Heaven Can wait: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  “I know a few people in town, too. I’ll take Flynn with me to poke around the more interesting parts of Atlanta. Maybe we can dig up some dirt on our Mr. Barton,” Gabby added.

  “That leaves you and me digging through the interwebs again, buddy,” Jo said to Sparkles.

  “It’s what I live for,” he said with a whinny.

  Six hours later, I drove back to the hotel with a disappointed Watson in the passenger’s seat of my rental car, a stack of spellbooks in the trunk, a huge box of takeout from Fox Brothers’ Barbecue in the backseat making me hungry, and bad attitude.

  I carried the books up the elevator, and Watson handled the food. We walked into the “war room” to see Jo buried in her laptop and Becks sitting with her head down on the table, fast asleep. Jo made a shushing motion to me as the door opened, but Flynn sat up and rubbed her eyes, looking at me sleepily.

  “Anything?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

  “No,” I said. “Looks like you had about the same luck.”

  “Yeah, Gabby punched a lot of people, but nobody could give us shit on Barton. It’s like the dude is a ghost.”

  “A ghost with a hell of a bankroll,” Sparkles said from the TV. He was wearing his Dennis face this time, and I reflected for just an instant on the cost of associating with me. Sure, maybe he would have ended up trapped in the internet like a modern-day Tron without my influence, but it’s pretty damned unlikely. Anna, Flynn’s dad, Dennis, now Renfield—I was starting to have the death of a lot of good people on my conscience. I looked around the room as I set my spellbooks down on the counter and wondered if any of these folks were going to get added to the list before we were done here.

  “Penny for ‘em,” Flynn said.

  “Huh?”

  “You were a million miles away. What’s up?”

  I looked around the room. Sparkles and Watson were exchanging status reports, but Jo was looking right at us. Not a lot getting past that one. “Nothing,” I lied. I could see in Flynn’s face that she knew I was lying, and it didn’t sit well with her. Hard to lie to someone who can see inside your head. But right at that moment, I didn’t care. I couldn’t stand in the middle of our war room, such as it was, and express my doubts that we’d be able to do this job, or get everybody out alive if we could. That wouldn’t help anyone. I kept a tight rein on my emotions and my thoughts, sending a quick promise across our mental link to explain later, when we were alone.

  “Nah, it’s cool,” I continued the lie. “I was just thinking about this one spell I heard a rumor about. It diverts energy from one place to another. Maybe we could use it to spread out the magical energy released from Orobas’s plan to a bunch of places, so it couldn’t open a permanent rift.”

  “But wouldn’t that open a lot of small, temporary, rifts? That might be just as bad,” Jo said. “Opening a dozen gateways to Hell all over the world, even for a little while until they closed on their own, seems like a recipe for a demonic invasion.”

  “And without having a team on the ground everywhere we diverted the energy to, who knows what kind of shitshow we’d be in for,” I agreed. “Yeah, that’s no bueno.”

  “Well, let’s eat, then we can get back to it after dinner,” Watson said, setting containers of food out on the table.

  “Did somebody say food?” Gabby asked as she came in. She was in a tattered t-shirt, jeans, and no shoes, with a towel wrapped around her head.

  I looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

  “Had to shower,” she said. “My clothes got a little blood on them.”

  “Some of the people we talked with weren’t very cooperative,” Flynn agreed.

  “Funny, you’re not covered in blood,” I said. “Or did you already wash off the evidence?”

  “No, I managed to stay out of the splash zone,” she replied. “But trust me, interrogations with Little Miss Sunshine here are messier than a Blue Man Group show.”

  “Adam and Luke already head out?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they’re off looking for seedy underworld connections to cajole, bribe, or intimidate,” Jo said.

  “I wanted to go, but they said I would intimidate their contacts,” Gabby whined. “Imagine that—Frankenstein’s monster meets Dracula, and I’m the scary one?”

