King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (21 page)

The door to the armory was a massive vaultlike contraption that required a digital combination to open. Dmitri strode confidently over to the keypad located to the right of the door and punched in an eight-digit code. There was a loud beep and then the door clicked open.

I’m not a gun freak, not by any stretch of the imagination, but even I was impressed when I got my first look at what was in that room. Racks lined three of the four walls, holding more firearms than I had ever seen in one place. Everywhere I looked the cold sheen of burnished steel winked back at me. There were pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, even one of those monster machine guns you see in action movies. Ammunition for each weapon was carefully laid out on shelves beneath each rack, the colored boxes looking like soldiers lined up in rows.

Dmitri was like a kid in a candy shop: his eyes opened wide as he wandered down one side of the vault, his hands occasionally reaching up to caress the blackened muzzle of a weapon.

It was an impressive collection.

But it wouldn’t do us a damn bit of good.

“While I can appreciate your need to wallow in the equivalent of gun porn, we seem to be forgetting something important.”

He barely looked at me. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“Firearms don’t work against Sorrows.”

Reluctantly, he turned away from the guns and pointed toward the back wall. “Yeah, I know. But the guns aren’t what we came here for. That is.”

Instead of firearms, the rear wall was devoted to melee weapons of every shape and size: swords, axes, maces, flails, and a hundred other weapons I’d never seen before and couldn’t name if my life depended on it.

I watched as Dmitri reached up, pulled a broadsword down from its mount, and gave it a few experimental swings through the air in front of him.

“You know how to use that thing?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Of course,” he said, as if it was as common as pumping gas or changing a tire. He’d been a warden, after all.

I, on the other hand, had absolutely no experience with a weapon like that.

Trying to put a brave face on it, I said, “Right. How hard can it be?” and stepped over to give him a hand.

We found two big carrying cases in one corner of the room and began to load as many of the weapons as we could into them. Dmitri concentrated on the edged weapons, while I filled my case with those you’d use to bludgeon someone to death. It was cheery work, trust me.

Once we had a good assortment, we carefully sealed the cases and began carrying them out to the truck for transport back to the clinic.

As we moved through the house with our burdens, I happened to glance through an open door to one side. Winston had been in the process of renovating when he’d been struck down: the floor of the room was covered with dust cloths, and a set of hand tools was lying in a neat pile off to one side, just waiting for the work to begin again.

I stopped, staring at the tools. A tiny germ of an idea began to form in the back of my mind, and I did what I could to nudge it along.

Something about the tools …

Inspiration struck.

Son of a bitch
, I thought, stunned at the idea that was unfolding in my head.

It might actually work …

Dmitri was already outside and I hurried to catch up, calling his name as I did so.

He was sliding the case of weapons he was carrying into the rear of the Expedition when I emerged from the house. He finished what he was doing and then turned to face me.

“What now?” he asked.

“I think I’ve just solved our problem.”

He gestured to the weapons we’d already loaded into the truck. “I thought that was what we were doing here.”

“I’ve got something better.”

“Like what?”

“Take me to Home Depot and I’ll show you.”

33

HUNT

When we returned to the clinic, Denise and Gallagher were waiting for us.

Gallagher sounded more tired than usual. I suspected he’d pushed himself a bit too hard. It had apparently been worth it, however, for he passed each of us a small jar, saying, “It’s not perfect but it will do in the short term. Just use it sparingly; we don’t have that much.”

I could hear the others unscrewing the lids to their jars. A horrible stench burst forth the minute they were opened.

“Ugh! What that hell is this?”

“A salve for your eyes. It’s a fairy ointment derivative. Rub a little of it on your lids and you’ll be able to see through the Curtain that separates this world from the next. If it works as well as I expect it to, the Sorrows will light up like neon signs.”

I could hear Dmitri sniffing loudly next to me. “What’s in it?” he asked.

“You probably don’t want to know.”

I knew I didn’t. I was also thankful that I didn’t need to use the stuff; my ghostsight allowed me to see the Sorrows without any assistance, even in the light of day.

That was a good thing, as there was no way in hell that I was putting anything that smelled like that near my face.

Next it was Denise’s turn.

“I have good news and bad news,” she said. “The scrying worked, but perhaps too well.” There was a rustling sound, like that of newspaper pages being turned. Denise said, “I’ve marked the hits I got on this map.”

There was a moment of silence while the others took a look.

“
Chyort voz’mi!
” Dmitri said sharply and I didn’t need a translator to know he wasn’t happy with what he saw.

“Somebody want to fill me in?”

Denise sighed. “I got a hit on forty-seven different locations.”

Forty-seven? There couldn’t be that many, could there?

“How the hell are we going to manage forty-seven packs of these things?” Gallagher asked. The tiredness in his voice had turned to disgust. It sounded like we were outgunned from the start.

But Denise wasn’t finished. “It’s not as bad as all that.”

“It’s not?” Sure as shit looked bad to me.

“No,” she said emphatically, “it’s not. Without a proper focus to zero in upon, the scrying can’t be targeted properly. As a result, we end up with a forty-eight-hour window of possibilities.”

I thought that one through for a minute. “So, the circles mark locations were the Sorrows are now or where they have been during the last twenty-four hours?”

“Or where they will be by this time tomorrow,” Gallagher said. “How do we separate one from the other, then?”

Dmitri spoke up. “Correlate the sighting reports with the markings on the map. If a Sorrow was spotted in that area during the past twenty-four hours, we eliminate it from the list. It won’t be perfect, but it will at least start limiting the playing field.”

It wasn’t a bad idea, and Gallagher said he’d get someone right on it. In the meantime, we still needed to come up with a way to deal with the Sorrows when we confronted them.

Thankfully, my partner and I had already solved that problem. “Dmitri?”

