Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

  And so here we were. Strolling down the mist into yet another place that nobody gives a damn about, all in the name of that sweet, sweet fiat currency.

  What was the first hint? Ah, yes. People seemed happy to see us. Like, really happy.

  Usually, how it goes is they’ve had a bit of a collection, someone’s promised their home and hearth, someone else had agreed to toss in a bit of meat for our dinner, and all things considered, quite a lot of people are eyeing their losses and wondering if the wailing monstrosity in the swamp is really worth all that money. There’s usually someone sensible who’s managed to hold the entire thing together, and he or she is a bundle of nerves and relief. Nerves, because if this goes wrong, people will remember whose cockamamie idea this was. Relief, because Gary, for all his faults, does look exactly like your stereotypical demon hunter: huge, muscled, gigantic sword on the back, the whole nine yards. Nevermind that most demon hunters go out of their way not to look like demon hunters. These imaginations know the concept of camouflage but haven’t really stretched it to hunting things larger than a deer.

  This time there were just a lot of people who rushed out, hollering like we were the second coming of Bombastus. They shook Gary’s hands. They patted him on the back. I swear some crooning old lady even tried to pick me up. I climbed up Gary’s back—he’s got some nice leather paw-holds—and yanked his ear.

  “Nature of the case,” I said. “Tell them to send out three people—”

  “Three people,” rumbled Gary. His voice has an impressive bass. A few windows rumbled.

  “—to describe the demon, case history, surroundings, effects to us.”

  “Tell us what’s up,” said Gary.

  “And someone get us some food and lodging and maybe a place to clean our gear and prep—”

  “Hungry, also,” said Gary, reaching the limit of his conversational skills. “Beer, bed, bath.”

  Miraculously, this worked. It always does in these villages. Something about Gary and the average IQ around these parts being on speaking terms with each other.

  So there we were eventually, water’d, victual’d, and in Gary’s case, slightly buzzed. I had a bit of milk splashed on the floor, myself, I don’t do alcohol, cat livers can’t take it. We were taken to a small barn that had been cleaned out fairly recently. The place smelled a bit of old horse, but there was fresh straw and it was all reasonably warm. Gary clunked in and did an elaborate show of removing his weapons, one after the other. They always watched this bit, you know. First the greatsword, which we carried around mostly for show.

  “Silver and sky-steel,” he said, with a meaningful look at the audience. “For the big ones.”

  More like tin over pig iron, but hey, it sold. There was some ooh-ing and aah-ing. Next, the axes, blades tinged a dark red with Laudimer’s no. 3 wagon paint.

  “Blood of the Eighteenth Angel,” Gary said solemnly.

  And then the knives. One. Two. Three. Five. Seven. “The teeth of Mar-Dumba,” Gary announced.

  Mar-Dumba was a scythe and a kettle melted down. Goes to show. Gary lay them down, looming impressively in that barn, and settled back, staring at the crowd. At this point the three who had sort of been milling around got their act together and stepped up. I cast one eye over them. A stout man, wringing his jacket between his hands; a young woman, thin and pale and sharp-looking; an old lady, bent and angry.

  Father, maiden, crone. The complaint—

  “Miller’s son, Ruen,” said the father.

  “My betrothed,” said the maiden theatrically, “or, was, really—”

  “Cursed,” said the crone. “About two weeks now.”

  “Just always been one of the boys,” said the father. “Used to come by for a beer every now and then, eh—”

  “Speaking in tongues!” said the maiden.

  “Cursed,” spat the crone. “Bought the Bitter Farm with dead mans’ gold, yes he did.”

  “But now you see him at night, eh, walking outside, whispering to the sky—”

  “Speaking in tongues!”

  “Buried his parents by the dead of night, yes he did.”

  “Carves runes in his bedroom, eh, the lads say he’s making a portal to hell—”

  “He did things—” At this, the old lady pivoted like an arthritic owl to stare at the girl, who blushed, and the father, who was quite animated until then, did a kind of curious hear-no-evil blank with his face, “—that he shouldn’t of known about—”

  “Tomorrow,” said the man. “At the Bitter Farm, at dawn, that’s where he’ll be.”

