Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

The thing in the mirror had very sharp nails, nails that cut into her arm, creating little furrows of heat and pain. The pain galvanized Jennifer into action. She slammed her palm and one foot against the tiled wall, grabbed her reflection’s arm in return and yanked as hard as she could. The thing looked surprised, then gave a short barking shriek as it came flying through the mirror, its passage marked by glittering silver distortion but no broken glass. The momentum sent the two of them flying backwards. The smell of rotting meat and eggs immediately filled the bathroom, the stench unexpected and overpowering; that, together with the jarring impact against the back wall, loosened Jennifer’s grip on the thing she’d pulled out.

The thing squirmed out of her grasp like an angry cat and gave another shriek, one that might have been laughter. Quicker than the normal eye could follow, it gathered herself and leaped at her, long, yellowed fingernails extended.

The dark, quiet part of Jennifer’s brain that assumed control under battle took over, and she ducked and rolled away. The thing hit the wall hard, its claws embedding themselves several inches into the tile where Jennifer’s head had been just moments before. It tried to free itself, but its claws were stuck. It curled its lips back and hissed in fury, a wisp of reddish steam escaping from its mouth, eyes flicking between the wall and Jennifer.

As it braced itself to pull back again, Jennifer made a long, sweeping kick at the thing’s head, aiming for its chin. The thing’s head snapped back with a satisfying crack. She’d hit it hard enough to break the average goon’s neck.

This creature, however, seemed just a bit hardier than the average goon. A small trickle of black blood trailed from one corner of its mouth, and it shook its head briefly, slightly dazed, but it otherwise seemed unhurt. Jennifer kicked it again, a small knot of fear intruding the dark, warm blankness of her mind. The thing merely shook its head again, and this time its laugh was unmistakable. It said something to her, a series of ugly sounds that scored her ears and mind like broken glass, and then it licked its lips with a pointed black tongue.

Well, shit, if kicking don’t work…

Jennifer moved up, shoved her left elbow against the thing’s back to push it back against the wall and grabbed a handful of its hair. She experienced a moment of disorientation: the hair looked exactly like hers, even felt like hers, except the scalp underneath was blazing hot, and she could feel the skin writhing as if a multitude of worms were frantically working just beneath the surface. The desire to flinch was almost overpowering, but instead she tightened her grip and yanked the head back. It thrashed and screeched as Jennifer slammed its forehead against the wall.

The head hit the wall with a dull, solid thump, the force jarring up her arm. The thing shrieked, lashing out with strangely-jointed legs and thrashing like a landed fish. Jennifer dodged its feet with ease, and slammed its head against the wall again. The stink of the creature was making Jennifer’s eyes water, and she felt her stomach tighten up and her mouth flood with an ominous wash of saliva.

She ignored the nausea, pulled the creature’s head back again and smashed it against the wall. The tile cracked, and when she lifted its head, there was a small spot of blood on the surface. Encouraged by the sight, Jennifer slammed the head against the wall again.

And again.

And again.

The sounds of the impact were getting wetter and wetter, the smear of blood on the wall blossoming as the cracks spidered out. Small chunks of flowered tile broke loose and clattered on the floor. And still the thing fought and kicked and howled, spitting dark ichor and red steam.

As Jennifer yanked the thing’s head back yet again, the clump of hair she’d been holding came off in her hands, a scrap of bloody scalp attached to it. What looked like small, black leeches poured out of the wound, and a few landed on her arm. She couldn’t help it: she leaped back, yelping and slapping the things off her. They left dark pink marks on her skin, marks that stung and burned.

The thing placed a foot against the wall, and with a loud grunt of effort, finally pulled its claws free.

Fuck.

Jennifer made a run for the bathroom door. She was fast. She always had been quick on her feet, and the Agency had done things to her to help her move even faster. But the thing was—well, it was inhumanly fast, and Jennifer wasn’t quite at the threshold when she felt its weight slam into her back.

She’d been half-expecting it to do that, and she tucked and rolled as well as she could under the impact, which was both heavier and harder than she’d anticipated. The thing clearly hadn’t expected her to do that, and she successfully flipped it off her back. Momentum made it skitter across the floor before it was brought up short by an armchair, its pulped head smacking sharply against a leg.

Jennifer had started running as soon as she’d thrown the thing off her, sprinting as fast as her enhanced muscles would let her, feeling the familiar buzz and hum under her skin as the micro-implants kicked into high gear. Her gun was on the bedside table. If she could get at it, maybe a few slugs in its head would finally slow the fucking thing down for a few seconds.

She was there in six bounding leaps. Just as her hand closed over the grip, she felt a hand grab at her hair and an arm snake around her middle. Its nails tore into her scalp, a startling pain that she registered and then ignored as she fought to free herself, but she didn’t have quite enough leverage. As it dragged her backwards, she could feel it trying to bore the nails in, only to discover that Jennifer was, in a very literal sense, one hard-headed bitch. It gave a frustrated snarl and drove its nails harder against her skull. The blow made Jennifer’s head ring and her sight dim, and she thought rather blackly, Well, shit, I’m dead, or I’m in for a big motherfucking headache.

But the bone reinforcements held. They held so well, the thing’s nails broke from the force of the impact. It bellowed in pain and fury, the sound reverberating in Jennifer’s sternum, and its grip around her middle slackened.

Tightening her hold on the gun in her right hand, Jennifer dropped down and slammed her hip back into the creature. It let go and fell backwards with a grunt, while Jennifer fell free, landing with a hard, wrenching crack on her left knee. Pain shot up her leg. She gasped and gritted her teeth, then turned around just as she felt its hand grab her ankle.

Many black leech-like things were working its way out of the thing’s pulped face and shredded scalp, squirming and crawling around in the raw flesh and bone; a few dropped onto the floor and thrashed wildly. Jennifer was struck with the thought that several of them may have landed on her during their struggle and may be, right at that very moment, burrowing into her. She resisted the urge to drop her gun and smack at her shoulders and back; instead, she aimed as best she could and pulled the trigger.

The results were spectacular. The upper left quadrant of its head exploded, showering the area behind it with blood, bone and hundreds upon hundreds of black leeches. The creature gave a hoarse cry and fell onto the floor, where it twitched and gurgled wetly.

Finally. Jennifer scrambled to her feet, hissing at the pain in her knee, and limped to where the thing lay. Its remaining eye, pupilless and red, glared at her, and it tried to hoist itself up onto its feet.

Jennifer took somewhat wobbly aim, trying to point for the center of its head, but it moved just as she squeezed the trigger. The right side of its head blew clean off, and the thing immediately slumped over. A torrent of the black leech-like creatures burst out of its ruined head and neck, and Jennifer couldn’t stand it any more: she screeched like a little girl and leaped back, feet flailing for purchase. She didn’t stop until she thumped against the wall several feet away, hard enough that it knocked the breath out of her. Her legs finally decided they’d had enough of the bullshit she’d subjected them to; she collapsed with all the grace of an epileptic stork, panting and shivering uncontrollably.

A rasping voice with just a hint of a wheeze in it said, from off to her left, “Not bad. Not bad at all. Messier than we would’ve done it, but you took care of business, sure enough.”

She turned her head, too tired and too much in shock to do much more than stare. Standing in the doorway to her room was a tall, stoop-figured black man with dreadlocks down to his shoulders and a massive sword strapped across his back. Off to the right and slightly behind was Nadia herself, her dark eyes bugging out slightly, looking distinctly green around the gills. And between the two of them…

Between the two of them was the Angel of Death in all his stern, bronze-faced glory, sword drawn, black, unfathomable eyes boring into her head. Except his left arm was heavily bandaged, and angels didn’t generally need bandages, did they?

