Weatherwitch, p.20
Histories, Volume II: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Collection, page 20
HISTORIES, VOLUME II
A QUINCY HARKER, DEMON HUNTER COLLECTION
JOHN G. HARTNESS
CONTENTS
In the Details
Duality
Reprise
Sanctuary
About the Author
Stay In Touch!
Also by John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Friends of Falstaff
IN THE DETAILS
Events in this story take place pro to Carl Perkins’ Cadillac.
You know it’s literally never Satanists, right?” I asked as I followed Glory up the brick sidewalk to the unassuming ranch-style house just outside of Clarksville, Tennessee.
“You’re right,” said the angel. “It’s never Satanists. And there’s never any hint of real supernatural power.”
I opened my mouth to ask her why the hell we’d just driven three hours in the pouring rain if she agreed with me, when she held up a finger.
“It’s never anything,” she said, turning to me. “Until it is. And when it is, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. There are two people dead in that house. The first murders this town has seen in more than a decade, and there are symbols that have the police thinking there might be an occult aspect. So, we’re going to go in there, wave our little federal agent badges around, offer up our services to the locals, get rebuffed because the last thing they want is a couple of feds sticking their noses into local business, and then we’re going to leave. But not before we get a look around. You good with that?”
I wasn’t, really. The last place I wanted to be was anywhere near even a hint of magic, but when your guardian angel throws the keys to your pickup at you and tells you to drive her halfway across the state to look at a couple of dead suburbanites, you just do it. I held up my credentials to the patrolman guarding the door, and he took the wallet and looked at me.
“Homeland Security? This ain’t no terrorist thing, man.” He didn’t tell me to leave in so many words, but I could tell he wanted to.
“Probably not, but my boss dragged me away from happy hour on Beale Street for this shit, so how about you let me look around, talk to whoever’s in charge, and let him kick me out?”
The cop’s eyes widened when I mentioned Beale, which wasn’t a surprise given that we were better than three hours from Memphis. “Well, shit, man. If y’all come all this way just to be disappointed, I reckon you might as well go on in. You don’t have to worry about booties or gloves, the crime scene guys left about ten minutes ago.”
“Thanks, Officer…” I looked at the name plate on his chest. “Woods. I appreciate it.”
We stepped into the house, which was at least as boring inside as it was out. The front door opened into a small foyer, with a dining room to the right and a great room off to the left. I followed the buzz of conversation and stepped into the great room, stopping just inside the door and waiting to be noticed.
A wiry little cop with more hair on his upper lips than on top of his head elbowed a big burly man who stood in the middle of the living room floor munching on a white powdered doughnut. The big man turned and bellowed at us, spraying crumbs and confectioner’s sugar all over the floor “Who the heck are you and what moron let you in here? Woods! You’re fired! You’re fired, and when I get back to the station, your brother’s fired, and if you give me any lip, your idiot dog’s fired, too.”
He stormed over to us, the little gnome statues on the mantel shaking with his every gargantuan step. “I asked you a question!” He practically shouted from six inches away from me.
I reached up, wiped a little speck of sugar from my cheek, and held my badge up between our faces. “Quincy Harker, Department of Homeland Security. We heard you had an unusual case and came by to see if we could lend our expertise.”
“Well if I need to stop a terrorist, I’ll call you,” he snarled, his lips curling in distaste. “But I think I can catch a devil-worshipping murderer without any federal help.” He was tall, and thick through the shoulders and the middle. Probably a high school football stud who went into law enforcement when he realized that playing for Middle Tennessee State wasn’t going to get him drafted into the NFL. He was almost certainly a pretty good Sheriff. Good at handling people, good at breaking up bar fights, and good at dealing with husbands who slapped their wives around.
But this wasn’t a small-town drunken scrap, and it wasn’t an abusive asshole who needed to be taught to respect women. This was murder, and from the moment I stepped into the house, I knew it was my kind of case. I didn’t even have to use my Sight to confirm it, I could feel the magic coating every surface in the place. Something seriously bad had happened here, and whatever did it, was not the kind of thing that was likely to stop.
So, I couldn’t let the second coming of Buford Pusser intimidate me, not that he ever had a real chance. I’ve stared down demons and Lords of Hell, and I learned to fight from Dracula himself. The day a redneck with a badge can stare me down is the day they throw the first shovel of dirt on my face.
“Sheriff,” I said, working to keep my voice level. No point in shouting until it became necessary. “This is no more a normal murder case than you are a ballerina, and while you might not want any federal help, I’m pretty sure you don’t have anyone in your department that can read those symbols painted on the wall over there.”
I pointed to an intricate pentagram scribed into the drywall with a knife, then filled in with blood. Most of it had dried to a dirty brown, but there was just enough shiny red still that there was no question what it was. It was a summoning circle. A big one, with complicated warding. There was an inner circle, with symbols running clockwise around the perimeter, then there was an outer circle enclosing those, with another ring of markings, this one running counterclockwise.
