“Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.” Jenner went to her knees beside the bike, hands hovering over the engine, the exhaust pipes, the leather of the seat. “Mason would never leave his bike like this. Never.”
“Okay, it’s okay, Jen… look, we’ll go find him.” Duke came up beside her, rubbing her armored shoulder. She brushed him off and got to her feet. Her eyes were hard, her face taut with feral anger.
Binah arched against my head, regarding the fallen hulk warily. I was with her. The air smelled cold, but the usual comforting, earthy aroma of forest loam seemed faded and dreary. With the smattering of rain, this place should have smelled like petrichor and pine, but it simply didn’t smell of much at all.
While the three shifters picked over the bike, I set Binah on the ground and moved apart from them to search the area nearby. She ran ahead of me with a chirrup, bold as brass. There were boot prints, clear patches slushed out of the dewy grass, which lead down a narrow rut into the gully beyond the clearing. My cat trotted off to the left; I followed her with the flashlight beam, briefly losing her until she meowed, and I lit on her rubbing herself against the roots of a tree bulging out from the side of a dug-out hill. A round concrete frame was mounted into the scalloped side, a huge pipe-shaped entryway with an open door. The fetid smell of death blew out on a warm breeze.
“Hey.” I called back up to them. “You should come and see this.”
“What?” Duke called back.
“There’s a bunker.” I took a little tube of Vicks from my jacket pocket, squeezed some out onto my fingers, and rubbed it under my nose. “And it smells like something died in there.”
That got their attention. I had only just put the menthol rub away by the time the three of them came skittering down the path.
“Jesus Christ,” Duke said. “That stinks.”
I took the lead, knife held at the ready. The stench that hung thick in the air beyond the threshold was not as bad as the smell at Falkovich’s house. It was the characteristic latrine-and-stale-ground-beef smell of a relatively fresh corpse. The entry tunnel led in and down, and the air became exponentially less pleasant the further we went. I heard someone choke behind me, and turned to see Duke dash out the door to vomit noisily into the grass.
“Get out of the way, Rex!” Jenner shoved up behind me. “That’s my old man in there!”
“Please… hold on.” I was scanning the walls and ceiling, moving forward with cautious attention. “It could be trapped.”
“Fuck traps!” Jenner snarled and seized the back of my jacket, jerking me off-balance. I was so tired that she’d pushed me aside by the time I got my guard up, and could do nothing but watch her stalk off into the bunker ahead of me. The entry wasn’t wide enough for the two of us to move side by side, so I followed up with my flashlight pointed at her back like a weapon.
The tunnel ended in a small, domed room with two doors on the same wall. One was open, the other locked. Inside the open door was a room where the stench was thickest. Jenner barged ahead, while I searched the wall for a light switch. There was none, and so I turned my flashlight back to look over things as Zane stepped in beside me, his hand over his mouth.
The bunker looked like a Cold War survivalist relic. Besides the lack of light, the interior was surprisingly modern, though Spartan. It was also quite large for a building of its type. The walls were smooth but unfinished, nothing but stained concrete. There was a shabby lounge suite interspersed with dining chairs set in a ring around a rug, a kitchenette with no visible food, and closed doors along the walls. A stack of bibles on a coffee table came into sharp relief as I swept the beam of light across. When I turned the light down to the floor, I saw something that made me pause in consternation. Bloody paw-prints that were larger than my head, the distinctive pinched triangle and jelly-beans pattern of a feline foot.
I was headed from the first when a piercing cry of rage echoed from the open door at the other end of the underground longhouse.
“God dammit, Rex.” Zane muttered. “GOD help us, she had to find Mason like this, of all people…”
We drew up to the doorway to see Jenner crouched beside the bed, her mouth twisted in a pained expression of grief.
“I… I…” Jenner was in tears, eyes huge in the beams of the flashlights. “I don’t understand.”
