CHAPTER 15
We rolled up to the nightclub about twenty minutes before noon. Our cars converged on the front entrance in the alley simultaneously. Nearby, men dressed in city utility uniforms had blocked off the alley from all other traffic, including neighboring streets, and parked large vehicles in strategic positions to shield everything from prying eyes. Even Hollywood Boulevard had traffic restricted down to a single lane going both ways.
Lizz hadn’t told me how much of a bribe she had paid, but seeing it in action, this was going to be a serious kick to the old budget.
As we piled out, a pickup truck that had been waiting down the street pulled in behind us, and Tom Black got out, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, like he was about to go turkey hunting. Only then he reached back into the cab and pulled out a riot shotgun and a bandoleer of shotgun shells and ran our way.
“Is that your cop newbie?” Leroy asked.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Tom’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
“I hope you’ve got his full name written down somewhere, so if he dies we can find his next of kin to send them the check.”
Deputy Tom heard that as he was approaching. “What? I even get paid for doing this?”
Leroy grinned. “I like this guy. New guy, you follow Lizz.”
“Gladly. I’ve seen her shoot.”
“He should stay and guard the entrance,” I said. “He’s not been through training. That’s company policy.”
“Yeah, I wrote it,” Leroy replied. “My gut right now overrules it. Everyone makes entry, then we’ll reassess.”
I’d learned a long time ago not to argue with a Shackleford about how to conduct a monster hunt. That family were as much creatures of instinct as I was.
Rhino surveyed his assembled force, looked toward the gigantic building, and made the final call. “We’re on. Chloe’s squad on the front door. Mine on the back. Let’s go.” He took a gigantic sledgehammer with him in case the back door lock was stubborn, and started limping toward the alley. His weakened leg had to be killing him to put weight on it like that but he was too tough to show any pain. “If this goes sideways, don’t hesitate to burn this place to the ground. You understand?”
Everybody shouted in the affirmative, and then headed for their assigned area.
We only knew of two ways in, and we were stacking four Hunters on each one. We didn’t know much about the layout other than what me, Lizz, and Melanie had seen, and the out-of-date blueprints we had were a guess at best. Ideally, we’d hit a place this big with a dozen Hunters to sweep the interior fast while more controlled the perimeter, but you work with what you got, and Franks’ ultimatum had screwed any chances of getting help here in time.
I strolled nonchalantly to the front door, with Justin backing me up, followed by Lizz and Deputy Tom.
We stopped at the door and waited, because it would take Rhino, Leroy, Kimpton, and Melanie a bit longer to get into position. I knew from our past trip here the stairs went down at a steep angle. At the base was a hallway with no doors or anything that dumped onto the dance floor. The other team would be entering through the fire exit into the hall by the storage area. Then both teams would work our way toward the only door Melanie had seen marked PRIVATE, which on the plans looked like it would be a warren of small rooms in the very back.
“I’m still kinda fuzzy on what’s going on here,” Tom said. “What’s our rules of engagement?”
“If it ain’t human, shoot it,” Lizz said.
“If what ain’t human?”
“Well, that’s the conundrum: We don’t rightly know. Probably blood fiends—think red-colored goblins with vampire hands—and who knows what else. The big bad bitch we’re after is probably either gonna look like a supermodel or a devil-bat critter. That’s probably who was telling your werewolf to make more werewolves. But anyways, don’t bother to shoot the bat model because that buckshot probably won’t do nothing, and just let Chloe stab it with her dad’s magic murder knife instead. Got all that?”
Tom blinked slowly. “Not really, but sure.”
All of us were trying to stand in a way our guns wouldn’t be too visible from any passersby, though the broken water main cover story kept traffic—or anyone walking by—from seeing much. According to Agent Franks’ letter, at four in the afternoon our twelve-hour window would expire and the government would get involved. We needed to make sure that didn’t happen until the hag was dead. I checked again to make sure the Black Heart of Suffering was in the leather sheath on my belt. Luckily, I’d found one that fit it pretty well, and with a strap around the bone handle, I wasn’t going to lose it. I had a Galil rifle and my Hi-Power. Justin had his AK-47 slung over one shoulder, because he had a big pry bar in his hands to use against the front door.
