by Jackie May
Brenner and I don’t catch up to her until we’re in the parking lot. Blinding sunshine glares off rows and rows of new cars. She waits for us at the back bumper of my Crap-pile. “Do you know what Arael Moaz’s name is? His real name?”
“Rumpelstiltskin?” I snark, in no mood to cooperate. Hillerman bailed before I could find a chance to use Don Deal in conversation with Roman, and now she’s assuming I know nothing about demons, which is mostly true, but insulting all the same. Of course I’ve heard that some demons have ancient names that are kept secret, but that always felt like an old wives’ tale, even by underworld standards. “You’re the demon expert. Why don’t you tell us all about it?”
“Nobody knows the real name of a horde master except the members of his horde, and even then they’ve never heard it out loud, because nobody’s allowed to speak the name.”
“How can they hear it, but not out loud?” Brenner asks.
Hillerman ignores the question. “Out of respect for the name, a horde only refers to their master with explicit pronouns: He, Him, His. Not just any He, Him, or His, but the He, the Him, the His.”
Brenner is just now catching on. “So Dario told the girls to meet back at His place. Capital H.”
“Their horde master.”
“Arael Moaz,” I say. “Looks like you get your wish.”
“Everything points there,” Hillerman defends.
“And you want it to. I bet you’re just loving this. You’d love it if demons are behind this, because it would prove you right about all of us, wouldn’t it?”
She squares up with me. “Why won’t they join the agency? What do they have to hide? Why is it that even underworlders don’t know much about them? It’s true, I admit it, part of the reason I’m here is to assess the demon situation, which we take very seriously—”
I cut in. “If the demons act up, they’ll be taken care of. By us, the ones who have to live with them. Not a government agency hundreds of miles away.”
“No offense to you, Agent Davies. You’re more than competent. I mean that. You got us here faster than my whole team could have managed in three days, if at all. But, the fact is, if the Agency takes this seriously, why’d they give me a new hire? Where’s Nick Gorgeous? Where’s Director West?”
“Nick’s not here because he knows that I can do this,” I lie.
“And tell me this—would Henry Stadther have given up any of his intel if we hadn’t forced his hand?”
That answer’s obvious. “No.”
“That’s right. Because the only thing underworlders care about is the underworld. They definitely don’t lose sleep over weapons that can only kill humans.”
“Give me a break. Bombs kill underworlders, too.” Just not very well. Vampires are undead. Shifters have strong regenerative healing. Sorcerers have protection charms. Some fey have rock-solid skin. For the most part, only demons are as physically vulnerable as humans.
Hillerman leans back against the trunk and takes a moment to curb the edge in her voice. “We have until tomorrow morning. Then we’re out, and this gets turned over to Homeland Security. And yeah, maybe all this is just a local grudge, just another East Side strike against West Side rivals, won’t even make the news.” She folds her arms with a fixed look at me. “But what if it’s something big? What if it’s big enough? How much longer before Washington decides that keeping the underworld hidden has become a national security risk?”
My frustration spikes. I’ve backed myself into a corner. If I cave to this pressure tactic, I’m saying that Hillerman is right about all this. But if I resist much more, Hillerman will be proved right about me: when the job gets scary, I cut and run. Is that why I’m resisting her? Because I’m scared, because she’s right? I reject both. I’m being played—and it’s my own fault for posturing too much. Once again, I decide that the best way forward is to square up and stop dicking around. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. Everything points to East Side, fine. We’ll go there and check it out. That’s the job, and I’m going to do it. But stop with the passive-aggressive threats. If the feds want to out the underworld, that’s not on me. Same with the demons. If they want to blow up the whole world, that’s not on me. Not because I don’t care, but because I didn’t pull the trigger, and it’s not our job to make sure everybody plays nice. I didn’t kill Dario. I didn’t do whatever horrible thing it was to you”—I jerk my head toward Brenner—“or to him. So stop treating me like one of the bad guys. Go ahead and take the case, if you want, give it to your crack team. See what they can do with all their super computers.”
