There are few places creepier than a deserted computer lab
in the middle of the night. And believe me, I know creepy.
Dozens of fans whirred, their white noise pressing like
cotton into my ears and making me jumpy about what I wasn’t
hearing. Eerie blue light half-lit the room; other lights
blinked randomly on the machines. Although it was late
January, fans blew in streams of frigid air. Even with my
leather jacket over my sweater, I had goose bumps prickling
both arms. I was alone with MIT’s new supercomputer, and
that made this particular deserted computer lab supercreepy.
That, and the fact that I wasn’t really alone. In here with
me, somewhere, was a demon.
That’s why I’d been called in, to exterminate a Glitch in
the supercomputer. Supposedly the world’s third biggest,
fastest, and smartest, lately this giant machine hadn’t
done anything but spit out error messages. The MIT
brainiacs tried everything they could think of to eliminate
the Glitch, but none of their usual fixes worked. In
desperation, they called me. I’m Victory Vaughn, Boston’s
only professional demon exterminator. And I deal with
Glitches the old-fashioned way: by killing them.
Fifty or sixty locker-sized cabinets, each holding multiple
processors, lined up in rows like ghostly soldiers standing
eternally at attention. I opened a cabinet, leaned in, and
sniffed, checking for that characteristic Glitch smell: a
strong scent of ozone with an undertone of grape bubble gum
mixed with sardine paste and rotten eggs.
Nothing. I’d been here half an hour with no luck. It was
slow going. A supercomputer is basically a series of ultra-
fast processors linked together to ramp up the computing
power. All those processors in all those cabinets gave the
Glitch hundreds of places to hole up in our little game of
hide-and-seek.
I opened the next door. Come out, come out, wherever you
are. Inside, a tangle of wires and cables snaked around
stacks of circuit boards. Hard to believe a mess like that
could perform billions of calculations at the speed of
light. Except it couldn’t—not with the Glitch frying its
circuits. I sniffed again, then tensed at the sharp smell
of ozone. Beneath it, almost too faint to detect, was the
stomach-churning odor of Glitch.
I pulled my rubber-lined electrician’s gloves from my belt
and put them on. Clumsy, but a necessary precaution. A
Glitch can take two forms. When the demon invades a
machine, it’s pure magical energy that feeds off the
electricity passing through its host. Outside its
electronic nest, a Glitch has a physical body the size of a
large teddy bear—but there’s nothing cuddly about its slimy
purple skin, needle-sharp teeth, and inch-long claws. A
shimmer of energy buzzes over its skin; touching one is
like sticking your finger in an electric socket. That’s
what the gloves were for.
To draw the Glitch out of the computer, I needed to force
it into its physical form. So I’d brought Glitch Gone, an
anti-static spray that won’t hurt the machine but forces
the Glitch out. When that happens, the Glitch stays stuck
in its physical form for a minute, maybe two, before it can
turn back into energy and re-infest a machine.
I sprayed a light mist of Glitch Gone inside the cabinet,
moving the can back and forth to make sure I didn’t miss a
spot. Stepping back, I readied my bronze-headed ax,
gripping it as best I could in the electrician’s gloves.
With any luck, I’d split the Glitch in two before it
attacked me.
Inside the cabinet, the processor lights began to blink
faster. A spark shot out, then another. The Glitch stink
intensified. Sparks, coming faster now, swirled into a
pinwheel. The wheel spun faster, coalescing into a solid
blur of light. I squinted against the brightness, trying to
focus on the shape the light was taking. Then energy
blasted out, a screech sliced the air, and the Glitch
sprang.
I jumped back and to the left, but claws swiped my cheek.
With the slash of pain came a teeth-clenching electric
shock that almost knocked me off my feet. I staggered, and
the Glitch leapt at me again. This time, I brought down the
ax with both hands, but the damn demon was too fast. It
sped away, and the ax buried itself in the floor.
I tugged at the handle, turning my head left and right to
see where the demon had gone. It was too soon for it to
reenter the computer—I hoped. My Glitch Gone spray was a
couple of weeks past its expiration date. As the ax started
to give, a yowl sounded behind me and the Glitch landed on
my back. I staggered. The demon couldn’t shock me through
my leather jacket, but what I heard promised something
worse. The Glitch was hawking up a big wad of spit.
