The Brimstone Series

by Robert McKinney

  “That’s all very interesting.” I say, borrowing a word from her. “But that still doesn’t answer my first question.” I say.

  Graham turns her head back a bit to look down at me. I don’t know how she does it, because once we stood it was plain to see that I was a head taller than her plus change.

  “Yes. This has something to do with why you cannot drop here.” she says. “Happy?”

  I’m not, but there’s a bit of a mood in her voice, and I don’t expect that I’ll get much more from her right now. I could push, of course. But I’m a guest here, and she’s the kind of woman that I suspect won’t take kindly to guests who become impolite.

  We come to a stop outside a dilapidated shell of corner convenience store. The sign outside of it is cracked with hand painted letters, beneath a barely functional fluorescent light, announcing “Graham’s Wine and Grocery.” I look from the sign towards where my guide is standing beside me. The first thing I notice is a look of apology on her face.

  That by itself wouldn’t have been so bad, save for the fact that the second thing I notice is the wicked looking knife in her hand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Adrenaline spikes through me, making me flinch. In a lot of people that’s about all they’d have done, because a flinch is usually followed by freezing.

  Not me, though. I’m an arms smuggler, and I’ve had my fair share of knives get pulled in the middle of a meet. One of the easiest ways to survive one of these occurrences, in my experience is not to fight your initial instinct to get some distance. The best choice, in my case, is to just keep moving away and keep moving.

  I dance back a step then dart to the side, forcing Graham to track me with her blade if she wants to use it on me. I follow up the side step with a few skipping dodges as well, as if i’m trying to fake her out on a basketball court.

  Unfortunately for me, this isn’t a basketball court. It’s a broken slabbed, unevenly buckled concrete sidewalk in one of the worse off areas of New Orleans. My heel catches the edge of something, and the rest of me pivots over that new fulcrum point.

  There’s this weird sound, kind of like a door slamming shut but with a airy whoosh that seems ingrained through it. Stars swim though my eyes, and I realize that I’ve fallen and smacked my head pretty well. I’m kind of fucked. I know what happens when you lose your feet in a fight with someone close. One of the commandos I sometimes traded with, or the jiu-jitsu instructor I’d spent a week training with while Mary was on a school trip a few years ago, may have been able to fight their way up from here, but not me. I’m a dead woman.

  Dead doesn’t mean that I have to go out on my back though, so I do a fair impression of a situp that levers my back and head off the ground. There’s no way I’ll be able to get full to my feet, much less run before Graham gets me with the knife, but to have my hair off of the ground feels like a victory, however small, to me.

  Fortunately for me, she doesn’t seem to have much interest in stabbing me, because I’d probably have a new hole or two if that was the case. The look of apology is still fastened firm on her face, though now it’s got a twinge of amusement as well. It’s the amusement that keeps me from running after I finally scramble to my feet. My heartbeat is still thundering in my head, and when I pull myself up with a sit up, my balance is even more off kilter than before.

  “OK, I should have mentioned this a bit earlier to you.” Says Graham. “The beignets were a fair enough price for me to grant you entry into my city. My patrons are another story, though. The sign on the door may say that this spot is mine, but I’m mostly here to keep out other, more vulnerable people, from entering. If you want to come inside here, you’ll have to pay something to them first.These aren’t devils, so they won’t need your body. A few ounces of blood, freely given and drawn by your own hand, will do well enough.”

  I look down from Graham’s face to the knife in her hands. What I’d initially seen as an icepick grip on the blade is something a damn sight less threatening. Her hands are folded carefully over the length of the blade, with the untouched handle held outwards towards me. She takes a step closer to me with the knife, and while my instincts rise up in me to get away from her, I manage not to flinch.

  Reaching out, I grab the handle of the blade in my left hand. The thing is a simple iron and wood kind of affair, and looks like it would be murder to hold any kind of edge. The wooden handle is warm, and the iron is as well when I find myself lifting a finger to test it’s edge.

  “Uh uh.” Says Graham, interrupting me. “Be careful. That blade has spilled quite a bit of red for the things on the other side of these doors. That lets them reach out into this world, just a little, and express their own desires. Pricking your finger there will feed them well enough, but it won’t count as the sacrifice that you’ll need to enter this place safely.”

  Graham takes a step back, and leads me towards the welcome mat place down in front of the grocery shop.

  “If you do it here, this will count. This is close enough for them to taste as well as hear.”

  I nod numbly at her, angry at myself for letting my head get so fuzzy. A concussion sounds like a good reason to be a little confused, but good reasons won’t change anything if I die before I get done with what I need.

  I finish getting to my feet and follow Graham with the blade in my hand. My balance gets worse and worse the closer I get to the door, and when I finally set foot on the welcome mat, I realize why.

  Eyes snapping open in shock, I turn, a bit too quickly considering the knife in my hand, towards Graham.

  “Gravity.” I say. “That’s what I’ve been feeling, the gravity’s wrong here.”

  Graham nods.

  “There no such thing as gravity where my patrons come from. This close to the them, we feel a little of what they feel. I think that they try to tamp it down, try to imagine what things should be like for my sake, but… things like up and down are a little difficult for them. “

  I take a step back from the doorway, and the feeling of vertigo, of my inner ear swinging free, lessens the moment I’m off of that welcome mat.

