Eventually our guide said something in a language I didn’t understand and Gallagher answered him in the same tongue. A few moments later he pointed out across the water.
“There. Pointe du Lac in all its glory.”
I stared at the decaying structure and wondered just what the hell I was doing here.
Once, long ago, the mansion might been the height of southern elegance, but those days were long gone. Now it was a crumbling hulk, half smothered beneath vegetation. Rot showed through where the paint had been worn away by the passage of time and the moisture of the swamp, and I had a sudden image of the whole place falling down around our ears the minute we stepped inside.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
Gallagher said nothing.
The boatman guided our craft over to a dock hidden beneath the draping branches of a cypress grove. Unlike the house, the dock was well kept and probably no older than a few years. It told me right away that there was more here than met the eye.
After tying up at the dock, Gallagher and I disembarked and made our way across the overgrown lawn to the house proper, picking our way across the rotting porch to the front door.
Gallagher reached for the door handle, but I stopped him before he could open it.
“Don’t you think we should knock or something?”
“What for?” Gallagher asked. “He already knows we’re here.”
I was still trying to digest the implications of that statement when he pushed the door open and strode inside. With nothing else to do, and nowhere else to go, I followed.
25
HUNT
Gallagher led me through a series of darkened rooms full of cloth-covered furniture and the occasional lighted candle. Despite the dim light, he moved with purpose. It was immediately clear that he was familiar with the layout of the house.
I wondered if that was because he had been here recently or because nothing about the place ever changed.
We emerged from a long hallway to find ourselves in what must once have been a drawing room. An old crumbling piano stood to the left, the dust and cobwebs that covered it clear evidence that it had been a long time since music had filled this room. More cloth-covered furniture was scattered here and there about the place, with no real rhyme or reason to the layout that I could see. Directly across the room was a large fireplace and a few red coals still burned in its grate.
Clearly, someone had been in the room, and not too long ago, either.
To the right of the fireplace was a set of French doors. Both of them were open to the night just beyond.
Gallagher held up a hand, indicating we should stop where we were. From inside his coat he removed the photographs of the creature’s corpse that he had brought with him to show to our host.
As we stood there, I became aware of a thick stench that was slowly seeping into the air. It was like the smell of carrion on the highway under the hot summer sun mixed with the smell of rotting vegetables and the taste of sour milk on the tongue.
I wanted to gag, to force the smell out of my system, but I held back when I noticed movement near the open French doors.
Our host kept to the shadows just beyond the doors, a tactic that I assumed was designed to keep us from seeing him too clearly, from seeing what he had become. But darkness hides no secrets from me, and I had a moment to see just what it was we were dealing with. After getting a good look, I can honestly say that I wish I hadn’t.
Nothing living should ever look like that.
Blackburn appeared as if he’d begun to rot from the inside out. His skin was deathly pale, with that waxy look common to a corpse two days past its prime, and his veins showed through it as a twisting lattice of black lines that pulsed at odd intervals.
Long stringy hair framed a narrow face that was terrible to behold. His eyes were oversized and red, and his ears had lengthened and came to a point at the tips. When he turned his head to look in my direction, I could see that his nose was nothing but a seeping hole in the center of his face.
His voice, when he spoke, was like the drone of a thousand hungry insects. My skin crawled at the sound of it.
“You know my price?” he asked.
Gallagher nodded. “I do and I accept it fully.”
He turned to face me, and in the darkness I could see the tension pouring through his frame. “No matter what you see, don’t move,” he told me earnestly. “He’ll kill us both if you interfere.”
“What’s he going to do?” I asked, not caring that Blackburn could hear.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gallagher said. “Just don’t do anything.”
He turned away and held up the photographs in his hand. “We need to know what…”
That’s as far as he got.
One minute Blackburn was standing just outside the French doors, watching us, and the next he was standing on the other side of Gallagher, so close that he could have kissed his cheek had he wanted to. Something long and wet, like the tongue of a frog, emerged from Blackburn’s mouth and plunged deep inside Gallagher’s ear. Blackburn’s eyes fixed on mine and I realized with a sudden shock that he knew I could see quite well in the dark, that he could have done all this without my seeing any of it, that he’d chosen to show me what he was doing so I would know the extent of what it took to barter with him should I ever return on my own.
I fought the urge to vomit as Gallagher stumbled and would have fallen had I not reached out and steadied him. By the time I had done so, Blackburn was again on the other side of the room, standing in the shadows near the French doors.
The photographs Gallagher had held in his hand were nowhere in sight.
“Jesus Christ, Gallagher, are you all right?”
He shook his head, like a swimmer trying to clear water from his ear, and his voice had a faraway sound to it as he said, “Will be … just give a moment…”
He shook himself again, this time his entire body, like a dog shaking off water, and then stood tall on his own. His voice was steady once more.
