by E. A. Copen
Every lady in the room eyed me when I walked in, sizing me up, trying to decide which inmate I belonged to. The middle-aged woman fixated on me, her expression growing harder. I sat down with my back to the wall and tried to stare back with equal animosity. She didn’t stop staring.
“Laz?”
I looked up into a pair of familiar brown eyes. Patricia Kerrigan’s face was rounder than I remembered, her arms more muscular, but her skin was still pale like she was permanently sick and never got enough sun. Her wrinkles had deepened, too. Thin locks of dark hair hung in curls around her head. She’d tried to make herself look nice.
A little pang of guilt stabbed me in the chest. I stood. When my voice came out, it was small and too high. “Hi, Mom.”
She looked like she was holding back tears as she embraced me. Her hug was as good and strong as I remembered. Some things never change. “Let me look at you,” she said, stepping back. “Could do with a haircut, but you clean up pretty good. Not bad considering the stock, eh?”
“That’s kind of why I’m here.”
She let out a breathy chuckle. “If you’re here to tell me your daddy’s dead, you’re too late. I got that letter this mornin’. You been up to Angola?”
“Went yesterday.” I gestured to the table, and we sat. “Did he ever send you any letters?”
Her hand grasped mine. “Let’s not talk about him. I ain’t seen you in ten years now. God, you look good, son. You got a job? Doing okay?”
I swallowed and stared at her hand on mine. My mind went back to the day that changed everything. Me, on the ground, all curled up while my father kicked me in the ribs and in the head. She grabbed him and tried to pull him away, but he tossed her just like he always did. She called the police, even though she knew she had an active warrant for her arrest. My mother could’ve hidden forever if she didn’t call. She was in her cell because of me.
“Why did you stay with him?” I met my mother’s eyes. “You knew what he was like. I know we left once. Why go back?”
She frowned, the wrinkles growing more shallow. “Baby, you’re old enough to know love is complicated. You can’t help who you love.”
I slid my hand out from under hers.
She closed her eyes and looked away. “Ain’t a day goes by I don’t regret that. But I can’t make up for it. Sure as hell can’t do nothin’ from in here.” She looked back at me, her face blank. “But you didn’t come to see me after all these years for a social visit, now did you? You’re a proper citizen now. Left all this behind you. What is it you really want, son?”
I sighed. “Did Dad send you any letters? Maybe something from the last three weeks?”
Mom pursed her lips and leaned back, clasping her hands atop the table. “Matter of fact, he did. Said you might show up with questions too. Said I should tell you whatever you wanted to know.”
Okay, that was unlike him. My father was a lot of things, but an open book wasn’t one of them. Might as well get straight to the heart of the matter then. “Did he say he was having nightmares? Maybe that something was after him?”
“Your daddy had nightmares all his life.” She crossed her arms. “Said he saw things, sometimes even when he was awake. The only way to make it stop was the drink. You know they put him on medication while he was inside? Called him manic-depressive or something. But he insisted, even in that last letter, what he saw was real.”
“He saw things?” I leaned forward, my skin suddenly crawling. “What kinds of things?”
“Ghosts. Demons. Things that wasn’t there. Depended on the day what he called ’em. Your daddy was a sick man, Laz.” She sighed. “But he did say you’d ask about that. You should check his journal. That’s all I know. Aside from being all apologetic, he didn’t have much else to say to me.” She stared at the tabletop a minute before adding, “I wish I’d wrote him back now.”
Mom and I chatted a little after that, but not about anything serious. She did ask if I’d found a nice girl yet, but I didn’t tell her about Emma. I didn’t tell her about Remy either. If I did, she’d want to meet my daughter, and I didn’t want to bring Remy into a prison. She wouldn’t approve of Emma either. My parents weren’t exactly progressive people.
By the time I left the prison, I was feeling even more down than when I went in. I’d come looking for answers, some insight into why my father did what he did. I had also been hoping to eliminate any link between Emma’s murder-suicide cases and my father, but that that had been a bust too.
