A slow smile spread over Chess’s face. “Sounds like a deal to me.” They glanced at Ralgath. “What about you?”
Ralgath tried to keep his expression professional, even though he wanted to grin like an idiot. “That sounds acceptable, Mr. Gizrun.”
“Good, good.” Gizrun swiveled a few eyes in the direction of the sleeping Fluffpaw. “You can even pick out a real hellhound, if you want.”
Chess’s eyes widened in horror. “Replace Fluffpaw?”
Ralgath cleared his throat. “With all due respect, Mr. Gizrun, Fluffpaw has proven herself a valuable member of the team.”
Gizrun shook his head. “If you say so. All right, Ralgath. Come to a crossroads at midnight once a week. If I’ve got a job for you, a demon will appear and give you the details.”
Ralgath bowed slightly. “Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.”
Gizrun vanished in a puff of sulfur-scented smoke, and Ralgath turned slowly back to Chess. “I—”
With a loud squeal, Chess launched themself off the car. Ralgath caught them in surprise, and Chess wound their arms and legs around him. “I can’t believe it. You get to stay with me.”
“I can’t believe it myself,” Ralgath said, and kissed them soundly. “I never expected Mr. Gizrun to make such an offer.”
They held each other for a long time, just breathing, feeling the newness of their partnership, the joy of being together.
“You don’t mind being relegated to the mortal world?” Chess asked after a while.
Ralgath leaned back just enough to look Chess in the face. “I’m happy to be in any world that has you in it.”
Chess’s expression softened. “Sweet-talker.” They kissed him again. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before Gizrun changes his mind.”
Ralgath climbed into the passenger seat, and Chess cranked the engine. As they started off into the hazy southern night, Ralgath had never been happier. The wind ruffled Chess’s hair, and their mouth was set in a smile that warmed Ralgath all the way to his toes. Fluffpaw hung her head out of the car, and as usual, her tongue flapped in the breeze.
“There is one thing,” Chess said.
“Oh? What’s that?”
Chess glanced at him out of the side of their eye. “You’re going to have to meet my parents.”
Ralgath grinned and settled back in the seat. “All right,” he said as they left the crossroads behind. “It’s a deal.”
JORDAN L. HAWK is a nonbinary queer author from North Carolina. Childhood tales of mountain ghosts and mysterious creatures gave them a lifelong love of things that go bump in the night. When they aren’t writing, they brew their own beer and try to keep the cats from destroying the house. Their best-selling Whyborne & Griffin series (beginning with Widdershins) can be found in print, ebook, and audiobook at Amazon and other online retailers.
Collared
By TA Moore
When ex-priest Jack finds a dead man nailed to his bed, he knows it’s going to be a bad night. He just has no idea how bad. Now he’s been recruited by his own personal demon to find the thieves who killed a man, kidnapped his family, and stole something of indescribable value from the demonic Math. To find answers he has to delve deep into the infernal underbelly of his town and face his own past. Jack’s been promised his soul back if he succeeds. As local cop Ben Ambrose risks his own soul by following too closely in Jack’s footsteps, and with a child’s life on the line, Jack has to decide if it’s a deal he’s willing to make.
To the Five who have always believed in me, to Mum who always worries I’ve not slept enough, and to everyone who’s said “but you seem so nice” after reading my stories.
1
PEOPLE HAVE always said that the world was going to Hell. In the end it didn’t have to. Hell came to us.
THERE WAS a dead man sleeping in Jack’s bed. A red smile had been cut into his throat, deep enough to flash a sliver of stained bone in his spine, and his hands had been nailed to the headboard with thick iron railroad spikes. Flies buzzed blood-drunk circles in the air or crawled, too glutted to fly, over the pillows.
Jack poured himself a whiskey. It didn’t do much for him—his body had gotten used to harsher spirits—but it felt like an appropriate response to the situation.
He was going to have to get new sheets.
The corpse hadn’t put itself there. Jack had seen suicides cut their throats before—you had to really mean it, but some did—but never drive spikes through their palms afterward. So it was either a frame-up or a message. Jack went to the window and twitched the curtain back to look out.
