The Brothers Three: Book One of The Blackwood Saga Read online

  Contents

  Chapters

  1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • 36 • 37 • 38 • 39 • 40 • 41 • 42 • 43 • 44 • 45 • 46 • 47 • 48 • 49 • 50 • 51 • 52

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  THE BROTHERS THREE

  Book I of

  The Blackwood Saga

  Layton Green

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE BROTHERS THREE, Book I of the Blackwood Saga, copyright © 2017, Layton Green

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Cloaked Traveler Press.

  Cover design by Sammy Yuen.

  Ebook Interior by QA Productions

  Books by Layton Green

  THE DOMINIC GREY SERIES

  The Summoner

  The Egyptian

  The Diabolist

  The Shadow Cartel

  The Reaper’s Game (Novella)

  THE BLACKWOOD SAGA

  Book One: The Brothers Three

  OTHER WORKS

  The Letterbox

  The Metaxy Project

  Hemingway’s Ghost (Novella)

  To the Frontier Trail Boys

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Present Day

  -1-

  If only all nights were this sultry, all moons so bright and clear. The tendrils of Spanish moss dripping from the oaks whispered adventure in Will Blackwood’s ear, made him long for gallant quests and fiendish dungeons and exotic, leather-clad heroines.

  With practiced flair, Will threw his cape over his shoulder, pulled on his gauntlets, and twirled his sword above his head. Then he shut the trunk of his Honda Civic and trudged through the parking lot to the employee entrance of Medieval Nights, a joust-themed dinner theatre in New Orleans.

  To make ends meet, Will spent a few nights a week engaging in staged battles with a staff of fellow underachieving twenty-somethings. Once Will stepped into the pennant-lined arena, the music started, and the crowd of children and bored retirees screamed at the top of their lungs for blood and victory, he knew he was as close to Middle Earth as he was ever going to get.

  After dispatching two trolls and a papier-mâché dragon, Will changed into a pair of Carhartt pants and a T-shirt and headed to the House of Spirits, a funky little joint where his brother Caleb tended bar.

  It would be the same routine: two draft Abita Ambers to take the edge off, a little online gaming back at the apartment, and then asleep by midnight so Will could wake up at six a.m. for his day job as a general contractor’s assistant.

  Just like every other night, just like every other morning.

  Right before he walked through the beaded entrance of the House of Spirits, Will felt his cell buzz.

 

  The text was from his oldest friend, Lance Wesson, whose name Will envied for not sounding like a hobbit’s.

  Lance had enlisted in the Marines after high school, then joined the New Orleans Police Department after returning from active duty. Will’s history of severe panic attacks, which had started after his father died, prevented Will from joining any profession involving danger or stress. Lance was sympathetic and let him ride along on calls he knew wouldn’t involve any risk.

  Will texted back.

 

  Will sighed, running a hand through his blond hair. What would be his next big vicarious adventure, staking out jaywalkers?

  He always felt patronized when he rode with Lance, but he had trouble resisting the siren call of potential excitement.

  Will’s fingers flicked across the keypad.

 

 

  Will stepped outside to wait. His quick blue eyes roamed the darkened street, all too aware that nothing truly mysterious lived in the shadows of New Orleans, or anywhere else on Earth.

  Why had evolution enabled human beings to develop such potent imaginations?

  The police cruiser pulled up to the curb outside the House of Spirits. A lowering window revealed Lance’s crew cut, handsome grin, and corded Semper Fi-tattooed forearms gripping the wheel.

  “S’up, Blackwood?”

  Will hopped in the car. “Laveau Cemetery, huh? Maybe it’s a Lestat wannabe?”

  “The only vampire around here,” Lance said, “is my blood-sucking girlfriend. I caught her texting her ex again.”

  Unlike Will, Lance was a slow speaker, in a relaxed, small-town kind of way. He had grown up near Nashville and moved to New Orleans in the sixth grade, two doors down from the Blackwoods.

  “Can’t you get any girl you want?” Will asked. “Why bother with her?”

  “True love ain’t easy for anyone. There’s always the one you can’t have.”

  As Lance took Napolean Avenue to St. Charles, Will enjoyed the sight of hundred-year-old mansions brooding behind a canopy of live oaks. He had no patience for sterilized modern cities. New Orleans had character. Sometimes late at night, when the ambient light dimmed and the fog settled around the palms and banana trees, seeping into the marrow of the city, Will felt as if he truly were living in a fantasy realm.

  Sort of like now, he thought, as Lance delved into the heart of the Garden district, towards the river and the deepening mist.

  A few streets later they pulled up to Laveau cemetery. Like all graveyards in the low-lying city, it was built mostly above ground. Unkempt pathways outlined the crypts, mausoleums, and knee-high stone coffins.

  Lance opened the car door. “Someone called in a loose dog howling its head off in the cemetery.”

  “Shouldn’t you call Animal Control?”

  “Not this late. And the Uptown folk, well, they get the police. Look on the bright side. You get to leave the car on this one.”

