by Deck Davis
Wren stopped. “Who is that?”
“The nurse. It’s her,” I said.
“No. The man.”
“You can see him?”
“Of course he can,” cackled the girl.
“It’s someone I knew,” I said. “A man I…”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Wren.
I nodded.
“Rats, sheep, figments…” said Wren. His eyes lit in recognition. So did Molly’s.
“Do you know its name?” I said.
Wren nodded.
“Then say it!”
“Only you can say it and have an effect.”
“Then tell me!”
The girl laughed now. It was a deep, throaty laugh, dripping with wickedness, the kind of sound a girl couldn’t possibly have made. She tipped her head back and the horrible sound grew louder and louder, and I wanted to plug my ears.
“Tell me the name,” I said.
Molly strode across the alleyway and joined me. She faced the girl.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Why are you talking to it?”
The girl grinned. “I told you. I have an agreement.”
“An agreement for what?”
Wren joined us now. He sighed. “I can’t give you its name, Joshua.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because it’s right,” said Molly. “We can’t banish this bastard.”
She put her hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off. Were they betraying me? Was all of this a lie? The hunters, true names, the bunker, the Grandmaster…everything. Was it all a trick to bring me here?
I shoved Molly away. I must have put more strength into it than I realized, because she hit the ground. Wren ran at me, and I slugged him in the face. He yelled out, and then he clutched his cheek, where his rat bite dripped with fresh blood.
I grabbed the girl by the throat. She let out a rasp, and her hot breath teased into my nostrils and made me gag. I tightened my grip around her neck.
Molly got to her feet. “We have to make deals sometimes,” she said. “We…the hunters…we can’t know everything. Our spotters can’t be everywhere. Sometimes, we have to let a little of the bad through to get to the things that are worse.”
“What are you saying? That you let this thing loose so you can get information from it?”
“Yesh,” rasped the girl, her breaths shallow.
“You’re killing her,” said Wren.
Remembering that beneath it all, this girl was just a vessel, I loosened my grip just a little.
Molly held her hands out, palms facing me, as if urging caution, as if I was the madman here and not them.
“Just trust me, Josh,” she said. “Trust me for just a second. Let me speak to her.”
What was I supposed to do? Wren wouldn’t give me the demon’s name, and if I used my demon fist, I’d kill the girl.
It was then that I noticed the rats. Hundreds of them all around us, watching from the shadows of the edges of the alleyway. They were silent and still.
I shoved the girl away from me and toward Molly. She tripped over the man on the ground - dead now – and landed on her knees.
Molly grabbed the girl’s hair. “What are you doing here?” she said. “You know the agreement. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Came to find you,” rasped the girl, her throat hurt from my grip.
“Why?”
“The agreement. Why else?”
Wren edged away a little, putting some distance between him and the girl, as if he was scared of her. “You needed to tell us something?”
The girl nodded. “One of the Mighty has made entry.”
I remembered the word from Wren’s lectures. The Mighty were the big boys of the underworld; the dukes and the generals and the commanders of legions. The ones who the Grandmaster’s wards were supposed to keep out, unless they sent just a shard of themselves.
“A shard?” said Wren.
“Bigger than that.”
“Impossible.”
The girl laughed. “Nothing is impossible.”
“Who is it?” asked Wren.
“You know I could never speak their name, even if I knew it.”
Now that, that was something I knew. Wren had told me that a demon could never reveal a fellow demon’s name. It was an oath bound deep into their skin, and to reveal it would destroy the demon who ratted on the other. Not just banish them back to the underworld, but destroy them completely.
“I can tell you their point of entry, if you honor the agreement.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s she talking about?”
“If we let her leave, she’ll tell us exactly where the demon come into the world,” said Wren.
Point of entry. Wren had mentioned that, but what had he said? Damn it. Why was I so stupid? Why couldn’t I retain even the slightest bit of information? All those fights, the punches, the concussions. I’d let them ruin my brain.
“Where did it enter?” said Wren.
“Where the clock never ticks.”
“Don’t start with the riddles, damn it. Give me a place,” said Molly.
The girl smiled wide. Impossibly wide, as though she’d unhinged her jaw to do it. It sent a shudder through me. “Stopwatch House,” she said.
Molly and Wren exchanged a look, and then Molly nodded. “Get out of here,” she said to the girl.
I felt my own eyes widen. “That’s it? It just gets to leave?”
“It’s the agreement.”
“You have to think about the bigger picture sometimes,” said Wren.
The girl stood up. She turned, ready to flee. Her rats made a move to follow, just waiting for her to walk the first step.
I felt like everything was a lie. The hunters, for all their faults, for all Wren’s contempt of me - I’d assumed they were good. That if the forces of good and bad were sides, they were standing on the right one. Now, I felt like they’d had crossed the gap a little. That they were edging toward the middle.
This demon was going to walk away in its vessel. It would live in the innocent nurse’s flesh until her body corrupted entirely, and then what? She’d die? And what about all the things the creature would do while it was in her body? Who else would it kill? What wicked plans did it have to enjoy the time on Earth its agreement with the hunters gave it?
