Collateral Damage (Demon Squad Book 8)

by Tim Marquitz

  “I need to go get a few things, baby girl,” I told her, handing her off to a fiend. Had she been awake, even she would have known I was lying. I did plan to get some things to make life easier for her down in Hell, but what I really needed was to get out of there and go somewhere I could hear myself think. There was simply too much noise and chaos for me to keep the ‘Hulk smash!’ voice under control much longer. I needed some time alone.

  After relaying a quick set of instructions to the fiend on how to deal with Abby, we both went to my chambers.

  “Baaby?” Chatterbox watched us enter, maggots in a happy tizzy.

  “Of course, buddy.” I motioned for the fiend to set Abby alongside CB. He snuggled in beside her and started whisper-singing some song I didn’t recognize. It must have been from his show tunes phase. Abby didn’t seem to mind. She smiled in her sleep.

  While the head soothed the baby, I corralled a couple of pistols, strapped them into a shoulder kit, then grabbed some extra mags all while wishing I’d had some body armor just in case I ran into more of Shaw’s goons. Getting shot sucked. That’s probably why I liked having my guns so much. There was something primal about bustin’ a cap in someone’s ass. Shit, that alone could probably explain nearly every case of police brutality out there. “Stop resisting, hippy!” Pop!

  “Okay, CB, watch the kid. You need anything, ask the fuzzy butler. Got it?”

  The head wobbled, his way of nodding, and went back to singing.

  After that, I slipped into the shadows and opened a gate out of Hell. I cast a quick glance back at my daughter sleeping peacefully on my bed guarded by the sub-demon, and wondered for about a second if I was making the right choice.

  I sighed. “Cover for me, CB.” It wouldn’t be me if I did, so I stepped through the gate and sealed it behind me.

  Eight

  The first place on my list was the house Karra used to share with her father, Longinus, after he’d been resurrected. Given the systematic way the other houses connected to us had been laid to waste, I didn’t hold high hopes that this one would be intact.

  Sadly, I was right.

  Whatever wrecking ball had hit it had done its job in spades. Like the others, caution tape encircled what was left of it, which wasn’t very much. The skeletal frame looked like giants ribs stretching toward the sky, the roof entirely gone, and the once pristine yard was covered in a layer of soot. The place was a black smudge in the neighborhood from where I surveyed it from above.

  I’d hoped to find some of the assholes responsible but it was clear the damage had been done a while back. They were long gone. And judging by the way there were no cops or reporters casing the scene, I was thinking maybe they hadn’t put two and two together yet, determining that this house was connected to all the chaos. That was probably a good thing, but what did it matter now?

  I dropped into the backyard after scanning the area with my senses, and crouched there for several minutes, making sure I hadn’t been seen. With the sun out, I was as obvious as I could be. Up in the sky I’d conjured up a blurring effect that would camouflage me from folks on the ground, but it took a bunch of concentration. I didn’t want to be distracted by trying to do it now. Fortunately, the neighbors had day jobs or were out. I hadn’t seen so much as a curtain flutter as I made my landing. I made my way inside.

  The place was worse than any of the others. The carpet was scorched and soaked at the same time, everything inside torched as though it’d been spray with napalm. The refrigerator and dishwasher were literally melted into slags of misshapen aluminum that would fit right in at any museum alongside the other pieces of abstract art. The floor was warped and creaked as I strode across is, tiles poking up at odd angles. The whole place reeked of char and melted plastics, a Barbie doll barbecue gone horribly wrong.

  I stepped into Karra’s bedroom, and then left without more than a glance. While she’d taken most of her personal belongings to our shared house, she’d left the furniture behind. It hadn’t fared well. The room was a pool of brackish water and scorched…well, scorched everything. There was nothing left. I drifted down the vague remnants of the hall, peering in the other rooms. They were pretty much the same. Nothing but ash and memories there. It wasn’t until I drifted into the living room that I spied something that wasn’t black and burnt. Something shimmered in the gloom, set dead center of the wreckage.

