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  Prologue

  PART I - Scent of the Marrow

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART II- Sight of the Marrow

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  PART III – TASTE OF THE MARROW

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  END

  Author’s Note

  Shores of The Marrow

  The Haunted Series

  Book 6

  Patrick Logan

  Prologue

  “No! We can’t leave her! No!” Robert screamed at the top of his lungs. “Nooooo!”

  But the arms that pulled him back were too powerful, too strong, and before he knew it, he was being shoved into a small, dimly-lit room, and then up a ladder. Visions of Bella, staring at him with her dark eyes jutting out from behind her strange haircut, the blade against Shelly’s soft white skin, filled his mind.

  They have her… and they have my baby.

  The thought, the realization, was like an icepick striking him directly in the center of his forehead.

  Unseen hands forced him onward, shoving him upward, into some sort of air vent, but these facts barely registered with Robert. Instead, his fractured mind was replaying a series of images—Bella’s smiling face, the fear plastered on Shelly’s—in something akin to stop motion animation.

  He saw his father, Leland Black, The Goat, and he watched as the winged-beast extricated itself from the gaping hole in the center of Sean Sommer’s chest as if undergoing some sort of bastardized birth.

  He’s here… Carson finally brought Leland back from the Marrow. The Goat was here.

  “No!” Robert screamed again, but this time a filthy hand wrapped around his mouth, muffling him.

  “Keep moving,” Agent Cherry ordered, shoving him even harder.

  He had been in this vent once before, a part of his mind realized, only back then it hadn’t been a drunk FBI Agent pushing him through, but a much younger Sean Sommers.

  Sean… the man who had brought him back into the fold on that deadly, rainy night. The man who couldn’t just leave him alone, couldn’t let him live a normal life. Sean, who was dead now; his quiddity sucked from him by his mother, the tattered vessel that had once held the ancient man ripped apart by his father.

  Tears streamed down his face, and Robert couldn’t help but think that everything was gone, stolen from him.

  Destroyed.

  First Amy and Wendy, then Shelly and his unborn child. Everything ripped from his grasp.

  His life, his mind, his sanity.

  Somewhere far away, Robert felt his body being lowered down a ladder and into a small room. The air around him still thrummed with that horrible electrical energy, and there was a slight tremble to the earth, but Robert couldn’t tell if this was just his body shaking or if the ground itself was moving.

  “In here,” a gruff voice instructed, and a large-air filter was peeled away from the wall, revealing a dark tunnel cut into the stone.

  Robert hesitated as he stared into that tunnel of dirt. The musty smell of moist earth invaded his nostrils, and he was reminded of the briny, acidic scent of the sea, of his short time at Seaforth Prison.

  You must stay in control, a voice inside his head suddenly chimed. You have to keep it together.

  It was Helen.

  Robert, for both our sake’s, and for the sake of Shelly and your child, you can’t let the darkness take over.

  But despite the plea, Robert felt his vision narrowing.

  A hand landed gently onto his shoulder, momentarily bringing him back from the brink.

  He turned and stared into the cloak that his mother used to cover herself. Even though Robert couldn’t see her eyes, he knew that she was looking at him.

  Into him.

  “Robert, please,” was all she said.

  Summoning the last of his will, Robert stepped into the tunnel and started to run.

  The others followed.

  ***

  The tunnel opened on the side of a hill overlooking Sacred Heart Orphanage. As Robert stared at the building below, light continued to spill from each of the dozens of windows, and a great beam of it shot from the roof, extending upward into a roiling sky.

  There were seven of them on that hill, their dirt-smeared faces staring down in abject horror: there was Robert, Cal, Agent Cherry, the Cloak, and the younger of the two detectives, Hugh. There was also Aiden, who had made the trek up the hill to join them.

  His body had acquired more texture, and Robert realized that he was no longer able to see through the man as he once had.

  Something wrong was happening here, something terrible.

  And there was nothing any of them could do to stop it.

  The Goat is here…

  Wind drifted up the slope, sending their grimy hair swirling about their dirt-smeared faces.

  No one said anything for what felt like ages.

  Eventually, it was Hugh who spoke.

  “What was that?” he whispered.

  The only answer came from the sky itself: it frothed madly, clouds crawling over one another like cicadas trapped in a mason jar. For an instant, Robert thought that the heavens themselves would tear open, and that quiddity would spill forth, filling this world with their madness, with their evil.

  But just as the cloud dance reached a fever pitch, the light blinked out, and their illumination was reduced to the bluish cast of a crescent moon.

  The Cloak pushed the heavy hood off her head, revealing her scarred face.

  Robert was drawn to his mother’s good eye.

  Chloe’s appearance was perhaps even more horrifying than the creature that he had seen climb out of the Marrow, but he wasn’t disgusted.

