by E. A. Copen
Nothing could have prepared me for the scene in the pawn shop’s back room. It looked like someone had taken several gallons of red paint and exploded them. Speckles, streaks, and smears colored the walls. The carpeted floor was soaked in it. Red chunks lay everywhere, some of them still recognizable as once belonging to a human. A pale string of intestine snaked from the right of my shoe over to an overturned display of records where it disappeared inside the upper torso of a police officer still wearing his uniform shirt.
There, beside the officer, was the most twisted-looking ghoul I had ever seen. I could count every knob of every vertebra in his back, see the space between his ribs, though the skin clung tight. Torn bat ears hung limply around holes in the side of his head. No hair either. His feet were larger than a human’s, more like webbed rabbit feet. He squatted with all his weight on the balls of those inhuman feet, ripping the flesh from the dead officer’s skull.
The carpet squished under my foot when I stepped into the room, and the ghoul turned his bloodstained face toward me. With no nose, dark eyes and a mouthful of bloody, serrated teeth, he looked more like an amphibian than something that had once been human. He opened his mouth and lashed a forked tongue out along with a gurgling hiss.
I leveled my staff at him, ready to put him down with a blast of energy.
Then, suddenly, Jean was in front of me, waving his arms. “Stop,” he cried. “That’s him! That’s Dominique!”
The momentary distraction cost me. The ghoul leaped through Jean and wrapped itself around me, claws flashing. Serrated teeth sank into my bicep. My brain flashed through a momentary panic that I’d been bitten by a ghoul, but I didn’t have time to deal with it. It was done, and I had to survive the encounter or else more children would die.
As the weight pushed me off my feet, I managed to plant the end of my staff and snarl out a spell that sent the ghoul flying away from me. He hit the far wall where a shelf fell and knocked him in the head, cracking the wood in two. He staggered to his feet, stunned but still aware. And minus one arm below the elbow. The ghoul regarded his missing limb and licked his lips.
A crash drew the ghoul’s attention to the back door as it swung open. Khaleda stepped in, an obsidian dagger in each hand, ready to face off with the ghoul. The creature let out a scream and charged her before I could intervene, tangling her in its long limbs and claws. Daggers went into the ghoul’s back, side, and arms. They came away bloody. Still, the ghoul didn’t stop ripping at her.
I followed it with my staff, gripping the wood tightly. I could hit it again, knock it away from her but there was no guarantee I’d hit the ghoul and not her. The force of the last spell had ripped off his arm. I was on a magic high thanks to all the extra energy, which meant my spells were amplified exponentially. I hadn’t meant to rip off the ghoul’s arm, just push it back. And if I missed and hit Khaleda… The spell could do a lot more permanent damage.
“What are you waiting for?” she screamed, kicking at the ghoul. “Kill it!”
“Don’t!” Jean screeched. “You need him to fix me!”
The ghoul’s eyes flashed a brilliant yellow. He slapped Khaleda, leaving behind three deep gores on her perfect face where his claws dragged over her skin. Her head rolled to the side, wide-eyed as blood poured from the gashes. His hand came back, fingers positioned in a familiar grabbing pose.
Horseman, my brain screamed. Ghoul or not, Dominique was still one of the Horsemen, which meant he could do something no other ghoul could. He could reach into Khaleda and pull out her soul.
Not if I stop him first. I pointed my staff at the ghoul’s other arm and shouted. An arc of fire exploded from the end of my staff in brilliant blue flame. It lashed out to strike the ghoul’s hand, slicing through it like a hot knife through an ice cream cake. The ghoul wailed as its flaming arm tore away, smacking against the wall with a wet thud. Fire immediately jumped from consuming ghoul flesh to old, dry wood.
I closed on the ghoul as he lay writhing in pain, pressing my staff against the creature’s chin. It opened its mouth to snap at me. “Go ahead, Gollum. Make my day.”
Too big eyes blinked at me, the fire spreading up the wall reflecting in them. “Yield,” the ghoul hissed out, raising its arms. “We yield.”
Without turning my head, I called to Khaleda, “You okay?”
