Chapter Text
Some days Wyll Ravengard sees himself as a twenty-four-year-old man, roadworn but not too bitter, well-read or at least well listened, and helpful when he gets the chance to be. Sometimes he sees himself as a seventeen-year-old boy, begging for his father’s mercy as a stranger wrenches his wrists behind his back. More and more often, he sees himself as the red-cabbed 80,000-pound semi he inhabits for at least ten hours a day.
When he stumbles from her to go freeze his fingers off in a warehouse or waste good money in a roadside diner because he can’t take one more day of ramen, he feels strange. He feels too light, too short. It’s a relief but it’s too much of one. He wonders what blind spots he’s forgetting.
Right now he’s due south of Newark. It’s his last stop before pivoting, back to Las Vegas where Frontiers Trucking is headquartered, and not coincidentally, where Mizora keeps her offices. She’s pacted with the owner, or Wyll would have been fired years ago. Monster hunting comes before deliveries, Mizora’s taught him that.
If he fucks up a delivery cause a hunt went sideways, it comes out of his pay. If he eats or sleeps or pulls off to piss by the roadside, it comes out of his pay too.
His first day of on-the-job training, his preceptor laid a hand on his shoulder, “Listen son.” he wheezed “Wheels ain’t turning you ain’t earning. That’s all you need to know.”
Magnum Pete was his name, and he spent three weeks showing Wyll the ropes. He was a wily conspiracy nut who kept photos of his three adorable kids scotch taped to his dashboard. He and Wyll got pretty tight because, in a sea of middle-aged white guys in MAGA hats, Pete was a middle-aged black guy in a MAGA hat. Wyll was so hard up for guidance that counted for something.
They found him in his sleeper at a truck stop a couple of years later, a mysterious hole dug into his skull. It was ruled a suicide, though nobody in the dense pack of trucks heard a shot, and they never did find any gun. This all went down in Tacoma, so he was kind of melted into the dashboard by the time they found him, or so Wyll heard. He was 56.
Wyll doesn’t think he’ll make it to 56, but that’s not today’s problem. Today is a crisp, blue beauty, and he’s got the windows down. He surveys the sea of cars around them, the sun pooling on their glossy shells, and he sees no idiots.
On the radio, Mo Rocca is spinning a yarn about a man in Seattle who is suing his pet parakeet. Wyll knows he isn’t bluffing because there was an episode of Generally Indistinguishable six months ago about people who were forced by health insurance bureaucracy to sue their pets. Lack of suspense aside, he appreciates the deluge of parrot puns.
Down below, he sees a little girl, staring. Her face is pressed to the window, nose scrunched flat. He gives her a little wave, and she startles, wrenching away from the window.
He tells himself it’s just how kids are, nothing to do with his scars or anything else about him. He chases off the sour feeling in his gut with a swallow of store-brand soda (flavor: diet cola). It’s conspicuously bland, but that just means he gets to appreciate it more when he relents and nabs a coke from some warehouse vending machine. Small joys. Little victories.
He turns the radio up.
When Wyll first met Mizora she was a sight for sore eyes.
Of course, within a week, he was one eye down and the other would rather take an acid bath than stare at her smug little face.
But the first time?
He was up in the Sierras, watching trees coalesce out of the roadside fog, scanning the dew-soaked road for deer. He was glad to be back in California and proud of himself for how well he was taking the mountain’s tricky serpentine twists.
The recent implosion of his life still smarted, but he was starting to believe there was such a thing as a future beyond it all, even if it looked a lot different than the one he’d been expecting. He was still a rookie, sure, but he floated gears buttery smooth, and it had been a minute since his last fender bender. And when he had the interstate to himself in the tender hours of a new dawn? Got to see those pastel pinks and purples melting over the horizon? Damn. Nothing like it.
Every old-timer he met told him this: Truckers were the beating heart of America. They stopped work for a week and the country ground to a screeching halt. Were the glory days of the profession long gone? Maybe. Indie trucking was getting harder with each passing year, and turnover at the conglomerates increased while wages stagnated. Maybe it wouldn't be a lifestyle for anyone in ten years, just a gig people put up with for a couple of months until they couldn’t anymore. But, while he had it, Wyll was going to cling to the sense of purpose it gave him with every bit of strength in his body.
He still doesn’t know what happened, but he lost everything. His brake and gas and steering wheel were all useless. He began to slide back down the road. In the rearview, a big yellow school bus loomed hot on his tail.
