by Debra Dunbar
Dar. I didn’t know if I was more incensed over him stealing my Steward’s call sign or his disrespectful tone.
“For someone who is trying to get me to do a favor, you’re really going about it in the wrong way. You should be kissing my ass right now, not chewing it off.”
“I said I’d give you credit. I said I’d share the payment with you. What the fuck do you want? I’m in trouble here, Mal. Big trouble. I’ll give you the whole fucking payment if you want. You gotta help me out.”
He was really upset, but that was nothing new. Dar was always getting himself in trouble. I honestly think he had more demons gunning for him than I did. Whoever he’d pissed off this time would need to get in line. A really long line.
“I’m busy,” I told him. “I don’t have time to bail your ass out. I’m over here on vacation, playing with the humans and having fun, and that occupies every second of my day. I’m not going to help you with some bullshit scheme you’ve hatched up. Call someone else.”
“You owe me. Remember when that sorcerer wannabe summoned you? Who pulled your ass out of the fire then, huh?”
Yeah, Dar had come through then. Other times, too. Although sometimes he just laughed at me and left me high and dry. Still, we did have history and, stupidly, that meant something to me. I wondered how much trouble he was really in this time. I had a gnawing feeling inside, a strange urge to protect him, but I pushed it down. I really needed to cut this human sentimental crap or I’d wind up in trouble.
“Okay, okay. I’m not saying I’ll do it; just tell me what you want.” I knew I was going to regret this, but he was my brother.
“The teeth have an artifact that belongs to us. They don’t want it. They’re only holding it until we send someone to get it. I just need you to go to Baltimore, meet with them and retrieve it, then call me. I’ll pop over and get it from you. Bingo. Easy money.”
First things first. “Teeth? You mean the vampires? I haven’t seen one in six hundred years.” Ick. The last time I saw vampires they were disgusting. Dirty, smelly rats with the IQ of a fencepost. I’m not sure I’d want to touch anything they’d handled, and I’m not particularly fastidious.
“The vampires. Not those ones you saw in Venice eating plague victims. I think they might have been cast out or something. These are organized vampires. They are pretty full of themselves, but they’ve always been respectful. I’ll give you the meeting time and location in Baltimore. Just go there and they’ll hand it right over.”
Yeah. Because everything Dar got himself into was that easy. And I was Mother Theresa.
“You said you were in trouble? Who is paying you? What’s it? And why do you want this thing?” I asked.
“It’s an artifact.” Dar’s tone indicated that he thought I was an idiot. He probably didn’t know what this artifact thing was himself. I’ll bet someone a few levels above him flattered him and promised money and status and he fell all over himself to comply. Whore.
“And? Who wants this artifact?”
“I do.”
I sighed. He was such a fucking pain in the ass. “You told me earlier that you’d share the money and the credit. If it’s only you that wants this thing, then there is no money to share, and whatever credit you could give me is beneath what I already have. So, I ask again, who?”
“We are peers, Mal. Peers. Don’t pull this better-than-me bullshit, because it doesn’t hold water. I can’t believe you would even hesitate to do such a small thing for me when I help you every time you ask, when I always stand by your side, when I defend you against those who would slander your abilities and status. Ungrateful bitch.”
I rolled my eyes at his dramatic rant. “Who? Tell me who, Dar, or I’m closing the line right now and you can risk your angel-bait ass to come get it yourself.”
Dar paused for a moment. He’d almost gotten tagged last time over and I knew he was nervous about spending any significant amount of time here. “Haagenti,” he said.
Ah, and that would be why he was in so much trouble. Haagenti wasn’t just a few levels up from us. He was up. And he was old, too. No wonder he wanted someone else to do his pick-up and delivery work. Someone like him couldn’t just slip over here unnoticed and do a grab-and-dash. He’d set off alarm bells the second he had a toe through the gate.
“What are you doing messing with that asshole?” I asked. “He’s going to fuck you over whether you get this thing for him or not.”
I felt Dar’s discomfort. What had he gotten himself into this time? He knew better than to deal with the likes of Haagenti.