She staggered to her feet, eyes unfocused. I felt the surge of succubine power from her in time to put up a mental shield, and that was the only reason I stayed standing instead of falling to my knees. I swayed, basking in the pleasant call of her power. It crashed into me, setting my skin on fire with the need to go to her and relive the highlight reel from the night before flashing through my head. I held my ground, but only barely.
The ghoul wasn’t so lucky. He stopped writhing immediately and flopped over onto his belly, pulling himself along the carpet with bleeding stumps to put his head at her feet. “My lady,” it gurgled out in the creepiest voice I’d ever heard.
“I can order him to come with us,” Khaleda said, her eyes locked on the ghoul. Her skin pulsated with an eerie white glow. “He’ll be passive as long as I hold him enthralled.”
“Dial it down, would you? I don’t like drooling on myself.”
She smirked. “If I dial it down, I will lose him. He is stronger-willed than you.”
I snarled at her but searched the walls. The fire was spreading quick enough we’d have to hurry to get out before the roof came down, but I couldn’t just walk a bleeding ghoul through the Quarter to my car. My gaze settled on a clamshell suitcase resting under some junk. I grabbed it, popped it open and kicked it over to Khaleda. “Tell him to get in.”
She did, and, to my surprise, the ghoul climbed inside the suitcase with a smile on his face, curling into the fetal position so he’d fit. Khaleda bent over, closed the suitcase, flipping the clasps closed. Then, without a word, she hauled him from the shop with me on her heels.
We rushed from the burning building and into the alley in the rear of the shop. Sirens wailed somewhere close by so we booked it for the car. I wanted to stay and try to explain things rather than flee the scene, but we were on a tight time limit. At dawn, I needed to be behind wards or all the power I’d worked so hard to gather would disappear.
Once they got the fire out, they’d discover the bodies inside and have a lot of questions, questions I couldn’t stop to answer. Hopefully, I could get everything sorted out with Emma, and she could explain it all in a way that made both the precinct and the news happy, but I doubted it. There were two dead cops, and I’d just fled the scene. I looked pretty guilty. Chances were good there’d be an extended investigation that would result in me spending time in an interrogation room. Whatever. If it waited until after I stopped the Archon, I was okay with that.
We reached the car and tossed the ghoul behind the seats as the first firetrucks pulled into the alley. I climbed in, started the car and took off as fast as it would move.
“You cut off his hands,” Jean said, horrified.
“You could’ve told me he was a ghoul, Jean. Hell, you could’ve told me he was the fucking Horseman we were looking for, too! We walked in there blind and unprepared. We…” I trailed off as something else occurred to me.
Kaitlynn had said the monster that took her looked like Jean. Dominique and Jean were both taken at the same time. If Dominique became a ghoul and Famine, what had Jean’s body gone on to become?
“A body without a soul,” I muttered in thought. “Undying. Effectively immortal. Sounds exactly like the kind of flesh suit I’d look for if I were something like an Archon. But what happens if you shove a human soul into the empty space occupied by an Archon?”
“What are you saying?” Khaleda asked.
I eyed Jean’s ghost. He wasn’t paying any attention to me, instead frowning at the suitcase where his half-brother’s mangled body was. “The Archon, the namer of Famine, is the soulless body of Jean Lafitte.”
Chapter Eighteen
The announcement hung between us in the quiet. I glanced again at the ghostly pirate beside me and tried to imagine him as some sort of arch villain with an evil laugh. I just couldn’t see it. Jean was a lot of things—overdramatic, overdressed, an embellisher of the truth, a ruffian, soldier, pirate, monster hunter—but no one could say he was evil. Yet his body had somehow been given the power to name a Horseman, then instructed that Horseman to rip the souls out of children before eating them.
A chill brushed over me as Jean floated closer. “That no good… Why, I never! Of all the…” He sputtered out a few more unfinished phrases before slumping forward, his ghostly head in his hands. “What do we do?”
“We keep going,” I said, turning onto the ramp that’d take us to US-90. “The plan doesn’t change. The only thing this affects is how much we know about the Archon. We’ve got an edge we didn’t know about. You know your body, even if it has been walking around without you for two hundred years. Hopefully, that gives us some kind of advantage when the time comes.”
