Jack lifted his eyebrows at Don. “Got a mouth on her, doesn’t she?”
Don cradled the girl’s head against his thigh. “Is that any way to talk to our friend Jack, darlin’?”
“I saw it,” she pouted.
“Sure you did. You stay out here and play,” Don said. “Jack and I are going to have a little chat indoors.”
The girl stared at Jack for another moment with her insect eyes, then went back to smashing her melted dolls together. Human flesh could contain a lot of things, but he still didn’t have a sense of what Don and his creepy little bug child really were, under the skin. He could be patient and see what he could see. Don was playing a long game, trying to make him comfortable, and Jack was content to let him think he was as dumb as the rest of the human race and had nothing to fear from this place. The Black writhed inside his mind like a snake, hard to grasp and cold to the touch. He’d be hard-pressed to call up witchfire, never mind sling a hex if he had to. Effectively, he was stuck here for as long as it amused Don to keep him, but he didn’t have to let on that he knew.
Don mounted the steps of the farmhouse, rotted boards cracking under his boots. “Come on in,” he told Jack. “Meet the rest of the family.”
CHAPTER 17
Inside the farmhouse, all was darkness. Light leached from above, through broken spots in the roof, and hit a floor littered with trash and the skeletons of small animals. The stench was even heavier than the darkness, shoving fingers into Jack’s nostrils and down his throat. The house stank of rot, old food and older sweat, decades of filth baking in the heat. Even the offal tanks of the Pit hadn’t stunk this badly.
Jack pulled his shirt over his nose. At least his own sweat was familiar.
Don jabbed a push-button switch, and a single bulb flickered overhead, casting bird-wing shadows into all the corners. Stairs with most of the treads missing led up, and a hallway stretched ahead, so stacked with ancient newspapers and fruit crates that Jack could barely maneuver it sideways.
“Levi!” Don shouted. “You in here?”
“Back room,” a voice croaked, and Don jerked his head at Jack.
“Levi’s my brother. You’ll like him.”
“Will I?” Jack said. “He as convivial as you?”
“He’s a laugh riot.” Don slithered down the hall passage with the acumen of a snake. Jack dislodged a stack of ancient, moldy National Geographics. A rat hissed and scurried deeper into the holes its compatriots had chewed in the stacks of paper.
“For such a flash chap, you sure do love filth,” he told Don.
Don shrugged. “Humans notice dirt. For me, your whole world is dirt.”
“Suppose it is,” Jack muttered. The back room had been a kitchen, at some point, and pipes jutted from the wall where a stove and icebox had once stood. A deep sink crouched in one corner, with some thick, black, viscous substance dripping down the stained porcelain flanks and puddling on the floor.
A mechanized wheelchair, the kind old ladies drove around shopping centers, sat in front of a TV fizzing with static and occasionally showing flashes of a saggy and low-budget porn film. In the chair sat the largest man Jack had ever seen—he overflowed the bonds of the chair, and white stretch marks cut jagged canyons on the back of his shaved head. He breathed with a deep, wet wheeze, something rotten deep in his chest rattling with every puff of air.
“That him?” Levi gave a wet sniff. “He doesn’t smell so sweet.”
Jack decided that pointing out that the waves of stench rolling off Levi could fell a werewolf wasn’t his most prudent course of action. “Your reception is shit,” he said, pointing to the telly. Levi grunted, jabbing at a remote with fingers strained with bloat.
“Everything here is shit. Your world is a crapper waiting for somebody to flush the floating turds.”
“Come on, now,” Don said. “Can you really say that after where you were when I found you?”
Levi coughed, and the floor shook under his weight. He didn’t have a shirt on—Jack doubted any shirt in existence would actually keep the rolling hills of his stomach under wraps—and the hair on his chest was sparse and black, matted with sweat. Blemishes dotted his shoulders like a range of volcanoes. “You bring me what I want?” he croaked at Don.
