King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (10 page)

Simon shook himself and then went on. “Yes, the illness. It started a few weeks ago and has been escalating rapidly ever since. As far as we can tell, only the Gifted are being targeted.”

Denise thought about how quickly Simon’s men had learned of their entrance to the city, the nature of the response that followed, and his use just now of the word
targeted
, adding it all up in her head.

“You think it’s deliberate,” she said.

Simon nodded. “I do.”

They were all quiet, digesting that for a moment. Hunt broke the silence.

“Just what, exactly, are we talking about here?” he asked. “Gene warfare? Magical terrorism? How do they, whoever the hell
they
are, even know who to target, for that matter? It’s not like you go around with signs on your heads, right?”

From the glance Simon gave her, Denise knew what he was thinking. She waved her hand in dismissal, as if to say, you can talk freely in front of him.

“That’s the problem. We don’t have any idea. One day someone is perfectly healthy, the next he’s in a coma.”

Denise frowned. “What symptoms are they exhibiting before that?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like,” he snapped his fingers, “that. They are healthy and then suddenly, they’re not.”

Exasperated, Denise asked, “What are the doctors saying?”

Simon got up, moved around his desk, and dropped into his chair with a sour expression. “They’re stumped. And lab test after lab test shows nothing unusual. From a scientific standpoint, there’s nothing there. These people should not be ill.”

That can’t be right
, she thought. “Obviously you just haven’t found the right test yet. What about after the fact? You must have learned something from the autopsies, right?”

But Simon was already shaking his head. “The coroner’s office hasn’t said anything publicly, but I’ve got a man inside who’s been keeping me in the loop. Apparently they can’t even pin down a cause of death. For any of the victims. The autopsies have all shown the same thing: the victims were in good health when they died.”

“Oh, this is just getting better and better,” Hunt muttered.

Denise didn’t blame him; she was starting to feel pretty uncomfortable herself. “Why not interview some of the survivors? Maybe they could tell us more about how they were feeling during the illness, and we can use that to figure out a new angle of attack.”

But Simon was already shaking his head, and what he said next scared her more than anything else that had been said so far.

“There aren’t any,” Simon said, his voice full of weary resignation. “So far, this damn thing has a one hundred percent fatality rate. Which makes it even worse than the freakin’ Ebola virus. If you catch it, you die. Period.”

13

CLEARWATER

Denise couldn’t believe what she was hearing. An illness that targeted only the Gifted and with a 100% fatality rate? It was practically unheard of in nature. If this thing was as deadly as Simon was suggesting, then it had to be man-made magickal or otherwise.

“Would you mind showing me the test results? Maybe let me look at a patient or two?”

Simon looked at her in surprise. “Of course; I can use all the help I can get. But are you sure you want to? If I were you, I’d be making plans to leave town.”

This time it was Denise’s turn to shake her head. “We’re here for a reason and right now it’s looking like this might be it. Taking a look at what you’ve done so far is the least I can do.”

As a hedge witch, much of her power came from the natural flow of energies surrounding us all. She could not only see the flow of those energies but could also manipulate them to affect the physical world around her. When someone was sick, the energy within the body was interrupted. Often entire bodily systems would fall out of alignment. A hedge witch’s magick was particularly suited to realigning those energies in order to flush the illness out of a person’s system. That was why village wise women had been revered for centuries before the advent of modern medical science.

It seemed logical, given what she knew so far, that her premonitions had something to do with this mysterious illness, especially since healing magick was one of a hedge witch’s basic disciplines.

But there wasn’t much she could do until she saw the patients, she decided, so that was the first order of business. Maybe the fact that she was an outsider would help her see something the others had missed, something that might give them a direction to go in. She said as much to Simon.

“That, at least, we can do.” He picked up the phone and told whoever answered that he’d be in the clinic. Then he led them back downstairs, through a connecting corridor, and into the building next door. Denise held Jeremiah’s arm, though she wasn’t certain if she did so to help guide him or to settle her rapidly fraying nerves.

Perhaps a bit of both
, she thought to herself.

When they entered the other building they found themselves in a small lobby that connected to a larger, warehouselike space through a set of double doors. A small break room complete with a rumpled old couch and a Coke machine with a big dent in the center stood off to the left of the doors.

As they headed for the door to the makeshift field hospital, Hunt held back.

“I think I’ll stay out here,” he said. “No offense, but hospitals, or anything remotely like them, just aren’t my thing.”

Simon turned to face him, a frown on his face. “You’ve been breathing the same air as everyone else for over a day now. If it’s airborne, it’s likely you’ve already been exposed,” he said reasonably.

But Hunt wasn’t swayed. “Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t see any reason to risk it just the same. Besides, I’m not a healer. I’d just be in the way.”

“All right. Why don’t you wait in there?” Simon said, then remembered that Hunt couldn’t see where he was pointing. He stood there in confusion for a moment, not sure how to handle the situation, until Dmitri came to his rescue.

“Come on, man,” Dmitri said, taking his arm. “I’ll keep you company.”

As the two men walked into the other room, Simon led Denise into the clinic.

“We’ve got makeshift clinics like this all over town, with healers and spell-casters doing all they can to slow the pace of the illness. We’ve even sent some of the sick into regular hospitals, but no one there has any idea how to help them either.”

Denise was barely listening though; she was too busy staring in shock at the veritable sea of patients in front of her. The room was filled with row upon row of foldable cots, the kind you can pick up in an Army-Navy surplus store for a few bucks each. She estimated that there had to be forty, maybe fifty of them total, and every single one of them was occupied.

That’s when she noticed the silence.

