Demon's Play

by David McBride

  Lou came back with a can of gas and began pouring it over the bodies. Occasionally one of the bodies would twitch spontaneously and I could tell it was all Lou and Lewis could do not to start shooting at what was left. I didn’t have that problem because I had no more bullets. Lou finished, brought the now empty can back to the squad car he took it from, and lit the fires. The twitching of the bodies was frantic when the flame first touched them, but then I felt the energy dissipate from them and they went still.

  As I picked up the empty clip I had discarded earlier, I looked around at the spent shells on the ground. The brass casings winked in the firelight like tiny yellow diamonds. Something else glittered in the light, not like the others. I walked over to it and bent down. One of the bodies had been there, covering it so we wouldn’t find it. It caught the light like dark steel. I picked it up and examined it. It was a dark talon the length of my pinky and hooked like a scythe.

  “What’s that?” Lou asked as he and Lewis came to stand on either side of me.

  “Something that shouldn’t be here.”

  6

  After waiting for the fires to burn out I had returned to my house to catch a little more rest. It wouldn’t be long until the sun would make its way above the horizon, painting the clouds in pinks and oranges and colors in-between, and I wanted to be sound asleep when that happened. So I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, refusing to admit that I was too high on adrenaline to sleep. When I finally crashed it would be a relief.

  Lou had insisted on keeping the talon that I had found, saying that I didn’t have any jurisdiction in the human areas, so it would all be handled by the STS. Officer Lewis had been uncharacteristically silent while Lou and I argued, not bothering to rub my face in the fact that I was getting rank pulled on me. In the end it didn’t really matter that Lou had kept the claw. I was fairly certain I knew what beast it came from, though I was hoping that Lou would prove me wrong. Out of all the paranormal beings and the various demon tribes only the ghoul had a claw that looked and felt the way it did. It was a glossy black or dark gray color, but all its shine merely hid the fact that it was rough and pitted. You could feel it when you ran your thumb along the surface. It felt like the essence of decay and rot, which was what ghouls were. They were angry, demented spirits that took the bodies of the deceased and twisted their forms to better suit their animalistic nature. But the thing about ghouls was that they were extremely rare, and usually hung out around graveyards and never attacked humans that would put up a decent fight. Two gang members definitely would have put up a fight, and the only cemetery near the scene of the murders was three miles away.

  So why was I laying in bed while a rouge ghoul might be running loose in the human city? I asked myself as I stared at the ceiling. Because Lou didn’t want my help if it involved the human side of Oakland, I answered. I didn’t think something like this would happen, not with Lou. Maybe what happened earlier had reminded him that I was a para; maybe it scared him. Or maybe it was the people themselves, the humans. Before I had left the scene an old man had started a make-shift sermon about the evils of paras, that we were committing sins against God just by existing. If he had known who or what I was he probably would have tied me to a stake and lit the fire himself. It was a common enough feeling among the older generation that this man was a part of, a generation that remembered a time before the Vampire War and the happiness they had, real or imagined. Men like him would be the ones to sound the call to battle if any more humans died because of this thing.

  His voice floated up through my consciousness, unwanted and unbidden. “Cast them into the fire and let it purify them.” His age-hardened face was lit by the two burning corpses a hundred yards away from him. He looked out over the people that had gathered around to see the spectacle and raised his voice to get their attention. “God will not lift a divine finger to help us unless we help ourselves first.” Officer Lewis and I stood and watched as more people turned away from us to face the street corner preacher. “If we allow them to live among us how can we ask Him to protect us? We must clean our own house before we ask God to sanctify it!” A murmur of approval ran through his audience, and someone even shouted “hallelujah!”

  “You thinking of taking up the new religion?” I asked Lewis.

  He turned his head slightly; just enough to give me a cold stare. “No. My father was a preacher, a real preacher, not this fire and brimstone crap. He never did approve of people that tried to scare people into getting religion.” He looked back to the preacher. “But this isn’t the new religion either, man, this is old. It’s as old as it gets.”

