Urban Enemies

by Jim Butcher

  “Yeah, you figured out I’m helping Marie find her lost sister. You want a medal?” I grumbled, tugging at my shirt, popping off the buttons. Two in one day. Goddamn wardrobe changes were eating up all the pay I could hope to see from this lousy gig.

  Ava let out a half hiss, half scream and jerked back from me like I’d burned her. In a way I had—the white lines that ran all over the skin of my chest and stomach were meant to pack a jolt, if you were a monster. Or the human kind of monster, the one that made the types that looked monstrous on the outside.

  I didn’t bother with good-byes, I just hauled ass out of there. I had a feeling Ava and I’d be seeing each other soon enough.

  At home, I double-locked the door and leaned against it until my hands stopped shaking and my heart calmed down. Hellhounds didn’t bother me so much as what they represented—hellhounds worked for a Reaper, and Reapers worked for demons. If one of them was tracking Marie, then she wasn’t just a nice lady looking for her sister, and this wasn’t just another job I did to make rent and buy cheap liquor. I mostly needed the liquor to forget those days when the job was a calling rather than a burden I’d shrugged off a long time ago.

  There was a division there. The Lee Grey from Arizona, the man who expected to grow old and die, was the one who had handled hellhounds and necromancers running in the streets. The Lee Grey I was now couldn’t have given a rat’s ass.

  I’d bought the little bungalow in Laurel Canyon for the view—it sure as hell wasn’t for the termites or the sinking foundation. On my back porch, I could look away and imagine I was back home—the mountains, the violent blue sky, the ferocious light. Sure, it was anchored by mansions and scrub instead of the empty desert floor, but it was close enough.

  I tossed the cap from a bottle of whiskey into the patch of scrappy yucca that was my backyard and took a long swig. It burned a little less, but not much. The yard was the only place outside my shower I went without being totally covered up. The scars all over my torso tended to put normal people right off their food, and I couldn’t blame them. But it wasn’t like I could get rid of them. And hell, they’d actually come in handy today, putting the hellhound back on her keister.

  I was a good mile down the road to being drunk when I heard a clang from my garage and jumped up. Probably just a coyote come down from the hill, but I still kept my body out of the way as I rolled the door of the garage back. Shadows filled up the space around ancient paint cans and old boxes from the previous owner, and rusty lawn tools hanging from the rafters.

  I dug my lighter out of my pants pocket and flicked it, the flame making the shadows leap back. A figure in a pale nightgown threw up her arms. “Please don’t hurt me!”

  Her face was smeared with dirt, and the nightgown was torn along the hem, like someone had grabbed it. Her hair fell around her face in bouncy natural curls, but she looked just like Marie.

  “Constance?” I said, shutting the lighter. She got up from where she’d crouched behind a box of old blankets and shuffled into the fading light outside.

  “I heard you come into the Deluxe. When you fought those things off. You didn’t seem scared, so I snuck out to your car,” she said. “I had to get out of there. If I just ran out on the street, they would’ve found me right away.” An all-over shiver wracked her as wind whined from the top of the canyon.

  “Come inside,” I said.

  She didn’t sit when she got to my sofa, just looked at it longingly. I went into my bedroom and dug out a fresh shirt for myself and a dressing gown for her. Dusty, but it did the trick.

  “Thank you, Mr. . . . ?” she said as she wrapped herself in it.

  “Call me Lee,” I said. “Your sister will be happy to hear you’re all right. She’s real worried.”

  Constance’s eyes watered and her chin wobbled. She did sit down then, and curled in on herself. “You can’t take me back to her.” She started to rock, rubbing her arms until her nails snagged in the cheap satin of the dressing gown. “Don’t make me do it again,” she whispered. “Don’t make me . . .”

  “Hey,” I said, catching her and settling her. “Why don’t you tell me what’s got you so spooked?”

  “I came here because I thought I could hide,” she said. “Louisiana, where our people are, it’s a small place. Easier to hide from her in cities. But she always finds me. Blood knows blood, she says.”

