Justin returned as I did. “They didn’t go that way.”
“I know where they went.” It wasn’t entirely the process of elimination. Maybe I was getting the hang of this psychic stuff. I straight-armed the glass door leading to the terrace that circled the conference level of the Marriott, overlooking the golf course.
Brian followed us out, then had to stop and lean a trembling hand against the wall. His face looked ashen in the dim light. “You guys hurry. I’ll catch up.” When I hesitated in concern, he waved me on.
“He’ll be all right.” Justin grabbed my hand; heart pounding, ribs heaving against my too-tight dress, I ran behind him, down the moonlit path.
29
the plan had been simple. Stick to Brandon. Follow him if he left, especially if Stanley left, too. Use the salt to protect him from the Shadow, since it was the only thing we knew worked. See? Simple.
The stench hit me the moment we rounded the corner. Oh yeah, the demon was here, all right. My gorge rose in my throat and I fell against the terrace wall, losing my struggle to keep down my dinner.
“Jesus Christ, Quinn!” Brandon’s voice rattled my skull. “You’re here, too? What is this, the whole goddamn circus?”
I blinked stupidly, trying to fit the puzzle together. Brandon stood in the center of the patio, his tux jacket thrown over a wrought-iron chair, a smoldering joint pinched in his fingers. Oddly enough, this was the only part that made sense. What I had to wrap my head around was Lisa with my camera case at her feet, empty now of easy-pour canisters of salt, and Stanley, wild-eyed and belligerent, clasping the now-familiar brazier in his arms.
Justin came to my side, looking green, so possibly he could smell the demon, too, though the other three seemed oblivious.
“Lisa?” She hadn’t even glanced at me. “What’s going on?”
“Yeah, Lisa,” said Brandon. “I’m just out here getting some fresh air, and this one”—he pointed at Stanley—“shows up talking crazier than a shit-house rat. And this one”—meaning Lisa—“starts playing Betty-effing-Crocker.”
I looked at the ground and saw a salt circle on the pavement, white in the moonlight. It looked as though most of the pattern had been put in place earlier and closed just now, where the line was cleaner. Raising my eyes to Lisa’s grim face, I realized she’d been holding out on me, and protesting entirely too much, perhaps from the very beginning.
“Lisa?” I repeated her name.
“I’m fixing this, Maggie.” She still didn’t look at me. “Just let me handle it.”
“Why are you interfering?” Stanley’s drab hair stood up in wispy spikes as he confronted her. “You hate these assholes as much as I do.”
“Shut up, Dozer,” she snapped. “You don’t even know what you’re dealing with.”
“Yes I do.” He held the brazier in both hands. It looked smaller in real life, but somehow…more. As if the evil contained in it were distilled down, latent in the beaten brass. “I’m the one who found the key. I’m the one who realized what it could do. I’m the one who can control it.”
“That thing doesn’t control it, idiot.”
“Lisa,” I cautioned, seeing Stanley’s face flush blood-dark. “Maybe you shouldn’t piss him off too much.” Just in case he could let the leash go early, better not antagonize the crazy guy.
Brian arrived then, leaning heavily on his cane. He stared in obvious confusion and Brandon, seeing him, made a disgusted sound. “You, too, Crip-patrick? This is a real loser convention. I’m out of here.”
“Stop!” At least three of us shouted at him. Justin because he was about to step across the salt barrier, Stanley because he was in full raving lunatic swing, and me, because I could sense the demon waiting, its anticipation invading my brain the way its stink invaded my lungs.
The footballer paused at our outburst, and Justin stepped into his path. He raised his hands in a gesture both calming and emphatic. “You really don’t want to head back right now.”
“Look, dickhead. I don’t even know who you are, but you’d better move before I kick your ass.”
Justin’s eyes narrowed and his face hardened. “You could try.” He may have been bluffing, but he convinced me.
The tension seemed to thicken the air, growing dense with every harsh word. I didn’t know whether to warn them or not. If we drew the Shadow out of hiding, we could fight it, with Brandon safe in the protective circle. The uncooperative bait, however, was one wild card. The other pushed his way past Lisa to get in my face.