“I kinda have to do this, Mal,” he admitted. “There was an issue, and I owe him. I’ve tried three times to come over myself and get the thing, but the vampires keep blowing me off and I almost got cooked by the gate guardian last time.”
“And what makes you think they’ll meet with me?” I asked, perplexed. I was in the same level as Dar. He was actually a few notches above me.
“They were surprised you’re there, that you’re living so close to them. They didn’t know. I guess they’re curious. Plus, Haagenti suggested it. After this last time, when I almost got dusted by that fucking gate guardian, he said I needed to get you to do it for me. He said if you did it, he’d let me off the hook. I don’t know how he knew the vampires would agree to meet you.”
I wished Haagenti would chance coming over himself. He was such an asshole. I’d love to sic Gregory on him. I had a moment of mental fantasy where I envisioned Gregory in all his horrifying magnificence swooping in to battle Haagenti. Haagenti in his favored lion-bull form and Gregory glowing with fire, black eyes deep as the abyss, sharp spikes of teeth and awesome sword. Gregory would shine with righteous fury and hiss as he chopped the snarling Haagenti to bits. I felt rather damp between my thighs as this all played out in my head. I could seriously masturbate to this fantasy. Mmmmm.
“Mal?” Dar asked, wondering if I was still on the line.
“Tell Haagenti to fuck off,” I told him. “I’m on vacation.”
“Mal, please,” Dar pleaded. “I’ve saved your bacon so many times in the past. You know how he is. He’ll stick me up to my neck in liquid nitrogen for a hundred years if I don’t come through for him. It’s just a pick up and drop off deal. Quick and easy. Come on. I need you.”
Liquid nitrogen. Haggenti didn’t fuck around. That would not be a good way to spend a century. And Dar was my brother, after all. We’d been through a lot together. That gnaw of guilt, that wiggling urge to protect Dar was back again, as was a wave of anger at Haagenti. I fucking hated that asshole.
“Ok. Tell me when and where. It better not be boring, either.”
Dar gave me the info on the meeting place and time. It was on Saturday, and I had a hard time explaining to Dar that that was a week away and not tomorrow. I didn’t want him hounding me all week because he couldn’t keep a damned calendar.
At least it was at a food and beer festival. I was supposed to go to the Suds and Shellfish Extravaganza at the Verizon Center in DC and meet the contact at the Jolly Molly Crab Shack booth at three. Dar had no idea what the contact looked like. He (or she) was evidently going to approach me, hand me the item, and leave. I hoped they were on time or I’d have to stand there and eat crab cakes until I exploded. Luckily I did like crab, and I did like beer. Could have been worse. I told Dar I’d let him know as soon as I had the item and he’d arrange to get it from me. Hopefully I’d do this and he’d stop pestering me to death with his stupid incessant calls.
Now I was even more late. I cut Dar off as he tried to chit-chat and dashed out the door because I had something really important to do before meeting Wyatt at The Eastside Tavern.
I pulled into Sharpsburg just as the sun was setting, turning the sky bright orange. Antietam Battlefield is supposed to be closed at sunset, and they make a sweep right around that time, so I was forced to park along Sharpsburg Pike and hike in. Luckily where I was headed was only a little more than half a mile from the main
road.
I loved Antietam Battlefield. It was one of the main reasons I’d picked this area when I decided to live among the humans for an extended period of time. Demons are drawn to conflict, and this war had been no exception. I had fond memories of many battles, but the one at Antietam was my favorite. Of the 100,000 soldiers on the field, roughly 23,000 were killed, wounded, or missing. In one day. It was the bloodiest day of the war. If I hadn’t been a demon I would have died at least six times that day. It had been chaos. Thick smoke, the roar of the cannons, and constant gunfire filled the air. I could barely walk a few yards without being filled with lead. I’d fixed myself so much during the battle that I’d needed to bolt back through a gate that night. I hated having to miss the rest of the war, but it was better than then being killed by an angel.
