Midnight Hunter (The Execution Underground Book 3)

by Kait Ballenger

  Shane looked up, clothes and face covered in blood. Vera was standing completely still, the light from her palms dimming to a slow burn. “I...I...only stunned her,” she gasped.

  Shit. That meant Mrs. Foley would sit up again any minute now. Shane swore. Only one sure way to kill any supernatural.

  “Vera, look away.”

  Her eyes widened until she looked like a cartoon character while she stared down at him. “Wh-what?”

  “Look away! Leave the fucking room, goddamn it!”

  She scrambled for the door and out into the hallway. Lifting the carving knife to Mrs. Foley’s throat, he sawed the blade against her neck. Dead or not, the sight of the blood and the sounds of her gurgling seared their way into his memory like a blazing-hot brand. When he had finished, he dropped the knife to his side and collapsed in a tired heap on the floor.

  He’d just decapitated an innocent woman who had clearly been spelled, brought back from the dead and turned into a veritable killing machine that had orchestrated the death of her husband—and nearly him—all by means of the worst type of black magic possible: necromancy. As he lay on the floor, soaked in blood that wasn’t his own, he swore to himself that he would personally destroy the monsters responsible for this.

  * * *

  ASH DEVEREAUX GAPED like a wide-mouth bass at the sight of Dr. Shane Grey. Drenched nearly from head to toe in dried blood, which clearly wasn’t his own, Shane sat in his usual position in the control room with deep furrows cutting across his normally smooth brow. What the hell had happened?

  Ash let out a low, long whistle. “What the blazin’ hell happened to you, Doc?”

  Shane looked up at him with glazed-over eyes that Ash knew all too well. “Necromancy. Necromancy happened.” The words tumbled from Shane’s mouth as if they were detached from him somehow, as if he spoke without really knowing what he was saying.

  Ash dared a glance at his fellow hunters. Jace sat beside Shane, the front of his trench coat also blood-soaked. “You, too?” Ash drawled.

  Jace shrugged. “Me, too. Shane called me to help him dispose of the zombie’s body.”

  Zombie? Ash stood silent for a moment, attempting to process Jace’s words. His brain tried to connect the clear reality that somehow Shane had needed someone to clean up a body for him. In all their time working together, he’d never once seen Shane covered in blood, let alone leave a trail of corpses, supernatural or not, behind him. For a moment he wondered if he’d taken one too many shots of Crown Royal and was drunker than Cooter Brown.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Damon said, interrupting Ash’s thoughts.

  David Aronowitz, their resident exorcist, stepped into the room. “What did I mis—fuck me. What happened?”

  Ash shrugged. “That’s what we’re all tryin’ to find out.”

  Shane slammed a fist onto the desk beside him. “I told you all already. Necromancy. Necromancy happened.”

  The look burning in Shane’s eyes sent a shiver down Ash’s spine, and that was damn well saying something, considering he spent most of his time dealing with angry ghosts. Seeing a bloodbath the likes of which Shane had clearly just experienced—especially when it was your first—made any sane man madder than a soaking-wet hen, which was pretty fucking angry if you’d ever actually seen a hen soaking wet.

  Jace clapped Shane on the shoulder. “Settle down there, kid. Here.” He pulled a flask from his jacket, unscrewed the cap and passed it to Shane.

  Shane took a swig of what Ash knew was Jace’s regular Bushmills Irish whiskey, swallowing the liquid fire down like a champ. He handed the flask back.

  Jace slipped the flask into his jacket pocket. “All right. That’ll calm your nerves some. Now, tell us what the fuck happened.”

  Shane sighed, his adrenaline and anger visibly calmed. He took several deep breaths. Then the words streamed out of him like water from an overflowing dam. “I had to decapitate Mrs. Foley. The same Mrs. Foley whose corpse was missing from the grave site Ash and I dug up. The same Mrs. Foley who was supposed to be very long since dead, but she was just sitting there in the middle of the crime scene, and then she lunged at me, screaming as if I was her dead husband. She was trying to kill me as if I were him. I shot her in the head and the chest, and she just kept coming. I got a knife and stabbed her, but she still kept coming back, so I...I...I sawed her head off with a carving knife.”

