And now he had another partner. Fiercer than he could have imagined. Maggie had been inside McNaulty’s office for the past half hour, exchanging words, and apparently not budging until she had her way. There was hardly anyone else in the building, most of the enforcers at the Academy trying to keep things in order.
The door to McNaulty’s office opened. Maggie exited, not a line of worry on her face, and calmly walked over to Logan. From the corner of his eye, Logan saw the McNaulty glare at him through the open door before slamming it shut.
“He’s not a pleasant fellow,” said Maggie, with a sigh.
“What did he say?”
“Oh, you can help me track down the ghouls. He’s allowing it.”
Logan nodded, impressed at Maggie’s negotiating skills. He had truly thought that McNaulty would turn her down and send him off to the Academy. Sometimes good things do happen.
Maggie smiled. Logan averted his eyes.
“He told me about your Mark,” she said.
Logan rubbed his beard, then stuck his hands in his pockets. “It doesn’t change anything. I can still do my job. You don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not,” said Maggie. “But I wish you had told me. It’s very rare for a someone to escape a vampire den. How old were you when it happened?”
Logan shook his head, and walked out of the enforcer HQ. Maggie quickly followed him out onto the sidewalk, into the flow of ungifted going about their ordinary lives. She caught up to him and put a hand on his arm, making him pause at the side of a building. The air smelled fresh. Grey clouds gathered above, promising rain.
“I don’t like talking about it,” said Logan, before Maggie could say anything. “Can you just forget about it?”
“No.” Firmly. “The vampire who marked you…He’s still alive, isn’t he?”
“She is,” said Logan. Suddenly his voice was hoarse.
“She calls to you? Is she here, in the city?”
Logan shook his head, and didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” said Maggie. “But I want you to know that I don’t look down on your for it. I don’t care. If the call gets to strong, let me know. I can help.”
You can’t help. I’ve already tried the Church. Many times.
There are two ways of dealing with a vampire mark: run away and hope the vampire decides not to track down its property, or kill the vampire.
Both of the priests Logan had turned to assured him that they would help him kill the vampire. Both had died.
“I’m thirsty,” said Logan. “Let’s go get a drink.
Maggie didn’t ask any questions. She went with Logan into Club Noir, not so much as batting an eye at the loud techno music, and the half-naked shifters partying on the dance floor. It was only after Logan was into his third beer that Maggie began to lose patience.
“We should be tracking the ghouls,” she said. She sat on the stool next to Logan’s, at the bar on the second floor of the club, where Logan always went to drown his memories. It happened that DJ Krishna was at the club again, dreadlocks flying wildly through the air as she violently bobbed her head to the beat. The lights, waving around from booth as they do at raves, passed now and then over Maggie’s cloaked body. They were sitting at the farthest end of the bar, Maggie right next to the railing where she could see over the dance floor.
“This is how it works,” said Logan, hunched over his pint. “We drink. We wait. Something bad happens,” he waved his hand, “we go, and deal with it.”
Maggie frowned. She did not like that answer. “I thought we came here to find a clue.”
Logan shrugged. “We can’t work all the time.”
It’s my fault, Maggie thought. I shouldn’t have brought up his past. It was too much. She saw then the cycle of Logan’s life: drink, forget, remember, drink. All while doing his best to keep San Fran safe from bad guys. It was obvious that he lived alone.
“Your friend, Lee. He might know something.”
“Said he would call me. He hasn’t.”
“There must be something that we can do.”
“You’re the priest. I don’t got any magic.”
“The night Suri came to the cathedral, we summoned the ghost of a dead body. It was the man you found at councillor Weathers’ house.”
Logan nodded. He knew this.
“He had a vampire’s bite. Not a Mark, the normal two holes.”
“Go on,” said Logan, still drinking his beer.
“The men that Lee brought over earlier, that tried to kill you. They had bite marks too.”
