Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  Waring stared at him with a flash of fear in his eyes but braced his hands flat against the table and waited. Some people would guess he’d fallen in love with a dhampir, but Took thought the boy had just picked up honor somewhere. Or both.

  This time Took spread out a map of Appleberg on the table. Annabelle and Waring were resourceful and smart, but they were still kids. Where else would they go than somewhere they knew?

  “Prove it,” Took challenged him. “They’re here, aren’t they? And if they’re this close, then someone will see them, maybe even someone who just wants to help. But will they trust the right people?”

  Waring took a ragged breath and jabbed his finger down on the map. His blistered fingertip flattened against the fenced-in space outside of Appleberg where Annabelle Franklin had spent so many summers—the summer camp that the Proverbial Church had just stopped using for no reason that year.

  This time the magic lashed like a whip. It scorched through Waring and made his veins stark and black against his skin as the blood burned. Then it bounced back into Took. Heat lashed through his veins and rattled around inside him like a pinball of electricity. He flinched backward and crashed into the wall. Bright streamers of power arced between him and Waring, as though the magic itself was pissed at Took for interfering. It pushed into his head, pressed against his ears as though they were going to pop, and he felt the staples that held his mind together stretch and rip. Something black and harsh snarled from the darkness he kept down there.

  “No,” he rasped out, and the cold flushed through him. It filled him from ears to fingertips, until there was no room left for the crackle of sorcery. Then, with one last whip kiss of pain, it left him.

  For a second, Took hung in the static comfort of that cold anger. It felt like nothing—numb and still.

  Then Madoc stepped out of the shadows and dropped to his knee next to him. His hand on the back of Took’s neck was icy, but it flickered the memory of warmth through Took’s bones—a kiss on his knuckles, the look in his eyes when he tilted Took’s face up for a kiss.

  Offended by the saccharine sentimentality of it all, the cold anger slunk back to where it lived.

  “Are you all right?” Madoc asked as he hooked an arm around Took’s shoulders.

  “Fine,” Took said. He let Madoc haul him back to his feet. “You know it’s maybe twelve feet from the observatory to the door? It was a bit dramatic to take the shadows.”

  Madoc brushed a kiss over his cheek and murmured, “Maybe I’m trying to impress you.” He propped Took against the wall and turned to the guards. “Get Waring into a Viper. If he wants credit for this, I want confirmation and an escort. Get Sheriff Anderson and whatever deputies he can pull off cow-tipping duty in case we need them.”

  On the floor, singed and scarred, Waring struggled to turn a groan into words. The wounds on his hands had split open and bled through his bandages like stigmata. As he tried to speak, the magic still in his blood jolted and spasmed through him.

  Took crouched down and pressed his hand to the boy’s shoulder.

  “We know what we’re doing,” he said. After a second, he glanced at Madoc’s back and made a decision that he probably should have made a while ago. “You can trust him.”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE VIPER bounced along the rutted country road toward Appleberg. Madoc slouched in the passenger seat, leather uncomfortably hot against his skin, even though it would have been worse if he still sweated, and divided his attention between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. In the back seat a still barely half-conscious Dom Waring sat next to his mother, her arm wrapped tightly around his shoulder. She gripped his bicep as she looked around nervously.

  “You know what happened,” she blurted out as she caught Madoc’s eyes on her. “Why does he have to go out to this place? Can’t you just let him go, let me take him home? All he did was try to help people. Your people.”

  “So he says,” Madoc countered. “If he wants that to stand up before the Senate? He needs more than a sob story and a sweet face to convince them he’s innocent.”

  Heather glared at him and went back to rubbing gel into her son’s burned hands. It wouldn’t help. The blisters were under the skin, not on top, but she persisted. Perhaps it was a mother’s instinct, not that Madoc would know anything about that. His grandmother would have been more likely to stick his hand back in the fire to teach him not to get burned than offer him a salve.

  “Should we have brought her?” Lawrence asked as she veered around the thin, black ribbon of a snake in the road. “If things go wrong, she could be in danger.”

