The Brimstone Deception

by Lisa Shearin

  “From the ‘sigh of eternal suffering’ you just let out, I take it there’s not a one eight hundred number for anchor mages.”

  “No, there’s not.”

  “Difficult to get?”

  “Impossible to get,” Yasha chimed in. “There are none in this country—at least not anymore. Only in Europe and Asia.”

  “So Ms. Sagadraco can’t just send over a company jet and pick one up?”

  The Russian snorted. “All are worthless cowards.”

  “Some aren’t worthless, buddy,” Ian said. “And there’s a few left who aren’t cowards.”

  Yasha took a particularly sharp turn, and I clutched the cupcake box to keep it from flying into the window. “Uh, a few left? Is there some kind of high job burnout rate for anchors?”

  “More like a high rate of getting sucked into dimensions they’re helping to close along with the portal mage and not being able to get back.”

  “I can see why that’d make someone want to switch careers,” I said. “So what about the ones who are left?”

  “They have established partnerships with portal mages, and only work with them.”

  “So we fly a team over here. Kitty doesn’t have to take the risk. A win-win.”

  “More like a lose-lose,” Ian said. “They only do smaller portals.”

  “Then what good are they?”

  “Not much. Plus, if the portal’s on American soil, they believe it’s an American problem, and that more than likely, we’d brought it on ourselves and can deal with it the same way.”

  “Bullshit. When those demons start pouring through, they may get us first, but I don’t think they’re gonna let a little thing like an ocean or two stop them. Not to mention, Europe and Asia have some amazing beaches.”

  “These people would say they’d deal with that problem when it came to them.”

  “And bit their faces off. I’m with Yasha. They’re worthless cowards.”

  From the driver’s seat, the Russian werewolf vigorously nodded in approval.

  “Even if there was a team who would be willing to help,” Ian continued, “Kitty’s the last of her family line. She’s the best, and some would say good enough to do it by herself, no anchor needed.”

  “What about anchor mages she’s worked with in the past?”

  That question earned me some uncomfortable silence.

  “Okay . . . let me rephrase that: Are there any surviving anchor mages who she’s worked with in the past?”

  “No.”

  I let out a low whistle. “Was she in some way responsible for that?”

  “From what I’ve heard, no. Just piss-poor luck on the part of her anchors, and the fact that they were working on big and nasty portals no one else would touch. Higher risk, higher mortality. Other portal mages and anchors call her the Black Widow.”

  “How did she survive when they didn’t?”

  “Kitty is brave,” Yasha said. “They are cowards.”

  “I have to agree with you there,” Ian told him.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked Yasha. “I thought only the boss, Moreau, and Ian knew.”

  “Kitty is friend. She talks to me.”

  I could understand that. Yasha was big, but once you got to know him, you realized his heart was as big as the rest of him. Our big werewolf was also a big teddy bear. I’d also told Yasha things I hadn’t told anyone else at SPI. Now I knew I wasn’t the only one. I was glad Kitty had realized she could trust him. Everyone needed someone they could tell anything to and not worry about being judged for it.

  “So what happened?” I asked them both.

  “The last major portal Kitty closed was eight years ago,” Ian said. “The portal was to a previously unknown dimension that really wasn’t that much better than Hell. A monster, for lack of a more descriptive word, started coming through. Kitty held on and kept working. Her anchor mage panicked and released the protective spell on both of them. The spell Kitty was using to close the portal gave her some protection; her anchor was defenseless—”

  “Because he was coward and dropped shields on him and Kitty,” Yasha said vehemently. “Deserved to be eaten by blue monster.” He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “My opinion.”

  “If Kitty hadn’t been strong enough to shield herself and continue working, she’d have been eaten, too,” Ian added. “She doesn’t trust anyone to have her back now.”

  I snorted. “With good reason. I take it this wasn’t the first time it’d happened?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Then I can’t blame her for telling people to close their own damn doors.”

  “If this were a normal portal, Kitty could probably do it alone,” Ian said. “But it’s a Hellpit. There’s no precedent on what could go wrong.”

  Just everything.

  21

  WE were halfway back to headquarters when everything caught up with me and I was suddenly bone tired. As a result, I made a decision.

  I’d spent last night in SPI’s infirmary. Tonight I was going to sleep in my own bed.

  I informed Ian of my decision.

  “Sure, no problem,” Ian said from the front seat.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, you want to sleep in your own bed tonight. I completely understand.”

  “Uh . . . good. I appreciate—”

  “Just as long as you understand that I’ll be staying with you.”

  “Me, too,” Yasha chimed in.

  Me getting snuggly in my own bed had just turned into a pajama party, with two coworkers who didn’t have pajamas.

  “Nice try,” I told them both. “Threaten to stay and get me to change my mind. It won’t work. I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to,” my partner told me.

  “Because I don’t mind you guys staying.”

  “You have popcorn?” Yasha asked. “And other snacks? And movies? I like musicals. I will keep sound low; I have good hearing.”

  Why me?

  On second thought, maybe I’d just grab some clean clothes and go back to headquarters.

