Hammer of Darkness (Veil Knights Book 8) Read online

  “Give me something.”

  She decided to try. I guessed $220 bucks and a dinner bought something after all. She was done in a moment, and she pushed it back toward me. I picked it up and looked at it. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing.

  It was the sigil on the wall.

  “She drew it a few times,” Clarice went on. “Just sort of drew it out, but then she’d cover it up with daisies, or big ships, or Mickey Mouse. She always did that.”

  “And she never told you what it was for?” I slipped the napkin into a pocket.

  “No. I asked once or twice after I picked up on it, but she said it was nothing, not to bother with it. It mean something to you?”

  “Not yet,” I said, sort of hedging. Hedging is a habit of mine. “But maybe later it will.” I stood and picked up the check. “You keep your head down, Clarice.”

  She reached out and touched my arm. “Thank you.”

  “Hey, services rendered. You helped me.”

  “No I mean, for not making me, you know…” she trailed off.

  I knew. I also knew exactly what I was feeling right now, shame. When I spoke bitterness accented my words.

  “Yeah, I’m a really big hero,” I said and walked away.

  Chapter 9

  It was full night when I walked outside.

  I couldn’t be sure if the haze obscuring the stars was rain clouds collecting, or pollution running into the cold air off the coast. Only a single one of the girls still walked the street, the rest were gone, earning money. The pimp named Jet was still gone, the BMW remained conspicuous by its absence. Neither Davis, Hennessy, or the black kid were anywhere to be seen.

  I stuffed my hands into my pockets and began walking fast down the sidewalk toward the bistro where Davis had hassled the kid. A narrow alley ran between the bistro and the old, brick building next to it, forming a linking this street and the next.

  As soon as I entered the alley, I knew something was wrong.

  I smelled blood.

  Automatically stepping against the alley mouth to avoid silhouetting myself, I reached into my jacket and hauled the Beretta out. Dipping into a slight crouch, I let my eyes adapt to the gloom. Shapes congealed out of the shadow and I realized there was a big problem.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  The kid was dead. He lay draped across a knocked over garbage can, utterly limp and still. He’d obviously been beaten, his face looked like rough clay, all lumpy and unshaped from the swelling. But more than that, his skull looked wrong in the back. His head had been caved in.

  Sprawled out beside him on the filthy ground lay Davis. The old street cop’s jaw hung slack, as if in surprise, and his eyes bulged, wide open and staring. His chest lay ripped open so that the white shards of his cracked rib cage showed clearly, entrails spilling over.

  The rush of adrenaline flowed into my body like high octane fuel and I felt the warm, preternatural calm that always came when it did. I dropped to one knee and lifted the machine pistol.

  The shape crouched over Davis’s body making hungry-pig noises as it ate. I have told you the Veil grows thin; I have told you San Francisco was long a place of thinness.

  The teenage girl turned and looked at me, face covered in Davis’s blood. I’d fallen for the setup without reservation. First Erica, then Clarice. I hadn’t questioned hard enough, doubted strong enough, hated hard enough. I walked into the trap with eyes wide shut.

  The girl was a pale, washed blonde, barely larger than Clarice. She wore a pair of pink Adidas kicks and Capri jeans under a blood soaked Hello Kitty t-shirt. She looked at me with bestial eyes, teeth smeared scarlet.

  Automatically, I closed one eye to preserve my night vision, and squeezed off a careful round with the Beretta. She darted to one side. The Parabellum slug lanced open the top of her shoulder, black blood misting in an ugly penumbra.

  She landed and tensed to make a leap, but I opened my eye, centered the muzzle of the Beretta and squeezed the trigger, firing three times in a burst. Three of the rounds struck her in the chest, punching her over onto her back.

  She screeched a bad, inhuman, sound, and flopped for a moment, more black blood pumping out of the dark blossom of wounds in her chest. Rising, I stepped forward and looked down at her, feeling sick. She glared up at me with naked hate. I fired the Beretta and an untidy third eye opened in her forehead. Her body jerked and went limp.

  Drawing in a breath, I lowered the gun, taking stock of the situation. A voice, rough and deep, but obviously twisted by pain, called out of the darkness further back in the alley.

