Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1)

by Daniel Humphreys

  He stood and stormed out of the room without looking back.

  I couldn’t help but frown. Guardian angels?

  By the time the sun was up, much of the crowd surrounding the prison had dispersed. A quick head count had shown that the only inmate not accounted for was Helen Locke. He’d ordered the workmen to leave the interior doors as they were for the moment. The rumors, Gary knew, would be bad enough. He didn’t want to foment any further unease by opening it up for even a quick look by the other inmates. They didn’t need to see the hell that had come to dormitory three.

  After the maintenance crew completed the work of repairing the downed exterior fence, Gary excused himself to his office. He kept a low sofa in there. It felt like the softest bed this side of any tropical resort as he settled down into the cushions and closed his eyes.

  A soft rapping at his office door brought Gary to an uneasy wakefulness. He sat up with a start. For a moment, he couldn’t remember why he was sleeping in his office. Then it all rushed back in and he shuddered. “Yeah,” he called out, rubbing his eyes with balled-up fists.

  Blake opened the door and stuck his head in. “Feds are here, sir. They wanted to touch base with you before they checked out the scene.”

  He lowered his hands and blinked at the CO as he tried to compose his thoughts. “I thought the coroner already cleared the bodies?”

  “He did, but they said they wanted to do some additional testing of some sort.” Blake shrugged. “They were damn polite about it — more than any Fed I’ve ever dealt with. Had no problem waiting.”

  Greg got out of the couch with difficulty. You tended to sink into it after a bit, and he’d been laying there long enough to make a pretty serious impression. “They say what agency?”

  The other man laughed, though there was an air of discomfort to it. “Yes, sir. They say they’re from ATF.”

  “Huh,” Gary said. That was a new one. He’d have expected someone from the Marshall’s Service or Bureau of Prisons. “Maybe the crew used a bomb,” he reasoned out loud. Blake just shrugged, then held the door for his boss.

  Gary was already getting tired of the long trek outside and around. He hoped that the Feds would release the scene quickly so he could delegate the cleanup and repair. Definitely heading home in a bit, he thought. The worst is over, they can do without me while I get some sleep.

  Both agents wore black suits and were of average height. The one that stepped closer to greet Gary had a crooked smile and tired eyes. His suit was impeccably pressed, but his hair was incongruously sloppy. Other than that, he could feature in a dictionary entry — ‘random government employee.’ As far as the hair went, who knew what the standards were like these days. The man was far from slovenly no matter how his barber conducted his work. That was good enough for Gary. “Warden? I’m Agent Eliot and this is Agent Valentine.”

  “Superintendent,” Gary corrected automatically, though he flashed a smile to show that he took no offense. “I suppose they think Warden is an archaic vestige of the old days.”

  “We must keep up with the times,” Agent Valentine drawled in a mild Southern accent as he stepped up and offered his own hand. Where Agent Eliot seemed to take pains to make himself bland, his partner sported a close-trimmed goatee and wore cowboy boots to offset the institutional sameness implied by his plain black suit and tie. “Glad to meet you, sir.”

  Gary stammered, momentarily overcome by the sheer charisma the second agent exuded. He usually felt the need to throat punch someone after dealing with the Feds. With this guy, he was ready to charge into battle. “Well, thank you for coming,” he managed finally. “If there’s anything you need from me, just get with Blake or one of the other CO’s.”

  “We’ll be on our way shortly,” Agent Eliot replied. “We just wanted to get your blessing before we cut in on your turf.”

  “Oh, no problem at all,” Gary said, with a wave of a hand. “Feel free to take a look around. I’m not sure what you’ll find, though, I thought forensics had already been over the scene.”

  The two Federal agents shared a glance. Valentine smiled, then said, “Well, we have a few advanced tools we’d like to check the interior with.”

  Gary nodded toward the hole in the wall. “Some sort of exotic explosive, right? That’s how they got in.”