“Do you think you can stop me? No one can stop this now.”
“Geez, Stanley. Did you get your dialogue from an old James Bond movie? Listen to yourself.”
“No, you listen, Margaret Quinn.”
Margaret?
He pushed my shoulder with the hand not holding the brass artifact. Brian stepped forward with a protective “Hey!” but Stanley ignored him. “You are an interfering little bitch and I don’t know why you’re not lying at the bottom of that swimming pool right now.”
I remembered the list of names in my dream, offered to the demon in parchment and blue flame. “You put my name on the hit list?” I don’t know where I found the room for indignation. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You pitied me,” said Stanley, pushing at my shoulder again. “And you meddle. So I put you on the list. I don’t know why it missed you, but…”
I shoved him back, remarkably restrained in confronting someone who’d tried to kill me. “Maybe because my name isn’t Margaret, jerkwad.”
Stanley stumbled backward; his heels scuffed the line of white crystals, but didn’t break it.
“Maggie!” Justin shouted a warning and a remonstration. I saw immediately why. In the shadows by the terrace wall a nightmare coiled in on itself, writhed into being.
Lisa grabbed Dozer by the arm and yanked him away from the circle and away from me, trying to reestablish control of the situation. “Stop it. Now.”
I looked at her, tried to sort out her involvement in all this. The demon knew my real name, but Stanley didn’t. If Azmael knew what its summoner knew…
Still inside the circle, Brandon took one last hit off his joint and pinched it out, letting the smoke escape slowly on a lazy laugh. “Are you the loser queen, Lisa? These your court jesters?”
…then Stanley didn’t actually summon the demon.
“Or maybe you got it bad for one of them.” Brandon continued his languid taunt, while Lisa stared at him, loathing in her eyes. “Is it Quinn? Did I put you off guys for good?”
“Shut. Up.” Her voice bit frozen chunks from the night air.
I stared at her. We all did. Nothing moved but darkness and shadow, growing in the corner of my vision.
Stanley didn’t know my full name. But Lisa did.
“I was drunk.” Bone-deep hatred twisted her words.
Brandon met it with indifference. “Duh. It was a college party. Everyone was drunk.”
A vague memory flitted through my head: spring break, leaving for Colorado with Mom and Dad, and Lisa telling me that she and Katie and Tess were going to get a feel for campus life while I was gone.
Her fists clenched at her side, gathered more air and clenched again. “I was too drunk to say no.”
Brandon’s careless shrug was another assault. “Not my fault you changed your mind.”
I took a furious step toward him, trembling with the temptation to do violence on him, to wipe that indifference off his face. “You unconscionable bastard.” Justin put out a hand, kept me from crossing the line. I glared at him, then turned my anger on Brian next. “You knew about this?”
He avoided my gaze, swaying on his feet. “I drove her home that night. I offered to take her to the police, but she didn’t want to.”
“Why not?” I looked at Lisa. Her whole countenance, her entire being rejected sympathy. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know.” Her gaze flicked to Brian, and
I glimpsed part of her unreasonable hatred of him. He’d witnessed her weakness.
I grabbed for Lisa’s hand, didn’t let her push me away. “He did wrong, not you.” Brandon snorted, and I ignored him.
Her chest heaved with the effort to control her emotion. “No, I was just stupid and naïve.” Two fates worse than death in Lisa’s book. She turned to Brandon. “All I wanted to do was punish you.”
Two burning yellow sparks flickered in the solidifying darkness. “Lisa,” I cautioned. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Something more stupid than summoning a demon, you mean?”
“No!” Stanley wrapped his arms around the brazier. “It was my idea. Mine. You just helped me, threw some ingredients in the pot.” He stared, transfixed, at the agglomeration of shadow. “And now it’s here, and you’ll see who is in charge.”
“You are all bat-shit crazy,” said Brandon with almost as much horror as contempt. The only time I would ever agree with him. “I’m done listening to this crap.”
The darkness broke free from the corner and spread across the patio in a dank, hell-born fog. “Don’t move,” Justin ordered.
