“In the name of God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son on Earth I command you to leave this girl!” When I opened my eyes again, peeking carefully over the big stone coffin I was hiding behind, Mike was standing over the girl, cross in his left hand and a Bible in his right. The cross was glowing with an ethereal light, and it looked like something was floating around the girl. A cloud of what looked like glowing red gnats, buzzing and angry, coalesced around her head. Then I heard the voice again, and not for the first time that night, I got really worried.
“Foolish priest. Do you think that your trappings of faith can save you?” The disembodied voice was all around us, swirling in and out of the cloud like an angry wind. “I see inside your soul, priest. I see your darkest thoughts, your blackest fears, and you are not holy.”
Mike raised his Bible over his head and pointed the cross at the girl like a conductor’s baton. “I am a servant of the Lord God Almighty and by His Grace I am sanctified. You are a beast of Hell and I command you to leave this girl!”
The thing laughed, and I swear the girl’s eyes glowed like a cheap X-Files effect. “I serve a power older and stronger than your pitiful little carpenter. Your little book means nothing to me, and you cannot command one with power such as mine.”
Mike’s Bible burst into flames, and he dropped the flaming holy book. He switched into Latin, and since I’m not old enough and certainly not religious enough to have much of a grasp on dead languages, I had no idea what he was saying. But after a couple of seconds of chanting, the cloud-thing screamed in rage and pain, and then flew at Mike like a comic-book bee colony, heading straight for his hand. The crucifix flared into blinding light, first white, then a deep crimson red. The voice sounded everywhere around us, and it began to laugh.
Through that awful cackling, I heard Mike howl in pain. There was one last flash of red light, and a wave of force blew out from Mike and the girl. Like a hurricane, it picked me up and flung me limp into the far wall of the crypt. The last thing I heard before I blacked out was that laugh. And Mike screaming.
Chapter Seven
When I woke up, I was alone in the crypt. There was a puddle of melted silver on the floor where I last remembered Mike standing, and the seatbelts I had tied the girl with were lying in a pile in a corner. They’d been cut neatly, not torn, but that was all the info I could glean from my surroundings. I went to the door and eased it open a crack to see the bright sunlight streaming into the crypt from the cemetery.
Crap. I was stuck for a while.
The whole thing about sunlight is real, too. We don’t burst into flames immediately, but it doesn’t take long for one of us to be reduced to a pile of charcoal briquettes if we come into contact with direct sunlight. I settled down to wait for nightfall and hoped that Mike had recovered enough to go into the church. I decided to check on Greg and Tommy, and reached in my pocket for my cell phone. I pulled out a mangled mass of plastic and computer chips and realized that the phone had been crushed during my fight with the girl-monster. I hoped everyone was okay, because I was trapped until sunset.
After a ridiculously boring day of staring at a sunbeam, I felt more than saw the sun finally dip below the horizon, and I headed out into the cemetery. Mike was hurrying across the sanctified part of the graveyard to meet me.
“Where have you been, dude? I’ve been stuck in there worried sick all day!” I started to lay into him pretty solid, but then I got a good look at my old friend. He looked his age for probably the first time ever. He had a bandage on his forehead that looked fresh, and his left hand was wrapped heavily all the way from the elbow to the fingers. “Jesus Christ, man, how bad did she get you?”
“Pretty badly, I’m afraid. Not all of us are blessed with eternal youth, James. I recently returned from the hospital with our young guest. She’s terribly shaken up. I only got her to sleep in the parish house a few moments ago.” He took my elbow and led me further from the church, as though there was someone in there he didn’t want to take note of our little chat.
“What? She’s in the church?” I was baffled. I would have bet the farm that she was way less welcome on holy ground than me. “And have you heard from Greg? My phone got—”
“Trashed. Again. Here.” Greg tossed me a replacement phone as he came out from behind a tree. I looked him up and down, but he didn’t seem to be any the worse for wear after getting pummeled last night. As if in answer to my unspoken question, Greg went on. “I’m fine. I had a snack before I went to bed last night. Tommy’s arm is a clean break, but she got both the bones so it’s gonna be useless for at least a month. They kept him at the hospital for observation. I talked to him while I was on my way over here.”
I put the phone in my front pocket this time, since my back pocket didn’t seem to be very good for protecting them. “What was that you said about the girl being in the church, Mike? I figured her for a serious bad guy, given what she did to all of us last night.”
“What was residing in the girl was, in fact, a very serious bad guy, but the girl herself was guilty of nothing more than curiosity and a desire for a little payback on the kids at school who teased her. I think we can all relate to those sentiments, can’t we?”
He raised an eyebrow at Greg and me, and we had the good grace to look sheepish. I’m not sure when my old friend had developed the juice to shame me for my youthful indiscretions, but he certainly had it now. Maybe it came with the first grey hairs. I’d never know.
“She was possessed? By what?” Greg asked.
“Yes, she was possessed. And based on the amount of power she exhibited, we may have a very serious problem. I don’t know exactly what type of demon possessed her, but it’s incredibly strong. I’ve never experienced anything like that kind of power. To be able to melt a symbol of the Lord in the hands of a priest . . .” Mike trailed off, and if anything, he looked a little paler. Not as pale as me, but getting there.
