Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (2 page)

It said something about the kind of place I was staying in that no one moved to stop the near-naked tattooed guy dressed only in his boxer shorts running helter-skelter down the length of the second-floor walkway leaving bloody footprints in his wake, which, when it came right down to it, was probably best for all involved. After all, I couldn’t see a damn thing; if someone had stepped out in front of me I would have simply slammed into them full speed, and I had little doubt that the collision probably would have ended with one of us tumbling ass-over-elbows over the railing and falling an entire story to the unforgiving cement of the parking lot below.

Not anyone’s idea of a successful escape.

I’d taken less than a dozen steps before shouts behind me let me know that whoever it was that had broken into my room was now in hot pursuit.

Again, there was no order to stop, no cries identifying my pursuers as law enforcement of any kind. I was starting to think I might be in more hot water than I’d originally suspected and pushed myself to go faster while trying to figure out a way out.

The stairwell would take me to the ground floor. If I could get to the bottom ahead of my pursuers, I might be able to get to the motel office where I could hopefully scrounge up some help or at least find a place I could hide long enough for the cops to show up.

If anyone had bothered to call the cops, which was
not
a foregone conclusion by any means in this part of town.

Still, I knew there was no sense in worrying about it; what would be would be. I just needed to get my skinny ass down there and hope for the best.

Thirty-five steps.

That was the distance from my bathroom window to the stairwell at the end of the walkway by the corner of the building. I was counting my steps off as I ran—
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen
—using my hand on the guardrail to keep me moving in a straight line.

Eighteen …

Nineteen …

Twenty …

I’d walked this exact route dozens of times already, and I knew that I had to slow down around the twenty-eighth step to keep from overshooting the stairs. Once I made the turn onto the stairwell I could speed up again, but making that turn without falling down was crucial to getting away, so I was totally focused on the numbers reeling out inside my head.

Twenty-three …

Twenty-four …

I was still ten steps off my count when I felt the railing disappear beneath my right hand, signaling the entrance to the stairwell. I heard someone shout, “No!” from behind, but it took my brain another precious few seconds to catch up with what my body was telling me: I’d gone too far, too fast.

My legs hit the railing in front of me at midthigh and carried me right over.

I screamed like a girl all the way down.

3

I thought I’d been pretty smart, pacing out that distance and knowing exactly how far I had to go if the shit hit the fan. A little too smart, as it turned out, as I hadn’t taken into account the difference in my stride. Walking that distance was one thing; doing it pumped full of adrenaline and running hell-bent for leather to save my hide was another.

All of this flashed through my head as I plummeted downward, and I found it more than a little ironic that I had managed to defeat a sorcerer and his pet fetch, live through a full-fledged throw down with an embodiment of the Grim Reaper himself, and escape from the FBI only to wind up killing myself because I suck at math.

Sometimes, life just doesn’t seem fair.

Fully expecting to splatter myself against the unforgiving ground, I was shocked for a second time that morning as I plunged into the freezing waters of the motel swimming pool. The cold made me gasp in surprise and I inhaled a boatload of overchlorinated water as a result, causing my body to start convulsing as it tried to rid itself of the offending substance.

This was seriously not my morning!

I probably would have spent the next few minutes trying to figure out which way was up—and ended up drowning in the process—if my ass hadn’t slammed into the bottom of the swimming pool at that point.

My eyes popped open, dazzling me with an unending field of white, and my brain threw that internal switch that fired up my ghostsight as my body’s innate survival instincts kicked in and it searched for a way out of the mess I’d landed it in yet again.

I immediately saw that I wasn’t alone there at the bottom of the pool. The ghosts of three teenage girls killed by a serial rapist back in the ’70s stared hungrily at me from out of the black, brackish water that surrounded us as my ghostsight painted everything with a patina of death and decay. The girls’ long hair floated like halos around their heads, but there was nothing angelic about their smiles of welcome as they drifted toward me.

