by SM Reine
For now, the OPA only jumps in when we need something. When Helltown is spilling outside its boundaries.
As long as Helltown stays self-contained, anything goes.
Down on the south side of Helltown, there are fewer shops and more apartments. The buildings were crammed all full of demons like carcasses being eaten by maggots from the inside out. But there’s one shop on the ground floor of a tenement that I’ve visited three or four times before. Aside from being a source of irritation for the OPA, the shopkeeper was a nosy pain-in-the-ass that always knows what’s going down in her town.
Monique was one of the more innocuous demons in Helltown—a glass blower. She mostly crafted supplies for witches—vials for potion making, bowls for mixing ingredients, enchanted flasks, that kind of thing—but she also made pipes for drug use. That was the thing that got her in the most trouble. It’s one thing to supply witches that live in Helltown, and another to supply potheads on the outside with pipes shaped like dicks.
Everything that demons craft gets demon energy crafted right into it. By smoking through a novelty pipe that Monique had made, druggies were opening themselves to demonic possession. It wasn’t a big deal for the occasional smokers. Now imagine April twentieth at UCLA with a hundred college students that suddenly need exorcism, and you’ll get why Monique is a problem.
We’d originally thought the dick-pipe affair was a witch thing, which was how it got assigned to me. Now Monique had the pleasure of being my one and only demon contact. She’d cut a deal to avoid incarceration, and she fed me information whenever I was brave enough to head into Helltown.
She still had a bunch of dick-pipes on the shelf by her front door at eye level. I had to give it to her. Monique was a real artist. Big dicks, little dicks, circumcised, uncut, all of them perfectly shaped for smoking weed.
“Get the fuck out of here,” said a gravelly voice.
I dragged my attention from a nine-inch pipe with detailed veins. The artist herself was behind the counter, sitting on a stool that lifted her squat, froggy body to a normal height. She was surrounded by spindly glass sculptures. They were genuinely beautiful.
“Hey, Monique,” I said. “How’s business?”
She gave me a flat look. Literally a flat look. No nose, no eyebrows, barely any lips. All of her looks were flat. But this one was especially unimpressed, like I’d just asked to borrow money from her. “I’ve stopped selling pipes to mortal kids, so I know you’re not here to fuck with me. Yet I told you to get the fuck out of here and you’re not listening. You want something, you ugly cunt, so what the fuck is it this time, Hawke?”
Great. I’d caught her on a bad day. “I’m looking for information pertaining to a murder.”
“You know I didn’t fucking kill anyone.”
I grabbed an Erlenmeyer flask off of her shelf. I could use some new equipment. “I know. You’re too short to do anything worse than bite ankles.”
She flashed dagger-like teeth at me. “I said I didn’t kill anyone. That doesn’t mean I won’t.”
Setting the flask on her counter, I fished around for some of the cash I’d stolen from Joey Dawes. “Erin Karwell. She was a waitress at a bar called The Olive Pit. Do you recognize the name?”
“Mortal?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?” Monique asked. I set a twenty on the table. Before I could let go of it, her hand shot out and seized my wrist. Her fingers were those of an artist, long and slender and delicate. Her touch sent chills rushing up my forearm. “I don’t want any of your fucking money. I know why you’re here. You’re in deep shit, Hawke, and you’re desperate for answers.”
“You can’t know why I’m here if you don’t know Erin.” I flashed the news article with her photo.
“Is that the cunt you killed?” Monique asked, barely even glancing at it.
Shit. She did know why I was there. It wasn’t fun being part of Helltown’s rumor mill. No fun at all. “Don’t tell me you’re siding with the cops on this one.”
“I’m on nobody’s side but mine, and my side is awfully fucking interested in not getting dead.”
I pulled my hand back from her counter, twenty clutched in my fist. “Has the OPA been through here asking for me?”
“It’s not the OPA you need to worry about,” Monique said. “Yeah, I recognize Erin. She used to come around here.”
That was news to me.
