No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay

by Benjamin LaMore

  “Don’t put pressure directly on the wound,” Claire says in a toneless voice. “Just in case of a skull fracture. Wrap it with a cloth but don’t squeeze.”

  I look at her and I can’t read her face. I just nod and close the door, cradling her head as softly as I can as Hollett sends us screeching out into the street.

  Twenty-Four

  We leave two smoking rubber trails out of the Store-Age parking lot. If they’d caught fire and lit up the assholes back there I wouldn’t have cried. Lisa is sitting bolt upright in her seat, only opening her eyes long enough to wince and squeeze them shut again against waves of nausea. I let her sit in silence, still seething. Hollett doesn’t need magic to read my mind.

  “They’re scared, Ian,” he says.

  “They should be. None of them are going to live to see daylight again.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, they’re scared of you.”

  That throws me. “Why?”

  He glances at me in the rear view. “Do you know what the Aegis is to the magical world? I mean, what it really is? It’s the sword of Damocles. Mess up, and it comes down on you. Even people and creatures of minor power are taught to fear the Aegis.”

  “That’s ridiculous. The Aegis isn’t about terrorizing anyone. You know that. They’re not about witch hunts.”

  “Tell that to the people of Salem. Yes, I know it’s not true, but to the vast majority who’ll never even see an Envoy it is. To them, the Aegis is the boogeyman. Now here you are, in a town that’s stupid with magical beings, and you used to work for them. More than that, you’re different. Most agents of the Aegis are magical themselves, so at least the people here have some kind of common ground with them. You’re not one of them, and you’re not one of the humans. They may call themselves the Grey around here, but you’re greyer than any of them.”

  I sit back into the seat, digesting this. After a moment I quietly say, “Why are you here?”

  “You needed backup. I didn’t think there’d be many people here lining up to throw themselves into the line of fire for you. Guess I was right.”

  “No, I mean why are you still in Superstition Bay? I mean, I get why you stayed for the day, but now night’s getting closer and you know you were pretty lucky just to have survived last night. You don’t have anything tying you this town. Why haven’t you left?”

  “Maybe I just like this place,” he says in a tone that will brook no further discussion.

  “Uh huh,” I say. I’m not buying it, but there’s no money in pushing this discussion right now. I sit back and let him drive.

  “Ian, if you’re not going to be holding her hand do me a favor and put her sunglasses back on.”

  “Sorry,” I tell him as I slip Lisa’s glasses back on, taking care not to get them near her injury. “But if all you’re doing is looking at her in the rear-view mirror you’re fine. Reflections don’t carry her magic. It only works with direct eye contact.”

  “If you say so. I’ve never dated a gorgon before.”

  “Yeah, the things you learn.”

  “How about giving me some directions up here?”

  I look around, getting my bearings. We’ve segued from shopping centers and strip malls into a pleasant residential neighborhood. The homes are one and two stories, on spacious lots. They’re all individuals, not pressed out of a contractor’s cookie cutter, which immediately jacks their worth by a large percentage. I wait until I catch a street sign at an intersection. “Four more blocks, then right.”

  It takes another five minutes before we pull into a driveway wide enough to fit two cars abreast. Doctor Milton Laveau’s house is a modest (for the neighborhood) French Country style home with a three-car garage, done in pleasant brown-and-tan siding and elegant windows. I called ahead when we first got into the Jeep, so Dr. Laveau himself is waiting for us on his stoop.

  He’s about sixty and looks it, narrow shouldered with thinning white hair and a pronounced belly. His light brown skin is wrinkled and dry. You’d think a doctor with access to medicine and magic would be able to keep himself a little better. Or maybe he does, since his energetic stride to the rear of my Jeep certainly belongs to a much younger man. I have the door open by the time he gets there.

  “She is safe, yes?” he asks me in his dusty, quick voice, being careful not to look directly at Lisa.

  “Yes, she is. Glasses on.”

  “Ah, yes.” He stands next to her, taking her wrist and feeling her pulse while he peers closely at the wound on her head. “And you are Lisa, yes? I have heard so much of you.”

