Raising Hell - a Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  Chapter 6

  I leaned back and digested both my eggs and Uncle Luke’s story. After a while, I spoke. “So he didn’t do anything but change his voice and that made you think he was carrying a demon around in his head?”

  “The fact that his eyes glowed purple may have had something to do with it as well,” Luke replied.

  “Okay, that’s something to go on. Purple fire may be his demonic signature,” I said.

  “Like always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time is yours.”

  “Kiss my ass, Unc. I’m going to go upstairs and get some sleep.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then tonight I’m going to pay Mr. Marlack a visit, and we’re going to discuss the etiquette of statutory rape, demon impregnation and having me arrested. I expect the conversation to turn violent. It may even start there. Thank Renny for breakfast for me. And Uncle,” I said, standing up and heading for the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for bailing me out. I really didn’t want to have to deal with this bullshit while I was awaiting trial for murder.”

  “You’re welcome. After all, what is family for?” He laughed, one of those old-school super villain laughs, then flashed into smoke and disappeared.

  I looked around the study. “I hate when you do that!” I yelled to the empty air, then headed upstairs to my room to catch a few hours’ shuteye.

  I live in an apartment near Uptown, but I’ve kept a room at Uncle Luke’s for as long as I can remember. We all did—my brother, my sister and me. I walked into my room and looked at their picture on the dresser. It’s the only thing I’ve got from the old days. I’m not Luke, I don’t drape my walls in velvet tapestries and bitch and moan about days gone by and gripe about all the “horseless carriages” and the general decline of civility. I just keep one photo, taken when we were all in our twenties, of me, James and Orly. That was before we realized how different I was, how much of mother’s blood was changed and passed down to her firstborn. That was back when we thought vampires were just stories that mother told us at night to make us keep our windows locked from the inside.

  I looked at the picture, yellowed and brittle and framed for its own protection, and thought about how much I felt like that paper some days. Old past my time, frayed around the edges and getting brittle with age. Then I shook my head, tried to derail my self-pity train, and poured myself a stiff drink. None of that OJ and Coke shit, either. A proper drink, Scotch with no ice and one lone drop of water to release the flavor. I knocked back the first one, and used the second to chase a couple of Vicodin down the old windpipe. It promised to be one of those days—the kind where my dreams are way more real than I want to deal with—so anything I could do to hold them at bay would be welcome. I checked email and surfed the web for a little while looking for information on Jacob Marlack, then when my eyes got heavy and the whiskey and painkillers started to take effect, I kicked off my shoes and sprawled, face-down and fully clothed, on the duvet and nearly drowned myself in goose down and opulence.

  I awoke some five hours later, undrowned in feathers and with a taste in my mouth like the sewers of Riyadh City. I looked around the room and saw a fresh can of Coke sweating on the night stand where by all rights my Scotch should have been, but Renfield is an industrious and slightly morally superior fellow, so I chose discretion over drugs and whiskey and chugged the soda. I stripped down and walked into my bathroom, finding the customary towels and washcloth laid out for me.

  I don’t know if Renny just comes in and does these things when I’m here, or if there’s some little magical spell he casts each day to freshen up the linens in the room, but everything is always sparkling and dust-free, no matter what ridiculous hour of the day or night I happen to wander in. Sometimes I wonder exactly who is thrall for whom in my uncle’s relationship with this Renfield, then I decided I don’t really give a shit, as long as he doesn’t get in the way. And he never gets in the way.

  A quick shower later, and I dressed in a change of clothes from my armoire. In any other place I’d call it a closet, or if I were feeling particularly genteel, a wardrobe. But in Uncle Luke’s place, it was an armoire. And I offered up another silent prayer of thanks to Saint Renfield for the clothing in there, because it all fit and had been mended since the last time I dressed there. That had involved a werewolf and a misunderstanding about a gambling debt. Actually, he’d understood the amount of my debt perfectly, just not my complete and utter disinterest in paying. That led to an unpleasant discussion and little bits of fur and brain matter becoming rather embedded in the fabric of my jeans. Renfield had either replaced those jeans, or done an amazing job of getting wolf brain out of the knees, because they felt like brand new. I only knew they were my old pants when I found a spare fang in the right front pocket.

  I got dressed and headed downstairs, groaning a little when I remembered that my car was still at the frat house. Gods only knew what those little fuckwits had done to it by now. Renfield met me at the bottom of the stairs, a little smile on his lips.

  “Mr. Quincy, good evening. I trust you feel better after your nap?”

  “I do, thank you for the Coke. I would join you for dinner, but I have to get going. There’s some pressing business I need to attend to with a man who calls demons for fun. Could you call me a cab?”

  “Of course, Mr. Quincy. You are a cab.”

  “You know, just because a joke never gets old, doesn’t mean it was ever funny in the first place. Now how about arranging some transportation for me?”

