Shadows of the Midnight Sun

by Graham Brown

  The Cajun dropped his cigar from his mouth in astonishment.

  It came on without a sound. It looked like moonlight, only stronger. Pale and ghostly white, it was brighter than the brightest full moon Christian had ever seen, but the moon had been down for hours.

  The old man looked around and then back down at the lantern, as if it were somehow the cause. He fiddled with the controls as Christian turned his eyes upward. It was difficult to see through the veil of the trees, but the light was definitely filtering through from the heavens.

  Christian knew what he was seeing. The Midnight Sun had arrived.

  “Dis mean something to you?” the old man asked.

  Christian nodded. “It means the beginning of the end.”

  Two thousand miles away, Drake stood in the fortress-like space on the top floor of his building. The beaten and broken Vivian Dasher lay at his feet. In one hand, he held her chains. In the other, he held a long Roman dagger. It had meaning to him—meaning he couldn’t avoid. He stared at it and then placed it into a wooden box and closed the lid.

  Strangely, light began to fill the room, filtering in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The light was pure like that from a helicopter spotlight, but Drake heard no sounds beyond the endless swish of his pendulum and Vivian’s labored breathing. He stepped toward the windows.

  High above, he saw a wispy pattern glowing brightly and spreading across the night sky in slow motion. It looked something like the starburst of a monstrous fireworks explosion. But there was no sound, and the light did not fade or fall.

  “The Midnight Sun,” he whispered.

  From his vantage point, nothing was left to the imagination. In the night sky, a star was dying, but as it went through its death throes, it signaled the beginning of new life. The reckoning had arrived. Drake’s wait was finally over.

  The angel would soon appear. Drake would destroy it and then launch his war against the Church, with nothing to stop him.

  Simon Lathatch sat at a desk in an old church in New Orleans. Dawn was still an hour away as he scratched notes into a small leather journal. The ink flowed dark and smooth into the old beaten book. It was the journal of the Ignis Purgata, kept by those who held his position. A book of triumphs and failures, of thoughts and conversations, a book of arguments made across time. Simon had kept and added to it since the day he’d assumed the leadership. When he retired, it would pass to his successor. Four others just like it were filled and bound with rubber bands on the shelf.

  As he finished inscribing his latest thought, Simon’s cell phone rang, jolting him.

  He picked up the phone. It was Bishop Messini.

  “Yes, Bishop,” he said.

  Simon expected bad news at such an hour. Instead, Messini spoke in excited tones.

  “Go to your window, my friend. Look to the southern sky, if you can.”

  Simon had no window, but he had a set of stairs that led to the roof. He made his way up.

  Upon reaching the roof, his eyes grew wide. The sky was ablaze with pure-white light.

  “It’s beautiful,” he whispered.

  “Your faith has been rewarded,” Messini said. “The Midnight Sun proves you are on the right path. Now you must find a way to save us, to save us from ourselves, my friend.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Carlisle, Massachusetts

  NORTH OF Boston, the winter winds were long gone. Spring was beginning to show itself as Kate and Billy Ray turned up Rockland Road toward a house owned by Vivian Dasher. Her lawyer may have kept her from talking—and sprung her faster than anyone had expected—but he couldn’t stop them from poking around in her business.

  “You think we’re gonna find anything here?” Billy Ray asked.

  “It took all night to prove that Vivian owned this place,” Kate said. “That tells me it’s the kind of place you don’t expect to get raided. I give us a fifty-fifty chance. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with rattling her cage a little more.”

  As Kate spoke, something caught her attention, floating above the trees. “What’s that?”

  “Smoke,” Billy Ray said.

  A sick feeling formed in Kate’s stomach. “Don’t tell me.”

  They turned off Rockland onto a more residential street. A half mile down, fire trucks and emergency vehicles blocked the road.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kate said.

  An officer stopped them, and Billy Ray rolled down his window.

  “The road is closed due to a fire. You’ll have to turn around.”

  Kate got out of the car.

  “Excuse me, miss,” the cop said.

  “I’m with the FBI,” Kate said. “We’re here to serve a search warrant.”

  With that, she turned and began to walk. She moved up the country road while Billy Ray smoothed things over with the officer.

  Pulling her badge from her pocket and waving it, the next line of cops let her by without a word. She made it past the edge of a stone wall and onto the mansion’s grounds. The huge structure was a smoldering wreck. Black smoke continued to drift skyward from gaping holes in what had once been an expensive gabled roof. Muddy water flooded the grounds.

  Firefighters were slowly removing their equipment from the shell that was once Vivian’s house.

  Kate stopped one of them. “What happened?”

  “Three-alarm blaze,” he said. “It was wicked bad, kept burning all night.”

  “Any survivors?”

  The firefighter shook his head and moved off.

  Kate advanced across the waterlogged ground. As she reached the front porch, the moment became surreal. Her stomach turned and twisted into knots. Any evidence that might have been found was surely gone now.

  She spotted Vivian’s lawyer talking with the fire commissioner. She marched over and gave him a blind-sided shove to the back.

  He stumbled forward. “What the hell?”