He tried to roll his rig off the side of the mountain. His death for twenty fresh, new lives? It was a decision as easy as breathing. He’d asked himself the question before he ever got behind the wheel, and in the heat of the moment, the answer stayed the same.
His truck ignored him.
He seized the steering wheel, yanking it again and again. A muscle tore in his shoulder. He yelled some dirty words and resumed his frantic efforts.
“Ahem.”
He looked over to see Mizora, in the passenger seat, dainty ankles crossed, playing with a stack of paperwork.
Six years later, he doesn’t regret taking the deal she offered. He thinks he massaged it well, in the safety of the brief pause she put on time itself. He didn’t get much in the way of perks, but he fixed it so she could only send him after “demons, devils, the heartless, and the soulless.”
And the life it led into this monster-hunting life, truly isn’t so bad.
He just wishes he’d been a little older than eighteen when it happened, or that she was a little better at keeping her hands to herself, or…
Well. No use crying over spilled milk.
She waits until night to call him, waits until he should be asleep, although he isn’t. The sick marimba of his ringtone for her cuts through the pleasant susurrus of Avery Truffleman regaling Gale Myst with the history of chinos.
He looks down at the road, stretching empty before him, blue-black off to the horizon. He imagines it’s her back instead, imagines the sound she would make, crushed flat under five consecutive pairs of tires.
He answers on the third ring. Bad things happen if he leaves it any longer than three.
“Having a pleasant evening without me, pet?”
“It’s past evening, Mizora,” he says, swallowing past the vile artificially fruity taste of the five-hour energy he downed fifteen minutes ago. She gives him acid reflux. Is this a devil power or some more mundane reaction on his part? Unclear.
“Well,” She huffs, put out by this basic correction, “I didn’t want to catch you in the middle of dinner.”
“Spare the niceties,” Wyll says, eyes trained on the road. “Barring any unforeseen delays I'll have your Gelugon killed for you by tomorrow night.”
For a while, the only sounds are the crackle of speakerphone static and the rumble of his tires.
Then Mizora purrs, “You don’t want that do you Wyll? You don’t want me to spare the niceties.”
Shit. He just gave her permission to harm him, outside of his contract’s generous punishment clause. There’s no way she won’t take advantage.
Wyll feels the weight of a phantom collar around his neck. He takes a deep desperate breath.
“Mizora, please. I’m driving.”
“There’s a thought,” she says, and the back of the collar tightens him, cutting off his airflow, keeping him on the edge of true strangulation, “You wrap your little wheely toy around a tree, shatter your little spine. I take you home. I’d nurse you back to health. Feed you pudding. Help you piss. All that stuff. You could be my little housepet.”
“I wouldn’t be able to hunt for you,” Wyll gasps. His grip on the wheel is weak. Dark spots wink in and out in the corners of his vision.
“But you’d look so cute lapping water from one of those little hamster cage water bottle thingies…” Mizora whines, “The…oh what are they called?
He tries to speak, but all that comes out is a high, thin rasp. The windshield is a blur.
Then the pressure eases for a moment and he coughs, “Please.”
“Bark for me.”
He barks. She relents.
He pulls over to the shoulder, rubbing his neck. He gives himself exactly five minutes to pull himself together, then it’s back on the road.
There used to be a scuzzy little truck stop off the interstate— Joe’s. He can still picture that red neon sign, the way the J kept blinking on and off before it fizzled out completely.
These little places were often owned by ex-truckers themselves, which meant they were good sources of information. A lot of truckers are hunters as well, or at least are in the know about the underworld. An itinerant lifestyle helps hunters evade clueless lawmen. Besides, you see things, on dark interstates. Things that shouldn’t be possible.
He makes the turnoff and discovers that the joint where he learned some killer bar tricks and punted his first shower rat has been digested by some corporate chain. Wyll is disappointed to learn it but not especially surprised. Just as indie trucking is becoming impossible, so too is independently owning a place like this. As the truckers get squeezed, trying to squeak by on paychecks that buy less and less, so do the owners of the businesses that rely on them. A slow collapse. An ecosystem spiraling into extinction.
