Chapter 14
To add insult to the injuries I was almost certainly about to face, it cost me ten bucks to park downtown because of a basketball game. There were cops all over the place, so I knew if I just left the car somewhere, I’d probably never get it back before it was turned into scrap. I ran down the steps at the Seventh Street Station parking garage and hauled ass up the block to the rear entrance of Spirit Square. The thick glass doors were locked, but a side door looked to be hanging a little funny in the frame. Upon closer inspection, the lock had several suspiciously bullet-like holes in it, and the door opened freely.
I slipped into the lobby, keeping close to the walls to stay as much out of view as possible of the completely glass front of the building. Glory kept close behind me as I slid along the wall and up the short steps into the main lobby. I stepped away from the wall, less concerned about someone noticing my feet than when my full body was in view. I got through the main lobby and passed the Duke Energy Theater on my left, then opened my Sight as I started up the ramp to the main theater, once the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, now a music and theater venue named after native musician Loonis McGlohon.
The doors to the theater stood open, and I heard screams coming from inside. Most days I would have charged right in like a kamikaze pilot, with about the same results, but since I had my third eye wide open, I saw the cat’s cradle of magical threads woven across the open doors, tripwires all leading to something spectacularly unpleasant, I was sure.
Instead of running through the door and triggering whatever terrible thing Sponholz had planned for me, I turned around and walked back down the ramp.
“Where are you going?” Glory asked.
“I have a buddy who does theater around town. He was doing a couple shows in here last year, and I came over to have lunch with him. He took me all through the place, showed me how a few things work, including how the actors get to the stage from the dressing rooms downstairs.”
“You don’t think the Cambion has covered those entrances?”
“I think he’s probably covered those, yeah. Especially since they’re just open stairwells. But what I hope he hasn’t covered is the door the tech staff uses to move the big cherry-picker from room to room to work on lights.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m divine in nature, Q.”
“Just goes to show that there’s only one omniscient being, Glory.” I gave her a grin and hopped up the steps to the Duke Energy Theater. I reached the heavy glass doors, locked, of course, and drew in my will. I focused my power to needle-thin stream of force and whispered “sesame.”
“Really? Sesame?” Glory said with a raised eyebrow.
“I just need something to focus the magic for simple stuff. If I was raising a demon, or banishing one, I’d have to actually use a spell. But just brute force bashing a lock open, I can do with ‘sesame’.” I pushed the door open, and we slipped into theater’s tiny airlock lobby/vestibule. I repeated the process with the door to the theater, and we slipped into the small venue.
“Where is this secret door, Q?”
I led her down the right-hand wall of the theater to the tiny “backstage” area, then pressed my ear to a door painted to match the rest of the wall. I heard movement on the other side, but it was muffled by soundproofing or distance. Either way, it sounded far enough away that Sponholz wasn’t going to be standing right there when I opened it, so I pushed the crash bar and flung the door open.
I managed to avoid making any noise as I slipped onto the stage and found myself behind Sponholz and what he obviously planned as his entry point for whatever he planned on bringing through to this world. Dennis lay on a makeshift altar in the middle of a summoning circle that stretched the entire width of the stage. Sponholz had an elaborate set of symbols inscribed on the floor, some Latin, some Enochian, some in languages I didn’t even recognize. A huge pentagram was perfectly drawn in the center of the circle, with a smaller circle in the center surrounding Dennis and the altar. The lines of the pentagram weren’t drawn with chalk, like a normal circle, or even salt, which I use when I’m working with particularly nasty critters.
Nope, the lines of the pentagram were drawn in liquid, a thick, viscous fluid that looked black in the dim light. I recognized the smell instantly—blood. Seems like I found Sponholz’s use for Nephilim blood. Candles burned at each point of the star, five black pillars illuminating Sponholz standing in the center of the circle, chanting and waving a dagger over Dennis’ chest.
“You go to the other side of the stage and come at him while I distract him,” I whispered to Glory.
