There was a pause, and Psy’s “Gangnam Style” assaulted our ears. Early on, I’d tried having Heibert speed up, but apparently the re-work on the Le Car had included shoe-horning a racecar engine into it, because the fuckers were keeping up with the rest of the convoy.
“It’s called K-Pop,” I replied. “Why?”
Please Jesus, I promise I’ll give up swearing…
“I was just wondering; I’d never heard it before,” she said. “Why are they listening to it?”
“They say it fires them up for battle,” I replied. “When we rode into Piccadilly in the choppers, they were listening to it through headphones, but since we’re now battle brothers, they’re sharing the magic with us.”
“I can see how that would work,” she said, then laughed. “I hope you didn’t promise anything you’re going regret if I didn’t like it.”
We slid to a halt at the roach motel, saving me from having to answer her.
Sheriff Des Rochers was waiting for us, leaning up against the side of the office.
“I cleared the motel, except for your idiots, who are still inside,” he said, waggling an infrared camera at me. “You’d think they’d have noticed the knocking, but they’re still in place. Tank’s around back to make sure they don’t try crawling out the bathroom window, and he hasn’t said anything.”
“How’s the room laid out?” I asked.
He laughed. “It’s a box. With a smaller box off to the side for the bathroom. We hit this place about once a month, looking for dealers.”
“Drugs?” Hovis asked, looking up from the office door he was examining.
“Nah, occult materials,” Des Rochers said. “You’d be surprised how much mystical paraphernalia comes through this town.”
“Oh,” Hovis said, turning from the door to me. “If the room door is like this one, I can probably take it out and not blow too many splinters through them, depending on where they’re standing.”
“Yeah, no,” Des Rochers said. “This door’s tough, ’cause the guy who owns the place lives behind the office and is scared pissless of werewolves or worse breaking it down and eatin’ his liver because of all the trafficking and whatnot. The ones on the rooms are more like a couple of pieces of cardboard held together with white glue. One of my officers, Tank, walked through one of them last time we raided this place.”
“No explosives then, I guess,” Hovis said, crestfallen.
“We could ask,” Dalma said.
“We could what?” Holt said.
“Ask. You know, knock on the door and ask them to turn themselves over to us,” she replied. “Worst thing happens is they go out the back door and run into Deputy Walks Through Doors.”
“Well, damn,” I said. “Anyone got a better idea?”
“I’ll knock,” Diindiisi said. “Even in all this gear, I’m less threatening than you are.”
“Right. Give us a minute to get into position to cover you,” I said, gesturing everyone into place.
I hunkered down behind a rental Prius I figured belonged to the two remaining Amigos and waved Diindiisi forward. She knocked on the door and waited. The curtain covering the window next to the door twitched aside, followed by a fierce buzzing on the far side of the door, which finally opened.
“Can I help you, good lady?” Fedora asked, bowing.
Fuckin’ neckbeards.
“Yes. You and your friend can step outside so we can place you in custody,” Diindiisi said with the positive tones of a British cop, even if she was carrying enough firepower to cause one to faint.
“Why would we want to do that?” Fedora asked, as if carrying on a conversation with heavily-armed women were an everyday occurrence for him.
“Good question,” Diindiisi responded. “My first response is to avoid what my husband calls ‘being on the receiving end of a dynamic entry.’ Which involves explosives and shouting at a bare minimum. My second response is you’ve got a better chance of reaching your full life expectancy if you surrender yourself into custody.”
“Are you threatening to kill us?” Fedora asked.
“Not at all,” Diindiisi replied. “If you avoid arrest, however, you’ll probably fall foul of either Abzu or Oeillet. You do realize they were behind the big show last week, right?”
“We have verbal assurances from those we met with,” Fedora started.
“You have verbal assurances from the followers of a devil of greed?” I asked, rising from behind the car. “You realize you can hold them to exactly what is written down, right?”
“I thought of that,” Handlebar said smugly, stepping to the door. “I recorded what they said!”
