Shadow of the Ghoul (Halfblood Legacy Book 2)

by Devin Hanson

  “For your own salvation, I pray you see the urgency. But I will not force you. Good luck with your work today.”

  She hung up and I took a pull of coffee. Tovarrah’s guilt trip wasn’t fair. It was one of the things I hated about Catholics and self-righteous people in general. If you weren’t dancing by their tune, then you were doomed to hell.

  I groaned and fell back onto my bed. As much as I wanted to blow off Tovarrah, I had a vested interest in making sure Steven received a successful exorcism. The last thing I needed was for my mother to regain her foothold in the mortal world. Whether I liked it or not, I really did need to go to the hospital again.

  But first things first. I found Sam’s number and hesitated, my finger a hair away from the screen. There was only one way to find out if I had completely ruined that friendship or not. I hit the call button and held my breath. After the third ring, I was about to hang up when Sam answered.

  “Good morning, Alex.”

  “Sam. Hi.” I swallowed. “I’m calling about work.”

  “Good. I was about to call you. We found that ghoul a block away from that office building last night. The medical examiner is going to do an autopsy and Lara wants you there.”

  “Oh.” That wasn’t how I wanted to spend the morning. “Um. What’s the address?” I sat up and went over to my desk and wrote down the address as Sam gave it to me. “Okay. My scooter is at Ethan’s. I’ll call an Uber now, but it might take me an hour to get downtown.”

  “No problem. Oh. Before you go. I, uh, told Lara we went to the hospital last night.”

  “You did?”

  “The alternative was trying to explain that we had sex and it healed you,” he said dryly.

  “Right. Um, okay. Probably for the best. I’m sorry you had to lie, though.”

  Sam laughed. “When I asked you to be a consultant for the department, I didn’t expect any of this stuff to be real.”

  I grimaced. The last thing I wanted was for Sam to start poking around in shadows. God only knew what might poke back. But that cat was out of the bag, it seemed, and Sam wasn’t one to sit idly by when people were in danger. “I never wanted you to get involved.”

  “It’s my decision, Alex.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t make me any less responsible if something happens to you. Look, I better get that Uber. I’ll shoot you a text when I get my scooter.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

  Sam met me in the parking lot outside the medical examiner’s office an hour later. The building epitomized the late 50s baroque architecture that had made it into Los Angeles; brick façade with a ludicrous plethora of cast-concrete detail work that turned the otherwise plain building into something that looked closer to a gingerbread house than a morgue.

  Both of us carefully avoided discussing what had happened last night. There was a tension between us that hadn’t been there before. Still, he wasn’t avoiding me, and even smiled when he held the door. Once we were inside, I forced my thoughts from personal matters. Unlike the exterior of the building, the hallways were suitably clinical, and the white tile and stainless steel helped me get into a professional mindset.

  We met Lara outside the autopsy room, and she looked up at me in surprise. “Alexandra, you’re looking well.”

  I shrugged, remembered Sam’s lie, and said, “Yeah, the doc said I had some bruising on my back and side, but I’m on enough painkillers to keep the discomfort to a minimum.”

  Lara nodded uncertainly. “You lost a lot of blood last night. If you start feeling lightheaded in there, just say the word, and we’ll take a break.”

  I swallowed and shot a glance at Sam. “Uh. I should be okay, I think. I didn’t eat breakfast.”

  “Good call.” Lara inclined her head toward the door and pushed her way inside.

  The examiner was a young woman, only a few years older than I was. She had gone for the emotionless professional look a little hard. She wore a turtleneck under her lab coat and her hair was pulled back into a severe bun that made her cheekbones stand out.

  “This is your civilian consultant?” she asked Lara, giving me a sideways look.

  “This is Alexandra Ascher. Alexandra, Doctor Portia Fenway.”

  I nodded a greeting. Behind the ME, a body was laid out on a stainless-steel table, a white sheet draped over it from head to toe. I knew without looking under the sheet that it was the ghoul. Or rather, the body that the ghoul had occupied.

  “I see. Bucket is in the corner.”

