I told Magdalena Szabó how, just maybe, I could get her what she wanted without cutting my own throat. And the girl in the chair nodded approvingly.
“Just one thing,” I said. “You gotta keep Harpootlian off my ass. You let me worry about B and Drusneth and the gruesome twosome, but you keep Auntie H off me.”
“Oh, my, how she hates being called that.”
“I’m fucking serious.”
“I’ll do all that I can,” the girl replied.
“You’ll do better than that, or I promise you’re never going to see your precious play pretty again. Harpootlian gets to me first, we both know that’s a fact. I might wind up deader than I am now, and I might wind up worse than that, but you’ll still go home empty-handed.”
The girl in the black satin dress on the black wooden chair licked her pale lips and nodded again. I stood up.
“I’m not kidding around, lady. I so much as smell—”
“Is this a threat, Twice-Damned?”
“No,” I told her, “it’s just business. Just a contract, the wages of supply and demand.”
She smiled again, like a slice of midnight.
“Do not disappoint me,” Magdalena Szabó said. “My arm is long, and my vengeance against those who fail me an abyss.” And then I was back on Broadway, sitting in the dirty snow and ice and slush outside a Chinese restaurant. The sun was just beginning to rise over Federal Hill.
• • •
So for the uninitiated—which I’m guessing is most of you—here’s how it usually works when someone’s willingly made a deal with a demon that grants it “permission” to “temporarily” possess you. First off, the whole permission part, that’s sort of a joke, as the demon’s gonna do it if the mood strikes, whether you consent or not. Second, “temporarily” is a total matter of faith. The demon might decide to honor the deal and vacate the premises, and it might not. You pay your money, and you take your chances. Regardless, though I may have seemed, in the preceeding pages, to have waffled on this point, I’d reached a place where I was more than a bit indifferent as to my continued existence. Still, like I said, I told that bitch Szabó how, just maybe, I could get her the goods without cutting my own throat. So I didn’t have much say-so in what would follow.
Roll the bones, right?
Seven come eleven.
Commence endgame.
Soon as Magdalena Szabó had plonked me back home from whatever pocket universe she’d dragged me off to for our confab, I went directly to my apartment. To my amazement, both the downstairs door and the door to my apartment had been replaced. There was also a yellow Post-it note my cocksucker of a landlord had stuck to my door, informing me the cost would be added to my next month’s rent. Anyway, I grabbed the big gym bag in which I lugged about the tools of my trade. The crossbow was already in there, along with extra clips for the Glock. I pulled my two shotguns from beneath the bed: the sawed-off double-barreled Lupara boomstick and the Mossberg 500 tricked out with a grenade launcher (oh, I always had a wicked hard-on for that bad boy). Two boxes of shells. Check. And there was still (just barely) room for a handful of M67 frag grenades, specially modified by a paranormal branch of No Such Agency for encounters with us paranormal nasties. I won’t get into the technical specs on those pineapples, but they pack a fatal wallop to pretty much anything that walks, flies, hops, prances, gallops, crawls, or slithers on its belly like a reptile, no matter what nether region it might call home. I grabbed my leather duster from the closet, which was loaded with the assortment of knives. I dropped a couple of extra grenades into the pockets.
As they say, I was loaded for bear. Or at least a werepire’s last stand. But if I’ve just painted myself as some sort of action heroine here, Sarah Conner or Alice from those Resident Evil movies or one of the cookie-cutter, tramp-stamped slayers from “shifter” pulp soft core . . . then I’ve given you the wrong impression. Half those weapons, I’d never even fired them. B kept tossing that shit my way, and I kept stashing it. Mostly, I’d used the Glock and the crossbow. The knives. Mostly. The rest? That was all goodies for the Szabó Gambit.
I called a taxi, then lugged the bag downstairs and stood on the sidewalk watching the sky until the cab arrived. The morning seemed to promise still more goddamn snow. Anyway, I gave the driver the address of Drusneth’s whorehouse on Cranston. At that hour, I knew the place would be quiet as it ever gets, and that the foul skank of a succubus’ guard would be as down as she ever lets it. Even demonesses gotta sleep sometime.
