Shout at the Devil

  A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter novella

  John G. Hartness

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Stay In Touch!

  Also by John G. Hartness

  Falstaff Books

  1

  Spoiler alert—tattoos are painful. Somebody is jabbing a needle into your flesh a few thousand times a minute, and that shit doesn’t feel good. I don’t care how many endorphins your body produces, or how into pain you claim to be, after the fourth hour in the chair, that shit has stopped being interesting a long time ago, and now it just hurts.

  Second spoiler—magical tattoos hurt even more. Because not only are you marking your flesh with permanent ink, you’re pouring mystical energy into the ink at the same time it goes into said flesh, bonding the magic to the ink and the skin in a complicated process that requires a fuckton of concentration, a mountain of magical power, and a practitioner who knows their shit.

  Now, my tattoo artist is a friggin’ wizard, which helps. I know, everybody that likes their ink says their artist is a magician of some sort, but most of them aren’t firing up the gun in the middle of a protective circle and tapping leylines to power the enchantments they’re pumping into the Sailor Jerry heart and roses on your bicep with “Mom” written on a ribbon in nice serif letters. No, my artist is a legitimate wizard, with a robe and everything.

  He’s also a goddamn giant of a man, with ink stretching from his finger all the way up his arms, across his chest, scrolling up the back of his neck and bald head, and down both legs. That proves that he knows how much it hurts. He’s also had all that work done on his own body, so when he tells me to stop wriggling around like a whiny little brat, I just suck it up and sit still.

  “Now, this is going to hurt a little bit,” Tuck said, his blue eyes dancing as he grinned at me through his bushy goatee.

  “What? Like the last four hours of this shit was a tickle fest?”

  “That was the warmup,” he said, not giving a single fuck about my pain level. “Those were some minor wards, some additional physical enhancements, real basic shit. This next hour is going to be more complex spell- and ink-slinging, designed to let you store more energy in your tattoos than you can usually handle in your body, and call upon it in an instant. The designs are more complex, and the power I’m pouring into these is very different from what you’re used to taking in. If you need a break, this is a place where we can stop for today and you can go off and whimper in a corner for a little bit.”

  “Are you good to keep at it?” I asked. I could see a few beads of sweat dotting his forehead, but Georgia in July is stupid hot no matter how much air conditioning you have, so it might have been the weather instead of the strain of the magic.

  “I guess I’ve got another hour or two in me, but it’s gonna leave me pretty drained.”

  I thought about it, then shook my head. “Let’s call it here for today. No point in you getting laid up for a week because you channeled too much power through yourself on my account. I don’t think I’m gonna be running into a big bad in the next few days, so just a little extra oomph will be fine.”

  Tuck nodded, then set his tattoo gun down and capped his inks. He spritzed some water on a paper towel and wiped down my left arm, cleaning off the excess ink. He dabbed a little Tattoo Goo on his fingers and rubbed it into my arm. He wrapped my arm in cling wrap and peeled off his black latex gloves, pitching them into a wastebasket as he started to neaten up his workspace. “You know the drill. Keep your shit clean, keep it moist with the Goo until it heals. For you, I expect this will heal up in a day or two. Between whatever you’ve got going on and the magic in the ink, it’ll speed the process a lot.”

  “Thanks, brother. I appreciate you working me in.”

  “Now what’s this all about, Q? I keep hearing a bunch of weird shit about you hanging out with angels, pissing off the devil himself, and trying to find God. Something tells me that’s not metaphorical.”

  I sat up in the chair and slipped my long-sleeve shirt on over my newly tattooed arms. As I buttoned the cuffs on the black shirt, I shook my head. “I wish it was, old friend. Somebody gave up something important to save my ass last year, and I have to get some divine intervention to help her out.”

  “But angels, Harker? That’s a little out of your league, isn’t it?”

  “My league has gotten pretty expansive since we were closing down strip clubs together, old friend.” Tuck and I had raised our fair share of hell in and around Atlanta a couple decades ago, but in the years since, he’d gotten mostly out of the mystical shitshow that I called my life and focused on becoming one of Georgia’s preeminent tattoo artists. Me, I just took my hell-raising to more literal fronts these days. “I don’t want to drag you back into this world, buddy. Just trust me that I know what I’m getting myself into.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that you know what you’re getting into,” Tuck said, taking a long swig from a plastic bottle of spring water sitting on his station. A part of me flashed back to our wilder days, when there almost certainly would have been a bottle of whiskey on top of his rolling toolbox and another one in my hand the whole time he was inking me up. “What worries me, Quincy Harker, is that you usually don’t give a fuck what you’re getting into. Is this something you have to do, or is it just more of your bullshit death wish?”

  I started a little and looked up to meet his eyes. There was no condemnation in the blue, just honest concern. “I don’t have a death wish. No, don’t give me that look. I probably did. Okay, I definitely did, I just couldn’t find anything bad enough to actually kill me. But I don’t anymore. I’m not over Anna, I’ll never be over Anna, but I don’t want to go chasing her into death. I’ve got something to live for, man. Somebody to live for.”

  “Your detective?”

