Heather Graham Krewe of Hunters 38 book series. Book 3 Sacred Evil, Book 4 The Evil Inside. A secret government unit is formed under the oversight of Adam Harrison, famed paranormal investigator. The six members he's gathered know a little of the otherworldly - each has honed a psychic talent of their own.
Heather Graham Krewe of Hunters 38 book series. Book 3 Sacred Evil, Book 4 The Evil Inside. A secret government unit is formed under the oversight of Adam Harrison, famed paranormal investigator. The six members he's gathered know a little of the otherworldly - each has honed a psychic talent of their own.
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Here are the next 2 books in The Krewe of Hunters series.
Book 3 Sacred Evil
Prologue
Someone was following her.
Stalking her.
She’d heard the footsteps. Among the deserted streets and the canyons of tall buildings; the sound seemed to echo from everywhere.
The night was extremely dark, and, Ginger Rockford thought, you would have believed that the streets were lit by centuries-old gas lamps, as they’d supposedly been during the filming that day.
A hot afternoon had turned into a chilly, misty night, and a fog was rolling in from the river.
The area seemed ridiculously quiet—except for that sound she heard now and then, a click-click, like a footfall, and then a shuffling noise, as if her stalker dragged a foot.
Great. Chased through the streets by a gimp.
It was New York City, for God’s sake. Millions lived on this tiny island.
So where the hell were they all now?
Ginger turned around to look back in the direction from which she had come. She could still see the row of trailers on Whitehall Street; she had just left one. Sammy Vintner, fat-old-ex-cop studio guard, was still on duty, but she saw that he was on the phone.
He was the only living soul she saw.
There were markers where the tape had been that had held the crowd back during the day, separating the filmmakers from the plebs hoping to catch a glimpse of megastar Bobby Walden.
She cursed Bobby Walden. While she’d waited, believing that he was really going to call her, Bobby had surely been picked up by a big black limousine.
Bobby was a somebody. She was a nobody.
But at least Bobby had spoken to her. The female lead, Sherry Blanco, had almost knocked her over, and she hadn’t even apologized. Well, maybe Sherry would learn. Ginger had done a lot of studying up on actors and their careers. She estimated that Sherry Blanco had about three years left—she was nearly thirty-five, and it was starting to show. Sherry was pretty, but she couldn’t really act. Nor had she been known for any kindness to the young hopefuls with whom she had worked. Ginger hoped with her whole heart that she might be a rising star when Sherry was a burned-out has-been.
At least Angus Avery, the up-and-coming director, had noticed her. Okay, so his words weren’t every girl’s dream. “Perfect! I mean, damn, do you look the role of the immigrant prostitute, her dreams already vanquished!” That was how she had gotten to be the one on Bobby’s arm, and how she had managed to flirt with him.
And then he had said that they needed to hook up, and taken her phone number.
So she had sat in the trailer well past time to leave; Missy Everett and Jane Deaver—who had played the other two young prostitutes in the scene—had begged her to leave with them. Their day of extra-stardom was over. They should celebrate, and wonder if they’d wind up on the cutting-room floor.
She, like a fool, had refused to leave; she’d been waiting for Bobby. And she should have left. The set was a construction site. The ugly old building that had been there had been razed to the foundations and a few structural walls. There were rumors about the site; bad things had happened there. She didn’t really know what—she wasn’t into history. Maybe it had been an old burial ground. But it had been perfect for the set designers when they had installed their prefabricated backdrops and facades, and it had been right next to Blair House, a truly creepy old place. She hadn’t been spooked during the day. The day had been chaotic with actors and crew, one shot being set up while another was being shot, sometimes over and over again if Avery didn’t like the lighting or the camera angle.
How had she managed to be the very last one on set? Oh, yes, waiting and praying that Bobby would really call her.
Sammy had emerged from his guard post. “Hey!” she called back, hoping that he would pay attention, see her and wait for her to come running back. She’d even take a ride with disgusting fat Sammy at this point.
He wasn’t looking her direction. He was going off duty, heading away from her. She should have accepted a ride from him when he’d offered, but she’d been convinced she’d find a taxi right away.
Who the hell knew that the area dried up like a prune once it got late at night?
