The Revenant Road (18 page)

The door to the sitting room burst open.

“Juno Kementari, avaunt!”

Neville Kowalski stood in the doorway, a black crossbow at his shoulder.

The Juno thing released me and I fell to my knees, my vision wavering, on the edge of consciousness.

“Get your ass out of the way, Grudge,” Kowalski snapped.

Behind him, ten other people streamed into the sitting room. The newcomers wore black skullcaps that hid the tops of their heads, heavy black work pants and black coats.

They moved with an eerie economy of motion. None of them spoke, each man or woman moving into position smoothly, circling us, seemingly without command or signal, until we were completely surrounded.

The hunters.

They were armed with a variety of weapons: iron staves, axes, handguns, shotguns. Some carried long-bladed cutting implements, knives, scythes or hatchets.

The Juno thing snarled as the black-clad strangers blocked the exits. The smell of frying carrion grew overpowering.

“Watch her!” Kowalski snapped.

The Juno thing screamed.

Then it burst into flame.

25

A Weapon of Mass Distraction

Kowalski cursed and fired the crossbow.

The wooden bolt shot across the room and struck the flaming Juno thing in the center of the chest. The burning creature shrieked. The heat radiating from its body increased and I felt the hairs in my nose disintegrate.

Kowalski’s wooden bolt fell away, burned to ash.

“Staves!” he shouted.  

I scrambled for the nearest corner, the smell of my own burning facial hair creating sufficient concern for my safety. I was inches from the shelter of an open armoire when somebody grabbed me by the collar. A second later, my feet left the floor.

The Juno thing launched into the air like a comet, towing me along through a foul-smelling cloud of black smoke and bits of hot bone. We banked over the heads of the monster killers and streaked toward the northern end of the room.

“Ware the windows!” Kowalski shouted.

Three hunters placed themselves in front of the tall French doors at the far end of the dining room. The Juno thing uttered a coughing belch. There was a deafening blast of heat and fire, and one of the hunters, a woman, clutched her head and burst into flames.

The second hunter, a compact black man wielding a hatchet, ducked under the next firebolt. He reared back, preparing to fling the hatchet. The Juno thing regurgitated a gout of flame and roasted the hatchet-wielder where he stood. The hunter was propelled backward by the firebolt’s force, his body melting even as I watched. What struck the floor was something so repellent that I screamed.

The third hunter, a dark-haired
Latina
, thrust herself between the Juno thing and the nearest window. In one smooth motion she rolled into a kneeling firing position and aimed a Glock 9mm at my face.

“Hernandez, hold your fire!” Kowalski thundered. You’ll hit Grudge!”

The Juno thing veered away from the woman with the gun and Kowalski appeared at the opposite end of the dining room in front of a second set of open French doors leading out into the pool area.

“Door’s right this way, you ugly sack o’ shitworms,” he barked.

With a murderous shriek, the Juno thing hurtled across the dining room, inhaling flame to blast Kowalski into hot blood pudding.

Kowalski tossed something high into the air.

The object, a foot-long block of white stone, flipped over once, hit the floor and shattered into a thousand white pebbles.

The Juno thing dropped me.

I fell six feet to the floor as the fireball shot past me, changing shape as she flew. The fleshless crone, extinguished now, dropped to the floor, landing on her hands and knees.   

“Oh, you bastards,” she snarled.

The crone leaned forward, veined hands stroking the white crystalline chunks, and began to lick the floor.

“Oooohhh, you dirty...
bastards
,” she moaned.

With a shudder, the crone began to sift through the tiny crystals, tasting some, rejecting others. The hunters surrounded her, their weapons raised. The fleshless crone ignored them, her attention devoted to the white crystals.

“It’s salt,” Kowalski said.

My body felt like it had been run through an automated meat tenderizer and flash-fried to a golden brown. But I felt better than I’d done a few moments earlier.

“What the hell’s going on?” I cried. “What’s she doing?”

“Counting,” Kowlaski said. “She’s a
soucouyant
.”

“A what?”

“Hails from
Trinidad and Tobago
. In other parts of the
Caribbean
she’s known as the Old Higue.”

Kowalski turned toward me. “She’s a vampire.”

“But I saw you shoot her,” I said. “That crossbow...”

“Was as useless as my old John Thackery,” Kowalski shrugged. “Sometimes the traditional methods work, sometimes they don’t. But this much holds true: Vampires, whether they hail from
Romania
,
Ireland
or the
Belgian Congo
, share one weakness: They’re all obsessive-compulsives.”

I stared at the crone.

She’d already succeeded in stockpiling a neat molehill of salt between her thighs. She nosed about in the crystals, separating them grain-by-grain, muttering to herself and cursing.

“Some of the legends are true,” Kowalski continued. “No bloodsucker will cross open water, or enter a home, or a mind, without being invited first.”

“Obsessive/compulsive,” I said.

Kowalski nodded at the crone.

“She could do that ‘til Madonna becomes the Pope,” he said. “Fortunately, we won’t have to wait ‘til Hell freezes over.”

