Chapter One: Said She was Wild
Chapter Index
I barely looked up when the man entered my office. I never do. I don’t like to come across as too eager, or too... girly. Flouncy-girly. Whatever. I’ve had too many potential clients assume I was the secretary, or worse, they’d just assume Jared (the actual secretary) was me and start asking him questions. That’s what I get for advertising under the name ‘Jules’ which most people assume to be a man’s name, but hell if I’m going to advertise under ‘Jillian’. It got less business, for one, and two, it wasn’t my name. Jillian Shepard is a quiet little housewife. Jules Shepard is a badass motherfuckin’ assassin and everyone knows it.
It didn’t take me long to assess the client as he walked through the door. There was a type of people who came into the office of a high class assassination expert, and they were generally all pale, sweaty, slimy scumbags, underlings for mob bosses, a terrorist or two, and the occasional government official who needed a kill off the books. I was good. I could make a kill untracable, could point all the evidence at someone else. At least, that’s what I advertised.
I finished scrawling a passive-aggressive memo to Jared about making sure lunch breaks were only an hour, and placed the pen neatly across the note, sitting back in my chair to regard the client with a cool eye.
He was pale as hell, no surprises, not greasy enough to be a part of the mob or a terrorist and his suit and build did not suggest government agent. He was actually rather thin, slight, fairly attractive. Enough to catch the eye but not turn the head. His suit was well tailored and professional; expenisve, possibly. He wore glasses that seemed to magnify is startlingly blue eyes, the eyes I proceeded to meet. Neither of our expressions changed.
“What do you want?” I finally asked, being sure to keep my tone level and aloof. That’s what was expected in this business, and he appeared to know that.
“I’m here to hire you to kill someone.”
“Well I would hope so,” I quipped. These were the normal nicities, the polite verbal snark that covered the tension of the real business-I need you to kill someone. How much are you willing to pay? “Would any someone do?”
“No, I need you to kill a specific someone. A demon.” He threw a file down on my desk. I bit back my gag reflex, suddenly thrown off by the change in protocal as the horrific pictures slid out of the folder-gory, half-ripped off faces, limbs missing, and eyeball that had rolled into the street, a hand replacing a head.
I inhaled, forced myself to look at the pictures for another moment, then looked back up at the client. “Normally I take care of rats, execs and political leaders. You know, humans. I’ve never dealt with a demon before. There are Ghostbuster teams for this sort of thing, aren’t there?”
“The so-called supernatural investigative teams are worthlessly ineffective against the demon I am sending you up against. Six adventurous and decidedly foolish teams have already tried to kill this thing, and all have ended up similarly to the victims seen in the pictures. This one-“ eh drew out a particularly gruesome photo with a creamy-white hand-“is actually of a member of the last team that attempted and failed. These aren’t your run of the mill house spirits we’re talking about, Ms. Shepard.”
“Mrs,” I corrected stiffly, tearing my gaze away from the fairly disturbing image to look back at his face.
“Mrs. Shepard,” he corrected. He lowered the photo and placed it back on my desk. There was a moment of silence, I suppose while he let me mull over what he just said. He watched me, expression bland save for one smug eyebrow raised in a look of superiority, his hands clasped professionally behind back.
“Well,” I said, slapping my hand down on the desk and lifing myself up. The sudden noise made him jump, and then wince, pulling his lips in like he’d tasted something sour. I hid my smirk as I glanced out the window, then turned to pace in the center of the room. “So what you’re telling me Mister, uh... let me guess. Gabriel?” I raised a smug eyebrow right back at him.
“Israel,” he corrected a smirk crossing his face. “Just Israel.”
“
Israel,” I repeated, then continued in my rambling. “So what you’re telling me, Mister Israel,i s that you are hiring me to kill a demon that teams better-armed and trained for this job than I am have not been able to defeat?”
“Do you really have so little confidence in your own abilities?”
“I wouldn’t call it a lack of confidence, more like a sense of self-preservation. While I may advertise myself as having taken on some jobs that appear to be suicidal, those jobs involved humans and my ability to manipulate humans. There’s a reason I don’t trust the supernatural. You never know how they’re going to act. You can’t read them.”
“Are you saying you trust humans, known to be the lowest of the low, back-stabbers and liars, over what are essentially animals, acting on instinct?”
“Yes,” I shot back. “Because as ‘low’ as they may be, they’re still my own species and I know them better than anything.”
