by TA Moore
Janey snorted at him and clattered away over the road, her skinny ankles at risk as she tottered over the potholed road. She caught up with Marissa, and they bickered over the keys.
“Fuck off, priest,” the gray man spat.
Jack tugged the collar of his shirt and felt a quick rash of inappropriate heat over his stomach as he remembered Math doing the same thing.
“Not a priest anymore,” he said.
Gray man showed his brown teeth. “You still stink of it. Second thoughts and fucking shame, it’s not good for business.”
It wasn’t, and Jack had been warned about that. He swallowed the instinctive belligerence that wanted to snarl at the gray man—he’d learned as a kid that men didn’t “take anyone’s shit,” and you never quite forgot a lesson from the end of a belt—and just shrugged instead.
“I need to find Clem,” he said. “Clem Runnells.”
The gray man laughed. There was something in his throat, thick and furzed around his tonsils, and his breath smelled fetid.
“Think anyone comes down here,” he asked, “looking for some other fucking Clem? What does the likes of you want with him?”
Jack smiled thinly. “Nothing that I want to share with some corner dealer. Where can I find him?”
Gray man hesitated, but then he glanced over at the Beetle and saw the day’s best sale already halfway in the car, her long bare legs stuck out into the road as she talked. His tongue darted out over his lips.
“You can usually find him at the Tantalus Draft—two streets down and take a left.” The gray man gave Jack an unfriendly look. “Don’t tell him I sent you.”
He shoved past Jack and moved to the edge of his patch, the spot where corner technically turned to street.
“Tell you what, two for the price of one,” he called out as he reached into his coat and pulled out two charms. “The bloke fucked you over, too, right?”
To Jack, the charms looked like old bone on fresh tendons—still wet—but Janey must have seen something different. She shrugged off Marissa’s attempt to pull her back and scrambled out of the car.
Despite her claim that this was just a mean trick, there was a nasty glitter in her eyes as she reached for the charms. The gray man tugged them back out of her reach and made them dance from their cords. Janey pouted but pulled her hand back as she fell into the negotiation.
“What will they do to them?” she asked in a voice that tried to be cagey but couldn’t disguise its eagerness. “I mean, how will I know it’s worth my time?”
The gray man stepped back until he could lean against the wall, and she followed him. Once she was back on the corner, the gray man started his pitch.
Jack closed his ears to it. It wasn’t his business, and it was easier to ignore if he didn’t know the details. He stalked back over to his bike and swung his leg over it, and the muscles in his thighs, still tender from the night before, ached as he pushed the weight of the machine upright.
It growled to life under him, and better judgment aside, Jack looked back as he drove away—not at Janey but Marissa, hunched and miserable in the car. As though she were ready for a quick getaway, she hadn’t bothered to close the passenger-side door. She rubbed her hand over her face.
Guilt gnawed at Jack’s stomach from two directions. On one side, could he really just abandon two women in Hell without even a lifeline, but on the other, a little girl needed him to rescue her… and his soul? The Kinney girl won. She’d been dragged into adult sins against her will. Marissa and Janey had driven down there of their own volition.
In Craven, bad intentions would always end up in Badends. People knew that, whether they admitted it or not, and they had to live with their own decisions.
That conviction got him to the left turn he was supposed to take, but instead he spun the bike around in a tight circle and drove back down the road. The gray man tracked him with suspicious eyes as he drove past, but he couldn’t distract his attention from Janey for too long. He had to sell her a fix so he could get his own.
Jack stopped next to the VW Beetle and leaned down to look in through the passenger door. A massive sunflower air-freshener hung from the rearview mirror and filled the interior of the car with the incongruous musk of roses. Marissa jerked her head up and gave him a worried look.
“I don’t have any money,” she blurted.
“Don’t bring her back here,” Jack told her. “If she comes anyhow, don’t come with her.”
Marissa wiped her cheek clumsily with one hand and sniffed. “We won’t be back. This is just to freak Mattie out, make her think she’s cursed. Why would Janey come back?”
