Collared

by TA Moore

  “Ambrose, you stupid bastard,” Jack muttered under his breath as loped up the short flight of steps to the front door. The mailman had started to leave letters and catalogs on the porch in dirty mildewed piles, as though he was worried about putting his fingers through the letter box. “What have you done?”

  The door wasn’t locked. Jack pushed it open and stepped inside. Boxes that still needed to be unpacked were stacked up in the hall, damp had stained into the corners, and the space felt vaguely unclean—a spiritual miasma that was basically imp piss.

  “Ambrose,” Jack yelled. His voice sounded louder than he expected as it bounced off the bare walls and high ceilings. It sounded like the house was still basically empty. He moderated it slightly as he tried again. “Why didn’t you tell me about the dead girl?”

  Math hissed in irritation behind Jack. “Ambrose,” he mocked in a not-bad impersonation of Jack’s half-dead drawl. “Why did you fuck off out the back when you heard us coming?”

  “He doesn’t want to run,” Jack said. “That’s why he asked me for help. He just didn’t want to admit what he’d done.”

  In one of the rooms off the hall, a bottle tipped over, and glass rattled against a wood floor. Jack followed the noise into a narrow, high-ceilinged drawing room. As in the hall, unpacked boxes lined the walls beside an Ikea desk stacked with old cracked-spine books.

  Ambrose might have started on the couch, but he was on the floor now with an empty bottle of whiskey next to him and a full bottle freshly opened in his hand.

  “Jack,” he said as he raised the bottle. “And Jack’s new friend.”

  “Old friend,” Math corrected precisely as he crossed the room. He stepped over the graceless sprawl of Ambrose’s legs and to the desk, where he idly ran his finger along the broken leather-and-canvas spines as he added, “His oldest friend.”

  Jack offered Ambrose his hand. But Ambrose glowered at him and braced his elbow on the couch cushions to lever himself up.

  “Why didn’t you ask me for help?” Jack asked.

  Ambrose laughed, and his voice had the same rusty creak as his gate. He slouched back into his sofa and rubbed the heels of his hands roughly against his eyes. “Because you’d have said no.”

  Jack opened his mouth to argue, but Ambrose flung his arm out impatiently. There was blood on the cuff of his sleeve, as though he’d dip-dyed it. Jack didn’t know if something else had happened, or if he was still in the clothes he’d worn the day before.

  “I didn’t want to know who killed that poor girl. I didn’t care. She was dead, Jack, and that wouldn’t change just because I knew who did it.”

  Math glanced up from his study of Ambrose’s books. “It might, depending on who you ask.”

  “I wanted to know why they’d done it,” Ambrose said. “Who they’d done it for. You never would have told me that, Jack. You never would before.”

  “For your own fucking good,” Jack burst out in frustration. “You could have just walked away one day.”

  Ambrose looked up at him with bitterness on his lean poet’s face. He jabbed his finger against his temple. “Walk? Or be dragged out? Like Jenny.”

  Your fault. Jack remembered the jaggedly angry message scrawled in blood in the window. She’d written the same thing the day she’d killed herself, her last message to Jack.

  “So instead?” Jack asked. “Who did you ask for help? Colm?”

  “He turned me down too. No, I found the people who killed that girl myself, and I….” Ambrose hesitated and had to gulp before he could get the words out. “I made a deal with a devil. If they brought me in, if they taught me everything I needed to know about what we’re facing here, I’d protect them. I’d cover for them.”

  His hands had been uncommonly still, but now they stuttered to life again. He rubbed at the blood on his sleeve and picked at a loose thread on his jeans.

  “I knew it was wrong, but….” He clenched his hands into fists and then spread them out in a helpless gesture. “I needed to know, and it wasn’t too bad at first. Most of the sacrifices are cultists themselves. Did you know that? Others are sick, and the cult pays for them to just… die a little early. It was still… murder… but it didn’t seem that wrong, not compared with what they taught me.”

  Math touched one of the books. The gold lettering was almost worn bald, and he winced as he pulled his finger away. Then he walked around behind Ambrose and looked over the scruff of messy hair at Jack.

