“Take a look at this.”
He pointed the penlight towards the ground. The Damned lay there. At least, what was left of it did. The thing’s fur was still slightly charred from its earlier encounter with a fireball. But the thing had been hacked to pieces. Its severed head lay glaring limply; eyes open but dead, a few feet from the rest of its body. Arms and legs were strewn all akimbo, hacked off at elbows, knees and shoulders willy-nilly.
“Limbs and head,” Nico said, “A friend of yours?”
Price bit his lower lip.
“I’ll be honest kid: I don’t see another Inquisitor doing this. I got lucky at the gas station but I was pretty sure there was no way I was walking away from this.”
“You thought you were going to die and you brought me along?”
Price cocked his head and fixed Nico with a withering glare.
“Yeah. That’s what I did. I forced you to come along. Twisted your fucking arm.”
“All right, all right. So…is there like…something else that can do this? Are werewolves real? Frankensteins?”
Price tapped the penlight against his teeth.
“The nightcrawlers pretty much keep the riffraff out of Vegas. This doesn’t really look like a werewolf’s work…I mean; this was done with a blade.”
“So werewolves are real?”
“Just assume everything’s real, kid. But what’s really weird is take a look at that.”
Price shone the penlight at the ground leading out of the copse in the opposite direction. A set of horse’s hooves led out.
“Centaur…?”
“No such thing.”
“Can we catch it?”
“We can try.”
Five
Last night…
Benito whistled. He was a man who appreciated carnage and this…this was a metric fuckton of carnage.
“Place is a goddamned abattoir.”
The little chapel was all but painted in blood. That meant humans had died here along with immortals. The trail of blood they had followed to this spot continued, in a sense, with a series of bodies in a row, connected by blood trails. Cashley’s disciples, Benito guessed, kicking one onto her back. Every single one was a woman.
“Never been much for keeping a circle myself,” Benito said, “But Cashley had a way of making it extra gross.”
“They’re just mortals, Benny,” Hofstra said.
Benito turned to look at Hofstra’s skinny, acne-riddled face and vulture-like nose. Whoever had granted him the Long Gift hadn’t based it on his looks. With a single motion he reached out, cupped the back of Hofstra’s skull, and slammed his head into the ground, smashing a tile. He waited until Hofstra had extricated his face from the ground, over-long proboscis gradually reforming itself to its original, ass-ugly design, before speaking.
“I know they’re mortals, ass clown. I’m saying Cashley is a degenerate.”
“Was a degenerate,” Piker announced from the front of the temple.
Piker held up the top of Cashley’s brainpan. Had he still been alive, Benito would’ve shuddered at the grotesque sight of Cashley’s ruined eyes. So that was why he always wore those blocky sunglasses.
“This is weird, Benny,” Hofstra said, apparently none the worse for wear, as he planted his fists on his hips, “No fixer would leave a job in a state like this. What if someone found Cashley and planted him back in the dirt? He could regenerate.”
“Maybe it wasn’t fixers,” Benito growled.
The rest of the gang was clattering around, looking for loot and, to a lesser extent, clues. Carson had picked up a big old sword from one of the corpses and was turning it back and forth in the waning starlight. Without a word, Benito took it from him and glanced up and down its length. It was the kind of blade an Inquisitor would use.
“Glog,” Carson said, kicking the woman’s arm so that her wrist turned upward. The telltale tattoo seemed to mock him.
“Shit,” Benito grunted. “If this is one of these local, super in-step glogs…”
With the blade he cut the woman’s jumpsuit from her breast, and then dug down into the flesh. Funny that she wore no bra. One of Cashley’s weird proclivities, no doubt. Then the blade struck metal. He knelt down and pulled it out.
“What’s that?” Hofstra asked, hanging over Benito’s shoulder.
Just for good measure, he shattered the ugly fuck’s nose again. The blinking device, attached to the dead woman’s heart, should have been obvious enough for anyone, even a retard like Hofstra, to identify.
