The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  “Dmitri,” said Semyon. “I thought we agreed that there was no reasonable way that he could have foreseen Ambrus’ behavior. Moreover, he did warn us.”

  Dmitri made a noise that could have meant anything.

  “Adrian,” said Semyon, “how are you?”

  “Above ground,” I said. “You?”

  “In fortune’s favor.”

  I waited a beat. “And how are you, Dmitri?”

  There were more inarticulate noises of discontent before he said, “I am well.”

  “Adrian, let us spare my brother and draw to the point.”

  I weighed the best approach. No matter what, this would cost me. I decided just coming out with it was the easiest way. “I need information.”

  “You can’t afford it,” said Dmitri.

  It was jarring. I’d expected something like that from him, but not the passionless way he said it. The second I made things business, his personal angst just vanished. He wasn’t being spiteful or bitter. His tone was even, just reporting a fact to me. He was right. Even at my most flush, I would never have had even close to enough money to afford information from them. Of course, I’d never planned to offer them money.

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged. “I can’t offer you cold hard cash. If you help me out, I’ll owe you a favor.”

  “Two favors,” said Dmitri and Semyon simultaneously.

  I blinked. That answer had come way too fast. I leaned my head back and thought it through. Why two favors? Why not six or twelve? Then I got it.

  “One to make up for Ambrus and one for the information?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Semyon. He sounded pleased, like I’d given him an unexpected and welcome surprise. “You should have made the offer years ago.”

  I felt like slapping myself in the back of the head. They were businessmen and, my perceived failure aside, I was a valuable resource. Cutting ties with me had undoubtedly cost them time, money, and made a number of potential deals impossible to complete over the years. Dmitri had been angry, furious with me, but I had the insight that it was the unclosed account that had kept him angry. If I’d been smart enough to balance the scales in his eyes, the matter would have been closed.

  “Two favors, then,” I agreed.

  In an instant, Dmitri’s attitude changed. “Very good, Adrian. God’s blood, man, do you have any idea how trying it was to keep pretending to be angry with you? I almost forgot when we saw you in San Francisco.”

  “What? You weren’t angry?”

  “One of us needs to maintain a reputation for being volatile and vengeful,” said Semyon. “Appearances, you understand.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  It made perfect sense. In their line of work, with the kinds of people they dealt with, it would have been stupid not to put on that front.

  “We have a great deal of work for you, should you be interested,” said Semyon.

  “You can also pay off the favors over time. We hear you’ve been, how do they say it, cash flow restricted as of late. You aren’t much use to us if you starve to death in the meantime,” noted Dmitri.

  I needed the money, assuming I survived the next day or three. “I’d be interested.”

  I could hear Dmitri beaming over the phone as he said, “How would you like to make some money today?”

  “Uh,” I said, “sure.”

  They gave me the details. It was an Adrian special. Someone wanted a particular kind of protective talisman that only three people in the world could make. All three of them resided on a Pueblo a bit north of Santa Fe. I’d spent some time there. I made some calls and, after promising that a visit would be forthcoming, the arrangements were set. It took half an hour. I called The Twins back and it netted me a cool ten grand, wired to an account I hadn’t used in a long time.

  “Now, what is it you’d like to know about?” Dmitri asked.

  Chapter 29

  “I saw something the other day that I didn’t recognize. I need to know what it is, what could have done it, and how to undo it.”

  There was a very, very long pause on the other end of the line. It was understandable. I rarely ran across things I didn’t recognize, in general or specific. The Twins were accustomed to me not needing a lot of explanations.

  “Describe it,” said Semyon.

  I thought back and did my best to describe the smoke over the grave and the feeling of utter wrongness it elicited in me. My mind didn’t want to play ball. It kept shying away from that memory, only willing to bring it into focus for a few seconds at a time. I’ve seen some godawful shit in my day, but that really raised the bar for me. The Twins spoke to each other in rapid fire Russian for a good three minutes.