Choking and gagging, with my thoughts starting to grow hazy as a result of my continuing lack of oxygen, I got my feet under me and pushed, sending my drowning body rocketing upward.

My vision slipped back to normal as I broke the surface of the water, the light blinding me to my surroundings. Still gagging and choking up everything I had swallowed, I had just enough strength left to thrash my way over to the edge of the pool and grab hold so I wouldn’t go under again. I was hanging there, hacking up mouthfuls of chlorinated water, trying to catch my breath, and expecting at any moment to feel the cold, hungry grip of the ghosts’ hands around my ankles when someone pressed the barrel of a gun against my forehead.

“Don’t you fucking move,
cabrón
,” said a voice in my ear.

I had absolutely no intention of doing so, but I didn’t tell him that. I couldn’t; I was still coughing up half of the swimming pool.

I heard hurried footsteps—two, maybe three people, I couldn’t be sure—and then the gun was pulled away from my forehead. The voice spoke again. “You two. Get him out of there!”

Rough hands grabbed my arms and hauled me out of the pool. I was still weak from my near-asphyxiation and almost fell when they tried to make me stand; the hands grabbed me again and held on until my feet steadied under me.

“Damn it! The bastard’s dripping all over my new shoes,” the one on my right said. My brain automatically cataloged what it could from the sound: male, thirty, maybe thirty-five years old, a bit shorter than I was given the way the sound rose to meet me. He was from somewhere back east, like I was. New York. Maybe South Jersey. I wasn’t sure. He was a smoker too; the nicotine practically wafted off of him.

“Fuck your shoes; they’re ugly anyway.”

On my left. A tall female who I guessed had to be built like an ox because she’d lifted me out of the water one-handed. Russian, or at least Eastern European, from the sound of her voice.
Was she the one I’d kicked in the bathroom? Must not have hit her as hard as I thought.

“Ugly? What the hell do you know about…”

Jersey didn’t get any further.

“Shut up,” said the guy with the gun, and both of them went silent immediately.

Definitely no doubt about who the boss was.

I was getting tired of standing around shivering in the light unable to see the people who’d just livened up my day so nicely. The dead girls were watching us from the middle of the pool, so I reached out and stole the sight from one of them.

There was a moment of dizziness, sharp and intense, and then the taste of bitter ashes flooded my mouth as the world swam back into view in rich, vibrant colors, ten times brighter and more vivid than anything I remembered from the days before I lost my sight.

Oh, the things the dead can see! They see everything, from the fallen angels that swoop over the narrow city streets on ash gray wings to the changelings that walk among us unseen, safe in their human guises. The glamourlike charms that supernatural entities use to conceal themselves from human sight are no match for the eyes of a ghost.

But what has always struck me as the cruelest irony is that despite being unable to feel emotions of their own, ghosts can see them pouring off the living without any difficulty whatsoever. It’s like each emotion has its own wavelength, its own unique color, like a beam of light seen through a prism. And it isn’t just the living, either. Inanimate objects can give off emotions too. If the object was important enough to its owner, over time it would soak up whatever emotions the living attached to it. A child’s teddy bear might glow with the pure white light of unconditional love, while a secret gift from a clandestine lover might shine with scarlet eroticism. The rule of thumb, I’d discovered, was that the more important the object was to its owner, the brighter the glow.

I didn’t want them to know I was capable of seeing anything, so I kept my eyes slightly unfocused as I moved my head from side to side, trying to make it look like I was just trying to hear them better. In the process, I got a decent look at all three of them.

The guy on my right didn’t look like anything too out of the ordinary, just a wiry fellow of medium height with a crazy shock of orange hair atop his head going in every which direction and the quick, twitchy movements of somebody with a severe case of ADD. He was dressed in a wide-lapelled maroon suit with a perfectly folded pocket square and pair of now-wet leather shoes. The silvery gleam that surrounded him let me know he was one of the Gifted, those humans who have gained the ability to tap into the supernatural essence of the world and use it for their own means, but the weakness of the aura told me he wasn’t all that powerful.