He sighed a little, turned his back on me and proceeded to begin examining the stuff on my desk. I’ll admit it, I keep a knick-knack or two on that desk-a few of those snowglobe things, a little ancient derringer that makes me laugh to hold in my hand, a picture of my dead husband. Of course it would be the last of those things he would latch on to, picking it up and wiping the dust off Craig’s face. He turned to me.
“This is your husband?” he asks, nodding to make sure I knew he was indicating Craig. I sighed, and nodded. “Well he’s very handsome,” he said. “You can just tell that you two look great together.”
I gritted my teeth. I hated hearing people talk about me and Craig in the present tense, as if he was going to come back, as if he had never been killed. “We did look good together,” I said. I was getting pissed off at all this switch in protocol. “Back when he was alive.” I waited for the stiffening, for ‘Mister Israel’ to quickly put the picture back on my desk, possibly knock it over in an attempt to backtrack and be forgiven for his awful mistake, but it didn’t happen. Instead, he just raised an eyebrow-I wanted to rip out those damn eyebrows-and pursed his lips in a look that I guessed was supposed to be a sympathetic one, though it just made him look more smug than before.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, in that voice where you know they’re not really sorry. “Illness?”
“He was murdered,” I said, my voice getting more and more gravelly. This had to end soon. I was not going to tramp out my entire life story as some kind of freak show for this freak who was supposed to be hiring me, not pissing me off. “By one of your little ‘animals acting on instinct’.”
“He was murdered by demons?” I nodded, looking into his face so he wouldn’t assume I was uncomfortable talking about it. He didn’t seem to be uncomfortable at all either, which was a little disturbing. “What kind of demons?” As if the only thing he really cared about was the demonology of it all, and not the fact that my husband was dead. I bit back a growl and tried to remind myself that he was only a client, a stupid client at that, who didn’t know any better.
“I’m not sure, to be honest. At the time, I was a little more concerned with the fact that my husband had been ripped to pieces by what looked like giant bears in the middle of the street, during the day.”
“So they looked like giant bears?”
That was the last straw. “Look, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Mister Israel-“
“You have a history with demons.”
I sighed. “Yes, sir.”
“They killed your husband-in front of you, too. In broad daylight.”
“Yes sir.”
“So why didn’t that experience-seeing your husband ripped to pieces, as you describe-make you want revenge? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and kill all the demons?”
“No sir,” I said, shaking my head. “If there’s anything I learned from that day, it’s that you should avoid demons as much as possible. I’m not about to go on a demon killing rampage.”
“But surely you miss your husband, and you want his killer dead?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t.”
“You don’t miss your husband?”
“Craig was a good man, and I loved him a lot, but he’s dead and there’s nothing I can do about it now, so there’s no point in splitting my pants over it.”
“But other people aren’t so strong, Mrs. Shepard,” he said. “For other people-the families of the people in these photos-their lives have been torn apart. Doesn’t that stir anything in you, Mrs. Shepard? Don’t you have any shred of human empathy?”
“My heart goes out to them,” I began, stumbling around words because the sudden switch in tactics had me confused. “But how is it my responsibility-“
“You have the ability to kill this thing,” Mister Israel continued, tromping right over my words like I hadn’t been in the middle of speaking them. “You alone have the ability, and therefore you have the responsibility, Jillian Shepard, to the world, to your husband and all the people this demon has killed, to kill this thing, destroy it, wipe it off the face of this earth.”
There was a long pause where I just looked at his pale face, my eyebrow raised. It was a look of ‘you are so ridiculous.’ “Was that little speech supposed to make me suddenly change my mind?” I asked snidely.
“I was hoping it would,” he said. “However, if you’re not swayed by that, I’ll have you know I have more than enough money to cover the cost of this job.”
“What if I told you that, because this is a special case, I’d have to charge double?” I slid back behind my desk, safe territory.
He grinned, not the reaction I wanted to see. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “I’m more than willing to pay double. And this-“ he pulled out a wad of bills and threw it on my desk. “Consider it a down payment.” I picked up the money and examined it. “Feel free to look at every bill,” he said. “I’ll tell you right now, though, that yes, it’s all real, and it’s one thousand dollars, just to get things going. There’s a lot more where that came from, and even more when you actually complete the job.”
I put the wad of cash down, exhaled, and folded my hands, looking up at him. “I’ll take the job,” I said. He grinned broadly.
“I thought you might, eventually,” he told me. “Everyone has their switch, you just have to find it.”
“Don’t think for a minute that this means you get to be involved in any way,” I growled at him. “You will just tell me where to find it, how to kill it, and then you will leave. You will send five hundred dollars every week until I call you and tell you I have completed the job, whereupon you will send me five thousand dollars.” I got up and opened a filing cabinet, digging around for an empty file and a blank contract.
