Raw Power: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Demon-Hearted Book 1) (2 page)

Amundsen was a tall guy, really lean. Looked like a middle-aged Peter Cushing. Black hair, with grey marking the temples. He was the type to act serious at all times, except that when the conversation changed to art, he'd give a genuine smile and his eyes would widen like a kid's. Always polite, always professional, I liked the way he carried himself. Aside from the palatial habitation through the gate and the fleet of expensive cars in his garage, he wasn't showy about his wealth. The dude wore nice, tailored suits of a modest sort and never acted particularly stuck-up. He was even willing to chat with a bit of hired muscle like me without his own guards present. Compared to other clients I'd had, Amundsen was a pleasure to work with, and I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't beginning to consider him a friend at this point.

While returning his wallet to his back pocket, I noticed a pendant hanging around his neck from a silvery chain. The pendant was shaped like a star, with several sharp-looking points, and there was something etched into it that I couldn't make out. Writing of some sort. It was a light-colored metal, possibly silver. Had I only been able to get a closer look I could have positively identified it, but it was out of sight behind the bulk of his jacket in the next instant. How he wore that jacket on such a humid night was beyond me. Anyhow, the pendant was a little gaudy, but I figured old wealthy guys like him are allowed to have eccentric taste and I didn't say a thing about it. Instead, it was he who continued the conversation, arching a brow and draping an arm over my shoulder.

“Lucian, I feel our professional relationship has blossomed, come along a great deal, since I first hired you. I think that I can trust you with most any job.” He peered up at the sky narrowly. “It occurs to me that the night is young. I'm asking a lot, but I was wondering if you might have it in you to consider another offer of mine. I've a new job that needs done, a little short-notice, that could benefit from your expert treatment.”

He was buttering me up something fierce, throwing out words like “expert”.

And, what can I say? It was working.

“Oh, what is it?” I asked.

 
He grinned, evidently pleased that he'd piqued my interest. “Well, to begin with, I'll gladly pay you double-- no,
triple
-- for this one, on the condition that you take care of it tonight.”

The sound of my jaw dropping to the curb could probably be heard for miles around.

A guy like me values his time. You have to put some serious cash on the line to get my attention. But if the price is right, I'm willing to deliver the goods stat, be your repo man, treasure hunter, whatever you want me to be.

 
Well, not
whatever
you want me to be, you perv. I
have
standards.

But it's safe to say that Amundsen had gotten my attention. For that kind of pay, there was little I wouldn't do. If he wanted me to set off in search of some lost painting or curio of his, then I was ready and willing. Money like that could put a hell of a dent in my loans, pay my rent for half a year and more. The alternative I'd been planning was to return to my apartment, turn on some music and get drunk as fuck. Scoring a few thousand bucks, tax-free, for a single night's work, sounded far better. I told him as much. “I can head out immediately. What is it?”

Amundsen's mouth did this little thing, where the lips were pursed and his chin wobbled. I guess that was his thinking face. “Well,” he began, cracking a smile, “it isn't a painting this time.” The smile didn't linger long, though.

 
Oh, God,
I thought.
He's about to ask you to bury a body or something for him.

I desperately began considering different parts of town with the lowest populations and the loosest soil; wondering which stores had the best prices on shovels; whether the yet-undescribed body would fit in my trunk.

 
Oh,
shut up
. Don't
tsk-tsk
me or bring your morals into this. This is a lot of money we're talking about here!

From the breast pocket of his jacket, Amundsen drew out a small, folded paper. Unfolding it, he handed it over to me, and in the light of the nearest streetlamp I could make out a simple drawing. It was an ink drawing of a box, perfectly square. There was a weird design on the top of the lid that reminded me of the pendant Amundsen was wearing, and the sides of it were done up in a filigree design.

“The design there, on the sides,” he said, pointing to the filigree, “is in gold. Inside the box,” he added, “is some ash.”

I furrowed my brow, still scanning the picture. “Uh... like, cigarette ashes, or... cremains, er...”

