"So you can get us there? Good," Watson said.
"I can get us there, but why in the world is a demon in a biker suit in the city's largest country music bar?"
"Wet t-shirt contest?" Gabby asked.
"He's a fan of terrible music?" Watson offered.
"He wants to drown his sorrows over his daughter's death and he's already drank all the booze in his own bar?" Jo suggested.
"I don't know, but something tells me that the answer is going to be even stranger than any of those ideas," I said as we trooped out into the afternoon light to hunt down a demon in a giant country bar.
13
"Nothing about this seems like a good idea to me," Beth said to my back.
"You just described most of my life, particularly any of the parts of it I spent in Rio," I whispered. "Now shut up. I'd really rather not get caught here. I think it would end up on my permanent record."
"Oh, you're a regular comedian, Harker," she muttered.
"Laughter is not typically the response I look to elicit in women," I replied, and immediately thought of Becks. That was a mistake. My chest got tight, and my focus on the task at hand was completely gone for a moment as I sent feelers down the invisible connection tying me back to Rebecca, hundreds of miles away in North Carolina working to clear my name and find out how high in Homeland Security our problem went.
I couldn't see through her eyes, or even contact her with coherent thoughts, the physical distance was just too great. But I could feel her, and as my consciousness brushed hers, I felt a whirl of feelings pass through me, not all of them mine. Fear, anger, stress, worry, love, more anger tied really closely to that love, and pain both physical and emotional. All that coursed through me in half a second as my steps faltered and I went to one knee.
"Are you okay, Harker?" Beth's voice brought me back to the present, to Lockton, Ohio, and to the task at hand. Said task was breaking into the main office to steal Coach Durham Balomb's personnel file so we could go to his house and try to deal with Lockton High's demon infestation once and for all.
I shook my head to clear it, then nodded to Beth. "I'm fine. Just a little wave of psychic impression. Let's go."
"Are you sure you can do this?" she asked, pointing to the door to the main office.
"It's a door. With a standard cylinder lock. I've been magicking these things open since before you were born," I replied. I didn't mention that I'd been magicking them open since before her parents were born, too. So far, Beth Kirkland hadn't asked any questions about my origin, and I wasn't looking to talk about it right now.
People tend to look at you strangely when they find out that the "Uncle Luke" you mention from time to time is actually Dracula, Lord of the Vampires, Vlad the Impaler, source of dozens of movies good and godawful, and arguably the most famous monster in history. Needless to say, I'd whammied my fair share of locks all over the world in the century and change I'd been around, so I wasn't really worried about popping open the door to a high school principal's office in the middle of nowhere Ohio.
I walked down the hall, sticking to the shadows and avoiding the few security cameras running on a Friday night. I stepped up to the door and put my hand on the lock. I focused my will on the tumblers inside, whispered "Sesame," and turned the knob. The door clicked open, and Beth and I slipped inside.
"Sesame?" she asked.
"What?" I said. "It's just something to focus my will on the doorknob. I could have said 'cheeseburger,' as long as I believed it would work."
"You didn't have to cast a ritual, or beseech the Goddess for help, or ask the blessings of the Four Winds, or anything?"
"Neither do you," I said. "Magic doesn't really work like that. It doesn't come from some divine place. At least, not the magic I do. It's energy, and if you know how manipulate that energy, then you can do it. Simple as that."
"So you're not a believer?"
"Darlin', I've seen so much shit in my life, I believe in just about everything. But I don't mix my magic and my religion. Except when I need to send some demonic douchebag back to Hell. Which is what we need to do here, so point me to where the employee records are kept and let's go show Coach Balomb the way to go home."
"In that room next to Principal Nettles' office." She pointed, and I walked over and put the whammy on that lock, too. We stepped into the file room and started looking through cabinets. It only took a few seconds to find the right drawer, and Beth pulled out her cell phone as I grabbed the right folder.
"I don't think this is the time to take a selfie," I said as I saw her open the camera app on her phone.
