Demon's Play

by David McBride

  “Crap.” What a lousy night.

  2

  “So, you want to tell me what happened?” Lou James, Captain of the Supernatural Tactics Squad, stood next to me looking down at the corpse that had been Paulo. I had called him and told him to meet me in the alley after I had sent Terri home to collect anything that might help her track the energy from the bracelet. Even without the bracelet itself she might have been able to give us a lead into what type of magic was used. That could narrow the search considerably.

  Lou’s response time had been unusually quick, and he showed up in person instead of sending a unit out. Must have been a slow night for the STS.

  “Terri and I were just taking a walk,” I explained, “when we stumbled on to him standing out here talking to himself. I tried to talk him down…well, actually Terri did most of the talking but it didn’t take.” I waved a hand at the corpse.

  “So he shot himself?” Lou looked at me, head tilted. “You brought me out here for a suicide?”

  “No, not just for the suicide. He was under some heavy-duty black magic influence. Thought I should give you the heads-up. A black magic using gang is bad for everybody.” Tearing my gaze from Paulo’s body, I met Lou’s suspicious look with my own. “Why did you come out here anyway? I didn’t request the newly minted Captain to come out here personally. Anyone could have taken my report.” Lou had just recently been promoted. He had been put on the fast track ever since he helped me break up a ring for the newest drug to hit the streets: dreamscape. It was tailor made with vampires in mind and made from the essence of creatures called Darklings. They were nasty creatures from another realm that seemed to feed on magic. Not much was known about them except that a black-hat summoner had brought them over and figured out how to harness their life forces and distill it into a liquid drug. For vampires it had acted like a steroid mixed with LSD, and they couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Anyone else taking it had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. We had put a stop to the man who created it, but the genie was out of the bottle now. If you looked for it hard enough you could find it, and as hard as the Inquisition worked to stop it we couldn’t unmake it.

  Lou sighed. “I came out here because I had to know if this was related to some other things I’ve heard about.” He paused, seeming to wonder if he should elaborate. I waited for him to continue. “There’s been an upsurge in gang activity in the human areas of Oakland over the last couple of weeks. We hadn’t been informed officially because it was all human-on-human violence, no suspicion of paranormal involvement. I just found out what was happening yesterday. It seems that there’s a new gang in town that’s chewing up the turf of the established gangs.” He pointed down at Paulo’s pullover. “Red is their color. But until now Oakland PD was wondering if it was all just rumor, some excuse to start a new turf war. They haven’t found any bodies wearing red bandanas, and witnesses couldn’t remember seeing any bangers sporting that particular color. The PD has been chalking it up to a type of psychological warfare by one of the established gangs. You know, start rumors of a new gang whose members are invincible and invisible, terrorize your enemies into backing off.”

  “Nice theory,” I said.

  “Yeah, too bad it ain’t true.”

  We stood side by side staring at the corpse for a moment longer and then, as if a silent signal had been given, we both turned away from it and headed back to his car. Lou rested on the hood and I stood in front of him, noticing for the first time how tired he looked. The streetlights gave his eyes a sunken and sad look. He ran a hand through his thinning black hair and blew out a long sigh. Behind us emergency responders loaded the body onto a stretcher and lifted it onto the back of an ambulance. Crime scene investigators swarmed in behind them collecting the gun and other detritus. They worked for the STS, so anything that might show a leftover trace of magic was collected for analysis. It seemed like a waste of time to me, but who was I to complain? They seemed to know what they were doing.

  “Lou,” I said hesitantly, “don’t take this the wrong way, but—.”

  “I look like shit?” He chuckled humorlessly as he said it. “Yeah, I know. I honestly didn’t realize how much crap the Captain had to go through every day. It never stops. And it’s not like the population of the Second City and the merge is that large, but there’s still so much. It’s like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag,” he philosophized. “No wonder that old buzzard Manetti put in for early retirement.” He shook his head. “This week I’ve gotten four calls from a woman whose cat ran away. She’s convinced that a witch took it in order to use it as her familiar.” I laughed and he glowered at me. “It’s not funny.”

