CHAPTER 10: RENEWAL | PART II

  GARLAND HEIGHTS, ST. CATHERINE'S—OCTOBER 17th, 1992 | EVENING

  ?

  Of the two men donned in priestly robes, the one with the broom was the first to move. His face was blistered with tension and fear as he swept the chalk of the circle around the creature away, and as soon as he did so, he ran.

  His counterpart, the one with the semi-automatic rifle, opened fire on the creature. Bullet after bullet after bullet pierced through the heavy cloth that covered its body, staining the burlap-like material in droves of black blood.

  It screeched and shook the very foundations of the basement atrium, its voice thunderous and undeniable. The large creature flexed its arms and the metal stakes that skewered it were expelled from its body, exploding outwards into the nearby cobblestone archways and columns like shrapnel. Leather constraints, which held its limbs together, were ripped apart and hurled across the ground.

  The cloth that covered it parted to the side, only slightly, as a deep red arm lurched towards the man holding the broom.

  Its hand was the size of his torso, its black claws as large as knives. They dug into his body as if his skin and bone was butter. The creature clenched and in an instant, the broom-holder was reduced to a pulp-laden mess of viscera and blood.

  Bullets peppered through the covered creature’s frame until the man who held the gun ran out of ammunition, and the moment his gun clicked, the creature’s opposite arm grabbed him by his lower body and ripped both of his legs off. He screamed once and never again.

  From afar, the soft eyes of Bishop Hargreeves watched with taciturn interest. It stepped out from the circle and tossed the cloth aside, and Leroy reeled at how ugly the thing was.

  Demons weren’t exactly lookers, but this one in particular was one gross and twisted bastard. Red and textured skin, fibrous muscle, and a massive upper body vastly disproportionate with the lower. Its face was more a collection of horns than anything else, and it only had one eye where its nose should have been, and a wide, vile mouth with old, chipped, yellow teeth. Tufts of scraggly quills sprouted out between its mess of horns like half-grown and unwashed hair.

  Bullet wounds were rapidly being filled by the cinder-like substance that flowed freely from the four people shackled behind it, and skin reformed in a matter of seconds.

  Leroy stared at the thing, grabbing hold of his heavy handgun from his equipment harness.

  He wouldn’t get anywhere unless the demon’s tethers were taken care of—thoughtless vegetables of human beings who just so happened to be within the things general vicinity when it crossed into their world. It was the only way they could walk freely among the realm of man on their own accord, short of making a contract and free-riding someone’s body, like Yaerzul, or being forcibly commanded to someone’s whim for a brief moment by way of demonology.

  Leroy didn’t think to question how Minister Rostavich had managed to arrange this for the renewal assessment, but his pull was deep. To have the Order of the Wardens hunt down a demon and its tethers, and subsequently have the damn thing gift wrapped by the Bishop Hargreeves and his exorcists was an easy thing for a man like that. Last year, it was a pack of lycans. The year before that, an especially dangerous thaumaturgist serving a life sentence at Blackpool Penitentiary. The Minister had no shortage of things to throw in Leroy’s direction in order for him to re-earn the title of arbiter.

  Ten years ago, he looked forward to these damned assessments. But these days, he dreaded them. October 17th had already been longer than he would’ve liked—a surprise call from Captain Holmes, a rushed arbitration note from Elizabeth Hausser, the whole fiasco with the hexling, Cameron Kessler. Now this. As the demon stared at him expectantly, all he could do was grimace. He could’ve been at home with a cold beer in hand, watching whatever mindless garbage happened to be on the television until he passed out on his couch.

  But instead, he stood in the basement of St. Catherine’s, and his ears rang to the incessant screeches of some hellish and twisted thing. Yaerzul was probably ecstatic. The bastard. He was awfully quiet, not uttering as much as a whisper in Leroy’s mind, probably watching through Leroy’s eyes in glee at the prospect of the chaos and bloodshed.

  “Oh, do be careful, Leroy! This one is particularly nasty,” chimed Bishop Hargreeves, seemingly unphased by the sudden and immediate deaths of his attendants.

  The demon leaped towards Leroy, and its gargantuan, red-leather arms swayed clumsily in the air.

  With deftness, Leroy grabbed hold of one of the three waterskins strapped to one side of his torso. He threw it forward. With his opposite hand, aimed his heavy handgun and fired. A .40 caliber bullet carved a chunk through the side of the demon’s face and broke through the waterskin in tandem. A burst of water splayed throughout the air, and with his newly freed hand, Leroy clenched.

  A wave of frost solidified around the demon’s mandible and the lower extremities of its face. This, Leroy knew, was crucial. It could not be allowed to say its name.

  The demon crashed into the ground and landed sideways, causing stone and dust to shoot out from in a plume of debris. Its bellows and dissonant groans were muted by the ice, and it dug its large hands into its mouth, dug away with its black claws, and writhed.

  Leroy focused his attention on the wall now. His brown eyes settled onto the shackled tethers, and he raised his handgun with a single hand. He fired without remorse at the one furthest to the right—whatever face was behind the burlap bag belonged to a husk of a human. Should he remove the bag, he knew exactly what he’d find. Eyes glazed over, a mouth strung open and a slackened jaw. A complete and utter absence of humanity: demonic cattle. He shot the one closest to it. He was doing them all a favor.