“How do I know you won’t gyp me and not call me for several weeks after you’ve killed it?”
“You don’t,” I shot back. “You just have to trust the contract.” I placed one on the desk and proceeded to write ‘Israel, Mister’ on the file. “Now, are you going to sign it, or no?”
Mister Israel tightened his lips at me, then sighed and bent over the desk, using his own pen gripped tightly in his pale fist to sign the contract. He turned it over to me, and I signed it with a quick flourish, then grabbed a piece of paper off my desk.
“Now,” I said. “Where am I supposed to find this thing?”
“It usually hangs out in a warehouse downtown, in the fishing district. The warehouse is abandoned, but it used to be Pier 49.”
“And I kill it...”
“By chopping it’s head off. But I must warn you-“
“Ah, nope, got everything I need,” I said. “Now, kind sir, if you’d leave and let me get to my work, it’d be much appreciated.” I sat back down at my desk and pretended to do paperwork, because I just wanted him to leave at this point. He looked like he was going to say something else, but he stopped, sighed, and turned around, striding out the door. Or he would have, if my secretary Jason hadn’t been coming back in, carrying a large brown paper bag. They crashed into each other, and Jason began apologizing profusely even as he dropped the paper bag and spilled what looked like sandwiches from the local deli. Mister Israel just grunted at him, and strode away, not even bothering to help Jason pick up the sandwiches. Jason finally got all the sandwiches back in his bag, and came into the office, looking vaguely hurt.
“Who was that?” he asked. Jason was a teenager, seventeen to be exact, and his mother was my next-door neighbor in my apartment building. He’d been working with me ever since he could get a worker’s permit, and he was a pretty decent, if somewhat bland kid. He was good at filing and if I really didn’t want to do the paper-pushing, it got pushed to him. He also watered the plants and swept the floor if I had a job abroad, and fed the fish in the hallway every evening.
“That would be a client,” I said.
“He was kind of a jerk,” he said, rubbing his arm where Israel had bumped into him.
“That he was,” I nodded, staring out the open door as Jason plopped his sandwich bag onto his desk.
“Want a turkey sandwich on rye?” he asked. “I got it without mustard, like you like it.”
I barely looked up when the man entered my office. I never do. I don’t like to come across as too eager, or too... girly. Flouncy-girly. Whatever. I’ve had too many potential clients assume I was the secretary, or worse, they’d just assume Jared (the actual secretary) was me and start asking him questions. That’s what I get for advertising under the name ‘Jules’ which most people assume to be a man’s name, but hell if I’m going to advertise under ‘Jillian’. It got less business, for one, and two, it wasn’t my name. Jillian Shepard is a quiet little housewife. Jules Shepard is a badass motherfuckin’ assassin and everyone knows it.
It didn’t take me long to assess the client as he walked through the door. There was a type of people who came into the office of a high class assassination expert, and they were generally all pale, sweaty, slimy scumbags, underlings for mob bosses, a terrorist or two, and the occasional government official who needed a kill off the books. I was good. I could make a kill untracable, could point all the evidence at someone else. At least, that’s what I advertised.
I finished scrawling a passive-aggressive memo to Jared about making sure lunch breaks were only an hour, and placed the pen neatly across the note, sitting back in my chair to regard the client with a cool eye.
He was pale as hell, no surprises, not greasy enough to be a part of the mob or a terrorist and his suit and build did not suggest government agent. He was actually rather thin, slight, fairly attractive. Enough to catch the eye but not turn the head. His suit was well tailored and professional; expenisve, possibly. He wore glasses that seemed to magnify is startlingly blue eyes, the eyes I proceeded to meet. Neither of our expressions changed.
“What do you want?” I finally asked, being sure to keep my tone level and aloof. That’s what was expected in this business, and he appeared to know that.
“I’m here to hire you to kill someone.”
“Well I would hope so,” I quipped. These were the normal nicities, the polite verbal snark that covered the tension of the real business-I need you to kill someone. How much are you willing to pay? “Would any someone do?”
“No, I need you to kill a specific someone. A demon.” He threw a file down on my desk. I bit back my gag reflex, suddenly thrown off by the change in protocal as the horrific pictures slid out of the folder-gory, half-ripped off faces, limbs missing, and eyeball that had rolled into the street, a hand replacing a head.
