Reaper: The Demontouched Saga (Book 3)

by Douglas Wayne

  “Devil’s trap,” I say. “Zeke taught me how to make one.” Was an odd time to finally use one, but that is a story for a different day.

  Truth is, unless you have someone who can create one out of thin air like Sara just did, they take time to prepare. Unless you know for sure that you will be able to trap one, they always seem like a waste of time. Especially when I can just launch my knife at them and be done with it.

  The only other problem I see with them is they only work a certain amount of times. I always felt that the others would end up being more cautious after they learned you knew how to make them. Considering there are only so many ways to hide one, I was waiting for the right moment.

  I walk past him and grab his chair. It is one of those heavily cushioned office chairs that I always wanted when I was an accountant. I always heard the same spiel about how the company couldn’t afford them every time I asked, yet they were ok with buying us the cheap ones every few years once they inevitably started breaking. This one is going home with me, Manager Dum isn’t going to be needing it for much longer.

  “I have a few questions for you. Depending on how you answer will tell me if you live or die after our conversation,” I say.

  He starts uttering something that I can’t make out. Either he is cussing me out in Spanish, or he is doing it in some demonic language. Times like this make me wish I paid attention in Spanish class. It may have had something to do with getting the ugly teacher because I just didn’t give a shit enough to stay awake. I did manage to pass the class though. I didn’t want to have her for another year.

  After a minute of his mumbling, I’ve had enough. I reach my hand in the circle and stab him in the foot with my knife. While the knife will only kill a demon if it punctures a vital organ, it sill inflicts considerable pain on them. While I am seemingly immune to the effects of a devil’s trap, I can tell you how bad the knife hurts. I’d say I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but as you know that isn’t true.

  “English, motherfucker. Use it or I turn your leg into a totem pole.”

  He says a few more choice words that I can’t make out before telling me that he doesn’t know anything.

  “Let’s make this a game, then. What do you say?” I look at him sideways. I’m not really waiting on a response so much as to pause for a moment to let him think. “If I hear you say you don’t know anything, I cut you. If you lie to me, I cut you. If you threaten me in Demonic again, I cut you. We square?”

  He just nods. I guess he said his peace already.

  “Don’t give me an excuse to amend the rules to me being offended by your presence.” I take a seat in my new office chair and place the knife on my lap. “First question, where is Rick?”

  “Rick?” he asks. Panic fills his eyes when I pick up the knife. “What does he look like, perhaps we know him by a different name?”

  I give him a general description, making sure to avoid the part where he might still have my sword. The last thing I want to do is show him that I’ve even had a moment of weakness.

  “He was here earlier, but he left not long before you got here,” he says.

  “Where did he go?”

  He looks down at my hands that are fiddling with the knife. If he tried to avoid answering the first question, he is going to have issues with that. I figure I may not have to repeat myself if I move it around a bit.

  He closes his eyes for a few moments before answering. “He is at the old mall close to the airport.”

  “I thought they closed that place down a long time ago.”

  “They did, but they didn’t destroy it all,” he says.

  I study his eyes for a moment, unsure how he got that answer. His voice sounded sure of it though. There wasn’t even a moment of hesitation.

  “Think we can trust him?” Nal asks, apparently over his rapid-onset nausea.

  “I don’t see what choice we really have. If he says Rick is there, we need to check it out.” I lean forward in the chair. “Tell me everything about his hideout.”

  We spend the next fifteen minutes going over everything he gives us, from his horrible drawing of the layout to how many people he keeps where. It is apparent that either this guy has spent quite a bit of time at this compound or he is a pretty good bullshitter. Whatever the case, this is the best intelligence we are going to get.

  “How often is he there?” I ask. What I’m looking for is a pattern to follow, so we know when to strike. The last thing I want to do is tear down the place if he isn’t there. We would lose the element of surprise and we would be back to square one.

  “Whenever he isn’t at the hotel,” he smiles.

  I brush the knife along his lower leg. “Hard to believe he is there all the time.”

  Sweat is forming on the manager’s forehead as he watches the blade. “No. No,” he says. “Not with the explosion. But, he is there at night.”

  “Every night?” I ask.

  “Most.”

  This is the best that we are going to get. I doubt Rick would fall into any sort of pattern that would put him into danger. Especially since we blew the hotel. Right now, we have the advantage. As far as he knows, we died in the explosion. With any luck he will have his guard down even further.

  “We should go back to Uriel’s place and come up with some sort of plan,” Nal says. He is willing to improvise when the situation calls for it, but he prefers to be part of the planning camp. I would be all for it, but I know he has one of the orbs. The longer he is allowed to walk the earth, the more people he will be able to kill. I’ve watched too many people die because of him already.

  “Tonight,” I say. “We need to hit him hard tonight.”

  “Mitch, I normally admire your methods, but that’s asking for trouble,” Nal says. “We don’t even know how much of this is even true. Let’s scope out the place for a few days. Make sure everything checks out.”

