by Jenna Ryan
* * *
If anything, the fog thickened in the time it took Rosemary Sayer to get from her home in Cambridge across the Charles River to Bethany Mews.
Keeping her hand, and the pistol she’d brought along as a precaution, in her jacket pocket, she looked up at the mostly deserted building. She let five relatively silent seconds pass before raising her phone and making the call.
“You took your damn time,” her stepbrother panted. “Is anything suspicious happening down there?”
She swept her eyes across the blurred outline of the roof. “There’s only the fog, Ben, and whatever’s wandering around inside it. You said number thirteen, right?”
“Right, but wrong. I’ll come to you. I’m hearing noises downstairs that I don’t like.”
The skin on her neck prickled and got her moving across the street. “I can tell you’ve been shot. Where?”
“Leg and shoulder.” His breath labored in and out, noisily enough to scare her. “Ro, do rats have yellow eyes?”
“I’m not—” She tugged on the warped outer door. “Some do. I think.” Planting a foot on the frame, she gave a hard yank. “Are you anywhere near downstairs yet?”
The door flew open while she was pulling and threw her backward. Before she could catch her balance, 160 pounds of long-haired, tattooed, leather-and-denim-clad stepbrother tumbled across the threshold and sent her crashing to the ground. Alarmed, and with her head reeling from the unexpected impact, Rosemary pushed him far enough away to see his shadowed face.
By filthy streetlamp light, she spied the leading edge of gray stealing across his striking features. And, oh God, his eyes were beginning to glaze.
“You need a hospital.” She got them both to their knees, then stopped and snapped her head around. Were those real voices murmuring in the fog, or was she only hearing them in her mind?
Fiery daggers of pain shattered the thought. She drew a short, sharp breath, and for a moment—less than a heartbeat of time—felt the icy blackness of death glide in and out.
“Jesus, Ben.” Clutching his shoulders, she dragged him up higher. “How much blood have you lost?”
“A lot.” He slurred the words and climbed to his feet as a drunk might after a bar brawl. “Alley’s right there. I lowered the fire escape.” He sent her a meaningful look. “Just in case.”
Because it was what he needed, Rosemary nodded and took his weight. “You always wind up in so much trouble,” she whispered without rancor. “Talk to me, Ben. Who did this to you?”
“Reaper.” His bitter laugh ended on a cough. “It’s what he is and what he’s called. A real green-blooded bastard.”
He stumbled. She caught him. “Hospital,” she repeated through teeth she didn’t dare let chatter.
He gave another feeble laugh. “Come on, Ro, feel me all the way through. No way am I checking in just so I can check out.”
Brilliant red arrows streaked through her head. As they did, Ben staggered and almost took her down again.
They reached the alley, barely. She felt him fighting the pain as he wrenched himself away from her and grabbed the front of her jacket.
“You need to find Tanner, Ro. Do you hear me? Find Sean Tanner. I’m thinking the name of the town where you can do that. Open your mind and take it from me. Read me, goddammit. You’re as good as Great-Grandmother ever was when you want to be.”
She never wanted to be, Rosemary thought, but now wasn’t the time to argue. She allowed the swamp he was visualizing in his mind to take shape in hers. Thick, green, lush. Teeming with insect life. Crawling with reptiles.
“Can you see it?” Ben demanded. “See him?”
A man’s face swam into view. She closed her eyes briefly and the muddy features cleared. “He looks like you.”
“Yeah—no. Smoke and mirrors, little Mim. Same hair and earring, less tattoos, more pissed off. You’ll have a time with him.”
“I’ll have a time with him, why?” Desperate now, she shook him. “Stay with me, Ben.” She glanced into the fog. Definitely bodies in there. “You need to sit. Maybe I can do something to slow the blood loss.”
He started to shake his head but stiffened and squeezed her upper arms instead. “Someone’s coming. Can you hear the footsteps? They’re quiet and purposeful.” He regarded her a moment longer, stared right into her eyes. “You have to go. Go!” he rasped when she hesitated. “For God’s sake, Ro, we’re talking pure evil here. Use the fire escape. Leshad. Remember the name.”
“You’ve told me the name, Ben.”