I inhaled, forced myself to look at the pictures for another moment, then looked back up at the client. “Normally I take care of rats, execs and political leaders. You know, humans. I’ve never dealt with a demon before. There are Ghostbuster teams for this sort of thing, aren’t there?”
“The so-called supernatural investigative teams are worthlessly ineffective against the demon I am sending you up against. Six adventurous and decidedly foolish teams have already tried to kill this thing, and all have ended up similarly to the victims seen in the pictures. This one-“ eh drew out a particularly gruesome photo with a creamy-white hand-“is actually of a member of the last team that attempted and failed. These aren’t your run of the mill house spirits we’re talking about, Ms. Shepard.”
“Mrs,” I corrected stiffly, tearing my gaze away from the fairly disturbing image to look back at his face.
“Mrs. Shepard,” he corrected. He lowered the photo and placed it back on my desk. There was a moment of silence, I suppose while he let me mull over what he just said. He watched me, expression bland save for one smug eyebrow raised in a look of superiority, his hands clasped professionally behind back.
“Well,” I said, slapping my hand down on the desk and lifing myself up. The sudden noise made him jump, and then wince, pulling his lips in like he’d tasted something sour. I hid my smirk as I glanced out the window, then turned to pace in the center of the room. “So what you’re telling me Mister, uh... let me guess. Gabriel?” I raised a smug eyebrow right back at him.
“Israel,” he corrected a smirk crossing his face. “Just Israel.”
“
Israel,” I repeated, then continued in my rambling. “So what you’re telling me, Mister Israel,i s that you are hiring me to kill a demon that teams better-armed and trained for this job than I am have not been able to defeat?”
“Do you really have so little confidence in your own abilities?”
“I wouldn’t call it a lack of confidence, more like a sense of self-preservation. While I may advertise myself as having taken on some jobs that appear to be suicidal, those jobs involved humans and my ability to manipulate humans. There’s a reason I don’t trust the supernatural. You never know how they’re going to act. You can’t read them.”
“Are you saying you trust humans, known to be the lowest of the low, back-stabbers and liars, over what are essentially animals, acting on instinct?”
“Yes,” I shot back. “Because as ‘low’ as they may be, they’re still my own species and I know them better than anything.”
He sighed a little, turned his back on me and proceeded to begin examining the stuff on my desk. I’ll admit it, I keep a knick-knack or two on that desk-a few of those snowglobe things, a little ancient derringer that makes me laugh to hold in my hand, a picture of my dead husband. Of course it would be the last of those things he would latch on to, picking it up and wiping the dust off Craig’s face. He turned to me.
“This is your husband?” he asks, nodding to make sure I knew he was indicating Craig. I sighed, and nodded. “Well he’s very handsome,” he said. “You can just tell that you two look great together.”
I gritted my teeth. I hated hearing people talk about me and Craig in the present tense, as if he was going to come back, as if he had never been killed. “We did look good together,” I said. I was getting pissed off at all this switch in protocol. “Back when he was alive.” I waited for the stiffening, for ‘Mister Israel’ to quickly put the picture back on my desk, possibly knock it over in an attempt to backtrack and be forgiven for his awful mistake, but it didn’t happen. Instead, he just raised an eyebrow-I wanted to rip out those damn eyebrows-and pursed his lips in a look that I guessed was supposed to be a sympathetic one, though it just made him look more smug than before.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, in that voice where you know they’re not really sorry. “Illness?”
“He was murdered,” I said, my voice getting more and more gravelly. This had to end soon. I was not going to tramp out my entire life story as some kind of freak show for this freak who was supposed to be hiring me, not pissing me off. “By one of your little ‘animals acting on instinct’.”
“He was murdered by demons?” I nodded, looking into his face so he wouldn’t assume I was uncomfortable talking about it. He didn’t seem to be uncomfortable at all either, which was a little disturbing. “What kind of demons?” As if the only thing he really cared about was the demonology of it all, and not the fact that my husband was dead. I bit back a growl and tried to remind myself that he was only a client, a stupid client at that, who didn’t know any better.
“I’m not sure, to be honest. At the time, I was a little more concerned with the fact that my husband had been ripped to pieces by what looked like giant bears in the middle of the street, during the day.”
“So they looked like giant bears?”
That was the last straw. “Look, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Mister Israel-“
“You have a history with demons.”
I sighed. “Yes, sir.”
“They killed your husband-in front of you, too. In broad daylight.”
“Yes sir.”
“So why didn’t that experience-seeing your husband ripped to pieces, as you describe-make you want revenge? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and kill all the demons?”
