Knight's Fall

by Angela Henry

  She pulled the gun out of the pocket of her hoodie, popped the trunk, and nudged the man, who had curled into a fetal position on his side. He wasn’t a big man, barely taller than Crystal, and slim. And he wasn’t moving. Her vision was a bit blurry, and she closed her eyes for a minute. When she opened them, the man was still lying in the same position. She felt his pulse and, not finding one, leaned down into the trunk to listen to his chest. He was dead but still very warm, indicating that he must have just died. It must have been a heart attack because she’d not laid a finger on him. She wondered what had scared him to death—her appearance or being locked in the trunk. Her hunger flared into overdrive at such close proximity to warm flesh. She just needed a little bit to get through what she needed to do. As she took a bite from soft flesh of the man’s inner wrist, she spied something she hadn’t noticed in the back of the trunk.

  TWELVE

  We were on Washington Avenue in Central City, where the kid had claimed he’d met with the information broker who’d sold him Vic Buchard’s identity. The entire neighborhood was derelict and practically abandoned, and the only other person we’d seen since we’d gotten there was a homeless guy sitting on a dirty rug in the middle of the sidewalk with his scrawny pit bull. He rocked and babbled nonsense, then spotting us, perked up and asked, “You seen Jeb, mister?” He grabbed at my pants leg as I passed.

  “No, sorry. I haven’t seen him.” I shook off his hand and kept on walking.

  “How could a legless man run away?” he asked the kid, who merely shook his head and looked away.

  “Jeb! Jeb!” the man began calling at the top of his voice between loud cackles. Poor bastard, I’d thought as I followed the kid to the rundown house across the street. It was a typical New Orleans dwelling, with a raised, ground-level basement. A set of crumbling concrete steps led up to a main entrance on what was technically the second floor.

  “You sure this is the address?” I asked, giving him a skeptical look as he knocked on the door.

  “This is the place. I’m positive.” The kid peered through the grimy, cracked window that looked out onto the porch.

  “Well, looks like whoever you met here is long gone.” I stepped back and kicked in the door. It didn’t take much effort since the wooden door was warped and rotting.

  “What are you doing?” The kid looked around wildly like someone was watching and would call the cops.

  “Checking to see if this phantom broker of yours left anything behind that we can use to track his ass down. You coming?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer and stepped inside. The place smelled musty and, except for a lopsided table in what once must have been a formal dining room and a moldy plaid couch in the living room, was devoid of furniture. The paint on the walls was peeling, and numerous planks in the hardwood floors had been pried up and used as firewood from the looks of the ash-filled fireplace.

  “Did it look like this when you came here?”

  “There was more furniture, but, yeah, it pretty much looked just like this.”

  The kitchen wasn’t much better. The appliances were gone, and the linoleum was cracked and stained with something that I couldn’t make out in the gloom. I bent down and touched it with a finger that came away wet. Thinking there might be a leak, I looked up at the ceiling, but there was nothing dripping. So why the wet spot if no one lived here and there was no leak? The kid walked across the room and had just opened up a door near where the stove used to sit as I brought my finger to my nose, sniffed, and realized the dark spot was blood. Something red and glowing also lay on the floor underneath the kitchen cabinet. I reached for it and realized it was a NeCro capsule. Shit.

  “I’m going to check out the basement,” he said and set off down the steps.

  “Hey, kid! Don’t go down there!” I raced to the top of the basement steps in time to see that he’d almost made it to the bottom. He paused to turn and stare up at me with a quizzical look, and then made a face.

  “Whew! Man, it stinks down here.” He covered his nose as shadows rushed at him from all sides.

  Before I could move, hands grabbed at his arms, clothing, and hair, pulling him kicking and screaming into the darkness of the basement. I was down the steps in an instant, but it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  “Xavier!”

  His voice had come from behind me, and I whirled around to see him with his shirt half torn off, backed into a corner by three figures that looked like they’d crawled out of a grave. NeCro addicts. We’d stumbled into a fucking nest of them. I couldn’t even tell what sex they were, but judging from their filthy clothes, would have guessed them to be two men and a woman. They were much worse off than Crystal Sneed, but not nearly as far gone as the woman who’d attacked me at Duquesne’s house. The kid managed to fend them off with sparks of electricity that shot out of his palms, knocking them back a few steps with each jolt. But I knew he was still weak from the masking spell and couldn’t hold them off much longer.

  I grabbed a two-by-four from the floor and ran to his aid but wasn’t watching where I stepped and slipped on some bloody intestines—God only knew whose they were—and landed flat on my back. Scrabbling sounds to my left alerted me to the presence of a fourth person dragging himself across the floor with muscular arms. It was a legless man coughing up black phlegm that trailed behind him like snail slime. I’d found the runaway Jeb. And before I could even form a fist, let alone slam it into his skeletal face, Jeb launched himself at me and sank his rotten teeth into my neck.

  “Nooo!” screamed the kid. He kept trying to get to me but couldn’t get past the three that were trying to eat him.

