Graveyard Druid: A New Adult Urban Fantasy Novel (The Colin McCool Paranormal Suspense Series Book 2)

by M. D. Massey

  “I’m Colin.”

  “Nelly. You wanting to know what happened to that poor guy?”

  I nodded, feeling foolish. “Yes, Nelly, I do.”

  She tilted her head and looked just past my shoulder. “You a reporter? I don’t want to be on no five o’clock news. S’good way to become a joke on the Internet. You remember that ‘got no time for that’ woman? Laughing stock, people made tons of money, and she never got a dime. Got any food on you?”

  “Nope on both counts. But I do have a few bucks I can spare. Would that help?”

  “It would. I promise I won’t spend it on drugs or cheap booze. I don’t do that. Not all of us are waste cases, you know.”

  “I didn’t assume you were,” I lied, feeling like an asshole for jumping to conclusions earlier. I reached into my Craneskin Bag for some cash I kept for emergencies.

  “Whoa!” She scooted back against the tree. “What did you just do? It felt like a door opened up into nothing.” She got up to leave. “I been around enough weird stuff today, mister. Don’t need to be involved in any more.”

  I pulled the cash out and shut my bag. “Please, don’t go—it’s harmless, I promise.” My second lie to her in under a minute; I was on a roll. Something in my voice must have convinced her to stay, because she harrumphed and then settled down under the tree again.

  I handed her a twenty and a five. Nelly rubbed them between her fingers and shook her head. “This is too much.” She handed the twenty back to me.

  “Keep it. Just tell me what happened here. I promise you, the information is worth it to me.”

  Nelly nodded and tucked the money away like a magician palming a coin; one second it was there, and next it had vanished. She swigged some water, arranged herself comfortably, and took a deep, shaky breath. I realized for the first time that she was rattled. She hid it well.

  “Well, about an hour ago I was sitting here under my tree when Douglas started shouting for help. We’ve had some attacks down here, you know. Mostly against women and mostly at night, but not always. Sometimes kids come by just to beat a loner up for fun, and sometimes people come from other camps to cause trouble. So, we stick together to protect ourselves.”

  She pulled the cheap windbreaker she wore tighter around her body, even though it wasn’t that cold out. “I went over there, knowing I couldn’t help much but thinking the more people, the more likely to scare someone off. When I got over where Douglas sleeps, some guy was eating his face off. Least that’s what they said happened.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, as if eating someone’s face off was the most natural thing in the world. “Probably took him away by now—he was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. Poor Douglas.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  She shrugged. “He wasn’t no friend. But he wasn’t an enemy, either. A lot of people die out here. Doesn’t mean it don’t matter.”

  “Nelly, do you have any idea what happened to his attacker?”

  “Cops shot him, least a dozen times that I could count. Finally killed him. Think they took that guy away, too.”

  Crap, that meant two potential ghouls at the morgue, if Douglas had turned. Not cool. I’d have to sneak in and make sure they stayed dead before someone at the medical examiner’s office got a nasty surprise.

  I was starting to wish I hadn’t taken this case. Luther had connections, and could have hired anybody to handle it for him. He had only given it to me because he knew I could use the money. It looked like I was going to earn it and then some.

  A glance at Nelly brought me back to my senses. I resolved not to complain about having gainful employment.

  “Anyone else get a good look at Douglas’ attacker?”

  “Petey did, but he split before the cops got here. You might look for him at the library—he hangs out there sometimes to get online and send emails and stuff. They call him Petey because he always has a black eye—least, that’s what they tell me. Shouldn’t be hard to spot. Just head to the computers, and you’ll probably find him there.”

  “You’ve been a big help to me, Nelly. Anything I can do for you before I go?”

  “Nah, but thanks. I’ll take the bus down to the women’s outreach later, get a hot meal. Good luck tracking down Petey.”

  I lingered for a moment, then realized there wasn’t much I could do to ease her situation. Eager to do something to help her out, I went to the courthouse to buy some snacks and a soda from the vending machines. She was gone by the time I returned, so I left my purchases under the tree, hoping she’d come back and find them there. Then I headed to the library to find Petey.

