The Dark Communion (The Midnight Defenders) Read Online Free Page A

invite it, didn’t prepare for it. Automatic readings like that didn’t happen often, and it was strange when it did. The bear’d been waiting for me like an excited child waits for its parent, waiting just to tell me about its day.
    I’m not psychic. The technical term is psychometry: seeing the history of an object simply by skin contact. I’d been doing it as long as I could remember. Some people sing well, I was just born with a different kind of gift.
    I stuffed the bear’s head into the pocket of my leather jacket so its feet dangled out and went back into the hallway where I met Ape.
    “Found the Charnel house, I see,” he said.
    “That’s not all I found. There was a Teddy in the closet.”
    “And? Did you get a reading?”
    “Bear belonged to Julie Easter.”
    “Fuck.” He turned away. “I was hoping that wasn’t her downstairs.” He grew quiet.
    “This fucking job…”
    Ape managed to look up at me, and his voice sounded broken. “I guess that’s it then. We can get out of here when you’re….Are you crying?”
    “What? No. Piss off.”
    “You are crying.”
    “You’re crying. My eyes are burning, and I have a fucking migraine. The reading was stronger than expected.”
    I walked past him and started down the stairs. I could feel him behind me, following. “We done then?”
    “Yeah. We’ve got what we need.”
    At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped at the headless body that had fallen across the threshold of the open doorway. Ape stopped with me, and we studied the body together for a moment in silence. “So what was he?”
    Ape shrugged. “Apart from the fingernails, the skin condition…? Near as I can tell, he was human.”
    “You sure about that?”
    “Why, what are you thinking?”
    I crossed to the head, bent to it. “I’m thinking he was too tough to just be some random tramp.” I lifted the calloused lips. Fresh red juices stained the gums. I parted the jaws, ran a finger along the crooked line of his teeth. They were spotted and grey, chipped, that white gunk built-up around the edges. I checked the roof of his mouth, pressed in places to no effect.
    “What are you doing, checking for vampire fangs?” Ape said. “Did you hit your head? Outside of the movies, when have you ever seen a vampire?”
    “No,” I said.
    Hunter 101: Vampires don’t exist. That was the main thing that separated my life from the shit you see in the cinema. That and the pain: my life has a lot more fucking pain than a bloody movie.
    I stood, turned to Ape. “Lots of things eat people. But I feel like there’s something I’m missing here. I mean, what makes a bloke turn cannibal when he’s spent so long trash-picking? Why go through all the trouble of kidnapping?”
    “You’re just pissed because he got the best of you. He got a few sucker punches and found the right leverage against you, that’s all. It’s physics, Jono. There’s nothing supernatural about it.”
    “Except for the room upstairs.” I followed him onto the porch, careful to step over the body. We descended, and I retrieved my Glocks from the lawn. As we crossed the street, sirens could be heard in the distance.
    “Except for the room,” he admitted. “But that’s circumstantial. I have to run some diagnostic tests, check for DNA. For all we know, he was just some sicko that painted the room with the children’s insides for some grimoire ritual he found in a dumpster somewhere. He was a desperate man. He had nothing to lose.”
    I thought about the fear that had almost overcome me a couple of times, how not normal it was, and almost said something about it, but thought better of it. He’d never let me hear the end of it. Jonothan Swyftt wasn’t a coward.
    “Yeah. You’re right. Get in the car.”
    We stood at my ’89 El Camino. The car wasn’t much to look at, but I loved her. She was black with red pinstripes down the sides, cracked windshield, and more than a few rust spots. Ape hated the car, said the