And once again, Hillerman responds in kind. “If I wanted that, Agent Davies, I’d have made the call already. I’d be back at the hotel right now, writing up the report. It’s true that Homeland Security has super computers. They have half a billion dollars in budget, almost a quarter million employees. And the reason why I’m not calling them right now is because I believe our best shot is you. That’s my evaluation.”
Oh my gosh, I’m so easy. Is that all it takes? A little pat on the head, a little stroke of the ego? There’s no denying the surge in my spirits after hearing her vote of confidence. I feel a sudden urge to grab her hands and jump up and down and say, You like me. You really like me! And even if she’s still playing me, what else am I going to do? Can I do this job or not? I don’t reveal any of these feelings, of course. I simply nod casually, like, Good talk, we’re cool, we’re all good. To Brenner, I say, “What about you? Grandy district. Off-limits.”
He looks almost hurt that I would doubt him. “I go where you go.”
Wow. I’ve known some sweethearts, but never a golden retriever.
“Don’t need to announce ourselves,” Hillerman says to him. “Lose the shirt and tie?”
First of all, shirtless, yes, please. Second of all, like Hillerman can talk. Her clean, comfy sweatshirt and hipster glasses don’t exactly scream Detroit ghetto chic.
As if in response to this thought, Hillerman removes her glasses and in one swift motion peels the sweatshirt up over her head and arms, giving a brief flash of rock-hard midriff with ridges descending in neat vertical rows down to a holster with a black handgun. A plain white tank top sets stark contrast to a mural of tattoos up and down both arms and spread across her chest. Not cutesy tattoos, either. Her right arm is dominated by cobwebs and a wicked black widow with fangs sunk deep into her bicep. Avenging angels with skull faces and broadswords haunt her shoulders, and across deep cleavage stretches a twisted, barren tree branch where black ravens perch. She pulls her blonde hair up into a clip on top of her head, revealing shaved sides above her ears. As a final touch, she replaces her glasses with mean-looking black shades.
And now Brenner’s pulling his dress shirt away from a hard body that is broad but flat—not puffed and bulging like a bodybuilder, but sleek and sinewy, his pecs raised in the thin, wedged shape of perfect skipping stones. His neck features tattoos of what appear to be chemical formulas, but otherwise his body is clean. Well, it would be clean if not for all the bruising from the scuffle with the vamps. Splotches of brown and purple and red overlap across his back and around his left rib cage like some hideous and painful camouflage. Like Hillerman, the waist of Brenner’s pants conceals an inside holster and gun.
Nearly struck dumb with giddy shock, I point to Super Agent Hillerman. “WHAT!” I point to Street Thug Brenner. “And WOW!” Back to Hillerman. “And WHAT!”
“Let’s go,” Hillerman commands, and her black shades glint in the sun. She meant to do that! So bad-ass!
“Yep,” is all I manage to say.
Don Deal.
“Let’s go,” I parrot with a goofy smile. “We’re going.”
Don Deal! Say it! You’ll be cool like them!
“Can we stop to get me some sunglasses, too?”
Okay, then.
When I get scared or nervous, I talk a lot. Whistling in the dark. So I’m driving us east on Gratiot Ave., and I’m saying, “Seriously, i
f I had known we were going from Breakfast Club to Suicide Squad, I would have put my muscles on this morning. I don’t work out like you guys, but my legs look good in jogging shorts. And I could have brought a gun. A big one. Bigger than your guys’s.”
But Brenner says he doesn’t know what The Breakfast Club is, or Suicide Squad either (wtf), and Hillerman only ignores me from behind her blackout sunglasses. She strikes her usual pose in the passenger seat, only now her little foot up on the dash doesn’t say, “Hey, I feel cozy here, as though I could curl up in this seat with a book and a cat shirt.” It now says, “I give exactly zero effs about books or cats, and especially not shirts. Look at my boobs.”
Chain necklaces cross below her collarbone. One chain is black iron; the other is silver, and keeps a row of various teeth of all sizes and shapes. One tooth definitely looks canine; two of them I would guess to be the eyeteeth of a vampire; others are made of wood. All the teeth are dirty and yellow, as though they’ve been ripped from the living. Like wearing roadkill.
