“Oh, goodie. He gets it,” Alice said, her voice a flat monotone.
Something was wrong here, really wrong. Alice had pointed out the holes and alarm bells started going off in my head like air raid sirens. My brain squirmed and tried to figure its way towards a solution. I really didn’t care any more about the why. My gut was telling me that now was a good time to get as far away from Mister John E. Lawman as possible.
That said, I was going to have to be patient with whatever I decided to do. We were easing onto the freeway and if it came to a fight in a moving vehicle chances were better than average we’d both be maimed in some horrible crash. I could probably snap the cuffs and then just kick through the window and jump. Unfortunately, the thought of hitting asphalt at seventy miles per hour wasn’t exactly appealing to me either.
“Hey Officer,” I said, settling back into my plastic seat.
“It’s detective.”
“Right, anyways. So, Officer, we lost?” I asked.
“Nope. Gonna make a quick pit stop.”
“Long way to go for a piss and a doughnut. The station’s about two miles that way,” I said, nodding my head to indicate behind us.
“Yep,” he answered, glaring at me in the rear view.
“So, where we going?”
“Got a friend interested in having a little sit down with you, that’s all.”
“Oh? Do tell?”
He grinned widely, yellowed teeth reflected back at me.
I really wanted to hit him.
“Jack, this is…” Alice said from beside me.
“Yeah, I know,” I said cutting her off. I turned my attention back to the cop in front of me. “So, like I said, where are we going?”
“Brockton. You have a date.”
I lifted both eyebrows, curious.
“Really? Who’s the lucky lady?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
I felt the air stirring before I was able to muster up a witty reply. It was a subtle change, a slight rise in temperature, the smell of ozone like before a lightning strike. Someone was gathering power, a lot of it, and fast. Whatever was coming, it was going to be nasty, it was going to be noisy, and if past experience held true - it was going to be painful.
For me to feel it, it had to be close. I wasn’t a wizard or witch by any stretch of the imagination. Truth be told, most of them could wipe the floor with me. They packed a hell of a lot of mojo, and I couldn’t even begin to understand how it worked. Fact of the matter was, it did and to great effect. Hell, I’d read once there was a guy in Chicago who could level entire city blocks with fireballs.
The van slid up beside us, matching our speed and all but invisible in the darkness. The lights were off -including the interior lights- which I put together when I saw the cargo door in the side had already been flung open. A figure was seated on the van’s floor, barely discernible, a shadow amongst shadows.
The cop was oblivious. He was texting again. Go figure.
I broke the handcuffs, snapping the little metal bars that held the bracelets together. I reached up grabbing the seatbelt and drug it across my lap, managing to buckle up just before all hell broke loose.
A wall of water slammed into the side of the squad car. My window blew inwards, drenching me instantly. Tiny square bullets of safety glass, the remnants of my window, peppered my face. The force of the impact almost ripped me out of the seat. A thick band of pain slammed across my thighs and chest, snapping against my ribs and sucking the air out of me. The cop jerked the wheel hard to his left, towards the van, trying to correct the swerve.
He failed. Miserably.
There was a moment of weightlessness as the cruiser went airborne. It was a single long second where outside, the horizon tilted and then twisted upside down on its axis. It was almost peaceful hanging in the air and watching as the pavement rose to meet us.
And then everything exploded. There was a sound like a mortar going off, an ear shattering symphony of warping metal and shattering glass as the car succumbed to the laws of gravity. The seat belt jerked again, hard, a two-inch line of pain and constriction crossing over my chest and my lap. My head snapped, bringing another loud flair of pain from my jaw only to be dwarfed a second later when my head collided with the hard plastic of the seat behind me.
The car rolled once more, smashing me against the door with equal amounts of vicious force and whip crack momentum. It finally settled on its roof thirty feet away from where some asshole had sent a pocket-sized tsunami up our collective asses.
I blinked, fighting through waves of pain and disorientation. The seatbelt held me suspended upside down, pulling tight across my already battered body. I put one hand against the roof, bracing myself and took stock of my injuries. For the most part I was whole. I had a few cuts from broken safety glass. There would be a nasty seatbelt shaped bruise across my chest and lap, but nothing seemed to scream broken bone, internal bleeding, or imminent death which was a plus. I’d be perfectly fine in less than half an hour. The marks would all be gone within a day, two tops.
All things considered, aside from a nasty headache, I was pretty damn lucky.
The cop, not so much. It would seem I wasn’t the only one he had forgotten to buckle in. He was breathing, albeit weakly. His legs were twisted at opposite odd angles and pinned by the steering column. Blood covered most of his face and I could see a few spots where teeth had been moments before through his parted lips. He was facing me, eyes opening and closing with a slow, dazed fascination.
“Jack,” Alice said, flickering into view on the street, just outside my now shattered window. She was seated Indian style, and seemed completely uninterested in my shitty state of affairs. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“I can tell how absolutely excited you are Alice. Really. I can,” I muttered.
