Chapter 20: The Dead Answer
Chapter 20: The Dead Answer
Chapter 20: The Dead Answer
HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE
Volume 1: Risen from Suicide
***
Rats.
That was the first thing the flashlight beams found, and for one stupid, suspended heartbeat, nobody in the tunnel understood what they were looking at.
The cardboard pile at the far end shuddered. A box slid sideways. Then another. And from the damp gaps between them, small, gray, matted shapes began to crawl out into the light.
Dead rats.
Dozens. Flattened by tires, bloated by rain, stiff with rot. Some were missing their tails. One had no head. They didn’t scurry. They dragged themselves, jerky and wrong, legs scrabbling at the concrete with a soft, dry, rattling sound like a handful of dice rolling in a bowl.
Thrum-thrum-thrum.
The cracked core in Yun Zhou’s fist pulsed with every one of their movements, as though each little corpse were a bead on a string, and he was holding the other end.
I didn’t call them.
I didn’t touch them.
The stone is leaking, and the dead are answering.
Behind him, the stranger’s breath went very quiet.
“What,” she said, “are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Yun Zhou whispered, and for once, there was no performance in it. “I’m not doing anything.”
***
The three men skidded to a halt thirty feet away.
Up close, they were exactly what Yun Zhou had expected. Two in sports jackets, the refrigerators from Kwon’s table. One lean and wiry, with a shaved head and a tattoo creeping up his neck. The wiry one held the gun, a squat black pistol, pointed at the floor and shaking slightly.
“What the hell,” said the first refrigerator.
“Rats,” said the second. “Just rats.”
“Rats don’t walk like that.”
“They’re dead, they’re all dead, look at the one with no...”
The pistol came up.
Not at me. At the rats. Fear makes people shoot the nearest thing that frightens them.
Use it.
Yun Zhou’s mind went cold and wide, the way it did in the moment before a cut. Three men, one gun, a pack of corpses that couldn’t be explained, a masked assassin at his back, and a core in his hand that was trying to eat him.
Too many variables. Remove two.
He dropped to his knees.
Not gracefully. A boy’s knees buckling with terror, a gasp, a sob, a gloved hand flung up to shield his face. The core fell from his fingers and rolled across the wet concrete, trailing a thin ribbon of gray light, straight toward the rats.
The knife at his throat vanished.
***
“Fool,” the stranger hissed, so softly it was almost a breath.
Then she was gone.
Not running. Gone. One moment a presence stood at his shoulder, the next a faint rush of air, the whisper of cloth, a flicker of black against black. Yun Zhou felt the displacement on his skin, like the wake of a passing boat.
Eye.
The tunnel sharpened. Not with sight but with memory, a map built from the faintest cues. The drip of water. The angle of the flashlight. And, tracing a thin line through the dark, a figure moving low along the left wall, slow enough to be invisible and quick enough to be deadly.
She’s going for the one with the gun.
She’ll kill him.
That’s... acceptable.
But I need the other two alive.
The core rolled into the nearest cluster of rats and burst.
Light.
A soft gray flare spread across the concrete, rippling out from the stone in a perfect circle, like a stone dropped in still water. The rats jerked as one. Their dead limbs twitched. And with a sound like a thousand tiny snapping sticks, they surged.
Not toward him. Toward the men.
A tide of gray, matted, rotting bodies poured across the tunnel floor, squealing, though their throats were silent. The first refrigerator screamed. A rat latched onto his trouser leg and he kicked wildly, stomping, slipping, going down on one knee in a wash of black fur and old blood.
“Get them off! Get them off!”
The gun went off.
***
The shot was deafening in the enclosed space. It cracked off the walls, rang in Yun Zhou’s skull, and for a moment the whole tunnel jittered white with muzzle flash. A bullet struck the ceiling and sprayed a handful of concrete dust across the floor.
He’s panicking. Good.
Two refrigerators on the ground, one still standing. The gunman backing up, firing blindly.
And she’s right behind him.
