Dead Ground (Harbinger P.I. Book 4)

by Adam J. Wright

  I slammed the Explorer into reverse and spun the wheel so we swung back to where Girard was fighting the creatures he’d refused to believe in for so long.

  Gloria opened the door for Girard and he jumped into the vehicle, panting for breath. “I got some of them. Maybe a dozen. I don’t…I don’t know what they are.”

  “They’re demons,” I told him as I put the Explorer into gear and pushed the accelerator pedal all the way down, shooting us forward onto the road. “They’re here because they want to capture Gloria. She’s a faerie queen. The demons want to take her to their masters, who are vampires from ancient Greece.” Hell, he’d come this far, there was no reason not to tell him the whole truth.

  He removed his shades and looked at Gloria.

  She smiled at him drunkenly.

  Girard frowned, processing what I’d just told him. Only a few minutes ago, before the demon attack, he would have scoffed at me and come up with a comment about how dumb I was for believing in such things.

  Now, he just nodded thoughtfully and said, “Okay.”

  Chapter 15

  “They’re still coming,” I said, looking in the rearview and seeing a mass of crimson-skinned bodies chasing us. Some were running along the road while others flew among the trees.

  Jim’s Jeep was thirty feet ahead of us. Detective Frasier was attempting to hang out of the window and shoot past us at the demons but the road was so narrow, the trees so close on either side, that she had to keep pulling her head and arm back into the vehicle to avoid getting splattered against a tree trunk.

  “What are we going to do?” Leon asked.

  “They won’t follow us all the way to town. We’ll just have to outrun them.”

  Something landed on the roof of the Explorer with a heavy thud.

  “I don’t think that’s an option,” Leon said.

  “I got this,” Girard said, picking up my sword from the floor and stabbing it up through the roof. The enchanted blade went through the metal as if it were butter and, judging by the shriek of pain that came from outside, it also sliced through demon flesh.

  When he brought the glowing blade back through the slit in the roof, Girard was grinning. “Wow, I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “Then you can explain it to the rental company,” I told him.

  The winged demon that had been on the roof was brushed off by a low-hanging branch. It tumbled onto the road behind us and the running horde trampled over its body.

  There was another thump on the roof. Girard eagerly thrust the sword up through the roof again but this time there was no sound on the other side. The demon leaped onto the Explorer’s hood and glared through the windshield at us.

  I tapped the brakes, attempting to shake it off, but even though we were all slammed against our seatbelts, the demon had its claws dug into the hood and remained in place.

  The people at Hertz were going to have dollar signs in their eyes when I took the Explorer back.

  The demon lunged at me, its deadly talons smashing through the windshield and cutting the air in front of my face.

  I dodged the attack, slamming myself against the door, struggling with the wheel while trying to see past the demon’s bulky body at the road beyond.

  Leon reacted with lightning speed, thrusting his sword into the demon’s belly. The creature howled and toppled into the trees, its black blood spurting over the Explorer’s hood.

  Ahead, Jim was approaching a fork in the road. He put his blinkers on to let me know he was going to take the right fork, the road that led to Huntsville, but Gloria shoved her face between the front seats and said, “Tell him to go left.”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the Jeep. “He’s going the wrong way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We need to go that way,” she said, pointing at the road that led deeper into the woods.

  “No, we don’t. We need to get to town.”

  “We’ll never make it.” She looked at me. “Trust me. There’s a portal in the woods ahead. I can sense it. We can use it to escape.”

  “A portal to where?”

  “To Faerie, of course,” she said, as if I were stupid to ask such a question.

  “You just escaped from Faerie. Why would you want to go back there?”

  She frowned at me as if I had just asked the dumbest question in the word. “Because we’re being chased be demons.”

  I wasn’t sure I could trust her. Reaching town seemed like our best option and heading deeper into the woods could get us killed. But then I smelled burning metal and realized we weren’t going to make it to Huntsville anyway.

  The demon’s black blood was corroding the hood, eating its way down to the engine. The Explorer didn’t have long left.

  “Damn it!” The decision was made for me. I honked the horn and flashed my lights at the Jeep and pointed at the left fork. Without question, Jim turned onto the road that led into the woods.

  “You’d better be right about this,” I told Gloria.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, closing her eyes. “The portal is close. I can feel it.”

  It had better be, because once that acidic demon blood reached the engine, we were screwed.

  I reached the fork and followed Jim along the road that led away from Huntsville and wound through the woods. The demons chasing us on foot seemed to have inexhaustible energy, still running along the road.

  Luckily, they didn’t have superhuman—or super-demon— speed; they could keep up with the Explorer on the narrow, windy road where I couldn’t put my foot down, but they couldn’t catch up with us. There must have been at least fifty of them back there and if they managed to reach us, we were dead, no doubt about it.

  The winged variety was faster and two of them swooped down onto the Explorer right after we passed the fork in the road. One of them landed on the roof, the other on the hood, obscuring my view of the road ahead.

  “Girard,” I said.

  He thrust the sword up through the roof but the blade didn’t seem to connect with anything. Girard peered up through the slits he’d cut in the roof. “Damn thing flew up to avoid the sword.”

