The Ghoul Vendetta

by Lisa Shearin

  Even more nauseating was the thought of what we had to do next. The guard’s body—or what was left of it—had not yet been taken away. I recognized the medical examiner who crouched over the body, using tweezers to extract something I thankfully couldn’t see from the ruin of the man’s chest.

  Dr. Anika Van Daal was the medical examiner. She was also a vampire and mage who had arrived in the city soon after it had been taken from the Dutch by the British and the name changed from New Amsterdam to New York. That’d been in 1625. At that time, two-thirds of the island had still been wilderness.

  She’d begun her career as a midwife, and had become the first licensed female doctor in the city. Every few decades, she “retired” from one position and took another. She’d been in her mid-twenties when she’d been turned so she didn’t stand out when she went back to school after a “retirement” to catch up on the latest medical advances. She’d learned to glamour and glamour well. As a result, she’d never had problems blending in or with being found out.

  Vivienne Sagadraco had a lot of pull in this town, and one of the ways she used it was getting supernaturals placed in strategic jobs. In addition to supernaturals in the NYPD, there were mages who, like Dr. Van Daal, could place a glamour on a dead supernatural and hold it there until the body was turned over to the family. Or if no one claimed the body, until it was cremated or buried by the city. These mages were in homicide divisions, the medical examiner’s office, and CSI teams.

  The boss had covered all the bases she could, but occasionally a corpse tried to steal home. When that happened, there was a lot of scrambling and improvising by whichever agents were closest.

  No one had needed to scramble today.

  This victim was human.

  He hadn’t stood a chance against ghouls—especially when one of those ghouls was something far worse.

  Ian took a long breath, quickly exhaled, and walked over to where Dr. Van Daal was working over the remains of the dead bank guard.

  She glanced up, then returned to tweezing something out that I had no desire to see up close.

  “Agent Byrne, I’ve been expecting you.”

  That was a surprise. Ian had said that a handful of people at SPI knew his background. It appeared that Dr. Anika Van Daal was one of them.

  “Was he alive?” Ian asked quietly.

  “Not for long. He was dead long before he bled out. He’s wearing a med alert bracelet for heart disease. Most of the bites and cuts were post-mortem. I won’t know for certain until I get him back to the lab, but I would say that he died of a heart attack before most of the wounds were inflicted.”

  My stomach turned. The cause of death may have been a heart attack, but the poor guy had a heart attack because ghouls were eating him alive.

  Ian didn’t flinch away from any of it. He’d been special ops in the military and then a homicide detective in the NYPD. My partner had seen death in all its forms. He was studying the guard’s remains to memorize what had been done to him. Ian planned to see to it that each of those ghouls paid the ultimate price for every bite and slice. Ian hadn’t known the guard personally, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from avenging his death.

  Dr. Van Daal lowered the guard’s arm to the floor from where it had been folded over his chest. His hand was clenched into a fist, but a glint of metal gleamed from between his fingers.

  Ian knelt beside the body. “What’s that?”

  Dr. Van Daal used her gloved hand to straighten two of the fingers, and a pendant on a chain dropped onto the floor.

  “It’s a St. Michael medal.” My partner was white as a sheet. “Anika, turn it over.”

  I moved closer and leaned over Ian’s shoulder to try to see. “I can’t read it, does—”

  “It says, ‘To Peter, all love, M.’ And there’s a date.” Ian sounded as if he were about to be sick. “If you’ll excuse us, Dr. Van Daal, we’ll let you get back to your work.”

  Ian stood and was halfway across the room before I could even scramble to my feet.

  Just because Ian had kept his reaction off of his face didn’t mean he’d been able to keep his heart rate under control. Though that was probably some kind of anti-interrogation technique he’d learned in the Rangers. Anika Van Daal was a vampire, and an old one at that. She could hear a human heartbeat without using a stethoscope, which no doubt came in handy being a doctor. But even I had noticed Ian’s reaction.

  He wasn’t waiting for me, but that was okay, I was fully capable of catching up. “You’ve seen that medal before.”

  Silence.

  “Ian, it’s me. That medal didn’t belong to that guard, and you recognized it, meaning that ghoul left it for you to find.”

  “Nice deductive reasoning,” Ian said as he kept walking. “You’re getting better.”

  “I was taught by the best. The best also happens to be my partner, who is also holding out on me.”

  He slowed. A little. “Not from you. Moreau.”

  “That makes all kind of nonsense.”

  Ian blew out his breath and stopped. We were in the bank lobby and out of anyone’s hearing. He pulled me aside.

  “What you don’t know, you can’t tell Moreau.”

  “If it’s that important that he not know, I won’t tell him.” I gave him the eye. “Unless it’s something he needs to know.”

  Ian’s silence told me the answer to that one.

  “Okay, perhaps a better question would be why you don’t want Moreau to know.”

  “Because he will pull me off of this case.”

  “I won’t tell Moreau,” I said. “But I want you to tell me. Who is Peter?” As soon as the name was out of my mouth, I froze and remembered. “Your partner, Pete.”

  Ian nodded. “The medal wasn’t found on his body. It was a gift from his wife, Meg, when he graduated from the academy. The date was the day he graduated.”