  “Certainly, sir. Your keys are in your duster, on the hook by the front door. Right front pocket.” Of course. Renfield was a manservant, an old-school, get-shit-done kind of manservant who didn’t need to be told to go get his boss’s nephew’s car from out front of the house where he’d been arrested the night before, he just did it. And we won’t talk about how he got those keys from the pocket of the pants I was sleeping in, but it explained the dream I had about Salma Hayek in the movie theatre watching E.T. Well, it explained part of the dream, anyway.

  “Thanks as always, Ren. You’re the best.”

  “I know.”

  I chuckled a little as I walked past him and out the front door. The sun had set, but that didn’t give me a good gauge on time. It was fall, so that could be anywhere from six to eight in the evening. Either way, it was about the right time to go pay Mr. Marlack a visit. A visit I sincerely hoped he was not going to enjoy.

  Chapter 7

  I wasn’t surprised when I found out that Marlack’s office was on the top floor of one of the massive monuments to small penises and corporate dickheads downtown. I also wasn’t surprised to find that he was still at work at 8:15 PM on a Thursday. I was surprised to find magical wards poured into the concrete on the building’s cornerstone and etched into the windows in the lobby. The wards on the windows flared briefly as I pulled the heavy glass door open and stepped into the atrium. My boots thunked across the marble floor, and I watched as the wage-slave security guard struggled awake behind his huge circular desk.

  “Don’t worry, Frank, it’s just me.” I waved my library card at him as I walked past the desk to the bank of half a dozen elevators.

  “Huh? My name’s Dennis. Who’s Frank? And who are you?” The guard was almost fully coherent by the time the express elevator dinged open and I stepped inside. I gave him a little wave as the doors slid closed, then pressed the button for the sixty-fourth floor.

  Nothing happened. The button lit up for a second, then went dark. I looked around, then noticed the card reader set above the bank of buttons. Obviously Mr. Marlack didn’t want any unexpected or unauthorized visitors.

  Since the next time I willingly walk up sixty-plus flights of stairs will be the first, I pressed my fingertips lightly to the card reader, focused my will on the device, and whispered, “Laborious pro merda,” which loosely translated into, “Work you piece of shit.” I pressed the button for the top floor again, and this time th
e elevator jerked into motion. I leaned against the back wall of the elevator car, arms crossed, feeling pretty darn satisfied in myself. After all, I’d saved the girl’s soul from Hell, figured out who was responsible, and was about to go do some serious smiting. That was a pretty good couple of days for me, even with an arrest thrown in for good measure. All I had to do was bludgeon Marlack into losing interest in the occult, and then finish showing his son the error of his ways. No problem.

  Until the doors opened on the sixty-fourth floor and I stepped out into the biggest damn casting circle I’d ever seen. The elevators sat in the center of the floor, and the second I stepped out, I felt myself cross a magical barrier that had every hair on my body standing at end. And you have no idea how uncomfortable that is while wearing pants. I turned in a slow circle, trying to take in all the unnatural details I could before I opened up my Sight. As bad as this place looked in normal light, I really didn’t want to know what it looked like in the magical spectrum, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have that choice.

  The floor was black marble with gold inlays. To a normal observer, the gold was in random patterns, but if you turned your head just a little and squinted just right you could see the runes set into the floor. That kind of precise gold work must have taken months, and cost millions, but given the kind of critters Marlack’s kid played with, Daddy obviously knew enough to set his defenses. I was standing inside one edge of a ten-foot circle, and I couldn’t break it if I tried. The second I stepped into it, the circle invoked, bringing up a mystical barrier between me and the rest of the known universe. Nothing was getting into that circle unless I, or someone else, summoned it. That wasn’t the part that worried me. I was much more concerned with the fact that I couldn’t get out.

  The rest of the floor, as much as I could see through the shimmer of the magical wall, was decorated in early twenty-first century office dickhead. Lots of exposed chrome and uncomfortable seating, a lot of track lighting and no plants or magazines anywhere. The whole place was designed to make you think the man in the office was very important, and that you aren’t. As soon as my eyes lit on the doors to the office, some dark wood double doors that were probably brought back personally from an expedition down the darkest reaches of the Amazon, the golden knob turned and the doors flung outward. Following in their wake was a tall man, thin but not gaunt, wearing a very sober pin-striped suit and a classy red striped tie. He looked every inch the captain of industry, and appeared to have no more magic than poor old Dennis down in the lobby.

  Until I closed my eyes and looked at him. That’s when I saw the power swirling around him like a heavy green fog. That’s when I could read the sigils carved onto his soul from twenty feet away and knew I was in the presence of a man who lusted for power like I lusted for Angelina Jolie, and would do absolutely anything to get it. He walked across the floor, his perfectly polished loafers making a thin click-click, the brisk click of his steps counting down the remainder of my time on earth, I’m sure.

  “Mr. Harker, I presume?” He stopped just in front of me and held out a hand.

  I looked at the hand like it was something disgusting, which it was. After a few seconds, he pulled it back. Marlack looked up at me with a rueful grin. “I suppose civility was too much to ask for. So be it. What do you want?”