“How’s the hand?” I didn’t like seeing my old friend scared, and wanted to change the subject.
“Mostly second-degree burns. I dropped the crucifix before it completely liquefied, but some of the molten silver landed on my skin. I probably won’t have full use of the last two fingers again for a while.”
That explained the screaming I’d heard as I passed out. Molten metal eating through your flesh tends to make even vampires scream.
Getting one of my best friends injured and maybe permanently disfigured wasn’t making me feel any better, so I switched back to the original problem. “So what do we know?”
“Not much,” Mike said. “There are only a few demons that have the kind of power the girl exhibited last night, and all of them are bad news. And if what she said about serving an even more powerful demon is true, then we have to find where the demon went when it left the child, and stop it.”
Of course we do. Because we’re not vampires, the beasties that give people nightmares and make them think twice about walking down that alley alone, we’re detective vampires. We’re the good guys. Like Batman, only with dietary restrictions. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to eat people, like a normal vampire. But no, not only do I have a conscience, I have a roommate with a Kal-El complex and a priest for a best friend. If I could find a shrink that kept office hours after sundown, I could spend eternity in therapy.
“What happened to the demon?” I asked.
“When you got it out of the girl it went back to Hell?” Greg asked, a little more hopefully than was reasonable.
Mike wobbled a little. “I have no idea, but I doubt it went anywhere we wanted it to go. I would expect that it found someone close by to inhabit, but the ethereal definitions of close by could mean anywhere in the city.”
I led Mike over to sit on a headstone. It was a mark of how much had been taken out of him that he was willing to sit there. Usually that was one of the things Greg and I did to get a rise out of him, sit on grave markers and make fun of the occupants. Mike never disrespected the dead. Gr
eg and I exchanged a worried glance behind Mike’s back, and I decided on an impromptu plan.
“All right,” I said. “Mike, you stay here and keep an eye on the girl, and when she comes around see what information you can get out of her. Somebody had to help her bring this thing up. No kid has that kind of power. See if you can get the names of who else was in the circle with her that night, and keep her here. The beastie’s gotten into her once. That might make her vulnerable to a repeat possession, if there is such a thing.”
I motioned to Greg. “We’ll split up and keep an eye on Tommy and his family. If getting revenge on him for picking on the girl was part of this creature’s contract for getting to this side of Hell, then it may still go after them. I’ll take the hospital, and Greg will keep an eye on the sister.”
“That sounds good, boys. I think I would do well to do my part from my chair this time. Once I get there.” Mike started back toward the church. “Boys?”
“Yeah, Dad?” I answered.
“Be careful. This one is bad. Very, very bad.”
Greg and I looked at each other as Mike limped into the church, looking way older than we were supposed to be. We stood there watching our friend’s back for a second, then headed off into the night for our respective charges. Good thing I was headed to the hospital. I needed breakfast bad.
Chapter Eight
It only took me a few minutes to get to the hospital. By bus. I’ve heard that some of us can take animal forms, but either I haven’t figured out how to turn into a bat, I haven’t been around long enough, the vampire that made me wasn’t strong enough, or something like that. I don’t really know. Since I can’t fly, I took the bus. And by that I mean I jumped on top of one and hitched a ride to the hospital.
I was out of cash. It wasn’t that Greg and I were hurting for money. We did okay with the detecting business and it’s not like we had much of a grocery bill, but I was bad about leaving the house without grabbing any cash out of the cookie jar, so I never had any money on me. That meant I rode the top of the bus a lot. It was more fun than mojo-ing the driver out of a free fare.
When I got to the hospital, Tommy had some company that I certainly wasn’t interested in seeing—the police. I did a quick one-eighty in the hallway once I saw the guard outside his room and headed back downstairs to swipe a disguise. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid masquerading as someone with medical training, because someone always wants you to do something with that training, and that can turn out poorly for you and the patient. So I usually put on my best janitor clothes and grab a bucket. There’s never been a hospital that didn’t have something that needed to be mopped, and the cleaning staff is usually invisible. Even if someone does notice you, they’re just happy to see you working their floor.
I found an unattended supply closet on Tommy’s floor and commandeered a bucket and mop. I wheeled my way down the hall to the room next to Tommy’s, and headed in to mop and eavesdrop. Fortunately for me, the guy in the room was comatose and didn’t care that I was doing a crappy cleaning job. I was able to hear a grumpy-sounding female detective grilling Tommy through the wall.
“Mr. Harris, how exactly did you break your arm?” she asked.
“Fell off my skateboard.” Tommy had the sullen teenager thing down pat, probably because he wasn’t acting. He was a teenager with a crap attitude toward authority figures and a system full of painkillers.
“That’s bull!” I heard her slam something to the floor, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who was playing the bad cop. If she was playing. “The doctor told us your injuries were consistent with your arm being broken by a very strong person. Now who did it?”
“I told you, I fell off my skateboard.” Tommy even managed a little whine at the end. I was impressed. I wasn’t anywhere near that good at being a putz when I was a kid.