“Remember Great-Grandmother, too. And whatever you do, don’t forget about the Reaper. He’s a big man on the inside. Sorry, I can’t give you a face, but it’s all about secrets in Leshad’s world. He’ll send the Reaper after you. The second I’m dead, Ro, Leshad’ll turn his sights on you. Get to Tanner.”
He shoved her away before she could respond. Stumbling into the fog, he flung his arms out to the sides and let his head fall back. “Man, I can smell that fire and brimstone from here.”
A gun appeared in his hand. Rosemary glimpsed the cocky half-smile she’d seen so often on his lips. And then—nothing. He was gone, firing bullets of pain at her and bullets of lead into the darkness.
Two very real yellow lights appeared. They flickered for a moment before blinking out in tandem.
“It’s you he wants, Ro.” Ben’s voice came directly into her brain. “Run, now, before Leshad gets hold of you.”
Pain bombarded her, wave after searing wave of blood-soaked red. She backed away, heard more shots and finally, a long, rattling breath.
“No,” she whispered, but it was a hollow denial, an empty, echoing sound, swiftly absorbed by the fog.
She closed her eyes, had to so she could jump-start her mind. She only opened them when her shoulder bumped the bottom rung of the fire escape.
A garish face, wooden and painted, hovered in the fog not two feet in front of her. A scream leaped straight into her throat, but she didn’t let it out, and the face didn’t linger. One more soft, crunching footstep, and neither did she. Grimly resolved, she grabbed the metal rails and swung herself onto the rusty ladder.
Ben had given his life to save hers. No way would she allow what had cost so much to be taken away by a mad serial killer or his bloodsucking Reaper.
CHAPTER TWO
“Darkest day I ever did see.” The old man squinted at the clouds that swarmed black and threatening overhead. “It ain’t natural. Figure it’s gonna be an even darker night.” He spit on the ground at Sean Tanner’s feet. “Tilly says it’s an omen.”
“No offense, Weezer, but your wife says it’s an omen if she burns her morning toast.”
“Ain’t hurricane season, is it?”
“Nope.” Tanner collected the tools he’d used to coax the old man’s ancient still back to sputtering life. “But there’s a little thing called climate change that’s got more than a few people concerned.”
The old man stabbed a knobby finger at the sky. “Whatever you call it, those clouds got storm written all over ‘em. Wild, wicked storm.”
“Yeah?” Obliging him, Tanner looked up. “In that case, you might want to batten down your still. That pump goes again, there’ll be no rescuing it. Savvy?”
“I hear you. I’ll strap it down. By the way, my shotgun’s been acting up. I’m thinkin’ it might be possessed.”
“You’re thinking that, or Tilly is?”
“Possible she planted the thought.” He spit again. “Can you fix it?”
“Always, but your tab’s getting pretty high.”
“Got a fresh jug of moonshine in the shed,” the old man offered with a hopeful, mostly toothless smile. “That should do you till my government check shows up.”
“Do me or kill me. I’ve still got half a bottle from last month’s batch.” Tanner tied a red bandana around his forehead. Whatever the hell the clouds portended, the late afternoon air was muggy enough to brew hooch without a still. Slinging
his tool pack over his shoulder, he headed for his truck. “I’ll take the shotgun today and the whiskey tomorrow, old man. Tell Tilly, if she’s interested, that Desdemona agrees with her about the omen thing. She says bad’s coming and it’s damn sure gonna blindside more than one person in these parts.”
Weezer scowled. “Desdemona’s the swamp witch who lives over in Nightshade, ain’t she?”
“She lives there, but she’s no witch.” Tanner swung into his truck. “Not a whole lot happens when she burns her toast either. I’ll bring the shotgun back in a day or two, depending.”
Weezer and Tilly lived in Bayou Faye, population 524. Tanner lived in the heart of Deadman’s Swamp, population never-quite-determined. It was beautiful, it was lethal and for the moment, it was home. Or as close to any place he’d called home since his fifteenth birthday.
He drove for a while along bumpy, gravel roads, briefly debated lighting up a stale cigarette. He’d quit smoking six weeks ago yesterday, on an afternoon almost exactly like this one. Black, ominous and silent. The combination had set his nerves on edge back then, and it did so even more today.