  The creature on the hood lunged in at me through the shattered windshield. I instinctively raised an arm and punched it in the face, stunning it for a second; all the time Leon needed to run it through with his sword. The demon’s hateful yellow eyes bulged as the enchanted blade slid into its body. Leon pulled the sword back out and I shoved at the dying creature, sending it toppling off the hood.

  There was a thud when the demon that had flown upward to avoid Girard’s attack landed on the roof again. Its talons punctured the roof, reaching down and clawing at the air over the back seat.

  Gloria shrank back, a look of terror in her eyes.

  Girard unholstered his gun and calmly shot up at the creature.

  The sound was deafening, making my ears ring, but the demon fell dead onto the road behind us. Girard turned in his seat to shout triumphantly at the dead demon through the rear window, “Take that, you demonic bastard!” He turned back and pumped his fist, giving Gloria a grin.

  She looked like she wasn’t sure what to make of his behavior, returning his wide grin with a weak smile.

  She said something to me but my hearing was still muffled, as if my ears were stuffed with cotton. I adjusted the rearview so I could see her in it and shouted, “What?”

  “I said we need to stop here. The portal is that way.” She pointed beyond Girard, through his side window.

  “How far?” I asked her. “If we stop, those demons are going to catch up with us pretty soon.”

  “I’m sure it’s close,” she said.

  That didn’t fill me with confidence but the dark smoke that was beginning to plume into the air from beneath the hood told me we weren’t going to be going much farther anyway. I flashed the Jeep and hit the brakes. The Explorer skidded to a stop. “Everybody out,” I said.

  We threw open
the doors and scrambled out of the vehicle. The Jeep’s brake lights came on and it slewed to a stop before Jim and Frasier got out. Jim ran around to the trunk and opened it, taking out the backpacks we’d stowed there earlier, as well as extra weapons he kept in there.

  Running toward him, I shouted, “There’s a portal to Faerie somewhere nearby.”

  He nodded and threw me a backpack and a sword. I hooked the backpack over my shoulder while running into the woods, following Gloria, who seemed to know where she was headed.

  Girard and Leon were at her side, clutching their swords and flanking her as if they were two knights protecting a queen, which, I guessed, wasn’t too far from the truth.

  Jim, Frasier, and I ran to keep up with them. Frasier, smaller-framed and lighter than Jim and me, pumped her arms and legs like a professional runner, her gun gripped tightly in her left hand. There was a look of grim determination on her face and I wondered if she was thinking of her family and how much she wanted to return to them.

  She and Girard had only come out to Jim’s house to question him, probably at Girard’s insistence, about the murder case and now they were running for their lives from demons. As a cop, Frasier obviously accepted certain dangers in her line of work but I was sure she’d never included fleeing from a demonic horde among her occupational hazards.

  The demons on the road veered into the woods, crashing through the undergrowth. At least the trees were so close together here that the winged demons couldn’t swoop down on us from above. They were effectively grounded.

  Up ahead, I saw Gloria point at something and she, Leon, and Girard made for it. Jim, Frasier, and I adjusted our trajectory so we could get to whatever Gloria had pointed at as quickly as possible. And we needed to be quick because the demons were gaining on us. They increased their pace, as if sensing that we had an escape route somewhere ahead.

  I used my sword to cut my way through a tangle of low-hanging branches and found Gloria standing in the center of a ring of hawthorn bushes, still flanked by her protectors.

  “Quickly!” she urged when she saw me.

  I ran into the circle, closely followed by Detective Frasier and Jim.

  When we were all encircled by the hawthorn, Gloria said, “When the ground begins to glow, cut down some of the bushes. It’ll break the circle so they won’t be able to follow us.” She closed her eyes and tilted her chin upward, chanting something under her breath.

  The demons were no more than twenty feet away now, their eyes full of hatred and triumph. They thought they’d caught us.

  The ground beneath our feet began to glow bright white and I slashed my sword at the closest bush, cutting it down with one blow.

  There was a low hum of magical energy in the air all around us. It increased in pitch as the glow increased in intensity.

  Then the woods and the demons disappeared and all that was left was a blinding white light.

  Chapter 16

  Felicity sat in her parents’ library, staring at a black-and-white photograph that had been taken in Egypt, in the tomb of Amenhotep II. The subject of the photo was a painting on the wall of the tomb that showed a man with a heart in his hand, standing before a mummy that had a hole in its chest. Between them was an open box.

  The photo had been taken in 1963 but the painting was referred to in an older source. One of the leather-bound books on the desk, a historical text called Wonders of the Tombs by a man named Walpole, written in 1932, described the painting as: The Sealing of the Heart. A priest removes a heart and places it inside a magical box.

  Felicity placed the photo next to the open book and searched through the other photos on the desk, looking for anything else that related to the Sealing of the Heart ritual. There were dozens of photographs, documenting thousands of hieroglyphs that had been painted on the wall of Amenhotep’s resting place. It would take her weeks to go through all the material and there was no guarantee that any of the other hieroglyphs even mentioned the Sealing of the Heart or the curse that was placed on the magical vessels once the heart was sealed inside.

