Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (21 page)

“You don’t have to be able to hear him for him to hear you,” Jack said hurriedly. “Try.”

Eden regarded him for a long moment and then settled back onto the loveseat, her lilac shirt clashing with the red and yellow floral design on the furniture. With a self-effacing grimace that revealed that despite all she had learned over the millennia, in this form she was still a teenaged girl, she closed her eyes and began to call for Seth. Her voice was soft, slightly embarrassed perhaps, but she called for him nevertheless, told him how she missed him, and that Jack was a friend who might enable them to speak. Entire minutes went by, though Jack could not be certain how many, and then just as Eden opened her eyes and gave Jack a look of frustration, a new presence entered the room.

Just over Eden’s shoulder, it appeared as though it had always been there and Jack had just opened his eyes to it. Seth was a silhouette of light, a man, perhaps, or just the shape of one. He wore robes and had no discernible features save for his eyes, which were a brilliant green quite unlike the dark eyes of other spirits he had seen. This being was more a construction of glittering light than a ghost.

Guardian angel,
he thought. That’s what Eden had called him. Jack had no idea if that was really what he was, or if he was simply a ghost who had remained on the Ghostlands for all these thousands of years. Whatever Seth was, though, Jack felt a wave of benevolence from the spirit that seemed to suffuse him with good feeling. In the quaint, richly decorated parlor in Eden Hirsch’s home, it ought to have been absurd.

Instead, it was sublime.

“Seth,” Jack whispered.

Eden’s face lit up. “He’s here?”

Jack nodded, staring at the figure of Seth. “I’m—”

“
I know,”
Seth said, and his voice was like the tumble of a waterfall across stone. “
I’ve been listening.”

Surprised, Jack frowned. “You’ve been here? Why couldn’t I see you?”

Though he could not make out the spirit-guide’s mouth, he was sure that Seth smiled.

“
I did not want you to.”

“He’s been here all along,” Jack told Eden quickly. Then he gazed at Seth again. “Can you help me? Do you know anything about the Ravenous?”

For a moment it was as though he could make out a definitive shape after all, a handsome face with aquiline, almost feminine features, and a kind of sash that was draped across the robes with some sort of insignia on it. Then the moment passed and the light flickered again and Seth was just a silhouette, a mirage of a man.

“
Tell Eden I love her, will you?”

Jack swallowed, his heart racing with the intensity of Seth’s presence. He looked at Eden. “He loves you.”

“I love you, Seth,” she said, speaking to the room, to the air, to her guardian angel.

But Jack was no longer listening. He was captivated by the clear green eyes in that splash of light. Seth stared at him for a time, then the silhouette grew closer, and Jack tensed.

“
There is not one creature called ‘the Ravenous,’ ”
Seth began. “
They are creatures who appear in the realm of lost souls from time to time. In truth, they are lost souls themselves, but they are not human. I listened as you told Eden of the Prowlers. While I do not know them by that name, I know of them, this race of beasts who mask themselves in the guise of men. A Ravenous is the spirit of one such creature who
has died but whose essence has become lost, wandering far from the netherworld that awaits it.”

“Wait, back up.” Jack frowned and shook his head slowly. “The Ravenous can’t be a Prowler. That doesn’t make any sense. I was told that Prowlers have no souls, that there’s no afterlife for them. And the Ravenous doesn’t look anything like a Prowler . . . or at least not very much.”

“
You have been misinformed,”
Seth replied, and his form somehow became both brighter and more transparent. “
As for the beast’s countenance, the appearance of the Ravenous is that of the heart of the beast, the true primitive. These creatures did not always appear the way they do now, could not always alter their forms.”

“So. What? You mean this ghost is what Prowlers looked like before they evolved?”

“
Precisely that,”
Seth agreed. “
They changed to survive.”

Prowlers had spirits, an afterlife. The Ravenous was nothing more than the ghost of a monster. Mind whirling with the implications of all this, Jack immediately thought of Bill. The big man thought there was no heaven waiting for him, no eternity.
Won’t he be surprised?

“I have a friend who’ll be happy to hear that.”

