No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay

by Benjamin LaMore

  “Dammit,” I mutter. I look back over my shoulder at the crowds of normal humans passing by only a few feet away on the other side of the thick, curtained glass. Then I turn to the blonde at the door, who’s looking more nervous with every second. She’s been here long enough to know what’s coming.

  “Katie,” I tell her with resignation, “bar the door.”

  Carl bolts like a greyhound towards the exit, which means he’s basically running right at me. He jumps over Walter’s flailing grasp, making quick gestures at me with both hands.

  I’d like to imagine that I look bored when whatever spell he’s trying to weave evaporates as soon as it hits me. I mean, really. It’s like he doesn’t know me. Then he’s practically on top of me and I have only a second to appreciate his expression of shock at finding me still standing in his path before I stiff-arm him brutally in the shoulder. Rocked forcefully off balance, he stumbles headlong into a stone wall and sinks to the floor, crying out in pain.

  His body has barely hit the floor when Walter springs forward, the fiend digging into his shoulder like a kid holding onto a sled and looking like it’s having a hell of a good time. Still in mid-air a rolling pin hits him in the side of head at what seems like Mach Two. Forward momentum keeps him hurtling forward but the trajectory wobbles and he lands in a two-being tangle on the floor right next to Carl.

  Before I can try to grab Carl the leprechauns press their attack. Pappy and Mike jump on Walter, while the third one (Sean, who is now weaponless after hurling his rolling pin) leaps at me. By rights anything that size shouldn’t be able to cover fifteen feet at a bound, but magic usually trumps physics. He comes at me like a wrecking ball: thick, heavy, and tough as concrete, and absolutely devastating if you’re immobile. Fortunately for me I’m more agile than your average building.

  I simply duck (deeply) and the leprechaun flies swearing over my head. Somewhere behind me he crashes into the same wall that felled Carl, only he leaves a bigger dent. As I stand I’m greeted with a round of cheers from the remaining diners, who have now officially become an audience. I don’t have time to flip them off. I’ll get to it later.

  Carl is getting jerkily to his hands and knees. I grab him by the belt and try to pull him towards the door, but he’s hauled out of my grasp so quickly I almost lose fingers. Pappy and Mike are holding him upright (on his knees he’s about their height, an odd visual).

  “Sorry, Ian,” Pappy says, not looking at all sorry. If anything, he’s fighting a smile. “You know we can’t resist a good donnybrook.”

  “You’re just maintaining the stereotype,” I say. “You know that, right?”

  “Where do you think it came from?” he says with a laugh.

  I shrug. “I guess you’re right. Okay, then. When in Rome…” I give him my best right cross, right on his crooked little nose. He falls on his ass, sputtering and clutching his face while I clasp my bruised hand to my chest, swearing. Little bastards have heads like Blarney rocks. Mike, looking outraged, cocks back the arm holding the ladle but before he can swing it Carl’s half-balanced body is yanked away from him with enough force to spin him in a tiny circle.

  “Finally,” Walter says, voice harsh with triumph. He holds Carl a foot off the floor by the shoulders, while the fiend drools something red and starts to hone its claws. Carl chooses this moment to become aware of his surroundings, sees what’s right in front of him, and screams his head off while squirming like a hooked worm.

  Oh, come on. I couldn’t get a shot off on Walter even if I was willing to draw my gun now (leprechauns hate guns – bet you never read that in the fairy tales). As the fiend reaches grasping claws towards Carl’s face I grab the ladle out of Mike’s hand, leap forward and down and smash it with all my strength on Walter’s left foot.

  He yelps, hopping backwards and dropping Carl right on top of me. He’s not huge but he lands awkwardly, knocking the breath out of me. While I gasp and choke I feel for the package in my pocket and to my relief I find it intact.

  Carl scrambles away, not even thanking me for breaking his fall, then he pushes himself to his feet and tries for the door again only to find Sean is waiting for him. With a squeak he wheels around, only to find Walter’s enraged face waiting for him. One last turn and there’s Mike and Pappy, who has blood running out if his nose and the most unnerving smile you’ll ever see outside of a circus.