  My heart skipped a beat at seeing it. There was no way anything that pristine had survived the destruction of the house. It had been placed there purposely, like the sigil had. There for me to find.

  Senses on high alert, I went over to the thing and knelt down beside it to take a closer look. My brain scrambled to make sense of what it saw. It was nothing like the sigil, which is what I’d expected. Some sort of message from the holy rollers as to their machinations, but it wasn’t that. Nothing pinged back against my senses at all. The thing was magically inert, which only made it all the more confusing. I reached down and scooped it into my palm. It was exactly what it looked like.

  A silver, thirty-sided gaming die.

  Karra wouldn’t have been caught dead playing Dungeons and Dragons or any of that shit, so what the fuck was it doing there? No matter what scenario I imagined, nothing explained how something that random had appeared in the house. It was a message, obviously, but about what I had no clue.

  I checked the thing again to make sure it wasn’t mystical, and then shoved it in my pocket. If it meant something, I was gonna need someone smarter than me to suss it out. It had to mean something, sitting there like it was, but damned if I knew what.

  I didn’t even bother searching the rest of the house after that. Everything in it was destroyed and there was nothing of her mother’s that I could take back to Abby for comfort. My chest tightened at the realization that Abigail would never hold anything in her life that had belonged to her mother. Everything was gone.

  That thought sent me on my way. I wound my way through the ruin and returned to the backyard only to be drawn up short as soon as I stepped from the house. An oddly familiar essence pinged against my senses. My breath caught in my lungs, and I could hear the blood whooshing through my veins as a figure stepped around the side of the house.

  “Good morning, Mister Trigg. It’s been a while.”

  My throat went dry at seeing the man I’d thought long dead, yet there he was, standing before me in his trademark suit and crisp tie.

  “Poe?”

  The barest flicker of a smile graced his lips. “In the flesh once more.”

  His cultured voice struck me like a physical blow, stunning me. I’d never expected to hear it again. My heart thundered.

  The last time I’d seen Alexander Poe had been when Gorath and his flunky Mihheer had commandeered the portal Baalth had been using to fuel mystical energy to God and Lucifer to help support the war effort. I’d convinced the aliens Black and White to take Baalth to God for healing, his only chance at survival, but Poe had been lost already. Baalth had asked me to return Poe’s body to Marcus D’anatello for burial, and I’d done just that, making sure the old boy had a decent funeral and pleasant sendoff. All that was very much at odds with what I was seeing right now with him standing before me.

  “How the hell are you—?”

  “We’ve little time for reminiscing, Mister Trigg. My leash is short these days.” I stared at Poe, unable to rationalize his being alive. It didn’t make sense. “I feel, however, that I owe you a kindness for what you did for me… What you did for Marcus.”

  I shook my head. “It was only right, and Baalth wasn’t able to do it himself.” My teeth ground together at the thought of my father’s demon lieutenant. He’d met his end at my hands for having dared to kidnap Karra. What I did to him was nothing compared to what I would do to the holy rollers once I caught up with them.

  Poe must have seen the anger flood across my face and misunderstood it. “Whatever animosity there was between you and Baalth, you were always respectful of me,
and I appreciate that. As such, I feel it is only proper of me to warn you as best I can.”

  I met Poe’s icy eyes and saw the earnestness there. Though we’d always been enemies in the technical sense of the word, it had been an honest relationship. We didn’t hate each other or really want to see the other harmed. We were only doing our jobs.

  Poe went on at my silence. “There are things I cannot tell you, though not by choice, so please forgive my vagueness.” Still shocked to see the guy alive and well, I let him talk without interruption. “Most importantly, the beings who assaulted your home go by the unoriginal moniker of Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit they refer to themselves individually. I’m sure you can determine which is intended to be which.”

  My guts went all Nagasaki at hearing their names, but I managed to bottle it up so Poe would go on. It would serve no one if I exploded and went off without learning everything I could about the bastards that killed my woman. My knuckles, however, ached as I clenched my hands into fists to keep losing control.

