Deadson Confidential: A Drakeverse Urban Fantasy Novel

by N. P. Martin

  It was still dark outside when I got up and made myself some coffee, wishing I had a cigarette to go with it. I had quit smoking three months before after suffering from sustained chest pains and crippling anxiety. The chest pains and anxiety cleared up a week after I quit, but man, I still missed smoking. Cigarettes still seemed real good to me, man. To paraphrase the immortal Bill Hicks, every one seemed made by God, rolled by Jesus, and moistened shut by Claudia Schiffer’s pussy.

  The cat was curled up sleeping on the sofa. I decided not to disturb it as I headed into my office and switched on the light, my eyes immediately drawn to the Illuminati Conspiracy Wall, or ICW for short. I know what you’re thinking. The Illuminati? Seriously? I must be some kind of crackpot, right? Wrong. The Illuminati are not just some made-up group for pop culture “artists” to draw inspiration from as they create symbols and song lyrics. The Illuminati are a real thing. Or rather, the people behind the Illuminati are a real thing. The name might be a joke these days, but the players hiding behind it are not. I’ve been investigating the Illuminati for years now, and I’ve found plenty proof of their existence.

  The information on the wall, spanning the entire surface, comprised not only my investigation into my sister’s disappearance but also a number of other investigations that linked up into one massive conspiracy. At the epicenter of this huge conspiracy was the Cabal, whose existence I had only uncovered two years before, and who kept themselves hidden behind the Illuminati theater. It was still unclear at this point if the Cabal were the end of the line as far as the conspiracy went. It was my feeling that they weren’t. I was convinced the conspiracy went deeper still, and I had made it my mission to find out how deep. My purpose in life was to expose this entire conspiracy to the world, shining a light on everything the players were trying to keep secret. By the time I was done, the world would be truly illuminated, and the people enlightened. It was that or go back to being a heroin addict.

  After staring at the ICW for a while, hoping my subconscious would make further connections, I turned away and went and sat down at my desk. Opening up my laptop, I logged into the Deadson Confidential backend and created a new post, titling it: Vampire Byron Black’s Snuff Cinema Burns To Ground.

  Then I wrote a short piece about how the cinema had burned down under mysterious circumstances, and that according to sources, Bryon Black himself had been inside the burning building and was now thought to be dead, along with his despicable and disgusting line of business. I ended the story with the words, Good riddance.

  After posting the story to the website, I then went through the dozens of comments that had come through overnight. Some comments were clearly written by crackpots, which I didn’t bother replying to. Two other comments were threats from people saying they were going to kill me. I got threats all the time from people, both online and through the mail. On my desk was a glass bowl filled with bullets; bullets that had been mailed to me, usually along with a threatening note, almost all of which were anonymous. I got other things through the mail as well—a severed finger once, a human turd wrapped in tinfoil, bloody rags, even dead rodents—but I never kept those.

  The sensible comments I wrote brief replies to. Then I jumped onto the DC forum for a bit of moderation, and to see what people were talking about. Sometimes members slipped tidbits of information into their posts for me to find, stuff I could follow up on and investigate if need be. Seeing nothing of interest, I left the forum and checked my emails, though there was nothing much of interest there either unless I wanted to enlarge my penis to a gigantic degree.

  Closing the laptop, I spun around to look at the ICW for another minute, focusing on the picture of my sister near the center of the wall. It was a picture I took myself shortly before she disappeared. I had gone to meet her that day at Harvard, where she was in her first year at law school. Ava was tall and thin like our mother, with dark bobbed hair and striking features. She had even done a little modeling in her time. Two days after I took that picture, Ava disappeared. I still didn’t know what happened to her nearly twelve years later, but I would not stop searching for answers until I found out the truth about her disappearance. It was my obsession. It had to be.

  Still craving a cigarette, I went back into the living room, wondering if Zee had any smokes lying around, for I knew she liked to indulge now and again, depending on what part she was playing. The cat purring on the sofa, however, made me forget about my cravings a little as I walked over to it, noticing it had its eyes closed and its body was twitching. If I didn’t know any better, I would have said the cat was dreaming. Having a nightmare, perhaps, going by how anguished its face seemed. As I went to stroke the cat’s head, it woke up suddenly and let out a screeching meow before leaping off the sofa, startling me as it ran for the door.

  Leaving my coffee cup on the table, I went to check on the cat, who was pressed up against the door. As I approached, the cat’s ears went back, and it hissed at me. “No need to be afraid,” I said. “I’m not gonna hurt ya.”

  I bent down and reached out to pick the cat up, which was probably stupid of me, given the anxious state the feline was in, for it swiped my hand, its claws raking my skin. “Ow! You little shit! I said I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”

  The cat sat where it was, pressed up against the door, looking up as if it wanted out.

  All right, buddy. You want out, I’ll let you out.

  I unlocked the door and pulled it open, and immediately the cat ran out into the hallway. As it bolted for the stairwell, I followed it just to see where it would go. The cat was fast, and I had to run to keep up with it as it lead me up to the top floor of the tenement building, onto the landing and through the doorless entry into the hallway. It then ran down the hallway before stopping by the door of one of the apartments. As I walked down to meet it, the cat was just sitting there staring at the door.

