Black Sun

by Gail Z Martin

  Black Sun

  The Joe Mack Shadow Council Files #2

  Gail Z. Martin

  Larry N. Martin

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Afterword

  About the Authors

  Falstaff Books

  1

  I couldn’t help a smug smile when the werewolf’s teeth clanged on metal as he bit down on my shoulder. Tough to know what was more entertaining—the shocked look on his face when he realized he’d broken a fang on my steel skin or the fear that came right after, recognizing that he wasn’t the biggest badass on the block.

  I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck faster than he could react, lifted him off the ground with one hand, and gave him a shake. Since he probably stood about six feet tall and weighed around one-ninety, I doubt anyone had done that to him since he was a pup.

  Certainly not the mark he’d figured for an easy dinner.

  “Bad wolf,” I scolded, giving him another shake that might have made his vision blur. He kicked and struggled, snapped and snarled, but I held him far enough away from my body that he couldn’t make his fists or feet connect. Not that it would have hurt me, but he might have broken a hand or a toe on my metal skin.

  “There’ve been four deaths close to here—werewolf kills. Hearts ripped out, deep claw marks on the bodies. The only good thing I can say is that you didn’t turn them. Probably went down so quick and easy there wasn’t time,” I said. “You know I can’t let you go.”

  Sometimes, there’s enough humanity left that the monster begs for a second chance, promises to be good, swears to turn over a new leaf. It almost never changes the outcome. Occasionally they try to bribe me and seem astonished when I turn them down. I have everything I need, and the things I want and can’t get, even the gods can’t give me. Once in a while though, I take a chance. It almost never works out, and we end up right back where we started, but it reminds me that I’m not one of the monsters.

  At least, not yet.

  The werewolf sealed his fate when he twisted, raking his claws down my chest in a move that would have ripped out my guts if I hadn’t been, well, me. Instead, he made an awful screech of nails on metal, howled when he broke a claw, and tried to bite me—again.

  Not the brightest pup of the litter.

  I snapped his neck with a flick of my wrist. Then I put a silver bullet through his heart. Someone would find him shifted back, a naked man dead in an alley. Another nameless tragedy of the big city. They’d never know he’d been the big bad wolf, with a string of murders to his name.

  I protect the ones who can’t protect themselves. That’s the vengeance I sold my soul for when I made a bargain with an ancient Slavic god as I lay dying.

  Most days, I’m good with that. I make a difference. Because of what Krukis, the god of blacksmiths, made me into, the victims have a fighting chance. I keep people from dying because I kill the monsters first.

  But on other days, the old memories of who I was and what I’ve lost crowd closer, and it’s impossible to forget.

  Immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  I thanked Krukis and felt his magic leave me. On my own, I’m a big guy, tall and brawny with muscles earned from hard work. Still not someone bad guys want to meet in a dark alley. But without Krukis’s magic, I’m not strong as an ox, fast as a racehorse, almost impossible to kill, and I don’t have metal skin or steel bones.

  Without Krukis, I’m just Joe Mack.

  I sighed, realizing that the werewolf had destroyed another good shirt. I thought about going back to my apartment for the night, but even with a successful hunt, my mood tonight was bleak, and it would be better if I weren’t alone. But I’d need to change clothing so that I didn’t scare the mortals.

  The bouncer at the door of the speakeasy looked me up and down, probably figuring that I could easily move him out of the way. Then again, he knew I was one of Mr. Ben’s friends, so he just waved me in without comment.

  Ben Lavecchia ran the best “blind tiger” in Cleveland. Prohibition declared it illegal to sell alcohol, but charging admission to see a rare blind tiger was completely legal. So here in the relative secrecy of the basement under the Hathaway Theater, Ben offered people the chance to “see” a rare blind tiger for the very affordable price of a few coins.

  Of course, if those same clients wished to enjoy a complimentary drink on the house while waiting to see those tigers, that was within the law. And if the tigers couldn’t be persuaded to show themselves for viewing, well, that was understandable—since there weren’t any tigers. Ben had to explain that reality once in a while to the very, very dense.

