Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Nassise, Joseph

  I started to feel sick to my stomach and turned away, unwilling to listen to any more. I could sense Ilyana’s presence nearby, but she didn’t say anything as I walked past. The questioning went on for several more minutes, with predictable results. The guy didn’t know anything and we left there with our souls a little darker for what we’d done but with no information to show for it.

  And so it went, for the rest of the day.

  We’d pull up to some location, question whoever we’d come to see, and then move on to the next. From time to time I was able to borrow the sight from a nearby ghost and take a look at those Rivera was bracing for information. They ran the gamut—men and women; Mundane, Gifted, and Preternatural; young, old, and in between. By late afternoon word had apparently spread and many of those we went looking for were not in their usual places. We kept at it though, scouring the streets until well after dark, for Rivera was loath to return to Fuentes without anything new, but eventually we were forced to do just that. Continuing to bang on doors and windows was just going to send those we were looking for deeper into hiding and that was the last thing Rivera wanted.

  The ride back was passed in silence and Rivera stalked off before the engine had even finished ticking. As I got out of the car, Grady said, “I could use a drink. Anyone else?”

  I was about to decline, not wanting to spend any more time in the company of these sociopaths than I had to, but Ilyana grabbed my arm and answered for us both.

  “Make that three,” she said.

  It seemed I was having that drink after all.

  23

  We retired to the poolroom where Grady had found me talking with Perkins a few days before. Ilyana led me over to a seat at the bar and climbed onto the stool beside me. Grady must have moved around behind the bar, for I heard glasses being knocked about and then something being poured.

  “It isn’t the best whiskey Fuentes’s money can buy, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a damn sight better than you’re used to drinking, Hunt,” Grady said as he clinked a glass down in front of me.

  I wrapped my hand around the glass and raised it to my lips, intending to take a drink, but a hand on my arm stopped me.

  “Hang on there, Princess. We’ve got to make a toast first.”

  “A toast?” I asked. “To what?” It didn’t seem like there was all that much to be toasting lately.

  But Grady surprised me.

  “To Perkins,” he said. “May his Gift guide him well in the afterlife.”

  “To Perkins,” Ilyana said.

  “To Perkins,” I echoed.

  Grady was right: Fuentes’s whiskey was a damn sight better than anything I’d ever had. It burned pleasantly on its way down.

  “Hit me again,” I said, putting the glass down on the counter, and Grady complied. By the time he and Ilyana began playing pool a few minutes later, my head was just starting to buzz.

  Which might explain why I asked my next question.

  “So what’s Rivera’s story? Why’s he so gung ho to please Fuentes all the time?”

  The clacking of the pool ball stopped and silence fell. It hung there for a long moment, a wet curtain dropped over the festivities. I was about to tell them never mind when Ilyana spoke up.

  “Sons typically like to please their fathers, don’t they?”

  I was in the midst of taking another sip and choked at her reply, spewing that fine whiskey all over the bar in front of me.

  “Rivera’s his son? Seriously?”

  I just couldn’t see it. There was no familial resemblance, never mind not a large enough spread in their ages. Unless Fuentes was a lot older than he looked, he would have had to father Rivera in his early teens.

  “Well, not by blood,” Grady said. “But blood has little to do with it in this situation. Fuentes plucked Rivera out of an orphanage when he was a teenager. Brought him up in his household, treated him as if he were his own child. It was Fuentes who identified Rivera’s particular penchant for the Art, who trained him and set him on the path he’s on today. Without Fuentes, I have little doubt that Rivera would either be in jail or dead at this point.”

  Ilyana cut in, her tone full of disgust. “Rivera is Fuentes’s attack dog, and if you find him at your door you’d best run if you get the chance. Quite a few of Fuentes’s more vocal opponents disappeared or were killed under mysterious circumstances in the days immediately after he became magister. There are quite a few in the city who believe that last thing those people saw was Rivera darkening their doorway just before the end.”

  “Why no one has blown him away yet is beyond me,” Grady muttered under his breath.

  Hearing him, I wondered the same.

  “What do they want?”

  “Who?” Ilyana asked.

  “Fuentes and Rivera. Fuentes is already magister of the city. What more is there?”

  Grady laughed, but there was no joy in it. “What do most megalomaniacs want? To rule the world, right?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not and that frightened me a little.

  Actually, that frightened me a lot.

  The conversation moved on from there, but I pretty much stayed out of it as I pondered what I’d learned. It seemed that Fuentes had seized control with Rivera’s help, which jibed with the things Bergman had told me previously. I assumed he’d been right—that Fuentes, or rather Rivera on behalf of Fuentes, had murdered Durante in an effort to get the Key and had failed to acquire the Key. Now they were trying to understand just what the former magister had done with the artifact and they were using us to do the dirty work.

  That pissed me off, but without a way to get out from under Fuentes’s thumb I didn’t see what there was that I could do about it. It was extremely frustrating and eventually made my head hurt.

  With a little help from that most excellent whiskey, of course.

  After a time I bid the others good night and slipped out the door, headed to my bungalow for what I hoped would be restful and much needed sleep.

