Trent moved in closer to the boy whose hands and ankles had been tied down for Trent’s protection while he worked. He continued to let the Latin phrases flow out of his mouth, making sure that at least every few words had something to do tangentially with spirits, energy, or darkness.
As Trent hovered close to the boy’s face, Aethan tracked him with wild eyes, a mix of terror and hatred emanating from them. Trent put his palm on the boy’s forehead and then placed his own forehead right next to that of the child’s. From the parent’s point of view, it must have looked like Trent was uttering a mystical prayer to their child to help banish the evil spirits forever.
In reality, Trent was whispering in Aethan’s ear in perfect English.
“Listen kid,” Trent said, “I know you didn’t mean any harm by any of this at first. Probably just wanted your parents to pay some attention to you instead of everything having to be about your little brother. I get it. But enough is enough, and today is your lucky day! Just follow my lead, and when I say exorcizo te, I want you to flop around a little and let out some rattling breaths kind of like you’re dying. Maybe five in a row. Then I’ll say a few impressive words that you won’t understand. You open your eyes, act dazed and confused, which shouldn’t be that much of a stretch for you, then hug your parents, and get on with your life. You don’t mention what I’m telling you to do right now, and in return, I’ll keep my lips sealed about you making the whole damned thing up. Comprende?”
Trent waited for a reply, but heard none. He snorted and lifted his head from the side of Aethan while continuing his chant. This time, he threw in a few expletives, once again counting on the fact that no one else in the room was fluent in Latin.
After a couple of minutes, Trent started speaking in English.
“I can feel this boy’s pain. His darkness. There has been a great tragedy in this family, and the negative energy from this event still clings to him like pollen on his soul. Aethan has been the prisoner of this negative force, but I am telling this darkness that it has to leave—that it has to move on toward its final resting place, that it can linger here no longer.”
“My God!” the mother cried, unable to keep her silence any longer. “The spirit. Is it my little Bradley? Is he still here?”
Trent did not look at her, but did answer.
“The dark thing inside of Aethan is not your recently departed son, Mrs. Stephenson. It is an unclean spirit that has wedged its way into the void in Aethan’s soul that was exposed when your youngest son passed away. I am telling that force that it has to go now. Do you hear me? It is time for…you…to…go! Exorcizo te!”
Despite his cue, the boy continued to growl and chortle, his eyes filled with defiant anger.
Trent jerked backwards from the boy’s body, like someone had just punched him in the stomach. He slowly stood at his full height, making sure to display some amount of effort in the process.
“This one doesn’t want to leave so easily,” Trent said. “But I will not give up.”
Trent once again knelt next to the boy, his head near the side of the boy’s face, with his other hand pressing down firmly on the boy’s chest.
“Listen, you little shit,” Trent whispered. “I came all the way over here tonight to help your parents and to give you an easy way out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Snap out of your act now, or I’ll give mommy and daddy their money back, tell them I can’t help you, recommend they commit you to an asylum, and fill their heads with so much trash talk about the occult that they won’t let you out of their sight until you’re an adult. So…one…more…time. Five rattling breaths. And make it good.”
Trent raised his head, but kept his hand on the boy’s chest, at first chanting in Latin, but quickly turning to English once again.
“I know you want to stay, spirit. You are afraid of moving on. But you must understand. You no longer have a corporeal body. No flesh. No bones. But this child does, and he deserves a chance to grow up and to live. So, I tell you again. Exorcizo te!”
This time, Aethan started to shake uncontrollably as soon as Trent gave the agreed-upon command. The child bucked and shook against his bonds, the veins in his neck standing out. Trent had to admit that he was impressed. The kid was doing a good job and might even have a future in show business one day.
After a few seconds, with Trent holding Aethan’s chest down the whole time with the palm of his hand, suddenly, the boy exhaled with a dry, raspy noise as if he were dying. After exactly five nearly identical breaths, the boy’s body relaxed, and he started to breath easily again.
Trent removed his hand from the boy’s chest, and slowly, Aethan’s eyes flittered open.
Aethan looked around as if he didn’t know where he was. When he saw his mother and father still standing in the doorway, the kid started to cry. Trent noted that although the performance was still pretty top notch, there were no actual tears in his eyes. The kid would have to work on that if he ever wanted to go pro.
The mother and father looked expectantly at Trent, real tears welling in their eyes. Trent simply nodded, and Aethan’s parents rushed to their son’s side—the mother hugging Aethan furiously, weeping, while the father worked as quickly as he could to undo the bonds that secured Aethan to the bed.
Trent stepped back and enjoyed the heartfelt reunion. A minute later, the father stood and shook Trent’s hand, while the mother threw her arms around his neck and gave him a tight hug.
“I think it’s best if your son rests for a while, and I wouldn’t let him out of the house for a couple of days, for his own safety. There is very little chance that anything else will enter again, but his life force still has to heal from what it’s been through.”
