The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance 2 (17 page)

Berith whispered a word that caused Cain to drop to his knees in searing agony. His chest constricted, his head throbbed so intensely he feared the skull wouldn’t take the pressure, every nerve ending felt on fire, bile rose up his throat and, in the blink of an eye, he was no longer in his temporary home in the slums of Montreal.

He was back in hell.

Ashes and glowing embers flew in twisters around him as the voices of the damned rose in complaints and cries. Everything was dead or dying. People, animals, things. Falling apart, collapsing, burning up in black smoke that choked the crimson sky and created heat vortices darker than night. Black holes in the blood-red sky. Spawns like the one he’d killed earlier that night swooped down on him, lashed his naked back with their talons, cawed in parody of his roars of pain.

In all his squalid grandeur, Berith towered before him, wisps of hair flying in the burning wind, shreds of skin falling off the massive skeleton. But the eyes were intact, always remained intact no matter the body’s decay. They stared at Cain, right into his core. Rage and terror and pain closed in on him.

“What was it about my ‘job’?” Berith asked, leaned over. He smiled as he delicately pressed a rotten finger through Cain’s shoulder.

His world vacillated. And Cain screamed.

They said if a man hurt enough, his body would shut down. In hell, that theory didn’t apply.

Cain flopped to the concrete floor back in Montreal when Berith summarily dismissed him in the middle of a quartering. Lucky someone had interrupted the demon because the last time Cain had pissed Berith off, he’d paid for it dearly. Even by hell standards.

“I need—” He coughed, cleared his raw throat. He
really
needed a drink.

His clothes hung in tatters and one of his shoes was gone. He shivered, raked a hand through his sweaty hair. Ashes still clung to his eyelashes and lips. Any moist part of him was likewise covered in the stuff. A dull, familiar pain radiated from the inside of his left forearm. Rolling on to his back to cool that side against the concrete, Cain raised his arm in front of his watery eyes. As with any other job, the name of his next “client” was carved in his flesh. It’d disappear. Not because the skin would heal, but because after he’d deliver the secrets, Berith would erase the name. Only to carve another. Then another.

But this one gave him pause. The name of a well-known politician.

“Shit.”

Other demons would want that woman’s secrets, like gold coins to the denizens of hell.
Everyone
wanted someone else’s secrets, demons included. They could buy souls with the stuff. And nothing was more important to a demon than the number of souls under his or her command. Maybe if Cain harvested a good number, Berith wouldn’t continue where he’d left off.

He showered to get the stench of Berith off him and, once again in a dark suit and Italian shoes – his armour – fired up the laptop to access tax records made available by another of his boss’s many “employees”. The demon had in his charge accountants and artists, politicians and activists, men, women, young and old, of every nation that existed and some that no longer did. Every demon had at least as many as Berith, some more, others less. He’d had to fight through hordes of rival demons’ spawns and secret keepers to get the jobs done. One in particular, Belial, employed only the most vicious and degenerate and commanded legions of lesser demons, spawns, humans and even a couple of renegade angels. No one wanted to mess with him, except Cain. He just didn’t care anymore.

With a triumphant ping, the search yielded a full legal name, an address and more information than Cain could ever use. He noted the address on a piece of paper – since the name was carved in his flesh – and tucked it into his coat pocket. Because he’d never been the positive type and suspected shit would hit the fan again, he loaded up on ammo and weapons, slipped a pair of throwing knives in their sheaths strapped to his calves. He might look like a banker but he hid an arsenal worthy of any specops operative, complete with little sachets of holy water and bullets made of gold and silver.

As he walked out, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. From tall, dark and handsome, he’d turned into tall, dark and haunted.

But first, a drink. He knew just the place and, if he was lucky, he might even meet the closest person he had to a friend.

Half an hour later, Cain pulled the dirty door to a hole-in-the-wall tavern named after the dead proprietor’s wife. It’d changed hands three times in the last fifty years. Cain could name each bartender since the place’s opening.

