He’d been thorough.
There wasn’t that much that was marked questionable, as far as I could see.
Rivera seemed to grow calmer as he worked through the thick file, as if each new revelation of betrayal was simply confirming something he already suspected or perhaps already knew.
I knew I hadn’t given the impression I was a particularly patient man, so eventually I spoke up. “Well? Are you just going to leave me in the dark? What the hell was in the safe?”
He might have seemed calm on the outside, but when he looked up at me I saw the fire in his eyes. Rivera was pissed.
“There are some materials here that we need to bring back with us to the magister. I’m going to find something to pack them in and then we’ll get out of here.”
I stared at that stack of cash for several long minutes once he left the room. A guy could run pretty far with that kind of spare change on hand.
I’d have to take out Rivera in order to get away with it though, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to do that.
Yet.
There was still time; we hadn’t yet found the third piece of the Key.
When Rivera returned to the room, I helped him pack the cash and stack of files into the duffel bag he’d found somewhere else in the apartment and followed him to the door.
31
The Preacher was waiting for me when I got back to my bungalow later that morning. I stepped inside, felt the biting cold that usually accompanied him like a cloud of Arctic weather, and knew I wasn’t alone. When I turned around after shutting the door, he was standing a few feet away, staring at me with those empty eye sockets of his.
“You surprise me, Hunt.”
“Oh yeah,” I replied, “why’s that?”
“The half-breed, Hunt? Really?”
I felt my ears turning red with embarrassment. How the hell did the Preacher know about that?
“Not really any of your business, now is it?”
He laughed. “Au contraire, Hunt. It is my business. You owe me a favor, and until I collect on that favor I will take an interest in anything that can limit your ability to deliver it. What will your dear Denise say when she learns of your dalliance with the wannabe demon?”
I took a step toward him, the anger rising from somewhere deep inside and spreading outward like liquid fire through my veins.
“You leave Denise out of this,” I told him, my fists clenching by my side. “Ilyana, too.”
I’d used physical force against the Preacher in the past and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again if it became necessary.
“I’m not the one who pulled either of them into this. That was all you, Hunt. Couldn’t just leave them well enough alone, huh? First you dragged Clearwater into your business in Boston and now you’re doing the same with the half-breed. One would think the kidnapping of your daughter would have taught you to mind your business.”
“Don’t you dare bring my daughter into this!”
He grinned and waggled a finger at me.
“Temper, temper, Hunt.”
He turned his back, deliberately I was sure, to see what I would do, but I stayed right where I was, unwilling to provoke a confrontation.
He did a little hop, skip, and a jump, then turned back to face me, straightening as he did so.
“Do you have the Key?” he asked, suddenly turning serious.
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
He looked at me a moment, and then cocked his head to the side and looked at me some more. I felt like a bug under a microscope and resisted the urge to shift my feet. He was waiting for me to say something, it seemed, but I was determined not to give him the satisfaction.
Eventually, he asked, “Why not?”
I shrugged. “The Key was split into three sections. I haven’t found the third section yet.”
“But you have the other two?”
Another shake of my head. “Not in my possession, no, but I know where they are and can get access to them when the time is right.”
“That’s not good enough.”
I was starting to grow really tired of all the people in my life who thought they could direct my every move. After the day I’d had, I didn’t give a damn whether the Preacher thought that was good enough or not.
“Frankly, I don’t care whether you find that acceptable or not,” I told him. “It is what it is.”
I had the sense that he was glowering at me with those empty eye sockets as he said, “I’m growing impatient, Hunt.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “Impatient? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s only been a few days since you gave me this assignment! Did you think I could just wave my hands and cause a mystical artifact that has been missing for the last few hundred years to miraculously appear just because you want it to?”
He was nonplussed. “How you do it is your business, Hunt. I just want the job done.”
“I’ll get it done, just as I told you I would. I simply need more time to do so.”
“Fine. I will give you three more days.”
“What?!” That wasn’t anywhere near enough time. Neither Fuentes nor Rivera had any idea where the third piece of the Key had been hidden and I certainly didn’t either. I’d been waiting for them to get a lead on it and had then planned to make my move to recover all of the pieces before Fuentes could do whatever it was that he intended to do with them.
“Three days, Hunt. Not a moment more.”
Talk about déjà vu. That was exactly the time frame he’d given me to bring Denise’s soul back from Caer Wydyr, the Fortress of Glass in the lands of the dead, when he’d come to me in the midst of the crisis in New Orleans. I’d taken the deal he’d offered and beaten his clock, though not by much. My gut told me he’d chosen the same interval just to mess with my head.
“There’s just no way,” I told him.
His reply all but tripped over my statement.
“Do you admit defeat? Are you forfeiting the task?”
Just as with the last time he’d visited with me, there was a certain ritual-like quality to his question, as if the answer meant so much more than the words seemed to indicate they did. It would be so easy to tell him that what he was asking me to do was downright impossible, but as before, something stayed my tongue.
