Exile

by Peter M. Ball

  I kept my mouth shut. Didn’t bother with any more explanations. Nora was right—I ran. Blame it on being young, stupid, and unaware of other options.

  “So you came back,” Nora said, “and figured you’d announce your return by bringing a shitload of trouble down on my head.”

  “No,” I said. “I came home and cut a deal with Sabbath. Agreed to do some work for him, in exchange for a hassle free stay. I didn’t plan on coming near you. I’d fucked up you and me enough for one goddamn lifetime.”

  “Don’t play the martyr,” Nora said. “It doesn’t really suit you.”

  “You either,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m the girl you left behind.”

  “And I got sent to kill you,” I said, “by a demon I could have sworn you didn’t know existed back when you and I were dating.”

  Nora blinked, her blue eyes cold and hard. “Oh,” she said. “We dated now?”

  “Didn’t we?”

  “No,” she said. “Not really. You and I, Murphy, we fell into each other’s orbit. Dating’s a terrible word for that. It implies you cared about me, instead of using me as the temporary escape when your other life got too much for you.”

  “Well, you were a good refuge.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I saved your ass last night,” she said. “Why don’t you at least try to get through this without fucking insulting me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why’d Sabbath want you dead?”

  “I owed him,” Nora said. “I wasn’t paying up. Not the smartest play, I’ll grant you, but I’ve spent the entire time since you’ve been gone trying to stay ahead of my debts. You know what he’s like when you owe him for too long. You, better than anyone, yeah? Isn’t that why you left?”

  “No,” I said. “Roark cleared my way out.”

  “Roark’s your friend? The guy Sabbath’s got a hard-on for?”

  “That’s him,” I said.

  She nodded. “He the one who told you to leave me behind?”

  It was my turn to nod.

  “Your friend Roark’s an asshole,” she said.

  “Nora—”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t get it. I was nineteen, Keith. My boyfriend, more or less, up and disappears. He might not have been a great partner, with all the secrets and the moody silence and the sketchy-as-fuck-friends, but he was my goddamn boyfriend and I thought I was in love.”

  Her voice cracked. She took a deep breath, fought to regain control. “It makes it hard, not knowing what happened, when that shit goes down. Even at nineteen, I needed answers. So I tracked down Wesna, got her help. Put all the pieces together until I found my way to Sabbath. She didn’t want me going there, getting up close with him. Didn’t know how to stop me, either, and your name opened up his doors ‘cause he still wanted ways to hurt you and I seemed all kinds of useful in that regard.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “No fucking shit.” Nora turned towards the window, watched the light growing dimmer beneath the curtain. “After a few years, I figured out you weren’t coming back. By then, Sabbath had me doing little jobs. That earned me a reputation, and folks puzzled out my connection to a certain asshole I used to go out with. I threw in with Sabbath ‘cause that was the safest option, considering the number of enemies you left here when you bailed.”

  She took a deep breath, sighed. “Sixteen years. It’s a long fucking time, Murphy. Let’s not pretend either of us knows jack about the other, or trade on what we had. I assume you’re not planning on killing me, given that I’m still breathing here?”

  “It was never going to be me. I was looking for options.”

  “And you elected to blow up my bar because?”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Oh, not you, just people who wanted you dead. Assholes who’d tracked you here and figured out we had a thing.” Her voice cracked a second time, accompanied by a momentary anger that washed across her features. “I built that fucking bar, Murphy. I built it out of nothing. If you’re going after the asshole who blew it up, I want to be involved.”

  I stood up, shook my head. “Yeah. That’s a good idea.”

  Nora rolled out of bed, frowning at my sarcasm. “Like I give a fuck,” she said. “I think you’ll find you owe me, Murphy, and I fully intend to collect.”

  “You’re leaving town,” I said. “Same way I did. Sabbath’s got reason to believe you’re deceased. I’d like him to keep believing that.”

  “If you’re taking down Sabbath, I want in on that, too.”

