Double-Barreled Devilry Read online

Page 3

He set the glass down.

  “Someone has moved against me in the open. They've done so by taking my daughter and killing at least one of my men. They have issued a challenged, one that will not be ignored or forgiven. Once he is in my possession, I will gather all of my friends and enemies. I will have them watch as I feed him his tongue and strangle him with his own intestines. Once I've killed him, I will kill his entire family. I will kill any friend he's ever had, and once I've done that, I will sniff out anyone foolish enough to help him move against me and do the same to them.”

  “Blood for blood.” I said.

  “You know the way this works.”

  “And if I'm not comfortable helping you murder dozens of people?” I asked.

  He leaned forward, staring at me in a way that made me feel like he was trying to set me on fire with his mind.”

  “The deal is my daughter, the Hellion, and the person stupid enough to send it after her, in that order. There is no negotiation. There is no half way. You are in, or you're out. You make a half a million-dollar debt go away. I'd say that's a pretty damn good deal, and if I were you, I'd take it. I may not be so generous in the future.”

  This was bad. There were too many variables to control.

  Part of it seemed simple. I'd killed thousands of Hellions, but that had been before. Before the booze, before the cons, before I'd made the biggest mistake of my entire life. Now, there were too many people looking for me to start playing demon hunter on the streets of San Francisco. Only, Hellions, dead or alive, draw the attention of the people I don't want finding out that I'm still alive. There was a good chance that the Hellion attack would bring that attention to the city, and if more attacks occurred, that was more likely.

  Decisions, decisions.

  I knocked back the rest of my drink. The way you do before you make a decision that you're going to have to live with for the rest of your life.

  “I do this, and it's all gone, five hundred thousand if I find your daughter, the Hellion, and the guy who summoned it.”

  Balthazar nodded.

  “I want your word.” I said.

  “May I remind you that it was you who lied to me. I have never misled you in any way. You were eating stray cats just to stay alive when we met. I was the one who took you in, treated you like a son.”

  “Save the bleeding heart for someone who doesn't know you.” I said.

  “I am giving you a chance to get your life back. Just like I did all those years ago. I am not a man of second chances. Do not squander this opportunity with pettiness. Take the deal, kill the Hellion and its master, and walk away a free man.”

  I nodded.

  “I'm glad you can be made to see reason.”

  “You have the body?” I asked.

  Balthazar nodded.

  “I'll need access, and I'll need someone who can do a tracker.”

  “Both are downstairs waiting for you.”

  Presumptuous.

  “I'll need access to your armory and a recent photo of Talia. I'll also need any info you have on your missing guard.”

  Balthazar slid over two more folders. One was a complete history and known associates list of Lester McCrane, the bodyguard. The second had a current photo of Talia and a detailed list of activities, interests, and friends.”

  “How useful.” I said.

  “Give Andrej a list of anything else you need.” He said. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Yea. I need your men on speed dial, but I don't need them getting in my way. If I do this, it's my way or the highway.”

  Balthazar nodded.

  “We have a deal?” He asked.

  “Yea.” I said. “I guess we do.”

  The body was in the club's basement. Andrej led me to the big walk-in freezer where they kept the food. A lesser man would have considered calling the health inspector to report the massive oversight in keeping a dead body in the same place used to store food. A lesser man.

  The mouse of a man waiting for us outside the freezer was Ajax. He was a cleaner, hence the name. He had probably been the one they called to pick up the body and sweep the street before letting the cops finish their thing.

  He wore his signature black tall tee and a grey hoodie over jeans. From behind, he looked like a teenager, but his face was withered, and he always looked beat half to shit. His nose tilted to the left and his patchy brown beard bled out from his mop of unkempt hair.

  His sunken eyes had dark, sleepless circles beneath them, and they shifted restlessly. Normally, I'd be suspicious of anyone who fidgeted so much, but he'd told me once that he'd been cursed by a rather nasty Warlock earlier in life. That could make anyone twitchy.

  Ajax smiled when he saw me. The little guy had been a small-time grifter and part-time exorcist when I'd found him. I'd been the one to bring him to Balthazar. Now, Ajax made good money and didn't need to spend his nights trying to run cons on dangerous people. That was my job now.

  “Long time no see.” Said Ajax. “Heard you been spending your time hustlin' old ladies and kids.”

  “Man's gotta earn a living.” I said.

  “Yea? What kinda money does that pay anyway?”

  “Mo' money, mo' problems.”

  “Well, your broke ass should be all sunshine and daisies then.” Said Ajax.

  We both smiled at that, shaking hands.

  “Good to see you Ajax.”

  Andrej cut in. “Hurry up. We need to torch the body. Trackers work both ways.”

  “I know how the damn tracker works.” Ajax said. “And if some juiced up Hellion wants to bust in here, it's gotta deal with the war room upstairs. Besides, you're the Russian badass. You can handle it all yourself right?”

  “Technically, he's Serbian.” I said. “It's not as cool as Russian.”

  Andrej stalked off, muttering under his breath.

  “Huh. Think it was something we said?” Ajax asked.

  I smiled.

