Devil's Thumb

by S. M. Schmitz

  She lay beside him and watched him for a long time. Sometimes, she tuned into his meaningless dreams that would occasionally trickle into her mind as well, but she was thankful they were the sort of dream that made little sense. Those dreams were harmless. They were the sort of dreams people were supposed to have. It was the memories that concerned her, these retellings of their pasts that shouldn’t have come to them with such clarity and precision. But their history didn’t bother Colin that evening, only an odd assortment of unusually large cockroaches that were unbelievably hard to kill and were apparently hiding in every cupboard in their apartment. Colin hated bugs.

  Anna finally fell asleep around midnight, unable to outwait the rest his body needed to finish healing. But first, she thought of the effort it must have taken Luca and Andrew to stay awake while searching for their friends after Colin had saved her. They hadn’t been as badly injured as today, but it all took a toll on them nonetheless. That’s just the kind of people Immortals were: they wouldn’t complain of their own pain or fatigue when someone else needed them.

  Anna was in her own strange dream about driving a golf cart through a lake when Jas showed up in the seat beside her. Anna’s first reaction was the same as the previous times Jas had shown up in her dreams – she knew her friend was dead and shouldn’t be with her, and she was scared to acknowledge this fact in case Jas disappeared. But then she remembered why Jas was here. Anna searched for the brake on the golf cart but it didn’t seem to have one. “This doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t a memory. Why are you here? And how the hell do I stop this thing?”

  Jas laughed and reclined in the seat. Anna didn’t think their potential drowning was funny. Granted, Jas was already dead and Anna was immortal, but still. It was a dream. Maybe she could die in dreams. “Girl, don’t panic. I’m only here to check on you. I don’t know what you did today, but I haven’t been able to pick up on those demons since this afternoon.”

  Anna had still been searching for the brake on the golf cart then realized if she stopped it, she’d sink into the water anyway. She was driving on top of a lake. “I’m fine. Colin’s the one who got hurt. But it was nothing major. Andrew got the worst of it.”

  Jas nodded and peered over the side of the cart. “Cool. There’s some kind of shark down here. I think it’s a sand shark.”

  “Sand sharks don’t live in lakes.”

  “It’s not my dream.”

  Anna braved a peek into the water at the edge of the cart, and Jas was right. Long brown sharks were circling underneath them. Great. Jas laughed again and assured her sand sharks didn’t attack people. At least, she was pretty sure they didn’t attack people.

  “So,” Jas straightened up again and was watching Anna, who kept her eyes on the water like she could possibly veer off course. There was nothing but a rippling blue surface for miles. “I’m almost positive Jeremy’s still alive.”

  Anna tore her eyes off the surface of the velvety blue lake and stared at Jas. “How do you know?”

  “Well, he’s not here. That’s my first clue.”

  Anna felt sick. She wondered if it were possible to get seasick in a dream. “And that thing Colin did today to protect you? I think that’s what these archdemons have been doing to Jeremy. They stole a hunter, and one who knew two Immortals. They’re not letting him go. I don’t know if y’all are going to be able kill him now.”

  Anna definitely felt seasick. “We should have killed him in Baton Rouge. That’s what you came to tell me?”

  Jas shook her head and pointed to something in the water. “Buoy. You might want to swerve.”

  Anna looked ahead of her again and a buoy had appeared in her path. It hadn’t been there before. Damn dreams. She pulled on the steering wheel and the golf cart made a hard right turn.

  “No,” Jas said, “I don’t think I could have killed him then either. Especially after what Luca told you. But you’ve been so busy with all this other stuff going on in your life, and I sure as hell can’t blame you, that y’all haven’t had time to look into whether or not it’s possible to get Jeremy back. So I’m actually here to remind you it’s probably time to start doing some digging around, see what you can turn up. I don’t know if it’s possible either. I mean, even your angel didn’t know. But if it is, it may be the only way you can get to him. Short of figuring out how to kill three extremely powerful archdemons of Hell.”

