I readied myself to move, in case she lunged at me. "Sorry to hear that."
"Don't be." She shrugged. "She was an evil old devil woman; probably had it coming a mile away."
"I haven't done that sort of work in a lot of years," I offered. Constance looked at me steadily.
"Well, you better start again, Lee, if you want either of us to live past tonight."
Finding the hellhound again was the easy part--they never give up once a warlock's debt to their demon comes due. All I had to do was put the word out with a few lowlife warlocks and vampires working the bars up on Sunset and wait for a phone call.
I arranged to meet Ava out at the Palisades, the wild cliffs that overlooked the Pacific, a place where we could have a quiet meeting and nobody would hear any screams.
I got Constance some clothes out of the garage and put in the call to Tom Mason.
"I hate this," Constance said as we bounced over the rutted track above the Palisades. "I never asked to do what I can do. Not like Marie."
I didn't answer as we pulled into the turnoff. Marie and Tom were waiting already, Mason swaying in the wind and Marie standing straight. I didn't answer, but I could have. I never wanted this, either. I wanted to be what Constance had thought I was when she saw my scars--a man gifted at hunting monsters. Not a man who became one.
"Thank goodness. I was so worried--" Marie began.
"You can cut the shit," I said. Behind Marie, in the scrubby little trees, bent double, I saw a four-legged shape move. "So what, you post up with the guy who's obsessed with your poor sister, and when he can't track her down, you get him to make a ruckus at the studio and wait for some of Montrose's hired help to track her down?"
"No," Marie said icily. "I wait for the idiot who can't be killed to show up and go into a hotel full of zombies instead of me."
"Constance," Mason started. "I got clean for you! I love you, baby--"
I pulled my pistol and shot him in the knee. He went down hard, and I turned the gun on Constance. Her face went slack, and I tried hard not to feel anything about that as I kept the gun steady.
This was the old Lee, but still me.
"You were right," I said. "I was one of the men empowered to hunt things like you. Then a pack of vampires caught me and hung me. I died, but I didn't stay that way. I've tried to leave that life behind, but you're right, Constance. Blood always finds blood."
"Don't you dare!" Marie screamed at me. "She is my sister! Mine! I control her, not you!"
The bushes parted behind Marie, and the hellhound rushed forward.
"That's a good story," I said. "Tell it to the demon who took your soul in trade when you get down to hell."
I pulled the trigger. It was like lightning flashing out over the Pacific--a tenth of a second of violence, then stillness.
Constance lay on the ground, a little smoke curling from the hole in her forehead. Marie let out a short scream, and then she was still as well.
A pair of small feet in roughed-up men's boots came to stand next to mine. A match flared, and I smelled the sticky, pungent waft of a hand-rolled cigarette.
"You know I'm going to have to tell my bosses about this," Ava said, exhaling. "But since I collected on Marie, you'll probably have a few days' head start." She looked up at me. "So, you're a hunter."
"Was," I corrected her. "When I was alive."
"Ever kill any hellhounds?" she said.
I met her eyes. "A few."
She snorted. "Be out of Los Angeles when I come back here, if you like . . . well, not being alive, exactly. Whatever you call this."
"It was a demon," I said. "Ancient. Lived under the mountain where they buried me. I died and I saw a long hall, man standing at the end all in black. I couldn't see his face. He brought me back. Still not sure why."
Ava ground her cigarette out under the toe of her boot. Behind us, Tom Mason whimpered softly, but otherwise the air and sea were still. "All of us have that hallway, Lee," she said. "Every one of us that's crossed over and come back. Only way you're going to have any peace is to look the man in black in the eye."
She left, on two legs or four, I wasn't sure. I left, too, after a while, and drove, feeling like a gold-plated bastard. I couldn't let Constance stay alive. Not with the risk her ability posed to everyone. Next time, it wouldn't just have been a brothel. It could have been a whole apartment building, a block, a city.
Ava, too. Her time would come. I wouldn't let her live, but I might give her a fighting chance. I owed her, after all. She'd reminded me who I was, even though I'd tried to paint over it for the last decade with the booze and the hiding. I was a hunter. That was why I was still here. And the first thing I tracked down was going to be the demon responsible.
DOWN WHERE THE DARKNESS DWELLS
JOSEPH NASSISE
In the world of the Templar Chronicles, a resurrected Templar order is tasked with defending mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. One of the recurring villains in the series is the necromancer Simon Logan, leader of the Council of Nine. Logan is an acolyte of an even greater threat, the fallen angel Ashereal, also known as the Adversary. "Down Where the Darkness Dwells" reveals how these deadly and dangerous individuals came to be allies . . .
The cave gaped like an open mouth, and staring at it, Simon Logan had no difficulty understanding why the local tribesmen regarded it with superstitious dread, thinking it an entry to hell itself.
Then again, he, like the others with him, knew all too well that some superstitions were rooted in truth. It might not have been hell they were descending into, but all their research suggested it just might be close enough.
"Well? What are you waiting for?"
