Besieged

by Kevin Hearne

  There were two problems with that plan: One, San Francisco was already pretty chaotic without demonic help—there were sixty thousand men and two thousand women at the time—and, two, none of those people would automatically report anything strange to me. Nobody knew who I was. But they would report to Sheriff Jack Coffee Hays, San Francisco’s first official sheriff, who had just been elected three and a half weeks earlier, a barkeep told me.

  The barkeep was quick to add, as he poured me a shot of rye, that Jack Coffee Hays had seen some shit. He’d been a Texas Ranger and then a colonel in the Mexican-American War and had somehow survived more than his fair share of fights. He wasn’t easily impressed.

  Approaching him for help in this matter would take some finesse. If I walked up to him as I was—barefoot, in homespun clothes I had made myself—he’d dismiss me immediately. To be taken seriously I’d need a new outfit, something that said I had plenty of money and therefore deserved respect. Nothing made one so respectable as the appearance of wealth, and in almost any country, in any century, clothes were the easiest way to achieve that appearance. Except finding such clothing in San Francisco at that moment would be problematic. I didn’t have time to wait for something bespoke. I needed something much sooner, and since I wanted someone else to find Pastore’s body and report it to the sheriff before I met him, I took the opportunity to return to the redwoods and shift planes into Central Park in New York City. New York had a ready-made clothing industry by then, and hundreds if not thousands of tailors were doing alterations in the city. Many of them were Irish immigrants, in fact, because the potato famine was in progress, and many of them were working out of their homes for next to nothing. Once I had my basics from a men’s shop and stopped at a barber’s to make myself presentable, I spent a lovely couple of hours with the Flanagan family while Mrs. Flanagan worked on my alterations. I paid her nine times the going rate to set aside her other work, and I brought in a week’s worth of groceries besides and a bottle of the Irish for when they needed some fortitude down the road. I traded stories and laughs with Mr. Flanagan and his wee boys, and every one of us was happier and richer for the experience when I bid them farewell.

  —

  “Time-out,” Granuaile said. “Wasn’t there something you could have done about the potato famine?”

  “That was the first I’d heard of it, honestly, five years in progress by that time. It wasn’t something an elemental would have shared with me. The Irish had grown dependent on a monoculture of potatoes, a mold arrived to feast on that monoculture, and that’s why we should always grow a wide variety of cultivars. But of course Americans are ignoring that lesson now and growing a single potato for all of its French fries. French Frymageddon is coming, I promise you. It would have come already except for the tons of pesticides they’re using to keep the crop viable.”

  Oberon said.

  “You’re full, aren’t you?”

 

  —

  The first thing I did when I returned to San Francisco was visit the impressive bookstore of Mr. Still on Portsmouth Square to look up something, and then I took a room at the American Hotel for an indefinite stay. Fragarach was stowed in the manager’s tall floor safe, which contained quite a few rifles in addition to the expected collections of wealth. I was careful to wear my new pair of uncomfortable shoes to prevent any of the Fae from tracking me via the effervescent joys of happy plant life—normally not a consideration, but my plane shifts in and out and in again to San Francisco had probably alerted Aenghus Óg that I was interested in something near there. All he had to do was inquire of Sequoia if something was wrong and she’d tell him about the escaped demon. Either he or one of his minions could very well show up at Stefano Pastore’s murder scene and begin the hunt for me even as I hunted for this demon—which meant the quicker I resolved this, the better. But horrors loosed out of hell never behave in such a way as to make my life easier.

  I arrived in gloves to hide my tattoos; a burgundy satin waistcoat with a gold pocket watch ticking away inside; a ridiculous tie with a sunburst pin; all covered by charcoal-gray pinstripe coat and pants and topped with a bowler. My hair was straightened and greased and combed into a reddish oil slick, and I made sure to wax my mustache and coo approvingly at my bristling sideburns. In lieu of my sword I carried a cane, which would do as a short stave if it came to fighting but which gave the appearance that I was nursing an old injury like a trick knee.

