Demon Ensnared (Demon Enforcers Book 4)

by Jenn Stark

  “Well, I, for one, say it’s about time,” came a smooth, older woman’s voice in a Midwestern accent. Trudy Behns, Gregori surmised. He could tell from her energy that she also knew what was going on, at least in part. “While I can understand your frustration, Angela, I’d also mostly forgotten about this company since we hadn’t heard from them in so long. It happens. Even with congressional support and funding, experiments frequently fail. When that happens, most of these organizations creep off to try to sort things out until we show up, asking questions.”

  “Or they fold altogether,” said another man, apparently Bob Minnick. “But Randall, you seem to have the inside track here. This briefing is pretty basic. What else are we missing?”

  “Besides that we may find ourselves in the position of having to notify other departments depending on what we see later today,” Angela pointed out.

  “That’s not at all how I would characterize the nature of this test,” Randall said hastily.

  “I, on the other hand, can absolutely see Angela’s point,” Trudy replied. “If AugTech has reached a level that’s anything close to what they’re suggesting, it’s time to escalate it through the proper channels. That includes Homeland Security, NSA, FBI, DOD. The whole lot.”

  “How much of this initiative are they already aware of?” Angela asked, her voice distracted, as if she was searching through paperwork.

  “Gregori.”

  The sudden sound of his name caught Gregori completely off guard. His hand was halfway to his temple to adjust the speaker when he caught himself, shifting his fingers to adjust the lapel of his suit. Why would anyone speak his name? And even weirder, the earpiece was in his right ear, and the voice sounded distinctively like it was coming from his left.

  “Gregori,” the call came again, and he stiffened. He wasn’t being summoned by someone in conference room A, but his boss. Great.

  Gregori could feel the tug of the archangel’s compulsion to leave his post, but he resisted, scowling. Michael, more than anyone, should know that mortals didn’t simply disappear into thin air. That meant he couldn’t either. He needed to remain here, guarding his charge. Exactly what Michael had asked him to do.

  A second later, Gregori was ripped out of the conference center waiting room, his arms going wide as he found himself in the center of an entirely different room, this one perched improbably high over Las Vegas.

  “I’ll be missed,” he growled.

  “Yo, dude. Only for a millisecond.”

  The unexpected voice made him blink, and Gregori realized he wasn’t alone in the room with the archangel. At least half the Arcana Council was present, from the Magician to the Devil to the Fool, their resident tech genius. Even Sara Wilde, Justice of the Arcana Council, had put in an appearance. She slouched in her chair, her fists driven into her pockets. Their eyes met briefly, and she nodded.

  But it was Simon, the Fool, who kept talking. “I’ve hijacked one of the cameras to project, not simply record,” he explained. “What that means is you’re currently a hologram there. Yes, if somebody comes up to you and spills coffee on you and you don’t notice, that’s a problem. But so long as people give you a wide berth, which I kind of suspect they do on a regular basis given the givens, you should be good for the few minutes we need you.”

  “Fair enough,” Gregori grunted. He trusted Simon, at least in this.

  In appearance, the Fool was one of the youngest members of the Arcana Council, and he seemed barely more than a boy, with his long legs and spindly arms, his unnaturally pale face and large eyes that tracked computer code incessantly, a skullcap pulled over his mop of dark hair. In his typical glamour, Gregori looked like he could twist the Fool into a pretzel, but he was well aware of the power every Council member wielded, from the tech wizard Fool to the pale and ghostly archangel.

  He glanced to Michael. “What do you need?”

  Sara Wilde interrupted. “We’re tapped into the same information feed that you are from the congressional conference room. AugTech is a new organization to us, at least by that name. But what they’ve been messing with is something that’s definitely been on our radar. Several months ago, there was an attack on a coven of Serbian witches, you remember?”

  “We did not intervene in time. It was a massacre.” Gregori winced as he said the words, but the Syx had had no idea of the power behind the horde that’d been unleashed on the unsuspecting witches, one of the oldest covens in the world.

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Sara said. As Justice of the Arcana Council, it was her job to hear the cries of the afflicted in the Connected world, particularly those who were being abused by their own kind. Psychics, magicians, and sorcerers who’d taken it upon themselves to oppress those too feeble or too ignorant to get out of their way. “We’d thought that most of these witches were dead, like you did. Only now, they’re starting to show up in other places.”

  Gregori straightened. “They’re unharmed?”

  “Oh, they’re harmed, all right. They self-destruct before we can get close, but it seems clear that they’re a conduit for control. They were kidnapped, abused, and forced into service to control demons for their abductors. They’re behind the demons’ actions, but not by choice. They get their orders through some sort of implant—we haven’t figured that part out yet—and then convey it to any demons on the frequency nearby. They’re getting pretty good at it too. The attack in Atlanta? There’s a Serbian witch behind it, mark my words.”

  “Did you know this?” Gregori directed this question to Michael, who’d remained uncharacteristically quiet so far.

