Demon Jack

by Patrick Donovan

  I was outclassed and outgunned. I could run, bail on them both… Should bail on them both, as a matter of fact. I had a lot more invested in me than I did either of them. If I died it was the end of the road for me, I was on a one way express right back to Hell’s front door. If they died, well, then I didn’t. Point for that option. Huge point for that option. I could slip out now. Hang back, let Maggie get inside the room, then just turn and walk away.

  If I did, if I could get far enough away, New York maybe, or DC, fade out like I had here once upon a time. I could dodge Adam and Legion.

  Despite the fact that I felt I owed them, I was really starting to see the upside to ditching them. This one might hang with me for a bit, make it a tad harder to sleep, but I’d get over it.

  “I’m going to have a cigarette, then check on Lucy,” I said, following Maggie up the stairs. She didn’t say anything, opting to turn a glare at me that would melt solid steel under its intensity.

  “You do that,” she said, her disgust staining her words. “I have a phone call to make.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  She stopped with the door half open, staring at me for a long time. Her eyes radiated challenge before she pulled her phone out of her pocket. She slipped through, slamming the door behind her. I lit a cigarette, taking a long drag and exhaling twin snakes of smoke through my nose. I tried to play everything out again in my head. It was all such a simple set up, and I’d been flung right into it without so much as a stutter step. I was right, at least I thought I was, and made to look like I was wrong. Damn frustrating that.

  “I know what you're thinking and don’t run,” Alice said, flickering into view. She was sitting on the railing, eyes locked on my face.

  “I thought you said if I follow through on this I was as good as dead?” I said.

  “You are.”

  “The demon is telling me to be altruistic?”

  “Hardly. The demon is telling you to be pragmatic,” she said calmly.

  I quirked a brow and inhaled from the cigarette.

  “Pragmatic huh?”

  “Yes. This is bigger than you.”

  “You’re not making a goddamned bit of sense, Alice,” I said.

  A meth head, his teeth worn to nubs and his ratty clothes stained, passed by. He looked at me like I was totally insane, or really, really high - one of the two. He was shaking his head and muttering something about tweakers.

  Hi pot, meet kettle. Asshole.

  I ignored him, focusing on Alice.

  “So, care to make me understand?” I asked.

  “Jack, your selfishness is astounding,” she said. “You’ll leave these people to face this and for the sake of self-preservation it’s perhaps best that you do just that. But let me ask you this - what if this is just the beginning? What if this is only the start?”

  I raised a brow at that.

  “The beginning?”

  “Yes, The beginning.”

  “Of?”

  “Something bad,” she said.

  “I think we’ve achieved ‘something bad’ already, Alice.”

  “No, not yet you haven’t,” she said and vanished.

  “Fucking demon,” I muttered. For a long moment I stood there, smoking, thinking, trying to play everything over in my head. All I had to do was turn and start walking. Walk away and wash my hands of the whole mess.

  Instead, I used the key Lucy had given me to her room and slipped inside. It was dark, mattresses flipped and propped against the walls, over the windows in an attempt to block as much sunlight as possible. I could see her face, barely visible in the gloom peeking out from beneath a small bundle of blankets. She was sleeping, though the fact that she didn’t breath, didn’t move, didn’t so much as flinch made her look dead.

  Adam could move during the day, albeit he was diminished. He had also had several decades to get to that point. During the day a vampire as young as Lucy pretty much had no choice but to sleep. Only something extreme would wake her up from the near death state she was in. It would take an explosion, a direct physical attack, something of that nature. If she did wake up, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight. She’d react like a cornered animal, all claws and teeth with very little rationale.

  I crouched down beside her, watching her sleep for a few minutes, the pair of us statues in the empty room. Outside, a siren wailed, a high keening drone of sound in the otherwise perfect stillness of the room. Staring at her, at what she had become, a weight settled on me. It was a cold, cloying sensation settling in my chest. Frustration, rage and helplessness grabbed my nerves, my thoughts, and choked me.

  The siren covered up the sound of me crying.

