A shadow crossed his handsome face, and I knew he knew what I was talking about. I also knew he didn’t really want to talk about it with someone he didn’t know, and that seemed smart to me. I leaned forward. “Hey, look, it’s cool. Why don’t I leave Cassidy a note?”
He relaxed a little when I used the name, and he slid me a pencil and piece of paper across the counter. I noticed he made it a point not to touch me, and I smiled a little. Working with someone who can pick up psychic impressions off objects would give me an increased personal bubble, too.
C —
In town for a few. Nothing you need to worry about. Council stuff. Next time I’m through, I’ll give you a call and we can grab a drink. Regards to S.
Harker
I scribbled my message on the paper, wrote my cell number under it, and passed it back to the young man. “Here you go. Thanks for the tip on the books. I’ll give those places a shot.”
“For special books, you probably want to start with Harbor Books. Gerry over there has been known to pick up some oddball things from time to time.”
“Thanks, um…what was your name again?” I asked.
“Teague,” he said. “And you are?”
“Quincy Harker,” I replied. “I’m an old acquaintance of the shop and the owners.”
His eyes widened just a tiny bit. “I’ve heard the name.”
I smiled at him. “All true, pal. Every word.” I turned and stepped back out onto the street.
Full night had fallen, and Charleston was a different world. The bright pastels of Rainbow Row were whitewashed in the moonlight, and the whole town felt more like Victorian London than a modern American city. Even several blocks from the water, I could smell the thick ocean musk and taste the salt hanging heavy in the air.
My boots clomped across the brick sidewalks as I dodged broken stones and ankle-snapping divots. I crossed the street and headed south, turning left onto Market toward East Bay and stopping cold as I saw a shimmering figure walking into the old City Market.
“I really don’t want to get involved in this,” I muttered. I said it like a mantra as I walked down the street outside the open-air craft market that stood on the site near where so many men, women, and children were sold as property. I kept pace with the ghost, having no desire to leave a wandering spirit at my back, even if it was a harmless specter.
Most of them are. Harmless, that is. It’s the rare ghost that can affect the material world more than a little knocking and the occasional moaning in the night. But it’s a pretty rare ghost that wanders much more than a few feet from its resting place, and this ghost was moving into its third block since I spotted it, so there was definitely something odd going on.
I opened my Sight and immediately understood what was going on. The ghost itself glowed white and yellow in my vision, a pretty common color for the non-malevolent haunting types. Around its waist was the interesting thing. A band of pulsating crimson energy encircled the ghost like a belt, or a lasso, leading off down through the market. This ghost wasn’t just wandering through the streets of Charleston. That happened all the time. This ghost had been summoned and was being compelled to do someone’s bidding. Compelled with blood magic and necromancy, two things that ranked only slightly below “demon summoning” on Quincy Harker’s List of Things that Get Your Ass Kicked. It looked like I was going to get involved in this mess after all.
I dropped my Sight, snapping my vision back to the mundane world just as I passed the delicious smells of one of Charleston’s many seafood restaurants. There was a line to get in the place, and I lost sight of the ghost for a few seconds pushing through the crowd. When I finally emerged on the other side, the glowing image was a block ahead of me, passing out of the end of the market and turning down a narrow passage between two buildings. I hurried after it, only to get to the mouth of the alley and see nothing.
“Shit,” I said. I opened my Sight, and the amount of magic around me left me momentarily blind. The entire alley glowed a deep red, almost the color of blood, shot through with streaks of gray, green, and a glaring piss-yellow. There was nothing good being done here, and all that not good was being done an awful lot.
I saw just a hint of white glowing amidst the darker sheen on the bricks and strode down the alley to where the last flicker of the ghost’s essence lingered. A dingy metal door with heavy hinges and a thick deadbolt stood there, just the barest hint of magical essence glowing through the crack under the door. I dropped my Sight, and the ugliness of the psychic world around me faded to the normal nasty of an urban back alley with a few random garbage bags, a hint of piss wafting into my nostrils, and the acidic reek of a puddle of vomit by the opposite wall. The gray door in front of me had no identifying marks, but the new lock and well-worn scrape marks in the dirt at my feet told the story of frequent use.
