by A. J. Burnes
Saul, the black sheep. Saul, the runaway. Saul, the boy who his parents preferred to pretend had never existed.
But he had existed, and clearly, he still existed. And apparently, he was getting into even more trouble now than the last time Tanner saw him.
“I’m going to kill him,” Tanner said hoarsely once his manic laughter finally degraded into a terrified whimper. “If I get out of here alive, then so help me god, I’m going to hunt him down and wring his neck. And if I don’t get out of here alive, then so help me god, I’m going to wait at the pearly gates for his dumb ass to show up and—”
The door to the slaughter room rattled slightly.
All of Tanner’s bitter thoughts fell away as he realized that, during his mindless rant, the humming noise had been steadily growing louder. Now it seemed to be concentrated right outside the door. Though Tanner couldn’t see the end of his own nose, his gaze settled on where he approximated the door to be. He focused on that spot, watching, waiting.
He was as confused as he was terrified, unsure what sort of living creature could make a noise like that. And unsure what sort of nonliving thing could track down his location and willfully travel here from the aforementioned boiler room.
Tanner had heard no footsteps. The goons hadn’t brought this thing up here.
It had brought itself up here.
A wight, he thought, feeling woozy. Muntz called it a wight. But that’s not a real thing…
The door rattled again, harder this time, and for a moment, it opened a sliver. The dim light from the hallway spilled into the room again, and Tanner finally glimpsed what exactly it was that was lurking in the hall. Only what he saw made no sense.
There wasn’t an animal in the hall. There wasn’t a machine either. Rather, there was nothing at all. The hallway was empty. Nothing had nudged the door open. Nothing was coming to kill Tanner.
The nonexistent thing hit the door again, and this time, it swung open all the way and did not close. Tanner stared wide-eyed in fright at the nothing in the hall. And as the nothing rushed at him with a whistled parting of the air, a sound like silk splitting under the force of freshly sharpened scissors, he noticed something that the door had previously obscured.
The nothing cast a shadow on the wall.
And the shadow was shaped like a monster.
Chapter Four
Saul
The “Castle,” formally known as Renault Manor, was a sprawling three-story monolith of rough gray stone that lay in the middle of Weatherford’s historical district, what had been the original town of Weatherford way back at the turn of the twentieth century. The grand manor had been built by the first mayor of Weatherford, Martin Renault, and his wife, Agatha.
They were known in the mundane historical records as a completely normal, happily married couple dedicated to improving their community through extensive charity work and local government initiatives. In reality, they were a wizard and witch couple with a rocky relationship whose frequent arguments had set fire to the town on at least two occasions.
From what true historical records hadn’t gone up in flames, it seemed their arguments largely revolved around how to police the preternatural community in an effective manner. Martin, ever the pacifist, had preferred something akin to an honor system that allowed each separate group of preternaturals to police their own behavior.
Agatha, on the other hand, preferred a more proactive approach. One that involved beating down doors with force spells and dragging alleged preternatural criminals from their homes in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again.
In the end, the troubled couple finally concluded their enduring debate in the 1920s—by handing the reins of Weatherford’s preternatural policing over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with their mansion and practically everything else they owned.
Not because they were so generous that they decided to go to their graves with nothing in their pockets. But because the tiny group of wizard agents who worked for the FBI back then threatened to send the Renaults to jail after the couple set Weatherford ablaze for the second time.
The compromise that the Renaults and the FBI eventually agreed upon involved the forfeiture of the Renaults’ extensive assets. It also required the couple to fuck off to a small town in the middle of nowhere, someplace where they couldn’t do quite as much damage. That was where the Renaults’ role as Weatherford’s preternatural watchdogs had ended, and also where the FBI’s Preternatural Threat Assessment Division was born.
The bowels of Renault Manor contained a massive library of texts on magic instruction, the history and origins of various magical creatures, and dozens of other topics related to the preternatural underworld. The subbasement beneath the library contained something even more incredible: a vast, private museum of magical artifacts. Each artifact had been meticulously cordoned off with protective wards—that was, wards meant to protect the visitors from the objects—by Agatha Renault, who the FBI suspected had stolen most of the objects from their preternatural owners during her many nighttime raids over the years.
Taking a cue from the Renaults’ organized administrative habits, the early precursor to the PTAD had folded the library and the museum into their operational initiatives. In the ensuing decades, they’d cultivated both, as new artifacts and texts, many of them extremely dangerous, fell into the FBI’s hands.
These days, the library contained well over ten thousand books, scrolls, maps, and other assorted printed materials, some of which would burn your eyes out if you tried to read them. And the museum was more like a prison for things that were supposed to be inanimate but had a funny habit of appearing in places you didn’t want them to be and trying to bite you in the ass.
Literally.
In short, the “Castle,” as it was affectionately called by the agents of the PTAD, was a treacherous building where no one in their right mind would willingly spend time. Which was why all of Weatherford’s PTAD agents happily spent the bulk of their work hours trawling the city, trying to prevent preternatural criminals from endangering the populace and the peace.
