by A. J. Aalto
Batten ducked. I whooped and aimed, reluctant to fire in close quarters. Aston clung to me like a drowning man on a tow line. Another little boggle rushed in, dodged around Batten’s legs and darted straight for my flashlight. Teeth flashed. I swung and missed. Gunther lunged at it, teeth nipping. It fled, howling and screeching into the hall. Another appeared, and another, slashing and biting as they came.
Blind Shale Boggles, covered in dull rocks, were spilling into the room, the ones Nyquist had described in the diner about a million years ago. Batten dodged the claws of a dozen of them. Their coats clicked as they tumbled and lunged. I kicked out at one and it hissed at me around a forked tongue. Gunther darted back and forth, yapping and biting at boggles that pushed in from the mud walls and clung to his fur. I swung the flashlight like a cudgel and felt it impact something with a wet, meaty schlap.
Goblins screeched out of the walls, filling the boil with excitement. Batten was shouting something I couldn’t make out, but I picked up the message clearly enough: we had to get out. Wrapping my arm around Aston’s frail form, I pulled him, wading through the surging multitude of mud-slicked creatures. Claws scratched and rocks clattered. I felt something latch onto my sleeve and flapped my arm, dislodging whatever it was before it could get its teeth into my arm, or worse. The jolt flung the gun out of my hand and it was lost beneath a dozen little grey feet.
Aston shoved me, and in the confusion of grabbing hands, I lost hold of him. He fled into the tunnel, pressing into the throng of biting creatures. Bolting blindly out of the room, I fled the other way, finding a less crowded path.
I grasped my fanny pack against my belly and ran, trying to unzip one-handed as I did so. Grabbing a wad of jerky from the last package, I yelled, “Come on, boggles! I’m the Oprah Winfrey of dried meat over here! You get some jerky, and you get some jerky, and you get some jerky!”
I made it rain with dehydrated bird instead of twenties, and when the boil of boggles and goblins pounced on the offerings, I pelted into the clear end of the hallway in the direction of the shale and the vault, with Batten close behind. I slid around a corner, the mud slick underfoot, banging my shoulder against a shelf and sending it teetering over. Old clay pots shattered on the floor. When I over-corrected, I slammed my hip into a heavy timber post. I leapt over a fallen cask, and dodged a keg.
Something grabbed me by the upper arm and I yelped, trying to pull away, but it was Batten’s cold hand, and when I saw where he was dragging me, I fell into step as fast as I could. When he took the flashlight out of my hand, I let him have it.
He pulled me into the vault and hauled the door shut, dropping the flashlight with a clank. The door made an unholy squeal as it jammed shut under the pressure of Batten’s immortally-powerful yank. He howled in what sounded like either frustration or victory.
It was neither. The sharp tang of burned sugar and seared meat assaulted my nose; the inside of the door had been booby-trapped against revenant shenanigans with silver.
In the hallway outside, rioting creatures scrambled, thumped, and howled. Hopefully, they would give up, rather than tunnel through the walls to get us.
“Shit,” Batten spat, kicking at the door in frustration. He paced in a tight circle, alternatively clutching and then shaking his burnt hands. “Shit, fuck, shit, shit.”
“Seriously, that's the best you can do? I trained you how to swear better than that.” I checked the door with the flashlight to see what had hurt him, and found it festooned with dozens of silver chains strung up on nails, dangling like the world’s drunkest decorator had chaotically flung tinsel at it. On either side of the door, embedded in the mud walls, were massive silver crosses. I swallowed hard.
There was a dull void in the room behind me, at rest but not quite empty, and my worries rose like yesterday's chili burps. The flashlight flickered and I whispered, “Don’t you dare die,” at it as I did a slow, exploratory spin. As it turned out, I was the only thing in the room that required light to see.
The room was designed for keeping revenants in. Specifically, I noted, the silent occupants of two shadow-engulfed tombs at the far end of the space. There was a weird dripping noise, a gurgling sound, and a plink-plink-plink that sounded like a leaky sink. Kegs lined the back wall, stacked up behind the carved stone sarcophagi. I wondered if the kegs were old remnants of Rotten Roy’s rum running business, or if he still smuggled booze in addition to cheese and who knew what else. But that wasn’t quite right, either, and something nagged me about the kegs.
