by A. J. Burnes
“That’ll do,” Jack said.
“Good.” Roland glanced warily at his phone, an indication that they were running low on time. “I’ll get Sandy to set up everything now. But until the spook prizes the secrets out of Benton Court…”
He snatched a manila folder off the edge of his desk and offered it to Jack. “Just received a report of a burned body found in a dumpster between Harrington and Lovell. Couple of homeless guys stumbled upon it when they were digging through the trash for some food thrown out by that Chinese place on Harrington.
“One of the men is a hedge wizard, and he said the body was teeming with magic. Might be the work of a sorcerer. Might be the work of a terrible accident. Either way, I want you to take a look at it. If it does turn out to be one of our cases, poke around and see if you can figure out what happened.”
“You want us pulling double duty?” Jack asked, taking the folder.
“Just for the afternoon, while you’re waiting for intel on the missing girls.” Roland sank back into his ergonomic desk chair. “I’ll put Cassidy’s team to work on the burned body as soon as they get back from Hartford this evening.”
“What about Frasier’s team?” Saul said with a frown. “They haven’t been on the duty roster since Wednesday.”
“I’m afraid Peterson is still recovering from that attack by the pixie swarm.” Roland sighed. “He’s quite allergic to pixie venom, it turns out.”
“So Frasier just gets to lounge around and do nothing on the government’s dime?”
“Saul…” Jack warned.
Roland waved his hand at Jack. “As a matter of fact, Agent Frasier and his two colleagues who aren’t covered in peeling rashes have an assignment for this evening. They’ll be leading two SWAT teams on a raid of that goblin market that sprung up at the docks last week.
Those damn goblins have been fleecing fishermen and sailors all week long, and they’ve gotten sophisticated. They’ve caught up with the times and bought themselves some handheld credit card readers. So now you have to worry about them killing your wallet and your credit score.”
“Aw,” said Jill, “I like raiding goblin markets. I wish we could go.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Adeline muttered dourly. “Last time I was at a goblin market, one of the goblins puked all over my shoes.”
Jill pursed her lips. “Ew.”
“Yeah, ew,” Saul parroted. “We didn’t need to know that, Ade. You give way too—”
Nausea rolled through Saul’s stomach, and bile surged up his throat. He slapped a hand over his mouth to stop himself from retching all over the expensive carpet of his boss’s office and shot up from his chair, intending to race to the nearest bathroom. Only for a wave of vertigo to send him stumbling into a nearby table. The impact knocked an antique lamp off the table, and its priceless glass shade shattered on the floor.
Ignoring the concerned questions from his teammates, he pushed off the table and staggered toward the door. But he didn’t even make it halfway there before his vision began eroding at the edges, darkness closing in. He felt the distinct tingle of too much carbon dioxide and too little oxygen, and belatedly realized he was hyperventilating. He stumbled at the edge of the carpet and went down to his knees.
To keep himself upright, he had to plant both hands on the floor. By removing his hand from his mouth, however, he basically opened the floodgates. He leaned to the side and threw up his pizza, along with what seemed like a gallon of acid that burned all the way up. Most of the vomit hit the hardwood floor in front of the door, but the splash-back caught the edge of the carpet and irreparably stained it.
Saul stared at the puddle of vomit, baffled, and thought, I haven’t thrown up like that since the accident.
Then he tipped over—in the opposite direction of the puddle, thank god—and fainted on the way to the floor.
Chapter Seven
Tanner
Tanner woke up on the dirty floor of the slaughter room with a massive headache. Blood pounded in his ears and throbbed behind his eyes. His throat was as dry as a desert, and his mouth felt as if it had been stuffed full of cotton balls. His broken arm still ached something awful, but oddly, the pain seemed less severe than it had earlier.
He’d also regained full feeling in his hands, the uncomfortable tingle of recently restored circulation still poking at his skin like a hundred tiny needles. As the dust in his mind settled—and what peculiar dust it was, those fragments of memory that belonged to multiple people, all of whom were dead—he slowly turned his aching head from side to side and took stock of his situation.
The chair he’d been strapped to now lay in bent pieces on the floor. The edges of those pieces glowed red hot, like someone had sliced and diced the chair with a blowtorch. All those zip ties that Ed Muntz had assured him would never break had been reduced to melted piles of goo slowly circling one of the drains. A space on the floor that roughly equated to where the chair had been situated now sported a circular scorch mark.
It looked for all the world like someone had set off a small bomb.
Except there had been no bomb. There had only been Tanner.
I don’t understand. Tanner ran his tongue along his cracked lips. Where did all the weird memories come from? What produced that golden light that burned the chair and the zip ties? And why on earth did that intense heat not burn me?
A niggling thought told Tanner he might find the answers to his questions in the weird memories, but they didn’t come to him unbidden, like his own memories. They were more like that half-forgotten knowledge you always had to dig for and sometimes failed to locate for days on end.
If he was willing to lie here for the next several hours, he might be able to piece together a bare-bones understanding of what had befallen him. But his arm was badly broken, he was bleeding from numerous cuts and scrapes, and his migraine was throbbing worse with each passing second. He needed to drag himself out of this awful place and get medical attention as soon as possible.
