The Ghoul Vendetta

by Lisa Shearin

The ghouls didn’t make any move to attack. They didn’t need to; they had Ian cornered. All they had to do was wait for their getaway portal—and their leader.

  Winthrop shifted behind Ian—and blurred, becoming taller.

  No.

  “Ian!” I screamed in warning as the ghoul loomed behind him.

  Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Ian sensing the ghoul and turning—both too late.

  The ghoul wanted to see shock and then despair in Ian’s eyes.

  My partner didn’t give him what he wanted.

  He attacked.

  He was trapped, he was outnumbered, rescue was impossible, but he was not going down without a fight.

  Until one of the ghouls sprayed a green mist in his face, and my partner was out before he hit the floor.

  The ghoul looked directly at the camera, flipped a switch on the wall next to the door, and watched with a smile as his ghouls carried an unconscious Ian through the portal. His smooth and otherworldly voice filled the room. “Checkmate, Agent Byrne.” Then he looked directly at the camera. “And Agent Fraser.” He started to step through the portal, but paused and turned back toward the camera. “I am certain you have many colorful and imaginative names for me, especially now, but for future reference, you may call me Janus.”

  The ghoul quickly followed his henchmen through the portal and closed it behind them. Yasha was standing at my side. I heard him inhale what had to have been half the air in the room. Even though I knew what was coming next and how loud it would be, I made no move to cover my ears. I wanted to hear it. As a human, I couldn’t produce a sound even remotely close, so I stood silently, tears pooling in my eyes, and let Yasha’s bone-chilling howl of desolation, anguish, and rage express what I couldn’t, as I continued to stare at the security monitor showing a now-empty vault.

  I tore my eyes away from the monitor, rage building to a level I knew I couldn’t contain without losing what little control I had.

  “Where is Winthrop?” I growled. “He called us into a trap. I want him.” I didn’t specify what I wanted him for and I didn’t need to. I’d probably have to fight Yasha to get my hands on the little weasel first, but at the moment, I thought I’d win.

  “Gone,” Moreau said without expression.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “He called us and ran away?”

  Moreau shook his head. “Gone as in dead. They ate him. What’s left is in his office. I’ve called Dr. Van Daal to examine the remains for clues.”

  The ghoul had to be one happy monster right now. No, Janus. He’d said his name was Janus. He’d gotten what he’d come for in the robbery two nights ago, and he’d taken Ian, who he’d been wanting for years.

  Yeah, Janus was one happy psycho.

  I didn’t even know where to start, but I would do everything in my power to wipe that smirk off his shapeshifting face, him off the earth, and get my partner back. I took out my phone, and tapped the name of the only woman I knew who could possibly help.

  “Who?” Yasha asked.

  “Kitty.”

  18

  KITTY Poertner could open and close portals. Size didn’t matter. She could operate a small portal that crossed meters or miles. I’d seen her close a portal to Hell itself. She’d had some help from Rake on that one, but Kitty had done all the heavy lifting herself.

  Kitty was the best, and right now, the best was what we needed.

  For over a thousand years, Kitty’s family had been the supernatural world’s doorkeepers, or to be more exact, portalkeepers. Her specialty was stabilizing and closing dimensional rifts.

  Hellpits, thankfully, didn’t open that often, so Kitty had a day job. She was a baker, the owner of Kitty’s Confections on Bleecker Street in the West Village, and could bake an angel food cake that was reputed to have made actual angels weep. But as a baker and a witch, Kitty had a ton of bad karma to live down. Kitty’s great-great-great-grandmother had lived in Germany’s Black Forest and had made Hannibal Lecter look like a cannibalism amateur. She’d chow down on adults in a pinch, but she preferred children. She lured them in with sweets, most notably gingerbread.

  Yep, she was that witch.

  A cannibalistic child abductor was a heavy load on a family tree.

  Moreau had offered to send a car for Kitty, but she’d refused, saying that she could get here faster by taking the subway. I didn’t argue with her. We had a problem that had to be solved before she got here.

