Devil's Thumb

by S. M. Schmitz

  Anna stopped stirring her coffee and glanced up at him. “She’s your angel now, too, Dylan. She’ll be the one who visits you when you need help.”

  Both of the O’Conners waited for some kind of recognition of what his servitude meant for his future – his very long future, but he just shrugged and set his coffee mug down on the counter. “True. Do I have to call her the angel though or can I make up my own name for her?”

  Colin was tempted to smell Dylan’s coffee to see what he’d put in it. Why the hell would The Angel’s name be the most pressing concern he had right now? Anna grinned and Dylan caught her. “Cut that out. It’s bad manners to talk about your friends when they can’t hear you.”

  Colin snickered but agreed with him. “I was just wondering what you spiked your coffee with.”

  Dylan’s forehead wrinkled with his confusion. “Two sweeteners. They’re on the counter if you don’t believe me. I was going to get some more of that Demon Ale yesterday, but well, shit happened and I never got around to it.”

  “How can you not be freaking out?” Anna asked. She had expected to spend the morning consoling and comforting their friend, not listening to him make jokes about a tragedy that was still too painful for Colin or Anna to talk about.

  But Dylan just shrugged again. “Anna, I was basically dead. You saved my life. I’m grateful. I’m sorry as hell we lost Max, but we all knew the dangers involved in this job, even long before you two showed up and all this weird stuff with the archdemons followed. I think after losing Jas and Jeremy, Max and I had just accepted how easily it could happen to us, too.” Dylan looked more carefully at Colin then added, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be irreverent. I know you feel guilty about yesterday. I shouldn’t have said that. I really was planning on getting The Beast, but dude, I looked this brewing company up online and I gotta show you this.”

  Dylan got off the stool near his counter and grabbed his cell phone. He pulled up a web page and handed the phone to Colin. “Look at the label on this one. That White Rascal. It almost kinda looks like that human-turned-demon you guys hunted down in Nanjing, doesn’t it?”

  Anna put her coffee down to look at the image on the screen. “Whoa,” she muttered, “it didn’t have those red things on its head, but yeah. Awfully close if this white rascal runs around on all fours.”

  “Huh,” Dylan took his phone back and gave the screen one last speculative glance before eyeing Colin and Anna again. “You don’t think whoever started this brewing company had any real knowledge of demons, do you?”

  “How old is this company?” Colin asked.

  “Not old. Founded in 1993.”

  “So the founder is most likely still alive,” Colin ventured.

  Dylan nodded. “Yeah, but I doubt he gives the tours himself.”

  “Does it matter? So what if he can see demons? He wasn’t one of Lacey’s hunters.” Her name caught in Anna’s throat and she took a sip of her coffee to try to push down the heartache that had resurfaced.

  “Just weird. Maybe you’re right though and it doesn’t mean anything. Besides, there’s plenty of descriptions on the internet that are pretty damn accurate.” Dylan sat back down and Anna kept her eyes fixed on her coffee. She’d put a bit of creamer in hers and the color reminded her of the smooth brown of Jas’s skin, that beautiful rich caramel, and she didn’t know if ghosts could stick around the living when they were awake, but she had promised her.

  “I dreamed about Jas last night,” Anna said softly, keeping her eyes on her coffee, but she could see the way Dylan’s body tensed at Jas’s name.

  He was quiet for a few moments before that tension melted away and he told her, “Lucky you.”

  “No, it wasn’t just a dream. She was there. Just like the archdemons can get in our heads, especially when we’re asleep, she found me in a dream. It’s the second time she’s done that. She said she’s been trying to figure out how to help us when these demons start invading our minds, because when she’s there, this demon can’t be. But it’s stronger than her, and it eventually pulled her out of my dream and she forced me awake.”

  “Holy shit,” Dylan mumbled. “Just like Jas though to figure out a way to keep fighting even after death.”

  “Not just her,” Colin said, “Max visited my dream.”