  I fell asleep to the memory of me and Lewis watching the crowd around the preacher growing larger and larger.

  * * *

  The smell of coffee brewing roused me from bed. Pushing my senses outward, I checked my wards to see why they hadn’t alerted me to an intruder. As far as I could tell they were working fine. That meant it had to be one of the few people who my wards recognized as friends. I put on a new shirt and went to the kitchen.

  Ben Jerrigan stood leaning against my counter with a cup of coffee in his hands and his staff propped up next to him. “Morning,” he said, and raised his cup in salute.

  “Morning,” I grumbled, and set about getting a mug out of the pantry. Ben walked over to the stove, picked up a spatula, and began scooping scrambled eggs and toast from two pans onto two plates he had on the counter. The smells of coffee and food attempted to pull me from my groggy state, but I was reluctant to give it up so easily. Anger seeped into my voice and mixed with my weariness to produce something akin to a growl. “Please, feel free to make yourself at home.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a sip, scalding my tongue.

  Ben finished preparing the plates, brought them over to the table, and then lowered himself into a chair that faced the window looking out over the backyard. “You’ve never minded me stopping over uninvited before,” he said without looking at me. All of his attention seemed to be focused on the slice of toast he was buttering.

  “You’ve never broken in before.” I looked at the plate in front of me. “Or made me breakfast before.”

  “Sorry about that.” He looked up at me. “About the breaking in part, not the breakfast part.”

  “Good to know,” I said, and started taking big scoops out of the eggs.

  “Let’s eat,” he said around a mouthful of toast. “Then we’ll talk.”

  We ate in silence while I wondered why he was here. Ben Jerrigan was the Inquisitor General of the west coast, in charge of all the Inquisitors and their respective Second Cities from Washington down to California. He was one of the most powerful wizards in America and had more responsibilities than most people could ever dream of. Yet he still found time to come down to Oakland and check up on me. I was beginning to think he was doing a bit too much checking.

  Ben had been the principal reason the SEC had been able to bring down Adam Drake and his dreamscape ring. Being a summoner had given Adam all sorts of advantages over me, and Ben had brought the odds back in our favor. But it had happened in my backyard, damn it, and it still pissed me off that I needed him to come to the rescue. That case had highlighted one of my main deficiencies as an Inquisitor: no offensive magical abilities. Most of my colleagues were either magic wielders or vamps or wolves. They could be counted on to throw down with the heavy-weights and hold their own. But me? The Recall was excellent for investigating, not so much for brawls where the main weapons were lightning bolts or face-melting clouds of acid.

  Ben had suggested taking on Terri as my apprentice. Till then she had just been a friend of mine who had taken an odd curiosity in my job. When Ben and I had had a sit down with her to offer her the job, she practically jumped at it. She was a good woman who wanted to make a difference in the world. I appreciated her and the job she did, but the reason for her being my apprentice still bugged the hell out of me.

  As I took a bite of fluffy yellow eggs, I pondered m
y earlier exchange with Lou. He didn’t think I spent enough time with humans to understand their thought processes, which was most likely true. And now Ben was sitting across from the table thinking what? Thinking that I was unfit to be an Inquisitor because of my low-level powers? Lou had been positively spooked when my eyes did their new glow-in-the-dark trick, but Ben wouldn’t be impressed unless I managed to shoot balls of fire out of them to smite my enemies. It seemed impossible that one person could be too powerful for one group and not nearly powerful enough for another, but I seemed to be walking that line like a tight-rope walker these days.

  Back before I had come out of the paranormal closet and admitted my lineage, I had been on Oakland’s police force. The other officers had looked at me with awe and jealousy as I used my secret gift to make connections no one else could just by touching an object, or knowing exactly where a murderer had hid his weapon. The firestorm that came about when I was revealed as a para was spectacular. Longtime friends no longer talked to me, officers who didn’t know me looked away in disgust, and the courts threw out half the cases I had been involved with. A lot of bad people got away from their crimes because I couldn’t own up to who I was for a long time.

