He slipped the shard into his pocket and headed back to where Luc and Allan carefully loaded a thick, crinkly brown roll into the back of the van. Matt recognized the tarp. He could easily guess who was inside it.
Malcolm stomped toward him. Blood glistened along the machete’s blade in the morning’s light. “They took Kazuo’s head.”
Matt frowned. Bastards. He looked at the smoking body nearby. “One of Dämoren’s slugs is in that guy’s gut. I need to get it out. Ballistics.”
“Is that something you need to do yourself, or can we help? Speed things along.”
He shrugged. “You can help, if you want.” Bullet recovery had always been the more distasteful job. “There’s a couple more I’ll need to get, too.”
Malcolm gave a crooked smile. Vengeful. He squeezed Hounacier’s horn grip. “Let me take this one for you.”
#
The hunters worked their way through the field of corpses spread around and up the earthen ramp. Matt dug one of Dämoren’s squashed silver bullets from the shoulder of an eviscerated body who had once been a rakshasa. The well-built man looked like he could have been an underwear model, with chiseled muscles and high cheekbones. Matt couldn’t help but wonder what had led him here. Who was he? Where did he come from? How did he become possessed?
‘Best not think about that,’ Clay had warned. ‘You saved ‘em. Don’t write their eulogy.’
At the top of the ramp, they found the corpses of the gunmen still lying where Matt had shot them. Spent rifle and shotgun shells littered the ground around them. Allan checked the compass, but the water was still pink. Matt rolled over the body of an Asian man, checking for an exit wound. Not finding one, he began to cut the slug out. He held his breath as he worked, slimy gore oozing around his fingers. Still, the taste of iron and death permeated through.
“Look at this,” Luc said, picking up a battered AK with his gloved hand. He tapped its enormous grip, wrapped in black tape. “They made the handle bigger and cut off the trigger guard.”
“Big enough for a werewolves claws,” Malcolm said, scooping a silver slug out of a corpse with his machete blade.
Luc tossed the weapon aside. “They were prepared for us.”
“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “And we fell for it.”
They circled around the side of the building to another smoldering corpse laid out, hands on its chest. Tire tracks scarred the soft ground around it, though all the cars were now gone.
“What’s that?” Allan pointed Ibenus to a teal-colored strap peeking out from a pile of rusted machinery.
Shielding his mouth from the dark smoke, Malcolm circled around the fire and pulled out a canvas gym bag. “It’s mostly dry. So it wasn’t here during the storm.”
“He was carrying that when I shot him,” Matt said, nodding to Smokey. “He was running to the cars. Must have fallen back there.”
“Well then.” Malcolm set it down on an empty steel drum. “Let’s see what we have.” He pulled open the zipper and rifled through a wad of folded clothes. “Hello there.” Malcolm removed a burgundy passport, blazoned with gold writing, and flipped it open. “Mister Alessio Brunelli.”
Allan’s grim expression faded for the first time all night. “Couple hours with that, we can find his friends’ names, too.”
Malcolm slipped the passport back into the bag and dug behind the ball of clothing. “There’s some papers in here, might be helpful.” He closed and zipped the bag. “We’ll go through it once we’re home. Get a few answers out of Anya’s prisoner.”
“Malcolm,” Luiza’s voice shouted through Matt’s earbud. “The bottle.”
Matt spun to see Allan holding his blood compass. A single red bead pressed against the bottle’s side, pointed toward the building beside them.
“It just appeared,” Luiza said.
“Demon must have leapt back into a host body,” Matt said.
Malcolm nodded. “We’ll need to take care of it before any more come back. Other possessed might still be hiding around here, or run off once the demons left.” He didn’t mention that had he not killed those three people they might be on them right now, which Matt was grateful for.
Malcolm pressed the radio button at his shoulder. “Luiza you stay there. We’ll check it out. Tell us if anything happens.” He looked at the hunters around him, meeting their eyes, then nodded to the building’s green steel door.
