A Cat's Chance in Hell (2 page)

He’d left his van close to where they exited the alley. It’d once been a people mover, of the sort that families with lots of kids drove around in. He’d ripped out most of the interior, blacking out the windows and giving it the appearance of a camper van, complete with bed and mini bar. What the average inspection wouldn’t uncover was the hidden compartments under the bed and in the floor, concealing a mini arsenal of weapons. He’d personally replaced the original engine and upgraded the suspension, tyres and braking system. It was one of the great loves of his life, so it was with resigned reluctance that he threw Gabi the keys. The stadium was a good half hour drive from the City centre, so there was no time to waste arguing with her.

Gabi drove the suped-up van like a sports car, speeding through red lights and crossing intersections without slowing. Kyle would swear she took some of the corners on two wheels instead of four. He was
used to her driving, but winced every time she red-lined the engine. Suddenly she slammed on the brakes almost hurling him nose-first into the dashboard; only his inhuman reflexes saved his boyish good looks. He grimaced as he smelt the burnt rubber from what was left of his almost new, low-profile tyres. A tabby cat stood frozen in the middle of the road directly in front of them, its eyes turned almost completely black by the onslaught of the van’s headlights. Gabi stared at it for a half second and Kyle could feel the slight whisper of supernatural power tickle the hairs on his arms, then the cat hissed loudly and bolted off into the darkness.

“
Bloody hell,
” she cursed, flooring the accelerator and sending them hurtling down the street again, the engine whining in protest.

“
What exactly did you say to it anyway?” he asked curiously. Gabi’s ability to communicate with animals was the stuff of legends, but he was one of the few people who knew the true extent of her gift.

“
I told him to go home and stop chasing cute little pussy tails around at night, or a big bad monster was coming to get him,” she replied with a stern huff. “That should keep him off the roads for a couple of nights.” Kyle grinned, shaking his head. That was the Gabi he knew and loved; as quick to save the life of an innocent, no matter what species, as to take the life of a monster. She was actually kinda sweet in that way, but nobody had the rocks to say that to her face, not even him.

“
What’re you grinning at?” she demanded, swinging the van violently onto the highway and
rocketing past a road hauler rather than brake and fit in behind it. He didn’t bother to reply, hanging onto the seat for dear life as she manoeuvred into the fast lane and headed out of the City towards the stadium.

To distract himself from the abuse of his van, Kyle ran over in his mind what he knew about the
old stadium; it had been a top class sports arena not too long ago, but it had fallen into ruin after being abandoned. It would probably seem odd to out-of-towners that such a valuable piece of property had just been left to go to ruin without any attempt to re-develop it. You had to be a local to understand. The urban legends surrounding it were many and varied. Many centred around it being haunted; but by who, or what, was hotly debated. Some said dead sportstars, or a group of cheerleaders who’d died under the stands, and some were convinced it was an army of long-dead warriors or soldiers. Other urban legends claimed the place was cursed, and yet others said it was protected by aliens from another planet; but the one thing all the stories agreed on was that it was best to stay the hell away from it. Teenagers still dared each other to spend a night in it, and the so-called “Satan Worshippers” gathered to practice dark rituals (fortunately most of these didn’t actually have a clue what they were doing), and it was sometimes used by drug lords and other criminals to conduct illicit business, but not as often as an outsider might expect. The police made a token effort to keep people out of it, but they rarely patrolled it anymore, most lawful citizens stayed away from it in any case.

