Ian had known for years that Helene hated Barbara. Yes, they were wealthy, and comfortable, and loved their lives. But Barbara had been a little too miserly with the facts, and it was hard not to look at Cait and see a dodged bullet.
“We can make it look like a murder-suicide,” said Jared. “Messy, but it gets the attention off of us. We’ll be free. No more channel to the future, but we have enough to be comfortable for the rest of our lives. We can have everything, if we act tonight. Are you in?”
“Yes,” said Helene.
Ian, bound by the word of a demon to present a united front with his wife, closed his eyes and hoped the sky was not about to fall.
***
Jared had a gun; Cait had a diagnosis of terminal cancer on her record. The plan wasn’t difficult to devise. It was Helene who knocked on the door of Barbara and Cait’s shared suite at eleven-thirty, a bottle of port in her hand, dressed only in a hotel bathrobe. When Barbara opened the door, suspicion in her eyes, she found no one else in the hallway.
“Go away,” she said.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” said Helene. Her words had been carefully chosen for their honesty. She held out the bottle. “Strip me, search me, do whatever you like, and then let me in, because if anyone needs a drink right now, it’s you.”
Barbara’s suspicion wavered. “You’re not here to hurt me? To hurt us?”
“Come on, Babs, what kind of fool do you take me for?” Helene’s smile was blinding. “You think I want to throw away everything you’ve helped me achieve? I have money, power, a family that loves me, all the things I never thought I’d have. I am so much more than I believed I was going to be. I thought I was only ever going to be the pretty one. You changed that for me.”
“I guess that’s true,” said Barbara, and stepped to the side. “Come in.”Helene—who had told so many truths, but who had never said “no”—stepped inside.
According to Barbara, Cait was resting; the cancer left her weary. Helene, whose system was crackling with so many uppers that it was a miracle she could pour the port without trembling, kept smiling as she served herself and Barbara, as she drank from the same bottle. Barbara waited until Helene had consumed several sips before starting in on her own glass, but once she started, she didn’t seem able to stop. Helene drank more slowly, aware of the sedatives hidden by the overly sweet alcohol, keeping herself awake as long as possible.
Barbara seemed to realize what Helene had done as she was losing consciousness. Her eyes widened. Her hand tightened on her glass. Helene reached over and removed it from her grasp, smiling sweetly.
“It’s time for you to rest,” she said. “Don’t worry. We’re going to take care of everything.”
Barbara made a soft sound of protest before slumping over in her chair. Helene rose, still carrying both glasses, and walked to the door.
Ian and Jared were waiting on the other side.
“My part’s done,” she said, with visible distaste. “The rest is up to you.” She leaned onto her toes to kiss Ian on the cheek. “Make it quick. I want to be seen in the bar before they chase everyone out for the night.”
Then she was gone, ghosting away down the hall with the tainted glasses and the doctored bottle of port. Anyone looking for its contents would need to be prepared to dredge the sewers. Even then, they’d be lucky to find so much as a trace. As for the sedatives in Barbara’s system, they were a brand she was known to use when she couldn’t sleep. Their presence would be easy to explain.
Easy.
So much of this was going to be easy.
Ian and Jared, working together, were able to hoist Barbara and carry her to the bathroom, where they stripped her naked and settled her into the tub. It was strange, seeing her like that. Like she was small, like she was helpless, and not the woman who had decided that the answer to all their prayers was calling out for a personal demon.
“Should we fill the bath now?” asked Ian.
“No,” said Jared. “Forensics makes it too easy to tell how long a body has been in the water. We kill the damn demon, and then we come back here and finish the job.”
Ian, looking nervously at Barbara, said nothing. United front, he thought, and followed Jared out of the bathroom, back to the main room of the suite.
Cait was waiting in the bedroom. She was seated primly on the edge of the bed, looking so much and so little like Molly that it ached, seeing her so. Her posture was too poised, too perfect. But her face was and had always been Molly’s, open and innocent, with wide-set eyes and a mouth that always looked slightly bruised, like she had been biting into apples too tough for her to swallow.
“Have you come to kill me, then?” she asked. She glanced meaningfully at the clock beside the bed. “You have four minutes remaining. If you are to do it, it had best be done quickly. Unless you wished to request one last foretelling before I go, one more sliver of the future doled out for your dull mortal minds to clasp?” She stood, chin up, regal as a queen, imperious as a president. “I have always kept my word to you. Always. It is not my fault if you do not like the things I have had to show you. You knew what you were doing when you called me.”
“Where do we go when we die?” asked Jared.
Cait smiled, syrup-slow and cruel. “Molly is already there,” she replied.
The gunshot was very loud and very soft at the same time, muffled by the homemade silencer Jared had somehow produced from his suitcase. Ian thought that this whole thing wasn’t nearly as spur of the moment as it had initially seemed; suspected, in fact, that Jared had been watching for an opportunity for quite some time.
Cait fell backward, clutching at her stomach. Her wide, wounded eyes were the most human things she had displayed since the moment she had entered her host body, since the moment she had become herself, and not the two component halves of Caim and Molly.
