Collared

by TA Moore

  Jack grinned against its cheek, and the scrape of his stubble made it shudder. “I’ll fuck you up on the way down, though. And what will that make you look like?”

  “The winner,” it sneered, but its perfect doll’s eyes rolled as it took in the audience. “Whatever. You aren’t worth the time. Besides, you need to catch a bus.”

  Jack looked around just in time to see Clem stagger out the door and slam it behind him.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  He let go of the demon’s throat and started toward the door. A few other demons got up and moved to intercept him. He wasn’t sure if it was loyalty or curiosity, but it didn’t bode well for him. Demons didn’t care for fame, and rarely understood how to actually fight, but there were more of them. Besides, when you could twist off someone’s arm like the leg off an overcooked turkey, you didn’t need to know the proper technique to throw a punch.

  They probably wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—kill him, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. Jack didn’t know what it would mean for Math either. If he didn’t intervene to save his favorite toy, he might look weak.

  Jack drew himself up and shrugged his jacket straight over his shoulders. He lifted his chin and picked the demon in the middle to lock eyes with. She looked like a yummy mummy, with blonde hair in a messy ponytail and yoga pants stamped with more logos than pattern. But the raw fish smeared over her face and the pin bones caught in her teeth would probably scare the other mummies in her yoga class.

  He walked up to her, and she cocked her head and grinned fishily at him. “Look at you. Brave little man,” she crooned.

  “Don’t make me break out the Latin,” he said.

  The grin didn’t shift. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, visible against her cheeks, and then slowly stepped back. One of the other demons went to step forward into her place, and she grabbed him by the back of his head. His skull crunched when her fingers dug through the bone, and his face went slack. She put him down on the floor, and his knees cracked against the stone.

  Jack jogged past her, but she leaned over and hissed in his ear as he passed, and the words caught despite his best efforts to ignore them.

  “Maybe we’ll fuck bloody one day,” she said and slapped his ass hard enough to make him stagger as the muscle went numb down to his knee.

  “You’re not my type,” he tossed back as he made himself keep moving on his numb leg.

  She laughed. It was surprised and honest, an untempered scrape of raw vocal cords and sand. “I don’t care.”

  He shuddered and stiff-armed the door open. Drops of blood were smeared over the road outside, and a seagull stood over one and pecked at the blood on the pavement. It cocked his head, squinted a beady yellow at him, and flapped away as he got too close. Maybe it was a Hell thing, or it might just be a gull. It could be hard to tell the difference.

  Jack followed the trail around the corner and into a cloud of gritty, sickly sour powder. He punched through it and laid Clem out flat on the muddy alley. Fresh blood poured from his battered nose, and he tried to stem it on the cuff of his jacket.

  “What was that?” Jack spat grit off his lips and rubbed his finger and thumb over his eyelids.

  “It should have drawn your soul from your body,” Clem said, “so I could trap it.”

  He crawled his hand over the ground to an embossed bag he’d dropped, but Jack stood on his wrist and bore down until he heard the creak of bone.

  “I’d need a soul in residence for that to work, wouldn’t I?” Jack asked.

  Clem snorted a laugh out through clenched teeth. “I suppose you would. I always forget.”

  Jack kept his foot where it was and crouched down. The weight against his arm made Clem go a sickly whey color and whine through his nose.

  “If anything happens to that little girl,” Jack said. “I’ll….”

  “What?” Clem asked. “Pray for me, Father?”

  Jack reached down and grabbed his nose. The broken bones shifted sickeningly under his fingers, and Clem croaked out a strangled sound. Bubbles of blood snotted between Jack’s fingers.

  “You won’t get away with this.” Clem’s voice was thick and half strangled with blood. “We’ll see how cocky you are when I send lilim to pick the flesh from your bones. Or maybe I’ll summon your dear, dead ma. Remember how piss-pants scared you were—”

  Jack used his grip on Clem’s nose to rap his skull back into the ground and shut him up. It cut the threats short, but Clem knew he’d hit a nerve and cackled about it.

