Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) by Joseph Nassise
Authors: Joseph Nassise
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some time ago; the earth along the sides was dried and cracked, though it was hard to tell that at first under the globe’s red light.
“So where is he?” Rivera asked.
I didn’t hear Perkins’s reply; my attention was caught by the smell of freshly turned earth that was wafting out of the pit.
That’s not right , I thought. Dried earth that hasn’t been turned in months shouldn’t smell like that.
I triggered my ghostsight … and was nearly knocked off my feet from the flood of hatred shooting up from the depths of that hole, like a river of emotion thundering over the spot where I stood, bashing and battering me in its current. I held my ground and peered through the emotion, trying to see where it was coming from.
There was a shape down there, just beneath the surface of the earth.
A human shape …
“Guys, you might want to take a look…”
That was as far as I got.
Something exploded out of the earth at the bottom of the pit and launched itself upward, soaring up toward the ceiling. Instinct screamed in the back of my mind, and I threw myself out of the way, so the claws that were supposed to tear my face off barely managed to nick my shirt instead. I hit the floor hard, my back slamming into the cold concrete, but that didn’t stop me from crab-walking backward in an effort to put as much distance between myself and the thing that had just tried to kill me as possible.
Which was why I was in a perfect position to see the whatever-it-was resolve itself into the image of a man, hovering just beneath the ceiling and staring down at us all with an expression of savage hunger and delight.
He was a Caucasian man in his midthirties, with eyes as black as coal surrounding pinpoints of red staring out of a lean, hard face missing its nose. In its place was a rotting hole, as if some savage animal had torn the appendage away and the wound had been left to fester on its own. He was dressed in the tattered remains of an orange prison uniform sans shoes. Even with the change in his appearance, he was still recognizable.
Wagner.
What the fuck?
I lay on the ground, stunned by what I was seeing. It hadn’t been that long ago that I’d seen another creature like this one in the swamps of New Orleans, a creature named Blackburn that had taken a memory in exchange for information. I had thought him to be unique, and yet here I was looking at another of his kind, if you could call it that. If he had chosen that moment to attack I would have been a goner; my brain just couldn’t wrap itself around what it was seeing.
Grady, however, didn’t have that problem. He brought his gun up in the fastest draw I’ve ever seen, pulling the trigger and firing twice in the space of what felt like only the briefest second.
Unfortunately, he might as well have been throwing rocks.
Wagner jinked to one side, letting the bullets zip past him without even sparing them a glance. I remembered how Blackburn had seemed to cross the floor at Pointe du Lac in the blink of an eye and shuddered at the speed of these creatures.
All Grady had managed to do was catch Wagner’s attention.
“I’m going to enjoy feasting on you,” the fiend said in a voice as cold as winter and then dove forward with hands and claws extended.
Grady didn’t bother firing again; he just stood there, unmoving.
I opened my mouth to scream his name, knowing even as I did so that at the speed Wagner was moving he was going to be on top of Grady before I had the chance to get the sound out of my mouth, but I had forgotten that we weren’t the only two people in the room.
A blur of motion that I barely identified as Ilyana shot across the room and intercepted Wagner before he could reach Grady, slamming into him and sending him pinwheeling backward to crash into the wall behind him.
The blow would have been enough to shake most preternaturals, never mind a normal man, but Wagner barely seemed to notice it. He came surging back across the space that
“So where is he?” Rivera asked.
I didn’t hear Perkins’s reply; my attention was caught by the smell of freshly turned earth that was wafting out of the pit.
That’s not right , I thought. Dried earth that hasn’t been turned in months shouldn’t smell like that.
I triggered my ghostsight … and was nearly knocked off my feet from the flood of hatred shooting up from the depths of that hole, like a river of emotion thundering over the spot where I stood, bashing and battering me in its current. I held my ground and peered through the emotion, trying to see where it was coming from.
There was a shape down there, just beneath the surface of the earth.
A human shape …
“Guys, you might want to take a look…”
That was as far as I got.
Something exploded out of the earth at the bottom of the pit and launched itself upward, soaring up toward the ceiling. Instinct screamed in the back of my mind, and I threw myself out of the way, so the claws that were supposed to tear my face off barely managed to nick my shirt instead. I hit the floor hard, my back slamming into the cold concrete, but that didn’t stop me from crab-walking backward in an effort to put as much distance between myself and the thing that had just tried to kill me as possible.
Which was why I was in a perfect position to see the whatever-it-was resolve itself into the image of a man, hovering just beneath the ceiling and staring down at us all with an expression of savage hunger and delight.
He was a Caucasian man in his midthirties, with eyes as black as coal surrounding pinpoints of red staring out of a lean, hard face missing its nose. In its place was a rotting hole, as if some savage animal had torn the appendage away and the wound had been left to fester on its own. He was dressed in the tattered remains of an orange prison uniform sans shoes. Even with the change in his appearance, he was still recognizable.
Wagner.
What the fuck?
I lay on the ground, stunned by what I was seeing. It hadn’t been that long ago that I’d seen another creature like this one in the swamps of New Orleans, a creature named Blackburn that had taken a memory in exchange for information. I had thought him to be unique, and yet here I was looking at another of his kind, if you could call it that. If he had chosen that moment to attack I would have been a goner; my brain just couldn’t wrap itself around what it was seeing.
Grady, however, didn’t have that problem. He brought his gun up in the fastest draw I’ve ever seen, pulling the trigger and firing twice in the space of what felt like only the briefest second.
Unfortunately, he might as well have been throwing rocks.
Wagner jinked to one side, letting the bullets zip past him without even sparing them a glance. I remembered how Blackburn had seemed to cross the floor at Pointe du Lac in the blink of an eye and shuddered at the speed of these creatures.
All Grady had managed to do was catch Wagner’s attention.
“I’m going to enjoy feasting on you,” the fiend said in a voice as cold as winter and then dove forward with hands and claws extended.
Grady didn’t bother firing again; he just stood there, unmoving.
I opened my mouth to scream his name, knowing even as I did so that at the speed Wagner was moving he was going to be on top of Grady before I had the chance to get the sound out of my mouth, but I had forgotten that we weren’t the only two people in the room.
A blur of motion that I barely identified as Ilyana shot across the room and intercepted Wagner before he could reach Grady, slamming into him and sending him pinwheeling backward to crash into the wall behind him.
The blow would have been enough to shake most preternaturals, never mind a normal man, but Wagner barely seemed to notice it. He came surging back across the space that
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