Kowalski lifted the empty skin the fleshless crone had left in the center of the room. It sagged in his arms like a ruptured Inflate-a-Date.

Keeping clear of the Juno thing, Kowalski stooped and grabbed a fistful of salt from the floor. The
soucouyant
snarled and slashed at him, her fingers elongating into vicious-looking claws as I watched. Then she went back to counting.

Kowalski tilted back the head of the empty flesh suit and poured the fistful of salt down the sagging throat.

The response was immediate. The Juno thing screamed and began to crawl across the floor toward us. One of the hunters raised a long black stave over the
soucouyant’s
head.

“Wait!” Kowalski shouted. “I wanna see this.”

He threw the empty skin on the floor, inches from the
soucouyant’s
outstretched hands. The
soucouyant
grabbed the flesh-suit and shrieked as if her hands were being scalded by the contact. Nevertheless, she began to crawl back into her skin.

I’d seen a lot of fucked-up things since meeting Neville Kowalski. I’d experienced enough strangeness to fill my head with a kind of howling numbness: a defense mechanism, I suppose, to protect my over-burdened psyche from a massive influx of the Weird.

But seeing Juno Kementari slither into a sizzling sack of her own vacated flesh was the bile-flavored icing on a seven-layer crap cake.

She’d barely gotten both legs back on before she began to dissolve. Her flesh split in a hundred places, bubbling as if she’d stepped into a tub filled with hydrochloric acid.

Juno screamed and gnashed her teeth, biting through the meat of her tongue until blood poured out of her mouth, but she wouldn’t stop.

“See?” Kowalski said. “Obsessive/compulsive. The
soucoyant
loves salt. Even though it has power over her, she’s gotta feel each grain against her raw nerves. It’s like catnip to a Calico: She can’t help herself.”

Even as Juno pulled the skin up to cover the top of her skull, the lower half of her body began to come apart. The air was filled with a sickly stench as plumes of black smoke burst from the top of her now human-looking head.

“You dirty bastards!” she howled.

By now, she’d covered herself in the skin suit, but it was too late. She rolled around on the floor, tearing at herself, gnashing at the flesh of her arms and legs as if she could scour them clean. Her body collapsed in upon itself, and I was unpleasantly reminded of what happens to a slug when covered with salt.

Juno uttered one high-pitched wail of despair, an ear-splitting screech that rattled the windows in the room. Then she lay still.

No one spoke for a long time.

Finally, Kowalski broke the silence.

“Well, ain’t
that
a bitch?”

I pinched my eyes shut, silently begging my gut to quit break dancing. It ignored me and performed a double-twisting ‘helicopter spin’ that would have made Justin Timberlake black with envy. A second later, I fell to my hands and knees and threw up all over Juno’s imported Turkish area rug.

The strained silence above me tickled the nerve-endings at the nape of my neck, a physical red alert that goes off whenever the walls of my dignity have been firebombed. I looked up to find that I was surrounded by the monster hunters.

Kowalski shook his head and gave up the kind of embarrassed shrug I’d come to expect from my mother.

“Heh,” he offered.

The tall brunette who had nearly blown my face off caught my attention. She was tall, about thirty-five, built like an Olympic swimmer: broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted. She wore a black leather biker jacket, black t-shirt, jeans and sturdy engineer’s boots. She might have been beautiful save for the grimace of distaste that curdled her features. And the black patch that covered her right eye.

“
That’s
Marcus Grudge’s son?” the one-eyed brunette growled.

“Damn right,” Kowalski growled. “So whatever’s stuck in yer craw, Hernandez, do the world a favor and
keep
it stuck.”

“He’s soft,” Hernandez snapped. “He smells like a cheap piece of ass. I don’t get it.”

“It’s not for you to ‘get,’” Kowalski shot back.

Hernandez shook her shoulder length black hair and slapped her Glock into a holster on her hip.

“He’s a pussy, Kowalski.”

The two of them glared at each other, something that looked like hate slicing the air between them.

“I’m bringing him along,” Kowalski said simply.

But something else lurked beneath the plainness of his statement, a softness that undercut his hard tone. The one-eyed brunette stooped in one graceful motion and picked up one of the black iron staves.

“You should have killed him,” she said. “He would have been better off.”

“You’re a cold-hearted ball-buster, Hernandez.” Kowlaski snapped.

The one-eyed hunter slid the iron stave into a long leather sheath. Her eyes never left Kowalski’s.

“And you’re a deluded old fool.”

A moment later, the doors leading to the hallway exploded off their hinges.

The other hunters spun, weapons at the ready as dust and debris settled to the floor.

Trocious stood in the doorway.

“Who the Hell are you?” Kowalski said.

“The fulfillment of a long, dark dream,” Trocious replied. “A dream from which there will be no waking.”

His eyes flared like sun storms, casting the rest of his face in ghoulish shadows. His voice rumbled through the air like the Trump of Doom.

 “I’m going to kill every single one of you.”