The patients lay in their beds, unmoving. No one spoke. No one coughed or yawned or made any of the hundreds of other sounds you’d expect from a room full of people. There wasn’t even a rustle of sheets as someone turned over. A room full of patients in front of her and not a single one of them was making a sound?

She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” Simon asked, apparently realizing what she was thinking. “Every one of them is like that. One minute they’re doing okay, talking and laughing, joking with their families, and the next they drop into a comatose state from which they never wake up.”

He stepped over to a small table standing off to the left and picked something up, then returned to her side, holding out one of the objects he’d just collected.

It was a necklace, with a large piece of quartz crystal hanging from it like a pendant.

“I fashioned the crystal myself. Charge it with a little energy and it’ll throw up a minor ward around you while you wear it. It won’t be strong enough to stop anything larger than a small rock, but it will protect you from any stray microbes that might be floating around.”

He slipped the second necklace he was holding around his own neck and then motioned for her to do the same with hers.

She followed suit, then directed a little of her own energy into the stone, charging it with arcane energy as Simon had instructed. Almost immediately she felt the whisper of an energy shield slide up over her body, like a second skin. Beside her, Simon did the same with his own pendant.

Satisfied that they were as protected as they could be, they headed toward the patients.

They spent the next two hours examining every patient in the clinic. For each one, it was the same. No external trauma. No visible evidence of bacterial or viral infection; no swollen glands, sore throats, stuffy sinuses. None of them had fevers.

And yet they lay there, eyes open and staring, not seeing anything. Their heartbeats were all steady, but extremely slow. The same was true of their breathing; they took one breath for every four of hers.

At one point during the afternoon Denise thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned, hopeful that a patient had taken a turn for the better, but they all remained quiescent and still.

Must have been my imagination
, she thought.

When they were finished with the last patient, a young woman about thirty-five with hair like muddy oil, Simon turned to Denise, a questioning look on his face.

“Not a clue,” she said. “It’s like you said: from a purely physical standpoint, these people shouldn’t be sick. I’m not even sure what to do next, to tell you the truth. There are a couple of rituals we can try to see if we can get to the bottom of things, but if those don’t work, I’m going to be out of ideas in a hurry.”

14

HUNT

I let Dmitri lead me into the break room and find me a seat on the couch. I waited until I heard him settle into a chair nearby and then asked the question that had been hanging on the tip of my tongue for the last fifteen minutes.

“Who the hell is Simon Gallagher?”

To my surprise, it came out a little sharper than I’d expected. This guy set me on edge, like listening to a drill in a dentist’s office go on and on and on, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. He obviously knew Denise …

“Lord Marshal of New Orleans, apparently,” Dmitri replied.

I didn’t need to see the expression on his face to know he was giving me a hard time. I counted to ten, slowly. Then, “How do the three of you know each other?”

“I met him a few times in the old days, back when Denise and he were coven mates.”

“In English, please.”

He laughed. “Sorry, sometimes I forget that you’re still wet behind the ears when it comes to this stuff.”

I bristled for a second, but then relaxed. He was right; I
was
wet behind the ears. Hell, if I’d had a lick of sense or some good information, I never would have listened to the Preacher in the first place, never would have attempted that ritual without knowing more about it or what it was designed to do.

Of course, if I had, I probably never would have gone through with it and would still be wondering what had happened to my little girl, so maybe there’s something to be said for jumping in with both feet, regardless of whether your eyes were open or closed.

Dmitri went on. “Mages can operate alone, but most of them like to be part of a Circle, or a gathering of like-minded mages who pledge themselves to support and assist each other. Circles are sometimes called covens, hence the term
coven mates
.”

“So they worked together for a while?”

Dmitri shifted in his chair. “It’s a little more complex than that. Joining a Circle is a bit like getting married. There’s a ceremony, the ritual that ties you all together, and during that ceremony there are promises made, promises to support and protect and defend the other members of the Circle. But unlike marriage vows, which don’t have much power beyond the words that are spoken, the promises made in the act of binding a Circle together are backed by an intermingling of arcane power that cannot easily be broken.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “So Denise and Gallagher are still tied together in some fashion?”

That’s where he surprised me. “No. Denise left the coven several years ago and severed all ties with them in the process.”

“What happened?”

“You’ll have to ask her. It’s not my story to tell.”

I badgered him about it for a few minutes, but he wouldn’t budge, and he eventually turned on the TV to show the conversation was over. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me that they’d known each other before; I just knew that it did.

Something to think on later, I guess.

With my curiosity at least partially satisfied, I leaned back on the couch and tried to relax.

Unfortunately, the dead had other ideas.

Now that I wasn’t concentrating on puzzling out the connection between Denise and Simon Gallagher, I felt their presence. They were slipping into the room, not through the door, but through the wall behind me, the one that adjoined the clinic into which Clearwater and Gallagher had disappeared a few moments before. They appeared as vague wisps of light and motion that I saw more out of the corner of my eye than anything else. Hospitals attract ghosts like honey attracts ants, and I guess a clinic full of terminally ill patients would do the same, so I wasn’t all that surprised to see them.

Their attitude, however, was not what I was expecting.

Ghosts don’t normally pay too much attention to the living, at least not as individuals. It’s the emotion we give off that calls to them and not anything related to who we are or what we do. Nine times out of ten they couldn’t care less whether you’re the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker, as long as you’re breathing and giving them something to long for by the simple fact that you’re on this side of the Curtain and they’re on the other.

Normally.

Today was apparently one of those days that was designed to skew the bell curve way out of whack for the rest of us.

These ghosts were angry. Pissed, really. They seeped in from the clinic next door, and the temperature in the room dropped a good ten degrees from one moment to the next. They circled the couch I was sitting on and focused their attention on me so intently that the hair on my forearms stood up straight.