Some people had a weakness for alcohol, some for heroin. Jack had grown up with enough of those. Others had an addict’s weakness for the Infernal. When he glanced over the road at Janey, he saw that in her face and in the hungry crook of her fingers as she tried to snatch the charms from the gray man’s restless hands.
He wasn’t in any position to judge, but he couldn’t miss it either.
“Why would you?” he asked Marissa.
Her lips, red matte lipstick still caught in the corners, pleated in a miserable smile. “She’s my best friend.”
“If she keeps coming down here,” Jack told her, “she won’t be anyone’s friend.”
Marissa looked stubborn, but Jack couldn’t do anything about that. He’d given her fair warning, and that was more than most people got. She might just have to learn on her own that some people weren’t cut out to be anyone’s friends, even if they didn’t end up addicted to the Infernal.
Jack revved the engine and swung the bike around in a tight, feet-up U-turn. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too late for Marissa, and Jack wouldn’t be too late for the little Kinney girl.
MOST OF the time, Hell dressed itself up in the shabby trappings of the human world. Demons put on pleasant smiles and carried briefcases made of leather that was too fine and slightly freckled. They pruned the black, bloody trees of the dead into box hedges and set their gardeners to pluck the dead birds and shrews from the hollow thorns.
Tantalus’s Draft hadn’t bothered. It had dragged itself out of Hell and seeded down in a cheap sports bar. You could see the line where they had been fused together, as the cracked obsidian floor ate into the scarred parquet, and the bottles of lead-capped hemlock distillations jostled up against IPAs.
Demons in sharp black suits drank pale oily liquors with the squirming, too-small skinsuits of the possessed. Blood dribbled from corrosive-scorched lips—Hell’s booze wasn’t meant for human livers—as the possessed spat out words between the host’s sobs. Tired waitresses brought plates of blanched sliced mushrooms and flayed fish, the pulped flesh bright as the thing breathed its last, and handed them off to diners. Most ate them with knife and fork, but a few just shed human manners and slobbered over their plates like hungry dogs.
It would have been less disturbing if they looked like monsters.
The humans in the bars—groupies and warlocks, cultists and nihilistic teens—sipped watered-down venial sins and traded spells under the tables like porn. Jack shrugged his battered jacket off and propped himself up against the bar. Thick veins of red ran through the dark wood and pulsed with a slow, weak heartbeat under his forearms.
“Can I interest you in a drink?” the bartender asked as she turned to him. A flick of the cloth she’d just used to wipe the bar shed crumbs over the floor, and she tucked it back into her pocket. She smiled at him and flashed empty gums and two metal implant fangs. “A bottle of Lethe perhaps. Half price for the first pretty new face in here in forever.”
She slid the clear bottle toward him, but Jack pushed it back to her. It wouldn’t do him any harm to drink it, since it was usually just tap water. Sometimes it had flavors mixed in or was dipped from streams to give in an authentically stony touch of chlamydia. Mostly they just filled it from a tap and glared any questions into silence.
There was no Lethe. Or if there were, demons had no read
y access to it. If you wanted to forget—and at times Jack had in other bars—the black lustful whiskey was the best bet.
“Clem,” he said. “Where is he?”
The bartender poked a nervous tongue up into the sharp point of her teeth. The flowers she had tattooed over her neck and shoulders moved when she swallowed as though they’d caught the breeze. She didn’t answer Jack’s question but just pointed with her chin over to the shadowed booth in the very corner of the room.
Jack passed a tainted silver coin over the bar. In Hell no one cared about curses. How could life get worse? The bartender scooped it up and stuck it in her pocket while Jack turned and headed over to Clem’s table.
“I was surprised to find out you were back in town,” Jack said as he sat down in the booth. The cheap vinyl sighed and sunk under his weight, the smell trapped in the stuffing musty and fetid. “Last I heard you weren’t welcome.”
Clem tossed back a shot of kerosene-oily gin and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The shadows of the booth fell across him like a curtain, so Jack couldn’t read his expression.