  Completely given over to panic, Carl bolts, zig-zagging through the room like a caffeinated rabbit. All three leprechauns chase after the jinx and, with a shout, the human and the fiend start chasing them until they are nothing but a chaotic Looney Tunes blur of running, dodging, and shouting, all to the cheers and applause of the audience. I heave myself into a seated position, catching my breath while I watch them blast through the room in a circle around me.

  All I wanted to do was a little Christmas shopping for my girlfriend. Was that too much to ask?

  As I get my feet under me the bizarre chase plows into the restaurant side of the pub, and the audience shrieks as the fight is suddenly upon them. What did they expect? A bar brawl that would politely remain confined to one area? Carl weaves through the crowd, sending people sprawling out of his way. He’s weaving micro spells as he does, trying to send enough bad luck in his wake to throw off his pursuers, but the phrase “luck of the Irish” wasn’t born for no reason. Everything he does the leprechauns counter by sheer instinct, and the fiend and his human are swept up in their wake.

  Finally, Carl does a brilliant fake to the left before he jukes to the right. Mike, in the lead, falls for it and runs right past him, but Pappy is wise to the trick and when he catches up to Carl he gives the man a wallop with his mallet right in the groin. Carl drops, clutching himself and gasping for air, in too much pain to even scream. As Pappy and Sean pick him up Walter makes a roaring charge at the leprechauns, but they drop Carl to the side and each of them jumps nimbly out of the way, allowing Walter to pass in between them.

  Right at me.

  “Shit!” I have time to gasp before he’s on me. Up close Walter and his fiend are much more dangerous than at a distance, as the two feet of chain between their collars allows plenty of room for both of them to fight hand and claw to hand, but the man is still wobbly from taking a flying rolling pin to the temple. I slip a loping overhand right, letting him stumble past me, and as I pivot back in his direction I drive my left knee into his kidney area with all of my hundred and eighty pounds behind it.

  An agonized wail escapes him as he sinks to one knee and I launch myself bodily at him, hoping to use my mass and momentum to bring him down to earth. The three of us fall against a table alongside the wall where an Asian man in a suit the color of burnished oak is still sitting, watching the brawl with paralyzed amazement.

  We fall as one against the table, with Walter taking the brunt of the impact. For just a second the fiend on his shoulder wobbles, so I grab it with my right hand and shove it off its perch and face first into the Asian man’s bowl of thick Irish stew. It chokes and sputters, slashing blindly with its small, razor-honed claws, but it’s panicking and missing my hand entirely for now.

  I grab the back of Walter’s head with my left hand and, with more force than might strictly have been necessary, I drive the man’s forehead into the wall and he sinks to his knees in front of the table with the all the grace the Hindenburg showed. Moving quickly, I let go of his head and pick up the Asian man’s heavy steak knife with my left hand. Then I use my right forearm to pin the fiend’s head in the bowl and use my right hand to grab hold of the thin gold chain that’s binding them together.

  Apart from being immune to magical energies, my touch disrupts spells that are already in motion. Like, for example, the link between Walter and the fiend. It was given shape as a gold chain, but that’s just symbolic of the mystical tether between them. To everyone else in the world the binding spell is something like a marriage vow: nobody can sever it but the two people who forged it.

  To me, of co
urse, it’s only thinly wrought gold.

  The chain comes apart on the second slash of the knife. The fiend’s bubbly screams peak, then quickly taper off as whatever energies tied it and Walter together hemorrhage through the broken chain. I relax the pressure of my forearm, standing up carefully. It lies there, face down in the stew, utterly dead. The diner has a piteous look as he regards his ruined dinner. I can sympathize. The leprechauns make great stew. I point casually at his now overly filled bowl.

  “Don’t eat that,” I say. He doesn’t answer me.

  I walk over to where Carl fell, patting my pocket to make sure the small bag is still in there. Along the way I stop to help Pappy to his feet.

  “Sorry about the mess,” I tell him.

