Bad Angel

by JC Andrijeski

  Glancing down at Kara, trying to gauge how much more time and angel-fire he needed inside her before he could start the ritual, he looked up a second time, scanning the space around and under the tree. He looked for demonic auras, trying to assess which ones might be about to regain full mobility, and which ones were still laying on the dirt, gasping in pain.

  He needed to make a decision.

  He couldn’t tell for sure how soon they’d be coming at him, which meant he had to guess. Whatever that number was, he couldn’t afford to still be kneeling on Kara when it hit.

  He’d back off, he decided.

  He’d back off, shoot them all again, maybe hit them a few extra times this round.

  Then he could try the angel-fire on Kara again, and start the ritual faster.

  He was just rising to his feet, still slamming the blue-green fire into Kara with his outstretched hands⏤

  When a sound behind him turned his head.

  It came from the same opening between branches. It wasn’t just crunching leaves. Dags heard and felt bodies, a lot of them, heavy breaths, like some of them had been running. He heard angry hisses and growls, and realized they were reacting to what Dags had done.

  A demon emerged from the lit opening between hanging branches.

  Dags recognized him.

  It was the big one he remembered from the house in Brentwood, the one that knocked Dags down in the garden.

  Rupert, they’d called him.

  Dags blinked, realizing the massive demon was way too close.

  Dags had positioned himself on Kara to keep an eye on everyone around the tree in front of him; he’d forgotten some might have been stationed outside.

  They could have watched him enter the tree’s canopy.

  They definitely must have heard the gunshots.

  Dags had to throw his plan out the window again.

  He couldn’t back off Kara now.

  He went down on one knee.

  Throwing more light into his right hand, he pressed down on her chest, even as twisted his upper body around, unholstering the gun with his left. He fired at the massive demon there without thought, and because he forgot to concentrate on not killing him, his first bullet slammed into the center mass of the huge man’s chest.

  Dags winced, watching the demon fall to the ground. Gritting his teeth, he concentrated to wrestle control back over his aim of the gun. Once he was reasonably confident he had it, Dags fired again, hitting the giant demon in the leg.

  He hit him four more times in quick succession: in both kneecaps, his right elbow, his left shoulder.

  Assuming he hadn’t killed the guy with that first shot, his demon nature should be able to fix all of that.

  Before he could stop it, Dags’ gun swiveled to aim at the demon’s head.

  Clenching his jaw harder, he shifted it sideways with an effort. He hit two more shots into the first demon he’d felled, then squeezed off a few more at the two demons who’d come after him with swords. Another demon appeared in the opening, and Dags hit that one once in each arm, each hand, each shoulder, then went after both knees.

  He could feel more demons out there, but they didn’t venture through the opening.

  Probably because he’d shot every demon inside.

  Gritting his teeth, Dags lowered the gun with an effort, holstered it, then focused back on Kara. He needed to reload, and soon.

  He’d try to deal with Kara first.

  He looked down at her face.

  Her eyes were changing.

  He could see the difference in her eyes.

  Still resting most of his weight on her chest, he opened up that angel-fire even more, slamming it into her auric heart with an intensity he feared could hurt her.

  He started the ritual, chanting the words under his breath.

  He felt the change begin almost at once.

  He felt the precise instant it started.

  He continued to pump blue-green light into her chest, clenching his jaw against the intensity of the current, ignoring her screaming and thrashing at him. He felt that black, silvery gunk start to lift out of her, dissipating in the dense clouds of blue-green fire. He didn’t let up when he felt it start to go, but increased the force, like turning up a valve.

  The demon, Leticia, began to scream.

  For the first time, it really hit him that he was killing them when he did this. The ritual didn’t just send them back into the ether, forcing them to find another human host. The white light above his head ripped apart their demon forms.

  It obliterated them.

  Maybe the demons around him knew it, too.

  The one in Kara certainly did.

  They always knew, when the end was approaching.

  Dags could feel the demons around him, the ones downed on the oak-leaf covered ground, start to stir. Not as much time had passed as last time, but they were moving anyway, reacting to Kara/Leticia’s desperate screams, her pleas for help, for mercy.

  He could feel the big one behind him moving with the others.

  In a way, he was relieved.

  He hadn’t killed him.

  Still, he needed to speed this up before one of them ripped his head off.

  He needed a few minutes to reload, or at least to change guns.

  Murmuring the ritual words, he stared around, monitoring the demons he could see. He couldn’t hear anything, or read much off their auras. Demon auras definitely weren’t like human auras, where he could at least pick up some information, and sometimes a lot of information, often mixed with emotions and memories, depending on the human.

  With demons, he got next to nothing, in terms of actual thoughts.

  He did get the sense of them communicating with one another, however.

  It hit him that they were reluctant to approach him while he was conducting the ritual. They were reluctant to get too close to that cloud of angel-fire.

  They definitely didn’t want to break the blue-green sphere created by the ritual.

  They were afraid it would pull them in, too, rip them out of their stolen human bodies and possibly even kill them.

  It might be the only thing protecting him right then.