  My shoulders hitched, and I settled back putting my back against the wall. I was scared. I was in over my head. I wanted to bail. I wanted to set things right. I wanted to survive. I didn’t want them to be more broken remnants of a life that I had fucked up since day one. Years of being the fuck up, years of drugs and nothing and being empty and desperation and struggle and misery - and this is where I ended up. At one point, people feared me. When I worked for Mr. Lin, people whispered my name with respect, and then that was gone. It was just as fleeting as everything else. It was full circle and everything that was left in the end was broken.

  I was scared to see the things, to face the things, that I had created. It was the story of my life, one crippling fear after another.

  I sat there, terrified, tears streaming down my face until I drifted into an uneasy sleep.

  Chapter 23

  I woke up a second before Lucy almost tore my throat out. Her hands were vice-like, one intertwined in my hair pulling my head sharply to the side, the other against my chest, pushing me into the wall and holding me still. Her eyes were empty, hungry, glassy and distant. They were locked on the big vein in my throat.

  Rivulets of venom coated her lips and stained her chin a pale yellow. It was a nasty toxin, it would paralyze me if she got a hold of me with her teeth, but be kind enough to leave me feeling every razor sharp fang tearing into my skin. I’d feel every touch of fear that came with having my life’s blood drained and be completely unable to move to stop it from happening. Gasping, mewling sounds escaped the back of my throat. I managed to put my foot into her stomach, holding her back. Her jaws snapped closed with an audible clacking sound, close enough I could feel her lips brush against the tender hollow of my neck, the venom instantly numbing my skin.

  “Lucy!” I yelled, shoving her back with all the strength I could muster. She hit the ground, rolling backwards ass over hat and into the dresser against the wall. The TV fell with a crash of sparks and glass. She came up to her hands and knees, eyes still focused on my neck and burning with animal hunger.

  I shot to my feet and she hit me like a linebacker, driving me back into the wall hard enough that I felt something in my neck crack from the whiplash. Her jaws snapped again at my neck, my hand catching her chin, forcing her head back. God, she was strong, far stronger than I expected. She was a vampire for barely more than a day and already she was every bit as strong as I was. She shoved me into the wall and the drywall beneath us gave way, small bits of white dust falling onto my shoulder. The two-by-four studs underneath us creaked audibly from the strain.

  “LUCY!” I heard Maggie’s voice, as the door flew open and she burst into the room. Outside, full dark had settled, the streetlights backlighting her and casting her shadow across the floor. She spat something out in Gaelic and drew her knife across her skin. It didn’t matter, I didn’t have even the slightest bit of a chance to brace myself.

  Lucy looked up, smelling the blood at the same instant that wind tore through the confined space, turning the whole room into something vaguely equitable to a wind tunnel. The gust hit us both, lifting us from our feet, slamming us into the back wall. Glass shattered behind Lucy, her tiny frame smashing into a mirror hung from the wall. I was lucky, I went through the dividing wall which separated the bedroom section from the bathroom
and found myself laying in a bathtub full of chunks of drywall and lumber, little pieces of light fixture dropping into my lap.

  Lucy rose from the floor with a shriek, both tortured and starving, a banshee howl that carried with it the death of a girl and the birth of a monster. She shook her head violently, blue and green hair whipping back and forth and tore through the apartment, bowling Maggie over, sending her to the floor. I watched her leap off the second floor walkway, nothing more than a blur of motion, and vanish into the night.

  “Ow,” I groaned, pushing a hunk of drywall off of me and crawling out of the debris. My hip gave a brief howl of pain, but given the course of the past few days, it was something that had become old hat, and as such, was promptly ignored.

  I pulled myself to my feet, heading out to follow Lucy. Maggie was back on her feet, staring out the doorway. Outside, a crowd was gathering, faces appearing and trying to get a glimpse of the calamity. I ignored them, grabbing Maggie’s hand and pushing through the small mob of onlookers. They watched us in stunned silence, questions dying on their lips as they got a look at the scowl on my face.

  “This is so not good,” Maggie said, master of the obvious that she was.

  “You think?”

