King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Joseph Nassise

  A door opened in front of me with a slight sucking sound and cold air wafted over my skin.

  The walk-in freezer?

  You have got to be kidding me!

  Gallagher said, “The three of us examined the body earlier and didn’t find anything unusual. But that doesn’t mean you won’t. Before we consider this a dead end, I’d like you to take a look.”

  “You’re going to need this,” Dmitri said, pushing a heavy jacket into my hands. “It’s cold in there.”

  I slipped it on and then followed the cold into the depths of the freezer.

  Denise called out one last piece of advice as the door was closing behind me.

  “Whatever you do, don’t touch the bedpost.”

  Bedpost?

  But then I heard the door close behind me and was too busy fighting down a sharp spike of panic as the realization that I was sealed in the dark with a dead thing threatened to overwhelm me. I took a couple of deep breaths, got my heart rate under control, and turned to the task at hand. My eyesight quickly adjusted to the darkness and the place swam into view around me.

  The shelves lining the walls were full of the stuff you’d expect to find in a freezer: meat and vegetables and various dairy products, all in industrial-size packages. But it was the body on the folding table in the middle of the space that drew my attention.

  I stepped up and gave it a long look.

  The creature, whatever it was, looked smaller in death than it had in life, a phenomenon I’d noticed before in my days of working with the Boston PD as an unofficial consultant. The dead always look smaller, as if the departing soul took something else along with it, reducing what was left behind.

  What it didn’t look was any less deadly, however.

  It was humanoid in shape, with two arms, two legs, and its head all extending from a central torso. Its black, leathery skin hung loosely on its frame and it was easy to see how I could have mistaken it for being a woman dressed in some kind of robe, particularly at night from across the room. But that’s where the resemblance ended.

  There was no mistaking the circular maw that served as a mouth, nor the fact that the interior was lined with multiple rows of teeth, all bent inward at a slight angle, designed, I guessed, to pull its prey into its mouth one bite at a time. Its eyes, open and staring at the ceiling above, were pupil-less black orbs that jutted out a good inch from the narrow skull like a fish. Probably had incredible peripheral vision, making it tough as hell to sneak up on.

  The winglike membranes that I’d glimpsed the night before were thinner than I’d expected, calling into question my earlier hunch that they allowed the creature to take to the air like some kind of giant bat. They seemed more vestigial than anything else, something that hadn’t evolved at the same speed as the rest of it.

  The body was laced here and there with parallel slashes, evidence that Dmitri had gotten in a few good blows with those claws of his, and the business end of a two-foot stake made from a broken bedpost was embedded in the left side of its chest, right about where you’d expect the heart to be if the thing followed any semblance to human physiology.

  The bedpost had obviously delivered the killing blow, but it made me wonder why they had needed it in the first place. Couldn’t they have just blasted it into oblivion with their magick?

  I made a mental note to remember to ask them that very thing.

  Steeling myself, I reached out a hand and poked the creature with my index finger, half expecting it to lash out in response.

  Nothing happened.

  “Of course not, you idiot,” I muttered, “it’s dead.”

  Satisfied it wasn’t going to suddenly sit up on me, I lifted each of its arms and examined its hands one at a time. The fingers were long and narrow, with one extra knuckle on each, and were tipped with thick talons that reminded me of those on a hawk or other bird of prey. An image of the thing perched on the frame of Rebecca’s bed swam through my mind and I knew the comparison wasn’t that far off.

  I spent another fifteen minutes examining the creature as thoroughly as I could but didn’t find anything that I would label “unusual.” I mean, yes, the whole damn thing was unusual, I’ll give you that, but that hadn’t been what I’d understood Gallagher to mean when he’d said it, and aside from the fact that the creature existed at all, I didn’t see anything else of particular interest.

  I even tried using my ghostsight, to no avail.

  If there had been anything of interest here to find, it was beyond my limited abilities to ferret out.

  23

  HUNT

  Back in Gallagher’s office, with a hot cup of coffee in my hands and my body beginning to warm up, I relayed to the others what I’d found, which was essentially nothing. They weren’t surprised; after all, they hadn’t found anything either.

  Unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I asked Gallagher the question that had been bugging me ever since I’d seen that bedpost jutting out of the creature’s chest.

  “What’s up with that stake? Why not just blast the thing with your Art?”

  He stopped his pacing for a moment to answer me. “The room was too small,” he said, with more than a trace of frustration. “If I’d cut loose I would have run the risk of hurting one of you or possibly even one of the family members watching from the hallway.”

  “Never mind the fact that using our Art in front of witnesses is generally frowned upon,” Denise added, for my benefit.

  I still didn’t see how they’d gone from hammering it with a magickal lightning bolt to stabbing it in the heart with a bedpost, of all things. “What did you do, grab the nearest thing to hand? What if it hadn’t worked?”

  “Then we probably wouldn’t be here talking about it, Hunt,” Gallagher snapped.