“No can do, Q,” the angel whispered back. “I can’t interfere in this kind of thing, even to save your life. Orders from upstairs, sorry.”
What good is a guardian angel if they can’t help you cheat and can’t save you from the absolute worst of your decisions? I shrugged and returned to my regularly scheduled lack of faith in anything religious. With no help coming from Glory, I had to resort to the old-fashioned methods of dealing with bad guys. I drew in my will, focused on the candles, and whispered, “cumulonimbus.” Then I blew out a breath magically amplified into a strong breeze, which immediately blew out three of the candles.
Sponholz looked up and smiled. “Why, Harker, so good of you to come. I was hoping you’d show up. So was your friend here.” He brought the dagger down and drew a thin line of blood across Dennis’ chest. Dennis stirred, but his eyes stayed closed.
“What’s wrong with him? If you’ve hurt him, Sponholz, I swear to God I’ll play jump-rope with your intestines.”
“He’s fine,” the Cambion cop said. “I need him alive until the stroke of midnight, so normally I’d say you have about an hour and a half to say goodbye. But since I don’t expect you to live past the next five minutes, that would be overstating the situation.”
“What the hell are you doing, Sponholz? Summoning a bigger demon than Orobas and that monster you cut loose at the Government Center? Why would you even do that?”
“You think too small, Harker. I’m not planning to summon anything. My master’s plans go much further than that. Too bad you won’t be here to see them come to fruition.”
“Yeah, because I believe you’ve got what it takes to kill me,” I shot back.
“Oh, I don’t. But he does.” With that, Sponholz nodded to something behind me. I didn’t bother to look around because I knew that trick. It was the oldest one in the book. I turn around, and Sponholz shoots me in the back. Or I don’t turn around, and whatever is back there gets a free shot at my exposed backside.
I chose a mix of A and B, where I kept my eyes on Sponholz until the last moment, using my enhanced senses to listen for the creak of a footfall on the stage, then dove forward into a front roll. I came up in a crouch with my Glock in my hand, spun around, and put four rounds in the chest of the demon standing where I had been moments before. Four rounds out of about nine that I squeezed off, but I never claimed to be a brilliant shot. Bullets ripped through the stage curtains and buried themselves into walls and floor, but the demon didn’t budge. Instead, it stood there, its image flickering between demonic and that of a really pretty blonde woman.
“Glory?” I asked, confusion making forget momentarily about the Cambion behind me trying to sacrifice one of my very few friends.
“Q? You shot me,” she said. “You shot me! Why would you do that?”
“Because I thought you were a demon!”
“Oh, that’s what that tickle was,” she replied. Glory closed her eyes, and the golden glow of her aura flashed into view, burning the demonic image away in an instant.
“Again with the distraction?” I said, turning back to Sponholz, who had re-lit the candles around the circle somehow. Probably magic. “What are you now, Detective? David Copperfield?” My smartass remarks froze on my tongue as I turned fully around. Apparently tired of waiting, the half-demon cop was standing in the center circle holding Denn
is Bolton’s bloody heart in his hand. Sponholz resumed his incantation, and as he spoke the words, the blood of the Nephilim began to glow and smoke along the lines of the pentagram. The heart in his hand started to do the same, and Sponholz reached up with his knife and cut a long slash lengthwise along his arm. Blood flowed down his forearm to his elbow, dripping onto the floor and starting to smoke and glow like the rest of it. Sponholz began to chant in a loud voice, and a portal began to appear over the circle.
“By the mixing of the blood, Angel, Devil, and Human, I pierce the veil.
By the blood of the angels, I pierce the veil.
By the blood of this human, I pierce the veil.
By the blood of this demon, I pierce the veil.
Find the veil rent asunder, my Lord, and open the path to Glory.
Find the veil rent asunder, my Lord, and open the path to Salvation.
