DarkWalker

  DarkWalker

  ALSO BY JOHN URBANCIK

  NOVELLAS

  A Game of Colors

  The Rise and Fall of Babylon { with Brian Keene }

  Wings of the Butterfly

  House of Shadow and Ash

  Necropolis

  Quicksilver

  Beneath Midnight

  COLLECTIONS

  Shadows, Legends & Secrets

  Sound and Vision

  NOVELS

  Sins of Blood and Stone

  Breath of the Moon

  Once Upon a Time in Midnight

  BOOK ONE

  DarkWalker

  John Urbancik

  AN EVILEYE BOOK

  June 2012

  First Digital Edition

  Published by

  Pulp+Pixel Entertainment Company

  PO BOX 1981

  Crystal Lake, IL 60039

  Story text copyright © 2012 John Urbancik

  All rights reserved

  This book and all derivative works in the DarkWalker series are exclusively licensed from the author by Pulp+Pixel Entertainment Company. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, or by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to persons, living or dead, are neither intended nor should be inferred.

  Cover art direction, book and title design by Viktor Färro

  Book Production by Cheryl Perez

  Cover Illustration by Daniele Serra

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9825789-6-4

  For more information about this series or other books published by Evileye Books, please visit Evileyebooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Mery-et

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A world of people spanning hemispheres and decades deserve thanks for helping me bring this to fruition. Especially Mery-et, who makes all things possible. Also India, and most the scattered gang from Orlando, for helping me survive in that tiny not-quite-Southern city. The Four Horsemen, especially Mike, for the introductions. Jazno, for inadvertently lending me his apartment. A.N. Ommus, Greg Kishbaugh, and everyone else involved with Evileye Books, and of course the men and women who kept bringing us all that wonderful steak. As always, a special thanks to Sabine and to the Rose Fairy. Lastly, to Daniele Serra for the fantastic cover art.

  DarkWalker

  PRELUDE

  A night like any other. Dry. Warm. The pulse of music, the rhythm, the bodies dancing obliviously.

  Meat. That’s all the dancers meant to some creatures—demons, succubi, vampires.

  In a corner of the club, outside the range of strobe lights and neon, past the rank odor of uncleaned bathrooms, a gorgeous woman—straight dark hair to her shoulders, brown eyes that were almost amber, lean and lithe and confident—pinned a piece of meat to the wall. He was relatively average, a little overweight, somewhat shy, surprised and thrilled to have been chosen by this Asian beauty—typical prey.

  She kissed his neck, licked it, her hands everywhere at once. She pressed so hard into him he didn’t even feel her bite. For him, it was nearly orgasmic.

  She held him up, drinking cleanly, and over her shoulder looked into the farthest shadows. Someone watched. She recognized what he was, if not who—and winked.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.

  Jack Harlow returned to the bar from the bathrooms and asked for another beer and a shot of Jack Daniels. It didn’t bother him much anymore, the things he saw; a man could grow used to that. It was the smiles, the nods, the acknowledgements . . . and the winks. That was new.

  He wasn’t a hunter, and he was never their victim. He knew it. They knew it. The whole damned underground knew it. He chased the whiskey with half the beer, and averted his gaze as the Asian vampire chick strode by.

  She ran her fingers across his back as she passed.

  Through the mirror behind the bar, he watched her sashay to the door, hug and kiss the bouncer, and then enter the night.

  That wasn’t lipstick she’d left on the bouncer’s neck.

  Jack hated being seen. This time, the whole thing had been accidental. His bladder had sent him back there, nothing else; he hadn’t noticed the vampire until she was already feeding.

  “Don’t you just hate that,” a gruff voice asked at his side. “Struts in here like she owns the place.”

  The man was as tall as Jack, broader and paler. He shook his head until the vampire was gone, then turned to Jack with a smile. “Why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”

  “I don’t take drinks from the dead,” Jack told him.

  The ghost shrugged.

  A woman stepped up to the bar, through the ghost as if he wasn’t there, and ordered a drink. The spirit grinned. “Now, that’s what I’m talking about. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a good piece of flesh?”

  Sometimes, they talked to him. Jack hated that, too.

  2.

  All Jack really wanted was to be left alone. Ignored. Forgotten. Maybe then he could find an average, normal, nine-to-five life somewhere. Get a job, a regular paycheck, a wife and kids. He could do without the white picket fence. And if he really thought about it, he didn’t need the kids, either.

  The first time he saw a thing was the night of his seventeenth birthday. He, Marie, and a few friends went through beer and cigarettes in the basement of an abandoned house. There were no rumors about it being haunted; the owners had put it on the market and left for South Carolina during the summer.

  So there they were, drinking and getting high, doing the very normal things teenagers were supposed to do, when the lantern died. It was a cheap electric bulb with cheap batteries. No one was really surprised. Someone banged it a few times on the concrete floor. Someone laughed. Someone else put their hands around Jack’s shoulders and hugged him close.

