Bad Angel

by JC Andrijeski

  He wasn’t thrilled with the idea of prolonging this, but he felt responsible.

  He was responsible.

  He couldn’t have said why he believed that, but it felt completely true.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at him. “Yes. Take me home, please.”

  He nodded, hiding his reluctance as best he could.

  He’d known she would want to come with him.

  They always wanted to come with him. Regardless of age, where they woke up, their gender or sexual orientation, how long the demon was inside them, how violent things got before Dags managed to get the demon out… they always wanted to go with him afterwards. They clung to him like wounded animals he’d rescued from certain death.

  When she limped closer to him, still fighting to balance on the broken shoe, he offered her his arm, and she hooked hers through it.

  He never understood why they trusted him.

  They always trusted him so readily.

  Yet everything about this situation was sketchy. Everything about the stories he told them was invariably sketchy. He was the guy who found them in the dark, after they woke up from a trance, with nothing but bruises and missing time to show for it. Sometimes they’d only blacked out for a few hours, if he got to them quickly enough. A few he caught right out of the gate, up in the area of the Hollywood Hills, and then it was a matter of telling them they’d fallen and hit their head, which at least was remotely believable.

  Others faced days, even weeks of missing time.

  Time where they had no idea where they’d been, what they’d been doing, who they’d been with.

  Yet they always trusted Dags to get them home safe.

  Somehow that made him feel guilty, too.

  The woman leaned heavily into his shoulder and side as he led her out of the studio street, back towards the parking lot where he’d left his car.

  By the time they got there, she was holding his arm, gripping his hand.

  He let her. He always more or less let them do what they wanted.

  But yeah, it made him feel like shit.

  Chapter 4

  Working Through Issues

  “Old man, leave me alone. Just leave me alone tonight. Please.”

  Dags stared into the void of dark red clouds shot through with black and white veins. He watched that vortex of light and shadow pull him in, felt a dip in his gut as he fell forward into a gaping tunnel made of light.

  He could feel the presences now; not just the old man, but all of them. Dags knew them to be friendly, but he didn’t care.

  He wanted them to go away.

  They wouldn’t go away.

  When he got summoned, he got summoned.

  “I don’t want to do this tonight,” he grumbled. “I really don’t.”

  The landscape changed around him, morphing seamlessly so that the old man sat on a rock under a shockingly blue sky. Red-rock cliffs rose up behind him, ribboned through with black veins, dotted with plants that dripped water from a cave above.

  Dags tried one last time. “Please. I’m tired. Just let me sleep.”

  The old man smiled.

  Maybe he didn’t hear Dags’ words. Maybe he didn’t understand.

  Or maybe, probably, he just didn’t care.

  “You asked for information, did you not?” the old man said. “You asked to be trained?”

  “You never just do train me though,” Dags muttered. “It’s always riddles and bullshit first. Finger wagging and telling me I’m doing everything wrong. The training is maybe five percent of what we actually do together⏤”

  “You need her, you know,” the old man said, cheerfully ignoring his words. “You really need her. And she needs you. She is suffering now.”

  “The whole damned world is suffering now,” Dags said.

  “You can’t do this forever,” the old man said.

  Dags didn’t answer.

  Some irrational, stubborn part of himself wanted to take that as a challenge.

  Oh yeah, old man? Watch me… watch me do it forever…

  He didn’t express that out loud, though.

  Not even inside his dream.

  Inexplicably, with the cave and the red cliffs and the old man on one side, Dags turned his head to look down at a view of Los Angeles below him. He saw himself looking from an impossible height, standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, a cliff that made no sense in terms of either geography or physics.

  From that height, Dags’ eyes followed the coast from Malibu to Santa Monica to Venice, then up the main arteries north and east, through Century City and Beverley Hills, into West Hollywood and then Hollywood itself.

  On the hillside, under the Hollywood sign, a dark, violent, blood-red light throbbed, like a wound in the side of the mountain.

  Like the red irises of the demons he expelled.

  Dags knew what it was. He knew exactly what it was.

  It was the portal.

  It was that damned hell portal, and pretty much the bane of his existence.

  “How do I close it?” Dags growled, staring at the thing. “Can you at least answer me that?”

  “You’re focusing on the wrong thing,” the old man said.

  Ignoring Dags’ darkening scowl, his grandfather smiled, pointing back over the city, to a sea of lights walking and sitting and sleeping and moving across the land. Dags saw those flickering, colored flames moving down the street in cars, jogging on the sidewalks, walking other, smaller lights on leashes, sitting in chairs and drinking coffee, reading on tablets and phones, talking loudly to other lights.

  “You have to protect them,” the old man said, his voice growing somber for the first time. “You’re here to protect them⏤”

  “I’m trying,” Dags said.

  “So is she,” the old man finished, again not seeming to hear him. “She is here to protect them too. You cannot keep her from this task. You have to help her.”

  Dags felt his jaw harden.

  “I can’t,” he said, throwing up a light-filled hand. “I can’t be the one, not right now. Don’t you see that? There has to be someone else.”

