I was that something. As soon as I locked eyes with him, a smile stretched across his face from ear to ear. Then it kept going, all the way across his face until his grin literally split his face open. He reached up with one hand, grabbed his nose, and pulled it backward over his head. He grabbed his lower jaw with the other hand and pulled down, ripping his skin-suit all the way down and revealing his true form.
“Oh, fuck,” I said as I looked my first Archduke of Hell in the face. I’d fought lots of demons, everything from imps and annoying little fucks like that, all the way up to reaver demons with foot-long claws instead of fingers. But I’d never met one of the real big deal demons before. I’d never even heard of one coming anywhere close to Charlotte, and I liked it that way. But standing in front of me on cloven hooves was a legit fiend, bat wings and all. He was every bit of seven feet tall, and if his meat suit was gaunt, it was camouflaging some serious muscle because this guy was built like Hulk Hogan, only bigger. He looked mostly human, except for the cat-slit yellow eyes, the red skin, the fangs, the horns curling out of his forehead, and the hairy goat legs. Okay, so he looked pretty much nothing like a human, except for walking on two legs.
“That was a mistake, Mr. Harker,” the demon grumbled. “We were content to live and let live, as it were. But no man lays hands on Duke Orobas and lives!”
Shit. Orobas was a legit badass, an archduke with twenty legions of hellspawn at his disposal. He had been through some wars in the land Way Down Under and was still standing, which didn’t bode well for yours truly. He started my way, and I ran down my personal inventory looking for anything that would help. I drew my Glock and put ten rounds in the demon’s chest, but he didn’t even flinch. Even the fact that my bullets were blessed and dipped in holy water didn’t help. I dodged right under one of his big slicing blows and looked up when I heard Christy whistle.
“Harker, use this!” she shouted, and pitched me her shotgun. I spun around and planted the barrel right into Orobas’ midsection. I pulled the trigger, and the demon actually staggered back. He looked down and seemed every bit as surprised as I was when he found a bloody hole there. I racked another shell and fired again. Orobas staggered, so I ran the slide and fired again. And again, and again. I put five shells into that bastard, and he never went down. After the slide clicked empty, the demon looked down at me and did the worst possible thing I could imagine. He smiled.
“Ouch,” he said, very slowly and very distinctly. “I actually felt that. I haven’t felt pain since Michael came at me with that Satan-damned flaming sword. Good for you, little wizard. You actually put up a fight. More than I can say for—”
“Get out,” came a voice from behind Orobas. I couldn’t see who was speaking, but I knew. I looked over at Christy for confirmation and she nodded.
Orobas turned, and I moved over to one side so I could see Mort. Mort was the proprietor of this fine establishment, and a being of some power besides. I say “being” because up until this day, I had no idea what Mort really was. Given that what was standing at the end of the bar looked for all intents and purposes like a twelve-year-old human girl holding a very large housecat, I was pretty sure I still had no idea what Mort was.
“Mortivoid?” Orobas’ voice rose, and it was obvious these two knew each other. My attacker grinned down at me, then turned to face Mort. “How many millennia has it been, old friend? You’re looking well. I’m sorry, I had no idea this human was your snack. Here, have it.” He gestured back at me. I scrambled to one knee and pulled a piece of chalk from a pocket. I sketched a rough circle around myself on the floor, focused my will, and with a whispered “protego,” invoked the circle. A shimmering blue-white wall of energy sprang up around me, giving me enough protection to survive at least two, maybe three, direct hits from a demon of Orobas’ power.
But Orobas seemed to have lost all interest in me. He circled Mort, or at least the girl I assumed was Mort, turning his head this way and that, checking her/him/it out from all angles. After a good minute of this, Orobas stood in front of Mort and looked down on her(?).
“Why that form, Mort? It can’t be very powerful on this plane, and it’s not terribly attractive,” the big demon said.