Logan took a moment to arrange his features into an approximation of pleasantness before turning to face the speaker. Jonathan Hale was a tall, hook-nosed blond with an air of superiority matched only by his power over the dead. He led the necromantic Council of Nine with ruthless efficiency. The mages in his inner circle were powerful sorcerers in their own right, though none equaled Hale's ability. One day Simon hoped to join their ranks. For now, however, he had to be content with serving as an acolyte, learning at the knee of men like Hale until his own meager powers grew into something more tangible.
It was a necessity, but Logan didn't have to like it.
The team was here in the jungles of Honduras hunting for an artifact of considerable power known as the Necklace of Yum Cimil. They'd landed four days earlier at Toncontin International Airport, where they were met by the guide Hale had hired to take them into the interior. They'd loaded their gear into a pair of off-road vehicles and driven for hours before camping the first night at a small village outside of Azacualpa. Then, at dawn the next day, they'd made their way on foot into the jungle. Three days of hiking through difficult and dangerous terrain had led them to this cave hidden in a thicket of mangrove trees.
It was Logan's job to lead them inside. Not because he had any particular experience in spelunking; no, that would have been too logical for a man like Hale. Instead, Logan had been selected to lead the group for the simple reason that he was the most expendable. Cave fodder, so to speak. If anything were to go wrong, Logan would be the first to tangle with it, giving the others time to react or retreat.
And he wonders why I'm reluctant to get under way, Logan thought. Still, he'd agreed, and there was nothing to be done about it now but shoulder on.
He spoke a word of power and watched as the end of the torch he carried burst into green flame. The arcane fire would burn brighter than normal flames but wouldn't give off the heat or smoke that were the by-products of a traditional torch.
More relevant, in Logan's eyes at least, was the fact that it would burn endlessly until it was extinguished by the mage who had created it.
We might be going down into the underworld, but we won't be doing so in the dark, at least.
A final glance back to be certain the others were ready, and then, with an impatient nod from H
ale, Logan stepped forward and passed through the mouth of the cave.
The tunnel sloped downward at a deceptively gentle angle, but it went on for a long way, and by the time it leveled out Logan had no doubt that they were a couple of hundred feet below the surface. The tunnel was high enough for him to walk upright without fear of banging his head, and wide enough that the party could have walked two abreast if Hale had so ordered, which he had not. It was cool and dry, unlike the jungle outside, and the rock underfoot was mostly free of debris, which made movement easy.
Logan could almost have imagined he was out for a bit of afternoon exploring if it wasn't for the sense of oppressiveness that hung over the place and the knowledge of what they'd come here for.
Yum Cimil was the Mayan god of death. He--it?--was often represented in the Mayan culture as a skeletal being adorned in the bones of his victims, or as a body covered with the black spots of decomposition. Ruler of the nine-level underworld known as Mitnal, Yum Cimil was judge, jury, and executioner when it came to the souls of the dead, believed to take great delight in torturing those who deserved punishment. According to legend, those who had committed particularly grievous crimes would have their eyes torn from their sockets and added to a necklace that Yum Cimil wore, granting him the power inherent in their evil souls.
Logan and the rest of the expedition team were here because Hale believed that the necklace was stored in a chamber deep within this cave system and he intended to retrieve it for his own. Doing so wouldn't be without its challenges; there were more than a few stories about those who ventured into these depths being lost forever, and Logan was enough of a realist to believe that there was some truth to those stories.
He was no innocent himself, after all. He'd stopped being one the day he'd discovered his talent for necromancy. That had radically changed his life, and he was determined to cultivate his power in any way possible. If that meant raiding the tomb of an ancient Mayan death god, so be it.
The team had been moving through the tunnel for nearly twenty minutes when a rough chamber spread wide before them. It was rectangular in shape and clearly man-made; tool marks could be seen on the walls, and the floor was covered with some kind of crude stone tile.
Logan hesitated. Something about the room didn't feel right. Nothing looked overtly threatening, but his gut was telling him something was off here. He turned to the man behind him and sent word back down the line.
A few moments later Hale stepped up beside him.
Hale surveyed the room and then asked, "Do you see the path?"
Logan shook his head. There was a thick coating of dust on the floor, covering most of the tiles, and it didn't look like anyone had come this way in a very long time.
Hale gave voice to several words of power and then flung the energy his spell had conjured up into the room before them. It ripped through the small space, blowing the dust from the surface of the stones and turning several of them as dark as charcoal before the power exhausted itself against the far wall.
In its wake, a clear path across the room was laid out in darkened stones.
"Stay to the path; do not stray from the revealed stones," Hale told him.
Logan wanted to ask what would happen if he made a misstep, visions of poisoned dart traps a la Indiana Jones running through his head, but the look on Hale's face told him in no uncertain terms that he really didn't want to know. Apparently ignorance truly was bliss.
Logan set off, carefully making his way across the room step by step, never straying from the darkened stones. Then, and one by one, the others followed until they were all on the far side.
With their first obstacle successfully navigated, the group continued onward.
They moved as quietly as possible, as if afraid of waking something lingering here in the depths of the earth. No one spoke, and the only sound came from the occasional rock rolling away underfoot or the swish of their equipment brushing up against the tunnel walls.
