by Chloe Garner
“I’ve seen her work,” Sam said. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“And I don’t?”
“Are you being difficult just to be difficult?” Jason asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Neither of you seem to be taking this seriously enough.”
“She’s just scouting,” Sam said, even though he knew it wasn’t true. She was interrogating the wraiths as he spoke, posing as some form of authority. And it made him want to grin. Samantha caught him in the lie and scolded him without knowing what it had been about.
Caroline sat back against the seat and crossed her arms. Sam glanced at her, feeling like he was on the wrong side of something.
“It’s like you’ve never been up against wraiths before. They’re smart and they’re mean. I can’t believe we’re just sitting in here.”
He thought of Annie, the sweet girl in New Orleans who had cried at the idea of being a wraith. Whom Samantha had cried over.
Samantha had finished her interrogation and was walking briskly out of the hospital. On the main floor, more people greeted her without seeing her, and then she hit the front doors.
“See?” Jason asked. “All in one piece.”
She walked across the parking lot and got in behind Sam.
“Five of them at least,” she said. “Cagey as drug addicts. Teeth are beginning to rot out on a couple of them. Mangy skin on the lot.”
“You saw their teeth?” Caroline asked.
“I inspected the morgue,” Samantha said.
“You…”
Jason crowed.
“That’s my girl,” he said. Something was bothering Samantha. Sam twisted in his seat as Jason drove.
“What’s wrong?”
She rolled her tongue along her back teeth.
“I don’t think these are the ones we’re looking for,” she said. He frowned. There was a line here they hadn’t really decided on yet. He tried not to look at Caroline.
“How do you know?” Jason asked. She kept Sam’s eye, only half-seeing him.
“Just a feeling. Too nervous. Too degraded.”
“You guys are hunting specific wraiths?” Caroline asked.
“A specific line of them,” Samantha said. “I think they’re stronger than normal wraiths.”
Sam tried to remember if she had ever used the word ‘wraiths’ before.
“Doesn’t change anything,” Jason said. “We still need to get in and get them.”
“I did a pretty good search. I don’t think they’re sleeping at the morgue,” Samantha said.
“Any warrants served at residences?” Jason asked. Sam nodded. He had the addresses in his phone.
“Two,” he said. “Two of them are brothers; the other warrant was only for one person at a house across the street.”
“You don’t get a job like that looking like a wraith,” Jason said. “Who’s hiring them?”
“One of the brothers runs the department,” Sam said. “Has for the last thirty years.”
“With a steady supply of organs, they won’t age at all, and he might have been healthier when he took the job. You know where he came from before that?” Samantha asked.
“I’ll have to look.”
“Does it matter?” Caroline asked. Jason scratched his chin.
“Fair question. Does it? We hit the houses, take them out, back on the road before midnight, maybe stay over in New York a few nights.”
“What’s in New York?” Caroline asked.
“I have some friends there,” Samantha said.
“A few days there could be fun,” Caroline said. “I’ve never really seen the city.”
Samantha pushed down a defensive reaction. He could sympathize. The idea of spending two days trying not to tip Caroline off about how far Samantha was from a Ranger was tough; spending the time not thinking about what their last trip had been like would be something akin to torture. He thought about the coat room under the demon dance hall and licked his lips, uncomfortable to have Samantha and Caroline sitting next to each other in the back seat. Samantha mentally growled at him.
“That’s two votes,” Jason said. “All in favor of staking out wraith central and ending this tonight?”
“How do wraiths get jobs?” Samantha asked.
“Sam?” Jason asked.
“I don’t know. We may not know where all of them live. What if they tip off the others?”
“We count the bodies at the end of the night and if we have any missing, we go looking. Same risk of them tipping each other off either way,” Jason said. “That’s three in favor.”
“Wait,” Sam said. Jason grinned.
“Even numbers. I’m back to changing your vote for you,” Jason said. Sam sighed. He had almost forgotten that tactic. He pulled out his phone and pulled up a map, setting it out for Jason.
“What, you think I’m going without lunch?” Jason asked. “Food first. Food always first.”
<><><>
They sat down the street from the pair of houses. Samantha dozed on and off, waking in a mental frenzy that startled Sam each time. Caroline and Jason tried to carry a conversation for a while, then abandoned it. Jason turned on the radio and they sat, counting time.
The sun began to set and the sky lit up orange as four cars pulled into the driveways of the two houses. Sam counted five heads. They waited another thirty minutes, then Jason looked over his shoulder.
“Ready to go in?”
Samantha sharpened, coming back from wherever she had been.
“Let’s go,” Caroline said. Sam got out and went to the back to get his bag. Jason got his duffel and Samantha hefted her backpack. Caroline didn’t get any extra tools. She looked at the three of them.
“Okay, so maybe you do take this seriously. Just shoot em in the head, right?”
“Shotgun,” Jason said, slinging his duffel over his shoulder. “They call the police around here if they see you walking down the street with one.”
Sam looked at Caroline and she grinned at him, then looked at Samantha as Jason locked the car.
“What about you? How could you possibly need that much stuff?”
Samantha was half-focused on the houses in front of them and half vacant.