  “Ach, don’t worry about it,” he says, checking his nose to see if the bleeding has stopped. It has. “It’s been too long since we’ve had any fun. That was worth the mess.”

  “We’ll take care of him, too,” Sean points at Walter.

  “Be gentle,” I say. “He just had a forced exorcism.”

  “Ah, he’ll be okay. All he needs is a pint and a bite.” The three leprechauns laugh and high-five each other.

  All I can do is shake my head. I don’t understand leprechauns. I walk carefully through the debris of the pub, take Carl by the nape, and haul him outside so I can put him on another bus. It’s time to go home.

  Two

  The tranquil moments tend not to last. From what I’ve seen of normal people’s lives this tends to be the case across the board, but no false modesty I think I can comfortably say that despite the last couple of years of relative peace my life hasn’t exactly fit in any kind of mold resembling “normal”. I think that’s why I try so hard to find the moments that really mean something and to hold them as long as I can. That’s why I’m taking a bit longer than usual to get out of bed this morning.

  It’s exactly one week since the escapade at McLaughlin’s and the sun is blazing in through the east window, heedless of anyone who might still be shaking off a night’s sleep. The game preserve that my house butts up against only delays the charge, but by using height of the nearest trees I’m guessing it must be around eight in the morning. It’s already getting warm in here. I’ll have to open the windows in an hour or so. My girlfriend Lisa, though, is Georgia born and still thinks anything under seventy requires a comforter. I stretch, and she curls back against me with a sleepy noise, sealing her body against mine once again hard enough to nudge me one more precarious inch towards the edge of the bed.

  I smile. I can’t help it. I’ve been doing that a bit more recently, but I don’t mind. The last four months have been some of the best of my life. The ones leading up to it had been remarkably less so.

  This past summer Remy Danaher, the most powerful magical adept in the region and a man I’d once considered a friend, had tried to do the unthinkable: bring his dead wife Susan back to life at the expense of the life of an innocent. Only my interference had prevented him from accomplishing his goal. The instrument for his plan had been a magical talisman of Biblical power, and there had been no shortage of people and monsters who had shown up in town eager to claim it and its power for themselves. The resulting battle royale between Remy’s guards and a legion of monsters and sorcerers is fast becoming legend, and people who are brave enough to visit the site are still finding lost weapons, spent shells and the occasional body part.

  That was the day I met Lisa Isherwood, the woman currently trying to snuggle me right the hell out of bed. Funny how life works. Technically she’d been trying to kill me when we met, but I don’t hold that against her. She’d been trying to kill everyone on that field. If my romantic history is any indication she’ll try again someday, but for now we’re having fun. She’d rented a small house here in town not long after the battle, though lately she’s been spending as much time here as there.

  I give up the fight to hold ground on my side of the bed and launch the only counterattack I have at my disposal: I curl onto my side and seal myself up against Lisa’s back. My lips brush against the warm, lavender-scented skin of her shoulder and neck, and she squirms in a way which erases all possibility that she’s still asleep.

  “Good morning,” I whisper.

  She stretches like a cat, from her fingers to her toes, her red satin nightie tightening in all the right places. The sheets can’t keep up with her lightly bronzed body, slipping away from her skin like water. The morning sunshine plays through the weblike dreamcatcher hanging over the bed, a delicately muted spray of color playing across her body like birds on a gentle sea. The dreamcatcher was Lisa’s first foothold in decorating my house. It could have been worse. At least she left my couch alone.

  She rolls towards me with a sleepy grin. She opens her eyes, but for just a second she won’t meet mine. It takes a moment of conscious thought before she remembers that she doesn’t have to do what she’s spent a lifetime training herself to do and looks me in the eyes.

  To me her eyes are no different than anyone else’s, unless you count how extraordinarily full and soft they are, but that’s her genetics and not her magic. Lisa is a gorgon. One look in her deep brown eyes will turn any living thing to stone, unless of course he’s the only person in the world immune to all forms of magic. So, her eyes don’t bother me, except when she cries. I’m just glad she doesn’t have snakes for hair.