  Poe seemed to understand my situation so he didn’t hesitate. “They were prisoners within Limbo until only just recently, fanatics placed there by Longinus at the behest of Lucifer, so very long ago. They have no love for either, nor do they have any for their descendants.”

  And suddenly it all made sense. My stomach soured, Daddy Dearest once more at the helm of a situation that had come back to bite me in the ass. I let out a quiet growl, not completely able to maintain my composure. I so wanted to kill someone right then, Lucifer at the top of the list.

  “They were released and aimed in your direction—”

  “By that bitch Shaw?”

  “I-I-I,” he started, frustration marring his normally placid expression before finally smoothing over once again. “I cannot say who is responsible for their freedom or their mission, but Rebecca Shaw is not without her own sins here in our shared glass house. Nor am I, I’m afraid.”

  The revelation wasn’t much of a surprise. “You working for her, aren’t you?” It was suddenly all so clear. I remembered the ping of familiar essence I’d felt at Katon’s house. It had been Poe, lurking in the distance.

  He nodded. “I am, but not by choice. She holds the strings to the marionette that is me these days. I am not myself anymore, not since I have returned, and there are things I’m being made to do that will haunt us all, though I resist as best I can. I am so very sorry for what may come of it. For all intents and purposes, I am your enemy once more, Mister Trigg, an asset of the Department of Supernatural Investigation.”

  Shit. That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking, but poor guy. He’d gone from bad to dead to worse. An idea slithered into my skull regarding the middle portion of that, but I wasn’t ready to go there yet. I needed some time to think. “Why don’t you come with me? DRAC would take you in, I’m sure of it. We could—”

  “That is not possible. The bonds that tie me to the service of Miss Shaw cannot be so easily severed, but I did not come here to discuss my circumstances. My fate is set. It is you who must be wary.”

  No surprise there. “Tell me what’s going on, Poe.”

  “Shaw has joined forces with Trinity, their interests one and the same: the destruction of the bloodlines of Lucifer and Longinus. Neither will rest until that mission is complete, be assured of that. Trinity is immortal and fueled by their hatred. They will hunt you until their final breath.”

  Lovely. For once, why couldn’t I make enemies of test pilots or stunt car racers, someone who’d die at an early age? “Where are they?”

  “I cannot tell you,” he answered. “And sadly, there is more I am unable to convey, but there is another being behind the scenes that hopes to bring you low, all in the bitter name of betrayal.”

  What else was new? I drew in a deep breath and let it out slow, the air whistling between my lips. “So let me make sure I have all this straight. Another day, same pile of shit, new bad guys sprinkled in with the old?”

  “However crudely put, that essentially sums it up.”

  I groaned. “Anything else you can tell me?” I dug into my pocket and pulled out the weird die. “What about this?”

  Poe shrugged. “There is no more I can do for you, Mister Trigg. I ask that you please understand this and do nothing to compromise my position within the ranks of the DSI. I can help you no further and may well have gone too far as is.”

  There were a million questions I wanted to ask, but I knew Poe was playing it straight. He always had. If he’d been able to tell me more, he would have. It didn’t make me feel any better, but it kept me from pushing him too hard.

  “Thank you,” I told him, and I meant it. We weren’t friends, never had been, likely never would be, but Poe had always been a stand up guy in my book. That deserved something. “I’m sorry you were dragged into all of this. Does Marcus know anything about…well, the new you?”

  “He does not, and I would rather he didn’t. Our lives have moved on since our days with Baalth, and it is best he not have any knowledge of my current circumstances. He would not…deal well with knowing.”

  “Fair enough.” I nodded. That was an understatement. Marcus was a burnt out wreck of a drunk the last time I’d seen him. Really didn’t figure he’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps yet, if he ever would. Of course, I’d been helping him stay that way by providing him a constant source of liquor, but I wasn’t gonna admit that to Poe. He wasn’t the kind of guy to understand the need for oblivion.

