by Layton Green
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • 36 • 37 • 38 • 39 • 40 • 41 • 42 • 43 • 44 • 45 • 46 • 47 • 48 • 49 • 50 • 51 • 52 • 53 • 54
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE RESURRECTOR
Layton Green
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE RESURRECTOR, copyright © 2017, Layton Green
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Ebook Interior by QA Productions
Other Works
BOOKS BY LAYTON GREEN
THE DOMINIC GREY SERIES
The Summoner
The Egyptian
The Diabolist
The Shadow Cartel
The Resurrector
The Reaper’s Game (Novella)
THE BLACKWOOD SAGA
Book One: The Brothers Three
Other Works
Forthcoming: Written in Blood
The Letterbox
The Metaxy Project
Hemingway’s Ghost (Novella)
Dedication
To Ryan K. and all the other true warriors out there
Epigraph
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
—Albert Einstein
-1-
KHAYALANGA TOWNSHIP
WESTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA
PRESENT DAY
The light of a full moon illuminated the couple huddled around a rusty oil drum in the center of the township. The trash fire inside the barrel doubled as a source of warmth and as an oven for roasting corn.
Behind them was the storage container they called home. A good space. Unlike most of the neighboring shacks, it had a metal roof instead of tarpaper. More resistant to wind and floods.
Just beyond the township lay the gentle swells of wine country. Golden fields and sprawling manors steeped in the wealth of the old Boer families. The inequalities of life in the Western Cape used to motivate the couple, inspire nightly political discussions with their neighbors while quaffing sour umqombothi beer, but they no longer cared for such things. Instead they stared with sightless eyes into the fire, numb from the sudden loss of their only child, a sixteen-year-old boy who cut his leg collecting copper and, less than a month later, succumbed to a bacterial infection in the township’s struggling clinic.
Shouts rose in the distance. A gang fight or a robbery. Two gunshots rang out, and then another. The grieving parents didn’t flinch. These disturbances were a nightly occurrence.
Besides, what could touch them now? Their son was dead. Their souls had fled to join his.
A gust of dry wind brought a whiff of sewage. As the wife turned the sharpened sticks piercing the maize, the commotion rippled through the township, growing closer to their home. Screams. Another gunshot. The wife noticed her neighbors pointing and shouting. Someone called her by name, warning her to seek shelter.
The husband seized her wrist with startling force. She had not felt his strength since Akhona had died. Yet instead of pulling her inside, he stood motionless, a strangled cry escaping his throat. When the wife finally looked up and saw the source of the uproar, the ground wobbled beneath her, and she collapsed into her husband’s arms.
Fifty feet away, a shirtless teenage boy was running towards them, followed by a group of men shouting and waving pistols. When the boy caught sight of the couple, he slowed beside a cluster of low, makeshift power lines. His smooth black skin possessed a grayish pallor. The woman thought she must have been hallucinating when she noticed that his fingertips looked like thorns from an acacia tree, and that instead of a bird-like adolescent frame, muscles rippled across his arms and torso.
Still, she knew him. She would always know him.
“Mother,” the boy croaked, as if the power of speech was an unfamiliar thing.
A brick mason grabbed the boy from behind. The boy turned and tossed him ten feet away, collapsing a tin shack. Two more men rushed forward as the mother screamed at them to stop.
With a neutral expression, the boy grabbed a cluster of power lines, spasmed as electricity crackled through him, and tossed the live wires into the group of men, scattering them.
The husband took a step back, his mouth agape. “Akhona?”
The woman had no such reservations. She rushed forward, aching for her son, his touch, his smell, not caring how this impossible thing had happened. The boy, Akhona, reached for her.
Another man shouted unclean thing in Xhosa, the language of the township. He ran up and fired a gun into the back of the boy’s head. Akhona took a few more steps, then pitched forward and lay still. Blood, bright and clean, poured from the wound.
The woman wailed and collapsed atop her dead son for the second time in a month. The father cast a fearful glance at the body, not quite as removed from reality as the grieving mother. It was their son, no doubt about it.
But how? The father had helped lower Akhona into his grave, had shoveled tired red earth onto the coffin.
Incredulous, the father lifted his gaze until it rested on the same place the rest of the crowd was staring: a halo of light spilling from the tower of a gray stone manor. Looming atop the nearest hill like a malevolent spirit trapped in granite, the manor was a place the father knew by reputation only, a place no one from the township dared approach.
A place where the Bad Things happened.
-2-
NEW YORK CITY
“Hajime.” Begin.
After announcing the last bout of the night—the finals—the tuxedoed Japanese man returned to his seat. He was not a referee. There were no referees. Only a few dozen wealthy spectators and a pair of gladiators who had weathered the storm of brutality and remained standing.
The night’s arena was the courtyard of a fortified stone monastery, The Cloisters, hidden in the heart of upper Manhattan. It belonged more to medieval Europe than to New York City.