The truth of the matter was
known only to a select few; those who were Magi by birth and those who were trusted by the Magi High Council. The stadium had been built over an area where an unusual number of strong ley lines merged before fanning out again into individual streams. This convergence caused a pool of supernatural energy to build-up below ground until its effects could be felt even above the surface of the earth. The power manifested itself in bizarre phenomena at the stadium. It began with freak accidents and mysterious occurrences during initial construction. The Council of Magi tried to have the construction suspended, even claiming it was being built on an ancient burial ground to get the land owners to build elsewhere, but the construction went on as planned. Once opened, the stadium suffered one disaster after another; stands collapsed, the electricity was off more than it was on, kitchens caught fire, showers turned themselves on and off, and the injury stats for athletes were astronomical. Within months teams refused to play there, staff refused to work there and contractors refused to keep repairing things. Two years after it opened, the stadium was abandoned. The only things still being maintained were the security lights, which were supposed to enable police to patrol it at night. There were eight foot security fences surrounding the perimeter of the stadium, but vandals, drug dealers and teenagers had long since cut holes in the fencing, so the place was essentially open to anyone who wanted to get inside. Tonight Byron; their boss and head honcho at the SMV, aka the Societas Malus Venatori, would’ve made sure that a police patrol, including one of their covert team members, would do a sweep of the place and clear out anyone loitering. The place would be deserted tonight. At least until the Demons turned up.

They left the lights of the City behind and as they sped towards an area where fewer lights blinked in the dark, Kyle knew they were nearing the light industrial and agricultural area that surrounded the Stadium.

There was a parking area on the far side of the stadium which wasn’t fenced off. Kyle directed Gabi to it and they found that some of the other members of the SMV had already gathered. The stadium loomed large and ominous in front of them; huge openings in the walls that once allowed public access to the interior and now looked like dark maws waiting to swallow unwary trespassers. Gabi parked the blacked out van near the others, turned off the engine and threw Kyle the keys.

“
I’m going to get dressed and kit up. See what else you can find out,” she ordered, climbing into the dark depths of the van. She didn’t need any light, Gabi could see perfectly well in the dark.

“
Yes, Ma’am!” Kyle shot back, throwing her a mock salute, and getting out of the van. He pretended to realign his neck, and check his arms and legs were all in one piece after the wild drive.

“
Idiot!” she hissed from inside the van. “Don’t think just because I can’t see you I don’t know what you’re doing. Now get going or I’m going to spit on all your knives and make them rust!”

He sighed dramatically. “You can be a cruel, cruel woman Gabrielle Bradford. You know exactly how to poke at all my soft spots,” he lamented mournfully.

“
The only soft spot around here is your head!” Her retort was muffled by clothing.

He
chuckled and sauntered off to join the others. A team of three was busy climbing back through a tear in the fence and they quickly loped over to report the area clear. He touched base with everyone else who had already arrived; none of them had any more information than he did, so he headed back to the van to update Gabi.

When she emerged from the van, a bystander probably wouldn’t have known it was the same woman. As she stepped into the dull light thrown by the security lights he could see why they called her Angeli Morte. Angel of Death. That was the name she’d earned for herself among the greater supernatural community, though her fellow Hunters tended to use a different nickname for her, one that Kyle had been calling her for years. She was dressed in black, toughened leather pants, a tight-fitting Kevlar-reinforced jacket and black flat-soled boots and with her hair tied up in a severe knot. She’d made no attempt to hide the myriad of weapons attached to her body in every conceivable way. She appeared cold, ethereal and deadly. Kyle knew just how deadly. She was one of more recent additions to the Hunter squad but she’d already notched up the highest number of clean kills. She stepped out of the van and began pacing back and forth across the tarmac, stopping every now and then to stretch out or warm up her muscles, running through short sequences of complicated martial arts moves.

Due to Gabi’s hair-raising driving they
’d made good time to the stadium. They had ten or fifteen minutes before they could expect any kind of action and he’d gone to the calm, quiet place he went to when a difficult fight was staring him in the face. He leaned back against the van and watched the members of the other Elimination Teams arrive and begin getting ready. There was a hushed, anxious kind of excitement running through them. Byron had called up everyone he could get hold of (and a few he couldn’t); he was obviously going with the concept of ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at them. Mind you, half a dozen Demons coming out of the Etherworld at once, was something you would want to throw the kitchen sink at, if that kitchen sink happened to contained a nuclear bomb. Demons hated everyone, other Demons included. They very rarely, if ever, made any kind of attack in numbers over two or three, and generally attacked alone. He briefly wondered if the Magi at SMV Headquarters could have been mistaken, but shook that off. They had never been wrong about an attack in all the time he’d been part of the SMV. Sure, they missed some attacks, it was impossible to monitor every inch of a city the size of this one, but when they said there was an attack coming they were right.