"No, but I thought I'd take a picture of his address so we can put the file back and maybe still have an element of surprise."
"That's fine, but you don't really think our little expedition is going to be discovered in the time it takes us to drive from the school to the coach's house, do you?"
"We're going after him tonight?" She looked at me like I was crazy. I probably am, but I didn't think it had anything to do with Coach Balomb.
"No time like the present, right? Why wouldn't we?"
"I don't know, I thought maybe we'd take time to research him, find a weakness, get some help, that kind of thing."
I snorted. "Nah, that kind of planning works great if you're Giles or Willow, but I'm way more of a kick down the door and beat the shit out of everything in the room kind of guy." I handed her the folder. "Now let's go. You're navigating."
I hate it when demons invade the suburbs. It fucks with my sense of the universe. Demons belong in cities, in abandoned sewers, nasty-ass empty factories, or even creepy old houses tucked away in old neighborhoods. Demons don't belong in ranch houses with two-car garages. But that's where Coach Balomb lived. Not even at the end of a cul-de-sac, right in the middle of the damn street like he was some kind of insurance adjuster or something like that.
"What do you know about the coach?" I asked as I pulled my pickup onto a side street two blocks past the address on the file and turned off the lights.
"I don't know much," Beth replied. "He started here last year as an assistant coach and economics teacher. When Coach Pate had a heart attack last June, they promoted Coach Balomb to Head Coach, and he brought in some old friends from the last school where he taught. I don't know where, just that it's somewhere down south, apparently."
"I think he's from a little further south than anybody suspects. Sounds like he engineered the old coach's heart attack and has brought in his buddies from the Pits to serve him here in Lockton."
"Yeah, that's what I figured," Beth agreed.
"But why?" I asked. "Lockton isn't big enough to be a real target, and there's no magical ley lines that run through the place, nothing special about this town whatsoever."
"Just a town willing to sell its soul for a winning football team and a bunch of missing Talented kids." Beth opened her door, and I slapped my hand over the dome light to hide its glow.
"Eclipso," I whispered, and a small cloud of absolute darkness enveloped the bulb. I took my hand off the light and got out of the truck.
"Now you're just showing off," she said, closing the door and walking around the front of the truck to join me. "What's the plan?"
"Well, we can either knock on the door and try to bullshit our way inside, then try to fight our way out..."
"Which sounds like a recipe for certain death."
"Or we can blast through the front of the house and the back door at the same time, kill anything we encounter, and hope the element of surprise can buy us enough time to take out Balomb before he gets his shit together enough to fight back."
"Do you have any plans that don't involve our almost certain death in an exceptionally bloody fashion?"
"Not really, no."
"Goddess only knows how you've lived this long."
"If you only knew," I quipped.
Beth sighed. "Let's go with the two-pronged attack, then. I certainly don't trust you to be able to bluff your way
through the door, so this way we at least have the potential to take a few of those assholes with us when we go."
"That's what I love in a sidekick, Kirkland—positive thinking. You take the back; I'll take the front."
"How will I know when to go?"
"You'll see the signal."
"What's the signal?"
"I'll figure it out when I send it. But you'll know it. I promise." She shook her head at me and peeled off toward the back of the house.
I walked up the sidewalk to the front of the coach's house and checked the ammunition in my Glock. The front door looked pretty easy to fortify, with a small porch that glowed like Christmas in my Sight. That wasn't going to work as an entrance. I scanned the front of the house and spotted a picture window with no magical enhancements on it.
"Bingo," I muttered. "This oughta serve as a pretty good signal." I pulled in my will, focusing my magical energy over my left hand, then drew my pistol. I put three rounds through the big window and flung a fireball through the shattered glass. It exploded with a massive BOOM, and I sprinted across the lawn to leap through the hole in the wall where a window used to be.
