Firecracker Ch. 02

"But up close, we aren't assassins. We're just predators."

"Willem." Isaac whispered. "Speed."

The badlands on either side were blurring past at such speed that when Willem slowed to seventy miles per hour, the new (and still illegal) pace felt slow.

--

Whelk was a tri-state agent. She took care of Wyoming and the Dakotas. Because of low population, they only needed one agent and a handful of pencil-pushers to keep an eye on the three states. Most outbreaks happened in the poorer reservation areas in South Dakota. But this campground was closer to Devil's Tower in Wyoming.

"If I can get this taken care of quickly, I'll come back to this motel, kay?"

Isaac nodded, looking out the window. The badlands had passed them by, and they were in a little prairie town, a good twenty miles away from the Wyoming-South Dakota border. The original motel had been only a few miles from the campsite itself.

Whoever the other demoneater was, Willem wasn't taking any chances.

It was a run-down motel 8. Isaac could only see a handful of cars in the lot, and the sun was hovering over the flat horizon like a pulsing orange ball. The flatness of the horizon was monotonous and a little frightening. Like being in the middle of a microscope slide.

Isaac glanced at the sun through his dark glasses. He imagined a gigantic eye.

"I know you wanted to go with me to the campground, and I'm sorry." Willem had calmed down, now that they were near the destination. Isaac shrugged and leaned over to give the man a kiss on his copper-stubbled cheek.

"I'll just watch some TV. I'm glad I came. We saw some cool stuff today. Maybe on the way back we can slow down a little, see some sights?"

Willem pulled the car into a parking spot. "That sounds great. I can't stay long, but maybe I can stretch my legs, and once we get to the room I might be able to give you a quickie."

Isaac fumbled with his seatbelt. His hands were a little sweaty from earlier, so his fingers slipped on the surface. Willem had already slipped out of the car.

Isaac opened the door. "That sounds amazing, do you think we'll get a room with a view of the... Willem?"

Isaac straightened and saw Willem. The older man was holding onto the upper edge of the car door with a white-knuckled grip. The tendons in his arms were standing out like cables. When Isaac saw Willem's face he got a cold feeling in his stomach. Something was very wrong.

Isaac whirled to see what Willem was staring at so intensely, with that guarded look of hatred and mistrust.

--

Willem felt his heart jackhammer at the sight of her smug face.

Her hair had grown out. It surrounded her head in a flaming puff, blowing in the wind. And did Willem detect a hint of grey?

He did.

She still retained that strand of thin fierce beauty that had stayed with her. Even after all the kids. Even after all of the indignities she had suffered at the hands of demons.

She looked fierce in the light from the setting sun. The oversized camo jacket on her thin shoulders, the sleeves blowing in the wind. Her thin but child-ravaged body on display in a tight tank top. Her nipples were poking against the thin fabric. The size and shape of pencil erasers.

"As if fucking men wasn't enough for you. Now you're fucking demons."

Willem found his voice, even though he could have sworn it wasn't possible. "Izarys is a demon, last time I checked. You don't have a problem fucking him." As he spoke, he moved around the back of the car, planting himself between her and Isaac.

Willem's eyes darted to the ripple in the air above her shoulder. "Isaac, get back in the car. I'll explain everything. You're coming with me."

Her eyes flashed. They were all silver now. Once upon a time, they had only had a ring of grey. "You can't leave now... I need to speak with you. That's the only reason I came up to this wasteland anyway." Willem bit his lip and refused to rise to the bait. That dangling fishhook heavy with six dead and five missing.

Isaac crept back into the car, closing the door and locking it, looking out with his wide concerned eyes. His eyes flashed cherry red through the glass. He was well fed. Willem kept him well fed.

Willem darted around the car, pointedly ignoring his mother and that shimmer above her shoulder. Even though taking his eyes off of her made every hair on his body stand up with fear. Willem thought he could feel every individual drop of sweat becoming pregnant on his skin.

"Willem, it's been three years, wont you even listen to what I have to say?" He could hear the sob in her voice. How much of it was real? He didn't even know anymore.

"Mother?" Willem held the car door open and kept his eyes fixed on the shimmer in the air. Izarys was too powerful to ignore, and it was easier than looking at her.

"Yes?"

"I don't know where she is, but whoever she is, you're going to have to find someone else. Because I wont help you. Not with this, never with this."