“Not quite.”

I nodded. “OK, and who has it?”

Amundsen shifted uncomfortably and gave a little shake of his head. “I'll give you an address. A small group seems to have taken it, though you shouldn't encounter any trouble. My understanding is that the thieves aren't in tonight, and have left the box unattended in a certain house where their type has been known to meet. It should be a very simple retrieval. They intend to use it in some sort of ritual.”

I laughed aloud. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have. “A ritual? Wait, like, voodoo? Devil-worship?”

The client said nothing.

 
I knew guys like him could be eccentric, but until today, I'd never known Mr. Amundsen to be into, well,
that
kind of thing. Years back, an interest in the occult could ruin one's reputation. These days, though, it was stunning to me just how many folks collected occult trinkets for the fun of it. I guess devilry was in vogue or something. Up to that point, I'd only known Amundsen's collections to contain cherished pieces of art, though it stood to reason that he'd have to fill that hulking house of his with other shit. Sure, why not occult collectibles?

If there's one thing I learned early on in this gig, it's not to ask too many questions. You start poking and prodding around in aspects of the job that don't really concern you and you can piss off your clients. There was way too much money on the line for me to risk that, and besides, I liked Amundsen well enough not to pester him about the particulars. Some people had made off with his little pentagram box and were trying to summon Satan with it while beating tom-toms or something similarly ridiculous. OK, I can handle that.

“All right,” I said, clearing my throat and tucking the paper into my pocket. “Where can I find it?”

The smile returned to Amundsen's lips. “Like I said, I'll provide you with the address.”

TWO

Amundsen had me going out to some shitty neighborhood in Flint. Flint was about an hour's drive away on the highway, though taking the back roads would likely be faster for me, since I could speed as much as I wanted without having to worry about a dickish highway patrolman writing me up. On the way, I stopped at the 7/11 for a coffee and went real heavy on the cream and sugar. I realized I hadn't eaten anything since that morning and picked up a few gas station cheeseburgers, too. What can I say? When I celebrate a big payday I like to pull out all of the stops.

When I finally got to the place, though, a large, burnt-out shell of a house at the end of a winding, unoccupied street, it wasn't at all what I'd expected. Oh, sure, it looked like the kind of house where some emo kids might meet up to fuck around on the weekends, but the entire atmosphere was so eerie that I couldn't shake it, and I wondered what'd possessed them to bring Amundsen's little box out here. Then I started wondering about what was in it, and why it was so important to him anyway, but I caught myself before jumping into that rabbit hole.

 
Don't ask questions. It isn't any of your business, remember?

I parked the car a little ways away and shut off the headlights a while before that, so that I could approach the house without being heard or seen. I don't know if it was just a sudden change in weather or what, but the wind had grown considerably colder in the past hour, and I was suddenly regretting my choice of T-shirt and jeans. A jacket would've been nice.

The curb was pretty busted but I followed it a while and sized up the exterior of the house. A fire had wreaked havoc on it if the scorch marks were any indicator, and a large part of the roof had caved in. All of the windows were broken and the lawn was so overgrown it might've been declared a metropark.

There was no telling what I could expect. Amundsen had been entirely too vague. He wanted me to get the box back and was paying me a shitload to do it, but as I approached the house and the cool wind reached my arms, I began to feel nervous.

Nerves in a job like mine aren't a good thing, least of all when you're standing outside the house where the action's about to go down. There's a place and time for butterflies in the stomach, for self-doubt, but mere moments before go-time ain't it. I balled my fists and ambled up to the edge of the building where I'd be able to peer into one of the burnt-out lower-story windows, unsure of what I might see.

 
Amundsen had assured me that there would be no one here. All I needed to do was poke around in this creepy house till I found his box and then beat it. Something about that wasn't adding up, though. The air was heavy. I didn't
feel
alone here.

I stuck my head just inside the window like a thief in search of a freshly-baked pie and caught only the faintest glimmers of orange cast onto a wall in some adjacent room.