Without a word, Allan and Luc took point on either side, weapons ready. Holding his machete out front, Malcolm approached the door. Allan pulled it open, revealing a darkened, cement-floor hallway. Spots of drying blood speckled a trail down the corridor, suggesting that some injured person had passed through.
Cautiously, Malcolm entered, followed by Allan, then Matt. Luc took the rear. Doors lined either side of the passage, some closed. The hunters took their time, checking every room before they passed, just to be sure no one snuck up and attacked them from behind. The first few were basic offices, furnished with desk, computer, cheap upholstered furniture that no one ever had thought looked good, yet seemed to decorate every office in the world, and then the photos and personal knickknacks of whose ever offices they were.
Allan kept a close eye on the red blob inside the bottle. It hadn’t moved.
They passed through a rather dingy break-room, its stained linoleum tiles chipped and broken off in places.
“Looks like they opened it up in here,” Matt said quietly, noting the stacked chairs and tables along one wall. “Just like Spain.”
“So much for Anya’s theory about the lunar eclipse,” Luc said.
Malcolm grunted in agreement. “I doubt they thought they could keep us alive long enough to wait for it.”
“Compass points this way,” Allan whispered.
They passed down another short hall, eventually coming to a large hangar-like garage. Beams of morning light shone through the dusty windows, casting rays across the room. A pair of giant rolling steel doors formed one side. Cluttered racks of tools and oiled machinery lined the walls, save a caged section on the back, filled with stacked fuel drums. A boxy, blue and rust-colored vehicle dominated one side of the floor. Chunks of cracked, gray mud clung to its giant wheels, which were almost as tall as Matt.
Compass in hand, Alan gestured toward the big earth-mover.
A loud, metallic crash came from the other side of the vehicle.
Malcolm pointed to Matt and Luc, gesturing they go around the other side.
They made it about three steps before Matt caught the sharp smell of diesel. He came around the edge of the vehicle, Dämoren out front, and saw a tipped fuel drum on its side. Amber fluid glugged out from a hole in the top, spilling across the concrete floor.
A lean, golden-eyed werewolf crawled out on top of the vehicle, its claws clacking on the hollow steel. It was female. Dual rows of dark nipples ran down her gray-haired torso. She held one arm high, clutching something in her long-fingered hand.
Matt brought Dämoren up and froze, noticing the spring-loaded trigger squeezed in the werewolf’s grip. His eyes traced along the twisted red and black wires extending down to a bundle of steel pipes in her other hand.
“It lets go of that,” Luc said, flatly. “And we die.”
Matt thought about the fuel drums behind him, at least forty of them. More than enough to blow the entire building to Africa. It’d kill the werewolf’s body, sure. But what was a body to a demon?
Her upper lip curled back from sharp fangs as she looked at Matt. “So proud. Arrogant,” she growled, yet Matt understood it. “Eat us for what we do, yet here you are. Guilty of your own crime, flesh-walker.”
“I...don’t understand,” Matt said carefully. The growing pool of spilled diesel reached his feet. It ran around his shoes, leaving him an island in a potential lake of fire.
“I don’t speak to you, food,” she snarled. “By now, they are all dead. Your order is destroyed, Urakael.”
Urakael?
“What’s it
saying?” Allan asked without moving his lips.
“The Great Mother will return, and your kind will perish.”
Matt eyed the detonator. If he shot the werewolf, she would release it before he could get close. Maybe the wire? He remembered the trick-shooters he’d seen, but severing a wire at fifteen yards—
The werewolf’s hand suddenly came off at the forearm. It fell, the spring-switch popping the fingers open. The detonator clattered on the wet concrete, wires severed.
Blood poured from the beast’s hairy stump. The werewolf looked past the hunters and roared.
Allan sprang forward, swiping his khopesh and appeared at the vehicle’s side. Stepping, he swiped again, blinking on top of one of the vehicle’s tires. Matt raised Dämoren, aiming at the creature’s heart, when her head split in half. The top of the werewolf’s skull, just above the snout, seemed to pop free, perfectly severed.
The demon fell and hit the ground right as Allan blinked to where she had stood.
