Don’t even try it, I sent to Flynn through our mental link. You have no shot. I don’t know if I could take her in a spell duel, and I know I can’t take out her and the three bouncers watching us right now.
“Fine,” Flynn said after a long second, and I let out a breath. She turned to me, and I was surprised to see genuine concern in her eyes. “Please don’t do anything too stupid. I’m actually starting to like having you around. A little. A very little.”
“I’ll try to refrain from abject stupidity for at least the next ten minutes,” I said, turning to go through a secret entrance between the restrooms at a dive bar to have a chat with a demon about a Catholic church that my personal guardian angel was afraid to talk about. I apparently need a new barometer for “abject stupidity.”
Chapter 5
After all these years, the monsters still find ways to surprise me. The last thing I expected when I stepped through the door Christy opened into the back room of Mort’s was a magic show, but that’s exactly what I walked in on. There was a small stage set up in one corner of the room, and on it a man in a tuxedo, top hat, and black cape with red satin lining. He was tall, thin almost to the point of gaunt, with a long face, the kind of face that always looks sad. His eyes were sunk in his face, and his cheeks were hollowed out, all of which gave his face a kind of beetle-browed skeleton look that would have been creepy even in the most innocuous of settings.
He was performing magic tricks for an audience of three—a little boy perched on a stool watching avidly, his feet tapping the rungs of the stool beneath him and his hair bouncing as the boy’s head bobbed to the rhythm of the magician’s background music. The boy was flanked by two bodyguards, both minotaurs in tailored double-breasted suits. They had huge double-headed axes strapped across their shoulders and Uzis in their hands. I didn’t want to think about what was tough enough that they would have to unstrap those big axes. Usually a couple seven-foot bullmen with submachine guns was enough to deter trouble. Of course, it hadn’t kept me out, so I guess they did have a point.
The magician juggled balls, then blew on each ball as it reached the apex of its arc, causing the balls to burst into multicolored flame, which he continued to juggle. He spun the balls of fire faster and faster until they blended into one long circle of fire, which the magician stuck his arm through, then another arm, then his entire torso, never letting the ring stop spinning until it settled on its hips and morphed again into a circle of solid multicolored light, flashing a rainbow hula hoop around his waist. He reached down once again, grabbed one end of the color loop, and flipped the stream of colors from around his waist into the audience, grabbing the tail of the rope at the last second when it dropped to the floor, a harmless length of connected handkerchiefs in all the colors of the rainbow.
The little boy on the stool clapped and laughed, then shot a pointed look at his bodyguards, who clapped politely. The magician bowed grandly from the waist, doffing his top hat as he did so. He came up with the hat held in front of him, top pointing toward the stage.
“For my next trick, I will pull a human out of this hat,” he said, then began to wave his hand above the top hat’s brim.
“Why don’t you try something new and pull a living human out, Clive?” I called from the back of the room.
The magician’s head snapped up and his eyes locked onto me like a missile guidance system. “Harker.” His tone implied that he was slightly less than thrilled to see me.
“In the flesh, no thanks to our last meeting.” I gave a little half bow, never taking my eyes off the man in the cape. It had been thirty years or more since I last saw Clive Hardwick, also known at the time as Zoltan the Spectacular, star of stages all over California. He was the real deal as far as magicians went; he had power in spades. It all emanated from the demon that lived in his top hat, of course, but Clive was allowed enough of a leash to use the demon’s magic for card tricks and sawing the occasional woman in half.
Not as part of his show, you understand. Clive and his demon just liked cutting people into little bits. I heard of some strange disappearances in the days after his show left town, and I followed Clive around from town to town for a couple months. I finally put an end to his private butcher’s practice behind a magic and comedy club in Fresno, when I banished his demon and beat Clive to within an inch of his life. Clive got in a few shots, too, including one that left me with second-degree burns over more than half my body. He burned most of my hair off and a fair chunk of my face. It took six months and more than a dozen donations from Uncle Luke to put me back together. But when I walked out of the alley that night, I was damn sure the only one capable of walking.
Honestly, I thought he’d died. He was well into his sixties in 1983, and he hadn’t exactly been the poster boy for clean living (not that I’m one to talk). So I was a little surprised to see him in Charlotte in the back of a bar where I was supposed to meet with a big-deal demon. And I was even more surprised to open my Sight and see that he had another demon living in his hat. That thing must have been the penthouse of pocket dimensions.
Clive didn’t waste time. I always admired that just a little bit in a “you’re an evil bastard and I’m probably going to kill you, but this one aspect of your personality is kinda cool” way. He didn’t launch into a monologue about what he was going to do to me, he just summoned up a glowing purple ball of energy and threw it at me.
In the second and a half before the sphere hit me, I didn’t have enough time to analyze it. I didn’t know if it was eldritch energy, demonfire, angelfire, distilled dragonfire, regular fire-fire, or some other kind of energy. I couldn’t tell, and frankly I didn’t give a shit. I just dropped flat to my stomach and let the ball of bad intentions fly over me and burn a hole in the brick wall behind me.
“That’s new,” I said, dusting myself off. “Did you get an upgrade when your new hitchhiker moved in upstairs?” I motioned at his hat.