  “I think that says something about your negotiation methods, Gabriella,” Watson said, looking at the containers of food with a skeptical eye. “Is there anything in this assortment of, dare I call it, food that isn’t fried?”

  “The barbecue isn’t fried, but the pickle are,” I said, pulling a paper plate out of the box and piling it high with pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, and fried pickles. “I thought about getting Frito pie, but that would have taken way too long to explain to Captain Cambridge here.” It was a statement of geographical prejudice that only Flynn smiled at my culinary humor.

  “What’s next?” Flynn asked as we all sat down to eat. Sparkles had vanished from the TV screen, not enjoying watching people eat.

  “Oh yeah, that reminds me.” I pulled a map of Atlanta out of my back pocket and tossed it into the middle of the table. “After we eat, I’m going to need everybody but Becks to clear out of here for an hour or so. I have a ritual that may let us locate the other major magical artifacts in the area, but I need quiet to perform it.”

  “So you’re going to perform a ‘ritual’ with your girlfriend for about an hour that requires the conference table?” Gabby asked with a smirk. “You know, one of the bedrooms on the floor might be more comfortable for that.”

  “Blow me, Gabs. It’s a geolocation spell, so I have to spread the map out. I’ll use Rebecca as an anchor while I send my astral form out into the city, using the map as a guide. That should let me locate any hot spots of mystical energy a lot faster than driving all over town. Flynn will be my tether back to my body in case I get lost or run into anything with bad intentions. Any happy fun time will have to wait until Orobas is dealt with.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” Flynn added. Gabby put up her hands in mock surrender, but the little upturn at the corner of her mouth never vanished.

  We plowed through healthy servings of barbecue and fried pseudo-vegetables in silence for a few minutes, then cleared the table. Jo, Gabby, and Watson retired to a nearby room with a stack of arcane books to scour for world-rending spells while I dug four big white pillar candles and a box of Morton’s salt out of another bag Watson brought up with the food.

  I spread the map out onto the table and held the corners down with the candles. I poured a circle of salt around the table, making sure there were no breaks in it, then had Flynn step over the line and sit at the foot of the table.

  “You’re going to be my anchor. All you have to do is keep our link open, and every once in a while, just throw a thought my way.”

  “Kinda like psychic radar? I just ping you every so often to make sure you can find your way back to me?”

  “Exactly like that,” I agreed. I sat in the chair at the head of the table and looked behind me to make sure the line of salt was still intact.

  “What’s the circle for?” Becks asked.

  “It’s just a little precaution,” I replied. “I don’t think anything is looking for me, and what I’m doing is unlikely to set off any defenses that local magicians have put on their stash of toys, but just in case, I want a little extra security around my physical form while I’m off dancing in the astral plane.”

  “Makes sense. But what if I need to bring the circle down for some reason?”

  “Obviously, I hope you won’t, but if something gets in here with us, and you need to bolt, just scrub the line of salt with your foot. Because we’ll be linked when I invoke the circle, your essence will be tied to it as well as mine, and you can take it down just like I can. Sound good?”

  “As good as anything.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s go on a magical scavenger hunt.”

  7

  I put my hands on the table,
touching the map, and sent a tendril of my consciousness out to Flynn, strengthening the link that was always there, bolstering it with a mental image of steel cables wrapped around each other into a thick, sturdy rope of metal wire, tying us together.

  Whoa, I “heard” in my head. That’s way tighter than we’re usually linked.

  Yeah, I sent back. Because I’m leaving my physical body, I needed to beef up the psychic tether so I’ll have something to follow if I get lost or need to jump back in a hurry. You good? I’m about to start the spell.

  I’m good.

