Her blade flashed down as she vaulted over the demon, leaving a broad line of black blood spewing from the monster’s shoulder. It whirled on her, and I pulled my will together in a hurried attack. “Separatus!” I shouted, thrusting both arms forward, fingers out straight and palms pointed to the floor, making a knife-edge with my hands. A glowing disc of force flew from my fingertips, slicing through one of the demon’s legs just above the ankle. It began to turn back to me, but that’s the moment the upper leg fell off the now-severed lower leg, and the beast crashed forward in a face-first sprawl. It crushed the information desk to splinters and plastic shrapnel, then clambered to its knees and reached for me.
I jumped back, my augmented strength helping me cover a good ten feet, and the demon’s claws whistled harmlessly several feet in front of me. I looked past the creature and saw Glory charge in, sword raised high over her head. I raised my hands to cast another spell, but caught Glory’s eye as she shook her head. Fair enough, I thought. If she wanted to handle the demon, I’d be happy to let her. I wasn’t really sure I had anything stronger to call up, anyway. She slashed down with the blinding blade, then back up in a continuous loop, and both of the demon’s wings flapped to the ground like giant ebon kites. Gouts of blood spurted from the monster’s shoulders, and it whirled on Glory once more, but she was already on the move.
She was a ballet of holy magic and death, always striking at just the point where the demon couldn’t reach her. She wove in and out and under its flailing claws like she was boneless, made of water. The thing couldn’t touch her, and as it became more and more frustrated, it also grew weaker and weaker, as every stroke of her blade opened another cut, carved out another chunk of flesh, severed another limb. Finally, after long minutes of ducking and weaving, the demon stretched just a little too far and lost its balance. The gargantuan beast flopped forward, catching itself on its bloody elbows, and Glory spun around, raised her sword high overhead, and brought it flashing down in a final blow.
The demon’s body collapsed, the head fell to the floor a few feet away, and the severed pieces immediately started to smoke and dissolve into extradimensional goop. Within seconds, the monster was well on its way to being nothing more than a stinky black mess all over the cracked marble floor of the Government Center. I turned around and took in the carnage that surrounded us. At least a dozen people lay dead and dismembered around the lobby, and that many more were cowering around columns or benches, clutching wounds or simply too terrified to run. The glass doors were shattered, some from people trying to get out, and one from me and Glory charging in like the Light Brigade. Literally, in her case.
I turned to Glory, shielding my eyes from the glow of her sword. Her brow knit briefly, then she seemed to realize what was blinding me, and the sword winked out of existence. So did her armor, leaving her standing in the middle of the wreckage in jeans, tennis shoes, and a Sunnydale High t-shirt.
“What the everloving fuck was that?” I asked after I took a long pull from the flask I often carry in my back pocket.
“That was a demon, Q. I thought you’d seen them before,” Glory replied.
“Not that,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Oh, that. Well, you don’t expect a guardian angel to be defenseless, do you? The job isn’t all about making sure you don’t drown in Farmer Dante’s pond while running away from the hayloft he caught you in with his daughter.”
I’d forgotten about that. I wondered exactly how it was that I found all those stepping stones, and why there were stepping stones in a pond in the first place. “That was you?”
“No, but I’ve heard stories about you. There’s an entire class on you in Angel Academy.”
“There’s an Angel Academy?”
“No, but if there were, there would be a class on Protecting Idiot Humans Who Really Try To Get Themselves Killed. And you could fill an entire syllabus.”
“Why was there a huge-ass demon in the lobby of the Government Center?” I asked. “Do you think it was here after Gilbert?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think that thing could fit in the stairwell, much less an elevator. I think it was probably here as a distraction.”
“Well, it was a pretty good one,” I said. “Oh shit.” I looked at Glory, and the look on her face mirrored what I was feeling in my gut. If the distraction was so good, what were we going to find when we located Kevin Gilbert?
Chapter 13
The answer was a drained husk hanging in the men’s room on the fifth floor. Kevin Gilbert was deader than your average doornail, and paler than Uncle Luke.
“Fuck, we’re too late,” I said. “Can you sense anything about the killer?”
“I’m not allowed to intervene except in matters of life and death,” Glory said. “While this certainly concerns death, your life is not in immediate danger, so I can’t actively help you.”
“Great,” I muttered. “What’s the point of having an angel if you can’t use them to break the rules of nature?” I didn’t wait for a response, just opened my Sight and looked around the bathroom.
That’s not the best idea, by the way. The Second Sight utilizes all sorts of odd spectra, and there’s some creepy shit in public restrooms. This one was pretty clean, mystically speaking, just a couple of smears of bad soul on the mirrors where some amazingly narcissistic executive spent too much time fixing his hair and gloating about the bad things he was going to do to his employees. And yes, people do leave that kind of psychometric fingerprint on things, if they have strong enough feelings. The strongest feeling I found in that bathroom was the abject terror centered on Kevin Gilbert’s rapidly cooling body. His Nephilim nature was evident in the wing-shaped nimbus of gold that still sparkled around him, but his last moments were obviously filled with fear and knowledge of what was coming.
