Chronicles of a Hell-bound Angel (unfinished)

[Eurydice]

((Write-up-ish of selected events from Kult: Suburbia. This one is going to have to remain perpetually unfinished, because the game was never concluded, and I don't thing I have enough of a grasp on the characters to say what would have happened after (aside from Dean dying and Jess killing Rudy. Everything else is totally up in the air). If anyone involved wants to speculate on what else happened after, I'm curious to hear what anyone has to say.))

1

Angelica Paulsen grimaced as she pressed the jagged glass against her fingertips. It stung like crazy, but she didn’t have much of a choice. She needed an ample amount of blood, and she hadn’t been able to get the cat to sit still.

Her demonic employer had contacted her earlier. His visits had been more and more frequent of late. Sometimes, it was just a matter of her running a simple errand—stealing a rare book from that miserly old dealer in town, or placing a cursed artifact under the multitudinous files of the local church—other times, it was actual, bodily possession. Those instances were harder to keep track of; Angelica could never clearly remember what went on while she was possessed, and the memory of directly before and after was fairly hazy as well. She had only the impression that she spent more time with the demon in her than she spent under her own power.

Running non-bleeding fingers through her dull brown hair, Angelica took one last look at the paper he’d given her; on it was depicted a lesser summoning rune, similar to a couple that she’d seen in an early-Italian Renaissance text. She didn’t actually know any Italian, so she hadn’t been able to determine exactly what sort of creature the thing was supposed to summon, but Angelica had been puzzling out languages for as long as she’d been able to read. At any rate, the assignment that her demonic employer had given her was a simple one: the symbol, in blood, across the doors of the chapel, and undetected, if possible.

Actual Christmas was still three days off, but the entire neighborhood was out at the church’s Christmas shindig, which had garnered even higher attendance than usual due to a gay kid being beaten half to death nearby recently and some subsequent nonsense about a statue of the blessed virgin crying blood. Those attending the party would be busy there until late, and the entrance to the church rec center was perpendicular to the entrance of the chapel itself, where Angelica stood now, drawing an uneven shard of glass across willing skin. Unless someone was looking carefully, no one would see her or her handiwork until she was long gone.

The girl winced again as she drew her bloody fingers across the rough wood. The whole damned process was taking much more time and effort than it should; she had to stop and squeeze more blood out of her fingertips every five seconds or so, because it wouldn’t come out fast enough on its own.

Finally, she stepped back to look at the product. It was not an ideal recreation of the symbol that her employer had drawn for her, but she hoped it was close enough to do the trick, for she had no intention of doing it over. Her hand was pale and almost completely numb from the combined cold and blood loss.

Angelica adjusted her glasses with her free hand and was stepping up to finish the rune, bloody fingers raised as if delivering a benediction, when the door swung open.

Both hands flew down to clasp each other behind her back. Her face was as one set in stone. Angelica had long ago mastered the art of looking unimportant and unobtrusive; her achieving the effect was somewhat more dubious at the moment, considering that she had been caught outside the church late at night, literally red-handed, with no particular alibi. On the other hand, she thought as she looked at the handful of people standing in the doorway, they didn’t have any particular business here either; none of them were figures of authority in the church, and all activity of consequence happening in the vicinity was at the party. All she could do was to hope against hope that none of them turned to look at the markings on the door.

The one who was holding the door open she recognized. She’d seen him around town, usually in the vicinity of that old, broken-down theatre. He was pale as a ghost, with an almost greenish tint to the skin, wrapped in a long brown trench coat. “What are you doing here, girl?”

Angelica set her jaw. “Could ask you the same. What, wouldn’t the cool kids let you stay at the party?”

Behind the man in the trench coat stood Mrs. Myers, a cloyingly sweet homemaker from three houses over and a man in a priest’s garb, maybe in his late thirties, that she didn’t recognize. The former spoke. “It’s okay, Detective. Angelica, is everything alright? I didn’t see you at the party. Do your parents know you’re here?”

“I’m fine, thanks for asking. Just heard there was a really swinging party in the chapel, thought I’d check it out.”

The man in the trench coat, the one that Mrs. Myers had called “Detective” took two imposing steps forward. He towered over her, and Angelica, sixteen years old, short and mousy, who never quailed at anything, stood her ground, every inch of her concentrating on not showing that she was intimidated and not moving; if she let him advance any farther, he’d easily see the glyph on the door when he turned around.