  The archangel grimaced. “I didn’t. I knew about the attack on the Serbian coven, of course. The massacre in the name of demon overlord Ahriman. I hadn’t heard that the witches were not uniformly killed and burned, which was bad enough, but that they were taken for these…experiments. This subjugation. It’s a level of debasement I still can’t quite grasp.”

  Gregori scowled. “You’ve had millennia to get used to the depths to which humans will sink when properly motivated. If you can’t grasp it, you haven’t been paying attention.”

  He ignored the archangel’s glare and turned to Sara. “So what do we do?”

  “From what we can pull from Simon’s bug, this AugTech group is staging a demonstration of a new brand of supersoldier later today. Very intense, very hush-hush. The congressional committee Angela Stanton sits on will be seeing it at the same time as Pentagon brass and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not the President, though.”

  “Plausible deniability.” Gregori nodded. A failsafe he’d seen in nearly every government since the dawn of human history. “What’s the test?”

  “That’s the question of the hour,” Simon piped up. “From what we can gather, it’s some sort of battle, but it’s almost gotta be demon on demon. And demon on demon…”

  “That’s not a good idea. Push the right one too hard, he’ll kill on command.” Gregori didn’t bother slanting a glance to the archangel. The demon enforcers had certainly proven that demons could be pushed pretty damned hard and not break. But they’d been vetted for their position, and they’d all been Fallen. Ordinary members of the horde were a far different breed. “Push the wrong one too hard, and he’ll kill everything in sight.”

  “Hugh will join you at the drop site, wherever it is,” Michael said. “You’ll intervene if necessary, but I would prefer it not be necessary.”

  Gregori grinned mirthlessly. “What, you don’t want to treat the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the sight of demons getting sent back beyond the veil?”

  “Could be cathartic for them,” Simon offered. “Evil gets its due and all that.”

  “Unless they realize that evil’s getting routed by creatures they also consider evil,” Michael said sharply. “The witches’ involvement is an unknown. Can they force demons to drop their glamour? Can they force them into killing each other for the sake of a demonstration? The horde is made up of two distinct groups. Those who ha
ve fought long and hard for their place on this earth, surviving in the shadows for millennia, and then the new influx of demons that were released in the midst of the battle against the pagan sorcerer gods.”

  Sara muttered something under her breath, and Gregori glanced her way. She hadn’t always been Justice of the Arcana Council. When he’d first met her, she’d been the only human strong enough to carry Gregori and his fellow Syx out of the bolt-hole they’d been lured into by another member of the Council, the Emperor. They’d agreed to the Emperor’s terms—to remain until summoned by him, guarding a group of children he’d abducted—on the archangel’s say-so. But the moment Viktor had left them in an oubliette outside the veil, they’d realized the truth. The Emperor never planned to release the children. Never planned to release the Syx either. The archangel, never much one to care about their personal comfort, had given them no indication how long this exile would last. In the lifetime of an immortal, it hadn’t been all that long—a scant ten years—but it’d still chafed. Then Sara had arrived to reclaim the children that Viktor had stolen from her hometown when she herself had been a young girl, and the demons had seen their chance for escape. They’d forced Sara to give them safe passage back to earth and only a few months later met their overseer, the archangel, in the flesh. Sara had been none too thrilled to play taxi driver to six demons, but that was nothing compared to her horror at inadvertently loosing legions of the horde across the earth, a side effect of her battle against the intruder gods.

  She blamed herself, but Gregori knew better. He shifted his focus to Michael. The archangel held his gaze, the tension between them almost a physical thing. It wasn’t Gregori’s place to correct Sara Wilde. Eventually, she would learn the truth. Until then…

  “Humankind has known worse than this scourge of demons,” he said quietly to no one in particular. “It will all make more sense when it’s over.”

  “We’re done here,” the archangel snapped. “You can return.”

  “I’ll warn Angela,” Gregori said.

  “No.” To his surprise, the archangel’s response was echoed by Simon and even Sara.

  “We don’t know for sure what they have planned, and Angela Stanton is trusted by them. She’s believable in her role. We don’t want to jeopardize that,” Michael continued. “Keep her safe, but don’t tell her about the demons’ involvement. There’s still too much we need to learn, and we won’t if we act too soon. Go.”

  The archangel’s directive was dismissive, but Gregori waited a second longer, simply because he could. Then, however, as his kind had been forced to do since the moment they’d been pressed into service as enforcers six thousand years ago, he went.

  He replaced his hologram seamlessly in the conference room. As Simon had promised, barely a few moments had passed. Gregori lifted a hand to his ear, checking the earpiece nonchalantly, but the congressional committee members droned on, their attention shifting to several contract organizations which were rumored to be testing similar weapons to AugTech, though with no real progress or success.

  Of course they wouldn’t have, Gregori thought. They didn’t have witches on their side.

  His lips twisted as all the ancient lore sprang up in his mind, seared into his senses over the millennia of his time with humans. Witches had real power over demonkind. When summoned into the circle of a witch, a demon was bound to do her bidding for the duration of whatever spell she put on him. Demons that’d previously been Fallen were not as susceptible to witches’ orders, but most of the horde would be. Still, how had this group of humans at AugTech managed to subvert not one but several of the most powerful coven of witches? What sort of technology had they developed to accomplish such a thing?