  “Then don’t let anything go wrong,” Madoc told her. The sun had started to come up. Madoc grimaced as a ray bounced off the front of the car and caught his eyes. He fished his sunglasses out, slipped them on, and glanced in the mirror again. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Waring. If your son told us the truth, then this will give him his life back.”

  Heather reached for her son’s hand and clutched it. Her knuckles showed tight and white through her skin as she squeezed down. Waring barely stirred, even though it must have ached down to his charred bones.

  “You say that like it’s meant to matter,” she said bitterly. “You’re the ones who put him under Salt in the first place. I told you that he was innocent, that my son would never do that, but nobody would listen. How am I supposed to trust you now?”

  Madoc studied her face, rendered in lilac tones through the purple lens.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Just trust your son.”

  She winced and turned back to her son, one hand raised to touch his scarred cheek. “I did,” she said. “I do. That’s not the point.”

  Lawrence lifted her foot off the pedal and the car slowed down. She glanced in the rearview mirror.

  “What do you mean?” she asked sharply. “Mrs. Waring?”

  Madoc grabbed the wheel and wrenched it to the left. The Viper’s tires squealed as the heavy SUV veered sharply across the road and the heavy truck that accelerated out of the trees only clipped their rear bumper.

  In the back seat, Heather screamed in shock as she wrapped her body around Dom’s to protect him. Lawrence bounced off the door and grabbed at the dashboard to steady herself.

  “What the hell?” she blurted out in shock.

  The Viper tipped over the shoulder of the road and crashed into a tree. The hood crumpled and the windshield cracked across in three jagged lines. A branch broke jaggedly off the tree and crashed down onto the car.

  Lawrence wheezed as she slumped against her seat belt. One hand fumbled at the clip on her gun as she tried to pull herself together. When she pushed herself upright, there was a bloody split through her eyebrow. She staunched the blood with her sleeve.

  “I’m sorry,” Heather said. Her voice was wet and frightened as she fumbled at the catch on her seat belt. “I am, but he’s my son, and I have to put him first. Those other parents would do the same.”

  Lawrence twisted around and grabbed at her arm. “What did you do?” she demanded.

  “What I had to,” Heather said as she pulled away, bloody runnels left in her skin from Lawrence’s nails. She tumbled out of the car onto the concrete and scrambled to her feet, both arms raised over her head. The heavy truck had slowed to a stop in the road and the men inside clambered out. Through the broken glass, Madoc caught fractured glimpses of camo gear and automatic weaponry, tattooed arms and hard-worn faces. Heather limped toward them, one shoe forgotten in the car. “He’s in the car. Don’t hurt him. Please.”

  “Bitch,” Lawrence hissed as she dragged her gun free. “What do we do?”

  Madoc’s door was wedged against a rock. Rather than fight with it, he twisted and kicked out the front window with one heavy-soled boot. It shattered into a thousand diamond-shaped pieces and burst out over the front of the car.

  “Exchange insurance information?” he said wryly as he boosted himself out through where the glass had been. “We’ve
been looking for these gentlemen for a long time. We should go and say hello.”

  Lawrence cursed him. She shouldered her door open and climbed out, too much of her weight supported against the Viper’s door to bode well for a fight.

  “Look at that,” one of the men jeered. He looked over his shoulder at his friends and jabbed the muzzle of his gun in Madoc’s direction. “It’s none other than the fucking cardinal himself. I’m gonna put his fangs on earrings for my wife.”

  Madoc plucked his broken sunglasses off his nose and pitched them aside into the road. The dawn made his eyes sting, the world around him washed-out, as though he’d looked directly into a light, but it was bearable. Most things were.

  “Maybe you should keep them for yourself,” Madoc said. “You seem to be short a few.”

  The man flushed, a quick, easy swab of red over his cheekbones, and glowered at Madoc. “Ain’t gonna be a wetmouth, ain’t gonna need to wet teeth,” he blustered. “When I get to Heaven, God’s going to know I got there on purpose.”

