Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (28 page)

“Why’s that?”

“Because my momma named me Archibald, and it’s a silly name that I don’t care for.”

Hendricks watched him, gave him a little smile. “That’s all right, no one calls me Lafayette, either.”

“Yeah, I heard you call yourself—what? Lafayette—”

“Lafayette Jackson Hendricks is what my momma called me,” he said, “when she was mad at me about something—which was a fair amount. But no one’s called me Lafayette since my momma died, and no one calls me Jack on account of I make it clear to them that I won’t abide it, so I pretty much go by Hendricks. Once upon a time it was Staff Sergeant Hendricks but now it’s plain old Hendricks.” Hendricks started to go on but one of the waitresses dropped a couple of bottles of Budweiser off at the table. He blanched as he took his first sip and saw the same from the deputy. “Bud’s not to my liking, either.”

“Oh, yeah?” The deputy eyed him carefully. “You tell much difference between the different kinds of beer?”

“Not the national brands,” Hendricks said. “Back home in Western Wisconsin, where I come from, they got a brew called Leinenkugels that beats the shit outta anything you find elsewhere. I went all over in the Marines. The only other things I found I really liked were some Greek beer I can’t even remember the name of and Guinness.”

Arch paused, surveying Hendricks real quietly. “This discussion of microbrews is real classy, but let’s cut right through the bunk. What happened back there?”

Hendricks grinned again. It was getting to be natural for him this evening, and it hadn’t been like that for him in years. “Like I said, you sure you want to delve very deep in that? It’s a long way down that rabbit hole, Alice. You might be sorry you ever opened your eyes to that world because it’s damned hard to climb back up after you take that trip, and things don’t tend to be the same after you take the first step.”

Not even a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, I want to know what happened out there. You said demon. Demon, like from hell?”

“Dunno if he’s from hell,” Hendricks said, taking another swill—literally, and not liking it much. “But I know he’s a demon, like the creatures of old. They look like humans, ’til you know what to look for. Different breeds, too, species, like animals, but they blend in with humans most of the time. At least, most do.”

Arch was listening, taking it all in. “All right, so if they’re demons, what are they here for?”

Hendricks gave the barest shrug. “If you’re talking about in the larger sense of it, in the ‘Why are we all here? What is our greater purpose?’ sense, then fuck if I know. If you mean, why are they here in this town, right now, that I might have an answer for, though I’m not sure you’re gonna like it.”

“Lay it on me.” It was hard to tell whether this deputy, Arch, was humoring him or seriously listening, but either way, he was paying attention, so Hendricks went on.

“The way it was explained to me, there are certain places on the earth that flare at any given moment, become ‘hotspots’ if you will, that pull in demons like the light on a bugzapper—but without the zapper, I suppose. They’re drawn to them, these bursts of … I dunno, mystical or whatever activity, and they come congregating into whatever town or place is throwing off that vibe. Right now, it’s here in Calhoun County.”

“Uh huh,” Arch’s arms were folded now, which was new. Hendricks didn’t like the look of that. “How do you know about this mystical stuff?”

Hendricks shrugged. “Someone told me about it, and I was just about as disbelieving as you are. Course, that was about five years and eighteen hotspots ago, so I’ve since developed a little faith that my mentor wasn’t just blowing smoke up my ass, but when I was sitting in your chair it was all, ‘Yeah, right,’ and ‘Whatever.’ Probably about what you’re thinking now. I was also thinking, ‘Bullshit,’ but you don’t strike me as much of the swearing type, so maybe you have a clean way to say it.”

“Malarkey.”

Hendricks raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Really? You’re gonna go with that, huh?”

“It’s gotten me this far.”

“‘Bullshit’ sounds more—”

“Profane?”

“That, too,” Hendricks agreed. “But I would have said serious.”

Arch rolled his eyes, which Hendricks got the suspicion wasn’t very characteristic of the man, either. But half his beer was gone, obvious by the light shining through the brown bottle. “You gotta swear like a sailor to be serious, huh?”

“I don’t do anything like a sailor,” Hendricks said with a frown. “I was a Marine.”

“Whatever. You know what I meant.” Arch took a swig and frowned, but it was a long pull and it looked like he’d just about finished the bottle. “I’m almost done with my beer and I’m still not really believing you.”