  “Only good things, right?” She’s smiling, which relieves me. It’s a weak smile in a pallid face, but I’ll take it.

  “Certainly! There can be nothing else, I’m sure.” He sets her hand gently back in her lap and turns to me. “Normally the first thing I’d do is check her pupils, but that’s obviously out. I’ll have to bring her inside to examine her.”

  “Of course.” Suddenly I’m too tired to explain about my touch neutralizing her, but he’s so safety conscious he’d probably want to wait anyway.

  Doctor Laveau claps his hands and one of the garage doors rumbles noisily up. When it’s only halfway open a wheelchair comes flying out like Jason Statham is at the wheel. It skids expertly to a halt next to the Jeep and I eye the Doctor.

  “House ghost?” I ask.

  “Yes, this is Kimberly, my nurse. How did you know?”

  “I’m familiar with the concept,” I tell him. Then I scoop Lisa out of the car and lower her gently into the waiting chair. “Drive carefully, Kimberly,” I warn the ghost.

  I can’t tell whether she responds, but the chair turns slowly and eases across the driveway towards the garage. I stay with them. Behind us I hear Laveau introducing himself and inviting Hollett inside. They follow us across the driveway towards the now fully open door.

  “Your clinic is in the garage?” Hollett asks.

  “You should always have some separation between your work and your life.”

  I stop just before the garage doors. Laveau notes my hesitation and gives a little chuckle.

  “You can come in, Ian. I have wards, yes, I have protections, but they will reset themselves after you leave.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I can’t,” he says knowingly. He makes a shrugging gesture, indicating the world around us with his hands. “They can.”

  I look around but can’t see anything. His family has had a pan-generational affinity for ghosts. Maybe that’s who he’s talking about. “Whatever you say, Doctor. Now’s not the time to go unprotected.”

  “There’s never a good time for that. Come, come.”

  Doctor Laveau’s garage has never seen a car, and it’s far more than a mere one-man clinic. It’s a small hospital ward. There are five beds, all the latest Starfleet model, with more computing power in each bed than the Apollo 11 capsule. The back wall is a laboratory unto itself, with rows of sleek, glossy scientific instruments alongside ancient chests and cabinets of oak and banded iron. Science and sorcery, all in one stop.

  I set Lisa in the nearest empty bed. There’s only one other patient here, in the farthest bed. A bedsheet, pulled up high, prevents me from seeing who it is. Doesn’t matter to me; the only patient I care about is the one in front of me. I make sure Lisa’s comfortable, tucking a white cotton blanket around her legs. While I’m doing this Laveau’s ghost begins to tend to her wound, cleaning and bandaging the area with quick, effective movements. A paper cup with two pills floats over to Lisa’s hand.

  “For the pain,” Laveau tells us. Lisa tosses them back and dry-swallows them with a grimace. Kimberly the ghost nurse produces a warm, wet cloth and sets to washing Lisa’s face, and when it’s done Laveau comes over and gets to work.

  For almost two hours Laveau and Kimberly work on Lisa. He dusts her with some kind of powder, waves smoldering twigs over her face, draws veve (voudon symbols) in ground cornmeal on the mattress around her. Then
he breaks out a small, beeping gadget and passes it over her body and in halos around her head. Kimberly brings him an odd device that looks like a bowler hat on wheels. He guides it over her head, pushes a couple of buttons and listens to the machine hum for five or six seconds, then he looks at a flat screen mounted on the side. When he’s done he beckons me over from the folding seat Kimberly provided for me.

  “Is concussion,” he tells me as he wipes some kind of powder off his hands. “She have headache for a while, be dizzy or queasy. She must rest. Don’t let her drive. I will give her something to speed up her recovery, but she must rest for couple of days.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I’ll take good care of her,” I promise. “I’ve got some stuff at home that’ll fix her up. If she’s okay to take a short drive, I’ll get her out of your hair.”

