King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1) Read online

  “This is stupid,” a woman in her forties, with neat and tidy hair in a neat and tidy suit coat said as she stepped forward. “All right, you’ve had your fun, you two.” The woman walked halfway between the gathered crowd and the corpse and put her hands on her hips as if she were a schoolteacher scolding a pair of students on April Fools. “The makeup is very nicely done, but the lack of pants isn’t terribly fair to the rest of us.”

  The woman turned to look back at Lydia with an accusatory glare, and Lydia was caught off guard once more as she realized the woman was blaming her as the other half of the prank. “N-no,” Lydia stammered and shook her head. “This isn’t—he isn’t—”

  “Then someone pulled off a great stunt on you,” the woman said with a smile in her direction. “But the joke’s over.”

  “It’s not a—” Lydia tried to explain but never had the chance.

  The monster seemed done with the conversation. He ran down the remainder of the hallway and closed the distance between him and the older woman in the suit coat. The corpse slammed into her, grabbing her by the arms. In that instant, he opened his mouth, revealing the sharp and deadly canine teeth in his possession.

  The crowd screamed and fell back against the wall as the monster’s inertia was going to send him, and the older woman, crashing into the rest of them. They all recoiled and wound up as a tangled mess of people and limbs against the tile wall like a group throwing themselves clear of a car wreck.

  But the impact never came.

  The corpse was gone.

  So was the woman.

  The moment they had come close to the pack of people, the two of them merely…vanished. Gone.

  “Jane?” a man asked. That must have been her name. The woman who was far braver—or at least far more convinced this was fake—than Lydia was.

  Nobody answered the call; there was nobody around. They could see down the intersection of the hallways in all three directions. They had disappeared right before their eyes in a blink. No smoke, no mirrors, no moment of flickering lights. Just…gone.

  “Jane!” the man shouted. No answer. The man turned to look at her, wide-eyed, as fear started to set in. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Lydia said breathlessly, her heart pounding in her ears. She didn’t know what a panic attack felt like, but she was wondering if she was getting close to one. “I just—he was in a bag, I unzipped him, and…” She trailed off, unable to finish. I was doing an autopsy, and like everyone’s worst nightmare, he got up and tried to kill me. That was what she wanted to say. But somehow, self-preservation kicked in. Lydia knew if she said that, they’d label her an accomplice because the other option—that it was true—wasn’t possible.

  Never mind the fact they had just seen a naked dead man and a woman disappear right in front of their eyes. If she added to that ridiculousness by saying the man was not wearing makeup and that he was actually a monster, it’d all be pinned on her.

  Not to mention that the dead man had a mark on his face bearing a substantial similarity to the one she mysteriously woke up with this morning.

  She just shook her head uselessly and hoped the man would pin her silence on her panic. It wasn’t too far from the truth.

  The man seemed to buy it, at least. “Jane!” he shouted again and put both of his hands through his hair. “Oh, god. We have to call the cops.”

  The cops just made things worse.

  Not because the cops weren’t trying to help, mind you. They were. Technically, they were all on the same team in some strange way, after all. The cops treated everyone—even Lydia—with the utmost respect since they were all working toward making Boston a safer place in their own way.

  It even looked like she would be let go without much fuss. That was until the cops saw the security tapes. Their system was horribly out of date and still ran on actual tapes.

  Once the recording was fetched and played back on the monitor, the cops instantly brought all the witnesses and sat them down in a room. There were five of them, now that she had the presence of mind to count. Three from one of the nearby departments who had all come running when Lydia had screamed for help and a fourth person who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jane had been the senior level administrator of the office shared by the other three.

  So now, they all sat around as the cop rewound the tape of the hallway and hit play. It wasn’t long before the unfortunate group understood precisely why they were watching.

  A naked dead man grabbing a woman and disappearing in a single frame of a film would have been one thing. That would have been hard enough for them to explain. But it was far, far worse than that.

  There was nothing on the film.

  Well, no undead corpse-monster, to be exact. The rest of the group—Jane, Lydia, Jane’s three officemates, and the fifth guy who just went for a soda—were all there in the frame. Everything else played out as she remembered it.

  First, Lydia came tearing down the hallway, screaming and bouncing off one of the walls as her momentum carried her around a previous corner too quickly. She didn’t even remember hitting the wall; that was how afraid she had been.

  Enter the other four and Lydia colliding into the group at full tilt. They all turned to look at…nothing. Nothing was there. Jane stepped forward, scolding the invisible monster for the prank.

  Here came the part that was really hard to explain. Jane was yanked off her feet and carried by some invisible force, crashing into the rest of the group. They all shrieked and fell against the wall in the same moment, and Jane disappeared.

  The cop paused it, rewound it, and played it again. When none of the group could explain what was on the tape—or rather, what wasn’t on the tape—that was when the real questioning began.

  They split them all off into separate rooms. Each of them was grilled by a cop, asking for a description of precisely what had happened. Lydia knew she was in for the worst of it, as she had been the lucky winner and had been the monster’s first target.

