Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (10 page)

The door swung open with a loud creak.

I chuckled. I couldn’t help it; it was such a horror-film cliché that it struck me as wildly funny.

Apparently no one else shared my sense of humor.

Verikoff leaned in close, near enough that I could feel her breath hot in my ear. “Personally, I don’t care what happens to you, but Fuentes seems to think you’ll be useful, so shut up, follow orders, and maybe you’ll get out of this alive.”

As pep talks go, it totally sucked, but I managed to stuff my quirky sense of humor back down into the back of my brain and focus on what was ahead of us.

We stepped through the door and entered the house.

I imagine there wasn’t much for the others to see, just an empty foyer devoid of furniture. With no living relatives to claim Wagner’s belongings, the state had confiscated everything he had owned. I suspected that had more to do with not wanting pieces of his furniture to start showing up on eBay than any real need on the part of the state, but the end result was the same: Wagner’s prior home was nothing more than an empty shell.

To me, however, the place was far from empty. Ghostsight allows me to see the true nature of things, and the inside of Wagner’s home was certainly no exception. What appeared to be an empty foyer in the real world was draped in thick cobwebs of horror, desperation, and decay. The emotions hung about the place, pulsing with intensity, no doubt fed by the presence of the ghosts hanging around outside, full of regret and hot with the need for vengeance and justification. My skin crawled at the sight of all that pain and fear given material form and I did my best not to let anything touch my flesh.

As we moved farther into the house, I expected the ghosts to crowd in behind us, but, to my surprise, they remained outside the building entirely.

Now it didn’t take much mental effort to realize that the ghosts were most likely the spirits of those whom Wagner had murdered. Similarly, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the state had missed quite a few of his victims, dozens, in fact, if the first conclusion was correct and each and every ghost represented one of those murdered victims. Ghosts often congregate at physical locations that were particularly important to them during their lifetimes; the house in which they were murdered would certainly qualify. But I’d never known them to avoid entering such a place. If anything, they’d be more apt to be found there than anywhere else.

So what was going on here?

These thoughts were still on my mind as Rivera turned to Perkins and said, “Find him.”

13

Perkins stepped forward and stood in the center of the room. Letting his arms hang loosely at his sides, he bowed his head and began to breathe slowly and deeply. Through the lens of my ghostsight, I could see his hands begin to glow, faintly at first and then with greater intensity until a pale blue light surrounded them completely.

With his eyes still closed, Perkins lifted his head and brought his hands up in front of him. The energy wafted out from his fingertips and drifted through the air like the tendrils of some alien creature, seeking, searching, looking for whatever it was that he needed to find. I watched those questing tendrils of power lazily stream outward and begin sliding across the walls, floor, and ceiling around us as if they had minds of their own, poking and prodding every little nook and cranny they discovered along the way.

Ilyana turned her head to watch as one of them drifted past where she stood and I knew that she, too, could see them. I suspected Rivera could as well, but he was watching the room around us, his body tight with tension, as if he were waiting for something to explode out of the walls around us and attack. It was a far cry from the cavalier attitude he’d had in the necropolis beneath the church the other night, and I wondered what he knew about this place that had him so on edge.

Just then the energy snapped back into Perkins’s body, rocking him on his feet and pulling my attention away from our glorious leader. As Perkins opened his eyes, I saw with my ghostsight that they were full of fear. Whatever it was that he had seen through the guise of his power, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses.

“The basement,” he said quietly. “He’s in the basement.”

Rivera nodded, turned and headed for the kitchen and, presumably, the door to the lower level at the back of that room.

I stepped over to Perkins, asked if he was all right, noting as I did that the energy that had surrounded him just seconds before had all but vanished. Only the faintest aura still remained, surrounding his fingers like a halo. I could see his hands were shaking, and when he looked at me I knew the trembling was from fear rather than exertion.

“It’s really him, Hunt. That evil son-of-a-bitch isn’t dead at all. He’s right here, waiting for us.”

“Who? Who’s waiting for us?”

