“Staves!” he shouted.
I scrambled for the nearest corner, the smell of my own burning facial hair creating sufficient concern for my safety. I was inches from the shelter of an open armoire when somebody grabbed me by the collar. A second later, my feet left the floor.
The Juno thing launched into the air like a comet, towing me along through a foul-smelling cloud of black smoke and bits of hot bone. We banked over the heads of the monster killers and streaked toward the northern end of the room.
“Ware the windows!” Kowalski shouted.
Three hunters placed themselves in front of the tall French doors at the far end of the dining room. The Juno thing uttered a coughing belch. There was a deafening blast of heat and fire, and one of the hunters, a woman, clutched her head and burst into flames.
The second hunter, a compact black man wielding a hatchet, ducked under the next firebolt. He reared back, preparing to fling the hatchet. The Juno thing regurgitated a gout of flame and roasted the hatchet-wielder where he stood. The hunter was propelled backward by the firebolt’s force, his body melting even as I watched. What struck the floor was something so repellent that I screamed.
The third hunter, a dark-haired Latina, thrust herself between the Juno thing and the nearest window. In one smooth motion she rolled into a kneeling firing position and aimed a Glock 9mm at my face.
“Hernandez, hold your fire!” Kowalski thundered. You’ll hit Grudge!”
The Juno thing veered away from the woman with the gun and Kowalski appeared at the opposite end of the dining room in front of a second set of open French doors leading out into the pool area.
“Door’s right this way, you ugly sack o’ shitworms,” he barked.
With a murderous shriek, the Juno thing hurtled across the dining room, inhaling flame to blast Kowalski into hot blood pudding.
Kowalski tossed something high into the air.
The object, a foot-long block of white stone, flipped over once, hit the floor and shattered into a thousand white pebbles.
The Juno thing dropped me.
I fell six feet to the floor as the fireball shot past me, changing shape as she flew. The fleshless crone, extinguished now, dropped to the floor, landing on her hands and knees.
“Oh, you bastards,” she snarled.
The crone leaned forward, veined hands stroking the white crystalline chunks, and began to lick the floor.
“Oooohhh, you dirty...bastards,” she moaned.
With a shudder, the crone began to sift through the tiny crystals, tasting some, rejecting others. The hunters surrounded her, their weapons raised. The fleshless crone ignored them, her attention devoted to the white crystals.
“It’s salt,” Kowalski said.
My body felt like it had been run through an automated meat tenderizer and flash-fried to a golden brown. But I felt better than I’d done a few moments earlier.
“What the hell’s going on?” I cried. “What’s she doing?”
“Counting,” Kowlaski said. “She’s a soucouyant.”
“A what?”
“Hails from Trinidad and Tobago. In other parts of the Caribbean she’s known as the Old Higue.”
Kowalski turned toward me. “She’s a vampire.”
“But I saw you shoot her,” I said. “That crossbow...”
“Was as useless as my old John Thackery,” Kowalski shrugged. “Sometimes the traditional methods work, sometimes they don’t. But this much holds true: Vampires, whether they hail from Romania, Ireland or the Belgian Congo, share one weakness: They’re all obsessive-compulsives.”
I stared at the crone.
She’d already succeeded in stockpiling a neat molehill of salt between her thighs. She nosed about in the crystals, separating them grain-by-grain, muttering to herself and cursing.
“Some of the legends are true,” Kowalski continued. “No bloodsucker will cross open water, or enter a home, or a mind, without being invited first.”
“Obsessive/compulsive,” I said.
Kowalski nodded at the crone.
“She could do that ‘til Madonna becomes the Pope,” he said. “Fortunately, we won’t have to wait ‘til Hell freezes over.”
Kowalski lifted the empty skin the fleshless crone had left in the center of the room. It sagged in his arms like a ruptured Inflate-a-Date.
Keeping clear of the Juno thing, Kowalski stooped and grabbed a fistful of salt from the floor. The soucouyant snarled and slashed at him, her fingers elongating into vicious-looking claws as I watched. Then she went back to counting.