  “Hmm, yes. Now we are past the danger, Ian,” he says casually, “but before you go it is lucky for me that you called. I was going to call you, as it happens.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Something happened this morning, something very strange. I had just come off of my shift at Three Saints, and I was very tired, so I did what I had to do and then fell asleep.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  He takes a breath, then another. He’s trying to find the words, then he shrugs again. “Eh, it is better to show.” He shuffles down towards the last bed.

  Curious, I give Lisa’s hand a quick squeeze and follow him. He gets there before me, impatiently waving me up next to him. When I get there, he pulls the sheet off the body. I jump back two feet, bumping into Hollett, who’s come out of nowhere to stand behind me.

  There’s a kiovore in the bed.

  At least, I think it’s a kiovore. It’s fatter than the others I’d seen but it has the same blood-hued carapace, the same bony claws, the round lamprey mouth under the flat expanse where the nose should be. But it’s clearly sick. Straps of gauze bandages, mottled and stained brown, crisscross its torso and the needle-like teeth have mostly fallen out. Several of them are laying on its chest, blood pooling from their roots. Its skin, that hardened, bullet resistant shell, is cracking and going soft like decaying meat. It’s been lashed to the bed frame at the wrists and ankles by lengths of black silk cord, no doubt of a heavy enchantment. I make sure to keep my hands well away from them, even though its movements are sluggish and unfocused.

  “Is this one of those monsters I’ve been hearing about?” he asks. I nod, dumbstruck.

  “What happened to it?” Hollett asks.

  “I do not know. I came home, like I said. It’s dawn. I’m trying to find my key, and this beast jumps out at me from my bushes.”

  “Did it bite you?”

  “No, no. It is slow, weak. It doesn’t try to bite, it just reaches out for me. It stumbles on my step and falls. Kimberly and I, we pick it up and bring it in here.”

  “Why did you do that?” Hollett demands. “You should have just let it die.”

  “How am I to do this?” Laveau looks offended. “I am a doctor.”

  I wonder if there’s a version of the Hippocratic Oath that deals with the care and comfort of monsters. I get closer to the bed, but it takes an effort of will. I lean down, looking down at the cracking skin. A section of skin midway down its chest, roughly two inches square, breaks free right before my eyes like ice separating from a floe. Laveau notices, makes a small noise in the back of his throat.

  “Again,” he says, grabbing a pair of forceps off the cart by the side of the bed. “Kimberly, the gauze,” he says. In a snap there’s a thin roll of bandage at his side. He leans over the kiovore, reaching the forceps down with steady hands. He picks the splintered shard from the body and wipes the area with a cloth soaked in sterile water. He drops the shard of carapace in a tray already filled with similar remnants and reaches for the roll of gauze. I stop him as he reaches to cover the exposed area and beckon him closer.

  “Doctor, look at this.” I point to the section of torso that had been exposed. Underneath the area looks raw, wet… and pink.

  “Am I seeing this right?”

  Laveau nods slowly. “I cannot be certain without a battery of tests, but I do believe so. Is skin.”

  “It’s… healing,” I whisper.

  Hollett can’t look away. “It’s becoming human again.”

  “More and more,” Laveau agrees. “This has been happening since it got here.”

  “Ian, I owe you an apology,” Hollett says quietly.

  “For what?”

  “I thought you were crazy, thinking they could come back. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  I give him a chuck in the shoulder. “Forget it.”

  The silence becomes awkward. Laveau caves first.

  “Hmm, yes. Well, enough of the looking. Now, for a little bit of thinking.” He claps his hands. A cardboard box, the kind files are kept in, floats up to us. Laveau accepts it.

  “Thank you, Kimberly. These are the things it wore,” Laveau says, handing me the box. “Perhaps they help us think.”

  I open it, setting the lid on the floor. Brown slacks and a white shirt, bloodstained in the front. The clothes are wrinkled and torn. There are no shoes. I look deeper. Keyring, no wallet, no glasses, a large square ring…

  “Holy shit,” I whisper. Hollett and Laveau say something to me but I don’t hear it. I dig through the box frantically until I find what I knew I’d find. I hold my hands up so they can see what I’m holding. They look dumbly at me even as I beam at them in triumph.

