SONYA BATEMAN
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Copyright © 2016 by Sonya Bateman
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Lou Harper, Harper By Design
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
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Books in The DeathSpeaker Codex series
Available now from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited
WRONG SIDE OF HELL | Book 1
FIELDS OF BLOOD | Book 2
REALM OF MIRRORS | Book 3
RETURN OF THE HUNTERS | Book 4
CITY OF SECRETS | Book 5
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COMING SOON:
PRISON OF HORRORS
The DeathSpeaker Codex, Book 6
More books by Sonya Bateman
The Gavyn Donatti series – Available for Kindle and wherever books are sold
MASTER OF NONE
One unlucky thief. One unlikely genie. One very odd couple.
MASTER AND APPRENTICE
A deadly cult. An unbreakable curse. The rules are simple: Learn to kill…or die trying.
PROLOGUE
Manhattan, New York – Christmas, 7 p.m.
Gina Bosco walked Abe and me to the door, since Lou was stuck in Molasses Swamp. They’d gotten their newest foster, a shy six-year-old named Valerie, the Candy Land board game for Christmas and started playing after dinner. A few of the older kids had joined in too, and their laughter filled the house every time Lou picked up a card and said, “Nope. Still stuck.”
I grabbed our coats from the rack and handed Abe his. When Gina deemed us properly defended against the cold, she hugged me hard — all five-foot-nothing of her. “Merry Christmas, Gideon,” she said. “I know how hard you and Abraham work all the time, but don’t be a stranger.”
“I’ll try not to. Merry Christmas, Mrs. B.” I kissed her cheek and stepped back, glad she had no real idea of what I did. “Thanks for dinner. It was awesome, as always.”
She beamed at me. “Thank you, for the grownup treats,” she said. “Mr. B and I can’t wait to break out the bubbly once things quiet down around here.”
“You’re welcome.” Every year I brought a big basket of candy for whatever foster kids the Boscos happened to have at the time, and a few bottles of nice champagne that usually lasted the two of them until the next holiday. “Wait … you’re saying it actually gets quiet around here?” I added with a grin.
She flapped her hand, an oh-you gesture, and turned to hug Abe. “Take care of our boy out there, and yourself,” she said. “Merry Christmas, Abraham.”
“You bet. Right back atcha.” Abe smiled as he straightened his tie. “If you’ve ever got room for one more, Gina, I’ll move in just for your pot roast.”
“Flattery gets you invited to dinner. But you’ll have to do the dishes.” She winked, and then stood aside as I opened the door. “You two stay warm, and be careful out there. Goodnight, gentlemen,” she said, and called over her shoulder, “Say goodnight, Mr. B!”
Lou’s booming voice came from the living room. “Goodnight, boys!”
“G’night, Lou,” Abe called back.
“Later, Mr. B.” I waved to Gina and stepped onto the porch.
Abe followed, closing the door behind him. “You drove, right?”
“Yeah. I’m parked right behind you.” Abe usually got here earlier than me on Christmas, lugging a carload of presents. If the man ever started a family of his own, he’d spoil his kids rotten — and I’d probably be right there helping him. Maybe I could be Uncle Gideon or something. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Gee, thanks. Don’t put yourself out, kid.”
“Hey, you’re an old man now. You might slip and fall.” I couldn’t help laughing at his offended expression. “Okay. I’ll stop now, before you push me down the stairs.”
“Good idea.”
We walked down the steps of the big house and out to the curb. When we reached Abe’s car, he started patting his pockets for his keys. “Big plans tonight?” he said.
“Not really. Chinese food and Die Hard, that’s about it.” Daoin was heading back to Arcadia later tonight, and he’d wanted to watch his favorite Christmas movie before he went to the Fae realm—where there was no electricity, let alone television, and no one knew who Bruce Willis was.
With Reun and the Duchenes gone to Louisiana for the holidays, it was pretty quiet around the Castle. I hoped, for once, it would stay that way a while.
But I knew there was about as much chance of that as me winning the lottery and retiring to Aruba.
“How about you?” I said to Abe. “Any wild cop parties on your itinerary?”
He grinned. “Oh, yeah. I’m headed for the paperwork jungle,” he said. “Never could convince the bad guys to take the holidays off.”
“I hear you.” I hugged him and patted his back. “Merry Christmas, Abe. You know where I am if you need me.”
“Sure do. Let’s hope nobody ends up calling for a ride tonight, though.”
“From your lips, man.” Whenever I got called for a ride, the passenger was already dead. And Christmas was a shitty day to die. “’Night,” I said as I headed for my van.
“Goodnight, kid. Take care.”
I waved as he climbed into his unmarked, then grabbed my keys and unlocked the van. For me the holidays had never been a big deal … mostly because I’d never celebrated growing up. Christmas with the Valentines had been just like every other day with them. Long, dirty, and painful.
This year I got to spend time with Abe and the Boscos, which was always great. But it was also my first Christmas with actual relatives — my brother, my father — and a few new friends. It felt surprisingly good. I’d never known what I was missing until now.
I only hoped things would stay this way.