  “So you know my sore spots,” Jack said. “And I know yours. I know how long you’ve warlocked yourself out to any demon willing to sell you a spell. How much respect do you think you’ll get around here if everyone knows you can’t cash your checks anymore? You’ve got, what, one sliver of a soul left? Maybe two? Do you think that Zachariah of yours would still be trying to win you over, or would he just take what he wanted?”

  “Shut up,” Clem said through tight lips. “What do you know about souls? You pawned yours off to Heaven and then traded it to Math for his cock.”

  He sounded defiant, but his blanched eyes looked defeated. The fight had gone out of everything but his voice. Jack let go of his nose and wiped bloody, snotty fingers on Clem’s shirt. He didn’t have any spare T-shirts left.

  “Kinney,” he said. “You did business with him, right?”

  Clem licked blood off his lips and grimaced. “I do business with a lot of people.”

  Jack reached for his nose again, and Clem twisted his head to the side as he spat the words out.

  “Fine, bastard, all right. All right. I know him. The Candleman. I bought candles and stuff off him to pawn off on the pilgrims. I used some myself. I don’t have anything against the bastard, Jack, or his family. He’s just some useful nobody. Everyone knows him. Everyone buys from him, even that jumped-up sorcerer’s apprentice Zachariah. But then you forget about him until it’s dark and you need a light.”

  “Was nobody,” Jack said. “Someone killed him. Who was his patron?”

  Clem turned his head and spat. “He didn’t have one. Dead?”

  “He had a shrine in his diner,” Jack said. “The sigil was a goat head, no horns. What demon answers to that?”

  Clem looked blank. “Nobody. I’m telling you, Kinney wasn’t a cultist. He sold his soul. It was a straight trade—one and done. Think about it. Worship is like the zombie powder. You need a soul to make it work.”

  That… made sense. Jack should have thought of that. He cast his mind to the little cupboard with the grubby cardboard boxes and fresh white-chalk goat face on the wall and the pile of tainted silver that tinkled and dinged. The wife? Jack had considered the idea she might be complicit but not that she might have been an active participant.

  “Did anyone have a grudge against Kinney?” Jack pushed. “Has he sent out a bad batch of candles, gotten in the middle of any disputes—”

  Clem shook his head before Jack finished. “He’s… he was… nobody—a useful nobody. There’s no reason for anyone to kill him.”

  “Maybe he had something they wanted,” Jack said, careful of how much information he gave out. “He sold his soul. It had to be for something. You’d kill a man for a scrying crystal, wouldn’t you, Clem?”

  Clem didn’t bother to look offended. “I would, and I wouldn’t have waited this long to do it. I’m telling you, Kinney had nothing. Nobody cared about him.” Reluctantly Jack believed him. He stood up and stepped back. The minute the weight was gone from his arm—the treads of Jack’s boot bruised livid and blue in the pale flesh—Clem scrambled awkwardly to his feet. He poked gingerly at his teeth behind mashed lips. “Unless you count that cop.”

  Jack felt a chill drip down his spine like a goose had just walked over his grave.

  “What cop?”

  Clem picked a clot of blood out of his nose and shrugged. “The cop. The one who gets all the weird, creepy cases.”

  “Ambrose?�
� Jack asked. “Tall man, thin? Tired?”

  “That’s him. He had a real hard-on for ‘the candlemaker’ for some reason. Maybe he thought the Infernal couldn’t do anything if it didn’t have candlelight to work by.” Clem chuckled at his own joke. “Even willing to pay the going rate for information.”

  Jack hadn’t thought his stomach could sink any further, but it could.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered.

  “Look around you,” Clem said bitterly. “He already has.”

  5

  “THE DEVIL made me do it” is what people say when every other justification has fallen by the wayside. The truth is, the devil never coerces anyone to do anything. It’s more fun to let us get there on our own. And we do.

  THEY WERE miles and years apart, but somehow the Craven and Jasper police stations smelled the same—blood, fear, and a whiff of Hell worked into the mortar like blood. It was always one of the last places that Hell blossomed in a town—creepy slaughterhouse stories are urban legends, but if all the police in town suddenly murder their families, that’s national news—but it was always the quickest to succumb.