Additionally, there was the matter of the invisible soul-sucking monster that had been about to devour him whole. What had become of that terrifying creature?
As if the thing sensed Tanner pondering its status, the humming noise from earlier resumed from somewhere in the darkest corner of the room. This time though, Tanner heard something else beneath the hum. Concentrating, he attempted to parse the new sounds.
With a start, he realized the monster was speaking. In English.
“All I wanted was a snack, just a lovely little snack. But then the nasty wizard had to go and burn my tongue.” It repeated these same words over and over, a hissing, bitter chant.
The creature spoke in a precise cadence that matched the peaks and troughs of the constant hum, but Tanner was certain that there hadn’t been any words masked by the hum before the burst of golden light and the deluge of memories.
Did the creature also produce the hum when it wasn’t speaking, or had something more than memory changed inside Tanner, something that allowed him to hear things that he couldn’t before? And if the latter was the case, did that mean Tanner’s other senses were similarly affected?
The term “Third Sight” flitted through his thoughts. He’d heard that term before, in relation to phony psychics who scammed people out of money for bogus séances and palm readings. But his instincts told him there was something more to the idea. Something beneath the fraudsters. Something steeped in a dangerous truth that regular people weren’t supposed to know.
Tanner dragged his gaze to the corner, where the creature—the sable wight, Muntz had called it—was nursing the wounds inflicted by the golden flash. The ambient light from the hall didn’t reach far enough into the room to cut through the darkness in that corner. Yet as Tanner stared into the black void, lines and shapes eventually resolved into something that resembled the shadow he’d seen cast against the wall.
The wight wasn’t invisible anymore.
Tanner simply hadn’t been
able to fully sense the creature earlier. Whatever had happened to him—revenance, his beleaguered brain supplied, having dredged the word up from the shifting mass of foreign memories—had flipped some sort of switch in his brain. He now possessed this Third Sight.
It was like a heavy veil had been lifted off his head. He was perceiving reality without filters, experiencing the world as it truly was.
Apparently, the world was full of man-eating monsters.
Now there’s a comforting thought.
Moving as inconspicuously as possible, Tanner felt along the floor with one hand until his pinky finger bumped what he was looking for—his wallet. He palmed it, slid his arm up to his side, and deposited the wallet back into its designated pocket in his coat.
His cell phone and laptop, having been in his satchel, were lost to whatever fate Muntz had dumped them into. But as long as Tanner had money, he could make his way to a police station and report his abduction and torture at the hands of a local lowlife.
Or maybe I’ll just hitch a bus ride home, after a trip to the ER, he thought, as he realized he couldn’t actually tell the cops the truth about what had happened to him. There was no rendition of events that left out the sable wight and this “revenance” thing that would adequately explain Tanner’s current state of body and mind.
If he went to the cops raving about monsters that ate life force and foreign memories from the distant past, they’d either call him a crank and cite him for wasting their time or book him on suspicion of drug use.
He would have to come up with an unorthodox method of punishing Muntz for his crimes.
As it was, Tanner’s apartment should be safe enough to return to. Muntz had thought he was Saul masquerading as a professor, not an actual professor who had real living arrangements close to campus. So he had probably given the address listed in Tanner’s wallet only a passing glance.
Which meant Tanner could go home to recuperate, and while he was lounging on his couch and chugging an obscene amount of wine, he could plot his revenge in peace and relative comfort. And revenge there would be, he promised himself.
Tanner had relied on Saul to protect him from bullies until Saul ran away that fateful day after their sixteenth birthdays. After that, Tanner had been left to fend for himself. A sink-or-swim scenario. He had, admittedly, almost drowned a couple times. But in the end, he figured out how to paddle almost as well as Saul.
The people who’d called him “freak” and “fag” and other slurs that had no place in polite society had learned the hard way that Tanner Reiz wasn’t to be messed with. Muntz would learn the same lesson, and he would learn it while suffering perfectly proportionate retribution for what he had done.
But first, Tanner had to avoid getting eaten.
He was substantially closer to the door than the wight, but he wasn’t sure how fast the wight could move. Its gangly double-jointed limbs suggested it was better at climbing than running, but it was an unnatural creature—“preternatural” is the common word, his overburdened mind informed him—so its shape and size might have no correlation to its physical capabilities.
The laws of nature, and physics, might not apply the same way to creatures that defied their boundaries in a firmly spiritual manner. Even so, the door appeared to be the only way out of the room.
Tanner would have to make a run for it, but in order to attempt such a feat, he’d first have to stand up. His head ached so badly just lying down that he knew the pain would be excruciating once he rose to his feet and the blood rushed to his extremities. The drop in blood pressure would push him to the verge of blacking out.
If he didn’t fall, he’d still be dizzy, and dizzy people weren’t known for running in a straight line.
Closing his eyes, Tanner counted out the seconds by taking slow, steady breaths. A technique he’d used to quell his anxiety whenever he was taking exams or doing presentations in college.
