game, trying to make him comfortable, and Jack was content to let him think he was as dumb as the rest of the human race and had nothing to fear from this place. The Black writhed inside his mind like a snake, hard to grasp and cold to the touch. He’d be hard-pressed to call up witchfire, never mind sling a hex if he had to. Effectively, he was stuck here for as long as it amused Don to keep him, but he didn’t have to let on that he knew.

Don mounted the steps of the farmhouse, rotted boards cracking under his boots. “Come on in,” he told Jack. “Meet the rest of the family.”

CHAPTER 17

Inside the farmhouse, all was darkness. Light leached from above, through broken spots in the roof, and hit a floor littered with trash and the skeletons of small animals. The stench was even heavier than the darkness, shoving fingers into Jack’s nostrils and down his throat. The house stank of rot, old food and older sweat, decades of filth baking in the heat. Even the offal tanks of the Pit hadn’t stunk this badly.

Jack pulled his shirt over his nose. At least his own sweat was familiar.

Don jabbed a push-button switch, and a single bulb flickered overhead, casting bird-wing shadows into all the corners. Stairs with most of the treads missing led up, and a hallway stretched ahead, so stacked with ancient newspapers and fruit crates that Jack could barely maneuver it sideways.

“Levi!” Don shouted. “You in here?”

“Back room,” a voice croaked, and Don jerked his head at Jack.

“Levi’s my brother. You’ll like him.”

“Will I?” Jack said. “He as convivial as you?”

“He’s a laugh riot.” Don slithered down the hall passage with the acumen of a snake. Jack dislodged a stack of ancient, moldy National Geographics. A rat hissed and scurried deeper into the holes its compatriots had chewed in the stacks of paper.

“For such a flash chap, you sure do love filth,” he told Don.

Don shrugged. “Humans notice dirt. For me, your whole world is dirt.”

“Suppose it is,” Jack muttered. The back room had been a kitchen, at some point, and pipes jutted from the wall where a stove and icebox had once stood. A deep sink crouched in one corner, with some thick, black, viscous substance dripping down the stained porcelain flanks and puddling on the floor.

A mechanized wheelchair, the kind old ladies drove around shopping centers, sat in front of a TV fizzing with static and occasionally showing flashes of a saggy and low-budget porn film. In the chair sat the largest man Jack had ever seen—he overflowed the bonds of the chair, and white stretch marks cut jagged canyons on the back of his shaved head. He breathed with a deep, wet wheeze, something rotten deep in his chest rattling with every puff of air.

“That him?” Levi gave a wet sniff. “He doesn’t smell so sweet.”

Jack decided that pointing out that the waves of stench rolling off Levi could fell a werewolf wasn’t his most prudent course of action. “Your reception is shit,” he said, pointing to the telly. Levi grunted, jabbing at a remote with fingers strained with bloat.

“Everything here is shit. Your world is a crapper waiting for somebody to flush the floating turds.”

“Come on, now,” Don said. “Can you really say that after where you were when I found you?”

Levi coughed, and the floor shook under his weight. He didn’t have a shirt on—Jack doubted any shirt in existence would actually keep the rolling hills of his stomach under wraps—and the hair on his chest was sparse and black, matted with sweat. Blemishes dotted his shoulders like a range of volcanoes. “You bring me what I want?” he croaked at Don.

Don fished a grease-spotted paper bag from his jacket and passed it into Levi’s waiting hands. The giant ripped it open and tore the wrapper from an In-N-Out Burger with his teeth. Two gulps, and it disappeared down his gullet. He unrolled the magazine also in the sack with greasy fingers, leaving thumbprints on the expanses of naked women in the glossy pages. What Pete called sad porn—junkie girls with empty eyes, tied and splayed, cut and displayed in ways that Jack supposed a bloke like Levi would find right up his alley.

