Hell Freezes Over - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  I felt something warm in my hand, and I looked down to see the little Standish girl standing beside me, throat mercifully intact, looking up at me with blue eyes the size of saucers. She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “What is it, honey?” I asked. She moved her lips, but again nothing.

  I got down on one knee in front of her. “It’s okay, sweetheart, nothing can hurt you here. Nothing can ever hurt you again,” I said. I reached out a hand and stroked her hair. She opened her mouth, and blood poured out. Not arterial spray, but a waterfall of crimson down her face, painting the front of her nightgown and cascading to the floor. I skittered back, trying to stay out of the blood, but my hands squished in red-soaked carpet.

  I scrambled to my feet, and the room looked like it did that morning when I’d first walked in. The eggshell walls were painted in some bastardized Jackson Pollack spatter, but only red. Red everywhere, all the way up to the ceiling and spattered across the blades of the white wicker ceiling fan centered over the bed. The little girl came toward me again, holding out both her hands, and now blood was flowing from her wrists down to her fingers, out of her eyes like tears turning her cheeks crimson, and blood streaked her legs from her cut arteries, puddling around her feet with every step.

  I kept backing away, and she kept coming, an inexorable vision of death in red and angel-blonde hair. She stretched out her arms to me, silent supplication like a toddler begging to be held. I shook my head and backed away, away from the abattoir of the bedroom, away from the hemorrhaging little girl, away from the memories of blood coating every surface.

  I felt something solid behind me and turned to see a giant door in dark oak, a wooden engraved surface stretching up high above my head, with a knob just barely within reach. I realized that somehow I was seeing this door through the little girl’s eyes, and if I wanted to get through, I was going to have to get back to my normal size.

  Let’s be clear—I did not want to go through that door. As a matter of fact, if going back through the Industrial Revolution was one of the choices other than going through that door, I’d be lighting gaslights and heating my house with coal again in a matter of seconds. But I knew it wasn’t an option. I had to go through the door before whatever piece of my subconscious dragged me into this shitshow would let me find the exit.

  So I willed myself taller, and the door shrank to a more normal size. It was still a pretty massive door, all carved oak and antique brass hardware with crosses and fleur-de-lis carved and embossed into anything that stood still long enough. I gripped the knob and turned, and once again was transported. This time I was someplace cleaner, if no less uncomfortable for me. I was in a church. A huge sanctuary with dark stone floors, cushy benches for pews, and hundreds upon hundreds of people all kneeling.

  I felt that warm little hand in mine again and looked down at the thankfully blood-free Standish girl gazing up at me in something akin to adoration. She beamed a smile up at me that made me forget at least a decade of the nastiest parts of humanity, and I couldn’t help but smile back. That smile faded as I saw my shoes—nice loafers unlike anything I’ve worn since an unfortunate investigation into a Wall Street broker in 1983 who literally sold his soul to a demon for hot stock tips. Even back then I could have told him just buy Apple, but I’ve met the guardian angel that sat on Steve Jobs’ shoulder, and that dude had some serious mystical horsepower behind him.

  I walked down the main aisle of the sanctuary, kneeling and crossing myself in the middle before my diminutive guide led me down an aisle to sit next to a good-looking woman of almost forty. Thirty-eight, to be precise, because I’d read Annie Standish’s brief bio in Flynn’s head while I stood over her cooling body. That meant the khaki- and polo-clad body I currently inhabited must be Darin Standish, the late Mrs. Standish’s apparently loving husband right up until the time he severed every major artery in her body and bled her like the first deer of the season, then sliced himself up like Christmas ham before bleeding out in the floor of his bedroom. A head of curly hair atop a shy smiling face leaned forward and waved excitedly at me—Clay Standish, excited to see his dad in a way only preteen boys can still be.

  I turned to the front of the church and felt the world shift like it only ever does in dreams. Everything blurred, and suddenly we were all somewhere else. Or more correctly, we were nowhere. Or I was, because I was alone. The church and all the people—gone. The Standish family—gone. Even my little girl guide was gone. It was just me, standing in a foggy, featureless plain surrounded as far as the eye could see with nothing.