Now, we could do this all blow-by-blow, right? Sure we could. But, Jesus, that shit gets old fast. I’ll settle for the highlights, with just enough of the gory details to tantalize those who get off on that sort of thing. There were a couple of the se’irim guards stationed at the back door, smoking Kools and gossiping. They had just enough time to glare disapprovingly and suspiciously at me before I vaporized them with one of the M67s, which also punched a pretty big crater in the rear foyer and made the very dramatic entrance I’d counted on.
Wouldn’t it be handy, I thought, if B’s still lurking around this dump?
Ah, Quinn, don’t get your hopes up.
And before you all start worrying about the hullabaloo and racket that ensued, Drusneth had long ago cast a spell over the brothel so that no one outside could hear anything going on inside. Probably she never imagined she’d regret that particular security measure, that it could be turned against her.
I made it to the “red room”—a parlor wallpapered in crimson velvet—just off the big staircase, and I set down the bag, quickly dumped its contents into a pile on the hardwood floor. Another se’irim and a burly golem (real low-class sorts, golems) appeared, and I unloaded both barrels of the Lupara, ripping them apart. Didn’t kill either one, but rendered them harmless.
Right about here, as Drusneth’s more serious lines of defense began to kick in, Szabó took control. Both her and Harpootlian’s powers were, as I’d been told, limited in this dimension, but by routing her consciousness through me, she could take advantage of a cosmic loophole and boost her signal all to hell and back.
I know. Ha, ha, fucking ha.
And here’s another one: All hell broke loose.
The bitch tumbled into my skull like a bucketful of molten glass, and I went down hard. It would take her a few seconds to get the hang of my motor control. I saw two of the prostitutes, all hooves and horns and terrified eyes, appear at the foot of the stairs, and I had just enough time to warn them to run. I gotta be honest, it was nothing personal, what was going down that morning. See, most of Drusneth’s girls and boys and trannies and . . . whatnot, they’re decent enough sorts. For demons.
I never lost consciousness. Not for an instant. The chaos unfolded around me like one of those dreams where you’re watching yourself up on a movie screen. The thing inside me didn’t even bother taking cover. It crouched there on the rug and unloaded the bow and the guns on everything that dared to show its face. It brought down the house, with cacophony enough that the concealment spell was broken and I soon heard the wail of approaching sirens. Which is when Drusneth herself finally appeared, clothed only in a blue-gray silk robe and wearing no face but that she’d been created with. She was stuck somewhere between utter disbelief and the utmost reaches of beyond pissed the fuck off. Smoke and flames curled about her, licking at her flesh, and she spread her wide leathery wings and advanced on me. Me and Magdalena. Whatever. Whomever.
“How dare you, Twice-Damned filth?” she roared. “Abomination, you cannot begin to comprehend the pain and horror I will visit upon you for all eternity and a day.”
“Save it for someone who gives a shit,” I heard and felt Szabó say with my tongue and my voice.
Surreal.
Drusneth made a noise like a train wreck and Godzilla, all rolled up into one, and I felt my finger squeeze the trigger of the Mossberg 500. A grenade struck her square in the chest, right between her droopy tits, and hurled her backwards into the cloud of th
ickening smoke. Szabó cackled and howled from somewhere deep inside me. Right then, a slimy assload of tentacles that would have made the most hard-core hentai fan come on the spot exploded from the burning floorboards only a few feet in front of me. I watched in awe as Szabó drew my Kershaw ten-inch bush knife—pretty much a goddamn baby machete—and sliced them up like so much sashimi (no, don’t know what’s with three Japanese analogies in one paragraph). The oozing stubs, spurting green-black ichor, withdrew into the gloom of the basement.
Gotta admit, I was in total fucking awe.
No way we were getting away with this shit.
