by Riley Mason
I felt like the feeling was so strange and alien at the same time. To see my brother was something that was supposed to change something inside of me, instead it felt like it broke something else and added to the pile of wreckage that was already waiting to be fixed or salvaged.
I take another cab back home, I want to be back in my apartment. As far as I know the hounds haven’t been on the hunt and as much as I should be out looking for them, I’m not and have no desire to at all.
Liam stays on my mind all throughout the cab ride, my brother and what I saw I chalk up to supernatural PTSD, it happens at times, less frequently when your drunk but it still shows itself from time to time.
I find I barely pay any attention to the scenery that moves by my window like I always do, actually trying to see the city knowing full well that I see a layer below it that no one else can. It’s not the same. My mind isn’t hunting, it's almost like it's shutting down and I have no desire to fix it anymore. I reach into my bag and grab the orange vile and snap the cap off. One quick look at the cab driver to see that he’s concentrated on the traffic in front of him and I chew at least five or six, I didn’t really count before I put my teeth to work. I can’t tell if I want this feeling gone or I need to nurture it until it can take over me.
As I get into my apartment, closing the door and locking the series of locks that straddle it, I look at my bed but decide that it's not for me right now. I want something there but I can’t quite put my finger to it.
I go to my computer, it’s where things start to make a little sense. I have to check my work email as well. During my off season, I’m a fairly successful researcher. It allows me to work but not devote me to the presence of an office, unfortunately, as simple as a Chaser can live their life, it’s a life that costs money to maintain.
It’s for that reason that I prefer to freelance. It pays almost as well but it also depends on how juicy the information that they want is. Most of my clients know that I can get them anything they want and they pay well to get it. They know I deliver, I have that reputation. If they knew that I hunt the supernatural in my spare time, that my entire life was groomed for that one sole purpose, I doubt the checks would come in. I’d much rather think that they’d have me committed and have a way to dissolve my net worth at the same time to get their money back or at least tie it up in a legal tug-of-war.
My work email has a few pending jobs. I suppose I could get my ass in gear and start to get to work on all of them. There’s nothing that I cherish at times more than a distraction that isn’t sitting patient in a bottle. Nothing is that special and I don't think that it would take me very long to put the dossiers that are being requested together but I decide that just like my bed, this isn’t the night for that. This is a night to try and put my own head together.
I think of the Voodoo setup in the victim’s apartment, the apartment that shouldn’t have existed. I barely knew her but I found myself defending her sanity. As if the scraps that I saw littered throughout her apartment was really enough to draw any real conclusion on the person that she was. I could've been wrong but I doubt that I was. I have a sixth sense when it comes to people that are under the umbrella of a hunt.
I cut out my inbox and turn to what I can find on the standard websites about the mantle that I saw. I pull it up in my phone even though its vivid enough in my memory that I can draw it from that. I suppose I have a photographic memory, at least now in the present. I wish it could serve more a purpose then it does in this life and have done some work in the life before this.
I don’t know a whole lot about Voodoo. Most of what I know has to do with demons and some other obscure occult instances. The hounds have been the biggest ones now for a while. There hasn’t been anything much more. I’ve witnessed a few possessions and overcome some exorcisms but my knowledge about Pagan Voodoo is light at best.
For a moment I think, and then I begin to search beyond the texts of information to people that might be able to put the theory into practice. I come up with a name. There is a man that is based out of NYU that might be some help to me.
Anthony Stark, a tenured professor at NYU that hosts a variety of classes about archeology but he also does some specialized listening sessions. His most recent one that I can see has to do with demons but he has done a few general sessions on the devil in practice and the devil in literature. As far as foremost experts go, he’s the best I’m going to find. I need to speak with him and I need to be sure that he takes this meeting.
Chapter 25
I sit there in the back of the arena listening to the man walk around on stage with different images on a screen that support what he’s talking about. Most of it is literature that I’ve heard of before. The standard texts from ancient Rome that have to do with the Renaissance and how Italians and most people of the world decipher the devil. It’s interesting, it’s always been an area of study that I can get behind because I can see it, it's tangible to me. I wonder how those in the crowd see it knowing that there isn't much evidence proving to a single truth behind those words.
When the speech comes to a close, Stark announces that he will be signing copies of his newest book in the lobby for about an hour. I decided to wait until the crowds get all their joy out of having someone that will never remember their name sign a personalized book to them so that he can close it, smile, and then move on with another flick of his marker on another blank filler page of his book.
I’m impatient but I have a feeling he’s worth the wait, the beliefs of that sixth sense that feels more developed rather than gifted talent. I can tell that he knows what he’s talking about and that there was limited bullshit in what he was lecturing and I ask myself if it’s from some sort of experience. For some reason, I have this instinct that he has a similar past to me, that he’d understand an intimate conversation of my past assuming that I could remember enough to hold that conversation.