  “Don’t back out on me now.” says Graham, and this time when I turn to face her, I’m glad for the knife in my hand. Her tone has lost its warmth now, and when I look at her, I see derision, disappointment, and something else. Something like hunger.

  “Don’t back out on me now that I’ve given you a shot that literally hundreds have died for. This is no small thing that I have told you, no small thing to kill what should not be killed, to trap what should never be trapped. My patrons know that you must be here to see them, largely because I haven’t killed you yet. Don’t back out on me now. Not after that.”

  I am not afraid to say that honestly, I’m afraid. In all of my rush to get here, I never really allowed myself to think about what I’m doing. I’d broken the laws of physics, hell the very laws of creation, almost every day of my adult life. But this? This seems like an order of magnitude larger than anything that I’ve dealt with. There’s this feeling in my belly that I’m not seeing the big picture. That I’m too focused on Beeze and what I have to do to him.

  But then I think of Mary, and how I was supposed to look after here.

  Yeah. I’ve always known what the smart thing to do was: leave it be. Get some distance, and leave this whole thing alone. This isn’t about the smart move though. It isn’t even about doing the right thing. It’s about doing what’s needed. And Ole Beeze needs to pay.

  Eyes still on Graham (just because I’m driven doesn’t mean that I trust her) I take a firm step, more of a stomp, back onto the threadbare welcome mat outside of this worn down grocery shop and stab the knife into my hand. I don’t mean to bring it down as hard as I do, but I also don’t think that I have much of a choice. I can tell now that Graham isn’t the only hungry thing near me. And as my blood leaks out in a swift river down my elbow and
towards the mat, I realize that the hunger I’d seen on Graham’s face just now may not have even been hers in the first place.

  The things inside of this building are starving for what I have to give them. I twist the knife a little deeper, and feel it click against bones inside of my hand. More blood flows, and without reaching forward, without anyone’s hand anywhere near a knob, the door in front of me shakes, sprinkles dust, and swings open.

  The feeling of pressure, or hurrying, pressing at my head, the feeling that made me jam the knife into my palm instead of lightly cutting the skin above it, relaxes in my head. The patrons Graham have spoken of are sated for now.

  Stepping inside, I hope that they’re bellies, or whatever it is that passes for bellies, haven’t taken too much. Once I have Beeze, I plan on feeding them till they burst.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “That was surprisingly decisive.”

  I hear Graham’s voice come from somewhere deeper into the store. It surprises me, because she’d been outside when I’d initially walked up to the place. Squinting into the darkness, I can see her, or something like her, moving in the shadows of the place. The lights are off, and there’s not much to see save for the faint outlines of head height shelves arranged in lopsided isles dividing the interior of the room.

  “Then again, it has been a while since my patrons have had a good meal.” says Graham’s voice, this time from elsewhere in the building, off near the cash register. When I turn, this time I don’t have to squint. There’s a narrow bar of light coming in from the open door, part of which washes over the counter, which is complete with an old, dust covered check out register. I can see the rust on the thing from where I stand, though that doesn’t stop Graham, who’s standing behind it, from popping the teller open and placing the bloody knife inside the cash drawer.

  Wait, what? The knife had been in my hand when I’d entered the place. I was sure of that, because I’d been gripping it so hard in my hand that my knuckles had ached more than the stab wound in my palm.

  Come to think of it … I look down to see that my palm, though still dripping red at an unnerving rate, doesn’t actually hurt at all. There’d been a pinch when I’d driven the blade home, but it hadn’t felt quite as… sharp, I don’t know, quite as real as it should have when I’d stabbed myself. I know what an open wound feels like. I’d been shot three times in my life, gashed a few times more and on one occasion, fucking Morrocco, stabbed in the arm. All of those experiences had been stark enough in my memory to make me still flinch when passing by large sea shells, pieces of sharp edged jade, or men who carried KABar knives tucked into the back of their jeans.

  The wound in my hand and the feeling of falling outside, hell everything, feels like that disconnected sensation one has when they have a bad dream. I lift my head up to my head and touch where my skull had struck pavement, and I’m surprised to find that my fingers come away from the back of my head bloody.

  “I think that I may have knocked my head a little harder than I’d intended.” I say.

  “Oh, that? No, that’s just our patrons. Again.” says Graham. “This close to them, well… things get blurry. The place where they’re from is very different from our own. When they come here, they carry a lot of… assumptions with them, assumptions that are what they imagine our world to be like. Most times, they get things wrong, or a little bit wrong. That’s a problem when you’re as powerful as they are. When I guessed that an elephant weighs 100 pounds as a child, it didn’t keep the elephant from weighing 10,000. When a god guesses wrong, well… “

  She gestures towards my hand, at my head, and then the entire space around us.

  “Things get weird.” I answer.

  She nods.

  Sighing, I lean down a little bit to put my hands on my knees. My head doesn’t hurt now, but I wonder if it will once I walk outside again. Hell, for all I know, it won’t be there at all, assuming I get enough distance from this place.

