by Devon Monk
“I promise I won’t let you down,” Jean said. When Bertie glanced away, Jean drew her finger across her throat and mouthed at me: “You’re dead.”
I waggled my eyebrows at her.
“You said there were two things you wanted to talk about?” Delaney asked.
“Oh,” Bertie said. “Yes. We seem to have developed a portal to Hell.”
The pause in the room, the full moment of silence as we each absorbed that statement, was immense.
Bathin broke the silence with a little grunt. “Huh.”
“A what?” Delaney asked. “No, just. Where?” She plucked up her jacket and shrugged into it as she strode across the room. “Where is the portal to Hell, Bertie?”
“Out by the lake, dear.”
“Which side?”
“In the park. Near the dragon.”
Delaney was all motion, already at the door, Ryder on her heels. “Bathin, with me,” she said. “Jean, stay here.”
“Yes, boss,” she said.
“Hatter, Shoe, you’re on patrol. We’ll keep you in the loop. Ryder, stay here.”
“Nope.” He was moving behind her, with her. They had become more than just boyfriend, girlfriend over the last year or so. They had become a team: partners at work, partners at home. There was no chance Ryder was going to let her charge off to face a portal to Hell without him.
I didn’t think Delaney realized it, but he had firmly planted himself in both her life and her career.
“Myra,” Delaney said.
The tug in my chest was so strong I felt like someone had hooked me and was reeling me in. “Oh, I’m coming with you.”
She nodded. “Be back as soon as we can, Roy.”
“I’ll save you a cinnamon roll,” he replied.
Chapter 3
Delaney and Ryder swung into his truck, and I marched over to my cruiser. As soon as I was behind the wheel, the passenger door opened and Bathin angled his way into the seat.
“No.” I pointed at the door.
“Yes. Delaney wants me to come, and there is no room for me in the truck between those two love birds.”
“Walk, transport, or find some other way to get there.”
“There’s a portal open to Hell. Hell, she said, Myra. And you don’t want to keep an eye on the only demon in town? You want me to go off on my own, maybe show up at the portal before any of you? Left to my own devices?”
I scowled. I hated it when he was right. I wanted to keep a close eye on him.
Lucky for me, I could pass the time grilling the only demon in town about portals to Hell.
“What was I thinking?” I said. “How silly of me. Of course you can ride with me. Let’s go.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What are you going to do, Myra Reed? I hope you don’t think crashing this car into a telephone pole would kill me.”
Strange that he’d jumped to homicide, but I was more than happy to follow that line of thinking.
“No?” I started the engine and eased out of the parking lot, following Ryder’s truck. He switched on his light bar, blue and red flashing, and I did the same.
No sirens yet, but if the road was too crowded—which it shouldn’t be on a Wednesday morning in September—we’d go in sirens wailing.
“So tell me,” I said, “what would kill you?”
He relaxed into the seat and flicked his blunt fingernail over the edge of the dash, as if there were a bug there.
There wasn’t. I kept a clean and orderly car just like I kept a clean and orderly life.
“Nothing. There’s a thing here and there which might damage me,” he said, “but I haven’t found anything that could kill me.”
Lie.
“Not even vehicular accidents?”
“No.”
“Beheading?”
“No. I am whichever shape I choose. I wouldn’t construct such simple vulnerabilities.”
Interesting.
“I don’t suppose stabbing you in the heart would do anything?”
“Ah, Myra. It’s sweet you think I have a heart.”
“I don’t.”
He hummed like he didn’t believe me.
“What about those scissors?” I asked.
“Which scissors?”
He knew exactly which scissors. “The ones your mother made that can somehow cut a soul out of your possession and will do you great harm?”
“Allegedly can cut a soul out of my possession. And will do the user great harm.”
“Allegedly,” I said.
“I’d need to see the scissors to know if they are the ones my mother made for my enemies to use against me.”
Not happening.
“She sounds just terrific, by the way,” I muttered, “your mother.”
“Oh, I assure you, she’s not. Where was it you were keeping those scissors, Myra? If you let me see them, I can tell you whether or not they could kill me.”
“You’re never going to see them until they’re buried in your heart. If that’s the way they kill you.”
“Promises, promises. Shall we make a date of it? A good old-fashioned stabbing? A crime of passion? You provide the crime, I’ll provide the passion?”
I bit my bottom lip so I didn’t shout at him. Or smack him. Or laugh.
He was hard on my insides. I found him equally frustrating and darkly wonderful.
No, not wonderful. He was holding my sister’s soul hostage. There was nothing wonderful about that.
“Tell me what to expect,” I said.
“Of what? My passion? Well, when a demon likes an officer of the law, he—”
“What to expect at the portal to Hell.” My heart was beating a little too fast. When he chuckled, it made me shiver and want to squirm in my seat.
What about angry sex? he had asked in the dream.
Oh, hell no.
“Your pulse, Myra,” Bathin murmured. “Whatever has crossed your mind?”
“A portal to Hell,” I lied. “What should we expect from it? Who opened it, and how did they do it? Is something coming into Ordinary or leaving?”
