King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Read Online Free PDF Page A

New Orleans it is.”
    She suddenly went still, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. I felt that she was watching me carefully, trying to gauge whether I was serious or not.
    After a moment, she said, “You’ll go with me?”
    I shrugged. “You followed me to New Jersey. Least I can do is return the favor and go with you to New Orleans.”
    My motivation was more than that, but now wasn’t the time to explain it to her, as I wasn’t yet sure that I could put it into words. Just thinking about her leaving made me anxious; it simply wasn’t an option as far as I was concerned. If that meant following her halfway across the country, then so be it.
    She turned and wrapped me in a hug, something she had never done before, and I responded in kind. I was acutely aware of her scent in my nostrils and the warmth of her body beneath my hands; it had been a long time since I’d held a woman.
    “Thank you, Jeremiah,” she whispered in my ear, before pulling away.
    I let her go, wondering if she felt the same reluctance to end our embrace that I did.

 
    4
    HUNT
    Denise called Dmitri inside and filled him in on what we’d just discussed. Upon hearing her reasons for wanting to leave, he agreed that it was a wise move. Ignoring the visions, he told her, could have disastrous consequences, and not just for the people of New Orleans. So with that settled, we got down to some serious planning, figuring out what we needed to do in order to close up shop here, deciding just how we intended to get there and what to take with us.
    Given our decision to hit the road, I thought I’d be able to skip my afternoon tutoring session, but I soon found out I was sorely mistaken.
    After we’d fled Boston together, Denise had taken it upon herself to improve my education with regard to the ways of the supernatural world around us, and not a day had gone by since then that we hadn’t spent an hour in “class,” trying to bring me up to speed as quickly as possible.
    Our sessions ranged from formal lectures on how to identify a nukekubi in the middle of the day while it was in its human form to hands-on workshops like the time she had me track a wererat around the Newark shipyard in the middle of the night after three straight days of no sleep. That was anything but fun. Dmitri would occasionally sit in, giving his own unique perspective on the topic at hand, but more often than not it was just Denise and me.
    Some days I looked forward to my lessons. Denise was a good teacher, with what seemed to me to be an encyclopedic knowledge of the unusual and the arcane, which meant that I always came away from our time together a little more informed than before. At other times it just felt like a colossal waste of energy. With the police on my tail, I didn’t expect to remain free long enough to encounter a Malaysian Pennagglan, never mind need to know that the only way to kill it was to pour broken glass into its empty neck cavity while the head and internal organs were off feeding on someone in the dead of night.
    Heading into today’s session, I was pessimistic about it all.
    Cross Mr. Miyagi, Yoda, and Merlin the Magician and you’ve got some sense of what it was like having Denise as an instructor. Learn by immersion, that was her motto, particularly for our hands-on sessions. She had a habit of giving me specific instructions without explaining the hows or whys behind whatever it was we were doing, expecting me to pick it up as we went along. What that really meant was that I’d usually fail the first few times, often spectacularly, and usually at my own expense. At that point she would patiently tell me what I had done wrong, walk me through the steps necessary to correct it, and then grill me mercilessly over and over again until I had it right. More often than not, this went on for days, as I tend to be a slow learner.
    The whole “wax on, wax off” approach got on my nerves, I must admit.
    That afternoon, after