  To that, the old man only smiled.

  “About that portal⏤” Dags began.

  But the old man was already fading.

  His image flickered and shimmered, then broke into tiny particles around Dags, along with the high red cliffs, the blue sky, the view of the Hollywood sign, the image of all of those people living their lives in L.A., oblivious to Dags and angels and demons and unhelpful old men who climbed down from celestial caves just to irritate the shit out of him.

  All that remained when the other things faded was a breathtaking view of blue ocean, ending in breaking waves on golden sand.

  Dags stared out at that water, feeling a longing so intense⏤

  He jerked awake.

  He moved violently, before he opened his eyes.

  He tried to sit up, then rise all the way to his feet before he managed to remember where he was. He caught himself, the movements half-completed, just before he would have brained himself on the low wooden ceiling of the elevated platform where he slept.

  He hadn’t made it home until dawn.

  He got the woman who’d been possessed (“Call me Daphne”) back to an apartment complex in the hills above West Hollywood, where he parked his car on the street just long enough to walk her up to her apartment on the second floor.

  She tried to get him to come in.

  For the first time since he’d rid her of the demon, Dags declined.

  She was damned persuasive, but he declined the second and third times she asked, too. It wasn’t personal. On a purely superficial level, she was hot as fuck, now that she wasn’t actively trying to kill him, but that wasn’t the point.

  He flat-out wouldn’t let himself go there.

  It was one of his unbreakable rules.

  Victims of recent demonic possessions were way too vulnerable right after they’d been freed. It would have been like t
aking advantage of someone who drank too much, or who just had a traumatic experience they could actually remember.

  Dags couldn’t do that.

  He wouldn’t do that.

  Daphne made him wait by the door while she went in and found a business card to give to him, anyway.

  He took it, albeit reluctantly, and got the hell out of there.

  He threw the business card in one of the communal trash bins before he left the gated apartment complex.

  Then he went to a club in Hollywood and picked up someone else.

  It was becoming a bad habit of late.

  Well… a worse habit, if he were being totally honest with himself.

  It was also verging on a compulsive one.

  He didn’t want to think about what he was trying really damned hard not to think about. He didn’t want to examine his actions well enough to admit what he was avoiding.

  He didn’t want to think, period.

  Yet he knew he’d be up for hours after a hunt and a demon expulsion.

  Something about using the blue-green angel fire to that degree, not to mention the ritual, plus all the adrenaline from the hunt and inevitable fight to get the demon down, meant he wouldn’t sleep until after he’d spent some time winding down. He’d tried running. He’d tried lifting weights. He’d even gone surfing a few times.

  Those only helped a little.

  Navel gazing in his apartment was a hard no.

  Alcohol was out of the question.

  So were sleeping pills.

  Sex, on the other hand, worked.

  Exercise and distraction rolled into one, sex pretty much covered all the bases. Having someone around to help him kill the time before he could sleep again was infinitely preferable to anything else he’d tried.

  So he found someone, which had been bizarrely easy of late.

  He went with her to her place… always her place, never his.

  He stayed for a while.

  Then he left.

  In this case, he waited until he was sure she was down for the count, making his way back out the front door and to his car after she’d curled up on her side and began to softly snore.

  By the time he got home, he’d finally been able to crash.

  Now he was awake again.

  It was probably two in the afternoon, and he was on his first cup of coffee. He sat on his couch, foot propped on a stylized, driftwood coffee table as he stared up at the high ceiling, trying to blank his mind.

  He’d already taken a shower.

  He’d listened to his messages.

  He’d taken his dog, Steve McQueen, out for a walk in the woods and fed him lots of treats, in addition to a big breakfast.

  His slashed-up coat⏤the fourth coat he’d managed to destroy this month⏤had already found its way into the trash.

  Dags knew he should stay here the rest of today, get some actual work done.

  He actually had things he needed to do⏤business-type things, not even demon-related things⏤like hire someone to clean out the house on the upper lot of his property, and find him a new tenant. It was something he’d been putting off for months, ever since his last tenant got killed by a demon while she’d been dog-sitting for him.

  Maybe it was guilt.

  Maybe it was a refusal to let go of Jane, who’d been his friend.

  Whatever the reason, Dags found he wanted to put off dealing with all of that today, too.

  He didn’t want to go through all of Jane’s worldly possessions, most of which were still in the house since she had no kids and her only living relative, her brother, lived in Japan. He needed to find some way to contact friends of hers, find someone who knew her better than he had, someone who could go through all of it and figure out what went where.

  He couldn’t stomach the thought today.

  Some perhaps small, but extremely vocal part of him wanted to go to the beach and just float on his back in the salty waves.

  Forget his dead neighbor, who he’d genuinely liked.

  Forget his dreams.

  Definitely forget about demons, and demon portals he couldn’t fucking close, and demons possessing people, and demons killing people he liked.

  He wanted to eat street tacos.

