Shadow Hunter: A Joseph Hunter Novel: Book 2 (Joseph Hunter Series)

by Alex Gates

  I’ll start my description of her with two words—Daenerys Targaryen. She had solid-white hair. And for a mentally unhinged woman living like a hermit in the woods, she was just as attractive as the dragon queen with way too many names—though that’s where the similarities ended. I doubted she’d washed any part of her body in, I would venture to say, oh, a lifetime. Her odor reached me from ten yards away. She wore this crazy dress that looked like a potato sack, and as she neared, I became more and more convinced that it was a potato sack. She was literally wearing a burlap bag cut with head and arm holes. But, in her defense, she wore it quite well. Also, as she came within peeping distance, I noticed dark circles bruising the skin beneath her red-stained eyes, and I wondered if she’d ever slept in her life.

  “I take it you don’t get many visitors?” I called out as she stepped onto the shore, pausing twenty feet in front of us.

  Xander cocked his head. I nodded at him, urging his thoughts to puzzle together the mystery of my strange question. Comprehension dawned on him and he swung around. He stepped back a few feet and stood beside me. “Easy,” he said, raising his hands.

  “Stick to the trend-setting, Annie. That burlap looks incredible on you. I wouldn’t mind rummaging around for some potatoes, if you know what I mean. Also, the au naturale look is coming back—hairy legs and pits. Hell, Xander here, his wife has a full mustache.”

  “Who are you?” Annabel Nevis asked from behind the stink-eye barrel of her shotgun.

  “Who are we?” I asked, pointing at myself. “Who are you coming at us with a shotgun on public land? Do you always treat strangers walking the shore to some birdshot?”

  “This is private property,” she said. “Did you not read the signs?”

  “I try my hardest not to read anything. It makes my head hurt—and when is pain ever healthy? The answer is never. So, reading is unhealthy. And like this guy says,” I nudged Xander’s arm, “my body is God’s temple.”

  “Ms. Nevis,” Xander said, attempting to salvage the encounter. He raised his hands to appear nonthreatening. “I’m Agent Alexander Shells. I work for Mather Investigative Services. We specialize in supernatural incidents that traditional law enforcement agencies refuse to listen to or accept as truth.”

  “And I’m Joseph Labrador Hunter,” I said. “Though Labrador isn’t my real middle name. I specialize in losing everything and everyone I ever loved to a tragic, horrible death. I also enjoy long, moonlit walks on the beach and hardcore bondage in the bedroom.”

  Xander took another careful step forward. “Ms. Nevis,” he said, “I found a record of the conversation you had with the PPD. They laughed at you, and over the past decade, their laughter has echoed in the form of hundreds of lives lost to the monster that killed your brother.”

  “Echoed in the form of?” I asked him. “What does that even mean?”

  Xander took another step toward her. “I’m here to listen to you. To help you. Can we talk?”

  “How did you find me?” she asked, foregoing manners and keeping the shotgun centered on Xander’s chest. Whipping her head to the side and staring at the nearest tree, she screamed, “Shut up, Andy!”

  I flinched at her sudden outrage toward the tree. My stomach tightened with lead balls of gaseous pain. I should have never ordered the chorizo. They wrecked my stomach every time. “Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?” If I hadn’t felt like I’d just lost a bout with a locomotive, I may have broken out my best Michael Jackson dance.

  “I have access to certain information that led me to you,” Xander said, ignoring her outburst—that in itself was a damn miracle, making me rethink my religious convictions. “You’re not…” Xander meant to say crazy, but he switched the word at the last second, “wrong about what you saw that day. There are things that exist outside our human comprehension. Things that history has written off as myth and legend—not as fact. Annie, I know about that monster that killed your brother. I know what it is. Do you believe that?”

  Annie lowered her weapon a few inches.

  Xander continued, “You abandoned society because they mocked you, because they refused to listen to you. You moved out here, onto the river, to prove them wrong—or maybe to prove yourself wrong. That you’re not losing your mind. That you saw what you saw. That your brother didn’t just drown, that he was really attacked and brutally murdered by a Scylla.”