Find the veil rent asunder, my Lord, and—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I muttered under my breath. I raised my Glock and squeezed off the last six rounds. Three of them struck Sponholz in the chest, knocking him flat on his back and scrubbing out part of his inner circle with his ass. He lay there for a few seconds, then rolled over and clambered to his feet. The portal stopped growing, but it didn’t close, just hung there in midair, some ten feet above the stage.
“That hurt, you asshole,” he growled at me. “And I dropped my heart. I need that heart for the ritual.”
“I wasn’t trying to damage my friend’s heart,” I replied. “I was trying my best to shoot out yours.”
“Well, it’s a good thing the department issues us all these handy bulletproof vests, isn’t it?” he said with a smile. “Now my ritual is fucked, and I’ve only got a couple of hours to get everything set up, and I have to kill you before I can get things started again.” He shook his right arm like his shoulder hurt, then drew his service weapon from a shoulder holster and leveled it at me.
The pissed-off Cambion got off four or five shots before he realized that I had thrown up a magical shield. He holstered his gun, lowered his good shoulder, and charged me like a balding rhinoceros. My mystical shield was tuned to protect against projectiles, not people, and he was moving faster than any normal person should, so I failed my dexterity check and caught two hundred eighty pounds of half-demon right in my gut. He bulled me backwards until we crashed into the baby grand piano parked upstage, and my ribs made ugly noises on impact.
Sponholz let me go and I dropped to my knees, all my wind gone. He threw a vicious side kick to my head, and I flopped facedown like a carp on the stage. I got myself up to hands and knees, but a stomp between my shoulder blades put me back flat on my stomach. I tried to pull my will together to cast a spell, but he kept distracting me with high-level tactics like kicking the shit out of me. I finally managed to trap one foot with my right arm and twist him around until he dropped to the stage on his ass.
I rolled away from him before dragging myself to my feet, then looked back at him. “Why, Sponholz? What’s in this for you?”
“I’m a creature of chaos, Harker. It’s what I do.”
“But you’ve always been a decent cop,” I said. “Maybe not great, but decent. Why betray that now?”
“Have you seen what’s happening all around us, Harker? These are already the end days. I’m just helping it along. The world’s going to shit fast. What does it matter if a couple million more damned souls move in and help us along?”
It clicked at the mention of “damned souls.” Sponholz’s wife had committed suicide back in the fall, and by his faith, she went straight to Hell the instant she died. Opening a gateway to the underworld was the only way he was ever going to see his wife again. I could understand the motive, even if I couldn’t condone it.
“You know Lucifer won’t let her come back, right?” I asked. Sponholz’s face crumpled, but he pulled it back together quickly.
“We have a deal. I give him the portal; he gives me Rachel.”
“Is it in writing? Did he promise that she’d be in her right mind? With her memories? Intact?”
“Why would he betray me?”
“Oh my fucking God, Rich, how goddamn stupid are you?!?” I yelled. “He’s the fucking Father of Lies, the dude singlehandedly responsible for original sin! Why wouldn’t he betray you? It’s what he does, you idiot!” I threw my hands up, and Sponholz drew his sidearm again.
“That’s a good place for those hands, Harker. You keep them there, and maybe after I’m done, I’ll shoot you in the head instead of throwing you to the demons that come through.”
Demons? He was planning on bringing through more than one? I really had to deal with him quickly. Then I had to figure out how to close that damn portal.
“Turn around and get down on your knees,” the detective said, moving toward me with his gun leveled at my chest.
“Why, Rich, I’m not that easy,” I said without moving.
His eyes narrowed, and he reached for my shoulder to spin me around. Most people wouldn’t move when someone points a gun at them. For most people, that’s a really good idea. But, as we’ve discussed, I’m a little augmented, shall we say? The second Sponholz reached for me, I grabbed his wrist and pulled forward, stepping to one side and bringing my knee up at the same time. He shot, but I wasn’t in front of his gun anymore, so the bullet buried itself in the stage floor while my knee buried itself in his gut.