Glitch saliva is both disgusting and dangerous. It’s
purple, has that grape-and-sardine smell, and it’s where
the phrase “gumming up the works” comes from. Worse, the
stuff is venomous, gradually penetrating skin to deliver
its poison. A couple of days of hard, repeated scrubbing
gets rid of it, but I was not going to spend the next week
washing Glitch spit out of my hair.
I reached back, yanked the Glitch off me, and slammed it
onto the floor. I got both hands around the ax handle and
swung. Missed by a hair. The Glitch zipped out from under
the blade and leapt on top of a cabinet. It started hawking
again, its yellow eyes squinting, its body bobbing with
effort. At the same time, the sparks that sizzled over its
skin began to consolidate and swirl into a circle above its
head. Damn it, the Glitch Gone was wearing off. If the
demon jumped back into the supercomputer now, it’d double
the amount of damage it had already caused. I swung, but
again the Glitch jumped clear. The cabinet didn’t, though.
My ax slammed through its top and into the processor inside.
Oops.
No time to worry about collateral damage. I spun in the
direction the Glitch had gone, in time to see a stream of
sparks flow into a video camera mounted in a corner of the
room.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I grabbed my Glitch Gone and raced to
the camera, which I blasted with a big cloud of spray.
Sparks shot out like fireworks. I ducked as the camera
exploded. This time, the Glitch materialized almost
immediately. It hurtled at me feet first, knocking me
backward with its powerful legs, using my chest as a
launchpad to rocket off in the opposite direction. Damn,
that hurt. The Glitch sped down the aisle between two rows
of cabinets, toward the back of the room.
I took off after it, clutching the ax with both hands, my
boots pounding the floor. I skidded around the corner where
I’d seen it turn. The Glitch launched itself at me, claws
aiming for my eyes. I dodged and swung. The ax smashed deep
into the side of a processor cabinet and, again, got stuck.
Instead of giving the Glitch another chance to attack, I
whirled around, reaching for the throwing knife in my ankle
sheath. The Glitch jumped at my face, but it overshot and
bounced off the wall. It landed with an oof and lay on the
floor. I threw. The damn Glitch rolled, and my knife barely
scratched its arm.
The demon emitted a nails-on-chalkboard screech and
clambered to its feet. It took off down the next aisle,
running toward the front of the lab. It was fast, but not
with its previous speed. I glanced at the ax embedded in
the cabinet, then retrieved my throwing knife instead. Its
bronze blade showed spots of purplish-black blood. Good.
Bronze is lethal to demons, and even though I hadn’t
wounded the Glitch deeply enough to kill it, the touch of
bronze had slowed it down. Even better, the scratch from
the bronze blade would prevent the thing from shifting into
energy.
That Glitch was mine.
I wiped the blade on my jacket sleeve and crept down the
aisle, pausing every few feet to listen, but I couldn’t
hear anything through the whirring of all those fans. I
scanned the tops of cabinets towering on either side, my
arm aching with tension, ready to throw the knife at the
first sign of a purple blur speeding toward my head. Next
time, I wouldn’t miss.
At the end of the aisle I wondered: which way—left or
right? I held my breath, straining to hear through the
white noise. My ear caught something. I listened harder.
There it was again, a shuffling to the right. I eased off
the electrician’s glove—no way I was going to let the
clumsy thing mess up my aim this time—flexed my fingers,
and got a good grip on the knife. I drew back my arm, ready
to throw, then whipped around the corner.
And found myself face to face with the barrel of a gun.
“Don’t shoot!” I dropped the knife and showed my open,
empty hands.
The face behind the gun came into focus: a wide-eyed
fiftyish guy in a campus police uniform. His gun shook.
“I’m not armed,” I said, standing absolutely still. A
shaking gun means a jumpy trigger finger. “I’m authorized
to be here. Check with Professor Milsap.”
“You hear that, Professor?” the cop said over his
shoulder. “Says she’s working for you.”
Milsap was here? Good. He’d clear this up, and then I’d
finish the job.
“Professor Milsap,” I called out. “It’s Vicky Vaughn.
Please tell the officer to put down his gun.”
“I will in a moment,” said a deep voice. Milsap appeared
behind the still-shaky cop. He was tall and thin, with a
full head of wavy gray hair—kind of Einstein-esque. He
glared at me through wire-rimmed glasses. “As soon as he’s
arrested you for vandalism.”
The rest of me wasn’t moving, but my jaw dropped far enough
to hit the floor. “What are you talking about? You hired me
to do this job.”
“We saw what you did. I arrived at Officer Hadley’s station
in time to see you disable the surveillance cameras.”
