Blood King (Spirit Seeker Book 1)

by Amber K. Bryant

  “I run a legitimate show. There’s no swindle. People get what they pay for.”

  “I doubt they’re paying to be mesmerized by a bloodthirsty hell beast, but whatever.” She sat on her bed, tucking her knees under her chin.

  “They pay to be hypnotized, or to sit in the audience and be entertained and that’s what they get, on both counts.”

  “You didn’t just hypnotize your willing volunteers today, though, did you? The whole audience was under your control and they never knew it. How many self-hypnosis CDs did you sell, by the way?”

  “A thirster’s still got to eat…or drink, at least.” A sly smile crept onto his face. “I didn’t do too badly, though. Thanks for asking. I have a limited window to make this sort of impact on people. The fair only stays in town for ten days. I spent a few months traveling around with it last year, but the carnie life is not the life for me. Now, once it leaves town, I stay put. Then it’s up to my private practice to keep me in organic grass-fed cow’s blood. That stuff’s not exactly cheap, you know.”

  “You have a source for grass-fed blood?”

  “Local, of course.”

  “No wonder you brought up hipster pizza yesterday. You’re one well-groomed mustache away from serving your clients mason jars filled with homebrewed kombucha. Which reminds me: Elis Tanner, Hypnotherapist. 1023 West Crawling Avenue. That’s a pretty swank neighborhood.”

  “You looked me up?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Google is my friend.” Of course, she’d looked him up. It was what her family did. Bounty hunters. Assassins. Psychic monster hunters. Whatever he wanted to call them. They found bloodthirsters, whether those bloodthirsters wanted to be found or not.

  “Come by tomorrow. I’ll be there.”

  She picked up a nail file from the bedside table and began to inspect the tips of her fingers. “Oh, I don’t know…your website says, ‘by appointment only.’”

  “Consider yourself to have a standing appointment.”

  Setting down the file, she cocked her head as she leveled her gaze at him. “This is dreaming Elis talking, not daytime, bloodthirster, incarnated soul Elis. He might not want to see me after what I pulled at his show. At your show. I mean, you seem pissed about it, and you’re not even the bloodthirster half of the Elis equation.”

  “Trust me, he wants to see you just as much as I do. I am him, remember. The spirit and the beast—we’re intertwined, inseparable.”

  Squinting, she lifted her hand up to his face, sliding it along what would be his cheek, if he’d been flesh and blood. “Are you sure about that? I’m just going to throw this out there, but if the two of you are so inseparable, how is it that you’re capable of checking out of casa de la beast so you can meet up with me?”

  He answered with a low groan followed by a question of his own. “Why is it that I can imagine I’m feeling you touch me?”

  “I guess we both have questions that can’t be easily answered.” She stroked his spectral cheek one more time, then brought her hand back and picked up her nail file again. “I need you out of my head now. Gotta be well rested for my hypnotherapy session tomorrow morning.”

  He nodded, but his forehead scrunched up in confusion. “I don’t know how to leave on command. It’s like I’m not ready for the dream to end yet and so I can’t go.”

  She threw a pillow at him, watching as it passed through his head and collapsed against the wall. “Make yourself useful then and go keep Nate company.”

  Elis grumbled. “He’s going to make me explain every single thing that’s happening on that imbecilic show. And, by the way, he’s still convinced the actors magically live inside your television. A bit of a clod, that one.”

  “That’s why I like him. He’s simple. What you see is what you get, nothing hidden.”

  “Everyone is hiding something. You just haven’t uncovered it with Nate yet because he’s wearing such a heavy layer of stupid.”

  Sybille laughed. “Get out of here.” She motioned towards the door. “Shoo.”

  “As you wish.” He bowed low to her, then, ignoring the open door, he floated through the wall.

  “Showoff!”

  “Make sure to give me a kiss when you see me. Maybe add a little nibble to my lower lip. I’ve always loved that…” His voice trailed off as he floated down the hallway.

