Of Saints and Sinners Read online

  Silas Robb: Of Saints and Sinners

  Erik Lynd

  Broken Gods Press

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Continue The Story

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  Also by Erik Lynd

  About the Author

  To my family, both old and new.

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  1

  Sometimes Silas just wanted to kill him. That’s unfair though, Silas wanted to kill anybody, Mort was just the most convenient human.

  He sat with his back to Silas at an outdoor table at the café. Although café might be too grand a name for the jumped-up sandwich shop that had expanded its stale bread and day old meaty reach onto the curb. Mort was hunched over his laptop, chubby fingers stabbing at the undersized keyboard. Silas had never seen him without his laptop, but he still typed with the hunt and peck method. He hadn’t even looked up when Silas pulled up on his bike although the exhaust thundered loud enough to set off the alarm of a car parked along the street. He could not see Mort’s face, but he knew that his glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose and he was squinting as though his sight was failing. All in all, he looked uncomfortable in front of the laptop, a quintessential Luddite. He was Silas’s tech support, although Mort preferred the term handler.

  Silas approached the table, his hands itching to choke the life out of him. They flexed open and closed with fury as though practicing. It was evening and his shadow reached the table before he did, his six foot five 275 pound frame cast a shadow large enough to cover the table. When the shadow touched him, Mort tensed.

  The head splitting sound of a two thousand cc bike exhaust did not make him flinch, but he sensed the danger now. Silas’s shadow was an extension of his demonic fury.

  In two smooth strides Silas was at his side and placed a hand on his shoulder forcing him back into the chair. He squeezed the shoulder, harder than he probably should have and Mort winced.

  Humans were so skittish.

  “Relax. I won’t kill you tonight,” Silas said.

  “Uh-huh,” Mort said.

  Silas sat across from him. As he expected, Mort’s glasses had slid down his nose and perched at the tip.

  “You have a way of sneaking up on people Silas,” Mort said.

  “I will take that as a compliment since I am not known for my subtlety.”

  Silas slid a cigar out of his jacket’s inner pocket and said, “But it is an odd thing to say to someone who just pulled up on a loud ass bike.” The cigar lit as he brought it to his lips. Being from hell meant never having to carry a lighter.

  “Why the fuck did you call me out? I’m missing band practice,” Silas asked.

  “Ah, you are referring to that motley group of thugs as a band now?”

  Silas slammed his fist on the table rattling the cups and plastic utensils and upturning Mort’s coffee. A few patrons at another table looked nervously at him.

  “Why am I here?” Silas yelled.

  “Jesus Silas,” Mort said as he grabbed some paper napkins and mopped up the coffee before it reached his laptop. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I was just joking. You guys are actually quite good.”

  “Why. Am. I. Here,” Silas repeated. He ignored the compliment, Mort might have heard his band a handful of times, but he was sure Mort never listened, he plucked slowly at his laptop at the gigs. Besides, rock and roll didn’t really suit Mort, he was more of a classical guy or maybe even country. That made Silas shudder.

  Mort sighed and looked down at his laptop, after a few hunt and pecks at the keyboard he answered Silas.

  “A fairy,” Mort said.

  Silas looked at him for a second trying to see if this was some sort of joke. Mort didn’t blink.

  “A fairy? You brought me out here to take care of a fairy?” Silas asked.

  “It is an unseelie fairy.”

  “Of course it is, you wouldn’t call out a demon to do battle with a nancy flittering about in tights, sprinkling happy dust on passersby. My point is why do you need me at all? I mean fairies can be annoying, but even one of your mortal agents can handle one.”

  “According to the report this one is especially difficult.”

  Silas grunted. This was going to be a long evening.

  “Father Teager filed the report after he came for a wellness check on a woman named Martha Willamet. She lives in that apartment across the street,” Mort said. “She missed church several Sundays in a row. According to Father Teager, she never missed a day and with the recent disappearances he thought he should go check on her.”

  “Disappearances? What disappearances?” Silas asked.

  “Jesus Silas, what rock do you live under?”

  Mort spun his laptop around, Silas saw the headline on the online newspaper. THIRD DISSAPEARANCE IN BROOKLYN

  “I don’t read the news much,” Silas said.

  He scanned the article. Three missing, two young men and an elderly woman.

  “You think this is related to the fairy?”

  “No, not necessarily, that was just the reason Father Teager went to check on her. According to the report she answered the door when he knocked and they had a pleasant conversation and she apologized that she had made him worry, but she had been sick.”

  Silas twirled his fingers in a hurry up gesture. Mort coughed and flipped the laptop back so he could read from the report.

  “At some point Father Teager asked to use the toilet and when he was in there, that is when the incident happened.”

  “Incident?” Silas asked and smiled, this was getting interesting.