  That’s what I looked like when I stepped into Pastore’s murder scene for the second time, but there were two men standing over the body, muttering about how damn strange it was. I froze in the doorway and gasped to draw their attention, but added, “Oh, bollocks,” to signal immediately that I wasn’t American. “I’m too late.”

  The two men rounded on me, one of them dropping his hand to his gun. He relaxed when he saw one hand on my cane, the other clutched in a fist over my heart, as if I was shocked by the scene.

  “Who are you?”

  I dropped my left hand on top of my right over the handle of the cane and gave a name befitting my disguise as an English toff, voice stiff as if I’d been laundered with the queen’s own starch: “Algernon Percy, Fourth Duke of Northumberland, expert on the occult and much too late to stop Mr. Pastore there from doing something terminally stupid.” Algernon Percy really was the name of the Duke of Northumberland at the time, though I doubt he looked much like me beyond the fact that we were both rather pale, and he certainly was no expert on the occult. But should the sheriff take the trouble to verify the name of the current duke, at least he wouldn’t catch me that way. I’d lifted the name straight out of a recent history of England’s military exploits that I found in Mr. Still’s establishment, working on the theory that officers were often noblemen, and, sure enough, the good duke was an admiral or some such.

  “You know this man?”

  “I do. And who might you be, good sir?”

  “Sheriff Jack Hays,” the man with a star on his coat said, his voice carrying a bit of a Texas drawl. He had a broad forehead and eyes like coal, which glittered with a hint of diamond in them. His hat was in his hand, and I noted a thick wave of dark hair sweeping about his ears and a square jaw to hang his beard on. He kept his neck shaven, though at this point he had a day or two’s growth on it and it looked as if it would fight with a square of sandpaper to see who was rougher. He nodded over to the other man, a clean-shaven, sunburned lad with straw-colored hair, who wore a star on his coat as well. “This here’s my deputy, Kasey Princell.”

  “It’s my very good fortune to meet you both. I do hope I can be of some service to you, since I’ve traveled around the earth chasing after this fellow.”

  “What can you tell us about him?” Deputy Princell asked. He wasn’t from Texas; the vowels and inflection were different, had more of a lilt than a drawl to them, and that was the beginning of my education in American Southern accents. I found out later that he was from eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachians.

  “He’s an Italian occultist, and I don’t mind telling you I’ve had a devil of a time finding him—if you’ll excuse the pun.”

  The lawmen squinted at me, which I supposed meant they hadn’t caught the pun at all. “I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that,” Hays said. “I’ve seen my share of dead men, y’understand, but I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this.” He looked down at the body. “Choked to death an’ then his guts pulled out. Or maybe it was t’other way around. Overkill either way. And then there’s all these things on the floor. Salt and candles and whatnot. Looks like some kinda magical fixin’s if I had to guess. I dunno. Would you know anythin’ about that?”

  “I would. I would indeed. May I come in?”

  “Sure. Just don’t step in any o’ this
mess.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” I moved forward and surveyed the scene, pretending to take it all in for the first time. “Hmm. Yes. A bit diabolical, eh?”

  “I dunno. Who do y’think mighta had it in for Mr. Pastore?”

  “Well, we are clearly looking for whoever broke the circles of binding and protection and gave the demon a free shot at the deceased.”

  “What now?” Hays said.

  “Did you just say ‘demon’ or—Jack, what the hell is going on?” Deputy Princell said.

  “Hell is precisely what is going on here, Deputy,” I replied. “You see the evidence of it before your eyes.”

  “Maybe you better explain what you’re seein’ that we’re not,” Hays said.

  “These circles you see here, the Hebrew and the Greek, the black candles, the silver dagger—what you called ‘magical fixin’s’—all of it was used to summon a demon. And it was a successful summoning.”

  “Are you bein’ serious right now?” Deputy Princell said. “An honest-to-God demon?”