“What’s that necklace?” I ask her, holding back a joke about witch doctors. Not surprised when she doesn’t answer, I move on to Brenner in the rearview mirror. I motion toward my neck. “What about those tattoos? Are those chemical formulas? That’s a drug thing?”
“It’s more of a poser thing.” He tries to give a smile, but it dies halfway, turning painful. “My time in Narcotics, I had to blend in on the street.”
“Undercover?”
He tilts his head at the memory. “Mostly, I was really good at being a convincing loser, the wannabe, you know. Stupidest guy in the room, one too many hits to the head.”
“That takes some real talent. Method acting, all the way.”
“I didn’t have to try too hard, I guess. Should’ve went back to school. That’s…” He pauses, swallows hard. “That’s what I was told.”
By your sister, I’m guessing. Before his memory was restored, he mentioned her name easily, eagerly. Since getting the memory back, he hasn’t said her name once. “So you’re less of an interview-the-witnesses-with-my-amazing-bedside-manner detective, more of the infiltrate-the-underground-fight-club detective. There’s no school that can teach that.”
Super Agent Hillerman lifts a finger to point out the window. “This is it?”
I’ve taken us off Gratiot into the neighborhoods on the outskirts of East Side. You have to imagine this part of town as a sort of target with three rings, and each smaller ring takes you deeper into Hell. The bullseye at the center is Grandy district.
“This is the start of it,” I say as we pass by houses that are still livable, but half covered with overgrown yards and rusted chain-link fences. We approach a street that would lead us deeper in, but its entrance has been blocked by large chains stretched between street signs. Any car could easily break through the chains, but the message is clear: Stay out.
“Most streets are blocked off like that,” I explain. “Chains, or a junked car, or piles of furniture.”
Hillerman’s head is shaking slowly. “And the city just leaves it?”
“The city’s the one that abandoned these neighborhoods in the first place. Most already have utilities cut off. Even took the bulbs out of the streetlights. These places are black holes.”
“They’re trying, though, some people,” Brenner says. “A guy wanted to buy all these neighborhoods and turn the land into urban farming, but the city wouldn’t go for it. Our chief of police, too, went to the city council with a plan to bulldoze the entire neighborhood.”
Hillerman half turns toward Brenner. “Recently?”
“Couple months ago.”
“In public?”
“It made the news, I guess, yeah.”
“So the demons know they’re being threatened? That certain people want them out? Seems like a good reason to lash out. Gives them motive.”
“A too obvious motive,” I opine (new favorite word). “City council votes to get rid of East Side, and the next day they’re bombed? Gee, I wonder who did it? The demons would have a war on their hands.”
Hillerman fixes me with a dead look from those black mirrors, so scary and cool. “Exactly,” she says.
I immediately get her point. “And Arael Moaz is literally a warmonger, I know, but…” But what? I got nothing. She’s right. But the explanation seems too easy to be true. The obvious red herring in a crime story. Like, if this were a murder mystery, we’d be all, ‘Arael Moaz is totally the killer!’ And we’d roll up at his house to arrest him, only to find him…gasp!…dead. So Arael couldn’t be the real killer, which would have been no surprise to the reader, because the story is only halfway over. (Um…don’t look now, but we’re about halfway through my story. Will we find Arael dead? No. But I will tell you that Brenner is about to get naked.)
“He’s a what?” Brenner asks.
I answer. “Warmonger. There’s all kinds of demons, like succubuses, or sadists. They feed off of different things.”
“Like sex?”
“Right. Or in the case of a warmonger…”
“War.”
“It’s like food to them, somehow. They can feed off emotions, or even stuff like death. Fatalics feed off death. We call them Rotters.” And that is the extent of my demon knowledge, but Brenner gets the idea. Demons, for the most part, are bad news for humans.
He sits up, leaning forward into the space between me and Hillerman. “Are they like vampires? Can they make me forget?”
