Redeemer

by C. E. Murphy

  "Capture?" Rosie felt like every word she spoke echoed something Hank had said, but she desperately wanted to understand.

  Hank raised a finger, holding off the question. "I'm getting there. Demons who can take over a human body without destroying it aren't like vampires. They can reproduce like we do, with us. They father magical bloodlines, and most of those bloodlines are evil. Ex Libris stamps out every sign of them they find. Except one."

  A chill wind off the refrigeration units spilled over Rosie's arms, raising hairs. "Redeemers?"

  "Redeemers." Hank nodded. "Redeemers can kill demons, Miss Ransom. As far as I know, nothing else human can. But Redeemers don't just kill them. They cleanse the madness from the soul, destroying the demon and redeeming the human host's soul when they do."

  "Wait." Rosie lifted her palms, eyes closed as she worked her way through Hank's lecture. "These demons are born from artists but usually kill them when they're born." A shudder twitched her spine and she muttered, "And they say childbirth is dangerous," before continuing. "Then the demons climb into other bodies. Do they have to be artists too?" She opened her eyes to see Hank shake his head and draw breath at the same time, like he might comment but thought better of it. "No, but I bet they like to find other artists, huh?" At his nod, she shuddered again and went on. "So a demon holes up inside a human and eats its soul bit by bit, and if it lives long enough it can have magic babies with normal humans. And if a Redeemer gets to it before it's finished eating somebody's whole soul, they … live?"

  Hank grimaced. "They die, but they die saved. In most European religions, that means they're able to go to Heaven. In Buddhism, it means they enter the reincarnation cycle at a higher place, or in Shintoism, they take an honored place among the ancestors."

  "What's Shintism?"

  "Shintoism. It's—never mind. The point is that Redeemers are the only thing that can save a demon-infested human's soul. The rest of us can just capture them, if we're lucky. And we captu—"

  "Wait." The cold off the fridges came back to stick against Rosie's skin, settling at her nape with a firm grip. "Wait, Redeemers are the only thing that can save the people demons … climb into? You mean if Ex Libris kills a demon, the person goes to Hell?"

  "They would if we could kill them at all, but we only catch them."

  "But that's horrible! How can a good person be damned to Hell just because they got stuck with a demon? That's awful!"

  A sorrow-tinged smile slid over Hank's lips. "Yeah. Demons are nasty business, Miss Ransom. There are schools of thought, even in Ex Libris, that it must be that only the deserving get demon-infected. People who are going to Hell anyway, I mean. But I don't think that's true." He raised his shoulders like he was passing off a shiver, and glanced into the Jaguar at where he'd thrown his coat. But even with the fridge units blasting cooler air, the night was still warm, and he left the coat where it lay. "I think people just get unlucky. And there aren't many Redeemers, so hardly anybody finds salvation."

  Rosie folded her arms around herself. "How do you capture them? How does Ex Libris stop them?"

  "In art." Hank sighed. "They're drawn to art, and they can be captured in it. It's their weakness, and it's why the world hasn't been completely overrun by monsters. A painter or a sculptor or a composer can write or paint or carve the demon's essence into their art. Or a writer. You wouldn't believe how many dirty limericks hold small demons. The big ones, though …" He shook his head. "You don't want to know what the Sistine Chapel holds. Or Ulysses."

  "You said ex libris means from the book," Rosie whispered. "Does that mean you're demons too? If you capture demons in art, and you're from the books … ?"

  Hank shifted his weight like he'd gotten uncomfortable fast, and gave her a curious look. "No. We just write down everything we know, so our knowledge comes from the books. It's a pun." He tried a smile and Rosie gave him a flat look in return.

  "Pretty hoity-toity, making Latin puns out of your secret society."

  To her surprise, Hank's smile grew. "We take our humor where we can find it. Anyway, we write everything down, we learn from the books, so it doesn't get lost from one generation to the next. We don't often live very long, and with two wars in Europe back to back … a lot of art has been destroyed, a lot of monsters have been set loose, and a lot of us have died fighting them. There aren't enough of us around anymore, and the monsters are gaining ground. Which is why Redeemers could be important, and when I saw you glowing at the station, I remembered the stories."

