Sinners and Saints

by Jennifer Roberson

  This time we were fully armed: me with my KA-BAR knife and the long-barreled Taurus snugged beneath left arm. Remi had the shorter version in his belt-holster, along with the Bowie and his throwing knives. Both revolvers were loaded with silver buckshot and silver .45 rounds pre-bathed in holy oil and our breath. Before Lily had left, we’d spent time gathering up various items we found prudent, if outlandish.

  Under still-cloudy skies upon the mountain, we found the cat but not the demon remains. We got down on our hands and knees to try and find one speck of bug droppings, or whatever the hell the leftovers were, and came up empty, as far as we could tell. We even lifted the dead cat and moved it aside to check underneath.

  Nope.

  Remi and I stood up, slapped damp knees free of dirt. The mountainside was still wet from the earlier storm. “No one else would have gathered up all that stuff,” I said. “Not even kids.” Because some kids would have found a tumbled pile of bug remains fascinating.

  “And even if it were kids, they would not have picked up every last bit.”

  I swore, looked in all directions in case we were being watched. In a way I kind of hoped we were, because it meant we could do something about it. Saw no one.

  Remi leaned down again, seemed to be trying to find tracks leading to or from. But he shook his head.

  I wanted to growl. “So we’re screwed.”

  “Looks like.”

  “Okay. Well, we’ve got Kelly’s baggie—let’s take that to the guy. It’s something.” I looked skyward. “I thought Arizona was a desert. This looks almost like Oregon, with all this rain.”

  “And earthquakes?”

  “Well, yeah. We ought to look into that. It was earthquakes across the world that coughed up a bunch of surrogates and jump-started our new careers.”

  “You thinkin’ the earthquake earlier today was a hell vent?”

  I shrugged. “Depends on if anything popped open, I suspect. Some kind of fissure, maybe? We’re on top of a volcano, after all. Didn’t you say this whole area is volcanic?”

  “Over six hundred of the suckers scattered across the plateau. They’re just not all as big as these peaks.”

  I nodded, brushed hands against one another to knock off the last of the dirt. “Then if we’re going to campus anyway to see this bug doc, let’s check with the geology department.”

  * * *

  —

  Northern Arizona University, I discovered, was an attractive, bi-level school built on a broad slope with a slight geologic break between one campus and the other. Plenty of grass and pines, even ivy, but with the patchwork architecture typical of older universities: old buildings mixed with new, and none of the styles similar.

  Mary Jane Kelly’s bug guy was a Dr. Hal Hickman, and he was indeed holding office hours. His door was one of many along the corridor, but the only one standing open.

  On the inside of the door, now bared to the hallway, he’d stuck up a calendar, a small whiteboard, and a quote in bright red calligraphic text on pale paper, treated to make it look aged: No one thinks of how much blood it will cost. —Dante Alighieri.

  No one thinks the battle between Good and Evil is real, either, nor what blood it might cost. And me smack in the middle of it, to boot. Possibly Dante did, when he wrote the graphic and terrifying Inferno portion of the Divine Comedy.

  Hickman glanced up from his desk as we lingered on the threshold, gestured us in. “You Mary Jane’s people?”

  “We are her people,” Remi confirmed, as I offered the sealed baggie.

  Hickman was late-40s by my guess, wavy sandy hair tied back into a frizzy ponytail. Eyelashes framing blue eyes were so pale as to appear nonexistent, and he was heavily freckled. He didn’t stand to shake hands, just leaned close to the desk and reached out a long arm to accept the baggie.

  Already he was distracted as he unzipped the sealed plastic. “Go ahead and pull those two chairs over—oh, yeah, sorry about that! Just move my leg.” He gestured with a thumb at a prosthetic leaning against a chair. “Stick it in this corner by me, if you would.”

  It’s not every day you see a prosthetic leg separated from its owner. Remi treated it carefully, leaned it precisely in the corner within Hickman’s reach and made sure it wouldn’t fall over.