Batten was checking out the door, listening, giving a tentative touch then jerking away. He had jammed the steel door shut, bending the edge of it until it crumpled and bent. For the moment at least, it was okay that we were stuck. Trapped, my brain reminded me. We're trapped between two very heavy dead guys and a bunch of riled-up flesh-eating critters.
Contemplating an escape through a boggle-infested hallway, assuming we could break out before getting drained by the ancient undead, I found myself wishing I smelled as bad as Nyquist. Apparently, the boggles and goblins had ignored the bat-scented geologist. Maybe boggles would ignore fox-scented Marnie? Goblin claws and boggle fists were clattering and banging, scratching at the steel. I had a much clearer vision of how frightened Cordelia Abrams must have been when they tried to grab her. The sound of them squelching and thudding out there was well past unsettling and deep into fucking alarming. Even their feet — paws? — were making awful noises.
I sank to the floor to catch my breath and clear my mind. I still had so many questions, but at least I’d busted the cheese smuggler and sticky-fingered Nyquist. I checked my cell phone — no bars, no service — but I did have a two-minute-old text waiting from Wes that said, Why are you freaking out? What do you need? Are you hurt?
I looked down at my arm and found a gash, and couldn’t remember where it had come from. The shelf? An exposed nail? A boggle’s claws? With all the adrenaline pumping, I’d blocked out the pain, but now I was looking at the wound and felt it throb. I might need stitches and almost certainly tetanus shot if I got out of here alive. I hoped boggles and goblins couldn't carry rabies.
“Well, choke my cherry,” I muttered.
Batten swallowed audibly. When I glanced up, he was moving away from me, shaking his head. “Put pressure on that.”
I searched my pockets, found an old, wadded-up tissue, and pressed it to the wound. I could probably fashion a makeshift bandage out of my fanny pack if I had to. He made a dry, rasping sound like a hiccup. “You okay, Kill-Notch?”
“Cover it, please.” He choked back a wash of hunger that spilled through the House Bond. “What is that smell?”
I got defensive, folding the tissue into a thicker square. The tissue stuck to the blood. “Shut up. I smell fine. Probably a helluva lot better than these two guys.”
“Not you,” he growled. “Smells like honey, almost.”
I lifted my sensitive DaySitter nose to the room. “Beeswax. Candles. Smoke.”
I did another scan of the vault and immediately wished I hadn’t. Batten turned his gaze where I pointed.
The two massive sarcophagi were covered in carved symbols, mostly crosses, but some other runes and characters that I didn’t recognize. There were names cut deeply into the lid of each. The closer one read Alvar Hervi; the one by the far wall only bore the word Sirekan.
“I give you our phantasms. Never heard of those houses, though. Hervi and Sirekan? Wait... Sirekan. Sarokhanian.” I looked up at Batten, who was, to the surprise of absolutely no one, doing the clench-unclench thing with his jaw. I hoped he never did that with his fangs out; snapping a fang probably hurt like hell. “Sirekan. The Lord of Exile, House Sarokhanian’s original Crowned Prince of the Blood. The OG-PoB, you might say.”
I looked at the nearer sarcophagus again. Alvar Hervi. Harvey. (“Name’s Roy Alvin Harvey, at your service.” That smile, so warm. “I’m everybody’s friend.”)
“Son of a bitch,” I said. Rotten Roy’s mak
er, trapped with the Lord of Exile. The nerve, to rename himself after the elder he replaced. I still didn’t know what House Hervi's Talent was, but it seemed clear that Captain Harvey, as Harry called him, had grand ambitions of running it. And if he did, Ghazaros and Zorovar, the eldest active revenants in the region, must have had reasons to allow a loose cannon like Rotten Roy to mutiny, to run wild and unfettered, swinging around his undead balls like that. Could their motives be as simple as greed? Money from an old smuggler doing new tricks? Again, that nagging feeling. I was still missing something. (“You blew nectar all over my walls. Don’t suppose you know what a waste that is?”)
