Graves Pact (Landon Graves Book 1)

by Matthew Stinson

  The incantation was long and difficult, full of odd sounds my English-speaking tongue couldn’t quite form properly. I had to repeat the spell three times—the magic number—to get the full effect. There was a pop followed by the sound of radio static and a disturbing ripping noise before the spatial hole opened.

  Thick smoke and virulent green light spewed forth from the rupture. An odd, deep keening hit me like bass at a rock concert. At first I tolerated it, but as a minute passed, I got a sea-sick feeling. I was swaying and my vision grew fuzzy. If I lost my concentration, I’d have failed before I’d even begun.

  I focused on the billowing fog that filled the hexagonal column made by the brass chain. Something moved through it, barely visible. It churned in on itself and I saw the vague form of limbs and a distorted head. The vapor gathered, gaining shape and color.

  Finally, an insubstantial creature formed.

  The face was a cross between a human and a lion, the maw full of vicious canines. Giant wings of black feathers arced up from its back. Its feet were wide and webbed, knees reversed. A long tail snaked idly behind it. Unlike Alastor, the demon remained semi-transparent and ethereal. Only powerful magic could give an Exiled like Ipos a physical form in my world, not the dismal bit of juju I’d just used.

  I knew I should be intimidated or outright afraid of the being, but all I saw was a reject from the ThunderCats cartoon. It crossed its furry arms and draped its wings over its shoulders like a cloak. It was a being ancient beyond my understanding and I felt like laughing at it.

  “Ah, not again,” the entity snarled. It shook its mane and set its predatory gaze on me. “Another mortal stupid enough to invoke my wrath. The last still screams in my realm. Should I replace him with you or just hang you by your entrails next to him?”

  “Be silent,” I said calmly.

  The taut brass chains hummed. Ipos’s eyes widened, but it said nothing.

  That’s a good sign.

  “Make no more threats against me. Make no attempt to break the circle. Speak if you understand my commands.”

  It snorted. “I understand that you are a fool playing with powers that will undo you. My kind has long memories. I will have your soul, mortal.”

  “My soul is already accounted for.”

  Ipos didn’t miss a beat. “Ah. So what does a thrall of the Fallen want with me?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Soft green light washed over the walls of my basement like the ceiling over an indoor swimming pool at night. Luckily, I had tinted plastic coverings over the window wells. I would’ve hated for my neighbors to have some reason to poke around. They’d have seen me chatting up a demon.

  “Rumor has it your kind can see the past, present, and future. Can you?” I asked the Outworld denizen, pacing around the magical cage to dispel my anxiety.

  “On your world, yes,” it said, its ethereal form turning to face me as I walked around.

  “So, you can tell me of events here?”

  The ever-shifting cloud roiled for a moment. Small flashes of light flared wherever the cloud touched the magical barrier. The creature reconstituted itself after a minute and I repeated my question.

  “If I bothered to look, I could tell you of the birth of man or its end,” Ipos replied, trying to awe me with its very nature.

  Tired of playing games, I tested the strength of my power over the Exiled being. “Answer me directly. Which of the Exiled is trying to open a Gate to my world?”

  Within the six-sided column, lines of light so thin I could barely see them shot forth in random directions from the hundreds of brass links lying on the floor. The luminescent fish line held the incorporeal demon tightly, pierced through a thousand times. Pale light pulsed through every strand causing searing agony to the spiritual creature.

  “Which of the Exiled?” it cried, enraged at the pain my spell had placed it in. “Every single one of us is trying to open a Gate to your realm!”

  “Which one is doing it now?” I demanded, raising my voice into a near shout.

  Ipos twitched as the brass chain’s humming intensified and the mystical wires pulsed again. “Your question has no meaning. Now? What does that mean to one of the eternal? Time here, time there. They are different beasts.”

  I was angry, but I understood what it meant. Where the demon came from, time was something different than it was on Earth. I couldn’t expect it to answer a question it didn’t comprehend. I decided to switch tactics.

