by Bruce Talmas
I had Amber drop me off in Lawrenceville in front of just such a building. I gave her half of the money I still had from my winning streak in Vegas for her troubles, and she offered me a freebie in return. I kindly refused and told her to give my love to Cassandra. The look in her eye said she was going to be giving her love to Cassandra first, but maybe she’d give her some of mine if she had anything left in the tank. Cassandra had that effect on women too.
Lawrenceville had been a forgotten little corner of the city when I had left. Practically a ghost town. Things had changed in the years I’d been away. There were coffee shops and restaurants where pawn shops and tattoo parlors used to be, boutique stores and art galleries where empty storefronts and no-name appliance repair shops had been, and microbreweries had replaced the dive bars and “night clubs” that used to line either side of Butler Street, the main thoroughfare through town . The whole town had a cultural vibe that had been lacking when I’d called these streets home. Hell, I might even do some sightseeing if I survived.
As I moved away from the main drag, the feeling of culture gradually dissipated. The ghosts of old Lawrenceville still lingered here: abandoned buildings, shady characters, and an overall sense of unease began to take hold. The town was vastly improved from what it had once been, but it was still a work in progress. At least the change had started to take place. Changing the heart of a place was never easy. It had a certain inertia that was difficult to fight against. For better or worse, once change started to happen, it was hard to stop. The forces of culture and diversity had taken root; the crime and decay had no choice but to retreat. It wouldn’t go away, of course. It never did. If the town continued on its present trajectory though, the blight would be banished to the back alleys and shadowy street corners far from the throngs of decent people walking down Butler Street.
I entered a stark corner of the neighborhood, moving silently through the abandoned businesses and dilapidated houses. The streets were deserted except for the occasional dealer, but even their numbers seemed fewer than ten years ago. The area’s progress had relegated them to this dingy little section of the town, where no one would find them unless they were looking. They didn’t bother with me; they’d been on the streets long enough to know that I wasn’t a potential customer, and I’d be more trouble than it was worth to try to rob.
I’d known as soon as I took the job from Volkov that I would end up here, and my subsequent conversation with Marchosias only confirmed it. If I couldn’t rely on my Fallen compatriots to see the emanations, I’d have to go see a real live seer. And the most powerful seer on the planet took up residence here, among the windswept streets and blowing refuse of the last bastion of decay in the area.
His name was Vassago, and he was one of the Fallen. He was also who I’d put in charge of protecting my father when I left town all those years ago. Who better to protect the old man from my enemies than someone who could see an attack coming days or even weeks before it actually happened?
I walked the abandoned streets for a long time, retracing my steps again and again, before I got my first whiff of him. He’d always been a sly bastard. I was good at hunting, but if a seer didn’t want to be found, there wasn’t much to be done about it. I humored him for a while, thinking he might just be in the mood to fuck with me, but after a while I decided he didn’t want to be found. Sitting down on the loading platform of an unused warehouse, I lit a cigarette and waited, not really sure what I was waiting for. After two hits, I looked up to see Vassago standing in the middle of the street a short distance away. He was laughing.
“Well well,” he said, “the prodigal son returns.”
“Why didn’t you just show yourself when I got here?” I asked.
“Sometimes the hunter has to stop hunting to find his prey.”
“Thanks Confucius.”
He walked over to me very slowly. He was leaning heavily on his cane. He relied on it more than I remembered, an oddity considering he was an angel and only as old as he felt like being.
“How are you, Vassago?”
He sat down on the steps leading up to the platform. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a blues song: old black man, blind as a bat, dressed in an undertaker’s suit and walking with a cane. His hair had passed beyond gray into a snowy white that peeked out from his fedora. The blinding white of his hair sat in stark contrast to his deep ebony skin, and his skeletal hands held onto the cane with a firmness that belied his apparent age.
“I’m old,” he replied. He was a Fallen, so he could take whatever form he liked. He could be an infant if he wanted, or an alien, or a damn spider monkey, but instead he chose to be an old blind black man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Perhaps he was doing his own sort of angelic missionary work like Marchosias. Maybe his was more penance for past sins. When you live as long as demons do, the sins start to pile up. Maybe that was why he was blind. I never knew if the blindness was by choice or perhaps some cosmic balance for his clairvoyance. I’d never thought to ask, and I’d known him long enough now to realize he wouldn’t answer me if I did.
It was too late now, but the more disconcerting aspect of all this was that I was thinking about these things in the first place. I’d known Vassago off-and-on for a few centuries, and I never gave more than a fleeting thought to why he was blind, or what he had done before I knew him. It was another symptom of the Katie syndrome. She’d put these musings in my head, and now I couldn’t stop them. I’d been infected with humanity by a teenaged girl, and it was going to get me killed.
“Cat got your tongue, my man?” asked Vassago, bringing me back around to the business at hand. He’d been on this world longer than anyone I knew of. No one knew quite how long, probably not even him. Some believed he’d been here since the beginning.
“You could be young if you wanted.”
