I knew something was up when my team deployed without me. Randy said everybody else had been sent to Dallas, to fight some giant robot cowboy that went berserk and started rampaging through the Metroplex, but Randy said Dallas already had two strong guys, and asked me to stay behind.
I was sulking alone in the breakroom, feeling sorry for myself, wondering what I had done wrong, when an eternally young thumbnail of Sonny Mao appeared in my optics.
“You’re still in Boston, right?” he asked without saying hello.
I nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Good. I had your team leave you behind because I need you for something, and I can’t leave Chicago to handle it myself.”
“You need me to punch something for you?”
“No,” Sonny said. “Harry says you’re a computer guy, and that you hacked a hospital last year?”
“Oh boy. Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to…”
“You’re not in trouble. I need your help. I need you to go to this old building in Dock Square. Do your thing, hack the cameras, and tell me what you see. My snitch tells me a bunch of demons have smuggled a batch of RedStar Kool-Aid to Boston, using a portal to Hell as a shortcut to get around the blockade.
“These demons, whoever they are, they want to start using human thralls for muscle, feeding them this drug to give them temporary powers and give them an edge while they get established here.”
“Most of the powers people get are cosmetic or useless. One in ten times it kills you, one in ten times you get some kind of useful power, and one in a million times, it opens a hole in the universe and creates a fucking demigod.
“Nasty stuff. It’s never made it to Boston before because demons don’t usually need it, but some major lord is consolidating troops for something, so everybody else is having to make do with Imps and scrubs.”
“That sounds really bad.”
Sonny shrugged. “Probably, but we’ll deal with that when it comes. Right now I want you to find out what’s going on in that warehouse, so I know if it’s bad enough to break off my patrol and head over there. Can you do it?”
“Probably. Drop me a pin.”
Sonny gave me the location of the warehouse, and I quickly learned that it was not connected to an outside network. No active Datacore nodes, not even an old I2 Internet connection. But the old camera signatures said they were wireless, so I might still be able to hack them, if I got close enough.
I explained this to Sonny, and he said, “Okay, do what you gotta do, but don’t go kamikaze on me. You’re gonna be alone, with no backup, so just do recon here, and call me in if we need to hit it together in a couple days.”
I nodded, and immediately realized I didn’t have to be alone. I knew another hero who was still in Boston and just might be available to back me up.
I jumped on our private channel and called Denise, embarrassed by the way my soul lit up when I saw her face.
“Hey, they let you keep the car!” I said. “Are you on a call?”
“Just driving around, bored out of my mind,” Denise said. “They haven’t found me another trainee, so I’m just cruising around in the dark, waiting for somebody to get bitten by something.”
“I’ve just been given an off-book thing for Sonny Mao. Hang on, let me try something.”
I navigated through the archaic Bluestar dispatch interface until I found the code for Denise. I pushed the button and issued a call for her. Then I watched her head turn as her board lit up in the car.
“Holy shit, I can summon you!” I said, astonished that it worked. “I outrank you now, so I can call you in for backup whenever I want! Oh, I’m gonna abuse the shit out of this. I’m gonna have you bring me burgers from all over town!”
Denise frowned. “Jesus, Tim. I did not know you could do this, this better be a real call!”
“It is absolutely a real call. Meet me on the roof and I’ll talk you through it.”
* * *
“I really wish we had Jade for this,” I said. “Our car is so obvious we’ll have to land blocks away, and I’m about as stealthy as a dump truck. Do you know any magic stealth shit?”
Denise shook her head. “My job was to jump in front of things and wave my arms so they would attack me instead of Mom, so we didn’t spend much time on stealth.”
“I’ll just have to jump across rooftops until I get close enough and hope they don’t have anything looking up. Can you hang in the car to advise and extract if I get in trouble?”
Denise nodded. “Don’t get cocky, Tim. We have no idea how many demons are gonna be in there, and they may still have a portal open.”
“But if they have a portal, you can close it, right?”
She nodded again.
