Heaven Can wait: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella
Page 3
“Is nobody else going to maybe remark on the fact that we are standing in the middle of a park in Georgia chatting with an angel like we’re talking about the weather?” Jo asked. I noticed that while her jacket was torn and there was blood running down one arm, the head of her hammer was streaked with gore and what looked like little flecks of Reaver skull. She had obviously given as good as she’d gotten.
I took a second then to give her, and the others, a once-over. Flynn was untouched, but I wasn’t surprised by that. She’d been through enough shit with me to know when it’s best to fight from a distance. Watson was similarly unscathed, but Gabby. Well, Gabby looked like she’d taken time off from shooting a Manson family biopic to remake American Psycho. She was covered in blood from her knees to the top of her head, and gore streaked her arms like she’d been kneading bread made with blood and entrails.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I asked. “I thought you had guns.”
“I did,” she said with a grin. Her white teeth shining through a mask of blood across her face was truly unnerving. “But then I had to get up close and personal with a couple of the Reavers. It didn’t go well for them.” She drew a pair of foot-long daggers from somewhere behind her back and twirled them around, all the while keeping that godawful grin plastered across her face.
“Has anybody ever told you about the message of our Lord and Savior Hannibal frickin’ Lecter?” Flynn asked, taking a big step sideways to create some separation with Gabby.
“Don’t worry, Detective. I still mostly like you,” Gabby said, putting her knives away.
I shook my head, trying to focus on the questions at hand more than the mental wellness, or lack thereof, of my partners. “Okay, let’s focus for just a minute, people. It makes sense that Orobas called these bastards, but why? Was there something here worth going after? Have there been any other incidents around the city? Why right here, right now?”
“I’ll go ask the constables,” Watson said, and walked off to the nearest pair of cops.
“I don’t know of anything spiritually or mystically significant about this park,” Jo said. “But I’ll jump online and see what I can grab real quick.” She walked over to a park bench and sat, pulling a tablet out of her jacket pocket and tapping away.
“She kept her iPad from getting busted while fighting demons? Maybe she does have super-powers,” I said.
“Glory, can you make a quick lap around the city and make sure this was the only demon summoning on the calendar for this afternoon? I’d hate to think we missed an important engagement,” Flynn asked.
“I can do that.” Glory gave me a stern look. “Try not to do anything suicidal in the next hour.” Then she vanished.
I looked at Gabby, standing there covered in gore like an extra in a community theatre Titus Andronicus. “Why don’t you go run through the fountain or something?”
“It’s cold,” she grumbled.
“Unless you’re planning on walking back to the hotel, which probably won’t let you in looking like Carrie, you should at least rinse off,” I replied. She scowled at me, then handed her gun belt to Flynn and stomped off toward the Olympic Ring-shaped fountain.
Becks watched her go, then looked at me. “Sometimes I think you’re one hundred percent batshit crazy, Harker. Then I spend time around some of your friends.”
“She raises a valid point, Quincy,” Adam said. “I believe I shall also go rinse off the worst of the gore before I have to drive to the hotel. I do not relish getting blood out of my upholstery. Again.” He gave me a sharp look before following Gabby to the fountain.
“Sorry!” I called after him. “Demons,” I explained to Flynn. We stood there, alone for the first time since I’d joined them, and of course, things got awkward.
“Umm,” I started, not really sure what I wanted to follow that brilliant opener with. “Did you get the… box I left for you with Glory?”
“I did.” Her voice was cold, and she didn’t look at me.
“And?” I asked. I could outwait her. I was over a hundred years old. I had the long game down.
“And I’m not going to respond.”
“Why not? Are you not interested? Because I thought we…” I could feel a lot of things bouncing through our link, but they were all jumbled up. At the root of it all, I could feel interest, along with fear, anger, worry, and a host of less fun things.