“A transponder. On a dead man’s switch. This place’ll be crawling with glogs any minute now. If it’s not already.”
He tossed the transponder down on Hofstra’s prone form. He struggled to catch it, missed, and it clattered away elsewhere. He rose to go retrieve it, but Benito gave him a taste of boot.
“Leave it! Moron!” Benito whistled sharply, and waved his hand up in the air as though lassoing a bull. “Yo! Forget the spoils. Forget the bounty, too. We’ve got to get out of here. Bali bali!”
The gang of fixers groaned but obeyed, making their way back to the front of the temple and the still-running Hummer that waited outside.
“What’s got you scared? They’s just glogs, ain’t they?” Carson grunted.
“You don’t know these Las Vegas types. They’re not the low-rent gypsies you’re used to dealing with. They’re militarized.”
Piker was carrying Cashley’s body in one hand and the skullcap someone had made of his head in the other.
“We should at least take Cashley’s body. The lepress put a good bounty on him.”
“Leave it,” Benito said, “I don’t want to get accused of bounty poaching. If another fixer doesn’t claim it in a few days, then we’ll claim it. But I don’t want to show up at Damiana’s manse with a body and find out someone else already took credit. I’d be a laughingstock and none of us would ever get work again.”
“No one else is going to claim it.”
Benito looked up. Sven had barely spoken since they’d arrived. In fact, he’d been standing in the same spot the whole time. Sven was Benito’s trusted number two and had the best nose in the whole gang. He beckoned to Benito.
Benito approached. A severed head and a body lay crumpled at Sven’s feet. Sven turned the face upwards so Benito could see it.
“MacVicar, too?”
Sven nodded and pointed toward a body crumpled in the aisle.
“Something went wrong here, boss. Real wrong.”
Benito let his lower jaw jut out.
“Well, I guess we’ll never know what. At least we can claim the bounty. Let’s go.”
“We can find out what happened. Boss, I know there’s no love lost between you two…”
“You’re right, there isn’t. But I know what you’re going to say. Don’t let that affect my nose for business. I got a great big mound of Sicilian soil back home and I can easily afford to bury him. Then we can find out what’s what and put him down again if need be. That what you were going to say?”
Sven shrugged, ever stoic.
“Fine. Grab him.”
The Hummer punched a hole in the compound’s back fence just as a caravan of Inquisition vehicles rolled in the front.
***
Scav shuddered with surprise as an angry, neck-shattering slap broke his repose.
“Wake up, you derelict.”
Scav’s eyes fluttered open just as a kick to the ribs caused his side to distend concavely inward. He spluttered and sat up sharply. Only a bare sheen of soil covered him, the sort of miserly amount that a child who refused to share his ball on the playground would’ve grudgingly given up. And true to that expectation, his brother Benito towered over him, a hulk of a man whose vacuous eyes shone in the moonlight, fluttering the burial shroud he had laid over his brother like a handkerchief in the wind. He was joined in a ring (well, hexagon, really) around Scav’s supine body by five of the dirtiest, smelliest, angriest fixers who’d eve
r worked a job.
“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” Benito said, driving the point home with another kick, You feeling better now that big brother took care of you?”
Scav’s head was swimming. His hands went instinctively to his neck. There was something wrong. He hadn’t felt pain like this…or much at all really…since MacVicar had granted him the Long Gift. Slowly, the bits and pieces of the last night began to reassemble in his mind like a jigsaw puzzle.
He’d been decapitated. After that, there was only blackness, emptiness. Not even the fitful dreams and vague awareness of his surroundings that usually marked his days asleep in his native soil. If that was death – true death – then Scav had to be at least partially grateful to his older brother for finding him.
“Benito!” Scav rasped, “It’s so good to see you, brother!”
Scav struggled to rise but one of the goons grasped his shoulder with a hamhock of a hand and gently pressed him back down to a sitting position.
“If you’re thinking to prey on my brotherly affections, you’re barking up the wrong tree, Italo.”