  “Shut up! You’re wrong! I’m not going to shoot them!” Annabel yelled, shoving her gun’s barrel into the ground. Her eyes never stopped bouncing and moving. She switched to a calm, normal voice, as if she hadn’t just screamed at thin air. “She was like that bad lady from The Little Mermaid. Ursula, I think was her name. Half-octopus, half-human. She wrapped her tentacles around Andy and dragged him beneath the current. I never saw anything more of him, other than the blood that rose to the surface.”

  “Did you ever see her again?” Xander asked. “This octopus woman.”

  “No,” Annie said.

  “Hey, Annie,” I said, stepping forward and scratching my forehead. “Listen, really important question here. What’s your bathroom situation like? I ate this massive chorizo burrito on the way out here, and I’m sorry to say this, but it didn’t settle well. Do you, like… have a hole that’s pre-dug? Should I grab a shovel and dig my own hole? I honestly don’t know if I have that kind of time. And what about the TP situation? You go with smooth rocks, leaves, or sticks? Or do you make monthly trips to the local Walmart and grab the good stuff? I prefer the baby wipes. They’re a little uncomfortable at first—but once you get accustomed to them, game-changer.”

  “Joey,” Xander said, shifting his head to face me. “Not now.”

  My bowels begged to differ, but I didn’t speak up. Annie, like the crazy hermit she was, straight ignored me. Apparently, she could see and hear her dead brother, but I was nothing more than an absent breeze.

  To Xander, she said, “I’ve followed the river for the past decade, looking for any signs of her—searching for places where she could possibly live. Locations deep enough for her to hide from the public eye, but with enough traffic for her to regularly feed.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  Annie stared at the river for a second, then jerked her head to the tree. “I’m going to tell them, Andy!” She smiled at me like a murderous lunatic, and I may have relieved a slight pressure from my bowels in that moment. “I use the river,” she said to me. “It’s awfully cold this time of year, though.”

  Did she mean she used the river as a bathroom? I gagged thinking about her feces and piss streaming down to the recreational areas—about people swimming in that water, stepping in that mud.

  She faced Xander again. “Are you here to kill her?”

  Xander licked his lips and hesitated.

  Remember that globe in Xander’s office that opened the bookshelf to a stairwell that led to a secret prison housing cursed humans? Well, MIS had recently went from executioners to rehabilitators. They hunted cursed humans and tried to reverse the Nephil’s influence on them. So far, they hadn’t had any luck. But I had the feeling that if Xander could have his way, the Scylla would find herself in a padded room with three meals a day and a New Testament Bible to keep her company, instead of floating down the river and staring at the sky with unblinking eyes.

  “I’ll do what needs to be done,” Xander said.

  Annie regarded him, lifting her shotgun. “Sorry, Andy, but I’m showing him everything.” She placed the weapon on her shoulder and turned toward her cabin. Taking a step forward, she called out, “Let’s go inside. It’s warmer. And I’ll show you what we’ve put together.”

  Before following her into the insane asylum, I grabbed Xander’s arm. “Hey. Hey. Hey. We’re not going in that place. She just said ‘we’, like there’s more than one of her crazy asses. And she keeps arguing with someone clearly not there.”

  “We’re going.”

  I stared at the cabin hidden in the trees and shudde
red.

  11

  Xander and Annabel entered her cabin like it was any other kind of house—like she didn’t live in a ten-by-ten space in the middle of nowhere. I stood at the bottom of a single wooden step just outside the open front door. It reminded me of the open cabin door Terry and I had stepped through as kids, twenty years ago. Despite my downhill and outside vantage of the interior, I could see the entirety of her home. It was all contained in a four-walled structure built like a shack. And not the love kind, either.

  Good luck getting that song out of your head, now.

  Inside, she had a cot off to the left, directly opposite the wood-burning stove. Shelves stretched from corner to corner of every wall in stacks of five, holding jars filled with liquids and roots and God knows what else. Breaking the lining of shelves, there was a stocked gun and knife rack, which terrified me even more than the madhouse jars. Don’t get me wrong, I love guns—all guns—but some people just shouldn’t be able to own them. A small window on the wall directly opposite the front door also broke apart the shelving. Light speared into the cabin and illuminated a rectangular stretch of dusty, planked flooring. An off-balance table stood in the center of the cabin, two chairs pushed into it.

  I wondered if she and her imaginary dead brother ate meals together, laughing like two loons in the night.

