King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (19 page)

Reluctantly, he followed the others over to the car.

Doherty got behind the wheel while Robertson and Lafitte sat opposite each other in the back. The senior agent wasted no time in getting to the point.

“I’m very sorry to intrude, Mr. Lafitte. You have the Bureau’s condolences.”

No harm in being nice,
he thought,
at least, not at first
. He could always pull out the hammer if he needed it.

“Do you recognize this woman?”

He passed him the photograph from Clearwater’s file, the one from her driver’s license.

Robertson was watching carefully. He saw Lafitte’s eyes widen slightly before the mask clamped down upon his face.

“I don’t think so,” he replied.

Robertson smiled. “I know this must be a difficult time, Mr. Lafitte, but please, think carefully.”

The other man fidgeted in his seat. Rather than answering directly, he tried to stall. “What did she do?” he wanted to know.

Thinking to play on the man’s sympathy, Robertson said, “We believe she’s being held against her will by this man,” and handed him the mug shot from Hunt’s arrest earlier that year.

Again there was that flicker of recognition, but this time Lafitte’s face went hard.

“I haven’t seen either of them. Are we finished here?”

That did it. Robertson was done playing Mr. Nice Guy. It was clear that Lafitte had seen both Clearwater and Hunt and that the informant’s information had been correct. It was time for the hammer.

“Doherty?”

The younger agent passed a folder over the back of the front seat. Robertson took it and began leafing through it while Lafitte looked on.

“Again, I’m sorry about your loss. You have an older child too, don’t you? A son, I think?”

The older man nodded cautiously. “Yes,” he replied.

“William, right?”

Again the nod, but this time with a bit more force. “What’s that have to do with this woman you’re looking for?” Lafitte asked, anger leaking into his tone.

Robertson smiled again. “I see that William is out on bail, awaiting trial for that possession charge.”

“Now you just wait a minute!” Lafitte stormed. “My son has nothing to do with this Clearwater woman! You leave him out of it!”

Robertson’s gaze hardened as he said, “It would be a shame if something happened to revoke that bail, wouldn’t it? So let’s stop fucking around. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll forget I ever heard of William Lafitte.”

Lafitte finally got it. His anger withered away like a balloon leaking air. He sat back in his seat and looked away, out the window across the cemetery to where the workers were sealing the doors to his daughter’s mausoleum.

“What do you want to know?” he said wearily.

Ten minutes later the conversation was finished. Lafitte climbed out of the car and walked away across the grass, never looking back.

That was fine with Robertson; he’d already forgotten the broken old man. He’d gotten what he’d needed from him: the name and address of the man with whom Clearwater, and presumably Hunt, were staying, and Lafitte’s promise not to mention their conversation to anyone.

28

HUNT

By midafternoon the next day the calls began flooding in. Strange, dark-robed creatures were being glimpsed here and there throughout the city, never for long and never all that closely. There had been other sightings before this, people now realized, but where they’d previously been dismissed as tricks of the eye or simple tiredness on the part of the viewer, now they were taken more seriously. Unsurprisingly, there were more sightings in the areas were the Gifted congregated than elsewhere in the city.

One thing was certain. The sheer number of reports and the distance between them made it clear we were dealing with more than just a single pack.

We had our work cut out for us.

Nor did it take a rocket scientist to figure out that the work was going to be bloody. If we wanted the attacks to stop, we were going to have to hunt down the Sorrows that had infested the city, just as our predecessors had done so many years before.

First, though, we had to find them.

Adding the wardens to our number gave us fourteen able-bodied individuals. That wasn’t enough to search a city the size of New Orleans, so we needed to be smart about what we were doing. Gallagher suggested that we split into pairs of two and have each pair concentrate on an area where there had been a higher incidence of sightings.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why can’t Denise just scry out their location for us?”

“I can try, but I don’t think we’ll have much luck,” she said. “Scrying works best when you have something that belonged to the target to use as a focus: an item of clothing, a piece of hair, a dab of blood. Because objects like that are tied to the target in metaphysical ways, the practitioner can use them to trace the link back to the source.”

Remembering the way she’d used the charms from my daughter’s favorite bracelet as a focus during her scrying efforts the previous summer, I nodded in understanding.

Denise went on. “Unfortunately, I don’t have anything like that to use.”

“Can’t you, I don’t know, use the blood from the body in the freezer or something?” I asked.

Denise laughed. “Sure, if I wanted to be sure the corpse hadn’t gotten up and left the freezer. The focus has to be specific to the target in question. I can’t use the blood from one Sorrow to track other Sorrows. It will simply ground me back to the original source.”

“So we can’t track them that way?” Dmitri asked.

“With enough power and Art, anything’s possible. I think it’s a long shot, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

“Scrying isn’t my forte, but I can add my power to your own. Maybe that will be enough,” Gallagher told her.

So the decision was made. I’d pair up with Dmitri while the wardens would split into five teams of two, leaving our two mages to see if they could pinpoint the Sorrows’ locations as best they could.

Word also went out to all of the Gifted still in the city, identifying the Sorrows as the real threat behind the attacks and urging them to take whatever precautions they thought necessary to protect themselves.

No one really had any idea if wards would work against the Sorrows, but that didn’t stop Simon and Denise from throwing some up around the clinic just in case.

When they were finished, Gallagher gathered his people in the courtyard for a briefing. As the meeting got underway, I pulled Dmitri aside.

“What can you tell me about them?” I asked, waving a hand in the general direction of the group gathered around Gallagher.

“What do you want to know?”

“Are they all combat mages like Gallagher?”

“I don’t know any of them personally—they’re all long after my time—but if Gallagher stayed true to form when assembling his team, I’d guess that at least half of them are. The others will probably be a mix of healers, illusionists, and the like.”

