Hellforged

“He tricked me, Vicky! He said he wanted to check something in the contract, so I gave it to him. He stuck it in his pocket and ran out. He locked me in his office.” She glared at him. “You need a new door, asshole.”

“Tina! You can’t talk to a client that way.” Not even if he was proving to be a certified, grade-A, world-class asshole. I was kind of glad she’d used her zombie strength to demolish his door.

“But he—”

“We’ll talk about it later.” First, I’d figure out how to make the campus cop quit pointing his gun at me.

Milsap patted his pocket, half-smiling, and then frowned at me like I was a disappointing student who’d failed an exam. “Do you honestly think any reasonable person would believe MIT hired an ax-wielding maniac to deal with a simple computer glitch?”

“But I didn’t,” I said.

The pursed lips twitched downward into a frown. “Didn’t what?”

“Deal with it. The Glitch is still loose in here somewhere.”

“Oh, come now. We both know there’s no such—”

Tina screamed.

The cop’s eyes bugged out, and he fired.

I dropped, but the shot slanted upward; he was aiming at the top of the cabinet, not me. As he squeezed the trigger a second time, a glob of purple goop sealed the pistol’s barrel. The gun blew up in his hand. He fell over sideways and lay still.

Above me, the Glitch was noisily hawking up another wad of spit. I scrambled to my feet, feeling around for my knife and yelling, “Take cover!”

Tina disappeared down an aisle, but Milsap stood and stared at me. A second later—ptoooie!—Glitch spit splatted on the side of his head. Looking dazed, he put his hand in the mess, trying to brush it off but managing to smear it around and get it all over his hand.

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s poison.”

He stared at his hand in disbelief.

From nowhere, the Glitch landed on Milsap’s shoulders, clawing at his face and spitting in his hair again. Milsap screamed and went down. The Glitch jumped away but was immediately back on top of the guy, sitting on his chest, gripping his throat with its claws, and crackling with electricity. Milsap’s cloth blazer didn’t offer any protection against the Glitch’s energy field; he howled and shook like he’d grabbed a live wire.

It was more like a live wire had grabbed him.

Time to finish this job. I kicked the Glitch, hard, and threw my knife. The Glitch flew across the room and hit the wall by the door. My knife flew with it. The blade struck the Glitch dead center, pinning it to the wall. The bronze did its thing, and the Glitch disappeared in a puff of evil-smelling smoke. All that remained was a slimy purple stain on the wall.

I went to the cop first, pressing my fingers into his neck to check for a pulse. At my touch, his eyes fluttered open and he struggled to sit up. “What the hell—?” he muttered, staring at his hand. He had a nasty burn, but he’d be okay and I told him so.

Milsap was another matter. He lay on his back, moaning, his face and neck striped with multiple slashes. Thick, sticky Glitch spit matted his hair and coated his glasses. The whole right side of his face was purple with it, and it had gotten into his wounds.

Good thing, too, I thought, as I heard Tina clomp-clomp back down the aisle. Zombies have this little problem with human blood—the smell of it sends them into a frenzy of hunger. Glitch spit gummed up Milsap’s wounds, and the stench of it covered any scent of blood. Tina wouldn’t try to gnaw his face off. On the other hand, it was a bad thing, because the venom in the Glitch saliva, normally slow-acting, would work faster where the skin was broken.

Tina appeared. She stood over Milsap, hands on her hips. “No such thing, huh?” Her voice oozed with sarcasm. “Asshole.”

This time, I didn’t rebuke her. Instead, I told her to help me get Milsap on his feet. I grabbed his right arm; Tina took his left. At the count of three, we heaved.

“Where’s a bathroom?” I asked Milsap when we’d gotten him more or less upright. “We need to wash out those scratches before the poison takes effect.”

Tina and I each managed to drape one of Milsap’s arms around our shoulders. Then we guided him across the room. Except he couldn’t seem to keep his feet under him, so there was a lot more dragging than guiding. In the hallway, he looked around like he’d never been there before. His spit-coated glasses sat crooked on his face, obscuring his vision. I plucked them off, and he blinked.

“Bathroom?” I reminded him.

He tilted his head left, so we went that way. Ten yards down the hallway was a door marked MEN. We half-walked, half-dragged Milsap to it. I shouldered it open.

The room smelled of disinfectant with an undertone of old mildew. We got Milsap across the scuffed tile floor to the sinks, where I reached out with my free hand and turned on the water full blast. He was half-falling down already, so it wasn’t hard to get his head under the faucet. In a second he was struggling and sputtering, but together we held him in place. Once he realized that I wasn’t trying to drown him—and that the purple water swirling down the drain was taking Glitch gunk with it—he relaxed and held still.

