by Lincoln Cole
If Arthur had to guess, then this guy was maybe around forty years old. He had scruffy facial hair and a big nose. The kind of guy Arthur had dealt with a thousand times before in his line of work. Just a normal guy that got himself in way over his head with the wrong crowd. He made a living by doing dangerous things.
Stuff where he might end up dead.
Arthur moved toward the man, who crawled on his side toward where his gun had fallen, moving away from Arthur and gasping for air. The rain pattered against his face and forced him to squint his eyes.
Arthur walked up slowly, kicking the gun out of reach, and then leveled his revolver at the man. “Did Bishop Glasser hire you?”
The guy rolled sideways, looking up at him in the rain. It came down with fury now and ran through his hair and into his coat. The guy had taken a gut shot, and blood poured out of the bullet hole. Just as quickly as it poured, the rain washed it away.
“You shot me,” the guy said. “You killed me.”
“Not yet,” Arthur said. “Still time to get you to a hospital.”
The guy leaned sideways with a grunt and spat at Arthur. It landed on his shoes, and the rain washed it away promptly. “Get it over with.”
“Did Bishop Glasser hire you to kill Aram’s family? Is that why you came out here?”
The guy didn’t respond, except to close his eyes and roll onto his back, holding one hand on the hole in his stomach. He laid back in the street, taking shallow breaths.
Arthur stood there in the rain, watching the man die alone and cold. He could still get him to the hospital, but that didn’t fall under his primary mission, and so the Council wouldn’t approve of the wasted time. If he followed protocol, he should leave him here and let him die.
Niccolo had nailed it.
He was a monster.
◆◆◆
Before now, Arthur had never questioned his duty.
He was born into this life, so-to-speak. It made for something his father did, and his grandfather before him. From the time he could walk, he had gotten prepped for the life of a Hunter and soldier. Not a soldier in the military, though, but rather in the supernatural.
What he did always made sense, and he had never second-guessed any of it. His father had worked as a demon hunter, and so Arthur had become a demon hunter. Home schooled and trained how to survive.
And, he got good at it. It came naturally to him, and he liked doing it. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. At sixteen, he had killed a man for the first time, and it had felt difficult.
The second time, though, hadn’t seemed nearly as hard.
Now, however, a new idea entered his mind and seemed set to make his brain its home. The idea murmured that he just provided a tool for the Council. That he had become a monster who liked to kill people. It struck a chord in him and made him wonder about why he did what he did.
Did he want this?
The answer proved easy: no. He wanted for his family to still be alive.
A noise behind him indicated movement, and he spun, raising his revolver. The cleaner stood there in the rain. He stumbled backward in the roadway, throwing his hands in the air.
“Woah!” he said. “Woah, don’t shoot. It’s me.”
Slowly, Arthur lowered his gun.
“Dude, you killed him?”
“He isn’t dead. Not yet. Help me move him.”
“Where?”
“Off the road. We need to bring the car over and get him to a hospital.”
He slid his gun away and hurried over to the dying man. Reluctantly, the cleaner came over and helped him drag the guy out of the road. Damn the Council; he wouldn’t let this guy die. He refused to live as just a tool and murderer.
“Car coming,” the cleaner said, glancing down the road. Arthur looked up. The vehicle headed toward them from Everett but remained a decent ways away.
Arthur grabbed his keys out of his pocket and tossed them to the cleaner. “Bring over the car.”
The guy caught them deftly and took off at a run back toward Arthur’s rental. Arthur slid his coat off and put it over the dying man’s midsection like a blanket, covering the bullet wound.
The car slowed when it drew close, and the driver’s window rolled down. An Indian woman looked out at him with a concerned expression on her face. In the passenger seat sat a young girl, maybe eight years old, and in the back, sat a young boy about a year older than his sister.
Aram’s family, he realized. He had seen photos of them but never met them. If they had driven by here twenty minutes earlier, they would have died.
Thank God for small favors.
“Do you need any help?” the woman called through the rain.
“No, thank you,” he called back. “Just a little accident.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. My nephew just got here, and we’ve notified the police.”
“Is your friend okay?” She looked at the guy on the ground and wore a concerned expression.
“Yeah. He got bumped around bad in the accident, but I’m going to get him checked out at the hospital as soon as my nephew brings the car around. Crazy day, huh? Guess I drove a little too fast for the rain.”
She seemed as if she didn’t quite believe him, but just then, the cleaner pulled up in Arthur’s rental car. He came to a stop just behind her.
“There’s my nephew now,” he said. “Thank you so much for stopping, but we are perfectly all right.”
She shrugged and then nodded. “All right, then. Good luck with your friend.”
“Thank you,” he said. “And thanks for checking up on us.”
She nodded, rolled her window back up, and then pulled off down the road. Arthur watched her go, and then let out a sigh. They would stay safe now. He had done his duty. Of course, he had one more thing to accomplish—get this guy to a hospital.
Together, they loaded the unconscious man into the backseat of the rental. Arthur grabbed the other guy, too, just in case. He bandaged up the gunshot wound as well as he could, but still, a lot of blood spilled over the backseat of the car.
