God Hammer: A novel of the Demon Accords

by John Conroe

  Unworthy, Sorrow said.

  She was unworthy of me? I wondered.

  Self-pity is an unworthy emotion for you. Gifted beyond measure, desired by hundreds.

  Can’t even hold my own pity party without crashers. Maybe he was right. I opened up my texts and found a recent one from Mack. He had a funny story about trying to impress one of Jetta’s waitress friends and slipping in a puddle and totally wiping out. I almost chuckled out loud.

  “Funny stuff, D?” Stacia asked suddenly. I hadn’t realized she was paying attention.

  “Just Mack. Funny story about a pretty waitress,” I said.

  “I like stories about pretty waitresses,” Stevens chimed in.

  “You’d like my roommate, Stevens. He’s a ladies man, too,” I said.

  “No, I’ve met Mack. He’s an actual ladies man with actual game,” Stacia said. “You could probably take lessons from him, Stevens.”

  “Oooooooo,” Doug said. “I smell toast.”

  “I’m going to tell him you said that. It’ll boost him back up. He failed hard with the waitress,” I said, laughing as my fingers texted.

  She gave me a little smile, then went back to her own phone. The rest of the ride was quiet.

  Back at Demidova World Headquarters, I got busy with checking the Gmail account we created to receive the results of Cuttle’s infected phone. A single message sat in the inbox. I opened it.

  Fifteen minutes later, I came off the elevator on the Executive floor, heading for Tanya’s door in a rush. The receptionist was a vampire, a redhead, perfectly quaffed and dressed like a million dollars. She managed to slide between me and the office door in a blur of pale skin. She bared fangs and nails that had become talons.

  “I have to see Chris and Tanya,” I said.

  “Nobody barges in!” she hissed, her elongated fangs twisting her words.

  “I don’t have time for this!” I said. I raised my right hand and made a knocking motion from seven feet away. The heavy doors shuddered under the blows. The receptionist hissed again and blurred straight at me. She came to a sudden stop against my shield, fangs and claws six inches from my face.

  I picked her up and held her in mid-air, but before I could move, the doors opened and both Chris and Tanya stood there, ready for battle.

  “Celeste? Why are you hovering in mid-air and snarling at Declan?” Tanya asked. “Declan, why is my assistant floating up there?”

  “He tried to break in!” Celeste snarled. Perfect blue eyes and unearthly violet ones turned my way.

  “Cuttle’s phone hack came through. I have the entire contents on my laptop,” I said.

  “That’s good news but please put Celeste down and apologize to her,” Tanya said.

  “Sorry Celeste,” I said, lowering her down behind her desk. She sniffed and ignored me, pulling out her chair and gracefully sitting down.

  I shrugged at Chris and Tanya. Chris let a quick smile flicker over his features, but Tanya just raised one eyebrow. Thoroughly ensconced in her domain, Celeste the assistant turned to her computer and began typing with vampiric speed. After a second, she turned and smiled up at the power couple. “Anything else, ma’am?”

  “No Celeste. Thank you for your bravery,” Tanya said. Chris waved me into the office while Tanya spoke for a moment with her ruffled secretary.

  “Sorry, but I was in a hurry and then she got up in my grill and well, I just reacted,” I said.

  “You couldn’t knock?” he asked.

  “I did!”

  “Almost broke the doors,” he said.

  “Well I got in trouble for not interrupting your HR meeting, so now I guess I went too far the other way,” I said.

  Tanya slipped in and closed the doors behind her.

  “Is she alright?” I asked.

  “Mad, embarrassed, and more than a little afraid,” she said.

  “Afraid?” I asked. “She’s a freaking vampire. Came at me like a crazed supernatural spider monkey hopped up on speed.”

  “You have a significant reputation among the staff. She takes her job extremely seriously. She thought you would burn her to ashes,” Tanya said.

  “Burn her? I just wanted to update you on Cuttle,” I said.

  “You stopped a falling elevator, drove off a dangerous program, and destroyed an army of vampire-killing robots. Our security staff has a special protocol in place in case you freak out,” Chris said.

  “I hardly ever burn people to ash,” I protested. “Maybe I should get her flowers or something?” I wondered.

  “Not a bad idea,” Tanya said.

  “Enough of all that. What did you find?” Chris asked.

  “Here, check this out—a set of texts that sound an awful lot like he’s requesting a hit. This one even has Krysta’s name in it,” I said.

  The computer disappeared from my hands in a rush of displaced air. Chris gave me an apologetic shrug on his vampire’s behalf because she was already poring over the contents of the cell phone at her desk.

  “This is the motherlode,” she said, reaching for her phone. “Celeste? Track down Lydia, Josh, Darion, and Chet. Ask them all to come directly to my office, please. What? No, you were entirely correct. He was just excited to present this to me. Very well,” she said.

  “What’s the gist?” Chris asked me.

  “It’s like a poorly written spy movie dialogue. Cuttle uses pretty obvious language and requests that a situation be resolved. Then in one text, he gives the recipient her name and address,” I said.