  Gary stayed perfectly silent through it all, intense concentration and absolute understanding on his face. “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “At dawn. Show us the Bitter Farm. Go now.”

  The crowd dispersed, with whispers of sky-steel and Mar-Dumba! Their torches vanished. The night returned. Gary tiptoed to the entrance, peeked around cautiously, and turned to me, his face a complete blank.

  “Possession,” I said. “Sounds like your standard possession case. Kid was probably a little close to a ley line and a little bit too horny and got zapped.” Happens all the time.

  Gary mulled this over. “Holy water work?”

  “It should.”

  “Salt circle? We have salt?”

  “Not enough for a full circle, but if worst comes to worst, you throw the water, throw the salt in his eyes, hit him on the head a few times.”

  “Fire?”

  We both paused briefly. In my case, it was PTSD from the last time we’d used fire. Technically, we’d gotten rid of that demon, but, as the judge had pointed out, we’d also gotten rid of the host, and their house, and their dog, and the town square, and the Elderman’s house, and really, setting fire to a large part of the village wasn’t considered professional.

  “Let’s just leave that for later,” I said, not unkindly. “I’ll go spy out the place, you prepare.”

  The Bitter Farm was a lot further than I thought it would be, and a lot lonelier. Usually, the houses in a village are, shall we say, rather evenly dispersed, because everybody needs a bit of land of their own. This village just clung to itself like a wet nightgown. A little further out I found the remnants of walls. Stone, earthbanks, hundreds of years old, with moss growing all over them. Their foundations ran in neat razor lines across the forest. I had a feeling that the walls had once been laid out in a Star of Warding.

  An encampment, then. That made sense. Some long-forgotten military comes swinging their swords here in this demon-haunted world and sets up their little defensive perimeter and their camps, and over time the camps become houses, and the spears and pikes become spades and hoes, and the wall that you once built to keep out the dark lies forgotten. And if the darkness eventually gets to you, makes you forget the reason your ancestors came here and bled out in this cold, unforgiving land...well, shit happens and flowers grow on it. That’s the way of the world.

  I found a nice little track and kept to it. Eventually the Bitter Farm came into view. It looked half-abandoned, let me tell you, what with the mist and the moonlight and all that. There were wards outside. Bear and bird, claw and wing, the kind that humans see but don’t really register. Gary could break these wards without even thinking about it, but most people couldn’t.

  So I miaowed and put a paw to the ward. A greeting.

  A door opened and a kid stepped out. There was some fumbling, and a torch lit, and I got my first good look at him.

  He was possessed. Oh dogs, he was possessed. No country bumpkin had that much charisma. This kid practically swelled out of the darkness in a cloud of his own magnificence.

  It was a very tight job, too. No lurching, no pink-eye, nothing.

  “Hello, Nine-Lifer,” the demon said cautiously, coming to a stop just beyond the wards.

  “I’m afraid you’re in a spot of trouble,” I said. “Miaow. Locals really want you out.”

  “Eh? Why’s that? And who’re you?”

  “Art,” I said, a
nd waited.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t a very well-read demon. “Wozzat?”

  “The Dark Art? Art of Magic? The Hellcat?”

  He frowned. “Wait, hang on. Didn’t you once set a guy on fire while exorcising him?”

  “Must have been some other guy,” I lied.

  “And you hang out with that dumb blond?”

  “He’s not so bad once you see him swing a sword.”

  “And they called you?”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” I said smoothly. “Look, there’s a whole lot of complaints about you. Speaking in tongues—”

  The demon looked affronted. “I’ve been trying to teach this lad I’m occupying a few things,” he said with severe dignity. “Foreign language lessons every Wednesday and Friday.”

  “Burying the boy’s parents—”

  “Better for the environment than burning, surely! Do you know what the carbon offset of one of their stupid cremation ceremonies is?”