I scrambled to my feet, following my suspicions to the backside of the sarcophagi, dreading what I might see, remembering Wesley’s anger at Harry for bottling his nectar for my selfish, game-playing family. I found exactly what I’d hoped not to: tubes strung through holes in the stone, holes surrounded by silver rings and crosses, and — looking oddly out of place but making too much sense in a place like this — several cans of bug spray and insect repellent. The tubes, full of the darkest indigo revenant nectar I’d ever seen, ran into filters and more tubes, and down through funnels, and finally into giant glass flasks.
“Huh,” I said, examining the lab set up on the floor. “Erlenmeyer flasks. Interesting choice. I’m not sure I would have gone with them, unless you’re doing mixing…” I turned around and studied the kegs on the walls. One was labeled “spiked rum.” Spiked, not spiced. I checked a few more kegs but they were all spiked. Spiked with… I turned back to the sarcophagi. “Oh. Oh, no.”
“Think that again, I’m missing some of it…” Batten said quietly, touching his temple.
“I’ll do you one better,” I said. “This is how it goes. Step one: lull your maker into a false sense of security. Step two: trap said maker and take over the show. Step three: profit.”
“Profit how?”
“By taking over the family business. Smuggling. Aston did it, and Ghaz and Zoro thought it was tight, and copied that shit with help from their bestie, an old rum runner named Rotten Roy. They turned on Aston and let Roy run the back end. Only they didn’t count on Roy being a mixologist of sorts. Roy knew there was much better money to be made if he blended revenant nectar into his goods, and sold that to mortals on the black market.”
“Vamp blood? It’s too fucking risky,” Batten insisted, his disgust clear in his dark eyes. “Too addictive.”
“So’s heroin,” I said with a helpless shrug. “But there's ms-lipotropin instead of methadone to deal with the withdrawal. Ghaz knew that we would figure it out. Saw it coming. He’s a Sarokhanian precog. That’s why he surrendered, probably fled to hide with Harry, hoping for clemency. Zorovar is in the wind, so who the fuck knows where he is now.”
Batten said, “Any of the revs involved with a phantasm injuring humans will be staked.”
“Not clemency from human law, dork,” I said, and it was my turn to roll my eyes. “From the revenant court. Ghaz’s betrayal of his elders is a crime worthy of being sunk in the Arctic in a shipping container, or maybe worse; his only hope is that he gains some forgiveness by stepping forward to be part of the solution. Turning state's witness, or whatever fancy-ass phrase they use in the Bitter Pass.”
“Ghazaros knew we'd end up here, exposing everything,” Batten said.
“I mean, he probably didn’t expect us to end up here like this, all trapped and shit.” I looked around at the room. “If he knew anything about me, he should have, really.”
Batten fell silent, and I was glad I couldn’t read his mind, though it would have been spiffy if he was still a psychic null for me; he Felt terrible. The chill in the room was heavier than just the ambient frigidity shed by a few immortals, but I chalked it up to the environment. By the time the boggles stopped banging against the vault door, my core temperature had fallen to the point where I was shivering non-stop. The dampness didn’t help. Pacing helped a little, so I tried to keep moving. I let the flashlight scan the walls and eventually the ceiling.
What I found was a high crevice with hooks; from each dangled lantern of brass and colored glass. There was faint light coming from half of them, and no two lights were the same. Some were crystalline, like butter yellow snowflakes. Some rolled like liquid mercury in the bottom corner, and when I stepped to the left, the liquid rolled in my direction as if attracted to my presence. Some had fingers or feelers, and floated up against the glass containing them like dandelion fluff caught in a windy corner. Some were flat, others active, fluttering against their prison like moths at a lamp. It took me a long, disbelieving stare before I could fully comprehend what I was looking at.
I tried to point them out to Batten, but my breath caught in the back of my throat, both in horror and in sadness. The Soul Caller’s trophies, not in bodies at all but in lanterns; his collection of victories hung with him in his enforced rest. Aston had imprisoned him, but was this evidence of Aston’s enduring respect for his maker’s legacy? As much as it sickened me, I could see it from that perspective. I hated that I could see it, I didn’t want to see it, but I had no choice. This collection of spirits kept Sirekan reassured that he was safe, kept him placated. Sirekan had lost his freedom, but he hadn't lost everything.
