Crook of the Dead
by Jen Rasmussen
Copyright © 2015 Jen Rasmussen
Cover Design Copyright © 2015 Christine Rasmussen
All rights reserved.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Dear Reader
First it was the hair. Lying there, limp, still attached to the bloody bits of skin of whoever it belonged to. It took me several seconds to realize what I was looking at, before I yanked Wulf back on his leash. Both of us yelped at the same time, him from the shock of being pulled so suddenly and hard.
Me because of the hair.
It was long and wavy and brown. Just like mine. And there was a hair clip attached to it: a blue enamel devil.
A message, then. The devil of Bristol was pissed off at me.
That was my first thought. That this was for me, meant to scare me.
Don’t get comfortable, Lydia. This could be you. This might be you, soon.
It didn’t seem real. And even if it was real, it didn’t necessarily follow that the person the hair belonged to was dead. You could scalp someone and they could live, right? I was pretty sure you could. It wasn’t like there was bone attached to it. Just skin. Losing a little skin would hurt like hell, but it wouldn’t kill you. And anyway, it almost certainly wasn’t even real.
But then I turned around.
The body was real. The blood was real. There was no doubt at all about that.
She was slumped in a sitting position against the side of my building, her back against the wall. At least I thought she was a she, judging by the shape of her body, and the hair behind me. You couldn’t tell from her face. Mainly because she didn’t have a face.
That was when I started screaming. I’ve seen a lot of blood and gore in my time. It takes a lot to make me scream. This made me scream.
A paramedic gave me something, a while later, to calm me down so I could talk to the police properly. I think he was glad to do it, to have someone he could help. It wasn’t like he could do anything for her.
I was still shaking though, despite whatever that pill was (I didn’t even ask), by the time I got back inside with Wulf. I closed the curtains over the remaining official types roaming around the crime scene.
My statement was that I was walking my dog and came upon the body. No, I hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. But then I’d just gotten home, and I was rushing around, not being very observant. I was supposed to be getting ready for a date. (Said date had texted me no less than nine times when he was unable to get into my parking lot, what with the police cars and yellow tape and whatnot. According to my phone, I texted him back at some point to tell him I was fine. I had no memory of doing it.)
I did not mention anything about Amias, the devil, Bristol, or fiends from other worlds who wanted revenge against me. There was no point. Obviously because they wouldn’t believe me, but also because it wouldn’t help them. They weren’t the ones who were going to have to deal with this.
I sent Wulf to get Phineas.
I spent that night, all of the next day, and then another night in bed. Mostly crying and ignoring the phone. A couple of the calls were from Evan, he of the ill-fated date, after he saw everything on the news. But most of them were from Charlie, who tried to get me to come and stay with him for a few days. He thought I was nuts for refusing, when someone who would do a thing like that was on the loose in my neighborhood.
It was even worse than he thought, of course. The only reason someone who would do a thing like that was on the loose in my neighborhood was because I lived there. And I’m not ashamed to say I was plenty scared. It would have been comforting to go home to Charlie’s, pretend for a while that I had a normal life, or something like it.
But it would have been a shitty thing to do, looking out for myself after this poor woman had just died, probably just because she had hair like mine. Part of me wanted Amias to come after me. Maybe he wouldn’t find me such an easy victim.
Wulf and Phineas came back the morning after that, early enough that I was still parked in bed. Phineas came into my bedroom without knocking, and woke me by opening the curtains and letting the sunlight fall right across my face, because even though I liked him and we were pretty close friends by then, he was still an asshole.
Without looking at me, he said, “I’ll go make the coffee.”
He’d made eggs, too, by the time I came into the kitchen, showered and dressed but still looking a lot worse for the wear.
“You don’t have any bacon,” was all he said as he slid a plate in front of me. Then he sat down across from me and waited.
“What could you tell, from Wulf?” I asked. I still wasn’t entirely clear on Wulf’s ability to travel across planes, or what that involved, or whether he could, I don’t know, talk there in that other world.
“Only that it was urgent,” Phineas said. “But it was three in the morning when we got here, so I checked on some things rather than wake you. I saw the news.”
“Then you know… about her body.”
“Yes.”
“It was Amias.”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t mentioned the hair clip, and I doubted it was in the news story either, but he’d immediately agreed that this was the Bristol devil’s work. I remembered then, what he’d told me about Amias. His crime scenes aren’t mistakable. He kills people in a very specific way.
“Oh my lord, that’s what you meant? That’s how he does it? Always?”
“Always,” Phineas agreed. “Every time, since his first.”
There wasn’t any skin on the victim—they still hadn’t released her name—at all. Not on her hairless head, not anywhere.
Not like she was flayed. More like she was shredded. Like sausage. Her eyes were gone.
“How does he do that?” I asked.
Luckily, Phineas didn’t need me to clarify. “Sparrows. Sort of.”
