The Stars Never Rise (The Midnight Defenders Book 2) Read online

  The Stars Never Rise

  Joey Ruff

  Copyright © 2013 Joey Ruff

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1492986003

  ISBN-13: 978-1492986003

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  EPILOGUE

  To my girls.

  Allison and Madison.

  Without you, I’d lack the inspiration to write.

  I love you.

  Always.

  Thank you to the fans. Your love and support has meant the world. You demanded the next book, and I’m happy to give it to you.

  Thank you to Josh Ruff and Marc Nutton

  Special Thanks to

  BJ and Cori May

  “For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;”

  --Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”

  “Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its head. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth…”

  --Revelation 12:3-4a, NIV

  1

  The shipyard was quiet. The waves of the Puget Sound were calm, and the two docked freighters sat silent and cold. A third, smaller ship hung from cables in a metal frame like a whale carcass.

  I was in an alley between two long warehouse buildings, and at my feet were small, scattered piles that burned like napalm. At first glance, the flaming substance looked like mud, but I knew better. I knew from the sodding outhouse-smell that it was poo. Not like in a brown paper sack and caught alight by asshole teenagers on a doorstep. No, this was more natural, and it served as a sort of trail of bread crumbs to lead me to what I was chasing: A bonnacon. While they all shat fire, this one appeared to have diarrhea.

  This wasn't a case. This was a night out on the town.

  Yet here I was, Jono Swyftt, P.I., doing pro bono work on my day off because some sodding Asian cow had bust through the wall of the Crab Dip seafood restaurant where Nadia was trying to give me a staph infection and get me to talk about my feelings.

  Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be out in the night hunting monsters. I guess that meant I owed the bonnacon one for getting me out of there. After I took it down, I'd have to buy it a beer.

  Nadia came around the corner. Her jeans and shirt were mottled with soot, and one of her sleeves was torn. She had a ragged look of annoyance on her face. This wasn't the night she had planned. Her whole motive was to get me out – out of the house, out of my own head. She said I was too sad lately.

  “Did you see it?” she asked.

  Before I could say anything, a single gunshot sounded, followed by the rolling report of an automatic rifle. As the gunfire faded, I heard the low, agitated mewling of a bull from somewhere nearby, then a crash and a shattering of glass.

  A flaming barrel bounded at my head. Nadia pushed me out of the way and we tumbled to the ground together as the heavy, metal drum collided with the side of the building.

  I looked up to see the bonnacon coming around the corner, a wild look that I took to be panic in its eyes. It was running, but as it saw us, it stopped, wary of the new threat. Bonnacons, as scary as they looked, were timid – cowed. Some pun intended.

  What stared us down wasn’t a bull. Its horns curled backward, and it bore a long, thick mane of hair like a horse. The dark crimson-brown hide was dried and leathery, and it stood – in size and width – just smaller than a semi-truck cab. Oh, and it was on fire. Liquid tongues of gold and orange rippled across its back and up the length of its powerful legs, twisting to sparks in the cool night air.

  I heard the spitting rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire echo and clang against what sounded like a tin roof, and the creature bolted in the opposite direction from us, taking off around one of the buildings, a trail of smoke and flames billowing from its hindquarters as if from a jet engine.

  “It's menacing,” Nadia said breathlessly. “And so beautiful.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Well, you don't let me help that often. It's usually just goblins, but the bonnacon...it's nature.” I understood what she meant. It was equal parts horrific and captivating, like an erupting volcano. “I’m not as jaded as you.”

  “Well,” I said, pulling myself to my feet, “if you love this thing so much, let's go take another look.”

  “Where are the gunshots coming from?”

  “Don't know, but they're spooking it.”

  We rounded the building and followed yet more flaming piles of shit around into the next building. “This is disgusting,” Nadia said, stepping around a rather large pyre.

  “It's nature.” I flashed her a wry grin she didn't appreciate. “Bonnacons have nervous stomachs.”

  We entered the warehouse in darkness, but even so, it wasn't hard to spot the thing; it was its own source of light.

  The bonnacon was corralled. Metal semi trailers stood behind and on either side of it, creating a u-shape, and in the open space before it, standing as mere silhouettes in the flickering light of the animal's flames, were three men with guns.

  Luckily, they hadn’t seen us, and we ducked quickly to the side, hiding behind a large stack of crates, and watched.

  Behind the bonnacon stood a wooden crate big enough for an elephant, stamped with Chinese characters and freight markings. The nearest side of the crate was open, and the wood of the door appeared to have been broken into splinters. The inside of the crate was scorched black.

  “It was imported,” I said quietly. “Whoever brought this thing here did it on purpose. Looks like it escaped.”

  “And now they're trying to get it back.”

  I nodded.

  “So …wait. How do you ship a flaming cow in a wooden box?”