  “Yeah, Rebecca Flynn. She reminds me why I’m fighting all these big nasties, Tuck. She’s worth fighting for. She’s worth living for.”

  “Fuck, I’ll drink to that.” He slid open the bottom drawer of his toolbox and pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey. He spun the cap off the bottle, took a long pull, and handed it over to me. I put it to my lips and let the amber fire pour down my throat. For a second, it was the nineties again, and I was ready to go out on the town looking for trouble with my old buddy Tuck.

  Tuck erased the magical circle around us with his foot, and my cell phone got signal again. As soon as that happened, the notifications on my phone blew up, and trouble found me.

  Tuck grinned at me, his eyes crinkling as I let out a huge sigh. “That’s why I never got a real job, Q. Too many people looking for you, and you can’t even enjoy a beer with an old friend after he brutalizes you for half a day.”

  “Kiss my ass,” I said, smiling. We bumped fists, I slid him four hundred-dollar bills, and went outside to see what the hell was wrong now.

  The Atlanta heat wrapped around my face like a warm towel the second I stepped out of the air-conditioned shop. It wasn’t cold inside, but it was so hot, and so muggy, that I swear I felt my eyeballs fog up. My tank top instantly adhered to my skin under the long-sleeve shirt, and I felt a row of sweat pop out on my forehead in the twenty feet it took me to get to my car. I opened the door of the Toyota, leaned in, and cranked the engine. I stepped away and leaned on the back bumper to let the AC kick in before I sat down. The car was dark blue, with gray interior, which meant it would be more like a sauna for the next five minutes anyway. Hell, the way the sun was beating down on the asphalt, I couldn’t touch the steering wheel without giving myself second-degree burns.

  I looked at my phone, and Dennis Bolton’s rainbow-horned unicorn face stared back at me. “What’s up, Dennis?”

  “Where the fuck have you been, Harker? Don’t you know we’re trying to save the world up here?”

  “You know exactly where I’ve been, asshole. You track my phone everywhere I go.” He did, too. Dennis was an old friend, a computer whiz who’d been murdered by a corrupt half-demon police detective some years ago. I saved his consciousness by shoving his soul into my cell phone, but thanks to the wonders of the nation’s largest network, he leapt right out of my phone and onto the internet.

  Now there was a smartass twenty-something with questionable decision-making skills and a moral compass that just spun in circles that had unlimited access to every piece of digital data in the world. It made it real convenient when I was short on cash because he could just reroute some Congress douche’s latest lobbyist bribe into my account. It was less convenient when I wanted to disappear for a day or two because not only did he track my phone better than the NSA, he also had access to every traffic cam and networked security camera in the world. All that meant that he never had to wonder where I was. As long as I was in this dimension, Dennis could find me.

  Which meant… “Oh shit, Dennis. The circle. I’m sorry, dude. James casts a circle whenever he’s doing magical tattoos and works off a battery-powered gun so nothing breaches the barrier. Including cell signal.”

  “Yeah, as far as any of us know, you van ished from the face of the earth fifteen minutes after you walked into your buddy’s shop. Which, by the way, has no internet security system, so I couldn’t peek inside, either.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why he doesn’t have an internet-linked security system. He knows about you, and he’s got some clients now and then that he’d rather I not ask him any questions about.”

  “You’re saying your tattoo artist also tattoos bad guys?”

  “Dennis, depending on who you ask, I am the bad guy. But that’s not the point. The point is that James is very private and doesn’t want anyone snooping on him. I’d be surprised if he used anything more recent than a flip phone.”

  “He doesn’t. I checked. Not even a burner smartphone. This dude wants to vanish, he’s gone.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Tuck and I had been in some sketchy places and had to make ourselves scarce from those places more than once. I was surprised to find him operating a shop under his real name, or at least the name I’ve always known him by. If anyone would have an escape plan in place, it was Tuck.

  “What’s got you so freaked out, Sparkles?” If he hated the nickname, he could stop appearing as a unicorn.

  “There’s a woman in San Francisco who’s been looking for you since this morning. Says it’s urgent, and she was super pissed that I couldn’t find you. Ask me what kind of tech ops guy I called myself, if I couldn’t find one wizard in North Carolina. I didn’t bother to tell her that you were currently one wizard in Georgia because her point was just as valid.”

  “Who is it?” I asked. I knew a few people in San Francisco, but nobody with a particularly bad temper.

  “I’ll patch her through. You can deal with her. I’m out of this shit. And next time you decide to vanish for half a day without telling anyone anything more than ‘I’m getting new tattoos,’ you get to be the one to talk Flynn down off the ledge.”

  Oh shit. I didn’t explain everything I was doing to Becks before I left the apartment at the crack of dawn this morning. That was not going to go well. I sent a tentative sliver of thought down the psychic link that I shared with my fiancée, but all I got back was a general sense of pissed off, with the tiniest hint of relief that I wasn’t dead. But mostly pissed off.

  That was not going to be a good conversation when I got home. Just the thought of it made me dread the four-hour trip back to Charlotte. I sighed. “Okay, Dennis, put the mystery woman on the phone.”