The fact that Dad was seeing things worried me. What if he’d had powers too? My magic had to come from somewhere, and Mom was as normal as Norms could get. Necromancy had scared the living hell out of my dad. There would be a good reason for that if it hit close to home.
The one thing I knew now for sure was that I would have to read Dad’s diary, which I’d received when I left Angola. It sat in the box in the back of my car, forgotten. I had meant to take it inside, but I hadn’t even been home yet.
I glanced at the box in the rearview mirror, wedged at an angle behind the passenger seat. He’d expected me to come see Mom. How did he know? Why had he told her to tell me everything? I didn’t want to read my father’s diary, but I wanted answers, and that was the only place I’d find them.
I fished the diary out of the box and held it in front of me. It was a simple, one-subject notebook, the kind with the sewn-in pages instead of a metal spiral. Spirals could be pulled out and fashioned into a deadly weapon. Notebooks weren’t hot commodities in the commissary. Most people went for snacks, which could be traded like currency in the yard, or stamps. If you wanted to write a letter, you’d find the one guy in the cell block who had paper and trade for it. You didn’t waste it keeping a journal, especially if you were functionally illiterate like my dad had been when he was arrested. That was one reason I got so into books. It was the one thing he couldn’t take away from me. But Dad? He wasn’t a reader, let alone a writer. Maybe he’d felt a little introspective in his old age.
From the first page, I knew it would be a hard read. It looked like he’d learned a little more about reading and writing while inside, but his spelling was awful.
I ran my hand over the date in the corner. October 23rd. He’d only started this recently. A month ago. I did my best to work through the spelling and broken grammar, piecing together what I could.
October 27th
Shrink told me last year to write down my thoughts. She was a hard bitch, but I was just thinkin’ the other day she might be right, least when it comes to this. I need someplace to organize my thoughts. That’s not going to be my brain. It’s a mess.
Haven’t been sleeping. Nightmares are back. Meds don’t help. Guards don’t listen. They just yell when I wake up screaming.
Nightmares. There it was again. I tried not to put too much thought into it. Mom had said he’d always had them.
I turned the page.
October 31st
Little Jake told me if I wake him up screaming about monsters again, he’s going to kill me. Not in so many words. But I know what he meant. I asked for sleeping pills. They put me on suicide watch for two days. Just got off. Didn’t sleep, but I pretended to. Monster didn’t come. I’m real tired.
November 2nd
Traded everything I had for coffee. Been shitting my guts out. Doc says lay off the caffeine. Guards confiscated my coffee. I’ll sleep tonight. I’m afraid. Nightmares have been bad the last few weeks. Getting worse.
November 3rd
I saw it! I ain’t no artist, but I described it to Drew and had him draw it on the back of this page. Scared me near to death. I felt it feeding on me. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. I swear, it was looking right back at me.
Guess I should start at the beginning, though. I had a nightmare first. Not just any nightmare neither. It was about that night. What I did to my boy. Except in the dream, Patty didn’t call the cops. I killed him and buried him in the yard with his mutt. (To any pigs reading this
, this isn’t a confession of guilt! Just a dream, and last I checked you can’t put me in solitary for dreaming!)
But even dead, he came back. Like one of those zombies on the TV. And he ate me alive.
When I woke up, it was the bug-eyed freak eating me instead! They’ll want to put me on more meds after this, but I don’t need no meds. I know it’s real.
On the back of the page was a drawing done by a talented artist, someone who’d had a lot of time to practice. And he was good. I recognized the image he’d sketched immediately.
There, in my father’s journal, under the heading Bug-Eyed Freak, was the thing I had seen trying to feed on me the night before.
Chapter Seven
I drove back to New Orleans with the radio off, thinking about what I’d read in Dad’s diary. The monster that had attacked me had also gone after him. Maybe that was why he’d hanged himself. I wouldn’t know more without reading more of the diary, but I didn’t want to keep going. I couldn’t. Just reading that much stung for reasons I couldn’t explain.