I pressed my ear to the door, but it was too thick for even my enhanced hearing to pick up anything. There was no knob, just a bent piece of metal bolted to the door, so I gripped the makeshift handle and pulled. The door was unlocked and swung open with just a whisper, more evidence that not only was this entrance used a lot, but by someone who took pains to make sure their passing was as quiet and unobserved as possible.
I slipped into the building, all my mundane senses open as wide as I could manage. I kept my Sight closed off except for brief scans because there was so much red and gray pain and death magic coating the walls and floor that I could barely stand the onslaught. I stepped into a narrow corridor running the length of the building, illuminated by one flickering fluorescent tube and glaring green LED glow of the EXIT sign over my head. My boots were nearly silent on the scuffed tile floor, but I kept to the walls and shadows as best I could regardless.
There was a hallway to my right that ran to the front of the building and what looked like a simple wooden door. To my left, the corridor went a dozen yards back into the building and turned a corner, away from the street and, presumably, any prying eyes. I went left, thinking that most things done with ghosts are probably best done as far from public view as possible.
I rounded the corner only to find the hallway ran just ten more feet into a dead end. There was an open door, and a little more light fed in from the next room or passage. I crouched down to make my shadow smaller and walked to the door. I peered through the door into a large room, some kind of warehouse or storeroom. It was a huge open space, easily sixty feet on all sides, completely empty except for the naked man standing in the center of the room in a casting circle, his hands raised to the heavens.
Great, I thought. Nothing better than fighting a naked wizard in a strange city when you’re supposed to be hunting down missing angels. I guess it could be worse. I could be wrestling a nude Sasquatch.
I drew in some energy from my surroundings, a little unsteady from the corruption coursing through the area, and released a trickle of it into the air around my hands. A bright blue glow filled the room, and the man in the circle stopped mid-incantation to gape at me.
“Who dares interrupt the workings of the Grand Barathan?”
“Is Grand your first name, or is it more of a description? I think you’re the only Barathan I’ve met, so I don’t have much of a basis for comparison. Is that a thing now? Should I start calling myself the Grand Harker? I mean, I’m the only one left, so it’s not like anyone’s going to fight me for the title belt or anything.”
My new buddy apparently had nothing in the way of a sense of humor because he waved his arms and a dozen spirits floated up from the floor of the warehouse and floated toward me, every one of them wailing and flailing like bad guys in a haunted house.
I’m usually not very worried about ghosts. With the exception of the random banshee, most things are pretty harmless when they’re dead. The exception is malevolent poltergeists, who can sometimes throw things with a lot more aim than they should have for denizens of the ethereal plane. Then there are wraiths—angry spirits summoned by necromancers. Wraiths can’t
cause physical harm, but they drain your life essence with every touch, kinda like Death in the old Gauntlet video game. Except you can’t get this essence back by eating a digital turkey leg.
I blinked my Sight in and out just to confirm my worst suspicions about the spirits currently coming for me across the floor of the abandoned warehouse. Yep, every one of them had the sickly yellow-tinted aura of a wraith. So I was all alone staring down a naked necromancer and a dozen ghosts that could suck the life right out of me.
It was looking like a bad night for our hero.
8
I let loose a bolt of energy from each hand, not even bothering to coalesce it into a spell, just pouring sheer power into the wraiths. I managed to blast four of them back to the Otherworld with my first shot, but that still left eight.
I leapt for the rafters and grabbed a joist, using it to swing over to the other side of the room, buying myself a few extra seconds. Unfortunately, in escaping the ghosts, I put myself a lot closer to the evil necromancer (yes, I know it sounds redundant, but I have met more than one non-evil necromancer). He lobbed a ball of fire at me, which exploded in a textbook circular blast and singed me even with my enhanced reflexes. Obviously, somebody played a little too much D&D.
