King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (3 page)

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, of course. Go back to bed. I’m sorry I woke you.”

Now it was his turn to brush it off. “You didn’t. I was up anyway. Memories, ya know?”

She did know. She’d been there when the ghost of his daughter Elizabeth had asked him to use his power to release her into whatever it was that came next. It was the glimpse of the man she’d seen in that moment, the one who would have gladly given his life to save that of his little girl, that convinced her to join him when he was forced to flee the city.

“Really, I’m fine,” she said, and smiled again to show that she meant it.

Whether he believed her or not, she couldn’t tell, but he said good night, turned, and wandered off back in the direction of his bedroom at the rear of the house.

She stayed up after Hunt had gone to bed, settling onto the couch and staring out into the night’s darkness, considering her next move. The visions had started two weeks before, and there was no denying the fact that they were coming more regularly now. Each time it was the same: she was trapped in the burning city while magick ran amuck around her and something dark and twisted stalked her through the smoke and flames of the city streets.

She couldn’t ignore the summons much longer. And there was no doubt about it, that’s what it was—a summons. Gaia needed her assistance again, just as she’d been needed when the fetch and its master had begun slaughtering people in Boston, intent on disrupting the natural order of things. Then, like now, she’d begun having visions, images of her and Hunt and Dmitri wrapped up in their efforts to put a stop to what was to come. Most of those visions came true, as she knew they would. The longer she waited, the more fixed those events became in that future timeline, as if her willingness to act sooner rather than later made a difference to the ultimate outcome. And maybe that was the point. You couldn’t ignore a call from the Earth Mother any more than you could ignore gravity, not if you wanted to continue as a practitioner of the Art, and doing so could have dire consequences.

So why was she resisting?

The answer was right there, simply waiting for her to acknowledge it, and this time she did so.

She was afraid.

Facing off against the shade of Eldredge and his deadly fetch had nearly killed her and her friends. Going back into battle against the unknown a second time wasn’t high on her list of favorite things right now.

What if this time they weren’t strong enough?

No matter how long she sat there, she couldn’t come up with an answer that satisfied her.

3

HUNT

A few days after our adventure in Newark, the weather finally broke, clearing away the gray overcast that seemed to be an ever-present feature of a New Jersey winter and giving us a glimpse of blue sky, with temperatures higher than they’d been for months.

It was the third week of December and the thermometer was hovering in the low fifties.

God bless global warming.

By noon it had turned into a beautiful day.

Or, at least, it seemed that way to me, though I’d be the first to admit that my viewpoint might have been a little off, given that I’d already consumed a six-pack of a Mexican ale with a name I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce properly when sober, never mind in my current state. I was sitting in a lawn chair at the ocean’s edge, an array of fishing poles stuck in the sand in front of me and a now partly empty beer cooler close at my feet.

Given his particular line of work, Dmitri knew he might one day have to run, and he’d planned ahead, buying a little place on the Jersey Shore. Why he’d picked Jersey was a mystery to me. I mean, come on, who wants to hide out in New Jersey, for heaven’s sake? Florida, the Bahamas, maybe even Costa Rica, sure, places like that made sense.

But New Jersey?

I had to give him credit though, the place he’d chosen was practically ideal, if you ignored the fact it was in Jersey. The town was small, the kind of community where people kept to themselves and didn’t stick their noses into other people’s business. Dmitri’s infrequent comings and goings were met with complete indifference, especially now that it was the middle of December.

The little house stood in the dunes not far from the water’s edge and from the front porch you could look out at the Atlantic and practically see forever. I’d been doing just that each night for the last several weeks, trying to come to grips with what I’d learned about my daughter’s death and the events that had led me to hiding out like a common fugitive rather than the respected Harvard professor I’d once been.

Funny how all it takes is one little curveball to turn your world upside down, isn’t it?