  I closed my eyes and poured a little bit of my essence into the circle, invoking it. The rest of the hotel room fell away as a shimmering barrier of magical energy snapped into place around me, the conference table, and Becks. My circles are a little different from the old-school ones that people used in the days before electricity, indoor plumbing, and hotels. My “circle” was shaped more like a dome, a semi-circle of magical energy with a flat bottom under our feet. It took me about ten years to figure out how to shape the energy to flow in a dome over my head with a flat disk under me, but it became a necessary evil once the floor beneath me was pretty much guaranteed to have conduit and wires running through it. That kind of breach makes a typical circle, which is more like a sphere, very vulnerable, and is why a lot of practitioners only work outside nowadays. If you can get far enough into the woods, you know that the bottom part of your circle is only going through dirt and roots, and it’s still intact beneath your feet.

  That doesn’t work for me. The demons I hunt are most often in buildings. Or in people who are in buildings. And after the first time an imp rode a water pipe through my circle and knocked the shit out of me, I learned that the old ways weren’t very good anymore. But now my circle was secure from attacks from below and above, so I could start my ritual.

  There wasn’t a spell for what I was trying to do, so I was making it up as I went along. The story of my life. I focused my consciousness inward, concentrating on the core of me, those things that defined my very Quincy Harker-ness. Not my height, weight, hair color, or clothes. More my sense of being, my smart-ass personality, my slightly off-kilter moral compass, my friendships, my desires, my love for Rebecca, my regrets about Dennis and Anna… all the things that over a century of life built up to make me into the man I am. I took that essence of myself and separated it from my physical form, stepped outside myself, and with a slight tearing sensation, I was free.

  I looked to my right, and there I sat. My hair needed a trim, I could use a shave, and I was a little too skinny. My jacket needed desperately to go to the cleaners, and my Doc Martens had seen better days. But my jeans were mostly clean, and my black button-down shirt still held a vestige of a crease here and there where it once saw the bottom of an iron. The bags under my eyes told the real story, though.

  This was a man who needed about a week’s worth of sleep, a month’s worth of good meals, and if the beginnings of a spider web of broken blood vessels on my nose was any indication, a serious decrease in the alcohol intake.

  I look like hell, I thought.

  You’ve seen better days, Flynn agreed.

  Why didn’t anybody tell me?

  I thought we’d save the world first, and if we didn’t all die in the process, I’d bring up the idea of a vacation.

  Makes sense.

  Now go find us some magical trinkets so we can finish up the world-saving and move on the sunny beaches and umbrella drinks.

  Yes, ma’am.

  I turned to the map, spread out over the conference table. It was a lifeless thing, but I knew how to change that. This was sympathetic magic, where I wanted to use the map as a representation of the real city to show me the location of items. I focused myself on the map and poured energy into it, strengthening its representational link to Atlanta. As I did, I concentrated on the mystical ebb and flow of the area, the pulse of magic that breathes in the heart of everywhere people live.

  The map started to glow in my Sight, a spider web of ley lines crisscrossing the surface as the natural pathways of magical energy materialized. Wherever they crossed, the light flared a little brighter, and where enough lines converged, a node appeared, a hub of magical focus where the power was closer to the surface, easier to access for practitioners and the mundane alike. Nodes began to flare into my view all over Atlanta: one in Centennial Park, one at the Fox Theatre, one right down the street at the Marriott Marquis hotel of all places. A smaller one at the Margaret Mitchell house, one at The Vortex, no surprise there. There were even a couple of churches built on nodes, a fact that would amuse the local witches and likely horrify some of the pastors.

  I focused past the nodes to the less natural hot spots. Some places popped into view that were instantly recognizable to me. The Masquerade nightclub was a long-standing meeting place for supernatural types, so I disregarded that one. Anything near Little Five Points was going to be too popular with local weirdos and wannabes to house any artifacts of real use, but three places twinkled in my view. Sitting far from any ley lines, nodes, or known locations of magical practitioners, there was a house in Buckhead that shone like a beacon to my astral self. There was also a hot spot in Grant Park near Zoo Atlanta, and one more right on top of the CDC.

  Great, do I want to go into the house of likely a powerful magician, go argue with a wild animal, or play with the plague? I’ll start with the magician. Looks like I’m off to see a wizard.

