by Rick Heinz
Mike saw a landing of buildings across the street that looked very interesting to run across. Before he could reach them, Frankie’s cab screeched around the corner in a nice burnout. Mike raised his fist and cheered him on as he slammed to a stop in front of Mike. The obligatory Bears bobblehead almost decapitating itself on the dashboard.
“Nice, Frank. You caught up faster this time,” Mike said.
“Get in. Just how much of a death wish do you have? Boss will kill us if you get caught,” Frank said. Ever since the change in Mike, he could understand Frank clearer than before. While his lipless mouth still moved, the words seemed to come from his throat. Another perk of being attuned to the land of the dead was that hidden things were now revealed to him.
“No way. It’s a fantastic night out. Come on. I’m starving. I’ll buy you some street tacos if you walk with me. No running. Promise.” Mike extended his pinky finger. Frank just let out a sigh of frustration and parked his cab in a no-parking zone.
“Nobody can refuse street tacos. Enjoy them while you can. Remind me to introduce you to an ol’ friend of mine who is a fantastic cook. If you take off, though, I’m telling each of your dead girlfriends the secrets of ghostly possession,” Frank said.
“Charming. What would I do without you?”
“End up a bloody mess on the ground when you fall from a skyscraper in sixty-three days?”
“Well, isn’t that just peachy.” Mike pulled out his phone and opened the Taco Tracker app. “The taco guy should be at the bar up on the corner real soon. Let’s go.”
“A few hundred years of evolution, science, and technology, and you humans use all your gifts to track tacos.”
“Look, Frank, hunting for good Mexican food is a fine art. It takes skill and patience. Unlike Chinese food, which throws itself at you like a lemur, fine Mexican cuisine is like a seven-horned, white-tailed buck. This taco guy is the prize stallion. His mom spends all day making the tacos and tamales.” Mike could almost taste the food. He was ravenous.
“Do you even listen to yourself speak? I mean, is there a pause from your brain to your mouth? Wait, don’t answer. I already know.” Frank put his bony hands in his brown aviator jacket, and the two of them crossed the street at a red light.
“So how long is this going to last? I’m immortal now, right? Bulletproof? What’s the catch? Why not just give vials of the stuff to every hospital in the world?”
“If only those with power were that caring. Besides, it will only last a little bit. You’ll have to keep drinking demon blood if you wanna keep the perks, or avoid withdrawal the likes of which you’ve never seen yet, boy. You are not bulletproof and can be killed. For Lady of Fate, who we work for, your rite of passage is when you die while you have the blood in you. You’ll come back as a ghost, with whatever scars you earned in death.”
“So why didn’t you just stick your head in an oven and gas yourself instead of getting your skin ripped off?” Mike asked as they walked through a crowd of people. To them, Frank was just an Irishman not worthy of any notice. They were still innocent.
“For starters, I’m not a ghost. We’ll cover that spicy pepper when you’re ready.” Frank replied. “Suicides, however, send ya screamin’ straight to a different death lord. Politics of the Unification can make the electoral college look like kindergarten. The stupid version is that all humans go to an afterlife. Where you go is sorted by the ruling belief of humans. The death lords all wedged their way into the process somewhere along the line. They siphon off souls for their own ranks and make purgatory less full, stealing them away from being demon food or waiting for judgment. Sure, this shit don’t make angels or demons happy. They didn’t have much of a choice, though, when we got our hands on magic a long time ago.” Frank paused as a train rattled by on the elevated platform above them, drowning out any conversation.
“So, shit. I don’t know, man. I just work here. All I know is that magic is fueled by divine blood.” Frank tossed his arms up. “Lazarus coming back is gonna give the Unification the strength it needs to sort all human souls. Cutting the divine out of the picture. The boss gambled away his fate for us with his demons for a special source of blood to help the cause. That little act makes some question our loyalty to Lazarus. O’Neil’s agents only hafta die on their own, each in their own way, to join our death lord, Lady of Fate.” He patted Mike on the back. “Of course, there are tons of ways to mess that up as well. You ain’t anything special, boy. You’re just another one of my fares this decade. If ya are special, I’ll be cartin’ you around the lands of the dead for a few more centuries.”