  When we got to my building, Yasha turned his anger at Kitty’s cowardly former partners into a hunt for a parking spot, while I hurried up the stairs to pack a bag with Ian doing his bodyguard thing.

  I lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in the East Village. The building was from the fifties, and a lot of the tenants were, too. The rest of us were young professional types. Thanks to rent control, the only way the seniors in the building were leaving was carried out on their flecked Formica kitchen tables.

  My apartment was at the end of the hall, with two windows that gave me an occasionally entertaining view of Bainwick’s Art Academy across the alley.

  Ian looked out the window. “I haven’t noticed that before.”

  “Art school.”

  His face was profiled toward me. He was grinning. “There’s a platform in the middle of the room. They use any nude models?”

  “Guys when it’s warmer, girls when it’s not.” I met his grin and raised him a smirk. “Must be that whole shrinkage issue. With the cold snap, the only thing in the raw right now are bowls of fruit. The heat over there works as well as it does over here, which is when it wants to.”

  “Need me to help you pack?”

  “I got it.”

  In my bedroom I kept the usual arsenal that helped single women sleep at night, but I’d added a few of my own.

  In homage to my Southern mountain-girl roots, I kept a seriously huge flashlight next to my bed. It had a trigger for a switch, a camo finish, and could blind a buck at fifty yards. While my intruder was having his retinas flash fried, I’d let him have it with a stream of Raid. Accurate for up to ten yards. Blind ’em with light and chemicals, then run like hell.

  Incapacitate while maintaining distance. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

  The best defense was avoiding contact in the first place.

  Since I
’d joined SPI, I’d gotten plenty of training in defending myself. When it came to hand-to-hand combat, I knew I had to have been the most challenging trainee Ian had ever been saddled with. After the first few months, Ian had told me that my brain was probably going to end up being my best weapon, and that weapon told me not to go around writing checks I couldn’t cash.

  I was smart enough to know and accept that I could be trained by the best and still never qualify as a badass. My goal was simply to make it to work each day and home every night. Ian was the badass-ninja-monster-fighter, not me. I did the best I could during our training sessions, and never stopped trying to improve, but I also accepted that the mayor or police commissioner would never shine the Bat-Signal in the sky to get my attention.

  I was good with that.

  I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I figured my duffel bag would be the right size for what I needed. My closet was the size of a phone booth, so I kept my luggage—along with anything else that would fit—under my bed. I got down on my hands and knees, stuck my arm underneath the bed, and started sifting and searching for something shaped like luggage.

  I found something squishy instead.

  I yelped and yanked my arm back, scrambling to my feet, tripping over my own legs in the process.

  The back of my hand was bleeding from a two-inch gash. Must have raked my hand on the bed frame yanking it . . .

  My eyes were even with the comforter on my bed, and they locked on the clear slime pooling in little indentations in the blanket. And on my pillow, a pool of wet filled the indentation that my head had made the last time I’d slept in it two nights ago.

  Since then, someone had been sleeping in my bed, and it wasn’t Goldilocks.

  A raspy hiss came from under the bed . . .

  . . . and from the half-opened door to my closet.

  A door I always closed.

  I drew my gun and slowly backed toward the bedroom door, my eyes quickly flicking between bed and closet. I bumped into my dresser.

  “Ian.” It came out one notch above a whisper. I swallowed on a bone-dry throat and tried again.

  “Ian.”

  A thing came out from beneath the pillow, squirming through the slime to free itself, dropping from the bed to land with a wet plop on the floor.

  It was maybe eight inches tall, with red skin hanging loose on a thin frame, its bald head topped with two tiny horns. A forked tongue came out from between thin rubbery lips as it opened its mouth, showing me a double row of jagged teeth. Its feet were hooves the size of a cat’s paw, its hands thin, spidery fingers, curling and uncurling to reveal claws curved to razor points.

  It looked like . . .

  It couldn’t be.

  A baby demon.

  Class Five, Class Seven, classless, who the hell cared? It was in my bedroom.

  And there wasn’t a portal to be seen or smelled. If they hadn’t come through a portal, then how the hell had they gotten in here?

  I opened my mouth, to shout, to scream, but nothing came out, not even a whimper.

  The demon’s yellow eyes focused on me and it hissed, its whip-like tail lashing the air behind it.

  I found my voice and the volume dial.

  “Ian!”

  I fired at those teeth. The demon was gone before the bullet got there. My pillow exploded in a blast of memory foam, and wood splinters flew from my demolished headboard.

  Simultaneous attacks came from under the bed and out of the dark closet. Every kid’s nightmare was now mine.

  A clawed hand shot out from beneath my dresser, clutching my ankle.

  I stomped on the hand, and fired at the demon skittering across the floor at me. It squealed as a spray of pink erupted from its side, but kept coming, its eyes brightly glowing.

  Four demons. Two more dropped out of the heating vent and scuttled on spindly legs off my bed and across the floor.

  Six.

  Squealing, hissing, eyes gleaming with a yellow light. They were fast. Too fast for bullets—at least my bullets.

  Bullets weren’t working. Leaning against my dresser, behind my door, was my Louisville Slugger. I landed a solid midair hit on a demon that launched itself off my bed, and heard a gratifying crack of the wooden baseball bat on spindly bones for my effort. I didn’t have time to confirm that I’d killed it or even knocked the wind out of the thing, as the remaining demons came at me.