I heard a muffled crump from the back of the house, followed by a string of small explosions like firecrackers. Sounded like Kirkland blew in the back door, then flung a fistful of those mini-fireballs into the house. Between us, we had the place burning pretty good, which might not have been our best move as the humans surrounded by denizens of Hell. They were a lot more resistant to fire than we were, but I had enough protections woven around me to keep me alive for a couple minutes at least.
Which might be more time than I had, given the fact that I had four demons staring at me from the living room and the door to what looked like the kitchen. None of them wore their human suits, but when wearing their natural forms, they didn't look that far removed from people. Just a little taller, way skinnier, with red skin, yellow eyes, and porcupine spikes instead of hair. Oh yeah, and preternaturally long arms, double-jointed knees, and three-inch curved talons on the ends of each of their six fingers.
So maybe they didn't really look anything like people, except for being bipedal and having roughly human faces, only more angular and sporting curved fangs. So they were nasty little bastards, but these were definitely low-level demons. The ones staring back at me now weren't even as strong as the one I'd banished a couple nights before, so I was only a little bit convinced that I was about to die.
They were way more confident in their ability to kill me than I was because they all charged me at once. I flung up a shield of force with my left hand, effectively blocking the three coming at me from the den. The one rushing me from the kitchen required a different approach, since I still held my gun in that hand. So I shot him. In the face. Four times. He dropped, but not fast enough to actually stop moving, so his momentum drove him right into me, which drove me hard into the other three with my shield, sending me and all four demons tumbling ass over teakettle to the floor.
I dropped my pistol, but held my shield, and wriggled out from under the dead demon that sprawled across my legs. The other three writhed on the ground, scratching, clawing, and biting at each other trying to get to their feet.
"Electro!" I shouted, reaching my hand in the air and pointing my index finger toward the ceiling light. Electricity flickered from the light fixture to gather around my fist, and I flung a ball of lightning at the squirming mass of demon dickheads on the floor. I've smelled a lot of nasty shit in my life, but nothing quite so foul as fried demon on old shag carpet. I'm not sure if it was the sulfurous stench of demon flesh or the horrific stink of polyester fibers, but that was the grossest thing I've ever smelled.
Beth came into the front room, covered in soot and demon blood. She leaned against the door into the den and looked at me. "Maybe next time we can try not to burn the house down before we run into it?"
"Maybe next time we don't have a next time?" I asked, then looked around. "Did you put the fire out?"
"Yeah. I called to it and channeled it into the ground outside. Scorched some grass and turned the dirt to glass, but at least we aren't going to die."
"You won't die from the fire, witchy-witch, but you will most certainly die tonight." I didn't even turn around. I didn't have to. Whenever somebody shows up and makes a pithy comment at what I really wanted to be the end of a fight, it's usually something bigger and badder than whatever I just fought. So I knew Coach Balomb had decided to join the fight, and shit was about to get real.
14
It all made sense to me when I pulled into the empty parking lot. Mort was a demon, and country music bars are a special kind of Hell, so it only made sense that he wanted to be there. His motorcycle was parked in the portico by the front door, and the door hung from broken hinges. We were in the right place.
I parked right behind Mort's bike and killed the engine. The four of us got out and made a quick check of our weapons. I ejected the magazine from my Sig and replaced it with bullets dipped in holy water and blessed by a Catholic priest who did things for Harker like bless bullets. Apparently in his line of work, it's a good idea to have people around for stuff like that. Life was so much less complicated when all I had to do was solve murders by humans.
The noise coming from inside told me that someone objected to Mort's presence and was doing something about it, with extreme prejudice. The sound of shattering glass and splintering wood rang through the parking lot. I drew my sidearm and waved the others in around me.
"Okay," I said, "when we get in there, let me take the lead. Mort's familiar with me, so I might be able to talk him down a little, and I am still a cop, so that gives me some authority with whoever else is in there. Watson, you go around and see if there's a back or side door. I don't want any of these guys getting away—"
"Is this because of my leg? Because I assure you, I can hold up my end of a fight." He scowled at me, and I looked down at his leg.
