by Kim Curran
She didn’t belong here. The truth was, Milly didn’t belong anywhere. Her mother was French, her dad British-Chinese, and she had never stayed anywhere long enough to be able to call it home. She looked at all those little pins in the map, each marking a major city. But Milly wanted to travel for real. She wanted to go to Mongolia and see the eagle hunters. To Mexico and climb ancient temples. She wanted to see the world and have great adventures, not just follow in her mother’s wake.
With a sigh, Milly changed out of her uniform and into her comfiest clothes: baggy tracksuit trousers and an old purple hoodie that had belonged to her dad. It was 9.30 p.m. on a Friday night and most other girls her age were probably out having fun, while she would be at home, doing her homework. Yet again. Not that she really minded, but it would be nice to have options.
“Milly!” her mother called again, more insistent this time.
“I’m doing homework,” Milly shouted.
“Stop being rude, we have guests,” her mother shouted back in French.
Milly let out a grunt of frustration and stomped towards her bedroom door. She threw it open and continued to stomp all the way down the stairs, making no attempt to hide how annoyed she was.
“There you are!” her mum said as she trudged into the living room. Mourdant lounged in a red-leather armchair, swinging a bottle of champagne back and forth. His head turned in her direction and she could feel his eyes behind the sunglasses boring into her skin. Alice was perched in the corner, staring into an empty glass as if she was wishing she could vanish into it. She swayed a little, her eyelids drooping like she was struggling to stay awake. Milly wondered how many glasses she’d drunk already.
“Oh, but, child, do you have to wear that hideous jumper?”
“I’m sorry, I’ll just go and slip into one of my ballgowns, shall I?”
“So sarcastic, Milly. I don’t know where you get that from.”
“Me neither,” Milly muttered.
Fact was she got it from her father. She and her dad used to have a lot of fun being sarcastic in sign language, drawing out the signs and exaggerating their facial expressions, while her mother had never picked up on it.
“Well, come, we promised you champagne.” She pushed an empty glass into Milly’s hand and waved her towards Mourdant.
The man unfolded himself from the chair and held out the black bottle. Milly didn’t want to accept anything from him – something about him made her skin crawl. But the sooner she got this over with, the sooner she could go back to her room.
She closed the distance between them and held out the glass. Mourdant poured, watching her all the while. Milly stared at her own reflection in his glasses; she looked so tiny, so afraid. Mourdant smiled, as if sensing her discomfort. The golden liquid filled half of the glass.
“Stop,” Milly said.
Mourdant ignored her and continued to pour and pour.
“Stop,” she said again.
Champagne filled the glass to the brim and then splashed over Milly’s hand and onto the carpet. Only then did he stop pouring.
“To your mother,” he said, raising the bottle in a toast.
Alice raised her empty glass and mumbled, “To mother.”
Milly raised her own glass and brought it to her lips, pretending to take a sip.
“Drink up, Milly,” Mourdant said, grabbing the base of her glass and tipping it so quickly that a mouthful of the fizzing liquid rushed into her mouth. She swallowed reflexively, and then coughed as the bubbles tickled her nose.
“Gentle, Mourdant,” Milly’s mother said. “This is her first taste of alcohol.”
That wasn’t true. She and Naledi had shared a can of warm cider once. Neither of them had liked it much. Champagne, as far as she could tell, wasn’t much better.
“Finish the whole glass, Milly,” Mourdant said. “You wouldn’t want such expensive champagne to go to waste.”
Fear crept up Milly’s spine. Why was he being so insistent about this? She looked to her mother for help, but she had started to hum and sway around the room. Alice was half asleep, her head lolling on her chest. Mourdant continued to stare at Milly.
She raised the glass to her lips again slowly, her hand shaking. She didn’t know why, but she was certain that something very bad would happen if she drank the champagne. With his gaze boring into her, she tipped the glass, feeling the cold liquid fill her mouth. If she didn’t think of something soon, she’d have no choice but to swallow.