  “Something like that,” Eliot confirmed. “We won’t be long at all.” His tone was polite but Gary could sense the dismissal in it. He took another look at the wall breach. Part of him wanted to scoff at the supposition. No explosives that he knew of could cut such a neat hole without so much as leaving a mark on the outer area. But there are times in your life where one has to decide whether to ask dangerous questions or to take the safe route.

  Gary was old, tired, and his leg was starting to hurt. The road less traveled was out of the question and had been for some time. “I’ll leave you to do your work, gentlemen.”

  As the Superintendent moved away, Agent Eliot turned at once and stepped through the hole in the prison wall.

  Matthew Valentine ran a finger under the neck of his collar to loosen the knot of his tie and sighed. Eliot looked back from the interior of the prison and murmured, “What are you waiting for? We’ve got the all clear.”

  Valentine grimaced, steeled himself as if to walk some great distance, and finally stepped through the opening. “Of all the places to have a threshold,” he grumbled. “People come in and out of this place every damn day.”

  The other agent just laughed, though it didn’t seem to fit his dour face. “It represents order, my friend. Of course, it’s going to have a threshold. You have to have a reason to come in and out.”

  Valentine just cursed under his breath. Hands on hips, he surveyed the destruction inside of the dormitory and shook his head. He drawled, “You know, Eliot, it comes to mind that allowing our fine lady to stay here might have been a mistake.”

  A pained look crossed the other man’s face. “You know the regs. Mundanes keep them if they get them first, for better or worse.”

  “I’m sure that will be of great comfort to the families of the ladies who got invited to the barbecue,” Valentine quipped. “All right, down to business.” He flipped up the hem of his suit coat and unclipped a slim, rectangular device from its position on his belt just in front of a holstered pistol. Kneeling down, he thumbed a control on the box and scrubbed one end through the layer of soot on the floor. After a moment, an indicator on the device turned red. The agent sighed in disappointment. “Balefyr,” he reported.

  “Yup,” Eliot agreed as he consulted his own testing device. “Somebody got their mad on, eh?”

  “Witches,” Valentine spat. “Why did it have to be witches?”

  The other agent tucked his tester away and moved into the unburned area of the dormitory. He studied the floor for a moment, then knelt down beside the bed to peer under it. “Over here,” Eliot called. As Valentine moved toward him, he pulled up on the mattress support. Heavy bolts and a long hinge attached the frame of the bed to the block wall of the cubicle. This kept inmates from moving them or using the frames for anything other than sleeping.

  A rough, hand-drawn outline married the glossy, painted finish of the floor. The crudity of its form betrayed both the time it had taken to inscribe it and the crude tools used to make it — a toothbrush, perhaps, or some other scrap. Prisoners, Valentine mused, were nothing if not industrious.

  The substance of the sigil on the floor was pointless, of course. It was the intent put into its creation that made all the difference. But most often, those of a mystic bent were creatures of habit. The broad circle under the bed contained two instances of the letter ‘S’ — one on the vertical with the other twisted 90 degrees.

  The last time Valentine had seen that particular symbol, it had been on a crimson banner in a burning castle. So much for thinking we finished that job. “Well, that’s going to piss Georgie off,” he remarked.

  “You think?” Eliot smirked. He took a pic
ture of the sigil with his cell phone, then let the bed fall back down to its resting position. “We were going through her mail, right?”

  “Standard procedure,” Valentine agreed. He looked around one last time, decided he didn’t need to know anything else and headed for the hole in the wall. Eliot sighed and hurried to catch up.

  “So, what did we miss?”

  “Hell, if I know,” Valentine said. Outside, he leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Talk to the intel folks.”

  “She had no visitors except for her son. We cleared all her mail. So how did she know to put up the shield? It had to have taken her at least a couple of days.”

  Valentine considered Eliot’s point. “What do you think — time to bring in the kid?” He shrugged. “Maybe he ain’t so spic-and-span as y’all think.”