  “This is excellent,” Tanya said, her head coming up to look our way, a feral gleam in her bright blue eyes. Somehow, I felt like I had just launched a missile at this guy Cuttle, one that might take some time to arrive on target, but when it did, it would be game over.

  The door opened and Celeste showed Chet and a young guy in a dark suit and dark-rimmed glasses into the office. She gave me a glare and them a smile. Yup, flowers were definitely in order.

  “Chris? When do I get paid?” I asked.

  “Every other Thursday,” he said, looking up from the scrum of people clustered around my computer. “Today, in fact.”

  “Good, I need to see about some flowers, and I don’t think you guys need me here,” I said. He waved me off.

  “Okay then. I’m off. I’ll see about getting my computer later,” I said. No one answered, all involved in the texts.

  I showed myself out. Celeste ignored me. “Again, I’m sorry,” I said. She pretended not to hear me. Right.

  Pulling out my phone to search for florists, I instead found a text from Mack. His sister was going on a weekend girls shopping trip to Manchester, Vermont. He wondered if he caught the train out of Saratoga if I might want some company. I sent back a Hell Yeah.

  Then I checked my bank account. And checked it again. Something was wrong. Way, way wrong. The balance made no sense whatsoever. I called H.R. The numbers were right. My first paycheck was bigger than my entire summer job the year before. Actually, maybe almost two summers of work. Then I multiplied it by twenty-six pay periods. That number was just stupid. I was so befuddled that when the elevator door opened, I just got off and found myself on the gym floor, not my floor. The doors had slid shut before I figured it out. Then I heard fighting.

  The gym doors were locked, but I could sense Thing Two inside, and the growls and snarls sounded entirely familiar. The lock and I had a brief Earth witch-to-lock conversation, and the door slipped open.

  Inside, I found a white-furred werewolf in combat form fighting the killer centipede. She thrust at it with the pinch pry bar, jabbing between the whirling blades, the sledgehammer held in her right paw, waiting to place the kill shot. But the pede was adapting to her tactics. It dropped down flat, scuttling forward under the spearlike pry bar. She swung her hammer but the pede hunched up its first three segments and spun a single blade. The steel edge caught the wooden haft of the sledge just behind the head and crunched into it, knocking the heavy hammer aside. A blur o
f metal feet and it was inside her weapon range. She scrambled back but a single mandible flicked forward, scoring a touch on a giant white foot. Then it stopped, frozen by the constraints I had programmed into it for sparring.

  The werewolf snarled in frustration, throwing down the bar and the hammer with a clang and a wooden crunch. The head of the hammer was now cockeyed; the haft cut almost all the way through.

  She spun to me and growled, then Changed, shifting in a blur of crunching and shrinking till just a naked woman stared at me. A magnificent woman whose perfection was only enhanced by her anger.

  “Does a locked door mean anything to you?” she demanded. “Do you just enter wherever you like?”

  Second time in a half hour I got in trouble with a woman for entering without knocking properly. Damn new record, O’Carroll.

  “I was just checking on you. I heard fighting.”

  “Right, and you just had to come and save me yet again, is that it? I’m helpless without you?” she asked, really pissed.

  “No, no. Listen, I’m sorry. I hear fighting, I check on things,” I said, both hands up, eyes on her eyes.

  “Maybe I don’t need a smart-assed wizard to save me all day long. You’re not the center of the world, you know,” she said, storming past me and grabbing her clothes from beside the door. I didn’t turn to look at her, instead frozen in place by my own sudden anger.

  I got in trouble for not opening doors, I got in trouble for trying to open doors, and now I was in trouble for opening a door to check on a friend. Couldn’t fucking win for trying. Part of me understood, at least on some level, that she was mad at herself as much as she was mad at me. Well, me too. I was mad at myself, but why should she take it out on me?

  She finished dressing and stormed out, slamming the gym door in the process, leaving me staring at the dropped and broken weapons. I stood that way for about three full minutes, eyes on the sheared-off hammerhead and the prybar. Then something clicked. A thought shoved its way past the anger and the hurt feelings and demanded attention. Moving forward, my hands picked up the hammerhead and the cold metal bar. Then I looked at Thing Two.

  “Rise up and extend one blade,” I ordered it, trusting its own AI to pick a suitable blade. “Freeze position.”

  The steel blade was banged and scratched but still plenty sharp enough to chop me in half. I held the pry bar in both hands and reached forward till the point touched the metal carapace. Then I noted where the blade was, how close the tip of the blade was to me and how much space there was between the pede’s body and the beginning of the blade. And just like that, the idea formed solid as steel.

  “Stand down and recharge,” I ordered, leaving the pede but taking the bar and steel hammerhead.

  Back in my own apartment, I texted Mack. Be prepared to help me with a project.

  He wrote back instantly. Fine, but we are going to have fun too right? And I’m gonna show you some of my work.

  Wanna go to Plasma?

  Hell Yeah!

  That settled, I left the tools and headed out onto the mean streets, tracking down a florist with late evening hours. Purchase in hand, I headed back for the tower.

