by Ann Charles
“Violet told Zoe about her special delivery this afternoon.”
Natalie wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that.” She took a seat next to Harvey, stealing a cookie from his hand. “You get more twisted by the day, girlfriend.”
“It comes with the job.” I offered Doc a beer from the fridge.
He nodded. When I brought it over, he caught my arm, pulling me back against him. I settled in between his long legs and let his body warm mine through my cardigan and yoga pants.
“I don’t understand,” Aunt Zoe said. “Why give Dominick a chimera’s head?”
“To teach the slick bastard a lesson. We had a deal.”
“What lesson does a head in a burlap bag teach?” Natalie asked.
I’d called and told her my plans for Dominick earlier before leaving Doc’s house. In addition to filling Natalie in on my mad, mad life, I’d wanted to make sure she planned to come for supper for two reasons—the first having to do with the recap of our adventures in Slagton; the second revolving around a certain Deadwood detective who might stop by for some grub.
“Dominick lied to me,” I answered Natalie. Although he denied that when I delivered my present, claiming he’d been misinformed as well. Hoodwinked or not, if he was going to make deals with me, he needed to make sure his information was accurate prior to delivery. “I wanted him to understand that I’m not someone with whom to fuck.”
Aunt Zoe crossed her arms over her worn, flannel work shirt, her gaze narrowing. “And you condone this, Doc?”
He took a hit off his beer. “Condone? Not really.” He wrapped his arm around my waist, fitting me even closer against him. “But I understand Violet’s objective after today’s adventures in Slagton.”
Natalie stole another cookie from Harvey. “What’s her objective?”
“To show the manipulative jerk that I’m not his bitch.” I looked at my aunt. “I’ll finish the lidérc job because of what’s at risk, but after that, I’m no longer an Executioner for hire.”
“What was his reaction to the chimera head?” Aunt Zoe asked.
Doc spoke first. “Initially, he looked wide-eyed and winded, like Violet had landed a surprise right hook in his breadbasket.”
“Then he tried to act insulted,” I joined in. “But I called him on it, so he switched into charming mode.”
“But Violet would have none of that either.” Doc took another drink before adding, “She reminded him that Executioners were killers, first and foremost.”
“Are you nuts?” Natalie sputtered. “That guy can control people with his mind.”
“But his tricks don’t work on me. Dominick can die by my hand as easily as others, even if he is as old as dirt.”
“In other words,” Harvey said, brushing cookie crumbs from his beard. “Ya spit in the wildcat’s eye.”
Natalie scoffed. “I’ll say she did. He can kill you, too, you know.”
Of course I knew that. “He won’t, though, because he needs me right now.”
Aunt Zoe was still studying me. “How do you know that?”
“If Dominick is being honest about being misinformed about the Slagton informant, then he has trouble with his subordinates.” I borrowed Doc’s bottle of beer, taking a sip. “Make that more trouble. Remember, Caly was one of his pets and she went rogue. My guess is that she isn’t the only one.”
“So now what?” Aunt Zoe asked.
“Now I find his lidérc and finish my dealings with him as an Executioner.” I was still willing to work with him on the real estate front, though, since it not only lined my pocketbook, but kept me in the know on some of his activities. However, now was not the time to disclose my monetary inclination when it came to Dominick.
Harvey hooked his thumbs in his yellow suspenders. “Did ya find out why that snake was sharin’ some tongue varnish with yer ex?”
“Dominick says he met Rex by chance during a Lead Chamber of Commerce meeting at the lab that afternoon.”
Doc took his beer back. “Masterson claimed it was a simple small-town coincidence that Rex is Violet’s ex.”
One of Aunt Zoe’s eyebrows lifted. “But you don’t believe him.”
“Of course not,” I said. “But I played along for now.”
“So this game of cat and mouse continues,” Natalie said.
“Exactly.”
The doorbell rang. Doc set me aside to go answer the door.
“Violet,” Aunt Zoe said. “I don’t want you to take any unnecessary risks when it comes to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Dominick may try to trick you and succeed.”
