Dark Siren (4 page)

“Okay,” she said once she had recovered. She kicked the bottle aside. “That wasn’t cool.” Her heart was beating hard, now. Not from what she had seen through the eye of the camera, but from the thought of having almost fallen over. The floor was wet and sticky with beer, and there were pieces of broken glass and splintered wood everywhere. Forget
that.

“See this?” she asked, holding the camera in front of her chest. “Do you know what this is?”

A can of beer came hurtling out of the darkness, but Alice saw it and twirled out of its path before it could strike her. It slammed against a wall with a loud boom, and the beer came spitting out in all directions like a tiny fire hose. “I don’t think you know what exactly this camera is,” Alice said, continuing as if nothing had happened, “That’s okay, you don’t have to know what this is or does. All you need to know is that you may have given the grim reaper the slip and managed to hold on after you passed, but you won’t slip by me and this camera. I’m the one they send to clean up stragglers like you.”

She felt her chest tighten, as if someone had poked a hole in the room and all the oxygen was being sucked out. “I know,” Alice said, “I know you want me out. But this isn’t your place, and you need to leave. I can help you do that. I can help you cross.” A bottle rolled along the floor. She wasn’t sure if this was the same bottle she had almost stumbled over a moment ago or a different one, but the sound had come from somewhere nearby, which meant the thing was nearby too. Alice chose not to raise her camera.

There were two ways she could deal with this thing. She could trap it, or she could reason with it. Some spirits were less willing to talk than others, but whenever she could get one of them to leave without having to use her camera, everybody won. Other times, trapping a spirit was all she could do if she wanted to get the job done; and when you’re getting paid to do something, the end result is all that matters. But using her camera was taxing, and if she could get away without using it, she would.

“Talk to me,” she said. “Let me help you deal with whatever’s brought you here so you and I can both go home.”

A finger of ice caressed Alice’s right shoulder and she spun, camera up, reacting on instinct. She saw, through the eye of the camera, a skinny shape shoulder-charge one of the wooden support columns in the middle of the room. The thing hit the column with such force the floor shook and dust fell from the ceiling. Knowing she only had an instant to react, Alice pulled her camera up and pressed her finger to the trigger. The camera made a
clack
and the room filled with harsh blue light.

Silence fell. The pressure around Alice’s chest lifted, and she lowered her camera. It made a whirring sound, and a second later a blank Polaroid came sliding out of the slit on the front. She plucked it out, and shook it once, twice, three times. The image formed much quicker than it would have from an average, off-the-shelf camera, but this one was special.

Inside the picture frame, a man was staring at Alice literally as if he had been caught on candid camera—eyes wide, mouth opened in an O of surprise, hands up to protect his face. He was old and frail, with wispy white hair falling down the sides of his face, sallow, gray skin, clear blue eyes, and was as naked as the day he was born. Alice didn’t know who he was, where he had come from, or why he was so angry. She would probably never know, now, but she had at least
tried
to reason with him.

The picture on the Polaroid suddenly started to move. The man came running toward Alice, his face twisted with fury, and eyes shining with malice. The picture shook in her hand like a fish trying to escape the fisherman’s grasp, but she gripped it more tightly. Alice didn’t jump, though her heart leapt into her throat and remained there far longer than she would have cared to admit. There were few things about her job she hadn’t adjusted to—with enough time, you could get used to anything. But the way her prisoners always tried to leap out of the frame after being captured was one of those exceptions.

Alice packed ‘Trapper’ in her backpack and safely stored the Polaroid in a small, black envelope. With the noisy spirit tucked away, there was nothing left for her to do here but cash in on a solid night of work. So she stepped lightly around the detritus in the store room and returned to the door. When she opened it, she heard Sherry’s breath hitch in her throat, and then release when it was Alice who walked through and not some invisible monster.

Alice gave the couple a quick nod, and the owners of Mack’s Pub embraced each other and breathed sighs of relief.

“What happens to the, uh…” Mack said, trailing off as he counted bills he had just pulled out of a safe.
Six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred…

“Hmmm?” Alice said, a little absentmindedly.

“The thing… what happens to the thing now?”

“Oh, him? Why? You looking for a souvenir?”

“Not at all,” he said.
Thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred…
“Just curious.”

“Now I put him away where he can’t hurt anyone else.”

“Will he… feel pain?”

“I wish I could tell you. There are limits to my knowledge.”

Mack grunted, and Alice sensed his discomfort. She understood it, too. These people were devout Catholics, and while Alice didn’t subscribe to any particular religion—knowing the things
she
knew about the world had thrown everything she believed up in the air a long time ago—she could relate. Her parents were the kind who said grace before meals, went to church on Sundays, and genuinely took steps to protect themselves against the Rapture. This man was trying incredibly hard to understand what had just happened without letting it shatter his worldview.

“Why don’t you say a prayer for him?” she said. “It might help him get to wherever he’s going.”

He looked up at her, pressed his lips into a thin line, and nodded. A little white lie, said for the right reasons, could never hurt anyone.

“Three thousand,” Mack said, and Alice took the money, rolled it up, and stuffed it into a pouch in her backpack.

“Pleasure,” she said, and she shook his hand. When their hands separated, he was holding her business card.
Alice Werner, Paranormal Investigator Extraordinaire.
“Remember to tell your friends; I work on referrals only.”

Alice turned around and headed for the door. She felt good, not just because she had another ‘job well done’ notch to scratch under her belt, but because the job had been clean, easy, and she had finished it without inflicting any further collateral damage—either physical or psychological—this time. The prayer thing was a nice touch, too, if she did say so herself. Mack didn’t need to know that the spirit she had just trapped wasn’t going anywhere except for her Chest of Haunts; her own private Alcatraz.

