Marlack glared at me, then coughed up a mouthful of sooty air in my face. I blinked and wiped my face to clear my vision, and when I could see straight again, Marlack was standing several feet away, perfectly composed. There was nothing in my hand but his necktie. I hate illusionists.
“That was a good trick, Mr. Harker, but not quite good enough.”
“I think it did alright. It got my hands around your throat.” I stepped forward, shoving myself forward with my enhanced strength and speed, but Marlack vanished as my hands went right through his neck. I really, really hate illusionists.
I spun around, looking for the annoying magician. Marlack stood in the center of the room, in a circle surrounded by more circles and sigils than my eye could trace. I looked down, making sure that I wasn’t trapped in any of the room’s many inlaid circles myself, and started toward him.
“Debilitatio.” Marlack pointed at me, and a bolt of green energy flew from his fingers. I leapt into the air, but the spell was cast on me, not just hurled in my general direction, so the magical arrow bent like a guided missile and followed my every move. It struck me square in the chest as I came down from my leap, and all my limbs turned to jelly. I landed on the inscribed marble in a heap, unable to move or feel any of my extremities.
I listened to those goddamn dress shoes click across the floor again, thinking about what kind of pansy wears hard-soled shoes to a fight as Marlack stepped over me. He reached down and rolled me onto my back before kneeling beside me. “Now I think it’s time for this charade to end, Mr. Harker. Let’s stop pretending that you are any threat to me, and I’ll stop pretending that you’re going to live through the night. Vis vires.”
With the murmured Latin, his hands glowed a deep purple, almost black against his pale skin. He reached out with his long fingers and wrapped one hand in the collar of my shirt and the other around my belt. Marlack stood, and hefted me over his head as he did so, like a professional wrestler hoisting a child. My two hundred and forty pounds bounced in his grip like it was nothing, and Marlack strode to a window, hefted me once more, then chucked me through like so much battered garbage.
I felt my skin tear as the glass shattered across my face, then the cold wind rush by as I made my rapid descent. I had just enough time to think that maybe Marlack was more than I had expected when I spun over in midair and saw what was rushing up to meet me.
I had just enough muscle control to mutter, “Oh fuck,” before I landed face-first on the roof of a parked Suburban.
Chapter 8
I lay there, face full of broken glass and Chevrolet factory paint, thinking about the poor choices I’d made in life.
That’s total bullshit. I lay there thinking, Fuck that hurt, until the first flashing red and blue lights showed. Then I shifted my internal monologue to just, Fuck. I still couldn’t move, although I wasn’t sure if it was due to Marlack’s spell or the grievous injuries I’d just sustained, and I could tell by the sirens that there were ambulances and police arriving on the scene. The last thing I wanted to do was explain to some overzealous public servant exactly how I was still alive after a sixty-plus story fall onto several tons of Detroit steel.
That’s more bullshit. The last thing I wanted to do was fight Marlack again, but the next to last thing I wanted to do was deal with the cops or the EMTs. So I made myself move. I peeled my broken body off the roof of the broken car like the coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, leaving a fair amount of blood, skin and a couple of teeth behind. I knew from experience that the blood and skin would replace itself in a few hours, but the missing teeth were going to be a problem for the next couple of days.
I had just rolled to the ground and pulled myself up to my knees when I heard one of the last voices I wanted to hear right in that moment, the usually welcome tones of Detective Rebecca Gail Flynn.
“Mr. Harker. This is where I would typically say something witty like ‘fancy meeting you here,’ except that I am totally and completely unsurprised at seeing you here. After hearing reports of strange flashing lights, explosions and a man falling to his doom from the upper offices of the Pantheon Building, it brings me no surprise at all to see you here in the middle of an explosion of blood, broken glass and property damage. I’m not even surprised to see you alive, no matter how bizarre that may be.” She reached down, helped me to my feet, then continued helping me right into a spin that ended with me face-down on the hood of the destroyed Suburban with handcuffs clicking shut around my wrists.