He waited a bit, about a block or so, staring out the window as our small, cloudy town zipped past.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to tell me,” I corrected.
“No. There could be many answers to your question. I don’t know which answers are the right ones.”
“Give me your best guess. I’ve done the research, I know the basics.”
He stared for a bit more, and when I snuck a peek at him, his eyes were narrow, that same look he’d had in the station, as if he were trying to read the head of a pin from miles away.
“I don’t know what was used to open the portal. It’s not a crossroads, it’s not something laying quiescent beneath the earth. It could be a summoning, a spell. If so, then the portal was called into existence from inside Ordinary. And that…that would be interesting.”
We had a lot of people with powers in town. It was possible someone from the inside had opened a portal to Hell. But it was against the rules to do so, and I didn’t know anyone who would break that law.
“Do you know who or what could be coming through?” I asked.
“No. But I think the portal was opened to allow something into Ordinary, not out.”
I worked to relax my grip on the wheel. Whatever we were about to face was coming out of Hell and straight into Ordinary.
I thought back to what I’d grabbed before I left the house today. Deck of cards, some tea bags. Extra socks. The bag I’d been carrying around for the last couple months had a rotating supply of oddities. So did the trunk of the cruiser.
Without really meaning to, I added and subtracted things out of the trunk and glove box with regularity. Delaney and Jean both gave me hell about it and liked to dig through the glove box to see what weird things I had stashed.
Jean called me the Swiss Army Reed, because she was a brat.
And yet, they never complained
when I had exactly what we needed at hand.
“I think I know what’s guarding the portal,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Basilisk? Sphinx? Devil?”
“No. Nothing like that. Nothing easy.”
“Those are easy?”
“Each of those things has rules.”
“The devil has rules?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He winked, and I refused to acknowledge what that did to my internal temperature.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What thing without rules is guarding the portal?”
We’d made it to the park and turned onto the narrow road wending down the hill to the lake. Since it was early morning on a school day, the park was empty.
I followed Ryder’s truck down the great rolling hill surrounded by tall fir trees to the parking lot at the bottom.
The big metal dragon statue stood watch at the top of the hill, a ramble of play structures stationed on two levels below. Behind us was a sandy stretch, the boat dock, and finally, the lake, bright and broad and waiting for swimmers, fishermen, jet skis, and boaters.
I’d seen the lake so many times—in sunlight, snow, rain—that it didn’t always hit me how beautiful it was. I was born here, grew up here. I’d spent as much of my summers on the lake as I had on the beach.
It was home, familiar, common. But at moments like this, the lake polished into sapphire and milky opal by the wide blue arc of the sky and striated clouds, I realized what a lovely, special place Ordinary really was.
“Where’s the portal, what’s guarding it, why are you so quiet?” I parked and turned toward Bathin.
His eyes were wide, really wide. Like he had just seen something that scared the hell out of him.
“Bathin?” I almost reached for him, but course-corrected and reached for my firearm, checking to be sure it was at my side, in my holster.
Demons could be anything they wanted you to think they were. Fake any emotion, if it got them what they desired.
So Bathin might not really be afraid of the thing he was staring at. It might all be an act.
My gut said no. This man, this demon, was afraid.
The tug in my chest—sharp like salt in a wound—said it was time to get out of the car.
Move, go, now.
“It’s worse than I thought,” he whispered. He wasn’t talking to me. Probably didn’t even realize he was sitting in a car next to me.
Terrific.
I left him to it. It didn’t matter what kind of monster we had on our doorstep. What mattered was, if the monster wanted to stay here, it had to wipe its feet on the mat and follow the rules of Ordinary.
Move. Go. Now.
I slipped my bag to one shoulder and got out of the car. I strolled over to Delaney who was next to Ryder.
Both of them stared up past the gray, brick retaining wall decorated by a school of metal fish, to the chain-link fence and the wooden maze of play equipment built and connected like a rambling castle.
Beyond that was a higher flat spot with brightly colored play equipment, and still farther, at the very top of the hill, and out of view from this angle, was the metal dragon statue.
Where was I supposed to be?
The tug in my chest became a warmth instead of a spike of pain. I was headed to the right place. To the right time.
Did I need to open the trunk? Pull out something I’d stashed there?
The tug didn’t change, didn’t pull that way. What I had on me—my weapon, my pockets, my bag—would be enough.
“You ready?” I asked Delaney.
“Oh, sure. So how do we handle that?” She pointed.
I followed her finger to the switchbacks, turrets, slides, and lookouts of the sprawling, castle climbing structure.
The wooden play equipment all seem to be where it should be. Swings, tunnel slides, monkey bars, cute little unicorn pony standing in front of a swirling vortex in the ground.
Hold on.
Unicorn?
“It’s a unicorn,” Bathin breathed, coming up beside me. “Holy shit, it’s pink. Pink.” He turned to me. “You see it, right? The unicorn? The pink unicorn?”
He didn’t sound like himself. All the swagger, all the ego was gone. He looked like he’d just seen a ghost. Or, well, a pink unicorn in front of a swirling vortex to Hell in a playground.
