Hunted

to himself. Something tickled at his memory. Something about fire. But the bowel loosening horror of the Black Angels drowned it out.
Larry snapped his insubstantial head around
“Holy crap! What the hell are those things!” he said.
If Hilario hadn’t been so terrified, he would have been amused to hear Larry drop his fake accent.
However…
“Shut up!” Hilario hissed, “You’ll draw their attention. Don’t even look at them.”
What was he saying? Didn’t he want Larry out of the van?
Yeah, but he didn’t need the black angels sniffing around him. They never forgot. And never forgave.
Which meant he was still on their poopy list.
“What are they–Oh my god!” Larry shouted. The dead idiot was completely ignoring the whole don’t look thing.
Hilario bent down and twisted the ignition key. The van’s engine r-r-r-roared to life. Okay, coughed to life. But it started. One less thing to twist his guts at the moment.
He didn’t need to look at what the black angels were doing.
Been there. Seen it. Peed his pants over it the first time he saw it.
The black angels would be drifting up to the freshly cleaved spirits. And Hilario heard the screams start. The sounds didn’t reach his ears. They came through the unseen world and echoed inside his mind.
The spirit would suddenly see the black angel. A terrifying being of darkness and sharp, glittering angles. Towering over them.
Then a spiky black arm would dart out and spear the spirit.
The spirit would scream (as Hiliaro was hearing now). And then the black angel would swirl around the spirit and they would disappear. Shrinking down in a black vortex before popping out of existence.
Going to places Hilario didn’t want to think about.
He glanced up at Larry. Who was staring at the scene with his eyes wide and mouth hanging open.
“Stop looking at them!” he shouted, “That attracts their attention.”
Hilario risked a glance.
“Oh booger doodles,” he said.
One of the shadowy beings was drifting their way.
Hilario shifted the van into reverse and stomped the gas. The van lurched backward. He spun the wheel around. The van’s suspension groaned. Two wheels left the ground. For a sickening moment it felt like they were going to tip over.
Then the van righted itself. Hilario shoved the selector into drive and punched the gas.
It would have nice if the van had leapt like a gazelle and sped away.
But that wasn’t the type of vehicle he had. The engine rattled and the gears whined as it pulled away at a stately pace.
He should have had Ted put a bigger engine in the thing.
Larry turned around to look behind them.
Hilario risked a tiny use of power. The privacy curtains zipped closed, blocking the view.
Larry turned back. His eyes were so wide, they were like cartoon ping pong balls, ready to fall out of his ghostly skull.
“What’s going on!” he said, “What are those things! And why am I dead?”
Hilario sighed. He had some questions of his own. The main one of which was: What am I doing?

3
Hilario’s day job was to entertain children. He considered this both a service and atonement for things he had done in his other life.
Plus it was a source of light energy. Pure, good energy untainted by the bad things.
Children were the main source of light energy. They were natural generators of it. And he had the ability to take that energy, amplify and feed it back to them in such a way that they released an even stronger and purer form of light energy.
When he went to entertain children at birthday parties, he would start with the usual clown routine. Before long they would be laughing and their joyous energy would fill the air. He would absorb it, then send it back. Filling their minds with visions of flying over chocolate mountains and candy cane forests.
Their joyous energy would turn his five hundred pounds into fluff and cotton candy. He would leap and pirouette as if he weighed nothing. And the children would shriek laughter. He would skim off just a sip of this pure light energy and store it away in his reserves.
Protection against the darkness in his own heart.
A wall against the press of dark energy all around him.
The world generated a lot more dark energy than it did light.
Any idiot could turn on the evening news and see that.
But what most of the world wasn’t aware of was the unseen world that ran like a dark current under the normal world. The unseen world was where the magic lived. And the monsters. It was where so-called psychic powers came from. A few normals were able to scratch the surface of those powers. But for the most part the unseen world belonged to the old races.
Even now, Hilario could speak the ancient incantations and slip over to the unseen world. The brick canyons of old downtown would turn into someplace even older. And darker. A place full of sharp edges and sulfurous smells.
At least in the bad places of the unseen world.
And those were the places that still wanted him back. Even though he’d paid his way out. Even though he had thrown himself at the mercy of the coven and pledged allegiance to them.
Renounced the bad places. And the dark masters.
He still had a lot to atone for, though.
And the seldom seen masters of the coven–his bosses, never made it clear just how he was supposed to atone.
He had to make his own rules for his new life: Don’t do bad things. Try to do good things.
He knew exactly what bad things were. It was the good deeds that were a little murky sometimes.
Like what was he supposed to do with the ghost of Larry Sparrow? The guy