“So O’Neil serves some demon, then? What’s her name?”
“His, in this case. Also no, he doesn’t. The rakshasa vanished, actually, in the nineteen twenties. Boss was pretty torn up when it went down. I guess it had to do with some infighting on the council. Either way, it meant Boss doesn’t need the council. Sort of put us on the Unification shit list at the same time. Makes me wonder how he landed the current gig.”
“Yeah, shit list. Right. How the fuck could a group of superpowered badasses get on a shit list? Much less ever get fired. You guys gotta be some sort of special pacifists if you can get your hands on this juice and decide to sit idly by while the world goes to shit.” Punching Frank in the shoulder, Mike chuckled.
Frank reached out and latched his bony hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Listen. For most people, you drink the blood, ya end up being able to cast spells. Still gotta know ’em first. Demons are like coke dealers, keeping ya comin’ back for more. The more ya use it, the more you crave it.” His grip felt like an iron vice as he kept on. “Boss broke that cycle for his men. Cost him his name. It also meant the Unification didn’t have a lock-down on divine blood. We’re wild cards to them. You think immortals care about money? You think people with this kind of power give two fucks about mortal trappings? Blood is all they have to offer us. The Unification keeps their various groups in check by controllin’ the flow. Succeed, the council sends you a crate. Fail . . .” Frank shut up as a stumbling man wandered by.
Mike’s smile faded as he realized the man was going to die of liver cancer. He tapped Frank’s hand while his eyes followed the man. “Easy there with the claw of death. So why work for ’em if you don’t need to?”
Frank pulled his hand away and tucked it back into his bomber jacket. “What else we gonna do, sit in a castle and rot for eternity?” Frank shrugged. “Besides, Boss has a plan or somethin’. Our job is to make sure that people survive. Do some damn good for once. Feels better than runnin’ an extortion racket if ya ask me.” He tilted his head up the street. “Let’s keep going.”
They walked up to the street corner where their prize stallion would soon be found, a drunken line already starting to form in search of late-night snacks to sober up on. “Good? A demon is a demon. Not that it matters much to me, I suppose, if you guys have your own source,” Mike said taking a spot in line.
“Nothing is black-and-white. We also don’t hand out that ichor to every Tom on the street or sick person, because it’s the rarest substance on earth. It’s not like demons are falling out of the sky. Most of it dried up after the witch hunts, they say. It was the last time the blood was easily accessible,” Frank said. “The Unification was formed for our survival as much as yours. Had to shift to rationing what’s left. You humans fucked shit up. Now drastic crap has gotta go down to restore the balance.”
A drunk couple wobbling in front of them slurred a cheer. “Woooo, witches! Yeaaaah.”
Frank and Mike eyed each other and mutually shrugged. Frank looked normal to the living, but words were still words. Mike started bouncing as he smelled tamales and tacos and did his best to ignore the realization that the taco guy would die from being stabbed. The man was a saint to Mike. Sixteen dollars later, Mike tipped extra, and they were back to walking and enjoying some amazing flour soft tacos. Except Frank. Frank was dead.
“I’ll eat that if you won’t,” Mi
ke said.
“I hate you.”
“Not my fault you crossed Joe the Alderman,” Mike said as they ducked into an alleyway to keep talking without passersby listening in.
“I’m tellin’ you, he cheated—” Frank said as Mike cut him off.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That.” Mike gestured with taco in hand to a corner by a garage. Something that looked like a small hairless squirrel crawled out of the shadow. It seemed afraid of the floodlight, like it was cornered by it. When it moved, the motion sensor would kick on, and it would scurry back to the shadow and hiss at the light.
Mike and Frank moved to flank the creature on each side of the alley. Mike crouched down to not startle it, trying to get a closer look. From here, he could see that it was much larger than he’d initially thought, about the size of a cat, ugly without any fur. Its eyes glowed like small laser pointers, and it had green skin with three-fingered hands. Smells like shit over here. The light clicked off again.
The ugly thing hopped back out, appearing to raise its tiny fist in defiance. It tried a new path, inching itself along the fence. It had yet to notice either of them. Mike slipped his coat off and secured his gloves, getting ready to make a dive and catch it.
