Chapter 2
TWO
Welcome to Madrid.
Madrid has no town drunk.
We all take turns.
—Welcome sign
It was a risk, coming back to New Mexico after so many years away, but the demon Quentin Rutherford was tracking didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass. Based on news stories, eyewitness accounts, and the compass , a weapon the Vatican guard had given him, the asshole he’d been tracking for a month had set up shop in the small town of Madrid. Which was weird.
The town was a seat of mystical energy. It sat between Albuquerque and Santa Fe on a stretch of road called the Turquoise Trail. It was an old mining town turned ghost town turned hippie commune turned popular art colony. When he arrived, Quentin’s skin fairly tingled with the energies swirling about the place. Like the wind before a dirt storm in the desert, hot and full of static electricity.
Still, last he’d heard, Amber was in New York. She’d gone to college there, a fancy one named Vassar. He didn’t know much about colleges other than the one he attended for a whole year: Gallaudet University in Washington DC. He was there when all of his troubles began.
Well, more of the same troubles, but things escalated rapidly one fateful weekend, and his life had never been the same. His relationship with the elfin queen—his descriptor—had never been the same. The fact that he thought about her every day, craved her every day, meant nothing. He’d hurt her. Physically. Emotionally. Psychologically. There was no going back. And in all the years since, in all the towns and all the bars and all the women, he’d never met anyone who compared to the ethereal creature known as Amber Kowalski.
Ethereal. That was his new favorite word. He’d written it down in his notebook like he did all of the English words he wanted to remember. English was bothersome and clunky and didn’t make sense, but that word sounded pretty. And the sign for it was almost as beautiful as Amber was. A befitting tribute to all that she was. All that she is .
“ If you don’t stop thinking about her, you’re going to get us killed .”
Quentin shook out of his thoughts, mentally flipped off the entity hitching a ride, and pulled his pickup off the main road that snaked through the tiny town. Madrid was a paradise for the chaotic-minded and a nightmare for anyone with OCD. Quentin leaned toward the latter. The town made him uncomfortable. Like his skin didn’t fit right. And yet, the hodge-podge of mismatched buildings and displays was somehow alluring.
Brightly colored buildings dotted a sparse landscape. Most of the houses in town had been built for the miners in the twenties and thirties. They were small and tightly packed. The artists had transformed the town into a multi-colored expression of pageantry and wonder, like Alice in Wonderland .
Artisans traded their wares, but Quentin mostly cared about food—he was hungry—and the dead people—of which there were now three. Three dead people in less than a week in a town of two hundred? Barring a major accident, a plague, or a serial killer, it wasn’t likely. Not in Madrid, pronounced Mad -rid, according to his source. This had to be the demon’s latest stop. The demon he’d been tracking for a month. He kept missing the otherworldly being by a day or two. Hours even. Every time Quentin got to a hotspot, at least two people were dead, and the demon was gone.
And the activity was all over the place. The compass verified what Quentin and his guest already knew. The demon showed up, killed a few people, then left. To say that the activity was unusual would be an understatement. Demons craved stability. They possessed for a reason. They wanted to set up shop, kick off their shoes, and stay awhile.
Then there were those who would tear a straight path through a given area, leaving trauma and carnage in their wake. Again, this one didn’t do that. It would be in New Jersey one day, Oregon the next, then show up days later in North Carolina. There was no pattern to its activity. No method to its madness. And that made tracking it a bitch.
When the compass, along with whatever natural-born talent Quentin had inside him, had tracked it to New Mexico, Quentin’s pulse sped up with the possibility of seeing her again. It had yet to slow down.
It was bound to happen eventually. He would have had to come home at some point. The only home he’d ever known, anyway. At first, he’d taken solace in the fact that Amber was in New York. Now, he missed her more than ever, and a small part of him hoped she’d come home to visit her mom and stepdad. He just wanted to see her face. To touch her hair. To kiss her full mouth. But again, as hearing people would say: That ship had sailed.
“ You’re doing it again ,” Rune said.
Rune, the demon inside him—and, no, not metaphorically—had possessed him while Quentin was in college. Rune was an old demon living in the bowels of the dorm. Quentin had felt him the day he moved in. During his second semester, he and a few friends, who’d sworn the dorm was haunted, took a trip to the nether regions beneath their rooms, and Quentin had come face-to-face with the ancient demon.
