Supernatural Syndicate: A Limited Edition Collection of Magical Mafia Stories

by Thea Atkinson

  Voices murmured from behind me and over my head. Feet whispered across the floor as they rushed to help the aging nun from the room. They were going to leave me there. All of them. Just take off and leave me to dig for the crucifix by myself. Fucking nuns.

  Bare legs flashed in my peripheral as I swept beneath the iron bed with my hands.

  "Fuck," I said as I groped to the left and swept my palm along the floorboards, fingers stretching and wriggling. I was far too big to fit beneath the industrial bedding and the mere thought that I couldn't but should notched up my panic.

  "Calm down, Mr. Saint," one of them said. The abbess, I thought.

  As if I could maintain a stoic calm when I could feel the demon within squirming like it had just slipped its zip-tie handcuffs and felt the breeze of freedom first time in centuries.

  "You can be calm," I barked into the dust. "You can afford to be." I sneezed against my forearm and that made me even angrier. "Fuck."

  Someone clucked in disapproval over my head but I ignored it and the sounds of cooing, of sharp orders, of women running in and out on bare feet.

  I only felt better when my fingers brushed against cold metal. I groaned in relief when I grasped the hilt of the stipe. I pulled it back with me as I retreated to the room again and sat back on my haunches on the floor next to the bed.

  "Thank you sweet baby Jesus," I said and opened my palm to stare down at the crucifix. Coated in blood and soot and dust, I couldn't quite make out the spelled stone set in the middle of the crosspiece and stipes. I scraped at the stone with my nail. The edge fetched up against something. A crack, maybe?

  "We don't appreciate your language, Mr. Saint," said the Abbess.

  I paused to look at her, taking in the frown holding her mouth in a tight line.

  "You think I care what you appreciate?" I said, stressing the last word. "I just saved your ass and your precious virginity. You can appreciate that." I rubbed the stone of the crucifix against my shirt to remove most of the goo coating it.

  If my tone or the words bothered her, she kept her reaction to herself. The novices and initiated crossed their arms over their chests even as the old abbess held her torn nightgown over her bosom.

  "You should leave now," she said cooly.

  I heaved myself to my feet, distracted as I studied the stone. Something wasn't quite right with it.

  "Do you think this is a crack?" I said, holding it out to the novice who had seemed concerned about me in the first place.

  She shook her head, now afraid, it seemed to have anything to do with me.

  "Never mind," I said and made for the lamp so I could inspect the cross in better light. I held it beneath the swath of yellow glow as the abbess herded them from the room. I thought I heard her telling them to hurry.

  "Shit," I said as my inspection revealed exactly what I feared. There, in a smooth line, cutting the stone directly in half, the crack caught the light.

  "Mr. Saint?" The novice again. I swung to face her. The crucifix went forgotten in my hand as I dropped my arm to my side. Some sort of buzzing had started up between my ears. I hadn't suffered tinnitus for over half a century.

  "I think I need help," I said to the nun.

  She was the only one in the room with me now. A gentle looking soul. Big, lipid eyes with lashes heavy enough to look like extensions though I knew they weren't. My throat ached looking at her. I swayed on my feet. Blinked multiple times.

  She took a step toward the door, backing up as though she'd glimpsed a lion and realized she was in the cage with it.

  Maybe she was. I felt something stretch inside me. I had the distinct impression that I was working the muscles of my neck sideways, easing long ingrained kinks that had gone unnoticed till that moment. And yet, I wasn't consciously doing so. If I was cracking my neck, it was totally autonomic.

  With each second, she looked more horrified.

  "Please," she said and both her hands went behind her as she felt for the doorknob.

  The door rattled. I thought it might open and she'd fling herself through the gap in door and frame and be gone before I could show her how much I appreciated her kindness.

  "Please?" I said.

  Someone else moved my hand and it flicked out in front of me. As if by a sucking wind, the door slammed into its frame, proving she had managed to open it. Just a little. But not enough. A dark chuckle moved up my throat and I managed to catch it before it escaped. I didn't want her to be too afraid. Not yet.

