Night Call (Book 2): Demon Dei (2 page)

Six months ago, I took down one of the biggest, meanest supernatural beasties in the world. They’re called
Primals and they’re the great-grandparents of the vampire race. Think mega-vampires that go out in sunlight and swap bodies the way we swap undies. Scary, huh? There’s seven of them, including the one I decapitated. She didn’t die. They’re so immortal nothing will ever get rid of them. I suspect if the Earth blew up, they’d still be there, floating amongst the debris, bickering about who got sucked into the black hole first. They’re that powerful. And I did for one of them in about as total a way as anyone could.

With such a big credential stuffed down the front of my pants, I was sure to be in hot demand to dispense more supernatural arse kicking. Like a lawyer who wins the un-winnable case. Or the doctor who performs the one in a million operation. Or the mechanic who works out what that clunking noise in the back of your car is. Near god-like.

So why was I head down, arse up, stuffed to my shoulders in some dusty, cobweb filled hole reaching around blindly for something the size of a rat?

“Have you got it yet?”

Mrs Arnold’s voice came to my ears very muffled. As it had to travel through thick shag pile carpet laid down in the seventies, on top of linoleum, which in turn sat on top of a layer of newspaper from the Mesozoic era, it’s not surprising that what I heard was ‘Ham moo moet?’ Luckily, I have ESP. Extra sensory presumption. It means I have this unbelievable talent for guessing and occasionally, I get it right.

“Not yet,” I replied and didn’t bother wondering if she understood. In truth, I was trying pretty hard not to breathe. The crawl space under Mrs Arnold’s living room had not been crawled through by anything larger than a stunted mouse for a very long time.

There was about half a foot of dust upon which time’s tidal ebb had left a mess of detritus. Said stunted mouse had died a while back and his skeleton curled in the corner by my head. There were rusted nails; scraps of newspaper; a dried out spider husk that might have very well been the thing that killed the mouse (either scaring it to death or by sitting on it); a coiled length of barbed wire that seemed too new to have been lost before the laying down of the geological strata of floor coverings, and things I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—recognise.

My shoulders ached from having my arms stretched over my head and from being jammed in a hole Mrs Arnold wouldn’t let me expand because ‘this house is heritage listed, young man, have some respect for your cultural foundations’. There were twinges in my neck that were probably the start of muscle spasms. My right foot had gone to sleep, thanks to being squashed between the wall and China cabinet (which I was not allowed to touch either, ‘Wedgwood, young man!’). And my
freakin’ torch decided at that moment to die.

Between me, the floorboards, the corner foundation of the house and the ground, there wasn’t a lot of space left to shake the bastard thing, but shake I did. Hey, it always worked in the movies. And sure enough, a hard shake brought the light back on. Pity that it took a smack against my head to work. And then the bloody thing was pointed right in my eyes when it came on.

“Argh.” My startled cry blew up a cloud of dust into my face, which I promptly sucked in.

“Did you find it?” Mrs Arnold asked through my ESP.

There aren’t letters to express the true cadence of my response, so we’ll leave it up to imagination. However Mrs Arnold’s imagination dealt with it, her entire response was something about getting a real pest man to come get rid of her problem. Ignoring her, I scanned the torch around the dark crawl space.

The beam fell onto a big lump that was even more out of place than the barbed wire—or not, depending on what you expected to find in crawl spaces, which in turn probably depended on the type of movies you watched. I have a t-shirt that says ‘Attention ladies: I watched “The Notebook”’. (Okay, I haven’t—watched the movie that is—but I do have the shirt.) I’m firmly in the ‘fully expect to find ghastly things in the crawl space’ camp, but I don’t admit that on first dates.

Mr Wibbles, a prize winning Burmese cat of remarkable proportions, was pretty much reduced to mincemeat. If you liked your mince to have fur and bones. I don’t and I’m guessing most folk don’t, but apparently imps do.

The creature crouched amongst the bloody remains, cheeks bulging with, judging from the scraps it had yet to eat, liver. It was, from pointed head to barbed tail, about a foot long, humanoid in shape and covered in greyish-red, wrinkly skin. About the biggest feature on it, apart from the tail, was its nose, which jutted out from its face like Pinocchio at a sports-scandal press conference. It had a pair of stubby wings on its back.