Chapter 26
The corpse of what could only be John Spotted Elk was torn open like a sacrifice, his body trapped in a hideous state between human and deer. His eyes were gone. His chest and belly were torn open, ribs cracked apart, and everything above his diaphragm was simply missing. The rest of his internal organs were scattered on the bed and floor around him. His hoof-like hands were still up by his face in a posture of defense, the dark flesh ripped open by claws.
The mattress he lay on was gouged, the springs crazed. The mingled smell of rotting meat, urine and feces was so powerful that it made my eyes sting. As difficult as it was to think, the defensive posture of his hands, the expression on his face, his spilled abdomen and the deep puncture wounds on the side of his neck all spoke of the same thing. He’d been mauled by an animal far larger and far stronger than he was. It had happened quickly, and death had taken him by surprise.
Numbly, I turned the torch up to check the ceiling and the wall. Above the bed was a sigil, far more crudely rendered than the one discovered over Lily and Dru’s: An eye with a blank iris drawn through with a cross. The flashlight dipped as I stared at it in dawning recognition.
The day that Vassily had gone to prison, I’d had a dream with Zarya and this very same mark: the cross and eye. Jana, the psychotic sorceress who had tried to enslave me for an unknown Master, had displayed this symbol in her downstairs basement oratory over a blank black altar.
“Mason… Mason wouldn’t do this,” Jenner said. She got to her feet, nearly tripping over the upended dresser behind her. “He wouldn’t do this!”
“Jenner…” Zane called to her from the doorway.
“He wouldn’t. He never killed anyone without good reason. Ever. He wouldn’t kill him. Neither would Michael.”
“I know that symbol.” I also took a step back. The reek was making my face hurt. “I have spare gloves if you want to search the room… but don’t touch the body. If someone reports it, we need to make sure we can’t be traced.”
“If we tell Ayashe we found this… Oh fuck.” Jenner moved back, her hands clenched in her hair. “Mason, Michael. What the fuck?”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?” I turned to find Zane clenching the edge of the doorframe. He was pale and sweaty. “We have to report this, Jenner. He’s the oldest fucking Elder in the city.”
“If the Vigiles get wind of this, they’ll kill him!” Jenner said. “They’ll kill both of them. We won’t know… we won’t have any way to find out why, or… or how.”
“We need to leave now,” Zane snapped. “This isn’t a job for us, Prez.”
“We have to find something. This is no way for an Elder to die. Rex. Give me the gloves.” Jenner held her hand out.
“Jenner, come on.”
“ZANE.” Jenner flashed him a hard look over my shoulder. “Shut the fuck up and see if you can find anything in the rest of this place. Both of you. I need time to think.”
Without a word, I passed one of my pairs of latex gloves to her, squared my shoulders, and headed for the main room.
“This is so wrong. Fuck… I can’t believe this.” Zane scruffed his hair and pulled away from the door, coughing.
There was no sign of the missing Spook. While Jenner sorted through the remains of the bedroom, I padded back out and did my amateurish best to put everything together. The paw prints were everywhere, meandering around the floor. There were human footprints, too. A few cupboards were smashed, a few bookshelves fallen. There were murals on the walls that I hadn’t seen on entering the bunker: Apocalyptic murals depicting nuclear war and the Rapture. The sky was gray and orange and dull red, with a format
ion of stars that had a crimson star glowing at the center.
Beware the Red Star in the Morning… beware the time when the sky screams…
They have begun the Third War, a War as old the ManLands which bore you.
You will see the Star, HuMan Hound… He comes for you again.
My stomach jerked. Rubbing it, I moved away to search for other clues.
There was a gun safe near the prayer circle – I assumed that was what the furniture arrangement was – but it had a two-ring combination lock and there just wasn’t time to puzzle it out. The first door I opened was a bathroom. The second was a bedroom lined with bunks. Six bunk beds, enough to sleep twelve people. It was set up like a military dorm, with trunks at the end of each bunk. I looked inside: they were full of children’s clothing, most of it soiled. I rifled through it, but there was nothing of interest.
