“Lucifer is the eighth Archangel?”
“Well…at one time he was the first.”
“If we’re getting Glory’s wings back, we have to make a deal with the devil?”
“Literally.”
“Fuck me.”
Then my phone rang, and my day went from shitty to spectacularly shitty.
15
“What?” I said into the phone.
“We need you, Harker.” The voice on the other end of the phone was almost panicked, but it was still mostly recognizable as Arianne.
“What’s going on? It’s still full daylight. There’s no way anything’s going down this early—”
“You ever been wrong before?” The girl cut me off.
“Yeah, once or twice.” It’s the kind of thing that’s bound to happen in a century of wandering the planet. I even made a few fashion misplays in the sixties, but everybody was on so many drugs nobody noticed.
“Well, add this one to the list because Barathan has Tara on the steps of the old Slave Market and is ranting about burying the whole city under the waves to wash away the blood of his ancestors. Now please get your ass down here with whatever magical grenades or rocket launchers or whatever else you’ve managed to dig up.” She hung up before I could respond, and I was left staring at a dead phone.
I turned to Gabriel. “How do you feel about mass murder?” I asked.
“Typically not a fan although I was willing to make an exception for Gomorrah, and for the assholes who destroyed the Library at Alexandria.”
“Just Gomorrah?”
“I never cared that much about Sodom. They were all cool, actually. The Gomorrans were rude, so I helped wipe them out. And don’t get me started on my Library. I’m still upset about that.”
I just shook my head. Sometimes my life is weird even to me, and I’m the one stuck in it. “We need to go stop a psycho witch from sinking Charleston into the sea, apparently. Come on.”
“No can do,” the angel replied, not moving. Not even making the beginning of an attempt at moving.
“What the fuck, dude?” I asked, already at the door with my Glock in my waistband. “Are you coming or not?”
“Not.”
“Is there any reason for this, or do you just feel like being a dick?”
“I can’t go out there in my true form. It would cause too much of a stir. People would see me and think that Revelation has begun. It’s not time for that yet, so it would not be advisable for me to leave in my current, glorious state.”
“So change back into less-awesome Gabe and come on. This asshole will kill this woman, and probably a lot of other people, if we don’t stop him.”
“I refuse to return to that addlepated form. I have spent many years quoting that Elizabethan hack ad nauseum, and I will not do it any longer.”
“So you’re not going to de-angel?”
“I will remain in my true form, that is correct.”
“And you won’t go out in public like that?”
“Also correct.”
“How do you plan to go to Charlotte with me?”
“I plan to travel mystically. I will meet you there.”
I forgot about that whole popping from place to place thing. I always thought Glory went to Heaven, flew over to the right spot on Earth, and came back, but teleportation (or mystical travel) made more sense. “So you’re not going to help me?”
“Unless you can move the confrontation to later in the evening, or this room—no.”
I was pretty sure I couldn’t just raincheck the guy trying to shove the entire city off into the ocean, so I just walked to the door. “Just for the record,” I said, stepping out into the hall, “you’re a dick.” Slamming the door behind me didn’t really get me anywhere in the argument, but it sure made me feel better.
I didn’t bother with the car. I just sprinted down the street to the Old Slave Market. Sure enough, there was a skinny black dude holding balls of crimson energy standing in front of the building, under the big arch proclaiming it the “Old Slave Mart Museum.” He’d invoked a circle in the flashiest way possible—by surrounding himself with a four-foot-high ring of fire. It had the combined effect of keeping people back and, honestly, making him look totally badass. I had to give the guy credit, he knew how to stage a photo op.
Behind him, hanging from the arch with magical bonds, was Tara, Arianne’s priestess. She looked mostly unharmed, but royally pissed. I couldn’t blame her, honestly. She was hanging by her wrists from magic chains in front of the whole city, looking helpless in the worst place of all—public.