  I didn’t see any plumbing—no toilets or sinks or showers—let alone running water. I didn’t see any clothes scattered on the floor or hanging from the rafters. No fridge or freezer. No light fixtures or an air conditioning unit. And believe it or not, no Wi-Fi router. How was I supposed to check my fantasy football scores? Also, to Annie’s credit, I didn’t see a boiling cauldron filled with toadstools and the toenails of a rascal, and I didn’t see any broomsticks or black, pointed hats.

  “Please, sit down,” she said to Xander in a completely sane voice, gesturing to the table. “No! You can sit on the cot. He’s our guest.” After her sudden outburst, she fixed her shotgun onto the gun rack and sat on the remaining chair. “The contractor forgot to insulate,“ she glanced at me with soft eyes, “so, it’s usually colder than necessary in here without the door being left wide open.”

  “Joey,” Xander said, glaring at me, “get in here.”

  “I think I’m going to find a hole. See if I can… loosen these burrito cramps.”

  “There’s broth in the stove.” Annabel faced the edge of the room where she’d instructed her brother to sit. “You can share. So what if he eats it all? I’ll make more.” Regarding me again, she said, “It’s great for relieving stomach pains. There’s ginger and homemade apple cider in it.”

  I grimaced, not wanting to know what she’d mistaken for ginger and apples. “Well, the place isn’t very big, so… if there’s an aromatic issue in the next few minutes, just please, remember that I warned you.”

  “Shut the door,” Xander said.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to steel my nerves. I stepped into the cabin and shut the door behind me. My body went weightless for a second as I anticipated…

  What had I anticipated? Some asshole to run along the exterior and swing a baseball bat against the siding and the window?

  So the hell what? I have killed people for lesser offenses than that. Why had it taken me so long to realize how irrational of a fear I held? Was it because, like most people, I clung to a singular experience and based my entire opinion on a ridiculous situation that had occurred years ago? If I’d only ventured into a cabin at any point after that moment, I would have found my fear… unfounded. I could have tagged along to that bachelor party in Tahoe with some buddies. I could have taken Callie on that vacation she always wanted in Yosemite. How many memories did I miss out on due to an irrational fear? Have I overstated my point, yet? Are you swallowing what I’m feeding you? Confront your fear, no matter how small or crazy it is—I promise you, you won’t regret it.

  When nothing fatal happened and I realized my fear was nothing more than a ridiculous memory, I winked one eye open, then the other, and chuckled. The tension fled from my body, and my laughter grew to an uncontrollable, bellowing cackle as I accepted how childish my fear had been.

  Annie and Xander both stared at me, judging hard—like a couple of backwoods rednecks attending a transgender wedding.

  I didn’t like they way they looked at me, not one iota, but I also found it hard to care as my stomach tightened and my breath shortened from laughing so hard. Planting my elbows on my knees to calm down, something terrible happened. The bending motion paired with my gasping and guffawing created an unfortunate incident. I didn’t just break wind—I shattered it.

  My laughter ceased immediately.

  Before either of them could respond, I straightened my posture and smirked, scratching the back of my neck. “I warned you both about the dangers of inviting me in here. Should I open the door?”

  They didn’t say a word as I crossed the six feet of space to the stove, opened the latch, and saw a cast-iron pot dangling from a hook. I removed it and looked at the contents. Globs of mashed vegetables and a yellowish liquid sloshed around. My throat locked up with disgust, but my stomach cramped and roiled and threatened more pain-relieving thunder. If this meeting led to a trap, to a Scylla or to Circe, and something went down, I was in no shape to fight. I had to do something to fix my tum-tum-boom-boom.

  “Spoons are over here,” Annie said, gesturing to a coffee mug filled with silverware and napkins and a yellow wildflower. “You can use mine. I think Andy’s already in a pissy enough mood.” Her eyes darted to the cot. “Ain’t that right?”

  I looked over and actually waited for him to respond. The more time I spent in this madhouse, the crazier I became. Would it be rude to deny her stomachache-curing potion and just leave?

  Potion, I thought. Holy shit!

  I realized that even though she didn’t have a cartoonish bubbling cauldron resting in the middle of her dilapidated cabin, she did have a tiny one hanging from a hook in her stove. Had she poisoned the broth? Would it kill me? Turn me into a dancing monkey? Make me fall in love with her?

