“Are you bein’ serious right now?” Deputy Princell said. “An honest-to-God demon?”
“Typically, demons are neither honest nor of God, but, yes, Deputy, I am deadly serious. Mr. Pastore’s body can attest to how deadly serious this sort of magic is. And I would point out that I would hardly journey all the way from England at great expense for the thrill of playing a small joke on a pair of complete strangers. I am telling you the absolute truth as I know it, gentlemen. This man summoned a demon, which escaped when someone broke the circles there and there, allowing the demon to do precisely what you see before you.”
“Well,” Hays said, “if we assume that’s all true—which is a damn big chaw to fit in my mouth, Mr. Percy, I don’t mind tellin’ ya—then that leaves us with some questions.”
Deputy Princell snorted. “Yeah, questions like ‘Are you shitting me?’ and ‘Why would anyone think summoning a demon was a good idea?’?”
A flicker of a smile passed across the sheriff’s face at the deputy’s comment, a brief meteor of amusement streaking across the sky. But then he focused on me, glittering dark eyes promising a reckoning if I couldn’t answer to his satisfaction.
“Who besides you would have known this guy was summoning demons, Mr. Percy? And where is that person now? And, more important, where is the damn demon you say we have runnin’ around?”
I liked what I saw in Jack Hays. Give him a problem and he wanted to solve it, not worry about whether it was impossible. He was going to try first to see if it really was impossible. Of course, his first question had an edge to it. I was already a suspect.
“I assure you I have no idea who was responsible. But the demon in question has probably possessed him, since you see only one body here and not two. That possessed person will, I guarantee, be sowing chaos in your city. And when you find him and confront him, the demon may fight, or it may leave that host and possess someone else, leaving his victim bewildered at why the sheriff wants to arrest him.”
Deputy Princell shook his head. “Psssh. Sheriff, I’ve heard some bullshit in my day, but this is the biggest pile I ever heard.”
The sheriff’s eyes slid sideways to his deputy for a moment, then back to me. “Maybe it is and maybe it ain’t. Look, Mr. Percy, I appreciate you comin’ by. We gotta clean this all up. Is there a place I can find you if I need you later?”
“Certainly. I’m staying at the American Hotel. If you arrest someone who can’t remember the recent past, please do let me know. By tracing their paths we may be able to figure out where the demon is heading next.”
“Right. Thank you.” He’d dismissed me at that point as a wealthy eccentric, a crackpot with nothing better to do than tilt at windmills; he was swayed not only by his deputy but by a general disbelief in the fantastic. That was fine. When the bodies started piling up, he’d come find me and point me in the right direction. That’s all I wanted. I lowered my head slightly and put my fingertips to the brim of my bowler.
“Good day, sir.” I returned to the hotel, ordered tea in the lobby like a proper Victorian subject of the queen, and opened up a copy of The Pickwick Papers, which I’d purchased from Mr. Still’s shop. Dickens’ turgid prose is often painful to read, but I was just beginning to be amused by the appearance of a cockney character in chapter ten when Deputy Princell came to fetch me, apparently against his will.
“The sheriff would like to see you, Mr. Percy,” he said, his face communicating that he thought the sheriff was making a mistake. I put Dickens down and grabbed my cane.
“I’m at your service.”
The deputy, grinding his jaw the whole way and deferring all my questions to the sheriff, led me a couple of blocks north to a saloon and gambling house, which proved to be the dominant business model in the city. Exactly the sort of place a demon would find delightful. I smelled the carnage before I saw it: that sickly coppery smell of spilled blood with a top note of sulfurous fumes. I wrinkled my nose and the deputy saw it.
“I know. Smells like somebody ripped the biggest ol’ fart this side of the Mississippi and it’s just gonna live there from now on like your nasty in-laws.”
It occurred to me that the deputy might have some domestic issues. “I know you’re a skeptic, Deputy Princell, but that is the smell of a demon.”
He didn’t reply, just shook his head and invited me to precede him into the saloon.
Overturned tables. Shattered mirror behind the bar and the bottoms of broken bottles of booze, their tops shot off. Five bodies sprawled on the floor, but only shot this time, not choked or disemboweled.
A bearded man, perhaps the proprietor, stood behind the bar, in a stained white shirt with black bands around his biceps. With a bleak expression he stared at one of the bodies, as will a young person who realizes at some point that his childhood has run away and if he ever sees it again it’ll only be from a distance. Sheriff Jack Hays stood on the other side of the bar and had just finished asking him a question when I stepped in, but he was getting no response. He called the man’s name and snapped his fingers at him to focus his attention: “Stafford? Stafford. Hey, Bill.” My arrival turned the sheriff’s head.
“Ah! Mr. Percy. Maybe you can tell me if this situation here has anything to do with, uh…with what we discussed earlier.”
“Perhaps.” I joined him at the bar, ignoring the bodies, and pointed at Bill Stafford. “Can he tell us what happened?”
“I was just trying to get him to go through it again. Stafford!”
The man startled and rounded on the sheriff. “Hmm? Yes?”
Using a small amount of power stored in my bear charm, I switched my vision to the magical spectrum and saw that Stafford’s aura was still entirely human. But the demon had been here, in the open; the smell attested to that.