  I’d never been more grateful to have a small bedroom. The demons leapt at me, and I dove for my bedside table, hitting the floor hard, but rolling onto my back with my can of Raid. The demon that reached me first took a direct hit in the eyes. Its shrieks were deafening. Any higher pitched and only dogs would have been able to hear it.

  A demon scrabbled out from beneath the bed and sank its jagged teeth into my shoulder. I screamed and beat it in the face with the can, frantic to get it off me. The can and my hand that death-gripped it were slick with blood, mine and demon.

  A flick of movement was all the warning I got of a demon jumping off my bed directly above me.

  It exploded in a bullet-induced spray of red, the bits raining down on me.

  Ian.

  The other demons kept coming at me, completely ignoring Ian and his gun as if he didn’t exist.

  Ian had his gun in one hand, but was laying into the squealing swarm with a freaking machete. Where’d he been hiding that?

  In a few seconds, my carpet went from beige to beyond able to be cleaned, as Ian and I hacked and bludgeoned our way through the remaining demons. When there were no more of the little monsters left to come at me, I just stood there, gasping for what air I could find, bat still held ready in a double-fisted, white-knuckled grip. Ian stalked around the room, checking for any survivors, and fortunately finding none. In the other room, Yasha all but took my apartment door off its hinges to get in.

  Ian flicked his blade to clear it of gore. “Maybe they knew I’d taste bad.”

  I sucked in enough air to make words. “Yeah.” Gasp, wheeze. “Right.”

  The Russian charged into my bedroom, sawed-off shotgun clutched like a toy in his big hands, eyes shining with an amber glow. The only sound was my ragged breathing. On my carpet was the sliced, smushed, shot, and sprayed proof that someone—alive, undead, or demonic—didn’t want me finding the portal to that Hellpit.

  * * *

  Demon eggs.

  That’s what Yasha found under my bed. Six leathery and slimy eggshells. And they hadn’t been left there by the Easter Bunny.

  Someone had left me an early Christmas present. Now all I needed to do was find out who my Secret Santa was.

  That, and have a screaming fit.

  The three of us were at my kitchen table.

  “If that squid demon hadn’t gotten hold of me last night, I’d have come home to sleep,” I told Ian and Yasha. “So much for whether the murderer and his demon lord cohort know I can see portals.” I gasped. “Oh, shit. What about Kitty?”

  Ian held up his phone. “Taken care of. I called this in and dispatched a team to Kitty’s apartment. She’s safe.”

  My shoulders sagged. “We didn’t try to hide that we were going to see her, and I don’t think anyone would believe that we just had the late-night munchies.”

  “Which is why we have people staying with her.” He frowned. “She refused protective custody at headquarters. She insists on opening the bakery tomorrow, so our folks will stick close.”

  “Why isn’t that reassuring?”

  Ian glanced back toward my bedroom. He didn’t look full of confidence for Kitty’s continued safety, either. He looked down at his phone’s screen and scrolled down to a number then hesitated, his index finger poised over the screen.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I really hate it when a situation’s so completely in the can that I have to call the boss on her direct line.” He sighed, tapped the screen, and put the phone to his ear. “Ma’am, it’s Agent Byrne. We have a Code Five. I wanted you to hear
it from me.” He listened, and glanced at me. “Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly where I’m calling from.”

  I groaned and rolled my eyes.

  He listened some more. “Some cuts that’ll probably need stitches, but other than that, she’s fine. We just need containment, cleanup, and minor medical.” He listened. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll hold.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “They’re checking to see if we’re about to have company from the police.”

  I dropped my head into my non-bloody hand. I hadn’t even thought of that. Though if the cops were on the way, they were taking their sweet time.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Ian put his phone back in his coat.

  “So . . .?” I asked. “Yes? No? Maybe?”

  “None of your neighbors called nine one one,” Ian said.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope.”

  Lately, SPI’s biggest crime scene challenge was getting there before the cops. This time, no one had even called them. There’d been gunfire, screaming, and pounding coming from my apartment, and not one call went through to 911.

  Considering the hour, half my neighbors were out drinking with friends, and the other half must have had their TVs turned up, or were in bed with their hearing aids turned off. All of the above kept the NYPD from being called. Luckier still, Mrs. Rosini, who shared a wall with me, was watching Fox News right now. We could hear it through the walls. There was no need to check on her; she was perfectly fine. Mrs. Rosini was one of those people who liked to argue with the TV. Fox News provided a constant stream of something to piss her off. But she made awesome cookies, though usually while talking back to the TV. We could hear her now, giving Bill O’Reilly hell. She’d never noticed when hell had broken loose over here.

  I slowly shook my head. “Gunshots, screaming, and no one called the cops.”

  “Is good,” Yasha said.

  “This time. What if I’d been on the receiving end of those bullets? Or had my face eaten off by . . . ?” I waved my hand in the general direction of my bedroom. I wasn’t going to say what they were out loud. I’d already visualized at least half a dozen alternate outcomes where I hadn’t come out the winner.