Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  With its cheap prices, slovenly service and haphazard attitude toward hygiene, the Monastery did not cater to the credit card-packing tourists the Quarter thrived on. As Palmer and Sonja entered the bar, the prostitute sipping her sloe gin fizz and the bartender drying a highball glass with a grimy rag stopped what they were doing to stare intently at them.

  “What if the guy you’re looking for isn’t here?” Palmer whispered hopefully.

  “He’s here, all right,” she replied confidently. “He’s always here.” She strode over to the back booth, where the shadows were the deepest. Her lips curled into a thin, cold smile. “Hello, Malfeis.”

  The demon returned her smile, licking his lips with a forked tongue. “Ah, Sonja! Please, call me Mal! There is no need to stand on formalities.”

  Palmer frowned. Whatever he’d been expecting to find, it definitely wasn’t a teenaged boy dressed in faded denims and a Shred or Die T-shirt. A skateboard, its belly painted to depict an eyeball wreathed in Day-Glo flames, leaned against the converted pew.

  “This is who you came here to meet? Are you joking?” he asked in disbelief. “This kid isn’t even old enough to be in here!”

  Malfeis lifted an upswept eyebrow in amusement. “Who’s the new Renfield, Sonja?”

  “My name’s not Renfield.” Palmer snapped, fighting the urge to grab the snot-nosed little skate punk by his rat-tail. “What’d you mean by that?”

  Sonja waved him silent. “I’ll explain after I tend to business. Wait for me at the bar, Palmer.”

  “But—”

  “I said wait at the bar.” Her voice was as hard and cold as steel, and as just as unyielding. She waited until Palmer left before taking her place in the booth.

  “Quite a change from the last time, Mal,” she said, gesturing to his current manifestation. “Last time I saw you, you were a Rastaman.”

  The demon shrugged, smiling slyly. “I like to keep it fresh. So, what brings you back into my clutches, sweet thing?”

  “I think you already know that.”

  “Do I?”

  “Don’t play cute with me, Mal. I don’t have the time or the patience right now. I need to know what Pangloss has up his sleeve.” She pulled the letter from Pangloss from her jacket, sliding it across the table.

  Malfeis tapped the folded paper with an overly long fingernail and grunted. “Easy enough. What’s in it for me?”

  She produced a black ceramic vessel the size of an unguent jar from her pocket and held it out toward the demon. “Got it in from Katmandu just last week. The powdered skull of a man who killed six Tibetan holy men, then murdered and raped three missionaries. Its good shit, man, as pure as you’ll find it.”

  Mal’s catlike eyes filled with a strange fire. His fingers drummed nervously against the tabletop. “Gimme a taste.”

  Sonja carefully unscrewed the lid and dispensed a pinch of a fine, chalky yellow powder into the demon’s outstretched palm. The demon daubed a forefinger in the pulverized skull and popped it his mouth.

  “So? What’s the verdict? Deal?”

  Mal nodded, appreciatively. “Done.”

  Sonja pushed the jar over to Malfeis’s side of the table. The demon brought out a gold-plated razor blade and a flat piece of volcanic glass, quickly arranging himself a generous rail of powdered skull. Oblivious to his surroundings, Malfeis lowered his head to the table and inhaled the line with both nostrils, snuffling like a bloodhound. He jerked his head up when he was finished, blowing out his cheeks and shaking himself like a winded stallion. His eyes were too big and the pupils slitted unnaturally, but otherwise he still looked human.

  “Cold-blooded! That some true righteous shit!” He grinned, showing a mouthful of shark teeth.

  “Glad it meets your approval. Now, about Pangloss...”

  “No problem!” Malfeis picked up the letter and tapped one edge between his eyebrows. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, exposing green-tinged whites. A strange, basso profundo gargle rumbled from deep inside his narrow, hairless chest, but no one in the bar seemed to notice. After a second or two he reconnected, his eyes dropping back down like the symbols on a slot machine.

  “There’s not much available information concerning Pangloss, outside of his recent attempts to make contact with you. That much seems up front. There does seem to be a bit of a buzz concerning Morgan, though.”

  “Really? What about?”