“But if you destroy my body, how will you put me back in it?” Jean exclaimed.
“Hate to break it to you, Jean, but if it comes down to it, I might have to destroy your body to kill the Archon.”
“Kill an Archon?” Khaleda laughed.
The suitcase behind the seat rattled, and I jumped, nearly swerving into the next lane. “Keep him quiet, dammit.”
Khaleda ignored me. “An Archon can’t be killed, Lazarus. That’s the entire point. You can’t harm them. You can’t fight them. You can’t stop them. The only thing you can do when an Archon is involved is run the other way.”
“Then why are you helping me?” I snapped at her. “Why did Morningstar tell you to keep me alive knowing what I was up against?”
“I don’t think he was expecting you to take on an Archon, Lazarus. Not directly. The Horseman, perhaps, but an Archon?” She shook her head. “It can’t be done.”
“Never tell me the odds.”
“You’re insane.” She meant it as an insult, but I took it as a compliment and smiled to myself.
I pulled my little car up in front of my shop behind Emma’s black Escalade. The passenger door to her SUV opened first, and Moses stepped out. I paused at the sight of him, unsure. I hadn’t expected him to come along. Though I hadn’t told Emma not to bring her partner, I was still surprised to see him. This wasn’t a police matter, not strictly speaking, and he didn’t normally get involved in the magic side of things. Emma only did because she didn’t believe in it and wanted to make sure I was on the up and up.
Moses strolled over to the sidewalk. A small spark lit up against his palm as he struck a light on the end of a cigarette, taking a long pull. He nodded to me as I got out of the car. “Lazarus.”
“Those things’ll kill you, Moses,” I said.
“Ghouls, fae, gods, and monsters and you think a little tobacco is going to do me in?” He put the cigarette back in his mouth just as Khaleda got out of the car, clamshell suitcase in hand.
Moses’ eyes practically doubled in size at the sight of her. Though he’d seen her before in the waiting room at the hospital, she hadn’t had her powers active at the time. I’d felt the pull all the way over, but then I had the advantage of magic and extra mental shields. That and I’d been biting my cheek the whole way. I’d still had to beat down the libido with a club several times.
Poor Moses didn’t have a chance. He opened his mouth, and the cigarette fell out. Had he been a cartoon, his tongue would have rolled out of his mouth and his heart would’ve beat all the way out of his chest. His pleasant, Louisana drawl got a little heavier when he muttered as she passed by, “Lawd, have mercy on a poor sinner. Is it me or is she glowing?” He squinted at me. “Aw, hell. You both are, or I’m a crawfish.”
I opened the back of the car and pulled out the duffel bag full of stuff I’d brought with me. “Don’t get too excited, Moses. She has that effect on people, and she likes it the same way a spider likes a fly.”
“Well, this old man’d take that spider bite any day of the week.”
“What spider?” Emma stepped up beside him.
“You didn’t see Khaldea just walk by?”
Emma scowled at Khaleda who waited on the porch. “The bitch whose clothes are so tight I can see her religion? Yeah, I saw her. What of it?”
I paused on the sidewalk, glancing between Emma and Khaleda. “You mean you don’t feel that?”
“Feel what?” Emma asked? “All I feel is the rain, and I’d like to get out of it before I turn into a fish.” She stomped off for the porch.
I stopped beside Moses and watched the fiercest little lady alive stop to glare at the succubus, her powers in full force. “I give up,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s not human. She can’t be.”
“Pretty sure the only thing that turns her on is working me to death.” Moses shook his head and ground his foot on the cigarette that’d fallen from his mouth. “Or maybe she only works on men.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, but then again, I’d seen her have the same effect on those strippers at Karma as she tended to have on me. Khaleda was Viagra on legs. Male, female, didn’t seem to matter. If she was on, everybody around her was too. Except, apparently, Emma Knight.
“I didn’t roll out of bed at four this morning to stand on the porch in front of a locked door,” Emma snapped. “Come on, boys.”