  “Thanks, Master Lance.”

  The night air was heavy and still. Will easily hopped the low wall surrounding the cemetery. He was three inches shy of six feet, both agile and sturdy. He was hardly the superman Lance was, but Will did have one thing on him: hand strength. Will had naturally large forearms, his grip was extraordinarily strong, and his profession had magnified these attributes.

  As Lance started to speak, a long, keening howl cut him off and prickled the skin on Will’s arms. The cry sounded weirdly ragged, as if the animal were gurgling water.

  Lance pulled his handgun. “This might be more exciting than we thought. That dog sounds like it has rabies.”

  Will slapped at a mosquito. “Have you ever heard a dog with rabies howl?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not.”

  “Then how do you know what it sounds like?”

  “Something’s wrong with it,” Lance muttered.

  The howl ripped through the air again, closer this time. Moments later, a large shape darted across the path, then disappeared among the tombstones. “You see that?” Will whispered. “That was a big dog.”

  “Probably a rottie or a mastiff. Remember to stay behind me, okay?” Lance said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you should go back to the car.” />
  “I’m fine.”

  They left the main path, stepping through calf-high weeds in the direction the dog had gone. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Feeling unprotected, Will picked up the bottom half of a beer bottle, holding the shard at chest-height.

  The cemetery air smelled stale but sweet, like an overripe banana left in a drawer. A low growl sounded, and the dog emerged twenty feet ahead of them, bristling next to a stone statue of an angel.

  Lance aimed his flashlight at the dog. Will got a good look and took a step back. It was a Rottweiler—or what was left of it. The dog’s skin had a grayish pallor, and it was missing chunks of fur and flesh. One of its ears had been torn in half, and clumps of wiry hair clung to its head and neck.

  “It’s sick or something,” Lance said.

  “Sick? It looks dead.”

  The dog kept growling, shambling forward on legs that looked too ruined to hold its weight. It bared its teeth, and Lance raised his handgun. “Easy, big guy. Just stay right—”

  The dog rushed them.

  Lance fired twice as he and Will scrambled backwards. When it was ten feet away, fangs bared, Will threw the broken bottle at it. The bottle bounced off the dog’s side. Lance cursed and fired again, at point blank range. No reaction.

  The dog emitted another ragged growl and then it was on them. Will stumbled and tripped over a tombstone. Lance fell over him and, in desperation, kicked at the animal’s diseased snout. The dog smelled putrid, like a dumpster stuffed with roadkill.

  It lunged. Lance threw up an arm in defense. Just before the mouth full of jagged fangs clamped down, the dog cocked its head, leaned back on its haunches, and loped away.

  After a deep breath, Lance pushed to his feet. “You okay, Blackwood?”

  Will couldn’t speak, because he was hyperventilating. He flopped onto his back and tried to regulate his breathing, but the panic attack had come on too fast. His throat constricted, and he clutched at his pounding chest.

  Lance lifted Will’s torso off the ground and tilted his head back to open the airways. With practiced gentleness, he held onto Will until the fear and panic seeped out of his body, replaced by shame.

  Stress usually led to the attacks, but sometimes they came out of nowhere. For Will, that was the worst part, the lack of control over his own body and mind. He wobbled to his feet, knowing the harshness in his voice sounded forced. “You see where it went?”

  “Over there.” Lance pointed at the rear of a manor looming at the edge of the cemetery, its turret-like tower rising above the trees and restored shotgun houses.

  After radioing in the shots fired, Lance put his hand on Will’s arm as if helping an elderly person across the street. “I’m taking you home.”

  Will brushed it away. “No way.”

  “You just about got bitten in half by a rabid dog.”

  “So did you.” Will crossed his arms. “And I’ve got news for you. That dog wasn’t rabid.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Think, Lance. If you want to make detective one day you have to do more than stay buff and wave your gun around. You saw what that thing looked like, and you shot it at point blank range. It didn’t even flinch. Not even rabies has that effect.”

  Lance mumbled a reply.

  “You’re also overlooking one galaxy-sized detail.”

  “Yeah, like what?”

  “Look around,” Will said. “What’s missing?”

  Lance cast his flashlight in a wide radius, then looked back at Will, his mouth tight. “Blood.”

  “That’s right.”

  They stared at each other. Lance started towards the cruiser, waving Will inside. “It’s your lucky day, Blackwood. I need to find that animal before it hurts someone.”

  -2-

  After an hour of scouring the streets around the cemetery for the Rottweiler, they came up short. Lance pounded on the steering wheel and made a u-turn, tires screeching.

  “Donut run?” Will said.

  “I can’t sleep knowing that dog’s loose. We’re going to that big house it was running towards. Maybe someone saw something.”

  Lance pulled to the curb in front of a massive, two-story Queen Anne with a wraparound porch, snake-scale shingles, and a conical tower. The wood was stripped and gray, as if in the middle of a remodel. An iron gate surrounded the property.