  “Typically, demons are neither honest nor of God, but, yes, Deputy, I am deadly serious. Mr. Pastore’s body can attest to how deadly serious this sort of magic is. And I would point out that I would hardly journey all the way from England at great expense for the thrill of playing a small joke on a pair of complete strangers. I am telling you the absolute truth as I know it, gentlemen. This man summoned a demon, which escaped when someone broke the circles there and there, allowing the demon to do precisely what you see before you.”

  “Well,” Hays said, “if we assume that’s all true—which is a damn big chaw to fit in my mouth, Mr. Percy, I don’t mind tellin’ ya—then that leaves us with some questions.”

  Deputy Princell snorted. “Yeah, questions like ‘Are you shitting me?’ and ‘Why would anyone think summoning a demon was a good idea?’ ”

  A flicker of a smile passed across the sheriff’s face at the deputy’s comment, a brief meteor of amusement streaking across the sky. But then he focused on me, glittering dark eyes promising a reckoning if I couldn’t answer to his satisfaction.

  “Who besides you would have known this guy was summoning demons, Mr. Percy? And where is that person now? And, more important, where is the damn demon you say we have runnin’ around?”

  I liked what I saw in Jack Hays. Give him a problem and he wanted to solve it, not worry about whether it was impossible. He was going to try first to see if it really was impossible. Of course, his first question had an edge to it. I was already a suspect.

  “I assure you I have no idea who was responsible. But the demon in question has probably possessed him, since you see only one body here and not two. That possessed person will, I guarantee, be sowing chaos in your city. And when you find him and confront him, the demon may fight, or it may leave that host and possess someone else, leaving his victim bewildered at why the sheriff wants to arrest him.”

  Deputy Princell shook his head. “Psssh. Sheriff, I’ve heard some bullshit in my day, but this is the biggest pile I ever heard.”

  The sheriff’s eyes slid sideways to his deputy for a moment, then back to me. “Maybe it is and maybe it ain’t. Look, Mr. Percy, I appreciate you comin’ by. We gotta clean this all up. Is there a place I can find you if I need you later?”

  “Certainly. I’m staying at the American Hotel. If you arrest someone who can’t remember the recent past, please do let me know. By tracing their paths we may be able to figure out where the demon is heading next.”

  “Right. Thank you.” He’d dismissed me at that point as a wealthy eccentric, a crackpot with nothing better to do than tilt at windmills; he was swayed not only by his deputy but by a general disbelief in the fantastic. That was fine. When the bodies started piling up, he’d come find me and point me in the right direction. That’s all I wanted. I lowered my head slightly and put my fingertips to the brim of my bowler.

  “Good day, sir.” I returned to the hotel, ordered tea in the lobby like a proper Victorian subject of the queen, and opened up a copy of The Pickwick Papers, which I’d purchased from Mr. Still’s shop. Dickens’ turgid prose is often painful to read, but I was just beginning to be amused by the appearance of a cockney character in chapter ten when Deputy Princell came to fetch me, apparently against his will.

  “The sheriff would like to see you, Mr. Percy,” he said, his face communicating that he thought the sheriff was making a mistake. I put Dickens down and grabbed my cane.

  “I’m at your service.”

  The deputy, grinding his jaw the whole way and deferring all my questions to the sheriff, led me a couple of blocks north to a saloon and gambling house, which proved to be the dominant business model in the city. Exactly the sort of place a demon would find delightful. I smelled the carnage before I saw it: that sickly coppery smell of spilled blood with a top note of sulfurous fumes. I wrinkled my nose and the deputy saw it.

  “I know. Smells like somebody ripped the biggest ol’ fart this side of the Mississippi and it’s just gonna live there from now on like your nasty in-laws.”

  It occurred to me that the deputy might have some domestic issues. “I know you’re a skeptic, Deputy Princell, but that is the smell of a demon.”

  He didn’t reply, just shook his head and invited me to precede him into the saloon.

  Overturned tables. Shattered mirror behind the bar and the bottoms of broken bottles of booze, their tops shot off. Five bodies sprawled on the floor, but only shot this time, not choked or disemboweled.

