Hell Freezes Over - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  “You’re not,” I agreed. “But I was hoping that since you got the end result you desired…”

  “Oh, but I didn’t,” Mort protested. “I didn’t care a whit about Danvar living or dying. I had a rather sizable wager on whether or not you would murder a man in cold blood. I counted on your single-mindedness and general misanthropy to carry the day, but apparently I was mistaken.”

  Great. I was the subject of a supernatural bet. And I was the cause of Mort losing said bet. Pretty much guaranteed I wasn’t getting the information I needed easily.

  “All right, Mort, what’s it going to take?” I asked, sipping my Coke in what I hoped looked like an “I don’t give a shit what the answer is” pose.

  “What is what going to take, Mr. Harker?” Mort grinned at me.

  “What’s it going to take for you to tell me what you know about what’s going on at the church?” I asked, wondering what my chances were against two minotaurs and a demon. I figured I was 50/50 against either one, but both was going to stretch the limits of my creativity.

  “Oh, that?” Mort asked. “That one’s so easy I’ll do it for free. Nothing.” Mort finished his soda and tossed the empty can back over his shoulder. The minotaur, obviously used to such behavior, caught the can on the fly. Mort just sat there, grinning at me like the cat that ate the canary.

  “What do you mean, nothing?” I asked.

  “I mean nothing, Quincy. I know absolutely nothing about that church. I’ve never been nearer to it that passing by on the road, and no one has mentioned anything about it in the bar. Not just recently, but ever. That’s what I know, Harker—not a goddamn thing.” He leaned back in the couch and crossed one leg over the other and put his hands behind his head. He was grinning to beat the band, and it all started to sink in.

  “You played me,” I said. After all these years, all the warnings to other people about dealing with demons, and I make a rookie mistake like that. I felt my face flush as it all sank in.

  “About time you figured that out,” Mort replied.

  “You fucking played me, Mort.”

  “You are absolutely correct, Q.”

  “You just wanted to use me to kill Danvar, didn’t you?”

  “Finally! He gets it!” Mort threw his arms wide, as if to give the world a big hug. “I’m so proud of you, pumpkin!” He stood and walked over to me. “Come on, Q. Let’s hug it out.”

  That was it. My vision went red, and every bit of restraint I had went out the window. I threw a straight right that flattened Mort’s nose and knocked the demon six feet backward to land on the couch again. He shook his head, ran a hand over his bloody nose, and glared up at me.

  “That was a mistake, Harker. Your last one. I never promised you information about the church. I just told you I’d tell you everything I know. Well, I held up my end of the bargain. If you don’t like the outcome, well, that’s what you get when you make a deal with the devil. But to lay hands on me? In my house? I don’t give a good goddamn who your uncle is. That. Doesn’t. Happen.”

  Mort was on his feet, and I watched with my mouth open as his form shifted, stretched, and grew from a harmless-looking little boy to an almost seven foot tall behemoth with muscles on top of muscles and a bloodthirsty grin stretching from ear to ear.

  “You like this version? It’s Bobby 2.0, the upgraded version. This is what Bobby could grow into with proper diet, exercise, a steady diet of protein and anabolic steroids, and a decade or two of mixed martial arts training. Or he could just let a demon live inside him and he gets to look like this whenever I need him to beat up an annoying business associate. Like right now. Hold him, boys.”

  The minotaurs charged me, but I wasn’t going to make it that easy on them. I ducked under the grasp of the one on my right and stepped inside his reach. I kicked his knee sideways, and the big man-bull dropped to the floor. I grabbed him by the horns and steered him around between me and his buddy, then planted a foot in the middle of his back and gave him a shove.

  In the move in my mind, this resulted in the minotaurs going to the ground in a tangled ton of bullman-flesh, leaving Mort for me to deal with one-on-one. In reality, the second minotaur vaulted the first one like an Olympic hurdler and charged me, horns-first.

  I sprang straight up, grabbed a ceiling joist, and swung out into the seating area, landing on Mort’s coffee table. This put me within striking distance of Super-Mort, and he caught me in the ribs with a sweeping sideways blow that took me off the table and flipped me backwards over one of the leather couches onto the expensive-looking rug. I took a minute to make sure I bled on the rug, then came to my feet, flipping the couch at Mort as I did so. He caught it without even a grunt, and it was a seriously heavy wood-and-leather sofa.

