Death Blows: The Bloodhound Files-2 (20 page)

The scythes’ blades are around a foot long. Most pires or thropes will hesitate when facing that much razor-sharp silver, but I find it’s even more effective with a little demonstration. And here I am in a produce department . . .

There’s a pyramid of cantaloupes right next to me. I snap a strike at the topmost one and bisect it along the equator, cleanly enough that the top half doesn’t slide off. I do it without my taking my eyes off Tair.

His claws dance in the air in front of me as he signs.
My, what big teeth you have, Grandma
.

“All the better to disembowel you with, asshole. Only one needing stitches is going to be you.”

He glances at the old woman on the floor, who’s managed to shift into half-were form and is twitching weakly while clutching her throat.
How about her
?

“She’ll be fine.” He’s trying to distract me.

And your arm? How’s that
?

It’s actually throbbing like a son-of-a-bitch at the moment, but not enough to make me lose focus.

“Thanks for reminding me. Where are your bandage buddies, anyway? There a sale on down at the Yarn Barn?”

He takes a step backward.
I apologize for their impulsiveness. A general cannot always control his
soldiers
.

“A general that can’t might find himself losing his privates,” I say, making a suggestive but not serious swipe at him. Unlike the last time we met, Tair’s gone completely commando; he’s not wearing anything but fur and fangs. The fur hides most of it, but not all. “Especially if he parades them around in public.”

We don’t really need to do this, Jace. I’m not your enemy
.

“No? Funny, the Blood Cross I pulled out of my arm says otherwise. And then there was that bitchneeding-stitches remark someone made . . . oh, wait. That was you.”

I was hoping to draw out Dr. Adams. Apparently he doesn’t care about your welfare all that much
.

“Or maybe he just knows I can take care of myself.” Which sounds good but is pure crap—before he vanished, I would have bet anything Dr. Pete would risk his life to help me if I was in trouble. He’s done it before.

But not now.

As I said before, my business is with Adams, not with you. Since he’s obviously fled, so have my
reasons for staying
. And with that, he turns and bounds away.

I don’t bother chasing him. I kneel down and ask the old woman if she’s okay. She growls at me, struggles out of her sundress, and runs off down the aisle on all fours. Guess she’ll be all right.

I sheathe the scythes and return to the checkout, trailed by a small group of curious shoppers. Xandra, unfazed, waves me over impatiently. “Come on,” she says. “You have to
pay
for all this stuff, remember?”

I notice she’s listening to an iPod—she probably missed the whole thing. Galahad looks at me with a worried expression and whines. I reach up, pat him on the head and say, “Good dog. Let’s get you home and off the streets, okay?”

The cashier is looking at me strangely as she rings up my items, but nobody tries to stop me from leaving the store—I wasn’t the one that busted it up, after all.

“Hey, look at this,” Xandra says as she helps bag our groceries. “This cantaloupe’s already sliced.”

I don’t tell Xandra about what happened or seeing Dr. Pete. She’ll have a million questions, and I have no answers. It’s starting to look like Dr. Pete was mixed up with some very bad people, and I just don’t know how to explain that—I don’t have enough information, I don’t know what is or isn’t true. Dr. Pete is the one with the answers, and he’s the one who’ll have to decide how much to tell his niece. In the meantime, she’ll have to settle for blissful ignorance.

I do tell her one thing: to watch out for a thrope with a gray stripe running down the middle of his head.

We go back to the apartment and I get ready to go in to work—looks like I’m working the sundown-tosunup shift for a while. I decide not to call Charlie; I don’t want to screw up his schedule just because he’s stuck with being my partner. He’ll either show up at the office or call me, anyway.

There’s a message waiting for me when I get in. Eisfanger wants me to see him in the lab. I head up there, wondering why he didn’t just call my cell.

The lab is its usual combination of stainless steel and industrial tile, brightly lit by halogen spots that every now and then illuminate something that doesn’t seem to belong: a broom that looks like it was put together in the 1700s, or an African tribal mask made from aluminum and high-impact plastic. Eisfanger’s there, but no other techs are around—odd for this time of night. He’s pacing when I arrive.

