The Ghoul Vendetta

by Lisa Shearin

  “For you, I can promise.”

  My phone howled. I looked at the screen. “Good, because Yasha’s about to, and I quote, ‘lock him in Suburban and put both on lift.’”

  “That wouldn’t be pleasant.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  16

  THE breakroom door opened again. It was Alain Moreau. He looked perplexed.

  “It’s unnaturally quiet out there,” he noted. “And when I asked where the two of you were, no one answered, they just pointed.”

  Ian and I exchanged a glance and shrugged.

  “I came to tell you that Bela Báthory has been found.”

  Ian sat up straighter. “Alive?”

  “Not even in one piece. Dr. Van Daal found signs, and rather obvious ones at that, connecting Bela’s kidnapping to the ghouls. I didn’t want you leaving this complex, but at the same time, it’s critical that we solve this as quickly as possible. You are best qualified to do that, as well as to identify any clues that may have been left for you.”

  “Clues?”

  “We have our official connection between the Báthory kidnapping and the robberies. Bela was eaten by ghouls.”

  I stood up. “Sir, you said, and I completely agree, that Ian shouldn’t—”

  Moreau held up a hand. “I will be going with the two of you, as will Agents Miles and Foster as guards. They will be assigned to Agent Byrne for the duration of this case.” His pale blue eyes bored into Ian’s. “Do not try to lose them, Agent Byrne. I want your word.”

  Ian stood, raring to go. “You got it.”

  • • •

  Calvin Miles was one of SPI’s commandos. He’d been instrumental in us taking down the male grendel just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. He’d also been on the takedown team for a hydra in a Chelsea apartment building laundry room. Small space, big mess, most of it had been made by the man who now stationed himself protectively behind Ian’s right shoulder. He was at least a foot taller than me with biceps the size of my thighs in my fat jeans, bull neck, and bald head. Kind of like Mr. T without the bling or funky facial hair. Calvin had been an army field medic in Iraq, which had come in handy on more than one occasion that I’d been involved with. All SPI agents have to be trained as EMTs. When you hunt monsters and supernatural criminals for a living—especially if you were human—it wasn’t a matter of if but when you or your partner or team member would need serious medical attention quick.

  Liz Foster was another of SPI’s commandos by way of the Marines. She was tall, but considering her background, she wasn’t nearly as muscular as you’d expect a former Marine to be. But like a lot of other things about Liz, that was deceptive, and many a monster had died with a really surprised look on its face. She was human, but supernaturally quick, and she made each and every one of her strikes count.

  Her favorite weapon was anything she could lay hands on, but she had a soft spot for flamethrowers. In our grendel-hunting excursion into New York’s abandoned subway tunnels, she’d gotten plenty of opportunity to put her favorite toy to lethal use. Considering where we were going, flamethrowers weren’t welcome.

  We made quite the entrance into the main branch of the New York Public Library. We weren’t here to bust ghosts, just collect a permanently dead vampire. Fortunately, this time, the majority of the NYPD who were on the scene were those in the know. The head librarian was a gnome with a very convincing height glamour. She knew who to call. Calvin and Liz were carrying openly: guns at their hips, more exotic weapons under their light jackets. As we came in the front doors, I saw that the NYPD had done their job and had set up barriers to keep curious library patrons from getting photos of anything newsworthy. The crowd showed zero interest in me and Ian, instead aiming their phones and flashes in the direction of Calvin and Liz, our heavily armed twin walls of muscle.

  My partner gave an exasperated sigh.

  “Hey, not one word,” I told him. “Protected is good.”

  “I never said it wasn’t.”

  There was a uniform posted to direct us to where Bela Báthory had been found.

  Barring our way to the body was a police photographer working over something laid out on a large sheet of plastic.

  “This is the clue I was referring to,” Moreau told us. “It’s a flag that was used to cover Bela Báthory’s corpse. Dr. Van Daal said it was centuries old from the look of it, a museum-quality piece. She is having photos sent to Amelia Chandler and Conor Delaney, to get it identified as quickly as possible.”

  The flag was a stunning example of ancient weaving.

  It was silk; at least that was the only fabric I could equate with the shimmering cloth at our feet. Woven through the bright threads of every color of the rainbow were fine threads of gold and silver. The Celtic knot designs were so intricate, that if it was meant to represent an animal or object, I couldn’t detect it. It was large, at least six by four foot.

  “Do you recognize it?” Moreau asked Ian.

  “Other than it being beautiful, no.”

  “Not even vaguely familiar?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”

  “Not going to. At least not in public.”

  We proceeded to where the main action was.

  Bela Báthory was laid out on a reading table like he was lying in state for a public viewing.

  Oh boy, was he ever.

  This was my first ever sight of a buck-naked, dead vampire that’d been eaten by ghouls.

  “We meet again.” Dr. Anika Van Daal looked from Ian and me to our sizable (and not just in numbers) entourage, one eyebrow raised inquisitively.

