Return of the Hunters (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 4)

by Sonya Bateman

  Legba didn’t even notice me until I walked up next to Denei. Then he did a startled double-take. “You,” he said. “This is not possible.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re not welcome here.” I did my best to tune out the Duchenes, who were all staring at me like I’d just lost my last marble. “And I think you should leave now.”

  He leaned forward slightly and looked at me for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, he shook his head and flashed that smug, infuriating smile. “No, child. You are not Samedi.”

  “You’re right. I’m not,” I said. “But you don’t know what I am, or what I can do.” I took a step toward him. “Care to find out?”

  The smile ticked away by degrees. After another long hesitation, he said, “We will take up this matter again soon, no? My children are in mourning, and should be allowed to grieve.” His hands folded on his cane. “But I would warn you against trying to bluff me. DeathSpeaker.”

  With that, he turned stiffly and crossed the room, then walked out the front door. It slammed shut behind him.

  The silence held for another minute, until I restored my glamour. Then everyone started talking at once. Denei grabbed my hand in both of hers, and I could feel her shaking. “You scared him off,” she said breathlessly. “Not for good, but still…” Her eyes met mine. “How’d you know to do that?”

  “Rex told me.” I cut a glance at the table and managed a small smile. “It’s a start,” I said. “We’ve still got some work to do, but…I think we can take him.”

  Now I just had to convince myself that I believed my own words.

  CHAPTER 24

  I couldn’t bring myself to attend the graveside funeral service. I agreed right away to help carry the bier to the cemetery, and they promised not to be insulted if I walked back to the house to wait for them after we delivered the somber burden.

  It wasn’t over for Rex and Senobia yet, and I couldn’t let myself think that way.

  The nameless cemetery of Baptiste Landau was about half a mile north of the first house in the village. To get there, you walked the only road until you came to a wooden suspension bridge that cut across the river to the left. At the other side of the bridge was an island with one very small house, one very large magnolia tree, and a whole lot of graves.

  The procession had left from T-Sam’s at twilight, and it was full dark when we reached the cemetery. They’d used the table from the viewing as a bier, taken the legs off and attached three long poles to the bottom to form handles on either side. Zoba, Isalie and I held one side, with Denei, Reun and Bastien on the other.

  Behind us was every man, woman and child from the village, carrying lit candles in glass lanterns. The light was surprisingly strong.

  Over the course of the day, someone—or several someones—had prepared the grave. Just one, meant for both of them. A wooden frame about three feet high surrounded the wide black hole in the earth, and two simple crosses with flowers tied onto them stood behind it, a mute testament to how quickly this had all happened.

  They hadn’t had time to get permanent headstones.

  We settled the funeral platform on top of the frame. I took a moment to pay my respects with bowed head and closed eyes, and then touched Zoba’s elbow to let him know I was leaving. He acknowledged me with a faint smile.

  As I made my way back through the still-gathering crowd, I passed T-Sam and Aubin. T-Sam stopped me with an upraised hand. Then he gave me his lantern.

  “Thanks,” I murmured. Hadn’t even thought about walking back in the dark.

  He nodded and continued on his way.

  The half-moon was bright in a cloudless, star-strewn sky when I crossed the suspension bridge and started down the road. Tonight would be hard, but tomorrow might be worse. We had to figure out how to take down Legba. And if we didn’t succeed on the first try, there was a hundred percent chance of death. For all of us.

  I’d gotten maybe halfway to the village, lost in my thoughts, when I heard…music.

  I slowed to a stop. The sound came from behind me and to the right, from the cemetery. There were drums, and chanting, and layer upon layer of voices I couldn’t understand—and didn’t have to. The words didn’t matter. It was mourning and joy, sorrow and celebration all at once.

  Good thing I hadn’t stayed. Hearing the music at this distance was powerful enough.

  While I was still standing there, something heavy rustled and splashed in the swamps to my left. Whatever it was, big definitely applied. I started walking again, running through any possible spells in my head that might work on an alligator.

