It was a good thing he did, for in the next moment something did, indeed, come flying through the portal.
Not pig-demons as he’d expected, but Cade Williams.
Cade felt that moment of chilling cold that marked the passage from the Beyond back into the real world and then landed with a mucky splash face-first in the muddy pit he’d left behind what felt like hours before.
He heard someone shout his name in surprise and lifted his head to respond, only to find himself literally face-to-face with the giant demon-sow that he and Joe had been working so hard to kill. The hideous face, so close to his own, made him cry out and scramble backward in surprise, which set the Night Marshal to laughing hysterically.
The sheer incongruity of the situation forced a laugh out of Cade, too, and the two men spent a good minute just reveling in the simple fact that they were still alive. Even better, the mission had been accomplished, which was a good thing for all concerned.
When they were done laughing, Joe helped Cade up and the two men filled each other in on what had happened since they separated. They were congratulating each other on a job well done when the rest of the Templar unit burst through a door on the far side of the room, staring at the two men covered in mud and pig shit, wondering what the hell had happened.
Which only set Joe and Cade to laughing all over again.
Joe let the Templars decompress and debrief for a few minutes. They’d all been through hell and deserved a bit of rest before they got to the end of this thing. He stood apart from the other men, giving them their space. When it sounded like they were winding down, he cleared his throat. “All right, ladies, you get what you came for?”
Cade tapped the sealed pouch on his right hip. “Right here.”
“Glad to hear it. Now you get to help me with something.”
Cade felt the tension in the Templars around him. Hark had proved himself handy in a fight, but they weren’t going to be happy taking orders from someone outside their command. “What are you talking about?”
Joe chuckled darkly. “You’re going to love this part. It’s time to clean this shit up.”
The Night Marshal held his badge aloft and it shed a piercing silver radiance before him. The Templars followed Joe away from the dead hell-sow and into the ruptured cistern. For a long moment, the group stood in silence and stared at the horrors before them.
Thick iron chains dangled from the high ceiling, their links glistening with congealed blood and scabbed with old rust. Each of the chains held thirteen meat hooks, and each of the hooks held a brutalized human body pierced through the neck. Cade whistled, long and low. “What the hell were they doing here?”
Joe aimed the light from his badge at the nearest body. It was a young man with a shaved head and a panoply of crude tattoos etched into his arms and legs. An incision ran from where the meat hook corrupted his throat down to his crotch. Thick black threads sealed the edges of the wound, and expertly. There were gaps between the stitches in his bulging abdomen, and through one of them a black eye stared. Whatever was in there squealed and burrowed deeper into the body to escape the purifying light from Joe’s badge. “Looks like they were making piglets.”
Cade turned to his men. “Haul the demolition gear down here.”
Joe waited until the rest of the Templars were gone before asking, “You have enough toys to bring this whole place down?”
Cade nodded. “It won’t take as much as you might think. A few well-placed charges and we’ll turn this whole place into a crater.”
“I just wanted to say, you know, thanks for the hand with this shit. If you hadn’t come along these pig fuckers probably would have bitten me on the ass at some point.” Joe scratched his chin. “But, once we’re done here, it’s probably best if you get the fuck out of my county and forget how you got here.”
Cade stared at Joe, who stared right back at him. “What am I missing?”
“Nothing. You and I both know what happens when people like us spend too much time in the same place. Sooner or later, we’d end up on opposite sides of the fence.” Joe spat, trying to erase the foul taste of blood from his mouth. “And then I’d have to kill you. Or you’d take a run at me. Seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”
It took the Templar team a couple of hours to wire the slaughterhouse and the cavern below it with explosives. When they were finished, they all drove a quarter mile away from the place and parked on a hill overlooking it. Joe and Cade leaned against the Night Marshal’s truck, waiting for the fireworks.
Cade showed Joe a flat black slab of plastic with a single red button on its face. “You want to do the honors?”
