Corpse Thieves (Shifter Squad Book 5)

by J. C. Diem

  We went quiet as we drew closer to the first group of ghouls. Unaware that their home had been invaded, they didn’t rouse when we had them surrounded. Reece signaled for us to use our flamethrowers rather than our assault rifles. We moved back so we wouldn’t accidentally roast each other then opened fire.

  Just like our first encounter with the creatures, it was a slaughter. We set the entire group ablaze and they woke screaming. They didn’t burn as well as zombies, but the flames did the job well enough.

  Word that enemies had invaded the tunnels was slow to spread throughout the rest of the ghoul community. They didn’t realize the danger until we tracked down the second group and set them ablaze as well. Their shrill screams roused the next small pack. Now that they were aware they were under attack, they scattered. Firing his assault rifle into the group to finish them off, Reece signaled for me to find the next group.

  Using their uncanny ability to pop upwards and run along the surface before descending into another tunnel at will, they had us running in circles again. If we’d been human, we’d have been exhausted from the amount of sprinting that we had to do to keep up with them.

  While the ghouls could escape to the surface when threatened, we had the advantage of being able to find them no matter where they hid. We’d hunted down around half of the inhabitants of the tunnels before we took a break.

  “I wish they’d make it easier for us,” Kala complained when she sank down onto her haunches. “They scurry away like cockroaches before we can stamp them out.”

  A creeping feeling that we were in danger had me holding up a hand to silence her. I cocked my head to the side, feeling something at the edges of my senses.

  “What is it?” Reece asked.

  “I’m not sure. I can feel something coming.”

  “More ghouls?” Flynn asked.

  A large number of ghouls appeared on my mental radar and I stood in alarm. “It’s not just more of them, I think it’s all of them,” I said. “We need to get out of here before we become trapped.”

  Reece immediately took off and I was once again thankful for his superior sense of direction. We made it to the rope and scaled it just as ghouls appeared at both ends of the tunnel. I was the last one out of the hole. Reece reached down, grabbed my hands and hauled me out.

  “Run!” I shouted. Flynn picked Mark up and tossed him over his shoulder as bodies burst out of the ground all around us.

  Reece, Kala and I used our flamethrowers to keep our enemies at a distance. We ran towards the far side of the cemetery, drawing the creatures away from town. Our rifles would have been more effective, but our gunfire would have been heard by half the city. We didn’t want anyone to know we were waging a war. If anyone saw us, the Mind Sweepers would have to be called in to erase their memories. Reece might not remember meeting him, but I personally never wanted to see Kurt Jorgen in action again.

  “A house!” Kala shouted and pointed beyond the boundaries of the cemetery. I could just see the edge of a building through the woods.

  We sprinted to the fence and leaped over it to land in an overgrown yard. The three story house had probably been a grand mansion when it was new. It was now a ramshackle hovel with broken windows and boards missing from the walls. The stairs that led to the door were weathered and didn’t look like they’d hold our weight. Reece leaped over them and skidded to a stop on the tiny porch.

  Bones were scattered around the steps and candles sat to either side of the door. Someone had been living here recently, but I couldn’t smell or hear anyone inside.

  Flynn set Mark down on his feet as Reece tried the door. It swung open with a rusty squeal. I had only a moment to take in the ornate design on the weathered door before we entered. It was even less inviting inside. Dark, dirty and musty, it smelled as if something had died in there not that long ago. Stairs led upwards at the end of the long hallway. I had no desire to explore the house further.

  Ghouls leaped over the ramshackle fence and moved to surround us. One shambled forward and I sensed that he was different from the others. Withered and ancient, his skin was white rather than green. Only a few strands of gray hair still clung to his scalp. His clothes were old and stained, but they were in better condition than the others. Like his kin, he blinked frequently and winced at the harsh sunlight.

  Mark nudged Reece aside so he could step into the doorway. He took a grenade out of his pocket and held it up for the creature to see. “I’d advise you to stop where you are,” he called. The ghoul recognized that the device was dangerous and grew wary. “Take another step and I will destroy you and your kin.” If they hadn’t been standing so close to us, Mark probably would have tossed the grenade at them. I know I would have.

  Flynn looked a little queasy when he realized he’d been carrying a small bomb over his shoulder along with our boss.

  Hissing a command at his offspring, the ghoul stared at us with malevolent hatred. “Leave this place,” he said. His voice was rusty and heavily accented. “You have culled our numbers enough.” Sorrow for the fallen tinged his words. “If you do not leave by nightfall, you will become our next meal, human.” He pointed at Mark with a skeletally thin arm, ignoring the rest of our team.

  The threat was clear. If we stayed in town, Mark would die. The ghoul was clever enough to know which of us was the weakest and easiest to target. With his instructions given, he turned to walk away and drew his kin after him. There were no tunnels for them to escape to in the yard. They had to retreat to the cemetery before they could descend into the passageways beneath the earth again.

  “That was a close call,” Kala said and mimed wiping sweat away from her brow. Mark’s sweat was very real. He carefully tucked the grenade away before using a pristine handkerchief to mop his forehead.

