Institutionalized (Demon Squad Book 10)

by Marquitz, Tim

  “How gallant of you.”

  The unexpected voice slithered out of the fog and all of us snapped our heads around to see Venai appear out of nowhere. Only then did I feel the wafts of her presence pinging against my senses, Limbo muting everything with its sullen bleakness. I raised an eyebrow and stared at our unexpected guest, wondering what she was doing there, but she wasn’t alone.

  “Incoming,” Lance called out.

  “Some early warning system you are.”

  He shrugged.

  Venai looked like she always did: intimidating and a little crazed. At least she had her clothes on this time around. I shuddered as my Lucifer-enhanced memory brought her naked image to the forefront but I didn’t let it linger, wiping it away like an Etch A Sketch on speed. Easily five or six inches taller than me, putting her somewhere halfway to seven feet, her massively muscled frame was more troll than woman, though the pair of double Ds at her chest threw that comparison a curve ball. The fact that she’d let her sandy blonde hair grow out a little since the last time I’d seen her only created more confusion, the style softening her square features. The mop sat wild atop her head but any goodwill it lent her ended at her eyes. They glared at me with a steel-withering hatred that would set a 9/11 truther off on a tangent.

  “You can’t believe anything he says,” Venai continued, shaking her head and splitting her gaze between Kit and Grace. “You know what he is. Who he is.”

  “But we can trust you?” Grace asked. Inwardly I applauded but kept my mouth shut to see how things played out. “You and Shaw bailed on us, leaving us to deal with the fallout, and here you are with her and…” she motioned to the others who came out of the mist behind her, “whoever the hell they are.”

  The first of the whoevers was Morgan, who’d crept in on the heels of Lance’s ill-timed warning. Seeing how I’d only just seen her a few days ago, I recognized her without issue, except she wasn’t running away in fear of her life.

  “You look weird from the front.”

  Which was a lie. She didn’t look bad at all. Actually, she looked like your average, ordinary suburban mom out on a weekend mall crawl. No longer dressed in her middle ages regalia, she wore a pair of hip-hugging designer jeans, black, stylish boots that ran to about mid-calf, and a plain, button up shirt. Her black hair was pulled back in a samurai tail—just her bangs pulled back—and I had to admit, had I passed her on the street, I might not even have noticed her. Well, I wouldn’t have noticed her face. It wasn’t until she sneered that her dark eyes exuded any hint of malevolence, her power setting off my inner alarms.

  The guy to her left, however, might as well have been on an episode of America’s Most Obvious Serial Killers for all the malice he radiated.

  Though shorter than me by a little bit, and not quite as broad across the chest and shoulders, there was no mistaking him for anything but a brawler. His skin was a deep black and well-defined muscles rippled beneath, scars peppering his flesh liberally. Unlike Morgan, he hadn’t bothered to update his wardrobe. He wore an old, black tunic without sleeves, which hung to his knees, split on the sides for ease of movement. His pants were strapped tight at his waist and flared out loosely down his legs only to be corralled once more at his ankles. Like his tunic, they were designed for mobility. A pair of leather-bound sandals rounded out the ensemble and he stood gracefully on the balls of his feet, ready for action.

  “Come and join us,” Venai said to Kit and Grace, breaking the unnatural silence that had settled over us during the face-off. “Rebecca wants us all to be together again. She had no choice but to leave without you. Maximus forced her hand, making us flee before she had a chance to talk with you.”

  “Go with you? Why, so we can exchange one pair of shackles for another?” Kit asked. “Fuck a bunch of that.”

  “Yeah, if she gave a damn she wouldn’t have hunted down and imprisoned our families,” Grace added. “That wasn’t Maximus, that was her, so don’t go pretending she cares about us.”

  “She’ll help you free them…” Venai started, but it was apparent neither of the women gave two tin fucks about what she had to say. Her argument died with a quiet sigh.