Joe grinned and pressed the button.
Dozens of bright flashes as the charges on the surface went off, and then a thunderous roar as subterranean blasts weakened the earth. A burning cloud rose from the growing crater and bloomed far overhead.
They watched the ruins burn until they could see the flashing red and blue lights of approaching law enforcement. “Probably best if you boys move along,” Joe said. “I’ll handle the local law.”
Cade stuck out a gloved hand and the Night Marshal shook it. “Good luck, Marshal.”
Joe watched the fires burn behind the Templar, and wondered if they’d fixed this problem or just cut off one of the hydra’s heads. “You, too.”
The Templars loaded into their black SUVs and disappeared into the night, and the Night Marshal waited for the law and wished for a drink.
Takes All Kinds
DIANA ROWLAND AND CARRIE VAUGHN
“Turn left in . . . one . . . quarter . . . mile,” said the aggravatingly calm computerized voice.
“But there’s no left turn there.” Kitty unfolded a paper map, turned it right side up, and accidentally ripped it almost in half along the crease. Her sigh was almost a growl. “This road just goes on and on and on.”
In the driver’s seat, Ben was grinning. “Go on. Ask me to pull over for directions. Just ask. I dare you.”
“Where are you gonna pull over?”
They looked around at wide, flat stretches of almost-swampland, heat shimmering visibly in the sticky air. The only building in sight was a weathered cabin maybe half a mile off the road with a bunch of beater cars parked out front. It didn’t look inhabited. A haze hung over distant clumps of trees, and the sky here seemed small. Louisiana was not really anything like Colorado. Their whimsical last-minute decision to take the scenic route had led them to increasingly narrower, less-well-paved roads until they ended up here, on some long stretch of gravel, trying to figure out how to get back on the highway to New Orleans. If she didn’t show up on time at the Southern Paranormal Research Conference tomorrow, would anyone notice? Would they send rescue crews? Was there cell service out here?
She thought she heard banjos playing in the distance, but was sure that was her imagination. No need to panic. Yet.
“How much gas do we have?” She leaned over, trying to look at Ben’s side of the dash.
“Half a tank. We’re fine.”
Her husband seemed very unconcerned. He might even have been enjoying himself.
“What are you smiling about?”
“I’m just reveling in this cliché moment we’ve created together. It’s kind of nice. Makes me feel a little more normal, you know?”
She looked over at him, affection winning out over annoyance. They might have been thrown together at the start, but oddly enough they suited one another. He was sensible to her impulsive, wry to her sarcastic. God, he put up with her, what more could she ask? He was just above average height, maybe just below average build, had bright hazel eyes, and his scruffy brown hair always seemed to need a trim, but that only made her want to run her hands through it even more.
“You’re really cute, you know that?” she said.
He put a hand on her knee; the touch comforted her, as he must have known it would.
She studied the road ahead, looking for a direction sign or s
omeplace—anyplace—to turn. Instead, a column of black smoke threaded up to the sky, billowing out as it rose. Ben saw it too; he pressed on the gas, and the car sped toward the source.
Maybe a mile ahead, a car was on fire. It hadn’t been burning long; the brown finish of the older-model sedan was still visible. Ben pulled over to the shoulder. He already had his cell phone out and was calling 911. Kitty stared at the flames, which engulfed the interior. She narrowed her gaze, peering—there didn’t seem to be anybody in the car. She couldn’t make out the shapes of any bodies.
“Yes,” Ben said at his phone. Thank goodness he’d been able to get a signal. “There’s a car on fire, we’re on—where the hell are we?”
Kitty grabbed their GPS navigator, even though she didn’t have much faith in it after the goose chase it had sent them on. “Parish Highway 307?”
Ben repeated the information, tried to estimate their location and what was happening, and was assured that emergency vehicles were on their way.
Kitty leaned close to the phone as the dispatcher asked, “Is anyone hurt?”
