by C. E. Murphy
"It's as good a place as any. Better than some, I guess. Not much traffic. The earth's not going to be soft, but I have a shovel in the trunk."
"What are you going to do to me?" Doherty's voice shot high.
Rosie sighed as they pulled down the power line road and bumped along.
"I guess that depends on how cooperative you are. Hank makes deals sometimes, but I've had a really bad week and you're the son of a bitch who fired me." Rosie frowned at Hank in the rear-view mirror. "Wouldn't a demon of any rank, one who could do anything useful, have tried it by now? I mean, Goode tried to eat me and that ochim thing just about took me apar—"
"You got Hannah? No, of course you did, of course, I haven't seen her since the Sunday shift, since I fired—what did you do to her?"
"I Redeemed her," Rosie said bluntly. "She's dead. What are you?" Hank killed the engine as she asked, and the question echoed loudly in the silence.
"I'm nothing, I'm nobody, just a cog in the wheel. I was an artist once." Doherty's voice thinned, like he'd lost something. Like it wasn't him talking anymore, although Rosie guessed it never had been Doherty, not while she'd known him. "I was never good enough, even though I tried so hard," he whined. "It ate at me, like a black spot on my soul, until it finally got out and took everything that was left of me. I barely made it into my wife's body, and she tried to kill herself. Weak vessels, all I've ever been able to find are weak vessels, with no talent, no passion, no fire. So I looked for protection. That's all I do. What I'm told. I keep the wheels greased, that's all. Maybe sometime I'll please my protector well enough to be granted a chance at a stronger vessel, someone with ability. That hope has kept me going for seventy years."
Revulsion mixed with sympathy in Rosie's breast as Doherty spoke, but his last words wiped away any compassion she might have had for him. "You've been moving through people for seventy years? Taking over their lives? Killing them slowly? And that doesn't bother you?"
Doherty turned a flat expression on her. "Why should it? They're only human. I'm the embodiment of art."
"You're an embodiment of madness. You're not what people aspire to. You're what they struggle against. Jeez, you should have gone to art school or something, mister, and tried learning something instead of just whining about being a failure."
Doherty's eyes popped and Rosie rolled hers with exasperation. "I guess you're not real bright, are you? He obviously doesn't know anything, Hank. I'm going to just Redeem him. At least we'll have one less demon to worry about."
"No no no no no! I can tell you things! I can tell you what you want to know!" Doherty's gaze went shifty. "I can tell you about the hive."
Rosie glanced at Hank, whose head dropped in one small, sharp nod. Rosie shrugged and jerked her chin at Doherty. "Get out of the car and tell me about the hive."
"Don't let her touch me," Doherty begged Hank, but the blond man shrugged.
"She's the Redeemer, mate. I do what she says. Get out." He prodded Doherty, who all but fell from the car, already babbling.
"Goode was a punk, all right? He was trouble, and the hive doesn't tolerate that kind of nonsense, not usually, but the Enforcer, he wasn't in town, and it doesn't matter how much trouble somebody is, you want to stay in the hive, you toe the line, you don't go after each other, at least not in this town. You don't break ranks." His gaze flitted to Hank as Rosie got out of the car and Hank came around its front end. "You understand about not breaking ranks, right, kid? You were a soldier. You know how it is." His attention returned to Rosie. "Truth is, you did us all a favor, killing that kid, and I'm real sorry I had to fire you, but orders came from on hi— I mean, what could I do, the whole situation made the factory look bad, I couldn't just let it slide."
"Orders came from where," Rosie asked softly. Goode had been dangerous. The ochim—Hannah—had been maybe even more dangerous than that, if less of a wild card. Helen Montgomery had come at Rosie full-force, full of killing rage, but Doherty just seemed pathetic. To think she'd been afraid of him just a handful of days earlier, only to see his true blubbering colors now.
"It came down from the boss, I swear it did. I don't know if they cared, not really, but somebody did. I don't know who runs this city, Miss Ransom. I just do my job and keep my head down, like everybody else."
"He's lying." Hank finally spoke again, his voice soft. Rosie lifted her eyebrows and he gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Look at him. Sweating, making fists, trying to distract us. He's lying." He met Rosie's eyes and dropped his chin in another almost-invisible nod, and realization caught her.