  The whole room went silent. Ash wasn’t certain any of them had ever decapitated anyone with a carving knife before. His own mouth was so wide-open he would probably start catching flies soon.

  “Well, damn,” said Trent, ex-military man that he was—God love him—who had been silently observing everything until then, managing to voice what every other son of a bitch in the room was thinking. “Doc Grey, I’m pretty sure that makes you the most badass soldier I’ve ever known, and I’ve known quite a few.”

  Shane shook his head, completely unaware of the awestruck state they were all in. “I had no choice. She just wouldn’t stop coming, and if I hadn’t killed her, she would’ve killed me, and nothing else worked, and...”

  Ash knew what Shane needed to hear, and it wasn’t a “good job, buddy” or a “damn, you’ve really impressed us,” though both of those things were certainly true. It was the same damn thing he wished someone had said to him after Jeanette’s death. “Shane.”

  When Doc continued to ramble on, Ash raised his voice. “Shane,” he demanded.

  Shane stopped speaking midsentence and looked at Ash.

  Ash met his fellow hunter’s gaze and held it. “You did what you had to do, what any of us would have done.”

  From that point on the meeting seemed to progress with the slightest bit more normalcy, as normal as it could get, anyway. Their most bookish hunter recollecting sawing off someone’s head and explaining how that was related to the most serious case of witchcraft their division had experienced to date was far from normal. But at the very least Shane appeared more collected after Ash’s comment. Though he was glad to have delivered some small comfort, the whole thing couldn’t help but make him wonder if maybe...just maybe...he would have handled Jeanette’s death more gracefully if someone had said the same thing to him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN SHANE FINALLY escaped the room, he breathed a sigh of relief. Throughout the meeting he had imagined the walls closing in on him, suffocating him until he could no longer breathe. He sucked a burst of cool air into his lungs as he stepped outside the warehouse. He’d killed that woman.

  A woman who was already supposed to be dead, but did that matter? She’d been reanimated as a monster hell-bent on destruction, but had she been alive? He couldn’t really find an answer to that. That was one philosophical debate he wasn’t prepared to think through. His fellow hunters had told him he’d done well, been a good soldier, and he knew he had, but that didn’t make the shock any less powerful or the images continually flashing in his mind any less devastating.

  He walked over to his car and slipped inside. Vera still sat in the passenger seat, her whole body shivering. Those small tremors were nothing compared to the earthquake of fear that had rocked her body when he’d rejoined her at the apartment covered in fresh blood, but the sight of her sent a wave of guilt through him that he couldn’t ignore.

  “Are you okay?”

  She glanced toward him, still trembling, and wrapped her arms around herself before she nodded. “Yeah, I just... God, there was so much blood, and when we saw her, I just froze and didn’t know what to do, but you—” she turned fully toward him then “—you were crazy brave.”

  Brave? He didn’t feel the least bit brave. Brutal? Vicious? Possibly, but not brave. Though with the way true admiration shone in her eyes, any man would be feeling a touch of bravery. He allowed the small triumph to fill him, even though he wasn’t really certain he
deserved it. The look in her eyes burned like a beacon in the darkness that engulfed him, and for a moment he thought that maybe, just maybe, if he stared into her gorgeous face long enough, the bravery she claimed he’d shown would melt away all his doubts about himself and his actions. Perhaps then he could escape the icy feeling in his chest. If she could fall into his arms, surely that ice would disappear forever. God, he wanted her now more than ever.

  But he knew better. Regardless of the relief and joy it would bring him, she was his student, and hell, he barely knew her outside of the classroom. It was wrong, plain and simple, and that was that.

