God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (12 page)

“Who are you?”

“I can’t let the police interfere with me, but I’m here to help you.”

“What do you want from me?” AJ asked for the second time that night.

“You are The Next. I can’t stop this without you...no one can!” The stranger swung one leg over his bike as a police car skidded to a halt in the mouth of the alley.

The bike came to life.

“I’ll find you again!” the man upon the chopper called and then was gone, roaring into the night on the back of a black-and-chrome American dream. Cops spilled out of the car. AJ stared after him for a long moment and then pulled off his shirt and sat down next to Clover, wrapping it around the cut on her arm.

“What the hell am I into?” AJ asked himself aloud and then squeezed his eyes shut against the world.

CHAPTER SIX

AJ rode in the back of the police cruiser in silence, thinking of Clover. She had been taken to the hospital to be treated for shock and to get her arm sewn shut. She was still in the dark about the whole living-dead thing and he wasn’t sure she’d want to be enlightened...regardless of the outcome, though, he’d have to try. He’d seen the monster she’d faced on the fire escape, though, how far decomposed it had been, and wondered if after that he’d really have to try that hard to convince her.

The cruiser turned into the station house and parked. AJ waited in the same room he’d been in before. It was just past midnight. That was something, at least: he’d managed to live to see another day.

A little over an hour later, he was still sitting there, numb and waiting, unaware of how much time had passed and perhaps in shock himself. Finally the door opened and in came Terrance Wills.

“Hey, man, where you guys been?” AJ asked, shaking the young man’s hand. “Where’s John?”

“At home, where I wish I was. But that don’t matter. Follow me.” The two left one cramped and stinking interrogation room for another. “I just brought your girl back from the hospital.” Wills cocked an eyebrow at the end of his statement. “She was my top priority, being as she don’t know shit about this. I imagine you want to fill her in?”

“We kinda have to, don’t we? And after what she saw?”

The detective took the question as rhetorical.

They stopped in front of a room and AJ pushed the door open. Clover was sitting at the table, wrapped in a blanket and smoking a cigarette. The black thread holding the pale flesh of her forearm together stood out like a broken promise, peaking from under one end of the bandage.

Terrance said, “I’ll leave you here until I get word from Dean.” Then he left.

Clover looked up and smiled as AJ sat down across from her.

“You all right?”

Her smile, thin to begin with, strained a little. “Why does this keep happening to us?”

AJ took a deep breath and began; he told of Karen Rosenthal’s suicide and return. He told her about Lubbock being attacked in the morgue and he told her about being adopted.

“I’m positive the things that attacked us tonight were the same way. Undead, I guess, is what you’d call it...” He cleared his throat and trailed away at the end. She won’t believe me, he thought. She’ll say I’m fucking crazy or I smoke crack and she’ll leave and I’ll never see--

“So how do we stop them?” Clover asked.

His looked back at her, his head cocked to the side. “You believe me?”

“That
thing
I fought with wasn’t, well,
normal…
I mean, I could see part of his
skull
. And I don’t see why you’d lie, so what else is there?” She was just sitting there, same as before, her face calm. But her eyes glowed like round, green fires, and she bore a smile of trust and belonging. She, at that moment, was the essence of everything innocent and beautiful in a life that seemed immersed in death and chaos. She didn’t have to be a part of this.
She
didn’t have dead people dropping by her work or following her home at night, wasn’t seeing vultures everywhere she went. She’d simply been thrown into the mix by the busy hands of fate and was still there. She wouldn’t desert him or think him mad.

She had helped him.

AJ knew right then that he could die for this girl.

* * * * *

Clover didn’t know where she was. It seemed like a tunnel, underground somewhere. The dirty, grey cobbles of the floor were slick with what could only be blood; her arms and legs were bound, chained to a wall. Out of the darkness across this terrible room came a man, his face obscured by shadows that should not have been. He stank of madness and torture, and he was coming closer all the time. He leaned in, telling her things that made her cry, touching her and making her wish she could crawl right out of her skin. Leaning forward, his pale, ghostlike face moved like a brutal moon crashing to Earth. He raped her mouth with his, kissing her and forcing between her lips a long, black tongue that was really a snake; it thrashed and slithered down her throat and she awoke, a scream held silent on her lips.