  “No, of course not.” I covered my mouth and tried to stop myself.

  “I tried to tell her that we checked for enchantments in her apartment building and came up empty, but she won’t believe it.”

  “Did you really check the building?” The smile came back to my face even as I tried to keep it at bay.

  “Of course not. We don’t have the resources to check on every crazy theory out there. And even if we did I wouldn’t waste our time with half the calls we get.”

  “Was the cat black by any chance?”

  “I hate you,” Lou grumbled, and then smiled. We both started laughing. Lou had to grab on to the hood to steady himself. I could practically see the tension sliding out of him. It was good to see. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and looked up at me. “You know, when I was just an inspector and your liaison with the human authorities I dealt with some awful stuff. But in some ways this is worse. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind not being in the line of fire constantly, but there is still so much bad blood between humans and paras that I wonder if they’ll ever stop blaming the boogeyman for all their problems.”

  The vampire war had ended over thirty years ago but its effects were indelible. The bulk of humanity had to find out about the existence of an entire world beyond theirs when it finally rose up and attacked them. And not only was it the vampires and werewolves that shared the world with humanity, but other numerous races and powers that they had never dared imagine were actually real. Eventually they would all be lumped under the label of para, short for paranormal, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept for those that were alive before the war. Those that remembered being at the top of the food chain had a hard time letting it go.

  “Far be it for me to derail your depressing train of thought,” I said, “but did your people get a full I.D. from Paulo?”

  His face went blank as he put his professional expression back on. “Yeah, why?”

  “Did you get his address yet?”

  He pulled out a notebook from his breast pocket and flipped through the pages, finally stopping at one near the end. “Yeah, it’s not far from here actually, just past where the merge ends.”

  “Want to go for a drive?”

  “Why? You think there’s something there that can’t wait until my guys go there?”

  “Maybe,” I said, and shrugged. The image of Cassie’s body convulsing on a bed as Paulo shot her ran through my mind briefly, and was gone just as quickly. “I don’t have my car with me, otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re holding out on me?” He studied my face closely.

  I kept my expression neutral, offered an innocent smile. “Why would I do that?”

  He stared at me for a moment longer, saying nothing, then got off the hood and got in the car. I got in and strapped on my seat belt. Lou looked at me and said, “You’ve never held things back from me before, why would you start now?”

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  The answer seemed to stump him, so he gave up and started the car.

  * * *

  We arrived outside Paulo’s apartment complex twenty minutes later. It would normally have been a ten minute drive, but Lou had insisted on getting a cup of coffee before we went there. After working with Lou for a couple of years, I knew that
without his proper intake of caffeine he could be a bear. Besides, Lou had insisted, the guy’s dead, so what possible difference could it make if we took an extra ten minutes getting there? I had to admit it sounded reasonable.

  Lou parked crookedly in the parking lot taking up the better portion of two spaces. We got out, Lou with his coffee in hand, and went to the glass door of building number twenty-four.

  Lakeview apartments were an ironically named complex. Lake Merritt was the lake the tenants were supposed to have a view of, but you couldn’t see it from any of the two-story building’s rooms. If you went on the roof with a stepladder maybe, but other than that it was a decidedly dry view. This whole area had fallen into disrepair as a result of something the media liked to call “merge sprawl.” It was like suburban sprawl, the way the countryside was eaten up by tract housing and shopping centers, but merge sprawl was more like a mass exodus than people spreading out. When the borders of the Second cities were established, a buffer zone was created to separate the First and Second cities. The merge was a place where you could get housing dirt cheap, because not a lot of people would live there willingly. Magic-users, psychics, and financially strapped humans made up the bulk of the merge as vampires, werewolves, and demons from the thirteen tribes were forced to live deep in the Second City. But here on the north side people were setting off for greener pastures, and places like this apartment complex that were just on the human side of the merge were getting left behind to be gobbled up by the expanding para community.