Only the clink of ice in glasses and the swish of money exchanging hands broke the silence. Hands loose at his sides, Dominic Grey pushed off the low wall ringing the courtyard. He knew the score. It was win or lose, submit or be maimed.
Across the courtyard, a Thai-American man with taped knuckles and a rubbery face clapped his hands twice as he approached. Though a few inches shorter than Grey’s six feet one, the Thai fighter was fifty pounds heavier, a pit bull in comparison.
Shirtless, unwilling to give his opponent the leverage of loose clothing, Grey calmly stalked the courtyard. What’s missing, he wondered? There’s something missing here.
Ah, yes.
With a detached nod, Grey reached back to the illicit fights of his youth, a string of raucous underground venues from Tokyo to Marseille. The feeling of an electric current zipping through his veins was the absent sensation, the dump of adrenalized fear at the start of a fight, the dry mouth and roiling stomach and quivering hands and knees.
It wasn’t adulthood, he knew, that had stripped him of the natural high that came before a battle.
It was someone he had lost.
His opponent threw a series of jabs and low kicks, testing defenses. Grey let him dance. The muay Thai expert was a bruiser, someone who relied on size and strength.
Grey had reached the finals with a series of smooth submissions that left the crowd awed but feeling cheated. The Thai boxer had pummeled his opponents into unconsciousness.
More jabs. Closer to the mark. Grey let him come, giving his opponent confidence so Grey could use his strength against him, bend when he tried to break and break when he tried to bend.
A tight snap kick. Grey bladed his body to the side and absorbed the blow. The muay Thai fighter threw an elbow combination, and Grey brush-blocked it aside.
The Thai fighter grunted and advanced, sensing weakness. Wondering how this emaciated, pale, greasy-haired deadbeat had managed to reach the finals. The thick fighter jabbed twice, throwing from so far away Grey knew it was a setup, and then attacked with a vicious roundhouse into Grey’s thigh, a blow that could shatter bone even if blocked.
But Grey didn’t block. Instead he pounced inside before the kick landed, so fast he could see the flash of surprise in the Thai fighter’s eyes. As the shortened kick struck Grey harmlessly in the side, Grey jabbed the palm of his right hand straight under his opponent’s chin, snapping his head back. At the same time, Grey swept out an ankle with the back of his heel and, keeping the ankle secured, thrust his leg high and straight back, a vicious osoto-gari that swept the Thai fighter off his feet. Grey wrapped the man’s arm as he slammed to the ground.
The Thai fighter managed to tuck his chin and avoid thudding his head against the cobblestones. Still, he was stunned and breathless, and Grey sat atop him with an arm trapped.
In full control, breathing in the other man’s sweat, Grey lifted his eyes for a quick glimpse of his surroundings. An old habit from life on the streets, and from his stints in Marine Recon and Diplomatic Security. Always be aware. Someone else could be coming at Grey from behind, with fists or knives or worse.
Instead of more attackers, Grey saw candlelit iron sconces and clusters of men in business suits, three to four per table, watching the fight with desensitized eyes. CEOs and mob bosses, arms dealers and stockbrokers. Men for whom violence was a habit.
Sorry to disappoint you, Grey thought as he jerked on the trapped arm and swung a leg over his opponent’s head for an arm bar. As long as his opponent tapped out—and they always did—Grey wouldn’t have to snap the elbow.
His eyes caught a glimpse of a woman seated to his left. A woman with caramel skin and a proud tilt to her chin, her hair swept into a bun. She was watching him with a cool familiar stare that left him breathless.
Nya.
Could it be?
Grey lurched to his left for a better glimpse, the manufactured focus he had summoned for the evening crashing down around him.
Nya? He thought again, whispering her name in the silence of the moonlit courtyard.
Crack.
Grey felt as if his head had just exploded. The Thai fighter reared back for another elbow strike, and Grey rolled away in desperation. His opponent followed, jumping to his feet and landing heavy kicks in Grey’s side. He tried to recover but he couldn’t think clearly. Head spinning, he covered his vitals and scrambled to the side, craning his neck for another look.
This time he got a better glimpse, and cackled at the absurdity of his mistake. This woman was a pale imitation of Nya. There was no curve to her lips, no depth to her gaze. Nya would never be here, sitting quietly as he participated in a sordid event like this. Not in a million years.
Another elbow smashed into Grey’s face. Blood flew from his mouth and he curled into a ball.
More, Grey thought. I deserve it. I deserve more than you could ever give.
The Thai fighter threw a series of vicious kicks into Grey’s side and back. Grey curled tighter.
Show me something. Hit me harder.
Frustrated, the Thai fighter tried to stomp on his head. Grey covered up as the blows rained down. Better, he murmured.
Most of the crowd had risen to their feet, sensing the end.
“Teach!”
A murmur rippled through the courtyard at the interruption.
The shout had come from a familiar voice. A voice from the living.