Arianna stood across the cobbled street surrounded by other witches, an island of stillness against the raging tide of humanity flooding up Chalmers Street toward Church Street, trying to put the flaming nutjob behind them as quickly as possible. I skipped the normal pleasantries, just walked right up to the edge of Barathan’s flaming circle.
“I think the Iron Throne is missing one asshole. They’d like you to come home as soon as possible,” I said.
“I will sink this entire city beneath the waves for the crimes it has committed against my people!” the crazy wizard yelled.
It was a little hard to hear him over the crackling flames in front of me, so I waved a hand and shouted “QUELL!” I made a bet that his fire was really just an outer ring of flash, instead of being part of his actual circle, and it paid off as a couple hundred gallons of water condensed out of the air around us and doused the flames.
I stood in the giant cloud of steam with my arms crossed. When I could see Barathan again, I gave him a little smile. “That’s better. Now, what were you saying?”
His eyes bugged out, and his face contorted into a grimace as he tried to raise his fire again and ran into my own magic stopping him. “This place is just a monument to hate and racism. This whole city was built on the backs of my people. Now their descendants will pay for what they did!” Spit flew from his mouth as he shouted.
“You do know that none of these people enslaved you, right? Oh, and by the way, you were never a slave. You’re a fucking hipster millennial just looking to make a name for yourself. Get a job, fuckwit.”
He turned the peculiar shade of purple I’ve usually associated with eggplants and one particular breed of lycanthropic Fae that I met in Lichtenstein. I’ve never seen it in a human before.
“Just because I wasn’t a slave doesn’t mean I don’t know what it feels like to be hated. They killed my brother, you bastard!”
Shit. He wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill magical asshole looking to get famous. He was a crusading magical asshole with what he thought was a good reason to sink Charleston under the Atlantic. If he killed Tara inside his circle, he might have enough power to do it.
Letting out a primal yell, he dropped his shield just long enough to throw a fireball at my head. He was really good at that throwing fire trick. Good thing I was prepared for him this time.
I murmured “suffocate” under my breath and held up my hands, palms out, at the onrushing ball of fiery doom. My magic flew right at the streaking missile and hit it square. All the air vanished from around the sphere, and the flame winked out, just like snuffing a candle. I felt a warm tingle as the magic passed through me, but there was no fire left, not even smoke.
“Nice try, asshole,” I said, my mind racing. Brother? Who killed his brother? I looked around to Arianne for a little assist, but she and her coven had turned their attention to the fleeing crowd, trying to keep people from trampling each other and healing the folks who fell or twisted ankles.
“I’m sure your brother would have been proud of you, murdering all these people and destroying the city in his honor. That’s really the kind of thing that makes somebody feel the loving memory, you know.”
“Fuck you!” he shouted back. Obviously, my witty repartee was going to be lost on this one. “You don’t know shit about Derek. He wasn’t doing nothing, and they shot him down like a dog in the street!”
> Something in the back of my head started to tickle, like I’d heard this story before. There was a kid, something about a traffic stop, and the cop thought he had a gun, and it turned out to be a wallet. The cop wasn’t prosecuted, and there were a lot of people pissed off about it. Including one brother with a fair chunk of magical talent.
“You’re Derek’s brother?” Arianne’s voice came from my left elbow.
“You probably shouldn’t be here right now,” I said.
“Don’t act like you knew Derek, bitch!” Barathan screamed. “I will burn you to ash right where you stand!”
“I did know Derek. We had Spanish together a couple years in school. He went to West Ashley, right? Graduated three years ago? He wrote in my yearbook.”
“Yeah, we both went there. I graduate next year.”
Next year? This fucking kid’s sixteen? Oh sweet bleeding Jesus. If he has power like this at sixteen, by the time he hits twenty, he really will be able to sink a city. This kid couldn’t go to jail; no jail would be able to hold him. I had to think fast, but first I had to make sure he didn’t cut Tara’s throat and make Chucktown go the way of Atlantis.
