Sensational Six: Action and Adventure in Sci Fi, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

by Sasha White

  One of the hookers looked at me. “I got family I don’t talk about.” I could see everyone’s expressions – she really hadn’t talked about them, no one else knew.

  “Who, where, how many?”

  “My parents, my two younger sisters and my little brother. They live in Prosaic Country Club and Estates.” She said it defensively. It was an easy guess why she’d never told anyone. It was a sad statement, though, that, unlike Jerry and Bobby, no one in her family had tried to help her.

  “What about the others?” I asked Freddy.

  “My family’s gone,” Freddy said. “All dead. However, the others might have someone close still living.” He spoke to the bums. “Fellas, really, you need to answer. You have any family here still?”

  One shook his head but the other two raised their hands. “Got a daughter,” the one who’d mentioned Bobby had kids said. “She’s married. May have kids now, too.” He looked down. “Don’t know. She and I didn’t…talk.” And now they’d never get the chance. I didn’t let it affect me – cops have to keep the emotional side protected, otherwise we’d spend our days and nights crying or falling for sob stories.

  “What about you?” I asked the last one.

  “Got two sisters, younger than me. Not married.”

  “How old are they?”

  He shrugged. “Guess they’re about seventy now.”

  I managed not to react. It was hard to tell how old a street person might really be, for a variety of reasons, but this was older than I’d been expecting.

  “How’d you survive so well?” Jack asked.

  The bum shrugged. “Don’t see how you call it ‘well’. Come from hearty stock. Still, dead now, right?”

  “Right.” I could see they weren’t going to stay resurrected for much longer. “Did all of you say the words Tomio gave you?” They all nodded. “What about the ones in the hospital, the ones who aren’t dead – did they say them?” More nods. I heard Martin speaking softly, into his wrist-com, I presumed.

  “Did the cops on beat say them, too?” Jack asked. To my stomach’s horror and my tail’s expectations, their heads nodded again.

  “They were trying to humor them,” Freddy said quietly. “You know how it is, they worked our area, knew all us regulars. They didn’t see no harm in it, and some bum telling them otherwise? Well, it was read the words and appease the majority or not read them and appease me and Cindy.”

  I noted Freddy’s speech was starting to go back to what I figured it had been before he’d become a bum. The undead lifestyle was good for a great number of those who’d failed at being successful humans.

  “Does an ex-husband count?” Sexy Cindy asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  She grimaced. “Then I got one of those. Well, had, I guess. No other family, Jerk Face moved us here, used up all our money, then dumped me for some gal who grew her own pot.”

  “I’m going to guess she counts, too. Why didn’t you go back where you were from?”

  She shrugged. “He’d put me onto the streets to make money already. Not like I wanted to go back to my grandmamma’s house like that.” She glared at me. “They’d have taken me back, sure. But I can survive on my own.”

  I refrained from mentioning that she hadn’t survived and wasn’t on her own. I had nothing against moxie, and a new succubus with drive was always a helpful addition to any team. “So, that’s seventeen. If we guess that there’s at least one child or other family member not accounted for, we get to eighteen easily.”

  “So, that’s three options, right?” Sexy Cindy’s brain appeared to be chugging along, too. I wondered what she’d been before she’d become a hooker. Besides a girl from what I guessed was a pretty strict family.

  “Yes.” I directed one last question to the resurrected. “Again, I want to know – what did you see and hear right before and right after you died?”

  I didn’t expect a lot and wasn’t surprised. The bums and hookers all looked confused. The bum with a daughter answered, seemingly for all of them. “A big, horrible monster came outta nowhere and ate us all before we could run. Then, the pain stopped and it went all black. I thought we got to see some kinda light when we died,” he added in the tone every sinner uses when they find out they really did have responsibility for their souls.

  “The light is for those ascending,” Martin said gently. “The choice is for those like Frederick and Cynthia, who are in a moral and mental state to make it. The darkness is for those who have not yet…been called.” He looked right at Jerry and Bobby. “And the Hellfire is for those who know their choices – and choose incorrectly.”

