Every person has a right to the small things.
His father’s words burst through his mind like the monsoon that had raged on the night all this had begun. Surely it was only his own guilt rearing, but it seemed the completion of the thought coincided exactly with the boy’s final mortal moment. The slight quiver that overtook the small body was as unnatural as if it were made of rousing snakes, and JJ shuddered, swearing he could hear a rattler’s shake.
The little happinesses.
The quiver strengthened into a quake, and the cells comprising Ricky’s skin began separating, looking pixilated at first, some sinking while others slipped and scattered across the ridges and angles of the young body before dropping to the cotton bedding. JJ’s gut twisted, and his hard exhalation scattered those loosened cells into a fine coating of dust.
Those are the ones that make life most worth living.
The boy settled more firmly, burrowing into his final resting place as his sandy insides softened, and he even looked peaceful before his small smile, and his lips, too, fell away. JJ refused to avert his eyes as the freckles dropped, the eyelashes fell. He saw the spiky hair flatten, dissolve, and leave behind a powdery skull. JJ’s unblinking stare was obscured only when he began to cry, and he eventually realized between convulsing, open-eyed sobs that his wet sorrow was melding with the boy-shaped dune. He could literally build a castle with his tears. It made him cry harder.
It’s what we’re fighting for, came his father’s last, late reminder.
When, and how, had JJ forgotten to fight?
The shell of Ricky’s body was now totally depleted, drained as if dehydrated, lacking life force instead of water. From somewhere in the suite a clock chimed off the last of the twelve-hour mark, and JJ reached out to touch a small hand, to say good-bye. In one moment there was a child. In the next, dust mounded the bedding, a handful finely ground as beach sand in JJ’s fist.
An innocent. A child. Dead because of him.
And JJ did bow his head now, unable to form thought or words, but sending up a prayer of emotion into the Universe, hoping someone, something, somewhere understood the regret squeezing his chest, the sorrow burning in his gut, and the hopelessness that made him want to lie down, too, and embrace a dusty death.
Weeping openly, not even trying to hide the scent of his shame and sorrow and misery, JJ didn’t turn at the soft sound behind him. Unguarded emotions were easy for his kind to pick up. Kneeling bedside, he bowed his head and welcomed blessed death. But the enemy he’d drawn back to him had something else in mind.
JJ turned his tear-streaked face, and found Warren’s unsurprised gaze locked hard on his. Tonya Dane’s prediction—the one Warren hadn’t wanted to believe and had been trying to prevent—had finally come true. His troop leader put it together quickly, eyes slipping mournfully to the mound of dust on the bed, as he inhaled to take in both the boy and Solange on JJ’s skin.
“You should kill me,” JJ said flatly, still kneeling.
“Yes.” Warren’s reply was, if possible, even flatter. “At the very least, exile.”
“No.” JJ’s mind stumbled over the unacceptable thought. “I don’t want to live. I don’t want—”
“I don’t care what you want.” Warren remained still, so enraged he was all but quivering. “From now on, you want what I want.”
“And that is?” JJ said it casually, but inside he was braced against the idea of living. He glanced at the plate-glass window, but a dive from the penthouse balcony wouldn’t be enough to kill him. Warren, clearly intuiting his thoughts, moved between him and the window.
“I take responsibility for this,” he surprised JJ by saying. “I made a mistake. I allowed you too much autonomy and granted you a position with too much power. I favored you because of your childhood, your parents, their deaths. When you wanted the position of weapons master I allowed that—”
Now something did spark inside JJ. “Because I’m the best.”
Warren nearly snapped back, but closed his eyes instead, his head and shoulders drooping. “But I should have had someone apprenticing with you. I just never thought you would…I should have thought.”
JJ didn’t bother saying he was sorry. An apology meant nothing in the wake of an innocent’s death. Besides, Warren was admitting he would exile or kill JJ if the troop didn’t need him so badly, and one thing that could be counted on by Warren, he always acted in the best interest of the troop.
When Warren lifted his head again, the fatigue was gone and that hard truth was branded in his gaze. “You will give yourself over entirely to me,” he said, voice harder than JJ had ever heard it.
Because living with the knowledge of what he’d done would be harder than dying over it.
“You’ll tell no one about your wife”—he spit the word—“or the changeling. You’ll do what I say, no questions asked, no argument, no explanation.”
“Okay,” JJ finally agreed, head bowed, fingers dusty.
“That wasn’t a request.” Warren’s voice regained its strength and rhythm as he strode forward.
JJ nodded, staring at the floor. “And then I’ll find her. I’ll make this right…”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Warren said, jerking JJ to his feet. Their faces were so close their noses nearly touched. “She’s poison to you, boy. Besides, do you think you deserve any sort of happy ending after what you’ve done?”
No. He didn’t. No happily-ever-after…including revenge.
“She won’t find you, either. We’ll change your identity in full this time. Micah will make you over into something new, something better, someone who won’t make this kind of mistake again.”
JJ recalled the fiery pain following his last surgery, and the ghost of his old bulk trying to squeeze from beneath his current flesh, but he only stared at Warren mutely before nodding again.