I straightened and stared right into those hollow pits where his eyes used to be, had the fleeting thought that we made quite the pair with our twin sets of ruined eyes that could both still see, and pushed the thought away as I answered him in a clear, confident voice.
“No. The task is not forfeit.”
I wanted to be sure there was no chance of a misunderstanding.
He stared back at me.
“Three days then, Hunt. Three days.”
“Agreed,” I replied.
Then I did something that, in hindsight, seems rather monumentally stupid, but made perfect sense at the time.
I activated my ghostsight.
The true face of things, that’s what my ghostsight could reveal, and I wanted to know just who, or what, this Preacher was. He looked and talked and acted like a man, but my gut said he was far more than that. No ordinary man, no matter how powerful, could tear open a rift in the fabric of the world the way he’d done in New Orleans. No ordinary man could find me at seemingly a moment’s notice. No ordinary man could appear and disappear at will, the way this one did. I was tired of wondering; it was time to know the truth.
For the briefest of seconds I saw beyond the Preacher’s mask. Images flashed past the movie screen in my mind, there and gone again before I could fully focus upon them. Still, what I saw in that brief moment was more than enough—a man strapped naked to a nail-studded rack as something invisible slashed through the skin of his flesh, leaving gaping wounds like open mouths screaming in its wake; hot irons being plunged into open eye sockets as a tongueless mouth screamed itself raw; a body being hacked into pieces and tossed from a cliff into a dark sea far below while demons cavorted in the waves�
��and then there was nothing but a scream of rage so loud and so strong that it literally lifted me off my feet and flung me away across the room as it was filled with a blinding light.
When I staggered to my feet, the Preacher was gone.
32
Midafternoon found me, Rivera, and Ilyana back on the street, rousting anyone we thought might have some information about the Key or Grady’s prior affiliations before coming to “work” for Fuentes. It was a slow process.
As I’d suspected would be the case, Fuentes had been furious to learn that one of his own had betrayed him. The magister just didn’t strike me as a particularly forgiving individual, and I knew that Grady was lucky he hadn’t been caught in the act. If he had, he probably would have suffered even worse than he had at the hands of the thing in my head.
I kept referring to it as the thing, but the truth was I knew exactly what, and who, it was. Durante’s ghost. I just didn’t have any idea how to get rid of him. I could try and banish him by playing my harmonica, but I didn’t have all that much confidence that it would work because the minute he started to feel the pull of the music all he had to do was force me out and take over the driver’s seat. I wasn’t sure just how much more I could take before he started making his presence there permanent.
So far I’d been lucky; he’d only tried to take control when I’d been sleeping. He hadn’t done anything beyond lending me his sight during daylight hours, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t or wouldn’t end up doing something more. Eventually, he’d decide that a certain moment’s opportunity was too good to pass up and he’d snatch control right out from underneath my feet.
My unwanted passenger had taken control and killed a man while I’d slept last night. Given the message that he’d left behind, I had little reason to doubt that he’d try something similar tonight. Grady had been an easy target; he’d been human, after all, and didn’t have any extra abilities or gifts that would have helped him fight back. What if tonight’s target was Ilyana? Or Rivera? Or, heaven forbid, Fuentes himself? Any one of those three wouldn’t hesitate to fry me if they considered me a threat, and without control of my body there wasn’t a damn thing I’d be able to do about it.
All of which meant I had about twelve hours to come up with a plan.
No pressure.
Our efforts that afternoon to obtain any information about the Key or Grady were ultimately fruitless, and early evening found us in a crowded Mexican restaurant, downing a few beers and waiting on some dinner. After sitting there for a while, I had to use the restroom, so I excused myself and made my way through the diners to the men’s room at the back of the restaurant.
I was only a few feet away from the restroom when someone abruptly stood up from a nearby table, bumping into me and knocking me off balance. I would have fallen if others seated nearby hadn’t reached out and steadied me. I turned to say something, but whoever it was had already disappeared into the crowd.
It was only a few minutes later, as I stood in front of the mirrored sink to wash my hands, that I noticed a slip of paper sticking out of my pocket that hadn’t been there before. I took it out, unfolded it, and read what was written there.
12549 Tamerlane Drive
10:00pm
That was it; nothing more.
Clearly someone wanted a meeting, but who? And why? My first thought was that it was Bergman, but then, remembering the face I thought I’d glimpsed through that SUV’s window, I wondered if it might be Dmitri. It wasn’t as if he could just call me up and chat, after all.
Whoever it had been, they had waited until I was away from Ilyana and Rivera before making their move, so it seemed logical that they weren’t a fan of Fuentes. That fact alone made me want to make the meeting.
I memorized the address, flushed the paper down the toilet, and returned to my seat.
“Everything all right?” Rivera asked, when I sat back down.
“Sure. Why?” I was suddenly worried that he’d seen the whole encounter, but my fears turned out to be groundless.
“You were gone for a while.”
