by Kevin Hearne
“If y’all wanna talk, talk from a distance, or I’ll open you up.”
“Sure,” one of them said. “That’s all we wanna do. Talk.” Their body language said different, but I pretended he was being sincere.
“Fine. I don’t know about you, but I’m thirsty. First round’s on me, gentlemen. Where’s can a body get somethin’ good to drink in this town?”
“The U.S. Exchange is pretty good,” one of the figures said. “They only water down their whiskey a little bit.”
“Sounds good. Maybe they’ll have a bottle hidden somewhere that isn’t watered down at all. Lead the way.”
It was only a couple of blocks or so to the U.S. Exchange, which sounded like a bank or a financial institution but was really a gambling hall that served liquor. Like everyplace else in San Francisco at the time, it had been hastily constructed out of wood, because when a boomtown is booming, you don’t want to miss a night of profit by building to last—the booms only last so long, and then the wooden structures are easily abandoned when the money dries up.
It was at least making pretentions of being fancy: They had a piano player, and I could only imagine where they’d shipped that piano in from. Surely not over land.
They had a couple of blackjack tables, faro tables, a roulette wheel, and plenty of other tables for poker or other card games. There were three women pouring whiskey and flirting with the miners. One of them came around to our table with a tray of glasses, and I bought one round to shoot and then another to sip.
I’d describe these men for you, except that I don’t remember their names. I was simply using them as a source of focused greed, hoping it would draw the demon to this particular building.
I slung them a fabricated story about my claim’s location, how I’d stumbled across it by accident, how there was so much more gold just lying around, no tunnels to be dug or anything, and I was sure it was the same all through that stretch of mountains, and they ate it up. They kept drinking. They were practically unconscious after an hour, but I was fine, because I kept breaking down the alcohol internally to prevent getting drunk. I didn’t have to fight them, and I gradually got the attention of everyone in the place, because word quickly spread throughout the hall, courtesy of the whiskey server, that I had found quite the strike somewhere and was rolling in it. Buying a round for everyone also got me some attention.
Leaving my would-be assailants behind in a drunken stupor, barely able to sit up, I performed what might be called an amateur mosey toward the roulette table. I took some time to understand the game and to chat, then I began placing bets. And cheating.
Not for any personal gain, of course: It was merely to attract my target. I would lose some but win a bit more so that, over time, I was amassing more and more money and others were riding along, placing their side bets.
—
“Time-out,” Granuaile said. “How did you cheat?”
“Whenever I wanted a sure win, I bound the surface of the roulette ball to the number I’d chosen, just long enough for it to stay in its little slot.”
“They never caught on?”
“I’d lose enough that they didn’t suspect. And I kept buying drinks and giving wads of money away to others, who would promptly lose it. The house was doing fine. I was winning enough to basically stay even with what I’d brought in. In the meantime, the atmosphere of greed kept rising.”
“I was just getting to that, Oberon,” I said.
—
I took a break for dinner; the U.S. Exchange provided some sliced beef in a sugary barbecue sauce, pinto beans in the same glaze, and a mountain of cornbread. It allowed me time to tell some jokes and ingratiate myself with the staff. I couldn’t finish my meal—the portion was huge—so I asked if they might have a hound who’d enjoy it.
“We surely do,” said the bartender, who gave his name as Perkins and informed me that he was also the proprietor. He had curled his mustache with wax on the tips and had a cleft chin jutting out beneath it.
“What breed?”
“Standard poodle. The tall ones, you know, not the miniature kind.”
“Name?”
“Felicity, because our meeting was felicitous. Found her out on the Oregon Trail; she was near starved to death. She’d lost her people, and I’d lost mine, and we kept each other going.”
“Sorry to hear about your troubles,” I said. “I don’t suppose I could say hi to Felicity? I haven’t seen a dog for a long time. Maybe she’ll bring me enough luck to maintain a winning streak.”
He grinned at me. “Sure, why not. I’ll have Lucy take you back.”
Lucy was one of the women serving whiskey, and at Perkins’ request she took me back into the kitchen past the cook, where the poodle was bedded down. Felicity had a fine curly white coat and looked well fed. Her tail thumped the bed a couple of times and then she rose to say hello. She got some scritches and beef from me, and I learned from her that she thought Perkins was much nicer than most humans she’d met. That was good to know.
—
“What? Oberon, no.”
“It’s not something I would think to ask.”
“It’s not pandering! Felicity still has a part to play in this. I said at the start there would be vintage poodles. Would you just let me finish?”
Granuaile did a poor job of stifling a laugh when she heard me protest the pandering charge.
—
When I returned to the saloon, I hoped that the mood would have noticeably shifted and my quarry would have appeared. A scan of the hall’s auras revealed nothing unusual, so it was back to work. I gambled and caroused and laughed. I got asked about my sword a lot and why I wore gloves. They were lucky, I said, and left it at that.
