Also by Benjamin LaMore
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Swim Like Hell: A Visit to Superstition Bay
No More Devils
A visit to Superstition Bay
“Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it – would they let me – since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.”
Herman Melville
One
I’m not the only one staring at the man next to me on the street corner, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who can see the monster on his shoulder.
Even without it he’s bound to draw stares. It’s the second week of December, and the temperature this evening is a relatively balmy fifty degrees, warm for coastal Louisiana this time of year as far as the locals are concerned, but not all that impressive if you grew up in a Northeast mountain town like me. I’ve gotten used to the warmer climate of Superstition Bay, the pleasant little burg I’ve lived in for the past three-and-a-half years, but not so much that a winter day in the mid-fifties seems cold to me. I’m wearing loose khakis and a black t-shirt, but most people are sporting light jackets or sweaters. The man on the corner, though, has gone Arctic, wearing thick jeans, heavy boots, and a thick, weather-beaten parka-like jacket. There’s even a woolen ski hat dangling from a jacket pocket. He’s dressed for the Iditarod, not the Gulf of Mexico.
He’s a few inches north of my five-foot-ten and built with proportionate thickness, with shoulders you could land a remote-control model plane on. A thick, unkempt mane of black, wiry hair that looks like it hasn’t felt water in far too long oozes in odd waves down over his ears. He’s freshly shaven, though. Odd. His skin is clear and smooth, thus removing any thought that he might have accidentally wandered in from the tundra. Constant exposure to wind and sun would have turned that skin to leather, or at least beaten it into a tone the poets affectionately call “ruddy”.
The thing on his shoulder is called a fiend, an ornery, vile little creep with enough nasty tricks up its sleeve to make anyone nervous. It’s a lumpy, misshapen creature, the size of a large house cat but vaguely humanoid, with mottled skin in shades of red, overlarge eyes and six needle sharp talons on each claw. A prehensile, segmented tail coils down into the collar of the parka, snuggling around the man’s neck. It doesn’t need the support.
There’s a chain of gold links as thin as filigree stretching between their necks, anchored to collars of gold and some kind of dark wood, age-worn and contact polished. The collars match. How cute.
I don’t like the chain. It implies servitude between the man and the fiend, and there’s no way for me to tell in which direction it goes. Either the man found a way to summon and bind the fiend, or the fiend has ensnared itself a human patsy. Neither combination is safe to have around normal people, which is still the majority of the population in this town.
This is shaping up to be anything but the quiet, peaceful night I’d set out for.
I’ve just stepped out of Echoes, a small but excellently stocked Wiccan shop on Benchley Street, a side-street of Superstition Bay that has recently tipped the balance between normal human occupants and magical ones. It’s a quiet little area with a dozen or so quiet shops and restaurants owned or run by citizens of the town with mystical abilities or heritages. Janet, the owner of Echoes and a fourth-generation Wiccan, somehow managed to get me the last item I needed to complete my last Christmas gift. Feeling triumphant, I take the small, precious paper bag in hand and step out onto the sidewalk, almost colliding with the stationary man. The triumphant feeling rapidly melts away.
Both man and fiend are staring hard at the thick wooden door of McLaughlin’s, a genuine Irish pub next door to Echoes. They advertise that they make the best Irish food in the south, but if you want to be technical it’s the only real Irish food in the world made outside of Ireland. They bring all their consumables directly from their sources back in the Old Country, and let me tell you that makes a difference. The food, the beer, even the stones and wood the pub is built from: all Irish imports. The staff too, and they’re tough to deal with when they’re in a mood.
I really wish these two had picked another pub to stare at.
Slowly, so as not to provoke a reaction, I edge over next to the man. Unless I want to walk around him I’m forced to stand on his right, the same side where the fiend is perched. I’m careful to stay out of its range. The delicate metal link between their necks is only about two feet long, but with magic even something as reliable as the length of a chain isn’t certain.
“Thinking about a beer?” I ask casually. I keep my focus on the man, not giving any indication that I’ve spotted his passenger.
“Hmm,” he grunts back.
“I’d go somewhere else,” I continue as if he’d engaged the conversation. “Got hit with E. coli the last time I went here.”
“Hrr,” he snarls.
Okay, talking’s not the way to go here. I’m starting to think that the fiend is the owner here. Most humans are more likely to talk than not, no matter how little they have to say, but those little bastards like to gut first and verbalize later. I’m pondering my next move when he abruptly walks forward, roughly shoving open the heavy slab of Irish oak that makes up McLaughlin’s door and vanishing into the dim interior.
Well, shit. There’s no way that whatever’s happening in there is going to end well, especially not in there. I tuck my bag carefully into my pocket, take a deep breath and reach for the door.
Before I can open it, the door swings out on its own accord as twenty people try to squeeze through it at the same time. I hop to one side, letting the stampede pass by, then once the flow of panicked diners ends I duck quickly inside, making sure I close the door behind me.
