Death Bound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Modern Necromancy Book 2)

by Justin Sloan

  “What the hell was that?” Rohan asked as they broke free.

  “Taxi drivers,” Nora said. “They’re harmless. Welcome to Latin America.”

  Rohan looked back at the swarm. An unsuspecting woman had given her bag to one of the men and he motioned her over to a weather-beaten taxi. She followed reluctantly.

  “There’s our ride,” Nora said.

  A tall Latino man waited near a fountain, leaning against a black Mitsubishi. His arms were folded, but when he saw Nora, a wide smile crept across his face and he waved. He had muscular arms and bronzed skin, like a Latin America movie star or soap opera icon. Rohan instantly decided not to like him.

  It makes more sense that Piero would pick them up rather than them seeking him out

  “When you told me to make room for two, I thought you were referring to your sister,” the man said, eyeing Rohan. His Spanish accent was thinly detectable underneath his smooth voice.

  Piero Obiedo stared down Rohan for a moment, and Rohan refused to break eye contact, even if he was perhaps intimidated. Finally, Piero gave him a nod and they shook hands reluctantly.

  Nora gestured between the two men. “Piero, Rohan. Rohan, Piero. It’s so good to see you. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Piero grabbed the backpack off of Nora’s back and jammed it into the Mitsubishi’s tiny trunk. Then he helped Nora into the passenger seat and climbed into the driver’s seat. “If you put your bag back there, the trunk won’t shut,” Piero said to Rohan, starting the car.

  “Got it,” Rohan said, not failing to notice Piero eye him in the mirror. He climbed into the backseat, and had barely clicked his seatbelt when Piero accelerated, weaved into traffic, and gunned through the street. A cloud of black smoke clouded the rear window.

  Nora grabbed the handle over the passenger door. A nervous glance back at Rohan made him wonder if there was something going on he didn’t know about. Piero drove in silence, combating the aggressive traffic, the Mitsubishi’s engine droning like a hornet.

  It could have been nothing, but Rohan was pretty certain he noticed Nora purposefully looking away from the man. If he had to put money on it, he’d bet there was a past there. Not that it mattered, he told himself. The image of him on the plane, her head on his shoulder as she slept, flashed across his mind and he felt a sting of annoyance toward this Peiro guy.

  “So where are you from, Rohan?” Piero asked.

  His tone told Rohan that he should choose his words carefully. “The United States.”

  “I would have guessed Canada.”

  “All us gringos don’t look alike.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Nora said. “We’re working together.”

  “Work, eh?” Piero asked. He seemed to relax a little bit at the revelation. “I thought you exited this line of work when you left Peru, Nora.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Well, I look forward to hearing every word,” Piero said.

  ***

  Piero lived in a small villa with a red tiled roof. The walls were painted green and a large wrought-iron gate blocked a fading set of wooden double doors.

  Piero left Rohan and Nora in the car and told them to wait. As he inserted his keys into the iron gate, several scary, throaty barks sounded from inside the house and claws scratched against the door.

  “Dino! Sky! Tranquilense!” Piero yelled. He entered the house and then shut the door promptly just as Rohan saw a glimpse of two large black dogs.

  “Okay, so who the heck is that guy?” Rohan asked.

  “Just… we might have had a history.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, he’s an old flame, of sorts.” She looked away, then mumbled, “It’s not a big deal.”

  Nora stepped out of the car and grabbed her backpack. She looked back at the house wistfully. “Years ago, I broke his heart. I can’t blame him for the way he’s acting or feeling right now. Don’t take him too seriously, though. What matters is that we can trust him.”

  “And who’s to say he’s not going to sic his dogs on me?”

  “Do you want to stop Altemus or not?” Nora asked, giving him an angry look. Her anger was rising.

  Rohan waved his hands. “Okay. But if I have to punch him in the face, consider this a fair warning.”

  The front door opened and Piero motioned them in.

  The inside of the house was cool with stone floors and Incan wooden baskets hanging on the walls. Piero ushered them into a small but cozy sitting room with a Peruvian flag on one wall and a world map painted by hand on the other. On the map were clusters of orange dots on every continent, presumably places where he had traveled.

  “My home is small. I travel most of the year so I don’t need very much. But you will both be welcome as long as you want to stay.”

  “Hopefully we’re not here that long,” Nora said. “I came to finish up old business.”

  “Old business?” Piero said. “Oh, I’ve been handling your old business.” He took off his shirt, revealing several scars across his chest.

  “What happened?” Nora asked.

  “Your friends paid me a few visits after you left.”

  Nora bit her lip in worry. “I had no idea. I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t want to be found if I remember correctly,” Piero said. “You gave me a fake number and fake address. I tried to find you.”

  Nora swallowed a lump in her throat. “Could they be watching now?” she asked, going to the window and closing a rickety shutter.

  “They’re always watching,” he replied. “So you better tell me what it is you need before all three of us end up with a bullet in our heads.”

  “We need to find the hidden city,” Rohan said.

  Awkward silence ensued, as well as an angry look from Nora.

  “What?” Rohan asked, shrugging.