But Perkins just shook his head and hurried to catch up with the others.

I was liking this little excursion less and less by the minute.

By the time I caught up with the others they were gathered in front of an open door on the far side of the kitchen, staring at the stairs leading downward into darkness.

Rivera cast an impatient glance my way but didn’t say anything. Instead, he raised a hand and said a few words in what sounded like Latin. A red globe of sorcerous energy about the size of a basketball sprang to life in his hand. With another whispered phrase, this time in a language I didn’t recognize, he sent it drifting down the stairs ahead of us, lighting the way.

My head was starting to pound from using my ghostsight and I was beginning to grow concerned about just what its use might attract in this place, so, reluctantly, I let it go. In the presence of that light coming from Rivera’s sorcery, I expected to find myself lost in my own personal whiteout, but to my surprise that didn’t happen. In fact, the light didn’t bother me at all; I could see just as well as if I’d been standing in complete darkness.

I was still pondering the ramifications of this when we reached the bottom of the stairs. With a flick of his wrist, Rivera sent the ball of energy drifting toward the ceiling to hover over the center of the room, casting its light about the space around us and revealing that we stood in an unfinished basement. Cement floors and walls greeted us, with the exception of a gaping hole in the floor in the far corner of the room.

Rivera glanced at Perkins, who inclined his head toward the hole.

Beside me, Grady reached beneath his shirt and removed a large, semiautomatic pistol from where he’d been carrying it at the small of his back. He released and reseated the magazine, more likely out of nervousness than any real need to do such a thing, and then chambered a round.

The click of the slide was loud in the empty room.

Ilyana was making her own preparations as well. Hers were more subtle though; I didn’t notice anything outright, but when I looked in her direction she seemed more predatory than she had moments before. Her head seemed to jut forward farther on her neck, like a bird of prey’s, and for just an instant I thought I saw blackened, tattered wings spread out behind her like a bat’s. She licked her lips and looked around, focusing on the hole that I’d seen when we’d first descended the stairs.

We moved in that direction.

As we drew closer I could see faded outlines of human forms drawn on the floor and back wall near the excavated area in white police tape. I remembered the corpses that had been found stacked in the basement of the Wagner house in the early days of the investigation, and how several dozen more had been found buried in a mass grave in the basement of his home. I was looking at that very burial site now, and the realization sent chills of horror creeping up my spine.

As they approached the hole, Rivera and Grady moved to either side, letting Ilyana approach from the center. I moved to join them, but Perkins reached out and grabbed my arm, stopping me.

“You don’t want any of that. Trust me,” he whispered.

“Any of what?”

I just wanted someone to explain what the heck we were doing there and what we hoped to gain in the process.

Grady had his gun out and pointed at the hole. Sparks of arcane power were dancing around Rivera’s hands as he held them up before him, combat-style, ready for use at the slightest notice. Only Ilyana approached the hole without obvious caution, striding right up to the edge and looking down into its depths.

“It’s empty,” she said. “Nothing but dirt.”

Rivera and Grady stepped forward and peered over the edge themselves, relaxing only after they’d seen for themselves that Ilyana was right. I took that as the cue for Perkins and myself to do the same.

The hole in the ground was rectangular and roughly fifteen, maybe eighteen feet deep. It looked like it had been excavated some time ago; the earth along the sides was dried and cracked, though it was hard to tell that at first under the globe’s red light.

“So where is he?” Rivera asked.

I didn’t hear Perkins’s reply; my attention was caught by the smell of freshly turned earth that was wafting out of the pit.

That’s not right
, I thought.
Dried earth that hasn’t been turned in months shouldn’t smell like that.

I triggered my ghostsight … and was nearly knocked off my feet from the flood of hatred shooting up from the depths of that hole, like a river of emotion thundering over the spot where I stood, bashing and battering me in its current. I held my ground and peered through the emotion, trying to see where it was coming from.

There was a shape down there, just beneath the surface of the earth.

A human shape …

“Guys, you might want to take a look…”

That was as far as I got.

