The Mouth of the Dark Page 12

  When Jayce reached the table, he set Nicola’s wine in front of her and put his beer down at the place where he’d been sitting. The woman in the tuxedo – who he presumed was the friend Nicola had been waiting for – looked up at him and smiled.

  “I’m Jayce Lewis,” he said, returning the smile. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Nice to meet you, Jayce. I’m Ivory. And while I appreciate your offer, there’s no need.”

  Jayce wasn’t certain what she meant, but then Nyla appeared and set a vessel in front of the woman. Nyla stood by while Ivory removed the lid and raised the jar to her face. She inhaled the vessel’s scent, closed her eyes for a moment, and then smiled.

  “Thank you, Nyla,” she said, eyes still closed. “It’s a wonderful choice.”

  Nyla grinned – looking more than a little relieved, Jayce thought – nodded once, and then headed back to the bar.

  “What did she bring you?” Nicola asked. Jayce sat as the woman opened her eyes and answered.

  “The last breaths of lovers who died during sex. Quite rare and sinfully expensive.” She smiled at Jayce. “But what’s the point of owning the place if you can’t indulge yourself once in a while?” She raised the vessel to her face once more, and this time she inhaled deeply.

  Jayce caught Nicola’s attention and arched an eyebrow. It seemed she was better connected socially than he’d realized.

  Ivory let out a contented sigh, put the vessel back on the table, and replaced the lid. Jayce wondered if she’d inhaled all the breaths stored within the jar or she was saving some for later. Ivory then turned her attention to him.

  “Nicola tells me you have a problem that I might be able to help you with, Mr. Lewis. Your daughter is missing?”

  “Yes.” Jayce took his phone from his pants pocket, found a recent picture of Emory, and showed it to the woman. “This is her.”

  Ivory took the phone. She looked at Emory’s picture for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve seen her around. I wouldn’t say she’s a regular, but she comes here often enough that—” She broke off and cocked her head slightly to the side. She brought the phone closer to her face and peered at Emory’s picture intently for several seconds. The light from the screen washed away some of the red from Ivory’s face, and Jayce could see where she’d gotten her name from. Her skin was white as porcelain.

  Without looking away from the screen again, she said, “What’s your last name again?”

  “Lewis,” Jayce replied, unsure where this was going. At first he’d been thrilled when the woman remembered Emory, but now it seemed like something was wrong, and although he’d only become – consciously – aware of Shadow a little over twenty-four hours ago, he’d learned enough to know that things could go very wrong here indeed.

  Ivory looked at Jayce now, but she made no move to return his phone.

  “There was another woman who used to come in here some years back. She looked a great deal like your daughter and had the same last name as you do. I was younger then, of course. I’d just started my second century, and you know what they say. After the first hundred years, some of the finer details start to escape you. I’m trying to remember the woman’s first name, but.…” She shook her head, annoyed.

  Jayce felt a cold pit open in his stomach.

  “When you say some years back, how long are we talking about?”

  “Several decades, at least,” Ivory said. “Maybe even as much as a half century.”

  The pit at the center of his being yawned wider.

  “Was her name Valerie?” He spoke softly, but Ivory had no trouble hearing him over the club’s noise.

  She smiled. “Yes, I think it was.” She looked at Emory’s picture once more. “Your daughter does favor her.” She finally handed the phone back to Jayce. “Is Valerie a relative of yours?”

  “She’s my mother.”

  He waited for his mother’s voice to say something, to confirm or deny what he’d just learned, but she was silent. Of course she was. Her voice wasn’t really hers, but his. Now he understood why she’d been so paranoid and overprotective all those years, why she’d always kept insisting that the world was a dangerous place. If she, like her granddaughter, had gotten involved with the denizens of Shadow, had for a time been one of them, then she knew just how dangerous the world could truly be.

  Ivory spoke again, but Jayce was so stunned by this revelation that what she said didn’t register. It took an effort of will for him to focus on her voice.