“What if they keep a grizzly bear as a guard dog?” she asked. Caroline snorted.
“Okay, I might not be able to take one of them down,” she said. “What would you do?”
“Hatchet to chest, crow bar as forearm shield, around, down, up, hunting knife to brain, draw machete to take on lion.”
“Lion.”
“There’s a tiger in this story somewhere, isn’t there?” Jason asked. Samantha hadn’t looked at either one of them. Sam had no idea where the words were coming from as she walked.
“No tiger. Blood demon, steel bullets, power demon, Byzantium, titanium edge on Wrath. Power demon, Hanging Metric, holy water crossbow finished with lilac hybrid to eyes.”
“This is gibberish, right?” Caroline asked. “Either that or I’m having a stroke.”
“Sam,” Sam said. She pulled her two halves back together and stopped walking for a second.
“Sorry,” she said. “Thinking out loud.”
“I doubt wraiths have demon body guards, but kudos for being prepared,” Jason said. Samantha looked back at the house.
“Or I could just use Lahn,” she said. Caroline looked at Sam and he shrugged.
“It’s not supposed to make sense.”
“Are you sure she’s okay for this?” she asked.
“If Sam’s not up for this, none of us are,” Jason said, but Sam wondered if he meant it. Samantha, at least, was confident. Her focus was unwavering, and she was sharp. She just wasn’t up for dealing with people. He knew the feeling.
They went to the back door of the house that the brothers shared and Jason picked the lock, opening the door and taking a step back. Samantha looked at Sam and put her hand to the small of her back. He thought about it, then shook his head. Not this t
ime. Too much to explain. She nodded and drew her hatchet and her machete over her head from the backpack and watched Jason.
Jason started the count, nodding… one, two…
Caroline walked through the door, soles of her shoes making solid clicking noises on the hard floor. Jason dropped his head toward his chest and they followed, sweeping the downstairs in pairs and meeting at the stairs. Jason motioned that Sam and Caroline should stay downstairs and that he would follow Samantha up. Caroline frowned, but silently agreed. Sam held his gun down at alert, listening hard. The house offered up no noises to hint at where the two brothers had gone.
Caroline waited maybe ten seconds, then started a second sweep of the downstairs. Sam moved to do what he could to keep her in sight and keep the bottom of the stairs where he could see them. She started looking under tables and behind bookcases for anything that was out of place. Sam listened hard upstairs, both to what his ears could tell him and to what Samantha was sending him. The upstairs seemed to be empty, as well, but Jason found an attic. Samantha was on the same high alert Sam was, strained with listening and reacting, but she was more comfortable with just Jason. She counted out the attic door with Jason and turned into it, finding satisfaction.
There was a series of thumps and what might have been voices and Caroline brushed past Sam to go upstairs. He hissed at her, but she ignored him. He looked around the downstairs once more and then followed her up. By the time he found her off of one of the bedrooms, it appeared it was over. Caroline was standing outside of the attic next to Jason, looking in at Samantha where she stood over a pair of decapitated bodies. Samantha was looking to her right, further into the attic.
“Look, no offense, but you don’t use a machete on wraiths,” Caroline said. “You let them get too close. You should shoot them.”
“We’ve got another house to go,” Jason said. “The neighbors are a hundred feet away. Police would be here before I got the door open across the street.”
“So?” Caroline asked. “You kick it down and you get the job done, then you get out of there.”
Samantha cleaned the blade of the machete off on one man’s shirt and came to stand next to Sam.
“You were sure?” he asked.
“O’na Anu’dd is here,” Samantha said. Sam wished he could see the angel. He was jealous that Jason had gotten to meet him.
“All that means is that they died, right?” he asked. Samantha’s face shifted. Grim humor.
“He was waiting outside the door for me,” she said. “He isn’t supposed to interfere, but he’s been waiting for them. They make him so angry.”
“Sam? What do you think?” Caroline asked. Sam looked up, startled.
“Sorry, what?”
Jason slapped him on the chest on the way by.
“Never go hunting with your girlfriend,” he said. “Heartache waiting to happen.”
Caroline looked livid. Samantha was trying to communicate with the angel without speaking. He motioned to the door.
“Let’s go clear out the other house,” he said.
“For as long as we waited here, there’s no way they’re still there,” Caroline said. “With four of us, this should have taken twenty-five seconds. In. Out. Next door. Let the police figure out the bodies.”
Sam gritted his teeth, vowing that this would be the last time he tried to mix Caroline into work.
“Let’s just get it done,” he said.
“That’s what I’m saying,” she said as he followed her down the hallway. Jason was at the front door, looking up and down the street.
“One at a time,” he said. “Don’t want neighbors noticing us. I’ll meet you at the back door over there.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Caroline said, walking out the front door and across the street.
“Sam, what’s she doing?” Jason asked, pausing in the doorway.
“Not a clue,” Sam said.
“And where’s your girlfriend?” Jason asked. Sam frowned. “The one we can actually rely on?”
“Sam’s up talking to O’na Anu’dd,” Sam said.
“Can you tell her we need her?” Jason asked, bolting as the sound of shattering wood echoed across the street. Sam gave Samantha a sharp tug and she answered at full speed.
