Hell Freezes Over - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  Contents

  Title

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Special Thanks

  Appearances

  About the Author

  Also by John G. Hartness

  Hell Freezes Over

  A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter

  Novella

  By John G. Hartness

  Falstaff Media

  Charlotte, NC

  Chapter 1

  I smelled the blood from the front steps. For a murder that happened upstairs in the master bedroom at the back of the house, that’s pretty bad. The smell of blood is visceral for me, probably because it’s at the core of everything I am. From my dad’s dalliances with Uncle Luke’s “wives” back in Transylvania, to Luke drinking from both my parents and meddling around in my DNA, to everything I deal with on the job, blood is kinda my gig. But not like this. Not the cloying, nose-clogging, overwhelming stench of it that boiled out of the Standish house like fog rolling in off the ocean.

  The coppery-hot scent of it crept into every nook and cranny and wrapped itself around me like a moist blanket, promising to flavor every meal I touched for the next three days. I hadn’t smelled blood like that since the Somme, when the mud ran red for two years after over a million men lost their lives in 1916. Luke and I spent most of that year running all over the front rallying British and French troops and pushing back vampires and werewolves recruited by the Germans to attack in the night and demoralize the Brits. The Kaiser’s boys had never encountered sheer British pigheadedness on that scale before. They died by the thousands, but nothing the Germans threw at them, military or magical, could make those stiff upper lips waver.

  But the smell of blood pouring from the Standish house in waves took me back to France, and I could almost hear the screams of young men dying in the distance again. I snapped back to the present when I caught a young uniform staring at me. I walked up to him, flashed my Homeland Security badge, and said, “Where’s Detective Flynn?”

  He stiffened at the sight of my fed creds. “Upstairs, sir. I think she’s still in the bedroom.” I took a step for the door, then moved aside as a forty-something sergeant came hustling down the steps, turned left away from the cops gathered in the driveway, and threw up in the bushes. The cop on door duty took a small notebook out of his pocket, opened it, and made a tick mark on a sheet of paper.

  “Running the pool?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sarge over there makes five.”

  “Mostly rooks?” I asked. Rookie cops were famous for puking at messy crime scenes.

  “Not really,” the officer, whose nameplate identified him as Vasquez, replied. “Two rooks, but everybody else has had some years on them. We even got one of the techs.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Now I really don’t want to go in there.” I wasn’t lying, either. The chances that this was something right in my wheelhouse were pretty high, and if it made veteran cops lose their cookies, it was going to be a bad night. Oh well, when you’re the demon-hunting part-vampire magic-wielding nephew of Dracula, there aren’t really that many uneventful evenings at home in front of the TV.

  I squared my shoulders and went inside, keeping my Sight locked down tight while I observed the room with my mundane eyes. Small foyer, large family room off to the right dominated by a massive TV over a fireplace with a game system and controllers on a shelf. To the left was what looked like a formal dining room, with a table for six set with holiday dishes. There was a light layer of dust on everything there, so I figured it wasn’t used much. I saw a door through the dining room open into a bright kitchen with nice tile floors.

  I didn’t pay too much attention to the downstairs, just enough to notice that there wasn’t a drop of blood anywhere. If the scene had been as messy as everybody was saying, how had the killer gotten out without leaving a drop down here? I climbed the stairs to the second floor, regretting leaving my jar of Vicks VapoRub in the glove box.

  I took a pair of booties from a box at the top of the stairs and slipped them on over my shoes. You’ll want to double-bag unless you’re tired of those shoes, came a voice in my head.

  Thanks, I thought back, reaching for a second pair of shoe covers. Most of the time the voices in my head are either bad memories or delusions, but ever since I saved Detective Rebecca Gail Flynn from bleeding out by sharing blood with her, we were linked more closely than any two people ever should be. Unless we were both very careful about shielding, we were in each other’s head all day, every day, which made for some truly awkward moments.

  The stairs ended in a hallway that led left to a small bathroom and linen closet, then right to three bedrooms. Two of the bedroom doors were closed, with kids’ names on the doors in bright wooden cutout letters. The door to the master bedroom stood open, with a uniform standing in the hall just outside.

  “Flynn inside?” I asked, holding up my creds.

  “Yes, sir, but I can’t let you in there.” He moved to block my path, and I managed to keep myself from laughing. Not only could I break every bone he ever cared about, but I could magically heal him, then kick his ass some more. But he was taking his doorman duties seriously, so I gave him a little credit there.

  “You see that badge says Homeland Security, right? You know Flynn is on the same task force with me, right?”

  “I do know that, sir, but this is our crime scene, and until somebody tells me different, nobody gets in without a CMPD badge or clearance from somebody over my head.”

  Somehow I still managed to keep from laughing. Flynn, get out here, I sent through the mental link we shared. Your puppy is showing his teeth.

  “Let him through, Birk,” Flynn’s voice came from around the corner. “He’s almost harmless, so he can come in.”