  “This where you live, buddy?” I said as I approached. “Even though pets aren’t allowed in the building?”

  The door the cat was staring at was slightly ajar. Despite the door being open, the cat didn’t seem to want to go inside, and I couldn’t help but wonder why, especially when my sixth sense registered as a tingling in my belly, and then a knot in my gut as I stared at the door. Something was off, I could tell that straight away by how the door was left ajar, and from the ominous silence coming from inside the apartment. Something had happened inside that had clearly spooked the hell out of the cat.

  As my insatiable curiosity and nose for a story took over, I reached out and pushed the door open further so I could see inside the apartment, or the hallway at least, which was dark and empty save for a coat stand and a table with some wilting flowers in a vase on it. Beside me, the cat meowed softly as if it didn’t want to go inside. “Hello?” I said, getting definite bad vibes from inside now. Not just bad vibes, but magic vibes as well. The air inside the apartment positively crackled with magical energy. “Something has definitely happened here.” I looked down at the cat. “You see what happened, buddy?”

  The cat meowed again as it came closer to my leg, as though for protection.

  Something sure has the cat spooked. I wonder what?

  The knot in my gut gave way to a tingling excitement. The same feeling I always get when I think I’ve stumbled across a juicy story. There was certainly a story there. How juicy it remained to be seen.

  Crossing the threshold into the hallway, I could almost feel the electric vibes of the residual magic pricking my skin. I’m no expert when it comes to magic. I avoided it for years, despite knowing of its existence from a young age. I only delved into magic after I met Zee, who helped me get a handle on it through the use of sigil cards, which I mostly used for protection, and also to occasionally clear a path into whatever story I was chasing down. I was an amateur magician at best, but despite my novice status, I could still get a sense of how potent the magic was inside the apartment. Like nothing I’d ever felt before. So potent it was almost scary.

/>   As I walked slowly down the hallway of the apartment, I feared what I was going to find. Who or what had left such a potent magical trail behind them? What had the cat seen that had it spooked so much?

  “Hello?” I said again, as much to break the deathly silence and quell my growing anxiety as anything else.

  My tentative inquiry got no response, which was no cause for surprise. The deeper into the apartment I went, the more I realized that something terrible had taken place in there. The question was what, though? Who would use such powerful magic in an ordinary place like that?

  Passing the table with the wilting flowers on it, I saw a couple of photographs. One of a woman in her thirties, blond, smiling in a black evening gown. Chubby build, pretty. The other picture showed the same woman posing with another similar-looking woman. Sisters perhaps?

  I swallowed as I stared at the photo, wondering if I was going to find the woman inside somewhere. And if so, in what state?

  Only one way to find out, I thought as I headed toward the living room.

  4

  The living room was vacant. No sign of the woman who lived in the apartment, and I saw nothing untoward either. The room was neat, tastefully furnished, though the curtains were still drawn. On the coffee table was a bottle of wine and two glasses, the bottle empty.

  Seems she had some company last night.

  If it weren’t for the magic in the air, I would’ve believed myself to be foolish thinking there was anything untoward going on. The woman was probably asleep in her bedroom, and whoever she had been entertaining had simply left the apartment and hadn’t closed the door properly on their way out. Too tired or drunk to do so, maybe.

  But the magic still hung ominously in the air, and the woman’s cat—assuming it was her cat and not some random feline—was still sitting out in the hallway, afraid to even enter the apartment.

  So if the woman isn’t in here, then she must be…

  In the bedroom. Or the bathroom.

  I decided to check the bedroom first, wondering if I was simply going to open the door to find two people sleeping soundly in bed.

  Shit, maybe the woman who lives here, or the person she’s entertaining, are magicians themselves? Maybe they spent the night doing magic of some sort?

  I saw no evidence to suggest the woman who owned the apartment was involved with magic, though. No ingredients lying around, no chalk outlines on the wood floors. Not even any books lying around. Though that proved nothing. I kept all my stuff in my office, safely secured in a wooden chest that I kept locked. The woman could have had her own chest lying around somewhere for all I knew.

  I felt a little silly now, like I’d jumped the gun, basing my assumptions on the behavior of a spooked cat. The woman was probably in the bedroom sleeping and I was there intruding in her apartment.

  Still, who leaves their front door open? Especially in a building like this, which is full of people who’d only be too glad to clean out your apartment for you if they noticed your door open?

  I would check the bedroom. The woman would be in there sleeping, and then I would leave feeling like an idiot for being led astray by a crazy cat. Hopefully, I wouldn’t wake the woman up, and whoever else she might be in there with, and I wouldn’t get reported to the landlord.

  Walking to the bedroom door, I paused for a second with my hand on the knob. Sensing the air, the magic felt stronger. The air practically hummed with it. Clearly the bedroom was the source.

  Particularly potent sex magic maybe?

  Turning the doorknob, I gently pushed the door open, half-expecting someone to scream at my intrusion, but no one did as I pushed the door open further, the magic inside exciting my skin to a high degree, making the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up.