  “Felicity, are you coming out for a while?”

  Felicity turned in her seat to see her mother standing in the doorway with a tray of cups, saucers and a teapot.

  “Yes, I’m coming,” Felicity said, getting out of the chair and taking the tray from her mother. “Here, let me take those.” She led the way out through the kitchen to the patio area where her father sat waiting at the garden table.

  The dull evening light in the garden made Felicity realize she’d been sitting in the gloomy library for longer than she’d thought.

  “You said you were coming out here hours ago,” her dad said. “Got caught up in the research, eh?”

  “Yes,” she said, placing the tray on the table. “You know what I’m like when I get lost in a book.”

  “Well, let me tell you one thing this heart attack has taught me,” he said as she took the chair next to him. “There’s more to life than studying books about the people of history. You need to be concerned about the people in the present as well, the people right here, right now.”

  “Well, that’s rich coming from you,” her mother said. “You spent most of your life with your nose buried in a book, and now you’re telling Felicity not to do the same just because you’ve come to some sort of epiphany?”

  “I didn’t say there isn’t value in it,” he countered, “just that there’s no need to spend so much time doing it. It’s important, of course, but those old texts can draw you in, make you forget about the real world. It becomes the most important thing in your life. But you need to look at it in perspective. It isn’t as if learning about the Sealing of the Heart ritual is a life-or-death situation, is it?”

  Felicity said nothing and watched her mother pour the tea. She couldn’t tell him that learning about the ritual, particularly how to break the curse attached to it, could mean the difference between life and death for Alec’s friend Mallory.

  It was funny how she always thought of Mallory as Alec’s friend and not as her own. She supposed she didn’t really know the girl well enough to call her anything other than “Alec’s friend.” Every time she’d met Mallory, she’d sensed a barrier between them, a wall that neither of them seemed willing to break through.

  She was at least partly responsible for the erection of that wall, she knew, and that was because she envied Mallory her close relationship with Alec. There was some kind of bond between them that was like nothing Felicity had ever experienced herself.

  She wasn’t even sure if she was jealous of the fact that Mallory had that bond with Alec, or if she was just jealous of the bond itself. She’d never felt such a deep connection to anyone. Her relationship with Jason had turned out to be so shallow that it could almost be called a business arrangement rather than a relationship.

  “Ignore your father,” her mother said. “He’s in one of his philosophical moods.”

  Felicity smiled and took a sip of the hot tea. It burned her mouth but it tasted good. “I know what he’s like,” she said, “but he seems to be forgetting that my research is going to help him with his article for the British Museum.”

  Her mother looked at her husband with disapproval in her eyes. “You asked Felicity to research your article for you?”

  He looked up from his tea. “What? No, she offered. She’s just collecting some information. It isn’t as if I don’t already know the subject backwards. A priest rips the heart from a living victim, puts it in a box or urn, says some magical words over it, and hey—presto, the bloody thing is regarded as an item of power. Then there’s a curse put on it. The curse was a safeguard to make sure nobody opened up the vessel to find that the heart, instead of still beating as the legend said, was actually dead and shriveled up.”

  Felicity, who had been raising her cup to her mouth, froze for a second before putting the cup back down on the saucer. Something her father had just said struck a chord. A living victim. A still-beating heart.


  “Felicity?’ her mother asked. “Are you all right? You’re staring into space.”

  “How could I be so bloody stupid?” Felicity muttered. “I knew the heart was taken from a living person but I didn’t think of that when I saw the painting on the tomb wall.”

  She pushed back from the table and stood up. Her mother looked at her with worry in her eyes.

  “Walpole was wrong,” Felicity said, feeling a glimmer of hope. “He was bloody wrong.” She ran back into the house.

  When she was in the kitchen, she heard her father say, “See, this is what I mean. Too much research addles your brain.”

  She crossed the library to the desk and picked up the photo next to Wonders of the Tombs. Walpole’s description of the painting on the tomb wall had been wrong. The priest wasn’t taking a heart from a victim. He was standing before a mummy. A living heart was required for the sealing ritual, so this painting could not be of a priest taking a heart to seal it in the box at his feet.

  Felicity studied the photograph. There was only one other interpretation: the priest had taken the heart out of the box and was putting it back into the mummy.

  Was this the way to break the curse?

  Her mind raced. The heart inside the Box of Midnight had been taken from a sorceress named Tia, a member of Amenhotep II’s court. So where was her mummy? Did it still exist?

  She went to the shelves where her parents kept boxes containing research on Egyptian tombs. The sixty-three known tombs in the Valley of the Kings were coded from KV1 to KV63, and the boxes were labeled accordingly. She tried to remember which one was Amenhotep II’s tomb. KV35, she was sure of it. She had to know if there were any mummies found in that tomb that might be Tia, and if so, where they were now.

  She pulled the box from the shelf and set it on the floor before removing the cardboard lid and delving inside. There were photographs, research papers, and her parents’ own writings on the pharaoh’s tomb.

  Her father appeared at the doorway, smiling. “Looks like you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about something.”