“That wasn’t just me, was it?” Jack asked.
Marin placed her hand on the wall. “Not just you. There’s magic pulsing in the walls.”
Jack waited to see if another tremor was coming. When the ground stayed firmly under his feet for several seconds, he said, “We need to check on Kaisermann.”
“You go. I’ll stay here.” She motioned to Elliot.
When they started talking livers, he’d looked a little rough. Now…now he looked numb.
“Yeah. Be back shortly.” Jack glanced again at Elliot. “If you have a contact you can tap for more information on aswang…”
“Yeah.”
Several guests were descending from the upper floor as Jack exited his room. The third floor must be where the shared rooms were located. From the chatter, the consensus was that there’d been an earthquake.
No surprise. He encountered it over and over again. Humans were stubbornly unwilling to see the unusual and out of place for what it frequently was: magic.
Kaisermann was addressing guests as they descended the stairs. “Nothing to worry about. Just a little local tremor. Everything’s fine.” He herded guests to the breakfast room, which also served as the games room, the drinking room, and generally a place for people to congregate and socialize. “Help yourself to the wine. I’ve got a few bottles open.”
After the last guest had drifted to the breakfast room, Jack said, “Wine? How do you manage that on twenty dollars a night per head?”
Kaisermann winked. “It’s not good wine. Oh, and you’re paying more than that. Semi-private rooms are at a premium.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t use that tone. I know you’ll expense it.” Kaisermann inclined his head to the check-in counter. “Join me?”
“Oh, yes, I think so. That was no tremor, and I’m hoping you can tell me what it was.” Jack walked behind the counter and planted himself in one of the two chairs.
Kaisermann sat down. “Apologies. I should have warned you. That was just Sally being proactive, pulling her shields up, so to speak.”
“Her shields? Please tell me we’re not trapped in here.”
Kaisermann’s eyebrows shot up. “What? No, no. Of course not. There’s just more of her in the house than under it now.”
“Under it? So is that the deal? She lives in the ground?”
“In the ground, the house, the surrounding vegetation. It’s all rather Mother Earth-like.”
Jack wasn’t sure that this was helpful for their current dilemma, so time to hit the meaty stuff. “If you’re sure there’s no problem…” Kaisermann nodded, so Jack asked, “About those dreams you’ve been having—you wanna tell me what you’ve been seeing?”
“Yes. Very unpleasant in the last few days. They started out much tamer. Initially, I was walking in the forest, being pulled through, compelled to walk down this path. But just a path.”
Warning bells went off in Jack’s head. Compulsion would be one way to describe mind control. “And then?”
“Then I’m digging.” Kaisermann rubbed his lower back as he spoke. “Had that one for several days. I thought I was sleeping poorly and my back pain had inserted itself into my dreams, but I got a new mattress and the dreams persisted. Does that mean anything to you?”
Jack shook his head, but digging combined with a nasty creature that was supposed to be buried…probably not good.
“Well, then I was trapped in some dark place, and that’s when it got bad. Never had heart problems, but I kept dreaming I was locked in a basement, having a heart attack. Terrible stuff.”
Jack sighed quietly. “Have you heard the latest news? About the woman found outside of town on the small farm?”
“Yes, and that there were others.” Kaisermann clasped his age-spotted hands together.
“You know she was missing her heart.” Jack saw Kaisermann’s eyes widen. Apparently still not in the news—which was weird. “Can you describe what the heart attack felt like?”
Kaisermann closed his eyes and shook his head. “Wasn’t a heart attack, was it? I just assumed. A man gets to a certain age, and he thinks chest pain is a heart attack. Can you blame me?” He leveled Jack with a grim look. “But yes, it could have been someone carving out my heart.”
“Hell, that probably would have given me a heart attack. I’ll pass on trading dreams with you.”
“Good thing my ticker’s still going strong, or it might have. Then again, I like to think Sally wouldn’t send me something that’s gonna kill me.”
Kaisermann had a good deal of faith in an ancient creature he didn’t know much about and could barely communicate with. Jack didn’t think he’d be capable of it. Then the irony hit him. Sure he was. He was home to the essence of a potentially equally ancient dragon. But his ancient creature—a.k.a. Joshua—wasn’t lurking inside of him. Jack had just gotten Joshua’s psychic energy or his dragony essence. Or something like that. Jack still wasn’t sure on the details.
