Hunter of the Dead

by Stephen Kozeniewski

“How does a horse outrun a car?” Nico asked finally.

  Without looking back to check, Nico guessed Price was shrugging.

  “I don’t know, kid.”

  “Maybe it was a vampire horse. Is there such a thing?”

  Nico glanced back. Price shook his head.

  “No. I mean, it’s possible. Animals, I mean, they can be turned, but they don’t last long. There’s all these rules you have to follow. No sunlight and sleeping in the daytime and I don’t know. We just got fucked, that’s all. Happens all the time. Nothing prepares you for being an Inquisitor like constant disappointment.”

  Nico nodded.

  Sounds like my whole life has been preparing me for this, then.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Price made a noise like an old-timey locomotive powered by mucus.

  “Now we shake hands and wish each other the best of luck and…”

  “Don’t you pull that shit on me, Carter.”

  “Well, look who’s getting so big for his britches. Sorry to clue you in on this, Nico, but the Fill-Up’s gone and you’re not my boss anymore.”

  Nico turned away. He hoped there weren’t any tears running down his face. He wasn’t crying, but maybe there were stress tears. He couldn’t really tell.

  “So you be the boss, Carter. I don’t have any ego in this game. I just want to help. But you can’t tell me, ‘Hey, Harry, there’s a world full of wizards but you’ve got to go back and live on Privet Lane.’”

  For a moment, Price was silent.

  “Is that a…what is that, a movie or something?”

  “Dammit, Price!”

  Nico popped his ballcap off and ran his fingers through his sweat-drenched hair. He jumped off the hood of the car and started to walk away, changed his mind, and found himself beating a circuit into the dirt. Finally he looked up at Price when he was certain his face was dry.

  “Where do we go? What do you do when you don’t know what to do?”

  Price took a deep breath.

  “Kid, I’m really not the type of person you want to be following around. And I say that not because I really care about you. I’ve known you a little while, you’re fine, but I don’t really know you. I don’t care what happens to you. You could get eaten by a vampire, and I’d shake it off the same way I’ve shaken off when lovers and family have been eaten in the past. But you’re looking at me like I’m something special and I’m just not. I’m not even really a good Inquisitor. I’m kind of…a fuck-up.”

  “Well, who are the non-fuck-up Inquisitors? Take me to them. Maybe they’ll give me some damn answers.”

  Price sat up. His face was suddenly alive, ideas rushing between his eyes.

  “Actually…that’s not a bad idea.”

  ***

  In his green polo and work pants, Nico felt instantly out of place in the funeral home. Thinking just a second too slowly, he snatched the ballcap from his head, but the jig was up. A very short woman in a demure black dress, arms jangling with bracelets, stepped around from the podium and charged them as fast as her high-heeled pumps would allow. Nico wasn’t certain, but he could’ve sworn her right eye was glass.

  “Gentlemen, I’m afraid this is a closed…oh, Carter, it’s you. You still have to leave.”

  “Bonaparte,” Price said through clenched teeth, inclining his head toward the funeral director. “Little late for a funeral, isn’t it?”

  Nico’s eyes darted around the room. Something about the funeral seemed off. A few family members were holding court at the front of the room, and a woman was kneeling at the coffin, apparently weeping. The pews were mostly full with darkly clad mourners. Externally it seemed like any other funeral Nico had ever been to.

  But who holds a funeral in the middle of the night?

  “This is a closed service, Carter,” the woman, Bonaparte, said.

  She put her hand on Price’s shoulder and started to wheel him toward the door.

  “At 3 am?” Nico asked.

  With a visible effort, Price wrenched himself out of her grip.

  “This is one of ours, isn’t it? And you didn’t even invite me. Spite is an unflattering trait.”

  It suddenly struck Nico what was off about the funeral. Machetes dangled at sides, every suit pocket seemed to bulge with a weapon, and wooden stakes seemed to make up disproportionate amounts of ensembles. The mourners were all loaded for bear, like Price. Even Bonaparte wore steel strapped to her side.