“I didn’t—”
“You sprayed an aerosol can at a camera, and then the
system went down.”
“That wasn’t me, that was the Glitch—”
“And now we arrive on the scene to find you’ve taken an ax
to several processors.”
“Trying to kill the Glitch you hired me to exterminate.” My
voice squeaked with indignation. I hate when that
happens. “I warned there could be damage to the facility.
There’s a clause about it in the contract you signed.”
“What contract? I signed no contract.”
“He’s lying!” shouted an indignant female voice. A second
later, a teenage zombie in a Hello Kitty T-shirt stomped
around the corner in her size-eight, pink, sparkly platform
sandals. Tina, my self-proclaimed apprentice, scowled like
she’d been grounded two days before the prom. This would be
the same self-proclaimed apprentice who was supposed to
keep track of my paperwork.
“He tricked me, Vicky! He said he wanted to check something
in the contract, so I gave it to him. He stuck it in his
pocket and ran out. He locked me in his office.” She glared
at him. “You need a new door, asshole.”
“Tina! You can’t talk to a client that way.” Not even if he
was proving to be a certified, grade-A, world-class
asshole. I was kind of glad she’d used her zombie strength
to demolish his door.
“But he—”
“We’ll talk about it later.” First, I’d figure out how to
make the campus cop quit pointing his gun at me.
Milsap patted his pocket, half-smiling, and then frowned at
me like I was a disappointing student who’d failed an
exam. “Do you honestly think any reasonable person would
believe MIT hired an ax-wielding maniac to deal with a
simple computer glitch?”
“But I didn’t,” I said.
The pursed lips twitched downward into a frown. “Didn’t
what?”
“Deal with it. The Glitch is still loose in here somewhere.”
“Oh, come now. We both know there’s no such—”
Tina screamed.
The cop’s eyes bugged out, and he fired.
I dropped, but the shot slanted upward; he was aiming at
the top of the cabinet, not me. As he squeezed the trigger
a second time, a glob of purple goop sealed the pistol’s
barrel. The gun blew up in his hand. He fell over sideways
and lay still.
Above me, the Glitch was noisily hawking up another wad of
spit. I scrambled to my feet, feeling around for my knife
and yelling, “Take cover!”
Tina disappeared down an aisle, but Milsap stood and stared
at me. A second later—ptoooie!—Glitch spit splatted on the
side of his head. Looking dazed, he put his hand in the
mess, trying to brush it off but managing to smear it
around and get it all over his hand.
“Don’t,” I said. “It’s poison.”
He stared at his hand in disbelief.
From nowhere, the Glitch landed on Milsap’s shoulders,
clawing at his face and spitting in his hair again. Milsap
screamed and went down. The Glitch jumped away but was
immediately back on top of the guy, sitting on his chest,
gripping his throat with its claws, and crackling with
electricity. Milsap’s cloth blazer didn’t offer any
protection against the Glitch’s energy field; he howled and
shook like he’d grabbed a live wire.
It was more like a live wire had grabbed him.
Time to finish this job. I kicked the Glitch, hard, and
threw my knife. The Glitch flew across the room and hit the
wall by the door. My knife flew with it. The blade struck
the Glitch dead center, pinning it to the wall. The bronze
did its thing, and the Glitch disappeared in a puff of evil-
smelling smoke. All that remained was a slimy purple stain
on the wall.
I went to the cop first, pressing my fingers into his neck
to check for a pulse. At my touch, his eyes fluttered open
and he struggled to sit up. “What the hell—?” he muttered,
staring at his hand. He had a nasty burn, but he’d be okay
and I told him so.
Milsap was another matter. He lay on his back, moaning, his
face and neck striped with multiple slashes. Thick, sticky
Glitch spit matted his hair and coated his glasses. The
whole right side of his face was purple with it, and it had
gotten into his wounds.
Good thing, too, I thought, as I heard Tina clomp-clomp
back down the aisle. Zombies have this little problem with
human blood—the smell of it sends them into a frenzy of
hunger. Glitch spit gummed up Milsap’s wounds, and the
stench of it covered any scent of blood. Tina wouldn’t try
to gnaw his face off. On the other hand, it was a bad
thing, because the venom in the Glitch saliva, normally
slow-acting, would work faster where the skin was broken.
Tina appeared. She stood over Milsap, hands on her
hips. “No such thing, huh?” Her voice oozed with
sarcasm. “Asshole.”
