by Aaron Crash
Bailey laughed at that.
“Mostly,” Jack said. “Give or take a locker room, a Wanda, or some rich fucker’s glass patio door.” He finished off his beer. “If I have to stop time to go through this door, I’m going to need a good night’s sleep. I need to replenish my energy. I’d love to have some kind of interface for how much Kairos I’m using. Or how much Kairos I get from Fugs.”
From the blank looks on the faces of the women, it was clear they had no idea what he was talking about.
He set the toy soldier on the table. “So tell me, Gabby. Our favorite demon said I didn’t need this. However, it’s pretty clear I do. Or why else would I have these powers?”
“Maybe there’s something in your past that is the answer. Would you like to talk about why you’re not a police officer?” Gabby’s eyes were bright with expectation. She wanted to get to know him.
But Jack couldn’t go there with either of these women. Not yet. Even after all these years, talking about what happened at the police academy was hard.
So he changed the subject and asked more questions until Gabby was nearly falling asleep. Bottom line, he had a lot to learn about the various creatures and places of the Septua Influunt, the holy name of the universe.
Gabby was fine sleeping on the couch but insisted on sheets so she wouldn’t leave her effluvia on the sofa—those were her exact words.
Jack got her all cozy.
He walked into his bedroom to see Bailey naked on his bed, a hot demon with no makeup on. She’d found makeup remover and watched a YouTube video on how to properly remove cosmetics. Even without makeup, she was gorgeous, but then again, he was mostly looking at her tits and that treasure between her legs.
They had sex, missionary-style, and her eyes were so full of lust as she gazed up at him. He leaned down to kiss her, and it was tender, and passionate, and, yes, full of love. He was deep inside her when he came. She moved her hips up and down, drinking him in.
When Jack lifted his head, he saw tears in the demon’s eyes.
She wasn’t a bit shy about the sex, but she was embarrassed by the tears. She pulled his head down into the crook of her neck to avoid his eyes.
From the other room, Gabby let out a happy squeak. “I felt that, Bailey. That wasn’t Ijjinaya. That was Nefesh! You’re falling in love.”
“Fuck off, angel!” Bailey screamed.
Then she shoved Jack off. “I’m pure lust, Jack. Don’t think you can change me.”
“Never wanted to,” he said.
The demon went to the bathroom, peed, and then got back into bed. She turned away from him. “Being human is stupid. Eating, peeing, and sleeping. Waste of time. This is all so stupid. But what I get from you, Jack, I don’t get from anyone else. I don’t want any other man, or any other woman that we don’t share. I only want you.”
It was clear the demon was enjoying herself, and, yes, Jack had felt something pass between them. It had been more than just fucking for him as well. Was he falling for Bailey?
Maybe. But like falling in love with a hooker, loving a sex demon was for suckers.
When he couldn’t sleep, he picked up his guitar and practiced, strumming chords and playing a few licks. Every day he was improving, and he marveled at his progress. His head was clear, his stomach was fine, and he felt tired, yes, but satisfied.
He thought of Annie. He had to save her, obviously. They already had a friendship, but that friendship could turn into more. He figured Bailey would eventually get tired of the bullshit of being human and take off.
As for Gabby? She had her angelic duties, which she’d spent a billion years training for. No, whatever relationship he had with the two supernatural creatures was temporary.
He’d find Annie and work for something more permanent.
What if he were wrong?
He didn’t know. When he crawled into his bed, and when Bailey pulled him close, he had to wonder at the demon. Was she falling in love?
Maybe. Jack could relate. He loved the feel of her skin on his, the warmth of her body, the musky perfume of her hair. Her carefree attitude and lewdness fascinated him. But he wished she hadn’t figured out the credit cards. This was the most expensive lay he’d ever had, no matter how good it had been.
And it had been good.
Bailey nuzzled into him and kissed him tenderly. Jack felt himself relax.
It would be just fine if Jack Masterson never slept alone again.
Chapter Sixteen
THE NEXT MORNING, THEY had breakfast, which was a quick bowl of Life cereal.