  The rustling behind me became footsteps on the road. People—more than one. And then a voice called, “Hey, you. The scrub with the candle. There a village around here?”

  My gut twisted so hard, I almost dropped to the ground. That bear-growl tone.

  Orville.

  I forced myself to calm down. It was probably another hallucination, and I didn’t want to hurt any more people. Even if they were rude. “No, there isn’t,” I said without turning around, in case they ended up looking like Valentines too. “Sorry.”

  A rifle shot cracked, and an undeniably real bullet plowed into the dirt road inches from my feet.

  “I believe you’re lying to me, scrub,” the voice I still refused to believe was Orville said. “We know there’s a village. Don’t we, boys? And you’re gonna take us there.”

  Two voices that couldn’t be Hodge and Morris offered rough agreement.

  This was not happening.

  I turned slowly. Sure enough, Orville Valentine stood there in the middle of the road, in all his redneck asshole glory. Tall, thick Hodge and shorter-but-solid Morris flanked him. All three had high-powered rifles trained on me.

  For about half a second, I thought maybe it was just a really strong hallucination. Or maybe they wouldn’t even recognize me after ten years. But I hadn’t so much as remembered that I could cast spells when Orville bared his teeth and snarled, “Son of a bitch. Shoot that little bastard, now!”

  “Céa biahn!”

  I managed to blow Hodge back, but all three had already fired. And one of them didn’t miss. The bullet burned through my side and knocked me down twisting and bleeding in the dirt. More shots went off, so fast that it was all I could do to scramble out of the way.

  Then I heard Morris say, “Pa, that was Fae magic. Get the iron.”

  The horrified scream in my head drove away all reason. How the hell did they know about the Fae—and how the fuck did they know to use cold iron?

  Gritting my teeth hard, I rolled once and jolted upright. My throbbing side wasn’t happy about that. Orville and Morris weren’t five feet from me, and Hodge had recovered and was running toward me fast.

  “Shoot him again,” Orville roared as he pulled a revolver from his hunting vest.

  The combination of the gaping hole in my side and the shock of hearing the word Fae leave my ex-brother’s lips kept me from reacting fast enough. Hodge and Morris fired. Another bullet ripped through my shoulder. Then Orville was right in front of me, pressing the revolver into my stomach.

  He was grinning.

  “Welcome home, boy,” he said.

  And pulled the trigger point-blank.

  When I fell back, hurting too much to scream, he stood over me and plugged me with cold iron bullets until I passed out.

  CHAPTER 25

  The smell of roasting flesh dragged me into consciousness. My flesh. I was chained upright to a metal hide-drying rack. Cold iron shackles on my wrists and ankles, burning my skin where it touched. It was not a hallucination, and it wasn’t the dream again.

  This time, the nightmare was real.

  It might’ve been the swamps instead of the mountains, but it was all here. The campfire, the caravans, the assorted Valentines in various stages of drunk and disorderly. Some lounging by the fire, others moving in and out of trailers. And oh, joy, one of them coming toward me.

  Mama Reba. Six feet of wiry,
dirt-mean woman with cropped ash-black hair, wearing clothes as shapeless and grimy as the rest of them, right down to the shitkicker boots. There was a cigarillo clamped in her teeth.

  And a syringe in her hand.

  “Guess it really is you, boy,” she said without expression when she stopped in front of me. “Orville! He’s awake.”

  She grabbed my arm and raised the syringe. It was filled with translucent purple liquid—a substance I’d seen before, felt before, when I was being tortured by Milus Dei’s mad scientist up in the mountains. It was mandrake oil. Poison to humans, and a drug to the Fae that enhanced all sensation. Including and especially pain. It was so strong that they only used it a single drop at a time, and she had a whole lot more than a drop.

  There was no way in hell the Valentines should’ve known to use that stuff.

