Demon Jack

by Patrick Donovan

  I closed my eyes, I didn’t want to see it coming. I could almost hear the sounds of Hell, the symphony of wailing and gnashing, of pains unspoken.

  Her hand hit the ground beside my head, and she leaned down, her lips against my ear.

  “Shoot me,” she said. “Don’t argue. Just do it.”

  I blinked, stunned. I didn’t move, couldn’t, confusion written on my face.

  She sighed, disappointed, and grabbed the gun, pulling it into her midsection. She put her thumb over my finger and pushed the trigger firing a round into her stomach, and then another. She growled, fighting back against pain and slid off me to settle on her knees, hands over her wound.

  “We’ll talk. Soon,” she said through gritted teeth.

  I scrambled to my feet, slipping the gun in the waistband of my jeans. I could see other vampires working their way through the trees towards me. I turned, jumping for the top of the wall. I didn’t make it, my fingertips barely holding me on the ledge. I scrambled, pushing my feet against the brick, more pain ripping through my side and chest.

  Lucy’s hand locked around my wrist, pulling me over the wall a second before one of the vampires would’ve ripped my leg off. We hit the street in a roll, and it took everything I had to bite back a scream. Lucy pulled me to my feet, half dragging me away from the house. They wouldn’t chase us here, not through suburbia. It wasn't that they couldn't catch us, they could. They wouldn't follow us for fear of being seen, despite most of the houses having a few football fields worth of yard, tree, and privacy fence between them.

  “What now?” Lucy asked.

  “We keep moving,” I said, growling through the pain.

  I stumbled, dropping down to one knee. The flush of adrenaline had faded and the cold hit me with merciless force. My teeth chattered and I could feel my body going weak, shivering violently. Everything caught up with me, the cold, the injuries, the flight across Adam's vast expanse of lawn - but it was mostly the cold. I had to fight to keep my feet.

  Lucy practically dragged me down the street, one arm around my waist.

  I hit the ground again, realizing only after a second that Lucy had let me slip to the asphalt. I felt her hand drift from my side, slowly sliding across my back and trailing little bits of warmth across my skin. I dropped the gun, not even realizing it was still in my hand until I noticed its absence.

  Light, bright and blinding, hit me in the face. It tore at my eyes, little stinging pains that radiated all the way into my brain. I threw an arm up, in front of my face, fighting to push it away, to save my sight. I heard voices, a hushed chorus of fear and rage. A wet cracking sound, a choked gasp, and then arms were around my waist, dragging me through the snow.

  I passed out, falling in a cold, almost comfortable darkness.

  Chapter 28

  I don’t know how long I was out, but when I awoke I was enveloped in soft, warm leather. Music played, fading in as I crawled my way back to consciousness. Something old - classic rock. I could feel motion, a gentle rocking movement and the slow glide around a turn. I was in a car apparently. Judging from the leather and the interior, a very nice car at that. Heat roared over my naked upper body, sliding against the cold and forcing it away with easy, steady fingers.

  I sat up. I wasn’t fighting for breath, the pain in my arm and side subsiding to a roaring ache as opposed to the previous tearing burn. Lucy was driving, shadows heavy against her face, her eyes distant. She focused on the road, ignoring me, hands tight on the wheel. The gun sat on the passenger seat. Around us, Southie was starting to materialize, the lush manicured lawns of Adam’s neighborhood replaced with concrete and apartment buildings.

  “Lucy?”

  She didn’t say anything, instead her hand found the knob of the radio and turned it up.

  I took the hint, settling back into the seat. We drove like that, the radio blaring, our conversation non-existent as we lanced through rundown industrial sites. Lucy finally pulled the car to the side, gliding slowly to the middle of an empty parking lot. Without a word, she grabbed the gun off the passenger seat and slipped out, moving to the back and opening the trunk. She reappeared a moment later and opened the back door. She tossed me a red warm-up jacket.

  “Get out,” she said.

  I got out of the car.

  It was a newer model Mercedes, the paint a thick, unmarred glossy black. The jacket was expensive, soft and surprisingly warm in the cold air. I put the hood up and slid my hands into the pockets of my jeans. I walked a bit back from the car, watching her. She went back to the trunk, pulling a road flare from a small road survival kit. She cracked the flare, rolling it under the car, and then walked to me holding the gun out, handle first.

  I took it, my eyes settling on her.

  “We have to get rid of it,” she said, her voice cast low, something dark and ominous looming in her tone.

  I nodded, lifting the gun and firing through the gas tank. Little hint, cars don't blow up when you shoot them, usually at least. Instead, thin streams of gasoline started to run from the holes, creating a small pool beneath the car. As the gas poured out, that pool expanded. We started walking backwards, watching the car. After a minute, the flare caught the gasoline, blue and yellow fire racing back into the gas tank.

  The fuel in the tank caught, and there was a massive whump noise, followed by a blast of heat. Flames rode out from the under carriage, rising up over the sides and trunk. The tires burst in a loud pop. For a long moment, we stood and watched it burn. We watched the fire bubble and distort the paint and then burn it away to bare metal. The windows shattered and thick plumes of smoke billowed into the night sky. Finally, Lucy turned, walking away. I fell in step behind her.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, which is why I’m not okay,” she said.