“Suri said they had the residue of necromancy,” Logan added. He rubbed his beard. This was already known. But it was likely that he had run into this necromancer before, if only indirectly. “Whoever it is, they’ve been in the city for a couple of days. They probably kidnapped the councillor.”
“Where would a necromancer be staying in San Francisco?”
“Anywhere,” Logan answered. “A crypt, a hotel. Airbnb.”
“Maybe before. He has sixty-three ghouls now.”
“What could he want with that many ghouls? Why now?”
Screams came up from the dance floor. It sounded like the shifters were really getting into the mood. Sometimes they shift fully into animal form and howl like crazy. But the screams grew louder, distinctly terrified. Spreading to new voices, as everyone on the dance floor screamed and ran for the exit.
Maggie sprang up from her stool and looked out over the railing. “What’s going on?” she asked Logan.
Logan pushed away his pint. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding as uncertain as he felt. He joined Maggie on the railing. Everyone on the second floor lounge was trying to find a spot where they could see the cause for alarm. Others were already rushing down the spiral staircase.
Logan and Maggie watched as the dance floor cleared out. The music stopped, DJ Krishna nowhere to be seen. But left behind on the dance floor were several bodies. They looked dead.
The shifters who came to Club Noir were ordinary gifted. Most had never been in a fight in their entire life. They were panicking, as something attacked them. Logan shifted halfway, and picked up the sound of growls through his badger ears. They could have been coming from shifters, but it didn’t sound like it. The growls were too wet, and raspy.
“Oh, fuck,” he said. He shifted fully into a honey badger, not even taking the time to remove his black leather jacket. It fell off Logan in tatters. In one leap he was over the side of the railing, had a moment to savor the look of astonishment on Maggie’s face before falling to the main floor.
He landed at the edge of the dance floor, right in the heart of the chaos. His enhanced sense of smell confirmed the ghoul presence. It was better than his eyesight in the club’s dim lighting. He found the nearest one, a fresh corpse from Maggie’s cathedral with a sagging face, and bore it to the ground. Two shakes of his head broke its neck.
I sure as hell hope there aren’t sixty of them in here.
It would be a massacre. No—it was already a massacre. All Logan could do was save who he could, and end the attack as soon as possible.
Club Noir’s bouncer squad was fully shifted. Eight burly lions and wolves, almost twice as big as your ordinary shifter. They fully engaged with the ghouls, fighting what looked to be twice as many. They put their lives on the line to give the ordinary shifters time to escape. Logan moved to join them, then smelled ghouls coming from a different direction. By the doors. The only exit to the building.
Club Noir was not exactly up to code. The Fire Marshal would have a fit if he ever saw inside the place. There were maybe three hundred gifted packed inside a small, underground club that had only one exit.
The screams, which had died down as the drunk party animals escaped the ghouls on the dance floor, picked up in volume. Logan ran for the exit on all fours, shoving through the massive crowd. In the end, there were too many. It was a stampede of drunk and drugged up gifted, most of them in their early twen
ties. Some were shifted, others in their human form, all trying to run for their lives, and unable to. Stopped, bottlenecked by the one, narrow exit, and the ghouls who had been sent to stand between them and the street.
There was nothing that Logan could do. He paced back and forth, furiously searching for a path through the crowd that would take him in deeper, closer to the front lines where the ghouls were waiting. Behind him, the bouncers were still fighting the ghouls who had come onto the dance floor.
That’s why the necromancer attacked so quickly, Logan realized. He used the most recently deceased, normal-looking corpses to slip them inside the club undetected. He doubted that the ghouls waiting by the exit looked as human. From his experience, they would be little more than rotting flesh. Skeletons, and eye sockets blazing with the artificial light of black magic.
Logan turned back to help the bouncers clean up the ghouls inside the club, and realized that two of them had fallen. There were more ghouls than he had realized. At least twenty, dressed in normal clothes and moving with hungry purpose. Their jaws hung low, saliva dripping from their lips. The necromancer’s black magic ritual had transformed the bodies, giving them long fangs and sharp claws before raising them back to life. And their strength was supernatural. Logan had been lucky to kill the first one by surprise.