  Jeb held fast as I punched him repeatedly in the head and body. The warmth of my own blood running down my neck only made me more frantic to get this freak off of me. Driving my knee up into his crotch area finally made him grunt and loosen his bite, and I used the opportunity to push him away from my neck and slam his face into the concrete floor with a sickening crunch. I couldn’t tell if I’d killed him and didn’t care. Unfortunately, he took a big chunk of my flesh with him. I was rapidly losing blood. Pressing my hand futilely to the gaping wound and noticing with an odd detachment that the wound was big enough that my fingers kept slipping inside, I got unsteadily to my feet. The kid, using what little strength he must have had left, sent a massive charge of electricity into the ceiling, causing the floor above their heads, as well as the moldy couch, to fall down on his attackers, knocking them flat in a mushroom cloud of dust and sending plaster and splintered wood flying in all directions. He climbed over the debris and ran to me as I fell to my knees.

  “Can you make it up the steps?” he asked as he ripped off the rest of his shirt to apply pressure to my wound. I was sinking into darkness, and it wasn’t such a bad feeling, until the kid whacked me hard across the face. “Xavier! Wake up! I can’t carry you! You’re going to have to help me out!”

  With great effort I got to my feet, leaning against the kid for support as we made our way up the steps. He had his right arm around my waist, while his left hand pressed the bloody shirt to my neck. Behind us the sound of the three addicts struggling to free themselves from the wreckage of the floor worked like a hard wind on our backs and buoyed us up the remaining few steps. Once through the door, the kid shut it and, spying a rusted nail file on the floor, wedged it between the door and the frame so the monsters couldn’t get out. Thanks to the kid, the living room floor had become part of the basement so we couldn’t get to the front door. The basement door rattled in its frame. They’d gotten loose, and remembering how strong corpse bride had been, I knew it was only a matter of time before they got out of the basement and after devouring us would leave the house in search of other food.

  “Can’t . . . let . . . them . . . get . . . out,” I panted.

  “We don’t have time! You’re going to bleed out! I’ve got to get you to the hospital!”

  My only response was to try and pull
away from him. A can of gasoline sat on the kitchen counter, and the kid and I spotted it at the same time. Cursing, he ran over and grabbed the can, and from the sloshing sounds I could tell there wasn’t much inside. But it would have to do. He poured the gasoline under the basement door and on the floor in front of the door, then fumbled in his pocket for his lighter, lit a piece of newspaper from the floor, and tossed it into the pool of gas. Flames licked up the door, and from the screams I knew whoever was behind the door had caught fire, too. It wouldn’t take long before the entire house turned into a bonfire. The kid quickly helped me out the back door before we could add smoke inhalation to our list of misfortunes for the morning.

  “Home. Take me home,” I croaked. A hospital was exactly the wrong place for me to be. Too many question whose answers would only cause me problems. Besides, I had something at home that could help me quicker and better than any ER doctor could.

  “But—” sputtered the kid as he helped me into the Range Rover’s passenger seat.

  “Home. Now,” I repeated. “Trust . . . me.”

  He hesitated only a few seconds.

  “Fine, it’s your life. Where do you live?”

  I mumbled the address and passed out. I was in and out of consciousness on the way home and don’t remember most of the drive. But once we got home and Granger helped me inside and onto the couch, I had just enough strength to point to the bottle of angel blood Leticia Moody had given me, which still sat on the kitchen counter. Once he placed the uncorked bottle in my hand, I took a big swig of the viscous silvery liquid. It should have only taken a few drops to heal me, but I wasn’t taking any chances since the blood was decades old. It had an odd taste, coppery, sweet, and smoky all at once. It coated my tongue and burnt a trail down my throat. I was momentarily nauseous, and for a tense few minutes, I feared I might throw it all up. Then the feeling passed, and my limbs grew heavy and began to tingle. I felt the skin on my neck pull as my wound began to knit together.

  “Amazing,” whispered the kid. “What kind of magic is this?” He was so close I could feel his breath on me. I glared at him, and he moved back. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Honey, I’m home!” came a voice from the doorway. It was Minx. And she was home early. She took in the sight of me bloody and laid out on the couch and the kid shirtless, bloody and kneeling next to me, and did a double take. “What the fuck?”

  The kid jumped up and gaped at the beautiful bald woman standing in the doorway wearing denim cutoff shorts, a tank top, and knee-length stiletto boots. She dropped the bag she’d been carrying and rushed over to my side, practically knocking the kid over in the process.

  “What the hell did you do to X?” she demanded. He just stared at her in awe. She gets that a lot. And I promptly drifted off to sleep, leaving him to explain it all.

  ****

  I woke up a few hours later to tension so thick that, thanks to the angel blood I’d ingested, I could see and feel it. Minx and the kid were in the kitchen talking in hushed, heated tones. Bright orange anger rolled off of Minx in waves, while Granger radiated a simmering pea-green funk. And I don’t care what those fools in 1973 thought: orange and pea green don’t make a pretty color combination. Much as I wanted to watch, I knew the kid was no match for my roomie, whose claws were razor-sharp, literally. I sat up, feeling more fit and rested than I had a right to feel, and noticed I was only wearing my boxers and had been cleansed of blood, probably by Minx. When I walked into the kitchen, Minx pounced on me without even bothering to ask how I was feeling.

