The Hag

by Erik Henry Vick

  Scott leaned toward him, his eyes blazing. “You don’t need to remind me of that!”

  Toby grimaced and raised his hands in supplication. “Sorry about that, Scott. I wasn’t thinking.” Scott tilted his head to the side but refused to meet Toby’s gaze. “But my point is the place where you’re coming from, the mindset that leads you to wonder about me, to wonder if I would have been a serial killer or something like it if I didn’t have the capacity to see and hunt demons, it’s the mindset you developed before you understood what the real world was. You’ve got to move past it.”

  “Do you really think I would have tortured‍—‍”

  Mike gestured as if he were patting the empty air into the tabletop.

  Scott nodded and went on at a reduced volume. “I just spent the afternoon dealing with our friend, Hartman. Do you believe I haven’t moved past it?”

  Toby inclined his head. “I believe you are starting to.”

  “And how could you not?” asked Shannon.

  Scott shifted his gaze from Toby to Shannon and nodded at her.

  “But I’ll tell you anyway, Scott. I’m not a sociopath, and I would recognize it if I were. But what I am, is a soldier, and like any good soldier, I compartmentalize my emotions. I can’t let them get in the way of what I must do.”

  Scott tilted his head to the side and relaxed, lifting one shoulder and letting it drop.

  A small grin played on Toby’s lips. “But still, you want a count of how many?”

  Scott repeated his one-shouldered shrug.

  Toby chuckled and looked around the table, his gaze coming to rest on Mike’s face. “Before you brought Oneka Falls to my attention, I had a list of four people I know are demons. In addition to that, there were thirteen that were probably demons, and perhaps twice that number that I still needed to check out. And before you ask, not everyone I check out goes on my list as a demon.”

  Scott put his hands on the table, fingers spread. “Forty-three people?”

  Toby shook his head. “Twenty-six people, thirteen probable demons, and four confirmed demons.”

  “But what I don’t understand, Toby, is that if you can tell just by looking at them, how can you not know if those thirteen are demons?”

  Toby chuckled. “I’m only one man, Mike. Surveillance takes time, and so does maintaining a fictional life as a cover.” He shrugged, smiling. “I just haven’t found the time to go lay eyeballs on them.”

  “It’s too bad you can’t teach someone else how to spot them.”

  Toby bobbed his head in agreement. “Yeah. I’m wondering…” He closed his eyes and pressed his lips into a tight line. “I keep thinking the three of us can’t be the only ones who have ever escaped from a demonic attack.” When he opened his eyes, he turned his gaze on Benny.

  Benny inclined his head, the movement slow and deliberate. “Your ‘food for thought’ question.”

  “What?” asked Mike.

  “I asked Benny to consider something. A question. Whether others like you and Scott exist out there, and if there are, how we can go about finding them.”

  “And?” asked Scott.

  Benny lifted his shoulders and snorted. “It’s only been a few days. I’m not a supercomputer that you can just feed a punch card into and‍—‍”

  “Computers aren’t programmed with punch cards anymore, Benny,” said Mike with a smile.

  “Whatever. I’m not a computer. And I don’t have a special, mystical grasp on truth with a capital T. Mike’s comment emphasizes one of my limitations. I’ve been in an insane asylum since I was eleven, guys.”

  “Well, what about the other thing?” asked Scott, leaning forward and staring at Benny.

  “What other thing, Scott?”

  “Can Toby teach his…his ability to others?”

  Benny tilted his head back, his affect going flat, his lips pressed into a thin line. He looked away from the table, gazing through the smoked glass windows of the restaurant. “Why is it you all expect me to have all the answers?”

  Toby lifted one shoulder and let it drop the way Scott had before lifting one corner of his mouth. “Because so far, you always have. Plus, you said Mike didn’t have a superpower because you hadn’t decided what he needed yet. Remember?”

  “Joke! It was a joke.” Benny closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can almost see it; I can almost see what Toby’s doing. But only almost.”

  “Can you see what I do?” asked Shannon with a note of excitement in her voice. “If I can teach all of you how to do this thing, our lives will get much easier.”

  “No, it’s the same.” Benny heaved a sigh. “And anyway, even if I can see what you’re doing, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to explain what you’re doing. And even if I figured out how to explain it perfectly, it doesn’t mean anybody else could do it.”

  “Then we’re back to recruiting,” said Mike. “But how do we do that without sounding like a pack of crazy people?”

  “No, there’s something more important we need to figure out.”

  All eyes at the table turned toward Scott.

  “Weapons. Firearms are a waste of time; we’ve seen that again and again. At best, they are a distraction. We need weapons that are effective against these fuckers.” He gazed intently at Toby. “We need more of your tranquilizer rifles.”

  “Yeah,” said Toby. He picked up his napkin and began to shred it into little pieces, building a small mound in front of him. “About that…”

  “Yeah, I get it,” said Scott with a sour grin. “It’s not exactly legal.”