Both Bailey and Gabby watched in wonder as he poured the milk over the cereal, and then both tried it. Bailey ate hers way too fast, and Gabby ate hers way too slow. Instead of cow’s milk, though, Gabby used soy milk.
Both enjoyed the experience. As for coffee, both liked theirs with sugar and different kinds of milk, and lots of it. Jack liked his coffee as black as Bailey’s heart. Or that was the joke. The reality? Bailey simply wasn’t as evil as she wanted to be. It was interesting watching her.
Gabby cleaned up her bed, folded her sheets, vacuumed, and cleaned the bathroom. That was something, seeing an angel with a toilet brush in her delicate hand.
All in all, it felt like a slumber party even though he was about to leave Earth in just a few short minutes. Jack would take his Beretta with two extra magazines. He’d also take his Mossberg Maverick, a solid 12-gauge shotgun, pump action with a six-round magazine capacity loaded with 2-3/4" shells. He’d keep it in a bag just to keep a low profile.
Jack thought about checking his credit card statement online to see how much Bailey had spent, but in the end, he didn’t much care. This Clockwatcher thing might kill them all. He’d figure out the money thing once they had Annie back, safe and sound.
Jack, Bailey, and Gabby left his apartment, and it was a quick walk down the street to the office building, which was mostly empty. Gabby led the way in her white-and-pink business suit, with the low heels. Bailey had on a red skirt, black tights, and a red-and-black top, unbuttoned to show cleavage and a lacy black bra. It was quite the outfit. More than once, Jack caught Gabby staring at Bailey’s chest.
Gabby wasn’t straight, clearly, but she was trying to be chaste. He wondered how deep that chastity went. To him, it seemed pretty shallow.
The trio went to the stairwell and up to the second landing.
Gabby pointed at the corner. “There’s a thin place here. Even when the building was full, not many people have ever really lingered here.”
Who spent any time in stairwells anyway? Most people took the elevator.
Jack slipped his shotgun out and let the bag drop to the smooth cement floor. He then flipped the switch on the toy soldier. A gleaming doorway appeared in the blank cement, shining brightly, with the light and noise coalescing around a single circle. That was the doorknob.
Jack gripped it, twisted it, and pushed.
And the doorway out of reality opened. They walked out onto a flat plain—the sky the angry red of an infected wound. The ground was pale yellow hard-packed dirt. It wasn’t like there was a central sun giving them light. The sky just glowed red. Behind them was a shoddy wooden door—the way back, it seemed.
In the distance rose a cinderblock building, ugly and gray and squat.
Jack noticed the pools first. It was like he’d walked right into a Salvador Dali painting. The puddles were clockfaces, liquid and shimmering. He had to stick the toe of his boot into a puddle. The puddle gave away to a black liquid, but soon went back to being a clockface.
In the distance, the yellow dirt seemed to drop off into nothingness, as if the whole realm was only a mile wide and a mile long, and everything else around it was void. The place was weird. Jack was glad he had his shotgun. He would’ve liked to have an AR-15, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Bailey summoned her demonic war pick. Gabby might look like a businesswoman going to work at an insurance company, but she had the gold jewelry, th
e golden belt, the sword, and the horn.
They approached the squat cinderblock bunker. There was a square opening in the front, with shadowy shapes walking back and forth. They looked like dogs, except they had something on their backs that looked like the same kind of key that was in Jack’s toy soldier.
Were they windup dogs?
Well, for someone called the Clockwatcher, that made sense.
The shapes emerged from the shadows to growl at Jack and his friends. They were a cross between clocks, monster wolves, and, yes, windup toy soldiers. They had the keys on their backs. Clocks had been shoved into their chests with numerals like the clock puddles. Their eyes were spinning gears, but their teeth were long and yellow.
They growled as their clockwork ticked away inside their hairy bodies. The keys continued to swivel on their backs.
Jack got ready for a fight. He was curious to see what kind of damage his shotgun would do against the clock dogs.
He never had the chance because Gabby strode forward, her horn in her hand. “Clockwatcher! I am Gabriella Jibra Jibril of the Pinturicchio Legion, a servant of heaven and one of the angelic righteous. If you do not want to hear my horn, you will call off your guards!”
