Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  The man snorted. “You got me, son.”

  Kat faked a cough. “Can someone enlighten me, please?”

  “He was an Enforcer.” Liam shot the man a hard look. “A member of the Circle’s internal police force slash personal army.”

  “You make it sound so much more dramatic than it is,” the man drawled. “And we don’t have time for melodrama at the moment, Mr. Crown. From the sounds of those sirens, half the city cops are on their way. If we stand here bickering for much longer, we’re going to wind up spending the rest of the night giving statements in smelly rooms at one precinct or another—instead of solving this demonic possession mystery that’s already cost three people their lives.”

  “You say ‘we’ like you’re going to tag along.” Liam scowled. “I don’t recall inviting you into the fold.”

  “Given what just happened up the hill there, it doesn’t seem like you’re in a position to turn down help.” The man hopped the stream with more grace than you would expect from someone his age.

  Liam backed up a step. “You were watching us?”

  “I’ve been watching you all evening.” He jutted his thumb at Kat. “I made her as a sup when she visited my store, but I couldn’t figure out what kind, so I did a little snooping and found out a woman of her description had recently moved in with a shoddy, pathetic, magic-using drunk of a PI who’d miraculously cleaned up his act in recent weeks. Got a little curious about that, so I followed you two around—and watched you blindly stumble into this mess.”

  Heat crept up Liam’s neck. He’d known he didn’t have the best reputation around, but he didn’t think he needed that many negative adjectives attached to his description. “You do know that insulting me is only fueling my desire to tell you to take a hike, right?”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you tell me, son.” The man eyed the nervous cops shuffling their feet as they debated what to do. One of them was slowly reaching for his radio. “You know how to approach supernatural crime from the perspective of a cop, but this is not a problem for the mundane police. It was a mistake to call them to this scene while the demon was on the attack. If I hadn’t dispatched it before they confronted it…”

  He huffed, and all the modern technology the cops had on them shorted out in a shower of sparks, causing them to yelp in panic.

  Liam grasped his knife but didn’t pull it out. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Cleaning up your mess.”

  The man jumped the full thirty feet from the stream to the top of the hill, a violet aura wafting off his heels. Landing next to the three startled cops, who scrambled to draw their guns, the man snapped his fingers. A cloud of magic billowed out from the tip of his index finger and engulfed the cops from the necks up.

  The cops tried to escape from the spell’s area of effect, but however they moved, the cloud followed. As they breathed in the magic essence of the little cloud, the spell took hold. They stopped fighting, stilled, and then just stood there, staring blankly as the cloud gradually dissipated.

  The man turned to the stunned shifters who’d arrived with the cops. “Contact your leaders and tell them to meet us at the nearest community center in half an hour. Someone’s using demons to target your people, and the mundane cops are going to be useless at stopping them.”

  The shifters gasped at the word “demons,” and immediately took off back around the house. Presumably to tell the other shifters on scene that it was time to skedaddle before more police arrived to cordon off the area and detain any witnesses.

  One of them yanked her phone from her back pocket as she rounded the corner of the porch. Just as the shrieks of the approaching sirens began to swallow all other sounds, Liam heard her say, “Ms. Cortez, the problem is worse than we thought. There’s a…”

  Well, at least Gabby’s up to speed, Liam thought sourly.

  The man moved out of sight for a moment, and when he reappeared, he had a half-conscious Yun slung over his shoulder. The man then jumped back down from the hilltop, leaving the spelled cops in a stupor.

  “What’d you do to them?” Kat asked, wary.

  “Short-term amnesia spell,” the man answered. “They won’t remember anything that happened over the past twenty minutes. Which means they won’t remember we were here. They’ll come out of the daze momentarily, so we best get going.”

  Liam groaned. “You’re unnecessarily complicating matters. I told a cop friend of mine that we were coming here. If we’re not here when she arrives, she’s going to start asking questions. Then the cops are going to figure out that we’re conspicuously missing.”

