We were in deep trouble now.
Can’t be helped, I thought. Focus on the music, nothing but the music. Get the Key …
As I continued to play, Peg stopped, turned, and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time since I’d arrived. There was an intelligent spark in her eye, an awareness to her features that hadn’t been there before.
She stared at me, opened her mouth, and spoke.
“Do I know you?”
The music faltered, then stopped. Ghosts don’t normally speak, and I’ll admit it caught me off guard.
“Ah … no, no you don’t know me,” I stammered out nervously. “I’m a friend of Michael Durante’s though.”
“Oh, that Michael,” she said, smiling and blushing as if they’d done something more than a little risqué together.
I really, seriously, didn’t want to know.
“Michael gave you something to watch over, didn’t he? He’s asked me to come collect it for him.”
I blinked and she was holding the final part of the Key, turning it over in her hands as she looked at it curiously.
“Doesn’t seem like much,” she said.
I agreed. It didn’t seem like much. Sometimes the smallest, most inconspicuous things can cause us all to stumble.
I hoped like hell this wasn’t one of those times.
“May I have it?” I asked.
The chopper was still hovering out there in the darkness, the thump of its rotors pounding out a rhythm in the sky above. Sirens could now be heard in the distance too, growing closer with every passing second, and I knew we were just about out of time.
Now or never.
Peg was still lost in thought, turning the piece of thick metal over and over again in her hands, as I stepped forward and snatched it out of her grasp.
The minute my hands touched the metal, Peg vanished.
Leaving me the proud possessor of the final section of the Key.
A key that was our ticket out of this mess.
I jammed it into my pocket and ran for the ladder.
Ilyana was waiting for me at the bottom.
“Do you have it?” she asked, over the ever increasing sound of the sirens.
“Yes. Let’s go!”
I turned to do just that but apparently Ilyana had something else in mind. I hadn’t taken two steps before she snatched me up, slung me over one shoulder like a potato sack, took off down the hillside while the just arriving police officers at the top of the bluff looked down and watched us go in sheer disbelief.
I wanted to wave, but decided not to press my luck.
38
The warehouse chosen for the meeting stood by itself at the end of a long pier opposite a massive container ship. Stacks of cargo containers stood nearby, piled eight high and five deep. Next to the front rack were two of the oversized cranes that were used to load the containers onto the ships, silent and watchful.
Fuentes’s Escalade was parked in front of the warehouse, as if flaunting his presence and daring someone to make a move against him when he was this far outside his sanctuary. I nearly smiled to see it; after all, I knew what lay in store for him.
Ilyana pulled the car to a stop a few yards away from Fuentes’s and we both got out. I had my harmonica in my pocket but had stashed the final piece of the Key inside the cushion I was sitting on. I had no idea if Fuentes would be able to sense its presence if I carried it into the warehouse with me, nor how it might react when it was brought into close proximity of the other sections. Better safe than sorry; I could always retrieve it later if and when I needed it.
“Let me handle the explanations,” Ilyana said and I nodded in agreement. She turned away, headed for the entrance, but when I moved to follow I was nearly overcome by a wave of dizziness so great that it threatened to bring me to my knees. I shook my head to clear it, took a few tentative steps in the direction Ilyana was headed, and then hustled to catch up.
As I came through the door to the warehouse, I saw Fuentes and Rivera standing together in the center of the room watching the door expectantly, each with a smug expression on his face. When Rivera’s gaze shifted to something over my shoulder, I knew I was in trouble.
There was motion in the shadows to my left and I had a split second to wonder where the heck Ilyana had gone as what felt like a twenty-pound sledgehammer slammed into the side of my face. I went down like a side of beef, my face bouncing off the cold cement floor of the warehouse practically before my brain even registered that I’d been struck.
I lay there, dazed and most definitely confused, blood leaking from my nose and mouth and dribbling down the side of my face to the warehouse floor. I thought I heard male laughter coming from what sounded like very far away, but I couldn’t seem to get a fix on it any more than I could get my arms to push me back up off the floor.
I heard footsteps approaching and then someone squatted down in front of me. A hand reached out and patted my cheek affectionately. It took a moment for Ilyana’s face to come into focus.
She smiled at me, then said, “You may be a good fuck, Hunt, but you are one naïve son-of-a-bitch.”
Another pat on the cheek and then she stood.
“Oh, one more thing. This is going to hurt. A lot.”
With her laughter ringing in my ears, I watched, unable to move, as her booted foot drew back and then came flying forward again, connecting with the side of my skull and sending it right down into the darkest oblivion.
39
When I came to I found I was lying on the floor in the corner of the warehouse, my hands and feet trussed like a Christmas turkey with bailing rope and my head pounding as if the entire drum line for the John Sousa Marching Band was parading through my skull.
I turned my head and discovered Fuentes, Rivera, and Ilyana bustling about in the center of the warehouse floor about twenty feet from me, making provisions for some kind of ritual. I could see that they had laid out a circle of protection on the floor in salt. Fuentes stood in the center of the circle, a small podium-like stand in front of him. On the stand rested a very old and very thick-looking book. He was muttering to himself while flipping through its pages, no doubt refreshing his memory about what he had to say and do to find success. On a small card table to his left were the three separate pieces of the Key.