The inside is messy and eclectic in a prefabricated corporate way, instead of messy and eclectic in the organic way it used to be. Wyll asks the girl at the counter—a purple-haired teenager who is jumpy enough that it makes Wyll’s knuckles itch to throttle whoever is responsible—if there are any local rumors, strange occurrences, nigh unbelievable things. She hesitates, and he can read on her face that she’s worried this is some sort of innuendo she doesn’t understand.
“Hey,” he reads her name tag, “Alfira is it?”
She nods.
“Don’t worry about the rumors. Just tell me, have you heard any jokes lately?”
She stares at him with the blown pupils of a prey animal.
“Nice jokes mind you. Clean ones. I tell them to my granny when she calls.”
Alfira smiles and Wyll is struck by how much he wishes he had living grandparents. God, it would be nice to have family to call! Not that his father isn’t family, but he never picks up anymore. Understandably! He thinks Wyll stole from him and failed to suffer the justifiable consequences with anything like dignity or grace.
“All right,” Alfira chirps, shaking him out of his doldrums, “what’s a pirate’s favorite letter?”
“Oh!” Wyll knows this one, but he gamely pretends to be stumped, “Could it be… oh I know! Arrrr!”
“No!” She cries, putting on a wretched pirate accent, “A pirate’s first love be the C, matey!”
He performs a rich, throaty laugh.
“All right,” he leans over the counter, unable to hide his excitement, “My turn,”
He tells her the joke about the depressed anteater which he first heard in the swelter of a Louisville summer, from a skateboard driver with a litter of cab kittens. She tells him a joke about a lion, a monkey, and a clever stray dog, which he first heard from an Indian pawnshop owner-it’s actually a paraphrase of a story from the Panchatantra, an ancient Hindu book of animal fables! He tells the joke about the bald man with the cigar in his mouth, first heard on the CB in Cincinnati. She tells him one about $3 beers that he first heard from a…well, from a sex worker he hired once, a stupid, risky move even if all they did was talk.
“All right,” he says, shaking off the memory of Sienna’s hoarse, rattling laugh, “One more. You ever heard the peg leg pig joke?”
She shakes her head.
“That’s a shame. You know, it’s based on something that happened to a buddy of mine!”
She puts her hands on her hips “It is not,”
“No shit. My friend Dave.”
“Whatever you say,” Alfira leans in, “So what happened to Dave?”
The peg-leg pig joke is one of his absolute favorites. Goes something like this, when he tells it:
“So my buddy Dave, right? He drove into a ditch in Nowheresville Ohio. This was in the days before cell phones so he had to trek up to some farmhouse to use their phone. Well while he was there he noticed that one of the pigs in one of the pens had a prosthetic wooden leg,
He inquired with the farmer and was told “That’s Myra Mae. She’s a special pig she is”
He was informed of Myra Mae’s exploits. She chased off a bear that was about to attack the farmer. But that wasn’t how she lost the leg. She fished the farmer’s kid out of the creek he was drowning in. But that wasn’t how she lost her leg. A fire started in the house and she squealed, woke everyone up before the spark turned into an inferno.
“Is that how she lost the leg?” Dave asked, “ In the fire?”
“No no, not in the fire”
“Then how’d she lose it?”
“Well you see, she saved all our lives, right?”
“Yes?”
“Special pig like that, you don’t eat it all at once.”
Wyll delivers the punchline with aplomb and Alfira winces.
Wyll is fine with that. Sometimes jokes don’t land. It’s normal.
“Wow,” she sighs, “I should laugh, sorry.”
“Nah,” Wyll waves a hand, “ Don’t force love, a laugh, or a fart. Haven’t you heard that saying before?
“More or less. It’s just…” Alfira plops her head on her palm, “It’s a sad joke though, poor pig.”
“Eh,” Wyll understands why she’d think so, but he is inexplicably itchy about that interpretation, “At least it’s alive, right? Up in that trough in the sunshine eating slop and rolling in mud puddles.”
“Just waiting for that next swipe of the cleaver.” Alfrira clucks her tongue, “Well, aren’t we all.”
He doesn’t like that tone from a girl her age but he’s hardly going to castigate her for taking it. God knows he was far more dramatic in his despair when he was a teenager.
He hopes she gets where she’s going and ends up far away from here, though he doesn’t say it. He buys gum instead of the Malboros he wants. He doesn’t want her knowing he smokes.
“Hey,” She calls, as he’s getting ready to leave.
He turns, to see her twining a pigtail around her finger, “Keep…uh…Keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down.”
Wyll grins, and tips his blue baseball cap at her, “You betcha.”