When Batten caught up with the horror I was currently wading through, I Felt the unfiltered whip crack of his fury and heard him say hoarsely, “No.”
“Aston Sarokhanian moved the souls here to keep Sirekan sedated. To soothe him. To trick him into thinking he was still in his home, so he wouldn’t fight the long rest until he was too weak to realize anything was wrong. By then, the traitors had the silver chains and the big crosses installed. Sirekan was helpless.”
Batten shed his chain-mail gloves and dropped them like a snake leaving an old skin behind. Stakes slipped from sheaths and clunked on the dusty floor.
“Hey, what the ever-loving fuck, man? I frisked you for weapons.”
“You suck at frisking.”
“What are you doing?” My question received only the answer of miserable silence. I kicked his boot tip, hoping to stir him back to frustration; an angry Batten was a useful weapon, or at the very least better company.
“We’re not done. We’re not giving up. You’re not giving up,” I told him firmly. “Kill-Notch Batten doesn’t give up.”
“Maybe I should have.” He sat down hard, staring forlornly at nothing. “I’ve been chasing a ghost.”
Thirty-Seven
Finally processing what Aston had told him, Batten struggled with vocalizing his pain, but I Felt it through the house Bond. “He’s been gone for years.”
“But you’re still here.” I moved into a crouch beside him, longing to touch him, uncertain that I should.
“No. I’m dead. I’m a dead man. I died for this.”
I didn’t know what to say. I unzipped my fanny pack. “Turkey jerky?”
He stared at me in disbelief. “Do you honestly think food is going to make me feel better?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that; food always, always made me feel better. It was my go-to. I truly thought it was everyone’s go-to. Why else would they call mac and cheese “comfort food?”
He was quiet again for so long that I started to get really worried. Then he laid his head back, avoiding any silver. “I became one of them for this, Marnie.”
This was not the time to remind him that I had been firmly in the don’t-die-for-this camp. He always took too much joy in pointing out my mistakes, so it was super hard not to agree that his decision had been reckless as fuck, not to mention hurtful to everyone around him. I’d do that later, in my bathroom mirror, where I could snarl it alone and not be a dick about it. I thought about how often Harry Felt exhausted by immortality, how bored he got, how lost he seemed some nights. Harry enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle thanks to the wealth built by years of shady business, but probably that behavior wouldn’t cajole Batten out of his despair.
“Babe,” he
said, shaking his head, “what the hell do I do now?”
“You start over,” I told him, reaching out to tentatively rest one hand on his knee. “You get to decide what you’re going to do next.”
“Next? I don't know anything about living like this.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at what was lurking next to us, albeit unconscious.
The good news is, you have a long, long time to figure it out. I patted his knee. “Listen. You didn’t just go into law enforcement to track Aston and stake revenants. You helped people. Even when you’re being a total prick, you’re saving lives. You’re like a superhero, but without a pulse or people skills.” I showed him my brightest smile. “You’re like… if Dracula bit Superman, and the yellow sun of the Earth made Undead Superman kinda hot but a total jackass.”
He swung his unholy, glittering gaze at me and said flatly, “I feel so much better now.”
I nodded for him. “Always here for ya, Hunkypants. Now, put your gloves back on, because you’re not finished. We’re not finished.”
Batten stared at me for so long that I felt awkward and had to look away. I nibbled some jerky to keep from talking.
Finally, he nodded. “Okay. What was your plan?”
I pinched my lips closed and stared at his chest, because sometimes that helps me think.
Batten said, “You didn’t have a plan,” not so much a question as it was a breathy expression of dismay.
“Not true!” I cried. “The plan was to come here and find out.”
“Find out…?”
“What’s going on,” I said, forcing a pleased smile. Point: Marnie? “So, yeah, plan executed perfectly. We know what’s going on. See? Look.” I motioned to the tombs and back past the door where we found Aston. He still looked unimpressed so I slowed down. “Underground vault, revs smuggling old nectar mixed with rum for black market whoopee-times, Rum Runner and Zoro in cahoots. Old dudes trapped, gross soul lanterns, unintentional phantasm disorder — that’s what I’m gonna call it in my paper — and, drum roll please, mystery solved.”