by Bryan Smith
Mitch’s smile faded. “Coward.”
He felt cheated.
He snapped the handcuffs off George’s wrists, picked up his shirt, and departed without another word.
Mitch felt a sense of exhilaration as he drove through the city streets. He repeatedly reviewed the images from the warehouse office, savoring especially the way smug Logan Caine had lost his cool.
He felt all-powerful.
Like a god.
Was that what he was now? It didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Hell, nothing seemed out of the realm of possibility anymore. The moon woman’s strange magic had allowed him to continue existing on the physical plane even though he was dead. It had invested him with unnatural strength.
There’s no limit to what I can do now, he thought.
I can go after Mr. Ligotti next. Hell, I can take over his organization. I can run this city’s underworld myself and make more money than I ever dreamed of making.
The prospect was intoxicating.
No longer would he have to listen to the self-righteous diatribes of people who didn’t want him to succeed. He realized his first order of business would be a visit to Karen. He’d set her right real good, make her see how fundamentally things had changed, and his family would be together again.
Mitch felt invincible.
Then he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Diana sitting in the back.
He gasped. “Diana! What…what are you doing here?”
She smiled. “You have closed the circle. It is time for you to leave this world.”
A sense of panic engulfed Mitch. His heart would have been thumping hard had he still been alive. “No. No. Fuck no.” He looked at her again, shuddered at the power in those luminous eyes. “I don’t wanna go. You don’t understand. All my life I’ve wanted success and respect. Now I can have those things. Please don’t make me give that chance up. It’s not fucking fair.”
Diana just kept smiling at him.
Mitch pulled the stolen car to the curb. There was no conscious decision to do this. Despairing, he realized he was through making decisions for himself. He got out of the car and stood in the middle of the street.
Diana appeared next to him.
She took his hand.
Mitch cringed as a tow-truck bore down on them.
The rumbling vehicle passed through them. Mitch realized his body lacked the solidity of just a few moments before. He was only incorporeal essence now. The magic granting his spirit physical form and substance had deserted him.
Diana smiled. “We’re going home now, Moon Child.”
He rose into the sky with Diana.
They rose high above the earth and the moon loomed large.
Home.
Where he would worship Diana and be a servant of the night forever.
Mitch experienced one more moment of longing, a desperate need to hold on to his earthly ambitions and appetites.
Then he surrendered and embraced the eternal night.
1.
The Blood of Innocents
Jack Grimm stood at the edge of the sea and smoked a single Lucky Strike down to the filter. Cool water rolled up the beach and over his bare feet. The water receded. The tranquil rhythm of the tide might have been soothing under saner circumstances, but in Jack’s line of work sane circumstances were rare.
Somewhere behind him lay the decomposing body of a five-hundred-year-old vampire. The sun was coming up fast, but the old vamp hadn’t been vanquished by the dawning of the new day. Nope. Victor Heinritz, the self-styled “Lord of the Dark” (a name that made Jack roll his eyes every time he thought of it), had instead met his fate at the hands of the American South’s premier private investigator specializing in crimes involving elements of the supernatural or otherworldly. Specifically, via a stake plunged straight through the middle of his stinking black heart by Jack Grimm.
Jack blew out a stream of smoke and glimpsed the still-wet blood of Count Jerkwad staining his fingers. He flipped the smoked-down filter into the ocean and knelt to wash the gore from his flesh. The blood stained the clear water, a cloud of drifting taint that rolled away from him a melancholy moment later. Jack sat there on his haunches a few moments longer, the cuffs of his grey trousers rolled up to his kness, thinking of all the other blood on his hands, stains no longer visible but that had left indelible marks on his soul. He thought of Mona, the long lost love who’d betrayed him so completely. He thought of his father, still alive but trapped somewhere in Hell. And he thought of all the people he’d failed through the years. People who had died, and people who were little more than empty husks waiting to die. He was so immersed in this dark turn of thought that he didn’t hear the faint electric sizzle of the portal opening behind him.
