King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (32 page)

For once, I wisely kept my mouth shut.

When the nurse was gone, I turned to the other two. “Talk to me,” I said. “How do we fix this?”

Neither of them said anything. I could picture them, heads down, refusing to look at me.

Suddenly, I was pissed.

“Don’t give me that, you assholes,” I said, my voice low and hard. “No way am I giving up and neither are you. I won’t let you. We can fix this!”

But even as I said it, I wasn’t so sure. Death itself, or at least his closest personification, had just sucked Denise’s soul into oblivion and then disappeared with it. How the hell were we supposed to fight that?

Right now I didn’t have a clue. But Denise had literally given a piece of her soul to save my life, so I was sure as hell going to …

Wait a minute!

Given a piece of her soul …

I spun to face Gallagher.

“The bonding ritual! The one Denise used to save my life! Can’t we use that to track wherever the hell it is that the Angeu went?”

Gallagher shook his head. “No. It won’t work.”

“Why not?”

It seemed like a reasonable question to me, but Gallagher apparently didn’t think so.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Hunt. Leave it alone.”

I wanted to hit the stubborn son of a bitch. “Like hell I will!” I shouted, getting right in his face, politeness be damned. “Answer the fucking question! Why won’t it work?”

That did it. My goading snapped whatever shred of self-control he had left. He leapt to his feet, shouting, “Because she’s dead, asshole, that’s why!” and shoved both of his hands against my chest.

Unable to see it coming, I had no way of bracing myself for the impact and ended up flying backward to land crashing into the row of plastic chairs behind me.

Silence fell over the room.

I climbed slowly to my feet, my anger barely held in check. I sensed someone approaching and balled my hands into fists, ready to fight back this time, but it was Dmitri, not Gallagher.

“Easy, Hunt,” he said, taking my arm and turning me away from the confrontation. “Why don’t we go get a coffee or something?”

I knew if I stayed things were only going to go from bad to worse, so I let him lead me out of the waiting room and through the hospital halls until we found a small lounge a short distance away. The serving area was closed down for the night, but the vending machines were still working.

Dmitri led me to a chair and then used one of the machines to fetch me a cup of coffee. It tasted like shit, but it gave me something to do with my hands to keep them from shaking.

We sat in silence for ten, maybe fifteen, minutes.

“You all right?” he asked finally.

“Fuckin’ peachy.”

He laughed and the sound prompted the release of some of the tension and anger I’d been holding inside.

After a few more minutes of silence, I said, “I’m not giving up.”

“I know.”

“Do you think she’s alive?”

He thought about that one for a moment, then said carefully, “You of all people should know that there is always hope.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I muttered, but it wasn’t the reassuring answer I was looking for. Seemed I was going to have to do this one on my own.

“I’m going to go back and see how Simon’s doing. You all right here by yourself for a bit?”

“Yeah,” I said, waving one hand in a sort of shooing motion.

After he’d left, I got up and began pacing about the empty room.

I was still lost in thought when the voice spoke out of the darkness behind me.

51

HUNT

“You can still save her, you know.”

I knew that voice.

I’d heard it only once before, but once was more than enough to leave its gravelly timbre etched permanently in the forefront of my mind. It had been five years since I’d heard it, but the passage of time didn’t matter either. It could have been ten, fifteen, even twenty-five years and I still would’ve known it as surely as I knew my own name. That voice had changed my life.

I spun around.

In the dim light of the lounge I had no trouble seeing. The Preacher stood on the other side of the room, watching me with those empty eye sockets of his. He was dressed just as he’d been on the night I’d first encountered him: black pants and waistcoat over a simple white shirt, a broad-brimmed black hat on his head, like a traveling preacher out of the Old West. The illusion was almost complete—all he was missing was a Bible clenched in one liver-spotted hand—but I knew him for what he was.

Devil.

Demon.

Outcast!

Under the weight of my stare a grin tugged at the corners of his thin mouth.

It was the grin that did it.

I crossed the distance between us and wrapped my hands around his throat before I was even consciously aware that I had moved. I didn’t let it stop me once I had, though, but instead used my momentum to slam him bodily against the wall, knocking his hat askew. In the process, long lanky hair the color of frost tumbled free to frame his face like a burial shroud wrapped about a corpse.

With a strength born of rage and frustration, I lifted him clear off the ground, the toes of his boots dangling a few inches from the floor. A brutal cold, like an Arctic wind fresh from the depths of the frozen north, seeped off his skin, but I ignored it, concentrating instead on choking the life out of him for what he had done to me.

He didn’t even try to stop me.

I stared deep into those empty eye sockets, knowing he could see me just as easily as I could see him, and squeezed, feeling his bony throat contracting beneath my fingers, watching as his face began to take on a bluish hue.

Die, you son of a bitch …

Only then did his words actually register.

With some effort, I opened my hands and stepped back, letting him fall to the floor in front of me.

“What did you say?”

The Preacher threw back his head and laughed, the sound bouncing off the walls and seeming to echo in the close confines of the room.

I clenched my fists, willing myself to remain still and not go for his throat again. He was trying to get a rise out of me, and this time I refused to take the bait.

I watched in silence as he climbed to his feet, straightened his waistcoat, and adjusted his hat.

“Where was I?” he asked with mock innocence.

I took a step toward him, and you didn’t need a psychic to feel the rage boiling just beneath the surface of my will. “I asked you a question, Preacher…”

“You can still save her.” He said each word slowly and distinctly, mocking my inability to understand. “If you love her enough, that is.”

I didn’t know if I loved Denise or not, but I wasn’t going to debate the point with him. I did know that right then I would do anything to save her, so my choice was a simple one.

“Tell me.”