Something exploded out of the earth at the bottom of the pit and launched itself upward, soaring up toward the ceiling. Instinct screamed in the back of my mind, and I threw myself out of the way, so the claws that were supposed to tear my face off barely managed to nick my shirt instead. I hit the floor hard, my back slamming into the cold concrete, but that didn’t stop me from crab-walking backward in an effort to put as much distance between myself and the thing that had just tried to kill me as possible.

Which was why I was in a perfect position to see the whatever-it-was resolve itself into the image of a man, hovering just beneath the ceiling and staring down at us all with an expression of savage hunger and delight.

He was a Caucasian man in his midthirties, with eyes as black as coal surrounding pinpoints of red staring out of a lean, hard face missing its nose. In its place was a rotting hole, as if some savage animal had torn the appendage away and the wound had been left to fester on its own. He was dressed in the tattered remains of an orange prison uniform sans shoes. Even with the change in his appearance, he was still recognizable.

Wagner.

What the fuck?

I lay on the ground, stunned by what I was seeing. It hadn’t been that long ago that I’d seen another creature like this one in the swamps of New Orleans, a creature named Blackburn that had taken a memory in exchange for information. I had thought him to be unique, and yet here I was looking at another of his kind, if you could call it that. If he had chosen that moment to attack I would have been a goner; my brain just couldn’t wrap itself around what it was seeing.

Grady, however, didn’t have that problem. He brought his gun up in the fastest draw I’ve ever seen, pulling the trigger and firing twice in the space of what felt like only the briefest second.

Unfortunately, he might as well have been throwing rocks.

Wagner jinked to one side, letting the bullets zip past him without even sparing them a glance. I remembered how Blackburn had seemed to cross the floor at Pointe du Lac in the blink of an eye and shuddered at the speed of these creatures.

All Grady had managed to do was catch Wagner’s attention.

“I’m going to enjoy feasting on you,” the fiend said in a voice as cold as winter and then dove forward with hands and claws extended.

Grady didn’t bother firing again; he just stood there, unmoving.

I opened my mouth to scream his name, knowing even as I did so that at the speed Wagner was moving he was going to be on top of Grady before I had the chance to get the sound out of my mouth, but I had forgotten that we weren’t the only two people in the room.

A blur of motion that I barely identified as Ilyana shot across the room and intercepted Wagner before he could reach Grady, slamming into him and sending him pinwheeling backward to crash into the wall behind him.

The blow would have been enough to shake most preternaturals, never mind a normal man, but Wagner barely seemed to notice it. He came surging back across the space that was separating him from Ilyana with a roar, his claws a blur as he slashed at her with unbelievable speed.

To my surprise she blocked every strike and even managed to land a few of her own in between. After a few minutes of that, Wagner attempted to back off and Ilyana let him. The two of them hung there, ten feet off the ground, waiting to see what the other would do.

Rivera’s voice rang out.

“We’re here for the Key and that’s all. Give it to us and we’ll leave you in peace.”

Wagner laughed and there was nothing human in the sound.

“I’m not a fool, Rivera.”

They knew each other?

“Even if I were to turn over the Key, you wouldn’t leave me alone. I know it and you do too. You may be content to be Fuentes’s lapdog but I am not.”

The last word was barely out of Wagner’s mouth when he made his move. Rather than rushing Ilyana a second time or having a go at Rivera, Wagner flung himself upward, straight at the ceiling above his head, no doubt in a bid to try to crash through it and escape through the structure above. It wasn’t a bad plan, as plans go; if he made it into the open air, for all I knew he might have been able to get away.

Rivera had apparently been waiting for Wagner to make just such an attempt, for even as the other man shot toward the ceiling, the sorcerer unleashed the power that he’d been holding ready in his bare hands. Black flames shot forth from his palms in a thick stream and washed across Wagner’s lower body as if flung from some kind of arcane flamethrower. I could feel the heat from where I was standing and assumed that was the end of Wagner, but once again my expectations fell far short of reality.