Damn Him to Hell Read online

  Praise for Boyfriend from Hell

  “Unlike many down-on-their-luck heroes who never seem to suffer, Quaid’s characters are genuinely desperate, lending a real sense of danger and urgency. Without a vampire, werewolf, or fallen angel to be seen, this strong debut is a pleasantly fresh take [on the genre].”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Quaid jumps into the urban fantasy genre with a bang. . . . She quickly establishes a unique cast of characters, full of flaws and mystery. There is plenty of humor, wild action, and vigilante justice in this truly excellent beginning of the Saturn’s Daughter series.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Fast-paced and action-packed entertainment . . . A fun read . . . wonderfully crafted.”

  —Seeing Night Book Reviews

  “Engaging and energetic . . . Sexy, fun, and dangerous are perfect words to describe this book.”

  —Books, Bones & Buffy

  “Action-packed from beginning to end, sparkled with a great dose of humor.”

  —Tynga’s Reviews

  “A quirky romp of a ride . . . A cute twist on the paranormal genre.”

  —Night Owl Sci-Fi

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  1

  On a noisy Friday night inside Chesty’s pole-dancing bar and restaurant, no one heard the gargoyles scream until the front door crashed in.

  The pounding rock music in the bar screeched to a halt—not an unusual occurrence or a reason for alarm. The DJ often had to spin albums with a hand crank, since anything electronic developed a personality of its own in the Zone. But this time, the shrill aiieeeee of the town gargoyles shattered the abrupt silence.

  Like most of the other patrons, I’d been boogying hard and was annoyed with the abrupt cutoff.

  Glimpsing two old people falling through the distant door, whacking at each other, I shrugged off the fight but puzzled over the earsplitting shrieks. The rest of Chesty’s clientele returned to eating and drinking. The girls on the poles put their clothes back on and wandered off until the DJ could get the music rolling again.

  Drunk on appletinis and sweaty from dancing off my exultation, I wiped my brow with the back of my arm. The persistence of the unholy screams raised my hackles, despite the buzz I’d been working on. The bar area didn’t have windows, so I slipped inside the office I used to share with Ernesto, the club manager, to look out the small one there.

  In the blue glow of the Zone, I could barely make out the outline of a stone gargoyle sitting atop the gutter of the building next door. It seemed to be stretching its neck and screeching bloody murder. While they were supposed to be mere architectural details, gargoyles in the Zone occasionally strolled the alleyways. They’d even been known to mutter insults. But they never just sat there and screamed.

  Not knowing what to make of this nonstandard alarm system, I returned to the main room and sought Andre to see whether he’d gone for the battling old guys, the DJ, or an AK-47 to shoot the noisy gutter. Andre Legrande owns Chesty’s and most of the businesses in the Zone. He’s also an amoral enigma, but I was confident he’d know what it meant when gargoyles cried.

  I caught sight of him across the room, pushing through the weekend crowd toward the struggling pair who’d broken in the door. Out of a sense of curiosity that will be the death of me one of these days, I slipped along the sidelines to do the same. Once upon a time I had been invisible to most of this crowd—a gap-toothed, four-eyed, limping nerd so innocuous that I disappeared into the woodwork. Nowadays, thanks to the rewards my patron saint, Saturn, bestowed upon me for damning people to hell, I was more noticeable, and had a reputation. People tended to shift out of my way of late.

  A puff of green and pink cloud drifted through the open doorway. Andre picked up his pace. So did I, my unease climbing.

  What kind of craziness produced pink-and-green clouds? The Zone’s massive pollution had created serious anomalies over the years, like the neon-blue buildings and the ambling gargoyles, but so far it hadn’t changed the weather.

  I winced as one of the old drunks smashed a chair over his opponent’s head. Instead of collapsing in a bloody heap, his victim simply shook a shaggy mane in bewilderment—which was the moment I recognized her. A her, not a him. Nancy Rose! Why would mild-mannered, motherly Nancy Rose the hippie florist be in a barroom brawl with a bum?

