Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (24 page)

Breathe, Hunt. Breathe!

At last my body responded, sucking in a great whooping lungful of air. I coughed, gasped, and fought to regain my breath. All the while Denise stared down at me dispassionately.

When I could at last take in some air without wheezing and gasping, Denise knelt down beside me.

“That’s for stealing my car. The knife in the chest I can forgive. Stealing my car? Not so much. So that’s not going to happen again, is it?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Glad we understand each other.” She patted me on the shoulder and stood.

“Dmitri, get him up. Then let’s go get something to eat. I’m hungry.”

With that, she headed off toward the diner door.

Dmitri came over and easily lifted me up, placing me back down on my feet like a parent picking up a young child.

I gave him an evil look. “You didn’t tell her?” I gasped out as I fought to get my breathing under control.

I was referring to the fact that it had been Dmitri who had given me the keys to Denise’s car when he’d helped me escape the police at the hospital back in New Orleans.

“It just never came up,” he said sheepishly, while steadying me with one arm.

“Thanks a lot, man.”

“For you, Hunt, anything.”

We slid back into the banter as if we’d seen each other yesterday, and I felt a ball of tension I didn’t know I’d been carrying around begin to break apart in my gut. It was good to be with my friends again.

Maybe together we could find a way out of this mess.

Ten minutes later we were all seated in a booth at the back of the diner. This was my turf; I knew the players to watch for, so I sat facing the door with the other two on the other side of the table. The waitress took our order, brought our drinks and food, and then left us alone, which is just how we wanted it.

“What are you doing here? How’d you find me?” I asked, when the opportunity presented itself, but I thought I already knew the answer, at least to that last question.

Denise shrugged. “I’ve been dreaming that you’re in danger. We would have come sooner if I’d been able to get out of that damned hospital bed on my own before this point. As for tracking you down, we’re bonded, remember?”

How could I forget?

While in New Orleans, I’d been shot by a rogue FBI agent and only managed to escape by throwing myself into a canal and hiding in a drainage tunnel. Unfortunately, by the time the cops had left, I’d lost too much blood to pull myself out. I was on the brink of death when Dmitri had found me and carried me back to Denise. Her healing magick hadn’t been enough, so she’d cast an ancient ritual that bound the two of us together, soul to soul. She had, quite literally, taken a piece of her soul and bound it to mine so that my soul would remain in my body, giving her a chance to work enough magick to heal the damage done to my body and spirit.

“It was like following a piece of myself across the country; all I had to do was listen to that inner voice and follow where it told me to go.”

Dmitri took over at that point. “A number of my past contacts are still active and it was a simple matter to look them up when we arrived in the city and ask if they’d seen a tattooed blind guy roaming around. They were hesitant to talk about it at first, but eventually they let us know that you were working for the magister.”

“Working might be too kind a word for it,” I told them. “Indentured servitude might be better.”

Denise was watching me closely.

“Tell us about it,” she said.

So I did.

33

I went back over everything that had happened to me since I’d fled the hospital that night in New Orleans: the long, rambling drive across the country with stops here and there to deal with some errant spirits, my arrival in Los Angeles and the weeks spent lying low, the discovery by Fuentes’s cronies and his successful attempt to shanghai me into service by threatening Denise’s and Dmitri’s lives.

The little information I had on the Key came next, not only its alleged power to open one of the gates to hell itself but also the actions Durante took to hide it away and how Fuentes had already managed to recover two of the three pieces of the artifact.

A pensive expression crossed Denise’s face when I mentioned the Key.

“After all this time, the Clavis Sclerata finally surfaces,” she said, when I was finished.

“You’ve heard of it?”

She nodded. “It may be legend to the Preternaturals, but the Gifted, especially practitioners of the Art, have always known that the legend was true. It was fashioned, after all, by one of our own.”

“So is Hunt correct?” Dmitri asked. “Can it really open the gates of hell?”

