80 Proof Hex Read online

  I let the KSG hang by the tac sling and maneuvered it back under my trench coat. I pulled off one of my gloves so I wouldn’t get blood on my phone. I pulled the cell from my coat pocket and dialed.

  “It’s down. I’m on C street. Get here quick.”

  I hung up and put the phone back. I turned around and looked for the tour group. A few of them had just kept on running. I was pretty sure I could make out a few outlines in the distance as they fled. Most had run far enough to get behind any perceived cover they could find and turned back to gawk. The girl with the beanie and pigtails was in the back of a pickup truck with her mom.

  I’ll say one thing for the girl, she may have stood around screaming too long, but when the time came, she did what she had to survive. I wanted to admire that, but my balls hurt too much for that to happen.

  I walked towards them, moving gingerly. They all looked terrified. I didn’t blame them. The first time you see a huge, man-eating, zombie elk, it can be a little jarring.

  “Everyone alright?” I asked.

  No one responded.

  I looked at the mom. She was looking at me, but her eyes were wide and wild. I raised my gloveless hand and snapped loudly. Her eyes came back into focus.

  “What? What was, What?”

  It was all she could stammer out. Again, jarring experience.

  “Definitely not part of the tour,” I said. “Not to worry, I’ll have it cleaned up in a jiffy.”

  I turned to the little girl. Her eyes and cheeks were bright red and stained wet with tears.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, not seeming like she was actually sure.

  I leaned forward; she leaned back. I suppose I was dressed like a drug lord’s assassin and covered in blood.

  “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. He’s never going to hurt anyone ever again.”

  She nodded again.

  I stepped back, raising my voice so everyone on the street could hear. People had filed out of a few of the bars at the sound of gunshots. Which if you think about it, is pretty damn stupid. Most of them had their phones out, filming. Great. Good thing I’d remembered to put my balaclava on.

  “Folks, I apologize for the inconvenience. Nothing to fear. I’ll have everything cleaned up momentarily. I would advise that all of you return to your rooms, drink heavily, and try to get a good night’s sleep. Repeat those last two steps until you feel better.”

  I saw a pair of headlights appear on the street and heard the low rumble of the small pickup.

  Carl pulled up and stopped next to the Hellion’s corpse. I strode over. Carl got out of the truck, which thankfully had the plates covered with black plastic bags. He wore a ski mask and looked like he was about to knock over a gas station. He was snuggled in a dark peacoat and black snow pants. His matching snow boots looked nice to my cold feet. My own leather boots hadn’t kept the snow out.

  “Everyone okay?” He asked, looking around at the scattered tour group.

  “Yea. Got to them just in time. No casualties. Well, other than him.” I pointed at the corpse.

  “We need to move quick. Calls already gone out. Sheriffs are on their way.”

  I nodded, moving to the back of the pickup. There were two five-gallon gas cans strapped down in the bed of the truck. I grabbed a can. Carl took the other. I started at the head, Carl the feet. We opened the cans and started dumping. The holy water came out in bursts.

  Everywhere it struck the corpse, flesh and blood dissolved instantly, bubbling like vinegar poured into a baking soda volcano. Just like anointing oil, holy water is highly acidic to things from down south of the eternal border. You can’t buy any old holy water either. It has to be the real deal, truly blessed. Luckily for me, Carl’s a God’s honest Holy Man. He could pray and bless the water from our sink.

  Carl was my roommate. We’d met the year before. He’d been my upstairs neighbor before our apartments had been trashed by a rampaging Ogre. It had its disadvantages, one of them being his strict no alcohol policy. Again, God’s honest Holy Man. On the upside, it was nice to have someone to help out and provide an endless supply of Hellion acid.

  We worked quickly, emptying the cans on the corpse and turning it into a puddle of sludge. Once we finished, we put the cans back in the truck. I could hear the faint sound of sirens. I tossed my trench coat into the back of the truck, not wanting to get blood in the cab of Carl’s truck. I opened the passenger side door and sat down, leaving my legs hanging out. I pulled off my boots and blood-soaked socks and tossed those into the back with everything else. The empty KSG hung at my side. I left it there for comforting reassurance.