  Jerry seemed to have recovered his junkie decorum. “You don’t scare me, weirdo.”

  “You should be scared,” Miriam said. “When the time comes and you are called, I promise you – I will destroy you myself.”

  “Scared me,” Jack whispered to me.

  Bobby looked away from Martin and back at me. “I saw the monster, but I also saw something else. It was smaller than the monster and it shimmered. I thought it was the drugs, they do stuff like that.”

  “Shut up,” Jerry snarled.

  Bobby shook his head and went on, talking faster. “There was a sound, like millions of buzzing flies or insects or something. And it…it was like the sound went into the shimmering. And all that went into Tomio, after we all died – that was the last thing I saw, that shimmering thing go into him. He opened his mouth and it sort of flowed in.”

  “He’ll kill you when he comes back,” Jerry said almost gleefully.

  Bobby gave him a look that said what we were all thinking. “We’re already dead, you moron.” He looked back to me. “I don’t care what happens to me, but if you’re right, I don’t want anything to hurt my wife and kids. I never thought this would touch them. Please…do whatever you need to do to me, but keep them safe. Keep everyone’s families safe.”

  The resurrection was fading. The bodies moved back to their graves. I had only seconds. “We’ll do everything we can to protect the people close to you – I promise.”

  There was a collective sigh, and then the bodies went back to very clearly dead. Black Angel Two worked fast, and soon there were seven neatly filled graves in front of us. Martin said some prayers over the graves, then we were done.

  “What now?” Jack asked quietly.

  I looked to Martin, Edgar and H.P. “It’s exactly what I think it is, right?” They all nodded.

  Jack coughed. “What do you, and apparently everyone else but me, Freddy and Cindy, think it is?”

  “Well, on the good side, it’s probably not the Prince.”

  “Oh, good. So, what’s the bad side?” Jack asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that Abaddon is already here, since they did the incantation a while ago. So this would be Apollyon.”

  “Those are the same name for the Devil,” Freddy said. “Book of Revelations.”

  “Scribes can get confused,” Miriam said. “They’re actually two different beings, and have nothing to do with the Devil. Yahweh is not their master.”

  “No, the Prince is.” I heaved a sigh. “I think it’s time to go back to the alleyway and take another look at the portal from Hell.”

  Chapter 26

  There was a little discussion about who was traveling how. I stood firm and insisted Jack and I had to remain with the car, so we got to drive over. Sadly, Ralph insisted on coming with us. Happily, the moment he so insisted, Hansel and Gretel also insisted. So we had the three of them in the backseat. Ralph and Hansel were panting and Gretel was grooming. I felt like we’d either joined Animal Control or were running our own mobile pet grooming business.

  “I’m sure Freddy and Cindy are asking the same thing,” Jack said as we drove out of the cemetery. “What’s with the number eighteen and what’s also with the idea of three different schemes?”

  “The number is only significant because it’s a common number we’re placing again and again at the scene of the
crime.”

  “Yes,” Gretel chimed in. “It could be seven, it could be thirty-three, hundreds, one. It’s the fact that we can easily slot to that number that indicates the problem.”

  “But we got to eighteen because there were five trails that led off from the alley,” Jack said. “Maybe we’re just reaching.”

  “But we’re not,” Hansel said. “If we were reaching, we couldn’t have matched that number so well and so often.”

  “Eighteen minus five is thirteen,” Ralph added. “Easy to match to the Prince’s favorite ‘bad’ number, too.”

  “So, no matter what, we have a big problem and a lot of people involved in it, right?” Jack asked. There was unanimous agreement from the rest of us. “So, what’s up with Abaddon and Apollyon? Who are they?”

  “Angels who went to the Prince. Any turned undead is powerful, but angels, by their nature, are worse.”

  Jack nodded. “I can see that. I don’t want to be around Black Angel Two right now. I don’t want to try to imagine what they’d be like completely evil.”

  “They’d be like Abaddon and Apollyon,” Gretel said, softly.

