The Brimstone Series

by Robert McKinney

  “I do not know how much these mercenaries cost.” I say. “But I can guess, because I’ve dealt with them before. Or at least I think that I have.”

  “Go on.” says Graham.

  I wipe a bit of sugar from my sleeve and keep talking.

  “They were part of a merc shop run by a man named Tom. Former client, before he turned on me after I said no to a job offer. Don’t know how much these guys are used to being paid, but he’d offered me half a million without batting an eye.”

  Graham listens to me without comment, or any spoken comment at least. Her eyebrow, however, raises an inch. I guess half a million isn’t just a whole lot of money to just me.

  “Anyway.” I continued. “He’s dead, now. No.” I pause, remembering the lack of truth in my words. “He’s not dead, but he wishes he was. I dragged him to hell, and a devil’s riding him now. It’s an indefinite stay kind of thing.”

  “Ah.” says Graham. She dusts a bit of sugar off of her fingers and goes back to leaning in her chair. “Well, if you’d played that rough with someone that I’d liked, I’d be angry enough to make deals with a few devils to find you and express my displeasure. Strange though. Few devils are strong enough to wield influence here. My patrons’ defenses over this city are quite … extensive.”

  “Patrons?” I ask, leaning forward and trying to hide my excitement. If Graham’s power comes from otherworldly beings instead of from herself, then there’s a chance of my finding something similar for me. I haven’t been much of a part of the magical community, but I haven’t had my head in the sand. I’ve done my research, and everything that I’ve heard says that most mortals gain powers from the devils, or on rare occasion, their more heavenly counterparts.

  “Yes, patrons.” says Graham. “There are things out in the deep that are far worse than devils, far more wrathful than angels. Many, in fact, are more powerful than gods.”

  “Gods …” I say, before shaking my head. “I’m sorry. I just, I never thought that gods, you know, plural, were really a thing. Even the singular was kind of unclear to me. I always thought that angels and devils were the most that there were. Angry little soldiers still mad over a long ago finished war.”

  Graham laughs, and when she does, I’m surprised to find that the sound of it swirls around and captivates me.

  “Oh their war may be the one they care about the most. Personal history, and the like. But it is far from the worst that either devil or angel have faced since creation bled forth from cracks in the deep. There are gods, plural, out there, and worse. My patrons are among the latter category.”

  Her words settle like a weight over me. I feel my heartbeat start to quicken as I process what she’s said, and what it could mean for me. If there’s something out there more powerful than a god, does that mean that it …

  “How much would it cost for your patrons to help me kill a devil?” I say.

  Graham leans back in her seat and laughs again.

  “See, I knew that you were going to be interesting.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I lean forward on the table, placing my own bit of beignet back on a napkin.

  “Tell me everything.” I say. A moment later, I realize that giving demands to a woman who owns a city and maybe even a state is not the best way to live to the end of the week.

  “Um, please?” I add, hurriedly.

  “Know anything about the world beyond devils?” asks Graham.

  I shake my head.

  “Most of what I know comes from Ole Beeze. I’ve met a dropper or two who was more or less like me. Not Beeze’s droppers, but other devils. They didn’t last long.” I say.

  Didn’t last long was an understatement. While devil-dogs are not common, we tended to make a splash once we gained our powers. Splashes mean attention, and attention often brings bullets.

  That’s a good thing for the devils. The powers they give us are not meant to be shared. My being able to drop through the world means that Ole Beeze is stuck flying coach for as long as I live.

  I’d been lucky enough to find a trade, arms smuggling, which required a low profile and a willingness to pick up survival skills. It’s a good chunk of what’s kept me alive all these years.

  “No,” says Graham. “We often don’t.”

  I look at her, thinking of Graham, and the nature of all powers that come from devils.

  “You were one of Beeze’s, right?” I say. “But that doesn’t make sense to me. The whole reason he’s after me is because I haven’t died yet. I’ve still got the ability he sold me, and will keep it until I make a mistake and buy the farm. How are you still standing if Ole Beeze has all his powers back except for the one he gave me?”

  “Oh that?” says Graham with a laugh. “Well that’s easy. I died, child. Not long after meeting Ole Beeze, in fact.”

  “You died?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re, you know. Not dead?” I say, wondering if I’m wrong. After all, she is called the voodoo queen. Maybe it’s for a reason.

  “I’m not a zombie.” she says. “But I do have a few of those in my keep. Real zombies, mind you, not those rotting things they have on TV.”

  She reaches forward and picks up the last beignet, dropping sugar across the table and her blouse as she does.

  “No. I died, intentionally, once I found myself some patrons who were stronger than Ole Beeze. Nasty bunch, but raising me from the grave? Not too hard by the standards that they’re used to.”

  “What’d it cost you?” I ask. No one in this world does anything for free. I have no reason to believe that it’s any different in the worlds that rub close to our own. Whatever she says will be worth it, though, if it brings me the head of Ole Beeze on a plate.

  “Sanity.” says Graham. She blinks again, and again I notice that something is indeed wrong with her eyes. She stares back at me hard, and I wonder if it’s an expression, a window into something deeper that I’ve been missing.