  “You,” he mouthed and then brushed a finger down Ambrose’s spine. “Or me.”

  Ambrose flinched away from the cold finger on his neck and jolted to his feet. His legs wobbled under him, but strain seemed to have gotten him halfway to sober.

  “Then, once you were in too deep,” Jack said, “they stopped pretending.”

  “Something like that.” Ambrose fumbled at the hem of his shirt and pulled it up. Raw gashes, long and pus-filled, crawled up his stomach until they disappeared under the shirt again. “They sent something last night, after I… after the woman was pulled out of the river. I think I’ve served my purpose for them.”

  “And what purpose was that?” Jack asked.

  Ambrose let his shirt fall back over his stomach. “You already know. The Kinneys. They knew him as the Candleman, but they wanted to know his real name, his address.”

  “And you gave it to them,” Math said. There was a cruel edge honed to his usual rasp—almost an emotion. Jack raised his eyebrows in question, but Math just smiled at him, all edges and a glimpse of sharp teeth.

  “I didn’t know.” Ambrose gave Jack a pleading look. “I swear to God, Jack, I didn’t know what they were going to do. When they asked me to find him, I thought they were just going to shake him down. Not…. But then it was too late.”

  Jack grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him in. The twisted cotton dug into his fingers as he glared into Ambrose’s morose, tear-stained face and felt a bleak, black sort of contempt. He’d given Ambrose a chance to hold on to his soul. He’d pretended that keeping the cop in that stained-glass glaze of sanctity made up for Jack’s own sins. But Ambrose had spat on that and trampled his soul into Hell’s shit of his own volition.

  Different from you how? a small voice in the back of Jack’s head asked. Just because your damnation was beautiful, it was better?

  He slammed the door on that and gave Ambrose a short, vicious shake. “They killed Mallory Kinney yesterday. After we spoke in the church. You could have saved her. That wasn’t too late, until it was.”

  Ambrose angrily shoved him. His shirt tore out of Jack’s fist, and the scabs that clawed up over his shoulder split and wept with infection. Jack felt a pinch of guilt.

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” he spat back at Jack. “I was there when they dragged her out of the fucking river. I saw her face, but it was done.”

  “The kid….”

  It was Ambrose’s turn to give Jack a pitying look. “She’s five. The body will wash up any day now. It’s done, and all that’s left is to decide if I can live with that.”

  Jack punched him. His fist caught Ambrose on the point of his chin with a brutal clack of bone on bone. The impact knocked Ambrose back a step, the whiskey bottle turned under his foot, and he fell back onto the couch. Blood welled from the corner of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin to drip onto his collar. He looked too shocked to fight back if Jack punched him again.

  It would have been nice if it had been Jack’s memories of being a punching bag, of being hunched in the corner of the couch as his ears rang and his kidneys bruised, that made him hold back. But it wasn’t. It was the expression of raw, delighted hunger on Math’s face as he leaned in over the back of the couch.

  “Get up,” Jack said flatly as he made himself step back. He took a deep breath of musty, vaguely damp air and glared at Ambrose as he wiped his mouth and got up. “You’re going to take us to these people, Ambrose.”

  Ambrose shook his head. “You don’t underst
and. They’re the real deal. The things I’ve seen them do… call up from Hell. You have no idea, Jack.”

  “Idiot,” Math spat in contempt. He grabbed a handful of Ambrose’s hair and yanked his head back. The tufts of coarse brown hair that stuck up between his knuckles blanched and withered. “You stole from me. Find it, or I’ll take everything precious to you and soil it. Every sweet memory, every friend, your dead father’s grave—I will shit on all of it so it will never give you comfort again. Understand.”

  Ambrose wrenched himself free, and his brittle, blighted hair snapped off at the roots. His face was gray and slack with shock as he rolled off the couch and kicked his feet against the floor to shove himself as far away from Math as possible. He bumped against Jack’s legs and stretched his hand up for help.

  Jack rebuffed him and stepped away. “Not this time, Ambrose. If anything happens to that child, I won’t try to stop him. I’ll hold his fucking jacket.”

