Spectral Detective: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Spectral Detective Series Book 1) by David Bussell & M.V. Stott

Author:David Bussell & M.V. Stott [Bussell, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Uncanny Kingdom
Published: 2017-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

20

With any luck I had what I needed to give the soul feaster a pasting, but with no idea where to find the thing, I could only concentrate my efforts on MacMillen. That meant spending the best part of the day twiddling my thumbs while I waited on our midnight rendezvous to roll around, all the while feeling the nip of God’s taxman at my heels.

I arrived at Highgate Cemetery early, a little before the Cinderella hour. A full-bodied moon hung low in the sky, chroming the graveyard with silver light. Moving at speed, I trudged through a maze of trees, snaking my way between crumbling crypts and monuments and tombstones, a thousand dead men rotting into anonymity beneath my feet.

I walked until the undeniable presence of a strange energy stopped me. Not MacMillen, but something else. Something that brought with it an awful, off-key lowing sound. My eyes snapped in the direction of the noise and found a row of sorrowful figures, pale and feathery yet somehow vital and invasive. I felt a lurch in my guts. Revenants. Feral ghosts that had followed their dead bodies all the way to a hole in the ground—phantoms that had suffered a violent death, and now violence was all they knew. These were the ghosts of ghost stories. The bony fingers tapping on the window pane, the eerie footsteps that belonged to no one, the hands that snatched away your bedsheets in the dead of the night.

The unquiet spirits held their ground, their hollow eyes regarding me intently but without malice. Revenants exist to wreak havoc on the living; with the dead they have no quarrel. I carried on past them, eyes dipped low to avoid their tractor beam stare, realising this was what would become of Ingrid if I didn’t do my job. This was the awful outcome of an unavenged death: to become a cursed soul that refused to go quietly into the night. I couldn’t let that happen to her. Forget about God’s judgement, if I failed to find Ingrid justice, if my negligence led to her becoming one of these monsters, my own lack of forgiveness would be punishment enough.

I carried on past the damned spirits and deeper into the cemetery, more determined than ever to take down Ingrid’s killer. I’d been wandering for half an hour by this point, and had still seen no sign of the Order of the Everlasting Flame’s fifth Beatle. Surely word of my invitation must have spread to MacMillen by now? How could he possibly turn down a chance to extinguish the loudmouthed ghost who’d taken to careening into pubs and shooting off his gob about his private affairs? MacMillen killed his wife and raised a demon to attain everlasting youth. That’s the kind of thing a man likes to keep to himself, particularly if he wants to avoid the wrath of the London Coven. Yes, Ingrid’s killer was here, I was sure of it. I just needed to trick him into showing himself.

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