Collared Page 2

  “There was a man,” Math repeated. He stopped at one of the tables and touched the edge of a plate that hadn’t been cleared away. The rind of burger shriveled and grew a pale beard of mold under his attention. “He had small ambitions—a woman, a business, a ‘nice’ life—and he was willing to do almost anything to get them, except work for it.”

  That old familiar story. Jack had heard variations of it all his life, from people who wanted to get the world for someone else’s song, whether it was his dad’s get-broke-quick schemes or the priest who wanted to barter someone else’s soul against the devil.

  “Aren’t we always,” he said bitterly.

  Math looked over his shoulder. His smile was sharp enough to cut.

  “You made me work for it,” he said. “The man in my story couldn’t wait to hand his soul over. It seemed to have weighed on him. In return he wanted his best friend’s life, his best friend’s wife, and you get the gist.”

  He did. Jack ran his hand through his hair. The shrill noise of the alarm dug through his skull and found the ghost of a hangover from the whiskey earlier. There was a large blue door at the back of the diner that blocked off access to the kitchen. It was the one place he couldn’t see.

  “So let me guess,” he said as he took a second look around at the unfinished cleanup. “Best friend dropped dead of a heart attack in the kitchen, blocked the door to the freezer, and the man and the wife died huddled in each other’s arms for warmth?”

  Math paused and then shrugged. The shirt looked better on him than it did on Jack. To be fair, most things did.

  “No, but that’s not bad,” Math said. “A little obvious, but the minimalism of it does win you some points back. A solid C for style.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I lost points for minimalism.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” Jack spat in frustration. “What did you do, Math? If you want my help, you have to tell me what’s going on.”

  Math turned to glare at him. Tension pulled his face tight over the sharp bones underneath.

  “No, I don’t.” His voice was sharp with cruelty. “If I tell you to help, then you’ll help. Or maybe I’ll make you wait here and spend the next forty years in jail. It doesn’t matter. If I want it, you’ll do it. You being dead made you worthless, but it didn’t set you free.”

  Jack flinched despite himself. Damnation put other fears into perspective, but his fear of confinement refused to be cowed. The thought of prison—steel bars and the smell of other men’s cum and crap—flushed cold, sticky dread through him.

  The thick heat of a South Carolina summer in the confines of a confessional, the door barred and his sins the only key to escape. The weight of his mom’s corpse as she pinned him facedown to the bed and slurred the blame in his ear.

  “Go to Hell,” he said.

  Math gave him a look of incandescent satisfaction. “I can’t,” he said as he stalked back over to Jack. “But tell you what, Jack, you get what was stolen from me, and you won’t have to either. I’ll give the title to your soul back, free and clear.”

  It was a trick. Math might not lie, but he never needed to. He told the truth in the right way, at the right time, and people heard what they wanted to hear. Needed to hear.

  Jack knew that. He always had. Maybe one day it would help him make the right decision. Right now, with old fear sour and salty in the back of his heart, the lure of freedom already had him on the hook.

  “Deal,” he said, dry-mouthed for the second time.

  It was just as anticlimactic as it had been the first time—no ominous crack of thunder, no diabolical cackle from Math, no swarm of demons—just a slow blink of jet eyes and a sense of finality that sank into Jack’s bones.

  Math grabbed Jack’s wrist and pulled his hand up. The scab between Jack’s knuckles cracked, and blood welled out in a slow, thick trickle that ran down toward his wrist. Instinct made him try to pull away, but Math’s grip was like stone. He bent his head, the short crop of curls still sun-streaked for all the sun hadn’t shone in weeks, and pressed his lips to Jack’s bloody fingers.

  Damp cool lips and the cat-swipe of Math’s tongue sent a pulse of reaction through Jack. His breath caught under his breastbone, and his balls tightened between his thighs. He struggled to stay above the hot wash of want and focus on what he needed.