  We needed to get into a locked vault.

  Richard Winthrop was dead. Janus had taken his key card and had probably tortured the banker to get the keypad code. Though being a gutless weasel, Winthrop had probably just given it to him. And in yet another taunt from Janus, we could see on the monitor that the key card was on the table in the center of the vault.

  Gotham Bank’s president had one, but she wasn’t here. She’d been on vacation in Bali when the robbery had happened, and was in the process of flying back. She was due back early this evening, doing us absolutely zero good.

  And for the sprinkles on top, the bank’s head of security was the one who’d died of a heart attack while being eaten the night of the robbery. His key card hadn’t been found.

  I glanced back at the monitor showing an empty vault and a key card on the table. When we finally got inside, we’d probably find the guard’s key card underneath the vice president’s.

  It was like Janus had checked out of a hotel. Just leave your key card in the room. Most hotel guests just take the toiletries and maybe the towels. Janus had taken Ian. I had news for him—unlike the Ritz, SPI wasn’t about to chalk that up to the cost of doing business.

  Since it was obvious that no one was in the vault, the NYPD was content to wait for the bank president’s flight to land this evening.

  I wasn’t content and I certainly wasn’t willing to wait. Every minute that passed allowed signs of that portal to fade, reducing the chances that Kitty could either reopen it or at least determine where it led. That portal was our only hope right now of tracking Ian—and saving him from the most horrible death imaginable.

  “Who the hell is Janus?” I asked Moreau.

  “I know the name as belonging to the Roman god of beginnings and ends, of time and transitions—and of doorways and passages both for this world and other universes.”

  “Portals.”

  Moreau nodded. “Janus is traditionally depicted as having two faces since he looks to both the future and past.”

  “I’ve got news, he has more than two faces.”

  “It may be a name that amuses him to use, or he may be connected in some way to the person in antiquity whom the Romans viewed as that god.”

  “A Roman god kidnapped Ian?”

  “I suspect it is merely a name that he uses.” Moreau was texting. “Though I will have our archivists compile a report with all that they have on the Roman god, or any individual in our database who is using or has used the name.”

  We smelled Kitty before we saw her, and Yasha’s stomach growled in response to the scent of sugar and vanilla. Though the scent probably came from the shopping bag she carried.

  She set it on the desk, took out the top box, opened it, and pushed it toward us.

  Lemon-blueberry scones. Otherwise known as wedge-shaped bites of heaven itself.

  “Eat,” she told us. Her tone said she wasn’t taking no for an answer; and to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to give her one.

  Yasha and I gratefully fell to. Even Alain Moreau looked like he was regretting his liquid diet.

  “You need to keep your strength up,” Kitty told us both. She glanced at the vault door. “Still don’t have it open.” She didn’t ask it as a question. The vault couldn’t be more inaccessible. She gave the bag with its boxed goodies to the one NYPD detective in the room. “I’m sure your officers would appreciate
not having to miss lunch. It’s just doughnuts and cookies, but—”

  The detective took the bag. “You’re an angel of mercy, ma’am. Thank you.”

  Kitty waited until he was gone. “Portals aren’t all I can open,” she said with a mischievous wink.

  I danged near choked on my scone.

  “I have an uncle who used his powers for profit,” Kitty explained. “He’s doing five to ten in Sing Sing.”

  “And you bribe police with doughnuts to go away,” Yasha said, smiling.

  Kitty shrugged. “Cliché, but whatever works. Personally, I prefer baking to burglary.”

  “Using your powers for good and not evil,” I noted. “And we’re grateful that you do.” I finished the first scone. “Choking a ghoul to death will take energy.” I started to reach for another then stopped, the scone I’d wolfed down now sitting like a rock in my stomach. Kitty’s comfort food wasn’t providing much by way of comfort.

