I made my way to the back of the room, stopping before the priest’s compartment. I touched the wooden door, making contact with the door and frame at the same time. I gathered my will and whispered “combino.” The wood blended together along the crack, effectively sealing the door. I was pretty sure I could let him out when I was finished.
I opened the door and let myself into the other compartment of the confessional and sat down. I looked at the low, padded rail, then thought better of it. Kneeling has never been one of my things, and I didn’t feel like I was starting today.
“Welcome, my son. What is troubling you tonight?” The priest’s voice through the grille was soothing, warm and compassionate. It didn’t sound anything like the bellowed Enochian from my dream, but who knew what evil lurks in the hearts of men, right?
“How did you know I came for confession?” I asked.
“It’s 5AM, son. There are only three reasons someone comes into a church before dawn. They’re looking for a place to sleep, they’re looking for something to steal, or they’ve got something to confess. You’re too well-dressed to be homeless, so I’m choosing to err on the side of virtue over larceny.”
I gave a little chuckle. “Well, you’re right, padre. I’m not here to crash, and I’m not here to steal. I’m here looking for answers.”
“Many come through our doors seeking answers. I have hope that I can provide you with what you seek.”
Man, this guy was good. He had the whole sincerity thing down cold. “I hope so too, Father.”
“What can I do for you, my son?” He asked.
I focused my attention on the face past the grate and said “I need to know what happened the Standish and Nettles families.” The priest’s head snapped up and I saw his eyes go wide through the mesh screen.
“I’m sorry?” he said, as though he were having trouble hearing me.
“I said, I need to know what happened to the Standishes and the Nettles. You remember them, right?” I growled through the screen. “Parishioners here, brutally murdered this week, father killed his wife and children then opened up every vein he could reach? Am I ringing any bells here?”
The priest turned and jiggled the handle a little, ready to leave. Unfortunately for him, there wasn’t really a door anymore.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna work,” I said.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I might have fused the wood together at the doorjamb. I’ll let you out when I’m done with my questions. Now, what do you know about what killed these families?” I asked.
“Nothing,” the priest replied. “I just heard about Annie and her family this morning, and then for the same thing to happen to Jim and Sandy…well, it’s terrible. I can’t understand why anyone would want to hurt them. They are both lovely families, well-liked within the church, and…” He looked up at me, and his eyes narrowed. “Are you with the media? I will not have these families turned into some kind of spectacle just for your ratings or sales numbers.”
I liked this guy. If my dreams weren’t pointing toward him as a mass murderer and perhaps the vessel for the destruction of my entire city, he seemed like somebody I could drink a beer with. But everything I’d seen showed him up to his eyeballs in this shitpile, so I had to stay on him.
“I’m not with the media. I’m with the police.” Not exactly true, but I’ve been lying to priests since my first confession somewhere along about the time electric light bulbs were starting to catch on. I pressed my badge to screen, then took it down before he got a good look at it. No need to waste time explaining exactly what the Department of Homeland Security’s Paranormal Division was, I thought. “I know you knew the families. I know they were members here. What else can you tell me about them?”
“Nothing,” he said, and his voice shook with emotion. “They were all members, yes. The children were active in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School in the summer. Jim Nettles played on the church softball team. Annie Standish volunteered with our annual coat drive in the winter. Darin Standish, I didn’t know him as well, but he came to services once or twice a month, and was always friendly. There’s no reason for anyone to want to harm these people.”
Except you, or whatever’s living in your skin, I thought. “Padre,” I said, letting a little menace creep into my eyes. “I know there’s something going on with you and these families. The only point of convergence is right here at your pulpit. So think about it. What is it that got these people killed? What happened here last Sunday?” I opened my Sight to watch his aura while he replied. It glowed with a steady yellow light, purity tinged with blue for a protector. This was a man who genuinely cared about his flock. So why did he cast a spell in an ancient magical language to make Darin Standish and Jim Nettles murder their families?
