Witch Wars (Shadow Detective Book 7) Read online

  Witch Wars

  A Shadow Detective Novel

  WILLIAM MASSA

  Critical Mass Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 by WILLIAM MASSA

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  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

  Also by WILLIAM MASSA

  About the Author

  1

  The call from police dispatch came in at 3:22 a.m.: “Caucasian female, age 80 or older, around five-foot-eleven and 120 pounds, is causing a disturbance on Lafayette Street and Nielson Way. The individual appears unarmed but might be under the influence of narcotics…”

  Officer Ron Parker spun the steering wheel of his cruiser and floored the gas. Police sirens warbled and keened as he shot down the deserted nighttime streets. This late at night, even the club crowd was thinning. His partner, Officer Steve Rushmore, was technically still a rookie and couldn’t hide his excitement in the passenger seat—the kid was ready for action.

  Parker barely recalled the days when he shared a similar thrill for police work. He’d witnessed too much, seen too many lives squandered. Nowadays, he showed up, put in his hours, and did his best not to shoot anyone or get himself shot. His calling had become a job, and like most of his fellow officers, he was biding his time to retirement. Twelve years down, eight to go.

  You’re more than halfway there, buddy.

  Traffic was practically non-existent, and it took them less than ten minutes to reach the corner of Lafayette and Nielson. Scanning the intersection, Parker spotted the bag lady who had prompted some wary resident to dial 911. The woman was tall and rail thin, a ragged coat draped over a bony frame, features obscured by a black hood. She stood in the road and paced erratically, mumbled and shouted to herself.

  Just another crazy old bat off her meds, Parker thought. Wandering around in the middle of the street at this ungodly hour was an open invitation to being run down by some careless driver.

  Parker stopped the car and nodded at Rushmore. “I got this.”

  The rookie looked disappointed, but Parker ignored him as he jumped out of the vehicle and approached the woman. He snapped his holster open but didn’t draw his firearm. The frail, bone-thin old lady wasn’t physically threatening, her behavior more a danger to herself than others. She kept moving to and fro as he drew closer, her body shaking with nervous energy. He was almost upon her when she spun toward him, impossibly fast, and Parker recoiled with horror and revulsion.

  The woman’s cadaverous face was chalk-white, webbed and mottled with a roadmap of wrinkles and unsightly purple splotches. Patches of stringy gray hair stuck to her skull in clumps. Her features were sharp, animalistic, the ancient skin tough as rawhide stretched over prominent bones. Parker stared into the milky eyes without pupils and flinched. The nightmarish woman looked like she was a hundred years old.

  Peering down at her, Parker realized she wasn’t wearing any shoes, her white feet smudged with dirt and caked with something that looked a lot like blood. Stepping closer, he also noticed a strange symbol carved into the pale flesh of her forehead, nearly lost among the wrinkles. It resembled an inverted Y with a third line at its center, like a peace sign without the circle.

  The woman rattled off a constant stream of words, engaged in some mystifying dialogue with herself. Her voice was too low for him to make out any of the gibberish. All throughout, her blind eyes flitted back and forth.

  Officer Parker took a deep breath and then did his job. “Ma’am, you can’t remain in the road like this. Please walk toward the sidewalk.”

  A vacant look and more guttural sing-song chatter greeted the request. The woman’s words seemed to press against his mind. Even though Parker was armed and outweighed the woman by about a hundred pounds, her yammering was getting to him.

  Pull yourself together. Don’t tell me you’re scared of an old lady now.

  Parker took a steadying breath while the old lady’s words continued to resonate with an undeniable power. He’d faced his share of druggies over the years, and their emotions could range from menacing and violent to blissfully vacant. This woman was different. There was something fundamentally wrong with her.

  “Ma’am, for your safety, I’ll have to ask you to—”

  Officer Parker paused. The crone was in a world of her own, preoccupied with her chanting, beyond the reach of his words. Even though every instinct was screaming at him to return to his cruiser, Parker stepped closer to the woman.

  Halogen street lamps bathed her face in its harsh glare, making her look ancient. For one irrational second, Parker felt she had aged another decade since he first laid eyes upon him. Her features lost in a quicksand of lined skin. The acrid stench of a long-unwashed body pricked his nostrils, and he gagged.

  Overcoming the wave of revulsion, Parker reached out for the old lady’s skeletal hand. Her parchment-like skin felt weirdly slimy, like a dead fish. The woman offered no resistance as he steered her toward the waiting cruiser. From inside the police car, Rushmore followed him with big eyes. Parker flashed the rookie the thumbs-up sign, indicating that everything was okay.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Rushmore asked as Parker guided the woman into the backseat.

  Parker shrugged. “We’ll let the doctors and social workers sort it out.”