  “Okay, fine. What does it take to complete a Gate spell?”

  The demon grinned viciously. “Brass and glass. Stone and bone. Rust and dust. Blood and mud. A place devoid of life and the sacrifice of a mortal soul. Do you wish to try it? I will forgive your trespass if you open the mortal realm to me.”

  “Of course not,” I retorted. “You think I’d ever be stupid enough to let your kind on Earth? Go to Hell.”

  Ipos laughed. I didn’t know why until I realized that the brass chain glowed red hot. All it took was one link breaking to end my control over the demon. A dozen links stretched open and snapped simultaneously as the piercing lines faded out completely. Just my luck. The demon surged forward and struck the magical barrier just outside the bits of brass-turned-slag.

  There was a flash of light at the soft impact of the incorporeal demon. Ipos floated back, its form even more transparent. Tendrils of vapor gathered back into its body. It snarled and began roaring profanity, making promises about the torture I’d endure when it got free.

  “Be gone!” I shouted, dispelling my conjuration. “You have no place in this world!”

  Just as before, a sense of vertigo washed over me as the rupture reopened. Nausea growing, I fell to my knees as the rip drew Ipos back into the Outworld, the warped realm in which it belonged. Barely audible babbling emanated from the hole this time. I tried not to listen, but the murmuring penetrated my mental defenses and got into my mind. I shouted wordlessly in defiance of the maddening pain and noise.

  “I will see you soon, foolish mortal,” Ipos said, its voice twisted and nearly drowned out by the cacophony of insanity. “This is what awaits you.”

  The ethereal demon was suddenly sucked in and the fissure closed with a thunderous pop. I fell back shivering and twitching, Ipos’s voice echoing in my head. In my mind’s eye, images of impossible places floated alongside visions of perverse creatures I couldn’t comprehend. I felt lost and hopelessly confused by the psychic backlash.

  I shut my eyes tightly and found myself adrift in another place. A familiar place, though I couldn’t pin it down. I swore I’d been there before, in the smothering darkness. Real darkness, not the red my Devil’s Sight made the real world.

  I wasn’t in the real world anymore.

  Like a dream, my surroundings shifted constantly. For one moment, I was in the burned out remains of some war-torn, third world hovel. The next, I was trapped in a hellscape of jagged rock and sulfurous flame. Anything out of my direct line of sight faded away into vague shapes.

  I struggled to find something solid to hold onto, some thought from which to form an anchor. I tried visualizing my ex-wife, but the picture of Jessica was torn away by the disembodied claws of a hundred vile creatures flying around just out of my sight. I tried to remember Father Miller’s voice, but the howling winds of my nightmare drowned him out.

  I screamed over the relentless din to hear something normal and the environment changed again. Suddenly, I hovered over an ethereal cemetery, the dead reaching out of their graves to draw me in. Above me, the sky was the color of bruised flesh. In place of the stars were countless eyes, wobbling around until they tracked onto me. As they focused, I sensed the mad wills behind those eyes trying to force their way into my already fragile mind.

  I squirmed and struggled, but my weightless body went nowhere. I felt the putrid nails of the corpses beneath me as they gouged my back. I couldn’t endure and my only choices were being devoured or driven insane. Parallel to the ground, I looked “up
” toward a dilapidated chapel as the constant drone died out.

  A mist rapidly crawled over the dead grass, obscuring it.

  With a single downward flap of his bat-like wings, Alastor rose through the mist, through the ground itself somehow. My patron appeared as he did when I summoned him, only larger and more menacing. I had no idea if the Alastor before me was another figment of my turbulent psyche or an actual manifestation.

  Whatever he was, my tumultuous mind stabilized and the environment changed subtly, though not much in the way of improvement. I drifted toward him and slowly spun, ending up standing before the mighty Fallen. Black ash and hot embers started falling around the two of us like color-inverted snow. Smoke replaced the mist and settled in, obscuring the surrounding area beyond a few dozen feet. Only the entrance to the decrepit church and a few headstones remained visible in the ambient haze.