  “Look—”

  Nora raised a finger.

  “I don’t run,” she said. “That’s not what I do. You present me with a problem, I figure out how to solve it. If Sabbath thinks I’m dead, that gives me an advantage. I could use an edge, Keith. I can kill that motherfucker.”

  “Jesus, Nora.”

  “Jesus, Nora, nothing.”

  “Do you even know how to—”

  There are fourteen reliable ways of killing a body possessed by a demon. She covered eleven of them in quick succession, stumbled a little over the twelfth.

  “I’m not the girl you left behind,” Nora said. “I figured this shit out, and I don’t need saving.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What I need,” she said. “What I’ve needed for a long damn time, are allies who aren’t afraid to work alongside me.”

  She backed away from me, sat down on the bed. Reached for the kettle on her bedside table. “So… you planning to be my ally, Keith? Or you really think you can convince me I gotta slink off after all the shit you’ve pulled?”

  THE RIGHT CALL

  We left Langford’s place a few hours after sunset, followed the winding route out of the Valley until we saw the lights of the suburbs. We’d been on the road about five minutes when the headlights appeared in the rearview, keeping to a safe distance. A professional would have chased me, forced me to take a corner at speed. Deaths happened all the time on the bends of narrow roads, particularly when it’s wet, but that’s not how demons do things. They’re creatures of another era, obsessed with killing you face-to-face.

  Nora sat in the passenger seat, nursing Langford’s .303. She’d abandoned the leather skirt for a pair of Langford’s jeans, hidden the bandages on her arm and shoulder underneath a borrowed sweatshirt. Langford used a little magic to disguise Nora’s features. For the moment, she looked older, dreadlocked and pierced. From a distance, you’d mistake her for Langford. Up close, the glamor would be obvious to anyone tethered to the Gloom.

  Nora didn’t care. Her eyes stayed on the road, fingers tight against the gun. She said nothing until we hit the main roads and I turned onto the highway.

  “North?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s heading towards Sabbath’s territory,” she said. “And we’ve already got a tail.”

  “Necessary evil,” I said. “Unless you’re confident we can do this with a borrowed rifle, and a rented van.”

  Nora buttoned her lip, but her judgment permeated the silence. I did my best to set it aside and remember the route to my stash.

  * * *

  The storage unit was a hold-over from my demon days, established when the idea of leaving Sabbath’s employ first took seed. Housing estates surrounded the once-isolated complex, courtesy of the advancing urban sprawl. Thirty minutes to up the highway, another ten navigating the winding maze of the rental facility. I’d paid for a space deep in a multi-story structure, a two-meters-by-three deal secured by a deadbolt and enough pre-paid rent to keep five years in advance.

  No signs of interference. Everything stacked as I left it: lots of boxes; old furniture, decades out of date. Dust and damp and a single, overworked light bulb that gave us a bare minimum of illumination. I pointed Nora towards a box by the door. “Grab the flashlight on the top layer,” I said. “It’ll have about three grand rolled up inside it, where the batteries would go.”

&nbs
p; She knelt and searched, sneezing as the dust rose. “An actual torch be more useful at this point.”

  “True,” I said, “but we’ve got what we’ve got.”

  I raided the hiding places and unearthing the tools of the trade. Vials of holy water. A couple of sharp knives, one blessed by a priest and another by a local wiccan. A twelve gauge and three boxes of shells. Two P220s, earlier models of the SIG that I’d used to kill Wotan, along with ammunition for each. I loaded the first, slid it into my empty holster. Offered the second to Nora.

  “Shit,” she said, “weren’t you the boy scout.”

  I looked around the cluttered shed, compared my early plans to the skills I’d picked up from Danny Roark. “This? This is nothing. Pick any other city where I keep a stash, and I can go to war with the gear I’ve got there.”