  I felt sick. And a fat lot of protection that medal had given Pete.

  “St. Michael is the patron saint of the police and the military,” Ian continued. “A lot of cops and soldiers wear those medals.”

  “They believe in an archangel’s protection, but not in ghouls and other monsters.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that ghoul took it as a souvenir.”

  “Right.”

  “He knew you’d come, so he left it for you.”

  Ian nodded once.

  I connected the rest of the dots. “So that you would come after him. Ian, that thing’s baiting a hook and he wants you on the other end of it.” I let a little silence grow between us. “I won’t tell Moreau, but I think you should, because if you don’t, Van Daal will. If you’re up front with him now, he’ll be more inclined to believe you when you tell him you’re not going to go off on your own and do something stupid.”

  The muscles in his jaw clenched. “I’ll tell him.”

  The words said one thing; the jaw told me he’d tell Moreau about the medal, but he wouldn’t like it. I didn’t care if he liked it, I cared about him. If it took an order from Alain Moreau for Ian to keep his promise, so be it.

  A bank robbery by a gang of ghouls was one thing. A bank robbery by a gang of ghouls led by the same being that had eaten Ian’s partner was worse. But that he left Ian’s dead partner’s St. Michael medal for Ian to find clutched in the dead fist of his latest meal/victim?

  That was as bad as it could possibly be.

  8

  DR. Van Daal would bag the St. Michael’s medal for the lab. I didn’t hold out hope of it yielding any evidence. Things like that ghoul didn’t leave fingerprints; and if they did, they wouldn’t be in any database, including ours. The SPI lab would call it evidence. I called it what it was—a sick greeting card for Ian. I don’t know what that ghoul wanted with the contents of five safe deposit boxes, or even what those contents
were, but he’d obviously decided to mix some sadistic pleasure with his business.

  The ride back to SPI was quiet. Yasha sensed Ian’s mood and didn’t try to engage him in conversation. Ian also didn’t tell Yasha what we’d found. That worried me. Maybe Ian didn’t want to talk about it yet. I could certainly understand that. That didn’t allay my suspicion that Ian wasn’t telling Yasha because he knew Yasha would sit on him for as long as it took someone else to find and take down that ghoul. Bottom line was that Ian didn’t tell Yasha because he hadn’t ruled out independent action. Come to think of it, Ian had merely said he’d tell Moreau about the St. Michael’s medal. He hadn’t promised anything in regard to not going rogue on that ghoul if the opportunity presented itself.

  • • •

  Neither the NYPD nor SPI had any leads on Bela Báthory’s whereabouts. There was no trace of the nephew of the East Coast’s most powerful vampire crime family. House Báthory was one of the top two most powerful vampire families in North America and one of the top five in Europe.

  As a vampire, Bela Báthory didn’t need to breathe, so those swamp creatures could have taken him underwater to another yacht, boat, or ship far enough from the Persephone so as not to be seen. One of the more elaborate police theories had the kidnappers doing the same thing, but with an oxygen supply for their victim, which aside from being unnecessary for a vampire, smacked of a James Bond villain evil master plan.

  The NYPD couldn’t exactly put the Hudson River and New York Harbor on lockdown, but they continued to search and investigate as best they could.

  Nothing.

  However, SPI had access to witnesses who had probably seen both the kraken attack on the Persephone and the kidnapping of Bela Báthory. Witnesses who the NYPD not only hadn’t interviewed, but didn’t even know existed.

  New York’s merpeople population.

  Around Halloween last year, Ian had had a productive chat with a mermaid. He’d called, she’d answered. She’d also confirmed Ian’s questions about where the bad guys had been headed. We might have been able to have found out that information without the mermaid’s help, but by then it would have been too late to have saved the lives of every supernatural being in the tristate area.

  So yeah, merpeople were good people.

  True to his word, Ian had told Alain Moreau about the medal. In turn, Moreau was allowing Ian to remain on the case provided that basically he use his investigative powers for good, and not evil. He was not, under any circumstances, to take on or attempt to take down the ghoul alone. Now that Ian had a trail to follow and work to do, other than pushing papers at his desk, I felt a lot better about my partner’s promise of cooperation. That being said, once we ran the ghoul to ground, Ian had made it abundantly clear to everyone at SPI who might be involved in the actual takedown that when the time came, that ghoul was his.

  No one had objected to that.

  And I hadn’t objected when Ian said he was going to question the merpeople as potential witnesses. He was looking for answers, not a ghoul.

  We took one of SPI’s boats out on the Hudson, and Ian opened it up and headed north. When we’d passed where the Persephone had been attacked, I spoke up. Actually, I had to yell over the wind and motor.

  “We’ve passed where the Persephone was attacked.”

  “I know,” he shouted back.

  “Then what are—”

  “We’re going to see Sirene.”

  “Sirene?”

  Ian cut back on the throttle a little so we didn’t have to continue to scream at each other. “The merpeople don’t have titles, but if Sirene did, the closest to what humans have would be queen.”

  “The mermaid queen.”

  Ian shrugged. “Merpeople are a matriarchal society. The females hold all positions of power.”

