Savannah returned to the front of the altar to get a clearer look at the girl’s bloody skull. Her hair hung down on either side of the gore and ran into the thick red bib that stained the front of her tattered dress. Buzzing flies flitted across the bloody cloth. Van could just make out the edges of more arcane script that tangled in the roots of the girl’s widow’s peak and followed her hairline back behind her ears. She watched the girl for several long seconds, until she saw what she hoped she wouldn’t.
“Savannah, you’ve let us clean up plenty of dead bodies for you over the years. Don’t see why that boy and this poor girl’s gotta be different.”
“Well, Phil, that’s the first place you’re wrong.” Savannah straightened up and lifted one of the candles from the altar, careful not to touch the scratched steel. “This girl’s not dead.”
“What the hell…?” Phil walked up the central aisle of the sanctuary, giving Lashey a wide berth and hitching his belt up as he went. “That girl’s been bound to this counter all night, at least. You and I both know she’s lost a lot more blood than what we see on that altar. I can see from here she’s not breathing. That’s what we professional law enforcement types refer to as deceased.”
“You ever get tired of being wrong all the time, Phil?” Savannah held the candle’s flame beside the girl’s tattered left leg. Soot stained her exposed bones black, and the words written on her skin grew blacker still. They gleamed like molten silver in the candlelight.
“This is still a crime scene. Try not to screw it up any worse by setting the corpse on fire.”
“Patience is a virtue, Detective.” Savannah brought the candle up to the girl’s knee and watched as heat from the candle brought a blush to her pale brown skin.
The girl moaned, a low, grating sound. Her leg jerked against the barbed wire, and fresh drops of blood spilled onto the altar. Savannah pulled the candle away and turned to the detective.
“This one’s not dead yet. She’s not alive just yet, either.” Savannah pointed at the altar. “You still want the scene?”
“I never should have taken this job.” Phil’s shoulders slumped. “What do you want me to do?”
“Cut her loose and put her in lockup.” Savannah snapped her fingers. Lashey came scrambling to her over the benches and around the chairs. “I’ll come by after sundown for a chat. Maybe she’ll be livelier then.”
Lashey jumped into Savannah’s arms, then wrapped her arms around Savannah’s neck, hooked her legs around Savannah’s hips, and then pressed her hooded face against her mother’s cheek. The voice she spoke with was not her own. “She is the first; others will follow. Uncle Ned will take them all.”
The little girl shuddered and went limp in Savannah’s arms. A dainty snore leaked out from the shadows of the hood. It was time to go.
Savannah walked out of the restaurant, whispering soothing words to her daughter. Soon, she would wake and the spirit that mounted her head would leave her. Savannah didn’t want her baby at the scene when that happened. Last time, things had gotten messy. She was nothing if not protective of her family… even the members that scared the hell out of her.
The detective trailed Savannah out to her SUV, leaning against the hood while she got her daughter buckled up, then tucked a heavy wool blanket up under her chin. It was chilly out, and she didn’t want Lashey catching cold once the spirit wasn’t there to keep her warm.
“Is it starting again?” The detective chewed at the inside of his cheek. A brown bead of tobacco juice sprouted at the corner of his mouth and trickled down through the rusty stubble on his chin. “Most of the detectives in this precinct are new. They aren’t ready for your brand of business just yet.”
Savannah walked back to the restaurant. She fetched her hat off the door, then eyeballed the girl inside. The first glimmers of real fear crawled up her spine. She crammed the hat down over the top of her head and strode back to her vehicle.
“Savannah, I asked you a question.” Phil spat onto the ground between them. Savannah’s eyes flicked to the brown stain on the ground, then back to the detective.
“This is the SWATS – Southwest Atlanta; the most haunted area in the United States. It’s not starting. It never stopped.” Savannah hauled herself into the driver’s seat of her SUV, started it, then slewed the heavy vehicle around in a gravel-spewing circle before heading to her next stop.
She watched the detective in the rearview. Phil stomped back to the crime scene, barking nervous orders to the men and women in his charge. No one moved toward the restaurant.
Savannah hoped the girl didn’t get too lively while the detective was getting her off the counter. Phil would never stop complaining if she ate all his officers, and Savannah just didn’t have the stomach to listen to his whining this morning.
She had monsters to hunt.
CHAPTER TWO
Savannah hated the SWATS. Driving along its pothole-laced roads felt like picking at a festering sore. Every landmark held some accursed tale; every resident had someone better and brighter they would like to be. All she wanted, from the time she was old enough to ride a bike, was to get the hell away from the place before its demons could drag her down and ruin her like they had ruined her mother.
She had even left for a while – fled, like a runaway slave, in the dead of night – in the summer of her 19th year, in an old Electra 225, with nothing but her hat on her head, her shirt on her back, and an empty wallet shoved into the back pocket of some well-worn Daisy Dukes. That trip had ended with her best friend’s death and Savannah back in Atlanta trying to make amends. A few years after that, she left again, and spent a decade reading palms and enjoying the nightlife in Chicago until her mother had tracked Savannah down and shamed her into coming back home to help out with the family business of killing monsters.