The problem with tossing around fireballs inside buildings is twofold. First, buildings burn, which is generally a bad day for everyone in them, often including the person who threw the spell in the first place. Second, fire sucks a lot of the oxygen out of a room, which is even worse for the people inside than the fire. You can run away from a fireball, but it’s a lot harder to run from suffocation. The bad guy’s spell not only caught the walls and ceiling insulation on fire, it also made it tough to breathe between the smoke and the lack of oxygen.
I drew my pistol and shot out a couple of the windows up near the ceiling line, letting more air into the room. On the one hand, that move kept me from dying right that second. On the other hand, it gave the fire in the insulation more fuel, and it raced across the desiccated fiberglass, spreading to every corner of the room in seconds.
I looked away from the blazing ceiling to see a pair of wraiths closing on me. I called up my personal reserves of power and shouted “begone!” at the top of my lungs. The wraiths vanished, but I staggered as the power flowed out of me in an instant. I ran across the room, firing a couple of rounds at the necromancer in his circle as I passed. They pinged off his magical protections, but it was worth a shot. Some folks forget to ward against physical threats when they believe their surroundings to be secure, and putting a couple of bullets into the wizard would have been an easy way to bring most of my troubles to a quick resolution.
I leapt over a wraith in my path and lowered my shoulder as I approached what looked like a standard office-issue, hollow-core wooden door. I heard a resounding crack as I slammed into the door, but it didn’t come from the door splintering into a million pieces like I’d really, really hoped it would.
Nope, it came from my collarbone as I hit a steel-reinforced door clad in what only looked like cheap wood. The door held up to my onslaught, but the surrounding wall wasn’t reinforced, so the door and jamb went down, with me on top of them. I took out a solid four to six inches of wall on all three sides of the door, and the whole mess fell flat underneath me.
“FUCK!” I shouted, scrambling to my feet and spinning around to see the four wraiths gliding toward me, an inexorable tide of suck preceded by the fire racing across the ceiling at me. The necromancer was nowhere in sight, having yanked down his circle and vanishing while I attempted my escape. I offered up a brief and petty hope that his pants had already burned.
I tried to raise my right hand and summon magic, but my shoulder screamed at me, and I dropped to one knee as the pain hit me like a bullet. From a crouch, I held up my functioning left arm and drew a hasty circle on the floor in front of me with a Sharpie I carry in my back pocket. I bit my thumb and smeared a little blood across the line, invoking the circle and buying me a few seconds. The circle would keep the wraiths out, and it would keep me from burning to death, but it wouldn’t do shit to stop me from suffocating, dying of smoke inhalation, or just broiling inside my own skin.
I wracked my brain for an incantation that would banish four wraiths at once, but the pain in my shoulder made it hard to concentrate. Even if I could whip up something of sufficient power to do the job, there were no guarantees that I wouldn’t fuck it up in my addled state. There are worse things than miscasting a spell and being trapped inside your own circle with it, but not many.
The four wraiths surrounded my circle, not touching the mystical barrier, just surrounding it. It was like they knew I couldn’t hold it forever, and all they had to do was be patient and they’d be able to get their fill of my soul. Their faces were twisted in a rictus of pain and hunger, and they bore no resemblance to the people they’d been. These were no friendly Caspers; these were monsters eager to rip my soul to pieces and feed on the scraps.
I reached out with one hand, cautiously extending my fingertips until I just brushed the surface of the glowing sphere of force surrounding me. Magical circles are kinda like soap bubbles. They have very little surface tension, but if you do it just right, you can actually touch one without destroying it. That’s what I did now, I just barely connected my fingertips with the circle’s inside edge. A push too hard, and it would pop out of existence, and I’d be wraith food. Not enough contact, and my silly plan wouldn’t work.