So far, the imp hadn’t noticed me. It just kept stuffing its face, humming to itself. Imps were even more totally self-absorbed than your average paparazzi-baiting tween starlet. It was hard to get their attention, and really, why would you want it? They were foot long garbage disposal machines with less intelligence than a brain-dead chicken. Still, they didn’t mix with human civilization too well. When their natural food source ran short, they took to scavenging. However, you didn’t find them head first in your knocked over garbage bin. Rather, you often caught fleeting glimpses of them while they were carting off your Chihuahua, or dragging your prize winning Burmese through a hole in the floorboards.

Imps. Small demons but they make up for it in ‘
eww’ factor.

In the hand not holding the torch, I had a tiny tape player. I’d
recieved a very strange look from the guy in the electronics shop when I’d rushed in and demanded one. He’d tried to sell me an MP3 player with speakers, and couldn’t understand why I thought that would be just a tad clunky. When I’d rushed next door to the music shop, they’d looked at me even more strangely when I asked for a cassette to play in my hard won tape player. Luckily, there are some people who still buy tapes, but probably owing to the personality type that would refuse to move into the digital age, the selection of tapes was thin.

I hit the play button.

I’m a big fan of music in general, and an ever bigger fan of good music in particular. And, as in everything in life, each to his own, right? Still, whoever had decided the world loved Irish folk songs enough to keep releasing them should never have sold the rights to whoever decided pan pipes were really cool.

Haunting, breathy strains of ‘Danny Boy’ echoed in the crawl space. It was all at once a totally absurd and eerie sensation—like elevator music piped into your head after your brains have oozed out of your ears. Whatever I thought of it, it worked.

Like a meerkat on look out, the imp sat up on its haunches and peered about. It saw me and tilted its head. Strings of livery flesh hung from its mouth, blood and gore splattered across its body. Slowly, it crept down from the mound of its meal and inched toward me. It came in hesitant bursts, rushing forward, stopping to look around for danger, then forward again, panicking and darting back.

Music was the one thing guaranteed to hold an imp’s attention, other than its stomach, of course. The little demon scuttled forward, tail swishing, head cocked to locate the source of the music. It didn’t notice me putting down the torch. Heck, it probably didn’t even realise I was there at all.

As soon as it got close enough, I made a grab for it. The imp realised too late and couldn’t evade me. I caught it around its scrawny neck and it squealed. The high pitched, eardrum-bursting cry drowned out the music. My teeth resonated in my head on a frequency set to crystal-shattering. The creature’s claws raked at my hand, its itty bitty teeth tried to dig in. Imps are stronger than their size would have you believe, and they’re fanatically ferocious, but the most they can down are your average household pets. It had no chance against me. Besides, I was wearing thick welding gloves.

Wriggling backwards, I hauled my upper body and imp out of the hole. We came out in a burst of dust and cobwebs and fingernails-down-the-chalkboard wails. Mrs Arnold gave her own little scream, back peddled quickly, hit her floral-patterned recliner and sat down so hard the footrest popped out and shot her legs into the air. Eyeballs full of grit protected her from any impropriety on my part.

Working blind, I groped about for the cat carrier I’d brought along. I found it and shoved the imp in and jerked my hand out a second before slamming the door and securing it. The demon cried some more, then stopped. A moment later, the sounds of eating emerged from the dark corner of the carrier.

No, I hadn’t killed a poor defenceless animal for it to eat. It was cat food.

“Oh my, oh my,” Mrs Arnold was saying when my ears recovered.

“It’s okay, Mrs Arnold. I got it. It won’t be bothering you anymore.”

She floundered for a moment, then managed to get the footrest down and the chair swung forward so she could look at me. Her eyes were wide and her hair pretty much stood on end. One hand fluttered at her chest.

“Are you feeling okay?” I hauled myself to my feet and went to check her pulse.

She slapped my hand away hard enough to make me yelp.

“Don’t you touch me, you pervert!”

“I’m not a pervert, Mrs Arnold. Honestly.” I stepped back and held my hands up in unconditional surrender. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. I’m a trained paramedic.”

Feisty old eyes narrowed. “And you sideline in pest control? I shouldn’t think so.”

“Hardly pest control,” I muttered. I could show her the imp in the cage, and we could argue about it until the cows came home for a change of undies and went out again, but I had a face full of dust, an aching back and prickling foot. Arguing about whether or not demons existed probably wasn’t what someone in that position, with my history, should do with an octogenarian. For both our sakes. This once, I’d let it slide.

“Now, did you see my Mr
Wibbles down there? Is he all right?”

“Ah, yes, Mr
Wibbles is down there.”

“Then back you go. Bring him up.”

I cringed. “You might not want to be here for that.”

“Why ever not?” Even as she asked, she understood. “Oh. No, I think I should be here.”

My mouth was open to protest, but she cut me off.