Beneath Manhattan – Christmas, Dark-Time
Run and find your friends. Quickly!
Eli was happy to go away from bad-Red. Bad-Red was always mean. Always calling him dim-wit-dull-brain. That meant stupid. Just because he couldn’t make words come. He had lots of words in his head, but his mouth-shape was wrong. His sound-making wanted to eee-eee-eee, like his small friends who looked like him. Words were hard to make out loud.
Good-Wurr told him it was okay, and his words were good. Sometimes Good-Wurr made loud words at Bad-Red, and then Bad-Red would stop. But this time Bad-Red made louder words. So Eli had to go.
He didn’t like giving his friends to Bad-Red. It made bad things happen. He could hear the bad things, even when Good-Wurr tried to make him safe. He knew the bad things. They happened to him, when he didn’t give Bad-Red his friends.
The bad things hurt.
It was nice here in the down place. Dark and quiet. Lots of small friends and water and echo-rumble-sounds, and no big people. Sometimes big people made loud sounds when they saw him, and he knew what they saw. They called him mean words. Freak. Monster. Ug-ly. He could stay in the down place until he found his friends.
The sad-spot in his belly didn’t want to find his friends. Bad-Red would hurt them.
They showed him pictures, so he would know his friends. The painted friend was sad. The angry friend scared him. But there was
a pretty friend, a she-friend. He liked the pretty friend. And they showed him smells, the funny bright sparkle-smell that Good-Wurr called magic. He could follow the smells to his friends.
Right now he had the magic-smell. It was big, and it was close. But this magic-smell was not the same. This was dark sparkle, wet metal.
He knew the word, but he didn’t like it. This smell was blood.
The smell led him to a big-tunnel. Fancy walls, like the bath-room where Good-Wurr let him play in the water. He didn’t like this tunnel. Now the magic-smell had more blood, and burning. Old burning. But he had to find his friends.
The tunnel stopped. He saw down-steps, many of them. And a floor, a far down floor. The big-people on the floor looked little. And they smelled … bad. Very bad.
“Badmen,” Eli whispered aloud, backing into the big-tunnel. “Badmen, badmen, badmen.”
He backed into a something, a hard warm something. It made loud words.
“Remove this vermin!”
The words hurt him. He tried to run, but the badmen squeezed his arms. Hard-hard. One arm went crack, like Bad-Red did to him sometimes, and he hurt-bright. He made loud sounds.
Then the big person with the hurting words picked him up. Eli shivered and shivered. His sound-making stopped, and he was wet beneath.
BADMAN.
Big, big eyes. Bad, bad magic-smell. Blood and burning and dead.
The badman threw him. He banged, and the dark came.
CHAPTER 1
Manhattan, New York – Two Weeks Later
Normally, a dead body in a graveyard wouldn’t be all that surprising. But this one was far from normal.
It hadn’t really snowed since just before Christmas, but it was cold enough for the ground to crunch beneath my feet as I approached the crime scene — a small hive of activity in the harsh blue-white glow of police spotlights. At least they were nowhere near my mother’s grave. When Abe called and told me they’d found a body at Cemetery of the Pines, that was the first thing I thought about. My mother, and Milus Dei. The cult had a secret storage space beneath the little church on this property, though it’d been mostly cleaned out months ago.
I’d wondered before about the coincidence. But Abe had assured me that the victim was male, and fresh.
He sounded a little strangled when he said fresh.
I saw why when I got a look at the body, but it still took me a minute to pinpoint what made this one especially horrific. The obvious should’ve been enough — the man was splayed face-up on a big, flat rock beneath an elm tree. His chest had been torn apart, his ribcage split and forced outward in a ragged explosion of flesh and bone. His heart was completely gone, ripped from the gaping cavity of his chest. But even that wasn’t the most disturbing part.
There was no blood. On, in, or around the body. Not a single drop.
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Abe said from somewhere behind me. “And here I thought the gory scenes were the worst.”
I turned with a faint smirk. “So you’ve seen something like this before?”
“If I had, I would’ve retired right then.” He was deliberately not looking at the body. “You got here fast, kid,” he said, casting a glance at the barricaded entrance to the cemetery where I’d parked my van. “They’re still processing the scene. You might have to wait a while to take him.”
“I’ve got time.” I shrugged and looked at the victim again. Dark suit, polished shoes — and something that drew a double-take from me. An empty gun holster at his waist. “Was he armed?” I said.
Abe frowned. “Yeah. He had a Glock .40, fully locked and loaded. Never even drew it. Whatever happened, it must’ve happened fast.”
“Jesus.” I stepped closer and crouched next to the body. Other than his mutilated chest, the left arm of his suit jacket was ripped apart and pushed up, and a big patch of skin had been cut from his forearm just below the wrist. There was no blood in the injury. Just glistening, half-frozen flesh. “You see this?” I said to Abe. “Kinda like those Saw movies, except it’s not shaped like a puzzle piece.”
He groaned. “Don’t say that. I really don’t need a serial killer right now.”
“Hey, there’s only one body, right?”
“For now.” Abe glanced around, and then jerked his head slightly. “Walk with me a minute.”