  “Don’t you fucking touch me.” I could barely get the words out. I’d been shot enough to kill a human three or four times over, and the wounds weren’t healing even though the bullets had been removed. They were keeping me just poisoned enough to prevent escape by magic. A small, gibbering corner of my mind attempted to warn me that was a very, very bad sign.

  The needle was coming. I tried to wrench my arm from Mama Reba’s grip, but that just kicked the pain into high gear.

  Then she injected me, and high-gear pain became a fond and distant memory in the face of fiery anguish.

  She dragged hard on the plastic end of the cigarillo and blew smoke in my face. “Not much to look at, are you?” she said. “I knew I should’ve drowned your scrawny ass before you got big enough to fight back.”

  “Now, Mama. If you’d done that, we wouldn’t have this big, fat payday right here.”

  Those were the most chilling words I’d ever heard out of Orville’s mouth, and I’d heard a lot of terrifying shit from him. I glared at the man who wasn’t my father. “What payday is that, Orville?” I rasped.

  “What did you call me, boy?”

  He backhanded me before I could blink.

  A scream collided with my clenched teeth, and I spat blood on the ground. “Fuck you,” I panted. “Orville.”

  I tried to brace for another blow. But this time, he just laughed. “Guess I’m gonna have to retrain you, brat,” he said. “I always knew there was something wrong with you. And lucky for me, turns out it’s because you’re a dirty little fairy.” He got in my face with that awful grin. “That means we can beat on you all we want, and you won’t die.”

  All the fight drained out of me. “How?” I whispered. “You can’t know all this.”

  “We know everything about animals like you,” he said. “Hell, we came out here to round up a bunch of voodoo freaks out of that village. They’re worth five hundred grand apiece. And then, we found you.” He stepped back as Hodge and Morris came up to join the party. “Feels like we won the lottery, doesn’t it, boys?”

  Hodge lifted his lip in a threatening snarl. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ve been waiting a long time to bust your ass, pretty-boy. And now I’m gonna do it again, and again, and again.”

  “You keep it standard, Hodge. No more iron than he’s already got. We need him alive.” Orville unbuttoned the sleeves of his flannel shirt and pushed them up one by one, flexing his massive fists. “Remember, there’s nothing wrong with the classics.”

  That was when I saw the tattoo on his forearm. A dark blue ankh, ending in the point of a sword.

  The Valentines were working for Milus Dei.

  CHAPTER 26

  They hadn’t invented words to describe this kind of pain.

  When consciousness came around again, I didn’t dare open my eyes. Well, eye. One of them was a hot, swollen nest of bruised flesh that wasn’t going to open anytime soon. It was the only pain I could sort out from the rest of it.

  My entire body felt like one big, exposed nerve. If that nerve was being continually fed through a meat grinder.

  I had no idea how long the three of them had spent beating me. I did know that at one point, I’d blacked out—only to be immediately revived when Mama Reba shot me up with another dose of mandrake. That was when I somehow passed the threshold of my pain limits and came out on the other side. Instead of bringing me closer to oblivion, every blow only made me feel the rest of it more.

  I’d finally passed out from sheer spite.

  As unbearable as this was, it was only the beginning. Orville had made that very clear with what he said before he threw the first punch, the one that fractured my jaw.

  You’ve got ten years of payback coming to you, boy.

  The next time I saw him, I’d ask how many years I still had to go. I didn’t give a damn about riling him up anymore. Things couldn’t possibly get any worse than this. No matter what I said or did, they’d torture me until they got tired of it.

  And then they’d turn me over to Milus Dei.

  I took a minute or so to listen. The fire was still crackling, and there were voices here and there. I heard the distant buzz-whine of the powerboats they used to get around the swamp, the pop-hiss of someone opening a beer can.

  Just as I decided to try moving my eyelids a little, something cold and wet touched one of my mangled wrists.

  I almost choked holding back a scream. That sent fresh agony through my shattered ribs, and I shuddered and coughed. But instead of sound, I ejected a bubbling torrent of blood.