  “Not being crazy seems like … an important thing.” I say, my voice timid, surprising me.

  “That it is.” Says Graham, “But it has its advantages. Being crazy is an escape when it comes down to it. A way for the mind to protect itself from a reality that’s worse than what you’ve been led to believe.”

  “Dying’s that bad?” I ask her.

  “No.” she says. “Combing back from it, however, is.”

  Her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment, before regaining their sharpness. She shook her head, and wiped the remaining sugar from her fingertips, her appetite apparently ruined.

  “Don’t worry yourself about that, though. I’ve long since learned how to come to terms with things the way they are, and how they have to be. Insanity is one thing, but inaction is no longer a luxury that I indulge in.”

  “Ah. OK.” I say, at a loss for words.

  “But that doesn’t answer your question does it?” prompts Graham.

  I shake my head, trying to get myself back onto topic. It doesn’t take me long.

  “How do I kill Beeze?” I ask her.

  Her answer comes in a more roundabout way than I would have prefered. In the minutes that follow, Graham tries to give me a crash course in the way creation used to be. I follow her when she explains that sentient beings have a kind of power that can be consumed by everything from devils to the greatest of the old things in the deep. I lose her, however, when she starts throwing around terms such as sanusphobia, “yog-sothoth,” and mind de-sync. She tells me that her patrons are often sleeping, but if I’m able to wake them, they can give me practically anything.

  “Practically,” says Graham, however, “Isn’t everything. Devils, and the angels that they once were, have been woven into the fabric of our reality. They cannot be killed, which is good, because I’m fairly sure that murdering one would shatter creation. It’s annoying
, but they are called immortal for a reason. They can be … neutralized, however. Trapped. Constrained. Almost the same thing, really. Better even.”

  “How do you do it?” I ask, before frowning. “No, how is chaining a devil better than killing?” I ask.

  Graham looks off into the distance behind me, her gaze flicking towards the street where I know that somewhere there’s a mercenary or three out looking for me. She shows her teeth, but it’s in such a manner that I can’t quite call it a smile.

  “The answer to both your questions is the same. You eat them,” she says. “Well, the patrons do, anyway. Like I said, devils are immortal, so the meal lasts forever. It’s painful, It’s dirty, and It’s far far worse a fate than what even the worst of those bastards deserve. That’s not the best part though.” she says.

  I lean forward, her words drawing me forward. A bad end for Ole Beeze is even better than what I’d hoped for.

  “What’s the best part?” I ask.

  “Trapping an angel, or a devil in your case, isn’t the gift that you’d receive after making a trade with one of my patrons. The sacrifice of those entities, immortal to the last, is the payment. Feeding them to the great old ones a devil is how you get my patrons, gain their attention, in the first place.”

  I shake my head.

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Graham sighs a little more melodramatically than I’d expect from her, and starts to rise from the table.

  “Child.” she says. “If you’re smart enough to get a devil in a place where the old ones can reach him, you’ll be giving them a delicacy. They’ll reward you, child, for that kind of meal. With their favor behind you, you could, well… it’s the next best thing to having a bottled djinn in your pocket. Use your imagination.” she says.

  And I do.

  With real power behind me I could stop running, and go after the mercenaries who have been coming for me. I can even build a stronghold and make sure that nothing like Ole Beeze ever comes for me again.

  Plus there’s what Graham had just told me. Back from the dead, she’d said. Child’s play for these things. With their power, just maybe, I could even get back my…

  Focus, Robin, I think. Distracted means dead in situations like these. Focus on what’s in front of me. Focus on killing Ole Beeze.

  “You said there were places where your patrons can reach out to things like Ole Beeze. Where do I find one?”

  “Find one?” says Graham. “Don’t you know that this is New Orleans? I know a place, hell ten places, that are in walking distance from here.”

  She starts walking away from the table without looking back. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I follow her outside, but that doesn’t mean I like it.

  There were mercenaries on these streets the last time I’d entered them and I’m on the sidewalk with Graham for less than a minute before I pick out the new wave that’s come to get me.

  “On my right.” I say to Graham, without looking in that direction. “Big guy. Looks like a bruiser. Holster inside his pants on his left hip.”

  “Oh he’s no bother.” says Graham about two seconds before I hear the squealing rubber screech of a car out of control. One of the pedestrians across the road to the right of me screams, and I turn in time to see a minivan, complete with wide-eyed soccer mom behind the steering wheel, bound over the curb… and slam directly into the mercenary I’d picked out.

  As I watch, the driver pops her door open and spills out into the street. She’s still screaming, but not because of the car crash or the man she’s just hit. Instead she crawls on her hands and knees away from the car, her head turned and eyes locked on some nightmarish vision that no one else, me included can see. She sobs as a bystander rushes to her side and I see another mercenary slip around a corner and start jogging towards the broken man in the street.