  “That was your mistake,” the man said bluntly. “Call your cop friend and tell her to keep her lips zipped. If she balks, tell her the stakes: A lot of good cops will die if they directly confront a strong demon. It’ll be best if we leave the police one step behind us to clean up the blood and close the case once the bulk of the risk has passed.”

  The man jumped the stream again and set off through the woods at a brisk pace. Liam and Kat had no choice but to follow, unless they wanted to try and stop him, a tactic Liam knew was doomed to end in disaster. If this guy was a former Enforcer, then he had enough magic energy to wipe the floor with Liam, and enough magic skill to run circles around Kat.

  So as much as Liam loathed letting this ex-Circle member force his way onto this case, he had to suck it up. For now.

  Reluctantly, Liam did as the man commanded and called Franc. To his luck, she hadn’t yet gotten around to telling anyone that he’d been the person who reported the attack. After he explained why she shouldn’t, she unenthusiastically agreed to claim the report had been anonymous, as long as Liam kept her in the loop.

  “But I’m serious, Liam,” she said as the final word. “Don’t get yourself in over your head.”

  She hung up, and Liam sighed. She’s not going to sit quietly on the sidelines while I work this case.

  Since the issue of Franc was handled for the time being though, he finally turned his attention to Kat—and noticed that not all the blood on her face belonged to Cunningham. If the cops get a sample of Kat’s blood from the scene, he realized with horror, her DNA will go into the national database.

  Liam came to an abrupt halt. “We need to go back and destroy the blood Kat left at the house.”

  Kat’s head whipped toward him, her eyes wide. Shit, she mouthed. A9 will find me.

  The man scoffed. “I already took care of that. I’m not an amateur, Mr. Crown.”

  “Took care of it how?” Kat asked.

  The man pointed one finger back toward the house. “That’s how.”

  Liam and Kat glanced over their shoulders…to see gray smoke rising into the night sky.

  Kat gasped. “You set the victims’ house on fire?”

  “Just a few areas of the ground floor, and the yard out back, where you spilled blood. If the cops get your DNA on file, then every time you get into a scrap, you’ll be hauled in for questioning. You don’t want the police barking up your tree all the time, do you?”

  Kat didn’t respond. She just shot him a disgusted look. And while Liam understood the man’s logic, he too felt disdain for the nonchalant way in which the man had worsened the lives of people who’d already been victimized tonight.

  The man noticed their discomfort, and shrugged it off. “Relax. I used a weak fire spell. It won’t burn the whole house down, and their insurance will cover the damage. Also, the trail of flames leads straight to that Cunningham man’s body, so the cops will simply blame the blaze on him.”

  Catching up to the man and matching his stride, Kat said sharply, “Why are you intent on ‘helping us’? Are Circle Enforcers just general ‘do-gooders,’ or is there a personal stake here?”

  The man took a moment to formulate a response that didn’t reveal too much. “I fought a lot of demons in my time as an Enforcer, and I saw a lot of
good Enforcers die fighting demons. So even though I’m retired from that line of work, I always keep an eye out for demonic activity.

  “A few days ago, some of the demon-sensing wards I placed around town went off, indicating the presence of a demon I fought several times throughout my career. A demon that I know for a fact was booted back to the Inferno about ten years ago, because I booted it back there myself. Which means that someone decided to summon it from the pit to wreak havoc yet again.”

  The man peered over his shoulder, a deep frown set into his grizzled face. “People don’t summon demons like Glasya-Labolas, the Earl of Bloodshed, for small favors and cheap rewards. They summon such demons to visit brutal death upon their enemies. And someone, it seems, has designated the shifters of Salem’s Gate as their enemies.”

  Kat gulped. “You didn’t kill that demon inside Cunningham’s body, did you?”

  The man shook his head. “You can’t kill a demon. It has no physical form to kill. You can either imprison it in the Inferno, the hellish realm where demons are born. Or you can destroy its essence altogether, which is an immensely difficult task that almost always costs multiple people their lives.”