  The last two of Morgan’s group inched forward, clearly sensing the negotiations had stalled and the time for violence was fast approaching. Both the man and woman looked like they were members of the Hell’s Angels, the supernatural chapter, and I’m not talking about the TV show. The woman had long red hair, streaks of black setting it off. She stared at me, the coldness of her eyes threatening to give me frostbite. Dressed all in black with a studded belt and a Leftover Crack T-shirt, the sleeves cut off to display the weft and weave of colorful tattoos that left barely any skin untouched, I felt her desire to curb stomp me.

  Her partner in crime—and I meant that in a Bonny and Clyde kind of way—was thick and built like a tank, though taller and a little less broad than the serial killer guy. He wore head boots and jeans and a plain T-shirt, which complemented his long, gray-blond goatee and James Hetfield haircut. I was so tempted to offer up my best, “Yeah-heh,” but he was likely too punk to get the reference. Fucker probably built motorcycles for a living or some shit like that, when he wasn’t out gallivanting with supernatural criminals.

  I really didn’t know what they were, but the only thing that set them apart from humanity was the dull gray sheen that crept slowly across their faces.

  “Last chance, ladies,” Venai said, easing back behind the three men and coming to stand alongside Morgan. “There will be consequences for those who stand against us. Of that you can be certain.” Her cold gaze fell on me at the end.

  No one said anything for a minute, Limbo deathly silent, and then out of nowhere, Kit raised a hand and flipped Venai off. “Tell Shaw I have one for her, too.”

  That was all it took.

  Morgan snarled and set a hand on the dark guy’s shoulder. “Deal with them.”

  “Oh, I shall,” he answered, the words rumbling loose of his throat like a volcano on the verge of erupting. He had the perfect death metal voice and, if he hadn’t been planning on killing us, I’d have offered to form a band with him. We could have been the next Obituary. Chatterbox would have been so stoked.

  While I contemplated that, there was a wash of energy and I realized, too late, what Morgan intended. “Poe! Stay with them.”

  The sorceress tore open the veil between dimensions and stepped through to vanish an instant later, taking Venai and the biker twins with her. I caught the barest flutter of Mike’s psychic voice and tried to call out to him but my words were swallowed by the closing gate. Poe’s telepathic growl told me he hadn’t been able to track Morgan’s departure or pin down Mike’s location before the dimensions sealed shut. Murder boy’s growl, on the other hand, told me I was about to get punched in the face.

  And I did.

  The guy darted forward and clocked me a good one, setting my teeth rattling in my jaw and snapping my head sideways. Chuck Liddell getting leveled by Rashad Evans sprang to mind. It was a hell of a hit.

  The guy’s follow up slammed into my liver and froze the air in my lungs. Still, for all the guy’s ferocity, it wasn’t enough to put me down. I’d had my ass kicked by the best of them and he wasn’t anywhere near the top 100 even.

  I drove my knee into his gut and followed it up with a sloppy right hook to give me room to operate. He gasped and folded around my leg and my punch just clipped the top of his skull. While I needed to work on my fist-face coordination, it was enough to stagger him. He stumbled backward, working to keep his balance, when he learned firsthand just how opportunistic Kit could be. I was starting to like her now that she wasn’t shooting at me.

  There was a loud boom and a flash of red appeared in the middle of the guy’s chest. He crashed to the ground, clouds of gray enveloping him as he scrambled to get to his knees. Crimson flared at his eyes, piercing the mist with his fury. Blood spilled from his wound but he wasn’t going out that easily.

&nbs
p; “I will devour your souls!” he screamed, his jaw looking damn near unhinged with his fury like he was some sort of extra in the Evil Dead.

  “Villain 101, how original.” I started forward to knock the guy’s jaw back in place but Lance grabbed my arm. It was a good thing he did.

