Books by James R. Tuck
BLOOD AND BULLETS
BLOOD AND SILVER
Novellas
THAT THING AT THE ZOO
SPIDER’S LULLABY
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
SPIDER’S LULLABY
JAMES R. TUCK
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Teaser chapter
Copyright Page
1
Charlotte’s front door was open.
It wasn’t open much, only ever so slightly. The edge of the door just touching the edge of the jamb. So close to being closed that neither of us noticed until we were standing in front of it.
That was my first clue.
The second clue was the bittersweet scent of Were-spider blood drifting from inside the house.
I might have noticed the smell first if I hadn’t been drinking, but I had. That’s what happens when you go out with friends to little gumbo blues bars on the south side of town.
Charlotte, Tiff, and I had met a few months back during some craziness that was a vampire bitch from hell named Appollonia using the Spear of Destiny to build an army of vampires under her complete control. We took that bitch down, but just barely. Since then we had become fast friends, spending time together when I wasn’t busy hunting monsters. Oh yeah, that’s what I do for a living. Deacon Chalk, Occult Bounty Hunter, at your service. No monster too big or too small. Have silver bullets, will travel.
It had been a slow night on the occult bounty-hunting front, so we had gone out and enjoyed a set by The Mother Truckers in a dive bar south of Atlanta.
Tiff was the designated driver this time, so Charlotte and I had tossed back enough shots to get a sports team blitzed. That’s what you have to do when you have a higher than human metabolism. It had been a fun, relaxing evening.
Until now.
That smell hit the back of my numb throat as Charlotte pushed open the unlocked door, sticking just behind my tongue like a thick blot of aspirin-laced honey. Adrenaline howled through my veins, burning away the haze of alcohol. My senses fired up as I jolted alert.
My left hand clamped down on Charlotte’s arm, jerking her back from going inside.
My right hand was full of Desert Eagle .357.
Pushing her behind me, I held a finger up to my lips. She nodded in understanding, mouth tightening into a hard line of silence. Her senses were sharper than mine, so I knew she could scent the blood in the air if I could. From the move of her head down to the move of it up, she shifted.
All night she had been a nice, if slightly conservative, looking lady. Thin and done up nice with smooth deep chocolate skin and wide hazel green eyes. All of that washed away as she changed.
Gray fur bristled from her skin. Her face elongated, becoming narrower at the chin and wider at the brow. Her mouth was still the same, except now lipstick painted lips hid rows of deadly needle-like teeth. Dark hair still swept into a retro, sixties-style, beehive updo, but now it crowned a face with no nose to speak of. Eight red lidless eyes ran in two rows up the sides of her forehead. Four long spider legs struggled to unfold out of the back of her dress, ripping free to wave around her like miniature cranes tipped with daggers.
My friend Charlotte is a Were-spider, and her spider-lady form always creeped me out, no matter how many times I saw it.
Movement made me look past her. Tiff was trotting up the sidewalk at a fast pace. Her arm was down beside her body, holding a Benelli tactical shotgun close to her body, trying to keep it obscured. The shotgun had come from my car, a 1966 Mercury Comet. She had been waiting in it while I walked Charlotte to the door. I was sure she had seen me draw my gun and that’s why she came a-runnin’.
She was wearing a really sharp little black dress cut high on a pair of really sharp legs. The two-inch heels on her shoes gave no trouble as she climbed the handful of steps up to the landing we were on. A jaunty black beret that matched her black wool peacoat held captive hair that was growing out in a nice thick tousle. She had stopped straightening it, but still colored it. This month it was an unnatural shade of dark magenta that contrasted sharply with her liquid blue eyes.
I realized I had been watching her walk instead of paying attention to the situation.
Back to work.
Stepping lightly next to Charlotte, Tiff brought the shotgun up across her chest, holding it ready like I had taught her. Tiff wasn’t an occult bounty hunter, but she was sticking around, so I had been showing her how to stay safe around me.
As safe as anyone could be around me.
I motioned silence to her also. I pointed to my eyes and then made a circular motion with my fingers. Keep your eyes open. Be alert. She nodded with understanding.
I turned back to the door and pushed it open slowly. Away we go.
2
The house was dark. The only light was the dim glow of streetlights through closed blinds. It took just a split second for my night vision to kick in, pupils dilating wide to compensate for the lack of light. Inside the house, the smell of Were-spider blood was overpowering, filling my nostrils and driving out oxygen. I sucked air through my mouth, but that didn’t help much. It was still like breathing in the thin chemical fumes from transmission fluid.
The front room was a living room. It looked completely normal, furniture all in place, nothing missing. My boots were silent on the thick, off-white carpet. Taking each step carefully, I kept the wall at my back, gun pointed forward.
Reaching down inside myself, I tapped my power. It rose up, boiling in the Angel blood that coursed through my veins to unfurl. It stretched and began moving through the house in front of me. Seeking. Searching out anything supernatural.