  “…places where your daughter might go. I could make some inquiries, but first I must know your reasons for searching for her.”

  At first he didn’t understand what she was saying, but then he scowled.

  “What reason do I need? I’m her father.” The words came out more harshly than he’d intended.

  Nicola reached out and put her hand over his.

  “It’s a valid question,” she said. “Some people are drawn to Shadow to escape something bad in their lives. So bad that Shadow and its dangers are a better alternative. And a lot of times, that something is a person.”

  Jayce understood what the two women were getting at. He looked at Ivory.

  “You’re asking if I’m an abusive bastard trying to track down the daughter who ran away from me.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” Ivory said evenly.

  Jayce wanted to protest, to shout that he wasn’t a goddamned child-abuser. But everyone would claim that, wouldn’t they? Especially an abuser. Besides, while he’d never raised a hand to his child, he didn’t feel he was going to win Father of the Year anytime soon.

  “I don’t want to take her away from Shadow, not if it’s the way she truly wants to live. I just want to know that she’s safe, and I want her to know that I care what happens to her.”

  Ivory looked at him for several moments without blinking. Jayce wondered if she could somehow read his mind, and if so, what memories she might find in there that he kept locked away. But whether she read his thoughts or, more likely, simply came to a judgment about his character based on their conversation so far, she nodded.

  “Very well. I’ll start asking around and see what I can find out. Do you have a number I can reach you at?”

  Jayce pulled his wallet from his back pocket and removed one of his work cards. He put his wallet away, and he handed the card to Ivory.

  “My cell number’s on there, right below my office number.”

  Ivory held the card close to her face and inspected it. As she did so, Jayce noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. He saw a figure – a large one – approaching their table with a brisk, purposeful stride. He turned to see Ohio Pig coming their way, a giant grin on his face. In his left hand he carried a canvas bag, the kind that environmentally conscious people used when buying groceries. The side of the bag bulged and it hung low, as if it contained something heavy. Then he realized the bottom of the bag was stained black. At least, it looked black in the club’s crimson light. The Pig had a number of similar black stains on his clothes, some as large as half dollars.

  The Pig stopped when he reached their table. He didn’t acknowledge either Nicola or Ivory. He kept his wild-eyed gaze fixed on Jayce. He raised the bag, reached into it with his other hand, removed a large object, and tossed it onto the table. It hit with a heavy thud and bounced once, leaving a dark smeary blotch on the tabletop before coming to a stop. It was a severed head, and it faced Jayce, eyes open and staring, lips parted to reveal a glimpse of straight, even teeth. It had long brown hair and its neck was a ragged stump with a nub of bone jutting out.

  “Told you I’d find her,” Ohio Pig said, sounding very satisfied with himself.

  The head, of course, was Emory’s.

  Chapter Eight

  Jayce didn’t move at first, didn’t breathe. It felt as if his heart sei
zed in his chest, and pain deeper and more intense than any he had ever imagined possible cut through the core of his being like a blade of white-hot steel. Nicola and Ivory both stared at Emory’s head, Nicola in shocked surprise, Ivory with reserved interest. People at the surrounding tables looked over to see what was happening, and more than a few of them laughed.

  Jayce’s body began moving on its own, without any conscious control on his part. It stood, walked over to the grinning Pig, reached up, grabbed the back of the man’s head, and then with a strength he didn’t realize he possessed, Jayce slammed the Pig’s face into the tabletop, crushing the man’s nose and dislodging several teeth. Blood gushed outward from both sides of the Pig’s nose, and he gave a strangled, gurgling cry of pained surprise. The impact of the Pig striking the table caused Emory’s head to bounce and roll off the edge and onto the floor. Seeing his daughter’s head fall from the table like a dropped scrap of food shattered his emotional paralysis and filled him with rage. He grabbed hold of the Pig’s hair and yanked him upward, fully intending to slam his face onto the table once more and to keep slamming it until there was nothing left of the man’s head but bloody paste and bone fragments. But before he could begin, the Pig swung his right arm out in a wide arc and struck Jayce on the side with his fist.

