King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Joseph Nassise

  Dmitri turned his shovel-shaped head in my direction and grunted something.

  Having no idea what he’d just said, one roar sounding pretty much like the next, I just stared at him blankly.

  Another growl, a quick sensation of movement, and before I had time to look away, Dmitri was back in human form, standing in front of me completely naked and seemingly not bothered by it at all.

  Catching a glimpse of what he was carrying around with him, I could understand why.

  Some guys just get all the luck.

  He walked over to Denise’s car, a black Dodge Charger we’d borrowed for the evening’s activities, and pulled on the extra set of clothes that he’d brought along for that purpose. I got in the passenger side, he slid in behind the wheel, and we took off in a spray of dirt and gravel.

  Dmitri drove for a few blocks and then pulled into the parking lot of an all-night diner, finding a spot beneath one of the few streetlamps illuminating the lot.

  “Give ’em here,” he said.

  I passed him the envelope containing the fake IDs.

  Besides limiting my vision, the Preacher’s ritual had also robbed me of my ability to see photographs or paintings of any kind. I could see the spot on the IDs where the images were supposed to be, but the images themselves were just flat black squares, making it impossible for me to judge how well the passports and driver’s licenses had turned out.

  Dmitri looked them over for a few minutes, even going so far as to hold them up to the light one at a time and turn them this way and that, before dropping them back into the envelope.

  “Good enough, I think,” he said, passing the envelope back to me, and I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. If we’d gone through all this trouble only to end up with useless junk …

  But we hadn’t and that was good. Really good. Having the IDs would at least provide us some small measure of protection, allow us to do simple things that other people took for granted, like cashing a paycheck or signing a long-term lease on a piece of property. Even opening up a bank account or getting a line of credit was now possible, though I didn’t think I’d want to put our IDs up to that level of scrutiny unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Dmitri started the car and pulled out into traffic, while I took out one of the prepaid cell phones we’d been using to communicate with one another and called to let Clearwater know we were on our way home.

  If I’d known what she was going to drag us into less than seventy-two hours later, I might have tossed the phone out the window and told Dmitri to head south at the fastest possible speed, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t.

  2

  CLEARWATER

  Around her, the city burned.

  She ran through the streets, the buildings on either side engulfed in writhing sheets of flame, tongues of green and blue danced with those of red and yellow, evidence of the eldritch energies mixing with the natural ones. The heat pouring off of the fire was intense; even from the middle of the street she could feel it beating against her flesh, sending rivulets of sweat running down her face. Smoke and soot and ash filled the air, limiting her ability to see as she ran, searching for something, though she couldn’t remember who or what it was that she sought. Behind her, lost in the smoke and ash, something searched for her in turn.

  She stumbled forward, looking for a street sign or some other landmark that would give her a better sense of her location, but all such markings seemed to have been removed, if they’d ever existed at all.

  The thing behind her drew closer. She didn’t know how she knew; she just did. The first twinges of panic rose to the surface of her mind, but she fought them back down. Giving in was not an option; the thing behind her would catch her and that would be the end.

  Of everything.

  She couldn’t let that happen!

  The smoke grew thicker, darker, and she was forced to hold her arm over her mouth as she stumbled forward. Her breath was coming in short, sharp gasps as she struggled to draw enough oxygen from the polluted air, but she bravely fought forward.

  Something moved in the ruins to her left and she turned in that direction, eyes straining to make out what it was in the glare of the flames, but it was gone as swiftly as it had come.

  A wailing cry sounded from close behind, just beyond the nearest curtain of smoke, and her heart pounded to hear it.

  Faster! You have to run faster! a voice shouted at her from deep inside her mind.

  She pushed herself, drawing on the last of her reserves. Sweat poured down her face and plastered her hair against her scalp, while her clothing seemed weighted down with falling ash. She dodged wrecked cars and the shattered remains of crumbled homes, racing deeper into the darkness, searching for a way out.

  She didn’t see the jagged crack in the pavement until it was too late. Her foot caught on the edge and she fell, her hands coming up to protect her face as she slid across the harsh surface, leaving flesh and blood in her wake.

  Already an inner voice was shouting at her, Get up! Get Up! Get Up!

  She tried, really tried, but her right leg wouldn’t support her and she fell back to the pavement, crying and screaming in pain and fear. She must have broken her ankle in the fall.

  Unwilling to give in, she used her arms to pull herself forward, dragging her wounded leg behind her.

  That wailing cry sounded again, this time from immediately behind her, and she knew she’d been found. She rolled over, bringing her hands up before her in defense, as she caught a glimpse of something monstrous looming against the darkness of the smoke surrounding them.

  She screamed as the thing descended …

  * * *

  The vision departed as swiftly and as unexpectedly as it had come. In its aftermath, Denise found herself standing before the big bay window in the living room. She was clad in the loose-fitting pajamas she’d pulled on when she went to bed earlier that evening, and she shivered in the cold air. A portion of the window had been fogged over, as if someone had just breathed on it, and the outline of two words were clearly visible on its surface.

  NEW ORLEANS.