Willem got into the car, and for a paralyzing moment, he couldn't get the key to go in. His fingers were slippery with sweat, and the keyring seemed obscenely big, so many keys and fobs. Isaac was staring out the window with single-minded intensity. At the woman who was walking closer.

Willem started the car and squealed off. The rapidly spinning tires left swatches of hot rubber on the pavement of the parking lot. He didn't relax until they were back on the road. He kept the speedometer needle just a hair above the speed limit the entire time.

"So." Isaac said softly. "Your mother?"

Willem glanced at the boy in the front seat. He wasn't sure if Isaac looked nervous and out of sorts from meeting his mother, or if Isaac was just reacting to how nervous he was.

"The other demoneater." Willem whispered. His arms and legs felt cold, the sweat on his body felt cold. His fingers on the wheel felt trembly. He hated how she could do this. How quickly she could make him feel like a scared and helpless kid.

Facing down a mason jar with a pentagon in red crayon.

"All you need to know right now, is that she's crazy. She's crazy, and you are worse than nothing to her. If I can help it, she wont ever see you again."

--

Isaac and Willem checked into the original motel. Willem took a heavy black suitcase out of the trunk. His personal clothes and toiletries were in a small blue duffel.

As soon as they got in, Willem opened the suitcase and started taking out slim sheets of paper.

He pasted four of the sheets on the door with little blobs of poster-tac. Each sheet of paper was scrawled with runes. "Protection." He muttered, as he worked.

He took a fat jar full of some kind of lotion out of the suitcase. He put on a single latex glove before spreading a thin clear layer of the lotion around the entire edge of the one window. Isaac slowly walked to the bed and sat down, watching Willem work.

There was something deeply disturbing about the fastidious way Willem set up the protections.

Isaac couldn't think of it. He watched Willem screw the lid of the jar shut and gingerly take off the latex glove, keeping the wet fingertips on the inside before throwing it away.

Isaac was about to open his mouth, but then he realized that Willem still wasn't done.

He was closing the bathroom door now, and pasting more of those long thin sheets of paper on the door. He was mumbling. His voice was strained and stuttering, so different from the normal lazy way he spoke.

"If you need to go, go now... Nothing will tak... I mean attack you while I'm here, but the bathroom... Dangerous. Too many wires, pl-plumbing. Yeah. Safer to close it off."

Isaac finally put his finger on it. Willem's shoulders were rounded and his back was hunched. Even his neck was bent down. He kept looking up, over his shoulders, everywhere but at Isaac.

Willem was terrified.

Isaac closed the black suitcase with fingers that felt too stiff. He sat on top of it. He waited patiently for Willem to finish sealing off the bathroom door, waited for Willem to come back to the suitcase.

Seeing the half-demon sitting quietly on the suitcase seemed to snap Willem out of it.

Isaac spoke slowly and firmly. "There are six dead people, and five people missing. The longer you spend here, the more likely it is that those five people are dead. The more you worry about me while you're there, the worse of a job you'll do."

Willem said nothing. He sat down on the corner of the bed. He looked Isaac in the eye. For the first time since they had seen his mother. Isaac stared him down.

"Take me with you. You just said that nothing would attack me while you were with me. I trust you."

Willem silenced Isaac by grabbing one horn and yanking the young demon up, squashing any further words with his hard mouth.

Isaac took the kiss passively, surprised. Seeing Willem so nervous, seeing his moods shift like this, it was a whole new flavor of unsettling.

"You're right. Of course you're right."

Willem took a shaky breath and looked around the room. Seeing the protections that he had put up.

"The campground is just a mile away. Short drive."

"Want me to do it?" Isaac whispered. "Give you a chance to calm down?"

That brought a ghost of a smile to his lover's face. A touch of the old him.

"You driving, Firecracker? How exactly is that supposed to calm me down?"

This time Isaac kissed him. "If I can't drive, can you at least promise to tell me what's going on? You told me about how she forced you to eat the mites, but you haven't told me anything that explains this."

Willem took a deep breath. "She's obsessed with creating demoneaters. She's one, and she is directly involved with creating three of them in all. Myself, the guy who takes jobs in central america, and a seventeen year old girl that she's still training. I'm her only son in the business, but I have..." His mouth twisted into a heartbreaking smile. "I have the best pedigree."

He was packing his black suitcase, taking it out to the car. Isaac followed, quickly adjusting his hood and mirrored sunglasses. The sun beat down on him, but the heat didn't bother him like it bothered humans. Or even Willem.