  The doors opened, and a row of congress people strode out, including a tight-lipped Angela. She gazed across the room at him, and his heart tugged hard. She was afraid of what they were about to see, no question.

  From what he’d just learned, she had reason to be.

  14

  Angela stood at one end of a grassy field they’d reached after a long and winding drive through Virginia forest. They were easily two hours outside Washington, DC at this point, but given the nature of the “test” she was about to witness, that was a good thing. AugTech had promised a three-wave exposition of the intelligence capacity, efficiency, and ferocity of their new weapons, which had been disturbing enough.

  More disturbing by far, however, were the assertions they were making, their words at odds with the cheerful sunshine and light breeze playing through the trees of the pleasant glade where they’d set up tents and refreshment tables and chairs, a summer garden party of death.

  “We believe that the following demonstration will impress you,” the AugTech rep was saying, his military-perfect bearing well-earned through the US war machine. “We know it will disturb you. What you’re about to see isn’t like something out of a Hollywood movie or science fiction book. It’s not about showy explosions and scorch-the-earth warfare. It’s far more minimal than that, and far more effective. We’ll only be showing you a very basic attack, far less sophisticated than what these units are capable of, reminiscent of wartime tactics we’ve long since abandoned. But rest assured, these units are equipped for far more sophisticated campaigns as well. Importantly, however, we’re not alone in developing this technology.”

  “You said as much in your report,” Randall cut in. “Before we go further, explain that.” To his credit, there was a new edge of concern in his voice. He’d been AugTech’s largest advocate, but he wasn’t a monster. He was having as much difficulty as the rest of them wrapping his head around the concept of AI war robots that were so humanoid, they bled and appeared to suffer pain.

  Will Granger, the AugTech rep who’d retired from military service with full honors and the rank of Colonel three years earlier, had already shown them detailed schematics of the insides of the robots—you didn’t get to anything approximating a circuit board until you were deep inside the torso. He’d also offered a live dissection demonstration with an AI battle unit, and the committee had turned him down flat. There would be time for that later, but none of them had the stomach that morning to watch surgery on a functioning humanoid figure, even if it was a robot. As it was, Angela’s head throbbed with all the medical and human-rights ethics violations inherent in this process. Did AI war machines have rights? Did it make a difference that these machines looked like humans and reacted like humans, to the point of screaming and dying with credible effect? AugTech had shown them a short video of those deaths, and the subsequent process to repair and return the machines to the front lines. It was…impressive.

  And deeply wrong.

  Now Granger grimaced—not quite a smile; the information he was sharing was too important for a smile—but not a scowl either. It was the expression of a confident man who believed in himself and his project, no matter how unsettling it was. “Russia, Korea, China, Japan, Iran—not Iraq yet, but they’re exploring it—United Arab Emirates all have R&D underway. So far, we’ve seen no sign of development in South America with government contractor groups, but it’s happening in North America and there are also several private sector labs in the US currently undertaking this research. And they’re moving fast, without needing to worry about congressional oversight.”

  Issued by another man, those words would have come across as a rebuke, but Granger kept his voice carefully modulated. His company’s efforts were being funded by the US government, and from what Angela could tell, Uncle Sam had given AugTech plenty of leeway to develop his machines as quickly as possible.

  “What’s your assessment of the threat level of these various operations?” she asked, her voice carrying on the brisk afternoon breeze.

  “We don’t believe the Russian, Japanese, or Iranian operations will be viable for another year. They’re too far behind the curve. The Chinese effort, though, is robust and well funded, and the regime is motivated by the amplified political unrest of its citizenry.
The idea of deploying a security force that appears human but that puts no more of its actual personnel at risk while quelling uprisings is very compelling for them. Dubai’s operation is moving quickly, but with a level of specificity that is different from ours. They want to create assassins and private bodyguards for the sultanate, not a massive police force.”

  Angela winced. “That’s still incredibly dangerous.”

  “Agreed. If one or two of these highly developed machines worked their way through our border security, they could infiltrate the personal security of high-level targets in the public or private sector. They could, in turn, also serve as a lone gunman in a mass shooting, though that is more problematic.”

  “Autopsy reports.”

  Granger nodded. “Detection after the fact remains the largest exposure for the use of these units. The mass hysteria that would result could potentially lead to bans and politically charged fearmongering that would, at a minimum, delay additional development and, at a maximum, shut down the operation entirely. No one in the business wants that.”

  “So if you’re going to use these, um, robots…your best bet is to use them in active theaters of war.”

  “Yes, where ‘casualties’ can be removed from a combat scene without detection. All units are programmed to simulate death on the battlefield on command—there won’t be any hostage taking. That would also result in detection. But Congresswoman Stanton, I would encourage you not to use the word ‘robot’ when referencing these units. The term robots conjures up images of mechanical constructs that are easily discernible as not human. That’s not what we’re developing. These units look, smell, feel, communicate, and react like humans.”

  The deep sense of wrongness continued, and Angela scowled. “Then how can you tell them apart?”