Hellraisers (11 page)

“Mom, please, it will be okay, I promise,” he said, his throat swelling—not asthma this time but tears, ready to explode out of him. He clamped down, feeling the sting in his eyes. “I promise.”

“You promise?” she said, tipping back the glass and emptying it in one swallow. “Promises and lies, Marlow. I can't stand it. You sound just like
him.
”

She didn't have to say who. She was talking about his dad, a man he'd never even met but whose every shortfall he seemed to share. The accusation turned his tears to anger.

“I told you, it's not my fault.”

“Yeah,” his mom said, fixing him with just about the coldest look he could imagine. “That was his line too. Right before he ran away.”

He opened his mouth to reply, found nothing there to say. He spun around, clenching his teeth against the wave of dizziness and nausea. Somehow he made it out of the living room, up the stairs into his bedroom. It was brighter in there, syrupy light seeping in through the filthy glass. But it still took everything he had not to run to the window and drop headfirst to the street where he wouldn't feel that unbearable weight on his shoulders, like the whole house was resting there, the whole big, dark, screaming world.

Instead, he stripped off the clothes, slung on a fresh tee and some sweatpants and his old sneakers. He grabbed his spare inhaler, then bolted past his sad, old dog for the door.

 

FAST EXIT

They moved out as quickly and as smoothly as they had moved in. Like a rising tide, Pan thought, each wave so small and so quiet that you didn't notice them creeping up the beach until your feet were soaked. Nobody said much as they traipsed out of the building. There wasn't exactly much to talk about. Nothing good, anyway. And it was nice to get some peace and quiet.

Pan had almost managed to shut the elevator doors when Herc's scarred hand slid through the gap. Her sigh of relief became a splutter of frustration as the big man clambered inside, slamming the gates behind him. He stood on a streak of fading blood that stretched along the floor, his boots squeaking as he spun to face her.

“How you holdin' up?”

“Worse now than I was a second ago,” she grumbled. The doors closed and the cab rocked as it started to descend. She sighed again, not enough left inside her to have this conversation. She lifted a hand, placed it against her chest, against the scar she could feel beneath her tee. It was like a lump of hot coal had been stitched there, her body trying to repair a wound that it couldn't even understand.

“You talked to Ostheim?” Herc asked, knowing full well what the answer was.

Pan felt her whole body slump. She closed her eyes, listened to the whining gears of the elevator.

“He needs to speak with you, Pan,” Herc said, and the rush of anger that rose from her gut was so fierce it scared her. She bit down on it, trapping her response behind her teeth, taking a deep breath through her nose.

“I know,” she hissed. The elevator growled, then thumped home. Herc snatched the gates open, let her out first. The building was an empty office tower, abandoned when it was only half-finished by an insolvent developer—one of an endless list of deserted buildings they'd already used that year. She marched through the empty lobby, just wanting to be out in the sun, wanting to leave all of this behind her.
Keep walking, keep walking, keep walking.

“Pan.” Herc's voice was like a choke chain around her throat, stopping her dead. She looked back, saw him lob a cell phone her way. She snatched it out of the air, fought the instinct to throw it back like it was a live grenade. Herc stood in the flickering fluorescent light of the elevator, shrugged his big shoulders. “He's on now.”

She punched through the doors into the noise and heat of the street, clutching the cell so hard she thought it might splinter into pieces.
No such luck.
She barged past the people, swearing at the ones who didn't get out of her way, ducking into the nearest alleyway. For a second or two she stood in the muggy shadows, took a couple of breaths of exhausted air. She could almost feel her employer there, a presence at the end of her arm, and she wondered if somehow he could see her, if he'd hacked into the phone's camera, or a nearby CCTV camera, or a even a satellite. She glanced nervously up at the white-blue sky. There wasn't much that Ostheim couldn't do. She lifted the cell.

“Ostheim.”