  Too many bad things soaked into the walls—the seventy-two hours a murderer spent behind bars while he replayed every squeal of his victims in his head to get to sleep, the tears of an innocent man in the wrong time at the wrong place, a crooked cop’s lust as he unlocked a door and made a scared drunk girl a sick offer. None of that ever went away, and it was like compost for Hell’s bloom.

  Jack slouched back against the wall in reception, a crumpled “See Something, Say Something” under his shoulders, and tried not to think about the last time he was there. It was a fool’s game, of course. The more he tried not to think about something, the more vivid it was. He was still the only one who knew why Detective Jenny Stillman had killed herself and that it hadn’t made much difference. None of it had gone away.

  The desk sergeant on duty looked up as though the bleak turn of Jack’s thoughts had made him uncomfortable. He checked the time and reached for the phone.

  “…still here,” he muttered as he swung his chair away from Jack. “I don’t care. If Ambrose isn’t here yet, send someone else. Just get rid of him.”

  He hung up and swung back around, a fake smile on his narrow face. “Someone will be with you shortly, sir.”

  Jack crossed his arms. “Don’t worry,” he said grimly. “I’ll wait.”

  The desk sergeant stared at him for a second and then made another call. This time he took the phone into the back office. Jack only caught the stressed words of the conversation, “fuck” and “now” and “creepy bastard.”

  Jack would have been offended, but there was no point. No one liked someone who reminded them of things they worked so hard to forget. Everyone in the Craven PD, except the rankest of rookies, had seen things their sanity depended on explaining away.

  Five minutes later a fat man with a detective’s badge clipped to his belt came down to reception, halfway into his jacket. Detective Harris Elroy had been fifty pounds lighter and a lot happier before his die-hard skepticism had, well, died. He stopped in front of Jack without looking at him and glanced sidelong at the desk sergeant.

  “I’m going for lunch,” he said stiffly. Sweat stained his shirt, and dark crescents were visible under his jacket as they crept down toward his waistband, and perspiration beaded on the back of his neck.

  The desk sergeant kept his eyes on the computer, fingers jerky as he jabbed at the keys and grunted.

  Harris finally looked at Jack and grimaced as though he’d just stepped in something nasty. He gave a mute jerk of his head and headed to the doors. Jack pushed himself off the wall and followed. He knew not to look back—every story in every culture told you not to—but he did anyhow, once he was in the parking lot.

  Behind the glass door, Jenny Stillman watched him leave. Her face was twisted with hatred. Lines that she’d never had before were worked into her skin, and her face was twisted with hatred—what was left of her face.

  It wasn’t her, not really. Haints were never the person you mourned at the funeral, just the worst bits of them glued back together. That never made it any easier to see the rags that were left of them.

  She smacked her bloody wet hand against the glass until it was stained like a church window.

  “Your fault” she scrawled in the blood with a cold, white finger. Then again. And again.

  It was what the haints always told him. They weren’t wrong….

  “What are you waiting for?” Harris asked impatiently. “You said this was important.”

  Jack glanced at him and then back at the station. She was gone. That early in the day, with the Witching Hour a whole turn of the clock away, she’d been lucky that even Jack could see her.

  He reminded himself—again, a mental Post-it added to the shrug of others in front of his guilt—never to come to the station after dark.

  “Nothing,” he said as he walked over to Harris. “And it is.”

  Harris grunted and pulled his egg-stained tie loose from his neck. “Come on then,” he said. “We can talk on the way to the food van. I have enough trouble without people thinking we’re friends.”

  Despite what Harris had said, they were halfway down the block before he finally broke his silence.

  “Did it smell like blood to you?” he asked absently. “Back there?”

  Jack glanced at Harris’s shoulder, at the wet red prints that stained his beige jacket on the shoulders and sleeves. They faded with each step. “No,” he said.