He joined the fray, leaping ahead of the bouncers and drawing the ghouls’ attention. They charged at him, jumped on him, slashed him with their claws and bit down with their fangs. Only a few were able to pierce his thick, badger hide and draw blood.
The weight and sheer number of them smothered Logan, restricted his movement. He snapped and swirled, throwing two of his back, stomping on them with his clawed feet, only to find them replaced by more. The bouncers could only fight one or two at a time, leaving the rest for Logan to deal with. His vision became red. The shifter bloodlust took hold, as old instincts confirmed he had thrown himself into a savage fight for his life.
7
Maggie knelt on the ground, deep in prayer. She was still in the second floor lounge area. Her reaction to the ghoul attack was not as fast, as her magic took longer to take form.
The murmured latin words coming off her lips were heard by no one, yet when she finished the last line, felt the force of the divine infuse her being and threw off her cloak, everyone around her stared.
Maggie shone like a beacon. Her armored robe was pearl white, lit from within by holy magic. The whites of her eyes were now golden, and swirling like lava. She levitated over the railing, up into the air above the dance floor. Her mace hung from her belt, unneeded as she spoke the latin word for ‘banishment.’
Although spoken softly, the word rang through the air and into the ears of everyone present. The shifters and gifted, fighting for their lives, felt no more than a tickle. The ghouls stopped what they were doing and shrieked. Maggie’s magic tore the souls from where they had been imprisoned in the corpses. Nailed into place by the necromancer’s black magic.
Several ghouls stopped moving, while others shook off the divine command. A testament to the power of the necromancer. Maggie saw Logan, a whirlwind of fur and blood, emerge from beneath a pile of ghouls and roll over, crushing one of them between the bulk of his weight and the floor. He snarled and leapt at three ghouls.
Most of the ghouls are still standing. The necromancer must be nearby to protect them from my spell.
Maggie had to find him. It was the only way—
The dead bodies on the dance floor, the first victims of the ghoul attack, were rising. Necromancy, before her very eyes.
Maggie immediately began chanting latin verses, countering the black magic. Only two of the bodies rose as zombies, joining the battle on the side of the ghouls. The other bodies twitched and writhed, caught between black magic and holy magic.
At once, Maggie felt the power of her opponent. It was a slinking darkness, heavy like a gallon of gasoline, and thick with malice. She grit her teeth and called on every shred of her willpower to oppose it, to drive it from the club with her holy light. The two sides were in deadlock, neither able to overcome and gain control. It was the first time since Maggie was a teenager that she felt such powerful evil. It would take hours of intense concentration to claim victory.
But in that time I can find out where you are, and who you are.
Like all black magic users, this necromancer casted his spells from the shadows. He, or she, did not want their identity revealed. Which was exactly what would happen the longer they contended with Maggie. The longer she engaged with the black magic, the more she was able to delve into its depths, and uncover its source and identity.
It would be up to the necromancer to decide if they wanted to cut the connection and let Maggie win, or take the gamble that they would overpower her eventually.
Then again, maybe all you have to do is keep me from joining the battle. Even I find out who you are, we all die anyways.
The battle was not going well. Two more of Club Noir’s bouncers, the strongest shifters in the building other than Logan, had fallen to the ghouls. He didn’t even want to think of the total dead. The ones trying to escape.
It was as bad as he thought. All sixty-three of Maggie’s bodies had been turned into ghouls and smuggled into the club. Logan never would have imagined this scale of attack happening in San Francisco. It was one of the safest cities in the world, for both gifted and ungifted.
Used to be. Not anymore. The necromancer had made sure of that. And there wasn’t any backup. No enforcers on their way to help. They were all at the Academy, as per McNaulty’s orders. Sixty-three missing corpses, and he couldn’t be bothered to spare another pair of enforcers. It was hardly surprising, given McNaulty’s twin accomplishments of corruption and incompetence.
