King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Joseph Nassise

  “They’re not sick at all. They’ve been attacked.”

  I told them everything that had happened to me that night: how I’d been led through the streets by Scream, how I’d used my ghostsight to see the patients’ true condition while in the church, how I’d come back here to find the exact same thing.

  They listened without interrupting me, though I didn’t think it had anything to do with my oratorical skills. They were scared; something was feeding on these people, one soul at a time, and if that didn’t scare the crap out of you, nothing would.

  I turned to face Gallagher. “So what do we do about it?”

  To his credit, he’d already thought through the implications and come up with a plan of action. Say what you want about him, he was a better leader than I was.

  “We need to confirm just how widespread the situation is before we do anything. Maybe these are isolated cases or there’s something different about the patients in these two facilities that we aren’t seeing elsewhere.”

  He turned and looked at Dmitri. “Take Hunt to the clinics on Jolene, Davidson, Babbage, and Green. Go inside with him and let him get a look at the patients, see if the situation is the same there as it is here. If anyone gives you any trouble, have them call me directly.”

  He faced me, a sardonic expression on his face. “My people and I have been trying to crack this thing for a month. You go out to play tourist and come back with more information than we’ve been able to come up with in all of our efforts combined. I don’t know whether to hit you or hug you, Hunt, but I can tell you this—you have my thanks.”

  I was tempted to fire off a wisecrack, but surprised myself by taking his hand when he offered it and shook.

  I pretended not to see Denise’s smile.

  “You’ve been out half the night. Are you up for this?” he asked, indicating with a wave what he’d just ordered us to do.

  “I’m good until the sun comes up. After that, it will get harder for me to see.”

  “Then you’d best get going; you’ve only got about an hour.”

  We borrowed the keys to Denise’s Charger and were on the road moments later. The chill I felt as we rolled through the streets had nothing to do with the weather.

  We hit the clinic on Jolene first, as that was only a few blocks away. Five minutes was all I needed to confirm what I was beginning to suspect we’d find at all of our destinations: if the patients weren’t dead already, they soon would be. A body can only live for so long once the soul has departed.

  As it turned out, my suspicions were correct. We found the same thing at the clinics on Davidson and Babbage, and by the time we rolled into the parking lot of the one on Green, there was no doubt what we’d find.

  Something was feeding on the souls of the Gifted citizens of New Orleans.

  At the rate it was going, there wouldn’t be any of them left by month’s end.

  As the sun came up behind us, we fled home, thoroughly dejected and uncertain what we should do next.

  19

  HUNT

  I was roughly shaken awake by a hand on my shoulder shortly after sundown the next day. When I opened my eyes, I found Dmitri standing over me in the darkness.

  “Get dressed,” he said. “Something’s come up.”

  It took me only a few minutes to do so, but by the time I emerged from the spare bedroom, Dmitri was gone and Clearwater was waiting for me in the darkened hallway in his place. The look on her face was a mixture of anticipation and concern.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, sliding my sunglasses on to protect my sight. The lights in the hallway were off, but there was enough ambient light drifting around the corner from the kitchen at the other end to start causing me some problems. It was like looking through a tunnel: I could see just fine looking straight ahead, but my peripheral vision was already lost and the whiteness was starting to creep in from the edges toward the center. The glasses wouldn’t help for long, but at least they would make the moment of transition a little easier.

  Denise took my arm and led me down the hall. “The daughter of a man Simon knows has fallen ill. From the symptoms, it sounds like she’s been the victim of one of these attacks. The trouble is, she’s a Mundane.”

  I stiffened a bit at the way I felt hearing Gallagher’s first name roll off Denise’s lips and then shrugged it off. Whatever was going on with me lately, I’d deal with that particular bugaboo later.

  But I couldn’t shrug off the implications of what she’d said so easily. If it was true, if the girl had indeed suffered an attack from whatever had been feeding off the souls of the Gifted here in New Orleans, then that meant things had just escalated to a new level.

  Please don’t let it be the same, I thought to myself.

  As we neared the end of the hall, my vision swiftly narrowed until I was left in a sea of white. I let Denise lead me downstairs and out into the night, where my vision returned.

  One of the Lord Marshal’s Expeditions sat idling in the driveway with the young guy with the goatee who’d picked us up on that first morning behind the wheel. Goatee’s name turned out to be Scott Spencer, which just didn’t have the same ring to it, if you asked me. Turns out I’d been right about the military service: he’d served two tours in Iraq before coming home to New Orleans to help his family clean up in the aftermath of the storm.

  Gallagher gave him some instructions in a low voice and then we were off, headed through the city streets at a good clip. The revelations of the night before lay heavy on all our hearts, I suspect, but I felt especially bad for Simon. Even if he wasn’t the father of that little girl, I knew it had to be hard.

  Our destination turned out to be a large home about five miles east. There was a crowd gathered in the yard as we pulled in and parked. As we approached the group, someone at the rear of the pack saw us coming and shouted out in a language I didn’t understand. In response there was movement within the crowd and then a pathway opened through its center, toward the house.

