Strangers in the Night

by E M. Jeanmougin

  They looked nothing alike.

  “Hello, Jasper. Happy hunting?”

  “Oh, peachy keen,” Jasper replied, stepping back and opening the door wider for Charlie to come in. “What’s up?”

  “I called your phone, but you didn’t answer.”

  Jasper shrugged. The soft chirping of the ringer was hardly enough to wake him.

  Charlie’s answering frown was very slight. “Ready for a debriefing?”

  “Can I at least take a shower first?”

  “Of course,” Charlie said. “My office, half an hour?”

  “Be there in twenty.”

  #

  Jasper showered quickly in the shared bathroom on his floor and went back to his room to get dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt basically indistinguishable from what he’d been wearing the night before. For a few minutes he struggled to do something with his hair, but, as usual, his hair was going to do whatever it was going to do, and he gave up. Still feeling half asleep, he took the elevator up to his father’s floor, walking past the empty classrooms to knock on his door. Maybe he’d be lucky and Charlie would have a pot of coffee on.

  It had been exactly twenty minutes.

  Jasper opened the door without waiting for an answer and found Charlie seated behind his desk. The office was smaller than the one he had in his apartment, sadly lacking the large windows that overlooked the city. What it lacked in windows it made up for in books—two of the four walls were dominated by filled bookshelves. Most of them were history books, recounting hundreds of unique events in the Underworld’s past. Some of them, Jasper knew, had been written by Charlie himself. His father had a passion for history and was often researching obscure events and creatures. A low table ran across another wall; a sad-looking plant and a picture of Charlie and Jasper from five years ago sat next to an unfortunately empty coffee machine.

  “Alright,” Jasper said, dropping into the leather armchair in front of Charlie’s desk. The arms of the chair were worn down and soft, canvas showing through the dark leather. “So the female vampire, that whole deal went off without a hitch. She walked right into it, practically begged to be staked. The only problem was her pack. It’s way bigger than we thought it was. And they were pissed.”

  “You seem to have handled it quite well.”

  Jasper ran his finger across the arm of the chair, drawing an imaginary circle on the fabric. He almost didn’t want to mention it. “Well… I had a little help.”

  Charlie raised an eyebrow, curious.

  “It sounds crazy, but this werespider helped me.”

  “A werespider?”

  “Yeah.” He knew how stupid it sounded. “How did we not know there’s a fucking werespider in Brooklyn?”

  “Oh, we knew.”

  Surprise and annoyance reared up together at this news. “And you didn’t think to let me in on that little secret?”

  “St. James has never considered him a priority. Apart from the odd victim, he doesn’t do much. We haven’t even turned up one of those for almost two years. I figured he had moved on. Or died. But you say he helped you? Why?”

  Jasper remembered the echo of the demon’s revolvers, the burning red of his eyes, the way his laugh filled the bar. “He said they were in his territory, causing trouble. Acted like I was the one who helped him out.” And then he asked me out, Jasper thought but did not say. “He said his name was Chris. Christopher Redd?”

  Charlie stood up from his desk and went to the short row of wooden filing cabinets against the wall. “He’s used that alias a lot in the past,” he said, opening a drawer and flipping past several folders before finding the one he was looking for.

  “That’s not his name?”

  “You’d be hard-pressed to find a werespider with a name like that.” Charlie returned to his desk to look through the folder, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. “His name, I believe, is Crimson Apocalypse.”

  Jasper laughed out loud. Charlie did not laugh with him. “You’re kidding, right? What the hell kind of name is that? What is he, some sort of death-metal, end-of-the-world cult guy?”

  “Werespiders often have… a flair for the dramatic. And this one’s certainly no exception. I can’t believe you found him.”