“You’re no longer your mother’s son. Not JJ, or Jay…or Jaden Jacks.” Not his mother’s son, not his father’s, either. Warren was stripping him of that connection and past, but in a way it was a relief. He had failed them, too.
“Solange won’t ever find you. We’ll make it so that even your own troop members won’t remember you. It’ll be as if you never existed.”
JJ did step back now, unable to keep his mouth from falling open. Would Warren really do that? He knew Micah could erase the memories of mortals, rewire their minds so that new pasts defined their futures. It was especially useful if one had happened upon an event or object derived from their hidden world. But could Warren really convince Micah to alter the troop’s collective memory? It’d be a huge undertaking…not just rewiring the minds of the twelve senior star signs, but the ward mothers who’d helped raise JJ in their underground sanctuary, and the flexible minds of the initiates, too—the children of the next generation who so looked up to him now. Would Warren do that?
He looked at his troop leader’s gaze—level again, and cool. Yes, he would. None of them would have a choice in the matter, and most wouldn’t even question it. If they ever read about JJ in the back issues of the manual of Light, it would be like reading about someone else entirely. And it made JJ wonder: had Warren ever done this before?
But he’d be alone in his wonder, JJ realized. That would be his punishment. To remember what he’d done, to know the failure forever, and to live among his peers as a fraud. So it was almost as harsh as a death sentence.
JJ nodded yet again.
“You will take the appearance and job I determine for you, you will return to the sanctuary every night without fail, and you will log your activities for me down to the last detail.”
“Yes,” he replied woodenly. He no longer cared where his needs and desires ranked in his own life. In fact, it would be a relief to follow orders and let someone else do the thinking for a while. He would give his life over in service to mortals, and he’d do it wholeheartedly…or at least with what was left of it after Solange’s betrayal.
Warren continued, v
oice thick with everything he wasn’t allowing himself to say…and do. “You will be the exemplary superhero in every way. If I even suspect you’re faltering, I’ll kill you myself.”
JJ nodded numbly. Then Warren punched him so hard he fell into the sea of pillows. A cloud of dust rose around him, and he coughed, tasting loss and death and a dry guilt that smothered any burning desire to fight. Warren didn’t want his numb acquiescence, he realized.
Not when there was so much dust.
“I’m not doing this for you.” Warren hissed, pointing a finger at JJ, tears rolling down his cheeks as he said it. “This is for your parents and what they meant to me, and what they sacrificed for us all.”
“I won’t forget again. Ever.”
Though his parents were gone, he would live for them, as they’d once lived for each other. And he’d learn to listen again to his intuition, the inner voice he’d muted while reaching for his own selfish dreams, reaching until Solange had snagged his palm, and pulled him into all this dust.
His answers, his sorrowed scent, seemed to mollify Warren. His leader turned to the bedroom window, trench billowing at his ankles, and looked out at the city he was charged to protect. “You may choose your own name.”
JJ stood and joined Warren at the window. “Hunter.”
Warren looked at him sharply.
“Hunter,” he repeated, sending back the steely gaze. Warren wanted the perfect embodiment of a superhero, so that’s who he’d be. The purest predator in the city. The most concentrated essence of good, he thought, looking up at the sky.
The quintessential hunter.
Because somewhere out there was a woman with a thing for dark-haired men, a preference for Mustangs, and a need for relevance. She took action based on the constellations, her deeds steered by the dark matter in between, and she did it with his daughter, his Lola, in her belly.
And a child, Hunter decided, rubbing faintly dusty fingers together, was a damn good reason to continue the fight.
THE DEAD, THE DAMNED, AND THE FORGOTTEN
JOCELYNN DRAKE
1
A body was waiting for me at the morgue.
That wasn’t the type of message I was expecting to receive when I awoke at sunset, but there was no avoiding it. My voice mail contained a semi-polite message from Archibald Deacon, Savannah’s coroner, informing me that a nightwalker had just been delivered to his morgue. The message was followed by one from homicide detective Daniel Crowley, also informing me of the waiting corpse. A final message was from the now frantic coroner, who wanted me to deal with the corpse immediately. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do until the sun had finally set beneath the horizon, allowing night to reclaim the world.
The private examination room was in the basement of the morgue, away from the main room that held the majority of the dead. It was one of the few buildings in Savannah with a basement, given the city’s high water table, and it came at a great cost. Due to moments like these, I had been more than willing to make the contribution to the city.
The cinder-block walls had been covered with a thick coat of white paint that had begun to yellow with age. A handful of narrow windows lined the walls more than six feet above the floor. The glass had been painted black to deter any inquisitive people who happened to wander too close. A window-unit air conditioner sputtered and coughed randomly from its perch at the far end of the room, spewing forth a semi-steady stream of cool air.
I looked up from the coroner’s report to watch Knox as he leaned over the body of the dead nightwalker. His lips were curled in disgust, revealing faint flashes of fang. The opposite wall from where I stood was covered with a stainless steel refrigeration unit for corpses. There were only four doors that opened to slide-out drawers. A larger unit was in the main examination room on the first floor.