Staring back at him left her feeling frozen to the core. The man’s arms and shoulders were relaxed, as if he were having a casual conversation, and his voice was soft and deep and utterly without tone or expression. “Girl. I asked you what you’re doing out here in the middle of the night by yourself, and bleeding from your fingertips. Answer my question, now.”

He was almost toe to toe with her. “Fuck off,” she snapped, and it was a miracle that her voice wasn’t trembling. The man exuded death magic, like a heavy stench, a wall threatening to bowl her over. Something about him was terribly wrong, but she couldn’t concentrate enough to pin it down to anything more specific than his reeking of morbid decay.

The priest gently pushed forward, breaking the other man’s unintentional hold over her. Angelica exhaled softly. “Let me see your hand,” the priest said, calm but somehow oddly insistent, and as if unbidden, Angelica’s bloody left hand extended to him. She scowled.

“How did this happen?” he asked, blandly formal as he examined the cuts.

Angelica exhaled again. The death man detective in the trench coat was still glowering at her, and it left her feeling queasy. She held back the shudder of revulsion that was growing in her. This conversation was over; as long as the three of them turned around and went back inside without looking at the door, she no longer cared. “None of your damn business,” she muttered.

Trench coat grumbled a dry curse and ambled back into the sanctuary. Mrs. Myers clearly looked worried, but Angelica shot her a withering glare, and the other looked away with a shrug. The priest patted her hand awkwardly. “Get this taken care of, child.”

Nodding noncommittally, Angelica turned to go, but curiosity gave her pause as an odd, screechy scratching sounded from the area of the ceiling inside. The scratching was almost immediately replaced with soft thuds, footsteps on planking. Mrs. Myers was looking up, shining a flashlight up at the rafters, and the priest was backing up as well, pulling out a small, clear vial. Job’s done, she thought. I can go.

But she did want to see what it was that she had summoned.

Wrapping her bleeding fingers in the baggy sleeve of her sweater, Angelica unobtrusively wandered into the chapel after the others and lifted her eyes up to the shadowy form on the rafters.

[Eurydice]

2

The doppelganger that had dropped from the rafters moved in a flash, snatching something (a plastic baggie? Something small and dark?) from the third row of pews, spinning about to hiss at them, and then loping towards the nearest wall; without thought or hesitation, the death man threw himself after it but was shaken free and thrown to the floor almost instantly.

Mrs. Myers had recovered from the shock and reacted first, sprinting up the stairs and out the fire escape, and Angelica followed close behind, eyes narrowed behind thick glasses, taking the stairs two at a time. Behind her, she barely registered the sounds of the death man cursing at the priest to help him up and the priest clattering up the metal stairs, stumbling as he went. “What did he take?” Angelica shouted, but Mrs. Myers was already out on the roof, the emergency door banging shut between them

Angelica felt her stomach lurch as she followed up to the fire escape. He’d told her to draw the symbol and then get out: a simple mission, one that should have minimized the personal risk. What the hell was she doing, getting involved?

Mrs. Myers was crouched by a dark form, lying on the flat roof. Probably the doppelganger, she thought, although possibly not; just as quickly, she spotted something else, moving about the edge of the chapel, as if something had recently descended the wall. Angelica knelt at the end of the roof, peering over intently but with no success; the shadowy form, whatever it might have been, was well out of view. With a grumble, Angelica turned back to the fallen form. The other two had joined the still, dark body and Mrs. Myers, who was speaking quietly: “Well. So much for following up on that lead.”

The priest settled next to Mrs. Myers, taking the thing’s hand, clenched in a claw of a grip, and turning it over gently. The death man was eyeing the two suspiciously but immediately turned as Angelica tiptoed up to join them. “Why are you still here?”

She shrugged, doing her best impression of a bored, uninterested teenager, and with a grunt, the death man nodded her towards the stairs.

About to follow his indication and get the hell out, something caught her eye: a cadre of teens, most of whom she’d at least seen around school, surreptitiously emptying out of the party and starting away from the church, not towards town or the nearest development, but down the snow-dappled back road, the same road the shadowy figure had taken. To the best of Angelica’s knowledge, the nearest things to which it came close included an Agway, a McDonalds, a run-down coffee shop, and a sheep farm; and, possibly excepting the last, none of the above really seemed like the typical hang-out for the quartet of kids who had just set out. She hesitated only marginally as she stood at the top of the stairs before heading down and taking the side exit, into the sparse woods that lined the back road. And despite the thin cover that the bare trees afforded, Angelica silently disappeared into the shadows.