  Hurrying, I shoved aside a drunk who got in my way.

  Unlike other Zone inhabitants who changed because of the chemical pollution, I have a cosmic birth defect for which toxic waste can’t be blamed. It seems I was born in the seventh house under a wrong asteroid or something, which warped my chromosomes and made me one of Saturn’s daughters. Mostly, it gives me an innate ability to screw up my life seeking justice. Repeatedly.

  I couldn’t let Nancy Rose’s assault go uncontested. I was about to drunkenly conjure a whammy to turn the old bully into a toadstool when—to my astonishment—the chair wielder keeled over, blocking the entry with his bulk.

  Seemingly unharmed, short, stout Nancy Rose stood dazed and swaying over her assailant’s sprawled body. Only when he didn’t get up to finish the fight did she slowly topple herself.

  Weird. Staggering drunks might be mother’s milk around here, but not fighting florists.

  The pink and green cloud continued to seep through the doorway.

  Andre reached the entrance before me. He stepped over both bodies and glanced in the direction of the chemical factory to the north. I made it to his side just in time to hear him mutter “Frigging shit” before cursing in three languages that I understood and a few more that I didn’t. Formerly Special Ops, Andre Legrande has a colorful background, and I could tell he was about to harsh what remained of my mellow.

  My gut churned as I kneeled beside Nancy Rose to check her pulse.

  Verifying she was alive and breathing normally, I stood up and stepped over the bodies into the street.

  On the harbor along this industrial south side of Baltimore, the Zone glowed blue neon on a normal night. A series of chemical floods over the past ten years had polluted the land along the water where tanks had once stored the output of our neighborhood chemical companies—the kind of places that create nerve gases for wars as well as personal hygiene products.

  After the last flood, the EPA had cordoned off the blighted harbor and abandoned the Zone’s commercial district to the shadow of the rusted-out chimneys of the derelict plant. Acme Chemical had rebuilt up the hill to the north of us. Tonight, a noxious pink and green cloud drifted down that hill.

  Holy crap. Acme sent gas and not a flood this time? Did they want to eradicate us?

  “That pink looks really bad against the blue,” I pronounced with drunken brilliance.

  “Shut up, Clancy,” Andre said angrily.

  My name is actually Mary Justine Clancy, but no one gets to use my first name. Most people just call me Tina, except Andre the All-Knowing.

  “I’ll handle Nancy Rose and clear the club,” he snapped. “You need to go home and wake up Pearl and my father and herd them into the basement until we know what’s happening. I’ll be up right behind you.”

  I was too buzzed to panic but not too drunk to register fear at Andre’s fury.

  I stared in trepidation at the chemical plant, trying not to believe we were being gassed in the middle of the night. Lights were popping on all over the plant, but I didn’t think they had a night shift.

  “And
here I thought tonight would be our night. I was really ready to celebrate that you’re no longer my boss,” I said with drunken regret.

  After years of struggling and a fortune’s worth of law school debt, I’d just received my official notice welcoming me to the Maryland bar. I was a real lawyer now, no longer a dispenser of street justice or Andre’s flunky. And I was about to be gassed by a pink cloud before I could find out what was beneath Andre’s silk shirts.

  Familiar amusement flickered in his dark eyes as he checked out my revealing halter top and micro-shorts.

  “I don’t do lawyers,” he replied, mocking my earlier rejection, when I’d told him I didn’t do bosses. Andre holds a grudge. “I’m sure the senator does.”

  I punched his arm for that snide remark, but the cloud rising ominously larger and more luminous had me heading up the street at a fast clip.

  If Andre was going to handle Nancy Rose, I needed to save my neighbors and my cat. Milo was aberrant enough—the whole Zone was aberrant enough—without being nuked by a Disney cloud.

  Checking over my shoulder to see how much of a head start I had, I jogged uphill toward our neighboring town houses. Trying not to panic, I determinedly clung to my moment of joy and triumph. After all these years of hardship, I deserved a celebration for achieving my goal of being able to officially defend the law instead of relying on my unpredictable Saturnian vigilante instincts.