  Damn him. Sybille hopped out of bed and closed the door, hoping that act would create enough of a psychological barrier to keep her from thinking about him. Behind closed lids, though, thoughts of that lower lip and what he wanted her to do to it—to the real flesh and bone Elis—kept her awake long into the night.

  Chapter Seven

  Low Hollow was Devin’s least favorite place on the planet. It figured that his job would take him there often and figured even more that he’d have to play the pretender while he was there, acting as though the Low was his go-to vacation destination spot. Sybille’s family kept a log cabin on a small lake along the edge of the Low’s southern forest. After researching Nathanial Atkins and his supposed whereabouts, he got an early start, reaching the lake by late morning.

  The cabin wasn’t much more welcoming than a musty cave would have been. He hadn’t visited it for several months and it showed. The Esmonds avoided the entire Hollow if they could, so it stood silent and empty unless Devin was there, curtains drawn, the inside like a cold, neglected tomb.

  Devin threw open the drapes and started a fire in the wood burner. Winter’s chill hadn’t yet set in, but the heat would help rid the space of dank air. He hoped he wouldn’t have to spend more than a night there, though something told him he couldn’t count on things with Nathanial Atkins to end quickly or neatly.

  Sybille had described his spirit as a bit on the dull side, but it seemed his bloodthirster half had taken whatever brains he’d had in his life and run off with them. Old accounts of his undead life existed in the hierophants’ databases. He had successfully eluded field agents half a dozen times over the past fifty years. All while never leaving this damned Low. Then, about a decade or so ago, he dropped off their radar.

  Devin was sick of working in the dark, but as disconcerting as it was for him, he could only imagine how much murkier Sybille’s job could be. Though the ether was not a place he’d ever been, Sybille had described it to him, along with the process in which she sought out spirits. A formless realm where nothing was tangible and yet everything was felt. Where spirits like Nate dwelled, slivers of consciousness held together in a tenuous arrangement between fate and sheer will. Where a spirit with little awareness outside their own thoughts would exist in limbo until their consciousness happened to intersect with Sybille’s. And if she was able to break through the fog, where they would be faced with a choice of remaining as they were or leaving the ether for the more confusing Now World in a bid for final release to the World Beyond.

  After listening to Sybille, Devin felt little need to complain about his own work. At least it took place on Earth and the objective was always the same: kill.

  Shifting the logs with his poker, Devin tried to shrug off the weariness threatening to stop him before he’d even begun the hunt. The Low had a way of keeping people like him from doing their jobs. He wasn’t a mystical kind of guy, but he had to admit this place had its own feel to it, like it was a living organism with a mind of its own. And that mind had been made up long ago to side with the monsters Devin tried to take out. It’s like they knew when he was coming and then did their best to fuck with him.

  Things went missing here: weapons, his phone, his sanity, not to mention people. Normally a steady guy with years of training under his belt, Devin became unhinged as soon as he entered the Low. Whenever he came here, he seemed to trip over the smallest twig or stone. After the third flat tire he’d gotten while driving through the Low’s dark stretches, he started keeping multiple spares in the back of his truck. On top of that weirdness, it was always foggy, no matter how cloudless the skies were elsewhere. The path in front of h
im was never clear.

  The Low hated him and the feeling was mutual.

  Unfortunately for him, bloodthirsters gravitated to the Low and nine times out of ten, it was a bloodthirster he was challenged to find. Why he’d given up his job as a cop to track down unrepentant, amoral monsters, to be dragged to the Low and forced to remember things he’d rather forget, was beyond him. Some days, he could almost believe that. He could convince himself that he didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing.

  Today wasn’t one of those days.

  It was Sybille—smart, sarcastic, infuriating Sybille. She wasn’t interested in him and he knew it. But interests could be cultivated. They could change. They could grow. If he had to keep tracking and destroying nightmare creatures in the one place on the planet that was his own personal nightmare so he could see her on a regular basis, he would do it.

