Raising Hell - a Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella Read online

  All demons have a thing for biting. And fucking, and killing, and desecrating holy places, and raping, and pillaging, and burning. Burning is one of their favorites. But this one liked to bite, I could tell from the way it had morphed Kayleigh’s teeth to sharp points as it had taken over her body. So I did what any reasonable human being would do—I put my face right next to its ear and whispered, “I know you’re faking, you son of a bitch.”

  It reacted about like I expected. It was fast, the body of a coltish preteen with years of community league soccer behind her meshed with the unholy might of a hellspawn enabled her to lunge from the bed faster than any human could react. A normal priest would have been lying on the floor with his throat ripped out.

  I’m not a priest, and I’m sure as hell not normal. I’m Quincy motherfuckin’ Harker, and the blood of Dracula himself runs through my veins. I dodged the demon’s bite, yanked the silver cross from my belt and brought it around and down through the back of What Used to Be Kayleigh’s skull. I put the tip of the cross right on the little ball in the back of her head where the skull meets the spine, the soft spot that just barely protects the medulla. It didn’t protect it enough. The three-pound crucifix, blessed in holy waters from the font of St. Peter’s Church, crunched through the thin bone walls and severed the brain stem, shutting down all neurological activity instantly. She died so fast her body didn’t know it was dead until a couple of seconds later, when it stopped getting signals from the brain. She collapsed face-first on the hardwood floor, limp, dead.

  I knelt beside her. I turned her over and pulled her the rest of the way out of the bed so she was lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling. I sat down, cross-legged, and pulled her head into my lap as the last light of Kayleigh fled her eyes, and then I closed them. I closed my own eyes and felt a tear slide down my nose. I took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling and said, “If you’re up there, you son of a bitch, and if for once in your worthless existence you’re paying attention—take care of her.”

  God and I have an interesting relationship, to say the very least.

  I closed my eyes again, took another deep breath, and then opened them to look down at the dead girl in my lap. “You can open the eyes now, asshole. I know you’re still in there.”

  The demon opened his eyes and smiled at me. “Why Harker, I must thank you for this gift. This body is young, strong…” The demon trailed off as it realized there was something wrong.

  “Paralyzed?” I offered.

  “What did you do? How did you do that? Why can’t I get out? Why can’t I make it work? What’s going on?” The demon’s eyes were darting side to side, looking for a clue, but it had no mobility from the neck down.

  “Oh, sorry about that. You see, I knew you’d just about finished eating Kayleigh’s soul, so I only had a few seconds to get her out of there before you were done with her, and then her soul would be gone, with no chance of Heaven. That didn’t seem very nice to me, so I decided to fuck with your plan. And while I was fucking with your plan, I decided to just fuck with you at the same time. You see, when I crushed Kayleigh’s brain stem, I didn’t just kill her body and free her soul. I left her body a quadriplegic, and that gives you a whole lot of fuck-all to work with.” My mom always told me I swear too much. I told her she was provincial and old-fashioned. She told me that both statements were true. She was right. I swear too much. But almost always only at demons. Except when I swear at people. And angels. And minor elder Gods. And traffic lights. And a lot at elevators. Fuck it, I swear too much.

  “But why—”

  “Why can’t you just jump out, like you always do? Yeah, that’s the necklace I slipped on little Kayleigh while I was praying. It’s got these twelve little charms on it, all around the cross. One for each apostle.”

  “You put me in a Saints’ Chain? You son of a—”

  I punched him in the face. It wasn’t terribly effective, since his body was dead and he didn’t feel pain, but he was surprised, and it did shut him up before he said anything bad about my mother. I don’t abide anyone saying anything bad about my mother.

  I leaned in so my face was uncomfortably close to the demon’s. “Here’s the deal. You can stay trapped inside that dead body by the Saints’ Chain and hope that in a few hundred years the body will decay enough for the chain to fall off the neck and let you loose, or you can tell me what I want to know and I’ll banish you right here and now. So what’s it going to be, a couple centuries in a lead-lined box, or scurry on home like a good insect?”