That was more than a decade in the past, when she still thought she could be free of the SWATS and its curse.
Now, the burden of protecting the place fell on her shoulders. In the end, the SWATS always called its own back home. It was a bad place that needed bad men and women to keep its evil from seeping out into the rest of the world. For now, Savannah was that bad woman and would be until the job killed her. She tried not to think about whom the job of Root Woman would go to once she was in the ground. Maybe no one would be fit for it, and all the madness the SWATS held would spill over its borders and drown the rest of Atlanta and then the world. Sometimes it felt like that, as if Savannah was all that stood between the world of men and a rising tide of beasts.
Savannah’s thoughts throbbed around her memory of the restaurant girl like the aching of a bad tooth. Maybe she could pick up a dime-bag to take the edge off what she had just seen before she took Lashey home to her daddy. Maybe she would smoke a joint on her way over to talk to Jimmy Odinga about the bloody shenanigans that had gone down in and outside Hotlanta Wings while he, the closed restaurant’s owner, sat on his fat ass in his big house on the hill.
Lashey mumbled in her sleep and curled up tight against the passenger door, tugging her blanket up to her chin. Her hood still concealed her face. Savannah wondered what it was like to share your mind, meat and marrow with someone – or something – else. She wondered if it was right to let Lashey share like that; if she was going straight to hell for letting her little girl help her with the job she’d fallen into when her mother died.
“Not like I have a choice,” Savannah grumbled.
“Everyone has choices,” a chill voice said.
Savannah started at the words.
Lashey’s hood had fallen from her face. An old man’s image floated in the space between Savannah and her daughter, squinting through a round monocle and adjusting a fancy suit that would have looked right at home on the streets of Harlem a hundred years ago.
“Some of us have less choice than others,” Savannah replied, then brought her attention back to the road, where it belonged. Sometimes Lashey’s spirits hung around for a few minutes after the shadows
over her face faded. “My mama didn’t offer me much alternative when the Night Howler choked her to death with her own intestines.”
“Pass it on.” The spirit said with a shrug. “No one can make you do this job.”
“You know what will happen if there’s no Root Woman to keep an eye on the goings-on here in the SWATS?”
The spirit chuckled – a sound like a thousand frogs croaking. “I do not… but I wonder – do you know what would happen if there was no Root Woman to watch over the good folk of Southwest Atlanta?”
“There’d be madness; chaos; storms of shit and vomit; time folding in upon itself and coffee at ten dollars a cup?” Savannah shrugged.
“Girls bound to altars? Boys hung from trees on street corners? Monsters and monster-hunters bound together by curses? Daughters possessed by mischievous ancestors?” The old spirit had a smirk on its lips. Savannah wanted to punch a hole right through that smug face.
“I believe you and I are done speaking, spirit.” Savannah forked her fingers at the old man and whispered “By my power and position... boy, bye!”
The spirit faded away.
Lashey stirred, rubbing her eyes with tiny balled fists.
“You all right, li’l mama?” Savannah patted her daughter on the leg and forced a smile to crease the weathered skin of her face.
“I’m fine, mama.” A lazy smile, warmer and more sincere than Savannah’s, lit up her face. “Did I help you?”
“You did, baby; just like always.”
Savannah didn’t say anything else, because she was still mulling over the words Lashey had whispered to her inside the restaurant. The words had come in the tongue of the dead, which was always tricky to decipher, but what Lashey said made Savannah wonder just how deep her troubles were getting.
“You want me to get great uncle Floyd to make you some more of them special bullets?”
“Not yet, honey.” Savannah did not want her little girl dealing with another spirit just yet. She did not know what it cost her little girl to call up the dead and let them ride around in her head.
“I’ll ask him anyway.” Lashey looked out her window. “You might need them when you go looking for the people who worked on that girl.”
“You remember that?” She did not like the idea of Lashey remembering what happened with the spirits. As long as she was a passive vessel who could give her the answers she needed, Savannah could keep on doing what needed to be done. But if Lashey remembered the spirits, if she remembered the crime scenes and grisly images Savannah saw all too often…
“I remember bits and pieces. What he said to you, mostly. About, you know, the restaurant girl.”
“Does it scare you?” Because it sure as hell scared Savannah. It was hard for her to digest the spirit’s words. It had to be harder for a little girl barely nine years old.
“I don’t think so.” She sucked on her bottom lip and cleared the curly dreadlocks from in front of her eyes with an exasperated puff of breath. “Why’d they leave her like that? It seems mean to not finish what they started.”
Savannah guided the truck into the mouth of the long, winding drive that led down to the family property. The length of the road was flanked on either side by white ash trees, transplanted and kept healthy by Rashad and their son, Carter. Red rose bushes, thick and dense, grew around the trees, forming a tangled, thorny wall. The bushes scraped against the side of the SUV, reminding Savannah she needed to get out there with some clippers to trim them back. Rashad wanted the cruel bushes gone, but Lashey and Savannah loved the smell of the roses – and the thorns protected the white ash, which protected their estate from intrusion by malevolent spirits, so the roses stayed.