  The cabin went from cold to stifling in less than two hours. He scarfed down a sub sandwich he’d brought with him, then resigned himself to settling in for the evening. He’d tied an old rag to a tree at the end of his driveway, letting his contact know he was there, but the chances of her seeing it today were slim. The day’s light slowly dying, Devin used the quiet time to examine a stack of printouts pertaining to the case.

  The spirit had been adamant that Nathanial would stay near the forest.

  “Once a lumberjack, always a lumberjack.” According to Sybille, those words had actually come out of his dumb-as-bolts spectral little mouth. Spirits were bound to become out-of-touch over time. The world sped on without them, after all. A spirit in the ether had no way of knowing what its bloodthirster was up to, but it could sense their general location. As much as Devin may wish he was, he doubted the spirit was wrong about Nathanial’s whereabouts.

  Before his first official trip to the Low as the Esmond’s field agent, Peter Esmond had given Devin fair warning. “The whole place is one big hierophany. The undead are attracted to it because the veil is always thin there. They sense the other side and the other side senses them. But the hierophany has chosen to protect them. We don’t understand why. They’re given safe harbor, while we who are hierophants, we who share a name and an understanding of the world beyond what we see, we aren’t welcome.”

  Peter and his sister Margot hadn’t been to Low Hollow in years. They’d refused to bring their children there while they were growing up. Sybille had yet to set foot inside its boundaries. After hearing Peter speak about the Low’s dangers, Devin couldn’t help but be glad that was the case. As for himself, he already knew more about it than he wanted to. That’s why Peter hired him in the first place.

  “The ether and what’s beyond—it knows what we are when we enter the hollow,” Peter told him. “And it wants us. It wants us for its own purposes. The biggest temptation in a hierophant’s life is to give the Low what it wants.”

  After he spoke, Peter watched Devin’s eyes grow wide. Devin had only been working for them for two days and was already starting to have serious regrets about it. “It doesn’t affect you, Devin, you know that. No worries there. I’ve never met anyone so entirely void of psychic powers. That’s why we need you. If you don’t spend too much time there, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  That was an out-and-out lie. Psychic or not, Devin was anything but safe in the Low. It knew he wasn’t a magical portal-to-the-other-side-opener like Sybille, but it knew he sided with them, knew he’d always been inclined to align himself with the do-gooder-rid-the-world-of-evil types, even if he wasn’t exactly a saint himself. It knew he was against the bloodthirsters—he had his own reasons for that and it knew those too. It felt his hatred, a hatred he’d spent all his adult years trying to contain within a little box stored safely in the back of his mind. The Low picked it out of him, opened it, rifled around inside, and laughed at it. It knew his hatred, knew why he hated. The Low found this all to be amusing.

  And so it went. When Devin entered the Low, he was entering enemy territory.

  At some point, Devin fell asleep. By the time he woke, face pressed against the papers he’d been examining late into the evening, it was already nearing midday.

  He got up and stretched, ate a couple of power bars from his stash, then headed out. If his informant wasn’t here yet, she would be soon.

  The living inhabitants of the Low were only human in that they shared their DNA with the rest of the world’s population. Their minds, however, had been slowly drained of their humanity over the years spent living with the push and pull of the supernatural world. Some seemed normal enough, but Devin had learned never to trust them. Only young children, born too recently to be entirely altered by their environment, could be counted upon to give Devin any straight answers. Fortunately for him, most of the parents in the Low weren’t the helicopter variety. If Devin needed information on one of the Low’s undead citizens, it was one of the free-range children whose help he sought.

  Knowing he’d bring her candy and soda pop, Devin normally didn’t have to search far to find one of the Low’s youngest and brightest. Sure enough, after tripping over a loose rock, it was his most reliable spy, an eight-year-old girl with stringy blond hair and a missing front tooth who caught him and helped him to his car.

  “It’s good to see you again, Charlie.” He handed her a Snickers bar. “You been doing all right?”

