Band of Demons (The Sanheim Chronicles, Book Two) (3 page)

“Does it matter?” was all he said instead.

“Yes,” responded Kate. “It does. It’s the entire reason that Summer had an opening here and we should have seen it earlier. She’s not claiming that Kyle Thompson wasn’t involved in the murders—that would be easy to disprove, given what we know now. What she’s arguing is that he was merely the assistant, a partner in crime with someone else. It was that person then, who killed him. So whoever killed Thompson…”

“Is the real Lord Halloween,” Quinn finished.

“Right,” Kate said.

“Do you know who killed Kyle?” Tim asked.

It was a dangerous question. Quinn knew right away that Tim was really asking whether
they
had killed Lord Halloween. He didn’t know anything about the Prince of Sanheim or their powers, but he had seen them last year. While Lord Halloween was hunting them, they were tracking him. It was not impossible to imagine a scenario in which they had gotten the better of him.

But Kate, to her credit, didn’t miss a beat.

“I wish I did,” she said. “I would give him or her a medal. That bastard killed my mother, Quinn’s best friend, and a whole lot of others who didn’t deserve to die. No, Tim, we don’t know. If we did, don’t you think we would have reported it?”

“Yet you seemed curiously uninterested in the question,” Tim said.

“Excuse me?” Kate said.

“There was no follow-through on the single biggest question left hanging,” Tim said. “You never speculated about who killed Lord Halloween. It’s as if you didn’t care about the matter at all. Frankly, I’m surprised it took this long for someone to step in with their own theory.”

“It wasn’t…” Quinn started. He had been about to say “relevant.” But of course it was. The only reason Quinn and Kate had appeared uninterested in the question was because they already knew the answer. In their articles, they had sidestepped the issue entirely, implying incorrectly that Lord Halloween had somehow died when police tracked him down. But they had never explicitly addressed it head-on.

Tim nodded his head when Quinn stopped speaking.

“You see?” he said. “Look, what you did was incredible work—truly outstanding journalism. What I am saying is that you left a good follow-up angle totally unexplored, and it’s the only way we are going to effectively respond to the
Post
.”

“We could just attack them head-on,” Kate said.

“Wouldn’t work,” Rebecca responded. “If we run something that just says, ‘No, he’s dead,’ but doesn’t add to the conversation, forget it. We’ll look defensive. People will conclude that the
Post
might have a point.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Tim said. “While you are out there reporting, Rebecca and I will have your back. When we get media inquiries—and we probably have some already—I know plenty of ways to subtly suggest the
Post
is off base without coming off as petty or defensive. But that can’t be our only response. We have to have something better in the works.”

“Like what?” Kate said, but Quinn knew she already had the answer.

“Who really killed Lord Halloween?” Tim replied. “You don’t have to have a definitive answer, but you need to provide enough new details to make it clear it wasn’t some fictional partner. Get the police involved. They have two reasons to help you. For one, if people believe Lord Halloween isn’t really dead, they’ll panic again the next time anyone dies in this county. Secondly, it will also make them look stupid. They already declared Lord Halloween dead once—Charles Holober, remember?—and were proved wrong. Sheriff Brown can’t afford to go through this again. They must know more than they’re saying. And they will have every incentive to help you find that out.”

Quinn nodded. The plan, from an outside perspective, made total sense.

“Okay,” he said. Kate gave him another warning look, but he pretended not to notice it. “We’ll get on the case. Starting now.”

“I don’t need to remind you that you don’t have a lot of time,” Tim said. “The longer the
Post
story sits out there, the more people will believe it no matter what we say.”

With that, he seemed to dismiss them from the room. Kate and Quinn walked out feeling like they had been battered and bruised. Kate started to speak, but Quinn motioned to go outside.

They walked downstairs to the basement, past the massive printing press and out the back door.

When they were outside, Kate wheeled around.

“What are you doing?” she said. “We can’t take this assignment.”

“Would you like someone else to do it?” Quinn responded.

“Yes,” she said. “Anyone else, in fact. Let Helen do it. We’re playing with fire.”

“And God knows what she’ll say,” he said. “This is the only way to control the narrative.”

“There is another way,” Kate said. “And you know it.”

“No, I don’t,” Quinn said.