  “Apparently, the Father heard noises coming from the toilet bowl and before he could investigate something clawed his ah… buttocks, painfully. He jumped up and saw a little head pop up from the bowl, like a wizened baby was how he described it. It spat and hissed at him. That made him think it was a little imp or demon.”

  “Of course it’s always a demon, all the bad little things that go bump in the night are devil spawn…”

  “If I may go on and be spared the rant?” Mort asked.

  Cocky little shit, Silas thought, I knew there was a reason I let him live. Out loud he said, “Go on.”

  “Well apparently Father Teager quickly left the bathroom and tried to tell Mrs. Willamet that she had a monster in her bathroom and she needed to leave. That is when she laughed in his face and said it was her little pet then she spat and cursed at him. He fled with her cackling after him. As soon as he reached the church, he filed this report.”

  Mort reached into his laptop bag side pocket and pulled out a folder. He passed it to Silas. Silas did not accept it he stared at Mort and puffed his cigar. Mort shrugged and put the file back into the bag.

  “Sorry I forgot you don’t read,” Mort said.

  “I can read and I have read more books in my thousands of years of existence than you could even grasp. I don’t like to read when I have a perfectly good mouthpiece spewing it for me. Besides I don’t need the details, as they say, the devil is in the details,�
� Silas flicked his ashes onto the table.

  “Anyway, he wrote it up as a possible supernatural event, even went so far as to claim it might be an incarnation of Satan.”

  Silas barked a laugh, “If good old Lucy decided to incarnate here in New York it would be a little bit more noticeable than a shrunken imp body floating in the toilet like some satanic turd.”

  Mort ignored him and went on, “While the report was ignored by most of the Vatican, it of course was singled out for Father Moreales. He thought it was important enough for the Inquisition Project and here we are. Apparently, what makes this different is the control that the entity had on the woman. Not normal for a standard fairy.”

  Silas sat back in his chair and puffed for a moment.

  “So what you are telling me Mort, is that it’s a slow news day?” Silas asked.

  “Yep, pretty much.”

  “I mean a fairy, really? They are a nuisance, but a threat? Hardly.”

  “All I know is that Father Moreales told us to personally take care of this and he is our boss. Unless, of course, you have found a way out of your contract? Then again you don’t want to bother reading a ten page report, so I doubt you have even glanced at the thousand page Binding contract.”

  Silas glared at him, but the mortal was right. The contract was a monument to legalese that would drive the greatest legal minds in the world crazy. Silas would know, Hell is full of them. Demons have the greatest lawyers who have ever died create their infernal contracts, but the devious holy minds at the Vatican have them all beat.

  And unfortunately he had signed it when he agreed to join the Inquisition Project. The Inquisition Project was a secret group within the Vatican charged with protecting humans from supernatural entities. The supernatural world, called the Pale, existed alongside the human one, separated by a thin metaphysical Veil. Whenever activity from the Pale threatened to spill into the human world, the Inquisition Project was called in.

  The theory went like this; if ever the general population of humans realized that there was a supernatural world all around them and that fairy tales were true, the Veil would come tumbling down and the supernatural world would collide with the human one. Chaos, war, death, and destruction would follow. Great fun from Silas’ perspective, however, it is also believed that this will hasten the end of the world and the Vatican is not convinced humanity is prepared for the rapture.

  That is where he came in. The Project summoned him to help fight against the encroaching Pale. They found a body for him to possess and a contract to bind him. The contract had straight forward rules or so he had thought. He was bound to help them by taking missions for which he was paid. That payment was a point system, when it reached a certain number he was free to let loose the shackles of the Vatican and roam the Earth as a free demon until his human form expired.

  “How much is the fee on this one?” Silas asked.

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Ten grand? What the fuck? That’s chump change, not even worth dragging my ass out here.” Silas slammed his fist down again on the table, this time leaving a dent in the wire mesh. This drew more stares to their table, Silas ignored them.

  “Well it is just a fairy,” Mort said.

  “Fuck,” Silas moaned and leaned back in his chair.

  “Hey Silas, it adds up.”

  Silas stood and dropped his cigar into the fresh coffee the waiter had just set down for Mort. It hissed, Silas liked the sound.

  “You taking the mission Silas?” Mort asked.

  “You know the answer to that Mort.”

  “I already took care of the surveillance. This time keep it quick and quiet.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “And absolutely do not harm civilians,” Mort said and tried to look Silas in the eyes. Not an easy task to do to a demon. Mort failed.

  Silas smiled and turned toward the apartment building. He walked across the street and stopped outside to look up at the building. The old brownstone fallen into disrepair, as were most buildings on this street. He supposed Mort would say he should come up with a plan. He stared at the building a moment longer.

  “Fuck it,” he said, he never was much of a planner.