Don fished a grease-spotted paper bag from his jacket and passed it into Levi’s waiting hands. The giant ripped it open and tore the wrapper from an In-N-Out Burger with his teeth. Two gulps, and it disappeared down his gullet. He unrolled the magazine also in the sack with greasy fingers, leaving thumbprints on the expanses of naked women in the glossy pages. What Pete called sad porn—junkie girls with empty eyes, tied and splayed, cut and displayed in ways that Jack supposed a bloke like Levi would find right up his alley.
“Got a funny look buying that,” Don told him. “You’d think those cunts who work in porn shops have something against the customer. As if I’d want to put it in her. Disease crawling all over the pussy in LA.” He turned to Jack. “You hear me? You getting any LA pussy, you wrap up. Fucking city’s a plague pit.”
“All right,” Jack said. The smell wasn’t making his stomach any easier to deal with, and he had a sneaking suspicion that if he vomited anywhere near Levi, the bloke would mistake it for dessert. “It’s been fun, gents, but if all you did was bring me out here to see the sewage main you live in, then I’m going to say thanks for the memories and make me way home.”
“Oh no,” Don said. “We’re getting down to business. I gotta take care of my brother, though. You understand.” He tilted his head. “Or maybe you don’t. Most people get close enough to spit on you tend to end up dead, don’t they, Jack?”
“You going to tell me something I don’t know?” Jack said. “Or is stating the obvious your particular gift?” He got Don’s play—he wanted Jack to know that he’d watched him, knew about him, saw all his dirty secrets and got off on them. He could revel in it all he wanted—Jack had enough dirty secrets to keep a team of Dons occupied for a year or two.
“Mouthy fuck, ain’t he?” Levi said. He shoved his hand down into the seat of the wheelchair, moving his fat aside, and came out with a packet of biscuits—or cookies, Jack supposed he called them. If he called them anything before he shoved them into his gullet. Levi burped, then tossed the empty packet aside and unfastened the top of his stained khakis. “Good job on the mag, brother. Choice snatch in there.”
“No fucking way in hell,” Jack said. Dealing with a demon who wanked off to holding a threat over his head was one thing, but watching his morbidly obese brother actually wank off was beyond the pale.
“That’s just Levi,” Don said. “We’re all slaves to our urges, in one way or another.” He gestured Jack ahead of him down another narrow hall, lined with doors. “My urge just happens to be a little bit less … obvious than Levi’s. And yours—well, you’ve got enough for both of us, don’t you, Jack?”
Don shouldered a door open. “I told you I’d explain what we are, and why we won’t go back. Why Belial can’t cage us.” A dirty pair of curtains, which Jack saw had once been littered with pink flowers and happy kittens, closed off the room at the end of the hall. Don gripped them and ripped them open. “A fucking visual is worth a thousand words, isn’t that right?”
After Levi and the girl in the yard, Jack figured that whatever else Don had to show him would be more shock and awe. He still stared though, still felt the sink in his stomach and the familiar sensation of his head being too full as his sight attempted to cope with the onslaught of psychic agony wrapped around the figure before him.
“This here is Teddy,” said Don. “Teddy as in teddy bear, as in won’t you be my. But he won’t. Teddy can’t be one of us, Jack.”
Jack heard Don absently, while the rest of him stared at the thing on the other side of the room. A child’s room—walls pale pink, painted with daisies in every color of the rainbow. A name—Claire, 1961—was carved above the shape of a headboard faded into the paint.
Agai
nst the wall, Teddy dangled, strapped into an upright harness like the type they used on movie mental patients. Hooks hammered into the ceiling held at least a dozen IV bags, the liquid inside green and black. Clusters of flies buzzed around Teddy’s face—at least, where his face would be if he’d had one.
Teddy’s neck formed a column of pale skin, and at the top a blank, bulbous protrusion twitched this way and that, as if trying to catch Jack’s scent. His body was a flat, flabby mass and out of it grew a multitude of limbs, some the size of a child’s arm and hand, some little more than angry, infected skin tags. In the center of Teddy’s mass, a round mouth rimmed with teeth twitched and sighed as the thing breathed.
Don stepped forward, checked the levels of the IV bags. “Shit,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Fucking Levi.” He kicked the door open, bellowing, “I fuckin’ told you to call me if he got low on anything! You think I can find this shit at the fuckin’ 7-11?”