Overhead, I heard the roof begin to come apart, and some vague approximation of the fiery perdition Drusneth had promised did indeed begin to rain down upon me. Us. Around us, there were only the sounds of burning, the scream of fire trucks and police cars, and the moans of the wounded and dying. The air stank of burned flesh, blood, smoke, sulfur, and gunpowder. I should have been a shredded, smoldering mess from the shrapnel and flames, but I wasn’t. I chalked that up to a fringe benefit of the possession, to a wee bit of evidence Szabó was playing good to her word. And, besides, a maimed host wouldn’t have been much good to her, natch. Nor would a hundred and twenty-five pounds of walking hamburger been much good for Stage Two of our master plan.
Maybe it’s time to make our exit, I thought as loudly as I could. She heard me.
Likely, said my mouth, you’re correct.
We walked through an inferno, out through a sizable hole in the wall facing Wendell Street, and not so much as a hair on my head was singed. The firemen were shouting and unrolling their hoses. If they saw the waxy-skinned girl emerge from the blaze, well, they were way too busy to say anything.
Part of me just kept thinking, Cool, over and over again. And some other part, all it could see was the damage done and the damage yet to come. That part of me, monster or not, felt something very near regret, and it was scared to death.
• • •
Stage Two: Find Mean Mister B.
Now, I’d assumed this was going to be anything but simple. The craven son of a butt fuck would have gotten word of the big-badda-boom holocaust at Drusneth’s place and gone straight to ground. And the man’s a virtuoso when it comes to tucking his tail between his legs and slinking off into secret crevices from which he doesn’t emerge until the coast is clear.
They say there are exceptions to every rule.
Sometimes “they” actually do know what “they’re” talking about. Not often, but occasionally.
To wit: I’d walked away from Szabó’s BBQ spectacle and wandered over to the park in the shadow of the turrets and yellow-glazed bricks of the Armory. If you know Providence, you know all about that great, ridiculous castle wannabe. And if you don’t know Providence, use Google. Anyway, the old snow was still ankle deep in the park, and new snow was swirling down from low bayberry clouds. The only weapons I still had on me were a couple of knives in the duster. Oh, and the last of the M67 grenades that had somehow ended up in one of the jacket’s deep pockets. Maybe there would be retaliation, and maybe there wouldn’t. Szabó had flown the coop, leaving my head reeling, my ears ringing, my stomach rolling like a long ride on the Block Island Ferry. I was on my second cigarette when my phone buzzed.
“A little early, precious, for the Fourth of July,” said B, all French-vanilla-ice-cream smooth. I flicked the stub of my cigarette at a snowbank. Werepires can be terrible litterbugs.
“Well, never let it be said you don’t have some big brass balls,” I replied. “Figured you’d be halfway to China by now.”
There was a short pause, and then he said, “We need to talk. We need to talk right now.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
There was a dull whump back towards Drusneth’s as this or that mystical thingamajig blew a little more of the shithole to kingdom come. I didn’t even bother to look. I kept my eyes on the snowflakes.
“I need you face-to-face, kitten.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“That’s not the word on the street.”
“The street ain’t always the most reliable source for current events and breaking news.”
Another pause, longer than the first, and when next he spoke there was an edge in his voice, the jaggedy sort comes right before anger. I could hear him straining to keep his cool. Oh, it felt good to hear that, a crazy satisfying combination of speedball and hemoglobin and the best of orgasms. Like that song by Recoil says, . . . some soft, soft drugs, all red delicious in my ear.
“This isn’t a bloody joke, Quinn.”
“Which is why you don’t hear me laughing.”
“Drusneth might have taken a hard hit, but—”
“Yo, B,” I cut in, “you really think it’s the best idea since sliced halva to be talkin’ this shit on the phone? Never know who or what’s eavesdropping. Also, did I mention how I didn’t do it?”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I got a better one, B. Where are you? How about we start from there? If you’re camped out in that fucking booth at Babe’s, you’re an even bigger idiot than me. Which is saying something, brother.”
“You know the place.”
“Let’s say I do,” I said, and fished out my last Camel and crumbled the pack before tossing it towards the aforementioned snowbank.
“Get your ass over here.”
“I swear, B, I didn’t do it.”