  Anna was still vacillating between gazing at her coffee and trying to meet Dylan’s eyes, and Dylan was far too observant not to notice. “She told you something you don’t want to tell me. Just say it, Anna. I can handle it. What? Are these demons about to target my mind now?”

  Anna shook her head. “She didn’t say. If she knew, she would have warned me. But she did want me to give you a message.”

  Anna finally met his eyes and they registered his surprise, but he waited silently for Anna to just deliver this message from a dead woman. Anna groaned and buried her head in her hands. “Ok, now you’re freaking me out,” Dylan warned her.

  “You’ve just been through so much lately.”

  “We all have. But you’re still freaking me out.”

  Anna lifted her head and sighed. “She told me to tell you she never knew how you felt about her and she wished she had. And that you were one of the best men she’d ever known.”

  Anna dropped her eyes again and focused on her coffee. The room had gotten so quiet they could hear Dylan swallowing, his shallow breaths as he realized what Anna was telling him. He exhaled slowly and propped his chin in his hand, studying his own coffee now. “I guess asking her to wait five hundred years for me is a little unfair, right?”

  Colin smiled. “I have a feeling time has a different way of passing for them. There is no end. It must.”

  “Five hundred years is still a really long time,” he countered.

  “Dylan,” Anna said, “it’s nothing when you compare it to eternity. You have half a millennium left on this planet. Just be as happy as you can. What makes Jas happy right now is trying to figure out how to protect us. She loved being a hunter and she’s figured out a way to still fight them even on the other side. She thought it was the most important thing she’d ever do in this life, and I’m willing to bet, even after this is over, she’ll try to figure out a way to keep helping us.”

  Dylan lifted his head and smiled at his cup of coffee. “Yeah, that sounds like Jas.”

  “If you had each known, it most likely wouldn’t have changed anything. Nothing would have stopped her from going to White Oaks that night. You would have a different set of memories, and I’m not sure it would make your long life now easier if things had been different.”

  Dylan finally looked up from his coffee at Anna, at Jas’s friend, this woman she was still trying so hard to save. “Why would she have thought that about me anyway? That woman could have had any man she wanted.”

  “Told you,” Colin thought. He remembered thinking the same thing about Anna and wondering what this angel in London ever saw in the poor Irish son of a sharecropper.

  Anna tilted her head at Dylan and studied him again. What was it with these men being so convinced the women they loved were too good for them because of their pasts? “She was right, Dylan. She is right, I mean. Only Jas’s body is dead, but she is still our friend, and she is still a hunter, and she does love you. But,” Anna stopped him before he could protest, “if you spend the next five hundred years moping and pining for a woman you won’t see again until you die, she’ll probably be royally pissed off at you. And that’s not the way you want to start off eternity with the woman you love.”

  Colin snorted. “Actually, that’s probably a fitting way to start off eternity with any woman.”

  Anna slapped his arm. Colin backed away from her and Dylan laughed. She warned Colin if he kept it up, they may be testing that theory, but Anna was only joking. Until their assignment in Baton Rouge when they’d been separated and Colin had acted so unlike himself, she’d never even really been mad at him. Dylan’s eyes were still smiling when he leaned toward Colin and asked him, “P
robably a stupid question to ask the O’Conners this, but you believe in soul mates then?”

  Colin had still been rubbing his arm even though Anna had only been playing; he was just teasing her, too, but he let his hand fall. “Of course we do. Not that people are made for each other, but some are certainly happiest when they’re with the right person. But we also think most people never get lucky enough to find someone whose spirit is so much like their own they’d count as a soul mate. Maybe they meet after death. Honestly, before Jas and Max showed up, we’d never met a ghost before.”

  “Huh,” Dylan’s fingers drummed against his counter. Ghosts were an entirely new element to their supernatural battle and even though these were their friends, it was still a little creepy. “You think they can haunt people? Like moving things and rattling chains and shit?”

  Anna rolled her eyes and finished her coffee. “If so, I’m telling Jas to come haunt you just for asking such a stupid question.”

  Dylan’s smile broadened. “So that’s a no then.”