A loud thud sounded as Alice fell off her chair. Mourdant turned around to look and Milly used that moment of distraction to spit out the champagne and tip the rest of the glass into a nearby vase.
She returned the glass to her lips and when Mourdant spun back around, she mimed swallowing.
“Hmm, lovely,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Although I don’t think it’s agreed with Alice.”
Her mother glanced over at her PA. “Oh, yes, she’s had a little too much.”
Milly edged towards the door. “Can I go now?”
“Of course, ma chérie.” Her mother kissed her on the top of her head. “Sleep well.”
“Yes,” Mourdant said, flashing one of his shark smiles, “sleep very well.”
He looked at her over the rim of his glasses and she saw his eyes for the first time. She could have sworn they were completely jet-black.
There was only one thing that came close to the high of performing onstage and that was dusting demons. Luckily for JD, he got to do both.
The demon’s screech never left its mouth as its air supply was cut off along with its head. JD continued the arc of the sword strike, letting the momentum spin him around to bring the tip of the blade to the face of a second creature. Even through the yellow smoke, JD could see that this one was young in human terms, with skin still covered in acne. Eyes still watering from the salt grenade, the demon couldn’t see JD in front of him. It bared stained, rotting teeth and charged – straight onto JD’s blade. With a pathetic squeal, it slumped to the floor. Another demon frantically clawed the wall, as if trying to somehow scratch its way through. It never got a chance to find out if it could. A flash of Connor’s sais and it toppled sideways. Which left one more. Tom took aim with his bow. A single arrow through a black eye and it was over.
The bodies of three men and one woman lay slumped on the floor. The smell of sulphur filled the room. That had taken less than thirty seconds. Now that the smoke had cleared, JD lifted his goggles to get a better view, but kept his mask in place.
“Not fair,” Zek said, arriving through the bathroom door and surveying the scene. “Did you not think to leave any for us?”
“You can kill my one again if ya like,” Connor said, pointing over his shoulder to the body oozing black blood. “You know, just to be sure.”
“Given how sloppy you are, I might have to.”
Niv appeared next to his brother and raised four fingers.
“Yep, only four,” Tom said, answering Niv’s question.
The bodies on the floor looked human, but JD knew that they’d been walking corpses from the moment the demons had possessed them. The cheap motel carpet had been ripped up and symbols marked on the floorboards in white chalk and blood. In the centre was a large pentagram scrawled with demonic writing. Looked like they’d arrived just in time to stop the ritual.
Demons were big into their rituals. Always summoning and sacrificing. Demons weren’t able to enter the human world on their own – they had to be summoned. They also couldn’t take possession of a human uninvited. They had to be let in, sometimes willingly, other times less so. As soon as a demon crossed over, it would go around recruiting, manipulating or tricking humans into giving up their souls to become hosts for more demons from the Netherworld.
Low-ranking demons could cross over into this world with no more than a few simple words from a human dumb enough to recite them. Say the right words and make the right marks and you’d be a demon hand-puppet in
no time. Demons even left summoning rituals on the internet for anyone to find. And lots of people did. Since Slay had been in the States, they’d had to save a number of drunken frat boys who thought summoning a demon would make for a fun time.
But summoning something stronger, like a demon prince, that took serious power. According to Gail, the last time a demon prince had been summoned was back in the 1930s and that had nearly ended the world. No one had seen anything so powerful since. But the creatures were there, in the Netherworld, just waiting.
A choked sobbing drew JD’s attention to the corner of the room. The girl was still alive, huddled in a corner, shaking. She was fourteen, maybe fifteen. Make-up ran down her face in dark tracks. In all the excitement, JD had forgotten about her.
Tom hadn’t. Tom never did.
“Hey,” Tom said, kneeling down next to the girl. She screamed and tried to scrabble away, terrified. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. I’ve got you.” He lifted his goggles so the girl could see his eyes weren’t black. “What’s your name?”
