Pay Dirt Read online

  Like most ghouls, they were a haggard bunch. Their clothing practically hung off them. I spotted one using a length of rope to hold his jeans up. Most were young, a couple even younger than Sal. Only half wore shoes—which I could see because they’d trampled the grass around the car into the dirt. Pain in my ass. If there was anything on the ground, any clue that might have helped me make sense of all this, it was undoubtedly crushed to nothingness by now.

  Silence fell over the crowd of ghouls, broken only by the sound of the grass shivering in the wind. And it wasn’t one of those peaceful, contented silences, either. Oh, no. This silence was hard and mean. Hostile. Accusatory.

  I stopped in front of them. “I’m Ozzy Turner. I’m a cunning man.”

  “We know who you are.” The voice came from a ghoul at the back of the crowd, close to the open front passenger door of the car. He pushed through the other ghouls and stood at their head.

  It was Sal’s friend from the train yard, the one who’d been giving me a hard time. Daud, I think his name was. He was younger than some of the other ghouls there, but no one shut him up. He had the kind of face you wanted to see squished into the mud beneath a very heavy boot.

  “I saw this guy last night,” Daud said. “He was hunting for Habi. He was angry at him.” He scowled at me. “No one ever saw Habi again after this guy found him.”

  I groaned inwardly. A few of the ghouls began to mutter among themselves. The others glared at me like maybe they wouldn’t mind eating live human for once.

  “Habi was alive when I last saw him,” I said. “I was trying to help him.”

  Daud sneered. “People like you don’t help ghouls.”

  “If they ask me to, and I can, then I will.”

  “Well, look how much good your help did.”

  This kid was really pissing me off. I gave up on him, turning my attention to the mass of ghouls behind him.

  “I need to see the body,” I said, determined to keep my voice even. “Let me through.”

  They didn’t move.

  “You don’t belong here,” Daud snapped. “This is ghoul business.”

  “Habi is still my client.”

  “Habi is dead!” Daud jerked a finger toward the car. A pair of birds nesting in a nearby tree took flight at the sound of the ghoul’s shout.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I’m going to find out who did it.”

  Daud turned to the ghouls with him. “We can’t trust him. He’s a sorcerer. Look at the way Habi died and tell me that wasn’t sorcery. He probably wants to get rid of the evidence. Or use Habi’s body for his spells.”

  “I’m not a fucking sorcerer!” I took a step forward, finally losing my patience. “I’m a cunning man, and I’m your best damn chance at getting justice for—”

  It was like a switch had been flipped. As I crossed some invisible boundary, the ghouls reacted as one.

  They all dropped into a crouch, ready to pounce. A keening noise rose from a dozen throats at once. Lips peeled back, revealing rows of jagged, yellow teeth. Eyes widened until they were bulging out of the ghouls’ skulls. Their arms all seemed suddenly longer, stretched and gangly and tipped with claws made for tearing into flesh. Jaws snapped open and closed with enough force to crush bones.

  I froze in place, my feet rooted the ground by the sudden wave of primal fear that washed over me. I swept my coat back and grabbed the truncheon at my side.

  “Stop!” Sal suddenly appeared between me and the horde of ghouls, one hand pointed at the leader. “Daud, quit being an asshole.”

  “Get away from him, Sal!” Daud snarled.

  “He’s trying to help.”

  “Sal,” I muttered. “Maybe this isn’t the best idea.”

  She ignored me.

  Daud scoffed. “And you trust him, do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He tried to help Habi. But you know what Habi’s like.”

  “Habi was one of us.” Daud jerked a claw toward me. “He’s not.”

  “You want to find out what happened to Habi or not?”

  “Of course I do. But—”

  “Then stop threatening the cunning man and let him find who did it.”

  “If it wasn’t the cunning man, then who?” Daud snapped. “Who could do that?”

  Sal lifted her chin. “Maybe the witch that attacked Ozzy.”