  I pulled her behind me, descending the steps and heading through the parking lot. That kind of excitement would bring police, even to a place like this. It’d take them longer to get here than say, suburbia, but it was still inevitable. After my last altercation with the cops, I intended to put as much distance between the boys in blue, the hotel, and myself as possible. I wasn’t as concerned with being turned in as I was of being caught by another of Adam’s stooges. Trading a stolen gun for a few days room and board had afforded me at least the luxury of a better than average chance that the clerk wouldn’t rat me out if for no other reason that he'd want to keep his own skin out of the fryer. Granted, I sort of wish I had kept the gun now, hindsight and all that.

  We walked, heads down, for a few blocks. Maggie didn’t say anything, her messenger bag thrown over her shoulder, bumping against her hip in hushed rhythm with her step. She kept her head down, shoulders hunched, in no way dressed for the cold. Our hasty retreat had left us with little more than what we were wearing and Maggie’s bag of tricks.

  “Where would she go?” she asked, cutting her eyes up to take in her surroundings. Around us, old factories, forgotten and discarded, loomed like the empty shells of a progress long past and discarded.

  “I have no fucking idea,” I said. The cold feeling of despair that I had experienced watching over Lucy threatened to settle over me again. I pushed it aside, turning it into a tight ball of anger and swallowed it. Now was not the time to give in to something like that. I had to at least try to keep my head clear. There would be time later for self-hatred. Right now, I had to focus on the matter at hand. Where was the crazed hungry vampire?

  “We ‘ave to find her.”

  “I’m aware,” I said, touches of frustration coloring my words.

  For a long moment she fell silent, content to walk to the beat of that bag against her hip. Silence reigned again, a weary, tired thing. It was the kind that came with a stack of questions and not enough answers, frustration without solution.

  “Well, where would you go?” she asked.

  “She’s not me, and I’m not a fucking vampire so to reiterate: I have no fucking idea.”

  “So you have no suggestions then?” she asked.

  “I seriously never thought about what I would do if I was a new vampire running around the streets with no guidance and a serious hard on for something to eat.”

  “Well we need to think of something, Jack. She’ll kill someone, get herself killed, and God only knows what kind of shit storm it’ll cause if that happens.”

  “Jesus freaking Christ, you think I’m not aware of that?”

  I didn’t have to think about that. I already knew the answer to that scenario. A huge fucking mess that would take Adam and company weeks to squash. By then, given the proliferation of cell phones, the Internet and the like, it’d be too late. Sure, people might write it off as a hoax, or a publicity stunt, but some wouldn’t. Word would start to spread that all those things that went bump in the night were real. It’d be a disaster. There were still those that hunted the supernatural for whatever reason. They’d descend on Boston like vultures.

  “So, back to the question at hand. What are we going to do?”

  The vampires stepped out of the shadows in almost perfect synchronization. The shadows seemed to stretch, sliding back off their skin as they stepped away from the buildings that had served as their hiding spot. There were three of them, two men and a woman. The men could have been twins, both well built and crammed into jeans and leather jackets. Both had shaved heads, the streetlights casting them with a dull sheen. The woman was young, maybe early twenties, and dressed in one of those motorcycle racing suits. The form fitting, catsuit kind that zipped up the front to the throat, its bright red playing off her shoulder length blond hair.

  I stared at them, and sighed. “Seriously? Again?”

  Chapter 24

  “Mister Draughn. Adam would like to conclude his business with you,” the woman said, letting the twins move to flank her, three sets of milky white eyes settling on me.

  “Well. I guess that answers that question,” I said, looking towards Maggie.

  “Hmph,” she offered in reply.

  I turned my attention back to the woman.

  “I’m sorry, now’s not the best time for me. I’ll tell you what, since you’re Adam’s people apparently, why don’t you go ahead and call my people. We’ll see what we can do about a power lunch?”

  “I don’t believe that’s an option,” she said, her voice all velvety and sultry.

  “Right, what is it with you vampire types always referring to shit like it’s a fucking board meeting anyways? I’ve never gotten that. ‘Conclude his business.’ Why don’t you just say, ‘hey Jack. Adam wants to finish fucking killing you now’?”