  “It hasn't been the same around here without you man. Especially with all the crazy shit that's been happening lately. I need someone around who's not a total buzz kill.” He said.

  “No one else besides me thinks you're funny?” I asked.

  “I am funny.” He said. “Obviously it just gets lost in translation.”

  “The attack got everyone on edge?” I asked.

  “Yea, especially since it happened so soon after the break-in at the mansion. People all think it was an inside job. Everyone knows that it's all about to hit the fan, and none of us wants to be in the way when that happens.”

  “Someone tried to break into Balthazar's place?”

  “Yea. Hell of a thing too since he's got a billion wards and defenses on the place, on top of the small army of guards.”

  “They get anything?” I asked.

  “Nah. They got as far as the vault before tripping one of the alarms. They got away though, and that has everyone thinking that what happened today might be connected.”

  “If you can't steal it, ransom.” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  Interesting. Balthazar had failed to mention anything about a break in. It wasn't unlike him to leave out important details like that. That would be extra incentive to bring someone in from the outside. Balthazar trusted me enough to get the job done and knew I wasn't involved.

  “How'd they get by all the wards?”

  Wards are spells laid down on specific objects, usually doors, windows, or objects if they are being used for protection. They ranged from sounding an alarm to blowing any would-be thief to kingdom come. They were expensive to set up, and you had to pay to have them reset each time they went off, depending on what kind of spell was warded onto the object.

  “Hell if I know. I just clean up the garbage. Shitty as it sounds, the break in and the thing today are good for business. Long as everything doesn't blow up tomorrow, my rent's paid for the next six months.”

  He had a point.

  “You ready?” I asked, nodding t
owards the door.

  “Yea. You're going to be cold as shit in there.”

  The thermostat read twenty degrees as he popped open the door and walked into the freezer. I was immediately reminded that my clothes were still wet as the frigid air billowed out. I shrugged down into my jacket and followed Ajax through the door.

  We walked through the main portion of the freezer, the part that housed ice, liquor, and a hundred other things you'd expect to find in a nightclub freezer. We walked up to the back wall, and Ajax flipped a switch hidden behind one of the shelves.

  A portion of the wall popped open, revealing a smaller room hidden behind the main freezer. We walked in and closed the door behind us.

  The second room was still cold, but it was sterile and reminded me a morgue. Everything was stainless steel. It was one of the places where people came to get fixed up after a firefight. It was also where Balthazar kept bodies on ice until he didn't need them anymore.

  A metal table in the center of the room held the pieces of a corpse that had been mostly put back together, fitted like a grotesque jigsaw puzzle. Ajax moved up to the table and started opening up cabinets.

  “Humpty a friend of yours?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, him. Nah. He was a dick. Word was his partner was tapping the boss's daughter. Not that I can blame him. She's a total babe.”

  Ajax started to pull out the supplies needed to perform a basic tracking spell. He rolled out a map of the city next to the body, using a few bottles to hold the corners down. After that, he set up a portal Bunsen burner and a brazier. He ignited the gas with a muttered word. I felt the shift in the room when the magic manifested itself to create the flame.

  “Balthazar know about those rumors?” I asked.

  Ajax poured in a shot of liquor into the brazier, followed by some bits of ash.

  “You ever know Balthazar not to know about something?” He asked.

  “No.”

  Ajax handed me a knife, continuing to stir and add ingredients to the brazier.

  “I think he was a lefty.”

  I took the knife, grabbing the severed left hand. It took some effort to separate the index finger from the rest. The cold had stiffened the joints.

  “I doubt he was hitting that. If he was, Balthazar would've cut out his tongue and fed it to him.”

  “Probably right.” I said.

  I put the blade below the first knuckle and hacked the finger off. It took some work to cut through the frozen flesh. I set the knife down and passed the finger to Ajax. I was glad for the extra drinks I'd had upstairs. Some spells are better prepared without inhibition. Hell, some of them require that you don't have any.

  “You know, the person doing the spell should have to do that part.” I said.

  “Psh. I'm the one having to do all the work. You can cut off one little finger. Least he's frozen.”

  He had a point.

  Ajax was a naturally born warlock. That happened when something from the other side, usually a Hellion, had a kid with a human. Most of the time the mother was the human partner and the father was the hell beast. The offspring ends up with some Hellion blood. That allows them to tap into magic, the power that flows all around us, the stuff that holds it all together. Ajax knew that I had a magic of my own. I wasn't born with it, though. I'd bought it the hard way.

  The powers I had now were the result of selling my soul to a Demon. Not my finest moment, I agree. I like to call it Anti-magic. I absorb and negate magic used on me or within proximity to me. I can't be killed or attacked with magic. On the flip side, I can't use magic either. Any magical object I touch is useless to me. I also can't be healed or protected by magic.

  That's why I needed Ajax and the finger. Normally, we could have used some hair and a compass and created a mobile tracker that would always point in the direction of the person that I was looking for. The only problem is that I would unspell that kind of tracker the second I touched it, and even being in my presence, it would gradually lose strength and fail.

  We needed something that would lead us to where the Hellion was but wouldn't require me to be around an active spell for any significant amount of time.