  Well, for the moment, I was merely a law clerk, but I was finally on the straight-and-narrow, doing-it-by-the-book path. Law libraries, not planets, ruled my world these days.

  I would not let a bilious green cloud extinguish the sweet future I had planned.

  Except, instead of calling 911, I was obeying Andre’s orders. Not out of habit, mind you, but because what happened in the Zone stayed in the Zone. Police hated melting their tires on our tar, and if officialdom came down here too often, they’d eventually realize the whole slum needed to be bulldozed instead of just the harbor.

  Or if the wrong people saw shrieking gargoyles, we could be turned into a freak circus. Some of our community members would take umbrage at that, and mayhem would be the least that ensued. There was safety only in privacy. Gas clouds were problematic for their ability to both hurt us and reveal us.

  I glanced back again, in some vague hope that the cloud would dissipate. Instead, it had all but obliterated any sight of the far end of town. I assumed the lighted windows meant someone at Acme had called for help, but one never knew.

  I tried my el-cheapo cell to warn my friend Cora and reached a Greek restaurant—in Athens, if the language was any indicator. The Zone was perpetually hungry, and cell phones were unreliable at best down here.

  As I tucked my phone away, one of the homeless bums from the encampment along the water darted out from between two buildings. He looked a little moon-mad with his gray hair straggling to his shoulders and his shadowed eyes darting from side to side. I intelligently halted—until he brandished a knife and shouted incomprehensibly in my direction.

  Mostly, the weird ones never gave me any trouble. This one ran straight at me, slashing the air in large strokes as if he carried a sword. What was it with old guys tonight?

  Fear robbed me of caution. I kicked high and connected with his wrist.

  The knife flew into the street. The bum stopped, blinked in astonishment, then slowly crumpled to the broken pavement, just as Nancy Rose had.

  Damn, I hadn’t hit him that hard! The bum’s belly alone was twice my size. Hauling him off the street was out of the question.

  I almost panicked, but Bill, the giant who operated the bar and grill down the street, lumbered out and noticed my predicament. “I’ll handle it,” he called. “Get out of here and warn the others.”

  I liked Bill for a lot of reasons.

  Checking the progress of the gas cloud, I sprinted faster. A street light pole twisted as if watching me run. I’d had some time to grow accustomed to aberrancy, but I still despised being spied on. Swiveling lights were a nasty reminder of the bad old days when I had snoops on my tail every minute.

  My apartment was in a Victorian row house a few blocks beyond the Zone on the south end of the harbor, half a mile or more away from Acme’s perch to the north. I could hope the gas didn’t reach this far. The gray flicker of TVs lit some of the windows, but none shone in the darkness of my building. Inside, I pounded on my landlady’s apartment door to wake her up, yelling at her to get to the basement. Then I ran up the stairs for my tufted-eared miniature bobcat. He’d grown too large to be called a Manx kitty.

  Milo raced to greet me, dragging the messenger bag I used as a carryall. He had a bad habit of running toward trouble, so I didn’t see this as a good sign. Before I could scoop him up, he dashed into the second-floor hall and raced up the stairs to the top floor. Shit. Running up into a sky full of gas didn’t seem to be the wisest course of action.

  Just as Milo reached the landing, heavy feet lumbered down. Milo turned, jumped past the bottom two steps, sped by me, and threw himself at the door of the apartment across the hall from mine.

  I had lived here only a few months. Caught up in study, exams, two jobs, and the tracking of a murderer, I hadn’t had time to make the acquaintance of any of the other tenants.

  That was about to change.

  “Basement,” a voice rusty from disuse called from above. A pair of shabby brown corduroys appeared on the stairs above me. Paddy!

  I recognized the crazy inventor who occasionally stopped at Chesty’s. The waitresses fed him gratis, and I’d assumed he was homeless. His graying chestnut hair fell lankly to his shoulders, and his lined and bearded face was nearly as wrinkled and faded as his corduroys.