  "I'm glowing?" Rosie extended her hands, searching for a glimmer in her fingers.

  "Not anymore. It faded."

  "How come nobody said anything?"

  "It doesn't show up unless you know how to see it. Besides, would you say something if you saw somebody glowing?"

  "I guess not. Or, I don't know, maybe. Maybe." Rosie folded her arms under her breasts again. "The glowing, that's got to do with being a Redeemer?"

  "Yeah. It's like a sign that they're one of the few who can save a demon-possessed soul. I don't know a whole lot else, honestly. There's not much in the literature about Redeemers. The Ex Libris don't think much of them."

  "Let me guess," Rosie drawled. "The Ex Libris are men, and Redeemers are women?"

  "Gosh," Hank drawled right back, "how'd you know?"

  "Men never think much of what women can do, but look at us now, building the whole war machine. Must be scary, knowing we can. I bet your library men are afraid of Redeemers, too."

  "I'm not."

  A sudden smile blossomed across Rosie's face. "Neither am I. Heck, we might make quite a team, library man." She finally sat on the edge of the Jaguar's hood, feeling the engine's warmth rising beneath her, and got almost halfway through asking, "How come Redeemer magic is okay?" before a sharp, small laugh broke the words into pieces. "Listen to me," she said more quietly. "Magic and Redeemers and demons."

  "Oh my," Hank put in softly.

  The corner of Rosie's mouth curved up. "Oh my," she agreed, but she couldn't keep the smile going no matter how hard she tried. "It all sounds crazy. How come I'm not running away screaming? I killed somebody tonight."

  Hank shook his head, hardly more than a twitch of motion. "You're an independent woman, Miss Ransom. You've got a job, I bet you don't live at home with your folks. But I bet you don't go out to the waterfront with strangers at two in the morning, either. I think you did run screaming. You're just dignified about it."

  "I should be running harder now. You're the one who told me about the monsters."

  "You already knew. Once you Redeemed PFC Goode, you knew. I'm just filling in the details."

  Rosie let a deep breath go, imagining she could see it on the fridge-cooled air. "Are you always this calm?"

  Hank grinned. "Part of my British heritage. Keep calm and carry on. Truth is you're not that rattled either, though."

  "No. It sounds awful, but it felt right. Not killing him, I didn't want to have to do that, but afterward, I couldn't—I can't—regret it. Oh, gosh, I've got to go home and tell Mom and Pop before they see the newspaper. It's going to be in the newspaper, isn't it?"

  "And on the radio."

  Rosie slid off the Jaguar, shaking her skirt straight. "I have to go tell Jean, too. She can't find out from the radio. It'll all be there, won't it? All the missing girls? They'll be talking about all of it, oh, no. You've got to bring me to her house, please. I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here instead of going to tell them right away."

  "There's a lot more I need to tell you, Miss Ransom."

  "You'll have to tell me on the way, or bring me to your secret headquarters tomorrow and let your supervisor tell me. This can't wait." Rosie flapped her hand at him as she scurried to the passenger-side door. He edged off the hood more cautiously, frowning. Rosie took advantage of him not being in the car yet to step over the car door instead of opening it, and settled into the seat with a mixture of dread at facing Jean with terrible news and excitemen
t at going for another drive in the low-slung convertible.

  Hank climbed into the driver's seat, still frowning, and all of Rosie's anticipation, good and bad, crashed into foreboding. Her stomach felt squeezed, and she thought maybe the serenity she'd felt after killing Goode had been gone for ages after all: she'd been all highs and lows, either excitement or anger, since then. Maybe she was rattled after all, even if not as badly as she thought she should be. "What's wrong?"

  "My supervisors …"

  "They might not like Redeemers, but they've got to see I could help, right? You can't not tell them, after all. I'd think it'd be a feather in your cap, finding a Redeemer."

  "No, you don't understand. It's not that I don't want to tell them. It's that there's no one to tell. I'm all alone out here."

