by E.J. Stevens
I swung at the ghoul’s neck, intending to take off his head, but my sword caught on his tattered hoodie. I shifted my weight and slanted the blade up at an angle which took off the top of the creature’s head. A chunk of scalp, writhing with maggots, hit my boot and I gagged. But I didn’t have time to puke my guts out.
The ghoul was still coming at me.
The only sure way to kill a ghoul with a blade is decapitation. A head shot with a large caliber gun loaded with silver shot will also work, but I was fresh out of both. The airlines frown on firearms in a girl’s luggage, and silver shot was expensive. I’d have to make do with decapitating the monsters with my sword.
That would be a whole lot easier if the shuffling corpses weren’t trying to chew my face off.
Ghouls aren’t like movie zombies, though a past encounter with humans is probably where Hollywood got some of their ideas. A ghoul bite won’t turn a human—only a vampire can create a ghoul—but a bite from a rotting corpse could still be deadly. Sepsis, staph infection, and necrotizing fasciitis are just a few of the bonus prizes that may come along with a ghoul bite. I’d rather take my chances with a rabid Pit Bull.
A ghoul latched onto my ankle, attempting to gnaw through my boot and I jumped.
“Damn it!” I shouted, shaking my foot, but the female ghoul held on tight. At least, I think she was female. She was so decomposed, it was hard to tell.
“Need a hand, love?” Ash asked.
He held up a severed hand and I snorted.
“No thanks, I got this,” I said.
I swung my sword a second time, taking off the first ghoul’s head. I threw myself back against the nearest wall, kicked at the female ghoul with my other booted foot, sheathed my sword, and drew my combat knife. It would take longer to cut through the ghoul’s neck with my knife, but it was safer than using my sword. With the ghoul latched onto my ankle, I was likely to take off my own foot if I used a longer blade.
I ducked, narrowly missing the grasping hands of the creature in the nearest alcove, and drove the knife into the female ghoul’s neck. She kept on gnawing away at my boot.
Pesky ghoul.
Grabbing her hair in one hand, I tried to hold her head still as her body thrashed around. Her arms ended in stumps at the elbow, so her attempts to claw at me were futile. She was also missing both legs at the hip, hence trying to gnaw through my ankle instead of my skull.
I don’t know what happened to her arms and legs. Perhaps another ghoul ate them. Vampires don’t always take the best care of their undead servants. Who cared if your pets cannibalized themselves when you could just make more?
I grit my teeth, sawing at the ghoul’s neck. Rotting flesh fell away in chunks, but the spine wasn’t so easy to sever—not with the woman continuing to gnash her teeth and chomp at my leg. It took a few more kicks to crack the bone, and a hell of a lot of sawing, but the head finally came free from the ghoul’s body.
Foamy spittle flew from her mouth as I tossed the head aside, and not a moment too soon. The ghoul from the alcove had climbed its way out and was dragging his way toward me. I was pretty sure the creature was eyeing my boots like they were a goddamn Slim-Jim. Who knew leather boots were so tasty?
I drew my sword and brought it down in a sweeping arc, chopping off the ghoul’s head.
“Incoming,” Ash said with a grunt.
I was still down on one knee, so I rolled, narrowly avoiding a head coming at me like a cannonball. The skull hit the wall with a sickening crack and tumbled over to rest on the ground beside me. A spider scuttled out of an empty eye socket and I snorted.
I know just how you feel, buddy.
I’d been uprooted from my home and tossed over to a foreign country where, so far, nothing had gone easy. But unlike the spider, I couldn’t just find another skull to crawl inside and start filling it with my new family. No, spiders had it easy. They didn’t have to protect a dozen innocent humans while trudging through a rough hewn crypt filled with the flesh-eating undead.
And have I mentioned the smell? Now I knew why some of the city’s streets had such a foul odor, and it wasn’t just the sewers.
We continued to battle the ghouls, carving up the rotting, animated human flesh like a Thanksgiving turkey left too long at room temperature. Like the holidays, I survived, but it wasn’t an experience that I wanted to repeat anytime soon.
After we cleaned out the servant’s quarters, we made it through the rest of the tunnel without too much trouble. Celeste was partially responsible for the ease of our escape, which was a good thing for her since I hadn’t forgotten that she was the reason we couldn’t leave the vampires’ nest the same way we’d come in.
Though her power was waning, Celeste managed to use her magic to calm the humans we’d saved and convince them that they were the victims of a mugging gone wrong. I was glad that we didn’t have to deal with frantic people, but the smiles on some of their tear streaked faces were creepy.
The tunnel dead ended beneath a wooden trap door. The rungs of a ladder bolted into the wall appeared to be our only means of escape.
“Celeste,” I said, waving her forward. “Can you sense anything?”
The front door to the vamp nest had been magically warded against intruders. I didn’t know if opening this door from the inside would trigger any traps, but it was better to be safe than sorry, especially when we had more than our own lives to worry about.
“It feels…blocked from the other side,” she said. “Just a minute.”
Sweat beaded on Celeste’s forehead, but she kept her eyes closed and hands raised palms up. After a few minutes, she nodded and opened her eyes.