  “A smoke binding,” said Semyon.

  “Very interesting,” said Dmitri.

  “Very rare,” they said together.

  “How rare are we talking?”

  “Profoundly rare,” said Semyon. “It’s not quite as rare as a Mona Lisa, but certainly rarer than an original Cartier Tank Cintrée.”

  “Cartier Tank Cintrée?” I asked.

  “It’s a watch,” clarified Dmitri. “Approximately fifty of them were made.”

  I blew out a breath. That wasn’t a good thing. It went a long way toward confirming my suspicions, though. At the rate I was going, The Twins might never get to collect on those favors.

  “What could do something like that? Could a person do it?”

  The Twins laughed.

  “Not a person,” said Dmitri in total confidence.

  “It would take a third- or fourth-order demon…” started Semyon.

  “Or higher,” amended Dmitri.

  “…to accomplish such a thing.”

  “How many orders of demons are there?”

  I knew that demons were categorized into orders, but most demon activity was done by small, weaker demons. They were easier to control. I’d never needed to know which order they were in before, so I never took the time to learn.

  “Twenty-three,” said Semyon.

  “Seventeen,” said Dmitri.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “There is some disagreement about whether the last six orders are demons proper or simply potent nature spirits of some kind,” explained Semyon. “I err on the side of inclusion.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So, for my own reference, how much juice would a third- or fourth-order demon have?”

  “This is a gross simplification, but first-order demons stand directly below Satan in terms of power. Second stand a rung below them and so on,” explained Dmitri. “Each order has an internal hierarchy, based on our limited knowledge of their membership, but at those levels of power, the weakest second-order demon could probably obliterate a small continent, such as Europe.”

  I thought Dmitri sounded a bit too cheerful at the thought of an obliterated Europe, but I kept that opinion to myself. No need to poke the bear. Especially when I considered what a third- or fourth-order demon could conceivably do. They might not be able to crush a continent, but, sweet baby Jesus, they could crush me, and the town, and probably the state as a whole, without much effort.

  “Let’s say I wanted to dismantle the smoke binding. How would I do that?”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Dmitri.

  “But if I wanted to,” I persisted.

  “You misunderstand,” said Semyon. “It’s not that you would or wouldn’t do it. Dmitri means that you can’t. Such an action is beyond your knowledge, power, and spiritual purity. To a staggering degree. It’s not that it would be difficult or painful for you. It is flatly impossible for you to unmake such a binding. The mere attempt would destroy you.”

  Holy shit. I’d known I was out of my league, but I hadn’t comprehended just how far out of my league I was until that moment. It was the first time in my life that I’d been told, in no uncertain terms, that a magical action was utterly beyond my ability. Not dangerous, I’d heard that plenty of times and, as a rule, had avoided those a
ctions, but impossible. I tried to imagine how much power would be involved to make it beyond my capacity to even survive. I was no nuclear power plant, magically speaking, but I wasn’t a double-A battery either.

  I found my hands trembling and a voice I’d been suppressing surged back into my active consciousness. Get out, it screamed. Get out while you can! You can’t win this thing. Just go. Take the girl, if it makes you feel better, but get your ass clear of this shit. I beat the voice back down, but I still felt the insistence of it. At the end of the day, I wasn’t equipped to do what needed to be done. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help Abby. I still wanted to help her just as much, but I was starting to grasp just how ineffectual my help would actually be for her. The Twins, unaware of the gibbering in my head, continued on.

  “The Pope might be able to do it, if he’s sincere in his beliefs,” mused Dmitri. “A saint could probably do it. Some of the Buddhist Llamas.”

  “Bodhisattvas and Arhats, assuming you could find one. A handful of shamans that are steeped in untainted traditions,” offered Semyon.

  I caged the panic, the fear, the knowledge of my own inadequacy, and focused. Information now, terror later, I promised my mind.

  “Right, I get it. Holy people. Really, really holy people.” Then a thought struck me. “What about someone like Helena St. Clair?”

