Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  OK. U all right?

  She waited. Clarence ran down a list of names and places while Sobell shook his head and furrowed his brow.

  Five minutes later, no further messages had come. Anna was still pissed, or at least impatient, and Genevieve couldn’t blame her. Anna’s clock was ticking, and the deaths of Van Horn’s entourage had been early and gruesome.

  Clarence and Sobell wrapped up, neither sparing much in the way of a friendly word for the other. Clarence gave Sobell an emergency contact number, much as Tran had, and told him he’d be back in the morning with help. Genevieve wondered if that was true.

  Then he left.

  “You got a fix for him?” Genevieve asked, just moments after the door closed. “For his guys, I mean?”

  “My guys,” Belial said, the words followed by a rough, inarticulate sound like a snarl, like heavy cloth tearing. “My brothers and my sons, my sisters and my daughters, feasting at last.”

  “It would be to our advantage if they could hold off on the feasting and focus on the task,” Sobell said. “How, uh, just how much control do you have over their actions? A great deal, I hope?”

  “They heed my words and work my will. They laugh in darkness, they—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Sobell snapped. “Is there anyone in that overcrowded, massively dense skull of yours that can concentrate for one minute? That can actually think? We are fucked here, Belial, you and me together, and if you can’t keep your goddamn babbling in check and focus, we’ll both go down right now, with my hands wrapped around your miserable throat. I am through with this idiocy!”

  Belial lurched through the opening to his lair. Half his face was flushed a violent red, and his beard had started coming out in clumps. His eyes shone with fury. “Do not presume to lecture me, man-child. I have laid low Belphegor and Astaroth, Malgaras and Amenadiel have cowered before me, I have devoured civilizations. The likes of you aren’t fit to wipe my ass.”

  Sobell quailed, but, to Genevieve’s surprise, he stood his ground. “The likes of me are all you have, you thick son of a whore. So help us!”

  “Help us,” Belial said, voice high and mocking. “Please, help us.” He staggered forward and stopped, steadying himself with a white-knuckled death grip on the edge of the table. For a moment, Genevieve expected him to hurl the table aside and lunge at Sobell, but he merely stood, grinning.

  The room darkened, and Belial’s grin widened into an obscene leer. Behind him, the walls of the room dimmed, becoming insubstantial, like reflections of themselves in dark windows. They seemed transparent, yet the parking lot and the street weren’t visible beyond them—only an inky black darkness that went on forever. Genevieve glanced at Sobell to see that he, too, had thinned out. She could see the door through his body. Then the door itself faded, disappearing entirely into blackness.

  “What—” She grasped at the word, but her breath had fled her body. She felt her chest hitch, her shoulders heaving as she started to hyperventilate. This isn’t real. It’s a trick. Just a trick.

  In the darkness that now surrounded them, a thousand pairs of shining slitted eyes opened. A thousand groaning, hungry sighs issued from a thousand invisible mouths. The filmy substance of Sobell’s body spun off him in a thousand wispy spirals. Hunched shapes, visible only as suggestions in the light reflecting from gleaming eyes, leaned in, some looming, others scuttling or slithering.

  A pale streak rose in the corner of Genevieve’s vision, and she turned her head to see that she, too, had become insubstantial, and now a transparent streamer the color of her flesh was flowing from her shoulder out into the darkness, toward a pair of eyes that hung over a glistening mouthful of fangs. Another flowed from her hip, and another from her navel.

  The demons in the darkness breathed, and it was a sound of grinding metal and shrieking brakes. Hot wetness ran down Genevieve’s face, and she wiped it away, certain her hand would come away with blood. Instead, her fingers shone with the wetness of tears.

  The room faded further, becoming a bare suggestion of surfaces. She and Sobell were beacons in here, insubstantial as they were. Only Belial was solid. Hovering in the darkness beyond him, distended and warped like Michelangelo’s face in The Last Judgment, pulled between two dark shapes, was a ruined figure she knew to be that of Hector Martel, her former mentor. Belial gestured, and the two creatures started pulling at the man’s limbs. His mouth opened in a soundless scream. Another gesture, and a vast creature towered over Sobell, drawing sustenance from another of the threads coming from the man’s body. Sobell became even more faded as Genevieve watched.