“Which is worth the paper it’s written on, kid,” I said. “Devils don’t take a shit without proper paperwork, and the human followers of one are even worse when it comes to things like that.”
“All we have is your word on that,” he sneered. “Mr. Medved said you’d lie in a situation like this.”
“When did you talk to Mr. Medved?” Fedora asked, voice clotted with jealousy.
“He came by when you were in the john throwing up,”
“That was two days ago; when were you planning on telling me about it?”
This was going nowhere, fast; something didn’t smell right, and I don’t mean in the psychic sense. There was a cloying smell of flowers coming from the room.
I blame the lack of sleep and the paperwork I’d been doing for the last five days, because it took me more than a few seconds to realize what was happening, and by then it was too late for Handlebar. Something reached out of a shadow and touched him.
“Contact!” Diindiisi shouted, grabbing Fedora and tossing him out of the room.
Handlebar jerked into a transformation, his arms and legs twisting and bulging. He screamed once and exploded in a rain of meat. What replaced him bulged with muscle in all the wrong places—the legs and arms were spindly, while the belly had a six pack that any CrossFit aficionado would have killed for. There was no head, and the entire being was a glistening, corroded gold. Wasting no time in contemplation, I grabbed Diindiisi by the drag handle on her armor, dove off to the side, and balled up around her. We’d just cleared the opening and whatever the fuck it was when everyone, including Sheriff Des Rochers, opened fire on the monster. It twitched under the impacts before reaching out and grabbing the rental parked in front of the room and using it for a shield.
“Fuck that shit!” Dalma shouted as Diindiisi and I crawled out of the impact area.
I looked—she was standing behind the Le Car with the big Solothurn braced on the hood.
“Fuck no!” I screamed, rolling to my feet and grabbing Diindiisi again.
Time slowed as Dalma took up the last bit of slack in the anti-tank rifle’s trigger. I watched the barrel begin the recoil process, and sparks flew from under the feet of the bipod as it gouged its way across the Le Car’s hood. The round tore through the car the devil was using for a shield, there was a bright flash, and my ear protection shorted out from the explosion that followed. I’m sure I kept Diindiisi from bouncing off the cheap brickwork of the hotel, because when I could see again, she was laying on top of me, and I was on top of the pile of brick we’d knocked out when the blast blew us through a wall.
Diindiisi was saying something, but I couldn’t hear a word until I reached up and pulled my useless earplugs out.
“Repeat that.”
“I said we should check on the others, if you’re ok,” she said, rising.
“I’m not ok, but I’m functional, so let’s go see how this cluster fuck has gone down,” I replied.
You ever hear Jeff Foxworthy talking about the press interviewing Southerners after a tornado? There’s a word he uses that fits what was going on outside perfectly—pandelirium. The hotel was on fire, and it was raining bits of green-technology Toyota. What was left of Handlebar after the devil’s touch had dragged itself from the room with one arm and was trying to pin Fedora—who’d survived, completely
unscathed—to a wall with a dagger-like finger.
Diindiisi pulled the trigger on her Roadblocker and nothing happened. She cycled the action, shucking the bad shell out of the gun, and tried again. The hammer fell, and nothing. Diindiisi tossed the gun at the devil before pulling the 1911 I’d given her in San Marcos months ago and emptying it into the devil. That got its attention.
It sniffed the air, then made a noise like garbage trucks having non-consensual sex.
“The ones the master desires!” it grumbled in a low voice.
“Not this shit again,” I said, pulling out the ‘Rite of Exorcism, really short form’ and a bottle of holy water.
I raised my hand to begin the Rite. Behind me, I could hear someone mindlessly screaming his or her last. That didn’t matter in the least, although I’d mourn whoever was dead if I survived. The air stank of cheap rose water, the kind you’d smell the locals cooking with in the poorer neighborhoods in Ramadi or Habbaniya. The stench told me something big and diabolic was trying to force its way into this world through the gateway that had opened using Handlebar’s soul. My hand moved with glacial slowness; automatic weapons fire sounded like single shots, and the night was turning to day. I knew one thing—we were all going to die, but before we did, I was going to ensure the devils both knew they’d fucked up. They were going back to Hell to report that QMG got the job done, no matter what. My one regret was not getting to spend more time with Diindiisi.