The moon was bright and silver, and the sidewalks were lit with steady fluorescence from the streetlights. If he blinked, he could see the crimson shadow of Hell’s flayed-skin moon laid along the road, and the streetlights flickered with the lucifer yellow of old gas lamps.
Demons liked gas. It had so many… connotations.
The bloom of the Witching Hour had nearly reached the city. One way or another, pretty soon he’d find out what the corpse was there for. Jack sat down on the floor on the far side of the room, his back braced against the mold-spotted wall and his legs stretched out in front him. Muscle memory made him drink the whiskey as he waited, even though it sat sour and unappealing in his gut—like a childhood friend at a school reunion, not nearly as much fun as you remembered and prone to repeat.
Self-hatred turned belly-up in Jack’s brain and cackled at him. School reunion, it mocked in a scratched-out voice, like if any of your schoolmates were alive, they’d ask you to come?
Jack snorted and tilted his glass in a mute toast and then tossed back the last of the disappointing liquor. He couldn’t argue with that. Last time he’d seen any of his old classmates….
He felt the bloom of the Witching Hour against his shoulders, a tug at old hooks buried down under the skin.
On the bed the corpse gagged on a mouthful of flies and sat up. Ichor dribbled black from the corners of its mouth, and Jack could see the tendons and muscle in the exposed throat work as it struggled to speak.
For a second it was a horror, and then it folded beauty around itself. Dirt-matted gray hair turned to silver, the coarse drink-raddled features sharpened, and the death-bloated corpse tightened. As before-and-after pictures for damnation went, it was effective.
Jack grimaced and looked away. It had been a long time since the demon picked that body to wear, a long time since he’d had to see that face and that mouth. His own fault. It never did any good to think about the past. When would he learn that?
“What the hell happened to my hands?” Math complained. His voice sounded like an opera singer had gargled with ground glass, like a boy had breathed too deeply of hellfire. “Why the fuck am I nailed to the bed?”
“Maybe I’ve gotten kinky,” Jack drawled as he drew his legs under him and pushed himself up the wall.
The eyes should have been blue. That’s how Jack always remembered them. Instead they were black and glossy like jet beads. The smile was the same, though—slow and uneven.
“Promises, promises.”
Math pulled his hands free. The spikes sounded wet as they tore through skin, and the fine bones snapped like dry, brittle sticks. For a second Jack saw the rot beneath, and then Math’s skin stitched back together over it.
“What do you want?” Jack asked.
Math smiled a devil’s sharp smile. “Does it matter?”
It should, but they both knew it didn’t. The hook in Jack belonged to Math, and so, by extension, did Jack. He’d do as he was told, like a trout strung from the river on a line, but he didn’t have to be enthusiastic about it.
And if he asked, that small, self-loathing voice in Jack’s head mocked him, what would you do for him if he just asked?
That was still too easy a question to answer. It was how Jack had gotten into this mess in the first place. He stayed where he slouched against the wall, empty glass dangled between his fingers, and waited.
Math gave in firs
t. Patience was a virtue, and on principle, he had no truck with it. He climbed off the soiled bed and padded naked to the dresser. It hurt Jack not to look, to keep his eyes off the long, lean lines of tight muscle and pale honey skin, and it didn’t help. He knew Math’s body, and the ache of want settled in the cradle of Jack’s hips, the cramp of it tight in his thighs and the web of muscle across his stomach. His cock ached, tight and heavy as it stirred under his jeans, and he remembered how his hands had skimmed over the smooth curve of Math’s ass.
“Someone stole from me,” Math said as he pulled open drawers and searched roughly through Jack’s clothes. He left boxers crumpled on the floor and T-shirts piled on the candle-scarred walnut top of the dresser. Jack poked down under the thin buzz of the whiskey for irritation, but he couldn’t muster any. After all the times Math had rummaged through Jack’s soul, it seemed pointless to object to him touching a few old shirts. “I want what they took.”