Benito spoke English for the benefit of his crew, but Scav was instantly transported back to his youth. Whenever he heard a sentence like that in their Sicilian dialect, he knew that it was about to be followed by being tossed off a roof, or having his pocket change stolen, or some other minor ignominy or pain.
“I would never dream of leaning on your ‘brotherly affections.’ I know what drives you, Benny. I haven’t suddenly gone soft in the head, you know. I’ve scored a big payday. Big.”
Benito looked around, making a big show of glancing from horizon to horizon, even raising his hand to his forehead to shield himself from an imaginary sun.
“And yet I don’t see shit.”
“I’ve got information you can’t pass up, Benny. I mean it. It’ll get you in good with Father Otto.”
Benito growled.
“About Cashley? Father Otto doesn’t give two shits about Cashley.” Benito jammed his index finger into his brother’s chest. “And I wouldn’t try to claim that bounty on his head from the lepress, either. We already claimed it.”
Scav shook his head.
“That’s fine. I don’t mind. But that’s not what I mean. It’s not about Cashley.”
Benito raised his eyebrows. Scav could see he’d gotten his brother’s attention at last.
“What then?”
The question barely needed to be asked.
“The Hunter of the Dead.”
A snort erupted from his brother’s stoic face. All six of the gangbangers practically fell over themselves laughing. When Benito finished, he effortlessly smashed Scav’s nose up into his skull.
“Try selling a Cicatrice on a fairy tale. Father Otto hasn’t got time for that bullshit.”
“Let me ask you something. All of you.” Scav glanced around at the six dull faces. “You know me. You knew MacVicar. You saw the carnage at Cashley’s compound. Is that something he and I are capable of?”
“He is a weakling,” one of Benito’s deadbeat thugs, Carson, said, scratching at his long, greasy hair. “Both of them were.”
“Killing Cashley’s one thing,” Piker added, “but there were six newborns there, too. That’s a tricky fight for two fixers. Not to mention there was a glog at their back.”
“You’re all missing the point,” Sven, who hardly ever broke his silence needlessly, said. “Everyone there was dead: fixer, target, glog, and bystander. Someone else swept in.”
Benito fixed his gaze on Scav.
“And you mean me to believe it was some guy on a big black horse with a magic sword and the power to melt immortal brains with just a glare?”
Benito turned his back, but gave no other indication of his thoughts. He took a few steps away from the ring, so Scav tentatively attempted to rise, but the pressure Sven applied to his temples would’ve been enough to kill a mortal so he remained seated. When Benito turned back around, he mysteriously had a mortar and a pestle in his hand.
“Oh, fuck me!” Scav shouted, attempting to scuttle backwards but immediately ramming up hard against Sven’s legs, who immediately kicked him back into the center of the ring.
“You remember this?” Benito asked, raising the mortar and the pestle needlessly.
Of course.
The ceremonial objects were unmistakable. Relics of their childhood. Their real youth, back before Benito had been turned. In his hands, the silver ceremonial objects were just an ordinary bowl and stick. Even if there were holy water contained within, without a faithful hand present…
Oh, shit.
“Oh, shit, indeed.”
Did I say that out loud?
“Yes, you did. I stole these from our childhood church. You remember? Mama used to take us to mass three times a week, sometimes every day. Until the cancer laid her low. I remember, when she first got laid up in the hospital my first thought was, ‘Thank God. Now I can just lie about going to mass.’”
Hofstra, the omega of the group, sniggered like a schoolboy.
“Ice cold, Benny, ice cold.”
Benito gave a look like he wanted to beat Hofstra with a 2x4 until he shut up, but perhaps in front of Scav he had to maintain solidarity.
“I remember no matter how hard she beat me, I never believed. But you, you loved all that God shit. You even took it with you to the other side. I thought there was something wrong with me when I brought you across. But now I know it was the poison you carried in your veins. Faith.”
Faithless, the mortar and pestle were just objects to Benito. But as soon as the holy water struck Scav, it would instantly burn him with the force of his own faith. Benito had always been surprisingly enterprising in devising torture methods.