  One of the other men, dressed in jeans and a sweat-stained gas-station T-shirt, snorted. He wore a slim metal stake in a holster on his thigh and carried himself like he knew what he was doing.

  “Shut up, Thomas,” he said as he reached up to clip Thomas around the back of the head. “Your soul is between you and God. This is temporal business.”

  Madoc chuckled as he shifted his feet on the road to anchor himself. “I don’t think he knows what that means.”

  Heather grabbed at Thomas’s arm. “My son,” she said anxiously. “You’ll be careful, won’t you? My son’s in the car.”

  “Your son near ruined us all,” Truckstop snapped. “You’re just lucky we need him for now. It’s the only reason I’m going to let him see another sunset. Get her the fuck out of our way.”

  There was one woman in the group, a lean young woman with fresh burn marks on her neck. She’d swapped a deputy’s uniform for black leather and old denim, but Madoc recognized the deputy that Took had saved from the explosion. She grabbed Heather’s elbow and dragged the older woman back to the truck. When Heather protested once too often, the blonde slapped her impatiently. The crack of a hard callused hand over Heather’s mouth shut her up.

  “What do you think this is going to get you?” Madoc asked. Mindful of where they were in his peripheral vision, he shifted position as the hunters started to spread out around him. “VINE knows about you now. The chief of police back in Charleston? He’s wanted an excuse to incorporate your town, and now he’s got it. Whatever you had here, it’s gone now.”

  Truckstop hitched his gun against his shoulder. “You don’t get it,” he said. “You think this is about us? It’s about Leveling the Accord, it’s about restoring what should have been the natural order. Maybe we’re done here, but you think we’re the only ones? Once we get those kids back, we’ll send them away to new homes, to places where they can grow up right with God. First, though, we’ll get rid of you. One less monster for them to kill.”

  He pulled the trigger. The gun jarred back against his shoulder and the bullets stitched across the road toward Madoc, a trail of splintered pocks in their wake. He stepped into the shadows were time ran slowly, the spray of bullets like spilled metallic honey, and just sidestepped it before he dropped back into the world. The butt of a gun caught him across the jaw and slammed him backward. He flew through the air and came down hard on the road. It caught him across his shoulders and back and knocked the metaphorical wind out of him.

  Habit dragged him back to his feet just in time to take a boot to the gut. It connected hard enough that he felt the bones in his pelvis grind against each other. This time he kept his feet, but only just, and managed to avoid the slash of a serrated knife that would have gutted him.

  Too fast. Too strong.

  Madoc caught sight of the muzzle of Truckstop’s gun out of the corner of his eye as it tracked him. He caught the knife under his arm as the man swung at him again and Madoc spun him around so he caught the whip of bullets across his back. It perforated him from hip bone to nipple, blood bright and syrupy where it soaked through his skintight, bleached-out camo shirt.

  The man yanked free and staggered backward, but he stayed on his feet. He grinned at the expression on Madoc’s face.

  “Not as easy as you thought,” he spat out as he yanked his shirt up. His stomach was already half-healed, the bullet holes sealed into soft, pocked scars. “Not once we even out the playing field. The game’s changed, wetmouth.”

  It wasn’t, and it had.

  Madoc shook his head to dislodge the high-pitched tone that hummed in his ear. He weighed up his opponents—six armed assailants who were close to his strength and speed. Those were not good odds. The out-of-uniform deputy and Thomas lunged at him. One aimed high and one low. He twisted out of the way of Thomas’s unsophisticated roundhouse and cracked his knee into the deputy’s temple as she tried to twist her weight around his legs to take him down. She rattled out a surprised yelp but managed to python herself around his legs like hobbles.

  A gun cracked and Thomas yelped in surprise as blood sprayed out of his shoulder. It would heal, but the joint was pulverized. That took a bit more time for the body to jigsaw back together. It didn’t always get it right the first time either. Madoc had broken Pall’s knee four times before it healed into something that would bear weight.

  Madoc glanced past the stunned Thomas’s pulped shoulder to nod acknowledgment to Lawrence. She ignored him, tongue caught between her teeth as she tried to get a clear bead on Truckstop.