“Is it clear?” I asked.
“It should be,” she said.
That was as much assurance as I was going to get. I shimmied up the rickety ladder and shouldered the trap door. I was prepared for a fight, maybe even a mundane trap or two.
What I saw in the hidden, underground room was not at all what I expected.
Chapter 38
“Hunters can’t afford distractions.”
-Jenna Lehane, Hunter
Two ghosts, a man and a woman, were inside the small room, humping like bunnies.
“Is that a nun and a flippin’ priest?” Ash asked, coming up behind me.
I jumped, heat rising to my face.
“Apparently, this room wasn’t always part of the vampires’ underground railroad,” I said.
Nope. At one time, this room had definitely been the place of a scandalous tryst. Not that it mattered.
I shook my head and hurried past the amorous ghosts. Hunters can’t afford distractions, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, so I continued to look for a way out. The tunnel had been steadily climbing upward, and if the draft I was feeling was to be believed, we were close to the surface.
I shone my flashlight along the wall and stopped when I caught sight of a tapestry moving slightly. If we were in luck, the movement would be from that same draft I’d felt, rather than the movement of rodents. I’d seen enough rats to last a lifetime.
“Help me move this bench,” I said, waving Ash over.
“Looks like a church pew,” he said. “Bloody strange for a vampire bolt-hole.”
I just shook my head and we dragged the heavy wooden bench across the floor. I had no idea where we were, or why the vampires had clawed a tunnel to this place.
“Look,” I said, pulling the tapestry back to reveal a small door.
It was sized for hobbits, but I wasn’t about to complain. I ran my fingers along the seams of the door, looking for a way to open it.
“Step back, love,” Ash said.
I sighed and moved to the side. Ash took two steps back and ran at the door, slamming into the dry wood with his shoulder. The door shuddered, and after three more tries, it burst open.
Ash was surprisingly solid for a ghost. He claimed that he only manifested fully when he was close to me, and I wasn’t sure if he was flirting or telling the
truth.
Dust motes filled the air, but it was obvious that we’d found another tunnel. I groaned and shook my head. I was sick to death of tunnels. What I wouldn’t give for the sun on my face.
“Go tell Celeste it’s safe to start bringing people up,” I said. “I’ll search the tunnel for a way out.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and surveyed the tunnel. Aside from the dust, it was clean. It was more of an underground, stone passageway than the kinds of tunnels we’d been trudging through—the kind found in old forts and castles.
At the end of the passageway, I found another trapdoor set into the ceiling. I climbed up a set of handholds, drew my combat knife, took a deep breath, and pushed upward. The shriek of the old metal hinges set my teeth on edge, but I smiled as I pulled myself up into an old room that held nothing but an old bed frame and chamber pot.
The faded silhouette of a cross still hung above the bed, but that’s not what made me smile. There was a small window on the far wall. I ran to the window and looked out onto one of the city’s canals.
We made it. We were free.
Chapter 39
“Hunters are trained to put the needs of others above our own.”
-Jenna Lehane, Hunter
According to Ash, the vampires’ tunnel had brought us to the Spookhuis, an infamous haunted house. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The Spookhuis was actually made up of two buildings that at one time had been joined by an underground passage. One building had been a monastery, the other a nunnery. The passageway had been intended to provide the nuns access to the monastery’s chapel, but one priest and nun found another use for it.
The popular story is that the priest felt remorse for his sins of the flesh, and one night murdered the young nun. If that was true, the two had made up in the afterlife. Either way, the buildings had developed a reputation for being haunted and were sold off, eventually becoming abandoned.
I didn’t really care—we’d found our way out of the vamp nest and our human charges were alive. I was dead tired, but my footsteps were light as we made our way to the guildhall.
Once we reached the guildhall, we left Ash outside—since ghosts couldn’t pass through the door wards—and took the men and women down to the Guild infirmary. I’d called ahead, rousing a grumpy Doc Martens who’d only just returned home after returning his daughter to her boarding school. If I thought he’d sounded irritated on the phone, it was nothing compared to his mood when we walked in with a dozen patients, all of us stinking of the sewers.
“And what am I supposed to do with all of these people?” he asked.
“Let them use the shower in the back, give them clean clothes and a bed, and tend to their injuries,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the doctor.
“That’s my shower,” he complained, but he started assessing injuries and pulling out supplies. Hunters are trained to put the needs of others above our own. It’s a hard habit to break, even when we’re not feeling so generous. “What happened to these people anyway?”
“They were the victims of a mugging,” Celeste said. “There was a street gang wearing masks to scare people into giving them their money. The gang was using the sewers as their hideout and had forced these people to follow them while they stole their valuables. Thankfully, we were out for a walk and heard a scream.”
It was farfetched as hell, but the vampire’s former prisoners seemed to accept the lie. I grimaced at the glazed eyes and vacant looks. Sofia and Nicolas, who we’d found alive and mostly unharmed, didn’t even seem to recognize me. It was as if they were all sleepwalking. I bit my lip, wondering what would happen when they all woke up from this living nightmare.
I inched my way over to Celeste and gave her a sidelong look.
“I thought memory spells were illegal,” I said, keeping my voice low.
