Detroit Kiss E-Book

Rhys Ford

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

For Javi Navarro, Detroit will become another blood-splattered city in his rearview mirror after he puts its dead back into the ground. Expecting an easy hunting job, Javi instead finds a kiss of ancient vampires on the hunt for a descendant of their long-dead creator.    Reclusive Ciarnan Mac Gerailt abandoned his family legacy of blood and death magic after it nearly destroyed him. Unfortunately for Ciarnan, the Motor City can only be saved if he resumes his dark arts and joins forces with Javi Navarro, the hunter who brought the vampire apocalypse—and hope for the future—straight to Ciarnan's front door. Previously published as "Legacy of Blood and Death" in the anthology Creature Feature 2

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Epilogue

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About the Author

By Rhys Ford

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Copyright

Detroit Kiss

By Rhys Ford

For Javi Navarro, Detroit will become another blood-splattered city in his rearview mirror after he puts its dead back into the ground. Expecting an easy hunting job, Javi instead finds a kiss of ancient vampires on the hunt for a descendant of their long-dead creator.

Reclusive Ciarnan Mac Gerailt abandoned his family legacy of blood and death magic after it nearly destroyed him. Unfortunately for Ciarnan, the Motor City can only be saved if he resumes his dark arts and joins forces with Javi Navarro, the hunter who brought the vampire apocalypse—and hope for the future—straight to Ciarnan’s front door.

One

IT WAS a tiny noise at first. Deliberate. Slow. So very different from the noises they’d heard over the time since their master and his enemy fell. Nothing like the scrabble of rats or the soft tread of a lost pet who’d somehow found its way into the sewers and happened upon their dark, hungry tomb.

Those sounds came with the erratic, quick beat of a heart on edge.

These tickles of echoes brought with them showers of dust and crumbling plaster.

And more importantly, the dark, heavy schlub of sweet human blood coursing through strong, vibrant hearts.

It was the promise of nectar and life. The revenants edged closer to one another, crossing through long-held territories in their underground prison. They crawled over the remains of the mages who’d died battling one another—one defending his right to dominate the humans within his grasp, while the other came to serve justice and retribution to the man who’d brought Detroit nearly to the brink of ruin.

There’d been many more of their brethren then. Twelve in each kiss, and twelve of those—a kiss of kisses—but one by one they’d fallen, dying of hunger or under their death-siblings’ teeth when the hunger ate away their control. The battle between life and death magic broke the walls, sealing them all in, and in their dying breaths, the mages continued to fight, leaving behind a pocket of ravenous hunters with nothing to slake their thirst besides the occasional stray animal and the remains of the mages themselves.

Divided, the vampires feasted on the two corpses, absorbing their meat and drawing on the magic from the mages’ flesh. Their hunger changed and they turned on one another, consuming the weaker who’d eaten off of the same body, until one long-ago day, only a full kiss remained. Six for each body—six hungry for the blood of the mage they’d consumed.

Boiled down to their most primal essence, the kiss slept, feeding only when something small came into the death mage’s old quarters, until one day the sounds above them changed—growing louder as the heartbeats came nearer—and they woke, gathering to where the swoosh-thump of hot blood resonated through the brick. As they packed in tight, their hunger grew to a fever pitch, and the kiss clung to the wall, their nails digging into the crumbling mortar all while on the other side, the sounds echoed and clanged.

Soon after the scent of sweet, hot human blood spilled into their tomb, a chunk of brick fell. It hit and bounced down into the space, and a shaft of light broke through the darkness. Scrambling to the ray, the revenants hunkered down, snuggling up as close to the rocky face as they could.

Then waited.

LIEUTENANT FERGAL Mulroney pulled into what looked like a battlefield after all of the armies were gone. Parts of the street were pristine and gleaming, virile spears of prosperity set in the ruins of an embattled city. What gave the area a war zone feel were the herds of abandoned construction trucks corralled in by a couple of weary, battered cop cars. A light wind picked at streamers of yellow and red tape warning pedestrians away from an innocuous brick building set between an ancient department store gleaming with gentrification and a dry laundry business boarded up with plywood announcing their closure, and Mulroney didn’t need a paranormal sciences degree to know there was a vampire hunter on the prowl.