She was already, in all likelihood, getting in too deep with whatever was going down tonight; might as well go all the way with it. Her demonic employer would punish her, to be sure, but such punishment had become so routine as to be almost trivial.

He was just looking for reasons to fuck with her now. It was well past the point at which she would try to reason it out. He was trying to break her, and he was succeeding admirably. Angelica couldn’t remember going forty-eight hours in the recent past without receiving some sort of ridiculous assignment, usually at some ridiculous hour in the morning. If she deviated from the assignment in any way, she’d be punished for disobedience. If she fulfilled the assignment, exactly to the letter, she’d be punished for lack of initiative and creativity. She’d given up trying to make sense of it.

Angelica started then, and cursed. Wrapped up in an annoyingly emo inner-monologue, she only now was realizing that something in the surrounding environment—the configuration of the shadows, perhaps, or the flutter of ambient noise—had altered without her recognizing what it was. She slowed her gait, gentling her footsteps and straining all of her senses against the ominous dark.

That was the only warning she had before an overwhelmingly heavy, forceful blow sent her face-first into the ground. Her glasses flew off the bridge of her nose as her face pressed up into a slick layer of snow and frozen earth underneath.

The breath knocked out of her, Angelica gasped for air, trying to make sense of the situation, but all she could determine at the moment was that a large knee in the back was pinning her to the ground with a substantial weight behind it, a hand twisting her left arm to her back with a thick hand. And then, the owner of that large knee, substantial weight, and thick hand spoke as the girl helplessly pinned underneath him cringed in recognition.

“What did you paint on that door, girl? What did you summon there?”

“Get the fuck off me!”

Angelica strained to push her wrist against the weak point in his grip and let out a shriek of surprise and pain as the death man’s grip tightened on her and the pressure in her back doubled, knocking the wind out of her completely for a second time. All strength left her, and all she could do was lie there, limp and faint, cheek pressed to the cold ground.

“Answer my question, you little brat. What did you summon?”

Some distant part of Angelica’s mind registered the sounds of the priest’s cry of indignation and Mrs. Myers’ demand that the death man (“Detective Statdler!”) let her up, for God’s sake (“She’s just a kid!”), but most of her mind was fixed on the fact that he was hauling her up by the shoulders and bodily shaking her, staring her down with withering intensity, demanding her attention, respect, and fear. Because, of course, she wasn’t “just” a kid. And the death man knew it.

The fact that she flinched away from his stern countenance was much more painful than his grip on her arms. “I don’t know…” She flinched again; her voice sounded so odd, so strangely breathy and distant. She tried again, but her voice was still distant and alien. “…Just what he told me to do… Lemme go…”

“Who told you?” The death man shook her again, and then, unexpectedly, his grip slackened, sending Angelica tumbling onto her back. Her head thumped soundly against the ground. Wincing and cursing, the girl sat up, hugging herself in pain and helplessness; with her good hand, she felt about in the snow until the familiar touch of her glasses met her fingertips. She pressed them to her face to see meek little Mrs. Myers, baker of chocolate chip cookies and soccer mom extraordinaire, looking mildly embarrassed and holding the butt of the gun with which she’d just clocked the death man on the back of the head.

“Are you alright, dear?” She held out her hand to Angelica.

Angelica nodded, stood painfully, ignoring proffered hands both from Mrs. Myers and the priest, and bolted.

[Eurydice]

3

Five years previous; Arezzo, Italy:

The eight-year-old girl gave a final shrieking wail that turned into a hiss like air escaping from an over-eager balloon, eluding its owner’s grasp. Her tiny face contorted into something dark and horrible, and then the demon clinging to her fled her, body and soul, dissipating like mist in a sudden sunrise; the girl sank back to the bed, silent, lifeless, and it was over.

By the door, the mother was moaning, tears pouring down her cheeks, hands clasped before her face. The young priest by her bedside stood, shaking, stumbling, and backed away slowly; his face was shining with sweat and pallor and a frenzied look in his eye almost as terrible as the demon’s. On the square outside, in the cloud-scattered starlight, the clock rang out for the second hour of the morning.