“Now, young man, I’m eighty-two years old. I’ve been around the block a time or two and I’ve probably seen some things to make you wet your pants. Mr
Wibbles stuck with me when Mr Arnold passed and through my hip replacement. The least I can do is be here for him now.”

Ten minutes later, I was back in the hole, fishing around with an old hockey stick, dragging the bits and pieces of Mr
Wibbles into range of the bucket I had to put him in. I mean, I couldn’t have left the carcass down there to rot and stink out Mrs Arnold.

I was scooping the last of Mr
Wibbles into the bucket when I heard something. A little mewling sound. From the outside world, there came an answering cry from the imp.

What the…?

They poured out of the shadows of the crawl space like a red tide. Tiny, tiny little imps, screaming tiny, tiny little supersonic war-cries. I gurgled a surprised scream of my own and hurried out of the hole. They came flocking out, wings buzzing like a swarm of killer wasps. The full grown imp in the cage set to caterwauling once more. The result was a cyclone of bone-rattling sound pitched at the very upper end of the human compatibility range.

I lay flat on my back, staring in disbelief at the baby imps spinning around the room. They weren’t terribly coordinated and they flew into walls and furniture with little thumps of impact. The figurines scattered throughout the room didn’t survive so well either. There was a tinkling crescendo of shattering porcelain.

Mrs Arnold was back in her chair and copped a fair few of the baby demons in her hair. They thrashed about and got hopelessly tangled. She sat in open mouthed shock. By good luck or sheer bad aiming, none of the imps flew into her mouth. I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone that I’d had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in order to dislodge a demon.

Thanks to the poor directional skills of the imps, it didn’t take long for them to batter themselves into unconsciousness. The last buzzed around the ceiling for a bit longer and then in a fit of panic, flung itself at the window. It smacked the glass hard and tumbled to the sill, where it sat and swayed before toppling over.

The adult imp was still kicking up a fuss in the cage, so I gave it sharp boot and knocked the cage into the wall. The imp crashed against the hard plastic and fell, splot, face first into the dish of cat food.

Sitting up, I surveyed the damage. A hasty count later, I pulled out my receipt book and started writing.

“Right, Mrs Arnold. That’s sixty-four—” A twitter under the China cabinet caught my eye. “Sixty-five… pests. My initial estimate may have been a bit short.”

Oh come on. Like I was actually going to charge her extra. I even threw in the removal of the unconscious imps for nothing. Of course, she had to give me Mr Wibbles’ old carrier to put the overflowing bodies in. All in all, it was a very tidy room I walked out of two hours later. A trifle bare of ornamentation, but demon free, and that’s always a plus.

I shoved the two carriers full of slowly awakening imps into the boot of the Monaro and slammed it shut before they could deafen me. I selected some soothing music and the imps shut up for the trip home. It was heading toward sunset when I pulled into the driveway and clicked the garage door opener. I slid the black car in beside the Moto
Guzzi and closed the garage.

Inside, I set the carriers down beside the stereo, tuned them into a classical station and then checked messages.

There were none. No missed calls, either. Not even a text.

It had to be faulty. Why else wouldn’t it record the many, many messages left by all the calls I’d sent to messages while I did an imp-
ectomy on Mrs Arnold’s living room?

I went into Mercy’s room and, ignoring the snoring lump in the middle of the bed, rummaged around in the dirty clothes on the floor for her mobile. I rang my mobile on it. I left a message and checked my phone.

“You are a fun and considerate guy. Everyone loves you,” came through loud and clear. The up vibe of my message evened out the depression brought on by the fact nothing was faulty. It was true. No one had called.

I wasn’t about to say business was bad, but, well, it was. Six months since I’d proven my brass balls on the Primal calling itself Heather
Veilchen; six months since I’d started—and ended—a battle between two rival vampire clans. Six months since I’d had a decent job. There’d been the odd vampire slaying or two and a brief and dirty plague of sprites up the road at the Sunshine Coast. Of course, the imp population had been on the increase for a while. I didn’t want to get bogged down playing lullabies for piddly little demons though. There was little profit in it, and no need for me to cart Mercy around the countryside. She was getting lazy.

Case in point, she was sleeping in a lot. The sun had set and she was still in bed. Once upon a time, she would have bounded out of bed with a spring in her step and blood lust in her eyes the moment the sun dropped over the horizon. Not so much these days.

I went back into her room. “Mercy, time to get up.”

The lump under the blankets shifted a bit and mumbled something.

“Come on, up and at ‘em, girl. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” Even my best drill sergeant voice got nothing more than a little white hand sneaking me the finger.

