Samuel Essau was not a man prone to outrage.
In all the time she had known him, Alexandra had only seen him approach angry once, maybe twice. However, the look on his face when Jacob Black walked through the front door of his office scared her. She had never seen her friend skate the edge of rage.
“What are you doing here?” Samuel said, his voice deep and husky.
“Good to see you too,” Jacob said around a predatory smile. “Nice place you’ve got here.” He took a step forward.
Samuel moved to block the door. “You’re not welcome here.”
“Now, is that any way to greet a guest?” Jacob said. “I thought you white hats were supposed be all sweetness and light, the poster children for civility. Or do I have that wrong?”
Samuel ignored the jab. He had no desire to engage Jacob in a challenge of wit. “A guest? You, sir, are no guest here.”
“Samuel, wait,” Alexandra said, positioning herself between them. “This is important. Please, let me explain.”
But Samuel wasn’t listening. “State your business, Black, then be gone.”
“Why all the hostility, Samuel? This isn’t a social call, after all. This is business, plain and simple.”
“There’s no business you have that concerns me.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Jacob said. “After all, I brought you a couple of gifts.”
“Gifts?” Samuel asked with more than a hint of skepticism. “What gifts?”
“Well, the more pleasant of the two is the lovely Miss Holzer here.” He motioned toward her. “It was my honor to escort her here from my office.”
“Your office…” Joshua was by her side in a shot. “What happened?”
“Ah, Mr. Demerest,” Jacob said. “I had all but forgotten you were here.”
Joshua shot him a look.
In response, Jacob smirked. “Oh, by the way, congratulations on your engagement. Alexandra has told me nothing but good things about you. Perhaps I just haven’t been around at the right time to see those amazing qualities she seems to think you possess.”
“That’s enough, Jacob!” Alexandra chimed in. “You’re not helping.”
“I’m also not the one being a bad host.”
Alexandra blew out an exasperated breath. It’s like dealing with children, she thought. Aloud, she said, “There is no need to make a tense situation any worse. Everyone just needs to calm down. Okay?”
“What happened?” Joshua asked again.
“Someone followed me from my apartment. Jacob helped me deal with it.”
“You went to this guy for help?” Joshua’s cheeks flushed an angry hue.
“Yes,” she said. “Jacob’s office was nearby and I knew he would help me. He’s a friend.”
“And I did I might add,” Jacob said, staring daggers at Joshua. “Help her, that is. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Who was following you?”
“I was just getting to that part,” she told Joshua. “But, instead of telling you, it might be easier to show you.”
“What do you mean?” Samuel spoke up.
“There’s someone outside you need to meet,” Alexandra told him.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Joshua asked once the van door slid open.
“This is the guy who followed me from my apartment earlier,” Alexandra said. “He has been… reluctant to share his name with us.”
Samuel cast a sideways glance at Jacob. “I can’t imagine why.”
The Slaugh was bound and gagged in the back of a black windowless van that was parked in the alley next to the loading dock. Also inside the van were two of Jacob’s men. They were big and imposing, but neither one said a word.
Samuel took one look at the bound creature and shook his head. “How is this possible?” he asked.
“How is what possible?” Joshua pointed at the tied up youth in the van. He couldn’t see what Samuel and Jacob could. “He’s just a punk kid.”
“That is no kid, Joshua,” Samuel said.
“Look at him!”
“They are, Josh,” Alexandra said. “They can see things in a way you and I can’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means this may have once been a ‘young punk’ as you called him, Mr. Demerest,” Jacob said. “Now, he’s little more than a receptacle for the creature living inside of him.”
“What kind of creature?” Joshua asked.
“It’s called a Slaugh,” Samuel said.
“I’m not familiar with those,” Joshua said.
“Neither am I,” Alexandra added.
“I’d be surprised if you were,” Samuel said. “They’ve been all but extinct for a long time. In fact, there hadn’t been a Slaugh sighting in a couple hundred years until a little over twenty years ago when your father ran across one trapped within a castle in… oh, where was it?”
“Portsmouth,” Jacob said. “New Hampshire,” he added when they all turned to look at him. Jacob shrugged. “My office keeps excellent records.”