“I understand,” she said, and collapsed.
“I hope it hurts,” spat Jared. He produced a stick of chalk studded with specks of silver from his pocket and used it to sketch an uneven circle on the floor: the first thing they had done that couldn’t be explained as circumstantial. He dragged Cait, unresisting, into it, and kicked her once, well away from the blood.
“Good luck escaping that,” he said. Then he turned and walked away, and once again, Ian followed.
***
Barbara had known. Of course Barbara had known. She had been the lover of a demon president who saw the future like it was behind a clear glass pane: there was no way she could have missed her own impending demise. And so she had taken things into her own hands.
She had known they were coming.
Ian and Jared returned to the bathroom to find a puddle of vomit in the tub, alcohol and sedatives mixed with the charcoal Barbara must have taken before Helene arrived. Barbara herself was sprawled in the middle of the floor, her wrists slashed to the elbow, strange sigils fingerpainted on the tile all around her.
They stood in the doorway for a while, looking at her, not saying anything. Finally, Ian asked, “What do they mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Jared. “But fuck her. I hope she burns. God, I need a drink.”
With that he turned and walked away.
After a time, Ian followed.
***
Ian and Helene had been silent for the entire drive home from the hotel. The lights were on when they arrived, and there were no police cars waiting. Ian breathed out hard.
“We did it,” said Helene.
“We’re free,” he said, and the words felt foreign on his tongue. The babysitter was sitting on the couch, her phone in her hand and a movie playing quietly on the television. Ian went upstairs to check on the girls while Helene dealt with paying the teen. They had both agreed that it was best if he never be alone with her. Not that he could have touched her, not with Cait’s wedding gift binding him to fidelity, but people talked. Oh, how people talked.
Phoebe was sleeping soundly, curled into a tight ball on the
very edge of her bed. He smiled, easing the door closed again.
Sabrina sat up when he entered her room.
“It’s just me, Brina,” he said softly. “Go back to sleep.”
“Thank you,” she said, and something was wrong with her voice; something was still and hard and alien.
Ian frowned. “For what, pumpkin?”
“It would have been very difficult for Barbara, to be left behind,” said Sabrina calmly. “Your intervention enabled her to request that she come with me when she cast the second summons. We will be happy here, once she has adjusted. It can be… jarring, on the first transition.”
Ian felt the blood drain from his face, leaving him dizzy. He clutched at the doorknob, praying for balance.
The nightmare behind his daughter’s face smiled at him in the dim light.
“Do not be concerned for the welfare of your daughters,” she said. “Molly will care for them as best she can.”
Ian was still screaming when Helene ran up the stairs.
She joined him shortly after.
BELIAL
Belial’s name comes from the Hebrew beli, “without,” and ya‘al (“value”). His name appears in older translations of the Old Testament, but always as part of a compound: “sons of Belial,” “children of Belial” (e.g., Deuteronomy 13:13, Judges 19:22). Current scholarship holds that the Hebrew beli‘al is an abstract noun meaning “worthlessness” (Hebrew idiom tending to use abstract nouns rather than adjectives as modifiers: thus “children of worthlessness” rather than “worthless children”).
Later, however, Belial came to be personified, and he appears as an adversary of God in the pseudepigraphal Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (dated to around 150 BC). In the present age, the text says, he causes man to stumble, but in the end times he will be bound and “thrown into eternal fire.” His name occurs often in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well, as the ruler of the world in its current wicked dispensation. Belial also makes an appearance in the New Testament, in 2 Corinthians 6:15, as an opponent of Christ: “What concord hath Christ with Belial?” (So reads the King James Version, although the Greek text has the alternate spelling Beliar.)
The Lesser Key of Solomon says that Belial was created immediately after Lucifer, and is a king in the demonic hierarchy. He was first to fall among “the worthier and wiser sort” of angels. He will accept sacrifices and offerings, and will give true answers in response, although no more than he absolutely has to: “He tarrieth not one hour in the truth, except he be constrained by divine power.” As for his appearance, “he taketh the form of a beautifull angell, sitting in a firie chariot; he speaketh faire; he distributeth preferments of senatorship, and the favour of friends, and excellent familiars.” He commands eighty legions, some from the order of virtues, some from the order of angels. Somewhat obscurely, the text adds that he appears to the exorcist “in the bonds of spirits.”
DALIA OF BELIAL
MICHAEL GRIFFIN
Dalia writhes in agony, seeping wounds soaking tangled sheets with blood. Infection breeds within six deep knife cuts in her belly. As fever overrules her reason, she craves to throw aside the bedding and strip off her clothes. At the same time shivering compels her deeper under the blankets, hoping warmth will lessen the pain.
Her hands, arms and front of her dress are stained green and brown from tinctures applied in hope of killing the infection, but without effect. All healing has failed, and Dalia’s agony only increases. In her delirium, she barely notices the dampness against which she has writhed and moaned for days and nights, slipping in and out of consciousness. When briefly lucid, she recognizes the pungent smell of illness pervading the room. Dalia has always valued smell. The most vital sense. In better times, she utilized essential oils and extracts to aid the alignment of body with mind and spirit. Rosemary for study, myrrh and vetiver for spiritual seeking, ylang-ylang to enhance sensual pleasures. Now the stench of sepsis threatening to kill her is more terrifying than the pain of her actual wounds.