  Jasper started to point out that the werespider was the one who found him, not the other way around, but just shook his head instead. “Alright, so what’s the deal? You wanna take him down? I saw him fight—he’s good. I mean, he seems like a bit of an idiot, but I think it’s mostly a front. We’ll probably need a team. Did you have anyone in mind?” Jasper snapped his fingers. “You know who’s good? The Neilson brothers—I know elementals are more their style, but—”

  “Actually, Jasper, I was thinking of something else. Something a little subtler than a team of Hunters, guns blazing. This werespider, he’s very old. And a demon doesn’t get to be that old without some help. He’s been in New York for hundreds of years. I bet he knows every demonic haunt and safe house in the city.”

  Jasper frowned. “You want to try to catch him?” Killing demons was much easier than capturing them.

  “Well, they did catch him. In the late seventies. Let’s see…” Charlie flipped open the case file. “They had him in the holding cells in ’75. But he and his cellmate escaped. It was a vampire. No name.”

  “Bullshit. No one gets out of here; the place is a fortress.”

  Charlie spread his hands before him as if displaying the evidence. The werespider was free in Brooklyn, not held in the basement at St. James. Jasper’s frown deepened.

  Charlie traced a finger down the text, reading over his glasses. “A different team managed to take out his pack in ’84—a strange bunch: a female werespider, a werewolf, and a human warlock—but he eluded us again.”

  “Alright,” Jasper said, “then what?”

  “Then nothing. They expected him to retaliate, to fight back. Instead, he more or less disappeared. At least that’s what it looks like. He was actually kind of my pet project when we first moved here. I did all sorts of research, but it doesn’t amount to much. Most of the old computer files are corrupted. All the information I have I got from hard copy—paper records, books.” Charlie handed the folder over to Jasper. “Everyone told me it was a waste of time.”

  Jasper opened the folder and flipped through it. There wasn’t much. A few brief mission summaries that Charlie had already covered, and a handful of copied photos. Jasper looked at one that showed a group of people and demons, easily finding the werespider he’d met the night before in the middle of the small crowd. His arm was around the shoulders of a shorter, bespectacled man, and the photo had been captured while both were mid-laugh. The werespider’s partner was wearing a dark green flight jacket and had a tattoo of a snake’s head on the side of his neck. Neither was looking at the camera, both seeming far more interested in one another. The pair was dwarfed by a massive woman in plate armor, who had an equally massive ax slung over one shoulder. Her other hand rested between the nubby horns of a satyr, while a robed figure wearing a skull mask floated in the background, opalescent blue eyes creating a flare on the lens. There were several other people, most of them seemingly human, some of them decidedly not. The most bizarre was a snakelike woman with her long body coiled underneath her torso to prop her upright, the tip of her tail lying over the werespider’s boots.

  Jasper turned the photo over, looking for any more information, but there wasn’t so much as a date, and it didn’t appear to be connected to any sort of text. The Hunter flipped the folder closed and drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the cover.

  “What are you thinking, Charlie?”

  His father placed his elbows on his desk, bringing his hands together as if in prayer. He rested his steepled fingers beneath his chin and looked at Jasper. For a long moment, he said nothing. And then he lowered his hands. “He liked you.”

  Jasper scoffed.

  “He didn’t kill you. He engaged contact. At the very leas
t he’s interested in you. And we’re interested in him. I’m thinking that if we could get close to him, we could find out what he’s been up to. Learn his connections. Find his haunts. It would be an easy segue into the city’s underbelly. The only known werespider in New York has to have some interesting information, don’t you think, Jasper?”

  “Sure,” he allowed, sitting back in the chair, his arms folded over his chest.

  “I want you to go undercover, so to speak. Get close to him, find out what he knows.”

  “Are you nuts? It’s a miracle he didn’t figure out I was a Hunter last night. He’d kill me in a second if I went poking around.”

  Charlie smiled. Jasper had seen that look before. “I happen to have a few ideas about that.”

  #

  The werespider’s territory wasn’t spectacularly large, centralized to Huntsman Avenue and spilling into the surrounding blocks. In the past days, he might have pushed into the sections left vacant by the vampires, but as far as Charlie had been able to tell, it was just the werespider by himself—no pack to speak of.

