Seven Demons by Aidan Truhen (best motivational books for students TXT) 📕

and bring your teeth along in a separate car. I hold up my bangles and say: “Dude I have a season pass open the fucking door.”

Door has in it what I would call a speakeasy grille but given the age of the house it is more like maybe a judas port or an arrow slit. Through this hole I can see eyeballs and one of those creases a certain Viking sort of physiology gets above the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. My friend Karenina who is now bio-anonymous slurry in the ocean under a tuna cannery had a crease like that and when she was drunk in bars back home and hoping to get laid with attractive waiters hoping to become movie actors at some time in the future she would put her credit card in it and claim to be a casting agent.

This did not work ever.

Guy behind the door makes a farting noise with his mouth and I hear big locks and the door opens. Big black door in a big black Dracula-looking house. All hope abandon yada yada but in fact I am reasonably sure it will be a broken pair of rigid stainless steel cuffs with custom Swiss-flag-pattern polymer overmold I am abandoning here so you know.

I go inside.

—

“Hi I am Jack hi so No Gods No Masters right viva la you know anyway I have this little problem and I—”

Before I can finish my hilarious riff I feel a hand across my face. Soft, fast hand, across my eyes so smooth like the lights going out. Another tucked into the small of my back and turning and turning. I am bent back and now I am nodding nodding like a toy dog. This way that way this way before I feel the wall on my shoulder blades and the air goes out of me like OOMPF and then there is a pressure on my mouth. Pressure. Fingers. Lips.

She’s so fast, the doctor.

So so fast.

And warm.

And now everything will be fine.

She holds me until I cannot breathe and then lets go and she is crying, which is so totally not like her and of course I know why and I have been avoiding it this whole damn time.

—

The room is big and the wallpaper is peeling and there are things living in the roof. There’s a bathtub with a shower and a screen curtain on wheels.

“Hi Doc.”

“Hi Price.”

“Wash me.”

“Yes ma’am.”

I wash Doc. It is like church and very sad. She washes me and changes the dressing on my leg. She puts her arms around me and tells me what I already know because I am not a dumbass. I do not cry because I do not.

Yeah. I guess you know it too.

Rewind the tape.

I said: “What the fuck is wrong with you man, you couldn’t aim for the fucking wheels?”

Volodya said Evil Hansel was lighter than he thought he would be.

I said I did not care about if Evil Hansel was lighter than Volodya thought he would be because right now I had about a thousand Swiss francs nailed to my leg with an oyster knife.

Volodya said: “I told you we should not come.”

bonk

And—

“I get off now Price you go on to end of line.”

He got in the train with me and he gave me a transfusion and Doc did not want him to do that because there was a bullet in him and he decided this was what he was going to do and he did it.

And he got out of the train halfway up and then he died somewhere.

He went out into the mountain and he fucking died.

Like in a blizzard or something like an explorer.

Log-cabin motherfucker doing his thing I guess. Doing his log-cabin-motherfucker thing and that is his choice that is what he chose to do.

—

Doc got everyone else over the border into Italy. She checked the Demons into a hotel there and she hired a kid named Matteo to take the dead lady’s stolen car and drive like hell to Naples and set it on fire. Charlie made everyone’s IDs disappear, just gone. Thermocline magic. Then Doc walked them all right out the back and around the corner to another hotel where they were other people, and the old other people who they were and are not now are notionally still in the first hotel because Matteo’s girlfriend is in suite 501 eating as much room service as she wants and making random calls to Indonesia until Friday when they’re both going on a four-week cruise.

When Matteo gets back, he will also be taking a suitcase full of money to a house in St. Gallen where there are two kids who just grew up hard and fast because their mother had a heart attack on a visit with friends in the capital. Dead-lady dues. Doc is nothing if not truthful. And then they came back over the border into Switzerland by train and back to Bern to look for me and they figured if I was not dead and the cops didn’t have me, then this was where I would be and they were right and that is nice and now everything will be okay. Business is business and everything will be okay.

“Volodya—”

Doc says that they found him already, that he threw himself into some kind of hoist machinery on a farm and got all cut up so no one could tell he was shot.

After giving me his actual blood.

Charlie already did a thing. Charlie of all people has friends here. She is known in the Black House and the Black House has gray connections because of course it does. That is a good thing although she seems to feel there may be personal friction if we stay for too long. Romance, man, go figure.

—

Task-management thing. Someone will collect his body for us. Store it.

On ice.

He’d laugh. Volodya would laugh about that he has a horrible sense of humor.

Guy eats corpse ham.

Not really.

Ate corpse ham.

Had