“Jace,” he says, managing to look both relieved and worried at the same time. “Good, good. I have to talk to you.”

“So I gathered. What’s up?”

“I’ve managed to locate some—uh,
resources
for you,” he says carefully. “In relation to that case I was helping you on.”

“Which one?”

“The unofficial one.”

Ah. Now I get it. “Okay. What do you have?”

He actually glances furtively around, as if espionage agents are lurking beneath his workstation.

“Comics,” he whispers.

“All right. Which ones?”

He hands me a bulky manila envelope, sealed with several layers of tape and a metal tab. “Here. Don’t ask me how I got them, don’t read them while there’s a full moon, and get them back to me within twenty-four hours.”

I take the envelope and frown. “Come on. Are they really that dangerous? Dr. Pete had a bunch in his basement.”

“Not like this. These are from the
Seduction of the Innocent
murders. They’re the only copies left in existence, and I’m not cleared to even be in the same room with them.”

“Wait. You said this was pertinent to the
unofficial
investigation—”

“It is. The storage unit itself was completely devoid of mystical activity, but I did a wide sweep of the area around the building hoping that maybe the thief left something behind when they arrived or left. I found this.” He pulls a glass vial out of his pocket that at first glance seems empty. Then I see it holds a minuscule, jaggededged black rock. “This was stuck in a crack at the loading dock. I wouldn’t have spotted it at all, except the energy it was giving off was so powerful. I ran a Spectergraphic analysis on it and came up with a match.”

I study the black mineral. “What is it?”

“Volcanic rock,” he says. “Produced by an eruption in 1956.”

I close and lock the door to my office, and then I open the envelope.

There are five comics inside: the three issues of
Seduction of the Innocent
, and two others. I slip on a pair of surgical gloves, then look at the
SOTI
comics first.

The cover of the first depicts a man holding a severed wolf’s head in one hand, and a bloody silver ax in the other. The eyes of the head are staring down at its own decapitated half-were body.

The second cover shows a blindfolded child with a smile on her face being led into a darkened room by a shadowy figure. The floor is covered with spring-loaded bear traps, the kind with big jagged metal teeth that lock shut on a leg when stepped on. For some reason, the drain set into the floor is the detail that disturbs me the most.

The last one depicts a thrope in full wolf form in a cage. The cage is suspended over a blazing bonfire, and is being lowered by a figure in a hooded robe.

I’m surprised by how much the images bother me. The subject matter is grisly, but it’s only ink on paper; I’ve seen far worse in person. It’s more than that, and it takes me a second to place my reaction. It’s smell—I’m having the same kind of visceral, slightly nauseous sensation produced by a really horrifying odor, like the smell left in a car that someone’s died in. But there
isn’t
any smell—just the sensation.

The paper has a slightly greasy feel to it, too, even through the gloves, and it’s just as illusory—my fingers don’t slide any easier against the paper when I try rubbing it. It’s as if my mind knows that the comics are coated with some sort of foul, slippery substance that my senses can’t detect.

The other two comics, though, don’t produce that reaction. The first one is a copy of
The Bravo
Brigade
, but the cover is different from the one Dr. Pete lent me: This one has no date or price listed, and the art depicts the Bravos facing off against a single man in a robe with his hood thrown back. I don’t recognize him—he has a high widow’s peak of jet-black hair, a hawk-like face with a sharp goatee and thin mustache. The banner beneath the art reads AGAINST THE DARK!

The fifth book is titled
Western Wonders
. The cover shows a very familiar-looking lem battling what seem to be Apache thropes—five lie dead or dying at his feet, the hilt of a knife sticking out of chest or throat, while another in half-were form leaps at him, tomahawk in hand; the lem’s already got his arm cocked for another throw. The banner just below the title reads, THE LAST STAND OF THE

I wonder why it’s there. None of the other Bravos seem to have their own comic—there’s no Sword of Midnight or Doctor Transe title. I leaf through it, but it’s a pretty standard tale of cowboys versus Indians, with the Indians getting the short end of the coup stick.