  The façade of the building was painted a dull gray that was flaking away in many places with only a generous helping of graffiti for color. Some of the designs had been done in painstaking detail, and would be considered art if it weren’t decorating the outside of a decrepit slum. All of the pieces except for one had been done on the ground floor. The lone exception was an enormous face that had been done using two blacked-out windows as the eyes. The fact that it had been done twenty or thirty feet off the ground was the first indication that it was some vampire showing off. The second was the face itself: an elongated ghostly pale face with those two windows for the eyes, and a gaping, fang-filled maw. There was no hair on its head, and the ears were slightly pointed at the top giving the picture a more alien appearance. Behind the silvery fangs was a whirlpool of red that seemed to spin endlessly down its imaginary throat. It was both terrifying and beautiful at the same time. It was probably this effort from an aspiring vampiric artist that caused the tenants to get antsy. Staring at that hauntingly real visage I could understand why.

  “Well,” Lou said, “that’s one way to get rid of your neighbors.”

  The look of disgust on his face told me that he was looking at the painting with totally human eyes. To him it would be an abomination, an offense to the senses. Even though he had been dealing with paras for years, he still had trouble grasping anything good about our culture. Although, when you deal with nothing but the scum of a particular group I guess it would be hard to find anything to appreciate about it.

  I didn’t know how long we had been standing there staring at the face, but it seemed to have its own hypnotic power. “It’s fascinating,” I mumbled. “So detailed...”

  “Fascinating isn’t the word I would use for it, but to each his own I guess. Shall we go in?” He motioned to the door.

  I tried to focus on what he was saying, but couldn’t quite tear myself away from those empty glass eyes. Would it be better if someone turned the lights on in those rooms, I wondered? Would that take away the darkness that lurked there, or simply give the being a new life, a blazing stare that knew the secrets of the universe?

  “Frank? You coming?”

  I tore my gaze away and looked at Lou. “Let’s get inside,” I said, shaking myself mentally as I walked past him.

  The inside of the place wasn’t much better than the outside. The ceiling and walls were an off-white color that did little to hide the stains on them. Fluorescent lights were set into the ceiling, and surprisingly only one bulb was burnt out. The carpeting was dark blue and was littered with tiny dark spots where lit cigarettes had spilled hot embers onto the fiber. The stairwell was on the right side of the narrow hallway. We went up and looked for Paulo’s apartment, all the while listening to the crushing silence of this dying building.

  “Does anyone live here anymore?” I whispered.

  “It is two in the morning,” he replied, also whispering. “We don’t tend to keep the same hours as you.”

  “Yeah, but where are the kids coming back from a late night of partying? Or a baby crying? Or anything other than that annoying buzz coming from the fluorescent lights?” We stopped outside the door to Paulo’s and I tried the knob. It was locked.

  Lou pushed past me to the door and fumbled in his pockets for something. He pulled out an auto-pick—one of those lock picks that looked like a small pistol—held it in front of the knob, and pulled the trigger. While he worked the lock he kept talking. “It’s that damn graffiti. The people figure that the vamps are marking their territory. They think that this is official hunting ground now, so they’re making a break for it. Those that can anyway.” He looked back at the knob as the lock clicked. Sliding the pick back in his pocket, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  “That can’t be the only reason,” I said, walking into the empty apartment behind him. “People know that vampires don’t mark their territory anymore. They haven’t done it in hundreds of years, ever since they established their laws. Besides, that painting wasn’t a mark or a signature; it was an expression of something. Imagine if Van Gogh or DaVinci had lived a near immortal life like a vampire. Think of what they could have done in those hundreds of years that they had to perfect their craft.”

  Lou pulled a small flashlight out of his jacket pocket and switched it on. The living room revealed itself to us as the shadows pulled away from the thin beam of light. “You know, Frank, normally I’m glad that you spend all of your time in the Second City making sure everything is running above-board, but sometimes I think you need to spend more time with regular humans.”