  Yeah, no shit, Sherlock, I wanted to say. That was precisely my point. We’d gone into the situation totally unprepared and had apparently barely escaped with our lives. I wasn’t all that impressed with how things were going.

  Which brought me to my other question.

  I turned toward Denise and asked, “What would have happened if I’d removed the stake?”

  There was a certain undercurrent of amusement in her voice when she answered. “I don’t know, but there are enough creatures out there with the ability to regenerate and heal their wounds that I thought it best to leave well enough alone. Removing it might have started the healing process. I didn’t think you’d want it waking up in the middle of your examination.”

  She had that right. Having that thing suddenly sit up? No, that wouldn’t have gone over well with me at all.

  “Well, at least we can all rest easy now,” I said, trying to look at the bright side.

  Gallagher grunted. “How’s that?”

  I gave him a quizzical look; it seemed obvious to me, but if he needed me to explain it … “We saw that thing stealing the soul right out of the little girl. Seems obvious that we’ve got our killer. Things should start getting back to normal.”

  Silence greeted my statement.

  “Right?” I insisted, getting a bit nervous given their continued silence.

  After another long moment, there was a discreet cough from the other side of the room. Dmitri.

  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Hunt, but there were two more cases reported this morning. Both in different parts of town. And both happened long after we’d killed the one you examined,” he said.

  Now I understood the general feeling of doom and gloom. If it had been that hard to take down one of them working alone, then dealing with several at once was going to be a real pain in the ass, to say the least. Never mind the fact that we didn’t have any idea where to find these things …

  “Okay, now what?” I asked.

  Denise spoke up. “We take what we’ve got to the High Council. They’ve got the resources to figure out what these things are, so let them come up with an appropriate solution, I say.”

  More silence.

  Eve
n I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

  “What?” Denise asked.

  “We can’t go to the High Council with this. It…”

  Denise cut him off. “Of course we can, Simon! This is exactly the kind of situation the Council was created for in the first place. You’re the Lord Marshal, for Gaia’s sake, they have to listen to you.”

  A sense of inevitability had crept into the room when I wasn’t paying attention and now it hung in the air around us. My gut ached in that way it does when you know something terrible is about to happen, even if you don’t know exactly what. I was struck with the sudden urge to tell Denise to shut up before it was too late, before the other shoe dropped.

  I wasn’t quick enough.

  Gallagher waited patiently until Denise finished her little tirade and now, in a softer voice than I would have expected, said, “We can’t go to the Council, Denise.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re dead.”

  The thud I heard was the proverbial other shoe dropping.

  “What happened?” I asked, when I realized that Denise had been shocked into silence.

  Gallagher sighed. “What did you expect? They got sick and died, just like everybody else. Or that’s what we thought, at least. Did you think I’d been elected to this post?”

  “Um, actually, yeah, I did.”

  He laughed, but it was a hollow, bitter laugh, full of pain and darkness. “Four weeks ago I was just one of the Marshal’s lieutenants. Then people start getting ill, dying, and suddenly everyone is looking to me to take charge because I was the most senior staff member still alive. Trust me, being Lord Marshal was the last thing I wanted.”

  “So you’re saying we’re on our own?”

  “Pretty much. There are a few major players left in town who didn’t take off after the news of the High Council’s death got out, but not many. I’ve been in touch with each of them, trying to coordinate a response to all of this, but it hasn’t been easy. Until now, we didn’t know what we were facing.”

  We still don’t, I thought.

  I had to give the guy credit. Whether he’d wanted to be Lord Marshal or not, he’d stepped up when necessary and done what he could to help people. My own initial reaction, by comparison, was downright embarrassing.

  “So my question still stands. Now what?”

  The attacks this morning clearly showed there were at least two of the creatures still out there, but beyond that we really didn’t have any idea what we were facing. The whole city might be infested for all we knew.

  I thought about the nun I’d seen in the church the night before. It was clear to me now that it hadn’t been a nun at all, but rather one of these creatures. I’d thought the “nun” had been praying with the patient, when, in fact, the creature had probably been feeding on the poor person’s soul while I was right there in the room.

  I physically shivered when I realized how much danger I’d been in without even knowing it.

  If I’d caught up to it there at the end …

  I hadn’t, though, and that was all that mattered.

  That and stopping these things before the situation grew any worse.

  “We need to figure out what these things are if we’re to have any hope of stopping them,” Gallagher said. “The Council would have been our best resource, but they certainly aren’t the only one.”

  Denise laughed, but it was a bitter, tired laugh. “The Council was the best and brightest of us, Simon. That’s why they were the Council, for Gaia’s sake. Without them, we’ve got nothing.”

  I’d never heard her sound so defeated.

  But Gallagher didn’t agree.

  “We can ask Blackburn,” he said.

  From the shouting that erupted after Gallagher made his suggestion, I got the sense that consulting this Blackburn character was the last thing on earth Denise and Dmitri wanted to do.

  Trouble was, I was starting to get the feeling that it didn’t matter what we wanted. Things were moving too fast for that.