  I’d been told that once upon a time, he’d been a renowned research scientist at Acme Chemical, which is owned by the Vanderventers, his wealthy, powerful family. After the disastrous flood, he’d fallen apart. From the looks of him now, he had deteriorated even more since I’d seen him last. He might not have taken the death of his nephew—my boyfriend Max—in a fiery car crash too well. Especially since Paddy’s son, Dane Vanderventer, had died shortly after, because of little old me.

  Well, sort of died. I had sent Dane’s wicked soul to hell for cutting Max’s brake lines, so in a strange twist of fate, Max’s soul now inhabited Senator Dane Vanderventer’s body.

  This caused a number of problems, but the point is I was a wee bit hesitant to tell Paddy about the Dane/Max arrangement. It didn’t seem like an explanation I could give to a man I barely knew and who wasn’t precisely in his right mind.

  Right now didn’t seem an appropriate time to strike up that conversation.

  “Basement,” Paddy repeated, taking the next flight of stairs. “I’ll get Pearl.”

  Pearl Bodine was our elderly landlady. I grabbed Milo before he could take out the door with his scratching, pounded on the old oak panel as hard as I could, and shouted, “Gas attack!”

  The heavy panel swung open to reveal a blurry-eyed Lieutenant Schwartz—in his knit boxers and nothing else.

  My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I gaped at ripped abdominals and bulging pectorals. This was what the good detective hid behind rumpled suits and uniforms? By all that was holy . . .

  Milo leapt from my arms and bolted down the stairs after Paddy.

  “Gas?” Schwartz asked, sniffing the air.

  “Acme. I think there’s been an explosion. Paddy says to get to the basement.”

  “Just a matter of time,” he said fatalistically. “Be right there.”

  I rushed after Milo.

  Paddy was already assisting a chattering Mrs. Bodine down the cellar stairs. I wasn’t entirely certain following a crazy scientist into the basement was the wisest means of avoiding a gas attack. If the cloud hadn’t spread, we had time to get the hell out of Dodge. My Miata could hold us, barely. Besides, Pearl had cobwebs on her chandeliers. I didn’t want to imagine what her basement was like.

  I waited to se
e what the good detective intended to do.

  Milo yowled and flung himself at the front door, disturbing my fuzzy internal debate. The appletinis hadn’t completely dissipated.

  “You can’t attack gas, you idiot.” I scooped him up again, but he jumped off my chest to the top of an ornate armoire, putting him in reach of the open transom of the aging town house.

  “Milo!” I screamed as my cat disappeared out the opening. Damned cat, if the leap to the porch didn’t kill him, the gas would. He’d pretty much used up half his nine lives already.

  Torn between the desire to protect myself and the urge to find my cat, I lingered long enough to hear Schwartz clattering down the stairs. Clattering? What was he wearing, a suit of armor?

  Not waiting to find out, I raced after Milo.

  If I died rescuing a cat, maybe I wouldn’t go to hell for all my vigilante justice after all. Although right about now, I was thinking the Zone was pretty close to hell on earth. All we needed was the stench of sulfur. I took a second to sniff the air, but other than the usual fishy odor from the harbor, I only detected a faint whiff of burned ozone. A few freaked-out gargoyles could still be heard.

  Milo leaped from the porch rail to the railing of the next town house, skipping stairs and the yellow jacket nest in the bushes. Feeling plucky, I followed suit, but landed with a thud far less graceful than my kitty’s feline pounce.

  “Milo, my white-knight cat.” With renewed urgency, I shoved him in my messenger bag before he could run again, then pounded the door knocker. Andre owned this town house and shared it with his father, Julius. He’d also taken in Tim, the invisible kid. If they were all still asleep, they needed to be warned.

  When no one answered, I let myself in and shouted, “Julius! Tim! To the basement, now!”

  I knew they had one. I’d been in Andre’s underground tunnel that led to an empty warehouse across the road. Should I ever have time to spare, I’d look up the history of these old houses, but I was more concerned about any illegal operations Andre might be running.