by D V Wolfe
Sirens.
We all moved as quickly as we could down the road towards the warehouse. Gabe had scooped Hilda up and Stacks was helping me move Noah along faster while Rosetta was fussing over Tags who headed off to get Joel’s Subaru.
“Head for Stevensville,” I yelled to the others. “Back to Hilda’s!” I made eye contact with Vince in the Jeep. “Follow Vince and Mick, they know the way!”
I climbed behind the wheel, turned the key, and felt Noah’s elbow in my very sore ribs. I cranked my window down to give myself an extra inch of space with my arm and shoulder out and I shifted into gear, following Rosetta and Gabe’s Triumph who were already turning and barreling down the road after the Jeep, heading back to the highway. When we’d hit the main drag, Rosetta had already been several blocks ahead of us and Gabe had taken a different way to the highway so we didn’t look like a caravan of criminals fleeing the scene. We passed what was probably Sicily’s only three cop cars blowing through lights on their way out to the Blue Ridge Estates trailer park.
“Wave to the nice officers,” I muttered to Hilda and Noah.
I turned the corner and changed lanes heading towards the edge of town.
“Well,” Hilda said. “That was fun.”
26
When we turned down Elm, on our way back to Hilda’s house, I heard her suck in a breath. Noah and I turned to look at her.
She was shaking her head. “The whole damn neighborhood is going to think that I’m hosting some kind of half-assed car show at my house,” she grumbled. I could kind of see her point. Parked in a line in front of her house, there was the yellow monster-Jeep, Rosetta’s pink Caddie, the blue Subaru, Gabe’s Triumph, and now Lucy. “Y’all wouldn’t know subtlety if it bit you on the ass,” Hilda spat, shoving the door open before we came to a complete halt.
“Make sure she gets to the sidewalk in one piece,” I said to Noah out of the side of my mouth. I got out and looked at the motley crowd of people, blood-stained and ragged, standing in front of Hilda’s house, hands-on-hips.
“Why didn’t you all just go in,” Hilda growled. “I can tell the dog men have been in here since I left.” Hilda turned to look at me, shaking her cane. “And you too. Apparently ‘mi casa es su casa’, so beat cheeks inside before the whole town thinks I’ve opened a shelter for accident-prone circus performers.”
Hilda led the way and everyone streamed inside after her. Rosetta paused and looked over at me. I felt heat in my face as we traded looks. I opened my mouth to say something to her at the same time she did.
“Rosetta,” Tags said. “Did you bring your kit? We’re going to need some stitching.” Rosetta turned back to nod at him.
“I’ll get the whiskey,” I said. I turned around and headed back to Lucy to dig out the bottle of Stitch’s.
I could feel someone behind me and I turned to see Gabe, hanging back, watching me.
“That was almost a Hallmark channel moment,” Gabe said, nodding at the spot where Rosetta had been standing.
I chuckled and opened the passenger side door. “Nah, what you were about to see was something even Jerry Springer wouldn’t show. When Rosetta has it out with me over everything I did...there will be blood rains, the earth will tremor….” I paused, picked up the whiskey bottle off the truck floor, and straightened up, turning to look at Gabe. “Why did the earth tremor, at the trailer park, do you think?”
Gabe shrugged. “Festus said that Mastick was this demon-want-to-be. Maybe he felt like he needed something dramatic as a signature. He seemed like the type.” I closed the passenger side door and headed past Gabe, back towards the house. “Hey,” Gabe said, reaching out and trailing the back of his forefinger down the back of my arm. I turned to look at him. “We all made it. We’re all still alive.”
“But Joel…” I started.
Gabe shook his head. “Just wait. Once Joel gets his wits about him, I think Sister Smile is going to have way more than she can handle. Joel may talk like a bum, but he’s a fast thinker. Just wait, I’ll bet by tomorrow, one of us is getting a call from a hacked-off Joel, standing in some truck stop in Oklahoma, asking where his car is…”
I was running up the house steps before Gabe had finished speaking.
“Where are you going?” Gabe asked.
Something Gabe had said gave me an idea. It was a slim chance, but I sure as hell was going to try.
Hilda’s living room was bustling. People were calling for suture needles, disinfectant, floss, pain killers, devil’s claw, and god-knew-what-else. I poked my head into the kitchen and I saw Hilda and Rosetta, sleeves rolled up, going to work on Tags and Vince who both had their shirts off and looked humiliated as the women sponged their backs and started threading suture needles. I walked into the kitchen and Vince and Tags both looked up at me as if I’d just ridden in on a chariot from the clouds.
“Oh thank god, Hilda here is apparently a tea-toddler and doesn’t have a drop in the house,” Tags muttered, reaching his hand out for the whiskey. I heard Hilda grumbling as she moved around behind Vince and Rosetta smacked Tags on the back of his head.