  Kitty Poertner opening a bank vault involved her standing directly in front of it, staring intently at the control panel, and munching thoughtfully on an iced gingerbread man cookie—beginning with the head.

  Closing a portal to Hell had done wonders for Kitty’s confidence—that and accepting the fact that she wasn’t her cannibalistic three-greats grandma and never would be. In celebration of that psychological breakthrough, last Christmas, Kitty had baked and built not just a gingerbread house, but an entire Victorian gingerbread village for her shop’s front window.

  The cops were going to be back any second, and Kitty was still in her own little world. I didn’t want to interrupt any serious magical working, but time wasn’t on our side.

  “Kitty, can you—”

  Click, whirl, and the massive vault door began to open.

  Dang.

  Yasha and Moreau pushed the door the rest of the way open, as Kitty and I slipped inside.

  I stopped at the table where Janus had left Winthrop’s key card. Yep, there was another one directly underneath, the card belonging to the head security guard. Janus had gotten everything he wanted from the Gotham Bank, and didn’t need keys to the vault anymore.

  Kitty was standing in front of the wall where the portal had been. It’d been nearly an hour since Ian had been dragged unconscious through it.

  I could barely sense it now. Hopefully, Kitty was getting more from it.

  “Well?” I asked quietly.

  “The first portal, the one from two nights ago, was somewhere else in the bank?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t know where she was going with this.

  Kitty nodded as if that was the response she expected. “This portal was intended for a one-time use.”

  I knew where she was going now, and I didn’t like it.

  “It’s not like a pair of doors off a hallway. After they’re closed, the hallway still exists. This was a temporary connection. This portal, the exit portal, and the hall, if you will, that connected them were one unit. When they went through this portal and out the other side, he collapsed everything behind him.”

  “There’s no way to track where he’s taken Ian?”

  “None.”

  I wanted to cry, scream, and kick whatever was closest.

  That wouldn’t bring Ian back, and if I was going to do serious damage to a ghoul in the near future, I couldn’t have any broken bones.

  I knew what I had to do—calm down and think. I took a breath and exhaled with as much control as I could.

  “So it wouldn’t have made any difference if we’d gotten in here right after they took Ian.”

  “No,” Kitty replied.

  That didn’t make me feel any better, but it did take some of the pain out of the guilt.

  On the floor, right in front of the wall where the portal had been, was Ian’s pendant. The chain was broken. I squatted to pick it up. It was wet. Not with blood from where it’d been torn from Ian’s neck, but with water.

  Kitty was casting a shadow across it.

  “Kitty, take a step back,” I told her.

  She did, and I saw.

  The floor was definitely wet. A puddle of wet. I quickly glanced around. There were wet footprints on the side of the vault where the ghouls had stood when they’d cornered Ian.

  Yasha started to come closer.

  I quickly held up a hand. “Stop. They left footprints.”

  Alain Moreau was just outside the vault, keeping anyone, namely the cops, from interrupting us.

  “What kind of footprints?” he asked.

  I knelt next to the closest puddle, bent over, and sniffed the water.

  Salty, with an underlying, ripe organic smell.

  I knew that scent.

  Three days ago, I’d gone for an unwilling swim in the stuff, and had managed to swallow some of it.

  River water. Hudson River water, to be exact.

  “Sir, we need a sample of this water.”

  Yasha frowned in confusion. “Why would ghouls have wet feet?”

  “Because I don’t think they were ghouls.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I jumped up and dashed out of the vault to the security desk. “Sir, I need this recording sent to HQ, to Kenji,” I told Moreau.

  “What is it?”

  “The connection between Báthory’s kidnapping and the robberies.” I jerked my head in the direction of the vault. “I’d bet my life the lab report on the water from those footprints will come back as coming from the Hudson River.”

  “You can smell it?”

  “I took a bath in it the other night. I’ve got a couple more talents past seeing through wards and shields.” I gave him a fierce little grin. “I’ve got nearly a hound-dog quality sniffer. It’s river water, all right. And those ghouls were wearing glamours.”