  “I stand on it so much in class I just pop it off in the office.” The professor slid out the middle desk drawer, dug up a pair of long tweezers. “I’ll get everything under the scope in the lab later.” Hickman teased out a fragment of remains. “I just want to get a quick first look.”

  He placed the bug bit down on the clean blotter, aimed his desk lamp at it, grabbed a handheld magnifier and began an examination. His freckled forehead folded like corrugated cardboard.

  Hickman was silent, twisting his mouth this way and that. He used the tweezers to turn the fragment onto different sides and edges. Finally he said, in happy tones, “I am clueless! This is fascinating! I see why Mary Jane said you guys felt it looked insectoid. It may well be part of an exoskeleton. But it has some very odd striations in it. Let me pull out another fragment.” He continued the examination, then asked if we’d felt the earthquake that morning. “Doesn’t happen often, but now and then, we are visited by the shake, rattle, and roll.”

  Remi and I both sat up straight. “Any reports of damages?” I asked. “Any new fissures?”

  “Matter of fact . . .” He was paying much more attention to the demon remains, and now had a little line of glittering brown bits. “Yeah, they said they’ve closed a portion of the trail out at Sunset Crater. There’s an old ice cave there. An area of it collapsed and the trail went with it. Parts of the lava flow may be unstable, so they’re checking it out.”

  Remi and I looked at one another sharply. Sunset Crater was the massive cinder cone where we had cleared a domicile and exploded a demon in black dog form. Supposedly no more demons could inhabit the place, but did that apply if earthquakes broke open new ground?

  I opened my mouth to ask more questions, but was interrupted by a young dark-haired woman in bright red glasses. She leaned around the doorframe. “Hey, Dr. Hickman—” But she saw me, saw Remi, and stopped dead in the middle of her sentence.

  Remi rose abruptly, knocking aside his chair. Her eyes widened and she took off like a shot. He pushed the chair away and went after her.

  Hickman and I both stared at the empty doorway, then at one another.

  The last thing we needed was a professor sounding the alarm because one of his students, and a young woman at that, was being chased through the halls by a cowboy. I opened my mouth to spin it as best I could, but Hickman beat me to it.

  He waved a hand. “Molly does that.”

  “Molly does that? Runs away in the middle of a question?” Some of my students ditched classes when I taught, but none of them ever ran away in the middle of talking to me.

  He spread his hands palm up in an oh well gesture. “Believe it or not, yes. And it’s not really running away so much as it’s an avoidance technique employed when she feels cornered by strangers. She’s one of those eccentric geniuses—you know, where you give ’em a pass because they’re actually much smarter than you are.”

  Of course that did not explain Remi’s leaping to his feet and running after her. So I tried to spin that, too. “Well, he did say his burger tasted a little off. Hope he found the restroom in time.” But Hickman was no longer paying me any attention at all, and I wanted to go after Remi because I was pretty damn sure he was chasing a demon. I edged toward the door. “Can we call tomorrow, or stop by?”

  “Sure. Or I’ll text Mary Jane. I’m going to take these home tonight, then bring them back in the morning to the big lab. No prob.”

  Okay, so Hickman had no prob. Possibly Remi and I did.

  * * *

  —

  Naturally, just at the moment I hit the corridor, class
es let out. I was engulfed by students, most of them grabbing phones out of pockets and purses and paying absolutely no attention to the possibility that a non-student might be trying to find another non-student who was in hot pursuit of someone who was a student, even if a demonic student, and therefore knew her way around. I needed Moses to part the Red Sea of social media addicts.

  But I had a phone, too, as did Remi, and I checked for voicemail or text from him as I threaded my way through the masses. Nothing, so I called him, only to reach voicemail.

  “Yo.” I disconnected, figuring that would be enough. I also sent him a text saying the same thing.

  And then I called myself something less complimentary than idiot, or even dipshitiot. Remi and I had not set up GPS apps on our ordinary phone, but I was betting it wasn’t necessary with the magic phones.

  Try Siri? Alexa? Google Assistant?

  “Hey iAngel,” I said, “where’s Remi?”