  “Now what?” I asked, and found that I’d spoken aloud for the first time since the dream started.

  A voice from above started to speak, and for a few seconds I just listened, trying to make out the words. I knew them, something about them resonated with me like something I’d heard all my life, just in a slightly different dialect or accent. Then the voice rose in volume, then rose again, then climbed to a scream, then a shrill shriek that bored into my brain like a dentist’s drill and drove me to my knees. I clapped my hands to my ears and screamed in pain, but the din of the chanting was so loud I couldn’t even hear myself scream. I rocked back and forth on my knees, screaming in time with the chanting, then collapsed sobbing into a ball, rolling on my side and shrieking.

  Then something hit my face like a slap and I was awake, curled up in a fetal position in the floor of my bedroom, my sheets tangled about me so tightly they cut off circulation to my legs. I was soaking wet from sweat, but also freezing cold, like…

  That’s when I noticed Flynn lying sprawled on the floor on the opposite side of my bed, completely unconscious. I got up, fell to the floor again, my feet on pins and needles, disentangled myself from the sheets and crawled over to the unconscious detective.

  “Flynn?” I asked, shaking her arm. Nothing. “Flynn!” I shook harder, probing her mind through our link. She was alive, but stunned almost to insensibility. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to shake uncontrollably. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I knew shock was a real possibility, so I sat back against the bed, pulled her into my lap, and wrapped my arms around her. Her shivering continued unabated, so I reached behind me and pulled a blanket off my bed to cover us up. I used a corner of the blanket to wipe the sweat and water from my face, then I held Flynn tight to my chest, trying to let my warmth soak into her.

  I focused my will and whispered “Fiero,” concentrating just on pulling up heat, not setting my entire bedroom on fire.

  After what seemed like half an hour of sitting on the floor holding her to my chest, Flynn woke up.

  Her eyes fluttered open, and I felt her consciousness twine into mine, like an old couple holding hands, comfortably connected. She looked up at me, gave me a warm smile, and said, barely audible, “This is nice, Harker, but you’re not just wet, you’re naked, too. And that means it’s definitely not a roll of quarters poking me in the butt right now.”

  Chapter 3

  A few minutes later we were both sitting on the couch in my den after I’d thrown on a pair of sweats and a Preacher t-shirt. I poured a healthy slug of bourbon in both coffee cups, ignoring Flynn’s protests.

  “You’re off duty, have a drink. You are off-duty, right? What time is it? Hell, what day is it?” I asked.

  “It’s about seven at night, and it’s Monday. Or Monday night, anyway. You slept the whole day away.”

  “It happens,” I replied. “While I’m not strictly nocturnal, like Uncle Luke, I usually do my best work at night.” I thought about that for a second, then decided there wasn’t anything going to save that statement, and just let it die. “What else did you find out at the Standish place?”

  “Nothing,” Flynn put her coffee cup down and leaned back on the sofa. “It appears to be exactly what you said it was—a perfectly mundane murder-suicide. Sad but ordinary.”

  “It’s not,” I said, remembering that little girl’s face looking up at me. />
  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it wasn’t monsters in the closet that had me screaming on my bedroom floor,” I said.

  “Yeah, I was gonna ask about that, but I was waiting for the right time. Like a month or so past never seemed like a good call.”

  “Ordinarily that would be perfect. With the shit I’ve seen in my life, the last place you want to go running around is the dark alleys of my mind. But this time we kinda have to pay attention to the signals I’m getting because this wasn’t a dream. This was a visitation.”

  “A visitation?” Flynn asked. “From who?”

  “The little Standish girl.”

  “Emily?”

  “Yup, in the flesh. Well, more like in the ether, but you get the idea.”

  “Why would the ghost of a murdered little girl come to you in a dream, Harker?”

  “Fuck if I know,” I said honestly. “Maybe her ghost sensed something out of the ordinary about me at the crime scene and followed me home, despite my wards.”