That was the last thing he remembered. He’d woken up two days later in the hospital with Amber, and her mother, Cookie, by his side. They’d flown up from Santa Fe, and he remembered how he thought she’d looked like a fairy princess from one of his video games.
At first, Quentin didn’t think much about the event, other than to stay the fuck out of the basement. But the more time went on, the more he felt the entity inside him. A wiggling here. A settling there. Because of his abilities, he’d been possessed before. He did not like it. Turned out, Rune was different. An orphan in hiding, much like himself. He needed Quentin as much as Quentin unwittingly needed him.
On the bright side, Quentin had aced his history final. Rune had lived through it all.
That was about the time the Vatican came knocking. One day, he was home from school making love—at last—to the girl he’d loved for years. And the next, he was whisked off to Italy to begin training. It was the part of him he didn’t recognize that’d made him accept the Vatican’s offer. The violent part. The part he chose to block from his mind, unsure if it was the demon inside him or the darkness that had always lurked beneath the surface that made him hurt her.
“ Stop thinking about her already. We’re hungry .”
Quentin ground his teeth, got out of the truck, and walked to a coffee shop near the house he was there to scope out. A house that had a shop in the front part. A house that also had two police units parked in front, lights still blazing, and had been cordoned off with police tape. Cordoned. Another word he’d only recently learned. He liked that one for some reason.
“ The latest victim died only a few hours ago ,” Quentin said to Rune.
“ Yes. We hope we haven’t missed him again .”
“ Me, too .”
The fact that the demon spoke better English than Quentin did irked, even after all these years. Of course, he’d been alive a lot longer than Quentin had.
It was still early, and he had his choice of tables when he stepped inside the small establishment—not that there were many. He stood eyeing a high-top near the front window where he could study the house. A forensics team was packing up. He would kill to get his hands on their report. Not that it mattered how the woman, a Dora Rodriguez according to a news report, had died.
Someone spoke to him from a short distance away. A woman. “Welcome to Java Junction.”
He turned, and a redhead in her early thirties stood behind the counter, her brows raised in question. He stepped up to the counter and ordered an Americana.
“Room for cream?”
Even though he could hear her—in a way—he watched her mouth for backup. He shook his head. He’d gotten used to Italian coffee the consistency of motor oil. This would be nothing in comparison.
She punched a couple of buttons on the register. He liked the sound it made. The first time he’d realized that registers made a sound, he’d been so intrigued, the kid behind the counter had to tell him three times how much he owed.
“Are you shopping today?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “Looking into the deaths,” he said.
“Are you Deaf?” she asked, in both English and ASL.
He cringed that she’d picked up on that fact so quickly and sagged in relief at seeing his native language. It was like dying of thirst and finding an oasis in the desert. “Yes,” he both signed and said, making sure his voice was almost too soft for the woman to hear. “But I hear a little.”
It was a lie. He didn’t hear at all. What residual hearing he did have was about as useful as a sledgehammer at a tea party. Rune heard. The demon inside him. And through him, through the parasite who’d taken up residence inside his body, he could hear, as well.
He talked a little, too, though he tried to wiggle out of it every chance he got. Even though he could now speak reasonably well, he could also hear his voice. Again, through Rune, but he could hear it enough to know that it didn’t sound quite right. It was too deep, maybe. And he didn’t pronounce words correctly. He often missed the S sound at the end of plurals, never quite mastered the hard G , and don’t even get him started on the R .
His relationship with Rune was an equally beneficial one. Quentin gave Rune sustenance and safe harbor. Rune gave Quentin the ability to hear and see at great distances. And they both had a profoundly honed sixth sense. They could both feel when a supernatural entity was nearby, which was how Quentin knew they hadn’t missed the demon. Not yet.
“And you’re here about the deaths?” the barista asked him before tugging her apron down to expose her cleavage.
He nodded. “I am. Anything you can tell me?”
“Are you an investigator of some kind? I mean, you don’t look like a cop.”
“I’m not a cop. I was hired by the family member of one of the victims.” He’d told the lie so many times, he almost believed it.
“Really?” She leaned over the counter. “Which one?” Her signing wasn’t bad. A little elementary, but he was impressed that she even tried. So few did.
“Sorry, that’s confidential.”
“Oh, of course.” She turned to the side and looked out the window. “Three deaths in three days. That just doesn’t happen here, you know?”
