Pact devils were real.
A chill slicked its way through her nerves, lighting her whole body up uncomfortably. Her own faith in religion, and by default all things otherworldly, was complicated, nearing non-existent with each passing year. Her mind briefly flickered to the darker corners of her history, finding that the hard rock of doubt still sat heavy in her heart. Santi could believe all he wanted, but belief was not a luxury she could afford. However, if devils and angels were now part of her ecosystem, what did that mean for what she believed, or more specifically, did not believe?
She fingered the worn wooden rosary Santi had given her in the early morning hours before they were finally calm enough to go to sleep. As each bead passed through her fingers, she recited four words: pact devils are real.
The thought should have been stranger to Carmen, but her uncle’s firm, matter-of-fact statement rang with more truth than she could honestly understand. Santi was many things: kind, jovial, unerringly optimistic, but he believed in facts almost as much as he believed in his faith. If he said pact devils were real because he had met them, well…
They were responsible for the grisly scene in front of her.
She could still see the flashing blue and red lights from the night before in between blinks, but now the scene before her was sparse with the exception of a crime scene tech or two still processing. From a healthy distance, she could see that the man’s body, or what remained of it, had already been taken away, leaving instead alarmingly vast pools of blood and blood spatter across the alley’s pavement and brick walls.
In the life she had left temporarily suspended back in the United States, she had been an investigator for her ex-husband’s law firm. She had made a living looking in dark, seedy corners of their world for evidence of man’s moral failings: adultery, thefts, manslaughter. The answers were not always clear but her understanding of human nature and the social construction of rules made sense to her. Here, as she tried to find a clue of any kind, she could not make sense of how a man leaves his apartment to walk his dog to end up torn to ribbons in an alleyway by some supernatural creature. What were the rules for this context?
It couldn’t be as simple as good and evil. Good and evil were extremes in a world where nuance and purpose could be found in most things. As she looked closer at the scene before her, outwardly this had all the markings of Evil, but to what end? Why risk the exposure to the human world? There was a reason, she simply hadn’t found it yet.
“Mija.”
Carmen snapped her eyes to the street corner nearest to the refectory. A small smile curled the edge of her lips as she took in Santi bundled up against the brisk October chill in a woolen coat and a well-loved obnoxious yellow and green scarf that her mother had knitted him decades ago. He was the picture of normalcy. An older priest out for a walk in his parish. However, even from where she stood, she could see the vigilant steel of his eyes, watching, wondering. There was nothing normal about this priest. He knew the blessings and dangers around him and now he had been tasked with ensuring the safety of his community from forces threatening them.
She lifted her hand in a small wave as she walked to join her uncle. She slipped her arms through his and let him lead her up the street to a small café. Under the burgundy awning were several bistro tables with heaters strategically interspersed in between them. A slight chill clung to the air, brisk enough to keep the Parisians moving quickly as they traveled the city but not so unbearably so that the tables were completely vacant. As they approached, Carmen caught her breath as she saw Emil already sitting at a table in the corner of the gated terrace, nursing a beer. He hadn’t noticed them just yet, so she took the opportunity to drink him in as an arc of lust electrified the lines of her body.
She found herself surprised that even in the daylight, he looked every bit himself as he had in the dusky shadows of the night before. His olive skin was a touch paler in the daytime, but now she could see a light dusting of freckles across his cheekbones and along his neck. His lush inky hair, shorn on the sides and longer along the top of his head, was not slicked back in the current style. Instead his hair was wayward and messy, standing on his head in different directions, flopping over his forehead as though he either hadn’t bothered to mess with it from waking up or hadn’t slept at all but instead spent the night dragging his fingers through his hair. Likely the latter, she thought to herself.
However, what surprised her most was he himself should have stood out too. It wasn’t the obnoxious fitted Hawaiian shirt, complete with bright red and orange hibiscus flowers printed across it, amid the sea of black, navy, and gray clothing the rest of the city preferred. It was the fact that the long fingers of his left hand, those same fingers that reached through her long tresses last night, gently tapped against his leg under the table. Despite the lazy sprawl of his long, lanky body in his chair, bottomless pools are dark eyes under a furrowed brow vigilantly scanned passersby, flicking back and forth looking for something, anything that would bring them closer to the monster lurking the streets of the City of Lights. He was hunting and no one had any idea. No one stopped to stare at him. He was just another person sitting in a cafe.
Only he wasn’t another person.
Santi and her weaved their way through tables until they made it to Emil’s table. Emil, stood up towering over the pair of them, nodding a hello to Santi. “Père Santiago, we meet under strange circumstances again.”
“Strange as always,” Santi replied calmly as he peeled off his coat and took a seat.
Emil turned his dark eyes to Carmen. Under his direct gaze, Carmen was certain she was going to spontaneously combust on the spot despite her struggle to reconcile the deliciously dark man from last night with the literal pact devil in front of her. She felt her body give way and take a step towards him, which he took as his opportunity to give her a short, sizzling peck on each cheek. “Carmen, je suis encore enchanté.”
“Enchantée,” she parroted, quickly averting her eyes to reach for her chair.
Emil pulled it out for her before gently pushing her back towards the table. He dropped back into this chair, resuming his laissez-faire posture from minutes before, a smirk twisting his lips as he winked at her.