Sure as shit, this was the place.

And something was going on inside.

 
I thought he said the place was going to be empty. Damn it...
I didn't have any reservations about roughing up a bunch of Harry Potter wannabes, but the fact that the house wasn't completely abandoned only ramped up my nerves and made my stomach stir up the dregs of those god-awful cheeseburgers.

 
Gulping down the dread that was quickly welling up in me, I did my best to ignore the subtle, breathy chanting I could hear issuing from deeper in the ruined domicile. Yeah, full-on chanting, like the kind you might hear in some voodoo orgy. I didn't know a whole lot about that kind of thing back then and have never been a religious person, but I knew
enough
to know that ritualistic chanting rarely ends well. In the movies, people or animals are brutally sacrificed, or demons are conjured up from the bowels of Hell.

 
Not that I believed in any of that. But knowing that I was about to barge into a room full of people who
did
believe brought an apprehension over me that was difficult to describe and even more difficult to dispel.

I edged my way around the house, my hands pressed to the cool siding, and sought out another window.

The chanting was getting a little louder with every step. Female voices, all of them. Couldn't hear a deep note in the entire chorus, and I stood by to listen for quite some time. I had no idea what they were looking to do, or why the smells of roasting meat entered the sensory equation a few steps later.

As I crept around the property trying to get a peek and establish the best entry point, I felt like a camera guy who makes nature documentaries for TV. Though, instead of wandering through the jungle to watch a couple of rare animals fuck, I was trying to sneak up on a little black box full of ashes.

I seriously doubt that any of those documentarians have ever been so utterly thrown off balance by what they've discovered, though.

Very carefully, and only after taking hold of a two-by-four I'd found on the lawn, I looked around a corner and found the sort of entrance I'd been looking for. Except, rather than pounce out and start pounding heads, I froze in place and tried to take it all in.

I'd been right about one thing; there was nothing but women in the place, all of them standing in a circle, hands joined and chanting.

A detail that was not lost on me, however, was that a scrap of clothing did not exist among the lot of them.

There must have been ten or fifteen nubile young things standing there, all of their good bits in view despite the wind's chill, chanting in some guttural language whose like I've never heard. I can't recall specifically how many there were; counting is not my strong suit when I've got an erection.

Watching the spectacle for a long while, I realized that this was some sort of Witch's Sabbath. I can't take credit for that revelation; I'd seen more than a couple paintings from fellows like Goya depicting such things. The whole scene was rendered almost as darkly by the flickering firelight, but was a good deal easier on the eyes than any of those pieces had ever been. Young, sexy witches? If not for the fact that I had a job to do, I might've joined in.

 
The scene was on the lawn. The back of the house had crumbled away, and the hollows were lit up by the firelight like a massive jack-o-lantern. The congregants were standing in the grass, and on a spit positioned just above their bonfire was a hunk of meat. What kind was hard to say. It might've been a trick of the light, but I thought I caught sight of
fingers
on that bit of meat, as if a thick, human arm had been set to roast.

Ultimately, I spotted the little black box on a makeshift altar. It was off to the side, about twenty feet away from my present position. It would have been a simple thing for me to rush over and take hold of it, except that, with so many sets of eyes in the area, there was no way my approach would go unnoticed.

And then it happened.

From behind, I felt a strong push. Two hands met my back and shoved me forward, so that I fell into the grass and out into the open.

 
Shit
.

I wasn't particularly frightened at this point; all I'd seen so far was a bunch of sexy babes chanting and carrying on like loonies around a fire. I sprang up and balled my fists, preparing to deck whoever it was that'd just pushed me.

And then the chanting stopped.

All eyes were on me.

The hands that'd pushed me down belonged to a kid. The kid, about twelve or so years old and scrawny, just didn't look right. His eyes were too big, his skin too pale. He was dressed in rags and stared me down with a vacant intensity that chilled me to the bone. He was human in shape, but, at the risk of sounding crazy, I admit he seemed anything but.