Dark Vigil

by Gary Piserchio

  The two left down the stairwell carrying the broken policeman.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When Detective Detrick Palmerroy opened his eyes, the remnants of a nightmare clung to him just out of reach of his memory. He was grateful to be awake, but it didn’t take him long to realize something was horribly wrong. There was a tube jammed down his throat, a half-dozen machines beeped and whirred, and wires spun a web around him. He was in a hospital.

  Then he remembered the nightmare.

  He screamed, but the tube muffled it. A woman’s face floated above his own for a moment then disappeared. Shortly, another woman’s face appeared. She told him she was a doctor and said other things, but his mind was too freaked out—and that was an understatement. His mind went where minds go when they’ve lost all connection with reality. When they couldn’t even fathom the concept of reality.

  Memories bashed him over the head. The feel and sound of bones snapping inside his body. The touch of something so monumentally evil that even now he felt its stain across his soul. This evil thing violated him, tried to consume him and take dominion of his body. He screamed again, making the doctor look kinda freaked out as well. And then he smashed into the ceiling.

  No, that wasn’t right. The ceiling rushed toward him, but he didn’t hit it. He was falling up. Was it that thing, that shadow coming after him again? Throwing him around like a rag doll? Maybe it never left him and had been waiting for him to wake up. He swung his arms and thrashed to try to knock it away, spinning around and—

  Holy crap.

  He went perfectly still as he looked down at the back of the doctor leaning over him, telling him to remain calm. He looked down at his own body in the hospital bed, his eyes closed.

  He was bandaged everywhere. Arms and legs suspended from wires and pulleys. A tube in his mouth and countless tubes and wires snaking in and around his body. It looked like he’d been in a horrible car accident.

  But, no, he’d simply been mauled by some sort of vile shadow. That’s all it was, just a shadow. And the man with the freaky eyes and unnatural strength. Pale skin. Had he really been kidnapped by a vampire? That didn’t seem so unbelievable now.

  The doctor looked at some of the machines. The one directly in front of her had his heart rate and blood pressure. It was beeping happily. She pressed something and paper tape spit out. Ripping it off, she seemed okay with whatever it told her. She turned to the nurse.

  “Let’s up the sedation,” she said, then spouted off medicine-speak followed by some CCs. The nurse nodded and went to another machine and pressed some buttons.

  The doctor looked at him, at his body, one last time then left the room.

  Palmerroy sat there—floated there—and tried to look down at himself. Not at his body in the bed below, but at himself floating in the air. He saw nothing. Obviously, he was dead, just no one else had noticed it yet. Soon the machines would scream their dire pronouncement. Ragged lines on monitors would go flat.

  He looked around for a shaft of bright light, as happened in the movies. But no such luck. He tried moving and, just like walking or raising his hand or picking his nose, he moved. It was the barest of thought, the non-thought of movement. So he moved toward the door, floating or flying or whatever, low enough to get through the opening.

  “I’m a ghost,” he said, hearing his own voice as if he were really speaking. He looked up. Could he fly through stuff?

  He floated up, through the ceiling tiles, the space filled with dust and wires and conduits, through the utter darkness of the concrete floor above, and then he was at foot level, watching a gurney run over him.

  “Huh.” For all the major-league freak-out he experienced a moment ago, he was amazingly calm, finding the experience of being a ghost quite remarkable. Cool, even. He kinda liked it, at least up to the point when he was suddenly sucked back into his body.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “How’s the pain?” asked the doctor. “Your kidney and liver levels are good; the rest of your blood work is normal. We could up the pain meds if you want.”

  It hurt like hell, but he shook his head. A very slight movement, but it was the only movement he had left to him. He was paralyzed from the chest down. But fortunately, he could breathe on his own and they’d removed the tube from his throat—or rather, from his trachea.

  Unfortunately, there was no chance of recovering his mobility, short of some miracle breakthrough. But the Kansas City PD had decent health insurance as well as strong long-term disability. Couldn’t get more long-term than what happened to him. The vampire and the shadow had totaled his body.

  Thankfully no one, not the doctors, nurses, or his family, had told him he was lucky to be alive. He could live without the silver linings. He did get questions, especially from his PD buddies, about what happened. He told them he had no memory of it. A complete blank.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d said that. It would be easy to say he was kidnapped by three guys. Was he afraid they’d find them, and maybe get hurt like he’d been hurt? Or was he afraid they wouldn’t find them? That the entire incident was a delusion ginned up by his mind after his body was destroyed in an accident he really couldn’t remember? Wouldn’t that bring him peace-of-mind, finding out he’d tripped and fallen off a roof or something rather than confirming he’d been attacked by some kind of supernatural beings?

  He didn’t think it would.

  In a raspy whisper, he told the doctor, “I’m good.”

  The doctor looked like she didn’t believe him. “I’m going to up the amount anyway.”

  “No!” It wasn’t a yell, he couldn’t do that, but he tried to make it as emphatic as he could.