  I found myself wishing for a moment that Ben’s mind wasn’t protected by his magic and years of Inquisitor training, just so I could get a quick glimpse of what was inside that head of his.

  After noisily slurping down the last of his coffee, Ben set down the mug and smiled at me, his face crinkling and looking years younger for it. He wasn’t an intimidating looking man; with his mostly bald head and slightly bulging stomach one would be forgiven for mistaking him for a kindly uncle or some other normal relative. He liked to joke that he was cultivating this look for undercover work. But anyone who fell for it and thought of him as weak was in for a world of hurt. His eyes were kind and empty of menace as he looked at me, but I had seen those same gray eyes turn to cold steel when facing the enemy.

  “So I hear you’ve had an exciting night,” he said. “Anything I should know about?”

  Despite the reservations I was having about him coming here, he was still my superior officer, so I filled him in on everything that had happened. He didn’t interrupt as I relayed the story, only nodding his head every so often as if he had expected what I had said.

  When I finished he sat quietly for a moment, and then said, “Your eyes were glowing?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “Neat trick. Want some more coffee?” He got up from his seat, grabbed the pot from the coffee maker, and brought it over. He poured his own then looked at me. I nodded and he poured me a new cup. “So do you think this Paulo guy was a card-carrying member of this phantom gang that’s sprouted up?” he asked as he returned the pot to the kitchen counter.

  I added a couple packets of sugar and some creamer and stirred absently. “Seems more than likely. And that band on his wrist? The trap that was set at his apartment? It was meant to capture his spirit, Ben, that’s some scary stuff, and it all points to one thing.”

  “Necromancy,” he said, nodding and looking down at his hands. “And now something attacked and killed two people in the human sector. Are you sure it was a ghoul’s claw you found?” He looked back up at me and nailed me to my chair with his searching and intensely focused gaze. It made me wonder if he knew more about this than he was letting on. Something was making him uneasy, something more than a ghoul and death magic, and that was worrying in the extreme.

  “Do you really think I could mistake that for something else?” I asked indignantly. “When I touched my power to it I felt the same thing that had been powering the zombies to attack.”

  “You,” he said, and pointed at me. “The zombies were only interested in you.”

  I frowned. “Yeah, at least it seemed that way. I felt the spell activate when I touched their minds. I guess they were just programmed to attack the first para they came in contact with.”

  He grunted and took a swig of his coffee. Necromancy was a touchy subject, even among fellow magic users. There was something about the intrinsic fear surrounding death that bled into the collective unconscious of humanity. It made people and paras alike distrust those who could manipulate death energy for their own purposes. For the most part necromancers were good people, but the magic they worked twisted itself more readily to the black arts than other forms of magic. I had only met one other necromancer in my life and he had taken up the skill to further his understanding of what lay on the other side. He talked to lingering spirits and communed with those that had passed over in an attempt to quell his own fear of what came next. Whoever was now in my city had no introspective goals, only harmful ones that were bound to lead to more death and destruction. And he was powerful, far beyond the level of the man who talked to ghosts.

  “Why do I get the feeling you aren’t telling me something?” I asked, and drilled Ben with a stare of my own.

  “Well,” he said, rolling the coffee mug between his hands. “I’ll have to check on some things before I can be certain, but this sounds like something I’ve dealt with before.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “No. Not until I make the proper inquiries.” He stopped rolling the cup and gave me a look that told me that that line of questioning was closed.

  The anger came up and I decided to press him, regardless of whether it would do any good or not. “So more people will die while you’re getting your answers, is that it? Aren’t you responsible for the welfare of these people just like I am?” My hands gripped the edge of the table until they were sore.