  “By blowing Cunningham’s head off,” Liam said to Kat, “all he did was send the demon’s essence back to the magic array in which it was summoned from the Inferno.”

  Kat touched the damaged side of her face. If a regular human had punched her, the injuries would have healed already. Cunningham’s fist, powered by a demon, had slugged her so hard that it would still be several more minutes before the cracks and bruises fully resolved.

  “It’s going to come back, isn’t it?” she said. “In someone else’s body.”

  “That’s a good bet,” replied the man. “The rogue magician who summoned it is clearly on some murderous mission, and any person willing to sacrifice one human to be a demon’s vessel is willing to sacrifice as many as it takes to get the job done.”

  They emerged into a gap in the woods, a narrow back road devoid of houses winding through the skeletal trees. An old Ford pickup truck sat on the curb, its bed covered with a canvas tarp.

  “The closest community center is on Partridge,” the man said. “By the time we get there, the shifter leaders and their entourages should be assembled. We need to have a frank discussion with them about the threat level this demon represents to the shifters of Salem’s Gate.”

  Liam gritted his teeth—he couldn’t stand how this guy was acting like his boss—but this wasn’t the time to criticize him. He was right. The shifters were in grave danger.

  “Gabriella Cortez is a friend of mine,” Liam said. “In fact, she was with us earlier when we, uh, acquired the focus object that we used to track Cunningham here.”

  The man snorted. “You mean the blood you stole from the house where those three shifters were killed earlier?”

  Kat choked on air. “You were there?”

  “Yup. Saw the whole thing.” He opened the back door of his pickup, the hinges squeaking. “Not the sloppiest veil work I’ve ever seen, but not the neatest either.” He eyed Kat. “I don’t know exactly what you are, Ms. King, but you need to get a better handle on how your magic works.”

  Kat’s gaze hit the ground, embarrassment turning her cheeks bright pink. “I know.”

  The man carefully laid Yun across the back seat of the truck. She was coming around now, but she wasn’t quite what Liam would call coherent.

  Wanting to steer Kat away from her shame, Liam asked, “Did Yun get hit with a psychic attack? Usually, she recovers from physical blows faster than this.”

  Kat thought about it for a second, then nodded. “I guess that’s what it was. Cunningham—er, the demon—just casually waved its hand, and then all my bad memories from the past two years basically punched me in the face at once. It felt like it physically hurt.” She worried her lip. “I don’t know what Yun experienced though.”

  The man shrugged. “Psychic attacks can take many forms. Whichever hers took though, she should fully recover. Deities have hardy minds and souls.”

  Liam shoved his blood-streaked hands into his pockets. “Well, you just know everything about everyone in Salem’s Gate, don’t you? You been following Yun around too?”

  The man shut the back door and gave Liam an irritated look. “I don’t have to follow her around. I’m a regular at the Thunderbolt. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out the place is run by a sup, when she goes around entertaining the guests by doing ‘magnetism tricks.’”

  “That’s funny,” Liam said. “Yun’s never mentioned you.”

  “I like to keep a low profile.”

  “Hence the memory wiping,” Kat muttered.

  “Exactly.” The man opened the driver’s door. “Now get in so we can get going. By the sounds of it, the rest of the cops are at the house now, and those three I spelled will have already spotted that Cunningham man’s body in the stream—again. So sooner rather than later, the uniforms are going to come pouring out of the woods in search of suspicious characters like us.”

  “And who exactly are you, Mr. Suspicious Character?” Liam said. “I never caught your name.”

  The man climbed into his truck and started it, the engine growling to life with a puff of gray exhaust. “Name’s Elmore Huntington III. But you can call me ‘Hunt’ for short.”