Carmen flicked a look at Santi, who regarded them with a mixture of suspicious amusement. Internally, she screamed knowing a sermon was bound to occur in light of last night. She quickly ordered a hot tea in accented French, requesting the waitress to bring her all of the sugar humanly possible.
“You shouldn’t drink tea with that much sugar in it,” Santi clucked.
“It’s this or I could be drinking that,” she retorted while pointing at Emil’s beer. “Is 10am too early for a beer, Santi?”
Santi let out an easy laugh. “You may be right my dear.”
“It’s never too early,” Emil added, taking a long pull of his beer to make his point. As he set the glass down, he gave Carmen and Santi a wolfish grin. “You should try it sometime.”
Santi playfully chastised them for a few minutes until their drinks arrived, a tea for Carmen, a café au lait for Santi, and another ale for Emil, before an uneasy silence fell over the table. After a moment, Emil snapped his fingers and Carmen sat a little straighter in her chair as she felt a shroud of heavy air settle over her shoulders. She looked around, seeing everything around her occurring as normally as can be, but something was different.
“It’s a glamour,” Emil answered her unasked question. “This way we can talk about our unfriendly neighborhood monster without attracting attention from the rest of the café.”
“Oh, right, that would make sense, I suppose.” Carmen paused before she blurted out, “Actually, none of this makes sense. I… I don’t even know where to start. Santi, you didn’t ask me to stay in Paris with you because of Richard, did you?”
From the corner of her eye, she watched Emil cock his head curiously towards her at the mention of her ex-husband’s name.
“I’m sorry, mija, but not entirely.”
“But I don’t investigate… paranormal…activities? Until last night, I didn’t even know-“
“You don’t need to know the ways of the lore in order to understand that something isn’t right and that you can help. You are more than clever and capable.”
Carmen blinked at Santi.
“Carmen,” Emil interjected. “Last night was the fourth gruesome murder in Montparnasse in a month, the second in a week. As we get closer to the All Saint’s Day, whoever, whatever, is killing these people will only get worse. Paris is not safe. If I’m honest, I don’t think the angels and devils of the city are too.”
“What do you mean?” She wrapped her hand firmly around the rounded edges of her cup, leeching the heat from the tea as a new chill made its way through her spine. She was not meant for end-of-the-world matters. She dumpster dived and snuck around with a camera to get evidence for Richard’s cases. Cases that might change lives, but not the status quo. Humans will steal, cheat, and kill, but these were not the matters of Heaven and Hell.
Santi fingered the fringe of his beaten scarf. “Pact devils make deals with mortals, fulfilling whatever their hearts desire in exchange for a favor later on. If our suspicions are correct, this might be the work of a pact devil calling in their favors in order to create chaos. The closer we get to All Saint’s Day, the thinner the veil is around the gates of Heaven and Hell.”
“Holy hell,” Carmen huffed out, her mind spinning as she did the mental and emotional calculus to understand what Santi and Emil were trying to tell her.
Emil chuckled. “Quite literally. Help us, Carmen.”
She sat back in her chair, watching as people hustled past them. Montparnasse, while it had its draws, was a residential neighborhood. Families and couples living their life in the heart of the city. Shopping for groceries at their local marchés, taking their children to the park after school, all the mundane, human activities that make up their existence. Something was hunting them down, making even a dog walk a bloody, fatal event.
She thought about Santi. She could never imagine anyone going after her uncle, a beloved priest and leader in the community. However, Santi also knew about the world beyond the mortal one. He had a direct connection to a higher power and a direct connection to literal angels and devils. If something was in fact stalking and killing the residents of the neighborhood, Santi was—
Quickly fishing through her purse, Carmen pulled out her book of maps of the city. Her copy was beaten and worn from multiple trips to visit her uncle, but it still would come in clutch for the upsetting theory she was about to propose. She ignored Santi and Emil’s looks as she impatiently flipped through her pocket guide until she found a map of Montparnasse.
“Show me. Show me where the bodies were found,” she asked, pulling out a pen from her purse as well.
Pulling their chairs closer to each other, Santi and Emil bowed their heads over her little book, quickly discussing where the four bodies had been found and when. The Cimitière du Montparnasse, on the loading dock of the Hôpital Cochin, in the plaza near the Catacombs of Paris, and one just down the street from the refectory.
The bodies were far enough apart that it did not look like the monster was coming after Santi, but Carmen was still concerned about the proximity of the last body near the refectory. Something was moving through spaces of death in the neighborhood. A quiet voice whispered to her, maybe they’re building an army. She shook her head. No, they were making a point, building fear, terror.
Someone was baiting Heaven and Hell into a war on Earth.
“It’s using the old mines, the ones that they turned into catacombs,” Carmen said matter-of-factly.
“It would make sense,” Emil agreed, tracing the rim of his glass.
“No, it’s not that it would, it’s that it does. There are entrances all over the city and Montparnasse is one of the larger parts of the system. The glaring problem is that they can use the entire system to start terrorizing other arrondissements.”
Emil blinked at Carmen’s words. “It’s a test.”
She nodded. “It’s a test. And we need to make sure it fails.”