“I disagree, Oro. I have a thick, glossy coat in many variations of color, and I have very sharp claws. Would you like me to show you?” Mort replied, and now I was even more confused because the cat was talking. “I’ve ridden many forms, Oro, you know that. This one amuses me, and it keeps the humans guessing. You wouldn’t believe the things I hear from my customers while they give me lovely ear scratches. And every once in a while I let them pet my belly, and they let me scratch them in return. It’s lovely, Oro! I get to shed blood in the center of a Sanctuary, and no one even thinks anything of it!”
“You always had a flair for the ironic,” Orobas said.
“And you always had a flair for the overly ambitious. It’s time to go home now, Oro. Or at least time to leave my bar. The human is under my protection as long as he remains here, and even you aren’t brazen enough to attack him outside in broad daylight. So give him whatever warning you feel you need to give, and then leave.”
“Are you throwing me out, Mortivoid? Are you actually daring to give me orders?” The big demon’s voice rose with every word, until he was practically bellowing in Mort’s face. Which made him look spectacularly silly, since he was basically screaming at an overweight housecat. He got right down in Mort’s face, spraying hot demon spittle all over the cat’s thick fur.
Mort did what cats do—he reached up and clawed Orobas right on the tender tip of his nose. The demon reared back, howling in anger and shock, and it was all I could do not to fall over laughing and break my protective circle. I somehow managed to stay upright, but my eyes went wide when Orobas struck a huge downward hammering blow with both hands at the head of the little girl holding Mort. Orobas’ fists slammed into some type of force barrier just inches from the child’s forehead. She never even blinked, but something told me that there was a lot more to that little girl than met the eye, too.
I gathered my will and began to open my Sight, but a whistle from Christy cut me off short. She pointed to her forehead, where the mystical third eye is usually located in art and drawings, and shook her head. I raised an eyebrow and gathered more of my will, and she shook her all the more vehemently.
“I really wish you wouldn’t do that, Mr. Harker. Particularly since I am currently doing pitched battle with my cousin on your behalf.” Mort’s idea of pitched battle and mine obviously differed pretty wildly, since all he was doing was walking toward Orobas slowly, carried by a prepubescent girl in a pinafore dress with an honest to God bow in her hair. Orobas twirled his hands in midair, called up a ball of fire the size of a basketball, and hurled it right at Mort and the girl. Mort didn’t blink, didn’t try to dodge, didn’t waver on his path an inch. He just walked his carrier into the ball of fire, and out the other side, none the worse for wear. The lace trim on her dress wasn’t even scorched.
The cat-bearer walked right up to Orobas, who stood staring at Mort. Mort meowed at his handler, and she lifted him up to her shoulder. By standing with his front paws on the girl’s head and back paws on her shoulder, Mort was able to look the larger demon more or less in the eye.
“I told you to leave, Oro,” the cat said.
“I don’t take orders from hijackers, Mort. Wear your own skin, or at least something properly combative. You look ridiculous in that thing.”
“You know I’ve never cared for fashion. What I care about is peace and quiet. And you are, as they say on the television, beginning to damage my calm.” Huh. Mort’s a Firefly fan. Who knew?
“I will damage more than that if you don’t scurry back into your little hidey-hole and let me at Harker. He has insulted my person, and he must suffer the consequences.”
Mort turned to me. “Mr. Harker?”
“Yeah, Mort, what’s up?” I asked.
“I think you should
apologize to Orobas, don’t you?”
“What the fuck?” I raised an eyebrow.
“His feelings were hurt, Mr. Harker. I think you should apologize. Otherwise, as his host, my feelings will be hurt. And you don’t want to hurt my feelings, do you, Mr. Harker?” His voice never changed. There was never a hint of threat in his posture. He never even raised an eyebrow at me. But I knew that he was really saying, “Take what I’m offering you and shut the fuck up, human.” So I did.
“I’m sorry, Orobas. It was not my intent to show you any disrespect, and I sincerely apologize for any distress I may have caused you.” I poured on a little of the flowery language I remembered from my youth and tried to keep every hint of “go fuck yourself” out of my tone. It must have worked, at least enough to satisfy the most basic requirements of demonic courtesy, because Orobas waved his hands in the air again and was suddenly back in his human-ish form, crazy-long fingers and all.