Jack was surprised at the stillness after the door shut. Wind rattled the walls, throwing dust against the side of the farmhouse, but aside from the wheeze of air passing in and out of the thing’s mouth, it was absolutely silent.
“Holy shit,” Jack told Teddy. “I thought I’d seen ugly, but you, mate—you’re the clear winner.”
You’re not much to look at yourself.
The voice didn’t so much split his skull as jam a steel rod straight through his sight. Ghosts could talk along the psychic aether, and demons could worm their way into your dreams if you were vulnerable, but actual telepathy was rare, and mostly confined to Fae, a type of creature Jack stayed as far away from as he would a Phil Collins tribute concert in an old folk’s home.
“I don’t have vagina dentata growing out of me fucking stomach, so I think I’m a leg up on you,” Jack said. “Sorry, mate.”
You’re him, Teddy hissed. Winter. The man with the plan.
“If I’d made a plan, do you think I’d be standing here talking to you?” Jack asked. A shiver ran through Teddy’s flesh, causing his IV bags to dance and slosh.
I don’t know, Winter. Was your plan to take it up the ass from a demon, or was your plan to be smarter than Don?
“Belial and I have an understanding,” Jack said. “Can’t say the same for your man out there. He’s given me no fucking reason to trust him, or that great skin-sack of crap he calls a brother, or you. Never mind Miss Future Spree Killer out in the yard.”
Demons lie, Winter. Teddy’s mouth gaped and flexed, and a pair of twin tongues flicked in and out. You know it. Don doesn’t lie. Don is older than lies. Better. Don does the things we need done.
“Don know you’re jawing away to me spilling his secrets?” Jack said. If Teddy was talkative, Jack wasn’t going to stop him. He was just as inclined to trust a flesh-bag as he was Don, if not more. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d indeed seen Don before, and that the bloke was just taking the piss with all of the pomp and secrecy.
Don knows what he knows and I know what I know, and what I know could fill oceans and burn forests, Teddy said. But I’m not really here and neither are you. We’re on a road to nowhere, and a highway to hell, and I can’t drive fifty-five.
Jack massaged his forehead. “Well, this has deteriorated quickly.”
Don came back into the room, holding a fresh IV bag of green liquid. It looked like pond scum, but Teddy gave a relieved sigh when Don changed out the IV. “You boys getting on?” Don asked, brushing his hands against his coat.
“That thing isn’t any more a boy than I am a unicorn,” Jack said. “But yeah, we’re having a grand old time.”
Don pulled up a chair, white and upholstered with a cushion that had once been the same color as the walls. “Sit with me, Jack. Listen to what I have to tell you. After that, if you’re still with Belial, well … we can discuss it. I don’t coerce people, even humans. I believe in that free will you all love so much.”
Jack could spot a soft-soap, even one delivered in the skilled, sensitive tone Don employed, but he shrugged. “Talk.” Teddy cackled low in his brain.
Talking’s what Donny is good at. Talking himself into things, talking us out of our skins and into new toys. Talk talk talk. Open the door, it’s just the meter man.
“Hell is ancient,” Don said. “Hell is older than Death. Hell was the first piece carved from the Black, before even Death. When the Hag was still hatching from her egg and this world was just a speck of dust floating between stars, there was Hell.”
“And then the man upstairs said let there be light, booze, and porn?” Jack said. Don’s mouth twitched, and Jack sighed. Fanatics were never any fun, and fanatics who took themselves too seriously were akin to shoving razor blades under your eyeballs and blinking. Whatever stripe their faith, Jack found them tiresome.
“God’s a fairy tale for children and the childlike,” Don said. “The same as Satan. You know that, Jack. But before the demons everyone is so afraid of, there were other things.”
He gestured at Teddy. “Me and mine saw Hell as our own, a place where there was nothing except existence. Hunt, food, mate, sleep, eat. It was a good place. The fires warmed us and the rivers flowed with blood and the meat was slow and fat. But shit happens, as you people are so fond of saying.”
“Demons get fed up with you boys taking all the good bits for yourselves?” Jack guessed.