“Go to Summer directly,” she said. “Make her back down from the story. She made this shit up. She’s pulling a Jayson Blair here and we know it.”

“How? How are you going to make her back down?”

“I’ve got lots of ideas,” she responded. “Most of which would be extremely satisfying.”

Quinn watched her uneasily. He thought the death of Lord Halloween would have eased some of the anger she had inside her. He understood—better than anyone—how the death of her mother had affected her outlook on life. But if anything, the fury she carried with her was even worse now. The only difference was that at certain times of the year, she had a powerful way to inflict that anger on others.

“No,” Quinn said. “For starters, we don’t have any powers yet.”

“I don’t need any powers to scare the hell out of Summer,” Kate said.

“Still no,” he said. “It’s a bad strategy. I guarantee Summer doesn’t think she made up the story. She’s not that terrible a reporter. No, someone whispered in her ear and she ran with it because she finally gets to take revenge on us.”

“For what? We never did anything to her,” Kate said, but she knew that wasn’t true.

“Oh, come on, Kate,” he said. “We broke the biggest story in this county’s history. She’s the
Post’s
reporter on the ground and she looked like a fool to her editors when she had nothing and we had everything. She has plenty of reasons to hate us and more than enough cause to seize any excuse to undermine our credibility.”

“She made it up, Quinn, and she should pay for it. Lord Halloween never had a partner. He’s dead. We killed him. We can’t write a story speculating about the killer when we know damn well it’s us.”

“Oh yes we can,” he said.  “I have a plan.”

“I’m not in your head, honey,” she said. “You’re going to have to say it out loud.”

“You aren’t going to like it,” he responded.

“There’s nothing about this I like,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

Quinn took a deep breath.

“We tell the truth.”

Chapter 3

Kate looked at him like he’d gone insane.

“You want us to admit that we killed Lord Halloween?” she said in disbelief.

“No, of course not,” he said. “But you left the door open, didn’t you? You wrote that letter. The one signed by the Prince of Sanheim taking credit for the killings.”

It took a minute for Kate to even remember what he was talking about. She had done it on a whim. It was early on November 1, shortly after they had lost their powers. She had left Quinn sleeping in bed to sift through the piles of information Buzz had left behind on Lord Halloween. She understood the gift they had been given—a roadmap of all the serial killer’s murders; years of research that Buzz had locked away without showing anyone. If he had, the police might have been able to find Lord Halloween earlier.

At the time, she was still reeling from all that she knew. It had only been the previous evening that Quinn had defeated the Headless Horseman at Phillips Farm. In that moment, everything had changed. Quinn had become the Horseman. But she… she wasn’t sure what she had become.

Madame Zora, the local fortune-teller, had said Kate was a psychic—a claim she had rejected. But when Quinn became the Horseman, Kate could see into Lord Halloween’s mind. He wasn’t a threat—not anymore—because the abilities Quinn and Kate had tapped into were far more powerful than any mortal man’s. She could see where his hideout was, what his plans were, why he was killing people—everything.

It had been useful information, data she used in tandem with Buzz’s notes to write the best stories of their careers. But it had also been profoundly disturbing. Seeing Lord Halloween’s thoughts… she felt like it had left a stain in her own mind. Like she had taken some part of him, no matter how small, and let it in permanently.

She had watched Quinn sleep. They were intimately connected now—two bodies with one mind and one soul—but she knew he hadn’t sensed the taint. Some things were apparently still hers alone. It was in that moment that she conceived the idea.

Her anger at the police was still acute. They had failed Leesburg and Loudoun County. It was Kate and Quinn who put a stop to Lord Halloween—and what price would they pay for it? As Quinn had warned time and again, the abilities they now possessed didn’t feel like something good.

So she decided to send them a message. Just as Lord Halloween had done to Tim Anderson, she wrote the police a letter. Something that let them know who and what had stopped the murderer. She wanted them to understand that something else was now stalking Loudoun County. If the police couldn’t protect people, then the Prince of Sanheim would.

When she wrote the first draft, though, it was confused, disjointed—not at all like something Kate would write. She tore up the first two versions. Finally, she had an inspiration. Instead of trying to use her own words, she would use Lord Halloween’s.

“Some of what we tell you will be lies,” she wrote, repeating the first line of Lord Halloween’s letter to Anderson.

