by SM Reine
“Kind of like a living room,” I said. “Somewhere to entertain guests.”
“How’d you know that?”
Because I’d been reading way too much steampunk lately. “I’m educated,” I said loftily.
Suzy snorted.
The drawing room was in the back of the house and we had to get a short tour of the entire first floor on our way to reach it. The whole manor was a lot bigger than it had looked from the outside, and much nicer, in that “older than dirt” kind of way.
The narrow hallway led past a library, a dining room with a grand staircase (which was only slightly ruined by the presence of a chairlift), and a couple of sitting rooms with wallpaper that my grandmother would have loved.
Herbert finally took us into an airy kitchen behind the dining room. The cast-iron cookware hanging over the island was greased to a shine. The oven was a beast that could have roasted a whole cow at once. The windows were small, but it didn’t seem to matter; there was nothing on the other side but vine-draped cliff anyway. Not much of a view worth fighting for.
“Do the residents eat pretty well here?” The knives were kept on a magnetic strip over the sink. I brushed one blade with my fingertip, and it was sharp enough to slice a narrow fissure into the pad.
“Why you asking?” Herbert sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.
“Just wondering. Looks like a well-stocked kitchen.”
“Is it a problem if we like to eat good? Can’t break into our brains with your radio signals if we don’t eat processed food with the neural implants the government adds?” Herbert smacked his knuckles against his temple. It sounded like it hurt.
So much for making casual conversation.
“There weren’t any incidents in this room, so let’s move on,” Suzy said tactfully.
“Ha! Notice you don’t deny the implants.”
“We can neither confirm nor deny the manipulation of packaged food goods.” She kept a straight face as she said it, but I could tell Suzy was approaching her breaking point.
Herbert grinned toothlessly. “I like this one,” he said to me. “Not as much of a liar as you other spooks!” He flapped his hands at the door. “Come on, come on, you gotta see the ghosts.”
“Have you encountered visible apparitions?” Suzy asked.
“What do you think, I’d call in a tip about ghosts I can’t see? Of course I seen them ‘visible apparitions’! What’s wrong with you?”
“Need that list alphabetized?” I muttered too quietly for Herbert to hear through his hair-stuffed ears. Suzy only pretended to be deaf, but I caught her smiling.
The drawing room was almost as big as the foyer, but unused. Most of the furniture was covered in white sheets. There was a fainting couch by the window, a piano, a couple antique sofas, a table. The wallpaper was discolored where paintings used to hang.
The floor was coated in dust. The only footprints were Herbert’s, I assumed, judging by the uneven gait and duck-footed twist to the prints.
When we walked in, floorboards creaked and clouds of dust filled the air.
I sneezed into my sleeve.
“What brought you back here in the first place, sir?” Suzy asked.
“All the cleaning I got to do,” Herbert said. “That dang orderly, he don’t do much cleaning. Told me not to bother with the rooms back here neither. They hired me to help around the house three weeks ago, and goddammit, I'm gonna done help around the house.”
Another sneeze. Two sneezes. Three. My face was exploding. “Pardon,” I managed to rasp before ducking into the hallway separating the kitchen and drawing room. It was narrow, windowless, dark. My hair brushed the rafters. Some kind of servant’s access, maybe?
It was dusty there, too, but I stopped sneezing immediately. Being able to breathe the stale air wasn’t much of an improvement.
Herbert’s voice drifted from the other room. “When I was cleaning the kitchen, I heard voices coming out of here. Then I heard something breaking. Came in to shut down the party. Found a broken oil lamp and them ‘visible apparitions.’”
I wasn’t eager to return to dust central, so I explored the servant’s hall. There was a door at the end that didn’t lead to a room I’d seen on Herbert’s reluctant tour. I tried to open it, but it had no doorknob—just a keyhole on a plate. Must have only opened on the other side.