“Perhaps,” Seth whispered, and now his form became even more diffuse, as though he were fading from them. “Remember, however, that the afterlife for these beasts is molded to them. It is a different plane of existence altogether, a savage, hellish place of almost constant battle. That is the wildness in them.” It felt as though Jack were crackling with the energy he felt now. Finally he had discovered the truth about the Ravenous. The problem was, how did he use that truth? He paced a moment, feeling Eden’s eyes upon him, knowing that it must be driving her crazy listening to him talk with Seth when she could not.

“I guess you don’t have any idea how to stop one of these things?” he asked finally. “How to destroy it.”

“
I do not. But the Ravenous only does what instinct tells it to do. It is not meant to be here among us. If you can guide it to its own netherworld, it would no longer be a threat. I would be happy to help if I can.”
Jack blinked, surprised. Seth knew the risks involved in that, what the Ravenous could do to him, but he was still willing to take that chance. It made him wonder just how long a soul would have to linger upon the Ghostlands to look the way he did, so pure and bright. Eden stared at Jack, and for a moment he only studied her face, so open and kind.

“Tell you what,” he said to her. “It’s probably a quarter to four. I’ve got to leave in about half an hour, but I’d guess you two have a lot to talk about. If you want, I’ll help.”

Even as he spoke, Eden’s face lit up into a brilliant smile, and tears began to form at the corners of her eyes.

Jack stayed.

The shades were still drawn, and there was nothing Bill wanted more than to fall back into bed. But he had been away from the pub long enough already. That morning after he had finally woken up he promised to return for his shift and headed home to clean himself and his apartment up and to get a few more hours’ sleep.

Despite the events of the previous twenty-four hours, his own bed, in his own place, still called to him. But all he had to do was think about Courtney, and remember that whoever planted that corpse in his trunk and broke into the pub last night was still out there, and it was easy to walk away from the bed.

When he walked out of his bedroom, the shades were still drawn and the room was dark. Bill patted his pockets for his keys, glanced around to make sure there wasn’t anything he was forgetting, yawned once, and then pulled open the apartment door.

He caught the scent too late. That familiar scent. And he looked up into a face out of his past, a face he remembered though he had nearly forgotten the scent.

“Dallas,” Bill said.

Then Dallas shot him with a taser gun and Bill stiffened with the pain as electricity surged through him. He slipped to the floor and unconsciousness claimed him.

C H A P T E R 11

Molly’s room was organized chaos. Everything she had brought with her when she moved into the Dwyers’ apartment—most of her clothes, a lamp, and a small nightstand—was ready to go. On the bed she had stacked the clothes in neatly folded piles, ready to be packed. To one side she had set a bunch of things she planned to wear in the nine days before she was to leave for Yale, and a Bridget’s sweatshirt just in case it got cool. All she needed now were the old radio CD player from her mother’s and enough boxes and suitcases to transport her clothes in.

With a sigh she stood and stared at the clothes, at the two open suitcases on the floor, and she knew there was one other thing she had to do. An uneasy feeling in her stomach, she walked out of the room where they had made her feel so at home and headed for the door. In the hall she paused outside Courtney’s room and glanced in.

There were the bulletin boards, tacked with stories of horrible mutilation murders and monster sightings that might or might not have indicated the presence of Prowlers. She felt the dark lure of that room, of those stories, as though she were shirking some responsibility. A sadness had been growing in her as she packed and now it came to a head.

Home.
Moments before, she had thought of this as home. And it was home, now, more than her mother’s house had ever been.

And the time had come to leave.

For a few more seconds she just stood there in the hall and stared into Courtney’s room. The papers on the wall fluttered in the hot August breeze. Then Molly pushed her hair away from her face, turned, and went out of the apartment. She walked down the stairs into the restaurant perhaps a little too fast, though she was certainly in no hurry to reach her destination. Though never the most self-aware girl by her own standards, it struck Molly as ironic that she was rushing away from the one place she really wanted to be.