  And because Ben’s father ran the Italian Mob in Cleveland—and with it, the police department—the cops left his speakeasy alone. It didn’t hurt that Ben was also a strega. Even Capone didn’t mess with witches.

  “Got any new tigers back there, Ben?” I asked. “Maybe some I haven’t seen before?”

  Ben gave me a look. “You’ve seen a lot of tigers lately, Joe. Keep it up, and you’ll be the blind one, not the tigers.”

  I shrugged. “I can’t get drunk. Part of the bargain. And it’s that time of the year.”

  Ben’s expression softened, and he handed me a shot of rum. “Take it easy,” he said. “I might run out of tigers.”

  I nodded my thanks and sat back down at the bar. Ben was one of the few who knew my story. The “bargain” was why I was over eighty years old and still looked like I was in my mid-thirties—and why I always would. Immortality has its benefits. But since memory didn’t fade with time, and my dreams were as vivid as ever, especially lately, I’d have to settle for vengeance instead of knowing that at some point, I’d find peace in death.

  I’d come over to this country from my native Hungary looking for honest work and a safe place for my wife and me to raise our son, back when I was still Joe Magarac. We’d settled in Pittsburgh, and I’d gone to work in the steel mills. The hard, dirty work held plenty of danger, but it also put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. Agata and our son died of fever, leaving me alone. Then came the Homestead Strike. I’d stood with my friends striking for fair pay. The Pinkerton agents hired by the mill owner shot us, clubbed us, beat us with fists, and left us to die.

  I’d called out with my last breath to old Slavic gods, the ones my grandmother believed in, whose altars she hid behind pictures of the Christian saints. Krukis, god of blacksmiths, heard my prayer and made me his champion, with a charge to protect the weak and punish the oppressors. He gave me immortality, and when I call on his power, I’m nearly impossible to kill, except by the heat of the forge. I took a new name, Joe Mack, because when you’re immortal, you have to reinvent yourself from time to time, or people wonder why you don’t get any older.

  Not a bad deal, all things considered. Except I kept the fuckin’ memories, and this time of year, they haunted me. The sweet pain of remembering Agata’s voice and my son’s blue eyes. The smell of gunpowder and blood the day I died. I couldn’t forget, and I couldn’t get drunk. Instead I stayed busy, and when I wasn’t busy, I stayed numb.

  “Thought I might find you here.”

  I didn’t look up at the sound of the familiar voice, as the newcomer slid onto the barstool next to mine. I knew what I’d see. Jack West, Supernatural Secret Service, in a natty suit and fedora hat. He looked like he’d stepped off a movie screen, too handsome to be a real tough guy. But I’d fought beside West more than once, and anyone who let his good looks fool them into thinking he was soft learned the hard way.

  We di
dn’t always see eye to eye, but Jack was also in the very small circle of those who knew the truth about me. Most of it, anyhow. I didn’t completely trust him. But I didn’t completely trust anyone.

  On weeknights, the theater crowd filled the speakeasy and finding a seat took speed and patience. On a Tuesday like tonight, there were plenty of empty chairs. I knew West didn’t come for a drink—he had a job for me.

  “Does your boss know you drink here?” I felt like talking shit. West’s a good guy, for a fed. He made it clear right up front he thought the Pinkertons were scum. So we had that in common.

  “Yeah. My boss drinks here on even-numbered days, and I get the days that end in the letter ‘y.’”

  I knocked back the rest of my “Caribbean” tiger that tasted a lot like rum and set the glass down with a thud. “What’s up?”

  “Maybe I just felt like hanging out. Thought we could go see a baseball game.” Now he was definitely poking the bear.

  “You hate baseball. So do I.”

  West gave me his slick grin, the one that made most people want to smack it off his face. Me, I grudgingly respected brass balls.