  “Deal,” Math said as he raised his head. His lips were stained red as he smiled the imperfect, faintly crooked smile that Jack could never convince himself was fake. He waved his hand toward the heavy blue door to the kitchen. “Open the door, Jack. We haven’t got long, and the glass slipper is going to stink when the bell rings.”

  Jack wiped his hand on his jeans and took a deep breath to steady himself. The tang of old grease was sour as it hit the back of his throat, but he walked forward and pushed the door open. His reluctance made it feel heavier, as though whatever nasty thing he was about to find on the other side pushed back against it.

  It was a kitchen. Unwashed dishes sat in the sink, fat congealed on the surface of the water in gray white bergs, and greasy pans sat with greening burgers still in them on the stove. It wasn’t a kitchen where Jack would choose to eat the meatloaf, but he’d eaten out of worse.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” he asked.

  Math snorted as he walked over to a narrow door on the far side of the room. It was jammed open, a dim light half dead inside.

  “You were a better priest than you are detective,” he said.

  “I was a terrible priest,” Jack said.

  “My point,” Math said. He leaned against the doorjamb, his shoulder braced. “Find what they took or we’re both fucked.”

  The Witching Hour faded like a shadow. Jack had adjusted to the pressure across the back of his brain, but it faded, the dusty pollen taste in the back of his throat cleared, and the dead man replaced the demon. As the borrowed beauty faded, the corpse slid down the wall and toppled onto its side, still in Jack’s jeans and favorite shirt. One arm flopped limply, neatly, into the door to keep it propped open. A livid mark showed where it had spent hours in that position.

  Flies rose up off the body as though they’d just been unpaused, fat and iridescent with good health. Demonic possession was hell on the ecology, but flies, rats, and pigeons thrived in Hell’s company.

  Jack’s stomach turned as the faint, sour-tallow smell in the kitchen ratcheted up with the addition of a badly stored corpse. He mildly regretted his earlier hunger. No more burgers for him for a while.

  He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and walked over to the corpse. The clothes were a write-off. Without Math’s face to overlay it, the dead man looked… nondescript, the sort of vaguely handsome that was far more forgettable than ugly ever would be. Jack gingerly stepped over the body and hooked his boot around the door to pull it open.

  It had started its life as a larder or a storeroom, but someone had repurposed it. Boxes of unwholesomely fat white candles were stacked on the shelves, a rough chalk sketch of a goat’s head with canine teeth growled from the back wall, and a pentagram had been scraped deeply into the tiled floor.

  The setup wasn’t new, but the pile of coins neatly deposited in the middle of the pentagram was. Demons liked hard currency, and silver had tradition behind it. As Jack stared at it, another coin pinged out of midair, dropped onto the pile already there, and clattered down to the floor. Eventually one would roll far enough to breach the lines of the pentagram.

  Jack sighed and crouched down to pull his knife out of his boot. He flicked the blade out and reached over to scrape a shallow line crosswise against the grain of the pentagram.

  The ting of metal stopped as one last, forlorn silver coin bounced over the floor. Jack pointedly crossed himself with the knife and muttered a quick apologetic prayer under his breath.

  He doubted God had any use for him these days, but even a pinprick doorway to Hell could do damage. Even if only whispers could escape, that could be enough to
let Hell settle over the neighborhood.

  Or not. No one really knew, but they were all very authoritative about it.

  Jack pushed the knife back into the sheath and pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. His foot bumped the dead man as he stepped back, and another cloud of flies burped out of the wet smirk of his opened neck.

  “Well, you’ve got nobody’s life now,” he said. “So I guess that leaves the best friend’s wife as a lead.”

  In the room, the pile of silver coins glittered enticement, pale and bright and stamped with not-quite-right dates and faces. “Take me,” they seemed to beg, “it’d be a waste otherwise.”

  Jack grabbed a handful of them and stuck them in his pocket as he stood up. Something on the other side of the pinprick exhaled smugly, almost sexual in its satisfaction. Jack shrugged at it as though it could see him.