  The blow knocked the air out of Jayce, and he released his grip on the Pig’s hair and took a stagger-step backward. Before he could recover, the Pig straightened, turned, and came at him. The man’s eyes bulged with fury and his face was a mask of blood. He roared as he rammed into Jayce and wrapped his arms around his midsection. The momentum of the Pig’s rush drove both men into a nearby table, and it collapsed beneath their combined weight, wood splintering, mugs and glasses shattering. Three men and a woman had been sitting at the table. Two of them were knocked over when Jayce and the Pig destroyed their table, but the other two sprang to their feet and started shouting. Jayce was only partially aware of all this. The two men lay on the floor, the Pig holding Jayce in a tight embrace, squeezing his ribs and preventing him from breathing. He struggled to break free, squirming and rolling, cutting himself on broken glass, but barely feeling it. His exertions didn’t help. The Pig held on to him with the tenacity of a starving pit bull.

  Despite his violent attack on the Pig, Jayce had never been in a physical fight before. The closest he’d ever come was minor skirmishes at school when he was a kid, consisting primarily of name-calling and shoving. He’d never thrown a punch or received one. He still felt rage and shock at what Ohio Pig had done to Emory, and those emotions – coupled with animal instinct – told him what to do next. He opened his mouth wide, fastened his teeth on the Pig’s cheek, and bit down hard. The man’s skin was already slick with blood from his broken nose, but fresh warmth gushed into Jayce’s mouth as his teeth penetrated the Pig’s soft flesh. The man howled, more in anger than pain, Jayce thought, but instead of releasing him, the Pig only tightened his grip.

  The man was damn strong, and Jayce felt his ribs grind together. He struggled to draw in a breath, but the most he could manage to pull in was a hissing gasp through his teeth. His mouth was still fastened onto the Pig’s cheek, and with no other way left for him to fight, he bit down harder, sawing his jaw back and forth to cut through the meat. The Pig moaned in pain but kept up the pressure on Jayce’s ribs. Jayce continued biting and sawing at the man’s cheek until his teeth came together and a slick hunk of flesh lay wet and slippery on his tongue.

  A pair of figures approached then, and at first Jayce thought Nicola and Ivory had decided to come to his aid. But then he realized that the figures were larger and more broad-shouldered than either woman. As the pair drew close, Jayce saw that they looked enough alike to be twins. Their heads were clean-shaven, and their eyebrows had been drawn on with heavy black liner. They had brutish faces – small, close-set eyes and wide, flat noses – but their lips were full and lush, and they possessed delicate shell-like ears. Their arms, however, were thick and well-muscled, chests wide, waists trim, legs like tree limbs. They were dressed the same: tight-fitting dark T-shirts, jeans, and black leather boots.

  The twins stopped when they reached Jayce and the Ohio Pig. Moving in almost perfect unison, they each bent down, grabbed hold of one of the men’s shoulders, and employing grips like iron, they pulled Jayce and the Pig apart from each other. The Pig struggled to free himself, but the twin had hold of him from the back, and the Pig couldn’t move. The man glared at Jayce who, after being lifted to his feet by a twin, was allowed to stand without any sort of restraint.

  The twins wore sidearms on their belts, along with sheathed knives, stun guns, and other objects Jayce couldn’t identify. Things of bone, rock, and feathers lashed together with barbed wire. They also carried small hairy hands tucked into their belts. Were those actual monkey paws, Jayce wondered, like in the story?

  “Why the fuck did you attack me?” With the Pig’s broken nose and missing teeth, his words came out as mushy noise that was difficult to make sense of.