  “Son of a…” I muttered to myself. I’d been hoping to keep Isidora’s involvement in this whole business a little more quiet, at least until I’d tracked her down myself. If word got out that people were looking for her, she might go to ground. A witch like her would have ways of hiding that even I might not be able to penetrate.

  A few of the ghouls glanced at each other. Some of the snarls receded. Daud glared at Sal.

  “What witch?”

  “She was snooping around the train yard last night.”

  Daud shook his head. “You’re lying.”

  But a couple of the ghouls with him didn’t look so sure. One tapped Daud on the shoulder and muttered something to him. Daud’s head snapped around.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “When? Where?”

  The ghoul continued to whisper in his ear, and Daud shot a couple more angry glances in my direction. I kept my hand on my truncheon, but I didn’t pull it free. If I could get out of this mess without ending up in a fight, I’d be a happy man. Some of the ghouls began to mutter amongst themselves.

  “All right,” Daud finally snapped, waving away the ghoul whispering to him. “Fine. Let the cunning man through. But make sure you’re watching him. Don’t let him take anything from the body. I know what these sorcerers are like.”

  I nearly said something, but in the end I decided to keep my mouth shut. I’d got what I wanted. No point screwing it up now.

  The ghouls parted for me. I felt a little bit like the pharaoh following Moses into the Red Sea. Sal came with me, thank Christ. I released my truncheon and held my chin up high as I moved through the crowd of ghouls. I could almost feel their hot breath as I walked. The distinctive smell of ghoul washed over me—that mix of unwashed clothes and gravedirt.

  Then my attention turned to the abandoned car, and the threat of the ghouls seemed to fade into the background. Sal stopped and started chewing on her fingernails again, unable to get any closer. I kept moving.

  The car had been there for some time. The weeds creeping through the rusted holes in the bodywork were testament to that. The tires were long gone. The side mirrors had been smashed off, and all the windows were shattered.

  The front passenger door was open. I crouched down beside it, looked inside.

  I hate to admit it, but you know the first thing I felt when I saw the body? Relief.

  A thought had been gnawing at my chest ever since I got the call from Sal. That maybe it wasn’t Habi they’d found here. Maybe it was Holden. I knew it was irrational. I knew it didn’t make sense. But the fear had been there just the same.

  So I was relieved when I looked at the body against the steering wheel of the abandoned car. It wasn’t Holden. And that meant he could still be out there somewhere. In trouble, sure, but alive.

  Habi, though…Habi was dead. And it didn’t take a genius to work out the cause of death. He was missing his head.

  Sal had told me that, of course. I’d been expecting to see a hacked-up stump of a neck. I’d expected blood drenching everything.

  Instead, he’d been decapitated so cleanly it made me think of hot wire cutting through cheese. His neck looked like a cross-section from an anatomy textbook—eerily clean and perfect. There was hardly even any blood. Only a few drops marred the collar of his shirt.

  He was wearing the same clothes I’d seen him in when I confronted him at the train yard last night. Without his head, I couldn’t be sure it was Habi, but everything pointed in that direction. It certainly seemed like the body of a ghoul Habi’s height and build.

  Spots started to appear in my vision. I realized I was holding my breath. I let
it out slowly, shakily. And the relief I’d felt at first gave way to something else.

  Habi had come to me for help. He’d come claiming he was cursed, fearing for his life. And now…now…

  My fingernails dug into the flesh of my palm. How could I have let this happen? I’d been there. Right there, in that repair yard workshop. I’d heard Habi cry out. At the time I thought he’d just hurt himself climbing out that damn window or something. I hadn’t bothered trying to follow him any further. I’d got my talisman back, and that was good enough.

  So I left. I left, and I went to Alice’s house, and I ate dinner, and while I stuffed my face Habi suffered and died.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the image of Habi’s headless corpse slumped against the steering wheel. It was no use. I had a feeling I’d be seeing that image for a long time to come.

  I opened my eyes, forced myself to breathe. Inhale, count to five, exhale. Again. Again.

  When my hands stopped shaking, I got to work.