  The bedroom was cloaked in darkness. I stood listening for sounds of breathing, but heard none but my own. Down the hall, the cat meowed as if prompting me to continue into the bedroom.

  But I almost didn’t want to, for as my eyes adjusted to the gloom inside, I made something out in the room, like a dark shadow hanging over the bed.

  What the hell is that?

  Flicking on the light in the room, I recoiled in shock when the scene inside was illuminated. “Jesus Christ…”

  What I saw in the bedroom almost belied belief. The woman was in there all right, but she was suspended above the bed, her weight held there by some invisible force.

  By magic.

  She was naked and facing the ceiling, her arms and legs hanging down, her body arched, her head hanging back and down to reveal her throat, which had been deeply cut, to where she had almost been decapitated, the white of her spinal cord exposed within the deep wound. The woman’s eyes were also missing, leaving two gaping black holes behind on her face, making her look even more ghoulish. And although there was blood all over the white sheets on the bed, the majority of the woman’s blood seemed to be floating in the air around her, suspended as the body was, as if the area held no gravity.

  In all my years, I had never seen anything so bizarre, and I had seen a lot of murdered bodies by that point. Unable to help myself, I moved further into the room and walked slowly around the suspended body, looking up at it as if I was looking at some ghoulish art piece. As I walked around the side closest to the window, I noticed that the woman’s abdomen seemed swollen, almost as if she had been pregnant, which sickened me even more.

  What madness have I walked into here?

  Despite my revulsion, I still had that tingling in my belly, for I knew there was a story to be had. Who had killed that poor woman in such a horrific manner? And why?

  I would have to report the murder to the cops, of course. But before I called a detective I knew at the FPD, I decided to have another look around first. Once the cops showed up, I’d be kicked off the scene, and then I would have to rely on them for information. Information which wouldn’t be very forthcoming, I knew. A murder such as the one I was looking at would leave the cops stumped, as all murders outside of their mundane experience always did. The cops didn’t want to know about anything pertaining to the supernatural or magic. They wouldn’t even entertain the idea of such things existing, even though most cops with enough time on the job knew full well that there were things out there that didn’t tally up with their narrow view of reality. When they wrote their reports, they made no mention of anything crazy like magic or supernatural goings on. They didn’t want to seem crazy themselves, so they pretended such things didn’t exist. And even if some brave cop wrote an accurate report, said report would quickly be changed or scrapped altogether by someone higher up, usually by someone with ties to the Occult Underground themselves. The cop who wrote the report would be frowned upon, and in a worst-case scenario, maybe even demoted or sacked from the job for being crazy. So the cops quickly learned to toe the line and keep their outlandish experiences to themselves.

  The only cop I knew at the time who entertained any notion of the supernatural was a guy called Ethan Drake. For a while, Drake had his own unit that investigated the stuff other cops didn’t want to know about. He was good at it, and even caught the Ripper Tripper, the serial killer who slaughtered all those prostitutes. I’ll admit, though, that I wasn’t his biggest fan. His methods were often questionable, even if they did garner results. And any time I tried to talk to him about the cases he was working, he would just stare me down—he was a big guy, intimidating—before dismissing me with his customary curt sarcasm. Once or twice he gave me a few minutes and a few tidbits of information, but he wasn’t the most forthcoming of people, and he made no secret of the fact that he hated the press, especially those who worked for tabloids like the Midnight Sun as I did.

  Drake left the FPD to work with a special FBI unit for a while, before he then took down Blackstar, the company he used to work for. There was more to the story—a lot more—as I was actively investigating Drake, especially since he apparently had a hand in setting up Lucifer on God’s throne. Yeah, you heard
that right. Lucifer was now humanity’s Lord and Savior. Go figure.

  But all that had happened over a year before I discovered the dead woman in that apartment, and I no longer knew where Drake was. The only detective I knew in the FPD who even acknowledged the existence of the supernatural was Detective John Murtagh, though he often elected to cover things up as well, if only to make his life easier at the FPD. Regardless of which cop was going to investigate the mess I had stumbled upon, no one was going to stop me from investigating it. The cat waiting outside the apartment had all but dumped the story in my lap, and I wasn’t about to turn away from it. If the FPD didn’t report the facts of the case, I sure as hell would on the DC website.

  So now that I had been pulled into a story involving a possible magic wielding serial killer—a phrase that lit a fire of excitement in my belly—I decided to do some snooping before calling Detective Murtagh, starting with examining the murder scene itself.

  From the looks of things, and going from the neatness of the living room, no struggling took place, the obvious conclusion being that the victim knew the killer. The woman and her murderer had sat in the living room drinking wine together before going into the bedroom. Probably to have sex. The bedroom was where the murder took place. There were no signs of blood anywhere else in the apartment that I had seen, though I hadn’t yet checked the bathroom, kitchen and second bedroom. My gut was telling me the woman had been duped by her killer into thinking they were going to have a night of passion, which turned out to be true for the killer at least. There was so much blood on the bed it was difficult to tell if any sexual liaisons had taken place, but I thought it probable that the victim had first had sex with her killer. Maybe the FPD would turn up bodily fluids when they examined the body at the precinct. I knew the medical examiner there, Gordon Mackey. Maybe he could shed some light.