“Nothing happened, I swear it! Sunday was a perfectly normal Mass. The Nettles family were all at the morning Mass, and the Standishes attended the later service. Carey was very excited; he was going to see his first Panthers game with his father that afternoon. I told him I hoped he got a football.” He did, too. The ball I found in his bed was an official NFL ball, one of the ones Cam Newton, the Panthers quarterback, gave to kids in the stands after he scored a touchdown.
I heard a choked sob from the screen. “Why would someone do this, Detective? Who does this to a family? To children?” The only change in his aura was a tinge of red with his anger. No black, no gray, no nasty greens and browns that indicated guilt, or possession, or lies. He was the real deal, a pastor genuinely upset at losing members of his flock.
“I don’t know, Father,” I said, reaching up and touching the screen where his hand was pressed. I felt nothing, not even a tingle of malicious magic. This man was as holy and God-touched as anything I’d ever encountered. It didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t know,” I repeated, “but I’m damn sure going to find out.” I opened the door and stepped out, touched the other door and released my spell, then scanned the sanctuary, reaching deep with my Sight to find something, anything that could point me in the direction of whatever was turning God-fearing, football-loving Catholics into some of the worst butchers of humanity I’d ever seen.
I walked the sanctuary for several minutes while the priest cried and prayed in the confessional. The whole time I paced the room, I scanned it for some demonic taint, some evidence of dark magic. There was nothing. Not even a mischievous pixie or a disgruntled brownie upset by the cleaning crew. It was the most blessed building I’d seen in years, and that made it all the more perplexing. Because something in this church was turning men’s hands against their own families, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.
Then my phone rang, and I was forcibly reminded that it wasn’t my life at risk.
Chapter 13
“This better be a real emergency,” I said into the phone. “Like the Krispy Kreme on Sharon Amity is out of glazed doughnuts, or something equally important.”
“Where are you?” Flynn’s voice was heavy with sleep.
“I went to church,” I replied.
“Did anything burst into flames?” Even sleepy, she was still a smartass.
“Both my ass and the building are still intact. As a matter of fact, as holy places go, it might be the most sanctified place I’ve ever set foot. I’m pretty certain that I’m the most unholy thing to set foot in the church in weeks.”
“Well, something there has been doing a number on people, because we have another dead family, this one right off Wendover, not three miles from the church.”
“Goddammit,” I muttered. “I was literally just inside the place, for the last hour and change. There is no way anyone there did anything magical, black or otherwise, within the last month. It’s cleaner than the friggin’ Vatican,” I said. Admittedly, there’s a lot of magic thrown around the Vatican on any given Sunday, so maybe that wasn’t the best analogy, but Flynn understood where I was coming from.
“I’m on my way to
the new crime scene. I’ll text you the address.”
“I’ll see you there,” I said, then slid my finger across the screen, ending the call. The text from Flynn came in moments later. I dropped the address into my GPS app and found the house, less than five minutes away. I opened my car door and slid behind the wheel, preparing to go walk through my third incredibly violent crime scene in as many days.
After a few seconds, I put my head against the steering wheel and closed my eyes. Visions of the Standish and Nettles homes flashed before my eyes: pictures of abandoned kids’ rooms, mothers with their throats cut so deeply they were almost decapitated, dead fathers sitting on their bedroom floors staring at the carnage they had wrought.
“Fuck that noise,” I said to myself, and cranked the car. I pulled out into traffic away from the crime scene. It was time to start getting to the bottom of this shit, one way or another. And it looked like it was definitely going to be “another.”
A quick Google search on my phone showed me that Danvar the Magnificent was playing at The Laugh Laboratory, a comedy club styled after a mad scientist’s lab located in the NC Music Factory, a renovated mill turned into a set of nightclubs, restaurants, and party zones. I expected the place to be pretty much deserted at dawn, and I wasn’t disappointed. The parking lot was empty except for a couple of pickup trucks with Super Clean Party Clean-Up logos on the side, and a green Mini Cooper with a scruffy looking dude asleep behind the wheel. I thought about rousing the sleeping beauty and sending him home, but if he was drunk enough that he shouldn’t drive, but smart enough to actually not drive, I figured I was doing the world a favor by letting him sleep it off.