“Excuse me? Did you just say fucking sparrows?”
“I said sparrows sort of,” he corrected. “They look kind of like your sparrows, but from my world. There’s not a really good translation for what we call them. I guess literally it would be shadow eaters.”
“That’s a suitably menacing name, I guess.”
“They’re good at hiding in shadows, holes, behind things. You don’t know they’re there until they’re on top of you.”
“So that’s the shadow part. And I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what they eat.”
“Not just your body. They take your soul.”
“Take it where?”
“In this case, wherever Amias tells them to. We think.”
“They’re his pets? I thought you didn’t have domesticated animals.”
“We don’t. They’re not his pets. As far as we can tell, they just sort of work together. By mutual agreement.”
“So he talks to evil sparrow-like birds and what, hires them for this? What’s in it for them?” I didn’t actuall
y want to know. But I deserved to know. I owed it to this poor lady, didn’t I? It was my fault she was dead.
Phineas stared into his cup of coffee. Neither of us had touched our eggs. He’d scrambled them, unfortunately. I covered them with my napkin. They were too reminiscent of mottled flesh.
“They’re psychopomps. A lot of birds can be,” Phineas said. “That means they can guide disembodied spirits to another world.”
“I know what a psychopomp is,” I snapped. “I’ve been in the departing souls business for a long time.” I can perhaps, under the circumstances, be forgiven a little testiness.
Phineas didn’t look irritated by my outburst. He just said calmly, “This particular species has tied that escorting instinct together with their prey drive. They hunt phantasms—and now humans, it seems—for both food and to release their victims’ souls.”
“And Amias provides them with free and easy prey.”
“Exactly. In exchange, the shadow eaters escort the souls where he wants them to.”
I didn’t ask again where the souls went. I already knew that Amias’s thing was sacrificing souls to Satan in hopes of getting a promotion to demon, or some shit like that. I pushed my plate farther away from me.
“You just said and now humans,” I said. “He’s never done it in this world before?”
“No.”
“It’s a message. For me. You too, I guess. He’s mad we ruined the good thing he had going in Bristol.”
Amias had built a sanctuary in the mountain town of Bristol, North Carolina. It was enchanted so he couldn’t be found there, a place where he could go to ground in between committing his crimes, and be safe from Phineas or anybody else who might come after him. He had quite a fan club there, too, a coven of witches who did whatever he asked.
But Phineas and I had just broken the spell a couple of months before. And Amias was obviously not very happy about losing his lair.
“Maybe,” Phineas said. “Revenge is a favorite pastime of his. Taunting is another. Maybe he just dumped the body here to let us know he’s recovered from our last encounter and back in business.”
“Her hair was exactly like mine.”
“Which made it handy for him to leave her here for you to find, and get so scared you could hardly function. And it worked.”
“Well, shit, Phineas!”
“With good reason,” he said, waving off my outrage. “But no offense, Lydia, your hair isn’t that special. A lot of people have brown hair. I’m not sure you can make this all about you just yet.”
“For fuck’s sake! That’s what you’re going with? That I’m being selfish and making this about me?”
“Well, you do have a tendency.”
“You’re a fucking asshole.”
He smiled. “So you say. But you think better when you’re mad than when you’re moping. And I need you at your best.”
“A manipulative asshole.”
He shrugged one shoulder, unabashed. “Whatever works. The point is, we need to figure out who this victim was. The fact that her hair resembled yours may not be the only connection.”
“But even if he killed her for a reason that had nothing to do with us, he wanted us to know it was him,” I said.
Phineas nodded. “He loves nothing more than to play with me. And now you, I guess.”
I stood up and took my plate to the trash, so Phineas wouldn’t see me tearing up. He’d rather have me angry than mopey? Fine. I’d get angry.
“Game on,” I said.
Phineas had brought a suitcase with him, full of clothes appropriate to my world, just in case. He insisted on staying with me. I can’t say as I minded. I wasn’t feeling as brave as usual. And by then Phineas and I had spent so much time together that I wasn’t even self-conscious about walking around in my pajamas. (Luckily, I’d never been a sexy pajama kind of girl.)
But I was in a temporary apartment, my house having burned down not long before thanks to Amias, and I didn’t have an extra room. Phineas slept on the couch, vying for space with Wulf, who as usual couldn’t get close enough to him.
The day after he came, he took Wulf for his morning walk. When he came back he found me on the couch with my laptop, his pillows and blankets shoved aside, the TV on but forgotten, as was the cold cup of coffee in my hand.
“That’s a pretty intense look,” he said. “What’s up?”
“The victim,” I said. “They identified her. Or maybe they identified her a while ago and they’re just releasing her name now, I don’t know. Belinda Palmer. Forty-five years old. Lived in New Hampshire. One of the things they’re investigating is what she might have been doing down here. I suppose he lured her here so he could leave her on my doorstep.”
