by Kat Cotton
He leaned on the car beside me, all buddy-like. I stood up and stretched.
Demon fighting is a mercurial profession. A few months ago, I had clients coming out my butt. I had money to burn. God knows what happened to that money, because I had none of it now. I did have a mighty fine pair of boots, though, and I’m pretty sure that I could claim them on my tax because you can’t kick a demon’s ass without boots.
Even in the midst of all this horror, we both had the same thought. Maybe it was a bit self-serving, but whoever got this case would have it made. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime. You might not get public recognition in this line of work, but you did get something, and that something was the Demon Fighter award. I’d won it three years running. McConchie, never.
He would be the one who needed to paste on a smile when I won the Demon Fighter award again this year. He’d have that same grin he had every year, the one that tried to say “I don’t really care about this shit” when you knew his heart was filled with man-tears.
Thing was, I’d won it with sheer numbers. Lots of small cases, all wins, no losses. A case like this one would eclipse all that with its sheer enormity.
“I guess you do have those ‘secret weapons.’” In case I didn’t get his meaning, he pointedly stared at my tits. “So much easier if you’re a woman, I guess.”
My specialty in demon fighting was sex demons, incubi and the like. For some reason, I had this sexual aura that was like crack cocaine to them. I didn’t really understand, but hey, if it got me clients, then I’d use it. For guys like McConchie, that made me somehow a lesser hunter. Even though most of McConchie’s business was built up using his dad’s money.
Before I could put him in his place, the mayor came back out.
We followed him to the doors of the club.
“I’ll take you in here, but prepare yourself. It’s a nasty business.”
I patted the mayor’s arm.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve been doing this for years.”
One of the cops opened the club doors for us and the smell hit me. I’ve been in some putrid places in my life, but this one… it smelled just like when you walk through the butcher stalls at a market, only a thousand times more concentrated.
My stomach churned. Shit, I did not want that coffee coming straight back up again, especially in front of the mayor and McConchie. I covered my nose and went inside.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked.
McConchie’s face was whiter than an ancient vampire’s, and his hands shook. I’d have mocked him mercilessly, but I had a horrible feeling that I looked no better.
We’d walked into a slaughterhouse.
Chapter 3: Carnage
In the semidarkness of the room, you couldn’t pick out details, but you could see enough. Body parts everywhere. No blood, that had all been drained except for a few splatters up the wall. Tables and stools overturned and smashed.
The silence of a room that normally pumped with music just made it all the more eerie.
It’d been carnage.
The bodies drained of blood usually meant only one thing. Vampires. No question about that.
My stomach turned. Shit, I hated vampires. Regular demons were bad, but vampires… all that neck biting and thinking they were so freakin’ hot. They drove me nuts, and it’d gotten worse lately with all these best-selling books and TV shows glamorizing them. There was even one jerk doing the motivational speaking circuit. People didn’t know he was a vamp, but you could tell. Jeez, spare me.
Vampires aren’t sensitive and sparkly. And they don’t drink animal blood instead of hunting humans. Vampires love hunting people, and they love killing shit. It’s just the way they are. Plus, with all that blood drinking, their breath really stunk.
Even so, vampires didn’t kill like this. They tended to be neat and picky. They covered their tracks. That’s how they survived, keeping it all underground. It’d been that way for centuries, and it was the only way for humans and vampires to coexist.
Maybe it wasn’t a vampire at all but some kind of bloodsucking werebeast.
I stepped further into the room. Something touched my foot.
Yikes!
It was just the leg of a barstool. Phew, that was a small relief. With so many body parts scattered around the place, I was scared about treading on the wrong thing.
The mayor touched my arm. The medical team was trying to get through. They didn’t need us getting in their way. Poor bastards.
“Walk around this way,” he said. “They’ve cleaned up most of this area.”
Cleaned up the bodies, he meant. We walked through the jumble of chairs and tables. Broken glass crunched under our feet. Random debris mixed into the mess—jackets and shoes and smashed lipsticks, money and drugs and eyeliner. People had been so eager to flee that they hadn’t given a shit about their belongings.
“We think it started on the dance floor.”
We stood back behind the railing, not wanting to get any closer.
The tangle of bodies made it hard to tell just how many people had been fed on. If I had to clean this up, I’d do it, but otherwise, I didn’t want to look too hard. I didn’t want those images burned into my brain. And the smell, it would only get worse as the day heated up.
“I’ve got to get them identified and contact the families,” the mayor said.
I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the one calling their families. I could cope with pretty much anything in this world but that.
“Hell, who did this?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come straight out and say vampires to the mayor. He was new on the job, and you can’t just blurt out “vampires” to someone not acquainted with the paranormal history of the city. On the other hand, the mayor had invited me in here, and McConchie as well. He couldn’t exactly be clueless about this stuff.
I figured I’d put out some feelers, find out how much the mayor knew and how much he wanted to know. Build up to the whole vampire thing.
“Demon Child,” said Harry McConchie, like he was the last word on the subject.
“Demon Child? No way.”
