The Cadaver Client: The Markhat Files, Book 4

by Frank Tuttle

  About the Author

  Frank Tuttle discovered writing at an early age. Later, when Frank figured out that writing did not in fact involve mixing seahorses with caustic lye compounds, he began to enjoy writing. And when Frank was first paid to write about things that never happened to people that never existed, he knew he’d found a vocation to take the place of professional carnival weight guessing.

  Frank is a hairy, nine-foot tall hominid weighing nearly six hundred pounds who makes his home in the heavily forested wilderness of the American Pacific Northwest. And he wishes all you people would stop trying to film him, and that business of making plaster casts of his footprints is really beginning to cheese him off.

  To learn more about Frank Tuttle, please visit www.franktuttle.com. Send an email to Frank at franktuttle@franktuttle.com. Send money to Frank any way you please, but quickly.

  Look for these titles by Frank Tuttle

  Now Available:

  Dead Man’s Rain

  The Mister Trophy

  Hold the Dark

  Demons in a feeding frenzy drive the world-weary Markhat to the brink…

  Hold the Dark

  © 2009 Frank Tuttle

  A Markhat Story

  Quiet, hard-working seamstresses aren’t the kind that normally go missing, even in a tough town like Rannit. Martha Hoobin’s disappearance, though, quickly draws Markhat into a deadly struggle between a halfdead blood cult and the infamous sorcerer known only as the Corpsemaster.

  A powerful magical artifact may be both his only hope of survival—and the source of his own inescapable damnation.

  Markhat’s search leads him to the one thing that’s been missing in his life. But even love’s awesome power may not save him from the darkness that’s been unleashed inside his own soul.

  Warning: This gritty, hard-boiled fantasy detective novel contains mild romance and interludes of suggestive handholding.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Hold the Dark:

  I picked up the candle and followed.

  The door wound down a long, dark hall. Walls, floors and ceiling all bore water damage, but the warped pine wood floor had been repaired in two places. Recently, too, the nail-heads shone of new-beaten iron in the light, which meant they hadn’t had time to rust.

  The hall abruptly ended. I stepped down, nearly stumbled, onto a cobble-brick floor, and my candlelight lost sight of any ceiling, and all the walls. It did illuminate the backs of four black-clad halfdead, who stood in a small circle a dozen steps away.

  Evis and his dark glasses turned to face me.

  “They are friends. They do not see you.”

  “Wonderful.” My mouth was so dry I spoke in a ragged whisper. My new friends didn’t turn, didn’t leap, so I licked my lips and took a step toward them. “What is it we’re seeing?”

  I wasn’t seeing a thing, aside from vampires and a flickering ring of shadows and floor-bricks.

  “Blood was spilled here. Spilled in such quantity that it rushed onto the floor.” He indicated the area, which the halfdead surrounded. They pulled back a few steps, and Evis motioned me forward. I took my guttering candle and went.

  All I saw were bricks, just like all the others—black and smooth and rounded over with age and wear. Half the old buildings in Rannit were built over even older roads, just like this one. The builders merely scraped the dirt off the cobbles and called it a floor.

  I knelt down, put my nose near the cold baked clay. If there was any blood there, it was too old and too faint for human eyes and a stub of a candle to see.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said, rising.

  “Do,” said Evis. “You see no trace because soon after the blood was spilled, the floor was cleaned. I suspect they used a mop and tanner’s bleach. My associates and I can still smell the traces though. Some must have run between the cobbles.”

  “Rannit’s got more blood-stains than pot holes,” I said. “What makes this one special? What does it have to do with Martha Hoobin?”

  Evis sighed.

  Then he frowned.

  “Mavis. Torno, Glee, come here.”

  Three new vampires appeared and glided near, their ghost-white faces turned down, their dirty marble eyes turned away from my light.

  “What the—”

  Evis raised a hand and the halfdead stopped still, faces down, beside me. I shut up.

