Games Creatures Play

by Charlaine Harris

  She got up and went into the parlor, stood where the man in the black suit had stood. The curtains had rotted away over a decade and the furniture was filthy. Finn had taken the light fixtures and the antique mantel and sold them, when he was deep in the grip of whatever he was shooting or snorting that week. He went through flush periods, where he was sober and his betting was paying off. He ran small scams on the side to bring in pocket money, pulled smash-and-grabs, hit people over the head when they owed Blackie money. Just the kind of life everyone expected him to have. That was Finn—if you expected the worst out of him, he was reliable to a fault.

  Ellie sighed and kicked over a stack of bootleg DVDs next to the fireplace. She remembered sitting on this carpet after the funeral, holding Finn as he sobbed and sobbed, until she thought his ribs would break, his small hands fisting into her dress. He’d always been small, and talked big because of it. She’d felt like they were floating, untethered from their earthly existence and in a singularity made up of the tiny sliver of time between having Dad, having a family, and Dad being gone, his spot on the sofa empty, to be filled by nothing except Finn’s sobs and her own ragged breath.

  The sun came through the bare windows just then and caught the wall up at the ceiling, the stain that had started before Ellie was born having grown to engulf most of the plaster. Amid the pitted rot Ellie saw a mark. She got a chair and climbed up higher, shining the small light from her keychain on the spot.

  The mark was faint, and she’d never have seen it if a decade of water hadn’t whittled away the plaster surface, leaving dark mildew in the lines so they stood out. Scratched with something no bigger than a penny nail, it was small and simple, just three or four intersecting lines.

  Ellie felt a tremor go through her, and even though it was only afternoon she felt the shadows move around her, inhaling her fear and swelling to fill the room.

  She knew how her father had died now, really. And she knew how she was going to save her brother.

  -6-

  In Ellie’s neighborhood, staying neutral didn’t net you much, so she’d always admired Doyle McManus for doing just that.

  Doyle wasn’t like Blackie, like her father. He was Folk, but he wasn’t a criminal. Not much of one, anyway. He stayed in his bookshop, watching the world go by through narrowed blue eyes buried in a face full of lines and angles.

  Much like Blackie, Doyle could have been anything from old to ancient. Unlike Blackie, Doyle was one of the few people her father had trusted.

  A cat stretched and yawned from atop a pile of mysteries when Ellie came through the door. Ellie waited. The cat examined her, then trotted to the back room. A few seconds later Doyle appeared.

  “Never thought I’d see the day you’d come through my door of your own free will,” he said. Doyle had stripped himself of his accent the moment he stepped foot on American soil. He worked at his talents, and he wasn’t somebody that Ellie would voluntarily cross, even if he wasn’t prone to exploding like most of the Folk she knew. The cat, a familiar, was only the start of it. Her magic was muddy and common, as was Finn’s, that striga trash Frankie Bonnaro, the Russians and their koldyun. None of them came from bloodlines where magic twined with your DNA. Even Blackie had just enough power to be bigger and meaner than the next guy. Doyle was the only person Ellie had ever met to come close to the bloodlines, the sort of power that was born, not learned or stolen.

  She’d always wondered if he might be from one of them, a bastard child of sorcerer nobility. They weren’t unheard of—the men from the bloodlines sometimes found women from the Folk side, and sometimes there were children, usually taken in by the bloodlines and raised with a quiet agreement not to discuss their parentage. Even half-blood was better than letting one of their own slip away to the Folk.

  Doyle cocked his head. “Last I recall, I visited you in jail and you told me to go straight to hell. Still standing up for Blackie?”

  Ellie breathed in. She wouldn’t have dreamed of confronting Doyle unless it was life or death. Unless it was Finn’s life. “You’ve got some nerve, considering it was you that gave my dad the means to summon a demon the night he died.”

  Doyle didn’t speak, so Ellie pressed on. “The way I see it, you helped that thing take my father from me. I’m sure he gave you a good sob story about whatever he owed Blackie, but you’re smarter, Doyle. You knew what it would do to him. So now you owe me a favor in return and I’m here to collect.”