It was still early enough in the afternoon when I arrived in New Orleans that I still had time to investigate a little. I wasn’t supposed to meet Emma for another few hours, which meant I had some time to myself, time I spent in the local library with my laptop. Armed with the picture in Dad’s journal, I tried to look up a name for the monster.
After an hour, nothing fit. All kinds of supernatural creatures could supposedly attack people in their sleep and feed on them, but none did what this one did. I found a few obscure vampire-type monsters out of Taiwan and the Philippines, but they didn’t fit either.
Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong, I thought, closing the laptop. I glanced around the library at the other patrons bent over their books. With school out for the holiday, there were plenty of older kids messing around on the computers, playing games. One mom sat with her son, clicking through something and smiling while holding a baby against her shoulder. Another family stood at the book checkout kiosk, making jokes about turkeys.
Watching them, I wondered what my life would’ve been like if I didn’t have my magic. Maybe Dad would’ve straightened himself out eventually. Or Mom would’ve wised up and left him in the dust. What would it be like to sit around a table on Thanksgiving and not have that painful, awkward silence hanging over my head where the air felt like glass? One wrong word, a look in the wrong direction, and the illusion of a happy family would shatter into a living nightmare.
John Holzgrief’s family wasn’t like that. He’d loved his wife and kids. Even though he’d killed them, it was plain as day he cared. A loving father, devoted husband. That didn’t describe my dad or me.
This thing is going to kill again, I thought, watching the father at the kiosk take his daughter’s hand and smile. It could be them next. I have to stop it. I’m the only one who can.
I opened the laptop back up and got to work.
Holzgrief had mentioned a coven he was involved in. Darnell Williams was dead, and so was John Holzgrief, but this Tim guy hadn’t shown up in the morgue yet. Maybe he knew something. But finding a single Tim or Timothy without a last name in a city the size of New Orleans was impossible. I’d need more than that to go on. Dammit, I should’ve asked Holzgrief for a last name. Maybe I could find out from the witches in the Quarter. Holzgrief had said they didn’t like him and his coven. That was the whole reason they’d formed their own.
The only witch contact I had in the Quarter was Sybille, and after my adventure with Josiah, I wasn’t sure she’d still talk to me. Something he’d done had made her uncomfortable enough to bow out, and we hadn’t spoken since. With Pony gone, she might be even more upset with me. The two were on-and-off lovers. If I explained what’d happened, maybe she’d listen, but I wasn’t going to risk going in the back way. I’d have to go in as a customer.
I checked the time. Her shop was open for another hour. If I hurried over, I could catch her, and she’d never turn away a paying customer. I just had to think of something to buy from the old witch.
I packed up my laptop and walked out to my car only to find a tall, thin black man in a tailored suit leaning against it. His skull cane rested on the pavement in front of him, and his top hat was pulled down just enough to hide his eyes. It drew him stares from the passersby, but Baron Samedi’d never cared much for what people thought of him. As the Loa of the dead, he had no reason to fear the opinions of the living. Except for me.
I was surprised to see him after our last conversation. Though I technically worked for him as the Pale Horseman, I’d told him in no uncertain terms not to bother me. The part he played in Lydia’s death and the subsequent cover-up meant I had nothing nice to say to him. If there was one thing my mom did right, it was to teach me to keep my trap shut if I didn’t have anything nice to say.
“Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any,” I called once I got close. “Unless it’s Girl Scout Cookies. Those are my weakness.”
The corner of his lip quirked up, but he didn’t raise his head. “Samoas or Thin Mints?”
“They’ve got s’mores cookies now. I’ve got a thing for marshmallowy goodness.” I stopped a few feet away, the laptop bag slung over my shoulder. “What do you want? Thought I told you to piss off.”
He lifted his head. “Language, Lazarus. We’re still on library grounds here.”
“Quit avoiding the question. What do you want, Samedi?”
