half-lich 02 - void weaver (19 page)

Alice pushed these thoughts to the back of her mind as she cruised along the motorway with the wind whipping at her hair. Despite the reality that she was being hunted by mages and that she was outmatched in just about every respect by Nyx and her forces, she allowed herself to be lost in the illusion of freedom offered to her by the Harley purring between her legs. She could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone; but she went home, because all she wanted to be was herself and that’s where Cameron had told her to go.

She had pushed the speed limit for a couple of miles following her escape from the sanctuary, but when she got into Ashwood she played by the rules and rolled along at a normal pace. Attracting attention wasn’t something she wanted to do, and obeying the speed limit went a long way toward achieving that goal, especially during daylight hours.

Finally, she arrived at the Victoria district and cruised past the many eateries and local markets in the area. At the foot of her apartment building, she saw her mustang parked squarely between two other cars. There was a rule that you couldn’t keep a fancy car in Ashwood because the moment you let it slip out of your sight something bad would happen to it. This wasn’t the case in Victoria, as evidenced by the currently intact condition of her own car.

Parking the bike a few spaces down, she slipped the key out of the ignition, and headed toward the door to her apartment building. A woman standing outside with a cigarette between her fingers and curlers in her hair—a client of the salon just a few doors down—gave Alice a pair of narrow, suspicious eyes, like she had just witnessed someone licking a dirty street light. Alice returned the sharp look, and the woman frowned, flicked her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk, and returned to the salon.

Alice took the elevator and opened the door to her apartment, which was quiet and clean. In the dimness it was almost serene, but a strange smell hung in the air. Alice made a cursory round of her living room, checking her kitchenette and the closet door before opening a window to let the aroma out.
Maybe it’s the kitty litter
, she thought. She remembered Dustin having mentioned a weird smell a few days ago, but she hadn’t given him instructions to clean the litter box out, and maybe he hadn’t had the initiative to do it on his own.

“Elvira,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Where are you, baby?”

Elvira was in many ways like most cats—solitary, private, except for when she wanted something—but in other ways she had more in common with dogs. It wasn’t uncommon to see Elvira standing by the door, grooming herself as Alice entered her home at any time of the day or night. But she wasn’t at the door today, and that struck Alice as a little odd. Dustin had been coming to her apartment, however, and this particular cat didn’t like strangers—

Something thudded in another room.

Immediately she turned, her spine stiffening as her heart leapt into her throat, hackles went up, and goose bumps rose on her arms. She thought the cat may have made the sound, but was almost sure it had come from inside her closet. This wasn’t entirely surprising considering her past experience with the closet containing her Chest of Haunts, but she had already been a little on edge to begin with.

Alice took a deep breath, exhaled the nerves, and circled around the couch. The padlock securing the closet door was there, as it had always been. This was good. She grabbed her keys and unlocked it, then set the padlock on the kitchen counter, and opened the closet door. The chest was there too, sitting quietly on the floor, minding its own business.

“Hello, old friend,” she said, squatting to come level with it.

Alice ran her fingers over the top of the brown chest and felt the grooves of the sigils etched into it beneath her fingertips. Touching the chest was almost electric, a feeling that caused her entire body to shudder uncontrollably. Some said this wild spasm happened whenever a ghost tried to harm you. Others said it happened when someone stepped over your grave. Considering she didn’t yet have a grave and, she hoped, she would know if there was a ghost in the room, she was able to debunk the superstition entirely.

But she
had
felt something and, considering she had been living in a power-void for a week, welcomed it.

She considered opening the chest and checking its contents, but decided against it. The chest was there, it was safe, and her connection to it was intact. But she couldn’t find the object that had fallen to the floor. Nothing in the little closet was out of place, at least nothing that looked like it had dropped from a shelf as the sound she had heard a moment ago had suggested.

Maybe the sound had come from another part of the apartment?

“Elvira?” she said, drawing herself up and shutting the closet door. “It’s me; can you come out of hiding?”