By way of answering, he reached into the large duffle bag he had brought with him into the meeting and lifted out one of the cordless pneumatic nail guns we’d bought at Home Depot the night before. He pointed it at Gallagher’s desk and pulled the trigger. The short hiss of the escaping gas was lost in the loud thunk that followed as the projectile sank deep in its target.

I wish I could have seen the expression on Gallagher’s face as he stared at the three-inch carpenter’s nail that was now three quarters embedded in the side of his desk.

“Sweet Gaia. That’s brilliant.”

I thought so, too. The nail guns were the cordless variety designed to handle the framing tasks at any modern construction site. They weighed less than seven pounds, could be managed with one hand if necessary, and held roughly four thousand nails at a time. We’d bought fifteen of them, all that the store had in stock, as well as enough boxes of nails to keep us in business for several weeks. The iron content in the nails would be dangerous to the Sorrows and the portability of the nail guns themselves would make it easy for everyone to carry them wherever they were needed.

Along with the nail guns, we’d sorted through the two cases of melee weapons we’d taken from the Marshal’s armory and picked out ten or twelve that we thought would be useable, from KA-BAR combat knives to small hand axes. If the Sorrows got in close, at least we would have something in hand to defend ourselves with.

Or so we hoped.

As it turned out, Dmitri was right. It took us almost an hour to match the reports against the locations Denise had identified, but by the time we were finished we had eliminated seventeen locations from our list, bringing the new total to thirty. While it was still a lot, it was at least beginning to reach manageable levels.

With that it was time to bring in the rest of the troops.

Gallagher gathered them together in the backyard and went through what we had learned since our earlier defeat. He walked them through the use of the nail guns they’d been issued and urged them to take one of the handheld melee weapons he and I had retrieved from the armory.

When he was finished, Denise took over, identifying the potential locations and giving instructions on what to do should they encounter anything. Jars full of the eye salve Gallagher had created were distributed to each team leader, and they were given a few minutes to apply it and get used to the effect it had on their vision. They’d all seen Dmitri transform in the midst of battle the other night, but it was still kind of funny to watch them recoil when they turned and looked in his direction. I’d forgotten how unnerving a good-sized polar bear was to behold up close, regardless of the fact that he was on your side.

Numbers were important at this point, so rather than sending us out in pairs, Gallagher reshuffled things a bit and arranged us into two separate teams. The four of us, plus two of the wardens, would return to the high school and face the nest there. The other team would head to the first location on Denise’s list to begin hunting for another nest.

For the second time that week, we went on the offensive.

34

CLEARWATER

Hunt had been a liability on the last mission; he knew it and so it didn’t take much for Simon to convince him to play a different role. He would still accompany them, but this time he’d remain with the vehicles and be ready to help provide whatever assistance they needed when they came back out again.

Which left five of them to handle the pack of Sorrows. Denise just hoped it would be enough.

The last attack had shown that the Sorrows were highly resistant to magick, but that didn’t mean that magick was no longer useful as a weapon in the attack. Quite the contrary, in fact. It just meant that she and Simon were going to have to be more indirect in their use of it, attacking the space and surfaces around the Sorrows, rather than the Sorrows themselves.

They arrived in the same fashion and even parked in the same location. The warden who’d been watching the site for the last twenty-four hours emerged from cover and confirmed that the Sorrows were still inside.

In eerie mimicry of the previous visit, Spencer led the way. Nothing seemed to have changed: there were no sentries and the Sorrows were in the same location as they had been before.

Simon nodded in her direction, indicating it was time for her to do her thing. Denise took a moment to gather her concentration and then called up her Art, using her affinity with all things natural to reach out and alter the gravity of the area at the bottom of the swimming pool, making everything in it weigh considerably more than it had the moment before.

As if summoned by the touch of her magick, the Sorrows awoke as one and then multiple pairs of eyes stared up at them out of the darkness.

“Now!” Simon shouted.

The team opened fire. The nail guns made a short sharp noise—
thunk
,
thunk
,
thunk thunk thunk
—and in the confined and tiled space it echoed five times louder than it normally would have. Trapped by the increased gravity and wounded by the iron content in the nails, the Sorrows shrieked with rage and fear.

In seconds, the room was complete chaos. Shouts and screams from both sides filled the air, and the cacophony was punctuated again and again by the sharp sound of the guns as they spat their deadly little missiles at the creatures. The nails didn’t stop the Sorrows, but they sure as hell hurt, if the screams the creatures were making was any indication.

Maintaining her gravity well required both power and concentration, and it wasn’t long before Denise felt it begin to slip away from her. A Sorrow near the edge of the effect broke free and rushed her, racing up the side of the pool and leaping into midair in front of her. She was knocked to the ground by a backhand sweep from the creature’s arm, only to watch as the creature was torn apart before her eyes by the rampaging polar bear.

Around her she could see several of Spencer’s people were tossing aside their makeshift firearms, the hoppers of the nail guns now empty of ammunition, and pulling their weapons from their belts to wade in and engage the Sorrows in hand-to-hand combat.

The battle was just as short and bloody as the first time they’d entered these grounds, but the outcome was entirely different. As the old scroll had suggested, the Sorrows were deathly allergic to the iron in their blades and what wouldn’t have proved to be a mortal wound against a human being was deadly to the creatures they faced. In the end, they triumphed. All of them had a minor injury or two, but none was life-threatening. Simon ordered Spencer and his men to round up the bodies of the Sorrows and burn them, using the cans of gasoline brought along for just that purpose.

*   *   *

Over the next two days they located and destroyed three more nests. The first two were handled without incident, but they lost another man while taking down the third because by then the Sorrows had begun anticipating their movements and had been ready and waiting for them when they arrived. For creatures that were supposedly of limited intelligence, it was an unsettling display of adaptability and initiative.