He looked around again re-counting the numbers of SMV members who were milling around in an ordered sort of chaos. Normal Elimination Teams consisted of two Hunters, one Magus who was strong at sending Demons back to the Etherworld, known as a Banisher, and a Clean-up Crew in a specially kitted out van. The Clean-up Crew consisted of a Magus who was gifted at wiping human memories, known as an Eraser, a Medic, and a Driver/Muscle person to help with hauling bodies when necessary. The Driver was most often a Werewolf but occasionally a Magus or Shapeshifter. There were different team set-ups for captures and for street patrols, but those details he left to Byron and the rest of the SMV Council, it wasn’t for him to worry about, and as long as they teamed him and Gabi together as much as possible he didn’t interfere. Tonight he saw all three of the other Hunters; Douglas, a 6 ft 6 Shapeshifter who knew more about weapons than he and Gabi put together; Matthew, a Werewolf, particularly welcome tonight as Werewolf saliva was fatally poisonous to Demons; and Lance, a very powerful Magus who could launch fireballs at you as easily as he could set you alight where you stood, he was affectionately called Zippo by the rest of the Team, and nobody tread too hard on his toes – not even Gabi. Kyle didn’t know all the other members who had shown up; he knew a few of the ‘Offensive’ Magi, the ones who had some kind of gift that could be used in a fight, and most of the Banishers he had worked with before, but the Clean-up crews he rarely interacted with and they were switched out on a regular basis, he knew some faces but not names. The Medics he knew intimately of course, both of them had patched him up more often than he cared to remember. He blew out a deep breath, hoping that the Medics wouldn’t be needed tonight.

Gabi had resorted to muttering and cussing to herself
and Kyle glanced back at her. He almost grinned, but thought better of it and bit it back at the last second. Her vocabulary got more inventive in direct proportion to her adrenaline level. She’d had a short temper and florid vocabulary for as long as he’d known her. He turned back to the van as his memories finally cracked through the controlled mask he’d tried to cover his grin with. He started to get various weapons strapped to his own body as an excuse to keep his face turned away from her, as he remembered their very first meeting.

Chapter 2

Saying that he switched schools a lot as a child was rather like saying the Pope prayed a lot. In fact, he couldn’t remember spending more than two terms at any one school. His mother was a single parent, and they lived on the small wage she made from casual work on farms or in factories or restaurants, moving on once work dried up or his mother felt it was time to go. When he got into his teens he finally put his foot down and told her if they moved again he was dropping out of school permanently. That seemed to be the incentive she needed to settle down and keep one job. She found work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in one of the better suburbs on the edge of a rural, forested area. She and Kyle had the use of a small, self-contained apartment above the garage. He’d been enrolled in the local High School, which was full of rich snobby types, along with a few poorer souls who were allowed in from lower class suburbs because they excelled either academically or in sports.

It
’d been important for Kyle and his mom to settle down near a rural area as she was a Werewolf and needed access to a large forested area during the time of the full moon. Werewolves were generally volatile creatures who struggled to contain their tempers, and were forced to change to wolf form over the three days of the full moon. Fortunately, the need to change was strongest at night, once the moon rose. So as long as his mom wasn’t expected to work in the evenings, and managed to keep her temper during the day, the housekeeping work suited her perfectly. Her supernatural strength made the daily chores easy and she was generally finished with everything before the bratty kids arrived home from school, thereby eliminating the chance of them igniting her temper. To Kyle’s utter astonishment, it had all worked out amazingly well.