The Baron leaned forward on his cane. “I came to remind you of something you’ve forgotten.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “And that would be?”
“Your duties as a Horseman.”
“I know what my job is.” I shouldered past him to unlock the passenger door. “Last I checked, I was doing it just fine. What did I miss now? Another god throwing a fit? One of the faerie queens sneeze on someone else’s caviar?”
“Some of the Titans have escaped their prison in Hades.”
I froze. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard anything about Titans. I’d had to deal with them on my trip through Hell to get Emma’s soul back. At each gate, I’d needed a key and the blood of a Titan to pass. At the first gate, I’d had to let the Titan, Fenrir, free. Just one Titan running around was bad news, but multiple? That was bad. Apocalypse-level bad. At least I’d gotten Fenrir to promise not to kill any humans, not that his promise was binding or anything.
I didn’t know a ton about the real Titans, but in myth, they were the precursor to the Olympian gods. Zeus and company fought against them for a long time without a clear winner until one Titan, Zeus’ mother Rhea, turned on her own kind and helped the gods win. If the gods couldn’t take them out, I didn’t know how I was supposed to do anything.
I left the key in the car door and turned around to face the Baron. “Which ones?”
“Hades is still assessing the damage. No one knew the walls of Tartarus had been breached until recently, but he theorizes it must’ve happened a few weeks ago, about the time you went on your fool’s errand to rescue Emma Knight from Hell.”
“Hey, I didn’t even go near Tartarus,” I said, jamming a thumb into my chest. “I was a little busy fighting a Kraken and killing Poseidon to save Persephone to go all the way over there. You can’t pin that on me. You want to blame someone? Look at Loki. He’s the one who set up Poseidon’s invasion into Hades.”
The Baron sighed and rubbed the bridge of his long nose. “Whoever’s fault it is, this is a situation that needs to be remedied. The gods have assembled a task force to search for and round up the missing Titans by any means necessary.”
I opened the car door and put my laptop in the seat. “What’s that got to do with me? You don’t think one of them is loose in New Orleans, do you?”
Samedi’s bottom lip stuck out as he considered it. “It’s difficult to say. Titans are not like gods. They’re older, more dangerous. They can’t be harmed by magic, and they won’t have souls for you to simply pull out. They may, however, be drawn to powerf
ul magic, such as the mantle of the Horseman. I came to warn you. Now that it’s done, I’ll be on my way.” He tilted his hat back, struck his cane on the blacktop, and strode away.
A thought occurred to me, one that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I reached into the laptop bag and pulled out my dad’s journal. “Hey, Samedi.”
He paused and took his time turning around, placing his cane out in front of him in a dramatic fashion. “Yes?”
I opened the journal and showed him the drawing. “Any idea what this is?”
The Baron’s eyes widened. In a blur of movement, he appeared in front of me and forced the book closed. “Where did you see that?” he hissed.
“Last night, and apparently I’m not the only one. There’s a body in the morgue of a guy who saw this thing every night for weeks before he went crazy and killed his family. When he was done, he hung himself. This journal belonged to my father. He hung himself in Angola a few days ago.”
“And you say you’ve seen it? Are you certain?”
I nodded.
He removed his hat and fanned himself a moment, staring at the closed book as if it would bite him.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” I waved the book in his face. “Tell me.”
“I…” He trailed off, staring at the journal intently. “I’ll be right back.” Baron Samedi disappeared in a puff of purple smoke that left me choking.
Son of a bitch! He did know, and he ran before telling me.
I waved away the smoke and cracked open the book for another glance at the horrible creature my father’s prison friend had drawn. There had been fear in Samedi’s eyes when he looked at that thing. What kind of monster scared Baron Samedi? If he feared it, then I was screwed.
Something vibrated in my pocket, and I let out a yelp. Stupid phone. I’d forgotten to take it off of vibrate when I left the library. I juggled the journal to my other hand and fished it out. Emma’s face smiled at me on the screen. “Hello, officer,” I answered. “Please arrest me.”