  Jasper spent the day packing and repacking his one bag, reading old manuals that barely held his focus, and shooting questions and answers back and forth with Charlie to make certain he had his story straight. More than likely, the whole thing would turn out to be a bust, so he didn’t know why he felt so nervous. He hated to admit to himself that his real anxiety was rooted in the idea that everything would go off without a hitch.

  The sun was riding low on the horizon when Jasper exited the agency, gun at his side, backpack slung over his shoulder. The city smog caught the glowing beams of light as they faded to the west, painting the sky in hues of pink and purple with darting wisps of golden-orange shot along the undersides and edges in an exquisite hemming.

  Jasper walked in the opposite direction with the fading light on his shoulders.

  By the time he reached Gravesend on the outskirts of Brooklyn, it was full dark. Huntsman Avenue featured a handful of low-end restaurants and sleazy bars, their flashing signs promising “cheap beer” and “great food.” He passed most of them and was beginning to think maybe he was out a little early for the werespider (it was only now just after eight) when his stomach curled strangely.

  It was not the same feeling he got near a vampire or a werewolf; the sensation was deeper and heavier with a fullness he associated with something very big or very strong.

  Jasper stopped under the striped overhang of Rascal’s and peeked through the grime-covered front window.

  The restaurant looked even gloomier than he remembered. Kitschy and outmoded, obviously on the brink of financial ruin.

  Crimson was practically right where he’d been the night before, sitting at the bar with a small pyramid of shot glasses stacked in front of him, as if he’d never left. His elbow rested on the counter, and he was turned slightly on the stool to face a twentysomething man whose long golden hair was held back from his face by a black bandana that sported white skulls and crossbones.

  Jasper readjusted his jacket to make sure it concealed the firearm, and stepped through the swinging glass door.

  He was so focused on getting across the room and intercepting the werespider before he could do something unspeakable to the oblivious human that he almost ran headlong into the tall, bulky man who stepped into his path to stop him. “Sorry, kid, it’s twenty-one and over after eight. Nothing personal.”

  “Wha…? Oh, uh…”

  He hadn’t had any trouble here the other night, and it hadn’t occurred to him that this might be a problem. He pretended to check his wallet. “Well, shit. I left my ID at home.”

  The man shrugged with a good-natured smile. “We’re open until two. Should give you plenty of time to run on home and grab it.”

  “That’s not really necessary, is it? I was just in here the other night and—”

  “Hey! Tony! Let him alone. He’s with me.” Crimson waved him over like they were old friends.

  Tony looked surprised, glancing at Jasper up and down. Then he grinned knowingly and shot Crimson a glance. “I thought Nigel was ‘with you.’”

  “Who the fuck is Nigel?”

  The blond man beside him angrily cleared his throat. The demon arched an eyebrow. “Ew, that’s not really your name, is it?”

  Nigel snatched his drink off the counter. “Fuck you, Chris. Seriously.”

  “Yeah, you wish.” Crimson laughed as the other man slid down from the stool and stalked toward the door. His shoulder jostled hard against Jasper’s as he passed. He paused only long enough to give Jasper an exasperated glare.

  “He’s all yours, man. Good luck.”

  “Nigel, wait—you can’t take alcohol out of the—goddammit, man!” Tony chased him out the door to retrieve the stein he’d carried out with him.

  Crimson didn’t seem sorry to see either of them go. He smiled at Jasper, easy and friendly as could be. “Couldn’t resist my charms, eh?”

  “It’s not exactly like that,” replied Jasper. He adjusted the strap of his backpack. “I’m not… like that.”

  “Guess I shouldn’t have pissed off Nigel, then,” replied the werespider, spinning back to the bar and standing on the footrest to lean over the counter and grab a bottle. The bartender, Nikki, watched him with a bemused expression, one hand on her hip, pierced eyebrow raised.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you drink like a fish?”

  “If a fish drank like me, it’d drown,” said Crimson. “Is he for real still just standing there? Jasper, c’mon, work with me here. If we’re gonna pretend to be civil, I can’t be the only one trying.”