She was marveling at the interesting halo around his head when she noticed that everything had taken on that fascinating shimmer, and why hello there, the room was tilting in the oddest way. Next thing she knew, the black man was catching her in his arms; as she slumped against him, he hissed sharply, flipped her onto her stomach and said, emphatically, “Motherfucker,” and he started plucking away at her back, muttering something about worm demons.

She raised her head, even though it cost her an inordinate amount of effort, and she managed to say, rather muzzily, “I knew those fucking leech things were on me, I knew it, I knew it, fucking things burrowing into me, godfuckingdammit--” before her world dissolved to a strange, buzzing grayness.

Chapter 2, Part 2

Jennifer didn’t feel much better after talking to Ramzi the Flea.

She considered herself a hard-headed empiricist, a skeptic. What Ramzi had told her opened up a new world, one she was certain couldn’t be real. Demons, gods, angels, spirits. Invisible beings who inhabited worlds nobody could imagine, who remained unseen until they chose to reveal themselves.

Ramzi wasn’t lying. If nothing else, he’d believed, heart and soul, in what he’d said. She had an uncanny knack of picking up on when people were being less than truthful. It was one of the many reasons why she was one of the best agents in the best mercenary operation in the Republic of Texas.

Maybe the wrinkled old bastard had finally gone crazy from all the dust, sand and plastic fumes he’d inhaled over the years. She hoped so. But either way, she now had several unanticipated variables to deal with. She hated unanticipated variables. Almost as much as she hated camels.

As Jennifer neared Nadia’s establishment, she could feel the nausea that had plagued her on and off all day rush back, creeping up her belly and into the back of her throat. The nanobots were letting her know they were unhappy with her. The Agency had injected the critters in her ten years ago, right before an operation in Moscow that had taken place in the middle of January. Thanks to the microscopic fuckers, it was now impossible for her to get an infection, frostbite or hypothermia.

An unanticipated side-effect was how poorly the nanobots reacted when it got hotter than 95 degrees. Nausea was the primary symptom. Jennifer had learned to deal with it. Throw up, drink some fluids, and move on—preferably to a place with air conditioning.

Nadia’s upscale brothel was in sight. Jennifer gave an inner sigh of relief. When she reached the steps, the bull-necked bouncer with the headset nodded at her and held the heavily gilded door open.

Sweet, blessed air conditioning. Few people in Cairo could afford it nowadays, but Nadia could. Jennifer’s nausea abated as the doors closed behind her, though an ominous pressure remained.

There was some public humiliation being conducted in the foyer. A naked man with a black bag over his head was tied in a kneeling position to a whipping post set on a small platform. Justine, a busty, sloe-eyed Frenchwoman, the most expensive of Nadia’s stunningly expensive whores, caned his buttocks, back and legs with a switch as thick around as her thumb. The man’s enormous erection rose from a thicket of graying pubic hair, deep red and aggressive-looking, bobbing with each blow. His moans were almost drowned out by the jeers and laughter of the small crowd gathered around to watch.

Jennifer threaded her way through the people. She braced herself to be grabbed or at least propositioned, but although several customers gave her lingering, appreciative looks, nobody made any attempts to touch her or approach her. The bodyguards scattered along the walls and in the stairwells, the ones who made football linebackers look like underfed puppies, no doubt presented a strong incentive for good behavior.

When she reached the stairs beyond the foyer, she took off the veil and inhaled deeply. She hated wearing them. No matter how thin they were, they made her feel as if she were suffocating. Her nausea eased another notch, though it still wasn’t entirely gone. She took the steps three at a time, impatient to get to her room and not particularly caring if her long strides exposed her ass. It was barely covered by the miserable excuse for a skirt anyway.

Her room was a small but lavishly appointed chamber in the east wing of the building. Deep purple velvet and satin dominated the décor, and the bed was a four-poster baroque monstrosity smothered in curlicues and pillows. One of the walls consisted of a giant mirror, but saints be praised, there was no mirror on the ceiling.

She was glad she hadn’t been assigned one of the leather-themed rooms. Those tended to be even more over-the-top.

She locked the door behind her, reached into a hidden pouch in her holster and pulled out a silver cube only slightly bigger than the top joint of her thumb. She pressed her right thumb against one of the surfaces until she heard an almost inaudible beep, then slid her nail against a hidden catch. The agent who had trained her on its proper use had shown her the scars; he’d learned the hard way what the consequences were when somebody tried to release the catch without allowing it to verify the thumbprint first. She unfolded the cube until it revealed itself as a cell phone, no more than an eighth of an inch thick. She tapped in the necessary code to turn the power on, then keyed in a long, complicated sequence of numbers to access the secure line. Receiving confirmation on the screen that she was patched in, she held the phone to her ear and said “Father.”

There was a brief silence, then Jennifer heard the phone dialing the number at headquarters. Mr. Williams picked up almost immediately.

“Well?” he barked. “What’d you find out?”

“Karkossian has made his way to Karnak along with the book, sir.”

“Karnak? Why the hell Karnak? There’s nothing there other than that bombed-out casino that used to be a temple.”

Jennifer cleared her throat. She didn’t feel stymied very often, but then, it wasn’t every day that she discovered what she thought was a run-of-the-mill—albeit insanely valuable—historical artifact was the repository of all evil. Today was just her lucky day.

“Well, sir, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, it seems that Karkossian has suffered what seems to be a psychotic break with reality, and is attempting to use the book to summon gods. He has headed to Karnak in search of a key that will allegedly help unlock parts of the book that he is unable to access right now.”

Silence and a slight crackle of static.

Then, “Karkossian wants to use the book to summon God.”

“No, sir. Gods, plural.” At that point, Jennifer had to stop and pinch the bridge of her nose. Saying all this out loud was making her cringe. “According to my sources, the book is rumored to have the ability to summon supernatural deities who were captured and trapped during the eleventh century. Karkossian seems to be convinced this is true, and according to my source, he’s determined to release these deities.”

More silence. Jennifer could almost feel waves of consternation and disbelief emanating from Mr. Williams’ lanky frame, thousands of miles away.

“I’m going to get confirmation from a couple of other sources,” she said, to fill the dead air. “But two things are very, very clear right now: Karkossian is insane, and he’s in Karnak.”

Another silence, this one mercifully brief, then “Anyone with Karkossian?”

“From what I’ve been able to ascertain, nobody other than some local thugs, sir. But I’ll spend the next couple of days gathering more information in Cairo and the surrounding area. I have a few of leads I need to check up on.” She didn’t mention that the leads were witch doctors, and one was a demon hunter.

A fucking demon hunter.

Jesus wept.

“Good. I want you in Karnak as soon as possible. Our client is extremely anxious regain his artifact.”

“I understand, sir. You have my guarantee that this mission will be completed as soon as possible.”

“I have every faith in you. Oh, and Jennifer?”

“Yes?”

“I take it you’re at the safe house in the Prostitutes’ Quarter right now?”

Jennifer didn’t like questions with obvious answers, and she liked the sudden change of tone in Mr. Williams’ voice even less. The deliberate casualness meant she was going to get bit in the butt, and not in a fun way.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Stay there for the duration. Our house in Old Town was compromised early this morning.”

Compromised. Jennifer was a bit surprised at how unsurprised she felt. “Who did it, sir?”

