Travis shuddered as the temperature dropped. A primal sense of fear and the urge to flee slithered up his spine, and he felt the energy shift. His gift as a medium took over, giving him an odd, slightly off-kilter double vision of the living and the dead. The mausoleum’s ghosts heeded the containment spell and stayed clear.
Father Ryan had a chant of his own in this ritual, and his voice rose and fell in counterpoint to Travis’s, tenor and baritone, in defiance of infernal power. Travis watched the doorway and wondered how many of the grief demons remained to heed his summons.
When the first tendrils of black and green smoke oozed into the mausoleum, Travis’s medium senses recoiled violently. The demons stank of sulfur and rot, and as the summoning compelled them to enter the containment area, the wards on the walls flared bright silver. Travis had no idea how many demons responded to the call, but soon the entire first floor of the building roiled with black clouds with streaks of foxfire glow.
Travis closed his hand around the silver amulet in his pocket as he chanted, not daring to hesitate. He felt the added protection of Father Ryan’s litany, and he knew Jason’s fire starting could drive off at least some of the demons, but he was aware of the massed evil below him and its barely constrained power and knew it could destroy them all if he lost control.
When he could sense no new demons entering the building, Travis finished the summons and spoke the word of power to snap the warding shut on the containment spell.
The demons, realizing they were trapped, howled and screeched like wretches in the depths of the Pit. Travis shifted to a liturgy of cleansing to make the stone floor and the ground beneath it less conducive for the demons. Travis knew he could not completely eliminate the ingrained old taint, but his intent lay in building a shell to isolate the demons from any energy reserves that might enable them to fight his power over them.
Outside the mausoleum, gunshots rang out. Travis recognized the crack of Michael’s rifle, the blast of Doug’s shotgun, and the pop of Brent’s Glock. He dared not stop the ritual, but he sent up a silent prayer for their protection—for all of them to survive the fight.
Travis felt the demons pushing back against him, straining against the wardings that held them in place. He forced himself to pay attention because he could not falter in his incantation. But he knew that the demons seethed at being summoned and contained, and would gleefully strip them all to the bone given any misstep. Father Ryan must have recognized the danger as well, as his chant grew louder, reinforcing the energies Travis had called and laying a second layer of binding on the malevolent spirits gathered beneath them.
An ear-piercing shriek rose from the mausoleum’s lower level as the maddened demons fought their containment. The entire structure trembled, and Travis realized that if he couldn’t finish the banishment quickly enough, the demons might be able to damage the solid building in a desperate bid for freedom.
Travis’s head ached at his temples and sinuses. His mouth felt dry and tasted of ash. Power thrummed through his body, as his psychic abilities merged with the energies on which he called to dispel the demons. He shifted into the exorcism, relieved at the familiarity of the words, grateful to be on known territory once more.
His headache spiked, and he tasted blood in his mouth. The pushback from the demons was invisible, but unmistakable despite the containment warding. Down beneath them, the silver flare of the sigils blazed through the dark smoke like a beacon from a lighthouse, holding the separation and, Travis hoped, weakening the demons’ power.
The building was as frigid as a meat locker, and Travis saw his breath. Exhaustion became euphoria as the long chant continued. Travis felt light-headed, and the tether between his soul and his body felt alarmingly loose as if he might step away from himself like shucking off a worn suit. A warm rivulet of blood trickled from his nose, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand, smearing crimson across his skin.
All of his senses, normal and extra, had heightened to the point of pain. He did not have to extend his abilities to know that the mausoleum’s ghosts watched the proceedings in utter terror, or that beyond the granite building, the cemetery’s restless residents had taken notice.
More gunshots, then silence. Travis couldn’t allow himself to think what that might mean.
As Travis chanted the exorcism to banish the grief demons, Father Ryan continued the litanies of protection, invoking the saints and the Holy Mother, surrounding them with white light.
