Contracted to Hell

Walking Dead

Damon made it three steps out of Pike's shop before the phone rang behind him.

Pike answered, listened, and held out the receiver like a man delivering a summons. "Diocese line. The one that doesn't officially exist. Father Brennan would like a word with the specialist."

"Tell him I'm busy."

"Take the call," Lilith said. She was already at the curb, studying his Buick the way you study a dog that might bite. "Hell is hunting you. Hell sends Hollows. Humans send casseroles. Find out which one this is."

He took the phone.

"Mr. Lockwood." Brennan sounded like he hadn't slept, which made two of them. "I'm sorry. I know what you did last night. But I wouldn't call unless I had no one else. A woman from my parish, Ruth Delaney. Her husband died on Sunday. Heart, in the garage. The county had him in the morgue." A breath. "He walked into her kitchen at two this morning."

"Corpses don't walk, Father."

"I know what a possession looks like. I've held a crucifix to his forehead. Nothing happened. Not a flinch, Mr. Lockwood. Nothing." His voice cracked. "He's sitting at her table, and he's polite."

Damon looked at Lilith. She didn't look back, which was an answer.

"Address," he said.

---

The Buick's heater was dead, which was fine, because Lilith's side of the car had gone cold anyway. She didn't touch the door handle. She didn't touch the seatbelt. She watched the houses slide past like a woman reading a menu in a language she used to speak.

The burner buzzed against his thigh at 8:41.

*Class. Mrs. A is standing in the hall like a bouncer. Alive and bored. Don't die.*

He typed *Hourly* and sent it, and felt his pulse come down one notch.

"You're allowed to say it," Lilith said.

"Say what?"

"That I brought this to your door."

"Did you?"

"I don't know." She said it flatly, eyes on the window. "That's the part that frightens me."

Eight minutes later the Buick coughed to a stop. The Delaney house sat on a street of identical houses, a gray two-story with a plastic Virgin Mary in the flower bed. Brennan met them on the porch, rumpled and gray-faced. Behind him the front door stood open, and the smell rolled out.

Fresh bread. Coffee. Lemon polish.

No sulfur. No frost. No wet-cellar rot. Damon had walked into forty possessed houses in seven years, and every one of them had stunk of something. This place smelled like a Tuesday.

That was worse.

"She's been baking since two," Brennan murmured. "She doesn't know what else to do with her hands."

Ruth Delaney stood in the kitchen doorway with flour to her elbows, a small woman in a cardigan with a gray braid down her back. She looked at Damon, then at Lilith, then at the floor.

"He's him," she said, before anyone asked. "Gil. He knew our anniversary. He knew where I hide the good scissors. He's him, Father, he's just..." Her hands twisted in her apron. "He doesn't blink."

"May I see him, Mrs. Delaney?"

"He's been asking for you. By name."

The hair rose on Damon's arms.

"I never gave him your name," Brennan said quietly.

"Neither did I," said Damon.

Gilbert Delaney sat at the kitchen table with his hands folded on the checkered cloth. Sixty or so. Heavy shoulders, bus-mechanic forearms, grease still packed into the creases of his knuckles where nobody had scrubbed it out. Someone had put him in a flannel shirt. Under the hem of the pants, a paper tag hung from his left ankle. County Morgue. A number.

His chest rose and fell. In, hold, out. Every four seconds, exactly, like a metronome.

"Good morning," Gil said. His voice was warm and ordinary. "You'll be Mr. Lockwood. Ruth, would you offer these people coffee?"

"I'm fine," Damon said.

"The lady?"

Lilith, in the doorway, said nothing. Her face had gone the color of the tablecloth.

Damon sat across from the dead man.

"Mr. Delaney. What's the last thing you remember?"

"The garage. A pain in my arm." Gil considered it with polite interest. "Then a long dark, and then Ruth's hallway. The walk was very long. I was not tired."

"You walked eleven miles."

"I was not tired."

He wasn't lying. That was the awful part. Damon took the man's wrist across the table, and the skin was the temperature of the tablecloth. No pulse. Not a flicker. The chest kept rising anyway, politely, as if breathing were a favor he was doing the room.

Damon let go and reached down for the second sight, the dim flashlight, and felt the number tick behind his eyes. Eighteen-ten. Ten days to look at one man. He was already counting what it would cost if he found nothing.

The kitchen rearranged itself.

Ruth was a frightened gold glow at the stove. Brennan, a steadier one by the door. Lilith, in the corner, was a cold, tangled shape that Damon did not look at directly.

And Gil Delaney was a dark house. No glow. No soul. No Hollow coiled in the rafters. The furniture was all in place and every light was off. Ward-Skin wasn't even humming. There was nothing in there to hunt.

Except, down the center of the man's chest, from throat to belly, a line of writing.

Registry script. Black, wet-looking, small as stitches, running down the breastbone like a zipper someone had forgotten to close. The same ink Pike's needle had flinched from an hour ago.

Damon leaned in. His eyes burned. The first lines swam and then held.

*One life, returned. Term: until called. Terms met by the Guarantor, as signed below.*

"Guarantor," he said under his breath.

"Don't," Lilith said from the doorway. Her voice was thin. "Damon, don't read the rest."

"Why?"

"Because Hell doesn't return what it takes." She said it like a prayer she no longer believed. "It collects. It does not give back. I have been in that building for longer than your country has existed, and I have never seen a dead man sent home."

"Did you do this?"

"No."

"Do you know who did?"

A long pause. "No."

He could not read her. Seven years ago he could have told when she was lying by the angle of her chin. Now every tell he remembered pointed the wrong way, and he couldn't tell if she'd changed or if she'd always been this good.

"Mrs. Delaney," he said, without turning. "Father. I need the room for a minute."

Brennan took Ruth's elbow and led her out. The back door clicked shut. The kitchen got very quiet, with only the refrigerator humming and the dead man breathing on schedule.

Damon followed the script down. Past the terms, past a clause about collateral that made his teeth ache, to the foot of the line where the ink pooled darker. A seal.

A thumbprint, pressed into the black. Registry-stamped, glossy, still wet. The kind of mark you leave when you sign a contract in blood.

He knew that whorl.

He knew the gap in it, a clean white slice where the ridges stopped, because his own left thumb had been opened to the bone on a church floor seven years ago and had healed that way. He had looked at that scar every day of his life since. He pressed his thumb against the table edge so hard it hurt.

Beside the seal, in tiny hellscript, a date and a time. *Sunday. 11:52 p.m.*

Sunday night, he had been on his cot above the dry cleaner, asleep, wards humming, door locked. Alone.

"That's my thumbprint," Damon said.

"It's genuine." Lilith had crossed the room without a sound. She stood at his shoulder, looking down at the dead man's chest, and her voice had no polish left in it. "That isn't a forgery, Damon. Hell stamped it. Somebody used your name on a contract for a body Hell took, and Hell honored it."

"I never signed for a dead man in my life."

Across the table, Gil Delaney turned his head. The movement was smooth and slow and perfectly friendly. His eyes were clear and brown and completely empty.

"Yes, you did, Mr. Lockwood," he said gently. "You signed for me."

The refrigerator shuddered and went silent.

"And the first payment," Gil Delaney said, "is due at midnight."