Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1) Read online

  She took a long drink from her mug, guzzling the ale down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sighed.

  “My dad, he had a beast behind his eyes. Or maybe it was always there, and he just woke it up. I’ve got one in me, too. A smaller, sleepier one, but it’s the same beast. I’ve got to toss it some table scraps every now and then, to keep it happy and fed.”

  “What happens if you don’t?” I asked.

  She smiled ruefully at her plate.

  “Then it demands a three-course meal,” she said, “and that wouldn’t be good for anybody, now would it?”

  EIGHT

  We drove back to the motel with full stomachs and heavy eyelids. No lights burned behind the curtains of April and Kevin’s room, so we decided to turn in and catch up with them in the morning.

  Our room hadn’t been freshened up since sometime in the early ’70s. From the garish tree-patterned comforters on the two queen beds to the cheap paper-wrapped soaps in the cramped bathroom, I felt like I’d been in this room a hundred times before. Spend enough time on the road, and they all start to look the same.

  “So you’re really okay, bunking with me?” Jessie asked.

  I sat on the edge of my bed and shrugged off my jacket. “Why, do you snore?”

  “I mean, after what I told you tonight.”

  I tugged at my tie, loosening the Windsor knot. “I asked you for the truth, you gave it to me. I haven’t seen a reason not to trust you. If you really thought it’d be dangerous, I think you’d insist on a private room.”

  She gave me a curious look. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  I carefully rolled my tie and slipped it back into my suitcase, next to the four others I’d packed.

  “Besides,” I told her, “we’re hunting the Bogeyman. I can’t deal with that and be afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.”

  Jessie tilted her head. She was quiet for so long I started to think I’d offended her, but then she broke into a toothy grin.

  “The Big Bad Wolf. I like that. But on the subject . . . ”

  She walked across the room and pulled back the accordion-style closet door.

  “This? Stays open.”

  I couldn’t argue. Sleep came fast once the lights went out, but my dreams were a labyrinth of empty houses and closet doors. I ran in slow motion and silence, through room after lonely room, looking for something I could never find.

  I woke to the alarm clock’s shrill whine, dragging me out of nightmares and into hard reality. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Scarlet numbers in the dark read six o’clock, and the first glow of dawn peeked around the edges of the window curtain.

  Jessie moaned, swore, and pulled a pillow over her head. “You can have the shower first,” she muttered.

  “So you can sleep another fifteen minutes,” I said, pushing the covers back and forcing myself to sit up.

  “Curses. You’ve seen through my cunning plan.”

  I’m a morning person, always have been. There’s something about the start of a new day that just feels ripe with promise, even when a case isn’t going my way. It felt like a metallic-green necktie day.

  I thought about last night while I showered, letting the pounding water and rising steam clear the fog in my brain. The cambion were searching the Gunderson house for something. It had to have been something small, since they’d torn open everything bigger than a pack of chewing gum. Something hidden. Something well hidden, since they’d even gutted the upholstery and torn out pillow stuffing to hunt for it.

  Maybe we needed to take another run at Helen and see if she was keeping any secrets up her sleeve. For all we knew, this could have nothing to do with the Bogeyman. Still, the timing was too close for coincidences.

  I finished showering, toweled off my hair, and unzipped my little vinyl travel bag. I always go light on the makeup—moisturizer, eye shadow, lip gloss, mascara, done. The scratch on my cheek had faded to an angry little welt. I wished I’d packed concealer, but I could live with it.

  “Bathroom’s yours,” I said on my way out. Jessie growled at me.

  Eventually we got ourselves together and migrated to the room next door. April and Kevin had made themselves at home: the phone by the television was nothing but an exposed bundle of cables and parts, wired up to Kevin’s laptop like something out of Frankenstein’s laboratory.

  “You’re going to fix that before we leave, right?” I said.

  On his screen, a medieval knight in shining armor stood on the veranda of an Italian-style palazzo, a massive sword strapped to his back.