  “Does this shit ever get any less strange?” I ask her. “I get the bits that I know. I’ve been hell dropping for years, through hell, literally, and it never seemed strange to me. Even the first time, I understood it. Loved it even. But this?”

  I mimic her own gesture, waving my hands vaguely towards the rest of the room.

  “I’ve been in your city for less than two hours, your state for less than two days, and this stuff just keeps getting stranger.” I say.

  “Be glad” she said. “At least it isn’t getting bloodier.”

  I pointedly looked down at my still not throbbing hand, which has by now dripped down to stain my jeans and even trickle inside of my shoe.

  “Speak for yourself.” I say.

  There’s a rustling, fluttering noise in the air, and I look up in time to catch something soft in the face. I claw at it with my bloody hand and come away with a clean washcloth in my hand. I look around the dust and dark covered room. I have no idea where it could have come from, but then again, I realize, after looking back towards the cash register, I have no idea where Graham has gone.

  Her voice returns to me from the opposite side of the room.

  “Space is a little hard for my patrons as well.” she says. “They tend to get very confused with that part, and the fact that they’re used to me doesn’t help. They pay less attention to things that they’ve grown accustomed to, and the less they pay attention, the less they get right. You’ll get used to it. I did.”

  “Sure.” I say, taking the towel in my hand and using the other to wrap it around tight. I look down at the puddle on the ground and the slashes and pools of red I’ve left on the floor leading into the room. They lead my eyes back to the door, but when I look outside, I can’t see the street beyond it. Just a weird washed out square of light.

  I shake my head free of the questions that brings up in me. I came here for a reason, and despite my hand, it’s time to get back to it.

  “What do I do next?” I ask Graham.

  “More or less whatever you want.” she says. “Though I strongly suggest sticking to a request. These patrons are also funny when it comes to thoughts. Unclear wants and desires can lead them a little astray. Direct questions and requests seem to help most.”

  I smirk a little. My own desires seem clear enough to me.

  “What I want is Ole Beeze dead, but I guess that’s not going to happen.” I say.

  “You guess correctly. Choose again.”

  “In that case.” I say, before biting my lip, thinking. Graham told me that these things out here can grant me practically anything that I want, but when it comes down to it, I can’t think of anything that I want other than Ole Beeze dead. Having them eat him as my payment takes care of that well enough for me, which still leaves me with a favor leftover from a psychosis causing god.

  “Any chance that I can just ask for a favor down the road, and have them hold it in reserve for me?”

  “Maybe.” says Graham. “Though I haven’t really asked the same before. Like I said, specifics and questions help quite a bit. You may end up wasting your payment in return if what you want is something a little too hard for them to comprehend.”

  I snort, and the sound coming from me is anything but ladylike.

  “I don’t really care one shit about the gift, ma’am.” I say, adding the ma’am part as a hasty afterthought. “The killing’s what I’m after.”

  Graham smiles.

  “Devils can’t die, remember?” she says. “What you’re going to do to him will be more like torture for an eternity.”

  That brings a genuine smile to my face, though only for a minute. I remember the others I’d sentenced to a similar fate, including Tom, who a devil now wore as a suit. This seems to be turning into a pattern for me, trapping my enemies in things worse than death. It’s not a pattern I’d much like to continue. Not for long, I think. But just long enough for Ole Beeze.
<
br />   I swallow down the disgust I’ve been feeling then nod my head.

  “That will work then.” I say. “I can live with getting nothing in return for Ole Beeze being taken, so long as he’s gone, and unhappy about it, forever.”

  I look down at my hand and pull hard on the knotted washcloth there, making it tighter.

  “Let’s get to work, then?” says Graham.

  “Let’s.” I say.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I think that trapping a devil would have been hard to pull off on most other days, but something about how the mercenaries have been following me, about how they’ve always known exactly where to find me, reminds me a little too much of my last major run in with Ole Beeze.

  It had been the same day Mary had been kidnapped, three years before. Practically every place I made a drop to had been swarming with gunmen looking for me. Ole Beeze made sure that his minions stayed a step ahead of me, all without my ever knowing that the bastard was the cause of my troubles. It allowed him to play me like a fiddle, and make sure I went to exactly to wherever he wanted me to be.

  This time, however, I know how he thinks. And more importantly, I know the tools he uses. I tell Graham what I’m thinking, which in turn makes her smile. Her job will be to stay at the shop and prepare the final bits of our trap for Ole Beeze. Mine will be to make sure his mercenaries see me, so that I can lure them into a chase which brings the devil along with them.

  Exiting Graham’s place, I walk a few blocks and flag down an old fashioned taxi. I could have used an Uber, but my battery is getting low and I don’t know how long it’ll be until I either get a chance to recharge it or buy another burner phone. My initial response to that had been to take out my cheap lighter and make another series of within eyesight drops from Graham’s place all the way back to where I knew I could pick up the mercenaries.

  Graham’s response to that idea had… well, while I hesitate to use the word “horror” to describe the look that came to her face when she’d seen me pull out my lighter while standing on her doorstep, horror isn’t far off from what I saw. Apparently, there were multiple bonuses to her locking down drops within the vicinity of New Orleans.