The worst part of immortality is boredom. That’s why you need a purpose. I’m standing across the street from mine now. A quaint bungalow with a manicured lawn, fresh paint, and a nondescript SUV out front. To anyone else, it would look like the home of perfectly normal people. I know better. I can smell the evil inside. The sweet stink of wilted flowers mixed with the rank odor of a clogged toilet.
I cross the street, careful to stay out of the sodium-yellow splash of the streetlights, and make my way to the backyard. The lawn has been ripped up, leaving a stretch of bare dirt with the occasional curious lump. The smell of wickedness intensifies.
The backdoor is one of those sliding glass jobs. It’s locked, but immortality comes with a few perks. I wedge my fingers into the jamb and pull. There’s a groan of bending metal, and then a sharp SPANG as the lock gives way.
Beyond is a kitchen, neat as a pin, and a hallway leading to the front of the house. I follow my nose, letting the stink of evil guide me to a door off the living room. It sticks out from the others, solid metal, the kind of door you put secrets behind. There’s a padlock, but one sharp yank and it snaps.
I open the door, and nearly gag. This time, it’s not just metaphysical evil, it’s the real deal: rot, shit, and sweat mixed together in a whopper of a stench. Stairs lead down into darkness, but before I follow them, I stand and listen. Someone stirs in the house behind me and soft weeping drifts up from below.
I head down, flicking the light switch in the stairwell. The basement is unfinished, with a concrete floor, brick walls, and what I came here to do.
The four people handcuffed to the wall are naked, each showing signs of abuse, though their wounds are not haphazard. The cuts and bruises are uniform, ritualistic. I know each victim’s name. They’ve been in the news for weeks. Missing, kidnapped, abducted. Two are pretty lively, eyes alert and pleading. The other two don’t stir as I approach. They’re not dead, but inside they might as well be.
I’m about to rip the first set of cuffs off the wall when the homeowner comes barreling down the stairs. He’s huge, with a physique like a bodybuilder, his bare chest splashed with a blood-red tattoo. It’s a sigil made of swoops and whorls. The mark of his master. He reeks of corruption.
He’s got a fireman’s axe, but he doesn’t come for me. No, he’s not driving the bus. The demon piloting the homeowner’s flesh knows what I am and why I’m here. He rushes past me, heading for the victims.
If they die, I fail. Worse, I don’t get paid. Can’t have that. I throw myself in front of the possessed homeowner just as his axe descends. It should have split the skull of a woman named Marcie Hammond. Instead, it splits mine. There’s a bright explosion of pain, and everything goes dark.
I wake up a few seconds later, lying on the floor, the homeowner standing over me trying to pull his axe out of my skull. It comes free with a squelching noise, and, thinking me dead, he turns to finish the massacre. That’s my opening. I stand up, blood and brains running down my face, and rush him. I grab the guy’s head with both hands and twist. The crack of his neck breaking echoes off the walls of the basement like a shotgun blast. He goes down like a sack of hammers, sending the demon inside on a one-way ticket back to the hot place.
I take a shaking breath, gathering myself. Dying isn’t new, and after the first time—I rub the scar encircling my neck—it gets easier, but not, you know, easy. When I get my shit together, I snap the handcuffs on each of the victims, freeing them. They look at me with a mixture of awe and fear. Can’t say I blame them. Weird and awful doesn’t even begin to cover what happened here, but I don’t offer an explanation. It wouldn’t make sense anyway. My handler will make sure the authorities are notified.
I head up through the house and out into the night. Time to collect.
Zadkiel sits in his favorite booth at Lucky Larry’s, a little dive bar in downtown Seattle. He sees me coming and smiles, all perfect white teeth.
I slide into the booth and nod at the bartender. He brings me my usual, a Benedict Arnold. It’s like a Manhattan, but sour instead of sweet.
“You did well,” Zadkiel says, his voice musical, like you’d expect from an archangel. “No casualties, and you sent one of Bael’s best packing.”
“Yeah, great,” I say and take a sip of my drink. My head’s killing me, and it’s hard to think straight. Having an axe in your brain’ll do that. “You got my payment?”
“Is your debt the only reason you work for me, Iscariot?” Zadkiel sighs and lays a wedge-shaped sliver of metal on the table.
“Pretty much.” I pocket the coin and finish my drink. “Let me know when you’ve got another job for me.”
Back in my shitty one-room apartment, I sit at a folding card table I picked up at a garage sale, a carved wooden box open in front of me. I take out eleven slivers of metal, nearly identical to the one Zadkiel gave me, and carefully push them together. I end up with a silver coin cut into twelve sections, a Roman denarius, just over two-thousand years old. I sigh and put a hand over the coin. It’s both soothing and sickening, a reminder of what I am and the key to my salvation. The completed coin makes eleven. Nineteen more to go.
About the author:
Aeryn Rudel is a writer from Tacoma, Washington. He is the author of the baseball horror novella Effectively Wild, the Iron Kingdoms Acts of War novels, and the flash fiction collection Night Walk & Other Dark Paths. His short stories have appeared in Factor Four Magazine, On Spec, and Pseudopod, among others. Learn more about Aeryn’s work at www.rejectomancy.com or on Bluesky @aerynrudel.bsky.social
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