I crossed my arms. “I won’t let him have you.”
“I appreciate you saying that, baby girl, but I’m telling you if it comes down to life or death, let me go.”
Harvey scowled. “Sparky ain’t gonna take off her spurs and call it a day that easy. She has too much gumption flowin’ through her veins.”
Aunt Zoe sighed. “Yes, but—”
“I ain’t gonna let her toss ya to the curly wolf, neither. You can beat yer gums to death about this, but all that hot air is fallin’ on deaf ears.”
Doc rejoined us with Cooper on his heels. The detective must have left his coat in the other room. His tie had been tugged on, his hair was a mess of blond spikes. In between those north–south borders, his face looked like ten miles of rough road.
“Hey, Coop.” Aunt Zoe smiled up at him. “You have some room for supper? Your uncle made a big pot of chili.” She pointed toward the stove, where the chili sat cooling.
“I’d love some, thanks.” His gaze flitted around the room, landing on Natalie last, who was busy breaking her cookie into small pieces while not meeting his gaze.
“No Reid tonight?” I asked Aunt Zoe.
“I need to keep that heartbreaker at arm’s length.” The worried frown on her face spoke volumes about her rekindled feelings for her old flame.
I opened the cupboard behind me and grabbed a bowl. “Any trouble with a corpse-eating ghoul tonight, Cooper?”
“Not so far.” He took the bowl and walked to the stove. “But the night is young.”
“And Mr. Haskell’s body?” I set a glass on the table for him.
“Eddie says the old guy hasn’t risen from the dead so far.”
Doc grabbed the pitcher of lemonade from the fridge, filling Cooper’s glass. When he finished, he returned to the counter, standing next to me.
I waited for Cooper to fill his bowl. “Your uncle figures you two killed about twelve chimeras today. Do we need to go back tomorrow and take care of the bodies?” If I were to stab them after they were dead, would they still turn to ash? Probably not.
He took Doc’s usual chair, sitting next to his uncle. “No. Brown says the bodies will be gone by morning.”
“Who’s Brown?” I asked.
“My informant.”
Mr. Brown and Mr. Black. I was beginning to see a pattern here.
“Who’s going to remove the dead?” Aunt Zoe asked him, pushing her chair back. She walked over to the fridge, grabbing a couple of beers.
“I didn’t ask, but I assumed the other residents that Brown told us about.”
“You mean the sentinels?” Natalie asked, taking the bottle Aunt Zoe handed her. “Thanks.”
Cooper shot a look her way over a spoonful of chili. “It appears someone already filled you in on today’s events.”
“Your uncle may have mentioned something about old dynamite and a shitload of bullets.” She met his gaze for a second or two.
Harvey had told his side of the story before supper while the kids were upstairs finishing homework. He explained how Cooper found fresh footprints leading into the woodshed next to the old Plymouth. Inside, several clues led to a trap door in the shed’s floor. Under that door was a small root cellar in which the informant was hiding with his Ruger rifle and a half-empty box of shells. He’d been hiding there for days due to the chimeras. They had come
to Slagton in a surprising wave, isolating and killing several sentinels. Those remaining had to flee or hide. If I hadn’t come along and killed that first one at Brown’s place, accidentally entering the battle, he might not have seen the light of day again.
By the time Cooper had helped Brown out of the cellar, the building was nearly surrounded by the predators. Cooper and the sentinel had run out the main door with guns blazing away while Harvey lit the dynamite and snuck out another door. The explosion had scattered the predators, giving the three of them time to return to the pickup where they held their ground against the toothy bastards, taking them out one by one. Only the largest chimera—the alpha male in the pack according to Brown—had escaped, which Cooper had tracked to the store. In the end, Cornelius had finished the job for them.
“Willis,” Doc said. “Did you tell Zoe what Brown said about Violet’s standing in Slagton when we dropped him off at your place?”
“Nah. I wanted to wait ‘til Sparky was here fer that part.”