“I really need to learn that. So, if I’m doing threat assessment here, how many demons is too many? How many can we handle by ourselves?”
Denise shrugged. “We handled like forty before, but those were Hunters, barely smarter than animals. This could be anything.”
“Okay, fair warning. If I can hack these cameras, I’m gonna do a head count, and if it’s one number less than forty, I’m goin’ in.”
Denise sighed. “All right. I trust you. Just, please don’t charge in without me.”
* * *
We landed on a roof a few blocks away and I tried to invent the art of stealth leaping, jumping from roof to roof until Jeeves finally registered a wireless signal from the warehouse cameras.
I had never consciously tried to suppress my aura before, struggling to keep the magic around my body from flaring in the visible spectrum. Any demon looking into the gray could spot me, but at least I wasn’t glowing like a mobile spotlight as I jumped from roof to roof.
I had to get right up next to it before I could get a signal from the cameras. Jeeves punched through the ancient encryption easily enough, but I could still only see cameras on one side, until I got closer.
The demons weren’t even concealing themselves. I saw a little swarm of Imps flying around inside, directing normal man-sized figures who were carrying boxes of lab equipment. These demons had worked out some kind of deal with Bonyak, trying to synthesize his new vapeable wonder drug in Boston.
It took me a minute to realize the human figures were also demons, a dozen demons disguised as people.
“Denise, I count maybe ten Imps and a dozen other demons, but they’re not Enforcers or Hunters, these guys are walking around like men. Is everybody on two legs some kind of Incubus?”
“Probably just Worker demons, cloaked by illusion magic from the Imps. There’s some work that you still need a human body shape for. They mostly do this trick in low-magic zones where nobody has the power to spot them. They don’t try it here because too many people in Boston can see through the disguise.”
“There are six more guys sitting on the floor here, but they look like normal humans. Really sick humans, like hospital patients or homeless people. Shit. Denise, I think these are test subjects. I think these demons are setting up a lab, testing batches on these guys until they get it right.
“Oh fuck, one of the test guys just took a hit from a red inhaler. I gotta get in there before they finish the next batch.”
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I was about to wave Denise in, but she was already there, using vines to quietly lift herself onto the roof beside me.
“You didn’t waste any time.”
“I know you, Tim. I knew you were going in the minute you connected to the cameras, no matter how many demons were in there.”
I smiled at her. “Hey, can you hang back a little for me? Watch my back, but let me take point here, okay?”
Denise looked insulted. “You want me to hide behind the big hero now?”
I sighed. “Denise, I am having a shitty, frustrating month. I watched an innocent man die last week, then I met an asshole who is profiting off at least two different kinds of slavery, and I had to let him walk. I am depressed and angry, and I think the quickest way to feel better is to punch some demons as hard as I can. Just please hang back, and don’t steal my kills.”
* * *
I smashed through an upper window of the warehouse and did my hero entrance right in the middle of them, smashing boxes of expensive glassware, punching the first Worker demon so hard it flew across the room while Denise watched.
Four others dropped their boxes and charged at me. These guys did not require any kind of subtlety, or any of the fancy fighting stuff Sonny tried to show me.
I just grabbed whatever I could grab and slammed them against something solid. The Imps might have been a problem, but Denise turned out to be a sharpshooting badass, tagging them with sacred wood shards that made them pop like zits.
I threw Workers left and right, punching and kicking and having the time of my life, until I saw a man-sized red portal open in the main office, revealing what had to be their supervisor, a lieutenant with jet black skin and golden eyes, swinging a giant distended belly like it was armor or a weapon. His horns were black and gold, and he had wings.
He dove off the interior catwalk and hit me with his full body weight, knocking me back into another rack full of vials and lab equipment.
I got splashed with a dozen kinds of god knows what, but I didn’t grow balls on my chin or anything, so the chemicals either weren’t dangerous yet, or my wards had been good enough to repel them.
This guy was strong, and I had to throw my arms up to block his claws. He was snarling and spitting and trying to look tough, unaware that he had actually just made my day.
