Older and Fouler Things (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  The vampire was down there somewhere, among the Worms. I searched for the skinnies and the Renfields, and was surprised at first that I didn’t see them. Until I saw the gnawed bones and the fresh hides stretched on frames among the Worms’ holes. Those minions had served the vampire until it had found more formidable ones.

  I could also see the dark shadows of the demonic spirits prowling about the cave. That was when I saw the vampire’s patron.

  Greater by far than the others, it hunched over the vampire itself, overshadowing the thing that had once been a man, what looked like great, clawed hands cruelly digging into the vampire’s shoulders. Countless lesser spirits swirled around it, their malevolence dwarfed by its own.

  “You have to stop the vampire,” Sam told me. “Charlie’s and Trudeau’s fates both depend on that. We can shield you from the worst the demons can throw at you; we already have. The best they can manage, for now, is to whisper temptations, temptations that you have done a good job resisting. We can still restrain them, but the vampire is up to you. Keep the faith, Jed. Don’t give up, don’t stop fighting. We’re with you.”

  When I opened my eyes, I was back in the tunnel. I had seen all of that in the time it took to blink.

  Chapter 21

  I looked around us, matching what I could see in the dark with the layout that The Captain and Sam had shown me. “Frank, give me your light,” I said. “I’m taking point.”

  With a bit of a puzzled frown, he handed me the little Streamlight. I clamped it against the forearm of my Winchester with my hand, and turned up the middle passage. “Follow me,” I called back to the rest.

  I could feel eyes on my back. The rest had to be wondering why I suddenly had decided to go that way. Father Ignacio pushed up next to me.

  “What just happened, Jed?” he asked.

  “What did you see?” I asked him, without looking back.

  He didn’t answer right away. I think he was still processing. “There was a flash, just like the one outside the cabin the other night,” he said slowly, as if he was half talking to himself, trying to sort out his thoughts. “When it was gone, the creatures were running and the sorcerer was a burned crisp.”

  “Did you see or feel anything in the flash?” I asked him.

  I didn’t need to look back at him to see his eyes narrowing as he studied me. “I didn’t see anything,” he replied, his voice still slow and his words picked carefully. “But, now that you mention it, I might have…sensed something.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “You’re being awfully coy, Jed,” he said. “I think you know very well what I’m talking about.”

  I finally stopped and took a deep breath before I turned to face him. “The flash was The Captain intervening,” I told him, my voice low. “And in the moment after that, he showed me a few things. Including how to get to where we’re going.”

  “You know, Jed,” Father said, after searching my face in the dimness, “there aren’t too many people, even within the Order, who can say that they’ve spoken with The Captain at all, let alone more than once.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I know.” I didn’t know what that meant. Personally, I was of the opinion that it just meant that I had happened to be in the thick of some of the worst lately, and had had the presence of mind to ask for help from the right places at the right time. I was under no illusions of my own saintliness. As a Witch Hunter, I knew I had to try harder to keep my nose clean; too little attention to matters of the soul was an even greater danger to one who faced the kind of darkness that we did on a regular basis than it was to most people. But I also knew all too well my own faults and frailties. I’m no holier than the average faithful layman. Possibly a good deal less.

  But that’s not the point, is it? Our own merits matter less than we might like, a fact that should be infinitely comforting if we really took the time to think about it. For whatever reason, the Good Lord had seen fit to send St. Michael the Archangel to watch my back a couple of times now, and I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I’d thank Him for it and drive on.

  Father seemed to sense what was going on in my head. He nodded, as if approving of my unspoken thoughts, then gestured down the passage. “Lead on,” he said.

  The passage twisted and turned, with several side passages branching off to either side as we moved, but except to carefully watch for another attack, I ignored them. I knew where we had to go. In fact, I had to slow myself down, reminding myself that I had seen the route we had to take, but that I no longer had that angelic perception to see exactly where our enemies were lurking.

