Before I could even think of a response, she was out the door and gone.
CHAPTER 7
Sadie was still wearing my clothes.
It was a stupid, pointless thing to focus on, but it held back the massive flood of panic for now. She had my clothes, and I wanted them back.
But she’d taken more than my clothes. From the moment I found her breaking into my van, she’d taken my balance, the comfort in my own existence. She’d taken my reality and replaced it with something dark and twisted, something I didn’t even want to consider. Something I couldn’t ignore.
And what she’d taken, I could never get back.
Now I had to deal with things the way they were. Knowing about the Others, and Milus Dei, and how I’d managed to step right into the middle of some ancient, secret supernatural grudge match. But I didn’t know nearly enough—and I had no way to find out more.
If Sadie was an actual wolf, I could’ve tracked her. I’d gotten damned good at that. Wolf, bear, cougar, any big predator that would fetch a decent price on the black market. I’d track them, and after the hunt I’d clean and strip the kills. In exchange, the rest of the Valentines would only beat me half to death instead of all the way.
But this wasn’t the wilderness, and she was mostly a person. There was no way to track one human through a concrete jungle the size of Manhattan. Besides, she’d probably lit out of the city now that she had her magical fairy pouch, or whatever the hell it was.
I probably shouldn’t have given it to her. But if she’d kept going back to the park, she would’ve been captured. Those cult guys weren’t screwing around.
Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about Sadie right now.
I was trying to decide between finishing my coffee and finding something to smash in sheer frustration when my phone buzzed. Earlier today, a time that already seemed like years ago, I’d told Rufus to give me until midnight. He must’ve decided not to wait quite that long. Maybe a couple of jobs would take my mind off what else may or may not be waiting for me out there.
It was Abe.
Damn it, I’d rather deal with Rufus’s cranky ass. I still didn’t know how to explain all of this to the detective. And I sure as hell couldn’t tell him that I’d found the killer—and then helped her escape. I almost didn’t answer. But I had to tell him something, or he’d just come out and find me. He knew where to look.
“Hey, Detective,” I said into the phone. “How’s your vacation going?”
“Real funny. Did you see what happened?”
“Uh...”
“At the park. You were there, weren’t you? There was another murder—an officer this time.”
I managed to breathe again. For a second I thought someone had seen me, which was still a distinct possibility. But Abe just meant he knew I’d have gone out to look around. “Yes, I was there,” I said slowly. “And...I was wrong. Sorry, Abe.” The last thing I wanted to do was lie to him. Unfortunately, until I knew more about this, the truth might be dangerous for him, too. “I didn’t see anything. But I think it actually was a wolf.”
Well, at least that last part was the truth. Mostly.
There was a long pause, and he finally said, “Well, damn. I gotta say, I’m kind of glad you were wrong for once.”
“Yeah. Laugh it up,” I said.
“Oh, I’d never do that.” I could practically hear him smirking. “Seriously, though. I’m glad because I don’t even want to think about a woman who could do that do a guy.”
I had to agree. I didn’t want to think about Sadie, either. “So the department’s still crying wolf, right?”
“Louder than ever. By the way, you’re about to get a call from dispatch,” he said. “They’re done with the scene and need a pickup. So if you’re still there—”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be convincing...I’m long gone.”
“Good.” He paused again. “Thanks for checking into this, Gideon.”
I shook my head. “Don’t thank me. All I did was get you kicked off the case.”
“Believe me, I’m glad to be off it,” he said. “There’s no way I want to face off against a giant-ass wolf. And don’t take it to heart. Everybody ends up shooting blanks once in a while.”
“Right. See you soon, Abe.”
“Take care, kid.”
The call ended, and I got my wallet out to pay for the food. Sadie had ended up costing me fifty bucks and a set of workout clothes, not to mention having to lie to a friend because of her. If I had a shit list, she was definitely on it.
Somehow, I intended to make her pay me back.