  “Hold still,” a female voice murmured. Then whoever it was smeared more cold, wet stuff on my wrist.

  A startled shout tore itself from my throat. “Don’t touch me,” I gasped. Christ, I sounded like a drowning duck. I managed to open the eye that wasn’t a skin balloon filled with lava, and it immediately started watering in pure sympathy for the other one.

  The girl standing in front of me was my age, maybe a year or two older. She had a small white tube, and she was squeezing gunk from it onto her fingertips. There was a big metal bucket at her feet. The kind the Valentines used to slop entrails.

  It took me a minute to place her. “Jerilee,” I croaked out. She was one of Brutal’s three kids—Brutal being Orville’s brother. The others were Bodean and Angel. In relative terms within the whole fucked-up family, Jerilee was the nice one.

  “I can’t talk to you,” she said hastily, and reached for my other wrist.

  While I tried not to scream, I made out the words on the tube she was holding. “Burn cream,” I muttered. “You’re kidding me. That’s not going to do anything.”

  She ignored me, reached into the bucket and pulled out a sopping, stained rag.

  “Neither is that,” I gasped, instinctively trying to move away. The motion made my broken bones feel like grinding glass, and I let out a hoarse cry. “Jerilee. Please.”

  She froze. “I’m supposed to clean you up.”

  “Why?”

  I could practically see the gears turning in her brain. “So they can—” She stopped before the rest slipped out, but I knew she’d gotten it.

  Hurt you more.

  “Look, you don’t have to do this,” I said hoarsely. “They won’t know. And you’re only making it worse.”

  Her lip quivered a bit. “But you’re a monster,” she whispered.

  Okay. I wasn’t expecting that. “I’m a monster? Look at me,” I said. “Look at me, and tell me who’s the monster.”

  She shook her head slowly. “We caught a…thing like you, a few years back. He killed Angel. All he did was say a word, and her neck broke.” Her shoulders straightened, and she looked directly at me. “I cleaned him up too, so they could hurt him more.”

  Jesus. If I was her, I’d probably think I was a monster, too.

  “Listen, I’m not that guy,” I said. “You know me. I’m—”

  “Jerilee!”

  The roaring voice made her jump. I focused on the figure striding toward us, and let out an involuntary groan.

  Oh, good. Bodean.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Bodean said, stopping beside his sister. Th
e one who apparently didn’t get murdered by a Fae. “You’re supposed to be patching him up.”

  “Nothing,” she muttered. “I was just going to now.”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  She didn’t reply. And he took that as a yes.

  A fist made of stone plowed into my gut and drove the breath out of me. “Don’t you fucking speak to my sister, freak,” Bodean said. “Not one word. You get me?”

  I wouldn’t have answered, even if I could.

  “Good. Jerilee, you shout out if he says anything else.” He grabbed my hair and jerked my head up roughly. “Open that mouth of yours again, and I’m gonna pop all your teeth out with a boning knife. Freak.”

  He spat in my face for good measure before he stalked away.

  Jerilee released a shuddering breath and wrung out the rag. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  I couldn’t do anything but close my good eye and wait for the pain to start.

  CHAPTER 27

  At least the moonlight was doing its work. I couldn’t cast a single spell with the cold iron and the mandrake oil poisoning me, but I’d healed enough that I could open one and a half eyes now. And I could mostly breathe without sobbing.

  That probably meant they’d start in on me again soon.

  I wouldn’t have much healing time left. The moon hung low on the horizon to my left, and the sky to the right was starting to gray. Just about bedtime for the Valentines. In fact, some of them had already turned in for the day. But it was way too much to hope they’d all go to sleep and leave me alone.

  The Duchenes and Reun must’ve figured out something was wrong by now. So I had to assume they were out looking for me, and pray the Valentines didn’t find them first. These bastards might actually have a shot at taking all five of them down. They’d gotten more ruthless than I thought possible over the past decade—and they had Milus Dei backing them up.