  Apparently more than a few in the crowd recognized Gallagher. Several of them greeted him by name as we passed and many reached out to touch him, though whether it was a sign of encouragement for him or reassurance for themselves I couldn’t tell.

  One thing was clear, though.

  These people trusted him.

  Dmitri, Denise and I received our fair share of looks as we passed through the crowd, but they were of curiosity; no one appeared to mean us any harm. I suspected, though, that if Gallagher hadn’t been with us, our reception would have been different.

  A gray-haired black man with a worn and weary expression met us on the front porch where the light had been left off, perhaps for my benefit. I put him in his midfifties, probably the father of the family that lived here. He grasped Gallagher’s hands with no little show of gratitude.

  “Simon, thank you for coming so quickly.”

  Gallagher waved him off. “You knew I’d come, Pierre. Quickly now, take us to Rebecca.”

  Pierre nodded, then turned and led us inside the house. No sooner had I passed through the doorway than the interior lights rendered me unable to see, so I was forced to rely on Denise’s help to find my way. There were more people gathered in the foyer and the sounds of their discussion quieted as we passed through and then started up again, hushed this time, in our wake. We were led upstairs and down a narrow hallway. I could sense people standing in doorways, clustered together in fear and pain, watching us move past, and my heart went out to them as memories of my own little girl surfaced. I knew what it was like to lose a loved one. I knew all too well what they were going through.

  We were led inside a room at the end of the hall. I knew it had to be the little girl’s, Rebecca’s, room, for the grip Denise had on my forearm suddenly tightened.

  “Stay here a minute,” Denise said, and let go of my arm.

  She moved off and I could hear her and Simon discussing the situation with Pierre, asking about Rebecca’s symptoms, medications, the u
sual kind of briefing before examining a patient.

  For the moment, I tuned them out.

  As I’d adjusted to my blindness over the years, I’d become adept at knowing who and what was around me at all times. For instance, I knew without having to see him that Dmitri stood about a yard to my right, his presence coming through loud and clear on my mental radar. I knew, too, that Denise, Gallagher, and the girl’s father, Pierre, were all standing close to the foot of the girl’s bed.

  Maybe it was the change in air currents or the way sound bounced off their physical forms; I don’t know. All I knew was that I could trust my instincts when it came to this kind of thing.

  And right now, my instincts were telling me that we weren’t alone in the room.

  There was something else in here with us. Even if I couldn’t see it, I could sense its presence, something dark and dangerous, like staring into the eyes of a shark at the aquarium and knowing they were looking right back at you.

  Goose bumps rose along my arms.

  I moved a few feet to one side and reached out with my hand, patting the air until I found Dmitri’s shoulder. Leaning forward, I said, “I need to see something.”

  He shrugged, which I took for permission.

  I concentrated a moment, forging the link between us in my mind and then flicking that mental switch the way I’d been taught.

  Pain exploded through my head, but I was ready for it and just breathed easy for a moment until it passed. When it had, I opened my eyes and took a look around.

  The bedroom was decorated with posters of teen heartthrobs of television programs intermixed with drawings of unicorns, fairies, and, of all things, SpongeBob SquarePants. In other words, it was the room of a girl tentatively reaching out toward her teen years while still holding tightly to the things of childhood. Memories of my daughter, Elizabeth, suddenly filled my head and I had to force them away or I’d end up weeping in the corner.

  The furniture in the room was simple enough: a bookshelf, a nightstand, and a bed. Paperback books and a series of porcelain dolls dressed in different period costumes filled the shelves, while a hamster cage stood on the nightstand along with an electric alarm clock. The hamster was curiously still, standing in the wheel inside the cage.

  A young girl lay resting in the bed, the thin white sheets pulled up around her face and neck as if she were cold, despite the sweat that clearly stood out on her cheeks and forehead. Her long brown hair fell tangled and damp on the pillow beneath her.

  Denise, Gallagher, and Pierre stood in a little cluster a few feet away, talking about the girl and paying Dmitri and me no attention.

  The room was otherwise empty.

  Yet I still couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t alone. Something was in here with us. I knew I was right. I could feel it, like that tingling feeling you get at the base of your neck when you know someone is watching you even if you can’t see them …

  I dropped my link with Dmitri and triggered my ghostsight instead.

  That’s when I saw it.

  Something was perched on the edge of the headboard, staring down at the girl in the bed below. At first glance it looked like an elderly woman dressed in a chador, those loose black robes that covered the wearer from head to toe, leaving only the face exposed. But when I got a closer look I could spot the differences, starting with the fact that what appeared to be a black robe was actually the creature’s flesh. What I had taken to be long, draping sleeves were winglike membranes that stretched from wrist to ankle. Its eyes were as dark as midnight and they stared down at the girl with a sick fascination.

  The message those eyes were sending was loud and clear from my perspective.

  It was hungry.

  “What the hell is that?” I said aloud, pointing at the headboard.

  They must not have been able to see it, though, for after a moment Gallagher asked, “What’s what?”

  Afraid to draw the creature’s attention, I kept my voice down but didn’t take my eyes off of it. There was no way I was letting it out of my sight. “That … thing. Right there! Don’t you see it?”

