Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (3 page)

Finally catching my balance, I looked up just in time to see the figure of a man looming on my right.

I never even saw the punch coming.

It caught me in the solar plexus, paralyzing my diaphragm and driving all the air from my lungs with one short, sharp blow.

I went down like a side of beef.

A face loomed over me as I lay there trying to suck air into lungs that were suddenly not cooperating.

“Going somewhere, Princess?” he asked.

Apparently I really did suck at math.

There were four of them, not three.

4

I’d gotten a look at my latest assailant before my link with the dead girl dissolved permanently and, to my surprise, he was fully human. Not a trace of Giftedness about him. He had a lean face, hard eyes, and brown hair cropped close in a crew cut that would have done the Marines proud. He was dressed nondescriptly in a dark peacoat thick enough to conceal the weapon I was certain he was carrying, jeans, and hiking boots. He also stank of cigarette smoke.

“All right, up you go.” He grabbed my arm in a steely grip and dragged me to my feet. I was still fighting for breath and didn’t have any strength left to protest; it was all I could do to stay up as my head spun from the lack of oxygen. By the time my lungs decided to listen to my brain and allow air back into my body again, we had been joined by the others and any chance I might have had to escape passed.

“Lose something, Rivera?” my captor asked. It was said in jest, but there was just enough of a hint of derision in his tone to let me know there was a history between him and the guy he was talking to, who I guessed was Tattoo.

My hunch was right.

“I’d watch your mouth, Grady,” Rivera said. “You’re a lot more expendable than he is. It’s not that hard to replace a thief.”

A hand grabbed my face and turned it a few degrees to the left. For a moment I was tempted to steal his sight, just to be a pain in the ass, but something, perhaps a long buried instinct for survival, stayed my hand.

“I don’t know if you can see me or not,
cabrón
, but try that shit again I’ll put a bullet through the back of your head. No one makes a fool of me,
comprende
?”

I nodded as much as his grip would allow for. I had no doubt that he’d do exactly what he said he would. Apparently Grady thought it was a mistake to fuck around with Rivera too much as well, for he didn’t say a word in his own defense.

“Bring him.”

Hands grabbed my arms on either side and I was practically lifted off my feet as they hustled me along. I thought about crying out for help but knew the chances of anyone getting involved were practically nonexistent. People didn’t take a room in a place like this to poke their noses in other people’s business. The exact opposite, in fact. There could be a couple dozen of them standing around watching right at this very moment, but were the cops to show up five minutes from now you could be damned sure that no one would have seen a thing.

They dragged me, dripping wet and wearing only my boxer shorts, back up to my room and dropped me into the room’s only chair. I heard one of them going through the dresser drawers and then a set of fresh clothes, one of only three that I currently owned, hit me in the chest.

“Get dressed,” Rivera told me. “We’ve got someone to go see.”

All of my clothing was the same—black t-shirts and jeans bought with a clerk’s help at a local surplus store a few days after arriving in L.A.—and so I didn’t have to worry that they’d dressed me up to look the fool. Dry boxers and jeans were followed by a long-sleeved shirt to help hide all of my tattoos from prying eyes and then socks and a pair of sturdy, yet comfortable boots.

I was finally getting my breath back, but I hobbled over to the dresser just the same, keeping up the pretense of being cowed by my captors’ presence. I could feel them watching me, but I knew they never would have let me get even that far if they hadn’t already gone through the dresser while going through my clothes, so I ignored them. I opened the top drawer, felt around until I found my wallet, a pair of sunglasses, and my harmonica, and stuffed them into the front pockets of my jeans. The wallet and sunglasses were just me being practical, but I didn’t go anywhere without my harmonica, not if I could help it at any rate.

“You ready now, Princess?” Grady asked.

I ignored him, turning instead to face toward where I thought Rivera was standing.

“What’s this about?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. Bring him.”

Hands grabbed my arms. I tried to shake them off, having recovered enough to be able to walk on my own again, but they were having none of it. Their grip tightened and they pulled me along with them as they headed out the door.