They had just moved through a long stretch of straight tunnel--the sameness of the rock around them lulling them into a kind of mental daze--when Logan stopped short, causing the next man in line to bump into him, nearly sending them both to their deaths.
Less than five feet in front of Logan the floor abruptly ended even as the curved walls went onward, creating the illusion that the tunnel continued ahead of them.
If I'd been looking forward rather than down at my feet . . . He shook himself, chasing away thoughts of what could have happened, even as the man behind him passed the word back down the line to hold in place.
Logan took another step forward and extended his torch, looking over the edge of the drop.
At the bottom of the cliff face, forty, maybe fifty feet below, was an open space, like a roofless chamber. The tunnel continued forward on the opposite side.
While this particular trap hadn't been included in their intelligence briefing, they'd come prepared for a wide variety of eventualities.
"Ropes!" Logan called, and two of the men behind him got to work, removing long doubled-nylon climbing ropes from their packs and securing one end of them to the tunnel floor with pitons. Once they were tested, the ropes were passed up the chain to Logan, who threw them over the edge. The ropes cascaded down the cliff, coming to rest in a puddled heap at the bottom.
Length was not going to be a problem, it seemed.
Logan fashioned a makeshift harness by straddling the cord, then wrapping it around his hip and over his left shoulder, around his neck, and back down past his right arm. The weight of his body would act as a brake as he slowly lowered himself down the side of the cliff.
Bones crunched beneath his feet when he reached the bottom, the remains of jungle animals who had wandered into the cave in search of food and had apparently not paid enough attention to the path ahead. Logan glanced at them fondly--he was at home with dead things--and then unwrapped the rope from his body and shouted for the others to make their way down.
When Hale and the rest of the group made it to his level, Logan took the lead once more. The first two obstacles had been successfully navigated, but there were certainly more to come, and Logan found himself increasingly nervous as his sense of security was slowly stripped away. At some point, one of these traps was going to get them; he was sure of it.
About fifteen minutes later, Logan brought the group to a halt once more. This time he found himself staring at a narrow rock bridge that stretched across a gaping chasm that dropped away for hundreds of feet below them.
The bridge looked to be about fifty feet across, maybe a bit more, but what it had in length, it lacked in width. Logan figured it was no wider than a foot, and that was only at the start. The center of the bridge looked to be just a few inches in width and would require putting one foot very carefully in front of the other.
Logan turned and called back through the tunnel to Hale.
"We should probably rope ourselves together--"
He didn't get any further.
"And have you drag me to my death when you slip and fall? Not a chance, you imbecile! Get moving!"
Fucker, Logan thought, but he got moving nonetheless, not wanting those behind him to crowd him on the narrow causeway ahead.
Taking a deep breath, he put his arms out to either side to help his balance and stepped out onto the bridge.
The rock felt sturdy enough beneath his feet, which helped. He didn't want to think about what crossing this thing would have been like otherwise. Setting one foot carefully in front of the other, he began making his way across.
He was fine for the first few steps; psychologically, he knew he could always turn and throw himself back to the ledge if something went wrong. But as he got farther out, the realization that there was nothing to hold on to--nothing that could support him in the event of an emergency--began to take its toll. His body began to tremble as if with cold, the shaking impacting his balance, until suddenly Logan found himself wobbling side to side as he tried to take another
step. His foot skittered off the rock before him, and for a frantic moment he thought it was all over--he was going to slip off the stone bridge and plummet hundreds of feet to his death in the darkness below--but then his foot found purchase and he managed to steady himself anew.
Easy, he thought to himself as his heart raced like wildfire and he tried to regain control of his fear. You can do this. Another twenty feet, that's all.
Summoning his courage, he managed to get himself moving again, and before he knew it he'd reached the other side. He stepped off the bridge onto the far ledge with a huge sigh of relief.
He turned, gave the hold sign to the next man waiting in line, and then pulled a rope of his own out of his pack. He attached a cam to the rope with the help of a nylon sling, then seated the cam deep in a crack in the nearby wall. He used a second cam to anchor the rope even more firmly in the same manner, and then tugged on the rope to make sure it would hold. When he was satisfied, he stepped up to the edge of the bridge and hurled the other end of the rope back across the gap to his companions.
A man on the other side secured it in a similar fashion, and suddenly the party had a hand line to use; the rest of them made their way across. Even Hale made use of it, though he couldn't be bothered to compliment Logan on his foresight and ingenuity when he reached him on the other side.
Another obstacle down, Logan took point once more. The tunnel began to twist and turn at sharp angles, growing narrower as well, making him thankful that he didn't suffer from claustrophobia.
He had just finished squeezing himself through a particularly narrow section when the passage ahead of him opened up and he found himself on the threshold of another chamber.
Holding the torch in his hand high above his head, Logan took a good look around.
This room was rectangular in shape and about twice the size of the previous chamber, but still small enough for the torch in Logan's hand to reveal the interior to him. On the far side of the room stood an altar. Atop the altar was a stand made from human bones, and hanging on that stand was a necklace.
That was what they had come for: the Necklace of Yum Cimil.