  “Oh my God,” Jessie groaned, throwing herself on the closest bed. “You colossal geek. Kill orcs on your own time.”

  “I’ll have you know, I’m mining for information,” he said, and gestured to the chat window in the bottom left corner of the screen. “Hackers, extremists, undergrounders and fringers—everybody knows the NSA’s all over IRC and e-mail these days, and phone security is a joke. Online games, though? Nobody’s monitoring private chat there. It’s the final frontier for unrestricted communication.”

  I took a peek, leaning over his shoulder and reading the chat as it scrolled up the window.

  (Private) Tomoe Gozen: Yeah, I’ll be your Google. I need the cash to get out of the 702 for a while. Everything’s going crazy here.

  (Private) Grignr: Thanks, TG.

  (Private) Tomoe Gozen: Anything for a guild buddy. Well, anything but cybersex again. That was a little weird.

  Kevin lunged for the keyboard, snapping the chat window shut. He grimaced and looked up at me.

  “I’m cultivating a confidential informant. A little privacy?”

  April, sitting over at the table near the window and poring over a stack of heavy books, glanced up at us. “He’s also slaying orcs.”

  “Hobgoblins, Dr. Snitch. Hobgoblins are not orcs.”

  “I,” April said, “have something a little more grounded in reality for you two. I talked to Vladimir last night.”

  “Vlad’s an antiquities dealer in New York,” Jessie told me. “Specializes in stolen artifacts, real grave-robber stuff. We flipped him a while back. Now he gets to run his seedy little operation as long as he feeds us intel and vouches for us when we need cover.”

  “As it turns out,” April said, “there’s a sorcerer he’s done business with living twenty miles from Talbot Cove. A man named Douglas Bredford. He’s a small fish in a tiny pond. Vladimir says that if anyone can identify the men who attacked you last night, it’s him.”

  I smiled. Finally, a lead. It wasn’t much, but at least we weren’t spinning our wheels and waiting for another kid to get snatched. “Great. Where do we find him?”

  April held out a yellow sticky note, bearing an address in prim, neat handwriting.

  “Most likely, this bar, at any given time of day. Mr. Bredford is, in Vladimir’s words, ‘a bit of a walking disaster.’”

  Out in the parking lot, I asked if Jessie wanted to drive. She took a long look at the Crown Victoria, put her hands on her hips, and said, “It looks even worse in the morning light, doesn’t it?”

  I took that as her answer and kept the keys.

  “We have a standard routine when we’re approaching occult-underground types,” she said. We drove away from the shoreline, pointing the car’s nose along a forest road that coasted up and down massive, rough hills. “We prefer going in undercover. The fewer people who know about Vigilant Lock, the better it is for everybody.”

  “And this Vladimir, he’s your cover?”

  “Bingo. Anybody calls his number, he’ll tell them we’ve been customers for years and totally vouch for us. Every major player in the underground either knows Vlad or knows of him, so that builds our cred. Just follow my lead; you’ll do fine.”

  Douglas Bredford lived in a town that barely qualified for a name, just a crossroads and a trailer park on the far edge of nowhere. April’s address led us to the Brew House, a gray wooden shack with busted-out windows and a front porch made fro
m a line of two-by-fours.

  The gravel strip of parking out front was almost empty, save for a battered old pickup truck that sported more rust than original paint. Rolls of twine held the back bumper on, and one of the side mirrors was completely gone.

  “This job takes us to the nicest places,” Jessie said as I pulled in a few spots down from the truck.

  Scratchy speakers over the bar played an old country tune as we walked in, a screen door swinging shut behind us. The bartender didn’t look up from his magazine. We were the only customers in sight, except for the man with the salt-and-pepper beard and trucker cap sitting in a booth in the back.

  Deep lines marred his face, and the hand that gripped his bottle of Budweiser trembled like a leaf in a stiff wind. His rheumy eyes couldn’t seem to focus on much of anything.