She shrugged and waved a hand toward the men and women waiting their turn with Doc Martens.
“The vampire venom and blood loss already made them susceptible to suggestion,” she said. “I just encouraged them to believe a plausible lie, one that would explain their injuries and disorientation. Would you rather they know the truth?”
I shivered, a chill running icy fingers up my spine.
“No,” I said. “Thank you. You helped save these people from more than death in that dungeon.”
“I just wish it was enough,” she said.
I cocked an eyebrow at Celeste, but she shrugged and shook her head. I wondered if it had anything to do with what Ash had said earlier. Celeste had been his partner, but she hadn’t been able to prevent his death. She’d taken it hard, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was still punishing herself for what she perceived as her ultimate failure.
“These people aren’t the only ones who owe you a debt,” I said. “You helped save their lives and save this city from a clan of vicious killers. If you’re willing, I’d be honored to have you at my side as I take out the remaining vampires.”
Her eyes widened and a smile flickered across her face.
“Help you take out Philip’s men?” she asked. She nodded and pulled out her phone. “I’d like that. But first I need to rest and to have a chat with my coven. I’m going to call a circle. They don’t approve of me being a Hunter, but they’re still my sisters. They deserve to know what happened here. I’ll be back by nightfall.”
I smiled. If Celeste was back by nightfall, we could begin our hunt for Philip’s remaining vamps as soon as they awakened and made the mistake of walking this city’s streets.
Watching Celeste leave, I sidled up to Martens. He frowned, but continued to hand out bottles of water to his patients.
“How are they doing?” I asked, nodding toward Sofia and Nicolas.
“Not bad for the victims of a mugging by a gang of delinquents who enjoy dragging their victims through the sewers,” he snapped.
I rubbed my face and yawned. I didn’t have the energy to argue with Martens. He was angry, I got that, but this was his job. If he didn’t like it, then he shouldn’t have signed up for it.
“I should get cleaned up, but...if there’s anything I can do for them,” I said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You look like hell Jenna. Go get some rest. That’s an order.”
“Okay, thanks Doc,” I said. “And Doc? Call me if there’s any change.”
“Fine, now go, Lehane,” he said. “You’re stinking up my infirmary.”
Wasn’t that gratitude for you? I raid a vamp nest, put down a rabid master vampire, and help rescue a dozen human prisoners, and when I make it topside I get told I stink. I snorted and shook my head. Good thing I didn’t do this job for the glory and recognition.
Chapter 40
“Being a Hunter isn’t always glamorous. More often than not it involves wading through blood, shit, and tears.”
-Jenna Lehane, Hunter
I trudged up the steps, out of the guildhall, and onto the street where Ash was waiting. Did he get tired? Did ghosts sleep? Even when my mother’s ghost had watched over me as a kid, I hadn’t thought to ask.
“Come on,” Ash said. “Let’s get you some chocolate waffles.”
I shook my head.
“I’m supposed to go home and rest, doctor’s orders,” I said.
“He said you have to rest, but he didn’t say you couldn’t eat first,” he said. “If you don’t start getting some calories, you’re going to fade away until you’re a bloody spook like me. Hmmm…maybe you should continue your ridiculous fasting. Can you imagine? We could be the dead version of Bonnie and Clyde. I can picture the haunting spree now.”
Great. Ghost humor. I was never getting used to this.
“Is there even a place that serves waffles at five in the morning?” I asked. The sky was still pitch black, since sunrise in Bruges this time of year wasn’t until seven. Most people would still be in their beds. “Plus, no one in their right mind is going to let me inside their restaurant looking and smelling like this.”
; I looked like a coblynau who’d climbed straight up out of the mines, but Ash was right. As tired as I was, I was too keyed up to sleep yet, and my stomach was growling. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate.
“I know a place,” he said.
Of course he did. Ash had spent the past two years floating around the city of Bruges with nothing better to do—until he’d met me and become a real boy, like freaking Pinocchio. Except there was a difference, because as real as Ash seemed to me, even now that I knew he was a ghost, most other people couldn’t see him. It was hard to wrap my mind around.
Maybe a stack of sugar and carbs would help fuel my brain and clear out some of the cobwebs. I gave up and followed Ash.
The waffle place turned out to be an all night waffle stand, and though the guy working behind the counter gave me a disgusted look, he did serve me. I took my “celebratory waffles” as Ash called them over to a bench and dug in with no regard for diets and optimal nutrition. Chocolate had never tasted so good.
I was eyeing the cup that the melted chocolate had come in, considering licking it clean, when someone tossed a coin into it.
“Hey, what the hell!” I shouted.
The man’s eyes widened and he hurried to blend in with the growing crowd. The Burg and Markt squares were often busy, but it was barely five-thirty in the morning and buses were beginning to drop off tourists in droves. I’d ignored it while eating, but the sound of luggage being rolled across cobbles was a constant. The place was so packed, I was lucky to have scored the bench I was sitting on—the bench most of the tourists were avoiding like the plague.
“They think you’re homeless, love,” Ash said with a smirk. “Think about it. They can’t see me, but not one person has tried to share this bench with you.”