A few newscasts and a little bit of Internet research had let us know that I was currently occupying a spot pretty high up on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. There were half a dozen terrorists ahead of me, but I’d made the top twenty without difficulty. According to the FBI, I was a serial killer known as the Reaper, responsible for a killing spree that stretched from coast to coast and went back ten years or more. In my lighter moments I was amused by it all, but the truth was that if the cops ever got their hands on me it would probably be a long time before I was anywhere but inside a six-by-six cell.

Dmitri wasn’t on the list, but there was no doubt he was the focus of the same kind of manhunt that I was; hacking into my police file had revealed that he was listed as a known accomplice of mine.

As far as we knew, neither the police nor the FBI had connected Denise to either of us. It was something we were thankful for, because it meant one of us could still move around freely without worrying about being recognized.

We weren’t too far from Atlantic City and we were making occasional use of Clearwater’s ability to influence the natural world to win at the craps tables from time to time. Not enough to call attention to ourselves, but enough to keep the heat on and pay the grocery bill. But while Denise was out and about, Dmitri and I were trapped in a beachfront cottage with nothing better to do than watch endless
Seinfeld
reruns and play cards.

Trust me. It wasn’t as exciting as it sounds.

The fishing poles had been Denise’s idea. She had picked them up for us one night after a particularly good run at the tables, and we’d been waiting for more than a week for the freezing rain to stop so we could try them out. Finding the sun out when we’d risen this morning had caused us to start acting like a couple of giddy schoolgirls and it didn’t take us long to stake out a spot at the water’s edge.

Now, a couple of hours later, we’d moved past mellow and were well on our way to being more than a bit under the influence.

As a result, neither of us was all that quick on the uptake when Denise showed up.

She wandered over without our realizing it, and the first we knew she was there was when she said, right out of the blue, “New Orleans.”

I turned my head and glanced over in her direction, surprised to find her out there with us. I couldn’t see her, the brightness of the midmorning sun rendering me as blind as a cave newt for all practical purposes, but normally I would have at least heard her approach.

I considered what she’d said and then decided that maybe my ears were playing tricks on me.

“Come again?” I asked.

“We need to go to New Orleans.”

I shook my head. “No, we don’t.”

“Yes, we do.” She said it slowly, as if talking to an errant child.

I reached over to my left and nudged the monster dozing in the lawn chair next to mine.

“Want to go to New Orleans?” I asked him.

Dmitri grunted. “Leave this lovely weather behind? Are you nuts?”

I smiled up at Denise, ignoring the glare I felt her leveling in my direction even though I couldn’t see it. “See? New Orleans is a bad idea; even Dmitri thinks so.”

I snatched a beer out of the cooler to my right and held it up to her. “Pull up a chair and have a cold one instead.”

My offer was met with silence. I could feel the temperature around me drop a good ten degrees beneath the weight of her stare.

Not good.

I tried again.

“Come on, relax, Denise. Sit down and we’ll talk about it, okay?”

I might as well have been talking to myself for all the good it did.

Her voice was calm and controlled, but I could hear the strain behind it as she said, “I’m leaving in the morning, with or without the two of you.”

The sound of her steps as she made her way across the sand told me the discussion was over.

“Sounds like you managed to piss her off,” Dmitri said. His tone held more than a touch of amusement.

“You think?” I shot back, but my heart wasn’t in it. A cold feeling was forming in the pit of my stomach. Something was wrong; I could feel it in my bones.

I started to get up out of my chair and then hesitated. The joking with Dmitri aside, one thing I’d learned to respect in the few months we’d been living together in our little cottage was Clearwater’s temper. She was pretty slow to boil, but when she went off, it was like Krakatoa in full eruption.

In other words, she was volatile as hell.

And right now, it seemed like she was on the verge of blowing her top.

Under the best of circumstances, pissing off a woman was usually not a good idea. Doing so to one who could turn you into a cockroach was even worse.

“Any idea what that was all about?” I asked Dmitri, my ass half in and half out of the chair beneath me as I wavered in indecision about whether just to let her cool off or to follow her back up to the house in the dunes behind us.