Someone stepped through the portal and cleared his throat.
Jack blinked. He shook the water off his hands and stood up, turning around to see Andy O’Day striding toward him with the familiar silver flash of whiskey in one hand and a filled-to-the-brim pint glass of Guinness in the other.
Jack accepted the glass of Guinness and drank deeply of stout while Andy screwed the cap off the flask and imbibed from its bottomless depths. Literally bottomless. The flask never emptied of Irish whiskey. It was a magic thing, Andy was fond of saying, you wouldn’t understand.
Andy’s lean, tall form stood framed against the blazing circle of the portal, which crackled in the air a few feet above the ground, a magical wound in the flesh of the world. He capped the flask and returned it to an inner pocket of his leather jacket, then extracted a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes from another pocket. Marlboro was Andy’s usual brand. Jack appreciated the gesture. Andy wedged a smoke into a corner of his thin-lipped mouth before proffering the pack to Jack. Jack accepted the pack, shaking out a cigarette he lit with his Zippo.
Andy exhaled smoke. “So…how did the big showdown with the dork lord go?”
Jack shrugged. “Went down the way I figured it. Vicky couldn’t resist the scent of virgin blood. I stripped and waited in the water while Lucy played bait on the beach. Poor son of a bitch never knew what hit him, he was so entranced by his succulent prize.”
Andy nodded and exhaled more smoke. “And Lucy?”
Jack’s expression darkened and he turned his gaze to the horizon. “She survived, but he got his fangs in her.”
“I see.” Andy’s tone was neutral, but Jack thought he detected a hidden note of reproach. “Will she turn?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “I guess I ought to stay another day, see what happens.”
Andy shook his head. “No can do, mate.”
Jack’s frown deepened and he turned to look his old friend and half-brother in the eye again. “Excuse me? It’s my fault she’s in this mess. If she turns—”
Andy jabbed an index finger in Jack’s direction. “If she turns, she turns. It’ll be too bad, but she knew what she was doing. That bastard wiped out her whole family. And God knows how many thousands of others through the ages. She knew the risk of being killed or turned was high.”
Jack’s brow furrowed as raw anger flowed into his veins like a fast-acting poison. “Which is exactly why we can’t allow her to become what he was.”
Andy shook his head. “I understand how you feel, but you did what you came here to do, Jack. What Lucy paid you to do. There’s more pressing business to see to back home.”
Jack closed his eyes. He could feel the onset of a wicked headache flaring to life behind his eyes. “What now?”
Andy chuckled. “You won’t believe it.”
Jack’s eyes fluttered open. He scowled. “I’ve killed vampires, werewolves, and demons. I’ve been to Hell and made it back alive. So you’ll have to forgive me if I doubt your word, ol’ buddy. Tell me what I won’t believe.”
Andy smirked. “One word, Jack. Want to guess what that word is?”
“I don’t feel up to guessing games, Andy.”
“You’re no fun when you’re in one o
f your angsty moods, Jackie.” Andy took another deep drag from his cigarette and flicked it away. “The word, Jack, is aliens. And I’m not talking about illegal immigrants. I’m taking about capital-V Visitors. Extraterrestrials. Beings not of this world.”
“I get the picture.” Jack studied Andy’s expressions, which had turned suddenly sober. “You’re serious?”
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”
Jack grunted. “Oh, I believe it.”
Andy frowned. “Seriously? Damn. I was hoping I’d finally come up with something that’d have you absolutely flabbergasted.”
A corner of Jack’s mouth twitched, a near smirk. Andy was having a bit of fun with him. His brother often knew things Jack did not, including a deep wealth of things most people would never guess. “Yeah, I already knew about this. But why the urgency? I thought they were peaceful?”