He hung up, and I sat there and finished my smoke. So, wow. Everything going more or less according to plan. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Still, a million or so ways this thing could blow up in my face, and I wasn’t about to pretend that wasn’t the case.
• • •
True to his word, the bastard was hiding out in The Basement. Never thought of it as a safe house or a panic room. Once upon a time, it had been a gay bar, and then some sort of goth/BDSM club, and then B had bought it and hired two or three thaumaturgy types to wrap it in every protective ward he could afford. Of course, Dru’s place had been two or three times that armored, and I’d strolled in there, pretty as you please. But where the hell else did he have left to hide?
He was sitting at the counter that had once been a bar, sitting on a stool drinking a bottle of Bass. You gotta understand, Mean Mr. B only lowers himself to lowly beer when he’s got trouble with two capital T’s.
“You know it’s not secure here?” I asked him, parking myself on a stool next to him. I reached over the bar and snagged a beer from the cooler.
“And you know some place that is?” he replied, and he laughed. It struck me as the laugh of a condemned man, a death-row dude walking Spanish, a reprobate who’d accepted the inevitable and begun resigning himself to the end times and judgment.
“Not right off.”
“You say it wasn’t you done this deed.”
“I know how it looks.”
He laughed that gallows laugh again. “Do you, now? You got some clue how much shit we are currently wading in?”
I took a swallow of the cold beer, and I nodded. “More than you, I’d wager,” I told him. “Yeah, it was my body holding those guns and squeezing the triggers. Tossing the grenades. Ain’t gonna deny that.”
“But?”
“But it was Magdalena Szabó pulling the strings. Ever known what it feels like to be a puppet?”
“This is what you say, precious.”
“Listen, B. Stop and think. If it had just been me, if I actually could have pulled off that sort of throw-down, you think I’d be here telling you about it? Fuck, you think I’d have walked away without so much as a goddamn bruise or scratch?”
He stared at me and rubbed his stubbly chin. Looked like he hadn’t shaved in a day or two, and Mean Mr. B is a fastidious man. “Szabó? So . . .”
“Yep. She’s as real as Harpootlian, and she’s come to cast her hat into the ring. And from what went down this morning, I’d say she’s a bit more of a power to b
e reckoned with than Harpootlian. When all is said and done, as regards Szabó, I think the word you might be looking for is warpath.”
The man shut his eyes, rubbed at them, then just stared at me for a while, watching me drink my Bass.
“So, we’re well and righteously screwed,” he said, finally. “Fucked as a hen in a roomful of roosters.”
I couldn’t resist a dramatic pause. I was running mostly on my own sheer terror and anger right here, and the more I saw B sweat, the clearer my head became. Those soft, soft drugs, remember?
And then I said, “I have the unicorn.”
He looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
“Well, not on me. I did, but now it’s hidden. Somewhere no one can get their hands on it. Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder if I can get it back. Aloysius ain’t the most reliable of safekeepers.”
Thunder-struck. That’s the word that was on the tip of my tongue a few seconds ago, trying to describe Mean Mr. B’s expression. He looked totally fucking thunderstruck.
“You gave it to a troll?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“And he—”
“Stashed it somewhere in the Hollow Hills, or at least that’s my best guess.”
B laughed again, but it wasn’t the same laugh as before. There was a note of genuine humor.
“B, it’s past time to give up on whatever get-rich-quick scheme you and Dru hatched. It’s almost gotten you killed.”
“Might yet,” he said, then finished his beer and reached for another.
“My point exactly. Time for an exit strategy, only I’m guessing the two of you—and Boston Harry’s rat fink brother—were so full of hubris it never occurred to you to come up with one.”
“Is Drusneth dead?” he asked, and he almost sounded like he cared. Touching.
“Fuck if I know. She took a pineapple to the chest. Last I saw of her, she—”
“Never mind, Quinn. Just never you mind. So, assuming you can get the unicorn back from that dodgy fuck, and you being all high and goddamn mighty and the dog’s bollocks of tacticians, you’re gonna tell me how we extract ourselves from this prickly dilemma?”
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