Also, he recognized the vintage black 1970 Challenger parked in front of the department store, its gleaming sleek body screaming bad-ass and dangerous—much like the hunter who owned it.

Javi Navarro spotted him as soon as Mulroney parked. The Hispanic man waved at Mulroney to acknowledge him, then broke off the conversation he’d been having with one of the cops lounging by a Caterpillar backhoe. Well built and compact, Navarro was a few inches shorter and leaner than Mulroney, but the weight of being a bounty hunter hung on him like a cloak. The man hurried down the sidewalk as Mulroney closed his car door, and he tensed, unsure if Navarro was going to greet him or challenge him for being on the scene.

“Hey, Mulroney!” Navarro hailed him, a bright white smile breaking over his face. “Man, glad you’re here. This shit is gone to hell in a handbasket woven by a cat who didn’t give a shit.”

“Never like to miss an invite to this kind of party. Almost as if they pay me not to miss the fun.” Mulroney shook the bounty hunter’s outstretched hand. “Good to see you, Navarro.”

“Ah, make it Javi. I’m going to be squatting in your city for a bit. Might as well be friendly. Hey, nice car.” Javi whistled as he walked down the length of the new Camaro Enforcer the city issued to its detectives. “I went old-school myself.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Mulroney chuckled. “You’re enforcing stereotypes, you know. Remember that old show? The whole vintage ride and a hunter. People are going to talk.”

“I saw a few of those. It was like they went out of their way to get everything wrong.” Javi scoffed. “Vampires walking around, holding jobs and shit. If that were true, it’d make my life a hell of a lot easier and I could focus on the important crap like why the hell there’s a werewolf pack operating a deep-sea fishing company in Morro Bay.”

“Car was hot, though,” Mulroney pointed out.

“Shit, who the hell in their right mind would pick an Impala?” The other hunter spat in mock disgust. “They did it for the back seat, swear to God. That Chevy’s rear end is shit, slides all over the place, but the back seat is big enough to camp in.”

“Saves on hotel costs,” he replied with a smirk, and Javi grinned back.

“Didn’t know you were that cheap you can’t afford even paying by the hour,” the man teased, and Mulroney flipped him off with a playful one-fingered salute. “’Course if you can’t last an hour—”

“Okay, now you’re just wrong,” Mulroney protested lightly, falling into step with Navarro as they headed to the front of the building. “Never ever disparage how long a man can last. That’s about as bad as talking shit about his mother.”

“Fair enough.” Javi threw his hands up in quick surrender. “Just saying, sometimes old-school is best. But yeah, this thing here? It’s a shit job.”

Mulroney paused and tagged the other man’s shoulder, bringing Javi up short. “I appreciate you coming here. I know you were nearby, but you guys aren’t cheap and the city’s strapped for cash. Hell, it’s always strapped for cash, but we aren’t prepped for this kind of thing. Not on this scale.”

“Dude, from what I was told, it was a massacre. I thinkit’s going to take an army to take this shit out.” The hunter nodded toward the ticker-tape parade of crime scene tags attached to the building’s front door. “I haven’t gone in yet. Nobody out here wants to go down there, and you know it’s bad if Detroit patrol cops won’t darken a door.”

“Great,” Mulroney drawled. “Well, it’s been a long time since I wore a uniform, so I guess I better go show these guys how it’s done.”

FROM WHAT the construction guy said over the phone, Javi was prepared for a kill site like no other, but nothing could have prepared him for what they walked in on. The stench of vampire clung to the structure, and beside him, Mulroney took everything in, drinking up the deconstructed walls. Most lieutenants rode a desk, but not Mulroney, and it showed as he moved easily around the torn-up area. He was definitely someone who was out on Detroit’s mean streets, taking the hits every day, determined to make it back home to his wife and kids every night and ensuring every other cop in Detroit had the same chance too. A floodlight dangling from a support beam swung slowly on its long cord, catching on the cop’s shoulder as they went by.

