Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (22 page)

Rivera stopped in front of the door to Grady’s apartment, took a key out of his pocket, and turned to face me.

“You might want to brace yourself if the smell of blood bothers you.”

If you only knew …

Rivera unlocked the door and stepped inside. “This way,” he said.

I followed, pulling the door closed and then locking it behind me. As I turned around, I saw that Rivera had stopped in the middle of the living room and was looking out at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows, his back to me.

In that instant I was overwhelmed with an almost murderous rage that swept over me like a forest fire. In my mind’s eye I imagined wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing the life from him, of being close enough to watch his eyes bulging out of their sockets, feel his legs kicking and jerking as he fought for air …

I turned away, breaking the line of sight between us, and it was like drawing the curtain at the end of a play; the thoughts disappeared and the thing in my head settled back down into silence for the time being. I breathed a sigh of relief. Taking on Rivera bare-handed was not my idea of a fair fight. It seemed I had dodged a bullet for the time being, but I had no doubt that presence would rear its head again before all this was through.

Rivera led me to the bedroom in the back of the apartment, where I was once again treated to the sight of my handiwork. I tried not to flinch and pretended to listen as he explained what was in the room with us.

“So why am I here?” I asked, when he was finished.

Rivera’s gaze was locked on the writing on the wall as he said, “I want to know if Grady’s ghost is still hanging about here somewhere. If it is, I want you to talk with it, find out what happened and who did this.”

Ghosts didn’t talk, at least not in the way that Rivera was suggesting, but I knew what he was asking just the same. It was a testament to how focused I’d been on covering my tracks when I came to on the kitchen floor earlier that I hadn’t even thought to look for Grady’s lingering presence.

“Got it.”

I had no idea what would happen if I tried to access my ghostsight with this thing in my head, but now was as good a time as any to find out, I thought. I closed my eyes, flipped the switch in the back of my head, and opened them again to a new reality.

The physical world faded into the background, growing fainter and less substantial. At the same time cracks and black pockets of decay spread across what remained, like a time-lapse presentation of the effects of entropy on a living world.

I glanced at Rivera.

With my ghostsight, I see the world’s true face. Nothing can hide from me; nothing can defeat the purity of my gaze. I can see through magick and glamours to reveal the real creature underneath as easily as I can see the state of a person’s soul.

Rivera’s soul was as black as pitch and twice as dark. He was surrounded by the same dark aura of power that I’d witnessed the first time I’d looked at him this way and so I didn’t linger there, knowing that delving into the depths of Rivera’s secrets was not on my current agenda. Instead, I let my gaze move about the room.

Grady came into view almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting for me. He stood in the corner, his ghostly form outlined in a silvery, luminescent glow that made him pop out against the background decay, and pointed a finger in my direction.

I tensed, waiting for an attack, but he did nothing more than glare at me with an angry expression.

Sorry, Grady,
I thought in his direction and then turned slowly as if examining the rest of the room.

“Well?” Rivera asked.

I paused. I knew very little about Rivera and had no sense at all of the extent of his powers. He could be staring at Grady right now, fully aware of his presence and just waiting for me to say the wrong thing. Hell, for all I knew he might have been able to detect my earlier presence in the apartment and had set all of this up as an elaborate scheme to get me to betray myself through my own actions. Sure, it was far-fetched, but when dealing with the Gifted I’d come to learn that far-fetched most certainly didn’t mean impossible.

Did I dare lie?

Yes, I decided finally. Rivera was a come-straight-at-you, in-your-face kind of guy. Fuentes might try to trip you up with your own words and actions, but Rivera didn’t have the subtlety for it, I thought.

I covered my indecision by glancing around the room again, and this time I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. There was a sheen of luminescence in the shape of a rectangle on the interior wall of the room, opposite the bed. It reminded me of seeing a light peeking out from beneath a closed door, but on all four sides instead of just one.

Grady, it seemed, had even more secrets to hide than we knew.