“Bomb residues tested positive for corn DNA, so this looks like a Vegan job. Or it might be one of Karkossian’s agents using Vegan plastique to help throw the scent off. We’ll know more tomorrow. We have agents on the ground right now investigating it. There’s backup at hand should things become more… complicated. Don’t worry about it now, though. Your job is to take care of Karkossian and get that book back. We’ll handle everything else.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I expect a detailed report tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Williams hung up. Jennifer turned the power off, folded the phone back into its original shape and slipped it into her holster.

She felt tired. No, more than tired—she felt like she’d gone through a few rounds with the world heavyweight champion. She pinched the bridge of her nose again, then rubbed it. She turned around and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She stopped in shock, and looked closer.

She looked like hell. The bits of her close-cropped hair that weren’t plastered against her skull with sweat were sticking up in cowlicks, and her eyes were huge, wild-looking. She tried to smile, but stopped because it transformed her face from sallow and drawn to something children and dogs would—should—run away from.

She turned away from the mirror, disturbed by what it showed her, and walked to one of the paintings in the room, a convincing replica of a Degas ballerina. She paused at arm’s length and pressed her right thumb lightly against the tip of the dancer’s left shoe. A thin beam of light appeared from the depths of the ruffled skirt and scanned her right eye. After a few seconds, there was a soft click and whirr, and the whole thing swung open on silent hinges, revealing the titanium alloy plates that backed the painting and a recessed space within the walls.

The safe was filled with her laptop and assorted useful things, including a few handy gadgets that had been outlawed by the 2068 revisions to the Geneva Conventions. She grabbed her laptop, swung the safe door shut and made her way to the bed.

Just as she settled into a comfortable position and connected to the network via satellite, she realized that the inevitable had finally caught up with her.

She made it to the bathroom just in time. She gagged, then choked; her body seized up and turned inside-out. The acrid taste of bile and partially-digested food brought involuntary tears to her eyes.

She was surprised there wasn’t any blood when she looked down; fuck knows it had hurt badly enough. She flushed but didn’t have enough energy to get back on her feet, so she chose to stare into the swirl of water instead. She silently counted the number of Egyptian missions she’d completed for the agency in the eleven years she had been on its official rolls.

Twelve missions. Twelve blood-soaked, sweat-drenched, nausea-filled missions, with her ass constantly getting nipped at by the goddamn camels in the goddamn cities. The missions in the more remote areas weren’t much better. She did more mental tallying. Two narrow escapes from pissed-off hippopotamuses, another even more narrow escape from a pissed-off leopard, one capsized boat in crocodile-infested waters, and countless run-ins with assorted criminals and vermin who thought a woman traveling alone would be easy prey.

Twelve missions in eleven years. She suspected that the agency deliberately chose her, not only because of her fluency in the regional dialects and her connections to Ramzi and the Prostitutes’ Quarter, but to test her mental and emotional resiliency. The agency excelled at breaking people down so they could build them back up again. They did it as often as they had to, until they had molded the agents just the way they wanted them.

Jennifer wasn’t quite sure which stage they were at with her. She’d lost track.

All she knew was, this particular mission was pushing her closer to the breaking point than any other she could remember.

She was still too tired to move, so she leaned her forehead against the seat, the cold plastic a shock, then a balm on her aching head, and thought about her earlier encounter with Ramzi.

He inspired nothing in her other than mild contempt. She’d made peace with that particular demon years ago. She kept waiting for him to remember, for something about her—her voice, maybe, or a mannerism—to trigger some sort of recognition in him. But nothing ever did. She didn’t know why she expected the old sumbitch to recognize her. The last time he saw her that he knew of, she’d been a tow-headed, chubby eight-year-old. She had grown and stretched beyond all recognition now, her hair a dark reddish-brown. She didn’t even bother speaking Arabic with him.

For some reason, it made her feel as if she were exerting a form of power over him, forcing him to speak English with her.

She sat up with a slight grunt, and forced herself to admit what she’d tried to avoid thinking ever since this mission had started: lodging at a whorehouse resurrected memories she’d much rather leave buried. Unfortunately, with the other safe house blown to shit, the only place in Cairo she could be reasonably sure was secure was a brothel.

The irony was more than a little bitter.

Then, there was Karkossian. She knew she’d have to kill him this time. She couldn’t afford to let him go.

Knowing she had to kill the first and only man she’d ever been in love with put her in a real shitty mood.

Jennifer touched her stomach, running her fingers over it gently, as if it were a safe she was about to crack, and leaned over the toilet experimentally. Nothing. She felt a bit shaky, but it seemed as if the nanobots were back in charity with her. She got to her feet, knees popping, feeling old for the first time in her life.

She had a report to send. And then she’d allow herself a nap. Just a short one.

*****

She couldn’t stop crying, and Kamilah was getting angry with her. It didn’t help that Kamilah herself was on the verge of tears, too, though she was trying to hide it.

“Look at you, crying like a little baby! Stop it! Do you want people to think you’re a baby who cries for no reason? You’re a big girl. Stop crying. Stop. Stop it. You don’t want to look ugly for the uncles.”

At the mention of the uncles, she howled even harder.

“If you don’t stop crying, I’ll have to give you that medicine again,” Kamilah said.

That threat finally stopped her wailing, although her breath still hitched and hiccupped. Tears streamed down her face, hot and slippery, and she didn’t know how to make them stop.

Two nights ago, one of the uncles had sat her on his lap and rubbed her all over her back, and then all over her front, and then the smelly place down there. It was more than any other uncle had tried to do. She’d been frozen by an odd sort of fear, fists clenched against her sides, remembering Ramzi’s threats of a beating if she didn’t allow the uncles to do whatever they wanted.

When the uncle finally left, she’d started crying, though she didn’t know why. She couldn’t stop, and when Ramzi tried to take her to show her to another uncle, she had fought against his grip, thrashing and clawing at him.

He had wrestled her to the ground, sitting on her chest while Kamilah, face tight with anger and some other unidentifiable emotion, forced the most foul-tasting medicine down her throat.

The medicine had made her feel strange. She wasn’t sleeping, but everything felt dream-like. She wasn’t able to move very fast, and she wasn’t able to talk at all. She didn’t even care when the uncles touched her. Hours afterwards, she had thrown up, over and over again.

Seeing the uncles was bad, but seeing the uncles after taking the medicine was worse.

Kamilah grabbed a wad of tissues from the never-ending store tucked under her bra strap and briskly scrubbed at the tears. Once Kamilah was done with the face, she held the tissues under her nose. “Blow your nose,” Kamilah said, voice abrupt but not angry.

She dutifully blew into the wad of damp paper. Her tears finally slowed, then trickled to a stop. She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to cry again.

“This is the last uncle you will have to see,” Kamilah said.

“For tonight?” she asked dully.

“No. This is the last uncle. After this one, Ramzi will decide which House to send you to.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. A rock gathered and settled in her stomach, but the sensation was distant, almost as if Kamilah had given her more of the medicine.

A few minutes later, she was led into Ramzi’s back office. Towers of boxes loomed over her, and she wished she could step behind one of the stacks, close her eyes and turn invisible—or, better yet, disappear completely.

The last uncle leaned back on Ramzi’s worn leather chair, one leg crossed over the other. He was a tall, handsome Ingleezi man, with grey hair streaking his temples. He was dressed in a dark suit and a buttoned-up shirt, despite the heat. A gold watch gleamed on his wrist, and he wore black leather shoes so shiny, she could see a distorted reflection of her face in them.

She stopped a distance away from him, reluctant to get any closer. He didn’t seem to care; he simply sat there and stared at her for the longest time.

“Come,” he finally said in Arabic, and she jumped at the sudden sound. He gestured with his hand. She walked up to him as slowly as she could, counting off the steps in her head. He didn’t seem angry at her deliberate delay; if anything, he looked amused.