  I leaned in, examining Habi’s severed neck. Seemed as good a place as any to start. The cut was far too clean to be natural. But I didn’t think it was the work of some witch either, or a magic-user acting from a distance. Don’t get me wrong: witchcraft can be lethal. But it usually works by turning the body against itself or by exploiting some connection to the victim. It kills slowly, subtly, and leaves little trace.

  This was different. The cut had been made by force. It wasn’t natural, sure, but someone or something had gone to the trouble to physically separate Habi’s head from his shoulders. They’d been right beside him. They would’ve been able to hear him pleading for his life. They did it anyway.

  So I’d been right: it wasn’t a curse that killed Habi.

  That didn’t make him any less dead.

  I glanced at the seat Habi was sitting in. Hardly any blood on it. The upholstery featured a long slice at about neck level. This was where he’d died. Maybe he’d crawled in here, trying to hide from his attacker. It hadn’t worked.

  But where was his head? Taken by the killer? Some kind of trophy? Or maybe he’d been killed by some creature that thought ghoul brains were a delicacy.

  When ghouls went too long without eating, they sometimes lost control, went from carrion eaters to predators. Even ate their own, sometimes. Maybe one of those feral ghouls had attacked Habi. I doubted it. A wild ghoul wouldn’t leave anything but hair and fingernails.

  What if it was the other way around? When a ghoul lost control, there was only one option: they had to be put down. Their brothers and sisters couldn’t allow one wild ghoul to expose them all. Habi had been acting a little erratically. Maybe one of his friends had decided Habi had lost himself to the hunger.

  I licked my lips, aware of the ghouls outside the car, surrounding me. But that theory seemed far-fetched as well, even if the ghouls did have some means of decapitating a person like this. Habi was lucid enough when he came to me. Why would he say he was cursed if he was really worried about his brothers and sisters hunting him down?

  No, this was something else. Something powerful. And it was still out there.

  I gave the rest of the car’s interior a quick once-over, searching for anything that would point me in the direction of Habi’s attacker. Maybe a hair, something I could use in a tracking potion. But if there was anything hidden among the rust and dirt and weeds, I couldn’t find it. The glove compartment had long since been ransacked, and there was nothing tucked into the visors either. The only thing that hadn’t been stolen was a moldy set of fuzzy dice hanging from the cracked rearview mirror.

  But as I glanced up at the mirror, something caught my eye. The car was old enough that the mirror surround was metal, not plastic. Only it wasn’t entirely rusted like the rest of the car. A faint streak of electric blue stained the metal.

  I’d seen metal that color only once before. Back at the train yard, on that piece of roofing that’d fallen on my head. Gingerly, I held out my hand, letting my fingertips hover half an inch from the surface of the blue-tinted metal.

  I could feel the unnatural cold of the metal without even touching it. It seemed to suck the heat right out of my hand, leaving my skin tingling like I’d been out too long in the snow. I snatched my hand back.

  What was this stuff? Some kind of residue? But what had left it behind?

  Early might know, if he’d ever pick up his goddamn phone. I could really do with some input from the old man right now. If only to get these ghouls off my back. They were still clustered outside, staring in through the windows at me. I caught sight of Sal, her eyes searching mine for answers.

  I wished I had some.

  Reluctantly, I turned my attention back to Habi’s body. The ghouls wouldn’t be happy—and neither would I, to be honest—but I had to search him. Turning so my actions would be partially hidden from the watchful eyes of the ghouls, I reached out and began to pat down Habi’s body.

  Even through his clothes, his body felt unusually cool. My stomach squirmed to feel his dead flesh beneath my hands. I swallowed and focused on the task at hand.

  He wasn’t carrying a wallet, but he had a little loose cash tucked into his pockets. My hands moved up higher, to his jacket. I felt something hard jammed into his jacket pocket. With a glance at the ghouls outside, I pulled the thing free.