  It came to her that this was the world as it really was, just thin tissue floating atop an unknowable black ocean teeming with horrifying, malicious creatures—creatures at the command of the demon before her. For the first time, she saw him as much greater than simply another enemy, if more revolting than most. For the first time she really understood that he was also unspeakably ancient and filled with knowledge and power beyond reckoning. This was the type of entity she dealt with each time she delved into magic, and why? Because it knew the secrets of the universe. The actual secrets. Not parlor tricks or religious pabulum or inscrutable mathematical descriptions of after-the-fact—the true secrets of the universe.

  For the first time, she was terrified by the power she touched when she worked magic. Not by the consequences of screwing up or the ultimate end awaiting her, but by the actual contact itself. Just what did she think she was meddling with?

  Amazingly, Sobell took in their surroundings, crossed his arms, and frowned. “Very cute,” he said. He sounded a little breathless but projected annoyance more than anything else. “You’ve made your point.”

  Belial sneered, but the room started filling back in. Genevieve’s chest loosened. The monsters around them receded—not disappearing, Genevieve thought, but lapsing back into the invisibility in which they normally lived.

  “Thank you,” Sobell said. “Now. We need to know everything. What are we looking for? How does it work?” He ducked his head to meet Belial’s gaze. “How much time do you have?”

  “I have all of time,” Belial said. The power he’d exuded moments before had diminished, and he suddenly seemed less like a god making pronouncements than a petulant old man. The transition was jarring.

  “No, you don’t. It’s obvious to everyone but you, if you can’t see it. You’re falling apart.”

  “This . . . body . . . is falling apart. This flesh. Is weak.”

  “And where will that leave you?”

  Belial glared. He couldn’t be this irrational, Genevieve thought, not on some level. He had taken over a cult and had seemed to be on his way to executing a fairly complex plan before Karyn and her crew had intervened. He had taken advantage of Karyn’s skill in a very specific way, not a week ago. But he hadn’t looked so bad then, either. Dirty and disheveled, yes, but not like he had a raging fever or that he was in the last throes of some kind of science fictional radiation sickness.

  Everybody around me is disintegrating, Genevieve thought. She remembered one of her first real conversations with Anna, in which Anna had asked, “Why is everybody around me a ticking bomb?” Genevieve’s response—altogether too glib, in retrospect—had been “Everybody’s a ticking bomb, sweetheart.” And while there was an element of truth to that, it glossed over the issues of degree involved. Some bombs made a lot bigger mess when they went off.

  As if he had read Genevieve’s mind, or perhaps his rational faculties were ascendant once more, Belial straightened. “Not much time now,” he conceded. “For me—or for you.”

  “How much is ‘not much’?” Sobell asked.

  “Not. Much.”

  “Days? Weeks? Hours?”

  Belial bit his lower lip so hard that blood spilled down the remains of his beard. “I don’t know,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “More than ho
urs. Maybe weeks.” He spat on the floor. “We . . . I have lain in darkness for centuries, drooling over every scrap of light or life that I glimpsed from afar. I will not go back.”

  “What are we looking for?” Sobell asked. “We’ll find it better together than fighting separately.”

  “Something pure to be defiled, to take on the corruption in my stead.” He shook his head in an abrupt, violent convulsion. “Your relic idea was clever.”

  “Clever, or correct?”

  Belial said nothing. Genevieve wondered if that was because he didn’t know, or if he merely wasn’t saying.

  Sobell pondered this for a moment before speaking. “The Ames woman. Perhaps if we tracked her down, we could get more clarity on the subject.”

  “Are you a child? Do you have so little experience with prophecy as to believe there are second chances?”

  “Well . . . Yes. There aren’t?”