The guard disappeared behind one of the trailers; he’d been anxious for her to go, of course, once she’d refused to ride with him. She’d been the last one near the trailers, the only one left who had been working on the on-location day-plus shoot for O’Leary’s, a tale about crime and prostitution in the eighteen hundreds in New York City. One of the pubs in the area had had the right interior, and the buildings—except for the gap where the old Darby Building had so recently stood—were perfect. The gutted area and the work tents set up on the old site were shielded by a blue screen for the moviemaking; New York was not a city to make do without the income a permit for such work would secure for the city. Nor, with the preservationist-supporting liberals to be found in the area, could a recently discovered historic site be disturbed.
Even so, the area around the demolished building was surrounded by cheap wire fencing that any schoolboy could scale, and closed by a gate with a two-bit combination lock. It looked like a war zone in a third world country.
She was beyond it, though, and she hurried; the gaping hole in the landscape seemed alive, mocking her for her fear of darkness and shadows.
Now she cursed Bobby Walden. Megastar—jerk!
So, maybe, she had been too easy, too wide-eyed and too hopeful. But he’d really been into her during the shoot; he’d whispered such cool stuff to her between takes that day. She was ready; she knew how to get her name in the paper, and how to move ahead. In film, in the real world, perception was everything. She wasn’t a fool; she didn’t expect a happy-ever-after with Bobby Walden. Just a date—or a night in his hotel room, a place she could pretend to slip out of while being sure that she was spotted by the media. That was all she needed. Her picture on Page Six, maybe. People would start talking about her, and it would make it worthwhile that she’d slept with the pimple-faced assistant at the casting agency to get the job as an extra—a down-and-out historical hooker—for the movie. And, she should still be glad, because she’d wound up with a few lines, enough to quality for her SAG card.
B movie. That was okay. Many a star had gotten his or her start as an extra-suddenly-given-lines. It took something like being singled out by Bobby Walden to get noticed.
“Hey! Hey, Sammy!” she called, walking back toward the site and Sammy. But Sammy didn’t appear from behind the trailer that was just about two blocks away now. He had to have heard her, but even if she ran, she’d never catch him. “Sammy! You fat ass!” she muttered.
Sammy was gone. Probably down in the useless-to-her Whitehall subway station already.
She thought she saw a man; a different man standing by the trailers. He must have been an actor; he seemed to be wearing a stovepipe hat and a long black all-encompassing coat. Whoever it was would be in big trouble with the costume department.
The moon shifted; there was no man standing there. She was making herself bizarrely nervous; it was simply because she’d never imagined that anywhere in New York could become so devoid of people.
She turned and retraced her steps. If she reached Broadway and started running…
She was almost at the corner when she heard the noise again. Click-click-drag.
Was it coming from behind her? Or before her?
She turned the corner and screamed; there was a man standing there. He looked dazed. He was in dirty jeans, a dirtier denim jacket. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his hair was tangled and greasy.
“Hey, lady, you got a dollar? Just a dollar—or some change? Anything—a quarter?” He took a step toward her with his hand outstretched, and she suddenly knew the direction from which the click-click-drag had come. She could smell him; he was absolutely repulsive.
“No!” she cried. “Get away!”
“Lady, I’m just a vet—”
“You’re just an alcoholic or a junkie—and you’re disgusting! Take a bath!” she said. She didn’t even want to touch him to shove him in the chest, but she did so. She was desperate to get past him.
He fell against the wall of the building she was passing. She didn’t look to see what type of office it was; she hurried on for a block, turned around. The ratty old homeless man was gone.
She leaned against a railing where she had stopped, panting, to stare back hard. She wanted to make sure that he was gone—really gone. She needed to get a hold of her fear. As soon as she got a little bit farther up Broadway, she’d start to see people. Ha! Stalked by a derelict who would fall down in a breeze. Well, the louse-ridden bastard was gone now. She kept looking down the street, making sure.
It was amazing; she could hear the traffic on West Street, albeit in the distance. Battery City was no more than a few blocks away. Wall Street was mobbed with cutthroat brokers during the day, and tourists thronged Trinity and St. Paul’s. But now the streets were dead, as dead as those rotting in the old graves and tombs of the city’s churches.
Yes, the derelict was gone, too.
She turned to hurry on up Broadway.
She hadn’t heard a thing; she hadn’t suspected anyone might be in front of her—she had been looking behind, back to the dark abyss of the site.
Her turn brought her directly into his arms. Before she could open her mouth, his hand clamped over it, and he twisted her viciously around until she was flat against his body.