  “It’s not that… To have mine made, I had to go to a lot of bad places on the Internet. Websites that are distasteful at best. Skinhead websites. Torture websites. Rape and rough sex websites. When I found the guy that made mine, he contacted me and wouldn’t even give me his name. I called him ‘Q’ after the guy in the James Bond movies.” Toby shook his head. “I’m not even sure if the contact information I have for the guy is still valid. And he thought I was a serial killer. I’m sure of it. Who knows if he’d make another?”

  Scott lifted both hands, palms up. “Only one way to find out.”

  Toby returned his gaze without expression. “That’s true, but that doesn’t address the heightening tolerance to M99 the demons are exhibiting.”

  “Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone,” said Mike. “Is there anything else we can use instead of the M99?”

  “There are other tranquilizers and ridiculously strong opioids—say carfentanil—we could try.” Toby drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table. “My concern is this: why are they developing a tolerance to M99? I’d never shot Hartman full of it before, and yet he took as much M99 as a much stronger demon would have.”

  “Your concern is that even if we switch to something like carfentanil, they will just develop a tolerance?” asked Benny.

  Toby grinned and shot him with his finger gun.

  Scott grunted and pursed his lips. “But we can’t go on with one effective weapon. Look what almost happened at Hartman’s place…if Shannon hadn’t been there…”

  “That’s an excellent point,” said Toby.

  “Okay, forget tranquilizers, then.” Mike leaned forward, his gaze boring into Toby’s. “What about that stuff you had in the canisters? That stuff we used to burn Herlequin. Wouldn’t that work?”

  “Chlorine trifluoride? Sure, that would work. It would work to burn the demon up, it would work to burn the room the demon is in up, and it would work to burn down an entire city block if we let it.”

  “But we used a slew of it in the middle of the woods…”

  Toby grinned and spread his hands. “I’d planned to use it for a controlled burn of Herlequin’s corpse if we needed it. I’d never planned to shoot those canisters with the shotgun.” He cocked his head to the side. “You both saw what happened, how incendiary the stuff is. Would you want to use it in any enclosed space? Would you want to use it in any place y
ou were trapped inside?”

  Both men shook their heads.

  “Something else, then?” asked Shannon.

  “Acid!” said Benny in a voice that would’ve sounded natural coming from an excited eleven-year-old. “We can get a bunch of those big squirt guns, you know, the kind with the pump thing that shoots the stream so far. We‍—‍”

  “The range on those things is terrible,” said Mike.

  “Would they even stand up to acid? Aren’t they made of plastic?” asked Shannon. She shuddered and pulled a face. “Imagine if it leaked!”

  “We might come up with something to solve those problems, and acid would be an effective weapon against demons, considering it would pull them apart at the molecular level,” said Toby in a thoughtful voice. “Still, the range…”

  “Not to mention accuracy issues,” said Scott.

  “What about paintballs?” asked Mike.

  “You have the same range and accuracy issues, I think.” Scott pursed his lips and stroked his chin.

  “I don’t know about that, Scott. We could always rifle the barrels if we can’t find something already rifled. And I think they have a special paintball you can buy that rotates on its own. Something to check into, anyway.”

  “Okay, so if we can overcome the issues with paintballs, what would we use? If we put acid in them, they might break as we’re running around fighting. They might end up doing more damage to us than the demons. If we use the chlorine triwhatsit, we’ve got the same issue as Toby has already mentioned.”

  “There are other things we could do with the paintball, though,” said Toby. “If we made our own paintballs, lots of options are doable. Chemicals that on their own aren’t that bad but when mixed create lethal poisonous gasses.”

  “Lethal to demons? Wouldn’t it also be lethal to anyone else nearby?”

  “Okay, so what about using two things that combine into a very potent acid or base—a mobile industrial digester.”

  “I don’t understand why we have to make our own paintballs,” said Benny.

  “We would make paintballs that had two distinct chambers. Unbroken, the chambers would keep the two substances apart, but once the paintball hit something and broke open, it would splash both compounds all over whatever you hit, and they would combine, doing whatever their chemical nature demanded.” Toby leaned back like a man sated by an extravagant meal. “I like this idea. It’s got possibilities.”

  “I’m sure we can find out how to make paintballs,” said Mike. “And if we can’t, I’m sure Scott could flash his badge and find out whatever information we need.” He turned to the trooper and raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m sure I can find out, but I doubt it’s even a secret. We can find it on the Internet.”

  “I’m sure it’s something simple—a gelatin thickener, perhaps,” said Toby. He had a faraway look in his eye and directed his gaze out the wall of windows next to their booth. “In fact, I bet I can get a recipe from one of the chemists here—oh shit!” He rocked forward, staring out the window.

  “Did you just remember something?” asked Benny.

  “We’ve got to get out of here! Now!”

  Scott twisted around and craned his neck to see out the window behind him. “What is it?”

  Keeping his hand out of the sight of anyone outside the booth, Toby pointed out the window. “There’s a demon coming this way.”

  “He might have nothing to do with us,” said Shannon in a wistful tone.

  A grimace of intense concentration settled on Benny’s features for a moment, and he squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, his gaze locked on Toby’s face. “No. He’s got everything to do with us.”

  “But how would he know where we are?” asked Shannon.

  “Everybody get moving!” snapped Toby. “My tranquilizer rifle is back at the apartment!”