  Chapter Ten

  Petey didn’t have too much to offer, other than saying the guy who’d killed Douglas was big, fast, and wearing a dark blue Dallas Cowboy’s hoodie. Petey was a tweaker, and after I slipped him a ten he was only interested in getting a fix. Guess I should’ve waited until after to give him the cash. Live and learn.

  The morgue was close to the bar where Luther worked, so I headed there first to ensure neither the victim nor the perpetrator would get up and start munching corpses—or the medical examiner, for that matter. The general policy among the supernatural community was the fewer people in government and law enforcement who knew about us, the better.

  Confirmation bias and fae magic helped keep the world beneath a secret to 99.99 percent of people out there. But folks who were hyper-inquisitive or who had an innate sensitivity to the supernatural were apt to stick their noses where they didn’t belong. Police detectives and coroners were the worst, because cops tended to have instincts for digging up weird shit, and coroners were trained to look for the unusual. And never mind that advances in medical science had made it harder than ever for those of us in the know to keep a lid on things.

  For that reason, Maeve, the Circle, Luther, and our local alpha Samson all had their own agents working inside law enforcement and government. Each faction had their own agenda, but they all agreed that keeping mundanes from discovering the inexplicable was their top priority. The good news was Luther and Maeve both had moles in the medical examiner’s office; unfortunately, I didn’t know either of them because I’d been out of the game too long. Besides, Luther’s guy wouldn’t be coming on shift until after dark, and for all I knew Maeve’s inside person was at a crime scene or hauling a corpse back to the lab. So, for the moment I was on my own.

  I parked a block away and triggered my see-me-not cantrip again, hoping I didn’t run into another blind person while I poked around. My experience with Nelly earlier had been a reminder that magic didn’t offer perfect concealment, and the last thing I needed was to be caught mutilating and desecrating corpses in the county morgue. I resolved to be extra careful to avoid getting caught.

  I walked around the building to the loading dock in back, which was on the lowest level of the morgue. Based on past experience, I knew they often left the bay doors open, and that the main autopsy room and walk-in cooler both sat just on the other side of those doors. Lucky for me, the roll-up door had been left open to air the place out, and a quick look under it told me no one was inside. I strolled up and rolled through the opening, coming up in a crouch just in case I’d made a mistake and someone was in the vicinity.

  As soon as I hit the other side, the stench hit me like a ton of bricks. People who have only ever seen autopsy rooms on television have no idea what a real morgue is like. Travis County’s morgue was more reminiscent of a scene from Saw or American Horror Story than something from CSI. Once you got past the stainless steel autopsy table and surgical lights in the middle of the room, that’s where all similarities to TV autopsy suites ended.

  The room itself was dark and dingy, and the air was thick with the fetid odor of rotting corpses. A quick glance at the rough concrete floor beneath my feet revealed an autopsy had recently taken place. Blood and unidentified body fluids still swirled in water that had pooled in a depression next to the drain. An industrial water hose sat o
n the floor, the nozzle leaking water that collected and ran in a tiny stream to the drain. Rubber butcher’s aprons hung on hooks along a nearby wall, and a radio played pop music from a local station in tinny, static-filled tones.

  There were a few empty body bags on the floor. One of them still contained a yellow viscous fluid inside, indicating it had held a badly decomposed corpse. I surmised that most of the stench was coming from that bag, and tiptoed over to zip it before donning an apron, surgical mask, and thick pair of rubber gloves. The mask and apron would make it easier for my see-me-not spell to work, and if I got caught they’d make it harder for me to be identified. The gloves I put on to avoid leaving prints—and to keep dead guy gunk off me.