The sheriff took a step back, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to, and looked at the wall. “And you’ve got somebody who can make sense out of that gibberish?” He flapped a hand at the circle. “I’ve sent pictures to half a dozen professors and four preachers, and ain’t none of them ever seen anything like this.”
He was wrong, of course. One of the ministers he’d sent pictures to, a Methodist minister by the name of Dr. Ann Robards, recognized the language but couldn’t translate it. So he sent the pics along to a Father Randall Hartwig, a Catholic priest in Nashville who just happened to be doing some important work with the homeless there. Important enough work, and in shitty enough neighborhoods, that the Host had seen fit to assign him a guardian angel of his own. When that angel saw the writing on the wall, he contacted Glory, who dragged me halfway across the state just so I could stand in the living room and have doughnut crumbs spewed on me by an overfed elected asshat of a sheriff.
“I do,” I said, pointing at Glory. “Her. Sheriff…?”
“Shelton,” he replied. “Gary Shelton.” He didn’t offer a handshake which saved me the trouble of leaving him hanging.
“Well, Sheriff Shelton, meet Glorinda Jones. Glory is an expert on ancient languages and rituals from around the world. And I’m pretty sure she knows exactly what you’re dealing with here.”
“Indeed I do,” Glory said, pulling her blond curls back into a twist and wrapping an elastic around her hair. It never fails. I can barely find my wallet, and Glory is never without a hair tie. I guess there are worse things to use your innate magic for. She walked over to the wall and put her nose right up to the edge of the outer circle. “This was scored deep into the wall. They really didn’t need the blood to bind the circle, it was solid enough without it.”
“But if you don’t need blood, you don’t need to kill people. And where’s the fun without the killing?” I asked. One of the deputies, a slender black woman with a tight afro, sot me a dirty look. I just shrugged. If Sheriff Gigantor couldn’t scare me, one woman looking at me with disgust wasn’t going to do it.
“How many victims?” Glory asked. “Two?”
“Yeah, Shelton said. “Emma Bosker and Dave Watson. They were married for a while but divorced a couple years ago. Decided to keep the house because they were upside down in the mortgage. Good people. They didn’t deserve…nobody deserves what was done to them.”
“They were tortured, weren’t they?” I asked. I stood by the hearth, looking into the ashes of the burned-out fire. There were fresh scorch marks on the carpet several feet away, like someone had thrown hot coals at something. Or someone.
“Yeah,” the sheriff said. HIs voice was different, all the bluster gone. I looked around and noticed this coincided with the last of his deputies leaving the room. “Look, I need all the help I can get. I’ve been sheriff for eight years, and we haven’t had a normal murder, much less something like this. Worst thing that’s happened since I took office was a bunch of bikers shooting each other up by a meth lab out of town, but none of them died. This? This is…”
“Fucked up,” I finished it for him. The sheriff looked like a good church-going man, the kind of man who could win an election in a small town with more churches than houses. He didn’t look like a man prone to f-bombs. Fortunately, I was there to pick up his slack.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Messed up.”
“Can you walk me through the scene while Glory translates the text?” I asked. I didn’t really give a shit how it happened. Everything we needed to know was w ritten on the wall, including the name of the demon calling the shots. What we didn’t know what who was working for it on this side, and how many more people were going to die before I caught the son of a bitch and sent him to Hell to join his demon boss.
The sheriff turned his back on the wall and its roadmap to Hell. He pointed to a blue and white-checked sofa and said, “Best we can tell, the victims were sitting here watching TV when the killer came in and slit their throats. We’re guessing he snuck in through the kitchen, since that door was unlocked.”
I looked around the den, confused. There was a healthy pool of blood on the floor, but it was all over by the wall with the circle on it. There were no arcs of blood to indicate an arterial spray, and the sofa had a few drops of blood on it, but not near enough for anyone who’s seen even one episode of a cop show to think that two people were murdered there. When I looked back at the Sheriff, something was very, very off about him.
He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t upset, or distressed in any way. He didn’t have a single drop of sweat anywhere on his face, and he was calmly eating mini-doughnuts out of a paper bag and sipping coffee, his stomach apparently undisturbed by the stench of blood that filled the room. For a small-town cop who had never investigated a murder before, he was remarkably calm. Even given his newfound willingness to let us help with the investigation, something was hinky.
“Okay, so then what?” I asked, moving around in front of the sofa. “The killer dragged the bodies over to the wall where he painted the circle with their blood, did whatever ritual he came to do, and left by the same back door?”
“That’s pretty much what we figured. We got a good boot print in a clear patch of mud in the back yard, so we made a cast of that. The crime scene guys took samples of all the blood and are running it all to see if the killer cut himself while he was skinning the bodies.”
“While he what?” I asked.
“He…he skinned them. Peeled the flesh right off ‘em.”