  Blondie’s eyes narrowed. She took a step closer, the muscle at her sides moving with her, fanning out to take position at our flanks. Beside me, Maggie tensed. The twin to my right smiled, running his tongue over his teeth.

  “You have the option, Mister Draughn, of coming peacefully, or we can take you by force. The choice is yours. You initiated the Rite of Challenge, and that rite has yet to conclude. It must be finished. If you’d like you may have a moment to discuss it with your friend,” she said, looking towards Maggie.

  I didn’t really need to discuss it. I had about had my fill of things trying to kill me, of turning a corner and surprise, something wants to rip my head off.

  “Whatcha think?” I asked Maggie, my tone mocking and almost jovial.

  The vampire to our left smiled wider than his counterpart, a shark tooth grin that seemed to split his face. He lifted his shirt, just the slightest, showing the gun tucked in his waistband. I scoffed at him.

  “I'm not thinking we have a whole lot of choice 'ere, Jackie,” Maggie said, false resignation rolling over her syllables. “Our options are right and proper limited.”

  “Yeah, that was my take.”

  Lucy exploded from out of nowhere, a blur of ferocious motion catching blondie around the waist. They hit the ground rolling, Lucy’s mouth already clamped on the woman’s shoulder. The paralytic toxin in Lucy's bite wouldn’t affect the vampire, but the impact of ninety pounds of starving Lucy sure as hell did.

  They hit the pavement in a tangle of thrashing limbs. Lucy had her arms and legs wrapped around the other vampire, wrapping her up in an unshakable death grip. The blonde let loose a rage filled scream, loud enough that it hit me like a physical blow, causing me to take a step back.

  The other two vampires, turned, their expressions radiating between surprise and confusion. I looked to Maggie, meeting her eyes. For a tense moment, everything seemed to go quiet. Even the thunderclap volume screams of the blonde locked in
Lucy’s arms seemed to dim.

  This was it, my last chance to turn and run. I knew, somewhere deep down, after this there wouldn't be any more opportunities to put this behind me, to scramble away, keep myself alive, and live to fight another day. If I did, Maggie and Lucy were done. They’d be memories, betrayals that I’d learn to fool myself into thinking I’d be able to eventually put behind me. I was tempted. I was really tempted. But I knew it wasn't real. They'd haunt me until whatever it was that offed me sent my miserable soul back to the pit.

  I kept my eyes on Maggie for a moment longer, then reached out grabbing the vampire closest to me by the back of his collar. He’d made the mistake of turning his back to me so he could see what was happening between his boss and Lucy. His surprise had, for a moment, made him forget all about me. I pulled him into the fist I drove into his kidneys. No holding back, no control. It was a quick, hard rabbit punch that hit like a sledgehammer.

  The vampire grunted, his legs going weak. He dropped to his knees, half turned towards me. He reached for his gun, fumbling at his waist. I grabbed his hair and rammed my knee into his face. There was a crunching sound, fire erupting across my leg. Teeth and blood flew from his face, and the heat intensified, my leg growing numb and wobbly.

  The son of a bitch had bit me!

  I could feel the venom pumping through my blood. My leg felt heavy. It took a physical effort to stay standing. I reached down, grabbing the gun as he freed it, easily pulling it from the dazed vampire's hand. I put it to his temple, still holding his hair and pulled the trigger. Red mist and other less desirable chunks exploded out of the other side of his head, leaving a greasy wet stain over the sidewalk.

  I lifted the gun, as the other vampire brought his to bear. Standing on the business end, the barrel looked vaguely wide enough to house a subway train. I fought to stay standing, my leg growing less responsive by the second. We held the stand off for a brief second. His eyes cut back towards where Lucy and the Blonde had been thrashing only seconds before, and then back to me. Indecision warred on his face. The leader of the trio lay beneath Lucy, the younger vampire straddling her waist. She tore savagely at the wound on her prey’s shoulder, blood staining her face. The vampire under her didn’t move.