Arthur felt fairly certain that his rental insurance wouldn’t cover this but didn’t care. He’d had considerably worse in his cars before.
They drove to a nearby hospital, and Arthur left both of the men at the emergency room entrance. He put the gunshot victim in a wheelchair, confident that someone would find him, and laid the other one out on the street.
Then they got out of there before anyone could ask any questions. They traveled in silence for about ten minutes, just listening to the rain, before the cleaner spoke up. He asked Arthur where to head next, and Arthur directed him once more to the movie theater.
They soon ended up back in Everett, heading toward the theater. On his command, the guy drove slowly around the parking lot, and Arthur got a look into all the cars. This late at night, most of the movies had ended for the day, so most of the foot traffic had gone.
It didn’t take him long to find Carl.
At first, it looked like Carl slept in the driver’s seat of a little red Chevrolet parked near the back of the lot. No other vehicles remained parked nearby, and it looked as if Carl had chosen this spot to stake out the place.
On closer inspection, he realized that Carl sat dead. His stomach had gotten cut open like Martin’s, and it looked like some of his organs had been removed. He hadn’t had time to check Martin in the bathtub, but when he did check him over, it seemed likely that he would find the same thing.
The bishop had harvested their organs.
“Was he …?” the cleaner asked when Arthur got back into the car. He didn’t finish the question.
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “He was a friend, too.”
“Man, I’m sorry.”
Arthur brushed away the concern, focusing on the task at hand. “You said you work for the local PD? Want to make some extra money?”
The guy looked like he hated the idea, but he didn’t object. “What did you have in mind?”<
br />
“We need to get my friends brought to a safe place and ready to ship.”
“Where?”
“Home. They can’t go through the system. Some people will come to pick them up in a couple of days and get them out of the country. Do you know somewhere we can keep them until then?”
“The morgue,” the guy said. “No autopsies scheduled right now, and the mortician has gone on vacation. The freezer is empty. I can stick your friends in there with some phony paperwork for a couple of days, and no one will think twice.”
“All right,” Arthur said. “Let’s get to it, then.”
Chapter 15
A few hours after Arthur got Martin and Carl to the morgue, he finally got a chance to stop running around and relax. Late at night now, it still rained but not quite as much as it had earlier in the day.
He’d just gotten back to the hotel and rented a room for the night. He had spent the better part of the day cleaning up the blood from both of the Hunters and making it look like they had simply checked out earlier this morning without saying anything.
Part of him wanted to go after Bishop Glasser right now, but that made for a bad idea. He could barely think straight, he felt so tired, and he needed to get a real night’s sleep before he went up against the bishop.
He didn’t have a lot of time to spare because now the bishop would know he was on to him and that he had halted his plan to murder Aram’s family. Right now, though, Arthur felt too tired to care.
No sooner had he lain down on his bed to get some shut-eye than his phone rang.
He grabbed it from the nightstand. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Frieda said. “Any news?”
“You tell me. I spent the entire day cleaning the blood of my friends off walls and out of carpets. Any word on your end?”
“I spoke to the Vatican, and they said they’ll look in to Bishop Glasser. They’ve heard rumors about him in the past, but so far, nothing substantial. Certainly nothing to justify this.”
“We will find out the truth tomorrow. I plan on paying him a visit.”
“Don’t kill him, Arthur,” she said.
He made a grunting sound in response.
“I’m serious. He’s a bishop, and that gives us a line we can’t cross.”
“It’s a line he crossed when he murdered my family.”
“Allegedly. We don’t know all the details, and we never will if you kill him. I shan’t ask you to stay away from him, but I beg you to handle this the right way. If things go south, the Church will never forgive us.”
Arthur didn’t respond for a long moment. His mind wandered back to when he’d stood in the street, looking down at the dying man. He’d dropped him off at the hospital but didn’t know if he’d lived or not.
At that moment, Arthur had thought of himself as a monster. Sure, he could chock up a lot of the feelings to his overwhelming exhaustion and take it with a grain of salt, but part of him knew it as the truth.
Maybe he was just a murderer.
Maybe the time had arrived to fix that.
“Arthur? You there?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I won’t kill him. You have my word. I’m done killing.”
The words flowed right by Frieda, and he knew she didn’t take his proclamation seriously. Why should she? Given his job and duty, and especially considering his history, it seemed a ridiculous assertion to make.
But he meant it. With all of his heart, he decided then and there that he had done with killing. For the Council, the Church, or anybody.
“I have a crew on the way to collect Martin and Carl. They should get there tomorrow morning.”
“Good. I’ll grab the bishop in the morning before he can get out of town, and then I’ll turn him over to the Church.”
“When you get him,” Frieda said. “Don’t turn him over. Not right away, at least.”
“What?”
“He makes for our only leverage. We need evidence, something we can bring to the Church to justify our worth.”
“What do you mean?”
Frieda hesitated before she said, “Glasser brought over half of our annual operating budget. Without him …”
“We’re broke,” Arthur said. “Won’t the Church pick up the slack?”