  “God deliver me,” Jack said only half-jokingly.

  “Gods help. When they can.” I thought about what Miriam had said to me. “But, when it comes down to it, it’s you and your soul against the Prince.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence. Well, other than the panting and other animal-related noises our backseat passengers were indulging in. I chose not to look.

  I spent the time instead running through the three options we’d identified. They all led back to the idea that we had, if not the Prince, then some of his strongest minions running around free on the human plane.

  We didn’t have enough data yet to be certain of what the play might be, though. And there was always the possibility that we didn’t have three plans, we had one big, nasty one. Eighteen doppelgängers was still a strong possibility – once the pattern was imprinted, you could make as many as you wanted to, within reason, that reason being there had to be the right number of corresponding souls to connect with.

  Eighteen fake Tomios wandering around was a bad enough idea. The essence of evil put into eighteen separate beings, myself and Jack included, was also not anybody’s idea of good. Eighteen souls connected to the infected souls – also badness. But if what Jerry had insinuated was accurate, it wasn’t Tomio who’d been in the alley last night.

  We poured out of the car and met the others at the end of the alleyway, at the dead-end. Examination of the physical revealed nothing new.

  I knew what was on the right – a small grocer who closed before dusk every night. There was a bridal shop on the left, also closed at night. Even the Prosaic City poor liked to look nice when they got married, after all. “What’s in the building that makes up the back side here?” I asked our newest recruits.

  Freddy and Sexy Cindy both shrugged. “Didn’t get to that side much,” Freddy said.

  I gave Sexy Cindy a look that said I wasn’t going to buy that from her. “We’re talking the fate of the known planes of existence here. What’s on the other side?”

  “I’ll go look,” Ralph offered eagerly.

  “Sit, stay, good boy. I asked Cindy a question and I want an answer.”

  She made a face. “I didn’t go there, not my kind of place.”

  Jack nudged me. “The Pleasure Palace, it’s a skin club.”

  I chose not to ask how he knew. “You’re telling me you didn’t cruise outside a skin club, looking for business? Seriously, we’re on the same side now, and just how naïve do you think any of us are?”

  She shrugged and looked down. “Didn’t like the clientele, okay?”

  The base of my tail did its thing. Sexy Cindy had known instinctively that the incantation Tomio handed out was evil. “What about them made you uncomfortable?” I used my “questioning a frightened witness voice”. It was normally considered soothing.

  Her head shot up and she glared at me. “I ain’t a baby.”

  I gave up. “No. You’re an undead, a succubus, to be exact. One of exactly two who were swallowed by Slimy, Creature from the Hell Lagoon, who survived relatively unscathed.”

  “We died,” Freddy said dryly.

  “Cry me a river. You’re standing there, unliving. You just talked to seven of your brethren who aren’t going to open eyes or mouths again until the Prince can arrange his Final Solution Attack and then they’ll be raised up for cannon fodder for the side of evil.”

  “You can’t know that,” Freddy argued.

  H.P. cleared his throat. “Actually, we can. There’s ample proof, in a variety of tomes. When we have a spare minute, Frederick, I’ll be happy to show you. Until then, you’ll have to trust that Victoria does know of what she speaks. The dead who do not ascend, who do not join the unliving, and who do not automatically go to the Prince’s Hell remain interred in the earth, in blackness, until such time as they are called to fight. Those who died more on the side of the Prince than on the side of goodness will fight as part of the Army of the Damned.”

  Sexy Cindy processed this. “That’s going to be most of them, isn’t it?”

  I couldn’t help it, I had to ask. “What did you do, before your ex forced you into hooking?” She mumbled something. “What? Didn’t catch that.” She mumbled again. “Really, speak up. Time’s wasting here.”

  “I was studying to be a preschool teacher.” Sexy Cindy had the combo of defiance and embarrassment down perfectly.

  “Oh, I think you should aim for higher education,” H.P. said, with complete sincerity. I couldn’t blame him. The streets were burning off of Sexy Cindy and Freddy at the speed of Zeus’ lightning bolts. “We always need good instructors.”