This time, I didn’t rebuke her. Instead, I told her to help
me get Milsap on his feet. I grabbed his right arm; Tina
took his left. At the count of three, we heaved.
“Where’s a bathroom?” I asked Milsap when we’d gotten him
more or less upright. “We need to wash out those scratches
before the poison takes effect.”
Tina and I each managed to drape one of Milsap’s arms
around our shoulders. Then we guided him across the room.
Except he couldn’t seem to keep his feet under him, so
there was a lot more dragging than guiding. In the hallway,
he looked around like he’d never been there before. His
spit-coated glasses sat crooked on his face, obscuring his
vision. I plucked them off, and he blinked.
“Bathroom?” I reminded him.
He tilted his head left, so we went that way. Ten yards
down the hallway was a door marked Men. We half-walked,
half-dragged Milsap to it. I shouldered it open.
The room smelled of disinfectant with an undertone of old
mildew. We got Milsap across the scuffed tile floor to the
sinks, where I reached out with my free hand and turned on
the water full blast. He was half-falling down already, so
it wasn’t hard to get his head under the faucet. In a
second he was struggling and sputtering, but together we
held him in place. Once he realized that I wasn’t trying to
drown him—and that the purple water swirling down the drain
was taking Glitch gunk with it—he relaxed and held still.
I pumped soap into my hand and spread it on his face. “Rub
that in. It’ll help.”
I went over to the dispenser to grab some paper towels. As
soon as my back was turned, Milsap yelped. There was a
splash and some gurgling sounds. I spun around, paper
towels in hand, to see Tina holding Milsap’s head down in
the sink. Water poured out of the faucet and splashed over
the basin’s rim onto the floor.
“Tina! No waterboarding the client!”
She grabbed Milsap’s hair with her left hand and wrenched
him upward as she waved some papers, folded lengthwise, at
me. Milsap gulped in air, trembling.
“It’s your contract. I told you he stole it.” She plunged
his face back into the sink.
“Okay, you got it back. Stop.”
I went to the sink and unblocked the drain, then untangled
Tina’s hand from Milsap’s hair. He coughed and gasped, and
I waved Tina back a few steps.
“Damn it, he broke my nail with his head,” she said,
inspecting her hand. “It won’t grow back, you know. I’ll
have to get acrylic. Add it to his bill, Vicky.”
I ignored her. You can’t fight demons if you’re worried
about breaking a nail.
Milsap braced both hands on the sink, then raised his
dripping head. Hunched over, he peered into the mirror. He
looked terrible. His bloodshot eyes blinked above bags you
could pack groceries in, scratches crisscrossed his cheeks
and neck, and a faint purple stain blotched his face like a
birthmark. His wild Einstein mane, matted and streaked with
purple, looked like a costume-shop fright wig someone had
left out in the rain.
“What was that thing?” he rasped, fingering a purple strand
of hair.
“The Glitch? You know what it was. You hired me to kill it.”
“Professor Milsap doesn’t believe in demons.” Tina stepped
forward, and Milsap cringed. “He doesn’t believe in me,
either.”
“I do, I do!” He ducked like he wanted to hide under the
sink. “Keep away from me! You’ve more than proved your
existence.”
“Tina, grab me some paper towels,” I said. “Hang on,
Professor. We’re almost done.”
Tina yanked hard enough on the towels to pull the dispenser
off the wall. It landed with a crash, making Milsap duck
again, his arms protecting his head. She stomped across the
room and threw the towels at the professor. They fluttered
around him like autumn leaves.
“He said everyone in Deadtown is either a psycho or a
fraud.” Deadtown was Boston’s paranormal zone. All zombies,
werewolves, vampires, and other assorted creatures of the
night—including shapeshifters like me—were required by law
to live there. Tina scooped up some paper towels threw them
at Milsap again. “Look at me! Does this look like something
I’d fake?” She raised her arms to shoulder height, palms up.
Not what you’d call a pretty sight. Like all zombies, Tina
had spongy, gray-green skin and bloodred eyes. But the rest
of her—the lashes gummy with mascara, the Barbie fashion
sense, the double ponytails sprouting from the top of her
head—that was 100 percent Tina. Her point was obvious:
She’d rather be a normal teenager than a monster. Who
wouldn’t?
Milsap straightened; he’d decided it was time to regain
some of his dignity. “I never called you a fraud, young
lady. Your condition is the result of a virus. It’s been
documented, even if we don’t yet understand it completely.