Once, on the day he’d defended his thesis, he counted to a thousand while waiting for the committee to call him into the presentation room. By the time they were ready for him, he’d been so zoned out that he felt no fear at all. He’d run through his thesis on autopilot and aced everything, down to the most difficult questions the committee had been able to throw. They hadn’t tripped him up, and he hadn’t stumbled.
When it was over, Tanner barely remembered anything from that important morning. But he came out of it with a PhD and the title of “Doctor,” and that was all that mattered.
Here, on the floor of this blood-caked room, in the presence of a monster that wanted him dead, all that mattered to Tanner was reaching the hallway, kicking the door shut in the sable wight’s face, and successfully fleeing to the safety of…well, anywhere but here.
So he breathed in and out, in and out, as he counted off a full sixty seconds to give himself the time he needed. Time to calm his racing pulse. Time to gather the shreds of his strength. Time to dig deep and find the seeds of his courage.
At sixty, he opened his eyes, pressed his good hand against the floor, and with monumental effort, pushed himself to his feet in one fluid motion. Without giving his body time to adjust to the change in orientation, he spun on his toes and sprinted for the door.
The sable wight caught on to his play immediately, and Tanner heard it scuttling after him. The pads of its hands and feet slapped against the floor as if its flesh was cold and clammy, and its knuckles, far too many knuckles, popped and cracked with each impact against the concrete.
The light from the hall cast the wight’s shadow away from Tanner, so he couldn’t see it approaching. But he could feel it, that soul-sucking sensation growing closer and closer, that cool breath ghosting across the back of his neck.
He pictured the creature opening its maw again, dislocating its jaw to create a space big enough to swallow a grown man. He pictured those awful needle teeth, made to separate skin from muscle and chewy tendons from crunchy bone.
He pictured all he hadn’t seen before he’d gained the Third Sight. The texture of its skin. The color of its eyes. The horrible expression of sentience on a truly monstrous face.
Tanner didn’t dare look back to see if his imagination was correct. He just ran. And ran. And ran.
It felt like a mile to the doorway, and when he finally reached it, he gripped the frame with his one good hand and swung himself around into the hall. Sliding past the edge of the door, he tucked his foot behind it, and using the wall as leverage, kicked back.
The door slammed shut with an echoing clang.
There was a heavy-duty sliding bolt on the door, Tanner now saw. So he reversed direction, grabbed hold of the bolt, and slid the lock through the catch. Not a second later, the sable wight struck the door, so hard the thick metal panel warped outward. But the door didn’t break, even as the wight savagely beat at it, again and again.
Tanner staggered away from the door and leaned against the opposite wall. Here, he was forced to take a break, as the sudden exertion caught up to him.
His head pounded like someone was slamming a hammer against his temple, and his peripheral vision faded to black. It was all he could do not to sink to his knees—he knew if he did, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. So he stood there, legs trembling, teeth gritted, and weathered the pain and light-headedness until they both diminished enough for him to manage.
Once his vision settled back into its usual level of nearsightedness, he looked both ways down the long hall. The ceiling lights were placed five feet apart, and half of them had blown out over time, so the hall was littered with dark spots. Half a minute of searching led to the discovery of a sign on the wall about fifteen feet to Tanner’s left.
Using the wall as a brace, he shuffled over to the sign and squinted at the faded gray letters that had once been painted white. Some of the letters were illegible, but Tanner got the gist of the message. To the left was the building’s boiler room, where the wight had been “bound.” To the right were the stairs leading up to the groun
d floor.
Tanner set off to the right, passing the door to the slaughter room again. The wight must’ve sensed him shambling past, either through smell or some other mechanism. It switched from hitting the door to ramming the door with its full bulk. The door groaned, and the protrusion in the middle grew larger, but the thick hinges and industrial bolt lock held tight.
Still, if the wight had enough stamina, it might eventually knock the door down.
So Tanner hurried down the hall.
The stairwell door lay at the very end of the hall. Someone had propped it open with a red bucket full of dirty water that was catching a steady drip from the saturated ceiling tiles. Just to be on the safe side, Tanner poked his head through the door and took a quick survey of the stairwell.
No one was lying in wait on the first few landings, and no sounds echoed down from higher up. Muntz and his two goons had fled the building after releasing the wight from the boiler room.
And that was probably the smartest thing they’ve done all day, he thought, seeing as their other accomplishments include murdering an innocent college student and kidnapping the wrong man. If it’s the last thing I do, I swear I’ll get that bastard—
Dread rolled through Tanner’s gut, so thick he felt like he was choking on it. For a second, he didn’t understand where the heightened reaction had come from. Then he realized that the sable wight’s hum had stopped again.
Absolute silence had fallen over the basement. And beneath this utter silence, Tanner could have sworn he heard the approaching whispers of Death itself.
Throat so dry he couldn’t even gulp in fear, Tanner turned back toward the bent door of the slaughter room. A hundred terrible thoughts tumbled through his mind:
That the wight had found another way out of the room. That it had bored through the ceiling. That it had dug through the floor. That it had knocked through a wall. That it was at this very moment taking a roundabout path to cut Tanner off and finish its unwilling dinner.