He saw it, a glint, a flicker, a thin dark shape rising behind the shaved head like a shadow growing from a wall. A gloved hand cupped the man’s jaw. Another slid across his throat.
No sound. No struggle. Just a small, wet click, and the gunman’s shoulders sagged. The pistol dropped from his fingers and clattered across the concrete.
He folded to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
One.
The second refrigerator, the one still standing, stared at the body, at the rats, at the empty air where the killer had been. His mouth opened.
“Ghost,” he whispered. “Boss, it’s a ghost, it’s...”
The shadow moved again.
Two.
***
It took less than six seconds.
Yun Zhou lay on his side in the wet, one hand pressed against his bleeding jaw, and watched it with a detached, almost professional attention. He had seen many killers in his old life. Sect assassins, mercenaries, men who killed for sport. He knew the difference between a brute and an artist.
This is an artist.
Efficient. Economical. Not a wasted motion. She doesn’t enjoy it, and she doesn’t hesitate. She does exactly what the situation requires, and then she stops.
A pity she was sent to watch me.
A greater pity that she’ll have to die, or be bought, before the week is out.
He filed the thought away with the others.
The last refrigerator was still screaming, kicking, trying to shake a dozen rats off his arms. He’d lost his flashlight. Gray tendrils of the core’s light curled around his ankles. And then, as the shadow slid toward him, something strange happened.
The rats stopped.
All of them. At once. They dropped from the man’s arms and legs and lay in small, still heaps on the concrete, as dead as they had always been. The gray glow went out. The tunnel went black.
Silence.
The man on the floor panted, sobbed, patted his arms in disbelief.
“Gone,” he said. “They’re gone. Oh God. Oh God.”
The core burned out. It spent the last of its light.
Which means the one who needed the rats is finished.
And the one who needed the last man...
The shadow stepped forward, a hand rising.
“Wait,” said Yun Zhou.
***
His voice cut through the dark like a thread of cold wire.
He was on his knees now, though he didn’t remember standing, one palm pressed against the damp concrete, the other hand clutching his bleeding throat. His face, in the faint spill of light from the distant market, was pale and tear-streaked.
The shadow paused, its hand an inch from the third man’s neck.
“Don’t kill him,” Yun Zhou said. “Not yet.”
“Why?”
The voice was flat and level, but he caught something new under it. Curiosity. Wariness. A hint of tension, like a wire stretched a little too tight.
“Because he’s the only one left who can tell me who sent them.”
A long pause.
She’s weighing it.
She doesn’t take orders from me. But she doesn’t kill without a reason, either. Give her one.
“He’s alive,” Yun Zhou added softly. “That’s the difference between a loose end and a witness.”
The shadow tilted its head.
For a second, nothing moved. Water dripped. The refrigerator on the floor whimpered, one arm raised, trembling.
Then the hand withdrew.
“Ask quickly,” said the stranger.
Yun Zhou nodded. He crawled across the concrete, around the heaps of dead rats, past the still body of the gunman. His knees left wet streaks on the floor. When he reached the man on the ground, he knelt in front of him and met his eyes.
The mask now. Soft. Frightened. Exhausted.
Let him believe I’m the one he can bargain with.
“Please,” he said. “Tell me why. I just wanted to go home.”
***
The man was young, maybe twenty-five, with a wide, bruised face and a split lip. His chest heaved. His eyes darted between Yun Zhou’s face and the dark shape behind him, and his jaw worked.
“Kwon,” he rasped. “Mr. Kwon said... he said you took a core you weren’t supposed to have.”
“The tip?”
“It wasn’t a tip. It was a bait. He wanted to see if you’d...” He swallowed. “If you’d react to it.”
React.
Not steal. React.
Yun Zhou kept his face blank, but under the surface, something clicked into place.
Kwon didn’t give me that core to be generous. He didn’t give it to cheat me. He tested me.
A cheap, chipped, E-grade core, tossed across a table, to see whether a pale kid with a cold body and a lapsed license would flinch.
Someone told him what to look for.