The priest pushed out of the room, and if he heard the mother’s shouts and sobs in both Italian and broken English, he gave no indication of it. The priest’s aide followed, stammering and occasionally throwing a look back at the dead girl’s bedroom. “Father Thomas—”

“I failed her.”

“Father, there was nothing more you could have done. We were simply called in too late to be able to help her.”

The priest said nothing as the descended the stairs to the street. He’d make it right. Had to. He’d find some way.

Father Thomas stood, looking up at the window, where the mother’s curses and prayers mingled with tear, filtering out into the uncaring night airs. He did not weep. He would not weep. He would make it right.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Rest in peace, Angelica.”

***

Angelica Paulsen flopped down on her bed and pulled the string on the Venetian blinds which swept up to the top of the window, letting in the last of the day’s sunlight. That absolute prick. It had been bad enough that he’d tackled her to the ground and thrown her off the trail of the only interesting lead she’d had in this whole nonsense with the thing she’d summoned, but this afternoon, less than a day later, he’d knocked on her door, demanding to speak to her parents and claiming to be a federal agent. He’d even brought along that damned priest to masquerade as his partner.

She couldn’t believe her parents were going along with it, effectively putting her under house arrest until she agreed to speak to him. How stupid could they get?

Rolling over onto her stomach, Angelica ran a lazy finger along the spine of one of the tomes that her demonic employer had given her almost a year ago. She knew she could get him to bust her out of this stupid situation, but calling on his help would inevitably involve her telling him why the detective death man was after her in the first place, and this was probably a bad idea. All she could do was wait it out.

Something clinked against her window. Angelica sat up, pressing her nose to the glass. It was Timmy what’s-his-face, twelve-year-old soccer brat, standing in the yard; she’d babysat him a few times. He was already talking before she pushed the window up and open, ignoring the frigid air. “What?”

“I said,” said Timmy, “that Mom wants to know if you can watch the house tonight and hang out with me.”

“I can’t,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m under house arrest.”

Timmy considered that. “Oh. That sucks. How come?”

“’Cause this stupid guy from town pretended to be an FBI agent and said so.”

“Wicked. For how long?”

“Dunno. He said he was going to come back and ask me some more questions, and if I knew what was best for me, I’d answer. It’s really retarded.” She shrugged noncommittally. “So, until whenever that happens, I guess.”

“Mmm. This guy. Was he, like, really epically scary, or just kinda annoying?”

“Just stupid, really. Why? You gonna rescue me?”

Timmy considered again, weighing the pros and cons of taking on someone kinda annoying versus really epically scary versus just stupid, really. He folded his arms and looked up at her with a patented cool-kid gaze. “Maybe. But you’ll have to do something for me in return, so that it’s fair and everything.”

Angelica laughed. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Well,” said Timmy blandly, “you could be my girlfriend.”

There was the slowly escalating sound of a broken-down motor at the top of the street; Angelica leaned out the window to see the familiar shape of the boxy, tan LeBaron that the death man had been driving when he pulled up to her house only a few hours ago. “Ah, shit.”

Timmy tilted his head, watching the car’s approach blankly. “Is that the guy?”

“Yeah. Get out of here, will you? This guy’s a jerk.”

“Yeah.” Timmy started for the sidewalk. “Remember, though. If I rescue you, you have to be my girlfriend.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

By the time Angelica had closed the window, made sure that Timmy was safely out of sight, thrown the demonic volume under a pillow, and crept downstairs, the death man was already inside and being served coffee by Mom and Dad. “Get him out of here!” she shouted.

Dad looked politely appalled. “Angelica, honey. This man’s a Federal Agent, and I would like to know what he has to say.”

“He is not a fucking—”

“Keep a civil tongue around us, young lady, and I mean it.”

Mom finished pouring the coffee and handed the death man a cup and saucer. “Sorry, Mister. Please go on.”

He hadn’t brought the priest with him this time; either he was getting sloppy, or he hadn’t been able to convince the guy to go along with the charade anymore. Either way, Mom and Dad didn’t notice, and the death man was speaking. “As I was saying, Ms. Paulsen, your daughter was suspected of being involved in certain acts of vandalism at the Church of Christ. Do you know where she was last night?”

“I thought she was at home,” said Dad, turning to look at her sharply. “Honey, is this true?”

“Oh, come on!” Angelica snapped. “What the hell is the FBI doing investigating graffiti?”