  “Wards?” Flynn looked around the room at the door, ceiling, trying to see what I was talking about.

  “You can’t see them without the Sight,” I explained. “And the really nasty ones you can’t even see with talent. The first layer just tells nasty and uninvited things to leave, that they aren’t welcome here. The next layer backs that up with a little spell of banishment that sends most things short of an archdemon or major seraphim back to wherever it came from. The next—”

  Flynn held up a hand. “Wait a second, Speedy. You’re telling me you warded your apartment against angels? Why? Aren’t they the good guys?”

  “Technically, yes. I mean, they still carry out the will of God and all that shit, but ever since the Great War, they’ve had free will, so when they’re not doing what the big guy wants, they come up with ideas of their own. Most of those ideas are really stupid, like New Coke and Jar-Jar Binks, but every once in a while they decide to do something truly dangerous, like try surfing. That’s where we get tsunamis. So I warded my place against the Host from both zip codes, north and south. If I can go through my life without speaking to another angel, I’ll be thrilled.”

  “Present company excepted, I hope,” came a voice from the door to my bedroom. I turned to see a vision of loveliness in a white v-neck t-shirt and white yoga pants standing there. Glory’s hair was tied into a long, loose blonde braid that spilled down and around one shoulder. Her blue eyes looked worried, and her normally Revlon-commercial lips were drawn tight.

  “Morning, Glory,” I quipped. Not even a hint of a smile. I must be in bigger trouble than normal. “What’s up?”

  “I should ask you the same thing,” Glory said.

  “Harker?” Flynn said from beside me. I looked over and saw her standing by the couch, gun in hand and trained on the angel in my doorway. “Who is that, and how did she get in here?”

  The stunned look on Glory’s face was almost certainly mirrored by my own. “You can see her?” I asked.

  “Of course I can, she’s standing twenty feet away from me. By the way, sister, there’s about a zero percent chance of me missing from this distance, so let’s keep all hands where I can see them, okay?”

  “Put the gun down, Rebecca,” Glory said.

  “Not a chance, cutie.”

  “I wasn’t asking,” Glory said, then something in her voice changed. “Put the gun down, now.” She put a little extra emphasis on the last word, the kind of emphasis that made her eyes flash blue lightning.

  Flynn holstered her weapon, staring at her hands the whole time like they weren’t under her control. Which they weren’t, not completely. She looked at me for help, but I could only shrug.

  “Rebecca Gail Flynn,” I said, “meet Glory. She’s my guardian angel. And I don’t think she likes having guns pointed at her.”

  “It’s rude,” Glory said.

  “So is popping into the middle of a conversation uninvited,” Flynn shot back.

  “Touché,” Glory admitted. “Now that we’re done fencing, may I sit?”

  “I was hoping that this whole thing would degenerate into Jell-O wrestling, but if that’s not going to happen, come on over.” I waved Glory to a seat on the couch and I moved over to an armchair where I could keep an eye on both of them. “So what are you doing here, Glory?”

  “I could ask you the same question, Q,” the angel said.

  “I live here.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it. Why did you lock this little girl’s soul to the Earth? What are you planning?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I haven’t done anything with anybody’s soul, at least not lately.”

  Glory pointed to the corner of my living room, by the TV that usually just sat gathering dust unless the Panthers were playing and I happened to be awake in my condo. “I’m talking about the soul of a little girl sitting in the floor of your den playing with her dolls.”

  “What the actual fuck are you…” I opened my Sight and shut my mouth, deciding to see for myself what Glory was talking about. I immediately regretted it. Glory was telling the truth. I didn’t know if she was even capable of lying, being an angel and all, but that was irrelevant in the face of the ghost playing dolls in my living room. Little Emily Standish looked just as angelic as she had in death, just as peaceful as she had in my dream, and just as goddamn creepy as you’d expect from a ghost in a bachelor pad.

  “Glory, why is there an eight-year-old ghost in my den?” I asked.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you, Q. And how can your little friend here see me? I’m supposed to be invisible to humans unless I decide otherwise.”