  He headed up the steps to the front door. Silas looked over the tenant list on the wall beside the door and noted that the Willamet apartment was on the fourth floor. The front door was locked with a simple deadbolt that looked almost as old as he was, or his current mortal form at any rate. He scanned the edges of the door and ran his hand along the seam. No security, but that didn’t surprise him. A slumlord couldn’t be troubled to protect the tenants. Any cameras inside would have been disabled by Mort, but based on the lack of security on the front door Silas didn’t think it had been any test of skill for Mort to do so.

  He pushed and the lock ripped out of the door as the door opened inward. He caught it before it slammed against the wall. Contrary to what Mort said, Silas could be subtle when he needed to be. To someone on the street it would have looked as if he had just unlocked the door. Of course, if someone entered the building they would see the lock on the floor and assume a break in. He better make it quick.

  The foyer and stairs were in the same state of disrepair as the door; workable, but barely. When it was first built, the woodwork would have been beautiful. Much of it had been replaced with cold lifeless pieces of particle board and faux wood paneling. Silas shook his head. As much as humans loved to charge into the future, they ignored the past and the beauty there.

  Silas skipped the elevator. He didn’t trust them and if there was a fairy in this building and it saw him coming the elevator would have been the perfect place to work its mischief. Of course that meant eight flights and that wasn’t much fun either.

  Before he reached the fourth floor Silas could smell it. It was the meaty rotten stench of death, of carrion. As much as that reminded him of home, it was out of place here. The scent was faint and only his demonically enhanced olfactory sense allowed him to detect it.

  At the top of the stairs he looked both ways, the hall was empty and quiet. Not even the sound of a TV. To his demonic ears, the only sound was coming from the street outside. According to the mailbox list at the door most of the fourth floor was deserted, at least most of the apartments didn’t have a name on them, but he hadn’t expected the whole building to be empty.

  The apartment at the end was Willamet’s, but Silas went to the door across the hall from the stairs first. The door was unlocked and he pushed it open, ready to lunge forward if someone was inside and he had to shut them up quick. The apartment was empty.

  Something was not right. He could feel it in his demon bones, magic lay thick about this place. He walked through the abandoned apartment.

  It wasn’t completely empty; odds and ends lay strewn about. Some clothes and boxes were in the back rooms. Some boxes contained junk, but he thought humans would have felt they were important. He found pictures in one, old baby toys and clothes in another. Whoever had moved out had been in a hurry.

  On impulse Silas reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a little vial. In it was a plant. He opened it and pulled out a little leaf. From his other pocket he pulled out a packet and shook out a small measure of blue powder. It was dried bluebell. He put both the leaf and dried flower in his mouth and chewed. If something supernatural had occurred here then the herbs he just chewed would interact with his human-demon physiology and he might catch a glimpse of what had happened.

  It would also make him high as a kite.

  He knew his target was in the other apartment and he should be there, the broken lock would go unnoticed for only so long. Maybe not though, there weren’t many tenants left to stumble upon it. He began to feel the slight tingling that meant the narcotic was going to work. It had a similar effect to dropping acid only instead of just hallucinations he would actually see the residue of supernatural events.

  He walked around the apartment, stumbling occasionally. He was enjoyi
ng the euphoric effect of the leaf that activated the bluebell. Bluebell was common and by itself did nothing, but when combined with the leaf of the larthean plant, only found on the Plains of Tartarus or in a quaint little apothecary on the Upper East Side, it opened the mind to the mystical.

  If he had come here to do battle with anything other than a relatively harmless fairy he wouldn’t have taken a chance on the intoxicating effect, but even high he should be able to deal with a fairy infestation.

  He pictured himself in an Orkin man uniform wielding a spray can full of iron dust. He burst out laughing and it took him a moment to catch his breath. Oh yeah, the drug was working.

  The visions began with tracers similar to LSD, but that is where the similarities stopped. They began to coalesce into faint shapes. He saw a little man running through the living room. The little man was chasing a mortal, an old guy, but the image was too faint to make out exactly how old. He appeared to be poking the old man with a little stick. The image faded as Silas stumbled to the bedroom door.

  In the bedroom an image appeared of the same little creature, a brownie Silas realized, pushing books and paper off the bookshelf to rain down on the old man’s head. The old man took a swing at the brownie with his cane, but the fairy danced away.

  Before he lost the effect of the leaf, Silas went out into the hallway and opened the door on the next apartment. Not yet approaching the one Mrs. Willamet lived in. As Silas had suspected this one was empty also, only there was more junk in it. The previous tenant hadn’t even bothered to pack half their stuff.

  In this apartment he saw a flying creature, a pixie, he thought, swooping like an angry bird and pulling at the hair of an old lady who ran around the room, mouth open in a silent scream.