McConchie folded his arms and smirked. I really wanted to punch him.
Okay, slow buildup was out of the question now. The mayor didn’t look particularly fazed by McConchie’s answer, though. He obviously knew it’d been something not quite human. Hell, you just had to look at these bodies to know that. Unless you were in complete denial, that was the only conclusion you could make.
“It has all the signs of his work. Turning up at a place where lots of young people gather. The mass destruction. He’s no ordinary vampire, and when he feeds, he goes into a frenzy.”
“I know that. I’m the one who wrote the book on the history of paranormal creatures in this city.” I gave McConchie a look to put him in place. “But he’s asleep. No one would wake him. The vamps want him comatose as much as we do. It took powerful magic to put him into an endless sleep, and it’d take powerful magic to wake him.”
That’s pretty much all I knew about the Demon Child. No one had told me I needed to do research for this.
McConchie walked away from us, still sticking to the edges of the room, where there was less carnage.
“Normal vampires stick to the dark to feed. Maybe one or two victims a month. Some have even gathered their own little feeding teams, keeping them alive as food.”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t need him mansplaining vampires to me.
“The Demon Child feeds, then sleeps it off. Sometimes for twenty, thirty years, but the last time he woke, they made sure that he’d sleep for good.”
“What the hell? Is he a vampire bear? A vampbear? He hibernates?” The mayor shook his head.
“Something like that,” I said. “He was about fourteen when he turned, still in that teenage stage of eating and sleeping, I guess.”
“Why’s he called Demon Child, then, and not Demon Teen?” the mayor asked.
“Demon Child sounds catchier,” McConchie said.
“He’s right,” I added. “Demon Teen sounds like a bad ‘90s movie.”
We walked around the room, but it sure as hell didn’t get any prettier. This is why I preferred vanquishing demons. Most of my cases were sex demons. Much less gore. They didn’t actually kill, just screwed the life force out of people. I had to find out what happened to Cassie, but I held back, not wanting to see her among the victims.
“So, why did they put him to sleep and not just stake him? That eternal sleep thing never works out well.” The mayor shook his head.
McConchie shrugged. I had no idea either. Staking would’ve been much easier.
I followed McConchie around the outside of the room, then froze.
I almost tripped on something.
A body sprawled on the floor near my feet, like she’d been running, but not fast enough. Her body was twisted so that what was left of her face looked up at me.
Her flimsy black dress had been ripped from her body, the thin straps broken. Her fingers gripped a gold clutch bag, as though holding on to it would protect her. One black stiletto was still on her foot, the other one lost. Gold hoop earrings hung from her earlobes. Her face withered. There was nothing left of her but an empty shell.
Cassie Manchelli.
Bile rose in my stomach. I fought down the sick feeling. No way could I show weakness here. Not in front of the mayor or McConchie.
The mayor’s hand on the small of my back broke my daze. He led me away.
I’d have to be the one to call Portia. She couldn’t hear this from the mayor or a random cop. It would have to be me.
My heart pounded. This wasn’t a situation I could handle. Sex and violence, I was fine with them. I could deal with any creature that went bump in the night. The ones that would tear off your limbs but keep you alive, the ones who slowly devoured you from the inside, the ones who oozed primal slime. Not this. Human stuff was not my forte.
Portia would be devastated, destroyed. I’d never had a close family or any of those ties, but Portia and Cassie shared the kind of bond you rarely see in family. In high school, I’d been a little envious of that warmth.
I’d expected to call her and laugh at her stupid fears, getting people to go out in the middle of the night for no reason, but the truth was so much worse than any of her fears had been.
“So, you called us both down here,” McConchie said. “You think it’s too much work for one person?”
“Not so much.”
The mayor shot us a grin. That grin hit me like a slap in the face. How could he be cheerful when someone’s kid sister lay amongst this devastation? This wasn’t just a case. It wasn’t a body count. This was real. I bet if the mayor had to call someone and tell them about their sister, he wouldn’t grin like that.
“There is too much going on in this town that’s covered up. Transparency, that’s what I’m about. You can’t just sweep things under the rug and hope they go away.”
My entire business model depended on just that. One of the most essential things for a demon hunter was to walk the line between providing a service to the public, a paid service, and keeping that service on the down-low. You couldn’t run a full-on advertising campaign or be too high-profile. Most people, if they were aware of us, treated us like a joke. The clients, the ones willing to pay, didn’t exactly go around talking us up.
“I know all this demon hunting can be a lark, but think about it. When you hide their evil, it only helps them. These beasts live in darkness. They love it. But they kill people. Look around you. This is not good. It’s not good for the city and it’s not good for the world. How can we fight them when essentially what we’re doing is protecting them? I’m the one who will get rid of these evil beasts. The only way to do that is to bring the evil into the light so it can be fought properly.”
“So why are we here?” I asked. “There’s no work for us. Nothing to cover up.”
“I want you on board with this. The best thing for both of you is to walk away from this. You are both business professionals, and there’s no work in this for you, so don’t go trying to be heroes.”