“Things change,” Clem said sourly. “Look at you. Used to think you were so fucking special. Now you’re just some washed-up old priest that no one cares about. Still running errands and sucking cock. Whose is it now? Zachariah’s? I told him if I were interested in playing acolyte, I’d had offers from real demons over the years.”
Jack grimaced. Maybe some things changed, but Clem didn’t. He never would.
They’d grown up in the same place at the same time. Not together. Jack’s dad had been the town drunk and his ma the town whore, or that’s what people called her, anyhow. The Runnells had been what passed for rich around there, turned out judges and doctors and even the occasional small-town politician.
So when Clem found out about magic and demons, he assumed it was for him. He wanted to claim ownership of Hell, to spit “do you know who I am?” at demons and have them quail like the poor broke waitress at the local diner.
It didn’t work like that, but he’d never given up. One hit of the Infernal had been enough to hook him for life, and he’d never quite gotten over that it didn’t give a damn about him. That was why he never made it as a cultist and ended up selling his soul in dribs and drabs—he wanted the demons to serve him.
“I’m looking for someone,” Jack said.
Clem poured himself another glass of gin. “If Math has finally lost interest in you, Jack, give up and have yourself put down. Old dogs and old priests don’t get new homes.”
“Dale Kinney.” Jack hitched his hip up off the booth and pulled out a folded-into-quarters photo of the man in question. Creased lines etched over the bland soft face when he unfolded the paper, but the image was recognizable. Jack pushed it over the table. “I don’t have time to play games, Clem. This is important. Do you know him?”
Clem snatched the photo off him and crumpled it up between his fingers. He leaned forward, finally out of the shadows, to glare at Jack. The state of him made Jack recoil in surprise. Hell treated nobody well, but the last time Jack had crossed paths with Clem, he’d been generically degraded, with puffy skin, scabs, and a junkie’s hollow eyes. Still recognizable, though, still tall and bony with expensively cut red-blond hair. Not anymore. He looked like he’d sold his color to Hell for something. His hair was dishwater-gray and his skin nearly the same color, and all his sharp bones had gotten lost under tight, bloated skin.
Not fat, not like he’d had any pleasure in getting there, just swollen and pocked with soft-edged craters. He looked like proving dough, like you could slice a chunk off and roll it, but Jack didn’t like to think about what he’d bake into.
“I don’t want to, and I ain’t gonna, help you,” Clem spat out. His eyes were dull and porridge-colored behind pink-rimmed lashes. “There’s nothing in it for me. If you fuck this up, maybe Math will finally realize he needs someone with a bit more class to deal with business for him.”
Guilt gnawed at the back of Jack’s throat. It felt like his fault. Not because he’d jumped the line to sell his soul, but because no matter how much he disliked Clem—all their lives, long before Hell was anything other than a way to liven up the Sunday sermon—he had been part of Jack’s congregation. This was the sort of thing that priests were definitely not supposed to let happen.
It was enough to get Clem one more chance. “This isn’t about currying fucking favor, Clem,” he rasped. “There’s a little kid missing. She could be anywhere, with anyone.”
Clem laughed nastily and slouched back into the shadows again. He dipped his finger into the gin and noisily sucked it clean.
“Why should I care? That’s just one less white-trash hillbilly to worry about,” he said. “Shame no one did the same to you—”
Jack reached over the table, twisted his fingers in Clem’s sweat-damp colorless hair, and smacked his face down into the table. The impact tipped over the bottle of gin, and acrid viscous liquor spilled out over the table. Clem screamed muffled profanities as Jack pressed his face into the puddle of gin, spit, and blood.
“Care yet?” he asked.
Clem garbled out a wet insult through split lips and cracked teeth and groped at the pockets of his coat with frantic hands. He managed to hook a thorned lead amulet out of his pocket with one hand and lashed out blindly with it. Jack swore and grabbed Clem’s wrist, dug his fingers to the bone, and smacked it against the edge of the table until he let the amulet drop.
It fell into the spreading pool of spilled gin and sizzled like acid.