“It wasn’t very nice, that is for certain,” Savannah said. “But I don’t think they meant to leave her like that. I think someone stopped them before they could get done with whatever it is they were up to.”
“Oh,” Lashey said with a nod, as if that made sense. “Then whoever stopped them was mean. They should have let the other ones finish with the girl.”
Savannah did not say anything to that. Lashey did not always understand how others viewed the world or why Savannah had to do the things she did. Savannah did not know how to explain to her that she was going to kill everyone involved with that poor girl. She had a sinking feeling that she would have to put a bullet through the girl’s head, as well. Savannah could not let anyone finish what they had started with her, and she damn sure could not leave her half dead the way she was now. That was just asking for trouble.
But first, she needed to figure out who had bound the little girl to that counter and what they were trying to accomplish.
“Don’t be sad, mommy.” Lashey patted her on the shoulder; a gesture far too world weary for her tender years. “We’ll get to the bottom of this mess. We always do.”
What she had seen in the restaurant that morning had upset Savannah’s head and stomach more than the hangover. She needed something to calm her nerves and focus her thoughts. She drove on past the cobbled-together main house and steered the SUV along a short trail that led to the guesthouse.
The guesthouse – now Rashad’s house – was one step up from a tar paper shack, held together with spit and prayers. He had moved down there when the curse got to be too much for them to handle; not long after Lashey had come along. She could see him at the sink, watching her through the window, and it took everything she had to keep from storming out of the SUV and into that house. Her fists clenched on the wheel, and she tried not to think what would happen if she did go in there.
“Baby girl, can you go in and ask your daddy for some of his herbal tea?”
Rashad had put his healing skills to use when it became clear Savannah’s weed smoking was not going to slow down. The bitter elixir helped Savannah cope with her demons, even if the concoction could not exorcise them.
“Sure, mama.” Lashey cracked the door of the SUV, then leapt down onto the high grass. The morning air had a cold bite, but Savannah’s daughter let her warm blanket fall from her shoulders without a backward glance. Half the time, Savannah was not sure the girl was not a spirit, herself.
Alone with her thoughts, Savannah wondered if she was up to the challenge of the restaurant girl. Someone new was in the SWATS; someone with the power and know-how to build themselves a young woman out of body parts, sacrifice and sorcery. That was serious work; the kind of necromancy the SWATS had not seen for three decades or more. Worse, whoever was doing it had not finished the job, then decided to leave their mess on an altar and hanging from a tree for the whole world to see.
It did not make sense, but it was not Savannah’s job to make sense of it. Her job was to find whoever was crapping on her city and put an end to them.
Or die trying.
CHAPTER THREE
No one volunteered to take the girl off the altar.
No amount of cussing or cajoling would get any of the officers to set foot inside Hotlanta Wings. Phil had to do it himself.
“Chicken-shit, ig’nant-ass mother…” Phil’s curses echoed in the empty restaurant. Outside, the sun rose; its rays of warmth and light stabbed down through the treetops. He envied his officers, who stood outside in the clean air while he breathed in black smoke and blood. Being the boss was a serious pain in the ass.
“Just cut her loose and get out,” he told himself; but his words sounded weak and scared, even to his own ears.
Phil stood in front of the open door, palms sweating, but he did not enter.
His parents had taken him to Hotlanta Wings restaurant every Friday night from the time Phil was old enough to suck the tender meat off those bones until he got a job and a place of his own.
There was a smell – like animals in a pen – that caught in his nose and drove spikes of fear into his brain.
“C’mon, Phil. You’re the Chief Detective in the SWATS.” He whispered the words, and they helped, even though the sounds they made were flat and dead in the cold air.
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“Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered.
He stepped toward the altar. The barbed wire binds on the girl came loose with a metallic snap. Phil jumped at the sound.
The girl on the altar had torn her damaged legs free of the barbed wire and was working her arms against the sharp metal tines, struggling to get them loose. She was frantic; a wounded animal willing to rip its own limbs off to be free of a snare.
Phil groped for his gun with a fear-numbed hand. The girl stared at him, her wide eyes boring into his, her lipless mouth open and gulping air beneath the oozing slits of her nostrils. The pain in her eyes was a bottomless pit that threatened to drag the detective down into its depths.
He felt the weight of his pistol in his hand. It shook in his grip.
“Do it,” the girl gasped. Blood dripped from fresh barbed wire wounds. It ran down her arms, trickled down from her throat, and streams of it leaked out from under the hem of her tattered dress. “Don’t let her be the one to kill me.”
Phil stared at the girl over the shaking barrel of his pistol. “Stop it,” he said. His voice was weak and wavering.
“Don’t let me go out like that,” the girl begged. “Don’t let her do me like she did all those others.”
The girl opened new wounds as she struggled to tear herself loose from the altar.
A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 2