Armed with new knowledge about the missing girls, Saul’s team returned to the Castle from their latest trawl. Jack pulled the car into the entrance of the small underground garage that had been added to the manor’s grounds in the early eighties. He stopped at the boom gate, waved his chipped FBI badge at the card reader, and waited until the gate lifted to continue into the dim garage.
Jack parked the car in its designated spot. “Saul, you head down to the infirmary first and get Laura to fix your jaw. It’s swelling so much you won’t be able to talk by the end of the day.”
“Yeah,” Saul slurred out, the right side of his jaw barely working, “I noticed.”
Adeline opened her door and stepped out into the cool dampness of the garage. “What about the rest of us, boss? We going straight up to Roland’s office?”
“Nah.” Jack opened his own door. “Roland’s got back-to-back phone conferences today with the director and a bunch of congressmen who like to nitpick top-secret project budgets. We don’t want to walk in on him unannounced while he’s in bureaucrat mode. I’ll swing by Sandy’s desk and let her know we need to speak with him urgently regarding the missing girls. She’ll get us penciled in for the earliest opportunity to have a short but productive chat, like she normally does.”
“I don’t know how she always finds time on his schedule,” Jill mused. “Whenever I look at the schedule book, Roland’s entire day is already blocked out with a bunch of stuff that has mysterious coded labels. And yet, when you ask Sandy to schedule time with him, open space seems to magically appear on the schedule between one blink and the next, even though she doesn’t visibly cast any spells.”
Adeline ducked her head back into the car. “Or maybe you just get distracted by the squirrels in the tree outside Sandy’s window, and by the time you snap out of it, she’s finished her scheduling.”
�
�I don’t get distracted by squirrels.”
“You spent five minutes staring at a duck in a pond while we were hiding in an ant-ridden bush searching for a fugitive loup-garou in Ridley Park.”
“Ducks are not the same as squirrels,” Jill argued. “I like ducks.”
“And I would like to go inside,” Jack said. “So let’s get a move on.”
In the hallway off the garage entrance, they went their separate ways. Jill and Adeline strolled off to the cafeteria to grab lunch—it was pizza day, everyone’s favorite. Jack headed up the winding staircase to the third floor—there were no elevators in the Castle. And Saul skulked down the long main hall to the west wing—where the mansion’s expansive parlor had been converted into a well-stocked infirmary.
There was also a surgical suite that had once been a reading room, connected to the parlor via an ornate wooden door. But that was only used in cases where an agent had an injury that would tickle the curiosity of mundane medical science.
As it was, agents usually incurred regular-looking injuries even from the most irregular of sources. And Saul Reiz collected such injuries on the regular, much to Laura Bingham’s chagrin.
When he arrived at the infirmary, she was loitering in the doorway, stirring what was probably her tenth cup of coffee for the day with a spoon that Saul was sure she’d pilfered from the attic full of Renault treasures that the PTAD kept in case they needed to sell something for quick cash to fund a covert op. He would’ve reprimanded her for such a breach of policy…if he himself hadn’t stolen an expensive antique clock last year and fenced it for enough money to fund a motorcycle purchase.
Saul Reiz was a lot of things, but hypocritical wasn’t one of them.
“Who’d you piss off this time?” Laura asked between sips of her coffee.
“Troll under the Karthen Street Bridge,” he said.
“Well, at least it was only one troll this time.”
“I’m telling you,” Saul huffed, “that whole biker gang beatdown wasn’t my fault.”
“Sure, Saul.” She stepped into the infirmary and ushered him inside. “Sure.”
Over the next ten minutes, she used a large glass lens imbued with a transparency charm to peer through Saul’s skin and check his jaw for fractures and his teeth for root damage. Once she was satisfied that his face wasn’t falling apart, she produced an herbal healing tincture infused with a couple of rudimentary spells that accelerated the reduction of swelling and diminished soreness. Saul downed the glass beaker of bitter tincture with a single gulp to reduce the gagging, and chased it up with water to wash the weird aftertaste out of his mouth.
His jaw started to feel better almost immediately, and he found himself able to once again speak without sounding like a drunk on a bad bender. “Thanks for the help,” he said to Laura as she was packing up her instruments.
“Why do you always insist on thanking me for doing something that’s part of my job description?” she asked, slipping the glass lens back into a wooden case filled with rows of similar lenses. “I get paid to fix the consequences of your dumb mistakes, Saul. I don’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. And if I had it my way, I’d make you suffer the full weight of those consequences every now and again. Because maybe then you’d learn not to do so many stupid things.”
“My interview with the trolls wasn’t stupid. It was actually pretty productive.” Saul told her about the missing girls and the connection to Benton Court.
Laura sank into the plush chair at her desk in the corner of the infirmary. “Benton Court, huh? That’s a shame. No way those girls took a stroll through there at night and left unscathed. Whole neighborhood takes on such an oppressive atmosphere after dark that most mundanes instinctively avoid it.”
“They were under the influence of a compulsion spell, so their instincts were being overridden.” Saul rose from the bed where he’d sat for his exam and worked the lingering stiffness out of his jaw. “Not to say they felt no fear when they fell victim to whatever was waiting for them in the shadows of the court. Compulsion spells dampen reason more than emotion, so at some point, their true feelings probably broke through the thrall. They just didn’t have the power to listen to their fear and flee.”