  My manager didn’t look convinced.

  “When we get this surveillance footage back to Kenji, I’ll be able to show you. I can see through glamours in person. No problem. On TV, or in this case, surveillance recording, it’s not easy for me, but I can do it. I was concentrating on Ian, and when who I thought was Richard Winthrop started morphing into the ghoul, my attention went to him. But after finding all those wet footprints in there, I realized that those ghouls looked fuzzy to me on camera. I thought it was just crappy equipment, but Ian was perfectly clear. They weren’t.”

  Moreau stared nodding. “They weren’t ghouls.”

  “No, sir, they weren’t. Once Kenji works his magic on that recording, I should be able to get confirmation on my theory.”

  “Which is?”

  I looked at Yasha. “That Ian was carried through that portal by the same things that kidnapped Bela Báthory.”

  Yasha looked over my shoulder at the monitor. “Like Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, except these are real.”

  I didn’t want to leave the bank. On some level, I felt like I was leaving Ian behind. But Ian wasn’t there anymore, and his kidnappers weren’t coming back. They’d gotten everything they wanted, including my partner.

  And I was going to get him back.

  19

  BY the time we got back to headquarters, everyone had been told what had happened to Ian, and how it had happened—inside a locked bank vault with Ian trapped with six ghouls who weren’t ghouls, with everyone who could have helped locked out, and the portal long gone by the time we got inside.

  I still felt guilty. There was nothing logical about how I felt. I guess that was why feelings had nothing to do with logic. I knew it wasn’t my fault, that there was nothing I could have done to prevent it, but Ian was my partner, and partners took care of one another.

  I’d failed.

  There it was.

  My partner had been in the ultimate danger, and I’d been helpless, powerless to do anything
about it. I could only imagine how Calvin and Liz must be feeling. Heck, they were his bodyguards. It’d been their assignment to protect Ian, and in their opinion, they’d failed, too. It didn’t matter that there were several tons of steel and concrete between them and who they’d been guarding.

  I stopped. It was exactly how Ian must have felt when that ghoul had killed his partner. Ian had been in the same room, but he’d been fighting for his own life against three ghouls. There was nothing he could have done. I knew that wasn’t how Ian saw it. He was a big guy, a strong guy, trained to protect and defend—and kill. Yet he’d been powerless to stop what had been happening to his partner.

  It was that helplessness that had been eating Ian alive since then.

  Eating alive.

  Jeez, Mac. Where did that come from? I bit my bottom lip and closed my eyes against the emotion again trying to force its way up past my tight throat.

  This does Ian no good. This does Ian no good.

  Those five words were quickly becoming my mantra. And until they didn’t keep me from breaking down into a crying heap, I’d keep repeating them. Prayers I’d already said and would keep saying, but those five words were the dam that was keeping the waterworks at bay.

  The faces of the agents in the bull pen were grim, and I was told “we’ll get him back” by more than a few. I know they meant it to be reassuring, they weren’t saying that I’d failed, but to me, it was like a punch to the gut.

  We’ll get him back. We will do it.

  I was the one who lost him, and dammit, I was going to get him back. I was a seer, not a soldier, but I was not going to be left out of this when the time came. And the time would come, and soon. I gave a tight nod to each agent who spoke those words to me, and kept going straight to Kenji’s desk.

  We would get Ian back, and I hoped and prayed I was right about finding the clue we needed.

  I walked quickly past my and Ian’s desks, not wanting to see his empty chair. I willed myself not to look and made a beeline straight for the IT department and Kenji Hayashi. I knew the elf would be at his desk, or his command center as everyone else called it. Kenji was literally at the center of SPI’s worldwide communications web. He was only a keystroke away from every agent at SPI New York, and another few clicks from every SPI agency office around the world. While each office had a chief technology agent—Kenji’s official title—no one had anyone like him. He was what every other SPI CTA wanted to be when they grew up.