  A moment passed. I strained my ears, since my eyes were proving useless. I heard nothing at first—then, faintly, I made out scratching, like a mouse in a wall, chewing away. I held my breath but couldn’t locate the source.

  Evis put his dark glasses away. “Dear God,” he said in a whisper. “Dear God.”

  A fourth vampire appeared at my right elbow. Evis nodded at it.

  “Go now, Mr. Markhat. Sara will take you to safety.”

  I opened my mouth. The scratching grew louder. Was it coming from the floor?

  “Sara!”

  Sara reached out, put both cold hands on my waist and hefted me a foot off the floor.

  She’d taken a single gliding step toward the door when the brick floor at our feet exploded and a long bubbling scream broke the silence.

  A scream and a smell. A stench, really, louder in its way than any noise—rotting flesh, warm and wet, thrust suddenly up out of the earth.

  A brick struck Sara on the side of her head, and she faltered, tripped and went down, and me with her.

  I heard Evis shout something and felt whips of motion around me and in that instant before my dropped candle flicked out I caught sight of the thing that we’d raised. It leaped toward me, a thing of loose and rotted flesh, slapping Evis casually aside when he grasped its right arm. There was no face upon that head, which was itself only a dark, swollen mass that sent sprays of thick, black fluid flying with every movement. It had no eyes, no ears, no lower jaw—but it saw me, somehow, and it raced toward me, arms outstretched, ruined belly burst open and trailing shriveled entrails as it came.

  The candle went dark. I scrambled up, and I ran. Behind me, I heard a thud and a gurgle as Sara rose and grappled with the dead thing. Evis shouted again and a pair of crossbows threw, thunk-whee, thunk-whee.

  I charged across the cobbles. I couldn’t see the door. I couldn’t see the wall. I couldn’t see the thing behind me, but I could hear it, hear Evis and his halfdead as they grappled, leaped and struck.

  The ruined thing screamed again, so close I smelled its foul exhalation, felt cold spittle on my back.

  I slammed face-first into a wall that might have needed new plaster and new paint but hadn’t suffered much loss in the way of structural integrity. The room spun. Blood spewed out of my nose.

  It shrieked at the scent, maybe a dozen steps behind. I put the wall on my left and charged, arms groping for a door, any door.

  More crossbows threw. A bolt buried itself in the wall a hand’s breadth from my head. I ducked and kept moving—had I turned the wrong way? Was the door behind me now?

  Something hissed. Something cold and wet laid itself on the back of my neck. I bellowed for Evis, lashed out with a back kick that sank into something soft. The smell hit me anew. I whirled and kicked again and it screamed, wet and triumphant, nearly in my bloodied face.

  I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all, but I felt the air rush past me, heard the pair of grunts and thuds as a pair of vampires dived into the creature and pinned it to the wall. A thick, foul spray of fluid caught me square in the face when the halfdead hit, and I retched and stumbled away, pawing and spitting.

  A cold hand gripped my shoulder. “This way,” said Evis, shoving me forward. “Go. Find the carriage. Tell Bertram and Floyd to wait with you.”

  Behind me, I heard shrieks and blows—short, wet shrieks punctuated with fast, hard blows. I assumed they had the dead thing pinned and when Evis let go, I moved.

  I wasn’t followed. The gurgling shrieks behind me grew fainter and shorter. I heard the faint sound of steel slicing the air
and, suddenly, all was silent.

  I found the ruined door, cut my hand on the splintered doorframe, darted through it and was down the hall at a run. My footfalls were loud in the dark, and all the way out to the street my mind played tricks on me, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind me, hearing a faint growl that crept from a bloated, gurgling throat.

  But I made it. I stumbled whole into the street, mopped blood from my nose, tried to pick out my rights and my lefts from the shadows and the warehouse fronts. That way, I decided. Right. Right for Evis’s carriage. Left to just skirt the whole mess and head for the country and raise a crop of sheep or do whatever it is they do out there.

  I’d taken a single step that way when hands—gentle hands—fell on my shoulder. “That way,” said a voice, and I was turned around, and a clean, white linen handkerchief was placed in my hand. “The carriage awaits.”