  A police drunk tank was no place for an old woman, but it beat roaming the streets at three in the morning.

  Once the woman was secure in the back, Parker slipped behind the wheel and started the car. Rushmore shot him a nervous glance as they rolled down the street.

  “Man, she’s freaking me out!”

  That makes two of us, kid, Parker thought. The chanting was maddening. He eyed the old lady’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. It was like staring at a ghost. Her pale, skull-like face seemed oversized for her shrunken body.

  As they drove through the city, Parker tried to block out the bizarre babbling but failed miserably. The chatter filled the cruiser and seemed to vibrate in his heart and mind. The hag’s words, though still unintelligible, were drilling into his soul. He thought he made out a smattering of Latin. Even more unnerving, she sometimes broke into tittering laughter, as if she could barely contain her amusement at some private joke. The laughter was worse than the chanting. Much worse.

  A shiver traveled up his spine. God, he couldn’t wait to get the creepy old lady out of his cruiser and make her someone else’s problem. The next fifteen minutes stretched as the woman’s disturbing babble
drowned out all other thoughts, each foreign word a fishhook digging into his brain. Judging by his partner’s expression, he too was on the edge of losing it.

  When they finally pulled into the station’s underground parking garage, Parker let out a deep sigh of relief. His clammy hands gripped the wheel tightly as beads of sweat masked his face. Their job was almost done.

  Once again, the corpse-like woman didn’t resist as he opened the rear car door and guided her into the parking structure. Her eerie voice reverberated in the cavernous space.

  Why won’t she shut up? Parker thought, desperate to escape the noise.

  Curious looks greeted them as they made their way through the bustling precinct. The old woman didn’t seem to show any signs of interest in the cops. Her mind was clearly somewhere else as she kept mumbling to herself.

  Parker exchanged a few brief hellos but never slowed down or allowed himself to get bogged down by any questions from his fellow officers. He looked forward to ridding himself of his unusual prisoner. Goosebumps prickled his skin, his sense of dread intensifying with each passing moment. He popped a button on his collar and sucked in a deep gulp of air. Merely standing next to the bag lady made him physically ill. Rushmore wasn’t faring much better. The rookie trailed him, his glassy eyes darting from side to side as if searching for an escape route.

  After navigating a series of stairs, passageways, and elevators, they finally reached the precinct’s drunk tank. A warden met them at the steel door that led into a large space split into three separate holding cells. The warden regarded the woman with big eyes.

  “Did someone just unload some PCP at the retirement home?”

  A chill danced up Parker’s neck. “What are you talking about?”

  The warden pointed at the drunk tank. “Better see for yourself.”

  Parker led the woman into the first holding cell. The tank was painted pink, designed to calm down emotional states compromised by alcohol and drugs. A series of lawn chairs and mattresses lined the walls so drunkards could sleep off their buzz.

  The moment Parker’s eyes fell on the two other women in the drunk tank, the gnawing feeling of unease erupted with a vengeance. Fear took hold of him. He swallowed hard, tasting bile. They had the same leathery skin, their smelly bodies stripped of every ounce of body fat, their features spider-webbed with wrinkles as deep as scars. Most alarming of all, they both sported the same inverted Y symbol on their foreheads. The two hag-like women in the cell could have been related to the demented bag lady.

  But it wasn’t merely their physical appearance that made his heart jump into his throat. The two women were babbling away in the same lilting sing-song. Their voices swelled, welcoming the newcomer in their midst. The sound affected Parker on a visceral level, and he clutched his stomach, gripped by nausea.

  Get a grip, Parker. He’d seen plenty of weird shit in his time, and this was no different.

  Rushmore didn’t even try to hide the growing panic in his voice. “What the fuck? They’re just like her! How can there be three of them?”

  Parker shrugged, wishing he had an answer.

  “They’ve been like this since they came in,” the warden explained, having joined them in the cell. His expression darkened, and he added, “Hey ladies, why don’t you give it a rest?”

  Almost as if to mock the warden, the trio’s voices rose in volume.

  The warden clenched his jaw and advanced toward the women. “Don’t you speak English? I said shut the fuck—”

  A gnarled hand with long claws shot out and grasped the warden’s wrist, and for a second, Parker could’ve sworn the symbol on the bag lady’s forehead lit up with an unnatural light. The warden cried out.

  Parker swapped a panicked glance with Rushmore. Surely the warden, a beefy ex-football type, could handle himself against a skinny old lady.

  The woman released the warden, and he stumbled backward. Parker stared at the hag’s face. Black gums showed through an insane smile as she laughed. As he watched, the woman’s features began to change. Her aged visage morphed into the stunning face of a goddess, and a bolt of desire struck him. Highly kissable lips curled into a smile…but the illusion did not last. The goddess almost instantaneously reverted to a geriatric skull mask.

