Chapter Fifteen
Hell House Client Brief: The mailman is called Brian. He'll ask for a drink. Don't let him in the house. Don't mention him to anyone else.
Shepherd shoved the placemats out of the way and dumped his canvas bag onto the table. He fumbled the buckles open and tossed the top back.
Shithead glared at him from inside it. The Milky Bar he’d tossed in back at the gas station was soft and squirming in the doll’s lap. Shepherd gingerly picked it out, the wrapper folding over his fingers, and tossed it toward the bin.
“Well, at least you didn’t starve,” he said.
Shithead rolled its eyes as he lifted it out.
Not that it had much choice—that was just how its eyelids worked—but this time it felt deliberate.
Shepherd folded its leg out and set it down on the table so it was sitting up.
“Don’t try that. You could have gotten out if you wanted, and you aren’t a Betsy Wetsy, so you didn’t need a toilet break.
Besides, we both know that if you could piss, you would have done it there. ”
“That,” Kel remarked sourly, “I didn’t miss.”
Shithead looked pleased with itself. To put a stop to that, Shepherd tossed a T-shirt over its head. Then he went back to digging through the bag. Halfway down, between his second and third pair of cargo shorts, his fingers brushed along the cracked back of what he was looking for.
He yanked it out and waved it triumphantly at Kel, who recoiled with a grimace.
“It smells like…sewage,” he said with distaste.
City boy. The book didn’t smell like sewage, although Kel had picked up on the notes of shit and piss. It smelled like the inside of a carcass shed: all fear, blood, and soaked dirt. Dry clots of mildew bubbled the slick paperback cover, and the pages were stained and stuck together.
“I shelved this book with Dio’s in the study,” Shepherd explained. “But—”
“Why?” Kel asked.
“It keeps them in line,” Shepherd shrugged. “This one got led astray. I thought it was just contagion, but what if it’s an infection?”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“...maybe?” Shepherd admitted as he riffled the pages of the book with his thumb to unstick the edges.
“The cultists didn’t do a lot of spelling bees, OK?
It should have clicked when we were talking to Ruby.
She was right, Dio had a habit of marking his place in a book with anything flat and smaller than his palm.
Toffee paper, bloodstained driver’s licenses, receipts, a dead mouse… ”
He turned the book upside down and shook it.
A thin strip of worn parchment fell out. It fluttered down to the table and sparks flew. Kel reached for it.
Easy got there first. He reached past Shepherd—his sudden presence making Shepherd flinch—and grabbed the parchment.
“There you are,” he said. As he unfolded the paper, his hands coarsened, the skin over his knuckles dark and wrinkled and his manicured nails thickening.
“Where did you come from?” Shepherd asked as he edged to the side.
Easy glanced away from his quick perusal of the contract. The red had settled into his eyes, bleeding out from the pupils.
“It’s my house,” he said. “I’m always here.”
Creepy statement delivered, Easy went back to the contract. His eyes cut back and forth across the dense, closely scribbled script as he looked for something. When he did, he spat on his thumb–it smoked–and rubbed it over the paper.
“Huh. Well, it was worth a try,” he said. Then he shrugged and set the contract down on the table. He slapped his hands together. “How about a beer? To celebrate.”
He didn’t wait for anyone to reply before he headed to the fridge. The flooring groaned under his expensive loafers, lino cracking, like he was a lot heavier than he looked. Easy pulled open the fridge door and pulled out three bottles, flicking the lids off with thick, black talons.
“To setting things back where they belong,” he said and then winked at Shepherd. “And new friends.”
Uh-huh.
Shepherd took a drink of beer as he looked down at the contract. The letters were written in blood, probably with a fountain pen carved from a human finger. The rib held a point better and did the same job, but people always went with a finger.
“So what next?” he asked. “How do you get Kel off the hook?”
Easy took a drink of beer. His nails scraped against the bottle as he shifted his grip, a sharp, metallic sound, as he set it down.
“Don’t bother,” he said as he reached out to pull the contract away from Shepherd. “It’s written in Latin. A very obscure dialect.”
He folded it again and tucked it into his jacket. Shepherd clenched his jaw to hold back a protest. It felt like a bad idea to let Easy take the contract when they’d just found it, but it was what Kel wanted. So Shepherd wanted him to have it.
Whatever that meant for them afterward. Shepherd was…he wasn’t made for ‘normal’.