She tried to scream, but the sound was muffled by the gloved hand. She strained to see, to kick to fight…
She barely even felt the knife across her throat; the blade was that sharp and the slice he made was swift and hard and sure. She was aware that, as the blood began to flow, he dragged her. She saw the lights of the street.
Seeming as pale as old gas lamps.
As she died, the world growing dark and cold, she was dimly aware once again that it was all a matter of perception. Blood was rushing from her throat, and she was dying. She was even aware of the irony—that she might become really famous at last.
Somewhere, not far, car horns blared, neon illuminated the city and millions of souls worked, played and slept.
But to Virginia Rockford, the world beyond was no longer of any consequence.
Her last vision was that of a shadow-man.
A man in a long black cape wearing a stovepipe hat. A shadow-man, coming at her again with the long wicked blade of his knife…
But she felt no more. Death became a gentle blessing.
Book 4 The Evil Inside
Prologue
The boy stood naked in the middle of the road.
Sam Hall’s headlights caught him there, frozen in position, like a deer. He was covered in something slick, and it dripped down his flesh. It looked reddish, like blood, as if the kid had run off the set of a horror movie after being drenched in buckets of the stuff.
Sam slammed his foot on the brake pedal, grateful for once that his years with Mahon, Mero and Malone had given him the ability to afford the new Jaguar with the stop-on-a-dime brakes.
Even then, the car pulled to a halt just inches before the boy.
Swearing softly beneath his breath and puzzled beyond measure, Sam jumped out of the car. “Hey, what the hell are you doing there, son?”
The boy didn’t move, didn’t seem to realize that he’d nearly been roadkill. He just shook as he stood there. Summer had recently turned to fall, and the air had a sharp nip, typical for Massachusetts at this time of year. Tree-laden tracts lined the road; the old oaks seemed to bend and moan with the breeze, while multicolored leaves danced on the road and swept around the scene as if they, too, were deeply disturbed.
The boy didn’t acknowledge Sam or look at him.
Again Sam swore softly. There was obviously something really wrong, though this kid couldn’t have been injured severely and still be able to stand as he was.
He couldn’t have lost that amount of blood and still be conscious.
Was it really blood…couldn’t be.
Either way, Sam couldn’t leave him in the middle of the road.
He looked at the new Jag he really loved, with the leather seats he also loved, and walked around to his trunk and found the beach blanket he’d picked up on his recent drive to the Florida Keys. It was sandy, but it would warm the kid.
He returned quickly, but the kid hadn’t run off, much less moved. “Are you hurt?” he asked quietly.
He received no response.
“Here, here, you’re going to have to get into my car,” Sam said, approaching the boy with the blanket. “We’ll get you to a hospital.”
Sam wrapped the blanket around him. “Sorry about the sand,” he said.
The kid looked to be somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, but underdeveloped. He was painfully thin. His eyes were huge and brown in the lean contours of his face. His chest was devoid of hair, so most of the blood had slid down his chest.
The temperature seemed to be around forty degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t freezing, but the kid shouldn’t be exposed to this long.
Sam intended to get him into the car. And yet, as he stood there, trying to be compassionate while saving his wool coat from the sticky red substance that looked like blood, he suddenly froze.
It didn’t just look like blood—it was blood.
Denial rushed through his mind.
But it was blood, no denying it.
Pig’s blood, cow’s blood…hell, rabbit’s blood.
But something told Sam that it was not.
He drew the blanket off the boy and turned him around, seeking an injury that might have caused that amount of blood.
But he didn’t find any. If he had, the boy wouldn’t have been standing upright. He wouldn’t have been breathing. He’d have been dead from a wound like that.
He’d already wrapped the blanket around the kid. No undoing that.
And if he could, would he leave the kid there shivering with nothing?
Still standing in front of the boy, who didn’t even reach up to hold the blanket in place, he fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone and hit 911. An operator with a droning voice asked him what his emergency was.
“My name is Samuel Hall. I was driving into Salem when I nearly hit a young man in the road. He’s covered in blood. It doesn’t appear to be his blood, but I can’t be certain that he isn’t injured. He’s standing on his own, and doesn’t seem in any way to be too weak to do so, but he’s nonresponsive. He may be in shock. Can you get someone out here—fast?” He looked around and quickly gave his position as best he could. Hell, it was a quiet backwoods road. He’d opted to take IA north from Boston, but had turned off early. The dark, quiet road through the trees had seemed a soothing path for his first visit home in a long time.