  I mopped blood and blinked.

  The street was full of halfdead.

  Ten or more glided past, quiet as ghosts. My giver of handkerchiefs joined them, gliding toward the warehouse like a black-clad puff of wind.

  I shuddered, but I held the cloth tight to my nose and marched toward the carriage. More halfdead popped out of the shadows. Each and all ignored me, though I tottered and stank and dripped their favorite beverage liberally out onto the street.

  There’s a metaphor there, somewhere. Something about bleeding profusely at a vampire parade. One day I’ll finish it and tell Mama it’s a Troll saying. But that night I just clamped the cloth to my nose and headed for Evis’s carriage.

  I found it easily enough, though the coachmen had lit their lanterns. They were both on the street, and both bore crossbows and nervous frowns.

  They backed up and wrinkled their noses at my approach.

  “We’ll never get the smell out,” said one to the other.

  “Just be glad you aren’t wearing it,” I said. The driver, bless him, produced a clean handkerchief and stepped close enough to hand it to me.

  “The boss said you found a bad one,” he said quietly.

  I mopped and nodded, not asking how the Boss had communicated this to the driver. I figured House Avalante could afford the finest sorcerous long-talkers.

  The driver’s friend opened the door. “Best get in. We’ll be leaving soon, and in a hurry.” He squinted at me in the lantern light. “It didn’t scratch you, did it?”

  Hell. Had it?

  I shook off my old Army jacket, kicked it into the gutter when I saw the thick black stain all down the back. I rolled up my sleeves, checked my arms and waist and legs.

  All the fresh blood was from my nose or my right hand. All the other—well, it wasn’t mine.

  “No,” I said. My voice shook, and I was getting weak at the knees, so I climbed into Evis’s fine carriage, leaving black stains as I went.

  Bertram and Floyd—I never learned which was which—watched me go, then turned their frowns and their crossbows back out toward the night.

  I sat and I panted and even with the door and window open I gagged at my smell. My heart still rushed, and memories of the thing’s bloated, eyeless face, I knew, would haunt my dreams for years.

  “The boss said you found a bad one.”

  That’s what the driver had said. A bad one. The flip side of Evis and his well-groomed friends. Halfdead in the raw—a hungry corpse, rotted and foul, still driven to a grim parody of life by a hunger that drove it from the grave.

  Her destiny—destroy the world. Whether she wants to or not.

  Calling the Wild

  © 2009 Lila Dubois

  Moira doesn’t know who’s hunting her, but she knows why. In her youth she unleashed a deadly force that killed everything within range—a strange power she has vowed never to use again.

  Needing protection, she risks a bit of the old magic to call for backup. She gets more than she asks for. A lot more. A proud, sexually magnetic, enraged centaur who’s far from a quiet, obedient servant.

  Kiron at first tries to intimidate the witch into freeing him, but she possesses more backbone than the average human. When she’s attacked again, he realizes she’s not a real witch. In fact, she’s not even human. And the sparks flying between them have nothing to do with the magical shackles that bind them together.

  Curiosity grows to admiration, then to a love that in the end may not be enough to protect her. Moira’s enemies are closing in, intending to harness her power to restore a dark kingdom that has lain dormant for a thousand years.

  There’s only one, heart-wrenching way out—give herself over to the full extent of her powers hoping that her true destiny lies with Kiron, and not in fulfilling a prophecy of death…

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Calling the Wild:

  Kiron traced his fingers over the cut. “Who did this?”

  “I did. I let it happen.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed information and paid in blood.”

  “That is dangerous.”

  “Everything about my life is dangerous.”

  Kiron bent low to examine her, his thumb tracing over line of the cut. Within the confines of her corset, Moira’s nipple beaded.

  “We need to leave,” she whispered.

