“Yeah, too bad I don’t have any of that stroke anymore.”
Glory reached across the table and put a hand on top of his. “You’ll get it back. That’s what we do. We help people.”
And here I thought all this time that all I did was chew bubblegum and kick ass. Guess I shouldn’t worry about being out of bubblegum. Nowadays I “help people.”
Fuck me running, I’m surrounded by celestial hippies.
4
Luke’s apartment was dark when I walked in. That wasn’t a huge surprise; he kept the place pretty close to pitch black most of the time. Being Lord of the Vampires came with a few perks, one of which was cat-like night vision. I didn’t inherit that quality, so I reached out to flip on the lights as I walked into the room.
“Leave it, please,” came my uncle’s voice from the middle of the living room. I heard the scrape of a match across a box, and a flame burst into life. Luke touched the burning tip to a red pillar candle on an end table, and a soft yellow light spread throughout the room.
I shrugged and walked over to the sitting area and took a spot on the end of the sofa nearest the candle. Luke sat in an armchair, his slick hair and perfect creases at odds with the forced casual appearance of his untucked dress shirt and open collar.
“How were the interviews?” I asked.
“Dreadful.” He didn’t elaborate for a long time, and I didn’t push. I couldn’t tell what Luke needed from me right now, if he needed to talk or just needed company, but I knew he didn’t need to be left alone to his thoughts. Down that path was a gauntlet of self-doubt and recrimination about why he wasn’t awake and able to save Renfield when Smith broke in. We’d all been able to shove our thoughts of Ren’s death aside when we went to Atlanta to fight Orobas and keep the world from ending, but now that we were back home, we had a lot of pieces to pick up.
“Brandy?” Luke asked, rising from his chair with the fluid grace that spawned legends of him turning to smoke and vanishing in thin air. He can do none of those things, but he can move with amazing speed and stand perfectly still in a shadow, so to the uneducated eye, he can seem to disappear at will.
“No, thank you, but I’ll take a single malt if you have one.”
“I do not. The Council had a fondness for scotch, Dr. Watson in particular.”
“I don’t know if he’s really a doctor, or if he’s got some kind of lawyer doctor degree. Good to know who drank all my scotch, though. Brandy will be fine, then.”
Luke poured me a brandy and poured himself a glass of red wine. We both knew it wasn’t exactly red wine, but as long as I never drank from his glass, I didn’t need to know exactly what blend of wine, blood, and anticoagulants he kept in his wine cellar.
He handed me my glass and sat back down in his chair. We sipped our drinks in silence for several minutes. I was content to wait. Luke and I have spent a lot of time together in my century and change on this Earth, and we don’t have to make small talk. It’s one of the things I like about being with him—no bullshit.
“Does the angel know anything?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“Nothing useful. He can turn the sword on, but he has no idea what he is. I had hoped being around Glory would spark him somehow, some kind of jump-start to his memory or something, but nothing yet.”
“Do you know anything about the next angel you need to find?”
“We’ve come up with a list of who they are, and Dennis is searching the web for any anomalies that might correspond to their presence. He said he wouldn’t have anything until the morning, so I left him to it. Glory is talking to Mitch about Heaven, trying to jog his memory of people, angels, that he should have known. Besides being boring as balls, I kinda didn’t care, so I thought I’d come check on you.”
“While I appreciate your concern for my hiring process, I am perfectly fine and completely capable of doing this without any assistance.”
“I know that, but it’s been a while since you hired a Ren—”
“Don’t call him that.”
“What? You always call your manservant Renfield. It’s been a thing since you met my dad.”
“That is over. I am no longer hiring a manservant. I am hiring a live-in personal assistant. I will learn his name, and he will become a valued member of my staff, nothing more.” Luke’s jaw was tight and his voice clipped. He was working very hard to keep his emotions in check.
“Nothing?” I asked after a few seconds.