  “There’s another one!” Hennessy barked.

  I turned, lifting the gun. A shape emerged in a bounding, frog-leap from behind a pyramid of overflowing garbage cans. It was one of the girls from the street. She snarled, animal features twisting in murderous rage. She struck me hard, slamming me back to the ground. She hit harder than Euryale’s doorman by a country mile, but Hennessy’s warning had been enough to save me.

  Gun already up, I triggered it and the muzzle flash lit up the alley in lightning flashes. Clawed hands, raised to deliver the coup de grace, froze as the upward slanted rounds struck the girl in meaty thwacks like cleaver impacts. She staggered. I kept shooting.

  The hex girl dropped like a sack of loose meat.

  Heart hammering, I sat up. Scrambling, I kicked myself across the alley until my back was to a wall, pistol up. I panted like a dog as I looked down the alley, but my pupils were contracted tight from the flashes and my low-light vision ruined.

  “Are there anymore?” I asked.

  Hennessy was an indistinct shape in the dark alley. His voice seemed disembodied when he answered. It was obvious the young cop was in a lot of pain.

  “No. I followed Davis in here. He was going to beat the kid some more. I stopped him. Then thought I heard something from the far side, I but couldn’t see. Davis suddenly starts screaming and when I turned I got hit hard. I still can’t move my limbs.” When he said the last part he sounded scared.

  “Might just be the shock,” I said, getting to my feet. “Davis do for the kid?” Hennessy hesitated, which was all the admission I needed to confirm his suspicions. “Yeah, he did,” he said.

  “The ambush was for me,” I told him.

  I began making my way toward the cop, looking up at the metal skeleton of the fire escapes, eyes hunting for motion.

  “He started a blood frenzy by killing the kid.”

  “Kid was selling junk, heroin,” Hennessy said, like it mattered.

  “Of course he was,” I shot back. “This entire street is a fucking junk store. Davis knows that. As long as it doesn’t cross east or north into better neighborhoods…” I trailed off.

  Coming up to the cop, I stepped over him and knelt down. Placing the pistol down within easy reach, I ran my hands across the rookie, searching for wounds. Almost immediately my hand came across a wet spot high up on the abdomen and I pulled a handkerchief from my jacket.

  He took it and pressed it into the wound. Or one of the wounds; in the uncertain light I couldn’t tell exactly what I was dealing with. I pulled out my cell, saw no bars and cursed. Then I wondered if the witches somehow knew this was a dead spot or if it just worked out that way because of the topography of the city.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” Hennessy said.

  Leaning in, I put pressure on the bleeding. I remembered the story of the little Dutch boy. It didn’t fill me with optimism.

  “You need to rest here,” I said. “I’ll go back and call for help.”

  “People must have heard those gunshots,” Hennessy coughed. “They’ll have called for help by now.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “I know it’s tough, I come from tough,” Hennessy said, his breathing ragged and labored. “But— “

  “But nothing, pal.” I cut him off. “You know tough? I know wounds. You need help and unless I go out there and call for it,
no help is coming.”

  “Why should I believe you’ll come back?” Hennessy spat in frustration.

  “Cause if I wasn’t,” I told him, standing up. “I’d just say, ‘Rookie, you’re an ass camel, good luck’ and then walk away.”

  “Those, kids,” Hennessy said in the sort of non sequitur speech common with trauma. “They just ran through us, for fuck sake. That one took so many rounds…” he trailed off.

  “You need to shut up,” I said. “I’ll call your boys.”

  “Hey,” Hennessy said. This time the pain in his voice had nothing to do with his wounds. “Thank you.”

  I smiled. Saying that must have cost him. I put my pistol away. “You’re welcome,” I said.

  Clarice giggled.

  I stiffened. The sound wasn’t right; the context wasn’t right. Everything, in fact, was wrong. Slowly, I turned, heart sinking. Clarice stood in the mouth of the alley, a dark silhouette, back lit by streetlamps. She wasn’t wearing her coat and her thin frame looked serpentine lean. She held those I’m-A-Big-Girl, Do-Me-Pumps loosely by the straps so they dangled casually from her hand.