  “So,” the cop started and sat down in a chair across from her in an office they had borrowed. They were questioning them all here and not back at the precinct, in the hopes that they’d be done with this before the end of the day, and Lydia and the others could all go home. “Run through it again with me.”

  Lydia had told them exactly what happened twice already. And seeing as they had other security footage of her in the lab, she had to confess to the whole thing. There was no getting around it this time.

  “This morning, I was assigned to a D.B. who was dead from apparent shotgun wounds. I’ve said all this already,” Lydia said tiredly. She wanted to cry. At least the nice man had brought her a coffee, and she was busy clutching it for dear life.

  “Yup, we have that here,” the cop confirmed, looking down at the notes that had been fetched. “Was there anything unique about him?”

  “He had strange clothes. They looked old—Victorian, maybe?”

  “We have them in bags, yes. Anything else?”

  Oh, thank god, at least they had that much proof that the man had been real. Then came the harder choice—the marks on his face. Since they hadn’t come in with photos of the dead body, she assumed there were no images on her work camera. Should she tell them about her matching ink? No. She didn’t want to be linked to the monster in any way, shape, or form. “No, sir.”

  The cop nodded. “Then what happened?”

  “I was pulling out all the buckshot when he, uh…” Lydia paused and looked down in her coffee, feeling the tightness in her throat start up again.

  Fear was an incredible emotion when you thought about it. Its only purpose was to keep us alive. To tell us what was safe and what wasn’t. To give us the wherewithal to get the hell out of dire situations. But here she was, sitting across from an armed cop. Clearly, she was fine. But just the memory of that man sitting up on the table made her mouth go dry and her hands start shaking. “I didn’t have anything to do wit
h this,” she said weakly.

  “Hey, hey…” The cop reached across the table and put his hand on hers. He was a young guy, like most of them were, and he was doing his best to calm her down. Something about a guy in the uniform always made her smile, like most women, she figured. The presence of his hand on hers was helping, so she let him leave it there. “We aren’t saying you did. You aren’t a suspect. We just don’t have any answers, and we’re trying to figure this out and find your coworker.”

  Lydia nodded, leaned back in her chair, and forced her heart to calm back down. The cop—Officer Malley was his name—removed his hand and let her gather herself up to keep talking.

  “He sat up. The corpse just got up. I screamed, I fell over…I grabbed my phone and ran the hell out of there as fast as I could. He told me to ‘get back here’ and ‘do not run.’ I think he was trying to kill me.”

  “So, from the tapes, you’re just standing there, working on…nothing at all,” Malley said with a sigh. “But what’s weird is we can hear him. We have his voice on the tape. We can see things fall over on their own. Whatever it is, it knocked over a table.”

  “That’s what’s weird about all this?” Lydia asked sarcastically.

  “Well, hey, I mean,” the cop stammered then shrugged. “It’s all weird.”

  “Yeah…” Tell me about it.

  The door to the room swung open, and an older cop walked in. This one wasn’t in full street garb. Probably a detective. “Everyone’s stories all match up. We’ve swept the building, no sign of Mrs. Tiel.” Jane’s last name, Lydia figured. “We can’t hold anyone without a warrant, and I need to wait for digital forensics to answer their damn messages,” he grumbled down at his own cell phone. “Look, I know tomorrow’s a holiday,” the detective said, looking up from the screen to Lydia, “but I really need you to stay in town.”

  Lydia nodded. She was raised never to argue with cops. Their gig was hard enough. And besides, it wasn’t like she ever went anywhere for Thanksgiving, anyway. Her family all lived in Seattle now, so traditionally, she just took an extended Christmas break to go hang out with them. Nick and Lydia were going to have a Friendsgiving or whatever people called it. It was their own personal tradition for the past few years. “I’ll be here,” she said.

  “Good. Thank you. You’re free to go,” the detective said and stood by the open door, clearly asking her to leave the room so he could talk to Officer Malley. So she picked up her bag and her phone and thanked the two men and bid them goodnight.

  Free to go.

  Why did that feel like a lie?

  ***

  When she found Nick on the sidewalk outside the building, she didn’t say anything. If she opened her mouth, she’d lose her tenuous grasp on the tears she’d been fighting all afternoon. So instead, she just hugged him. God damn it, she needed a hug right now. He responded in kind and clutched her tightly as she rested her head on his shoulder.

  They stood like that for a while before she finally pushed away and nodded weakly in thanks. She really did seriously need that after the corpse, after the cops, after everything. Nick hadn’t been questioned, but he worked in security. He knew all about what had happened. He’d probably been part of the search team for Jane, trying to find the woman who the undead freak had, well, taken. There was no other word for it.

  As she pulled away, she felt something on his side under the zip-up hoodie he was wearing. Something hard was strapped to his side. “Nick? Are you wearing a gun?” she asked warily, shooting him an incredulous glance.

  Nick had a license to carry a concealed weapon. He was a security guard and in a dangerous area of town. There were handguns for the security guards in the office that they signed for when they clocked in and out of work. None went off the property. Ever. And yet here one was.