  I advanced on her.

  She was so vulnerable. So pure. I wondered what her blood would taste like if I was to nibble down on that white neck. How would her skin would feel beneath my hands? Where was the most delicious part of her body that would provide the tastiest bit of fear? I could cut into that skin with blade or nails or teeth. Should I dance in her blood? Bathe in it?

  "Mr. Saint," she said in a tremoring voice. "Hale."

  One more step. That's all it would take, and I'd be close enough to reach out for her. To feel her bones beneath my hard fingers.

  "You know his name," I said and the gravel in my voice sounded off, like two voices were speaking not one.

  "We all know your name, Hale," she said and I had the impression she'd been schooled in the psychology of negotiation. Say a name. Personalize the connection. Make your quarry feel as though you know them.

  I smiled at her. My lips stuck to my teeth.

  "You're Hale Saint," she whispered. "A mercenary who used to be a priest."

  My neck cracked as I tried in vain to shake off the feeling of my skin crawling off my body.

  "Someone's been doing her homework," I said in a throaty voice. "But you don't have all the facts. Not even half."

  She edged sideways as I got closer. I saw her sneak a look toward the bed. My blade lay there on the mattress. Someone had found it after all and placed it ever so conveniently within reach.

  She wouldn't make it to the blade, though. She had to know that.

  I sidled one more step toward her. She was going to bolt for the knife. I knew it before she did. I also knew she wouldn't be able to use it. She'd flounder, her Christian values in conflict. She'd need a good reason to take a human life.

  "I was excommunicated a century ago," I said to her and caught her attention.

  She paused, uncertain. Should she feel pity for a man who was flung out of the order or was she just confused about the timeline. Maybe a bit of both.

  I tensed all over, ready to lunge for her. I could almost taste her fear. The scent of it clung to the air by its nails and it was as savory as the aroma of a meat pie.

  "A century?" she said in a whisper.

  I nodded. I knew I didn't look one day older than I'd been at thirty two when I'd abandoned the order. The only thing that changed in my appearance was that the spindly, unfit physique was much more muscled now. There were hard edges of scars and old wounds that changed my looks the way hard living does to any face.

  I dropped my voice in a conspiratorial whisper to match hers. "I fight demons for anyone who will pay my fee but I fight angels too if the pay is good enough." I grinned half-heartedly as I went on. "And I share my soul with a demon."

  That last did it. She dashed the last few steps to the bed and the predatory demon inside relished in the way she flung herself in desperation to the mattress.

  I had her pinned beneath me in one movement.

  And that's when the door burst open and a wet flood swept over me. I heard my own hiss. My body recoiled instinctively from atop the petite nun.

  I ended up crouched in the corner with my booted feet sinking into the mattress, my back against the wall. The little nun scrambled from the bed and ran for the door, pushing past the abbess who stood just inside the room.

  Her retreat knocked aside a large but empty glass bottle that by some miracle hadn't shattered on impact. It spun wildly along the floor and collided against the foot of the bed.

  I was alone in the room except for the abbe
ss. She had pulled a robe over her torn nightgown after she'd left the room, and evidently had time to rob her stores of holy water.

  And find herself a shotgun.

  4

  She pointed the over and under at me without so much as a single tremor. It was a heavy weapon, one that should have made her shoulders sag.

  "Get out," she said in a faint echo of the command I'd given her not ten minutes earlier.

  I licked my lips, thinking I might be able to find some defense, but gave up when I caught sight of the young novice in the hallway, blinking at me in terror. I shifted my gaze from her to the abbess, feeling much clearer now.

  "Someone has to pay me," I said and lifted my arms in surrender.

  Robbed of the demon's lust after the soaking with holy water, I felt entirely human again. I gave up the pretense that I might have any sort of defense that might make a difference to these women who had just spent the last three weeks suffering the attentions of several incubus demons.