  “Is it just me, or was that ghoul slightly more civilized than the others?” Flynn ventured as he looked at the house. “I think we might have accidentally stumbled across his lair.”

  Now that the immediate danger was over, I satisfied my curiosity and inspected the door more closely. A pair of golden doorknockers had been fixed to both panels. Bald and ugly, the faces were vaguely humanoid. Skulls had been carved into the door along with what looked like Celtic designs.

  The bones that were scattered around the bottom of the steps turned out to be human. If we were to search the house, we’d most likely find more remains inside.

  “What’s the plan?” Reece asked Mark.

  “It’s too dangerous to stay in Lilydale,” he replied. “We need to make them believe that we’ve given up. That means we’ll have to leave town for now. We’re going to need help if we want to destroy the rest of the ghouls.”

  A strange look came across Kala. She held her hand up as if she was in class and wanted to ask the teacher a question. “I have a suggestion.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” Flynn said with a grimace.

  She flashed him a sour look, but didn’t let his doubt stop her. “We managed to tear a bunch of vampires apart when we were in our were-forms. Why can’t we just do that again?”

  Mark was clearly intrigued by the thought, but he shook his head regretfully. “That’s a good idea, but you’ll be facing nearly a hundred and fifty ghouls. That’s too many for even you four to handle. For now, we should get out of here before they return.”

  ₪₪₪

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  We followed Mark back to the cemetery. Apart from a few burned patches of grass, there was little evidence that a short battle had been waged. The ghouls had taken their fallen back beneath the ground. That saved us from having to call the Cleanup Crew in to dispose of them.

  I could feel a pair of ghouls shadowing us as we climbed into the SUV and headed back to the house. They stayed out of sight, but not out of mind as we showered, changed then packed the rest of our gear into the vehicle.

  Zeus knew we were being watched. He kept up a continuous low growl as he sat near the front door. Only my firm men
tal command for him to stay close stopped him from taking off after the ghouls when we were ready to leave. With our SUV crammed full, we drove away.

  “Where to?” Reece asked.

  “We have two choices,” Mark replied. “We can head to New Orleans and hunt down Katrina, or we can come up with a plan to finish off the ghouls.”

  I didn’t like having unfinished business hanging over us. When we finally went after my mother, I didn’t want anything to distract us from our mission. “She can wait,” I said.

  “We have a compound about a five hour drive from here,” Mark responded. “We can head there and decide what we’re going to do.”

  Kala let out a groan. “Five hours stuck in the car with the fleabag?” She cast a look over her shoulder at Zeus. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand it.”

  “It will take just as long to arrange for the jet to arrive,” he pointed out.

  She subsided with a grumpy expression that we all shared. The trip ahead wasn’t going to be much fun.

  “Did anyone else get a look at the door on that broken down old house?” Flynn asked.

  Reece and I nodded at the same time. “It had Celtic designs carved into it,” Reece said.

  “Not to mention skulls,” I added.

  “Are you sure the designs were Celtic?” Mark asked curiously.

  “I’m not one hundred percent positive, but I’m pretty sure they were,” Reece confirmed.

  Mark fished his tablet out of his pocket and opened a file. “Legend has it that ghouls originated from Ireland. I’m wondering if it might actually be true.”

  Remembering how ancient and withered the leader of the small horde was, I shook my head in disbelief. “Are you saying you think he was the very first ghoul?” If so, he’d have to be at least a few hundred years old.

  “It’s possible.” He handed his tablet to me and I saw the familiar writing of Thomas the priest in its original form. As always, he’d drawn pictures of what he’d seen. In this case, he’d drawn a creature that greatly resembled the ghoul that we’d just met. “Look familiar?” he asked.

  Flynn and Kala crowded in close to stare at the aged picture in awe. “That’s him, alright,” Flynn agreed. “I guess the priest didn’t manage to kill the ghoul.”

  Mark shook his head. “The creature fled and was never seen again.”

  “Until now,” Kala corrected.

  “How could he have travelled from Ireland to the US without being discovered?” I asked.

  Mark had an answer, of course. “By ship, most likely. He could have passed for a human if he’d kept his face covered.”

  Four hundred years had passed since Thomas had crossed paths with our target. The passage of time hadn’t been kind to the ghoul. To occupy myself, I spent the next couple of hours reading through the modernized copy of the journal entry.

  Thomas had ascertained through his research that the first ghoul had indeed been Celtic. He and Harold had been called in to investigate some bodies that had gone missing from a cemetery in London. They’d heard rumors that corpse eaters existed, but it wasn’t until they saw the empty exhumed coffins that they actually believed it.

  An old woman hobbled over to them when they left the cemetery. She’d been waiting for someone like them to investigate the missing bodies. She told them a tale that her grandmother had made her memorize when she’d been a child. Apparently, a barbarian ruler from a savage land had attacked a coastal village in Ireland with a large army of his kin. They’d wiped out the village and had slain and then eaten some of the inhabitants.