“Nothing.” He didn’t look at me, just stared into the dregs in his wine glass. “I can’t anymore, Quincy. I simply can’t. I have to remain detached from these…people. I became attached to Sylvester. He was much more than a manservant or a butler. He was…”
“A friend?” I supplied the word.
“Yes. He was a friend.”
“Sylvester.” I rolled the name around on my tongue. It felt odd, like I was saying something wrong. I’d honestly forgotten Ren’s real name until the day before. After a while, I just ignored the fact that he had another name, another life.
“Yes, Sylvester. He had an entire life before coming to me. He had a sister whom he loved very much, and he sent most of his salary to her until her death two years ago. His parents were long deceased when he entered my service, and he never married. His sister died childless, so his generation, his entire family line, ended when he passed.”
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” I said, thinking about the various family lines that I had running around out there. Both of my brothers died before they had children, James because his wife couldn’t conceive, and Orly because he was still mostly a child himself when the influenza took them.
There were aunts and uncles scattered across England, but none that I kept track of after I started traveling with Luke. I realized that I had no idea if I was the last Harker or not. Then I realized that I had no idea if I had any children scattered across Europe and America. The twenties had definitely roared, that was a sure enough thing.
“It certainly makes my life simpler when there is no next of kin,” Luke said. “Out of eight men interviewed today, four of them were married and one other had a serious girlfriend. That makes them completely unsuitable for my service.”
“Yeah, someone can’t exactly keep all your secrets if there’s the possibility of pillow talk,” I agreed. “I guess that’s another reason to keep a level of detachment from your new…assistant.” An idea hit me. “Have you interviewed any women?”
“Excuse me?” Luke looked genuinely shocked at the concept.
“Luke, it’s the twenty-first century, get with it. You’re not hiring someone to wrestle a coffin into the back of a wagon, or drive a carriage, or defend your lair against roving villagers with pitchforks and torches.”
“I never have,” he replied. “I believe you have me confused with Adam. He was the one chased from his home with pitchforks and torches. Although he assures me that was purely cinematic license.”
“My point is that there’s nothing in the job description that requires your…assistant be male.”
Luke looked at me, a thoughtful expression bouncing around his face. “Perhaps you are correct, Quincy. I shall consider female applicants during my next round of interviews. I shall contact the headhunter tomorrow with new directions.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” I said.
“Why not? It is, I believe, the acceptable term.”
“It is, but just looking around at all the people and things we deal with, it might ring a little too close to true for us.” Luke actually smiled a little bit at that, the first time I’d seen that in a week or more.
“What is your plan now, Quincy? You have located an angel, but he does not understand his nature. If all the Host are in such a state, then how will you manage to coerce them into helping you restore Glory’s divinity?”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a long pull on my drink. “That’s a really good question.” The truth was, I had no idea. There’s onl
y one way angels get made, and that’s by the hand of God Himself. With the Big Guy AWOL, the only way to find Him was using the Archangels. If the Archangels had no idea they were angels, then the chances of their homing beacon for the Almighty being turned on were slim to none.
I let out a sigh and leaned back in my chair. “I don’t know, Luke. All I can think of right now is that we need to find them all. I guess I’m hoping that if we get them all in the same place, some kind of spontaneous anti-amnesia thing will happen, and everybody will suddenly sprout wings, pick up harps, and fly off to the Pearly Gates, leaving Glory with a nice new pair of wings.”
“Somehow that seems more ludicrous than even some of your worst ideas.” Luke never has been one to pull punches with me.
“Yeah, I know. But I can’t think of anything else to do. I have to get her wings back. I need her, Luke. I need her at full strength, I need her fighting beside me, and I need her to not have lost everything because of me. I need…” I let the words just hang there. My chest was tight, and my breath came in short gasps.
“You need to save one of them.” The words were almost a whisper, but I heard them as well as if he’d used a megaphone.
