Deadson Confidential: A Drakeverse Urban Fantasy Novel

by N. P. Martin

  I nodded as I forced a smile. “Yeah.”

  “Come,” he said. “Sit with me.”

  I followed Pan Demic over to the bank of computer screens as he sat in a chair that had bat wings on the back of it.

  Who the fuck are these guys? I wondered, failing to see how they could help anyone. I felt like I had stumbled into the home of a couple teenagers whose parents had gone on vacation and now their sons were partying hard in their absence, using their parent’s credit card to pay for hookers and coke.

  But as soon as I sat down and saw their computer setup, and the reams of data running across the large screens, I realized these guys were serious. And when I watched Pan Demic’s fingers fly across his keyboard, hints of magical energy wafting from his fingertips, I knew he must be some sort of cybermancer. “Help yourself to anything you see here,” he said as he stared at the screen in front of him, the data streaming across it incomprehensible to my eyes. “We got plenty girls and coke to go around.”

  “No thanks,” I said as I stared at the pile of coke sitting next to him, tempted despite myself. The white powder used to be my drug of choice before I moved on to heroine. Staring at its cold whiteness, I could almost feel the ghost of its effects, how it made me feel invincible, like a winner. There was nothing else like Grade A coke. Nothing at all.

  “You sure?” Pan Demic said, now looking at me looking at the coke. “You seem like you want to.”

  I smiled. “I’m good. Really.”

  “Who you trying to convince, me or yourself?”

  My smile tightened. “Both.”

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said, throwing what looked like a bandanna over the coke to cover it. “Gotcha.”

  Christ, Haedemus, you couldn’t have brought me to a worse place.

  I sat for another minute, staring around me, glancing over at Haedemus who was still getting a blowjob from one of the hookers. Then Pan Demic finally finished typing and turned in his chair to face me just as the other guy, Artemis, came and sat next to him, a large joint in his hand, which he passed to Pan Demic. “So,” Pan Demic said after taking a puff from the joint. “Haedemus said we might be able to help you. We’re both big fans of Deadson Confidential, by the way.”

  “Yeah,” Artemis said. “To be honest, we’ve thought about contacting you a few times. We have access to so much information, man. Information you could totally publish on your site.”

  “We get what you’re doing,” Pan Demic said. “Trying to show the world what’s really going on? That’s sort of what we do as well sometimes.”

  “Hard to get people’s attention, though.” Artemis puffed on the joint, blowing the pungent smoke in my direction, which smelled nice, I have to say. “It’s like, a while ago, we found out Big Pharma had a full-fledged cure for cancer, but they were hiding it. So we stole the formula for the drug and released it online. It’s a really simple formula actually, anyone could make the drug with stuff you could buy at the pharmacy. But you know what happened?”

  “I’m guessing people thought it was bullshit,” I said, wishing they would turn the damn music down a bit.

  “Fucking right they did,” Artemis said. “And Big Pharma ran a propaganda campaign warning everybody not to use the formula or they would die from it, so most people didn’t use it. It sucks, man.”

  “We’ve released loads of footage of supernaturals online too,” Pan Demic said. “But the dumb people out there think it’s all fake, or their brains just won’t allow them to believe that supernatural shit exists. We hardly bother now.”

  “Yeah,” Artemis said. “Mostly we just party now, and find information for whoever needs it.”

  “My sister, though, she shares your goal of enlightening the world,” Pan Demic said.

  “Your sister?” I said.

  “Yeah. That Illuminati shit you always talk about on your site? My sister is totally into that, and a lot more besides. You should really talk to her sometime.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, feeling like my ears were bleeding at this point. “Hey, could you maybe turn the music down a little. It’s just, I can hardly hear myself talk.”

  Pan Demic smiled. “Not a Cannibal Corpse fan then?”

  I shook my head as I smiled politely. “Not really.”

