by Sara King
Hijo Sagrado, she thought, horror creeping into her very being. Could the Church’s doctrines, at least in part, be based off of demons?
Not possible, she thought, quickly erasing that thought from her mind. It simply was not possible. God would not have allowed it.
Yet this wolf had to be something. Magi simply did not have the power to do what she was doing. Not these days. The Order had won too many battles, removed too much of the corruption. The creatures…fed…off of each other. Things like the phoenix made habitat for other things, which in turn fed still more, just as an olive tree made the basis of an ecosystem for grasses and birds and mice and snakes. Even now, they were unraveling what was left of that network of corruption, having gone too long unchecked in the heart of Alaska. With each demon that fell, their habitat collapsed, and the magi had less power to use in their witcheries.
Yet they had just lost six of her men, all of whom had been equipped with the best technologies and artifacts available, and these monsters were walking the Void to escape them.
…when they weren’t leaving blatant, brazenly fearless trails across the mountainside, daring her men to follow.
It was something that the texts told her should not be possible. Not with the Realm as pure as it was now.
So she had to assume she was dealing with something more than a magus, and had to assume that Zenaida could also be one of these creatures, masquerading in the Order as a magus to do…what? Drain blood and…do what with it? What was Zenaida doing down there in the basement, when no one else was looking?
Her tingles of dread were rapidly progressing into outright horror, and by the time Jacquot got her to Padre Vega’s mountainside home, she was all but blind from an intense migraine. It took her a moment after Jacquot stopped the car before she could find enough physical control to open the passenger door and step into the snow outside.
The glare of fresh snow hurt like a laser, and Imelda did her best to concentrate on the darkness of her clothes as she crossed Padre Vega’s driveway and climbed his steps. She knocked on his door, twice, then ducked her head and closed her eyes, leaning against the side of the cabin’s wall.
Padre Vega opened the door in a bathrobe, with water-tussled hair and a book in one hand. “Imelda!” he cried in Spanish, giving her a happy grin and gesturing inside. “You don’t have to knock, child. Come in!”
“Thank you, Father,” Imelda whispered, stumbling into the house after him. She knew that Padre Vega’s look was changing to concern as he watched her pull off her boots and cross to her favorite chair, but she could not find the will to hide it.
“The headaches are bad today,” Padre Vega commented softly, coming to stand beside her and setting his book on the coffee-table beside his chair. Imelda read the title. The Life and Words of Thomas Jefferson.
Imelda waved a hand, her head a throbbing mass of pain. Six men. She’d lost six men to this thing and she still didn’t even know what it was she was dealing with.
“I’ll start coffee,” Padre Vega said, moving to the kitchen. He was, she noticed gratefully, blessedly quiet. After having known her for almost thirty years, ever since he dragged her from the slums of Barcelona as a toddler to raise her as a Sister, he had long since learned how best to keep the pain within from growing too intense. In fact, her migraines always seemed to lessen around her Padre, though she knew the cause was probably as simple as the fact that he kept the lighting low and did not bang around pots in the kitchen, when her head hurt her.
Still, the pounding in her head did seem to be lessening. She wondered if her medicine was finally kicking in. Rarely did the pills actually help, but by the grace of God, sometimes there were exceptions. Imelda closed her eyes and listened to Father Vega rustle around in the kitchen getting coffee, then heard his slippers on the rug as he came to sit beside her.
“This is not good for you, Imelda,” her Padre said softly. He leaned across the coffee table and put a cool palm to her forehead. “You are going to make yourself sick like this.”
Almost immediately, the coolness of his palm soothed her migraine enough that she could open her eyes. “I don’t have a fever, Father,” she sighed, with a wan smile.
Father Vega removed his hand with a shake of his head. “What happened this time?”