  He glared at me for a long moment, which would have been unbearable for most people. I’ve had what some people would call an interesting life, and what sane people would call an absolute fucking nightmare existence, so being glared at by a demon didn’t even register.

  “Fine, what do you want to know?” it asked.

  “Who summoned you?”

  “Like I have any idea. I don’t know, and I don’t care. All I cared about was getting out of Hell and up here on furlough for a couple weeks until some self-righteous prick like you found me and sent me home. You know, it’s not too late—we could still party.” I felt the demon’s essence pressing on my mind, trying to worm into the cracks in my consciousness and take hold. I blinked twice, then focused my eyes on the demon’s and pushed with my own being, flooding the demon’s mind with the essence of me. And the essence of me isn’t very pretty. You know you’re an asshole when a glimpse inside your head makes a demon draw back, and that’s exactly what happened.

  “Wanna play some more?” I asked.

  “Hell no! I’ll tell you the whole thing, just let me go after that. It was a frat party, Saturday night, Omega Sigma Iota. Some horny fucktards called me up to persuade the girls at the party to be just as horny as they were. It didn’t work out quite like they had planned. They all got laid, just like they instructed. But maybe they didn’t all get laid by who—”

  “Or what?” I interrupted. I’d had a few conversations about human sexuality with demons in my past, and they had pretty flexible views on inter-special relations.

  The thing inside Kayleigh grinned at me, and my stomach did a couple of flip-flops and a barrel roll or two. Thinking about what the demon made those boys have sex with made me really happy I’d skipped breakfast.

  “Or what,” it confirmed. “They expected a fucking. They got one. I held up my end of the deal, and I got this barely-used meat suit all to myself. Until you came along and fucked it all up. So send me home, shitheel. I’m going to have a world of trouble with the boss when I get home.”

  “You mean Lucifer?” I asked.

  “No, fuckwit. I mean my wife. The last time I got a chance to run off after some young live bait, she did macramé with my intestines for a millennia. And that was her idea of a warning.” Good to know even demons had women troubles. Not that I had enough time to chase women to give me troubles.

  “I’m going to have to have your name to banish you.” True Names have power, and someone who holds a demon’s True Name can call or banish it from anywhere. I could see his reluctance in giving me his real Name. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t trust me with it, either. But he didn’t have a choice. He whispered his Name to me, and I repeated it until I got all the syllables right. Demon language is kinda like all the nastiest-sounding parts of Latin and German thrown in a blender with a bunch of apostrophes and just a little bit of Klingon sprinkled in for garnish. I finally got it right, and was ready to proceed.

  I reached into a pocket of my leather jacket, pulled out a vial of holy water, and sprinkled it on Kayleigh’s forehead. “Begone from this vessel, Krag’tharisman’teak, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I banish thee.” I opened myself up to the Source, closed my eyes, and pushed. I felt the demon leave Kayleigh’s body and opened my Sight.

  Before me stood a humanoid figure, shimmering from within with a reddish light. The demon’s spirit manifested as a nearly seven-foot tall winged human
with goat hooves and clawed hands. It looked at me, eyes wide in, I don’t know what, surprise that a human could actually banish it? Shock that someone without any real faith could perform the ritual? I couldn’t tell, and the demon’s soul didn’t stick around long enough for me to ask. I watched closely as a small hole opened up in the aether behind the demon, and the soul was sucked back to Hell where it belonged.

  I stood up, Kayleigh’s limp body in my arms, my knees protesting from sitting on the floor too long. I put her in the bed, pulling the covers up tight around her neck and taking the Saints’ Chain off her body. If you ignored the blood seeping from her neck wound, it looked almost like she was sleeping. I knelt beside the bed and put one hand on her forehead.