As soon as she wrote it, it felt right. This was how to get their attention. The rest had poured out of her. She had taken credit for killing Lord Halloween and issued a warning to the police: “The monsters are out in force.”

The ending was so natural she never stopped to consider it. She had repeated Lord Halloween’s initial missive word for word, but then added a twist: “We are night. We are October. We are flesh torn and rent. We are the rider that was promised long ago, the harbinger of fall. We are death, riding on a black horse. You can call us the Prince of Sanheim.”

She had known Quinn would think it was a bad idea. Some part of her also understood that the letter would only antagonize the police and, worse, tip them off to their existence. But she had sent it off anyway, without his knowledge. She wanted the police to know they were out there. Instead of a serial killer, there was now a demon on the loose—and the police were to blame. Their failure had made the Prince of Sanheim necessary.

It wasn’t until much later that she wondered if the letter was a sign of something darker. What if she had borrowed Lord Halloween’s words because she really had been corrupted by looking into his mind? In those moments before he died, Kate had seen everything about the man. Did some part of Lord Halloween live on in her? Was that why she sent the letter?

Since that day, she had pushed the letter out of her mind. She didn’t want to think about it anymore. It wasn’t until Quinn mentioned it that it all came bubbling back up to the surface.

“Yes,” she said simply, but she looked away. She was ashamed of the letter now and desperately wished she hadn’t sent it.

“Well, I’m sure the police haven’t forgotten,” Quinn said. “If we’re supposed to get information on the real killer, it’s the only clue they have.”

“No,” she said.

“Kate, what choice do we have? Tim wants us to find the real killer. Well, you invented one for the police. Why not use that?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you get it?” she asked. Her words came out much harsher than she meant them.

“Get what?”

“The letter… it’s only going to make Summer look right. She said someone was working with Lord Halloween and…”

“Okay,” Quinn said and sighed. “I get it.”

It wasn’t the response Kate had expected.

“Now I’m lost,” she said.

“That’s why you’re so angry, isn’t it?” he said. “It isn’t that we got scooped on our own damn story. It’s that Summer Mandaville accused us of being in
league
with Lord Halloween—of being his partner.”

She opened her mouth to deliver a retort before she stopped herself. The dangerous part of being so intimately connected with someone was that you couldn’t dismiss anything they said anymore. She couldn’t say, “Well, you just don’t understand.” The problem was that Quinn
did
understand her. Apparently better than she did herself.

She looked out at the parking lot. She hated April. Indeed, she now hated all months except October. Being the Prince of Sanheim was exhilarating, liberating. She had never felt more powerful or free. But when that power was gone… It was like seeing the sun and then having to live the rest of your days in the shadows. She should be grateful to have some sense of normalcy, but she wasn’t. She had been part of the Prince of Sanheim for only a brief time, but there had been no doubts, no fears. Now fear and doubt were all that was left.

“You’re right,” she said softly, and looked at him again. She was still ashamed, but he would love her anyway. Forever. She took some comfort in that.

“It’s stupid, though, Kate,” he said. “We stopped him. We’re the good guys.”

“Are we?” she asked. “I wonder about that. And don’t tell me that you don’t too.”

 “Maybe, but we don’t have time for regrets,” Quinn said. “We’re in a box and we need to find a way out. Your letter—even if you regret sending it—will allow us one.”

“So what’s the plan? Publish it and hope they don’t notice we wrote it in the first place?” Kate asked.

Quinn smiled.

“Come on,” he said. “We can do better than that. The police will be in such a hurry to prove Lord Halloween is dead, if we ask the right questions, we can weasel the existence of the letter out of them. After that… we can ‘obtain’ a copy. Who knows? They may be so desperate, they actually give us a copy of our own letter.”

“And what then, Quinn? Ask people in town if they’ve seen the Headless Horseman lately?”

She said it as a joke, but the look on his face was deadly serious.

“Why not?” he asked. “I know at least a couple already and there are bound to be others that saw me racing by that night. Let’s tell people that there is a new player in town—and it’s not Lord Halloween. Your letter was quite clear that the innocent don’t need to fear us. That doesn’t sound like Lord Halloween to me.”

Some part of her still insisted it was a bad idea, but she had to admit she was warming to the notion.