  Ajax dumped the finger into the simmering liquid and began to chant. The words were dark and guttural, Hellion speech. I could feel dark tendrils of magic begin to crawl into our reality, the hair on the back of my neck rising. As he continued to speak, I watched the liquid in the brazier turn black and begin to boil.

  I knew what the words meant as he spoke them. It was a call to the dead man's spirit. He offered justice. He offered revenge. As Ajax spoke the words, they passed beyond our plain of existence and wandered to the spirit world, searching for the soul of the man on the table.

  Slowly, another voice joined the chant. It was distant at first, but the more he spoke, the louder it became. The sound of bones breaking cut through the air and the brazier flashed a blinding white. I covered my eyes, feeling the light warm the air in the room. I felt the sudden rush of magic as it flooded the room. My body pulled some of it into myself, the energy seeping through my skin and dissipating inside my body. When I looked back, purple dots danced across my vision, and the brazier was dry. The only thing that remained was a skeletal finger, the bits of bone held together by glowing red tendrils. The spell had stripped away the flesh entirely.

  “Forgot how much harder that is with you in the room.” He said.

  Ajax picked up the knife, holding it over the map and grasping the blade with his left hand. With that, he pulled slightly and let his blood dribble on the table. Ajax had offered part of his own life force to power the spell. Picking up the stark white bone, he dipped the tip of the finger in the blood and used it like a macabre quill, drawing a single sigil on the map in blood. It was the final piece.

  The sigil didn't have a direct translation, few of them do. Angelic and Hellion writing carries ideas instead of singular words. This one meant Guide my Path. The spell was simple in theory. You called up a dead spirit and asked them to point in the direction of their killer. It was classic blood magic, fueled by the power of someone's life force and will.

  The blood began to run across the map, heading towards the waterfront. It swirled and circled down the images of streets in a spiral until finally settling in a single dot. I recognized the area. It was industrial, and the recession had left many of the buildings foreclosed and ripe for less than reputables to do with as they please. Ajax wrote the address down on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

  “Don't go doing anything stupid now.”

  “You mean like going to a warehouse to pick a fight with an angry Hellion?” I asked.

  “Nah that's fine. Just don't go dyin.” He said. “Place is too much of a buzz kill already for that.”

  “Eh, you never know. I get myself killed; they might just throw a party.”

  Ajax held out his hand.

  “Take care of yourself, Cain.”

  “Always do.”

  2

  It was well past midnight by the time Andrej dropped me off at home. He let me know everything I'd asked for would get brought by the next day. I told him to stay golden.

  My apartment is a few nails and boards away from being a hovel. It had been a house at one time, but some genius got the idea to turn it into a duplex, walling off the stairs in the house that led to the basement. I'd never been in the top apartment, but the bottom floor was drafty, leaky, and not at all sound proof.

  I'd been living here for five years now. I'd lost count of the number of tenants that had lived above me. They'd pretty much all been deadbeats, working girls, or illegal immigrants. That changed about six months ago, when Carl moved in.

  Carl Rodriguez was a minister at a church a couple blocks from the apartment. He'd specifically moved to the city to start the congregation. He'd given up a life of luxury for a rundown apartment and general humility, least that's the back-story I'd given him. On the surface, he didn't seem like such a bad guy, and if you kn
ew my history with organized religion “not a bad guy” is a compliment.

  I walked up the path leading to the front door and moved around to the left side of the building. A small staircase ran along the side of the house, leading down to the door to my apartment. The stairs were right next to the trashcans, and more than one person had cracked their head open on my stairs trying to take out the garbage late at night. I was fumbling for my keys when Carl rounded the corner, black trash bag in hand.

  “How you doing this fine evening?” He asked.

  I grunted and kept looking for my keys. There was no way for him to know that I'd been dealt a crap hand. It had finally stopped raining, but still, it was in no way a fine night. I'd also lost my buzz.

  “Late night?” He asked.

  I silently cursed my lack of key ring organization as I reached the point where it would be awkward to continue to silently ignore him. Besides, he was just too damn nice for me to get my usual satisfaction from snubbing a holy man.

  “You could say that,” I said, turning towards him.

  Carl never looked like he should be a pastor. Maybe that's why I don't mind him. For starters, I've seen him wearing leather pants. He grows a helluva five-day beard, enough to make me jealous and consider shaving down my homeless style mane. His hair has changed ten times since he moved in. Currently, it was long on top, slicked back with shaved sides.

  He was standing there with several trash bags and a pizza box in his hands wearing ripped jeans and a Brooklyn Nets jersey. I've heard rumors he knows Jay-Z. I doubt he did, though.

  “Whole pizza for yourself, Father? Skipped that part about gluttony I take it.”

  He smiled and tossed the bags in the cans; the box went in the recycling. I didn't even know we had recycling till he moved in.

  “Oh, I've read it,” He said. “I hold a men's group the first Friday of the month. We get together to eat and talk about life and the Word. Though, I'll be honest and say I ate more than my fair share tonight.”

  I continued my search for my key at the mention of “The Word.”