The door led into a tight hallway, various closed doors lining each side. The door at the end was open. A small set of stairs wound down and into the basement. We took the stairs, leaving the sounds of the fighting behind us.
The basement was vast, the walls lined with more bondage gear, stacked liquor boxes, and beer kegs. It was unfinished, the floor bare concrete, the walls bare cinder block. Lucy moved to the back, past another stack of empty beer kegs and liquor boxes to a grate set in the floor.
“This is how Adam brought me here, through the sewers,” she said.
Next to me, Maggie let out a slow, whimpering groan. I set her down, and tore off a portion of her shirt, tying off her wounds. I was going to have to get her somewhere, hospital or something. I didn’t know if she was going to make it. Her color had become an ashy pale, her motions slow and weak. She healed quickly, at least, from what I could tell if she had her magic skin lotion goop. Though at the moment, she wasn’t doing much outside of weighing me down.
I debated leaving her. I probably should have. For some reason, I couldn't.
“Hang with me, Maggie,” I growled, pulling the makeshift tourniquets tight.
Lucy lifted the grate one handed and tossed it aside. Behind us, stragglers were filing down the stairs, bounding the few steps to the floor in pursuit. I fired another three shots towards them, doing nothing more than shattering a few wine bottles and ricocheting off the cinderblock walls. In hindsight, I’m lucky one of them didn’t bounce right back up and give me a kiss. I grabbed Maggie, throwing her over my shoulder and stepped over the edge. The hole was wide enough for the both of us, almost six feet across and recessed into the floor.
We fell maybe six, eight feet at best. Maggie let out a strangled “oof” when we hit the bottom. I tried not to think of the lumps of spongy gunk that hung around my feet and ankles, floating in the shallow water. Lucy dropped down through the grate a second later, surprisingly graceful and seemingly un-phased by the muck. Granted, she didn’t breath much anymore, which probably made it a lot easier to ignore the stench.
One of the green eyes dropped in right behind us. He was dressed in a tracksuit, and looked to be about forty at best. He stared at me, eyes narrowed. He growled, blood caking his face, most of his teeth broken at the gums.
“Host,” he growled.
“Hi,” I said and shot him twice in the face, the gun echoing loudly through the sewer. The third pull of the trigger left me with a dry click. I dropped the empty clip into the water, hitting the release with my thumb. I somehow managed to balance Maggie over my shoulder, slam the spare clip into the handle, and snap the slide back into place without dropping her.
“We need to move,” I said, looking to Lucy.
Adam was more than likely holding his own up there, thralls or no thralls, but some of the green eyes had followed us into the basement. It wouldn't be long before they found their way into the sewers after us. In such tight quarters, with a new vampire and a bleeding woman on the verge of shock, the best option I had was to get the hell out of Dodge, regroup and try to figure out what the fuck I was going to do next.
“Which way?” I asked Lucy.
She shrugged.
“What do you mean?” I said, spreading my arm wide and eliciting a small whimper from Maggie.
“I was sort of, you know... In a not so great spot,” she said, eyes narrowed.
I sighed.
“Fuck it,” I said, and turned moving as fast as I could over the slippery stone floor of the sewers, Lucy a step behind me. Alice was nowhere to be seen. Go figure. I turned at random, taking rights and lefts, as the route appeared to put as much distance between Adam's club and us as possible.
Echoes of pursuit followed us: water splashing, growls and footsteps. The walls of the sewer played hell with the acoustics, sending the echoes bouncing off each other and reverberating in maddening ways. They seemed almost a foot behind us and a hundred yards away all at the same time.
Lucy yelped in pain as we passed under beams of sunlight, thrown across the floor like prison bars through a storm drain. They made her stagger, like she was on the verge of fainting until she passed once more into shadow. The variation between fright and total lethargy was kind of disconcerting, to be honest. I looked back as I went, her face and arms had withered and blistered, turning the deep red of a really nasty sunburn. She put on a mask of determination and pushed on, ignoring the pain.
