Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
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Copyright © 2018 by Sonya Bateman
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Lou Harper, Harper By Design
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
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Books in The DeathSpeaker Codex series
Available now from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited
WRONG SIDE OF HELL
FIELDS OF BLOOD
REALM OF MIRRORS
RETURN OF THE HUNTERS
CITY OF SECRETS
PRISON OF HORRORS
THE SCROLLS OF GIDEON
Coming soon… Book 8 (untitled) in the DeathSpeaker Codex!
PROLOGUE
Manhattan, New York City – Three Weeks Ago
I tried not to wince as the needle descended. “Do you really have to do that?”
“Yes. It’s necessary.”
“Well, it sucks.” And this was going to hurt.
The needle buzzed louder when it hit my chest. It actually wasn’t as bad as I remembered — probably because I’d been a lot younger and more terrified the first time. I’d also experienced pain a lot worse than this since.
“So how long do you have to keep the Grotto closed?” I asked Cobalt while he inked the new tattoo.
“Not long. A week, perhaps,” he said. The Seelie Fae who’d done my coverup tattoos ten years ago, and enchanted them without telling me, paused to wipe a dribble of ink before he continued the pattern. “These city planners. They’ve no concern for independent business, or the losses we incur when they decide to remodel the sidewalks. Again.”
I held in a hiss as the needle buzzed across my collarbone. “Maybe you and Will could take a vacation or something,” I said.
“We are, of a sort.” He smiled. “We’ve plans to visit Braelan in Arcadia, with Uriskel and Trystan.”
“That sounds awesome,” I said. Braelan and Uriskel were Cobalt’s brothers, and I counted myself lucky that all three were my friends. Uriskel had helped me rescue my own brother, and my birth father, when they got kidnapped and taken to Arcadia. And Braelan was the current King of the Seelie Court. I’d met him after his guards tossed us in the dungeons. “When’s all this happening?”
“Three weeks from now.” Cobalt paused to admire his handiwork. “These protections will be stronger than the ones on your back,” he said, and then gave a small shake of his head. “I do wish you’d no need for such measures, though. You’ve been critically injured far too often.”
“Yeah, probably. But this is just a precaution,” I told him. The enchantments in the tattoos kicked in when I was close to dying, and worked against anyone who tried to harm me by paralyzing them with fear. But the last time I used them, I’d had to go through a lot of painful contortions to get my tormentors to look at my back. Since then I’d figured if I had them on the front too, it’d be easier. “Don’t worry. There’s no critical injury forecast in my near future.”
“You’re certain of that?” Cobalt said with a smirk.
I shrugged the shoulder he wasn’t tattooing. “Like ninety-five percent sure. I just got out of a … situation, and I’m in no hurry to find a new one,” I said. “Besides, I have a sweet new house to enjoy.”
“Ah, yes.” I’d told him about the house that Lady Tethys sort of gave me. “You’ve moved in, then?”
“Soon. We’re in the process,” I said. “It’s gonna be great.”
“Well, then, I’m glad for you.”
Honestly, I was a tiny bit worried about the string that was attached to the house. I’d never even heard of Lady Tethys, much less met her, before she showed up at the Castle a few days ago, told me she’d known my mother, and offered to give me a house. The catch was that I owed her a favor. She’d insisted that it was a small favor, retrieving some artifact from somewhere, but I had my doubts.
The last favor I did almost killed me.
“I believe we’re finished,” Cobalt said as he pulled the needle back, switched it off, and wiped a bit more ink away. “Have a look, if you’d like.” He gestured at a long mirror on the wall across from the tattoo bench, in the back room we currently occupied. Cobalt had given me a private, off-hours session instead of using the Grotto’s main parlor, where he and the other artists did tattoos in glass booths with a live audience watching. He knew I was kind of sensitive about my scars.
I pushed up on my elbows and looked in the mirror. The new tats were glossy black, the skin around them red with irritation, but they looked awesome and blended right in with the rest. They even covered up more of the scarring. “These are perfect. Thank you,” I said.
Cobalt nodded and smiled. “They will also help you further enhance the Path.”
It took me a few seconds to figure that one out, but then I remembered. The Path was a Fae thing, an internal sense of place and direction along with an awareness of danger. The earlier tattoos Cobalt had given my younger, dumber and more scared self not only protected me, but also made the Path stronger.
He’d done that because I’d seemed lost when I came to him. And I definitely was.
“Remember to keep your tattoos clean, and to apply the ointment I gave you religiously,” Cobalt said. “I’d not want you to ruin my work with an infection.”