“No,” Hillerman states with conviction. “They have no real power over others, besides the power of suggestion. It’s an influence, much weaker than a compulsion, which is why demons require time, lots of it, to do their shit. We call it the whisper. Stop the car.”
Startled, I immediately pull to the curb and stop. The street is quiet, not a sound, not a movement. The houses stare at us with black, empty windows for eyes, like Hillerman’s shades. I’ve never heard anything about demon whisperings. Forget about the bright sunshine—we might as well be sitting around a campfire at midnight.
Hillerman pulls her gun and checks the magazine. Turning around in the seat to face us, she speaks with the authority of a leading expert lecturing to freshmen. “Powerful demons—certainly all horde masters—use the whisper to introduce thoughts into the minds of those within a certain proximity, like an aura. These thoughts appear to come from the subject’s own mind, and can be indistinguishable from your own thoughts. So ask yourself right now, How well do I know my own thoughts? How well do I know the voice in my head? Can you recognize a foreign thought in your own voice? I promise you won’t, not at first, so as a general rule I’ll advise you not to dwell on any thoughts for long, and definitely don’t let yourself fall into a stupor. The best defense against demons is to focus on immediate actions rather than thoughts. Keep a one-track mind. Do not let it wander, understand?”
Neither of us can answer with hearts stuck in our throats.
“What we don’t want is to make situational choices, because your perception of the situation may be manipulated by the demon. Always fall back on principle—those behaviors which don’t change. For instance, under normal circumstances, would either of you kill another person? Even if you hated me, would you kill me?”
Our answers are quick. “No,” we say in unison.
“Fine,” she says. “Easy, right? Any thoughts that may occur to you, then, of harming me, of killing me, might trigger that awareness in your mind that you’re being whispered to. I say ‘might,’ because murder will feel right to you, no matter how illogical, and it can be difficult for some to overrule emotion with logic.” Hillerman looks at Brenner, as though her last thought applies more to him, and she says, “So you wouldn’t kill others, but what about yourselves? What about harming yourself?”
“No,” I say quickly. Of course not.
But Brenner is silent. I can hear the shudder, the rattle in his breathing. His eyes drop to the floor. Hillerman shoots me a warning look, and then, “Focus
on action and purpose, not thoughts,” she reiterates. “We’re here to look for a white Ford van and a white Ford car. That’s all. Get in, look around, see what we see, get out. Got it?”
I manage a nod. Brenner, too.
“We need visual confirmation of the two vehicles. We get that, we can come back here with an army. Until then, we’re on our own. Brenner, you were Narcotics. You’ve been around these kinds of neighborhoods in Chicago. What chance do we have of going unnoticed?”
“Zero.”
“That’s a fact. Three new faces in an unknown car will be marked immediately, which is why I say we don’t even try to go unnoticed. Just the opposite, we should draw attention to ourselves in a way that’s nonthreatening.”
“Play dumb,” Brenner agrees. “Let me do it.”
“Oh, easy,” I joke. “Brenner strips down to his underwear and walks down the middle of the street while we follow in the car.” I make the gesture and sound of cracking a whip. Whi-pshhh!
There is a brief moment in which Hillerman and Brenner seem to consider the idea, after which they both appear to make the same decision. Hillerman turns around to give Brenner some privacy while he begins untying his shoes. No, is he really going to? I turn to look at him, but the sound of his pants zippering down sends me spinning to look out the windshield.
“So, he’s obviously all in,” I say to Hillerman. “And you haven’t even given him any of the speeches you gave me. You’re not going to grill him on why he does this job?”
“I know why he does this job,” she answers flatly.
I want to ask her to share with the class, but now Brenner is passing his gun up to me. I take it eagerly. “Ooooh, I held my friend’s gun once. Just point and shoot, right? Is this the trigger?”
Hillerman snatches the gun away and places it under her seat. “I don’t want you shooting a gun anywhere near me.”
Brenner’s belt buckle rattles as it hits the floor. “They might already have eyes on us,” he says. “So…”