  I concentrated on the image of the house in Buckhead, focused my mental imagery on the map, the surrounding streets, fixed an image in my head of tree-lined avenues and ridiculously large homes, and stepped into the map.

  I closed my eyes tight as I dove forward, half-expecting to run face-first into the walls of my own circle and get slammed back into my body and knocked silly with magical backlash, but the spell worked exactly how I wanted it to, and when I opened my eyes I was “standing” on a sidewalk in front of a two-story house on a tree-lined street in north Atlanta.

  Well, that went better than expected. I reached out along my mental link to Flynn and felt her respond with a little tug. Good, my anchor line was holding. So far, looks like everything’s coming up Harker.

  I walked to the front door and stepped right through it into a grand foyer. The floors were marble, and a huge staircase curved up in front of me, banister gleaming in the light from a crystal chandelier above me. I was a little confused at the ease of my entry. This house was warded to high heaven, but only against physical threats. There was nothing in place to keep out spirits or astral projections, which seemed off to me. Why ward against one type of threat, but not the other?

  “Probably because I am not afraid of ghosts or spirits,” came a voice from my right. I turned to see a man standing there with a pair of long curved daggers in his hands. He was a big man, easily six-three and about two-fifty, and nothing about him looked soft. He wore his brown hair short, and he was dressed for bed, in a pair of pajama pants with no shirt and bare feet. He held the knives like he knew how to use them, and they glowed like a pair of miniature suns in my Sight. I knew right away that those blades could cut me to ribbons, even in my incorporeal state.

  I knew that was too easy.

  “Yes, you should have,” the man replied.

  I cocked my head sideways. You can hear me?

  “Of course I can hear you. You are in my home, my domain. I am the master here, and I can do whatever I choose. I can hear the spirits, I can see ghosts, and I can send you back to the afterlife!”

  I’m not a ghost! I’m an astral projection. I realized a little belatedly that admitting I was essentially a psychic cat burglar might not be any more endearing than being a ghost. My host apparently decided the same thing, since he charged me with those glowing knives aimed straight at my chest.

  8

  I felt for the tether to Flynn, looking to use it as a quick escape, but it was gone. I had no connection to the outside world, nothing tying me to my body, a
nd no good way to get out of this house before its owner skewered me with his glowing spirit blades.

  I dodged left to avoid his first charge, my mind racing as I tried to come up with a plan. I couldn’t fight him because I didn’t have any mass or form. But he could hurt me with his magical blades. At least they certainly looked like they would hurt, and he was waving them around like they would hurt, so I figured it best not to take the chance.

  He swiped at me with one hand, but I kept dancing back. I’d never fought anyone while incorporeal before, so I was at a disadvantage. Worse for me, my opponent moved like it wasn’t his first ghost battle. I danced around the foyer until I got to the front door, then dove forward to get outside and start making my way back downtown to the hotel the best I could.

  Except I couldn’t get through the door. I smacked into the wood just like I was solid, crossing my eyes and sending stars shooting through my vision. What the fuck?

  “By the way, revenant, my domicile is built as a spirit trap. Think of it as a roach motel for the supernatural—ghosts check in, but they don’t check out.” He laughed, an ugly thing that bubbled up from some dark place, and I started to wonder about his intentions in turning his home into a beacon of mystical energy, then setting a trap for anyone who decided to take a peek. This was not a dude who just stumbled onto an artifact. This guy knew what he was holding and how to use it.

  And he wanted to use them on me, as evidenced by him charging me again. I was hamstrung without my connection to Becks, trapped in this house with a pissed off ghost hunter, but I was the furthest thing from helpless. As I leapt over his charge, I started to remember all the things I knew about astral projection and defending myself while spirit walking.

  I couldn’t kick his ass, but I could still touch magic. Hell, I pretty much was magic at that point. I sprinted up the stairs, and when he followed, I vaulted the railing down to the first floor to create some separation. He spun around and sprinted down the stairs after me, but I had the seconds I needed.