  “Recruit for the University later,” Monty said. “We need to plan our next moves.”

  “No, actually, we need Cindy to tell us exactly why she didn’t like the clientele at The Pleasure Palace.”

  “I agree,” Edgar said. “Because I believe there’s a good chance the monster originated on the other side of the wall.”

  Chapter 27

  We all stared at Sexy Cindy. She glared back.

  I gave it another shot. “Look, we’re not asking because we think you’re stupid or not good enough or whatever inferiority thing you’ve got going is telling you. We’re asking because you’re spotting evil naturally, and you’re repelled by it. Ergo, if you were repelled by The Pleasure Palace’s clientele, we really want to know why, in that cop way of ours.”

  She deflated. “Okay, fine. They all seemed…wrong to me. I don’t know any girl who ever picked a john up from there, either. Well, except one. But she’s dead now.”

  Jack and I exchanged the cop “oh really?” look. “What did she die from?” he asked.

  “Got real sick, sort of wasted away.”

  “How soon after she picked up that john from The Pleasure Palace?”

  Sexy Cindy’s brow crinkled in thought. “Maybe a week, maybe a little more.”

  “How long ago was this?” The base of my tail mentioned that it knew exactly what Sexy Cindy was going to say.

  “Right about the time when Tomio had everybody read those evil words.” Her expression said she had a direct line to my tail. “Oh, crap, it killed her, didn’t it?”

  “No. Well, yes, but not in the way you probably think. And,” I added to the glare that was starting to radiate out of her eyes, “not because I think you’re stupid. Because you’ve been undead about a day and I just doubt Indoctrination taught you about what possession by a major evil minion does to a human.”

  Ken put his hand against the wall and concentrated. “It’s not giving off any evil resonance.”

  “And yet, it should,” Edgar said. “A manifestation of the size you dealt with should leave resonance for days. Which means it’s got a spell on it.”

  “So, what do you figure?” Ralph asked me.

  “The incantation provided Abaddon with a
portal. He came through into The Pleasure Palace. For whatever reason, he didn’t take a possession there. Isn’t that odd?”

  Edgar shook his head. “It makes sense. The clientele are the Prince’s servants. They want a strong army. Better to take an innocent, ensure one less for our side.”

  “Okay, so he picks up the poor girl unlucky enough to score a john from our little den of iniquity. He drains her life source and drops her back on her street corner.” A thought occurred. “Cindy, did you know her well enough to know who her pimp was?”

  “Yeah. Same pimp as the other two girls we just, ah, talked to. She worked that side of the block, though, so I didn’t see her much.”

  “How well connected to Tomio is this pimp?” Jack asked.

  Sexy Cindy shrugged. “I dunno. Tomio knew everyone.”

  “Which was why he was the perfect choice for infiltration,” Martin said. Black Angel Two nodded. Not that I felt we needed angelic confirmation because it seemed obvious Tomio had been hand-selected for evil quality.

  “I go back to the question of what our plan is,” Monty said. “Figuring things out is nice. Doing something about it is better.”

  “Thank you, oh fount of wisdom and experience.” I considered our options. Splitting up seemed like it was going to be in order. We clearly needed to investigate The Pleasure Palace, we needed to track down all the potential relatives of the dead, keeping an eye on the folks in the hospital was going to be a given, and finding out what was up with Tomio had to be a good idea.

  It dawned on me that it was probably past time to check on Amanda and Maurice. I dialed up Amanda on my wrist-com. No answer. Okay, no reason to panic. Called Maurice. No answer. Called the Count. “Have you heard from Amanda or Maurice? Recently, I mean?”

  There must have been something in my tone of voice that told the Count that now wasn’t the time to chide or complain. “No. I’ll try now.” It was quiet for a few long seconds. “No answer from either one. Black Angel One just came back on duty, sending them to intercept.”

  “Good. Please tell them to be careful and fast.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what do you think has befallen them?”