As the exorcism rose to a climax, Travis felt the containment spell weaken. He could not stop now, not when he was so close to the end. The demons sensed that their banishment was imminent, and fought to free themselves and destroy their tormentor with all of their waning power.
Tendrils of black and green smoke thrust up from the first floor, tearing through the fragile spellwork barrier. Father Ryan brought up a shotgun loaded with shells packed with salt and silver, blasting at the demons as they neared where Travis stood.
Behind him, Lyle shot into the hissing, roiling mass. The demons shrieked loudly enough that Travis thought his ears would bleed, but he kept on chanting. He was so cold that his numb fingers and toes no longer felt like his own. He willed his lips to continue as fear constricted his throat and made his heart thud.
Fire streamed all around him, driving back the encroaching smoke.
“I’ve got your back!” Jason yelled. “Now finish the hell up!”
Travis shouted the last few lines of the exorcism, straining to be heard above the shrieks and screams of the damned. He cried out the final words in triumph, and Father Ryan’s voice rose to join him in the benediction.
With his inner Sight, Travis thought he glimpsed a rift opening into utter darkness. The grief demons gave a final, desolate howl before they were pulled like a maelstrom into the rift. The sigils flared once more, blindingly bright, and when the light faded, the mausoleum was empty.
Travis staggered, catching himself on the railing as Father Ryan grabbed him by the arm to steady him.
“That was…awesome,” Ryan said, looking as if he had just witnessed something miraculous.
“Wasn’t sure we were going to pull it off, for a few seconds there,” Travis admitted. Ryan pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and Travis did his best to dab away the blood from his face.
“You look like you’ve been on a bender,” Jason observed. “Haven’t seen eyes that bloodshot since my freshman year in college.”
Travis managed a weary laugh. “I might look bad, but you oughta see the other guy.”
“Shit.” They all turned to see Lyle, who had his hands on his hips and was glowering. “How in the hell am I going to explain all the pellet holes in the marble?”
Jason laid a hand on Lyle’s shoulder. “We’ll blame it on vandals. The cops will round up the usual suspects and let them go for lack of evidence. Then we’ll hold a fundraiser to repair the damage.”
Lyle looked barely mollified, but he nodded and let Jason steer him toward the steps.
They descended warily, but both the demons and the wardings were gone. Travis dreaded learning what had transpired outside, fearing the worst. They swung open the heavy doors to the outside, surprised that the autumn air seemed warm compared to the chill of the mausoleum.
“What the fuck?” Jason muttered behind him, as they surveyed a landscape littered with dismembered ghouls and rotting corpses.
“Sorry about the mess,” Derek said, stepping out of the shadows. He had come straight from work, and his polo shirt and chinos were stained with dirt and gore. One sleeve had been clawed to shreds, and four deep gashes in his upper arm suggested a nasty fight.
“Brent? Doug?” Travis called.
Brent jogged up from one side of the mausoleum, while Doug joined them from the other. In the distance, Travis could just make out a dark form climbing down from the bell tower, which he figured was Michael.
“What happened?” Father Ryan asked, looking over the memorial gardens th
at had turned into a battlefield.
“It happened pretty much like Travis thought it might,” Derek said. “The demons got sucked into the mausoleum. But before they went, they must have put out an S.O.S. because there were so many dead people clawing their way out of their graves, I thought it was the Second Coming.”
As Brent and Doug drew closer, Travis noticed the toll the fight had taken. Brent’s clothing looked like he’d been mauled by dogs, and he was bleeding from gashes on his shoulder and thigh. Doug must have taken a punch to the face since one eye had swollen closed and was darkening to bruise. He was covered with dirt and stained with grass, suggesting he’d wrestled with an attacker.
“The demons tried to take us,” Brent reported. His face held the flush of the fight. “Derek’s magic saved our bacon.”
“I didn’t know necromancy could hold off demons, at least for a short while,” Derek said with a shrug. “I never thought of them as dead, but since they’re not living, maybe they’re ‘undead’…I’ll have to look into this further. But, I’m glad I could help.”