  A bearded man, perhaps the proprietor, stood behind the bar, in a stained white shirt with black bands around his biceps. With a bleak expression he stared at one of the bodies, as will a young person who realizes at some point that his childhood has run away and if he ever sees it again it’ll only be from a distance. Sheriff Jack Hays stood on the other side of the bar and had just finished asking him a question when I stepped in, but he was getting no response. He called the man’s name and snapped his fingers at him to focus his attention: “Stafford? Stafford. Hey, Bill.” My arrival turned the sheriff’s head.

  “Ah! Mr. Percy. Maybe you can tell me if this situation here has anything to do with, uh…with what we discussed earlier.”

  “Perhaps.” I joined him at the bar, ignoring the bodies, and pointed at Bill Stafford. “Can he tell us what happened?”

  “I was just trying to get him to go through it again. Stafford!”

  The man startled and rounded on the sheriff. “Hmm? Yes?”

  Using a small amount of power stored in my bear charm, I switched my vision to the magical spectrum and saw that Stafford’s aura was still entirely human. But the demon had been here, in the open; the smell attested to that.

  “Tell us one more time what happened.”

  “Oh. Sure.” He had a Texas drawl like the sheriff’s, helping me get the cadence down for later use. “Well, that feller over there—the one that smells real bad—he came in a little while ago and started winnin’ big on the faro table. So big, in fact, he’d drawn himself a crowd, and there were side bets goin’ on and all manner of stuff. All I knew was that he was cleanin’ me out and we were gonna go bust if he kept goin’ on. Had my man Collins go over and say all nice ’n’ polite that he oughtta take that amazing luck of his somewhere else because we couldn’t afford him no more. An’ that’s when things got violent. He pushed Collins and told him to go spit, Collins pushed back, and then that man just picked Collins up and threw him across the room like he was a rag doll. Collins crashed into a poker game, and those men all got up to tell the guy who threw him a thing or two. Then there were guns out, and the lucky man wasn’t a smart man. It was four against one, and he shoots one dead and the others unload on him. But even though he had three bullets in him and got some more besides, he kept firing, one shot in the heart to each poker player, and only then did he fall down and die.”

  “I see. And the other people in the bar?” I asked.

  “They all ran o
ut when the shooting started. I notice they took a bunch of money with them.”

  “When did it start to smell in here?”

  Stafford frowned. “I think it was when the faro player died.”

  “And who was the last to leave?”

  “Collins.”

  The sheriff spoke up. “Your man who got thrown across the room and crashed into a table?”

  “Yeah. Thought he was unconscious or maybe even dead, but he kinda jerked awake and staggered out, laughing like it was all funny. Didn’t say a word to me. I guess he quit. Wouldn’t blame him for wanting a new job after that.”

  “That’s him, Sheriff,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow at me. “We need to find this Collins. That’s who we want.”

  “He didn’t do nothin’ except what I told him to,” Bill Stafford said.

  “What does Collins look like, Bill?” the sheriff asked. “We just want to ask him some questions.”

  “Tall. Six foot. Green waistcoat, brown hair, blue eyes, and one o’ them funny Irish caps, you know the kind I mean? The ones that are flat on top.”

  “Does he have a gun?”

  “Naw. He’d move in close if he had to throw somebody out, then punch him out cold before he could draw.”

  “Did he go right or left out of the door?”

  “Left, I think.”

  “All right.” The sheriff turned to Kasey Princell. “Deputy, I’d appreciate it if you could round up some help and get these people sorted so Mr. Stafford can get his business going again as soon as possible. I’m going to look for Mr. Collins with Mr. Percy here.”

  We found Mr. Collins in an alley not one block away, moaning and vomiting in a sulfurous miasma.

  “Ah, Lord a’mighty,” he said, his Irish accent plain as he dragged himself to a sitting position. “I feel terrible. What’s that fecking smell?”

  I checked his aura: no demonic presence, just that lingering smell. He’d jumped into someone else already.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked him, squatting by his side.