“Just because Hilda doesn’t brush her teeth with the stuff, like someone I know,” Rosetta hissed at Tags.
“Where’s my cell phone?” I asked, looking from Rosetta to Tags, to Vince. “Winner gets the whiskey,” I said.
“Mick has it,” Vince said. He grinned and held out his hand for the bottle. I held it out to him and jerked it away just as he was reaching for it.
“Hilda, Rosetta, do you two want a slug off the bottle before I give it to them? It might help. I can guarantee you, these two are whiners when they’re getting stitched up.”
Hilda held out her hand, “Give me that.” I handed her the bottle, she unscrewed the top and knocked back two fingers.
Rosetta held a hand out to Hilda. “Oh hell, don’t hog all of it. I have to perform miracles over here with this wrinkled hide.”
Both men looked scandalized as Rosetta and Hilda passed the bottle between them. I rolled my eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be plenty left over for you two.”
I moved out of the kitchen, looking for Mick. He was sitting perched on the edge of the loveseat next to Noah. Mick was tense, hunched over and staring into the kitchen. Noah, on the other hand, looked completely boneless. He’d flopped back on the couch and was snoring, his mouth open and head back. It had been a really long day.
“Vince says you have something small, hard and annoying for me,” I said to Mick.
Mick looked surprised, blushed, and then looked confused. “What...what are you talking about?”
“My cell phone,” I said, holding my hand out. Mick sighed, stood up, and fished it out of his pocket. I looked down at the screen. No missed calls. I flipped it open and scrolled through my phone book. I found Joel and pressed the button to call. I moved back towards the front door, trying to escape the noise as Stacks tried to engage Mick in conversation about the possibility of Cynocephali being government-engineered and Rosetta and Hilda yelling at Vince and Tags to sit still.
“Who are you calling?” Gabe whispered when I got close to him. I motioned for us to head outside and he held the door open for me. He followed me out onto the front steps as the phone rang and rang. I heard a faint strum of a guitar and I moved towards the street. It was getting louder. I redialed and I moved closer to the Subaru. It was Jack Johnson. I opened the Subaru door and reached under the passenger seat. Joel’s phone. I watched it buzz in my hand as the screen lit up with a picture he’d taken of me while I was sleeping. The screen said, ‘Call from Buckaroo’. A strangled sob erupted from my chest. I felt Gabe’s hand on my shoulder. I turned to look at him.
“I just thought, maybe he had it with him,” I said. I stared at the phone.
“I didn’t know you two were still…” Gabe said, looking down at the phone. I looked up at Gabe and it was hard to read his expression behind his beard.
I shook my head. “We weren’t. We ne
ver really were. Mutual attraction at the time, but he’s my friend. And when I couldn’t get through to any of you, he came. He and Vince and Mick.” I looked up at the yellow Jeep and winced at the deep scratches in the perfect paint job. I sighed. “Guess I’m going to be getting a body shop bill for that.” I nodded at the Jeep. Gabe turned to follow my gaze.
He snorted. “Mick broke your nose. I think you’re even.”
“I darted them with dog tranqs,” I said.
Gabe nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably going to get a bill.”
I sighed and closed the Subaru door. Gabe shifted his weight and I heard him draw a sharp breath. I looked up at him. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of damage you managed to do to yourself.”
“Me?” Gabe said. “Do you want to be the pot or the kettle?”
I paused and narrowed my eyes at Gabe. “Did you teach Noah that?”
Gabe put a heavy arm around my shoulder and leaned on me more than was necessary. “How do you know he didn’t teach me?”
“Where’ Festus?” I asked Stacks when we got back inside.
“Shower,” Stacks said. He had an old copy of a Home and Garden magazine from the table next to the couch open in front of him.
I turned to look at Gabe. “I’ve never seen Festus wear anything but that suit. I don’t know if he has any other clothes.”
“Well, you better find him something,” Stacks said from behind the magazine. “Hilda made him hand her his clothes through the door and they went into a garbage bag and outside. I think the phrase ‘send them back where they came from’ was tossed around by Rosetta, so Festus might be getting real comfortable with all of us, very quickly.”
“Do you want to see a naked Festus?” I asked Stacks. Stacks dropped his magazine.
“What? No. Why did…” Stacks started to say. Then I saw his expression change. “Please tell me you have something he can wear.”
I sighed and headed back outside.
Twenty minutes later, six pizzas were delivered to the front door. I handed the delivery guy some cash and we piled them on the kitchen table. I turned around to see Festus, standing in the living room, drying his hair and looking, surprise-surprise extremely pissed off.