“And here's me thinking you'd left off without so much as a letter of notice,” he replied, that familiar accent that was half German, half somewhere even farther away. She'd never been able to place it, and as she'd never actually met Ostheim, or so much as seen a photo of the man, she had no other clues as to his whereabouts. “But it's good to hear your voice, Pan. For a second back there, I thought we'd lost you.”

“For a second, you did.”

“So I heard. How was it?”

“Death?” Pan swallowed, her throat parched. She could still feel it, invisible hands reaching through her skin, through her bones and muscles, grabbing hold of something even deeper, ready to rip it away and drag it down to wherever it was they came from. She wrapped her free hand around her stomach as if to hold in her soul, worried that now it had been wrenched loose it might simply fall out. It was almost too much, and she leaned back against the warm bricks, sliding down into a nest of old newspaper.

“Pan?” She'd almost forgotten he was there, his voice making her jump.

“I'm okay,” she said. “I don't want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough,” he replied, as bright as always. “But you know I'm here if you need me. Just a phone call away. I've been doing this a long time, Pan, I know what it's like.”

To feel the very essence of you almost torn away? I doubt it.

“Anything you need, you just let me know. Anything at all.”

“How about a reference for a new job?” She spluttered a humorless laugh at her own joke.

“You know you can get out any time. All you've got to do is say the word. We'll set you up, you'll never have to worry about anything again. Is that what you want?”

Yeah, and then what?
A job at McDonald's? Sharing a small apartment with a roommate and a poodle called Herc? She wasn't sure if the thought made her want to laugh again, or just weep. This was all she knew. And a life without the Engine, without the things it gave her … that was no kind of life. No, she wasn't going back.

“All you got to do is—”

“Shut up, Shep,” she said. “I told you, I'm fine. What's next?”

She could almost hear him smiling, like he'd known exactly what she was going to say. He probably had, the smug bastard. Ostheim knew everything.

“Next is you tell me what went wrong.”

“Hasn't Herc already debriefed?”

“He has, but I want to hear it from you.”

Great.
Pan pushed herself up, pacing down into the darkness of the back of the alley. Behind her she heard car horns and children shouting, somebody barking out a laugh loud enough to echo off the walls. She tried to tune it out, thinking back, back past the tower, back past the hospital, back past the van as it barreled down the expressway, back to yesterday morning.

“It went wrong,” she said, knowing even as she spoke that it was the most pointless statement in the history of statements. “The target, he wasn't there.”

Their objective had been simple: to infiltrate the suspected home of a guy called Patrick Rebarre. He was an Engineer who worked for the other side, a creep whose sole purpose was to bring about the end of the world. He'd deserved to die, and she'd been more than willing to do it. That was a soldier's job, right? Take out the enemy.

The only problem was he hadn't been there.

“We breached the house, Ostheim,” she said.

“And…”

“And somebody had beaten us to it. His security team was dead, three bodyguards left on the floor like … like dog food.”

She could see them now. Not just killed but turned inside out.

Literally.

“You found his body?” Ostheim asked.

“Rebarre?” Pan shook her head. “No, he'd gone.”

No corpse, no clues, no nothing.

“You think somebody warned him?”

“I think…” She swallowed hard to keep down the boiling contents of her stomach. “I think
he
did.”

Mammon,
said her brain before she had the chance to stop it. She glanced behind her, just in case thinking about him somehow managed to conjure him. Stranger things were possible, after all. But there was just the alley, and the world beyond, oblivious to the knowledge that monsters walked in their midst. She rubbed her churning gut, forcing herself to speak.

“It was a trap. I knew something was wrong as soon as we breached. There was something in the air, something that shouldn't have been there. You've been around the Pentarchy, Ostheim, you know the stench they leave behind.”

The Pentarchy. The Five
.
They'd be considered gods if they weren't already devils.

“But you didn't actually see him?” Ostheim asked.

“I didn't need to. He was there.”