“Shit, you can smell them. It’s like rotten death.” Mulroney whistled under his breath. “Damn. It’s like gross central. Where’s the kill spot? In the kitchen?”

“Nah, looked like this place used to have a back room during Prohibition. Probably, the owners wanted to make it this cool hip speakeasy thing.” Javi motioned to a bookcase swung away from a long wall. The gap let them see a peek of the dingy room hidden behind the hinged furniture. “Would have worked too—”

“If it wasn’t for those pesky meddling ticks.” Mulroney flashed him a smile, his rugged worn-in face warming with humor. From the wrinkles on the guy’s nose, Javi guessed the cop figured out where the smell was coming from. Pointing to the bookcase, he quirked up one eyebrow. “In there, then?”

“Yeah, in there.” Javi took a deep breath. “Let’s gird our loins and all that shit.”

The bookcase moved easily and the putrid rank grew stronger. They both gagged, choking on the roil of stench coming from a fissure in the floor. Barely a foot and a half wide, the steep of a vampire lair was only tempered by one thing—the ocean of tacky, drying blood covering most of the speakeasy’s cracked floor.

“Holy crap.” Mulroney sounded as shocked as Javi felt. “Do they know how many ticks were here? Sorry, revenants. Vampires. I was told by brass that tick is offensive.”

“Only if you’re a tick. So far none of them I’ve brought down has complained. Haven’t gotten a clue about the numbers. Someone’s going to over the tapes but—mostly it’s blurs and watching the construction crew die. Not for the weak-stomached.” Javi shrugged. “I’m more worried about how strong they are. And if we—pretty much me and you guys—can take them out. More than one, that’s for sure. Hell, how many could have been down there?”

“And what if there’s more waiting?” Mulroney quipped.

“That’s why we’re all carrying guns, Mulroney,” Javi teased.

A heavily muscled man in heavy gear worked at the fissure with a jackhammer while a few others stood by with weapons, muzzles aimed at the dark slash in the concrete. It took them a good fifteen minutes to break through the floor. Given the carnage and the responding officers’ reluctance to cross the threshold, they tried to be careful, not wanting to disturb the vampires’ lair.

Once the fissure was wide enough for them to look down into the cavern, Javi dropped in one of the crew’s shock-resistant lanterns and they poked their heads in, Javi’s shotgun at the ready in case of a surprise attack.

The room was empty of revenants, but the dusky husks of extinguished vampires littered the floor and a messy scatter of bones lay on top of the remains, their long shanks broken apart and gnawed on as if something sucked out the marrow from within.

“Hell,” Mulroney whispered, pointing at the skulls lying a few feet apart from each other. “Who the fuck do you suppose those guys were?”

“Mages,” Javi replied. “Look on the ground. Well, where you can see the floor. Those are casting runes—death magic. Holy shit, Detroit. A speakeasy. That’s what? A hundred years, maybe a little bit more?”

“Yeah,” Mulroney agreed. “About that. Why?”

“Two men.” It was a shock. What he saw was something he thought no one would ever find. Stumbling across the site of what he suspected was one of the most historic events in paranormal history was mind-blowing. “Mages, probably both of them. Fuck, Mulroney. Do you know what we’ve found?”

“No fucking clue, man. That’s why I asked you.” The lieutenant snorted. “I’m a cop. I deal with simple things like drive-by shootings and murders. Vampires, mages, and everything else haven’t been on my radar much. I leave that kind of shit to guys like you who ride in on their black horses and woo our women.”

“Don’t like women so, guess you’re safe on that account,” Javi shot back. “What your guys found here is… like the Holy Grail and the Arc of the Covenant for hunters, man. Or maybe Amelia Earhart.” Javi exhaled hard, his heart pounding with excitement. “I think we’ve found their last battle. Shit, it all adds up. Two bodies, vampires, and look over there! That’s a staff, and I bet you it’s rowan. Something a life mage would carry. Dude, this has got to be it. You’re going to have historians squatting here for years if I’m right.”

“You want to let me in on the joke here, Indy?” Mulroney poked at Javi’s side. “I’ve got no clue what you’re talking about.

