Fields of Blood (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 2)

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Copyright © 2016 by Sonya Bateman

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

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C
HAPTER 1

From WRONG SIDE OF HELL

Manhattan, New York – The Hive –One month ago

The dead can’t lie…

I closed my eyes for a minute. This wasn’t going to work much longer. “How many Milus Dei people are in the warehouse?” I said.

Don’t know.

The words stabbed deep, and something hot and wet ran from my nose. Blood, falling in fat drops on my splayed hand. “How many do you think?”

Forty. Fifty. Doesn’t matter. More will come from the outside, all over.

“Forty or fifty. More from the outside,” I gasped. The blood was gushing now. “How many more? Who are they?”

“Gideon, stop!” Sadie said frantically.

“No, I’ve got this. How many more?”

 
Thousands more. Tens of thousands
. I could feel the dead guy’s smug satisfaction.
You’ll never win, freak
.

Thousands? That was impossible. I opened my mouth, intending to make him clarify.

Then a huge, blinding flash went off in my head, and I knew nothing.

Manhattan, New York – Present Day

When Abe called me from a crime scene in the middle of the day, I knew something was about to go wrong—if it hadn’t already.

Detective Abraham Strauss had been unexpectedly promoted to captain last month, just after the Milus Dei disaster in the sub-station under Port Authority. The department had skipped him right over the lieutenant rank. They’d also somehow managed to make a few dozen dead bodies, a lot of them cops, slide way under the public radar. There hadn’t been a single peep about the Forty-Second Street Massacre in the papers, in the news, or even online.

I was suspicious at best. Milus Dei, the twisted cult with a mission to hunt down, capture and ruthlessly torture all non-human Others to death—including me—had been firmly entrenched in the NYPD, under the leadership of Chief Nigel Foley.

Now that Foley was dead, it should’ve been over.

But Abe had called me because of a certain distinctive mark on a fresh murder victim that suggested it wasn’t.

Traffic was a bitch. I generally avoided driving in Manhattan during the day, and up until recently, my job had been ideal for that. I was a body mover, a taxi driver for the dead. Life had been simple and quiet, at least for a few years. I’d pick up corpses wherever they dropped and bring them wherever they needed to go next—usually the hospital, the morgue, or a funeral home. I’d worked at night and kept to myself. Most of my conversations were one-sided rambles with dead people.

Until the dead started talking back. That’s when I found out that the Others existed. Werewolves, fairies, vampires—though I hadn’t seen one of those yet—even the bogeyman. They were all real. The creatures of the night.

And I was one of them. Still hadn’t gotten used to that.

It took me almost an hour to get to the crime scene. Of course, it was in Central Park, where everything truly horrible in my life seemed to start. I was beginning to hate the damned park. I pulled my van in alongside the handful of emergency vehicles still on scene, and hopped out to find Abe.

Didn’t take long. Unlike the gruesome deaths that had started the whole thing, where the bodies were found half-hidden in the wooded Ramble, this killer had left the victim right out in the open. On a popular public walking path, in broad daylight.

Abe stood over the bagged body, his tie loose and handkerchief in hand. That wasn’t a good sign. He only brought out the face rag when something bothered him enough to make him sweat, even on a brisk November day like this. He looked up with a frown as I approached. “What happened, you get lost?” he said.

I shrugged. “Hey, it’s ten in the morning. I’m not wired for this daylight stuff.”

“Tell me about it,” he muttered. As a detective, Abe worked all hours—most of them night hours, since crime preferred the dark. But the promotion had him pulling normal-people shifts, mostly in the office. He hated it. And it was another reason his call worried me. Technically, working the crime scene was no longer his job.

“So what’s the word, Detective? Sorry…Captain.” I grinned. Couldn’t help needling him a little. He deserved the promotion, even if he didn’t think so—Abe had always been one of the good guys. “Let me guess,” I said. “No witnesses.”

He grimaced. “Hell, there’s plenty of witnesses. Problem is they can’t agree on anything about the perp, except he was ‘a guy with a knife.’ Real damned helpful.” He glanced furtively at the nearest people, a pair of forensic techs sorting through evidence bags, and lowered his voice. “Like I said, the vic has that tattoo. The blue one.”

“Right.” Every member of the cult had their symbol tattooed on them somewhere. An ankh with the blade of a sword as the base, done in dark blue ink. Milus Dei was Latin for ‘soldiers of God,’ but the ankh wasn’t a traditional Christian symbol. Maybe the bastards just thought it looked cool or something.

“You think one of the…er, Others killed him?” Abe said, still hushed in case anyone was listening.

“Maybe. If it was, I can’t say I’d blame them too much.” I hadn’t given Abe a lot of detail about the unspeakably horrific things this cult had done to countless non-humans, but he knew enough. “Mind if I take a look at him?”

“Be my guest.”

I knelt on the ground and unzipped the body bag. The dark-haired, thin-faced dead man inside was in good shape compared to previous Milus Dei victims—he still had a face, and his guts weren’t on the outside. The last ones found in the park had been mauled by a werewolf. But she’d done that in self-defense.

I’d never seen Sadie as a bloodthirsty killer. Not even before I knew her, when she tried to steal my van, and then went wolf on a cop.

This victim was different. It was deliberate, almost ritualistic. He had an extra-wide red smile below his face, a gaping gash where his throat had been slit with a blade that must’ve been razor sharp. The edges of the wound were clean lines, no shredding.

And there was something carved on his chest. I couldn’t quite make it out, because his torn shirt was still in the way.

I looked up at Abe. “Got a pair of gloves on you?”

“Probably, somewhere.” He investigated various pockets until he came up with two severely wrinkled, blue latex gloves. “Don’t give ‘em back,” he said.

“What, the NYPD doesn’t recycle?”

He snorted. “Only stuff that’s not covered in dead people.”

“Got it.” Smirking, I pulled the gloves on and carefully lifted the dead man’s shirt. My stomach clenched when I saw what had been sliced into his flesh.

It was a rune. A Fae symbol…fairy writing. I’d just found out I was half Fae and still didn’t know much about them, especially their language and writing. But this was one of the few I could understand.

Vengeance.

“Jesus Christ on toast,” Abe blurted.

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a new one,” I said. “You know, Abe, you could’ve mentioned the whole chest-carving thing.”