The police tape was still up when I got back to the park. I expected to check in with one of the other detectives to pick up the body, but the man waiting for me on the scene was a bit higher in rank.
“Chief Foley.” I had to be careful talking to him. He didn’t know about my arrangement with Abe, and I was still pissed at him for pretending not to suspend my favorite detective. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” I said, leaving out the fact that I considered that a good thing. “How’ve you been?”
The chief grunted. “Not so great. One of my officers was just murdered.”
“Really. Thought there’d be another word for it,” I said. “Can wolves commit murder?”
I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud. But I couldn’t help myself—Nigel Foley was not one of my favorite people, and I knew he didn’t give a damn about his officers. He just had to fake it when one of them went down.
“Oh, that’s right. You’re the funny one, aren’t you.” The chief failed to smile. “What’s your name again?”
“Gideon Black.”
He stared at me a lot longer than necessary. “You like your job, Black?” he finally said.
“Are you threatening me, Chief?”
The man laughed coldly. “You’re not important enough to threaten, son. No, I was just making small talk,” he said. “Wondering if you actually enjoy carting dead bodies around, all by your lonesome. Sounds pretty grim to me.”
I shrugged. “It’s not so bad,” I said. “Quiet.”
“Yes. I suppose it would be quiet.”
He was still staring at me, and I didn’t like the feel of this conversation. It almost seemed like Foley was digging for something. I had no idea what he’d want from me—but maybe he’d gotten suspicious of Abe and realized how often I was on scene with him. I wouldn’t give him a damned thing. “Well. Guess I’d better get Officer…”
“Walters,” the chief said. “He’s Rob Walters. Was, anyway.”
I was surprised Chief Foley even knew the man’s name. “All right. I’ll take Officer Walters down to the morgue,” I said. “If you’ve got the release form…?”
For a minute I thought he’d refuse. I had this crazy image of the chief getting in my face, shouting vague questions like the cliché movie bad-cop in the interrogation room: Where were you the night of the twenty-first? Who did you work with? Why did you do it?
But he only glared at me a minute longer, and then walked over to his car parked just past the crime scene tape. He opened the front door, grabbed a clipboard and came back to shove it at me. “You know the drill,” he said.
“Pretty much.” I slid the pen out and scrawled my name at the bottom of the sheet. The release form gave the NYPD a record of what bodies went where, with who. Signing it also made sure I got paid. “There you go, Chief,” I said as I handed it back. “All dotted and crossed.”
Foley took the board. “He’s all yours, Mr. Black.”
“Thanks.”
The chief went back to his car and got in. At least he wouldn’t hover over me while I loaded Officer Walters up.
The body was bagged, and I didn’t bother opening it. I already knew what killed him—or rather, who. My gut twisted a little as I remembered the man I was hauling onto the stretcher, alive and ready to make me dead. Sorry. No witnesses. He’d said it without emotion, like murdering witnesses was just an
other item on the to-do list next to picking up milk on the way home.
And then a werewolf had saved my life.
I shook off the memory and focused on my job. Get the body in the van, secure the stretcher, start the engine, head for the morgue. At least Viv would be there by now. I couldn’t talk to her about Sadie either, but I still wanted her thoughts on the other bodies, and this new one.
“Hope you enjoy the accommodations, Officer Walters,” I said, not thinking much about talking to a dead guy. Hell, I did it all the time. Dead people were great at listening—the ultimate captive audience. “I’d make you more comfortable, but you did try to kill me. So I guess I don’t care how smooth the ride is.”
Kill you.
I frowned at the whisper in my head. Why would I think that? I didn’t want to kill anyone, and the only person near me was already dead. “Hey, no worries, Rob,” I said. “Can I call you Rob? Anyway, I’m not into desecrating corpses. Makes it hard to get paid.”
The whisper came again. Louder this time.
We’ll kill you…Gideon Black.
CHAPTER 8
I damn near crashed the van.
Somehow I managed to slow down and pull to the curb. I sat there a minute, heart pounding and hands tight on the wheel. There was no way I could’ve heard what I did. My subconscious had not spun that threat—I was pretty sure the voice wasn’t even mine.