“We think,” said the death man, ignoring her outburst, “that she was doing so under the instructions of known occult-affiliated criminals. They’re very dangerous folks, and our capture of them is of paramount importance. We need to know any details she has. Complete cooperation would be very much appreciated.”

“Of course,” Mom said, nodding, “of course. Angelica, calm down and sit down.”

“Like hell! He’s not an FBI agent, and I’m not saying anything!” She stamped her foot, glaring at the death man and trying not to think of how easily he’d captured her before. “Get out of here!”

The death man glared right back, his eyes cold and merciless, but she had braced herself against the full force of his gaze and did not turn away. Shaking his head, the intruder stood and shrugged back into his trench coat. “Naturally, I can’t force a confession. I’d only ask that if she’s not going to talk now, that you please keep a close eye on her until she’s ready to do so.” With a nod, he clapped the hat onto his head and ambled towards the front door.

The jarring ring of the phone sounded from the kitchen door. With a snarl of impatience, Angelica turned on her heel, strode down the hall, and picked up the receiver. “Hi, you’ve reached the Paulsen residence; this is Angelica speaking. Unfortunately, we’re in the middle of a crisis at the moment, so give us a call some other damn time.” She slammed the phone down and turned back to the front door to make sure that the death man was leaving.

On the other end of the line, the priest who had accompanied the death man on his earlier visit, the man who was now calling to see if he couldn’t speak to the girl in a slightly less invasive way, stood there frozen for almost a full minute, having registered only the sound of the girl’s voice and the name she had given, before hanging up, grabbing the keys for his rental car, and heading out the door.

[Eurydice]

4

One year previous; Baltimore, Maryland:

The girl hesitated only marginally before lighting the intersecting rows in the circle of small red candles, chanting softly aloud and praying silently. Within the circle lay the corpse of a man in plainclothes, a figure that had been, in life, magnificently forceful but was now a frozen shell, arms folded peacefully, with a kind of expressionless tranquility that had never been apparent when he was alive.

The last syllables of the spell hung in the air as she took out a small vial of translucent green liquid and sprinkled the body with it, wrinkling her nose slightly at the odor that floated up from green fluid spotting the body.

Heavy silence permeated the room.

The girl, whose name was Jennifer, leaned forward over the body, wondering if she’d somehow gotten the incantation wrong, and as she sat forward, her knees pressing against the still body on the floor, the body was suddenly no longer still. It was heaving up with a sharp inhalation, eyes open and unseeing, strong arms alive again and blindly striking out at the nearest thing they could find. Thick fingers curled around the girl’s throat with absolute power, cutting off her cry of, “Dad!” and crushing the air out of her, stopping the flow of oxygen in her body, fingers unable to release long after the girl had gone limp and lifeless.

Only an hour later did the dead man truly wake, and only then did he see what had happened.

***

The kid was a good talker. Angelica had to give him credit for that. Mom and Dad were ready to scream their heads off at her when the front door had closed behind the death man, but as if on cue, Timmy had shown up, the perfect imitation of a goody two-shoes charming smile gracing his face, and with a few choice sentences about his being “really behind in school” with Angelica as “his only hope” who was being “so nice to help him and all,” Mom and Dad had dropped the reaming they were about to give her. It would, doubtlessly, come later, but there would be time to deal with it then.

Timmy followed Angelica up half a flight of spiral stairs to the attic, the space right under the roof where Angelica kept her computer, personal journals, and half a dozen tomes on angelic and demonic histories. “So, you’re my girlfriend now, right?”

“Actually,” she said with a bland smile, sitting down in the creaky rolling chair by the desk, “no. Deal was for me to be your girlfriend if you saved me from the jerk, not my parents.” She leaned back in the chair; it was a broken mess, and you couldn’t sit to close to the front or the left side without the whole damn thing falling apart, but that was a minor detail. A tiny spider skittered out from between the cracked plastic of the base.

“But I did both!”

“Yeah?”

Timmy smirked and gestured her over to the row of round windows near the floor. Crouching beside him, she had to completely double over to see where he was pointing.

On the street below, the death man was cursing vividly (she could not hear his voice, but she didn’t really need to) and staring at the front tires of his car, both of which were flat as a board. She clapped a hand over her mouth, although stifling the shriek of laughter did no good or harm, for the death man could neither hear nor see her. A second car turned the corner, coming in from the direction of town, cleaner and newer than the first; the death man waved it down and, body language still speaking volumes to his anger, got in on the passenger side.