  “How could you bring this EA snitch into my house, X?” She gestured toward the kid, who had showered and wore one of my T-shirts and a pair of my sweats. His damp blond hair was slicked back.

  “You know about the Equinox Agency?” I was incredulous. Minx rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “I know enough to stay the hell away from them! I know that if you don’t play by their rules, you mysteriously disappear!”

  “That’s not fair!” protested the kid indignantly. “The EA’s rules protect both humans and nonhumans; without them there would be chaos!”

  What he’d just said sounded like the same spiel I’d heard from Desi West, and I was surprised the kid was defending the very agency out to get him because he’d broken one of their so-called chaos-preventing rules.

  “Bullshit!” said Minx. “If one of us broke one of your precious rules, we’d be taken into custody and punished, probably even killed. But what if a human broke one of our rules or hurt one of us? What would happen to them? Nothing! They’d probably get a medal. The EA doesn’t give a fuck about us! Those rules are to keep humans safe! Period.”

  “We don’t kill anyone.” The kid looked like he’d been punched. “We just keep the peace, make sure everyone’s getting along, and clean up the mess when things get out of hand. We can’t have the general public finding out that there are two worlds. That would be a disaster!” he said but sounded a little unsure.

  The guy had no idea what the EA was really about or how powerful they were. And telling him right now would be like kicking a puppy, and I had other fish to fry.

  “Much as I hate to break up your little debate, we need to track down Vic Buchard.”

  “Who’s Vic Buchard?” asked Minx, so I filled her in. Then she asked, “Have you tried the Internet?”

  The kid and I just looked at each other while Minx walked back into the living room to a far corner where the one thing in the house I’d never touched sat, the computer. I’m not a computer person. They confuse the hell out of me. But Minx was a pro and could spend hours chatting, tweeting, texting, and Facebooking, whatever the hell all that meant. She even had a small, flat, handheld computer she kept in her purse, and her cell phone was supposedly smart and also a minicomputer.

  “If you’d have just let me show you how to use this, you could have saved yourself getting a chunk bitten out of your neck.” She gave me an exasperated look.

  “And miss out on all the fun of doing things the hard way?” I teased.

  “Keep pissing me off, X, and I’ll make that zombie hickey you got look like a mosquito bite.” She was giving off an orange glow again, so I shut the hell up.

  She typed Victor Buchard’s name on a page labeled Google and ended up with a list of results she called hits. But a lot of them were for guys with the same name that lived in other parts of the county and even several in France. Who knew Vic Buchard was such a common name? Minx scrolled through pages while Granger watched from over her shoulder. I had gone to the kitchen to make coffee when she found something.

  “I think she found him,” Granger called out excitedly.

  I walked over to see that Minx was on the University of Louisiana’s website.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “It’s an alumni bulletin for former students.” She moved aside so I could read the screen.

  There wasn’t much to read. Under the headline: Alumni News, a single sentence announced that Victor Raymond Buchard, BS in Chemistry, Class of ’99, had accepted a position as a researcher at Necropolis Pharmaceuticals. It was dated six months ago.

  “Can you do a search for . . .” I began.

  “Already on it.” Minx plugged the words Necropolis Pharmaceuticals in the search box.

  It popped up as the first hit in the results list. Necropolis Pharmaceuticals’ slick website showed that they were headquartered in New Orleans, their CEO was a man named Dr. Langdon Grace, and their company logo was a pair of black wings, exactly like the ones in Duquesne’s pillbox. Bingo.

  “You think it’s the right Vic Buchard?” asked Granger.

  “Positive,” I said.

  “This site is just smoke and mirrors,” said Minx. “Nowhere on here does it even say what drugs they make.”

  “We know what they make,” I replied grimly. “And now we know that Vic Buchard isn’t just some poor sap who got hooked on a supernatural drug. If he’s a researcher with Necropolis Pharmaceuticals, then
he’s helping to make the shit.”

  Granger pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number for Necropolis that was listed on their website.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “He worked for them. Someone there has to know where he is,” he replied anxiously. “Yes, can you please connect me to Victor Buchard?” he said to whoever had answered the phone, and then a minute later, “No, that can’t be right.” The kid gave me a startled look. “But I’m positive he’s one of your researchers. Hello? Ma’am? Hello?”

  Minx shook her head at him like he was crazy and got up and walked away.

  “She hung up on me!”

  “Yeah, I figured that much, kid. But what did she say?”

  “She said no one named Victor Buchard has ever worked for Necropolis Pharmaceuticals.”

  THIRTEEN

  Dr. Langdon Grace was leaning back in his custom leather office chair taking a nap when his secretary knocked on his door.

  “Come in,” he called out but didn’t bother to put his seat in an upright position because he wanted his secretary to know she’d disturbed his lunchtime nap.