  Mort swung the sofa around like a baseball bat, and I dropped to my stomach. He quickly reversed grip and swung the huge piece of furniture down at me. I rolled onto my back and got my hands up in time to keep from getting crushed, but still was faced with a giant pissed-off demon swinging hundreds of pounds of decor at my head.

  I gripped the sofa with both hands, focused my will and shouted “Infiernus!” The wood frame and leather burst into flames, and I let go of the couch and rolled to my right. I came up on one knee in front of a minotaur, and I pulled my Glock as I came to my feet. I pressed the pistol to the underside of the monster’s jaw and squeezed the trigger four times. The pistol spat 9mm slugs into the bellman’s jaw, and they rattled around in his brainpan, generally making a mess of things. I stepped back to let the dead minotaur drop to the ground and turned to Mort.

  The ‘roided out demon-child was holding the flaming sofa, looking at it like it was a new toy. That’s when I realized the error of my ways. If you’re going to use something as a weapon against a denizen of Hell, fire probably isn’t the best choice. Mort was born in fire, so setting stuff on fire around him just made him comfy.

  It didn’t do much for me, though, so when Mort chucked the couch at my head, I dropped my gun, rolled forward under it, spun around, and shouted “Aquas!” at the flying sofa. A stream of water sped from my hands like a fire hose and soaked the couch, putting out the fire and filling the room with noxious smoke. With a moment’s concealment, I drew a knife from my boot and opened my Sight to find the other minotaur. He stood out against the smoke, limping around trying to find me to rip me limb from limb. He wasn’t moving very quickly. I’d obviously done some damage with my kick, so I circled around him and sliced through his hamstring.

  He dropped to one knee and I stepped up behind him, pressing my knife to his ear. “You can live or you can die tonight, Bessie. You want to live?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you drag your busted-up leg the hell out of this room and you never raise a finger to me again, you understand?”

  “Mort will kill me,” the minotaur whispered.

  “Only if he makes it out of here, which I do not intend to let happen. So who are you more afraid of, the guy with the knife in your ear, or the guy that might kill you someday.”

  “Y-you,” the big monster stammered, and started limping towards the door. That left me Mort, who was throwing more furniture around trying to find me in the smoke. The air cleared a bit, and Mort found me sitting atop his desk, legs crossed, wearing my best unconcerned with the world look.

  “There you are, Harker. Time to die!” He charged me, and I sat there cross-legged as he ran right through me.

  I dispelled my illusion and gave Mort a little whistle. He turned and charged me again. This time I went to the rafters again, using the bar joists in the room as my own personal jungle gym. Mort followed me swing for swing, until I got to the wall and jumped off, jumping ahead to the wall and bouncing off. Mort tried, but he was a little heavier than me, so he ended up with both feet buried in the drywall. His upper body flipped backward, and Mort was hanging upside down by his feet. Still buried to the knees in the drywall and concrete.

  That was the opening I’d been lookin
g for. I grabbed a hunk of sidewalk chalk and sketched a hasty circle on the wall, trapping Mort within. I called up my will, focused it on Mort, and said, “Vade in domum tuam.”

  Mort looked at me and said, “Go home? That’s the best banishment you could come up with?”

  “Fuck off, Mort. I’m tired,” I said, then grinned as the circle began to glow with an infernal red light. “Besides, it worked, you sonofabitch.”

  The circle glowed faintly, with a bright blue-white light, then it shifted to a blinding yellow flash, then the circle was empty, and all that was left of our encounter was a smoldering sofa, a thousand pounds of dead minotaur and a circle burned into the wall with a pair of footholes in it. I looked around the destroyed office, then walked back out into the main bar.

  Every eye in the place turned to me as I stepped out of the private office. “So, Mort’s dead,” I announced. “And I’m in a shit mood. If anybody’s feeling suicidal, this is the time to step up. Otherwise, I’ll be leaving.”

  I stopped at the end of the bar where Christy stood, bar rag in hand, polishing the same square foot of bar she’d been polishing when I walked out.