An older woman in a corner booth caught his attention. So he wouldn’t drink alone that night.

Cain slipped into the booth. “Sister.”

“You look like shit,” she said in rapid-fire sign language. The gold cross resting on her mint-green cardigan gleamed when she raised her hand, three fingers extended. “Eat something.”

The bartender came over and set down an open bottle of Canadian rye whisky and a pair of thick-bottomed tumblers. With a dip of his chin to the woman, the bartender returned to his bar.

The first swallow scorched Cain’s already raw throat all the way down then spread in a nice warm wave in his belly. He inhaled deeply, was about to take another swallow when the bartender returned, this time with a plate of smoked meat sandwich and fries.

Out of habit, Cain thanked the man, remembering too late, as always, that not many would remember him two seconds after talking to him. It’d taken him centuries to get used to it – of people looking through him as if he wasn’t right there in front of them. But the in-between state had its pluses – especially when it came to gunfights. Ha. Yet the solitude had been crushing at first. Then he’d become accustomed to the shroud that seemed to cover him, used it to his advantage. Those like him who didn’t belong on the mortal plane, who’d had their turn and left, were no longer part of the equation. Like ghosts.

He wondered why the Sister
could
see him though. She’d accosted him a few years ago as he walked across a park. It’d been so long since he’d spoken to someone that he’d temporarily forgotten what it felt like for a person to look straight
at
him. A real, living person. The dying could see him all right. But she hadn’t been dying – and still wasn’t – neither was she a demon, spawn or angel, that he could tell, anyway (angels had always been sneaky). She must have been a lunatic then. Not that he’d ever tell Sister Evangeline to her face. The woman ran a men’s mission near the old port and no one willingly messed with her, not even the mayor. The thought made him smile.

“I didn’t even know you had them,” Sister Evangeline said. A mocking lift to her mouth rounded her ample cheek.

“Had what?” Cain bit into the sandwich. Juices triggered by the meat and hot mustard forced him to focus on the meal and not the conversation. He wolfed the thing down in four bites.

“Teeth.
I didn’t know you had teeth. Never saw them.” She stole a fry from his plate.

“It doesn’t bother you he thinks you’re talking to yourself?” Cain nodded in the bartender’s direction. The man seemed oblivious to Evangline’s gestures as he watched a snowy little TV screen set on a soccer game.

“He can think whatever he wants.” Still holding the fry, she managed to sign at the same time. “It’s you I worry about. I swear to God, you look worse every time I see you. Are you sick?”

Cain pushed the plate away. He wasn’t hungry anymore. But he was still thirsty, so he poured them both a second glass.

She grimaced. “Fine, be the mysterious jerk. If you think it makes you look cool, think again,
mon garçon
.” Only Evangeline would ever call him a boy. He was older than she was, by a few millennia, too. He’d lived through the Great Flood and listened live on the radio as the Hindenburg burned.

He caught her looking down at his chest and realized the butt of his Luger stuck out of his coat. With his elbow, he surreptitiously slipped the holster back a bit. His forearm throbbed like a neglected wound quickly infecting. He had to get to work.

“Remind me again what you do for a living?” Her eyebrows moved as much as her hands when she talked.

He stood, slipped money from his pants pocket and placed it on the table, drained another glass that didn’t burn half as much as the first two. “I never told you what I do for a living, Sister.”

“Do you know your scripture?”

“What makes you think I’m Catholic?”

She smiled. “You wear guilt and shame like a pair of well worn gloves. So,
do
you?”

“You know what they say about curiosity. ‘But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt’.”

Sister Evangeline’s French-Irish temper came out in explosive hand signals almost too fast to follow. Cain had always thought the sign word for “asshole” was funny as hell. A reversed version of the symbol for “OK”.

Grinning, he left the seething woman to finish the fries.