  I would be all for it, but stakeouts are low on my list of fun activities. I’m sure the manager has fudged some of the details about the compound, but there should be more than enough for us to take Rick down. “He has been on the streets for too long already. I don’t know what he is planning, but I do know he needs to kill people to make it work. If we give him so much as another day, he can be long gone,” I say. “I’m going to take him out tonight. It’s up to you if you come with me.”

  Sara puts her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll go.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” I say.

  “She should go,” Nal says. “She did just manage to save your ass by herself.”

  “Fine. But I am not responsible for anything that happens to you.” I try to put on my tough guy facade, but I can’t hide the truth. If something does happen I wont be able to write it off under the ‘she should have known better’ rule, but she is a big girl. If she wants to come, I won’t stop her.

  Not that I could.

  “I’ll drive. I know a back way to the mall,” Nal says. “Couldn’t pull me out of the arcade as a kid if you tried.”

  I throw him the keys as we walk back towards the front.

  “Please,” the manager says. “Release me.”

  I turn around and smile. “As you wish.” The blade zips from my hand and into his eye socket. The manager twitches for a few seconds before coming to a stop on the floor. I snort when the blade comes back to my hand without much effort.

  One more demon down. Another mall full to go. Tonight is going to be a busy night.

  - 13 -

  The parking lot on the east side of the mall is clear. We found most of the cars parked on the southwest corner, not too far from the construction equipment. Unless I’m mistaken, that is where everyone is getting inside which means that is not how we want to get in. When they are used properly, entryways are nothing but death traps to intruders. There was a reason why they heavily trapped these parts of the castles and towns in medieval times. You force them into a massacre, or make them find another way inside.

 
; Of course siege tactics evolved with time. It became much more efficient to block the supply routes in and out and starve them out. You could only store so much food and water. Unfortunately for us, that is not an option. We are going to have to find another way in.

  “Have you ever tried to make yourself fly?” Nal asks, popping a mint into his mouth.

  “That one is definitely not one of my gifts,” I say with some disappointment. Life would be a lot easier right now if I could.

  “I mean by using metal, dummy.” He grunts heavily as he pulls some sheet metal out from a pile of debris. “May be a stretch, but Magneto could do it in the X-Men which you seem really close to being like.” This is one of those times that makes me wonder about his father. You would think there would be more important things for your kid to learn than what super powers people had in the comics. Shit, I had nothing even close to that to aspire to. Every time I spent more than an hour on my Playstation my dad was threatening to pull the plug.

  “Not sure this is the place to practice.”

  “Look, you wanted to come in here, guns blazing,” he says. “If you had given me a day to think things over, we might have a better plan.”

  “Plan?” Communication is not one of my better points. My plan, if you want to call it that, was to smash through one of the windows on this side and fight our way from there. It would be much safer than going in the main entrance anyways.

  He points to the top of the mall. “We need to get on the roof. Either we go inside the mall and see if they will sell us some climbing gear, or you need to learn how to fly.”

  “Why would we want to be on the roof?” I say. “Wouldn’t it be easier to go through a window?”

  “Easier, yes. But easy is bad.” He pulls out the rough drawing the manager gave us and points to a spot in the middle. “Unless they changed the layout, there should be a skylight right here. Once we smash through the glass, we can watch how they set up their defense. With any luck they will tell us where Rick is at without your girlfriend needing to put another one in a fancy flame circle.”

  This has to be the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. If it isn’t stupid enough to climb on the roof, we then have to crash down through the skylight into the middle of the mall. All using my powers in a way that I’ve never thought about, let alone tested.

  “Just try it Mitch. If it doesn’t work we can do it your way,” Sara says. “Right, Nal?”

  “Yep. Not going to willingly kill myself for this bullshit,” he says. “But the only reason this shouldn’t work is if you don’t even try.”

  “Fine!” I stand in the middle of the sheet of metal. “If I kill myself trying this, I will haunt you both for the rest of your lives.”

  “Done,” he says. “Just a hint though. You should try to crash quietly if you want to haunt us for more than a few minutes.”

  I shake my head when Sara doubles over laughing. I fail to see the humor in the situation, but if they want me dead. Then I’ll gladly oblige.

  Stretching out my arms, I use my power to pull the edges of the sheet. My knees start to shake rapidly as the metal shift rapidly while the edges curl towards my hands. I watch the grin on Nal’s face widen as I put a little extra in my pull.

  “You got it!” he says.

  Right when I think I’m getting the hang of this I lose my balance and fall back on my ass, the metal sheet rattles on the pavement shortly after. “Idea is sound, but the metal is too weak,” I say.

  “It’s the best we got,” Nal says. “If you can’t make it work, we have to do this the hard way.”

  “When we were in the car chase, how did you do that thing to the cars?” Sara asks.

  “The car body was fiberglass, so I focused on the front clip. Eventually I was able to hit the motor and push the car away.” I remember that well. It took me so long to finally latch onto something that I thought they would kill us. I would have if it wasn’t for Nancy’s crack shot.

  “Why don’t you try to do the same thing, but push past your feet,” she says. “It might help you balance better.”

