Before Valdis could react, I brought the sharp blade of the axe down on the skull-mask splayed out on the ground. I rained blow after blow on the original skull which had set this horror show in motion. I didn’t stop until until I had reduced it to a pile of bone splinters.
With the mask destroyed, the skulls floating above us changed color. The red glow turned to bright white as the evil hold over the skulls shattered.
For a beat, the six skulls hovered in formation above me and then they surged toward their newest victim—Valdis himself. The monster who had both murdered and forced them to do his horrific bidding. The six free skulls rained down on Valdis, teeth tearing into the unmasked villain.
Blood spurted and Valdis crumpled, his screams echoing down the alley as the ground turned red.
The old me would have looked away from the brutal drama. But I was part demon now. If I was being honest, I’d been part demon ever since Switzerland. And I rejoiced in seeing this human monster brought to his knees by his victims.
I don’t know how long it took before Valdis stopped moving. When the last bloody tremor passed through him, the skulls finally pulled back from the gore-streaked corpse. Spiritual light burst from the skulls, forcing me to shield my eyes.
One by one, the skulls dispersed into thin air, and the world turned dark again.
I looked down at the corpse, empty eyes peering up at me, his body painted red from countless bite wounds. Serves you right, I thought grimly.
A deep emptiness filled me, and I felt nothing in the wake of my victory. Valdis’ death wouldn’t bring back his victims. It wouldn’t bring back Skulick or even Aria Giovanni. Nor would it restore my lost humanity. I stared at my demon hand, reptilian skin gleaming in the dim light filtering into the alley.
My gaze turned toward the windows of the warehouse loft.
An hour earlier, it had been a sanctuary from the madness I faced every day. Now it had become a mausoleum filled with the ghosts of my past.
As these dark thoughts rippled through my head, I spotted a silhouette in the topmost window. It had to be Father Cabrera. That was just great. Now that the White Crescent knew of my demonic passenger, I could expect a team of exorcists to come after me. If you’ll excuse the cliché, I was about to go from hunter to hunted.
The figure upstairs turned, and I saw who it was. Staring down at me was none other than Skulick himself!
My heart jolted in my chest. How could my partner still be alive? I’d seen the sixth skull, the pin on Valdis’ map indicating his next target, Skulick’s lifeless body in the vault…
Scratch that. I had seen that Skulick was down, but he could have been unconscious. I had been so flush with rage and adrenaline that I never considered what the skeleton creature might have wanted from our vault. What if Valdis had never been after my partner? He was a formidable force of good, but perhaps he didn’t qualify as the best representative of the heavenly virtue after all.
And then it hit me. Of course.
The Skull of Saint Magnus. Known for his humble lifestyle as he traveled medieval Europe on a holy quest to rid it of witches, monsters, and demons. That had to be it! Valdis had never been after my partner’s skull. All along, he had wanted one of the relics we kept locked away inside our vault.
It didn’t matter now. I’d made my choice.
To Skulick’s eyes, I was tainted. A monster to be hunted, just like any other.
A deep sadness filled me. I knew I couldn’t return to the loft. For a beat, I held my partner’s burning gaze. Would Skulick realize that despite my condition, we were still on the same team?
He looked away first.
Thunder rumbled, a harbinger of darker times to come. Lightning flashed. Rain began to drizzle in the alley, and I raised the collar of my shirt in a vain attempt to ward off the icy downpour. A deep shiver ran up my spine. I truly was on my own now, for the first time since I was a kid.
“You’re not alone,” Cyon reminded me.
I failed to draw any comfort from Cyon’s words. Thunder crashed as I scooped up the Demon Slayer. The days ahead looked bleak. The Crimson Circle had returned. Both my partner and the White Crescent would now be coming after me. Not to mention Morgal and all the other dark forces gathering within the Cursed City.
Sword in hand, Hellseeker holstered, my partner still staring down at me like some stone sentinel, I walked out of the alley.
No matter what the future might hold, one thing was for certain. The battle with Hell’s legions would continue. And I would keep fighting for the forces of light, despite the darkness within me.
NOT THE END
Raven, Cyon, Skulick and Archer will return in
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Ghoul Night
1
The cemetery gate yawned before Jennifer like some mystical doorway to another world. The dead dwelled beyond this point, and the living weren’t welcome. The thought made her shiver, and she suddenly wished she could turn back. She didn’t want to push open the wrought-iron gate, didn’t want to walk through the moss-encrusted stone archway. Didn’t want to confront what was waiting for her on the other side.
“You sure you’re up for this?” Rachel asked.
Definitely not, Jennifer thought even as she nodded at her best friend.
Although she would have preferred to be anywhere else in the world, Jennifer pushed open the gate. Her father lay buried in this neglected patch of land nestled on the outskirts of the city. She hadn’t seen or heard from her father in years and had only recently learned of his passing. Now she was about to visit his grave. In her wildest dreams, she had never pictured their reunion to play out like this.