The girl stared at Tom. “I’m Hope,” she said, her voice shaking. “My arm hurts.”
Blood trickled out of a semicircular cut on her arm. It looked as if the demons had tried to force her into becoming a host, but they’d not been able to complete the mark. Tom cleaned the wound before pulling a bandage out of the kit on his belt and wrapping it around her arm.
“Well, Hope, listen to me.” A melodic quality came over Tom’s voice. “You’re fast, fast asleep at home and you just had a horrible dream.”
“A dream,” the girl said, her voice soft and sleepy.
“You’ve been sleepwalking, Hope, and we need to get you back into bed.” He helped her to her feet and started leading her out of the room.
“You have beautiful eyes,” the girl said, gazing up at him.
“That’s nice.” He looked back at the boys. “I’ll put her in a cab.”
JD smirked. Tom wasn’t the hottest of the bunch, he wasn’t the funniest, but he did have a way with girls. Not that he was even remotely aware of it, which JD thought was for the best. He also had a way with hypnotism. Gail had tried to teach the other boys how to do it, but only Tom had the knack – something to do with those bright green eyes and the gentle tone of his voice. JD didn’t have the patience for it. He stuck to hitting things and left the talking to the others.
“Have we been here before?” Zek said, turning back to the room. “I recognize the delightful decor.”
JD followed the direction of his gaze to the grimy, striped wallpaper. Before the band had really taken off, they’d stayed in places like this.
“Maybe,” JD said. “If so, I’ve tried to wipe it from my memory.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Zek said, patting the wall. “It has a certain Stephen King charm.”
Niv’s hands flashed, finishing by drawing a finger across his neck and miming blood splashing over the walls. JD didn’t know much sign language, but he often got the gist when Niv was telling a particularly twisted joke.
“Eww,” Zek said, wiping his hand up and down Niv’s back.
“Okay, enough messing,” JD said, as Niv tried to push Zek’s face into the wall. “Clean-up procedure. Connor—”
Connor groaned. “Why is it always me?”
At fifteen, Connor was the youngest of the group, even though he didn’t look it. He was the tallest and broadest of the boys, having had a freakish growth spurt a few months after joining them. JD remembered Connor as he’d been back when they first met: a bony little thing with huge blue eyes staring out from a round, dirty face. Now he was all muscles.
“I was going to say, ‘Connor, go get the jeep while the twins and I bag and fry’. But if you want to do the duty?”
“No, no!” Connor said, holding his hand up. “Getting the jeep is grand.” He rushed out before JD had a chance to change his mind. It was technically legal to have a learner’s permit at fifteen in Illinois and Connor, who had learned to drive the family tractor when he was twelve, was making the most of it.
A moment later tail lights shone through the small front window, lighting up the grubby room as Connor backed the jeep up. He killed the engine and the room was thrown into darkness once more.
JD and Niv opened the back of the jeep and dragged out three disposal sacks. They were like body bags, only made from PBI – the stuff they made astronauts’ suits out of – and designed to withstand intense heat. Roll a body in there, throw in a mini incendiary grenade and zip it up, then it was only a matter of disposing of the ashes. No bodies to be found and the demons’ victims would just be added to the endless list of the missing.
JD often wondered why they didn’t go public about the existence of demons – at least it would give the families of those possessed or killed some kind of closure. But Gail insisted they keep it quiet. She’d explained it to him four years ago, in the police station in Manchester – where he was being held after his aunt and her boyfriend had been killed by demons.
“If the public found out that these creatures walk among us there would be panic. Before we knew it, they’d be burning their neighbours and shooting their bosses just to be sure. Have you ever read about the witch-hunts of the Dark Ages? It would be like that. Only with YouTube.”
So JD and the others went around taking down demon after demon and clearing up the mess so that no one would find out. All part of the job.
“She’ll be okay. I hypnotized her – she’ll only snap back out of it when she’s home in bed with no memory of tonight,” Tom said, coming back into the room. “My Derren Brown stuff is coming on a treat.” He waggled his fingers.