“You are not in charge here!” shrieked Stanley.
The Shadow chortled, less a sound of laughter and more the noise of bugs scuttling across rock.
“Christ on a crutch!” Brandon frantically searched the dark. “What was that?”
Lisa’s face shone white in the moonlight. “I came up with the formula to evoke it. I can control it.”
“I found the brazier.” Stanley backed away from the fog, pressing his back to the wall. “I gave it the list of names.”
“Shut up, Stanley.”
Brian collapsed without warning. Justin turned instinctively to break his fall, and Brandon took his chance. He stepped out of the circle. As soon as his foot broke the line, it happened, more quickly than my mind could completely process.
The haze wound together, spinning into a noxious cyclone that amassed into a malformed approximation of legs and arms and trunk, sulfurous orbs where eyes should be.
Stanley dropped the brazier, three millennia of burnished brass hitting the concrete with a clang that echoed all the way back to its forging. Brandon’s arm jerked suddenly up and back, like a police control hold, and kept going until I heard a crack and a wet pop and a tearing sound, then it fell to his side like a dead thing.
The pain reached his brain and he began to scream. His other shoulder cracked, the joint splintering. Then the rib cage…Oh God, the sounds it made.
Do not pass out, Maggie. Think! I still clutched the shaker I’d taken from the table. My fingers lost precious time fumbling to unscrew the top. The metal cap bounced on the ground, and I poured the fine white crystals into my hand, until they ran through my fingers.
The screaming stopped.
Lisa fell to her knees, doubled over with horrified sobs. Stanley pressed himself to the wall as if he could crawl through it. Brian lay lax and still, but I could hear his breathing in the grisly silence.
Justin stood slowly. We watched as the Shadow dropped Brandon’s broken body over the terrace wall, like so much rubbish, then turned to face us. It looked almost the same, a mostly human shape with a miasma of smoke clinging to it, trailing as it moved.
“Now we meet in the real world, Magdalena,” said the demon Azmael. “At last face to face.”
30
it knew my name because Lisa did. I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around that, but I didn’t take the time to analyze it now.
I flung the handful of salt. It hissed and fizzled against the creature’s cloaking outer layer, and the acrid smell redoubled until I choked on the burning fumes, my eyes streaming until I couldn’t see to defend myself. That was some deflector shield.
“Don’t be rude,” he—it?—chided. “I’ve waited so long to meet you.”
“Sorry,” I wheezed. “I left my book of demon etiquette at home.” I don’t know how I found the courage to quip. But I figured collapsing in a gibbering puddle of terror wouldn’t do anyone any good. Least of all me.
Justin’s hand slid into his pocket. I knew he was armed, too, and I drew the demon’s attention to me with another lame verbal sortie. “I gotta tell you, buddy”—Behind it, Justin silently opened his Ziploc bag—“now that you’ve got armpits, I suggest some deodorant. Because…damn.”
“This century is full of wonders.” A tendril of its smoky layer snaked toward me, winding as it came, twisting into a thin rope of shadow. I forced myself not to retreat. “The human capacity for false courage is just one of them.”
The cord snapped around like a bullwhip, and I flinched as it struck Justin’s hand, sending an arc of fine white crystals flying harmlessly across the paving stones. The tentacle lashed again and wrapped around Justin’s throat.
His fingers tore at the blackness without effect. The demon didn’t even look at him, but cocked its head at me. “Was that sporting, Magdalena? No. I think not.” It lifted Justin higher, until he was hanging from the smoky extension, his back bowed as he tried to find purchase. He couldn’t even draw enough breath to choke.
“Let him go!”
“Drop your weapon.” I tossed my carton to the ground, next to Lisa whose fingers twitched, just barely. Justin made tiny, gasping half-coughs, and his grip on the demon noose began to slide away. “Now ask nicely.”
Slowly, as if forcing my stubborn knees to bend, I took a supplicant’s position. I couldn’t read the creature’s expression—I could only see its eyes through the concealing black miasma—but I sensed its surprised pleasure. Arrogant son of a bitch. “Please,” I said, my fingers creeping across the stone until they met cold brass. Lisa’s hand inched to the carton of salt. “Let…him…Go!”
