Until Death

by E. A. Copen

  It was a mistake.

  Most creatures had souls, but I knew of a few that didn’t. Archons, for example. I hadn’t met anything from the Nightlands that did, so I’d just assumed everything from there was a soulless creep. Either Guy wasn’t from the Nightlands, or I was terribly wrong.

  I don’t know if the thing I saw crawling inside of him was a soul or not, but it had a hundred bloodshot eyes, each one focused on me, and existed as a writhing mass of void. Not just black, but a space completely devoid of all color. It was like looking into the gaping mouth of madness itself.

  The next thing I knew, I was curled into a ball in the middle of my wrecked kitchen, lying on my side, and rocking back and forth with my arms wrapped tightly around my middle. Guy bent over me, waving air at me with his hat. “Easy there, bub. Let it out.”

  I was about to ask what I should let out when nausea surged. I rose to my hands and knees and vomited all over my nice, clean kitchen floor.

  Guy patted my back. “Yep, happens every time. Don’t feel bad. There’s a reason I walk around in this mook’s meatsuit.”

  I spat and wiped a sleeve across my mouth. “What the hell are you?”

  “That’s…a long story, best saved for another time, I think.” He handed me a towel—one of my good towels.

  Looking around the kitchen, I guess it didn’t matter. The place was wrecked and would need a full remodel just to be salvageable. Cleaning up vomit with my good hand towel barely seemed to matter in the grand scheme of things. I mopped it up and pitched the towel. “What about the giant cat?”

  “Wasn’t just any cat.” Guy stood and offered me a hand. “That was the Yule Cat. Squirrely bastard.”

  I took his hand and pulled myself up with a grunt. “Yule Cat, Krampus… Is there a reason Christmas is attacking me?”

  “Another part of that long story.” He righted a chair, dusted it off, and gestured to it. “I think you’d better sit down for this one.”

  “You followed me home,” I said, eyeing him.

  “Easily. I thought for sure you’d try to lose me, but you weren’t even paying attention, were you?”

  I sighed and half-fell into the chair, suddenly more exhausted than ever. “I told you. I’m getting married next week. You married? Or do they even have that back where you’re from?”

  “Never had the pleasure.” He picked up another chair and sat on it, one leg crossed over the other. “This guy I’m in, he was a bit of a player back in his day. Still gotta squash those urges sometimes. That’s one of the problems of running around in a body with a mind of its own. Damn thing still thinks it’s in the driver’s seat. You mind if I smoke, bub?”

  I gestured to the wrecked room around us. “Why not? A little smoke damage isn’t going to make things any worse.”

  Rather than pull out a pack of cigarettes, he got out a little pouch of tobacco and sprinkled it into a rolling paper. The guy moved convincingly enough to be human, unlike some other monsters I’d run into, but there was also something distinctly non-human about him. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was, but whenever I looked at him, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  “So,” I said, “you’re some sort of parasite, and this guy is your host?”

  “Sorta. It’s more like we’re conjoined twins, except I control just about everything. He’s in here, complete with all his thoughts, memories, and desires, but most of the time he’s dormant. When he gets a mind to, he can be a right bastard, though. Stubborn mook.”

  “That’s the whole human race for you.”

  He rolled a second cigarette before lighting and offered it to me, which I declined. Guy tucked it behind his ear and lit the first one, inhaling deeply. Smoke curled out of his nostrils, and relief flooded his face. “Speak of the devil.” Guy held up the cigarette. “You know they used to say these were good for you? That’s how the mook got hooked. Everybody was smoking then. Guys, dolls...everybody. Couldn’t go out without breathin’ it in. Never been able to kick the habit.”

  “Try chewing gum,” I offered and glanced around. “What happened to the cat?”

  Guy shrugged. “I couldn’t very well open the void in the middle of your house with you losing it on the floor. Creep ran off.”

  “We’ve got to find it and stop it, then.” I pushed up from my chair and almost fell over.

