Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (13 page)

The room where the action was happening was a study, if the three-story-high collection of books and artifacts could be called that without it seeming a bit ridiculous. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, filled with books of all shapes and sizes. Ladders stood against the shelving on either side of the room, designed to provide access to the higher levels. A large cherrywood desk stood off to one side of the room, leather chairs and a couch nearby. It wasn’t hard to imagine Durante at work in this place; it had a distinctly masculine feel to the room.

Of course, the pitched battle going on in the middle of the room tended to distract one from design evaluations.

Perkins hung ten feet off the floor, skewered through the stomach with what appeared to be the two-handed sword taken from the suit of armor standing just inside the doorway to my left. He was obviously still alive, for he was howling in pain, his hands wrapped around the blade of the weapon at the point just before it disappeared into his gut.

Rivera and Ilyana stood on the floor in front of and below him, doing what they could to keep the cascade of objects, from books to chairs to decorative marble busts, from striking him as they were repeatedly flung in his direction. They were getting about ninety percent of what was being thrown at him, but every time an item got through Perkins would howl in agony again. Grady apparently was already down for the count; I could see him lying on the floor a few yards away, unconscious, half buried beneath the twin to the couch that stood in front of the desk on the far side of the room.

What I couldn’t see was whatever it was that was pressing the attack in the first place. Aside from us, the room appeared to be empty.

Poltergeist
, I thought.

Had to be a powerful one too. Knocking over coffee cups or the occasional book was more in line with what the average poltergeist could accomplish. When you got into moving furniture and sending deadly weapons soaring through the air with pinpoint accuracy, you were well beyond the normal.

I was reaching into my pocket for my harmonica when the suit of armor standing next to me swung its armored gauntlet outward and smashed me in the face.

Pain exploded through my skull and my link with Whisper was broken. The bastard had gotten me good; blood was running down my face and the back of my throat. I was pretty sure my nose was broken and worried that my cheekbone might have suffered the same fate. As I tried to analyze the extent of the damage, I realized as well that I was sprawled on the floor, no doubt having fallen there in the wake of the blow without even knowing I had.

The clank of a steel gauntleted foot warned me.

Unable to see anything thanks to the loss of my link with Whisper and the electric lights the others had turned on in the room, I simply threw myself to the side, hoping to avoid whatever was coming. I felt something go whistling by my head, scant inches away, and then I was climbing to my feet and triggering my ghostsight so that I’d be able to see.

The poltergeist stood on the desk I’d noted earlier, hands out and mouth open in a silent scream of rage. He appeared as he must have at the moment of his death and, despite all the damage done to him, I was still able to recognize him as the man in the photographs from the bedroom, Durante.

They’d worked him over before killing him; that much was obvious. Deep, savage cuts crisscrossed his face, the wounds gaping open by a quarter inch or more, and his left ear was missing entirely. When he raised his hands to send another barrage in our direction, I could see that he was missing several fingers.

Even as I watched, Ilyana launched herself toward the ghost, perhaps to try and devour it as she’d done with the spectre that first night we’d gone on a mission like this, but she didn’t even make it halfway across the room before Durante waved his hand and sent her flying back the way she had come. Ilyana tumbled end over end and then slammed into the wall with enough force to spill several shelves of books down to the floor.

As she staggered to her feet, he waved a three-fingered hand at a leather reading chair in the corner and sent it flying across the room to smash her back down again.

In facing down the half-breed, Durante had forgotten about the sorcerer. No longer hampered by the need to keep objects from striking Perkins now that Durante had focused his attention on Ilyana and me, Rivera conjured up a blast of arcane energy that he sent soaring across the room at the ghost.

I watched the literal ball of power splash across the ghost’s form and thought, “That’s it; game over.”

But I was wrong.

Durante shook off the strike the way a prizefighter shrugs off a punch in the first round of a title match. He looked over at us both, grinned, and sent the entire contents of the shelves behind him hurling in Rivera’s direction.