“What do you mean, ‘around here?’ Helltown? Your shop?”
She pushed the flask toward me. “Take it. Consider it a parting gift.”
I didn’t touch it. “Erin was just some waitress. What would she have been doing in Helltown?”
“Get your dumb ass down to the Temple of the Hand of Death,” Monique said. “It’s on Sekhmet, northwest side. That’s where you’ll get your answers.”
My sense of alarm heightened. “Why? Is someone there expecting me?”
Her smile was even more unpleasant than her glare. “Have a nice day.”
16
Common sense said that I shouldn’t go to the Temple of the Hand of Death. It was on the north side. The north side of Helltown was where the incubi were, so I didn’t go to the north side. Especially not if there were things expecting to see me there.
Should have been a no-brainer, right?
But common sense and desperation didn’t play nicely, and I didn’t have a lot of other options.
I drew my Desert Eagle before approaching the so-called temple.
It was one of the shittier buildings in Helltown. The temple looked like it occupied a former gas station, judging by the row of vintage gas pumps in front of it. You could still almost make out the graceful lines of the fifties-style decorations on the outside of the building, but they had rotted with age. The roof sagged in the middle. The sun had bleached the colors out of everything. The windows had been punched out.
Smoke spiraled out of the windows, fogging the area in front of the door. Smelled like a brushfire. I sneezed.
A steel sign had been hung over the door. It read: “Vedae som Matis Duvak.” I didn’t understand vo-ani, the demon language, but I was going to assume that meant “ugly-ass gas station.”
I pushed the door open.
The floor inside was poured concrete. An altar stood at the far end of the room—a folding table with an array of melted candles sitting in piles of sludgy wax. There was a big clock on the wall behind it. A couple of hand-woven baskets stood along each wall. They were covered, fortunately. I didn’t want to know what demons considered to be fitting offerings for demon-gods being honored in a temple gas station.
I didn’t see any demons there, but I still eased the safety off the gun as I slipped inside. The door whined shut behind me.
“Is anyone here?” I asked, raising my voice. “My name is Agent Cèsar Hawke and I’m with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. I have questions.”
“I have answers,” someone said from behind me.
No way in hell someone had gotten behind me.
I spun to see a woman. A human woman. She had bushy brown hair, a hunched back, innocent-looking eyes. Couldn’t have been any older than a gawky fifteen or sixteen. She wore black velvet—heavy skirt, sleeves that draped to her fingertips—and a boned corset. Delicate iron jewelry dangled at her neck and over her forehead. Black symbols had been painted on her cheeks, one under each eye.
She gave me a nervous smile. She was holding some kind of stone scepter that looked much too fancy for an awkward teenager.
“Are you a good man, Agent Cèsar Hawke?”
You want to talk about things that make me useless? Women were number one. Children were number two. Combine both of them by sticking a vulnerable young girl in front of me, and I turn into a giant sucker. This kid was way too young to be dressing up like an infernal priestess and hanging out in Helltown, no matter what she’d done or who she thought she was.
Every single one of my protective instincts went nuts in an instant.
Like a big raging beast was trying to break out of my chest.
“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, lowering the gun. “Who are you?”
She cocked her head to the side. “Who am I? Who are you?”
“I’m Cèsar,” I said again, slower this time, even though she’d already said my name. “What are you doing here? How did you end up in Helltown?”
Her smile turned weird. Her eyes unfocused. “I think you are probably a good man, Cèsar, but that doesn’t change anything.”
Wait, her eyes weren’t unfocused.
They had just focused behind me.
I turned.
And there she was: Isobel Stonecrow, holding a folding chair in both hands like she thought she was a WWE wrestler.
She swung. The chair struck.
I was out before I hit the ground.
+ + +
I didn’t feel it when I went unconscious. It was like I blinked, and suddenly I was in a chair with ropes tethering my ankles and left wrist. Isobel Stonecrow was kneeling on my right side, quickly knotting the cord on that arm.