Wyll is forced to get out his police scanner again. It’s a useful tool, although he goes tense, listening. It feels criminal somehow.
He chews the spearmint gum, wishing he at least had some Nicorette or something. He has a couple of Adderall left but he’s not going to take them until thirty minutes or so before he starts the hunt—and they make him more anxious anyways.
He imagines Gale Myst, host of Generally Indistinguishable, in the passenger seat. Imagines him sitting, legs crossed, fingers steepled, the way he always sat in the live shows Wyll watched online. They are researching together, working on a story, although when Wyll presents the finished product, Gale will react with the same sonorous fascination to every new fact he reveals, peppering in questions that presume Wyll is very intelligent and cool, and maybe his favorite contributor.
About an hour later, when his imagined Gale is beginning to get frustrated and Wyll himself is verging on downright jittery, their search bears fruit. There’s an abandoned slaughterhouse in the South Side where people have started to report noise disturbances. The cops suspect teen vandals.
They are too old to understand the extent to which teens today are indoor cats. Teens do not go drink and smoke pot out at blatantly haunted places much anymore. They don’t, Wyll understands, even Snapchat each other pictures of their butts anymore. Now it’s all about “tik tok” and “thirst traps.” Time is relentless, isn’t it? Just keeps flowing forward, though it’s left you behind.
There are disappearances also. Desperate people, seems like. The kind who make deals.
It’s enough for Wyll to want to take a look.
In veritate triumpho,” he whispers.
His vision warps, hazy like the air above a blazing fire. He blinks, and the world settles back to normalcy.
Now he should be able to see through the veil, the intangible glamour that keeps ordinary mortals from noticing the supernatural. His eye should also be glowing bright red. He’s seen it, and it looks awesome, which does wonders for his confidence.
As for other practical matters, his rig draws far too much attention, and the slaughterhouse is way too far to walk. Which means it’s time to summon his noble steed.
On one hand, part of him still worries she will forget her manners and swallow him whole.
On the other, he missed his girl!
He straps on his fanny pack of holding and laces up the boots of jumping he paid an obscene amount for. He hops out into the lot, game face on.
“Fortis Equis” he intones,
A sleek, black convertible materializes in a swirl of hellfire. The engine revs and the exhaust ports snort clouds of inky smoke.
Wyll hefts a gas can full of goat blood. The car nearly flattens his toes, it pulls up alongside him so eagerly.
“Easy, Chapblack” he murmurs, stroking the scarlet flame decal on her flank, “Easy, girl.”
She whinnies, which is a strange sound to hear an engine make, and calms, to the extent that she is capable of tranquility.
He slips the nozzle into her and endures her noisome suckling. Her tongue slithers through the neck of the container, scraping every trace of blood from the blue plastic. When she’s finished he notes that he’ll have to buy a new gas can: the threads of this one are too chewed for him to fit the cap back on.
He gives her a scritch and whistles. Her door slams open.
Wyll mounts the driver’s seat.
“Let’s hunt,” he tells her.
She peels out, leaving tire marks that smolder with infernal flame.
Wyll lays a chiding foot on the brake pedal, but in the spirit of equanimity, he tells her to crank the radio up.
With gusto, she obeys.
Wyll leaves her parked a block away, with firm instructions to behave. He would dismiss her since she’ll be banished back to the hells within an hour regardless, but…eh. Nice to have someone to come back to.
He hops the fence, creeping like a cartoon burglar around the perimeter of the massive, dilapidated building. He finds an unassuming back door and listens at the keyhole. There’s no demonic chanting, of the sort that actual demons do. There’s no demonic chanting of the sort bored teenagers do either.
"Macte virtue," he whispers.
He takes a moment to appreciate the soap-bubble shine of the magical protection that the spell affords him. Then, he pops the ancient lock and shoulders inside. He’s standing in what looks like a holding area, big enough to fit forty or fifty animals. It’s colder in here than it was outside, cold enough that Wyll wishes he’d worn his parka over his flannel, for all it was still stained with pit fiend.
There’s a logo, on the far wall, of a green cow with yellow spots, smiling in a way that bovines shouldn’t be able to smile. Wyll can’t help it: he feels a stab of guilt at the fact that he’s never quite managed to go vegetarian, much less vegan. He’s not living the kind of life where that’s feasible, but it still sits heavy on his shoulders. Sorry cows, he thinks, Sorry, planet.