  Jayce still had the bloody gobbet of the Pig’s cheek in his mouth, and he spat it at the man. It struck his chest with a wet smacking sound, slid off, and fell to the floor with a plap.

  “Because you cut my daughter’s head off, you goddamned lunatic!”

  Jayce screamed these words, and the twin behind him put a large hand on his shoulder to keep him from renewing his attack on the Pig.

  Now that the fight had been broken up, Ivory and Nicola came over. Ivory nodded toward the twins.

  “Thank you both.” She then looked at Jayce. “The Therons are the best security I’ve ever had. They anticipate problems before they happen, and they were likely already halfway to our table before this man” – she glanced at the Pig in distaste – “pulled his little prank.”

  Jayce couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Prank? The motherfucker killed my daughter!” He practically howled this last word.

  He felt wetness on his cheeks, and he thought Ohio Pig had injured him without knowing and he was bleeding. But then he realized the wetness wasn’t blood. He was crying.

  Nicola came to his side.

  “Are you all right, Jayce? Did he hurt you?”

  His ribs ached, and he thought a couple might be cracked, but he didn’t think any were broken, and he’d torn a couple of the stitches on his hand where one of the dog-eaters had cut him, and the wound was bleeding a bit. But none of that mattered right now. Emory was dead, decapitated by the madman being held by one of Ivory’s security brutes only a few feet away from him. How could both Ivory and Nicola be so unaffected by what had happened to his daughter? Nicola had told him that exposure to Shadow changed people, and the longer and more intense the exposure was, the greater the change. Neither woman seemed changed outwardly, but inwardly? Given the lack of empathy they’d displayed since seeing Emory’s head dropped onto the table in front of them like so much trash, maybe they were both as crazy in their own way as Ohio Pig.

  His intense rage had burned itself out, leaving behind only soul-crushing sorrow. His little girl, his Emmy, was gone. She’d died a horrible, unimaginable death, and he hadn’t been able to do jack shit to stop it. He’d failed her again, and this time it had cost Emory her life.

  His mother’s voice, silent for so long, spoke up now.

  You should’ve kept your dick in your pants. The way she ended up, she would’ve been better off if she’d never been born.

  He wanted to deny Valerie’s words, but he couldn’t. Despair flooded him, bringing with it bone-deep weariness. His knees started to give out, and he would’ve collapsed to the floor if Nicola hadn’t grabbed hold of his arm to steady him. Given that she didn’t seem to give a flying fuck about his daughter’s death, he wanted to pull away from her. He didn’t want the psycho bitch’s help. But he was too drained to do more than stand there.

  Ivory walked up to the Pig, her lips pursed
in distaste.

  “You know you’re not welcome here,” she said.

  He attempted to smile, but the best he could do was part his swollen, blood-smeared lips to reveal a mouthful of cracked and broken teeth.

  “I go where the job takes me,” he said.

  Ivory turned to Jayce. “The Pig” – she almost spat the word – “fancies himself as something of a low-rent Van Helsing. He views Shadow as a corruption of reality, and the beings who inhabit it as distorted, debased, and subhuman.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” he said. “Most of you fuckers are harmless enough, long as you keep to yourselves. But when you start messing with regular folks, that’s when I go to work.”

  “Well, your work here is more than done.” Ivory addressed the twin holding Ohio Pig. “Escort him off the premises – and you needn’t bother being gentle about it. Make sure he doesn’t return tonight. I’d like to finish my conversation with Mr. Lewis without further interruption.”

  What was there to talk about now? Emory was dead. And the piece of shit who’d killed her was standing right in front of him.

  “You can’t let him go,” Jayce said. At first, speaking was an effort, but the longer he spoke, the more his strength returned. “He needs to pay for what he’s done. We have to call the police.”

  “Those of us who live in Shadow police ourselves,” Ivory said, a hint of frost in her tone. “But even if that weren’t true, there would be no need to contact the authorities.”

  “You’re insane,” Jayce said.