When she was by his side, he sat up, uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. He reached out and touched her face, gently stroking her cheeks.

“Have you been crying?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Are you going to start crying again?”

“No,” she whispered.

He smiled. “Too bad.”

The rock in her stomach grew, but she felt confused. She thought crying was a bad thing. Only babies and crazy people cried for no reason like she’d been doing.

The man gave her a lot of the same instructions the other uncles had given her, asking her to turn around, raise her arms, bend over, lift her skirt. Then the dreaded words came:

“Come, sit on my lap.”

Her fists clenched, her body stiffened, but she climbed onto his lap and sat there, trying to imagine she was one of those wooden dummies she’d seen on television. She was a block of wood. She could feel nothing.

He didn’t hurt her. Not yet. He petted her hair, stroked her shoulders and back, ran his hand up and down her arms. She held still, biting her lip.

A block of wood, a block of wood, a block of wood...

His hands reached her legs, fondling her ankles and calves. They moved higher with each stroke. When he reached the smelly place between her thighs, she started trembling, and couldn’t stop. He noticed it, and wound one of his arms around her middle and yanked her close to him. The rock in her stomach grew, and grew. He was petting all around the outside of the smelly place, and it was awful; if he didn’t stop soon, she was going to scream and then puke all over his shiny black shoes.

He took his hand away, and she breathed a silent sigh of relief. From the corner of her eye, she saw him put a finger, in his mouth and suck on it, the one he’d been stroking her with, and she wrinkled her nose in startled disgust. Then, before she quite knew what was happening, he had reached under her skirt, pulled her panties off and shoved the finger inside her.

The invasion was startling; the pain, even more so. She screamed and pushed against the arm holding her down, but he was bigger than her, stronger than her; the arm didn’t give way. And as she squirmed and fought, she moved down just as the hand between her legs moved up. It impaled her against his finger even harder.

The burst of pain was electric. She bellowed. Something deep within her mind snapped, almost like a restraint she had never known was there. She flailed, then grabbed the arm that was wrapped around her middle, grabbed on to it tight and flexed as hard as she could, and felt something within her flex as well. His arm broke with a sharp crack, as easily as a dry stick of wood, and now it was his turn to scream.

She scrambled off his lap and threw him on the floor; he weighed no more than a doll. He lay there, nursing his broken arm, eyes streaming with the pain. His mouth formed words she couldn’t hear above the roaring in her ears and she launched herself at him, going for the throat, tearing at gristle and flesh, and then she realized she was screaming unintelligible words in a guttural language she didn’t know.

Blood rained down on the both of them in the storage room.

*****

Jennifer opened her eyes. She was breathing hard. Her arms and hands throbbed. Something tickled her nose, and she sneezed. She looked down.

She’d torn apart one of the pillows on her bed, her fingers still curled in claws and digging into the filling.

Another nightmare, another dead pillow. She was a menace to bedding everywhere.

She unkinked her fingers, flexing them and wincing a little at the ache. She pushed the tattered velvet and goosedown off her, then sat up, head feeling thick, the knot of unshed tears and trapped screams a hard weight in her throat.

The dream was an old one. The man changed from time to time. Sometimes it was one of the pimps, other times it was the man who had bought her at the House of Budding Flowers. No matter how they started out, they always ended the same way: with her tearing the man’s throat out and screaming words in an ugly, unknown language.

As far as she could remember, none of the pimps had stuck anything in her while checking her over. That would’ve damaged the goods, so to speak. Most of them had limited their touching to quick, almost impersonal examinations, like a woman examining a dubious leg of lamb at the market.

She thought of how one of the pimps had grabbed her arm, pinched at it and made disapproving noises about how plump she was. It didn’t occur to her until years later that he was haggling with Ramzi, which amused her. So much for the fatted calf.

Her memories of what had happened at the House of Budding Flowers were chaotic at best, and always had been. Only discrete snapshots and sensations were left, but there was no continuity to the pictures. It was as if somebody had taken a box of photographs, discarded half of the pile and then jumbled the rest up hopelessly. She remembered the smell of his breath, rank with alcohol and cigar smoke. She remembered what it had felt like for him to lick at her neck. She didn’t remember everything he did to her. She didn’t remember what his hands felt like.

She would never, as long as she lived, forget his face, his blunt, even features. She remembered how unexpectedly kind his smile had been, not at all sinister, which had given her hope at first. She learned fast enough what lay behind that gentle smile. Eventually, she’d passed out from the pain.

When she woke up, he was a naked, torn heap, blood streaking the walls and pooling on the floor. Mr. Williams stood over the body, dressed entirely in black, stocking mask drawn back from his long, lean face and a smoking gun in his hands.

He’d looked at her for the longest time, cool grey eyes assessing her, and she’d stared right back, feeling blank, resigned. After a few minutes, he’d wrapped her in a blanket, picked her up and carried her out the window with him. A guard along the wall had noticed the strange man and his unusual burden, but Mr. Williams had dispatched him with quiet efficiency.

He hadn’t said a single word through the whole ordeal. She wouldn’t have been able to talk back, anyway. All the screaming had broken her voice, and for days afterwards, she was unable to speak above a hoarse squeak.

Jennifer rubbed her eyes and kicked herself free of the covers. She glanced at the clock and did a double-take. She’d slept for almost twelve hours.

She never slept for that long. And now she was running late.

She hopped out of bed and padded to the bathroom. As she washed her face, she stopped again and stared at her reflection. Really, she looked awful. Her pale skin looked almost green under the lights, and her face…something was odd about her face.

She squinted and leaned closer to the mirror, trying to figure out what exactly was wrong.

Her reflection smiled at her, mouth filled with needle-like teeth.

She recoiled and stepped back, but too late. Her reflection reached out, grabbed her wrist in a crushing grip, and pulled.

Chapter 2

Of all the days to leave the sword at home...

Kahiro gripped the gun in his hands, bracing himself against the tremors shaking the floor, palms sweating a little. Demons hated sunlight, but it wasn’t fatal to them. They were capable of showing up at high noon if they had to. This one apparently hadn’t been too bothered at the thought of gaining a bit of a tan.

Picturing the geyser of blood that had erupted from Ramzi’s body, Kahiro fought the urge to hunch his neck protectively.

The deep rumbling abruptly stopped. A soughing sound replaced it, like a massive beast breathing. Hot wind stirred against Kahiro’s neck and cheek. He relaxed his muscles as much as he could and unfocused his gaze just slightly, all his senses alert, looking into the Middle Distance the way Andreas the Greek had taught him so many years ago.

The slight distortion he caught from the corner of his eye warned him. He dove for the floor, rolled onto his back and fired off a few shots, aiming for the faint ripple above him. A deep-throated roar tore through the air, the demon’s rage and pain a palpable pressure in the room. The ripple retreated.

Kahiro scrambled back on his feet, dizzy with a potent combination of adrenaline and relief. His silver hollowpoint bullets filled with holy water worked on some demons, but not all; he was glad that this particular demon was susceptible.

He noticed a large puddle of dark brown fluid on the floor. Seemed like he’d done more than nick it. Good. The more it bled, the more effort it would take for it to remain invisible.

He glanced around, trying to keep his gaze relaxed while fully opening the hidden eye, the one that allowed him to see things that would drive normal people insane.

There, to the left.

He took a few more shots at the faint, warped shape. Some of them hit their mark, judging by the enraged howl, but he tried too hard to focus on it. It completely disappeared from his field of vision.