  I nodded in approval. “As it should be. I like Queen Sirene already.”

  “If Sirene wasn’t a witness, some of her people must have been, and they would have reported to her everything that happened.”

  About ten minutes later, we reached the northernmost tip of Manhattan where the Harlem River emptied into the Hudson. I think the neighborhood was Inwood, which was being touted as New York’s next gentrifying neighborhood. They’d get there a lot faster if they knew a mermaid queen lived offshore.

  “I would have expected merfolk to live closer to the open ocean,” I said.

  “They winter in the ocean, taking the Gulf Stream south. They summer here.”

  I grinned. “Two-legged Northerners do that, too.”

  Ian pulled a long chain from under his T-shirt and lifted it over his head. He’d used it before to call a mermaid source for information.

  I leaned forward to get a better look at the pendant. It was a silver oval with what looked to have once been intricate engravings, now worn with age. “You say you don’t have any psychic abilities, but you can dip a necklace in the water and telepathically talk to mermaids. I’d call that pretty danged psychic.”

  Ian shrugged as if it was no big deal. “My grandad gave it to me. His father gave it to him. He was a fisherman back in Ireland. Grandad said his father told him he could use it to call the merfolk. Grandad didn’t put much stock in fairy tales as he called them, but it’s been in the family at least as far back as four generations, so he wanted me to have it.”

  “And when you came to work for SPI, you realized that fairy tales were fairy fact.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Cool.”

  Ian leaned over the edge of the boat and submerged the pendant on the end as I’d seen him do before. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was close enough to make the water look more than a little ominous, especially considering what had happened Friday night. I winced and held my breath, fully expecting a kraken tentacle or a Creature from the Black Lagoon to drag Ian over the side. I didn’t like that Yasha hadn’t been able to come with us, and neither had he. Merpeople were nervous around many supernaturals, including werewolves.

  A head broke the surface a few feet from where Ian leaned over the side. Long hair flowed over slender shoulders and down into the water. The features indicated that it was female, and all of the above seemed to be more or less human—except for the green skin.

  Or at least it looked green from what I could see.

  Her large eyes were solid, dark orbs. Orbs that stared over Ian’s shoulders to where I sat. She looked familiar. More than familiar, she was identical to the mermaid who had come when Ian had called that night on the edge of the East River. I wondered if all mermaids looked alike, or whether even asking that question would be extremely offensive. I opted to keep my mouth shut and let Ian do the talking, telepathy, or whatever.

  The mermaid submerged completely.

  Seconds later, she surfaced right under where Ian’s hand held the chain and pendant stretched over and into the water. My partner didn’t move as a long-fingered, webbed hand reached up to him. Ian lowered his hand and she closed her definitely green, webbed fingers around his.

  She gazed up into his eyes and they stayed like that for a good two minutes. Then she simply released his hand and sank back into the darkening river without leaving even a ripple as a sign she’d ever been there.

  Ian removed the pendant from the water and dried it on a towel before putting the chain over his head and tucking the pendant under his T-shirt. He turned toward me with a crooked smile. “The queen will see us now.”

  I didn’t necessarily expect a crown of seashells or coral, but I did expect the queen of New York’s merpeople to have differentiated herself from her subjects in some way. Since only her head and shoulders were above the water and it was night by now, I thought maybe her fish-like tail was fancier or sported some kind of aquatic-themed bling. Her features did look more regal than those of the mermaid Ian had initially made contact with, but aside from that, there was no
outward indication of rank.

  However, four long and sleek forms swam just beneath the surface around our boat and the queen. They were broader of shoulder and carried trident-like spears.

  Guards. Male.

  Once again there was no speaking, only telepathy between the queen and Ian, and it lasted less than five minutes.

  When she’d finished communicating, the queen smoothly sank below the surface and disappeared, her guards along with her.

  I leaned forward in my seat. “Well?”

  “We have a witness. Dozens, actually.”

  “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “They saw what happened to the Persephone, acknowledge the invaders to be a threat, but they don’t have a name for them. Yasha’s black lagoon things, not the kraken. They know what the kraken was. Sirene will try to get more information for us on the black lagoon guys. Her people reported that Bela Báthory was taken farther up the Hudson.”

  “They took him up the Hudson past Manhattan?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “So much for the swamp creatures being hired fins for one of the other vampire families.”

  “I asked Sirene if she had any plans to have her people scout farther up the river. She tried that, but pulled them back. There’s a pair of hydras where the river gets deeper just past Yonkers.”

  I blinked. “There’s hydras in Yonkers?”

  “Sirene said they showed up around the same time as the kraken and the others.”

  “I’d pull my people back, too. So what’s up the Hudson past Yonkers?”

  “About three hundred miles of river.”

  “How much of that is brackish water?”

  “From New York Harbor all the way up to the Federal Dam in Troy, about a hundred and fifty miles.”

  “So . . . Creatures from the Black Lagoon and their kraken buddy kidnap the nephew of a vampire crime lord and then post hydras off Yonkers to keep anyone from following them.” I just sat there waiting for that scenario to sink in. It didn’t. “This is the trippiest case ever.”