  “There’s nothing there, Hunt.”

  But there was; I could see it as plain as day. Even as I watched, it stretched out its hands over the sleeping girl. The girl’s mouth opened in unconscious mimicry of the creature crouched above her and from it a wispy blue haze began to slip forth. It drifted above her face for a moment, a blind snake searching for its prey, before being pulled steadily toward the open maw of the creature looming over her.

  Denise must have sensed it, for I heard her say, “Wait, what’s that…” though it was more to herself than to the rest of us. I heard her begin muttering the words of a working under her breath.

  As I watched, the connection between the girl and the creature squatting above her intensified, the flow from the girl’s mouth coming faster and thicker at the same time. As the flow of power increased, the girl’s body strained upward in response, like a woman yearning for her lover, and there was something so obscene in that reaction that my stomach churned and it took all my will not to turn away. The girl’s body strained upward, until only the top of her head and her toes were touching the mattress. Her body shook violently from one end to the other as twin streams of similar energy began to spill forth from her eyes and follow the other stream upward.

  The creature sucked them all up with an obscene kind of enthusiasm, its dark eyes rolling back in its skull as if in ecstasy.

  I couldn’t let this continue. Heedless of what it might do to me, I rushed forward.

  I didn’t have a plan, didn’t really know what I was going to do, I just knew that I had to protect the girl somehow. As I got closer I reached out and tried to grab it with my hands.

  Faster than I thought possible, it lashed out with one arm, striking me in the face and knocking me backward to the ground.

  While it seemed to be able to conceal itself from the eyes of my companions, it couldn’t mask the fact that it had just knocked me halfway across the room. Nor could it disguise what it was doing to the girl herself. They couldn’t see the energy flowing from her, but the others could see how she was arched upward, her body flailing about, lending credence to what I was saying.

  As I climbed to my feet, my ghostsight showed me that the trickle of energy had become a raging flood, one the creature was struggling to finish. The more of that energy that the thing consumed, the weaker the aura around the girl became. The shimmering silver light that had surrounded her when I’d first arrived was growing dimmer by the second.

  We had to do something and we had to do it quickly. If we didn’t, the girl wasn’t going to live through the next few minutes, never mind the rest of the night.

  My lack of knowledge was a major handicap here, because I couldn’t even explain to the others what it was that I was seeing. By the time I did so the girl might be dead. I needed to let those with more experience with these kinds of things understand what we were facing, and I needed to do it in the next few seconds.

  A plan formed in the back of my mind and I grabbed at it in desperation, not seeing any other way to do what had to be done.

  Denise was out of reach on the other side of the room, which left me with only one option.

  Gallagher.

  Even as I turned toward him, I hoped like hell that I would live through the next few seconds.

  I didn’t bother taking the time to explain; we didn’t have seconds to waste. I grabbed him around the upper arm with one hand instead and used the other to point directly at the thing that was killing the girl right before my eyes.

  As he started to protest and tried to pull away from my grasp, I shouted, “Look!” and mentally pushed with everything I had.

  I’d spent the last several years borrowing the eyes of the dead and had even recently learned how to do the same with the living. But in all that time I’d never once tried to share what I was seeing with someone.

  Never mind doing it with a po
werful mage who really didn’t want me to in the first place.

  Lucky for me, he wasn’t expecting anything of the sort and I managed to get past his mental barriers and inside his head before he knew what was happening.

  In that second I went blind as I forced my sight to override his and the pain exploded inside my skull, worse than anything I’d ever experienced before. Gallagher’s innate defenses had sprung into action, snapping into place like mental shields, trying to push me back out of his head. It felt like being struck with sledgehammers from several directions all at once, and I let loose an involuntary cry of pain but refused to relinquish my hold. He needed to see what he was facing and this was the only way I could think of to pull it off.

  Thankfully, my gamble worked.

  I heard Gallagher gasp at my intrusion and then immediately curse as he got his first good look at what we were up against.

  “The girl!” he yelled, his voice ringing in the small room. “Protect the girl!”

  By this point I was starting to pay the price for my impulsive act. Pain filled my head, a roaring sensation that threatened to overwhelm my ability to think and to send me spiraling down into my own personal darkness. I found myself on my knees in the middle of that hardwood floor but I had no idea how I had gotten there. What I did know was that I couldn’t hold on for much longer.

  “Hurry…” I muttered, but I don’t think anyone else heard me, for the room was full of shouting voices and the shrieking cries of something that should never have been heard by human ears in this world or the next. Or any other, for that matter.

  I knew Gallagher would be fighting blind the moment the connection between us was severed, so I fought back against the encroaching darkness and the static building in my head.

  The roar of an enraged bear filled the room, letting me know that Dmitri had entered the fight. Whatever was sucking the girl’s soul, I hoped the combined might of two mages and a berserker would be enough to deal with it, because I was rapidly reaching my limit.

  I clenched my fists in counterpoint to the pressure in my head and tried to hold on, tried so hard for so long that time just seemed to slip away and there was just me and the darkness, fighting for dominion.