As the crowd begins to clear, I walk up to him and hold out my hand. I’m prettier than the other girls, I would never have thought it but I could see it in his face that I roused something inside of him. “Hello,” he says to me, a routine smile on his face, well-practiced but this was more of a private reserve blend.
“Hello Professor Stark,” I say kindly. “I was wondering if I could show you something?” I ask. I know he has no reason to want to indulge me but I can see the hunter in his eyes that he will help me.
I take out my phone and show him the image. “I was wondering if you knew about this?”
I watch as he pulls out his glasses, offers a superficial smile and then holds my phone in the two-handed grip that elderly men tend to do and looks at it, head arched mouth open.
“Where did you get this?” he asks after a few minutes.
“Do you know what it is?” I ask him, curiously.
I stand my ground as he stands. “Come with me,” he says and I follow as he hands me back my phone.
There is a small annex of a room on the other side of the arena, it seems set up and cozy as we enter it. It’s in the dark but he doesn't bother to turn on the lights. The lights from the outside are pouring in through a window at the far end of the room.
“Where did you see that?” he asks again, his voice has lost the luster of public speech.
“An apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, below another apartment beneath a trap door,” I say to him studying the expression that I can see looking back at me. There is anger in there and there is a little bit of fear.
“I need to know the purpose of it,” I insist.
“To summon something,” he says to me.
“To summon what?”
“A wraith,” he says and pauses as he collects words that he normally wouldn’t string together. “A wraith that can take human form.”
“They don't exist,” I tell him.
“Not in the last thousand years of documented supernatural events they haven’t.”
Chapter 26
“But the stand is Voodoo,
I don’t understand,” I say. “Voodoo doesn’t date that far back.”
“That’s because it’s not Voodoo, while it’s made to appear that way. Most religions have piggy backed off one another’s beliefs compounding with what was believed then amended to serve whatever religious purpose a people have set out for. This one for example is actually Babylonian, something that actually was meant to be over and done with in the last millennia.”
I take my phone out and look at it again. “The machete and the cigar?” I ask.
“Sacrifice and a nasty habit,” he says to me. “The piece is more than authentic, there are more than enough Babylonian markings to suggest that its authentic.”
I go to speak but I hear something and I quiet myself. As he goes to speak I quiet him too, holding up my hand and he takes the hint. There is something moving around just outside the doorway.
I turn as the door is kicked in and three men storm into the room. I quickly throw my foot into one of their stomachs and send him back and adjust my weight so that I land even. Another comes at my side I left my knee and lower my elbow, absorb his weight as he tries to come into me grab him by the back of his head with both my hands and drive three knees into him, I hear something snap on the third.
The final one looks at me and a smile skips across his face, there’s a gun in his hand but he doesn’t raise it at me. “You’re a sexy little cunt,” he says to me.
As he runs at me, I bend and throw my knee into his face as my body angles and I hear him fall to the floor before I even right myself back up.
I bend down and grab the weapon off the floor, a Sig Sauer and I snap back the chamber and see a bullet waiting there. An explosion in the distance and then the window at the far end breaks and before I can turn, blood spits into the air out of the chunk that was just ripped from Starks’ shoulder. As he goes down, I catch him.
“Stay low,” I tell him as I wait to try and angle myself to see if I can spot the sniper.
My hand moves to the bullets incision and I apply pressure to it to try and damn the bleeding before his body pushes it all out. I feel around, the bullets still in there, it's going to have to come out and soon but I can’t take him to a hospital, they ask too many questions that I’m not quite prepared to answer.
I look at him, his face is pale, that much is clear through the dark and I can see that milky stain flood into his eyes. “I’m going to get you out of here but I need you to stay conscious,” I tell him and I can see the small tremor that he understands and he’s willing but I know neither of us is too sure that his body is able.
“It’s going to hurt I tell him,” I don’t want to surprise him.
“Already does,” a weak voice replies to me.
I look around again and aim the weapon in the direction that the bullet came from and send back nine shots of my own, it's nearly the full clip, but I figure whoever is hidden behind the scope would have to move to get out of the path. It would take time to readjust to his line and to the wind and range.
After I fire, I pull Stark across the room, drop the gun, grab another gun that’s on the floor that’s heavier than the one that I dropped, bullets are full in the guns belly.
When Stark and I get into the hall, I prop him to his feet and look him in the eye just before my eyes dart over his body, I need to know if there’s an injury besides his shoulder, if there’s blood leaking from anywhere else on his body, he’s close to losing the consciousness that he has. “Where is your car?” I ask him to try and keep him awake.
Chapter 27
I push my hands into his pocket and pull out the keys, unlocking the car, I shoved him in hard and slammed the door behind him.
