Heaven Sent - a Quincy Harker Novella (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 5)
Contents
Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Special Thanks
Appearances
About the Author
Also by John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Of Lips and Tongue
This Giant Leap
Heaven Sent
A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter
Novella
By John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Charlotte, NC
Chapter 1
I guess most people don’t meet their guardian angel at a murder scene. I guess most people don’t meet their guardian angel at all, but I’ve never been most people. So while it didn’t surprise me too much to see an angel hanging around the newly deceased body of Lincoln Baxter, Esquire, prosecuting attorney extraordinaire, it surprised me quite a bit to find out that she was there for me, not for the soul of Mr. Baxter. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that.
It was about seven years ago. The sky dumped rain in buckets, and there was no blood to speak of, so either Dead Lincoln had been lying there getting rained on for a while, or he’d been shot somewhere else and dropped in the parking lot of the Harris Teeter on Randolph Road. Since that strip mall was fairly high-rent, even seven years ago, I figured he hadn’t been there that long. That left a body dump, and that meant trace evidence, although most of it was currently getting washed into storm drains thanks to the mid-June thunderstorm. This was before every house had streaming video, so I hadn’t yet binge-watched every episode of every CSI franchise, but I still understood a little about fibers and transfer from a couple of cases I spent working with Scotland Yard back in the 1960s. Admittedly, the culprit in those cases had eventually turned out to be a pair of ghouls resurrected by an Oxford medical student with a talent for the occult and a moral compass that only pointed south, but the theories were sound.
I had a few advantages that Scotland Yard didn’t have. I could use my Sight to take note of the fact that there was no magical trace around the body, but that didn’t really mean much. Magical energy and running water don’t get along very well, and it was pouring rain. What meant a lot more, although I had no friggin’ idea exactly what it meant, was the pair of ethereal wings the deceased was sporting. I could only see them in the supernatural spectrum, but they glowed a pale golden yellow in my Sight, and I’d never seen them before, which made this murder pretty unique.
The blonde standing just outside the police cordon was also pretty damned unique, and the presence of a beauty like that at a murder scene at three in the morning should have been conspicuous as hell, except that no one seemed to see her but me. So I turned my Sight on her, and quickly dropped back into the normal spectrum, rubbing my temples from the glare. I’d never seen anything like her either, and that was two more new things than I typically liked in one night.
I shook my head and looked up just in time to see the rotund form of Detective Rich Sponholz lumbering toward me. Sponholz was a decent enough detective, if he wasn’t winning any marathons. He was a big man, thick through the shoulders and arms, obviously an athlete who lost the drive to work out after years of paperwork and stakeouts. He didn’t like me much, so it was no surprise that his face was turning red and his finger was waving wildly at me long before he covered the twenty feet between us.
“Goddammit, Harker, I told you to stay the fuck away from my crime scenes,” he started in on me when he was still almost ten feet away. “I’ve got enough bullshit to deal with, this being that prissy fuck from the DA’s office, without you coming down here talking about ghosts and devils and your hocus-pocus bullshit.”
Okay, so Sponholz might have had a few blind spots in his worldview, but I usually didn’t hold that against him, or anyone else for that matter. Most humans don’t go through life calling the most famous vampire in history “Uncle” or throwing around magical spells from the age of sixteen. Me? Well, let’s just say that when your parents are Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, you don’t come from exactly “normal” stock. So I didn’t begrudge the good detective his prejudices, but I did turn to see how my ethereal visitor reacted to his diatribe. She seemed unfazed, like she either didn’t hear what he was saying (yelling, really) or like she was so focused on what else was going on that she didn’t notice him.
“And good morning to you, too, Detective,” I said when he came near enough to converse normally. I’m not opposed to a good shouting match but only when I think it might get me something. And I’ve been around long enough to know that yelling at cops never gets me anything good. “What can I do to help you this fine morning?”
“You can fuck right off, that’s what you can do, Harker,” Sponholz replied. “It’s the middle of the night, it’s raining like pouring piss out of a boot, and I’ve got a dead city attorney lying in the grocery store parking lot. The last goddamn thing I need is you.”
“Well, in that case, I’ll just leave,” I said, turning to go.
“Wait a minute,” the detective said, grabbing my elbow. I expected him to do something like that, which is how I kept my reflexes in check. I really don’t like people grabbing me, and it usually ends up in broken or missing body parts for the grabber. But I kinda liked Sponholz, despite his insistence that I was a fraud, and I didn’t like jail, so I chose not to break his arm.
I turned back to him instead. “Yes, Detective?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“What do you mean, Detective?”
“I mean, why are you in the parking lot of a closed shopping center in the middle of the night where a city attorney just happens to be lying in a pool of his own blood?”
“Actually, I think you’ll find he’s likely lying in a pool of rainwater, motor oil, and leaked engine coolant. I saw very little blood. But I was only able to examine things from behind the police line. You see, I arrived after your boys and girls in blue called in the body. I have a police scanner, and I like to stay abreast of what goes on in my city.”
