Jax woke up to the sound of a CRT monitor exploding against a chain-link fence.
"YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DID? I SAW YOU, MARIA! I SAW YOU WITH MY OWN EYES!"
A woman's voice screamed back something in Spanish that Jax was pretty sure translated to anatomically impossible suggestions. Then came the crash of more electronics hitting pavement; sounded like a keyboard this time, the keys scattering like plastic teeth.
He lay on his mattress, staring at the water stain on the ceiling, and waited for the rest of it.
There it was. The screen door slamming. A car alarm going off. Someone else, a third voice now, probably Mr. Dominguez from 3B, shouting at both of them to shut the hell up, some people were trying to sleep.
6:47 AM. Right on schedule.
Jax didn't own an alarm clock. He didn't need one. The Garcias next door had been having the same argument every morning for the past eight months, and they were more reliable than any clock he could afford. He didn't know what Maria had done, the story seemed to change depending on the day, but whatever it was, Mr. Garcia was absolutely not over it.
He dragged himself upright, bones popping, muscles aching from yesterday's fight. The demon hadn't done much damage, but he'd landed hard when he'd tackled it, and his shoulder was letting him know about it.
The bathroom was a closet with a toilet and a showerhead that produced a thin stream of rust-colored water when it felt like cooperating. Jax splashed some on his face, flinched at the cold, and reached for his toothbrush.
The toothbrush had seen better days. Better years, actually. The bristles splayed out in every direction like a tiny plastic explosion, half of them brown with age, the other half bent at angles that couldn't possibly be effective. He'd found it in a gas station bathroom two years ago; someone had left it on the sink, still in the packaging, and he'd been using it ever since.
He squeezed the last of the toothpaste onto it; a sad little squiggle of paste that was more air than anything, and scrubbed. His reflection stared back at him from the cracked mirror above the sink.
Nineteen years old. He didn't look it.
The face in the mirror could've passed for mid-twenties easy, maybe older on a bad day. There were lines around his eyes that shouldn't be there yet, a tightness to his jaw that came from years of clenching it against hunger and cold and the general bullshit of existence. His skin had a grayish undertone; not sick, exactly, but not healthy either. Like something was burning through him from the inside, using him up faster than he could replenish.
He was tall for his age, almost six feet, but the height just made the rest of him look worse. His frame was built for muscle that wasn't there; shoulders too wide for the skinny arms that hung from them, a chest that looked caved-in under his shirt. Malnutrition did that. Years of gas station hot dogs and two-week-old pizza and skipped meals did that.
His hair was a disaster. Brown, curly in a way that would've been fine if he could afford to do anything with it, currently hanging past his ears in a tangled mess that he'd stopped trying to manage months ago. He'd thought about shaving it all off, but razors cost money and he'd probably just cut himself anyway.
Jax spit, rinsed, and got dressed.
The hoodie was the same one he'd worn yesterday. Same one he'd worn for the past two weeks, actually. It had been gray once, back when he'd pulled it out of a donation bin behind a church. Now it was a color that didn't have a name, somewhere between brown and nothing, with darker patches where demon blood had soaked in and dried. The zipper was broken. One of the pockets had a hole in it. The sleeves were too short because he'd grown since he'd gotten it and hoodies didn't grow with you.
The jeans were worse. He'd patched them so many times that they were more patch than jean at this point, and even the patches were starting to go. The left knee was held together with duct tape. The right back pocket had torn off entirely. The button had been replaced with a safety pin that poked him in the stomach if he sat down wrong.
He looked like shit. He knew he looked like shit. But looking like shit was free, and looking good cost money he didn't have.
Fifty-seven fifty. One week. Something real.
Time to go to work.
Center City was already awake by the time Jax got off the bus, the sidewalks thick with people in suits and people in scrubs and people carrying coffees that cost more than his dinner budget for the week. The sun was bright and the air smelled like exhaust and fresh bread from the bakery on the corner, and everyone was walking fast like they had somewhere important to be.
Jax walked faster.