  * * *

  I woke up feeling worse than when I’d gone to bed, my muscles aching and my joints stiff and sore. I felt as if I’d put myself through the wringer half a dozen times and hoped that my discomfort wasn’t a sign that I was catching the flu. I hated being sick.

  I stretched out a leg, trying to relieve a cramp, and my foot brushed up against something soft and warm.

  It took my sleep-fogged brain a few seconds to realize it was someone’s leg.

  I jerked my foot back and then froze, afraid my motion would disturb whoever was in the bed with me. I waited through several long, tense seconds, but the other person didn’t stir.

  That was when I realized I was naked.

  I normally slept in just a pair of boxers, but those were now missing. Even worse, my groin was not only sore, but had that dried-sticky feeling I get when falling asleep before washing up after sex.

  What the hell?

  My senses were fully awake now. The room was dark and a cautious sniff brought me the musky scent of sex still hanging in the air. It had a peculiar flare to it, though, one that I couldn’t identify.

  Experimentally, I reached out with my left hand and, even though I was expecting it, nearly recoiled when it came in contact with the smooth, sleekness of a woman’s hip.

  A woman as naked as I was.

  As light as it was, my touch must have awoken my companion, for she shifted position slightly and said sleepily, “I thought you’d had enough.”

  My heart jackhammered in my chest the way I imagined a mouse’s heart might when cornered by a cat. Adrenaline flooded my system as fear hit me like a freight train. I had to physically fight the desire to flee that washed over me in that instant of recognition.

  I knew that voice.

  Knew that accent.

  Ilyana.

  24

  How in hell’s name did I end up in bed with Ilyana?

  That was the thought that was spinning around my head like
a kid’s spinner toy on steroids as I fumbled for an answer to her remark. It hadn’t been a question, not exactly, but when a beautiful woman whom you’ve apparently just had sex with thinks you’re asking for more sex, you want to be as careful as possible in turning her down.

  Especially when she has demon blood running through her veins.

  An image of Ilyana swallowing that spectre whole the other night like an anaconda swallowing a mouse flashed through my mind, and I felt the skin across my body break out in goose bumps as fear seized me in its iron grip.

  You had sex with a demon, my mind gibbered at me.

  More than once, apparently.

  Just what the fuck were you thinking?

  I didn’t know.

  My ability to understand my actions was hampered by the fact that I had no memory of even considering such a thing, never mind carrying it out.

  I couldn’t explain it and yet here I was.

  In the same way that I couldn’t recall driving to Bergman’s hotel the night before, I didn’t remember anything from the moment I went to sleep until the moment I woke up naked in bed. At some point I had left my bungalow and walked to hers. I’d most likely made up some clever witticism to get her to invite me inside and then had apparently somehow maneuvered her into bed for a night of repeated sexual antics.

  I didn’t remember any of it.

  It was like the punch line of a bad joke.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” she prompted.

  “No,” I said, surprised at the steadiness of my voice given how surprised and, quite frankly, mortified I was to find myself there. “Just thinking a bit. I’m sorry I woke you.”

  “Eh, no big deal,” she said, “We’ve got to get up soon anyway or Rivera will come looking for us.” She kicked off the covers and stretched languidly.

  I couldn’t help myself. I turned to watch, taking in the swell of her chest, the sleek curve of her hip, the long smooth muscle of her thigh …

  Maybe she’d forgotten that I could see perfectly well in the dark, but I didn’t think so. She was doing it on purpose to manipulate me, and I found myself wondering just what she wanted. Unfortunately, it was working. I felt my body stirring at the sight and glanced away, unwilling to be drawn into her game now that I was aware of it.

  How the hell had I ended up here? I wondered again.

  When I didn’t respond, Ilyana slipped the sheet back over herself and rolled to face me. She watched me for several minutes, not saying anything, and then asked, “Did you really do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Kill that detective in Boston. Scranton, or whatever his name was.”

  Someone had been checking up on me, it seemed.

  “Stanton. His name was Stanton. And no, I didn’t kill him.”

  Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, like a predator’s.

  “So who did?”

  I explained about the fetch, the shape-changing creature that I and several others, including Stanton, had faced off against months before, of how that creature had kidnapped my daughter and been the cause, directly or indirectly, of all that had happened to me before I’d fled Boston for the Big Easy. It was a long convoluted story, but it actually felt good baring my soul; I didn’t think I’d ever told it in its entirety to anyone before.

  When I finished she was quiet for a moment, then said softly, “You are a good father, Jeremiah.”

  “Right,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “If I was a good father none of this would have happened in the first place.”

  “Nyet!” she said sharply, causing me to jump in surprise.

  She grabbed my chin in a viselike grip and made sure I was paying attention. “You are a good father. Much better than mine, who left me to fend for myself when I became of age. Terrible things happen to those left unprotected where I come from; he knew it, and he left anyway. Look where that got me.”

  She sighed, then curled her body around mine and laid her head on my chest. Her hair ticked my nose.

  It wasn’t the kind of behavior you expected from a demon, half-breed or not.

