Free Harmony Black by Craig Schaefer Page A

told wrong.”
    Or lied to, I thought. Sullivan and his cambion followers came after me in a casino parking garage. He looked like a genteel schoolteacher until the gloves came off and he turned into a feral, mutating terror that took a bullet to the face without flinching. He damn near outran me, too—and I was on a motorcycle at the time.
    Everything I knew about incarnate demons came courtesy of a thief named Daniel Faust, and he was knee-deep in brimstone. He’d had every reason to lie. Then there was the woman. I’d identified almost every member of Faust’s crew, every thief and killer and warlock he ran with . . . except for the pale Scottish redhead who kept showing up at his side.
    Every background check came back empty, I thought. Image-recognition searches, nothing. Not the ones I did. The ones that I sent to the Bureau. Almost like somebody on the inside wanted to keep her anonymous.
    I didn’t want to know, but I had to ask. “Mr. Bredford, how much influence do these demons have in our . . . social structures?”
    “That’s not the question you wanna ask me,” he said, leaning forward and pitching his grizzled voice low. “The question eating at you is, are they infesting the hallowed halls of Washington, DC? And the answer is yes. Them and their human toadies.”
    He sat back and sucked at the bottle.
    “There are agents of hell in the government?” Jessie said.
    “You girls, God, you’re cute. You’ve got your little shadow-op conspiracy going, probably got a name like Operation Cold Spectrum or something, and you think you’re the secret hand of the president. The men in black, here to save the day from the hordes of hell. News flash, ladies: you’re not the only conspiracy in town. There are only two reasons you haven’t been shut down and left dead in an alley—either you’re too weak to care about, or you’re already their pawns.”
    “You make it sound hopeless,” I told him. He just laughed.
    “Don’t you get it?” he said. “It is hopeless. That’s the joke. The great cosmic jest at the end of the line. There’s a hell, but no heaven. The universe isn’t just apathetic toward humanity, it actively fucking hates us . What are you doing, huh? What are you doing right this minute?”
    “We’re hunting a monster,” I said, my shoulders clenching.
    “Sure, sure, good for you!” He applauded against his bottle. “And while you do that, a hundred others are out there in the dark, and a hundred more are waking up every year. The war is over . We lost . Humanity is like a . . . a . . . a crocodile with a bullet in its brain, too dumb to know it’s already dead. We just keep kicking, keep moving, all the way to the dinner table.”
    “I don’t believe that,” I said. “There’s always hope. And there’s always a reason to fight. If I can save one life, it’s worth doing.”
    “Even if you pay with yours? The things I’ve seen, I couldn’t even begin to tell you . . . ” He rolled his head back against the broken vinyl and clutched his bottle. “Well, that’s why I’m drunk at nine in the morning, ain’t it? I figure I’ve got two, three more good years before the cirrhosis kills me. How much horror do you think you can take before you’re right here with me? Maybe I should save you a seat, huh?”
    I locked eyes with him.
    “You would be amazed how much I can take,” I told him.
    Jessie slapped her palm on the table. “Change of subject. When we crossed paths with the Gresham brothers, we left them bleeding. One’s got a bullet in his shoulder. Are they dumb enough to go to a hospital, or is there somebody they’d call for an off-the-books patch job?”
    Douglas thought about it for a second. He held up a finger, nodding.
    “One guy, one guy I know, does that kind of work. Emmanuel Hirsch. He’s a big-name plastic surgeon in Detroit, but he offers backroom surgery for anybody who can keep their mouth shut and pay in cash. Pretty sure he’s in