I don’t know if it was my regret, or because we’d made the proper sacrifice, or because the forces of evil had broken one of the rules governing their eternal war with good, but as I continued to gesture and chant, the miracle occurred. There was a flash of light, and visions of the angelic host. Well, sort of. Fred saw the Thunderer, and Diindiisi saw Raven. Me? I saw the Patron Saint of Breaking Shit and the infantry—Michael the Archangel. Although, as I later told Miller over a lot of whisky, he was wearing body armor and carrying an M240, not a pin-striped suit.
There was a second flash and a whole lot of screeching, followed by the sound of tons of scrap metal falling from a great height. The devils and whoever had intervened were gone, leaving behind the smell of roses and cordite.
“Sound off!”
Everyone was there, and aside from multiple contusions, very much hale. Until I got to where Dalma sat, with Ozzy and Alfie going over her.
“I’m fine, damnit,” she said, making a fist with her right hand.
“Honestly, you shouldn’t be,” Ozzy said, checking her pupil reaction with a light. “Jesse, she should be dead.”
“You know, Dalma, we have to stop meeting like this,” I said, looking at her sitting there, splattered in blood. “Anyone got an emergency shirt?”
Whatever had happened, the dwarves had cut off everything down to her bra. Flak jacket, jacket, and shirt lay in a tumbled pile beside her. It took a hell of a pair of scissors to cut through the plates in a flak jacket.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “Jesse, I was dead.”
“What happened?” I asked, squatting down next to her.
“I realized what you said about the same time the sear on the Solothurn released,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I…I hadn’t thought about punching a 20mm round through the batteries on the Prius.”
“It didn’t help that the magazine in the gun was a mixed load,” Alfie said with an apologetic look. “High Explosive was the first round out of the gun.”
“High explosives and lithium batteries definitely do not mix well,” I said. “That doesn’t explain your state of dress, or thinking you were dead.”
“I don’t think I was dead, I was dead,” she insisted. “When the car exploded, part of it smashed into the gun and drove it backward. My hand tangled on the charging crank, and I felt my arm get ripped off at the shoulder.”
“I was bracing her from behind or she might have ridden with the gun, and not, well, you know,” Alfie said apologetically.
“I’m starting to see,” I said, waiting on her to tell the rest of it.
“She really was dead, Jesse,” Ozzy said. “I think she bled out before we got her gear off, but I’m not one hundred percent sure.”
“So you were dead, and missing an arm. Now you’re whole and aren’t,” I said.
“Yes…well…about that. I remember passing out after my arm went that-a-way,” she said, pointing behind her. “I came to in a deer stand, next to an old dude in the ugliest blue and yellow camouflage I’d ever seen.”
She shifted position while Ozzy and Alfie continued to check her over.
“Anyway, old dude says his name is Simon, or Simeon, or something like that, and he’s sad to see me, because I’m not supposed to be here yet. ‘You must have done something really stupid, young lady,’ he said,” Dalma said, pausing to drink from a bottle of water. “So I told him ‘Yeah, I blew up a car and killed myself, but it was that or watch my friends die.’”
Fred came over and tossed her a shirt, and she pulled it on. Diindiisi stepped up and whispered that they’d gotten Fedora into the sheriff’s car and were going to move him to the Gas N’ Go, which had a couple of rooms set up to hold things of an unusual nature. I squeezed her hand, and she left, taking half the team with her.
“Simon says, ‘While dying to protect your friends is a good thing, young lady, your friends are still in trouble. Would you like to help them?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m not sure what I can do,’ while I’m trying to watch this thirty-six-point buck at the edge of the clearing where the deer stand is. ‘I can send you back, if you’d like,’ Simon says. I’m like, ‘But with one arm, I’m not going to do them much good.’ He just smiles and says, ‘Don’t worry about that, girl,’ snaps his fingers, and I’m back here with Ozzy and Alfie pawing me. I didn’t think you guys were into women,” she said with a smile at the dwarves.