Holding myself up with one arm, I undid the seat belt and flopped over onto my side, as opposed to my head. I lay there for a moment, fighting off a wave of nausea. Once I was sure I wasn’t going to vomit all over myself, I began to worm my way out through the shattered window.
“I’m glad you can acknowledge that,” she said.
I glared at her. Behind her, I could see the van skid to a stop. Thankfully traffic was almost non-existent this late, or else we’d have gotten run over while this whole fucked up scene played itself out. A woman jumped out of the side door, the motion one of quick feline grace. She was taller than me, with thick red hair and a body built out of compact muscle. She wore a simple green tank top and black jeans over heavy boots. She walked towards me, chanting quietly to her self. There were small, bleeding cuts on the inside of her forearms, the blood running down over her hands and dripping from her fingertips to the pavement.
I made out the words “Goddess” and “Cleanse” a moment before Alice’s face registered a look of total surprise and the little demon vanished.
Weakness washed over me. Everything went fuzzy, slowly shifting in and out of focus. My stomach heaved and emptied itself on the asphalt in a thick, lurching retch. I tried to fight my way to my feet but my muscles failed me. I collapsed in a broken heap at the redhead's feet.
It took me a minute to realize I couldn’t understand what language the woman was speaking. Because of Alice, I was able to understand any spoken language on the planet, and some that weren’t. I should have been able to understand what she was saying as easily as if I was hearing English.
I couldn’t understand a damned word of it.
It finally dawned on me what she had done and the copper taste of fear replaced the taste of bile in my mouth. There are only two things that can really hurt me. I mean really and truly do me harm that I can't recover from. One was holy objects, those things infused with faith over time. Not the symbol, but the pure faith that’s put into them by their owner through years of prayer and turmoil and hope. A rosary, for example, held and prayed over for years would be able to burn my skin like a branding iron. The other thing was b
lessed earth, be it Christian, Buddhist, Wiccan whatever. As long as someone with pure, true faith had consecrated the ground, it was anathema to everything that Alice was and left me cut off from her power.
The redhead had just blessed the patch of road we were all standing on, and she had done it in less than a minute flat.
Because of it, I was just another average human. Alice kept me exactly as I was the moment I had sold my soul and my spirit had returned to my body. I didn’t get sick. My body didn't age at the same rate as a normal person. I’d pretty much keep on trucking until I met whatever it was that ended up doing me in or I managed to get a few centuries under my belt. That said, I had been a heroin addict when I died. When my soul returned to my body, I'd been in a coma for days without heroin. Without Alice to stave it off, I was going to going to come down with a serious case of dope sick in rather short order.
Chapter 3
“Nice ta’ see yer still breathin’,” the redhead said, standing over me. She had a thick Cockney British accent. “I was really ‘opin I wasn’t gonna ‘ave to carry you.”
I stood up weakly, using the overturned patrol car for support. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt back up to obscure my scarred face. I could already feel the familiar pull of addiction returning. A steady pressure, like a single finger pushing agony into my brain at the base of my skull. In a matter of hours it would be an all-consuming misery, wracking my body with need. I did my best to shove it to the periphery of my thoughts and focus on the woman instead. It only half worked.
“Carry me huh?” I said, turning my head and spitting blood and bile onto the pavement. “Lady, it ever occur to you that maybe I’m not interested in going, be it carried or otherwise, anywhere with you?”
“Oh? That’s funny. I didn’t recall you ‘avin much of a choice in the matter boyo,” she said with a cold smile.
I pushed myself off the car, still shaking internally from the crash. It felt like every one of my organs had been rearranged, liver in place of kidneys, stomach up around the lungs. I had to fight the urge to throw up again.
I took stock of the situation and pretty much instantly decided I hated my life. If I tried to make a break for it, aside from the fact I could barely walk, I was pretty sure Lady Poseidon here would find reason to strongly object. More than likely, she'd object via another of those well placed mini-tsunamis. Throwing down wasn’t an option. I could barely stand, let alone hope to go toe-to-toe with her in a fight. Given what she had done to the car, I had no doubt that she could do something equally nasty to me in regards to bodily harm if the urge struck her. Even at full mojo, she was probably more than I could handle.
On the plus side, I didn’t think she wanted me dead. If she did she could have just lit me up as I was crawling out of the car’s wreckage, before I had a chance to even defend myself. Instead, she had cut me off from Alice, which led me to believe she had an idea of what she was dealing with. The fact that she was talking instead of killing, also meant she was taking me at least a little seriously. I tried really hard to consider that a point in my favor, especially when I took stock of what I was dealing with.
“You’re a witch.”
“An’ yer possessed of a crackin’ intellect aren’t ya?”
“Right. So, if I refuse?” I asked.
“I’ll beat ya ‘bout yer ‘ead an’ neck till ya agree that neither one of us wants to be standin ‘ere when his friends show up,” she nodded towards the cop, “be they in blue or otherwise. So, can we pretty please, with sugar and a cherry on top, get the fuck out of here?”
I looked back at the cop and sighed in resignation.
She offered me a winning smile, nearly luminescent with cheer and pearly whites.
I climbed into the van.
“Good boy.”