  * * *

  We climbed back into the van, drove down to the McDonald's at the end of the block. Wesna and Randall parked their car outside, doing their best to look inconspicuous. Nora peeled a twenty off the roll of bills from the storage shed and ordered us some food. Quarter pounders. French fries. Cardboard cups full of Coke. I kept my eyes on the demons. Nora focused on her burger. She chewed slowly, took regular sips, mimicking Langford’s birdlike movements. “So, the asshole who blew up my bar?”

  “He goes by Thirteen.”

  “If you say so. I’ll stick with asshole.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s he after?”

  “Me,” I said.

  “That’s the short version. I want something longer.”

  “Not certain what else there is. He’s part of a cult. I killed their leader. They’ve been chasing me ever since.”

  “That’s why you came back?”

  “Ah-huh.” I sipped my drink. The post-mix hadn’t blended with the soda water, left the Coke tasting bland. Nora sat there, chewing. When she swallowed, she put the burger down. Watched me for a moment, then said: “Who else did you kill?”

  I shrugged.

  “Does that mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me.”

  “It means it’s what I do. What I’ve been doing for years now,” I said. “Me and Roark eliminated folks who messed with things they shouldn’t. Entities from the Gloom who refused to play by mortal rules. I don’t feel the need to apologize for it.”

  “Was that your job while you lived here?”

  “No,” I said. “It happened afterward.”

  “Is it why you left?”

  “One reason.”

  “What are the others?”

  I drew a long breath. “Youth. Stupidity. My own little fuck-up while handling Sabbath’s business, which meant the other option was sticking around and getting dead. Roark came along and offered an alternative. I took it because it was easy.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Do we have to do this?”

  “Are you sorry you bailed?”

  The rain was easing up outside and moonlight peeked through the clouds. “No,” I said. “I’m not sorry I left. It was the right call, Nora. I know I’m not meant to say that, but it’s the honest-to-god truth.”

  I dragged my eyes away from the window, met her angry stare. Nora reached for her Coke, pulled it closer. Her gaze flicked to the counter, studying the strangers lined up to order. Then Nora looked at me, her eyes big and very blue. She’d given up crying a long time ago. I could see that in her face. That didn’t mean she’d stopped wanting too. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t be crying now, if she still had tears left.

  I couldn’t blame her. I had plenty of regrets myself.

  “Come on,” I said. “We gotta find some place to crash tonight.”

  * * *

  Traffic on the Gold Coast is a pain in the ass. It’s a long, narrow city with the kind of public transport system that hugs the beach. If you want to go most places, you’re driving the two arterial streets. In an urban district of six hundred thousand people, that shouldn’t be a big deal. Factor in the ten million who pass through every year, it quickly adds up to a nightmare.

  We lost sight of Wesna’s sedan about an hour after we left McDonald's, but I took backstreets for another forty-five minutes to be sure. Dumped the van down in the Tweed, caught one of the local busses north, and checked into a hotel. We looked like hell, but the bloke behind the counter didn’t bat an eye. He passed me the swipe cards and delivered a pre-packaged monolog about the complimentary breakfast buffet.

  Nora sulked as we rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor. Our balcony offered a wide view of the beachfront and the dark mass of ocean. The windows were tinted, double-glazed glass, designed to help combat the heat. Nora eyed the bed in the center of the room. It was big and wide and entirely overstuffed with blankets. She sat on it and hit the remote for the TV. A cheerful, smiling woman worked out on some revolutionary exercise machine that hooked over a door. Nora watched it while I stowed my gear.

  “So, where are you planning to bunk?” she said.

  “The bed seems appropriate.”

  “And I sleep where?”

  “We can switch out, nap in turns. I don’t sleep much anymore, especially not with someone hunting me. I’ll trust you not to run.”

