Scarlet Night: The Complete Trilogy

by Megan J. Parker

  Zane’s face turned red as the truth sank in and he looked away. “We could’ve found her some other way.”

  “Says the dipshit who didn’t have sense enough to consider it before getting his ass kicked,” Raith sighed. “Did you even get a single hit in on him?”

  Zane shrugged, “Not really; ugly bastard kinda caught me off guard with everything.” He smiled then, “Though I did piss him off. Like, big time!”

  Raith smirked, “Oh?”

  “Mmhm,” Zane beamed, “Just like Serena.”

  Saying her name brought the sadness back to his face, and Raith saw his hand start to drift back towards his pocket.

  “So let’s go find her,” Raith said.

  Zane looked up. “Huh?” His eyes narrowed, “Like it’s that easy? Like I haven’t been combing the whole fucking city for a week? Besides, with Zoey out of commission we’ve lost our best source for finding her.”

  Raith groaned and let his head fall back against the wall, “You must really think I’m an idiot. Come on, asshole, let’s track this fucker down.”

  “An atlas?” Zane laughed, “Really? We have millions of dollars of top-of-the-line computer equipment literally right behind you and you’re using an atlas?”

  Raith sighed, “Let me start by remarking that it’s because of things like this atlas that the information on those computers exist. I’d also like to add that, with Zoey unconscious, nobody seems to know how to work the millions of dollars of top-of-the-line computer equipment short of logging onto Facebook or watching porn.”

  Zane frowned, “I thought I cleared the history…”

  Raith chuckled, “Busted.”

  Zane rolled his eyes, “Moving right along to Raith’s ancient map of wonders.”

  Raith laughed at that, “Fair enough.” He pulled out the file that Zane had gotten from the club and flipped it open; Zane seeing that a bunch of the pages had been highlighted and scribbled on. “These are all of the various events that your informant felt had something to do with Maledictus, and, in that, he wasn’t wrong. Mind you, yes, some of these are unrelated—either having some connection to other clan cases that have been wrapped up since then or random on-goings and a few pranks—but, for the most part, these all outright stink of that asshole.” Raith pushed five of the pages—all of them with a red X scribed in the upper-right of each page—off the table.

  Zane stared at him. “Really?” he nodded to the pages that now littered the floor, “Was that necessary? You could’ve just—”

  “It was for effect, asshole,” Raith sighed, “an effect, I’d like to point out, that you just deflated.” He shook his head and spread out the remaining pages before taking out a Sharpie. “I was looking through these before I came to get you, because I genuinely think I’ve narrowed in on his hideout,” he shook his head, looking over at Zane, “but I don’t know the area well enough to determine where exactly.” He opened the atlas to their city—Zane already seeing a few marks from Raith’s Sharpie—and pointed the tip of the marker to Ben’s club on the map. “This is where you first spotted him before he led you to the lumber yard”—he dragged the capped tip across the map in the direction they’d taken—“which actually tells us something.”

  Zane frowned, “What? That the asshole likes wood?”

  Raith cupped his face in his free palm. “Sometimes I just cannot believe that I actually went on missions with you. No, you dunce! It has nothing to do with the lumber yard, it’s the direction!”

  Zane looked back at the map and frowned, shaking his head, “What about it?”

  Raith retraced the path from the club to the lumber yard several more times as he spoke. “A lot of animals—birds especially—will, when the threat of a nearby predator is felt, travel away from their nest or burrow. It’s an instinct—a baser one—to lead the threat away from their home; to protect their families.”

  Zane’s eyes widened, looking at the map. “Then that son of a bitch high-tailed it to the lumber yard because…”

  Raith was already nodding.

  Zane studied the map harder, taking in the various marks that Raith had already applied. “So wherever he’s stowing Serena must be around…”—he circled his finger roughly around a site on the map as he looked at the pages from Ben’s file—“But where? Where?” he chanted to himself as he looked at the documents with a renewed hope.

  Raith nodded, “That’s where I got snagged, too. So I figured I’d come find you; see if you couldn’t figure out something I was missing.”

  Then Zane spotted the police report on the body at the cemetery.

  “Bringing the dead back to…”

  Raith leaned forward, “What? You’re mumbling, mate.”

  Zane motioned to the page. “That report; they found that body dug up and lying a few feet from its grave.”

  Raith nodded, “Yea. Pretty sick shit. It definitely stinks of our boy’s MO, but I couldn’t figure out how exactly? I mean, I have a few guesses, but nothing I want to think about too long, y’know?”

  Zane shook his head, “No, he wasn’t digging up corpses to fuck them, Raith, he wasn’t digging them up at all! He told me earlier that he could bring the dead back to life; that he’d been able to do this way back before he was him. This body did dig itself up—just like those kids in the report said!—but it was because that son-of-a-bitch brought it back to life!”

  “What? Like a Leiche or something?” Raith looked up at him.

  “A what?” Zane looked back.

  Raith’s palm met his face again, “Don’t you Council-appointed warriors have, like, homework or something that you have to do before they give you a bunch of weapons and turn you loose on the world? A Leiche is a… well, it’s like a zombie.”