We ran like that for what felt like hours, but it was probably not much more than twenty minutes. Panting, I settled Maggie on a dry patch of the floor where the stink and sludge hadn’t touched. She slumped against the sewer wall. Her breathing coming in slow, shallow gasps. Lucy stayed back in the shadows. She twitched, her posture equal parts hunting cat and drug addict inches away from a fix. The look in her eyes spoke volumes. They were distant, vicious, and settled on Maggie’s arms where the blood had sheeted and dried, dying her skin a coppery brownish red.
“Lucy,” I said, my voice even.
She didn’t respond, her empty eyes starting forward. Her tongue darted out, sliding over her lips with hungry anticipation. Even in the gloom, I could see the tiny, venom coated fangs that lined her mouth where her teeth had once been. It was a painful reminder.
“Lucy,” I said again.
She blinked, turning to look at me. For a moment she stared, head tilting slightly to the side, eyes coming back into focus. She shook her head, her lower lip trembling. Tears welled in her eyes.
I was disgusted. Disgusted with Adam, disgusted at the situation, but more than anything disgusted with myself. I had always been about myself. I didn’t care really who got hurt, or where the chips fell, as long as it was in my favor. In front of me, coated in blood and shit, one nearly dying, one already dead and still moving with a hunger worse than any addiction rolling in her gut, it became crystal clear that the game had changed. It became even more clear that I had changed somewhere along the way. Killing Essie had been a necessity, and while it hung around my neck, it was tolerable, even acceptable to my worldview. With Maggie? Maggie had intervened and known the risks. I could accept that. Lucy was a different story. Just by being in my presence her life was over before it had even really had a chance to start.
I could hear my father’s voice in the back of my head, breaking free of the cage I had kept it in for years. His drunken slur screaming the words in my psyche: “You’re a goddamned disappointment. Everything you touch turns to shit.” I shook my head, looking between one dying and one crying.
“Jack,” Alice said from behind me.
I turned towards her, eyes narrowed.
“Not now,” I growled, perfectly content to hold onto my rage and self-loathing without being reminded that on top of it all, I had sold my soul to, you know, the forces of Hell.
“Jack,” she repeated.
I gave her a murderous glare.
She vanished.
I took a deep breath, pushing my father’s voice away, my anger, and tried to think through the situation rationally. I had to get somewhere safe, first of all. Not the church, and not any of my old haunts. Somewhere warm, off the map. I had to get Maggie to a hospital. I had to get Lucy as far away from Adam as possible. I had to get somewhere, hunker down and figure out how to deal with the total shit storm my life had become.
The pieces of something sort of like a plan start to formulate in my head. I rolled with it.
“Lucy, can you keep under cover until night?”
She nodded, albeit weakly. “I can try,” she said, her arms crossed under her breasts, wrapped over her stomach like she might be sick. She looked frail, broken beyond repair. I had to push down another massive bout of self-loathing.
“Right. Keep moving, go to the Commons. Soon as you can get out of here, head topside, meet me there. Alright?”
She nodded.
“Go.”
She turned, and within the blink and eye, she was gone leaving only a ripple in the small bit of wat
er she had been standing beside. I turned back to Maggie, slapping her face lightly, trying to rouse her from half conscious to at least coherent.
“Hey. You with me?”
“Oy,” she said weakly.
“Alright, hang in there,” I said, and lifted her up, carrying her more gently. I moved as quickly as I could through the sewers. It took me less than a minute to find a ladder to the street. I set her on the floor. Had she been more than half awake, I would have probably earned a rather nasty tongue lashing for what I had set her down in. I climbed the ladder, lifting the sewer lid and peering out to make sure I didn’t drag us out into the middle of the street and into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. My luck was sort of heading in that direction lately, after all.