Ruby fire buherst from her wounds, quickly spreading over the still quivering corpse. Matt flinched, momentarily forgetting demon fire couldn’t light the diesel.
What the fuck? Matt turned to see Luiza standing fifty feet behind them. She held Kazuo’s katana, its curved blade gleaming in the morning light, light that just moments before would have been shaded by the standing werewolf.
“Luiza!” Malcolm said, his voice a mix of surprise and relief.
She nodded. Her black hair shone in the in the sunlight. “I... I thought you might need me.”
Luc released a long, steady breath, then laughed.
Malcolm eyed Akumanokira in Luiza’s hand, but said nothing.
She swallowed and looked down at it, seeming to sense the question. “He called to me,” her voice proud, yet shameful. “He...missed Kazuo. The pain of losing him. And to heal one another, he called.”
“Just in time,” Allan said, climbing down off the giant vehicle.
“We need to go,” Matt said, spoiling the reunion. “Now.”
“Why?” Allan asked. “What did it say, Matt?”
“It said the order is all dead.” He tensed his jaw, meeting the knights’ stares. “I think we can’t reach the chateau because they attacked it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Matt sat, strumming his fingers on the armrest as Malcolm raced to the chateau, knuckles white around the steering wheel. French traffic cops were renowned for strictness, and Matt prayed none saw them barreling down the twisting highway. The patched bullet holes might pass a careless glance, but if anyone saw inside, saw the blood-soaked floor, Susumu unconscious on the bench seat, human bodies wrapped in a tarp in the back, one missing his head... Matt tried not to think what might happen to that policeman.
He glanced over at Luiza, protectively clutching Kazuo’s sword...no...her sword, as if someone might try to take it from her. She ran her thumb absently over the clover-like hand guard, following the rim’s decorative dips and rises.
Luiza said the sword had called her, that it missed Kazuo, and chose her to heal their mutual pain. Feinluna had been gone only four hours. Luiza had been devastated at its loss. But yet...she accepted the katana’s call. Matt wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
How could she do it?
If Dämoren died, smashed to pieces before him, he wouldn’t want to live. The idea that the single most important thing, something he’d kill for, die for, could be replaced so easily. How?
Luc twisted in his seat to face Matt. “What did the wolf say to you?”
Matt blinked, his line of thought broken. He hadn’t liked where it was taking him, anyway. “It said they were all dead by now, that my order was destroyed. But...”
“But what?” Luc rumbled.
“I don’t think it was talking to me... More like, at me.”
Luc’s brow rose.
“It called me Urakael.” He turned to Allan sitting in the seat behind him with the still-unconscious Susumu. “Have you ever heard that name?”
Allan’s lips tightened into to a thin line. He shook his head. “What else did it say?”
“That I was guilty of my own crime and called me a flesh-walker.”
“Maybe,” Luc said carefully, “it was speaking to the being inside you. You are a demon-killer, but yourself possessed.”
“Urakael could be the wendigo’s name,” Allan offered.
Matt shook his head, fighting a small knot forming in his chest. “The wendigo died. Clay shot it. Its soul burned up.”
“Maybe not all of it,” Luc said. “There is something inside you, Matt. That much is true.”
It’s dead, Matt thought. Still, Luc’s words troubled him. What if it wasn’t? What if some piece was still alive? What if it got free? No. Its dead. I saw the fire. “It said the Great Mother will return. Does that mean anything to you?”
“The werewolf said that?” Allan asked.
“Yeah.”
Luiza raised her gaze from Akumanokira. “A demon mother?”
“Demons don’t have mothers,” Matt said. “They don’t even have a sex.”
“Grendel had a mother,” Luc said.
Matt frowned. “Grendel? Like Beowulf?”
Luc nodded.
“He’s right,” Allan said. “Beowulf kills Grendel, then along comes his mum, who’s even worse.”
“But you said that there probably wasn’t even a Beowulf or Grendel,” Matt said.
Allan shrugged. “True. But Grendel was a troll, and we know they’ve been summoning those. What if the oni are just the precursor to something more. Just building up to it, or maybe need the oni to summon something greater.”
