Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 10), page 1
REAPER
QUINCY HARKER, DEMON HUNTER
BOOK TEN
JOHN G. HARTNESS
Dedicated to Chuck Palahniuk, for obvious reasons
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Friends of Falstaff
1
You take me to the nicest places, sweetheart,” I said as I pulled the hood of my raincoat over my head. One of the benefits to growing up in the earlier parts of the twentieth century, I actually own a raincoat designed to keep water off me, not just a hoodie that gets soaked in the lightest drizzle. This one was a weatherbeaten old London Fog trench with a hood that I’d picked up in a thrift shop because it reminded me of one I had back in World War II, before my life imploded and I went batshit crazy. Admittedly, what I was looking at on the streets of Charlotte wasn’t any less nuts than some of the things I saw in mid-century Europe.
I was standing on the edge of a sand trap next to a pond on an exclusive golf club in south Charlotte, looking at a naked dead guy curled up in the fetal position. A blue folding tent kept the rain from washing away any evidence that might have remained, but it felt an awful lot like a losing proposition. It was closer to sunup than sundown, and the body had been discovered by a pair of amorous teenagers several hours before. The ground was soaked, and the sand trap was more mud trap than anything, thanks to the rain rolling in mid-afternoon. According to the weather app on my phone, it wasn’t letting up for another day at least. Any physical evidence would have to be under the body to be of any use. “Who is it, and why are we here? This looks a lot more like a CMPD thing than ours.”
“It would be, if this was the first body to be discovered like this. And if there was any obvious cause of death. Look at him, Harker, he’s in perfect condition. Too perfect.” The lean Black woman crouching by the body was Department of Homeland Security Deputy Director Rebecca Gail Flynn, who also happened to be my fiancée. Or girlfriend, depending on how annoyed she was with me about not setting a date for our wedding on any given day.
“So he’s healthy. Except for the being dead part,” I said. “What makes this ours?”
Becks looked at me like I was being intentionally obtuse, which I certainly wasn’t. I can be obtuse without even trying, like tonight. “This is the fourth mysterious corpse to appear in the last six weeks. Every one of the victims has been in peak physical condition. In the other cases, no cause of death could be determined, even with an autopsy. That doesn’t seem weird to you? Four men in perfect health found naked and dead scattered around one city?”
Okay, that was pretty odd. I opened my Sight to get a look at things in the supernatural spectrum, and everything became perfectly clear. And completely opaque at the same time. I knew why this guy looked like there was nothing wrong with him, and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume the other victims were similar. But that spawned a larger question. Who was murdering lycanthropes and leaving their bodies out in the open for anyone to find?
An hour and a half later, we were in dry clothes sitting in the living room of our apartment, my Uncle Luke relaxing in an armchair with my cat purring in his lap. “Quincy, are you certain this man was a werewolf?”
“He was a were-something,” I replied, pouring a healthy slug of bourbon into a glass. It wouldn’t get me drunk, my metabolism is too supercharged for that, but the burn helped dash away the last of the night’s chill. “I can’t promise what type, but he was definitely a lycanthrope.”
“You can see if someone’s a shifter with your Sight?” Becks asked, coming out of the bedroom with a sleep kerchief tied around her hair. She looked adorable in flannel pajamas, but her expression was definitely one that brooked no nonsense. She petted Nameless, the cat, and perched on the arm of one of my sofas.
“Yeah, and if the other victims were lycanthropes, it explains why there were no visible injuries. Weres heal when they shift, even if they’re dead. So if he was killed as a wolf, or whatever he could turn into, and he shifted back, he’d look perfectly healthy. Assuming he wasn’t shot in the head or dismembered,” I said. “Some shit even magic can’t fix.”
“If we can get the other bodies, would you be able to tell if they were shifters, too?” Becks asked, holding out her hand for my glass. I handed it over and made myself another.
“Probably,” I said. “How long have they been dead? I’ve never looked at a were’s corpse with my Sight that’s been dead any significant amount of time, so I don’t know how long they retain their magic after death.”
“My source inside CMPD says this has been going on for about six weeks, but she didn’t feel comfortable calling me until this one.”
“You still have connections inside the police department?” Luke asked. I swear to God seeing him stroke the cat’s gray fur put me in the mind of Dr. Evil, and I kept waiting for him to hold a pinky up to his mouth and ask for a million dollars. Of course, he already had a million dollars, and way more, but that’s what happens when you live for centuries.
Oh yeah. Luke, or Lucas Card as he went by lately, was more famously known as Count Vlad Tepes, or just Dracula. My family tree is weird. I turned to see Becks’ response, since I’d been wondering the same thing. She left the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department on less-than-favorable terms after actions the cops took during the protests in the summer of 2020, and I was as surprised as Luke that she had an inside source.
