Dark Vessel: An Urban Fantasy Series (Meredith Bale Book 3)

by DC Malone

  I didn’t want to let on that I knew he was following me, so I dropped to a crouch and retied my boot before springing back up and continuing on my way. I slowly built my speed until I figured I had a little more distance on him, then I ducked down the nearest alleyway at the first opportunity. There was a side entrance to the building on my right. The door was unlocked, so I pushed inside and waited for the sounds of angry shouting from any occupants on the other side. When that didn’t happen, I figured it was as good a place as any to lay in wait for my hapless stalker.

  It took nearly a full minute for the tall man to appear on the other side of the cracked door. He looked for all the world like a dog owner who’d suddenly lost track of Fido, his gray topped head spinning left to right and back again as he crept further up the alley. He didn’t look to be armed, which gave me the physical advantage and the element of surprise.

  I tiptoed out after him. He was moving faster by the time I caught him, but he was completely oblivious to my presence until I was right behind him with the two fingers of my right hand pressed firmly to the middle of his back.

  “Don’t move a muscle.” If he really thought about it, he could probably tell that I didn’t have a gun pressed to him. But the fact was, with Hiram’s little trick, I could send a jolt right through the man’s shade and put him out like a light. So, my two fingers were at least as good as any stun gun.

  “I—I don’t have much money, sir. My wallet is in my breast pocket. There’s maybe fifty dollars in there.”

  “You did not just call me sir.” Maybe it really was time to give the booze a break. I had always thought my voice had a bit of a sensuous huskiness to it, but maybe I had that confused with a masculine rasp. “Turn around. Slowly!”

  “You?”

  “That’s right, me.” I kept my fingers pointed at him for a few more seconds until I realized how ridiculous it looked. “Why are you following me?”

  “My name is Donovan. Isaac Donovan. Uh, Father Isaac Donovan, actually.”

  “What is this? Your Bond¸ James Bond moment? Wait, father?” It finally clicked. The reason ol’ Isaac looked so familiar was that I had seen him just a few days ago in his priest uniform. What was the thing called? A caltrop? A haddock? It didn’t matter. He’d been in a black dress with a white collar, and he’d been walking right into Francie’s.

  “I saw you like three days ago,” I said. “Walking into my friend’s bar. How long have you been following me?”

  “I was there to visit you. I understand you keep an office at that establishment.”

  “Yeah, okay. But that still doesn’t tell me anything. What do you want? And why didn’t you just come up and speak to me? What were you going to do if I didn’t notice you back there? And just so you know, you’re a pretty crummy stalker.”

  “I wasn’t going to do anything to you,” Father Donovan replied. “Except maybe try to help you, try to intercede on your behalf.”

  “Intercede on my—” It began to dawn on me that just because the guy was a priest didn’t mean he wasn’t short a few marbles. “I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, buddy. But I’m just about positive I don’t require any interceding. How about we just go our separate ways and call it a day, okay?”

  “I felt you, Ms. Bale. I feel you.”

  “You did what now?” My hands shot out in front of me. If Father Feelgood decided to take a step forward, I would soul shock the sucker back to his choirboy days.

  “I—I felt you when it happened. Just a few days ago. I felt—”

  I tensed as he lifted his left hand, but he only turned it so I could look at the other side. It was decorated with a red star-like symbol. Just like the one on the back of my hand.

  I looked at the matching mark on the back of my hand. A chill went down my spine. “You? You’re behind the murders?”

  I was a little surprised when the man nodded his head sadly in agreement. I expected denial or, at least, some kind of deluded justification. All I got was a resigned admission of guilt.

  “Put your hands up!” I was acutely aware I still didn’t have a visible weapon in my hands, but I didn’t care. The murderer had fallen right into my lap, and I wasn’t about to let him go.

  “It isn’t what you think.” The priest still put his hands up without objection. “And you are aware that you don’t have a gun, are you not?”

  “What I do have is just as good.” I wriggled my fingers before him like that explained anything. “And even if I didn’t, I’m pretty sure I could still take you, father. No offense.” I wasn’t precisely sure why I was apologizing to a murderous priest, but my statement had the ring of ageism to it, and I felt I was above such things. For all I knew, the priest’s favorite hobby was kickboxing, and he could ring my bell anytime he chose. Who could say?

  “I want you to listen to me carefully,” Father Donovan said. “You can do with me as you please. The burden of my guilt is inescapable and inexcusable. But there are other forces at work here as well. Forces that you may not believe or understand. Are you a believer, my child?”

  “First off, I’m not your child. Second, that’s none of your business. And third, I’ve seen a few things, things that you might not believe. So lay it on me. What are these other forces you’re talking about?” This was the part where he’d lay on the justifications—the inevitabilities. I didn’t yet know exactly how he’d pulled off the murders; maybe it was a kind of mind control Hiram wasn’t familiar with, or maybe it was a more mundane form of brainwashing. He was a religious leader, after all. Perhaps that wasn’t enough for him, and he decided he would rather be a cult leader instead.