“Oh, we definitely did. But if we’re going to take that kind of step, and I’m not saying we should, but if we are, I sure as hell am not going to be proposed to by a proxy, even if she is an angel. Let’s get through this whole end of the world thing, make sure neither one of us comes down with a bad case of the deads, and then talk about maybe going on a date.
“Harker, I’m nowhere near ready to get married. Two years ago, I thought you were just a conman fleecing people out of cash by spinning horror stories, and now I’m fighting demons in a park with Frankenstein, and I’ve got Dracula on speed dial.
“My life has gone from zero to a monster movie in eighteen months, and I don’t even know if I’m still going to have a job when I get back to Charlotte, much less know if I want to marry you. And then there’s the whole thing where I get old and you don’t, and I’ve seen Highlander, and I know how well that turns out, so… we’ve got a lot of shit to figure out before I put that ring on my finger.”
I looked down into her brown eyes and saw the emotion welling up, right behind the tears that threatened to spill down her caramel-colored cheeks. I gave her a little smile, sending emotion across our link to make sure she understood that I meant what I said. “You’re right, Becks. I was scared when I sent that ring with Glory, and it was dumb to put you in that position. I’ll slow down a little. But make no mistake about one thing, Rebecca Gail Flynn—I love you, and I will tear down the Gates of Heaven itself to make sure we are never separated again.”
She smiled up at me, then threw her arms around my neck and kissed me, jamming her lips to mine with a ferocity that reminded me I was with a warrior woman. She pulled back and looked me in the eye. “Nicely said. Sometimes I forget that you weren’t raised by wolves, but that was actually poetic.”
“Live long enough and you read a lot. Even poetry. I’m partial to Billy Collins, myself,” I said.
“I hate to interrupt your little tete-a-tete, but I think I know why the demons attacked here,” Jo said, walking up with her iPad in hand.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“There was a some kind of strange disturbance up at Stone Mountain about an hour ago, just about the time the demons hit the first gondola. Lots of flashing lights in the sky were reported, and the rangers that went to check it out are now being called in as missing, their vehicles abandoned.”
“Shit,” I said. “There was something there, and Orobas went after it.”
“And got it, from what these reports sound like,” Jo agreed. She handed me the tablet, and I read a string of messages from Sparkles. Everything was just like she said—rangers missing, lights over the mountain, and a big hole in the ground at the summit. Whatever was there, it was gone now.
“Fucking hell,” I grumbled. “Alright, we still have to check it out, just to see if we can pick up any clue as to what was there. Jo, you and the others go circle back to Luke and see if Sparkles has found out anything about Barton. Flynn and I will ride up to Stone Mountain with Adam and poke around. We still have our Homeland credentials, even if we’re fired.”
“So fired,” Flynn agreed.
“Adam!” I yelled. “Get your big ass over here! We gotta go hunt demons in the woods.”
“Again?” he called back. “Must be Tuesday.”
4
We took the back road up to the top of Stone Mountain and pulled off to the side behind half a dozen cop cars and one lost-looking UPS driver. Adam and Flynn followed me as I badged us past the uniformed cop on crowd control duty, and we started to look around for any traces of Orobas or anything magical.
“And that’s why she’s the detective, ladies and gentlemen,” I replied. We walked over to the hole, which looked just like any other big hole in a big rock. There was smoke, there was rock blasted to pebbles, and there was one really shaken college kid in khakis and a polo shirt talking to a cop. The kid was tall and so terrified his man-bun was shaking as I walked over to eavesdrop.
“I dunno, dude,” the kid was saying as I walked up. “It’s like I said, man, one minute he was a normal dude, and the next he was a friggin’ monster. He was like ten feet tall, with six arms and gigantic teeth. Scared the shit out of me, so I hid, man.”
More like seven feet tall with two arms and a shitload of attitude most likely, but I didn’t need to correct the kid. He’d just survived his first demon encounter; he could see as many arms as he wanted. “So you didn’t see anything after the dude turned into a monster?” I asked.