If I let it leave, I was complicit in everything. If someone died at its hands, the blood would wash over my palms. The specter of the Babe was gone now, but I felt like he was still in my head, still blaming me. God, killing a man by accident had torn me apart enough. What would happen if this demon killed someone else?
“We better go,” said Molly. “I’ll see what I can find about Stopwatch House.”
The nurse started to walk away now.
I remembered the names.
Plagus. Trickerie. Jonas.
I knew it couldn’t be Plagus. That demon had spread the Black Death, it had taken countless lives. It seemed too grand an entity for it to be whatever inhabited the nurse.
That left Trickerie and Jonas. Had Wren ever mentioned them when he tried to teach me the names of demons, back in his endless bunker lectures?
Jones was…he was…come on. The information was there. I could feel it.
Yeah! Jonas was a forest demon, and even when he took a vessel, he often shied away from towns and cities. He preferred to work deep in forests, where he’d capture hikers and walkers and tie them up and torture them for days.
That gave me the answer.
“Trickerie,” I said.
My words echoed in the alleyway. The girl stopped walking. Smoke began to rise from her, and her clothes melted from her back, revealing her skin, showing a patchwork of scratches.
“Joshua!” cried Molly.
“Oh hell. What have you done?” said Wren.
An entity stepped out of the girl, almost as if it was pushed out,
and the two forms separated. The girl fell to the ground, leaving the entity standing beside her. It was small and hunched, and it had long, stringy hair that ran to its ankles.
It spun its head around, its neck tendons crunching as it turned its head 180 degrees without moving its body.
“The agreement,” it croaked through dry, cracked lips. Its eyes were slits, devious little shards of black.
“Fuck the agreement,” I said.
I ran at it now, energy trembling in my demon fist, and I tensed my arm and I held my breath. Trickerie raised his hands, covering his face with long, nail-capped fingers.
My fist crunched through its skull, a flare of white light mixing with a bilious black blood, the liquid spraying out, shards of bones chipping away and hitting me in the face.
Trickerie collapsed in a heap, and his form sizzled on the ground. A stench wafted up, a fog of black, foul-smelling smoke.
A voice spoke in my ear.
Demon Banished.
Chapter Nine
The rats were gone now. The Babe was gone. It was just the five of us; three hunters, an unconscious nurse, and the man’s corpse on the ground.
“Spread a ward,” said Molly. “Make it push people back. We can’t have anyone walking into the alley while I get rid of the body.”
“Get rid of it?” I said. “How?”
“I’m a Cleanser. I have ways.”
“What about the nurse?”
“I’ll cleanse her mind when she wakes up. She’ll think she was mugged, and she’ll go to the police, but she won’t remember much about it.”
Wren, a thunderous look on his face, jabbed a finger into my chest. “What the hell have you done?” he said.
Anger flared in my chest, centered around where he’d poked me. “You don’t want to do that, book mite.”
He must have read the look on my face. The barely-contained fury boiling in me. He backed away a little, but his expression didn’t soften.
“You idiot. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I couldn’t let that thing live.”
“The Grandmaster is going to hear about this. Think he’ll pay you for it? Not a chance. I told you about him, Molly. He’s dangerous. We should never have let him…”
“I’m dangerous? You were going to let that thing leave. Don’t you have a conscience?”
Wren eyed me with contempt. “Sometimes you have to think bigger than that.”
“Spoken like a man who never had to live with real guilt.”
“You can’t even begin to understand the complexities. The factors involved, the alliances…”
“Listen to yourself,” I said, aware my voice was booming from the alley, but unable to control it. “Listen to what you’re saying. These are demons. Killers. There’s no complexity. They need to die, and that’s it.”
Molly, crouching beside the dead man and sprinkling some kind of ash over him, looked up at me. “Think of it like the police. Sometimes, they let a drug dealer off the hook so they can catch his supplier.”
“But people die in the meantime, Molly. What makes you think you can gamble their lives?”
“I think about that all the time. The fact is, we have to do this to make sure nothing stronger gets through. Like Plagus. What happens if he finds his way past the Grandmaster’s wards? He took out half of Europe last time.”
“Sixty percent is more likely,” said Wren.
“Shut up,” said Molly. “Think about Plagus. What if he came back? And what if a demon like Trickerie could tell us where he was, or help us stop him? Would it be worth letting him go free to save millions of lives? We need to think smart. Be like the police. Think bigger, not smaller.”
“The difference being that the police wouldn’t let a killer walk the streets.”
“No?” said Wren. “You’re walking the streets, aren’t you?”
The anger exploded in my gut so fast and so hard that I couldn’t even think. My face burned as blood rushed to my cheeks. I grabbed Wren and squeezed his throat. “You little bastard.”
Molly pulled at my arm. I squeezed his neck tighter, and I heard him gasp for breath. I wanted to choke every last bit of air from him.
Then an image flashed in front of my eyes. The Babe.
I let Wren go and shoved him away. He stumbled back, tried to catch his balance, but he fell.
