Demon Jack Read Online Free PDF Page B

up. “This is me keeping our mugs off the telly.”
    “Okay?”
    “It’s the hard drive for the cop car’s camera system,” the kid up front said, his voice rumbling before cracking into bat frequency. He blushed and turned his attention more forcefully towards the road. I couldn’t see where we were from where I was sitting and I didn’t really feel up to moving and finding out.
    “Mind handing me my bag, Richie?” the woman asked the driver. He tossed her a black backpack from the front of the van without looking back. It hit the floor a few feet away. She reached over, pulling it into her lap and began looking through it.
    “Where are we going?” I asked.
    “Be patient. Dun wanna ruin the surprise.”
    “Yay. Another surprise,” I deadpanned. “So let’s try this. Who the hell are you?”
    She pulled a few of those wet naps you get at wing places out of the bag and began wiping the dried blood off her arm.
    “Better question,” she said without looking at me, “ya know who that was that ‘ad ya?”
    “Yeah. The police.”
    “Obviously, but more specific?”
    She tossed the wet naps, now a coppery brown in the bag and took out a roll of gauze and a small jar. She spent a moment rubbing some sort of balm over her wounds, the smell of it reminding me of dead leaves and wood smoke. After lathering herself up, she began wrapping the gauze tightly around her arms, one roll around each forearm, starting near the crease of her elbow and wrapping towards her wrists. She moved with the precision of practice. It took her less than a minute to wrap the wounds.
    I shrugged.
    “Oy,” she said, conveying disgust in the single syllable. She tossed the gauze back in the bag and pushed it along the floor towards the front of the van and out of her way.
    “I have no idea,” I said.
    “Detective Marshall Newton. We’ve ‘ad ‘is mobile wired for months. We jus’ pulled yer arse outta the fire big time mate.”
    “Okay?” I said, trying to follow the logic train and failing in reasonably short order.
    “He worked for Adam,” Richie, the driver chimed in.
    I took a minute to wrap my head around everything. Several years ago, before I went to prison I worked for a criminal named Mister Lin. He ran most of Boston’s prostitution and drugs. I was, in essence, his go-to man for putting an emphasis on certain decrees. One of those had been to send a message to Adam, a vampire. I sent the message by lighting his Childe, Miranda, on fire. Adam caught me and gave me one week to find him a suitable replacement. I went to prison two days later. Apparently, he was still holding a grudge. I always wondered why he didn’t have me offed in prison. Guess he wanted to do the honors himself.
    Even better, now I was riding in a van with two people whose names I didn’t know, who could bug a police officer’s cell phone, and to top it all off, one was a witch that could toss around massive amounts of water without so much as breaking a sweat. Yep, there was only one word to sum the whole situation up.
    “ Fuck ,” I said finally.
    “Indeed,” she said.
    We drove the rest of the way in silence. I kept waiting for Alice to reappear, for the feeling of rejuvenation that would accompany her. I waited for my muscles to become wired with life again, for the pain to melt away from my jaw, my sides, my stomach. More than anything, I wanted the nagging itch in my skull, the pressure on my temples to die away. I wanted the noose of addiction around my neck to loosen, even for just a second. Unfortunately, it was only getting tighter. It just wasn't happening.
    Apparently a van could be consecrated as holy ground. Who knew?
    Our destination turned out to be Saint Cecilia’s in Boston. As churches go, from the exterior it was nothing spectacular. It looked like a cross between a factory and a castle, built with bricks the color of rust and shadowed by much larger and more modern buildings. An arched stone doorway, wreathed in what