  And to my surprise a nice little nav-map came up on the screen with cool moving wing icons indicating me, and another set of wings that I assumed represented Remi. Mine were red, his blue, and they were pretty far apart. I was supposed to exit the building, according to the screen, so I hit the push-bar on the heavy glass door, shoved my way through.

  Around the corner. Along a sidewalk. Crossed a street. Into another building, through another door. I probably looked like I was playing Pokémon GO, though it now was passe.

  I chanted swear words beneath my breath. Remi was on the move, which we needed, but I kind of wanted him to pause long enough for me to make up some ground.

  “Are you lost?” A woman’s voice. “Can I help?” I looked up, prepared to politely decline, and then saw Molly herself in her bright red glasses grinning at me from a distance of ten or so yards. “Boo!” she cried. “Welcome to the war!”

  And then she took off.

  And I took off.

  As I ran I pulled up Remi’s contact, hoped he’d answer. Just in case, I yelled to voicemail. “On me!” I shouted. “I’m on her ass—follow my little wings!”

  Oh, that didn’t sound weird or anything. And it was still a man chasing a young woman on a college campus. All she had to do to really screw with us was scream for help.

  So I stopped. I just stopped. Molly was familiar with and in control of the battleground, so to speak, and we weren’t going to catch her. All we would do was get ourselves arrested. Possibly amusing to Molly, but not so much to us. And I was a felon, so even though Grandaddy would probably come handle the legalities, I’d still have to deal with the red tape in the meantime. Police don’t take kindly to ex-cons to start with, particularly murderers, but especially not when caught chasing female college students. We might know she was a demon, but they wouldn’t. And anyway, trying to explain such a thing to police? Pass. Easier to talk about UFOs.

  I watched Remi’s little blue wings on the screen get closer and closer to my red ones, and then they turned purple as his icon and mine met. I turned, and there he was coming up behind me.

  “You get her?” he asked, resettling his hat.

  I shook my head. “Gave it up for a lost cause. She was just screwing with us.”

  “Yeah. And even if Hickman has her number or address, he won’t give either to us. Student privacy.”

  “Think she hopped bodies into a real student?”

  “Makes sense,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s temporary, and the host is okay.”

  I nodded, wondering whether a host was aware a demon had highjacked the body, or would have no memory of it after the host was vacated. Providing he or she survived.

  “Hickman said he was going home early to look at the remains under his scope, then he’ll bring them back tomorrow to the school lab. He’ll call Mary Jane if he finds anything of interest.” I tucked the phone away. “So, I assume your Spideysense started tingling when Molly stuck her head around the door?”

  “Like a damn bad weather alert,” he said. “One minute I was sittin’ there, nice as you please, and then I knew. I just knew. I can’t even tell you how.”

  “But you were able to follow her.”

  “For a bit, but it didn’t last. I guess my personal batteries died.”

  I checked my watch. “Well, we’ve still got a few hours of daylight. Nothing more we can do until Hickman gets back to us, and even then it may do us no good. Let’s call the guy at the Harley shop and see if we can finally go haul my poor bike out of the ravine. I’m just praying it can be salvaged.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Remi drove us out the winding Highway 180 toward the far side of the San Francisco Peaks. At the A-framed Chapel of the Holy Dove, which we had reconsecrated to keep demons from setting up shop, he turned us around. It had been on the way back from the chapel a couple of days before that we engaged with La Llorona, the weeping woman from Mexican folklore. She had been getting her jollies by orchestrating car wrecks triggered by her sudden appearances in the middle of the two-lane road.

  I’d been doing 50mph when she popped up immediately in front of me, and I opted to lay down the bike, an action that is beloved of Hollywood and TV because it looks Really Cool, while it is to be desperately avoided in real life. But reflexes are reflexes, and mine went into action when a woman appeared out of nowhere right in front of my bike. I’d dumped it and sent myself tumbling across the highway to the shoulder on the far side. In boots, full leathers, gloves and a helmet, I’d survived without any broken bones and no head injury, but fine I was not. The bike screeched down the asphalt, disappeared on a curve into forest alongside the road, and took a dive off the edge of a steep, rocky ravine, where it landed in the creek.