Benito raised the pestle high above his head and then brought it down like a butcher’s knife. The liquid splattered all over Scav, who hissed and backed away from it. A drop got in his eye and he dug in to claw the offending orb out entirely. But when he stopped moving and held his regenerating eye in his hand, he realized he was in no pain at all.
“This isn’t holy water.”
Benito swung the pestle and the mortar in arcs around each other, as though he were a magician vamping in preparation for a trick.
“Its maaaagic, just like your God. Except instead of water into wine, Italo, I’ve turned water into…” Benito splashed what felt like half a liter directly into Scav’s face. His remaining eye suddenly opened wide as he recognized the smell. “…kerosene.”
“Oh, Lordy!” Benito cried out, turning and facing the ceiling as though he were truly moved, “It’s a miracle! From useless holy water into goddamned lamp fuel!”
When Benito turned back, he gave up the game and simply splashed the whole pestle’s payload onto Scav. He raised his foot for a kick and Scav held his arms up to fend off the blow that was coming next, but Benito was so tall it didn’t matter. He lifted his jackbooted foot up into the air and brought it down squarely on his brother’s windpipe, driving him backwards and onto his back.
Scav grunted under his brother’s immense power. He had been strong in life, and was even moreso in death. Scav had noticed over his years that some immortals developed their powers in unusual ways. Some became gradually immune to the light; others could control their lifedraining with frightening exactitude. Some claimed to have powers of clairvoyance or transmogrification, but Scav had yet to see that actually demonstrated. Benito, being the typical thug that he was, had simply grown in raw, unchecked strength over the years.
Scav liked to think that his own power was survival, even in the harshest of conditions. He was like a cockroach. Let the nuclear rain come. He would survive. He had survived The Hunter of the Dead after all. Just as he would survive this latest encounter with his sire and brother.
Scav didn’t have to breathe, of course, but the real discomfort came from the feeling that with a twist of his shin, Benito could’ve popped Scav’s head off his neck like a bottlecap.
Benito leaned deliberately forward, shattering Scav’s neck under the pressure. Benito’s crew grunted peals of idiotic approving laughter.
“I always knew one day I’d have to take care of the mistake I made in siring you.”
Scav pointed at his neck. Benito nodded and lifted his foot slightly, allowing the air back into Scav’s dead lungs and his spine to begin to mend.
“You can’t kill me,” he wheezed, “It’s the code.”
“‘Immortals shall not kill immortals?’ Oh no no no, my dear brother, you are Houseless. MacVicar adopted you as your sire, remember? Snatched you right out from my hands. And he never granted you his blessing. That means you have no sire, you have no House, you have no rights. I could kill you and no one would even bat an eye.”
“MacVicar promised he would free me after we destroyed Cashley. You just have to let me talk to the lepress. Father Otto will grant an exception.”
Benito put a cigarette in his mouth and Hofstra fell all over himself to strike a match and light it.
“Sounds like a lot of trouble. Plus it calls our bounty into question…”
“But what about The Hunter? People need to know about The Hunter.”
Benito raised the lit cigarette over his brother, as though determined to drop it on his kerosene-soaked body.
“Why would I make it up?” Scav whimpered.
“You know, Benny, you kind of had a good idea earlier.”
All eyes turned to Sven.
“What?” Benito asked, cocking his head.
“Why don’t we send him to Father Cicatrice? This is his town.”
Suddenly, Benito’s eyes glittered with avarice.
“I’m picturing it now, boys. A pathetic, battered Signari fixer shows up on Cicatrice’s doorstep. Houseless, he can’t go home. But he thinks maybe he can trade information about Cicatrice’s favorite boogey man for protection. Maybe cash. And then we have a mole in the organization, don’t we?”
Six
Price climbed up onto the hood of the Caddie. Sticking his hands behind his head, he sprawled out, lying back against the dashboard glass. Nico remained hunched up at the front of the hood, hugging his legs.
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