  24

  HUNT

  Six hours later, just before midnight, I found myself sitting against the gunwale of a decrepit old skiff as it made its way slowly through the bayou toward Blackburn’s, its puttering engine sounding like it was going to give out at any minute and leave us stranded in alligator country. Gallagher didn’t seem concerned, though, so I tried to keep my nerves to myself and hoped that he knew what he was doing.

  It wasn’t easy. It was made more difficult by the fact that both Denise and Dmitri had flatly refused to accompany us.

  After the initial argument in Gallagher’s office had died down, we’d decided that before going to Blackburn we would first see if we could find any information in the High Council’s library about the creatures.

  That seemed like a good idea to me. At least until we’d set foot in the place.

  Despite the fact that I couldn’t see anything, it was clear just from the way our voices were echoing that the room we were standing in inside the Chief Councilor’s mansion was enormous. It was supposed to hold all the knowledge that the seven mages who made up the Senior Council had accumulated during their long years as practitioners of the Arts. With their deaths, control of the place had passed to Gallagher.

  We were armed with photographs of the creature and a determination to search the library for any hint of what we were facing.

  How the hell we were going to do that given the size of the place, I had no idea.

  As it turned out, neither did the others.

  They guided me to a chair and left me there as they began to search the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, looking for anything that might prove helpful. They brought stack after stack of books and parchments back to the study area in the center of the room and spent hours paging through them, to no avail. Conversation went from hopeful and enthusiastic to practically nonexistent as the scope of the task became evident. We could spend days in there without knowing if we were even getting close.

  Hell, for all we knew, they’d already skipped past what we were looking for without even knowing it.

  Finally, after hours of hunting for what was the equivalent of a needle in an entire county of haystacks, Gallagher again brought up the idea of consulting Blackburn.

  Another argument ensued, but this time Gallagher had his mind made up.

  “Ignoring a resource as powerful as Blackburn is stupid!” he finally shouted, silencing the others. “You can stay here if you want, but I’m going.”

  “Then go!” Denise snarled in return. “But you’ll be going alone. There’s no way in hell I’m getting near that thing!”

  Dmitri hadn’t said anything himself, but given the animosity that was pouring off him in waves, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that he supported Denise’s decision.

  The fact that Denise used the word “thing” to describe Blackburn didn’t escape me.

  Which made what I did next surprising, even to myself. I’m still not sure what perverse need for self-inflicted suffering made me speak up at that moment.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  Which was how I now found myself being ferried through the bayou in the dead of night with only Gallagher and an old Creole fisherman for company.

  The cypress trees, their branches hanging down almost to the water’s edge like mourners with their heads bowed, cast odd shadows across the water in the bright moonlight. Our guide steered us along without trouble, as if he’d been doing this very thing for untold years.

  For all I knew, he had.

  To my surprise, the swamp was alive with sound, even at this hour of the night. The frogs had a chorus all their own, from the guttural belching of the bulls to the chirps of the smaller tree frogs. They were joined by the incessant buzz of the insects that swarmed around us and the occasional hoot of a far-off owl.

  From time to time a loud splash could be heard, and each time it happened, I tensed. I watched the water, wary of gators, but other than an
occasional glimpse of something moving off in the distance, I didn’t see anything.

  “So you think this Blackburn guy will help us?” I asked, if for no other reason than to keep my mind off the alligators I knew had to be out there in the swamp watching us and thinking about their next meal.

  He took his time answering. “He might.”

  My, that was reassuring. “What do you mean, might? I thought that’s why we came out here in the first place.”

  “It’s not that easy, Hunt. Blackburn can be … difficult.”

  I wasn’t going to let him off that easily. “How so?” I asked.

  His silence was longer this time, and I found myself wondering what he was afraid of. Blackburn couldn’t be that bad.

  “A long time ago, Blackburn was one of our best and brightest. They say that he could have risen to head the High Council, if he’d wanted. But somewhere along the way he fell off the path, so to speak, and something happened to him.”

  Around us, the night fell quiet, as if even the denizens of the swamp waited to hear what Gallagher had to say.

  “Blackburn encountered something out there, in the darkness where man was not meant to go, and it changed him. Made him … different. Both more and less human, if that makes any sense.”

  Oddly enough, it did. I’d once encountered a being like that myself and the experience had changed me as well. I knew more than one person who would say it wasn’t for the better, either.

  Gallagher went on. “Blackburn bought himself an old estate on the edge of the bayou and retreated there over a decade ago, cutting himself off from the rest of the practitioners in the city, unable or maybe just unwilling to interact with them any longer. Frankly, I’m not sure he’s even still alive.”

  I wasn’t sure who was the bigger fool, him for thinking Blackburn would have any interest in helping us or me for blindly following along.

  Gallagher fell silent at that point and wouldn’t say anything further. I sat there, staring out into the swamp around us, and wondered what would possess a man to retreat into a place like this. And what might make another man seek him out knowing what he already knew. It revealed a side to Gallagher that I hadn’t suspected and I wondered if it had anything to do with Denise’s departure from both the Circle and the city.