  I focused on a calming breath, and flashes of a memory jolted through me. Don’t worry, no backstory flashback this time—just a flyover to illustrate my misplaced and newfound distrust in Xander’s pact.

  Once, while on a super top secret mission for the U.S. of A. military, we were captured by an Acolyte of a Nephil in the Middle East. Though they had us in a Paul and Silas situation—see, I’m not complete ignorant on my scripture—Xander had remained pretty even-keeled. Not once did my God-fearing friend appear afraid of our demise. I, on the other hand, hadn’t shut up whenever the Acolyte paid us a visit. I offered him damn near everything from my social security number to Xander’s most embarrassing stories from Militus University to—well, there’s no need go into further detail of that incident. Let your imagination run wild and naughty.

  At one point during our incarceration, Xander had looked at me with utter calmness and, like a raving lunatic, he had said, “We’re meant to be here.”

  That was it. For two days, whenever the terrorist Acolytes attempted to harm or kill us, they couldn’t. Their poison had been diluted. Their guns had jammed. A firefight broke out right before our beheadings. It was just one catastrophe after another avoided by a stroke of pure, coincidental luck.

  Spoiler alert. We ended up surviving and killing everyone there, winning the day for the good guys like a couple of BAMFs.

  Inside the sunlit cabin and staring at the broth, I found myself trusting Xander once again. Besides, maybe I still feared—just a little—being inside the log walls, and I was just a little paranoid. Annie had no idea we were headed her way that morning, right? Why would she have poisoned the broth?

  “You have a bowl?” I asked.

  “You’re holding it.”

  I glanced at the cast-iron pot in my hand and thought of her sipping thick stew from the same bowl. When was the last time she’d washed it? Did she back
wash? When had she last showered? Brushed her teeth? Was it worth eating from the same pot she’d abused over the years with her filthy living habits?

  Hesitating once again, I remembered the gun that Xander had offered me. Ten shots waited patiently in the Beretta’s magazine. Maybe eating a bullet or two would be the better option. And, if I really did the math, there was enough to share. One for Annie. Eight for Xander. One for me.

  I lowered my head, staring at my feet, and carried the pot to the table. With my crudely splinted hand, I grabbed the spoon Annie had offered me. So as not to upset Andy, and I sat cross-legged on the ground and began to shovel the mucky broth into my mouth.

  It tasted like dirt and toenails.

  I tried not to cry or vomit. Maybe that’s why it was so effective with stomach pains. It just forced you to hack up every meal you’d consumed in the past year.

  Annabel and Xander resumed their earlier conversation about her murdered—but also invisibly present—brother.

  At the edge of the table rested a notebook. Annie opened it and flipped through a few pages before settling near the middle. She ran her hands over the paper to flatten it out. “Andy and I were hiking,” she said, facing the cot. I thought she meant to scream out another reprimand, but she lowered her gaze and stared at the notebook. In a low tone, she continued her story. “Despite the age gap—eleven years—we were close. I was eighteen at the time, which made him twenty-nine… the same age as me now.”

  That statement issued forth a tense silence. I slurped the broth, waiting for Annie to continue. Xander folded his hands on the table, probably wanting to hold hers and comfort her. That lump of love refrained from his baser instincts and sat in his chair, focused on Annie.

  After an eternal few seconds, Annie said, “The age gap made it hard for us to find common interests, being at different stages in our lives. But we had always enjoyed nature and being outside. Once a month, we made it a point to go out and hike and catch up with each other. He would update me about his wife and family and job. I told him about school and boys—usually playfully arguing with him about Gladas.” She glared at the cot. “That’s not fair, Andy! He had no idea what would happen!” Turning her attention back to Xander, she said, “Gladas was his best friend. As I went through high school and matured, he took an interest in me. I always thought him a little creepy—he did have a crush on a high-school girl eleven years younger than him. But I did enjoy his company. We read the same books, watched the same movies, and believed the same things. Anyway, Andy and I went hiking that August, and it was hot.” She shook her head and covered her faced, muttering, “No, Andy. I’m not going to say that. It’s inappropriate. Just shut up, okay. I’m going to tell the complete truth if you don’t bite your tongue.” She lifted her gaze and stared at the cot with malice. When she spoke, though, I’m pretty sure she spoke to Xander. “We were right outside the cabin where you walked up, moving along the river, and he decided to jump in to cool off. That’s where he… that’s where it happened.”