  “Well, he’s no bother anymore.” continues Graham. I can barely make out her voice amid the sounds of the crowd, and when I turn back to her, I see that she’s a good ten feet ahead of me. Apparently her little … whatever the fuck it was that she’d just done, had been so small of a worry that she’d never broken stride. I tuck my head down to the pavement and hurry over to catch up.

  “What in the fuck did you just do?” I ask her.

  “Me? Not much. I just let her see a glimpse of what waits for all of creation on the other side of New Orleans. It’s not my fault that what she saw just happened to be waiting more or less where that mercenary had been standing.”

  She tosses a look back to the still unfolding triage happening on the street behind us.

  “It was a 50/50 shot of if she’d try to swerve around or just ram into what I showed her. Given the crash, I’d say she’s a mother. We tend to have a fighter’s instincts.”

  I stare good and hard at the woman I’m walking with. A lady who makes devils fear to enter her domain, and sends protective mothers into madness without a moment’s hesitation. I wonder what in the world could have made her like that, and if something similar could happen to me.

  Probably, I think, as a sinking feeling enters my stomach. I’ve seen terrible things in my life. Hell, I’ve done terrible things, too. Was dragging people into hell the peak of savagery for a woman like me?

  Was it only the beginning of a long arc somewhere far worse?

  My thoughts must be clear as day on my face, because a moment later Graham stops and turns towards me.

  “Are you, of all people, judging me?” she asks.

  I think on it for a moment, then nod.

  “Yes.” I say. “But I get it too, I think. I’ve done things, myself. I already told you what I’d done to their friends.Those mercenaries have reason to be after me.”

  “That you did.” she says. “Though in all honestly I can’t say that I blame you. I’d have done worse if they’d taken my own sister from me.”

  Once again I stop in my tracks.

  “How do you know that?” I say, my heartbeat rising.

  “Oh come now.” says Graham, still walking down the street. “I’ve known who you were for years. Devil dogs like ourselves rarely last out the year, yet alone a decade. That kind of thing gets around, even in antisocial little circles like the ones we inhabit. There’s a reason I didn’t kill you the moment you stepped into my territory. I wanted to see you for myself, another devil-dog who’d survived Ole Beeze. Thank goodness I did.”

  She turns around to look at me.

  “In another life, maybe, I think we could have been, well, something. Maybe friends.” She says.

  I walk along with her, my feet aching from the uncomfortable shoes on my feet. I’m tired, and growing more so and Graham’s decision to hold back information isn’t helping me with that at all. I almost say something objectively rude to her, a collection of Tagalog curse words I’d learned from an ex-priest in the jungles of Mindanao. Instead I settle for filling my voice with the kind of candy coated sweetness that annoys most people, especially coming from someone as blonde as me.

  “Oh that’s me.” I say, my voice bubbling. “Friendly, that’s why all of my clients come back for more.”

  I can practically hear Graham rolling her eyes at me.

  We make a few turns and walk a few more blocks to the edges of another commercial area. The mood in this part of town is decidedly different from the wide open streets and heavy foot traffic outside the Cafe du Monde. The smell that’d been annoying me since I set foot in this city is worse around here and the scent of mold or something similar makes the back of my throat and eyes start to itch. I look around, wondering if this is one of those places that never recovered from Hurricanes Katrina, Alberto, Chantal or the long parade of tropical storms that leave semi-permanent floods from here to the Florida Keys. None of the buildings I can see, be it house or store, show any of the telltale high waterline stains that
have become so familiar everywhere east of Texas.

  Still though, the smell persists, digging into my nostrils and making my eyes water. I go a few more steps and realize that something else is wrong, too. It starts with a misstep. There’s a crack in the road that I go wide to avoid - the leftover buckled concrete of one of the city’s many floods. Stepping on it would be the kind of everyday chance that most people avoid without noticing, me included. Concrete like that has a tendency to wobble, and there’s no telling how much weight it has behind it until it dislodges and smacks into your ankle. I stumble a bit while moving around it, and it takes me a moment to realize that it wasn’t the broken concrete itself that made me trip. It was almost like a wave of vertigo, albeit one too short to be normal.

  I catch myself and look over at Graham walking next to me. There’s something dreamy about her movements now, something that I’d once interpreted as elegance or grace, but I now see is a fluid balance, a kind usually seen in people used to life on the sea. I’ve seen navy boys who walked in that liquid loose-kneed walk that seems more of a glide than anything else. The dizziness I’ve been feeling, the disorientation isn’t something I’ve been imagining. Graham is not only feeling it too. She’s expecting it and compensating well.

  Holding my hand out wide to gesture towards the cityscape around us I ask Graham.

  “Does all of this have something to do with why I can’t drop near this city”?” I ask.

  “No.” Graham says pressing on, “the floods are just from global warming.”

  “I’m not talking about the floods.” I say. “I’m talking about all of this. Something’s wrong with the air here, and my balance is all shot to hell as if I’m on a boat. There’s no way I’m alone in feeling this.”

  “Oh, that.” says Graham. “And you’re not alone, though most people don’t pay attention enough to pin down the specific reason for the discomfort they feel here. I don’t mind it personally. Keeps the property taxes down at least.”