“You didn’t answer his question,” Kel pointed out, dragging his gaze away from Easy’s hands. He looked a bit tight around the mouth, but he had a firm hold on ‘together’ otherwise. “What’s the next step?”
The lights drowned out whatever Easy said in answer to that.
It was a kaleidoscope of whistles and blue and pealing red.
Shepherd reached for the table. His hand passed through it.
He watched that happen with surprise. Then the floor came up and smacked him in the face.
In the background, he could hear voices being batted back and forth.
One of them was raised, alarmed, and the bottle clattered on the floor and rolled in front of him.
Pale yellow liquid spilled over the floor, soaking into the grout.
He could smell it. The hops and the yeast. There was something else too.
Oh.
That was the next step.
That made sense.
The world switched off.
There was something cold and wet under Shepherd’s ass.
He thought about that.
It was not the first time he’d woken up like that. Usually, though, he felt better about it. Not the breathless, top-of-a-roller-coaster dread he could feel waiting in the wings.
All that, plus his nose was itchy.
Shepherd went to scratch it and felt rope scrape against his wrists. OK. That was new. He wasn’t opposed to the idea in theory, but his control issues could never. You could be tied up like a lamb to the slaughter once and…
Oh.
Shepherd ran his tongue across the back of his teeth as the events of the afternoon came running back. He tasted hops and a faint, underlying…OK, that might just be his breath.
Fuck.
He tried to panic. A bit of chemical assistance would probably help at this point, but his nervous system had always sucked in emergencies. It just tapped out and left his brain to deal with it unpumped.
Yet ask him to try and navigate getting a credit card, and he could spit adrenaline like a cobra.
Shepherd let his brain mutter along in the background as he squinted one eye open and took a quick look around. A bare bulb swung overhead, yellowish light disturbing the aggrieved shadows that clung to the walls. The taste of bleach and bicarb was chalky strong in the air as Shepherd swallowed.
He was in the cellar of the Murder House.
“…you need to think about this,” Kel said. His voice was low and rough as a cat’s tongue. The last time that Shepherd had heard his voice like that, he’d run, but only after he’d folded like a paper doll. It was still hot. Even if he slurred a bit as he went on. “There are other options.”
Easy chuckled. “Don’t try and teach your grandfather to suck eggs, boy,” he said. “You can’t steal a soul from something that doesn’t have one. Might as well try and compel the kettle. Besides, with what I slipped you, I doubt you’d be able to steal candy from a baby right now.”
His footsteps sounded heavy and hard on the floor as he moved around. They echoed.
Shepherd squirmed around to look in the direction of the voices. His wrists were shackled to a block of granite that had been in the garden last time Shepherd had seen it. He was able to twist his hands around the loop sunk into it to get up onto his knees.
He was naked, but that was to be expected.
You made dinner for someone, you unwrapped it before you put it on the plate. That was just manners.
Kel was tied to a chair on the other side of the hole in the ground. His hair was matted to his forehead, and his lip was split. Blood scabbed on his chin and dripped down onto his shirt.
“Let him go,” Kel begged. “He’s nothing to do with this.”
Easy came back out of the shadows. A heavy black robe hung from his shoulders, the edges frayed where it dragged on the ground. He looked thicker across the shoulders than he had before, and his polished black loafers had been replaced with polished black hooves.
“I mean, if that’s what you want,” Easy said.
He flicked his robe back and crouched down in front of Kel.
Taloned fingers gripped Kel’s chin, slicing through the skin.
“But if he’d not come back, who do you think I was going to send to Hell as my proxy?
So, do you want me to let him go? Think about—”
“Yes,” Kel interrupted. He looked nearly as surprised as Easy, but then he set his jaw and glared at his grandfather. “Just…tell Ruby I fucked off.”
Easy let go of Kel’s jaw and rubbed his fingers together, like he’d somehow got sentiment on them.
“So, just to be clear, you’d rather I kill you?”
Kel glanced over toward Shepherd. Their eyes met, and Kel twisted his mouth in a wry smile, then flicked his attention back to Easy.
“Might be the drugs,” he acknowledged. “But yeah. Unless there’s another option, let him go.”
Easy sucked his teeth and then patted Kel’s cheek affectionately. Hard enough to jolt Kel’s face to the side, blood dripping from his nose, but still warm for what Easy was.
“...I would,” he said. “But he’s already naked and anointed, so…”
That explained the wet ass. It was…
“Did you piss on me?” Shepherd asked.