“This isn’t over, Harker. When I see you again, and I will see you again, you won’t have Mort to hide behind.” Orobas turned and swept out the front door, his long coat billowing out behind him. He paused for only the briefest of seconds to reach behind the bar and pick up his flunky, then he tossed the unconscious biker over his shoulder and continued on his merry way.
“I can never get my coat to billow,” I bemoaned. “Why is that?”
“Too much Kevlar,” Christy replied from the bar. “Now come over here and get some liquor in you before you fall over.”
I couldn’t argue, and I’d made it a policy long ago never to argue with an armed woman, especially one who hid a shotgun behind a bar. No telling what else she had back there. I collapsed my circle, scrubbed through the line in a couple of places with my toe so nobody could come after me and invoke it without at least a little bit of effort.
I sat down at the bar, and the little girl came and stood next to me. Mort climbed off her shoulder onto the bar and paced back and forth in front of me, his tail twitching. I picked my whiskey up off the bar. No need to add cat hair to my diet. Mort was currently walking around as a huge orange and white short-haired housecat, with bright green eyes and a little paunch that let me know that Mort was taking good care of this current body. He walked up and sat down right in front of me, those emerald chips locking onto my own eyes.
“What the sweet evergreen fuck were you thinking, Harker?” the cat asked, and I’ll admit, it was pretty disconcerting, being cussed at by a cat sitting on a bar at barely two in the afternoon.
“Which time?” I asked. “When I sucker-punched the demon? When I decided to stand up and fight the demon fair? When I hid like a mouse in my little circle while you people, donor body and all, stared him down and ran him out of Dodge?”
“Let’s start with the beginning, shall we? Why did you think it was a good idea to come in here, shit on my bar, wipe your ass with my Sanctuary, and put yourself in a position to get not only yourself, but any other human in a three-block radius, killed?”
“Well, it sounds bad when you say it like that,” I said, knocking back the last of my drink and putting the glass down on the bar. Mort reached out with one paw and knocked it to the floor, where it shattered.
“Sorry, Christy,” he said to the bartender, who wore a scowl that said it wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that. “Feline instincts, I can’t help it.”
“God, Mort. Cats really are assholes,” I said.
“Cats possessed by demons are even worse. I can’t tell whether it’s Mort being a dick, or his host. I’ll be glad when this episode of ‘Stupid Pet Tricks’ is over,” Christy said, walking over with a broom and a dustpan.
I turned back to the cat, who looked a great deal like he wanted to claw my eyes out. “I don’t know, Mort. There’s something strange going on, and this is the place in town to go if you want to find out about strange.”
“Well, that’s true enough, I guess.” He licked his paw and started cleaning his head with it. “I suppose a run-in with Oro was inevitable once he started asking about you and glowering at everyone.”
“It does kinda happen that way,” I agreed. “People ask questions about me, and eventually I show up with answers. It’s not often that I show up with answers they like, but I do bring answers.”
“But you said you came here to ask about something, not looking for the guy who was asking about you. Coincidence?”
“You don’t believe in that shit any more than I do. Lincoln Baxter was found dead last night. Somebody cut his throat from ear to ear, then drained his blood and dumped the body in a mall parking lot.”
“What does that have to do with anything? Stupid humans kill everything anyway. Not like he was going to live very long in the first place,” Mort said.
“Then why was my guardian angel at the dump site?”
I saw Mort’s hackles actually raise. “What?” he asked, scouting back a little on the counter.
“What’s wrong, Mort? Not a fan of the angelic host?”
“De-mon, you jackoff. Look it up. No, I am not a fan of those prissy fucks. But if one was hanging around a crime scene, then you’re right, something’s fucked up. And since when are you important enough to have a guardian angel?”
“I asked her the same thing,” I replied.
“It,” Mort corrected me absently.
“Huh?”