  He wanted to watch people roller blade and lift weights and perform stupid tricks for tourists. He wanted to walk along the boardwalk and remember what life was like before the Change, back when Dags was just ordinary, like everyone else.

  Maybe he’d even go surfing for a few hours.

  The longer that more vocal part of Dags painted that picture for him, the more Dags found himself wanting to go.

  Right as he dragged himself up from the couch, more or less making up his mind to do it, to just go outside, to bring Steve McQueen, to just be a normal damned person for a change⏤

  His phone rang.

  Chapter 5

  New Case

  “Jourdain,” he said, unable to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

  “Hey.”

  Dags frowned when she didn’t go on.

  “And?” he said. “What is it, Ruby? What do you need?”

  “You have a new client.”

  Dags’ frown turned into something closer to a scowl. “You’re not supposed to do this,” he said. “You’re supposed to call me first. Run it by me before you say yes. Run it by me before you even talk over details about whatever it is⏤”

  “He said he knew you,” Ruby said, unfazed. “He said you were old friends. I figured you had to take it, given that. And I did call you. At, like… ten o’clock. You didn’t pick up.”

  Dags cursed under his breath.

  He didn’t usually sleep through his phone ringing. He deliberately chose the most annoying ring-tone he could find, since it woke him up pretty much without fail. He must have crashed harder than he thought.

  “I left you a message⏤” Ruby began, now sounding defensive, or maybe annoyed. It was hard to tell without seeing her aura. “And I did try to call. He said he knew you. He said you went to high school together or something. Mentioned Venice?”

  Dags frowned. “What was his name?”

  “Something Russian. Vlad? Pavel? I left it on your voicemail.”

  He could hear her shuffling papers around on her desk, and could picture her in that tiny room above the taco shop and the old-fashioned theater in Los Feliz that he kept for his actual business. He waited for her to find the notes she’d probably scribbled on the back of a magazine with black eyeliner or one of her paint pens with the glitter.

  He already had a pretty good idea of what she was going to say.

  Dags only knew one Russian in Venice.

  “Uri,” she said, sounding triumphant. “Uri Kominsky. You know him, right? He really seemed to know you. Said you went way back. Told me some stories⏤”

  “Yeah,” Dags said. “Yeah, I know him.”

  He’d known it had to be Uri, but Dags still felt something akin to shock.

  Uri tracked him down? Christ.

  He hadn’t talked to Uri in probably eight years.

  What the hell would Uri want with him?

  Uri had been there the night of The Change.

  He’d been the one to feed Dags the drugs that night, his “Dreamwalk potion” or whatever the hell it had been, mostly Datura, from what Uri said, but probably magic mushrooms and LSD and God knew what else.

  Ironic that Dags was the one with Native American in his family tree, and he got fed that crap by a junkie Russian from Torrance.

  “He actually came by?” Dags said, bewilderment in his voice. “In person?”

  “Yeah. He walked up the stairs with his two legs and feet and everything.”

  Dags’ jaw briefly clenched.

  Pushing Ruby from his mind, he fought to think.

  He came to the conclusion he needed more coffee.

  “What’s the job?” he said.

  “It’s on the message⏤”

  “But I’m talking to you
, Ruby. Right now. Tell me what he said.”

  “He wouldn’t say much,” she admitted, chewing on something he could hear through the phone receiver. “He wanted to talk to you personally. At first he said he was going to wait for you here, until I said I had no idea if you’d be in today. Then he said someone was missing. He said she was a friend of yours. Of both of yours. Someone you know. A singer? He said the three of you lived together.”

  Dags tried to untangle this.

  Then the gist of it clicked.

  “Jade,” Dags muttered, frowning for real. “Jade’s missing? Is that what he said?”

  “Do you want his number or not?”

  “You’re a shitty assistant,” Dags grumbled. “I don’t know why I pay you.”

  “Because I put up with all of your weird shit,” she said, still chewing whatever it was. Her mouth sounded full now. “…Because I don’t tell anyone about the times I’ve come in here and found you naked on the floor, covered in bruises. Or the times I had to bail you out of jail for public nudity in other parts of the city. Or that time when⏤”

  “Okay,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his fingers. “I get it.”

  But she wasn’t done.

  “⏤And I don’t complain about how you’re never here, Jourdain. Or how I’m sitting in this little sweat-box by myself, with a crappy, three-hundred-year-old air conditioner that breaks down every other day. Or the fact that I’m pretty sure this is all just a front for some shady, probably-illegal thing you have going on the side⏤”

  “All right,” he said, annoyed in spite of himself. “Just take better messages next time. And for crying out loud… buy a new damned air conditioner if it’s really that bad. I’ll cover it, as long as you pick out something reasonable.”

  She grunted. “Reasonable. Sure. Cheap bastard.”

  “I don’t mean a piece of crap,” he cut in. “I mean reasonable. Not the Rolls Royce of air conditioners. It doesn’t have to be a used Pinto. More like a Subaru. Or a Honda.”

  “Like I know how to install an air conditioner⏤” she grumbled.