Kneeling down, I put my eye to the keyhole. The room on the other side was red. Just plain red, walls and floor and ceiling, a color so uniform that I couldn’t make out any difference between the carpet and the wallpaper.
Huh. Must have been a trick of the light.
“Can you describe the apparitions?” Suzy asked.
Scrubbing my nose, I reentered the drawing room. My partner was holding the pieces of a glass bulb that looked like they had once belonged to an oil lamp. That was what Herbert had heard breaking.
“Don’t got to describe nothing,” Herbert said. “Make your own goddamn observations.”
I opened my Steno pad to the first blank page, drew a line, and wrote “crazy old people haunting” at the top. New case, new page, time for some new notes. “How are we supposed to do that?”
Herbert gestured impatiently at a bookshelf. “Well, look at them.”
The bookshelf was populated by lots of old hardbacks and a few small photographs.
No apparitions.
My eyes started watering again. I held my breath, tried not to sneeze.
“That’s little Gertie,” Herbert said, pointing to the corner. “Let me done tell you, if she’d growed up in my house, she never would have had these kinds of manners. God knows where her parents went. She’s a beast.”
“You can see Gertie right now?” Suzy asked.
“I’m not blind, woman! And this one’s—this one’s named Lynne,” Herbert said to a shelf. “She can be a real female dog, if you know what I mean, but at least she done got some manners.”
I clicked my pen twice, tucked it into my shirt pocket. Seemed like I was definitely not going to need notes for this case. Herbert really was just crazy.
Then I sneezed again.
This time, I recognized the burn flaring up my sinuses, and it had nothing to do with dust.
Herbert looked irritated. “You got a problem, son?”
“Sorry. I must be allergic to something around here.” I gave Suzy a significant look. She frowned at me so I added, “Something must have bloomed powerfully this year.”
Her eyes brightened. I could actually see the light bulb going off in her head. “Pretty powerful,” Suzy agreed. “Or in close proximity to where we’re standing.”
See, I’m allergic to magic. If anyone casts a spell nearby, I struggle to breathe. The more sneezing, wheezing, and mucus, the more powerful the magic. Pretty awkward quirk for a witch, but it had its utility.
Like now, when it told me someone was casting spells in a supposedly haunted house.
“What rooms surround this one?” Suzy asked.
Herbert scowled. “No bathrooms or nothing. We ain’t got no mold problems, if that’s what you’re suggesting. We’re up to code here. One of the first things I checked when they hired me. I'm taking care of everything.”
“I don’t mean to imply anything, sir. I’m just trying to get a grip on the house’s layout.”
He scratched the whiskers on his chin. “Storage closet’s over there. Got a hallway alongside the other wall.” That was where I’d stepped out for a breather. “It connects with an old servant’s bedroom.” Probably the red room. “That’s about it, aside from the gardens out there.”
Suzy rubbed a spot on the window clear and peered outside as I kept sneezing. “Nobody in the garden,” she said.
“And I didn’t see anyone in the hall or servant’s bedroom.” I was so congested that I sounded like Comic Book Guy criticizing the latest episode of The Simpsons.
“You stay out of the bad man’s bedroom, now,” Herbert said. “He don’t like no visitors. Even
less friendly than Ander.”
“Ander is another apparition?”
“You’re not very bright, are you, spook?” Herbert asked.
I chose to treat that like a rhetorical question.
“That’s all that borders the room,” Suzy said, changing the subject back. “A closet, a hallway, and the gardens.”
“Aside from the basement right underneath us, yeah.”
Suzy and I exchanged a look.
“How do I get into the basement?” I asked.
I hadn’t noticed the trap door in the servant’s hallway. When I opened it, what waited underneath was wholly uninviting in that dark, cobwebby kind of way. The narrow stairs led directly underneath the drawing room. They looked so old that I wasn’t even sure they could hold my weight.
“You want to check that out?” I asked Suzy. “You’re smaller.”
She looked kind of green. “You go ahead.”
