Free Hunter of the Dead by Stephen Kozeniewski Page B

of that matters now.
    “Kid! Come on up here!”
    Nico glanced back at the Caddie.
    “Should I bring the keys?”
    “Eh…no, leave ‘em. They’ll be fine for a second. It looks like we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
    Nico stumbled up into the copse of trees and quickly found Price by the glow of a penlight. Price looked positively demonic in the low light.
    “Take a look at this.”
    He pointed the penlight towards the ground. The Damned lay there. At least, what was left of it did. The thing’s fur was still slightly charred from its earlier encounter with a fireball. But the thing had been hacked to pieces. Its severed head lay glaring limply; eyes open but dead, a few feet from the rest of its body. Arms and legs were strewn all akimbo, hacked off at elbows, knees and shoulders willy-nilly.
    “Limbs and head,” Nico said, “A friend of yours?”
    Price bit his lower lip.
    “I’ll be honest kid: I don’t see another Inquisitor doing this. I got lucky at the gas station but I was pretty sure there was no way I was walking away from this.”
    “You thought you were going to die and you brought me along?”
    Price cocked his head and fixed Nico with a withering glare.
    “Yeah. That’s what I did. I forced you to come along. Twisted your fucking arm.”
    “All right, all right. So…is there like…something else that can do this? Are werewolves real? Frankensteins?”
    Price tapped the penlight against his teeth.
    “The nightcrawlers pretty much keep the riffraff out of Vegas. This doesn’t really look like a werewolf’s work…I mean; this was done with a blade.”
    “So werewolves are real?”
    “Just assume everything’s real, kid. But what’s really weird is take a look at that.”
    Price shone the penlight at the ground leading out of the copse in the opposite direction. A set of horse’s hooves led out.
    “Centaur…?”
    “No such thing.”
    “Can we catch it?”
    “We can try.”

 
     
    Five
     
     
    Last night…
    Benito whistled. He was a man who appreciated carnage and this…this was a metric fuckton of carnage.
    “Place is a goddamned abattoir.”
    The little chapel was all but painted in blood. That meant humans had died here along with immortals. The trail of blood they had followed to this spot continued, in a sense, with a series of bodies in a row, connected by blood trails. Cashley’s disciples, Benito guessed, kicking one onto her back. Every single one was a woman.
    “Never been much for keeping a circle myself,” Benito said, “But Cashley had a way of making it extra gross.”
    “They’re just mortals, Benny,” Hofstra said.
    Benito turned to look at Hofstra’s skinny, acne-riddled face and vulture-like nose. Whoever had granted him the Long Gift hadn’t based it on his looks. With a single motion he reached out, cupped the back of Hofstra’s skull, and slammed his head into the ground, smashing a tile. He waited until Hofstra had extricated his face from the ground, over-long proboscis gradually reforming itself to its original, ass-ugly design, before speaking.
    “I know they’re mortals, ass clown. I’m saying Cashley is a degenerate.”
    “Was a degenerate,” Piker announced from the front of the temple.
    Piker held up the top of Cashley’s brainpan. Had he still been alive, Benito would’ve shuddered at the grotesque sight of Cashley’s ruined eyes. So that was why he always wore those blocky sunglasses.
    “This is weird, Benny,” Hofstra said, apparently none the worse for wear, as he planted his fists on his hips, “No fixer would leave a job in a state like this. What if someone found Cashley and planted him back in the dirt? He could regenerate.”
    “Maybe it wasn’t fixers,” Benito growled.
    The rest of the gang was clattering around, looking for loot and, to a lesser extent, clues. Carson had picked up a big old sword from one of the corpses and was turning it back and forth in the waning starlight. Without a word, Benito took it