  I swallowed. “Hello, Clarice.” I let my hand slowly creep toward the Beretta. “I don’t think this is where you want to be right now.”

  She giggled again.

  “What the fuck is wrong with her!” Hennessey coughed out. He seemed to get it because in the next moment he said, “oh, god.” It might have been a prayer.

  “What the fuck is wrong with her,” Clarice mimed in a little girl sing-song voice.

  “Jesus,” Hennessey whispered.

  “He’s not here right now,” Clarice told him.

  I got my hand under my jacket. “When is he ever?” I asked.

  Clarice suddenly spat like a cat and took a threatening step forward. “More often than you’d think,” she snarled. The heels dropped to the ground.

  “Shoot,” Hennessey begged. “Come on man, shoot her!”

  “I would never shoot a little girl,” I lied to Clarice. I hoped she believed it.

  My hand reached the Beretta and pulled it free. Even as I brought it around, muzzle tracking, the child-whore was on the move. Her form, almost a blur in the gloom, streaked away from the alley mouth and toward the rough brick of the wall.

  I turned, dropping into a crouch to twist with her motion, but I was nowhere close to fast enough. She came off the wall and struck me, I went spinning down to the ground, the Beretta tumbled into a blood pool near Evie.

  My head rang with the stunning force of the blow and the floor of the alley came up and hit me with the force of Jet’s speeding BMW. My face stung and I felt ribbons of blood gushing out of her talon marks.

  I heard Hennessey shouting as she mounted him. She screamed, shrill and piercing, and rained blows down on him, clawing for his throat and eyes. He had a hundred pounds on her, most of it muscle, sinew, and bone, but he couldn’t dislodge her. She perched on his chest, legs pinning him to the ground, and went like a jackal for all his soft parts.

  He bucked hard, twisting in terror, but she kept her balance easily. He managed to get his right arm up between them, covering his vulnerable throat and eyes. Her nails punched through the heavy fabric of his coat and raked his arm.

  I sprawled forward into the blood and grasped for the Beretta. Clarice’s eyes gleamed metallic silver in the dismal light and I knew she saw in this gloom easy as day. Drool flew out of her mouth in thick strings as she snarled, lipstick smeared across her face.

  “Oh, my daddy was sick and mean to me!” she mocked. “Fucking hero! The Lady in Black is using your precious Kay like a toy!” She came at me.

  I found the handle of the Beretta, my arm on fire from the lacerations, and hot blood ran freely down the limb, soaking the side of my shirt. I’d been struck once in the shoulder in Angola with a machete and bled less than I did now.

  She hit me as I tried to aim, driving into me and then swarming blows like falling hammers. I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t find my center, my instinctive counter-punches melted away. Her knuckles slammed into the top of my head and drove my skull into the pavement. She raked at me with her nails until the front of my shirt hung in shreds and more blood spilled slick and wet across my skin.

  She took my head and slammed it into the ground over and over. I lost the Beretta, for all the good it was doing me anyway. Explosions of light detonated behind my eyes, filling my vision with shooting stars. My frantically slapping hand found the pistol and grasped it.

  Poised, up on the balls of her feet on my convulsing chest, her hand closed around my feebly blocking arm and peeled it back with ease. Her other hand came up in a vulture claw to deliver the throat slash. She grinned so wide it seemed to split her face in half.

  I tried to respond but I felt slow and stupid, reacting to her attacks in spasmodic flailing far too sluggish to be effective. I heard myself screaming as her arm whipped around.

  She jerked and blood spurted from her shoulder, in the same instant the alley echoed hard with the reverberation of a gunshot as Hennessey fired from down the alley. Clarice seemed more surprised than hurt, giving me the breath I needed.

  The Beretta cracked between us, lighting up the dark space as I emptied the gun into her chest. The blazing muzzle flash caught her cheap dress on fire and she tumbled over backward, shrieking.

  Free of her weight, I dug my heels into the ground and kicked into a jerking crabwalk as I tried scooting away. I dropped the gun. I didn’t have any more bullets. I’d never planned on a full out combat tour when I began the evening, and I hadn’t even loaded the extended magazine. I thought 15 rounds would be plenty. Silly, Berk, witches need all the bullets.