  It took a surprisingly long time before we began to hear the furtive, padding footsteps again. They seemed less certain as they followed us; the terror that The Captain had instilled in them would take some time to wear off. As powerful and dangerous as the monsters of the Otherworld could be, along with the demons that so many of them revere, they fear the holy with a deep and abiding terror, that even their hate and loathing cannot ever entirely overcome. And little besides the Divine Presence itself would be more terrifying to them than the Captain of the Heavenly Host stepping into their midst.

  But the Worms feared their Abyssal masters even so, and would not abandon the pursuit for long.

  Soon, we could hear them down every side passage, padding and grunting. We could occasionally even see their bulging eyes reflecting our lights in the darkness. They still did not dare come at us, but their caution was beginning to wane. We’d be back in a fight soon enough.

  Before that could happen, though, the game changed.

  We were passing another side passage, one that I knew went down to the left, leading to a deep pit that we’d never climb out of if we fell into it. Shortly after I passed the pitch-black opening, a very human, feminine scream echoed out of it.

  We all stopped dead. The scream repeated itself. “Miller! Help me!” the voice cried, the words echoing and reverberating through the rocky tunnel.

  The voice was unmistakably Trudeau’s.

  Miller immediately surged toward the opening, but Kolya grabbed him. “You do not know what is down there,” the Russian hissed.

  “Karen’s down there!” Miller protested. “We have to rescue her!” He looked around at the rest of us. “Don’t we?”

  Father Ignacio and I were stony-faced. “That might be Trudeau,” I said. “It might be something else. Or, it just might be Trudeau, except not the Trudeau you thought you knew.”

  He looked around at us again. “You think the vampire took her, don’t you?” he demanded. “You think it turned her.” He stabbed a finger around at us. “Well, we don’t know that. All we know is that she disappeared in the chaos of the fight. Maybe she knocked her head on a rock and crawled off somewhere she thought she might be safe. Have you considered that?”

  “It’s possible,” I conceded, though deep down I knew that it wasn’t. If she’d been knocked out during the fight, the Worms would have taken her, and her bones would probably have been among the gnawed piles I’d seen among their holes along the shores of the lake.

  “So, let’s go!” he insisted.

  “Miller, face facts,” I said quietly. “Something’s been eating at Trudeau since before we left the house. Her little freak out back there in the narrow spot in the tunnel wasn’t just claustrophobia, and you know it.” He crossed his arms obstinately. The truth be told, I didn’t like what I was saying any better than he did, but I knew I was right. “Even if that is her down there, and she’s still herself, that’s a trap.”

  “And how do you know?” he demanded. “Have you grown some kind of supernatural sixth sense, that you can tell when there are monsters waiting for us, even when you can’t see them?”

  I traded a brief glance with Father Ignacio. This was not the time to tell Miller about my vision. But before I could answer, Frank broke in.

  “Use your head, Miller,” he said. “You’re thinking like a friend, not a cop. You need to thi
nk like a cop. If she was injured and crawled away, how did she get in front of us? She could only have gotten down there if someone or something made sure she got there. This isn’t mysticism or secret knowledge, here. This is common sense.”

  Miller looked like he was thinking it over, but then another agonized, heart-rending scream came up from below. “Miller, please!” Trudeau sobbed. “Help me! They’re hurting me!” She screamed in pain again, the wail dying down to racking sobs.

  “I’m going after her!” Miller exploded. “If you’re so certain that she’s evil, without any proof, then you can leave her to suffer and die, but I won’t!” Without waiting for us, he plunged into the darkness of the side passage.

  “Miller!” I shouted, my words coming back to me in ever-fading echoes. He didn’t stop or turn back.

  There was nothing for it. We couldn’t let him go into that alone. All too aware that time was pressing, I followed him into the blackness.