  Turning away from her, he twisted his key in the ignition. They drove in silence. The shit had really hit the fan, hadn’t it? A necromancer was on the loose in Rochester, using the darkest type of black magic imaginable to resurrect innocent people in order to turn them into murderers, and he had no idea what their motivation might be. Top that off with the trouble Vera was clearly in, having found that familiar in her apartment, not to mention the media shitstorm that would arise when the Rochester PD found fresh blood from the long-dead Mrs. Foley at the crime scene of Mr. Foley, and they might as well both be neck-deep in quicksand and about to be pulled under.

  There was no way the Rochester PD would be able to make hide nor hair of the forensic evidence, and their confusion was going to produce one hell of a story.

  So what would his fellow hunters do in a similar situation? Lie low at home or in a hotel, where they could work free of distraction, until they managed to get a few things sorted out. His apartment was easily the most heavily warded place in the city when it came to black magic, so back to the Batcave it was.

  After fifteen minutes of silent driving they pulled up outside a small brick apartment building. A wooden rocking chair sat on the concrete stoop. In the summertime green ivy snaked up the sides of the brick, but now, with winter still lingering in the April air, the leaves were dead and the building was plain, undistinguished.

  “Where are we?” Vera asked.

  “My grandmother’s apartment. I live with her.”

  He grabbed his weapons bag from the backseat and exited the vehicle. Thank God for the cover of darkness—otherwise, every little old lady who lived in the building would have a heart attack at the sight of him covered head to toe in blood.

  Vera climbed out of the passenger’s side, not far behind him. “Your grandmother’s apartment?” She followed him up the steps of the building. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Shane, but I’m pretty sure the sight of you right now would make any old lady in her right mind keel over. Not to mention you totally lose hot-professor points by living with your grandma.”

  Hot-professor points? A half smile crossed his lips. There was the Vera he knew. Her fear had clearly begun to subside, and she seemed to be feeling like her normal self again—her normal, playful, sexy self. God help him.

  Pulling out his key, he unlocked the front door of the building and held the door open for her. “Sorry to disappoint on the hot-professor front.” He couldn’t help but grin like a goofy idiot at the thought of her finding him attractive. “And as for the other part, I suppose in this instance it’s a good thing my grandmother’s not in her right mind.”

  Vera paused at the threshold of the building. Her expression softened. “I’m so sorry, Shane. I didn’t mean to...”

  He held up a hand. “It’s okay. She’s had dementia for the past few years now. I transferred here when I realized that her memory was starting to go downhill so I could take care of her. It’s called Sundowner syndrome. She’s usually pretty alert and her memory is somewhat decent in the morning, not perfect but better, and then, about the time sundown hits, she starts to get confused and forget. I pay a caretaker to stay late with her on the evenings I’m not home, and I pay her extra for her silence, if you get my drift.” He pointed to his bloodstained clothes.

  She nodded, then stepped into the building. He closed the door behind them before he led the way up the stairs.

  “Not that it’s any consolation,” she said from behind him in the stairwell, “but the fact that you take such good care of your grandmother totally ups your hot points, at least in my book.”

  He laughed. Damn, did that feel good. Just a few minutes ago he’d been certain he would never find it in him to laugh again, and here she was already fixing him, making him feel as if maybe he wasn’t some vicious killer, as if maybe he was a decent guy who had done the right thing. He knew that feeling made her even more dangerous than the sweet sway of her hips or the long, lean length of her luscious legs.

  Once they reached the second floor and were standing on the sunflower-covered doormat that read Home Is Where The Heart Is, he unlocked the door hung with the wreath of fake purple flowers his grandmother had crafted from items she’d bought at the dollar store.

  “Henry, is that you?” his grandmother called out from the kitchen.

  “No, Grandma. It’s me, Shane.”

  He wiped his feet off on the mat and stepped inside. A moment later his grandmother appeared in the hallway. A large smile crossed her wrinkled face, exposing what he knew were her dentures, but even as a confused ninety-six-year-old, the sight of her still warmed his heart. “Oh, Shane, what a surprise. I’m so happy you came to visit me all the way from Vegas.”