After half an hour of fruitless searching in the dank underground, I took a single Bible from the table while we gathered outside. Zane separated from us to stare out into the forest, lost in his own thoughts. Duke had finished puking and was chain-smoking mixed tobacco and marijuana joints to settle his nerves and stomach, Binah on his lap. The regular scent of tobacco was very green to me; these cigarettes smelled dark green and bright blue, a weird combination of abrasive and sweet-sharp color-tastes.
“You know, I always had my doubts about the Four Fires.” Standing off to the side, Jenner held none of her usual energy. Her shoulders were hunched, her voice quiet and firm with the kind of steadiness that only someone who had faced atrocity could muster. “They were always so up themselves, you know? They’d go on about a ‘shapeshifting community’. John came up with all this inclusive language bullshit. Sat on the panels and lobbied for inclusion in the Vigiles and everything. Now he’s fucking dead, and I don’t know what to think about him, about the Pathfinders… I don’t where anyone’s gone.”
“Guess we know what his Ka is, anyway.” Duke said.
“He didn’t even have time to shift,” Zane said. “I can’t even… I can’t believe it. Maybe that Spook is still around here. I mean, what kind of power does it take to catch someone in the middle of the change? And where the hell is Michael?”
Duke’s dark eyes slid to the side, glancing at Jenner. “Sorry to say it, boss, but… I dunno. Maybe Mason took him somewhere. Maybe Michael took Mason somewhere. There’s no way to know.”
I sighed, and moved to keep myself upwind from the pot smoke. “I know the symbol that was left in the bedroom. Maybe it’s older than Mason’s being here, maybe it’s not. In either case, the symbol belongs to a cult or underground dark magic fraternity. They have the capacity to summon and deploy primordial, deeply evil entities. I only know them by acronym: the TVS.”
“Tsch. Call them DOGs, already. We know what Morphorde is.” Jenner reached out for the joint. “What does TVS stand for?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Before I left the Organizatsiya, I dealt with one of their members: A female serial killer working on behalf of someone she only signed with ‘L’. She had that eye-and-cross symbol over her altar. Jana was a mage, like me. When her soul awakened, she went mad. There was something wrong with it at the metaphysical level. Contact with her soul changed her, and she went insane. Could something like this happen to Weeders?”
“If it can, I’ve never heard of it. I’ve been incarnating, round and round, for close to five hundred years that I can remember.” Jenner took a deep drag on the joint. It had gone out. “Fought in France, fought in Russia – got killed there, that was nasty. Now Vietnam, on both sides. I knew some Weeders who got really sick or died when they were fighting the Deep Black, DOGs and shit. Most of them were the smaller guys… the rodent shifters, rabbits, weasels and possums.”
I frowned. “Isn’t that the general group of people that the Pathrunners recruit from?”
“Little critters awaken faster,” Duke grunted. “They get killed more often, so they live more lives than us. They’re super-social, you know… So they became lawkeepers.”
Lily and Dru. Moris Falkovich. Ivanko, and Vanya, by extension. Now, Michael and Mason? John’s murder hadn’t been signed by ‘Soldier 557’, like the others had. They were connected, somehow. I crouched down and stroked Binah while I thought, trying to fit the pieces together.
“Was Michael a member of any organizations beyond the Pathrunners? The senior pastor at the Church of the Voice mentioned that he was working with the church for the childrens’ program.”
Duke was watching us with an expression of puzzled ignorance. When Jenner looked to him, he shrugged. “Fucked if I know, boss.”
“Same here.” Jenner nodded. “What? You think they’re hiding something?”
“I know that Lily and Dru have to have been hiding a lot of things,” I said. “But I remember you saying that Pathrunner Elders have to go through a lot of tests and trials to attain their status. Is it the same as the initiation ritual John told me about?”
As one, all three Tigers looked towards the bunker.
“No,” Jenner replied. “It’s different for every gang. I don’t know what their rites are, but I know the Pathrunners have some hardcore vetting.”
I sighed. “Then something must have happened to change them between the time they were vetted, and the time they were murdered. Otherwise, I’m honestly at a loss.”