They didn’t look like much through human eyes, just three oddly shaped pieces of metal, each about six inches long. I knew perceptions could be deceiving; when I viewed the pieces of Key through the borrowed eyes of the ghost in my head they shone with a light as black as midnight and twice as deep.
Seeing them there, all together in one place, reminded me that I’d been betrayed. I glanced at the three of them bustling about and felt Durante’s rage explode inside me. His emotions shot like quicksilver through my body, igniting every nerve ending and setting my muscles vibrating so hard that I felt as if I could run a marathon in mere moments. It was like switching from smoking cigarettes to mainlining pure heroin; one moment I was trying to make sense of what had happened to me, the next I was roaring with rage and bloodlust.
I’ve never wanted to kill three people more than I did at that very moment.
And yet … something held me back. Durante might control my emotions, but I still controlled the centers of reasoning and self-restraint inside my head and I used them now to try to calm my errant passenger down. I knew if he attacked now all our efforts would be for naught; Durante, Rivera, and Ilyana combined were no match for the former sorcerer.
Not yet, I cautioned, knowing Durante could hear me just fine inside my head. Not yet. I promise that you will have your revenge, but the time isn’t right. Just a bit longer.
I kept repeating the same refrain, over and over again, until I felt all that raw anger recede. It was nice to know it was there for when I needed it, but right now cunning was more important than uncontrolled rage.
I moved my head slowly, looking around as surreptitiously as I could. The doorway I’d come thr
ough was along the rear wall. The section of the warehouse to my left held palates of packaged goods wrapped in opaque plastic stacked nearly to the ceiling. Across the room, on the other side of my enemies, was a series of offices stretching down the far wall. All of them were dark.
All but one was empty.
Or at least that was the case if everything went according to plan. Dmitri had been familiar with the warehouses from some point in his past and he’d been able to hack into the city servers and call up blueprints on his iPad for us to examine at the diner last night. The offices were determined to be the easiest place to hide, as well as the most defensible location should they be discovered ahead of time. Fuentes and Rivera had been too intent on capturing me, never mind the third piece of the Key, to do a thorough check it seemed.
I was just about to turn away when a flash of movement behind the window in the second to last office caught my attention. For just a moment I thought I’d seen a young girl go running past, her hair in pigtails and bouncing against her back.
Whisper.
That was where my friends were hiding; I was certain of it. It put them less than twenty feet from where I now lay at my end of the warehouse, which was going to make things easier when the shit hit the fan.
The trio in charge of the ritual appeared to have just finished their individual preparations when a rather significant look passed between Fuentes and Rivera. Unfortunately for Ilyana, she was looking in the other direction at the time and didn’t catch it.
Without warning Rivera stepped closer and grabbed her by the back of the head. Sparks and wayward tendrils of power flew out from beneath his hand while the rest burrowed themselves deep into Ilyana’s skull. Her limbs danced about spasmodically for a moment, a puppet doing a Saint Vitus dance, and then she collapsed to the floor, unconscious. The smell of burnt hair filled the room.
“Careful, Rivera,” Fuentes scolded. “We need her alive for the sacrifice; without that demon blood in her veins, there’s no way to hold the gate open permanently.”
Rivera shrugged off the admonition. “She’s tougher than she looks. She’ll be fine.”
He bent over her, did something to her hands, and then stepped away again, revealing the iron chains that he’d secured about her ankles and wrists.
Even as I looked on, thin wisps of steam began to rise from her flesh, as the cold iron worked its magick on her nonhuman flesh and began to eat away at her like a very slow acting acid. Iron was anathema to demons and ghosts alike. Even if she woke up, Ilyana wasn’t going anywhere now.
When he was finished binding her, Rivera picked Ilyana up and dumped her inside the circle. Then he, too, stepped inside it and “sealed” it behind him with a cup of salt that had been laid aside for that purpose. I wasn’t an expert on circles by any stretch, that was Denise’s department, but I seemed to recall that the circle would protect the summoner from whatever it was that he summoned. It wouldn’t do squat against an earthly foe, such as myself, but if something came through the gate and decided not to listen to Fuentes, he and his companions would theoretically be protected.
I’d be fair game, but they obviously weren’t too concerned about my overall welfare anyway.
“Let us begin,” Fuentes intoned.
“Let us begin,” Rivera replied.
The two men stripped to the waist, revealing an intricate series of tattoos covering their entire upper bodies: chests, backs, and arms. Fuentes picked up a gold-plated dagger from the podium beside him and then made a ritual slash across one shoulder with the blade. The fine network of scars already there told me this was a regular occurrence. Fuentes handed the blade to Rivera, who did the same thing to himself before picking up a silver goblet off the table nearby and advancing toward Ilyana, knife and cup in hand.
He’s going to slit her throat, I thought.
But it wasn’t to be. Holding her up by the hair, Rivera instead slashed the edge of the knife across her forehead. For a second nothing happened, so fine was that knife blade, but first drops and then streams of blood began pouring out the wound.