  Instead, he felt a pang of sadness deep in the pit of his stomach.

  He wasn’t the only one who had lost during this battle.

  And some of them had suffered for much longer than he had.

  Chloe had two sons, two boys who had been drawn to opposite sides of this battle between good and evil, between what was right and what was decidedly evil.

  Trapped in the strange, mystical sea between life and death.

  With a shuddering sigh, Robert tore his eyes from h
is mother’s scarred face and looked to Cal, who was staring down at the Orphanage, his cheeks wet with tears. Then he glanced at Hugh, who looked equally as confused as frightened, and then to Agent Cherry. The man’s blond hair was damp with sweat, his mouth a thin line.

  Aiden was similarly stone-faced, but his eyes… there was a darkness to his eyes that made Robert tremble.

  Yes, they had all lost something in this battle.

  A horrible growl, a deep rumbling sound that rattled molars and blurred vision, filled the night, seeming to somehow become it. It was a sound that Robert knew could only have been made by one entity, and he felt his entire body go numb.

  On the heels of this howl, Chloe Black finally spoke up, her gravely voice torn from her throat by the wind.

  “We need to move… it isn’t safe here. We still have work to do. This… this is only the beginning.”

  PART I - Scent of the Marrow

  Chapter 1

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

  Callum Godfrey pulled his jeans up and then sucked in his gut before doing up the button. When he relaxed, his stomach flopped over the waistband, and the hard material cut into his skin. He teased his white t-shirt down, tucking it into the front first, and then turning sideways to look at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of his door.

  He grimaced at the sight, then pulled it back out again, letting it hang loosely.

  Much better, he thought.

  “Cal, get downstairs and eat your breakfast! You’re going to be late for school!”

  Cal took one more look at himself in the mirror, smoothed his dark hair, which immediately sprung back to near exactly the way it had been, then opened the door to his bedroom.

  “Coming!” he shouted, taking the stairs two at a time. He reached the landing and saw his mom standing there, lunch bag in hand. “Thanks,” he said, as he grabbed it.

  “What about breakfast?” his father hollered from the kitchen.

  Cal looked over his shoulder to the kitchen. David Godfrey, dressed in his usual crisp white dress shirt and blue slacks, stared back overtop of his glasses that were pulled down onto the bridge of his nose.

  “Not hungry,” Cal said simply. His father’s eyes moved to Cal’s shirt, which was untucked, and therefore against the school dress code, so quickly that he didn’t think that Cal noticed.

  But Cal noticed.

  “Not hungry,” he repeated, trying not to frown.

  “Okay, son. Have a good day at school.”

  Cal nodded, and turned to his mom. She leaned down and he gave her a quick peck on the cheek, and he rolled his eyes.

  “Bye, mom.”

  Cal hurried from the house just in time to see the yellow school bus pull away from the curb. For appearances, he chased after it, but his effort was manufactured at best. When he turned the corner, and out of sight of his mother who he knew had been watching from the front door of their house, he stopped, and then glanced around for his friends.

  On cue, two boys and a girl came into view, beaming smiles plastered on their faces.

  “Cally-boy!” the taller of the two boys shouted, raising his hand up high. Cal slapped him with a high-five, then did the same with the other boy.

  “Hey Brent, Hank.”

  The girl also raised her hand, but when Cal went to high-five her, he took some mustard off the slap, and this somehow served to make it a less coordinated movement.

  Instead of hearing the satisfying smack of palm on palm, Cal missed her much smaller hand and thudded against her shoulder instead. Cal started to blush immediately.

  “Heh, sorry,” he grumbled. “’Sup Stacey.”

  Stacey smiled broadly.

  “Hey Cal. Missed the bus again today?”

  Cal chuckled.

  Accidentally on purpose.

  Hank, who was taller than all of them by nearly a foot, but whom Cal still had at least forty pounds on, looked around nervously before pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

  “Who wants one?” he asked, teasing one out for himself.

  Stacey shook her head, but Brent was eager. He tossed his head to the side, forcing his shaggy blond hair from his face, and grabbed one.

  Hank raised his eyes to Cal’s.

  “How ‘bout you?” he asked, holding the pack out.

  Cal scanned Hank’s dark eyes buried behind thick spectacles, then Brent’s, and finally Stacey’s.

  “No… no, I’m all right. Mrs. Johnson is a hawk for that shit. Last week, she said that Tom Tricker smelled of smoke and sent him right to the office. He said that it had been two days since he had a cigarette, and even then, it had only been a drag or two.”

  Brent shook his head.

  “It wasn’t two days since he had a smoke, it was early that morning; I know, because it was my smoke.”

  Cal shrugged.

  “Whatever, but I don’t want her calling my mom again. She’ll have a shit.”