Angelica shook her head in amazement. “You are gonna be in so much shit.”

“Not if they don’t find out.”

She could see from the impudent grin that there was still something more he was holding back, and she had to admit, she was curious. “Okay. What else did you do?”

Timmy swung the well-worn green backpack, covered with Manchester United patches and pins from Linkin Park and Fall Out Boy, off his shoulder and unzipped the top, pulling out another bag, black, completely unadorned, and even more well-worn than the backpack. “Raided the trunk and the glove compartment.”

“Jee-sus…” She snatched the black bag from him and started rifling through it, pulling out, among other things, a large bottle of something translucent and smelly, a digital camera, several rounds of ammunition, and a silver flask in a black leather case.

Timmy watched her remove and inspect the spoils of war that he’d brought her. “I didn’t take his wallet, ‘cause I figured that’d kinda be noticeable and a big deal. He didn’t have a whole lot of cash on him, anyway. Also, you are totally my girlfriend now.”

Angelica nodded absently, holding the bottle up to the light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It gave off a slight yellow-green cast. Unscrewing the top, tightly fixed, she frowned slightly at the stench that came off it. It was almost familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. Bio class, maybe? She scrunched up her eyes, peering at the torn label, lips moving slightly as she tried to decipher the worn-off writing there. “What the… no way is this… embalming fluid?”

Legs crossed, Timmy leaned forward to look as well. “Isn’t that, like, the stuff that they put in mummies?”

“It’s a preservative, yeah. You use it to keep a dead body from going totally disgusting right away. Like, you can’t have a funeral with an untreated corpse unless it just died really soon before, otherwise it’s putrid and gross and no one would want to see it.” She bit her lip, puzzled. “Dunno why this creep has it with him… maybe he stole the car from a mortician.”

She pushed the bottle carefully off to one side; shouting at a supposed Federal Agent was one thing, but she’d have even more serious explaining to do if they found a bottle of spilled embalming fluid in her attic. The flask was ordinary, if empty. The bullets were for shooting. The camera, however, was a truly promising find, and she flicked it on immediately, scrolling through the stored pictures.

The camera started at the most recently taken and scrolled backwards, and the little screen lit up with the image of something small, dark, shaped almost like a tiny hand, the size of a monkey’s paw, in a plastic baggie. Angelica wasn’t sure what it was, but she was reasonably sure that it was the same item that had been stolen by the dark figure in the church. She nodded slightly as the next picture depicted the silly miracle-statue, dripping red fluid from the eyes, the timestamp confirming that the picture had been taken last night.

Timmy shifted his weight impatiently. “What is all that stuff?”

“A statue crying blood; what does it fucking look like?” She flicked the zoom, trying to get a better look at the base of the statue, but the resolution on the picture wasn’t high enough for her to get anything useful. “If this guy’s a detective, maybe someone wanted him to figure out that the whole statue thing at the church is a fraud.”

“How d’you know it’s a fraud?”

Angelica gave him a pitying look. “Because it’s a fucking statue crying blood. Don’t tell me you’re a believer.”

Timmy shrugged.

Angelica continued scrolling backwards through the pictures. There were a lot of them, but most of them started to look exactly the same after a while, crime scene after crime scene, murder victim after murder victim, empty room after empty room. The only remotely interesting picture was one taken a year earlier, a crooked photo depicting a young woman with dark bruises around her neck, sprawled in the midst of red candles that formed a common summoning circle, one that Angelica would have recognized any day of the week.

Even twelve-year-old, cool-as-fuck Timmy looked slightly thrown. “Yikes.”

It took Angelica a few minutes to turn over the image in her head, combined with the overwhelming sphere of death magic surrounding the man who owned the camera. “He was casting a summoning circle for a spirit of the dead, looks like. Jesus…”

Several blocks away, the bells in the clock tower of the old church proper sounded, and Timmy stood abruptly, nearly banging his head on the slanted ceiling. “Shit. I have to go; if you’re not babysitting me, then I have to go to this stupid dinner with Mom and Dad.”

“Sorry about that.” Angelica scooted out from under the low roof and stood as well, heading for the stairs again. “Look… thanks for getting me all this stuff. Don’t talk to anyone about this, okay? I mean it; this is really dangerous shit, if the guy’s this much into necromancy. Stay away from him.” She stopped by the door at the bottom of the stairs, hand resting firmly on the doorknob.

