Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  Nobody spoke for a little while. The radio played Top 40 at a volume low enough for Karyn to ignore. No point in talking yet. She didn’t want to have this discussion without being able to look Elliot in the face.

  Elliot wasn’t inclined to wait, apparently. “Amaimon,” she said.

  Karyn craned her neck to see Elliot, who moved to the middle seat to accommodate her. “What?”

  “The name of your demon.”

  “Our demon.”

  “Yeah. It’s called Amaimon.”

  The image of the car interior vanished briefly. A blue-cloaked woman in what looked like some kind of medieval finery curtsied and then disappeared.

  “What does that mean?” Karyn asked.

  “It’s a name. It doesn’t mean anything, that I know of.”

  “No, I mean what’s the importance? Why does it matter?”

  “My mostly useless reference material,” she said, stressing the words bitterly, “actually had a few things to say about it. Supposedly, it grants visions.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “It also—supposedly—knows the future and the past, can make people fly, can raise the dead, has terrible breath, and was once bound by Solomon to build an impenetrable prison. Among a bunch of other nonsense that may or may not have any basis in fact.”

  Knows the future, my ass, Karyn thought. Not unless it gets it from me. “Okay. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about, but it’s good to know.”

  “I want Belial,” Elliot said.

  “Pull over, would you?” Karyn asked Nail. She needed to get out, talk with Elliot face-to-face, even if it meant sitting on the sidewalk.

  Nail pulled the car over. In the small lot next to where he’d parked was a cement circle with a round platform in the middle. An ugly, misguided piece of art, but nobody was around and it would work for a sit-down.

  The three of them got out. Karyn sat on the concrete platform. Elliot did likewise. Nail stood, watching the neighborhood and half listening.

  “Belial,” Karyn said.

  “Two prisoners escaped last night. Killed half a dozen guards on the way out and started a riot.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” She was, too, not that the words were likely to be of any help.

  “Yeah. Well, they were Belial’s. I saw photos. It was . . . pretty ugly. How many more does he have? That he can infect others with?”

  “I don’t know. A lot.”

  “I keep thinking about those images your—Amaimon showed me. The ones showing Belial in action. I think they’re for real. Two unarmed men blasted a hole through a wall and killed six guards, and God knows what they’re doing now. A hundred people like that could wreak devastation on a terrifying scale.”

  “That’s . . . true.” Karyn felt a hint of shame. She’d been so focused on Anna that she hadn’t really thought about the wider scale of the problem. Not in any meaningful way.

  “I want Belial,” Elliot said again. “Whether I bring him in or take him down.”

  Karyn shook her head solemnly. “You can’t take him down. I don’t know anybody else who can get the demons out of his guys. We need to get that from him, and then you do whatever you need to. Otherwise, all those people die. You said yourself that there’s no credible exorcism.”

  Elliot’s expression was steady, unyielding. “I’m not sure we can save them. I’m not sure we ought to.”

  “Let me put it this way: If you don’t exorcise them and you don’t kill them, there’s nothing to stop them doing more of the same, at least until they wear out. Belial is at the top, but he’s not the only concern.”

  “You’re worried about Anna.”

  “That’s high on my list, yes.”

  “We’ll do the best we can, but I really think we need to keep the big picture in mind.”

  “You think all you want about that ‘big picture.’ Just remember that as far as I’m concerned, the central figure in it is Anna, and everybody else is just gray shapes in the background.”

  Elliot glanced down at her hands, then back up at Karyn. There was a sorrow in her eyes, something that looked awfully close to pity. “I don’t mean to make light of your situation—at all—but have you done much of anything but manage your gift since it manifested?”

  “I don’t have much of a choice,” Karyn said.

  “I didn’t say you did. I’m just saying that tends to make you pretty focused on yourself all the time.”

  Karyn felt heat rise to her neck, and she knew that a red blotch was spreading up the side of her face, as sometimes happened when she was really pissed. “That is not fair.”

  “There’s nothing fair about any of it. All I’m saying is that your perspective is pretty narrow. Necessarily, maybe, but there’s more to the world than you and yours.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Elliot leaned back, both arms braced against the concrete and holding her up. To her credit, she didn’t look the slightest bit exasperated. “You’re a cynic.”

  “Do you think I wanted to spend my life stealing weird crap from crazy people and giving it to other crazy people? I didn’t know about any of this occult junk until I had to, and I’d have died happy if I’d never had to learn.”

  “‘While men plan, God laughs.’ Isn’t that the saying? You’re not that special.”

  I don’t need this, Karyn thought. She carried enough guilt to last a lifetime, she’d done enough she was ashamed of that her conscience was bent and crushed under the load, and this impromptu, bullshit tough-love session wasn’t helping. “You got anything on the photo, or do you want to keep making me feel like shit about myself?”

  The long look Elliot gave her made her think the woman didn’t want to let it go, and they were going to go another two rounds. Elliot surprised her, though. “I don’t know if it’s gang work, but it’s right in gang territory.”

  “Go on.”

  “I only know of six gang-affiliated practitioners in the county. Three are in custody, two are presumed dead, and one is acting as an informant. None of them ever worked at that scale.”

  “There are a lot of gang members in L.A.”