  When the lantern came on, Marie screamed. So did one of the guys. Someone cursed, and the lantern fell. It cracked, and the light died again, but not before Jack saw what they’d seen: the woman with her arm around him, who had slid very comfortably next to him and seemed about ready to nibble his ear or kiss his neck or whisper, was translucent. He felt the weight of her arm, her cool skin; he saw bones through her flesh, teeth under her smile, a skull behind her eyes.

  He froze. One girl fainted, the others ran, but Jack calmly turned to the unreal woman.

  “Wasn’t that just grand?” she said. She faded away; he couldn’t see her, but felt her become less substantial. Just a moment before becoming smoke and dust, she kissed his lips, like a feather brushing his mouth.

  He might have seen things before then and not been aware of it; he might have noticed oddities in the shadows or heard voices that spoke to no one else. He might have smelled deeper layers of death in the cemetery, or felt eyes upon him when no one was around. But that moment—the ghost in the basement—had brought awareness.

  3.

  “Not very talkative tonight, are you?” the ghost asked.

  The ghost occupied the woman’s space, as if they were joined. Jack said, quietly, “No.”

  “Somewhere more private, is that what you want?” the ghost asked. “I’ve got stories to tell that’ll blow your mind.” He laughed. “Literally.”

  The bar was relatively old for Orlando, the music loud, and dancers packed the floor. There was the constant smell of excessive cologne, stale beer and cigarettes—and a mustiness underneath it all. The walls were bare brick in some places, probably fifty or sixty years old. Plenty of time for a dead man to lay down roots. Maybe he’d been shot in the backroom, a drug deal gone bad or a debt unpaid. Maybe he’d overdosed. More likely, he’d been innocent, a bystander caught unaware by a situation as random as lightning. They tende
d to linger when death was unexpected.

  “Listen, it’s not every day someone comes along I can talk with as freely as you,” the ghost said. “I mean, there’s plenty of fine young meat here, girls that’ll coo and cower till they’re pale in the face. But not like you. You’re rare.”

  Jack grunted a monosyllabic laugh.

  “A watcher, here in my bar,” the ghost said. “That’s not every day. Vampires . . . shit, I see one or two of them a week. Even demons.” He lowered his voice, confiding. “I do tend to stay away from them. Scare the hell out of me.”

  Jack tightened his fists. Wouldn’t do any good; he couldn’t exactly hit a ghost. The girl smiled as she turned, sipping her drink, and left to find her friends—or friend or stranger. Jack didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

  “We all play our roles,” the ghost said. “Do you even know what you are?”

  “Annoyed,” Jack suggested.

  “More fundamentally,” the ghost said. “You’ve got Sight, man. You see what we see—you can see us. All of us and everything.”

  Jack closed his eyes. “I’ve been keeping records.”

  “That’s good,” the ghost said. “You’re a Watcher. You’re supposed to watch.”

  “Watcher, eh?” Jack had never heard the title. The things he saw—spirits, witches, werewolves—rarely engaged him in conversation.

  “It’s your role. Like mine is to haunt. And I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy it.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you already damned?”

  “Semantics,” the ghost said. “Anyway, it’s not true. Just because I’m a creature of the night doesn’t make me evil.”

  The music shifted, the dance floor thinned, and a crowd formed at the bar. Jack slipped aside, toward the door, but the ghost persisted. “Tell me things. What’s it like out there anymore? What’s it like to breathe? I haven’t had air in . . . I . . . I don’t even know how long.”

  Jack stopped and turned to the spirit. He seemed worried, nervous, anxious, floating from foot to foot as if shifting weight, and his eyes were big and watery. “Life,” Jack told him, barely speaking above a whisper, “is a series of dark nights. I see people die. I count the variations. I take odd jobs for cash sometimes, but usually steal it from corpses. They don’t seem to care anymore. I watch, because you’re right. It’s a role. All the world’s a stage, right?” The ghost smiled. Sincerely. “When night fades, I crawl into a bed just like every other damned thing that stalks the night, and I do it because I don’t know any other life. You want to know what life is like? You want to feel breath? Ask her.” He nodded toward the pretty girl with the blue drink. “I haven’t got one.”

  Jack turned and went out.

  4.

  A breeze carried the scents of cinnamon and jasmine. A tarot reader had set up a table a few yards from the bar. Ribbons of silk weaved through her long, flowing hair, which had been dyed a variety of colors: blondes, reds, browns, without order. She shuffled well-worn cards, an old deck by the look and smell of it. Her skin was flawless. Bracelets jangled, necklaces dangled. Her dress spread around her feet, even while sitting, like a sunburst. She had a unique quality to her look, a hardness to her jaw and eyes that was rare in street frauds. But a fraud, she most certainly was.

  A hopeful young girl had given the woman twenty dollars to read her fortune. The seer promised riches, a husband, the fulfillment of various generic wishes. But it wasn’t the seer that caught Jack’s attention. Nor the girl.

  Slightly to the seer’s right, unnoticed, stood a tall gentleman. Black suit. Beard. Cane. His head had been shaved, which seemed incongruous considering the attire.