  “Was it someone I knew?”

  “Carter, you’re making a scene. I know you don’t have much dignity left, but…”

  “Well, damn you, Bonaparte! At least tell me it was no one I knew.”

  A grim frown etched itself across Bonaparte’s face. Price pushed her out of the way and stomped to the front of the mortuary chapel. Nico crushed his hat in his hands and tried to avoid Bonaparte’s gaze. When he risked a glance he saw she was staring right at him, had been the whole time. Awkwardly, he cleared his throat.

  “This is, um, a beautiful building you’ve got here.”

  “I wouldn’t get involved with him, Nico. I know Carter Price seems like a pretty together guy. Cool, even. But you don’t know him like I do.”

  “How…how did you know my name?”

  Have these Inquisitors been watching me? Considering me for training? Maybe they put a camera in the Fill-Up to keep an eye on Price, and instead they saw me and thought I might be a good candidate and…

  She tapped the plastic nametag affixed to his shirt.

  “‘Nico Salazar, Shift Manager.’ Stick to shift managing, kid. Carter will lead you nowhere good.”

  Price’s gait was grim and slow as he returned from the casket.

  “Miranda.”

  Bonaparte nodded.

  “She was a good…Inquisitor.”

  “One of the best.”

  “Bonaparte, I know there’s a lot under the bridge between us, but I genuinely didn’t come here to spar. And I’m sorry about Miranda. I know you two were close as well.”

  Sighing, Bonaparte seemed to relax.

  “What do you want, Carter?”

  “Can we talk for just a minute? Alone.”

  Bonaparte’s lower jaw jutted out.

  “I need the room!” she announced in a booming voice.

  Like automatons the mourners rose and marched out of the chapel, streaming past Nico and Price. Most gave Price dirty looks, but a few pressed his shoulder. When the room was empty, Price unslung his stake bandolier and sent it crashing to the ground.

  “God damn it, Bonaparte, why do you always have to make a big production number out of every little fucking thing?”

  “You are grating on my last nerve, Carter. Normally I can stomach almost anything from you, but tonight…”

  “All I meant is, couldn’t you just have stepped around the corner?”

  Nico could’ve sworn the woman was about to blush, but the color never actually rose to her cheeks. She turned and walked slowly down the aisle towards the open casket.

  “I guess that hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Why kick over a molehill when you can scale a mountain instead?”

  “What do you want, Carter? I’m in no mood to discuss fighting philosophy. We’ve been over this ground a thousand times. And that’s why we don’t work together anymore.”

  Price nodded, seemingly acknowledging the détente.

  “I came across something today I can’t really explain.”

  “Well, you see, Carter, when a man and a woman love each other very much…”

  “I saw one of The Damned.”

  Bonaparte crossed her arms.

  “Of course you did.”

  “Ask the kid. He’s a civilian.”

  The petite woman’s eyes slid over Nico.

  “One I’m sure you haven’t coached.”

  Nico held up his hands as if warding off an attack.

  “Hey, lady, I just found out vampires were real today. Nobody’s co
ached me on shit.”

  Her eyes went first from Price then to Nico then back again.

  “Describe the monster you saw today.”

  Nico took a deep breath.

  “It was hairy and gray. Its jaw was missing. Like one of those creepy fish…I can’t remember the name.”

  “A lamprey,” Price said, his smirk obvious.

  Nico snapped his fingers and pointed at Price.

  “That’s the one.”

  “All right,” Bonaparte said, holding up a hand, “So you saw one of The Damned. What do you need? A legion of my best people to help you hunt it down?”

  “That’s just the thing, Bonaparte. That fucker’s dead. That’s what I need help with.”

  “Dead? How do you mean dead?”

  “Uh, not living? It was an ex-vampire?”

  “He’s passed on,” Nico said. “This vampire is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker.”

  Nico and Price grinned at each other, a rare moment of shared warmth.

  “All right, all right! Sorry I asked. But dammit, Carter, how is that even possible? What could kill one of The Damned? It wasn’t you, was it?”