“That’s a mistaken impression, Jack. They’re really quite nasty. And they have plans, Jack. They’ve been staking out territory, setting up operations, getting up to all sorts of nefarious shenanigans. They’ve got to be stopped. Now.”
Jack shrugged. “Wouldn’t this be a matter for the government, then?”
Andy laughed heartily.
In a moment Jack was laughing just as hard. He managed to compose himself long enough to say, “Good point.”
Andy nodded. “Let’s get cracking then, eh?”
Jack sighed again. “Sure, why not?”
They stepped through the blazing portal, which immediately ceased to exist, leaving the rapidly decaying carcass of Victor Heinritz alone on that windy stretch of bone-white beach.
2.
Trouble On The Way
Jack Grimm stepped out of the portal and into the stock room of the Sherlock Holmes Pub in Nashville. Andy was ahead of him, already moving toward the door to the bar. The door opened and Andy moved through a vertical rectangle of light. Sounds from the bar filtered into the stock room, laughter, boisterous conversation, Celtic music, and the faint tinkling of glassware.
Jack thought, Not again.
On rare occasions a trip through a magic portal took them through a gap in time. The gaps were usually quite short, anywhere from a matter of a few minutes to as much as a day or so. This time looked to be toward the longer end of that spectrum. Jack suspected they’d lost nearly an entire day. But the occasional small time gaps were the least disconcerting aspect of portal travel. Actually stepping through one of Andy’s portals was the hard part. All awareness vanished upon entering that blackness. It was like ceasing to exist for a time, like an atheist’s concept of what death must be like. Spooky as hell, in other words. Portal travel was a necessary evil in their line of work, but Jack hated it. He hoped like hell the jump ahead in the time stream wouldn’t come back to haunt them this time, but Jack figured it probably would. His luck ran that way. If there was any possibility things could go bad—really, REALLY bad—then they probably would. He recalled the sense of urgency in Andy’s tone during his quick summary of the alien problem and shuddered.
Sweet Jesus, he thought, What am I stepping into here?
Jack moved through the open door and immediately caught sight of several familiar faces arrayed around the bar and sitting in rickety chairs at a handful of wooden tables. Many of them acknowledged him with a nod and a grin. A few pretended not to see him. One such person in the latter category—a tall, strikingly handsome man with long black hair—slid off his barstool and followed them out of the bar.
Jack and Andy waited for Lucien on the sidewalk outside the pub. By the time the hellhound joined them, Jack had already smoked another Lucky Strike halfway to the filter.
The pub’s front door swung open and Lucien stepped outside. He declined Jack’s offer of a cigarette with a shake of his head that caused the long hair to fall across his face. He brushed the hair back and said, “They’re coming.”
Jack gave a barely perceptible nod. “Now, right?”
The fierceness of Lucien’s gaze made the answer clear.
Jack said, “From where?”
Lucien’s lips barely moved as he said, “From everywhere. Behind you. From the pub. To our left. To our right. We have maybe a few seconds.”
Jack looked at Andy. His half-brother’s eyes communicated a decision that didn’t need to be verbalized. Jack detected movement in his peripheral vision, the pub’s front door opening again. Light glinted off something metallic. Jack’s cigarette slipped from his fingers and tumbled end over flaming end to the sidewalk as his hand moved in a flash to the .45 in his shoulder holster. The gun was in his hands and aimed at the pub’s door less than a heartbeat later. Andy O’Day produced his weapon just as quickly and aimed at something behind Jack. For one breathless, frozen moment the world seemed to stand absolutely still.
Then Jack’s forefinger squeezed the trigger of the .45. The big caliber gun made a big sound
BLAM!
and sent a bullet zipping through the air. The round struck the forehead of a big, burly, bearded man clad in leather, punching a neat hole all the way through where his brain should have been—but there was no rain of blood and brain matter against the pub door, nor did any leak from the forehead hole. Jack kept firing even as Andy’s own weapon started to erupt. Spent shell casings rained on the sidewalk.
