Viper Moon (21 page)

“Does Dacardi own many legitimate businesses?” I asked Flynn.

“I think so. I don’t work that area, but the Feds, mostly IRS, are on him.”

“Drugs?”

“Surprisingly, no. He owns a couple of casinos. Probably launders cash. Mostly he deals guns and other weapons. Owns some big things in Mexico. Someone said Interpol had an eye on him, too.”

“Hope the stuff in the warehouse today wasn’t his,” I said. “He’s likely to be a bit ugly if he knows what we did.”

“It wasn’t, though he might have sold them at one time or another. I talked to Perkins at the site. He’s with the Feds. Been here since Exeter Street. Did a couple of joint ops with him last year. They were tracking this shipment from China when it disappeared. The Feds don’t tell us much, but Perkins says they’ve known for a year there’s a big buyer in the States. Apparently, our find was the first break they’ve had on it.”

“Dacardi might not let you in.”

“Then you’ll just have to make him, won’t you? You seem pretty good at pushing him around.” He reached over and ruffled my hair.

The area consisted mostly of warehouses until you reached the docks. Mostly clean, prosperous places. Farm and manufacturing goods passed through and onto barges bound for the Mississippi. I found the Columbia warehouse easy enough, and the north door. Getting inside proved to be a bit more difficult. As I’d figured, Dacardi’s goons didn’t want Flynn the cop to pass. I simply told them to tell Dacardi I’d arrived and wasn’t coming in unless Flynn came with me. They’d report to Dacardi and he could decide. Five minutes later, one of the goons came out and said we could go in.

“See,” I said to Flynn. “Wasn’t that easy?”

Of course, the next problem began again when they wanted our guns. We stood back-to-back and refused. The game ended when Dacardi arrived, screaming at everyone involved. To my surprise, he sent the goons away.

Dacardi led us into the deepest part of the warehouse. We walked down lanes between bales and boxes stacked twenty-five feet high. Only our footsteps broke the silence. He’d probably sent all the legitimate workers home, a substantial financial loss since the docks usually operated twenty-four hours a day.

Hammer sat in a room off the main warehouse. He looked good, considering. Broken nose, a little blood on his shirt, but other than that, okay. Dacardi had him tied to a chair with one goon watching him. He sent the goon away as we entered the room.

A thin, bony man with dark skin, Hammer had eyes as black as puddles of oil on a garage floor. He glanced at me, then jerked his face away.

“Now that’s odd, Hammer.” I laid a friendly hand on his shoulder. He flinched. “You’re dealing kids and you don’t seem surprised to see me. Why is that?”

He didn’t answer.

Dacardi moved in, fists clenched, teeth bared.

I held up my hand. “I told you, I get to go first.”

“Then fucking
do
it.” Dacardi’s face twisted into a rigid mask and his broad shoulders hunched with solid muscle.

Flynn stood steady, arms crossed in disapproval, but said nothing.

I opened the bottle of talking potion Abby had given me and filled the eyedropper.

“Hold his head,” I ordered.

Dacardi grabbed Hammer’s hair and twisted his face toward me. Hammer’s eyes widened as I pinched his broken nose shut. He opened his mouth to breathe and I squirted the eyedropper’s liquid in.

He struggled, fought, and spit. It didn’t take long. I barely had time to recap the bottle and stuff it back in my jeans before he grew lethargic. His eyes were a little unfocused, but he stared straight at me.

“Now, Hammer, we need to discuss the boy and girl you had at the Goblin Den the other night. You probably didn’t ask their names, but Theron remembered seeing them with you. He told me that after Michael broke his arm.”

Hammer’s breathing slowed. “Paid.”

“Who paid? Where are they now?”

“Gone.”

“Dead?” I hated to ask that, but I had to know.

Dacardi growled. Flynn drew a deep breath but didn’t interfere.

“Are they dead, Hammer?” I slapped the side of his head, not hard, but I had to get his attention. “The kids. Are they dead?”

“Don’t know. Took them.” His words came wet and slurred, one side effect of the drug.