  “What is he?” Ambrose asked as he scrambled back to his feet. “What is it?”

  Math gave him the finger from across the room.

  “He’s your new nightmare,” Jack said as he scruffed Ambrose and shoved him toward the door. “If you don’t help us, he’ll be your last one too.”

  FEAR AND fresh air had burned through the last of the whiskey. Ambrose slouched in the passenger seat of his own car, stole the occasional nervous look in the rearview mirror at Math, and muttered directions. The setting sun, low and orange in the sky, gilded Ambrose gold and bronze through the window. It made him look less like a painted saint and more like a tarnished statue.

  Maybe that was just based on Jack’s own feelings about Ambrose as they leaked through.

  “Left here,” Ambrose said as he leaned forward, the infected wounds on his chest suppurating under the seat belt. His eyes creased anxiously at the corners as he blurted out a quick correction. “No. Wait. There was a bridge just after the turn. It must be the next road.”

  Jack yanked the wheel straight again, and the car shimmied under him as it skidded on the cracked asphalt. They’d left Craven town limits behind them half an hour before, and as the sun set on the heavy, fall-tinted woods around them, every road started to look the same.

  “Be more useful,” Math said coldly from the back of the car, “or you’re no use at all.”

  The unarticulated threat made Ambrose wince and raise his hand to absently rub at the shorn, white shock of hair behind his temple.

  “The next one,” he said with nervous confidence. “It’s definitely the next turn.”

  Jack scowled at Math in the mirror. If they ended up driving in circles because Math had terrified Ambrose into bad directions, Jack was going to be pissed off. He took the next turn, and the car bounced as the wheels hit the ruts the last bad winter had blown out of the road.

  “Who do they serve, these cultists?” Math asked. “What mange-assed se’irim thought he could crawl out of his bolge and take what wasn’t his?”

  Fear twitched across Ambrose’s face as he glanced in the mirror again. His mouth trembled around the “what is he” question again, but he swallowed it in time. Jack wondered sourly if he’d finally learned that sometimes it really was better not to know.

  “The leader? He calls himself Zachariah, his real name is Zachary Harrick. It’s his house we’re going to,” Ambrose said, and a smile twitched briefly at his mouth. “I got his prints off the sacrificial dagger and ran them through CODIS. He’s a doctor. Just a month ago, that seemed awful, that a doctor could kill someone.”

  Math hissed in annoyance. It sounded more like a snake than anyone with a human tongue should be able to manage.

  “Not the priest,” he said. “Their patron. Their demon.”

  For a second, Ambrose looked like Ambrose again. He straightened up in the chair and tugged at the lobe of his ear as he explained, “No, see, that’s what I didn’t realize. They don’t worship one demon. It’s a pantheon. Like Ancient Greece—a demon for every day and one for every need.”

  Jack swore and put his foot down. The car coughed in surprise at the sudden acceleration and then lurched forward. He hit the bridge at speed, and the car nearly lifted off as they hit the hump. In the back seat, Math blurred away and the dead, ruined corpse of Mallory slouched forward against the back of Ambrose’s seat. Her wet, boggy flayed arm dropped over his shoulder.

  “Fuck,” Ambrose shrieked as he tried to squirm out of his seat belt to get away from her. When that didn’t work, he slapped her arm off him and half turned in his seat to shove her away. The dry, fungal remains of her insides spilled out over the back seat. “What the fuck? He’s… that’s Mallory. What the fucking hell?”

  “Water,” Jack said flatly. “The Infernal don’t cross it well. He’ll be back.”

  “He was a… he was a fucking demon?” Ambrose spluttered. He scrubbed at his shirt and hair with frantic hands, as though he could brush Hell off if he just tried hard enough. “They can’t come into our world. It’s anathema to them.”

  Jack veered hard around a pothole and bumped the tires down into the gutter at the side of the road. The wheel hit something hard that bounced up into the undercarriage with a dangerous-sounding rattle. Jack steered through it. Cultists were bad, but they had souls, even if they’d been promised to Hell when they died. Warlocks were a different breed. They tore out chunks of their souls on order, served them up like sweetmeats. And what was left… festered. Look at what Clem had done to himself, and his soul had always been a raisin of a thing.