  Another thing struck Dags as he watched them stare at him from outside the glow around Kara’ prone form; he wouldn’t be able to surprise them like that a second time.

  He looked down at Kara, studying her face.

  Her color was beginning to return.

  He could see wisps of her ordinary human aura now, that familiar purple and orange glow with its smattering of gold, the star-like sparkles that shimmered around the edges. Her familiar aura flashed in and out of his awareness as the tar-like demon aura attempted to swamp it, to cover it over and erase it from view, only to be washed away by the ritual and the flame.

  Just a little bit more.

  Dags was still staring down, murmuring the words of his grandfather, when he felt it start to go. He felt the demon’s body start to rise up, to leave her.

  The demon’s soul, or essence, or whatever the hell it was, rose up on that thread, like all the demons before it, sucked up into that enormous cloud of pure, blindingly-white light. When the real end came, it was so sudden, it was almost anti-climactic.

  Dags felt the last coil of sticky black and silver threads fighting to cling to her⏤

  When it lost its purchase.

  Detached from whatever it used to hook into Kara’s form, it rose shockingly fast. The last of it left Kara’s body in a tangible whoosh.

  He felt her suck in a breath under his hands. She gasped it in, bleeding out shock, like it was the first breath she’d taken in weeks⏤

  Then something hit him, hard, from behind.

  Chapter 27

  Kills Many

  Dags felt it, right as it was about to happen.

  Maybe a half-second before it happened.

  Maybe a little less than that.

  It was subtle, a change in pressure. A barely-discernible dis
placement of air.

  Whatever gave him that hair’s breadth of a head’s up, Dags began a movement in instinct even as his mind went totally still.

  His body slid down and sideways right as he threw up an arm.

  His arm went up just in time to catch and cushion the blow. Instead of getting a metal pole to the head, wielded with enough force that it likely would have dented his skull, the pole slammed into the back of his arm and shoulder.

  It hurt like hell.

  It hurt enough to blind him, briefly, more than he could breathe through, so much he didn’t make a sound. He managed to stay mostly upright. Much more importantly, he managed to avoid taking the second blow to the head, too, absorbing that one primarily with the opposite shoulder, letting the energy of it throw him sideways.

  The second hit smacked him off Kara, throwing him a half-dozen feet over the rough ground and into a pile of cement pieces they must have jackhammered out of the tree.

  He landed on his back in the dirt, leaves, and cement with a pained grunt.

  It was the only sound under the tree’s canopy.

  He was damned lucky.

  He didn’t like that he’d left Kara, but he didn’t have time to think about that. He didn’t like that he’d left his bag of guns and ammunition by the opening between the branches, but he didn’t have time to think about that, either.

  Unholstering his second gun, which he’d strapped to his right thigh, he opened fire.

  He was firing at the shape by the door before he’d fully focused his eyes.

  It was a slightly less efficient gun than the Steyr, but not by much.

  Still, he wasn’t concentrating enough, not at first. He got the demon three times in the chest and once in the head before he pulled back enough to stop firing.

  He sat there on the dirt, gasping, holding the smoking gun.

  Damn it.

  First dead body.

  “Kara!” he shouted. “Kara! Can you hear me?”

  Movement at the opening between branches swung Dags’ gun arm to the left. That time, he managed to concentrate enough to hit the thing in both legs, the shoulder, the arm, the hand on one side, and the elbow, wrist and shoulder on the other side.

  It was more than enough to bring him down, especially when Dags capped it off with a solid second hit to one shoulder, knocking him backwards once his balance was completely off.

  That one looked a lot like Jamie Paz, Phoenix’s actor friend.

  Dags had been wondering what happened to the guy.

  Opening his jacket, he pulled out a spare magazine and reloaded in the silence under the tree. Reholstering that gun, he reached into his other pocket and reloaded the Steyr.

  Slamming in the second magazine, he caught movement above him and looked up.

  Shifting his aim without thought, he caught the female demon as it fell down towards him from the upper branches of the oak tree. Dags managed to concentrate well enough to not kill it, but still got it once in the gut, which couldn’t be good.

  He hoped like hell the demon could heal itself before Dags’ bullet killed her.

  Then another, new demon was shooting at him from the entrance into the oak’s canopy, and Dags rolled sideways and scrambled to his feet, throwing himself behind the oak tree’s thick trunk. He needed to calm the hell down, or this was going to be a bloodbath. He’d already killed or maybe killed way too many of them.

  He glanced around the trunk at three demon bodies he’d left on the ground.

  One was trying to get up, so he shot that one first, in the leg.

  Then, holding the gun in both hands, he edged around the side of the trunk to look back at the door-like opening between the branches.

  The demon who appeared there this time had a gun.

  They shot at Dags, and he fired back without thought.

  He cursed when he hit them between the eyes.

  Goddamn it.

  Another one down.

  He’d done it again. Another person, another human being, who wouldn’t be getting up or going home again, thanks to Dags.

  Which was pretty much exactly why Dags hated guns.