Phineas didn’t comment on that. Instead he looked over my shoulder at the snapshot of Belinda Palmer on what looked like a ski slope, wearing sunglasses and smiling, the wind in her hair. I hoped she’d had a nice day.
He leaned closer, frowning. “You’re kidding me.”
“What?”
“We need another picture,” he said. “Can you find one?”
“Why?” I asked as I typed her name into a search engine.
“The sunglasses,” he said. “I need to see her eyes.”
I had a feeling I knew what that meant. “You think she was one of yours?”
“I think I need to see another picture.” His voice was uncharacteristically tight.
So I found another picture, this one at a charity event less than a year before. I zoomed it in as far as I could, but that took the quality down, and I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were.
I was relieved, however, to see that she didn’t much resemble me, apart from the hair. Her nose and teeth were big, and she didn’t have my too-square jaw. She was also a few years older than me, and looked it.
I guess Phineas saw something I didn’t, or maybe he just didn’t need to see her eye color anymore, once he saw her whole face. He swore again. I waited.
Finally he said, “That’s definitely her. Bella Traven.”
“You know her?”
“I did.”
“Well then, don’t give me two word answers. Just spill it.
Belinda Palmer—or Bella Traven—was a phantasm and a witch. Phineas knew her in the eighteenth century, when she lived on a farm in New Hampshire with her sisters Henrietta and Rebecca. Apparently they were running some sort of little coven, a place where human witches could be safe from the less-than-friendly eyes of their time. Mercy Tanner, the woman who’d broken Phineas’s heart and betrayed him to run off with Amias, had lived there.
I won’t lie, I was feeling mighty relieved. It was obvious that Amias had left Bella’s body where he did to scare me, but this was no random victim. He knew her, and he’d chosen her for a reason. Maybe, most likely even, a reason that would have led him to kill her anyway. Our having the same color hair was just a coincidence, after all. Like Phineas said, lots of people had brown hair.
“But I don’t know whether killing her was the priority and warning us was a bonus, or it was the other way around,” Phineas said.
Our first order of business was clearly figuring that out. But Phineas hadn’t seen Bella in well over two hundred years, my time. He had no idea what she might have done to piss Amias off.
He went home for a day—just an hour in his own world—to ask around. Apparently nobody had seen any of the Traven sisters in several years. Which meant decades or even centuries on my plane.
I tried on my end too, but I wasn’t able to track down either a Rebecca or a Henrietta Traven. Not that there was any reason to assume they’d kept the same names for hundreds of years.
“Do you think they might be married to humans? Or that Bella was?” I asked Phineas when he came back.
“We’re all around the same age. When we first started coming here, it was at a time when women who could do magic weren’t much admired. Bella enjoyed men, as I recall, but they weren’t looking for human husban
ds.” He did his one-shouldered shrug, and I realized how much I’d missed it all summer. I’d been too upset when he first came to notice such things.
“But it’s been a long time,” Phineas went on. “I have no idea. I guess I could start in New Hampshire. Look around up there, near where I last knew them.”
“Sounds like a goose chase,” I said. “There’s probably a strip mall or something over that old farm. It’s not like her sisters will just be sitting there waiting to greet you after all this time.”
It was while we were discussing this that Wulf alerted us to a more immediate problem.
Before my house became a big black clump of ashes, I’d kept a basket of old (mostly spitty and gross) dog toys in the living room. Wulf had rarely played with them anymore, and I doubted he missed them. But when we came to the apartment and everything was so unfamiliar and unstable, I naturally projected my own feelings of loss and rootlessness onto my dog. So I went out and bought a new basket, and a bunch of new toys, and put them in the living room. As far as I knew, Wulf had never touched them.
Until that day. I was distracted from my conversation with Phineas by snorting and snuffling noises. Wulf had pulled most of the toys out, not to sample them, it seemed, but to get to the blue stuffed rabbit on the bottom. Now that he had it, he was growling and ripping at it.
Phineas and I laughed, thinking he was playing, but after a few seconds I started to wonder. His tail was stiff, and his growl was not playful.
I was walking over to take it from him and see if I could figure out what was wrong when, with one enormous paw pinning half of it to the floor and the other half in his mouth, Wulf ripped it nearly in two. Cottony white stuffing, like the fake snow you get at Christmastime, fell out onto the carpet. But that wasn’t the only thing that fell out.
“What is that?”
“Got me.”
I bent to pick up the small black rectangle. The white lettering on the side announced it as a FourSpy Mini. FourSpy? That didn’t sound good. I grabbed my laptop and did a quick search.
Surveillance, anti-surveillance, and spy gear. The Mini, identified by a bright blue star as a best seller, was an audio recorder. Voice activated to save battery life! Over one hundred and fifty hours of recording time!
Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3) Page 1