He spotted his target halfway down the block; a guy in a camel-hair coat, leather briefcase, Inquirer tucked under his arm while he talked into a cell phone. The guy was gesturing with his free hand, laughing at something, completely oblivious to the world around him.
Perfect.
Jax came up alongside him, matched his pace for half a step, and ripped the newspaper out from under his arm in one smooth motion.
"Hey!"
Jax was already running, weaving between a woman with a stroller and a bike messenger who swore at him in what might have been Polish.
"That's my paper! Someone stop him!"
No one stopped him. This was Philadelphia. People had their own problems.
Jax ducked into an alley, slowing to a jog, and glanced back over his shoulder. The camel-coat guy was standing on the sidewalk, phone still in hand, staring after him with an expression of pure bewilderment.
"Get a subscription, dipshit!" Jax shouted.
He didn't wait for a response. He leaned against the alley wall, breath coming fast, and flipped the paper open.
Front page: something about the Middle East. He didn't care.
Sports: Eagles were terrible. He didn't care about that either.
Classifieds. There.
DEMONIC ACTIVITY REQUESTS — LICENSED CONTRACTORS ONLY
His eyes scanned the listings, mouth moving as he read.
Class F, Gray's Ferry. Residential. $9.
Nine bucks. That was insulting.
Class F, Frankford. Commercial (laundromat). $11. Nighttime only.
Eleven. Nighttime meant it was probably bigger than a Class F, which meant they were lowballing on purpose.
Class E, Brewerytown. Abandoned property. $7 per entity, estimate 5-8.
Swarm job. He'd need bandages afterward, and bandages cost money. Net profit: basically nothing.
Class F, Mantua. Residential. $10. "Might be in the walls."
"Might be in the walls" meant definitely in the walls, which meant tearing out drywall, which meant property damage, which meant the homeowner would find a reason not to pay.
That was it. That was the whole list.
Jax stared at the paper. Turned the page. Turned it back. Checked the date to make sure he hadn't somehow grabbed yesterday's edition.
Nope. Fresh off the press.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
He did the math. Best-case scenario: he took all four jobs, everything went perfectly, no complications, no medical expenses, no one stiffed him on payment. That was nine plus eleven plus forty-two (assuming seven swarm entities at six bucks each, which was optimistic) plus ten.
Seventy-two dollars. Maybe.
He owed fourteen hundred.
"FUCK!"
He crumpled the paper into a ball and hurled it at the ground. It bounced off the asphalt, rolled a few feet, and came to rest against a pile of garbage bags.
Jax stood there, fists clenched, chest heaving. A rat poked its head out from behind one of the bags, looked at him, decided he wasn't food, and disappeared again.
One week. Mrs. Reyes had given him one week to come up with something real, and the best the classifieds could offer was pocket change. He could work every single job on that list and still not make a dent. He could work for a month straight and still be behind.
This was it. This was how it ended. Not with a demon tearing his throat out, not with some dramatic last stand, but with an eviction notice and a long walk to nowhere.
He kicked the newspaper ball. It skittered across the alley and hit the wall, pages fanning out on impact.
And then he saw it.
The paper had opened to a page he'd missed, the back of the classifieds section, where the bigger ads lived. The ones that cost money to place. The ones that weren't just desperate homeowners hoping some unlicensed kid would solve their problems for cheap.
One listing. Boxed in black. Bold text.
DEMONIC ACTIVITY — URGENT
Port Richmond area (E. Allegheny Ave, near river). Commercial/industrial property. Electrical interference, possible Class C or higher. Licensed contractors only. Proof of insurance required. Background check mandatory.
$500 FLAT RATE — PAID ON COMPLETION
Contact: Kowalski Industrial Solutions, 555-0199
Jax read it again. Then a third time, just to make sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him.
Five hundred dollars.
Five hundred dollars.
That was more than a month's rent. That was food for weeks. That was enough to get Mrs. Reyes off his back and maybe, maybe, start climbing out of the hole he'd been living in for the past four years.
Licensed contractors only. He wasn't licensed.
Proof of insurance required. He didn't have insurance.