“The Slaugh were… are… soul hunters, eaters of sin,” Samuel said.
“I beg your pardon?” Joshua interjected.
If Samuel even heard him, he chose to ignore the young lawyer’s comment. “If you believe old Irish folklore tales, the Sluagh are dead sinners that have come back as malicious spirits. They called themselves The Wild Hunt. According to legend, they come out of the west, flying in tight groupings not unlike those of a flock of birds. When they find a dying sinner, they try to enter a house and take away that person’s soul. The old stories claim that the Slaugh eat the dying man’s sin.”
“What if they aren’t sinners?” Joshua asked.
“Everyone sins,” Jacob said evenly.
“Try to get in?”
“Yes, Alexandra. Try. Most Irish families would keep the west-facing windows of the home shut at all times to keep the Sluagh out.”
“If all it took was closing a window to keep these guys out, how dangerous can they be?” Joshua asked.
“Dangerous enough,” Samuel said. “There were also certain local barriers that could block their entrance to a home. When added to the construction materials, the Slaugh were barred entry.”
“At least at first,” Jacob added.
Samuel shot him a disapproving look. “Yes. Eventually, the Slaugh learned how to overcome these obstacles.”
“Aren’t you going to tell them how?” Jacob asked. When he realized that Samuel was trying to soften the details, he chimed in. “At first they simply set the homes on fire, which was rather ingenious on the face of it. Once the barrier was gone, they could swoop in and collect their bounty.”
“You sound like you admire them,” Alexandra said.
“No,” Jacob replied. “I do admire their resourcefulness, though. They never gave up.”
“Charming,” Joshua said.
Samuel steered the conversation back on track. “It wasn’t until some hundred years later when a coven divined a method of holding a Slaugh at bay, eventually trapping it, at least according to folklore.”
“How much stock can we put in an old fairy tale?” Joshua said.
“You’d be surprised,” Samuel said.
“And do we have access to that same method?” Alexandra asked.
“No.”
“What a surprise,” Joshua said, throwing up his hands in frustration.
“The minerals used to construct the prison that held The Wild Hunt are extremely rare in the old country. In the United States, it is all but non-existent.”
“Then how are we holding this guy?” she asked. “He’s tied up with a couple of silk ties we took off of some lawyers at Jacob’s office. What’s keeping him from breaking free?”
“Fear,” Jacob said plainly.
“Fear of what?” Joshua asked.
“Me.”
Jacob’s features remained neutral and hard to read, but she took him at his word. Jacob was intimidating on normal days, but she knew that he could be a scary guy when he needed to be. She had seen only a hint of it before. She hoped to never see him really cut loose.
“If this guy was possessed by the spirit of this Slaugh creature, can it be removed?” Alexandra asked instead of worrying about Jacob’s scary demeanor. “Is there any way to save the host?”
“Maybe,” Samuel said. “Possession, as you well know, is a tricky beast. We have to move carefully lest we do more harm than good.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” she told him.
“Being inside the host body opens them to human frailties. They can be hit or stabbed, for example. Unfortunately, we can’t do anything about the Slaugh itself while it’s inside the body. It will have to be removed from the host before we could send it across.”
“How do we separate them?”
“I have a team ready to go back at my office,” Jacob said. “They are very good at dealing with stubborn spirits.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Samuel deadpanned.
“So, what’s our next play?” Alexandra asked. “Is this guy alone or has the entire Wild Hunt returned? And why were they following me?”
“Those are very good questions,” Samuel said. “I wish we had some good answers.”
“I know somebody who might be able to help,” Joshua said, pointing toward the man hog-tied in the back of the van. “Why don’t we ask that guy?”
Jacob smirked. “I’m starting to like this guy,” he told Alexandra.
“Told you,” she said.
Jacob reached into the van and pulled the bound man toward him by the scruff of his shirt. He pulled the gag free from his mouth. “What about it, pal? You ready to talk?”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you!” he spat. “Or your friends!”
“You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?” Alexandra said. With a hand lightly brushing against Jacob’s arm, she told him to let him go.
The Slaugh unceremoniously slumped back to the seated position, but somehow kept from falling over.