  Belial snorted. A gray-green glob of snot slopped out onto his mustache. He didn’t wipe it away. Genevieve stared as it hung there, transfixed by the awful possibility that it would ooze down onto his lip.

  Why does that matter? What could possibly matter less at this point? she asked herself, but she couldn’t make herself look away.

  Sobell coughed, and Genevieve swore he was making an effort to keep his eyes locked on Belial’s instead of farther south. “To recapitulate: we’re searching for something, but we’re not sure what it is. Ames’s prophecy suggests a relic of some kind, but we don’t know where to find one. She helpfully narrowed it to the ‘valley of the garden’ somewhere, I sincerely hope, in the general vicinity of Los Angeles. We will have, at most, a hundred thugs and lowlifes to help us find it. It occurs to me that, even if, by some astronomically unlikely fucking miracle, they find it, the odds of them recognizing it as the object in question are minuscule.”

  “Can we actually save Clarence’s guys?” Genevieve asked.

  Sobell raised an eyebrow in apparent confusion. “What possible difference does that make?”

  “He’ll be pissed if we can’t.”

  “We’ll be dead or worse if we don’t get the use of his people. I can’t immediately identify a lie I wouldn’t tell or a false bargain I wouldn’t strike to get out ahead of that. If we’re alive and kicking, we can figure it out then.”

  She turned to Belial. “Can we help them? After?”

  Belial’s shoulders heaved a couple of times in what might have been soundless laughter. “By my command? Perhaps. I have convinced worms not to feast on dead flesh. Perhaps my brethren will not be so stubborn as that.”

  What happened to “they heed my will”? Genevieve thought, but she kept her mouth shut. There was a thread of hope there, a poor one, but likely the only way out for Clarence’s men or for Anna.

  Sobell cleared his throat. “Now, if we’ve gotten past our sudden foray into misguided altruism, I have a proposal. It’s not without risk, but I see no alternatives.”

  “Shoot,” Genevieve said.

  “Speak,” added Belial.

  “We’ll break Clarence’s men into three groups. One of us searches with each group.”

  “For?” Genevieve asked.

  “A relic, information about a relic, or anything else that looks like it matches that meager scrap of prophecy. Unless you can clarify for us?” he asked Belial. The demon merely grinned.

  “We’re going out in public with Clarence Wilkinson’s guys? Your lawyer would—” Genevieve began, but she stopped at an evil look from Sobell.

  “My attorney isn’t present. Is there something you would like to add?”

  “What if someone recognizes you? And what about . . . ?” She glanced sidelong at Belial.

  “If someone recognizes me, the last of my luck runs out. And he’s essentially indistinguishable from any of the city’s myriad displaced indigents.”

  “You’re all heart.”

  Sobell’s face went still, became a placid mask she couldn’t see beyond. “Do you have a problem, Ms. Lyle?”

  “We’ve been over this. I’m problem-free. This is just starting to get more insane by the minute.”

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” He grimaced. “Ye gods. How dire must the situation have gotten for me to resort to such tripe as that?”

  She tried on a smile, aware that she was now in the full-time business of placating monsters. “Three groups, huh?”

  Chapter 9

  Karyn watched the sun descend below the buildings across the street, courtesy of the demon in her mind. As was typical these days, her eyes showed her only chaos. A thick river of shining cars, packed bumper to bumper and even overlapping and merging with one another, snaked through the street below. The building across the street was simultaneously sunlit and lit by only the lamp outside its front door. The building to the right of that had burned to the ground—or, more accurately, would burn to the ground. There was no telling when. The building to the left had inexplicably transformed into a red obelisk, covered in hieroglyphs.

  “What a mess,” Karyn said.

  Anna sat on the floor next to her. “What’s that?”

  “I said it’s a mess. Out there.”

  “Not getting better?”

  Huge, dog-sized scavenger beetles crawled over the burned-out ruin, and Karyn gave a grim laugh. “No, it’s better. Just, you know. Not good. You?”