Aunt Zoe turned to me. “What did he say?”
“I won the turf war.”
“For now,” Doc added.
“What does that mean?” Natalie asked.
“According to Cooper’s informant,” I explained to her, “Slagton is like a frontier town on the border between worlds. The sentinels are there to keep order and monitor what comes and goes.”
According to Brown, this explained the decapitated predator we’d found hanging from his porch. It turned out the message painted on the store about trespassers being hung and gutted had been a warning from the sentinels meant for troublemakers passing through town. The big-horned creature was a bounty hunter notorious for torturing its prey for pleasure. Brown and another had killed it and put it on display to warn others like it.
When Doc had asked if by others Brown meant the chimera, the informant told us that normally these troublemakers were few and far between. They would make an appearance once every decade or so, such as the bone cruncher digging up graves and the faceless sentinel from Slagton that we’d found in Harvey’s safe who’d been naïve enough to try to take it out on his own. But lately, the amount of traffic coming through Slagton had increased tenfold.
For whatever reason, the tide had turned and predators were now coming in numbers larger than any time in the last century. While Brown had been happy to see me, he wasn’t sure that one Executioner would be enough to balance the tide. His words echoed Ms. Wolff’s before her death, as well as Prudence’s warning several months prior. In short, I was up shit creek and paddling wasn’t going to do me much good.
Tonight, I didn’t feel like talking about this dismal situation to Aunt Zoe and Natalie. Instead, I explained how our defeat of the chimera made me the current head honcho in Slagton, which meant Brown and the other sentinels would be reporting to me the comings and goings of Slagton’s more notorious visitors. Cooper had agreed to act as our middleman so the detective stayed in the know.
When I finished my tale about the battle for Slagton, Aunt Zoe sat back in her chair, her face lined deeply around her mouth. “What were you doing while Harvey, Cooper, and this Brown character were shooting up the town?”
I glanced at Doc. He nodded at the question in my eyes.
Taking a deep breath, I spilled it all. I started with Cornelius and my visit to the clockmaker, giving a brief lesson about what the hour and minute hands represented on the clocks, and ending with lighting the dynamite in Kyrkozz’s face. When I finished, wrinkled brows and wide eyes stared back at me, except for Doc, who’d already heard it all before while I lay sprawled on his chest after we’d finished warming up from our cold shower.
“Why did Kyrkozz look like Wolfgang?” Natalie was the first to break the silence.
“Doc has a theory about that. The first time Kyrkozz and I met was when I fell asleep during a séance. Wolfgang was my most recurring nightmare back then, so Kyrkozz latched onto that image, knowing Wolfgang filled me with terror.” I smirked. “The asshole needs to catch up with the times, though. Wolfgang doesn’t hold the crown in my dreams anymore.”
“Doc,” Aunt Zoe said, “how were you able to find the clockmaker in the dark?”
Good question. “It was you who opened that door, right?”
He nodded once. “When I’m in there, things look different for me than they do for you.”
“Different how?” Cooper asked, lifting a spoonful of chili to his mouth.
“You see only darkness, but I sense light and sounds, sort of like white noise, in the space between here and there.”
I tried to picture that. “Was it this ‘white noise’ that kept disrupting our communication?” His voice had been laced with static until after the dynamite blast.
“Yes. It also makes it hard to know where you are.”
“You were able to find Cornelius in the dark—I mean light.”
“Cornelius is very focused, while you emit continual waves of energy. Sometimes the waves are thin, and I can penetrate them to locate you, such as after the explosion when you were lying still, listening. Other times, when you’re in the thick of action, you blast energy like a solar flare, knocking out my radio towers, if you will. It takes me time to regroup and find you in the brightness after one of your flares.”
Harvey stroked his beard. “It seems like if Sparky is shootin’ out energy, it’d be easier to locate her. Like watchin’ lightning strikes.”