He couldn't admit to his power, not in front of a demon, especially one they hadn't decided what to do with yet. If they cut a deal, Hank was as good as dead the minute word got out he could read emotions, and Rosie didn't believe for a minute that Doherty wouldn't sell Hank out if he got the chance. She stepped away from the supe, dropping her voice, but not quite enough, to speak to Hank. "Look, I think you're wrong. I think I should just Redeem him—"
Doherty's theatrical howl of fear almost derailed her, but Hank picked up the thread, shaking his head as he spoke. "We could Artifice him. He might turn out useful later, and we could always bring him back out."
"Do that," Doherty whimpered. "Do that, that's a good idea. Just don't Redeem me, I don't want to die—"
"No, if he doesn't know anything useful now, he's not going to learn anything trapped inside a drawing. I'm just going to—" Rosie lifted a hand toward Doherty, having no real idea of how to awaken the Redeeming magic when fear didn't have her in its grasp. She certainly didn't want to repeat the terrible scene with Pearl, but as she lifted her hand, Doherty gave an awful wailing scream and fell to his knees.
"The hive is holed up on the abandoned Pennicott factory." Hank went white, but Doherty kept babbling. "They've been there for years, keeping quiet, but there's more and more of us now, refugees from Europe, and pretty soon Detroit's going to be a demon town! We're going to take it over, the whole city, and once we're established here, the whole lake system will be ours! We're—"
Rosie whispered, "Oh my gosh, shut up," and spun around to knee Doherty in the head as hard as she could. His eyes crossed and he hit the ground almost before he stopped talking. Rosie stood above him, breathing hard, then looked up at Hank's stricken expression. It changed briefly as he focused on Doherty. When he met Rosie's eyes, he looked almost impressed. "I didn't teach you that."
"No, but you said hit hard parts with other hard parts and I figured my knee was tougher than my fist. What did he say, Hank? What scared you?"
"The Pennicott property." Hank swallowed. "My dad owns that."
TWENTY-THREE
They left Doherty in his own car at the factory, even though neither of them felt sure keeping him alive was smart. Rosie kept muttering, "He helped. I said I wouldn't kill him if he helped," like she might convince herself if she said it often enough, and Hank just shook his head every time she said it.
"I couldn't feel him," he finally said. "In the diner, in the car? I couldn't tell he was a demon, not until you said so. Then it hit me, the blankness in him. The emptiness. I couldn't even read him like he was human. I believed everything he projected, the offense, the anger, the fear."
"I think that was all real. They might eat the soul when they take over the body, but they bring their own corrupted soul in, don't they? There must be some emotion left in it." Rosie pressed her knuckles against her mouth, watching the street speed by. "Hank …"
"No." He snapped the word. "Not right now. I can't. I have to see—I have to see."
"Okay. All right. Just—" She took a breath, stopping herself, and shook her head. "Okay."
Hank nodded, not exactly thanking her, but she understood that he meant it. The humidity had burned off since lunch, leaving the air hazy with dust but no longer so thick to breathe. Rosie's lungs filled more easily, but it made her feel like she was preparing for a fight, and she didn't even know who with. Maybe Hank, maybe Harrison Vaughn, may
be a hive full of demons. "Should we stop at the library for weapons?"
A laugh escaped at the question's absurdity, and to her surprise, Hank cast a brief smile her way. He put on an old librarian's voice, querulous and rickety: "Yes, yes, Miss Ransom, you'll find the swords in the S section, after Steinbeck, and the battle-axes have been moved to A, after no one was able to find them under B. Now go along, child, I can't be bothered with your queries every other minute of my day."
"Mrs DeForest has never once said anything like that to me." Rosie smiled.
"Only because they don't actually keep weaponry in the public library," Hank assured her, then shook his head. "No, I don't think so. I'm not going to pick a fight right now. I just need to see …"
Rosie nodded. "If they're there." She took a breath, looking for something to say that wouldn't seem patronizing or like she was trying to give Hank something else to think about. "How big is the property?"