  Carl threw the truck into gear as I closed the door. I rolled down my window. “Ladies and gentleman don’t forget to tip your waitress,” I yelled.

  Carl shook his head and took off down the road. Cutting down a few side streets before pulling back onto C street in the opposite direction. We drove past four patrol cars as we headed out of town. They all were tearing off towards the scene. They wouldn’t find much. There were people who’d say they saw a man come out of the shadows and shoot a twelve foot tall, man-eating elk. Not exactly what you’d call credible.

  When they’d ask to see the corpse, they’d find a puddle of unidentifiable goop. They’d find a dozen shotgun shells littering the street, but they’d been wiped down and couldn’t be traced back to Carl or I. People would show them grainy cellphone footage that would no doubt end up on the internet. It would go viral on a few conspiracy sites, but most would discredit it as fake.

  In the end, it would go down as an unexplained incident, and everyone would just have a really weird story to tell. Just the way it was supposed to be.

  My name is Deckland Cain, and I’m a badass Demon assassin. You’re welcome.

  2

  Carl kept it slow and steady on the way back into town. The mountain roads were icy and downhill. Neither of us had a death wish, so slow and steady wins the race. We sat in silence, for the most part, both of us keeping our eyes peeled for lights and sirens in the rearview.

  We crested a hill and were greeted with a view of the city spread out below us. The Biggest Little City had changed since I’d been there last. What had once been Vegas’s kid sister was now starting to have a boom of its own. Tech companies who were tired of paying to live in the Bay Area were starting to flock to Reno. The location was pretty close to their massive vacation homes in Tahoe and also had the benefit of pretty lax tax laws.

  It was small enough to be obscure, large enough to hide, and there were enough people to have a steady stream of jobs. It was a great place for a man on the run, which is what I’d been for almost sixteen years.

  “You did a good thing tonight.” Carl kept his eyes on the road as he spoke. I looked over at him, his face awash in orange light as we passed a streetlamp.

  “Just wish someone was paying me for it,” I said.

  “Not everything is about money.”

  “Tell that to our landlord.”

  Carl smirked. He had more to say, but the damned smirk on his face said enough.

  I’d met Carl about a year earlier. He’d been my upstairs neighbor. I’d had my fair share of those at my old place in South San Francisco. Most of them had been deadbeats, but when Carl had moved in, he’d been different. He had come to the city to start a church. Like I said before, Carl’s a God’s honest Holy Man, the real deal. He talked the talk and somehow managed to walk the walk too. To be frank, it’s annoying as hell most the time.

  He was also the only person in the last decade that had gotten mixed up with me and didn’t hate my guts, even after I’d nearly got him killed a few times over the past year. We’d moved to Reno out of necessity, well I had. Carl just hadn’t had much of a choice but to come with me, not that he’d ever admit it.

  Ten months earlier, I’d stopped Moloch, the Demon Lord of Hate, from coming out of Hell to kill everyone on the planet. Usually, you’d think someone would ge
t a medal for that kind of thing. I sure as hell thought so. The problem was, the people who wanted me dead or imprisoned didn’t really give a damn. Turns out if you sell your soul to a Demon, people stop caring about anything else other than punishing you, despite your reasons. Rude, I know.

  Carl was different though. He knew that I’d sold my soul. He didn’t seem convinced it was as damning as the rest of the world did. Carl was sure that there was still hope for me and had an annoying habit of trying to make me believe him.

  “You work in the morning?” I asked.

  “Five o’clock sharp.”

  I glanced at the radio. It was past eleven already.

  “You’re going to be tired.”

  “Good thing I work at a coffee shop.”

  “Yea. A real divine appointment.”

  He smirked again. He did that a lot whenever I made stupid comments.