This city had a balance. Vampires and demons in the darkness, humans in the light. I walked between those worlds. I kept people happy. And, mostly, I helped people hold on to their fragile illusions that the world was a safe place.
This Demon Child shattered that balance.
The smart thing to do was get that balance back as quickly as possible. What the mayor wanted was not the smart thing.
He checked his watch. “Okay, I have to get outside. It’s time for my press conference to start.”
“All those kids outside. They saw the whole thing.” It hit me like a jolt. “That’s why they can’t leave, right? You want them on TV.”
Nothing would work to back up his story like the image of those kids, shaken and upset. He planned to use them to give this story impact. I had no idea how this press conference thing worked. Like would he just get up on the podium and start saying “vampires”? Surely not. He’d get laughed out of office. The public wasn’t ready to hear that.
Maybe he’d hint around the whole vampire thing, hoping the pictures would tell the story. That seemed the most likely thing he’d do. People are more willing to believe stuff if they think they thought it up themselves.
“Listen, you might be mayor and all, but do you think you’re doing the right thing here? What’s going to happen if all the regular people in this city find out they have vampires in their midst? Well, for starters, I guess most of them will think you’re nuts, but if you can actually convince them, then there’s going to be panic. It’ll be a nightmare.”
The mayor patted my arm.
“You aren’t just a pretty face, are you? Of course, I have plans in place for that.”
The mayor seemed pretty confident in his plans, but I wasn’t convinced. The whole idea of people knowing about the seedier underbelly of the city didn’t sit right with me. Using those kids like that wasn’t good either. Everyone said the mayor was a swell guy, but I wondered if he was really as swell as he made out. Out of the public eye, he didn’t seem to have all that much empathy.
“Maybe you are a good guy, but you could at least get those kids their coats and stuff. Having a bunch of them end up in hospital with exposure isn’t going to make you look good.”
Even though they’d removed Cassie Manchelli’s body, I still had that image in my mind. Far better to be out of this place. I headed for the door. I didn’t want to look too eager to get outside, but outside had fresh air.
If I was a good person, a noble, self-sacrificing type, I’d have come up with a plan right then to stop the mayor from giving that press conference. But I wasn’t getting paid to deal with this. It was sad and horrible, the stuff of nightmares, but it wasn’t my job. I had my own stuff to deal with.
Chapter 4: Portia
That call to Portia Manchelli had been tough. She’d cried and she’d yelled. I just had to stay on the phone because, even if you can do nothing to help, you can’t just hang up on someone in that kind of situation. The shadow of it still hung over me three days later.
The last thing I expected was for her to turn up at my office.
At first, I didn’t recognize her. She looked about ten years old than me, even though she wore sunglasses. Then she took them off.
Portia had always been stick-thin, but she looked skeletal. Her hair, normally styled and sprayed to a perfect if overly elaborate style, hung limp. Her skin looked sallow without makeup and her eyes seemed to shrink into her head. All the brashness had gone from her movements. She still wore an expensive suit, something designer label, but it hung badly from her emaciated frame. Her heels clicked on the floorboards as she walked into my office.
I’d thought of going to the funeral, but it’d been family and friends only. We’d never exactly been friends. Portia was just the type to keep track of everyone we�
�d gone to school with. She’d been one of the few never to call me a freak or bully me, though. That put her ahead of most of the girls in my class.
“Sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I apologized for. It just seemed the thing to say.
She sat down before I could tell her to. Then she said nothing. A silent Portia was not something I’d ever seen. Maybe she was silent in her sleep, but I wasn’t even sure then.
I tapped my nails on the desk. A habit that annoyed even me, but her silence made me so uneasy. Not just her silence, her entire presence. I’d been so wrapped up in this case that the true nature of the Demon Child had slipped my mind. Now, the horror of seeing Cassie Manchelli’s body rushed back to me. The smell of my undrunk coffee on my desk made my stomach turn.
Portia sat perfectly still.
I wasn’t sure if I should break the silence or leave her to speak in her own time. I folded my hands on my lap to stop the tapping and waited.
“The mayor says it’s vampires.” She looked like she wanted me to deny that.
“He hasn’t actually said that.”
“I had to identify her body.”
Portia shook. If I was a different person, I’d hug her or something, but that wasn’t something I could do naturally.
Even though I didn’t want to tell her the truth, I couldn’t deny the vampire thing. Not after she’d seen Cassie’s body. Sure, I could come up with a good story, say it was some drug-crazed gang with delusions of vampirism, but maybe she deserved the truth.
“I don’t need you to confirm it. I know what I saw,” she said.
I just nodded. I didn’t want to go into details about the Demon Child. She didn’t need to know he could strike again at any time. She didn’t need to hear that and, like the rest of the city, she probably thought the mayor was the greatest guy ever.
I wasn’t sure where this was going when she jumped up.
She opened up her handbag and dumped a pile of money on my desk. Bills bundled up into big bricks. My heart raced at the sight of them. I wanted to pick them up and breathing in their divine smell.