She laughed, but almost ended up crying, so wretched did she feel. “You mean aside from no sleep in over a week, with those damn demons screaming in the basement?” She grimaced, tears threatening. “This wolf that follows the djinni—it killed one of my teams. Slaughtered them to a man. From the ground, Father. How does a wolf knock a helicopter from the air?! We have shields up around it, made using the blood of the very things we fight.”
Father Vega made an unhappy face. “It’s a sad thing, Imelda.” Very cautiously, he began, “Have you considered that…perhaps…this…wolf…is something more than she appears?”
Mutually exclusive. The words came back to her from her time in the basement, speaking to the wereverine. “It can’t be anything other than a wolf,” she blurted. “The Law of the Realms states that no ranked demon from one realm may overtake the demon of ano—” She froze, her words dying in her throat. “She doesn’t give off any of the usual signs…” she whispered, “…because she was bitten by a wolf. Because she isn’t anything other than a wolf. A demon can only be one or the other. Not both. The Pact of the Realms.”
“That would be my guess,” her Padre said. “This higher-tier demon was bitten and, for some reason, the Third Lander was allowed to take hold. It wouldn’t happen often because the Third Lander moon-cursed are so low-tier. But if the circumstances are right…”
Imelda hadn’t considered that, and once again found herself glad for her Padre’s greater experience. After over fifty years with the Order, there was very little that the man could not help her puzzle through. “What kind of circumstances, Father?” she asked.
Father Vega sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking all of his seventy-eight years. “The time I saw it, it was an elemental in Scotland who had been bitten by a cat. He lost all of his water-based powers with the bite. Couldn’t even return to the ocean to avoid our team.”
“What caused the possession to take hold?” Imelda asked. Usually, immortals of a higher tier could easily withstand the magics of those in tiers beneath them. Elementals, while low on the First Lands scale, were still well above moon-cursed, and should have simply been able to brush the possession aside. After all, werewolves and the like were the hoodlums of Third Lander society, and while bestial and brutal, there were much bigger things that went ‘bump’ in the Third Lands’ eternal night. Like vampires, barghests, or jötunn.
“He’d run afoul of a sea serpent’s spines,” Father Vega said. “He’d taken a human form and was resting on the beach, waiting for the numbness to work its way out of his system when the moon-cursed found him.”
Considering, Imelda said, “So he had been previously weakened.”
Her Padre nodded. “If the victim is lower tier, or maybe if the victim is already fighting the magic of something else, or if the cursed soul managed to deliver an overly large dose of poison into their systems… Such are ways that it could happen.”
Imelda watched the coffee brew. “I don’t think it’s weaker than a moon-kissed.” She could think of a couple First-Lander demons who were weaker, but none of them were magi. Natural magi, as a rule, were almost always middle-to-top-tier.
Almost tentatively, her Padre said, “If you want my opinion, I would say you’re probably dealing with one of the top tier, possibly the top tier, of First Lander demons. Tread carefully, Sister. If you don’t, a good many more of your friends will die.”
She gave him a tired look. “Is that your Sight speaking, or your heart, Father?”
He gave her a sad smile. “That’s history, my dear.”
Imelda felt her face twist. “If it were me, I would stop pursuing them altogether. They just have too much maneuverability, and we don’
t have any home or kin with which to pin them down. All we know is that they are headed north, but we don’t even know why they would be headed north. The djinni hate the cold, according to the texts.”
Father Vega fiddled with the pages of the book on the coffee table. “What is most likely to be in the north, Imelda?”
“There’s no roads,” Imelda cried, frustrated. “We don’t know what’s up there. There’s the rivers and a few gravel airstrips and that’s it. What could they be looking for?”
Then she remembered the wereverine’s vicious smile. “Oh, about a couple hundred dragons.” Her heart started pounding a brief moment, before she forced that idea down. No, the dragons were dead. Hunted to extinction centuries ago, one of the great success stories of the Order. The beast had just been trying to scare her.
“Let me put it this way,” Father Vega said. “If your kind were naturally predatory, requiring vast quantities of meat to survive, yet were both reviled by human civilization and hunted by the Order, where would you go?”