  So the coins were cursed. Jack wasn’t surprised. Anything—anyone?—that spent time in Hell either rotted or was tainted. Good luck to the curse in making his life any worse.

  Besides, he needed new sheets.

  2

  WHEN HELL moved to Jasper, South Carolina, people asked, “Why here? Why us?” The demons just smiled sharp smiles and said, “We like the humidity.”

  MATH HADN’T been wrong.

  The office/studio had been cheap, the Private Investigator had already been painted on the door, and Jack had no better ideas at the time. When the first client knocked on his door, it seemed like as good a job as any for a man whose only previous experience had been the priesthood and being a demon’s pet.

  Not many people were desperate enough to come to him. There were other investigators in Craven, ones who had experience, computers, and some sort of state certification. If a person wanted their wife followed or their business partner’s bank account turned over, that’s where they went.

  The clients who climbed all the way up the stairs to Jack’s door had been turned away from everywhere else. Their wives had started to go out more, sure, but when they came back, there was blood on their shoes, not cologne on their collar. Their business partners had bright silver in their pockets and strange, dark new associates who always smiled and never ate. Something terrible had infested their nice, normal world, and they didn’t know what to do about it.

  Jack usually did. He’d been one of the Vatican’s exorcists, even if his tenure had been for a mere two days. It was only when a case required some actual investigation that he came up short.

  His usual recourse to that was to draw it to the attention of the relevant authorities and wait. Eventually the case would end up on the desk of one of the harried detectives with too much integrity to turn a blind eye and too much common sense to believe in any of it. Ever since Father Colm at Saint Benedict’s stopped taking their calls, that was when they’d call Jack in.

  Usually.

  Jack slouched down in his office chair, hips barely on the cushion of olive-green leather, and stared at the old-fashioned plastic handset on the desk. Like the Private Investigator on the door, it had been there when the landlord handed over the key. It was currently obstinately silent.

  It was past noon. Even if the police had ignored the alarm at the diner all night, the complaints would have started to roll in once the rest of the street opened for business. Once they found the dead man, his sour stock of candles, and the goat-man shrine, the pass-the-shit-parcel game would begin.

  That was a game that always ended on one desk.

  So why wasn’t he on the phone?

  Jack gave in and reached for the landline to make the call himself. He could claim business was slow and he was chasing work. It could even pass as true; things always flagged as the year trudged toward October. Demons had to plan their Halloween events as well, and haunted houses had to be on their best behavior if they wanted the frats to rent them for an All Hallow’s party.

  But just as he grabbed the sweaty plastic handset, the ringtone rattled the receiver against his fingers. He dropped it and let it ring as he spun to give the window a quick look. His own reflection stared back at him suspiciously, his brown eyes deep-set, and three day’s worth of stubble dark against his lean cheeks. He looked like hell, but not literally. There was no sign of Math’s pale, smug shadow in the planes of glass.

  Coincidence, then?

  Jack didn’t know if he believed that. He answered the phone as it rang for the fourth time.

  “What?” he said.

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, as though whoever was there had already thought better of the call. In the background, faintly, Jack could hear the low murmur of voices and slow movement. Then a soft, nervous cough broke the silence.

  “I need to talk to you,” Ambrose said in a low, tense voice. “Now. It’s important.”

  Jack decided that, coincidence or not, he wasn’t going to look a gift detective in the mouth.

  “Where?” he asked as he scrambled to his feet and grabbed his keys. Even as his mouth shaped the words, he didn’t know why he bothered.

  “St. Benedict’s,” Ambrose said.

  Where else?

  THE SOUND of bells greeted Jack as he pulled up outside the church. Despite everything, the somber toll of the Angelus bell strung the prayer up out of his soul like a rosary, one word at a time.

  The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary….

  It tasted bitter.