  “Mr. Bredford,” Jessie said. “Sorry to bother you, but we’re with the Church of Starry Wisdom in Rhode Island, just passing through. Our friend Vladimir says you’re the person to know around here.”

  He took a long pull on his bottle, looking us over.

  “My ‘friend’ Vlad is a double-dealing son of a bitch, and if you two aren’t cops I’ll eat my hat. No.” He looked my way. “Feds. I was on the job for almost thirty years, lady. Clocked you the second you walked in the door. Well, sit down, say what you’re gonna say.”

  We obliged him, sliding into the booth across from him. Cracked red vinyl padded the bench, patched over here and there with strips of duct tape.

  “Cambion,” Jessie said. “Three of them. Locals. We want them.”

  Douglas snorted and drank his beer. “Forget you, lady. I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  “The bad news is, we’re putting somebody in handcuffs today. Them, or you. The good news is, you get to choose.”

  “I ain’t done anything,” Douglas said, squinting at her. “You’ve got no grounds to arrest me.”

  Jessie smiled thinly. “Given that we know what cambion are, you’ve probably sussed that we’re not the regular kind of feds.”

  “Noticed that, yeah.”

  “We don’t take people to the regular kind of prison, either,” she said. “You go to the special one. Offshore. And you never come back.”

  “You can’t—you can’t do that,” he said, pushing his shoulders back and sticking his chin up, “I’ve got rights.”

  She was losing him. The shock-and-awe approach works on some suspects, but more often than not, it just backs them into a corner and clams them up. I gently put my hand on the table. Not touching him, but close.

  “Mr. Bredford, a child has been kidnapped.”

  He looked my way. “Not their usual style.”

  “They didn’t do it, but we think they know who did. This is a serial offender. He’s stolen other children, and they’ve never been found. With every hour that passes, the trail gets that much colder.”

  He looked down at his beer. “Those boys are gonna kill me.”

  “Right now,” I said, “there’s a mother staring at the door, staring at the phone, wondering if she’ll ever see her baby alive again. Minutes, hours, days . . . can you imagine how much that hurts? You can help her. Right now, you’re the only person who can. Please. Help us find these men.”

  Douglas slouched back, the brim of his cap slipping down over his eyes.

  “All right,” he grumbled. “Goddamn it, all right. Fine. You’re looking for the Gresham brothers. They hole up in a trailer park in Berrien County, just off Route 12. I can give you the address.”

  “What are they into?” Jessie asked, leaning closer.

  “Meth, mostly, but they’ll rip off anything that ain’t nailed down. You know the saying ‘Don’t get high on your own supply’? Well, they don’t think much of that rule.”

  “They work only for themselves?”

  Douglas grunted. “If you call that work. Yeah, mostly, but every once in a while somebody from the Flowers throws a dirty job their way.”

  “Flowers?” I said.

  He looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

  “Yeah. Court of Night-Blooming Flowers?”

  I looked at Jessie. She shrugged.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Douglas said. “Special feds, huh? You don’t know shit. You ladies get comfortable while I grab another bottle of Bud. I’m about to ruin your lives.”

  NINE

  “Been in this game a long time,” Douglas said, back at the booth with a fresh bottle of beer. “I was a cop, out east. We were working a gang beat in Little Vietnam, trying to roust some scumbags who were preying on the immigrant traffic. Then one night, my partner gets sick. Coughing up blood, buckets of the stuff. Ran him to the ER. Turns out, he had ninety-eight fishhooks in his stomach, like he’d swallowed them one by one.”

  Douglas took a long pull on his bottle, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment.

  “After the funeral, I had a lot of questions. Didn’t care about why—I knew why: we’d stepped on the wrong toes. I wanted to know how. Because my partner didn’t swallow any goddamn ninety-eight fishhooks, but there they were.”

  “Find what you were looking for?” Jessie asked.

  “And then some. And then I couldn’t stop. That’s the thing, this world, it just . . . sucks you in. You start looking for the answer to a question, it leads you to a hundred more questions. You start looking to answer those, and there you go. Straight down the rabbit hole, and that’s a one-way trip.”