On my word, Lisa and I moved together. She snapped the canister up, throwing the contents across Justin and the demon-tentacle that held him. I lurched to my feet with the brazier, and slammed the metal with all my might and momentum into the monster’s amorphous head.
Solid was a relative thing. The weapon clanged, I felt the impact up my arm. Acid yellow eyes dripped like the yokes of two rotten eggs, then congealed and rolled back up to where they belonged. Where the salt struck, its smoky extension sizzled and evaporated; Justin fell to the ground as the creature reeled back, making an animal squeal of pain.
“Close the circle,” I shouted at Lisa. The demon had stumbled backward into the broken ring. “Close it!”
Lisa jumped forward and poured salt over the gaps. I felt a strange subliminal buzz as the line became complete again, a scant instant before the demon collected itself.
I hurried to Justin, who pushed himself up, wheezing painfully. Pulling loose his tie and opening his collar, I saw his skin was blistered and bruised, but his breathing eased quickly. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Help me up.” He staggered to his feet, squaring his shoulders as we turned to face the trapped demon.
“Oh Lisa,” it said, disappointment in its tone. “You had such potential. That one”—it gestured to the unconscious Stanley—“was just a clown. I had high hopes for you.”
“That’s enough, Azmael.” I stepped forward, speaking the creature’s name aloud for the first time, bringing it into the open and reducing its psychological power.
It hissed at me, eyes burning brighter for a moment. “Your bravado annoys me. You will be very afraid before I’m done with you, Magdalena.”
The demon knew the power of a name, too. “You’re trapped, Ass-my-el. And I’m going to punch your return ticket.”
A tendril of its cloaking layer gestured carelessly to Lisa and Justin. “I will kill these two first, to give you great pain.”
I raised the brazier like a shield. “It would give you a lot of pain, too. I know you’re solid now.”
“Not that solid.” Its voice skittered with amusement, like dry, multilegged things in the dark.
The creature gave a heat-mirage shimmer. A layer of its swathing ha
ze pulled away, like a wet peel of sunburned skin, and fell to the ground in a congealed lump. The blob twitched and writhed, as the demon shed another layer to plop beside the first. Clump after clump became semisolid until the imprisoning circle was filled with contorting masses of ectoplasm, heaving and struggling to be born into something vile.
I stepped instinctively back; beside me, Justin went taut with the same revulsion that held me transfixed. Stripped of his outer coating, Azmael looked as though someone with no real understanding of human form had tried to sculpt it out of dry and filthy earth. Eyes sat in sockets without lids and the nose recalled the vestige holes on a mummified corpse. And when the misshapen mouth moved to speak, my skin crawled at the wrongness of it.
“Do you not like my inner form, Maggie Quinn?” The demon taunted me. “Perhaps you liked me better as a shadow?”
“I certainly liked you better before you could talk.”
The pseudo-face showed little more emotion than the veiling layers of smoky ectoplasm, but it managed anger pretty well. “And I prefer you quivering with fear.”
The first Hell-blob leapt up. It wasn’t done cooking, but it had too many legs, too many eyes, and its gaping maw seemed impossibly large, impossibly full of ragged, sharklike rows of teeth. The jaws snapped; I stumbled back, even as the thing hit an invisible barrier at the circle’s limit.
“What are those things?” Lisa stood at one shoulder, Justin at the other.
“Trapped,” I said, relieved, but not entirely. The beasts pawed the ground, a distorted hunting pack, growling with foul, sooty breath.
Azmael stood in the center of its minions. “It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Lisa.” The beasts at its stubby feet snarled and sniffed the air. “I’m grateful to you for opening the door for me. The tasks you and the boy set before me allowed me to gain a liberty I haven’t had for centuries.”
“I never wanted—” Lisa began.
“I knew what you wanted better than you knew yourself.” It made a tsking noise, almost droll. “Yet you give me no thanks.”
Prom Dates From Hell Page 21