“I thought I had a bird’s eye view of The Walking Dead ,” Michael said, joining them. At first glance, Travis thought he had escaped unscathed in his aerie, but then he realized that the sniper’s jeans were clawed to ribbons from the knees down. Michael seemed to follow his gaze.
“A couple of ghouls climbed up after me. I shot them.”
Lyle looked over the carnage with a hopeless expression. “I’m not sure we can cremate this many bodies fast enough,” he moaned. “And how do we explain the dug up graves?” He gripped a handful of his hair as if he was distressed enough to tear it out by the roots.
“You’ve still got the backhoe and the forklift, right?” Jason said, coming up beside him. Lyle nodded. “Well then. You drive the forklift, and I’ll dig a hole. We’ll blame the dug up graves on mutant gophers. With everything that’s gone on around here, that’s not even strange. Problem solved.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I think I’ve found the hell gate—which means I’ve also probably found the genius loci.” Brent didn’t look up from his computer screen, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw Travis’s head snap up.
“Where?”
Brent angled his laptop so Travis could see. “I’ve been going over the old mine maps. Mining was the first real industry in these parts, and it brought the first big settlement, so I keep coming back to thinking it helped to strengthen the dark energy. And when I made an overlay of the oldest maps and layered them, I found this.”
He pointed to a deep, central shaft that was common to more than half a dozen of the oldest mines for which they had maps. “It took me a while to catch on that the mines had different names because there were branches and spurs that opened up in new locations. So instead of expanding and getting backlogged trying to bring more coal up out of a single entrance, they dug new tunnels to the surface to connect.”
“But at the heart, it’s one mine,” Travis murmured, leaning forward for a better view.
Brent leaned back and rubbed his eyes. They were dry and strained from too much time at the computer in the poorly lit motel room. He’d grown to hate the blue-green wallpaper and the ugly brown carpet almost as much as he disliked the strong smell of bleach when the housekeeper doused the shower with disinfectant. His apartment over the shop back in Pittsburgh looked luxurious by comparison.
“I don’t think all of the mines are connected,” Brent said. “At least based on the maps we have. But these are the oldest, and I think that might matter.”
Travis stood and stretched, arching his back and flinging out his arms. They were both tall men, and the motel’s chairs were not built for ergonomics. “So you think they drilled down deep enough to awaken a creature from the Pit?”
Brent shook his head. “Not exactly. But the center shaft is in the area the native tribes considered to be a bad place. So maybe whatever this energy is, having a clear shot to the surface makes it worse.” He leaned to the side, cracking his neck. “Demons, I understand. This genius loci thing is fucked up.”
“I’ve been talking with Simon and Chiara,” Travis said. “Derek, too, since he has a perspective with the necromancy that might come in handy. I keep going back to what Hazel wrote in her research notes about working a ritual on this side and having someone on the other side do something to interrupt the hell gate so we can close the door, so to speak. Hazel gave very specific instructions in her journal.”
“You’re basing a lot on something that might really have been speculation,” Brent warned.
“I know,” Travis admitted. “But it’s the best lead we’ve got. I was a priest, not a witch. We had fancy religious names for the magic we did,” he added with a wry twitch of his lips. “But Paige had to do some dark magic to bind Penny’s soul to her, and Benjamin messed with forbidden magic to raise his brother. Plus there’s Aricella—”
“Who?”
“One of my Night Vigil folks. She’s a baker—and a powerful bruja . She knows how magic can go wrong. One of her spells got fucked up and killed her grandmother.”
“Which is how she got to be one of your people, isn’t it?” Brent asked. Travis nodded. All of Travis’s Night Vigil crew seemed to have reached rock bottom because of their abilities, and saw helping out as a way to put things right, or at least atone.
“Anyhow, they know magic; I don’t. So I asked them whether the ritual Hazel wrote about in her notes was real, and they all thought it sounded legit.”