Flynn hustled me into a nearby squad car and gave the uniform behind the wheel strict instructions to take me to jail, directly to jail, and not to allow me to pass “Go” or collect my two hundred dollars. After a quick thump on the roof of the car, Flynn receded in the back mirror and I turned to face the driver.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider a detour through the emergency room, would you? I think my everything might be broken,” I said through the Plexiglas divider.
“Detective Flynn said straight to the station. So you go straight to the station.” He never turned, not even flicking his eyes up to the mirror.
“But do you want to be the one that ‘just follows orders’ or do you want to be the guy that takes compassion on a fellow human being that’s suffering?” I tried to make myself look suffering. It didn’t take much, since I was still bleeding from a dozen cuts and my left eye was swollen almost completely shut, but my escort still wasn’t looking.
“I want to be the one that’s not playing crossing guard outside all through the winter. So you’re the one that’s going straight to the station.” He kept his eyes firmly focused on the road, leaving me to bleed and throb at my own pace.
*****
The drive to the station took a solid twenty minutes, during which the worst of the bleeding stopped and a couple of small shards of glass expelled themselves from my face as the cuts there started to heal. I decided that I had lost three teeth in the fall, and hoped I hadn’t swallowed them. That always made for an unpleasant morning after. Officer Silence held a hand on the back of my head to keep me from further injury as I got out of the car, a nice touch I thought. He perp-walked me in through the back door and up to Central Booking, where I was fingerprinted (again), had my mug shot taken (again), and was escorted to the drunk tank for holding (again). I settled in on my bench and rubbed my chafed wrists while taking stock of my situation.
I’d failed horribly in my attempt to beat Marlack into submission, or even understanding of his wrongdoings. He wasn’t just unapologetic; he was gleeful about his depravity. I’d ended up in jail, where I was somewhat less than effective in both avenging Kayleigh Garda and protecting any other girls from Marlack’s brat and his fraternity brothers. All in all, I had to admit it was a pretty godawful night. I was sitting there, minding my own business and listening to my blood clot, when a voice jarred me from my moping.
“That’s my seat.” I looked up at a lump of a head atop a mountain of flesh sitting somewhere near seven feet off the ground.
I stared at him, not moving. My mind flashed back to everything I’d ever learned about predators, both human and not. Then I thought fuck it, and stood up. “If this seat means enough to you to die for, then have it. I’ll go sit over there. But if you start some bullshit about that being your seat too right after I get comfortable, then we’re going to have a problem. The kind of problem that involves somebody washing a lot of your blood down the drain in the center of the floor and me quite possibly causing serious injury to my hand while beating your fucking face in. Got it?”
The mountain held up both hands and backed up a couple of quick steps. “Hey man, I don’t want no trouble. You can sit wherever you like. I was just gonna say that I’d been sitting there before I had to go pee, and could you scoot over a little. Okay? But I’ll go sit somewhere else. Just don’t beat me up, please?” His voice was a lot higher when he was scared shitless, and on second look he was just a fat lush spending his weekend in the drunk tank, not some harden
ed criminal trying to establish jailyard supremacy.
I stood up. “Never mind, buddy. Total misunderstanding. I’ll go sit over here. You have a nice sleep.” I crossed the room to the other bunk, all of eight feet away, and sat down facing the now-terrified drunk.
A dreadlocked head popped over the bunk, looking down at me. “You are not a nice man.” The head said, then broke into a grin. “I’m Jake.”
“I’m not interested.”
“I’m not trying to pick up a date, bro, just making conversation. What happened to you? You look like you got run over by a steamroller.”
“I fell down.”
“Shit, man, how far?”
“About sixty stories.”
“Bullshit!”