One by one, the keys on the backs of the dogs wound down until they stopped. There were six in all.
Gabby threw a grin over her shoulder.
“What in the hell does that horn do?” Jack wondered.
Bailey hefted the war pick onto her shoulder. “You don’t wanna know.”
They walked past the clock dogs, which smelled like gun oil and wet fur. It wasn’t pleasant. They walked into a courtyard full of clock parts and animals: some clockwork bears, a few zebras, and a big lion with golden gears showing where its hide had rotted away. The decaying elephants were the worst, since they were the biggest and smelled the most. Inside, the elephants had a mixture of mammalian entrails and clock parts. Every animal had the windup key on their backs.
At the back of the courtyard was a series of cinderblock steps that led up into rooms above, which seemed to be big and square and as formless as the rest of the weird place.
Jack held the toy soldier in his pocket. The headache was starting. If this Clockwatcher knew where Horns took Annie, he’d better tell them sooner rather than later. He had to steady himself. He wasn’t on Earth anymore. This was an eon palace, a totally other dimension, and that was unnerving.
“So time is stopped on Earth?” Jack asked.
“Yeah,” Bailey breathed. “We’re outside the normal flow of time. Some fuckers call places like this the Influunt Interim because they have their own rules.”
Gabby got chatty, probably because she was nervous. “Heaven is known as the Influunt Divinatio, while hell is the Influunt Diaboli.”
A clanking from above silenced her.
Something big and clicking came down the cinderblock steps from the rooms above—something with metal feet that came smashing down on the bricks. Clack. Clack. Clack. A fat man came into view, or at least he was mannish. He had clocks in his skin—big faces and small faces, big roman numerals and scripted Arabic numbers. Some of the clocks showed through gaps in his skin, while others were inked on. The combination of tattoos and clocks culminated in his face. He had a big clock inked around his right eye, which was black and diabolic. The left eye was like the clock dogs, spinning gears, buzzing and clinking.
The Clockwatcher didn’t have a key on his back though. While he wasn’t naked, his loincloth and vest barely covered his nipples and dick.
He moved on brown metal feet that were connected to his knee bones. He wouldn’t be able to flex those bronze toes—they looked like they’d been poured into a mold and let cool. His fingers were fleshy though. And he pointed at Jack. His voice was oddly mechanical. His teeth were gears. His tongue was bright red. “One o’clock, and how do you stop an angel and a demon and a door breaker, a clock controller, a new thing, a human thing?”
The fat clock man waddled into the courtyard, and all the clockwork animals knelt down on their front knees, or bowed outright, to pay homage to their master.
Jack stepped forward with the shotgun ready. “We thought you might know where something called Kerrata took Annie Blackburn. Kerrata has big horns and smells like—”
“Two o’clock, you can stop. I know of Kerrata and the long minutes of his decades plan, and the woman he held, pulled from the Tempus Influunt, the flow, the flow, the sacred flow.” All of the clocks on the fat man advanced by an hour, the big hand on the twelve, the little hand on the two. Even the tattoos advanced. The clock man moved up to Jack, and Jack had to stare up into the strange thing. Getting a look at the clocks impaled in the flabby white flesh didn’t make them any less gross.
“Great,” Jack said. “You can tell us what we need to know.”
The Clockwatcher’s wide nose flared. “Three o’clock, barrel, stock, and lock, and here you are. The demon is the barrel, the angel is the stock, but I don’t know about the lock. And what are you? Interim, Phantasm, or flesh made real?”
Jack had the distinct impression he was being sniffed.
“I’m just a human,” Jack said. “I want to find Annie Blackburn. And maybe find a way to better understand my powers. I can stop time.” From his pocket, Jack pulled the toy soldier. He kept his hand near the shotgun’s trigger, though. He could easily shove the barrel of the scatter gun into the gut of this fat clock man and blow his gears out the back of his ass.
“Is this one of yours?” Jack asked.