  Shane forced himself to return the smile, despite the pain of her confusion. It didn’t matter how many times she said that to him when he arrived home, it still broke his heart. Grandma Grey hobbled forward with the assistance of her walker and promptly planted a large wet kiss on his cheek, as if he wasn’t soaked almost completely head to toe in someone else’s blood.

  A moment later Mae, the caretaker, rounded the corner. The petite Asian woman let out a small squeak of alarm and clapped her hand over her mouth, eyes wide and alarmed.

  “Sorry to show up looking like this, but there was an accident in the lab at the university.” He shrugged, as if it were completely normal for university lab accidents to result in him coming home covered in bodily fluids.

  Slowly, Mae nodded, glancing over him once more before finally lowering her hand. “Oh, uh, okay. Do you want me to stay the rest of the time, even though you’re here now? She’s had a good day today. She’s been trying to cook, but she doesn’t seem to realize you turned off the gas on the stove.”

  He watched his grandmother flash a large, warm smile at Vera. “Who is this gorgeous girl you brought with you, Shane? You didn’t get married and not tell me, did you?”

  He blushed at the thought of walking down the aisle with Vera by his side. Yeah, right. Like that could ever happen.

  “No, ma’am,” Vera said, answering for him. “I’m just a friend of Shane’s. My name is Vera. It’s very nice to meet you.” She held out her hand.

  His grandmother swatted her hand away before stepping closer. Pulling her into a tight hug, she wrapped her arms around Vera’s neck. “Now, don’t be a stranger, dear. We hug in this household.”

  He watched Vera’s face, and his heart melted a little at the sight of her smiling happily as his grandmother hugged her. Oh, damn, this was dangerous, because now not only was she beautiful, resilient and sassy, but his grandmother, the only person whose judgment he’d ever really cared about, liked her. He was beginning to realize the more time he spent with Vera, the more he shifted away from seeing her only as the sexy student he wanted to do awful, naughty things with to a woman who legitimately impressed him in more ways than with just her beauty. Not to mention she was still amazingly sexy on top of it all. His cock twitched. Damn it. No way. He could not go down that line of thinking.

  He shook the thoughts away as he turned back to Mae. “You can go ahead and take the rest of the night off, Mae. I’ll keep an eye on her this evening, and I’ll still pay you in full.” He held the front door open for the nurse. He couldn’t risk Mae overhearing any o
f his and Vera’s conversation tonight.

  Mae looked him up and down with a wary eye one more time before nodding. “Okay, then.” She retrieved her coat and purse from the hallway table, then paused to pat his grandmother, who was just finishing squeezing the living daylights out of Vera, on the shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mrs. Grey.”

  Mrs. Grey released Vera and clasped both of Mae’s hands in hers. “Thank you for coming, Betsy. It was so good to see you.”

  Mae nodded, ignoring the older woman’s use of the wrong name. “You, too. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She squeezed Grandma Grey’s hands one last time before making her exit.

  Shane stopped her as she reached the threshold. He slipped a hundred-dollar bill into her hand. “For doing such a great job,” he muttered. Judging by the nervous nod she gave him, their understanding was mutual. Silence was a condition of her employment.

  She took the money and left. Shane closed the door behind her, leaving himself alone with Vera in the relative privacy of his grandmother’s dementia.

  Grandma Grey clapped two weathered hands together. “You’re just in time. I was making brownies.”

  Vera smiled and Shane nodded. He knew very well what that meant. That meant his grandmother had spent the past hour puttering around the kitchen he had safety-proofed for her by removing all the knives, sharp objects and any possibility of starting a fire by turning off the gas, most likely placing soup cans in odd places and mixing things that were never meant to be eaten together.

  Grandma Grey clutched the handles of her walker and moseyed her way into the kitchen. Shane followed, with Vera close behind him. When they stepped into the small space, decorated with caricatures of chickens and roosters as far as the eye could see—his grandmother had always liked the farmhouse look—they found she had removed all the mixing bowls from the cabinets. The largest one contained a whisk, a beater from a hand mixer, a clove of garlic and one of her house slippers.