  It hurt just to remember it.

  Heading back the way we’d come, I spotted skid marks and shards of shattered glass from the bike’s lights littering the asphalt. Remi pulled off to park truck and flatbed trailer on the shoulder. The guy from the Harley shop was supposed to meet us in a half-hour.

  I got out, closed the door. “Let’s just hope he can get his truck all the way to the edge of the ravine to use the winch. Otherwise we may be shit-out-of-luck.”

  Remi grabbed a gearbag from the back of the truck and tossed it across the bed to me, then hooked another over his shoulder. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  “Lay on.” I slipped an arm through the woven handles, hitched the bag up high. “Everybody gets it wrong, just like the ‘Catch me when you can’ Ripper quote. But that’s not what Shakespeare wrote.”

  “It’s ‘Lay on, Macduff?’”

  I turned to head out, but threw the reply over my shoulder. “Last words Macbeth says before he and Macduff get into it. He wasn’t following Macduff into battle, he was telling Macduff to take his best shot.”

  “Huh.” Remi was close behind me as we made our way through trees and vegetation. “I did not know that. So, then, what about ‘To thine own self be true.’?”

  “The Bible verse? What about it?”

  “Which verse is it?”

  I laughed. “Don’t ask me that! I’m not up on Biblical stuff.”

  “Shakespeare,” Remi said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a quote from Shakespeare, not the Bible.”

  I marched onward through trees. “Amazing what we go around misquoting.”

  “Speaking of quotes,” Remi began, “I did some reading in the Bible earlier today. It has some things to say about demons.”

  I grinned. “Well, one would expect that, yeah. Kind of invented the genre, didn’t it?”

  “You know how our demons say ‘Everyone comes home,’ and they gather up the remains?”

  “Yeah.” That had been our first real meeting with a surrogate, when it rode a host body to the Zoo to recover remains.

  “It’s addressed in Matthew 12: 43 and 44, ‘When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes th
rough waterless places seeking rest, but finds none.’ Then the verse says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ There’s a little more to it, but that’s the salient point. Exorcised demons go home in order to be made whole again. And some bring back seven of its kind worse than it is.”

  That was a game-changer. “So you’re saying this Jack the Ripper demon, this Legion, that if we kill it, the remains are taken back to hell and it will return with seven pals worse than it is? Shit. It’s like the Magnificent Seven of bad guys.”

  “More like Seven Deadly Sins.”

  It was astounding to me. “Can you imagine demonic versions of the Ripper, Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, Manson, and so on, joining forces in the middle of Armageddon?”

  “I reckon that might could be the whole point, and which is why we ought to be concerned about those remains that got scooped up on the mountain today.”

  Shit. Shitshitshit. “So, from here on out we burn ’em up before we go anywhere else, instead of leaving them lying around.”

  “Or take them off somewhere ourselves to destroy them later.”

  “But meanwhile most of those got away from us.” I mulled it over as we walked. “Should we have exploded the cat like we did the black dog? Greg said that was enough when she did it for us at the Wupatki ruins.”

  “Well, that cat jumped me before you got there, and then it went right after you,” Remi said, “so I’m figurin’ we did the best we could. Besides, it’s a public trail system. Shooting a mountain lion is one thing, and Mary Jane said it’s not illegal. But chanting a foreign language while sticking our rings together and exploding an animal all over the mountainside might could be a tad much for most folks seein’ it up close and personal.”

  And that took us right to the edge of the ravine. We stood side by side and peered down. It wasn’t a sheer cliff, but a cascade of edged rock outcrops and hummocks of soil and grasses, exposed tree roots, divots and pockets in stone. Both of us had managed to climb down to the creekbed without the aid of anything before, though at the time we’d been chasing a deadly figment of folklore and not thinking about ourselves. It’s easier climbing down a rocky ravine when lives depend upon it. At this juncture, no lives depended upon it and neither of us was ready to go over the edge without aids.