  “You think I don’t know what happened here?” Kate shouted. “You think we can’t get you for tampering in an investigation!”

  Billy Ray grabbed Kate from behind, holding her back from doing any more damage.

  Vivian’s lawyer was named Whitestone. He was a high-society type, extremely expensive and well connected. He got to his feet, flicked some of the mud off his hand, and glared at her.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m shocked by what I’m seeing in front of me. My only concern is for my client, wondering if she’s has burned to death in there.”

  Kate pulled loose from Billy Ray. “You snake!” she yelled. “You told her. You let her know we were coming. She’s not in there, and you know it!”

  Whitestone picked up his briefcase and looked at Billy Ray, then back at Kate. “How could I have warned her? I just found out about this warrant two hours ago. The fire began late last night.

  “What?”

  “Last night,” the fire commissioner said. “The first call came in around midnight.”

  “You really should learn to control yourself,” Whitestone said. “Next time, you might actually hurt someone, and then your career will be over.”

  Whitestone began to walk off.

  “Where is she?” Kate yelled after him.

  “I don’t know, Agent Pfeiffer,” Whitestone replied.

  Kate could not believe what she was seeing. She turned to the fire commissioner. “Did you find anything?”

  “No bodies in the house, but a few super-hot spots that seem odd.”

  “Hot spots?” Kate said. “So it was arson.”

  “I didn’t say that,” the commissioner replied. “The hot spots are spread out in an odd pattern in what would have been the main living room. But there is no sign of an accelerant.”

  “That doesn’t sound possible,” Kate said.

  “I agree,” the commissioner said. “Something’s not right about this scene. I really need some more time to study it before I can tell you anything.”

  �
�I want to see them,” Kate demanded.

  “I’ll show you.”

  The commissioner headed toward the house. Kate started to follow but stopped when Billy Ray grabbed her.

  “Hey, what is the matter with you? Have you lost your mind?”

  “He’s lying, Billy. You know it as well as I do.”

  “He couldn’t have known we were going for a warrant.”

  “He guessed,” she said. “And you know what? He guessed right. And now all we’re going to find here is some weak evidence that’s meaningless.”

  Kate shook loose from Billy Ray and followed the commissioner into the burned-out shell of the home.

  “The fire burned white-hot here,” he said, pointing. “If you look here through the floorboards, you can see that the piping is melted. That’s not copper. It’s cast iron—and it melted.”

  “I’m not a fire expert,” Billy Ray said. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that the fire was burning at over twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit in this spot.”

  “So there was something here, some type of material,” Kate said.

  “Should have been,” the commissioner said. “But, so far, we haven’t found any residue.”

  “What else?” Kate asked. “Is this the only anomaly?”

  “No,” the commissioner said. “There are six spots like this scattered about this room. We call them hyper-burns. No pattern, no rhyme or reason for placement. Look for yourself—here and over there.”

  “Yeah, I see,” Billy Ray said. “Can you give us a second?”

  As the commissioner nodded and walked out, Kate began walking around the room. There were strange shapes to these hyper-burns. One, up against the stone hearth, almost looked like the outline of a person.

  She bent down and picked up some burned material and then tossed it back on the ground.

  “What do you think?” Billy Ray asked.

  Kate shook her head in disgust. “I think we’re a day late and a dollar short, and now more people are going to die. I think, wherever Vivian Dasher is right now, she’s laughing her ass off. She played us and she knows it, and I’m pretty sure we’ll never see that bitch again.”

  Billy Ray agreed.

  Kate looked around, feeling defeated. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go report the latest disaster.”

  CHAPTER 28

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  NIGHT BENEATH the Midnight Sun was different. The darkness was chased from the streets and forced beneath the overhangs and into the narrow back alleys. Out in the open, things seemed brighter and safer. But the danger wasn’t gone. It was only hiding, biding its time in the deep, dark places of this world.

  As he strolled the back streets of the French Quarter, Drake Castillion knew this to be true, for he was part of the darkness itself. He traveled slowly for now, wandering past flickering gaslights and wrought iron balconies covered in hanging plants, easing his way toward an address he had not called on in forty years.

  Drake felt at home in New Orleans, but to live here, as so many of his kind had tried to do, was a fool’s choice. The Church always watched this city, afraid of its lingering connection with the dark arts. At least, for the moment, Drake wasn’t worried about the Church. He was looking for someone who owed him a favor.

  He turned down a side alley and made his way to a set of stairs that led up to a door. A shingle rested on the far wall. It was old and weathered by time, like the man Drake had come to see. The sign read, jackson’s soles.

  Stepping back into the shadows, Drake waited. A short while later, the door swung open. An older black man in his mid-sixties came out of the shop. He carried a cane and was accompanied by a teenage kid.

  “Oh, sure, Miles was great,” the older man said, “and so was Clifford Brown, but none of them could play like Dizzy.”

  “You saw them in person?” the teenager asked.

  “All the time.”

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and began walking away from where Drake stood. A few paces later, the older man stopped dead in his tracks. He put a hand on the teenager’s arm and began to look around, eventually facing back down the alleyway.