  The lights hanging dusty and cobweb-strung from the shop ceiling flickered and dimmed, and the hair on Ellie’s neck stood on end. Doyle’s cat yowled and ran off, scattering a pile of ancient National Geographics in its wake.

  “What makes you think you get to ask anything of me? You, who thinks just because you crawl out of the gutter you leave the stink behind?” Doyle’s voice wasn’t loud or harsh, but it sent a cold blade through Ellie’s guts and she was surprised she managed not to flinch.

  “My father was no prize,” Ellie said. “He was a mess ever since Mom took off. But he wouldn’t have known what to do without you.”

  Doyle ran his finger down a stack of battered Hawthorne stories, the gold lettering almost absent from the leather spines from a century of readers’ fingers. “Blackie threatened you kids. Declan never would have done it otherwise.”

  Ellie looked around the shop, not having an answer to that. It was exotic when she was a kid, a place where people read books for pleasure and had enough money to buy them. The dusty stacks had the promise of secrets only she’d find, because she was the only one in the family who wanted to find them badly enough. Now, in the daytime, choking on musty paper and dust mites, she saw it for the crap heap it was, the barricade that Doyle used to keep the world out.

  “If you want this so badly,” Doyle said, “you’re desperate, and it’s bad to deal with demons when you’re desperate.”

  “You said if I was desperate, come to you,” Ellie said. “Well, I’m desperate. And I’m not afraid.”

  “That should bother you the most,” Doyle said. He went behind the counter and came back with a black leather bag, the kind doctors used to carry around, back when they came to your house at all.

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your father,” Doyle said as he shoved the bag at her. “There’s some mistakes shouldn’t be undone. Not for the price you need to pay.”

  “It’s Finn,” Ellie said. Doyle had always liked her brother, let him run wild in the shop and never scolded him when he broke things or stole comic books from the battered bins under the front window.

  “It’ll always be something,” Doyle said. Ellie picked up the case. It was surprisingly light, even though the contents didn’t rattle at all.

  “I’d like to just get through this time and deal with the next disaster when it comes.”

  She’d opened the door and jangled the bell when Doyle spoke up again, his papery voice somehow cutting through the traffic outside. “Eleanor.”

  Ellie stopped, because she still liked Doyle, even after he’d stopped coming around, divorced himself from the pain of his friend’s death.

  “It’ll offer you a way out,” Doyle said. “It’ll give you a chance to come out on top.” He coughed, a sound of gravel scraping over pavement. “Don’t take it,” he said. “Make a straight bargain. It won’t be in your favor, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Ellie shivered against the air rushing in from the outside, the needles of winter moisture melting on her skin. “I’m not thinking this will be an easy thing, Doyle. Don’t you worry.”

  “Don’t try to win at its game,” Doyle said again. “Your father tried that, and look what happened to him.”

  -7-

  Ellie thought about where to set up. She’d never summoned anything much beyond a few spirits, a few half-drunken words slurred over a Ouija board at parties to answer questions from beyond the beyond. Will I get ma
rried, will Sean be all right in Iraq, will we ever get out of this godforsaken neighborhood?

  The apartment was out—that was familiar territory. That was where her father had rolled the dice and lost.

  Bloodline sorcerers made deals with demons all the time. There were families out there who’d had powerful members of the demonic elite bound for centuries, symbiotic relationships granting the sorcerers power and the demon a ready source of food.

  That’s what she was to this thing—food. Ellie had no illusions. Folk who messed with demons ended up dead. Except sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they brokered a deal first, managed to eke out something impossible for decades of life, or a favor, or all of the power they could contain.

  Demons weren’t picky about what they ate, but they were always hungry.

  Ellie finally picked the Blue Tone, one of Blackie’s properties that he’d snapped up during the boom as a way to launder cash. There were a half dozen of these sad closed-up clubs and restaurants, strung from Salem to Revere, all of them Blackie’s tax shelters.