I laughed. “That’s going to be a lot easier, now that I have a working shower.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said as I eased off the bench and grabbed my shirt. “And Gideon, do not be a stranger. You and your friends are welcome to visit any time. I’m certain Uriskel would enjoy seeing you again, as well.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see him too.” Which was a strange thing to say, considering we hadn’t met on the best of terms. In fact, Uriskel thought Taeral and I were trying to attack his brother the first time we visited the Grotto, and he’d almost killed us.
But we’d been through a lot since then, and now I couldn’t help liking him. And respecting the hell out of him. As bad as my life had been growing up, his was a hell of a lot worse — and since he was Fae and immortal, his bad part had lasted a lot longer.
Cobalt and I exchanged goodbyes, and I headed
out of the Grotto feeling pretty damned good despite my sore chest.
In fact, I almost felt like nothing could go wrong.
CHAPTER 1
Manhattan, New York City – Present Day
The dead guy riding shotgun in my van was terribly worried about his collection of Johnny Cash records.
“You’re sure the cops won’t steal them?” he said, twisting around in the seat once again to look into the back of the van at his corpse. He couldn’t actually see his own dead body, since it was in a body bag, but he kept trying. “I mean, I’ve got a sealed Ring of Fire that’s worth five hundred by itself, easy.”
I fought a smirk as I inched the van along with the rush-hour traffic. “Positive,” I said, imagining the look on Abe’s face if I told him he was suspected of stealing a bunch of country albums. In his opinion, the only real music was ’70s classic rock, and everything else was a certain descriptive category of noise. Modern rock, for example, was screaming monkey-mating noise. Country was twangy cat-gutting noise. And he’d be downright shocked if anyone told him Johnny Cash wasn’t exactly country. “I know the guy in charge,” I reassured the dead man. “He’ll make sure nothing happens to your stuff.”
“Well, all right.” My passenger leaned back in his seat with a deep sigh. “I can’t believe I’m actually dead,” he said. “Heart attack. What a way to go. And you’re not an angel, or the grim reaper, or anything like that?”
I shook my head. “Nah. I’m just a body mover.”
“So body movers can talk to dead people?”
“Not all of them,” I said. “Just me.” Of course, I was also half Fae and the only DeathSpeaker in the world, but I wasn’t going to get into that with the now-deceased Rudy Johnston from Greenwich Village, whose most pressing concern right now was whether the NYPD would steal his vinyl collection.
This habit of talking to the dead folks I ferried around the city was relatively new. After a lot of painful trial and error, it was finally more or less easy to project their souls and have conversations on the way to the hospital, the morgue, the funeral home, or wherever we were headed. I didn’t do it every time — only for the people who wanted to talk to me.
Turned out the stronger I became as the DeathSpeaker, the easier it was for souls on the other side of the barrier to recognize me and call out. Now if I was within a hundred feet or so of a dead person with something to say, I’d hear them. Sometimes the message was actually important, something I’d end up passing on to Abe to help him solve a case or tie up the vital loose ends of a person’s life.
And sometimes, it was just about Johnny Cash records.
Rudy, who’d been craning for another look behind his seat, straightened again and looked at me. “What happens now?” he said.
I gave a slight shrug. “Once we get to the morgue, they’ll check you out and—”
“No, I mean … what happens to me?” A kind of sad bewilderment surfaced on his not-quite-solid face. “That’s not me anymore,” he said, jerking a thumb at the body behind us. “This is me, right here. So do I just sit in this van forever, or what?”
A sarcastic reply rose to my tongue, something along the lines of do you see a bunch of dead people hanging around in my van? I decided that wouldn’t exactly be comforting. But then, I doubted anything I said would make him feel better about being dead.
“Honestly? I don’t know what happens,” I finally said, trying to choose my words with care. “Nobody’s ever explained exactly what it’s like. But a friend of mine did tell me this one thing. Wherever you’re going, there’s a whole lot of stars.”
“Yeah?” He lifted a faint, almost hopeful smile. “I think that’ll be kind of nice,” he said. “You don’t get a lot of stars out here in the city.”
“True,” I said. It was about the only thing I missed from my life before this one — the open air, the night sky. The stars and the moon.
If endless stars was the only thing the afterlife had going for it, that wouldn’t be so bad.
“Okay.” Rudy Johnston closed his eyes briefly and nodded, as if he were convincing himself. “Okay,” he said again, and let out a breath. “How do I get there?”
“I’ll release you, and you’ll just go.” I wasn’t exactly sure of that either, but souls generally seemed able to find their way to wherever, once they accepted they were dead.
“Right. You’ll release me.” He sat up a little straighter and tried a smile. “I’m sorry. What’s your name again?”
“Gideon,” I said. “Gideon Black.”
“Just a body mover.”
“Yep.”