  “Okay, that’s confusing. Where’d the car come from?”

  She turned her eyes towards me, dark haunted eyes. She didn’t say a word, just walked beside me staring. The wound on her neck was gone. There wasn't even a trace of scarring left. In the fading light of the fire, I could see that the angles of her face were fuller, making her look almost the same as she had before this whole mess started. Two and two clicked together in my head to make four. I didn’t ask her about it. I just looked down and paid attention to putting one foot in front of the other while she wrapped the scarf around her face again.

  “Where are we supposed to meet Maggie?” she asked.

  “Garrison’s,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “You wanna talk about it?” I asked, really hoping she didn’t.

  “No.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I had no idea what to even say to her. She had killed someone to save my life. I didn’t even know how to respond to something like that. Do you say thanks? Do you just ignore it? So I said absolutely nothing at all, which was probably worse.

  We walked the rest of the way to Garrison’s.

  Garrison’s was a hole in the wall at best - a tired old shell of a bar set between two other buildings. The hardwood floor was riddled with stains ranging from beer to blood with a healthy dose of everything in between. A bar lined one wall, the bartender, a thin, skeleton of a man with a shock of white hair polished the glasses with a bored expression. It was the type of place that played only Johnny Cash and Skynard, where the clientele mostly consisted of dock and factory workers, blue collar types who stopped in on their way home for a drink and a bit of relaxation after a hard day’s work. The interior was dark, heavy on shadows and lit by the colored lamps over ratty pool tables and old beer signs.

  It was my kind of place.

  Lucy huddled as far into her coat as possible. It didn’t help. The guys at the bar were still unnerved by her presence. One of them actually stood up and left, casting a wary glance over her as she passed. The alcohol probably helped a little to keep them from full-on bolting.

  I was a step behind her, following as we traced our way through the tattered pool tables. O
ther than the few at the bar, the place was mostly empty. Maggie was seated in a booth in the corner, the scarred tabletop littered with two or three empty beer bottles. Another rested in her hand, and she sipped at it with a look of mild annoyance.

  We slid into the vinyl bench across from her. She eyed us for a long moment, taking stock.

  “So?” she asked.

  “Well, I guess it’s settled.”

  “You guess?”

  “He won’t be bothering us for a while,” Lucy said quietly.

  She watched us for a drawn-out, quiet moment.

  “You wanna talk about it?” she asked, pointedly ignoring me, her eyes focused on Lucy.

  Lucy’s glare could have frozen flame. It was a stare of pure, intense misery, of anger at nothing in particular. She held Maggie like that for a moment, leaving the witch to turn her head, looking towards the door.

  “No,” Lucy said finally.

  Maggie nodded, seeming to turn that over. There was a pause, broken by the chirping of her cell phone. She pulled it from her pocket, checking the small screen. She tilted her head curiously and stood.

  “Excuse me,” she said, heading towards the back and somewhere a bit quieter.

  Lucy looked towards me.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “No. No, not at all. People keep asking me if I’m okay,” she said finally, “That’s making me a lot less okay.”

  I squirmed in my chair. This was awkward.

  “I...” she said, her voice trailing.

  “You did,” I said, nodding.

  “That’s how I survive now,” she said, her tone carrying a note of finality.

  “’Fraid so.”

  “I... Jack...,” she said, fighting for words. Indecision was all over her face, tears running down her face. “I hate this.”

  “I know... I, shit. I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “Nothing, don’t say anything,” Lucy said. “There's nothing to say.”

  “Still...”

  “Don't, Jack, just don't.”

  “We should go,” Maggie said, approaching the table and sliding the cell phone back into her hip pocket. Her eyes were set, jaw lined with grim determination.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Yavetta’s dead,” she said, her voice hushed, face drawn together in a mask of barely contained pain. She was trembling.

  Lucy and I both blinked, the surprise on my face no doubt doubling that on the vampire’s. I didn’t know what to make of it, I had seen the green in Yavetta’s eyes, Legion’s eyes, and had assumed that was that. I had seen him possessed, and yet now he was dead. If that was the case, that meant that it had been the Padre. Maggie, not believing me, would act on his orders if he got the urge to impart some harm on yours truly.

  The best thing I could do for the moment was play along, go with them, try and sort this out on the fly. If nothing else, it'd get me close to Hernandez, that I get a chance to put this to an end.

  Chapter 29

  We stepped outside, the three of us, to a haze of gently falling snow. Apparently, Mother Nature didn’t think ice was bad enough. She wanted to compound the nasty. I could feel the ache in my side pulsing in time with my chest, slowly knitting itself back together. Maggie led the way, walking across the street to a parking lot. Lucy and I followed a few steps behind her.

  “Hernandez found his body at the church,” Maggie said quietly.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Maggie cut her eyes back at us, the answer evident on her face. Legion happened.

  “Hernandez wants to ask Lucy to see what she can dig up. So to speak,” she said.

  My eyes cut to Lucy. She was walking head down, ignoring the conversation. She seemed lost, the corners of her eyes strained, the stains of tears still on her cheeks.

