C.J. Carella's Website

ONE

I knew it was going to be a bad night when three cultists of a Mad God tried to kill me in a shitty bar in New Haven.

They came at me with knives. At close range, a blade in the hands of someone who knows how to use it is as deadly as a gun, and a lot less likely to jam or send a ricochet back in your direction. However, that’s not the main reason why the blank-faced men drew Tanto-style daggers from under their jackets and went for the kill, silent as swooping sharks and just as intent on drawing blood.

Those who’ve turned their backs on humanity and reality itself like to feel flesh and bone parting under their well-aimed thrusts and slashes. They like the smell of blood and the look in their victims faces as agony turns them into unthinking, dying beasts. The pain of others is one of their few remaining sources of joy and pleasure.

Not the kind of people you want to hang around with at a bar, or anywhere else for that matter.

Jorge’s began its existence as a second-rate Irish pub that shifted as the neighborhood’s demographics did. My contact, a hood rat by the street name Cornflakes, had insisted on meeting me there. The place was dark, indifferently clean, and the regulars had been looking at me suspiciously since I came in. The locals were mostly Puerto Rican; when I ordered in Spanish they identified me as a Dominican and only the fact that I’m about as tall and wide as your typical NFL linebacker limited their hostility to glares and muttered comments.

I got to enjoy the ambiance and a few sips of my Corona for about five minutes before the assassins followed me in. During that time, I got one of my customary but never welcome migraines, and knew bad things were about to happen. One of my gifts is the somewhat erratic ability to catch glimpses of the future. Said glimpses are never anything good, like next week’s Powerball numbers; all my visions are of upcoming death and misery. Some gift.

The cultists walked in separately, about thirty seconds apart, three pale men in cheap business suits who clearly didn’t belong at Jorge’s. The first one sat by the bar next to me. The next one in went to a table behind and off to the left of my position. The last one was drawing out his blade even as he stepped inside, and that was the signal for the others to follow suit.

I was already on the move when they did.

The migraine disappeared in a wave of adrenaline as the awareness of danger sent my body into overdrive. Beer sloshed everywhere when I swung the half-full bottle of Corona at the cultist at the bar as he stood up and unsheathed his knife. Nothing wrong with his reflexes: he blocked the bottle with his left forearm, shattering it and providing me with a nice jagged piece of glass. I was carrying three guns in concealed holsters – shoulder, back, ankle – but they weren’t going to give me time to pull out any of them. The broken bottle and my hands and feet were going to be my only weapons for the next several seconds.

Knife-fighting Lesson One: win or lose, you’re going to get cut. Accept it, be ready for the upcoming sensations of metal slicing into you, and you’ll have a much better chance of living to see the inside of the ER while the other guy is assuming room temperature at the morgue.

The cultist managed to grab my wrist but couldn’t completely stop the trust with the makeshift shiv. That meant the sharp end of the broken bottle didn’t go all the way through his eye socket and into his brain. It still went in deep enough that he let me go and started to howl like a monkey in a wood chipper. It doesn’t matter what kind of Lovecraftian entities you worship, as long as you’re still mostly human, a popped eyeball will keep you from doing much of anything for a few seconds. In any case, he didn’t have even that long left to live; my second thrust caught him in jugular. Blood sprayed everywhere, and his dying spasms broke my makeshift weapon. Oh, well. I should write the makers of Corona and recommend a sturdier bottle design.

I turned my attention on the guy who’d sat down behind me. He was already one his feet and charging my way, but I kicked and empty chair at him. He tripped on it and went down, rolling on his side, but didn’t stab or cut himself with his knife, which happens more often than you’d think. Still, that bought me a couple seconds.

The third assassin was moving through the crowd as I turned to face him. The first patrons were just figuring out something was going on; surprised shouts – Que carajo? What the fuck? – rang out over the loud music.

A burly patron, too drunk to realize what was happening, staggered into the assassin. “Mira, canto de cabron…” he started to yell.

The killer grabbed the man by the hair, pulling his head back, and slit his throat with one swift, well-practiced motion. People started to scream as the assassin pushed the dying man aside and closed the distance between us. Everybody moved back, giving us plenty of room to dance.

He bored in, knife held low so he could stab me prison-style, a sewing-machine motion aimed at puncturing the victim in as many places as possible in the shortest amount of time. It’s deadly even when you’re using a sharpened toothbrush handle, and much more so when you’re wielding a four-inch blade with a chiseled point.

Of course, that move put him in very close contact with me, and that wasn’t a good place to be in.

I twisted my body as we slammed into each other, and managed to trap his knife hand between my upper arm and armpit, although not without getting a shallow cut on the side for my troubles. He was a full head shorter than me, which prevented me from biting off his nose. Instead, I slammed a fist into his throat just before he managed to reach my balls with his free hand – cultists fight dirty, too – and that distracted him enough for me to knee him in the balls.

Even as the pale man started to sag under the double impacts I was on the move, holding on to him, twisting around to face the third cultist before…

The knife went into my back, missing a kidney because I was moving, not that there any good places to get stabbed in the lower back. Adrenaline allowed me to ignore the wound, and I swung my dance partner in the direction of the assassin who’d stabbed me, spoiling his follow-up attack. I noticed the body of another bar patron on the floor; whoever it had been, he’d bought me a couple of extra seconds with his life.

After they were done killing me, the cultists would probably slaughter everyone in the establishment to celebrate their victory. That’s how they rolled.

 I shoved the guy with the crushed balls at the throat-slasher, but he sidestepped and moved around his partner to get at me. I was weaponless. He swung the blade in a furious figure-eight pattern as he advanced. I took several cuts on my forearms, trying to strike the flat of the blade, but life isn’t a Kung-Fu move, and knives, even a big pig-sticker like his Tanto, move too fast to parry cleanly or easily. He cut my arms, two, three, four times. The fifth slash turned out to be a feint; he managed to get under my guard and stabbed me in the gut.

There was no pain at first, just a cold shock where the blade went in, and it didn’t slow me down. I grabbed the back of his neck with one hand, his jaw with the other, and twisted with all my strength. Vertebrae snapped with a crack almost as loud as a gunshot. The assassin’s head was turned all the way around, causing several patrons to redouble their screams of horror. He went limp immediately and collapsed, leaving the knife inside my guts. I grunted and swayed on my feet for a second, but didn’t touch the weapon; pulling it out would only make me bleed out faster. I was already leaking plenty of vital fluids; blood dripped from my side, back and arms.

One cultist left.

Neither of us was in good shape by then, and it became a contest between whose wounds were worse: his crushed testicles and bruised throat versus the knife in my gut and blood loss from multiple cuts and stabs. It was a near-tie. He gave me another cut on my left arm, and I slammed he palm of my hand against his jaw. Bone and teeth shattered; the assassin spun around and ended up face-down on the floor, dead or unconscious. I took two unsteady steps towards him, set myself, and stomped on the back of his head with my steel-toed Timberland; skull and vertebrae crunched under the impact. After the second stomp, his head didn’t look like a head anymore.

All done.

I staggered out of the bar into the cool night air, the knife in my gut sending fresh waves of pain with every step. Nobody tried to stop me.

Cornflakes had set me up.

He and I were going to have a little chat about that.

* * *

I made it to my Humvee, leaking blood all the way. Not good. There was a good chance I’d bleed out before I could do anything about it.

I managed to drive off, all my concentration on the road; my vision was narrowing down to a tunnel, and my hands were shaking. As the adrenaline high wore off, every wound loudly made its presence known. I had maybe a minute or two left before the lights went out.

There were no good choices. I drove to the back lot of a closed restaurant and parked there, out of sight from the street. No choice. I leaned back on the seat, and let it come out, the thing that lived somewhere between my guts and my soul.

It was waiting for me, horribly aware and full of sheer malevolence, an alien presence driven by savage, desperate hungers and unending hatred. It hated me most of all, for keeping it bound in the darkness within me, but it also loved me in its own way. Its love was somewhat similar to that of a child for a bowl of ice-cream, but it was a love of sorts.

It didn’t use words. Its mind, such as it was, didn’t handle concepts in the same way humans did, and it communicated mostly through telepathic games of dominance; any ensuing exchange of information was a secondary factor. It sensed my agony, and delighted in it. It tried to take advantage of my weakness to overwhelm my will and take over my body permanently, destroying my mind along the way.

Nice try. Suppressing the monster within was as instinctive and ingrained as keeping control of my bladder. The intricate network of wards tattooed all over my skin flared into life, driving the demon back. For the Beyonder trying to crawl out of its fleshy prison, it was like being caught in a net of red-hot razor wire. It understood pain and power, and it soon realized it couldn’t win. Its lesson learned, it became obedient to my commands. I loosened its mental leash slightly and allowed it to come forth and do its job.

The draining agony from my wounds was set aside by an old familiar pain, as things started shifting and moving inside my abdomen. Organs were roughly pushed aside as alien flesh manifested itself inside my body cavity. It wasn’t just painful; it was a violation of sorts. But I’d gotten used to it.

I became something other than a human being.

* * *

The first time it happened wasn’t the worst, but it was in the top five.

“There he is! Get the fucking Haitian!”

Age eleven. I was already bigger than most kids my age, so it took a group of seven or eight mostly older kids to feel brave enough to come after me. I ran through the streets of San Cristobal, but the neighborhood was not familiar to me, and all I managed to do was get lost.

“Haitiano de mierda!”

Dominicans don’t like Haitians very much. The Spanish half – more like two-thirds – of the island and the French-speaking side have a long and checkered history, little of it pleasant. I don’t know who started the – totally truthful – rumor  that I was some Haitian orphan a gringo couple had adopted and then lavished with a lifestyle I didn’t deserve, but whoever it was had done a thorough job and everyone in San Cristobal knew about it.