“My Lord Duke Dantalion granted me one his finest spell crafters for my service,” Clive grinned as he stroked the hat. It was a little creepy, like he actually cared for the thing in there. I guarantee whatever demonlet Dantalion had sent up from the fifth circle didn’t feel the same way about Clive.
“Nice to hear you and Dandelion are getting along so well,” I said. My fingers were quickly twining together a piece of string I found on the floor with a couple of pop tops from beer cans.
“What are you doing there? I can’t quite…oh, I don’t care what you’re doing, Harker. It will all end the same way, with you burned to cinders in this room. Infernos!” He thrust both his hands out at me, and a stream of fire shot out like water from a fire hose.
I finished with my makeshift bracelet and tied it to my wrist. I held up the representation of a shield and focused my will. “Inverso!” A blue-white half-sphere appeared in front of me, centered on my wrist. The fire-stream hit my shield and split, bending around my shield and spewing off harmlessly to the sides.
Unfortunately, the heat didn’t go with it, so after less than a second of Clive’s fireboats, my wrist started to smoke and blister.
This brought back unpleasant memories of our last meeting, so I tried something I didn’t think of decades back in California. I drew my Glock and shot him three times. Or shot at him, rather. Clive flicked up a hand, and with a quick “Dispersos!” sucked all the kinetic energy from my bullets. The spent slugs dropped to the floor, harmless, but Clive had to stop his fire assault to save himself, so I got what I needed—breathing room.
“Come on, Clive,” I called out, flipping a couple of tables and taking cover behind them. “You couldn’t beat me decades ago, don’t you think I’ve learned new tricks in all that time?”
“Ahhh, that’s where you’re wrong, Quincy,” Clive called back from the DJ booth, where he was hiding. “I’ve not only learned a few new tricks of my own, I’ve got backup to help me make them more spectacular than ever!” With that, he pulled his hat off, waved his hand over the op
ening, and shouted “Sica!”
Daggers flew from the opening of his top hat. Dozens of them, all streaking across the room right at me. I ducked, and most thunked into the overturned bar table, some flew over the top, and a couple skittered along the floor.
I quickly stripped off my makeshift bracelet, added a couple of knots of my hair into the weave, focused my will on the scruffy little band of aluminum and copper, and whispered “redirectus.” I wrapped the bracelet around my fist, brass knuckles style, and stood up, throwing my hand at the stage like a punch as I came up. A wave of force pulsed out from my arm, catching the stream of deadly blades and reversing their course.
As usual, things didn’t go exactly as planned. Not all of the knives reversed perfectly along their axis, so some went careening off in random directions. None of them headed in my direction, which was the good news. It wasn’t great news for the kid sitting in front of the stage, though. While several dozen knives whipped toward Clive at ridiculous speed, a good six or so whirled and tumbled toward the boy, who sat watching our little magical duel with unrestrained glee.
I didn’t think about who the kid was, or what kind of parent lets a cherubic, tow-headed little boy with glasses taking up half his face sit in the back of a demon’s bar watching an evil wizard do parlor tricks. I didn’t wonder about the obvious control he had of the goons surrounding him, goons who were already moving to intercept the missiles streaking toward their young charge. Missiles that were going to be way faster than any human’s reactions. I didn’t think about anything, other than Oh shit, I kill this kid and Glory is going to have my balls for earrings. My guardian angel likes kids, and getting one killed would put me on her shit list for most of an eternity, at least.
So I didn’t think, I just acted. Describes a lot of decades for me, especially the 60s and those years in San Francisco and St. Maarten. I flung a hand out toward the kid and shouted “Inertius!” Immediately, all the forward momentum of the knives halted, and they dropped to the floor with a thunderous clatter. But since energy can’t be destroyed, it had to be redirected somewhere, so I redirected it to Clive. Actually, Clive’s shoes.
All the forward energy of dozens of knives flying through the air at blinding speed suddenly transferred itself to Clive’s shoes, yanking his feet right out from under him and dropping him flat on his back and sending his hat spinning across the stage beside him.
The biggest problem was that Clive never cancelled his spell, so his hat was still firing knives at the rate of several blades per second. As it spun around the room, knives bounced and clanged around the bar, thunked into the table I ducked behind, and one buried itself into the shoulder of a bodyguard who finally wrapped himself around the little boy, who still sat clapping on his stool, laughing and shrieking with joy at the chaos and bloodshed around him.
The hat spun, spitting knives in every direction, until it came to rest on its side right next to Clive. That pointed the mouth of the hat right at the old magician’s side and neck, which were promptly filled with razor-sharp four-inch daggers. The skeletal old magician tried to roll out of the way, but the hat just kept spewing sharpened death at him until he finally collapsed. When Clive died, his spell was broken, and after one last hiccup of blades, the hat fell still. I stood up from my cover behind the table, looking at the carnage Clive and I had wrought upon Mort’s private room. There were knives poking out of almost every vertical surface and more than one horizontal one. Shattered glassware littered the bar and every tabletop, not to mention the spilled drinks and the utter destruction wrought upon the front of the jukebox. It must have gotten some spray from a fireball, too, because it was wrecked.