Gambling halls back then didn’t have closing times as long as there was money to be made. And since there was quite a bit of money changing hands—I was making sure of it—Perkins didn’t go to bed at a sensible hour. He had someone come in to take over but he stayed on, keeping an eye on things. There were several fights that broke out at the poker tables, but I kept everything cooking along nicely at the roulette table. Like the king in Hamlet, I took my rouse and kept wassail. But even with breaking down the alcohol and taking breaks every so often, I was getting tired and thinking about giving up. It was long past midnight—three A.M., if I’m not mistaken—before something shifted in the air.
A man with a slight beer gut strode into the hall then, wide-brimmed hat pulled low, his full dark beard kept trimmed, and a slim cigar smoldering at one corner of his mouth. Two guns hung low at his hips, and he had pointy steel-toed boots that were meant to be seen as much as worn; he wasn’t a working cowboy or a miner. He was something else.
Checking him out in the magical spectrum, I saw the black roiling stain in his aura that meant he was possessed. A demon was riding this man around like a meat limousine.
I finished up my roll at the roulette table, hoping to lose that round, and I did. I excused myself for a break and opted for a saunter instead of a mosey, beckoning to Perkins.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Makepeace, what can I get for you?” he said. I crooked a finger at him so that he would come closer and no one would overhear me.
“I’m not really Silas Makepeace,” I said, letting the Texas drawl go and returning to my English accent. “My name’s Algernon Percy and I’m working undercover for the sheriff. A man we’ve been looking for just walked in the door. Could you send someone to fetch Sheriff Hays here immediately? Tell him Percy’s found our man.”
“Okay. Is there going to be trouble?”
“Quite likely, but I hope we’ll be able to take care of it without anyone getting hurt. The faster the sheriff gets here, the less likely it is you’ll suffer any damages.”
“Which man?”
“Slim cigar, wide hat, fancy boots, string tie around his neck.” I bobbed my head in the general direction of the front door.
Perkins’ eyes shifted, stopped, and narrowed. “Never seen him before. But that doesn’t mean anything. All right, I’m on it.”
The piano player from earlier in the evening had gone home, and the new one was playing so ecstatically he might have been floating in a haze of laudanum, which is a hell of a drug.
The possessed man’s eyes fixed on the roulette table, where the largest concentration of greed was centered. If he followed the pattern he’d established elsewhere, he’d start betting there and keep winning until Perkins asked him to quit. Then things would get violent. And he would take as many people down as he could before slipping out of this body and finding a new host.
While Perkins sent his extra barkeep out to find the sheriff, I turned around and focused on those holsters. I used some energy in my bear charm to bind the iron to the leather so he’d never be able to draw. The iron resistance, both on my end and on the part of the gun itself, meant it took more energy than I would have liked. For good measure I fused the hammers down so he wouldn’t be able to shoot through the holster. It didn’t leave me with a whole lot of magic to draw on, but I hoped I wouldn’t need much more. Drawing power now would bring the wrong kind of attention.
The demon took his time scoping out the hall before moving to the roulette table, and I left the bar before his eyes got to me. I circled to the far side of the table and hid myself behind a couple of hangers-on. It wasn’t a long wait before he appeared at the table and started to manipulate things. Cheating, in other words, as I did. I watched in the magical spectrum. He made sure the main bettor lost while his side bet won. He would become the main bettor soon, and that would put us all on a dangerous path. I needed to get him away from the others before he seduced them with greed and killed them, claiming their souls for himself.
Upgrading to a brisk walk and carrying Fragarach in its scabbard in my left hand, I flanked the demon and tapped him on the shoulder before he could place his next bet.
“Say, partner, don’t I recognize you? What’s your name again?” I smiled at him as he turned to face me. He deliberately puffed a toxic cloud of cigar smoke my way before answering.
“Stephen Blackmoore.”
“Naw, that’s not your name. You’re Mammon, aren’t you?”
I did not expect the fist that plowed into my gut at that point, nor did I expect its speed or power. I thought I’d get a squint and a raspy Clint Eastwood challenge along the lines of “What’d you call me, punk?” before we got into trading fisticuffs, but, nope, I got a pile driver into my diaphragm. Doubling over was instinctive and I couldn’t help that, but I staggered back so he couldn’t follow up easily. He clipped me anyway on the shoulder, and the force of it caught me off-balance and drove me to the floor. I rolled, gasping for air, to avoid the stomp or kick I was sure would follow. He took a couple of pointy kicks at my head and missed; my tumbling took out a fun-sized man, who wasn’t aware that a fight had broken out and fell over me, cursing. That slowed down the demon long enough for me to regain my feet.
I was just in time to see another fist coming at me, and considering the power of his other punches, if I let it land I’d have my nose driven into my brain. I swept my left forearm in front of my face, knocking his fist to the left, and struck a couple of stiff fingers into his throat a split second later. The demon might not care about air or much else, but the meat wagon he was riding had reflexes. He reeled back and the cigar fell from his lips. I caught it, flipped the lit end toward him, and shoved it right down that gasping mouth. That gave him something more to think about. He might even be thinking about leaving the body of Stephen Blackmoore a bit early, since demons aren’t that great at healing.