“Fuck off then.” I lay down on the bunk and put my hands behind my head. Jake’s head disappeared for a minute, then the rest of him spun into view as he dropped down off the top bunk and sat at my feet. He was a skinny black dude with long dreads, a pierced nose, the bloodshot eyes of the cosmically stoned, and a Bob Marley Legend t-shirt. I shook my head. I tend to immediately discount the musical opinions of people wearing shirts with records that were released before they were born. Of course, before I was born they were making music on wax cylinders, so I suppose I’m only a poseur if I wear a Mozart shirt. Which I never will.
“Hey man, I’m just trying to be friendly. How did you fall that far and live? Did you go, like, super-limp or something? Are you like a superhero? Or are you just really, really fucked up? I mean, I read once that if you’re fucked up enough, you don’t get tense at the moment of impact, and you can like live through almost any fucking thing. Like getting hit by a bus or whatever. Is that what happened to you?”
It took me a minute to parse the sentence, but when I did I just shook my head. “Go away, kid. I’ve had a really shitty night and I just want to sleep this off, get up in the morning, post my bail, and go home. I don’t want to deal with fighting for turf, I don’t want to deal with making friends, and I don’t want to talk about my night. You got all that? Good. Now get your ass off my bunk and leave me alone.”
“Nah, I don’t think so.” He leaned back and grinned at me.
I sat up, looking around for a weapon. That’s when I noticed that no one else in the cell was moving. At all. Not like they were asleep, like they were frozen in time. Or like I was suddenly outside of time. I jumped out of the bunk and stomped across the cell, trying to find something to kick that wouldn’t hurt too much in the jail slippers I was wearing.
After a minute of fruitlessly looking for something to use as a weapon, I turned back to my bunk, where “Jake” was now sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed, smiling at me like a cat with a bellyful of canary. Then I realized what was happening. “Goddammit, Glory, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Guardian stuff. You know, making sure you don’t become somebody’s prison bitch while you sleep, that sort of thing.” My angel’s voice sounded strange coming through Jake’s weed-scarred vocal chords, but it was probably doing all sorts of good things for him being inhabited by one of the Host.
“Yeah, like that was going to happen.” I looked around the cell and waved at the others in my little twelve by twenty room. There was Tubbo, the innocuous fatty that I’d given up the first bunk to. He was probably three hundred fifty pounds of Jell-O and milquetoast, not exactly the stuff my nightmares were made of. Then there was skinny Jake, too high to tie his own shoes, much less subdue me. That only left one little guy stretched out on the top bunk across the room, a banker-looking dude about five-eight with wire-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline. He looked too timid to take eleven items through the express lane at the grocery store, much less attack anyone.
“It was. The guy whose body I’m inhabiting? He killed three people last night in a psychotic break. In the movie in his mind, you’re his high school girlfriend and this whole conversation has been taking place after prom. You two had been waiting months for this perfect moment, and he was about to seal the deal with you.”
“Not while I’m still breathing,” I said, looking back over at Jake. He looked harmless, if high. “Are you sure he’s delusional?”
“He thinks Fox News really is fair and balanced,” Glory replied.
“Yup, batshit crazy,” I agreed. “What about these two dweebs? Weren’t they going to help?” I pointed at Tiny and Tubbo on the other bunk.
“They aren’t the ‘get involved’ type. The fat one is so scared he pees a little every time anybody speaks to him, and the other one is a complete blank to me.” Her brow furrowed as she said that.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Glory stood up, in Jake’s body, and walked over to the side of the bunk where the little guy was frozen. She stared at him for a few seconds, then turned back to me. “Run.”
“What? Where?” I asked. Glory/Jake had this look of pure terror on his/her face, like nothing I’d seen before. What the hell could scare an angel? I found out as the little nebbishy guy, who looked like a less butch Les Nessman off the old TV show WKRP in Cincinatti, sat bolt upright in bed, bounded across the room, and wrapped his legs around Jake/Glory’s neck. The second he touched the angel, time started moving at its normal pace again, which is to say way too fast for my comfort.
