by TA Moore
“From what the waiters have said, he didn’t have any,” Ambrose said. “He used to be close to his brother, they opened the business together, but after he married his brother’s ex, that broke down.”
Jack nodded. That fit. It was a brother instead of a friend, but human bonds were difficult for demons to understand. They defined relationships by what they needed from each other, not by affection.
“Could the brother have done it?” Jack asked. “Fratricide has a proud tradition.”
“He’s in Alaska,” Ambrose said. “He’s out at sea on a fishing boat. No way he could have gotten back here, murdered his brother, and taken a plane back in time.”
“What about Dale’s wife and child?” Jack asked. “What do they say about him?”
“Not much,” Ambrose said bleakly. He checked his watch, sat back, and tapped a beat out against his knee with his fingers. “The symbol in the larder. Is that… the Devil?”
He almost whispered the words, as though that would help. Jack snorted.
“This? No. If he tried to summon him, nobody would have answered. Lucifer doesn’t leave Hell.” Or maybe couldn’t leave Hell. Every demon or drude or lilin that Jack had spoken to had a different story about why they’d all left Hell two decades before, but they were united that they wouldn’t go back willingly. “But just in case he changes his mind, no other demon wants to stand on his toes and step in for him. That’s the number-one reason more stupid high-school kids don’t end up with their soul in hock.”
Ambrose scowled and rubbed his hand over his face. “You say that like it’s a fact, like the servants of Hell are just another gang, with rules and standards. Why should I trust you, Jack? How did you find out so much about them?”
Blood in Jack’s eyes and mouth, his head full of the underwater disorientation of concussion. They’d dragged him out of the church and down to the shore, the stones hard and unforgiving under bare feet. A bonfire flickered and flared on the beach, the heat of it an unbearable addition to the muggy oppression of the summer that seemed like it would never end.
A girl groped his cock, fingers tight and frantic as she dug into the flesh, and the specter of his dad in Jack’s head cackled some sort of twisted approval and laughed in a nervous, shrill voice at her transgression.
“Get the fuck off him,” one of the boys in black hoodies, sleeves clumsily painted with occult symbols, spat as he slapped her hands away. “The Lord of Lies wants a virgin, not your fucking sloppy seconds.”
They were just kids who had nothing and wanted everything. Stupid, dangerous kids.
“Are we really gonna…,” a nervous voice whispered. They sounded as though they almost hoped that no one would hear the question and seal it with an answer.
“Too late to back out now,” the hooded boy snapped.
They dragged Jack into the center of the shell-made pentagram and used tent pegs and nylon rope to pin him down. The hooded boy started the chant, a girl’s voice was the first to pitch in, and then the rest gradually joined.
Jack choked on his own blood and laughed at the fact that the church choir had at least taught them to harmonize.
“The hard way,” Jack said as he absently reached up to rub the old scar that was almost hidden in his hairline. After a second he reached out and gripped Ambrose’s shoulder. There was wiry muscle wrapped around his long, lanky frame, hidden under baggy shirts and worn jackets. “Don’t ask too many questions about Hell, Ambrose. You won’t like the answers.”
“Why not?”
Jack smiled thinly. “It’s Hell. There’s not much to like.”
A shudder rattled through Ambrose, and he twitched his hand up to cross himself but never quite completed the gesture. Instead he tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“First time I called you,” he said softly. “What was it? The haunted McDonald’s?”
The McDonald’s hadn’t been haunted; it was the cow. Wherever they’d sourced their meat from had been near enough to the borders of Hell to pick up some sort of taint. It screamed when they slapped it on the grill and dripped wet, red blood no matter how charred it was. At night the shade of something big and mean put itself together from grease and charred smoke—as good as burned offerings, any day—to stalk customers.
“I think so,” Jack said. “Why? I doubt it has anything to do with—”
“I didn’t speak to you for months after that. How many times have I called you this year?” Ambrose raked his fingers through his hair, and it stuck up in unruly curls around his face. “Once a month? More?”