  Two of the tethers remained. But before he could fire another bullet, the ground behind him shook.

  Leroy glanced over his shoulder. The demon was upright and charged towards him, with heavy hands that clobbered the stone below. He reached for another waterskin and threw it toward the ground.

  Water splashed in front of him and he clenched a single hand, turning it into a small frozen path shaped as a semi-circle that ran counter-clockwise from the demon’s position. He slid across it and grabbed his gun with both hands. He fired another round of bullets into the creature, and aimed not for its body, but for its legs; far smaller and skinnier than its gorilla-like arms.

  Black blood spattered onto the ground. The demon toppled over to the side, and as it did, Leroy’s eyes widened. He was too close.

  As it hit the ground, the dust and debris expanded outward. Caught in the radius, Leroy was ejected from his path of ice and hurled into the wall behind him, causing his hefty frame slamming into one of the two remaining tethers.

  It hurt more than he anticipated. His body was still ripe from the fight he’d had with that damned hexling, Cameron Kessler, only several hours ago. Every fracture and welt and bruised bone screamed at him in protest, jointly declaring that he was far too old to be doing this.

  He had to end this quickly. A younger Leroy Waters could afford to make mistakes, but the man he’d become was far less spry and lacked the resilience of youth that, if he could guess, began to weaken with each passing year after he hit forty. This Leroy Waters had to be smarter. More clever. Quicker to the draw.

  With a groan, Leroy turned over to his side. He aimed and fired.

  A bullet skewered though one of the remaining tethers. Leroy glanced back over at the demon. Its wounds were healing, filling up with the black cinder that emanated from the remaining tether, albeit much more slowly. One more tether. All he needed to do was shoot the last one, and the thing wouldn't be able to regenerate.

  He aimed the gun to the final shackled, head-bagged tether. His gun clicked. Out of bullets.

  “Fuck,” Leroy muttered.

  After multiple falls, the ice around the demon’s mouth had broken. It sprang towards him in a bountiful leap and landed in front of him. Before he could so much as groan, he felt the strength of its hand pinning him against the wall—its claws stabbing straight through the stone behind him.

  His vision blurred. The blunt-force trauma of it all made his head heavy, and the added pressure on his damaged frame exacerbated some of the fractures incurred by Cameron Kessler. They were clean breaks now; maybe one rib, maybe two. Blood spilled out from between Leroy’s teeth. The demon set its single eye onto him in vapid curiosity, its heated, foul breath washing over his face.

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  It looked down and found only Leroy's bloody smile.

  Somehow, under the weight of the demon’s hand pressed against him, he managed to clench a fist.

  A dim blue surrounded the blood that exited his mouth and he shaped it into a small, needle sized shard. He spat it straight into the demon’s eye.

  Frosted spikes exploded forward and out. Each of the demon’s fingers was skewered. It failed to realize that by slamming him into the wall with such force, it had ruptured the last of Leroy’s three waterskins. With a heave, Leroy shouldered his way out of the demon’s minced fingers, stepping through black blood and sinew as he rolled forward onto the ground.

  He turned to face the final tether, pivoted on his foot, and grabbed hold of one of the ice shards still lodged in the demon’s hand. He ripped it out and cut his palm in the process, stepping forward to plunge the shard into the tether’s head.

  The trail of black cinder that steadily filled the demon’s wounds dissipated, and so too did the demon’s capacity to regenerate.

  “M..Aauh.. Muadres—”

  A curdled squelch filled the air as Leroy promptly removed the shard from the tether’s head. He pivoted, and hurled the shard square into the demon’s face.

  “M—.. AuAuh.. M..MuaAuh.. Muadrest—”

  Not today. Leroy whisked his index and middle finger to the side, and in a swiping motion, each of the jagged, crystalline spikes that had been lodged in the demon’s hand were torn out from its tendons, slickened in the fat and bile and its ichorous, tar-like blood.

  Leroy pointed his fingers forward.

  One by one, each of the spikes filled its mouth, carving holes into its tongue and shattering its rows of teeth. He clenched his fist. Each of the shards merged into a greater mass, and on Leroy’s final twist of the wrist, it had transformed into a shard large enough to bore a hole into the demon’s skull.

  It fell backwards into a bed of debris and fractals.

  Leroy backed up into the wall and slid down. Pained breaths left him. He granted himself a moment of reprieve, and stared absently at the massive corpse in front of him.

  From the far side of the room, he heard the echo of a metal clank hitting the cobblestone floor. Bishop Hargreeves was well on his way towards Leroy. He sauntered slowly with his assistive crutch and stopped to examine the fallen demon, the trapped flames of the surrounding cast-iron braziers elongating his already gargantuan shadow. Leroy stared at it and shook his head. The pain of his broken ribs caught up with him; it was more wheeze than laugh by the time Bishop Hargreeves arrived.

  “Excellent! I imagine that we will be able to harvest a fair amount of blood from this one,” mused Bishop Hargreeves, more to himself than to Leroy.