  “Is he really dead?” Christy asked.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t kill a demon on this plane. But he is banished, so he’ll either have to be summoned back here, or find a hole to crawl out of on his own. There aren’t very many of those left, I’ve seen to that over the years.”

  “Then I’d better get the summoning circle ready,” she said.

  “Wait, what?” I stammered. “You’re going to call him back? Why? You have a chance to run this place on your own, or at the very least get out of here and live free of Mort.”

  She gave me a sad little smile, like I was the slow child in first grade who couldn’t understand why Dick ran after Jane. “Q, it doesn’t work that way. This bar isn’t on Earth. We’re in a pocket dimension just outside of Hell’s sixth circle. Mort is a mid-level seventh-circle demon, which makes him stronger than all but the very toughest sixth-circle demons. He was the one enforcing the Sanctuary here, not me. All my power comes through me, from Mort.”

  “Why? Why in all the hells would a demon run a bar for Earthbound monsters?”

  “It’s different. Nobody else was doing it, and it was a diversion. Torturing souls gets boring after a millennium or two, so he wanted something to change it up. And by moving in on the sixth circle, he insured—”

  “That no one would challenge him because anyone strong enough to take this place from him would be too busy trying to move up in Hell’s hierarchy to care about this little dive bar,” I interrupted.

  “So Mort got to play in the mortal world a little, got to wreak havoc on Earth and the sixth circle, and stayed pretty invisible to his seventh circle kin,” Christy finished.

  “That’s a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.”

  “Not smart enough to leave you alone, no matter how often I warned him,” Christy said.

  “You warned him about me? Why?” I was thoroughly confused.

  “You’re one of a kind, Harker. There’s never been another being like you in the history of the universe. Part human, part vampire, with a moral compass that changes directions like humans change socks and enough magical knowledge and power to be truly dangerous. You’re a singularity, and those are either extremely valuable or extremely powerful. But they are always extremely dangerous. That’s you, Q, in a nutshell.”

  I thought about it for a second, then opened my mouth to speak. But nothing came out. A singularity? That was gonna take a while to wrap my head around. I closed my mouth and nodded.

  “I’m gonna go summon my boss back from Hell. You should probably be gone when I’m finished.”

  I nodded again and headed to the door. I never looked back, because you never know what might be behind you, but nothing jumped me before I opened the door and walked back out into the deserted parking lot. I call that a win.

  Chapter 16

  “How bad is this one?” I asked Officer Aguirre when I stepped up to the door.

  “Those boots might survive,” he said, looking down at my Doc Martens. “Detective Flynn is upstairs. She’s been waiting for you a while.”

  “Yeah, I had some stuff to do,” I said.

  “Whatever it was, I hope it included getting your affairs in order, because she is pissed.”

  I chuckled and said, “Aguirre, a woman may some day be the death of me, and it might be Detective Flynn, but it won’t be today. I’m good to go in?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  I’m here, I sent to Flynn.

  About damn time, she replied. Aguirre was right, she was pretty grumpy.

  Anything new?

  No, same shit, different beautiful dead babies. Get back here and do your mojo thing so you can tell me you don’t know shit.

  I bit off a smartass reply, put my head down, and headed up the stairs. No matter how much fun winding Flynn up is on a normal day, this wasn’t it. There were dead children upstairs, again, and I didn’t know what was killing them. And if I didn’t figure it out by tonight, we’d wake up to four more bodies tomorrow morning, and the morning after, until either our killer changed his plans, or Our Lady of Holy Comfort ran out of four-person families.

  That wasn’t a comforting thought.

  The Lemore house was a little different from the other two crime scenes. It was a sprawling Dilworth ranch, with all the bedrooms arranged on the left side of the house, with an entryway into a formal living room front and center. The garage, mud room, and kitchen were at the end of the house on the right, and that looked like how most people entered and left the house. Dinner dishes were loaded into the dishwasher, but it had never been run. Maybe the mother was waiting for a full load and died with a dishwasher half-full of unwashed dishes. That struck me as sad, somehow, that those dishes would never get clean.