He looked around, forcing his gaze to unfocus again. He couldn’t see anything, though the sound of its breathing filled the room. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. He had to fight the urge to hunch his neck again.

A slight ripple appeared right next to him. He jumped away, but not quite in time. Something invisible and extremely sharp made a long, shallow slice along his torso.

Instinct made him chop down his left arm down while chanting an incantation of power. Warmth tingled in his palms as a burst of energy surged up through the soles of his feet and down his arms, and his forearm made jarring contact with something hard and burning hot. With an audible crack, the demon’s limb broke. The pain in his own arm hit him at about the same time a violent blow to his side sent him flying through the air and slamming into a pile of boxes stacked against the wall.

Kahiro lay on the floor, surrounded by crumpled cardboard and limp from the after-effects of the incantation. He tried to catch his breath, praying he hadn’t broken any bones. By some miracle, he’d managed to hold on to his gun.

Across the store, the air shivered violently, distorting his view.

It was moving towards him: a massive, half-coherent shape. Baleful red eyes appeared and disappeared one moment, a hint of silvery scales the next. Suggestions of strangely-jointed limbs snapped in and out of view.  Its roaring was an unholy boom now, the vibrations shaking pottery, statues and fake papyrus scrolls off the shelves and onto the floor.

Forcing himself to scramble to his feet, Kahiro raised his gun and shot at the coalescing shape. It shifted and ducked, but its progress was steady. Blackish trickles of blood marked where Kahiro had hit it.

Then, for a brief second, its whole body manifested and came into clear focus. It towered about eight feet tall. Its heavy, jackal-like head had a mouth filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth. Its hide was covered in tough silver scales, and its hands were a nightmare forest of blades, though its right arm dangled uselessly by its side, a jagged piece of bone poking through the skin.

Kahiro took aim at its left eye and pulled the trigger.

And missed. Instead, the demon’s cheek and lower jaw exploded in a spray of blood, bone, flesh and gristle. The roaring abruptly stopped, and it fell backwards.

The next trigger pull yielded nothing but a hollow click. “Ah, shit,” he said, as he dropped the gun and ran. He’d have to find another way to put the demon’s eyes out; either that, or behead it. There were other ways to kill a demon, but Kahiro was no necromancer.

He looked around frantically for a weapon, any weapon. At this point, he’d even settle for a pair of nail scissors, but saw nothing except useless bric-a-brac. He could hear the demon moving behind him, pulling itself back on its feet. The bullets had taken their toll, and its movements were sluggish. But then, Kahiro wasn’t in top form, himself. He was quite sure he’d cracked some ribs because breathing and moving felt like holy hell. His whole front felt warm and wet; he was afraid to look down to see exactly how much blood he’d lost from the cut the demon had made. He could move his left arm, but the resulting sensation wasn’t exactly what one would consider pleasant.

He glanced behind, only to see a shredded face snarling at him, almost within arm’s reach.

With a yell compounded of terror and exhaustion, he set his shoulder against the nearest shelf and threw his weight against it. With a long-drawn creak, the shelf tipped and crashed down on the demon. It bellowed and flailed, but Kahiro had caught it by surprise. It went down.

He knew the flimsy shelves wouldn’t pin it for long, though. He ran, panting, heart racing, looking around for a weapon, any weapon…

Then he saw the sword.

It was a genuine antique, one of the very, very few displayed in the store proper. It was kept in a locked glass case against the wall and Ramzi had claimed it dated back to the time of the Prophet. Kahiro sincerely doubted it, but the sword’s pedigree hardly interested him now. Picking up a large stone carving of a fertility idol, he swung it against the case, praying Ramzi hadn’t invested in bulletproof glass.

He hadn’t, may the Gods bless his stingy old soul. Sweeping away the broken shards with his sleeve, Kahiro yanked it out of the case and clumsily pulled it free from the scabbard. Light and gracefully balanced, it had a long, thin, highly-polished blade, with just the slightest curve near the tip. Kahiro could have wept with gratitude. He just hoped its edge was as sharp as it looked.

He hefted the sword and turned around to find the demon only a few feet away. It was staggering a little as it walked, all efforts at maintaining its invisibility gone. Its body was torn and bleeding where the bullets had hit it, but even as Kahiro watched, the wounds were slowly, gradually healing. Shattered pieces of bone and fang gleamed white against the wine-dark meat on the ruined left side of its face. Its pupilless red eyes glared into Kahiro’s, and he felt an almost crushing pressure in his mind as the demon spoke.

“You’ll pay, maggot,” it said in the Old Tongue. Its words were slurred, but the power of its voice still reverberated within Kahiro’s very bones. “I will make you watch as I tear your flesh away, piece by piece.”

It had gathered itself and leapt into the air before the last words left its mouth.

Kahiro knew there was no way to avoid it. Calling out another incantation of power, he braced his legs, grabbed the sword with both hands despite the shrieking pain it caused his left arm and swung with all of his strength just as the demon came crashing down on him.

Being trapped under the demon felt not unlike being crushed by a blazing kiln—if kilns had scales, teeth and razorblade fingers. The sword had bitten deeply into the demon’s neck, and Kahiro, energy from the incantation surging through his body, pain in his left arm temporarily gone, pushed and sawed his way through. Scalding, foul-smelling blood gushed down and made the sword grip slippery. The demon gurgled and snapped with what was left of its muzzle. Kahiro gasped and flinched as its hand flailed, then gripped his right arm. Through the euphoria of the incantation, he could feel the blades sinking into his bicep, trying to pull his arm away.

Fuck. This is going to hurt.

The brief surge of power the incantation produced was fading, bringing with it the unnatural exhaustion that almost always followed. Kahiro gritted his teeth and ripped his arm free, grunting at the pain of torn skin and muscle. With the last of his reserves, he pushed the blade all the way through, screaming with the effort.

The demon’s head thumped on the floor next to them, and Kahiro averted his face from the spray of blood. He kicked, pushed and wriggled out from under the monstrous body pinning him, but once freed, he had didn’t have enough energy to crawl more than a short distance away.

Blackness swallowed him.

***

Kahiro woke up slowly. He wasn’t quite sure where he was. He faced a dirty white wall, and he was laying on a multitude of lumpy objects. He registered that his head was buzzing, and that he hurt. Everywhere.

He tried to sit up and huffed in pain. His ribs. His right arm. And Gods, his left arm. He could barely move it. What had he done to it?

He turned around and saw the demon’s headless body. He stared at it for several seconds, feeling numb inside even as his body felt too much, and remembered the fight. He couldn’t have been unconscious for too long; the imps hadn’t arrived yet to collect the corpse.

He looked down at himself. His shirt and jacket were sliced open and black with blood, both his and the demon’s. Ramzi’s too, no doubt. His face was crusted with the stuff. He struggled to his feet, trying not to allow the darkness lingering in the periphery of his vision overtake him again.

Suddenly, the sound of wings and a noise not unlike chattering crows filled the store.

They fluttered down from the ceiling, poured down the walls, crawled over ruined shelves and strewn boxes. Dozens of them, none of them taller than his knee, most of them a good deal shorter. Pitch-black skin, narrow faces with hungry, hollow cheeks that were at odds with their squat, sturdy bodies, wide mouths filled with sharp little teeth, faceted eyes on swiveling stalks. Many of them had bat-like wings that allowed them to glide through the air and carried them for short distances.

The imps had arrived.

They flocked around the body of the dead demon, crying out to each other, poking and prodding, lifting parts of its body to test the weight. Two of them picked up its head and hefted it onto their shoulders, staggering under their burden.