  I hopped over to the walk-in cooler door where they kept most of the bodies, pausing as I grabbed the handle. What if there was a live ghoul on the other side? I didn’t have any weapons handy, because a guy holding a sword or a spear in a morgue was just too damned incongruous; it’d burst my see-me-not glamour like a balloon in a mesquite tree. After a quick search, I grabbed a wicked-looking stainless steel hammer with a hooked handle from a nearby table, then yanked the door open and stepped back.

  The single bare light bulb just inside the doorway flickered slightly, but it illuminated the space inside well enough to reveal what had happened. Several body bags had been ripped open, corpse parts and pieces were strewn all over the cooler, and gastric contents and fecal matter had been smeared about as the ghoul had fed. My worst fears were confirmed; the ghoul the cops had shot had only been partially incapacitated, and it had recovered after arriving at the morgue.

  I held my breath as I hastily checked the tags on the other body bags, gagging at the rich, cloying stench of corpses in various states of decay. I finally located the victim from the park, who was in so many pieces that it was highly unlikely he’d be coming back to life. Just to be sure, I flipped him over and bashed the back of his head in with the autopsy hammer, mouthing a weak apology. The deed done, I turned him face-side up again and zipped his body bag closed, despite the fact that it was shredded beyond repair.

  The question now was, which way had the ghoul gone? He could have still been in the building, or he might have slipped out the way I’d come in. I exited the cooler and shut the door behind me, leaning on it and taking deep breaths of the comparatively fresher air beyond that had repulsed me just moments before. I hunched over with my hands on my knees, smearing blood and brain matter from the autopsy hammer on the front of the apron. After a few breaths, I recovered my composure and scanned the room for signs of where the ghoul had gone. There were no blood marks or prints on or around the bay door, so I had to assume he was still in the building. I swept my eyes across the room and spotted a gory streak on the wall near the stairs, leading to the offices above.

  It was after five in the evening, so I assumed the only people still working would be a janitorial crew and whoever had been cleaning up after the last autopsy. Tactically speaking, the time for stealth was over. I set the hammer aside, pulled the apron off and hung it back on a hook, and discarded the gloves in the trash. Then I pulled out my short sword and vaulted up the stairs two at a time. If I was lucky, I’d get to the thing before it got to anyone else… but luck hadn’t been on my side thus far.

  I adjusted the strap on my Craneskin Bag before opening the door to the offices upstairs, making sure I could reach it in a hurry if needed. I wanted that spell bag within easy reach, just in case. I eased the door open, peeking around and listening for any sign that the ghoul might be waiting in ambush.

  Ghouls weren’t the brightest of the undead, but they could be crafty when necessary for their survival. More than a few hunters had regretted underestimating a ghoul’s canny and unpredictable ways. A quick scan of the hall outside revealed nothing to arouse my suspicions, so I moved into the office space, following the hallway to the offices proper. Doors lined the hall at regular intervals, with name plaques indicating who or what occupied them. The lights were off in the offices, and except for the hall lights, all was dark and nothing stirred within. I passed a junior medical examiner’s office, an investigator’s office, and a storage space, finally ending up at the reception desk. There was no sign of the ghoul at all, and I started to wonder if I’d missed him while I’d been searching the basement level.

  Then a loud scream pierced through the quiet. A second scream came from the stairway I’d exited a moment before. Had I missed the ghoul downstairs? I ran back down the hall, burst into the stairwell, and immediately saw my mistake. In my haste to get into the building, I’d failed to see there were more stairs leading up. I’d also missed the bloody streaks on the walls leading to the second floor.

  Another scream came from above, so I sped up the steps two and three at a time, hoping I wasn’t too late. The man sounded desperate—or at least desperately scared. I exited the stairs to the second floor and entered another hall, following the screams and sounds of struggle until I came to a conference room. A peek through the window revealed the ghoul, a victim pinned under it on a conference table. It gripped the man by the shoulders, inching its mouth closer to the man’s face. The ghoul’s intended victim strained to push the ghoul away, his hands white-knuckled and latched onto the ghoul’s neck. It was a losing battle. With every second, the ghoul’s superior strength and inability to tire brought the man closer to death.