  Through the kitchen was a smallish dining room with a bedroom off it that was converted into an office. Then we had the den, or great room, or whatever the real estate agents call them nowadays. It sat right behind the formal living room and was dominated by a fireplace with a huge TV hanging above it. A couple of discarded game controllers lay on the floor in front of the fireplace, and I could just hear the dad’s voice telling the kids that he wasn’t buying another one when theirs got broke because someone stepped on it. The whole place was just like the other two—a Donna Reed slice of heaven dropped into the middle of the twenty-first century.

  I turned left and made my way down the hall past the guest bathroom to the bedrooms. The door to the master bedroom was open, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. I knew what was waiting for me in there: a pile of cops and crime scene techs all trying to be professional while holding back tears and nausea, dead children looking like little sleeping angels, a mother who died knowing she couldn’t save her babies, and a father who somewhere in his consciousness must have been raging against whatever force made him destroy everything he’d ever built, and no clues. Never any clues, no hint who was behind this unnecessary, spiteful suffering, no arrow pointing the way for me to direct my rage. Just more goddamn questions.

  I opened the door on the right instead and stepped into the little girl’s room. Her name was Jeannie, judging by the sparkly blue letters on the door, and she loved Frozen and all things having to do with that movie. I stepped into a suburban winter wonderland, with walls painted pale blue and covered in snowflakes, to a white plush rug and ceiling painted with white and glitter to look like stars sparkling through a snowfall. Emily Standish sat on the bed, looking up at me with her big, sad eyes, holding the hand of a gorgeous little girl I assumed was Jeannie Lemore. Jeannie wore a Frozen nightshirt that hung almost to her feet. She was around ten, forever trapped on the verge of transitioning from a little girl to a teen heartbreaker. Her black hair was done up in cornrows adorned with pink, white, and blue beads that I could almost hear click against each other as she played.

  “Hello, Emily
,” I said. “You must be Jeannie,” I said to the other little girl. She nodded.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked, kneeling down to be on eye level with the girls. Jeannie’s brown eyes were big and round, almost too big for her face, the kind of eyes you knew would show all the secrets of her soul when she got older. Except for the obvious, of course.

  She shook her head. I looked to Emily, who just looked back at me. Emily raised a hand, held it out to me, and I touched fingers with her. Nothing happened, and I looked back at Emily, who just sat on the bed, ethereal and inscrutable.

  “What is it, honey? I can’t touch you here. I can barely even see you…” I closed my eyes at my own stupidity.

  I opened my Sight and reached out to Jeannie, pressing my fingers to the sides of her head. In the physical world, my hands passed through the space where Jeannie sat and my fingertips touched, but in the world outside, my fingers pressed to the girl’s temple, and her eyes flickered up to lock onto mine.

  I felt myself falling backward and almost broke contact with Jeannie’s head to catch myself, but remembered what I was doing and let myself fall into the contact. I tumbled head over heels, closing my eyes to keep from losing my breakfast, which shouldn’t have been much of a concern since I hadn’t eaten in a day and a half.

  When I stopped moving, I opened my eyes and saw that I was back at the communion rail in Our Lady, kneeling between a lovely woman in a pretty green dress and a little boy in a short-sleeved dress shirt and khakis. The part of me that was Jeannie Lemore instantly labeled these two “Mommy” and “Dwan.” I didn’t even know they made khakis for eight-year-olds, but I’m not exactly part of the khaki-wearing set. I watched as the priest stopped at the family next to us, said a few words, placed the communion wafer on the man’s tongue, and moved on to the man with us, who Jeannie-me identified as “Daddy.”

  The priest pressed his hand to Daddy’s forehead and began to speak, not the normal rhythmic Latin that always lulled Jeannie to sleep, but a harsher tongue, more sharp edges and guttural sounds than Latin. I knew it to be Enochian, the ancient language of angels and demons. That’s how I knew there was something wrong with the church, because the priest was speaking the tongue of demons. But when I went to investigate, there was no hint of demonic activity anywhere, much less in the priest. Everything about him screamed “holy” to the high heavens. But where would a legit holy man in modern North Carolina learn a magical language that has never been widely spoken on Earth and hasn’t been spoken at all in the US since the 60s? Where could he learn a language that died thousands of years ago if not by the very creatures that spoke it?