  Just seeing the words there made her nervous and so she reached up, intending to wipe them away. Out of sight, out of mind, she thought, rubbing her fingers across the glass, only to recoil in fear when the words did not disappear.

  They couldn’t.

  They were written on the outside of the glass.

  A shiver of arctic cold ran up her spine, and she took a few steps back, unable to tear her gaze away from the letters as they slowly faded from view, seeming to mock her as they did so. Her thoughts raced through all the ways those words could have ended up on the window in front of her, each one more dangerous than the last …

  “Are you okay, Denise?”

  She screamed.

  She couldn’t help it. So great had been her concentration that she hadn’t heard Hunt enter the room behind her. His sudden voice in the silence of the room shocked her almost as much as seeing the words on the window.

  Almost.

  She knew he’d react to her fear and so she quickly turned, waving her hand and intentionally laughing to keep him from learning how upset she actually was.

  “Gaia, Hunt, you startled me!”

  Moonlight spilled in through the windows, letting her see his face. His white eyes seemed to gleam of their own accord in the partial darkness and she wondered, not for the first time, exactly what the ritual he’d undergone had done to him.

  “You looked like something scared you,” he said. “Well, before I did, I mean.”

  She shook her head. “It was nothing—a bad dream, nothing more. I’ll be fine. Your voice just surprised me, that’s all. I didn’t hear you come into the room.”

  He glanced past her to the window but apparently didn’t find anything there to make him suspicious since he turned his attention back to her.

  “You’re sure?” />
  “Yes, of course. Go back to bed. I’m sorry I woke you.”

  Now it was his turn to brush it off. “You didn’t. I was up anyway. Memories, ya know?”

  She did know. She’d been there when the ghost of his daughter Elizabeth had asked him to use his power to release her into whatever it was that came next. It was the glimpse of the man she’d seen in that moment, the one who would have gladly given his life to save that of his little girl, that convinced her to join him when he was forced to flee the city.

  “Really, I’m fine,” she said, and smiled again to show that she meant it.

  Whether he believed her or not, she couldn’t tell, but he said good night, turned, and wandered off back in the direction of his bedroom at the rear of the house.

  She stayed up after Hunt had gone to bed, settling onto the couch and staring out into the night’s darkness, considering her next move. The visions had started two weeks before, and there was no denying the fact that they were coming more regularly now. Each time it was the same: she was trapped in the burning city while magick ran amuck around her and something dark and twisted stalked her through the smoke and flames of the city streets.

  She couldn’t ignore the summons much longer. And there was no doubt about it, that’s what it was—a summons. Gaia needed her assistance again, just as she’d been needed when the fetch and its master had begun slaughtering people in Boston, intent on disrupting the natural order of things. Then, like now, she’d begun having visions, images of her and Hunt and Dmitri wrapped up in their efforts to put a stop to what was to come. Most of those visions came true, as she knew they would. The longer she waited, the more fixed those events became in that future timeline, as if her willingness to act sooner rather than later made a difference to the ultimate outcome. And maybe that was the point. You couldn’t ignore a call from the Earth Mother any more than you could ignore gravity, not if you wanted to continue as a practitioner of the Art, and doing so could have dire consequences.

  So why was she resisting?

  The answer was right there, simply waiting for her to acknowledge it, and this time she did so.

  She was afraid.

  Facing off against the shade of Eldredge and his deadly fetch had nearly killed her and her friends. Going back into battle against the unknown a second time wasn’t high on her list of favorite things right now.

  What if this time they weren’t strong enough?

  No matter how long she sat there, she couldn’t come up with an answer that satisfied her.

  3

  HUNT

  A few days after our adventure in Newark, the weather finally broke, clearing away the gray overcast that seemed to be an ever-present feature of a New Jersey winter and giving us a glimpse of blue sky, with temperatures higher than they’d been for months.

  It was the third week of December and the thermometer was hovering in the low fifties.

  God bless global warming.

  By noon it had turned into a beautiful day.

  Or, at least, it seemed that way to me, though I’d be the first to admit that my viewpoint might have been a little off, given that I’d already consumed a six-pack of a Mexican ale with a name I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce properly when sober, never mind in my current state. I was sitting in a lawn chair at the ocean’s edge, an array of fishing poles stuck in the sand in front of me and a now partly empty beer cooler close at my feet.

  Given his particular line of work, Dmitri knew he might one day have to run, and he’d planned ahead, buying a little place on the Jersey Shore. Why he’d picked Jersey was a mystery to me. I mean, come on, who wants to hide out in New Jersey, for heaven’s sake? Florida, the Bahamas, maybe even Costa Rica, sure, places like that made sense.

  But New Jersey?

  I had to give him credit though, the place he’d chosen was practically ideal, if you ignored the fact it was in Jersey. The town was small, the kind of community where people kept to themselves and didn’t stick their noses into other people’s business. Dmitri’s infrequent comings and goings were met with complete indifference, especially now that it was the middle of December.