  Price shrugged.

  “I’d love to take credit for it…”

  “It was already dead when we found it,” Nico chimed in.

  Price nodded and jerked his thumb in Nico’s direction.

  “What the kid said.”

  Bonaparte rubbed her chin. She turned and faced Miranda’s coffin, putting her hands behind her back.

  “You’ve heard about this ‘serial killer’ the nightcrawlers are all on edge about?”

  “Sure, I’ve heard rumors.”

  “I haven’t,” Nico said.

  Bonaparte smiled.

  “I like him.”

  “He’s a pain in my ass.”

  “Same way you were a pain in mine?”

  Price grunted and folded his arms. Bonaparte gestured for them to sit next to each other on a pair of folding chairs. The next row forward she sat side-saddle on a chair so she could turn around to face them.

  “Here’s the deal, kid,” Bonaparte started to say.

  “Don’t you people ever get tired of calling me ‘kid?’”

  “‘Tiger,’ then. Here’s an education for you. The first step to being an Inquisitor is knowing your enemy. Knowing how he thinks, knowing what he fears. If you want one of these one day…” She raised the stack of bracelets she wore on her right wrist. The jewelry had been cleverly hiding a tattoo: a green double cross with a tree branch and a sword, just like Price’s. “…you’ll pay attention to what Carter has to teach you. But remember you can always come back here and learn from the big boys.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Nico said, “I didn’t sign up to join your crazy party. I just didn’t want to be left behind.”

  “Yeah,” Price agreed, unscrewing the top of his flask and taking a sip of something putrid, “and I sure as shit didn’t agree to train him.”

  “Sure,” Bonaparte said, “That’s not what’s happening here. Well, I’ve got an army of mourners waiting outside for us to finish chatting, so you’ll forgive me if I cut through the shit. I’m under no illusions about what an individual Inquisitor can accomplish. Carter’s going to give you some cock and bull story about how staying independent is what keeps us strong or some shit, but the truth is that we’ve been doing that for over a hundred years and god damn it, it just doesn’t work.”

  “A single Inquisitor working alone or with an apprentice doesn’t endanger the whole organization when he’s captured or killed,” Price said, “Your little plan to unionize, organize, militarize? Put all of our eggs in one stupid basket? That’s going to get us all wiped out at once, Godfather-style.”

  Price took a long swig from his flask and passed it to Nico. Nico stared at the inscription on the flask. It read, Exurge domine et judica causum tuam. Something about God judging something. He sniffed the liquid inside. It smelled like rocket fuel, or possibly some kind of bottom shelf bourbon. He pretended to take a drink and handed it back.

  “So word slips out that more nightcrawlers are getting killed than the average. They all keep tallies, their little Houses. They always know how many there are, how many there are supposed to be.”

  “No nightcrawler is supposed to shit out another nightcrawler without his House patriarch’s consent,” Price added.

  Bonaparte nodded.

  “So now there’s the legend of a serial killer. First thought is: an Inquisitor. They shook us down. They shook us down bad. But the truth is for all our tricks, for all our training, we’re just not taking out enough of them to really make a difference to their numbers.”

  “Then why bother?” Nico asked, instantly regretting it.

  “Because every one counts,” Bonaparte and Price replied in near unison before exchanging a glance and then looking away in embarrassment.

  “Anyway,” the woman continued, “The next guess would be an oldblood. An ancient, powerful vampire, gone off the reservation for some reason. It’s as good a guess as any. But they can’t find him. And their damn records are too good. No babies without permission, remember? The power differential is right, but it’s highly unlikely there’s an oldblood missing without anyone knowing.”

  “One of The Damned would be strong enough,” Price said, “But from what you saw tonight, kid, do you see one of those monstrosities hanging back in the shadows and picking off nightcrawlers now and again?”

  Nico shook his head. Bonaparte rose and began to strut down the aisle. Price and Nico followed her until they came to the altar at the head of the chapel.