“No sir,” I said, shaking my head. “If there’s anything I learned from that day, it’s that you should avoid demons as much as possible. I’m not about to go on a demon killing rampage.”
“But surely you miss your husband, and you want his killer dead?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t.”
“You don’t miss your husband?”
“Craig was a good man, and I loved him a lot, but he’s dead and there’s nothing I can do about it now, so there’s no point in splitting my pants over it.”
“But other people aren’t so strong, Mrs. Shepard,” he said. “For other people-the families of the people in these photos-their lives have been torn apart. Doesn’t that stir anything in you, Mrs. Shepard? Don’t you have any shred of human empathy?”
“My heart goes out to them,” I began, stumbling around words because the sudden switch in tactics had me confused. “But how is it my responsibility-“
“You have the ability to kill this thing,” Mister Israel continued, tromping right over my words like I hadn’t been in the middle of speaking them. “You alone have the ability, and therefore you have the responsibility, Jillian Shepard, to the world, to your husband and all the people this demon has killed, to kill this thing, destroy it, wipe it off the face of this earth.”
There was a long pause where I just looked at his pale face, my eyebrow raised. It was a look of ‘you are so ridiculous.’ “Was that little speech supposed to make me suddenly change my mind?” I asked snidely.
“I was hoping it would,” he said. “However, if you’re not swayed by that, I’ll have you know I have more than enough money to cover the cost of this job.”
“What if I told you that, because this is a special case, I’d have to charge double?” I slid back behind my desk, safe territory.
He grinned, not the reaction I wanted to see. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “I’m more than willing to pay double. And this-“ he pulled out a wad of bills and threw it on my desk. “Consider it a down payment.” I picked up the money and examined it. “Feel free to look at every bill,” he said. “I’ll tell you right now, though, that yes, it’s all real, and it’s one thousand dollars, just to get things going. There’s a lot more where that came from, and even more when you actually complete the job.”
I put the wad of cash down, exhaled, and folded my hands, looking up at him. “I’ll take the job,” I said. He grinned broadly.
“I thought you might, eventually,” he told me. “Everyone has their switch, you just have to find it.”
“Don’t think for a minute that this means you get to be involved in any way,” I growled at him. “You will just tell me where to find it, how to kill it, and then you will leave. You will send five hundred dollars every week until I call you and tell you I have completed the job, whereupon you will send me five thousand dollars.” I got up and opened a filing cabinet, digging around for an empty file and a blank contract.
“How do I know you won’t gyp me and not call me for several weeks after you’ve killed it?”
“You don’t,” I shot back. “You just have to trust the contract.” I placed one on the desk and proceeded to write ‘Israel, Mister’ on the file. “Now, are you going to sign it, or no?”
Mister Israel tightened his lips at me, then sighed and bent over the desk, using his own pen gripped tightly in his pale fist to sign the contract. He turned it over to me, and I signed it with a quick flourish, then grabbed a piece of paper off my desk.
“Now,” I said. “Where am I supposed to find this thing?”
“It usually hangs out in a warehouse downtown, in the fishing district. The warehouse is abandoned, but it used to be Pier 49.”
“And I kill it...”
“By chopping it’s head off. But I must warn you-“
“Ah, nope, got everything I need,” I said. “Now, kind sir, if you’d leave and let me get to my work, it’d be much appreciated.” I sat back down at my desk and pretended to do paperwork, because I just wanted him to leave at this point. He looked like he was going to say something else, but he stopped, sighed, and turned around, striding out the door. Or he would have, if my secretary Jason hadn’t been coming back in, carrying a large brown paper bag. They crashed into each other, and Jason began apologizing profusely even as he dropped the paper bag and spilled what looked like sandwiches from the local deli. Mister Israel just grunted at him, and strode away, not even bothering to help Jason pick up the sandwiches. Jason finally got all the sandwiches back in his bag, and came into the office, looking vaguely hurt.
“Who was that?” he asked. Jason was a teenager, seventeen to be exact, and his mother was my next-door neighbor in my apartment building. He’d been working with me ever since he could get a worker’s permit, and he was a pretty decent, if somewhat bland kid. He was good at filing and if I really didn’t want to do the paper-pushing, it got pushed to him. He also watered the plants and swept the floor if I had a job abroad, and fed the fish in the hallway every evening.
“That would be a client,” I said.
“He was kind of a jerk,” he said, rubbing his arm where Israel had bumped into him.
“That he was,” I nodded, staring out the open door as Jason plopped his sandwich bag onto his desk.
“Want a turkey sandwich on rye?” he asked. “I got it without mustard, like you like it.”