Jack hesitated. “Sometimes more, sometimes less.” He hedged around the truth. It was usually more.
“It’s getting worse,” Ambrose said. “There’s a new cult in town, killing more people. They don’t even try to hide it.”
That was true, but it always got worse. Hell was like an infection—once it bloomed in an area, the best you could do was contain it. There were places where it was worse, where it spread faster. Back home in Jasper, it metastasized through the town within a year, roots buried so deep there was no way to get the lye to them.
“I need to know what I’m dealing with,” Ambrose said, almost pleaded. “How to deal with them. Stop them.”
It wasn’t the first time Ambrose had asked, and it wasn’t the first time Jack had shaken his head and rejected the idea. “Then how would I make rent?” he asked. “Best to just leave it to me, Ambrose. You’ll sleep better at night.”
Jack didn’t know if that was a mistake or not. Maybe if everyone in the world turned around and saw that Hell had grown up in the suburbs and alleyways, consumed whole towns and counties, they might do something. The Church might find a sacrifice that was big enough to wall the demons away again.
Maybe. Might.
If Ambrose wanted to survive, he needed to hang on to the little part of him that didn’t quite believe in demons, the part of him that looked skeptical at Jack’s statements about sigils and souls and might be able to join the rest of the world in looking the other way.
Otherwise he’d end up like Jack—soulless and damned but without the streak of asshole that Jack had inherited from his dad, the only useful thing the old drunk had ever given him.
“I don’t sleep well now,” Ambrose said as he braced his arms against the panel in front of him and pushed himself to his feet. “You should know that.”
The words hung in the air, caught somewhere between flat statement and accusation. Jack rubbed his hand through his hair and left it there. One night. An itch and a bad idea. It had left him with the bittersweet notion that he might have loved someone like Ben Ambrose, if he hadn’t been someone like Jack. And he always had been, even back when he’d been Father Collins.
“Can I talk to Dale’s wife?” he asked.
Bitterness looked good on Ambrose’s expressive poet’s face. It might have been aimed at Jack or it might have just been for the world.
“She’s missing,” he said. “Their kid too. Presumably whoever killed Dale took them too, but at least your consulting fee is safe. Here.”
He pulled a door key out of his pocket and handed it to Jack. A cardboard evidence tag dangled from it with an address and a case file number written on it. “We’ve already searched Dale Kinney’s house,” he said. “So there won’t be anyone there. Maybe you’ll see something that we didn’t. You know, since you actually know what’s going on.”
He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple sharp under the thin skin of his throat, and after a second, he decided he had nothing else to say. Jack closed his fingers around the key and squeezed until the edges cut into his skin.
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t,” he muttered.
A few pews ahead of them, the wild-haired man turned around. He was younger than his hair and posture suggested, and his eyes were mismatched, not just in color but in expression. One was blue and desperate, the other bright green and merry. The collar around his neck was grubby and limp with sweat.
“Y
ou shouldn’t drink the cup of demons,” the man said sharply, condemnation in his voice. His inky hands worked their way into his tangled hair and tore at it. “You will seek death, but death will be denied you.”
“No offense, Father Colm,” Jack said as he stood up. “You’re a few years too late with that advice.”
The mismatched eyes stared at him. Tears welled up in the blue, and the green one dropped in a wink.
Word on the street was that Father Colm had gotten into the communion wine, but Jack knew better. One day he’d walk in there and be greeted by a gray-haired man with matching eyes. He wanted to believe they’d be flinty and blue, alight with a crusader’s passion, but he didn’t. If he believed in miracles, he might have made different choices.
The memory of Math’s face flicked through his head, eyes wicked and wet, well-kissed mouth slanted with dark amusement.
Or he might just have made the same ones.
Colm narrowed both eyes, and a sly smile pulled up one side of his mouth as though he knew what Jack was thinking. It was possible, and it made Jack’s thoughts feel soiled and sour.