  “You don’t even like Hammer Smashed Face? That song is a classic.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “No worries, bro.” Pan Demic turned and tapped a button on his keyboard and the volume of the music blessedly dropped, just in time for everyone to hear Haedemus let out a long, agonized groan as he orgasmed.

  “Jesus fucking nelly!” Haedemus shouted. “Oh…oh god…”

  “Having fun there, Haedemus?” Pan Demic called over.

  “Goddamn, I needed that,” Haedemus shouted back. “This girl is like a fucking human vacuum, I tell you.”

  Artemus and Pan Demic both laughed. “We love that guy,” Artemis said. “First time we met him, when he was still a Hellicorn, we gave him a load of coke and he went fucking crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Pan Demic said. “You know what he did? He—”

  “Eh, I think that’s enough there, boys,” Haedemus said, suddenly standing behind me as he zipped himself up, grossing me out slightly. “I don’t think Damion here wants to hear about my misadventures.”

  “But what you did was Ctrl-Alt-Crazy, dude,” Artemis said.

  Haedemus laughed then said, “Yeah, tell him and you’ll end up like those mares.”

  “What mares?” I said.

  “Nothing, dude,” Pan Demic said. “Forget we said anything.”

  “Good advice,” Haedemus said. “Damion, why don’t you ask the boys what you came here to ask so we can go. I have a lot on today, as I said earlier.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I said, taking the piece of paper with the symbol drawn on it out of my pocket and handing it to Pan Demic. “I’m trying to find out what this symbol is. Maybe you guys know, or could possibly find out?”

  Pan Demic took the piece of paper from me, looked at it, and then his stoned smile disappeared, indicating to me that he recognized the symbol. Saying nothing, he handed the piece of paper to Artemis, whose face also dropped when he saw the symbol.

  “Fuck me, dude,” Artemis said, shaking his head.

  “What?” I said. “Have you seen that symbol before? Where? What does it mean?”

  Pan Demic sighed heavily. “It means, dude, that you’re in deep shit if you’re looking into this.”

  “Why? What the hell is it?”

  “Where’d you come across this?” he asked, having taken the piece of paper back from Artemis.

  “The symbol was tattooed on somebody’s hand,” I said. “I’m trying to track down the man the tattoo belongs to.”

  “You want our advice?” he said, handing me the piece of paper back. “Drop this right now. Forget you ever saw it.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because,” Pan Demic said, “that symbol right there belongs to a group of people you definitely don’t want to fuck with, not if you value your life.”

  Sighing in frustration, I asked, “What group? Who are you talking about? I need to know.”

  “Why do you need to know?” Artemis asked.

  “My sister disappeared twelve years ago,” I said, staring at them. “And I think these people you’re talking about are responsible for her disappearance, along with the disappearance of many other people over the years.”

  Pan Demic nodded. “I see,” he said. “I can see why you would want to know, why you want to go after these people, but I’m telling you, dude, these aren’t the kind of people you go chasing after for any reason. These people are—”

  “For fuck’s sake!” I snapped, unable to contain my anger any longer. “Just fucking tell me who they are! I need to know!”

  Pan Demic and Artemis both stared at me, apparently not put out by my loss of temper.

  “O-kay,” Haedemus said, walking around to the side
of me. “Before things get any more heated here, why don’t you two just tell Damion what he wants to know. Damion, can I get you a drink, or something else perhaps—”

  “I’m fine,” I said, still staring at Pan Demic and Artemis. “Look, I get that you are just trying to look out for me, and I appreciate your concern, but it’s very important that I know who this symbol belongs to. This is my sister we’re talking about here. You understand? Pan Demic, you said you had a sister, didn’t you? Well, imagine if she vanished off the face of the earth. Wouldn’t you do anything to try and find her? Anything?“

  Pan Demic nodded. “Yeah, I would.”

  “Well then,” I said, calming down a little. “No more discussion. Tell me what you know.”

  Pan Demic raised his hands. “Okay, dude. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Artemis, show him what we got.”