  It was Zane’s turn to cup his face in his palm, “You can’t be asking me to believe in zombies right now, Raith. You really can’t.”

  “Just bear with me here,” Raith sighed. “A Leiche is like a zombie—the whole walking dead thing—except that they’re not all brain-dead and dull-witted and such. They’re like auric vampires—all that energy and aura-manipulation and whatnot—except that they gain their energy from killing; they are human magic users who, through magic, have locked their own essence into their bodies and purposefully died so that they could come back to life as one of these things. They’re like… like anti-aurics, in a way. They absorb the auras of the dead and use that power to manipulate death and decay.” He pointed to the picture of the corpse in the police report, “Like that! You told me he said he could raise the dead! When is the only other time shit like that happens?”

  Zane sighed, still not believing what he was hearing; his entire life—his existence!—was set in the foundation that nothing that was dead could also be alive. It was why the growing zombie craze had become such a joke within the mythos community. “Raith, do you really believe that—”

  “C’mon, Zane! I know you know this much! When can a dead body—gone, not a vampire in the midst of the change, not an enchantment; a true, blue dead body—come back to life?”

  Zane sighed, “Only situation I can think of is if an aura winds up possessing it somehow.”

  Raith nodded. “Exactly! An aura! Auric energy! We’ve seen it before; aurics are always taking control of minds to control them. The truly sinister ones outright control the people themselves!”

  Zane nodded, “Right, but whenever they do the brain can’t take it. Humans under the control of an auric end up—”

  “—dying,” both Zane and Raith finished the sentence; Raith nodding his point.

  “See? A living body isn’t equipped to handle that much strain. An auric can’t keep those they control alive because, without the human’s aura in control of the body—in control of the brain—it loses hold and passes. And a body without an aura is a dead body! If Maledictus was…” he shook his head, “If he is a Leiche—a death wizard—then he could have control over something like that; he could raise the dead. And it would sure-as-
hell explain why he’s such a murder-happy bastard!”

  Zane frowned and nodded, looking down at the file. “A sang needs blood, an auric needs life-energy…”

  Raith nodded, “And a Leiche needs death-energy.”

  “Fuck me sideways…” Zane shook his head, looking back at the map. “He said he’s got something big planned, Raith; something that could change the world. He said that it wouldn’t be long until he was strong enough to do it.”

  “There’s nothing more certain in this world than death, man,” he looked over, biting his lip. “That’s a lot of fuel for something like that if it wants to start some shit.”

  Zane groaned, wiping his brow. It was so much easier to want Maledictus dead when he was just a dangerous psychopath who’d made him and his loved ones suffer, but this was turning out to be something far greater than he ever could’ve imagined. “Okay, this is serious. He’s gotta die. Like, really gotta die; like, him… or all of us—that kinda serious.”

  Raith nodded, “You’re not exactly a poet, mate, but you don’t hear me arguing. So where the hell is he?”

  Zane looked at the area on the map that Raith had determined to be the likely region Maledictus was in, but it was still over fifty square miles of city. There had to be more…

  He looked at the files again. Risen corpse at the cemetery. Spooked patients at the old folks' home. Creepy shadows scattered about the region. Missing college kids. Murdered rape victims near the hospital.

  “Like an animal,” Zane muttered to himself.

  “What’s that, mate?” Raith looked up.

  “You’d said that he’d been like an animal earlier tonight when he tried to lead me away from his ‘nest,’” he nodded to himself. “What if that’s how he’s acting now?”

  “How do you mean?” Raith’s heart rate sped up in Zane’s ears, and he knew his friend could tell he was on to something.

  Zane scratched the back of his neck, “I mean, he’s in an ykali body now. We moved that thing inside the corpse and Nikki replicated the curse’s markings on his scales to transfer the essence into that thing; figured we could just dispose of it later.”

  Raith nodded, “Yea. And?”

  Zane shook his head, “It’s still an ykali, though. It’s not like we replaced its brain or swapped out all the old parts of what it had been; we just added a crazy psychopath into a dumb animal. Albeit, a seven-foot, ravenous mythos animal, but an animal none the less.”

  “So you think that the ykali brain is still calling some of the shots?” Raith asked.

  Zane nodded, “Why not? I always thought that he was such a vulgar, perverted fucker because that was how the taroe created him, but he wasn’t created; not like that, anyway. What if the bulk of what made up the personality of the Maledictus we know was how the essence of whatever he’d once been perceived itself through our vulgar, perverted minds. However old that thing is, I’m sure that it wasn’t words like ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ or the whole mess of porno-words he loves to play with; all that had to have been learned after we were cursed with it. And think of who he targeted when we were the hosts: all those close to us. It fooled me into thinking we’d killed Celine, and every time after that it was always local incidents. It never transformed and then went on some road trip to take revenge on somebody from a past life. It was always acting through our filter; it was those close to us.”

  “So who’s close to an ykali?” Raith shook his head.

  Zane smirked, “That’s the thing. Nobody! He’s got no modern filter except that of a blood-thirsty lizard. No connections or focuses; it’s probably why he’s even beginning to remember his old self.”