  St. Benedict’s was the sort of narrow, whitewashed church you saw in picture books—high stained-glass windows and a hollowed-out steeple with windows at the top so you could see the bell ring. It sat on a neat square plot on the edge of the worst part of town, a defiant watchtower against the slow creep of Hell.

  Or it had, until Father Colm lost his nerve.

  Jack climbed the steps and let himself in. The smell of beeswax and fear caught in his nose—decades of sinful piety sweated into the stained pews and the cracked old floor. It smelled familiar.

  At the front of the church, a clutch of middle-aged women waited in line for the confessional and played “guess the sin” between prayers. Behind them an old man with frayed gray curls hunched over his hymnal and muttered bleakly as he flipped through thin pages with a grimy finger. Right at the very back, a young man sat with his head bowed over clenched hands, fingers twisted painfully together and knuckles sharp and white. The light through the stained-glass windows painted his skin and hair in gold and blue until he looked like something out of an old illuminated manuscript.

  Jack found an empty row and sat down. His ass slid with easy, narrow familiarity into the smooth dent that others had made in the wood over decades of piety. St. Benedict’s used to be a well-attended church.

  Habit made Jack fold his hands together for prayer. He scowled at his fingers as though it were their fault and pulled them apart to shove into the pockets of his jacket instead. Why tempt fate? God might overlook that he’d raised a flare next to an open portal to Hell, but this was His house, and Jack had fucked up his welcome years ago.

  Eventually Ambrose raised his head from over his hands and looked around. His eyebrows pinched together and a short wrinkle etched crookedly in the skin between them when he saw Jack waiting. He got up and shuffled along the length of the pew, hunched and apologetic as though he were in a movie theater.

  “You should have told me you were here,” he said quietly as he slid in next to Jack. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jack said. “You were praying. Maybe it will help.”

  Detective Ben Ambrose laughed quietly and rubbed at one deep-set eye with a long, knuckly finger. “That would be new.”

  He was only still when he prayed. The rest of the time, Ambrose was in constant nervous motion as he pushed his hair back, fidgeted with his cuffs, or checked the watch strapped around his bony wrist. He was handsome in a worn, weary way that pinched the corners of his mouth and bruised his eyes. There was something poignantly human about it.

  “I pull
ed a case out by the fairground,” Ben said quietly. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a creased, well-stuffed envelope. “Tell me what you think.”

  Jack folded the flap back and extracted a sheaf of photos of a familiar crime scene. The unflattering glare of the flash showed details that he hadn’t noticed the night before. Almost buried in the puffy flesh of the man’s arm was a glitter of beads and silver, and under the chalk outline of the goat man, he could just about see the scrubbed-away ghost of another sigil on the wall.

  That was bad form. Demons might spread their favors promiscuously, but servants who did the same rarely lasted long.

  Jack shuffled back through the pictures to the dead man in his stolen shirt. “Who is he?”

  Ambrose shrugged. He leaned forward and rested his arms on the pew in front, his hands lax as he watched a woman, with a rosary twisted around her fingers like wire, light one votive candle after another. Her face was pale and set as she mass-mailed God her prayer over and over. Eventually she kneeled down and started to work through her beads again.

  “Dale Kinney,” Ambrose said quietly. “He owns a diner near the fairground, has a wife and kids at home, and apparently went to the Missionary Baptist Church every Sunday.”

  “Well,” Jack said dryly. “Baptists.”

  That was an echo from his childhood. Back in Jasper the question of whose house God would stay in if he visited was an old and contentious one. It wasn’t enough for the other congregation to be wrong, they had to be told about it ahead of time. As it turned out, none of them were quite on the money.

  Ambrose gave him an annoyed look. “What can you tell me about the murder?”

  Jack looked back at the photos and balanced what he knew against what he could share. Ambrose should keep an eye on the beat cops and crime-scene techs for a while, since the pile of silver had further diminished from when Jack grabbed a handful. But that would require too much explanation.

  “I’d need to know more about him,” Jack said. “His associates. His friends?”