Unbound

JJ stood and joined Warren at the window. “Hunter.”

Warren looked at him sharply.

“Hunter,” he repeated, sending back the steely gaze. Warren wanted the perfect embodiment of a superhero, so that’s who he’d be. The purest predator in the city. The most concentrated essence of good, he thought, looking up at the sky.

The quintessential hunter.

Because somewhere out there was a woman with a thing for dark-haired men, a preference for Mustangs, and a need for relevance. She took action based on the constellations, her deeds steered by the dark matter in between, and she did it with his daughter, his Lola, in her belly.

And a child, Hunter decided, rubbing faintly dusty fingers together, was a damn good reason to continue the fight.

The Dead, The Damned, And The Forgotten Joelynn Drake

1

A body was waiting for me at the morgue.

That wasn’t the type of message I was expecting to receive when I awoke at sunset, but there was no avoiding it. My voice mail contained a semi-polite message from Archibald Deacon, Savannah’s coroner, informing me that a nightwalker had just been delivered to his morgue. The message was followed by one from homicide detective Daniel Crowley, also informing me of the waiting corpse. A final message was from the now frantic coroner, who wanted me to deal with the corpse immediately. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do until the sun had finally set beneath the horizon, allowing night to reclaim the world.

The private examination room was in the basement of the morgue, away from the main room that held the majority of the dead. It was one of the few buildings in Savannah with a basement, given the city’s high water table, and it came at a great cost. Due to moments like these, I had been more than willing to make the contribution to the city.

The cinder-block walls had been covered with a thick coat of white paint that had begun to yellow with age. A handful of narrow windows lined the walls more than six feet above the floor. The glass had been painted black to deter any inquisitive people who happened to wander too close. A window-unit air conditioner sputtered and coughed randomly from its perch at the far end of the room, spewing forth a semi-steady stream of cool air.

I looked up from the coroner’s report to watch Knox as he leaned over the body of the dead nightwalker. His lips were curled in disgust, revealing faint flashes of fang. The opposite wall from where I stood was covered with a stainless steel refrigeration unit for corpses. There were only four doors that opened to slide-out drawers. A larger unit was in the main examination room on the first floor.

“Are you sure there were no other wounds on the body besides the main two?” I inquired, turning my attention from the disgruntled nightwalker to the coroner, who hovered close by. Archibald was a short, round man who stood on stubby little legs. His dark brown hair was thinning, leaving the top of his skull nearly exposed. Archie, as I preferred to call him, had been the coroner for Savannah and the surrounding counties for nearly twenty years and we had known each other for almost as long.

“Mira,” he snapped. His bushy grayish-brown brows bunched together over his large, bulbous nose. “Half the body was destroyed! How could I possibly answer such a question?”

“Can you at least tell me if the body was burned before or after he was beheaded?”

“After,” replied a new voice.

Archibald jumped at the unexpected appearance of Detective Daniel Crowley, but I didn’t flinch. I had sensed him walking through the building toward our location in the basement.

“How do you know?” I asked, looking over at Daniel as I closed the file folder that held a copy of the coroner’s report. It was the real copy, one that would never be officially filed with the police department. Archibald would create a second version that would carefully omit any questionable details like the elongated canines, the sensitivity to sunlight, and any kind of genetic abnormalities he was already aware of.

“I talked to some of the guys who were first on the scene,” Daniel continued, closing the door behind him. “When they found the body, one of the officers opened some curtains to let light in and the body started being reduced to ash like a slow-burning ember.”

“They saw him burn?” Knox demanded in a harsh tone. Daniel took a hesitant step backward and looked over at me again. Knox and Daniel had never worked together. In fact, I was the only nightwalker in contact with Daniel and Archie, but it was time for that to change. If Knox was going to aid me with managing my domain, he needed to know the humans I was in contact with.

However, the corpse was unnerving Knox more than I had expected, and the nightwalker was losing some of the cool, unshakable logic that I had come to depend on him for. This unexpected rough edge couldn’t be seen by these trusted humans.