  The Blue Tone was the only one that made her sad. It was a sagging Art Deco mess, but once, a long time ago, it had been beautiful. The limestone façade glittered in the sun, made you squint so you could almost ignore the weathered plywood blocking the windows and the rusty chain on the door. Gang tags and obscenities couldn’t hold a candle to the carvings above the arched, leaded windows on the second floor.

  Ellie took a flashlight and a few road flares from her emergency kit in her trunk and slipped inside through the back door, the padlock there broken long ago by scavengers looking for fixtures and copper.

  The kitchen was a dripping, stinky mess. A burst pipe had left a constellation of mold on the half-fallen ceiling, but when Ellie stepped through the swinging doors onto the dance floor, the setting sun sent gold bars through the upper windows, illuminating the inlaid wood and painted murals of jazz musicians, flappers, and gilded beauties faded to ghosts on the walls.

  The setup wasn’t hard. She drew a rough circle on the ground with a can of spray paint from her trunk, and outside it drew the same mark carved into the wall of the old apartment. She had to stop for a moment, listening to the wind creak the windows, feeling the building rumble under her as a truck passed by.

  Had her father felt this gnawing desperation? He must have. Nobody would do this if they weren’t desperate.

  Ellie lit a few candles she found clustered in the corners of the room, memories of some long-ago break-in. She sat in the center of the circle and took out her pocketknife. She waited a long time before she cut into her hand.

  It hurt less than she expected. It was cold enough that her blood flowed slow, fat droplets hitting the wood floor, hovering for a moment before they ran into the marks, crawling all around the circle as Ellie flexed her hand.

  Folk tradition wasn’t complicated. Blood, talent, and time was all it took. Ellie wrapped a rag around her hand and waited.

  The devil she’d seen didn’t approach or appear in a puff of smoke. He was simply there at the edge of the candlelight, black suit and bright white shirt, the only part of his face glimpsed the gleam of his eyes.

  “I know you,” he said. “I saw you once. You were smaller.”

  Ellie’s mouth was dry with dust and fear. “I know you too.”

  “Are you here for revenge?” the demon said.

  Ellie shook her head. “I’m here for my brother.”

  The demon smiled then. “Family is important to your kind. I like that. It keeps me visiting this part of the world, every winter or two. I like the winter here. The air smells like iron. Like blood.”

  “My brother owes a gangster thirty thousand dollars,” Ellie said. Her voice, caught in her throat like a rat in a trap, sprung free in a rush. She fought against the tight fist that closed her throat and tried to keep the tremor from her words. “I don’t have it. I have no way of getting it. He’s going to be dead by morning unless I do something.”

  “The money isn’t a problem,” the demon said. He came closer, his black shoe touching the circle line, and with Ellie’s next breath he was inside. She jumped up, backed away, knocking over one of the candles. It guttered and went out, wax pooling around her feet.

  “You called me. You invited me. You can’t shut me out with some paint and prayers,” the demon said. “As to your brother—what will you give me? It’s not a small sum, so the exchange will not be small.”

  Ellie waited. There was no point in pushing back just yet. She could play it cool, hear the offer, and counter. She tried to lie to herself. This was just a deal like any of the hundred back-room favors she’d bartered as a stupid kid, for clothes and shoes, for money to pay the bills, for the stuff Finn wanted so he could be like his straight friends—TV, video games, the right sneakers. Anything that fell off a truck could find its way into Ellie’s hands. But not money like this.

  “I’ll give you a month to put your affairs in order and say good-bye,” the demon said. “That’s more than I gave your father. Of course, his situation was more complicated.”

  “I know what happened to my father,” Ellie said. A month? He couldn’t be serious. She’d thought a year maybe, chopped off the end of her life, when she’d be too old to care anyway. Maybe some sort of unholy favor. She’d done enough of those for Blackie. She was the most talented member of his crew, had been right up until the day she left, so all the worst jobs became hers.

  “Do you?” The demon regarded her. He never blinked, not once in all the time he’d been staring at her.