  “Look, I know there’s a lot of talk about opioids in the news, but for someone who’s gone through—who’s going through what you’re going through, it’s okay. I’ll make sure—”

  “No. That’s—” he had to wait a moment for his breathing to catch up to his emotions and ability to speak, “—final.”

  Her look lingered on him a moment longer and he was afraid she was going to up the meds behind his back. She went to the bedside computer and typed something into it, then said, “I’ll be back later.”

  She left without fiddling with any of the machines. Of course, she was the doctor. She probably didn’t know how to fiddle with the machines. That was clearly nurse territory.

  As soon as she left, he closed his eyes and rose out of his body. He still had no idea what left his body. Was it his soul? Maybe it had no name.

  At first, he wondered if he was hallucinating but decided he didn’t care. It was the only true silver lining in the whole shitstorm, and the narcotic pain relievers made it difficult for him to leave his body. And when he floated free, he felt no pain.

  It’d been a week since he regained consciousness and he’d become quite adept at moving around outside his body. He also discovered quickly that whatever it was that left his body, his body couldn’t live without it. After about twenty minutes he went into heart failure. At least that’s what the various doctors said.

  When his body went into cardiac arrest, they brought out the paddles—the crash cart was now stationed outside his room—and when they zapped him, his soul got sucked back into his body.

  After a couple of times, he figured out how long he could be away. He’d always had a good internal clock, so when he ventured outside the hospital, which he did daily, the little timer in his head let him know when to return.

  Now that he was free of his body—okay, that was a strange side note. He thought of it as “his body,” as if it were a separate thing. It wasn’t him, he was the floaty thing.

  He moved quickly outside. He thought of this as his physical and, pun intended, spiritual therapy. Each day he could do a little more than the previous day.

  There’d been a park a couple of blocks away where he’d gotten a dog to bark at him the day before. As he’d flown through the neighborhood, he went there on a whim. He’d been trying t
o make himself visible. It felt, even though he didn’t really have any physical feelings, like he could almost summon the energy or whatever it was to make himself seen. As he moved around the park, he concentrated on becoming visible.

  He’d been around the dogs before, but yesterday as he tried to become visible, a black lab started barking at him. He assumed the dog was barking at something else, but he flew around the dog and it followed him. It could either see him or otherwise sense him. And the dog wasn’t happy about it. Palmerroy quickly left, as the dog lost its shit and his master had no idea what to do about it.

  That was real progress. A part of him hoped he could Patrick Swayze the shit out of being a ghost. Be able to touch things and even move them. He’d been practicing that, too, using strong emotions like they did in the movie. No luck so far.

  As he left the hospital, he thought about visiting the park again. A lot of people and dogs were always there. He’d lost track of what day of the week it was, but it didn’t seem to matter, and the park was busy even on weekdays.

  For the time being, he just flew. That was definitely a silver lining. He even tried to see how high he could go. Made it to the clouds, which he found awesome in the true meaning of the word. And he was getting faster, like a muscle and working it out was making it stronger.

  As he made his descent, he felt a strange tug that was almost physical. At the same time, he felt a sensation of knowing where someone was when he couldn’t see them. And in this case that someone, that something, was the shadow. With utter certainty he knew exactly where it was and if he wasn’t careful, that tug would pull him right to it, which terrified him.

  That thing had nearly killed him. God only knew what it could do to him in his current form. But as stupid as it sounded, he was also curious. The cop in him wanted to check it out.

  But what if it was summoning him to finish him off? Despite his physical body being utterly broken, he still didn’t want to die. Whatever life was, it was amazing how tenaciously he wanted to cling to it.

  Still, the cop won. He changed course and a sharper image of the shadow’s location came into focus, as if he was already in the room with it—and then he was. No flying between locations. In a blink, he was part way through a west-facing wall of the fourth floor of a building. He recognized it as the same building where he’d confronted the vampire nearly a month earlier. He’d woken up only a week ago, but the incident had taken place weeks before that.

  It dawned on him that this wasn’t the first time he’d traveled instantaneously. When he got zapped by the paddles, he didn’t fly back to his body, he was just back in it. It hadn’t occurred to him that he could travel like that of his own volition.

  “How is the recovery?” asked the vampire, looking at the wood box on the table.

  Then the detective saw the shadow hovering over the box. The room was completely dark, no light whatsoever, but he could see. And he noticed why it was so dark. Someone had built an inner wall from floor to ceiling just inside of the original wall, cutting off light from the building’s windows.

  The sight that he now had wasn’t bright in the least, but he could see the vampire, the table, the box, and even the dark misty smudge of the shadow. The detective stayed near the wall, uncertain if they, in return, could see him. If anyone—anything—could see him, outside of dogs, wouldn’t it be the vampire or the shadow that had broken him?

  If the shadow answered the vampire, Palmerroy didn’t hear it, but he could sense that the thing was weak. Tired. There was some connection between him and it. He didn’t like that thought at all. If he could sense where it was, then surely it worked the other way. He should have left, but he didn’t.

  I am gaining power, Lorcán. It was a voice in his head, not something he really heard. It was a disturbing voice, both fingernails-on-a-chalkboard and horrifying at the same time. The voice came from the shadow.