  9

  Kat

  The community center on Partridge boasted a modestly sized conference space, with enough room to comfortably fit about forty people, plus a few fold-out tables for food and drinks. Tonight, twice that many people had crammed themselves into the poorly ventilated room, and while no one had brought snacks, the tables lying folded against the wall, Kat felt like she barely had enough space to breathe.

  She, Liam, Yun, Franc, Hunt, and Cortez, along with a few other high-ranking shifters, sat in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Everyone else huddled around the circle, necks craned and ears tilted down so as to not miss a single word, even though they all had superhuman hearing.

  As Cortez brought the enormous crowd to order with nothing but a shush—she clearly held a lot of respect among the city’s shifter community—Hunt once again shot Franc a suspicious look. He’d been furious when he found out Liam sent Franc a text telling her to meet them here. But Liam had pointed out that if they let Franc in on the whole story, she could subtly influence the police investigation to keep the cops at a distance until it was safe for them to intervene.

  Hunt had begrudgingly accepted this as true, though Kat got the impression that simply being in the same room as a cop rankled him. Apparently, the Circle’s law enforcement arm wasn’t fond of the mundane variety.

  Once the crowd was totally quiet, Cortez gestured to Liam and said, “Mr. Crown, you have the room. Please tell us all that you know about the attacks.”

  Liam cleared his throat and recounted his and Kat’s involvement with both attacks—though he conspicuously skipped the part where they broke into the Avery house to steal blood. He wrapped up by passing the torch to Hunt to explain demonic possession in more detail than he could provide himself. Liam had admitted he had limited experience with demons.

  Hunt, on the other hand, was clearly an expert. He spoke of all things demon like he’d been born and raised amid a war between Earth and the Inferno. Once he covered the same information he’d told Liam and Kat during their walk through the woods, he added a new dimension to the lecture.

  “Possessions are always tricky to handle within the mundane legal system”—he glanced at Franc again, and she met his eye, unyielding—“which is yet another reason why I don’t want to fully involve the Salem’s Gate PD quite yet.”

  “Tricky how?” Cortez asked.

  Hunt scratched at his gray stubble. “Most of the time, demonic possessions occur because a person allows them to happen. Only demons of the highest order can forcibly possess a body. This particular demon,
Glasya-Labolas, is not of that order. It was two steps lower on the demonic hierarchy the last time I fought it, and you can’t ascend two whole orders in one decade. It takes hundreds of years to climb a single step, given how many demons compete to gain what scraps of power the princes of the Inferno leave for all the rest.”

  One of the other community leaders, a buff man with a buzz cut and an abundance of tattoos, piped up. “So you’re saying this Luther Cunningham guy isn’t completely innocent in all this? He let the demon have his body so it could slaughter our people.”

  Hunt shook his head. “Not exactly. While there are some people who willingly become demonic hosts, thinking it’ll grant them power or longevity, about seventy-five percent of the time, there’s some degree of trickery or coercion involved.

  “Cunningham could’ve been tortured by the rogue magician until he agreed to submit to the demon. His family could’ve been threatened. He could’ve unwittingly signed some sort of contract that gave the demon permission to use his body under certain circumstances. The possibilities are numerous.”

  “It would be unwise to condemn the man,” Cortez said, “until we know for sure how he ended up as the host.”

  The buff man dipped his head in deference to Cortez. “Okay, so we’ll hold off casting judgment on the ad man. I guess that brings us back to the main point: who the hell wants to kill the city’s shifters, and why?”

  “To answer those questions, we’ll have to pursue various lines of inquiry.” Liam leaned back in his chair and raised his index finger. “One, why was Luther Cunningham, specifically, chosen to be the first host for the demon? Did he get involved, willingly or not, with some supernatural criminal element? Was he a convenient option for some reason or another? Or was he just randomly abducted off the street by the summoner, who was looking for nothing more specific than a warm body?”

  He raised a second finger. “Two, why were those shifters, the Avery family and the Wilson family, picked as the first and second groups of victims? Does the perp have a specific list of intended victims, or are they picking shifter families at random?”