  Parker choked back a shriek. He whirled toward the warden who was cursing to himself as he cradled his wrist. And that’s when Parker received his next shock: the warden’s features had drastically changed, too. The face of an old man stared back at him with helpless eyes. The warden had aged fifty years in a matter of seconds.

  “What’s wrong?” the warden said, his old man’s voice laced with growing panic. “Why are you looking at me? What in God’s name have they done to me?”

  God has nothing to do with this, Parker thought. He stole a quick glimpse of the three hags. Even though their constant chatter hadn’t abated, they were all grinning.

  2

  SKULICK’S LOFT, ONE HOUR EARLIER

  Stories of doom and gloom dominated the news. From local channels to cable outlets, the message remained the same—the end of the world was near. Reports were coming in from all parts of the city at a furious rate. The metropolis was spiraling out of control and Devil’s Night was living up to its name. According to the newscasts, a strange gas leak was spreading throughout the metropolis, triggering an epidemic of violent behavior.

  Now that’s a nice euphemism for the zombie apocalypse, Skulick thought.

  While the reporters theorized about the source of the leak and the possible causes of these cannibalistic attacks, Skulick knew better. Over the years, he’d learned to read between the lines and separate innuendo and wild speculation from the facts. The truth might sound like a bad horror movie, but it was plain to see if you opened your mind to the possibilities. The dead had risen, and the living were fighting a bitter battle for survival.

  Skulick chewed the inside of his cheek as he considered the war raging beyond the safety of his converted warehouse loft. The news continued to show scene after scene of the devastation. All he could do was watch helplessly from the sidelines as brave men and women sacrificed their lives. God, he hated being trapped in a wheelchair while others did the fighting.

  Up until his terrible accident eleven months ago he’d prided himself as being someone who didn’t shy away from being in the heat of the action. Nowadays he pulled strings from behind the scenes. He’d discovered that sending other people to their deaths was far worse than risking his own life. He had never wanted to be a general. For decades, he’d been a soldier who battled the darkness on his terms. If it had been up to Skulick, he would have died fighting on the front lines.

  He cursed himself for the umpteenth time for letting a ghost get a drop on him. He and Raven had been investigating a haunted hotel when a specter had hurled him through a window, sending him four stories to the streets below. The dead bastard had ended a thirty-year monster hunting career that night. It was a miracle he’d survived the fall. But sometimes he thought survival was worse than the alternative.

  Shaking off the memories, Skulick palmed his cell and hit redial.

  “Archer, pick up,” he muttered.

  His call went straight to voicemail as it had the last twenty times he’d tried to reach her. Skulick tapped his fingers on his desk, anxiety building.

  Pull yourself together. Think. Review the facts.

  Archer had followed Raven to a local graveyard, and then he lost contact with her. Less than a half hour later, the reports of the fog had started coming in. The first sighting of the mist—and the undead attackers—had been near the cemetery. One didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that the cemetery was ground zero for the zombie outbreak. And that raised an interesting point. What had led Raven to the graveyard? Was he working a case? And if so, did it confirm what Raven had tried to tell him all along? Was his protege still hunting monsters despite being compromised by a demon?

  The possibility weighed heavily on Skulick. He had in
itially refused to accept the idea that Raven was still in control, that he was somehow working with this demon toward a common goal. The servants of darkness didn’t make partnerships with mortals. They made bargains, generally for the soul of their host. If Raven was telling the truth, then this was unlike any possession Skulick had ever encountered.

  Could he still trust the man who had been like a son to him?

  Father Cabrera would have scolded him for even considering the possibility. He could almost hear the exorcist’s voice. You’re deluding yourself, old friend. And what if he was? Hadn’t Raven at least earned the benefit of the doubt after all these years? Skulick should have heard him out earlier. He should have given Mike a chance.

  You cannot play games with devils! Cabrera’s words echoed in his head.

  Raven might be lost, but damn it, his heart told him otherwise. That’s why he had recruited Archer for the hunt. He feared Cabrera might be a tad too eager to destroy the monster Raven had become. The head exorcist only saw the demon while Skulick saw a man who needed saving.

  On-screen, a cloud of yellowish mist enveloped a panicked reporter, and a heartbeat later, the screaming started. Mercifully, the image fizzled and went dark. The ashen features of the newscasters back at the studio replaced the live report from the front lines. Skulick didn’t blame the shaken hosts. The forces of darkness normally operated in the shadows and avoided the spotlight. These recent events couldn’t be so easily dismissed by the mainstream media.

  The monsters are growing more daring.