The same couldn’t be said for his two companions, however. Just one look at either of them was enough to tell me that I’d gone from the frying pan into the fire.

The woman was not the weight-lifting Russian muscle-head I’d been expecting, but was instead a complete stunner who practically dripped sexual attraction: long legs wrapped in a pair of skintight leather pants, a beautifully curvaceous body peeking out of a silk blouse, and a head full of long dark hair that fell past her shoulders. There was a gleam in her eyes that promised delights beyond anything you could possibly imagine, and when she licked her lips just so, as she did when I glanced in her direction, the average red-blooded American male would have had more than a little trouble concentrating.

Thankfully I didn’t, as my ghostsight allowed me to see past all of that to the true creature behind the disguise she wore. Don’t get me wrong, she was still beautiful, but the demonic blood that ran through her veins was easy enough to see when the Veil was stripped away. The sense of hunger, of sheer need, that rolled off of her had my body responding despite the fact that my head was screaming no. She would no doubt provide a night beyond your wildest dreams, but that might just end up being the last one you would enjoy. I didn’t need anything that badly, thank you very much.

But as scary as the demon half-breed might have been, she was nothing compared to the leader of the group. If the cold hadn’t had me shaking, the sight of him would have done the trick. He was a tall Hispanic man in his midthirties, maybe six foot one or so, with a cleanly shaven head and an angular face that ended in a dark goatee. His eyes, as black as night, stared out from deep sockets that gave his face an almost skeletal appearance.

He had a fur-lined men’s coat draped over his shoulders but was otherwise naked from the waist up, displaying the upper body tattoo he was sporting. That tattoo was a riot of shapes and colors and depicted a hellish landscape where demons and devils were tormenting humans in a hundred different ways. The figures in it, human and demon alike, appeared to writhe and move of their own accord if you stared at them for too long. From the waist down he wore black jeans held up by a belt with an oversized silver buckle, and he had leather motorcycle boots on his feet. In his right hand was the pistol that had been pressed against my forehead just moments before.

The gun wasn’t what made him scary, though. Call me crazy, but I was much more frightened by the aura that surrounded him, an aura full of corruption and the shifting faces of the restless dead—each one representing some innocent soul that he’d taken during the practice of his dark arts—than I was by the blue-tinted piece of Detroit steel in his hand. This guy was a serious practitioner, far more powerful than my friend Denise Clearwater or even her former companion Simon Gallagher, the combat mage.

That much power was scary in and of itself. In the hands of someone like this, it was terrifying.

I didn’t know who the hell these people were or what they wanted with me, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that going anywhere with them was probably not a good idea, so I did the one thing no one ever expects the blind guy to do.

I ran.

I bolted to the right, wanting to get away from Demon Lady as quickly as I could while still staying out of Tattoo’s reach. That meant passing a bit closer to Jersey than I wanted, but I dealt with that by knocking him backward as I pushed past. There was a shout of surprise and a splash, which brought a smile to my face, but I was too busy racing for the iron fence surrounding the pool. If I could get over that and into the building beyond, I might stand a chance …

I wasn’t worried about Tattoo’s gun, as strange as that may sound. After all, if they’d come to kill me they could have done it half a dozen times already. The fact that they hadn’t spoke volumes. The gun was meant to intimidate me, to force my compliance, and it only had as much power over me as I was willing to give it. Now that I’d shown I wasn’t going to be cowed, they’d be forced to try something else.

The crack of the gunshot and the spang of the bullet ricocheting off the fence in front of me told me I had a lot more to be worried about than I’d thought.

So much for that theory.

I caught the fence with both hands and vaulted over it, the perfect picture of grace in motion. Then my wet feet slipped out from under me as I landed on the flagstone walkway on the other side and I stumbled forward, staggering to and fro as I fought to keep my balance. My vision was starting to white out around the edges, the increasing distance between me and the ghost of the dead girl whose sight I borrowed weakening the link between us, and I knew I’d be blind again in another ten feet or so.