  The abbess waved the business end of the barrel at me as she moved sideways so I could exit the room. "You'll get your pay, Mr. Saint."

  "But no thanks, I'm guessing," I said.

  Her expression didn't change. It held onto the determined clench of jaw as she laid her finger on the trigger. "I am not going to ask again."

  I flattened my back against the wall as I slid toward the doorway. The novice and several other nuns parted like waves in the Red Sea.

  The abbess took no chances that the demon would peer back through and pressed the barrel of the shotgun against my spine as she walked me down the hall and into the foyer.

  The chains from my broken crucifix clutched in my grip slapped against my ear as I walked with my hands over my head all the way to the door. I paused only long enough to hook the bag of money that sat at the bottom of the steps like a fat black toad.

  Someone had thoughtfully seen fit for it to be waiting for me.

  I didn't bother to check to see if it was the amount agreed upon. In truth, in light of what had happened, the money was the least of my concerns. I had far more troubling things to worry about than whether or not the convent had paid the ten grand I'd requested. And those troubling things were not going to wait. I just rammed my hands in between the zipper teeth and plucked out a couple handfuls of bundled money. What was loose, I left inside. Probably ones and fives from the weekly collection plate.

  I practically ran down the stone exterior steps. I'd come by cab, all the better to create the anonymity the cloister required of me because they didn't relish the idea of news getting out to other orders that a possessed monster hunter had arrived at their doorstep.

  That meant I'd need to hail one too. I halted beneath the streetlamp at the edge of the courtyard and swiveled around to get my bearings. The night was brisk with a full moon hanging over the rooftops of the borough. I doubted any school aged children would be out and about, but the convent was an old order, its building aged stone and brick and located next near a school zone.

  I sighed as I thought about the possibility of several loitering teenagers to contend with and me with my demon showing. The older buildings wore graffiti and sat in lots filled with cigarette butts and soda cans.

  I tucked the crucifix and its broken bits into my pants pocket and hefted the bag higher, so it wouldn't slip off my shoulder as I fled through the borough to the main street in order to hail a cab.

  I didn't carry a cell phone into assignments unless I knew I had a safe place to stash it while I faced whatever nasty I was hired to neutralize. It didn't just afford me the confidence that I'd not lose the damn thing but also allowed me to hike the price by two thousand. Added risk and all.

  I had a feeling it was going to cost all my haul and more to dig myself out of the mess I'd just gotten myself into so I was glad I'd insisted on the cell phone waiver. I mulled over the possibility that I was wrong as I headed toward the noise of traffic and the brighter lights of the city proper. I'd not lied to the young nun. A century earlier, I had been excommunicated and I did share my soul with a demon.

  I felt for the cross now as I walked. My behavior with the young novice confirmed my suspicions about the state of the spelled stone on my crucifix. That stone, a blood-red drop of amber, embedded in the cross hilt just between the outstretched arms of Our Lord, had been spelled a century ago by a fae changeling and it was the only thing that kept my demon dormant. The sinking feeling I'd had when I ran my nail along the stone in the cross wasn't just an irrational concern. It was cracked. And that meant it was just a matter of time before the demon took full advantage.

  The magic that bound it to me in the first place had been difficult and it had required some terribly black magic, but we'd managed to wrestle the demon into a small space behind a veil in my soul. The demon's essence kept me alive and offered me some perks that enabled me to sell my services to those who were badgered by the unworldly. It was costly magic too as my bank account could attest to half a century later when she'd had to re-spell the stone.

  But I didn't think she'd do it for me again. Not for even double what I'd paid last time. We hadn't exactly parted on good terms, since the spell had nearly killed her.

  I didn't think she was likely to help me now, but I had to give it a shot, and there was one place I was most likely to find her. Rosario Grace thirsted for one thing besides dark magic, and that particular brand of alcohol was only served in the kindred district.