But the cat wouldn’t come, and this wasn’t just odd anymore—it was worrying.

Alice headed into the kitchenette and noticed Elvira’s food and water bowls were almost untouched, and she hadn’t flung her litter out onto the floor. Her hackles rose again. Spiders crawled all the way up her arms and across her shoulders, and she could still smell that fucking awful stench. Looking across from the kitchenette and into the hall she could see the bathroom door and bedroom door were closed, just as Alice had left them, but the laundry-room door—which was more of a closet than a room—was slightly open.

In there
, she thought,
that’s where she’s gone.
And she probably wasn’t wrong. The laundry room, which contained her water heater and a washer-drier, was dark and there were many nooks for a cat to hide in. If she didn’t want to be found, that was where she would likely have gone. Still, Alice’s senses were on high alert, and the corridor was dark. Almost unnaturally so.

She swallowed hard and pulled a knife out of a drawer as her heart began to thump inside her chest. Carefully she went down the stub of a hall, passing the bathroom door and then her bedroom door. She was about to nudge the laundry room door open with the tip of the blade when she realized the smell was fainter here than it had been a moment ago.

A thought like a sharp icicle suddenly invaded her mind:
what if she got stuck in the bedroom?
For one horrible, terrifying instant, she could almost see an image of her cat lying dead at the foot of her bed. Alice felt a lump wedge itself into her throat, and then emotion took over. She turned on her heel, grabbed the bedroom door, pushed it open and spilled inside on her stride, yelling for her cat.

The wall of stench hit her almost immediately, disorienting her and causing her hand to fly to her mouth and nose. It wasn’t a warm smell. No, this was the cold, hard stench of spoiled meat which had been left to rot in the fridge. She noticed the broken glass strewn all over the floor, beneath the busted open bedroom window, and then—as if her mind had been trying to prevent her from seeing that which would shock her most—she saw the body lying stiff on her bed.

The world began to spin and Alice staggered, putting her hand out and grabbing the dresser for support.

Her empty stomach threatened to heave and expel bile, but Alice swallowed the awful, acidic sensation and regained her senses. Slowly the world stopped spinning and her equilibrium returned. When it did she saw who was lying on the bed, cold and dead and gray: it was Raegan. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her chin was up, and upon her eyes were two silver coins.

“Fuck,” she said aloud while backing away from the bed, “Fuck, fuck.”

The cold, clammy hand of death gripped Alice then, and caused her movements, her thoughts, to slow to a crawl. So much so that she didn’t see the man whirling out from around her bedroom door and clock her in the jaw. A flower of pain exploded on her cheek and the world spun again for an instant, causing her to drop the knife she was holding. But the hit had snapped her back into her own mind, and instinct took over. The man came at her with another solid right hook, but Alice ducked out of harm’s way, into the hall, and backed into the kitchen.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” Alice said, but she had made a mistake in entering the kitchen. From here, the only ways out were through the front door or out the window, and to do either, she would need to leap over the counter. But as she looked at the man steadily advancing toward her, she knew who he was. The blue coveralls with the waste-management logo on the breast, his slicked back hair, his heavy farm-boy accent—this was the man from the diner; Doug, the garbage man.

“Get out?” Doug asked, “But you just got here, an’ we’ve got so much to talk about.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“That’s alright, because I’ve got plenty to say to you. All I need is for you to listen, an’ I promise I’ll make this quick and painless. Struggle, an’ this’ll get ugly for y’all.”

Alice’s eyes flitted from right to left. She saw the still open drawer, sharp cutlery gleaming from inside, and reached for it, but it took her a second too long to find a solid object to grab, and that second was all it took for the much stronger garbage man to seize the advantage, grab the back of her head and toss her over the counter and into the solid back of her couch.

Before she could even think about getting up, he was on her again with his hands around her neck.