  “Doctor says it’s my imagination,” Harris said. “But I swear, it’s like something got in my nose and is rotting there.”

  He pulled a tissue out of his pocket and sneezed into it.

  “Ambrose didn’t come in today,” Harris said as he wiped his nose. He balled the tissue up in his hands and shoved it back in his pocket. The handprints had almost faded off his shoulders, and there was a sharpness to his voice that hadn’t been there before. “I covered for him, but I don’t want to know what’s going on. Not after what happened with Jenny. I can’t face the… the bad cases anymore, Jack. I can feel the pressure in my head, like a fault line.”

  He stabbed a blunt finger against his temple and screwed it around until his nail dug grooves into the skin.

  “You should leave,” Jack said.

  People always put it off too long. Hell was slow when it rooted down into a neighborhood. The good, the kind, and the pious usually had enough time to find new jobs, to break their lease, to head out of town. But cities went under quickly, and no one got out of Hell.

  You did.

  “It’s not that easy,” Harris said. “I have a house. My wife is a Realtor, and business is booming. Maybe in a year or so.”

  Jack shrugged. “Up to you. Do you know why Ambrose didn’t come in?”

  Harris took one of those sidelong looks at Jack again, as though the fault in his head could cope with things seen in the periphery.

  “He caught a bad case last night,” he said. “A dead woman washed up in the river. She was all cut up, like the other one a few months ago. Like, you know, sacrificed.”

  Jack missed a step. He stumbled and tried to remember the last call he’d gotten from Ambrose. It had been… a while. Until Math had crawled into the dead man on his bed, it had been quiet—no call about a sacrificed girl, and there should have been.

  “What girl?” Jack asked.

  Harris shrugged as they reached the food van. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket, the leather creased and stained with long use, and thumbed out a couple of dollars.

  “He didn’t call you?” Harris joined the end of the small line. “He said he was talking to a consultant about it. I didn’t ask much. Maybe the good Father is doing better.”

  Jack thought of Colm’s eyes, mismatched in a rare agreement as he denied prayer, and he doubted it.

  “Do you remember anything about the case?” he asked. “Any detail?”

&n
bsp; A muscle in Harris’s jaw twitched hard as he clenched it. “Didn’t ask.”

  The line cleared, and he stepped forward to ask for a pastrami sandwich and a bag of chips. Inside the van a bony man with burns up and down his arms laughed and winked as he grabbed the money.

  “Extra sauce,” he promised as he wiped sweat on the back of his sleeve. “Since you’re one of our best customers.”

  He grabbed a massive knife from the wall behind him to sliver off long, wet, red strings of pastrami. The blade chunked into the wood with an almost hypnotic steadiness. Harris, shoulder still turned to Jack, said something to the server, and the bony man laughed.

  “The secret sauce is blood,” he said conversationally as he turned away to wrap the sandwich.

  Harris flinched and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Sorry, what?”

  “Good,” the man repeated genially as he turned around. His smile was set below the cheekbones and his gums showed red. It looked painful. “The sauce is good. Everyone says so.”

  There was a pause, and then Harris laughed nervously and took the wax-paper-wrapped sandwich. It crinkled under his fingers.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” he said. “Sorry, I umm… I misheard.”

  He turned away, and the bony man winked broadly at Jack and went back to slicing pastrami. The sound of the blade hitting the wood was off-beat now.

  Jack grimaced and went after Harris, who sat down on a low wall to unwrap his sandwich.

  “I thought he said something else,” he said absently. “My wife keeps putting me on these diets, but the only time my head feels clear is when I get out of the station. I need some excuse.”

  “What happened to the woman pulled from the river last night?” he asked. “Did Ambrose say anything about—”

  Harris clenched his hands, and the edges of the sandwich tore under his fingers. Mustard squeezed out, wet and brown between his knuckles.

  “I. Didn’t. Ask,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “I can’t. I won’t. Maybe I’m a coward, but what good does any of this do? What good has it done anyone? It just keeps happening, and we keep getting broken. Just ignore it, Jack. Ignore it, and maybe it will go away.”