  “Good job, Junior,” I said as I passed the uniform. “Now she’s pissed at both of us.”

  Leave him alone, Harker. Flynn’s voice rang in my head as I stepped across the threshold.

  “I didn’t start it,” I protested as I stepped into the room. I froze as I caught sight of the scene. I took an involuntary step back and this time heard the squish of soaked carpet beneath my feet. I looked down, and my blue-bootied shoes were islands in a sea of crimson, two of the few things in the room that didn’t look like they’d been painted with reddish-brown drying blood.

  The mother and two children were in the bed, on top of the blankets, lying peacefully as if sleeping, or posed. She was a trim woman who looked like she did Pilates three times a week without ever breaking a sweat. Her blonde hair was pulled off to one side with care, like her husband didn’t want it to get bloody when he murdered her. The irony of it was almost enough to make me scream.

  Lying on either side of her were her kids, maybe eight and ten, maybe younger. I’ve gotten worse at guessing ages since nutrition had gotten so much better. All kids look like giants to me now. These two were as different as night and day—the boy dark with curly brown hair spilling over his face, and the girl slight and blonde, looking almost ethereal lying there.

  Their eyes were closed, thank God, but their slit throats made a huge grin across their necks like some demented comic book villain.
All three of them had their necks slashed from ear to ear, then long slashes up the inside of each arm and slices across the wrists, just to be thorough. Looking at the bloodstains on the woman’s nightgown and the kids’ pajamas, I guessed that the femoral arteries would be opened up as well.

  I wish you were wrong, came Flynn’s voice in my head. But the doc confirms it—the major arteries in the neck and the veins in the arms were opened. They bled out in a minute. Two tops.

  The walls were a study in arterial spray-painting, with arcs of blood droplets reaching to within a few feet of the ceiling. The mattress was soaked, with blood dripping from the comforter onto the floor and pooling all over.

  Sitting in one corner beside the bed, a butcher knife in his hand and a puddle of blood spreading out from his ass, was the man of the house, Darin Standish. Fortyish, Latino, trim, dressed in silk pajama bottoms and nothing else but blood. To put the icing on the cake, in his left hand, almost impossible to see clutched in his fist, was a rosary. He was praying before he did this. That thought ran through my head, and I almost lost my own lunch. If I’d eaten anything in the past six hours, it would have been gone that second. As it was, I had to take a few deep breaths through my mouth to keep my gorge down. I got myself together, gave myself a mental shake, and got back to the body.

  From the position of the body, I was guessing that he killed his family, then sat down and cut the arteries in his own legs, slashed open one wrist, and made it halfway through his own neck before succumbing to blood loss. I was staring at a seriously dedicated suicide. I reached out to the body, stretching my senses just to edge of the mundane world, but sensed nothing malevolent in the room.

  “You getting anything?” Flynn asked in a low voice. Our link was more secure, but she didn’t like the idea of letting me inside her head on a regular basis. I didn’t blame her; I wouldn’t trust me with my deepest and darkest secrets, either.

  “Nothing except nauseated,” I replied. “This is as bad as anything I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around the block once or twice.”

  “Yeah, it’s awful. Look at that little girl, such an angel…” She was right, of course. The little girl was the place everyone immediately looked in a tragedy. And this one was more cherubic than normal, with apple cheeks even in death, a halo of blonde hair spread out on the pillow beneath her, and a tiny gold cross around her neck.

  I mentally wrote off my pants as a total loss and dropped to one knee in front of the father, opening my Sight. The “real” world swam out of focus, becoming less immediate as my senses shifted into the magical spectrum. Nothing changed in the magical spectrum—no demonic taint, no dark magic sigils carved on the dad’s aura, nothing to explain why this apparently happy man would murder his family in the most brutal way imaginable.

  I stood up, turning my attention to the daughter. Sometimes nasty things from other dimensions can break free using a child’s belief in monsters as the anchor point. But not here. It was like this child had never known fear a day in her life. The girl looked exactly the same through my Sight, just as innocent and beautiful, with her cross glowing in my Sight like a beacon, a ray of light in a murky Otherworld. I looked all around the room with my magical senses, then dropped my Sight and turned to Flynn.

  “There’s no magic here,” I said, turning for the door. I squelched my way to the stairway and was about head down when Flynn caught me.

  “What are you doing? Where are you going?” she hissed at me.

  “Well, I was going to eat ice cream and binge-watch Justified on TV, but if you’ve got a better idea, I’m not married to that one.”

  “There is a dead family up there, and we don’t have any idea who or what killed them. You can’t just leave.”

  “Oh, I can. I promise I can. You’re welcome to watch me just leave. Look, Detective, I’m the supernatural guy. I’m the one that believes in all the weird shit. You’re Scully. You’re the one that thinks the world is a normal place that operates under normal laws. So you should be ecstatic when I tell you this was a normal murder/suicide. So now, dear skeptic, I take my leave.” I made my most florid bow, which was pretty good given the amount of time I spent in Europe, and once again tried for the door.