“I need air,” I said.
I started to walk away from them, when I heard Molly’s voice. “Don’t go far. We don’t have much time.”
I left the wider alleyway and went back through the twists and turns that had led me there. The alleyways weren’t a maze anymore, and it didn’t take me long. I realized that I had been right, back when I was chasing the nurse. She – or he, I reminded myself – had done something to the alley. An illusion, a trick, I didn’t know, but he’d made it seem like a nest of never-ending turns.
The cigarette-smoking chef was still standing by the doorway, with cigarette butts littering his feet. He gave me one glance, then flicked his stub and went back inside the restaurant, slamming the door behind him. Hope he washes his hands, I thought to myself.
I slumped against the wall behind me. Tiredness washed through me now, and I wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for a week. Maybe after that, I’d get up and I’d call Glora and arrange a visit with Ruby, even if it wasn’t one of the days our custody agreement set out. We’d go to the park, where it was sunny and the only sounds were the creaks of the rusted see-saw and the laughter of the other kids. I’d buy her a hotdog and a doughnut, and I’d get one for myself too, because screw staying in shape – what was the point? You only got so many years on Earth, and maybe it was better to indulge yourself and enjoy them in the company of the people you loved.
But I couldn’t do that, could I? Molly had promised me a lucrative job, but I needed to banish demons to see the benefits of it. Without those benefits, Glora and Ruby were in trouble, and I wasn’t going to be the kind of guy who couldn’t take care of his little girl.
Even so, how could I trust Molly and Wren? Trickerie told me one of the hunters worked for the demons. That they’d helped bring an entity to Earth. Did that mean Wren? Molly? It could have meant another chapter of hunters, I supposed. There were two more in England, and half a dozen spread through Europe. It didn’t necessarily mean the ones in my chapter.
Damn it. It was impossible to know. If it was Wren or Molly, how would I tell? The fact was, I couldn’t trust either of them, but I couldn’t just leave, either. There was Ruby to think about. Molly told me they’d researched me before asking me to join them. Did that mean they knew about Ruby and Glora?
My chest tightened at the thought. My breaths came harder. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and I called Glora.
It rang three times, then went to answer phone. I hung up. Instead of leaving a message, I sent her a text.
I was thinking. I’ve got something on this weekend. It could pay well. Tell Ruby I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to see her. Maybe you could take her to your mum’s in Newcastle?
With that done, I felt like I had set myself down a path. There was a demon to find and banish; one that, if we could believe Trickerie, was more dangerous than the others. Now that I’d seen the evils even a minor demon could do, I couldn’t in all conscience head for the hills and forget about it all. No, that wasn’t an option. Closing my eyes confirmed as much, because when I did, I saw the Babe’s guilty stare looking back at me.
I needed to help banish this bastard. Or bitch, as the case could be. While I did that, I needed to see if there was any truth to what Trickerie had said. Demons could lie; Wren had warned me of that time and time again.
But maybe he was lying, too. The way he looked at me with such contempt, his constant complaints about me being there. Was it Wren? Had he betrayed Molly and the Grandmaster and all the other hunter chapters?
I was going to find out.
When I rejoined Molly and Wren, the dead man was gone, with jus
t a faint bloodstain on the alleyway stone as the only sign he’d ever been there. The nurse was gone now, and I assumed Molly had cleansed her already, removing any trace of the last few days. I hoped to God the poor woman wouldn’t remember anything about what she’d been through, or what Trickier had done while using her as a vessel.
Molly eyed me warily. “Got yourself together?” she said.
I nodded. “I need to ask you something.”
It was a question I’d held off from asking until now, because I knew how sensitive it was. Yet, I felt like the answer might help me somehow. It might let me decide if Wren’s contempt of me was just his dislike of a stranger taking the place of his friend, or if there was something else behind it.
“We better get moving,” said Wren.
“Wait a second.”
“What is it?”
“How did Capgrove die?” I asked.
“Now’s not the time,” said Molly.
“There’s never going to be a good time. I need to know.”
“It’s none of your business,” said Wren.
“I’m your new Banisher. I have every right to know how the last one died. You want to go to Stopwatch House and see what’s happening, I get that. But I need to know.”
“Points of entry are vital,” said Wren. “It’s the surest sign a demon can leave behind. If we don’t get there soon enough, they’ll fade, and we won’t know who he is or what vessel he’s taken until bad things happen. With your almighty conscience, I’m sure you don’t want that to happen.”
“He deserves to know,” said Molly.
“But you just said-”
“I know what I said, Wren. But we need him fully on side, especially if something big is out there.”
Then, she faced me. “There’s not a lot to tell you. We’d just gotten back to the bunker. We’d tracked a demon to Edgeside, and Capgrove banished it. When we got back, Wren’s wrist was sprained, I had concussion, and Capgrove was exhausted. But then we got told we had to go out again. There’d been another entry.
This never happens, Josh. In my six years with the hunters, I’ve never heard of demons taking vessels so soon after one another. They normally wait; when they hear about a banishment, they let the dust settle.”