30

Rivera was growing impatient at my lack of response, so I figured I’d better say something before he totally lost it.

“No sign of Grady’s ghost,” I told him and watched him visibly relax at my words. Apparently he was just as sick and tired of facing off against angry ghosts as I was. “No ghost, but I did find something interesting.”

“I’m listening.”

I walked over to the wall and rapped right in the center of the luminescent rectangle.

“I think there’s a safe behind this wall.”

A look of eagerness crossed his face and he hurried over to stand next to me. He put his palms flat against the wall at roughly the same place where my hand had been and then closed his eyes. As I watched, black, ropy wisps of smoke rose from the back of each hand, twisted and twined about each other, and then stabbed downward at the wall in front of us with the blink of an eye. A few seconds passed and then Rivera stepped back, pulling his hands away from the wall, and opened his eyes.

“I think you’re right. We need a sledgehammer,” he said.

The two of us hunted around for one, but the best we could come up with was a meat tenderizer from the kitchen. I was ready to begin pounding away when Rivera walked out of the apartment, only to return a few minutes later carrying a fire extinguisher he’d taken from somewhere out in the hall.

I eyed it dubiously and then said, “Can’t you just blast the wall to expose the safe?”

He shook his head. “Not without possibly damaging the safe, and I don’t want to do that until I know exactly what I’m dealing with here. I don’t know about you, but I’m very curious what Grady considered important enough to hide away behind a wall.”

I hated to admit it, but I agreed with him completely. I wanted to know just as badly as he did.

Rivera raised the extinguisher and brought it smashing down on the wall about six inches to the right of where he’d placed his hands earlier. The double layer of Sheetrock crumpled and split, leaving a battered dent in the wall. Rivera did it several more times, creating a rectangle of crushed Sheetrock. When he put the extinguisher down and began tearing at the Sheetrock with his bare hands, I stepped in to help him. In just a few minutes we had the object Grady had hidden behind the wall exposed to view.

It was a safe.

One of the old-fashioned kind made of solid cast iron, with a fat combination dial and brass handle jutting out from the center of its face. Two-by-fours had been cut and fitted together to form a framework that supported the safe at a height of about five feet off the ground.

Rivera stepped forward and reached for the handle.

“Wait!” I cried.

When Rivera stopped and looked in my direction, I asked, “What if Grady booby-trapped the safe?”

He shrugged. “If he did, we won’t live long enough to know it,” he said. He paused, considering, and then said, “Why don’t you go wait for me in the living room?”

I shook my head. “I’m fine where I am. What if Grady’s ghost suddenly turns up and attacks while I’m in the other room?”

He glanced around, then back at me. “Is that likely?”

“I don’t know. Does he have reason to?”

I knew Rivera would see that as an accusation that he’d been the one to kill Grady and I threw it out there intentionally, wanting to see what kind of reaction in provoked. He wasn’t as easily set off as I’d hoped, though. He just scowled at me and said, “Fine. Stay here. Turn off your Sight though; I’ll let you know if you need to see what’s in here.”

“Kinda hard to for me to see if Grady’s ghost is waiting to pounce without my Sight, but if that’s what you want…”

“Yes. That’s what I want.”

“Okay.” I paused. “Done.”

“Good, now wait over by the door.”

“Right.” I did what I was told, but kept my head up and pointed in his direction, as if listening closely to what was going on. In reality, dropping my ghostsight had simply brought my rider’s sight back over my own.

I watched everything Rivera did.

He waited until I was across the room and then pulled the handle of the safe.

I cringed, fully expecting the worst. I had visions of an explosive charge going off, blowing both the safe and the two of us into smithereens, Rivera’s fatalism be damned, but nothing happened.

The handle was locked and simply made a clicking noise when he pulled it down.

Even I would have recognized that sound. “Now what?”