  “We’ve got a situation, and I think you’d be the perfect inside man.”

  Ben gave me a new shot, without me even having to ask. I plunked down my money. It probably costs a lot to feed those tigers.

  “Explain.” West and I didn’t waste words. I wasn’t in a mood to be chatty.

  “Something weird is going on in Reading, over on the eastern side of Pennsylvania. Our witch informant got murdered. There’ve been wehrwolf attacks.”

  I raised an eyebrow. The way West pronounced the word sounded closer to German than English. “I thought that was some cheap novel. And the book wasn’t even really about real werewolves.”

  “And I meant what I said,” Jack replied. “Der Wehrwolf is a hack novel that is all the rage with the Völkisch groups, and with the folks back in Germany who sided with the Kaiser and like some of the young hotheads who are screaming in the streets over there.”

  I’d heard of the unrest and hoped it didn’t come here to America. Such things did not end well.

  “So, who’s worried about these things? The government? The industrialists?” I asked. “And what’s their fear? That people will rise up and ask for their due? Or that there’s someone using dark powers?”

  “We don’t entirely know what’s going on, or who’s behind it. All the signs are there that whatever it is won’t turn out to be a good thing,” West replied, and I appreciated his honesty. “There’s reason to think dark magic is part of it, and money. Right now, the activity is deep in the Pennsylvania German community. I’d like to send you because someone else might not take the time to tell the difference between good immigrants and bad immigrants, if you know what I mean.”

  I did, and dammit, West was right. “What do you want me to do—assuming I agree?”

  I saw the quirk of his lips, an almost-smile that said he knew he had me. In my current mood, I couldn’t bring myself to be annoyed. Maybe West was doing me a favor, although he didn’t know it. Going out on a case might be just what I needed, to pull my head out of my ass and escape my dark dreams.

  I slid him a sidelong look. “Same arrangement as usual?”

  “Of course.”

  I might be the champion of an ancient dark god, but I didn’t work for free—not for the feds. Gave the wrong impression. Part of my deal with Krukis involved a wallet that always refilled with enough money to cover my food, clothing, and rent, sometimes with a bit extra for a job well done. I didn’t need much. But people value what they pay for, so my arrangement with West meant the Supernatural Secret Service handled my transportation and expenses, with a stipend on top. Usually I gave most of that stipend to the soup kitchen. Too many people were hungry, and I knew how that felt.

  “All right,” I said. “How sure are you this isn’t a bunch of superstitious bullshit dreamed up by people who are still sore at the Germans over the Great War?”

  West shrugged. “I’m not. That’s why you’re the one I trust to go in and sniff around. But you won’t be on your own—Sarah and I are going to wow the swells and see what the beautiful people are up to.”

  I knew West could fight like a back-alley cutpurse. But he was best in an expensive suit cozying up to movers and shakers at some invitation-only ritzy party where schemes were hatched.

  “How’d Sarah get involved in this?”

  “We think that whatever’s going on has something to do with the higher ups at the Reading Railroad,” West replied. “And Reading Railroad also owns Reading Coal and Iron. Ring any bells?”

  Oh, that rang plenty. Alarm bells. The Homestead Strike where I died was in 1892. But fifteen years before that, in 1877, there’d been the Reading Railroad Massacre, where the head of the railroad called in private security troops and the “official” toll was sixteen dead, fifty injured. I felt certain the true numbers were much larger. I had no love for the Reading Railroad.

  “So she’s working her Harringworth Coal connections?” I asked.

  Sarah McAllen grew up among the Pittsburgh elite as the daughter of a steel magnate. She married the heir to the Harringworth Coal fortune, but dear old Harry ended up shot dead by one of his many mistresses. That left Sarah completely independent and obscenely wealthy.