Background check mandatory. His background was a horror show of dropped charges, truancy violations, and one incident with a stolen car that technically wasn't his fault.
Class C or higher. He'd never fought anything above a Class D, and that had almost killed him.
Jax picked up the paper, smoothed it out, and read the listing one more time.
Five hundred dollars.
He started walking toward the nearest payphone.
The payphone on the corner of 11th and Market was occupied by a middle-aged guy in a windbreaker, leaning against the booth like he owned it, receiver pressed to his ear while he laughed at something the person on the other end said.
Jax did not have time for this.
He walked up, grabbed the receiver out of the guy's hand, and slammed it back onto the hook.
"What the fuck?!"
"Emergency," Jax said. He was already digging in his pockets, coming up empty. Shit. He'd spent his last change on the bus. "You got quarters?"
"Do I—" The guy's face was turning red. "You just hung up on my wife!"
"Cool. Quarters. You got 'em or not?"
"I'm not giving you shit, you little—"
Jax spotted the bulge in the guy's front pocket. Coins. Had to be.
He reached in and grabbed them before the guy could react; a handful of quarters, dimes, and what felt like a nickel, then shoved him back with his other hand. The guy stumbled, arms pinwheeling, and sat down hard on the sidewalk.
"Thanks." Jax was already feeding quarters into the phone. "Tell your wife I said hi."
"I'm calling the cops!"
"You do that."
He dialed the number from the listing, fingers moving fast. The guy in the windbreaker was getting to his feet, still yelling, but Jax had already tuned him out.
One ring. Two.
"Kowalski Industrial Solutions, this is Frank."
The voice was gruff, tired, the voice of a man who'd been dealing with a problem for too long and was running out of patience.
"Yeah, hi." Jax turned his back to the windbreaker guy, who was now yelling something about assault. "I'm calling about the listing. The demon thing."
A pause. "You licensed?"
"Absolutely."
"Got insurance?"
"Full coverage."
"Background check?"
"Clean as a whistle."
Another pause, longer this time. Jax could practically hear the guy weighing his options on the other end of the line. He knew how this worked; the more requirements a listing had, the fewer people called. And the longer a demon sat in your building, the worse things got.
"Look," Frank said finally. "I'm gonna be honest with you. I don't know if it's actually a demon. Could be electrical. Could be rats. Could be some crackhead broke in and is living in the walls, I don't know. But something's messing with our power grid, and the electrician couldn't figure it out, and I've got a contract deadline next week and I can't afford to lose power again."
"What kind of interference?" Jax asked.
"Surges. Blackouts. Machines turning on by themselves in the middle of the night." Frank's voice dropped. "And sounds. From the basement. Like... clicking. Tapping. I don't know how to describe it."
Clicking. Tapping. That sounded like a tech-spawn, something that had grown out of the e-waste that was probably piled up somewhere on the property. Could be small. Could be huge. No way to know until he got there.
"Five hundred, right?" Jax said. "Flat rate?"
"That's what the ad says. You kill it, you get paid. But I'm gonna need to see your paperwork before—"
"I can be there in an hour."
"—before you start. Did you hear what I said? License, insurance, background check. I'm not getting sued because some cowboy gets himself killed on my property."
"I'll have all of it. One hour. What's the address?"
Silence on the line. Then a sigh, the sigh of a man who knew he was probably making a mistake but was too desperate to care.
"2847 East Allegheny. It's a warehouse. You'll see the sign."
"Got it."
"And sir?" Frank's voice hardened. "If you show up without papers, I'm not letting you in. I don't care how far you drove. Understood?"
"Understood," Jax said.
He hung up.
The guy in the windbreaker was still there, phone in hand now, probably actually calling the cops. Jax didn't care. The cops in Center City had better things to do than chase down some kid over pocket change, and even if they didn't, he'd be long gone before they showed up.
He looked at the paper in his hand. The listing. The address.
2847 East Allegheny. Port Richmond. Down by the river.
Class C or higher. Electrical interference. Clicking and tapping in the basement.
Five hundred dollars.
This was either going to save his life or end it.
Jax started walking toward the bus stop.