King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (29 page)

Turning to Dmitri, she said, “I need you to clear the room. Take everybody with you.”

“What? You need help right here and I…”

“Do it, Dmitri!”

Perhaps it was the urgency in her voice. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she’d never yelled at him in such a savage tone of voice. She didn’t know. But whatever it was, he stopped arguing and got moving. He rounded up the volunteers who had been helping and ushered them all into the hallway outside the bedroom. She watched him go and then, as soon as the door swung shut behind him, she used some of her dwindling strength to bind the door from inside, preventing anyone from entering, even someone as powerful as Simon.

What she was going to do, she had to do alone.

In the years since she’d left the coven, she’d continued her education in the Arts, broadening the scope of her interests and learning all she could, even some of the rituals that were frowned upon by many in the mage community. She’d always been of the opinion that she needed to understand the powers of those who used such rites if she was to work to counter their influence. But magick was not something you could just learn from a book. You had to get out there and live it, channel the power, feel its effects, if you were to understand how it functioned and what you could do to work against it.

Since leaving New Orleans her traditional training had been …
enhanced
, was perhaps the best word, as she mixed with other practitioners and learned a wider set of skills. She knew that some of what she’d learned would be frowned upon by those with a more traditional viewpoint, like Simon, for one, but without the protection of a coven around her, she’d felt that having more tools in the tool belt was a smart move.

One of those tools was a small, forbidden ritual that had been designed to allow a mage to bind another to her will by capturing a portion of a soul and holding it as her own. But Denise thought she could turn it around, to use the same principle to bind a piece of her soul to Jeremiah’s, anchoring his own soul to his body in the process and keeping him alive while she worked to heal the rest of his injuries.

She stared down at his worn and bloodstained face and used her fingers to momentarily caress his cheek.

She would do what she had to do and the consequences be damned.

46

HUNT

The pain told me I was still alive.

Which was a good thing, I guess. If I hurt this much and then I discovered I was dead, I’d have been pretty pissed. I felt like someone had run me over with a steamroller, but I’d take that over being dead any day of the week.

Cautiously opening my eyes, I found myself lying in a bed in a room that I didn’t recognize. The blinds were drawn, but the lack of any light bleeding through them let me know that it was some time after dark.

Just how late, I didn’t know.

I was dressed in a loose pair of sweatpants—whose, I didn’t know—sans top. I turned my head and found Denise sleeping in a chair next to my bed. She’d looked better: her hair was a tangled mess and lines of exhaustion crisscrossed her face, but it was good to see that she’d made it back from Chicago alive.

Chicago …

It all came back to me at that moment, everything that had happened since Denise left with Dmitri to try and retrieve the soul knives. The Sorrows’ attack. My encounter with Robertson. Getting shot by the son of a bitch. And perhaps most important of all, what my daughter’s ghost had shown me while I lay in that drainpipe slowly dying.

I needed to talk to Gallagher.

I threw back the covers and swung my legs out of the bed without thinking, only realizing after doing so that my body should have been shrieking in agony and wasn’t. Glancing down I found a wad of bloodstained bandages wrapped around me.

It hurt, sure, but no more than if I’d been kicked by a good-sized horse. It should have been a lot worse; even a healing spell couldn’t repair that kind of damage.

What the hell was going on here?

My need to talk to Gallagher now all but forgotten, I reached up with a shaking hand and gently peeled the top of the bandage away from my skin.

Last week, if you’d asked me if I ever wanted to know what a bullet wound in my upper chest looked like, I would have told you no. Now, however, I was almost hoping to see it. At least then some of this craziness would make sense.

But instead of a bullet wound, the yellowish purple of an already healing wound stared back at me.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I knew I’d been shot; the memory of hot blood spilling over me was still vivid in my mind, as was the time I’d spent huddled in that pipe with only my fear and pain for company. And yet it looked like I’d been healing for months.

“How are you doing?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of her voice. My concentration had been total; I hadn’t realized she was awake.

“Not bad,” I managed to croak out, as my heart rate settled back down to normal. “Considering.”

I could see her nod in the darkness. “It was a bit close, I’ll give you that.”

There was a certain sense of satisfaction in her voice, though I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d managed to remain among the living or because she’d obviously had a considerable part in my doing so.

I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

“Did you do this?”

She rolled her head around, getting the kinks out, and then looked off into the distance. Given the room was almost completely dark, I wondered what she was seeing.

“Yeah,” she replied. “And I’m sorry. There wasn’t any other way.”

I laughed. “Sorry? Don’t be; I’d probably be dead right now if you hadn’t.”

She turned to face the sound of my voice, and I watched as her eyes moved slightly back and forth, trying to find something to focus on in the darkness.

“No, you would be dead. No probably about it. Which is why I did what I did.”

An ugly little chill formed at the base of my spine and wormed its way up my back. Something in her tone …

“What’d you do? Sell my soul to the devil?”

Denise shook her head. “No, I gave you a piece of mine.”

That chill crested and broke over the rest of my body.
What the hell was she talking about?

“You did what?”

Just like that, she was wringing her hands and tears were flowing down her cheeks.

“Hey, hey,” I said, reaching out and taking her hands in mine. “It’s okay.”

Her words flowed out a mile a minute. “I couldn’t watch you die, Jeremiah. I had to do something. I didn’t even know if the spell would work, but I had to try, and…”

“Sshh,” I told her, “take it easy. Just tell me.”

She got a hold of herself and, when she was ready, she told me.

The spell was ancient, she said. No one really knew where it had come from or whether it would even work, but she’d been desperate and desperate people do desperate things.

That, I understood. I was the poster child for desperation.