  Mike glanced at Scott and treated him to a terse nod. They were both armed with pistols. “Scott and I can slow him down.”

  Toby shook his head. “Not without collateral damage. Not without him getting to one of you. No, it’s time to run, and it’s time to run now!”

  2

  Dan Delo strode across the small square of green grass nestled between buildings on the university campus. LaBouche himself had given him his mission, and he’d given instructions on where to go, but as Dan looked around, he didn’t see the people that LaBouche had ordered him to find. The people LaBouche wanted dead.

  Each building faced the square with a glass wall, doors set in their middles. They had signs above the doors—The Cosmic Cheeseburger, All Green Grazing, No Soup For You, and, even stranger to Delo, The Lamb and The Lion. Dan could make no sense from the names—well, except for the cosmic cheeseburger one. He supposed the others were restaurants, and perhaps the names said something to the young people attending the university—maybe they gave clues as to what sort of food they sold.

  Not that it mattered. In a moment, one of the places would be a mess of shattered glass, splintered wood, broken bodies, and blood. Lots of blood.

  Dan longed to stretch his great wings. Keeping them pulled in tight to his body all the time irritated him, which might have explained his horrible temper and the tendency to dismember his victims while they were still alive. Or not.

  Thick muscles—what the humans called a bodybuilder physique—rippled beneath his purple scales—scales so dark many mistook them for obsidian. A shade lighter, his leathery wings almost doubled his height and made him appear even bulkier. Around his head, his scales had fused into a protective helmet of a kind, with spikes and horns sticking out like the ball of a morning star.

  He’d tried to make his human visage unintimidating—he appeared as a rail-thin geek, not a muscle in sight, with slicked-back hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Very few people paid attention to him—not until it was far too late.

  It wasn’t the guise he preferred wearing, but LaBouche had been specific about that. He hadn’t wanted to take any chances that one of the humans might have recognized him after seeing him in Oneka Falls.

  As it was, he had to rein in his temper almost every fifteen seconds as young humans brushed against him or stepped on his feet or pushed him to the side. He wanted to lash out, to rake his majestic silver claws down the side of a perfect face, or to bite a chunk out of a muscled athlete’s shoulder.

  But he did none of those things.

  With razor-sharp focus, he peered through the tinted glass front of The Cosmic Cheeseburger. Inside more pathetic young humans sat, drinking one of their foul concoctions, or eating the flesh of bovines stacked in bread.

  He rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the tension out of his back and neck, trying to keep himself loose and ready for the destruction he was about to wreak on the unwitting humans in one of the four eateries. He didn’t see the five people for whom LaBouche had given him images, and he stopped short outside the door to the restaurant.

  “Move your ass, geekster.”

  Someone shoved him to the side, and without thinking, Dan lashed out, swatting the young man to the ground. The student lay there, bleeding and spitting his teeth out onto the concrete. The demon shrugged and turned away.

  He strode toward the restaurant called All Green Grazing, ignoring the high-pitched whining from behind him. He applied his intense focus on the humans sitting inside, but again, his search was fruitless.

  As he turned to approach the building with the No Soup For You sign emblazoned above the door, a hand fell on his shoulder and pulled him around.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, chummy?” demanded the young man who’d grabbed him. “You can’t punch someone and think it’s okay to walk away!”

  “My mistake,” said Dan Delo. He took half a step forward, planted his hand in the center of the athletic man’s chest and pushed him hard. The man screamed as his feet left the ground and he flew backward, landing in a heap next to the other bleeding student. Dan glared at the surrounding students, meeting thei
r gazes with hostility and open hatred. “Anyone else have complaints?” he asked. No one replied, and he went on with his search.

  After he’d searched all four restaurants and found nothing, his blood boiled, and his hands itched to take his frustration out on a human, but LaBouche had been specific: he wasn’t to draw attention to himself.

  With one last glare at the students who stood frozen and silent, staring at him, Dan Delo turned on his heel and left the square. As soon as he rounded the corner of the closest building, he dispensed with the fiction of walking, spread his wings, and soared into the sky.

  3

  Toby led them through the tunnels that ran underneath the school. The tunnels allowed easy travel between buildings in the winter, when snow covered the ground, and were open to all. But almost no one used them in the warmer months, and the five of them ran into no one.

  He led them up the stairs to the building that contained the office of Doctor Drew Reid—the persona he had created to shield himself from scrutiny during the years he’d been alone, during the years he’d been stalking and killing demons. As they came up from the basement, he glanced out through the lobby and saw another demon lounging outside.

  The waiting demon was a weird, a demon that walked on two legs, but that had four arms—two longer arms and two shorter that grew from below her armpits. She had dark, wispy wings as if created from black mist. Her malachite eyes glowed in the afternoon sun, and she had two large tusks that grew from her lower jaw sticking out of her lips. Her tusks and fangs were burnt gold—the color of fallow fields in the fall.

  With a grimace, Toby turned on his heel and ushered the others back down into the tunnels. “Another demon is standing guard up there,” he said.

  “Is there another place we can exit the tunnels?”

  “Sure. These tunnels go to every building on campus.”

  “That must’ve made it easy to get bodies to the medical school,” said Scott.