“Now!” Mike shouted, jumping forward. Frank followed from his side and rushed to it. The floodlight kicked back on, freezing the small creature in its tracks. Mike quickly wrapped his coat around it. It let out a series of kicks and noises as if it were an angry cat held over a bathtub. “Got it!”
He held up his makeshift sack, and both of them stared at it and listened. “That’s a demon,” Frank said at last. He was pressing his hands against his coat, maintaining a distance.
“Oh, please tell me this is not a succubus,” Mike said. “That would just be way too funny.”
“No, no, I’m not sure, but I think that’s a nefrit. Uh, a librarian of hell? Homunculus, imp, goblin kind of thingy,” Frank replied.
“Kind of thingy? Do you even hear yourself speak? What kind of zombie tour guide are you?” Mike grinned.
“It shouldn’t be here, Mikey.”
“Sure. But it is. Hey, can we use its blood? You said they are rare, right? This is like winning the lottery?” When Mike said that, the creature picked up the pace of its frenzy.
“Mikey, this isn’t a joke. It should not be here.”
Farther down the alleyway, another motion light clicked on, and a similar screech was heard. It was another one of the little buggers. Only this one was looking right at them.
“Mike, we need to go. If there are more of them, they stop being afraid. Unless you have a cat, or some salt, more will keep coming,” Frank said as he backed away. Another one appeared on top of the garage. “Let him go. The sunrise will send him back to hell, Mikey.”
Mike looked over at Frank with a grin. “Man, for a dead guy, you’re really scared of a lot of things.”
“You see a lot of shit as one of us. If you wanna keep existing, run when you see something ya aren’t prepared for. Sunlight, hunters, magic, angels, demons, the YouTube . . . children . . .” He shuddered. Mike heard Frank’s bones rattle and a tendon pop.
One of the imps scuttled along the shadows under the floodlights at Mike, jumping and screeching at the same time. With a swift kick, Mike punted the imp like a football back down the alleyway. The remaining ones scampered away. Mike would have laughed if it weren’t for the scream from the crowd of people walking past where they ran.
“Okay, I’m new here, but I know that shouldn’t happen,” Mike said. “Why can they see them? I thought you had to be initiated to see this stuff.”
Frank’s face held all the expression it possibly could. Mike was sure he somehow managed to make his eye sockets wider. “They ain’t kids. They shouldn’t be able to see.”
“Come on, Frank. Let’s go home. I’ll bite. One of them is bound to have ‘the YouTube.’ If you are this freaked out . . .” Mike said, grabbing Frank’s arm and pulling him out of the alley. Luckily most people are drunk at 3:00 a.m. on Friday.
CHAPTER 13
Peace and quiet were things that Mike had learned to let go of in recent nights. His new permanent residents floated around the place, displacing his belongings only to pick them up again later and put them back. More than just a little bit haunted is an understatement now that I can see ghosts all the time. But do they have to trash the place? Almost everyone he knew who died was still lingering around, lost in a perpetual cycle of awareness that they were dead and then forgetting that very fact.
Drones or poltergeists, either term was fitting. Mike thought he was never going to have a clean house again in his life. I’m probably going to have to handcuff my car keys to my wrist at this rate. Ugly cat things appear and my ghosts turn into ferrets. Great. At this particular moment, however, the location of household knickknacks was not the focus of the five people standing in the kitchen.
Officers Winters and Matsen brought an old cat carrier to hold the ugly critter. It took Mike, Morris, and Frank an epic battle full of tiny claw marks and bites to jam the imp into the carrier. The five of them now relaxed a bit and inspected the tiny hell beast.
“So it just appeared in an alley?” asked Morris for the third time.
“Yeah, with a few others. Which kind are these again? I’m not exactly a demonologist,” Frank replied.
Morris leaned in close, and the imp tried to claw his nose. “The kind that steal souls from children. Legend says they sneak in and steal the breath of kids. Cats are their natural enemy.” Morris waved Matsen over. “You guys need to arm up. This is most likely additional feedback from the Twin Cities ritual. We need to keep it quiet if people can see these things. That part is an added twist. Hear any reports?”