  A knock on Dylan’s door made them all jump even though Anna had just insisted ghosts didn’t really haunt people. It most likely wasn’t a ghost at the door, but the coincidence made them all look sheepishly at each other for reacting that way to a knock. The person knocked again and this time, Colin recognized the sound. “That’s Luca. Not a ghost. Just the oldest person you’ll ever meet. That’s almost the same.”

  Dylan let Luca in and Andrew followed him. Dylan immediately offered them both coffee as well. Anna’s hand instinctively reached up to touch the St. Casimir medallion she was still wearing around her neck as she watched Andrew approach the kitchen. He caught what she was doing and offered a sympathetic smile. “You’ll see, Anna. He’ll help you.”

  Anna’s fingers wrapped around the pendant as she listened to Colin repeat the same dreams they’d experienced with Jas and Max. Luca and Andrew listened attentively, Luca’s eyes darting between the O’Conners and he bit his lip nervously as Colin talked. That made Anna clutch the medallion of St. Casimir more firmly. Anything that made Luca nervous made her really nervous.

  As soon as Colin finished, Dylan turned to Luca and asked him, “So do you have any experience with ghosts?”

  “I once had an ex-girlfriend track me down at least forty years after breaking up with her. Woman must have been almost dead by then. Does that count?”

  Andrew snickered as he poured his coffee. “Why the hell did she hunt you down? What did you do to her?”

  Luca brushed him off. “I always told her I couldn’t marry her. She just didn’t listen. Come to think of it, she may not have been completely sane.”

  Anna was about to ask him why he was in a relationship with her in the first place then, but Colin stopped her before she could speak. “Don’t ask him that. Because he’ll actually tell us.”

  Dylan was drumming his fingers on the counter again. “So no ghosts. What about you Andrew?”

  Andrew shook his head and poured a generous amount of creamer in his coffee. It turned a milky burlap color and he stirred it absentmindedly. “No ghosts. Who knows? Maybe Heaven’s figuring out a way to circumvent some of these rules, too.”

  “What do you mean? How are ghosts appearing in people’s dreams getting around demonic rules?” Dylan asked.

  Luca reached across the counter for what was left of the coffee. “Because usually once a soul has crossed over, that’s it. They’re in another place, not here. But if Jas and Max are showing up in dreams, they’re sort of here but not really. It’s getting around the principle that souls move on to a world that’s not our own.”

  Anna stared at Luca, trying to wrap her head around this possibility that even Heaven was trying to bend the rules now. “The Angel didn’t say anything …” she stuttered.

  Luca didn’t even look up from his coffee. He was counting out packets of sweetener. He fished out three and tore them all open at the same time to dump into his mug. “Your angel works for Heaven, just like mine does. Can’t expect them to know everything.”

  Anna put her slender fists on her hips and glared at him until he finally looked up at her. “What?” he asked.

  “They’re angels, Luca. They bring people back from the brink of death and give them superhuman powers. Of course I can expect them to know things we don’t know,” Anna retorted.

  Luca smirked and asked for the creamer, and Anna thought about kicking him again. She loved him as much as if he were her real brother, but he also tried her patience just like a real brother. “Every power angels have comes from the same source, Anna. They’re conduits. They may be closer to the source but that doesn’t make them inherently more knowledgeable.”

  Colin realized he was the only one who didn’t get a cup of coffee and the pot was empty now. He watched Luca put the empty carafe back on the hot plate. Anna shook her head at her husband who was as helpless as a child sometimes. “Dylan, where do you keep your coffee grounds?”

  Dylan motioned to a cabinet and Colin half-heartedly protested, but mostly, he was thankful he was getting coffee. “Hey, I’ve always been a progressive husband. I learned to cook in the 1640s so you wouldn’t have to when you weren’t feeling well. And I’m a pretty good cook.”