  “Sorry, that requires First Hierarchy clearance. I don’t have the necessary power to access that information for you, at least not in detail. I can tell that whatever it is Morgan is doing, it’s generating a great deal of speculation among the First and Second Hierarchies. But whether that means they approve of what he’s doing is impossible to say.”

  “Don’t you have some connections? I thought your uncle was a Second Hierarch.”

  “Uncle Oeillet? He’s not exactly what you’d call a big wheel nowadays. His star’s been on the decline since the Reformation. He’s in charge of tempting people to break their vows of poverty, for crying out loud! Still, a direct hookup with him rates a blood sacrifice of at least three quarts. I wish I could cut you a better deal on that, babe, but them’s the rules.”

  Palmer glowered first at the highball in his hand then back at Sonja, still talking with the fresh-faced punk with the funny-looking eyes. The Black Madonna stared down at him from her place above the liquor. The Black Baby Jesus looked like a doll someone had dropped down a coal chute, its chubby uplifted arms ending in misshapen fists, thanks to fungus rotting off its fingers.

  “Hey there, mister,” the prostitute at the end of the bar leered. “You looking to party?”

  He shook his head without looking up from his drink. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  There was something in her voice that made him look up, and what he saw was enough to make him gasp in horror. Seated at the end of the bar was Lola. He could feel insanity rushing toward him, yawning like a snake eager to swallow him whole, right down to his cigarillos and library card. She smiled seductively and moved closer to him. She smelled of sloe gin fizzes and something Palmer recognized but could not name. Her fingers were cold and dry against his exposed flesh, but Palmer was beyond shivering. At her touch, his penis became painfully erect, to the point of forcing tears from the corners of his eyes.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she cooed in his ear. “I’ve been waiting such a long time.”

  His dick throbbed as if someone had slipped a piano wire tourniquet around its base and was slowly cutting off the circulation. Palmer wanted to cry out, but his mouth had been sealed from the inside.

  “Come on, baby. I got a place we can go and be alone,” Lola said, hooking her arm in his as she pulled him free of the stool. Although she was six inches shorter than he was and barely weighed hundred and pounds, she was amazingly strong. “When we’re alone, I’ll fuck your brains out!” The way she laughed made it sound like the joke was on him.

  Palmer didn’t want to go, but it was as if he was being pulled along by a wire fastened to the end of his dick. Every time he tried to fight it, the invisible tourniquet tightened its excruciating hold on his member. They were halfway out the door before a he felt someone grab him by the elbow.

  “Back off, hell-bitch!” Sonja snarled as she yanked Palmer back into the bar.

  Lola held firm, hissing like a cat as she dug her nails into his upper arm. Palmer tried to scream, but his mouth was still pasted shut. He pictured himself being ripped apart like a wishbone as the two fought over him. Then Sonja produced her switchblade and neatly severed Lola’s hand at the wrist, weakening her grip on Palmer long enough for her rival to wrench him free of her grasp. Lola calmly picked up her severed hand and tried to stick it back on her wrist. To his surprise, the graft took.

  Once physical contact was broken, his overinflated sex organ rapidly shrank like a deflating balloon. It was the first time in his life he’d been relieved to lose a
n erection. “Lola...?” he rasped, now that he could once again speak.

  “She’s not Lola,” Sonja said. “Take my hand: see as I see.” Before Palmer could protest, she grabbed his right hand and squeezed.

  Suddenly Lola was gone, replaced by a creature with three pairs of floppy tits, arms as long and hairy as an ape, crooked legs, with a six-inch-long sheathed clitoris dangling between her shanks and tiny horns growing from a sloping forehead.

  The succubus hissed, her lipless mouth hinged like a piranha’s. She stepped forward, growling a challenge to the mirror-eyed intruder that had dared steal her evening’s repast.

  “Jamara!” The voice was as loud as thunder and so deep it sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well. The succubus cringed at the reprimand, automatically presenting her flank in submission.