  “Easy there.” Guy pushed me back to the chair effortlessly. “You’re in no shape to go off chasing a Yule Cat. He ain’t gonna bother nobody, not for a while yet. He’s only interested in you because, well…” He gestured at me with the lit cigarette pinched between two fingers. “I think you might have a piece of him inside you somewhere.”

  Chapter Four

  I shook my head. “How is that possible?”

  Sure, my soul had shattered into a couple of pieces, and my body had laid empty in a hospital for a few days, but I’d been back for over a month, and nothing felt different. No one had mentioned that I might be acting strange. I was stressed as hell from trying to pull together Emma’s dream wedding in the space of a month and a half, plus trying to sell my house and get the shop up and running again, but life was normal, aside from all that. The weirdest thing that’d happened to me since coming back from the dead was the appearance of a Krampus and a Yule Cat, which hadn’t shown up until Guy did.

  Guy pursed his lips and blew out a cloud of smoke in a slow stream. “Anything’s possible. Just look around you, pal. You hunt gods for a living.”

  I held up a finger. “Correction. I don’t hunt gods. I police them and the fae is all. Make sure they behave. And I don’t make a living doing it. That gig barely pays the bills.”

  “Same difference.” He shrugged. “Point is, you should know better than most that just about anything can happen at any time. You’re asking the wrong questions. What you really want to know is when did it happen to you?”

  I nodded and lowered my hand. “And what proof you’ve got. Everything seems normal to me.”

  Guy’s eyes slid past me. He nodded to my fridge with his chin. “Open the fridge.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Okay, why?”

  “Just humor me.”

  I was still a bit unsteady on my feet as I rose, but the fridge was just a few steps away. I made it without falling over and pulled open the door. At first glance, everything seemed normal. Better than normal, actually. My fridge was normally empty, especially since I’d been spending so much time at Emma’s, but I’d read in a magazine that it might help sell the place. Strange, I know, but apparently, homes were supposed to look lived in but not messy. Stocking the fridge would make it seem like I was home more than I was, which I guess would also infer that I loved the place. I don’t pretend to understand the fine science of selling houses. I just do what the brochures say.

  But rather than stocking the fridge with normal staples like eggs, milk, and orange juice, it was overflowing with meat. Whole packages of ground beef lay open, the plastic torn aside. It looked like whole chunks had been scooped out. Looking closely, I spied what looked like finger marks.

  I closed the fridge to keep from being sick at the implications. “Okay, so there’s a bunch of ground beef in there. Doesn’t mean anything. I know I’m not eating it if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  Guy crossed his arms. “What’d you do yesterday?”

  “Christmas Day?”

  He gestured for me to go on.

  I opened my mouth, but my brain was suddenly blank. That couldn’t be right. It was Christmas, and I loved Christmas. It was one of the few days of the year I got to lounge at home and do nothing. That was especially true this year since Emma and I had both forgone celebrating to save for the honeymoon and wedding. I’d been so tired. Yeah, that had to be it. “I slept all day.”

  Guy’s expression was doubtful. “All day? Didn’t get up to piss or grab a snack?”

  I opened and closed my jaw. I should’ve remembered something about the day before, but it was a tota
l blank. “One missing day doesn’t mean anything.”

  Guy grunted and stood. “If you were going to hide something, say about yea big by yea wide—” He formed rectangular dimensions with his hands, roughly the size of a hardback book. “—where would you put it?”

  The house didn’t have any sort of secret passages or vaults. Pony had always been open about most of the magic he did, but there was a small closet in the back he’d slip into if he wanted to do spells alone, the same place he’d used before to summon Baron Samedi. It was warded against intruders. Like Pony, I kept all my magical valuables crammed in that closet. It was so full of junk that I barely knew what was in there anymore.

  I swept by Guy without telling him where I was going and went to the closet. He appeared at the end of the hallway. Arms crossed, he leaned against the wall and watched as I quickly took down the wards and pulled open the door. I expected to get buried in boxes of mostly useless junk. To my great surprise, someone had organized my mess, labeling everything by hand.