“That’s a little odd,” I said.
“What’s that, Q?” I was starting to get used to Glory calling me “Q,” not that I was willing to let her know that yet.
“There’s no glee, or mirth, or even arousal in the room,” I said. “Usually someone who kills in such a specific way, with such obvious intent, has some real hatred behind it. But I’m not picking up any emotion at all from our killer. It’s almost like it was just a job for him, or he was just following orders.”
“Are you sure the killer is a man?”
“As long as it’s a human, it’s a man. The number of women who can subdue a grown man then lift his body to be drained like a deer ready to be dressed is pretty small. Especially when you factor in that it had to be done between the time the demon first appeared and the moment we got here. Yeah, it’s either a guy or some supernatural creature, so it’s just easier to refer to it as male.”
“That makes sense. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t missing something.”
“I probably am, Glory. I’m just pretty sure it isn’t the gender of our killer.”
“So whoever it is has Gilbert’s blood—what’s next?”
“Well, the Solstice is tomorrow, so maybe it has something to do with that,” I said.
“Oh shit,” Glory said, then clapped both hands over her mouth.
I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. She’d known me less than two days and I already had my guardian angel swearing. A couple more weeks on the job and she’d be rolling blunts and listening to Dr. Dre.
“That’s not funny,” Glory said. “The solstice is a period of weakening the barriers between the realms. It’s much easier to bring across much stronger beings than would normally be able to pass between dimensions.”
“How big?” I asked, thinking back to Orobas and the ten-foot monstrosity that she just sliced and diced.
“Big enough to make that thing in the lobby look like an ant.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I guess we should probably figure out who’s running this party, get ourselves invited, shit in the punchbowl, and send everybody home early before things really get rolling, huh?”
>
“Sometimes I don’t understand human metaphor. You don’t actually want to defecate in a punchbowl, do you?” the very perplexed angel asked.
“No, Glory, I just want to wipe my ass with this guy’s very carefully drawn-out plans.”
“Is that another metaphor? Or do you have a strange fixation with rather unpleasant bodily functions?”
“Is both an option?” I asked, opening the door and stepping out of the restroom, almost running into a rotund government functionary with a bad toupee. “You really don’t want to go in there, bub. I just blew chunks across all three sinks after what I saw in the lobby. I’d go down a floor if I was you.”
He turned away and bolted for the elevator, and I grinned at Glory. “Come on, angel. Let’s go stop an apocalypse.”
*****
“How do you know where we’re going?” Glory asked from my passenger seat. I got back to the Camry just in time to sweet-talk the tow truck driver into not hooking her up and hauling her away, so I still had wheels.
“I don’t, but I know someone who will. Dennis is one of the most tech-savvy people I know, and he’s got more than a little experience with things that go bump in the night. If anybody can whip up a high-tech solution for finding a low-tech beastie, it’s him.”
We pulled into Dennis’ driveway about fifteen minutes later, a modest split-level on the east side of town. I parked behind his van and hopped out.
“Shit,” I said as soon as I took a good look at the house. The front door was hanging open, and the storm door was lying in the bushes beside the front stoop.
“What’s wrong?” Glory asked. It was still a little creepy that she never had to use the car doors.
“Somebody’s been here, and it looks like they either killed or took Dennis.”
“How do you know?”
I pointed to the front stoop and the three brick steps leading up to it. “Dennis never uses the front door. He’s got motorized lifts to get from floor to floor, and a wheelchair on each floor, but he can’t navigate those steps. The back door has a small ramp. Dennis uses that entrance. He says it’s safer if burglars don’t know the owner of the house can’t run after them.”
“Smart,” the angel remarked.
“He’s a smart dude,” I replied. I hopped up the steps and looked at the door. It didn’t look that out of the ordinary. It wasn’t destroyed, or burned through or anything, just kicked in, like I’d done to Janet Hamilton’s door that afternoon. That was only about hours before, but it felt like a lifetime.
I pushed the door open wider and drew my Glock. I slipped through the opening and swept the room with the barrel of my pistol. The front parlor was empty, as were the small dining room and kitchen. I motioned behind me to Glory, pointing her upstairs, and I went down the steps to the basement. Dennis went long days without ever leaving the bottom floor of his house, and he didn’t really need to. It had a full bath, his office with all his computers, a den with a TV and every gaming system imaginable, and a small mini fridge full of sandwich meat, mayo, and sodas. A freelance web designer didn’t need a whole lot more.
The stairs spilled out into a small foyer, and I passed through that quickly on the way to the den. I swept the room, then moved on to the bathroom and the office. Nothing. If Dennis was in the house, he was upstairs.
“He’s not upstairs,” Glory said beside me, shattering that inkling of hope.
“Whatever we’re after must have taken him to slow me down.”
“How? Do you think the killer came here after killing Gilbert?” Glory asked.
“No, there wasn’t time. He must have subdued Dennis, then gone to the Government Center and cut the demon loose in the lobby while he murdered Gilbert.”
“So Dennis was what, in the trunk of his car?”