  “So what 'appened with Adam?” Maggie asked.

  “I’d rather not get into,” I said, my tone flat.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Yeah? Tough shit.”

  Maggie glared at me for an uneasy moment, then turned her attention once more to the parking lot.

  The snow started to blanket everything. At this rate, we'd be under six inches by morning. Maggie switched her messenger bag from one shoulder to the other, fumbling in it for her keys as we approached her car.

  “I take it Hernandez is meeting us?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Where the bloody 'ell are my car keys?” she said and began muttering to herself, her voice trailing off, hand rifling in her bag. I realized a second later that she wasn’t muttering in English.

  I saw Lucy’s head snap up just as the discharge of wind caught her under the chin, a basketball size blast of gale force wind that slammed into her, sending her sailing forty feet through the air and into the side of a parked car. The door buckled under her, the whole thing, a massive SUV rocking up onto two wheels from the impact. She lay propped against it, moaning quietly, dazed from the sheer thunderous force of the hit. The car alarm went off, a rapid keening of noise that echoed off the nearby buildings.

  “What the fuck?” I yelled, taking a step back. She pulled her hand out of her bag, the cut lining her palm pouring blood. She started chanting in Gaelic, opening another cut on her palm. I shot forward, closing the few feet of distance between us in a couple of steps. I managed to get one hand on her before the Gaelic became an indecipherable alien tongue. She had blessed the ground... Again. Instantly, pain from my wounds and the burn of addiction settled over me. I nearly collapsed under its weight. I shuddered, my stomach rolling over itself, my lungs struggling for air. I fell to one knee, my hand weak and loose on Maggie’s shirt.

  “What… What the fuck are you doing?” I gasped, already winded. The culmination of my injuries and pain had become too much in a matter of seconds. Moving at all was like trying to swim through wet concrete.

  “Sorry, Jackie boy,” she said quietly. “Turns out Legion’s 'ere for you and your little pal Alice. We’re gonna 'ave to get rid of that demon after all. Orders are orders.”

  I struggled, fighting against the leaden weight of pain to push to my feet, to stand. The world tilted, the horizon dipping one way and then the other, before simply spinning like some kind of vomit-inducing carnival ride. I fell back down to my knees and then collapsed on my side in an ungraceful heap.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I don’t like it. I really don’t,” she said, and her voice sounded tired. “But it 'as to be done so no one else dies.”

  She reached down, scooping up a handful of gravel. She muttered another bit of Gaelic, holding the small stones cupped in her palm. She dripped the blood from her bleeding hand over the rocks and tossed them on the ground in front of me. I stared at them, the crimson staining the mottled gray and black of the rock to a darker hue.

  “Maggie, it doesn’t have to be like this,” I said, fighting against the tightness in my chest.

  “It does.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Jack, don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be,” Maggie said with a sigh.

  “Maggie. Please, just listen.”

  She spoke another bit of murmured Gaelic and the stones began to spin, caught in a tiny whirlwind. They coalesced, rising slowly from the ground like steam. They shot forward, spinning around my wrists. She said something else I couldn’t understand and the rocks shot inwards, towards my flesh. There was a flash of heat and a set of solid stone handcuffs held me restrained. Maggie opened the back door of her car.

  “Are you going to get in voluntarily, or do I 'ave to drag you in there?”

  I didn’t say anything. I really couldn’t. I was still too dazed, the pain too intense, the thundering nervous clawing of addiction rattling through my skull. I didn’t so much as stand, as crawl up onto the back seat. A part of me was happy to lay down and rest.

  Maggie slid into the driver's seat and started the car. Once we were rolling, she looked into the rearview, peering back
at me. She seemed torn, her eyes softening. She mouthed unspoken words, and tightness returned to her features, eyes narrowing as they returned to the road.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “For what it’s worth, I am sorry, Jack. I know what’s in store for you when this is all said and done, but you did it to yourself.“

  “You’re a fucking idiot.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. I bit down on the inside of my cheek, trying to block out the myriad of agony with a new, fresher pain. It was impossible to focus, everything kept hazing in and out. Even the front seat of the car seemed far away, Maggie’s voice coming down a tunnel. I felt hot bile in the back of my throat, mixed with the coppery taste of fear. Maggie was right, there was a whole lot in store for me when this was all said and done. At the top of that list was a long trip to Hell, sans hand basket.

  I was quite literally as hopeless as a newborn kitten in a yard of pitbulls.

  “Yavetta’s not dead is he?” I asked her.

  “No. ‘E’s the one that put two and two together, complete with proof.”

  “Proof? Well that should be fucking enlightening. You should get a fucking Emmy for that little bit of acting you did in the bar to, by the way.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You do realize that either Yavetta or Hernandez is Legion, right?” I said.

  She laughed, a sound of total disbelief and amusement.

  “Seriously? You’re going to try that now? That’s the best you can do? The same tired story?”

  “At the coffee shop, I saw it.”

  “At the altercation that you initiated? Of course you saw it, you orchestrated it. You knew Legion would come for you there, so you put the three men that had you under their thumb in its way, hoping it would kill them and you could weasel your way out of this.”