Sanctuary

by Jeff Mariotte

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Fred took the stairs up as quietly as she could manage in her weakened state, knowing that the guys climbing up below her were making enough noise to mask small sounds and that speed was the most important thing just now. They were making no effort, as far as she could discern, to be quiet or discreet. Their feet landed heavily on the wooden steps, and they talked and laughed at full volume. She wondered if maybe the rest of the building was unoccupied—that would account for the fact that she heard no noises while she was handcuffed in that one room, and for the lack of concern these guys had for being discovered by neighbors now.

  But when she reached the top, she was momentarily stumped. There were several doors, as there had been on the other levels. If there were people behind those doors, though, how would they react to someone banging on their door in the middle of the night? Or simply trying the knobs, hoping one of them was unlocked? In a minute or so, the guys downstairs would discover that she’d gotten away, and then she’d need someplace to hide, and quick. And what if everyone in the building was in league with them? Wouldn’t she just be replacing one bad situation with another? Maybe worse? I should have just stayed put and waited for Angel, she thought. He’ll be here. He always comes through.

  Sound traveled well enough up the curving stairway for Fred to know when the men below had stopped their ascent and stood at the doorway to the room she’d escaped from. She estimated it had taken her about fifty seconds to climb the five flights of stairs to the top. It would certainly take less than that, from the time they opened the door, to determine that she was gone—there was no place in that room where she might have been able to hide, and only the one door to go through. So within a minute—two, tops—chances were there would be someone on this flight looking for her.

  “Gone!” she heard the voice—definitely the man she’d exchanged a few words with, who called himself John—drift up from below. The tone was a mix of disbelief and rage. “Find her!” came next, and she knew the minute or two she had thought she had was being abbreviated.

  She looked more carefully at the doors. Most of them had the brass letters on them, but a couple—she’d noticed this on the story below, as well—were missing the letters. On one of the letter-less doors, she could make out a faint faded spot where a V had once been. The other door with no letter had no such spot, and when she looked more closely at it, there wasn’t even a tiny hole where a nail had held the letter on.

  That’s my door, then, she decided. No time to second-guess herself. She rushed to it and gripped the knob. It turned. She pulled the door open, hoping she wasn’t walking into a trap.

  Another staircase rose up beyond the door, no wider than the doorway and illuminated only by the light that fell in from the hall. She pulled the door shut behind her, as silently as she was able, and went up the stairs three at a time. Another door waited at the top, and if that was locked, then she had just sealed herself in a dark, narrow death trap.

  When she reached the top, hearing commotion below as the men shouted to each other and stomped around the staircase, she felt for the doorknob. There wasn’t one. She felt a rush of panic. Her cheeks flushed, her heart zoomed, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Blindly, she pawed at the door. It had looked like a door from below, when a small bit of light glowed from the sconce outside.

  At last, her fingers touched a hook-and-eye latch. She managed to slip the hook free of the eye, and the door fell open a bit. Fred shoved it the rest of the way. Outside, she saw sky. She stepped out.

  She found herself on a flat roof, covered with grainy roofing sheets. Air-conditioning units rose up here and there, and strange vents and pipes pointed toward the starry sky. She looked about quickly for something she could prop against the door to hold it closed, since she couldn’t relatch it. A side panel of one of the air conditioners was hanging off, she noticed, held in place only by one screw that had worked itself mostly out. She went to it and turned the screw with her fingers, ignoring the way it bit into her skin. Then the panel was free, and she ran back to the door with it. She pushed the door into place and leaned the panel up against it. There was no way to wedge it so that the door wouldn’t open, but at least if they just glanced up from below they wouldn’t know that she’d gone through.

  Now, though, she couldn’t hear where they were or what they were doing. Looking for her, of that she had no doubt. But how close? How much time did she have? No clue. When they got here, though, it wouldn’t take them long to find her. She could hunker down behind one of the air-conditioning units, but that wouldn’t fool them for long. She had bought herself a few minutes, that was all.