  “A month . . . that’s like no time at all,” Ellie said. Finn wouldn’t last without her. Sean wouldn’t take care of him the way he needed. He’d slap Finn in some rehab, Finn would run, and he’d end up dead, just as sure as he would owing Blackie the money.

  And Sean . . . he was strong, but how strong? He’d have no one. No one to call when the nightmares got bad. No one to drive him when his leg acted up, no one to help him manage the snowdrifts of paperwork from the VA and his government benefits.

  “Of course, there is another way,” the demon purred. Ellie felt that same feeling, that same paralysis she’d felt watching him take away her father, but this time it lasted only a moment. She knew she’d say the word long before it flew free.

  “Yes.”

  The devil was the devil she’d dreamed of, that she’d feared in that moment. The devil gestured toward the bar. “Instead of bargaining, we could simply play a game.”

  Ellie felt that cold draft wash over her again, the one that had crept inside and sunk its teeth into her skin a dozen years ago on the night her father died. “What game did you have in mind?”

  The devil ran his fingers across the tiger maple of the bar. It was inlaid with strips of darker wood, all of it scarred and stained and covered in dust and grime. Under the devil’s touch, though, the lights in the curved brass chandeliers sprang to life and a tinny song dribbled from the old cloth-covered speakers that dangled from the wall.

  “There’s all kinds of games we can play, Ellie. Games of skill . . .” He pointed to a crooked dartboard at the far end of the bar. “Games of chance . . .” The devil leaned over the bar and brought out a deck of cards so old most of the suits had rubbed away. “Or simply games of luck,” he said, and with a flick of his wrist a pair of dice appeared in his palm. “I tend to leave that up to your kind.”

  Ellie tried to make herself very still, like she would when her father was angry but hadn’t passed out yet on the bad nights, or when she’d screwed up and Blackie had grabbed her and shaken her, his thin fingers like wires tightening around her arms until she feared they’d draw blood.

  “What game did my father play?” she asked the devil.

  He drummed his fingers on the bar. “Not one he was particularly good at.”

  Ellie grabbed the cards, swiping them over the bar. “Best o
f three. I’ll take a chance at each of these and if I win two of the three you do what I ask and you leave.”

  “And if I win?” His teeth gleamed in the low light. The song was stronger now—Billie Holiday, crooning “Solitude.”

  “Then I guess you get what you want.” Ellie shuffled the deck and shoved them at the devil. “Cut.”

  He did as she asked, his eyes dancing with amusement. “Dealer’s choice, I take it?”

  Ellie’s heart thudded through every inch of her, every vein and vessel trembling. It had been a long time since she’d tried to cheat someone, and never someone like this.

  She thought of her father, the spicy smell of whiskey and aftershave, the rough pads of his fingers showing her over and over how to win even if you didn’t have winning cards, because Sean wasn’t interested and Finn didn’t have the patience.

  The devil got a two of hearts and a queen of diamonds. He huffed. “Hit me.”

  The four of clubs hit the bar, now gleaming and new as it had been on the day the Blue Tone opened its doors.

  Ellie waited. The devil sneered. “Again.”

  She dropped a card. Four of spades. The devil laughed. “I like you more than your father. You at least tried.”

  “I still have my cards,” Ellie said, and dropped them fast. Queen of spades. Jack of clubs. Ace of hearts. “I win,” she said, and was glad she was leaning against the bar, so she didn’t lose her balance.

  The devil pursed his lips. “So you have.” He spun on the heel of one polished shoe and went to the dartboard. “But you haven’t beaten me yet.”

  Ellie followed him, rolling one of the ancient darts between her fingers. It was dusty and unbalanced.

  The devil set his stance and sank three bull’s-eyes, one after the other. Thud-thud-thunk, like three bullets through Ellie’s heart.

  He smirked at her, the devil, and stepped aside. “That’s all you, my darling.”

  “Do you always play these games with desperate people?” Ellie asked. The devil shrugged.