  Artemis turned to his computer and tapped on the keys for a moment, bringing up various folders before opening one of them to reveal a series of images, one of which was the dreaded symbol I showed them a minute ago, only this one was crimson on a black background. “That right there,” Artemis said, “is the symbol for a cult called the Ord an Dúnmharú Amháin.“

  “What is that, Irish or something?” I said.

  “Spot on,” Artemis said. “Translated, the name means Order of the Murderous One. The cult is made up of very bad people—”

  “Very fucking bad,” Pan Demic added.

  “What do you mean bad?” I said. “How bad?”

  “Well, nearly all of them are serial killers,” Artemis said.

  “And torturers,” Pan Demic said.

  “To even become a member of the cult, you have to present the leader with three human heads,” said Artemis. “Then you have to go through the initiation rites, which involves days of torture. If you survive the torture, then you get to be a member of the Order, or the ODA as it’s known in the Underground.”

  “But first you have to be branded,” Artemis said.

  “Branded?”

  “By the creature they worship.”

  “What creature?”

  “Apparently, it’s a Fae creature, but it doesn’t belong to any court.”

  “We don’t know its true name,” Pan Demic said. “But the rumors suggest this creature is so dark and evil that the rest of the Fae want nothing to do with it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said as I rubbed my forehead.

  “We did warn you, dude.”

  “You’re saying that’s who took my sister? These fucking psychos?”

  “Well, only members of the Order would have that tattoo, so yeah, it seems likely.”

  “Between them,” Artemis said, now looking at a text file on his computer screen, “these guys are responsible for hundreds of murders and disappearances over the years.”

  “That we know of,” Pan Demic added.

  “How do you know?” I asked, my throat dry and tight now.

  “Well, we’re sort of serial killer buffs,” he said. “We go to serial killer cons and stuff. You may have heard of them?”

  “Yeah, I know about them.”

  “Cool. The ODA got talked about a lot at the cons.”

  “That stopped when people started to go missing,” Artemis said. “Now nobody talks about the ODA. People are too afraid they’ll go missing as well.”

  “So no one knows anything?” I said.

  “Well, one guy found out something before he went missing,” Artemis said. “He told a few of us at a con one time that he spoke to someone on a message board who claimed to be a member of the ODA, going by the handle—” He glanced at the screen. “FSGG74. No idea what that means, but we naturally checked this person out. In the conversation FSGG74 claimed to have killed over two dozen people, men and women alike. This person also said to our missing friend that the ODA had a place near the Great Woods where they met once a month to hand over ‘captured humans’ to this Fae creature, though he didn’t say what for.”

  “Wait,” I said. “He said that? That they hand over the people they kidnap?”

  “Yeah. They could be like sacrificial lambs or something, I don’t know.”

  “I’m gonna need a transcription of that conversation.”

  “Sorry, bro, no can do. It was deleted. Even we can’t get it back.”

  “After our friend went missing,” Pan Demic said, “we looked deeper into FSGG74. We even managed to get the person’s real name.”

  Artemis stared at the screen as he read, “Alexander Milton, a construction contractor out of North Elmview.”

  “But two days after we discovered this,” Pan Demic said, “Milton goes missing, never to be heard from again.”

  “We can only guess that the ODA found out about his indiscretions and killed him for it,” Artemis said. “Which is why we’re saying going after these guys is like a death sentence. The only reason they don’t know about us is because we made sure to cover our tracks well.”

  “If you start looking into these guys,” Pan Demic added, “they’ll hear about about it, and then they’ll come after you.”

  “And to be fair, dude,” said Artemis, “your sister went missing twelve years ago. It’s highly unlikely she’s—”

  “Stop!” My heart beat madly against my chest as if I was on the verge of a panic attack. At that point, it was either stick my nose into the pile of coke on the table, or leave the penthouse to get some air. Standing up, I chose to leave the penthouse, Haedemus calling after me as I headed up to the roof, hardly able to breathe now my chest was so tight. When I burst out onto the roof, I took a few more steps before stopping and doubling over like I was going to be sick.