  I looked where she pointed and saw a red biowaste trashcan with a matching liner. I forced a smile. “Thanks.”

  The ME turned away and I raised my eyebrows at Sam, who gave me a minute shrug in response. I guess when you dealt with dead bodies all day, your social skills got a little rusty. Dr. Fenway wasn’t exactly rude, she just had an abrasive disinterest in anything other than the job at hand.

  With a disappointing lack of ceremony, Dr. Fenway folded the sheet down from the table and clicked on a recorder. “Body is IDed as the late Mark Tully. Aged 45 years, divorced, with a chronic alcohol habit. According to the… initial exam records, Mr. Tully passed from a failing liver resulting from a night of binge drinking. No external wounds recorded, at that time.”

  She pursed her lips. “Subject was found in the parking lot outside an office complex in Glendale last night at 1:15 in the morning. Detective Lara Moreno was the officer on the scene when the subject was located.” Dr. Fenway circled around the table and started listing off the wounds.

  I listened in morbid fascination.

  “Shotgun blast to right thigh, shotgun blast to the chest at two or three yards judging by the degree of tissue carbonization. Three bullet holes, nine-millimeter rounds, in a close grouping in center mass.” She prodded the corpse’s arm. “Multiple fractures in right humerus, and both ulna and radius are in shards. Dissection will have to be carried out in order to determine the number and degree of breakage. Same with the left arm. Clavicles, both left and right, appear to be broken. Right ankle is broken. Complete lack of tissue edema suggests wounds were sustained post-mortem.”

  She clicked off the recorder and turned to face Lara. “Okay, Detective. If this is a practical joke, it’s not one I find amusing.”

  “You saw the body cam footage,” Lara said quietly. “The wounds sustained by the suspect match those of Mr. Tully.”

  “I saw a man charge a shotgun and receive wounds that should have been instantly fatal. Then I saw what appears to be the same man tackle Ms. Ascher off a third-story balcony, then get up and run away. I’m assuming you were the one to do the damage to his arms and chest?”

  This last was directed at me, and I nodded after a moment’s hesitation. I found it extremely difficult to tear my eyes away from the body on the table. Despite Dr. Fenway’s best efforts at laying the body out straight, the man’s arms zig-zagged down his sides. I could still feel the impacts through the tonfa handles in my palms. I clenched my fists and met the doctor’s eyes. “It was self defense.”

  She snorted. “I care nothing about blame. Leave that to the detectives. Why did you keep striking?”

  “He kept trying to attack me,” I said. Looking at the man in the cold light of the examination room, it did seem a little excessive.

  “Even after you broke bones for the first time?”

  I nodded and Dr. Fenway pursed her lips again. “Well. I will have to do a full autopsy. It will take hours, and I doubt you want to hang around for that.”

  “Do you have any doubt the subject was deceased when it received its injuries?” Lara asked.

  Dr. Fenway leaned against the foot of the table and crossed her arms across her chest. “Only an autopsy will tell for sure. I’ll be honest, detective, I expect to find something that suggests the deceased was in fact alive during your altercation at the office building. I’ll probably find PCP in his blood stream, maybe a neurotoxin that made him appear dead during the initial examination.” She shook he
r head and cracked the first smile I’d seen on her face. “He’s dead now, though. A child could surmise that much.”

  Behind the doctor, something moving caught my eye. Tully’s head turned and his eyelids opened, showing blue eyes turned milky white. Horror clutched at my chest and I lunged forward, moving on reflex. Tully hinged up at the waist, his mouth gaping wide and teeth bared. I caught Dr. Fenway around the middle and tackled her to the ground.

  There was a deafening crack and above me, the table shook as the body crashed back down onto it. Fenway was shrieking, somewhere between outrage and panic, but my ears were ringing so I couldn’t make out any of the words.

  I rolled off her and almost put a hand in a lumpy trail of grey matter that sprayed out across the floor and up the corpse lockers on the far wall. Bile surged up my throat and I scrambled for the barf bucket. I made it in time to spew out a watery mouthful of vomit into the bucket.