  “That so?” Piero asked with a raised eyebrow. “You and everyone else.”

  “I had no idea this would happen, that they would connect me with you, Piero. But for what it’s worth, I’ve been paying a heavy price ever since I left Cuzco.”

  “Best I can figure,” Piero said as he walked back over and picked up an apple from the table. “You want me dead. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come back here.”

  “How much do they know?” Nora asked.

  “They know you took the tablet.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Rohan said. “Who is they, exactly?”

  Piero massaged his right temple, then bit into his apple and stared at Nora, waiting for her to explain.

  Nora started slowly. “It’s a secret group. Los Defenderos de La Historia. They protect the city, kind of. They’ve been tasked with guarding its location for centuries, and, well…. They’ll definitely use force if necessary, as you can see by Piero.”

  “Lethal force,” Piero said.

  Rohan shook his head, trying to understand all of it. “We don’t have a choice,” he said. “However dangerous this is, I’ve seen much worse, trust me.”

  “That’s a load of crap,” Piero said.

  “Try me,” Rohan said.

  “Watching a scary movie doesn’t count. If you don’t remember, we’re in South America, amigo. There’s no one to protect you here. You screw up, you end up in the afterlife.”

  “Got it,” Rohan said, rolling his eyes.

  “You helped me get to the lost city last time,” Nora said, putting a hand on Piero’s shoulder. A bit of pink was returning toner cheeks. “Can we count on you?”

  “Last time, it was under different circumstances.” Piero said.

  “Yes, it was different. But I need your help.”

  Piero puffed. Rohan felt the urge to punch him, even though he knew it was unwarranted. Why should he care if she had a history with this man, or if that history had been why he’d helped her last time?

  “I’m not putting my neck on the line,” Piero said. “Not again. But I’ll tell you how to get there.�
��

  He went to a bookshelf and pulled out one of three books he had. When he placed it on the table, he opened it and pulled out a faded map. He pointed to the jagged city lines tucked in between mountains and rainforests. “This is Cusco. Take a flight to Puerto Maldonado. It’s a small town about an hour from here. From there, it’s a short boat ride to the rainforest. Take this map and that’s the best I can do for you. If you want to find the city, you’re on your own.”

  Nora and Piero looked each other in the eye and he gave her a smirk.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to tag along?” she asked.

  “You can’t tempt me anymore,” Piero said. “But good luck, Nora.”

  Rohan got the sense that even though there was history between the two, there was still a hint of flirtation. Nora ran a hand through her hair and then snapped out of a half smile.

  “And what exactly is this city called?” Rohan asked, trying to diffuse the awkwardness.

  Nora rolled up the map and started out of the house. “The Lost City of Vilcabamba.”

  As they left the house, the sun was setting fast, and while Rohan didn’t see anyone, he got the strange feeling that they were being watched.

  Chapter 8

  They took a chartered plane to Puerto Maldonado, a small town at the base of a mountain with a runway strip cut through a field barely big enough to accommodate it.

  The altitude was getting to Rohan. Cusco was almost eleven thousand feet above sea level, and the descent into the rainforest region made his ears pop painfully.

  From Puerto Maldonado, a place that reminded Rohan of the places in South America he’d seen on television, with bustling markets, goats running through the streets, mopeds everywhere, and stands filled with fruit so colorful it could have been neon.

  They soon found a guide that Piero had told them to seek out, and he got them into a taxi and out of the town.

  Out here it was green fields under a clear blue and expansive sky. Rohan wasn’t the least bit sad that Piero refused to come with them. That would have made this trip even more difficult. And annoying.

  Soon they were driving along a bumpy, dirt path surrounded by trees—but the journey was feeling familiar. Too much traveling to foreign countries to search out ghosts or lost artifacts lately, he supposed.

  “You too,” the man said, glancing at them in the rearview mirror, “make a muay beautiful couple.”

  He winked at Rohna.

  “Um….” Nora glanced over, then smiled. “It’s not exactly like that.”

  “Yeah, work partners,” Rohan said, not meaning for the agitation to come through, but it did, and judging by Nora’s raised eyebrow, it was obvious.

  “Well, no, that’s wrong,” the driver said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  Nora leaned forward so she could better see the man instead of in the mirror. “What?”

  “I can tell,” he said. “An aura around the two of you. I see it.”

  Nora chuckled nervously, then leaned back, away from Rohan. He wasn’t sure what the driver could tell or sense, but at the moment, the guy felt dead wrong. Not that Rohan didn’t almost feel it too, but he tried to push it back and ignore it.

  The driver carried on, whistling to himself with the occasional glance back at them in the mirror. Rohan was minding his own business, when Nora leaned over and nudged him.

  “Hey,” she said, in almost a whisper. “I’ve been thinking….”

  “Is that rare?” He didn’t even know why he said it. Stupid, he thought, wanting to slap himself.

  “Shut up. I’ve been thinking about our trip… you know, down south.”

  For a second he didn’t get the reference, and even thought this was some attempt of hers to talk dirty, but then it hit him—the afterlife.

  “It’s hard to forget,” he said. “Even if you were unconscious half the time.”

  “Yeah, and even more so when you see The Six in person.”