  “What is it?” the teenager said.

  The older man didn’t reply. He stepped into the darkness and took a deep breath, as if tasting the air. His face soured. “You best run on home now,” he said to his helper.

  “But I always walk you home. Ma says you can’t find your—”

  “I said go home, Charles.” The voice was surprisingly powerful for such a frail-looking man. In a softer voice, he added, “Don’t worry, I’ll be along shortly.”

  The teenager looked startled, but he did what he was told. He moved away, heading for the end of the alley, glancing back a time or two before disappearing around the corner.

  Drake spoke from the shadows. “Terrance Jackson,” he said. “It’s good to see you again. But tell me, how is it you know I’m here? The sighted walk right past me.”

  “I can feel your presence,” Terrance replied. “The air is always a little bit colder when one of your kind is around. And I can hear the thoughts in your unquiet minds, they reach me like whispers on the wind.”

  Drake was impressed. “Ah yes,” he said. “The presence of a vampire and the senses of a blind man do not mix.”

  Terrance shifted his weight, turning and honing in on Drake’s voice, facing him dead on. Another trick the sighted could not master. “We had an agreement,” Terrance said curtly. “You were never to come here again.”

  “Forty years ago, you called me,” Drake said. “You reached into the dark and asked for my help, because you wanted something. I gave it to you. You always knew I would demand repayment someday.”

  “You took Vivian with you,” Terrance said. “That was your payment.”

  “That was an installment,” Drake replied.

  Terrance stood a few yards from Drake, clenching his jaw, grinding his teeth. “I’m old and worn-out now, Drake. Not much help I can give you these days, unless you’re wanting some shoes repaired.”

  Drake smiled. “Time may have eroded your physical strength, but not your spiritual abilities. You’re like a musician in his prime—like your idol Mr. Gillespie, hitting notes others could only dream of. And make no mistake, you’re the only one who can do what I ask, so I will force you to if I must.”

  Terrance was silent.

  “Don’t look so glum,” Drake said. “I offer a gift as well. Do as I say, and Vivian will be returned to you.”

  The old cobbler’s face softened a fraction. “Is she here?”

  Drake knew what Terrance pined for; he would give out the taste in small increments. “Just walk with me, old friend.”

  He took Terrance by the arm, supporting him much like Charles had been doing, and the two begin to walk the French Quarter.

  “I need you to reenact the ritual of the calling,” Drake explained. “Only, this time, you will perform it indefinitely.”

  “Indefinitely?” Terrance shook his head. “I don’t think you know what you’re asking for.”

  “I assure you I do,” Drake said. “An entity of great power has recently crossed over from the other side. You may have even felt the tremors. It walks among us somewhere. I need you to bring it here. I need you to lure it to the woods, as you once lured me. The calling is the only way.”

  Terrance stopped in his tracks. “What you ask is not something to be taken lightly. The taste of life does not discriminate, especially if you plan to keep it going for days on end. You’ll bring everything that’s trapped in the void, everything that hasn’t passed over.”

  “That’s not my concern.”

  “But it’s mine,” Terrance said. “The most powerful of those caught between worlds will come first; they’ll feel the scent of the ritual before the rest of them do. You expect me to bring that down upon this city? Upon my family? Out there in the woods? Alone?”r />
  “Most of the Fallen will not be able to get here so quickly,” Drake assured him. “The ones that do will feel my presence. Trust me, they won’t come near you as long as I’m out there.”

  “They’ll drift into the city instead,” Terrance said. “New Orleans will become a slaughterhouse.”

  Drake’s anger flared. He grabbed Terrance by the back of the neck like one might grab a cat. “You know, if you weren’t blind, we wouldn’t have to play these little games,” he said. “You’ll do what I ask, and you’ll do it for as long it takes. You’ll do it because, if you don’t, I’ll be forced to pay a visit to some of your grandchildren. You’ll do it because, as high priest of the Santeria, you’ve always wanted to test your power, and I can think of no greater test than this. But most of all, you’ll do it because, once the abomination appears, I’ll allow it to touch your beloved Vivian. It will turn her back into what she once was—the wife of your youth, human and frail.”

  Drake released Terrance, and a look of anticipation crept over the blind man’s face. Drake had taken Vivian from him forty years ago, after Terrance had used the calling to lure him to the swamps and begged him to save her from a deadly fever that the doctors couldn’t cure.

  “It won’t be a simple matter,” Terrance said.

  “Do whatever you need to,” Drake said. “If you need a human to sacrifice, I’ll bring you someone.”

  “That isn’t our way,” Terrance said. “We don’t steal lives or destroy them. That’s what your kind does.”

  “Very well,” Drake said, putting Terrance’s hand on the post of a streetlight. “Gather what you need. I’ll meet you out there tomorrow night.”

  Terrance felt around him. He couldn’t be sure where he was. “You’re leaving me here?”

  “Despite your orders, Charles is not far away,” Drake said, having spotted the young man up ahead of them, glancing out from behind some trees. “Nor will I be.”

  CHAPTER 29