When it looked like I was on my way out, she’d cast the spell, grafting a small piece of her soul to mine. Doing so had kept my soul anchored in my body and had drastically accelerated the healing process.

“Sounds like a bargain to me,” I said gently, but she shook her head.

“You don’t understand,” she told me, wiping her tears away as she got herself back under control. “It’s permanent.”

“So?”

Denise was probably one of the most decent people I knew. It wouldn’t be so bad carrying a little bit of her around with me wherever I went.

“So now there’s no going back. We are, quite literally, stuck with each other. If one of us tries to leave, the other will feel such a deep longing that they’ll be forced to track the other down. The soul longs to be whole and the only way for that to happen, for either of us, is if we stay together.”

She was starting to freak out, so I gave her my best smile and said, “I bet Gallagher’s pissed, huh?”

She snorted, then laughed as she tried to cover it up. “Oh, yeah!” she said. “He’s pissed all right. He keeps lecturing me like I’m a first-year novice. I’d like to see
him
pull it off.”

No thanks. Carrying a piece of Gallagher around inside my soul was not something I was particularly interested in. But it did remind me of why I sat up in the first place.

“Speaking of the devil, I need to see him right away. Get Dmitri too. I think I know what the Angeu is up to.”

Anything else and she might have told me to get back in bed and rest, but with innocent lives at stake, she knew it couldn’t wait. Coaxing me back into bed, at least for the time being, she went to find Gallagher and Dmitri.

No more than ten minutes later she returned with both men in tow. Ever the considerate host, I let them turn on the lights and retreated behind my wall of white; I was going to be doing all the talking, at least at first, and I didn’t need to see in order to do so.

I filled them in on what I had seen in my vision, realizing even as I did that Denise had been right that night back at the hotel in Tennessee.

Death
was
coming for us.

And he was bringing all his friends with him.

“What about the Sorrows?” Dmitri asked, when I finished telling them about the army of ghosts the Angeu had been commanding, an army that would be headed in our direction before long.

I shook my head. “The Sorrows have served their purpose, I suspect. I don’t think we’ll face them again.” It all even made a warped kind of sense, when you looked at it from the Angeu’s view. Use the Sorrows to harvest the souls of the dead, particularly those of the Gifted, who would have considerably more power, and then press those very same souls into service to carry out your black-hearted plans. And where was it that every lost soul wanted to go before anywhere else?

Home.

Right back to the Big Easy.

My story had at least gotten Gallagher to stop shooting mental daggers in Denise’s direction, and as I finished explaining, he started in with the questions.

“You’re certain it was a full moon?”

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

Dmitri’s voice sounded frustrated. “Well then we’re really up shit’s creek. The full moon’s only two days away. How the hell are we going to be ready?”

But I was barely listening to him. I felt the sudden tension when Dmitri said “two days” and knew that the others had just realized something important.

“What is it?” I asked.

Denise’s voice trembled as she said, “The winter solstice is in two days.”

I didn’t see the relevance.

But Gallagher obviously did. “Sweet Gaia!” he said. “The Curtain!”

I still didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.

Denise explained. “The Curtain is the mystical barrier that separates this realm from any other, the shimmering mist that you saw in your vision. On certain nights of the year our world passes closer to the spirit world and on those nights, the Curtain is weaker. If the Angeu intends to bring an army across, he’d do it on one of those nights.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “The solstice is one of those nights.”

She smiled weakly, telling me I’d got it in one.

While she was explaining, Gallagher was thinking about my vision. “Would you recognize it again? The place where the Angeu plans to cross over?” he asked.

I gave it a little thought and then nodded. “If I was standing there, looking out as I was during the vision, yeah, I think I could.”

Denise frowned. “There have to be a million different places he could have been standing, Simon,” she said. “How do you think you’re going to narrow them all down?”

I was wondering the same thing. Turned out we were both way off base.

“He doesn’t have to,” Gallagher said, with a feral grin. “I think I already know where it is.”

47

ROBERTSON

Without a body, Robertson was reluctant to believe that Hunt was dead, even with all the circumstantial evidence that suggested otherwise. He’d seen too many other agents make fools of themselves by declaring a case closed only to be forced to open it again when the killer resurfaced somewhere else a few weeks or months or even years later. He had no intention of making the same mistake.

The blood trail he’d followed to the canal had been proof that he’d struck Hunt with at least one of his shots. That was the good news. The amount of blood on the ground suggested that he’d hit something vital. But somehow Hunt had still managed to escape.

After searching the general area for two hours after Hunt disappeared from view, Robertson had been forced to call it a night. As he’d climbed back into his vehicle, his cell phone rang with a call from Doherty.

“This had better be good news,” he said sourly, after answering it.

Unfortunately, it was not. By time Doherty finished explaining how Clearwater and Alexandrov had overpowered him and managed to make off with two priceless artifacts stolen from the Field Museum’s collection, Robertson felt like shooting someone. Instead, he took several very deep breaths and forced himself to remain in control. He would not let Hunt get the better of him. Robertson ordered Doherty to return to New Orleans and instructed his driver to take them back to the office.

At first light the next morning, he and the cadre of men he’d brought with him, including a newly returned Agent Doherty, were back, combing the area for any trace of evidence as to where the fugitive might have gone. Help from the locals was practically nonexistent; they had their hands full dealing with the current health crisis. Not that Robertson minded. With the locals out of the way, he was free to run the investigation any way he wanted.

One way or another, he was going to put an end to the bullshit.

He was working the phone, trying to scare up a boat with which to dredge the canal, when Doherty, face flushed with excitement despite the bandage covering the wound he’d received from Alexandrov, knocked on the door of the office Robertson had commandeered.

“We’ve caught a break, sir!”