What I said was that Boston’s so-called ‘werewolves’
and ‘vampires’ were either charlatans or deluded.” He
turned to me, lifting his eyebrows with earnestness. “I am
a man of science, Ms. Vaughn. It is not possible for a
corpse to return from the grave and survive on human blood.
It is not possible for a human being to transform into a
wolf for three nights each month. The laws of physics, not
to mention biology, proscribe it. Whatever psychological
aberration these people suffer does not, cannot affect
their physical reality.”
Psychological aberration, huh? I was starting to feel like
dunking the guy’s head myself. I’m not a werewolf, but I do
change form. As one of the Cerddorion, a race of
shapeshifting demon fighters that stretches all the way
back to the Welsh goddess Ceridwen, I can change into any
creature, three shifts per lunar cycle—the laws of physics
and biology be damned. Maybe there were some things science
hadn’t caught up with yet.
“You saw the demon,” I pointed out, bending over to gather
some paper towels. I crumpled the towels into a ball and
wet them at another sink.
“I don’t know what I saw. Some kind of animal, perhaps,
that escaped from one of the biological research labs.” His
expression turned defiant. “I do know, however, that demons
do not exist. I opposed the trustees’ decision to hire you.
I only volunteered to be your contact because I didn’t
trust you. I fully expected you’d crash around the computer
room for a while, causing untold damage, and then claim
you’d driven out the ‘demon’”—his voice went all sarcastic
with the word—“after you’d wreaked so much destruction that
the so-called Glitch would be moot. So tonight I left this
young lady in my office—”
“Locked me in, you mean.”
“—and I went to the security surveillance station to see
what you were up to. The officer was sprawled across the
desk, and snoring. I woke him, and we both saw you disable
the camera. We rushed to the lab before you could do
worse.” His glare was just this side of murderous.
“Whoa, Professor.” I held out both hands in a calm-down
gesture. “I didn’t disable anything. That was the Glitch. I
sprayed the camera to pull it out of your surveillance
system. It fried the camera when it came out.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You are so lame!” sputtered Tina. “That Glitch zapped you
halfway into next week, it clawed your face all to hell,
you’ve got Glitch spit gooping up your hair—and you keep
saying there’s no such thing. How can you be so stupid?”
Milsap gaped at her, his face a mixture of dumbfounded
dropped-jaw and angry-furrowed forehead. As if never in his
whole life had anyone called him stupid before.
“Whatever.” Tina dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “I
saw a vending machine back there, Vicky. I’m getting
something to eat.” She’d have slammed the door behind her
if it wasn’t the self-closing kind.
Zombies are always hungry. Now that I thought of it, I’d
never seen Tina go so long without a snack—or twelve. It’d
be good for her to work off her emotions by chomping down
twenty or thirty chocolate bars.
Milsap stared after her. “Next, you people will be telling
me the library is haunted by the ghost of some
undergraduate who perished in the stacks.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Professor.” He blinked at me like a
purple-spotted owl. “Everyone knows there’s no such thing
as ghosts.”
He kept blinking, like he couldn’t tell whether I was
kidding or not.
I approached him with the sodden mass of paper towels. “Let
me get a look at you.” He leaned over the sink again,
turning his head so the spit-covered side was toward me. I
used the paper towels to scrub more of the gunk from his
face. I can’t say I was all that gentle—I mean, the guy had
tried to rip me off and have me arrested. He winced, but he
didn’t complain. I inspected the slashes on his cheek where
the Glitch had clawed him, checking the broken skin for
specks of venom. I dabbed at a couple of spots with the
paper towels, lifting the poison out, then rubbed in more
soap. Milsap flinched as the soap stung him. Another rinse,
and I checked again.
“That’s the best we can do for now,” I said. “I cleaned the
venom out of the cuts, but keep scrubbing your face until
there’s no trace of purple left. It’ll take a day or two to
get rid of it, but you should be okay as long as it’s
completely gone in a week. It takes about that long for the
poison to work.”
He straightened again and glanced in the mirror. “And my
hair?”
“Wash it a hundred times, shave it off, whatever. You could
even leave it in for a new look—if you can stand the smell.
The stuff in your hair won’t hurt you. But get it off your
skin.”
A tremendous crash shuddered the bathroom door. Tina must
have been awfully hungry—it sounded like she’d torn the
front off the vending machine and hurled it down the
hallway. Well, why not? Like I said, zombies are always
hungry. And she’d already wrecked her manicure.