  Murder boy’s mouth just kept growing wider and wider, a yawning pit of ebony. One second it was nothing but a blackened void, the next I could pick out shapes squirming inside. His eyes burned red and he howled, his throat undulating like a Hellraiser sound effect. The next thing I knew a swarm of darkness spewed from his mouth. I caught the vaguest hint of wings and spindly legs all entwined in the mass before instinct had me tossing up a mystical barrier to keep whatever it was away from us. An instant later I spied an army of flying roaches shrieking toward us.

  Then, like a windshield on a long distance drive, his spell crashed into my defensive wall. Rancid carapaces crunched and splattered with a greenish-white goop that stunk of bug guts and blasphemy. The nastiness obscured my sight, roach bits oozing down the shield as more collided with it, their dying hum drowning out everything else.

  Kit tossed something small and spherical over the edge of the shield and there was a loud whumpf and tongues of fire joined the bugs, carcasses flaring and disappearing in puffs of black ash. Not long after the barrage ceased.

  “Drop your shield,” Lance told me, hunching beside me.

  I did and I could see again, a goopy, charred soup of nastiness sluiced to the ground to form a puddle in the gray clouds of Limbo. Lance didn’t even wait for it to settle before he leapt past me and put a foot in murder boy’s chest, knocking him onto his back. And then Excalibur fell in a silver arc. A gush of red followed and the head of Morgan’s pet rolled into the clouds, no longer connected to the rest of the guy. Lance stood over him, blood dripping from his blade.

  Search him,” I said, heading over with the others. “Maybe he has something on him that will help tell us who he is.”

  “No need.” The Father held up a warning hand as we came close, keeping us from getting too close. I heard a whispered hiss right after, air seeping from what sounded like a punctured balloon.

  Murder boy spasmed and his skin rotted before our eyes, striations spreading across it as if it were a time lapse photograph of decaying fruit. Bits and pieces of flesh and meat bubbled up and curled at the edges, wisps of yellowish smoke rising from wounds that erupted and split open like sinkholes in fresh asphalt. Something moved inside the holes and, against my better judgment, I looked a little closer.

  It was a good thing I hadn’t eaten.

  Miniature geysers of tiny white maggots burst from the body, spilling across it like a pot boiling over. The tiny black dots of their eyes seemed to take everything in as they squirmed and writhed, devouring the corpse until there was nothing left but fat, sated insects that spilled to the ground and churned the clouds of Limbo.

  “Step back.” Kit barely waited for us to comply before she turned the barrel of a newly made device on the roiling sea of maggots. Fire burst from the tip and consumed the creatures in a rush, sizzles and pops resounding like nuked popcorn left too long in the microwave.

  Too bad it didn’t smell the same.

  I took another handful of steps away from the smoldering remains as Kit went on torching the area. Lance and Grace joined me, both covering their noses.

  “You know who he is,” I asked the Father, still waving the funk away.

  “His name is—”

  “Was,” Grace corrected.

  “Was…Nergal. It is said he is a Mesopotamian deity, a minor god of war and pestilence.”

  “Yeah, I could have figured out the last bit on my own.” I shook my head, realizing our little plague rat was connected to our recent adventures in the Interstice. “This asshole is related to Marduk, isn’t he? Was he one of the beings trapped in the ice?”

  Lance nodded. “He is, though I do not recall seeing Nergal among the other deities when we were there. It is possible he was isolated somewhere else, likely the reason he hasn’t appeared before today. He might well have been in Limbo this entire time, the same as Morgan, hence their apparent allegiance. They would have had plenty of time to get to know one another. She could well have come here to retrieve him and the others.”

  “Great, so she’s traipsing through the place making friends. Just what we need.” I sighed. Limbo had always been the dumping grounds for the supernatural world’s elite, a ready-made prison so vast and confusing it was like dumping bodies in a black hole. Which was awesome as long as God was in his place and all the trains ran on time, so to speak. With Him gone, no one was minding all the doors.

  “And now they’ve hooked up with Shaw,” Grace said with a growl, interrupting my sad reverie.

