Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  She gave Karyn’s hand a last squeeze, managed a weak smile, and stood.

  Karyn waited by the window while Anna settled into bed and the sun did likewise. Uncertainty gnawed at her. She’d told Anna they’d get it figured out, and maybe part of her believed that, but there was too much she didn’t know. They were banking on Belial having enough rational self-interest to pull them out of this under the right kind of coercion, but while the few demons she’d encountered were pretty high on self-interest, rational had not been their strong suit, at least not over any long time frame. And then there was the horrible possibility that Belial might not even have a solution. Just because you let something out of a box didn’t mean you knew how to get it back in.

  “Okay,” she whispered, trying to keep her voice low enough to avoid waking Anna. “Tell me about Belial.”

  The image of the darkening room in her mind vanished, replaced with that of a snarling fanged horror, rows of wicked teeth lining a maw big enough to swallow a St. Bernard. Karyn flinched at the sudden ferocity of the image, then grew annoyed.

  “Yes, I know you hate him.” God, did she ever! “That’s not new.”

  The image changed to a ruddy-cheeked man in a wooden stall at some kind of outdoor market. His table was loaded with brightly colored scarves. In his left hand, he held one. He held his right out for payment.

  “You have got—” Karyn glanced toward where Anna lay, then got up and crossed the room. Moving quietly, she opened the door and stepped out onto the rickety wooden steps. The air was cooler out here already. She closed the door.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” she said, nearly hissing the words through clenched teeth as she paced the small landing. “You ride around in my head all the time, and you want more?”

  A woman in a white coat, handing a squinting man a pair of thick glasses. A filthy, rotten-toothed man on the wooden deck of a ship holding out a spyglass for a somewhat less filthy man in a plumed cap. More in the same vein, all with the same subtext: I help you see.

  “Yeah, I know.” Unbelievable. What else did the damn thing want from her? “I don’t know what to offer you,” she said.

  The next image showed Belial—or, more specifically, the man Hector whom Belial inhabited—with a knife at his throat. A woman’s hand held the knife—Karyn’s own. She recognized the sleeve, though she couldn’t see her own face in the image. With a quick slash, she opened the man’s throat.

  Karyn closed her eyes and put her palm on her forehead. God save her from monomaniacal demons. “I can’t promise that.” There were so many problems with that. It might never be in her power to deliver, and it might not even be in her interest—or Anna’s—to deliver. And she wasn’t sure under what circumstances she could kill a person. Self-defense, almost certainly, but in cold blood? As payment? Belial was repugnant and terrible, but even so, that was a big, ugly step. “Anything else on your Christmas list?”

  The next image showed Karyn with a black splinter in each hand. She watched herself give one to Anna and the other to Nail. Each of them inserted a splinter into their own flesh, smiling the whole time. Talk about bullshit—she’d jammed one of those in under her thumbnail, and the pain had been monstrous.

  “No. I’m not spreading your plague for you. Would you like to try again?”

  No image at all. A sullen blankness in that spot in her mind, not even filled with the usual image of Karyn’s surroundings.

  “What an asshole,” Karyn said. She did her best to remember where she stood, using shadowy images from multiple futures to guide her, and she managed to sit down against what she thought was the door. She could wait here for a while. Either the demon would give the image back or she would get Anna and cut the splinter out of her flesh and evict the damn thing.

  While she waited, she turned Anna’s predicament over in her mind. Who did she know who could even offer any guidance on this stuff? Anna’s contacts were nearly exhausted, and an alarming fraction of them were getting the hell out of town. Genevieve hadn’t offered up anything useful, and Karyn wasn’t sure she was trustworthy anyway, so there was nothing she could rely on there. Karyn felt a pang as she thought of Tommy, who she’d blindly, stupidly sacrificed on the altar of her own freedom—which had of course never arrived, making the whole thing that much more awful. He would have had something for them. Some bizarre divination, some obscure document that shed a sliver of light on a corner of the puzzle. All of it a little gruesome, a little bloodstained, delivered with the cheerful buoyancy of a kid who’d just discovered fireworks.