  Palmer turned and saw the boy called Malfeis rise from his booth in the back, casting aside his mortal guise as he did so. The demon stood over six feet tall, even though the curvature of his spine made him stoop, and was completely covered in coarse, brick red hair, like that of an orangutan, save for his twin-pronged penis. His features were porcine in appearance, complete with curving boar’s tusks and a twitching snout, and he walked on cloven feet.

  Malfeis shouldered his way past Sonja and Palmer and reached behind the succubus and grabbed her tail, giving it a vicious twist. Jamara squealed like a sow dragged to slaughter and tried to break free, only to have Malfeis propel her out onto the street.

  “I’m sorry about that,” the demon said, his manifestation once more assuming the appearance of a young man. “I promised one of my sisters I’d break her in, but I’m afraid it’s just not working out.”

  Chapter Six

  Palmer shifted in his seat and tried to ride out the nicotine fit. He could feel the pack of cigarettes calling out to him from inside his breast pocket, nestled against his heart like the picture of a loved one.

  Sonja sat beside him, mirrored shades in place, nonchalantly paging through an in-flight magazine. His companion was an up-to-date vampire; no crates packed with native earth for her. She believed in traveling first class. “We should arrive in a couple of hours. Pangloss said he’d have his car there to meet us. I have no reason not to believe him,” she said without looking up from the article on Fun-Filled Florida Family Vacations.

  Palmer nodded without saying anything. Personally, he considered the decision to meet with Pangloss suicidal. Part of him wondered if she’d used a devious form of mind control on him to make him agree to come along. He knew she could do stuff like that. In deed, he’d seen her use it against the TSA agents at the New Orleans airport, after her switchblade set off the metal detector.

  “There is no weapon,” she said firmly, holding up the ornately decorated knife.

  “We’re terribly sorry, ma’am. Our mistake. Have a nice flight,” the TSA agents said, in unison, doing everything but tugging their forelocks as they backed away from her.

  It was easier to believe his decision to accompany Sonja was made for him than to accept the fact that he didn’t stand a chance on his own. Like it or not, the safest place for him, right now, was tagging along in a punk rock vampire’s shadow. Disgruntled by where his thoughts were taking him, Palmer glanced out the window, only to immediately wish he hadn’t.

  There were things sitting on the wing of the airplane. At first he mistook them for children, although he knew it was impossible for kids to be clinging to the aluminum skin of a DC-10 at fifty thousand feet. Then one of the frail figures stood up, unfurling its bat-like wings as it embraced the jet stream, and shot up and away into the night sky.

  There were at least six of the grayish-white creatures crawling up and down the length of the wing. Their arms were twice as long as their bodies, with long, bullet-shaped skulls and hairless bodies. As Palmer watched, the things scuttled along, bellies pressed against the plane’s vibrating skin, and, one-by-one surrendered themselves to the winds. One of the things shot upward, only to catch some turbulence and strike the side of the plan, right next to Palmer’s window. Instead of hearing a loud, juicy thump, he was surprised to discover that it made no sound upon impact. The thing peeled itself from the fuselage and peered through the window at Palmer.

  Its eyes were large, lidless orbs the color of rancid butter, which hovered over a tube-like proboscis that dangled from the middle of what passed for its face. A long, worm-like tongue whipped out of the thing’s snout, momentarily tasting the reinforced Plexiglas that separated it from Palmer, before resuming its climb back to the wing.

  Palmer turned to Sonja, cold sweat running down his back. “Am I seeing things?” he asked, gesturing to the window.

  Sonja looked up from her in-flight magazine and leaned forward, peering out into the dark. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she assured him. “They’re real.”

  “Great,” Palmer groaned, pulling the plastic shade down with trembling fingers. “That’s all I need right now.”

  “They’re just afreeti, that’s all. Nothing to get upset about,” Sonja explained with a shrug. “They’re a form of elemental and they like hitching rides on airplanes. They’re harmless, unless you get a couple of warring tribes arguing over who gets to jump off first. The few humans who’ve seen them usually mistake them for gremlins.”

  Palmer never wanted a cigarette more than at that moment. It was a lot easier to tell himself that this was all part of the rich and wonderful tapestry of life if he could soothe his jangling nerves with a double lungful of nicotine.