  “You should have damned your soul for better information,” Jack said grimly. “There was a demon there that night. Your half-assed friends left the gate open when they left.”

  Ambrose couldn’t decide what should demand his attention—the fruiting corpse behind him or Jack’s breakneck speed on the rutted road.

  “There was a demon in the back seat of my car!” Ambrose pointed out with a hysterical edge to his voice. Jack wondered if he’d taken it this badly the first time Math peeled back the world and let him peek through at all the hidden stuff.

  “Answer the question,” Jack snapped.

  Ambrose took a shaky breath, let it out, and rubbed his hands briskly up and down his face. “Zachariah—Zachary—a deal with the Candleman. We were—I’d been told—that we were going to take over his business and pay him off. That’s why Zachary summoned the demon—to bring the money across, but something Zachary said made Candleman change his mind. He told Zachary to stick the dowry up his ass—”

  “Dowry?” Jack interrupted.

  “That’s what he called it,” Ambrose said. “He probably meant tithe, just didn’t know the word.”

  Jack didn’t think so, but he held his tongue and concentrated on the road as Ambrose finished the story.

  “That’s when it all went to shit.” Ambrose shoved his hand through his hair and shuddered as his palm brushed the short brush of burned-white hair. “Candleman called Zachary a liar and tried to push him out of the diner. Except Zachary had a knife, and he just, he just cut Candleman’s throat, right down to the bone. Then we just left him there with the money, and we got outside, the others were there with the wife and the kid.”

  “You could have told someone then,” Jack said, “told me.”

  “Jesus, Jack, and then what?” Ambrose asked. “My life would have been over. I’d be in jail. Everything I did, all the stains to my soul, would be for nothing. I wouldn’t be able to help anyone.”

  Jack checked the rearview mirror. The corpse on the back seat remained a corpse. There was no blood left to spill, but something dark and wet oozed out of the cavity of her stomach.

  “You could have helped her.”

  Ambrose hunched in on himself as though he thought he could put enough distance between him and the corpse to not be disturbed.

  “I swear, Jack,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d hurt her. Candleman was… it wasn’t really murder. Candleman had sold his soul years ago, and if you
don’t have a soul, you’re not really human, are you?”

  A grim smile folded Jack’s mouth. He’d asked himself that question, off and on, but it didn’t make it feel any better to hear it from someone with a soul.

  “Dale Kinney didn’t have a soul, but he tried to protect his wife and child,” Jack said. It might not be entirely true. Maybe Zachary had just tried to short-change Kinney on the deal, but Jack wanted to believe otherwise. “You and Zachary have one, and you did that.”

  He took his hand off the wheel to jerk his thumb into the back.

  Ambrose didn’t have an answer. They drove in silence for a while, but for the occasional “left” or “watch for the abandoned truck” from Ambrose. The smell of Mallory’s corpse grew riper—not like rot, but dark and heavy. Ambrose twisted the rearview mirror up so he didn’t risk a stray glimpse of her.

  “Stop,” Ambrose said abruptly. “We’re here.”

  Jack braked. The road was empty with trees clustered close to the sides. The sun made the dying leaves glow with color. It was a pretty spot, but there was no sign of life, and it was silent except for the muted mutter of the country. Jack tightened his fingers on the wheel in frustration.

  “Ambrose—”

  The shriek of a distressed child sliced through the air. The pitch of it drilled into Jack’s ears and hooked there with a staunch refusal to be ignored.

  Ambrose flinched as though the wails were a personal accusation. He deserved it.

  “We usually park along here,” Ambrose said as he gestured to the muddy ruts along either side of the road. “No one else ever comes out here. Zachary’s house isn’t even on Google Maps. You can’t get out here by GPS.”

  The miserable hitch and fall of the kid’s voice tried to drag Jack out of the car. He quashed the instinct, threw the car back into drive, and crawled around the corner. The road ended abruptly—as though someone had cut the road off with a hot butter knife—and turned into dirt. Jack pulled in there and turned the engine off.