Except I paused and tested it, and sure enough, the front door was unlocked. Of course, if there was a carnivorous, human-sacrificing Fey and her blood-drinking servants in here, they’d be happy for random people to blunder in during the week. Transients looking for places to sleep or even would-be burglars would all end up as food. Justin shrugged, put the pry bar back on his pack, and got his Kalashnikov ready.
We were amped up, and had enough ammo, guns, and explosives to take out a small Caribbean nation. We were just waiting for the signal from Rhino.
The fire escape door getting smashed in was loud enough we all heard it. The other squad was on the move. I threw the front door open. There was nobody in the entryway where the bouncers had been. Taking a deep breath to steady my nerves, I descended the stairs.
The near silence within the nightclub was disconcerting. The only sound I could pick out was the faint electrical hum of a few lights that had been left on. Lizz flicked on the rest of the lights as we went. We all had flashlights ready in case the monsters killed the power, but until then, light was our friend.
An odd rhythmic, hissing sound started in the shadows below. I’d heard something nearly identical last night, when the two blood fiends had ambushed Alex. An angry growl erupted from my chest, deep and primal.
I heard a second blood fiend, then a third. Our entrance had woken them up. Now there were so many of them that it sounded like we were descending into a nest of snakes worse than the real one we’d recently been in. Apparently there was a blood-fiend convention on the dance floor. I sniffed the air but the overpowering smell of stale booze, cigarette smoke, and other things I couldn’t easily identify overcame my senses. I felt my pulse race—not in fear, but anticipation. Because I already knew this was going to be one of those fights.
I reached the bottom of the stairs. If Melanie’s memory was correct, Rhino’s team would be reaching the back of the disco hall in the next few seconds. We were at the front. Between us it sounded like there was an entire pack of feral blood fiends hiding in the big dark space.
Except it wasn’t dark for long, because when the other team passed by the control booth, one of them must have gotten the bright idea to turn everything on.
Suddenly it was floodlights, alternating strobes, and disco balls spinning. In the center of the dance floor was what had to be dozens of blood fiends gathered to feast on several dead bodies. The monsters jerked upright, nightmare faces contorting into fearful surprise.
The weird strobing effect of the lights, combined with the disco ball hanging above the dance floor, made everything seem slanted and off-kilter. There were curtains hanging from the ceiling, sparkling silver things that shimmered and reflected the mostly naked, emaciated creatures below. The corpses on the floor had been people once, but the fiends had practically ripped them to pieces in their eagerness to feast on their blood. It wasn’t nearly enough to feed so many creatures, so the hag had to be keeping them here, miserable and starved.
The speakers started to blare Billy Preston’s “Outa-Space.”
“This must be blood-fiend hell,” Justin whispered.
Blood fiends were normally ambush predators who didn’t like straight-up fights, but the hag had kept these things so famished that the instant they saw us, they were so overcome with hunger, they charged.
“This is for Alex!” I flipped my rifle’s selector to full auto and let it rip. Justin was right next to me, roaring and working the AK back and forth across the dance floor.
The skinny monsters were hammered with bullets. Chunks of starvation-pink meat got blown off bones. Blood squirted. One nearly flanked us before Tom put a round of buckshot into its belly. He fired again as fast as he could pump the action and the next shot took the top of its skull off. Fiends tried to crawl over their dead compatriots in order to escape. Some of them ran for the back exit—
—only to have Rhino’s team open fire on them too. Leroy had a belt-fed, and the thunder of an M-60 is astoundingly loud indoors.
The pack of fiends was caught in the center of a deadly X. And since the two who had put our friend at death’s door were in there somewhere, no mercy.
These monsters had clearly never gone against real Hunters before, and the sudden carnage shattered any bravery they might have possessed. The only thing on their mind was to flee, but there was no escaping our wrath. They served the hag’s bidding and now would die because of her. It was the perfect symmetry of life.