“Oh, man. This is crazy.” Rudy laughed a little. “Thanks for talking to me, Gideon,” he said. “And … I’m ready.”
“No problem. You’ll be fine.”
His eyes closed again, and I looked away as I let go of the unseen string I’d been ‘holding’ to keep his soul projected. I felt him draw through me, faint pressure followed by a full-body sigh as he passed out of me, back toward his body and presumably on to the realm of the dead.
I kind of wished I had a better answer for him. But the only way I could really know what happened after death was to die — something I didn’t want to do just yet. Not when things were starting to get interesting for me.
And by interesting, I meant I’d actually gotten to live in a real house with working plumbing and electricity for three whole weeks. During which time no one had tried to kill me, torture me, or kidnap the people I cared about. In fact, tonight Abe was coming over for dinner and to check out the new place, and the chances of violent interruptions were slim to none.
I could really get used to this whole not-fighting-for-my-life thing.
CHAPTER 2
“I gotta say, this is the fanciest room I’ve ever eaten cheap takeout in.”
I grinned over my sesame chicken at Abe, who was sitting across the polished oak dining room table. “I know, right? Wait until you see the media room.”
“Media room,” he muttered. “That’s … yeah.”
I recognized his look of fatherly concern. Captain Abraham Strauss wasn’t my father by either birth or circumstance, but he was still practically my dad. And like any kid faced with unspecified parental disapproval — even one on the north side of his twenties — I was irritated. “What?” I said. “Come on, Abe. You look like you’ve been doing shots of lemon juice ever since you got here. What gives?”
“Can you not guess?” Taeral said dryly from the other end of the table, where he sat with Sadie around a family sized platter of beef lo mein. Normally Eli would’ve been here too, but they’d let him watch television in his room with dinner tonight. Not a bad idea, since the four-foot talking rat usually made Abe nervous — which scared poor Eli right back. “I’ve no doubt he shares my own concerns,” Taeral went on. “If a thing seems too good to be true…”
Sadie narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t you start again.”
“Why not? We’ve yet to meet this mysterious benefactor,” he said. “Apparently, she will only speak to Gideon.”
“She talked to Grygg too. Come on, it’s not like she accosted Gideon in a dark alley or anything. She just walked right into the Castle.”
Taeral’s jaw twitched slightly. “Despite the protections we’d placed to prevent that very thing from happening.”
“Look, this is a good thing. Why can’t something good happen to us for once?” Sadie said. “We have hot showers. A real bed, an actual kitchen. And did I mention the washer and dryer?”
“Aye, you have. Several times.” He gave her a sidelong smirk. “Not that you’ve a particular need for those machines, love. Technically, you are not in fact wearing clothes right now.”
The look she gave him promised searing retribution. If it bothered my brother, he didn’t show it — but it kind of bothered me. I’d managed not to think about it for a while. The moonstone choker Sadie wore allowed her to generate clothes, since real ones got torn to pieces whenever she went f
ull wolf. It was really weird to think she was only wearing magic. That I could probably see through if I tried hard enough.
Knowing what Taeral was capable of, I decided not to try.
“He’s right, kid.” Abe shoved his mostly finished Szechwan platter aside and leaned on the table. “Something about this deal is seriously rotten,” he said. “Nobody just gives away a place like this, especially to someone they’ve never even met. I mean, who is this woman? Mother goddamn Theresa? You don’t even know her name.”
He sounded so indignant, it was hard not to laugh. “Sure I do. It’s Lady Tethys.”
“Yeah, right. Last name Tethys, first name Lady. That doesn’t sound suspicious at all.” Abe scowled and drummed his fingers. “I did some checking up on her, you know. She’s a nutcase. A rich, flaky nutcase who wrote a bunch of woo-woo books about chakras and magic crystals and crap like that.”
I smirked and pulled the moonstone pendant from my shirt. “Hey, look,” I said. “A magic crystal.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do. But—” I broke off with a sigh. “Abe, she knew my mother.”
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Christ, kid,” he said. “I know you want that to mean something. I really do. But don’t you think it’s just a little too damned convenient?”
Maybe I did think that, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I’d never gotten to meet my mother. She died when I was born. And before now, the only people I talked to who’d known her were Daoin — who’d been either insane or unreachable in Arcadia since I met him — and Taeral, who understandably resented her. I wanted to know her, and Tethys might be my only chance.
She might even be able to answer a few questions I still had about my mother’s family history. I’d finally gotten a chance to go through the package of information on the Hadey family I’d gotten from one of the witches in Lightning Cove, and it was really good to know a little more about my relatives, my ancestors. But some of the stuff in the files had been blacked out, and it looked like there were also some pages missing.
The Scrolls of Gideon (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 7) Page 1