“I’ve paid your price,” he said to our host.
“Yesssss,” Blackburn said and his voice dripped with the lazy sounds of satisfaction. “Ask your question.”
“The creature in the images,” Gallagher said, pointing to the photos that I now saw Blackburn was holding in his hands, “what is it?”
Blackburn barely even glanced at them. “The streets of the city are full of Sorrows.”
I felt my anger rise. We’d come here for information and we’d paid his price. Now the son of a bitch was going to dick us around? Not a chance. I opened my mouth to challenge him, but before I could Gallagher’s hand thumped me heavily on my chest.
“Don’t,” he warned. “He answered our question. Anything more will require that you pay the same price that I did. Is that what you want?”
Blackburn lifted his head, his eyes gleaming at the prospect of another bargain.
The sight of his eagerness made my guts churn.
“Not a chance in hell,” I replied.
Blackburn licked the thin, narrow edges that served as his lips. “What is a single memory against the answer to your most precious question?” he asked. “It’s really just a small price to pay. Surely you can spare a single memory?”
I stared, my revulsion growing. Without taking my eyes off of Blackburn, I asked Gallagher, “Is that true? Is that the price of his knowledge? A memory?”
“Yes,” the mage replied and the pain in his voice made it plain it wasn’t as easy as Blackburn made it out to be.
We’d gotten what we’d come for; it was time to get the hell out of there, I decided.
Gallagher didn’t say another word, just began backing out of the room.
I followed suit, not looking away from where Blackburn watched us with hungry eyes until we’d left the room behind.
Our guide was waiting for us and we made short work of casting off and getting underway.
Back in the boat, I could
n’t help but ask.
“What was it?” I asked.
“What was what?”
“The memory. What memory did he take?”
Gallagher was silent for a long moment, so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But he did, eventually, and when he did his voice sounded as if he had aged twenty years.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
26
HUNT
The sun was starting to rise as we made our way back into the city, and by the time we returned to the High Council’s library, I was left unable to see. Gallagher led me inside, where we found the others asleep at the table, open books and parchments piled up around them.
After guiding me to a chair, he shook the others awake.
“Sorrows,” he told them. “According to Blackburn, we’re dealing with a pack of Sorrows.”
That generated another round of arguing until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Quiet!” I hollered and to my surprise, they stopped.
Into the silence I asked, “Would someone please tell me what a Sorrow is?”
“It’s a myth. A legend. Nothing more,” Denise replied, and I could practically hear her glaring at Gallagher as she did.
“Blackburn believes differently,” he shot back.
“Blackburn’s brain rotted away a long time ago and so will yours if you keep it up! How could you let that thing do that to you?”
I didn’t want to listen to their spat. Or rather, I did want to listen, would probably have enjoyed it immensely in fact, but now wasn’t the time, so I quickly threw out a suggestion.
“If there’s any information available about Sorrows, real or imaginary, this would be the best place to find it, right? Particularly since we now know what we are looking for?”
Grudgingly, they agreed.
This time it didn’t take long.
“I think I’ve got something,” Dmitri called out, waking me from the catnap I’d been enjoying while the others were digging through the shelves. He waited for the others to join us and then explained, “The manuscript isn’t in the best of shape, and it’s written in a mix of Latin and Greek, but I think I can read most of it.”
He scanned the page in front of him, translating as he read it aloud.
“It’s the journal of an eleventh-century practitioner who was creating a kind of bestiary, information on various supernatural creatures that he’d pulled together from other sources,” Dmitri explained. “Here’s what he has to say about the Sorrows.”
Unearthly in nature, Sorrows were once harbingers of the dead, tasked with guiding the souls of the dead on their journey into the afterlife. But the Sundering infected them with madness and they forgot the purpose for which they had been created. They became corrupt, preying on the souls of the living like a pack of rabid dogs.
“The Sundering?” I wondered aloud, but no one knew what it meant. For all we knew it could have been anything from a minor spell to a major cataclysm. We could look it up, I supposed, but that would take additional time we really didn’t have.
Dmitri went on. “There is a paragraph or two that is illegible and then it picks up again. ‘From a distance they resemble a woman wrapped in a cloak and can thus be easily overlooked, but upon close examination they cannot be mistaken for aught but what they truly are: abominations against man and nature.’”
I thought about the Sorrow I’d seen in the church the other night, the one I’d mistaken for a nun. How was it that I’d seen it without difficulty, yet the one in Rebecca’s bedroom had managed to remain hidden until I’d used my ghostsight?
I put the question to the others.
“Perhaps it’s something it can turn on or off at will,” Gallagher suggested. “An offensive mechanism of some kind?”