  “You’re staying here,” Lance said.

  “I think I deserve to go. And I might be useful.”

  “I can’t break protocol like that.”

  Will got out and started walking towards the house. “You already have.”

  He heard Lance scrambling to catch up. “This is the last time you’re riding along.”

  “I know,” Will muttered.

  They climbed the steps to the double-gallery porch. The creepy dwelling sparked Will’s imagination, and he felt the house hovering over him, sentient and watching, guarding whatever dark master lay within.

  “Don’t say a word,” Lance said in a harsh whisper, as he rapped on the front door. No one answered. He knocked harder and rang the doorbell.

  “It looks abandoned,” Lance said.

  Will’s eyes swept the porch and yard. “The grass is low, the gate didn’t creak, and there’re no dirt or cobwebs on the porch. It might be empty tonight, but it’s not abandoned.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  As Lance started to knock again, the door opened to reveal a tall, wide-shouldered man with a ponytail. He wore black pants and a blousy white dress shirt with an upturned collar, as if on his way to a costume party dressed as an eighteenth century French aristocrat. Only in New Orleans, Will thought.

  The man’s hands, long and slender, were clasped in front of him, and he wore a jeweled ring on each finger. His smooth skin looked like it had never suffered a day of real work. Will also noticed that instead of looking at Lance, the man was looking right at Will, almost as if he recognized him.

  The man finally turned towards Lance. “May I help you, Officer?” His accent sounded British, and his intelligent voice possessed an underlying sharpness, like a scythe whisking through grass.

  Lance inclined his head in greeting. “I’m looking for a stray dog that’s causing some trouble in the neighborhood. I saw it running this way and was wondering if you’d seen anything.”

  “I have not.”

  “One of your neighbors called in a noise disturbance.”

  He didn’t respond, which Will found odd. People respond to police officers.

  “You don’t own a dog, do you?” Lance said.

  “I do not.”

  Will noticed a flutelike object attached to a chain encircling the man’s throat. “Nice necklace.”

  The man turned towards Will. Confident and handsome, his face had a silky, Mediterranean texture. Something about his eyes, however, made Will shiver. They radiated an aura of unquestioned power, reminding him of the gaze of third-world dictators he had seen on the news. Or those black and white photos of SS officers.

  The man looked him up and down. Will felt as if he were chattel that had just been inspected. “Thank you,” the man murmured.

  “It reminds me of a dog whistle I saw on TV,” Will continued, staring right at him. “During that dog show on Thanksgiving.”

  The man’s thin lips curled upwards. “It’s a family heirloom.”

  Lance stepped on Will’s foot with the heel of his boot. “Sorry to bother you,” he said to the man. “Give us a ring if you hear anything. We have reason to believe this is a dangerous animal.

  “Of course,” he said, and closed the door.

  Back in the car, Lance shook his head. “You’re always pushing the envelope. I’m a police officer, Will. And I was serious about earlier. This is it for you.”

  “I was serious when I said it looked like a dog whistle,” Will said.

  “Who wears a golden dog whistle on a necklace?”

  “Sinister owners of unpainted castle-houses w
ho command zombie dogs.”

  Lance snorted. “You live in a fantasy world.”

  “You don’t think anything about tonight was, say, out of the ordinary?”

  He flung a hand towards Will. “Of course I do! But out of the ordinary doesn’t mean supernatural! There’s a diseased dog running around that needs to be caught and impounded. The lack of blood loss was highly unusual, I’ll give you that—and I’m sure there’s a rational, medical explanation. Or maybe the bullets just grazed the dog.”

  “At point blank range,” Will said.

  “It was dark out there. And what else, oh yeah, there’s a weirdo living in a house under renovation by a cemetery. So. Freaking. What. That describes half of New Orleans. You know I love you, buddy, but don’t you think it’s time you grew up?”

  Will started to retort, then turned to stare at the army of live oaks lining the street, trunks thick and watchful.

  A couple of college girls glanced in Will’s direction as he entered the House of Spirits. Their eyes lingered on his strong but boyish features and job-scarred forearms, then noticed his DragonCon T-shirt and slipped away.

  Whatever, he thought.

  Mardi Gras posters and flyers from local concerts plastered the walls. A jukebox and a working Atari shared space in the corner. The place was patronized by men in white suits sipping bourbon, tattooed musicians swilling dollar drafts, and everything in between.

  Lance was right that New Orleans was full of weirdos, but the owner of that house had been different. The arrogance brightening his eyes had been real.

  “Yo, little brother!”

  Caleb, three years older than Will’s twenty-one, raised a shaker he was about to pour. Tall and dark-haired, fine-boned, olive-skinned, and perfectly comfortable with women, Caleb looked so unlike his younger brother that Will wondered if genetics was a fake science.

  Then there was Val, the eldest brother, a hotshot corporate attorney in Manhattan who somehow always made time to listen to the details of Will and Caleb’s country-song-worthy lives.