  • • •

  Angel went into the office building next to the building that housed Caritas. A quick glance around told him that the units started at A through C on the ground floor. So H would be on three. He headed up the stairs, swift and silent, ready for action. Hearing some kind of disturbance upstairs, he sacrificed silence for more speed. He couldn’t tell what had happened, but whatever it was couldn’t be good for Fred.

  As he reached the second floor, he saw two men coming down from above. At least, first glance, he thought they were men. But they fixed him with glowing green eyes. “Angel,” one said, sounding surprised.

  “Where’s Fred?” Angel demanded.

  The one who had spoken answered, even as he started to change. “We have no idea,” he said. “But when we find her, you’re both dead.”

  The transformation took only a second as the two came down the last couple of steps. Before they had looked like human men; now they were Kedigris demons. They approached Angel with reaching tentacles and gnashing teeth. As the one in Caritas had complained, though, he had killed Kedigris before and would have no problem doing so again.

  Just have to watch out for those suckers, he thought. When a Kedigris was able to wrap its tentacles around an opponent and latch on with its suckers, small barbed hooks emerged from the center of the sucker and dug into the enemy’s flesh. Poison traveled through a tiny vein in the barb. Paralysis was almost immediate; death came soon after.

  Anticipating Kedigris, though, Angel had brought a Guatemalan machete with him from the car. As the Kedigris reached his level and charged him, he whipped it out from beneath his long coat and slashed upward at the nearest tentacle. The demon hissed and whipped his tentacle out of the way. Angel reversed course, slicing down, and this time caught a tip of a tentacle. It fell to the floor with a wet, meaty thump. The Kedigris it had belonged to screamed in pain.

  Angel hadn’t wanted that—he didn’t know what was going on upstairs, and the idea that they had somehow misplaced Fred gave him hope. But he had hoped this fight could be kept quiet so he’d at least have the drop on whoever remained above. So much for that plan. He feinted with the machete, and when the wounded Kedigris reacted by withdrawing its tentacles, Angel slashed toward the other demon.

  The Kedigris tentacles were more agile than he remembered, though. The demon stepped back, his tentacle dodging Angel’s flashing blade, and then curled and darted forward, surrounding Angel’s arm. It caught him, coiled like a snake from the wrist up to his shoulder. The sword was useless now—he couldn’t break free of the demon’s grip, and couldn’t use the machete at all. He let it fall to the floor.

  Fortunately, he’d worn his leather duster. He felt the demon’s suckers prodding at it, the barbed hooks trying to work their way into his flesh, but they were only biting at the leather. He still had a shirt on underneath that, and the hooks weren’t reaching his skin.

  Small comfort, really, he realized. Because the Kedigris still had hold of him, and the power in their tentacles was immense. The other tentacle snaked toward him, and there was still one more demon to go. A smell like cinnamon hung heavy in the air now.

  He batted at the second tentacle with his left hand, and kicked at the Kedigris’s torso. But he couldn’t quite reach it, and the tentacle managed to evade his swings even as it w
orked nearer to him. It’s like trying to swat a snake, he thought, only the snake has had three triple-shot espressos and you’re half-asleep.

  The second Kedigris, the one he’d already wounded, came forward more cautiously, but he seemed to be working his way around Angel to grab him from behind. Which, since the first one held him fast, was probably going to work, Angel realized. He had to come up with something, and it had to be soon.

  • • •

  Maybe they won’t come up here, Fred told herself. Maybe they don’t know about the stairs to the roof, or they’ll just glance up and see that the door is closed and assume that if it’s closed, it must be latched from the inside. Maybe when they don’t see me right off they’ll figure I went down, not up, like any smart person would do, and they need to be looking for me on the streets and not on the rooftops.