  Anna sighed and cast a watchful glance around the surface of the lake again. She didn’t want to be surprised by any more buoys or breaching sand sharks, even though she was pretty sure sharks didn’t breach. But it was a dream after all. “So all three are still alive. And here,” she confirmed.

  Jas nodded again. “Yep. Afraid so. Can’t tell who they are though. They’re masking themselves and I can’t get much more off them than you can. I follow you around, and that’s how I know when they’re trying to get in your head again.”

  Anna cringed and smirked at the same time. “Wait. You follow me around all the time? That’s kind of pervy.”

  Jas snorted and rolled her eyes. “Not like that. My God, Anna, there are some images I don’t want to spend eternity with in my head. Though don’t be mad at me for still thinking your husband’s hot.”

  Anna just shrugged. “He is.” She wanted to add something about Dylan, but he had five hundred years left on this Earth. There were probably going to be a lot of things Jas wouldn’t want to know about his life as well, so she didn’t bring him up at all.

  “Oh, Luca’s angel told me to tell you something. In the morning, y’all need to get together and talk about the time you were in Berlin together. How come you lived in Berlin so often?”

  “Because I love that city,” Anna smiled. But she and Colin had only ever lived in Berlin with Luca at the same time for about a month in the early 1920s. She couldn’t imagine what was so significant about this memory. Jas didn’t know either. “Girl, I don’t know. I barely even remembered from history class there was a republic there after World War I. I couldn’t figure out why y’all were there in the first place. His angel had to tell me.”

  Anna exhaled a frustrated breath. “Yeah, and as always, just as things got peaceful and prosperous, we had to leave. We came to New Orleans after that, actually.”

  “Hey,” Jas cautioned, “watch out for that sand bank.”

  Anna ran into the sand bank and the collision threw her from the cart. Instead of landing in the sand or the water of the lake filled with the shadowy shapes of sharks, she awoke in her bed in Devil’s Thumb, Colorado and saw that Colin was watching her, concentrating on this memory. He had seen enough of Anna’s dream to hear Jas’s message from Luca’s angel, and as the early morning sun peeked through the blinds in their bedroom, Colin pulled the covers off of him and got out of bed. “I’m going to get Luca. Jas came with two messages: we needed to look into if it’s possible to reverse Jeremy’s possession, and we needed to remember living with Luca during the Weimar years. They’ve got to be related. Maybe Luca has some answers for us after all.”

  Chapter 20

  Berlin, 1923. Colin and Anna met Luca at a restaurant near their apartment. Like most places now, if anyone wanted to eat, they had better brought something other than money with them because the sign in the window made it clear they weren’t accepting Marks. Colin dug in his pocket and handed the waiter U.S. currency then he took their orders and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “My German’s not very good,” Colin admitted. “Did he just say we’d get whatever the cook felt like making?”

  Luca nodded. “Pretty much. Everyone’s in a bad mood lately.”

  Anna looked over her shoulder at the street behind her. A few people were stopping to pick up the paper Marks that had fallen on the sidewalks or the street itself but most didn’t bother picking them up to throw away and just walked over them. A couple of men entered the restaurant carrying a bundle of fireplace matchsticks. They asked if they could barter them for coffee and some brea
d rolls. The same waiter – the only one who seemed to be working here – looked over the long matches and said he’d test one out. If they worked well, he’d accept the trade. That’s how most business was conducted lately. He disappeared into the kitchen again.

  Anna yawned. “I’d settle for him just bringing the coffee right now.”

  “If they actually have coffee. Maybe they’re still serving that shit made from acorns,” Luca said, but he kept his voice low just in case the waiter overheard them. They were hungry and didn’t want to get kicked out.

  “If he’s bartering matches for it, probably,” Colin agreed. The waiter returned to their table with three cups and a single plate with round rolls on it. Anna glanced into the cup. It was definitely not real coffee. The waiter said something then walked back into the kitchen.