  Who else was there? Nobody with the capabilities or the contacts, nobody she trusted not to screw her over.

  Some kinds of screwing were worse than others, though. There was one more option. Not a great one, and one that might very well result in a screwing, but not the fatal kind. Jail time didn’t even sound half bad anymore in comparison to some of the possibilities.

  She’d call Elliot.

  Karyn sat on the landing, contemplating. At some point, she realized she could see the light at the front stoop of the building across the way, as well as the deep shadow over the storm drain. The demon had relented. Karyn stood up and went inside.

  Chapter 10

  Anna sat on a rusted-out fire escape, legs dangling over the side, a pair of overpowered binoculars pressed to her face. Somewhere down the street, heavy bass thumped from a house party, but that was the only sign of life. “It’s too fucking dark,” she complained. She could see the church from here, but the area around it was surprisingly dark for the middle of the city. The lights here had not fared well.

  At her side, Nail shifted, his boots clanking against the metal grating. “You ain’t got, like, super night vision now?”

  “Asshole,” she said, but she chuckled. At least Nail wasn’t treating her as if she might explode and eat his face, even though that wasn’t something she could strictly rule out right now. The urge to do something kept surging inside her, and it was usually something extreme. Violent, a lot of the time, but not always. Mostly, it was losing control of normal appetites. A woman had bumped into her on the sidewalk earlier, and there had been a frightening moment when she’d frozen, locking herself down as the urge to beat the woman’s head against a curb tried to take control of her body. The urge passed, but she’d found herself staring at the woman, almost overcome with a sudden, intense sexual attraction. When she recovered her senses, she wondered what she’d been thinking. She didn’t go for bookish types in accountant suits, at least not usually. She’d gotten the hell out of there, only to go on to eat four cheeseburgers from a really dubious-looking food truck. She’d thought about going back and talking the guy into making her a fifth one, raw, before she caught herself. Four had been too many already. Her stomach was still rolling over and contemplating suicide.

  “You try these damn things for a minute,” Anna said, waving the binoculars up at Nail. He took them.

  “Could be worse,” he said as he fiddled with the focus.

  “See anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then how much worse could it be?”

  He turned his head away from the binoculars and raised his eyebrows at her. Then he went back to looking.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said under her breath. “I still think we should split up. Cover more ground.”

  “Uh-huh. Right.”

  “We could.”

  Nail grunted something like agreement. “And Karyn could kill my ass when she found out I let you run around here in the dark by yourself.”

  Anna leaned forward against the lower rail. “Gen texted me.”

  “I am spying on a church here, not looking for updates on your fucked-up personal life.”

  “You’re still an asshole,” she said.

  “That’s what my mama tells me.”

  Anna started to reach for her phone, anxious to flip i
t open and reread the message, take in that stimulus from a far-off place. The light would come on, though, and she didn’t want that. She scratched her thighs instead, fingernails scraping long arcs against the rough material of her jeans. “She says the graffiti we saw was probably a curse of some kind. Against Gant Street’s enemies.”

  Nail lowered the binoculars so fast he damn near dropped them. “Say what?”

  “A curse. If she knows more than that, she ain’t saying.”

  “How’s she know anything about it at all?”

  “I sent her a picture. Asked her ‘Hey, what the hell is this thing?’”

  Nail’s mouth worked, as if he was trying out a bunch of responses, but they weren’t quite coming out. “That’s . . . You what?” Before Anna could answer, he continued. “That was not a good idea. We don’t know what her deal is right now. Could be she’s just drawing you out. Sobell wants this thing bad as we do. Probably worse.”

  “If she’s still on our side, we couldn’t ask for a better spy.”

  “Yeah. If. Did you think this through or are you just making this shit up as you go? You ain’t exactly at the most stable I’ve ever seen you.”

  “Cheap shot.”