The manhole opened up into an alley behind a restaurant. The back door was open and I could see into the kitchen. The smell of frying food rolled out, providing a welcome reprieve from the stench of the sewers and sent my stomach into burning convulsions of hunger. The sun shone high in the sky, nearly blinding after emerging from the darkness of the subterranean passages. I climbed back down and draped Maggie as gently as I could over my shoulder. After a few minutes of fighting against the slime covered ladder, balancing Maggie on my shoulder and trying not to drop us back down onto shit covered stone, I was able to prop her up next to the wall beside the door.
Inside, cooks milled about the restaurant, moving pots and pans, grilling, frying, and just generally keeping busy. They didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to me or Maggie. They were perfectly content to yell at each other in Spanish, arguing over a soccer game on a portable TV.
“Hey,” I said quietly, once again given light slaps to her cheek.
“Eh?” she asked, eyes bleary.
“Gonna get you some help, alright? You’re gonna have to trust me though.”
She shrugged.
“Can’t I just go to sleep?” she asked, her words thick and slurred.
“Fuck that,” I growled, giving her face another light slap.
“Oy,‘ell are you doing?” she asked me drunkenly
“Stay the fuck awake. I mean it.”
I turned, leaving her there, propped against the wall and stepped into the kitchen. I reached over, grabbing a rack of spices, cooking utensils and pots, and tipped it over sending the whole mess clattering to the floor in a riotous cacophony of noise. Every hand stopped and every head turned towards me. I gave ‘em the finger and bolted.
Easiest way to get someone to go where you want them? Piss them off and run.
The plan worked beautifully. The guys in the kitchen tore after me, completely ignoring the mess I had caused, leaping over the pile of cookware and spices. They burst through the door as I was hitting the end of the alley, they all stopped seeing Maggie. Instantly, they were in damsel in distress mode, one of them pulling a cell phone from his pocket, the others tending to her wounds best they could.
Granted, they’d probably accuse me of trying to kill her or something, but one problem at a time.
Chapter 15
It took me a few hours time to make it to the Sunrise Inn. I spent the majority of that time weaving through back alleys and side streets, moving on foot and trying to stay as far away from people as possible. At the same time, I made sure to take an abstract route in case someone was following me, doubling back over my own tracks a few times.
The Sunrise Inn, at its height, had been one of the finest hotels in Boston. Over time, urban decay had set in and it had become a palace of a completely different kind. Now it catered to meth addicts, hookers, and other sundry types. Empty syringes and drug baggies littered the parking lot. The streetlights, usually meant to dissuade less than savory characters from conducting their business out in the open, were all shattered, their glass lost amidst the green and brown of old beer bottles. A few cars dotted the mostly empty lot, the majority of them old, battered warhorses pitted with rust and dents.
It was the kind of place where you could trade a stolen handgun to the guy at the desk for two rooms and twenty bucks, which was exactly what I did. I managed to get smokes from a half-broken machine in the lobby, considering the pack I had started with had all but disintegrated in my pocket after the run through the sewers. I also managed a pack of pop tarts and a soda from the vending machines outside with my spoils.
The room with a bed (calling it anything else would be a disgrace to proper motel rooms) wasn’t much better than the exterior. It had yellow carpet that smelled faintly of mold, a single bed with an atrocious flowered comforter and an old dial style television on top of a chipped and scarred dresser. There was a table and chair situated in one corner. A bathroom, barely large enough to stand in, sat in the back corner. It had no door and the mirror had long since been shattered, leaving only an empty frame. Finger-long thin scratches marred practically every surface, some of them still stained with bits of powder.
I grabbed the chair from the table and set it down beside the window, damn near collapsing into it. I was tired, my head hurt, and I was hungry. I wore the battering Adam had given me in a myriad of lumps and angry bruises. All in all, given what had happened, I was pretty lucky to have made it out wearing mostly other people’s blood.
“Jack,” Alice said, appearing on the bed behind me. She was seated, hands folded primly in her lap. She had her eyes settled on me, those blank, white orbs unblinking. I turned to her from where I was watching the parking lot from behind the drapes.
I wasn’t paranoid. Not at all.
“Yeah?”
“We should talk now,” Alice said calmly, though her voice had an edge to it. Something I couldn’t place.
