Fields of Blood (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 2) (2 page)

“Didn’t know. The forensics photographer called me about the tattoo because of the other cases, but this guy was already bagged when I got here.” The handkerchief went into motion, wiping a fresh sheen of sweat from his broad face. “You know what that thing means?” he said.

“Yeah. Means it wasn’t a werewolf.” I sighed, tugged the shirt back down and zipped the bag closed. “The symbol is Fae,” I said.

“Like your…er, friend with the metal arm?”

I nodded. “He didn’t do this, though.” Taeral, the Unseelie Fae who’d threatened to kill me the first time I met him, was actually my half-brother. I knew he wasn’t involved in this—he had plenty of other things to worry about right now. Wandering around and slitting people’s throats was definitely not on his to-do list. “I’ll look into this, find out what I can,” I said. “Can I take him?”

“Yeah, they’re done with him. Let me just go get the form.” Abe turned toward his car, paused and looked at me. “You all right, kid? Look like somebody nailed your cat to a tree.”

“I’m fine. I just…thought this was over,” I said.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “We’ll make sure it’s over, Gideon. Don’t worry.”

“Great,” I said, wishing I could believe that. As Abe headed for his car, I stared down at the body bag knowing what I had to do now—and not liking it one damned bit.

It was time to have a chat with the dead guy.

C
HAPTER 2

A
fter I signed the form and promised Abe I’d call him as soon as I found something out, I loaded the body into my van. This corpse, like most of the bodies involved in police investigations around here, was headed for Scruvener University Hospital—better known as Screw U by its overworked staff and underserved patients. But first, I had a few questions for the dead man.

And he’d answer them truthfully, because the dead can’t lie. At least, not to me.

That was something else I hadn’t shared with Abe. Mostly because I had no idea how to even begin to explain it. In addition to being half Fae, I was apparently the DeathSpeaker. I had the unique, and painful, ability to compel the dead to speak.

It wasn’t a talent I would’ve picked if I had a choice. In fact, I’d rather have the unique and preferably not painful ability to do just about anything else. Tie knots with my tongue. Clean toilets like a boss.
Anything
but this.

Milus Dei had wanted me because I could learn the secrets of the Others—like where they lived, how to find more of their kind, and how they could be killed. They’d planned to use me to annihilate every non-human in existence.

Being the potential instrument of mass genocide was not my idea of a good time.

I wheeled the stretcher in place beside the fold-down bed in the back of my van. Before the Others happened, I’d lived in here. Rented space in a parking garage, ran things like my laptop and phone charger off a jump pack generator. It wasn’t much, but it was home—the only kind of home I’d ever known. Cramped, lonely, and always on the move.

Sometimes I still slept out here, when the walls got to me and I felt like people were too close for comfort. None of my new sort-of-family really understood why, and I never tried to explain.

I didn’t talk about the past.

Once I had the stretcher locked down, I opened the body bag and hesitated. Hadn’t actually done this in a while. Most of the time it worked better when I was touching the dead person, but I wasn’t that eager to have my brain turned into a pincushion.

I took a deep breath and laid a hand on his shoulder.

Almost immediately, there was a tugging sensation in my head. The dead guy didn’t want to talk. Too bad, because I needed to know what the hell was going on. These guys were supposed to be finished. “Hey. Milus Dei asshole,” I said. “What’s your name?”

Peter. And you must be the DeathSpeaker.

“Yeah, I am. Shut up.” Every snarling word hurt, a quick stabbing sensation that flashed behind my eyes like a threatening migraine. I wished I knew how a voice in my head could cause physical pain. “Okay, Peter. Who killed you?”

You did.

The words chilled me. The dead couldn’t lie, but that sure as hell wasn’t the truth. I’d have remembered slitting a man’s throat in Central Park. “Bullshit I did,” I said. “Let’s try that again. Who killed you?”

You did
, the voice repeated.
When you released him. You’ve killed us all.

Christ, that was painful. And it didn’t make any sense. “Released who?”

The Fae.

Okay. That definitely made no sense. We’d rescued all the Others these bastards had captured, some who’d been held in that nightmare of a place for years. But only one of them was Fae, and there was no way he’d done this. After he’d been tortured for twenty-six years at Milus Dei’s hands, Taeral’s father—and mine, though we hadn’t been able to tell him that—was an empty shell, a mild-mannered lunatic with no memory of himself, his son, or anything that happened longer than ten minutes ago.

“Are you saying Daoin killed you?” I said.

No. The other Fae.

“Goddamn it, there was no other Fae!” I forced myself to calm down. One of the other Milus Dei dead guys had acted like this, answering with what was technically the truth—but not the truth I wanted to hear. I just had to ask the right questions. “What is the name of the Fae who killed you?” I said.

Reun.

No. That wasn’t right. I didn’t release him, because he hadn’t been a captive. In fact, I’d tried to kill him. Reun was a Seelie noble who’d been willingly working for Milus Dei. He’d used his magic on Sadie to help them track down the Hive, the underground camp where dozens of Others had lived for years. The bastards burned the place to the ground and captured most of them.