  “All right, God. I know you’re up there, probably watching something stupid like soccer or The Dick Van Dyke Show reruns, but this one needs a little help. She didn’t deserve what happened to her, so she doesn’t deserve to deal with your usual Purgatory bullshit, or some stupid line at the Pearly Gates, or whatever crap you’ve cooked up this year to keep the humans cooling their heels outside of heaven while you and your band of merry fuckwits sit on clouds and play harps or whatever it is you bastards do. So let her in, and take care of her like you didn’t do while she was alive.”

  “You know, Q, one day he’s going to actually listen to one of your ‘prayers,’ and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna be pissed.” The voice from behind me was cultivated and slightly British. It was also female, which made it all the worse.

  “Hello, Glory.” I stood and turned to the angel in the corner. “Was she one of yours?”

  “No. She wasn’t mine to watch. Sorry, you’ll have to blame someone else this time.” Glory leaned against the wall, casually gorgeous like a woman who is beautiful the minute she rolls out of bed, all Heidi Klum class and Sandra Bullock girl-next-door sexy rolled into one stunning package that stood about five and a half feet tall and had blonde curls falling down her back like a waterfall of gold. She was dressed for work, not business, which meant jeans, boots and a silky-looking tank top that made me want to run my hands all over her torso. I thought better of it quickly. Copping a feel on a celestial body is a good way to get disintegrated.

  “Who was her angel?” I asked. Yes, guardian angels are real. Yes, everybody has one. No, they’re not really worth a shit, as was evidenced by the dead girl in the bed I was standing beside.

  “I’m not going to tell you, Q. It’s not your day to die.” Glory was my angel. As such, it was her job to keep me from dying before my appointed time. I didn’t make it easy on her. Picking fights with angels is a good way to get dead, and I’ve done it more than once.

  “So it’s Michael? Gabriel? One of the big boys?” I pushed, trying to see if I could get something out of her. I needed to punish someone, something for this girl’s death, and sending the demon back to Hell just didn’t feel like enough. I have a thing about supernatural beings fucking around in the heads of innocent young women. Call it a family issue.

  “I’m not telling you. I will tell you that it was her time. She was dead by tomorrow no matter what. If she didn’t go to that party and get possessed, then she would have wrapped her car around a tree on her way to school in the morning. Or maybe she would have had a massive aneurism. Or just tripped going down the stairs and broken her neck. I don’t know the how, I just know the when, and this was all part of The Plan.”

  “Fuck the Plan.”

  “You seem to do everything in your power to do just that every single day. But not today. Now what are you going to do about her?”

  “I’m going to find the frat boys who thought it was a good idea to summon a demon just to get a little underage pussy on a Saturday night, and I’m going to emasculate them with a blender and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You have a dead teenage girl in her bedroom and the murder weapon with your fingerprints all over it. How are you going to deal with the whole not going to jail thing?” I hate it when she talks like a Joss Whedon character. It’s bad enough my guardian angel ripped off her name from a Buffy character, I really can’t deal with it when she starts talking like the show, too.

  “I’ve got a plan.”

  “Is it better than your last plan?”

  “I don’t remember my last plan.” I totally remembered my last plan. This one wasn’t all that much better.

  Chapter 3

  It took a little mojo, three fairly complicated spells, a minor summoning that wasn’t exactly on the white side of magic and a whole lot of arguing with Glory, but by the time I left the Garda residence, Kayleigh’s body was exorcised and sanctified, Mr. Garda was on his way to the drugstore to buy some Nyquil for his sick daughter, and the toaster was rigged to blow the gas oven sky-high about ninety seconds after I got into my car. I hated to do that to the poor guy, he’d really lost enough for one day, but most people’s minds aren’t built to deal with the kind of shit I spend my life dealing with. So a little suggestion mixed with some fairy dust I keep in my toolbox for situations best forgotten, and Mr. Garda would never remember that his daughter died in her bed a couple of hours before delivering literal Hell on earth.