  “Flynn might not be exactly one hundred percent normal human anymore, remember?”

  “Oh, shit, that’s right. But she can see me? I didn’t think the last one could.”

  “First, her name was Anna. Second, you weren’t around nearly as much back then. Something about leaving me to live my own life, et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah.”

  “That was before I had a century’s worth of proof of exactly how dangerous you are to yourself and the rest of the universe when left alone for more than five minutes.”

  “I’m going to let that one go and say that I don’t know if Anna could see you or not, because she never mentioned it. But apparently Flynn can see you, so maybe you two should shake hands, or go for coffee, or whatever. But can you please for the love of fuck do it after we figure out why I’m being haunted by a preteen murder victim?”

  “Maybe she wants your help,” Flynn said. Glory and I both turned to look at Flynn, who just shrugged. “It’s kinda the logical answer, right? You wander into her murder scene, throwing magic around like some kind of scruffy superhero, and she notices you. You don’t pick up on whatever she wants you to see, so she follows you home and shows you something in your dream that gives you a clue. Then you help me catch her killer, she goes to Heaven, and everybody’s happy. Right?”

  I looked at Glory, then back at Flynn. It made sense, in the perverse way things happen in my life. “Fine,” I said. “Then we’re going to need all your case files, photos, and everything you’ve got on the Standish family. If something from the dark side of the tracks killed these people, there’s a good reason for it. I hope.”

  “You hope?” Flynn asked, going to a briefcase on my dining room table.

  “Look, sometimes things are just nasty. There’s no real reason for what they do, they’re just assholes. The same holds true for monsters and people. There might not be a reason for what happened to the Standishes. Could be they just ran into a monster with too much time on its hands.”

  “That covered up every single trace of any evidence? Come on, Harker, you don’t believe that any more than I do,” Flynn demanded.

  “That’s just it, Becks,” I protested. “I don’t know what I believe. Nothing about this crap makes any sense, least of all why there was a little girl walking around in my head last nig
ht.”

  “Well, here’s what we have on the family. Annie Standish, thirty-eight, civil engineer at McFarland & Greene. Steady employee, nothing out of the ordinary. She had three days of PTO left this year, had already scheduled them for Christmas week. Married thirteen years to college boyfriend Darin. Two children, Emily and Clay, ages eight and ten. Studied at NC State, got her Master’s at Clemson, where she met Standish. They both graduated, got married immediately, and went to work. Married almost ten years before Clay comes along. Easy delivery, no complications, she goes back to work a month later. Couple years later along comes little Emily. Same story, textbook delivery. These people have a friggin’ storybook life, Harker. They’re so nice and easy that they’re totally boring. There’s no reason for anyone to target them.”

  “Okay,” I mused. “The wife was a civil engineer. Not exactly a high-risk profession. Pretty unlikely she pissed off any supernatural agencies with a bridge design. What about hubby? What did he do?”

  “He was a compliance manager for an investment bank,” Flynn replied.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” I said. Flynn looked at me, unbelieving. “Seriously, I have no idea what those words mean. Look at me, Becks, I was born when people still lit their houses with hurricane lamps, and most of my ridiculously long adult life has been spent either battling the forces of darkness all over the world, or studying arcane texts in dead languages. I’m an expert in a lot of shit, but modern banking is beyond me.”

  “He was the guy who made sure that the stock brokers weren’t breaking any laws,” Flynn explained. “He was almost a lawyer for the bank, making sure that no SEC rules were broken.”

  “So he wasn’t boring enough to just be a banker or a lawyer, he was a half-banker, half-lawyer, all Yawnsville.”

  “Unless he caught somebody moving money illegally and shut them down?” Flynn theorized.

  “The kind of people who launder money and murder people over it aren’t often the same people who can mojo a husband into murdering his whole family. No, this wasn’t a work thing. There’s something supernatural here, or there wouldn’t be a ghost playing tea party in my den. Did they go to church?”