I went into the cage and ripped the blanket off the bed. Mercy spluttered and hissed, moving into a crouch with liquid ease. Her dark eyes flashed silver.

Hey, I don’t know about anyone else, but a girl not much over five feet, about as wide as my thigh, with a sweet heart-shaped face and bouncing curls of black hair isn’t that scary. Especially when she’s wearing PJs with My Little Pony on them.

“Whatever. It’s time to get up.” I spun around and walked out of her room.

In the kitchen, I made myself some lunner—think brunch but at the other end of the day. I was finishing off my bowl of cornflakes and grapes when Mercy slouched in. She’d showered and washed her hair. It was plastered down to her scalp and shoulders and dripped water onto her t-shirt (slogan—I’m Dressed and Out of Bed, What More Do You Want?) and track pants.

“Evening.”

She snarled at me and went to the cupboard hiding the blood fridge.

“Grumpy. Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep.”

Mercy had made leaps and bounds forward in learning to act human, but sarcasm was still a lost cause with her. She glared at me and then glared at the locked fridge.

“I’m hungry,” she snapped.

“You ate two nights ago.”

“And now I’m hungry again.”

“Why? You’ve done nothing. I checked your haemoglobin this morning. It was fine then, it’ll be fine now. You don’t need any blood.”

She moaned and threw herself into a chair. “But I’m hungry.”

“You only think you’re hungry.”

Her head hit the heavy, wooden table with such force it jumped. I caught my bowl before it could shatter on the floor.

“Be careful with the furniture, Merce. Please. We can’t afford to replace anything if you break it.”

Her muttering was stifled by the table. I patted her head on the way to the sink.

“Do that a couple more times while shouting ‘I’ll never get it, never’ and I might take some pity on you. Otherwise, earn your keep.”

Dragging herself up with exaggerated weariness, she followed me into the living room. “But there’s nothing to do.”

I showed her the imps. She got down on her hands and knees and peered into the cages. They woke from their music induced stupor and hissed at her. Mercy growled and the cages rocked backwards as the imps all piled up at the end furthest from her.

“They’re really tiny,” she observed.

“Babies. I figure the big one is mum or dad. Maybe both. I think I read somewhere demons are hermaphrodites. Or they reproduce asexually. Either way, they shouldn’t be here. Take them out and drown them.”

In a lot of ways, Mercy was much like a teenager. She was turned when she was twenty-three, but her mental age was younger. In vampire years, she was barely a toddler. At two and bit years turned, she should have still been nothing more than a mouth on legs. Feeding was all that consumed a young vampire’s mind in the early years. Only when they reached the ripe old age of twenty or thirty did they start to slow down and learn a few words. At fifty, they could pass for a sulky adolescent. A lot of wild vampires didn’t make it that far. They were, relatively speaking, pretty fragile until they hit the half century. After that, it was a rapid incline until they could pass for human at a night club, then quickly on to making muster at a cocktail party. Around the 300th year, they could be in government and no one would know the difference.

It seemed that with a well-planned diet and regimental training program, a vampire could roar through that process in no time at all. I’d stumbled on the process by accident while trying to help Mercy through the early stages of the transformation. The discovery, and Mercy’s subsequent awesomeness compared to other vampires her age, had drawn all sorts of nasty interest. The fight with the Primal Veilchen had been a result of that interest. And it was why I couldn’t quite understand why we hadn’t been inundated with avenging vampires since.

Mercy sighed as if I’d just asked her to lop off a limb and offer it to a hungry dog. She picked up the carriers and trudged outside with them. I followed her as far as the back door and watched as she went to the end of the dock in the backyard. Our house backed onto a salt water canal. The neighbours all had sleek boats at the end of their docks. We had nothing, if you discounted the grouchy vampire on her belly, dunking cat carriers in the water.

Demons don’t like salt. At least, imps don’t. It’s like Holy water for vampires. You dunk an imp in the ocean and you can almost hear the plaintive cries of ‘I’m melting’.

The water boiled around the carriers and thankfully the imps were suffocated before they could start yodelling again. When the water calmed down, Mercy lifted up the carriers, drained them of sludge and brought them back inside.

“Happy?” she demanded as she went past.

“Immensely.”

“Can I eat now?”

I went and got her a bag of O
pos and she took it into her room. Moments later, I could hear the opening of ‘Thor’. Since Mercy had discovered Chris Hemsworth, Will Smith hardly got a look in.

Retreating to the office, I called Roberts.

“Hey,” he answered. “I was about to call you.”

