get back to Harry, and he might be in even more trouble than he is right now.”
Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, “I hereby promote you from mackerel to tuna fish.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking. Bob was a spirit. Such beings were bound by their words and promises, by the contracts they made with mortals. “Okay, look. You serve Harry, right?”
“Yep.”
“If I give you this information,” I said, “and if in your judgment his possession of this information could prove detrimental to his well-being, I want you to swear to me that you will keep it from him or anyone else who asks you about it.”
“Okay,” Bob said, drawing out the word with tremendous skepticism.
“If you do that,” I said, “I’ll tell you. If you can’t, I won’t. And bad things are going to happen.”
The skull’s eyelights brightened with what looked surprisingly like curiosity. “Okay, okay. I’ll bite. You have a bargain. I do so swear it to you, Vampire.”
I took a deep breath and glanced around. If another Venator knew what I was doing, they’d put a bullet in my head without thinking twice.
“Have you ever heard of the Oblivion War?”
“No,” the skull said promptly.
“For a reason,” I said. “Because it’s a war being waged for the memory of mankind.”
“Uh,” Bob said. “What?”
I sighed and brushed my gloved hand back over my hair. “Look. You know that for the most part, the old gods have grown less powerful over the years, or have changed as they were incorporated into other beliefs.”
“Sure,” Bob said. “There hasn’t been a First Church of Marduk for a while now. But Tiamat got an illustration in the Monster Manual and had that role in that cartoon, so she’s probably better off.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about, but generally speaking, you’re right. Beings like Tiamat needed a certain amount of mortal belief to connect them to the mortal world.”
The eyelights brightened. “Ah!” the skull said. “I get it! If no one remembers some has-been god, there’s no connection left! It can’t remain in the mortal world!”
“Right,” I said quietly. “And we’re not just talking about pagan gods. We’re talking about things that people of today have no words for, no concept to adequately define. Demons of such appetites and fury that the only way mortals in some parts of the world survived them at all was with the help of some of those early gods. Demons who had to be stopped, permanently.”
“You can’t destroy a primal spiritual entity,” Bob mused. “Even if you disperse it, it will just re-form in time.”
“But you can forget them,” I said. “Shut them away. Leave them forever lost, outside the mortal world and unable to do harm. You can consign them to Oblivion.”
Bob made a whistling sound.
What the hell? How? He doesn’t have any lips.
“Ballsy,” Bob admitted. “I mean, fighting a war like that . . . The more people you brought in to fight on your side, the more the information would spread, and the stronger a hold these demons would have. So you’d have to control who had the information. You’d have to lock that down hard.”
“Very,” I said. “I know there are fewer than two hundred Venatori in the world. But we’re organized in cells. I only know one other Venator.”
“Venatori?” Bob said. “There’s like five thousand of those dried-up old prunes. They’ve been helping the Council fight the war, remember?”
I waved a hand. “Those are the Venatori Umbrorum.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “The Hunters of the Shadows.”
“One way to translate their name,” I said, “and it’s the one they believe is correct. But it’s more accurate to call them the Shadows of the Hunters. They don’t know it, but we founded them. Gave them their store of knowledge. Use them to gather information, to help us keep an eye on things. And they’re camouflage, too, to make our enemies have to work a little harder to find us.”
“Enemies, right,” Bob said. “A war has to have two sides.”
I nodded. “Or more. There are a lot of . . . people . . . interested in the old demons. They’re weak compared to what they once were, but they’re still a route to power. Cults, priests, societies, individual lunatics. They’re trying to keep the demons nailed to this world. We’re trying to stop them.” I shook my head. “The Oblivion War has been going on for more than five thousand years. Sometimes decades will pass without a single battle