  Not a word uttered in memoriam to his two attendants. Leroy glanced towards their bodies, at least, what remained of them, and shook his head. Bishop Hargreeves was, if nothing else, a pragmatic man. He likely knew he was sending those two to their deaths, and by the same token, knew that they were replaceable.

  “And, uh, what’s the market rate for a barrel of unpasteurized demon blood these days, Bishop Hargreeves?” Leroy asked, his words punctuated with the occasional groan.

  “One-hundred dollars,” the Bishop stated, proceeding towards Leroy. “Thrice that if it is pasteurized. Leroy, I must say, you look a little worse for wear.”

  “Been a long day,” said Leroy.

  Bishop Hargeeves reached under his priestly robes with his large hand and produced a vial, where the glassware was aptly labeled: P?-BLD. He leaned forward awkwardly, and held the vial out towards Leroy. “For your troubles then.”

  Leroy popped the cork with his bloodied teeth and spat it to the side, downing the green-tinted liquid. It was a taste he’d never get used to, like mold mixed with rotten food suspended in sewage water. Not that he knew what any of those things tasted like. Still, pasteurized demon blood was nothing short of revolting, and his face scrunched up in blatant displeasure the moment the thick and gooey liquid glided down his tongue.

  It wasn’t a miracle elixir, but it was close to it.

  A single dose wouldn’t make you good as new, but it did multiply the body's natural healing process by magnitudes, and Leroy could already feel some of the pain leaving him as his bones began repairing themselves. It would be a few days before he was good as new. A few days was better than a few months—especially in his line of work.

  “If you would join me upstairs in my office, Leroy, I will sign and seal your notary slip," said Bishop Hargreeves.

  “A hand?” Leroy asked.

  “Surely.” Bishop Hargreeves, in spite of his unwieldy stature, had no issue reaching his long arm down toward Leroy, who took it to help himself to his feet.

  On their way back towards the stairwell, Leroy grabbed hold of his old brown leather jacket and slung it over one shoulder. In a few hours he’d have the mobility to put it on, but as of now, the pasteurized demon blood was taking its sweet time mending to his wounds.

  “Where’d they get that one?” Leroy asked, waiting for Bishop Hargreeves to open up the warded door. And another. And another. And another. Then began their long steps up the stairwell.

  “The demon? Ah, yes. The Order of the Wardens found it rummaging about in the Pines, supposedly in search of a prospective contractor. Though I am not too keen on the details, I suspect it was summoned outside of the city, and, given the emaciated state of the tethers, it must have been weeks ago. If I had to guess, it likely emerged in Bar Harbor over in Maine, or north, out of Saint John in New Brunswick before beginning its trek to our wonderful city.”

  “Sounds about right. Some aspiring occultist probably found an old tome, got access to a summoning ritual,” Leroy said, proceeding up the steps behind Bishop Hargreeves.

  “Such is often the case, I've found, for the stragglers from outside of the city limits. At any rate! Leroy, we’d best hurry up. You’d be wise to make it back to city hall before Minister Rostavich settles in for the evening.”

  ?

  Leroy returned to the office just as the Minister prepared to close the doors behind him, rune-marked key in hand. Before the Minister could so much as get a word in, Leroy slapped the notary slip against his gray suit and nodded towards the door. “Day isn’t over yet. Back inside, Mikel.”

  “Ah—Leroy. I apologize. I can assure you I was not leaving, only briefly stepping out to address something elsewhere.”

  “It’s fine.” Leroy reached for the door knob and held it open for the Minister, nodding him inside.

  They stepped into the office and without taking a seat, the Minister opened up a familiar drawer on his side of the desk and removed the Ledger. He shifted through a number of parchment pages, and, with impetus, placed Leroy’s notary slip into the Ledger. The Minister reached for a thin, rectangular strip of wax and the adjacent matchbox. After withdrawing one, he struck a match alight to let it drip onto the open page of the Ledger. Wax fell atop of the notary slip, and the Minister reached for his seal to clamp it down onto the page. He smiled to himself, adjusted his thin, rectangular glasses, and offered a hand out to Leroy.

  Leroy shook it. “When can I expect the renewed license?”

  “By tomorrow morning, and no later,” confirmed the Minister.

  “Right. Be seeing you, then.”

  “There is one more thing, Leroy.”

  The Minister cleared his throat, and reached for an envelope positioned on the far side of his desk. It bore a seal of its own, distinct from the office of the Minister of the Commonwealth of Brinehaven, and extended it toward Leroy. Occult and Civic Authority. Leroy grabbed it, and with his opposite hand, grabbed his own face, inhaled deeply, and exhaled with a tangible heaviness.

  Leroy ripped open the envelope.

  THE COMMONWEALTH OF BRINEHAVEN V. KESSLER

  CASE NUMBER: 3109713

  “A subpoena, courtesy of Captain Holmes. Four weeks from now, on November 14th, you are due to arrive at in the courtroom here in city hall,” the Minister said.

  Leroy raised the envelope up and issued him a sneering smile. “I’ll be there, Mikel.”

  LEROY WATERS

  MINISTER ROSTAVICH

  BISHOP HARGREEVES

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