  Unlike most of her social group, Sarah had a conscience. She’d always felt guilt over her family being members at the South Fork Rod and Gun Club, whose badly managed earthen dam caused the Johnstown Flood and killed fifteen hundred people, even though she was just a child at the time. So she meddled, becoming a patron of mine and a supporter of West’s sometimes off-the-books endeavors. It’s how she gets her kicks, and to be honest, the lady is good with lock picks and a gun.

  “Yeah. There’s a swanky dinner up on Mount Penn this weekend and another reception at a big mansion. We’ll work that angle, and you see what you can find out from the regular Joes.” West paused. “You do speak German, don’t you?”

  Hungarian was my native tongue. But working in the mills, I picked up a lot from the men around me, all the languages of Europe. Mostly curse words. But whether it was Krukis’s doing or something I had a knack for, learning languages came easily for me. I spoke enough German to get along, although I wasn’t sure anyone would mistake me for a native.

  “Well enough to get by,” I answered. I knocked back the shot. “You know anything about these Völkisch groups?”

  West nursed his second shot. He knew better than to try to drink me under the table. Hell, even when I was mortal, I could hold my liquor better than most men. Of course, my size helped. I had a couple of inches height on West, and probably forty pounds of muscle. He was fit, but I’d forged this body in the hard work of the steel mills. People tended to get out of my way.

  “Mostly that they’re trouble,” West replied. “They sound nice and cultural, on the surface. Make you think they’re going to do folk dances and tell stories. But dig down, and it’s just some ugly shit about how being German is better than being anything else—and they have a short, very specific list of who they are especially better than,” he added, loathing clear in his voice.

  It didn’t take much imagination to guess who was on that list. The usual suspects, the ones who got beat down every time some tinpot dandy wanted to make himself feel like a big man by pushing other people around. I had no patience for that sort. As far as I was concerned, that type of human garbage fell into my charge from Krukis to clean up the place and leave it a little better than I found it.

  Knocking heads together for a good cause was a sure way to cheer me up.

  West and I get on each other’s nerves. We annoy the fuck out of each other sometimes. But he treats women with respect, and he isn’t a dick to people because they talk with an accent or have a name he can’t spell or aren’t lily-white. He’s a good man. I just don’t say that to his face, because his head is swelled enough already.

  I
looked up at Ben, who was fiddling behind the bar, trying to look like he wasn’t eavesdropping. “You know anything about this?”

  Ben might have gone as straight as the family business would permit, but he was still Anthony Lavecchia’s youngest son, and Ben’s father and older brothers kept tabs on him. Which meant he heard stuff through Mob channels even if he didn’t want a piece of the action. And being a strega, he heard the witchy gossip, too.

  “Maybe.” Ben finished drying glasses behind the bar and came over. I looked up at him, he rolled his eyes, and fetched me another shot; this time it was vodka.

  “We have a new Russian tiger,” he said and pocketed my money. “Be careful. He bites.”

  “So…the grapevine?” West asked.

  “A lot of people who live here now lost family in the Great War, back in the Old Country,” Ben said. He’s always careful about what he shares, not a surprise given the circles he runs in. “They pay attention to what goes on over there. Germany remains a worry. The Germans lost, but they’re very angry, and this Völkisch movement you mention, it says the loss was everyone’s fault but the Germans’. People are nervous. They’re trying to bring family over before something else bad happens.”

  That squared with what I read in the newspaper and heard at the pubs. It must have sounded right to West because he nodded. “Yeah, that’s what my sources are telling me, too.”

  “You think people in Reading are disloyal?” I asked and sipped the vodka.

  West grimaced. “The majority? No. They answered the call, and they served in the war with honor. But some…especially if they came over with high expectations and got the shitty end of the stick, I think they can start thinking the grass is greener on the other side of the ocean, if you know what I mean.”

  I don’t know when West’s people came over, but I figured it was long enough ago and from places that made him feel settled, like he belonged here. I knew what it was like to leave a home and a homeland behind. I missed things about Hungary—odd things, like cookies that were hard to find here, certain flowers I hadn’t seen since I’d come over, the smell of the Turkish coffee my mother loved.