Two

Cain felt trouble long before he caught the first whiff. Spawns, a lot of them. The night sky took on a more sombre quality, as if it was thick with activity he couldn’t see. But hear it he could. Hissing, growling, sucking sounds, the flap of wings and scrape of talons against concrete.

Snow fell slowly, in small flakes that didn’t melt when they landed on Cain’s shoulders and coat sleeves. A twister of debris roiled along the sidewalk a few feet away. In front of him like a gargantuan sentinel, stood a tall and thick stone mansion surrounded with a high wrought-iron fence. He checked behind him, noted nothing above the rooftops except for the faraway silhouette of the Olympic Stadium, Montreal’s white elephant, and its inclined tower.

Yet he could feel
them
. Growing closer. It hadn’t taken them long to sniff him out. Sometimes, he suspected spawns had nothing else to do than wait for a gate to open so they could swoop down on whatever came out.

Movement exploded left, right, above. Snow flew in thick ribbons that lashed and whipped him like tiny grains of salt.

“Here we go,” he snarled.

Cain cocked his shotgun a second before the first spawn swooped down to his left, missed and hit the pavement a couple of inches in front of him, creating a tiny but messy crater. This surprised him. They rarely missed their aerial attacks. They were being careless, therefore desperate. They’d make mistakes. Bad news for them. Very good news for him.

He pumped a quick pair of specialized maximum shredding rounds into the fiend. Each minced a wing and part of its torso and, on a long and angry hiss, the thing lay still. Others replaced it. They always did in his world of in-between – not on Earth, not in hell. Both at once, yet in neither place.

One landed right on top of him, sent him to his knees, dug talons and claws into his back and shoulders. It wailed in his ear a split-second before he aimed the AA-12 straight up and fired. A shower of gooey bits fell around him and burned like acid wherever the stuff touched. The burn of its claws spread to his body. Hellish fever. Cain ran across the deserted street, fired as he went, rounds hitting targets and downing them, others ricocheting on bony ridges and creating scuffs against the stone fence. To mortal eyes, nothing would show, no sound would be heard.

On a run, he leaped on top of the hood of his car, then on to the roof, where he whirled on himself and dispensed death at five rounds a second. One spawn thudded against the trunk, trashing and flailing. One of the wings caught Cain on the arm. His shotgun went sailing ten feet high and landed in the snow bank.

“Shit,” he snarled. His breath was ripped out of his lungs when a spawn struck him with its wing. The talon lacerated his coat across the chest. Despite the adrenaline, he heard a button land on the frozen sidewalk.

Cackling in delight, the spawn raised its misshapen, clawed hand. The final hit. This one would hurt. Cain only had time to pull his Luger out of its holster at his chest. Gold bullets with silver cores dipped in holy water. His best ones, usually reserved for full-fledged demons. Such a waste.

He levelled it at the thing’s chest, fired just as both its wings spread for the coming attack. The shock sent it flying back in a geyser of embers and ashes, sent it colliding against a hydro pole. It bent with the violent collision. Sparks coursed along the wires.

Burning pain exploded in his lower back.

Cain looked down, more shocked than hurt, and spotted a long, glistening claw coming out of his belly.

“Damn.”

Dying meant a split second of suspension where he’d be catapulted back to hell, where no wound was too great to “heal”, then another split second to be sent right back up to the mortal plane as if nothing had happened. Where half a dozen spawns waited for him. The circus would never end. Not until he’d accumulated enough secrets for Berith’s taste. The demon had told him that some day, when Cain had brought enough secrets to sell for souls, he’d be sent up to the purgatory. Still in hell, but a world better than the seventh level.

He aimed back and fired a bullet into the spawn that had backstabbed him. And then he died. Again.

Ashes and smoke, the smell of sulphur and charred flesh, cries and lamentations, crimson sky, black sun, and abruptly, snow replaced it all. It grated against his face as Cain realized he’d come back facedown into the street, where a spawn stood over him, no doubt ready – and delighted – to send him back for another spin downstairs.