“Fair enough,” Hendricks said. “You did just see a man turn into something decidedly un-human, then disappear after being stabbed in the neck, though. What would be your logical, non-demon explanation for that? You know, if you had to explain it. Extra points if you manage to steer clear of any accusations involving me doping you with hallucinogens, because I plainly didn’t.”

Arch cocked an eyebrow at him. “Some guy I barely know just got—I don’t know, devoured by shadows while I watched—I’m not ruling out hallucinogens. For all I know you sprayed some kind of gas in the air and I’m tripping right now.” He held up the bottle. “Which would explain why I’m having a beer with you rather than dragging you to jail. Might be the only thing that makes sense in this case, actually.”

“He didn’t disappear,” Hendricks explained, keeping his cool though he felt his mouth go dry. He really, really didn’t want to spend a night in jail. Or two. Or three. Anything more than possession of the sword would be hard to prove, but the sword was pretty rare and he didn’t want to risk losing it. Or have shit go down out in the outside world while he was sweating away in county jail. “Most demons don’t have bodies like us, exactly. What they have is like a shell, a kind of a veneer of human flesh on the outside that hides their true appearance. When I stabbed him in the neck, I was breaking the shell, which caused his essence to be drawn back to wherever the hell it came from. Kind of breaks their hold on this … dimension? Realm? Whatever, I’ve never really understood the explanation I’ve gotten on that one.”

The bar was smoky, but Arch’s gaze was smokier. “You went after this thing to kill it, but you don’t really understand what happened to it?”

“Actually, I went up to the guy to ask for directions to the cheapest motel in town, but I recognized him, he knew I recognized him, and he knew I knew, which caused him to have to throw down, because that’s how Chu’ala demons act when they feel threatened in the slightest. I would have been perfectly happy just to get my directions and be on about my evening, but once that happened, we kind of got locked on course.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you’re carrying a sword to fight these things when you don’t really know what they’re all about.”

“I know enough,” Hendricks said, keeping his irritation under wraps. “The full explanation is somewhere between a genius-level physics problem and something involving mystical elements that are way more spiritual than I give a fuck about. I know the mechanics, I know how to kill them, and so I stick to what I know. And I carry the sword because the sword kills them.”

“How?” Arch asked.

“Mystical stuff,” Hendricks said. “Breaks through—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Arch waved him off.

“So,” Hendricks went on after a pause in which Arch stared at his beer for what felt like several minutes, “you still haven’t answered me about what you think it was you saw tonight.”

“See, I don’t have to explain it to you,” Arch said, and it was damned obvious he was cross as hell. “I have to explain it to the sheriff, my boss, about how I think I witnessed a murder, except I don’t have a victim, I don’t have a body, I don’t have anything except some cowboy with a sword and a pistol.”

“Hey, the pistol’s legal,” Hendricks said. “My carry permit is valid for Tennessee.”

“The sword ain’t, though.”

Hendricks gave a weak shrug. “You’d let me carry a gun but not a sword? So you charge me with … uh …”

“Let’s not go there,” Arch said darkly. “I could charge you with any number of things. That’s not at issue, me finding nominal violations of the law. My issue is whether I want to believe some jackwagon who steps into town and his first night starts stirring up some deeply dark mystical juju of a kind I don’t even know I believe in. If I let you walk, is this gonna become a pattern? You gonna go out and raise some more havoc, kill some more of those things?”

“I try to keep it out of the public eye, but yeah,” Hendricks replied, and finished his beer with a long pull. “Trust me when I tell you that these demons are not the sort of thing you want walking around your town, in human skin or without. They’re killers, murderers, and cause all manner of mischief that goes unreported. Mysterious disappearances follow in their wake like fleas trail a dirty old hound dog. Things burn when they’re around, mental illness leaps right up through the roof. Murder rates skyrocket. “

Hendricks leaned across the table. “Things don’t turn out so well for these hotspots. Look at Detroit, look at New Orleans. Both of them have had flare-ups at various points in the last fifty years—hell, Detroit’s been a hotspot some twenty five times, some worse than others. Small towns, though, they get real bad. Turn to ghost towns in some cases.” He lowered his voice. “There was a town in Alaska last year, just dropped off the map, five hundred people gone by the time it was done flaring. You don’t want this thing going unchallenged, not here, not anywhere.”