It was too quiet, he reflected, rolling to a halt at one of only three intersections Bayou Faye had to offer, as if the buildings themselves were holding their breath.
Which sounded too much like Weezer’s wife, so he dusted the thought and ramped up the volume on his iPod until all he could hear or think about was Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath.
He glanced left at the next intersection. The local bar—if you could call a partly boarded-up former bordello run by Herman and Lily Munster on nasty pills a bar—was less than a mile out of his way. Tanner eyed the looming cloud mass, then made the detour.
He spent a semi-buzzed pair of hours fighting off “Lily’s” mildly terrifying advances and ignoring “Herman’s” fearsome glares. After not responding to five phone calls from a woman he’d had sex with last weekend and losing seventy bucks in a game of darts, he figured he done enough damage and stepped outside to a display of pitchfork lightning that all but blinded him.
No rain, though, he noted. Not yet. Just a whole lot of bangs and flashes—and a knot of something in his belly that even the badass bourbon he’d consumed hadn’t been able to shake loose.
Really didn’t need this, he told himself, and hoped like hell he could sleep the feeling off.
It took him more than thirty minutes to twist and turn his way into the swamp. The light show above the cypress trees was amazing, and he swore the thunderbolts were rocking the roads. Pulling up outside his house—yeah, okay, not so much a house as a shack—he cut the engine, snagged his half-gone bottle of Weezer’s hooch and climbed out.
Thanks to the bourbon in his system, his hand made it less than halfway to the gun he kept tucked in the back of his jeans, when he heard a telltale click. “Shit.”
Palms up, features blank, bottle right there for whoever to see, he executed a ninety-degree turn on his boot heels.
“Aw, Jesus, not again.” Eyes he couldn’t help rolling came into hard focus on the woman twenty feet in front of him. “You’re that knot I’ve been feeling in my gut, aren’t you? Beauty without the Beast. Where is he, Belle? In trouble, obviously, or you wouldn’t be here, holding that.” He nodded at the semiautomatic Sigma pistol steadily brandished in the woman’s right hand. “Do you know how to use it?”
“Move, and you’ll find out. My name’s Rosemary Sayer.”
“Yep, got that in the first sweep. Ben was big on family pictures. Is he dead?”
Her eyes might have flickered. Or it could have been the lightning. Whatever the case, her gun hand didn’t falter. “He was killed six nights ago. Indirectly by a madman called Leshad. More specifically, I think, by someone he called the Reaper.”
“I’ve heard of the first, not the second. Where’s Crucible?”
She almost smiled. “That’s a very good question. I wish I knew. Five minutes, five hours, five days behind me? I’m not an agent, Tanner, just your old friend Ben’s stepsister.”
Tanner lowered his hands a fraction. “He sent you to me.”
Now she did smile, a little. “You don’t ask questions so much as make statements. You must have been one of Crucible’s better agents.”
“I had my moments,” Tanner agreed, “once upon a time. Not so much these days. This bottle weighs a bit, Rosemary. Hands?”
“Where I can see them.” She moved a shoulder. “Sorry if that sounds cliché, but I’m feeling kind of paranoid. I loved Ben. A lot.”
“If it helps, and speaking on his behalf, the feeling was mutual. Ben talked more about you than he did any of the women he slept with.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. You heard me say maybe five minutes, right? About Crucible?”
A faint chuckle rose. “He’s not here. Not yet, anyway. I’ll know when he shows.”
“When he shows.” She lowered the gun to her side. “No chance of ‘if’?”
“There’s a first time for everything.” Tanner slid his eyes up and down her body. “But in your case, I doubt it. Do you know why Ben was killed?”
Jagged lightning shot through the rapidly darkening sky. Strains of Black Sabbath from inside the truck were underscored by ground-rattling peals of thunder. But still no rain fell. Tanner wondered what Tilly would make of that.
“I know why Ben went to Crucible,” Rosemary told him, “and why he wanted to work his way into Leshad’s criminal whatever-it-is. Organization, camp, coven of demons. I also know that Crucible wants Leshad badly enough to try just about anything, risky or not, at this point. But I don’t know what Ben did or didn’t do that got him shot.”