Alexandra stepped closer, her voice soft and playful, as if talking to a wayward five-year-old who refused to take his nap. If Jacob was the bad cop, she was the good one. “Look, whatever you’re up to or think you’re up to, or whatever you had planned, it’s over. You’re done. Caught.” She chucked a thumb over her shoulder toward where her friends stood. “These guys are not going to let you just walk out of here. You have to know that, right?”
The Slaugh nodded.
He shook his head. He had no intention of answering the question.
“Okay, maybe something a little easier. Why were you following me?”
The boy’s face tightened. He wasn’t talking.
“Okay, how about what you want?”
He laughed.
Undaunted, Alexandra pushed onward. “Let’s try a different approach. My name is Alexandra Holzer. You can call me Alex if you like. And you are…?”
He stopped laughing and gave her a long, hard look. “Holzer?”
“Yes. That’s my name,” she said, suddenly nervous. “Do you know me?”
“I’ve heard the name. The leader of the hunt has said it before.”
“Who is he?” Alexandra asked.
“He’s the one who freed us from the blackness of purgatory where those witches left us!” His voice started to rise with each word. “We were supposed to only stay there a short time while the coven was dealt with, but the leader was trapped.”
“In the castle?”
“Yes. Then, he was freed, but a man stopped him. A man named Holzer.” He smiled and Alexandra felt a chill crawl up her spine. “Now, we are free to hunt again. Once we’ve eliminated the threat posed to us by the one called Holzer, The Wild Hunt shall ride again.”
“Is that why you were following me? Did your hunt leader send you after me?”
He started to laugh, which only made her anger grow.
“Are they going after my father?”
The laughter increased.
Alexandra grabbed the boy by the shirt and yanked him forward, all traces of civility washed away by his cackling. “Answer me, dammit!”
“Oh, child,” the Slaugh said around guffaws. “They aren’t going after your father. They already have. He’s probably already dead.”
Although she wasn’t generally prone to angry outbursts or fits of violence, Alexandra Holzer did not take kindly to threats against her family. Before she even realized she had done it, she punched the Slaugh in the face. He fell backward into the van, still laughing as blood spurt from his newly split lip.
Alexandra shook her fist. “Ow!”
“Feel better?” Jacob asked.
“No. That hurt,” she said, rubbing a sore knuckle.
“It takes practice,” Jacob told her.
“I thought you said this guy was a ghost?” Joshua said.
“He is.”
Joshua pointed at the van then tapped his own lip. “Then why is he bleeding? Last time I checked, ghosts were dead. No blood.”
“He’s right,” Alexandra said, rubbing her sore knuckles. “He’s pretty solid.”
“In this form, yes,” Jacob said.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple, Miss Holzer,” Jacob said. “The ghost has possessed this man. The outer body is just a shell, a human shell.”
“So it can be hurt?” she guessed.
“After a fashion.” Jacob scratched the back of his neck as if deliberating on whether or not to reveal more. “The spirit and the host are connected. If you hurt the host, the spirit will register the pain.”
“So, if we hurt them, we can stop them, right?”
“It will be difficult. There is nothing to stop them from vacating the host.”
She smiled. “But then they’re back to being spirits and that’s something we know how to handle, right?”
Jacob smiled. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”
“We have to get to my father,” Alexandra said. “It’ll take too long to drive or take the train. I need options!” She had to shout over the rising thrum until she realized what was causing the noise.
She looked up; they all did, just in time to see a black helicopter hover over the alley before settling onto the roof of the building that housed the OAGI.
“I know,” Jacob said over the noise of whirring blades. “I took the liberty of arranging transportation for us.”
“Us?” Joshua asked.
“Yes,” Jacob said. “I’m going with you.”
“Then so am I,” Samuel said.
“Me too,” Joshua added.
“Sounds like a party,” Jacob teased. He motioned toward the nearest entrance to the building. “Shall we?”
Alexandra was the first one up the stairs, the others hot on her heels.
Minutes later, the helicopter lifted into the air and angled away from the building that housed the Office of Angel Guides on a straight shot toward Holzer House.
As she watched the city pass by beneath her, Alexandra hoped they were fast enough.