“Hey,” said Timmy, looking unconcerned and unmoved. “It’s me.”

*

Timmy raised an eyebrow at the dark blue car parked on the sidewalk across the street. The man in the driver’s seat was doing a magazine crossword puzzle, nervously and badly, from what Timmy could see of it, and the man in the passenger seat was obscured by the collar of his coat and the tilt of his hat.

These guys weren’t very good at keeping an eye out on people, he thought, no matter how good his girlfriend thought they were at necromancy. Whatever that was.

Even so, he took the long way home, cutting through the back yard and looping around the next block.

[Eurydice]

5

Ten years previous; Severna Park, Maryland:

“This,” hissed the vampire, spitting as he spoke, “is a prize worthy of a minor god. And you, fleshling, have the gall to sneak into my private domain and attempt to steal it? Did you think I would leave it so poorly defended?” He laughed hoarsely, throwing his head back for dramatic effect.

The woman in the black leather coat in front of him, however, was sick and tired of his melodramatics, and shot him through the forehead with a bullet of pure silver, watching impassively as the thing fell, shrieking and wailing, to the gravel of the driveway behind the church. Pulling on a leather glove over her left hand, she stepped forward and took the prized paper that the vile creature had so desperately clutched and, careful not to touch it directly, set it ablaze with the cigarette lighter from her inside pocket.

She didn’t know exactly what it was that she was burning, only that it hadn’t belonged to the dead vampire on the ground, and now it was gone. Perhaps it was some poor soul’s true name, released into the night air at last. Perhaps it was an incantation, spoken once, never to be repeated. Or maybe it was just for the vampire’s autograph book.

The woman in the black leather coat didn’t really care. She pulled out a mobile, informed her employers that the thing was dead, and hung up with a sigh. She gently patted the barely visible swelling of her three months’ pregnancy. “I am getting way too old for this,” she muttered.

***

Julia Myers swore colorfully as the grease fire in the oven finally fizzled and died. The fire alarm was still screaming, and she swatted at it with her oven-mitted hand until finally it shut up and left her in the relative peace of her kitchen, covered in dirty dishes, half-blackened food, and smoke along the ceiling. She got down on all fours, waving at the smoke belching out of the oven and trying to survey the damage. It didn’t look good.

Why couldn’t cooking be as straightforward as demon-slaying?

Little footsteps sounded at the stairs. “Mommy? What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Tommy. Go back upstairs and get changed for dinner, okay? Company’s going to be here really soon.”

As of yet, the stuffing seemed to be the only thing that remained unscathed, and that was only because it had been sitting on the kitchen table, on the other side of the room. The turkey was almost entirely coal-black, the parsleyed potatoes weren’t much better off, and half the salad had spilled in the kafuffle to clear out the oven. Mrs. Myers pursed her lips, deep in thought. There was probably enough pre-cooked chicken in the fridge for her to quickly fake something. She could clean and tear up some lettuce without losing too much time. The potatoes were a lost cause, but what could you do?

She let the turkey sit until it was cool enough to throw out and started working on another salad, praying that it would be done before that stupid snob Stephanie showed up with her damned family, ready to make snide comments about the set up of Julia’s house and the inadequacy of the meal she’d prepared.

*

Timmy wore his best shit-eating grin as his mother ushered him into the neighbor’s dining room. He had never really understood the particular brand of politics in which his mother engaged, but he was more than happy to play along with them, whatever they were, especially when he was fairly sure, as he was now, that his mother was the one winning.

The evening had progressed normally with the traditional bout of greetings (“Julia, darling! Perfectly lovely to see you again.” “Please come in, Stephanie my dear; so pleased the three of you could make it.”), the subtle jabs (“My goodness, what on earth happened in the kitchen? If there’s anything I can do to help you out, you just tell me, and I’ll be there.”), and the closing arguments (“Oh dear, I know how busy you are; why don’t you come over to my house next time? I’ll be sure to make enough time to prepare you and yours a proper home-cooked meal.”), and now they had moved on to the dinner table pleasantries. Afterwards, there would be coffee and desserts in the living room until Mom won, and then they would leave. It was very predictable.

Dad was in the middle of some businessman joke that Timmy didn’t really get or find interesting (although he did find its effect on Mr. and Mrs. Myers to be quite interesting) when Timmy’s ears pricked up slightly. Something was moving around outside, heavily and quickly, but he was facing the back porch and could see nothing.