Dead end. I’d run into a blind alley. I turned around and saw only hostile faces. Most of them were shorter than me, but they looked mean and tough. None of them went to my school, the fancy Catholic institution reserved for the wealthy and a few lucky scholarship students, and they hated me as much for my expensive school uniform as for my Haitian lineage. I figured they were going to beat the crap out of me for the sin of being who and what I was. I was wrong.

“Look at that fucker. Le voy a cortar el bicho,” said the leader. He pulled out a switchblade. It glittered in the sunlight as he waved it back and forth like a magician’s wand. I wanted to believe that his threat to cut my dick off was not serious, but I was terrified that it wasn’t.

I felt like I was going to throw up, or piss myself, but my terror brought forth something worse.

The pain was huge and unexpected. I was torn up from the inside, as if a cancer was growing at impossible speeds, gnawing at my entrails. I screamed, and something ripped its way out of my skin, tearing through my jacket, just below my ribs. The other kids screamed, and ran even before a second twisting limb, something like a snake, tore its way out from the other side of my body. The pain was bad, but nothing compared to the sudden realization I was feeling the warmth of the early afternoon’s sun on the skin of the two tentacles, that they were as much a part of me as my arms and legs. I stopped hurting and felt my senses shift, and my fear was replaced by something between anger and hunger.

If those kids hadn’t run, something terrible would have happened.

What happened to me was bad enough.

I felt burning lines running down my back as the monster inside battled the wards inscribed on my skin. The slimy, cold mind of the Beyonder touched mine. A thousand forgotten nightmares suddenly came alive in my mind, and I understood what it was. I’ve forgotten most of that terrible understanding, thankfully, because that’s the kind of knowledge that kills you, body and mind and soul.

My adopted parents had found me shortly after my birth, crying on a stone altar, my swaddling clothes soaked in the blood of my mother, her rendered remains scattered all around me. My father had been crushed against a wall, so thoroughly destroyed he was nothing but a misshapen stain less than an inch thick. Thirteen other wannabe sorcerers were lying in pieces throughout the desecrated church, where the thing they’d dared to summon had found and slaughtered them. My rescuers were knowledgeable enough to know what had happened to me, and compassionate enough not to kill me out of hand. Instead, they had raised me as their own and taken precautions for just such this event.

Those precautions saved my life and sanity that day. Barely.

I don’t remember making my way home, but I’m told I walked in, eyes wide but unseeing, my clothes torn and covered in grime, sweat and blood. I slept for three days straight; they had to put an IV drip in my arm so I wouldn’t dehydrate. When I woke up, I had a very special talk with my adoptive father.

* * *

Cold.

I shivered in the blood-drenched seat of my Humvee. I could hear police sirens in the distance. That could be first responders arriving to the bar, or some other crisis. Bad stuff happens at night a lot more often than before the Shadowfall. Five deaths in a bar fight could well be just one of several incidents. And with cops refusing to respond to calls in less than overwhelming numbers, it often took a while to get assistance.

My wounds were gone. The car still had the rich metallic stink you get when you spill half a gallon of blood in an enclosed space, and the blood was still there, ruining the custom leather seats and my clothes, but all the slash and stab wounds were closed, replaced with pale scars, the kind you’d get from old, long-healed wounds. My inner demon had fixed me right up. There was a price, of course. There always was. The Yonder drew power from somewhere other than this world, and, when used to accelerate cellular regeneration, that power changed stuff. For one, I would have to get a thorough checkup as soon as I had the spare time: there was a good chance cancerous tumors were beginning to grow next to my recently-healed internal organs. Even worse, the areas around the scars would feel different, would perceive the world differently. Every time I healed in this way, funny things happened to the nerves surrounding the wound. I wasn’t looking forward to the new, improved sensory input I’d be receiving from the scars. From past experiences, I knew they would range from feeling bursts of pleasurable tingling whenever somebody nearby died to being incapable of sensing heat or coldness, or feeling cold when exposed to heat, or vice versa. The weird new senses usually faded away after some days or weeks, but they added more spice to life than I liked.

Oh, well. It was something I’d learned to live with. I set it aside and concentrated on the job at hand. Time to find Cornflakes.

I opened the glove compartment and pulled out a small bundle made of thick human hair, bound together with string. An associate of mine had pulled a handful of cornrows right off Cornflake’s head a couple of years ago, and made that bundle out of it. Corny had a way to piss people off, so he’d probably deserved it. It was a small miracle someone hadn’t taken him out before this. That streak was probably not going to last the night, however.

Even three years ago, using the hair bundle to track him down would have taken hours of ritual preparations and concentration, all of which would have been wasted if the target had moved more than a few blocks in the interim. Magic – a wildly inaccurate term used to describe the interactions of the human mind with various levels of existence beyond our own – had been an unreliable, very difficult kind of endeavor, even when you were using the right formulae and symbolism, which most so-called occultists didn’t.

It had been almost two years since the Shadowfall, however. A lot had changed in the interim.

TWO

It’d been twenty-one months since Las Vegas was nearly destroyed by what had been described, by various pundits and analysts, as a terrorist attack, a freak weather system, an alien invasion, a zombie apocalypse, and the opening act of the End Times. Those in the know knew it’d been a bit of all of the above, and much, very much more. Unlike similar, smaller-scale events, this time the truth just couldn’t be hidden or explained away. Billions of people around the world had watched footage of a dark mass of clouds blotting Vegas from sight, of ravening packs of crazed people running down the Strip, attacking and in many cases eating tourists and residents alike, of monsters ranging in size from cat- and dog-like to things as big as buses, with glimpses of the kind of stuff you usually see in Japanese creature features. The official toll – over eighty thousand dead, a similar number injured, and two hundred thousand missing and by now presumed dead – had been bad enough. Tens of thousands more had been rendered, in the words of an expert, “psychologically unfit,” a bloodless term that covered everything from PTSD to catatonia, with a large percentage of poor bastards who just wouldn’t stop screaming unless heavily sedated.

The hollow shells that once had been luxury hotels and casinos had largely lain untouched in the ensuing twenty-one months. Vegas was no longer a valued tourist destination. By all accounts, less than fifty thousand people still called the city and surrounding environs their home, and that number dwindled every day. Mostly via emigration, although disappearances, murders and suicides were plentiful enough.

The casualties of the Vegas Disaster had extended far beyond the Clark County limits. A lot of people had lost their marbles just by watching the events unfold on their TVs or mobile devices. Among them had been the President of the United States, who’d been relieved of duty and was currently recuperating at an undisclosed location while the VP more or less bungled her way through the remaining three years of the current term of office. There’d been riots, a rash of suicides, active shooter incidents, dogs and cats living together and so on, not just in the US, but all over the world. The economy had gone to hell too, as a sizable portion of the population decided to stop spending their disposable income on anything other than bullets, cans of beans and batteries, none of which were exactly major drivers of prosperity. Things were messed up everywhere, except perhaps for the Middle East, but only because when you’ve already hit bottom there’s nowhere to go but up.

And, to top it all off, supernatural events kept happening.

Well, they’d been happening, with increasing frequency and intensity, for quite some time. Plane disappearances. Freak outbreaks of mass hysteria that could be called zombie mini-apocalypses if you were of a paranoid bent, or just read between the lines of CDC reports. Monster sightings galore, from the old mainstays like Bigfoot, Nessie and the Chupacabra to things that had no names even in mythology. The number of incidents, along with the increased missing person reports, bizarre accidents and deadly “natural” disasters had grown dramatically over the previous decade. The authorities had worked overtime to cover things up, but the worsening situation was an open secret to anyone with an internet connection who typed the right search words in Google. There were hundreds of sites devoted to such thing. A few even got things right a good deal of the time.

After Vegas, of course, traffic to those sites exploded.

It had been an interesting psychological experiment, if by interesting you meant downright horrifying, and if by experiment you meant upheaval on a planetary scale. What would people do when confronted with evidence that there were unexplainable, and worse, very dangerous things lurking in the dark?

As it turns out, for a majority of the population, the answer was to do nothing. A substantial percentage pretended Las Vegas hadn’t been ravaged by things beyond the common understanding of nature, or decided it had been a one of a kind event, unlikely to ever repeat itself. Most folk understood things would never be the same after watching the YouTube videos of inhuman creatures tearing hapless tourists and residents apart, or news and smartphone footage of the smoldering ruins of the Strip, but most of them accepted, consciously or otherwise, that they couldn’t do very much about it. So, whether they ignored the new reality or just set it aside, they went on with their lives, kept going to work, raised their children, paid their taxes and posted cute kitten pictures on Facebook. They either bought or pretended to buy the official explanations for those events, and, unless something literally showed up to bite them in the ass, they ignored the news or made vague noises about them.

In many ways, they were doing the rest of us a great service: if everyone started running around screaming like it was the end of the world, civilization would grind to a halt and the end of the world would be all the more likely for it. I often pointed that out to the bemused and contemptuous peanut gallery that looked down on the “sheeple:” keeping the trains running and the lights on was as important as chasing monsters. And to some degree people were right not to panic. Statistically, if you took Vegas out as an anomaly, you were still far more likely to be killed by cancer or a car accident than by some Unknowable Thing from Beyond Reality.

The second largest group more or less stayed the course but paid more attention to the not-so-occult news, and for the most part only managed to make themselves anxious and miserable, although with perhaps a slightly greater chance of surviving any brush with the Beyond. Not a great chance of surviving, mind you, just a slightly greater chance than those who remained in denial and refused to run away before something dead or many-tentacled got within grabbing distance. This group also included a large number of over-believers who treated supermarket tabloids as holy writ and who were easy prey for any con artist that came along, spending their money on fake holy water, charms and amulets, tinfoil helmets and other alleged defenses against the supernatural. They were also more likely to attribute a supernatural cause to just about everything, from the weather to the price of gas.