Wyll sticks to the shadows, relying on the moonlight streaming in through the shattered half of the dusty window to see. He sweeps the perimeter of the room. The stains on the sawdust-covered floors don’t look as old as they should, and in the corner, there is a pile of rusty bolt guns, crusted with bright red fluid.
Well! He’s not a betting man but he wagers he’s come to the right place!
There’s a narrow, unlit passage off to the side. He straps a headlight over his cap and turns it on. He doesn’t see anything sinister lurking in the shadows though that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. He makes his way down the passage, into a space so small he has to contort himself to fit.
If this is a trap it worked. Wyll packed himself in like a sardine. He couldn’t scratch his ass, much less draw his sword. He imagines he’s telling Gale about how the workers used such a unique architectural feature historically, except he has trouble making up anything cheerier than “it was designed to take the mutilated bodies of the child laborers to the incinerator.” Gale is fascinated by that tidbit of information, to a disturbing extent.
Fortune smiles on him as it has so many times before. He comes up on a wall with a rusty ladder bolted into it. He climbs, wincing at the echo of his boot steps.
Atop the ladder, he finds a platform, which overlooks a web of fat, copper pipes, suspended from the ceiling with narrow bands of steel. Below, is an array of smaller silver pipes, and below that, from what he can see, is the slaughterhouse floor.
He’s tapping his foot, trying to think of a sensible way to navigate here, when a distant sound slices through his thoughts.
“Help!”
Nothing gets Wyll wired like that sound. Not caffeine or nicotine or adderall. Not even the sound of Gale’s honeyed voice slowly and gently untangling the moral nuances of a dispute about Danish import taxes on Belgian cheese.
Nevertheless, he cannot rush in half-cocked. That’s how he ends up bleeding out on the slaughterhouse floor.
He bends down, squinting through the tangle of pipes at the massive space below. There’s a cow draining rail against the far wall, and thirteen people suspended from it. Their wrists are zip-tied above their heads, to gleaming meat hooks. They’ve been here a while, but it’s a matter of hours, not days. The tips of their fingers are bright purple, not yet black.
Wyll is not horrified, not now, in the moment. He thinks he actually can’t be, anymore. He will talk about it to Gale later, a bit dry, a bit coy but not so emotionless as to come off as heartless.
"It's nasty work devil hunting," he will say, "But someone has to do it. You guys are just lucky that someone is me."
Wyll picks his way along the cold, rusty pipe, frost slippery under his fingers, the metal groaning with each careful inch of progress. He rarely has a living audience, and stage fright threatens to weigh him down. He thinks of quips to toss out as he fights. Cold-related things, ice-related things. It’s better than thinking “Is this how I die?”
He’s so caught up in brainstorming that he neglects his six. He hears the telltale whap of leathery wings not a foot behind him and nearly shits himself.
The whistle of an incoming projectile warns him to duck. A knife-sharp icicle grazes the top of his head, shattering against one of the ribbons of metal that hold the pipe to the ceiling.
He turns to see that he’s been flanked by two white creatures with simian bodies and long craggy noses.
Mephits. Believe it or not, they’re strange bedfellows for a Gelugon. They’re elementals, not devils. But sometimes Earth’s extraplanar guests make strange alliances. An outsider is an outsider after all.
He casts repelling blast, aiming for the translucent membranes of the leftmost mephit’s wings. It falls, squealing like a stuck hog.
The other mephit’s mouth gapes. It blows, the air sacs that bracket its throat compressing, and a wet, cold wind buffets Wyll’s body. He slips, scrabbling uselessly at slick metal.
For a breathless second, he tumbles through open air. He catches himself on a narrow steel pipe and has a moment of relief before it collapses under his weight.
Wyll twists his body as he falls, forcing his legs below him. As his feet brush the ground he shifts into a roll, using his momentum to propel him forward on the icy concrete instead of shattering his legs. He rolls onto his feet again and he can tell he’s wrenched his ankle and bruised the rest but all and all it’s not so bad.
“Impressive.”
The voice comes from behind him, lightly accented in a way that shouldn’t be possible, accented with a hint of ice cubes clinking and translucent insectoid wings buzzing.