It was nearly five o’clock but there were already a couple-of tables filled by people having an early dinner or a very late lunch, mostly suits in the midst of business. The bar was practically deserted, but that would change almost as quickly as the situation in the dining room. Fortunately the lunch crowd had thinned out early and Courtney had let Molly off around three to start organizing her things for the big move.

Now, as Molly walked among the tables, she glanced around for Jack. He was supposed to come on at five but he had not come up to the apartment yet, so she assumed he just started working. But there was no sign of him.

Courtney was talking to Matt Brocklebank, the young guy who usually covered the bar when Bill wasn’t on. She leaned against the bar, lion’s-head cane clutched tightly in her hand. Though she looked completely put together in black pants and a cream top with spaghetti straps, and her sandy blond hair was pulled back with nary a strand out of place, there was an intensity to the set of her jaw that worried Molly.

“Hey,” she said as she approached. “Everything all right?”

With a frown that knitted her brows and made the light spray of freckles across her nose look almost sinister, Courtney turned to her. “Jack and Bill are both late.”

“Oh,” Molly said, her voice small. “Guess that answers my question, then.”

Courtney focused on her for the first time, then shook her head. “Sorry. I’m ticked at the boys, not at you. What was your question?”

Molly shrugged. “I was hoping I could borrow your car to take a run over to my mother’s. But if you want me to stay to cover until Jack gets back—”

“No, the hell with it. Matt’s going to cover the bar for a while, and I can spot Jack half an hour or so. Not without tormenting him, of course, but that’s what sisters are for. I think my keys are in the kitchen upstairs.” With a mischievous smile, Molly held up Courtney’s key ring.

The older woman threw up her hands with a laugh. “Good. Go. Have fun.”

It was Molly’s turn to frown. “I did say I was going to my mother’s, right?”

“All right, then, hurry back.”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

When Jack pulled into his spot in the alley lot, he was surprised to see that his sister’s car was gone. A spark of alarm went off inside him and burrowed into his brain. Though lack of sleep had combined with his busy day and the emotionally draining time he had spent with Eden and Seth, he felt his exhaustion burn off as he rushed down the alley toward the rear kitchen entrance into the restaurant. The door was propped open with a cinder block, letting out some of the heat from the stoves and ovens. Jack walked right in, startling one of the line cooks as he prepped salads. Tim Dunphy glanced over in alarm but then waved when he saw it was Jack.

“Where’d Courtney go?” Jack called over the loud radio and barked orders in the steaming kitchen.

Tim grimaced a second as he tried to decipher the words through the clamor. Then he got it, and hooked a thumb toward the dining room. “Out front.”

“Her car’s gone.”

With a mystified expression, Dunphy shrugged his shoulders. Jack waved and hurried through the swinging doors and into the dining room. He was half an hour late, and that didn’t include the time it was going to take him to run upstairs and change his clothes. When he saw his sister on the phone at the front of the restaurant, standing by the hostess’s station and taking reservations on the telephone there, relief surged through him. Then Courtney glanced back into the dining room. When she spotted him, she shot him a withering glance that made him feel every single minute of his tardiness.

As he approached he gave her a sheepish grin, waiting for her to hang up the phone. She scribbled a reservation into the book that lay open at the hostess’s station, then used her cane to turn around and stare at him, awaiting an explanation.

“It’s complicated,” he warned, though not without an apology in his tone.

“We don’t have time for complicated,” Courtney said, her voice strained. “Bill hasn’t shown up yet. Matt’s been on since eleven o’clock. As soon as you’re ready, why don’t you spell him and I’ll keep hostessing with Wendy.” As if summoned, Wendy Bartlett returned to the hostess-station after having seated a party of four. Jack exchanged pleasantries with her, a sort of awkward break in his conversation with Courtney. Then a thirtyish couple laden with shopping bags came in and Wendy grabbed menus and escorted them to a table. The moment she was gone, Jack studied his sister again. Several strands of hair had come loose and hung at odd angles around her face. He doubted he had ever seen her so harried.

“Have you heard from Bill?” he asked. “I mean, did he call?”

Courtney gave a sharp shake of her head that betrayed the tension she felt, but she said nothing.