Kowalski tilted back the head of the empty flesh suit and poured the fistful of salt down the sagging throat.
The response was immediate. The Juno thing screamed and began to crawl across the floor toward us. One of the hunters raised a long black stave over the soucouyant’s head.
“Wait!” Kowalski shouted. “I wanna see this.”
He threw the empty skin on the floor, inches from the soucouyant’s outstretched hands. The soucouyant grabbed the flesh-suit and shrieked as if her hands were being scalded by the contact. Nevertheless, she began to crawl back into her skin.
I’d seen a lot of fucked-up things since meeting Neville Kowalski. I’d experienced enough strangeness to fill my head with a kind of howling numbness: a defense mechanism, I suppose, to protect my over-burdened psyche from a massive influx of the Weird.
But seeing Juno Kementari slither into a sizzling sack of her own vacated flesh was the bile-flavored icing on a seven-layer crap cake.
She’d barely gotten both legs back on before she began to dissolve. Her flesh split in a hundred places, bubbling as if she’d stepped into a tub filled with hydrochloric acid.
Juno screamed and gnashed her teeth, biting through the meat of her tongue until blood poured out of her mouth, but she wouldn’t stop.
“See?” Kowalski said. “Obsessive/compulsive. The soucoyant loves salt. Even though it has power over her, she’s gotta feel each grain against her raw nerves. It’s like catnip to a Calico: She can’t help herself.”
Even as Juno pulled the skin up to cover the top of her skull, the lower half of her body began to come apart. The air was filled with a sickly stench as plumes of black smoke burst from the top of her now human-looking head.
“You dirty bastards!” she howled.
By now, she’d covered herself in the skin suit, but it was too late. She rolled around on the floor, tearing at herself, gnashing at the flesh of her arms and legs as if she could scour them clean. Her body collapsed in upon itself, and I was unpleasantly reminded of what happens to a slug when covered with salt.
Juno uttered one high-pitched wail of despair, an ear-splitting screech that rattled the windows in the room. Then she lay still.
No one spoke for a long time.
Finally, Kowalski broke the silence.
“Well, ain’t that a bitch?”
I pinched my eyes shut, silently begging my gut to quit break dancing. It ignored me and performed a double-twisting ‘helicopter spin’ that would have made Justin Timberlake black with envy. A second later, I fell to my hands and knees and threw up all over Juno’s imported Turkish area rug.
The strained silence above me tickled the nerve-endings at the nape of my neck, a physical red alert that goes off whenever the walls of my dignity have been firebombed. I looked up to find that I was surrounded by the monster hunters.
Kowalski shook his head and gave up the kind of embarrassed shrug I’d come to expect from my mother.
“Heh,” he offered.
The tall brunette who had nearly blown my face off caught my attention. She was tall, about thirty-five, built like an Olympic swimmer: broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted. She wore a black leather biker jacket, black t-shirt, jeans and sturdy engineer’s boots. She might have been beautiful save for the grimace of distaste that curdled her features. And the black patch that covered her right eye.
“That’s Marcus Grudge’s son?” the on
e-eyed brunette growled.
“Damn right,” Kowalski growled. “So whatever’s stuck in yer craw, Hernandez, do the world a favor and keep it stuck.”
“He’s soft,” Hernandez snapped. “He smells like a cheap piece of ass. I don’t get it.”
“It’s not for you to ‘get,’” Kowalski shot back.
Hernandez shook her shoulder length black hair and slapped her Glock into a holster on her hip.
“He’s a pussy, Kowalski.”
The two of them glared at each other, something that looked like hate slicing the air between them.
“I’m bringing him along,” Kowalski said simply.
But something else lurked beneath the plainness of his statement, a softness that undercut his hard tone. The one-eyed brunette stooped in one graceful motion and picked up one of the black iron staves.
“You should have killed him,” she said. “He would have been better off.”
“You’re a cold-hearted ball-buster, Hernandez.” Kowlaski snapped.