“Mierda, we have found the mother lode of mage lore. The final battleground of two of the most powerful mages of their generation—John Roget and The Mac Gerailt.”

THE CHECKBOARD Diner’s pancakes were as awesome as the street cops promised, and they’d gone through two stacks each before coming up for air. Mulroney patted his belly, probably glad the maple syrup was hot and real, a sweet balm to wash away the vampire stench resting in his nostril hairs. Picking at his bacon, Javi chewed slowly, then refilled their coffee cups, leaving a little room for cream.

It was late. They’d taken some time to examine the room and its contents, trying to not step on the mages’ remains, but the bones were too tossed about, and other than removing the skulls for burial, it was a lost cause to gather up the skeletons.

Not like they could tell which broken shard belonged to which mage.

“So let me get this straight—because I’m not up on the whole mages and other stuff. I can ID the monsters. I just don’t know what or who made them,” Mulroney said, after listening to the dump of lore Javi gave him while they’d waited for their food. “We’ve got one death mage and one life mage—”

“Death mage is the bad guy. Supposedly kidnapped people to kill so he could make vampires from them. Very bad man.”

“Why Detroit? Why not Chicago?”

“Probably because Detroit didn’t have the organized crime problem Chicago did back then, but it was pretty rich. A lot of money was coming up through bootlegging and manufacturing, but it wasn’t big enough for a large-scale outfit to move into,” Javi explained under the quiet rattle of utensils and conversation in the mostly empty diner. “There were some smaller families here, but not like Chi-town. That place was crawling with vermin. Easier to move things in and out of ports and roads there. Lots of traffic, and people don’t look too closely at things in a city. Or at least that’s what people thought. No one asked the guy. The Mac Gerailt was kind of a ‘shank now, undead later’ sort of dude.”

“But he was enough of a bad-ass that everyone knew about him?” Mulroney mused. “And this Roget, he decided he was going to take Mac Gerailt down?”

“Had to. No one scared The Mac Gerailt, and it didn’t look like he was stopping any time soon.” Javi stirred a packet of sugar into his coffee. “Mulroney, three hundred people went missing in Detroit in the span of a month at the height of this mage’s work. That was way back when there were Tommy guns and people said skiddle-dee-doo. We don’t get that kind of numbers now, and there’s gangs out there with long-range artillery. Mac Gerailt was an asshole and Roget drew the short straw. Still, no one knew where The Mac Gerailt’s lair was located, but after all of the murdering and revenant-making stopped, everyone figured Roget did the job. He just never came back.”

“So it sounds like we found them then,” he agreed. “But now what?”

There’d been little left in the room. A few pages ripped out of a journal and mostly mold-eaten books, too covered in furry black to be of any use, but the name Mac Gerailt was clearly embossed on a leather-bound ledger tucked into a crevice in a fallen bookshelf. A glint of gold on the floor turned out to be a signet ring, barely large enough for a man’s pinkie and embossed with an elaborate R. John Roget’s name was inscribed on the inside, enough evidence to confirm Javi’s suspicions.

“Roget’s family moved to Detroit after he went missing, but I don’t know a lot about them. Something about the widow wanting to find her husband’s body. Obviously she didn’t, but I don’t know if any of the family’s around. They’re going to have a hard time piecing him back together unless the coroner’s going to do it.” Javi shrugged. “The Mac Gerailt clan are over the pond, I think. They’ll probably kick up their own fuss about what’s down there. Brace yourself for a lot of battles between stuffy professors and rich assholes.”

“So the next question is, why would they leave? The vampires?” Mulroney gestured with a piece of bacon. “There were people around, but they ignored them. I mean, thank Gods for that, but makes it harder to hunt them down.”

“Vampires seek out their masters when they’re separated. Something about the blood pulling on them. Could be they’re being drawn to someone or something.” Javi sipped at his coffee, swallowing before continuing. “Could be even a relative with some untapped power is sitting someplace doing accounting. Right up until a couple of revenants break through his office window and tear out his throat. They need to feed. And usually it’s their master that feeds them.”

“The video showed the… what are they called? A kiss? A flock?”

“A kiss.”