  I handed her a rag for her eyes and went to the little kitchen nook, striking a match to the gas under a pot of strong coffee that had gone cold from this morning.

  “Is that why you’re working the brothels on Fountain?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I was hiding. I used to live up on Mulholland with this old lady; let me stay for a good price if I did a little bit of cooking and washing when I wasn’t at the studio.”

  “Is that how you met Tom Mason?” I asked.

  She bit her lip, nodding.

  “Unfortunately. I was just a wardrobe girl. I thought he wouldn’t even notice me. But he kept showing up when I was by myself, and then he followed me home, and I just . . .” She sucked in a shaky breath. “He said he had a taste for dark meat. I hit him. The next day, I went to work, and that son of a bitch Louie Montrose told me to clean up my worktable and get out.”

  Her jaw ticked, and I was suddenly awful glad I’d given Tom Mason that bottle of morphine after all. Sad I didn’t follow it with a swift kick to the nuts.

  “Marie must have promised him something,” Constance said. “She’s good at telling folks whatever they need to hear to get what she wants.”

  Like “Help me find my missing sister, the vulnerable ingenue actress.” Had a much nicer ring than “Help me track down my streetwise tough-nut sister who clearly wishes I’d go play in traffic.”

  “One of the day players works the Deluxe, and she let me stay,” Constance said. “But Marie found me, and she always makes me do it. Then it got out of control, and . . .” A shudder passed through her whole body. “Everyone there is dead, aren’t they?”

  “More or less,” I said. She swiped at her face again and then looked up at me, twisting the rag tight in her fists.

  “All this must seem incredible to you.”

  “Not so,” I said. The coffee bubbled and I turned off the flame, pouring two mugs. I added some good Kentucky bourbon Louie had pressed on me when in a generous mood. “If you were watching me at the Deluxe, you saw my scars,” I said. “I’ve seen the dead walk before.” I took a sip, let the warmth tickle all the way down. “Hell,” I said. “I’m one of them.”

  Constance blinked warily at me, and I waited. I was drunker than I’d realized, to be blabbing about this stuff.

  “Marie’s a warlock?” I said, to fill the hole. She nodded. “So what about you? You get in touch with the unseen world as well? They say it runs in families.”

  “The dead,” she muttered. “I touch them, and they’re not so dead anymore.”

  That made me set my cup down. “Raising zombies without any blood conjuring is a pretty good trick.”

  “It just happens,” Constance said. “Any time I touch them. They’re so hungry, so vicious. Much worse than normal zombies. The first was our father. Marie has been trying to use me ever since.”

  She gulped the last of her coffee and looked at me, steadier now. “I don’t know about you being dead, but I know what you are. One of you killed my grandmother.”

  I readied myself to move, in case she lunged at me. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be.” She shrugged. “She was an evil old devil woman; probably had it coming a mile away.”

  “I haven’t done that sort of work in a lot of years,” I offered. Constance looked at me steadily.

  “Well, you better start again, Lee, if you want either of us to live past tonight.”

  Finding the hellhound again was the easy part—they never give up once a warlock’s debt to their demon comes due. All I had to do was put the word out with a few lowlife war
locks and vampires working the bars up on Sunset and wait for a phone call.

  I arranged to meet Ava out at the Palisades, the wild cliffs that overlooked the Pacific, a place where we could have a quiet meeting and nobody would hear any screams.

  I got Constance some clothes out of the garage and put in the call to Tom Mason.

  “I hate this,” Constance said as we bounced over the rutted track above the Palisades. “I never asked to do what I can do. Not like Marie.”

  I didn’t answer as we pulled into the turnoff. Marie and Tom were waiting already, Mason swaying in the wind and Marie standing straight. I didn’t answer, but I could have. I never wanted this, either. I wanted to be what Constance had thought I was when she saw my scars—a man gifted at hunting monsters. Not a man who became one.

  “Thank goodness. I was so worried—” Marie began.