  It was suddenly quiet, like a mournful winter morning without the cold. The pain receded, though a sense of melancholy replaced it. Every jumbled emotion I felt settled into near-apathy, almost pleasant in comparison. Without the jarring transition between dreamscapes, my nausea abated.

  “My foolish thrall. What have you done?” Alastor asked as he crossed his arms and regarded me with an air of superiority. “Glimpsing the Outworld? Greater men than you have gone mad from it. What good would you be to me locked in an asylum?”

  “I-it’s always about y-you, isn’t it?” I muttered, shuddering uncontrollably.

  Alastor growled. “Ungrateful and small-minded. You should drop to your knees and thank me every time I grace you with my presence. This pact has brought you up from the ranks of the sheep. It’s not my fault that you continue to live as one.”

  I didn’t know if I was arguing with the real Alastor, but it felt good to yell at something. It helped me feel something more than loss and numbness. It made me feel human.

  “You didn’t do me any favors! You preyed on my ignorance and made me a tool for evil. You’ve damned me!”

  “I saved your wife!” he roared, wings stretching out in some instinctual reaction to threaten me. “You’re the one who lost her! Tell me, do you ever regret it? Does the thought of her with her new family—her new husband—make you wish you let her die in agony?”

  Every talk with Father Miller meant nothing in the face of Alastor’s question. If I had let her die, she’d be at the pearly gates or whatever actually happened to the souls of the good. But twenty-two years was too short a life.

  She always wanted a family.

  I couldn’t form any other response.

  “No. I don’t regret it.”

  The devil laughed and I hated it. That laughter always got under my skin, like barbed wire crawling under my shoulder blades. Alastor loved to gloat. Winning wasn’t enough for one of the Fallen. He had to lord the victory over the losers.

  “And what have I made you do?” my patron asked. “Obscure a few money trails? Arrest a few criminals?”

  “I have to send souls to Hell,” I said, my voice growing hoarse.

  Alastor sighed impatiently. “You don’t listen very well, Landon. The souls you mark are already bound for Hell. You simply ensure they come to my realm.”

  “Funny how they all seem to die shortly after I meet them.”

  “Fate is fickle.”

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” I spat at the creature.

  “Landon, please.” The massive devil knelt down and leaned in close. If it was an illusion, it was a damned good one. I could smell the ammonia-stench of its slimy maw. “Don’t be obnoxious. We’re in the same business, you and I.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You apprehend the guilty and I punish them. It’s the Creator’s will. If that wasn’t planned from the beginning, then why is it so? No one is powerful enough to defy the Creator. No god, fey, angel, spirit, or man. You say that I force you to do ‘evil’, but I only force you to do your job. Think on that, thrall.”

  My patron dismissed me with a casual motion. Though his clawed hand never touched me, a force pushed me back. My head whipped forward violently, but I moved in slow motion through the raining ash. I shut my eyes for only a moment.

  The transition was instantaneous, something I couldn’t even comprehend. I’d had surreal nightmares before, but nothing like this. What the hell had just happened?

  I was curled up in a ball at the base of the stairs that led to the main level of my house. I sat up and the cramps in my arms and legs seized my limbs. I could tell I hadn’t moved in hours. Regaining my bearings took several minutes. I’d woken up after a college kegger feeling better than I did then. I wiped the drool off my face.

  Summoning demons… dangerous. I wrote that down in my mental notebook of stupid shit I’d done. A hole into the Outworld smaller than a CD had nearly unraveled my sanity. And Ipos called that place home.

  I groggily looked around realizing that meager light filled the basement despite the fluorescents being off. I blinked my sandy eyes, banishing the afterimages of the living nightmare I’d just endured. Then it hit me.