Fiends ran for the bathroom. A couple of them even made it into the ladies’ room. Kimpton ran over and tossed a hand grenade through after them. The resulting explosion knocked the door off the hinges and caused a rain of dust to fall from the ceiling. Another fiend vaulted over the bar to try and hide on the other side, only to have Rhino methodically work a shotgun over the whole bar, each blast blowing a gigantic hole through the wood and shattering glass on the other side. The shelf holding all the bottles came crashing down.
Blood fiends are remarkably resilient, though, and even getting hammered with bullets, some of them were closing. Justin and I had run dry at about the same time, but one of them was still upright and rushing us. I went for a new magazine, but Justin stepped forward and smashed it in the face with the butt of his AK. It flailed back and slid across the hardwood on its back. I dropped the bolt and stitched a burst of 5.56 rounds from its pelvis to forehead.
I hadn’t known fiends could climb, but some of them were making their way up the curtains. We shot those too. Some of the floodlights exploded. Melanie put half a dozen bullets into one fiend with her Colt Commando before it dropped, tearing down the sequined curtains behind it, like a parachute that had failed to open.
They hissed, they crawled, they fought, but in the end the blood fiends did what all good monsters did when MHI came calling: they died.
Our gunfire tapered off. The floor was covered in fiend blood, body parts, and brass shell casings. The smoke and dust began to clear a little. The ventilation in the club wasn’t the best but it was at least working a little. Even at just a few thousand bucks a pop, that was a whole lot of PUFF bounty lying there. Alex would be pleased.
“Well.” Rhino looked around at the pile of blood-fiend corpses. Somehow blood had even gotten on the disco ball. It wasn’t nearly as glittering as before. We’d done a number on the monsters and hadn’t even been so much as scratched. “That was easy.”
Of course, that was when the werewolf came crashing through the drywall and damned near ripped Rhino’s arm off.
The big man didn’t even have a chance to react before blood fountained outward, painting the ruined wall. Rhino started screaming in pain once it dawned on him his wrist had been slit wide open. The werewolf hit the floor, spun around, and claws slashed through the air to rip more of Rhino’s arm open.
It was right in front of Rhino. I didn’t have a shot.
The werewolf snarled, blood dripping from its claws, and started toward its next victim. Kimpton reacted and fired from the hip, but at such close range it was nearly impossible to miss. The steel-jacketed rounds punched clean through the werewolf. It howled, twisted sideways, and backhanded Kimpton across the flak vest. The blow put Kimpton through the wall.
Rhino stumbled backward a few feet before shock leveled him. Groaning weakly, he slumped against the opposing wall. Now I had an angle.
But so did Lizz, and she was a better shot. She struck it repeatedly, and in a flash the werewolf had gone back through the hole it had come from.
“Load silver if you’ve got it!” Leroy shouted, because of course we’d not been wasting the rare stuff on mere fiends. He didn’t have a belt of silver for the M-60, but sufficient volume worked too, and he moved to a position where he could cover both of our fallen hunters.
“Can I have some of that?” Tom asked.
Liz shoved her hand into one pocket and handed him a handful of shotgun shells. Tom began feeding them into the magazine tube like it was the most important task in the world, right then, and it probably was.
Melanie found a metal rod about a foot long lying on the floor, remnants from some of the piping in the wall the werewolf had just crashed through. She grabbed a strip from one of the tacky silver curtains hanging from the ceiling and ripped it down. Tying the sequined rag just above Rhino’s elbow, she used the rod to tighten it until blood stopped pumping from the stump. “Stay with me, Marco,” Melanie said as she twisted the bar in her hands. “We’ll evacuate you to the hospital.”
“I ain’t going nowhere.”
“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I’ve got extra.” Lying on the floor with his back against the wall, Rhino took a few deep breaths. “Would somebody please shut off that godawful music?”
Leroy glanced over at the sound system area, and absolutely leveled all the sound equipment with a burst from the machine gun. “Better?”
“Thank you . . . ” Rhino composed himself and used his words. “As nice as your curtain rods are, Melanie. I’ve got a real tourniquet in my med kit.”
“Sorry, boss,” Melanie said as she reached for the pouch. “I got excited.”