The inside is pleasantly dark, paneled in deep wood and dull brass, with light coming chiefly from wall sconces with pleasantly muted bulbs. The pub is divided roughly in half, the restaurant side consisting of booths and family sized tables, and the bar side where a long slab of mahogany runs parallel to the back wall and half a dozen or so tables dot the floor. There are no TV’s to disrupt the old-world feeling, no jukeboxes, nothing but hand carved wooden comforts and the warm, inviting aromas of thick beef stew and even thicker beer.
The rapid exodus of patrons only emptied about half of the pub. Around two dozen people are still inside, quickly but carefully toting plates and mugs from the bar side to the restaurant side, turning in their seats once they get there in order to get a better look at the evening’s entertainment. I know most of the faces of the lingerers.
Different towns and cities across the world have their own names for their magical sub communities. Here in Superstition Bay they call themselves the Grey, meaning the grey area between humanity and the hidden magical overworld. Most of the people (and sort-of people) who make up the Grey are just average folk with too much magical talent to ignore but not enough to have an impact on the world at large. We have some adepts, men and women who’ve accumulated a lot of power either by heredity or by careful study, and we have our share of monsters, too, though they generally play nice with each other because if they don’t, I step in. I’m their shepherd, warden and de facto sheriff, the authority where there is none. None of this is by my own choice, but that’s another story.
Right now, the story is the twenty-ish people hanging out to watch the show, and they’re not in any hurry to leave the pub. Some actually look disappointed that I’m here, but I’m used to that from them. They seem to know something worth seeing is going to happen, and yet they don’t look the least concerned. Fools.
As the door swing
s shut behind me I find myself standing next to the hostess, a young woman named Katie. She’s petite and blonde, an Americanized member of one of the owner’s families, with a perky, cheerleader-esque cuteness about her. She’s worked here for years and gets chided constantly for not being a redhead. She points wordlessly to the bar, but she doesn’t really need to. The expectant gazes of the crowd pave the way for me.
The man is standing with his back to me over by the empty bar on the other side of the room. Judging from his threatening stance and the mewling coming from the person his massive frame is hiding from me he’s got someone pinned up against the bar, and none too gently.
This is where I come in. Just over a decade ago I was drafted into the Aegis, a secret but very much feared organization devoted to safeguarding the world against magical threats. Think of the Men in Black filtered through the Mission: Impossible force and rerouted through Hogwarts. Thanks to an inherent and total immunity to any and all magical energies, I spent years as an Envoy, one of their operatives, traveling the world, finding the things that went bump in the night and putting my boots up their asses (usually metaphorically, but once literally and I needed a vacation after that job).
That all ended a few years ago. During an assignment I made a decision that the Sovereigns (the Aegis’ ruling body) didn’t agree with, and that cost me my position. The intervention of a friend in the ranks pulled a lot of strings and kept me out of the nightmarish prison the Aegis maintains, but at the expense of my job.
Officially, I’m retired. Unofficially, it’s my job to keep the scores of magically talented people and creatures in this town from tearing each other and all their human neighbors apart. It was part and parcel for keeping my freedom, though sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice after all.
I glance over at Katie. She rests her hand on the phone next to her podium. I shake my head. There are a fair number of cops in the SBPD who are clued in to the real nature of the town they serve, but their presence would just be gunpowder tossed on what is, for the moment, only a small spark.
“Hey,” I shout at the strangers.
Both man and fiend turn their heads but not their bodies, looking back at me over their left shoulders in perfect, eerie unison.
“Get lost,” the man growls. It’s a relief to hear him speak. I wasn’t sure he’d be able to, and fiend-language is all but impossible to decipher. “This is none of your business.”
“Unfortunately, this is exactly my business. My name is Ian DeLong, and you’re in my town.”
When they hear my name the man and the fiend exchange glances. My name still carries a bit of weight in supernatural circles. Most people (and non-people) who have magical abilities tend to rely on them, so knowing there’s someone out there who is immune to their best shots makes you memorable. Most visitors to the town know who I am and that this town is my home now, and as such they usually make it a point to stay on their best behavior. The fact that these guys don’t tells me that they are either fools or sloppy, or both. It’ll be so much easier for me if they’re both.
“Step away from the bar,” I say, with a firmness in my voice I don’t really feel. The man is more than half a foot taller than me and I don’t know if I could take him short of shooting him, and while anything the fiend tries to do to me directly would simply and utterly fail it would only be a matter of time before he gets clever and realizes he can use his magic to distract me long enough for his human muscle to finish the job.
Then again, if a fight breaks out in this place we could all end up facing the short end of the stick. Literally.
For a long moment the pair stares defiantly at me, the man’s eyes black voids in the dim light and the fiend’s red, reflective caverns, and just when I’m convinced that the situation has deteriorated past salvation the man pivots smoothly on one foot away from the unfortunate person whose spine he had been bending the wrong way over the bar and letting me get my first good look. Suddenly I realize exactly why the crowd has stayed to watch.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Carl,” I exclaim.