The interior was bare, save for the two front seats and a few fast food wrappers and empty soda cans. The driver looked about two days out from actually getting his license. He was pudgy, dressed in black slacks and a white dress shirt stained with sweat. He was focused on the road. He didn’t say a word, or even so much as look in my direction, as I damn near crawled to the back and collapsed against the far wall. The woman climbed in a minute later, holding a black box about the size of a hardcover book in her hand.
She took a seat Indian style across from me, the box in her lap. For a few moments we said nothing, staring across the expanse of space between us. We let the sound of the van’s tires against the road and the rumble of its engine fill the air.
Even in the gloom I could see she was pretty. There was something about her, something that was more than physical that lent to her attractiveness in intangible ways. It was a vibe, if you will. She had a sort of innocence, something childlike and wondrous that echoed in her eyes. At the same time, she held herself with a dangerous, feline like poise. It was disconcerting.
“What’s that?” I asked, nodding towards the box in her lap. The motion made my head swim.
“This?” she said, holding it up. “This is me keeping our mugs off the telly.”
“Okay?”
“It’s the hard drive for the cop car’s camera system,” the kid up front said, his voice rumbling before cracking into bat frequency. He blushed and turned his attention more forcefully towards the road. I couldn’t see where we were from where I was sitting and I didn’t really feel up to moving and finding out.
“Mind handing me my bag, Richie?” the woman asked the driver. He tossed her a black backpack from the front of the van without looking back. It hit the floor a few feet away. She reached over, pulling it into her lap and began looking through it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Be patient. Dun wanna ruin the surprise.”
“Yay. Another surprise,” I deadpanned. “So let’s try this. Who the hell are you?”
She pulled a few of those wet naps you get at wing places out of the bag and began wiping the dried blood off her arm.
“Better question,” she said without looking at me, “ya know who that was that ‘ad ya?”
“Yeah. The police.”
“Obviously, but more specific?”
She tossed the wet naps, now a coppery brown in the bag and took out a roll of gauze and a small jar. She spent a moment rubbing some sort of balm over her wounds, the smell of it reminding me of dead leaves and wood smoke. After lathering herself up, she began wrapping the gauze tightly around her arms, one roll around each forearm, starting near the crease of her elbow and wrapping towards her wrists. She moved with the precision of practice. It took her less than a minute to wrap the wounds.
I shrugged.
“Oy,” she said, conveying disgust in the single syllable. She tossed the gauze back in the bag and pushed it along the floor towards the front of the van and out of her way.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Detective Marshall Newton. We’ve ‘ad ‘is mobile wired for months. We jus’ pulled yer arse outta the fire big time mate.”
“Okay?” I said, trying to follow the logic train and failing in reasonably short order.
“He worked for Adam,” Richie, the driver chimed in.
I took a minute to wrap my head around everything. Several years ago, before I went to prison I worked for a criminal named Mister Lin. He ran most of Boston’s prostitution and drugs. I was, in essence, his go-to man for putting an emphasis on certain decrees. One of those had been to send a message to Adam, a vampire. I sent the message by lighting his Childe, Miranda, on fire. Adam caught me and gave me one week to find him a suitable replacement. I went to prison two days later. Apparently, he was still holding a grudge. I always wondered why he didn’t have me offed in prison. Guess he wanted to do the honors himself.
Even better, now I was riding in a van with two people whose names I didn’t know, who could bug a police officer’s cell phone, and to top it all off, one was a witch that could toss around massive amounts of water without so much as breaking a sweat. Yep, there was on
ly one word to sum the whole situation up.
“Fuck,” I said finally.
“Indeed,” she said.
We drove the rest of the way in silence. I kept waiting for Alice to reappear, for the feeling of rejuvenation that would accompany her. I waited for my muscles to become wired with life again, for the pain to melt away from my jaw, my sides, my stomach. More than anything, I wanted the nagging itch in my skull, the pressure on my temples to die away. I wanted the noose of addiction around my neck to loosen, even for just a second. Unfortunately, it was only getting tighter. It just wasn't happening.
Apparently a van could be consecrated as holy ground. Who knew?
Our destination turned out to be Saint Cecilia’s in Boston. As churches go, from the exterior it was nothing spectacular. It looked like a cross between a factory and a castle, built with bricks the color of rust and shadowed by much larger and more modern buildings. An arched stone doorway, wreathed in what looked like maybe granite or marble, though truthfully I had no idea, stood out on one corner.
We parked across the street, and sliding out the side door of the van I could feel the sort of vibe that radiates off old churches. It was a feeling of warmth, of comfort, but at the same time an alien sense of distance. It was like there was something inside that would never be attainable, something invisible and intangible but every bit real. Overhead, the sky had begun to lighten as dawn approached and star bursts of sunlight flashed off the church’s windows. For a minute I wobbled on my feet feeling weak and drained. Every inch of my body hurt. My skin felt like it wanted to crawl over itself, turn inside out and shrink all at the same time.
I wanted heroin. Badly.
Richie hopped out of the van and keeping his head down, hands in his pockets, headed for the church.
Demon Jack Page 3