We’ll kill you.
“Shut the fuck up!” Reacting instinctively, I slammed both hands on the wheel, ripped the seat belt free and scrambled between the seats to the back. “You’re not killing anyone,” I snarled. Grabbing the body bag zipper, I yanked it down, half expecting Officer Walters to open his eyes and gasp out my name.
He was still extremely dead.
“This is insane,” I muttered. “I’m yelling at a corpse.”
Cold laughter answered in my head. For some reason, I could feel the sound—an unpleasant, almost painful sensation prickled my brain, like pins-and-needles when your foot falls asleep.
I glared at the body of Officer Rob Walters. Blue-tinged skin, closed and swollen eyes, throat ripped out. “Dead people do not talk,” I said, hammering every word like a coffin nail.
Only to you, DeathSpeaker.
“Excuse me?”
The words left my lips before I could remind myself this wasn’t happening. Fine, there were such things as werewolves. Maybe even vampires and fairies and whatever that other thing was that Sadie mentioned. But human or not, the dead stayed dead.
We’ve been looking for you, the dead voice said, still causing ripples of discomfort in my brain. We’ll find you. Use you. And we’ll kill you slowly…kill you all.
Okay. This conversation wasn’t real, but the dead guy was starting to piss me off. “Did you happen to notice that you’re no longer alive?” I said. “You’re dead. Deceased. Permanently punched out. I’m pretty sure that means you can’t kill me. And what do you mean, you’ve been looking for me?”
I could feel him struggling not to answer, like a tug at the back of my head. He was almost groaning with effort.
What the hell?
You are the DeathSpeaker. You are the key. The voice was choked and straining, and every word sent a sharp, stabbing pain like a bee sting through my head.
“The key to what?”
Silence. Nothing.
“Hey! Dead asshole!” I almost reached into the body bag and shook him, but I knew that wouldn’t do any good. It would probably get messy, too. “What am I the key to? And what the hell is a DeathSpeaker?”
Still no response. I didn’t feel anything, either. Whatever had just happened, it was over now.
I closed the zipper with shaking hands and made my way back to the driver’s seat. I’d wanted to know more about Milus Dei, and now I did.
I knew I was in a hell of a lot more trouble than I’d thought.
“Why am I not surprised to see this?”
Viv had the latest body on the table, blocked and stripped. She was pointing at the tattoo on the dead man’s wrist. “I have to say, though, this is seriously weird. The other two weren’t police officers.”
I managed a nod. I’d had to fake surprise at the tattoo discovery, and it wasn’t easy to concentrate right now. My brain was stuck somewhere between werewolves and the talking dead.
“Gideon?” She frowned at me. “Are you okay? You look awful.”
“Fine. Didn’t sleep much today.” I scrubbed a hand down my face and moved closer to the body. If Officer Dead Guy started talking again, I wasn’t sure I could hide my reaction. “Do you know anything more about the other two?” I said.
“Not much. First one’s name was Peyton Beaumont, and he worked at a bank. No immediate family. We’re still trying to determine next of kin.” Her lips firmed as she looked absently over the fresh body. “Second one’s harder. No ID, and no face. His prints aren’t on file, so they’re looking at dental records.”
“So, nothing to tie them together besides the tattoos.”
“And being mauled to death in Central Park. But yeah, besides that,” she said with a grin. The expression fell away as she added, “I hear they took Abe off the case.”
“Yeah.” I would’ve mentioned that it was my fault, but Viv didn’t know anything about my outside work with the detective. “He doesn’t mind, though. Said something about not wanting to face off against a giant wolf.”
She snorted. “This is not a wolf. Come on, Gideon. Three guys with identical tattoos?”
“Chief seems to think so.”
“Well, the chief’s an idiot. Look at this.” She headed for the long table at the back of the room, where there was a laptop plugged in with lights blinking. I followed slowly. It might be time for a change of subject—I wasn’t sure I could keep clinging to the wolf theory.