"Shit, sorry, I forgot. Is it better for you to come in the front with me, so you don't have to walk as far?"
The scowl changed to confusion as he tried to process what I was asking. "No, I simply meant that I am capable of handling a frontal assault, that my leg will not prove a liability in the fight."
"Oh," I said. "Sorry, didn't think about that. No, I just need somebody to cover the door, and you're the most lightly armed, so I wanted to put you out of the line of direct fire. But if you—"
"No, that's fine. Thank you, Detective."
"Thank me if we all get out of this alive. Jo, you and Gabby are with me. I'll lead, and you two fan out...goddammit." I swore as I heard loud reports from inside and noticed that Gabby was nowhere in our little huddle. "Fuck it, let's go!" I ran into the building where Gabby was laying down a pretty serious field of fire with her two .45 semiautomatics. That's a big bullet, and she was a decent shot, so everything she hit was on its ass seconds later.
The problem was that everything she shot was a demon, and bullets aren't very effective against a lot of Hellspawn. So while Gabby was knocking them down, they were getting right back up again. A few of them stayed down after headshots, so a change in tactics was obviously required.
"Headshots, Gabby!" I shouted. She nodded, then holstered one pistol and switched to a two-handed grip to give herself better control for the difficult task of shooting a moving target in the face before said target kills you. Nothing's ever as easy as it looks on NCIS.
I scanned the room for Mort, but all I saw was a shit-ton of demons. Red demons, black demons, demons still in human form, whatever you wanted, apparently they were all redneck day drinkers because this bar was full of them. I heard the scrabble of claws above me and looked up just in time to see a little green bastard with talons on all four limbs and a long tail with a scorpion spike on the end of it drop to the ground right in front of me.
"Duck and roll!" I heard from behind me, and I did just as I was told, diving to my right into an awkward roll that would probably result i
n some bruises in the morning. If I kept this shit up, I was definitely going back to krav maga class. I spun back to the demon just in time to get splashed with black blood and little bits of demon skull as Jo swung that nine-pound hammer like she was Babe Ruth. The demon's head disintegrated into the world's nastiest oatmeal, and she reached out a hand.
"Good reflexes," she said.
"I date Harker," I replied. "Fireballs are a thing that happens in my life," I said by way of explanation. There was a brief moment when nothing was immediately charging us, so I took the opportunity to shout for our quarry.
"MORT!" I yelled. "Cut this shit out and come talk to me!"
"Not until he tells me where to find that murdering son of a sulfur-sucking pitworm!" A voice from the center of a writhing cluster of demonic bodies on the floor bellowed back.
I looked at the others and nodded. "Let's get him out of there." Gabby, Jo, and I walked toward a pile of a dozen demons all struggling and scrambling to get a grip on a piece of Mort's new body and rip it off. It looked like a pileup on the football field, only with more claws and fangs, and about ten percent fewer tattoos.
We got to within a few feet of the squirming mass of demons and raised our weapons. "Get off the interloper, assholes," I said over the barrel of my pistol.
A seven-foot demon with stubby little horns and a tail that looked like the one you get in the naughty devil costumes at Halloween got to his feet and glared down at me. "And what if we don't want to, human?"
"I don't waste much time on what a demon does or doesn't want, fucktard," I said, then I shot him. In the groin. He dropped to his knees, making him a much more reasonably sized foe, and I stepped to the left. Jo took one long stride forward and came around with her great-great-grandfather's hammer again. The rectangular head of the hammer caught the demon right on the hinge of its jaw and knocked its head clean off.
The pile of demons froze, and the room fell silent as the thump, thump, thump of the head bouncing along the bar's hardwood floors reached everyone's ears. The body made a wet thwap sound as it fell over, and the entire mass of a dozen or more demons separated and came to its feet almost in unison. I took a step back as the three of us stared down at least twelve or fifteen monsters straight out of humanity's worst nightmares.
Heaven Help Us (Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Book 7) Page 9