  “Tossing gold around—”

  “Solid investments at 12 percent per annum, banked with the Hotelier’s Guild—”

  “Scribbling runes—”

  “Charting index funds, actually. You don’t expect me to keep everything in this head, do you?”

  “And apparently you, ah, displayed some talent with the lad’s fiancé...”

  “So she remembered that, did she?” he said, sounding rather pleased with himself. Then the demon sighed. “Look, I’m just trying to improve things around here. Do you know how bad their quality of life is? They’re wearing sacks, for Darkness’ sake, and they think bathing will kill them off. And you know, left to themselves, they’re only going to get worse.”

  “I get where you’re coming from,” I said, because I really did. “But you’re scaring them, and they’ve called us in to kill you.”

  “What’s so scary? Basic hygiene, basic financial skills, a second language, a balanced diet, a bath every two days, maybe a manicure every now and then—trust me, that girl got nothing more than the benefit of good core muscles, I’ve always said a good set of abs on a guy does wonders—what’s bad about that?”

  I sighed. “That’s all true,” I said. “But you know how they are.”

  He was in a bit of temper, though. “I’ve even got a fairly good deal on some hedge funds close by. With a little bit of work we might actually be able to, you know, make it so that they aren’t bumbling about eating stale bread and kicking puppies. They should love me! I took this feeble-minded little shit and made him something! They should all love me! Wretched! Pathetic! Feeble!”

  “You know your eyes are glowing, right?”

  “S’ night vision,” he grumbled. But he put them away. “So what do you propose, Mister Cat?”

  “No chance of you going back home?”

  “No. I just moved out. Whole brood’s going to laugh at me if I throw in the towel.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do, then,” I said, and spelled out the contract I always made on nights like these. The idea was simple, comes down to your basic whatcha-ma-call-it, psychology. Basically, from the outside, there’s two types of humans. One’s expected to stay poor and stupid and miserable, and one’s allowed to be smart and rich and fiendish and all that. The poor and stupid policed their own; any one of them trying to act different—like the demon was making the miller’s son do—would be dragged down, punished, exorcised, put in their place. The smart and the fiendish generally gave a bit more leeway, but they, too, had ways of doing things, ways of saying this is Us and that is Them, and if you weren’t too careful you ended up in a crow cage with a bird plucking your eyes out.

  The demon’s boy wasn’t supposed to know about stocks or second languages or the intricacies of pelvic thrusting. At the next town we came to, Gary and I would deliver the demon, sans boy, to a place with clientele of that second tier, who did go in for that sort of thing by default, which in my opinion would have fit him just about perfectly. We were going down the road to Widdward-on-High, and then Big Wattle, and Avonhearth after that. Plenty of nobles and gentry on the way.

  It was a simple matter of audience fit and reaching your target market, as I explained to him.

  The demon listened to all this with a dubious look on his face.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “We do charge a fee.”

  “Aha! I knew there was something!”

  I fixed him with the best offended look I had. “If you’re good at something, never do it for free,” I said. Wisdom from Mister Hobbes, who used to be the cook’s cat at the Duchess’ castle, and who never caught a mouse without first demanding a bacon pastry. “Nothing too large, of course.”

  One favor. A favor, settled to the best of their capacity, whenever Gary and I came calling. I’ve lived long enough to know that sometimes a favor in the right place is a hell of a lot better than a sackful of gold.

  The demon crouched down in front of me. His eyes were pulsing softly, a moonlight color that gave way to grey, and then a deep blue flecked with white, like the sea. “And what if you betray me, Mister Cat?”

  I flicked my tail. The question deserved it. “We don’t betray anyone,” I said. “Rules.”

  “Rules.”

  “Rules. They’re all that separate us from the humans.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. The moon came out from behind a cloud just then, and what a strange sight it must have seen: a pale man and a cat, sitting on either side of a wall of wards, more powerful, perhaps, than the bumbling rocks the humans had slapped together into a wall all those thousands of years ago. Making deals on behalf of half-asleep creatures who could barely get their shit together long enough to better themselves.