“I’m listening,” I said, tearing open the wrapper of the pop tart, tossing half of one in my mouth. I washed it down with a long gulp of soda.
“Jack, this...” She paused for a long moment, seeming to turn words over in her head, searching for the right set. “I don’t believe you understand what you’re up against,” she said finally.
“Care to enlighten me then?” I asked, finishing off the rest of the first sugar coated, fake fruit filled pastry. I started on the second, post haste, washing it down with more soda.
“Your enemy, this thing that wants to kill you, it’s... It’s biblical.”
“Okay? What the fuck does that mean exactly?” I asked around a mouthful of food.
“I didn’t see it the first time, with your friend. Didn’t see it for what it truly is. It was still too weak, it hadn’t pulled all of its pieces together yet,” Alice said quietly.
I stopped chewing, watching Alice for a long stretch of minutes. I didn’t say anything, trying to see past the immovable veil of indifference that had settled over her face. It gave nothing away and even now I wondered if the fear I thought I had seen was nothing more than adrenaline mixed with confusion at everything that had been happening at the time.
I swallowed the last of the food and lit a cigarette.
“Alright, so it’s a demon. How do I kill it? Fuck, how do I even find it?” I asked, a trace of frustration evident in my tone. All I had going for me at the moment was Lucy, assuming she managed to make it to the meet without Adam finding her and she actually had some sort of connection to this thing that would allow her to find it. That whole line of thought, in retrospect, was a pretty hefty gamble. Maggie, the closest thing I had to an ally, was out of play. The people who had forced me into this whole mess had gone to the mattresses. All I had was Alice.
“You don’t,” She said.
I blinked. “I don’t?”
“Well, let me rephrase. You can’t kill it. And truthfully, I’d rather you not die trying.”
“Seems it’s a bit late for that. This thing has a major hate-on for me at the moment,” I said.
“Of course it does. Three times now, you’ve survived it,” she said.
“So what do you propose I do then if I can’t kill it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at her hands
in her lap.
“That’s not much help, Alice,” I said dryly. “So what exactly is it then?”
“Legion,” she said. “Well, a Legion.”
“I have no idea what that even means.”
“You’ve seen Hell, sold your soul to a demon, and have never bothered to read the Bible, even for perspective, have you? That’s... quite pathetic actually.”
“I’ve had other things on my mind,” I said flatly.
“I’d suggest you put this on your mind then, Jack,” Alice said. “Let me put it in a way you’ll be able to wrap your simple mind around. Legion, for we are many, cast out of a man by Jesus himself, and into a herd of pigs and then sent to drown. It’s considered to be one of the miracles of Christ. Think about that for a minute. It took the Christ himself to get rid of a Legion.”
I quirked an eyebrow at that. I was still mostly confused. My family had been Catholic, well somewhat. My mother had been Catholic. After she had passed away my father had traded his Bible for a bottle. Granted, in hindsight I was pretty sure the only reason he ever attended mass when I was a kid was to make her happy.
“So, you’re telling me that I’m fucked then?” I asked.
She stared at me, silent.
“Great. Fucking great,” I muttered, and stood. I took another drag off the cigarette, running a hand through my hair.
“Do you remember our deal, Jack?”
I took a long moment, letting my eyes trace over the script scarred into my hand. The symbols themselves were enough to be dizzying, wrong angles and even more obtuse curves. Each one was a passage in a language I couldn’t read, couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I knew what it granted. Kind of. I knew what I had paid, and I still didn’t know what it said.
“Not the semantics, or the fine print, but what I said to you when you agreed to this?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes,” she said.
“No.”
“I said live. Live and carry not your sins or the sins of others.” Her voice was almost reverent at the words. They hung in my ear for a moment, a faint echo in their intonation, like someone striking bells in the distance. It was strange the way they resonated, carrying in a long droning against the inside of my skull. The words themselves seem to warm me from the inside out, some of the ache bleeding out of my muscles. That was new.
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