  I wasn't keen on crossing the threshold of the Rot Gut Tavern to find her. It was owned and run by a vampire with a checkered past, who had got hold of fae magic to help spell small chunks of absinthe-soaked sugar. His bar had the reputation of draining nearly empty and abandoned drinks into a vat filled with the absinthe crystals. In the 70s the college kids called those kinds of drinks Purple Jesus's but those mortal concoctions couldn't deliver the same magic-juiced blast of hallucinations that the Rot Gut cocktail did to those of the tavern's patrons who elected to give the drink a whirl.

  I'd been to the tavern twice in my lifetime: one of them was to track down and kill a vampire lodging in the safe rooms there. It had been a bloody, loud, and brutal killing and I'd been paid enough by the Regent of the Cult of Artemis to hold me over for a full year. The second time was when I'd got dragged inside by a vampire I was trying to neutralize.

  Although I'd only been there twice, I knew the tavern well. Mostly because the fae he'd got to spell those first crystals was the same fae who spelled my crucifix. Rosario got addicted to her own spell.

  While I dreaded the thought of seeing the old fae hanging over a seedy bar in a place where she consumed her own magic, I desperately hoped she'd be there.

  I hailed a cab easily and when it took me across town without the demon in me so much as blowing him a kiss, I thought it best not to tempt fate. I got him to let me out a block away from the Kindred District and all but ran the rest of the way.

  I knew the back alley entrance by the stink of blood and old magic. The neon sign above the door phased in and out of time in a high pitch that buzzed deep in my ears. Unlucky were the mortals who mistook this back entrance for a regular tavern. They'd become targets to the lazy vampires who used the bar the way rural hunters used deer stands to take down their trophies.

  Truly unfortunate were the ones who ended up abducted by the clientele and taken away from the bar altogether. Their fates would be far worse.

  Even the detritus surrounding the back door looked suspect. The dumpster rats were double the expected size. A curious looking length of insulated wire snaked over the surface and disappeared underneath a pile of garbage. A woman's shoe, just one, lay drunkenly on its side near the door and the neon sign lit the large, irregular shaped blackish stain nearby and turned it pink at the edges.

  I didn't need to inspect it to know it was blood. I could smell the sick of the woman who'd fallen prey to a monster a day or two earlier if my nose was right. Not vampire. Not even werewolf. Something that would have drain
ed her blood and taken instead the skin and bones.

  I stamped down the delight of the demon that twisted within at the thought of what that stain might mean, and I determined to see this through. Whatever had happened to that chick had nothing to do with me. She was gone and there was nothing I could do for her now.

  Fayed was at the bar and all but hissed at me when he saw me as I stood in the door frame, reluctant to step inside because I didn't want any creature inside to see me and assume I was here for them.

  I didn't have time for that shit. Not now.

  "Fuck me," Fayed said and several red-eyed vampires swung around on their stools to stare. While Fayed had been more subtle, those vamps did hiss, recognizing the human in me but understanding somehow, that the mortal spirit was somewhat sidelined by evil.

  I braced myself and stepped over the threshold.

  The amber lights glinted off the glasses, reflecting in the red liquid within. Not full blood, just drops of it in alcohol. I knew those vamps had fed already and were lingering over a drink the way humans did with coffee or wine.

  "I'm looking for someone," I said and could have bit my tongue off for the habitual opener.

  His fangs dropped as he let go any pretense that the bar was normal.

  "I told you never again," he said.

  He nodded to a burly looking fellow who hovered at the entrance to a back hallway. He in turn, nodded to someone hidden in the shadows of that hall. I counted five thick-necked vampires slithering out from the darkness and forming a line across the room, all facing me.

  "Not like that," I said and threw my hands up to show them I wasn't working. "I'm not here for that."

  I didn't want to start anything. I didn't have the time. I could already feel the demon within rolling over behind the veil.

  "Some other time, maybe." I said to the bouncers as I spread the hands wider, doing my best to appear casual and non-threatening. "Give me a couple weeks and I can come back and oblige you fellas if you think you're up to it."