  “It—it is a forsaken thing.” Father Donovan’s voice took on a quiet tremor. “We would be wise not to discuss such matters openly. I can help you understand, but you must come with me back to my church. It isn’t so far.”

  “You want me to come with you to your church?”

  “Yes. It is for the best.” The priest nodded his head emphatically.

  “You just admitted to being responsible for at least four murders. There are probably more that I don’t even know about. And you think I’m going to just follow you back to your church? How about I do you one better? You can bind my wrists, for my own protection, and lead me back to the cellar or dungeon of your choosing. I’m sure that would work out just peachy for me. Got some rope handy?”

  “It is not like that. On my honor—”

  “As a murderer.”

  “I must make you understand.” Father Donovan didn’t raise his voice, but his words did become more urgent.

  “Then spit it out. Here. Not at your church. Right here, in the relative safety of this, uh, deserted alley.”

  “Lechbaalmet.”

  “Are you having a stroke?” I looked the older man over, but I couldn’t see any obvious signs of distress, aside from the obvious fear in his wide eyes.

  “Lechbaalmet!” He spat the word like a curse.

  “If you’re trying to hex me or—”

  “I am telling you what you wanted to know, what you were too stubborn to see any other way. It has arisen from me—from my failings and shame. And now its cursed eye is upon you too, girl! Neither one of us is as lucky as those lives it chose to end. It wants us to bear witness, to suffer.”

  “Well, then I’ll be doing you a favor on that front,” I said. “I’m going to turn you over to the NAPD and the only thing you’ll have to watch is a bland six by eight room for the rest of your days. How does that sound?”

  The priest lurched toward me, hand outstretched, but I jerked back before he could touch me. “I must make you understand,” he groaned. “Our time is already almost over. Surely you can feel it.”

  I started to say that I didn’t feel anything of the sort, but that wasn’t exactly true. My hand had started burning once again. The pain had built up so gradually that I almost didn’t notice it.

  “That’s it,” Father Donovan said, reading my expression. “That�
��s him.”

  “Lechbaalmet?” The name tasted ancient and dirty on my tongue.

  Something made a scraping sound behind me, but there was nothing there when I turned to scan the alleyway. Pedestrians and cars flowed in both directions along the street beyond, just as before, but the normal din they created seemed dimmer or muted in some way. It was like they were farther away than they appeared.

  “He doesn’t want us together.” The priest stepped around me, back toward the street. For some reason, one that I didn’t quite understand, I didn’t try to stop him. In fact, I wanted him between me and the alley’s entrance.

  “What is it?” I listened as the scraping sound came again. The sound was grating, unnerving, like a dull blade against bone, and it sounded closer each time it came. There was still nothing to see, but I was certain that didn’t mean there wasn’t something there.

  “You know.” The priest took another couple of steps toward the sound.

  Demon. I didn’t want to say the word out loud. It was funny, really. I had seen countless things that defied any concept of normal—spirits, golems, vampires. But somehow all those things made a kind of twisted sense to me. There was a logic to those things, even if it was of the funhouse variety. A demon, though, that felt like some other category to me. It represented something innately evil, an actual malevolent force. I knew that people sometimes did bad things—evil things, even—but I had never believed in evil as a thing in and of itself.

  Perhaps, it was time to revise that belief.

  “Come with me,” I hissed at Father Donovan’s back. He was still moving toward the street-side of the alley, and every fiber of my being had me ready to move in the exact opposite direction.

  “I—I think it may be done with me now that it has you.” There was a terrible relief in the man’s voice.

  I took a couple of slow steps backward, not daring to take my eyes off of the empty alley in front of me. My foot bumped against something hard, drawing an undignified gasp, but it turned out to only be the lowest step up to the door next to me.

  The scraping sound ended suddenly, and once again the sounds from the street ahead of us seemed to return to full volume.

  “Come on, Father! I think it’s g—”

  My words were broken off in my throat by another voice that seemed to come from all sides of the alley. Calling that wretched, soul-rending howl a voice was like describing a death rattle as a lullaby. And it wasn’t just a single voice; it was like the wails of a hundred tormented souls crying out as one. The sound tore its way into my head, into my mind, until I felt like it would be a relief to jab something sharp into one of my ears and dig it out. But, somehow, through the skin-crawling cacophony, I was still able to make out a single word.

  Mine.

  The empty area in front of the priest began to shimmer and thicken like the sun-heated air over a deserted road in the summer, and that awful scraping sound returned. My eyes were glued to that spot until it began to darken and take shape. The thing was massive, at least eight feet tall, and even in its incomplete and hazy form, it wasn’t something that could have been mistaken for a man. A major giveaway was the fact that, where a head would normally be, there was only a large, split circle of flesh that was wreathed in sharp finger-length protuberances which were still too indistinct to make very much visual sense.

  Run.

  It was the sound of my own voice trying to scream above the madhouse sounds that were still pushing down on me. I understood the sentiment, but I still could not look away from the thing shimmering into existence in front of me.

  Run!

  A blurry, incomplete hand reached out to alight against Father Donovan’s forehead. The poor man made a sound that was half sob and half titter of insane laughter.