  A witch who lived in a hut in the woods nearby was the sole survivor. Knowing she would die, she strode into the midst of their evil feast and cast a hex on the leader, cursing him to live forever. As an added kick to the guts, she stipulated that he could only eat human flesh. No other food would ever pass his lips. Eating the dead after a battle was one thing, but he would become an outcast, unnatural and shunned by all once it became apparent that he was now a full time cannibal permanently.

  Laughing raucously, he ordered his men to behead her. He returned to his victory feast, but choked when he tried to eat beef. Laughing off the incident, he ordered the old woman to be roasted instead. He had no trouble eating her flesh and his men became uneasy. They had a superstitious dread of eating the witch and none dared to taste her flesh.

  Over the next few days, he tried to eat normal food, but grew ill each time he put anything other than human flesh in his mouth. He took to eating alone so no one could see that the curse had taken effect. Only when he was caught butchering a small child did it become known that the curse was real and that he was doomed to be a cannibal forever.

  Driven away by his own men, he became the lonely outcast that the witch had fated for him. He might have been cursed to eat human flesh, but he still had other needs as well. He kidnapped a woman and kept her captive until she birthed him a child. When the child was old enough to eat solid food, he killed her mother and fed his daughter her flesh. By either accident or design, he’d passed the curse on to the little girl.

  Over the coming centuries, his family had grown. They interbred with each other and they all shared their sire’s curse. Thomas and Harold had set a trap for the ghouls, but the leader had been far more intelligent than they’d realized and he’d escaped. He’d lain low until he’d managed to travel to America via a ship sometime later. This was the first time he’d been seen since the brief glimpse Thomas had caught of him so long ago.

  “It was a curse that gave the first ghoul death magic,” I said, startling everyone in the car.

  “What are you talking about?” Kala asked. She’d been in a semi-doze from sheer boredom.

  I quickly summed up the story for her.

  “You think the legend is true?” Mark asked.

  “It seems to be. It looks like his curse spread to his children, but it isn’t quite the same.”

  “What do you mean?” His interest was unfeigned. He wasn’t humoring me like a lot of adults would have.

  “They can eat animals as well as humans,” I reminded them. “They also aren’t long-lived like he is. They grow old and die, just like we do.”

  “How many generations of ghouls has he spawned by now?” Reece asked.

  Mark tried to calculate it and shook his head in defeat. “Too many to guess accurately. It’s a wonder we aren’t facing a greater epidemic.”

  “He’s been smart enough to keep their numbers small,” Reece said. “Until now.”

  “How did he know what we were up to?” Kala asked. “There’s no way he could have heard us shooting them or setting them on fire from his hovel.”

  “They share a bond,” I explained. “They’re linked by their death magic. He figured out we were here to eradicate them and rallied them all together to stop us.”

  “Now that they’ve been discovered, won’t they just run?”

  Mark shook his head. “It’s doubtful. They’ve made this city their home for a very long time. That house is easily over a hundred years old.”

  “He’s been taking really good care of it,” Kala scoffed.

  “I imagine he allowed it to become in a state of disrepair to keep people away.”

  “Does anyone have a theory about why they can only travel straight up and down through the earth?” Flynn queried. “Why can’t they appear anywhere they’ve been before like zombies can?”

  “The death magic feels different for ghouls,” I replied and received stares from everyone. “Theirs is a lot weaker,” I explained with an uncomfortable shrug.

  “That’s interesting,” Mark mused. Taking his tablet back, he opened a file and made some notes.

  “Wow, who would have known that having a werewolf infected with vampirism on the squad would come in so handy?” Kala teased.

  “Why does Lexi know so much more about death magic than Reece?” Flynn wanted to know.

  “Probably because she was first bitten as a baby,” Mark replied. “Her
mother has fed from her twice since then, which seems to have given her an affinity for dark magic.”

  “Maybe that’s why she could see ghosts and the Dark Coven’s wards and she can also feel magical objects,” Flynn wondered aloud.

  “You’re so talented,” Kala said and batted her eyelashes at me. “I want to be you when I grow up.”

  I sent a mental request to Zeus and he obliged me by leaning forward and licking Kala from her cheek to her hairline. “Yuck!” she complained and turned to see him grinning at her. “What was that for?”

  I sent her an innocent look and shrugged. “I guess he thought you needed some attention.”

  “I’m sure Cole gave her plenty of tongue while he held her captive,” Flynn said dryly. She flashed him a dark look and subsided into a sulk.

  ₪₪₪

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  We stopped at a town half an hour away from our compound to stock up on supplies before continuing on. It was a relief when the usual thirty foot high fence came into view. As always, our base had been built in a dense wood that was stocked with various types of animals that we could snack on when we turned.

  Weary from sitting still for far too long, we escaped from the SUV after Reece backed it into the garage. Zeus headed straight out to patrol the grounds. I knew he’d be safe here and I allowed him to roam at will. Nothing was going to get inside the electrified fence.

  Mark let us into the long corridor then into the main area. From the musty smell, no one had been here for some time.

  “Have you been here before?” Reece asked.

  “I’ve spent some time in all of our compounds,” Mark responded. “Even if it was just for a few weeks.”