  “You can cut the shit,” I said. Behind Marie, in the scrubby little trees, bent double, I saw a four-legged shape move. “So what, you post up with the guy who’s obsessed with your poor sister, and when he can’t track her down, you get him to make a ruckus at the studio and wait for some of Montrose’s hired help to track her down?”

  “No,” Marie said icily. “I wait for the idiot who can’t be killed to show up and go into a hotel full of zombies instead of me.”

  “Constance,” Mason started. “I got clean for you! I love you, baby—”

  I pulled my pistol and shot him in the knee. He went down hard, and I turned the gun on Constance. Her face went slack, and I tried hard not to feel anything about that as I kept the gun steady.

  This was the old Lee, but still me.

  “You were right,” I said. “I was one of the men empowered to hunt things like you. Then a pack of vampires caught me and hung me. I died, but I didn’t stay that way. I’ve tried to leave that life behind, but you’re right, Constance. Blood always finds blood.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Marie screamed at me. “She is my sister! Mine! I control her, not you!”

  The bushes parted behind Marie, and the hellhound rushed forward.

  “That’s a good story,” I said. “Tell it to the demon who took your soul in trade when you get down to hell.”

  I pulled the trigger. It was like lightning flashing out over the Pacific—a tenth of a second of violence, then stillness.

  Constance lay on the ground, a little smoke curling from the hole in her forehead. Marie let out a short scream, and then she was still as well.

  A pair of small feet in roughed-up men’s boots came to stand next to mine. A match flared, and I smelled the sticky, pungent waft of a hand-rolled cigarette.

  “You know I’m going to have to tell my bosses about this,” Ava said, exhaling. “But since I collected on Marie, you’ll probably have a few days’ head start.” She looked up at me. “So, you’re a hunter.”

  “Was,” I corrected her. “When I was alive.”

  “Ever kill any hellhounds?” she said.

  I met her eyes. “A few.”

  She snorted. “Be out of Los Angeles when I come back here, if you like . . . well, not being alive, exactly. Whatever you call this.”

  “It was a demon,” I said. “Ancient. Lived under the mountain where they buried me. I died and I saw a long hall, man standing at the end all in black. I couldn’t see his face. He brought me back. Still not sure why.”

  Ava ground her cigarette out under the toe of her boot. Behind us, Tom Mason whimpered softly, but otherwise the air and sea were still. “All of us have that hallway, Lee,” she said. “Every one of us that’s crossed over and come back. Only way you’re going to have any peace is to look the man in black in the eye.”

  She left, on two legs or four, I wasn’t sure. I left, too, after a while, and drove, feeling like a gold-plated bastard. I couldn’t let Constance stay alive. Not with the risk her ability posed to everyone. Next time, it wouldn’t just have been a brothel. It could have been a whole apartment building, a block, a city.

  Ava, too. Her time would come. I wouldn’t let her live, but I might give her a fighting chance. I owed her, after all. She’d reminded me who I was, even though I’d tried to paint over it for the last decade with the booze and the hiding. I was a hunter. That was why I was still here. And the first thing I tracked down was going to be the demon responsible.

  DOWN WHERE THE DARKNESS DWELLS

  JOSEPH NASSISE

  In the world of the Templar Chronicles, a resurrected Templar order is tasked with defending mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. One of the recurring villains in the series is the necromancer Simon Logan, leader of the Council of Nine. Logan is an acolyte of an even greater threat, the fallen angel Ashereal, also known as the Adversary. “Down Where the Darkness Dwells” reveals how these deadly and dangerous individuals came to be allies . . .

  The cave gaped like an open mouth, and staring at it, Simon Logan had no difficulty understanding why the local tribesmen regarded it with superstitious dread, thinking it an entry to hell itself.

  Then again, he, like the others with him, knew all too well that some superstitions were rooted in truth. It might not have been hell they were descending into, but all their research suggested it just might be close enough.