He pointed into the room on the other side of the glass, where I could see Denise’s body lying in the bed, her chest rising and falling with each motion of the ventilator.

“The Angeu may have reaped her soul, but her body lives on. While it does, there is a chance you can save her.”

I knew I shouldn’t trust him. I’d listened to him once before and while he hadn’t lied to me directly, he also hadn’t told me the entire truth. As a result, I’d nearly gone mad from the ritual I’d conducted and the things I’d seen. If Whisper hadn’t come along and saved me when she had, I wouldn’t be standing here right now.

There was no sane reason for listening to him.

But I did it anyway, and maybe the fact that it was nuts was what allowed me to make that decision in the first place. After all, just about everything I’d been through since the night I’d accepted the book from the Preacher could be called insane in one way or another. Five years ago I wouldn’t have even considered the existence of a creature like the Angeu or the Sorrows that he had bound to his service. I wouldn’t have believed that my friendship with the ghost of a young girl would first save my life and then lead me to the answers I sought regarding the fate of my daughter Elizabeth. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten involved in a mystical battle for control of New Orleans.

And I never would have met Denise in the first place.

I knew I wasn’t going to like what he had to say, but what the hell. Beggars can’t be choosers.

“Tell me,” I said.

He smiled and there was nothing friendly in that smile.

Then he told me what I had to do.

I was right.

I didn’t like it.

Didn’t like it even one little bit.

But I was going to do it anyway.

52

CLEARWATER

The first thing she saw when she regained consciousness was a sky the color of wet shale that roiled and churned like something alive. It hung above her, looming there, as if poised on the edge of a long drop, and she found herself cringing from the wrongness of it, unable and unwilling to look at it anymore.

Her gaze fell first upon the wooden slats that made up the side of the cart she was riding in and then dropped lower still to give her a good look at the uncomfortable surface she was lying upon.

Bodies.

Dozens of them, men, women, and children, all naked, their bones jutting out from behind the thin covering of their pale flesh, their eyes open and staring at her.

She cried out and then tried to scramble away from them, only to discover that she was secured in place atop the pile with some kind of netting that wouldn’t let her move more than a few inches at best.

She was trapped!

The discovery sent her into a panicked frenzy, thrashing against the netting, her arms and legs straining against her bonds to no avail.

After several minutes she collapsed, exhausted, only to jerk her neck upward when she realized that the back of her head was resting against the face of a corpse directly beneath her. She held her head upright for several long minutes, her muscles aching and screaming from the strain, but she knew she couldn’t remain that way indefinitely. She was going to need her already depleted strength for something more important, like staying alive.

With a whimper of dismay she finally gave in and lowered her head, gritting her teeth against the scream that was building in her throat.

Easy, girl. Hold yourself together. You’ll need your wits about you if you’re going to get out of this.

She took several long, deep breaths, repeating a mantra to herself that she’d learned as an apprentice, over and over again until she felt her serenity return.

Good. Now think. Don’t react; think.

She realized that while she might be bodily tied down, both of her hands were reasonably free of restraint. And since she wasn’t gagged, that meant she could utilize both the vocal and somatic motions she needed to access her Art. She could be free in minutes!

Her excitement rising, she slipped her hands up through the holes in the netting and wriggled her fingers, making sure that she had a full range of motion. When she was satisfied, she opened her mouth and spoke a few words in ancient Sumerian while weaving her fingers in a complicated pattern.

The spell was designed to send a wave of intense cold outward from her body in a ten-foot sphere. The netting that held her down, as well as the rear of the cart itself, would instantly go from its current temperature to something on the order of thirty degrees below zero. The sudden drop in temperature would make it extremely brittle, and all she’d have to do at point was give the net a good tug and she’d be free.

At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

The reality, however, left much to be desired.

A stabbing pain shot through her skull the minute she tried to access her Art, overwhelming her senses and scattering what little power she’d begun to gather.

She shook her head to clear it and then tried again.

The pain was even worse this time, a juggernaut that roared through her skull, smashing everything in its path, causing her eyes to bulge in their sockets and blood to trickle out of her nose.

As before, the pain vanished when she stopped trying to call upon her Art.

It looked like she was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

Without magick.

The thought sent a quick pulse of fear through her veins.

Take it easy
, she reminded herself.

She didn’t know how she’d gotten here or even where
here
actually was. She needed to calm down, take stock of her surroundings, and try to understand what was going on so that she could figure a way out of here.

The first thing she noticed, aside from that awful sky, was a steady
clop-clop-clop
sound coming from somewhere behind her head, in the direction that the cart was traveling. This confirmed her suspicion that the cart was being pulled along by a horse, or perhaps a team of horses. She twisted her neck as far as it would go to one side, but all she could catch was the occasional glimpse of a tall, lean form wrapped in dark clothing sitting at the front of the cart.

That was enough, though.

She knew that form.

She’d last seen it, in fact, driving a cart much like this one, while leading a horde of ravenous ghosts on an invasion of the living world.

Denise raised her head and looked past her feet to the back of the cart, hoping there might be something to see in that direction. While the sides were made of rough-hewn slats that fit together unevenly, the rear was a single piece of wood, held in place by short strands of rope. It was clear from the way it was constructed that it functioned as a makeshift tailgate. Thanks to the way she was restrained, she couldn’t raise her head high enough to see over it, so with more than a hint of frustration she turned to look at the side closest to her. At least there she could peek through the holes between the slats.

There wasn’t much to see.

A gray, ash-filled landscape stared back at her, a harsh, barren plain that stretched out toward the horizon. Very little grew in that wasteland and those few trees that broke the monotony looked more like charcoal-stained skeletons than living things.