JD kneeled down next to one of the bodies and pushed up its sleeve.
“We’ve got a mark,” he said. Sure enough, there was a tattoo: a looping circle with overlapping ends. Each of the other bodies would have sigils like this one – marks that allowed the demons to take possession of their bodies. Some were unwilling sacrifices, like the girl had clearly been. Most were idiots who branded themselves, becoming willing hosts. What they didn’t realize till it was too late was that as soon as a demon stepped in, the human soul was kicked out and lost for ever.
The boys bore marks of their own – but instead of inviting demons in, their tattoos kept demons out.
“Same mark on this one,” Tom said, pointing at another body. “I don’t recognize it.”
Niv took a picture of the symbol with his phone and JD watched as he ran it through DAD. After a few moments the phone screen flashed.
NOT RECOGNIZED
“Maybe Gail will know what it is?” JD said.
Zek rubbed at the tattoo. Black pigment flecked away. “The ink is fresh.”
“Stupid,” JD said quietly, shaking his head. The man had probably summoned the demon thinking it would bring him fame or fortune. All it had brought him was death. When would people learn? There was no doing a deal with demons – the demons always won.
“Check this out,” Zek said, holding up an open wallet. “He’s got a Lyric Opera pass. ID says he’s security.”
Niv picked a baseball cap up off the floor. It had the word Lyric stitched on the front in gold thread.
“Opera lovers, it seems,” Tom said.
“Didn’t I tell ya demons had class?” Connor said, from inside of the jeep.
“Hmm,” JD said. They’d have to look into what was going on at the opera house. “Okay, let’s fry these guys and get back to Agatha.” JD rolled the first body into a bag, pulled the pin on a grenade and threw it in, then zipped the bag up quickly, trying not to look too hard at the dead guy’s face. A face that in the next few days would be appearing on missing posters and in JD’s nightmares.
With a dull thuff the bag expanded, then slowly deflated, a small curl of foul-smelling smoke drifting through the zip.
Milly closed her bedroom door behind her and leaned against it. Then, as an afterthought, she locked it. Her hands still shook and she felt a troubling foggines
s tugging at her mind. She hadn’t realized champagne could be so strong.
She took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. She was overreacting. She was always overreacting. Sure, Mourdant was creepy and that whole business with the champagne had been so weird, but it was over now and she was safely in her own room. He’d be gone soon and tomorrow she would talk to her mum and insist that that man never stepped foot in this house again. Okay, so she already knew how that would go: her mother would tell her to stop being so dramatic and ignore her. Like always. But she would at least try.
She stepped away from the door and shook her hands and head, trying to brush off the feeling that Mourdant was still watching her. The sharp tang of champagne lingered, more bitter than she had expected. Why had Mourdant been so adamant that she drink it? What did she really know about him anyway? He’d appeared from nowhere, persuading her mother to fire her old manager, and then suddenly they were here in Chicago and she was signing some new, exciting contract. Was he even a real manager? Well, there was one way to find out.
Milly walked over to her desk, stumbling against her bed a little, and sat down. She fired up her laptop and typed one word into the search bar.
Mourdant.
The first two pages were filled with results about a nineteenth-century Scottish lord, the third and fourth pages were no help either. Milly refined the search by adding the word Manager. This time, all she got was information on an accounting firm in New York. She scrolled and scrolled until her eyes started to blur. If only she knew his first name.
“I mean, come on,” she said out loud, “who doesn’t have a first name?”
There was nothing on this guy. Not so much as a tweet. He didn’t, according to the internet, exist. It all made a weird kind of sense. He had to be a conman, manipulating her mum into…what? Giving all her money to him? What was in that contract that he was so excited about? Milly knew she should storm down there, grab that thing from him and tear it to shreds. But what would be the point? Her mother would only shout at her and send her back to her room before signing a fresh copy. Besides, she was so tired.