Her memories of the man felt hazy. One day, when she was nine years old, he hadn’t returned from work. According to her mother, his vanishing act was a godsend. It had never felt like that to Jennifer. His sudden departure had left a gaping void in her life, an emotional hole that she’d desperately tried to fill all throughout her teens. Alcohol, drugs, and bad boyfriends had all failed to extinguish her deep sense of abandonment.
Jennifer’s self-destructive tendencies had nearly driven her mom to the brink. “If you knew your father the way I did, you would thank your blessed stars that he left us,” she often said.
Her mother’s words had only made Jennifer even more determined to find him one day. According to her mom, her father had been a strange man with even stranger interests, whatever that meant. There were rumors, of course, whispered stories exchanged at family gatherings. Tales that her father had formed a cult of some kind and had cut himself off from society. To her young mind, these had sounded like wild fantasies, and she refused to give them much weight.
When she met Rachel, a yoga-obsessed health nut who saw the best in everyone, Jennifer finally decided to turn her life around. She dumped the bad boyfriends, turned her back on the long nights of hard partying, and began to get her act together.
Almost overnight, her life improved drastically. She managed to graduate on time and was even considering pursuing a master’s degree in counseling. She wanted to help young kids who were as confused as she had once been at their age, to steer them through the rough seas of adolescence. Her future looked bright—until she received word of her dad’s death, and all the progress she’d made felt like it had vanished overnight.
The cause of her father’s death remained shrouded in mystery. All she knew was that he’d run a mortuary about an hour away from where she’d grown up in the city. Her gaze flicked to the eerie structure towering over the cemetery in the near distance like the Bates Motel. Judging by the shoddy state of the funeral home that bordered the tiny cemetery, business had been on a sharp decline for qui
te some time. And now both the creepy funeral home and the adjacent cemetery belonged to her, all part of an inheritance she didn’t know what to do with.
Jennifer had always wanted to ask her father why he’d left. All she could do now was visit the gravesite of a man who had haunted her life for over a decade. She had resisted coming here for three long months, telling herself there was no point in making this pilgrimage to the final resting place of a man who had turned his back on her. But the past has a funny way of catching up with you.
After receiving news of her father’s death, she’d fallen into her old bad habits again. It started with a drink or two after work, progressed to some late-night bar hopping and not-so-safe hook-ups. Once again, she tried to fill the gnawing emptiness the only way she knew how. Fortunately, she recognized the vicious pattern and decided to put a quick stop to her self-destructive tendencies. If she was to ever move on and be happy, she would need to make peace with herself and her father.
“Let’s do this!” Jennifer declared. She sounded more gung-ho than she felt as she took the first step through the cemetery’s gate. Rachel fell in step behind her.
Tombstones jutted from the ground like broken teeth, a sharp contrast to the city’s glittering skyline silhouetted in the distance. Jennifer had to remind herself to exhale, almost as if she feared that the sound of her breathing would offend the souls buried below her feet. Trees and shrubbery grew rampant, and the eroded tombstones looked like giant rats had nibbled away at them. Fading sunlight dappled the moss-covered graves, adding a surreal, dreamlike quality to the poorly maintained cemetery. All too soon, the sun would set and darkness would fall.
Jennifer had no plans to stick around that long. She was going to locate her father’s grave and get this whole experience over with. It was time to move on with the rest of her life. He’d been a loser with an unhealthy interest in the occult who had ditched her when she was a kid, and she didn’t owe the old bastard anything. Her presence here was more than he deserved, or so she tried to tell herself.
As she advanced through the collection of old grave markers and crumbling crypts, Rachel kept stealing nervous glances around her. Jennifer was acutely aware that they were the only living creatures here. An unnatural silence had descended over the cemetery, almost as if the stone walls and screens of trees could shut out all outside sounds. Strange. Not even faint traffic noise drifted over the haunted landscape.
“This place is seriously creepy,” Rachel said.
“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said. “You can wait in the car if you want.”
“No way, girl. I’m not leaving you in this place alone. But…let’s hurry, okay?”
Jennifer smiled gratefully at her friend and started walking faster, scanning the graves for one that looked relatively recent. There was an air of decay and neglect here that wasn’t normal. Most of the graves were infested with weeds, and some of the tombstones had sunk deep into the ground, almost as if parts of the burial ground were caving in. Further inspection revealed that the ground was depressed around many of the graves, almost as if some giant groundhog had burrowed its way under the soil. A few feet from where they stood, two tombstones lay broken on the grass.
For a second, her overactive imagination lit up with the image of a bolt of lightning sizzling down on the cemetery and splitting the grave marker in two. It was a scene from a horror movie, a silly notion which she found hard to shake. This place was getting to her. Beyond the sorry state of this place, there was another detail that bothered her, some subtle wrongness.
She at first couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Then it hit her. There were no names on the tombstones. No dates. No flowers. No signs that anyone had cared for these graves in ages. Inspecting the grave markers more closely, she noticed that strange glyphs and symbols adorned them instead. What sort of cemetery was this? More importantly, how was she supposed to find her father’s resting place among the myriad of nameless graves?
A voice inside urged her to leave this place immediately. Something wasn’t right here.
“Have you noticed there’s not one single cross around this cemetery?”