  “God have mercy,” I groaned as the first ray of dawn lit up the window wells. “I have to go to work.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Just a few scrapes and bruises?” Phil asked as he sat down across from me in the conference room. He set a fat stack of files down, pulling the top one off. He purposely didn’t look at my face as he leaned back in his chair and opened the manila folder.

  “Nothing serious,” I lied before sucking down more coffee. “I got it squared away with the police. Now… I’ve got a few leads from my old case files.”

  He believed my little fibs and let me change the subject without pressing me further on the events of the weekend.

  “Good,” Phil said before sliding a folder over to me. “Autopsy report on the victim at the scene. Look at the tox panel.”

  I was a little surprised by that, since it usually took a few weeks to get lab work done. I guessed the pressure from the Department of Defense big wigs really lit a fire under someone’s ass. Probably a whole department. I hoped they got overtime.

  I scanned the unfamiliar document and flipped back a few pages. I hadn’t looked at a report like that since my first year out of the academy. “Lorazepam and ketamine. The victim was sedated. That fits with what I learned about the ritual.”

  “Our perp really sacrificed him,” Phil said, voicing the realization. “Sick.”

  He had no idea how sick our perp could get. “Looks like we have an ID on the victim thanks to the dentals. We can get some local uniforms to track down next of kin and get a look at his life. Maybe see where he would’ve run into our killer.”

  “Already happening. Good to see all that time at your desk hasn’t made you completely useless.” Phil said it jokingly, but I knew there was some truth intertwined in the words. “What else have you found?”

  Framing my response correctly was crucial. I couldn’t give away too much without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Phil was a good investigator and I didn’t want him looking at me too closely.

  “The ritual calls for some rather odd materials and a human sacrifice. Dark stuff, I know. I typed up a list and likely places to find them.”

  Some policemen would run down the shops where it was possible to procure the bizarre assortment of items. I purposely excluded Harkin’s. I didn’t want to bump into anybody from work if I went there.

  The list was pretty generic. Ipos’s rhyming had been vague. Still, I’d come up with some likely candidates by cross-referencing my Lesser Key. From my limited understanding, components for spells were often symbolic, serving only as foci for the various mystical energies that floated around naturally. The cynical part of my mind bemoaned the fact that I was basically wasting someone’s time with this goose chase.

  Clearing my throat after another gulp of coffee, I said, “I think it’s safe to assume that our perp is pretty obsessed with the details. He’ll want to get ev
erything right.”

  “Which means he’ll snatch another person,” Phil said, rubbing his chin. “I’ll have the police fill us in on any new missing persons reported. They’ll have to waive that forty-eight hour bullshit though.”

  “The sedatives… are they hard to track?” With money, there was always a trail. You just had to follow it through all the convoluted twists and turns. Viewing this case in the same light helped me sift through the information.

  “Any hospital will have the stuff,” Phil said. “Probably vets as well. Unless we had bar codes on the vials themselves... The drugs may be a dead end, but the fact that the dosage was correct tells us something.”

  I jotted a note on the legal pad in front of me. Medical training. Occult obsession. Needs a private, secluded location. “Have we got anywhere on the scene? Who knew about the suspension of construction? How could the perp get onto the base with a sedated guy?”

  Phil scratched his head. “Police are interviewing staff, but they’ve got a lot of guys to track down and it’s been three months since Daniels and McGraw pulled the plug. Anyone on that crew would’ve known the ins and outs of the site.”

  Knowing that some sites tried to protect copper fixtures and such furnishings from would-be thieves, I asked, “No cameras?”

  “Yeah, there were a few, but they went dead that night.”

  “Tampering?” I asked, though I figured the perp hexed the power before he went in. Magically inclined creatures and individuals all knew how to do that in the modern age. Well, all except me.

  If he is so good with magic, why didn’t he hit me with some spell that night? I’d have liked to believe I was just too much warlock for the demon to handle, but I wasn’t that delusional. I’d kept it off balance with hellfire, but was that enough to stop a magic user of the ability I assumed necessary for the other rituals I’d seen?