“You think they’re dead?” Laura rolled her chair to the small table that held her prized Keurig coffee maker and set another K-cup to percolate. “Think something nasty ate them?”
“Honestly?” Saul ran a hand through his hair. “A part of me hopes they’re dead. Because if they’re not, then something in Benton Court is either killing them slowly, or keeping them alive to be used in some grotesque way.”
Laura blew air through her teeth. “All jokes aside, I don’t envy your job.”
“You think it’s bad here?” Saul asked. “In New York, shit like that happens on a daily basis. It might be slow in Weatherford sometimes, but I for one am glad I got assigned to hold down the home fort. I honestly think I’d lose my mind if I had to handle half the nightmares the big field offices deal with year in and year out.”
“You say that like you didn’t lose your mind years ago.”
“Thought you were done with the jokes.”
She stared at him over the rims of her glasses. “I wasn’t kidding.”
“Screw you too.” He stomped his shoes on the floor, knocking half-dried river mud onto the pristine white tiles. “Anyway, I’m out of here. Got a meeting with the big man upstairs…at some point in the near future.”
Laura eyed the grime on the floor with disdain. “Best of luck with our dear Agent Smith. I hear he’s in a real mood today.”
“When is he not?” Saul set off for the door. “Man’s descended from Thor. If he wasn’t acting like a dramatic, overbearing bastard, then I’d be concerned.”
Chapter Five
Tanner
Tanner was cold.
Not the cold of a midwinter gale howling through a city street and stripping the heat from exposed skin, or the cold of a plunge into a pool of deep water the sun hadn’t yet caressed. Not the cold of dark dread that welled up in your chest when you found the cops knocking at your door, or the cold of slow grief that overshadowed all joy when you looked in the mirror and realized what little time you had left was passing you by.
No, this was a different sort of cold. An abnormal kind of cold. A cold that leached not from the mind or the body, but from the soul.
Tanner felt like he was dying in a way humans were not meant to die: by having the very essence of life drained from the core of his being.
He lay on the floor, cheek pressed against the film of dried blood on the concrete. His entire body had broken out into a thick sweat, and the blood was now stuck to his skin. The damp copper tang filled his nostrils and made him want to puke. But he couldn’t throw up. He could barely even breathe.
His muscles wouldn’t obey most of his commands, and his autonomic functions worked in fits and spurts. One moment he felt like he was suffocating. And then he would suck in a gasping breath. And then the air would slowly leak from his lungs because they couldn’t push it back out.
As if that wasn’t torture enough, when he’d accidentally tipped his chair over in fright, he’d landed on his left arm, and the metal bar that supported the back of the chair had cracked his ulna and compressed a nerve in the process. His entire arm was screaming in pain, and Tanner would’ve been screaming along with it—if his lips could do more than flounder, or his throat could do more than convulse.
As it was, all he could do was soundlessly cry.
Oh god, I can’t take much more of this. Please just kill me and be done with it.
But the nothing—the invisible creature that kept circling him like a hungry lion—was taking its sweet, sweet time.
Tanner kept catching glimpses of its terrifying shadow each time it passed the door, where the ambient light trickled in. It was at least ten feet tall, and it had an extremely slender figure, with long, gangly limbs that had more joints than were reaso
nable. It walked on all fours, its spindly back hunched at an angle that would’ve snapped a human’s spine, and it moved with a rapid stop-start motion that made Tanner feel like he was watching a film on an old, buggy projector.
It was both frightening and disorienting. But Tanner couldn’t look away. He was transfixed by the glimpses of this creature, this thing from a child’s nightmare that had no right to exist in a rational world.
As much as Tanner loved fantasy novels, never once had he entertained the idea that the kinds of creatures he read about in fiction had any basis in reality. Yet here he was, alone in some sort of abandoned slaughterhouse, being murdered by a soul-sucking monster that apparently like to savor every morsel of its meals.
A comparative analysis of real supernatural creatures to their fictional counterparts. That would be a fascinating topic for research, he mused, a hysterical giggle caught in his seizing throat. Too bad I won’t be around long enough to write a paper about it. I would…
Something ruffled Tanner’s sweat-drenched hair.
A breath. A frigid breath. A breath that smelled like decay.
A whole new wave of fear flooded Tanner’s veins as he noticed the nothing had stopped moving in circles. Judging by the size of the shadow cast on the wall, the thing was now standing directly behind him, with its elongated head tilted down toward Tanner’s own. Tanner was so weak, he couldn’t turn his head to look up at the creature, but he knew it wouldn’t matter even if he could.
The creature was completely invisible, and soundless as well, besides the odd hum that buzzed through the air like a massive swarm of flies. It could stare at him all it wanted, but he couldn’t stare back. Couldn’t challenge its dominion over his dying body.
That rubbed Tanner the wrong way. He didn’t want to be killed by something that refused to show itself. He wanted to look death in the eye, with his head held high, and maintain as much dignity as possible when he finally walked off into the afterlife. (If there was such a thing.)