  Was it Erica who wanted me dead, I thought. Or Fallows?

  A bullet skidded wild off the brick wall and whined in a ricochet as Hennessy’s pistol cracked again. Clarice stood up, fire running through the thin, cheap material of her dress like dry kindling. I went into my pocket and came out with the switchblade.

  Hennessey fired again and I popped the blade open, not entirely sure exactly what I was going to do with it, and Clarice ripped the flaming dress from her body. In a single leap she made the lowest rung of the fire escape and raced up it, disappearing over the top of the roof.

  “Holy Christ,” Hennessey panted.

  “I’m glad your paralysis was only hysterical,” I told him.

  “Screw you, I just saved your life.”

  “Screw you, I saved your life first.”

  I pushed myself up. I needed medical attention, and I was utterly fine compared to Hennessey. I stooped and picked the Beretta up out of the puddle of blood. Frowning, I finally decided to wipe it clean on Evie’s pants. Her open, frozen eyes stared at me.

  “What are you going to do?” Hennessy asked.

  Fair question.

  I checked the roof on either side of the alley, just in case. I looked around, head throbbing and ringing.

  “You walk?” I asked.

  Hennessey tried pushing himself up, grimaced, gasped, and then slumped back down. He couldn’t meet my eyes when he shook his head no.

  “Then the plan doesn’t change,” I said.

  “You’re leaving me here? After that attacked me?”

  “Us,” I clarified. “After that attacked us. But yeah, I don’t have any choice. You can’t move, no one’s going to help.”

  “At least drag me into the street,” Hennessey begged.

  I looked again at the stacked up corpses lying around us. I didn’t blame the cop. Besides, maybe, being in the open would provide him with some small, extra bit of protection. I thought about the others, those too thin, too young, prostitutes who’d been standing with Clarice.

  Then again, maybe it wouldn’t, I thought.

  I looked down at Davis then bent over and pulled his service weapon from his holster. The SFPD carried Sig P226’s in .40 calibers. It was a solid weapon, a solid round. Whether or not it could put down what I was shooting,
I did not know. Clarice had been a whole order of different from the other two.

  “I’m not putting the pistol away,” I told Hennessey. “I gotta drag you by your collar.”

  He nodded his acceptance. “Give me two seconds to reload, then I can cover behind us as you pull.”

  I crouched down, trying to look everywhere at once as Hennessy reloaded. Even in this poor light he was deathly pale from blood loss. I knew he was on the edge of going into shock.

  This city is a bitch, I thought.

  Just beyond the mouth of the alley in the street, Jet’s BMW cruised slowly past. Remembering where I’d seen the driver before, I swallowed. At least we were going out the other way.

  Hennessey snapped the magazine of his service piece home, racking the slide. I grabbed hold of his collar and started dragging him toward the other end of the alley, away from GOOD EATS and BMWs and Satanic sigils of chaos magick.

  We came out of the alley onto the sidewalk and I looked around. Safe enough to check my phone, I thought.

  Hennessey looked up at me as I leaned him against the grimy brick wall of a building. Smears of blood like ink smudges on cheap newspaper marred the ground behind us.

  “Hey,” he said. His voice was tight from the pain.

  I looked around, not putting the pistol away. “Yeah?”

  “That girl…I feel like an asshole for asking, and if you tell anyone I’ll deny it, but was she, was she a fucking vampire? That’s what it looks like? You hear rumors and rumors of rumors in the Narrows, stupid stories. But seeing that…”

  “No,” I said. “She was a witch.”

  Hennessey frowned, winced as he shifted position, and then scowled. “Why do you say that? She moved like a goddamn jungle animal and she was strong, too strong.”

  “I didn’t say sorceress,” I clarified. Squatting down, I began using the blood-soaked handkerchief and my own belt to put a pressure dressing on the big gash in Hennessey’s leg. It was the more serious wound.

  The cop watched me work, sweat standing out in bullets on his forehead from the pain, flesh deathly pale. “Are you playing games with me? What’s the difference?”