  He glanced about, staring out across the torched yard and house with unveiled disgust in his eyes, before looking back to me. “Be careful, Mister Trigg. It would appear that dark days lie ahead for all of us.”

  And with that, he was gone, the barest flicker of magical energy signaling that he’d teleported away, using some kind of mystical device like the others had. I was alone again in the chaos of Karra’s old house with more questions than answers burning a hole in my brain.

  I stared at the space he’d been for a few moments after he was gone before I could find it in myself to move. The storm had come and I was sitting in the eye of it, waiting for the worst to hit. What was so horrible was that I had come to realize that losing Karra was only the beginning of the misery that threatened to fall on my head. Trinity—it was nice to have a name for those bastards at last—and Shaw were playing to win, and I had a hand of 2s and 3s, bullshit high, and this wasn’t a game I could bluff my way through. If I were to lose, they’d kill Abigail and everyone else I gave a damn about.

  That wasn’t gonna happen, I swore to myself.

  My teeth clenched, I willed my pseudo-camouflage into place and leapt into the sky. I still needed to appropriate a few things before I returned to Hell.

  They weren’t gonna steal themselves.

  Nine

  I appeared back in my quarters in Hell, arms loaded down with baby stuff that I’d appropriated from a Goodwill drop off point that had yet to be picked up. I’d have to write them a check later, but until then, I would pretend I felt bad. Being the Devil has its benefits. Asshole is the default mode.

  “Here, set all this stuff up, fuzzy,” I said to the fiend as I stepped through the gate. He stood with his shoulders slumped like a kid caught whackin’ it by mom. Abby squirmed on the bed, cooing. A slobbery smile smeared across her chubby cheeks when she saw me, but her gaze slipped past to something behind me. Chatterbox whistled innocently. I turned and looked at the looming presence that had cowed the talkative head and so captivated my kid.

  “Hi, Rahim.”

  “Chatterbox, Frank? Seriously?” he asked. “The least you could have done was tell us you were leaving so someone less…” he gestured to CB, “Someone not that could have watched the baby while you were off gallivanting who knows where.”

  Chatterbox harrumphed.

  “You had enough to deal with,” I answered, refusing to be browbeat about my poorly thought out parenting decisions. “How’s Rachelle?”

 
He rolled his eyes at my changing the subject, but let it go as I went and snatched Abby off the bed. She grinned and sprayed me with gooey love. I gave CB a dirty look. “You were supposed to lie for me.” He fell over trying to shrug.

  Rahim ignored our antics and kept talking. “She was able to rescue another couple dozen of our people, but our furthest flung compounds have been completely destroyed, all of our employees there are dead or missing.” He swallowed hard though he managed to keep his face expressionless. “We’ve lost a number of good people and stand to lose more. Many of those we brought here are gravely wounded and might not survive until nightfall.”

  Hell of a place to die, I thought, no pun intended. Though in reality, it didn’t matter where they breathed their last. With God gone, the mechanism of sorting through souls and deciding whether they fell under Heaven or Hell’s purview was gone as well. As far as these folks were concerned, dead was dead. Welcome to the end. It’s a deep, dark hole of nothing, all of us sharing the same dirt.

  “I can have the fiends create a hospice of sorts, someplace outside of the main thoroughfare, if that helps.” It wasn’t what he’d been hoping for, but it was all I had to offer, sadly.

  He struggled to hide his disappointment. A long time ago, Rahim’s spine had been shattered, and he was likely never going to walk again, but I’d taken a chance and dosed him with some of Lucifer’s blood. It wasn’t a miracle cure by any means, his humanity a buffer against the full measure of its potency, but it had done enough. Soon after, Rahim could move, his paralysis resolved enough to give him a chance at a normal, if not entirely pain free, existence.

  “All the go-go juice is gone, Rahim. I’d hand it over in a heartbeat if I had any,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”