“Hazel was one hell of a woman,” Brent said, shaking his head in admiration.
“Finding the best place to do the ritual was one of the last missing pieces,” Travis said. “I spent all morning gathering the materials Hazel listed in the ledger. There weren’t many, but it took a bit of searching. Now, all we need is someone to close the door.”
Brent felt a chill, and he sensed Danny’s presence. No , he thought. Not you. Brent shivered again. Not gonna happen. I don’t want to talk about it.
“Something wrong?” Travis asked, and Brent wondered whether Travis could sense Danny the same way he could.
“No,” Brent said a little too quickly. “What did you have in mind for the ritual?”
Travis’s gaze lingered a second too long just off to Brent’s right side, making him suspect that his partner did see Danny’s ghost. “I want to reach out to Hazel and to the spirits of those killed by everything that’s been going on, and see if we have any volunteers. They lost their lives because of the genius loci; they should have a chance to put an end to it.”
That seemed fair, Brent thought, a little desperately. Let the people who died get a chance at revenge. Danny’s death didn’t have anything to do with the hell gate. This isn’t his fight. Brent felt uncomfortable as if he was on the receiving end of a disapproving glare.
“When will you know?” Brent asked, hating that he sounded nervous.
“It’ll have to be soon. If your date calculations are right, we only have three days. But I was trying to wait at least until this evening. What we did at the cemetery last night kicked my ass,” Travis admitted.
“And we still don’t know what this cycle’s grand finale would be, in case we can do something besides close the hell gate to stop it,” Brent pointed out.
“The trains don’t run here anymore, and the mines are all closed,” Travis said. “There’s I-80. I guess the genius loci could undermine the road, make a bridge collapse again, or cause a huge accident—”
Brent listened, staring out the window past Travis, watching traffic on the road. Two white and green Preston Energy trucks drove by, and Brent felt a shiver go through his body.
“Wells and mines—isn’t that what Hazel told you?” he asked, interrupting Travis. “Danny said something about wells, too.”
“I figured they meant deep places, like the shaft you found,” Travis said, obviously not following Brent’s sudden conversational shift.
“You said one of
your Night Vigil saw a field with green and white flags that went up in flames,” Brent persisted. “Danny and Hazel both talked about fire. Gas wells,” he said, words coming out in a rush. “Preston Energy. Oh, God.”
He dove for his computer, typing quickly as Travis pulled up a chair beside him, watching over his shoulder. The Preston Energy website promised better living through cheap, plentiful natural gas, and downplayed concerns about fracking, their controversial extraction method.
“Look.” Brent’s voice was hollow with fear. A map of the county popped up, with red dots and lines that showed the expanding network of gas wells and pipelines. “They’re everywhere.”
Travis stared at the map and paled. “Fuck. That doesn’t count the trucks that are full of who-knows-what to pump the gas out of the shale.”
Brent traced the latticework of lines. “They’re all around Cooper City, over by the highway, near the power plant. If those blew, it would take out half the county. Probably fuck up the drinking water for a century, too.”
Travis carded a hand back through his black hair as he stood and paced. “We’re going to have to do the ritual before the hundred and fiftieth day. We’ve got three days.”
“Maybe,” Brent warned. “Remember, we weren’t entirely sure what counted as Day One. There were some iffy things that happened—”
“So, tomorrow night,” Travis said, practically vibrating with tension.
“Are we ready?”
“We have to be,” Travis replied, looking a little shell-shocked. “If we counted wrong, and those gas wells go up—”
Brent flinched at the thought and looked away quickly. He’d had a bad night, after the fight at the mausoleum, and hoped Travis hadn’t heard him cry out in his sleep through the motel’s thin walls. His dreams had been a mashup of Mosul, the clusterfuck when he was with the Bureau, and the monsters in the cemetery. Only in his dreams, every time, the demons won, dragging away the soldiers in his unit, killing his FBI partner, and slaughtering them all at the mausoleum.
Sons of Darkness Page 24
