“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.
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.