She hadn’t had a nightmare in years.

It was now 4:24 A.M. according to the digital clock on the bedside table. Clover lay shaking in a bed that wasn’t hers, in a room where she was the stranger.

The police had moved them to a safe house, a two-bedroom suite in a hotel. AJ was in the room next door. There were two cops in the front, another outside, with rotations to be made every four hours.

It was odd, though, being guarded. It didn’t make her feel safe. It reminded her that something she didn’t understand was coming for them. Clover shut her eyes and ran her hand along the cool sheets on the other side of the bed, picturing AJ lying there asleep. She felt a little better, thought of how he’d looked at her in the police station. And it wasn’t just that he’d looked
at
her, he’d looked
inside
her. When he’d reached across the table and took her hands, a warm current had flown between them. It had only lasted one long, wonderful moment before Terrance had opened the door to take them to the hotel. She felt a little of that same current return when she thought of him.

She shook her head to clear it, the nightmare already fading, although she would be forced to remember it much later. But for now her fear abated, first growing ragged along the edges and finally unraveling into the nothingness from whence it came. Clover lay quietly with her eyes closed but it was quite some time before sleep found her again.

* * * * *

“Why wasn’t I called?!” John shouted into the phone. It was exactly 5:30 in the morning now. He managed to stay home that long but there was too much cop in him not to call, just to make sure nothing had happened. Inside, he had believed nothing
had
happened, because it was
his
fucking case, and someone would have called him.
He
was the one who had stayed up for god knows how many hours.
He
was the one put a bullet in that…thing that was once a woman named Karen.

“No one thought to—” the voice on the other end tried to explain.

“You’re damn right no one thought! I’m gonna walk through those doors in exactly twenty minutes, you hear me? I want a full report of every single thing that’s happened since I left, not so much as a fucking
fart
unaccounted for!” John slammed the phone down and grabbed his trench coat, cramming the fedora on his head on the way out the door.

As he drove, John tallied everything up in his head, thinking for a second that he should be grateful the white-haired stranger had shown up last night; word was that he’d saved the two kids. Or had he? In his head, John repeated his mantra:
Never close the mind off to other possibilities
.

It was closer to forty minutes before he stormed into the station house. The rain slowed traffic and he got soaked walking in from his car.

He did, however, have his report. It was hastily complied, but complete. John scanned the prelims as he walked toward Dean’s office, his eyes snagging on a particular name: Terrance Wills.

Could that be right? John had worked with Wills a few times in the past, once on a particularly nasty homicide, and the younger man had never failed to report anything of even minor significance to him. He was more disappointed about that than anything. John sighed and kept walking. A bitch of a headache was coming, a pain slowly building between his eyes. All this bullshit and it was only a quarter after six.

Outside, a brilliant stroke of lightning tore the blackness in two. The thunder came and it began raining even harder.

John knocked on Dean’s door and walked in, not waiting for a response.

“You look like you died an hour ago,” John said in a pleasant, conversational tone.

Dean looked up at him from his desk, red-eyed and haggard; he’d probably been up for the last thirty-six hours or so.

“I was about to go get a bite to eat. Care to join me?” Dean stood and grabbed his leather coat off the back of his chair.

“We need to talk,” John responded, not giving second thought to the invite.

“Don’t start. I’ve been in here and on the phone for the past hour chewing a variety of asses on your behalf.”

“Good. From now on I want to know what happens, when it happens.”
This is CNN
ran through his head in James Earl Jones’s voice.

Dean nodded and took a sip of coffee, grimacing at the taste. “You will.”

“So where are you keeping them, anyway? Benny’s?”