I couldn’t remember the last time Suzy had been anything but gung-ho on a case. Probably because she was never anything but gung-ho.
“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” If she were, I’d have to tease her mercilessly about it.
I immediately began planning an office prank involving obscene amounts of cardboard around her cubicle.
“It’s the cobwebs,” Suzy said out of the corner of her mouth, arms stiff at her sides.
“What? The spiders?”
“Yeah. The spiders.” Her cheeks were pink.
Suzy and I had been forced to go into semi-abandoned mines on a case earlier that year. I say “semi-abandoned” because the mines hadn’t been occupied by people anymore, but they had been home to demon-spiders the size of small horses. They would have killed us if we hadn’t gotten backup in time.
She’d come out of it a lot more fucked up than I had, both physically and mentally.
“Okay, no problem.” I shed my jacket and handed it to Suzy.
I was surprised that she didn’t try to prove herself manlier than me by jumping down anyway, but she was still standing stiffly beside the trap door when I headed down into the darkness.
The basement stairs creaked underneath my weight. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight to a job taking place during full daylight, so I felt along the wall for a switch and felt nothing but cobwebs whispering across my fingers.
Something cold bumped me in the forehead, gave a soft jangle.
Chain for a light bulb? I tugged on it.
Dim orange light radiated through the basement, painting long shadows on everything stored in the basement.
There was so little visibility that it was easy to imagine those shadows as things much scarier than the mundane reality. A stack of bulk toilet paper formed the lumpy shape of a giant worm. The faded Christmas decorations cast shadows of demons I’d once fought in downtown Reno. The fake potted plants looked like jagged teeth. Lawn maintenance equipment looked like…well, lawn maintenance equipment.
Giant rusty tree clippers don’t need to look like anything else to be creepy.
None of that was suspicious or out of the ordinary. I even spotted the spare linens that the one old guy had been asking for.
But there was one incredibly suspicious thing sprawled right in the middle of the basement, and it was no trick of the light.
Someone had left a giant fucking altar and circle of power in the basement of a retirement home.
Maybe Herbert wasn’t all that nutty after all.
I’d been doing intense study on circles of power lately, trying to beef up my ritual knowledge. So I could tell it was the kind of circle I’d never cast, not in a million years.
The symbols carved into the floor were jagged and hungry looking, augmented by white paint. Melted wax marked the thirteen points where candles would stand during a ritual. The altar was covered in bones. Big bones. Either someone had been butchering a deer at Paradise Mile, or someone had sacrificed humans for their spell.
Those marks, those remains, the placement of those candles—I recognized everything.
Someone was evoking demons from Hell.
Coincidentally, that someone—the witch himself—was standing on the other side of the altar, and he was aiming a gun at me.
His scrubs were stretched awkwardly over the frame of a high school football player who had gone to seed. His greasy hair was cut short. The name badge on his chest said “Nichols.” He stared at me with wild eyes, sweating so profusely that it dripped on the floor.
Neither of us moved.
We were frozen, staring at each other in shock. I hadn’t expected to find anything in the basement. And the orderly definitely hadn’t expected to find me, either.
“I found the source of the apparitions,” I called up the stairs, hoping Suzy would hear me, hoping she’d detect the worry in my voice and wouldn’t come down to investigate.
I couldn’t hear her response. Couldn’t hear anything but the pulse roaring in my ears.
The whole basement seemed to have reduced to the gun pointing at me.
The orderly’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. He was trembling. “I have to do this,” he rasped.
I lifted my hands slowly. Real slowly. Like I was saying, Hey, look, I don’t have a gun. “Let’s talk.”
The whites of his eyes made a bloodshot rim around his irises. “We can’t talk. There’s no time if we want to be able to stop him before he performs the merging. Don’t you understand?”
I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I did understand that I was one finger spasm away from joining those bones on the altar.
There wasn’t any time to negotiate, no time to talk him down.