  There was another exchange of rapid-fire Russian.

  “Well,” hedged Semyon.

  “St. Clair is an…” Dmitri hesitated, “uncertain quantity.”

  “It is possible, possible, that she could unmake such a binding. But the cost could be terrible for her,” Semyon warned.

  “Okay, so unmaking the binding is a desperation move. What about the demon itself? How would someone fight that?”

  Both men let out nervous laughs.

  “Seriously,” I pressed.

  “Summon an archangel,” ventured Dmitri. “That might do it.”

  “There are a handful of old gods that could fight such a demon, not that you could bend them to your will,” said Semyon.

  “Run away, if you can,” said Dmitri, his voice earnest and concerned. “You don’t fight something like that. You flee.”

  “Is there a single mortal practitioner in the world who could fight something like that?”

  “No,” said Semyon.

  “Yes,” argued Dmitri.

  “He said mortal,” countered Semyon.

  “They are mortal.”

  “By what measure, Dmitri?” Semyon demanded.

  “They can die.”

  “Gods can die, too,” said Semyon. “That doesn’t make them mortal.”

  “Gentlemen,” I interrupted. “Let me put this another way. Is there someone who could fight it that would be able and willing to help me?”

  “No,” they said together.

  “Awesome. Any particular reason why not?”

  “They aren’t available at present,” said Semyon. “One is incommunicado, whereabouts unknown. One is presently engaged in preventing the end of the world.”

  “What?”

  “It’s less terrifying than you might think,” said Dmitri. “There’s a fight like that going on most of the time. You get used to it.”

  “Okay,” I said, not at all convinced that was true. “What about the others.”

  “Other,” corrected Dmitri.

  “You won’t get help there,” said Semyon.

  Dmitri chimed in. “She doesn’t like you very much.”

  My head jerked in shock. Somewhere along the line I’d bumped into a quasi-immortal being capable of taking on a demon so powerful it required an archangel to fight it? More chilling, I’d managed to aggravate said being? I needed to work on my people skills. I shook my head. Fine, there was no cavalry to call in on this particular problem. I drummed my fingers against the side of my car.

  “Let’s say that I could talk Helena into trying to take down the smoke binding. What would she need to do?”

  The Twins explained it to me. Then they reiterated, several times, that there was no guarantee Helena could pull it off at all. Then they reiterated that it would be stupid and dangerous for her to try. Then they reiterated that I should run away, as fast as I could, just like a me-sized gingerbread man. I said I’d bear that all in mind and promised to be in touch. I rubbed the back of my neck and tried to think. There was a chance that I was wrong about everything. The Twins’ information might be bad. Granted, that didn’t happen often, but it could happen.

  I needed to be sure about things. I needed to go back out to that cemetery and take another look. I glanced at the hospital and strangled a groan. I needed to go, but only after I went and browbeat a teenage girl into being more pliable. I expected that experience to be some real pleasant icing on my day. After all, what could possibly be more fun than scaring the shit out of a girl who’d had nearly universal bad luck since she’d been born? For kicks, maybe I could pour battery acid on my testicles afterward to experience something a bit less painful.

  I seriously reconsidered the idea of trying to get Paul to take Abby away from town. I could tell him that she could get better care somewhere else. I could spin yarns about specialists at urban hospitals. Hell, it might have even been true for all I knew. I could play the emotional trump card. Abby didn’t seem to have any friends in town. At a better hospital, one with a serious oncology department, she’d meet other kids who also had the misfortune of getting cancer. They’d have the kind of common ground people need to strike up friendships. It might work. I loathed the idea of launching that kind of emotional nuclear strike on the guy. Given the alternatives, though, I might have to do it.

  I grimaced as I realized that I was procrastinating. I guess it said something about me that I preferred to stand in a parking lot in ninety degree weather rather than go into the hospital and participate in Abby’s indoctrination into the world of the spooky. I hoped it said something good about me. At the least, I thought, it said that I wasn’t such a wreck of a human being that I could shrug off the innate cruelty of that indoctrination. Understanding the necessity of it, especially in the long run, didn’t alleviate my own misgivings.