That left the hard-core believers, a tiny minority so far, thankfully. These were people who’d taken a good look at Vegas and decided the end was near. The fact that there was a good chance they were right did not make their actions any more reasonable or useful.

There had been an understandable upsurge in religious belief across the board, but a small but very loud percentage of true believers were about ready to bring back the Crusades and the Inquisition or other religions’ equivalents. Most organized churches were clamping down on such militant impulses, but a lot of smaller ones were feeding on them. Zealots of diverse stripes blamed pagans, gays, pornography, the Teletubbies, Women’s Lib, the Patriarchy and Snooki for the coming of the Apocalypse. While most zealots restricted their activities to the occasional demonstration, boycott or petty act of vandalism, there’d been a few violent and even deadly incidents already.

Survivalists had become “in” again. A bunch of people had retreated to isolated communities where they’d built mini-fortresses and stocked them with guns, ammo and supplies. How well they would fare if some Beyonders – our technical term for entities from outside our reality – decided to make an appearance near them was an open question. My guess was that they would fare poorly.

Still, both zealots and survivalists were several notches above those who had decided that the best way to deal with the Beyonder threat was to join them. For most of recorded history, cults of that stripe had consisted of small, ineffective and largely harmless groupings of mentally-ill unfortunates. Once in a blue moon, they managed to conjure something with real-world applications. Said somethings almost invariably ended up eating the cultists that summoned them before going back to their homes. That had been changing steadily over the last few decades, however, and now that the volunteer pool was going up in both quality and quantity, it was only going to get worse.

Outwardly, not much had changed. In the US, people still went to work – those who still had jobs, that is – paid their taxes or collected their government checks, watched TV and downloaded Internet porn, much as they had before darkness had swallowed Sin City. If someone from the day before the Vegas Disaster traveled in time to this morning, he would find things pretty much the same, during the day, at least. Things changed a lot after the sun went down.

A lot more people stayed indoors at night – on my way to Jorge’s I’d seen precious little traffic even though it was only a little after nine p.m. Fear of the dark had made a triumphant comeback, reinforced by the growing number of disappearances and bizarre killings that tended to happen in the evening. To further aggravate the economic downturn, restaurants, bars and clubs were shutting their doors left and right. Those who went out usually did so in groups and didn’t stray very far from home. Driving at night wasn’t all that much more dangerous than it’d been before Vegas – the Sociedad had recorded less than one hundred confirmed cases of roadside deaths and disappearances in the US since those fateful forty-eight hours – but several of them had made the news and scared the bejesus out of a lot of folk, as the news often did.

It’d been a weird twenty-one months. Nobody knew whether it was just the calm before the storm, a sort of Phony War before things well and truly went to Hell, or a slow return to normalcy. It was my job, and that of my fellow members of La Sociedad de la Salvacion, to undo the damage and prevent things from going to Hell.

As far as I was concerned, it was a family business.

* * *

Age eleven:

“Dante.”

I opened my eyes and saw my father sitting by my bed, leaning over me.

Brandon Godoy was a spare man, a little over five eight, with a whipcord-lean physique, tanned, weathered skin, light brown hair and steely gray-blue eyes. He was missing his right arm at the elbow, as well as his left foot. A line of puckered scars down the side of his chest were usually explained away as a shark attack. At the moment, none of those injuries and mutilations were evident, except for the prosthetic arm, poking out of his short-sleeved button-down shirt.

“Hi, Dad.” I knew I was in trouble. I only remembered a little of what’d happened in that alley, but it was bad enough, and I was terrified that the stuff I didn’t remember was even worse.

“How are you feeling?” His voice – cool and collected, I couldn’t think of a time he hadn’t been cool and collected, even when we’d gone fishing and got caught in a sudden squall that almost sank our little sailboat – helped steady me. I very much wanted to cry, but I remembered what he’d said about tears – “save them for the times when nothing else will do, son.”

“Tired,” I replied truthfully. “There was this thing between my guts, and it bit me from the inside.”

“It’s gone now, Dante. But it will come back, and when it does you must be ready for it.”

“What is it? Am I possessed, like those people you help?”

I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but even in the big hacienda you couldn’t avoid overhearing things. When I was eight, the distant sounds of screaming had woken me up, and I’d sneaked out of my room and watched as a screaming, contorting woman was bound onto a kitchen table while Father Andres shouted at her in Church Latin. At some point something had spoken through the woman, in a voice no human throat could have produced, making noises in some alien language. I’d run back to my room and hid under the bed, saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over until the screams stopped or I fell asleep – I didn’t remember which one, just that I woke up under my bed and tried desperately to convince myself I’d dreamed the whole thing. Unfortunately, a few months later, the same thing had happened again – a young man or a boy this time, by the timbre of the screams. That time, I didn’t sneak out of bed to find out.

“It’s not like those people, not exactly,” he said. “What do you know about what your mother and I do? And Father Andres, and our occasional visitors?”

I thought about it, about the trips overseas which often happened suddenly and without warning, following telephone calls in the wee hours of the night; about the guests, rough-looking men and women, some of them bearing guns and knives even at the dinner table, as if they couldn’t stand being unarmed under any circumstances; about Father Andres’ eternally haunted expression, and the times when he’d stop in mid-sentence, staring at things only he could see. And their work at the nearby mission, tending men, women and children who had been ravaged, physically, mentally and spiritually.

“You help people,” I said. “You… fight bad things.”

He nodded. “Bad things, and bad people, and things that once were people.”

“You’re like superheroes. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I loved that show, watched it religiously on TV, dubbed in Mexican Spanish that sounded funny but didn’t make it any less enjoyable.

Dad chuckled at that. “Something like that.”

“So it’s all real? Vampires and werewolves?”

“Not like in the movies or TV, son. Mostly, they are bad spirits, taking over the minds of mentally-ill people and making them worse. Once in a while, though, it’s something bigger, something corporeal – you know what corporeal means, don’t you?”

I nodded. “With a body. Something that we can touch.” That can touch us, I didn’t say out loud.

 “Very good. Some of those things sometimes slip into our world, and the Sociedad has to stop them.”

I knew my parents worked for La Sociedad de la Salvacion. Our home doubled as the chapter house of the organization, which was why we lived in a converted plantation with fourteen bedrooms, including two converted worker’s barracks and an overseer’s shack. We still grew some garden crops, but most of the former farm and ranch land was used for other purposes, for training and practice: we had our own shooting range, a hiking area, and a number paramilitary facilities. We had an arrangement with the Dominican Army, and sometimes they sent people to train under my father, who despite his missing limbs was an expert pistol and rifle shot. We even had our own chapel. I had to walk three miles to go to school in San Cristobal, but I didn’t mind, because my home was its own little world, and the long walk just helped keep that little world separate from everything else.

 “Am I one of those things, Dad? Like a werewolf?”

“There is something attached to you, Dante. It’s not your fault. But it’s not like being a werewolf. You don’t become something else, not really. It’s inside of you, always.”

“Like a tapeworm!” I said. You can’t grow up in the Caribbean without learning a great deal about parasites, and the whole episode reminded me of the worms that could grow to gigantic lengths inside your intestines.

His eyes widened briefly. “You know,” he said. “That’s as good a way to put it as any. It is a parasite of sorts.”

My brief burst of enthusiasm faded, and I almost started crying. “Why don’t you get it out? I don’t want it!”

“I know, son. We’ve tried, we’ve been trying since we adopted you.” I’d known I was adopted since I was seven. “So far, nothing has worked. But we’ll keep trying to fix it.”

He didn’t promise me they would fix it. He didn’t say everything would be okay. Even at my young age, I respected that, even though it made want to cry very badly. At that moment, I realized that things might never be all right. I realized I was going to die, very possibly in a horrible manner.

I was cursed.

* * *

I shifted around on the Humvee’s bloodstained seat – detailing the vehicle was going to be a bitch – and did some hoodoo. I chanted a string of Sumerian words, not because of that language’s occult value, but for two simple and practical reasons: first, concentrating on speaking in a foreign language made it easier to focus one’s mind and willpower, and, just as importantly, you didn’t want to mix magic with words you might use in casual conversation or when idly thinking or dreaming, not if you didn’t want to trigger an effect by accident.

I’d been taught by the best minds of the Sociedad, which had gained its knowledge the hard way: trial and error, combing through millennia’s worth of occult records and sifting through the dross to find the very rare nuggets of wisdom found there, and most importantly, carefully interviewing the unfortunate few who’d been in contact with the Other Sides and sifting through their largely insane ramblings for yet more wisdom. Most of the initial work had been done by a trio of ex-Jesuits in the 1960s; two of them had paid dearly for their research, one with his life, the other with his sanity. The third one was still on the job, pushing ninety but looking sixty, an intense wiry man with crazy eyes and a penchant for laughing shrilly for no apparent reason.

In any case, the incantation worked as advertised. As I said the final word – Asar, meaning Eye, or All-Seeing Eye, depending on who you asked – I forged a link between me and my quarry. I immediately knew how far he was from me, and in which direction. That wasn’t quite as helpful as you’d think, since I couldn’t quite make a beeline for his location, not unless I could fly, and as far I knew, none of our spell books had a recipe for that. It took me a good fifteen minutes’ worth of maneuvering through New Haven’s annoying one-way streets before I reached the little bastard.