“At the hour they went in? Huh-uh, they got enough to deal with. They’re at the Fireside, off Horizon.”

John whistled. Most people who got put on protection were lucky enough to be crammed into a Super 8. “Why the luxury?”

“Manager owes me a favor,” Dean said and shrugged. “Besides, I like the hell outta that kid, you know?”

John nodded. “Too bad this shit had to happen to him.” Dean agreed and eventually coaxed John across the street for a breakfast you couldn’t fit in a little metal flask. He’d resisted at first, wanting to get up to the Fireside, but Dean made a good point: they wouldn’t be up yet anyway.

* * * * *

AJ opened his eyes and looked around the unfamiliar room, wondered vaguely if Clover was awake and somehow knew she wasn’t. His watch said it was just after 8:30 A. M. He yawned and shook his head, then got up, showered, and dressed, realizing he hadn’t eaten since he’d shared a pizza with Burrell.
With a dead man
, he thought. AJ joined the others in the front room where John Lubbock sat on the couch, talking shop with officer Gomez, who’d given him a ride home on that long first night.

“Hey, kid. How’d you sleep?”

Like the dead
almost came out but AJ thought that might be in poor taste. “I slept great but it’s weird to be awake in the morning. This is when I usually go to bed.”

“You been through a lot of shit lately. Your body knows when to adjust.”

“What do we have as far as breakfast goes?” AJ asked, looking back and forth between the cops.

“There’s a room service menu up there,” Gomez said, pointing to a little table by the window.

“Eat up, kid. Taxpayers’ treat,” John said and Gomez laughed. AJ didn’t find it all that amusing so he assumed it was a department joke. He kept quiet and perused the menu.

He could eat pretty much anything, so long as it wasn’t eggs, but what he was really looking for was something for Clover.

He ended up ordering the breakfast platter for her, which was an array of bagels, fruit, and muffins, with a side of hash browns and bacon. For himself, he ordered French toast, home fries, bacon, and biscuits and gravy. He also had a couple pots of coffee and a tray of pastries sent to the room; there were cops there, after all.

“Oh, and uh, could you see if you can’t score me a pack of smokes? I’m about out,” he said to the desk attendant.

“Sir?”

“Smokes. I need some cigarettes.”

“Oh. Well, of course. Is there any particular brand you favor?” The attendant had a slight British accent, as AJ imagined all desk attendants at good hotels did.

“Pack a’ Red Apples, with a filter if you have ’em.”

“Very good, sir.”

He hung up the phone and joined the others, sitting in a large, high-backed chair.

“So what are you thinkin’ about this
Detective Quidman
?” John asked him.

“Well, I get the feeling that he’s actually dealt with this before. He has a thing about cops, though,” AJ said, saying the last part almost apologetically.

“From what I hear, he’s got a thing about guns too,” John said. “But you trust him?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay. Then we trust him, long as he’s willing to sit down and tell me exactly what the hell’s been going down these past couple days.”

“I don’t know. He took off pretty quick when your boys showed up last night.” AJ remembered how the blue-and-red flashers had gleamed off the chrome of the chopper.

“Damn right he took off quick. He ain’t exactly operating within the normal means of the law here, kid.”

AJ shrugged it off. “Hey, man, we need all the help we can get.”

A few minutes later the guard in the hall pushed in the room service cart, stacked with food.

“Jesus, kid, you eat much this week?” John asked.

“Well, I ordered the pastries for you guys, and the coffee, too.” AJ set the tray of donuts and pastries on the table, along with a pot of coffee, then pushed the cart into Clover’s room.

* * * * *

Clover thought of her parents (especially her father, with his strict, bible-thumping ways), and wondered what they would make of all this. She believed they would throw her into an asylum if she ever spoke word of it around them.

Just then the door opened, slowly, and AJ stepped in. Whenever she thought of him after that, this image, this moment, was the one she wished would come into her mind first: him standing there with that irresistible grin on his face, perfectly framed in the doorway, bringing her breakfast in bed.