  “What was that you were saying earlier,” I asked, “about flowers?”

  “The Court,” he said, making grand gestures and rolling his eyes, “of Night-Blooming Flowers. Lemme bottom-line this for you. A few centuries ago, Lucifer took a vacation and never came back. Hell fell into a civil war. What was left, when the dust settled, were the courts. Each one with a prince, each one laying claim to some patch of dirt here on Earth. They call it the Cold Peace. Some really old-school factions, like the Bargainers and the Chainmen, they get an exemption and can go wherever they want. For most of hell’s rank and file, though, they keep to their own courts. Plotting and scheming against one another gives the bastards something to do, I guess.”

  “Slow down,” Jessie said. “Are you telling us hell is organized? They have a functional government, and they’re claiming actual territory in the United States?”

  “I don’t know how functional I’d call it, but yeah. And they’ve got operatives. Hounds, they’re called. Not hijackers who have to possess a human body, but incarnate demons. You know what incarnates are?”

  I nodded. “I met one, in Las Vegas. He called himself Sullivan. I was told he was the only one in the country.”

  Douglas snorted. “Then you were told wrong.”

  Or lied to, I thought. Sullivan and his cambion followers came after me in a casino parking garage. He looked like a genteel schoolteacher until the gloves came off and he turned into a feral, mutating terror that took a bullet to the face without flinching. He damn near outran me, too—and I was on a motorcycle at the time.

  Everything I knew about incarnate demons came courtesy of a thief named Daniel Faust, and he was knee-deep in brimstone. He’d had every reason to lie. Then there was the woman. I’d identified almost every member of Faust’s crew, every thief and killer and warlock he ran with . . . except for the pale Scottish redhead who kept showing up at his side.

  Every background check came back empty, I thought. Image-recognition searches, nothing. Not the ones I did. The ones that I sent to the Bureau. Almost like somebody on the inside wanted to keep her anonymous.

  I didn’t want to know, but I had to ask. “Mr. Bredford, how much influence do these demons have in our . . . social structures?”

  “That’s not the question you wanna ask me,” he said, leaning forward and pitching his grizzled voice low. “The question eating at you is, are they infesting the hallowed halls of Washington, DC? And the answer is yes. Them and their human toadies.”

  He sat back and sucked at the b
ottle.

  “There are agents of hell in the government?” Jessie said.

  “You girls, God, you’re cute. You’ve got your little shadow-op conspiracy going, probably got a name like Operation Cold Spectrum or something, and you think you’re the secret hand of the president. The men in black, here to save the day from the hordes of hell. News flash, ladies: you’re not the only conspiracy in town. There are only two reasons you haven’t been shut down and left dead in an alley—either you’re too weak to care about, or you’re already their pawns.”

  “You make it sound hopeless,” I told him. He just laughed.

  “Don’t you get it?” he said. “It is hopeless. That’s the joke. The great cosmic jest at the end of the line. There’s a hell, but no heaven. The universe isn’t just apathetic toward humanity, it actively fucking hates us. What are you doing, huh? What are you doing right this minute?”

  “We’re hunting a monster,” I said, my shoulders clenching.

  “Sure, sure, good for you!” He applauded against his bottle. “And while you do that, a hundred others are out there in the dark, and a hundred more are waking up every year. The war is over. We lost. Humanity is like a . . . a . . . a crocodile with a bullet in its brain, too dumb to know it’s already dead. We just keep kicking, keep moving, all the way to the dinner table.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “There’s always hope. And there’s always a reason to fight. If I can save one life, it’s worth doing.”

  “Even if you pay with yours? The things I’ve seen, I couldn’t even begin to tell you . . . ” He rolled his head back against the broken vinyl and clutched his bottle. “Well, that’s why I’m drunk at nine in the morning, ain’t it? I figure I’ve got two, three more good years before the cirrhosis kills me. How much horror do you think you can take before you’re right here with me? Maybe I should save you a seat, huh?”