“The demons? Strike at us?” Don laughed. “Jack, we made the demons. We made some from mud, and some from flesh, but one among us lay with somebody—something—that was an abomination, and she birthed four sons.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. As far as creation stories went, this was one where he was sure he could guess the ending. “The Princes.”
“They created the six hundred and sixty-six Names,” Don said. “Made them in their image, not ours. Together, stronger than us. Legion. They murdered who they could, and the strongest of us, the four counterparts of the Princes, they locked away. Four of us plus one, the death-bringer who would just as soon devour Hell as he would their enemies.”
“Nergal,” Jack murmured. He could still feel the black presence in his mind, the endless, unfathomable hunger for the life of the Black, of Hell and everywhere in between.
“Nergal is a fucking dickhead, by the way,” Don said. “Whiny little bitch, all down the days we spent together in that place.” He grinned. “Can you guess what the twist is now, Jack?”
“Naughton broke Nergal out,” Jack said. “You slipped the gap, and here you are.”
“Oh, no,” Don said. “I got out long before those necrophiliac morons got their bright idea to spring the asshole. But my kin, yes. They came from the break. Reality is a pretty fragile thing, Jack. Bend it just a little and stress fractures appear. The Princes have kept us under lock and key for millennia—their masters, locked away, tortured, and violated like we were nothing. Well, we’re free now, like the old times. And we’re not going back.”
“Look, mate,” Jack said. “I got no issues with you doing … whatever it is you’re doing out here, personally, but I think you’re underestimating exactly how far up Belial’s arse you’ve gotten with this little escape routine. He doesn’t do well with losing.”
“The demons lost a long time ago,” Don said. “This business with the Morrigan and Nergal is just the knell sounding the end. Hell is fracturing, politics are king, and things like Belial are scrabbling for power. Time was, they feared our names. So did your kind—every pack of superstitious children has a name for us. They called us Shiva, or said we were a wolf that devoured the world. Four horsemen who ride forth on the last day.” Don grinned. “I always liked that one. Got great imagery. Probably why they stick it in so many movies. Point is, it’s our time again, and we’re riding hard.”
“I still don’t know what you expect me to do about all this,” Jack said. “I don’t have Belial’s ear. We’re not mates who go down to the pub. I can’t get him off your trail and stop Hell from throwing you back in the clink any more than I can
make Belial do a Riverdance.”
“We want you, Jack,” Don said. “Because without you, none of this would’ve happened. My kind would still be cast into darkness. If you hadn’t been a good solider and helped the Morrigan wake up Nergal, we never could have found those fractures.” He leaned in. “And if you hadn’t visited us in Hell, we couldn’t have found you now. I want you to be with us, Jack. I want you to be my soldier, because together we can turn Belial into a smear on the pavement.”
Of course. The dreams—memories—that had woken up the moment he landed in LA. He’d seen the demon’s vast prison. And now the inmates had him over a barrel. Perfect.
Jack resisted telling Don that for a supposedly ancient creature, he was a bit of a fuckwit. Nothing could kill a demon. You could exorcise them, send them back to the Pit, but to actually destroy the essence of a demon was something he’d only seen once, and he didn’t care to repeat it. “And if I decide that I’d rather not play with your fucked-up little family?”
Don shrugged. “We can’t force you, Jack. Like I said, we owe you one. You joined the Morrigan, and you let Nergal free, and you made it possible for everything that came after.”
“I didn’t let Nergal do anything,” Jack snapped. He’d known, hadn’t he, that when the Morrigan offered to get him out of the Pit it was too good to be true? He’d taken the deal anyway, because anything was better than Hell. He let her wipe his mind and body clean, and then she’d simply vanished. Not for good—she never left him for good. But she’d left him not knowing what she’d done to him, and without any memory of Hell until now. How much worse could Don’s offer be than that?
“You’re a nexus for these things, Jack,” Don said. “Things that shake the foundations of the world. There’ve been other men like you, but none that I could get a face to face with.” His smile dropped. “You know, me being imprisoned in the dark by the ants who call Hell their own.”
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