Then the kid made a small gesture, and one of the crew stripped the hood off the captive, revealing long, stringy black hair that hung to the ground, swarthy skin, and a muzzle clamped over the lower part of his face.
“Jesus,” Zel whispered.
Gabriel flinched at the curse—or maybe it was a plea—but he couldn’t look away.
As the oldster had said, Stamp did have a point to make, but Gabriel wasn’t sure how much it had to do with keeping the Badlands safe. Maybe it had more to do with how Stamp treated those who needed taming . . . like his neighbors.
The kid nodded, and one of the crew, a guy with an old-fashioned miner’s hat and a blond braid winding down his back, took out what looked to be a brass dagger.
“This
thing
,” Stamp said, “is what’s been sneaking around these parts.”
With a grin, the braided man pressed the brass blade to the captive’s forehead, and as flesh steamed, the victim convulsed, shutting his eyes tight, flopping around as the muzzle cut off his cry.
The crew member yanked the dagger away, but not before the oldster came to step in front of Zel, who’d groaned while lurching forward, as if she intended to stop this torture session. Sammy helped hold her back.
“Now open that monster’s eyes,” Stamp said to his crewmen.
The employees enthusiastically forced the captive’s lids open so that his eyes were big and glaring.
Eyes that were a spangled black—as startling and bright and endless as the old star-ridden sky.
Gabriel’s mind raced. What was this man? Better yet . . . what was this monster Stamp had caught?
And why hadn’t Gabriel been able to identify it right away?
At Stamp’s next gesture, the blade-wielding crew member pressed the dagger to the captive’s neck, creating another sickening hiss. The other thugs laughed, as if this were a prelude to some live carnerotica.
Stamp’s low voice scraped over Gabriel. “Do you know what this piece of work is, Mr. Gabriel?”
“I’m not . . . sure.”
The kid paused, as if deciding whether Gabriel was lying. Then he said, “A demon.”
Gabriel tried not to respond. He’d never knowingly met a demon before. Shouldn’t he have some kind of violent instinctual reaction to or sympathy for a fellow monster . . . or was it all too true that the other kinds were too hard to identify?
Worse yet, should he be glad it’d been caught because it was Gabriel’s rival in the race to survive off the remaining humans in this area of the fractured earth? Should he
want
his competitor’s death?
He wasn’t sure if vampires were supposed to be allies or enemies with other preters. According to the vague pamphlet his creator had given him, vampires had long ago nursed a preferred avoidance for anything else supernatural. But the rules had changed during the scramble for survival. Every creature did its best to keep to itself out of necessity, never exposing what it was so that it might test any theories of who were friends and who were foes.
As the torture continued, Stamp put his hands on his hips again, as if taking in a sporting event like mash baseball or killfight. “When one of my me glad itt sight of this loser prowling around Cedric Orville’s gutted body last night, he thought he saw it changing shape, from man to red cloud and then back again.”
As the demon flailed under the brass knife once more, Gabriel strived to appear untouched by the creature’s pain. It’d been out there, somewhere, last night, maybe even yards away from Gabriel and Chaplin, and he’d never even known it.
Wild things, he thought. What else did the New Badlands host? No wonder the community stayed close to home.
He managed to respond to Stamp. “A shapeshifting demon.”
“Yes, but it’s not shifting now; brass can bind and harm this one. And also?” Stamp’s words got graveled in obvious bitterness. “It’s clearly a man-eater.”
And it’d been feasting on Stamp’s crew.
The kid added, “The employee who spied it thought fast enough to take a jetpack closer to the hubs, where she was able to secure Nets reception. She did some quick research about ways to handle situations like this, then persuaded a bunch of fellow employees to catch it, with each of them trying different methods. Fortunately, one of the boys was slinging brass, and it worked to bind and disable this scourge. I didn’t even know about the hunt until they were done.” Stamp smiled. “Now, that’s a crew a boss can hold some pride in.”
Zel was breathing hard, a hand clamped over her mouth. The oldster and Sammy just seemed frozen.
Questions rained down on Gabriel. The community had existed out here for years and had to have known a creature of this order was near. Had they been doing something to appease this demon, to keep it from coming to their home?
Gabriel searched his mind for any evidence of that, but he came up with nothing.
As the crew kept at the creature with the brass blade, one of the men pulled down his arm glove and accessed his personal computer screen, reading out loud from it. He must’ve uploaded the information into his own database.
The words weren’t familiar to Gabriel, but his best guess was that they were Hindi, and they made the captive squirm even more.
Expelling the demon from its shell, Gabriel thought.
He shut his mind to the sight, thinking that this torture could’ve been his own if he hadn’t been so determined not to flaunt his vampire powers, even on the night he’d arrived here and Stamp’s men had roughed him up.
As the crew member’s words got louder, faster, the demon stiffened, then . . .
Much to Gabriel’s horror, the captive’s body burst open, letting loose with a group of ten screeching black heads, all with long necks and mouths that snapped at the air, then began tearing into each other. While the crewman raised his voice at the peak of his incantation, the heads whirled into one screaming mass of red, then ripped away from the prone host body, hovering in the air, then seeming to melt into a flood of gore as it fell to the ground, seeping into the dirt until there was nothing.
In the aftermath, all went still. No one spoke. Not until the crew started whooping and high-fiving each other, taking kicks and swipes at the decimated mass of flesh and bone dripping upside down from the poles.
Gabriel turned away, expecting the blood from this body that the demon had possessed to tweak his appetite, though it was from a dead man whose blood wold be no good for him.
But. . .
He smelled it—the polluted blood of an urban hubite. And the sustenance didn’t pull at him as it usually did.
The peace he’d shared with Mariah. Her imprint was still alive in him, wasn’t it? And it’d strengthened Gabriel against himself, even temporarily. That had to be it.
He straightened, looking Stamp in the eye, confident that his monster was pushed so far down that the kid wouldn’t detect it. And when Stamp just smiled, then looked away to watch his men kick around like giddy idiots, Gabriel knew he was on firm ground.
Then Zel burst out from behind the oldster and Sammy, and Gabriel caught her before she got to Stamp.
“You fiend,” she yelled. “That was—”
“Justice,” the kid said, sending her a collected, and even somewhat puzzled, look. “And isn’t justice beautifully simple in a place like this?”
Maybe, as a cop, she’d seen too many bad guys like Stamp, and she knew when to back away. Whatever the reason, she put distance between her and the kid as she headed for Mariah’s entrance.
“There’s a place for people like you,” Zel said, sounding different, as if some vital portion of her had flipped.
“Believe me,” Stamp answered as she opened the domain door, “I’ve already been there.”
Sammy followed her, but the oldster went only halfway in.
“Our squabble has been settled, I take it,” he said.
The glimmer in the kid’s black-hole eyes sent chills over Gabriel.
“Just being a good neighbor,” Stamp said, “keeping us all informed and safe. You can count on cordiality from now on.”
And then, as Gabriel settled himself at the entrance, too, the kid walked away, toward a rumbler, signaling to his men, making it unnecessary for the Text-fluent crowd to read his silent intentions of leaving.
They followed their boss, deserting the carcass of the former demon in what Gabriel took to be a dire warning for anything else that might decide to go hunting in the night.