  Jack had seen many things over the years. He knew the seer was false because he’d recognize someone gifted. In the beginning, he had difficulty distinguishing between the living and the dead; it was now as easy as red and blue. He knew the names of most things. He had counted eleven types of vampires, seventeen things called ghosts, and all manner of “mythical” creatures. So he recognized nightwalkers, even when—as in the man watching the seer—he had no idea what it was.

  The man looked briefly at Jack, locking eyes. A shiver—an honest, spine-spanning shiver—rippled down Jack’s back.

  Ignoring it, or at least pretending to, Jack folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the brick wall. He was between the bar and the seer, who was just finishing up with the girl. “A long and wondrous future,” the woman was saying.

  The man with the shaved head tapped the street twice with his cane. It was a dark wood, perhaps oak or mahogany, something with a red tinge to it.

  The girl rose, dizzy with visions of diamonds and gold, slightly tipsy but not quite drunk. She stumbled with her first step, in Jack’s direction, but only once. Her smile was genuine, masking a sadness that had little true depth. Dumped, Jack assumed. Tonight. Maybe in this very bar.

  The stranger strode past Jack without a glance, using the cane with his perfectly manicured right hand. An Egyptian hieroglyph was tattooed in the nape of his neck.

  The girl, and her pursuer, turned down a side street.

  Jack, of course, followed.

  It was a stupid trait, he knew, and would someday get him killed. But, as the ghost inside said, he was a watcher. He watched. Recorded what he saw on his laptop. Compiled it meticulously, as if preparing for an exam. Dates, times, places, even the ambience. Moon phases. Temperatures. As if this information might be useful somewhere.

  It might get him committed.

  Washington Street was darker than Orange Avenue, but still well lit, sparsely used but not empty, with a pizza place at the corner, police station down the road, a public parking lot across the street. The girl was halfway down one of the aisles, walking between cars into a thicker darkness, an unnatural mist she didn’t seem to notice.

  Jack followed into the dark. He glanced toward the window of the police station; if anyone watched the street, the mist obscured him. Only three people existed in the dark: girl, stalker, and watcher.

  Oblivious, the girl pulled keys from her purse.

  “You won’t be needing those,” the man told her. He’d closed the distance between them and folded his left hand over hers. Startled, she turned, pulling slightly away from him, but didn’t free her hand.

  His voice was clipped, the accent too well disguised to be traced. Maybe British. Or Russian.

  “I . . . I should be getting home,” the girl said, looking down.

  “You are home,” he told her. Still clutching the cane in his right hand, he lifted her chin and forced her to look up at him. She reminded Jack of Silver Screen starlets, black and white beauties long deceased. He wanted to help her, call out to her perhaps, or somehow interfere.

  A flash of dark penetrated the mist, blinding Jack momentarily, and the girl became ash. The man inhaled. She flowed into his nostrils like cocaine. He consumed her whole body in one breath, and leaned heavily on his cane.

  Morbidly, Jack wished he could see the man’s face.

  The mist vanished, replaced by normal night.

  The man tapped his cane on the tar of the parking lot, turned briskly on his heels, and strode in Jack’s direction. The cane barely made a sound.

  “I appreciate privacy,” he said, stopping alongside Jack but looking beyond, toward the street.

  “Of course,” Jack said. He suppressed his anger, his frustration, his impatience. It had never done him any good.

  “I don’t like being watched.”

  “Nobody does.”

  The man chuckled and tossed Jack a coin. “For your troubles.”

  As the stranger walked away, Jack examined the gift: a 1926 ten dollar gold coin in mint condition. Sighing, he pocketed the coin and fished out his own keys. He’d had enough interaction for one night.

  5.

  On a typical night, Jack saw one, maybe two things worth noting. Most were as simple as a living shadow or a red-eyed rat. Once, maybe twice a month, the things he
saw acknowledged him: the smiles and nods Jack hated. Three times tonight: a wink, a conversation, and . . . what, a warning?

  But, as the saying went: the night was young, an hour still till midnight.

  It was called the Witching Hour, and the air often changed with the day. Ghosts became more vocal and visible. Some creatures came out only after the twelfth strike of the clock. Some walked only at twilight. There was no single set of rules, except perhaps that they generally ignored Jack. He’d never figured out why.

  They didn’t ignore him entirely. But when seeking victims, their dead or crimson or feline eyes passed over him. Sometimes, Jack felt neglected.

  He wondered, sometimes, if he was meant to defend their chosen victims. He sharpened some stakes and bought a Bowie knife with a silver blade, but it felt wrong. There was no other way to describe it. The first time he prepared to go out hunting, his car wouldn’t start. When he walked, it rained—not a light drizzle, but heavy, splattering drops that were soon strengthened by a gale. A black cat looked at him from the top of a fence and shook its head. People got in his way. His head ached. His stomach revolted. He retched for thirty minutes, giving up every scrap of bile in his gut, just for the idea.

  When he turned around to give up for the night, wind and rain ceased. His car started without a hitch the next day. Pain receded. He added the stakes to a barrel fire he shared one night under a bridge. If there was a troll, he never saw it.