“Then thank God I killed that oni,” Malcolm said from the front.
“One of them,” Luc said. “Selene is still out there.”
“Unless the one Malcolm killed was the same one summoned in Spain,” Matt said. “Just in a different body.”
Luc shrugged. “Maybe.”
Matt turned back to Allan. “So, Mister Librarian, are there any records of some demon goddess?”
Allan ran his fingers through his hair. “Stories, yeah. Dozens. But real occurrences, that was Ramón’s area. He’d been working on finding all the references before he went to Spain. He was trying to find a pattern to the killings.”
“Did you read any of it?”
“Not much. He worked on it mostly while Schmidt and I were chasing you down. Anya took it over after he died.”
“You remember any of it?”
“Ramón thought the murder sites were tampered with after the summonings. He figured that was why we couldn’t find any recognizable symbols. But most of his theories he shared with Anya.”
“Then we’ll just have to ask her when we see her.” Matt said. If she’s still alive.
#
It was noon before they reached the chateau.
Malcolm turned the van into the drive. “Matt, those compasses ready?”
“Doing the second one now.” Matt held an open water bottle between his thighs and pressed the plastic pricker to his finger. He pushed the button and it clicked with a short jab of pain. The van rumbled over a cattle grate, slinging a bit of water onto his leg. Matt held his finger over the bottle’s mouth and squeezed four fresh drops inside. Not too much to spare, thinking of Susumu’s transfusion. The blood swirled and mixed with the drops he’d added that morning, refreshing the compass’s potency. He screwed on the bottle cap. “Ready.”
Malcolm pulled the van through the arched gate and into the chateau’s courtyard. The house’s front doors stood open.
Matt checked the compass. “There’s one inside. No, make that two.”
“Could be the masks,” Allan said.
Matt shook his head, eyeing the red beads. One ahead and to the left, the other further to the side. “They’re moving.”
“But not the masks?” Allan asked. “You should be picking them up in the entry hall.”
“Not seeing them,”
Matt replied.
Malcolm stopped before the front steps and opened the driver’s door. “Allan, you stay here with Susumu. Keep him safe. Radio if you see anything.”
Allan swallowed. He eyed the open doors, obviously wishing he could go inside, but simply nodded.
Malcolm drew his machete. “Everyone on me.”
Matt pulled the sliding door open and stepped out. He drew Dämoren from her holster and cocked the hammer as he scanned the chateau’s windows for movement. Nothing.
He checked the compass. One of the red globs, the one toward the house, rolled quickly along the bottle’s inner wall. It was moving fast, though Matt couldn’t tell if it headed toward or away from them.
“All right,” Malcolm said. “Our knights might still be in there. Look before you attack anything. We don’t want any accidents.”
Cautiously, they headed up the stone steps and through the entranceway. The giant mirror on the back wall was broken. Bits of silver glass still clung along the edges of its gilt frame around a bullet hole in the wall behind. Matt tasted the tinge of smoke. Torn clothing, shoes, and other effects littered the tile floor beside several smears of dried blood.
“The masks are gone,” Luiza said. She flipped the wall switch, but the lights didn’t work.
“No.” Matt picked up a broken piece of green stone off the floor. It was about two inches across. One side was smooth, the other bore fine lines, like carved hair. “They broke them.”
Luc motioned to a second cluster of broken jade. “The other is here, as well.”
Metal glinted from the scattered debris and Matt picked up a thin, half-circle of gold. The engraved pattern along the outer side seemed drawn out, nearly invisible at the ends. He’d seen it before. Rings, stretched to the breaking point when a demon’s body changed. Though if the demon was susceptible to the metal, such as a silver ring on a werewolf, the ring could cut off its expanding finger. He offered it up to Malcolm.
Malcolm flipped the crescent over in his hand and frowned. “It’s Ben’s ring.” He turned to Luc, sifting through the second pile of tattered clothes and broken jade. “We know who that is?”
Damoren Page 22