  Anna smiled at the memories. Sometimes, she missed their old life. She didn’t miss being sick so often or how worried Colin always was about her. But they had been happy. They’d had so much peace and love and comfort in their home together. Every Sunday when they went to church, she prayed for the same thing: to live to middle age with her husband and not leave him a widower too young. She never told Colin that’s what she prayed for every night before going to sleep, every morning when she woke up, every Sunday as she sat with Colin in one of the pews near the back of the church in case they needed to leave if she started to feel unwell.

  Every anniversary that passed, she considered it an answered prayer. By the time she was 25, she allowed herself to believe that maybe she would be allowed to have the life she and Colin wanted. They only wanted to be together, and they asked for nothing else. By her 26th birthday, she felt she had defied the odds again. She had grown too confident, too sure now that she and Colin would be gifted this life together. That winter, though, tuberculosis ravaged the city and she knew as soon as the doctor diagnosed her with consumption that she would not survive this. Her prayers had not been answered after all.

  Colin had stepped into the kitchen with her and put his arms around her, kissing the back of her head as she watched the coffee dripping into the clear carafe. The other hunters were used to these private moments the O’Conners often shared and had started their own conversation, but neither Colin nor Anna was listening. They were both back in London in 1647.

  “There were so many orphans back then. If I had been only a little bit healthier, we could have adopted one and had absolutely everything we’d ever wanted, Colin.”

  Colin kissed her again and she leaned against him, wishing her mind would disentangle itself from the past. It was a life lost to them now, and it was one they could never get back. “When I think of that life, I think we both died that night. You died from the disease and I died along with you. This is our afterlife. Our purgatory. But at least we’re in it together.”

  Anna turned her head to look up at her husband. “What did we do to deserve purgatory?”

  “Sometimes, none of this seems real, and I wonder if I imagined everything that night. Maybe it’s not what we did, but what I did. When you died, I was thinking of killing myself. And maybe that condemned us both.”

  “Oh, Colin. Then we’d both be imagining the other immortals, our friends. Their angels. Besides, we already know there’s no such thing as purgatory. People make a choice, and they only have two choices.”

  The coffee finished brewing but neither of them moved to grab a mug for Colin. “I know it doesn’t technically exist. But isn’t this a kind of purgatory? We’re not dead but we’re not really alive. Not like other humans. Our sole ex
istence is to help Heaven in its battle against evil, and we have no way out. Not until the end of our servitude. Kind of sounds like purgatory.”

  Anna pulled away from Colin and interrupted Luca who was, once again, in a heated debate about the college football season, which had just started. Dylan still liked LSU’s chances of getting into the playoffs and Luca insisted he must have added something stronger to his coffee than aspartame. “Luca,” Anna asked, “have you ever thought about what we do as a kind of purgatory? Especially those of us who have the half a millennium tacked on to our servitude?”

  Luca paused mid-argument and mid-drink, his coffee cup still in the air between the counter and his lips. “Purgatory?” he asked incredulously.

  Anna nodded.

  “My sweet girl, I know you’re not Catholic, but you know what that is, don’t you?”

  Anna nodded again. Dylan set his cup down. “Actually, I’m not Catholic and I don’t know.”

  Luca sighed and put his coffee down and Andrew mimicked him. “Purgatory is believed to be a place of suffering where souls go to repent their sins. But none of us are suffering, and none of us have been asked to repent for any sins. Why would you think this is a kind of purgatory?”

  Colin shrugged and grabbed an empty coffee mug. “Because it’s not Heaven or Hell either, but we’re not really human anymore. I don’t know what we are, but humans get to live normal lives, have kids and grow old and die. We just stay the same forever.”

  “Not forever,” Andrew reminded him. “When my five hundred years are up, I think I’m done. Luca’s one of only two people on this planet who’ve signed on indefinitely. They’re out of their minds.”

  Luca waved a hand at him dismissively. “We’re just dedicated.”

  Andrew was just as dismissive and insisted he was crazy. After all, he apparently didn’t think twice about entering relationships with women who were most likely insane and would later hunt him down for not offering her marriage. “Yeah, but you didn’t see this woman. The younger one who was only 27 when I met her, not the older one who blamed me for her life as a spinster. She was Aphrodite herself.”