“Give me a second to get this faucet pinched off.” Rhino pulled his shotgun over and pumped it one-handed. “Track it down. I’ll bring up the rear and cover us.”
Rhino was one tough motherfucker. For a moment, I almost asked him if his dad had served during World War II in a special unit before deciding against it.
Kimpton came stumbling back, covered in drywall dust, and from the way his vest was shredded the only reason the werewolf hadn’t flayed him to the bone was the flak had slowed the claws down. But he looked like that hit had rung his bell.
“You okay?” I shouted.
“I’m fine.” He dropped the mag of regular ammo from his Colt and pulled a twenty-rounder from his back pocket that had a stripe of silver paint on it. With silver-plated bullets loaded, Kimpton watched the walls in case the werewolf decided to make another sudden entrance.
My squad moved their way, stepping over blood fiend bodies. “I think that was our missing college student.”
“Shit,” Lizz spat. “Nicole didn’t maul anybody last month during the full moon. What if it was because the hag managed to keep her caged in here somehow?”
The whole time we’d been looking for her, she might have been with the hag the entire time? And had she changed on command during the middle of the day when we’d broken in? The prospect was scary. If a hag could exert that much influence over a newly created werewolf from her prison, then there was no telling what she could do once she was free.
“Don’t borrow no trouble,” Justin muttered as he looked around the room. The werewolf had made one hell of a disappearing act. “Stick to the mission. Take out the hag.”
He was right. With silver, we could kill a werewolf. The hag was the real threat.
“Melanie, Tom, stay right next to Rhino. The rest of you on me. Let’s go,” I ordered automatically. Leroy outranked me, but he was a sharp guy who knew he was an outsider while the rest of us were used to working together. He wasn’t about to mess with that dynamic.
Justin took point this time. The werewolf had burst through from a storage room, which was empty now. On the other side was a long hall. We quickly moved down to where there was a door marked PRIVATE. Justin kicked the flimsy interior door in, and I swept in after, gun up and ready to fire. It was dark inside, so I blinked hard and when my eyes opened, they were the glowing eyes of the nagualii.
This had to be the accountant’s office. There was a cluttered desk with an electronic typewriter on it. There were graphs and numbers on the wall, none of which made any sense to me. In the corner was one of those fake plastic plants that were all the rage. It looked like a peace lily. On the desk there was a picture of the accountant, his wife, and three daughters. I remembered him hitting on Melanie. Asshole. Cute kids, though. However, there was no sign of the werewolf.
I turned back to tell the others that, and Justin jumped when he saw my eyes. “Shit!”
“Clear. No werewolf. Sorry.”
“Naw, we still cool. That cat-eye thing is just some freaky shit, is all.”
Lizz, being the smart one, walked in and flipped the light switch on.
Something strange caught my eye. There was a map of the area on the wall, and several locations had been circled in red marker. Inside one of them was the broadcasting station near the Hollywood sign where I’d talked to Tezcatlipoca. I bet if we checked those other spots, we’d find traces of other human sacrifices, probably covered up by Agent Orwig.
“Check this out.” Lizz had picked up what appeared to be an actual stone tablet off a shelf. “What language is that?”
I glanced over. “Nahatl . . . Put that down!” The last thing I needed was somebody on my team trying to read bad magic.
Leroy walked to the far wall and looked at it curiously. His head tilted sideways and he frowned. “There’s a seam.” He ran one hand over it. “This isn’t right. This is a secret door. There’s probably a hidden latch mechanism somewhere in here. Check the filing cabinets.”
Justin smashed a hole in the wood paneling with the pry bar.
“Or that works too.”
The wall smoothly slid open to reveal a passageway—brick, pitch black, and sloping downward. Now that certainly hadn’t been on the old blueprints. “Where do you think that goes?”
“Bet you a dollar it leads to the hag,” Lizz said.
“Not taking that bet . . . It bends to the left. I can’t see where it goes,” Justin reported.
“Want to toss in a grenade?” Kimpton asked hopefully.
“No,” I answered instantly. “There might be hostages or something back there. What if the hag made a feeding pit, like vampires do?”