The one-eyed hunter slid the iron stave into a long leather sheath. Her eyes never left Kowalski’s.
“And you’re a deluded old fool.”
A moment later, the doors leading to the hallway exploded off their hinges.
The other hunters spun, weapons at the ready as dust and debris settled to the floor.
Trocious stood in the doorway.
“Who the Hell are you?” Kowalski said.
“The fulfillment of a long, dark dream,” Trocious replied. “A dream from which there will be no waking.”
His eyes flared like sun storms, casting the rest of his face in ghoulish shadows. His voice rumbled through the air like the Trump of Doom.
“I’m going to kill every single one of you.”
26
Throwdown at the Ambiguously-Lit Rodeo of Doom
Kowalski turned toward me and flipped a 9mm toward my head. I caught it, barely.
“What is he?” Hernandez snapped. She held the sharpened iron stave in front of her, its point facing the black giant in the doorway.
“I don’t know,” Kowalski growled. “Frankel’s the Diviner.”
“Frankel’s dead,” Hernandez said.
Trocious stood casually, his thickly-muscled arms at his sides seemingly relaxed. His eyes remained focused on mine as if the hunters’ discussion was beneath his notice.
“I’m offering you a chance,” he said. “You have uncommon attributes which our side might find useful.”
I glanced at Kowalski. The old man was holding his crossbow at the ready. I hadn’t seen him reload it, but a black bolt sat notched and aimed at Trocious’s heart.
“Don’t listen to him, Grudge,” Kowalski said. “He’s a goddamned liar, just like his dead-bitch mistress.”
Trocious laughed.
“Mistress?” he said. “But you misperceive my purpose. The woman was not the cause, merely the lure. Her fate is of no consequence.”
“You seduced her,” Kowalski said. “Sucked her in with promises and then turned her into that thing.”
“She sought power,” Trocious sneered. “Her dreams called out to me, brought me to her even across the Rift, so great was the force of her desire. They were the dreams of a powerful mind, but she craved more power. Such thoughts are as meat and drink to my kind.”
“In return you gave her Death,” Kowalski said.
“I gave her Night’s Embrace,” Trocious said. “And the power to use it however her wits might allow. It was she who chose the form of her destruction.”
Trocious turned his gaze back to me.
“These others have only moments of life left to them, but you may choose a different destiny.”
“Grudge...” Kowalski warned.
“A destiny you will serve, willing or no.”
“Shoot him,” Hernandez snapped. “Goddamit, Kowalski…”
“It won’t do any good,” Kowalski said. “Can’t you feel his power?”
Indeed, in that moment even, I saw it. He seemed to vibrate with force. Energy, an aura, some kind of power swirled in the air around Juno’s “manservant.” I could see it, a black-light cloud of dark motes spinning around Trocious like a tornado of malice. That malice reached out and swirled around Kowalski and the hunters.
“I was born a slave,” Trocious said. “I’ve walked this world since before Abraham Lincoln was born. In my dreams, one of the Hallowed Ones came to me. He sang to me tales of a faraway land, a land of olive trees and white sands, of a distant shore lapped by a deep green sea: a land where all men were free.”
Kowalski and the other hunters stood as still as statues. Tears glimmered in Hernandez’s eyes, a rictus of pain twisting her face. The hunters stood, immobilized as effectively as if they had been turned to stone by Trocious’s malice.
The manservant took a step toward me.
“The Hallowed One offered me the power to destroy my captors if I served him willingly. He offered me the lives of the ones who sold my children. I accepted, and became as one of the Hallowed. I have served them ever since.”
Trocious extended his hand toward me. In the flickering candlelight, the nails of his right hand shone black as obsidian.
“Of what do you dream, Obadiah Grudge? Power? Limitless Wealth? The hearts of your enemies laid before you to grind beneath your heel? You have only to join us and all these dreams can be made real.”
Unbidden, the face of Tobi Bernardi, the literary critic for the New York Times, popped into my head. A vision of Bernardi crawling naked across the floor of my mansion in the Hamptons with an apple in her mouth sprang into being before my inner eye. The fact that I didn’t own a mansion in the Hamptons seemed a minor consideration.