“Yeah,” I choked out. “I need to not have another one die, or lose everything about themselves just for being near me. I need to save one of my people. It’s all well and good to save some faceless people on a Ferris wheel, or a bunch of people at a concert, but goddammit, once in a while, I need to be able to save my people. The folks who put their lives on the line for strangers all the time. The people who took up weapons and stepped forward just because I asked them to, because I said it was important. I need to be able to save them, too. Just this once.” Tears rolled down my cheeks as I thought about the people I couldn’t save, going all the way back to my younger brothers, who both died in the flu epidemic of 1918. I couldn’t do anything for them, I couldn’t do anything for Anna, I couldn’t do anything for Dennis or Renfield or Rebecca’s dad, but goddammit, I was not letting Glory lose her divinity on my account.
“Then we shall find the angels, Quincy,” Luke said, standing up and taking my glass. I sat silently and watched him walk across the room and refill my drink, turn to me, then return to the bar and pour me a double.
He stood in front of me, glass full of that lovely amber liquid. “Now, have yourself a nice drink, and let’s figure out where we start, shall we?”
5
I pulled into the downtown Historic District of Charleston, South Carolina, around two in the afternoon a couple days later. I had the windows down and the breeze rolling across my arm as I hung it out the window of my new car, a deep red Honda Accord. I’ve never been a “car guy,” looking at my vehicles mostly as a mode of transportation and not some expression of my soul or my worth as a human being.
When I got back to North Carolina, I realized that the junker pickup I’d bought when I went to Ohio was still in Ohio and that my old car had been destroyed in the same explosion that blew up Luke’s house. Something about a door through the grill. So I took the insurance payout and a little cash I had floating around from being over a century old, and I bought myself a nice little four-year-old car. It had plenty of room, rode the highway well, and had a jack for me to hook up my phone, which meant that I had all the internet music I ever wanted. There are some bonuses to having a friend who’s made up of electrons and can travel through the web.
I turned into the small parking lot of the King Charles Hotel and got out, taking a deep breath and cracking my back. I patted myself down to make sure my pistol was secure, pulled on a long-sleeve shirt to mask the gun, and walked into the lobby.
“May I help you, sir?” a young lady behind the desk asked as a bell on the door jingled my arrival. The lobby was well-appointed in what looked like either antiques or decent replicas. Nice chairs with striped upholstery and rounded backs flanked a small table with flyers for ghost tours and upscale restaurants scattered across its surface. A huge gilt mirror dominated one wall, and I smothered a smile at my recollection of Luke’s face when I told him where I was staying.
He hated that lobby, most particularly that mirror. New mirrors with their acrylic and glass construction weren’t an issue, but he still didn’t show up in older mirrors. Something about the way the silver they used to back the mirrors reacted to the magic that sustained him. I didn’t understand it, but I knew that wasn’t the only reason he didn’t accompany me. He was still interviewing new Renfields and beginning the cleanup and reconstruction process on his house. While I hated the reason he had to do it, I was glad he was moving forward with the project. The sooner he wasn’t living in the apartment next to me, the better.
I walked over to the front desk and leaned my arms on the dark green granite-topped counter. “Room for Harper, please. I have a reservation.”
She tapped on the keyboard for a few seconds, then smiled up at me. “Mr. Harper, I have you down for a king bed corner suite for seven nights. Will you be needing a parking pass?” I nodded, and she passed me a garish yellow slip of paper for my dash, then took my credit card and fake ID. I knew the feeble attempt at masking my identity wouldn’t stand up to any serious scrutiny, but I had Sparkles lurking in the internet ready to alert me if anyone queried the name of Orly Harper from Battle Creek, Michigan.
Orly was a traveling consultant working with several major hotels on energy efficiency. He was in Charleston to review the power consumption of their ballroom lighting and make recommendations on how to reduce their overhead through the use of LEDs, occupancy sensors, and daylight harvesting. If that wasn’t enough to bore any Curious George chatting me up in a bar, I could go on for hours about Orly’s hobby, which made Charleston such a fascinating section of his sales territory. Orly loved architecture, particularly French-inspired architecture from the antebellum South.