Sponholz’s face turned three different shades of red as he spluttered at me. “Y-y-your city? Your city? You nut bar, what in the hell…oh never mind, just go home.”
“Take a look at the amount of blood by the body, Detective. He wasn’t killed here. Have a nice day!” I called after Sponholz as he stomped away.
“That attitude is going to get you in trouble someday, Quincy Harker,” my mysterious lady said.
“It’s already done that,” I replied. “More times than I can count. But that’s not the important thing.”
“What’s the important thing?” she asked, a little smile playing around the corner of her mouth.
“The important thing is what in the hell is an angel doing hanging around a dead lawyer in North Carolina? Don’t you have somebody to save or a plague to call down on Egypt or something?”
“We don’t do much plaguing nowadays. Just a lot less call for that kind of thing. And as for the saving thing, well, that’s what I’m doing. Kinda. I’m Glory, your guardian angel.”
“My guardian angel is named after a villain from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
“What can I say? Joss Whedon’s a genius. Now,
how did you know I wasn’t just another onlooker?”
“Well, partly because you wouldn’t have been ‘another’ onlooker, you would have been the only onlooker. It’s three in the morning. There’s nobody here but you, me, and the cops. Speaking of whom, let’s move this conversation somewhere a little more private.”
“What’s wrong, Harker? Don’t want to be seen talking to an angel?”
“Sweetheart, with a body like yours, talking isn’t the only thing I wouldn’t mind being seen doing. But since you don’t seem to be visible to anybody but me, I’d rather not look like I’m completely out of my mind.”
She at least had the good grace to look chagrined when she looked around and realized I was right. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. “I’m still not used to this whole walking among the mortals stuff. Let’s go.” Then she vanished. Because that’s what angels do. They just appear and disappear whenever they feel like it, with no regard for the laws of physics or polite conversation.
Because I can’t just teleport to wherever I want to be, I trudged through the rain to my battered navy Honda Accord. Not the flashiest of cars, but almost impossible to spot on a crowded street if I needed to stake something out, and not nearly interesting enough to steal, which is probably good for the thieves given the assortment of mundane and magical weapons and accessories I keep in the trunk. I got in the car and gave myself a shake, rummaged around in the floorboards behind the passenger seat for napkins from a couple of McDonald’s takeout bags, and dried off my face and hands enough to hold onto the steering wheel.
“That seems like quite a nuisance,” said a voice beside me. I whipped my head around, gathering my will for a spell as I did, then relaxed and let the power flow out of me when I saw it was Glory.
“Jesus Christ, angel! You could give a guy a heart attack doing shit like that,” I grumbled.
“That doesn’t seem like a term of endearment when you say it like that,” she said, chewing on her bottom lip in an absolutely human, and adorable, fashion. Now that water wasn’t pouring into my eyes, I took a good look at my visitor from the ethereal realms. She didn’t look all that much like Clare Kramer, the actress that played her namesake on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she did have curly blond hair, kewpie-doll cheeks, and brilliant blue eyes. She looked to be about five-eight or so, and I learned a long time ago not to guess at a woman’s age or weight, and I was betting that translated into angels, too. But she was trim, and fit, and no matter how I tried to get a peek at her back, I couldn’t see even a hint of wing. No halo, either. I was starting to get disappointed at the shortcomings of my guardian angel when I realized that she had just materialized in my passenger seat out of thin air, completely dry, as thought raindrops didn’t touch her. Yep, she’s plenty magic, halo or no.
“They’re spiritual,” she said, pointing at the area over her shoulder. “The wings. I don’t need them for anything while I’m here. They just help me ride the currents as I navigate the planes.”
“Navigate the planes?” I repeated, having no idea what she was talking about.
“You know, Heaven, Hell, Earth, Purgatory, Valhalla…all of those.” Her voice was bright and cheerful, like she talked about Valhalla like it was a real place every day. Hell, maybe she did.
“You…fly between the planes?” I asked.
“That’s how we get there,” she said. “You would have to use a spell, or have a spell go wrong. Or die, of course. But that shouldn’t happen any time soon. Not if I have anything to say about it.” With that, her expression became stern and her eyes flickered, like there was lightning behind them. Apparently she took the “guardian” part of her job description seriously.
I shook my head, then asked her the question that had been on the tip of my tongue ever since I first saw her. “What are you doing here?”
“You mean Earth, or here specifically?”
“Let’s start with here specifically. If we need to broaden the scope of our conversation to include the whole planet, I’m going to need a drink. You know, now that I mention it…” I leaned over, reached across the startled angel’s lap, and popped open the glove compartment. I reached in and pulled out a flask, twisted off the top, and let eighteen years of oak-barrel-aged Macallan pour down my throat. I turned the flask up and let the flavor of the Scottish moors wash over my tongue and teeth, swallowing what felt like centuries of fine craftsmanship with every drop.