  Trudeau’s wails and cries continued as we descended. If she was in the pit, and she genuinely needed to be rescued, we’d never get her out, but I didn’t say as much. Miller wasn’t going to listen, anyway, not to me. He’d have to see it for himself.

  I hoped that she was only bait in an ambush set by the Worms, though in the deepest, darkest parts of my mind, I knew that that would be too easy. It was going to be worse than that. And I wasn’t wrong.

  We didn’t make it all the way to the pit at the end of the passage. The tunnel widened as it leveled out, and there was Trudeau, kneeling on the floor, her face in her hands, crying. A half-dozen of the Worms of the Earth were crouched around her, their wide, fanged mouths leering in gaping grins. Or at least that’s what it looked like. The troglodytes didn’t seem to be particularly expressive.

  Miller slowed at the widening of the tunnel, bringing his pistol up. He couldn’t have many rounds left; he hadn’t brought much in the way of spare mags that I’d seen. But he advanced a step, in a perfect isosceles shooting stance, his shoulders rolled forward and leaning slightly over the balls of his feet. “All right,” he barked, “Let her go!”

  For a moment, I thought the strain had finally gotten to him. He wasn’t a cop down there, underneath millions of tons of rock, in the dark. And those weren’t criminals who would be awed by his badge or his commands. Or his gun, for that matter.

  The Worms just stared at him. Then the croaking laughter started. And it was echoed from behind us. More of them had followed us into the passage. We were trapped and low on ammo. But Miller didn’t seem to notice.

  “Step away from the hostage!” he continued. “Do it!”

  “Miller, what in blazes are you doing? Have you completely lost your mind?” I whispered. But he didn’t seem to hear me. He stepped forward, and the gruesomely chuckling Worm closest to him stepped back, spreading its hands. It seemed to be mocking him.

  “Karen?” he asked quietly. “Are you okay?”

  She lifted her head. Her eyes were pools of blood. When she opened her mouth to smile, her long, needle-sharp canines gleamed in the glow of our flashlights.

  “I’ve never been better, Simon,” she hissed.

  She was on him like a striking snake, smashing the pistol out of his hands and wrapping her fingers around his throat. It was a tricky shot, and I probably shouldn’t have taken it, but I shot her in the forehead, barely an inch to the side of Miller’s ear.

  As I’d feared, it had absolutely no effect. The impact snapped her head back, but there was no splash of blood, no sudden fall. When she slowly lifted her head, cracking her neck as she stared malevolently at me, there was a dark mark on her forehead where the bullet had hit, but it faded even as I watched. The mashed chunk of lead and silver hit the stone floor with an audible clunk.

  The Worms, which had retreated behind her, hooted and croaked with glee. But they didn’t seem to want to get too close. I expected that they were afraid of even a fledgling vampire. A sudden crash of gunfire from behind indicated that their kin above us weren’t as afraid of our guns, but the first couple of volleys were not repeated.

  She stared at me for a long moment, holding Miller immobile by his neck. His toes were barely touching the stone floor of the tunnel.

  “You were all so predictable,” she whispered sibilantly, the sound still just as loud as if she were speaking in a normal voice. “So self-righteous, so sure of your own superstitions that you thought that I’d simply go along with whatever doctrines you spouted, once I saw that the world wasn’t what I’d been led to believe it was. Well, Arthur showed me the truth. The real truth. The Powers that move the universe. The Powers that truly decide our destinies. You should have seen it before, if the Church hadn’t blinded you. These are the real divinities of the world. And now I’m with them.”

  She looked at Miller. “The things they have shown me,” she said dreamily. “And I can share them with you. I will share them with you, Simon.” She opened her mouth wider than a human being should be able to, rather like a snake disjointing its jaw to swallow a mouse whole. Her fangs gleamed as she slowly moved them toward his throat, her eyes locked on me.

  “You’re forgetting something, Trudeau,” I said levelly. She stopped, staring bloody daggers at me. “You fell for the flash and the theater, and took it for real power.” Unconsciously, the tone of my voice changed. “In the Holy Name of The Most High, I forbid you to bite that man.”

