Soul Smuggler by Milo James Fowler

Author:Milo James Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror collection, urban fantasy, supernatural, noir, horror
Publisher: Chiaroscuro Press
Published: 2017-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

A Coyote's Revenge

The girl had been skewered, run through with a blade and left to rot.

Crouched on a tenement's roof in the driving rain, Mercer watched the alley below as a single squad car arrived and two cops in yellow slickers stepped out to survey the scene. They shrugged and chuckled, sharing inside jokes to keep the tension at bay as they went through the standard procedure of stringing yellow caution tape around the scene. The coroner would arrive within the hour. All part of the routine.

Mercer cursed under his breath. The corpse would have been a paying client, but somebody had gotten to her first. Now there was no telling where her soul would end up, and his account was sadly lacking the five grand they'd agreed upon for his services, unrendered and no longer needed.

Only one man had a bad habit of nosing around in Mercer's business, and he just so happened to carry a blade—a long one, the type that could easily have done this kind of damage. But he'd never interfered before, not by murdering a client anyway. He usually went straight for Mercer's throat.

Time to pay the holy man a visit.

Mercer's body collapsed to the gravel rooftop like a bag of bones, and his spirit broke free, hovering eighty-odd feet above the alley floor before plummeting in a steep trajectory, straight for the girl's drenched body.

The cops leaned on their car, sipping from stainless steel thermoses with their backs to the corpse. They didn't see it sit up sharply with a sudden intake of breath, eyes wide, hands going for the bloody hole in her abdomen.

The wound was fresh. Mercer could feel the blood oozing out. He glanced down the alley, swiveling the girl's head and directing her eyes as if they were his own. This fleshbag had given up the ghost only a few minutes ago, just before he'd arrived by rooftop, doing what he could to throw off anyone interested in following his trail.

Careful not to draw the cops' attention, Mercer got to the girl's feet and swayed a moment as he caught his balance. Vertigo was a common side effect of swapping fleshbags. He tiptoed barefoot out of the alley.

A pair of neon pink high-heels and a crimson stain diluted by the rain were all the cops would find when they decided to turn around.

Mercer headed for the Plaza Hotel where he'd find Father Thomas, a katana-wielding Terra Sacra assassin residing on the fourth floor. If the priest had been responsible for the girl's death, the last thing he'd ever expect would be her on his doorstep.

The Plaza—a rundown hive for all manner of poverty-stricken deviants—rented out rooms by the hour, the day, or the week. Father Thomas considered the populace to be his special congregation. That was his front, anyway: offering weekly chapel services in the foyer for the few schizophrenics who joined him, as well as inviting prostitutes from every floor to come to his room for confessions that lasted well over an hour.

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