  He’d feel guilt, of course. He was a parent who’d lost a child, and I could only imagine what that felt like. Fortunately, given my line of work, it looked pretty unlikely that I’d ever have to find out. Which meant I also wouldn’t spawn any demon-summoning, high-school-girl-raping, overprivileged doucherockets like the ones I was about to visit some seriously unholy vengeance upon. Although, thinking about it, my plans for the fucktards that got Kayleigh knocked up with a demon baby pretty closely mirrored some of the smiting the Almighty did back in the Old Testament days, back when he actually paid attention to what happened down here, before we got to too much begetting for him to keep track of.

  I pulled up in front of the frat house at about two in the morning, but you’d never know it was late from the music blaring and the drunk kids hanging out of the windows and lounging on the porch and front yard. I walked up the sidewalk, my boots making a solid thunk-thunk rhythm that sounded a lot like the beat of fists on flesh. That thought almost cheered me up a little as I bounded up the steps and flung open the door.

  “If you’re not a member of this frat, get the fuck out.” I didn’t say it very loudly. I didn’t have to. I pushed my voice to make sure everyone in the building heard it, and put just enough suggestion behind it laced with imagery of fire and bloodshed that a veritable flood of bimbos and hangers-on cascaded down the stairs and out of the house like rats following the Pied Piper.

  “What the fuck, dude? Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck is everybody going? We still got a party goin’ on here!” A shirtless, blonde college-age Justin Bieber lookalike with a square jaw and more abs than an Olympic sit-up team walked up to me and bumped chests with me.

  I stared at him. He actually bumped his chest into mine, like we were fucking gorillas in a mating ritual or something. I backhanded the little fuck to the ground and stepped on his balls. “I’m the motherfucker that just ended your party, shitbird. Now get the rest of your brothers into the living room. I’ve got questions. You’ve got answers.” He scurried backward until he could reach the stairs, then scrambled to his feet and started rounding up members.

  Another one came up to me, all full of bluster and righteous indignation. “What is this about? I’ll have you know, my father is Jacob Marlack; he’s a very important attorney in this city and I know my rights—”

  I cut him off by grabbing his throat in my left hand and marching him backward into the living room where most of his fraternity had gathered. I steered him to the couch and shoved, forcing him to sit. “I’m going to say this once, and I get irritable when I have to repeat myself, so pay attention. I don’t give a fuck who your daddies are, how much money they have, or what they do for a living. I don’t give a flying shit if you can buy Rhode Island. I’m here for information and the faster I get it, the f
ewer of you bleed. Are we clear?”

  I looked around the room. A couple of the boys looked like they wanted to say something, but the ones next to them either smacked them or just shut them up. And they were boys, for fuck’s sake. Most of them had three chest hairs between them and they’d already summoned a demon. They were so fucked and they had no idea. I felt bad for them for about a second and a half, then I remembered what Kayleigh looked like, lying in her bed, dead at my hand because these assholes wanted to bang an underage girl. These stupid fucks that could have had their choice of college tail but wanted something different. And I had to clean up the goddamn mess.

  “Last Saturday night you boys had a little party.”

  I started, only to be immediately interrupted by the drunkest of the Overindulged Ones. “We have a fuckin’ party every fuckin’ night, asshole. You’re going to have to be more spefi . . . scepifi . . . specific.” He grinned and high-fived the brother sitting on the couch next to him.

  I gathered my will and murmured, “Sobrietate.” Then I pushed my will at him. He went from happy drunk to a little green, then pale, then sweating, then miserable and holding his head as he went from tanked to stone-cold sober in about three seconds. I was impressed that he didn’t puke.

  “May I continue?” I asked. There were nods all around. The boys were looking from me to their now-sober friend with what I thought were appropriately frightened glances, so I thought I might make some headway this time. “Now, at this party was a cute girl named Kayleigh. She looked a lot like the girl in this picture.” I produced a snapshot I’d pulled down off the wall in Kayleigh’s house. You know, before I burned it to the ground with her demon-violated corpse inside.

  “Anybody recognize Kayleigh?” Lots of shaking heads. “Really? You guys are absolutely certain you’ve never seen her before?” A lot more shaking of heads, but several sideways glances, too. Most of them landing on Mr. My Daddy’s a Lawyer. Big surprise.