The kid looked at me like I was his best friend just for even thinking that I believed him, but the cop he was talking to was way less enthused. He was the kind of guy who looked like he broke a sweat just walking up from his car, and he certainly didn’t need any interlopers in his case. He was in his fifties with a belly that stuck out so far I wonder if he just took it for granted that he still had feet and a scowl on his red face that looked permanent.
“And who the hell do you think you are, mister? And how the hell did you get past Gerald?”
“Quincy Harker, Homeland Security,” I said, flashing my badge. He wasn’t as inclined to just automatically yield the floor as his younger buddy down by the crime scene tape line, so I passed over my wallet when he held out his pudgy little hand.
He squinted at the picture, then at me, then passed it back over. “Who’re they?”
“They’re with me,” I said.
“I didn’t ask who they were with, smartass, I asked who they were. You want to stay on my crime scene, son, you better—”
I stepped forward and picked him up by the front of his shirt. I lifted him up about two inches off the ground so we could look eye to eye. “Look here, Deputy Fuckwit. This shit is so far out of your jurisdiction it might not have even come from the same galaxy. You’re so far in over your head you can’t even see the sun, and you don’t even know it yet. There are things out there that your little pea brain can’t handle. That’s what I’m here for. I handle the shit you only see in your nightmares, and that’s what shit we’re dealing with here. Now unless you can come up with some normal criminal that can carve a ten-foot hole in solid fucking granite in a matter of seconds, you need to get out of my way and let me do my job. You got me?”
He nodded, silently, and I put him down. I gave him a steady look and said, “Now fuck off out of here while the adults deal with the bad things.” He hustled back down the hill toward his car, and I turned my attention to the kid.
“Don’t kill me, man,” the kid said, shrinking back a little closer to the edge of the hole than was probably safe. I reached out and grabbed his shirt, too, but only to pull him back before he fell in the crater and smashed his skull in. “I’m not gonna kill you, kid. I just want to know what you saw.”
“Like I said, man. There was a dude, then he was a monster. He made some kind of weird light show with his hands, and then the ground blew up. A chunk of rock whizzed by my head, and I screamed a little. That’s when it came at me. But I fought it off.” He puffed up at that last bit, proud of himself for standing up to the monster. Too bad it was a load of shit.
“You fought it off?” Flynn asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, man. It came after me, but I judo-chopped it right in the nose, and it flew off out of here, man.”
“Is that why you pissed yourself?” I asked. “Because you were so damn proud of the way you judo-chopped a demon? A demon that would have ripped off your arm and beaten you to a bloody pulp with it had you even so much as looked crosswise at it.”
His long face fell, and I felt like I just nut-shotted Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoons. “It’s okay, kid,” I said. “You can tell all the girls that you fought the thing off. I just need to know what it got out of the hole.”
“The hole?” the kid asked, and I revised my opinion on the harmlessness of marijuana. This kid had definitely smoked his last brain cell.
“Yes, dumbass, the hole! The great big fucking hole in the rock that you almost fell into ten seconds ago!” This time I yelled. It had been a long couple of weeks. I think I was allowed a little yelling.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, man. I didn’t see what it took out of the hole. I was kinda hiding.”
I took a deep breath because the more deep breaths I took, the less likely I was to throw this idiot kid off the mountain. “Kinda hiding?”
“Okay, I was totally hiding. In there.” He pointed over to the snack bar beside the sky tram stop at the top of the mountain. “I pulled the drink machine out from the wall, and I hid behind it. Sorry, dude.”
I looked at my feet, then up to Heaven, then back at the kid. Just as I opened my mouth to say something truly vicious, Flynn stepped in. She doesn’t always play the peacemaker, but she’s a hell of a lot better at it than I am, so I let her do the talking.
“Hey… Dave,” she said, reading the kid’s nametag. “Why don’t you and I go into the office and look at the security camera footage. Maybe there’s something useful there.” She pointed up at a small camera mounted to an overhang on the roof of the tram stop. It pointed in the general direction of the hole.