Viv hit a key, and the laptop flashed to life. “I was doing some research,” she said as she opened a browser and pulled up the bookmarks. “On that symbol, you know? And I found this.” She stepped back to give me a look.
The website was a wiki-style page called Directory of Cults, Pagan Groups and Symbolatry. There was an image of the ankh and sword, and beside it, a single paragraph of text:
Milus Dei [Latin, “Soldiers of God”]: Roman in origin and founded alongside the birth of Christianity, this ancient cult is thought to have been formed to “root out evil that is not of man, yet walks the earth” [Ref. The Scrolls of Gideon].1 While some consider this cryptic explanation to point to early demon hunters, others interpret “not of man” to include other paranormal entities such as witches, vampires, and faeries. Rumors of the Milus Dei cult endured for centuries, but the organization is said to have dissolved sometime in the early 1920s due to global distractions of war, as well as rapid advancement in technologies and scientific progress with subsequent waning belief in the paranormal or supernatural.
“Holy…” I couldn’t settle on the right curse word, so I left it off. Seeing my own name in that stark block of text had shaken me badly, even though I knew it couldn’t have a damned thing to do with me personally. “They left out werewolves,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Sorry.” I closed my eyes and let out a long breath, grateful she hadn’t heard me. “Is this all you found on these guys?” I said, turning to look at her.
“Pretty much. Apparently, they were a closely guarded secret.” She frowned thoughtfully. “But maybe someone adopted the symbol, you know?” she said. “Like a gang. Or they don’t even have to be that. Maybe it’s just a bunch of guys trying to make a modern-day version. Vigilantes, religious zealots, something like that.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Except I knew the truth. They’d never dissolved. They just went further underground, until they were hiding in plain sight.
And now they wanted me.
Viv tapped the screen. “The Scrolls of Gideon,” she said. “Isn’t that funny? I mean, not in a ha-ha way, but—”
“Hilarious.”
I made myself smile, hoping it looked natural. “Can you do me a huge favor, Viv?”
“What’s that?”
“Find out everything you can about Milus Dei, and the Scrolls of Gideon, whatever those are,” I said. “Dig as deep as you can.”
Her brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Because maybe we can get Abe’s case back for him.” This time my grin was genuine. “I’m sure he’d love that. He’s totally into gangs. They don’t have fangs and claws, and they can be handcuffed and fingerprinted.”
She laughed. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, Gideon…”
I raised an eyebrow.
“If you knew something about this case, you’d tell me,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” I lied without hesitation.
She stared at me a moment longer. At last she said, “Okay. I’ll dig into it after work, and you check in with me tomorrow.” Then she smiled. “It’d help if you tried not to bring me too many bodies between now and then.”
“Right.” I said. “I’ll go spread the word—Viv’s busy doing a favor for me, so no one’s allowed to die tonight.”
Her laughter followed me out of the morgue.
CHAPTER 9
The business of dying in New York refused to take the night off, and I was busy hauling corpses until eight in the morning. At least no other dead people tried to talk to me. Every time I managed to forget about Officer Rob Walters and his threats from beyond the grave, something managed to remind me—and the tension came flooding back with it.
I was half dead myself, exhausted from the strain of looking over my shoulder for a threat I wouldn’t recognize unless it walked up to me with a big sign that said HERE TO KILL YOU, by the time I folded my bed down and climbed in.
Sleep dropped over me like a lead curtain.
The dream came faster than usual. The deep woods, the campfire that barely banished the chill of oncoming winter. Colorado—grizzly country. Battered RVs, rusted pickups and patched tents formed a semi-circle around the campsite. Orville Valentine, lord and master of his domain, roaring drunk as usual. Hodge and Morris beyond shitfaced. A handful of cousins scattered here and there, and Mama Reba holed up in the silver Airstream with her cheap wine and satellite sitcoms.
Wrong Side of Hell (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 1) Page 4