  And maybe wishing won’t make it so, and maybe caves are better than roofs because if you fall, at least you’re already on the ground. She had a lot of maybes there, she knew, and not much certainty. The only certainty she could really come up with was that when they caught her—and they would catch her—they would kill her. No more waiting for Angel, no more offering her up for trade. She would have made herself into too much of a problem, and they would just finish her right there, right then.

  She was crouched behind an air-conditioning unit, watching the door carefully. The unit was a big sheet metal box with ducts and pipes and grates, silent now. She had glanced inside the one she’d taken the panel off, wondering if there was enough open space in one for her to hide, but there wasn’t. She thought it was possible, given time, that she’d be able to dismantle one enough to slip down into the ductwork and escape from the rooftop that way. But she’d need a screwdriver, at the very least—or time to fashion one from the steel at hand—and probably hours, to work. And if she had hours, certainly there were better ways down. A fire escape, maybe—she’d determined that there were none from this building, but several buildings adjoined and it was possible that one of the others had one. She hadn’t gone looking yet because she figured she had only seconds until they came, and felt more comfortable hiding instead of standing and walking from roof to roof—or, worse yet, being caught near the edge of one.

  So she hid, and she waited. And she was right, as it turned out—she had only been waiting for about a minute when the door jiggled and the sheet metal panel she’d propped against it fell with a sound like a rifle shot. The door flew open, and three men came through: the one called John, and two others she didn’t recognize. They all had those bright green eyes, though. Which meant Jack was one of them, whatever they were. She had thought she’d met a nice guy in Caritas, and instead she’d just met some kind of evil demon who had been looking to use her to hurt Angel. There are some nights it just doesn’t pay to leave home.

  Most of them, actually.

  She held her breath as they stepped out onto the roof. She watched from around the corner of the unit, staying low, knowing that if she showed her head over the top they’d be far more likely to spot her. But the roofline was so busy with wires and ducts and big metal boxes, the outline of a quarter of a head would not call much attention to itself.

  She hoped.

  “She’s here somewhere,” John said. “That door didn’t get propped by itself.”

  “Maybe she’s already down,” another one suggested.

  “Only if she fell,” John suggested. “We made sure the fire escapes were worthless when we moved in here. She tries to use one, she’ll drop like a rock.”

  That’s good to know, Fred thought. Or is it? There are fire escapes, but the word “escape” doesn’t really apply, in that case.

  “If she fell, we’d better not let Angel find out,” the third guy said. “A dead girl doesn’t do us much good as a hostage.”

  “We need her back,” John agreed. “Alive is best. Spread out.”

  The way he said that reminded Fred of Moe, from the Three Stooges. Gunn loved those guys. She found out she could tolerate them, in small doses. The idea that the green-eyed fiend who was looking for her, hoping to use her to lure Angel into a death trap, could be Moe made her giggle nervously. Better name for him than John, anyway. She let out only the tiniest squeak before shoving her knuckle between her teeth to silence herself, and she drew her head back so she was completely hidden by the metal box.

  “What was that?” Moe demanded sharply.

  You couldn’t possibly have heard that, Fred thought. It was the wind, a noise from the street, a bird…

  Footsteps crunched on the tarpaper roofing material. She huddled against the air conditioner, desperately willing herself invisible, squeezing her eyes shut as if that would make it so. A couple of moments later, the footsteps stopped. Fred didn’t want to, but she opened her eyes.

  One of them stood a dozen feet away, looking right at her. Larry, she decided. He looked enough like the other guy, Moe or John or whatever, to be his brother. And like Jack, she realized. They were all of a type.

  “Got her,” he said. Moe and the third guy, who could only be Curly, came to where he was.

  “You’re a troublemaker,” Moe said. “I didn’t think you would be. I thought you’d be cooperative, but look at you.” His form started to shimmer as he talked, like she was looking at him through heat waves. Then she realized he was changing. All three of them were. Bodies elongating, arms slimming and stretching out, those green eyes protruded and extending on the ends of stalks. Their heads changed shape, spreading at the tops and narrowing at the chins until they assumed a kind of T shape.