I stepped over to the hat, sprinkled a little holy water from a vial in my coat pocket into the depths of it, and murmured a quick exorcism. Clive’s little buddy shrieked a number of rather unpleasant names at me, then let out one final shriek as my magic banished him back to hell. I tossed the hat over Clive’s dead face and looked around. The little boy had scrambled out from under the body of a pincushioned guard and was now back on his stool, looking over the wreckage.
“You okay, kid?” I called out.
“I’m fine, Mr. Harker. But I seem to be in need of a new magician. This one has sprung a few leaks. Do you know anyone who would like a job?” The voice coming from the kid was way older than anything that should come from that body and I started to have a bad feeling about this little boy.
“No, I don’t know of anyone right offhand. Let me guess, that’s you in the little ankle-biter, isn’t it, Mort?”
“Mortimer Jacobus Venesta, at your service, but I prefer Mort. My parents called me Jake, but that was so long ago that I’m the only who remembers those days. Well, maybe your uncle.”
“How old are you?” I asked before I could remember never to ask a monster anything more than was absolutely necessary. You give away information just by the act of asking, so it’s always better to keep your mouth shut when dealing with ridiculously powerful creatures from the lowest circles of Hell. Which I was pretty sure is exactly what I was dealing with.
“I came into this world somewhere along 1790, so I suppose your uncle has been here longer. And we won’t mention my time before I came over.”
No, we wouldn’t. The last thing I wanted was to chitchat with a demon about his millennia in Hell. And that’s what this kid was—the earthly vessel for Mort, the demon.
Chapter 6
“So, Mr. Harker, what can I do for you this evening? I assume you want something since it’s been more than a few years since our last conversation, and that ended with a certain amount of broken architecture.” Mort and I weren’t exactly strangers, even though I’d never been to his place of business, and I’d certainly never seen him in this current body. We’d had a disagreement some years ago about the acceptable uses of fresh corpses that resulted in the death of a lot of ghouls and the destruction of a few automobiles and one small warehouse. I had almost forgotten about it, but obviously Mort hadn’t. I decide just to breeze along like we’d never tried to kill each other and hope I could outrun him if it came to that.
“Yeah, I need some information,” I said. I walked over to the seating area in front of the stage, picked up a toppled stool, and sat down across from the little demon host.
“What kind of information?” Mort asked.
“What’s going on at Our Lady of Holy Comfort?” I asked. I figured no point in beating around the bush. He’d either tell me or not, and the fewer opportunities I gave the centuries-old demon to trap me into something with my words, the better.
The demon got a thoughtful look on his face, then he broke into a grin. “Oh yes, the Church of the Holy Blankie! I know that one, some big goings-on going on down there. Didn’t your little guardian angel fill you in? Oh, I guess she wouldn’t, would she?”
Her word was “can’t” not “won’t,” but I’m not here to parse grammar with him, I thought, trying not to let anything show on my face.
“Not talking? Afraid I’m going to twist your words into some binding agreement that binds your soul to my service and traps you into wearing women’s underpants for a century? Don’t worry, Mr. Harker, I have plenty of people entering into agreements with me willingly—I don’t need to trick people. And as far as underpants, I’m not interested in what type, if any, you wear.”
“So what’s the deal at the church, then?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not that simple.”
“Why not? You just went through this whole spiel about how you weren’t going to make me do anything ridiculous to get the information, now you’re telling me the exact opposite.”
“I didn’t actually say any of that.” The demon kid folded his arms across his chest.
“And people wonder why demons have a terrible reputation as welshers.”
“I’ll have you know that I have never reneged on an agreement in five millennia of dealing with you hairless apes!” I’d struck a nerve, and decided to push my
edge. Not the safest course of action, I’ll admit, but if you’re looking for someone to tweak a demon’s nose in its own lair, I’m your guy.
“But you certainly took advantage of the ignorance and purposeful misunderstanding of your temporary business partners, didn’t you?” I swear, dealing with demons is worse than faeries. Faeries can’t lie, it’s a genetic thing. So they’ve learned to obfuscate and evade with the best of them. Actually, they are the best of them. Demons are a lot like that, with more negotiations ending in eviscerations, and less arbitration.
“There might be a few souls currently serving thousand-year sentences as fulfillment on contracts they didn’t read thoroughly,” Mort admitted.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.
“You’re not going to refuse to work for me on principle?”
“I don’t have that many principles, Mort, and the ones I have are pretty flexible. So what’s the gig?”
“I need someone killed,” Mort said.
“What do you need me for?” I asked. “You’ve got to have dozens of killers wandering through the doors every hour on the hour.”
“I do, but they can’t take this guy out. He’s got some real juice, magically speaking.”
“Like Clive?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the boy snorted out a laugh. “If Clive were actually talented, and ever had more power in his whole body than you have stored in your pinky finger.”
“I typically don’t just kill random people as favors for demons. That’s a good way to really irritate a guardian angel, you know,” I said. Since he already knew about Glory, I could use her as the “bad cop” to try and spin this negotiation to something I wouldn’t hate doing.
Hell Freezes Over - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella Page 4
