by Andrew Dudek
I looked at Dallas. “You see their outfits?”
“Black leather, yeah,” Dallas said. “Not exactly practical for the weather last night.”
“But common attire for low-level witches. Here’s what I’m thinking: they had a little magical study group. They come out to the cemetery for the first meeting of the new term, planning some kind of bonding experience. They do their spell and, either something goes wrong, or it goes right. Either way, they must have summoned something.”
Dallas’s lip curled. “Yeah. Shit.”
“And when you add the sulfur…”
Dallas looked over his shoulder and spat.
“What?” Fasano asked. “What is it?”
I took a deep breath and said, “They summoned a demon.”
Chapter 4
Dallas and I stood on the sidewalk outside of the cemetery. Traffic moved steadily past. Those three girls had been ripped apart by some monster, some demon, and the world kept on going. The earth kept turning, same as it always had, and nothing could change that. I ran my hand through my hair and spat on the ground. In the summer heat the spittle evaporated.
Something dangerous was loose. Something deadly was wandering around my territory. My hand ached for my sword.
“So,” Dallas said. “A demon in Newark. Kinda makes sense, doesn’t it?”
I frowned. “What?”
“ ‘Cause the Devils play here. The hockey team.”
It wasn’t funny but I snorted anyway. “Can you find this thing?”
“Probably. Something like that…finding it isn’t gonna be the problem. Stopping it will be.”
“Just find it,” I said. “Point me in the right direction and I’ll take care of it.”
“Here’s what’s bothering me, though: something this strong, there’s no way three junior varsity witches could summon it by themselves.”
“So you think there was someone else here?”
Dallas wiped sweat from his brow. “Maybe. And whoever they are, they’re good. They’d have to have a lot of power and experience to summon a demon. There’s a reason not every megalomaniac with a penchant for destruction calls up something from the Otherside. They’re next to impossible to control, unless you have the power and the know-how to do it.”
“So maybe they didn’t,” I said. “Maybe they overestimated themselves. Wouldn’t be the first time the bad guys beat themselves with hubris.”
Dallas shook his head. “I knew these girls a little bit. Not well—I never knew their names—but they used to come into the store and we’d talk. Always buying ingredients for tiny spells: everlasting flames, wards to protect their purses, maybe a veil to cover a zit. Nothing like this. They had help.”
“Help that can summon a demon and doesn’t mind sacrificing a trio of innocents.” I shot a glance at the old tree on the hill in the cemetery. “That’s a dangerous combination.”
“Too right it is, man. Come by the store later. We’ll crack open those old books and see if we can’t figure out what this thing is and where it might be hiding.”
“Done.” I clapped his back. “Later, Dallas.”
“Wish me luck,” he said.
To his retreating back, I called, “Good luck.”
Harrison and Madison were sitting on the couch when I walked into the office’s bullpen. There was a book open between them, but neither of them were looking at it much. Instead their eyes were darting around the room, only occasionally alighting on the other’s face, and never at the same time.
Save me from puppy love.
I cleared my throat. Madison stood up as suddenly as if someone had hooked her with a fishing line. The book fell to the floor.
“Hey,” I said.
“Uh, Captain, we were just…”
“Looking at that book.” Which was facedown on the carpet, pages bent.
“Uh, yes.”
“Anything interesting?”
Madison smoothed the front of her skirt. “Not yet. We just started.”
“I bet,” I said and winked. “Come on, kid. Grab the book and let’s go upstairs. We’ll see what we can confirm.”
“Krissy called, by the way,” Madison said as we headed for the stairs. “She and Earl finished up in A.C. and they’re on their way home.”
“Good.” I kept my face carefully neutral.
Upstairs, I opened the huge leather-bound book on my desk. Habits and Customs of the Wolfmen by Ludo Crushworth. Nice name. I flipped the pages for a few moments before reaching the section I needed.
“Here we go: ‘How to recognize a wolfman in human disguise.’”
“Disguise?” Harrison’s voice cracked. “Does that mean I’m not human?”
“Technically, if you’re a werewolf, then no, you’re not. Don’t be ashamed. Being human ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
I had a momentary flash of memory, a vision in my head:
I was underground, in an abandoned subway station. It was stained with old gore and a decade of dust. A middle-aged man leered at me from behind a scruffy beard. His eyes were wide and streaked with red and gold. Blood poured from his nostrils and soaked his mustache. His sword lay uselessly at his side, and his mouth was contorted with rage. I killed him.
“Oh.” Harrison didn’t sound quite convinced about the lack of shame, but he didn’t argue.
“Let’s see.” I bent to read the tiny print. “ ‘Wolfmen will often possess senses of smell and hearing that are far more potent than those of mankind.’ Well, we know you have that one. ‘The wolfman’s physical abilities are superior to those of our brothers and sisters.’ What about that?”
Harrison shrugged. “I don’t about ‘superior,’ but I was always faster and stronger than kids my age.”
I grunted. “Two for two. ‘Even in human disguise, the wolfman are unusually hirsute; their hair grows far more quickly and thicker than possible for the children of God.’” I looked at Harrison.
He tugged at the fringes of his mountain man beard. “I shaved last week.”