Books rained around him as he hit the floor and tried to protect himself. The rain became a flood became a veritable tide as he was buried under the onslaught.

The ghost turned and screamed in rage in my direction.

We were in serious trouble.

I was mentally screaming for help, sending out a summons to Scream with as much force as I could muster, even as I pulled my harmonica out of my pocket and brought it to my lips. I opened my mouth, intending to send out a tune that would hold the poltergeist in place, only to have two steel arms wrap themselves around the middle of my chest and squeeze.

The air left my lungs in a sudden rush, leaving me nothing to power my instrument, never mind breathe on my own. I could feel the world around me starting to fade out as I fought for the air I needed to survive, and if it hadn’t been for Scream’s timely arrival I probably wouldn’t have made it.

Scream entered the room like a runaway freight train, bursting through a wall and charging across the floor to slam into the other ghost with all the precision of a carpet-bombing campaign. The two of them were hurled backward and disappeared on the other side of the desk.

I brought my harmonica to my lips, ready to play but afraid to cause any harm to Scream if he was still holding on to Durante. I couldn’t see either of them, and needed line of sight to make the banishing work, so I climbed to my feet and forced myself to head in that direction.

I’d barely taken three steps before Durante rose slowly up from the other side of the desk, hovering in midair and staring at me.

Of Scream there was no sign.

Uh oh
, I thought.

I began to play just as the ghost flung itself toward me.

The music surged through the room, a complicated melody that dipped and swirled and spun like a living thing.

The ghost flew into the force of it and slowed, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. He kept coming.

I played harder, louder, varying the key in an attempt to find just the right refrain as the ghost flew directly at me, to no avail. Just as he reached out to seize me in his spectral grasp, I reached for one final minor key change …

Durante’s ghost crashed into me, sending darkness washing over me like the tide.

*   *   *

When I came to the others were crouched around me, concern on at least one of their faces.

“What happened?” I asked. All I could remember were those final seconds as Durante reached for me …

“You did it,” Grady told me, as he helped me sit up. He had a lump on the side of his head that no doubt matched the swelling of my nose, but at least we were both alive. Ilyana and Rivera looked battered and bruised, but otherwise okay.

“Perkins?” I asked, remembering the sight of him skewered to the wall.

Grady shook his head. “He didn’t make it.”

That was that. None of us had the strength or the desire to continue searching after that. Rivera was all set to go, but Grady and I refused to leave Perkins behind. They had already used the ladders to climb up, remove the sword, and lower his body to the ground, so all we had to do was transport it to the car. We wrapped him in a tablecloth we found in a nearby closet and then, with Ilyana’s help, carried him out to the Charger. Rivera’s lack of involvement, his downright refusal to help, in fact, convinced me that Perkins was right. The only one of us actively cooperating with Fuentes was Rivera; the rest of us were here against our will. I filed that away for future reference, as I might be able to use it if and when the opportunity presented itself. With allies on the inside, I might just be able to find a way to get us all out of this mess once and for all.

But that would have to wait until later. For now, we needed to go home and rest. Fuentes wasn’t going to give up until he had the Key and neither was I.

Though he didn’t know that yet.

Back at the estate, Grady took control of Perkins’s body and I headed for my bungalow without a backward glance. Once inside I checked to be sure I still had the picture I’d taken from the bedroom of Durante’s mansion; I did. I stashed it inside my shoe, thinking it would be the last place someone would look once I was dressed in the morning, and then went into the bathroom to review the damage.

My face was swollen, yes, but thankfully my nose wasn’t broken. I took a long, hot shower, letting the water soak into my muscles, hoping to ease the stiffness before it set in too deeply, and then sat in the front room for a while, thinking. I’d learned quite a bit in the last twenty-four hours, but I was still a long way from going to the head of the class. Some important elements were still outside my reach.

What, exactly, was the Key? What did it do? Why was Fuentes willing to kill for it? Were these others willing to die to keep it from his hands?