“If you ever want to hold a diploma, you need to cut this shit out, Junior,” I said. Maybe appealing to his sense of the future would get me somewhere.
“Fuck you, asshole!”
So much for appealing to his future self. “So what’s the play, kid? You gonna cut her throat and harness her energy to open the fault line under Charleston Harbor? Crack that bad boy wide open and flatten South Carolina all the way up to Charlotte? Maybe you’d rather summon up a tsunami and just wipe out the whole coastline? That oughta run out of steam somewhere around Wilmington if you’re lucky. Shouldn’t kill more than a couple million people. That sounds fair, right?”
He started to look a little unsure, so I pressed my advantage. “Oh, you thought you could just, what? Dig a moat around Charleston and push this place into the ocean? You thought that wouldn’t wreck anything else? Maybe you shouldn’t bother trying to get a diploma. You’re obviously too stupid to get out of high school. I’m surprised you’ve made it this long remembering to look both ways before you cross the street. I guess your big brother really did get a raw deal. It’s bad enough he got killed by a cop, but he had to take care of your dumb ass his whole life, too? That really sucks.”
The teenaged mage did exactly what teenagers do when you poke them enough—he lost his shit. In this case “his shit” didn’t just consist of his temper or his control on his profanity, which if we’re being fair, he never really had under wraps in the first place. He also lost his sense of his surroundings, so when he took his first step forward to deliver the ass-kicking I certainly deserved, and just as certainly was not going to receive, he broke the plane of his circle, and all his wards dropped with a POP.
Normally when I bait someone into dropping their shields, I step forward and knock them out. Sometimes I shoot them in the face. Sometimes I trap them in a circle of my own or send them back to Hell. I didn’t do any of that to Barathan. As a matter of fact, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have to.
The second his circle fell, all the other bindings and protections he’d woven into it disappeared as well. That left him standing three feet in front of a very pissed-off High Priestess, who dropped to her feet and stepped forward, conjuring a huge green glowing war hammer as she did. She laid that hammer upside Barathan’s head, and he dropped to the ground like a marionette with its string cut.
I looked over at Arianne who gave me a thumbs-up. “Great work, Harker!”
“Yeah, great. Except this guy mopped the floor with us just a couple hours ago. Do you ever get the feeling that something was just a little too easy?”
I’ve really got to learn to keep my mouth shut.
16
16
Barathan was out, but he had one last trick up his sleeve. Just like terrorists rig up secondary charges to go after the first responders to a bomb attack, he had a bomb of his own lurking in the shadows. Well, not really the shadows so much as the slave market. When his circle fell, a second wall of magical fire that had been obscured by his flaming barrier also fell. This magical barricade wasn’t holding us out; it was filling the gate to the old slaver’s auction house holding something in.
Stepping out of the darkened market into the sunlight was one of the biggest damn demons I’d ever seen. It was huge and walked on four legs, then stood up in the middle with two arms and even more badness. It looked like a cross between a lobster, one of H.R. Geiger’s Aliens, and a yellow jacket. Pincers the length of my legs protruded from its midsection, and a triple row of teeth populated its mouth. It had a forked tongue and two tails, one with a club-like growth at the end, and the other one ending in a nasty-looking spike dripping green ichor to sizzle on the brick pavers.
“That’s not good,” I said with my typical talent for understatement.
“Nope,” Arianne agreed, walking backward to get away from the thing and keep an eye on it at the same time.
“Oh yeah, that’s real bad,” Tara said from her spot directly in front of the monster. It swept its left pincer at her, and she managed to duck, but it right arm came across and punched her in the face, splitting her nose and laying her out across the sidewalk.
“Shit,” I said, drawing my Glock. I fired eight shots in about six seconds, most of them finding a home in the demon’s torso and face, but to no effect. The beastie looked over at me, smiled down from its ten-foot height, and flicked out its forked tongue to lick its lips.