“That’s cute,” Mick said, looking at Festus. “You look like a mini-Bane.” Festus was dressed in one of my a-shirts and a spare pair of Noah’s cargo shorts.
“I was wrong before,” Festus said. “This is humiliating.”
I moved over to stand next to Vince and I pulled Joel’s phone out of my back pocket. “Here,” I said, holding it out to him.” Vince looked down at my hand. “It’s Joel’s. I know you and Mick talk to him more than I do. Do you have a place you can stash Joel’s car for safety?”
Vince nodded. “We’re about to head out to the west coast. Mick can drive it and we’ll take it back to Joel’s house in Santa Monica. He has a garage. We’ll lock it up. Keep it safe until he surfaces.”
I nodded and felt the muscles in my chest relax slightly. Everyone was moving through the kitchen, picking up pizza and talking. Festus stood at the back, apart. I moved over to him.
“Glad to see you’re no worse for wear,” I said, looking from the scabbed over cuts on his face to the puffy, purple bruises and deep angry cuts on his arms and the parts of his chest that I could see.
Festus picked at his shirt. “I actually think this outfit is making my wounds worse. I need to depart, go procure something less taste-less and go check-in at the office. You may not hear from me for a few days. I need to catch up on your totals and probably have a few lengthy and pointless meetings with my superior to make up for lost time.”
I shivered. “Why does that sound really, really painful?”
Festus shrugged. “Because you’ve been to Hell and you know that ‘really, really painful’ is our company motto.”
I studied Festus. “So, at the warehouse in St. Louis? What happened?”
Festus sighed. “Don’t read too much into it. It’s in my best interest to get through this job without any more delays. If I’d have stepped aside when the tribe pulled up in those near-luxury sedans, it really would have just been shooting myself in the foot. So, I employed a little demonic guile.”
“That doesn’t sound appetizing,” I said. “And you did this by relocking the warehouse?”
“And hiding your decrepit vehicle from their eyes.” Festus frowned. “The damned thing probably gave me some kind of mental tetanus…”
“Wait,” I said. “You ‘hid’ it from them?”
Festus nodded. “Yes. Demons can warp the reality around them. The reality mortals see. You know that, right? It’s not easy and it takes everything we have, at least for my pay grade. We have to be still and completely focused on the illusion we’re creating.” Festus huffed a sigh of annoyance. “Which is why those cannibalistic ignoramuses got the drop on me.”
“You were captured because you were busy hiding Lucy from them? So they wouldn’t know that we were there?” I asked.
“Yes. And they were breaking out the salt and pepper shakers and poking at my extremities with rusty steak knives when we were clear of the warehouse and I realized just how deep in it I was,” Festus said.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
Festus shrugged. “The only thing I could. I told them there was a demon smorgasbord in town, much stronger and more filling than any human mortal.”
“So you already knew about the Johnson Meredith building,” I said. “We had to pendulum to find it.”
Festus nodded. “I couldn’t tell you that’s where it was happening. There was too much of a risk that me assisting you might be tortured out of me the next time I was back in the office downstairs. With the cannibals, I didn’t really have a choice. I thought at the time that my only option to escape becoming dinner was to give them the keys to a buffet, hoping they’d be too full to finish me off before I thought of a plan of escape.”
“But they kept you,” I said. “Even after the massacre in St. Louis.”
“That Carrion knew who I was. He knew about my connection to you and after he found out about Sister Smile’s carload of cannibals had been feet away from you at the warehouse and unable to detect you, he then usurped her as the leader by force. His plan was to find and kill you all at the Johnson Meredith building, but what he hadn’t accounted for was that there was dissension in the demon ranks.”
I narrowed my eyes at Festus. “What do you mean?”
Festus met my gaze and his red eyes dimmed almost to a light brown as he said. “There were demons in St. Louis who didn’t want you dead.”
This was a new one on me. “Why?”
Festus shook his head. “I’m not sure. Having dissension in the ranks isn’t exactly new for Hell, but I hadn’t expected anything like this. Somewhere, in that mess was a demon or several demons that were warping reality to keep you hidden from Mastick and the cannibals. They couldn’t hide you from the other demons because they know how the magic tricks are done as well, but they could hide you from a two-bit Carrion and a bunch of flesh-crazed cannibals.”
Well, that explained the miracle of us all making it out of St. Louis alive.
“So, no theories as to why there was a demon or several demons that didn’t want us to be eaten by cannibals?” I asked.
Festus shook his head. “It’s not exactly difficult to hide a cat amongst the pigeons in Hell. We’re all there because we tended towards duplicity in life, but helping a mortal? Especially one that would be taking so much power away from the engine if they succeeded in freeing the souls?” He shook his head.