  My common sense reminded me that I was lying there with the human equivalent of a barracuda, one that got pissed off rather easily too, but my curiosity pushed the question out of my mouth anyway.

  “How did you end up working for Fuentes anyway?”

  She stiffened and for a moment I was afraid she was going to do something painful to me, like rip my guts out with her bare hands, but then she settled down and started talking.

  “I am not ‘working’ for him, as you say. I have no choice in the matter.”

  “How’s that?” I asked, even as Fuentes’s threats against Dmitri and Denise rang in my memory. Our host certainly had a variety of methods by which to insure our cooperation, and I didn’t doubt Ilyana’s story would turn out to be more similar to my own than I expected.

  “Let’s just say that I am not free to make my own choices in the matter. I will do as I am asked.”

  Though she didn’t say it, something about her tone made me think that she’d left the phrase “for the time being” off of the end of her statement.

  Since she was in a semitalkative mood, I decided to change the subject.

  “So what’s this Key we’ve been hunting for?”

  I tried to be casual about it, but Ilyana apparently had hearing as good as, if not better than, my own and caught the nuances in my tone. She tipped her head up to look at me, knowingly.

  “What’s the matter, Hunt? Feeling left out?”

  Yes, I was, but not for the reason that she thought. “Come on, Ilyana. I live enough of my life in the dark; I don’t need to be deliberately put there by those I’m trying to help.”

  I didn’t know if it was my request or if she was just in a talkative mood, but she answered.

  “The Clavis Sclerata. Latin for the Key of Wickedness or the Infernal Key.”

  I was a former professor of ancient languages at Harvard University. I certainly didn’t need the translation, but I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to interrupt the flow of information.

  “Legend has it that the Key was fashioned by a Jesuit priest named Raphael Xavier Chavez in Lisbon in the late sixteenth century. Father Chavez was a highly placed member of the Inquisition and was tasked by the Holy See with learning as much about their enemy as he possibly could.

  “Believing that the best way to obtain information about the Infernal Realm and the creatures that dwelt there was to capture one of its denizens and force the information out of it, Chavez fashioned a key that would serve two purposes: the first was to open one of the Nine Gates that provide access to the Infernal Realm, the second, to summon a lesser demon. Chavez believed the information gained could then be used to better arm the Church against its ancient enemies.”

  Eight years ago I would have laughed at the very notion of the existence of an Infernal Realm, never mind that it was populated by demonic creatures that threatened the very safety of the world above, but now I knew better. I knew too much now, had seen too much, to ever laugh at anything of that nature again.

  If Ilyana said the Key was intended to open a door to hell itself, then I believed her.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  She laughed. “As they say, pride goeth before the fall. Chavez told the wrong person about his plans and a group of practitioners hostile to the Church made a predawn raid on the cathedral Chavez was using for his research. They released the demon, which promptly hunted down and slaughtered Chavez for the torture he had inflicted upon it, leaving the infiltrators free to steal the Key and disappear back into the night.

  “For hundreds of years the Key was lost to myth and legend. Many believed it didn’t exist. But then Fuentes received word from what he called an ‘impeccable source’ that a man by the name of Michael Durante was the current guardian of the Key.”

  “The mayoral candidate? The one found murdered a few months ago? That Durante?”

&nb
sp; She nodded. “That’s the one. Durante was also one of the most skilled practitioners of the Art in all of L.A. That didn’t matter to Fuentes, however. He still sent Rivera and me to try and ‘persuade’ Durante to give up the Key. Durante, of course, laughed in our faces and then threw us out.”

  I imagined that went over well with Rivera.

  “Did Fuentes have anything to do with Durante’s death?”

  Ilyana just looked at me, not saying anything.

  I took that as answer enough.

  “What happened to the Key?”

  “Fuentes didn’t know it at the time, but Durante split it into three pieces and hid each piece in a different location. We’ve found two, but there’s still one out there somewhere.”

  I was about to ask what Fuentes intended to do with the Key once he found all of the pieces, but a sharp knock at the door interrupted us.

  “Come!” Ilyana called, before I could object.

  The door opened and in walked Rivera.

  The look of surprise on his face at seeing me in Ilyana’s bed might have been priceless, if I wasn’t so wrapped up in amazement at the fact that I could see.

  Bright sunshine was streaming through the door behind Rivera but I could see!

  25

  I blinked several times, unable to speak.

  Colors jumped out at me, crisp and bright, in a fashion similar to when I was “borrowing” the eyes of a ghost, but different as well. It took me a moment to realize that there was no corresponding splash of emotion to go along with them. Rivera was clearly annoyed at finding me there, but I couldn’t see the aura of darkness that should have been shimmering around him as a result of that annoyance.

  Had my sight somehow miraculously returned? Had I lost my Gift?

  Rivera said something in a language I didn’t understand and Ilyana answered him in the same tongue. I barely noticed; I was too wrapped up in what I was seeing. Everything was sharp, vibrant, and clear, and it was that fact that told me this wasn’t my old sight come back to me but something new entirely. It was like going from a color television set circa 1982 to a twenty-first-century high-definition plasma screen. There was just no comparison.