Whatever his connection to Joshua, Jack was hardly in a position to judge whether placing one’s trust in ancient magical creatures was a good idea.
“Ah, about Sally—did you come up with the name or did she?”
“I’m not sure. Does it matter?”
“I got a message from the great beyond that might have mentioned Sally.”
“The great beyond?” A spark of curiosity lit within Kaisermann’s eyes, and Jack remembered that the man had shown equal interest when communicating with the dead had come up before.
“Ghosts. If you haven’t run into any, they’re around. One reached out to us recently via a medium. We’ve received a few pieces of information from her, but her last communication was cut off mid-message: S-A-L. No context, other than the recent killings.”
“I hope there wasn’t any implication that Sally was responsible.”
“No, nothing like that. If she did mean Sally, then I’d guess she was trying to point us in the direction of another source.” Jack massaged his neck. “It would be a nice change to get a straight answer. Interpreting dreams and ghostly messages lacks a certain clarity that might be nice, given we’re hunting a supernatural serial killer.”
“Predator.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s a predator. If it were human, it might be a serial killer. It’s not human, so it’s likely a predator hunting for what it needs to survive.” Kaisermann shrugged. “Fifty years as a hunter says I’m right.”
Jack considered Kaisermann’s words. “I’ll pass on that bet. Anything else you can think of that Sally might be trying to tell us?”
“No. What did you get out of that muddle I gave you?”
“Between your dreams and our ghost’s messages, we know we’re dealing with an aswang, native to the Philippines. That it can compel its victims to some as yet unknown degree, that it was likely buried, probably released by some poor soul or souls who were compelled to dig him up. That he removes the heart and liver, for purposes as yet unknown—but like you said, probably to do with his survival.”
“Why here?”
“Excellent question. Belize has been the nexus of too many magical or magic-adjacent events recently for there not to be a connection. Something about Belize…?” Jack expelled an irritated huff of breath, but his frustration didn’t ease. “It traveled an awfully long way to find its hunting ground.”
“Ah, are you sure?”
“Hell no. What are you thinking?”
“That we don’t know it chose Corozal as its hunting ground, but we do know it was trapped here.”
Jack didn’t see the old guy’s point. “What’s the difference? He was here—for some reason—and then was trapped. Now he’s awake and back to his nasty aswang tricks.”
“Hm. Maybe. But he’s from the Philippines and got stuck underground here, in Belize. There’s something there.” Kaisermann tapped his temple. “I’ll have a think on it before I go to bed tonight. Maybe Sally will come through for us.”
“Absolutely. Anything you come up with, we’ll be grateful.” Jack stood to leave, but then turned back around. “We really do appreciate you putting us up. We’ve brought this killer—predator—to your doorstep, and—”
“No. Don’t mention it again. I spent my life denying my connection to Sally, refusing to acknowledge that the old sanctuary in Austin was anything other than a house. When I moved to Belize, I promised myself… ” Kaisermann leaned forward with narrowed eyes. “I promised Sally that I was all in. And this is what being all in looks like.”
Jack couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. He hoped he had a cause he believed in half as much when he was Kaisermann’s age. “Yes, sir.”
Jack jogged up the flight of stairs without any flashes of vertigo. Better yet, the ache in his jaw and side from his encounter with Elliot was fading.
He was ready to kick some aswang butt.
He knocked on the door of room three and then let himself in. The doors were old school and didn’t lock automatically.
Marin turned her back to the door and continued to speak quietly on her phone. Since he caught the occasional “yes, sir,” he figured it was her dad’s boss, head of the McClellan clan.
Not all dragons organized as clans, nor were all dragons Scottish. That was just the McClellan Clan—the only dragons Jack happened to know. Oddly, most of them didn’t sound particularly Scottish. Probably something to do with living in the now. It was a big deal in the dragon world, because if a dragon stopped living in the now—started clinging to the past—they went nuts. A one-ton mass of scales and muscle that could shoot fire with laser precision or cut a fiery swath the length of a football field was not a creature anyone wanted running around with a screw loose.