  A cat’s got to eat, though.

  “You have until morning,” I said, and stalked back along the path to Gary and a bit of warmth.

  Morning came, and I’d say it came with the smell of dawn and the bleating of lambs. But really, it came with a mob, all dressed up in the very best. Some of them even had pitchforks.

  Now, Gary might not exactly be the sharpest sword in the regiment, but over the years he’s got this moment down to a bit of an art form. He sat out there. His blond hair was braided. He had his second-best leather jacket on, the one he’s sewn with tin discs between the layers. He was polishing his giant sword.

  There’s something about the image that really sticks, you know. Big man. Big sword. Just waiting. You know something’s going to happen. The key is to be out there early, long before the first of them show up. Get ‘em early enough, and the mob just quiets down and forms a line, you know, didn’t want to cause a fuss, you know, just lend a helping hand, definitely not going to suggest you do this and that, oh, no, sir, just a pleasure to meet you is all.

  Gary looked nonchalant, almost bored, but that’s probably just because his brain hadn’t really woken up yet and it was really his spinal cord running the show. Eventually, he blinked and staggered to his feet. The sword rose, pointed in the general direction of the farm. And we were off.

  The mob followed.

  “Did he take the deal?” Gary murmured once we’d got enough of a lead on the weekend pitchfork crowd.

  “Said he’d think about it,” I meowed back, sotto voce. “Told him we’d need a bit of a show.”

  “Damnit.”

  “Start with the salt,” I suggested. “Let’s see how this goes.”

  We came up on the farm. In this early morning, with the wind playing fair on us, Bitter Farm looked even more demonic than it had during the night. Under moonlight it was part of the shadows; under sunlight it looked as if some darkness still clung to it, as if the night had not been entirely dispelled from its windows. The pitchfork crowd fell silent. It was one thing to shout blue murder on your neighbour’s lawn. It was another thing altogether here.

  The demon was waiting outside, seated quite casually on the porch. He had dressed up. In one hand was a long scythe.

  “Well, well, well,�
�� he drawled, and I mean really drawled. “If it isn’t Art and Gary, the demon hunters.”

  “He’s taking the deal!” I whispered to Gary, who grinned, hefted his sword, and walked through the wards as if they weren’t even there. That’s the God-touched for you. Gary can’t see the supernatural, but he sure as hell can trample all over it.

  There was a bit of a poof! and the wards exploded, setting up a rather convenient ring of fire between us and the mob.

  “Nice touch,” said Gary, pretending to snarl something at the demon.

  “I had a bit of oil around the house,” said the demon, pretending to pirouette out of the way. Darkness swished about him.

  Gary hefted the giant sword. “Need to make this look good.”

  “Then let us give them a proper show,” said the demon. “Now, one, two, three—”

  They leaped at each other and started hacking away, scythe versus sword, clang, clang, hiss. I found a nice place to watch. Of course, they were both human, and so they weren’t terribly agile, but the demon did some really fancy flourishes with the scythe. Good footwork, that lad. You could see he was really trying. Gary, predictably, just stood there and hammered back. The crowd bayed like dogs every time his sword clanged on the scythe.

  It was a shame, really. A perfectly good demon, chased out of a host, for no greater crime than wanting the lad to be a little bit better spoken and a tad more hygienic and be slighter better poised to carpe diem than the average turnip. A little more understanding, a lot less panic, and this whole village could have prospered, and that young lady would have grown up a lot happier into the bargain. But no. Instead we had sword against scythe, set to the jeers of the mob.

  Out came the salt. Two shakes and the boy went sprawling, screaming. The demon shuddered out of his host, invisible to all but me, and came and sat down next to me. He’d opted out of his demon form and taken something closer to my cat-shape—except, of course, being a demon, he couldn’t help the glowing eyes or the bat-like wings or the nervous sneezing.

  “It’s a bit painful in there.”