She frowned. “Somewhere with lots of game.”
“And, what is Alaska but one of the few places on Earth not honeycombed with roads, with bountiful game still thriving in untouched forests?”
“And we’ve found them,” Imelda agreed. “We’re sweeping up the last of the problem now, along the Yentna River.”
Father Vega shook his head sadly. “You misunderstood. Alaska has over five hundred thousand square miles of wilderness. Do you know how much of that can be reached by road? Or how much of it is completely untouched by modern humans?”
Imelda’s heart began to hammer. She had honestly not considered that the problem could have spread beyond the Yentna River area. She had been looking at it as a few last survivors, fleeing the Order-patrolled cities like rats off a sinking ship. It had actually not occurred to her that they could have been here before the urban sprawl. She had always looked at them as predators slinking at the edges of a campfire, picking off those unwary enough to travel beyond the light. Scavengers that lived off of the misfortunes of humanity, prowling the outskirts of civilization. After all, they were the agents of Satan, and Satan’s goal was to corrupt the souls of humans. Why would they have gone to the still-wild areas of the world, if they were seeking to desecrate humanity, as the Bible claimed they were?
“You mean,” she said softly, “they’re just trying to hide.” She had seen too much violence in her life to believe that, and told him so.
Father Vega shrugged. “Just as in humans, there are those that get cornered or those that are bad eggs that do things that make the hearts of the rest of us ache in dismay. For the rest…” He sighed and stood. “I’m sure they’re just trying to continue to exist.”
She peered at Father Vega, trying to divine his meaning, yet trying to find some other explanation than the obvious. “Are you…defending…the demons, Father?”
“Not defending,” Father Vega said, as he walked to the kitchen. “Commiserating with them, perhaps. Are you in a cream and sugar mood?”
“Please,” she managed. “My stomach has been…finicky…of late. The straight stuff would probably kill me, at this point.”
Father Vega gave her a concerned look over the coffee carafe. “You need to take better care of yourself, Sister.”
“It’s hard,” she managed. Then, considering, she asked, “What do you think are in the mountains, Father?”
“Dragons,” he said simply.
Again, the wereverine’s words came back to her in a cold rush. “Oh, about a couple hundred dragons.”
“Then,” she said softly, “we have a very big problem on our hands.”
Father Vega chuckled. “There are over a billion members of the Church, Sister. Even if there were dozens of dragons up there, they would not fight an outright war, not as they did in the Middle Ages. They are too few, and the Order’s powers too great. Besides, the dragons were mainly reclusive, if you read the histories.” He set a cup of coffee down upon the table beside her. “No, I’d be more worried about this beastie you’ve been chasing with the djinni.”
“Why’s that?” she asked, frowning.
Her Padre gave her another of those looks that left her believing he knew a good deal more than he was telling her outright, and asked gently, “What do you know of God’s angels, Sister?”
Her heart began to pound. “They are messengers.”
Father Vega nodded. “And do you know the history of angels? Where in the Bible does it say when they were created?”
Her blood began to feel like acid in her veins. “It doesn’t.”
“Yet these beings were filled with great wrath and awesome power, meting out God’s justice for him, were they not? Utterly loyal to God and his commands? Did a single one of them not wipe out an entire camp of a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian soldiers in one night?”
“Yes,” Imelda whispered.
“So,” Father Vega said, “if there is no record of God creating them, who did?”
Imelda’s stomach began to twist upon itself. “Father, what you are saying is blasphemy.”
Father Vega sighed and pulled something silver from his pocket. “Yes,” he said, holding the symbol between his fingers, “I’ve seen this before, Imelda,” he confessed. “And if the one who carried it is the symbol’s rightful owner, I wish you the caution of a hundred-and-eighty-five thousand Assyrians.” He handed it back to her, his face sober. “Drink your coffee, Sister. You’re going to have a long day.”