  Raith nodded, “He’s got no other distractions from the ykali’s brain.”

  “Exactly! All that’s there is basic animal instincts. And that pretentious cocksucker is so certain he’s on top of everyone and everything that he’d never suspect that his actions were being dictated by a ‘stupid animal,’ so he’s casually acting on ‘stupid animal’ logic thinking it’s his own. Which is why he went to such great lengths to lead me away from this area,” Zane motioned to the area on the map.

  “So where would Maledictus, driven by an animal brain, think to go?” Raith finally asked.

  Zane’s eyes moved around the map once more. “A stupid animal would want to stay close to its shelter”—he pushed a few pages off the table—“A stupid animal wouldn’t stray far from what it knew”—he ‘X’ed out a few areas on the map—“And a stupid animal would always seek out the perfect home to suit its personality…”

  Honing in on a spot on the map, Zane smirked and drew a circle around the location of Maledictus and Serena.

  “An abandoned loony bin? Are you kidding me?” Celine frowned, looking at the map while everyone suited up around her.

  Zane nodded, fastening the last of the buckles on his boots before he hurried to begin arming himself. “Absolutely! That son-of-a-bitch has proven time and time again that he’s nothing more than a psychotic, misery-seeking asshole. He’d seek out someplace private, someplace that nobody would dare go poking around, and someplace teeming with pain and suffering.”

  “He’s right,” Nikki offered, zipping up her leathers and securing her bright red hair in a tight ponytail. “If he is a Leiche—and all evidence points to it—then he’d be innately drawn to places where many had died.”

  “And, though the records are a bit sketchy, this place has seen more localized death than any other site for the next hundred miles at least,” Raith, wearing minimal layers to allow for a quick transformation when the time called for it, didn’t bother looking up. “All irony set aside, there’s no better place for something like him to hide out, and almost every event we can tie him to took place within twenty-five miles of there.”

  Isaac, like Raith, was wearing simple street clothes for the ease of transforming when the time called for it, and, like Zane, he was impatient. He’d initially refused the request to help them track down Maledictus, taking Zoey’s hand in his and telling them he wouldn’t leave her side for anything until she woke up. Both Zane and Raith—having their own lover to weigh their situations against—couldn’t argue with the loyal therion’s convictions, but they’d known that they needed as many on their side as they could get, and the few Vail warriors they’d been able to muster weren’t going to be enough. It had been Raith, having an understanding of both Zane’s desperation and Isaac’s focus on Zoey’s wellbeing, to convince him.

  “Serena is the most powerful psychic this clan has,” he’d said, “Second only to Zoey. If anybody could get through whatever was clouding her mind and bring her back, it’s her.”

  Sighing impatiently, Isaac glared at the others. “We gonna take all night, or are we going to kick some ass?”

  Zane couldn’t help but smirk at that as he slipped his favorite katana into a sheathe on his back. “I’m with Dick-zilla, guys! Let’s get a move on!”

  It was just after four in the morning when Zane’s entourage—two non-matching cars and Isaac on the motorcycle Serena had lent him, which he had since then stolen—took to the streets and started towards Sacred Gates, what had once been an asylum for the psychotic and criminally insane. Back when the Gates had been open, psychiatry had been more of a series of torturous experiments and counterproductive practices that typically did more harm than good. As time passed and studies into psychotherapy advanced beyond scheduling near-drowning sessions or drilling holes into patients’ skulls, the treatments that the doctors at Sacred Gates began to fall under scrutiny. As more and more media attention fell on the hospital and more and more people began protesting the inhumane treatment of their patients, the Gates found themselves forced to hide most of the horror stories they’d created before everyone working there faced criminal charges. Many doctors had reportedly killed themselves on Sacred grounds, while others suffered nervous breakdowns that moved them from the staff files to those of the patients. Several reports of a few patients who’d only s
uffered of minor mental afflictions being killed to keep what they’d seen quiet bubbled to the public’s attention, and, practically overnight, Sacred Gates was turned into a vacant site that served as nothing more than a reminder of far too many horror stories.

  Ever since then, the unholy gates of Sacred Gates Asylum were locked to the public.

  The property, being as massive as it was, represented too great a financial burden to simply destroy, and any hopes of selling the land were soon after dashed when a prospective buyer learned of the history. Even those without superstitious reservations felt unnerved with the idea of having any investment in a place with such a terrible history. As the years passed, the building—like the stories it contained—faded into a sweet oblivion; falling victim to disrepair and neglect and, though fewer chose to admit it, shame—the sheer abundance of dark energies that had been pounded and saturated and shocked and drilled into the very foundation turning it into a festering place of self-destructive magic cast by an unknowing many.

  Zane, riding shotgun next to Raith in a dark blue SUV, pulled back the slide on his pistol—feeding a round from the clip into the chamber—before setting the safety and holstering it before beginning with the next gun.

  “Are those going to do you any good if Maledictus can now move in overdrive, as well?” Nikki leaned in from the back seat.

  Zane shook his head, but still worked to load the second gun. “Probably not, but I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know that having lots of guns is never a bad thing.”