  “Stop.”

  I stopped and turned back to Flynn. “I need your help. Even if this isn’t anything more than a human nutball, it’s as deranged a rat bastard as I’ve ever encountered. And that puts it right in your wheelhouse.”

  “I wish that were a little less true, but go on.”

  “So there’s absolutely no evidence of magic here?”

  “Let me look again,” I said, and opened my Sight again. Using my Second Sight is like laying a filter over the world in front of me. Everything goes a little fuzzy, and I can see bright spots of color where magic was used, or where supernatural creatures touched this plane of existence.

  The Standish’s bedroom looked as mundane as any house I’d ever been in. There were the normal minor cold spots where ghosts passed through from time to time, but that could just have been grandparents looking in from the Other Side on the kids, or a curious spirit here and there. The little girl’s cross glowed with a white halo of purity, like it was recently blessed, and the rosary in the father’s hand radiated the same kind of minor blessing. But there was no hint of dark magic or demonic presence anywhere. I let my Sight drop and the room returned to ugly reality.

  “Sorry, Flynn, there’s nothing. It looks like they went to church recently, but that’s all I’ve got. There was absolutely nothing supernatural about this murder. I know that’s hard to take, but most of the nastiest things humanity has ever done have been like that—completely without supernatural help.”

  “I know. People are the nastiest creatures in the world.”

  “In a couple of worlds, Detective.”

  Chapter 2

  I left a very disappointed Detective Flynn at the house going over details with the crime scene techs and working on recreating the events of the previous night. I had less than no interest in reliving someone’s murder, so I went home. Even with the sun high in the sky, I was exhausted. Flynn’s call had come in around eight in the morning, and I’d been fleecing an all-night poker game until after seven, so once I finally got home, I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow. That’s when I got my first hint that this case wasn’t as mundane as it seemed.

  I came awake seconds after I fell asleep. At least it felt that way. It was dark as the devil’s own asshole in my room, which was odd since I distinctly remembered it being almost noon by the time I got showered and into bed. I looked around for a clock, but couldn’t see one, then pawed the nightstand for my cell phone, with equal lack of success. With my eyes useless, I focused on listening to the room, but I heard no sounds of life, not even my air conditioner or the fan on my computer. Complete silence is so rare in today’s world that I noticed it more acutely than I had in previous decades. But this silence was pervasive, like a blanket covering everything around me.

  Finally, out of the edge of my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of some kind of low light, a glimmer or shine off in the distance. Distance? I was in my bedroom, which is barely fifteen by twenty. A decent room, certainly, but there was nothing in my whole condo that could be measured in anything resembling “distance.”

  Fuck, another dream.

  I don’t dream. At least, on a good night I don’t remember them. On a bad night, I wake up right in the middle of them, thrashing about in my bed, sheets a sweat-sodden rope twisted around my middle tight enough to cut off blood flow to my feet, a scream caught in my throat, fighting with everything I’ve eaten for the past twenty-four hours to get up and out past my teeth. If I’m lucky I manage to get control of myself before I puke or piss myself. If I’m unlucky, it’s another 3AM run to the all-night laundromat reeking like a homeless man on a two-week bender. They know me there.

  I’ve seen some shit. I suppose it’s impossible to get a century under your belt without
seeing some shit, but my family tree, particular “gifts,” and undeniable talent for sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong have put me in situations to see more shit than a sewer rat. And when I sleep is when all the barriers between the nasties in my mind and my memories crumble, and the worst things I’ve seen across over a hundred years and six continents come out to play.

  Antarctica. It’s what you were wondering. There’s nothing fucking scary in Antarctica because there aren’t enough people there. The whole fucking continent has about five thousand people on it in the summer, such as it is, and less than two in the winter. And they all chose to be there, and they all have enough shit to do just to stay alive and do their jobs to not fuck around with anything supernatural. Not enough time on their hands to get really stupid.

  The other six continents? Full of assholes. Assholes who fuck with things that should be left alone and call up shit that people like me have to put down. And make me do shit that I have to live with forever, especially when I’m alone in the middle of the night without any whiskey to dull the screams that echo through the dark hallways of my soul.

  I stood in the dark long enough for the glimmer of light in the distance to take shape, and I couldn’t tell if I was moving toward it or it was moving toward me, in that weird Pan’s Labyrinth way that things move in dreams without actually moving, but I realized the the light was the outline of a door, and I’ve known enough about lucid dreaming for long enough to know that I was meant to open it. So I did. I reached out my hand and opened the door.

  And was immediately back in the middle of the Standish family’s bedroom. The only difference was there was no blood and no dead people. It looked like the bedroom of a happily married middle class couple from Whitebread, USA. There were no signs of death or destruction, just a patterned white and mint green comforter that I had seen at Target a couple weeks ago and now was under no circumstances ever going to purchase, no matter how well Renfield said it matched my curtains.