  “Gopher wood. It's flame resistant, and the fires go out when the thing's asleep. Gopher wood sedates animals.”

  She stared at me blankly. “Gopher wood? The stuff Noah built the ark with?”

  “Had he used any other wood, the lions would have torn the hind-quarters from the gazelles before it was raining hard enough to turn the wipers on. No one since Noah's used the stuff until about

  fifty years ago when a grove of them was discovered outside some Tibetan monastery. When the monks tried to pass through on donkeys, the animals kept falling asleep.”

  “Is this the best time for a history lesson?” she ask
ed with a grin.

  “Hey, your father wanted me to teach you this stuff. I'm fucking teaching. Shut up and let me do my job.”

  “Fine. So what do we do?”

  I reached down to my thigh and unfastened the strap on Grace's holster, and I held her up with a smile. “We save the day.”

  Grace was a triple-barreled Soviet pistol: the two on top took shotgun shells, and the lower, rifle ammo. She was my girlfriend, all I need in this life of sin. We'd been together a long time.

  I cracked her barrel and chambered a few shells, and I looked at Nadia. “Give me some cover?”

  Without batting an eye, both of Nadia's hands began to glow in green light, and in the next moment, she was holding two emerald discs, about the size of music CDs.

  She was the daughter of a Hoodoo holy man, but what she did wasn't witchcraft. Some people are born with the ability to sing well. Others draw. Some are naturally gifted athletes. Nadia just did what she did, and I never questioned it.

  The colored energy discs that she created altered an object's willingness to move. The red discs made things stop; the green discs made things go.

  She stepped out from behind the crates and threw her hands forward with the ease and fluidity of a college frisbee champion.

  The gunmen didn't notice a thing until the discs hit the towers of crates stacked on either side and the heavy boxes cascaded down on them like an avalanche. When the first of the gunmen fell, crushed beneath the weight of unnamed cargo, the other two turned. One saw Nadia and called out, brought his gun up to fire, and was smothered in falling boxes. The third rushed forward, his pistol barking.

  I leapt into the open, rolling as my shoulder hit the ground, Grace at the ready, and I let her do the talking. The gunman fell backwards as she struck him in the shoulder, landing on his neck. His gun skittered away, and I was in motion, standing atop him before the dust settled.

  My boot caught his chest as he tried to sit up, and I forced him down. If he doubted my intent, he didn't doubt Grace, her lips hovering inches above his, one of her barrels still smoking and hot for him. I just shook my head, and any fight left in him was gone.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the other gunmen shrugging a box to the side as he staggered to his feet. He adjusted his fedora squarely on his head, brushed his jacket off, and pulled an automatic rifle from the debris. As he lifted it to fire, a single gunshot rang out, and the man fell.

  I turned to see Nadia holding the first man's discarded pistol.

  When I was sure the third man wasn't getting up, I turned back to the man under my boot. “Who do you work for?” I asked. “And why are you smuggling Asian shit-bulls?”

  The man spoke, but I don't know what he said. It was in Italian.

  Frustration welled up inside, and Grace smacked him, knocking a tooth loose and rendering him unconscious.

  I walked over to Nadia, but she wasn't looking at me. Her attention was held by something on the other side of the toppled crates. “What do we do with him?” she asked.

  I followed her gaze to the bonnacon that cowered inside the burned-husk of the shipping crate, eyes looking heavy, legs trembling to support itself under its own weight. The once-roaring flames died to a slow, simmering kindle as the Gopher wood began to take effect.

  “I'll call Ape. He has a supply of treated Gopher timbers in the barn. We'll crate it back up.”

  “And what? Mark return to sender?” she asked. She sounded annoyed.

  I shrugged. “Well, it's probably best that it isn't still hanging around when the police come looking for the Rat Pack over here.” Whether it was my imagination or not, I heard sirens in the distance: probably fire department, if I had to guess, heading for the Crab Dip restaurant.

  “We could call Hunter.”

  “I'm not calling Hunter. He's not my disposal guy.”

  “You called him for the dragon.”

  “No. I didn't,” I said. “Ape and his friend did. I'm not speaking to Hunter.” She shot me a disappointed look. I shook it off and turned to the bonnacon who had just closed its eyes and laid its head down, its legs curling underneath itself. I sighed. “Call Ape. Tell him to bring the wood and the big truck. Maybe we'll keep it in the stable for a while.”

  She smiled at me.

  “You're such a girl. But if you keep the sodding thing, you're picking up its poo.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “What time is it?”

  She pulled out her phone and hit a button to illuminate its screen. “Almost eight.”

  “Shit. I gotta go.” I turned, took a couple steps away, and then stopped. “Can you wait here for Ape and catch a ride home with him?”

  “Where are you going all of a sudden?”

  “I have an appointment. New client.”

  “At this hour? We had a date.”