The Gelugon is six inches taller than Wyll. Its exoskeleton glints silvery in the glow of his headlamp. He inventories its strange features: the mantis-like head capsule, the bulging orange compound eyes, the long feathered antennae. Its spiked mandibles—wicked implements as long as his forearms—chitter as it circles him. Its plump, spiny tail thrashes. It could dole out plenty of punishment unarmed, but it clearly subscribes to the Boy Scout motto, wielding a frost-glazed spear in its spindly pincers.
It is, in all honesty, a lovely creature. Too bad it must die tonight.
“Wareeg I presume?” Wyll asks.
The Gelugon inclines its head, a lesser devil equivalent to a nod.
“Ice to meet you.” Wyll draws his blade with the usual flourish, his deft footwork tracing a path away from the wreckage of the pipe on the floor.
The Gelugon feints with the spear and swings its tail at the side of Wyll’s face. Wyll tips his head out of his way, and it whistles just past his nose.
“Such a cold welcome,” Wyll says, as he rolls out of the way. He tries to stab at the soft scales of its belly but it turns and takes the blow on the corrugated plates of its carapace. Wyll fears for the integrity of this rapier for a second, but he withdraws it intact.
Wyll steps forward, boots crunching on the slush-covered floor. The Gelugon springs away, a buggy ballerino with excellent form. They spar, as chips of frost fall from the pipes above, swirling around them like snowflakes. Wyll makes cautious overtures and it undulates free of them with a sinuous coordination he can’t help but find compelling. It retaliates, arcing its tail towards Wyll’s cheek. Wyll dodges with toreador flair. They dance without touching, hungry for first blood but not hungry enough to do anything foolish.
Not yet, anyways.
Wyll’s breath billows in pale clouds between puns and incantations. He revels in the extent to which they are evenly matched, as if they were fated to fight before this crowd who are no less invested for being unable to comprehend exactly what is going on.
Gale, frowning, asks if being evenly matched doesn’t raise the chances of Wyll dying here now, with no one to miss or mourn him.
Wyll’s eyebrows furrow. A second too late he looks up to see the Gelugon’s spear slicing through the faint shimmer of his armor, sinking into the meat of his sword arm.
He passes his rapier to his off-hand, gritting his teeth. The laceration tingles like a muscle that’s fallen asleep, and the sensation radiates up his arm at alarming speed.
Paralytic venom. Shit. Time to play defense then.
He gestures with his rapier and shouts “ Detono,”
A wave of thunderous force bursts from him. The Gelugon cringes at the impact, sliding backward on the icy floor.
Wyll roots in his fanny pack for a potion that isn’t there.
Things look bad for him, and he leans into it. He lets his eyes go wide, channeling Alfira. He’s a twiggy teenager out of his depth, not a worthy opponent at all.
Sure enough, the Gelugon grows overconfident. It takes a wild swipe with its spiked tail, overbalancing.
Wyll intercepts the blow with his pact blade, impaling the soft, snakelike scales on its underside Blue ichor oozes onto the concrete floor, steaming, melting the ice underneath.
Wyll presses his advantage and casts repelling blast. The devil is blown back into the fallen pipe, and trips, landing belly-up.
Wyll advances, and so do the reflections of him in each segment of the devil’s eyes, an army of sword-wielding soul reapers.
The Gelugon drops its spear, tracing a sigil in the air.
A wall of ice forms, bearing down on Wyll. In defiance of his natural instincts, he runs towards it, vaulting over it. He clears it as easily as if he were hopping a puddle.
Jumping boots. Worth every penny.
He lands within a foot of the Gelugon, plunging his rapier into its chest, a spot of blue blooming over the snowy white.
It is hard to read emotions in features so alien but Wyll is used to provoking fear in wicked things. He has to admit, he enjoys it. He draws his arm back for another blow.
The Gelugon lunges, sinking its mandibles through the intangible armor into Wyll’s shoulder.
Wyll grits his teeth as the mouth tears deep, slicing tendons, dripping that poison into his bloodstream.
“ Acido ” he spits, and acid streams from his fingers into the creature’s eye. It falls back, clawing at its face with a piteous shriek.
“Well fought, Wareeg,” Wyll slips the rapier up under its chin,“ You almost had me for a minute there.”
“Please,” The Gelugon whines, “Please, good warlock. I surrender. You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood would you?”
“ Cold blood,” Wyll chuckles, “That’s a good one.”
“I…I wasn’t. Please….”