“Well, the kiss broke. The damned things split up. A couple of blurs went one way, but most of them went in the opposite direction,” Mulroney pointed out. “What the hell is up with that?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Javi interjected, pulling the salt and pepper shaker out of the condiment well and placing them in front of Mulroney. “Suppose something happened to the vampires during the fight. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe Roget was strong enough to break Mac Gerailt’s spell and got them vamps to turn on him or something. Maybe some of the ticks actually are looking for Roget’s blood instead of Mac Gerailt’s. Or maybe they’d been wired to hunt down someone before the fight happened and they’ve gone off to do some murdering on their own.”

“So that means we’ve got to find… hell, whoever is related to both of those guys.” Mulroney whistled low and hard. “Dude, too many. We don’t even know… hell, where would we start?”

“We start by looking for mages. The vampires are probably going to hunt down the strongest link they’ve got to their master or his enemy. Kind of like a blood tie,” Javi explained, sliding the salt shaker over to Mulroney. “Usually, mages don’t have big families. Something about the magic cuts down on the swimmers or something. We track down if these guys had any great-grandkids and find the one most likely to become a tick Slurpee.”

“And then?”

“Then we see if they’ve got mojo. We might need a life mage to help take these vamps down.” The hunter frowned, turning the pepper shaker over, spilling a few grounds onto the table. “And more importantly, we’ve got to make extra sure there isn’t a death mage out there ready to take over great-granddaddy’s vampire army.”

Two

DETROIT WAS dying. Or at least trying to.

She’d been dying for a while now. Lots of things brought her to the brink. Everything from corruption to selling herself cheap, the lady’d done it. She’d done it all. Now the wrinkled, rattling carcass of her used-up body stood on the street corner of life hoping for that one last car to roll out of the darkness—hoping that one true Golden Trick would see her beauty and take her home.

There were a lot of people who weren’t quite ready to let Old Dame Detroit slip off gently into the night. Despite the decay and dissolution, pockets of resistance were growing—tiny hubs of humanity clinging like lichen and barnacles to the slumbering, aging behemoth whose bones were too brittle to hold up her own weight.

Evidence of the ragtag groundswell shone between the death shrouds the city’s caretakers pulled up around her. A massive gardening effort where a foundry once stood. A spot of brightly painted refurbished houses on a street more cracks than solid asphalt. A three-block-wide field with partially erect brick walls and chain-link fence holding Bob’s Chicken Output Consortium where, if he wanted, Javi could pick up his own twelve eggs for a dollar.

The smell and sound of the chicken ranch was overwhelming, powdery and bitter with an occasional storm of clacks and clatters more in tune with an arriving train than any fowl. Still, it was a sign of life on the old girl—a flush of young skin peeking out between the tired feathers of her plucked-thin boa.

Of course, he’d probably feel a hell of a lot more optimistic about the Old Broad if he wasn’t cruising through her deserted, seemingly war-torn streets looking for the undead.

But if he was going to go hunting for bloodthirsty rabbit during duck season, he needed to know who else was out there in the field with him.

“So, let’s go find out what Fong is up to.” His phone wasn’t happy about searching through business listings in Detroit. Javi wasn’t all that thrilled either, since it seemed like the old Cantonese moved around more than a popcorn kernel in a pan of hot oil. After getting the fifth address hit, Javi growled, “Would you fucking stay in one place, you sneaky bastard? And fuck me hard and call me a squeegee. You were sitting right on top of them.”

Fong’s seemingly permanent address was less than three blocks away from where the legendary mages battled themselves to extinction and a group of innocent construction workers became take-out sushi all because they broke through one little wall.

The Challenger rumbled throatily as he drove slowly through the beaten-down neighborhood, its engine’s growl echoing off brick and cement. His car glided over the rough street, its suspension taking the hit for the road’s uneven surface. He’d paid a lot to upgrade its undercarriage, and during times when the road was pocked like a stressed-out teenager’s face, Javi was glad he’d eaten vegetable ramen for three months to pay for it. The 1970 Dodge was his biggest expense, but since he spent more time in it than most people did in their own houses, he figured it was a good trade-off.