Five years ago, while hunting the monster that slaughtered my family, I rescued an Angel of the Lord from being abused by bad guys. When I found the monster, I went and got myself killed by that Nephilim piece of shit. The Angel showed up and resurrected me with an infusion of her blood, or whatever Angels have for blood.
After coming back, I’m stronger, faster, and tougher than plain old human. I can sense supernatural things now. I used the advantage to kill the monster that took my family and I have been killing monsters ever since. One day I’ll find one who’s bad enough to send me on to be with them. It hasn’t happened yet.
Maybe today would be my lucky day.
One more step took me into the hallway where I found the first body.
It was a naked man. Cut in two. Half of him was against one wall, propped up like he was napping. His waist ended at the floor. Longish hair fell down around his face, hiding his features from me. The other half of him was a few feet away, against the other wall.
This half had been turned upside down, legs akimbo in the air. It looked like he was diving into the floor on one side of the hallway and emerging from the floor on the other side of the hallway.
Were-spider blood had turned the carpet a dark green, almost black in the dim light. The blood was still moist but was thickening into the consistency of glue. It lay in a wide smear between the two halves and splattered in a line about waist high that arced up the walls, across the ceiling, and back down. My power felt no hum of life from him.
I stepped over and continued down the hall.
&
nbsp; Moving through the open archway midway down the hall put me in the kitchen. It was a wreck. The counters had been swept clean. Everything that had sat on them had been dumped onto the floor. My eyes tracked a row of bullet holes along the cabinets beside the sink and stove. The front of the dishwasher was dented, the metal creased and smeared with something that looked like Were-spider blood. The refrigerator lay propped up on the counter opposite to it. The doors had opened and food spilled out on the linoleum. It was a morass of milk, eggs, and other food. It was all swirled together in an insane child’s finger paint. I could see tracks, but no actual footprints.
I stepped back into the hallway, moving past.
Opening the remaining doors gave me four more bodies: three men, one woman. Two had been shot. Double bullet holes gaped from their chests and the back of their heads were both gone. One bullet hole neatly punched each of their foreheads.
The other man and the woman had been hacked to death using something extremely sharp. They had been sliced into pieces trying to defend themselves, butchered into cuts of Were-spider. Both of them in separate rooms, both of them in the same curled position trying to make themselves too small to cut.
Both of them had failed.
I turned to find Charlotte in the hallway, kneeling over the man who had been cut in two. She lifted his chin with fingers that had too many knuckles. Her bottom lip quivered, but she did not cry. I didn’t know if Were-spider eyes could shed tears. Did spiders have tear ducts?
Now wasn’t the time to ask.
I stepped over to her. She looked up, letting the man’s head fall back down. His teeth clicked together sharply as chin hit chest. I made a mental note. He hasn’t been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in.
I kept my voice low even though I didn’t sense anything supernatural in the house except Charlotte. To my power she was a blaring red flare, pulsing with spikes of lycanthropic anger. “Where are you keeping it?”
She stood and pushed past me. I followed her into the bedroom at the end of the hallway. She stopped for just a second as she saw the woman’s body on her bed. The only part of her that was intact was her head. Her arms and legs had been cut off in pieces, and her torso had been slashed so many times it looked like ruffles on a blouse. The bedspread was saturated with Were-spider blood. It dripped onto the floor at the corners.
Charlotte took a deep breath. I watched her pull herself together, spine straightening into a steel bar. She stepped over to the closet and opened the door. Inside was covered with a thick batting of spiderwebs. A set of stairs led downward. It was pitch-black.
Charlotte took a step into the closet.
“Wait.”
She stopped, becoming unnaturally still like only a predator can. I moved in front of her. The green laser from my Desert Eagle .357 disappeared, drowned in the inky darkness down the stairs. To my left, something cast a faintly greenish light. It was a light switch, the end of it painted with glow-in-the-dark paint. I flipped it up. Yellow incandescence snapped to life down the stairs, burning away the darkness. Yes, it ruined the element of surprise, but I had a bad feeling we wouldn’t need it.
I began to walk down, my boots falling softly on each step. The sides and ceiling of the stairs were coated in webbing. It clung, thick and white. Claustrophobic. Tension sang inside me as I held my body tight, so I brushed as little of it as possible. It was easier said than done at 6′4″ and right at 300 lbs. Some of the webbing still snagged on my shoulders, clinging thin and pale against my black T-shirt, snatching on the one day’s worth of stubble across my head.
The bottom of the stairs stopped at a web-covered wall, opening to the left into a room I couldn’t see. I stopped, listening. It was silent, but I couldn’t tell if that was from the baffling of the spiderwebs or because it was actually silent. Crouching, I looked around the corner, gun at the ready. My skin tingled with tension, the back of my scalp pulled tight.
Nothing happened.