“Nah,” he swiped away the thought with a wave of his hand. “Being young when everything else gets old and dies, it’s not right. It feels…unnatural.” I couldn’t empathize. I was old—my demonic half, at least—but I was from Hell. Everyone was old in Hell. We didn’t get a lot of new additions to the neighborhood who actually came of their own free will. And as I well knew, time moved a lot differently in Hell than up here.
“Speaking of old, how’s the priest?” I asked.
Vassago shrugged. “He’s fine. Still running the show: giving mass, marriages, funerals, bake sales. I could map out the entire scope of human existence just by following his calendar. I stop in to see a mass every now and then, but I try not to make it a habit. Been there, done that. No need to rehash the past. He gives a good sermon, though. And he’s got a younger guy there to help him now that he’s getting up there.”
That was new. For all the years I’d known him, he had run the congregation on his own. Perhaps the years were finally catching up to him after all.
“I appreciate you watching out for him.”
“Why wouldn’t I? You’re a good kid, and my traveling days, they behind me. It’s not like I’m goin’ anywhere.”
“Still, I would have a lot more to worry about if you weren’t here.”
He laughed. It was a bluesman’s laugh. “Son, you got more than enough to worry about even with me here.” He slapped me on the back, but his words carried an ominous tone. “I can’t believe you made it this far.”
I took a hit from the cigarette and looked across the street. A trio of young black men were watching us. I couldn’t tell if they were just curious about the odd pairing we made, or if they were looking for some trouble. For now, they just stood there, so I ignored them. They seemed smart enough to know we weren’t the kind of trouble they wanted to get into.
“That’s kind of why I’m here,” I told Vassago. “I get the feeling things are coming to a head.”
He started laughing again. “You think?” he asked sarcastically.
I shrugged. “I mean, I’m no seer or anything.”
He cleared his throat and turned serious
. “You been out in the world for the last, what, ten or twelve years? Huntin’ and killin’ and whatever else it is you kids do. Meanwhile, every demon in the world hates you and would love to see you hang from the tallest building with your guts hangin’ out. It’s a wonder you’re still breathin’ at all.”
When he put it that way, it was kind of depressing. “I don’t think they all hate me,” I objected.
He laughed. “Oh yes they do,” he said melodically, like he was preparing to break out into song. I hoped he would wait until I left before he did. “Every last one of those little bastards hates you and everything you stand for.”
I finished my cigarette and threw it into the street. “I didn’t know I stood for anything.”
“You always were thick as brick for such a bright boy. Think about it son, what does a demon see when it looks at you?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. Charm? Staggering intellect? Devastating good looks?”
He laughed at that last one longer than he should have. “They see the choice they couldn’t make. You lived among the demons in Hell for millennia. You fought wars with them, you bled with them. They were your brothers. And then this…this human,” he tapped me between the eyes with his index finger, harder than was strictly necessary, and surprisingly accurate for a blind man, “he gets in your head and suddenly you have free will. You can make the choice they could never make. You rebelled. And they hate you for it.”
I’d never thought of it like that. My condition always seemed a burden, but I guess there was always another side to the story.
“See, Lucifer, he hates you for betraying him. But he’s the only one. All the other demons out there hate you ‘cos you could betray him, and they never could…”
“So what am I supposed to do? Is this all supposed to mean something?”
He held his palms to the sky. “It don’t mean a thing. They all want you dead. In the end the reason don’t matter. You’ll be back in Hell either way.”
“Are you seeing my future right now, or are you just telling me the odds?”
“Oh trust me, if you stay in this city, you are gonna die. That is a certainty. I don’t need emanations or to be a seer to know that.”
I nodded. His news wasn’t entirely surprising. “Speaking of emanations,” I said, “I hear there’s something going on with them.”
“Nope,” he answered flatly. “It’s exactly the opposite, actually. There’s nothing going on with them. In fact, there’s no ‘them’ at all anymore.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Ain’t it obvious?” he asked. “It means there’s an Angel pulling the strings here. Or at least one that’s intimately involved in the proceedings. Either way, it’s bad news for you. I know you’re a badass and think you can handle anything, but an Angel is too much for you. An Angel’s too much for anyone.”
Truth be told, I did think I was a badass, but I wasn’t delusional. I wasn’t rushing into a fight with Azazel because I wasn’t sure I could take him, and he was a simple Fallen. Same with Marchosias. And Vassago, for that matter, blind or not. I wasn’t about to try my hand against a full-blooded Angel from Heaven unless I had to.
“We’re all the same in the end,” said Vassago, seemingly reading my mind. “Angel, Demon, Human: we all have the same failings. We’ll always destroy ourselves if given the chance.”
I got up, brushed the dirt off my hands. The trio that’d been watching us had wandered off, thinking better of whatever their intentions had been. I held out my hand to Vassago, forgetting he was blind. After a few moments, I figured out the obvious and took his hand in mine. “Thanks for your help, Vassago.”
“I wasn’t any help at all. You’re still gonna do what you were gonna do before we spoke.”
“Maybe,” I said, “But at least now I know just how bad an idea it is.”
He started laughing that bluesman’s laugh again, before I even finished speaking. This laugh was louder than before, more mellifluous. I walked away, but he just kept laughing and clapping his hands.