“Gate, not gates,” she said. “It will only open one of them. The Bone Gate.”

“There’s a difference?” he asked, and I was pleased to see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about this stuff. I had no idea there was more than one gate to hell, never mind that each of them had a different purpose.

Denise did, though. “You’d better believe it,” she replied. “Choose the wrong gate at the wrong time and all hell could break loose. And I mean that quite literally.”

Despite myself, I was intrigued. It’s not every day you get the chance to hear a discourse on the gates of hell, after all. “Why is it called the Bone Gate?”

“The pillars that support it are fashioned of human skulls and the gate leads to a plain littered with bones, a plain that stretches as far as one can see, making the killing fields of Cambodia look like a child’s diorama.”

Sounded like a pleasant place.

But Denise wasn’t finished.

“Not too many people have journeyed beyond the plain and lived to tell what they’ve seen, but those few who have report a great city of demonic creatures, just waiting for the gate to be opened. Some say that whoever opens the gate gains power over the creatures of that city and can order them to do their bidding as long as they return control of the Key, and by extension, the gate.”

“Why do I have the feeling you’re going to suggest that it’s up to us to stop Fuentes from opening that gate?” I asked.

“Do you see anyone else around?”

I was about to point out the nearly four million other people who called Los Angeles home, but to my surprise Dmitri beat me to the punch.

“Screw that,” Dmitri said. “We played hero last time, remember? All it did was nearly get us all killed. Fuentes can’t hold a threat to our lives over Hunt’s head anymore; I say we blow this popsicle stand right here, right now. We could be in San Diego by sunrise. Catch some rays, do a little fishing. Let somebody else save the world for a change.”

Right on!
I wanted to tell him, but there were a couple of problems with that scenario that I hadn’t gotten around to mentioning yet.

“We can’t,” I said quietly and both Dmitri and Denise turned to look at me, eyebrows raised.

Back in New Orleans I’d been the first to suggest that we cut and run when we were facing something as powerful as the Angeu, the Welsh personification of Death. In fact, I’d been rather miffed that they hadn’t seen things my way. Here I was arguing the exact opposite.

Sometimes I confound even myself.

“There’s more I haven’t told you,” I said, and then went on to explain what had happened the night we searched Durante’s home for the third piece of the Key.

I tapped a finger against my skull. “I don’t think I’m alone in here anymore.”

Denise frowned. “Lean closer,” she said.

When I did, she put a hand on either side of my head, bowed her own, and mumbled a few words in what sounded to me like ancient Chaldean. I felt the soothing flow of gentle heat moving from her hands and into my head, but only for a moment as something inside me reacted to that heat, jerking away and burrowing deeper in my mind to get as far from it as it could.

The whole room swayed about me like the deck of a ship in a storm and nausea threatened. Just as I thought I was going to lose it all over Denise’s lap, she let go of my head.

The dizziness receded and I was left sitting there, panting heavily as I tried to regain control.

“Yep, you’ve got a rider, all right,” Denise said, “Damned nasty one too.”

“It’s Durante; I’m sure of it.”

I explained about Bergman, as well as how Bergman thought Fuentes had tortured and killed Durante.

Dmitri nodded. “We heard the same story, but from a different source. That prompted us to track Bergman down for ourselves.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Denise did a scrying.”

I turned to face her. “Fuentes had no luck at all when he tried to scry out Bergman’s location.”

A clever little grin crossed her face. “That’s because he was looking for Bergman directly and his magick was blocked by the wards Durante had placed upon his aide. I scried for you instead.”

I knew from previous experience that scrying was an imperfect art. It could just as easily show you where a person had been or would be as where they were currently. Denise had used that to her advantage.

“So it was you that I saw rushing off with Bergman!”

“And just in time, too. If we hadn’t, Fuentes’s crew would have gotten him.” She paused, considering. “Wait. How did you find Bergman in the first place?”

I told them about the fugue states I had been having, how I’d found Bergman in the middle of one, and how Grady had wound up dead after the last episode.