He stood and folded his napkin courteously, just like Mom had shown him. “Excuse me, Mrs. Myers, but where’s the bathroom please?”

After she took him to the downstairs bathroom, Timmy waited impatiently for her footsteps to fade before quietly opening the door and silently moving to the bay windows at the front of the house. He could barely see anything for the dark, though, no matter how hard he looked. Finally, he decided he’d have to give up pretense for the moment. Or, rather, he would have to sacrifice one pretense for another.

“Hey, Mom, I left something in the car; I’ll be right back!”

He could hear her sweetly reminding him that it wasn’t polite to run out in the middle of dinner, especially when they were guests, but Timmy wasn’t really paying attention. He inched the front door open in time to see Angelica vaulting over the hedges in front, and a tall figure in a long coat barreling after her in hot pursuit.

*

It was not turning out to be a good night.

She knew she shouldn’t have been so paranoid as to go out and check after Timmy had left, to make sure that he wasn’t lying maimed on the pavement outside or something. And she definitely knew that no matter how evil she could tend to be, being the Good Samaritan and returning the dead man’s things wasn’t necessarily the best of ideas. But, she’d gone out anyway.

Stupid, stupid.

She’d spent close to half an hour sitting in a tree while he prowled around below. She’d thought he was gone when she leapt down, but of course, he was just waiting, and she should’ve known that. She didn’t know why he was chasing her or what he wanted to find out; all she knew was that she had to get away.

Angelica was half-aware that she was sprinting past Mrs. Myers’ house, the door a crack open as she passed.

Behind her, the death man gave a yell of surprise, and the sound of his footsteps abruptly altered, changing direction and slowing down. Rounding the corner of the house, Angelica dared to look back and saw little Timmy with a handful of rocks in his off hand, disappearing back into Mrs. Myers’ house, and the death man holding what would probably swell up to a bump on his forehead, looking annoyed.

Maybe being Timmy’s girlfriend would work out, she thought, reconsidering the little twerp who had come riding to the rescue. One never knew.

There was no time to think about it now, though. The death man was still looking around at the house, looking over the cars in the driveway, the nameplate above the mail box, and Angelica took the opportunity to scamper to the back yard and find a good hiding spot in the thick clusters of evergreen bushes.

The death man didn’t come back around the house for several minutes. Angelica could feel her legs cramping up, crushed under the force of her own vigilance, but she stayed put. If she could hold it out here for long enough, she should be fine. But the death man didn’t even seem to be looking in her direction. He was sticking to the shadows and examining the house. Inside, from what Angelica could see, Mrs. Myers was having some sort of a dinner party, and Timmy was just sitting down again, taking the seat next to his mother. The death man finished his survey with a nod, reached into his bag—one similar to the one that Timmy had pilfered from his car—and withdrew two items that she couldn’t quite make out.

Warning bells sounded in her mind. He thinks I’m inside. And he wants me to get out.

The thought had barely finished playing across her mind’s eye as the death man, who had been soaking a rag in something extremely flammable, lit his impromptu incendiary and hurled it at Mrs. Myers’ roof.

Angelica was stone still and didn’t make a noise. She had to let him think he was smoking her out. And then he’d leave, and she could go home, and she’d be safe until the next day, when she’d have to think of something else.

*

Mrs. Julia Myers, standing outside the burning house beside her husband Stephen and her son Tommy, stared up at the blackened mess of the roof.

There had been no warning, nothing at all. Stephanie’s boy, Timmy, had claimed to see a flash of something outside, but it had disappeared just as quickly. Then, strange crackling had started to come through the roof; Stephen had run out to the back yard to see what was what and had come charging back in seconds later, diving for the phone (“Hello, 911? My roof is on fire…”).

The fire department had made reasonably good time, but the upper floor of the house was in shambles, completely unusable. Mrs. Myers stared up coldly at the scorched shell of the normal life that she had built for herself, watched the men in reflective yellow jackets swarming all over it, seeing how much of it was safe and salvageable.

Somewhere, out in this night, there was someone who was responsible for this. Julia Myers had sworn off her career as a paranormal investigator to build a family and find a little peace and quiet, and now, someone had taken a stab at the very heart of that family, peace, and quiet. Someone had, for reasons unknown, struck out against her, threatening her life and her livelihood.

And that someone would pay. Mrs. Myers swore to that.