Tupac “Cornflakes” Kingston displayed a rare combination of actual occult talent, street smarts and plain dumb luck. Those traits had allowed him to survive if not thrive in the East Coast supernatural community, which until recently had been populated mainly by assorted barely-functioning psychopaths, frauds, and the deluded, with a slight leavening of things that had once been human but had switched teams at some point. The proportion of the latter had been growing steadily over the last few years, even before the Las Vegas Disaster. Corny had been eking out a living by selling charms and amulets to a select clientele comprising the more superstitious elements of the Southern Connecticut criminal underworld, which was a fairly large group, criminals being a superstitious and cowardly lot. Some of the charms actually worked, improving the luck of their wearers, although in most cases it would take a trained statistician to notice their effects. Cornflakes supplemented his income by selling information he picked along the way to an even more select clientele, including the Sociedad. And also, as it turned out, the Sociedad’s enemies.

For someone like Cornflakes, the changing times spelled doom, one way or another. Either something from the Other Sides would take advantage of his minor psychic abilities to set up shop inside his skull, or someone or other would bump him off for being in the way, or to remove a potential competitor. Or he could go out of his way to antagonize the wrong people. People like me.

Even without the location spell, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Corny at The Stain. The establishment was a low-rent tattoo parlor, occupying the bottom floor of a three-floor building in one of the hinkier neighborhoods of the city. To a select few, The Stain provided a little something extra, if you had the coin and connections: paranormal items, tattoos that acted as charms of protection, that sort of thing. Cornflakes was inside the parlor, probably spending whatever payment he’d gotten for setting me up on a fancy new Ward or Sign inscribed onto his worthless skin.

After parking my Humvee, I strode through the front door. The proprietor, a burly ex-biker who went by the handle Longshanks looked up from what appeared to be an incest-fantasy dirty book, if the lurid cover and title – Learnin’ To Love Daddy – were any indication. His eyes widened when he saw me. I hadn’t cleaned up, and I must have looked rather frightful, what with all the blood.

“Holy fuck, Dante. You okay?”

“Cornflakes,” I said.

I’d been in New Haven for three months, long enough for Longshanks to know the score. He indicated the booth to my left with a shake of his head, and stayed the hell out of my way.

The buzz of the coil machine in the booth masked my approach. Poison Luo, a talented Asian woman with a gift for geomancy and a taste for the forbidden, was working on Cornflakes’ bare back: a circle was already drawn there, and she was adding assorted symbols that, when completed, would provide a great deal of protection against entities from the Other Sides. The lady did nice work; if I didn’t have all my supernatural tattoo needs already covered, I might have hired her to add a few extra touches to my thoroughly decorated hide.

Poison’s eyes widened when she saw me coming. I gestured with my head, and she dropped her needle and got out in a hurry. “Please don’t break anything!” she said as she stepped hastily around me.

“I’ll try,” I replied. I presumed she meant anything in the parlor; I wasn’t making any promises about Corny.

Cornflakes had earbuds on and was listening to some classical hip hop. He’d begun to stir when he noticed Poison leaving, but he didn’t really know what was happening until I grabbed him by the back of the neck and lifted him off the recliner where he’d been laying face-down.

The informant wasn’t a small guy – five eleven or so – and he worked out, but I picked him up as if he was a child and dragged him to his feet. The sudden move sent a small cloud of dandruff flying from the thick cornrows on his head. A dry scalp and indifferent grooming habits had earned him his street name.

“Motherfucker!” he shouted before he realized who’d grabbed him. His right hand froze halfway to the pocket where he carried a dinky little holdout pistol. He knew that drawing on me would only earn him a broken wrist on top of whatever else he had coming to him.

“You stood me up,” I said as I relieved him of the weapon, a cheap-ass .25 caliber Phoenix HP.

“Dante. Yo, man, I…”

“Let’s go. I promised the lady I wasn’t going to break anything in here.”

Cornflakes didn’t give me much trouble as I frog-marched him out of the parlor. Longshanks studiously kept his eyes on his novel. Poison was nowhere to be seen.

“Yo, hey, man. Dante, man. Hey.”

“Hay is for horses,” I said. When we’d gone out and around the store, to the parking lot out back, conveniently out of sight from the street, I casually shoved him into a dumpster. Cornflakes slammed into it and fell to his knees, the wind knocked out of him. He looked over his shoulder at me, eyes wide.

“Dante…” There were tears of terror running down his face.

The way I looked probably didn’t help. I normally favor light business suits, but in deference to the meeting place I’d been wearing a sweat shirt and black jeans. My clothes were covered in blood and rather torn up, courtesy of the cultists’ knives. I was also clearly pissed off. I try to be pleasant and affable if at all possible, but I do have a temper. Like the man said, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

“You done fucked up, Cornflakes,” I said. I normally don’t curse, either, except when I need to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.

“Hey, man. They was gonna kill me! Gonna set a Yonder on my ass!”

“Whereas I’m just going to beat you to death.”

Cornflakes whimpered. The guy had surprisingly little intestinal fortitude for someone who dealt with the occult.

“Unless, of course…” I went on, letting him connect the dots.

“Yeah, man. Whatever you want, you got!”

“You said you had a line on the cultists doing all those killings in town. Was that just bullshit to get me to Jorge’s?”

“Yeah! I mean, no! They reached out to me, aight? So yeah, they told me to set you up. But I know where they at. Ain’t no bullshit.”

“Address.”

“You ain’t gonna whack me after I spill, are you?”

“Only one way to find out, C-Dog. Address.”

He spilled. It was a house near the harbor, which I didn’t like one bit. Probably worshippers of a seaborne Yonder; a pack of Deep One wannabes, just the kind of insane bastards that give evil cults a bad name.

“You gotta protect me now, you know what I’m sayin’? They gonna…”

I didn’t want to kill him. Cornflakes was a small-timer and still basically a human being, and I loathe killing people. But I couldn’t let his treachery go, either. You always have to send a message with your actions, and I had to send the message that messing with the Sociedad was a good way to get messed up.

So I just knocked him out.

I pulled the punch enough that I didn’t break his neck or shatter his jaw, but he lost a few teeth and collapsed unconscious onto the alley’s cold asphalt. The poor guy would wake up with a concussion and wouldn’t feel right for days, if ever. I field-stripped his Phoenix pistol and scattered its components and nine rounds of ammo all over the parking lot. On my way back to the Humvee I stopped by The Stain. “Call him an ambulance, please,” I told Longshanks. He nodded, looking a bit pale.

I don’t like doing that kind of thing, but the supernatural underworld is a teeming cesspool of human and inhuman garbage. Fear is the coin of the realm. As it was, ending up with a ruinous dental bill, plus an arrest when the cops found the dope Cornflakes almost certainly had on him – most psychics end up self-medicating to avoid completely losing their minds – might not be enough to discourage the real hard cases out there. If I’d wanted to send a serious message, I would have had to torture Corny to death, and leave his dismembered corpse somewhere his friends and family could find.

That’s one line I won’t casually cross. Can’t say I’ll never cross it, though. That kind of promise always get broken, sooner or later.

Hopefully not tonight, but the night was young.

THREE

“Suzie’s on her way,” Lorena De Kork told me over the encrypted phone. “Maybe you should wait for her.”

“If she’s coming from Boston, it’s going to take her three hours to get here. I don’t want to give them time to rabbit.”

“So go be macho, then,” Lorena said lightly. Too lightly. She was concerned about me. It was one of the most endearing things about her, how much she cared.

After we’d survived Vegas – long story – we’d been together for three months. Two glorious months when I’d actually been happy, had fooled myself into thinking things were going to be good, and one horrible month when everything fell apart.

In the end, the nightmares had done us in.

It wasn’t an uncommon thing in my line of work. Anybody who worked in the Society had trouble sleeping, except for the one guy in a coma, and even he didn’t have what you’d call a peaceful coma. Too many bad memories sloshing around our subconscious, plus the small but quite real worry that Something might get us while we’re slumbering and helpless. Night after night, Lorena would sit up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath, seeing her dead boyfriend coming at her, or the horde of zombies in the tunnels, or her partner being disintegrated while she dangled helplessly over a vortex between realities. I would hold her while she regained control, or let her cry on my shoulder.

To be fair, she did the same for me plenty of times.

Problem was, some of her nightmares involved me. She’d seen what I looked like when I let the monster out.

Hard to sleep next to someone who is the star of your nightmares.

She tried, I’ve got to give her that. Went to the Society-vetted therapists and tried to tough it out, hoping it’d eventually get better, that the night terrors would fade away in time.

By the third month, she started dreaming that I turned into a thing of tentacles and claws and teared her apart. The first time it happened, I tried to hold her and she recoiled from my touch and screamed in sheer terror when she saw me. And that was pretty much that. We coasted for a couple of weeks, but we could tell the writing was on the wall.

We’re still friends. As long as we don’t share a bed, we get along pretty well.

“Same old story,” I went on. “Too many fires, not enough firefighters.”

“I know.” The Sociedad had speeded up recruitment, and for the first time we were getting as many fresh fish as we could handle; more than we could handle, really, and I was dreading the time when we’d have to start cutting corners in training and outfitting troubleshooters. But the number of incidents was also growing, and faster. Much of the time we could only send an investigator or two to deal with a potential intrusion, and if they found something, they’d alert the authorities and hope the local police, reinforced with some Federal firepower, would take care of it. The Feds were still reeling from the Las Vegas debacle, however. The NSA, which had been in charge of dealing with paranormal activity, had been purged and sent out to pasture. Homeland Security and the FBI had been re-tasked to pick up the slack, but they were still playing catch-up. The Sociedad was doing its best to help, but the fact remained that many if not most of our activities were illegal, and attracting too much attention from the authorities would only end badly for us.

What a mess. What a royal mess.

“At this rate, I’m going to end up doing field work myself,” Lorena said.