“Yeah? Got a job for me?”

“Nah. I saw Jacob today. He was wondering if you wanted to come in for a Black Books marathon.”

I scowled. “Why couldn’t he call me himself?”

“What am I? His secretary?”

“No, you’re mine. And you’re not doing your job properly. How come I’ve got no work?”

“What are you talking about? I gave you that job in The Gap.” There was a short pause. “Didn’t I?”

“You did, and I finished it today. More imps. Lots more imps. How did you get my card to a senior citizen anyway? Have you moved out of the pubs and clubs and onto the bowling greens? RSLs?”

Roberts was a rep for booze companies. He trawled the drunken rabble of the local watering holes with promotional gear and competitions to win, you guessed it, more alcohol. I’m not so great with crowds, so Roberts hands out my business cards whenever he overhears a conversation that might be of interest to me. It’s an agreement that works fairly well. Until now.

“No,” he answered slowly. “I do have a life, unlike some people whom shall remain named as you. I met the old duck at the theatre.”

I strangled back a laugh. “The theatre?”

“Yes, Carla and I went to see The Phantom of the Opera.”

“Hang on. Carla? What happened to Gale?”

Roberts sighed. “Do you remember that trip you dragged me on, up to the Sunny Coast?”

“The sprite invasion, sure.”

“I missed Gale’s birthday.”

The last serious relationship I had was at university with Halle, a girl with a sad Brad Pitt dependency. I’m now thirty-two. My memory might give out on me every now and then, but I still knew missing a birthday was a Big Deal.

“Ah man, I’m sorry. If I’d known, I would never have asked you along.”

“The sad thing was, she’d never told me it was her birthday. Apparently, I was just supposed to know.”

I sucked in a sharp, wounded breath. “That’s tough.”

“Yeah. But anyway, Carla’s better. Longer legs.”

“When do I get to meet her?”

Roberts snorted. “Never. Gale was ready to forget me an hour after meeting you.”

“Hey, that’s not fair and good job changing the topic of conversation. Why don’t I have any work?”

“Shit. Okay, here’s the reason. Mate, there is no work. I keep listening but no one’s talking.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“It’s the truth. Get your arse out of the house and come check it out yourself. No one’s got vampire problems, or troll issues, or ghoul troubles. I’m telling you, you must have cleaned up the town. There are no nasties out there for you to get all righteous on.”

I sagged back in the chair. “Well, that hardly seems fair. I was just hitting my stride. And Mercy’s at a stage where I don’t have to constantly be watching her.”

Me and my fat mouth.

“Hawkins!” Someone began pounding on the front door.

I lurched out of the chair. “I’ll call you back,” I snapped at the phone and hung up. Racing to the front door, I flung it open before Charles could knock it down.

“What’s the deal, Charles?” I demanded.

Charles was my neighbour. We didn’t get on so well. He thinks I’m weird. I don’t know where he’d get that idea.

“That… that… girl is in your backyard.”

Charles thinks I’m weird and he thinks Mercy’s retarded. He’s never quite come out and thought it openly, but he subconsciously believes I’m taking advantage of the poor, mentally deficient girl.

How do I know this? Because Charles has a very open mind and I have psychic superpowers. I’ve lost count of the number of nights I’ve been woken up by his dreams. I do, however, know how many times I’ve been woken up by Charles and his wife Sue having sex. They’re both screamers, but their emotional screaming is what gets me. If I didn’t regard Charles with so much contempt, I would probably blush whenever I saw him.

And right now, his stuttering words were matched by his stuttering mind. Flashes of Mercy in the backyard slapped me in the brain, along with Charles’ embarrassed lust.

“Dear God,” I muttered and, leaving Charles at the door, I ran through to the back of the house and out onto the patio.

There’s a narrow strip of grass between patio and canal. Mercy had put down a towel on the grass and was lying on it. The only thing she wore was a pair of sunglasses. The moonlight was like silk on her pale skin, caressing the curves and accentuating the peaks. She was flawless. You would never have guessed she’d almost died of severe wounds six months ago.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Sunbathing.”

I blinked several times. “Okay. As long as you’re doing it sensibly.”

Charles was still at the door when I returned.

“Is she still out there?”

“Yes.”

“Covered up?”

“No.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Sunbathing sensibly.”

He gaped at me like a fish out of water.

“Might I suggest,” I said as I turned him around and gave him a helpful shove toward home, “that you and Sue watch a movie tonight. Or play Scrabble. Or, if you want, look out the window at the naked girl and have some fun. Whatever. Goodbye, Charles.”