I shrugged, then reached for my drink. “Only one stall and the guy in front of me took awhile. Hope it’s not the food they serve in this place.”
Rivera scowled, unamused.
Ignoring him, I took a swig of my beer and hoped I wouldn’t have to put up with him or Fuentes much longer.
* * *
I left my bungalow around eleven and retrieved the Charger from the garage out back. I typed the address into the GPS, saw that it was less than an hour’s drive, and headed out into the night. I was driving without my shades for the first time in years and felt almost naked without them. I had them nearby though, just in case the ghost in my head decided that he didn’t want to be looking out anymore and left me alone in my blindness.
I caught the I-5 and headed out of town.
The address turned out to be that of a twenty-four-hour diner on a dark stretch of highway about forty miles outside of L.A. At this hour there were only a few cars and a handful of tractor trailer rigs in the parking lot. All of the rigs were dark, their drivers no doubt curled up in the back of their cabs to catch a few hours of shut-eye before making the return trip back to wherever they had come from. A tall thin man and a teenager in matching Red Sox caps were just getting into a shiny new Lexus as I swung past, but they were laughing together and neither bothered to even look in my direction.
Of the four remaining cars in the lot, only the dark-colored Mustang caught my attention. It was a newer model, parked off by itself near the back of the lot, in a spot that was just on the edge of the sodium-arc lights’ reach. As I slowly approached, the driver flashed the lights at me, once, briefly.
I parked a few spots away, with nothing between us, and got out of the car. The night was cold and reasonably quiet, the only sound the faint growl of cars going past on the interstate off in the distance.
The door to the Mustang opened. The interior light didn’t come on as one might normally expect, which meant it was either broken or disabled. My money was on the latter.
There was a pause and then a large, hulking individual climbed out of the driver’s seat and stood next to the vehicle for a moment, watching me just as I was watching him.
We might have stood there half the night, both of us hesitant to make the first move, if the passenger door of the Mustang hadn’t opened at that point to let the woman inside get out.
She looked over at me and even in the near darkness I knew who she was instantly. My heart skipped a beat, maybe more, as I drank her in. The sight of her was like food for my starving soul, for I truly thought I might never see her again. I marveled that she was here at all and was curious about her healing regimen. I wondered if she’d forgiven me yet for shoving an ancient dagger deep into her heart.
Only one way to find out.
I walked toward them.
As I drew closer I could see Dmitri’s usually gruff expression crease into a smile. He stepped forward and wrapped me in a literal bear hug, crushing me to him and lifting me off my feet.
“It is good to see you, Hunt,” he said, after he’d put me back down and released me. “I truly did not expect it to be this soon.”
“It’s good to see you too, Dmitri.” And it was, too, but I had eyes for just one person at that moment.
Denise Clearwater.
Hedge witch extraordinaire and the woman who had literally shared her heart with me to bring me back from the brink of death.
The same woman for whom I had walked the lands of the dead and whose soul I had brought back from there in fulfillment of the vow I’d made to her.
I opened my mouth to say something but was prevented from doing so as she rushed into my arms, nearly bowling me over in the process. She clung to me and I could feel her heart beating as furiously as mine. I had missed her, I knew that, but the full extent of just how much hadn’t hit me until I’d seen her get out of that car. Now I didn’t want to let go.
>
She pulled her head away from my chest and looked up at me. I saw a thousand different emotions in those eyes and wished that the milky orbs that had once been my own pale blue eyes could still communicate in the same way.
If it was true that the eyes were the window to the soul, then I didn’t want to think about what mine were saying to other people.
Denise seemed to sense what I was thinking, for she smiled a sad little smile and took a step back.
“I hope…”
That was as far as I got. Quick as lightning her right fist shot out and slammed into my solar plexus with stunning force, doubling me over. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell that was for and discovered that I couldn’t breathe.
Not even a little bit.
I could feel myself trying to draw a breath, could sense my muscles trying to obey the commands my brain was sending to them, but it was no use. My entire diaphragm was paralyzed.
My face grew red from the effort and I fell forward on my knees. A white emptiness gathered at the edges of my vision as the ghost inside my head began to pull back from my consciousness in order to protect itself.
Breathe, Hunt. Breathe!
At last my body responded, sucking in a great whooping lungful of air. I coughed, gasped, and fought to regain my breath. All the while Denise stared down at me dispassionately.
When I could at last take in some air without wheezing and gasping, Denise knelt down beside me.
“That’s for stealing my car. The knife in the chest I can forgive. Stealing my car? Not so much. So that’s not going to happen again, is it?”
I shook my head.
“Good. Glad we understand each other.” She patted me on the shoulder and stood.
“Dmitri, get him up. Then let’s go get something to eat. I’m hungry.”
With that, she headed off toward the diner door.
Dmitri came over and easily lifted me up, placing me back down on my feet like a parent picking up a young child.
I gave him an evil look. “You didn’t tell her?” I gasped out as I fought to get my breathing under control.
Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Page 18