He had me on my back, but I grabbed his arm, held him still, and punched him hard enough to spin his head a little too far to one side, hard enough that a human would have had a broken neck.
No need for stealth now, so I let my aura flare full blast, lighting up the shitty old warehouse like a road flare.
The lieutenant yelled, “What the fu—” as I punched him again, stronger and stronger until he broke off and tried to run.
I jumped back to my feet and grabbed one of his wings before he could take off, yanking him back down so I could punch him again.
I spun him around and held him up by the neck, the way Titus and Baalphezar had held me so many times.
“I have a message for your Master!” I shouted, spraying spittle in his face. “You tell him Boston is my city now! You tell him humans are taking the Earth back! And you tell him if he’s got a problem with that, he can come up here and deal with me!”
And then I punched him as hard as I could, spraying the wall with blood, brains, and shards of his skull. His blood was dirty gold, like his whole body was a chocolate candy filled with caramel.
I wiped the goo off my face as the bodies started to disappear. I turned around and saw Denise looking at me with this weird, intense expression I hadn’t seen on her face since… well, since I kissed her at a party and ran away.
She had heard my little speech and had been close enough to get demon fragments all over her blouse, but she had made no move to brush them off. I was about to brush them off for her, but she quickly turned away and used vines to lift herself up to the main office, so she could close the portal to Hell.
I was checking to make sure all the demon bodies were fading when I heard a gagging, choking sound behind me.
Denise was still up a level, leaving me on the ground floor with five terrified guys dressed in filthy torn clothes, scrambling away from their buddy who was twitching and seizing on the ground.
I ran over and tried to heal him, but the healing spell was trying to heal organs that he didn’t have anymore, trying to impose some kind of human shape on a body that had already come apart.
I watched in horror as he just… deflated, like something had eaten his bones away from the inside, turning his skin into a bag filled with blood.
The poor bastard gurgled and screamed as his body turned to liquid, dumping a gallon of blood, leaving other parts laying there like somebody had spilled a bag of kitchen trash. Whether it was body chemistry or just bad luck, nothing could have saved him after he took the drug.
I was about to use a cleaning spell on the area, but all this stuff would be evidence, so I had to leave his remains on the floor, as the others stared at the jumbled pile of organs that used to be their friend.
I hustled them outside and checked out the five guys who were still intact. They had been offered a thousand dollars each to show up here, with no clear idea of what they would be expected to do, and they hadn’t taken the drug yet.
Some of them had been beaten up or wounded recently, just from ordinary life on the street, so I offered to do some magical healing before the cops arrived. I got consent from four of them and left the fifth guy alone.
The third one had a terrible cough that cleared up immediately. Then he started dancing around on a leg that he had been limping on a moment before. He threw his arms around me and said thank you until he started to sob. He smelled worse than the dead guy, but hey, at least I was able to help one person today.
There were no immediate threats left, and I was covered in chemicals and demon goo, so I found a filthy men’s room in the back corner and went to clean myself up. I was fucking up a crime scene again, but I was too new to notice, until I got chewed out for it the next day.
I remember laughing when I saw the filthy men’s room door covered in handprints, compared to the women’s door that nobody had touched in years. I should have just gone in the clean one, but the social convention about men in the ladies’ room was just too strong.
I was running water in the sink, trying to clean myself off with wet paper towels, when I saw Denise walk up behind me.
I laughed a little and said, “One of us is in the wrong—" before she jumped me, turning me around and kissing me so hard she forced me back against the sink.
She was smearing her clothes with half a dozen mystery substances that I had on mine, but neither one of us gave a damn.
She was sweaty from the fight and her long day in the car, but she still smelled like Denise, and I still wanted her as much as I had ever wanted her, since the first time I had been close enough to smell her hair.
Everything about her was so human. There was no weird family history, none of the shame I associated with touching Lydia. Just two people doing the most human thing in the world, kissing like there was nothing in our way.