  Someone scooped my hair out of my face and held it back until I was done dry heaving. I spat my mouth clear and gave Lara a watery smile in thanks. She nodded and stepped back, returning to her customary professional aloofness.

  Dr. Fenway was still on the ground. She had sat up and was staring up at the table, shock on her face. Tully had fallen sideways on the examination table, and his brains were splashed out behind him. A single, neat hole was centered between his eyes. Sam had his service pistol in his hand, and he kept it at a wary guard, eyes fixed on the re-re-dead Mark Tully.

  “What in the hell is going on here?!” Fenway shrieked.

  Lara’s mouth thinned and she looked pointedly at me. Right. I was supposed to be the expert. “Mr. Tully died two days ago from alcohol poisoning,” I said, crouching next to the ME and offering her a hand up. “Something used his body last night in an attempt to destroy evidence. Then, just now, that same thing used his body again. He was going to try and bite your neck, I believe.” This last I added as an afterthought, my mind’s eye replaying back the flashes of blurred action as I was diving toward the ME.

  “Like a vampire?” she asked shakily. “It wanted to drink my blood?”

  I shook my head. “No, not a vampire, thank God. This was a ghoul and it was probably just trying to kill you.”

  There was a wild look in Fenway’s eyes, shock and lingering panic had scrambled her thoughts. She couldn’t pull her gaze away from the body lying sprawled on the table.

  “Is it going to get back up?” Sam asked urgently.

  “He can’t,” Fenway said distantly. “The brain is like a switchboard for the body. There isn’t enough left to send impulses to the rest of the body.” She shuddered. “What am I saying? He’s dead! Of course he can’t move!”

  Footsteps were coming, hammering up the hallway outside.

  “I’ll deal with them,” Lara said and stepped outside.

  “Well, I guess that answers the question on how to kill them,” Sam said. Still, he didn’t put his gun away.

  “You destroyed the body,” I corrected him. “The ghoul is uninjured.”

  “Shit. Is it safe here?”

  I looked at the wall of corpse lockers. “Dr. Fenway, how many bodies are stored here? And are they frozen or refrigerated?”

  “This is the only positive temperature lab. There are… three other bodies here.”

  “Do those doors open from the inside?”

  Fenway boggled at me. “No? I think?”

  I frowned, then shrugged. “We should be okay. We’ll have plenty of warning if the ghoul tries to grab another body. The rest are frozen, so I imagine they’d be useless to a ghoul. Doctor, can we drop the temperature of these to freezing?”

  “Yes, there’s a setting… What is going on? I don’t understand! Detective?”

  Sam gestured at me. “You heard the expert.”

  “You can’t be serious. A… ghoul? Is using bodies? This is real life, Ms. Ascher, not a video game. The dead do not get up and walk. I demand an explanation!”

  I stepped away to a control panel set into the wall and after some experimental prodding of buttons, found the controls to the locker temperature and dropped the temperature well below freezing.

  “You saw what happened,” I said over my shoulder. “Mr. Tully here tried to eat you.”

  “I didn’t see anything!”

  I hesitated. She was right. I had tackled her when her back was turned. I looked about the room and spotted a security camera in a corner. I pointed at it. “Can we pull up the footage?”

  That proved to be easy. Lara had already defused the situation in the hallway by suggesting the footage be reviewed in lieu of getting arrested, and we all trouped upstairs to the security office under the hovering guidance of the policeman stationed at the morgue. It didn’t take long for the nervous-looking IT guy to find the camera in question and queue up the last half hour.

  “Thank you for your assistance,” Lara said once she saw us join Dr. Fenway in the autopsy room. She put her hand on the man’s shoulder and started escorting him from the room.

  “I’m not supposed to allow anyone in there without me,” he protested.

  Lara gave him a frosty smile. “You’re not cleared to see these tapes. Once we review them, I’ll be taking the originals with me for evidence.”

  The policeman posted at the morgue refused to leave. “You can kick Mike out, but unless I see some damn good reason for you to discharge your weapon at a body, I’m placing the lot of you under arrest.”