“We see it,” Delaney said. All calm, that girl. And obviously perplexed by Bathin’s reaction. “I don’t think it’s evil, dude.”
Bathin blinked. Several times. “It’s a unicorn. Of course it’s evil.”
“Maybe to a demon,” Ryder said.
Bathin laughed, one short, disbelieving bark. “Yes, to a demon. And to everyone. Everyone. It’s pink.”
We stared at the unicorn, which was about the size of a sheep and…well, posing was probably the best description. Its glossy, light-blue mane flowed down its neck, the light-blue tail arched elegantly, and four tiny, perfect, pearly-white hooves shone in the grass.
The rest of it was, indeed, pink. From the tip of its nose raised high and proud, to the bottom of its legs, one of which was lifted in a curl.
The wind, which wasn’t stirring a thing around us, tossed the unicorn’s mane so that it flowed hypnotically.
And the horn was a thing of beauty. It wasn’t pearl like the delicate little hooves, no, it was diamond. Sharp and shining with fractal rainbows, clear as a star, glowing with power.
It was hard to look away from the horn. As a matter of fact, there was a palpable draw to the creature, or maybe the vortex swirling in the ground behind it.
Ryder had already taken several steps toward it, but Delaney reached out and grabbed his arm. “Me, first,” she said. Then: “Myra?”
“I brought a turnip.”
“Oh…kay?”
“It seemed like the right thing at the time.” I dug it out of my bag and stood next to her. “I also brought a candy ring thing. So there’s that.”
“Do unicorns like turnips and candy ring things?”
“Nope. They like clear springs and virgins. We’re basically screwed.”
She snorted, and I grinned. Yeah, sometimes this job was just too ridiculous for words.
She opened her palm like a TV doctor asking for a scalpel.
“Turnip,” she intoned.
I slapped the turnip into her hand.
“Turnip.”
“Candy ring thing.”
I slapped it into her hand.
“Candy ring thing.”
“Anything else I should know?” she asked.
“Other than demon boy is freaking out? No.”
I thumbed through the massive library of data I carried around in my head. “I’ve never heard of evil unicorns. The old records don’t say unicorns are evil. Or pink, for that matter. Or tiny. They have also never mentioned unicorns guarding portals to Hell, so…”
“Right. We’re going in blind.” She grinned. “Let’s go figure this out.”
Delaney, Ryder, and I strode up to the playground, shoulder to shoulder, to figure this out.
Chapter 4
There was no wind, no matter how close we got to the unicorn. And yet its mane still waved, backlit by the swirling vortex on the ground radiating moonlight in the middle of the day. The moonlight made the vortex look like a clear puddle in the grass fraught with the same fractured rainbows, deep steel shadows, and star-sharpened brightness as the unicorn’s horn.
The scent hit me next. Apple pie. It wasn’t a fake apple smell like a candle or spray. It was the full, buttery, crusty combination of apples and spices and sugar and pie crust, melting and crisping together in an oven.
That delicious scent wafted up from the vortex. I felt a need to walk forward, to get closer, like a hungry kid spotting a candy-covered house. But the tug in my chest was a stone, stopping me, anchoring me right where I stood.
“You smell apple pie?” I asked Delaney.
“No.”
“You feel the pull?”
“No?”
We stopped a good six yards away from the unicorn who still hadn’t broken out of its pose, which was probably supposed to be majestic, but was starting to look a little staged.
I glanced at our surroundings, checking to make sure nothing was using this as a blind or a decoy.
We were out of the line of sight if a car approached, blocked by the bulk of the wooden castle structure. A set of monkey rings stood on our right, a swing set behind us, and a metal slide corkscrewed down from a stair stack of the castle’s decks in front of us.
The park was empty except for three humans, a demon, and a unicorn.
“My name is Delaney Reed,” she said. “This is Ordinary, Oregon. We welcome all kinds of supernaturals, humans, and gods here. But we do not allow portals to Hell. Do you want to explain why you’re breaking Ordinary’s law before I ask you to pack up that portal and leave?”
Reasonable, confident. Friendly even, considering she was staring at a hell mouth, and the unicorn it had spit out.
The unicorn didn’t move. Ryder stood on Delaney’s right, his body tense, as if he were having a hard time not walking forward, straight into the apple-pie-scented hell hole.
“Is that apple pie?” he whispered. “I smell apple pie.”
“Ryder,” Delaney warned.
“I just…I’ll just take a quick look, all right?” He got exactly two strides forward before Delaney gripped his wrist and held him still.
“Not another step.”
Delaney did not have the power of voice. She couldn’t order someone to stop and make it stick, except…
…except she was the bridge of Ordinary. The earth of it. Her roots dug deep into this soil, into the stones beneath. She was a part of it in a way none of the rest of us could ever be.
And she used that, was using that right this moment. The whole of Ordinary, the dirt and trees and sand and sky, holding Ryder still, anchored there by her hand.
That urge to move forward hit me again—not my gift—and I cocked my head, considering the vortex shining moonlight reflections onto the metal slide.
It wanted my soul—the vortex, not the slide. But I was a Reed, so most supernatural things didn’t affect me as much as they would a human.