Marin ended the call.
As she tucked her phone away, Jack said, “Everything’s good on the house front. Sally’s just being extra cautious. How’s Lachlan?”
It took her a moment to turn around, and when she did, she’d wiped all emotion from her face.
A nasty feeling hit him in the gut. “What’s happened?”
Calmly, clearly, she said, “Lachlan’s just told me that my father’s missing.”
Holy hell.
“He took leave from IPPC to handle a clan matter, and Lachlan’s lost contact with him.”
Jack hated to ask… “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Elliot said. “You need to leave. I’ll get you a ticket on the next flight out. I’m sure—”
“No!” The air crackled as Marin snapped the response. The sharp static feeling in the air was gone as fast as it had appeared, and Marin lowered her voice to a more reasonable volume. “No. I’ve been advised not to return. That the situation with my father is under control for now”—her nostrils flared, demonstrating exactly how credible she found Lachlan’s statement—“and the clan needs me here more.”
Now Jack knew what all of the “yes, sirs” were about. And that bad feeling he’d had before ramped up threefold. “The aswang.”
Marin nodded. “He said he’d come himself, but given the circumstances, he couldn’t spare the time or any other clan resources.” A brief flicker of intense emotion crossed her face. “He needs to focus all of his attention on finding my father. I need him focusing all of his attention there.”
Jack held up a hand and shook his head when Elliot would have protested. “Did he give you any information on aswangs? How to kill one, preferably?”
Again with the pinched nostrils. “He told me dragon fire won’t do it. Lachlan thought they were gone, wiped out years ago, because there haven’t been reports of them in ages. He also had his suspicions as to why this thing had been trapped—that it was in a feeding frenzy and couldn’t be stopped any other way. Although whoever did it probably didn’t count on it surviving in hibernation indefinitely.”
“Shit.”
Elliot looked back and forth between Marin and Jack. “What? I mean, we have to figure out how to kill it, but you guys can do that. That’s what you do. Right?”
“If it can be killed.” Jack gritted his teeth. “What she’s saying is that her boss, a well of supernatural minutiae, doesn’t know how, so he’s not sure it can be killed.” Turning to Marin, he said, “Any thoughts on trapping it?”
“Find the original cage, stuff him back inside it, and hope like hell it holds him longer this time. At least long enough to work out a more permanent solution.” Marin inclined her head once, then again more decisively. “And that needs to happen before the world figures out he’s not human and magic is involved. The danger with a creature like an aswang is more than the swath of dead bodies it leaves behind. It’s also the magnifying glass that follows so many deaths and the increased risk of exposure. From what Lachlan says, it won’t stop. They have a rabid hunger for human hearts.”
Mass casualties would be IPPC and the clan’s main concern, not the individual victims. Lots of dead bodies created awkward questions. Jack’s buddy Kenna worked with IPPC, specifically with Harrington, more than he did. And he had to agree with Kenna’s oft-voiced complaint that the man’s priorities weren’t always in the right place.
Jack knew that individuals could cope when confronted with the reality of magic. He had a few years of anecdotal evidence on the subject. Humans, on a small scale, were able to not only comprehend that magic existed, but also to keep the concept under wraps.
Unfortunately, the world wasn’t full of individuals; it was full of groups of people. Adding in magic made one plus one equal riots and mass executions. The world wasn’t ready for witches, spell casters, and dragons. He knew it in his gut. But Corozal shouldn’t have to burn for that.
Finally, Jack asked, “And what is Lachlan going to do if the potential for a reveal scandal increases?”
“Lachlan, IPPC—someone—will take care of it if it goes that far.”
“It?” Elliot asked. “The leak? The town? The people of Corozal?”
Marin narrowed her eyes, but didn’t respond.
Elliot ran his hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up at odd angles. “These are good people, and they sure as hell aren’t responsible for anything this monster has done. They’re the victims.”
Jack had his doubts that IPPC and the clan could create a media blackout. The internet was a relatively new factor when it came to the question of protecting the world from knowledge of magic. But IPPC resources were also growing in quantity and variety every day—so…maybe.
“We make sure it doesn’t come to that,” Jack said. “We stick this bastard back in the ground.”