“Angels are neuter. They have no genitalia, thus they are neither he nor she, but properly referred to as ‘it’.” Mort gave me a look that was suspiciously like a cat grin.
“Whatever, dude. She looks like a chick, talks like a chick, and I’m pretty sure I’m not ever going to get a chance to inspect any closer than that.”
“Yeah, Harker, if there’s ever been a babe that’s out of your league, I’d say anything with wings and a halo qualifies. But what was she doing at the murder scene of some human lawyer?”
“How did you know he was a lawyer?” I asked.
“The same way he knew full well that Lincoln Baxter was less human than you are, Harker. He was a regular here,” Christy chimed in.
“You’re speaking out of turn, Christy,” Mort said, and there was a warning tone to his voice.
“Oh, like I give a fuck, Garfield.” She glared at him. “Why don’t you just tell him, so he can get the hell out of here and start causing a ruckus in somebody else’s place of business. Then I can get started cleaning up his mess.”
“Hey!” I protested. “It wasn’t just me. Orobas threw me through the table, so that wasn’t my fault.”
“And the face-shaped dents in the back table?” Christy gave me the eyebrow. I wilted.
“Yeah, that was me. Sorry.” I turned back to Mort. “So what were you going to tell me?”
He didn’t meet my eye, just became very interested in licking the back of his paw. “Come on Mort, spill it,” I prodded.
“Lincoln Baxter wasn’t exactly human,” Mort grumbled under his breath.
“Yeah, I got that. What was he? And why would anybody want to kill him?”
“Pretty sure those answers are one and the same,” Christy said.
“You gonna tell him, or you gonna let me do it?” Mort snapped.
“If you’d get on with it,” Christy shot back. “We don’t have anyone to do a drumroll for you, so spit it out.”
“Fine,” Mort said. “Baxter was Nephilim.” He shrank back within himself just saying the word, but it meant nothing to me.
“What’s a Nephilim?” I asked. Mort looked even more uncomfortable, if that were possible for a cat. His tail was thrashing around, and his gaze kept flitting around the room.
“Abominations. Some of the nastiest beings in all the planes,” Mort said.
“Not answering the question, Mort. What are Nephilim?”
“They half-human, half-angel bastards with no allegiance to anything and none of the limitations of the Host.”
“So Lincoln Baxter was an angel…” I mused.
“Half angel,
” Mort corrected. “Half-human, half-angel, all asshole.”
Chapter 5
“I thought angels couldn’t…I thought they didn’t have…fuck, how do angels make babies?” Renaissance and rococo art aside, everything I’d ever learned about angels said that they were neuter. Genderless. Made it easy to refer to them as nutless wonders when they didn’t help out down here as much as I wanted them to, because they really were. Nutless, that is. Except apparently not.
“Look,” I started again. “I admit I’ve done a lot more studying of the denizens of the lower planes, mostly because angels don’t usually go around killing humans, so I don’t have to fight them.”
“Looking at how you handled Oro, I’d say that’s probably a good call on your part,” Mort said.
“Look, Meow Mix, that was a friggin’ Archduke of Hell. I think it’s safe to say I was punching up a little in weight class.”
“Whatever, meat sack,” the cat demon replied. “You don’t have to understand how it happens, just understand that sometimes angels and humans make babies. These babies are called Nephilim, and they live on Earth, just like you humans. Well, just like those humans you hang out with.”
“Hey!” I protested. “I’m human.”
“At least eighty percent,” Mort agreed with a piercing look. I didn’t know what kind of demon Mort was, but as cats go, he was a dick. “So most Nephilim don’t have any idea that they’re part divine. They just go through life, usually doing really good shit all the time, never harming a living soul, that kind of boring horseshit. Sometimes they figure out what they are, either through dreams, or noticing that they’re really hard to kill, or some kind of near-death experience. These are the ones that cause trouble. They either get hyper-holy, in which case they’re assholes, or they get all kinds of nihilistic, in which case they’re violent assholes.”
Heaven Sent - a Quincy Harker Novella (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 5) Page 3