I quite purposely did not mention waking up in bed next to Ilyana. I didn’t think it would go over well, even if I hadn’t been in control of my body at the time.

“So how does he get rid of it?” Dmitri asked.

“I don’t know.”

My face fell. I realized then that I’d been expecting her to have the answer I needed, and her lack of information was disconcerting.

“Fine. I’ll just share my head with a dead guy for the rest of my life,” I said sourly.

Denise grimaced and looked away.

She was too used to me being blind; normally I wouldn’t have caught a gesture like that. But this time I had.

“What was that look for?” I demanded, the hair on the back of my neck suddenly standing at attention.

Somehow I knew I wasn’t going to like her answer.

I was right.

“I’m afraid you don’t have that long.”

“Say what?”

“You’ve already mentioned that the rider is taking control of your body when you go to sleep. You’re less alert during those times; it’s easier for him to push your consciousness into the background and let his come to the fore.”

Right. I’d figured that part out myself. It was what she said next that made me sit up and take notice.

“Obviously you can’t stay awake forever, but even if you could that wouldn’t save you. Not really. The whole time he’s in there he’s mapping out the territory, getting an understanding of just where your defenses are and how strong they might be. Eventually, he’s going to have your whole head mapped out. Once he does, it will be trivial for him to force you into the backseat while he takes control. Permanently.”

Nothing like adding a ticking clock to an already screwed up situation.

“Great. Just fucking great,” I said, with no shortage of sarcasm. I’d be the first to admit that I have a habit of getting myself into trouble, but this time I’d really outdone myself, no doubt about it. Fuentes, the Preacher, and now Durante—it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of me. Disappoint any one of them and I was in deep shit. I didn’t even want to consider what my life would be like if I disappointed all three. Nuclear Armageddon would probably be preferable to …

Wait a minute!

The idea came out of nowhere, as most of my best ideas do, and there was no doubt that it was probably the most cockamamie and outlandish idea I’d ever come up with, but the very insanity of trying such a thing might be the thing that made it succeed where other more sane ideas might not.

Question was, would Durante help?

I realized that the others had fallen silent and looked up to see them both staring at me expectantly.

“What?” I asked.

“You’ve got that look, Hunt,” Dmitri said. “The one that says you’re about to dump us into a whole bunch of trouble.”

“I have a look?” I asked.

“Yes!” they both answered, simultaneously.

I laughed. In a weird way, their agreement was oddly comforting.

“Okay, fine. I’ve got a look. But I can do one better than that this time around—I’ve got an idea.”

And I told them how we were all going to get out of this mess.

34

Later that night I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom of the bungalow Fuentes had assigned to me, watching my reflection, hoping to catch a glimpse, just as I had a few nights before, of the rider I was carrying.

If I could get him to show himself …

It wasn’t to be, apparently. My reflection looked perfectly normal. Or, at least as normal as a guy with badly dyed hair, tattoos from waist to shoulders, and milky white orbs for eyes could look.

Still, I knew all wasn’t as it appeared to be. The fact that I had the lights on and could actually see my reflection at all was proof enough of that; someone else was in my head with me and was looking out through my eyes at that very moment.

It was more than a little unnerving.

Just what the fuck did Durante want anyway?

That was the question of the hour. Judging from everything that had happened so far, I was pretty well convinced that he wanted me to stop Fuentes from getting the Key. Why else would he have led me to where Bergman was hiding?

The same went for his elimination of Perkins, and even Grady for that matter. Perkins clearly had been targeted because he could have pinpointed the location of the third section of the Key if he got close enough to it, and Durante must have recognized that in him. It seemed to me that Grady had been targeted to send a message to Fuentes that he wasn’t safe, hiding away in his ivory castle. If Durante could get to one of Fuentes’s trusted lieutenants, then it stood to reason that he could get to Fuentes himself. That’s no doubt what the message on the wall had meant: I’m coming for you. Literally.