  She pushes aside her chestnut curls (like I said, no snakes) does a remarkably agile pivoting maneuver on one elbow, twirling in place so we’re face to face. She slides her left hand up in between us so she can get a daytime look at the object encircling her wrist.

  “You’re six days early with this, you know.”

  “That was yesterday. Five days early, now.”

  “And you’re one hundred percent sure it’ll work?” she asks. “Not that I don’t trust your alchemist friend or anything, but you know… this is my life we’re talking about here. If he got it wrong…”

  “Johann von Wollner has worked for the Aegis since the year 1800. Alchemy for him is like breathing for us. He doesn’t get it wrong.”

  She turns her wrist over, letting the sunlight play on her Christmas present. The bracelet is a solid platinum band four inches wide, woven through with a dozen spells and twice that number of esoteric minerals and miniscule fossils. The final ingredients were a thin braid of our own hair and a tiny pebble from the Hawkesbury River in Australia, home to the Hawkesbury River Monster. The monster, called the mirreeular by the native Aborigines, is sort of a cousin to Nessie, but unlike his Scottish cousin the Hawkesbury monster makes his stony nests on the shore. The pebble was what I’d collected from Janet down at Echoes before the ruckus at McLaughlin’s.

  “Still, how do you know? What if he made his first mistake in a hundred and fifty years?”

  “Then I pay him a visit one dark and unexpected evening. I know where he lives and where he works and how to get into both, and he knows that I know. The last thing he wants to do is make me vengeful.”

  “Vengeful. I like that.” She turns it over in the sunlight, delighting in the intricate metalwork. “Looks like one of Wonder Woman’s.”

  “I don’t think it’ll stop bullets.”

  “That’s all right, it’s her look I always liked. Besides, I’ll finally be able to get into your house without you holding my hand.”

  “I didn’t think you minded that part.”

  She jabs me in the ribs, and it hurts a little. She’s well-muscled, not like a bodybuilder or power lifter but as a physical therapist whose office treats a number of professional athletes she’s stronger than she looks and sometimes she forgets that. She moves her head onto my pillow so that we’re practically nose to nose. Her face grows still, her voice serious.

  “You’re sure you want to give me this?”

  “Of course I am. Why?”

  “I just know how important your security is to you.”

  I prop myself up on my elbow so I can look into her ey
es. “You’re important to me, too. Besides, as long as you’re with me there’s a chance that someone who I’ve pissed off over the years will try to get to me through you. As long as you’re wearing this, you’re the only person in the world besides me that can get into this building alive. You’ve got your own impenetrable safe house. Besides, it’s good for Jamie to have someone besides me to talk to.”

  “Oh, and here I thought you just wanted to make the sex more convenient.”

  I make a show of thinking that over and she laughs as she pie-faces me away.

  “Do all women act like this when you give them a key to your house?” I say from my back.

  “If they could die because of a problem with the key, maybe.” She does a double take. “Wait a minute. Am I the first woman you’ve ever lived with?”

  For an odd reason I’m embarrassed. I spent most of my adult life in the Aegis, chasing down monsters and rogue sorcerers all over the world during the period of time when most people meet someone and settle down. I’ve had my share of romances along the way, sure, but never once did I ask a woman to move in with me until a month ago. Lisa, showcasing her remarkable instincts, has absolutely no difficulty piercing my hesitation. In one smooth motion she rolls gracefully on top of me, our faces almost touching.

  I can see the question coming. It’s all over her face but, before she can ask it, she smiles and kisses me very, very well. I appreciate it on several different levels, running my hands up her sides until my fingers sink into her thick, sleep-tousled hair. I hold her in the kiss, gently moving my body underneath hers, heartrate rising. She responds in kind with a soft moan, and in her skin I can feel her body temperature climbing fast.

  My damn cell phone rings.

  “Shit,” she says, breaking the kiss. She doesn’t ask me not to answer it. She knows that I don’t have a lot of friends in this town, so if someone’s calling me it’s not just to say hello. Personally, I’m not quite ready to be as forgiving. I grab the phone off the night table and glare at the screen. My anger evaporates, replaced with pure surprise.