  “Calm down Frank.” He sighed. “Necromancers can’t do much in the daylight, so I have at least six hours to get the answers I need. And even if I don’t get them I promise I will tell you all of my suspicions before sundown. Satisfied?”

  “Partly.” I released the table and took up my new mug of coffee, savoring the smell before taking a swig. It warmed the places inside me that had gone cold from thoughts of mad necromancers and dead civilians. “Now tell me why you’re here. I know it wasn’t just to see what I’ve been up to lately.”

  He smiled and leaned back in his chair, relaxing now that I had given up the interrogation. “Right you are, my boy. Have you heard about what’s been happening with the tribes lately?”

  I nodded. The thirteen earth-bound demon tribes; beings from the infernal realm that had been trapped here for centuries, possibly millennia, had been in our sights recently. Once they had crossed over to our plane of existence they became mortal, trading in eternal torment for a finite existence here on earth. Not a bad trade-off if you ask me. In the infernal realm they had been soldiers and slaves of the beings that ruled that place. Both types of beings were considered demons, but the ones who had crossed over to earth were referred to as the tribes to avoid some confusion. Upper-echelon Demons were still only spoken of in hushed tones and whispered threats. They were the ones with the real power, true immortality, and an utter lack of anything resembling humanity.

  The tribes had been around as long as anyone cared to remember, and had tried to stay under humanity’s radar. During the original Inquisition in the 15th century the tribes were hunted relentlessly, and so had decided that the less people saw of them the better. They stuck to rural areas and away from population centers to avoid detection. Then the Vampire War came and turned the world upside-down, showing people that their worst fears were reality. Even though the tribes had nothing to do with the war they were a highly visible minority. Vampires, for the most part still looked human, as did werewolves when they weren’t in wolf form. The tribes, with the exception of the shape-shifter Simlons, were entirely alien-looking. When the peace accords were signed and humanity and the various paras ceased fighting, the demon tribes were left out of the agreement. They were anyone’s meat. To this day it still wasn’t a crime to kill a demon for no other reason than its continued existence offended you.

  Now the demons seemed to be fighting bac
k. In the last couple of months groups of them had been attacking Inquisitors, killing seven. Retribution had been swift on our end with death squads (of course we didn’t actually refer to them as such, wink-wink) being dispatched to the areas where attacks had occurred and scouring the city clean of demon nests. For every one of us they had killed we killed a hundred of theirs. But despite our swift revenge they didn’t seem dissuaded from their current course of action. If anything the attacks had been stepped up in the last month with two Inquisitors dead and three more injured.

  “It’s worse than you know,” he said, a frown creasing his features. “You don’t have it too bad out here because the tribes tend to stay away from the coasts. Inquisitors across the Midwest and down near the Mexican border are reporting increased activity. Attacks in Africa and Asia have been heavy, but we’re keeping quiet about those. The media in the countries involved isn’t as prevalent as it is here so we’ve been pretty successful.”

  I looked at him expectantly and motioned with my hand for him to continue.

  “Well, the point is we’ve found a way to negotiate with them. The Council thinks that we can reach a ceasefire with them.”

  “Really,” I said dubiously. “The Council expects them to negotiate? They’re alien. They’ve never been human like vamps or weres. There can’t be a negotiation with them, they should be wiped out.” I sipped my coffee.

  He looked at me curiously and said, “That’s pretty extreme don’t you think?”

  “Not at all. They’d do the same to us if they had half a chance. Where they come from pain and suffering is all they know, and they want to bring that here, infect our planet with their disease. It would be a mercy to eradicate them.” Ben sat there staring into my eyes, not saying anything, so I continued. “Have you ever seen one of the upper-echelon Demons?” He nodded, his lip curling in disgust. “They are the embodiment of evil and they want to make earth their playground. The tribes thought they could get away from them here, but they can’t. In the end they’ll just be used like they were in their own realm to serve the causes of their masters.”