried to claim diplomatic immunity to avoid the work. “You are creating an international incident!” he declared. I responded—quite reasonably, in my eyes—that his choice of aftershave was an international incident, to which he huffed and launched into a complicated defense of his fragrance choices, punctuated with a lot of references to sandalwood and the Queen.
Succubus Hunter 2 (The Succubus Series) Page 9