That’s why you’re the detective, I thought to her.
Shut your pie-hole is what came back to me across our mental link, but I felt a little smile behind it.
“Yeah,” Dave said. “I think there’s a monitor in the electrical closet.”
“I’ll go with Dave, and we can take a look at the footage,” Flynn said.
“We’ll stay out here and in the crater, see if we can pick up any… forensic evidence.” I went with that lame excuse to poke around the crater because saying “I’ll open up my Second Sight and see what’s going on in the metaphysical spectrum” always sounds so pretentious. And had the potential to get me put in a padded room.
Flynn and Dave headed off into the little snack shack, and I turned to Adam. “Watch my back for a minute.”
“Story of my life, Quincy,” he said, but I knew he’d cover me if there was anything dangerous in the mundane world while I was focused on the Otherworld. I didn’t need to wonder long. The instant I opened my Sight, I found plenty of trace all over the mountaintop. There had definitely been a demon close by, and Stone Mountain wasn’t going to be considered sanctified ground anytime soon, but there was also nothing useful. I saw where Orobas changed, because his taint on the rock got stronger, and I could see the trail he left going down into the crater. The crater itself literally glowed with dark purple magical residue, both from demon taint, which usually has a reddish tinge to it, and the destructive magic used to dig the crater.
I got closer to the edge of the crater, which really wasn’t much more than a big hole about ten feet across and maybe five feet deep in the center. I scrambled down into it, kicking over the occasional rock to make sure I didn’t miss any mystical trace that I could follow back to Oro, but the big bastard had covered his tracks pretty well. No blood, no hair, nothing I could really use in hunting him down in a city as sprawling and jammed with different energies as Atlanta.
There was a rectangular depression in the very bottom of the crater, so I got down on my hands and knees to examine it more closely. The stone was shaped here, not naturally formed or blasted away, so whatever had been down here had been here for a long time, and hidden by something powerful enough to make the very stones of the earth bend to its will.
The hole left by whatever it was measured about a foot-and-a-half by two feet and was about eight inches deep. I couldn’t tell a
nything else about it, except there was a hint of pale blue energy glowing faintly in my Sight. Whatever was there, it was long gone, and it had enough power to tint the soul of the mountain.
I dropped my Sight and poked around the dirt a little, looking for actual physical clues, but there was nothing. The only hope I had was that Orobas left a fiber or something behind, but there was very little chance of that leading me to him, no matter how many episodes of CSI I watched. I clambered back out of the hole just as Flynn came back.
“No Dave?” I asked.
“He had to go call his boss. Something about a demon attack being a very good reason for shutting down the snack bar for the rest of the day,” Flynn replied.
“Makes sense. Anything on the video?” Adam asked.
“Just a big damn demon hauling a box out of the ground. But he made that crater with a spell, Harker.”
“Yeah?” I had kinda figured that much.
“Can you do that? I mean, look, I know you wizard types have a lot of juice, but that’s a big damn hole.”
“I don’t know if I have that much power or not, Becks. Oro isn’t just a Reaver or a Torment Demon like we fought this afternoon. He’s a legitimate big deal in the Armies of Hell, and we’ve been lucky all the times we’ve dealt with him before not to have a lot higher body count.” I remembered the last casualty of Orobas’s plan to remake Charlotte into his own private Hell-condo. Renfield was more than just my uncle’s butler; he was a friend, and I watched him die. It wasn’t the first time that happened to me, and it wouldn’t be the last, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“I guess I didn’t realize just how powerful he was,” Flynn said, her face a little drawn.
“Would it have mattered?” Adam said. I looked up at him, but there was no sarcasm there, just acceptance of our place in the world. We stood between the bad things and the helpless, and sometimes the waves of shitty washed one of us away.
Flynn looked at him, then at me. Then she shrugged her shoulders, let out a sigh, and said, “No, it wouldn’t. I picked up a badge to stop bad things from hurting good people, and this is just more of the same, only on a bigger scale.”