  It was a small notebook, worn and crumpled. I flipped it open. Inside, a scrawled mess of writing filled every inch of available space. And not just on the first page, either—page after page was filled with what I assumed was Habi’s writing. Blue ink, black ink, pencil, it looked like he’d written with whatever he could get his hands on.

  At first glance it seemed incomprehensible. The writings of a madman. But as I started to decipher his handwriting I noticed some patterns: dates, locations, almost like a diary or a log. In a few places the text was broken up with sketched maps with particular locations marked.

  It took me a few seconds of flipping through the pages to work out what it was: a record of his scavenging. By the look of it, every meal he’d had recently was recorded here, along with every conceivable detail about said meal: where he’d found it, what kind of flesh it’d been, how decomposed it was, whether he’d bought it from some flesh dealer or whether he’d scavenged it himself.

  By the look of things food hadn’t always been easy to come by—several entries described ventures into local cemeteries at night to dig up the bodies of the recently deceased. At least he was courteous enough to rebury whatever he didn’t eat.

  “Hey!” Daud cried out. I glanced back to find him leaning over the front of the car to peer in at me. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  I ignored him, my eyes darting across the pages, trying to take everything in as quickly as possible. This could be the break I needed. Maybe Habi had recorded whatever it was that made him think he was cursed. And just maybe that would lead me to whoever had done this.

  “I said you could look,” Daud yelled, “not go pawing at him. I told you all this would happen! He’s trying to use Habi for some kind of sorcery.”

  I flipped through page after page, hoping against hope that some clue would pop out at me. I was holding my breath again. My finger suddenly burned with a papercut, but I didn’t stop.

  And then the writing ran out. I turned the page, and the next one was blank. So was the one after that, and the same for the rest of the pages in the notebook. As I flipped back to Habi’s last entry, I noticed something: several pages had been torn out of the notebook. The last entry was dated more than a week ago. Whatever Habi had written since then had been removed.

  “Are you deaf?” Daud snapped. The car door screeched open beside me. Two pairs of ghoul arms reached in, long fingers clamping tightly around my shoulders.

  I tried to resist, but the ghouls were surprisingly strong. They hauled me out of the car and slammed me back against it.

  “Leave him alone, Daud!” Sal shouted, but she couldn’t get through the
press of ghouls around me. Daud approached me, sneering, and ripped the notebook from my hands.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said. “I need that book.”

  Daud glanced down at it, then looked back at me. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Goddamn it, Daud,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m trying to help.”

  He leaned in close, close enough for me to smell the stink of his breath. He bared his teeth. “We don’t want your help. Understand? This is a ghoul problem. And ghouls will deal with it. Like we always do.”

  “Daud!” Sal shouted again, her voice carrying through the crowd of ghouls surrounding me.

  Daud glared at me a moment longer, his nose almost touching mine. Then, with a sniff, he pulled back and gestured to his friends. They released their grip on me.

  “I want you out of ghoul territory,” Daud said to me. “If I see you again…”

  He left his sentence hanging. Probably thought it made him sound more threatening. It actually made him sound like the whiny little teenager he was.

  The crowd began to disperse. Daud and his closest buddies went around the other side of the car and started pulling Habi’s body out. I opened my mouth to say something, but I felt a hand on my arm.

  “Don’t,” Sal said. “He’s looking for an excuse to fight you.”

  She was right. I’d got all I was going to get. What exactly that was, I wasn’t sure. A couple of clues, maybe, if I could make any sense of them. And a little added motivation.

  Whatever had killed Habi, I had to stop it. I had to find Holden before he ended up like poor fucking Habi. If it wasn’t already too late.

  “What are they doing with his body?” I asked Sal.

  “They need to begin preparations for the funeral rites.”

  Sal glanced down at her feet. Her jaw was set.

  “What did this to him, Ozzy?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “Will it…come back?”

  I hesitated a second, watching as two of Daud’s buddies slung Habi’s body between them and started to shuffle away. Daud shot me one last glare as the crowd of ghouls headed back in the direction of the train yard.