“We’ll come back tomorrow and see if they’ve got a unit for rent,” Mack said. “I’ve got my own hunch that Alpha will hear about it.”
“How’s that?” Liam asked.
Mack pointed to a street sign as he left the neighborhood. “This is Baylor Drive.”
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
Monday, July 1, 2019
THE YOUNG LATINO WORKING as the day shift manager of the storage facility was easy prey for Pilar’s flirtations. He was too distracted to notice three people amble past the reception area into the supposedly secure storage facility. The only real security these storage lockers had were the renters’ own padlocks.
“Here. Ish.”
Liam had stopped in the middle of the alley between two different blocks of lockers.
“Ish?” KC repeated.
“The demon isn’t in the self-storage.” Liam pointed to his feet. “It’s under the self-storage.”
Mack dropped prone on the concrete with his ear to the ground. He closed his eyes and listened intently for a moment. “Modern sewage and drainage system, too small for person to fit inside. It’s... about ten years old. There’s a... It’s not a hollow, but there’s a spot down below the infrastructure layer that’s got a different density than the soil around it.” Mack quick-crawled several feet from his previous position and listened again. He repeated the maneuver four more times before standing up and nodding.
“The bastard burrows.” He pointed back to his third listening position. “I figure he started there. Went down at a diagonal and stopped there.” He pointed to where Liam had originally indicated. “Best I can tell, he’s curled up in a ball like... I don’t know what like, but when he wakes up, he’s either gonna tunnel straight up or, and I feel like this is more likely, he’s gonna diagonal back up to there.” Mack pointed to a spot opposite the entry point.
“How can you be so sure?” Liam asked.
“You’ve got your evil spirit detector; KC’s got her intuitions and premonitions, and I’ve got a werewolf’s predatory instincts combined with a Tuath De’s innate understanding of our natural enemy’s ways of action. This thing isn’t a Fomorian, but it’s a demon from the same hell realm. I can just feel it in my bones.”
“Let’s get out of here, then,” KC suggested. “We can’t kill it now without drawing a lot of unwanted attention.”
“Yeah, we’ll need more explosives than we have with us just to excavate the demon’s body,” Mack sighed in agreement. He looked up and around, making sure that he was seen by security cameras. “I think we’ve given Alpha enough of a clue that we’re here for today. We’ll do a couple more drive-byes and recons over the next couple of days.”
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
Thursday, July 4, 2019
ON TUESDAY, MACK HAD come back alone and rented one of the storage units facing onto the alley under which the demon Hasturaddon slept. He made a point of chatting up the manager about the facility’s holiday hours and whether or not he’d be able to access his locker on the Fourth or not. Mack laid a great deal of importance on holiday access as he would be leaving Albuquerque that night, his business in town concluded. Of course, his words weren’t for the poor boy covering the day shift. They were for whoever was listening on the other end of the security cameras in the lobby and office. Most security cameras weren’t wired for sound, nor were they of especially high quality, but this crappy little Mini Storage had high end cameras with audio pickups that would have made the Secret Service green with envy.
A lot of subtle little clues were now obvious to Mack after long hours of studying both the book and the extensive research journals stored on Ebenezer’s laptop. He saw several indicators that this Mini Storage was, in fact, a Frateco-owned business. Only the general manager was likely a frato, and the main purpose of the business was to launder money, but Mack had already figured out which unit had the meth lab and which units had been used to store other contraband. For his part, Mack had gone to a Walmart and purchased several large plastic storage bins. Then, he’d gone outside of town, out into the desert, and filled all of those bins with sand and rocks except one. He’d made several trips with Liam to the Mini Storage to drop off the bins in his unit on Wednesday. The last bin was the odd bin out, the one that hadn’t been filled with sand and rocks.
That night Mack and Liam returned well after regular business hours. A lone security guard was on watch. The overweight middle-aged man was no match for Mack or Liam and was quickly subdued and bound. Liam stood watch while Mack went into the manager’s office and disabled the surveillance system and turned off all the alarms. KC arrived with Pilar shortly. KC had prepared a spell that would scramble the guard’s memories. Once it was applied, she sent the guard on his way home where he would wind up sleeping for the next 36 hours.