The leader, distinguished by its unusually large set of wings, toddled up to Kahiro. Its eyes blinked slowly, stalks swiveling to take in the full sight of his battered body.

“You!” it said in the Old Tongue. Its voice was unusually deep for a creature so small. “I should have known you were the one to slay Bil’Azmul.”

“Greetings, Shum’Miznash,” he replied. “Did you perhaps think somebody else in Cairo was capable of killing it?”

“No, no,” Shum’Miznash said grudgingly. “And I’m sure Bil’Azmul did not expect to find you here when he was tasked with taking care of the short, old one.” It sighed gustily, and a very strong smell of rotten fish reached Kahiro’s nose. He was faintly shocked he could smell anything still, given the stink of the demon and its blood. For the first time since the whole mess started, his stomach roiled.

“Do you know who had set Bil’Azmul on this task?” he asked abruptly.

Shum’Miznash smiled, exposing yellowed fangs. “No, Demon Slayer. All I know is that he had been tasked to kill the old man if he talked to certain people. But even if I knew, I would not tell the likes of you.”

Kahiro shrugged. “Fair enough. I supposed you want your usual payment?”

“That would be nice, yes,” Shum’Miznash replied. It held out its four-fingered hand, small and delicate as a tulip. Paying the imps for their services was a courtesy that guaranteed they wouldn’t swarm the demon-killer. They weren’t hard to kill, but there were many of them, and they were fast, with retractable claws hidden in their deceptively fragile-looking fingers. Their bites were also legendary for their nastiness; falling dead from septicemia a few hours after an untreated imp bite was the rule, not the exception.

Kahiro dug around in his pocket, wincing in pain. He pulled out a gold coin and flipped it at the imp, who plucked it from the air with great dexterity. It tested it briefly with its teeth, then bowed in a mocking salaam. With a guttural cry to its underlings, it turned around and walked back towards the body., which a few dozen imps had hoisted onto their shoulders. When their leader reached them, they started trudging away, singing a piercing funeral dirge for the fallen demon. Kahiro watched as they brought the body and head towards the back of the store, where they disappeared through the wall, one by one. The imps who weren’t helping with the carrying scurried up the walls and disappeared through the ceiling.

Kahiro slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, drained by his brief conversation with the imp. He didn’t have it in him to move at the moment. His mind, however, was now re-living the events, jumping from point to point.

A demon attack in broad daylight was rare. Bil’Azmul must have been presented with strong inducement indeed to risk the agony of sunlight. It was difficult enough as it was to bend a demon to one’s will without throwing a daytime mission into the bargain.

That wasn’t the part that really disturbed Kahiro, though. What shook him most was how there had been no warning.

Ramzi was greedy, but he wasn’t stupid. Working in the business he was in, he had the shop and his house well warded against demons and spirits. Even if the demon had been powerful enough to breach the wards, its entry should have at least tripped one of the many alarms Ramzi had placed all over the store. It hadn’t.

Why hadn’t it? Somebody must have removed or deactivated the wards and alarms. Somebody human. Somebody who really knew what they were doing, because Ramzi had wards that prevented tampering with the demon wards as well.

The question was, who?

Then it hit him.

The strange Ingleezi whore.

The coincidence was just a little too neat. Minutes after she left the store, empty-handed and seemingly in a hurry, Ramzi was dead. Kahiro’s instincts were screaming at him again, and this time, he didn’t ignore them. She was the key. He still didn’t know what it was about her that bothered him, but now, it didn’t matter. He had to find her.

He dug through his pocket again and found his cell phone, a tiny, sleek black thing. It was completely undamaged despite the brawl--he’d made a point of buying a model that guaranteed itself as being virtually bomb-proof. He flicked it open and put it against his ear. “Power on,” he said, and heard two soft beeps as the voice recognition software registered that it truly was him and turned the phone on. “Andreas,” he said, and heard the phone dialing.

Andreas picked up almost immediately, his gravelly voice music to Kahiro’s ears. “What is it? Where are you? I’ve had a very, very bad feeling about you for the past hour.”

“I’m at Ramzi the Flea’s shop. I just got done with a fight.” Kahiro thumped his head back to the wall and closed his eyes. His head was starting to swim again.

“A fight?” Andreas’ voice sharpened considerably. “Who did you fight? Surely not Ramzi?”

“No, not Ramzi. He’s dead, by the way. Beheaded by a demon. An upper-echelon beast, but not an Elemental or an Angel. Shum’Miznash said its name was Bil’Azmul.”

Andreas sighed, then coughed. Emphysema could be such a bitch. “I’ve heard of it. Big, ugly, jackal-headed bastard. Can turn invisible at will. And you didn’t bring your sword, did you?”

Kahiro chuckled bitterly. “No. It’s broad daylight. Ramzi’s shop is warded. Or at least, it used to be warded. I thought I was safe, which was stupid of me. Something big is going on, Andreas. To send a demon like Bil’Azmul in broad daylight merely to kill a dried-up peddler like Ramzi…the person who has the book is obviously not taking any chances. And he’s afraid of something.”

Andreas sighed again. “What a fucking mess. You need help getting out?”

Kahiro laughed outright. “Yes, you can say that. Bring the car. I don’t think I can even walk right now. Oh, and Andreas?”

“Yes?”

“There was a strange woman who was in the store right before me. Tall, Ingleezi, dressed like a whore from the House of Suffering. She seemed to be in the pistol-whipping discipline. Carried a big plastic gun. Very pale-skinned, probably a redhead. I need you to track her down for me. Talk to Edouard, he owes me a few favors, and he has more connections with the House of Suffering than most.”

Andreas cursed. “You know how many tall Ingleezi dominatrixes there are in Cairo?” he demanded.

“Yes, I have a good idea. This one is new, though. And young.”

“You know she might not even be a whore?” Andreas asked.

“It has occurred to me, yes. But she has the tattoo. Somebody in the House sanctioned that tattoo, even if it’s a fake. She wouldn’t have made it two steps in the quarter alive if it hadn’t been sanctioned. Either way, somebody in the House of Suffering knows who she is.

“And I intend to find out.”

Yeah, I’ve never tried to write a drawn-out action sequence before. COULD YOU TELL? Feel free to tell me how much this sucked in the comments. Anyway, stay tuned for the concluding part of Chapter 2, coming soon. Ish.

Click here to go straight to part 2 of Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Egypt.

If there was one thing Jennifer hated, it was fucking Egypt. Especially Cairo.

The crowds. The noise. The stench. The thieves. The beggars, who were more often than not thieves in disguise. The food—really, was a piece of roast mutton or beef that didn’t still have hanks of skin and fur still sticking to it too much to ask for? It was enough to turn Jennifer into a Vegan.

And the camels. Oh Lord, the camels. The gas crisis of ‘79 had hit Egypt particularly hard, and much of the populace had decided to go back to using the filthy beasts for their transportation needs. As far as Jennifer was concerned, though, the only good camel was a camel roasting on an open fire. They smelled evil, they were surly, they took up way too much room, they spit, and worst of all, some of them seemed to have a regular fetish for rubber, which they liked to bite without warning.

Not convenient for an agent who always kept a pair of rubber gloves or two in her back pocket.

Most of all, Jennifer hated the heat.

God. The heat.