I looked around, saw no sign of the cleaning crew, and walked around to the back door of the Laugh Lab. It was locked, of course, but that didn’t matter to me. I thought about picking the lock, just to make sure I still could, then decided that kneeling in front of a doorknob in broad daylight was exactly how I never wanted to start a conversation with a nervous cop or security doofus.
I pressed my hand to the deadbolt and whispered “recludo.” I felt the tumblers click into place through my fingertips and turned the knob easily. The door whispered open, and I ducked through into the (hopefully) deserted club.
For once, things went my way and the club was empty. I navigated a maze of tables and chairs, meandering through to the dressing room off the side of the stage. Behind a thin black curtain was a short hallway with two doors on one side and one at the end. The first door had a simple piece of white tape on the door reading “Opener.” The second door said “Employees Only,” and the door at the end of the hall had an honest to God gold glittery star on the door above a small printed piece of paper that read DANVAR THE MAGNIF. I guess they ran out of room on the page to make truly magnificent.
I tried the dressing room door, but it was also locked. A quick spell, and I was inside. The dressing room was spacious, way more room than one assistant-raping magician needed. A makeup counter with lights surrounding the mirrors dominated one wall, covered in flowers in vases and bouquets just lying around. A long couch sat under a series of photos of famous comedians and magicians on the opposite wall, and a small fridge with a microwave on top sat next to the door. A small door marked “restroom” stood closed at the back of the room, but it was on the makeup counter where I found what I needed.
“Here we go,” I said, opening the makeup kit. I pawed though the various concealers, blushes, and creams until I found what I was looking for—a small black plastic comb. I plucked a few hairs from the comb and sat down cross-legged in the floor.
From my pockets I pulled out a selection of spell components and set them on the floor in front of me. Four candles for the four points of the compass, check. Knife, check. Chalk, check. Matches, check. String, check. I drew a hasty circle around myself, then placed the candles at the cardinal compass points. I lit each candle in turn—North, East, South, West—for positive spell casting. If I were casting a spell intended to harm, I would have drawn the circle widdershins and invoked the candles backwards, but this was a simple finding spell, nothing dark about it, except my intentions for Danvar once I found him.
I plucked a few hairs from the comb and set them on the floor in front of me. I drew my knife and cut my thumb, squeezing a few drops of my blood onto the hairs, then placed the blade of the knife across the hairs. I focused my will on the blade, blood and hairs, muttered “contineo,” and released my will onto the knife. It blazed with white light, then flickered to darkness. I picked the knife up and stood up, slowly turning inside my circle. As the point of the knife neared the northern compass point, it began to glow, brightening as it zeroed in on a direction. I continued to turn, slowly rotating past the direction the knife indicated I should go. As I got further away from pointing north, the glow faded more and more until it was dark. I turned in the other direction, reversing course, and as I neared north, the blade shone once again, confirming the spell worked.
I reached out with a foot and scrubbed out the edge of my circle, feeling an inrush of energy as the protections dissipated. I flicked my fingers, and the candles went out, snuffed by my will. North. Danvar was somewhere to the north of me. Didn’t make sense, all the decent hotels were to the southeast, in downtown. Unless Danvar purposefully didn’t stay in decent hotels.
Decent hotels mean decent security, and means that people aren’t used to hearing screams from the rooms next door. But north, north led to the University, which was also pretty clean-cut. Then it came to me—Sugar Creek. There were a lot of cheap hotels near the intersection of Sugar Creek Road and I-85, and a lot of them weren’t the type of place to report the occasional loud noise in the middle of the night.