  “They can be cured.”

  Twenty-Five

  A loud, echoing clatter sounds behind us. I whirl to see a tray of medical supplies scattered on the floor, already being invisibly gathered up by the startled Kimberly.

  “What the hell are you talking about, DeLong?” Hollett gapes. Laveau is too experienced in this kind of thing to look at me like I’ve sprouted wings, but he’s clearly waiting for me to point out what he’s missed. I address Hollett.

  “When the original kiovore turned Celeste and Nariko they attacked the crowd at Parkman Gems. Do you remember the guy Celeste jumped on in the middle of the street?”

  “Yes, a fat man. He had a shield charm built into his rings. Probably bought them off the Gamagori.”

  “This is that guy, right here.” I put my hand on the bed railing.

  “How do you know that?”

  “The rings. The clothing was generic, could be anyone’s, but I haven’t seen rings like those in this town before. I’m certain of it, that’s the guy.”

  “Okay, if you say so, but why’s he reverting? What happened to him?”

  “It’s not what happened to him, it’s what happened to her.”

  “Celeste?” He rolls it around in his brain. “She’s the only kiovore that we know died. You think that cured him?”

  “Maybe it broke the spell, severed the magic, whatever. Some curses are broken when the originator of the curse dies.”

  “There used to be a race of werewolves in America that was linked that way,” Laveau says. “The head of the bloodline was killed back in 1990. Every living wolf that descended from him was cured on the spot.”

  “Exactly. Look at the timeline. He was bitten around nine-thirty. We saw him change. Celeste died around a little before eleven, so that’s when he started to change back. I’m guessing that takes longer, and it definitely looks more painful, so some part of his rational mind that still functioned instinctively sought out Doctor Laveau. That’s where we found him.”

  “So, in order to cure an infected person, we need to find the kiovore who bit him and kill it. You’re still looking at a serious body count here.” A clever look rolls over his eyes. “Unless…”

  I’m already there. “Unless you find and kill the first one. Cut the curse off at the top and let the cure roll downhill. I knew you’d catch on eventually.”

  “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Maybe it’s just my mercenary side, Ian, but weren’t you talking about letting
them all die just a couple of hours ago?”

  “Why do you think I said you find it and kill it. Good luck with that, by the way. I’m taking Lisa and making a beeline for the closest Envoy and a nice, safe secure room until this whole thing is over. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t worry. I’ll call Samantha and tell her what I think, and she can pass it on to whoever’s in charge of the perimeter. Either way, it’s someone else’s problem.”

  “You’re just going to walk away?” he asks incredulously.

  “You’re damn right I am. Look, I was told to look after those people, and I have. For a long time now, I’ve been the good little soldier, following orders like I’m still an Envoy. Well, I’m not. Fuck the Aegis for letting me go. Fuck Pale for making me the babysitter for a whole damn town and while we’re at it, fuck this town. I don’t give a damn about it anymore. Tomorrow the Aegis will relocate me again, or if they don’t I’ll do it on my own. No matter what, I’m done here.”

  Hollett’s stoic on a normal day but now his face is a venomous mask, his eyes slitted like a snake, the cords of muscle in his jaw are countable.

  “Were you always a coward,” he growls, “or did they retire your backbone with your title?”

  It’s a huge tactical mistake to go nose-to-nose with an adversary. You have no room to maneuver, no time to react, no ability to defend or attack. We humans do it anyway, even those who have a wealth of training. It’s a primal reaction, a show of force meant, on a primitive level, to intimidate your enemy into backing down. It’s an unthinking hind-brain action and I hate that I let that part of my brain take the wheel and shove me right into Hollett’s stone face, close enough to smell his aftershave.

  “That had better be just the first part of your sentence,” I growl back at him. He meets my stare like it’s supposed to impress me when Lisa’s doesn’t. Laveau is a minor shape in the background, slowly stepping away from us like we’re a rattlesnake that’s lost its rattle and could snap at any moment without warning. After a moment Hollett pivots away from me on his heel and stalks off.