  The screen went dark, then an unfamiliar face popped into view. She was a dark-haired woman in her late thirties, with strong cheeks and jawline, dark eyes, and the dark skin of a Latina. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and her nose was red, like she’d been blowing it a lot. “Are you Quincy Harker? The sorcerer?”

  “I usually just answer to Harker, but yeah, I’ve been known to cast a spell or two. I don’t think we’ve met. How did you know where to call?” If my identity was out in the world, it could get very uncomfortable for some folks I cared about, so I tried to stay somewhat below the radar. As much as possible, given the fact that I do hunt demons and work with not only the Department of Homeland Security but also a secret organization working for the greater good called The Shadow Council.

  “My name is Arlena Meneses. Lena for short. I found your contact information in my wife’s phone, under her emergency contacts.”

  I cocked my head to the side. “I’m sorry, miss. Who is your wife? And why would she have you call me in case of an emergency?”

  “I don’t know. But your name was in her emergency list, with a note to call you if anything weird ever happened to her. Well, she was murdered last night, and I think it’s because she was a witch. Is that weird enough?”

  I wracked my brain trying to come up with a witch in California who would have me in her phone. I couldn’t come up with anyone, then it hit me like a bag of bricks. “Faye?” The name came out of me in a strangled gasp. “Faye Spataro?”

  The woman on the screen nodded, sniffling a little. “Yes, Mr. Harker. Faye Spataro. My wife. She was found mutilated in a deserted apartment this morning, with all kinds of magical shit strewn around the room. Is that weird enough to get you out here?”

  I was already in the car, slamming the door and punching in Hartsfield-Jackson Airport into the GPS on my dash. “I’ll be on the next flight out. If there are local cops there, tell them that this is now a Homeland Security case and to get the fuck out of my crime scene. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I clicked off the call, dialing another number out of my speed dial list. As Becks’ phone rang, I remembered Faye Spataro, a fiery witch I’d worked a couple of summonings with out of California more than a decade ago. She was one of the good ones, and whoever hurt her was going to pay. They were going to pay dearly.

  2

  “Okay, but call me as soon as you land.”

  “Will do. I love you.”

  “Love you, too. And you’re still taking me out when you get home. Somewhere nice, not just a food truck this time.”

  “Deal,” I said, then pressed the button to end the call. I could feel Rebecca’s concern across our mental link, but it was faint, given the distance. Without concentrating on it, the link would be almost imperceptible when I landed in California, as long as nothing too tragic happened to either of us.

  I sat in the Delta lounge at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the United States, waiting for my flight west to board. Dennis had worked his magic and gotten me not only onto the next flight, but in first class. Somewhere there was a middle manager who was having a bad day. When I got tired of people-watching, which took about a minute and a half, I pulled out my iPad and surfed the web, looking for any news about Faye. There was nothing on the major sites, which wasn’t surprising. Most witches keep a low profile, and Faye was no exception. She worked in a florist’s shop doing wedding arrangements, mostly, and dabbled in the occult on the side.

  Now her side hustle got her killed. Faye was always more than just the standard crystal ball and Tarot cards BS medium or prognosticator. Faye was a legit water witch, with the ability to make her primary element bend to her will. I’ve never met an elemental practitioner as powerful as Faye, so the fact that she was murdered concerned me, more so that it happened in San Francisco, a city with water all around. She wasn’t short on resources, so what found her that took her so by surprise that she couldn’t fight back? Or worse, what was powerful enough to overwhelm her?

  These were thoughts that normally would have me flagging down a bartender to get another double vodka cranberry, but if something was hunting practitioners in California, I was going to need all my faculties. Plus, I hate having to piss on airplanes.

  I managed to get through the flight sober, a wonder in and of itself, then I rented a pretty swanky BMW SUV at the airport and headed into town to meet Arlena Meneses. I hooked my phone into the Beamer’s dashboard computer and called Dennis.

  His horsey image appeared on the screen, grinning a ridiculously human grin. “How do you like the wheels, boss?”

  “Pretty good, Boltron, pretty good. Not as much as I liked the first-class plane ticket, but a close second.”

  “What’s the use of having an almost digitally omnipotent friend if you’re going to fly coach?”

  “I agree,” I said. “Now, what can you tell me about Arlena Meneses?”

  “You mean Marine Gunnery Sergeant Meneses? She of the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for her work in Afghanistan? Or do you mean Sergeant Meneses, of the San Francisco Personal Crimes Division, who is the current city pistol champion?”

  “Well, smartass, I guess I mean both of them since they’re probably the same person.”

  His computerized horse image jumped up and clicked its heels, making a shower of rainbow sparks. Sometimes, he was so cute it made me want to barf. Instead, I just suffered in silence. “You got it, boss-man! Sergeant Meneses has been with the SFPD for five years since receiving her undergraduate degree in criminal justice from San Francisco State University. She minored in art history. She’s been with the Personal Crimes Division, assigned to homicide, for the past year. She’s considered a rising star by the brass, a ‘diversity hire’ by the racist asshole desk sergeant, and a solid investigator who’s a little green and carries a chip on her shoulder, but is overall worth the investment by her CO.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11