  The other agent grimaced, then shook his head. “Morgan’s kept eyes on him long enough to know that he’s not bent yet. And you know as well as I do that bringing him in isn’t our call.” He glanced at Valentine with a thoughtful look on his face. “Besides, he isn’t going anywhere, not anytime soon.”

  Valentine flipped a piece of sod back into place with the toe of one boot. “I hadn’t heard that,” he admitted. He dug a can of chewing tobacco out of an inside pocket of his jacket and tucked a generous helping under one lip.

  “This is why you actually show up to briefings,” Eliot pointed out with a grin.

  “It conflicted with my schedule,” Valentine growled. “What’s the story?”

  “Sounds like the kid accounted for a witch and three familiars, pretty much on his own. Our forensics team is going in for a look as soon as it gets dark again, but seems like the kid disrupted a greater summoning.” Eliot paused a beat. “Again. You ask me, we should be giving him a medal. Or at least a job offer. Either way, he’s going to be stuck in the hospital for a few days at least.”

  “Local cops?”

  “Called off. Morgan and the Director had a long talk with the local Sheriff. Paxton Locke is under active Federal investigation, our jurisdiction only. The man wasn't happy, but he’s playing along. I think the familiars had him spooked, if nothing else.”

  The other agent coughed a chuckle. “Where’d the new witch come from? One of the mama’s followers, I suppose?” He shook his head and spat into the grass. “Between here and there, they’re popping up like weeds.”

  “We always thought that Helen Locke somehow acquired Josef’s grimoire. I know Morgan was pushing the Director to let her put Helen under compulsion to fill in the blanks, but he had concerns that might interfere with the geas her son put on her.”

  Valentine rolled his eyes. “The man can’t take a dump without consulting an oversight committee.” He favored Eliot with a crooked smile. “Which doesn’t mean that we don’t get to do some follow-up. Get the ball rolling on approval for bringing him in, but let’s swing by the hospital and have a look-see. If they clear it, we bag and tag him. If not, no biggie. I can at least get a better sense of the kid.”

  His compatriot considered the notion, nodded, and hauled out his phone. “I’ll call upstairs — you drive.”

  Chapter 20

  The doctors told me they planned to keep me in the hospital for a week. For at least the first day, I was in no position to fight them about it. I went through bag after bag of IV glucose and enjoyed the offerings of the cafeteria a bit too much if you know what I mean. When hospital food tastes good, you know you’ve got serious issues.

  The first time that I hobbled into the bathroom to pee I nearly scared myself out of my skin. The reflection in the mirror was a fun house representation of what I usually saw. I’d figured that my labors, mystical and otherwise, had come at a cost, but I wasn’t ready for the extent of the bill. My cheekbones stood out in stark relief. I now understood all too well why the nursing staff had been happy to call down for seconds on dessert. I’d shaved a good thirty to forty pounds of fat off of my frame, but maybe only about half of that had needed to go. The total loss had quite literally cut me down to the bone. No wonder I’d been so weak. No wonder Cassie had been able to manhandle me out of the hut with so little effort.

  Healing myself was a massive labor and I hadn’t realized just how much it would take to use the spell on someone else. It was a good thing Cassie had pulled away when she had, or I might not have survived the experience.

  I didn’t have any more visitors. I don’t know if Sheriff Hockers scared them off, but even so, I was in no shape for company. I slept, waking only intermittently when the nurses came to refresh my IV or bring me food. After eating, a deep sense of lethargy would fill me and I’d drift off to sleep, sometimes in mid-bite.

  Sometime after I’d stuffed myself to bursting and zonked out after dinner, furtive moment roused me from my sleep. I snapped awake in fear, but my tension was immediately eased by the figure in scrubs and a lab coat. To my surprise, I hadn’t had any nightmares about my experiences. That was one advantage to such sheer exhaustion, I suppose, but for some reason, I felt an odd sense of danger now as I woke.