Rachel’s question hung in the air for a beat. A quick glance at the graves confirmed her friend’s disturbing observation. Indeed, there were no crosses in this place of the dead, no angels or stars of David or any other religious symbols.
Jennifer’s gaze swept the cemetery and locked on the large structure that dominated its overgrown center. The mausoleum thrust from the ground like the dark heart of this place, a feeling reinforced by three concentric circles of tombstones which ringed the giant crypt. It made Jennifer think of Stonehenge in a weird way. There was a purposeful quality about the way the graves enclosed the temple-like mausoleum. This place was like no cemetery she had ever seen before.
Despite her misgivings, Jennifer approached the mausoleum, drawn to it, almost as if it was calling her on some level. The large shadow it cast sucked up the surrounding light and warmth, and Jennifer fought back a shiver. She leaned closer, only inches separating her face from the cool stone.
This is where your father is buried. And those other graves are his followers.
She shuddered at the unbidden thought. Where had it come from? She didn’t get a chance to dwell on it further as the eerie glyphs on the mausoleum’s surface lit up with a ghostly light.
Jennifer recoiled from the mausoleum, and the light dimmed almost instantaneously. She inhaled sharply, her legs wobbly. Rachel shot her a questioning look. “What’s wrong?”
“Didn’t you see…” She broke off as Rachel looked at her dumbfounded, clearly unaware of what had just happened.
Had she imagined the light?
Jennifer bit her lips. She had always been sensitive to strange sights and sounds beyond the senses of most people. Your father’s curse, her mom had called it when she was drunk. When she was sober, she claimed Jennifer’s visons were mere flights of fantasy, a product of an overactive imagination. Growing up, she’d learned to block out the strange things her senses sometimes picked up. She had even joined a support group for people like herself who were gifted with extrasensory perception—apparently there were quite of few of them in the city. Time had taught her to accept and live with her abilities.
Until now.
Coming here had been a mistake.
She was about to tell Rachel that they needed to get the hell out of there when she caught a flicker of movement behind a nearby tombstone. A pale figure darted between one grave marker and the next, moving too fast for Jennifer to make out specific details.
All the blood drained from her face, leaving her lightheaded with terror.
“What’s wrong, Jennifer? Talk to me!” Rachel’s voice hummed with panic, sensing something was terribly wrong even if she couldn’t see it.
Jennifer remained silent, choked by fear, eyes fixed on the grave marker behind which the strange figure had vanished. Had the phantom been real or a trick of the fading sunlight? She was still trying to answer that question when more of the tombstones lit up with an eerie green light. One by one, the glyphs flashed to phantasmagorical life, almost as if the cemetery was some giant machine in the process of powering up.
She wanted to turn and run, but her feet remained rooted to the muddy ground. Rachel stared at her with big, concerned eyes. She clearly couldn’t see the mystical light show.
Your father was a strange man with even stranger interests.
Her mother’s words now carried a far darker connotation. What had she meant? Jennifer didn’t want to wait around and find out. All she wanted was to put as much distance as possible between her and this accursed burial ground. And the cemetery was cursed, that she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt. Dark secrets haunted these graves, secrets best left buried.
Too late, girl, her inner voice said. The moment you set foot in this place, you activated something. Something that can’t be so easily turned off...
“Shut up!” she said out loud.
Jennifer grabbed Rachel’s hand. Her eyes flitted back to the main gate through which they’d passed less than ten minutes earlier. It seemed miles away.
She broke into a fast walk. Rachel seemed to sense that now wasn’t the time for questions even if she couldn’t see the eerie light show. They jogged through the cemetery in silence, the only sounds were their footfalls on the dead grass and the roaring of blood in Jennifer’s ears.
They had cleared nearly half the distance between the mausoleum and the cemetery entrance when Jennifer caught sight of the darting shadow once more. It flitted along behind the tombstones to her right, keeping pace with them.
It’s stalking us, she thought.
Rachel let out a scream, and Jennifer knew her friend had spotted their phantom pursuer too. The stalker was flesh and blood, and not some ghost only she could see. Weirdly enough, she drew some comfort from this. At least she wasn’t going insane.
Jennifer gasped as the figure rose from behind a tombstone. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t quite human judging by the luminescent quality of its skin and the melted, deformed features. The cemetery stalker was over six feet tall, its gaunt physique clad in a tattered, mud-encrusted black trench coat. The legs and feet were hairless and bare, and she was certain the stranger was naked under the coat. Her stomach twisted with revulsion. A film of mud clung to the exposed skin, almost as if it had emerged from the soil they stood on. A pair of bloodshot pink eyes leered at her from those alabaster features.
“Run!” Jennifer screamed. Rachel broke into a sprint. They were young and fit and fast, but they were no match for the creature which had set its sights on them. With ferocious speed, the stranger leapt at Jennifer’s best friend and knocked her off her feet. Rachel’s head slammed against one of the gravestones on the way down, and a pitiful scream broke from Jennifer’s lips. Rachel lay unconscious as the inhuman pursuer turned his baleful gaze on her.
Shawdow Detective Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 4-6] Page 24