“The calling card murders.” Even with a bourbon coating, the words left a bitter taste in Tanner’s mouth. “Hard to forget the scenario. Leshad or one of his henchmen targets a victim, murders him—or her—then leaves a calling card with the sketched silhouette of a homicidal freak next to the body. Did Ben get a card?”
She met his eyes. “Maybe. Probably, if Leshad and/or his Reaper hit man are running true to form. In case Ben didn’t mention it, Leshad’s second victim was my great-grandmother.”
Twila Black, Tanner recalled reluctantly, but the name had planted itself in his memory a long time ago and for some reason stuck there. “Ben said your great-grandmother was a recluse.”
“Depends on your definition of the word. Twila baked fruitcakes every Christmas and sent them to the scores of people she knew.”
“The scores of people she hated,” Tanner corrected. When Rosemary’s gaze narrowed, he made a noncommittal head motion. “Not a fan of fruitcake.” He watched the bottle he held sparkle in the weird streaks of lightning. “I don’t work for Crucible these days, Rosemary. I’m only a so-so shot.” He kept his expression deliberately neutral, met her gaze point-blank. “I’m not a marksman.”
“Neither was Ben. But he was charismatic and slippery and excellent at infiltration. He was a Navy SEAL.”
Tanner’s lips curved. “That and more.”
“Like you.”
“Infiltration wasn’t my thing either, and I’d rather choke down a hundred fruitcakes than work under the thumb of Crucible or his infamous team of directors again. So if your purpose in coming here was to persuade me to get back into the life, maybe try to avenge Ben’s death, the answer’s no. And I’m being really polite.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Just making my position clear. Ben was a good friend. He wasn’t a good enough friend for me to become involved in something that could end with one or both of us getting shot, stabbed, drowned, suffocated or incinerated. Unfortunately, seeing as you’re here, it’s obvious I’m the person Ben wanted you to contact.”
“Ben excelled in creating difficult situations.”
“More than anyone I know. But this particular situation brings to mind a rather intriguing question.” He raised a dark brow as lightning crackled the air between them. “Why didn’t Ben send you to
Crucible?”
CHAPTER THREE
Crucible knew what he’d find long before he strode into his temporary New Orleans office. Tom Cutter, one of four government-assigned directors, sat (or more correctly, lounged) in a black “visitor’s” chair. His feet were insolently propped on the desk, and he’d rearranged the hat he perpetually wore to shield his eyes.
He summoned an enormous smile at Crucible’s entry. “Such a ferocious scowl on your face, old friend. Do I take it to mean you haven’t located Ben Sayer’s next of kin yet?”
Rather than answer, Crucible circled the desk and sat in his slightly higher chair. “As this is my office, I’ll ask the first question. Why are you taking such an active interest in Ben Sayer’s death?”
Cutter’s smile widened. “I take an active interest in any death that involves our phantom serial killer. Leshad’s become something of a celebrity in certain criminal circles. That wasn’t the result we were hoping for when we undertook this investigation. I believe I speak for the other directors when I tell you we’re less than encouraged by your progress to date.”
Crucible saw an eccentric, pompous ass, but he responded to his superior. “Did you really believe this would be a quick capture? That a clue would pop out of the woodwork and three hours later we’d be stripping the mask off a madman? You know as well as I do, Tom, that Leshad’s shrouded in multiple layers of protection and false fronts.”
Again the toothy smile flashed. “You mean we’re peeling an onion—so to speak.”
Pompous and holding fast to the remains of a cultured British accent. Quirky, with a floppy brown hat covering his mop of brown curls and always that irritating, larger-than-life smile.
“We’ve peeled away several significant layers since we began,” Crucible reminded him. He picked up and slid a silver letter opener through his fingers. “It’s been alleged that Leshad’s first victim, Madeleine Lessard, had some form of second sight. Partly for that reason we’ve come to believe that our phantom is extremely superstitious.” A heavy brow rose. “Which is why we’ve had our collective eye on Rosemary Sayer ever since her great-grandmother Twila, Leshad’s second victim and a woman also credited with possessing second sight, died last year. There’s also Rosemary’s great-great-aunt Tallulah. Her abilities, though not as strong as her sister Twila’s, are a factor we’ve had to consider. It’s true her death came further down the list, but still—we’re talking about a certain amount of second sight.”