  “Jesus, Murphy.” She curled her legs up, hugged them to her body. I went to work securing the room. Basic wards on the doors and windows, powered by a few drops of blood. Then I fished a book out of my pack, settled in to the room’s single armchair. I kept the SIG P220 close, resting on my lap, and opened to an unread page of Persuasion. I read the same passage about Anne Elliot’s time at Uppercross a half-dozen times, not really able to concentrate on it. My brain ran on a loop, working through everything that’d happened. Wesna. Nora. Sabbath. Michael Wotan down in Adelaide and his friend Thirteen. I didn’t like not having a plan. I hated not having Roark around to think details through for me.

  “Murphy?” The way Nora said my name, all soft and gentle, did more to get my attention than the word itself. She’d crawled into bed wearing a t-shirt Langford had loaned her, left her jeans in a small puddle with her belt and her shoes beside them. Her head was resting against the pillow, stray hairs falling across her face. The glamor faded. She looked like Nora again.

  “This thing you did,” she said. “This business with Roark. Tell me about it.”

  “There’s nothing to know,” I said. “Not really.”

  “It’s—” she hesitated, bit her lower lip. “This is the job you chose over me,” she said. “Give me something, yeah?”

  I thought about that. Figured it couldn’t hurt. Started telling her about the last sixteen years. Nora lay in the bed, watching me. I stared out the window, mouth working on its own, meandering through the training and the hits and the little details that wore away at me. The targets we’d taken down to forge a secure world: an incubus running brothels down in Kings Cross; a handful of werewolves up north, hunting the local backpackers who wandered into the bush. I dredged up the isolation of living in hotels and safe houses. The hours of setting things up. The painstaking rituals required to keep something dead, despite the Gloom-born’s habit of returning from the grave.

  I told Nora about Michael Wotan in Adelaide. The way Roark told me we were hitting the necromancer, the chill that shot through me at the thought of undertaking it. The hope it would finally be the end.

  I told her about the cult he built up over centuries, the girls that disappeared every lunar cycle. About the pall that hung over Adelaide, Australia’s own capital of murder and serial killers, all because he lived there and clung on like a tick. I mentioned Roark’s instructions, the clear moon overhead that night before I broke in and pulled the trigger. About the little things I couldn’t quite remember that may have been mistakes, about having to run with the soul in the bullet despite the fact I didn’t really know what to do with it.

  I told her all of it, ‘cause she’d asked me to, and ‘cause some part of me thought I owed her and hoped it might change things. Nora gave me
the space to talk, the blankets pulled to her shoulders and her expression serious.

  When the words petered out, I sat there and studied her face in the lamplight. The old feelings nagged at me, and I wondered what me and Nora could have become if I’d stayed. In the warm glow of what-might-have-been, all my visions of our lives played out happily, ignoring the threats and dangers being with me entailed.

  “Murphy?” Nora said.

  I shook off my reverie. “Yeah?”

  “We’re adults,” Nora said. “You can use the damn bed.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I won’t sleep for a while.”

  “Murphy,” she said, like I was missing something, and then I caught her eye and I put my book down and shucked off my pants while she watched. I peeled off my shirt and Nora’s eyes followed the scars and the tattoos, trying to read the lost years between the lines they’d left on my body. I didn’t give her long to do that, not before I was under the covers alongside her, throwing an arm around her and pulling her close. Nora wriggled back, ground her butt against my groin. I didn’t protest, and she didn’t complain when parts of me started remembering the times we were more than friends.

  She rolled over and pressed her lips against mine. Her hand went lower, searching for a way into my underwear. I pulled away. “Are you sure?”

  Nora’s fingers found what they were looking for, and after that my focus wasn’t on questions or talking. We peeled off our clothes and remembered what it was like when things weren’t so complicated and she didn’t really hate me, and I remembered what it was like to care about something other than the job.

  * * *

  The next morning, I rented a sky blue hatchback and drove us both down to the safe house. The rain had cleared overnight, replaced by the clear light of morning, and the view from the house stretched out across the water. Nora spent a few minutes exploring the place, whistled beneath her breath. “Doing what you do pays better than I expected,” she said. “Maybe you were right to bail.”