I left the Laugh Lab the way I came, equally unnoticed, and got back in my car. The guy sleeping in his Mini was gone, and I pulled out of the Music Factory without seeing another soul. I turned left onto Tyron, heading north to Sugar Creek with a dagger blazing merrily away on the passenger seat.
My gut was right. The dagger kept glowing like a firebrand as I turned left onto Sugar Creek, then cruised into the parking lot of the Imperial Extended Stay Motel right beside the interstate. The parking lot was mostly deserted, with the construction workers that took up most of the rooms in the hotel out on job sites. I pulled into a parking spot beside a banana yellow Cadillac with New Jersey vanity plates that read MAGICMN.
The dagger kept glowing as I pointed it toward the door, so I figured my intuition and magic had led me to the right place. I dispelled the location charm with a wave of my hand and a pinch of salt from a McDonald’s bag crumpled up in the floorboards behind my passenger seat. The spell was effective, but there aren’t very many times when you really want to be carrying around a knife that glows like a roman candle.
I stepped out of the car and leaned on the bumper of the Cadillac. A moment’s concentration and I whispered “aqua,” sending my energy into the gas tank of the car. With no other magical changes to the car, it wasn’t going to run very well with a tankful of clean water. Danvar’s getaway handled, I stepped up to what I thought was his door and kicked it in.
Sometimes I forget my own strength and the shoddy nature of modern construction. The door didn’t just open, it flew off the hinges and slammed into the TV sitting on the end of the dresser. The TV toppled forward and shattered on the floor, and I heard another thump and a muffled shriek as a body hit the floor.
I stepped through the door and looked around. Danvar the Magnificent was lying on his back on the floor between the bed and the wall. In front of him was the ubiquitous cheap hotel round table covered with playing cards, an empty Wild Turkey bottle, a single overturned yellow plastic cup, and a huge glass bong with a naked mermaid on the front with the carburetor protruding from her legs.
Danvar was a remarkable sight, the finest example of not wanting to see behind the curtain that I’d ever encountered without demonic involvement. He lay flat on his back, turtled in a cheap hotel chair that
had apparently gone over with him in it when I kicked the door in. His skinny legs stuck out of his white striped boxers, and his arms flailed the air unconstrained by anything more than a yellowed wife beater. He looks to be at least seventy, gaunt to the point of being skeletal, with a lush white goatee his only visible hair anywhere.
“What the fuck?” Danvar bellowed from the floor.
A skinny woman in nothing but black lace panties stood up from the floor on the far side of the room. I quickly surmised that she was the cause of the thump and squeal I heard when I “opened” the door. She looked to be about twenty-five, with brown hair and a birthmark just to the left of her bellybutton. I figured she was the new “assistant.”
“You want to leave,” I said to her.
“I can’t leave my master,” she replied, casting a loving glance in Danvar’s direction.
“Can you at least go lock yourself in the bathroom until the crashing and cursing stops?” I asked. She nodded and did just that.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, shitbait?” Danvar asked me, coming to his feet and getting untangled from the chair and table.
“You’re Danvar the Magnificent, right?” I asked, focusing my will around my right hand.
“Yeah, I’m Danvar. And I believe I asked you who the fuck you are.”
“I’m Quincy Harker, motherfucker, and this is my town. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
“Nope,” he said, diving onto the bed, his hand darting under the pillows and coming out with a small black revolver.
He squeezed the trigger, but I was ready. I held up my hand and shouted, “Perfringo!” The magic enveloped the handgun, and it blew up. That did a number of bad things to Danvar, including blowing his fingers off. One whizzed by my ear, splattering bloody mist all over the right side of my face. One blew backward and smacked Danvar in the forehead, and I think the rest were reduced to tiny pieces by the explosion.
Danvar collapsed onto the bed, howling and clutching his wrist. He held up the damaged stump and shrieked at me. “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck?”
Hell Freezes Over - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella Page 9