I sighed, shifted my grip on the duffel, and shook my head. “Definitely inhuman.”
The women on the porch parted to make room for me. I stopped in front of the door, extending a hand and concentrating hard on not letting too much power slip through. As charged up as I was, it wasn’t an easy task. The wards carved into the door glowed a bright crimson for a moment before dying with a sizzle.
“You’re hurt,” Emma said beside me, her gaze still fixed forward.
I looked down at myself. The ghoul had torn up my chest pretty bad, but the wounds had mostly stopped bleeding. They should’ve hurt, but with all the power coursing through me, I wasn’t surprised they didn’t. The magic high had a way of drowning out or dulling most pain. I could still feel the bite in my right bicep. It burned as if it were on fire.
I knew what it meant. Being bitten by a ghoul was a death sentence, even for me. I might have longer than most people if I was lucky and careful, but even the Pale Horseman wasn’t immune to death. The fever would burn through me within the week and leave me just like it’d left Dominique. Except I wouldn’t let it get that far. Once this business with the Archon was settled, I’d end it myself rather than let myself become like him.
But Emma didn’t need to know all that.
“I’m fine,” I lied and unlocked the door.
The front room of my office was small. A few cheap, padded chairs sat off to the left around a second-hand end table. Pamphlets on ghosts, possession, and places of power littered the small table around a lamp. I went to the lamp and pulled the chain, illuminating the small room. On the opposite wall stood a counter with more pamphlets, plastic storage bins with rocks, crystals, and bits of polished metal beside a cash register.
I walked past the counter and made for the back room with Khaleda and her suitcase behind me. The back room is where I worked any real magic, but it was also where I met with clients who wanted more than just a talisman or a quick reading. As such, it was decorated to look the part of a medium’s workspace. A round table sat in the center of the room with a black, lacy tablecloth. On top of that sat a replica of a human skull, beeswax candles, and a crystal ball. I cleared all that away by wrapping up the tablecloth and dropping it in a wooden trunk.
Underneath, the table was much less impressive, bearing nothing more than a simple pentagram inside a circle.
The pentagram had a bad reputation anymore, mostly because of its mistaken association with non-Christian religion. Ironic, considering ancient Christians once used the same symbol to represent the five wounds of Christ. In medieval times, the sa
me symbol was used to represent the five virtues of knighthood. Sir Gawain—yes, that one—even had it on his shield as a symbol of his virtue and faith.
I didn’t consider myself any kind of modern knight, or religious for that matter, but I did believe in the power of the symbol itself. Humans were born with five physical senses. Lay down, and you’ll find the human body itself forms the same symbol with the head, hands, and feet all being points on the star. Mathematically, the pentagram satisfies the rules for a golden ratio. For me, the pentagram wasn’t so much a symbol of faith, but of rational thought and physical power, a link between my five senses and the magical world. For that, it didn’t need to be anything fancy.
With the table cleared, I set about drawing a secondary circle on the floor.
Emma stood over me as I worked, arms crossed, head tilted to the side. Her eyes burned into the back of my neck. “What are you doing?”
“Drawing a circle.”
“I see that. But what’s the purpose of all this?”
I crawled a few inches around the table, dragging the oil pastel with me. “The Archon’s been pulling souls from people, right? I thought, at first, it was just devouring them, but there’s more to it. I don’t think Kaitlynn’s soul’s been consumed yet. I know Jean’s hasn’t, which means it’s possible in theory to return a disembodied soul to its body. Before I go about doing that, I need to know if it works first. I’m going to test it on someone else.”
“Who?”
I eyed Jean floating in the air near the edge of the circle, his face grim. “Before I tell you that, there’s something else you should know. The thing that’s been eating those children? It’s another Horseman. Famine. And the Archon? Well, he’s to Famine what Baron Samedi is to me.” I stood and dusted off my hands away from the circle. “And I’m pretty sure the Archon is in the body of Jean Lafitte.”
Moses, who was examining a book, slid it back into the bookshelf. “Okay, then. Where’s this Famine?”
“Right here.” Khaleda swung the suitcase up onto the table, unsnapped the clasps and let the lid fall open.