I pointed my right hand toward the floor and spun my essence out through my fingers until I found what I was looking for. I lit upon a fat conduit carrying electrical wires underneath the building and drew power from it up through the floor, through myself, and poured it into my circle.
The barrier flickered, blinked a little in spots, then strengthened, its power bolstered by the power from the building. I opened the flow of energy a little, channeling more power into the circle. Like bubblegum, the sphere of energy started to expand as more and more juice poured into it. I cranked up the juice, and the circle grew exponentially faster. The wraiths whirled around faster and faster, torn between their desire to get at me and their fear of the power expanding outward.
I kept the flow increasing at a steady pace for several seconds, then cranked the floodgates wide open, drawing as much energy through myself as I could handle, blowing the circle wide open and sending a wave of energy out from myself like a shockwave from a nuclear blast. Except this shockwave was pure magical force, and when the wave hit the wraiths, it slammed into them like a hurricane wind, tearing the spirits to shreds and scattering their essence across the Otherworld.
The wraiths gone, I ran for the front of the building, found a plate glass window, and hurled myself through it. I intentionally used my already-injured shoulder, which ended up with me screaming and rolling around on the sidewalk covered in glass and soot, smoke rising from my hair and clothes.
A pair of boots materialized in front of my eyes, and I looked up the legs attached to them to see Arianne scowling down at me. Great, from a necromancer to a pissed-off witch. This night really sucks.
“I knew you were trouble the first time I laid eyes on you,” the witch said, waving a hand at the mess behind me as if it were evidence.
Sometimes I can’t keep my mouth shut when I really should. This was not the time for old Meat Loaf quotes, but I couldn’t stop myself. I smiled up at her and said, “I bet you say that to all the boys.”
The last thing I saw was a combat boot coming at my forehead; then everything went black.
9
I woke up with a headache, a really sore shoulder, and the smell of smoke lingering in my nose. All in all, I’ve had worse. I tried to sit up, and immediately, the pain in my shoulder went through the roof, and I moved right into the “worse” category. I fell back to the bed I was on, and that sent another wave of pain rolling through me. I fought desperately to keep my lunch in place as the waves of blinding pain radiated from my shoulder to my skull
and back again.
“Fuuuuuuck,” I groaned.
“Oh good, you’re awake. We didn’t want to try healing you until we could at least let you scream a little.” I didn’t try to sit up this time, but I did manage to turn my head to the side and look at Arianne. She was sitting in a cheap hotel chair, and by my best guess at the chair and the table beside her, we were back at the King Charles. I assumed we were in my room, but they all pretty much look the same, and I couldn’t see any of my crap lying around, so maybe not.
“Heal me?” I asked. My voice cracked, and I sounded like a man who had just walked for a week in a desert. Or spent five minutes in a burning building. They sound about the same. “Feel free to start that process any time.”
“Okay, but this is going to hurt,” came a new voice. I turned my head to the other side and saw a young man with blond curls and a goatee sitting on the bed next to me. He held a pair of very large scissors and wore a serious expression. I didn’t like where this was going.
The stranger leaned in, scissors moving toward my throat. I sucked back the agony in my shoulder enough to roll away from him and bring my hands up as I tumbled off the bed and came up to my knees.
“Back off, pal. I don’t know what you’re planning with the scissors, but nothing I’ve got going on requires surgery.”
A puzzled look flashed across his face, then he relaxed and let out a little laugh. “Don’t worry,” he said, exactly the kind of thing a psychopath with scissors would say. “I have to cut your shirt off to set your clavicle. Otherwise, when we heal it, your shoulder won’t work right. I don’t think you want to try to raise your arm over your head right now, do you?”
I looked down at my clothes. I had just survived a fire, so it’s not like anything I was wearing was really salvageable except for my trusty Doc Martens. My jeans were pretty much okay, except for a little soot and a scuff at the knee, but my shirt and t-shirt were pretty well fucked.
Devil Inside: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Urban Fantasy Novella Page 5