  It was just one more reason to take the woman out when we found her.

  “I can find no trace of them here in Limbo,” Poe told us through our telepathic connection, “their trail disappearing the moment they stepped through the portal.”

  “So what now?” Kit asked, coming over to join us. Her flamethrower had been converted to what looked like a harmless baton, no hint of its former ferocity to be seen.

  “We go home and sniff around somewhere else. She can’t hide from us forever.”

  I hoped.

  Five

  We returned to DSI headquarters to get our bearings, such as they were.

  I left Father Lance behind to keep an eye, so to speak, on Limbo as he didn’t have any luck sensing Morgan on Earth when we returned. He’d let us know if she popped back up there while we went about looking for Morgan.

  Venai had confirmed that Shaw was connected the old sorceress so, if we could track either one of them down, it was pretty clear we’d eventually find the other one. Still, the fact that we couldn’t detect them on Earth or Limbo meant they’d found somewhere else to hole up and stay off our radar. That was frightening as there weren’t that many places to go that we couldn’t reach.

  “What about the prisons?” Grace asked once we’d gathered in the conference room. “Could Shaw be using them now that Maximus shut them down?”

  It was a good question. One I didn’t have an answer for. “Last I recall, there was only one left that hadn’t been cracked open with a nuke, yanking it out of its little pocket of Limbo. You think she’s there?”

  Grace shook her head. “There are more of them hidden away from what I was told, though only Maximus and, of course, Shaw, would know where they are. We’d have to get his say so to look, let alone access them. Seeing how that’s likely where they’re holding my…” she drew in a deep breath, pausing a moment before continuing, “where our albatrosses hang, as you so eloquently put it. I can’t see him handing over the keys and offering up directions.” She was so used to dancing around Shaw that the habit had transferred over to me, her concern for whoever it was the DSI was holding making her paranoid. I couldn’t help but feel for her—for all of them—seeing how family was the reason I was there, too.

  “If he wants Shaw bad enough he will,” I told her, but as much as I wanted to believe that, she was right. If Maximus was still holding their families, he sure as hell wasn’t gonna let us take away his leverage. Still, I had to ask.

  A phone rang in the background as I contemplated how one of the supernatural prisons would be the perfect hideout. It wasn’t actually connected to Limbo, just surrounded by a bubble of the dimension, thus hiding it from Earth and the other dimension at the same time, which explained why neither Poe nor Lance could pick up their scent. The only way we would know if they were there would be to yank the prison free of its moorings and bring it back to Earth.

  “Thud’s on the line,” Kit told me. “I’m putting him through the speakers.” I nodded as the demon’s rasp rumbled over the line.

  “Shaw’s made a mess of several of the safe houses,” he said. “Ransacked them and, as far as I can tell, took basic survival provisions. The food stores are gone. Bitch even too
k the damn Ramen noodles.” He chuckled. “She must be desperate.”

  “Anything else missing?”

  “She cleared out all the portable electronics: backup burner phones, tablets, laptops, shit like that. She also emptied the safes, snatching up whatever cash was in there but she left most of what was in the bags behind.”

  I glanced at Grace, one eyebrow raised.

  “Each house has a bugout bag in the safe with about a hundred grand in small bills and pre-prepared documents such as social security cards and passports and credit cards, all designed to be quickly manipulated should any of us need them.”

  “So she left all the docs behind?”

  Thud grunted affirmative.

  “All of those identities would be compromised,” Grace said, “so there’s no point in her bothering with them. She’d get flagged right away if she tried to use any of them.”

  “What about the computers and whatnot. Can any of those be traced?”

  Kit shook her head. “Nope. It’s the DSI’s policy to keep all equipment clean of identifiers, limiting who might take advantage of it should any of the stuff get lost or stolen. We don’t even have a list of the serial numbers so she could pawn the shit and no one would know.”

  “Well, that’s brilliant.”