I stepped around the corner into a room that had no furniture, just a side of beef that was beginning to go ripe in the cool room. Thick ropes of webbing hung loose and empty in a tangle in the center of the room. I turned to Charlotte as she stepped down behind me. Cramming my gun into its holster pulled the leather straps tight across my body. My voice was harsh with unreleased tension.
“The egg sac is gone and so is Ronnie.”
3
I stood in front of Charlotte’s cabinets. They were painted a bright yellow and had a nice scrollwork accent that had been carved into the corners. The small ceramic handles had tiny swirling patterns in a cornflower blue. They smelled like they were made of oak. I noticed all of this while looking at the thumb-sized hole through the center of the cabinet door.
If I had my guess, it was a .45 caliber bullet hole. The best I had was a guess because there weren’t any shell casings lying around. None. Not one. They had all been picked up.
Opening the cabinet showed the wood around the hole was splintered to hell and back. White plates that had been stacked behind were shattered. The wall in the back of the cabinet had a hole in it. Reaching in, careful of the razor-edged shards of porcelain, I stuck my finger inside it.
Smooth, lumpy metal met the tip of my finger. There was a steak knife in the sink that I picked up. Digging into the wall, I got the point of the knife past the metal lump, pried up, and popped it free. I tossed the knife back in the sink and looked at the snarl of bullet in my palm.
Yep, .45 caliber.
Tricky, tricky, tricky.
Closing the cabinet, I turned to the two ladies in the kitchen who were watching my every move. “This was a professional job.”
Charlotte stood still. Gray fur covering her body shimmered as she quivered in anger. The four spider legs from her back came around her, agitating the air. Her voice was full of venom. “How the hell do you know that?”
Tiff put a hand on her. “Charlotte, please calm down. This is what he does, you know that. Let him explain.” She turned her face toward me expectantly.
I pointed at the cabinets. In my head I could picture what happened here. The bullet holes stitched along the cabinets, trailing off in a line along the wall. I could see a Were-spider in spider form, probably the one taking up both sides of the hallway, scrambling up the wall and ceiling trying to get away from the killer. They had thrown the refrigerator over in an attempt to get away, blocking the killer that was after them. He had chased them with bullets instead.
“We are looking at a professional using two suppressed .45’s.”
Tiff looked thoughtful before she spoke up. She was trying to learn. “How do you know they were suppressed?”
My finger tracked the trail of bullets. “A normal .45 will shoot through six layers of plywood without stopping. These bullets stopped in the sheetrock behind the cabinets. When you put a suppressor on a semiautomatic, the bullet speed is reduced so it doesn’t crack the sound barrier. And .45’s are loud as hell. This many unsuppressed bullets would have had the neighbors dialing 911 like it was their job. We would have gotten here and found a yard full of cops.”
“How do you know they used two guns?”
I pointed at the holes again. “There are twelve bullet holes here. A standard .45 comes with a seven-round magazine, so eight shots if you keep one in the chamber. You can get extended magazines for them, but when you start retrofitting clips they usually misfeed. We know these guns were suppressed, which would make them prone to misfire. A professional wouldn’t use an extended magazine.”
Her brow furrowed as she processed what I was saying. “And this wasn’t a robbery gone wrong?”
“Absolutely not.” Gently, I tossed the bullet over to her. She caught it with one hand and held it up to the light, studying it. “What do you see, little girl?”
Realization clicked on. “Silver.”
“Got it in one.” I smiled. She was learning fast. “This was done by someone who knew they were hitting a lycanthrope’s home.” We
looked at each other in understanding.
God, her eyes were blue. Big and bright, like the clearest day you ever saw, they pulled to me from behind a thick lace of lash. We had shared a connection since I took her out of the club where she worked. It had been owned by a vampire douchebag named Gregorios. It wasn’t the first time we had met. I had done her first tattoo years prior. That had been before. Before my life exploded. Before all that I had was ripped away by the murder of my family.
I don’t want to talk about that.
It hurts too much.
When we met the second time, she decided to become involved in my crazy, monster-hunting life. She had been there at the end of the Appollonia thing, standing strong, trying to fight my fight with me.
I had sent her away to keep her safe. She was completely unprepared for the hell we were going to have to unleash.
She had kissed me before leaving.
It had been a moment in a bad situation where survival wasn’t guaranteed. It hadn’t happened again and we hadn’t talked about it. She seemed to understand without me telling her that I was still too wounded from losing my family so many years ago. Since their deaths there had been no one. She didn’t push anything, and because of that we had become very ... close. We weren’t dating, but there was a connection between us that grew stronger the more time we spent together.
Our attention was broken by the scrape and bang of Charlotte shoving the refrigerator back in place. She turned to face us. Her hair had fallen, hanging in black and gray strands around her alien face. Long, slender fingers with too many knuckles smoothed it back.
Turning away from her task, she looked at us with eight unblinking red eyes. “How is any of this going to help us find the bastard who did this?”
“The more information I can gather the better chance we have.”
Spider's Lullaby Page 1