“Not likely. At least not for a few years and not unless we can prove to them that they need us. If we bring the bishop down ourselves, that will go a long way toward proving that to them. Either way, it will take a long time for us to court another benefactor like him.”
“So, what happens now?”
She laughed. “Now … we all get to fly coach for a while.”
He chuckled. “The horror.”
“You’re avoiding her, aren’t you?”
The question caught him off-guard. “Who?”
“Abigail. You feel like if you love Abigail as much as you used to love your daughter, that you’re betraying Becca, don’t you?”
He wanted to object to that idea, but the words caught in his throat. Frieda had it right, even if he couldn’t admit it to himself.
Becca had been his everything. The light of his life, and his little angel. She had gotten stolen from him in the most horrible way possible.
When he’d first found Abigail with that cult in West Virginia, it made perfect sense to take her in and protect her. She had given him a reason to go on living and a purpose.
But he’d begun to feel that maybe he hadn’t honored Becca’s memory the way he should. He worried that spending time with Abigail would dishonor his memory of his real daughter.
He felt terrified that he would forget her. Like, maybe, he had just found a suitable replacement.
“She wants to see you. I think I have the Council convinced to let you adopt her, and the vote happens in a month.”
“What? So soon?”
He had fought for permission to adopt her for months, but the idea that it might actually happen felt overwhelming.
“You have to deal with this, Arthur. No more running.”
“I’m not running.”
“Mmhmm,” she said. “Sure.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “Okay. I’ll come back to Germany as soon as I get the bishop. Goodbye.”
“Auf wiedersehen, Arthur,” Frieda said.
They hung up, and he dropped the phone onto the bed next to him.
Frieda always got it right about things like this, especially where he was concerned, and this time made no exception. He hadn’t consciously avoided Abigail, but that missed the point. She needed him, and he wasn’t there for her.
But how could he be? He felt like just a broken man unsure about what part he should play in the world. How could he take care of her when he couldn’t even take care of himself?
Right now, he felt too exhausted to deal with any of it: Abigail, Niccolo, Frieda, the dying man. It all piled on and became too much, and he needed a good night’s sleep before he could begin to unravel it and make it make sense.
With that encouraging thought, he leaned his head back on the pillow and fell asleep in only seconds.
What a hell of a sleep.
He didn’t often have nightmares, but this proved an exception. Crazy and vivid, they seemed to center around what had happened to him in West Virginia when he assaulted the cult. He had nearly died and spent the better part of a month in a local hospital recovering.
Because he hadn’t set an alarm, it had grown bright out when he finally staggered away from the bed. He kicked himself for sleeping so long, but he did feel refreshed and ready to go.
Emotions he’d felt so strongly the previous night had faded into the background once again. His feelings about his daughter and Abigail and whether or not he was a monster. They remained there but suppressed and easier to deal with.
One thing that hadn’t faded, though, was his new conviction that he would never kill another person.
He spent twenty minutes getting showered, shaved, and dressed. It felt incredibly refresh
ing, and he felt tremendously better once he’d gotten clean and put on a fresh outfit. The morning looked sunny, too, which made it all the more pleasant. He had a feeling that this would turn into a good day.
Only a short while later, he checked out of the hotel room and got back on the road in his little rental car. The bishop lived outside Everett to the West, and Arthur took his time driving through the city on his way.
He’d drawn close now; so very close to confronting the person who’d gotten his family killed. He wanted nothing more than to ask the bishop why he’d done it. Had it been worth it?
He got lost in his thoughts, driving through the center of town, and then he spotted something that pulled him back to reality. Father Reynolds, the local priest he’d met with Niccolo at Rose’s home, strode down the sidewalk, up ahead of his car.
He watched as Jackson turned and headed into an apartment building on the right. Arthur frowned, not sure what had set his mind into motion. Something, he felt, seemed wrong, and it only took a moment to realize what.
Someone followed the priest.
◆◆◆
A few moments after Father Reynolds went into the building, another man walked in after him. He had stood waiting, keeping his distance, and it became clear to Arthur that Jackson was his target.
The guy didn’t just follow him for kicks; he moved with purpose, hand stuffed inside his pocket and, no doubt, fingering either a gun or knife.
No, he had other things in mind.
The stalker wore jeans and a red flannel t-shirt to blend in with the passersby on the sidewalk. Arthur could tell that he didn’t look well-trained at subterfuge. Probably just a regular guy sent here to deal with the young priest.
It brought a distraction, Arthur knew, and remained none of his business. Still, the priest would end up in trouble without his help. He pulled to a stop next to the curb, and with a sigh, he opened the door and stepped out of the car. With not a lot of spare time to waste, he still didn’t want to let the priest get hurt.
Or worse.
Arthur followed the two men into the apartment building. When he made it inside, he didn’t see anyone on the ground floor, but he could hear footsteps heading up the stairwell to his right. He moved to pursue, climbing the switchback stairs carefully and trying to get a bead on the guy in the flannel shirt.