Running around, the gun out in the open in my hand, I get in the driver seat, start the engine, and move the car.
“Keep your head down,” I say, following my own advice only barely seeing over the dashboard.
The tires are squealing and I’m driving way faster than I should be but I have to get off the property, I don't know where those shots came from and I don't want to find out. I don't think that I was the intended target and part of me thinking that the victim in Hell’s Kitchen was hired to do the work or at the very least convinced to do it. The only truth I know is that someone made this connection the same way I did, someone knew that I found the mantle.
When I’m back on the main streets of the city, I feel like I can slow it down. NYU is filled with police in the surrounding area, no one would take a shot at me not with me this public.
I look at him and I can see that he still has some life inside of him. “Hold your hand there,” I say as I push his old hand to the wound on his shoulder and listen to him moan in pain.
“You have to hold it,” I repeat, my anger getting the better of me, the adrenaline was getting harder to chew back.
There’s a friend of mine that did some work on my injuries, he’s the only name that I can think of. I haven’t seen him in some time now either but I know he understands the need for peace and quiet. I call him. It’s becoming a string of acquaintances.
“Andrew?” I ask.
“Arinna?” he responds.
“I need your help.”
“Figured as much,” he says back to me.
“Where are you?”
“Home,” he said.
“Give me twenty.”
I look at the speedometer and see that I'm barely doing sixty, I look at Stark and I know that he’s not going to be able to hold on for much longer.
I push it, first to seventy and then to eighty until I hit the Westside highway. New Jersey isn’t too far I can make it.
Chapter 28
A tall man named Nasir stands up from where he was propped. A bullet blew in and out of his right shoulder when that bitch had let down cover fire for herself and the old man. He had touched his neck to the com unit that was there and told all of them to fall back to the secondary location.
He was angry and he was pissed. He looked back to where the window was, where he had shot, he should be moving faster, enough bullets were fired to get some attention but even now he couldn't hear any sirens in the distance. The pain at his shoulder seared and he felt like the meat in between the entry and exit wound had seared from the heat of the bullet.
Slowly, he bent down and lifted the weapon as one unit, there wasn't strength enough to break it down back into its casing. Down the building and down the steps, a smile broke out on his face. It wasn’t that he had been shot, he had felt this pain before, a mercenary from Syria, you knew pain and you knew it well like old friends reconciled.
He wanted to know if Gabriel was right about the dead man’s blood. What would it do once it touched the old man’s system and had a chance to mix with the thick red blood that he was actually using.
When the weapon was back in the trunk, he got in the car and opened the glove box, the sirens were coming alive in the distance but he had a few minutes before they would get onto the property, figure out what had happened, and then shut it down, this was more than definitely no one in or out because with all the bullets and collateral damage, they would assume there were bodies.
A syringe came out of a small kit in the glove box and gritting his teeth he shoved it into the bullet hole fighting back the fierce pain that started to choke him as he injected the contents of the syringe into his body and could feel almost like a cream taking the shape of the hole and pushing against the inside of his skin.
The syringe dropped to the floor once it was done, sweat was slick on his face and his hand and arm were shaking. It felt like he had run electricity through himself.
Closing his eyes and containing the pain, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his phone and calling Gabriel.
“Nocturnal,” he said issuing the code word for the mission. “Injection has been reached and the host contaminated.”
“And what about Arinna?” Gabriel asked him.
“No shots executed, three men were taken out.”
“More than likely but contact remains dark, police inbound.”
“That bitch has so many fucking lives,” Gabriel said but Nasir waited. “Her mind is changing, she might start to become a bigger priority. Put out the search, I need her tagged.”
“Will do sir.”
The line went dead and Nasir started the car.
While pulling out, he had his phone still in his hand. From the keypad he dialed *#928736! And hit send.
It didn’t matter if the three of those men were alive or not. They had no history and they had no prints, what they needed now was to be stripped of everything else. The explosion came through as he was leaving the property, he could see the initial red and orange clouds of escaping force. They would have their bodies to find now.
Chapter 29
This friend of mine is actually someone that I met during my day job, in the hours when that career demands me into the public eye for a time. No one really expects to see me dressed down from that world, I know how to put myself together. Eric Sanders is about to see another dose of what my nightlife consists of.
Eric is a medical technician that works and consults with the FBI but owns a private facility just outside the Midtown chaos. He’s a medical examiner, usually, he works with the recently deceased. I know the FBI and NYPD branches have brought him in on a few of their cases for his medical opinion. It’s not unusual for them to go outside of their own payroll loops to find outside medical explanations.
I pull up to the garage, when the security guard sees me, he instantly opens the gate and I pull in. The man basically never once looked at me, he saw the car and he saw the plate and allowed me entry without paying much attention to anything else, had he looked he would've seen the badly bleeding Professor Stark to the right.