  “That don’t make me wrong. What else you tell her?”

  “Nothing. She wanted to meet. Wanted to know where we are. I ignored her.”

  Nail gave her a reluctant nod. “That was smart, at least.”

  Anna said nothing. Part of her seethed at the way he was talking down to her, as if she were some kind of idiot child . . . and part of her thought he had a valid point, at least a little. It was risky, corresponding with Gen like this. The information exchanged might be used against them, for starters, but if Gen stayed loyal and got caught, then it might get her in a lot of trouble. Bad all around, yet Anna couldn’t see going back to full radio silence. She was still angry at Genevieve, and might be for a long time, but that didn’t get better by shutting all communication down. She wanted to talk to Genevieve.

  She wished she knew what to believe.

  “A curse, huh?” Nail said, speculation in his voice. “You know, we passed that thing, just the same as those bangers with the exploding gun.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t count as Gant Street’s enemies.”

  “Yeah. Let’s hope.” He paused as though he had something to add, then turned away, raising the binoculars.

  Anna felt like railing at him, shouting him down for no particular reason, but she recognized that thought as alien. Nail and Karyn were all that held her together right now. Funny bit of role reversal, that, and while she appreciated the irony, it was still obnoxious.

  “Fucking demons,” Anna said.

  “I hear that,” Nail said, not looking away from the binoculars.

  Minutes crawled by, and even this, the normally comforting ritual of surveillance, grated on Anna’s last nerve. She stared into the darkness across the street and kicked her feet like a kid sitting in a grown-up’s chair. It would be nice, she thought, if she had gotten super night vision out of this awful demon situation. It would be nice if she’d gotten something out of it. A thought bubbled up to the surface of her mind, unbidden. She needed paper, hemlock, and a mortar—

  Hemlock? What even is that?

  She did her best to ignore the strange, intrusive thought. She wished Gen were here to tell her a dirty joke and help her laugh it off.

  “What the hell?” Nail asked. “I don’t know about no haunted church, but there’s definitely somebody fucking around in the cemetery.”

  “What? Where?” Anna said.

  “Toward the back. Northeast corner. Definitely movement, but I can’t see shit else.”

  Anna squinted. The cemetery behind Nuestra Señora was large, taking up maybe half a block, and poorly lit. Half the streetlights had been smashed, and most of the rest just didn’t work. Shadows cast by nearby buildings and trees only confused the scene further. Beyond the standard-issue black cemetery fence, Anna couldn’t see much of anything.

  Hemlock, a mortar, and—no.

  She started down the fire escape ladder.

  Nail looked over the rail at her. “Yo, Nail,” he said, his voice pitched artificially high, “how about we go check it out?” Then, in a deeper voice: “Sure, Anna. Sounds pretty great. I’m glad you asked.”

  “I didn’t know you needed an invitation. Quit yer whining and come on,” Anna said. She dropped the last eight feet to the pavement.

  Nail landed next to her a moment later. “Be careful,” he said. “Lots of people to piss off around here.”

  “No shit.” The party down the street had spilled out into the yard of one of the dilapidated houses, and somebody had cranked the music up louder. Anna thought there were people dancing in the yard now. Not great for remaining unseen, but good for covering any noise they made.

  “You go left, I’ll go right?” Anna suggested. “Make sure they can’t run off?”

  “Let’s just stick together, huh?”

  He was right, but her blood was up, and the urge to run as fast as her legs could propel her was tough to deny. Stealth might have been the order of the day, but the demon didn’t care much for it.

  Too bad you’re not in charge.

  She checked possible approaches. Too much light on the right. Their quarry would probably see them coming. Left would work better, but it would mean skirting around the front of the church in full view of the party. Most of those people were occupied, but it would only take one to look over at the wrong time to wreck their whole night.

  Let them come, she thought, and her lips peeled back from her teeth.

  She slapped herself.

  “Hey—” Nail began.

  “There,” she said, pointing at the side of the church, where a small door hid in a shadowed alcove. “We’ll cut through the church.”