  “Good. Do you want me to bring another human for you?”

  No. I will venture forth and seek a host.

  “As you wish.”

  A host. The memory of the attack flooded back—the shadow trying to take control of his body. If he could have shuddered, he would have been a shivering mess. Terror filled him like air filling a balloon and then he blinked up at the ceiling of the hospital, little alarms beeping around him. He glanced sideways, able to see the heart monitor. His heart rate and blood pressure had spiked. A nurse whisked into the room. He checked the monitor and the little paper readout.

  “Panic attack,” whispered Palmerroy.

  The nurse sighed and smiled sympathetically. “That’s understandable. I’m going to give you a little sedative to calm you down.”

  The detective was going to tell him no but decided against it. The terror of his memory hadn’t faded. Going night-night wouldn’t be the worst thing.

  The nurse pushed some buttons on another machine that dangled several plastic bags of liquid above it. Changing the mix of his cocktail, his heart rate fell almost immediately.

  Calmer, he let himself think about the shadow. What was it and why was the vampire doing its bidding? And, shit, what would happen if it found a host that didn’t break?

  He floated away, but this time into sleep.

  Present day

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Aunt Patrice put her through two months of grueling training. It’d been difficult physically, mentally, and emotionally. Aunt Patrice made every previous trainer seem like Mr. Rogers. Her aunt was the first trainer and sparring partner to leave her bloodied and bruised by the end of a session—even knocking her out once.

  “Sparring” was the wrong word. They’d been vicious fights, Tabby even fearing for her life at times, especially when they used the rowan heartwood batons Calico had made for them. While she still sparred with the MMA dudes when her aunt wanted more video, the two women fought in one of the gym’s private studios. No one was allowed to see those matches.

  Tabby’d never taken her training lightly, but when you’re better than everyone else, it was difficult to know how much more she needed to be pushed. So despite the pain, she had thrilled at Aunt Patrice kicking her ass and then making her better than she knew she could be.

  Thrilled and grateful because the two were preparing to go up against Lorcán. That was all the name either of them knew. He was a big-time vampire at least hundreds of years old. Mom had tracked him to Kansas City.

  Still, Tabby couldn’t stop thinking about Calico. There was a hole in her heart because her baby sister hadn’t come through for her in the end. Tabby was so certain she’d come around.

  Calico was supposed to be her seanchaí and it hurt that she wasn’t. It hurt like hell that her sister had turned her back on not only her, but her family. The two sisters should have been in communication with each other, Calico supporting her vigil. Working together. Instead, except for that one anonymous text already two months ago, she couldn’t communicate with her sister at all anymore.

  But she had to put that behind her. With her gym training complete, she had to focus or die. She was out in the “wild” now on her first hunt. Aunt Patrice had her pursuing a nestling of Lorcán’s. He wouldn’t have the power or skills of Lorcán, but he would still be murderously dangerous.

  Her aunt’s plan was to have Tabby pick off the nestlings as her next phase of training. Then, when she felt Tabby was truly ready, the two would go up against Lorcán himself. After killing him, they would go their separate ways to pursue individual vigils.

  And that’s how Tabby found herself engaging with her first vampire on a hot Kansas City summer night—or morning, actually, as it was after 2 A.M. She was jittery, maybe a little nervous, but she was also ready.

  “Wanna go somewhere?” he asked.

  “Where’d you have in mind?” said Tabby.

  He took her hand and guided her toward an alley.

  “There’s a shortcut through here.”

  When they were midway down the alley, Tabby pulled a rowan
baton from the sheath on her thigh and turned on him. Aunt Patrice told her to kill him somewhere isolated, like this very alley the two women had scoped out as a possible attack site. There couldn’t be witnesses. Even though she was killing a monster, witnesses and, more importantly, the police wouldn’t see it that way.

  “Whoa, what the fuck?” said the vampire, pulling his hand free as Tabby lifted the wooden stake into view.

  She was surprised by the vampire’s reaction. He acted scared. She’d expected him to attack. Flash his fangs. Growl, even.

  Instead, he stumbled backward into the brick wall of the building behind him and winced in pain at the impact. Aunt Patrice coached her to ignore anything they said or did that might be a trick. Attack fast. No mercy.

  Tabby leaped forward and raised the rowan stake. The vampire cried out and flailed ineptly at trying to block her as she smashed the iron cudgel against the side of his head.

  It thunked loudly, like hitting it against an unripe melon. The vampire fell limp to the asphalt. First daze them, because even with her strength, putting a wood stake through sternum or ribcage required quite a bit of effort. With practiced precision, she flipped the baton and moved in to ram the sharp stake through the monster’s heart.

  But he wasn’t dazed, he was unconscious, blood flowing over his head and face. There was also something off about his face. His cheek was smudged, but not with dirt. Spinning the baton back into its cudgel position and raising it, ready to strike if he attacked, she ran her fingertips over the smudge. It was oily. Looking at her fingers, the tips were covered in gray makeup.

  “What the hell?” she said.