Grabbing a flashlight from the car, I hiked across the wide fields marked with plaques detailing the conflict. Then I hopped the rough-hewn, zig-zag fence marking Sunken Road. It had been renamed Bloody Lane after the battle. More than 5,500 men had been killed or wounded in this very spot within three hours. I wanted to linger, but the place I needed to be was a bit further in, down Roulette Lane and by a copse of trees. I paused for a brief moment to remember. It had been a horrific point in the battle. Bodies everywhere, with the Mumma farm burning as a backdrop. Good times.
I walked down Roulette Lane, stepped off the dirt trail and into the woods, then stopped, seemingly in front of nothing, and looked at the gate, a jagged tear by the woods. It hadn’t been here at the time of the battle. I’d discovered it one day when I’d come to reminisce.
It was a wild gate. Most gates between my home and here were created by the angels. They were big, meticulously well-crafted, stable. They were works of art. The elves back home made gates, too. Theirs were small and unobtrusive, mainly to catch unwary humans and bring them over. But there were other gates. Ones that just seemed to occur on their own. These gates were a terrible gamble. They rarely went somewhere you wanted them to go.
This summer, in a desperate attempt to get away from Gregory before he killed me, I’d taken a chance on a wild gate and almost died. Gregory had managed to find me and pull me out, but the odd thing was that he thought I’d created it. Demons must have originally known how to make gates, but we seemed to have lost the knowledge. A big to-do on my continuing education list was to learn to make gates. And I was terrified.
I must have stood there for ten minutes just staring at the thing. I’d been through the angels’ gates hundreds of times in my life. I could probe them, activate and use them, but I just couldn’t determine how to make one of my own. Maybe the angel gates were too complex for me to learn from. Perhaps it was like trying to understand calculus before you’d mastered basic multiplication. I was hoping that if I explored this wild gate, compared it to the more complex ones, then I’d be able to figure out how they were constructed.
I’d learned all I could with my eyes so I pulled my personal energy back safely into my core and reached out with my hand to feel the gate. It was open. The angel ones were always closed until you activated them, and were masked so humans couldn’t see them. This one was small, and very hard to see. Humans would only notice a shimmer. I doubted they could fall through. The opening was narrow, like a slit, but widened as I stretched my arm toward it, as if it were welcoming me. Which didn’t do anything for my racing heart.
Taking a deep breath, I stuck my arm into the gate and paused a moment, thinking it might try and suck me inside. Nope. My arm slid easily out, as if what lay on the other side was just air. No slashing, bruising, melting flesh or other alarming changes occurred to my arm. Slowly I eased my personal energy down back into the arm. It felt fine. Now for the scary part.
I placed my hand on the outline of the gate and examined its structure, felt how the energy supporting it was anchored. The outline was irregular, but surprisingly basic. Taking a deep breath, I put my hand gingerly back into the gate. I didn’t feel anything particularly alarming, so I sent out a scan around the edges. The gate itself was shallow, and definitely opened up into something, although I couldn’t tell what or where. The edges narrowed into a point at the top, like a triangle, but it was tall enough that a human (or a demon) wouldn’t have to stoop when going through. I pulled my hand back and tried to work up the nerve to go through. Several times I stuck my hand back in and pulled it out, but couldn’t bring myself to put any additional body parts in.
Finally I gave up. Chickened out. I don’t have any qualms about throwing myself into unknown, potentially deadly situations, but this gate really hit a nerve with me. My instincts normally have a direct line to my moving parts, and they told me to run as far from this gate as I could. In spite of my instincts, I was still determined to get to the other side and try to figure it out. I wanted to do it without unnecessary pain and suffering though. Or death. I was coming back to try again, but not today. I needed to think about what safeguards I could put in place to ensure I didn’t die in this little experiment.
I was in a bad mood as I drove to The Eastside Tavern to meet Wyatt. I’d pondered some possibilities in exploring the gate without due risk, but I felt like a failure for walking away today. Fucking coward. I’d always just jumped into things without any thought at all about my personal safety. Why was I weak in the knees over this one?