“Think they’re any good?”

“From what I’ve seen so far, which admittedly isn’t much, I’d give them a solid B. They look like they’ve been through a few scrapes before and do a decent job of following orders.”

“I sense a
but
in there somewhere.”

He grunted in acknowledgement. “I’ve had a chance to talk to a few of them. A handful have some experience with this kind of thing: Spencer and Mitchell did a couple of tours in Iraq with the National Guard and Kramer is a former cop, but the rest have never dealt with anything this dangerous. It’s hard to know who will break and who won’t when the shit hits the fan, ya know?”

It wasn’t the biggest vote of confidence I’d ever heard, but it wasn’t the worst either. There wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway; they were all we had.

A memory from our first day in New Orleans jumped up suddenly, prompting another question.

“If they’re all Gifted in some way, why can’t I see that with my ghostsight?”

“They’re wearing charms specifically designed to block abilities like yours. Wardens have to face all kinds, and keeping the enemy from knowing exactly what they’re up against can sometimes make the difference between a peaceful resolution and a violent one.”

That explained the faint shimmering aura I’d seen in the diner that day. I can’t say it made me happy to hear it though; I’d thought my ghostsight couldn’t be fooled.

Seems I still had a lot to learn.

I tuned in to what Gallagher was saying.

“… stick to the areas you’ve been given. If you spot one of them, don’t do anything overt. There are only two of you per team and that’s nowhere near the level of force that will be needed to overcome one of these things, never mind a group of them. Try to follow them if you can and determine the location of the nest, then call it in. We’ll figure out a proper response from there. Everyone clear?”

There were nods all around.

“All right. Spencer, you’re with Daniels. You’ve got sector one. Gomez, I want you with…”

It wasn’t the best plan I’d ever heard, for there were far too many variables that we didn’t have control over, but it was going to have to be good enough.

Dmitri and I were assigned to the French Quarter, something neither of us was all that thrilled about. We did, however, understand the logic behind Gallagher’s choice. I was a stranger to the city and it had been years since Dmitri had been here, which in a way made us both a bit of a liability.

My partner spent several minutes grumbling about the assignment, until I reminded him that it was one of the few areas in which there’d been a confirmed Sorrow sighting. With his spirits improved, we set out on patrol.

The next few hours went by
very
slowly. We took a cab to the Quarter and then made our way through the crowds on foot, searching every back alley and dark corner for a sign that might lead us to a Sorrow nest. We found nothing.

It was close to eight o’clock when we got the call from Spencer’s team down in the Ninth Ward that changed everything.

29

HUNT

Gallagher was already there when we arrived and the three of us were quickly brought up to speed. Spencer and his partner were preparing to search a high school that had been condemned in the wake of Hurricane Katrina but had yet to be torn down, when they spotted something coming down the street toward them. They’d quickly taken cover and watched in amazement as a group of Sorrows swarmed into the school before them.

The pair had waited ten minutes, making certain the Sorrows weren’t simply going to emerge again, and then retreated a short distance down the street before calling it in.

The Lower Ninth Ward was one of the areas hit hardest by the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina and very little of it was left standing, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that the Sorrows had decided to set up a nest there. Very little traffic, human or otherwise, passed through. This area, formerly home to many poor and working-class black folks, had largely been abandoned and those who remained behind weren’t exactly the type of people to make a public outcry over anything anyone else was doing.

I’d heard stories about the devastation, but seeing it with my own eyes was something else entirely. House after house had either been knocked flat by the storm or bulldozed into rubble later when it became apparent that there was no way to salvage them. There were entire city blocks where nothing was left but piles of debris. Years later the place was still a disaster zone.

The school was at the end of the block about forty yards from where the five of us huddled behind another abandoned building.

Spencer went on. “While we waited for you guys to arrive, I ducked in for a quick look around.”

He ducked in for a quick look around?
This guy had major cojones apparently …

“The Sorrows have taken over the annex at the rear of the building and have turned the empty swimming pool into some sort of nest.”

He shuddered when he said
nest
, which told me all I needed to know about how much fun this was going to be.

A tactical discussion followed, with Dmitri and Gallagher quizzing Spencer for information about the approach angles and sight vectors and a hundred other things that made very little sense to me but were apparently vital for our response to the threat before us. I tended to favor the more direct approach: wait until the monsters were all asleep and blast them into oblivion.

If the things even slept, that is.

A van arrived while the others were still hashing out the plan and the rest of the wardens poured out of it, dressed in dark clothing with night-vision goggles around their necks. A few of them were armed with some sort of short stocky machine gun, but they were the exceptions. The majority of them intended to fight fire with fire, so to speak. Bracers and amulets seemed to be the latest fashion accessories, and I could only guess that they helped focus their magick in some way. The threat was supernatural in nature, so they were going to use their Art to remove the threat before it could do any more harm.

Thankfully one of them had brought a weapon for me and I received a quick thirty-second course on how to use it. It didn’t seem all that tough: point and shoot, basically. A lever near the trigger guard released the empty magazine, and all I had to do was slap a fresh one into place and I’d be ready to rock ’n’ roll again.

I was keyed up, far more than I expected. My heart was racing and my breathing sounded labored even to my ears. I didn’t know what was wrong with me; I’d done this kind of thing once before and hadn’t felt this uncomfortable, but then again, I’d had my fear for Denise’s life to drive me onward then. This time around, I was risking my neck for people I really didn’t even know.

What’s that old expression? God protects heroes and fools alike? Right now I was having a hard time figuring out which one I was.

Spencer led us around the side of the building to where he’d left a door propped open after his earlier recon. Pulling a red-lensed flashlight out of the pocket of his fatigue pants, he flicked it on and disappeared inside with us on his heels.