“So, you didn’t get on the train with me,” I said.
“Nono, I tell girl.”
“Then why are you here now?”
“The man,” she pouted.
“What man?”
“Big man. Big smelly man. Hurt girl.”
I sat up. “Someone hurt Brenda? She’s not…”
“Girl run away. Make me use train.”
“Shit,” I said. Then I threw in, “Shit, shit, shit. It must have been the demon. Are you sure she’s okay?”
“She hide,” Iza emphasized. That was the best she could do, comfort-wise. Had I known half of the goddamn Internet was following me around, I would have given her more cash and demanded she change addresses immediately.
“Demon?” Tchekhy asked.
“Yes,” I said. “And he attacked a friend. He must be one tough bastard to get the best of her.”
“A woman against a demon?”
“She’s not a woman. Brenda’s a vampire.”
“Ah. Of course.” Tchekhy picked up the bottle of vodka from the cot and promptly downed the remainder. He was probably planning to pick up a few more crosses later at wherever one goes to buy crosses. I’m a bull in the Judeo-Christian worldview china shop.
“Iza, how did you find me here?” I asked, remembering that this was a fairly big city.
“I smell,” she said.
Great Zeus, did everything have a better sense of smell than I did?
I thought of Whomp and how quickly he’d followed me to the pier. Could this one track me as easily? Could he track Iza?
“Tchekhy, I need strong coffee and a very quick answer on that email question,” I said, rubbing my eyes as if that had some sort of magical sobering effect. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to be safe for me to stay here much longer.”
“
“Also, what the hell time is it?”
It was pushing seven in the evening, which I discovered as soon as I remembered I was wearing a watch. It felt like later, but I hadn’t gotten much sleep over the last couple of days. All I really wanted was another bottle of Tchekhy’s vodka and a good long nap on his couch, but it was thinking like that that got me into this little jam in the first place, so instead I sipped my coffee and tried to clear the woozies as quickly as possible. It was time to start thinking straight before things spun any more out of control. I could figure my way out of this. Or that’s what I told myself.
The whole thing shook me up pretty badly when I thought hard enough about it. Between the devoted little Internet cult tracking me, the bounty hunters, the demon, and the letters in the newspaper, I felt more trapped than I had in a long time. As I said, I’ve managed to escape long-term imprisonment in my many years, but lack of firsthand experience doesn’t dampen my fear of it in the least bit. Throw in the instinctive reaction to being cornered and the times in the past when I’ve been an actual slave, and it was enough to make an immortal crazy.
My strongest impulse was to get up and just run. Well, run and drink more vodka, but mainly just run. But I was no longer entirely comfortable doing that either. I was running when I left Boston, and it was possible Brenda paid for that decision with her life. If I ran again the next one at risk might be Tchekhy, and I liked his odds against a demon considerably less than Brenda’s.
That was the biggest problem—the demon. I could get away from human bounty hunters, and I could live with the people from the MUD snapping my picture because neither had shown any particular talent for tracking me, thus far relying mainly on luck and tip-offs. But the demon might have gotten my scent, and if I wasn’t careful he’d leave a trail of bodies in his wake.
I was clearly going to have to figure out a way to kill it. Possibly, modern weaponry could do now what swords and arrows could not.
With the first inkling of a plan tricking through my brain, it occurred to me it might be helpful to know if the demon was in New York yet.
“Iza, are you still here?” It’d been an hour since she had arrived with her news, and in that time I had mostly sat still and sobered up while Tchekhy continued to violate the law and pretend there wasn’t a pixie in the room.
“Uh-huh,” I heard her little voice declare. She zipped over from whatever distant corner of the room she’d been camping in.
“Do you remember what the demon smells like?”
“Deeman?”
“The big man who hurt Brenda.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If I asked you to fly around the city and look for him, could you do that? I can get you some more mushrooms.”
“Uh-huh, okay.”
“And then tell me when you find him,” I added. You have to be very specific with pixies.
“Uh-huh.”
She buzzed off.
Once it was clear she was safely out of the room, Tchekhy looked up from his hacking. “It is not natural,” he muttered.
“What, her? She’s no less natural than you are,” I said.
“I know my Bible, Efgeniy. You should not traffic with such beings.”
“I’m a lot older than the Bible, my friend, and I can tell you from experience the world is a good deal stranger and more interesting than anything in that book.”
He fell silent and continued to work. That’s usually what happens when someone brings up the Bible with me, mainly because I was around for most of it. Let’s just say if you’re looking for historical accuracy there, you’re looking in the wrong place. And the stuff that is accurate—or at least fact-based—is horribly skewed. Take Joshua, from battle of Jericho fame. Joshua was a ruthless and violent man who was looking to carve out an empire without any particular concern about how much blood was shed to do it, just like every other megalomaniacal world- conqueror from that time. Having the God of the Old Testament on his side didn’t make any kind of difference, nor did it make the blood on Joshua’s hands justifiable.
I’m willing to concede that the wisdom contained within the Bible is worth at least a little pondering, but anyone who thinks, for instance, that because pixies aren’t featured they are therefore bad in some way needs to re-evaluate.
I returned to the matter at hand. “So, where are we?”
“I am on my third company,” he said. “I was able to trace the first email address to a forwarding address at a tech firm in Colorado, and from there to a savings-and-loan in New Mexico.”
“This guy knows a lot of email administrators,” I commented.
“
“Because what?” I asked, but it was as if I was no longer in the room. He started typing faster, and then paused. Then he wheeled over to another computer and engaged a search engine.
“There,” he said. “I should have figured it out earlier.”
“What?”
“All three of the companies have the same security profile. They contracted the same firm to establish their