“Sure.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and followed him away from the scene, out of earshot of the detectives, officers, and techs still milling around. When he stopped, he faced me with an unhappy expression. “You think maybe this is an … Other thing?” he said.
I knew why he was asking. It seemed like an impossible murder, at least for a human. But considering he knew that things like Fae and werewolves were real — hell, he was talking to one of them right now — what happened to the victim over there became distressingly possible. “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It’s not like any spell or attack I’ve ever seen, if that’s what happened. I mean, Sadie mentioned vampires once, but … ”
“You think it was a vampire?” Abe half-whispered.
“No idea. I’ve never seen one, but I guess they exist. Somewhere.” Even while I said it, I had a feeling that wasn’t right. They were supposed to drink blood, not tear ribcages open like gruesome people-books and rip out hearts. “I could ask around.”
Abe nodded. “Maybe you can do that thing you do. You know, with the body.”
I had to smile a little. Far as Abe knew, my thing was part intuition, part dumb luck. I’d officially told him everything about being half-Fae, and I’d even confessed about the Valentines. Just last month, he’d helped me bring down the brutal family I’d grown up with, and now the FBI had those bastards permanently locked up. But I hadn’t exactly explained that I was the DeathSpeaker. That was a bit more complicated.
My ‘intuition’ came from being able to speak directly to dead people — and they couldn’t lie to me.
“Yeah, no problem,” I finally said. “I’ll find out whatever I can.”
“Thanks, kid.”
I looked back toward the crime scene. A few officers were unrolling a body bag on the ground next to the rock, and two more stood near the victim, looking uneasy. Almost time to turn the corpse over to me for transport. “Looks like my cue’s coming up,” I said. “If you’ve got the paperwork, I’ll …”
I trailed off as I noticed something just beyond the edges of the spotlight’s glow. Two silhouettes, one significantly taller than the other — just standing there, watching. I couldn’t make out any detail or definition. They were shapes sketched against shadows. “Hey, Abe,” I said. “You got some brass out here observing or something?”
His brow furrowed. “Don’t think so.”
“Who are those guys, then?”
He followed my gaze, and the frown deepened. “What guys?”
“The lurkers out in the shadows, there,” I said. “Look, just to the left of that—”
I stopped abruptly. The silhouettes were gone.
Before I could decide whether I was hallucinating, someone shouted, “Captain!” An officer broke from the scene, waving a hand and jogging toward us. “Hey, Captain, you’d better get over there,” he called. “We have a problem.”
Abe was already moving at a brisk clip, and I followed him. “What’s going on?” Abe said.
“It’s the Feds.” The officer pointed toward the barricade. A man and a woman, both in dark suits, had pushed one of the sawhorses aside and started for the scene. One of the other officers walked behind them, gesturing and talking loudly. “They said they’re taking over here.”
“Like hell they are,” Abe growled.
I held back a groan. This night was going to be a lot longer than I thought.
CHAPTER 2
The Feds had reached the body and shooed the officers away before Abe could stop them. I could see him getting ready to drill them new assholes, but the male agent held out a placatory hand and moved slightly in front o
f his partner. “Captain Abraham Strauss, right?” he said smoothly. Blond hair, affable brown eyes, perfect teeth showing in a practiced trust-me smile like a plastic toy. “We’re hoping for your cooperation here.”
“Well, you don’t have it,” Abe said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Agent Knox Gilmore.” He held a hand out, but Abe declined to shake it. “My partner is Special Agent Calla Frost. We’re with the NSA.”
I glanced at Abe and saw his eyes widen a little. The FBI was one thing, but having the National Security Agency show up at a crime scene seemed a lot worse.
Abe folded his arms. “What, exactly, are we supposed to cooperate with?”
“This investigation,” Agent Gilmore said, nodding down at the body. “The murder is connected with a case we’re already working.”
“Oh, bullshit. We don’t even know anything about this murder yet.”
I looked away from the impending fight between Abe and the oversized Ken doll, and watched his partner instead. Special Agent Frost was on her phone, speaking low and intently to someone. Black hair pulled back from her face and held loosely with a pair of jade combs, pale green eyes sweeping the area as if she expected to find snipers hiding behind the gravestones. She’d barely glanced at any of us.
But when she ended her call, her gaze honed in on me. Her features hardened into something approaching a snarl. “We’re taking over this case, and this body, Captain Strauss,” she said without looking away from me. “And Gideon Black is coming with us for questioning.”
“Excuse me?” I blurted, backing up a step. I’d never seen this woman, either of these agents, in my life. They couldn’t possibly know who I was.
“The fuck he is,” Abe said. “We’ll see about you taking over, too.”
“Call your commissioner, if you have to.” Agent Frost was impatient, and just as cold as her name. “We’ve already discussed it with him. The victim is FBI. Special Agent Eric Redfield.” She reached into her jacket, pulled out a photo and handed it to Abe. It was the dead guy — only with a little more color and a lot less horrified death stare. “He’s not the first,” she said. “We’re questioning Mr. Black in relation to the other victims.”
City of Secrets (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 5) Page 1