“There are some women within the department, younger officers of color that I mentored when I was there. A few keep their ears to the ground for me and give me a heads up when something spooky comes across their radar.”
I raised an eyebrow. We worked for the Department of Homeland Security’s Paranormal Division, but that Division didn’t exist, as far as the public knew.
“Look, Harker, everybody in the department knew I was dealing with some weird shit before I left. So now if one of my ladies hears something that would have probably landed on my desk when I was there, they make sure I know about it.” She downed her purloined bourbon and rattled the ice cubes at me.
I took the glass and freshened up both our drinks, like the good bartender/boyfriend/magician I am. “Six weeks? Are the bodies still on ice?” I asked, handing Becks her glass and sitting at the far end of the sofa so I could face both Luke and her.
“One is. One was claimed by relatives, and the other was disposed of after it was unclaimed for thirty days,” she replied.
“Do we know where exactly it was buried?” Luke asked.
“We are not robbing graves,” I said, my voice hard. “I still get twitchy around shovels after that night outside Constantinople.”
“Istanbul,” Becks corrected.
“Not Constantinople?” I asked, the corner of my mouth twitching up.
“Don’t start,” she said.
“Quincy, you do not get ‘twitchy’ as you say, around shovels because of that unfortunate incident in Turkey. You get twitchy because you are afraid someone will ask you to perform manual labor,” Luke said.
He wasn’t wrong, exactly. But the whole Istanbul thing sucked. Luke had been hiding in a coffin in a small family cemetery on account of us being out too close to sunrise and not having time to get to a light-tight room. I was digging him up when a farmer thought I was there to do unspeakable things to his dead granny’s corpse. It took me the better part of four hours to pick all the birdshot out of my ass. Admittedly, I got off easier than the farmer. I think it took him six weeks for his arms to heal enough so he could wipe his own ass again.
“No matter the reason for Harker’s twitchiness, there’s no body to dig up. The remains were cremated and put into storage. Nothing to see there,” Becks said.
“Then I guess we look at the other dead guy,” I said, downing my drink and standing up. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Luke asked.
I peeled off my shirt in response and started walking toward the bedroom. “Unless you think he’s going to be any less dead after sunrise, I’m going to grab a couple hours sleep and go see a dead man about a fur coat in the morning.”
“I’ll get you in to examine the body, then I’ll work on finding out who claimed the other victim. If we can talk to his pack, we might get some insight into who killed him,” Becks said, following me into the bedroom and closing the door. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me, her soft flannel pajamas rubbing against my bare chest in delightful ways. “Tomorrow,” she whispered, then nipped at my earlobe.
“I shall return to my apartment. With the cat,” Luke called from the den. Becks and I fell laughing into the bed, where we didn’t get nearly enough sleep.
2
This wasn’t my first trip to a morgue, not by a long shot. But one of the biggest changes in my life since getting together with Becks and starting to work for official government agencies was that I no longer had to break into morgues to investigate weird shit. We just walked in the front door in broad daylight, showed our badges to the balding middle-aged drone at the front desk, and told him what we were there for.
We’d barely gotten uncomfortable in the molded plastic-and-steel chairs in the waiting room when a cheerful round Asian man in scrubs came through the double swinging doors and walked over to us. “Director Flynn?” he asked, walking over to me. I jerked my thumb at Becks, who stood and extended a hand to him.
“I’m Deputy Director Flynn,” she said, shaking his hand.
“I am so s-sorry,” the man said, a slight flush coloring his cheeks. “I’m Doctor Yang.”
Becks shook his hand and looked at me.
“It’s okay,” I said, standing up. “Happens all the time. On account of me being so much older. Quincy Harker,” I said, holding out my own hand.
Dr. Yang looked back and forth between us, confusion all over his round face. I am a lot older than Flynn, but I don’t look my age. When my powers kicked in as a young man, my aging slowed to a crawl. I’m over a century and a quarter old, but I look like I’m barely forty. Becks is in her late thirties, young for her position, but we look pretty much the same age. I try not to mention this too often, because my couch is uncomfortable and I really like sleeping with my fiancée.
“Um…okay,” Dr. Yang said, obviously wanting to get the conversation back onto more familiar footing. “Come on back. Alex said you were here about one of our John Does?” He turned and headed back through the double doors, probably as much to get out of the uncomfortable conversation I’d put us in as anything else.
“Yes,” Becks replied. Don’t annoy the coroner until we get the information we need, she said over our mental link. Ever since I used some of my blood to heal a mortal injury Flynn sustained on a case, we’d been tied together. We could communicate without speaking and sense each other’s presence and emotions over a huge distance, unless one of us took pains to close down the connection. Or unless someone severed it somehow, which generally ended very badly for whoever had that stupid idea. “We understand that he was brought in nude and with no apparent injuries.”