“Who told him?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” The man shook his head frantically. “I swear, I’m just muscle. He got a call two days ago. From someone who knew about you. He said the buyer wanted proof. Proof that you were the one.”
The one.
“The one what?”
“I don’t know!”
“Think.”
The man’s lips trembled. “He said... he said to watch for a boy who gets close to dead things. A boy who can’t keep his hands off them. And if he reached for the stone, we were supposed to take him. Alive. Not hurt.”
“And Gorman?”
“He doesn’t know.” A weak, bitter laugh. “Mr. Kwon’s been selling Gorman’s own list to the buyer for three weeks. That’s why he wanted the drive. It was the last piece.”
The Seven.
“The Seven have already...”
Already moved on Gorman.
And now on me.
His pulse stayed steady. His face stayed soft. But the cold, quiet voice at the back of his mind had gone very still.
Someone told Kwon what I am. Before I understood it myself.
Who knows that a boy with a sealed body and a hunger for the dead exists?
The box. The seven dots. The gray suits at midnight. They took my parents.
And now they’ve found me.
***
A soft sound broke the silence behind him.
Click.
Yun Zhou turned his head.
The stranger had stepped out of the shadows. In the dim glow from the tunnel mouth, he could finally see her, though not much of her. A slim figure in black, a hood pulled low, a mask covering everything below the eyes. Her hands were gloved. A pair of short knives hung loose at her sides, slick and dripping.
And her eyes.
They were red. Not the red of rage or blood, but a deep, dark, cat-like crimson, narrow and sharp, with a tiny mole at the outer corner of the left one. They were fixed on him with an intensity that made the skin prickle on the back of his neck.
An assassin’s eyes. Calm. Calculating.
And afraid.
“You,” she said quietly. “What are you?”
“A courier,” Yun Zhou said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“You’re lying with the truth. I know the difference.” She took one step closer. The knives didn’t rise. But they didn’t lower, either. “The rats. The stone. The hunger. The look on your face when it flared.” Her voice dropped. “I was told you were a broken hunter with a cold body. I was not told you could do that.”
So she was sent.
By whom?
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I swear. It... it just happens. When I get scared. I don’t understand it.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.” Her red eyes narrowed. “But I can’t tell if you’re lying about not understanding it, or lying about not wanting it.”
Sharp.
Very sharp.
I’ll have to be careful with this one.
***
The man on the floor whimpered.
Yun Zhou glanced at him, then back at the assassin. “He’s seen your face.”
“He hasn’t.”
“He’s seen your eyes.”
For a fraction of a second, something flickered behind the crimson.
Good. She hadn’t considered it.
Which means she isn’t as perfect as she looks.
“I’m leaving,” the stranger said. “Both of you. Now. Before more come.”
“And him?”
“Dead or not dead. Your problem.”
She turned. Her cloak whispered. She took one step toward the dark end of the tunnel.
Then she stopped, and her head came around, very slowly, and her gaze dropped.
Not to Yun Zhou.
To the floor behind him.
What?
He followed her eyes.
On the concrete, in the pool of faint light spilling from the market, the body of the gunman lay where it had fallen. Shaved head, tattooed neck, one arm flung out. A stain spread slowly beneath him, dark and glossy.
And his hand, the hand that had dropped the gun, had moved.
Yun Zhou stared.
Nothing in his own body had stirred. No thought, no command, no tug of the hunger behind his ribs. But on the floor, the dead man’s fingers curled, slowly, deliberately, toward the cracked fragments of the core that lay beside his palm.
The gray lines on Yun Zhou’s forearms flared beneath his gloves.
A single, soft, cold word rose unbidden into his mind, in a voice that was not quite his own.
Raise.
The gunman’s eyes snapped open.
They were milky white. Empty. And they were looking straight at the terrified man lying on the ground beside him.
From somewhere in the dark, the assassin whispered, in a voice stripped bare of everything but dread:
“Necromancer.”
Her knives rose.
***
To be continued in Chapter 21: “No Witness Walks Free”