“You’re too good a cop to be wasted as a door-kicker.” That was true. Lorena was a damn good investigator, and we needed people able to make sense of patterns and to do the painstaking work that got troubleshooters like me where we needed to be in time to do what we needed to do. But that wasn’t the only reason she wasn’t out in the field with a gun in her hands. She was certainly brave enough, but she didn’t quite have the killer instinct – and the callousness – you really needed if you were going to be shooting at monsters and cultists on a regular basis. The things she’d had to do in Las Vegas still bothered her very badly. You couldn’t care the way she cared about people and keep doing the sort of thing troubleshooters had to.

Case in point: I didn’t feel great about putting Cornflakes in the hospital, but I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. He wasn’t part of my tribe; my empathy for him was strictly limited.

You don’t have to be a sociopath to do well in this business, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

“I don’t like you going after a nest of cultists alone,” Lorena said. “We don’t have any hard intelligence on them, for one. There’s no telling what you’re up against. They’ve already ambushed you once.”

“And that’s why it’s best to hit them now. They’re short three members, and if they’d had a small army they would have sent more than three guys. Maybe they’re short-handed too. You can’t just look for people willing to kill or die for the Elder Gods on Craigslist.”

“True. How about the local cops? Detective Morelos sounds like a good guy.”

“He is. But convincing him to do a no-knock raid without probable cause is going to take too much time. Even worse if I try the Feds.” That was part of it. The other part was that I wasn’t sure Morelos could handle a face-to-face confrontation with the supernatural. He’d seen enough stuff to become a believer, but it had all been after the fact: impossible murders, that sort of thing. Chances were he and his men would only manage to get themselves killed.

I’d gotten Lorena’s partner killed doing just that, dragging two inexperienced people into my war. It might have saved my life, and possibly many more, but I’d rather try my luck alone.

“Fine, I won’t push it, Dante. Just be careful, okay?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Take care.” She hung up.

I drove the rest of the way in silence.

The neighborhood my targets were living in had started out as a nice place to live, if the size of the homes I drove past was any indication, but it had fallen on hard times, judging by the number of properties boarded up and covered in graffiti. The economy had stayed stubbornly bad since the first decade of the 21^st century, and had gotten much worse after Las Vegas got overrun by monsters and zombies and bears, oh my. The Dow had just gotten back to twelve thousand, and the stock market highs from the second decade of the century seemed like dreams of an idyllic and mythological past. Real estate prices were in the crapper. The cultists must have gotten a great deal on their lair.

The address Cornflakes had given me led me to an unusual house, a Queen Anne architectural mess, asymmetrical and with a corner tower topped by a witch-hat roof, surrounded by a wrought iron fence. As I drove past I could feel bad vibes emanating from the place like the stink of a skunk. They were laden with hopelessness, cold rage, and a deep, abiding malevolence towards all living things. Underlying it all was an alienness I’d felt a few too many times during my career.

There was a live Yonder in there.

Beyonder, if you want to get technical. We mostly use the short nickname because it helps break the overwhelming terror most of us feel when going against the damn things. They are monsters from beyond our reality, they wield a dizzying variety of powers, are very hard to kill or even to banish, and they can kill you ten different ways in the span of time it takes a normal human to draw a single breath. Most of them can’t survive in our reality for very long unless they have help by way of such charming things as human sacrifice.

I probably should wait for Suzie to back me up. And maybe try to get reinforcements. The 82^nd Airborne would do.

The points I’d made to Lorena still stood. If I waited two or three hours, they might decide to skedaddle. Or call for reinforcements themselves; I could probably handle a single Yonder, but if they called two, things might get hairy.

Going into an unknown area, with an unknown number of opponents waiting for you, is usually a fairly straightforward way to commit suicide. I was going to have to cheat, and cheating meant calling out my demon for the second time tonight, God help me.

There was no other choice. If I went in there as a normal human, even normal human me, there was a better than even chance I wasn’t coming out in one piece. The cult had sent three killers after me; there had to be at least another two or three in there, possibly more, plus their pet Yonder.

The one bit of good news amidst all the bad was that, whatever the Yonder in the house was, my inner demon didn’t like it one bit.

The critters from the Other Sides don’t like each other any more than they like us. Some are diametrically opposed to each other, matter and antimatter, so to speak, doomed to annihilation the moment they come together. Others are predator and prey, or rival predators competing for turf. We’d had little clue about the politics of the Other Sides until Vegas, when a myriad different Yonders had shown up at the same time. For the most part, any particular incursion into our world would come from a single source, or at least it used to. The times, they were a-changin’.

My Yonder didn’t like their Yonder. That gave us a common foe.

I drove around the block and parked my Humvee in front of a boarded-up house a block away. Chances were that someone or other would try to break into the vehicle while I was otherwise occupied, but my security system should take care of it. There was a set of wards inscribed in a few discrete places in the vehicle that would ruin the day of any trespasser.

There were two ways to do this kind of job. Slow and stealthy, or quick and brutal. Slow and stealthy requires decent intelligence and planning.

When it comes down to it, I tend to favor quick and brutal anyway.

I grabbed a few essentials from the back of the Humvee. Body armor and helmet; armored pads for my upper arms and legs, a combination of Kevlar, ceramic and steel plates, all marked with symbols of protection meant to shield me from both mundane bullets and otherworldly threats. I strapped in my guns: a 9mm Glock-17 pistol, a ludicrous .500 Linebaugh revolver for things that need lots of killing, a heavy duty machete belted at the waist, two combat knives, three flash-bang grenades, and, last but not least, my newest toy: a Kel-Tec KSG bull-up shotgun with dual tube magazines that put fourteen plus one twelve-gauge shells at my disposal, all in a compact package ideal for fighting at close quarters. The shell loads were all specialty rounds that kicked like an angry mule, hexed buckshot pellets made of exotic metals and propelled by a souped-up powder load. The shotgun cartridges would do a number on humans, Yonders, and things in between.

I put on a utility belt with pouches for extra ammo and other useful stuff, strapped on some low-light goggles, and was ready to go hunting. Loaded for bear, which improved my chances a little, but enough.

All my life, I’d trained to do battle. My big-boned frame had developed a nice sheath of muscle as I grew up, courtesy of endless hours of brutal workouts. I’d spent all of my formative years learning a variety of ways to kill and maim my fellow man, using weapons ancient and modern, carefully crafted or hastily improvised, or my hands, feet and teeth. My teachers had all been veterans who’d shared their hard-earned wisdom with me, and I’d avoided many of the mistakes rookies make the first time they are out on the sharp end. I’d come out ahead in deadly games with terrorists, mercenaries, renegade Spetsnaz commandos, and, one time, a SEAL team gone wild (long story).

And if I went up against a handful of armed cultist, all it would take would be one second’s bad luck and I’d be dead.

Which meant there was one thing left to do.

I called forth my Yonder once more. Not fully, though; I just needed to borrow enough of its inhumanity to be faster, stronger, tougher than any mere mortal. With a Yonder as my copilot, I’d be able to react to things no normal human could handle, ignore wounds that would cripple or kill me otherwise, and double or triple my normal four hundred pound bench press.

There was a price, of course.

* * *

Age twelve:

It’s just a dog. A mangy street dog, lean and mean and dirty. Diseased. Maybe even rabid.

Justifications to give in to temptation. My inner demon didn’t speak. It made its desires known nonetheless, and let me rationalize them. The whispering voice telling me to go ahead was my own. I knew what it wanted, and was tired of feeling the mental pressure of its frustrated desires. Besides, every time I’d let it out had been an amazing rush, like being a comic-book superhero.

Mom and Dad will be mad.

They don’t need to know, my treacherous inner voice countered.

That voice was lying, of course. I couldn’t lie to my parents, even if I wanted to. They would know what I had done. Sooner or later, they would find out.

So take your punishment. It’ll be worth it.

The dog in the alley growled at me, its hackles up, slobber dribbling from between its bared teeth. It was a mean one, feeding off garbage and any mice, rats or small household pets it could find. And if it wasn’t rabid now, sooner or later it would be. No great loss.

I stepped forward, unafraid. I was already as tall as most fully-grown men, and with enough strength, and speed to knock out a Marine unarmed combat instructor: I’d done just that a few days before. I could have killed the dog a dozen different ways without letting the demon out, but none of those methods would satisfy its hunger.

To feed, it needed to look through my eyes, and taste the world through all my senses.

No great loss.

I let it come forth.

Outwardly, nothing changed, except for my eyes, which became the solid dark orbs, cold and unfeeling, like those of a moray eel or some other remorseless predator. My perspective shifted, grew sharper and more intense. I knew the dog was indeed diseased, and what diseases it had: three types of worms writhing inside its lungs, intestines and heart, numerous skin infections, and fleas and ticks in plentitude. Its spirit was just as diseased, driven by fear, hunger, and a bleak certainty that each day would only bring new indignities and suffering. And, as it sensed the change in me, a growing, uncomprehending terror.

The dog tried to flee, even if it meant running past me. Its dash was swift and cunning, befitting an animal that only lived because it had managed to outrun and evade those who wanted it dead. This time, it wasn’t enough. I snatched it in mid-stride with one hand, effortlessly picking it up by the scruff of its neck. It whimpered and struggled feebly in my grasp as I looked it in the eye. A fierce surge of desire and possessiveness rushed through me. The dog was mine.

My demon wanted it to suffer, but I couldn’t bring myself to go that far. Instead, I snapped its neck and made a quick end of it. It was bad enough: I felt the animal’s substance being absorbed by my demon. I wasn’t sure what the entity was devouring: the dog’s spirit or soul, perhaps, or maybe all the information contained in its consciousness or its very existence in time and space. Different Beyonder species sought different things from their prey. Mine craved death, loved to observe and partake in any killings I did. Its joy at feeding on the dead dog was a sickening thing.