“There hasn’t been any chatter on the radio tonight. Nobody has called anything like this in yet. But it’s late, and from what you’ve said, these things are afraid of bright lights and cats. If anyone did see one, it’s nothing that can’t be thought of as a deformed bird.” Matsen chuckled. “You guys really thought this looked like a cat? Look, it’s got tiny wings. I’m telling you it’s a featherless bird.”
“Any rules we should know about it? Don’t feed it after midnight? Keep it away from water?” Mike asked the room. “I take it that this is the kind of stuff your boss was talking about with the world changing? Are cats really going to become man’s new best friend? The imp might be a better companion. So, million-dollar question: How did it get here?”
“It was summoned,” Officer Winters said as he stood by the back door. “We got a rogue sorcerer in town.”
Morris gave a dirty look to Frank. “No, I don’t think that’s it. Summoned ones can usually speak the language of whoever summoned it. This thing just chitters and clacks. Also, Boss has been on a recruiting spree,” Morris said, pointing at Mike. “It’s here because when people mess with this stuff, it never goes according to plan. All you can hope is that this is as bad as it gets. I’m not going to bet on that, though. This is just the start. Boss needs to know about this.” He folded his arms in front of him and leaned back on the kitchen counter. “We’ve been at this too long, and I need to get out of here before sunrise. I want good news by sunset. Make a plan.”
Mike threw his feet up on his kitchen table and leaned back. Matsen’s lips pressed together and gave a disapproving look. “Hey. My house. My table. My pet cat-bird-demon thing,” Mike said, holding up a finger. “Look, chief, you guys kidnapped my friend, ransacked my house, and had me drink the blood of demons. Frank is pleasurable company and all, but now I have the ghost of everyone I ever knew walking around in circles. You really fucking think I’m actually going to work for you?” he asked.
Everyone in the room looked at each other, mouths open and then closing, but nobody talked. In the awkward silence, their eyes eventually turned to the floor or away from Mike. Frank threw his hands up in the air. “None of ya guys are going to tell him, are
you? Fine. I will. Mikey, the Unification already put its plans in motion while you were asleep.” Frank avoided looking at Morris.
Mike dropped his feet and stood up, leaning into Frank and raising one eyebrow. “What plans?” Mike poked Frank on the shoulder.
“At least the boss was right about recruiting Doc,” Morris cut in. “The dead don’t exactly keep hours conducive with most businesses. His father was a member. Doc figured it out. Now he’s our therapist. Let’s just say that some of us carry a lot of issues. I mean, look at Frank. He had his skin ripped off him. Matsen? Well, she struggles with the things she has to do. And Win—”
“Do not finish that sentence, Morris,” Winters said.
“Right. Look, friend. We’re the good guys, but we can’t fill you in until you decide you want in. Your pal Doc? He’s doing real good now. Has actual clients. For some reason the boss wants you. I can’t figure out what the Unification would want with you. What good are you at keeping people alive?” Morris spat at the room full of ghosts.
Mike laughed. “Therapist of the dead. Fitting for Doc. You mean to tell me that the skeptic signed on to your little merry troupe? Hope you realize that he probably thinks you’re all clinically insane and that this is all one giant conspiracy to control the world.”
“We’re leaving. You already know what to do if you want answers. Keep the imp locked up. Might give you some perspective. If you are right in the head, you’ll run in the other direction from us. Matsen, Winters, he’s back on your watch now,” Morris said. He grabbed Frank and headed out of Mike’s place.
Matsen stepped forward and put her hand on Mike’s shoulder. “It’s for the best, you know. You can help all of them.” She nodded to a ghost learning to throw a spoon across the room. “We’ll be outside in the car.” They followed the others out and closed the door, leaving Mike alone with a demon and an apartment full of ghosts.
Even Mike was starting to get tired. He let out a long yawn. He could still stand the sun, but even drinking the blood made you want to sleep all day. He looked at the imp inside the cage, cowering near the back, trying to hide as much as it could. “I suppose you aren’t a fan of the sun if a flashlight scares the crap out of you. You need a name.” Also some food, I imagine.
