Demon Jack (18 page)

“Go.”

She turned, and within the blink and eye, she was gone leaving only a ripple in the small bit of water she had been standing beside. I turned back to Maggie, slapping her face lightly, trying to rouse her from half conscious to at least coherent.

“Hey. You with me?”

“Oy,” she said weakly.

“Alright, hang in there,” I said, and lifted her up, carrying her more gently. I moved as quickly as I could through the sewers. It took me less than a minute to find a ladder to the street. I set her on the floor. Had she been more than half awake, I would have probably earned a rather nasty tongue lashing for what I had set her down in. I climbed the ladder, lifting the sewer lid and peering out to make sure I didn’t drag us out into the middle of the street and into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. My luck was sort of heading in that direction lately, after all.

The manhole opened up into an alley behind a restaurant. The back door was open and I could see into the kitchen. The smell of frying food rolled out, providing a welcome reprieve from the stench of the sewers and sent my stomach into burning convulsions of hunger. The sun shone high in the sky, nearly blinding after emerging from the darkness of the subterranean passages. I climbed back down and draped Maggie as gently as I could over my shoulder. After a few minutes of fighting against the slime covered ladder, balancing Maggie on my shoulder and trying not to drop us back down onto shit covered stone, I was able to prop her up next to the wall beside the door.

Inside, cooks milled about the restaurant, moving pots and pans, grilling, frying, and just generally keeping busy. They didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to me or Maggie. They were perfectly content to yell at each other in Spanish, arguing over a soccer game on a portable TV.

“Hey,” I said quietly, once again given light slaps to her cheek.

“Eh?” she asked, eyes bleary.

“Gonna get you some help, alright? You’re gonna have to trust me though.”

She shrugged.

“Can’t I just go to sleep?” she asked, her words thick and slurred.

“Fuck that,” I growled, giving her face another light slap.

“Oy,‘ell are you doing?” she asked me drunkenly

“Stay the fuck awake. I mean it.”

I turned, leaving her there, propped against the wall and stepped into the kitchen. I reached over, grabbing a rack of spices, cooking utensils and pots, and tipped it over sending the whole mess clattering to the floor in a riotous cacophony of noise. Every hand stopped and every head turned towards me. I gave ‘em the finger and bolted.

Easiest way to get someone to go where you want them? Piss them off and run.

The plan worked beautifully. The guys in the kitchen tore after me, completely ignoring the mess I had caused, leaping over the pile of cookware and spices. They burst through the door as I was hitting the end of the alley, they all stopped seeing Maggie. Instantly, they were in damsel in distress mode, one of them pulling a cell phone from his pocket, the others tending to her wounds best they could.

Granted, they’d probably accuse me of trying to kill her or something, but one problem at a time.

Chapter 15

It took me a few hours time to make it to the Sunrise Inn. I spent the majority of that time weaving through back alleys and side streets, moving on foot and trying to stay as far away from people as possible. At the same time, I made sure to take an abstract route in case someone was following me, doubling back over my own tracks a few times.

The Sunrise Inn, at its height, had been one of the finest hotels in Boston. Over time, urban decay had set in and it had become a palace of a completely different kind. Now it catered to meth addicts, hookers, and other sundry types. Empty syringes and drug baggies littered the parking lot. The streetlights, usually meant to dissuade less than savory characters from conducting their business out in the open, were all shattered, their glass lost amidst the green and brown of old beer bottles. A few cars dotted the mostly empty lot, the majority of them old, battered warhorses pitted with rust and dents.

It was the kind of place where you could trade a stolen handgun to the guy at the desk for two rooms and twenty bucks, which was exactly what I did. I managed to get smokes from a half-broken machine in the lobby, considering the pack I had started with had all but disintegrated in my pocket after the run through the sewers. I also managed a pack of pop tarts and a soda from the vending machines outside with my spoils.

The room with a bed (calling it anything else would be a disgrace to proper motel rooms) wasn’t much better than the exterior. It had yellow carpet that smelled faintly of mold, a single bed with an atrocious flowered comforter and an old dial style television on top of a chipped and scarred dresser. There was a table and chair situated in one corner. A bathroom, barely large enough to stand in, sat in the back corner. It had no door and the mirror had long since been shattered, leaving only an empty frame. Finger-long thin scratches marred practically every surface, some of them still stained with bits of powder.

I grabbed the chair from the table and set it down beside the window, damn near collapsing into it. I was tired, my head hurt, and I was hungry. I wore the battering Adam had given me in a myriad of lumps and angry bruises. All in all, given what had happened, I was pretty lucky to have made it out wearing mostly other people’s blood.

“Jack,” Alice said, appearing on the bed behind me. She was seated, hands folded primly in her lap. She had her eyes settled on me, those blank, white orbs unblinking. I turned to her from where I was watching the parking lot from behind the drapes.

I wasn’t paranoid. Not at all.

“Yeah?”

“We should talk now,” Alice said calmly, though her voice had an edge to it. Something I couldn’t place.

“I’m listening,” I said, tearing open the wrapper of the pop tart, tossing half of one in my mouth. I washed it down with a long gulp of soda.

“Jack, this...” She paused for a long moment, seeming to turn words over in her head, searching for the right set. “I don’t believe you understand what you’re up against,” she said finally.

“Care to enlighten me then?” I asked, finishing off the rest of the first sugar coated, fake fruit filled pastry. I started on the second, post haste, washing it down with more soda.

“Your enemy, this thing that wants to kill you, it’s... It’s biblical.”

“Okay? What the fuck does that mean exactly?” I asked around a mouthful of food.