“Good point,” Kimpton said. “That was the best way to handle tunnels in Vietnam, though.”
“How you wanna to do this?” Justin asked.
“I’ll take point,” I told him. He grunted and moved to the side as I pulled out a flashlight. I had my father’s eyes, but the rest of the team was out of luck. Either the hag had been too cheap to install lighting in this part or, more likely, the things that frequented this part didn’t need lights to see in the dark.
After the bend, there was a fork in the tunnel. One fork went down, while the other was back level with the dance floor. From the fresh blood smear on the wall, that was how the werewolf had come at us before, and that was probably Rhino’s blood.
“Which way?” Lizz asked.
“Down,” Leroy and I said at the same time, because we were both feeling the same thing. The hag would be at the bottom of this.
I listened to make sure that Rhino, Melanie, and Tom were still behind us, and, satisfied they were, kept going down. I didn’t know how the hell Rhino was still on his feet.
Shining the light around the corner of the dark hallway, I could see it went down farther before making another left. We were on a downward spiral. It was brick-and-mortar construction, and for some reason I guessed 1930s, like a Prohibition era bootlegger tunnel, but I really had no idea and it could have been built last year. There were cobwebs above, but the floor was surprisingly free of them. It was clear that something came through here quite a bit, since I could see the worn path through the dust.
As we kept corkscrewing into the ground, I came across a prison cell. It was a small room, with heavy steel bars for a door, and it stank of werewolf. There were several sets of shackles on the wall.
“She was going to use this werewolf to create more,” Leroy said.
I didn’t like cunning monsters. Blood-fiend hunger, werewolf fury, those were predictable. A monster who could plan, anticipate human responses, and have contingencies was a terrifying prospect. I don’t know a single monster hunter out there who had ever gone toe to toe with a high-ranking Fey solo and survived. I’m sure they were out there but if anyone had succeeded, they were awfully quiet about it. For good reason too, since Fey Courts were notoriously vengeful things.
Tom made it around the corner to join us, with Rhino leaning on him for support. Our team leader didn’t look good, but he was too stoic to actually show any pain. Melanie was walking backward behind them, ready to mow down anything that was following us.
“This thing’s breeding werewolves?” Tom asked, having apparently overheard us.
“Yeah . . . she’s turning innocents into killers. This is the evil you’ve been fighting against all these years, and you never even knew it,” Lizz said. “I bet you never imagined anything like this when you started sticking pins in a map, huh?”
“Not even close,” Tom muttered. “Let’s finish this.”
A bit past the steel bars was a man lying facedown on the floor. I approached carefully, and as I did so, he moaned. The rest of my team got ready to shoot just in case it was a trap. I rolled him over with my boot and shined my flashlight in his face. It was the accountant Melanie had flirted with when we’d scouted this place. He coughed up a bunch of blood. I pointed my flashlight down . . . the damage was horrendous. His stomach had been pulled open and his guts were hanging out. There were clear bite marks all over him. He was dying but wasn’t quite dead yet. If he survived, we’d have another werewolf on our hands. That would not do.
“She said she’d protect me,” the man whispered hoarsely. “The Mistress said she’d protect me from her pets.”
“Bitch done lied to you,” Lizz said.
I didn’t feel pity for him, not in the least. He knew what he’d been working for, even if he had lied to himself about it. Magical befuddlement only works for a time, and after that you’re sticking around because you want to. You don’t work around this level of evil and remain ignorant of it for long. Then I thought of the map and tablet in his office.
“You weren’t just serving as her accountant. You were her priest.”
“She is divine.”
Leveling my pistol at his forehead, I said, “Do not sup with the Fey.” I had nothing for him, but I did feel a momentary twinge of sadness for the man’s family before I pulled the trigger.
Over the ringing in my ears I could make out the growl of something big and scary. The werewolf was around here somewhere, stalking us. A slight shiver of fear crawled up my spine. I hate being the hunted.
“That’s coming from below,” Justin said.
Nicole knew where we were and since none of us had planned on the werewolf being here in the club, nobody had thought to bring wolfsbane with us. Even with the powerful aromas wafting throughout the club, she could track us easily. Their noses were supersensitive, far better than mine was, and astronomically better than a human’s. Werewolves were stronger, faster, and tougher than nagualii were as well. Life just isn’t fair sometimes.
