“I’m on my way,” she said through gritted teeth. The pressure around her throat tightened the slightest bit, then the oppressive weight of the mayor’s displeasure was gone.
“Good.”
The line went dead.
Savannah spent a few minutes cleaning up the worst of the blood and securing Ray-Ray’s body in the SUV’s loadspace. She made sure the boxes were still in the cooler, then tucked it behind Ray-Ray’s corpse where it would not flop around too much. She had a feeling the mayor was going to want to see them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Rashad pressed his palms to his wounded throat but the blood continued to spill. He watched it dribble onto his feet, staining his toenails red. He tried to calm down; slow his breathing; settle his thundering heart. He could fix this, he just had to give himself time to remember the words…
Something hammered at the walls inside the house. Rashad blinked away the fog gathering over his eyes, then straightened up. His children needed him; he could not leave them alone with whatever was making that racket. He just had to remember the words…
“Been under that bitch’s thumb too long, boy.” The Night Howler’s voice was strong and firm. “All I taught you blown away, like dust befo’ the wind.”
“No, Mama.” Rashad shook his head. He winced as jagged hooks of pain sliced their way out of the wound in his neck. “I’m hurt. I just need to think a second.”
“Go on, then. Not like I can stop yo’ thinkin’.”
Rashad tried to ignore his mother and focus on his injury. The blood on his hands reminded him of moonless nights, spent deep in the forest, calling to the spirits and bending them to his will. It was long ago, but the words were still there, still waiting for him to whisper and claim their power. All that stood between him and that ancient strength was a promise he made to the only woman – besides his mama – he ever loved.
“Yo’ woman know ‘bout this?” The Night Howler was in Rashad’s ear. “Blood magic is well along the There Road.”
“Not the same,” but Rashad could not help but wonder. Was it the same? What would answer his call when he offered up his blood? What would he let into the world in exchange for sealing the hole in his neck? “It’s not.”
“We’ll see,” the Night Howler chuckled.
“We will.” But Rashad did not say the words. They were right there, burning in the back of his throat, but he would not let them out.
“Better get to it. Yo’ babies need yo’ help.” She stroked her son’s hair; a careful, wistful touch. “If you can still help ‘em.”
Rashad hooked his hands into talons, his index fingers and thumbs tracing eccentric orbits in the air. He was breaking his promise, but Savannah would understand. She had to. He could not leave his babies alone with the darkness. Rashad let the first word fall from his lips.
The air hissed as the fabric of his world grew thin and frayed.
“Don’t have to stop with yo’ throat.”
Rashad let the next word fall. The blood on his feet and on the floor boiled, red vapor rising from its bubbling surface.
Cracks in reality thudded with a tripartite heartbeat.
“Whatever’s in yo’ house, you think yo’ babies can stop it?”
Rashad raised his hands to the sky and let his head fall back. The sun pulsed. Rashad saw flashes of the spirit answering his call. Long limbs, crooked and warped like lightning-blasted trees. Eyes with an oily radiance. A hand like an ant’s pincers fastened around Rashad’s neck, holding the blood inside.
“Let it go, boy. Earn my name!” Grave-cold hands settled on Rashad’s shoulders, rubbing his muscles with a mother’s familiarity. “Make them pay for what they did!”
The last word gushed from Rashad and painted the world black. For one moment there was no air, no life, only the darkness of the enslaved spirit that dissolved his damaged flesh and stitched it back together.
Thirteen enormous eyes shone through the blackness, and the grip around Rashad’s throat faded away. He could feel the monstrosity leashed to his will, waiting for him to guide it. He felt the words ready to spill forth – a simple command that would send the specter raging into the house, ready to destroy anything that threatened Rashad or his family.
“This is who you is, boy. This is what you meant to be.”
Rashad bowed his head then brushed his palms together, scattering flakes of dried blood. The empty blackness gave way to the warm yellow sun, and he felt his mother’s presence wane.
“I can’t kill my way out of this, Mama. Death don’t solve nothin’.” Rashad felt his old accent coming back, poking through the layers of Morehouse education. When push came to shove, he was who he was.
“Someone oughta tell yo’ woman that.”
“Someone should have told you that.” Rashad limped to the back door, leaving his mother’s spirit behind.
He came in through the door. The kitchen table was covered with gouges and slivers of glass. Blood splattered the cabinets and ceiling, while weird, inky stains writhed on the floor to form a shifting pattern of shadow-glyphs.
The blood called to him. This was the blood of his children, spilled in his house. Fear fell into his stomach like a spear of ice. He listened for sounds of life, of conflict; for anything other than the tidal thunder of his pulse pounding against his eardrums. He heard nothing.
The memory of his mother’s words haunted Rashad. Should he have unleashed the spirit he had called to heal his wounded throat? Would it have made a difference if he had embraced the dark lessons he learned at his mother’s feet and turned his hoodoo on these intruders? Had his fear of Savannah, and her damned Law, stayed his hand when he most needed his power to protect his children?