Jack laughed, and Math turned to look at him. The tilt of his head cast a shadow on the shabby walls that didn’t quite match his flesh. Anger curled his mouth and tightened the pale, perfect skin over bones as sharp as his smile.
“I stole nothing,” Math said. “I took nothing that you didn’t give.”
“You kept it, though. Me.”
Math shrugged and grabbed a pair of jeans. He pulled them up over long legs and tucked his cock in behind the zip. “You dressed better when you were a priest.”
“I suppose I did.” Jack tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “I was better when I was a priest.”
Math padded across the room, betrayed by the creak of old, winter-warped boards, and stood too close to Jack. His breath was sweet—cinnamon and first fall apples—but there was no warmth to the hand that brushed Jack’s face. There never had been. His skin had always been cool, even when Jack’s was slick with sweat and dizzy with high summer and… lust.
“Liar.” For a second Jack wasn’t sure what Math meant. They were both lies. He opened his eyes and looked up into coal-black eyes. Math’s fingers lingered on his jaw. “You were the same man then. You were just more… afraid.”
Jack stiffened his neck to resist the urge to tilt his face into Math’s cold hand, like a lover or a pet. He bared his teeth in a humorless smile.
“Not afraid enough,” he said.
Math laughed. There was something under his humor that pricked the back of Jack’s neck with atavistic fear, like the dread one felt when they heard the brittle crack of ice underfoot. It made him hard too. The fact that that was the least of his issues didn’t say much about his life.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Math said as he turned and grabbed a T-shirt from the bed. “You would still have wanted me more.”
It wasn’t that Jack spent a lot of time on his clothes. Interchangeable jeans, interchangeable T-shirts, the same biker boots and leather jacket, but as Math pulled the soft blue fabric over his head, the muscles in his back heavy as they moved under his skin, Jack realized it was his favorite. Or it was his favorite now. Math could make it hard to tell what direction your want ran—to him or from him.
“I guess we’ll never know,” Jack drawled. His mouth was dry with lust, so he grabbed the whiskey from the table and took a swig straight from the bottle to wash it away. It used to work better. “What do you need?”
Math looked at him and Jack felt a cold chill down his spine. It was never easy to forget what Math was but Jack could usually manage it for a while. Until moments like this when Math went to someplace past simply still and a caveman part of the brain freaked that a predator was considering Jack for dinner.
After a moment Math cocked his head slowly to the side. His black eyes grazed down Jack’s body from his shoulders to the hard, didn’t-give-a-fuck-about-good-ideas jut of his cock under his jeans. The tip of his tongue dabbed his lower lip.
“If only you’d been this accommodating when you were alive,” Math said as his gaze flicked back up to Jack’s face. “Now all you have that I need is a car.”
Jack winced. There was nothing like the truth to draw blood.
“Kill yourself once,” he drawled, “and nobody lets you live it down. You have an address?”
Math blinked contemptuously at him. “No. I thought we’d just drive around until I see something that looks familiar. Come on. We don’t have long.”
He walked out of the bedroom. Jack watched him go, because apparently his cock was actually incapable of learning, and he waited. The hook caught under his breastbone and lodged there, a jolt of sharp pain that punched through him. Wet, itchy sweat prickled at the back of his neck, and his breath rasped against the back of his throat.
It reminded him of summers back home when he was a kid, of the racoons his dad trapped on the porch and laughed at as they choked themselves to death on his shitty snares. Jack had cut one loose once, after the old man drank himself into piss-wet unconsciousness, but it hadn’t absolved him. One live racoon didn’t make up for all the dead ones.
Jack deserved this. It didn’t mean he could bear it.
“Suffer on your own time,” Math said impatiently from the hall. “I don’t have time for you to wallow.”
Jack let the compulsion win. The cracked-bone, exposed-marrow pain of it eased immediately as he stepped away from the wall. He capped the whiskey bottle and clunked it down on the disorganized dresser on the way past, slotted it between his tossed aside shirts. The whole bottle wouldn’t make him slur his words, but he didn’t know what it would do to his blood-alcohol level.