We went down the steps and out into the parking lot. I heard a car’s doors being unlocked and opened.

“Get in.”

I did as I was told, finding the roof of the car with my hand to keep from banging my head on it as I slid into the backseat. I ended up sandwiched between Demon Lady and Grady, leaving Jersey and Rivera to take the front. The car’s engine started up and I cursed beneath my breath at the sound, recognizing the throaty roar.

Rivera was not only kidnapping me, but he was using my own car to do it!

All right, so it wasn’t really my car per se, as blind guys don’t usually have too much use for hot rods like the one we were riding in. The Charger actually belonged to my friend, Denise Clearwater. I’d taken it the night I’d fled New Orleans. Denise hadn’t been in any condition to object, as I’d just plunged a two-thousand-year-old dagger into her heart five minutes before stealing her car, but I’d been telling myself for weeks that she was okay with my taking it despite all that. I believed it too. I’d swapped the Massachusetts license plate for a California one at a truck stop just outside of Palm Springs and had only used the car a few times since arriving in L.A., but I knew it like the back of my hand at this point. This was definitely my car.

Which meant that if, by some slim chance, someone did actually report my being forcibly removed from the premises against my will, the only clue to my kidnappers’ identity—the car they took me away in—would simply lead investigators away on a wild goose chase and ultimately get me into more hot water than I was in now.

I had to hand it to Rivera, it was a brilliant move.

I disliked this guy more with every passing minute.

Jersey shot out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell, throwing me hard against Demon Lady beside me in the process. No soft curves for her; she was all sleek muscle under that outfit. Normally I might have enjoyed being so close to such a beautiful woman, but I had about as much interest in tangling with her as I did in jumping naked into a pool of starving piranha. At least with the piranha I had a chance of getting out alive.

I settled into my seat and did my best to ignore Jersey’s driving—
What the hell was his name anyway?
—while trying to figure out what was going on.

If Rivera wanted something for himself, if he had some personal interest in me or my abilities, he probably would have mentioned it by this point. Since he hadn’t, I had to assume that he was operating on behalf of a third party.

The question was who?

I ruled out the police or other law enforcement agencies pretty quickly. Rivera wasn’t the type to work with law enforcement, first of all, and second, if he was after the reward the authorities were offering he could have simply phoned in my location and let the U.S. Marshals break in my door instead of doing it himself. A million dollars was a pretty big incentive, I had to admit, and it was being offered simply for information leading to my arrest and capture; Rivera wouldn’t have even needed to get his hands dirty in order to collect it.

After crossing off the authorities and Rivera himself, I was still left with a long list of potential people that might have sent someone after me, from the relatives of the victims Agent Doherty was convinced I had killed and who knew who I was thanks to an overzealous media, to Simon Gallagher and his followers from New Orleans, the very people I had escaped from with my friend Dmitri’s help just a few weeks ago. Truth was, it could be any of half a dozen different groups. And those were just the few I knew about!

It was time to try to find some answers.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

No response.

I tried again. “What do you want? Where are we going?”

The foursome continued to ignore me, though Grady let out an amused little chuckle at my continued ignorance.

It was the chuckle that tipped me over the edge.

I was less than thrilled at what had happened so far that morning, and the continued silence in response to my questions was increasing my irritation by the minute, but that laugh told me that my apparent helplessness was amusing to Grady. That was simply unacceptable. I had come too far and endured too much to be laughed at by some thug who’d gotten the drop on me when I wasn’t looking.

Without stopping to think about the consequences of what I was about to do, I reached out and stole the driver’s sight.

5

While we were holed up in the safe house outside of Atlantic City after fleeing Boston, Denise began teaching me how to better understand and control the strange talents I’d gained in the aftermath of the Preacher’s ritual to “see the unseen.” We worked on improving my ability to use my ghostsight to see into the spiritual realm and on refining my techniques for borrowing the sight from another individual, either living or dead. Where once I’d needed to not only personally know my target but also be in physical contact with them, now I could borrow from acquaintance or stranger alike, provided I was within twenty feet of them.