  It sounds like a stretch, but it is worth a shot. If I was able to do my push through a sheet of fiberglass, then I should be able to do a pull through my foot.

  I get back onto the center of the sheet. Putting my fingertips down, I focus on the area under the balls of my feet. Within the minute, I’ve already managed to feel the metal. My problems on the highway must have had more to do with the movement than they did the fiberglass because this is easy in comparison.

  Slowly, I lift my hands up, trying to avoid any sudden movements. The sheet starts to rattle, sounding like rolling thunder, as it leaves the ground. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I am resisting the urge to celebrate as I lift higher in the air. It is somewhere around the three foot mark that Sara breaks into applause.

  “I knew you could do it,” she says.

  I slowly reverse the polarity, the rattle stopping when the sheet touches the ground.

  “Looks like my plan is on.” That is classic Nal speaking. Instead of celebrating the small steps, he only has feelings for the finale.

  “Slow down there, cowboy. Making myself float is much different than trying to do it with all three of us. I’m not even sure I have enough power to pull that off.”

  “Only one way to find out.” Nal gets onto the sheet on my right and Sara takes the left.

  “Put one foot on mine. That way I don’t have to worry too much about the edges.” I give them a second to comply, wishing I wore some steel toe boots tonight. “OK, now you both need to hold on tight. If one of you fell it could break my concentration. That’s the last thing we need when we are in the air.”

  Finding the metal under two feet is a little harder, but I still manage to get it after a minute. I lift my hands slowly, my body rocking slowly as the metal sheet gets off of the ground. It doesn’t take long for us to be about ten feet in the air. If my math is right, we need to go another fifteen feet before we are on the roof.

  Normally, I don’t have a fear of heights, but I can feel my anxiety level raising along with my altitude. My mind must be freaking out because I’m making us fly because we aren’t that high up. I keep pulling up, hoping that I can drown out my anxiety with focus.

  It is nearly five minutes before I’m able to bring the sheet down safely, my legs giving the moment my feet feel solid ground.

  “One part down,” Nal says. “Now you just to bring us through the skylight.”

  “Don’t remind me.” I try to rub the soreness out of my knees. Hopefully the trip down will be much more pleasant than the trip up was.

  “Whenever you’re done rubbing yourself, Sara and I will take the sheet over to the skylight,” Nal says. “No sense on wasting your energy moving it there yourself.”

  “Sorry,” I say, walking off the sheet.

  There is something concerning me about the trip back down. When I was going up, it was just a matter of gradually increasing my pull until we were at the same level as the roof. I may just be getting paranoid, but it will probably be more difficult for me to get us down. Unfortunately, there is only one way to find out.

  The hard way.

  “Ready whenever you are, Princess.” Nal takes out his pistol and checks the rounds.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” I stretch out my legs one last time before joining my tormenting friends. “You see anything inside?”

  “There are six of them that I see. All sitting around a table off to the right,” Sara says. Even when she isn’t around a computer, she is looking into things.

  “Before we do this, you both realize that I won’t be able to help out if shit goes sour.”

  “Shit always goes sour around you,” Nal says. “But I think we can handle things. You just focus on getting us down in one piece.”

  “How about you, babe?” I say. “You think you can handle yourself in there? It’s not too late to pull out.”

  “It actually is,” Nal says. �
��Don’t want to break it to you the hard way, but my bullets don’t do much to a demon. If she backs out now, we just need to get out of here.”

  “I’ll be fine!” Sara folds her arms under her breasts. This is her way of telling us to back the fuck up. I only hope Nal can read the signal before she blows up at us both.

  “Right, then. What do you say we get this show over with,” Nal says.

  “Might as well,” I say. “We need to get you home before your naptime.”

  We all laugh as we get into position. I take a deep breath before starting my pull. Not only do I have to focus on getting us down, I have to lift us up a bit to get over the skylight.

  My heart is working in double-time the moment I have the plate over the clear glass of the skylight. Below I can see the six men Sara was talking about. It is hard to make out, but it looks like they are playing cards. I don’t make out any weapons, but that isn’t a guarantee of anything. If even one of them is a demon, we could have our hands full pretty damn fast.

  “Down we go,” I say as I start to release my push. The plate starts to float downward slowly, coming to a stop on the glass panels of the skylight.

  “Figures we would have to bust through the one skylight that doesn’t want to break,” Nal says.

  “I might need to let go of my pull for a second to get us through.”

  “You sure you can do that without killing us?” Nal says.

  “Twenty minutes ago I couldn’t promise you I that I’d get us up here.”

  “Point taken,” he says. “I say that we go for it, but I won’t speak for the lady.”

  Sara nods. “You will be fine.” She kisses me on the cheek before putting her fingers through my belt loop.

  “Alright then. Hold on.” As I release my pull, I can hear the glass starting to crack.

  “Sounds like it’s working. Keep it up.” Nal trains his gun on the table below.

  “We should be…” Before I can finish my line the glass shatters, sending us plummeting towards the ground below.

  - 14 -