She and Ben looked at each other, and his uncertain expression matched her own. “I don’t know, we can’t tell.”
They agreed to wait at the scene to talk to police when they arrived.
Kitty couldn’t help herself. She got out of the car. Maybe if she could get a good scent of the surroundings, catch the trail of anyone who might have left the area, she could reassure herself that nobody was in there.
“Kitty—” Ben called after her. Then he got out of the car.
They stood together in the middle of the road. Flames reached up, roaring. The heat of it pressed them back. Their werewolf noses worked, taking in acrid scents of burning metal and rubber—and blood. What Kitty had thought was oil spilled from the ruined car was actually blood, a great messy pool of it—enough to be a sign of murder. The blood wasn’t all—once she got past the stink of all the synthetics, the smell of cooking meat came through. A body on fire.
Under her rib cage, her wolf-self stirred, pricked her ears, and looked for the danger. Someone had been hunting here . . .
She reached out. Ben’s hand was right there to hold hers.
“Hon, back in the car,” he said.
“But there’s something really weird—”
“Exactly. That’s why we’re sitting tight and waiting for the cops.”
He was right, of course. Any way she interfered in the scene would just get her sucked into a situation she didn’t need to be in. They could be good citizens and report the accident, but they didn’t need to do any more than that. There wasn’t much more to do.
Ben must have been thinking the same thing. “Anybody in that car is way past saving. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Yeah, but—look at all that blood.”
His nose wrinkled, taking in the scent of it. His wolf knew that smell as well as hers did.
“We wait for the cops.”
They locked themselves in their car and waited, sweating in the heat even with the air conditioner cranked up.
Within half an hour, the remote highway turned into a traffic jam as fire trucks, police cars, and an ambulance all tried to crowd around the scene of the burning car. One crew put out the fire, and a police car pulled up alongside Kitty and Ben. Ben rolled down the window and answered all the nice officer’s questions. Surreptitiously he asked a few of his own and found out that yes, there had been a body inside the car. The officer wouldn’t answer any further questions, but reassured Ben that they likely couldn’t have done anything to save the victim.
Yellow police tape went up next, surrounding the car, the pool of blood on the road, and a good distance beyond. A couple more cops directed the sparse traffic around the site, and Kitty was vaguely reassured that this road actually did have people on it every now and then. They wouldn’t have been totally stranded.
Kitty opened her window and leaned out to watch, to listen, to smell. The guy was right, they probably couldn’t have saved whoever it was. But she wondered: What had happened here? Whose blood was that? She was itching to get out and have another look around. See if there was some kind of trail to follow.
“I need to stretch my legs,” she announced and opened the door.
“Wait, Kitty—”
“Just for a minute.”
Bystanders gathered, and the ubiquitous phones were out snapping pictures before a uniformed officer ordered people to move along. Kitty walked off the road, a ways out from the caution tape, just taking in the air. Smelling for a trail. Trouble was, she didn’t know what exactly she was smelling for, and the acrid burn from the fire and the chemicals used to put it out overwhelmed her nose.
Two more vehicles arrived: a black Dodge Durango followed by a black van. Coroner’s office, looked like. The grimmest work of the whole episode began and Kitty didn’t really want to watch this part as the two nitrile-gloved CO personnel carefully removed the body from the car and laid it out on an open body bag. A burned lump, black char against black plastic. The thing was abstract enough that Kitty could distance herself from it. It was just a shape, nothing more. She took one last, long breath of the scene, searching for anything out of the ordinary, for another clue to go with the blood and mess—and caught something she’d never smelled before. Ever. And that was saying something.
There was a chill, an icy thread in the air that she normally associated with vampires, but this had something else to it. A fungal tang, the thing in the forest growing under a rock, simultaneously rotting and full of life. The smell made Kitty stop and tilt her head, trying to capture it, trying to track its origin.