“I knew there was a reason I liked you Jacob!” he called after me. “You just like me, you know that? I knew it the first time I laid my blind eyes on you. You know what we are?”
He sounded like a crazy man. Which he probably was. All of human existence spent down here, watching generation after generation make the same mistakes but somehow keep stumbling forward. Only to have it come to a head, now that there were seven billion souls on the line. Maybe he just didn’t care anymore. Maybe he finally had enough of this world. I didn’t bother to stop walking. I didn’t need to. He might not be able to see me, but I was sure he knew I was listening
“We’re the martyrs of lost causes! I’ve been one all my life! Now you’re one too! Welcome, brother!”
He practically sang the words, and the way he pronounced ‘broth-ah’ made him sound more reggae than blues. I couldn’t help but turn to see him one last time. He was still grinning madly and clapping along to some unheard beat. If he ever did change his appearance, I hoped he opted for an old Jewish woman. The bluesman thing was starting to freak me out.
Chapter 13
Belial was doing a better job of staying hidden than I would have thought him capable of. I had to consider the increasing likelihood that an Angel was calling the shots: that there was a puppet master who was somehow able to keep him in check. Whoever that unseen entity might be, I wasn’t likely to smoke him out with a few dead demons and some foul language. And I needed someone who’d actually had contact with Belial, which meant I was going to have to start at the bottom and work my way up. I could go to the Pittsburgh Airport and try to pick off one of the scouts assigned to watch for me, but the risk of going into the lion’s den far outweighed any potential knowledge a scout could provide.
I needed a low risk/medium reward target. Since the airport was too risky for that, it seemed natural to expect the bus station to be a slightly easier fishing hole to catch me a demon. Theoretically, Belial should have known better than that. We’d known each other for millennia. That should have been enough time for him to realize that I would never, ever be the type of guy that takes a bus. But like I said, he’s a racist. As far as he was concerned, I was wearing wife-beaters and watching NASCAR at the local dive bar. Just another lamb to be slaughtered. He’d post someone at the Greyhound station, because that’s what sheep do in Belial’s mind.
They ride the bus.
********
There were no Wards in or around the Greyhound station. I didn’t expect there to be, but it paid to be thorough. There was no magic of any kind being used anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the station. Two woefully incompetent demons sitting on a bench were the only sign that Belial even considered I would arrive in the city by bus. Maybe he wasn’t as racist as I thought. I watched the two demons for a time, but that got boring real quick. They were seated on a bench with a newspaper spread before them, but I would have bet a million dollars that they didn’t know how to read.
These clearly weren't Full-Bloods. They were Possessors: the lowest rung on the food chain. I didn’t know if I should even waste my time. Chances were that they wouldn’t be able to work the vocal cords enough to speak. I watched them for about ten minutes, but in that time they did nothing but argue with each other in a series of grunts and slaps that looked like caveman slapstick. When I saw they weren’t going to be of any use to me, I left them alone. Revealing that I was in town wasn’t worth anything they could give me.
The trip wasn’t a total loss, though. As I was leaving the station, I caught a familiar face lurking in the shadows in a far corner of the station. His name was Chase Hewitt. I was mildly surprised he managed to stay alive this long, and more surprised to see that he wasn’t in prison. He and his brother Justin had been young street thugs before I left the city. They both dreamt of making it big and rising to the top of the criminal underworld. I called it the Scarface Delusion. Every young punk wanted to be Scarface bac
k in the day. It was still probably true today, I just didn’t pay any attention anymore. Justin might have had a chance of making a name for himself without Chase dragging him down. Justin was smart and cruel and all those other nasty things that count as assets on the streets. Chase was cruel, but he had neither the intelligence nor the muscle to back up his cruelty. He was the criminal world’s answer to a yapping Chihuahua.
They’d tried to get into pimping shortly before I left for good. Chase wasn’t cut out for it because it’s hard to be a pimp when most of your women can beat the shit out of you. He moved on to recruiting for his brother by hanging out at bus stations and picking up girls that didn’t have much money, or sense, or survival instinct. It was the same scam run in every other city in the world. He’d set the women up in a cheap apartment, and only after it was too late would the women realize that they were prisoners. The brothers would get them hooked on meth or heroin and the next thing you know, they were shaking their asses and flashing their tits like any other streetwalker. Once those girls got in the car, they never had a chance.
I figured their business dried up whenever Justin was murdered. It was merely coincidence that I was the one that murdered him. I needed some fast cash and an easy target. Pimps and drug dealers were the easiest to hit, so I made myself a list and went on a little killing spree to bankroll my trip out of town. It got me about a hundred grand for startup cash, plus the pleasure of killing a bunch of lowlifes. It also opened up the world of contract killing to me.
I’d assumed Chase would just wither away and die without his brother. He probably should have, but the world of men no longer operates on the basis of natural selection. Survival of the fittest no longer applies, so the unfit get to keep taking our air and eating our food. From the looks of things, Chase was still up to his old tricks. Probably working for someone else now. I couldn’t see him running an operation on his own.