  “So you can see why we’re so confused,” Bonaparte said, “Nothing this powerful should be this patient. Nothing this patient should be this powerful. So we mostly chalked it up to a funny little mystery in the vampire community. Maybe one day it’ll turn out there’s an STD or something weird. No point obsessing over it the way they do, right? We’ve had people looking into it but not exactly clocking any overtime. That is, until today.”

  Bonaparte opened the tabernacle which sat on the altar. She reached in and drew out a tiny chunk of something black and globby, sealed in a Ziploc bag. Nico crossed himself.

  “Those don’t like any communion wafers I’ve ever seen.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Price whispered, about as irreverently as those words could be spoken.

  He held out a hand.

  “May I?”

  Without saying a word, Bonaparte let him take the baggie from her and examined it from all angles. Nico wasn’t looking as closely as Price was, but from what he could tell it looked like a shard of metal coated with some kind of black, oily substance.

  “This can’t be possible,” Price breathed, “It’s a children’s story. A fairy tale nightcrawlers tell their kids to keep them in line.”

  “As someone who’s witnessed about five different kinds of fairy tales crawl out of the Grimm Brothers volume and try to eat me tonight,” Nico said, “may I be the first to suggest that we dispense with all the ‘gee whiz’ bullshit and you just tell me what that is?”

  “I really like him,” Bonaparte repeated.

  “That, kid,” Price said, shaking the baggie as if by giving it a good shake it would cease to be and the world would begin to make sense again, “Would be the first proof (that I’m aware of) of the existence of The Hunter of the Dead.”

  Seven

  The Dark Ages…

  Brother Pablo swallowed the gasp which threatened to spring from his throat as they ripped the blindfold from his face. The woman who stood before him was entirely missing a solid quarter of her face. A line, more or less, drawn from the bottom of her right ear to the corner of her nose and everything below it was sheared down to the bone.

  A ghastly smile began to take shape on the half of her mouth which retained lips. Pablo struggled to coax words from his suddenly desert-dry mouth in his finest liturgical Latin.

&nb
sp; “In…in the name of His Holiness, I bring you a message from Rome, Lady Lilith.”

  She spoke, surprising him by falling into the vernacular of his Iberian home. “I am no lady. Not in any peerage which you and yours would recognize.”

  The two brutish men who stood on her right and left, but a few steps below her on the dais, began to chuckle. Pablo felt worms tighten around his belly and worried he might soil his travelling cloak. The half-faced woman was staring at him expectantly.

  “How…how shall I address you, then?”

  Her glacial mask softened and he knew that he had chosen the right words. For now at least.

  “I am no more and no less than the mother of my household,” she said, and placed a hand atop of the heads of each of her two factotums, “and all who dwell within.”

  A chain jangled off to Pablo’s right side, and as hard as he tried to keep his eyes locked forward on her, he couldn’t help but catch a glimpse out of the corner of his vision of the horrors of her throne room. The perimeter was littered with trophies from her favorite victims, in display cases like a museum’s or a library’s.

  There was the lute of a famous minstrel, with his hands still attached, locked in place by rigor mortis. The walls were hung with the hides of men. Some were carved with ancient and arcane spells. Others had been inked and colored to form surprisingly complex tapestries. The centerpiece was the member of a famous lothario. She had ordered it dipped in wax while still engorged, then severed, so that it would remain erect for all time.

  Chained at regular intervals between the displays were men and damsels – slaves, Pablo realized – kneeling, naked, and shivering.

  “Mother Lilith, then,” Pablo said, trying to keep his voice from faltering.

  “Lilith sounds so formal. Stiff. My children call me Lily…like the lily of the fields.”

  Pablo pressed his lips together. The pope had warned him that the Luchesi woman was capricious – some said mad – and ran cold like Alpine snow one moment and hot like Vesuvius the next. There were rumors that the girl was Urban’s own bastard daughter – but Pablo thought that madness. The pontiff had not spent nearly enough time in Rome for such dalliances. Then again, only a few moments would really have been required of him…

  “Will…will you hear my message?”