This devil must think Wyll was pacted yesterday. It won’t die when he kills it, not really. It will simply return to the hells, which is where it deserves to be. Thirteen victims, young and vulnerable, strung up like cattle by this contemptible being. To sink so low, under any circumstances, is unforgivable.
“Any last words?” Wyll asks, matter-of-fact.
“No,” The Gelugon grunts, “ Just… Just allow me one last free breath.”
Wyll does not have time; he has to take care of the hostages.
But it’s the noble thing to do. It’s chivalrous, to grant his quarry some fleeting sweetness before banishing it back into the clutches of its wretched master.
He nods. The Gelugon takes a long, winding breath, savoring every second.
He’s milking it, in Wyll’s professional opinion. But then, devils always do.
The Gelugon blinks at him, its ruined eyes oozing out jelly, “One more,”
Wyll shakes his head, “Time’s up, friend,”
“All right,” Wareeg babbles, “ All right. I wouldn’t want to impose on your kindness.”
It knows that, if Wyll were so inclined, he could dispatch it painfully. Wyll wouldn’t, but it’s a convenient fear for Wareeg to have.
It lays a claw overtop of Wyll’s wrist, “Look me up when you get to Cania, won’t you? Maybe I’ll be out of the spike pits by then.”
Wyll does not explain that he’s not one of Mephistopheles’ warlocks, that the bounty on Wareeg was subcontracted to Mizora. He certainly doesn’t delve into how he will become a lemure once he dies, without the cognitive ability to follow through on his vow.
He just braces himself, preparing to dispense a clean, quick death. “All right,” he declares, “If I get the chance, I will.”
He is a surgical killer, under the right circumstances. Precise. Practiced.
He slides his rapier free as Wareeg’s corpse goes up like flash paper, a quick, black burn. He shields his nose against the sulfuric stench of it.
He turns from the smoldering spot on the ground where Wareeg’s body once lay, towards the row of bleeding hostages.
There are words carved into their torsos, in a language Wyll recognizes as infernal. Wareeg meant to go through with a ritual, then. Probably a shortcut to a promotion. That’s what devils want—power at any expense. Revolting.
Wyll’s fishes out the three healing potions he has left in his fanny pack. He splashes them on the victims who are bleeding the heaviest, resigning himself to dealing with an achy arm and shoulder until he can beg for healing from Mizora.
He grabs one of his burners and dials 911, using thaumaturgy to put on a voice demonic enough that it couldn’t be forensically matched to his own. He tells the operator hello and that it is nice to meet her, then confirms the address and says that there are thirteen people here, bleeding out.
As she starts to walk him through first aid, he wipes his prints and tosses the phone. He stomps on it four or five times, hoping that will convey the urgency of the situation.
He packs the wounds as best he can, working until thinks he can hear the sound of sirens wailing blocks away.
Medically he shouldn’t leave them. Every second counts and the paramedics are going to waste precious time waiting for the cops to clear the location.
But if he stays, he’ll be detained for questioning, maybe even charged if the veil confused the victims enough that they think he was one of their tormentors. And damn it, it’s been five years now since he saw the inside of a cell, six since he languished in one for any significant amount of time.
Yes, six years now since he sat on that rock-hard cot, stomach growling because he traded his past two meals away for soap, which he didn’t even get to use because it became a crucial bargaining chip in the tenuous detente he brokered with his cellmate. Ah, colossus of a cellmate. The stories Wyll could tell about that guy. He was a pasty Irish piece of shit that Wyll in his less charitable moments thought of as “The Great White Nope.” He was also a textbook victim of a chain of abuse and the failure of mental health services, cyclical poverty, and a penal system that spits out citizens less reformed than it took them in. Wyll’s incessant sleep-talking nearly shattered the poor man’s fragile mental health, and therefore he could hardly be blamed for threatening to filet him.
Two measly months Wyll spent there, six years ago, before Mizora, before he went for his CDL. And yet he still breaks into a cold sweat remembering the smell of linoleum floors overwashed with lemon fresh, and the sound of men older than his father jeering in the showers at his shaved legs. Still loses sleep thinking about the faded bloodstains on the first pair of secondhand underwear he was issued, wondering who wore it before him and if they were okay now. Still goes numb thinking about the hitch in Florrick’s voice over the phone when she told him his father really had tried to make time to take his call.
Any more time on the inside would kill him, and his soul would belong to the hells. That has to matter, doesn't it? It’s not selfish if…
No. It’s selfish regardless.
