As she prepared her summary of the events since that update, she was conscious of the fact that in the broad strokes the new update followed much the same lines. She and Patrick had met with Joyce Nguyen to get the results of an autopsy of a suspected drug dealer, then returned to Ross University to meet with another professor who had some background on Fuller, and finally she and Agent Richardson had accompanied officers of the RPD on a raid. The differences, though, were that the autopsy results indicated that the drug dealer Malcolm Price had already been dead before he got back to his feet and tried to attack Izzie, the background the university professor had provided had largely been concerned with a secret society of Mayan warrior priests, and the raid had ended not with any arrests but with an attack by dozens of the shambling undead and the murder of a police officer. Izzie felt that it was prudent to be as vague about those differences as possible, at least for the time being.
She still told herself that she fully intended to reveal the entire truth of the situation to the Bureau when the time was right. And yet every time she omitted key details from an official account, or failed to notify her superior about a crucial bit of evidence, or was coy when explaining the nature of her current investigation, an internal war was being waged in the back of her head. Part of her still insisted that it was vital to observe regulations and procedures, if perhaps not in an entirely timely manner. But there was another voice in her head, faint at first but growing in volume, that questioned whether it was necessary to report on this at all.
But she would have to worry about that later. She had much more pressing concerns in the short term. Like staying alive long enough to figure out exactly what they were dealing with, for one thing.
After emailing the sanitized summary to her supervisor, Izzie pulled up the photo she’d taken of the license plate of the car outside a short while before. She ran the plates, and within moments discovered that a car with that license plate number, of the same make and model, had been reported stolen the month before. And while she seriously doubted that the elderly retired gentleman in San Diego who was listed as the vehicle’s owner had any connection with the hooded person behind the wheel, she made a note of his name and pertinent details, just for the sake of thoroughness.
Exasperated, Izzie shut the laptop and slid it across the desk. Then she opened the drawers in the desk until she found the one where she had put her things the previous day, and pulled out a stack of hardcover journals, an academic paper, and a legal pad.
The previous day, Izzie had spent several hours reading through the journals of Roberto Aguilar, using his granddaughter-in-law Samantha Aguilar’s academic paper as a skeleton key to help her decipher what it was the old man had been writing about. Izzie had filled page after page in the legal pad with her notes, before being interrupted by Patrick’s call to come join him in the warehouse near the docks.
Roberto Aguilar claimed to have been inducted as a young man into the “daykeepers,” a secret order dating back to the ancient Maya who protected humanity from threats from beyond. The daykeepers believed that entities that Aguilar referred to as “daimons” and “shades” invaded our world from another space which he called “the Unreal.” The daykeepers believed that it was possible for daimons to make use of the bodies of the dead and nearly dead as vessels, and called to those controlled by daimons as “Ridden,” just as those possessed by spirits were called in the Haitian Voudou tradition. Aguilar wrote that the daykeepers believed it was necessary to dismember the bodies of the dead, in order to make them unsuitable as vessels for the daimons.
Five years before, Izzie and the rest of the taskforce had assumed that the “Recondito Reaper” butchered the remains of his victims in order to satisfy some kind of aberrant psychological gratification. And even after they had identified Nicholas Fuller as their primary suspect, and found the mountain of books on mythology and religion in his apartment, among other obscure and arcane topics, it was believed that Fuller had simply cobbled together a delusional rationalization to justify his own actions and drives to himself.
But the day before, Izzie and Patrick had learned that Fuller had actually been following in the secret traditions that he had been taught by Roberto Aguilar. He had syncretized and synthesized elements from other religions and mythologies along the way, but the core of his personal belief system derived from the Mayan daykeepers.
Already the little that she had been able to glean about the daykeepers from Aguilar’s journals had proved to be invaluable. Had she not read in the early evening that they believed that the Ridden could not cross running water, it was likely than Izzie and the others would not have survived the rest of the night. She questioned the efficacy of the Ziploc gris-gris bag that she’d cobbled together that morning, but if it worked at all it was because she had read in Aguilar’s journal that crystals and silver were inimical to the Ridden.
Silver could disrupt the connection between the Ridden and the daimon, she had noted on the legal pad. What she and the others had taken to calling