I couldn’t react as quickly as I normally would have. The world was swimming around me, spinning and flipping and blurring like I’d just had another rough night with a bottle of tequila. I swiped at Isobel too slowly. By the time my fist grabbed at the place her throat had been, she had already dodged, grabbed my arm, and pinned it back to the chair.
She wasn’t alone. Another priestess of the Hand of Death was behind her, watching with an amused grin that she couldn’t hide behind her fingers.
Yeah, laugh it up.
“He’s ridiculously handsome,” the priestess said, giving Isobel a thumbs up. “Nicely done.”
The corner of Isobel’s mouth twitched. “Can I have a minute, Elora?”
“You can have fifteen. Or maybe twenty. However much you need.” Was she waggling her eyebrows? Jesus. Women.
The priestess slipped past Isobel. I twisted, trying to see where she was going. I couldn’t turn far. For all I knew, there were a dozen priestesses back there giggling at me really quietly.
“What the fuck, Izzy?” I asked once I was reasonably certain that we were alone.
One thick eyebrow arched, lips twisting. “Nobody calls me Izzy.”
I didn’t even know why it had slipped out like that. I sure as heck wasn’t feeling in a “pet names” mood with her. Probably the concussion talking.
Tried to jerk my wrist free. She had already knotted the rope. Damn, she was fast.
“You hang out in Helltown?” I asked as she backed away from me.
“Sometimes,” Isobel said. “It’s a place to settle when I’m not on the road. I have friends here.”
Friends? More like coworkers. She was wearing the robes of the priestesses of the Hand of Death, all black velvet and glittering iron jewelry. I would have been lying if I said that the way the corset lifted her breasts wasn’t totally awesome. But even if I’m a sucker for beautiful women—and I am—I’ve got my limits.
“Let me go,” I said.
“All I want to do is help. Don’t be afraid.”
A scoff. “I’m not afraid.” Not that afraid, anyway. But you try being held hostage by someone in Helltown without losing your cool. I’d heard stories of agents going into Helltown and never coming out again—some of them rumors, some of them definitely not. I didn’t want to be another cold case. I might have been sweating a little.
Like I said, there’s nowhere hotter than Helltown.
Finally prying my eyes free of Isobel in all her robes and demon jewelry, I took a long look at the room where I was now momentarily trapped. I was fairly certain that it was underneath the gas station temple. It looked like a basement. There were floorboard joists over my head. The walls were bare concrete stained with moisture. No windows. Just torches. Fucking torches, like we were in the Temple of Doom.
Isobel had three big baskets behind her. She grabbed one of them and hauled it closer to me.
“Let me out of here,” I said.
“Not until you believe me. I’ll untie you once you’ve seen the truth, and you can decide what to do after that.”
She was still on about that? “If you’re stashing kids in the temple, then what comes after that might be a call to the cops.”
Isobel frowned as she dropped the basket at my feet. “Kids? You mean Ann?”
“Is that the name of your little diversion upstairs? How did she end up here? Kidnapping?”
“She’s vedae som matis bougaknati.” Whatever the fuck that meant. “Don’t go near Ann,” Isobel said firmly. “You have to listen to me, Cèsar. I can help you. I want to help you.”
I strained against my bindings. “Yeah, I can tell. That’s why you lied to me about being able to talk to Erin and tied me to a chair.”
Her eyes lit with fire. “Fine. You think I’m a fraud? Let me show you how much of a fraud I am.”
She kicked over the basket. The lid flew off and hit my shins. Bones spilled out—dry human bones. I would have recoiled if I hadn’t been attached to the chair.
There were no drums this time, no fake accent, no chanting.
Isobel extended her hands over the bones in front of her, palms facing the ground. She closed her eyes.
“Come to me,” she whispered.
The magic slapped me upside the head like a folding chair. My eyes burned and sinuses tingled and I sneezed three times in quick succession. The room blurred. All that magic that I had felt in at Shady Groves Cemetery was back, strong enough to choke me.