“This isn’t right,” she said.
“What isn’t?” he asked.
“He’s too angry,” she said, pausing just for a moment, then shaking her head. “This isn’t right.”
She ran across the street, dropping her backpack at the front door and drawing Lahn. Sam paused behind her in the doorway. The downstairs, what was visible from the door, was empty.
“Where’d they go?” he asked. Samantha shook her head. She held Lahn out in front of her, away from her body, eyes jumping around in her odd way of taking in a space, and she nodded toward the staircase.
“Up?” she asked. They listened, and Sam nodded quickly when he heard footsteps above them.
“Let’s go.”
They slid quickly up the staircase, pausing at the top. Jason was standing in the hallway at one end and Caroline was at the other. Jason looked angry. Caroline was throwing open doors. She opened the last one and went into the room and Sam ran to follow as she opened fire.
Four shots.
One.
Two, three.
Four.
The sounds of angry people scrambling for escape, throats, feet, hands, then the sound of them collapsing to the ground. Jason pushed past Sam into the room, but they were all down. Caroline tucked her gun away again and pushed past them.
“I’m going to finish the house, then we should go,” she said.
“Sam checked to make sure they were the two guys she had already ID’ed,” Jason said.
“Let me look,” Samantha said, putting her hand on Jason’s arm to move him to one side. The shutters on the windows in the room were closed, and only the weakest of bluish light from the streetlight outside made it through. She turned one and then another of the bodies, then stood over the third.
“It’s them,” she said. “That’s all five of them.”
“And they were all wraiths?” Sam asked.
She looked over the bed and smiled bitterly.
“Hello, friend,” she said. She paused, then nodded. “Yes, my friend. I know.”
“What did he say?” Jason asked.
“That their hearts stopped beating long ago,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Sam asked.
“It’s supposed to make her feel better about killing them,” Jason said. She was frowning. Harder and harder. She turned to Sam.
“Get downstairs. Now.”
They were halfway down the staircase when they heard Caroline scream.
<><><>
Jason looked around the room, mind desperately trying to figure out how to do damage control.
They hadn’t been much more than zombies, the basement full of remainder wraiths. The problem was that Caroline had gone downstairs in the dark, not expecting to find anything. They were all dead, not even hard kills, but he stood over Caroline’s body, torn between being Sam’s brother and being a Ranger. He didn’t know where Samantha even was.
He felt sick and numb and wanted more than anything to ignore reality. Run away. Sam sat on the stairs, unmoving, eyes fixed on Caroline.
Gunshots. Neighbors. Police. Jason shook himself and picked Caroline up. There was a blood mark on the cement in the shape of her body, but he didn’t have time to take care of that. He carried her over to Sam.
“Get up,” he said. Sam looked up at him, face empty. “Get up,” he said again. Sam obeyed. “Go upstairs.”
He followed his brother up the stairs and walked him to the back door. He saw Samantha standing at the front door wearing her backpack and cleaning Lahn. She was just as gone as Sam was. He forced himself to think clearly. Bodies. He had to take care of the bodies. He looked hard at Sam.
“Sam.” His brother looked at him, reaching for
a lifeline. Jason gave him Caroline. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Stay here.”
He walked back to the staircase to the basement and Samantha handed him a container.
“Gasoline,” she said.
“Thank you.”
He went downstairs and poured the gasoline over the tallest pile of bodies and lit it, then ran back upstairs. Not enough time. Not enough time to react. Samantha was gone when he got upstairs. He stuck his head out the door to find her walking down the far sidewalk. Okay. One out. He went to the back door and unlocked it. Sam simply stood.
“Jason,” Sam said.
“I know, Sam,” Jason said. He led Sam outside and took Caroline, careful not to look at her. He swallowed, then cleared his throat. “Go that way,” he said, motioning with his head. “I’ll pick you up. Just walk. Okay?”
“Jason,” Sam said again.
“I know.”
Lights were on up and down the street. He couldn’t carry Caroline back to the Cruiser now without someone noticing. He paused, wondering if he should have left her in the basement, but angrily dismissed the thought. He wouldn’t do it to Sam, so he wouldn’t do it to Caroline. Out of the question. He darted back to a large stand of bushes in the back yard, buying time. At least no one had come out of their house to see what was happening. Call the police, lock your doors. He figured it was a good guess the wraiths hadn’t had friends on the street.
He had to figure out how to get Caroline over the four-foot wire fence around the house. To the back, there were a few adjacent yards that he could use to get down the block a ways, then maybe he could find a place to hide and wait for the chaos to die down. The house to the back didn’t have lights on. He lifted Caroline over the fence and dropped her feet, holding her shoulders up with one hand as he crawled over the fence himself, snagging on the wires and nearly falling onto her. If he could keep her just another payload…
The light caught her face as her body dropped and he looked away, closing his eyes. He picked her up again and carried her the length of the three yards, then sat against a fence behind an evergreen, looking around, trying to figure out what next.
“Give me your keys,” Samantha whispered. His hand was on his gun before he processed that it was her. He frowned when he realized that her hand was on the back of his, holding his gun in his belt. “Give me your keys.”