  “No one’ll notice until Monday. It’s a holiday, and in all the fuss, I can say I forgot it because of what happened.” Nick shrugged. “Walter’ll write me up and forget anything happened.” Walter, Nick’s boss, was notoriously lax.

  “You stole it.”

  “I’m borrowing it. You got attacked, Lyd!” he insisted. He was honestly surprised that she was shocked by this. “And I’m trained. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Great. Just don’t shoot me.” She shook her head. Although, honestly, the idea of having something should that corpse show up again was a relief, so she stopped giving him grief over it.

  Nick was a lot of things, but he was responsible when it came to weapons. And all those years of video games made him a decent shot. Lydia pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to fight off a headache she felt edging in at the back of her skull.

  “You all right?” he asked, probably knowing it was a stupid question but having to ask it anyway.

  “No. I need a cocktail. Beer isn’t going to do it this time,” she muttered, and they began to walk down the street. The fact that they needed to gather up after everything was over and talk it through was just understood between them. Besides, she was starving. Her hands were shaking. Partially from the day’s events, but also because she hadn’t had anything but a cup of coffee and a package of crackers the police had provided to her a few hours ago, and it was now well past seven in the evening.

  “I saw the tapes,” Nick said quietly. “They said a corpse attacked you…?”

  “Yeah.” Lydia shoved her hands into her coat pockets. She wanted to hide the rest of her in there if only she could. “It got up. Chased me. Grabbed that woman and just…poof.”

  “You sure he was dead?” When she glared at him hard enough to put a hole in his head, he raised his hands defensively. “Hey. Hey. I had to ask.”

  Lydia rubbed her hand across her face. “The cops asked the same thing. Three times. I’m not the best at my job, but I know when somebody’s dead.”

  “I know, I know.” Nick bumped his elbow into her arm. It was his way of apologizing, in his I-don’t-ever-actually-say-sorry kind of way. Lydia had grown up with one vaguely douchebag-y older brother, and now she joked that she had wound up with the second one in Nick.

  All her other friends wondered why she and Nick weren’t a thing. By his own words, he wasn’t interested, and neither was she. They were family to each other, close friends and nothing more. They understood each other and their weird quirks.

  The two of them made it to their favorite spot to drink and sat in the restaurant section. Usually, they just hunkered down at a corner of the bar. But this time, they ordered some food along with drinks. Lydia got her favorite, a whiskey old fashioned, deciding she needed a treat since she had been chased by a homicidal monster that day and all. God, it sounded stupid even saying it to herself in her head.

  It made the tattoo on her arm seem a lot less weird by comparison. It was incredible how context was king.

  “Are you okay?” Nick asked in the pause after their waiter walked away.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted woefully. She ran her hand through her blonde hair and let out a small breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It felt like every little sound, every tiny plink of glassware or silverware, was going to send her jumping out of the window in a panic. She didn’t think of herself as a jumpy person, but here she was, proving that theory false.

  They were both quiet, and she picked at the part of her sleeve over the tattoo, unable to help but dwell on it. Lydia didn’t even notice that Nick was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. It wasn’t until he cleared his throat that she realized he’d been trying, nervously, to get her attention.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Look, I didn’t want to bring this up earlier. You’ve had some weird shit happen you today, and you don’t need to deal with my weird shit,” Nick rambled.

  “It’s fine. I don’t think my day could get any worse. Go for it.”

  Nick began to unzip his hoodie and pull it away from his neck. “I just…I gotta tell somebody. I’ve been Googling it all day.”

  “Look,
your rash is between you and your doctor,” she quipped.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He dismissed her joke with a snicker, enjoying her crude humor. “But what in the actual fuck is this, though?” He pulled the edge of his t-shirt away from his neck.

  There, just below the collarbone on one side, was a mark. About the size of a quarter. It looked like some messed-up alchemical symbol. A four with two dash lines through it. Black ink. Like a perfect, single-line tattoo. It would take an artist maybe five minutes to etch it onto his skin. But impossible for someone to get magically without them realizing or remembering it.

  Lydia felt her face go pale. Felt all the color drain out of her face like someone had pulled the tap for the second time that day.

  “I know you think I’m nuts,” Nick exclaimed. “I know you’re going to say I just got trashed and don’t remember getting it. But I…” He was stammering. She’d never seen him like this. “I swear I didn’t get a tattoo, and not last night. Last night I just smoked a joint and went to bed and I didn’t—I don’t know what the hell is going on, Lyd!” Nick’s voice turned higher and strained as his eyes went wide. Nick didn’t deal with panic the same way she did.

  Silently, as actions spoke louder than the words she didn’t know how to form, Lydia rolled up her sleeve to her elbow and put her arm down on the table, palm up, showing him that she too had a mark. When he saw it, he grabbed her arm and ran his thumb over her tattoo, as if he was trying to wipe it off. As if confirming it matched his. Maybe not in shape, but certainly in style.

  She didn’t know what to say, except, “I believe you.”

  Now, how to tell him about the third set of marks she had seen today?

  ***

  Edu gripped the hilt of the sword as he looked down over this human city. It had been several years since the last Ceremony of the Fall and over a hundred years since he had returned to this plane.