“Or the back of his van. Dennis is brilliant, but he’s not exactly a fighter. And he only lost his legs a few years ago, so he’s not all that nimble moving around without his chair. All the killer would need to do is gag him and bind his hands, and Dennis would be largely helpless.”
“Do we know that he’s still alive?”
“No,” I replied. “But I have to assume he is.” Because if he wasn’t, it would mean I’d failed him. Twice.
“Now what?” Glory asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s a clue in whatever he was last working on. I know he was looking at possible locations for the ceremony.” I sat down at Dennis’ computer and clicked the mouse. The machine sprang to life, asking for a password.
“You know his password?” Glory asked.
“We were close,” I replied. “That, and it’s written on a sticky note stuck to his monitor. Dennis left it there for me in case I ever needed to get into his computer, and he always said that no one would expect a hacker to keep a password out in the open like that.”
“How very meta of him.”
“That’s what I thought,” I agreed. I clicked on the icon for a maps program still open on the desktop. A map of Charlotte popped up, with certain areas highlighted in green, yellow, and red.
“Good man, Boltron,” I said with a relieved sigh.
“What is it?”
“He color-coordinated the map. The red circles are mystical hot spots, but not relevant to our case, like Luke’s house and Mort’s. The yellow circles are maybes, but unlikely to be the place that our main event is going down. The green circles are big magical focal points in town, exactly the kind of place that you would want to open a highway to Hell.”
“Really? A hard rock reference? Now?” Glory didn’t look amused at my AC/DC pun.
I just shrugged. “Seemed appropriate. Anyway, there are four focal points large enough and secure enough or remote enough for our guy to open a big hole in the universe. The big racetrack up in Concord, but I’d gonna guess no on that one. My gut says he wants to cause as much havoc right out of the gate as possible, and the speedway is pretty deserted after dark. Then there’s the bandshell out behind SouthPark Mall, and I think that one’s probably out as well. Same reasons—the potential for mayhem in the middle of the night is much less than the other two options.”
“Why does the ritual have to be performed in the middle of the night?”
“Well, the Solstice starts at midnight tonight, and I don’t think our boy wants to keep Dennis around any longer than he has to.”
“That means…”
“Yeah, that means we have about six hours to find this guy, rescue Dennis, and stop this assclown from setting loose Hell on Earth. Literally.”
“What are the other two options?”
“They’re both pretty reasonable choices, if you think about it. The first is the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. Tens of thousands of people go through there every day, and they all leave a little bit of their energy behind. Couple that with the anger people feel when traveling, and most folks think a busy airport is already a kind of hell. But I think it’s the last one. Spirit Square Center for Arts & Education, downtown. It’s the old First Baptist Church building, so the irony would appeal to a showboating demon like this one, and since it’s right in the middle of downtown, as many people pass through or by it in a day as the airport. Plus, it’s a lot closer to all our dump sites and the Government Center. Our killer is comfortable in the Uptown area; I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t someone who knows Charlotte like the back of his hand. A realtor maybe, or postal worker—someone whose job requires them to drive all over town…motherfucker.” I put my elbows on Dennis’ desk and dropped my head into my hands.
“He played me like a goddamned fiddle, didn’t he?”
“Am I supposed to—”
“Oh cut the shit, Glory!” I snapped at the angel. “How long have you known?”
“Known what?” She was obfuscating again, but now I knew she couldn’t tell me a direct lie.
I stood up and turned to face her. “How long have you known that Sponholz is the Cambion?”
“I’ve always known,�
� she said, not meeting my eyes.
“And you weren’t going to tell me, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t. You have to understand, Quincy.” No “Q” this time, I was Quincy again. That was fine. I wasn’t in the mood for nicknames. “I couldn’t tell you. And it’s not like I didn’t want to, I couldn’t.”
“The fuck you couldn’t. Don’t give me that shit, Glory. You could have—”
She slapped me. It was just a simple open-handed slap, but she swung my head sideways and made my ears ring.
“No, you don’t give me that shit, John Abraham Quincy Holmwood Harker. I am an Angel of the Lord, and unlike all you humans walking around on Earth fighting, farting, and generally fucking everything up, I don’t have free will. So when I tell you that I couldn’t say anything about the killer’s identity, it’s because I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to tell you, but when I am given an order from one of my superiors, I can’t violate that directive, no matter how much I would like to.”
“Oh.” I didn’t have anything better to say. Besides, I was a little concerned that if I said much more than that, she’d slap me again.
“So now that you’ve figured it out, what are you going to do about it? My ability to interfere may be limited, unless your life is in direct danger.”
I gave her my best grin, which was hampered a little by the fact that I couldn’t feel half my face. “Oh don’t worry, darlin’. I’m going to go to an old church and try to stop a well-armed police detective who happens to be half demon from opening a portal to Hell with the blood sacrifice of one of my four friends in the world. I’m pretty sure ‘life in danger’ will barely scratch the surface of the shitstorm I’m about to stir up.”
Heaven Sent - a Quincy Harker Novella (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 5) Page 9