I go back to the Brigade comic. Turns out it isn’t a comic at all—it’s a mock-up of one, twenty-two pages of rough panel layouts and scrawled notes in the margins. I pull out Dr. Pete’s copy and compare them side by side; they’re very similar except for one thing.

John Dark has been completely excised from the version that was released to the public.

I realize I’m actually avoiding reading the
Seduction
issues. It’s not a full moon, so it should be safe—

but I place them flat on my desk and use a pencil to turn the pages anyway.

I don’t learn anything new. The stories are all standalone plots, usually dealing with some sort of betrayal or evil deed that winds up backfiring on the perpetrator. A question occurs to me, and the best person to ask is probably Cassius—he and I are overdue for a conversation anyway.

I walk down to his office and knock. There’s no answer at first, and I wonder if he’s disappeared, too—

at this rate, I’m going to have to get a bicycle lock for Charlie. I knock again, and this time he tells me to come in.

He’s at his usual spot behind his desk, but the room is much darker than usual; the only light comes from his computer screen. Whatever he’s looking at, it has a lot of green in it.

“We need to talk,” I say.

“The words every man loves to hear,” he says. He taps a key and the lights come up, just enough to make the room feel more like a study instead of a dungeon. “You should know, Jace, that I can’t tell you much about the Hexagon.”

“I didn’t think you would. My question is about the
Seduction of the Innocent
murders—specifically, the comics that were produced as a result. Which of the scenes depicted were duplicated in real life—

the original crimes, or the consequence that always follows?”

He studies me for an instant before replying. “The consequential ones.”

“That’s what I thought.” Those were the more horrifying of the two, of course—the initial murder scenes were bad, but the retribution that resulted was always worse.

“The spell generated a type of emotional dissonance,” Cassius says. “Reading the comic generates horror, but it’s tempered with a certain moral satisfaction that the antagonist gets what he or she deserves. Reversing the crime and punishing an innocent is a corruptive act—especially when subjecting an innocent audience to it. By approving of what befalls the villain in the comic, they’re unwittingly giving metaphysical support to the actual murder.”

“Essentially making them silent partners in the cult itself. Not exactly believers—more like endorsers.”

“Exactly. Thus the title of the series—the ones being seduced were innocent of what was occurring.”

“But John Dark knew exactly what he was doing.”

Cassius doesn’t respond.

I sigh. “You told me you now believe Dark is behind the murders, but you won’t give me anything else? Not even the reason you changed your mind?”

“We had him under surveillance, which is why I know he didn’t commit the murders personally. But the killings now seem secondary to the acquisition of the Brigade’s weaponry—and that’s very much Dark’s methodology. I simply don’t know who his agent is, or how they’re communicating.”

“Well, whoever they are, they now have the Sword, the Balancer gem, and the Solar armor. That’s a powerful combination.”

“If they can wield them. Mystic artifacts aren’t like your gun—you can’t simply point one and pull a trigger. All the Brigade’s weapons were warded and keyed to their user—those wards can be broken, but it will take time.”

“So why wait until they do? If you were surveilling Dark, you know where he is—can’t we just bring him in, try to sweat him?”

He laughs without any amusement in it. “Oh, absolutely. Then maybe we can put the president in an interrogation room and get him to confess all the bad things he did in college.”

I look at him skeptically. “You’re saying he’s out of our reach?”

“Not at all. I’m saying that any move we make directly against him better be as immaculate as the Virgin Mary and as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, or the consequences will destroy us both.”

“Ah. There goes my plan of locking him up until he needs to go to the bathroom.”

“In any case, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone—vanished right from under our surveillance. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know.”

“Damn it! Is every person associated with this case going to vanish into thin air? First Dr. Pete, then Silverado, now John Dark—I can’t even get hold of Gretchen.”

He blinks. A shadow of an emotion flickers across his face, so quickly I almost miss it—what analysts call a micro-expression. I’m trained to spot them, and I identify this one immediately: guilt.

“What?” I demand. “What
about
Gretchen?”

“She’s fine.”

“Okay. Where is she
doing
this being fine?”