He could no longer see her mouth well, and discomfort prickled along his spine. Even with Rune’s hearing, and her attempt at signing, he would rather see her face.
“Do you know how they were connected?”
She turned back to him, and he relaxed. “They weren’t related, if that’s what you mean. Mrs. Rodriguez had lived here forever. She drove a school bus. Even though they think she may have had a heart attack before she fell down the stairs, there was definitely something suspicious about her death.”
“How do you know?”
She spread her hands before answering. “The cops have to get coffee somewhere, and we’re the only coffee joint in town.”
Joint. She said “joint” and did the sign for smoking pot. He laughed softly. “And the other two?”
“I know, right? Billy Tibbets was a glassblower. The only one in town. Took after his dad. So, he died first.” She ticked the deaths off on her fingers. “His car shifted out of park while he was checking his mail.” She shivered. “The second one, Angela Morrisey, was electrocuted in her bathtub when her space heater fell in.” She eased closer. “What the hell? I mean, these houses are old, but damn. That is so against code, right?”
“It is.” And no one in their right mind would prop a space heater over their tub.
“ Exactly ,” Rune said. “ But why these three people ?” Fortunately, no one but Quentin could hear the creature.
“ That’s what we need to find out ,” Quentin replied.
When Rune first began speaking to him, Quentin worried that everyone would be able to hear him. They could not. Then he worried he was crazy. What was that saying? The jury is still out ?
“Well, I’m Sarah,” the woman said, giving him her sign name, an S on her right cheek. She held out her hand.
Quentin took it for a quick shake. “I’m Quentin.” He didn’t offer his sign name. It wasn’t normally done in his culture until you got to know a person better. An amateur mistake, but he still appreciated the effort.
“And I guess I should do my job,” she said with a schoolgirl giggle that belied her age. “Can I get you anything else?”
“ Bacon! ” Rune shouted in Quentin’s head. Dude loved bacon.
Quentin pointed to a green chile and bacon breakfast burrito in the display case and said softly, “Burrito?”
She beamed at him. “Our specialty.”
Quentin chose to ignore the fact that what she actually signed was closer to: We give blowjobs .
“Besides the coffee, of course,” she added.
He gave her a thumbs-up and said, “Great.”
“Will that be it?” When he nodded, she rang it up, took his money, and handed back his change. “Here you go, honey,” she said, actually signing the word for honey . “How about you take a seat? I’ll warm this up and bring it out to you.”
He flashed her a grin, and she lingered a moment too long, the gaze transfixed on his mouth betraying her interest.
After a long moment, she nodded and said, “One Americana, coming up,” before pirouetting away. She had pretty hazel eyes, but he preferred blue like the ocean on a summer day.
“ You should hit that .”
Quentin grabbed a seat at the high-top and refocused on the cops across the street. It had taken a long time for him to learn English. He was still learning, especially slang like hit that . But he was getting there.
Unfortunately, Rune refused to learn ASL. Probably for the best, though. It wasn’t like Quentin could see him. He could hear and feel him, and sometimes, he thought he could even smell him—like smoke with a hint of brimstone—but he’d only seen Rune for that brief second in the basement years earlier.
Later, he’d asked Rune exactly what’d happened. How he’d ended up unconscious and in the hospital. Rune feigned ignorance. Quentin would get it out of him someday. But the longer they were together, the more fused they became. Quentin no longer knew where he ended and Rune began.
Sarah delivered the coffee in a mug that proclaimed Bad Coffee Sucks and set a plate down with the warm burrito while tugging at her apron again.
He gave her a grateful smile when Rune said, “ They’re leaving .”
Quentin hadn’t even been looking at the police cars as they headed out. That was another cool thing about Rune. He could see all around them and, just like with the hearing, so could Quentin. It was like having a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view with video surveillance cameras.
The two of them drank some of the best coffee they’d ever had, scarfed down the burrito, left a tip, and walked back to the truck. The demon was nearby, but they couldn’t tell if it was in the house Dora Rodriguez had died in or somewhere else close by. Of course, the fact that a woman snuck under the police tape, glanced around furtively, then walked around the back of the house just like Quentin planned to do did not bode well. If a demon was in the house, it would not take kindly to intruders. Even ones that looked like…like elfin queens.
Quentin stood by his truck in shock as he watched his ex. The same ex who was breaking and entering, two departed in tow, into the very shop he’d been surveilling.