  Lara shrugged. “Suit yourself. But if you watch this, you’re going to be deputized into my task force.”

  He matched her stare with a glare of his own. “We’ll see. Roll that tape.”

  I sighed. There was a reason I hated getting the cops involved with the supernatural. They didn’t understand it, and the more you tried to keep things quiet, the more they wanted to stick their noses in. Unfortunately, this time the cops were already involved. The best I could do was try and limit the number of people who were exposed.

  “Officer, can I have a quick word?” I asked.

  He glared at me. “No.”

  I tried a placating smile. “Look. I respect your integrity on this. I’d be suspicious too, in your shoes. But you trust Dr. Fenway, right? She would not allow corpse mutilation under any circumstances, right?”

  The cop glanced at Dr. Fenway. “Absolutely.”

  “Then, if Dr. Fenway reviews the tape and decides the gunshot was justified, would that satisfy you?” I could see the confusion and distrust on the cop’s face, and I smiled sweetly at him, trying to tilt his judgement in our favor.

  It seemed to work, because the cop let out a deep breath. “You okay with that, Doctor?”

  Fenway gave a vague nod.

  “I’ll be right outside the door, then.” With a last distrustful glare at us, the cop stepped outside.

  “Nicely done, Alexandra,” Lara muttered. “Doctor Fenway, would you care to do the honors?”

  The ME stepped up to the computer and hit the play button. There wasn’t any sound and the image was grainy, but we could clearly make out the body lying on the table and the rest of us standing around in a loose knot as Fenway moved about the table, making her preliminary examination.

  Fenway paused it again right before the ghoul started moving. I saw her brow was sweaty and she looked pale.

  “Are you okay, Doctor?” I asked.

  She glared at me. “In five years of working with bodies, never once have I seen one move on its own.”

  I thought I understood. Here was a woman who was a prodigy of some sort. She had a doctorate and a job at the county morgue at an age where most people in her profession were just starting their internships. She had probably started college at twelve years old or something. This was her life. It was all she knew, but she knew it very well.

  “Take your time,” I nodded.

  Her glare softened, and after a moment she turned back to the computer and hit play. Things moved pretty fast. The angle of the camera obscured the m
otion of the body’s head that had triggered my dash forward, but there was no hiding the way Tully sat up on his own. His arms were useless deadweight, but his mouth snapped closed where Fenway’s neck had been a moment after I had dragged her to the floor.

  Sam’s draw was lightning fast a moment later, and Tully was just starting to roll off the table when the bullet hammered him backward. The gore looked like a burst of dark mist coming out behind Tully, and then he slumped back to the table.

  Fenway paused the tape. She had her hand to her mouth, and her eyes were wide with terror.

  I cleared my throat. “Doctor?”

  Wordlessly, Fenway rewound the tape and watched it through again. Then she ejected it and handed it over to Lara. She looked at me and I saw the terror had subsided, but fear of the unknown still lingered. “You understand what happened?”

  I nodded.

  “Very well. I do not, but it would seem I owe you an apology.” There was a stiffness to her face, and visible discomfort.

  “An apology isn’t necessary,” I muttered.

  “Then accept my thanks instead.” Fenway went to the door and pulled it open. The policeman was standing outside, concern and distrust on his face. “I have reviewed the footage. There was no wrongdoing,” Fenway announced.

  “You sure, Doc? Give the word and I’ll arrest the lot of them.”

  “Thank you. But no, that won’t be necessary.” The policeman nodded reluctantly and left. Fenway looked after him for a moment, then returned to the security room and shut the door. She folded her arms and looked at us for a few seconds, then nodded to herself. “Okay. I’m listening. You say this thing is a ghoul?”

  The two detectives looked to me. “Ah. Yes. There are a few modern uses of the word, but the etymology goes back to the Middle East and northern Africa. There are Islamic myths that document the existence of the ghouls as far back as before Adam. They are not zombies or undead. I’m still learning what exactly they are and how they are able to use the bodies of the dead.” I shrugged, a little uncomfortable. I wasn’t much of an authority and my explanation sounded weak even to my ears.