“Then we have to assume he followed you,” Ostheim said. “Or at least tracked you. There was no sign of him at the hospital?”

“No. I think we lost him.”

“You didn't,” Ostheim said. “Just stay alert. You know I don't have to tell you how dangerous this could be. Out of all of them, he's the worst. He can tear your soul apart with far greater efficiency than the demons can.”

She wrapped her free hand around herself, holding her shaking body as tight as she could. She needed to be whole again, needed to be protected, needed to be immortal.

“I need the Engine, Ostheim,” she said. “Send me back.”

“In time,” he replied. “Take this chance to recover. I'm sending Nightingale and Truck to your location.”

“They won't be enough,” Pan said. “Not if
he
shows up. Please, Ostheim, I need it.”

“I need you to find Rebarre. We cannot afford to let him live. Not with what he knows. I don't need to remind you what's at stake here. If the Circulus Inferni find out the location of our Engine, then that's it, game over.”

Understatement of the century,
she thought. It's why they had that name, why they'd had it for thousands of years.
Circulus Inferni
, the Circle of Hell. If they won this war, then it would be hell on earth.

And that wasn't just a metaphor.

“Pan?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. We'll find him.”

She heard Ostheim sucking his teeth, like he was deep in thought.

“Good. See that you do. What about our bait?”

“The kid? Shep, I have no idea what you're planning but—”

“It's what we need to do, Pan. We have to draw them out somehow, position them where we can get to them. What better way?”

“They'll kill him,” she said.

“And here's me thinking you never had a heart,” he said, laughing. “We'll be there. We'll get to them before they get to him.”

Yeah, right.

“And, Pan…”

“What?”

“I meant what I said. If you sense Mammon, if you feel him in the air, if you so much as break into gooseflesh or get a shiver down your spine, you start running. Okay?”

“Shep, I'll be fine.”

“What he will do to you is worse than an eternity in hell, you hear me? Listen to my words. If you sense him, you run. Run, and never look back.”

And with that he was gone. Pan listened to the dead line for a moment, hearing the echo of his words in the hissing static.

Run.

Yeah, like she really had a choice.

 

GHOSTS

Marlow stood outside Victor G. Rosemount High School in the sweltering heat, trying to work out why he felt so lost.

Because you've got nowhere to go,
his brain told him.
Nobody wants you.

The words stung, but only because they were true. This place had kicked him out, and his mom would happily trade him in for the son she'd lost ten years ago. Danny may have been dead, but Marlow was the ghost. Even here people streamed past him like they couldn't see him, nobody so much as acknowledging his presence.

Except one—the merest glimpse of a familiar face, the same girl half-lost in the crowd, then gone before Marlow could make sense of it.

Hold it together, man,
he told himself.

He wanted to find Charlie, if only to prove that he still existed. He needed someone to talk to, to try to make sense of everything that had happened. Things may have been about as crap as they could be but Charlie would crack a joke and they would laugh and at least he'd feel like a real person again. Besides, however bad his life was Charlie's had been worse, and there was nothing like perspective to make you feel a little less sorry for yourself.

With no cell, though, he needed to fetch him in person. He pulled his inhaler from his pocket and squeezed two shots into his mouth, grimacing against the bitter taste. His lungs crackled and he rubbed his chest until they eased. Then he walked across the road to the locked gates. He jabbed his thumb against the intercom button. Seconds later the school receptionist answered.

“It's, um … I'm late, sorry, need to get in.”

“Name?”

“Mar—” he started, then, “Charlie Alvarez.”

There was a pause, then the gates buzzed and he pushed his way through. He decided against the lobby and cut around the side of the main building. He entered through the fire door that never latched properly, clattering up the stairwell and along an empty corridor. He had to peer into three classrooms before he found the right one. Charlie was sitting in the middle of the room, lost in a daze, pen between his teeth. Marlow knocked softly, then pushed open the door. Everybody turned to him, and Charlie's eyes just about popped free of his head.