“Stay calm now, Mr. Hall,” the operator told him. “I’ll have a car out to your position immediately. Patrolmen are in the vicinity. It won’t be long. You’re sure the young man isn’t bleeding? If so, you must stanch the flow of blood. Stay calm. Are you doing all right?”
He hesitated for the fraction of a second, staring at the phone, his mind racing. He thought of the horrors he had witnessed in the military, and he thought of the crime-scene photos he’d studied as a criminal attorney.
“Ma’am,” he said, his voice even and strong, “I’m about as calm as a dead Quaker. But you need to get someone out here fast. I’m going to suggest you send an investigator, because I have a feeling this might be human blood, and I don’t want to compromise any more evidence than I already have by putting my blanket around the boy.”
“Of course, sir. Please remain on the line. And do your best to remain calm.”
“If you tell me to remain calm one more time, I’m going to implode and become consumed by spontaneous combustion—”
“There’s already a car on the way. Sir, you just have to remain calm. This is Salem, Massachusetts, sir, and we are moving into the Halloween season now, you know. You may be the victim of prank. Now, stay on the line, and remain calm, Mr. Hall.” She gasped suddenly, her well-learned rhetoric failing her for a moment. “Oh, you’re the Sam Hall—”
He heard the sound of a siren then. “They’re here” is all he said. “Thanks.” He hit the end icon on his phone.
A patrol car pulled up on the road in front of him, and the glare of its lights met and mingled with the Jag’s headlights, almost blinding him for a minute. Two uniformed officers exited from either side of the car, guns in position.
“He’s not armed!” Sam called. “He’s—he’s in shock. He needs medical attention.”
“An ambulance is on the way,” the driver called out. “And Detective Alden. I radioed him on my way out.”
Alden? He wondered if it was his old friend John. Puritan names still abounded here, and John Alden and he had been on the football team together. John had always wanted to be a cop, a detective, actually. He must have worked his way up through the ranks.
The patrolmen walked forward, slowly holstering their guns as they saw that the shaking youth carried no weapon and that Sam seemed nonthreatening, as well.
“Patrolman Nathan Brewster,” one said, introducing himself. “And my partner, Robert Bishop.”
Sam nodded. “Samuel Hall,” he said, but the patrolmen were just staring at the boy. They glanced at each other uneasily.
“Yeah, yeah, Detective Alden is on his way. Any minute now,” Brewster said, almost as an afterthought.
“What’s going on?” Sam asked. The two were behaving curiously. They had holstered their weapons but appeared ready to spring for them again at any second.
Neither touched the boy. Neither spoke to him. The kid was shaking harder and harder, despite the blanket Sam had set around his shoulders. Neither did the boy make any attempt to hold the blanket to his bony frame.
Again, the two exchanged glances. “We’re not really at liberty to say, sir.”
“Fine, well, I think we have to get him into a heated car, or he’ll die of exposure pretty soon,” Sam said. True or not, he couldn’t bear watching the shocked youth stare wide-eyed at nothing and shake anymore.
But before the patrolmen were compelled to respond, the sound of sirens suddenly seemed to grow to an alarming pitch. First on the scene was an unmarked car. A grim, solid-looking man of about fifty in a worn woolen coat and plaid sweater exited the driver’s side of the car and strode quickly toward them.
Plainclothes cop. Detective, Sam thought. He hoped it was John.
And it was.
But unlike the others, he didn’t pull a weapon. He hurried forward, passing between the patrolmen and Sam and the youth. He didn’t look at Sam, but at the boy, and his expression wasn’t authoritarian or harsh, but sad.
“Malachi,” he said. “Good God, Malachi, you’ve done it now.”
“Excuse me. He’s shivering. He’s freezing. He’s in shock. John? It’s Sam—Sam Hall.”
John Alden turned and looked at Sam.
“Sam!”
“I was on my way to the folks’ place. I nearly hit the boy. He was just standing there, in the road. Covered in blood.”
“Sam,” Alden repeated.
He looked as if he was about to say good to see you or something to that effect, but in the road with a blood-splattered boy, it just wasn’t appropriate.
“John, this kid needs help. I think he’s in shock,” Sam repeated.
John Alden nodded and indicated, with the cast of his head, the ambulance that had arrived. “Yeah, he’ll get medical attention. And he’s in shock, you say? He should be. He just hacked his family to death.”
The next episode will be the next 2 books in the series.
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