  Carl was a preacher with a higher calling, but he was also a guy who needed money to live. Unless you’ve convinced a boatload of suckers to give you their money, being an honest man of the cloth doesn’t exactly pay the bills. That meant that Carl had to work close to forty hours a week at a chain of local coffee shops to help pay our rent. To be fair, Carl paid for most of the rent for the both of us most months. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to contribute. It was more so that the only thing I’m good at is killing Hellions and scamming people.

  When we moved, Carl put the kibosh on scamming people. That left killing Hellions, which most people don’t think are real. As far as ordinary people are concerned, they aren’t just going to pay you to go out and put a hit on the Boogeyman. I’ve met a Boogeyman before. They’re all glitz and glam.When it comes down to it, they are usually little bitches. They bleed and die just like the rest of them. Regardless, I can’t exactly advertise in the paper.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Carl said. “Look in the glove box.”

  “Forgot to tell me what?” I asked, pulling it open. There was a newspaper stuffed in.

  “Open it to the classifieds.”

  “You take an ad out?” I asked. “If you want to get back in the game you just need to ask out that girl from the coffee shop.”

  “That’s not what it’s about.” He said.

  I opened the paper. “It’s not what it’s about cause you aren’t making a move. She practically memorized your schedule. I see her there every time I come, regardless of which store you’re working at.”

  “She’s in a doctoral program. She’s working on her thesis.”

  “People can do that at home, or the library. They don’t have to do it at the coffee shop every time you’re working. Especially when you aren’t always working at the same coffee shop.” I started to look through the classifieds. Something had been highlighted. “I’m telling you, next time she comes in, write your number on the cup. It’s just cliche enough to be charming if you play it right.”

  I stopped talking, reading the highlighted section.

  Need help?

  Call DC Investigations.

  Nothing too strange.

  No mystery too big or small.

  I sat staring at it, mouth hanging open and forgetting how to it. I reread the ad several times.

  “You like it?” Carl asked. “I figured we could celebrate you finally getting your P. I. license.”

  I looked up from the paper, staring at him.

  “You put an ad in the paper?” I asked. “You put an ad in the public paper? What the hell is wrong with you? You know that people are looking for me.”

  “I didn’t put your name. DC Investigations could be anyone. Besides, you had to put your name in the system anyway to get your P.I. license. I saw the paperwork when you brought it home. It has your name on it.”

  “It has my name on it because I paid some guy five hundred bucks to put it there,” I said. “Dammit Carl, you think I’d actually put my name in the system? We’re on the run!”

  “Wait, that license isn’t real?” He asked.

  “Of course it’s not! I didn’t take any classes. I found a guy to forge all the papers.”

  “Deckland!”

  “What?”

  “That’s against the law.”

  “So is shooting up a street in the middle of the night when you’re hunting a Wendigo, but you don’t see those people back there complaining about it,” I said, jerking my thumb behind us.

  “That’s different,” Carl said.

  “Not as far as the cops are concerned.”

  “You can’t just take shortcuts through life.”

  “Shortcuts?” I asked. “You think not getting killed or thrown back in the Void is taking a shortcut? You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve been on the run for less than a year. I’ve been hiding from the Venatori for over fifteen. They hate me, and if they get wind of me, they will come down on this place with the Hammer of God and destroy anything that gets in their way. That’s not a metaphor. They will send the literal Hammer of God after me. Civilian casualties mean nothing to these people when it comes to serving Justice.”

  We sat in silence, watching the illuminated city grow on the horizon. Carl was being sullen. He does that sometimes. I was pondering.

  I looked back at the paper. It wasn’t great, but Carl was right. It could be anyone. It didn’t mention anything supernatural. Sure, it implied that I was willing to deal with the crazies, but it’s not like it was saying I would do exorcisms on demand. A gnawing feeling of guilt started to fill my stomach. Carl was trying to help. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t understand the way the Venatori worked.