  Not quite six to one, then. It didn’t improve the odds that much, but it was better than nothing.

  Madoc let the deputy trip him. He rolled as he hit the ground and grabbed the first foot that swung at his head. A quick, heel-of-the-hand punch to the joint the man had his weight on snapped it out of true. The man went down hard, mouth agape with shock and pain, and Madoc slit his throat down to the bone with the knife on his belt. Then he twisted, one sharp clean pop and jerk, and tossed the head away. It rolled over the uneven ground, bounced off Truckstop’s foot, and ended up under the wheel. Glassy blue eyes stared blankly at the tableau.

  “Do you really think humans were ever our biggest issue?” Madoc mocked Truckstop as he kicked the deputy off, the impact of his heel against the point of her jaw enough to crack it into an awkward, broken angle. “Don’t flatter yourselves. I’ve fought more of my own kind than any Hunters.”

  Not that they were human, or not completely, Madoc supposed. They weren’t vampires, and their blood didn’t have the skunked smell of a werewolf, but nothing human clicked their broken jaw back together like the deputy just had.

  For a second, he considered sorcery, but six sorcerers willing to work together? A human with an Anakim’s right hook was more believable. Besides, he doubted Thomas could spell sorcerer, never mind be one.

  Like a Goat. Took had told him that’s what Gabriel said about these faux Hounds, fake Hunters. But not rotted. Stronger than any Goat that Madoc had put down, but that would make sense if he was right.

  “Madoc!” Lawrence’s voice cut through the muggy, mosquito-noisy air along the road. She sounded terrified, and Truckshop grinned when he heard her. Madoc kept one wary eye on his opponents as he shifted to have her in his periphery. She held up the radio, and it crackled with the staticky sound of Quick’s scream. “They have the other team, at the campground. They knew.”

  Truckstop looked pleased with himself as he slung his gun up over his shoulder. “Like I told you,” he said, “games change. We’re playing by our rules now. You want your people back alive? Get on your knees.”

  Lawrence stayed hunched behind the door of the car, radio in one hand and gun on the other. “Sir? What do we do?”

  She wanted a heroic, last minute save, the sort of thing that the old stories about Cardinal Madoc were ripe with, the sort of story this was meant to have been.

  The threats were to-the-point and u
nimaginative, scored across plain sheets of paper and signed as though it were something to be proud of.

  “How did you get these?” Madoc asked as he flicked through them.

  “If they threatened him, then they threatened her,” Took didn’t answer him. “Except she hasn’t told us, so that means she’s probably theirs. We can’t trust her, but—”

  “We can use her,” Madoc finished for him.

  Now it looked like they’d been used.

  “Sir?” Lawrence tried again. “Madoc?”

  The truth was Madoc couldn’t lose Took again, not like this. Death was one thing, but trapped and tortured? No, Madoc couldn’t live with that thought. So he did something for Truckstop that he hadn’t done since the first night they landed on this continent.

  The Bathory’s cardinal, once the most feared man in half of the US, knelt down on the concrete and laced his hands behind his head. For the first time in living memory, Madoc just gave up.

  BLOOD OOZED stickily from the raw sockets in Madoc’s gums. Truckstop had held the pliers as he worked all the teeth he wanted free. His wife would have a full set of tacky ivory jewelry before the month was out. It wouldn’t last, but it wasn’t pleasant.

  His arms were twisted behind him and broken over a silver bar that slotted under his arms and was secured with silver wire. His shoulders dislocated and upper arms broken, he’d been thoroughly worked over with fist, boot, and submachine gun butt. Most had delivered the beating with a businesslike thoroughness until he stopped healing so quickly. A few had gloated as they tried to punt his testicles back inside him, but he had killed their friend, so he supposed he couldn’t blame them.

  The wheels hit a bump and pain scraped along Madoc’s abused bones. Next to him Lawrence sat in tense resentment while Heather Waring sobbed noisily over her silent son. A sharp turn rolled Madoc against the side of the truck, his arms twisted even more awkwardly than before.