“We were trying to save your life!” Alfie said indignantly.
“She knows, love,” Ozzy said, taking Alfie’s hand. “She’s just jerking your chain.”
“I learned something important, though,” Dalma said with a small smile. “Don’t shoot a Prius with an anti-tank rifle.”
* * * * *
Chapter Fourteen
It took about eight hours for word to filter from Austin to Dallas that we’d taken Fedora into protective custody. He’d started screaming for a lawyer the minute he realized we weren’t going to let him walk out the door so whatever devil or daemon he’d made a pact with could eat his soul, probably dipped in the diabolic version of Tabasco. Headquarters, in a rare display of ‘play fair with the smaller organizations,’ actually paid the Van Helsing brothers for the use of their protected conference rooms, and had sent the best lawyer we had on staff to help unravel exactly what the hell—pun intended—Fedora had gotten himself into. While we were waiting on the lawyer to show up, I filled out enough environmental impact statements to choke a horse, and took a nap, because as sure as God made little green apples, it was going to be one of those days.
Dalma was undergoing tests. Sola sent Cathe back to Piccadilly as soon as he heard we had definite contact with a non-earthly higher power—his words—and the dwarves were monitoring Dalma in case she’d completed her mission and her arm spontaneously fell off. Dwarves have some tough gods, and her arm falling back off would be something they’d pull. Dalma wasn’t happy with all the attention, although she’d perked up when Fred presented her with the trashed Solothurn mounted on a plaque, complete with a label that read “For conspicuous stupidity above and beyond the call of rationality.”
The lawyer showed up and went into conference with her client, complete with various smokes and thunders that showed she was fighting against a devil-written contract. The Van Helsings were even standing guard, they said, to ensure nothing disturbed the lawyer. I’d seen the ‘rent’ they were gouging out of HQ. It included an extra fee for ‘professional, on site protective services provided by the owner of the property.’ Which meant Bubba or Cletus in their cleanes
t mechanics shirt and jeans, sitting outside the door to the conference room downstairs, glowering at anyone who approached. Bubba had a hell of a glower. Cletus looked like an angry mole rat.
While the contract breaking was going on, I watched the video we’d found on Monocle. Other Dave made popcorn and laid out an assortment of snacks for the viewing. Most of it was banal shit—the Three Amigos leaving Austin for a ‘secret location,’ where they would be shown ‘powerful magic of a most benign nature,’ they assured us in the voiceover.
“Are these guys just total idiots, or lucky?” Other Dave asked, pausing the feed on a wolfman and a bearman looking at the camera with hungry eyes.
“Little of column A, little of column B?” I replied, snagging another Coke. “Useful idiots probably.”
“You can say that again,” Other Dave said, hitting play.
The camera went past the therianthropes and into an alcove. The sign on the door, crudely hidden with a sheet, showed they were trying to keep some secrets, but I had an idea of which building it was because of the geometry and architecture. I’d been on campus at MU-P more than once.
“Man, it’s got to suck being allergic to the creatures you’re trying to save,” I said, looking at the rash on Fedora’s arm.
“Someone forgot his antihistamines,” Other Dave agreed. “Or, just based on what I’ve seen from these idiots, he’s trying a homeopathic remedy for werewolves.”
“If that’s the case, at least he’s staying hydrated,” I replied, watching the screen. “Pause it.”
The scene stopped, showing a stone corridor with hardwood floors.
“You recognize that place?” Other Dave asked.
“Anthropology Department, professor’s offices, Miskatonic University Piccadilly,” I said, showing him the picture I had pulled up on my laptop. “We should be able to figure out what professor they’re going to see by counting the doors, since they ensorcelled the nameplates.”
Where the sign on the outer door was badly covered, the ones in the hallway were ensorcelled into cuneiform. Not that we needed that to show us who had leaked the spell, but it didn’t hurt.
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