The werewolf of Lake Arrowhead had had a god complex and been relatively easy to kill. For all her being new, this one seemed sneakier. She had already ambushed us once and was clearly circling around somewhere, preparing to get us a second time. A clever werewolf was worse than a psychotic one.
Moving farther down, my stomach felt a little queasy. Even over the stench of the werewolf I could feel a difference here. Out on the dance floor of the disco hall it had been filled with the smells and feeling of the living. Here? Not so much. There was something deeply and profoundly wrong here. Shaking my head, I tried to get a grasp of just what my gut was warning me about. My head swam and my mouth grew dry.
I remembered feeling like this once before, but it had been a long time ago, at the orphanage in Mexico. There was the influence of a higher power here, and it was the opposite of a sanctified place. The nagualii was pushing hard to take over, knowing my control was slipping. I needed to breathe, to relax.
“Are you okay, Chloe?” Justin asked, as he sensed the change. He seemed to be doing fine, as was everybody else I could see. Whoever had constructed this dimensional prison had made it so that if any unnatural thing like me drew near, it would be incapacitated. Or worse, changed.
“I’ll be fine.” I gritted my teeth and carried on.
The corkscrew tunnel opened into another room, only this one wasn’t made of bricks. They were great big stones, and every one of them appeared to be intricately carved. The room was big enough that my flashlight couldn’t reach the back wall, so I waited for Rhino and the others to catch up. Once the gang was all here, we went through.
In the center of the room was a rectangular altar, just big enough to hold a human body, which I was positive wasn’t a coincidence. On the other side of the altar from us was an ancient stone statue of a being I recognized.
“Oh shit.”
“That looks Aztec,” Leroy said as he shined his light on the squat, bat-headed thing, with its wings spread wide.
“It’s not. That’s Camazotz, the Mayan death bat. Worshipped by Mayans. The Court of Feathers doesn’t give a shit who worships them, or what. But the names are important.”
“Another relative of yours?” Justin asked.
I tried not to take that as an insult. “No, but I bet the hag is related to him. This place is set up to honor a descendant of Camazotz’s line.”
“What’s Camazotz’s deal, anyway?”
“He’s a lord of night, death, and sacrifice.”
“Ohhh . . . ” Justin said slowly. “Did you guys ever think about having any pleasant deities?”
“Yeah. When I converted to Judaism.”
The werewolf moved in the shadows behind the statue, growling.
“There she is.”
Every gun swung that direction, but Nicole was merely a distraction.
The hag had already had time to use her to infect more werewolves. Four more of them, in fact, and they all came flying at us from the shadows, blurs of hair and teeth.
“Motherfu—” Lizz started but it quickly turned into a scream of pain as a werewolf struck.
We all started shooting, only this time we had loaded silver.
Swinging flashlights and muzzle flashes created an effect similar to the disco ball and strobes above.
“Lizz!” It was like the werewolf had instinctively picked out the smallest and weakest from the herd to attack. Except the repeated boom of her gun told me she hadn’t died, and the werewolf yelped as she took a piece out of it.
After the smallest, instinct said target the wounded, and one werewolf almost made it to Rhino. He lifted his shotgun one-handed, and put 12-gauge silver buckshot pellets right through its open mouth to blow out the back of its skull.
Had it been five experienced werewolves, we all would’ve been dead in seconds. But with these four new creations—and this was probably their very first time changed—we had a slim chance.
I looked back in time to see a sleek werewolf shrugging off a whole bunch of bullets as it leapt over the statue of Camazotz, claws extended right for my face. I yanked the trigger on my Galil, but the werewolf plowed straight into me, knocking my rifle away. We both came up superfast, and it was only by my inhuman reflexes I avoided its tearing claws. It was so close I went for my knife instead of my handgun.
When my fingers landed on the Black Heart of Suffering, the bone was cold as ice, and when I drew it and slashed, instead of splitting werewolf throat, the magic blade cut the world in two.