“I picked a bad day to leave my guardian angel at home,” I said, dropping to one knee and invoking a quick circle. The magic sprang into existence just fast enough to deflect the two pincers that were coming for me. They dug into the concrete on either side of me, making divots three inches deep and eight inches long in the sidewalk. I was protected, until my magic couldn’t hold any more, but I was now stuck, unable to move, unable to cast offensive spells, unable to do anything to stop the giant lobster demon from picking Tara up in one huge claw and lifting her over its head.
The demon threw its head back and unhinged its jaw like a snake. It dangled Tara high in the air by one foot and made to swallow her whole. I dropped my circle and poured every bit of energy I could draw upon into a stream of brilliant blue energy aimed right at the demon’s throat. It staggered and dropped the unconscious priestess. She hit the ground with a sickening crack, and I wondered briefly if I had done any saving at all, or if I’d just found my Gwen Stacy moment.
I poured power into the demon for a solid minute, drawing more energy from the city around me and adding it to the blast. It wavered, wobbled, and smoked a little, but it never fell. My power slowed from a torrent to a trickle, then all my juice flickered out, and I dropped to my knees in the street.
“Now you die, human,” the demon bellowed, rising up on its back two legs to strike a killing blow.
“Not today, motherfucker,” I said under my breath, and leapt up like an expanding spring. I pulled my Kershaw knife from my pocket as I vaulted the creature’s head and flicked the razor-sharp blade open one-handed. I hooked my left hand in the demon’s nostril and pulled myself down to drape over its head. I jabbed my pocketknife into its three-inch eyeball and grinned as it screamed in rage and pain.
It started to writhe, probably trying to throw me off at the same time, but I wrapped my legs around its thick serpentine neck and held on like a champion bull rider. It thrashed and convulsed, but I held on tight and kept jamming that little pocketknife farther and farther into its eyeball. I dug in until I felt resistance, then gave a mighty shove. I felt something crunch beneath the tip of the blade, and my hand sunk in its eyeball up to the elbow.
The demon made one last giant spasm, then went still, topping over like someone had just pulled the plug on it. Which, in a way, I guess I had. I twisted my hand around inside the demon’s cranial cavity a couple times for good measure, then pulled my arm out.
My fist was covered in greenish-yellow ichor and black demon blood with a sliver of brain stuck between my fingers.
Arianna walked up beside me and looked at my arm. “That might be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I wish I could say the same,” I replied.
“Does it at least make the Top Three?”
“Top Ten for sure. Maybe Top Five if that smell gets any worse…yep, definitely Top Five.” The demon’s body was rapidly turning to a putrid yellow ooze as its soul returned to Hell and its corporeal form lost consistency. My knife wasn’t any kind of blessed object, and I certainly am nowhere near holy enough to destroy a demon without one, so it wasn’t dead, just banished.
“Is Tara okay?” I asked. I almost didn’t want to know the answer, because I was afraid I knew already.
Arianne surprised me, not for the first time. “She will be. Marcus got to her pretty fast. Is that thing…”
“Gone,” I said. “As long as nobody calls it back, it won’t bother Charleston again.”
“Speaking of people calling up demons…” She jerked her head over to where Barathan lay unconscious and bound across the street.
“I could shoot him,” I said. She looked horrified, so I quickly went on. “I’m kidding. I swear. I know a guy. Well, it’s actually his girlfriend who will be useful here. She works for a government agency that doesn’t exist, if you get what I mean.”
“I get it.”
“Well, they have facilities where they can handle people like Barathan without them posing any more danger to society.”
“Seems kinda shitty, doesn’t it? I mean, all he wanted was justice for his brother.”
“Don’t confuse justice with revenge, Ari,” I said. “I should know.” Images flashed through my memory, over two hundred faces of men I slaughtered across Europe after the Nazis killed my Anna. They were bad people, they deserved punishment, but not all of them deserved to die, and no one deserved to die the way I killed the men. Except demons. Fuck demons. Kill them however you want.
Devil Inside: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Urban Fantasy Novella Page 9