“Got a funny look buying that,” Don told him. “You’d think those cunts who work in porn shops have something against the customer. As if I’d want to put it in her. Disease crawling all over the pussy in LA.” He turned to Jack. “You hear me? You getting any LA pussy, you wrap up. Fucking city’s a plague pit.”

“All right,” Jack said. The smell wasn’t making his stomach any easier to deal with, and he had a sneaking suspicion that if he vomited anywhere near Levi, the bloke would mistake it for dessert. “It’s been fun, gents, but if all you did was bring me out here to see the sewage main you live in, then I’m going to say thanks for the memories and make me way home.”

“Oh no,” Don said. “We’re getting down to business. I gotta take care of my brother, though. You understand.” He tilted his head. “Or maybe you don’t. Most people get close enough to spit on you tend to end up dead, don’t they, Jack?”

“You going to tell me something I don’t know?” Jack said. “Or is stating the obvious your particular gift?” He got Don’s play—he wanted Jack to know that he’d watched him, knew about him, saw all his dirty secrets and got off on them. He could revel in it all he wanted—Jack had enough dirty secrets to keep a team of Dons occupied for a year or two.

“Mouthy fuck, ain’t he?” Levi said. He shoved his hand down into the seat of the wheelchair, moving his fat aside, and came out with a packet of biscuits—or cookies, Jack supposed he called them. If he called them anything before he shoved them into his gullet. Levi burped, then tossed the empty packet aside and unfastened the top of his stained khakis. “Good job on the mag, brother. Choice snatch in there.”

“No fucking way in hell,” Jack said. Dealing with a demon who wanked off to holding a threat over his head was one thing, but watching his morbidly obese brother actually wank off was beyond the pale.

“That’s just Levi,” Don said. “We’re all slaves to our urges, in one way or another.” He gestured Jack ahead of him down another narrow hall, lined with doors. “My urge just happens to be a little bit less … obvious than Levi’s. And yours—well, you’ve got enough for both of us, don’t you, Jack?”

Don shouldered a door open. “I told you I’d explain what we are, and why we won’t go back. Why Belial can’t cage us.” A dirty pair of curtains, which Jack saw had once been littered with pink flowers and happy kittens, closed off the room at the end of the hall. Don gripped them and ripped them open. “A fucking visual is worth a thousand words, isn’t that right?”

After Levi and the girl in the yard, Jack figured that whatever else Don had to show him would be more shock and awe. He still stared though, still felt the sink in his stomach and the familiar sensation of his head being too full as his sight attempted to cope with the onslaught of psychic agony wrapped around the figure before him.

“This here is Teddy,” said Don. “Teddy as in teddy bear, as in won’t you be my. But he won’t. Teddy can’t be one of us, Jack.”

Jack heard Don absently, while the rest of him stared at the thing on the other side of the room. A child’s room—walls pale pink, painted with daisies in every color of the rainbow. A name—Claire, 1961—was carved above the shape of a headboard faded into the paint.

Against the wall, Teddy dangled, strapped into an upright harness like the type they used on movie mental patients. Hooks hammered into the ceiling held at least a dozen IV bags, the liquid inside green and black. Clusters of flies buzzed around Teddy’s face—at least, where his face would be if he’d had one.

Teddy’s neck formed a column of pale skin, and at the top a blank, bulbous protrusion twitched this way and that, as if trying to catch Jack’s scent. His body was a flat, flabby mass and out of it grew a multitude of limbs, some the size of a child’s arm and hand, some little more than angry, infected skin tags. In the center of Teddy’s mass, a round mouth rimmed with teeth twitched and sighed as the thing breathed.

Don stepped forward, checked the levels of the IV bags. “Shit,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Fucking Levi.” He kicked the door open, bellowing, “I fuckin’ told you to call me if he got low on anything! You think I can find this shit at the fuckin’ 7-11?”

Jack was surprised at the stillness after the door shut. Wind rattled the walls, throwing dust against the side of the farmhouse, but aside from the wheeze of air passing in and out of the thing’s mouth, it was absolutely

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