During the Port Authority thing, the bogeyman—whose name was Murdoch—had basically scared Reun into a drooling vegetable. Then we’d accidentally left him in a substation.

He’d vanished before we could get back down there to pick him up.

I didn’t have any problem believing Reun had killed this guy, but that didn’t make it my fault. “How did I release him?” I said.

You ended his promise.
The words stung a lot worse now, the pain in my head graduating from needles to fishhooks.
When you killed Mr. Foley, you released him. Now he’s free to—

“Shut the hell up,” I snapped, not thrilled to hear that I’d accidentally done Reun a favor. “That hurts.”

Oh, really. It hurts you, too? In that case, let’s sing a song. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Feel free to join me, DeathSpeaker. Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall…

He kept going, and the pain flooded my head with a vengeance. My nose started drizzling blood. “Damn it, shut up! How many more of you bastards are there around here?”

There was a lot more tugging, but at least he stopped speaking daggers for a few seconds.
Don’t know. A handful. Maybe he killed them all, but not the rest. Have you heard this one? I’m Henry the Eighth I am, Hen-ry the Eighth I am, I am, I got married to the widow next door, she’s been married seven times before, and every ONE was a Henry, HENRY, she wouldn’t have a Willy or a Sam…

I could barely think through the pain. The blood poured freely now, and tremendous pressure was building in my ears. They’d pop and bleed soon, if I didn’t stop. But there was something really damned important in his last round of babbling. Something I had to know about.

I’d only asked how many were around here. He’d said a handful, “but not the rest”—like there were more of them somewhere else.

“The rest of what?” I gasped out between sharp-edged lines of Henry the Eighth. “How many people, total, are members of Milus Dei?”

Countless. Legions. We’re everywhere, DeathSpeaker. You will be caught, and all of you will die. I’ve memorized the entire Constitution. Want to hear it? We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure tranquility, provide for the common defense against monsters like you, filthy murderous creatures of the night, HOW DOES IT FEEL NOW YOU BASTARD PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE AND SECURE—

I let go of him with a startled shout, just before my brain could explode and leak out through my ears. Before I passed out like the last time. Blessed silence filled my head, and I gave an involuntary shudder.

It wasn’t over. Not even close.

The rest of them were just going to love this. I had to get back to the Castle and break the news, about Reun being awake and on the loose as much as Milus Dei. We’d barely put down the bunch we faced, and they had less than a hundred. I didn’t know how the hell we’d be able to deal with countless legions.

But I did know one thing. The next time I talked to a dead bad guy, I’d damned well keep my mouth shut about how much it hurt.

C
HAPTER 3

I
dropped off Peter the Singing Dead Man at Screw U, but I didn’t stick around to chat. Dr. Vivian Cavanaugh, my favorite medical examiner, worked the night shift. I hadn’t seen Viv in a few weeks, and I still owed her dinner.

Unfortunately, I had a feeling that vague, date-shaped window was closing. I’d been so busy lately, I hadn’t been able to follow through with the offer I’d made after she helped me do some crucial research—and before that, it was a few years before I even realized she’d wanted me to ask her out. So she was probably pissed at me.

Couldn’t blame her, really. I’d never had much success in the relationship department. I wasn’t charming or handsome or funny or rich. My job was unusual and interesting, but it also tended to turn women off when I told them I hauled dead bodies around all night.

To be honest, I didn’t mind my generally dateless existence. Kept me from getting too close to anyone.

But it was hell on my sex life.

It was a little before noon when I got back to the Castle and pulled my van through the narrow space hacked into the overgrowth around it to park in the front yard. The place wasn’t actually a castle, but it was formerly called the Castle Hotel. It had been abandoned for years. With the Hive destroyed, we’d needed a new, hidden place for twenty-six displaced Others to live.

This had been Daoin’s idea. No one knew how he’d found it, or how he managed to not only remember the place, but magically transport all twenty-six  of us here at the same time from the subtunnels under the city.

That was the last crazy magic he’d performed. Since then, he was just plain crazy.

I walked in the front door to the former hotel lobby. The place still looked like a dump, but we’d done a lot of work to upgrade it from total shithole to merely abandoned. When we got here, the entire lobby floor had been a carpet of ferns and moss—and that was the smallest of the problems. At least now there was sporadic running water and electricity, some of the rooms were semi-habitable, and the kitchen could be used if you didn’t mind a little plaster dust or wood shavings in your food.

Though we’d cleared out most of the junk, the lobby still contained an immobile hunk of a front desk made from solid walnut and battle-scarred with age. Behind the desk, at his usual station, was the immobile hunk of Grygg. The massive, nearly eight-foot tall golem had been the gatekeeper at the Hive, and he seemed to have set himself the same task here. For decades he’d made sure no unsanctioned human or suspicious Other had passed through the magic barrier that separated the underground haven from the rest of the world.

Until Milus Dei came along with Reun in tow, and somehow managed to remove his head and one of his arms. But apparently that kind of injury was just a minor setback for a golem—he’d made a full recovery.

Some of the others who’d come here at first had drifted away over the past month, and we were down to eighteen residents. Six of them were still Duchenes, so now they were one out of three people here.