As Trent led the parents out of the room to rest and to take care of payment for his services, Trent looked back at Aethan who was lying on his bed, staring straight at Trent with a scowl. The son mouthed a single word, directed at Trent. As best he could tell, that word was asshole.
Trent closed the door behind him and hurried to join the parents.
“On second thought,” Trent said, “Just to be safe, you’d better keep him in the house for at least a week. And watch closely for any signs of abnormal behavior. I think he should be fine, but there’s no reason to take any unnecessary risks either. I’ll give you my card. Please call me if there are any more problems with Aethan. And of course, there will be no extra charge.”
Chapter 3
THE HUNTER SAT in front of the banks of flat-screen video monitors and clicked back and forth from one view of the underground tunnels to the next.
He was bored, and he was tired of the same type of predictable prey every month.
However, he knew that he had survived this long, not simply by being ruthless, but also by being cautious.
The combination of those two traits was perhaps the greatest lesson he had learned as a boy aside from also learning to hunt as a way of life from his father.
He understood there were inherent dangers to becoming bolder in his selection process. There was a risk involved with expanding his hunt beyond the lost, polluted, and weak outcasts to which the city was more than happy to turn a blind eye.
But he was also concerned that his clients were growing weary of watching the same old show month after month—that they hungered, as did he, for a more interesting contest—for something new.
The city in the sand, the city of sin, was short on many things—water, ethics, even decency—but it never failed to provide a fresher and continually enhanced experience for its visitors.
The Hunter knew that if he didn’t deliver a better game, someone else would.
Occasionally, one of his prey would surprise him, employing true ingenuity and intelligence. But even those who rose above their peers still fell short of providing the level of performance that would please his clients enough to ensure their repeated return.
Humans may have been touted as the most intelligent of animals, but the Hunter had di
scovered that, when hunted, most were no better than any other game animal—scared, irrational, and soon dead.
When he had first seen the young woman with the raven-black hair, he knew that she would be different.
She was intelligent, resourceful, and although a denizen of the city’s underground civilization, she was also fully engaged with the city above.
She would make this month’s hunt special.
But to include her would mean taking some risks, and her disappearance would not go unnoticed.
Taking chances, however, was sometimes unavoidable for a predator.
If the Hunter’s soul had walked in pre-historic times, he would have been an apex hunter—at the top of the food chain with no natural predators.
In today’s world, things were not much different. The planet was overflowing with people whose fate it was to be walked upon, to be used, and to play an insignificant role in the world.
There were also those, although very few, who were destined to rule others and to shape destiny instead of falling victim to it. His father had been such a man in his own small way—at least he had seemed that way when the Hunter had been just a boy, growing up in the wilds of Alaska.
When the Hunter left home as a young man, his father had told him to go into the world and to be a hunter of men and to never be a victim. Before his death, his father had fallen to alcoholism and sometimes to vagrancy, but one thing he had never been was a victim. His father had always made his own way in the world, leading others when they would follow and enforcing his will upon them when they would not.
The Hunter was also such a man, and in five days, on the night of the full moon, he would establish his alpha position in the world that existed beneath Las Vegas once again.
Chapter 4
AFTER ANOTHER troubled night’s sleep, Trent was mostly enjoying the drive to Vegas.
Utah may have been filled with folks who were too religious for his liking, but the state was blessed with beautiful scenery at least.
As he drove his rented white Prius through the winding roads, he took in as much of the surrounding mountains and canyons as possible along the way. Passing through Bryce Canyon, Trent imagined a mythical giant smashing his way through the land, leaving mountains and valleys that looked too magnificent to have occurred by accident.
Instead of being able to enjoy the vistas fully, Trent’s mind kept wandering uncontrollably to Christina and how much he missed her.
Maybe it was because she was the first person he had met who could make him doubt his own sanity. Or maybe it was simply because of the raw and animalistic chemistry they shared. When the two of them were together, it was so intense that he felt like an animal in more ways than one.
In a daze, Trent absently rubbed his shoulder. The bite wound from that night almost a month ago still hadn’t healed. He knew that it was nothing more than a physical reminder of some wild and amazing sex, but he was beginning to get a little worried and was finally debating on whether or not he should get it checked out by a physician.
Even Christina had seemed pretty concerned about it and had apologized repeatedly in grave tones for something that should have amounted to no more than a scar from their lovemaking.
She had even made him promise to contact her if the wound didn’t heal properly.
It was a promise that Trent hadn’t kept.
He knew that if he did get in touch with her, she’d only try to convince him that she had inadvertently passed on to him the Whittier curse and that he was now possessed by one of the animal spirits that haunted the town.
He liked Christina. He more than liked her, even. But he had never been quite sure whether she was completely crazy or whether the isolation that came from living in a remote town year round had just made her and the rest of the townspeople delusional to the point of insanity.