  Though it was true that they needed to get away from the club, Moira was using it as an excuse. Away from the pulsing lights and music, what they’d done seemed like a terrible idea. She didn’t know enough about centaurs to know if it has meant anything to him. She had some vague memories from Greek art and archaeology classes that the centaurs were known for their lust. Lust for drink, lust for battle and lust for women. If that meant that what had happened inside meant nothing to him, she would deal with it. What would be a problem, would be if she let what happened mean too much to her.

  “Open the back,” he said, stepping away from her. Her breast felt cold without his fingers.

  “Why? You can ride in the cab.”

  “I will not wear this weak human form any longer.” He stood back and spread his arms, lips pulled back in a sneer. Moira looked him over. He was tall as a human, over six feet. His upper body had the same muscular build, and his legs were thickly muscled also. She knew they were, because she could see the muscle definition in his thighs through his pants. Speaking of his pants… Moira looked him up and down.

  The hilarity of her mythical centaur dressed in black PVC pants and a poet shirt hit Moira.

  “Where did you get that outfit?” she asked on a giggle.

  “I watched a man come out of the club wearing this and replicated it. He also had on a long red coat, but it was too hot so I discarded it.”

  “Too bad about the coat. I would have paid good money to see you in it.”

  “I look stupid.”

  “No, I’m sure all the other badass centaurs wear frilly shirts.”

  “Are you laughing at me, witch?”

  “Laugh or cry, those are the options.”

  White sparks spilled over him, growing until he was concealed by a waterfall of white. The sparks dimmed and cleared, the few stragglers blown away by the breeze that danced through the parking lot.

  Kiron stood before her, a centaur once more. He even had the sword on his back.

  “Where did the sword go when you changed?”

  “I brought it into me, made it a piece of me.”

  “You can do that? How?”

  “I will show you when we get back to that messy place.”

  Moira swallowed her questions about his magic and moved to the back of the truck to open the door and pull down the ramp. Looking around nervously, she waited until the lot was clear and then waved him in.

  Kiron thundered up the ramp, the ring of his hooves on the metal ramp as loud as gunshots. Wincing, Moira slid the ramp into place and grabbed the door.

  Kiron had finished turning around, though this time she had no sympathy for his cramped posture as she knew he could make himself more comfortable.

  “Food,” he said unexpecte
dly.

  “What about it?” Moira jumped on the bumper to grab the door.

  “I do not know how often humans need to eat, but I am hungry.”

  “Oh, right. Do you like burgers? Do you know what they are?”

  “Yes, I do like burgers. Order me four.”

  “Four burgers. Check.”

  Moira closed the other door and bolted it in place, before racing to the front of the van and hauling herself up into the cabin.

  With a final look at the club, she put the van in gear and pulled away.

  The chosen one…with no choice at all.

  Midnight Revelations

  © 2009 D. McEntire

  A Watchers Story

  Suma lives life on the edge—in more ways than one. As her tribe’s chosen protector, her role is far from a privilege. It has sentenced her to a life of isolation, shunned by the very people she is sworn to protect. But protect them she will, no matter what the cost to herself.

  When she discovers the gorgeous hunk she’s been eyeballing is actually a vampire, she doesn’t hesitate to mark him as the next evil creature she has vowed to hunt down.

  There’s a Rogue-killing black wolf loose in a local state park, and Rayne is not too happy to be pulled away from his Watcher Cell in Louisville to check it out. The simple investigation turns complicated when he realizes the wolf is a female Skinwalker. And that Skinwalker is Suma. How does he know? It takes one to know one.

  And when they cross fangs, another fact hits him right between the eyes—she’s his mate. Even though their passion runs hotter than the magic burning under their skin, in the end there’s only one real choice.

  To answer the call of love…or the call to duty.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Midnight Revelations:

  The sun finally sank behind the trees and Rayne was free of the trailer, but to his disappointment, Suma opened the door. She had finished her swim and had allowed the sun to dry her skin, but her hair was still damp, looking very sexy to his eyes.

  “Did you enjoy your swim?” he asked as she stepped into the trailer, unable to control the huskiness in his voice.