  Run!

  This time I listened.

  Chapter 9

  I was more than three blocks away from the alley and Father Donovan, and still gaining speed, before I dared dart a glance behind me. There was nothing there, save for a few annoyed glances from some of the pedestrians I had nearly trampled in my haste to keep moving. But then again, how would I even know if I were being followed? I hadn’t been able to see the thing until it wanted to be seen.

  No, not thing. Demon.

  That’s what it had been. A demon. It would have been easy to write off Father Donovan’s assessment of the creature, had I not seen it with my own eyes. He was a priest, after all, so he was supposed to think everything that went bump in the night was a demon or devil.

  But I had seen it. Well, at least the hazy, shimmery outline of it. It was more than that, too. I had felt it. Felt the purity of the creature’s evil and intent. It wasn’t a monster or just a bad thing. Not in the same way a murderer is a bad person, at least. That creature—that demon—was a force of nature. It was something I could feel in my very soul. Something that some part of me had always known about but had never had the proper context to explain.

  My heart felt like it was going to punch through my chest at any second, and a bright pinch of pain was lighting up my right side, but I had no intentions of stopping or even slowing. I wanted to run all of the way back to my apartment, push something heavy in front of my door, and burrow beneath my bed and stay there until the world made a little more sense.

  Just as I caught the welcome sight of Sason’s in the distance, the phone in my jacket pocket blared out its familiar tune at a volume that seemed like it shouldn’t have been possible. I let out a birdlike squawk of terror and misjudged the edge of the too-quickly approaching sidewalk. The dark gray of the pavement and asphalt that moments before was blurring past beneath my feet, suddenly became a wall that was rushing to meet me head-on.

  I hit the ground hard and slid at least a couple of feet over the sidewalk. Sharp, burning pain tore through my palms where I tried to soften my fall. I lay there for long seconds before the full wave of hurt poured down over me.

  It was about a fifty-fifty split between physical pain and embarrassment.

  I rolled onto my butt and sat in place as the foot traffic on the sidewalk diverted to give me a wide berth. The closest anyone came to checking on me was when an angry-faced man said, “This city’s gone to the crazies,” as he took pains to stay out of grabbing distance.

  The funny thing was, as I sat there mentally licking my wounds, I realized I had deserved it. The world had risen up and knocked me flat on my face, and I was glad it had. I was acting like a little kid, running in terror from the big bad wolf. Sure, it had been a genuine bowels of the underworld demon. But that didn’t change a single thing. I was Meredith Freakin’ Bale, and I drank ghosts and ate monsters for breakfast.

  Well, something to that effect.

  I rose unsteadily to my feet and did a quick systems check. Nothing seemed broken or sprained. I’d probably be sore for a few days, and my scraped palms were going to smart every time I touched something, but it could have been a lot worse.

  I fished my phone out of my jacket pocket. Miraculously, it wasn’t broken, so I pulled up the recent calls list and saw that it had been Carter who inadvertently almost ended my life. I tapped the redial icon and waited for the line to connect.

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Carter’s voice sounded strained and tired even over the tinny phone speaker.

  “Just out for a jog.” The desire to hide in my apartment had worn off just as sharply as it had come. “But I’m finished now. Care to join me for a drink?”

  ***

  I was just starting on my second gin and tonic when Carter finally walked into Francie’s. He was dressed just like the last time I saw him—wrinkled suit and threadbare fedora—but it didn’t stop the other patrons from noticing him and immediately understanding what he was. It seemed pretty universal that being in the presence of a cop changed something fundamental about the atmosphere of a room. There was the usual stuff, like more subdued conversations and fleeting glances, but there was something else there too. A sort of acknowledgm
ent that there was a wolf amongst the sheep.

  It probably didn’t help that up until fairly recently I had made a dishonest living of borrowing from the homes of the recently deceased. I was still acutely aware when the eyes of a lawman fell upon me, and it was more than a little difficult to feel that it wasn’t a me versus him kind of situation.

  “I gather you have something?” Carter took the seat at the bar next to me and signaled for Nic to bring him a beer.

  “Drinking during working hours, isn’t that frowned upon by your superiors?”

  “Not as much as you’d think. Besides, it was your invite.” Carter traded some bills for the bottle when it came, then turned his attention back to me. “You sounded different on the phone. Something happen?”

  “You could say that. When I went for a walk earlier, I picked up some uninvited company.”

  Carter put his bottle back down on the bar before it touched his lips. The weary expression was gone, replaced by a startlingly intense focus. “You were followed? How far? Did you get a look at the guy?”

  “I did more than look,” I said. “I got the drop on him, and we had something of a conversation.”

  Carter didn’t say anything, but I could see the interest practically buzzing through him. He needed this to be the break he was looking for in the case. And it was. But I knew he wasn’t going to much like what I had to say.

  “It was a priest. Isaac Donovan. He played a central role in these murders—acted as a catalyst somehow.”

  Carter was already up off his stool. “Priest. Isaac Donovan. It won’t be hard to track him down. This is ex—”

  “There’s a hitch,” I interrupted.

  “What hitch?