Darker Angels

About the Author M.L.N. Hanover is an International Horror Guild Award-winning author living in the American southwest. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ONE "Hey," my dead uncle said. "You've got a call." I rolled over in bed, disoriented. A dream about meeting Leonard Cohen in a perfume factory was still about as immediate as reality. My previous day's clothes were piled in the corner of the tile floor along with the leather backpack I used as a purse. The pack's side pocket was open and glowing. My uncle Eric's voice came again. "Hey. You've got a call." I untangled myself from the sheets and stumbled over, promising myself for the thousandth time that I would change the ringtone. The bedroom was still unfamiliar. The cell phone flashed a number I didn't recognize, but there was a name -- Karen Black -- associated with it, so she must have been in his contacts list someplace. I accepted the call. "Unh?" I grunted into the receiver. "Eric, it's Karen. I've found it!" a woman said. "It's in New Orleans, and I know where it's going next. There's a little girl with Sight, and she says her sister is the next target. I don't know how long I've got. I need you." It was a lot to take in. I hesitated, and the woman misinterpreted my silence. "Okay, what's it going to take?" she demanded. "Name your price, Heller." "Actually," I said. "That's complicated. I'm Jayné. Eric's niece. He's...um...he passed on last year." It was Karen Black's turn to be silent. I gave her a moment to let it sink in. I skipped the parts about how he'd been murdered by an evil wizard and how several of Eric's old friends, along with a policeman who owed me a favor and a vampire with a grudge against the same wizard, had teamed up to mete out summary roadside justice. I could get back to that later if I needed to. "Oh," she said. "Yeah. He left me pretty much everything. Including the cell phone. So...hi. Jayné here. Anything I can do to help out?" The pause was longer this time. I could guess pretty well at the debate she was going through. I gave her a hand. "This is about riders, isn't it?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "So you know about them?" "Abstract spiritual parasites. Come in from Next Door or the Pleroma or whatever you want to call it," I said as I walked carefully back to the bed. "Take over people's bodies. Have weird-ass magical powers, kind of like the magic humans can do, but way more effective. Yeah, I've got the For Dummies book, at least." "All right," she said. "Did Eric...did he even mention me?" "No," I said. "Sorry." The woman on the other end of the line took a breath as I got back under the covers and pulled the pillow behind my back. I heard Aubrey cough from one of the bedrooms down the hall. "All right," she said. "My name is Karen Black. I used to be a special agent for the FBI. About ten years ago, I started tracking down what I thought was a fairly standard serial killer. It turned out to be a rider. We caught the horse, a man named Joseph Mfume, but the rider switched bodies." "So not so easy to track," I said. "No," she agreed. "My supervisors wanted me to stop. They didn't believe there was anything to it. And...well,