  In the lobby, the elevator door opened, revealing Grace and Aleesha on one side of the car and Stacia on the other. All three looked at me, then at the bouquet of white roses in my hand. I stood back to let them all off, not saying a word. Grace and Aleesha slid by me, eyes flicking from the flowers to my face and then back to the flowers. Stacia frowned at the flowers, then at me. I shifted the flowers to my other hand and waved her off the elevator. Now her frown shifted to puzzlement as she stepped by me. I walked into the car and turned around, pressing the button for the executive floor, still not saying a word. All three females looked at me, confusion on one face and curious speculation on the other two. Then the doors slid shut.

  Celeste raised one eyebrow at me when I stepped off on the exec floor. When I set the vase of roses on her desk and apologized again, she allowed the smallest quirk of a smile before it fled from her face, but she did give me a single nod, which I took as apology accepted. She pointed one slim, red-tipped finger at the corner of her desk. My laptop was sitting there, awaiting its owner. I thanked her and left.

  Mission accomplished, I went to find Katrina and Mr. Deckert.

  Chapter 35- Chris

  “Do we leak these texts, send them to the FBI, or just bury the bastard ourselves?” I asked.

  “Lydia, has Miss Chatterjee done any blogging yet?” Tanya asked the pixie-sized vampire.

  Lydia just smirked and pointed her tablet at the wall monitor. Brystol’s blog page, The Cryptic News, was open to an entry dated earlier today, titled The Evil within Us.

  Dear Readers:

  I’m enraged, disgusted and madder than I have ever been in my life.

  Let me explain.

  I’ve made the paranormal, the eldritch, and the supernatural my business, and these last few years, business has been good. I was honored to bring you the first interviews with Christian Gordon and Tatiana Demidova after the Battle of Washington, as well as the first one-on-one chat with the White Werewolf, my friend Stacia Reynolds.

  During the Battle and continuing since then, we’ve seen a steady stream of miraculous revelations. In short, the world has been turned on its collective ear and I’ve been privileged to occupy ground zero for all it.

  But in my opinion, the most disruptive thing to come out of all these events isn’t that vampires and werewolves are real, or that Angels walk among us. I believe it’s the stunning treatments and cures that vampire biology promises for the most insidious of our diseases. If you don’t believe me, just look at the plummeting stock values of the world’s most advanced pharmaceutical companies. That’s proof positive to my mind that the medical and business world believes in the treatments being tested in other countries right now.

  Our nation will be among the last to have access to the wonder drugs derived from Darkkin biochemistry while many of the world’s poorest and sickest are already enjoying the life-altering effects of this new technology. The irony is delicious. Even the richest must petition to be treated in India or Thailand, the decision in the hands of the very people who saved our President, our government, and our country from an apocalypse straight out of the bible. And the source of these treatments spends enormous amounts of its own money to sponsor, through Angel Flight, the most needy of Americans to receive life-saving medicine.

  Four of these individuals: Krysta Downes, Stevie Winslow, Kyle Roberts, and Trinity Keevers, all beautiful, courageous children given a new lease on life, have all died. Two in accidents, two of medical compications. There are organizations that would have us believe it is the fault of man for turning to vampires for cures. That an angry God has taken them back among his own as punishment for the sin of seeking a cure from, gasp, a supernatural race. A group whose leader claims to know what God is thinking. I call bullshit. This is not God’s vengeance but Man’s evil. My evidence? Take a look below at this YouTube video showing security camera footage of Kayla Downes’s last day on Earth. Note that glorious little girl rubbing her shoulder after this person bumps into her. Read the autopsy report that says she died of sudden onset pneumonia and see here, circled in red, where the doctor found a red spot similar to a needle track. Coincidence? Or a highly professional hit?

  Slim, you say? I dug deeper. Here’s a copy of the police report on the accident that killed Kyle Roberts. The car that lost its brakes and hit him had just been inspected two months earlier. Yet the brakes failed completely on a four-year-old car. I’m sure Stevie’s dad would have cried foul, but he died too.

  My grandmother used to say once is an accident, two times a coincidence, but three times makes a pattern.

  Trinity Keevers died of a particularly virulent form of influenza that completely overwhelmed her immune system. The Arkansas state health department reported no other cases of that particular strain in the entire state. The hand of God or the tw
isted hand of Man?

  If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, guess what… it’s very likely a duck. But who would do this? Stay tuned… this reporter is on the case with further information and evidence coming soon.

  On a separate note, tomorrow’s blog will be a big one; a fascinating look into the world of witches and witchcraft as I report my interview with a real spell-slinging, potion-brewing practitioner of magic. That’s right, Harry Potter better move over because the real deal is out there and I’ve met him.

  Chatterjee out.

  “Well, she’s got the ball started,” Darion said. “My advice would be to sanitize our backtrail, print this shit up, and hand it, in gloved hands, to the DA of Krysta’s home county, the Texas Attorney General and the FBI. With Miss Chatterbox’s fire burning under their collective asses, something ought to catch.”