"About a block. It used to be Pennicott Manufacturing. They made stoves, but there was a fire about a decade ago."
"Oh! Oh, yeah. I remember that. Some of my friends' fathers worked there. I remember them being worried that it might not be rebuilt."
"Yeah. It was, obviously, but instead of rebuilding there, Dad—" Hank cleared his throat. "Dad moved the whole site down to the river. Easier to ship from there, and the waste could be dumped right in, instead of piping it somewhere. And he had big ambitions for expansion. There was money in kitchen appliances, but he wanted to start his own automotive line. There was room on the riverfront, land to be bought up for cheap. Cheaper than up here, and there weren't any families to move around. Dad doesn't like the kind of press that generates, even in the name of progress."
"I remember a couple of my friends' dads got jobs at other factories while they were rebuilding. But the equipment's probably all destroyed now."
"What didn't get wrecked in the fire was taken to the new factory, yeah." Hank glanced at her. "Why?"
"I used a riveting gun to shoot a demon a few nights ago," Rosie said. "I guess I was trying to imagine what might be there that I could use for a weapon."
"We're not getting out," Hank said firmly. "Doherty's probably going to call somebody, warn them that we might be coming to look. I don't want to risk getting caught."
"Doherty's not going to do anything," Rosie said with conviction. "He'd have to admit a Redeemer and a library man caught him if he did that, and they'll know he ratted them out. He wouldn't last a minute. So maybe we're not getting out this time, but we're going to have to sooner or later, aren't we? If there's a—a hive there …" She shuddered. "That word makes me squirm. It makes me think of bees and bugs crawling all over everything. It's worse than a nest, somehow."
"Nests have birds. Baby birds with open mouths, wanting to be fed. That sounds harmless. Swarms of bees don't. And demons aren't."
"Doherty didn't seem like much, for a demon. I kept expecting him to do something. Scream, or move fast, or …" Rosie sighed. "Or run his hands through fire without getting burned. I don't know."
"They're not all powerful, not any more than all humans are powerful. But when a lot of unkillable bees swarm …"
Rosie shivered. "Yeah. Do you think they could do it? Take over Detroit?"
"As far as I know, it's been almost two thousand years since demons actually took over a human city, since Rome. Most of them can't cooperate well enough. But if there's a daemon rex here … I don't know. Maybe."
"What happened in Rome?"
Hank's voice took on a strange note. "It burned, Rosie. Rome burned."
"Well what the heck good does that do, if they can't die?"
"Nero fiddled," Hank said. "Rome burned, and Nero fiddled, and the demons came to him. He caught them in the fiddle, in the fiddle itself. It was one of the greatest acts of magic humanity ever performed, and what do we remember? A tyrant who laughed while his city burned."
Rosie whispered, "Hank," in astonishment, and he performed a hard little smile. "Where's the fiddle now? It can't have been destroyed, can it? Or all the demons in it would be let loose."
"Safe, I think. I imagine. Ex Libris spirited it out of Europe at the start of the Great War, but only a handful of people have access to the records for locations of items like that. They can't move the Sistine Chapel or the Taj Mahal, but the smaller things they can and do, so no one can find them. It wasn't a fiddle," he added suddenly. "They hadn't been invented yet. It was a lyre."
"I don't even know what that is."
"It's little and pot-bellied. Like a cross between a fiddle and a squash."
Rosie laughed. "Delicious for dinner and an after-dinner concert. That's it up there, isn't it?" she said as Hank pulled over to a parking space on the sidewalk. "It doesn't look like anybody lives there."
"It wouldn't, if demons are hiding out there." Hank went silent. "I used to play around the building there. They'd let me help drive the lift trucks and guide the cranes. I haven't really been down to look at the site since it burned. I've driven past, but … " He shook his head, and Rosie found herself nodding in sympathy.
Tall fences, half beaten down with weather and time, surrounded the old factory site. What paint there had been had long since faded, visible only as peeling strips now, if at all. Wire and wood tangled together unpleasantly, and that was only the exterior, what was easily visible from the street. Hank got out of the car after all and, rather gentlemanly, came around to open Rosie's door after a few other vehicles had passed on the road. She smiled at him as they got out, and he took her hand as they ran across the road, Rosie keeping to his pace. "We can't be arrested for trespassing," he said, pushing aside a loose board. "Dad still owns the place. Come on."