“Really? Damn, that’s impressive. ‘When enraged, the wolfman finds himself overcome with a desire to rip apart their enemies and taste their blood.’ Sounds like what you told me about with those kids last year.”
Harrison didn’t answer. He was bent over, his head down so strands of hair fell in his face.
“Come on, kid. No judgements.”
“Not, like, a lot,” he whispered. “But there have been times, especially when I was younger, when someone would be picking on me and…I wanted to rip out their throats.”
I fought to keep from my face a wave of revulsion. If he’d wanted to, Harrison would have been able to do exactly that to his childhood bullies. It could have been a massacre.
I forced a grin. “Congratulations, son. You’re officially a werewolf.”
“Congratulations?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “At least now you know. That’s better than the alternative.”
“But I’m a monster.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “At least, I don’t think you are. I don’t know you, but being a werewolf isn’t the same thing as being a monster.”
“Really?”
“Sure.” I smiled. “Don’t get me wrong—a lot of your kind are miserable bastards that go rogue and prey on humans, but they’re just the ones that get all the press. For the most part, weres just want to be left alone. You should be fine.
“Now, you said you never knew your father?”
He nodded.
“I can relate. But it sounds like your dad’s the wolf in the family. Does your mom know about that kind of stuff?” I rapped a knuckle on the leather cover of the book.
“She’s the one who told me to come to you.”
“So she knows more about the supernatural than a lot of people. We should start there.” I pulled a notepad out of the top drawer of my desk. “Write down your address. I’ll come to your house tomorrow morning and we can figure out what your mo
m knows and go from there.” I paused and considered something. “There’s a wolf pack upstate. Maybe that’s where your dad is.”
Harrison’s eyes widened. “I don’t want to meet him.”
“I understand, but you should consider it. The best way to learn about being a werewolf would be actually being a werewolf.”
He shook his head.
“Fine. Just give me the address. Where did you say you lived?”
“Connecticut.”
I nodded. I’d need an early start, then. Even on the best of traffic days I was looking at a two hour drive out of the city. Add in the return trip and I was looking at a lot of hours in the car.
As Harrison scribbled the address down he looked troubled.
“Listen, kid,” I said, “It’s gonna be okay. You’re not gonna turn into the big, bad wolf.”
I hoped. And if I was wrong…well, he wouldn’t be the first werewolf I’d had to put down.
Chapter 5
If it had been hot in the front of the Rabbit’s Hat, the back room was stifling. The last time I’d been in Dallas’s office had been in March, right before the world had come damned close to falling apart at the seams, and then it had been as cold as a vampire’s heart. Dallas did his best to keep the room as uninviting as possible by keeping the decorations practical. The only furniture was a little card table with a couple of folding chairs and an IKEA desk. There was a stack of books piled on the table. More—which had already been examined and discarded—were scattered across the floor.
I was careful with these books, lest I rip some vital component of an ancient treatise on demonology. Because that’s what these books were: a sizable collection of humanity’s knowledge on demons and other denizens of the Otherside. The wizard and I had been sequestered in the hotbox for hours.
“I don’t know,” I said and closed a book, dropping it on the pile. The image on the last page stayed with me: a detailed illustration of a ten-year-old girl whose body had been turned inside-out. “We’re not really any closer to figuring out what killed those girls.”
Dallas looked up from his own volume, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead, and said, “Not a lot of them imitate animal attacks, do they? Maybe we’re coming at this from the wrong way: maybe we ought to be talking to an expert.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t happen to know any demon experts in the city.”
“I do,” Dallas said. “I have a friend who’s a mythology professor at Columbia. Knows a lot about demons and stuff. Clued in,” he added to my skeptical frown. “Not a practitioner, but not a total square, either. Knows about the supernatural. If anybody would know what kind of demon this was, it’d be Professor Bogart.”
“Great.” I stood up. “Let’s go.”
Dallas laughed. “It’s eleven o’clock at night, Carver. The Professor’s not gonna be on campus this late.”
“Oh,” I said. “Good point.”
“Tomorrow. First thing.”
“I can’t in the morning. I have to go upstate to talk to a werewolf pack for a different case.”
“Well, I can talk to the Professor by myself.”
“I want to be there. I should be back by late afternoon. We’ll go to Columbia then.”
Dallas snorted. “My mom will be so happy: I’m finally going to an Ivy League school.”
I laughed. “Yeah, maybe we can absorb some edu-mah-cation.”
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The hilt of my sword was propped against my bedside table and my hunting knife was a solid lump under my pillow. A bead of sweat rolled down the crook of my nose into my eye. Mrs. Chang, my landlady, didn’t believe in air conditioning, so my room was hot, cooled only by the slow motion of a fan.
Sleep wouldn’t come, but it wasn’t because of the heat.
When I closed my eyes, even for a moment to blink away sweat, I saw a face. The man in my dreams had once been like a father to me—he’d taught me most of what I knew about fighting monsters. He’d been my hero. And he had betrayed the human race.
A few months back, I’d killed Bill Foster. Slashed his throat and taken the Gauntlet of Greckhite, an ancient weapon that had granted him godlike power. It was his face that I couldn’t escape.