The Clockwatcher took the soldier in delicate hands. The hands of all the clocks adjusted by one. “Four o’clock, and here we talk. The toy is but a toy, but the Kairos in you is the soldier. And it longs to rise. The only surviving son—the sixth son of the sixth son of the sixth son. The beast the Beast fears. The god of time that cracks the clock as it adjusts the hands.”
Jack wasn’t sure he caught all that. Were there three sixes there? He knew his father had been the sixth son, but it hadn’t really been something they talked about. So Jack’s grandfather had also been the sixth son? How far did those go back?
And with Andy dying of cancer that September, Jack was the only surviving son. That seemed why he’d suddenly gotten the powers.
Bailey let out a laugh. “Oh, this is just getting better and more fucked. That’s fucking prophecy shit. I don’t want anything to do with prophecy shit. I’m ditching your asses.”
There went his hot demonic bedmate. Damn.
Gabby gasped, hands to her cheeks.
All the hands on the Clockwatcher clicked forward. “Five o’clock, and it’s the clocks that count the Tempus Influunt, for we all swim in the Kairos, but the Kairos swims in you. I can offer you a gift, godling.” The clock man dropped the toy soldier and grabbed Jack’s left arm.
It all happened fast and was over faster.
Jack staggered back, shotgun up, but he didn’t squeeze the trigger. Suddenly his vision blurred, and he could see his current Kairos level, but that wasn’t all.
<<< SEPTUA SANCTUS >>>
Level: 1
Current Kairos: 21/100
Current Corpus: 100/100
Current Nefesh: 100/100
Current Ijjinaya: 100/100
Current Psyche: 100/100
Current Morpheum: 100/100
Current Decaysia: 100/100
Special abilities:
Potential Auxiliary Storage: 0/100
<<< SEPTUA SANCTUS >>>
Jack blinked. “Yes! This is exactly what I need.”
All of it was fairly self-explanatory, and he wasn’t surprised that he was only level one. However, the auxiliary storage was an interesting surprise. Was that an extra tank he could use to keep on reserve? It was a great idea, but he wasn’t sure how it worked. He didn’t have that much control of any of this, yet he remembered how he’d taken damage from the Mouth. After killing the Fug, his flesh had healed. Corpus was his physical body.
Then Jack noti
ced something else. He glanced down and on his left index finger he had a new tattoo of the tin soldier, turned so he could see the key was turned to the left. The time-stopped position. He saw how he could rub his thumb over that index finger to turn the key to the right and start time again. If it worked like he thought, he could start and stop time with just the flick of his thumb.
The tin soldier lay on the ground, so Jack grabbed it and put it back into his pocket. He’d have to give it back to Hugo when he saw him again. And there was his mother’s Kairos levels to consider.
He did have to wonder about the Decaysia levels, since that was the level of decay in his body. He’d expected that to be one.
The Clockwatcher’s hands moved, little hand on the twelve, big hand on the six. “Six o’clock, the tock did you a favor, and you’ll return the tick at some point, son of the triple six. Gave you a clockface you’ll understand, given your human games and the gaming you do. You want to find Kerrata’s prey, the Annie of the Blackburn family, and I know of this transgression, but I want something first. I want the Eternity Cannon from the Palatinate of the Misplaced.”
Jack had to unpack everything the Interim creature had said. So, the Clockwatcher knew about human games, so that explained the interface and the point levels. Jack couldn’t help but be grateful. However, he knew that sometimes people did shit for you to control you. “Thanks for the gift, Clockwatcher. But I didn’t ask for it, and if there’s a price, I don’t want to pay.”
The Clockwatcher shrugged.
Bailey let out a strangled cry. “No. We are not going to the Land of the Tossed.” It seemed she wasn’t too concerned that Jack had just gotten a surprising but unwanted tattoo, as well as a new way of looking at his powers.
Gabby stepped up, horn ready. And in truth, the Clockwatcher seemed far more afraid of the horn than he was of the sword. “No way, Clockwatcher. We won’t be going to the Cast Away, Gone Astray. Not us. I’m not going to be the one to tangle with the Count Palantine. Not with the...you know...the current events that aren’t current yet going on.”