The floorboards above creaked. The orderly jerked with surprise.
I leaped off the bottom of the stairs and dived into a shelf of bathroom supplies. Toilet paper and disposable razors and Band-Aids exploded everywhere. The debris cloaked me and made it harder for the orderly to aim at anything fatal—I hoped.
Bang! Bang!
Two gunshots, nearly at the exact same instant.
Wood exploded right next to my head, shattering one of the shelf posts.
Simultaneously, a perfect red circle appeared in the center of Nichols’s forehead.
His eyes went blank. He collapsed behind the altar.
I shoved the toilet paper off of me and spun to see Suzy on the steps, both hands gripping her Beretta. She was stiff. Glaring. Nostrils flared, eyes wide, jaw clenched.
The orderly’s arm was limp on the floor beyond the altar, the gun inches from his unmoving fingers. A puddle of blood oozed into the grooves of the circle set into the floor.
Hell of a shot from Suzy Takeuchi.
She didn’t lower the gun until she had kicked the orderly’s weapon away and checked him for vitals. “You’re welcome,” she told me, which I took to mean that the witch tormenting poor Herbert and company was dead.
So it wasn’t exactly a He-Man case, but at least it was over fast.
I’d had worse days.
CHAPTER TWO
MY NAME IS CÈSAR Hawke. I work for a secret government organization that handles everything that doesn’t officially exist.
Pretty cool, right?
We’ve got a department that handles dissemination of misinformation. Guys whose livelihoods hinge on convincing government officials that their city’s children didn’t vanish because of a bloodthirsty cult, but because of sex trafficking. Or that the winged thing soaring over their city wasn’t a demon escaped from Phlegethon, but a hot air balloon with an unusual design.
There’s another department for regulation of rogue demon hunters. Pretty big job there—especially since collateral damage from vigilantes is a bigger cause of civilian death than actual demon attack.
Try finding a job like that on Craigslist.
Me? I work with witches, mostly bad ones.
I’m pretty good at it. We’re all pretty good at our jobs, though.
You can tell we’re good because normal people
keep living normal lives, oblivious to the work we do. You’ve never heard of Magical Violations, Infernal Relations, or Kopis Regulations because we’re so damn good.
Sure, the pay is crap, but I don’t do it for the pay. I do it because I like helping people.
Even when helping people means that I have to watch my partner shoot an old guy in the face.
You’d think after my front-row ticket to a man getting shot in the head, I might have trouble sleeping. But I rested like a chloroformed baby after my day in Mojave. Eyes shut at ten, eyes open at four, no dreams, felt awesome in the morning.
I didn’t make a habit of dipping into my sleeping potions, but I’d been working a lot of rough cases the past year. A succubus assassin, a psychopathic werewolf, a nightmare demon, even a fallen angel. Decent sleep was becoming harder by the week.
If I needed potions to rest, then dammit, I’d drink the potions.
It was the only way I’d be able to make it to my daily gym appointment the following morning.
To be honest, I didn’t really need to go to the gym at all. Sleeping potions weren’t my only magical augmentation. Strength spells were my real specialty. Every morning, I magically juiced myself using potions and poultices, and the outcome was a thousand times better than anything I could accomplish in a gym.
After years drinking my brew, I was strong. Really strong. I could probably bench a car if it was one of those wussy European two-seaters, but I’d never tested it.
Try finding someone willing to spot a lift like that. Good luck.
But I arrived at the gym by five in the morning, same as I had every other morning for months. Strong for the average person is weak compared to most preternatural enemies. I’d been working hard at building up my reflexes and speed.
The results had been less than magical so far. Let’s put it that way.
Still, you’d expect that potion-enhanced strength alone would help me win against a guy who’d had his foot recently amputated. Beefy ol’ Agent Cèsar Hawke versus some skinny dude missing an appendage? Easier than a drunk kid at his first frat party.