“Who took them?” My voice rose to a demand. I wasn’t getting the reaction I’d expected. He should have been babbling for the first few minutes before he settled down and talked.

The air suddenly grew tight and close. I actually glanced around to be sure that, like a horror movie, the walls hadn’t started closing in to crush us. We were in the Barrows, the realm of the Darkness. This was a mistake. We should have found another place far from here.

Hammer’s body jerked. His muscles corded and strained against his bonds before he slumped and let out a long sigh. Then he raised his head. Only it wasn’t Hammer. As the Earth Mother had watched me from Abby’s eyes, so something gazed at me from Hammer’s. Something alien and terrible.

It laughed with a sound like knives cutting the air. Everything inside me recoiled. “Great Mother.” I barely breathed the words.

Hammer’s face split in a savage, inhuman grin. When he spoke, the words slammed me with power. “Great Mother? You pray to that whore? She whose cunt spawned you? Stupid bitch. I remember you—I watched. You threw your child on the bitch’s fire at the stone circle. Sacrificed your babe to her a thousand years ago. Pretty little thing. What was her name?”

My body went cold. A memory slithered into my mind. Was it
my
memory? No, it couldn’t have been. But . . .

“Cass!” Someone shouted. Something hit me and I reeled across the floor. Then the only thing I heard was sick laughter. Words from Hammer’s mouth mocked, “I will see you at the dark moon, Huntress. Watch for me.”

I collapsed sobbing on the floor, my mind full of horror and my heart aching with loss.
Is this why I’m the Huntress?
Why I’m compelled to find the children? Guilt for what I had done? The Mother would never ask for that horrifying sacrifice. If I did not believe in her, in her goodness, I would not serve her. Men had made a perverted mockery of her religion as they had so many beliefs. The Darkness was manipulating my mind, as he had manipulated others. I’d thought I was immune, but I was wrong. But that didn’t stop me from wondering . . . Had I led this past life? Did I have a child? And out of ignorance, did I let them throw her into the fire?

No! No! I wouldn’t do that. I could not. I would love and protect my child. I knew.

Flynn helped me to my feet and I clung to the solid mass of his body. Never in my life had I needed someone’s strength as I did then.

Dacardi stood beside Hammer. Hammer’s mouth and nose gushed blood. His body jerked, muscles straining against the ropes binding him. He died in one final spasm. As he did, the oppressive air cleared and left me feeling very small and vulnerable in the middle of an enormous cavern.

Dacardi’s chest heaved. “That . . .
thing
. It has my son?” He held his hands out as if begging for something, anything, to hold on to. He, at least, had understood possession.

I swallowed, but I had to answer him. “His servants do. That was—” The Darkness. This was the Barrows, his place, under his influence, his realm. He had the power to use his servants as the Earth Mother used Abby.

I coughed, hard and dry. “I need some water. I’ll try to explain.”

Dacardi ran his hands through his hair. His eyes were cold, hard, and dark. “Take her in there.” He looked at Flynn and nodded at a door and glass window in the wall.

Flynn kept his arm around me as he walked me to an office at the side of the warehouse while Dacardi shouted at his men, I presumed to get rid of Hammer’s body. Flynn didn’t speak, but I knew he had to be doing some heavy thinking.

The utilitarian office contained a gray metal desk and a small table with green folding chairs. I sat on a chair while Flynn dug in a small refrigerator sitting next to the wall. By some miracle, he found a bottle of water. Bottled water always tasted bad to me, but not this time.

Flynn knelt beside me and held my shaking hands. He didn’t speak. In this matter he remained silent, giving all authority to me.

“What happened?” I asked him. “What did you see?”

“Hammer raised his head and said something weird . . . The Mother and a sacrifice. You froze for a few seconds; then you started screaming and fell.” He laid a hand on my knee. “I was afraid you’d hurt yourself.”

“What did you see? Did Hammer change? Look different?”

“He looked like . . .” Flynn shook his head.

I stroked his cheek and kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? You didn’t do—”

“It’s not what I did. It’s what I am.”