“Not offensive, defensive,” Denise replied. “When it’s feeding, its attention is elsewhere, making it more vulnerable. Hiding itself from view, like a chameleon changing its color, would offer it some measure of protection.”
We had Dmitri check the text to see if it said anything on the issue, but it did not. Nor did it give any idea of the Sorrows’ strengths or weaknesses; we were just going to have to figure that part out on our own.
It did, however, give us hope that they could be defeated. The writer had wrapped up his entry with one final statement,
After many months, the Temple Knights located the last of the Sorrows’ nests and put the rest of the unholy creatures to the sword, ridding our world once and for all of the evil that they had wrought.
“Guess they missed a few,” Denise said. She’d gone for lighthearted, but the comment came out flat, reminding us that we were going to have to do considerably better.
Something about the wording was bothering me and it took a moment to puzzle it out. “It says nests. What’s that about?” I asked.
Simon grunted with distaste. “Sorrows always find a secure location within their hunting grounds to act as a kind of lair. Somewhere along the way someone started calling those locations nests and the name stuck.”
Lovely. At least we had one thing going for us now though: we knew what we were up against.
With that information in hand, we got back in touch with our various allies throughout the city, asking them to keep watch for anything that even remotely resembled a Sorrow.
Finding the Sorrows was the first step in solving our problem.
27
ROBERTSON
After getting Clearwater’s name from the clerk at the Majestic, Robertson put his people to work trying to track her down. Canvassing the neighborhood led to a sighting at a two-bit diner down the street from the hotel a few days earlier. Upon questioning the waitress, Robertson learned that Clearwater and her companions, whom he knew to be Hunt and Alexandrov, met with three other men before leaving together in a pair of SUVs. Soldier types, the waitress had called them, but that didn’t really give Robertson anything to go on. There’d been military personnel, from the regular army to the National Guard, in New Orleans since the hurricane; unless they’d been in uniform, there was no way to tell them apart.
The vehicles had been black, Yukons or Suburbans, something like that, according to the waitress, and no, she hadn’t thought to take down the license plates. Why should she? They weren’t of any interest to her.
It looked like the diner was a dead end.
That didn’t mean they were without recourse, however. Robertson assigned several local agents the task of digging into her background. Who was she? Where was she from? Did she have a record of past convictions? How about outstanding warrants?
While it certainly seemed like she was willingly aiding and abetting a fugitive, which itself was a federal crime, he told himself not to jump to conclusions. Perhaps she’d been taken captive by the other two. Given all the depraved things that Hunt had done over the years, kidnapping certainly wouldn’t be a surprise.
He’d know soon enough.
In less than an hour he had a decent-sized file on his desk detailing the life and times of one Denise Clearwater. It made for rather boring reading, actually.
Born and raised in San Diego, California to a middle-class family. Father and mother were both killed in an auto accident when she was sixteen. She attended the University of California for a year before moving to New Orleans and transferring to LSU. Moved to Massachusetts in 2003, or at least that’s when a driver’s license was issued to her at an address in Brookline.
No serious run-ins with the law, though she did have a penchant for speeding: four tickets in the last three years. She’d accepted responsibility on all of them and had paid the fines on time without argument.
Her credit report was limited, which was a little unusual. She had accounts in two major banks, one of which held a small nest egg that looked like she’d built it slowly over time, but no credit card history to speak of. It looked like she paid cash for most everything. She’d inherited the house in Brookline from a distant aunt, which probably explaine
d the sudden move east, and with the mortgage paid off there was no real need for a credit history.
In other words, she appeared to be your average American, though one with less debt than most.
Not the kind of individual he’d expected to be found in the company of Alexandrov, a black marketer, never mind a confirmed killer like Hunt.
His unwilling accomplice theory was looking more likely.
At that point he split his people into two squads and put them on different tracks. The first group would delve further into Clearwater’s life, looking for any connection between her and Hunt or Alexandrov. The various timelines would be compared and any common circumstances would be examined in more detail. If they’d interacted with each other for any reason at any time in the past, Robertson wanted to know about it. At the same time, the second group, comprised mainly of local police officers, would work their contacts and the streets, trying to determine where the trio had gone after departing from the diner.
Surprisingly, it was the second group that hit the jackpot first.
Clearwater had been seen in the company of two adult males at the home of a family named Lafitte the night before last, according to a beat cop who, in turn, had gotten the tip from one of her local snitches. She’d passed along the address, as well as the fact that the family wouldn’t be in this afternoon; they were attending the funeral of their daughter, who’d recently passed away after an illness.
Years ago Robertson might have been troubled by the need to intercept a man at his own daughter’s funeral, but he was well past that point now. Justice waits for no man, and catching the witness at an emotional moment might make him or her reveal something he or she would otherwise not want revealed.
King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Page 14