The narrow strip of asphalt in front of The Eastside Tavern that served as a parking lot was full, as always, so I drove around back and parked by the wooded area past the dumpster. I beeped the car alarm, although at this point all the regulars knew my car and respectfully kept their sticky hands to themselves. The usual crowd of smokers was milling around the front lot and on the enclosed deck area by the door. I swung open the iron barred glass door and wandered through the bar and dining area to see if Wyatt was already there. They’d added a coyote to their taxidermy decorations, and I patted the fellow’s head as I passed by. Finally I spotted Wyatt toward the rear, sitting at one of the Formica-topped tables.
“Would you rather sit at the bar?” he asked as I plopped down beside him in the torn vinyl chair. “I can tell Brenda to bring our food and drinks up there.”
“This is fine.” I kissed his cheek like a normal girlfriend. “What did you order?”
“Burgers and hot wings. And your usual,” he added as the waitress put down an ice cold vodka and a Bud Light in front of me.
He was the best. I sucked down the vodka appreciating that they now had my favorite, Van Gogh Espresso, in the freezer. Just for little old me.
“I need your help with something,” I told him. “And do you want to go to a beer and seafood thing with me next Saturday?”
Wyatt made a face. “I want to go, but I’ve got an online tournament that will probably run all day and into the evening. How late is it? I can meet you there, but it would be around seven or so.”
“Nah, I hope to have things wrapped up and be back by dinner time.”
I wondered about Wyatt’s tournament. The only tournament I’d ever participated in had ended in disaster. I have a hard enough time staying on a horse without someone poking at me with a long pole. After my fifth time being knocked off, I got pissed and boiled my opponent in his little metal suit, which didn’t go over very well. There was a cry of “witch” and “sorcery” and I’d had to make a mad dash for the closest gate. I’d barely made it through before being overrun by angry humans or nabbed by an angel. I couldn’t imagine Wyatt doing that sort of thing with his computer, but people did all sorts of stuff with video games now. What a fucking boring way to spend an entire Saturday though.
“What do you need my help with?” Wyatt smiled, unaware that I was mentally deriding his life’s work.
“Can you use your tablet and check all the pet stores in a twenty mile radius to see if any of them have birds?”
Wyatt looked at me quizzically. “Don’t you have enough animals already?”
“It’s for a project,” I told him.
“Just
go to PetSmart and pick one up.”
I squirmed. “They won’t allow me in PetSmart anymore. Boomer was not very well behaved the last time we were there.” I liked to blame it on Boomer. He made a good fall guy.
“Okay. Let’s see if there’s anywhere on the east coast you haven’t been banned from.”
Wyatt waved his fingers around the tablet’s screen. “There’s a place in Frederick with a nice African Grey. It knows eight words and is a steal at two thousand, although I see you as more of a raptor kind of girl. Maybe a falcon?”
“It doesn’t need to talk, just breathe. Actually I want a canary,” I decided. The miners always seemed to have used canaries and I didn’t want to take a chance that this was a species specific kind of skill.
“How about love birds? Or doves? There are a ton of places that have doves. It’s all the rage to set a bunch of them free at weddings.”
“No, it’s gotta be a canary.”
There were no canaries to be had in Frederick except for the ones at the forbidden PetSmart, but Wyatt worked his magic and found a pet store in Glen Burnie with one.
“Do you want to go pick it up?” he asked.
I had no desire to drive to Glen Burnie so I asked him to have it delivered to my house.
“Is this canary destined to be stuffed in a bug zapper?” Wyatt asked, referring to a mouse incident this past summer.
“No, although I need it for a project.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe I should get a few. Just in case things go terribly wrong.”
Wyatt shook his head. “They only have the one. There’s a place in Northern Virginia that has a few. I can have them ship one, but I’m not sure how fast it will get here.”
I mulled the situation over. If this canary died, there was no way I was going through that gate. Maybe I’d hold off on the others until I saw what happened with one. I really didn’t want to get stuck with them, and I was pretty certain that a dozen mangled, dead birds wouldn’t reveal any more than one.