  I tried the door. Locked. I busted the small window with the pommel of my sword and reached inside. After fumbling a few moments for the latch, I finally unlocked it, slamming the door open with my shoulder. Leaping across the room, I struck the ghoul with the sword’s pommel instead of chopping its head off, fearful I might cut the man if I used the blade.

  You never knew what kind of condition one of the undead was in until you hit them—sometimes they were crunchy, sometimes squishy, and sometimes they were hard as granite. Ghouls were even trickier, because the longer they were undead, the thicker their bones became. Unlike zombies, they were able to slowly regenerate and heal minor wounds—so long as they had fresh meat to feed upon.

  Sadly, striking it over the head only seemed to piss it off. In response, it backhanded me into the wall, where my upper body and head left a depression. That pissed me off, and worried me. The beast inside me, my “Hyde-side,” had been nice and quiet since the events at Crowley’s farm. That part of me was a result of my curse, an ultra-violent alter-ego that showed up only when I was under extreme duress. Unfortunately, I could neither control nor contain the beast. I preferred to keep it hidden away, for obvious reasons. So, I tossed the sword into my bag and reached for the heavy artillery, my battle club.

  I had used the weapon often in my early days of training under Finn, until I’d discovered it was semi-sentient. In my experience, semi-sentient weapons and artifacts were pains in the ass. They’d get lost at odd times, or leapt from your hands and attacked people just to start fights, and generally acted like they had a mind of their own… because in essence, they did.

  By all appearances, this weapon was nothing more than a worn ash wood bat. But underneath the glamour, it was a fearsome weapon. Iron shod and fire-hardened, it had been passed down to me from my father, and the rumor was it had been made by old Lugh himself. In the past it had proven effective on all manner of fae, as well as an undead dwarf. Time to see how it fared against other undead creatures.

  I pulled it from my Craneskin Bag like a samurai drawing a katana, using the draw stroke to backhand the ghoul under the jaw. As the weapon struck the creature’s face, it sounded like a gong. That was another reason I didn’t like using the thing; the magical sound effects it came with were noisy as all hell. The good news was that it worked just fine on ghouls, and the blow knocked the thing off the poor guy it had been attacking. The intended victim scrambled away and cringed in the corner of the room behind me. Good. Now I didn’t have to worry about hurting him as I kicked this ghoul’s ass.

  The ghoul quickly shook off the effects of my initi
al attack. It sprang to its feet and roared at me, revealing a row of crooked yellow teeth stained with blood and gore. Its skin was split in several places and stitched back up, and it had a grey pallor to it that was more common among nosferatu than ghouls. And shit, that thing was big. It had to have been a bodybuilder or football player or something similar in a previous life, because it was damned near Hemi-sized and might have carried more muscle. It had a Dallas Cowboys hoodie on under a grimy black jacket, carpenter pants, and work boots. Not the sort of thing you saw someone buried in, that was for sure. It made me wonder where the necromancer was getting bodies to raise from the dead.

  Better get back on task, Colin. I could ponder the mysteries of necromantic body snatching later; right now I had a ghoul to kill. I waited for it to pounce, winding up for a swing by rolling the tip of the club around in circles over my shoulder like a batter at home plate. C’mon, you ugly sack of shit, attack, I thought, picturing its head coming clean off.

  “What are you waiting for? Kill that damn thing!” the guy behind me shouted.

  I didn’t bother looking at him as I replied, preferring instead to keep my eyes on the ghoul. “Oh, I will. Just as soon as he—”

  The thing leapt faster than I anticipated, catching me off guard despite my readiness. That threw my aim off, and I caught it in the chest instead of the head. There was a thunderous impact, and I felt rather than heard ribs crack via tactile feedback from the club. As I followed through, the ghoul flew over the conference table and out a plate glass window that overlooked Sabine Street below. I vaulted the table and swept shards of glass off the sill so I could lean out and see where it had fallen. By the time my eyes adjusted, I caught just a glimpse of a dark figure limping off into the night.