Imelda laughed in desperation. “Are you trying to tell me I’m hunting an angel, Father?”
Father Vega gave her a long look. “What do you think?”
She considered. An angel…cursed by a wolf. The thought of one of the awesome messengers of God being brought low by a mere wolf seemed ridiculous to her. “Why would an angel allow herself to be bitten by a wolf?”
Father Vega smiled. “Only one of many oddities, isn’t it?”
But Imelda’s mind was already racing onward. Suddenly, things were falling into place, making total sense to her. Imelda felt her breath leave her in a whoosh. “The djinni…he’s not bound to an object. He’s bound to her. He gave her his service.” But why? Immediately, her head began to pound with possibilities. Why would a djinni offer his service, unless in the greatest act of desperation? There were the legends of the magi who passed djinn back and forth with their final wishes, resulting in near-perpetual wishes, until someone got greedy and broke the cycle. Yet, those magi used their wishes, instead of holding onto them in perpetuity. Further, while the wolf was a magus, Imelda could not imagine an angel participating in such a scheme. Did that make the djinni a demon so vile it had received the direct attention of God? Or was an angel nothing more than another First-Lander demon? Not something to be respected, but something just as vile?
As her ever-present migraine continued to intensify, Father Vega continued on unawares. “It would certainly explain why this djinni, by being bound to this wolf, managed to survive the Incursion,” Father Vega said softly. “It might also explain how an angel survived into the twenty-first century.”
“An angel…survivor?” The idea was almost beyond comprehension for her. “What killed them? And how?”
Father Vega gave her a woeful smile. “What always destroys the great messengers?” When she had nothing to offer, he said, “Betrayal, my dear.” He looked deep into his coffee mug, eyes distant. “Betrayal.”
Chapter 10: The Sleeping Beauty
Kaashifah made them a small shelter within a rocky peak overlooking their backtrail, which appeared as if it continued for a mile into the valley ahead of them, when in reality she had spent the final moments of the evening levitating both herself and the djinni to the rocky ledge and shooting a blast of energy down a ley line, allowing its energy to surge and melt the snow in the same way as the djinni’s passing. It gave her a completely unobstructed view of those that would follow them, while at the same time making it look as if
they had continued further up the valley.
“And that,” Kaashifah said, wrapping a field of invisibility over the entrance of their cave, “is how we set a trap, ‘Aqrab.”
“And this in-for-red will not see us here?” the djinni asked, giving the valley below a dubious look.
“Let it try,” Kaashifah said. She patted a large boulder that was part of the rocky outcropping beside her. “I have plenty of rocks.”
The djinni grunted, but eventually just shrugged and turned to enter the cave depression she had ‘bubbled’ into the mountain behind the rocky ledge. Following him inside, she gestured at the floor. “My stomach is killing me, djinni. Where would you like me to sit while you fondle my hand tonight?”
‘Fondle’ was perhaps the wrong word. He had taken to massaging it, and, after Kaashifah had fallen into the habit of his nightly routine, she had almost begun to look forward to the moment she would slip her fingers into the djinni’s hand and allow his heat to warm them. For she, unlike a djinni, did not have the innate heat to survive this place without spells and shielding to protect her, and, once she got over the fact that it was being done by a man, found the sensation rather pleasant. Sometimes, she almost wished he would turn her attentions to her other hand, or her perpetually-cold feet.
The djinni turned from where he had been examining a glittering vein of gold that glinted in the white quartz that her bubble had unearthed and gave her an amused look. “Oh? And what makes you think I will bargain for your hand tonight?”
Kaashifah felt a stab of panic before she fought it down. She should have known, after three weeks of touching only her hand, the djinni would get bored. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s been my hand every night until now. Why change a good thing?”
The djinni crossed his arms to regard her with that regal pose he had perfected. “Perhaps I tire of petting your hand, mon Dhi’b.”
