Three days ago, Julie Easter, age seven, went missing. The bus took her to school in the morning, it didn’t bring her home. The school had no idea what happened to her, and when the local authorities couldn’t do anything, Frank and Judy Easter, hired me. I didn’t normally take missing persons cases, but was getting more calls for disappearances and runaways than I could turn down. I was a father once. I guess Julie just reminded me of Anna. So I did what I do: tracked down some leads, followed some clues. I talked to bus drivers, teachers, little kids. When that turned up nothing, I squeezed some informants, got something out of a Satyr that owed me a solid and got a bead on an old, condemned Colonial house.
With the flaking paint, the loosely dangling shutters, and the sagging shingles of the roof, the place couldn’t have looked worse had it weathered a zombie apocalypse. Ape and I had circled the block and approached from the rear, hopped the fence from the neighbor’s yard, and dodged the rusted swing set built for four-year-olds. There was a broken wagon nearby, once red, now more of a rusty brown, sitting next to a flimsy metal shed that had apparently been kicked in by an angry pack mule. The overgrown lawn was littered with trash and debris, used fast-food cartons, and piles of dog shit.
We were on the other side of town from the Easter home, and there was no way a young girl would wander into a place like this. She’d been taken, that was for sure. By what, I had no fucking idea, and the not knowing made me nervous. In my trade, knowledge was the number one weapon, and the difference between success and failure, most of the time, was in knowing what kind of ammunition to take. Iron burned the fairy kind. Rock salt was a purifier, used to dispel the undead. For the rest, silver – it didn’t always kill, but it at least burned like fuck. I hated going in blind. I did my homework to learn what I was up against and how best to take it down.
“I’d feel better if you hadn’t made me leave Glory in the car,” I said.
“We're in a neighborhood,” Ape replied. Ape was Terry Towers, my roommate and partner, but not in that San Francisco, Harvey Milk kind of way. Affectionately, I called him Ape because, well, his physique was wrought with that tight sinewy muscle of a white rapper and the coarse, head-to-toe brown fur of a Teen Wolf.
“And it would be great if, just this once, you didn't attract any unnecessary attention.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Glory is a military-grade assault rifle. Besides,” he added, “Don’t you think you have enough guns?”
The Dark Communion Description:
When Daddy, Gramps, drunk Uncle Billy…whoever it was, looked at you when you were a little kid, blankets around your neck, trembling in bed, sure-as-shit convinced that there was something out to get you under your box-spring, in your closet, and they told you there wasn’t anything there – that monsters didn’t exist – they were lying to you. Jono Swyftt knows this because that’s what he does. He kills things. Bad things. Nightmare things: Orcs, trolls, haunts, gnomes…the bloody Easter Bunny. Swyftt was a copper, a priest, a Night Hunter, a husband, a father.
Now he’s just a burnt-out PI with an arsenal of big-ass guns – an unrepentant foul-mouth who keeps everyone at arms length – and yet, whether your problem is a mating orgy of Cyclopes, a murderous imaginary friend, or a strip club full of horny Sirens, everyone from US Senators to Julia Roberts knows he’s the one man to call. When a high-school student hires him to find a missing autistic boy and a catatonic billionaire runs away from a nursing home, it’s up to Swyftt, his partner, and his ward to piece together the clues and stop the nightmare that’s feeding on the city with an underground ring of serial-kidnapping bums. But that’s what Swyftt does. He’s the very last line of paranormal defense in the greater Seattle area. And he ain’t bloody cheap.