I pumped soap into my hand and spread it on his face. “Rub that in. It’ll help.”

I went over to the dispenser to grab some paper towels. As soon as my back was turned, Milsap yelped. There was a splash and some gurgling sounds. I spun around, paper towels in hand, to see Tina holding Milsap’s head down in the sink. Water poured out of the faucet and splashed over the basin’s rim onto the floor.

“Tina! No waterboarding the client!”

She grabbed Milsap’s hair with her left hand and wrenched him upward as she waved some papers, folded lengthwise, at me. Milsap gulped in air, trembling.

“It’s your contract. I told you he stole it.” She plunged his face back into the sink.

“Okay, you got it back. Stop.”

I went to the sink and unblocked the drain, then untangled Tina’s hand from Milsap’s hair. He coughed and gasped, and I waved Tina back a few steps.

“Damn it, he broke my nail with his head,” she said, inspecting her hand. “It won’t grow back, you know. I’ll have to get acrylic. Add it to his bill, Vicky.”

I ignored her. You can’t fight demons if you’re worried about breaking a nail.

Milsap braced both hands on the sink, then raised his dripping head. Hunched over, he peered into the mirror. He looked terrible. His bloodshot eyes blinked above bags you could pack groceries in, scratches crisscrossed his cheeks and neck, and a faint purple stain blotched his face like a birthmark. His wild Einstein mane, matted and streaked with purple, looked like a costume-shop fright wig someone had left out in the rain.

“What was that thing?” he rasped, fingering a purple strand of hair.

“The Glitch? You know what it was. You hired me to kill it.”

“Professor Milsap doesn’t believe in demons.” Tina stepped forward, and Milsap cringed. “He doesn’t believe in me, either.”

“I do, I do!” He ducked like he wanted to hide under the sink. “Keep away from me! You’ve more than proved your existence.”

“Tina, grab me some paper towels,” I said. “Hang on, Professor. We’re almost done.”

Tina yanked hard enough on the towels to pull the dispenser off the wall. It landed with a crash, making Milsap duck again, his arms protecting his head. She stomped across the room and threw the towels at the professor. They fluttered around him like autumn leaves.

“He said everyone in Deadtown is either a psycho or a fraud.” Deadtown was Boston’s paranormal zone. All zombies, werewolves, vampires, and other assorted creatures of the night—including shapeshifters like me—were required by law to live there. Tina scooped up some paper towels and threw them at Milsap again. “Look at me! Does this look like something I’d fake?” She raised her arms to shoulder height, palms up.

Not what you’d call a pretty sight. Like all zombies, Tina had spongy, gray-green skin and bloodred eyes. But the rest of her—the lashes gummy with mascara, the Barbie fashion sense, the double ponytails sprouting from the top of her head—that was 100 percent Tina. Her point was obvious: She’d rather be a normal teenager than a monster. Who wouldn’t?

Milsap straightened; he’d decided it was time to regain some of his dignity. “I never called you a fraud, young lady. Your condition is the result of a virus. It’s been documented, even if we don’t yet understand it completely. What I said was that Boston’s so-called ‘werewolves’ and ‘vampires’ were either charlatans or deluded.” He turned to me, lifting his eyebrows with earnestness. “I am a man of science, Ms. Vaughn. It is not possible for a corpse to return from the grave and survive on human blood. It is not possible for a human being to transform into a wolf for three nights each month. The laws of physics, not to mention biology, proscribe it. Whatever psychological aberration these people suffer does not—cannot—affect their physical reality.”

Psychological aberration, huh? I was starting to feel like dunking the guy’s head myself. I’m not a werewolf, but I do change form. As one of the Cerddorion, a race of shapeshifting demon fighters that stretches all the way back to the Welsh goddess Ceridwen, I can change into any creature, three shifts per lunar cycle—the laws of physics and biology be damned. Maybe there were some things science hadn’t caught up with yet.

“You saw the demon,” I pointed out, bending over to gather some paper towels. I crumpled the towels into a ball and wet them at another sink.

“I don’t know what I saw. Some kind of animal, perhaps, that escaped from one of the biological research labs.” His expression turned defiant. “I do know, however, that demons do not exist. I opposed the trustees’ decision to hire you. I only volunteered to be your contact because I didn’t trust you. I fully expected you’d crash around the computer room for a while, causing untold damage, and then claim you’d driven out the ‘demon’ ”—his voice went all sarcastic with the word—“after you’d wreaked so much destruction that the so-called Glitch would be moot. So tonight I left this young lady in my office—” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">