I understood that one small piece of the puzzle now. At least I thought I did. I couldn’t brush away the feeling that what I had seen was real. But how could I explain it to Flynn?

I laid my hand on his cheek. “I can’t rescue all the children who are lost in the Barrows. Sometimes I receive instructions, and sometimes I have to choose. I try to go for the youngest, because as they get older they change, and even if I find them, they won’t go home. Something wants me in the Barrows at the dark moon. Selene is old enough that I might have passed her up, if it hadn’t been for the Earth Mother, your mother, and Abby. Do you understand?”

Comprehension flashed across Flynn’s face, quickly replaced by anger. “The Darkness said he . . . it . . . would see you on the dark moon. Selene is in the Barrows with those creatures because she’s bait. You’re the mark, and you’re walking into a trap.”

“Yeah. It looks that way. But I’m a moving target. And I’ve had ten years of experience avoiding traps. I don’t understand. Why does the Darkness want me? And why the dark moon? I’ve been in the Barrows for years.”

Flynn shook his head. He couldn’t possibly have answers. He stayed with the immediate. “And Dacardi’s boy?”

“I don’t know, but when it comes to things like this, there are no coincidences.”

Dacardi walked in. He sat at a chair behind the desk, his face cold and closed. Again, he reminded me of Nefertiti when she readied herself to strike. “Well, what was it?” His voice held no emotion at all.

I had to give him some answers.

“This isn’t easy, Dacardi, but at least your grandmother taught you to believe. Flynn’s not had that luxury. There are places where the separation between worlds is thin enough to allow an interaction between them. That’s the Barrows.”

I told him of the Earth Mother and the Darkness, and the Barrows prison, adding the things I hadn’t told Flynn, the things he had to see for himself.

Dacardi’s face had no expression. “The kids?”

“Are used as servants, soldiers. Probably Hammer was one of them once. The Darkness is a powerful thing, but has to use others, invade their minds. It has no physical manifestation in this world. We, you, me, Flynn—we’re all tiny parts in a larger plan.”

“Then what do we need the bronze for?”

I spoke of the creatures living in the sewers. How they prowled the deserted streets on nights when they couldn’t see the moon. “I don’t know what they are, or where they came from, but bronze and fire kills them.”

“They exist, Dacardi,” Flynn assured him in a steady voice. “I’ve seen them. Up close.”

Dacardi grunted. “I’ve seen demons before. My granny—evil, damned bitch—called them up in fire. Talked to them.”

The criminal was, if nothing else, a practical man. He suddenly turned his attention to Flynn. “You and me going to have a problem? Over Hammer?”

Flynn shrugged. “We’re going to have a problem someday, I expect, but not over Hammer. He had my sister, too. And as far as I could see, you—or Cass—didn’t kill him.”

Dacardi gave a short bark of a laugh. One totally without humor. “She’s right. It wasn’t Hammer. You saw.”

Flynn’s fingers tightened on my knee.

“It’s okay, Flynn.” I reached out and laid my hand on his shoulder. Monsters in the sewers, a tangible thing, were a long way from accepting pure magic like the Mother’s passage through the world.

“Now what?” Dacardi demanded. “The thing in Hammer said it would see you under the dark moon. Motherfucker knows we’re coming.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t know from which direction. Little surprise there, I’ll bet.”

“Bet? What odds?”

“Not good, but I never let that stop me.”

Dacardi nodded, his face bleak. “Me, neither.”

Flynn and I left Dacardi at the warehouse and drove back toward Abby’s. Night had fallen and I found roads that lay as far from the Barrows as possible. I drove past the run-down strip shopping centers, all-night drugstores, and used-auto dealerships. Behind them were small houses crowded so close to the street you had to look both ways before you stepped off your minuscule porch.

The area between the docks and the shadow of uptown’s glass towers reeked of lower-middle-class life, people who lived in modest circumstances. Most would live out their lives never having seen anything other than what lay within the few square miles of Duivel. I suddenly realized I’d never seen great oceans or highest mountains. Farmers like my parents took few vacations. I had locked myself into the Huntress persona and it allowed no time off.