We were just kissing like normal people now, but I could feel her bringing in magic, about to pour her power into me and invite me to do the same. I still didn’t know if that would be considered sex or not, but whatever it was, I knew it would be a step too far.
I held her like that for… way too long, still holding her as I broke off the kiss, whispering “I know. I know, but we can’t. No matter how much I want to, we can’t.”
“Fine,” Denise said, smoothing her hair back as she stepped away. “But if you can’t kiss me, I want you to kill for me. I want you to go out there every day and kill demons, just like that, until there is not a single one left in my city. Can you do that?”
I bent at the waist and bowed to her, until she reached out and ran her fingers through my hair.
* * *
If the BPD cops were amused to see us coming out of the men’s room together, they were all too polite to say anything. Regular cops and DMA took over the scene, while I made sure the five homeless guys all made it to the hospital.
I couldn’t give them jobs or provide a place to live, but I took a bit of their pain away, and maybe added a few more years to their lives, hopefully giving them long enough to turn things around. Healing couldn’t cure drug addiction, but maybe I could give them some hope, and help them find some new reasons to get clean.
I hadn’t saved everybody. I could never save everybody, but I had wiped out a demon beachhead and gotten a warehouse full of dangerous drugs off the street. I didn’t know which demon lord I had just pissed off, but I had called him out directly, in the heat of the moment, oblivious to the consequences.
Denise and I climbed back in the car, and I reported back to Sonny.
“You took on twenty demons by yourself?” he asked.
“No, I had Denise Hardy with me.”
“You took Hardy on a combat op? She’s not cleared for combat ops.”
“She should be,” I said, blithely forgetting to check with her. “We’re both good alone, but together we are a goddamn magic wrecking ball. Those bastards never knew what hit them.”
“Good to know,” Sonny said, smiling to see a little swagger from the new guy. “Get cleaned up, and don’t write anything official about this. We don’t want to start a panic, but I’ll make sure Randy knows what you two pulled off today.”
* * *
We landed on the roof of Berkeley Street HQ and headed down toward the locker room, careful not to drip anything dangerous on the floor.
Any other day, we might have used the shower at my place, but with Lydia there waiting for me, and Denise and I still about half-crazy after the fight, an evening at my place could end with way more than a shower.
“Hey, there’s something I should have asked you a long time ago,” I said, trying to break the awkward silence that had settled on us after the kiss. “I saw you get dive-bombed by Imps but there’s not a mark on you. How do your wards work?”
“I don’t use wards like you do,” Denise said. “My soul is bonded with an Effigy Tree.”
“What the fuck is an Effigy Tree?”
“It’s a living tree that’s grown into the shape of my body. Mom keeps it in her garden behind the shop. Whenever anything hurts me, the damage happens to the tree instead of me. Like, if something hits hard enough to blow my arm off, it takes a limb off the tree instead.
“But you have to be careful with that, because if I get hit in the same arm twice, I’ll have no protection at all. Use an Effigy for a while and you get really good at angling your body, so you never get hit in the same place twice.”
“So, what happened to this tree when we got stuck in the fire?”
“Burned it real bad, almost killed it, but Mom brought it back to life. Good thing we got a couple weeks off and gave it time to grow. I would have been really weak until it grew back.”
We got to the door of the locker room, but I held back. “You go first,” I said. “I can’t go in until you come out. If we went in there together the way I feel right now, I would definitely break some regs, and I don’t think you would stop me.”
Denise didn’t answer. She just touched my cheek and walked inside.
* * *
I sat on a long bench beside the door while I waited for her. Denise came out about thirty minutes later, looking refreshed and slightly damp.
I stood up and deliberately brushed by her, close enough to smell her hair again. “Denise, do you realize we just fought a demon drug dealer? I just met Sonny Mao a week ago, and my life is already turning into a Sonny Mao movie.”
Denise nodded. “You say that like it’s a bad thing, but look on the bright side, if Jesus comes down and hands you a holy assault rifle, you’ll finally have a decent ranged attack.”