“Are you sure there were no other wounds on the body besides the main two?” I inquired, turning my attention from the disgruntled nightwalker to the coroner, who hovered close by. Archibald was a short, round man who stood on stubby little legs. His dark brown hair was thinning, leaving the top of his skull nearly exposed. Archie, as I preferred to call him, had been the coroner for Savannah and the surrounding counties for nearly twenty years and we had known each other for almost as long.
“Mira,” he snapped. His bushy grayish-brown brows bunched together over his large, bulbous nose. “Half the body was destroyed! How could I possibly answer such a question?”
“Can you at least tell me if the body was burned before or after he was beheaded?”
“After,” replied a new voice.
Archibald jumped at the unexpected appearance of Detective Daniel Crowley, but I didn’t flinch. I had sensed him walking through the building toward our location in the basement.
“How do you know?” I asked, looking over at Daniel as I closed the file folder that held a copy of the coroner’s report. It was the real copy, one that would never be officially filed with the police department. Archibald would create a second version that would carefully omit any questionable details like the elongated canines, the sensitivity to sunlight, and any kind of genetic abnormalities he was already aware of.
“I talked to some of the guys who were first on the scene,” Daniel continued, closing the door behind him. “When they found the body, one of the officers opened some curtains to let light in and the body started being reduced to ash like a slow-burning ember.”
“They saw him burn?” Knox demanded in a harsh tone. Daniel took a hesitant step backward and looked over at me again. Knox and Daniel had never worked together. In fact, I was the only nightwalker in contact with Daniel and Archie, but it was time for that to change. If Knox was going to aid me with managing my domain, he needed to know the humans I was in contact with.
However, the corpse was unnerving Knox more than I had expected, and the nightwalker was losing some of the cool, unshakable logic that I had come to depend on him for. This unexpected rough edge couldn’t be seen by these trusted humans.
Nodding once to Daniel, I dropped the folder on a nearby desk and slipped my hands into the front pockets of my worn jeans. The relaxed stance helped to ease some of the tension from Daniel’s shoulders.
“It was weird, they said.” Daniel ran his fingers through his sweaty hair, causing large chunks to stand on end. “There was no fire, but they said it was like the body was burning. No one commented that it was the sunlight. They thought the killer might have doused the body with a chemical in an effort to destroy the evidence.”
“I’ve got a couple things I can put in the report that could potentially work as an explanation,” Archie interjected.
“Write down the names of the cops,” Knox ordered. “We may need to adjust their memories.”
Again, Daniel looked at me, frowning. I nodded slightly, approving the request while inwardly I wished I could smack Knox on the back of the head.
Pushing off the wall, I pulled my hands out of my pockets and stretched my arms over my head, extending my entire body into a long, straight line. “Excellent. Anything else I should know?” I was still trying to fully wake up—I hadn’t expected to find myself at the morgue first thing in the evening, especially without even time to shower.
“The call came in at around nine A.M. Anonymous male caller from a prepaid cell phone,” Daniel replied.
“The killer?”
Daniel shrugged, acknowledging the possibility.
“That’s about three hours after sunrise,” Knox muttered in a low voice. He took a few steps away from the corpse, brushing his hands against his pants even though he had never actually touched the body. “Plenty of time to get in and get out after he was unconscious for the day.”
“We’re still trying to dig up which cell tower was used to see if the person was still in town at the time,” Daniel said. His frown deepened as he watched Knox start pacing between the stainless steel table and a wheeled cart loaded with different sharp instruments.
“Anything at the house?” I inquired, dragging the detective’s keen attention back to me.
“No, we didn’t find anything of interest.”
I watched Daniel from under the brim of my baseball cap. The fluorescent lights in the morgue tended to give my pale skin an inhuman pearlescent sheen. It was why both Knox and I were dressed in long-sleeve shirts and baseball caps despite the fact that it was still above eighty degrees outside.
“Knox and I will check it out tonight.”
“Do you know who did this?” Daniel asked. Sweat stains stretched from under his arms and lined his collar. His tie had been loosened and he looked oddly out of sorts without a cigarette in one hand. It was still early in his shift but it looked like he had already been through hell. He must have either come in early after hearing about the strange murder or hadn’t gone to bed yet from the previous night.
“I’ve got some guesses. We’ll take care of this. Get some rest.”
“Mira, I can’t just walk away. If there’s a murderer within the city, I need to track this bastard down and stop him before he kills someone else. That’s my job.”
A smile lifted my lips. Daniel didn’t see the half-burned remains as some bloodsucker that got what it deserved. He saw him as a person who had his life unjustly ended and believed that the rest of the population (humans, nightwalkers, and all the others) needed to be protected from the murderer. I was doubtful many humans would be so open-minded.
“I appreciate that, Daniel,” I said, stepping away from the wall to stand between the corpse and Archibald and Daniel. “And normally I would let you get your man, but this time it’s a nightwalker that’s been killed. You’re not equipped to handle this problem. Knox and I will handle it. We won’t allow the killer to endanger the citizens of Savannah.”
“What about the body? We can’t…People are going to want tests run and…” Archie started, turning my smile into a smug grin.