The heat in Egypt had a personality all of its own. It was a pushy lover—no, a strident, nagging mother. It insisted you sit up and pay attention to it now. It enveloped you, smothered you, swallowed you whole and then spit you back out, covered in a slime of sweat. And you had to brace yourself for more of the same the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Jennifer was decidedly in Egypt, and not only that, she had lost Karkossian’s trail yet again. Consequently, she was feeling out of charity with the world, and Ramzi the Flea just happened to be a handy. Literally. In the tiny, crowded back office of his shop, lit only by the few rays that managed to filter through the small, dirt-encrusted windows, she had him against the wall and dangling a foot off the ground. Her .44 Toshiba Motivatrix—God bless the Japanese, it came with a built-in electronic silencer and it took decent digital pictures—was jammed under his chin. Ramzi looked just about as unhappy as Jennifer felt.

Good.

“OK, darlin’” she said, her Texas drawl more pronounced than usual, the way it always was when she was pissed off, “Would you care to repeat that again? I think the heat must’ve affected my hearing, ‘cause I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear you right.”

“Madame, I assure I don’t know any—glurk!” Jennifer hitched him even higher against the wall and pressed the gun lovingly against his Adam’s apple. Ramzi the Flea had come by his nickname honestly: tiny and wizened, he couldn’t have stood higher than 4’10,” a whole twelve inches shorter than she was, and that was without the three-inch heels she was currently sporting. His face was starting to turn purple; the resemblance to a prune was uncanny. She smiled.

“Ramzi, hon, why you gotta piss me off? You know how much I fucking hate this place. You know how much I fucking hate the heat, especially when there’s no air conditioning anywhere. And you know—you gotta know—how much I hate coming into the Prostitutes’ Quarter to look up your shriveled little ass for some information that I know damn well you have. Now, maybe the heat has affected your hearing too, so I’m going to ask again, real nice: Where is the Book of Angels, and what does Karkossian want with it?”

Ramzi’s mouth open and closed, but only a faint whistling sound came out. His thin hands flapped in the air and plucked ineffectively at her. Jennifer eased up the pressure on the gun. He took an unsteady breath. “Madame. The book.” He paused and panted.

“Yes? The book…” she said encouragingly.

“It is.” Another pause, another panting breath.

“Baby, I don’t have all day,” she said and started pressing the gun against his throat again.

Something about the look in her eyes must’ve twigged him on to the fact that at this point, she would’ve happily blown his head off and looked for another informant, one who wasn’t as recalcitrant. “The book!” he squeaked. “The book, it is a very bad book Madame and it does not like women so please Madame if you forgive a worm like me to say this, if you even touch that book bad things will happen, very very very bad things, Madame, and I do not know why Karkossian wants it but he is a very very very very very"—another big, shuddering breath—"very very very bad man.”

“Excellent, darlin’. This is a start. But come on, now. ‘A very bad book?’ What kind of bad? Mein Kampf bad? Or Bulwer-Lytton bad? And it doesn’t like women? What the hell does that even mean?”

Ramzi looked up at her, large brown eyes swimming with misery. Jennifer almost felt sorry for him. Almost, if she hadn’t known what a ruthless, evil, conniving old bastard he was.

She did spend the first eight years of her life with him, after all.

“Madame,” he choked out, “The book. It is… It has the power to—to summon things. And it does not like women. Every woman who has touched it, Madame, has died horribly and in great pain. The last woman who was foolish enough to do so, they could not find enough pieces of her to find out who she was.”

“You’re shittin’ me. Come on, now, for real.” She tightened her hold on him and hitched him a bit higher.

“No, no, I do not lie, Madame,” he croaked, hands going to the back of his neck in a vain attempt to loosen her grip. “Karkossian has the book, and it can only mean he wants to summon the Elder Gods, the Sleeping Ones. No other reason to seek the Book of Angels. He took it to the ruins of Karnak, and that is very very very very very…”

“Bad,” she finished for him. “Right. I get the picture.” She sighed, stepped back and opened her hand. Gravity did the rest. Ramzi landed in an ungainly heap on the floor, leaving an impact crater in the thick dust and knocking over a stack of boxes stamped “Made in Taiwan” and “Fragile.” The topmost box split open, and dozens of massive pink dildos cascaded out. Jennifer’s eyes flickered to the spill of sparkly ersatz phalluses on the filthy floor. Her mouth quirked up, then flattened again as she pressed her gun against the side of Ramzi’s head. Caught in mid-scramble, he froze and looked up at her with a wounded expression.

She lifted him to his feet with a none-too-gentle yank, gun trained on him the whole time. “OK, Ramzi,” she said, shoving him back against the wall. “I’ll bite. Tell me about this woman-hating book and the Gods it can supposedly summon.”

*****

There was something odd about the Ingleezi whore.

Kahiro absently smoothed the folds of his beige linen pants and contemplated the glass of iced coffee set on the marble table in front of him. He was in a small, discreet and insanely expensive coffee shop. The coffee shop was insanely expensive because each cup of coffee came with extras. One of the extras was currently purring Arabic love-phrases in his ear and rubbing his shoulders, while breasts that owed more of their shape to art than nature pressed against his back.

But Kahiro wasn’t interested in companionship—not at the moment. He was in here only because it happened to be across the street from Ramzi the Flea’s place of business. The table he occupied had a most excellent view of the front door.

Ramzi liked to call himself an antique dealer, but it was common knowledge that the job description was merely a thin disguise for the mind-boggling array of sex toys, pornographic holograms and dirty DVDs he sold from behind the counter. What most people did not know was that Ramzi actually did specialize in antiquities—antiquities of a very specific sort. Connoisseurs and collectors of certain kinds of arcana would sometimes show up at Ramzi’s door, always at odd hours of the night, leaving with the customary brown paper packages.

The contents sometimes vibrated or shook, but they owed nothing of their movement to batteries.

Other times, the bold or the vengeful would go into the shop to consult with Ramzi about texts and amulets, statues and lamps. Objects of power, objects of summoning.

A few days ago, Kahiro received some reports, very disturbing reports, about the ruins of Karnak. Odd lights at night. Howls and screams, quickly muffled. Strange, eldritch shapes that dissipated before one’s eyes could focus on them. A book that could summon demons and gods. That last tidbit got him moving, and moving fast, but he wouldn’t do anything until certain details were confirmed. It was his job to sift out fact from rampant speculation.

He was, after all, the foremost demon slayer in all of Cairo.

The coffeegirl had grown bolder and was now nipping at Kahiro’s ear. He moved away with a subtle motion while reaching back and petting the girl’s hair, feigning encouragement while disengaging himself. The girl just plastered herself against him again, of course, but at least she was no longer licking and biting at him.

The Ingleezi whore….

She had looked magnificent. She was tall, very tall, dressed in a sequined bandeau and a tiny, gauzy skirt. Her legs stretched to eternity in her silver high heels, and she walked as if she owned the world, shoulders thrown back, every movement sinuous and arrogant. Her skin was ivory, with the pale pinkish overtones of a redhead. As required of all prostitutes who ventured into the streets, her head had been covered with a veil, but there were intriguing hints of an assertive jaw and chin beneath the thin silk.

The big, gaudy plastic gun holstered on her side surprised him a little, but it all made sense when he spotted the scorpion tattoo on her right upper arm. She was a member of the House of Suffering, and a high-ranking member, if not one of the procuresses themselves, if she was allowed out unaccompanied in broad daylight.

What was the discordant element that had caught his eye? Was it her clothing? The way she moved?

Just as he felt a revelation tickling at the back of his mind, the Ingleezi whore swung out of Ramzi’s shop and walked down the street, long strides eating up the road. Kahiro immediately set the coffeegirl away—she was perilously close to his ear again—and absent-mindedly dug out two hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, tossing them on her table. She cried out with delight and clutched at him. He barely noticed. He was watching the Ingleezi, and she was almost out of his line of sight. Cursing under his breath, he shook himself free of the coffeegirl’s enthusiastic embrace and sprinted through the shop and out the door.