“Get up, Teach!”
Only his students called him Teach. After absorbing another kick, Grey shifted and saw a young African American girl standing by the doorway leading into the main building, eyes wide as she absorbed the scene.
Charlie.
One of the guards approached her while another inspected a wad of cash offered by an older man in a black suit filling the doorway.
“Viktor?” Grey said, confused.
The guard gripped Charlie’s shoulder. The sight of someone laying hands on Grey’s pupil incensed him, broke through his wall of depression. As the next kick came, he grabbed onto his opponent’s ankle, then shot his leg out and kicked the Thai fighter in the side of his knee. His balance destroyed, the bigger fighter crashed to the ground. Grey swiftly applied an ankle lock and then jerked backwards, straightening his body and creating immense pressure on the trapped joint.
The Thai fighter bellowed and slapped the ground, a universal signal of submission.
It was over.
Grey released the hold and stood, coldly eyeing his opponent to make sure he honored the surrender. The other fighter clutched his sprained ankle and then limped out of the courtyard.
The crowd offered subdued claps at the sudden turn of events. Respectful but disappointed.
As Grey stood alone in the courtyard, sucking in oxygen and catching a whiff of expensive cologne drifting from the tables, Charlie slipped the guard’s hold and ran over to him. She was a homeless teen who lived at the shelter where Grey taught jujitsu. The closest thing to a mentee Grey had ever had.
“I haven’t seen you in a month, Teach.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Hey, yo . . . Lurch over there told me what happened in South America.” Her eyes slipped down. “I’m sorry.”
Grey swallowed and didn’t respond.
“He also told me you two were detectives. That you take cases all around the world. You never told me that.”
“How did you think I paid the rent?”
“I dunno, you white. So what are you, some kinda superhero?”
Grey had to chuckle. “Hardly. I just watch the professor’s back.”
“That’s not what he says.”
Grey stepped over the low wall and grabbed his duffel bag. He toweled off, then shrugged into a long-sleeved black shirt. “What do you want, Charlie?”
“She’s here at my request,” Viktor boomed as he approached. “Since you haven’t taken my calls.”
The spectators had dispersed, the winners drinking and chatting in the courtyard, those who had lost bets casting irritated glances at Grey as they headed for their limousines. Grey slung his bag over his shoulder and approached one of the guards, who handed him a leather pouch stuffed with hundred dollar bills.
“Five G’s, man,” the guard said. “Good take.”
Grey grabbed it and started walking.
“Is your salary not sufficient?” Viktor said quietly, as he and Charlie followed. The professor eyed Grey’s bruised face. “Or is it not about the money?”
“You told me once I could fight in these things or study with you,” Charlie added. “Not both.”
“Yeah, well,” Grey said, “you ever heard of ‘do as I say, not as I do’?”
“Course I heard it. Didn’t think you the type to say it.”
Grey went through a heavy oak doorway and down a corridor of stone, past silent chapels and looming gothic vaults. A relic of the Old World slumbering amid the puzzle box of high-rise brownstones that defined Hudson Heights.
Grey had no idea who had been paid off to secure the venue or what would happen if they were caught.
Nor did he care.
As they emerged atop a hill over
looking the Hudson River, Viktor laid a hand on his arm. “I have a new case.”
“You need to hire someone else.”
“I don’t want anyone else.” Viktor folded his arms as Grey slipped on his motorcycle jacket and strapped his duffel bag onto his restored Kawasaki Avenger. “You can’t live as if waiting for death, Grey. That’s not a life.”
“I’m not waiting for anything. Death already came.”
“Not because of anything you did. You made the world a better place.”
Grey snorted. “Don’t.”
“There are people out there who need you,” Viktor said. “Wouldn’t she want you to help them?” As Grey revved the bike, the professor handed him a hotel business card. “Why don’t we discuss it over dinner?”
Grey glanced at Charlie and found her trying to conceal her interest in the outcome. Viktor had been smart to bring her. Grey eyed the card for a long time and sighed. “I’ll come, but no promises.”
And as soon as Charlie’s home safe, I’m gone.
Charlie started to climb onto the back of the bike. “No,” Grey said, harsher than he’d intended.
She froze, a hurt look in her eyes.
“You don’t have a helmet,” Grey said gruffly, masking his true reason. He couldn’t be responsible for anyone’s safety right now. Not someone he cared about.
“Neither do you, Teach.”
Grey muttered beneath his breath and looked at Viktor. “Take her home, please.”
“I ain’t going to the shelter tonight,” Charlie said with a grin. “I’m going to the hotel.”
Grey gave Viktor a scathing look. That was a cheap ploy.
Viktor put his hands up. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“I made him promise,” Charlie said, her grin expanding. “My payment for finding you.”
Grey frowned. “How’d you know where I was?”
“What, you think you ain’t a legend on the street? When Teach fight, everybody know.”