  “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  Logan took a moment to arrange his features into an approximation of pleasantness before turning to face the speaker. Jonathan Hale was a tall, hook-nosed blond with an air of superiority matched only by his power over the dead. He led the necromantic Council of Nine with ruthless efficiency. The mages in his inner circle were powerful sorcerers in their own right, though none equaled Hale’s ability. One day Simon hoped to join their ranks. For now, however, he had to be content with serving as an acolyte, learning at the knee of men like Hale until his own meager powers grew into something more tangible.

  It was a necessity, but Logan didn’t have to like it.

  The team was here in the jungles of Honduras hunting for an artifact of considerable power known as the Necklace of Yum Cimil. They’d landed four days earlier at Toncontín International Airport, where they were met by the guide Hale had hired to take them into the interior. They’d loaded their gear into a pair of off-road vehicles and driven for hours before camping the first night at a small village outside of Azacualpa. Then, at dawn the next day, they’d made their way on foot into the jungle. Three days of hiking through difficult and dangerous terrain had led them to this cave hidden in a thicket of mangrove trees.

  It was Logan’s job to lead them inside. Not because he had any particular experience in spelunking; no, that would have been too logical for a man like Hale. Instead, Logan had been selected to lead the group for the simple reason that he was the most expendable. Cave fodder, so to speak. If anything were to go wrong, Logan would be the first to tangle with it, giving the others time to react or retreat.

  And he wonders why I’m reluctant to get under way, Logan thought. Still, he’d agreed, and there was nothing to be done about it now but shoulder on.

  He spoke a word of power and watched as the end of the torch he carried burst into green flame. The arcane fire would burn brighter than normal flames but wouldn’t give off the heat or smoke that were the by-products of a traditional torch.

  More relevant, in Logan’s eyes at least, was the fact that it would burn endlessly until it was extinguished by the mage who had created it.

  We might be going down into the underworld, but we won’t be doing so in the dark, at least.

  A final glance back to be certain the others were ready, and then, with an impatient nod from Hale, Logan stepped forward and passed through the mouth of the cave.

  The tunnel sloped downward at a deceptively gentle angle, but it went on for a long way, and by the time it leveled out Logan had no doubt that they were a couple of hundred feet below the surface. The tunnel was high enough for him to walk upright without fear of banging his head, and wide enough that the party could have walked two abrea
st if Hale had so ordered, which he had not. It was cool and dry, unlike the jungle outside, and the rock underfoot was mostly free of debris, which made movement easy.

  Logan could almost have imagined he was out for a bit of afternoon exploring if it wasn’t for the sense of oppressiveness that hung over the place and the knowledge of what they’d come here for.

  Yum Cimil was the Mayan god of death. He—it?—was often represented in the Mayan culture as a skeletal being adorned in the bones of his victims, or as a body covered with the black spots of decomposition. Ruler of the nine-level underworld known as Mitnal, Yum Cimil was judge, jury, and executioner when it came to the souls of the dead, believed to take great delight in torturing those who deserved punishment. According to legend, those who had committed particularly grievous crimes would have their eyes torn from their sockets and added to a necklace that Yum Cimil wore, granting him the power inherent in their evil souls.

  Logan and the rest of the expedition team were here because Hale believed that the necklace was stored in a chamber deep within this cave system and he intended to retrieve it for his own. Doing so wouldn’t be without its challenges; there were more than a few stories about those who ventured into these depths being lost forever, and Logan was enough of a realist to believe that there was some truth to those stories.

  He was no innocent himself, after all. He’d stopped being one the day he’d discovered his talent for necromancy. That had radically changed his life, and he was determined to cultivate his power in any way possible. If that meant raiding the tomb of an ancient Mayan death god, so be it.

  The team had been moving through the tunnel for nearly twenty minutes when a rough chamber spread wide before them. It was rectangular in shape and clearly man-made; tool marks could be seen on the walls, and the floor was covered with some kind of crude stone tile.

  Logan hesitated. Something about the room didn’t feel right. Nothing looked overtly threatening, but his gut was telling him something was off here. He turned to the man behind him and sent word back down the line.