Nebbish had his legs locked around Jake’s neck, and I could tell from the look on Jake’s face that he had no idea how he’d gotten there. Apparently whatever was in the other prisoner bounced Glory out of Jake on contact. Then Nebbish straightened his legs out and twisted at the hips, crossing his ankles and pushing himself upwards on his hands in a sitting position. The twist he put on Jake’s neck resulted in a very unhealthy-sounding POP, and the dreadlocked head lolled to one side, eyes going blank in death.
Tubbo saw the body drop to the floor in front of his bunk and curled up the fetal position. I could smell the urine flowing from across the cell. No help coming there. Nebbish dropped from the top bunk, straightening his shirt as he stepped up to me.
“Mr. Harker, what a pleasure to meet you. I was instructed to tell you that Jacob Marlack sends his warmest regards. And by ‘warmest,’ he is referring to the Hell he has hired me to send you to. Have a nice trip.” Nebbish threw a punch at my midsection that probably would have sent his fist out through my spleen if it connected. I decided that it shouldn’t connect, so I sidestepped the punch and grabbed Nebbish’s wrist. I pulled, and he flew past me to crash face-first into the bars of our cell.
He turned around, and the look on his face made me take an involuntary step back. The little bastard was smiling. Blood was streaming down his forehead from where his head impacted the bars, and he was grinning at me through the red drops. He came at me again, keeping his hands low and outside to prevent me from going around him this time. I saw what he was doing, so I didn’t go around him. I went straight at him instead, diving headfirst across the floor, rolling over onto my back as I slid between his spread legs, and kicking upward with a front snap kick from the floor. My slipper caught him square in the nuts, and he toppled forward. He recovered fast enough to turn his tumble into a forward roll, and was back on his feet facing me by the time I scrambled to my feet.
“What the fuck are you?” I asked.
“What am I?” Nebbish repeated. “You ask the wrong question, mortal. I am not a what, but a who. I am the Grand Marquis Fornas, leader of twenty-nine of Hell’s legions, corrupter of the sciences, defiler of the experiments, and despoiler of the philosophies. I am a warrior, a poet, a scholar, and your doom.” He lunged at me again, but I’d used his monologue to maneuver us around so that Tubbo was right behind me, and when Fornas leapt, I dropped flat, leaving the Grand Marquis to fly face-first into a great big pile of terrified, gibbering drunken pee. He shrieked with rage and turned to fling himself at me again, but with enough time to think for once, I caught him in midair and pressed my right hand to his forehead.
“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei
Patris omnipotentis, et in noimine Jesu Christi Filii ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti, ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei, quod Dominus noster ad templum sanctum suum vocare dignatus est, ut fiat templum Dei vivi, et Spiritus Sanctus habitet in eo. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum, qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos, et saeculum per ignem.”
I wasn’t sure if it would work with me not knowing Nebbish’s True Name to cast out the demon, but I poured my will into my right hand and felt the tattoos flare to life along my arm and my palm. They burned as the power of The Word coursed through me, and Nebbish dropped to his knees screaming. I screamed right along with him, because having holy magic run through your arm feels an awful lot like sticking your middle finger in a light socket while being struck by lightning and peeing on an electric fence all at the same time.
The air around us went dark as noxious purple-grey smoke billowed from Nebbish’s mouth, nose, ears and eyes, and all I heard over the sound of screaming was more screaming and a faint fire alarm in the distance. Finally, after what felt like a year but was probably all of thirty seconds, Nebbish’s eyes went back to normal human hazel eyes, all the smoke in the room cleared in an instant, and I fell to the floor with a diminutive accountant on top of me.
I lay there trying to catch my breath and wondering exactly how I was going to explain this to the nice man lying on top of me when suddenly Nebbish’s weight was lifted off me and I was hauled roughly to my feet. My eyes were still trying to focus, but I got a good look at Detective Flynn as the two uniforms dragged me out of the cell and down the hall.
“I warned you, Detective, I’m the reason we can’t have nice things,” I said, giving her my best saucy smile. Then I passed out.
Chapter 9
Raising Hell - a Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella Page 6