Of course, even though he knew there was nothing genuinely supernatural about any of it, he was still a curious man.
After all, he was a mentalist, and that meant that he possessed the kind of mind that could entertain even the most outlandish of possibilities without ever subscribing to it as fact.
The worst thing about his persistent wound was not that it constantly reminded him of Christina but that it also reminded him of the terrible things he had done that night when he had regressed to deeds almost as horrible as those of the townspeople. He had given into something dark within his own self that night—something primal and animal-like that both fascinated and repulsed him.
Maybe the trauma of the experience had left him a little more damaged inside than he wanted to admit. Something had been awakened inside him—that was for sure. And he knew that one day, he would have to face it head-on and to deal with it.
But not today.
Right now, he just wanted to forget, and the damn bite wound on his shoulder wouldn’t let him.
Suddenly dry mouthed, he reached over and took a swig from his water bottle as he noted several large birds circling something in the distance high overhead.
As he reached the Nevada state line, Trent smiled, and the sunshine warming his face through the window took away his dark thoughts for a brief moment. Utah was indeed beautiful, but there was nowhere like Nevada—and there was no city anywhere like Las Vegas.
It was a town where anything could happen and most things usually did, and he was excited about spending a relaxing week in its embrace.
Chapter 5
WITH THE MIGHTY power of the Prius at his command, it was hardly any time at all before he was passing through the outskirts of Las Vegas.
As he got closer to the strip, Trent noticed the entrance to what looked like several large concrete storm drain tunnels pointed toward the city.
Within another ten minutes, Trent passed the iconic diamond-shaped welcome sign and suddenly was in the middle of downtown Las Vegas. He followed the street, looking for his turnoff as he passed some of the larger hotel casinos that the town had to offer.
As he took in all the people milling along the sidewalks, he could almost sense the action inside the grand hotels, as tourists cashed in their money for chips—ready to bet on anything and everything where they thought they could turn a profit.
Every once in a while Trent was tempted to belly up to a black jack or a poker table, but even though he didn’t mind cashing in on sending away evil spirits when money was short, he could only rarely bring himself to play cards against other people.
Even if he tried not to, Trent couldn’t help memorizing cards and calculating probabilities, and he certainly wasn’t able to turn off his ability to read the faces and the actions of his opponents.
He could clearly see when someone was bluffing, lying, cheating, hopeful, excited, or even telling the truth just by their body movements, the micro expressions on their faces, and any number of other tells that they possessed but of which they weren’t even aware.
He also knew that if he played for any length of time, the casino staff would soon single him out and ban him all together.
So only on rare occasions would he ignore the risk and allow himself a few hours at the dollar tables just to stay in practice. And if he was feeling really adventurous, he would play poker and see if he could help one of the other players win without anyone, including the player himself, being the wiser.
Still, he was always careful to not stay at any one table for too long or to take too much of the casino’s money. People in Vegas took their gambling very seriously, and the hotels didn’t like to lose.
Coming up to his turn, Trent took a left at the street the hotel was on, and after driving just a single block, came to the correct address. He turned into the parking lot and brought the Prius to a stop, his mouth slightly agape as he looked at the hotel’s marquee that read, The Lucky Imp.
In a town where every year yielded something bigger, better, and always brighter, the Lucky Imp seemed like it would be more at home in some small beach town in North Carolina than a block off the Veg
as strip. In fact, if one were to be strict about the definition of a hotel, the Lucky Imp was really more of a motel being that the doors to its rooms opened to the outside—making it much less secure than a real hotel that possessed such modern amenities as interior hallways.
His agent had told him that the owner was looking to bring in more weekday evening business with Trent’s show, and now that Trent saw the place, he understood why.
Unfortunately for Trent, in this town, performing even a block off the main drag was the same as having his show in another country.
Trent exhaled a deep breath as he parked the car.
The gig was only for a week, and when he wasn’t working, at least he could walk over to the strip and enjoy the town. All he had to do was to adjust his expectations a bit, and he was sure he would still have a great week.
The sun was just beginning to set as Trent hauled out his two bags and headed for the lobby. As he entered the hotel, the place was bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside, and it was obvious the owner had done some recent remodeling and modernizing inside.
There was even a nice fountain with some huge koi fish swimming around right before the entrance to the casino. Trent tried not to laugh, but every place in Nevada had a casino. Even the Las Vegas airport was filled with slot machines. Gambling was ubiquitous, and the Lucky Imp was no exception. And because its slot machines were probably programmed to pay out at a slightly higher rate than those on the main drag, the little casino probably saw a decent amount of traffic on weekends at least.
Trent moved up to the front desk and hit the bell once with the palm of his hand.
A young man, maybe in his early twenties and dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans eased his way out of the back room and asked how he could help.
Trent explained who he was and asked to see the stage before he went up to his room.
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