He didn’t respond. Instead, he kept one hand on the handle and put the other over the dial beside it. There was a flash of red green light accompanied by the scorched-metal smell of ozone. When he took his hand away, the dial was revealed to be bent and blackened as if it had just been through a massive fire.

“What have you been hiding, Grady?” Rivera asked himself and then pulled the handle outward.

The door to the safe swung open on well-oiled hinges.

Five minutes later he had the contents of the safe spread out on the table in the living room. It included sixteen stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, a passport with a picture of Grady in it that had been issued in the name Daniel Stevens, and a thick set of paper files banded together with a short bungee cord.

As Rivera counted the money, all three hundred and twenty thousand dollars of it, I sat across from him and waited as patiently as I could, resisting the urge to take a look for myself by pulling off that bungee cord and leafing through the files. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be able to see anything. Within moments I was ready to scream with impatience.

The money didn’t matter; I was certain of it. The mystery was in the files.

Convinced I was blind, Rivera saw no need to hide the contents of the files away from me as he began to leaf through them. By keeping my head in one position, I was able to observe a fair amount of the files he was looking through. I wasn’t the greatest at reading upside down, but I made do and it didn’t take all that much effort to understand just what was in front of us.

Grady, it seemed, had been working undercover for someone else.

The files contained notes and observations on many of Fuentes’s senior lieutenants, including both Rivera and Ilyana, detailing what they had been doing, who they had been meeting with, and what they were expected to accomplish for any task assigned to them over the last six months. The information appeared to have been meticulously collected and had been cross-referenced with the names of those who supplied it as well as those who had corroborated it. If a piece of information couldn’t be corroborated, Grady had made note of that and marked the data as questionable.

He’d been thorough.

There wasn’t that much that was marked questionable, as far as I could see.

Rivera seemed to grow calmer as he worked through the thick file, as if each new revelation of betrayal was simply confirming something he already suspected or perhaps already knew.

I knew I hadn’t given the impression I was a particularly patient man, so eventually I spoke up. “Well? Are you just going to leave me in the dark? What the hell was in the safe?”

He might have seemed calm on the outside, but when he looked up at me I saw the fire in his eyes. Rivera was pissed.

“There are some materials here that we need to bring back with us to the magister. I’m going to find something to pack them in and then we’ll get out of here.”

I stared at that stack of cash for several long minutes once he left the room. A guy could run pretty far with that kind of spare change on hand.

I’d have to take out Rivera in order to get away with it though, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to do that.

Yet.

There was still time; we hadn’t yet found the third piece of the Key.

When Rivera returned to the room, I helped him pack the cash and stack of files into the duffel bag he’d found somewhere else in the apartment and followed him to the door.

31

The Preacher was waiting for me when I got back to my bungalow later that morning. I stepped inside, felt the biting cold that usually accompanied him like a cloud of Arctic weather, and knew I wasn’t alone. When I turned around after shutting the door, he was standing a few feet away, staring at me with those empty eye sockets of his.

“You surprise me, Hunt.”

“Oh yeah,” I replied, “why’s that?”

“The half-breed, Hunt? Really?”

I felt my ears turning red with embarrassment. How the hell did the Preacher know about that?

“Not really any of your business, now is it?”

He laughed. “Au contraire, Hunt. It
is
my business. You owe me a favor, and until I collect on that favor I will take an interest in anything that can limit your ability to deliver it. What will your dear Denise say when she learns of your dalliance with the wannabe demon?”

I took a step toward him, the anger rising from somewhere deep inside and spreading outward like liquid fire through my veins.

“You leave Denise out of this,” I told him, my fists clenching by my side. “Ilyana, too.”

I’d used physical force against the Preacher in the past and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again if it became necessary.

“I’m not the one who pulled either of them into this. That was all you, Hunt. Couldn’t just leave them well enough alone, huh? First you dragged Clearwater into your business in Boston and now you’re doing the same with the half-breed. One would think the kidnapping of your daughter would have taught you to mind your business.”