With a surge of willpower, I sent the Yonder back into the darkness beneath my skin, and ran home, crying like a child, to confess to my parents and take my punishment.

That would be but the first of many bargains.

* * *

The Yonder came out to play. No tentacles burst out, but I felt them slithering around my intestines, making my guts itch in a way that made me want to stab myself. It sniffed the air; I made an involuntary sound, something between a purr and a growl that made my vocal cords hurt. I stopped the Yonder’s use of my voice box and punished it for daring to push its boundaries. It took the psychic pain stoically, but it stopped trying to take liberties. That would have to do.

I moved forward, not feeling the weight of my gear anymore, jogging lightly on my feet. If anybody saw me rushing towards the cultists’ house, they didn’t make anything out of it. Some neighbors were probably already dialing 911, but police response times were pretty bad in that area, especially at night. The festivities would likely be over long before the NHPD showed up and started taking its time establishing a perimeter. Even before the Las Vegas Disaster, cops didn’t often charge into potential firefights; they’d rather hang back and wait for reinforcements, and move in only in overwhelming force. Those procedures made collecting a pension a lot more likely. Cops had grown even more cautions after a few incidents where first responders got eaten by things from beyond reality. Some of the dash-cam footage had been very disturbing, even to me. Cops just didn’t rush in.

I did, since I didn’t expect to live long enough to collect the admittedly lavish pension the Society provided.

The wrought iron gate was locked, and before I touched it I felt a serious layer of protective wards bound into it. The wards were a form of transdimensional circuitry that would ground out alien energies, making it hard to work magic. They were designed to keep things from crossing past the property’s threshold without the express leave of their maker. Against your typical, half-assed practitioner, those wards presented a formidable, likely impregnable first line of defense.

Against me, it only provided me with the means to kill the first of my victims.

I grasped the handle of the gate and growled two Sumerian words while I channeled my will, reinforced by the fury and hatred of my dark passenger. The front gate glowed red-hot for a moment; an instant later the metal shattered like glass hit by the right harmonic vibrations, and I felt the mind of the cultist charged with monitoring the wards. There was a moment of shock, a brief surge of fear, and his mind was snuffed out with sudden finality. The Yonder lapped away at something I dimly perceived as memories, emotions, a lifetime of thoughts and experiences turned into a snack.

One down.

I strode past the ruins of the gate. A piece of shrapnel had sliced open my cheek. I ran a finger over the wound, and cauterized it by a minor application of summoned fire.

It hurt like a mother, but I was used to ignoring pain. Practice makes perfect.

The Queen Anne house was well-defended against mystical threats, and if the cultists inside knew what they were doing, it would have a nightmare to storm. Someone at the windows on all three floors or the peaked roof tower should have been able to peg me as I walked up the stone-stepped path to the front door, but they hadn’t thought about posting snipers there. It was clear nobody in the bunch had much in the way of military training.

They might not have been trained, but they turned out to be well-geared. The front door opened and a cultist emerged into view, a tall skinny man in a flannel shirt and baggy jeans. He went on one knee, using the door frame for cover as he took aim with a semiauto rifle, a Ruger Mini-14. The ballistic plates on my chest would shed most civilian .223 rounds even at point-blank range, but no sense giving him a chance to nail me in the face or some other less-armored part of my anatomy. I shot from the hip as I moved, spoiling his aim by sending a load of extra-heavy buckshot his way.

The first blast missed him but hit the door frame, showering him with splinters and sending his own shot wide. He didn’t get a chance to fire again.

The second one removed most of his face.

My inner demon drank the cultist’s essence, sucking it dry and removing it from existence. I felt/heard a sound of primal despair coming from the fleeting consciousness of the man I’d killed and then sacrificed to the monster inside me. And I didn’t care as all that much.

Two down.

I paused at the door, standing over the still-twitching body and taking two quick glances inside, left, right, and I looked right just in time to see another Yonder worshipper, a young woman who really should stay off the carbs, charging at me with a classic Mac-10 SMG in one hand and a hatchet in the other. I ducked back as she cut loose with the boxy submachinegun.

Even under the best circumstances, the Mac-10 isn’t a particularly accurate gun. Shooting it on full auto one-handed while on the run pretty much guarantees you’ll only hit whatever you’re not aiming at.

The stuttering sound of a long burst drowned out all other noises. More splinters flew off the door frame as I stepped out of the line of fire. A ricochet tugged at my left sleeve; that was the closest any of the 9mm rounds came toward me. A second or two later, the gun went silent, shot dry in a few loud, furious moments, signifying nothing.

I popped back in. The screeching woman was almost within kissing distance, hatchet raised for a killing blow.

My shot took her in the lower abdomen, the shotgun muzzle so close that her knit sweater burst into fire even as six iridium-osmium pellets, about two ounces of combined weight, tore into her flesh. Movies to the contrary, no man-portable gun can actually send someone flying backwards. It’s a physics thing: Google it. The cultist slammed into me, dead on her feet but retaining enough forward momentum to stagger me a couple of steps. I shoved her off of me as I pumped the shotgun’s action and she went down, trailing a coil of intestines. Her trashing legs almost made me stumble again.

Three down. Her soul made a delicious snack for my spirit friend. I tasted a life tainted by self-loathing and hatred of everyone and everything, turned into deluded worship and ending in a hot blaze of agony punctuated by ecstatic terror. To my Yonder, its flavor was like bittersweet chocolate.

The front door led to a short hallway that opened up into a foyer with a staircase on the end and two entryways off to the sides. A man came running down the stairs, a little red-headed shrimp of a guy wearing a knit cap and an oversized sweater, a ceremonial dagger in his hand. A second man emerged from one of the entryways, a big whale of a cultist who bore a striking resemblance to Peter Griffin from Family Guy, wielding of all things a Claymore two-handed sword.

I turned towards Peter the Cultist, but disentangling myself from his late friend had slowed me down just enough to lose the initiative. He swung the sword at me, a powerful overhead blow that would have likely done some serious damage, even in my body armor.

Unfortunately for him, it’s hard to swing a two-handed sword indoors. He ended up hitting the ceiling with it, spoiling his swing and giving me time to line up a shot. I double-tapped him, letting the recoil of the first blast – which turned his left pectoral into a mass of blood – line up the second one as I pumped the action; he was swaying on his feet when the second shot took him right in the mouth. That made a mess. Something hit my goggles, right over my left eye, and stuck there. A tooth, I realized.

No time to dwell on that, or on the nearly-beheaded body going down with a heavy thud, or the psychic burp my Yonder made as it battened on the soul of the dearly departed. The red-haired stepchild had made it down to the foyer, and he was chanting and making waving motions with the knife. The little incantation was likely meant to trigger a heart attack or brain aneurysm, or maybe turn my blood into hydrochloric acid, or simply drive me insane with a glimpse into the Other Sides. When it comes to magic, there is any number of things you can inflict on your fellow humans if given enough power, knowledge and malice.

I didn’t wait to find out if the wards on my armor and skin, or my inner demon its own self, could handle whatever hex this bastard was slinging my way. One important tenet of this business is that only a select few practitioners can sling a curse faster than someone can pull a trigger. Carrot Top wasn’t one of them.

Three shots: chest, chest, and head, just to be sure. I switched to the second tube magazine of the KSG, and gave him one more tap when he started to sit up despite the clearly mortal wounds. The fourth blast severed his connection with the Other Sides, and his corpse became a corpse in truth.

The man’s soul was so thoroughly infected by his dealings with the Other Sides that my Yonder notionally spat its consciousness out, uneaten. I caught enough of a glimpse of what had been living inside the redhead’s skull to make me vaguely nauseous.

I set the disgust and self-loathing aside while I thumbed fresh shells from a belt pouch into the KSG’s magazines and looked around for other threats. No more cultists came running out. Either the survivors were smarter than their four buddies, or this was it. Not that I was going to relax when one or more murderous psychopaths could be lying in wait for me. I’d accounted for five of them, including the unseen bastard who’d died when I broke the outer wards. That was probably everybody.

Except for the Yonder, of course.

I could feel its presence everywhere. If left in one place for more than a couple of hours, the critters inflict themselves onto the environment like supernatural toxic waste. The actual effects vary widely, of course, but in the Society’s experience, they’re never good. Food sours at indecent speeds, local temperatures undergo rapid swings, insect life multiples and mutates, that sort of thing. The natural order of things is inverted, perverted, mocked.

In this particular instance, the air felt thick and stale, with a faint fishy stench that grew less faint as I walked into the foyer, noticeable even through the awful smells recently-killed human beings make. This Yonder was a thing of the seas, or some sea-like location in whatever hell dimension it called home. Fighting it on dry land was a blessing; I wouldn’t want to face it in any medium similar to its native environment. This was bad enough, having to search the whole house for it. And my inner demon was positively bubbling with hatred for whatever dwelt in the house: there was clearly some bad ichor going on.

Clearing a dwelling on your own is not wise. Too much risk that somebody will come up from behind you while you’re checking a room. If you have to, you have to take your time, look in every possible direction before you make a move, and hope you haven’t missed anything that will rear up and bite you in the ass, often literally. But with my own Yonder watching my back, I would be okay: it would use my senses to their fullest, and know if anybody tried to sneak up on me.

I checked the first level first: to my left was a dining room that hadn’t seen much use, if the spider webs and dust covering the antique table and chairs there were any indication. To my right was the kitchen, where the lone female member of the gang had been having a snack. A bowl of something raw, red and white was on the kitchen table, and it didn’t smell appetizing at all. As their connection with the Other Sides deepens, many cultists acquire a taste for human flesh. It’s not a healthy diet, but these are people who no longer care if they live or die, or for any of the conventions of humanity. That’s just one of the many reasons we kill them without ceremony or much regret. For all intents and purposes, they’re already dead.