“Spread the legend,” she said, and she smiled in spite of herself.

“Exactly,” he said. “And when next Halloween comes around…”

“Make a few guest appearances?” she said.

“There’s already buzz out there,” he said. “It’s quiet now, but I’ve seen a few mentions on Internet forums. All we need to do is give them a name and a voice. And I guarantee that any bad thing out there in this terrible world will want to stay as far away as possible.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You heard Janus. He warned us not to raise our profile. If we do this, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Whoever is hunting us will know just where to look.”

“It’s a risk, but what choice do we have?” Quinn asked. “Our careers are on the line. If we don’t respond to it, everyone will think we screwed up. And we can’t very well make up another killer. Besides, can you imagine the look on Summer’s face when we scoop her on this? She’s going to throw herself off a building or something.”

Kate laughed at that.

“Okay,” she said. “We can try it. But only if we can legitimately get the letter from someone else. We don’t need the police to suspect us anymore than they already do. And for the record, I’m still not sure this is a great idea.”

“Deal,” Quinn said. “We’ll be careful.”

*****

Implementing the plan was easier said than done.

Quinn spent several useless hours calling police sources, none of whom could help him. Kate trolled the Internet, looking for possible sightings of the Headless Horseman. While she found plenty of mentions, mostly it was of a “friend” who saw the legendary ghost, not the actual witness.

And time was running out. All day, Rebecca and Tim fielded calls from other media organizations asking the same question: Do you stand behind your story? Is Lord Halloween dead? Was there a secret partner?

The breakthrough didn’t come until Kate called Johnny Redacker, her father’s friend who remained on the Loudoun police force.

“How come you only call me when bad news hits the papers?” he asked.

“If I called you every time there was bad news, you’d hear from me every day,” Kate replied. “Bad news is our stock and trade, you know.”

Redacker grunted in response.

“I don’t know how much I can tell you,” he said. “We—like you—believe Thompson acted alone.”

“Okay, then who killed him?” she asked.

“We really don’t have a clue,” Redacker responded.

“That’s not true,” Kate said, and then decided to take a leap. “We have an inside source that says someone took credit for the murders.”

There was a long, pregnant pause.

“What else do you know?”

There were two ways to play it. Kate could seem like she knew everything—which she obviously did—and ask him to confirm information. But that was risky and potentially suspicious. Very few on the police force knew anything about last year’s letter. If she said too much, it would be like firing a flare in the sky to announce who the Prince of Sanheim was.

But she hated the other method, even if it was a trick reporters had used since the dawn of their profession: playing dumb. It worked so often because it took advantage of a fundamental truth of human nature: people want to show off. If they know more about a subject, they like to demonstrate it. In this case, it was the safer play.

“Honestly, Mr. Redacker, that’s all I know,” she said. “The source I talked to said they overheard something once that made it sound like there was someone who had claimed responsibility for Lord Halloween’s death. But they didn’t know who or even how long ago.”

There was another long pause. Kate could practically hear the wheels turning in Redacker’s head. This was a make-or-break moment for him.

“All right,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t. But… in all honesty, I think it would help at this stage. The panic has already started, Kate. The phones are ringing off the hook. I don’t think this town has ever really believed Lord Halloween is dead. He’s not just a serial killer to them—he’s the goddamned bogeyman.”

“But he is dead,” Kate said. “That much I know.”

“Yes,” Redacker replied. “This isn’t like last time, when we knew there were lingering doubts about Holober. We’re sure about Thompson.”

“So the person who killed him?”

“He, or she, I suppose, though that’s less likely,” he said, and Kate was glad he couldn’t see her smile, “sent a letter. It took responsibility for killing Lord Halloween.”

“I don’t suppose it was signed?”

“Actually, it was,” Redacker said. “But I’m going to make you a deal. I want you and Quinn to come down to the station.”

For just a moment, Kate’s heart was in her throat.
He knows
, she thought.
He’s known all along.
Her mouth went dry.

“Why?” she asked in as calm a voice as she could manage.

“Because I can’t give you more details without Brown’s approval,” Redacker said. “Before you start protesting about confidentiality, he knows we’re family friends, Kate. And I’m one of the few people who knows the right details here. If you printed anything I told you, he would know instantly who gabbed.”