I know slightly more about antebellum architecture than I do about nuclear submarines, but only slightly. If anybody looked like they really wanted to chat me up about that crap, I was either going to have to develop an acute case of irritable bowel syndrome or kill them.
I retrieved my credit card and Michigan driver’s license, signed the slip for the room rate, and pocketed my key. I took a few minutes to take my bags to the room and unpack my crap, then I walked back out to the car and slipped my pistol under the driver’s seat. It was still broad daylight, and I was in the middle of downtown. If there was an ambush of pissed-off Homeland Security demons waiting for me, they would have been in the hotel lobby. They wouldn’t be walking The Battery, which was where I was eventually headed.
I walked a couple of blocks from the hotel, then took a right on East Bay and headed toward the tip of downtown. I stopped by the big fountain and walked out on the pier at Waterfront Park, sitting for a few minutes on a swing until a family with a pair of toddlers wandered up really looking like they needed a seat. I walked all the way to the end of the pier and leaned out, letting the smell of the water and the slight spray of the salt air lull me into a deep sense of calm. My heart beat in time with the slap-slap of the waves against the rocks, and the gulls overhead pierced the peace with an occasional screech.
“Penny for ‘em,” a soft voice said beside me. I opened my eyes to see a young woman leaning on the rail to my left.
“Just thinking,” I said, not wanting to get involved. She was too young for me, and not my type anyway.
“I could see that, silly. What were you thinking about?” I looked at her a little more closely this time. Dark hair cascaded down to her bare shoulders, partially obscuring a large tattooed undersea scene that sleeved her right arm in vibrant blues and greens. She wore a tank top and threadbare khaki cargo pants with black Chuck Taylor high tops and a belt studded with pouches and pockets like a utility belt slung low across her hips. She had narrow features, almost pixie-ish, but a little too angular for that. Dark eyes looked up at me, a challenge written in huge letters across the smirk she wore. There was a lot more going on in that
face than just dimples, but I wasn’t at all sure why she was talking to me, out of all the people closer to her age on the pier.
“My thoughts.” This time I didn’t bother trying to keep the “piss off” hidden from my tone. I wasn’t really thinking about anything, just taking a minute to center myself before I opened my Sight and started scouring the city for an amnesiac angel. Now, as they said on Firefly, this girl was starting to seriously damage my calm.
I turned to walk away, and she put a hand on my arm, stopping me. I don’t mean that she put a hand on my arm, and I stopped, like most people do when they’re being polite. One, I’m rarely polite, and two, that isn’t what happened. She stopped me. I couldn’t break free of her grip, and I couldn’t push past her.
I looked at her hand, then back at her face. All smirk was gone now, and the face that looked up at me was cold. “I’m going to need a little more than that,” she said.
Well, she was about to get it. I pulled in my will and muttered “cumulonimbus” under my breath. Just as I clapped one hand on the pier railing behind me, a huge wind blew up, a solid forty-mile-per-hour gust that sent tourists and one hot dog cart tumbling.
It did absolutely nothing to the pixie-ish girl holding onto my arm. She waved a hand, whispered “disperse” like she was blowing a kiss, and the wind died down.
“That wasn’t very nice,” she said, her eyes taking on a deep purple glow. My arm started to tingle through my shirt, a pins and needle sensation running down to my fingertips and back up to my shoulder.
“Let go of me before I have to show you how not nice I can get,” I replied.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, mister. I don’t like strange wizards coming into my city without going through the proper channels. That happens, and people start to think there aren’t any rules at all, or that they just don’t apply to them. Can’t have that, can we?” She raised a fist toward my face, wrapped in that same purple glow.
Devil Inside: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Urban Fantasy Novella Page 3