His breath whooshed out, and I threw a left hook that caught him right behind the ear and drove him to his knees. A right to the temple, then another left, and he sprawled on his stomach on the floor. I moved over and stomped down on his right wrist with my heel, listening to a satisfying crunch as a lot of those little bones in his hand and wrist turned to powder. I kicked the gun across the stage, then hauled him up by his collar.
“How do I close the portal?” I hissed in his ear.
“Go fuck yourself,” he said between gasps of pain.
“Nah, I think I’d rather get you fucked instead, demon-boy. Why don’t I just send you home to Daddy? You think you’d like that? I hear they have all sorts of things they can do with the living down there.” I stepped around in front of Sponholz, tagged him with another left to the temple, then landed an uppercut on the point of his jaw that snapped his mouth shut and made his eyes roll so far back in his head that I expected to see his optic nerve. He dropped to his knees, unconscious.
I picked up the comatose Cambion/cop and hauled him to the altar. I laid him across Dennis’ lap, then reached down to pat my friend’s cheek. “Sorry, buddy. You deserved a lot better than what you got, but I hope you know that this one, at least, saved a lot of people from some very bad things.” I set his bloody heart on the altar next to him, then wiped my hands on his shirt.
I pulled a piece of chalk out of my pocket and repaired the circle where Sponholz had scrubbed it out with his butt when I shot him. Then I fixed the few Enochian symbols that were scuffed or askew and drew a new inner circle. I picked up the dagger Sponholz dropped, and pricked my finger with it. I shook a drop of my blood onto the circle and poured just enough of my will into it to invoke the circle. I felt the magical barrier snap into place around me, shielding me from anything that went wrong with what I was about to do.
“Q, what are you doing?” Glory asked from the stage.
“You still aren’t allowed to help me, right?”
“That’s unfortunately true.”
“Then I think this is my best bet for closing the portal and getting rid of the bodies.” With that, I began an incantation. This spell was very precise, between contacting a specific plane of existence and needing to send only specific things through, so I wanted to focus my energy very tightly to make sure nothing happened that I wasn’t expecting.
“Regna terrae, cantata Deo, psallite Cernunnos,
Regna terrae, cantata Dea psallite Aradia.
caeli Deus, Deus terrae,
Humiliter majestati gloriae tuae supplicamus
Ut ab omni infernalium spirituum potestate,
Laqueo, and deceptione nequitia,
Omnis fallaciae, libera nos, dominates.
Exorcizamus you omnis immundus spiritus
Omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio,
Infernalis adversarii, omnis legio,
Omnis and congregatio secta diabolica.
Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, dominates,
Ut coven tuam secura tibi libertate servire facias,
Te rogamus, audi nos!
Ut inimicos sanctae circulae humiliare digneris,
Te rogamus, audi nos!
Terribilis Deus Sanctuario suo,
Cernunnos ipse truderit virtutem plebi Suae,
Aradia ipse fortitudinem plebi Suae.
Benedictus Deus, Gloria Patri,
Benedictus Dea, Matri gloria!”
I poured my will into the spell, and the portal above my head opened wide for the briefest of moments. I tried to resist the temptation to look, but couldn’t quite. It was a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of horrors in there—lakes of fire, imps with whips, demons rending the flesh from men and women with their bare hands—and above it all I could feel a presence, a malevolent overlord taking delight in the suffering of others.
I shuddered, then took a step back, careful not to disturb the circle, as the altar with Sponholz and Dennis rose into the air, then was sucked into the portal to Hell. I released my will, and the portal winked out of existence, but not before I sensed that malevolent entity’s attention focus on me for the briefest of seconds, and I felt terror like I had never felt before.
I scrubbed the circle out with my toe, and the magical barrier came crashing down. I stepped intentionally on the outer circle, smearing it into nonexistence and obscuring enough of the symbols to make it unusable to anyone who didn’t read Enochian. At the time I knew of two people in Charlotte who could read Enochian, and I was pretty sure Uncle Luke wasn’t planning on opening any Hell-portals anytime soon.
Heaven Sent - a Quincy Harker Novella (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter Book 5) Page 10