  Ian sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “Isn’t it always?” Dr. Van Daal turned her attention to Moreau. “Alain, always lovely to see you. I take it your presence here is due to political necessity considering the identity of the deceased?”

  “Partially,” Moreau said.

  He didn’t clarify what the other part was, but I thought Dr. Van Daal got the message that it also was complicated. From the looks of things, she had more than enough complexity to deal with. Van Daal’s assistant was an elf, the rest of her team were humans. Van Daal knew what had done this; the others were just trying to ignore what had been done, and judging from the pasty faces of most of them, they weren’t succeeding.

  Bela Báthory’s head was being photographed.

  A good ten feet away from his body.

  Interesting.

  And so much for what had killed him permanently. Nothing got up once you severed its spinal cord.

  “There’s a good story there,” Calvin muttered.

  “There is indeed,” Van Daal said. “The head was still attached to the body when it was found, but apparently the spinal cord had been severed, so the skin of the neck was all that was holding the head onto the body. When we shifted the body to continue our examination . . .”

  She didn’t say more and she didn’t need to. I wondered with the morbid cop humor that I’d picked up from our NYPD friends if the head had bounced when it’d hit the floor. Probably. I was sure the more jaded investigators had found it funny; the newer folks had probably danged near lost their lunch. Van Daal’s elven assistant was bagging the head, to preserve evidence, but mainly to keep the uninitiated from seeing Báthory’s incisors.

  Anika Van Daal stepped away from the body, giving us an unobstructed view of the deceased. My cola and cruller stirred uneasily in my stomach.

  Moreau hadn’t exaggerated. Bela Báthory had been eaten.

  Ghoul teeth were pointed for tearing through flesh and muscle, unlike human dental work which only had incisors for puncturing, and even those weren’t sharp on most people. The teeth that had done this weren’t human, but the radius of the bites were.

  Like I said, ghouls.

  The
human NYPD contingent in attendance were leaning more toward denial.

  I didn’t blame them in the least. I’d rather not know what had done this, either—and I especially didn’t like what it meant.

  The attack on the Persephone and Bela Báthory’s abduction and permanent death were most definitely connected to the robberies.

  And now all of it was connected to Ian.

  Van Daal was talking to Moreau. “Thankfully for the librarian who found him, he’d been covered to the neck with what you saw on your way in. It wouldn’t have been the first time they’ve discovered a homeless person sleeping in the stacks or on an out-of-the-way reading table. When the librarian tried to wake him up and Báthory’s half-eaten arm fell out from under the flag and over the side of the table, the poor man realized that Mr. Báthory wasn’t with us anymore.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more. He’d been dead—well, undead—to begin with, meaning his corpse was easier to look at than the bank guards.

  There was no blood.

  The surveillance footage of the second robbery had shown a bloodbath. Those men had died from shock and blood loss.

  There was no blood and no sign of bleeding on Bela Báthory’s corpse.

  It’d been three days since he’d been taken. From the dried and almost papery condition of his skin, he hadn’t fed or been allowed to feed. The corpse’s bloodless state could be explained by it being killed and the blood drained elsewhere.

  I’d never seen the insides of a centuries-old vampire—either fed or starved. To me, Bela Báthory’s exposed parts looked more like beef jerky than anything else.

  Dang. I’d really liked beef jerky. Now it was off my snack food list.

  A sick and twisted corner of my mind wondered if ghouls had a particular affinity for vampire jerky. That was a question I could go the rest of my life without knowing the answer to.

  I’d never been one for getting closer to a dead body than I had to, especially a naked one, but what I saw didn’t belong on a ghoul-eaten corpse.

  “Permission to get a closer look at something, Dr. Van Daal?”

  “Of course, Agent Fraser. What is it?”

  “These.” I indicated a set of puncture wounds, six of them, set in an offset arc. I had seen them before, but I . . . I stopped. I did recognize them. I’d seen these claws and the webbed hand they’d been attached to tear the throat out of a crewman on the Persephone.

  “Creatures from the Black Lagoon,” I murmured. “Though now known as Fomorians.”

  Dr. Van Daal gave me a quizzical glance. “I beg your pardon?”

  Ian studied the claw marks over my shoulder. “You’re sure?”

  “As close as I could be without becoming fish food.” I winced. “That wasn’t the best way I could have said that.” Ian’s frown told me he’d already made the connection.

  “What happened still isn’t, wasn’t, and never will be Rake’s fault,” I added.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  “I found salt crusts around some of the wounds, as well as these.” Van Daal held up a sealed glass tube; its contents were shaped like fingernails, but were green, silver, and black.

  Ian squinted. “What the—?”

  “Scales,” I said. “I know what made these.” I told Dr. Van Daal about the things that had taken Bela Báthory from his yacht.

  She nodded as if I’d confirmed a theory for her. “There are also numerous puncture wounds on the body that correlate to claw-tipped, webbed fingers. The depth indicates extreme pressure. As best as I can tell outside of a lab, these wounds happened at the same time as the bites.”

  I felt sick. “The Fomorians held Báthory down while the ghouls ate him.”