  “Doesn’t matter, cuz we ain’t even going to school today, are we, guys?” Hank said with a grin.

  He moved the pack even closer to Cal.

  Not going today?

  Cal’s thoughts turned to his mother, to the brown lunch bag that she had given him, which he still clutched in a suddenly sweaty hand.

  “Nope, we aren’t,” Stacey confirmed. “Going to go to the Pit again. Brent scored some whiskey from his dad’s cabinet.”

  Cal looked at Brent who had since lowered his backpack off one shoulder and proceeded to pull the zipper back a few inches. Cal leaned over and peered inside. Sure enough, he caught the reflection of a bottle within.

  He chewed the inside of his lip, and was about to protest when Hank shoved the smokes up against his stomach.

  With his shirt loose as it was, Hank misjudged the distance between them and the pack crumpled as it struck his belly.

  Cal blushed again, and took the pack from his friend’s hand.

  “What the fuck,” he said, “Why not?”

  Cal liked school, but he liked Stacey Mclernon more.

  The Pit it is…

  Chapter 2

  “My parents are square as shit, you know that.”

  “Wait, your shit is square?” Hank said with a chuckle. He brought the bottle to his lips. “You should get that checked out.”

  Cal frowned and took a drag of his cigarette. It was almost noon, and he was starting to get hungry, which was making him irritable.

  “No, what I mean is, they are just so damn boring. I mean, they’re great and all. But boring.”

  Cal’s eyes moved to The Pit as he spoke, his gaze moving along the rim of the bowl. It had once been an active gravel pit, he knew, but it had long since been abandoned. When they had been younger, nine and ten instead of fifteen, the three of them used to race from the bottom to the top, sprinting all forty meters, at no less than a seventy degree angle, until they collapsed on the dirt path, their chests heaving, sweat pouring down their cheeks.

  Now, they just liked to look at the spot they affectionately called The Pit and think.

  And talk.

  And drink, smoke, whatever.

  “All parents are boring,” Stacey offered, grabbing the bottle from Hank. “It’s kinda like their job to be boring.”

  Cal shrugged. Boring was fine, normal, even. But Boring? With a capital B. That was the worst.

  “I guess.”

  For the next several minutes, they passed the bottle around in silence. Cal was beginning to feel buzzed, although he wasn’t sure if this was from the alcohol or the cigarettes.

  Or just on account of him being hungry.

  “You guys ever think about what we’ll be doing ten years from now? Twenty? I mean, this,” Hank swished the bottle, and indicated the gravel pit with his chin. “is great, but will we still be coming back here when we’re boring, too? When we have our own kids?”

  The forward-thinking comment was so unlike Hank, that Cal had to do a double take to make sure that it wasn’t Brent wh
o had posed the question. As he watched, Hank scrunched his nose, moving his glasses back up to where they were supposed to be.

  No, it had been Hank, and the boy appeared to be actually thinking about it.

  About getting older.

  For Cal, the answer was easy: if he was still in Mooreshead, South Carolina, when he was an adult, then he failed.

  He wanted out, plain and simple.

  Because Mooreshead, like his parents, was just too boring for him.

  But Cal kept this little tidbit to himself. Instead, he offered, “Yeah, I think so. I mean, this place is cool, so why the fuck not?”

  “We’ve had some good times here,” Brent said softly. “You guys remember when we brought Trevor up here? Like six months ago?”

  Cal chuckled.

  Of course, he remembered. How could he forget how his stomach had hurt, first from the laughter and then from Trevor’s fist.

  “Yeah, he did a complete back roll down the side of the Pit,” Hank replied with a chuckle of his own. “Fell all the way to the bottom. And you, Cal, I can’t believe it was you that tricked him into walking backward toward the edge.”

  “Why? I can be—”

  “Cuz you’re a pussy,” Hank said, laughing again. “And when Trevor punched you, I thought you were going to cry.”

  Cal stopped laughing.

  “Fuck off, I wasn’t going to cry. I was just laughing too hard, otherwise I would have hit him back.”

  Hank rolled his eyes, but Cal didn’t notice. His attention was focused on Stacey, who was staring down the side of the gravel pit, clearly disinterested in the boys’ pissing contest.

  “You? Take on Trever? I don’t think so.”

  Cal felt his face go red, and looked away, distracting himself with a drag from his cigarette.

  He inhaled too quickly and coughed.

  “Whatever,” he said after the irritation in his throat passed.

  “I hope we come back here one day,” Stacey said at last. “One day when we’re old, but not boring. When the world has changed.”

  Cal’s brow furrowed as he stared at her profile, marveling at how smooth her skin was.

  Although he didn’t have the same problem with acne that Hank did, Cal’s skin always seemed a little bumpy to his touch. Stacey’s, on the other hand, was as smooth as a sea worn stone.