Pushing the fear back, Rashad followed the trail of blood and wreckage out of the kitchen and into the hall. The sigils on the floor were words he recognized from the Black Book in his mama’s house – symbols for broken lives and shattered dreams; threats and promises of a dark day to come.
“Not in my house,” he whispered. “Not while I still draw breath.”
The blood led to the stairs. The silence made him fear the worst. If his children were still alive, then they would be fighting the shadow. Carter would roar, Lashey would shriek her anger at the intrusion. But silence could mean anything.
From the top of the stairs he could see the door to Savannah’s room. It hung from the hinges in three pieces, torn apart by blows that had smashed chunks of the heavy wood into splinters. The doorway was framed with more symbols, a tapestry of alien threats and dire prophecy. Rashad looked at them a second too long and found himself kneeling in the hall with his head down, vomit pouring out of him in sour torrents.
He clenched his teeth, beating back the nausea, then demanded his body to rise. He got to his feet then walked ahead.
The door was slathered with blood, bright and red and wet. Rashad moved the ragged sections of the door aside, careful to keep his hands away from the spilled blood. His senses were still acute from the magic he had worked and touching blood right then might have triggered actions he would later regret.
He froze just inside the room, eyes wide.
The bed was smashed, the big posts at its corners torn free, smashed against the walls and left broken on the floor. Blankets were soaked red and stained black. Sodden sheets moved through the air in a sinuous pattern, weaving around one another to form a sphere of gliding, gore-laden ribbons.
In the center of the sphere sat Lashey, her face hidden behind shifting shadows within her hood. Her head was bowed over her brother’s still form.
Carter lay curled on the floor before his sister, his skin studded with shards of broken glass and striped with raw, red wounds. His head was in his sister’s lap. Lashey stroked his gore-matted hair with the back of one hand.
Rashad waited in the doorway, afraid to move. He held his breath, praying for Carter to be alive; for Lashey to be unharmed.
“Baby?” he whispered.
&
nbsp; Lashey’s head turned toward the door like a wind-up toy with broken gears, jerking to one side, then slipping back to the other. The shadows parted. Rashad could see streaks of blood on his daughter’s face.
“Daddy, I’m tired,” Lashey whispered. She collapsed over her brother.
The blood soaked sheets fell from the air to cover them both.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Once the estate and mansion of Asa Griggs Candler, Jr., the eccentric son of Asa Griggs Candler, co-founder of the Coca-Cola Company, the Briarcliff looked as if it had fallen into the future from the Dark Ages. Its tall, red stone walls and massive white columns were topped with barbed spikes and surrounded by a tall iron fence. The fence’s gate was carved from ebony. The gate swung open on silent hinges, to allow Savannah’s SUV entry. Sleek, black cameras with bulging lenses tracked the vehicle, swiveling atop the walls.
Savannah drove down the long, thin ribbon of blacktop between the gate and the main house. Huge oak trees grew up on either side of the drive, tangling their long branches overhead to block out the sun.
The shadows deepened. Savannah tried to shake off the heaviness that settled onto her shoulders. Outside these walls, Savannah was a woman to be feared and respected. In here, she was just the hired help.
The dogs met her where the trees ended. The shadow-black American Bulldogs stood four feet tall at the shoulder and ran with the tireless, loping gait of pack predators. Five of them escorted the SUV up to the mansion. They sat on the steps leading to the front door, their long red tongues hanging from jaws that could close over a man’s head without their teeth touching him.
Savannah killed the SUV’s engine.
The dogs stared at her with bottomless black eyes, enormous teeth bared in vicious snarls.
“Well, that’s new.” Savannah drummed her fingers on the truck’s steering wheel. She thought about getting out of the truck and just walking past the pack, but their malevolent stares and big ass teeth gave her pause. She waited. The dogs glared. The clock on the dash ticked away.
The Briarcliff’s doors opened at last. The dogs stood then backed away from Savannah, watching her with deep hostility as they slipped inside. Mayor Green appeared in the doorway after the last of the dogs had vanished, his thin face a tawny brown blot against the velvet dark of the shadows. He beckoned with one gaunt hand for the Root Woman to join him inside. Savannah left the revolver after a long look, then hauled her tired body out of the SUV.
Under the mayor’s watchful eye, Savannah’s walk to the front door felt like it took half the day. Her dread grew stronger with each step. She respected her boss, even admired him in some ways, but she knew enough to fear the man.
The mayor closed the door behind Savannah then gestured toward the sitting room at the end of the capacious, two-story high foyer. Savannah tried not to look through the doorways they passed, but the scents and sounds kept dragging her attention through the shadowed portals. Something gray and moist fell from the wall of one room then flopped on the floor like a catfish in a canoe. Another chamber stank of rot and stale armpit sweat. Inside that room, Savannah caught the briefest glimpse of a young woman dancing with some sort of alabaster squid.
“Eyes ahead, Savannah.” Mayor Green laughed at Savannah’s discomfort. He clapped a hand on her shoulder. “You have been here often enough to know that much.”