Mentally reaching into the front seat from where I was sitting was a piece of cake.

As usual, there was that moment of discomfort and then the whiteout in front of my eyes receded and I could see again.

The driver, of course, could not.

He rubbed frantically at his eyes for a moment and when that didn’t restore his sight, he panicked.

“I can’t see! I can’t fucking see!”

Pretty much what I expected.

Jersey’s sudden outburst stunned the others into immobility as they tried to figure out just what was happening to him. In the backseat, I secretly watched it all, nearly laughing aloud at the expression on Rivera’s face as he tried to puzzle out Jersey’s antics.

In his panic, Jersey inadvertently turned the wheel a few degrees to the left. That put us squarely into the other lane of traffic. For a few seconds I was treated to the sight of oncoming headlights flaring in my eyes and then Rivera overcame his paralysis, reached over, and yanked the wheel to the right, shouting in Spanish as he did.

Horns were blaring, Rivera was cursing, and, beside me, Grady added his own voice to the din.

“What the fuck are you doing, Perkins?”

Perkins? The poor bastard.

Unable to see and therefore unaware that Rivera had just saved all of our lives by putting us back in the right lane, Perkins jerked the wheel back in the other direction. The car careened into the other lane again, narrowly missing a family of four in a Honda Civic. I watched their faces flash past through the side window, their mouths open in a silent “Oh” of surprise. Maybe this hadn’t been such a bright idea after all.

“What did you do?”

I shifted my gaze at the sound of her voice and found Demon Lady staring at me. Watching her expression change as she realized that I was watching her in return—and not just blindly looking in her direction—was even more amusing than all the chaos going on around me, and I couldn’t hold back a little chuckle of my own.

Another long horn blast, a thundering crunch as we clipped the car next to us, and then Rivera was shouting for someone to “Get Perkins’s fucking hands off the wheel!” and the woman had no choice but to respond.

As the two men in front continued to jerk the wheel back and forth in a furious tug of war, Demon Lady leaned forward over the front seat, grabbed Perkins by each wrist, and yanked his hands upward until he sat there looking like someone holding their hands up in the middle of a robbery.

With Demon Lady and Rivera, the two most powerful individuals in the car, otherwise occupied, I made my move.

Demon Lady’s comment to me must have just registered in Grady’s mind for he was turning toward me with a look of surprised concern on his face as I brought my arm up across my chest and then violently reversed it, driving the point of my elbow right into his solar plexus in a bid for payback that had me grinning like a lunatic.

My strike hit home like a sledgehammer, driving the air out of his lungs, and leaving him gasping like a fish out of water.

As he struggled to take in a breath, I leaned in close to be sure that he would hear me over all the shouting.

“Fuck you,
Princess
,” I said.

Then I reached for the door handle.

I’m not really sure what I thought I was going to do at that point, to be honest. In his panic Perkins had mashed the pedal to the floor and the car was barreling along like a bat out of hell. It had stopped swerving violently back and forth now that Rivera had sole control over the wheel, but diving out at that speed definitely wouldn’t have been good for my overall health, not to mention my tender flesh.

Maybe I had some vague idea of pushing Grady out the open door and following him out afterward, hoping he might cushion my fall, but as it turned out I never got the chance to make good on my move. Rivera must have finally understood that I was the source of all the commotion, for as my hand found the door handle he let go of the steering wheel, reached over the seat, and grabbed my shoulder. His fingers found the nerve cluster just beneath my collar bone and dug in, hard.

The pain was so excruciatingly intense that it was more than my weary body could handle.

Out I went.

*   *   *

A splash of cold water dashed across my face brought me back to the world sometime later. Still foggy, I lifted my hands, intending to wipe the water from my face, only to hear the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked just behind my head. I froze, hands in the air, as my memory came flooding back to me.