No question, her injuries have festered. She’s too weak to restore herself, either with herbal remedies or esoteric techniques. Nothing has halted the progress from fever and inflammation, to onset of blood poisoning, and finally, toward agonizing systemic death. Dalia must confront a fear she never imagined would apply to her.
Mortality. The ultimate failure of personal power.
And so she lies dying in her private room, concealed by the curtain hanging across the inner doorway at the rear of her storefront. The outer, unmarked door to the street was left unlocked to permit the arrival of clients on Tuesday morning. But before her first appointment, she was visited not by one seeking services, but by the husband of a client from the day before, angry at some divinatory detail his wife had learned from Dalia.
Angry enough to kill.
At first, she must have slipped into shock. By the time she revived and dragged herself to the back room, so much blood had been lost, she was barely able to stagger to her workbench. There she mixed restorative remedies, spoke healing conjurations, and tried by various means to influence her wounds. Already she was too weak. Lightheaded and dizzy, she was unable to focus her vision, let alone intent.
Dalia waits, barely aware of her slippage into sleep and back out again, yet hoping strength might return, even as recovery seems increasingly unlikely.
How could someone of her knowledge and power be brought so low? She possesses a diverse arcane knowledge, has at her disposal an array of obscure tools. At least at first, it seemed reasonable to persist in believing some method of influence, whether natural or occult, may yet remain.
At the very last, failing all else, she imagines she could climb from her bed, stagger out the front door and into the street, where she might find someone willing to help. Even that now feels impossible.
In the days since the attack, no clients have come. Three days, or has it been four? In that time, no visitors, none of her appointments, not even the usual drop-ins. That’s unheard of! Even in such a small town, the devotion of a loyal clientele has kept her constantly busy, almost from the first day of her arrival, years ago. Usually, her shop hums with activity throughout the day, into evening, often late into night. What slander could have spread, sufficient to frighten everyone away? Some vengeful distortion, designed to demonize her and terrify her patrons? Dalia knows the accusations must have originated with the same man who did this to her.
Her gut clenches again in response to rising anger. The pain is too much. Something inside feels ripped loose. She has never given birth, but the sensation in her belly is like what she’s always imagined that experience to be. Muscles cramping, flesh tearing, screams in delirium. Wild havoc, all self-control overcome, and finally an aftermath in a blood-soaked bed.
She hesitates to look at the blankets, or her dress, but feels the wetness all around, as if her body is disintegrating. Though she’s never been squeamish, she’s disquieted by these sights. The spreading purple wetness reminds her of something else she can’t quite place.
There’s no reason she has to look. She closes her eyes. In this self-imposed blindness, totally alone in the world, Dalia wants to speak. But as she begins, she’s unsure what to say.
“Please, can’t someone come…?”
She almost addresses a specific name, but can’t guess what she meant to say. If any help is available, she has no idea where it might be. Dalia wallows in pitiful helplessness. She wishes she could be the devout sort, one who slipped easily into supplication. How simple it would be to beg for salvation, to simply give herself over to the divine and pray to be saved. Even now, a weak and frightened shadow within herself whispers, suggesting one possible answer.
Ask forgiveness. Beg to be saved!
But who could be listening?
Dalia feels exhausted by this burden of solitude, hopeless to a degree she’s never before felt. She tries to believe the self-pity isn’t real, that it’s only a symptom of her physical pain, but she gives in
to an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and angrily discards the suggestion. Her persistence, which she’s always considered a strength, is really only stubbornness. Self-reliance is nothing more than a name invented by the forsaken to disguise their own loneliness. Normally she wouldn’t allow herself to think this way, but she no longer cares. Her plight is real.
If her power has reached an end, she’ll have nothing left at all. Who will be here for her? Dalia trembles, heartbroken and afraid, experiencing the fear of an abandoned child, beyond hope or rescue. The panic rises, a jagged spike that quickens her breath. She wants to run, but her body is incapable of rising from the bed.
“Please…” she moans through gritted teeth.
No grace, no dignity remaining, only weakness in the face of looming death. She needs help, any assistance from anyone at all. Yet no one cares. Whatever lies Tara Lamb’s husband spread about Dalia, she still deserves better. Someone loyal should have come. If not Tara Lamb herself, one of the others.
“I…need you.” Finally Dalia allows herself to direct her pleading outward, words choking, interrupted by tears. If she begs, if she cries, someone will respond. She strains to project her voice, to cry as loudly as she’s able. “Please. Save me!”
The suffering of her body is overmatched by anguish of spirit. She would offer anything, even promise to give herself faithfully again, if only…
But how? What has she to offer, lying here this way? She has no payment to pledge in exchange for salvation.
A bargain.
That’s what Dalia can give. Her promise.
The Demons of King Solomon Page 37