  He heard a groan and slid his back around to peer out past the other side of the trunk.

  “Kara?” he whispered. He scanned the dark. With the getting thrown and all the gunfire, he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d left her. “KARA! Answer me, damn it!”

  The body nearest to him groaned.

  He realized he recognized the person lying there.

  It wasn’t Kara.

  It was Ruby.

  The demon wearing the Ruby body lay there on the dirt.

  She must have been one of those he hit when he first got in here, when he just saw shadows heading for him from behind the tree. The sword she’d tried to use on him lay on the dirt, a few inches away from her twitching fingers. Dags hesitated a bare instant, then leapt over to where she was, just long enough to grab her shoulders and drag her backwards.

  He brought her behind the trunk of the tree.

  Like he had with Kara, he pressed his hand down on her chest and opened the spigot all the way on the blue-green charge, flooding it into her skin.

  Ruby writhed under him, screaming.

  She screamed louder as he increased the voltage.

  He leaned on her with one hand, sending even more of the lightning-like current into the middle of her chest.

  As he did, he peered around the tree trunk, again looking for Kara in the dark. While he scanned the dirt floor under the tree, he used his free hand to check how many magazines he still had on him after he’d reloaded from those last few volleys.

  He was going to run out of bullets fast, with that bag on the other side of the clearing.

  He’d run out of them faster still, if one of those demons grabbed that bag.

  He’d have a whole host of new problems if that happened.

  Checking his other jacket pocket awkwardly for the Beretta he’d put in there, he continued using his right hand to aim the angel-fire into Ruby’s chest while he checked for magazines for that gun, too.

  Seeing demons starting to climb back to their feet, he aimed a few shots at various body parts after he’d checked their auras to make sure they weren’t Kara, concentrating with all of his will to keep from killing them.

  “Kara!” he whispered, loud. “Kara! Where are you?”

  The guy he’d hit in the chest by the entrance to the tree still hadn’t moved.

  Damn it.

  That was three he’d likely killed.

  He hoped like hell Phoenix didn’t know any of them.

  He still hadn’t seen Uri or Jade.

  Under him, Ruby started to cough.

  He saw flickers of her aura under each cough, and realized the human part of her was trying to expel the demon crap already, trying to cough it out of her lungs. He poured more angel fire into her chest, upping the voltage, and she coughed harder, her back arching under him from the effort. Realizing she must have enough of the angel fire in her now for him to begin the ritual, he started speaking the words under his breath.

  He didn’t let up on the blue-green charge as he did.

  He kept that fire aimed right at the center of her chest.

  Ruby had stopped screaming, and now she stopped coughing, too. She just lay there under his hand, panting for what felt like a long few minutes.

  He spoke the words louder, feeling them run through his chest and his hand, infusing the blue-green fire and spreading out into her body.

  She groaned. After a few seconds more of him speaking the words, she broke into another series of wracking coughs. She let out a particularly violent one, one where she sounded like she was choking.

  For the first time, Dags considered backing off⏤

  ⏤then she threw up, a yellow stream of bile onto the dirt.

  Dags felt the last of the sticky demon aura leave her.

  She was gasping then, taking full breaths, tears streaming down her f
ace.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Dags,” she gasped, looking up at him. “Is that you?”

  “Jourdain!” another voice shouted, hearing them.

  Dags looked around the tree, recognizing the voice.

  Kara. Finally.

  “Kara!” he yelled. “Behind the tree! Get your ass over here! Now!”

  Remembering then, he called out a second time.

  “Wait! The black bag! By the opening! Grab it if you can. Bring it here!”

  He saw a shadowy form moving by the opening into the tree. He saw her walk around in a few small circles by the opening, likely blinded by the moonlight from outside.

  “To your left!” he yelled, using his angel sight. “Yes! Yes! Grab that! Bring it here! As fast as you can!”

  She was running towards them then, low to the ground, gripping the heavy bag in both hands, half-dragging it swiftly through the dirt and leaves.

  He’d forgotten how heavy the damned thing was.

  Ruby was getting up now, and Dags moved to the next downed demon. He hit it in the temple with the butt of his gun to daze it, then dragged it behind the tree trunk as well. As soon as he got it back to roughly where Ruby and Kara were, he started pumping angel-fire into its chest, like he had with the other two.

  He didn’t know this one, but it didn’t matter.

  “What the fuck is going on, Jourdain?” Kara hissed, throwing the canvas bag behind the trunk of the tree.

  She stared down at his glowing hand, her jaw dropping.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “Not exactly,” he muttered.

  He tried to use his body to shield at least some of the blue-green light, but obviously, it was a lost cause. She just walked around to look at him from the other side.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she said, fear in her voice. She walked closer to him. “Damn it, Jourdain! What are you doing to him?”

  “I’m trying to save his life,” he growled.

  Without waiting for her answer, he jerked his chin towards Ruby, who was sitting up, holding her stomach in one hand and looking like she might be sick again.

  “Can you get her out of here?” he said, glancing up at Kara.

  He looked around them, at the canopy of oak branches.