  “I counted at least four pairs of hands,” Van Daal said.

  Moreau spoke. “A vampire of his age would have put up more of a fight than any number of mortal creatures could have held out against.”

  Ian’s jaw hardened. “But it only took four of those lizard things to hold him down.”

  That image was chilling. I knew what a centuries-old vampire was capable of strength-wise. I’d seen Alain Moreau rip the wing off of an ancient Grecian harpy. Everything about him was as hard as granite, and even more impervious to damage.

  Báthory had been fighting for his survival, and it had taken only four of those things to hold him down—while their ghoul friends ate him.

  I’d be revisiting that horror in a future nightmare.

  17

  WE were leaving the library when Ian’s phone rang and he yanked it out of its holster.

  “Byrne,” he snapped.

  I couldn’t understand the words, but whoever was on the other end of that call was yelling, screaming even.

  Ian gave me a sharp glance and picked up the pace.

  What the hell?

  “Mr. Winthrop, calm down and for God’s sake, be quiet. They’ll hear—”

  The bank vice president.

  “We’re five minutes away,” Ian told him. “No, do not hide in the vault. They can . . . Mr. Winthrop?”

  Ian swore and jumped into the Suburban; the rest of us piled in behind him.

  “Gotham Bank,” he told Yasha. “Step on it.”

  “What is—” I started.

  “The ghouls are back.”

  • • •

  Moreau had called it in, and an NYPD cruiser was already on the scene, and clued-in officers were inside the bank.

  Yasha pulled up in front, and Ian almost waited until he’d stopped before jumping out, with Moreau, Calvin, and Liz right behind him. I didn’t want my partner going in without me, but I was neither a vampire nor a commando. I was a mere mortal who didn’t want her face to have a close encounter with asphalt. Yasha jumped the curb with the Suburban just as I was about to get out, and I’d barely missed becoming a pancake. He slammed it into park, cut the engine, and was right behind me. The cops probably didn’t have silver-infused bullets in their guns, but we did. And Yasha was wearing his long jacket, which hid about the only thing guaranteed to put down a ghoul—a machete.

  Take their head and pretty much anything would stay down for good.

  Once out of the Suburban, I almost caught up with Ian and the others. My legs were shorter than theirs, but I had the adrenaline to make up for it.

  I felt the portal’s pulse as soon as I crossed the bank’s threshold. I felt it, but I couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from. Except for us and the cops, the bank was empty. Odd that they’d still be closed after two days. Yes, there’d been a robbery, and yes, there’d been a murder, but this was a bank in Midtown Manhattan.

  Richard Winthrop had told Ian he was locking himself in the vault. Either the call—or Winthrop—had been cut off before Ian could tell him not to go into the vault because that was how the ghouls had gotten in last time. Portals were equal-opportunity doorways—they could go anywhere at any time.

  The portal didn’t matter; at least it wasn’t my first priority. Ian was. Winthrop had told him he was going to the vault, so that’s where my partner had gone.

  “Follow me,” I told Yasha.

  I had my gun out, held low and ready, with every nerve, every sense wide open and on high alert.

  None of this felt right.

  A hollow boom vibrated the marble beneath our feet.

  The vault. The vault closing. Winthrop was supposed to already be in the vault. That’s what he’d told Ian. What if—

  “Shit!” I spat, and charged through the lobby.

  Yasha, bless him, didn’t ask questions, just hefted his Desert Eagle in one hand and a machete in the other to back me up.

  I slid to a stop on the marble floor in front of the massive fire doors, doors that had been open when we’d been here before. Doors that were now closed against Mo
reau, and an enraged Calvin and Liz.

  Ian was on the other side. He’d only been a few steps ahead of us and had just stepped into a trap. Once he’d sprung that trap, it’d slammed shut, locking any hope of help outside.

  That wasn’t stopping Alain Moreau. He had actually gotten the tips of his fingers in the seam between the two doors, and I heard the metal groan.

  Calvin ran to the security desk, and after some frantic searching at a control panel, found the right button and the doors slowly began to open. Moreau and Liz didn’t wait. As soon as they had a slot big enough to squeeze through, they were inside. Yasha, Calvin, and I were right behind them.

  The two cops who had been the first to arrive were sprawled on the floor in front of the now-closed vault door, their heads turned at impossible angles.

  Whatever Ian had been lured into had already happened.

  Screw quiet.

  “Ian!”

  Nothing.

  There was nothing down here except the vault and the four small offices for clients to open their safe deposit boxes. All of the doors were open. Calvin and Liz checked them.

  Empty.

  We turned to the vault door.

  Even with Moreau’s strength and Yasha at full werewolf, we weren’t getting inside. If there was a portal in there, Ian could already be gone.

  The monitor behind the security desk flickered to life, showing the inside of the vault, and a scene from a nightmare.

  Ian and Richard Winthrop were backed into a corner. My partner stood protectively in front of the banker, using his body as a shield between Winthrop and six ghouls.