  Sonja seemed to pick up on his anxiety and leaned forward, resting her hand atop his. “I know what you’re going through is tough right now. I remember the first time I started ‘seeing things.’ I thought I was going nuts! And I didn’t have someone to walk me through it, not at first, anyway. But, believe me, you’ll get used to it. Either that or you’ll go nuts. Most real psychics end up schizophrenic.”

  Palmer stared down at her hand as it lay atop his own. This was the first time she had deliberately touched him, outside of grabbing his arm while saving his bewitched butt from the succubus, since their initial contact. He was expecting her skin to be cold and clammy, like that of a corpse, but it wasn’t. Suddenly the taste of Jimmy Eichorn’s blood flooded his mouth again.

  He jerked his arm away and stood up stiffly, trying to control the tightness in his throat. “Excuse me a minute, would you?”

  He screwed his mouth into a bitter grin as he made his way toward the first class cabin’s toilet. He tried the toilet door, found it locked, and then noticed the OCCUPIED sign. Sighing, he folded his arms and glanced back down the aisle, idly scanning the handful of passengers who could afford to fly First Class. His gaze momentarily settled on a heavyset man in a rumpled business suit rooting through the contents of an attaché case. Wisps of smoke wreathed the businessman’s frowning face. As Palmer stared harder at the florid-faced man, the smoke shifted and roiled, as if coming into sharper definition. Palmer’s heart beat faster as he made out the shape crouched on the businessman’s right shoulder. It looked like a squirrel monkey sketched by a skywriter and left to the mercies of a strong breeze.

  Palmer quickly looked away, unsure as to what it meant but certain a cigarette would help him deal with it, whatever it was. The restroom door opened and Palmer dived into its solitude without waiting for the previous occupant to completely clear the way. His hands were shaking as he slammed the bolt home and pressed his back against the door. Inches from his knees stood the undersized, uncomfortable airline toilet, its stainless steel bowl beaded with droplets of sky-blue disinfectant. The equally tiny hand basin bruised his hip as he searched his pockets for a lighter. He glanced up at the smoke detector above his head and scowled.

  The stewardesses were always making such a big deal about how passengers shouldn’t tamper with the damn things, so that probably meant they were pretty easy to fuck up. Still, the last thing Palmer needed was to have the bloody thing go off while he was me
ssing with it. The last thing he needed was a snoot full of fire-extinguisher a thousand dollar fine slapped on him.

  Palmer looked at the packet of cigarettes liberated from his breast pocket, then back up at the plastic disc dangling over his head like an electronic Sword of Damocles.

  Fuck it.

  He stuck some of the black cigarillos in his mouth and reached up to disconnect the smoke detector, giving himself a leg up on the edge of the toilet seat. As he did so, he found himself staring into the shatterproof mirror mounted over the sink. What he saw made him snort in self-derision. It was just like trying to cop a smoke in the boy’s room at Mater Delarosa Junior High back in Akron. His hair was starting to gray at the temples and he wore a tailored black trench coat instead of a school jacket, but there wasn’t that much difference between the fourteen-year-old Palmer suspended for smoking behind the gym and the thirty-nine-year-old preparing to hamstring the smoke detector.

  Except for the smoke-monkey perched on the present-day Palmer’s shoulder like parrot.

  “Yaaah!” Palmer shouted, losing his balance and plunging one of his feet into the toilet. The shock he’d experienced at the sight of the smudged gray thing crouched on his shoulder was quickly replaced by the fear of being accidentally sucked out through the toilet’s trapdoor, ala the bad guy in Goldfinger. Swearing viciously, Palmer yanked himself free, falling against the locked door with a loud thump.

  “Sir? Are you all right?” It was one of the stewardesses, sounding both solicitous and suspicious. “Is something wrong? Do you need help?”

  “I’m all right! I just made a little misstep, that’s all!” Palmer replied, glowering at the blue dye staining his lower leg. Luckily, his pants and shoes were dark enough to hide the discoloration.

  He avoided looking in the mirror as he exited the cramped confines of the toilet, for fear of seeing the smoke-monkey again, while smiling sheepishly at the flight attendants grouped outside.