CHAPTER 20

Quick and the Dead

The garbage man released his hold on Alice’s throat and she gasped for a lungful of fresh air. She writhed on the floor, rolling to one side and coughing as he drew himself up and looked down at her. His slicked back hair had fallen forward in thin, mad strands. His eyes were wide and excited, but possessed of a cruel intelligence. This man’s actions weren’t fueled by emotion, but by cold, hard logic—and that made him even more dangerous.

“Now that you know I mean business,” he said, flexing his fingers, “You may be a little more open to having a conversation with me.”

Alice coughed away the last of the pain and fought to get to her feet, reaching for the kitchen counter and using it for support, but he grabbed her by the arm and tossed her over her couch like a discarded towel. This guy was strong, stronger than she, and fast, too, despite his size. She would need to be careful here.

“What do you want?” Alice asked, pushing her hair out of her face.

Doug circled around the couch and stared down at her. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Alright, then I’ll tell you.” He sat down on the coffee table, which creaked under his weight, then clasped his hands together in the gap between his knees. “You’re probably wondering a bunch of things right now. Maybe you’re wondering why I sent you to Raegan’s apartment, but I think you know that. You could be wondering how I got in here, but I bet you’ve got a pretty good idea about that too. Lemme tell you, climbing up the side of that building with a body over your shoulders is a good workout.

No, more likely you’re trying to figure out who in the world I am an’ why in the hell I’m doing this to you.” Doug laughed inwardly. “This isn’t like some soap opera—you didn’t wrong me once upon a time an’ I’m not here to get revenge, but I am connected to your past because I’m connected to
her
.”

“She’s lying to you,” Alice said, “Whatever she told you, she lied.”

“That’s good. She told me you’d say something like that. She also told me to punish you if you tried to throw me off my mission. Now, I’m gonna let that one slide, but the next time you try to get clever, I’m gonna have to re-introduce you to a good friend of mine.” He closed his right hand into a fist. There was a spot of blood on his knuckle.

“Why don’t you just get to the point?”

Doug’s expression hardened, a cloud of anger rolling across his face. “You left our welcome party a little too soon yesterday. How’d you manage that?”

He was talking about her visit to Raegan’s apartment. “You want to know how I got out? Doesn’t
she
know?”

“She might, but I don’t. I know you had a man with you, but I can tell you aren’t the kind of girl to go into a potentially dangerous situation without your own means of protection—the present situation excluded, of course. You did come
home
after all, and what place is safer than home? Anyway, whatever you did, it got her attention and she wasn’t exactly very forthcoming with the answer—assuming she had one. I was hoping you would be able to shed a little light on how you managed to get past all of her little critters.”

Alice’s eyes narrowed. She reached for his aura, honing in on his signal, and found it more easily than she had found any other since losing Trapper. Maybe it was her proximity to the Chest of Haunts, maybe it was the fact that they were alone in her apartment, or that in this tense situation Alice was possessed of an almost predatory clarity, but she had found it.

He was afraid. His aura tasted like blood and sweat, and she exulted in her ability to even take it in—never mind the fact that he was scared. It was as if she had been born again, as if she had been brought back into a world of sensory input from a lifetime of darkness and silence. But fear wasn’t all she could taste; the garbage man was also curious, and calm, and prepared, and a fearful man capable of thinking clearly was dangerous.

“You don’t trust her,” she said, going out on a limb.

“Now, why would you assume something like that?”

“Because you want to know how to destroy the spirits she uses to hurt people. You’re scared she’s going to use them to hurt you.”

“I trust her. She’s promised me a good life. Hell, she’s already given me a better life than the one I had. What would make you think I need to buy myself some kind of insurance?”

“Because humans are food to her.
You’re
food to her.”

The garbage man fell silent. He breathed hard through his nose and every breath he took through his nostrils made a kind of wheezing sound. “Tell me how you did it,” he said. “The dark lady tells me you’re like a fly without wings, so how’d you get out of that nest of vipers?”