Savannah allowed herself to be led into the sitting room in which the mayor held his meetings. She crossed the room to the low bar against the far wall then poured herself a glass of Mozart – white chocolate vanilla cream liqueur –on the rocks. She raised the glass of heaven toward her lips, but it never made it to her mouth.
The mayor held the drink Savannah had just poured in his own hand, across the room. He raised the glass in a mocking toast. “Let’s hold the drinks for a bit.”
Aggravated at having her drink swiped, Savannah flopped down on the overstuffed horsehair sofa in front of the bar. Mayor Green hunkered down in his chair – his “throne,” he called it – a strange contraption of gnarled wood and copper struts, held together with knots of cured deer tendons. The chair looked more like a torture device than a seat, but the mayor sat in it as if it was plush and comfy.
Savannah tried to get a handle on the conversation before it ate up her entire afternoon. “I can’t stay long. What can I do for you?”
The mayor leaned back in his chair then drained the glass of liqueur in a single slow draw. He opened his hand. The glass was gone.
“How are you feeling?” the mayor asked.
“You mean aside from being almost killed last night and digging a pack of demon vermin out of a junkie today? I guess I feel fine.”
Her boss stared at her over steepled fingers, his eyes measuring, probing. “Something seems different. Perhaps it is just the ordeal.”
Savannah shrugged. She could not deny the mayor’s analysis. She felt different; stretched thin and frayed at the edges. Fear for her family, anger at the people she was trying to protect, it was all crowded in her chest.
“It has been a tough couple of days. I imagine it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
The mayor nodded. “I heard you’ve been rousting the locals. Vigorously.”
“I’ve been investigating an issue within the purview of my office.” Savannah wished she had that drink. “Some of the offenders became violent. There were unavoidable altercations.”
The mayor’s laugh gave Savannah chills. She tried not to look at her boss when he laughed. There was something unnerving about the man’s face; the way it sloped down to his nose and receded back from his chin. It did not help that he was also the tallest man she had ever seen. All of the rooms in the Briarcliff had fifteen-foot to twenty-foot ceilings, but Savannah swore the man’s head scraped them from time to time.
“The way I hear it, everyone you talked to about this mess has ended up dead. And by dead, I mean that you have killed them.”
“They were adherents.” Savannah clenched her hands in her lap to keep them from trembling. “Fanatics are hard to reason with.”
“They shot first? You were just defending yourself?” The mayor leaned back in his chair, his body curving into its confines, his thin legs spreading across the floor. Shadows flickered behind him, long and tattered, spreading from his shoulders into the darkness of the room’s high ceiling. “But you are making progress despite all the violence?”
“I have this.” Savannah fished Ray-Ray’s phone out of his pocket. “One of the adherents’ phones. Someone in this contact list is behind this mess. I’m sure of it.”
“Are you? Because I wonder if that is the case.” The air in the room shuddered, and the mayor was suddenly beside Savannah, offering her a heavy crystal glass half-filled with the liqueur she tried to drink earlier. “Here, calm your nerves.”
Savannah was grateful for the distraction and the time it gave her to gather her thoughts. The mayor rarely talked to Savannah except to point her toward wicked magic. He had never questioned the Root Woman’s methods, and Savannah found this whole meeting both annoying and terrifying. She was not sure that she could be fired, but she also did not want to wind up stuck in one of the rooms she had just passed – a curiosity for the mayor’s amusement. She took a healthy swig of the sweet drink and let it work its magic before she spoke again.
“There aren’t many people who could conjure those girls, unless they had outside help.” She took another drink. “Ray-Ray was bringing them that help. He would have called his buyer, at least once. Or they would have called him. The name of the person who was buying his shit is in this phone somewhere.”
The mayor snapped his spidery fingers. One of the American Bulldogs padded into the room with the handle of Ray-Ray’s cooler in its enormous mouth. It dropped the container at the mayor’s feet then loped back out of the room.
“I assume this is the help you meant? What do we have here?” He popped the top off the cooler with his bare left foot then wri
nkled his nose like he had just smelled something beyond foul. “Now, this is unexpected.”
Savannah kept her mouth shut. If anyone knew what those things in the cooler were, it would be the mayor. Anything Savannah had to add would just sound ignorant.
The mayor’s hand darted into the cooler as if he was reaching into a bear trap. He tossed one of the little boxes in the air, caught it with his other hand, then bounced it between his palms for a few seconds. He snared it between his index fingers then pushed against the wood until its thin walls shattered. Something small and white dropped into his palm. He balanced it on his open hand, pointed at it with his free index finger. “What do you plan on doing about this?”
Savannah drank the last of her cream liqueur. “I don’t even know what the hell that is.”
“It’s an Izintwala, a…”
“I didn’t ask what it was. I know it’s more There Road crap for me to deal with. My plan is pretty simple. I’m going to look at all the people in this phone’s contact list. I’m going to start visiting them, one at a time. I’m going to talk to them until one of them tells me something useful. Then I’m going to follow that chain to its end and kill what needs to be killed.”
A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 15