“You broke my wrist,” Clem screamed at him. “Fucking gutter-trash cracker inbreed. I’ll—”
Jack smacked his face into the table again to shut him up. “I don’t want to enjoy this,” he growled harshly. “So shut up unless I ask you a question.”
He shifted his grip to the back of Clem’s collar and dragged him over the table. Clem didn’t shut up. He screamed insults flecked with blood and spit, grabbed at the edge of the table and the torn seats of the booth with both hands, and writhed like a gaffed trout. The other customers either pretended not to notice, engrossed in whatever they saw in the bottom of their glasses, or turned to look.
One last yank pulled Clem all the way out of the booth. He rolled off the table and hit the floor with a thud that didn’t sound quite heavy enough. Jack used his collar to haul him back to his feet and shook him until his teeth clacked and he shut up.
“Changed your mind?” he asked.
Clem spat blood spit at him. He didn’t snort enough phlegm for it to carry, and most of it dribbled down his chin. Only a wet spray hit Jack’s face, but he took that as his answer. He dragged up the collar of his T-shirt to wipe his face and shoved Clem toward the door.
“Get off me! Get your filthy hands off me.” Clem’s fingers squeaked over the bar as he grabbed it, and blood smeared along it as the sharp stone cut him down the bone. He tried to dig his heels in but couldn’t find purchase. In a panic he fell back to his old habits. “Do you know who I am?!”
Jack laughed at him. “Fuck’s sake, Clem. Do you think anyone cares?”
With a gargled snarl, Clem twisted around and swung his fist in a wild, knuckly haymaker at Jack’s head. It caught Jack on the cheekbone, and the impact rattled through his bones before the dull ache of the bruise settled in. Blood dripped down his cheek and onto his shirt.
Clem grunted in satisfaction and tried again with a short left-handed hook to the ribs. He’d never been much of a fighter, not when he could pay other people to do it for him. Jack absorbed the crack to his ribs, grabbed the lapels of Clem’s coat, and yanked him in close enough to ram his knee into Clem’s crotch.
There wasn’t as much “meat” there as you’d expect, but it was still enough to make Clem whine and fold over. He staggered back and bumped into a painfully thin figure on a barstool. The impact made the figure spill their beige, thick slop over the bar, and they hissed like a snake writ large in irritation. They unfolded themselve
s from the stool and turned around.
“That was my drink,” the perfectly unremarkable, somehow undeniably wrong person said. It was impossible to say exactly what they’d gotten wrong about being human—a little too thin, maybe, or the way the perfect white veneer of their teeth matched their eyes—but it was enough to disturb. “You spilled my drink.”
Usually that was when Jack would invoke Math, the seal on his throat evidence he had the right to do so. If Math’s name wasn’t enough to make whatever it was back down, then a mixture of threat, blackmail, and flirtation would defuse the tension.
That was off the table.
Jack grabbed a bottle of whiskey, swung it in a short, vicious arc, and smashed it against the side of the demon’s head. Its odd glassy eyes skewed with the impact, and it wobbled on its feet. Blood and red liquor poured down its face and stained the neat collar of its shirt. The starch wilted as it got wet.
The only thing his dad had ever bothered to teach him—when in doubt, fuck somebody up. If nothing else, it will buy you some time.
The demon reached up and dubiously poked the bloody injury. The jagged chunks of glass stuck in its thick skin ripped its fingers as it poked at them.
“That hurts,” it said incredulously. It looked around at the other demons and repeated itself. “It hurt me!”
Jack hooked his foot behind its ankle and yanked. It staggered, and while it was still off-balance, he grabbed it by the throat and muscled it up to the bar.
“I could strip your skin and fuck your heart,” it spat at him. “What are you? How did you do that?”
Jack tightened his grip on its throat. It swallowed, and the way its throat worked under his fingers felt alien. He leaned in until he could smell the sour-milk neglected-baby stink that sweated off it and whispered in its ear.
“I guess I’m just a special case,” he said. “So just back off and let me finish my business with Clem.”
A muscle twitched just under its eye. “You’re still just human. I could take you apart and stitch you back together inside out, give you a fucking spleen for a nose.”