  I picked up a jar of graveyard dirt and moved my fingers over the label. “This isn’t my handwriting.”

  Guy said nothing.

  I put the jar back. “What am I looking for exactly other than proof I’m a sleepwalking neat freak with a bad case of pica?”

  He pushed off the wall with a hip and slid into the closet. Jars clinked and boxes rattled as he moved them all aside, eventually coming out with an elaborate, sealed trunk.

  “That’s not mine,” I said.

  Guy lowered the box to the ground. “Check it.”

  “For what?”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Wards.”

  “Can’t you undo them?”

  He plucked the cigarette stub from his mouth and put it out against his tongue before gulping the whole thing down. “I can do a lot, bub, but that type of magic ain’t part of it. If you warded it in your…other state, I’ll blow myself to kingdom come opening this.”

  “Right.” I swallowed, knelt, and let my hand hover over the chest, extending my magic into it. Something woke when I touched it with my power and snapped out at me. I jerked my hand back and examined it for bite marks, but the attack had been magical in nature, not physical.

  “Anything?” Guy asked.

  I rubbed my hand. “Yeah, something, but not the sort of ward I’d normally use either. I think I can undo it, though.”

  The metal clasps felt warm under my hands. Slowly, I snaked a spell into the chest, feeding it my will. Whatever other power was inside recoiled. The clasps burned against my palm. I pushed harder. Suddenly, the wards fizzled to nothing, and the clasps popped open. I carefully lifted the lid and peered inside. “A book?”

  Guy’s shoulders slumped with a sigh. “I hate it when I’m right.”

  I lifted the book out of the chest. Unlike most hardback books, this one had been bound in a strange, waxy leather, smoother than any leather I’d ever touched. Both the spine and the cover were blank of everything except strange, ghostly wrinkles. I turned it over a few times before flipping it open. Inside were strange geometric shapes and pages full of a language I didn’t recognize. “What is this thing?”

  “That,” said Guy, sliding a handkerchief from his pocket, “is a spellbook bound in human skin.”

  I dropped the book right into his waiting palm. “Jesus Christ! Warn a guy next time! Where’d that come from, anyway?”

  He wrapped the book in his handkerchief with all the care I’d use for a precious gift. “Most recently? It was lifted from Special Collections at the university library here in town. Before that, it was found under the body of a certain congressman, NLB.”

  “NLB?”

  “No longer breathing.”

  I swallowed. “Oh.”

  “Anyway, before that, it was in Stalin’s personal library, and he got it from the Nazis who unearthed it somewhere in Egypt where it should’ve stayed buried. But these things have a way of wanting to be found.”

  “You talk about it like it’s alive.”

  Guy tucked the book into his jacket. “Define alive.”

  I shuddered and braced myself against the wall of the closet. “Okay, so I’ve got missing time, an appetite for raw meat, and a weird skin book of spells I can’t read. How does any of that mean I’ve got a piece of Mask playing tag along?”

  He gave me an appraising look and adjusted the collar of his jacket. “Ignoring all the evidence, I’ve just got a feeling. When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, that’s gotta count for something. Besides, Mask would need to attach himself to a powerful wizard if he wanted to make use of the book. You fit the bill.”

  I felt like I was going to be sick. My back slowly slid down the wall and I sank to the floor, supporting my head with my hands. What the hell was I going to do if he was right? Josiah might’ve been able to help, but he hadn’t been answering any of my calls or texts since he disappeared. Neither had Khaleda or Stefan.

  I looked up at Guy, who was just standing there as if he were waiting for me to process the news. “You haven’t explained how Mask has anything to do with all these Christmas critters showing up.”

  “Easy.” He tugged up his pants at the knees slightly and sat cross-legged on the floor across from me. “What’d you see, looking at the cat?”

  “Red soul.” I tapped my chin. “I’ve only seen that a few times before.”

  “They’re servants of the Outer Gods,” Guy said.