  “You’re human,” I said, scanning the room and only partially paying attention to Lou.

  “Heh. I said regular humans. I hardly qualify as regular.” He swung the flashlight in a slow horizontal arc until the light came to rest on the hallway that led to the bedroom. I nodded to Lou and we headed in that direction. Even with the light I managed to snag my foot on a small table near the mouth of the hallway. I swore softly and looked at the table. It was covered with a white frilly cloth and looked like it had displayed something at one point, but there was nothing on it now. Paulo didn’t strike me as a frilly-lace sort of guy. It had to have been Cassie’s. Lou started talking again as we walked. “What I mean is…well, you don’t seem to know humans that well, Frank. I mean you keep calling that grotesque thing out there a painting and a work of art, but when normal people see it all they can think of is what’s waiting in the shadows for them. When they see that symbol painted on the wall of where they live they tend to freak out, and I can’t say I blame them.”

  “So you would move if someone painted something like that on your house?”

  “Hell no, I’d stake the bastard,” he said with a grin. “But I deal with more paras in a week than most people will in their entire lives.” He shook his head as we got to the bedroom door. “You just don’t understand the mindset of people. In most cases when individual people are confronted with something they fear they’ll run away.”

  “Fight or flight,” I said. “I know that, Lou, I’m not stupid.”

  “Well then start acting like it.” Lou turned to me then, flashlight aimed at the floor, anger clear on his face. “Humanity considers them monsters, and you’ve lived with them all of your adult life. You’ve grown accustomed to them, and so some of the fear of them has been removed. Most people only know the stories and the rumors. They don’t know that sometimes the truth is far worse. If they did, I think that
a second war would be inevitable, and this time it would be the humans that drew first blood. Fear’s a powerful motivator, and the biggest picture of the boogey-man I’ve ever seen is on the outside of this building.” Lou turned back to the bedroom door and opened it. He pushed hard so it hit the back wall to make sure no one was standing behind it waiting for us. It must have been habit from his training, because we weren’t expecting any trouble and up until now we had been irresponsibly lax in keeping track of our surroundings.

  As we entered, Lou swung the light from left to right and then back again taking in the emptiness of the room. There were two end tables pushed against the far wall on either side of where the bed should have been. But the bed wasn’t there. Lou went to the closet, pushed back the sliding door, and peered in.

  “There are men’s and women’s clothes in here. So where’s the girl?” Lou asked.

  “That is the question.” I kneeled down where the foot of the bed would have been and ran my fingers across the carpet. There were deep indentations where the bed’s legs had sat. In my head, I replayed the vision of Paulo killing his girlfriend. It was all there in painful detail, whether I wanted it or not. She had bled out on the bed. If there was no body the police might not think there was a murder, but with all that blood it would have been hard to ignore. Someone had taken the bed to get rid of any possible evidence of a homicide. That was pretty thorough.

  I reached out with my senses and opened my Second Sight. There was very little change in the appearance of the room, but the feel of it changed. It didn’t seem to be an empty shack anymore. The feelings that Paulo and Cassie had shared for each other had permeated the very atmosphere of this place and made it something more than what it had been. Most homes had this sort of a feel to them if there was a family living there for a long time. But for a man and woman to make a rented place like this into something that felt like home to both of them, that was something special. I pushed my way through the various levels of emotion and energy and cut into the part I was looking for: the dark energy. That moment when Paulo had killed Cassie, all that fear and betrayal. It was suffocating in its intensity, and still I had to push deeper. The black magic revealed itself to me reluctantly. With it came the smell of death and decay wafting through the room. Only I could smell it, just as only I could see the shape that the magic took. It resolved itself into the shape of the bed that had sat right in front of me. The energy was greenish-black and pulsed and flowed like the energy in Paulo’s bracelet. Cassie’s death had created it and now it was feeding itself on the anguish and pain left in the air of the room. It was being fed well. Soon no one would want to live in this room, as the energy created its own self-sustaining atmosphere of misery.