“You didn’t want to lead with that?” I asked. I felt a slightly sick churn in my stomach, the complete opposite of the sheriff’s calm demeanor. “Were the skins still here?”
“No. The killer took them. We figure he wanted them for trophies.”
Nope. That was one hundred percent not what was going on. I had a theory, but none of them involved some Silence of the Lambs re-enactor dancing around in the skin of his victims. “Okay, then. That puts a different twist on things. Can we meet you at the station later today? My partner and I need to go do a little research.”
The sheriff looked confused at my sudden desire to leave. “O-okay. I reckon I’ll be there most of the day dealing with reporters and paperwork and shit. I reckon I’ll have to go over to the morgue and talk to the coroner this afternoon, but otherwise I’ll be in my office.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “We’ll check in with you in a few hours. We may even join you at the morgue, if that’s alright”
“Sure. If you want to.”
“Good. Glory? We need to roll,” I said. “I’ve got a couple things I need to call the Regional Office about.”
“O…kay,” she started to ask questions, but when she got a look at my face she just nodded and followed me to the truck.
Once I turned the pickup around and got us pointed back toward the main road, Glory turned to look at me. “What was that about? Did something spook you?”
“Yeah, kinda,” I said. “More confused than spooked. Did you notice anything funky about the sheriff?”
“Other than his doughnut fetish, not really. Why?”
“He wasn’t nearly freaked out enough for a guy who found two people flayed alive just a few hours ago. He had just the right level of territorial pissed off for a small-town cop when we got there, but he shifted gears way too easily into helpful. And the rest of the officers? I expected to see cops puking their guts up all over the crime scene, but they all just seemed…detached.”
“Or professional,” she countered.
“Yeah, but like you said, there hasn’t been a murder here in years. It’s mostly breaking up bar fights and throwing drunks in jail overnight to cool off. This is big-time murder, with a serious gag factor. I mean, skinned corpses? I’ve seen those before. They’re nasty.”
“Where have you seen skinned corpses?” Glory asked.
“New Mexico. I think it was eighty-nine or ninety. There was a nasty demon there skinning people and trying to blame it on the Apache living on the Jicarilla reservation. I convinced the local white people not to go messing with the tribe, and I tracked down the demon and sent it back to Hell.”
“What were you doing in New Mexico?”
“Believe it or not, I was cactus farming. I had a couple hundred acres planted in agave, and I wanted to make tequila.”
“You’ve…never struck me as the farmer type.”
“I suck at it. Lost my shirt. I was only there a couple years, but long enough to make myself known to anyone with any kind of power in the area. When people started pointing fingers at the res, tribal leaders came to me and asked if I could help clear them. They figured a white guy would have a better chance of being heard than one of their medicine men.”
“What happened?” She asked.
“Spoiler alert - it was a white guy who called the demon, lost control of it, and now the demon was running around skinning people and eating the skin.”
“Okay, that’s nasty. And a new one to me. Why the skin?”
“Do you really want to know?” She gave me a steady look, so I sighed and told her. “The demon said it tasted like pork skins, only chewier. It considered the skin to be the best part, because that’s where all the scars and pain were stored. It felt like consuming the flesh gave it true dominion over the person.”
“You’re right, I didn’t want to know. Do you think this is the same demon?”
“That depends. Your Enochian is better than mine. What was the name on the wall?”
“Malindor. It’s not one I’m familiar with, so he either isn’t old enough to be one of the Fallen, or he wasn’t powerful enough back then to be part of the War.” That was a first. Glory was usually really hush-hush on her time before she was my guardian. She’d never said anything about being part of the War for Heaven before.
“Yep,” I said. “Same guy. That sucks.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s smart. And he knows me. That kills any element of surprise we might have. But we don’t really have a choice. He’s not going to stop killing people, and we can’t just let a demon run around outside Nashville. Commercial country music is bad enough lately without adding demons to the mix.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We hole up in a hotel, do some research, and when it’s dark we go back to the house and see what we can find without any interference from the locals.”
“Does your research happen to include hot chicken?” Glory asked.
“Well, we are less than an hour from Hattie B’s. And I’m going to have to eat something.” She laughed as I plugged in the address of the best chicken joint in Tennessee into my phone and pressed the accelerator down.
“If you get arrested, I am not bailing you out,” Glory said as I put my hand on the doorknob to the Watson/Bosker home.
“No, you’ll just do that angel thing where you ‘poof’ out and leave me to deal with the consequences on my own.” I gathered my will and focused a tiny thread of magical energy on the lock. “Apertum,” I whispered, and released the magic. The tumblers on the lock clicked into place, and the door swung open.
I slipped on my Sight, peering around the house in the magical spectrum. Even with all the cops and crime scene techs that had been traipsing through there all day, there was still a thick slime of dark magic coating every surface. This place was going to need some serious cleansing before it was every habitable again.
“What are you looking for, Harker? It’s not like there are going to be any clues the crime scene guys didn’t find.” Glory asked.