  “What did he say?” Colin asked.

  Luca sniffed the liquid in his cup. “He said the cook has some Weisswurst back there. He’s boiling it now. Your American money just bought us a sausage.”

  “One,” Anna reiterated.

  Luca just shrugged and bravely took a sip of the ersatz coffee. They had gotten used to all sorts of shortages during the war, but they’d expected those deprivations to end at some point. Instead, they were still drinking acorn water and splitting a plate of rolls and a single sausage.

  “Eh, the Republic hasn’t handled the postwar economy very well, obviously,” Luca responded. He’d lived through far worse shortages than this. He wasn’t concerned. Of course, he’d also witnessed several outbreaks of plague and famines, so he tended to measure scarcity a little differently than the O’Conners.

  “Look on the bright side, Colin. At least it’s not dandelion leaves.”

  Colin’s nose wrinkled at the memory of living in Verdun and subsisting on squirrels and the greens of dandelions. That same winter, in this city they were living in now, the shortages had been even worse. Colin supposed foraging wild greens wasn’t as bad as trying to survive on turnips, some of which were already rotten by the time they reached the cities.

  The waiter returned and placed another single plate on the table in front of them with one white sausage on it then left without speaking. “I guess our American money doesn’t buy manners though,” Colin thought.

  “We’ve got breakfast. And … hot brownish water. Could be worse.”

  “You two talk aloud or I’m eating this myself,” Luca warned. The waiter hadn’t brought them any silverware so he had to use his own knife to slice the Weisswurst.

  Luca had only been in Berlin with the O’Conners for a few weeks. He had been sleeping on their sofa because he wasn’t planning on being here much longer. He’d been following a particular demon through Europe and it was an elusive bastard. He’d come across this demon in Bulgaria, a strange sort of creature with olive green skin and peach eyes, and even though Luca hadn’t been able to get close enough to it to kill it yet, he had gotten close enough a couple of times to see that it had some kind of marking on it. He just couldn’t tell what it was.

  For the past month, the demon had fled northward from Luca, and oddly, it kept reforming as this olive toned beast. Colin and Anna didn’t think that was overly strange though; demons often seemed to harbor a fondness for a particular manifestation.

  Colin split the last roll with Anna and told Luca, “We had one get away from us a while back in Brazil. We followed it into Paraguay and every time we spotted this demon, it reformed as a tapir. Except with long fangs, because demons love their fangs. Must have seen one in the Amazon and thought it looked pretty intimidating or something. Guess it wasn’t paying much attention or it would have realized tapirs are vegetarians and aren’t any scarier than a pig.”

  “They kind of are with the fangs though,” Anna pointed out.

  Colin nodded in agreement, but really, monstrously long fangs on any animal made it look scarier than normal.

  Luca looked like he was puzzling over something then shrugged and finished off his fake coffee. “Well, if I’m right and it’s here in Berlin now, you’ll see what I mean. This one’s just a bit weird. Not as weird as that white fellow you killed in Nanjing but weird enough.”

  Anna grimaced at the memory of the demon from Nanjing, the formerly human demon they’d killed in China during the Taiping Rebellion. “You don’t think this is another human-demon do you?” she asked. She’d hoped never to see one of those again.

  Luca shook his head though. “No, it transforms. It’s a regular demon. I think. But something is still different about it, not to mention it’s escaped from me through four countries. Demons don’t escape from me.”

  “Apparently they do,” Colin retorted.

  Luca mumbled something in an Italian dialect neither of them could speak, and Colin smiled back at him. For the most part, Luca was right. Demons didn’t get away from him. He was a legend and the fact that this one had eluded him for this long was strange enough on its own.

  Colin choked down the last of his coffee, which really didn’t taste like coffee no matter how many times the restaurateurs around here tried to convince him otherwise, then followed Luca and Anna out into the bright morning sun that was burning off the overnight chill of the October German air. Anna was about to suggest they head toward the Tiergarten when she spotted a murky olive green form disappearing around one of the buildings across the street. She grabbed Luca’s arm and pointed in the direction she’d seen the demon vanish.