“I didn’t see it the first time, with your friend. Didn’t see it for what it truly is. It was still too weak, it hadn’t pulled all of its pieces together yet,” Alice said quietly.

I stopped chewing, watching Alice for a long stretch of minutes. I didn’t say anything, trying to see past the immovable veil of indifference that had settled over her face. It gave nothing away and even now I wondered if the fear I thought I had seen was nothing more than adrenaline mixed with confusion at everything that had been happening at the time.

I swallowed the last of the food and lit a cigarette.

“Alright, so it’s a demon. How do I kill it? Fuck, how do I even find it?” I asked, a trace of frustration evident in my tone. All I had going for me at the moment was Lucy, assuming she managed to make it to the meet without Adam finding her and she actually had some sort of connection to this thing that would allow her to find it. That whole line of thought, in retrospect, was a pretty hefty gamble. Maggie, the closest thing I had to an ally, was out of play. The people who had forced me into this whole mess had gone to the mattresses. All I had was Alice.

“You don’t,” She said.

I blinked. “I don’t?”

“Well, let me rephrase. You can’t kill it. And truthfully, I’d rather you not die trying.”

“Seems it’s a bit late for that. This thing has a major hate-on for me at the moment,” I said.

“Of course it does. Three times now, you’ve survived it,” she said.

“So what do you propose I do then if I can’t kill it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking at her hands in her lap.

“That’s not much help, Alice,” I said dryly. “So what exactly is it then?”

“Legion,” she said. “Well, a Legion.”

“I have no idea what that even means.”

“You’ve seen Hell, sold your soul to a demon, and have never bothered to read the Bible, even for perspective, have you? That’s... quite pathetic actually.”

“I’ve had other things on my mind,” I said flatly.

“I’d suggest you put this on your mind then, Jack,” Alice said. “Let me put it in a way you’ll be able to wrap your simple mind around. Legion, for we are many, cast out of a man by Jesus himself, and into a herd of pigs and then sent to drown. It’s considered to be one of the miracles of Christ. Think about that for a minute. It took the Christ himself to get rid of a Legion.”

I quirked an eyebrow at that. I was still mostly confused. My family had been Catholic, well somewhat. My mother had been Catholic. After she had passed away my father had traded his Bible for a bottle. Granted, in hindsight I was pretty sure the only reason he ever attended mass when I was a kid was to make her happy.

“So, you’re telling me that I’m fucked then?” I asked.

She stared at me, silent.

“Great. Fucking great,” I muttered, and stood. I took another drag off the cigarette, running a hand through my hair.

“Do you remember our deal, Jack?”

I took a long moment, letting my eyes trace over the script scarred into my hand. The symbols themselves were enough to be dizzying, wrong angles and even more obtuse curves. Each one was a passage in a language I couldn’t read, couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I knew what it granted. Kind of. I knew what I had paid, and I still didn’t know what it said.

“Not the semantics, or the fine print, but what I said to you when you agreed to this?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes,” she said.

“No.”

“I said
live
. Live and carry not your sins or the sins of others.” Her voice was almost reverent at the words. They hung in my ear for a moment, a faint echo in their intonation, like someone striking bells in the distance. It was strange the way they resonated, carrying in a long droning against the inside of my skull. The words themselves seem to warm me from the inside out, some of the ache bleeding out of my muscles. That was new.

“That’s what you do,” she said, “you live.”

I turned once more towards the window, watching the setting sun behind Boston’s skyline. I turned back, and Alice was gone.

Just as well.

Time to go meet a very new, very hungry vampire.

Chapter 16

I found Lucy sitting on the Parkman Bandstand steps. She had cleaned up, changing her clothes for something that had probably come out of a donation bin. On the plus side, they fit her well. She wore a long sleeved black turtleneck, the color faded to an almost greenish-blue, and tattered jeans. She had a scarf wrapped around her neck, the frayed edges hanging around her knees. She looked up, hearing my footfalls crunching in the newly fallen snow.

She had tied her hair back, accenting the now stark features of her face. Her eyes had a look in them of desperation, of hopelessness which nearly broke my heart.

It wasn’t a feeling I was used to.

“Glad to see you made it,” I said, brushing leaves from the steps and sitting beside her.

“It wasn’t hard,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’m hungry though. I'm really hungry.”

“Adam didn’t follow you, or try to?”

“I haven’t seen him,” she said with a shrug.

“Well, you probably wouldn’t. At least not until he wanted you to see him. He’s an asshole like that,” I said.

“Where’s the little girl?” she asked.

“Alice?”

“I guess?”

“She has a tendency to just pop in and out at random. Otherwise, I guess she’s here.” I tapped my head just above the ear. “hiding out.”

“From?”

“The things that...” I let my voice trail off. Piece one clicked, falling into place. I was surprised I hadn’t caught on to it before. I had been about to say
the things that want to drag her back to Hell.
I slammed the heel of my hand into my forehead, irritated.

“Stupid Jack. Fucking stupid,” I muttered.

“What is it?” Lucy asked me.

“I have an idea. I think I know why this thing is following me, and probably how.”

“Okay. Care to share?”

I stood, pacing in the snow, trying to let the pieces fall into place.

“The deal I made with Alice.”

“The deal you made when you died?” Lucy asked, cutting me off.

“Yeah. That one. It was a two-way bargain. Both of us wanted to stay out of Hell, Alice needed my body as a taxi, so to speak. She’s an escapee. She can’t exist here without tying herself to a mortal’s soul. Even then it’s not a very strong anchor, other demons can do it. For some reason, she can't.”