  Thinking of the Venatori always got my blood hot. No one knew the way they worked better than I did. I’d been one of them. I’d hunted down Hellions and Warlocks. I’d scavenged the globe looking for people that abused magic and killed them. There was no mercy when it came to the Venatori’s justice. I’d found out first hand when I’d sold my soul. They’d found out and sent me to the Void, Purgatory, the endless eternity of nothingness. Over a century of faceless nonexistence had changed me. I still don’t know how I escaped, but I knew one thing. I was never going back.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I appreciate the thought. The ad is good. Hopefully, it will bring in business. I just have to be careful. If they find me, that’s it. For you and for me. They won’t care if you aren’t a Warlock. They won’t care that you’re a preacher. They’ll only care that you didn’t come to them when you found out who and what I was.”

  Carl nodded. “I should have asked. Just thought it would be something nice to celebrate.”

  He flipped on the radio, and we drove. Pop garbage filled the cab of the truck. I didn’t bother complaining. For as pious as he was, Carl was a sucker for trashy pop music.

  It took another twenty minutes to reach our apartment building. We didn’t say much on the way, but that was ok. I didn’t feel like talking. I was too busy fuming at the thought of the Venatori. My mouth watered, and I wanted a drink. I settled for a Redbull from the cooler on the floor of the truck.

  Carl and I share an apartment in a god-awful building. The giant white box sits on a corner lot on the border of downtown and midtown. It looks like it was built before 1900 and it smells like it too. We parked in the small lot to the right of the building. Getting out, we both grabbed some of the gear from the back of the truck and walked in. I stuffed the KSG inside my balled up trench coat.

  I smelled terrible, but we lived in a place where several people smelled terrible on any given day. It was a blessing and a curse.

  As we walked up to the front door, there were three shabby looking guys smoking on the stoop. There were always people on the stoop. I could practically tell time by the way they looked. The later it got, the shadier the people who showed up were. I felt sorry for the girl who lived down the hall from us. She lived alone, and if she came back late at night, she had to wander past a group of chattering hoodlums by herself.

  Carl said hell
o to everyone, as was his way. I ignored them and dared someone to say something, as is my way. We are a comparison of opposites, Carl and I.

  The front door has a knob and deadbolt, both desperately hanging on to life. I walked in and turned around, making sure no one was following us in. That happened sometimes. I kept the knob turned and slammed the door shut, the glass panes set into the door rattled. If you didn’t keep the handle turned, it wouldn’t latch, and anyone could just push it open. Most people in the building were wise to the game now, but every once in awhile someone was either too drunk to remember or just didn’t care. That’s how we ended up with a homeless guy taking a massive dump in the hallway.

  Not being above anything, I told the landlord I’d deal with it for a discount on the next month’s rent. He’d said yes, and I’d paid some kid fifty bucks to clean it up and saved two hundred on rent. All and all, I’d thought it had been a pretty sweet deal.

  We walked up the squeaky stairs to the third floor. The old wood had been a dark brown once, but decades of use had worn the finish off, and the wood was smoother than any sandpaper could have made it. Every step screeched and squawked when you stepped on them. It was annoying to most people, but I didn’t mind. We lived on the third floor. It was impossible to go anywhere in the hall without everyone knowing someone was coming or going. It was paradise for my paranoia.

  We reached our floor and walked across equally squeaky floorboards to the door. The walls were painted a dirty white. Every year the owner threw another coat of matte white paint on top of the old layer. The paint had to be a quarter inch thick at this point. It was probably the only form of insulation we had if we were all being honest with ourselves.

  Our apartment isn’t large. It consists of a front door which immediately leads into a short hallway. There are three doors in the hallway. The first one on the left leads to the small bathroom. The door right across from it leads to Carl’s bedroom. It’s the only room in the apartment. It’s a decent size and has a small walk-in closest. Surprising, I know. The second door on the left leads to our kitchen. Past that, the hallway opens up into a small living room. There’s a second door that leads into the kitchen from the living room.