PLINKPLINKPLINKLPLINK
and glittered in the streetlight before rolling off the curb into the storm drain. The faux-biker’s body was soon riddled with holes and it fell back against the bar’s entrance. It was shaken, but far from out of the game. It looked at Jack and grinned as it struggled to push away from the door. There was no more doubt the grinning jackass was an alien. A real human would be dead already, flat on his back, bleeding out on the ground. A primal fear rose in Jack, but he dropped a psychical equivalent of a manhole-sized lid on top of it, shutting it deep down into the recesses of his brain. There was no time for fear in a situation like this, no time to wonder how in hell you might kill something that gave every appearance of being unkillable.
So he squeezed the .45’s trigger until it clicked empty. He ejected the spent cartridge even as Andy spun on his heel, drew a bead on something to their right, and kept firing. Jack calmly stood his ground as the alien at last managed to push away from the door and come lurching toward him. He slammed a fresh cartridge into the .45 with the base of a fist and drew down on the biker alien again.
Before he could start firing again, the air next to him shimmered and grew warm as Lucien shapeshifted. A savage growl reverberated in the street and saliva from the hellhound’s snarling mouth hit the sidewalk and sizzled, the corrosive fluid eating through concrete as easily as a stream of lava burning through timber. Another stuttering growl rang out, then Lucien sprang at something outside Jack’s field of vision. There was a heavy thud as the hellhound drove the body of an alien to the ground, followed by the agonized wail of the alien.
The sound of the thing’s pain heartened Jack. It meant they could be hurt. Maybe even killed—at least by a supernaturally powerful refugee from Hell. Jack directed some more high velocity lead at the biker alien, obliterating most of its head with a tightly centered series of blasts to its face. The thing tottered sideways a moment, swayed on its feet, then feel to the ground in a unmoving heap. Jack kept his gaze on the downed alien a moment longer, not quite trusting the reality of its death, then he released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and glanced around him, taking quick stock of the situation.
Lucien, still in full-hound mode, looked up at him from the sidewalk, his muzzle flecked with bit of shredded flesh—but no blood. Instead, the insides of these things were filled with a vaguely ectoplasmic white goo that stank worse than a chest-high pile of manure.
Andy, who’d guessed the proper kill method sooner, had dropped three of the things. Their faceless, nearly headless bodies lay still in the street and on the sidewalk, leaking goo on concrete and asphalt.
Jack’s heart pounded.
&nbs
p; Awareness of the rest of the world hit him with the force of a cannonball to the head. His first thoughts were of damage control and of how to escape. The police would be here within moments, and there’d be no way to explain any of this in a way that’d make sense to normal people. His gaze swept the street. He saw people cowering in doorways and behind parked cars lining both sides of the street.
Jack laughed. It was desperate laughter. His own office was on this side of the street, just a couple of buildings down to the left. But there would be no sanctuary there tonight. Not after a big-time Technicolor shootout in the middle of a crowded city street.
Lucien’s hound form shimmered and he resumed his human form, his tattered clothes hanging from him like rags, making him look like a wolfman from some old movie. Jack met his gaze, nodded, then looked at Andy.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Andy put his gun away, palmed his pack of Lucky Stikes from his jacket pocket and calmly lit a smoke. Andy liked to project an air of absolutely imperturbable cool. He wanted you to think he was the coolest, smoothest, calmest dude in the world. At times like this, Jack suspected he was exactly that.
Andy exhaled a stream of smoke, cleared his throat. “Yeah, mate. Let’s portalize our asses outta here.”
Using the tip of the cigarette, he described a circle in the air as he intoned a series of Latin phrases. The circle shimmered. It was more of an oval, really, Jack thought. Then there was a black, fire-ringed space in the fabric of reality.
Andy, puffing on his cigarette again, stepped through it.
Jack and Lucien, careful to keep their feet away from the flickering flames, followed.
3.
Another Random Hell