She was just turning the corner into an alleyway, seemingly headed towards the more upscale brothels in the western part of the Prostitutes’ Quarter. Kahiro was torn. Should he follow her? Could he catch up without making it too obvious that he was following her? But why go through all that trouble for a whore who may or may not have something strange about her?

With a bitter twist of the mouth and instincts screaming, he let her go and walked into Ramzi the Flea’s domain.

*****

A bell tinkled overhead as Kahiro opened the door. The smell of overheated dust, plastic and rubber hit him like a punch in the face. The store was a crowded, dark oven. Air conditioning, since it used up so much fuel, was affordable only to the finest of establishments, and this shop couldn’t be considered “fine” by any stretch of the imagination.

Ramzi was at his regular spot behind the counter in the back corner of the store, surrounded by boxes and piles of cheap—and likely fake—antikas. He didn’t look up at the bell, just kept tapping away at a laptop. His face, which always had a look of faint disgust to it, as if he’d just swallowed a dung beetle by mistake, looked even more disgruntled than usual. He was rubbing at his throat as if it hurt.

Interesting.

“Assalaamu’alaikum.”

Ramzi looked up, and his eyes narrowed into slits. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want, Japanese dog?” His voice, normally high-pitched and raspy, sounded downright hoarse.

Very interesting.

“Nothing more than what I always want, uncle,” Kahiro said.

“I have nothing,” Ramzi replied curtly. “I am not feeling well. Go away. If you come back tomorrow or the next day, I might have something of interest to you.”

“No, uncle, I think you have something of interest to me right now.”

Ramzi gazed at him with deep suspicion, head dipping a little like a turtle trying to draw his head in. “Oh?” he asked, hand leaving his throat to tug nervously at his green taqiyah. It looked even dirtier than usual, as if someone had ground it into the floor recently.

Kahiro walked up to the counter, navigating his way through the crooked aisles of boxes and shelves. Ramzi shrank back even more.

Very, very interesting.

When Kahiro reached Ramzi, he casually leaned his right hip against the counter and crossed his arms. “I’ve heard some stories lately, uncle.”

“People who do what you do always hear stories. What is it to me?”

“These stories are a bit different than the usual. For one thing, many things seem to have happened, but no blood has been spilled. Not that my sources can tell, at any rate. And for another thing...” Kahiro paused and watched Ramzi’s face intently, then continued, “It’s all taking place in Karnak.”

Ramzi’s mouth tightened. “Karnak? What does anything that happens in that accursed place have to do with a poor antika seller in Cairo?”

Lying old bastard, Kahiro thought, and smiled internally with grim enjoyment.

“Ah, see, these odd events are related to a certain book. A book of great power, it seems. I am curious—” his hand snaked out and caught Ramzi’s wrist just as the wily old goat launched himself off his stool—"as to what you know about this book. What it is, where it comes from, what it can do.”

Ramzi thrashed briefly in Kahiro’s grasp, reaching with his other hand for the gun he kept under the counter, but Kahiro simply grabbed the flailing arm and yanked him, hard. Ramzi’s torso hit the glass case with a sharp thud. He yelped in pain, then started spewing a filthy but undeniably creative stream of invective.

“Well yes,” Kahiro said when Ramzi paused for breath, “We both know my mother was a whore, but I doubt she did any of those things you’re claiming she did with either camels or swine. Unless you paid her a visit, uncle.” He transferred both of Ramzi’s wrists into one hand and reached into his pocket with the other. He threw a wad of bills onto the counter; he did not bother looking at how many or what denominations they were, but judging by the way Ramzi’s eyes widened, it was a respectable amount.

“So, uncle, are we ready to talk? You don’t like the Japanese, I know, and you like half-breeds even less, but we have been doing business for many, many years. You know you can trust me to treat you fairly. Tell me the information I need to know, and there will be more where this came from.” He tightened his grip on Ramzi’s wrists until he felt the bones compressing. “You know I don’t like hurting humans, but if I have to, you also know I am more well-versed in pain than most...”

Ramzi’s mouth worked soundlessly, his skinny body trembling with rage. He glared at Kahiro, who smiled gently, even fondly, back. After a few moments of silence, he spat out, “Fine! On your head and mine be it. The book, it is the Book of Angels. It is in Karnak.”

Shock nearly made Kahiro release Ramzi. “What?”

Ramzi smiled. “Yes. A crazy Ingleezi man came to me and claimed he found it in the private collection of some Israeli warlord, and he wanted instructions.” He wheezed out an ugly chuckle. “Instructions!”

The Book of Angels.

Instructions.

Kahiro felt numb. He’d heard of it, but he thought it had been destroyed hundreds of years ago, during the First Crusades—that was how the story went, anyway. He didn’t want to think right now about how the rest of the story went.

“Are you sure it was the book?” Kahiro asked, leaning in closer. “Did you actually see it? It’s a fake, surely. According to everything we know, the book was destroyed.”

Ramzi snorted. “Yes, I saw it. He brought the cursed book into my shop. At first I thought the same as you, that it was a fake. But he put it on my table, and when I touched it...” He closed his eyes briefly and shuddered, his face tight with horror. “It was not fake. I could feel the power in the book as soon as I laid hands on it. It burns to touch it, but it is almost impossible to let go. And you see… things. The man had carried it in a lead box, but even then, you could see in his eyes that he had touched the book a few too many times.”

He sagged in Kahiro’s grip. “Are you happy now? He told me there would be consequences if I told anyone about this. But then you tell me there will be consequences if I don’t tell. I am an old man, a poor, simple antika seller, and for this I get beaten and strangled and abused...”

“Yes, yes,” Kahiro said, cutting off Ramzi’s flood of self-pity. “What instructions did this man want? And did you give them to him?”

“Stupid Japanese dog! He wanted to know how to summon the Elder Gods. I didn’t want to tell him, but he was...persuasive. Even more persuasive than you.” Ramzi bared his teeth and wheezed out another chuckle. “I told him all I knew, gave him all the scrolls I had, but I warned him that my knowledge was not complete, that he needed to seek...”

Ramzi never got to finish his sentence.

It wasn’t until the head thumped dully on the floor and the warm arterial spray hit Kahiro’s face that he fully realized what had happened. The cut looked unusually clean, as if sliced with a very sharp blade. He let go of Ramzi’s completely limp arms, allowing the headless body to collapse like a sack of meat. He wiped his sleeves over his eyes to clear the blood off, turning and looking around the shop but seeing nothing.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck…

Then he noticed the smell of blood, sulfur and rotting meat filling the shop. Deep, booming vibrations shook the floor and rattled the shelves, vibrations that felt disturbingly like laughter.

“Oh fuck,” Kahiro said, and pulled out his gun.

Wasn’t that fun, kids? Stay tuned next week for chapter 2!

Notes:

1. Kahiro calls Ramzi the Flea “uncle.” This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re related by blood. In a lot of Asian cultures, calling someone older than you “uncle” and “auntie” is a sign of respect. Unless the person already has an honorific (mother, father, teacher, etc.), you call them “uncle” or “auntie” if you want to address them politely. This can get confusing for people who aren’t used to this, because it’d seem like everyone is related to everyone else. I have no idea if Arabic cultures in general or Egyptian cultures in particular do this. I just stuck it in there because I could. If anyone knows for sure, do let me know; I’m curious but way too lazy to look it up.

2. A taqiyah is a small hat-like thing many Arabic Muslim men wear. This page has a decent explanation of its function and a picture of what it looks like.