  That didn’t exactly make me feel better about myself. Discomfort at the notion of being cruel to a sick teenage girl was probably automatic for decent people. More to the point, I was going to carry through with that cruelty. Perhaps that was what really separated the magical community from the rest of the humanity. Maybe practitioners were built with a capacity for a specific kind of cruelty that didn’t fit into the everyday world. We shared a willingness to shatter beliefs and undo learning, albeit false learning, and impose a cold, terrible truth in its place. I didn’t think for a minute that truth was somehow better than the falsehoods most people lived. In fact, I was pretty sure it wasn’t better by any objective standard. It absolutely wasn’t kinder. It was just true, which wasn’t a redeeming feature in my estimation.

  I started toward the hospital entrance and dragged my feet every step of the way. I pondered the idea of truth. It was always bound up with a strange, psychological golden glow, as though it were somehow a pristine, marble statue that needed to be defended and idolized at all costs. I didn’t buy it, though. The cult of truth was as absurd as any other cult. Truth wasn’t some kind of savior. It was a slavemaster with a tireless whip arm. An unpleasant thought struck me as I stepped inside the hospital. That day, the whip was in my hand.

  Chapter 30

  Abby’s door was propped open and I poked my head into the room. The tension was obvious, but not overwhelming. It seemed Helena decided not to press things too hard before she called me off the bench. Abby’s face looked set in stubborn defiance. Helena was doing her best St. Francis of Assisi impression. I might have backed out of the room and let the chips fall where they may, but Abby caught sight of me. Her face split into that blinding smile.

  “Hi, Mr. Hartworth!”

  Damn, I thought. I was committed. I smiled at Abby, nodded to
Helena, and stepped into the room. I already felt like shit and hadn’t even done anything. Proactive guilt was a new one on me. My guilt usually appeared after the crap behavior. I pushed those thoughts and feelings aside as best I could and walked over to stand by the bed. I positioned myself opposite of Helena to avoid Abby’s subconscious reading my choice of where to stand as implicit support for Helena. Even if that idea never reached the girl’s conscious mind, it would inform her response to me.

  “Hi, Abby,” I said. “Where’s Paul?”

  “He said he needed to take care of things at the new place,” said Abby.

  She frowned at the mention of the new house. It had to be hard on her. She hadn’t seen the little cottage in person. The place wouldn’t be home any more than a pup tent was home on a camping trip. It was just a place to sleep. I hadn’t asked about it, but it stood to reason that most of her belongings were smoke-damaged or burned beyond salvation. That would add to the strangeness of the place. There were a lot of things I couldn’t do for Abby, but maybe I could ease that particular worry.

  “It’s a nice place,” I said. “Smaller than what you’re used to, but it’s got good vibes.”

  “Yeah?” Abby asked.

  Helena gave me a sharp look. I hadn’t mentioned that to her.

  “Yeah. If I was looking for a place, it’s exactly the kind of place I’d pick. It feels like home, you know?”

  Helena’s jaw hung open a little as she stared at me. She might have looked less stunned if my head spun around while I vomited pea soup. I guess the idea of me considering what I wanted in a home, or wanting a home for that matter, never crossed her mind.

  Abby considered my words for a moment. “It’s a good place, sort of like the school is a bad place for me.”

  “Something like that,” I agreed.

  Helena blinked and gave me a speculative look. I blinked back. I got it after a second. The topic offered a natural inroad for the necessary conversation. If I could keep Abby on this track, introduce the ideas without making it obvious I was trying to teach her something, things might go a little smoother. It was a good plan with only one obvious flaw. I’m about as subtle as a fire truck with its lights on, sirens blaring, barreling through a red light on its way to a five-alarm building fire. Still, it beat the standard approach.