  FIVE

  Hank explained, on the drive to Jean's house. At least, he kept talking, but the words whipped past Rosie, lashing her skin the same way stray hairs caught in the wind did. She only heard half of what he said, maybe not even that much. Something about Detroit being an outpost. Something about rumors of a—daemon rex, Hank said, and she glanced at him only to be told, as if the translation tasted bad in his mouth, "King demon." Something about a king demon in the Midwest, then. Something about his duty being to find that demon. "Not doing much of a job at it, are you?" she asked, but didn't think he heard, not with the wind snatching her voice away.

  Earlier the drive had been a release, but the car felt like a prison now. She'd wanted to go somewhere that she could make sense of the day, and instead it made less sense now than it had before.

  Except it didn't. It only made less sense if she thought she'd flipped her wig, and Hank had been right about that. She didn't for a minute think she'd gone crazy. She believed him about the demons. About everything, and that bothered her more than anything else. The world shouldn't be able to hide something as awful as demons without lots of people knowing the truth. "Only we do know, don't we? They're not really hidden. We have all kinds of stories about them. We just don't quite believe them. Not as real things, not things that walk the earth."

  "What?"

  Rosie shook her head and pushed her thumbs against her temples, where dried sweat made the fine hairs feel thick and rough. Her whole hairline felt like that where she pressed her index fingers against it, and the longer she held her hands there, the more hair came loose to tickle the backs of her hands. It'd be an awful mess later, and she had to get through a whole day, all of Saturday, before she could wash it again. Well, maybe she'd do it in the morning instead of waiting until Saturday night. That would feel good. Underneath trying to distract herself by thinking about her hair, she finished making herself understand why she believed Hank. She'd seen the demon, and Hank had explained it, and she could either figure that she'd gone nuts or that she now knew the truth. She had enough faith in herself to believe her own eyes and heart.

  Hank kept going on about how America didn't have much in the way of Ex Libris anyways, even before the wars, because there were so many more demons in Europe and China. That didn't even make sense, if demons came from art. People made art and there'd been people in America forever, but her objection washed away before she said it. Men hated being challenged over details like that, and she still had to figure out what to say to Jean. Ruby's dead, Jeannie, you were right, and I'm so sorry. But I killed the thing that killed her, and I'm not sorry about that at all. It sounded awful. It sounded right. She didn't know what to say.

  "Did you see anything when he died? Anything that could tell you about the daemon rex?" The wind died down as the car slowed, making Hank easier to hear.

  Rosie twisted her hands in her hair, frowning. They weren't far from Jean's house now, and the Jaguar's engine sounded rudely loud among the quiet tree-lined streets. Half the neighborhood would be peeking out their windows, seeing Rosie Ransom driving around late at night with a strange young man. "Are Redeemers supposed to be able to read souls, too?"

  "Not that I know about. I'm grasping at straws here, Miss Ransom."

  "How do you know he wasn't the, uh. The daemon rex himself?" Rosie made a face. "That sounds stupid and highfalutin' coming from me. The demon king."

  Hank glared at her. "Haven't you been listening? My superiors were glad I was from Detroit. It meant they could send me back here and have a local ear to the ground on the rumors they'd been hearing for years. Goode had just come back from France. He couldn't have been the daemon rex." His glare faded to a sigh and he conceded, "The king. He hadn't been here long enough."

  It didn't seem right to say she hadn't hardly been listening, but he'd asked another question, so she didn't have to. "I didn't see anything in his soul. Just that it washed clean and rose up. No clues. Aren't you too junior to be hunting king demons?"

  Bitterness flashed across Hank's handsome features. "Don't you mean too crippled?"

  Rosie's eyebrows drew down in real surprise. "No, I meant too young. It seems like king demons would be a job for somebody with years of experience, not rookies."

  "Like I said, we're spread thin," Hank said shortly. "Where do I drop you off?"

  "You promised Detective Johnson you'd drive me home," Rosie said with a faint smile. "This isn't my home. Turn here. Jean's house is up there on the right, the one with the green Oldsmobile and the lights on." The tram stop near Jean's house looked strangely lonesome at night, a dark forgotten space beneath the trees. Rosie turned her face away and shivered.

  "Your friend has a car."

  Rosie's shiver slipped away into a scowl. "I'm about to go tell my friend that her best friend is dead. She's not going to be in any condition to drive. I was going to ask if you would wait, please, yes, but now I think I'll just tell you to, or I'll be calling the detective in the morning to tell him you're a lout."