  Jasper really was just standing there, partially because he was beginning to reconsider his options, and partially because he was still trying to understand what had just transpired. He remembered that he needed the demon to like him and forced a smile. “I’m not pretending to be civil.” He took a seat at the bar and set his backpack on the floor at his heel. “I was actually looking for you.”

  “No shit?” Crimson sounded unimpressed. “Here I thought an underage, nondrinker like yourself just happened to have wandered into my favorite bar, all by coincidence. It’s such a hotbed of activity.” He sarcastically swept a hand to indicate the nearly empty room. At the other end of the bar, the only other patron, a drunken old man, fell from his stool and hit the hardwood floor with a thud.

  Nikki swore and ran to check on him.

  With her departure, the werespider’s manner changed—his back straightened, his eyes flickered with a dangerous glint, and his brows drew down. “So what’s up?”

  “I have a favor to ask.”

  “Well, you’d better be careful about that.” The grin showed through the scowl fleetingly, like the flicker of a strobe. “You don’t know what I might ask in return.”

  Jasper’s stomach fluttered. The back of his neck felt hot and he hoped his blush didn’t show in his face. Flirtation wasn’t uncommon in demons, but Jasper didn’t usually have to put up with their leering longer than it took to draw his gun. He cleared his throat and pitched the story he and Charlie had come up with. “My last client burned me, and that vampire you let get away has my number. I’m running into hits left and right, and I’ve got no place to go. So I was thinking maybe since you were so nice before…”

  Crimson took the lead, hook, line, and sinker. A look of surprise registered on his face. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I just need a place to crash for, like… a few days. Maybe, like, a week…”

  “Nikki, could I get a shot of something stronger, please?” Crimson called down the length of the bar. Jasper opened his mouth to speak, but the werespider held a hand up to him. “Just… lemme have a shot, okay?”

  The pair of them sat in silence as Nikki, a cordless phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, dug one-handed beneath the counter. She poured a green splash of absinthe into a tumbler and made a shooing gesture before pointing impatiently to the man on the floor and then
to the phone in her hand.

  Crimson tossed the shot back, clapped the glass down, and spun towards him. “You know what you’re suggesting is pretty fucking weird, right? Did one of those vamps latch onto your brain and just suck the common fuckin’ sense right outta it? You don’t know me. I could be a serial killer. Fuck, Jasper, I am a serial killer.”

  Jasper looked at Nikki, fully expecting her to be staring at them, but she hadn’t reacted to the werespider’s voice. She was crouched by the old man, trying to bring him around with a none-too-gentle smack on his cheek.

  “And,” continued Crimson, as if nothing of interest were going on, “even if I weren’t, I don’t know you. You could be—” He paused, cocking his head to the side. “In fact, you’re also a serial killer. Hell, you could be a Hunter for all I know. So why the fuck would you think that (a) living with me was a good idea or that (b) I would even let you?”

  “You invited me back to your place the other night.”

  “Yeah, but not to live there. Don’t you have somewhere else you can go?”

  Jasper had a very complicated answer lined up in store for this question, but he changed his mind at the last second. “Alright, if you’re too scared of me, I’ll just try somewhere else.” He started to get up.

  The demon caught him by the collar of his shirt, dragging him back into the seat.

  “Alright, don’t be fuckin’ obnoxious about it.” He drummed his fingers on the bar, pensive. “I guess you could be useful to have around. For a while.” The drumming stopped. “But I’m warning you, if this is all some sort of, I dunno, insanely elaborate trap, you’d better back out now.”

  “It’s not a trap,” Jasper assured him. Crimson was dead on the money, but Jasper couldn’t tell if this was because he’d done something to give himself away to the werespider, or if the demon was simply paranoid. “I just need a place to stay.”

  “Well, you would say that,” replied Crimson. “One way or the other.” He paused. Sighed. Kneaded his temples with his long fingers. “Alright, you can stay, just for a few days. Until you sort your shit out or whatever.”