  “Are you all right?” Haedemus said as he came walking up to me.

  “No, I’m fucking not all right,” I said, shaking my head. “Do you have cigarettes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me one.”

  Haedemus produced a pack of cigarettes and handed me one of the cancer sticks, which I jabbed between my lips before he lit it for me, the first draw sending me into a coughing fit, but I didn’t care as I recovered and took another drag. With tears streaming down my face now, I walked across the roof to the edge and stared out at the surrounding buildings, looking across to the ominous hills and mountains at the edge of the city, and the Great Woods beyond.

  “I’m sorry, man, I really am,” Haedemus said as he came to stand beside me.

  “Yeah,” I said as I stared out at the city through wet eyes. “So am I.”

  16

  A few hours later, I was sitting in some pretentious bar where everyone in it was tanned and wore power suits and talked endlessly about trading and money and their favorite expensive restaurants and their gym memberships and preferred tanning salon and on and on and on like characters who had just stepped out of the pages of American Psycho.

  I sat in a corner with a scowl on my face and an overpriced Scotch on the table in front of me, on my sixth or seventh drink by now, at times wishing I had chosen a different bar to sit in, especially when I got blatant stares from the power suits who probably deemed me too scruffy—and poor—to be sitting in such a trendy establishment. Their stares were even more annoying because I knew my family’s fortune would dwarf all of their net worth put together. Not that I gave a shit about money, which I suppose is easy to say when you grew up not having to worry about it. But even as I was just scraping by, I still cared little about it, nor the supposed power that came with it. Power that did more harm than good at the end of the day.

  As I was ordering another drink from the waitress serving me, I got a phone call from Detective Murtagh. I hesitated before answering, not really in the mood for talking with him, especially after our last conversation when he all but blamed me for the case against Martin Phillips going nowhere, and for the fact that Rick Marino escaped his grasp. I let the phone ring, hoping it would stop. When it didn’t, I sighed and answered it. “Yeah?”

  “Deadson,” Murtagh said. “Our
friend Marino left us another body.”

  “And you’re telling me this why?”

  “Because I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “What’s up with you? You sound depressed. Is it your time of the month or something?”

  “Fuck off, Murtagh. Why are you phoning me? You made it clear last time we talked you didn’t want anymore to do with me.”

  “That was then. We need your help to catch this guy now.”

  “My help?”

  “Your girlfriend’s help. Whatever. You said she could track him. Can she?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Fuck’s sake, Deadson. People are dying here, or don’t you give a shit anymore?”

  I sighed as the waitress brought me my drink. “Course I care. What about the other victim? Did you freeze the body like you said you were going to? Did it work?”

  “Yeah, it worked,” he said. “Thank God. But now we got a body in the freezer with a monster inside it we don’t know what to do with, soon to be joined by another one.”

  “Incinerate them. It’s the best way.”

  “And what about the victims’ families? What do we tell them, genius?”

  “Whatever the hell you want, Murtagh,” I said. “I really don’t care. That’s not my concern.”

  “Jesus, you really are on your fucking period, aren’t you?”

  “Fuck you, Murtagh.” I hung up on him, slamming the phone down on the table before lifting my drink and downing it in one, drawing a few stares from the power suits sitting nearby, which I ignored. A moment later, Murtagh rang back, and reluctantly, I answered.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you today, Deadson,” he said. “But whatever it is, I hope you can see past it so you can help catch this fucking incubus guy before he kills and impregnates some other poor woman.”

  “It’s not just him.”

  “What?”

  “There’s more out there, all monsters doing their thing for Phillips’ website.”

  “Yeah, you said, but we can’t catch them all, can we? Not until we have IDs on them, and right now, Marino is the only one we know, so let’s focus on him for now.”