  Despite what should have been the reassurance of knowing that it was a doctor or nurse that stood at the foot of my bed, for a long moment my instincts refused to believe it, but the moment passed just as quickly as I’d awaken.

  “Sorry about that,” the figure said, in a lilting southern accent. “I thought you were a bit deeper under.” He stepped a bit closer, into the circle of light cast by the equipment at the head of my hospital bed. He looked young, but he wore a shirt and tie beneath his lab coat and stethoscope. Doctor, then.

  “No worries. Feel like I’ve been sleeping for most of the day. Oh, wait.”

  He gave me a polite chuckle as he flipped through the pages of my chart. “How are you feeling, Mr. Locke?”

  “Tired, still,” I admitted. “Starting to get hungry again. Ache pretty much all over.”

  He made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “By the looks of these X-rays, I’d say you should buy a few lottery tickets. You have what look to be at least ten green stick fractures. That should account for the aching, I’d guess.” He lowered the chart and gave me a look. “It says here you declined to be cast?”

  My memory of doing so was fuzzy, but it made sense — as soon as I got my strength back up I could finish the job of healing myself and I’d just have to cut them off. I’d rather the hospital regard me as weird than as a freak of nature. If they knew that those breaks had been fully displaced and in the case of my leg, compound, less than 24 hours ago, they would have found reasons for tests. I had no desire to be a guinea pig or to answer questions. Heck, if I had a vehicle, I would have signed myself out already and parked somewhere with a case of Mountain Dew and junk food.

  I realized that my thoughts had consumed me for far too long and replied, “Right. I don’t have anyone to help me out if I did have them, and I promised I’d take it easy for a few weeks.”

  He said nothing, just tapped his pen on the charts and made another interested hum in the back of his throat. “What’s your story, Mr. Locke?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The police say you stumbled onto some sort of murder cult and that they burned your house down, but not before you took care of business and saved the day. That sound about right to you?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t save the day. There’s a family that’s dead. Maybe that’s not my fault, but I didn’t — couldn’t — stop it. Yeah, the, uh, murder cult won’t be able to hurt anyone again, but I can’t take much credit for that.” I thought about being helpless and at the end of the line. I thought about a daytime sun in the middle of the night and said, “I can’t take any of the credit if I’m being honest.”

  “Humble to a fault, I see.” The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “A true paladin, as it were.”

  “Maybe more of a jester,” I shrugged. “Thanks, though.”

  “I’ll let you rest. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll be up and at them when your lady comes bac
k.” He slid the chart back into the holder at the end of my bed, then continued in a stern voice. “In the meantime, if you’re serious about the casts, you need to take it easy for the next month at least.”

  I wanted to tell him that Cassie wasn’t ‘my lady’ but the term was so quaint — and, if I was being completely honest, intriguing — that I didn’t bother to correct him. “Thanks, Doc, uh,” I said.

  He grinned and supplied, “Valentine.”

  “Thanks, Doctor Valentine. I will take it easy,” I lied, but I tried to put a bit of earnestness into it. After all, when I got done taking it easy, my injuries would no longer be an issue.

  He seemed to believe my little white lie. The Doc gave me a polite nod as he turned and departed the room.

  As I rolled over to go back to sleep, I considered the odd click of his heels. Cowboy boots? Huh.

  Agent Valentine’s languid stroll across the parking lot informed his companion of the results of the informal shake-down before he even got into the borrowed government sedan.

  One tends more toward haste when one has just performed an execution, after all.

  With a frustrated sigh, Valentine pulled open the passenger door and plopped into the seat.

  Eliot started the car with a smirk. “Don’t look so glum, Val,” he mused. “People don’t surprise you all that often. Enjoy it.”

  The other agent frowned. “Humble, self-effacing. He’s spent, but he’s still a smart-ass.”

  “Sounds like somebody I know.” The other man gave Valentine a sidelong glance, but he didn’t take the bait. He had a thoughtful look on his face as he drummed his fingers on the dashboard.