  “Yeah,” Nail said. “Good call.”

  She and Nail walked across the street slowly. Her pulse pounded in her ears, a rising, rushing, whooshing sound rather than a beat, the ebb and flow of a vital tide. Her blood sang. Let them see. Let them come with their guns and their knives, and I will tear them apart.

  The two of them ducked into the doorway just as Anna began contemplating the abandonment of this mission entirely, blowing it off and instead starting a fight over at the party. Insane, but for a moment it had seemed as urgent as breathing.

  She closed her eyes, willed her heart to slow, willed her breath to come evenly. Some of that wild urgency faded. Her hands uncurled. She got out her lock picks.

  They were inside a minute later, stepping into an arched entryway with plain white walls on either side. A few steps ahead and up half a dozen worn wooden stairs was the main room of the church. The only light came from a couple of discreet, soft spotlights on the crucifix behind the altar, to Anna and Nail’s right, and another on a painting of the Virgin Mary, swathed in blue, cradling her son in her hands.

  “You gonna start on fire?” Nail asked.

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Hey. Language.”

  She studied his face, incredulous. “Are you serious? You believe this shit?”

  “I don’t fuckin’ know, okay? We got demons, right?”

  “I got a demon, like some kinda spiritual tapeworm. I don’t know what that says about anything else.”

  “Me either. But, hey, it’s a church. Show a little respect.”

  She shook her head and fought an impulse to spit. “Best way to the back door?”

  He walked up the stairs, and she followed, wondering for a brief absurd moment if she would catch fire after all. She laughed at the idea, then quickly covered her mouth when Nail glared at her. The laugh echoed in the open space.

  Again, Nail pointed. To either side of the nave, a wide arch led farther back into the building. The farther one,
on the left, had a handrail and stairs, but the nearer one was a ramp. For wheeling the casket down.

  They went that way. Anna half expected a priest to burst out from behind the altar, waving his crucifix and shouting in Latin. Part of her would have welcomed it—in her current frame of mind, either a fight or an exorcism sounded pretty good. Neither occurred, though, and she and Nail followed a hall down to a set of double doors at the back of the building. They were the kind of doors she was used to seeing in schools, hospitals, or other institutions, the kind that opened with a push from inside, regardless of whether they were locked.

  Nail paused with his hand on the door. “We’re just watching, right?”

  “And following, if we can.”

  “Cool.” He opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and then he was out. Anna went after him.

  Outside the church, a short width of driveway gave way to the struggling brown grass of the cemetery itself. Evidently, the city’s watering rules weren’t liberal enough to keep the grass thriving, or maybe the church couldn’t afford the bill. Small headstones, most little more than plaques, dotted the ground at regular intervals. Only a few were anywhere near big enough to hide behind, and there was nothing like a mausoleum out here. Nobody in this neighborhood had anything like that kind of green.

  Moving at a crouch, Anna started across the lawn. She still couldn’t see what Nail had seen, so she moved roughly parallel to him, heading for the northeast corner as quietly as possible and using the occasional large grave marker for cover. The cemetery had seemed an impenetrable maze of shadows from a distance, but from here it was an open wasteland with virtually nothing to hide behind and only darkness to mask her. Dead grass crunched underfoot, announcing her passage and adding fuel to her paranoia.

  Cover became even more sparse as they got farther from the church. Sixty years ago, the neighborhood had been a growing, thriving community of if not the well-to-do, at least the comfortable, but it had declined substantially since then. The larger monuments were fewer and farther between out here, charting the decline in what the locals could afford to memorialize their dead. A bare handful of stones stuck above the grass, some, Anna guessed, marking the resting places of the heads of big families who had pulled together to donate, others marking those of local “drug kingpins”—basically kids who’d climbed to the top of one of the tiny neighborhood pyramids before getting gunned down, and who’d left enough cash in the hands of the people they loved to put on a decent funeral. There weren’t a lot of them.