  The little house stood in the dunes not far from the water’s edge and from the front porch you could look out at the Atlantic and practically see forever. I’d been doing just that each night for the last several weeks, trying to come to grips with what I’d learned about my daughter’s death and the events that had led me to hiding out like a common fugitive rather than the respected Harvard professor I’d once been.

  Funny how all it takes is one little curveball to turn your world upside down, isn’t it?

  A few newscasts and a little bit of Internet research had let us know that I was currently occupying a spot pretty high up on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. There were half a dozen terrorists ahead of me, but I’d made the top twenty without difficulty. According to the FBI, I was a serial killer known as the Reaper, responsible for a killing spree that stretched from coast to coast and went back ten years or more. In my lighter moments I was amused by it all, but the truth was that if the cops ever got their hands on me it would probably be a long time before I was anywhere but inside a six-by-six cell.

  Dmitri wasn’t on the list, but there was no doubt he was the focus of the same kind of manhunt that I was; hacking into my police file had revealed that he was listed as a known accomplice of mine.

  As far as we knew, neither the police nor the FBI had connected Denise to either of us. It was something we were thankful for, because it meant one of us could still move around freely without worrying about being recognized.

  We weren’t too far from Atlantic City and we were making occasional use of Clearwater’s ability to influence the natural world to win at the craps tables from time to time. Not enough to call attention to ourselves, but enough to keep the heat on and pay the grocery bill. But while Denise was out and about, Dmitri and I were trapped in a beachfront cottage with nothing better to do than watch endless Seinfeld reruns and play cards.

  Trust me. It wasn’t as exciting as it sounds.

  The fishing poles had been Denise’s idea. She had picked them up for us one night after a particularly good run at the tables, and we’d been waiting for more than a week for the freezing rain to stop so we could try them out. Finding the sun out when we’d risen this morning had caused us to start acting like a couple of giddy schoolgirls and it didn’t take us long to stake out a spot at the water’s edge.

  Now, a couple of hours later, we’d moved past mellow and were well on our way to being more than a bit under the influence.

  As a result, neither of us was all that quick on the uptake when Denise showed up.

  She wandered over without our realizing it, and the first we knew she was there was when she said, right out of the blue, “New Orleans.”

  I turned my head and glanced over in her direction, surprised to find her out there with us. I couldn’t see her, the brightness of the midmorning sun rendering me as blind as a cave newt for all practical purposes, but normally I would have at least heard her approach.

  I considered what she’d said and then decided that maybe my ears were playing tricks on me.

  “Come again?” I asked.

  “We need to go to New Orleans.”

  I shook my head. “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do.” She said it slowly, as if talking to an errant child.

  I reached over to my left and nudged the monster dozing in the lawn chair next to mine.

  “Want to go to New Orleans?” I asked him.

  Dmitri grunted. “Leave this lovely weather behind? Are you nuts?”

  I smiled up at Denise, ignoring the glare I felt her leveling in my direction even though I couldn’t see it. “See? New Orleans is a bad idea; even Dmitri thinks so.”

  I snatched a beer out of the cooler to my right and held it up to her. “Pull up a chair and have a cold one instead.”

  My offer was met with silence. I could feel th
e temperature around me drop a good ten degrees beneath the weight of her stare.

  Not good.

  I tried again.

  “Come on, relax, Denise. Sit down and we’ll talk about it, okay?”

  I might as well have been talking to myself for all the good it did.

  Her voice was calm and controlled, but I could hear the strain behind it as she said, “I’m leaving in the morning, with or without the two of you.”

  The sound of her steps as she made her way across the sand told me the discussion was over.

  “Sounds like you managed to piss her off,” Dmitri said. His tone held more than a touch of amusement.

  “You think?” I shot back, but my heart wasn’t in it. A cold feeling was forming in the pit of my stomach. Something was wrong; I could feel it in my bones.

  I started to get up out of my chair and then hesitated. The joking with Dmitri aside, one thing I’d learned to respect in the few months we’d been living together in our little cottage was Clearwater’s temper. She was pretty slow to boil, but when she went off, it was like Krakatoa in full eruption.

  In other words, she was volatile as hell.

  And right now, it seemed like she was on the verge of blowing her top.

  Under the best of circumstances, pissing off a woman was usually not a good idea. Doing so to one who could turn you into a cockroach was even worse.

  “Any idea what that was all about?” I asked Dmitri, my ass half in and half out of the chair beneath me as I wavered in indecision about whether just to let her cool off or to follow her back up to the house in the dunes behind us.

  “Not a clue. But if I were you, I’d go find out.”

  “Turning into a regular Dr. Phil, aren’t you?”

  Snagging the beer from my hand, he replied, “I’m much better looking than Dr. Phil. Besides, somebody’s got to keep the two of you from killing each other.”

  Great.

  I grabbed hold of the guideline that he’d strung for me when we’d first arrived and, with one hand on the rope, followed it back up the beach to the house. It stood a good ten feet off the ground on a raised platform, designed that way in order to provide some protection from the angry Atlantic in the midst of the winter storms. The wooden steps leading up to the front door were smooth beneath my bare feet—worn down by the water, wind, and the passage of time.