  “I’m here to tell you to stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Playing around with things you don’t understand. You’re messing with stuff humans have no business getting involved in, Marlack.”

  “I’ve been involved with those things, things like your Uncle Luke, since long before you were born, Mr. Harker. I don’t think I’m going to stop now just because you don’t approve of my son’s recreational activities.”

  “Recreational?” I spluttered. I couldn’t even get the word out right. “You call summoning a demon and letting it rape a little girl recreational?”

  “No.” Marlack’s smile disappeared and his eyes went cold. “No, I call it stupid. And I appreciate you dealing with the situation before it got out of hand. But it has been dealt with, and now your services are no longer needed. So, thank you for sending the demon back to Hell. Now, please leave my office.”

  “I don’t think so, pal. You’ve got a lot to answer for, not the least of which is giving that douchecanoe you call a son the books to raise demons with in the first place. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that he needed to start learning to use his gifts, the gifts I worked very hard to bestow upon him. And if he decided to use those gifts on some whore at a party, then the world loses one whore, and nobody notices. Even you only care because he happened to pick an underage whore. If she’d been eighteen and white you wouldn’t give a damn. But Laws a’mercy, we gots to help the little brown girl! We gots to take our liberal guilt and uncle’s money and help the poor little wetback!”

  “Fuck you, pal. Your kid raised a demon, and you taught him how. There’s a price for that, and now it’s time to pay up.”

  “And who appointed you the Morality Police, Mr. Harker? Who gave you the badge and the gun and told you to clean up Dodge City?” He was right in front of me now, less than five feet away, inches from the edge of the circle, which he could obviously pass through without any trouble.

  “I did. When I promised that little girl’s father I’d try to save his daughter.” An image popped into my mind, one I’d worked very hard to keep buried for the past several days. It was a little girl looking at me through the back window of a car as it drove away. I blinked a few times to shove the image back down inside and focus on the asshole at hand.

  “Well, Sheriff, I suppose we are at an impasse,” Marlack said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and stepped back, crossing into another circle as I did so. The barrier that had surrounded the two of us flicked out of existence as the new circle invoked. His power flickered to life in the material plane, and a solid barrier of will sprang into existence along the edges of the circle he stood in, freeing me but separating the two of us. I reached out and touched the surface of the circle, watching the vibrant green magic swirl and pool around my fingertips. I pushed against the magic, and it turned hot to the touch. I snatched my fingers back.

  Marlack laughed. “You can’t think my circle is so weak, can you, Harker?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “I haven’t tested it yet.” With that I drew a silver dagger from the small of my back and jabbed it into the barrier. The blade penetrated about an inch into the circle, then stopped, slowed as if I had stabbed some almost solid mass. The green magic swirled faster, focusing on the blade, and the silver dagger turned red, then white-hot, and melted, falling into two puddles separated by the circle’s scribing.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Marlack said with a smile.

  “I can.” I didn’t boast. I didn’t yell. I just pulled out a 9mm Glock pistol and fired fifteen rounds into the magical barrier. I angled the shots off to the side, away from Marlack’s face and more importantly angled the ricochets away from my own. Green lights flared up with each impact, and I saw Marlack’s brow furrow, but his circle held.

  “Now are you beginning to understand what you’re dealing with, boy?” Marlack asked after the ringing in my ears subsided a little.

  “I’m getting a pretty good picture,” I said. I stepped into the office and began pulling thick law books off the shelves. I took my time building a nice little two-foot wall around the outer edge of the circle, all the time ignoring Marlack’s queries. Once I had the circle completely ringed in bound paper, I pulled out my Zippo, drizzled a little lighter fluid across the tops of the books, and lit them on fire. The books with lighter fluid on them blazed to life, and the fire quickly spread to the entire ring of books. Marlack was perfectly safe from the flames within his circle, but unfortunately for him there was still plenty of air traveling through his magical barrier.

  I walked across the o
ffice and looked for a way to open his floor-to-ceiling windows, but apparently they don’t allow that sort of thing in high-rises. So I put my fist through the glass, shattering it and letting some fresh air in. At least for me. The added oxygen just made the book fire blaze up even higher, and Marlack began to cough. I pulled a chair over from Marlack’s desk and sat by the window, keeping the worst of the smoke from my eyes.

  A fire alarm blared to life, but a whispered, “Silencio,” shut the fire alarm system down before the sprinklers kicked in. Marlack coughed inside his precious circle for a couple more moments, then with a wave of his arms and flash of green light, he dispelled his protective barrier. Another wave of his hands and my circle of burning books broke apart and flew into all corners of the room. Some of them even hurtled through the air and out the open window I was sitting next to. I would have been concerned, but there was too much smoke for Marlack to see me, much less throw a book at me.

  I got up and walked over to the coughing wizard. Tears streamed down his face, and soot stained his forehead. I grabbed him by the throat and pulled him upright. “Now we’re going to talk about your book collection, and then we’re going to talk about what kind of punishment your son gets to face.”