  “It’s a mess.” Anna pointed to her head. “In here.” The setting sun lit up the side of her face, revealing lines that Karyn didn’t remember seeing before. It was the stress, she thought. They’d all be completely gray before any of them hit forty, if they lived that long. “If we don’t get this figured out, I’m gonna hurt someone. Or, I dunno, eat a hot dog out of a Dumpster and die of food poisoning or something.”

  “Sounds pretty bad.”

  “The worst part is that it feels like me, you know? It’s not like this voice from outside telling me to do stuff and I just can’t resist it. It feels like natural impulses that come from—wherever that shit comes from normally. Only way I can recognize that it’s not really me is when I stop and think about it, and not always even then.”

  Karyn turned around and sat with her back to the window so she could see Anna better. “I get it. Sometimes the stuff I see obviously doesn’t belong, so it’s easier to disregard, but sometimes it’s right there and normal enough, and it’s impossible not to believe. Even when it’s weird, I want to believe my eyes. I just know better.”

  “Look at us,” Anna said. “Fucking pathetic.”

  “Is that what you think of me?”

  Anna winced. “Ah, fuck—I didn’t . . . No. Not one time, ever.”

  “Then cut yourself some slack, huh?”

  “I’ve thought you were a pain in the ass plenty of times, though.”

  Karyn smiled. “That’s fair.” She shifted, pulling one knee up and folding her arms over it.

  “You know what this means?” Anna asked. “We’re gonna have to keep Nail around. He’s the only one left with some kind of sense of reality.”

  They shared a laugh. Simple enough, but it seemed to Karyn that it had been a long time. She tipped her head back against the window and let the smile linger on her lips.

  “When’s the last time we went out dancing?” Anna asked.

  “Is that the demon talking? You hate dancing.”

  “If we get through this, I’ll take one for the team. You dance, I’ll drink. If I get drunk enough, I might even join you.”

  The humor had drained from her voice, and Karyn thought she could see wetness shining in her eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Karyn asked.

  Anna tightened her mouth and gave a useless, noncommittal shrug.

  “Seriously. What’s up?”

  A painful sort of confusion knit Anna’s brow. “I . . .” She s
wallowed. “I don’t know how to . . .” She looked at the floor by her side and brushed something invisible away. Then she brought up her gaze with what appeared to be an immense effort. “I’m afraid I’m gonna die.”

  Karyn locked up. The situation was so unfamiliar her mind simply threw up its hands and walked away from the problem for a moment rather than try to find purchase on it. Anna wasn’t afraid—that was just not who she was. She didn’t get maudlin, she didn’t cry. Once, about five years before, she’d come home upset after breaking up with an unusually serious girlfriend, and Karyn had sat up with her for a night with a bottle of foul-tasting vodka, slowly turning the heartbreak into sour grapes. By the end of the night, Anna had declared the time with her ex to have been a bore, the jokes unfunny, the sex terrible. That had been the last Karyn had heard of it. Anna didn’t cry—she got angry.

  Maybe more to the point, Anna was her rock. When reality shredded itself before her eyes, it had always been Anna who helped her piece it back together. For Anna to be afraid like this—it was terrifying.

  Karyn couldn’t get herself to move. What did you say at a time like this? Was a hug appropriate, or was that too weird? As a tear swelled to a silvery gleam on Anna’s eyelid, the need on her face became too great to ignore, and finally Karyn moved forward and took her hand. Anna squeezed back, hard.

  “Hey. We’ll get through this,” Karyn said, praying it was true. “We always do.”

  Anna closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t remember feeling so hopeless about it before. I keep hearing Sheila’s head. When it hit the concrete. She mighta been dead already, I don’t know, but she sure as shit was afterward. One minute, talking about taking her vengeance and conjuring up whatever the hell that thing was. Next minute—crack.” A shudder rippled up Anna’s body, ending with a sudden jerk of her head.

  “One thing at a time. We get the relic, we get Belial and Sobell, then we fix this. We’ve got time.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” A dry sigh, reminiscent of a last gasp. “I’m just tired. Think I’m gonna crash early.”