Arch stared back at him. “There gonna be more like you coming?”

Hendricks took a long, slow breath, let the tobacco smoke in the air waft in. He didn’t smoke, but when he was drinking it didn’t bother him like it did when he was sober. He almost kind of liked it. “Probably, but not for a while. There’s kind of a lot going on for my kind right now.”

“Oh, yeah?” Arch asked. “You a … what? A demon hunter or something?”

“Something like that,” Hendricks said. “And there are definitely demon hunters, and some of them might even come this way, though I’d suspect it will be a long while before they do.”

“Why’s that?”

Hendricks took another breath of the secondhand smoke, and could almost feel it calm his nerves. “Because this is the eighteenth hot spot in the world that’s flaring right now.” He wanted a cigarette and he didn’t even smoke. It had been a long day.

“You say that like it should mean something to me.”

“Sorry,” Hendricks said with some genuine contrition. “Didn’t mean to be so damned vague. So, this is number eighteen. That’s kind of unusual. There are usually less.”

“Less?” Arch’s hands were back behind his head now, and he waved off the waitress when she came by to make another pass to see if they wanted another round. “Like, ten?” Hendricks shook his head. “Five? Four?” He kept shaking his head, and used his index finger to point down, tapping at the table the entire time.

“More like one,” Hendricks said, gingerly, and he shook the empty beer bottle, wishing it was full again. He looked up at the deputy with all seriousness, though. “Usually, there’s only ever one at a time. So, as you might guess with eighteen going at once … we’re in some new territory, here.”

+ + +

Hollywood didn’t want to stay at the dairy farm, not with the smell. He hated it, and it was in his suit, his fucking ten-thousand-dollar suit that he’d gotten on Savile Row in London. He knew it was in his ponytail, too, and he was going to have to exfoliate like crazy to get the smell of it off his skin. He had Sleeveless driving his car for him, chauffeuring, and had made sure they’d gotten towels from the farmer’s house for Sleeveless to sit on. No point in soiling the town car any more than was necessary, after all.

They were heading toward the interstate, maybe even as far back as Chattanooga, because he doubted there was much more than a fleabag motel in this town, and frankly, there was a lot to be said for being able to get a meal with some decent organic produce. You didn’t know what you were getting, after all. If his body was going to be the temple of Ygrusibas, it made sense to feed it things that would make it better, not worse. Also, none of the local motels had a gym. Or Wifi. Fucking hicks, fucking sticks.

“Something going on up here,” Sleeveless said as they drew close to the interstate. It was an hour or so to Chattanooga, and there had to be at least somewhere he could stay there, somewhere that would take his Black Card and give him some semblance of order, something approaching—maybe like a lesser version, like tier one instead of tier five—the treatment he got in L.A. They knew how to do shit right. They should, after all. The whole place was built by and for demons.

Sleeveless slowed the car as they drove past the parking lot of a neon-lit hellhole that a sign proclaimed to be Fast Freddie’s. Hollywood looked out the window, staring into the dark night as they went on, taking in the scene in the parking lot. It was almost nothing, really, something so subtle that only their kind would notice.

There were two men standing next to a cop car. It wasn’t so much what they were wearing in terms of clothes—though one of them wore a cowboy hat, like he was what? John Travolta or something? No, it was what they were wearing over the clothes that caught the eye. It dusted them and clung to them like skin, so obvious that it practically glowed to those who knew what to look for.

“Looks like those boys just killed them a demon,” Sleeveless said from the driver’s seat.

Hollywood couldn’t find it in him to disagree. It was obvious; they were just doused in the essence. “One of the locals?”

“Could be.” Sleeveless slowed the car further, and rolled down the window. “There were a decent number of us around before things started heating up, and lots of strangers been coming into town lately with the rising.” The smell of sulfur was obvious even at this distance, and Hollywood wanted to gag even more now, needed to get to something approaching a five-star hotel, preferably one with multiple shower heads. “Should we stop, maybe put ’em down?”