Now that they had their run of the place, Mack cracked open the odd bin out and began distributing its contents to his partners. The four of them began placing the items from the bin all around the alley, high and low. They were done by 11 pm. Then, they took the bins filled with sand and rocks and stacked them up three bins tall across the mouth of the storage unit forming a barrier with a small gap at one end. Pilar’s head barely poked up from behind the barrier, but Mack could easily stand up behind it. By midnight they had done as much as they could do. Now, they had to wait. Hasturaddon could awaken at any time between midnight and sunset, to emerge into the world to once again wreak terror and havoc as it fed on human fear and flesh.
Chapter Seventeen
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Thursday, July 4, 2019
WHEN THE DAY MANAGER showed up KC used the befuddlement spell on him and sent him on his way back home. Throughout the day she sat in the reception area pretending to be a new hire, answering the phone and informing customers that the Mini Storage was closed for the day due to a sewage leak that city workers were dealing with. She was quite lurid when describing the smell to callers. Anybody who showed up in person was treated to a lighter version of the befuddlement spell which allowed her to place the hypnotic suggestion in their minds of the worst sewage smell imaginable in their minds before sending them on their way.
The night manager showed up around seven that evening. He wasn’t befuddled. Instead, he was subdued by a display of guns pointed at him from multiple directions, bound and gagged with duct tape, and placed in his office.
Mack leaned in over the man and growled, “Do you know Alpha, frato?”
The sudden bulging of the man’s eyes and the visible swallowing of a lump in his throat was all the confirmation Mack needed.
“Good, frato. Do you have her number?”
The night manager shook his head, but the smell of fear and the sudden uptick in his heart rate laid the lie bare.
“You can’t lie to me,” Mack told the man, allowing the wolf out just enough to put a rumble in his voice and turn his eyes to molten gold. He smiled elongated canines at the night manager. “Do... you... have her number?”
The night manager tried to mumble through his duct tape gag. Mack ripped the tape free.
“S-si. I mean, yes. I-in the address book in the locked drawer. The key’s...”
Mack ignored the man and ripped the drawer free in a casual display of superhuman strength. He picked up the address book. “How is she listed?”
The night manager swallowed another lump. “Uh, under, um, ‘M’ for ‘Mini Storage Upper Management’. T-this is her place, cabron.”
Mack smiled. “Oh, then, this was meant to be.” He handed the address book to KC who looked up the number.
“Got it,” she reported.
“We’re gonna call Alpha,” Mack informed the night manager. “You’re gonna tell her or whoever takes her messages that the guy from Dover is here. Now. Just that, nothing more. You say anything more than that, and, well...” Mack raised the Sword of Light into view and pulled it from its sheath. The blade began to glow. “I’ll be blunt. I will cut your head off, an
d with this thing, it’ll burn the wound closed. No blood spatter, just your body duct taped to that chair, and your head over there in a corner.”
The night manager nodded. “O-okay, but you gotta know, Alpha’s gonna come for you.”
Mack treated the man to another toothy predatory grin. “You think I don’t want that?”
“She’ll kill you.”
“She’s tried before and failed. This time won’t be any different.” Mack nodded to KC. “Dial it.”
ALPHA ARRIVED AROUND nine. The sun had already set, and the Fourth of July fireworks were starting to go off. The show looked like it was going to be a good one this year. Long and loud. Alpha was counting on the distraction. She wasn’t alone. She’d brought Soldiers and Cutters with her this time. The Soldiers were nameless, faceless minions to Alpha. She’d called up two interligoy for this job. Soldiers were usually formed into fratoy of three, five, or seven, but an interligo, or coven, was thirteen Soldiers. That was the largest Soldiers-only fratoy, usually assigned with a Cutter to provide close security to a boss or elder within the Frateco. Alpha actually had four covens at her disposal, but she had obligations the other two covens and their Cutters were needed for.