Exhaustion finally won out over the adrenaline rush of the earlier combat and I headed off to bed, suddenly desperate for sleep.

17

The chill woke me from a deep sleep.

I sat up in bed, confused. It had been a balmy seventy degrees when I’d gone to bed and I’d left the window open to try and catch a little bit of the night air. Now it felt like I’d been dropped into the middle of the Arctic in nothing but my boxer shorts; goose bumps had broken out all over my flesh and my teeth were on the verge of chattering.

As the fog of sleep cleared from my head, I began to put two and two together. I’d felt cold like this before and I didn’t like what it heralded, didn’t like it at all. I got out of bed, pulled my jeans on over my bare legs, and then hunted around until I found my shirt. With my arms wrapped around my chest, I went in search of my visitor.

I found him in the front room, standing by the window looking out into the darkness. The moon had not yet risen and the lights in the room were off, allowing me to see without difficulty. Not that he would have been hard to find; cold air seemed to pour off of him like the winter wind.

He was dressed as he’d been the last time I’d seen him, in black pants and a black frock coat over a simple white, button-down shirt. A wide-brimmed hat, like that worn by a traveling preacher from the Old West, rested atop his head, hiding all but a few wispy strands of white hair that hung down past his collar in back. He stood with his back to me, his hands slipped into the shallow pockets on the front of his vest.

As I entered the room, he turned staring at me with those empty eye sockets that were a strange and eerie counterpart to my own.

“I’m surprised, Hunt,” he said, in that cold, sterile voice of his. “I never would have figured you for a Hollywood kind of guy.”

“Yeah, well, I chose L.A. just so I could disappoint you. Don’t you feel special now?”

My nerves were on edge, my heart pounding in my chest. The Preacher had made no overt threat toward me on either of the two occasions when I’d encountered him previously, but just being in his presence unnerved me. I felt like the gazelle at the watering hole nervously eyeing the crocodile on the opposite bank. At any moment it might slip into the water …

He pretended not to hear me as he went on. “And the company you’re keeping these days? Carlos Fuentes? Really, Hunt, what are you thinking?”

I ground my teeth together in an effort not to respond to his jibes. I’d been shanghaied into service, but I’d be damned if I was going to tell him that. Something told me that admitting weakness once too often in front of him might make him turn on me, like the crocodile on that gazelle, and I had no intention of being either his lunch or dinner if I could help it.

“What do you want?” I asked.

His smile grew wider. “Why, I’ve come to collect, of course.”

Just like that I was back in the Harvard Playhouse with my wife, Anne, in the early years of our marriage, back before Elizabeth had disappeared, before it all went to hell. We’d gone out to see
Peter Pan
, but at the last minute Anne had changed her mind, had decided that the crowd waiting in front of the playhouse was too big, too noisy, and she’d dragged me down the street to a smaller venue. They were putting on a production of
Faust
that night, and Anne had rolled her eyes spookily and demanded that I take her. In those days I still did whatever my wife asked, and so fifteen minutes later we were staring up at the stage, enrapt, as the Devil arrived to claim his due. The smile on that long-ago actor’s face matched perfectly the one on the Preacher’s now.

I shook off the feeling. I didn’t know who or what the Preacher actually was—devil, demon, or something worse—but I’d made no bargain as demanding as Faust’s.

All I had done was promise to carry out a task for him.

How hard could that be?

I squared my shoulders and shook off the chill. “All right, a deal’s a deal,” I told him. “What is it you want me to do?”

The Preacher watched me closely as he said, “I want you to deliver all three pieces of the Clavis Sclerata to me.”

Whatever I’d been expecting, it was not that. I tried to ignore the kicked-in-the-nuts feeling that washed over me at the sound of that name and did my best to keep my expression the same as I said, “The what?”

The Preacher cocked his head sideways slightly and said in a voice heavy with anticipation, “Are you refusing to carry out the task?”