Surprisingly tall grass grew around the fence, thick with a years-long lack of attention, and dry from the summer's heat. Rosie waded through a step or two ahead of Hank, testing the ground before she committed herself and beating down some of the worst snarls. Hank mumbled a thanks that acknowledged she'd eased the way for him, and she waved it off with a wiggle of her fingers.
Beyond the grass lay tarmac, melted and pungent under the sun. Rosie wrinkled her nose, testing that, too, with a toe, and Hank, at her side, smiled faintly. "You won't stick. Not too much, anyway. I used to play a game where I'd stand as still as I could for as long as I could, waiting to see if it would suck me down like a saber-toothed tiger. Like in the tar pits."
"I guess it never did."
"No, but I ruined a couple pair of shoes before Mother put a stop to that. Do you feel anything yet?"
"No. Do you?"
Hank shook his head. "Let's get closer."
"Okay, but I just want to be the one who says this isn't very much like staying away." The tarmac didn't quite pull Rosie's shoes off, but she felt it wanting to, and looked around to see if she could find any signs of where Hank, as a child, had wrecked his own shoes. Even if the marks had lasted this long, she doubted he would have been this far from the main building. Someone would have been paying attention to where the boss's son was.
"We couldn't exactly come in the front driveway," Hank pointed out. "If somebody's here, they'd notice that. Otherwise, believe me, I'd have been happy to drive up in the car. I don't run all that fast, and I hate the idea that something that could chase us might be in there. In Europe, I would have been able to tell from this far away."
"Well, I guess I can't tell from more than about fifteen feet, so let's hope we don't have to get that close to find out if there are monsters here." The factory itself still retained the general structure it had once held, but the external walls were scarred with smoke and fire marks that hadn't faded even after almost a decade. Once-solid concrete bricks crumbled both inward and outward, making a maze of hills and hiding places. Rosie scrambled up a pile of broken wall, trying to keep low, and looked beyond it into the building's wrecked interior.
In full daylight it seemed easy enough to navigate, but a thin layer of cloud cover would render it murky a
nd nerve-wracking. Steel and concrete leaned and lay and lumped together everywhere, the remnants of old assembly lines now rusting heaps that smelled strongly of iron in the heat. Birds scattered at the broken-in ceilings as if offended that anyone chose to come near their roost. Rosie shivered, imagining how many rats and other rodents were likely to be hidden in the shadows.
"It looks all right." She turned back to offer Hank a hand, although he climbed up easily enough on his own, taking weight on his own hands to make up for where his leg might fail him. "Be careful of the glass."
He gave her a dirty look and she turned away, grinning at both of them. A few seconds later, he joined her in looking over the steeper inner wall, and pursed his lips. "I can lower you down… ."
"And jump down yourself? It makes more sense for me to lower you."
"I must outweigh you by—" Hank hesitated, a spark of panic in his eyes. "A lot," he said, rather than guess at her weight.
Rosie flexed a bicep just like Charles Atlas. "Probably, but I'm pretty tough. Come on, there's no point in getting this far and deciding I'm too fragile now." She lay down and shifted herself until she was relatively comfortable hanging over the wall, and waggled her fingers at Hank. "Go on, swing yourself over and then use my hand and arm to keep from falling."
"If I pull you off …"
"Then I'll land on top of you and have a nice soft landing. Come on, the concrete is digging into my ribs."
Hank, shaking his head, sat on the edge, turned over, and worked his way down, finding toeholds where he could. "It's not too bad."
"Good. We'll be able to climb back up again. Take my hand anyways, because if someth—whoof!" Hank took her hand just as old concrete crumbled beneath his foot and he jolted downward. Most of his weight yanked on Rosie's arm. Another grunt of pained effort escaped her as broken concrete dug deeper into her ribs and her shoulder socket stretched, but after a second or two, Hank found another foothold and some of the weight lessened. He looked up at her, whey-faced, and although her ribs hurt, Rosie widened her eyes in an expression meant to convey "See, I told you!" and "That was close!"