I opened the fridge. Besides a few two-liter bottles of Diet Coke and a pizza box, it was filled with mason jars containing assorted human organs, mostly sweetbreads. More happy meals of the dammed.

My choices were the upper floors or the basement. I knew where I would keep a pet monster from beyond reality, and it wouldn’t be the master bedroom. There had been no sign of life from upstairs, where I assumed lay the mortal remains of the cultist whose brain I’d fried when I shorted out the defenses around the property. The cops would be showing up sooner or later: the average response time to a ‘shots fired’ report in this neighborhood was around eleven minutes. Best to deal with the Yonder before doing anything else.

I wasn’t looking forward to it.

FOUR

The door to the basement was in the kitchen. It was padlocked shut, but neither the padlock nor the door itself were sturdy enough to keep me out, even without my inner demon juicing me up. I kicked it open and looked down a narrow set of stairs leading into darkness that my night vision goggles converted into monochrome definition. A stench of rotten seafood greeted me. It was cold down there, at least ten degrees cooler than the kitchen.

I went down, gun ready, mentally steeling myself for what I’d find at the bottom.

The basement was unfinished, with a dirt floor and exposed wooden supports on the ceiling. The cultists had set up a large inflatable pool that filled most of the available space, and presumably placed their pet monster there. Seeing the three-foot tall plastic and metal circle, filled with deceptively still dark water, almost startled a chuckle out of me: something so prosaic didn’t belong in the basement of a house full of cannibalistic cultists. The symbols of power carefully painted all over the walls of the pool transformed the oversized toy into something else, however.

Those symbols erased any thoughts of laughter. Not just because I could tell at a glance how much power had gone into creating them, which gave me a good indication of how dangerous whatever was waiting from me inside would be. But because I recognized the work. Those symbols hadn’t been cribbed from some ancient grimoire after laboriously sorting out useful bits from all the garbage; those were modern designs developed by teams of talented and dedicated men and women who’d risked and in many cases lost their lives and sanity developing reliable techniques to bind and contain things from Beyond.

Those symbols had been developed by the Sociedad. And I could think of only one way the cultists had obtained that knowledge. Someone had given it to them. Whoever had betrayed the Sociedad and everything it stood for had perverted the geometries we’d developed to contain and defend against Beyonders into something that could be used to summon and control them. It was the worst kind of betrayal, and there would be a reckoning.

First things first, however. I had to force myself to set aside the shocking revelation and concentrate on the here and now.

What little room wasn’t taken by the inflatable pool was mostly taken by a small butchering table, stained with blood. A couple of severed human limbs that had ended up in places too inconvenient to reach had rotten where they lay, adding to the smell. A spike in missing person reports had been one of the first indications something was going on in New Haven. Now I could tell where many of the missing had ended up.

Getting rid of whatever lurked inside the pool would be tricky. If I smashed the wards containing it, it would be free to do as it wished, and Yonders rarely choose to meekly go back home right away. Its most likely reaction would be to unleash its full power on the surrounding area, fundamentally altering the laws of physics over several city blocks until reality reasserted itself, which would not be soon enough for any unfortunates in the area. At the very least, dozens of people would be killed, and hundreds more driven incurably insane. At worst, the attack might create a fracture in the walls between worlds, allowing more things to come rushing into our world. It wouldn’t be as bad as Vegas, but it would be bad enough.

No, this was going to take some finesse. I would have to enter a meditative state, link my mind to the energy patterns of the wards and syphoning constructs surrounding the kiddie pool, discern their function and slowly, painstakingly take them apart. It would be…

My inner demon roared and took over. Its attack was so unexpected and violent that my defenses collapsed.

Alien sensory input flooded my mind and erased my consciousness.

* * *

I was in a deep, cold ocean, water laden with exotic metals and salts, filled with strange lifeforms. Titanic constructs broke through the ocean’s surface and reached towards the skies, miles-tall things with impossible angles that shifted shapes from one moment to the next even as they clawed for purchase in the hostile seas they had invaded. The dwellers of the ocean world were massing against the intruders, unleashing a vast host of monsters, some as big as whales, the largest the size of continents. Actinic blasts emanating from the living towers boiled the waters around them, destroying the world’s defenders by the thousands, but still others pressed forward, seeking to bring the towers down and feast on the agonies of those who dwelled within.

Gates screeched open and the invaders sallied forth to defend their great siege towers.

I was among them, a fledgling warrior; this was my first great battle. Adjusting my shape to fight in this alien environment was a source of pain and discomfort, but pain and discomfort were the only constants of my existence, had been since my first moment of self-awareness in the scalding-hot place of my birth. I knew pain, fear and rage: those were the forces that drove me forward, that made me shift shapes and become a thing of slashing tentacles and murderous fury. There was hunger, too, but the things that lived in this ocean world provided no nourishment to my kind. I dimly understood the invasion was meant to use this realm as a stepping stone towards other, more suitable universes, places filled with tastier entities. The seaborne creatures whose flesh I rendered in an orgy of destruction were rivals that had to be disposed of before we could move on to our rightful prey.

The battle was brutal and seemingly endless. Thirty-three towers had burst into this world, each containing a dozen legions, and they fought the massed hosts of the ocean world for months, for years, as reinforcement poured through the breaches in reality the towers had torn open. I killed with wild abandon, ignoring the agony from a dozen wounds, ignoring the way the liquid medium within which I fought attacked me, trying to drown me or, failing that, to eat away at my hide. The ocean itself was alive and aware, being but an extension of the Greater Entity that ruled this realm. If our armies inflicted enough damage, it would be convinced to withdraw and cede this portion of its substance to our Masters. That was why we fought.

We fought, and we lost.

There were too many of them. Warriors greater than myself fell all around me, crushed, ground down into parts too small to reconstitute themselves. Their remains dissolved in the cold ocean and were used to fashion deadlier defenders. The enemy pushed us back to the towers by sheer press of numbers, and the living metal of the towers themselves proved to be too weak to resist their constant pressure. One by one, the titanic structures collapsed.

Fear became the only thing. To be killed in that realm meant endless torment: our essence would be trapped in the cold caustic waters and toyed with by the Greater Entity that ruled there. The few survivors among the legions, a small fraction of the hordes that had entered this realm, fled back to the universe from whence we had come.

Our foes followed us.

The rout became something worse, as the dark waters of the world we’d invaded came pouring into the harsh rocky planet that housed our legions.

It wasn’t a battle. There weren’t enough survivors left among us to put up a meaningful resistance. There was only fleeing before the relentless tsunami waves and the things riding them.

I was one of a handful of survivors.

I never forgot.

* * *

Drowning.

I instinctively gasped for air and was rewarded with a mouthful of foul, burning water, and that almost killed me right then and there. I coughed, kicked and twisted around until I broke through the surface, spitting the poison in my mouth and sucking in a breath of air.

I was swimming naked in the portable pool, which somehow felt much deeper than the three feet it should have been. I had to get out of there.

 It took some desperate swimming through the caustic, foul liquid before I reached the edge of the pool and was able to scramble over it. My eyes burned, and even after I wiped them as best I could with a piece of discarded clothing I found on the floor, I could barely see. I rushed upstairs, looking for a bathroom. I found one on the second floor, past the cooling body of the first cultist to die that night, and I jumped in the shower. I let clean water run over me, washing off the stuff still clinging to my skin. It felt as if I’d been dipped in battery acid.

That was where the cops found me.

* * *

“This is one fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Godoy,” Detective Antony Morelos, Major Crimes Division, said as I finished toweling off. He’d been kind enough to have a patrolman bring me a set of NHPD sweatpants and a hoodie. The cop was short and slender, with a perpetually-tired expression, half-lidded eyes over facial features out of a Mayan bass-relief. “You know I should bring you in in cuffs, don’t you? Just the weapons violations…”

“You know I got a federal dealer’s license,” I said wearily. The stinging on my skin and eyes was beginning to fade, but I still felt like crap, on the inside as much as outside. Exhaustion was but the tip of the iceberg. All of my internal organs felt bruised somehow. All I wanted to do was cry myself to sleep, but I forced myself to pay attention and act like everything was just copacetic.

“You ain’t got a license to kill, mano. There’s five bodies downstairs, pieces of a bunch more, and Dios sabe what the fuck’s going on in the basement. So tell me why I shouldn’t be Mirandizing your ass just about now.”

“Because you do know what went down in here,” I said as I put on the sweat pants. They were a tight fit, but they would do for now.

“I don’t like this shit, Dante. None of it. Too easy for people to settle scores and then go around claiming they were taking out monsters and cultists and shit. That’s how it went down during the Spanish Inquisition. You wanted some payback, you accused some poor asshole of being a witch.”

“Sure, but the boys and girl in this house were real witches. Well, diabolists. Don’t want to besmirch the Wiccans, who are by and large as harmless as Pentecostals, and a lot less likely to knock on your door peddling their wares.”

Morelos sighed heavily. “I know. And after we’re done identifying the bits and pieces in the fridge, we’ll solve a bunch of missing person cases. Explaining all of that to the chief and the mayor is still going to be a pain in the ass.”

“I know. And I appreciate you not arresting me just to make things easier on you.”

The first responders had taken a look at the scene on the ground floor and called Major Crimes before going in. Not too long after the Vegas Disaster, Detective Morelos had drawn the unenviable job of dealing with Weird Shit. Every city in the US now had an unofficial Weird Shit division. I’d had a sitdown with the detective as soon as I arrived to the city, and the frank conversation, as well as some character references from a few friends in high places, had paid off. Luckily for me, the detective didn’t need to be convinced of the basic truths of our brave new world. He’d seen enough Weird Shit to know the score. Morelos was willing to cut me a great deal of slack.