Logan fell back from the mass of ghouls, shaking them off him like a wet dog. He was starting to hurt. The individual attacks were adding up, taking a toll on his flesh. Death by a thousand cuts.
He regrouped with the four, remaining bouncers. Unfortunately, it allowed the ghouls to fully surround them. The brilliant light emanating from Maggie’s robe high in the air helped him see, and was doing the opposite for the ghouls.
Logan and the bouncers stood back-to-back directly below where Maggie floated, as close as possible to the source of holy magic. The ghouls winced in pain as they drew near, hunched over, jaws hanging with hunger and circling ever closer. It made the ghouls less accurate, and Logan found it easy to stave off their attacks, and counter with heavy blows of his paws. It was only temporary safety, lasting as long as Maggie remained in what looked to be a trance, and the other ghouls, by the exit, were occupied. “Please,” Logan whispered. Don’t let those kids die.
When he had first jumped into battle, he had been expecting to fight for twenty minutes, at most, before a magi councillor ported into the club and showed who was boss. The few times that Logan had heard of such a large scale attack happening, that was exactly what had happened. Overpowered magi councillor saving the day. The local councillor, Boyde Weathers, was missing. Kidnapped, maybe dead, and probably by the same sick son of a bitch directing the ghouls at this very moment.
It struck Logan that it might all be coordinated, a grand plan only now coming to fruition. The missing councillor, the attack on the Academy, leaving the city distracted and defenseless. Open to any bad guy with enough wallop to mess with the ordinary gifted.
It was a worse situation than Logan had thought, and that coming after the death of what was now over a dozen gifted.
This is only the beginning. He shivered, knowing deep down that it was true. The world had been thrust into chaos, too quickly for him to notice.
Logan shifted back into human form, drew his Clint Eastwood revolver and unloaded on the ghouls. The bouncers protected him, fighting hand-to-hand and giving Logan the space he needed to aim and fire.
The bullets lacked enchantments, only killing the ghouls when Logan severed the skull from the spine. He dropped five of them,
injured several more. The bouncers were quick to pounce, and tore the injured ones to shreds. More ghouls came on, taking the place of their fallen. Their ranks were thin, but too many still stood to finish off with a final charge.
The bouncers could hold their own. Logan’s beer belly stood out as he broke away from the group under Maggie’s light. He fired off the last of his bullets, clearing a path, and ran for the crowd of gifted still trying to get out the exit.
Logan was smaller now than when he’d been in badger form, and he was able to make his way through the crowd, toward the source of the screams and violence. He was shirtless, hairy chest covered in puncture marks and streaked in blood and sweat. It would be hours until he could shift back into badger form. Hours he did not have. People were dying now. Kids, people tangled up in a mess than Logan could have prevented. He needed to do something, anything, to put an end to it.
Logan was gravely aware of his soft human flesh. He reached the far edge of the crowd, where the ordinary shifters and the ghouls were fighting.
It was madness. Blood soaked the floor. Logan was out of bullets. The ghouls were advancing, doing far more damage than they were receiving.
He roared, and threw himself at the nearest ghoul. Knocking it aside before it could sweep its claws across the face of a young shifter. He fell with it to the floor, straddled its rotting flesh and began to twist its head. Another ghoul landed on his back, fangs digging deep into his shoulder. Logan screamed, rolled to face the ghoul and hold it at bay. I’m coming, Suzy. Logan was ready for the afterlife. Hell, he’d been ready every since his wife died.
Fate didn’t let him go so easy.
The ordinary shifters, the scared party animals who had first tried to run for their lives then been petrified in terror by the ghouls, surged forward. Logan’s mad attack had shaken them awake. Reminded them what bravery looked like.
Faerie Empire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Vampire's Bane Book 2) Page 4