“By their fruit, ye shall know them,” Colm said archly. “A bad tree won’t bear good fruit.”
Jack tucked his keys into his pocket and gave Colm a lean smile. “It’ll do if you’re starved, though. Pray for me, Father.”
For a moment both parts of Father Colm—human and demon—were in rare agreement as he dropped his hands and stared at Jack with undisguised venom.
“No.”
Fair enough.
THE KINNEY family had only been absent for a few days, but the little blue Cape-style house seemed as though it had been abandoned for years. It wasn’t neglected—the inside, once Jack let himself in under the police tape, was briskly clean and well-tended—but it was preserved rather than lived in.
There were pictures of a little blonde girl on the sideboard and on coffee table, her big blue eyes and irrepressible gap-toothed grin framed in Ikea square frames, and a few of Dale and her as he pushed her on a tricycle or let her ride on his shoulders. Jack assumed the space on the walls was reserved for the dead brother.
For the first time, he appreciated why Dale might have made a devil’s bargain to take over his brother’s life. The man caught in Technicolor 2-D on the eggshell white walls looked enough like Dale that it was obvious they were siblings. But he was a more defined version, not exactly handsome—his nose was a bit too big and he had a scar through one eyebrow—but memorable. The walls were the only place where the wife made an appearance, her face always turned toward the man as though he were the sun.
Jack wondered dourly how hard Math had had to work to make her want to fuck her dough-faced brother-in-law instead.
The sick wash of pity and guilt would usually have put Jack back on his heels, but he didn’t have time for that. Whatever had been done couldn’t be undone, not for the Kinneys, but his soul hung attainable, like a brass ring at the fair.
He could feel bad later.
It took him an hour to go through the house. He might not be much of a private investigator, but he had once been a kid full of guilt and shame. It wasn’t hard to work out where people hid the things they didn’t want to think about.
The police would have gone through already, of course, but they looked for evidence and contact details. He needed to find something more precious to Math than Jack’s soul. Although, since he’d killed himself, it was hard to weigh exactly how precious that was.
The mother had hidden a blank card with a phone number on it on the fridge, sandwiched behind layers of kid’s drawings that were held in place with random Ms and Hs. If it was found, she could plead ignorance of how it got there. Jack tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans and paused to study the drawings.
Some of the drawings were typical little-kid scrawls, with suns that smiled and perfectly square houses. Others looked more like ones you’d take to the psychologist’s office than put on a fridge, with hollow-outlined people and black scratched shadows that nearly tore through the page in places. Children found it harder to edit out the parts of the world they weren’t meant to notice. They might not understand what they saw—rationalizing it as a monster under their bed instead of a demon’s influence around the house—but they knew it was there.
Jack hoped she learned to close her eyes before it was too late. He clipped a fallen blue magnet back to the fridge and went to find Dale’s secrets.
Nothing.
Under Dale’s side of the bed, Jack found a porn magazine with crumpled corners and predictably big-breasted women who pouted and tousled from the wiped-clean pages and the police had also found a better-hidden envelope of pictures taped under a drawer in his desk—lean blond men with whips and thick erections dominated.
None of them were the stand-in for Math that Jack would have picked, but he couldn’t judge.
No tacky grimoires, cheap amulets, or signs of the occult anywhere. Jack wondered briefly if he was on a wild goose chase. Maybe Dale hadn’t been the cultist and had just found out something he shouldn’t.
It was possible enough to gnaw at Jack’s nerves, but it seemed unlikely. Math was circumscribed by his nature not to be too forthcoming, but whatever was lost, he wanted found. A stupider demon than Math wouldn’t muddy the trail more than necessary under the circumstances.
So Dale just hadn’t kept the stuff in the house, but it would be close. That sort of stuff, no matter how hard you tried to get rid of it, always ended up making its way back—a buried grimoire dug up by a neighbor’s dog and bought by your wife as a cookbook or a tossed athame that turned out to be the murder weapon that killed your son.