  "Fine." Hank pulled up behind Jean's Oldsmobile and killed the engine, sitting back with his arms folded across his chest as Jean burst out of her house with Irene a few steps behind. Jean caught the veranda strut and swayed, stark fear marking her face. "Ruby?"

  Rosie vaulted out of the car in a flurry of skirts and ran up the steps two at a time to catch Jean in a hug before the other girl fell. Jean's weight pulled her to the porch, and they sank together with Irene collapsing to her knees behind them. Rosie huddled Jean against her chest, feeling tears run hot and soaking her dress. Jean smelled like Irene's perfume, depths of floral, and her dress crinkled under the pressure of Rosie's arms. Irene put her arms around them both as Rosie whispered, "I'm so sorry, Jean. I'm so sorry. It was Goode, and it wasn't just Ruby. Carol Ann, and some of the Negro girls too. But he's dead now." Rosie surprised herself with the vicious triumph in her voice. "He's dead now. I killed him."

  Jean's head snapped up with such violence that she caught Rosie in the jaw and Irene on the nose. Irene cried out, clapping her hands to her face as Rosie's head bounced back against the porch post and she bit her tongue. Jean made a sound of dismay through her tears, patting ineffectually at Rosie and twisting to look at Irene, whose eyes were bright with tears as she tested her nose. "I'm okay," she reported shrilly. Rosie said, "Me too," on a swollen tongue, and Jean wailed, "I'm so sorry."

  Rosie pulled her into another hug, suddenly laughing through the pain. "They couldn't have done that in the pictures if they'd tried."

  Irene and Jean both giggled equally hysterically before tears and hiccoughs broke the laughter apart again. Jean lifted her head more carefully this time as she said, "You killed him, Rosie? You killed him?"

  Rosie slumped against the porch post. "Do either of you know a girl named Pearl Daly? She lured me to him and he tried to—"

  "He tried to what, Rosie?" Jean's color rose, tears in her eyes adding a glitter to her anger. "He did something, didn't he? I don't know what, but he had to do something to make Ruby fancy him. He wasn't—he wasn't her type, Rosie. You know he wasn't her type at all."

  "But he was so darn handsome," Irene protested. "How could such a nice-looking man
do—do anything awful?" She glanced toward the Jaguar and Hank as if she hadn't really noticed them before, then turned a worried frown on Rosie.

  "He's with the police," Rosie said. "He's got to drive me to Mom and Pop's so I can tell them about Goode before the newspapers do. Jean, he tried to—to glamour me. I thought he was handsome too, Irene, just for a minute. But then I could see through it, and he wasn't any sheik, he was just a boy."

  "See through it? You can't see through good looks, Rosie."

  "You can if it's magic." Rosie hardly even heard herself say it. Hardly even wanted to hear herself, because she knew Jean and Irene would look at her the way they did, like she was a little bit crazy after killing someone. That hadn't even really sunk in yet, she could tell, and if they didn't really believe she'd killed Goode, she couldn't see how they were going to believe he'd been a vampire. A demon. Storybook monsters didn't just turn up working the night shift in a Detroit airplane factory.

  "How did he die?"

  The way Jean asked made it sound like Rosie hadn't been responsible for what she'd done, and somehow that got her back up. She straightened, took a breath to steady her voice, and said, "I shot him in the chest with a riveting gun."

  Both girls recoiled, imagining the impact of a rivet on a man's body, but Jean leaned right back in with an angry grin stuck in her teeth. "Do you think it hurt?"

  Rosie started to say she thought it had been too fast to hurt, that she thought he'd only been surprised, then thought of all the dead girls, and of how their bones had been made into bread. Goode had eaten them first, too, cut or bitten them to drink their blood, and bespelled or not, she bet anything that had hurt them. Ruby and the others hadn't died fast, with only enough time to be surprised. They'd felt it, and Jean didn't want to hear that Goode hadn't suffered. Rosie said, "Yes," quietly, and saw a flush of pleasure on Jean's cheeks before she began to cry again with wracking sobs.