  They crossed the street and approached the narrow alleyway slowly, feeling the presence of the demon here now. The putrid stench so common for these creatures was leaking around the brick edges of the building. The alleyway opened to another street behind this building; as soon as the demon saw them, it would take off across Berlin, and none of the hunters wanted to try to chase a demon through a city this size. It was one thing to chase demons through cities while there was a war going on, but during peacetime, people seemed to notice strangers running through the street with daggers in their hands a lot more.

  Colin and Anna waited for Luca to tell them what he wanted to do. This was his demon, his chase. Luca tapped his fingers against the hilt of his dagger a few times then offered the O’Conners one of his signature smirks. “Well, my old friends, get ready to run.”

  Luca dashed into the alleyway and Colin and Anna followed him, surprised by Luca’s sudden announcement, but not wanting to let this green bastard get away again. The demon morphed into a shape that was eerily humanlike with olive skin and peach eyes, an assortment of carmine markings down its spine. It took off running from them as soon as they entered the narrow alley. The demon chanced a look back at the hunters pursuing it and Colin and Anna were able to see its face more clearly, unnaturally long and jutting to a pointed end. Like all demons, it seemed to think fangs were a necessary component of looking evil. Anna shuddered when, right before turning around to virtually fly across the street, it seemed to smile at her.

  Anna and Colin kept pace with Luca, but he hadn’t been gifted telepathy. They had to trust his hundreds of years of experience and superior skills would make up for him not knowing what the O’Conners were planning. “Luca will follow him. If we can get in front of it somehow, we might be able to get it to run back toward Luca or one of us. We just need to get in front of it to get it to change course,” Colin suggested.

  Anna remembered using that tactic quite a few times, including in Nanjing, but this demon was unusually fast. No wonder it kept getting away from Luca. “And how are we supposed to get in front of it? We can’t even catch up to it.”

  Colin looked down the street. “At this rate, we’ll end up in the Tiergarten anyway. And if it keeps going, it’ll run into the Spree. Think it can swim?”

  “That’s your plan? Chase it to a river and hope it can’t swim?”

  “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky. There are smaller bodies of water all around there. Maybe it’ll head west a bit so we don’t have to run through the entire Tiergarten.”

  An
na could already see the greenery of the park ahead of her. It wasn’t going to turn west in time. “This is the most ridiculous plan you’ve ever come up with, Colin Aedan O’Conner.”

  She could feel the laughter in his head but his body was working too hard to let him laugh out loud. “I have a better idea. Demons usually think I’m weaker because I’m a woman. If I can get its attention, separate myself from you, maybe it will come after me and then you and Luca can sandwich it.”

  “That’s almost as ridiculous as my plan.”

  Anna took the “almost” part of that as admission her plan was better and she should try it. They had just stepped into the park when she broke away from them and ran back toward the Potsdamer Platz. The demon continued on its path through the Tiergarten, but then seemed to notice there weren’t as many hunters pursuing it anymore. It glanced behind it and Colin’s heart beat even faster when he noticed its cantaloupe colored eyes following Anna’s retreating figure. He could see the indecision playing in its thoughts, and the temptation to isolate and kill a weaker hunter finally won out. It cut a hard right and ran parallel to the path Anna had taken.

  To Luca’s credit – he was a legend after all – he never even slowed down. He followed the olive beast and Colin stayed beside him. They both knew, however, Anna wouldn’t be able to outrun this one. It was too fast. But Anna wasn’t planning on trying to outrun it. As soon as Luca and Colin were behind the demon again, she stopped and spun around, and the olive demon nearly collided with her. The monster seemed startled for a second before baring those fangs it probably thought frightened her. But Anna didn’t hesitate. She plunged her dagger into its chest and yanked the blade back toward her. This demon looked vaporous but it was as leathery and thick as any other.