Demonic items didn’t like to be discarded.
Jack went out into the garden. It was bare dirt and a few sparse patches of stubborn grass. A rusty swing set was set up in front of the fence, and a dog yapped with metronomic persistence from the house next door.
Hell overlaid the neighborhood lightly even in daylight. The rows of gently worn homes were interspersed with dark run-down houses with blacked-out windows and mold-bulged siding. Gardens had sprouted white fleshy plants with thin, rattling branches and painful twisted trunks, and the swings in the yards creaked gently as they swung, even though there was no wind. Just a stain until dark, when things would tap on back windows and people would dream of all the impossible things they wanted to do. If only they had some way to pay for them….
The scent of the Infernal made Jack’s job a little more difficult.
He scuffed his boots through the dry tough grass as he had a quick look around for anything out of place. There was a kennel at the far side of the house, big enough for a spaniel or something of that size, but no dog to be seen. Jack crouched down and peered in.
The dark was thick as fur and smelled of old piss and dog sweat. An old bundle of rags lay at the back, and the glitter of the zipper as the light caught it momentarily deceived that it was an eye. Jack grimaced and thrust his hand into the space. His fingers dug into wet, rancid fur, thick and felted under his grip like a hotel carpet, and flesh that yielded too eagerly for health.
The familiar shrieked in inarticulate surprise and offense as he dragged it out into the air. It looked like a dead cat with a rat’s low-set bald ears and a set of teeth too big for its mouth. Long stained claws made from shaped bone scrabbled at the inside of the kennel as it tried to stay where it was.
Jack tightened his grip, and something split and oozed over his fingers.
“Your master is dead,” he said. “You’re falling apart already. Give it up.”
The familiar lost a claw in the wood of the kennel. It keened—a warble of sound that sounded more like a bird than whatever had been used to make the thing—and went for Jack. It writhed out of his grip and left a handful of greasy fur and slimy meat twisted in his fingers as it lunged at his face.
Jack spat out a curse and lurched back. The snap of oversized teeth snapped shut just shy of his nose, the whiff
of decay and damnation sweet as old roses. He lost his balance and landed on his ass in the hard dirt. The familiar smacked into his shoulder and clamped down. Its teeth tore through his leather jacket and into his shoulder.
Pain injected into his muscles, a hot bleed that ran down through his elbow and into his fingers and then settled into a dull itch. It seemed unfair that the dead could still be hurt, but he supposed it made sense. Hell would otherwise be just a long, patient wait for the end of days.
Jack clenched his jaw and grabbed the thing’s naked rat tail. It was ridged with barbs that sliced his fingers, and the drip of his blood was thin and slow as he wrenched it off his shoulder. It brought a ragged scrap of his jacket with it, still clenched in its jaw.
Getting his soul back was turning out to be hard on his wardrobe.
The familiar crawled up its own tail and sank its teeth into his wrist. The points scraped against his wristbone as it gnawed. Jack spat out a “fuck” and shook his arm. The familiar lost its grip and swung, all hisses and drool, from his fist.
It showed no signs that it was going to just give up.
“I gave you the chance,” Jack muttered.
He swung the disintegrating familiar against the side of the kennel. Scavenged bone cracked and poked in raw yellow points through the badly cured hide. It should have made it easy. The familiar was just a lockbox of bone and skin for the imp whose services Kinney had bartered for. Jack just had to unlock it, and the thing would have no hold on the solid world anymore.
Except it looked—sort of, in bits and literal pieces—like a cat, and he felt the guilt as he dropped the dead, squirming thing to the ground and stamped on it. It still writhed and tore its own rotting skin off to bare the makeshift structure of bone and staples underneath. He swore at the distastefulness of it and smashed its skull under his foot. The bone cracked, and a single silver coin and a handful of scented powder spilled out over the grass. As the coin rolled away—a bright glint of dangerous metal that secreted itself in the damp space under the kennel—the familiar finally went still.