The world rattled along on a fragile balance of disbelief these days. It probably didn’t need Jack to stand up in traffic court to argue that liquor didn’t work on the damned soul of an ex-priest. Although, to be fair, it had sailed blithely past worse evidence of Hell’s incursion into their reality.
Jack grabbed his jacket, keys heavy in his pocket, and shrugged it on. He gestured for Math to leave his desk alone and head on out through the door.
Sometimes, when you couldn’t change what was going on and you didn’t want to understand it, all you could do was shove it under the bed and make sure your toes didn’t stick out from the covers.
Ten years ago a whole fucking town in South Carolina, all 14,000 God-fearing bastards of Jack’s old congregation, had rotted itself straight into Hell, and all the waking world had done was change the road signs.
It wasn’t sarcasm. Jack rolled off the throttle as he turned off Berman, and his knee dipped precariously close to the road as the weight of the bike leaned into the corner. Math tightened his arms around his waist.
“Where now?” Jack asked over his shoulder.
“Just drive. I’ll know it when I see it.”
Now that he thought about it, Jack supposed that Math didn’t travel by road often anymore. When you could ride the dreams of the lost and lonely on a straight-shot express from bedroom to bedroom, why commute?
The empty lot of the fairgrounds loomed dark and almost empty on the left, just a chord of twisted calliope music carried on the Witching Hour to catch the ear and pull your eye to the shadows. A ragged banner flapped desultorily over the gate, frayed and faded from six months of weather since Craven’s 42nd Annual Spring Fair. A crow perched on the roll of barbed wire on top of the fence and unspooled a ribbon of innards from something it had spiked on the barbs.
It was Hell’s wink, the barker’s pitch to cajole the susceptible into asking “what if” and whistling the right tune at the right crossroads to catch something’s attention. Out here on the outskirts of the city, where the buildings had no secrets and the suffering was the banality of a nine-to-five, the Infernal still needed an invitation.
The hard line of Math’s body pressed against Jack’s back as he hissed “here” in his ear.
Or at least a ride.
Jack leaned his weight down and let up on the throttle. The heavy rattle of the engine under his ass dulled to a growl as he rolled into an empty parking spo
t in front of a closed diner. Faded white lines marked out the spaces on the concrete. Two large green dumpsters were shoved up against the side of the building, eyes bright and reflective in the shadows under it.
Cat, possum, or imp. At this time of night, in the company Jack kept, it could be any of them.
He let the engine shift into idle and planted his booted foot against the scarred concrete. The Virago wasn’t heavy as bikes went, but he could feel the weight of it against his thigh muscles as he braced it.
“Here?” he repeated dubiously as he looked up at the diner.
A dusty green neon sign was stuck up at a lightning-bolt angle over the door, decorated with the red letters that spelled out No Wait Diner. Through the dark glass, behind his reflection, there were rows of red leather booths and white Formica tables. The sign in the door claimed that the diner was Open but it felt closed, like the dusty sign of abandonment.
Math loosened his grip on Jack’s hips and slid his hand down the taut line of Jack’s thigh as he got off the bike.
“No,” he said over his shoulder. “I just wanted a burger.”
That was sarcasm. Like most demons, Math didn’t eat animal flesh. Souls were like salt to them—without it what was the point.
Jack killed the bike engine and kicked the stand down. He rubbed his hands over his face and thought sourly about the plans he’d had for the night. Two hours ago he’d planned to bribe the old drude behind the jail to snitch on the prisoner’s dreams in return for cheap whiskey and a murdered rat. If he’d known he’d end up here instead, he’d have been more enthusiastic about a night with the drude.
“So what did they steal?” His voice sounded loud and out of place in the dim early morning. “Your grandma’s hot sauce recipe?”
“My grandmother was a rooster,” Math said as he peered through the window of the diner. “My father feasted on him once he hatched.”
“I don’t know what’s worse,” Jack said as he gave in to the prod of curiosity and got off his bike. The rancor was an old friend, but Jack had nursed it too long for it to be interesting. “Your god-awful family tree, or the fact that my kin are still worse.”
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