My mouth hinged open.
Then another voice rang out.
“Bullshit.”
Trocious turned toward the speaker.
Kowalski was chewing his lips to pieces.
His mouth and chin were covered with blood; a pink froth dripped out of his mouth and spattered his black coat.
“Bu...bu...bullshhh...”
As I watched, Kowalski raised his right fist as if it weighed a hundred pounds and punched himself in the nose.
“Bullshit!” he hollered.
His distress seemed to galvanize the other hunters.
One by one, they re-started, like sleepwalkers waking to find themselves naked in the middle of the Hollywood Freeway.
“You freaks killed my father and every other hunter that was ever worth a good goddamn,” Kowalski said.
He lifted his crossbow and fired. The bolt flew across the room and buried itself in Trocious’s heart.
“Let him have it!” Kowalski roared. A second later, a fusillade of gunfire filled the room with the thunder of War.
I dove to the floor.
Trocious stood there, his arms outstretched in the hail of bullets, with Kowlaski’s crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest.
The manservant grew a foot taller, his shoulders bulging, shifting as his muscles twisted and expanded. The bones in his legs broke themselves and reformed. His feet turned black, became hooves. His face elongated, nostrils flaring—
Blood. Wet. Darkness. Laughing, laughing in the light…
—and his forehead broadened and extended. As the hunters’ fire tore into him, Trocious roared. His upper body hunched forward, grew heavier, even more thickly muscled. A dense black fur covered his torso, back and shoulders, and two long black horns burst through the bones of his skull.
What stood before me was something I remembered from Greek mythology, a monster, half-man and half bull, cursed by a god to live in seclusion and darkness for all eternity.
Kowalski fired another bolt.
Trocious snatched the shaft out of the air and flung it at one of the hunters, a short, stocky woman with a blue Mohawk. The shaft pierced the hunter’s throat and pinned her to the armoire.
Then he charged.
The hunters scattered, diving out
of the monster’s path. One hunter, a muscular Asian man, was unable to get out of the way. Trocious impaled the hunter with those massive horns, lifted him off his feet and rammed him into the wall.
The impact shook the whole house, smashed plaster from the ceiling. Behind me, a huge chandelier crashed to the floor. Trocious left the hunter half-suspended in a man-sized depression in the wall, spun, and charged Hernandez.
The one-eyed hunter pulled an iron stave from the leather sheath strapped to her back. A moment before Trocious struck, she dove out of the way.
Trocious thundered past Hernandez. Before he could turn and run her down, Hernandez came up behind the bull-man and plunged the stave into the small of his back. The bull-man roared. He lashed out with his horns and struck Hernandez a glancing blow to the upper body. The one-eyed hunter flew ten feet through the air, landed on the long table and slid unconscious to the floor.
A lithe black woman darted in with a stave in each hand and rammed them into the top of the bull-man’s right buttock. Trocious roared and whirled, swinging its head with enough force to break the black hunter’s neck and fling her corpse the length of the dining hall.
Another hunter swept in swinging a long-handled axe to behead the bull-man. Trocious whirled and countered with one long horn. The shock of the impact snapped the axe handle in half. The bull-man lashed out with one massive fist and pulped the hunter’s head.
Two more hunters attacked in unison. One of them opened fire, peppering the bull-man with rounds from a semi-automatic shotgun. The creature staggered, reaching for the staves in its back. It seemed more affected by the iron spears: Bullets only seemed to annoy it.
The second hunter, a tall, redheaded man, threw his stave like a javelin and struck the bull-man in the shoulder. Trocious roared, spun on its heel and thundered toward me.
“Move!” the redheaded hunter cried.
At the last moment, he shoved me out of the way.
Then the bull-man ran him down.
“Shoot it!” Kowalski cried.
He was talking to me.
I glanced down at the silver automatic in my hand as the bull-man reached the far end of the dining room, spun on its heel and came for me.
The Revenant Road Page 13