“Imagine walking blindfolded into a large room with a stereo turned up to full volume,” Doc said. “And you have to figure out where the speaker is.” He caught my hand. “With Violet, I have to try to use a combination of my other senses to find her through the brightness. It’s not easy, but I’m getting better.” He raised my hand to his lips. “I’m determined to figure out a way to keep track of her in the light.”
I blew him a kiss.
“You didn’t finish answering the question about how you knew what door the clockmaker was behind,” Aunt Zoe said.
“That’s the tricky part.” Doc lowered my hand, but didn’t let go. “What I’ve learned over time with Violet is that each time she goes into the darkness, the setting shifts. Don’t think of it as me finding places for her to go in a made-in-stone maze. Think of it more as, depending on her situation during the point of entry, the characters, doors, and trails inside the maze will vary from the last time she visited the dark. But the maze itself is still based on Violet’s point of view because she is the channeler who is leading the way. In other words, if I were able to go into Cornelius’s darkness with him at the helm, the setting would be different, the characters unique to his abilities and state of mind.”
I tried to wrap my head around that. “You mean not all darkness is the same?” I hadn’t ever considered that it would shift depending on who was leading the way into the dark, but that made sense.
“Exactly. You have an exceptionally dangerous dark side, Killer. I doubt anyone else in here would have near the horrors waiting for them that you do.” He looked at Aunt Zoe. “The clockmaker’s workshop wasn’t the first door I checked in there, but when I saw all of those clocks, something told me our new resident Timekeeper needed to stop there first.”
“If I want to go back there, would you be able to find it again?”
He rubbed over his beard stubble. “Possibly, but you’ll have to go through the dark again.”
That meant there was always the risk of my not making it back out. As Mr. Black had said, I’d have to trust in the Oracle’s abilities to see where I could not.
“But you’re getting better at finding Vi when she’s in the dark,” Natalie said.
“Yeah, but she keeps getting better at scaring the hell out of me while in there.”
“What about Cornelius’s broken candle?” I asked. “Did that help you keep track of me?” Maybe we could try that trick again next time.
He nodded. “I could sense the tether between us until the clockmaker pulled it from my hands.”
“How did she do that?” Aunt Zoe asked.
Doc shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“How did you know Violet needed to blind Kyrkozz to escape?” Cooper asked, pushing his empty bowl away.
“In that book she ‘borrowed’ from Lila Beaumont about the demon, there is a drawing showing Kyrkozz recoiling from light reflecting from what I believe is a mirror.” Doc looked at me. “I think Kyrkozz is stuck in that dark realm. It’s his prison.”
“So when I go into the dark, it’s like I’m visiting his cellblock in Alcatraz?”
“Yes, but he’s not the only one stuck in there. There are others.”
Were the others like me? Had they ended up stuck in there with him? I shivered. Talk about hair-raising nightmares. I was beginning to rethink that return visit to the clockmaker.
“Until Kyrkozz can find his way free,” Doc continued, turning back to Aunt Zoe. “The darkness is where he must reign. According to the book, he’s developed the ability to see in the dark. I’d intended for Violet to blind him with her candlelight somehow, not blow up a stick of dynamite in his face.”
“Do you think Violet managed to get rid of him for good?”
“No,” I answered for Doc. “He’s still in there, I could feel it afterward. But the blast threw him off.”
“If the clockmaker could sense an Oracle was near and take your candle,” I asked him, “do you think Kyrkozz could sense you, too?”
If he could, Doc was even more at risk than I was.
“I don’t think so. When you were at the clockmaker’s, I had a lock on you and was able to easily listen in to what was being said. She somehow picked up on my eavesdropping, whether via my scent or my energy imprint. After you went into the darkness, I lost you in the light. I would guess that our disconnect saved me from being discovered.”
“But you could see Cornelius clearly enough to pull him out?”
“Yes. As I said, he’s focused and pulls in energy, receiving rather than blocking me.” He frowned at Cooper. “It was a similar situation with you at Ms. Wolff’s the night Violet killed the Timekeeper. I was able to sense you clearly except for that brief moment after you made contact with Violet.”