  “It wasn’t a date, love. It was your attempt at an intervention, and I set this up as a way to get out of it. You said yourself I was spending too much time with Anna, that it was unhealthy, that I needed to take more cases.” I flashed her a big smile.

  “I…” She sighed. “So who is this new client?”

  “Jamie DeNobb.”

  “The Channel Five weatherman? He’s cute. Like Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead. When do I get to meet him?”

  “Watch it,” I said, sounding more like a parent than I intended.

  “What?! I’m eighteen, Jono. I’ve never even had a real date.”

  “And you’re not going to.”

  She sighed, and I turned to walk away.

  “What do I do if those thugs wake up?” she asked.

  “You’re eighteen now. Figure it out.”

  2

  Jamie DeNobb lived in the heart of downtown Seattle, on the twentieth floor of a building with more security than the counting room of a Vegas casino. I took the elevator up, and by the time the doors opened for his floor, I could almost feel a nose bleed coming on.

  I found his door with little effort and knocked.

  Now, as a rule, I hate television. With the whiny, big-haired bitches and the greasy, shirtless fuckholes, it was filled with the worst kinds of rubbish. I did, however, watch the news on occasion. Seattle was my city, and I liked to know what went on there.

  So, I was familiar with DeNobb. He delivered the week’s weather forecast every morning with the shit-eating grin and confidant swagger of a typical frat boy, which, judging from his appearance, he probably was this time last year.

  The guy who answered the door was not the DeNobb I was familiar with. On his head he wore a colander, and bits of his black hair stuck through the little holes like a porcupine. He wore an apron over a worn, stained t-shirt with a metal cookie tray tied in place as a breastplate. Oven mitts covered each of his hands, and in his right, he held a large, round pot lid. The stubble on his well-crafted chin had to have been at least three days old, and his eyes couldn’t have been bulging out of his head any more if he’d been part chameleon. He looked more like an inmate from the state hospital than a weatherman.

  His eyes darted back and forth nervously along the corridor, and then they alit to me without really focusing. “You Swyftt?” he asked.

  “Are you on something?”

  “Come in. Come in.” He crossed the threshold and disappeared into shadow. “Quick, close the door. I’ve got it trapped.”

  I entered, closed the door carefully behind me, and found myself searching the ground at my feet as I did so, as if on the lookout for some as-yet-unknown pet rushing past. “Trapped what?”

  “The ghost.” He didn’t look at me. Instead, he proceeded away down the hallway, his lid before him, and a long, metal spatula (that he’d retrieved from a side table) held high in his other hand. He took several cautious steps towards the kitchen.

  “Right,” I said, more than just a hint of skepticism in my voice. “You do remember when we spoke on the phone, I said ghosts were a load of bollocks, and you don’t have one.”

  He
stopped, cast a glance back at me over his shoulder, and let out a scoff of laughter. “Tell that to the thing trapped in my kitchen.”

  I sighed.

  Ghosts didn’t exist – at least, not the way they do in movies. People died, and they shuffled off this mortal coil. They didn’t hang around banging cabinets and flicking light switches to make TV weathermen piss themselves in their lonely, high-rise apartments. This wasn’t information I retained from my time as a priest. I’d been a hunter for twenty years, and the simple truth was that there were no ghosts.

  It didn’t mean people weren’t haunted. Just, most cases, what did the haunting had nothing to do with the dearly departed or previous owners. It did have a lot to do with spirits, however. And no, it’s not the same fucking thing.

  The main cause of what your average person would term a poltergeist was a pissed off house spirit, like a Brownie. I know this because I’ve faced off against a few. Hell, Ape’s house had a Brownie, called Chess, but I’d somehow managed not to piss him off, yet. He was generally very helpful, making pies and the like. Brownies were territorial, and for one reason or another, they attached themselves to buildings. There were other forms of spirits that were attached to objects – djinns, for example, or mammon like Leprechauns.

  Here’s the real kicker, though. Most spirits could assume, however temporary, a physical form.

  “Alright,” I said. “So what does your ghost look like?”

  He laughed, loud and high and beautifully rhythmic. “He’s a ghost, man.”

  “So…like a bedsheet draped over his head?”

  He paused in the kitchen door and actually turned to look at me. “I thought you were a professional ghost hunter or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s not at all my title.”

  He arched an eyebrow at me. “It’s in here.” He nodded his head towards the kitchen. “I’ve got it trapped under a pot.”

  “The ghost?” I said. “How do you know it’s under there if you didn’t see it?”

  “I saw it. Just not very well. It was really more of a blur.”

  “Ah.”

  He put his finger to his lips to silence me, and then he stalked into the kitchen. I followed, and just as I came around the corner, I saw him stooping low to the ground, nearly on his knees. He faced up towards the counter, to the abnormally large stew pot overturned on the surface, staring at it as if he could see up its dress.