  She blinked. She didn’t move for a moment. Then she started to shake. Suddenly, with a shriek, she threw Miller at me. I took one hand off my Winchester long enough to barely catch him, at least keeping him from bowling both of us over and falling on the floor.

  Trudeau, or the thing that had been Trudeau, was already moving, but Father Ignacio had his big crucifix held high, and bellowed, “Crosses!”

  She recoiled from the silver image, hissing and snarling like a maddened animal. By then, I had my own crucifix held up in front of me, and Eryn had moved to Father Ignacio’s other side, with her own held at the end of its chain.

  Her fangs bared, Trudeau threw her head back and let out an ear-splitting, mind-shredding shriek. As she did, she dropped her arms to her sides. When she lifted them again, there was a dark, smoky membrane stretching from her sides to her wrists, and she leaped toward the ceiling. She stuck there for a moment, then slithered along it like a snake, though moving as fast as a flying bat. She vanished up the tunnel, back the way we’d come.

  I hadn’t forgotten the Worms, though, and quickly brought my rifle to bear. They seemed to have developed a considerable respect for our weapons, though, and shuffled backward into the darkness behind them.

  It was also a distinct possibility, I considered, that they had been thoroughly frightened by the fact that I’d managed to command a vampire, and it had been utterly unable to disobey.

  With Trudeau gone, at least for the moment, I suddenly had the opportunity to think about what I’d just done, and I started to shake. Thank you, Lord, I prayed silently.

  When I turned around, Kolya, Ray, and Eryn were watching the tunnel where we could still hear the muted noises of the Worms, though they seemed almost as subdued as the ones that had just faded back toward the pit at the end of the passage. Father Ignacio had his head bowed, praying quietly.

  Frank and Miller were both staring at me, like they couldn’t quite believe their senses.

  “How did you do that?” Miller asked, his voice hushed.

  “I’d like to know, myself,” Frank said. “I’ve seen litanies and exorcisms work, but I’ve never seen anything like that. You just ordered her not to bite him, and she simply couldn’t. How?”

  “I don’t know, Frank,” I confessed. “Except that it wasn’t me. I imagine that if I tried to do it again, no matter how convinced I was that I could, it wouldn’t work.” I was still shaking.

  Miller was still staring at me like he was in the presence of a prophet or something. It made me more than a little uncomfortable. I honestly had no idea how that had wo
rked, except that the Lord had seen fit to back my command up. I sure wouldn’t be trying it again, not deliberately. There are ways that are laid out for us to deal with these things, and that’s not one of them. The belief in personally channeled Divine authority can lead all to easily to dangerous pride.

  Which why I was dreading hearing from the voice in the dark again. Because I was sure it was going to start urging me to try it again.

  “What do we do now?” Frank asked. “We’ve got two vampires to deal with now.”

  “I think I know where they are,” I admitted, though that only seemed to intensify Miller’s awed stare. “Though I don’t want to try to face both of them at once. And they aren’t likely to be stupid enough to think that the same trap’s going to work twice.”

  “Even if they were when they were fully human,” Father Ignacio growled, “their demonic patrons wouldn’t be. And terrain advantage is going to be useless against a vampire. You’ve seen how they can move in ways that would be impossible to us.”

  “Yes, climbing ceiling and turning into smoke,” Kolya said. “How do we stop something like that?”

  “Remember, they don’t react well to blessed things,” Ray pointed out. “Holy water and crucifixes.”

  I’d almost forgotten my holy water flask in the fights with the twisted, but still physical, Worms of the Earth. Instinctively, I put my hand to my back pocket, and to my relief, it was still there.

  “They’ll be down in the Worms’ holes, by the lake,” I said. “If we go there, we’ll find them. And probably Charlie, too, presuming he hasn’t already been bitten.”