"The one in Guatemala, his name is Vincent. He's a distant relative. She bullied her aunt into having five kids, and then bullied her cousin into having half a dozen kids until a fifth son of a fifth son was born. And the girl... She's been almost consistently pregnant since she was twelve."

Isaac stopped. Startled. "But you said she was only..."

Willem nodded curtly. Slamming the trunk door. He opened the hood of the car. The engine was overheated from the long day, steaming. "Seventeen. My mother doesn't care if it's a boy or a girl, but it needs to be the fifth of it's gender. The girl's had four sons and she's not even eighteen."

Willem laughed, and Isaac had never heard an angrier sound. "I'm sure there are half a hundred families from miles around that got seeds from my mother's babyfarm."

"Will..." The older man stopped his jittery angry rant for a moment when his young lover hugged him from behind. Taking both of his hands and holding them still.

Willem couldn't believe how he sounded. He felt like he was unravelling. And it was all her fault. Slower, calmer, he continued.

"I'm her biggest achievement. She's the fifth daughter of a fifth daughter, and a fifth son of a fifth son was my father. She started feeding me from the earliest age possible. She had a plan. A dynasty of fifth-sons and fifth-daughters. Getting more and more powerful as the bloodlines stacked up. She wanted to put me out to stud with half a dozen fifth daughters."

Isaac felt cold, and he could barely hear what Willem said next. "I don't want anything to do with her fucked up plans. I've been nothing but breeding stock to her all these years. But she has it tangled up in her fucked-up mind that I wont do it because I'm gay. She's tried to hurt people close to me before. Sometimes, she gets through my defenses."

This felt so wrong. Hearing Willem like this. Hearing him sound so scared, and defeated already.

"Fucking faggots."

Isaac practically jumped a foot in the air. He had been hugging Willem from behind for half a minute, and another man in the lot had taken notice. A sneering stoop-backed old man with his lower lip bulging around a pinch of tobacco, taking a suitcase from the bed of a lovingly maintained old truck the color of Isaac's eyes.

Isaac could feel the muscles in Willem's back tense up. The older man didn't look it, but he was very strong. Isaac put his hands up on Willem's shoulders, got on his toes so he could talk softly in his lover's ear. "It's nothing, Will. It's just an old bastard. Let him be. We got bigger problems."

Nine times out of ten, Willem would have ignored the old man. Not the best of percentages to begin with.

And the demoneater was having a rough day.

Willem walked purposefully towards the truck. It was crimson and mirror-bright. Washed, maybe even waxed, recently.

He swore. At least that's what it sounded like. Only Isaac recognized the low twisted syllables, though not their meaning.

The car alarm started screaming. The red car rocked violently back and forth, tires leaving the pavement two at a time, then slamming down hard enough to burst loudly. All of the safety-glass bowed out at once. The horn honked loudly. Once.

Willem crossed his arms and watched, a good ten yards from the possessed vehicle. His eyes glowing and his mouth set into a small white line. Destroying the car only helped a little. The look on the old man's face was more trouble than it was worth. The agency would be on his ass for sure.

The car settled on it's blown tires. The body was bowed and crinkled out of place. The windows were set, but whitened and bowed with cracks. The once-gleaming hood was marked hundreds of short gouges, revealing bright sheared metal underneath. The remaining paint was rippled and distorted with heat. The old man was on his ass, his face white and his mouth trembling. Utterly speechless. A brown stain of tobacco juice dribbled down his chin.

"Watch your language." Willem said. Soft, his voice almost kind.

Isaac didn't say anything to him until they were nearly at the campsite. It seemed wise.

--

"I've never seen you do anything like that." Isaac could see Devil's Tower against the sunset. It was striking. The black pillar alone on the plains, haloed by the sun. The sunset sky was a huge seeping bloodspot, the clouds edged in gold and purple.

"You've only seen me work when I'm against small fry." Willem seemed a lot calmer. Appearances weren't everything. "The Dreamer, those imps in the parking garage, the sun-dog in Illinois... All of those guys were small. I didn't have to fight them, only eat them. The sun-dog was the only one that had enough brains to know what I was.

"There isn't a single demon that I couldn't swallow. But the stronger ones are still dangerous. I have tools at my disposal."

Willem burped slightly. "You saw the shimmer in the air above my mother? You heard me talking about him? Izarys?"