  So they were demons all along, Fred realized with a gulp of horror. She had suspected it, but the confirmation made it worse. It just figures, doesn’t it?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Angel’s right arm was beginning to go numb, but he was guessing it was simply because of the Kedigris’s tight coils. He hadn’t felt the jab of any of its barbs piercing his skin yet, and he still managed to fend off its other tentacle with his left hand.

  The other one was behind him now, though, and he couldn’t dodge tentacles he couldn’t see. Which meant that the time to do something about this had definitely come, and if he couldn’t, then the whole night’s efforts had been for nothing. The demons needn’t have bothered kidnapping Fred at all; they only needed to sic two good fighters on Angel and he’d fold like a lightweight.

  But I’m no lightweight, the vampire thought. He grabbed hold of the tentacle that held his right arm with his left hand. He had avoided that because he knew the creature would be able to snag his left with its other tentacle if he did it, but he decided there was no other choice, and hoped that it wouldn’t be an issue long enough for the Kedigris to paralyze him. Once he had the fleshy limb in his grasp, he leaned toward the Kedigris briefly. The demon corrected his own balance to compensate for Angel’s move, and as soon as he did, Angel lurched in the other direction, tugging with his left hand and his immobilized right arm.

  The demon’s other tentacle had just settled on Angel’s left hand, and one of its suckers clamped down on the skin there when Angel’s sudden motion yanked the thing off-balance, falling toward Angel. The vampire lashed out with one booted foot that slammed into the onrushing Kedigris, breaking an eye stalk and driving into the demon’s skull. The Kedigris’s legs folded at the knees and it went down, its tentacles losing their grip at the same time.

  Angel spun around, knowing that the immediate threat now was from behind. The wounded Kedigris had been just about to clamp its suckers down on Angel’s neck when the sudden flurry of action had interrupted its attack. Angel was able to dodge so the tentacles missed his neck, but one of them whipped across the front of his shirt, tearing it open. Angel slapped it aside. It struck back, whipping across Angel’s face. The vampire blinked from the sudden sting and tried to catch the flailing limb. He missed, and the tentacle landed on his chest again, a sucker fastening itself there like a massive suction cup. Angel felt one of the barbs prick him.
His left hand already felt numb from the barb he’d taken there. This one was much nearer his heart. He wondered how much time he’d have before the paralysis was total.

  He grabbed on to the tentacle that was shooting poison into him and held it as he hurled himself to the floor. The Kedigris fell forward, too, losing his footing as Angel pulled on it. Angel had a reason for hitting the floor, though—that was where he’d left the machete. He scrabbled about with his right hand until he found it, then closed his fist around its handle. Rising to a kneeling position, he sliced up with the blade, severing the tentacle seven or eight inches from his chest. Disconnected from its owner, the end that stuck to him lost its grip after a second and fell away.

  Now the Kedigris had two sliced-up tentacles, and it didn’t seem very happy about it. It backed away from Angel, but Angel pursued, weaving a net of flashing steel in front of him with the machete. Every time the Kedigris raised a defensive tentacle, Angel slashed toward it. Finally, the Kedigris backed against a wall. It could go no farther. Angel expected it to plead for its life, or maybe to utter some defiant phrase. But it didn’t—it just glared at Angel with those strange green eyes and waited for the end.

  Angel obliged it. When that was done, he finished off the other one, the one he had stunned but which was starting to recover already.

  When he started up the stairs again, Angel realized with concern that his left arm had gone completely numb.

  Since they didn’t actually have her surrounded, Fred pushed herself to her feet and started to slowly back away from the freaky-looking creatures. The one she now thought of as Moe laughed, showing his pointy little teeth as he did so. “You could just make this easy on all of us,” he said, his voice deeper than it had been when he’d looked human. “You’re not getting away, so why make me work harder than we have to, and make me angry at you? Anything that happens to you now is just your own fault.”