Normally, Dayshon Monday would have been Alpha’s choice to lead one of the covens into battle, but he was currently in jail, still awaiting trial for the hit that went down in Georgia a couple of months ago. She missed Monday, but she was glad that he’d survived. A stint in prison wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle, of course. Even twenty years was a “short” stint for somebody as long lived as a svartalf. Instead, the other survivor from the Georgia hit, Priscilla Garcia, was leading one of the covens.
The dryad had taken the assignment as an honor, but the truth was that Alpha barely trusted the other woman to watch her back. Garcia was loyal, and she was a good hook-up from time to time, but Alpha had doubts about her competence. So, Garcia would be taking her coven in ahead of Alpha. Let the dryad and her Soldiers soak up any necessary losses if the commando guy was laying in wait for them.
The other coven was being led by a Cutter that Alpha did trust, a hornless ogre called Daishi. He wasn’t Japanese, despite the name, just an American otaku or enthusiast for all things Japanese. Daishi was what anybody else would describe as a “neckbeard.” He was tall and stout with a pasty, oily complexion, and he had a thick, curly beard that only grew beneath his jawline. His cheeks were completely free of hair follicles as far as anybody could tell. He did have a mustache, but it was barely more than peach fuzz. Daishi’s wardrobe consisted entirely of socks and sandals, cargo shorts, anime tee shirts, a staggering variety of trilby-style fedoras, and a long black trench coat.
Daishi had even gone so far as to study and master Japanese ken-jitsu or swordsmanship. Because he was seven feet tall, Daishi had eschewed the katana in favor of the larger no-dachi. His fascination with Japanese weapons didn’t end there either. The ogre did carry a gun, a .45 ACP caliber SIG P220 that he insisted was actually a custom manufactured Japanese SCK from Minebea, the company that manufactured sidearms and submachine guns for the Japan Self Defense Force. Nobody took the ogre to task for his pro-Japanese delusions, though. The ogre’s chosen street name meant “Great Death” in Japanese, and he’d lived up to it. Alpha certainly trusted the insane ogre, which was why Daishi was in charge of the coven coming in over the Mini Storage’s back fence.
The rest of the Cutters with Alpha tonight were her cousins, members of the extended Baylor family, all Aes Sidhe. At least, that’s what they told people they were, but the truth was the Baylors were all Fomorians, demon-blooded Aes Sidhe. To a one, the Baylors were tougher, faster, stronger, and smarter than any “ordinary” Aes Sidhe. They were all also oddly deformed in some strange way that they explained off as physical geasa. None of their deformities detracted from their physical beauty, though, the way that a natural physical geas might.
Cousin Mel, for example, could have easily made a living as a male runway model as long as he never had to model in his underwear. Below his navel his skin turned bright red with a leathery, pebbled texture that did not photograph well. Otherwise, he was physically perfect. Alpha wasn’t the only one with oddly colored hair, either. Cousins Tish and Luther had black and white striped hair, and poor Cousin Linea was completely bald over her entire body. Cousin Thad had a tail, a curly little pig tail. Like Mel, Tish, Luther, Linea, and Thad were all print model pretty, tall and lithe. The other two Baylor cousins Alpha had called upon, though, were not as attractive as the rest of their kin.
The Terrible Twins, Jake and Drake Baylor, each had an over-sized lazy eye, right and left respectively. Unlike their common ancestor neither twin’s lazy eye was particularly evil nor possessed of destructive magic. On the other hand, Jake and Drake were massive brutes as tall and muscular as common orks, just lacking the distinctive tusks. Each twin possessed one hand that was significantly larger than the other, covered in thick, leathery skin with bony plates like armor, on the opposite side of their bodies from their lazy eyes, left and right respectively. They called their over-sized armored hands “whammers.”
Jake and Drake were known to be shockingly fast. Both had been known to catch bullets in their whammers, taking no damage to that hand in the process. Jake and Drake were unsurprisingly strong, using their whammers like biological sledgehammers to pound opponents into a pasty goo. Alpha felt that the Terrible Twins alone should be more than a match for the commando guy, but she wasn’t taking chances. Only dumb luck had saved her life in Dover that fateful night.
“Chefo Tranchilo.” The voice on the radio was Garcia’s.
