City of Dust and Ghosts: A James Bond Halloween Story

Prologue

Cries of terror came over his radio.

"He's here!"

"Where is he? Where is he? There is nothing on camera?"

"Why isn't the damn power working. We can't see-"

"It's a demon, that's why there is nothing on camera."

"Stop it, you superstitious ass. It's only-"A gasp, then silence.

"We're being punished for what we've done. He's come to punish us."

Shouts, gasps, sometimes screams, and then silence. Always the silence.

"Jaime?" Melisandre whispered into his mic. "Jaime, Ou es-tu?"

The wind shook the windows and moaned into the inky darkness of the hallway like the hopeless lamentations of the damned echoing in hell. Melisandre felt his sweat grow cold where it coated his neck and back, and he squeezed the cheap plastic grip of his rifle even tighter. In some remote, fear-soaked part of his mind it had stopped being a rifle and had become a totem--the only thing that could ward off the evil that stalked him.

His earpiece relayed dead silence. Melisandre keyed his mic a few times, and heard the short crackle of the channel opening properly. His radio worked fine, but there was no one on the other end of the line to receive him.

He had come and he had killed them all.

Melisandre took a few tentative steps down the corridor, despite the smothering darkness. Its features were more notional that real, sketches from his memory overlaid on the black canvas. There were hotel room doors on either side of him, he remembered, but they had no balconies and the windows didn't open. He couldn't have entered them from the outside. There was a stairwell up ahead on the left, perhaps ten meters. Would he come from there? Melisandre pointed his rifle in that general direction, what he believed was that direction, and fumbled with the safety. He had never fumbled with the safety since he'd first bought the rifle, but tonight his thumb slipped, his grip became dislodged from the perspiration of his hand.

Melisandre felt arms encircle his head and neck and he shrieked like a woman, his mind going white with terror, his only response an involuntary spasm, which fired a single deafening shot into the nothingness before him.

The world lit orange for a moment, and allowed Melisandre one last thing to see before died: the ice-blue eyes of the Englishman who had brought death to this place.