A real hero would risk it, on the off chance it would save even one of the infinitely precious human lives hovering on the precipice right in front of him.
But this is his kryptonite. Even Mizora knows it, knows it so well she dropped her standing order for him to run when the cops come.
He flees of his own accord, melting into the shadows of a winding alleyway as red and blue lights flash on the bricks mere inches from his back.
Mizora is sitting in his truck when he returns, her bare feet braced against the windshield. He suppresses the urge to gag.
“Well done, pet,” she simpers, “And you even got to do your little hero roleplay! See, we really do work well together.”
He slips into the passenger seat, trying not to wince as she pokes all the gauges on the dashboard, using some sort of magic to make the dials spin madly, “Thank you for the opportunity,”
“You’re showing me proper gratitude?,” her rosate eyes fix on him, blinding as high beams, “As much as I’d like to believe I’m growing on you, I’m guessing that means you want something?”
“I’m wounded,” he admits, “I’d appreciate being healed,”
Their contract requires her to heal injuries and replace resources used on hunts. Crucially though, it doesn’t give her a deadline by which she must make him whole,
It’s a useless clause, in other words. A cruel taunt in flawless legalese.
Mizora flexes her gold-painted toes, luxuriating in his suspense, “Oh,” she hums finally, “Would you?”
“You can kiss it better,” he concedes, “If you’d like.”
If he doesn’t offer, she might choose one of the really excruciating methods, just so he’s more inclined to ask for the kisses next time.
“Oh!” her smile displays the tips of her sharp little fangs, “Happily,”
It is by far her favorite way to heal him, pouring a health potion on her lips and mushing them into his wounds. It’s a good deal more time-consuming and uncomfortable on his end than directly pouring the potion on would be but he supposes that’s the point. He allows her slimy lips to work his wounds, pretending he doesn’t notice when her forked tongue slithers out to taste his torn skin. He endures it until the pain ebbs.
“All right,” Wyll pants, although his shoulder still aches, “I’m good now, thank you.”
She stops when she’s ready, not when he asks her to. Same as always really. Shouldn’t surprise him.
When she does release him, she leaves behind a pack of health potions and a couple of scrolls he’s too exhausted to page through.
He has enough time to shower, and enough points to shower for free. He’ll say one thing for the chains, the loyalty rewards are nice. And they do keep their showers clean, even if the bleachy scent of them makes him lightheaded. He chases his blood down the drain with the showerhead, and feels the impotent sulkiness Mizora inspires in him washing away with it.
He dries off, dresses, and hobbles back down the aisle of trucks, lit up by a sparse trail of lamposts. Chrome shines all around him, in every appealing color, candy apple red and lime green and sweet, sunny yellow. There’s a black truck with these great blue flame decals and a blue one with a mural on the side, a purple mustang galloping along a pristine interstate.
He may not have the most glamorous life but Wyll is lucky to be one of the precious few who gets to go where he goes and see what he sees. He looks up at the sky and realizes it’s a full moon out tonight. Mostly full at least! And he almost missed it, feeling sorry for himself.
“Help!” Someone calls, the sound ringing through the chilly air. Wyll almost chalks it up to a hallucination conjured by his over-eager ears but it comes again, “Help!”
Here it is! The universe has given him an opportunity to redeem himself! He, feet flying, back down the line of trucks that watch with massive headlights.
He chases it down to the chain link fence at the edge of the lot, where some meathead in plaid has pinned a white-haired man…well person… who is dressed in…not very much at all, each piece of scanty, feminine clothing a likely candidate for having provoked this obvious hate crime.
Either that or this obvious lot lizard (no that’s the wrong term, it’s derogatory. Sex worker) tried to solicit the wrong guy. It’s always the same kinds of men who won’t leave women alone who turn violent when a “no thank you,” would suffice.
The victim’s gaze flicks from his assailant to Wyll. His flinty gray eyes have Wyll certain he is in danger, a danger that has nothing to do with the overgrown lunk pinning the lot lizard (wrong term!) against the chain link fence, spread out like a butterfly.
Old habits will not win out tonight, Wyll vows. He’s going to save him—although maybe them is a safer pronoun?—He’s going to save them and go to bed. Think about them all night but in bed. Alone.
“What seems to be the problem here, gentlemen?” demands Wyll.
It must be a trick of the light, but he thinks he sees the sex worker sporting a wolfish grin.