“Fuck this. I sent Mason out here with these idiots.” The woman growled, and began to angrily strip her leathers. She threw them to the soft forest floor, and before I could so much as avert my eyes, she pulled her t-shirt off as well. She was so small-breasted that she didn’t need a bra. “We’re going to look for him. Zane! Get your kit off. It’s a full moon, and I need your eyes.”
Zane’s shoulders tensed, and his hands fisted. “Prez, I still don’t-”
“Stop being such a fucking prude and get your fucking clothes off.” She pulled her belt out. Duke was also beginning to undress. I began to feel more than slightly awkward.
“I assume that one of you will be taking Mason’s motorcycle back to the city,” I said, glancing at Zane, who was still noticeably reluctant as he began to shuck his leather to the ground. “I’ll drive the car and meet you there.”
“You should do your mojo here while you’re gone,” Jenner said. She dropped her jeans, and I turned reflexively, clearing my throat. “Scan the place, or whatever it is you do.”
“It would be better for me to return,” I said. Quite suddenly, I felt the way that Zane had looked. “I need to finish decoding some gematria for Ayashe. That might give us some leads into who is responsible… we won’t find answers without a culprit, or culprits. If this TVS organization is involved-”
“Okay, whatever.” Jenner spoke from behind me. “I don’t need details, Rex. Just results. Ready, guys?”
“I was born ready,” Duke said. “And furry.”
Zane did not reply, except to throw me the keys. Summarily dismissed, I collected my familiar and began to mount the hill back up to the parking lot as wet tearing sounds ricocheted from below. I turned at the crest and looked back, hoping to see them, but only saw piles of discarded clothes and the flick of a huge shadow disappearing from the pool of moonlight in the clearing.
Secrets on secrets. I had effectively lied to them, again, but I was so good at it and becoming so accustomed to it that the sting of indignation barely registered. Part of that was because lying – or hiding the truth, at least – was becoming habitual. Part of it was because I knew, without a doubt, that someone had to be lying to me, too.
When I reached the Buick, I turned on the cabin light and looked through the Bible I’d taken. Revelations was heavily marked. Individual numbers and letters were circled with pencil throughout the text – Bible code notations. Grimacing, I started with the first New Testament ‘M’ chapter, Matthew. In the second chapter, I found a heading: ‘The Slaughter of the Infants.”
“Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he
became very enraged, and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi.” I recited the words gutturally. My voice was a deep whiskey-hoarse croak. “Matthew 2:16.”
The Bible verse made me think of Christopher and the Church, but I hadn’t intended to visit Falkovich before this afternoon. Even if Christopher was some kind of telepathic adept, he couldn’t have known where I was intending to go, because I hadn’t known about him before or during out meeting. In fact… I hadn’t told anyone about Moris Falkovich, or the rumors I’d gotten from my doctor. I’d gone off by myself like a fool, thinking I’d break a couple of fingers and get him talking, and walked straight into a trap.
A trap just like this forest bunker. I exhaled thinly, and sat back. Just like Falkovich’s house, it had been set up before we arrived… but who had set it up, and what were they trying to catch?
Chapter 27
I arrived back just after dawn, breath sour with hunger and head hurting for want of caffeine. The clubhouse was empty save for Talya: She was still at the bar, her head resting on her folded arms. When the door closed, she startled up and squinted. “Rex? Where’s everyone else?”
“Jenner, Zane and Duke have stayed back to search for Michael and Mason,” I said. “Spotted Elk is dead.”
The proclamation hung between us for some time. Talya rubbed her face, and looked down at the keyboard she’d been slaving over. Her eyes were reddened with fatigue, but she did not cry.
“You warned us,” she said. “In the reading. You warned us this would happen. That people were going to die.”
I looked down at her feet, unsure of how to react. “I suppose. Though Jenner has already made her opinion on tarot known to us all. I will continue to do my best, but we are running out of time.”
“I know. I have an awful feeling that someone is trying to destroy us.” Talya pushed back and got to her feet. “That there’s some… master manipulator at work. You know for sure that John’s dead?”
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