“Go,” Alpha said curtly.
“The night manager is duct taped to his chair in the corner of his office.”
Alpha frowned. “What does he have to say for himself?”
“Nothing, Chefo. He’s in some kind of coma. I even kicked him in the balls, and he won’t stop snoring.”
“Sounds like a spell,” Alpha muttered to herself. She keyed the radio. “Garcia, leave him or put him down, your choice. Have you located the target on the security system?”
“The security system’s been disabled. My guy says the drives have been taken, and the router smashed beyond repair.”
Garcia was interrupted by the office phone’s intercom tone.
“Hi. Is this thing on?”
“Chefo?”
“Answer it and keep your line open so I can hear!”
“I hear you,” Garcia replied over the intercom.
Alpha motioned for her cousins to follow her.
“And who might you be, dear?”
“Garcia.”
“Can Alpha hear me, Garcia?”
“Yes.”
“Is she in the room with you?”
Garcia glanced up as Alpha strode into the office. “No, of course not.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire. Meh. Doesn’t matter. I know she’s there. You can keep talking for her if she wants. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same to me. For clarity, I’m the man in Dover who killed her team and blew up her van. Well, me and the missus, that is.”
“Who are you?” Alpha hissed, suddenly enraged.
“Paranormal security contractor. Mostly, I hunt monsters. Critters, undead, even the occasional paranormal bail jumper. Got a decent pay day off the fratoy you wasted going after the Tuath De’s lawyer, by the way. Thanks for that. I wonder how many outstanding bounties I’m gonna collect tonight?”
“None ‘cause you’re gonna die,” Alpha snarled.
The man on the other end of the intercom laughed. “Hate to break it to you, Althea, but technically speaking, I’m not here for you. You’re just a nice little side benefit. I’m in unit number 27. You might wanna hurry if you don’t want your neckbeard ogre to get me first.”
Alpha snatched the entire phone off the desk as if strangling the device would strangle the man on the other end of the line. “WHO. ARE. YOU?”
“My name is MacDuff. Your bro
ther killed my parents. My mother’s brother killed your brother. You killed my uncle. Now, I’m gonna kill you. I’m the last Llewellyn.”
Alpha hurled the phone across the room.
XHW’T AWAKENED. XHW’T had slumbered for twenty solar rotations, dreaming of mortals Xhw’t had eaten. Ah, the day was come, the day that those above celebrated their separation from the motherland across the ocean. Xhw’t neither knew nor cared what either tribe wished to call itself. Xhw’t knew only hunger. The stomachs of Xhw’t rumbled with emptiness. The maw of Xhw’t desired the fear-seasoned taste of mortal flesh. The mind and emotions of Xhw’t craved the feelings of mortal fear and despair that came with the hunting and the killing. Mostly, though, at this particular moment, the bowels of Xhw’t desired to release the contents being held within them for the last twenty years.
Ah! What was this? Mortals above the resting place of Xhw’t? Oh, so many mortals! Xhw’t stretched out with the senses of Xhw’t seeking an accurate count of the prey to be. Forty individuals! Human! Oh, human was the favorite prey of Xhw’t. No. Not just human, though! Had Xhw’t needed to breath, Xhw’t would have gasped with delight. Many, almost all, of these humans had the touch of the Fae in them! One or two might have been of diluted Celestial stock, and, oh, a large handful carried within them a touch of Infernal stock! Xwh’t liked the taste of Infernal more than even the taste of Fae or iron-blooded human. The taste of Celestial was not good, but Xhw’t could digest it, but Xhw’t most preferred that which most tasted like Xhw’t. Xhw’t was something of a cannibal, after all.
The evening of celebration was now begun! Unwary mortals launched chemical explosives into the night sky, a colorful display to celebrate the separation and a goodly distraction for Xhw’t. Xhw’t would emerge from the slumbering burrow. Xhw’t would slay and eat of the humans above, even the nasty tasting Celestial ones. Then, Xhw’t would take on a new form, a human shape, and Xhw’t would seek another place where to hunt and to gorge and to prepare for the next time of slumber.
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