  “Sorry, the what?” Rohan was sitting up straight now, eyes locked with hers.

  “The Six… I don’t know. Demons, or gods, depending on what texts you read. Azrael is one of the more powerful, but the others are equally as scary. The worst of the fallen angels, corrupted beyond all sense of redemption.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rohan said, lowering his voice in case the driver was listening, but the man was still whistling away.

  “I didn’t know if I believed in them, not until last night. And even then I wondered if it was crap, and I was losing my mind.” She leaned in even closer, almost inaudible now. “If they’re tied to this tablet and the Eye of Gilgamesh, this is worse than we thought. I mean, like end of days worse.”

  “You waited this long to tell me you knew something about them?” he said. “I’m not sure I appreciate that.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out where you fall in my circle of friends,” she said.

  Rohan noticed silence, and glanced up just in time to see the driver averting his eyes. The whistling returned, but Rohan had to wonder how much the man was purposefully listening in on.

  They reached a brown river that flowed quickly and dangerously. The currents were strong and made Rohan nervous about navigating them. But a boat guide named Ricardo assured them it would be okay as he helped them into a sturdy speed boat. And they sped over the top of the river, bouncing up and down as Ricardo negotiated around wide river bends.

  It was hot. Ungodly hot. Hotter than Cusco, which was hard to believe because it was only a few hours a way.

  Nora read the map as they drifted down the river, and after an hour she told Ricardo to let them off at shore and slipped him several hundred dollars for him to wait. He counted the money with wide eyes, and with a charming smile he pointed to a case of beer and fishing pole and told her in broken English that he would be just fine.

  They climbed off the boat into muddy soil that reached their ankles. The air bled with insect buzzing and the distant calls of birds that Rohan had never heard before. His shirt was soaked—nothing new from all the adventures he’d been on—but his throat blistered from thirst and a constellation of mosquitos clouded around his arms, and no amount of bug spray would keep them away.

  Nora looked like she had been traveling through the rainforest her entire life. The bugs didn’t faze her, and though she was sweating she didn’t show any signs of exhaustion. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and black rain boots that went up to her knees. She was tougher than she looked.

  They made their way up a slope to the forest’s edge. Nora unhooked the machete off her belt and cut her way into the thick, green darkness.

  As they walked, Rohan wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and took a sip of water from a canteen.

  “What’d you ever see in Piero?” Rohan asked.

  Nora glanced back, an eyebrow arched. She cracked through a clump of vines and said “Really?”

  “He’s not that good looking. Not that I care, or anything like that.”

  She just smiled and kept pushing forward. “Drink more water. Your skin is looking pale.”

  They pushed on, the heat growing unbearably worse by the minute.

  “Back to those demons,” Rohan said, more to distract himself than anything else. “Is there something in those legends about what happens if they break free?”

  “Nothing different from every other dooms day prediction you’ve probably heard,” she said as she ducked under a low tree branch and then hopped over a puddle. “Each will be given their own territory, their section of the world, do with as they please.”

  “And let me guess,” Rohan said, “as they please means murder, possession, and worse.”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  They came to a steep decline and helped each other down it, grabbing tree branches and large rocks—anything that fastened down and could keep them from plummeting to the trees and rocks at the bottom.

  “You’re sure this is the same path you took before?�
�� Rohan asked, pushing through some branches that blocked their path.

  “Positive,” Nora said.

  They reached the bottom, where the ground spread out before them. A light mist dampened the leaves and made their air thick and hard to breath.

  Nora pulled out a GPS and confirmed the coordinates. “We’re getting closer. We’re almost to the exact place I was last time.”

  They’d been in the trails of the Peruvian jungle for over two hours now, and it was getting even hotter. The forest floor was like brown soup and they waded through it.

  Several times Rohan had to watch himself. He crossed a line of leaf cutter ants perpendicularly and stirred them up. They had to run for several minutes to avoid an attack.

  Another time he got hit in the ear by a nut—a group of monkeys followed them for several yards, shaking branches and screaming at them.

  And three times they found themselves under a massive flock of parrots who turned the sky green with their brilliant feathers. Rohan and Nora stood at the base of a kapok tree, hiding in its gnarled maze-like trunk as they waited for them to pass, avoiding tarantulas that had gathered on the wood.

  Rohan couldn’t help but wonder at the amazing chaos in the forest. The entire place was alive. All he had to do was stop and watch long enough to see the very forest floor moving underneath him. Yet it was peaceful. He would have liked to visit this place with Senna, but he told himself to stop thinking about the past.

  “I know it sounds strange, but this looks familiar,” Nora said. “There,” she said, pointing to a fallen tree that rose up like a horn. “I was right here, and then…” She spun, looking at a mound of rocks. “Yes…” She followed it, then stepped close to where the drooping tree hung over the rocks.

  And then she was gone.

  “Nora?” Rohan said, stepping close, careful not to slip on the slick rocks. “I know we never explicitly talked about disappearing out of thin air, but maybe we need to have that discussion?”

  Her head poked out from what looked like two rocks. “I remember exploring here.”

  “But this isn’t the spot?”