“So what are you going to tell them?” I said. “The chief and the mayor.”

“That you were investigating a tip and were the victim of an unprovoked attack by a cult of devil-worshippers with a fridge full of human body parts, and that you acted in self-defense. Saying you’re one of the heroes of Las Vegas will help. Having Bishop O’Toole give the mayor a call will help more.”

“He will,” I assured Morelos. The Bishop would get a call from the Sociedad to do just that. We still had a very cordial relationship with the Catholic Church, even after we parted ways sometime during the Sixties, when it became clear that faith and exorcisms just weren’t enough to deal with the Beyond and the Sociedad became a secular occult paramilitary organization. Priests could bless Crusades, but couldn’t lead them. Most of our members were laypeople, and about two thirds of them weren’t Catholic; many of them weren’t Christians or theists of any kind.

“Hope so,” Morelos went on. “Anyways, do you always get naked and take showers after going on a killing spree?”

“Had to. I took a swim in some very toxic stuff. By the way, you should call a Hazmat team to handle the kiddie pool in the basement.” That should be safe enough; whatever had happened in the pool had ended with the demise or banishment of the Yonder in it.

Come to think of it, my Yonder was unusually quiet at the moment. I tried not to dwell on that for now.

“Will do,” Morelos said. “The smell down there is so bad a couple guys almost keeled over just from poking their heads in. They spotted all kinds of gear scattered on the ground. Bits of clothing, torn-up suit of body armor, and a buncha guns. Yours?”

“Yes. Mind if I pick them up?”

“They’re evidence.”

I groaned inwardly. The armor and most of the gear were likely a total loss – when I’d shifted I’d ripped through everything I’d been wearing – but there were several thousand dollars’ worth of customized guns that I would sorely miss while they made their way through the justice system. It’d probably be months before the Sociedad could pull enough strings to get them back to me. But I didn’t press the issue. Not getting arrested was good enough.

“Fine. They’re all yours, Detective.”

“No need to get all formal and shit, Dante. I’m just trying to do my job. Not to mention covering both our asses. Speaking of which, someone matching your description killed three guys in a bar down by Dwight Street. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

 I shrugged. “All right, Tonio. I know what a mess this is. I’ll do what I can to help.”

“Tell me this is the end of it; that’ll be plenty of help right there.”

“I’d be lying.”

His shoulders slumped. “Yeah, figured as much.”

“I’ll be in touch. We need to know who these people were, ASAP. They had access to knowledge they shouldn’t have.”

“All right. And you’ll keep me posted if anything else is going on, right?”

“I will.”

“You will if you think it’s something I need to know, and you’ll keep me on the mushroom diet otherwise.”

Kept in the dark, fed horseshit. “Do you really want to know more than you need to? I can give you full access, but you’ll never have a good night’s sleep afterwards.”

Morelos scowled at me. “Cono carajo. How well do you think I’m sleeping now?”

“All right. I’m going to leave town for a couple of days, but when I’m back we’ll go grab a drink and I’ll answer any questions you got. Just don’t expect to like any of it.”

“Good enough.”

It wouldn’t be, but he’d find out soon enough.

* * *

My sat phone was ringing in the glove compartment of my Humvee just as I opened the driver’s side door. I picked it up as I sat behind the wheel of my personal mini-battle tank. The blood on the seat had mostly dried, but it still wasn’t fun to sit on.

“Dante.”

“I’m just getting off the exit,” Suzie Hamed said.

“And I’m just about to drive back to the Home Office.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? I drive all night to help you and you’re skipping town?”

“I learned something I need to pass on in person.”

“Fuck. That bad.”

“Yeah, that bad. Tell you what, meet me at my place, and I’ll fill you in. I need a fresh set of clothes anyway.”

“One of those nights, eh? ‘kay, see you there.”

Fifteen minutes later, she arrived to my base of operations, a rented house a couple blocks away from the Payne Whitney Gym. It was a humble one-story house, the kind of place graduate students from Yale University could (barely) afford on their Teacher Assistant’s pay or stipend or whatever they got. I’d done some home improvements on the place since I moved in. There hadn’t been enough time to set up a layered defense network, but I’d been able to plant a few discrete wards around the front and back yards, enough to keep anything supernatural from coming through without spending a good deal of power, and, more importantly, without warning me something was coming. Through the wards, I picked up Suzie’s arrival; her collection of protection devices glowed like beacons in the night.

Suzie (nee Suhaima) Hamed stood five foot three inches tall on her sensible shoes – she’d given up platform shoes along with her former career as an exotic dancer – had a voluptuous figure, olive skin, thick black curly hair and piercing, bright brown eyes. She could have stood for any number of Biblical or Qur’anic characters, or as a Mesopotamian goddess, as long as your taste ran towards the more lethal, bloodthirsty deities.

After surviving the Vegas Catastrophe, not a small feat in itself, Suzie had turned out to have a number of hidden talents. She was highly sensitive to psychic perturbations, which had allowed her to quickly master a number of magical tricks. At the same time, she was naturally resistant to all forms of mental domination, physical and supernatural: she’d retained her sanity when faced with Yonders and Warlocks, and more recently had quit an expensive coke habit without missing a beat. Most importantly, she was a stone-cold killer, the kind of borderline sociopath that could divide the world into us-versus-them and show no mercy or empathy towards “them.” In the two years since she’d joined in, she’d become a very valuable asset to the Sociedad.

I trusted her enough to tell her the truth. She was a relative outsider in the Society, hadn’t had enough time to get too deeply embroiled in our internal politics, and she was a friend.

“Shit’s really hit the fan,” were the first words out of her mouth after I let her in and she took a good look at my face.

“You have no idea.”

“I was monitoring the police freq on my way in. Nine bodies in one night. Is that a non-Vegas personal record?” We’d all agreed to leave Vegas out of our score cards. Too much of an outlier.

I shrugged. “Close up and personal, it’s pretty high up the list. Using explosives or crew-served weapons, no.” Once, I’d helped sink a freighter loaded to its gunwales with former Lybian refugees gone undead, thereby sparing Italy from a George Romero version of The Camp of the Saints.

“What happened?”

“Someone went through a lot of trouble to kill me.” I gave her a brief recount of the action. “The whole thing was a set-up. If the knife guys didn’t get me, the heavily armed cultists would, or if that failed, the Yonder in the basement would. Multiple redundancy.”

“So why didn’t it work? Good or lucky?”

“I’d say I was both good and lucky, plus my pocket monster helped. Mostly it was my pocket monster.”

Suzie shuddered. She’d only seen what she’d jokingly referred to as my ‘pocket monster’ once. The fact she still treated me as a human being and a friend was a testament to her notional testicular fortitude. “The more you rely on it…”

“… the more likely it’ll be able to break out. I know. I actually lost control over it, the third time it came out.”

“Dante…” Her eyes were wide. By admitting I’d lost control, I’d literally put my life in her hands. The Society’s standing orders were to put me down if I ever lost control. Since I was back behind the wheel, so to speak, the situation wasn’t black and white anymore, but she would have been entirely within her rights to draw her Glock and put seventeen bullets in my head right then and there.

“That was the final layer of their death-trap. The Yonder they summoned was of a species my pet monster hates more than anything. That hatred gave it enough power to break free, at least for long enough to destroy its enemy.” And in the process had given me some insights into my inner demon I wish I’d never had. I didn’t share that tidbit with Suzie, though: we had bigger fish to fry.

“Who would know how to do that?”

“Same people who constructed the summoning grid for the critter. They were using McDowell’s geomantic formulae, Suzie. Stuff only a couple dozen people in the Society know about, and maybe five or six have the brains and willpower to actually use in the field.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. We’ve got a traitor in the Society.”

“Fuck.”

“I should set up a swear jar for when you’re around.”

“Go fuck yourself, prissy-boy. I like to keep it real.”

“Yeah, real foul-mouthed.”

“Whatever. So what are we going to do about this? I thought I was joining the good guys. This is beginning to look like one of those stupid movies where everyone is a bad guy.”

“I’m going back to Washington. Have a talk with the Old Woman, lay the cards on the table, and hope we can find the traitor – hoping it’s just one – without tearing the Sociedad apart.”

“Better you than me. The Old Woman’s one scary chick,” Suzie said.

“I know. She scares the crap out of me.”

“The shit. She scares the shit out of you.”

“I’d rather save my four-letter words for special occasions.”

“Fucking Boy Scout.”

“I wish I’d been a Scout. I was too busy training in small-unit combat tactics.”

“And yet you talk all PG-13 and shit. Whatever. What do you want me to do? You think you’ll need backup in Washington?”

I shook my head. “I need you to follow up on the situation here while I’m gone. Make sure there’s no more cultists running around. I have a feeling we’re not done with them yet.”

“Sure. I can do that.”

“And if you get even a whiff of something hinky, call for backup, all right?”

“Sure. Because with a traitor or traitors running around, I’m going to put my life in the hands of my Society pals.”

“Crap. You’ve got a point.”

“Fucking-A I do.”

“Here.” I grabbed a post-it note from my desk and scribbled a couple of numbers on it. “The one on top’s mine. You’ve got Chico’s number, right?” She nodded; the former gang banger was another new agent, and thus not likely to be the traitor. “The other is the Lady of Mercy’s private line. She’s on personal leave right now, but if you call her she’ll come running. I think she’s got a soft spot for you.”

“That’s good. She also scares the shit out of me.”

“Crap. She scares the crap out of you.”

“Fuck you.”

We grinned at each other.

When the crap hits the fan, it’s good to have friends.



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