“And I told you, I know you’re lying.” I could almost see her leaning toward him. Her voice dropped and became confidential, inviting. “We can’t protect you if you don’t tell us the truth, Tommy. And you want us to protect you, don’t you? I’d hate to have to leave here and take that guard with me. Wouldn’t you?”
I certainly wouldn’t hate that, but she wasn’t asking me.
I heard nothing for a minute, then heard Tommy take a deep breath and say, “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.” My heart, if it still beat, would have stopped for a second, and Tommy’s next words did nothing to make me feel any better. Before I could reach through the wall and strangle him, he said “I hired a couple of vampire detectives to protect me from a demonic curse, and when we went to confront the witch that cursed me, she broke my arm like a twig.”
The silence from the other room was thick, and I leaned my head against the wall berating myself for not eating the kid when I had the chance. After a long minute I heard the woman’s voice again, and it was pretty obvious that she was not happy with Tommy’s answer. She spit out the words like they were bullets. “You little bastard. I have somebody in this town kidnapping little kids, and this girl is the latest. Now, you were seen harassing her at school and the neighbors say a kid matching your description was at her house before she went missing last night.”
“You know something about this. If anything happens to that little girl and it turns out you had anything to do with it, I will personally make sure that you do your undergraduate work at the federal penitentiary in Raleigh.” With that, I heard her stomp toward the door. Seconds later I felt the wall shake as she slammed the door to Tommy’s room.
“Come on, leave the chump here. Anything that’s after him can have him,” she said to the guard. Without a glance, they passed by the open door of the room I was mopping and headed for the elevator.
The woman led the parade, followed by two uniforms. She was striking more than pretty, a little too sharp in the face for most guys’ comfort. Tall, with ass-kicking boots on she was almost six feet, her dark brown curls tied into a messy ponytail. She wore a tailored jacket open to show her badge and gun, and a cross around her neck.
I notice the little things, like crosses. They get to be important. I counted to a hundred twice and then wheeled my bucket into Tommy’s room. He was fiddling with the bed when I closed the door behind me and moved a chair under the knob. I didn’t need any nurses coming in to take fluids while Tommy and I had a heart-to-heart.
“Holy crap!” Tommy cried. “I almost peed the bed! I thought you guys had left me here to die!”
I crossed the room as quickly as I could, which is pretty damned quick, and put my hand over his mouth. “You want to yell that a little louder? I’m not sure every brat in the nursery heard you,” I whispered into his face. His eyes got big as he noticed the pointy teeth, and I backed off a little. “How long were they here? What did they tell you? Start at the beginning and walk me through.”
“They were here when I woke up. That chick cop was a real bitch. She was all about wanting to know how my arm got broke, but I didn’t tell her anything, I swear.” He flopped back onto his pillows looking proud of himself.
“Except the absolute truth, you mean. Good thing for all of us she’s a civilian and doesn’t believe in anything having to do with our world.” Tommy looked a lot less smug, and I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Vamp senses are ridiculously good. I listened through the wall.”
I pulled a chair over to the window and looked down. The detective was standing by her car looking up at me. I sat down quickly hoping that she was nearsighted. I knew I’d have to deal with her before this mess was over. She wouldn’t see a vampire and think “janitor.” Not this one.
“Did she say anything earlier about little kids being kidnapped?”
“Dude, don’t you, like, read the paper?” Tommy used the remote to elevate his bed so he could see me better after I took the chair.
“My morning delivery leaves a little to be desired. Enlighten me.”
“There’s been, like, ten or eleven kids go missing in the last month, d
ude. There’s talk of not letting anybody go out for Halloween unless they catch whoever’s taking them.”
That would suck. Halloween is one of the best nights of the year. It’s like a Vegas buffet, only everyone you nibble on has had so much candy they all taste like dessert. I took the lid off his dinner plate and poked around at the leftovers, hoping for a little Jell-O. “Go on.”
“What are you doing? I thought you couldn’t eat.”
“Old habits. Now about the kids?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, the first couple were no big deal, their parents were all over each other about custody anyway, so most folks figured one or the other was lying and had swiped the kid. But then a pair of twins vanished out of a day care, and people started to get worried. By that time, everybody was making a huge deal about the cops not caring because the first kids were black, and the latest kids were white, and it got to be a whole big thing. The cops made a task force and held press conferences, and made a big news thing out of everything. But while the cops were conferencing, kids kept disappearing. Hey, can you hand me that ginger ale?” He took a drink while I looked at him.
“Is that all?” I asked when he didn’t continue. “What do you mean? I guess. That’s what I know, anyway.” Sometimes I wonder if everybody in the world is brutally stupid, or if it’s just my clients. “Your demon and this bunch of disappearing kids might be connected.”
“No, man. That was, like, a demon or something. This is just some kids going missing. Oh! I get it! You think the demon might be taking the kids, right?”
It’s almost cute how excited stupid people get when they figure something out. Like Christmas for morons. “I was thinking that maybe the people calling the demon might have something to do with the vanishing children, yes. How many did you say were gone?”
Modern Magic Page 24