She moved back toward the road, and unfortunately back in view of the body, which the techs were sealing into the body bag and loading onto a gurney. And there it was. Not the body; the weird smell came from the woman in the coroner’s office shirt, skinny with punked-out hair and an overly pale face, like she rarely went out in the sun. She moved, lifting the bag with her partner, strapping it in place, exchanging a few words with a nearby cop—and the scent was her. Now that Kitty had it, it overwhelmed the blood baking in the sun.
The woman looked up briefly and caught Kitty staring at her. Kitty didn’t look away.
Then the woman wheeled the gurney to the back of the van, and she was gone.
“Huh,” Kitty murmured.
Now the whole scene was looking bleak and sad. She wandered back to the car, where Ben was leaning on the hood, arms crossed, smirking.
“See what you need to?” he asked.
“Yeah, um—I think there’s something very strange going on here.”
“I think you’re right.”
That surprised her. Ben was usually the last person to encourage her bouts of dangerous curiosity.
“I just sat here, listening,” he said. Werewolves didn’t just have hypersensitive noses. They had really good hearing.
“Oh?”
“The victim in the car? They’re saying he was already dead when the fire started. Like something had sliced him to pieces.”
“That explains all the blood. So what the hell happened?”
“Let’s get out of here, then we can talk about it.”
That sounded like an excellent idea. Ben waved at the officer in charge one more time, and they got in the car and steered away from the chaos. Ben had also, it turned out, asked for directions from one of the officers. They were just two turns away from a major highway that would take them straight to New Orleans.
“And this is the last time we take the scenic route anywhere,” Ben added.
“Watch the arm,” Angel murmured. The death investigator, Derrel, nodded and readjusted his grip, and together they carefully extracted the partially burned corpse from the vehicle and set it in the open body bag. A thin breeze wafted the gruesomely appetizing scent of cooked meat to Angel’s nose and she suppressed a groan as her mouth watered. It was small comfort to know that others had the same reaction to the odor
of burned human. And like those others, Angel had no desire to ever actually eat human flesh.
Well, except for the brain. But that didn’t really count as flesh, right?
Angel zipped the body bag closed, sealing away the human BBQ smell, to her relief. Derrel helped her get the bag onto the gurney, then he turned back to finish getting information for his report while Angel started toward the coroner’s office van with the gurney. Gawkers mingled beyond the crime scene tape, but they backed away from her and the body bag, and a few hard glares from her sent most slinking back to their cars.
A new scent rode the breeze to Angel, wild and strange—enough so that she found herself scanning the area in a primal search for the smell. Onlookers continued to trickle away from the crime scene tape, but a slender blond woman stood by the car at the front of the line, eyes narrowed on Angel.
The hell? The odd scent came from her, Angel realized as she locked gazes with the woman. It had been a couple of days since Angel’s last brain-meal, which meant her zombie parasite was highly aware of all the juicy human brains in the area. Police. Firemen. Gawking bystanders.
And the blonde—except hers wasn’t like any human brain Angel had ever smelled. It had a wild edge to it, sharp and feral, with a hint of blood and a whisper of trees and earth. Human . . . and more.
Angel pulled her gaze away and continued wheeling the gurney to the van, but as soon as she had the body loaded up, she pulled her phone out and snapped a few pics of Blondie. The job with the morgue kept Angel well-supplied with the brains she needed to keep her mental faculties acute and her body in one non-rotted piece but, most importantly, kept her from turning into a monster who’d bash skulls in for a meal.
And I know a monster when I see one, Angel thought grimly.
Her thoughts tumbled as she drove away from the scene. She’d known the murder victim. Hell, everyone knew Jimmy Nunez. Like her, he’d lived his entire life in St. Edwards Parish, Louisiana. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was a decent guy who stayed out of trouble, and was always willing to help a neighbor out. Likeable. That was the word. Angel couldn’t imagine anyone hating him enough to slash him up, then set him on fire.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 13