  The girl shrugged as she peeled back the candy wrapper. He couldn’t help but be happy to see her. Not only was Charlie whip smart, she had a good read on people. She knew there was something wrong with the adults around her and had enough sense to know Devin was different.

  “Seriously?” She spoke through bites of chocolate and caramel. “When have I ever been ‘doing all right?’”

  “Hey, I had to ask.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I hope you have more where this came from.” She flicked the wrapper at him. “You here tracking another monster?”

  Devin pursed his lips. He hated that a child barely old enough to read had to know so much about bloodthirsters. Monsters weren’t an imaginary being to children like Charlie. They didn’t hide in her closet or under her bed. They didn’t hide at all. Her life was full of them—bloodthirsters, shifters, even her parents, who paid less attention to her than they did the dog she said they kept tied up under their porch.

  “I’m looking for a man named Nathanial Atkins. Big white guy. Brownish-red hair, lots of muscles. Probably prone to wearing plaid and suspenders. You know of a thirster like that?” She scrunched up her nose and held out her hand. “I may have heard the name…but it’ll cost you.”

  “You know I’m good for it.” He reached into his bag and tossed over half a dozen full-sized candy bars. “Where can I find him?”

  “You don’t even know who he is, do you?” She shoved the bars into the pockets of her coat. “He runs Hocus, for one. And he’s super mean!”

  Hocus? Of all the places it could have been. Which meant...

  Devin slapped the door of his truck. Damn it to hell. That information hadn’t been in the hierophant database. They’d dropped the ball on this one. “Does your dad do business with him?”

  She rolled her eyes again. “Everyone does business with the Blood King.” She turned on her heals, collected her bicycle and headed down the driveway leading away from the cabin to the strip of country road circling the lake. “Be careful with him, Devin. If he kills you, where am I gonna get my sugar fix?”

  “Thanks for your concern!” He watched her speed away until she turned the bend and disappeared.

  It was Charlie who really needed that concern—hers, his and anyone else who would listen. Helping him was a dangerous act and they both knew it. He kicked at the loose stone that he’d tripped over earlier.

  How many years of sane living did she have left, anyways? Five, six tops. Either her parents or Nathanial or the Low itself would do her in at some point. He’d thought on more than one occasion about taking her away from here, bringing her back to Margot and Sybille and letting
them care for her away from the Low’s reach. He’d mentioned this to Sybille, who had looked both horrified and devastated.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘away from the Low’s reach,’ Devin. Even if we got her out of the Low in a physical sense, she’s still spent her whole life there. It’s a part of her. More importantly, she’s a part of it, and it’s not bound to give her up easily. You’d only be putting all of us at risk.” She’d sat down next to Devin, placing her hand on his knee. If it had been any other time, he’d have reveled in this moment, in her freely given touch. But it hadn’t been any other time, and now he found himself teetering midway between anger and dejection. “It’s too late for her, Devin. I’m sorry.”

  Devin leaned against his truck, remembering this exchange, thoughts of the home Charlie was pedaling back to interfering with the thoughts he should be having as to his next course of action. Maybe he’d take her away from the Low anyways. Maybe Sybille was wrong.

  Not that Sybille had ever been wrong before.

  Sybille…time to give her an update.

  Taking out his phone, he sent her a text.

  Have a lead on our guy. Bad MF. Database needs serious updating and a good slap. Going to get him now. Call the Patron. Expect this one to get messy.

  He hovered for a second over Sybille’s contact image. In it she held one hand up, trying to stop him from taking her picture. She may have objected to having her picture snapped, but her face betrayed a playful smile. He pressed send, threw the phone on the passenger’s seat and started up his truck.

  Nathanial Atkins was the Blood King. That was an unpleasant development. He’d heard rumors of him over the years, but no one ever mentioned him by any name other than Blood King. Most people likely didn’t know his long abandoned human moniker. He was surprised that Charlie knew it, to be honest. Whatever his name, the guy was a bad dude, even by bloodthirster standards. Devin had tried to steer clear of him, fly under his radar every time he came to the Low.