“Not a clue. But if I were you, I’d go find out.”

“Turning into a regular Dr. Phil, aren’t you?”

Snagging the beer from my hand, he replied, “I’m much better looking than Dr. Phil. Besides, somebody’s got to keep the two of you from killing each other.”

Great.

I grabbed hold of the guideline that he’d strung for me when we’d first arrived and, with one hand on the rope, followed it back up the beach to the house. It stood a good ten feet off the ground on a raised platform, designed that way in order to provide some protection from the angry Atlantic in the midst of the winter storms. The wooden steps leading up to the front door were smooth beneath my bare feet—worn down by the water, wind, and the passage of time.

Noise coming out of Denise’s bedroom at the end of the hall led me in that direction. I found her inside and didn’t need my eyesight to know that she was tossing what few belongings she had with her into a suitcase and preparing to do just what she said she would.

Leave us behind.

“What’s going on, Denise?”

I was honestly bewildered. Sure, I’d been a bit of a wiseass back on the beach, but that wasn’t anything unusual; wiseass was practically my middle name. My behavior certainly didn’t deserve this strong a response.

I thought of how I’d seen her late last night, standing before the big bay window at the front of the house, staring off into the darkness outside, a look of fear on her face.

“Decided you’ve had enough?” I asked.

She stopped throwing things around, and I knew she’d turned to face me when I felt the weight of her stare.

“Is that what you think?” she said, her voice trembling with sudden anger. “That I can’t handle it anymore?”

I raised my hands in surrender and took a step back. “I don’t know what to think, Denise. That’s the problem. You’ve been tense for days; you’re short-tempered, you won’t talk to us, and now you suddenly declare, completely out of the blue, that you’re going to New Orleans with or without us. I mean, come on, what am I supposed to think?”

I waited for the explosion I knew was simmering beneath the surface, but, much to my surprise, it never came. Instead, I heard a sigh of frustration and the sound of the bedsprings as she sat down on the bed.

I walked over and sat beside her, quietly waiting.

“Sorry,” she said eventually.

“No problem.” And it wasn’t. She’d been under a lot of stress lately, we all had, and the fact that we weren’t ready to kill each other by now was a minor miracle. A little temper tantrum now and again was expected, in my view.

Besides, she was my friend. It had been a long time since I’d been able to say that about anyone.

“Want to tell me about it?”

A long moment of silence followed and I thought she wasn’t going to say anything, but she surprised me again. “I’m having visions.”

I tensed. The last time she’d had visions, we’d ended up facing off against a doppelganger and the vengeful shade of the sorcerer that had created it. The three of us had almost died in the process.

“Visions?” I asked, already knowing I wasn’t going to like the answer.

I knew she was nodding, even though I couldn’t see it. “I’m in New Orleans and something is chasing me through the streets, something horrible. I don’t know what it is; all I know is that I can’t let it catch me, no matter what.”

Sometimes I hate being right. “Sounds to me like you’d be better off avoiding New Orleans altogether,” I said.

She sighed. “That’s the problem. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it just isn’t done. Ignoring a summons from Gaia is like driving the wrong way down the highway at rush hour. There’s only one way it can end and that’s in disaster.”

Gaia. Now there was a concept I was still having trouble wrapping my head around. Best I could understand, Denise believed that the Earth itself was alive, that it was the embodiment of an ancient goddess spirit, and that all life, human or otherwise, was linked to it through some kind of mystical web of interconnectedness. It was this divine spark of energy that powered her magick, she explained once, when I asked her about it.

Telling me she tapped into the Force would have made about as much sense. Then again, I wasn’t the one who had to believe.

Still, just because she was content taking directions from Mother Nature, didn’t mean that I was too.

“Needs you how?” I asked.

She thought about it for a minute, and I got the sense that she was choosing her words with care. “I’m not … really sure,” she said. “I think I’m supposed to prevent something from happening, something really major, but I’m not quite sure what that is.”