Once I could see again, all of the oxygen vanished from my lungs.
There was an apparition in front of me. The full figure of a naked, hairless human man, who looked baffled to be in the basement. His dark skin looked inhumanly gray. And—Jesus—I could see the basket through his shins.
He was a ghost.
His mouth moved, but Isobel spoke for him, still whispering, still in her true voice. “Where am I? What’s going on?” Her eyes were empty, like the ghostly figure had taken control of her.
“Holy hell,” I said.
Isobel stepped around the apparition to touch my shoulder. The ghost’s empty stare followed her movements.
“Do you believe me now, Cèsar?” she asked softly.
Oh yeah. I believed her.
17
Isobel had parked her RV behind the Temple of the Hand of Death. She dragged me to it, delicate fingers encircling my wrist, eyes on the surrounding road and the creatures milling between buildings.
I must have been unconscious longer than I’d thought—it was starting to get dark by the time we left. Dangerous time to be on the streets of Helltown, even for a woman dressed like a priestess. During the day, only the corporeal, daywalking demons could go outside, making it relatively safe for visiting OPA agents. Once night fell, shit got real.
The OPA specifically forbade agents from entering Helltown in the afternoon to make sure that they wouldn’t be there at nightfall.
I didn’t trust a lot about the OPA right now, but I trusted their sense of self-preservation.
Isobel shoved the door to her RV open and pushed me inside. I held my breath when I stepped onto the upper step, prepared for her magic to overwhelm me. All witches have a habit of marking our territory with wards and curses, which can be enough to fuck up my nose if the witch is powerful. And Isobel was definitely powerful.
Yet I didn’t sneeze. I didn’t feel even the slightest tingle.
The RV looked even more retro on the inside. She had shag carpet, a beanbag chair. Her furniture was upholstered in plasticky white material. All she was missing was a lava lamp. But even though her kitchen counters were covered in jars of herbs and bags of—oh Lord, was that blood? I didn’t see an altar.
“Don’t you cast magic in here?” I asked as she climbed in behind me, slamming the door.
“Not exactly,” Isobel said. She dropped the velvet skirts. They puddled around her ankles, and she
kicked them away. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts underneath, which clashed with the remaining corset in a sexy kind of way.
“What’s ‘not exactly’ supposed to mean?”
She tossed her veils to the floor and climbed into the driver’s seat. “It means that I’ve never had a dead person in my RV, so I’ve never had to cast a spell in here.”
The engine groaned to life and my eyebrows climbed toward my hairline. Vehicles weren’t meant to work within Helltown, not with all the infernal energy. Mechanics got all gummed up. “Then how’d you get the RV working?”
“I have talented witchy friends,” Isobel said, turning on the headlights. I stood behind her, hands braced on the back of her chair, as she wrenched the wheel to the right and got onto the bumpy road. “They know things.”
If she knew the kind of witches powerful enough to shield her RV against infernal energy, then I wanted to know those witches, too. Heck, the entire OPA would want to know those witches. If we could bring our SUVs and BearCat assault vehicles into the neighborhood, it would change the game in a big way.
Later. After I wasn’t a fugitive anymore.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Isobel shot a smile over her shoulder at me. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
The shadows were growing long, stretching in spindly fingers over the pavement. The darkness didn’t have that blue cast to it that sunset often gets. It was black. Blacker than black. The shadows weren’t just shadows, and they were creeping toward the RV.
The engine grumbled, floor bucking under my feet as Isobel drove toward the nearest exit.
A group of men appeared in the street. They were all narrow-shouldered and wearing studded leather jackets. They didn’t walk. They sauntered, slouched, almost slithered, until they stood in the middle of the road in front of us.
Just a glance at the three of them filled my head with dirty mental images of lips and tongue and fingers. I wasn’t gay or anything; everyone with a pulse would get desperately horny around these guys, and I wasn’t any exception. Most humans were useless against a demon’s thrall.