  “What, like Cthulhu?”

  He shook his head and took out his tobacco and rolling papers. “No, you’ve got it all wrong. Everyone does. Everyone just wants to lump them all together, but I promise you the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones are two very different sorts of beings. All you need to know is that these two factions have been engaged in a cold war of sorts since before mankind crawled out of the muck. Mask works for the Great Old Ones. The Kringles all work for someone who works for the Outer Gods. Yule Cat and the Krampuses used to work for the Outer Gods, but don’t anymore. It’s really more complicated than that, but those are the basics.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Does the Easter Bunny work for them too?”

  Guy lit his cigarette and leaned back against the wall. “Not that I know of, but you’re getting it. Certain beings exist because enough people believe in them. That belief is usually stronger at certain times of the year. This time of year, the world builds effigies and shrines to Kringle, so he and all his ilk rise to rule while the others slumber. In general, these creatures don’t have a will of their own. They live by habit, stuck in a pre-determined cycle. The only thing that would cause them to deviate from that cycle is a break in reality. They’d be drawn to it like flies on shit.” He gestured to me.

  I put my hands on my chest in defense. “I’m not a break in reality. I’m me.”

  “How can I put this so it makes sense?” He sighed and rolled his head back, pounding it twice against the wall. “You aren’t the break, but you’re flirting with it, which is drawing them here. They don’t like it. Given the chance, they’ll paint the walls with your intestines rather than let you continue to screw up their routine. Make sense?”

  I nodded slowly. There were still plenty of parts I didn’t get, but it seemed like that much was clear enough. Something I was doing threatened to cause a break in reality—or rather, something Mask was doing when I was unconscious—and they’d been drawn by the supernatural power surge to try to stop me. Because I just happened to be lucky enough to do it at Christmastime, those particular spirits showed up.

  “How do I stop it?” I asked.

  Guy tugged out a revolver and spun the barrel. “Simplest way is a bullet to the brain.”

  “Screw that. How do I stop it and survive?”

  He frowned and tucked the gun away, disappointed. “Well, you’d have to find a way of locating wherever this piece of him is and then devise a way to remove it without killing you. To keep him from just hopping into the nearest body, you’d need to
find the right spell in this book to bind him to whatever object you planned to use and then transport him directly to the Nightlands.”

  I whistled. “That’s a lot of steps.”

  “And anything could go wrong at any of them, which is why the bullet is the surest way. But, if you want to try the other way, be my guest, pal.” He stood.

  “Wait a minute, you’re not going to help me?”

  Guy adjusted his fedora. “I just did,” he said and left the closet.

  I scrambled to my feet to chase after him. “What about the book? You said I’d need it.”

  “You will, but I ain’t about to leave it with you. Mask also needs it to finish whatever he was working on.” He pulled open the broken back door and stepped through it. “Tell you what. You survive long enough to get to that point, I’ll bring the book back.”

  I snorted. “So don’t call you, you’ll call me?”

  He lifted his hat in a sort of salute. “And do yourself a favor, eh? Deck the halls with boughs of holly. It repels them.”

  “Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la fuck you, buddy.”

  He smirked, turned, and walked away. “That’s the spirit. See you around.”

  I clenched my jaw, watching him hop the fence and disappear around the corner of the next house. Something about the guy gave me the creeps, even before I’d made the mistake of getting a look at his soul. A shudder ran through me at the memory of it. I couldn’t recall exactly what it looked like, but my brain recoiled whenever I tried. Maybe that was a good thing.

  Chapter Five

  “What the hell happened?” Finn asked, sidestepping some junk I still hadn’t managed to clean up in the kitchen.

  The walls would need more than a sheet of plastic for the place to be livable again, and the door would need to be replaced, but for now, I’d gotten a tarp out to keep the rain off. New cabinets, a new sink… Fixing the damage the Yule Cat had done was going to put me into even more debt.

  I sighed and pitched another pound of ground beef from the fridge into the trash. “Yule Cat.”