Given enough space and time to breathe, I drew Fragarach from its scabbard and pointed it at him. “Freagroidh tu,” I said, activating the enchantment worked into the blade, and that bound him in place as well as any ward or ring of salt could. I let him spit out the cigar, but then I followed up in Old Irish: “You may neither move nor speak without my permission.” It didn’t matter if he understood me: Fragarach did. He froze up, glaring at me, and then I was faced with the old proverb about what to do when you catch a tiger by the tail. You’d better not let go.
The problem was that I had just done this in front of a whole bunch of witnesses. They might not have understood right then that they were witnessing a Druid squaring off against a demon from hell, but they knew something was weird, because a man with two guns wasn’t even trying to face down a guy with a sword, and the guy with the sword talked funny.
“Sorry, everybody,” I said in my uncertain Texas drawl. “We’ll take this elsewhere and let you carry on with your evenin’.” To the demon I said, “Let’s move over by the door and talk, real nice.”
By moving the tip of Fragarach, I could give him a bit of a nudge in the right direction but not really force him to move. The enchantment was designed to prevent movement more than to push or pull people around. And the demon inside Stephen Blackmoore really did not want to cooperate.
His hands dropped to his guns and he attempted to pull them out, only to find that he couldn’t. He shook and trembled all over, trying to break free of the enchantment, perhaps even to escape his host and possess someone else, but he was well contained. His eyes turned the color of boiled lobsters as his frustration and rage grew; his mouth dropped open, and the sound that erupted from it wasn’t the sort of thing a healthy person ever makes: It was pitched low, as if he ate a bad burrito an hour ago, but it was unmistakably a battle cry filled with a berserker’s promise of doom.
The saloon fell silent as everyone turned to stare. The piano player even stopped his mad tinkling of the keys.
“This man ain’t well,” I said. “Don’t touch him, please, just give us some space. He knows he needs to do what I say, but he doesn’t want to. Sorry, y’all. We’ll get out of your way as soon as we can.”
Stephen Blackmoore kept trying to shuck his guns free. “They’re not coming loose. I made sure of it. So let’s go talk, all right? It’s the only way to be rid of me.”
That was as much for the crowd as for the demon. Satisfied that there wouldn’t be any gunfire, they murmured and some of them politely turned their backs to resume their games. The piano player took his cue and pounded the keys once more.
“Go on,” I told the demon. “Walk toward the door.” The red glow in the eyes faded and the tremors in the limbs subsided as the demon decided not to fight it anymore. He walked toward the door with clenched fists and I kept the sword pointed at him, asking people not to get between us. There was a table with a few down-at-the-heels miners chatting over drinks. I asked them if we could sit there and threw some uncashed chips at them as a naked bribe. One of them asked for more, but the other two told him not to be an asshole; they’d just come out ahead on what was otherwise a shit night.
I had him sit across from me, his back to the door, and Lucy came over to ask if we wanted drinks. I ordered two shots of rye, but neither of us had any intention of actually drinking.
It was time to use the other power of Fragarach: compelling the truth. “Let’s get to it, shall we? I’m asking the demon possessing this human right now: What is your name?”
At first the demon was amused and a low chuckle burbled forth from Blackmoore’s burned throat, but then “Mammon” escaped his lips, and the flaming eyes returned as the demon realized he didn’t have a choice about answering.
“I thought so. Stefano Pastore was a fool to summon you. But what I want to know is this: Who helped you escape the summoning circle and kill Pastore?”
Blackmoore’s face twisted into a nasty grin. Ma
mmon was delighted to answer that question. “Some other fool entered the room shortly after I was summoned, because I bellowed. Pastore didn’t protect against my influence on others. I promised the man incredible wealth and all he had to do was kick a bit of salt aside for me. Pastore begged him not to do it, but he was helpless to stop him. The man broke the circle and I possessed him. Then I used him to break Pastore’s circle of protection and pay him properly for his arrogance. Who are you?”
“I’ll ask the questions. Did you keep your promise to the man you possessed?”
“Yes. He had a fine run at faro and acquired more money than he’d ever seen, before someone tried to stop me and guns came out. But I took four more souls before I left his body.”
That sounded like that first night, when Mr. Collins got thrown across the room.
“And you’ve been doing something similar to that every night since?”
Another smile from the demon. He approved of these questions. “Yes. This is my kind of town.”
“Well, not anymore. I need you to go back to hell.” He simply stared at me, and I realized I hadn’t asked him a question. “You may speak freely so long as it is in English.”
“You cannot send me back,” he spat.
“Sure I can.”
“You are no priest. You are not one of the host either.”
“That’s true enough. But your spiritual opposites are not the only ones with an interest in keeping demons from roaming around this plane.”
“This weapon you have used to bind me,” he said, sneering at it, “cannot do any lasting harm to me.”
That was also true. I didn’t have a nice set of arrows blessed by the Virgin Mary, like that time in Mesa when we had to go after the fallen angel. Fragarach could dispatch most lesser demons, who had only a tenuous grip on their manifestations here, but Mammon was one of the true badasses. How do you destroy a pure manifestation of greed?
“I never said I was going to stab you with it,” I told him. “It’s doing what it needs to do, which is keep you in place while I get hold of something or someone that can harm you. You’ve heard of Brighid, First among the Fae, who can cast Cold Fire?”