I rolled out of bed at two in the morning and paced out of the bedroom. There was a short hallway leading from my bedroom to the kitchen, then out to the front room of the apartment. The wall in the front room had a large window that looked out over a busy street in Long Island City. This time of night there wasn’t much traffic. The streets were quiet and I left the lights off as I padded to the window and looked out at the neighborhood.
My eyes were drawn to a pool of glow cast by a streetlight on one corner. A man stood under the light, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. He was thin and he had a hat pulled down low over his face. Although…was it my imagination, or was he looking at my window?
I stood in the dark window for a long moment, waiting for the shadowy figure to move, to toss the butt on the ground and be on his way. He didn’t go anywhere.
In my line of work you take shadowy figures outside your apartment pretty damned seriously. A lot of people would have closed the curtains and gone back to bed. I’m not a lot of people.
I pulled on the nearest T-shirt, slid into a pair of jeans, and tucked my feet into my sadly neglected running shoes. Before I left the apartment, I grabbed my switchblade.
I went out the side door, down a flight of dusty stairs, and emerged in the alley. The house next door was close enough to reach out and touch, but I jogged away from the street towards where a wooden slat fence stood. I vaulted over the fence and darted through the backyard of the neighbor’s house. I scaled the next fence and hopped down on a cross-street. The corner with the streetlight was just a few yards away.
The figure was gone.
Under the streetlight I flicked open the switchblade. The silver knife glinted in the artificial light. I speared a cigarette butt and examined it. Still warm, but with this heat that didn’t mean anything.
I looked around the neighborhood. I saw nothing, except for the red glow of a car’s taillights.
I returned to my apartment. This time, when I still couldn’t sleep, it wasn’t because of bad memories.
Chapter 6
Bright, early, and not the least bit refreshed, I drove to Connecticut. Hamden, not far from New Haven, was one of my least favorite types of place on the planet. Every house was paneled in some shade of white and every lawn was more carefully maintained than my hair. My car, which could disappear in the city, might as well have been dragging a sign—its dents, scratches, and smears screamed “THIS IS NOT A MAN WHO BELONGS HERE!”
Everything was manicured, new, and WASPy. I felt a pang of sympathy for Harrison Edwards. Adolescence in a neighborhood like this would have been hellish for some black or gay kid. Imagine what it would have been like for someone who wasn’t even the same species. Kids could be cruel, and with Harrison’s beard, he’d probably spent most of his childhood being called “Hairy Harry.”
The Edwards estate (and I’m only slightly exaggerating by calling it that) was at the end of a cul-de-sac and surrounded by trees. The lawn was impossibly green, even in the summer heat. I pulled the Taurus into the driveway and spotted Harrison sitting on the steps near the front door. His hair was combed neatly. It made him look like he was desperate to fit in, to not be noticed.
“How’s it going?” I called as I climbed out of the car.
“Okay, I guess. Ready to go?”
I nodded. “Just need a quick word with your mom.”
He shrugged and frowned. “Okay, I guess.”
The foyer of the Edwards home was large enough to fit my entire apartment. The floor was spotless, shiny marble, and the walls were decorated with framed paintings. I didn’t recognize any of them. At the end of the hall, the hard floor gave way to a soft-looking carpet, which led to a wide flight of stairs. This seemed like the kind of house where you could get
lost. They probably had to impact the kids with GPS tracker thingies.
A high-pitched yipping sound erupted from somewhere in the back hall, followed a moment later by a tiny ball of white fuzz. It sprinted across the carpet before skidding to a halt on the marble, barking the whole time.
Harrison waved his hand at the little dog. “Get out of here, Trixie.”
I crouched to let the dog sniff my hand. “Calm down, girl. You always this friendly to strangers?”
“She’s not barking at you,” Harrison said. “The stupid dog hates me.”
Domesticated animals take a disliking to supes, especially weres. I’d done some reading in Mr. Crushworth’s opus the night before. There had been a chapter about werewolves and their relationships to dogs and other pets.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Snarl at her.”
He stared at me with cocked eyebrows.
“Just…show her your teeth and growl.”
Harrison rolled his eyes like he couldn’t believe that I was the guy who was supposed to help him, but he bent over the little dog. He licked his lips, then drew them back from his teeth and let out a growl that almost made me wet my pants. Trixie shut up in mid-bark, spun around, and sprinted from the room as fast as her little legs could carry her.
“See?” I said. “You just gotta show her who’s boss.”
Harrison looked like he was gonna be sick.
“Harry?” a female voice called. “What’s gotten into Trixie?”
A woman came out of the kitchen, holding the fuzzball in her arms. She wore a bathrobe and bunny slippers. Her hair didn’t have a trace of gray and her skin was mostly smooth, but something in her eyes made me think she was at least in her mid-forties.
“Oh,” she said when she spotted me. “Harry! You didn’t tell me we had company.”
“Ms. Edwards,” I said and offered my hand. “I’m Dave Carver. I understand you sent your son to me to help with his…situation.”
She smiled, tucked the angry dog under one arm, and shook my hand. “You mean his little hair problem?”