After I shook the last drops from my flask, with a warm fire burning in my belly and throat from the whiskey and the slightest fuzziness at the edges of my vision, I tossed the empty flask back in the glove box, closed the door, and leaned back in my seat. “Now we can talk,” I said to the angel. “I am now sufficiently fortified to hold a conversation with an angel in my economy car.”
“Well, like I said, I’m Glory, and I’ve been assigned as your guardian angel. Not everyone gets one, but you seem to find yourself in more trouble than most, so you get me.” She smiled brightly at me, and I found myself wishing desperately for more whiskey.
“And if I say no?” I asked.
“What?”
“What if I say ‘thanks but no thanks’?”
“You mean refuse my protection?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t know if you can. As far as I know, no one has ever tried. Besides, why would you want to? It’s not like I’m going to be watching your every move and tattling to Father whenever you sin. Trust me, the last thing I want to do is watch you and some of the women you go out with.”
“Those are all perfectly nice girls, thank you very much.”
“Regardless, that’s not what my job is about. I’m here to take care of you, not anyone you might be sleeping with.”
“And I say no thanks.” I laughed a little bit, one of those short, barking laughs that almost sounds like a cough. “Sweetie, I’m pushing a hundred years old at this point. If something out there was going to kill me, it would have done it long ago.”
Chapter 2
So there I was, sitting in my car with a stunned angel sitting next to me. I chuckled again and started the car. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed up Randolph into Uptown. I had a new condo, and the bed was calling me pretty loudly.
“Why were you there?” Glory asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What were you doing at the crime scene?”
“I could ask you the same thing, I suppose.”
“You could, but I’d answer instead of ducking the question. I was there looking for you. I felt like it was time we met, so I followed your aura.”
“You followed my aura?” I asked.
“Of course. I’m your guardian angel. Quincy, I can sense you no matter where you are.”
“Don’t call me Quincy.”
“Why not? Your name is Quincy.”
“Only my family calls me Quincy. And nowadays that list only has one name on it.”
“Of course. Your ‘Uncle Luke,’ as you call him. But what do your friends call you, Quincy?”
“All my friends are dead, Glory.”
“What about that nice policeman you spoke to back at the crime scene?”
“He hates me, in case you missed it. He threatens to put me in jail on a regular basis.”
“I’m sure you deserve it. There have been some less-than-savory activities in your past, if you’ll recall.”
“Pretty sure I can’t forget 1944. Wait a minute. Exactly how long have you been spying on me?”
“You’re a fairly new assignment. I’ve only watched over you for the past twenty years or so. But that’s plenty of time for me to understand that you have only the loosest understanding of the term ‘law’ as it applied to you.”
“Twenty years, huh? And you decided that we need to meet tonight? What the fuck is going on?” I’d never met an angel before, so I wasn’t one hundred percent sure she wasn’t going to smite me for cursing, but she wasn’t carrying a flaming sword, so I thought I might
get away with it. Besides, I was starting to feel seriously creeped out knowing there was an angel watching my every move.
“Nothing is going on,” the angel replied. “I just felt it was time we began to interact more directly, that’s all.”
“So angels are terrible liars. That’s good to know. Now, you want to stop bullshitting me and tell me what you want with me?”
“You want to tell me why you were in that parking lot in the middle of the night?” I could feel her eyes boring into me from the passenger seat, but I kept my gaze locked on the wet street unrolling in my headlights. I passed the Mint Museum, didn’t say anything. I passed Presbyterian Hospital, didn’t say anything. I crossed under I-277, didn’t say anything. Finally, I got caught by a red light just before my right turn onto College. I took a deep breath and let it out slow.
“I felt something.” I felt something putting those words out there. Stupid. Yeah, my life hasn’t exactly been a Norman Rockwell picture of normalcy, but it hasn’t been all that weird, either. The occasional monster, a rogue wizard every once in a while, but nothing really heavy-duty on the psychic or mystical front. Until tonight. Tonight I’d been jolted stone sober by a sudden need to get to the parking lot of the Cotswold Mall. Whatever happened, it killed a good buzz and cost me well over two hundred bucks in top-shelf liquor.
“I was on my way home from my book club,” I continued.
“They read at The Men’s Club?” Glory asked, naming the strip club I’d spent most of the evening in.
“Usually the young ladies there are more interested in pictures. Pictures of Andrew Jackson, pictures of Ulysses S. Grant, you get the idea. They have a particular fondness for pictures of Benjamin Franklin.”
“Not the point, Q.”
“Q?” I looked at her. A playful little smile curled up one corner of her mouth, and she gave me a saucy look right back.
“Yeah, Q. You don’t want me to call you Quincy, and calling you Harker all the time sounds like I’m angry with you—”