Best leave the Necromancy to the heathens; why tarnish a pure soul, right?

CHAPTER TWO

The Contract

A cold, crisp night had gathered by the time Alice stepped into the street. Cars hissed along on rain soaked roads while pedestrians walked briskly with their collars and hoods turned up against the biting wind. Above, sitting on cables and ledges, were the unmistakable impressions of crows, black shapes against a sickly yellow sky. Some cawed loudly, while others simply shuddered and shook flecks of fresh rain off their feathers, indifferent to humanity as it passed beneath them.

Ashwood commanded a portion of the East Coast of the United States with a kind of viciousness that made its sister cities look like cute kittens. Like a dark cloud, a mysterious force hung over the city that mere humans couldn’t see, but the effects of which were visible everywhere. Crime was higher, pollution was higher, and homelessness was higher, but humanity can adapt—and even thrive—in just about any environment. Ashwood was no exception.

The Victoria district, where Alice lived now, was a tangle of modest duplexes and three-story apartment buildings pressed tightly enough together so as to give the impression of connection, as opposed to overcrowding. All manner of restaurants and markets jostled for position alongside one another here, saturating the air with tantalizing smells.

It wasn’t uncommon to see women in nightgowns and slippers standing on the sidewalk at midnight, smoking cigarettes and gossiping about one person or another while their children kicked around a soccer ball. Folks in Victoria looked after each other and kept their ears close to the ground. Victoria was a great place to live, a huge change from the South Side where the hookers were cheap, the gangbangers had no shame, and the cops didn’t care to tread unless it was to start hitting people with sticks.

Things got bad sometimes on the South Side, sure. The city wasn’t for everyone. But Alice wouldn’t have wanted to live anywhere else. Countryside? No thanks. No people equals no trouble, and no trouble equals no paycheck. Alice’s particular talents required a large concentration of humans because where there were humans there were
things
feeding on them, and cities were like all you can eat buffets;
come right in, eat your fill, and don’t worry about the mess.

Tucked between a nail salon and an all-night laundromat was the door to Alice’s quaint office. Behind the door labelled WERNER INVESTIGATIONS—the plaque rested on top of a logo which resembled a ghost from the old Pac Man arcade game—was a small, simple office out of which one person could comfortably work. On the far wall, a single window looked into the alley between buildings, lines of light filtering through to give the place a kind of film-noir feel. A bookshelf on one wall was filled with books on the occult, ranging from neo-Paganism to neo-Satanism, but the film of dust on the shelves suggested these books hadn’t been read in a while.

An Agatha Christie novel lay spread open, face down on the desk next to a laptop.

On the floor beyond the door she found a menu for a new Chinese takeout place, a menu for an Italian takeout place, and the daily paper. Never one to want to skip out on the local news, or on good food, Alice took the papers to her desk and sat down to rifle through them. She began by reading the newspaper. If there was one truism about Ashwood, and there were enough to fill an entire horror novel, it was this: no one with an inhuman agenda ignored the local news. Why? Because if Ashwood was a buffet, the news agencies were the ones responsible for providing the menu and covering the festivities every night. Each company was owned by some Inhuman Lord or another, and each edition of their newspapers was rife with coded messages meant for invisible eyes.

Alice had trained herself to decode these messages, and had been expecting to hear news on the fate of a particularly dangerous vampire—Neo—who had escaped court custody and remained at large. Instead what she found, and couldn’t look away from, was a story covering Doctor Isaac Moreau—curator of the Ashwood Imperial Museum—and the unveiling of a brand new Greek exhibit being held tomorrow night at the museum.

Seeing him like this, so suddenly and unexpectedly, made her heart feel like it had been squeezed. She stared at his face and, for a moment, didn’t know whether to frown, laugh, or throw the newspaper across the room. If someone had asked her why she was feeling these things, she wouldn’t have had an answer for them. Alice hadn’t seen, or spoken to, Isaac in almost—
or was it over?
—two years. But something about the picture was making strange, unwelcome feelings bubble up.

A knock at the door untangled her suddenly tight emotional state. She stood, relieved to stop thinking about Isaac now and bring her mind back to center.

“One second,” she said, and she crossed the room, wrapped her hand around an iron pipe she kept hidden behind the door, and pulled it open.

Standing there was a man who looked like he hadn’t eaten, or slept, in days. He may have once been cute, may have looked full and happy, but it was as if something had sucked the life out of him. His eyes spoke up when his mouth couldn’t.
Please
, they said, and Alice let go of the iron pipe and ushered him into the office.

Nathan—or Nate—Wyatt didn’t have much to say as Alice walked around her desk and sat down. She offered to make him a cup of coffee, but he refused. He was shaking, she noticed, and his aura, something she couldn’t see with her eyes but could sense, smell, and
hear
, was pulsing wildly. Someone was in trouble, he was concerned, but he didn’t know if he had come to the right person. His problem wasn’t a mundane one; the
dread
pervading his aura said as much. Alice decided to help him get started.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I need your help,” Nate said. He was turning his phone in his hands in the same way Sherry had done with her rosary at Mack’s pub.

“That’s usually why people come to me. Help with what?”

“A friend of mine… she’s been taken.”

“Taken? By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long has it been?”

“Two days,” Nate said.

“And you’ve called the cops?”

He shook his head. “The cops can’t help.”

“You look like you’re really sure about that.”

“If I thought the cops would be able to help I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”