The man recently freed from the big man’s grasp looks at me with a mixture of relief and alarm. Carl Nichols is just over five feet tall, thin as a pencil, with iron-straight black hair in a long ponytail. He’s wearing his trademark black pants, white button-down shirt, and a black vest, and he’s only glad to see me because he knows I’m one of the few people in town who won’t shoot him on sight. Even if none of the diners would actually jump in and help administer the punishment he was facing, it was damn sure none of them would help him, either. Too many of them had fallen prey to him in the past. That explains why so many of them stuck around once they saw who it was that was about to get pummeled.
Last time I saw Carl had been eight months ago, when I’d kicked him out of town. He’s what people in the mystical world call a jinx. He likes to play around with probabilities, using his unique magical gifts to subtly manipulate the odds of whatever game he happens to be playing in his favor. Most of the time he’s smart enough to avoid messing around with those who have enough juice to do him real harm. Apparently, this time he judged his victim poorly.
“What was it this time, Carl?” I ask him. “Cards? Dice? Three card Monte? What?”
“You know I never could turn down a game of blackjack, Ian.” He’s relaxing minutely, draping his elbows over the bar in a losing attempt at nonchalance, but his eyes look like those of a deer who knows what the crosshairs that just found his forehead really means. He’s ready to bolt at the very first opportunity. With Carl, flight always trumps fight.
“Looks like you could have picked your lamb a little better.”
“Who, Walter here? He actually tricked me, believe it or not. I didn’t know he had help until the deal was done.”
“Looks like the bad luck finally caught up with you.” I turn to look at the pair of out-of-towners. “Look, guys, I know what a dick this guy is. Believe me, I know. But it’s not worth getting your hands and claws messy. How about he pays you back, with twenty-five percent interest, and we call it quits. Sound good?”
Someone in the back of the pub actually boos this. While Carl squeaks in protest the man and the fiend look at each other wordlessly for a long moment, having a discussion in a place none of the rest of us are privy to. When it’s over, the man looks at me and the fiend at Carl. The message is printed on their faces in bold capital letters.
“Losing money wouldn’t teach him,” Walter says, his voice a guttural rasp.
“Losing a foot, though. That might do it.” The fiend looks satisfied with this outcome. I’m surprised at how clear his speech is, given that twisted little mouth. Even his accent is good.
“He can still play with only one foot,” the man says with over exaggerated patience.
“Fine, fine. His hand then.”
“Better.” He reaches for Carl’s wrist with a massive hand. Before he can clamp down my hand flashes to my waistband, coming up with my .40 caliber Springfield Armory subcompact. The barrel finds the spot between the man’s shirt pockets and gets comfortable there.
“Don’t do that,” I say before he can secure his grip. “He’s no friend of mine, but I won’t let you hurt him.”
“Lessons can be painful. In fact, sometimes they have to be.”
That’s when I realize that I’ve just drawn a weapon while still in the pub. “Shit. Look, Walter, I really can’t explain right now, but we need to step outside.”
“Sure. He can stay. His hand comes with us.”
He doesn’t see Carl making a twinkling motion with his right hand, but I do and I’m too far away to stop it. That’s why I’m not surprised when the man and his fiend trip over a barstool and fall heavily to the floor when the man makes a full lunge at Carl, who dances nimbly away from the suddenly unlucky pair. I wince at the floor-shaking impact.
“Sorry about that, Walter,” Carl quips. “Maybe you should have gone for the foot after all.”
Walter�
��s hand flashes out, grasping Carl obligingly by the ankle. One muscular heave sends Carl bouncing away like a tumbleweed, violently upending two tables and one waitress before crashing to a stop in a hailstorm of broken crockery and slopped dinner.
I groan at the noise, because I know that there’s no longer any chance to stop what’s going to happen next.
The door to the kitchen swings open and three men stomp out. They’re wearing dirty aprons and hairnets and are carrying various kitchen implements (ladle, rolling pin and tenderizing mallet) which, while wholesome in the kitchen, are being brandished with fairly obvious bad intentions. Two of them sport thick, braided red beards, the third is clean shaven. They each weigh about a hundred and fifty pounds. The tallest of them is just over three feet tall.
Leprechauns. They’re not like anything in the story books. They don’t mend shoes and they don’t hoard gold, and they’re not pleasant or happy-go-lucky at all. To be honest, they’re assholes. If one stereotype carries over from the motherland, though, it’s that they love to fight, and it doesn’t take much at all to get them there.
“What the devil’s going on here?” the clean-faced one demands.
I tuck my gun back in its holster, even though I know it’s too late. “Nothing, Pappy,” I say. “I’m taking it outside.”
“Looks like you’re not taking it fast enough,” says the one with the ladle. I’ve never seen a ladle look threatening before, but on the bright side none of them are carrying their shillelaghs. Those things hurt.
“Don’t worry, Mike. We’re leaving. Right, Carl?” I look meaningfully at the con artist with eyes that both plead and command.
Carl’s eyes dart around the room. Walter and the fiend, me, the three Irish fire hydrants, and back around again. He’s weighing his odds, and that’s what he does for a living. For a moment I hold out hope that he’ll make the right choice and quietly come outside. Then his face settles, the decision made, and I can tell from the half smile that sneaks onto his face that it’s the wrong one.
No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 1