Rivera positioned the cup to catch most of it, then dropped Ilyana’s head back down against her chest and carried the blood-filled cup over to Fuentes.
Accepting it, Fuentes poured the blood over the three pieces of the Key. The strange metal sucked up the blood instantly, the way the earth will consume a rain shower in the midst of a drought. Within seconds there was no sign that blood had even been shed.
Satisfied with what he’d seen, Fuentes arranged the pieces so that they resembled a three-sided star and then pushed them together. There was an audible click, and a low-grade hum filled the room. At first I thought the sound was coming from Fuentes, but after watching for another moment I realized that it appeared to be coming from the Key.
That’s it? I thought. All that effort for three pieces of metal and a disembodied voice?
Fuentes picked up the Key, spun it several times between his hands, and then placed it in the air directly in front of him as if putting it on a shelf.
It stayed that way, hovering above the floor at a spot about five feet off the ground.
Then Fuentes spoke a command in a loud voice in a language I didn’t understand and the three-sided Key began to replicate itself.
Click, click, click, click—each piece would split off and form a new piece, slotting itself in place and then repeating the process until that simple, three-sided structure had grown into an intricate combination of elements with a gleaming Tau Cross in the center.
The Key hung there in the empty air and seemed to taint the very air around it with a malevolent presence.
Fuentes began chanting. Softly at first and then with increasing rapidity, he called out in a deep, guttural language that didn’t belong to this reality but to another, darker one just beyond. Rivera waited until he’d been through one entire sequence of the chant and then joined in, his voice rising in eerie counterpart to his master’s, pushing the sound to newer, greater heights.
Within minutes the sound grew so loud that it was no longer possible for something of that volume to be produced by human lips, and I knew then that this was why they had slashed themselves and drawn their own blood. Death mages can’t work a major working without shedding blood, and using their own blood in a ritual powered it up in a way that few other things could. The room soon filled to bursting with the magick they were pouring into the heart of the chant. Tension flailed about like an angry child, and if they didn’t do something soon I was certain the room would explode.
As if hearing my thoughts, Fuentes reached out, grasped the Key around the cross in its center, and gave it a sharp twist.
A deep groaning sound seemed to rise from the earth beneath our feet and then the very fabric of reality seemed to shiver and shake for a long, gut-wrenching moment.
When it stopped, the rear section of the warehouse was just … gone.
Standing in its place was the Bone Gate.
40
I laid there stunned, not quite believing my eyes.
Twin columns rose on either side of the structure, giant gateposts made of human skulls piled nearly one hundred feet high. Some of the bones were fresh, their gleaming white surfaces reflecting the warehouse lights, while others appeared centuries, if not millennia, old, yellowed and cracked with the inexorable passage of time. All those empty eye sockets staring down at you was chilling and, when combined with the unmistakable aura of malevolence that surrounded the structure, it was enough to make me want to turn around and run like hell to get as far away from this place as I possibly could.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury.
Between the skull posts was the gate proper, a glistening metallic structure consisting of horizontal arms at vertical intervals, reminding me of a whale’s rib cage turned sideways and welded into place. The metal of the crossbars seemed to pulse and breathe with a life all its own. I was instinctively repulsed by its very existence. It was just … wro
ng somehow, and my very being seemed to cry out against it.
Beyond the gate a dusty, bone-strewn plain seemed to stretch on forever under a dark and thunderous sky. Nothing moved on its surface and no structures broke the plain’s seemingly endless march to the horizon. Nothing but skulls and bone fragments as far as the eye could see.
I tore my gaze away from the gate and looked to where Fuentes stood, staring through the gate into the strange land beyond, still chanting his summoning ritual. Rivera stood nearby, guarding his back now that the gate had appeared, but he was no longer adding his voice to Fuentes’s. At Rivera’s feet lay an unconscious Ilyana.
Just like the Angeu, and the shade of the sorcerer Eldredge before him, Fuentes and Rivera underestimated me from the very beginning.
Directing my thoughts inward, I called out to Durante in the same way that I’d been calling to Whisper and Scream for years now.
I need your help, Durante. I need your strength. I need your rage, but I need it controlled. Can you do that?
Involuntarily, my head nodded up and down.
Goose bumps raced across my skin; not being in control of my own body was a horrifying situation and one I would be happy to be free of once we dealt with Fuentes.
A voice in the back of my mind that sounded like me but very definitely was NOT me echoed the sentiment.
When we’ve dealt with Fuentes. And his pet sorcerer.
I tested the bindings holding my wrists together behind my back. They were too tight for me, but maybe not for him. I would definitely need my hands free for what came next.
Can you get these bindings off my wrists?
I felt the equivalent of a mental shrug and then my arms tensed and kept tensing. I could feel the cord biting into my skin, could feel blood starting to run down my wrists, and then he was there inside my head, blocking the pain and goosing my muscles with his own ghostly power until with a snap the bindings broke.
I reached down, grabbed the bindings around my ankles and, with another surge of help from Durante, tore those loose as well.
Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Page 21