Isaac nodded. "Well, I have a couple of friends, too. A few I can call up... and one that I carry around with me. I always meant to tell you about Min. The timing never seemed right."

Willem had a sheepish little grin on his face. "She lives... Well, I'm a vessel. She lives inside me. Mostly sleeps and gluts herself on the demons I eat. She's a security measure. She makes sure that the demons I eat stay quiet, and if I need something, or someone, wrecked..."

Isaac knew that his mouth was hanging open. He clicked his teeth together. "Can... Can she... hear us? Now? Or when... When we...?"

Willem winced. "Well. She sleeps a lot. But when she's awake... She can see through my eyes, listens through my ears. I tell her to leave off when I'm doing something private... And she mostly listens."

Isaac bit his lower lip. It was hard not to see the funny side, but at the same time he felt a little betrayed. "Do you have anyone else you want to tell me about?"

Willem sighed. "The only two entities that are near us right now are Min, and a wisp that does recon for me. The wisp likes to change his name and identity all of the time. Right now he's a 'he' and he likes to be called—" Willem sighed heavily. "Enchilada. Enchilada lives in the left headlight of my car, so he can't hear us right now. Min is sleeping. She's gotten pretty lazy over the years."

Willem had a wry little smile on his face. Isaac got the distinct impression that Min was not asleep.

"I... I could see the Dreamer a little. I could see the imps clear as day, and the sun-dog had an aura. How come I've never seen Min or Enchilada? Or... Or the others?"

Willem pulled the car off of the highway. Riding on a narrow unpaved road. "Min is an incredibly powerful entity. That's why she can survive distinct inside of me, when most demons immediately revert to energy. You can't see her when she's resting with me, and when she's outside, she can disguise herself seamlessly. Not only to humans, but also to you and most other demoneaters. Izarys can do it, too, but he likes to have a presence. And Enchilada is rarely out in the open. He's either in the headlight, or out doing recon. The others... I've asked the others to keep their distance.

"You... You were going to tell me about this, right?" Isaac kept his voice quiet, but it was impossible to completely disguise the frustration. "That you had... an attack dog sleeping in your stomach, and an enchilada in your car? And god knows who else?"

Willem pulled to the side of the road. All the lights from the emergency vehicles were flashing from an adjacent dirt road. "I should have told you about Min. I should have told you about my mother. While we're at it, I have a few more things I want to tell you. But I'll tell you everything when we are somewhere surrounded by protection, and when Min is asleep, fair enough?"

Isaac slid out of the car. "Is... Is the headlight-wisp the reason you've been getting so much Taco Bell?"

Willem sighed. "He likes the smell. This isn't so bad. For a few months, she called herself 'diaper'."

Isaac stopped in his tracks to stare at Willem, pulling his coat from under the seat. "You're making that up."

Willem gave him a look, brows raised almost to his hairline. "Honey, I wish I was making that up." He pulled his creased brown leather jacket over his shoulders, keeping his arms free of the sleeves. Isaac blinked, and realized he had seen somebody else wear their coat like that. Just today.

--

Whelk met them at ground zero.

Willem glanced at Isaac, knowing that she wasn't probably who he was expecting. Whelk was maybe all of four-foot-ten. She had a round moon face and deeply creased brown skin with gray flyaways escaping from a bun resting on the back of her neck like a wrecking ball. Her sharp black eyes were framed by massive red horn-rims and her green tracksuit had a dusting of cat hair and dandruff on the shoulders. In one hand she had a neon-green workout bag, and in the other she had a hissing Coleman lantern. She looked more like a quarrelsome grandma from the rez than a secret agent.

She didn't believe in wasting words on something so banal as a greeting. "She fucked us, Willem. I can't stand that cunt. What is this?" She gestured to Isaac. "I get that Boss is okay with this, but you don't have to bring your pet here. Especially when she had to bend over backwards to clear the Fish out of here."

"Don't talk about him like that." Willem didn't look at her. He didn't feel like getting into a fight with Jo 'Bad Wound' Whelk. So he spoke to her, but didn't look. Instead, he walked around the campsite, inspecting the shredded tent under the harsh white light of Whelk's lantern. "With 'that cunt' around, I can't leave him alone. He wont effect my work. If anything, he can help. He can see past the first two Planes without glasses, and he's fireproof. His name is Isaac, and he isn't a pet."