Yang held up one finger as we walked. “Sorry, I don’t like discussing specific cases in the public areas of the building. Some of our clerical staff are…not accustomed to some of the things I see in my work.”
“Got bitched at for making somebody’s executive assistant lose their lunch?” I asked with a smirk.
“More or less,” Yang said, pushing through another pair of swinging doors. I wondered for a moment why there were so few normal doors in the place, then remembered that most of their customers arrive on stretchers.
We followed the short man into the heart of the morgue, passing through one empty autopsy room and into a large room with tables in the center and dozens of drawers lining the walls. There must have been room for three dozen bodies in the place, and judging by the name placards on each drawer, most of the spots were occupied.
“That’s…a lot of dead people,” I said, looking around. And given the number of bodies I’ve dropped in my day, it takes a lot to impress me.
“You should have seen it during COVID,” Dr. Yang replied. Then he sighed. “No, you shouldn’t have. It was nothing I ever want to live through again.”
I could relate. The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t my first experience with overcrowded morgues and funeral homes, but I sincerely hoped it was my last. I’ve seen enough mass graves from all over the world to last me a lifetime. There’s a lot of good to be said for living a very long time, but having lived through the flu epidemic of 1918, the Holocaust, and Pol Pot’s killing fields, I knew the horrors that nature and mankind could inflict upon the species long before the first victim of the novel coronavirus got the sniffles. It doesn’t get any easier for having survived a pandemic before.
“Hopefully this spate of mysterious deaths won’t turn out to be contagious,” Flynn said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. It was a pretty clumsy attempt at condolence, but Yang seemed to appreciate it nonetheless.
“I don’t see how it could,” the doc replied, his cheeks reddening slightly as he looked at Flynn’s hand on his shoulder. “Since I couldn’t determine a cause of death at all.” He opened a drawer at chest height and slid a body out of a long metal roller tray. “There is nothing wrong with this man. No injuries I can see, either by visible exam or on x-ray. No illness of any kind, no organ damage discovered during autopsy. No poisons or drugs in his toxicology report, no alcohol in his system, not even anything out of the ordinary in his stomach contents. I can find no reason that this man shouldn’t be walking around in perfect health.”
“Except for the part where he’s dead,” I said. I stepped closer to the body and looked it over. He looked like a lot of the werewolves I’ve met—tall, muscular, a little hairier than most people, without a scar to be seen anywhere. He didn’t even have the little callous most people have on their index finger from holding a pen for years. He looked too young for a smallpox vaccine scar, which might have been the only thing he kept. A lot of weres still have scars from before they were turned, but if they were born shifters, the normal childhood bumps and scrapes didn’t even leave a mark.
I dropped into my Sight and examined him again. Yep, definitely a lycanthrope. There’s something in their aura that lingers long after death, a kind of greenish brown “woodsy” aura that marks them as creatures that wear multiple shapes. His was faint, but that was to be expected after nearly a month on the slab. With my Sight active, my other senses were more acute as well, and I could smell a faint hint of thick musky scent. This wasn’t just any shifter: this was a were-bear.
That put everything into a different light immediately. What the hell could do enough damage to a were-bear that it would die before being able to shift? Normal bears are big, strong, and way faster than they have any right to be, and the whole thing about them not being able to climb trees is abject bullshit, which I learned to my horror one afternoon in the Black Forest. But were-bears were stronger, faster, and even more massive, as they tended to shift into the Grizzly or Kodiak varieties. So, whatever had killed this guy, it had almost certainly killed a nearly half-ton beast with claws that could rip through sheet metal and enough power to rip a human in half.
This was…not good.
We spent another half hour pretending to examine the body before confiscating his personal effects, which consisted entirely of a necklace with an odd pendant that looked familiar but I couldn’t place right away. We bid Dr. Yang farewell, and after he pressed his card into Flynn’s hand and implored her to call him if she needed any more help, we stepped back out into the Carolina spring sunshine. I took off the hoodie I’d needed first thing in the morning and in the conscientiously cold morgue and followed Becks to her government-issued Suburban.
“Have you ever thought about driving around in something a little less ‘I’m a federal agent’?” I asked. “Besides, this thing has to get absolutely shit gas mileage.”
“The car came with the badge, and I don’t have to pay for maintenance, so I’m pretty good to look like a fed. Also, I am a federal agent, and with the engines we’ve got in our fleet, I get sixty miles to the gallon, so gas isn’t really an issue.”
“Wait, what?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat. “Are you telling me you’ve got a magic motor in your Suburban?”
“I’m not telling you anything other than it gets better gas mileage than your Honda. You don’t have clearance to know the details,” Becks said, cranking the SUV. I noticed it did run a lot quieter than most enormous parking spot hogs.