  “Forty thousand or so, at last count. Over a hundred thousand in the county.”

  “So maybe you missed some,” Karyn said.

  “Maybe. But this kind of thing doesn’t usually just pop up overnight. Additionally, it has some odd markers in it. They actually reminded me of something, so I went back and pulled this.” She brought a picture up on her phone and showed it to Karyn. Nail tore himself away from neighborhood watch duty and came over to look at it with her.

  The picture was small, but it was easy to make out the field of gray it depicted. Ash. Lots of ash. Some charred remnants of structural members sticking up from the black and gray heaps that filled what looked like the outline of a room. The place had burned to the ground, exposing the entirety to the sky. Karyn didn’t see what Elliot thought was so important, and she said so, so Elliot zoomed in. In the bottom right corner of the blasted room were what looked like traces of occult symbols. Karyn zoomed in farther. The resolution was terrible this close, but it was good enough to tell that her first impression hadn’t been wrong.

  “Similar to the symbols in the picture we gave you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Elliot said, nodding enthusiastically.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The building burned to the ground a few months back. Oddly, nobody filed an insurance claim. I traced the ownership. It was owned by a company that’s owned by another company that’s owned by an offshore company that we’re pretty sure belongs to Enoch Sobell.”

  “So? Sobell’s pretty well known for messing around with this stuff.”

  “No, not this stuff. That’s my point. This stuff is unusual,” she said, tapping the phone’s
surface for emphasis. “This stuff is related specifically to heretical sects and a very odd, practically extinct occult tradition.”

  Heretical sects, a haunted church, and a priest. Something was coming together here. Karyn was damned if she knew what, but the outlines were emerging. “What do you know about it?”

  Elliot shook her head. “Just what I said. I’ve got messages in to some people who might know more, but they weren’t answering their phones at nine o’clock tonight.”

  “I’ll see what else we can dig up, if anything.” Karyn held out a hand. “So we have a deal, then.”

  Elliot didn’t take her hand. “I want Belial. Sobell too, if possible, but Belial is paramount. I’m not willing to compromise on that issue. As long as we’re clear on that, this can work.”

  “Good enough.”

  Elliot shook her hand. It should have seemed superfluous after the steps the woman had already taken, but the gesture felt important, some kind of human grounding in all this cosmic baloney.

  She just hoped Elliot wasn’t about to screw her.

  Chapter 15

  It probably wasn’t smart to be doing this alone, Anna thought. She wasn’t at her best these days, and even if she had been, skulking around a neighborhood full of nervous, paranoid gangbangers would have been plenty dangerous. Doing it without backup bordered on suicidal, a fact she vaguely realized should bother her. Nail was busy, though, and she couldn’t tolerate another night with Karyn staring at her or through her or whatever it was she did now, waiting for an eruption that never came.

  She didn’t have to put up with that here. Gant Street was quiet and mostly dark, the corners providing small islands of light with long stretches of shadow between. Nobody moving, nobody watching.

  This is so dumb. The thought merely brought a smile to her lips. This excursion brought back an illicit thrill of trespass that she’d thought had long since disappeared, and only part of it was the transgression itself—much of the thrill came from the risk. If she got in trouble here, there would be no help but her wits and her reflexes. It seemed like that might be fun, a straight adrenaline rush instead of all the complicated bullshit machinations of four different sets of criminals with at least as many agendas. Maybe more. She’d lost track.

  She crossed in front of the diagram at the corner and gave it a friendly slap. It seemed to glow and shimmer, but that was most likely just the glossy paint reflecting the streetlight. Something about the structure of the diagram sank hooks into her mind this time, though, and she stopped, stepping back to stare at it. It was a blueprint for a building she almost understood, or a simple circuit diagram whose purpose eluded her. But she almost grasped something . . . Pull out the fuse here, and the whole thing would stop working. Knock out the support there, and it would collapse.

  Am I hostile? Am I the enemy? The question announced itself in her mind with some urgency. Whatever else the diagram was, whatever else it did, it was a sentry of sorts. A spotter, perhaps, like one of the guys in Nail’s old platoon, whose job it was to paint a target with a laser so that somebody else could blow it up. This thing would mark her as she went by, and she thought that later it just might blow her up, or help somebody else do the job. Genevieve was supposed to tell her about that, but she hadn’t, and now Anna was beginning to get an intuitive grasp of the thing herself.

  Not myself. Goddamn demon is feeding me answers.

  Fine. Let it make itself useful.

  She picked up a piece of broken glass, green, the Dos Equis label still clinging to it. She still couldn’t fully comprehend the circuit in front of her, but the demon had shown her which fuse to remove to shut the thing down, at least insofar as it might affect her. Perhaps totally. Who knew? Who cared?

  She slashed her palm (the left palm, a part of her insisted) and watched the blood well from the wound. Her stomach growled, but instead of lapping at the cut—or tearing at it—she smeared seven marks on the diagram on the wall, starting at the top and working her way around counterclockwise. Widdershins, she thought, and then: What does that even mean?

  She stepped back and admired her work. There was a timer attached to it, she thought, or at least she felt a sense that she should move, quickly, before . . . Before something.

  But wait. I have blood. It would be a shame to let that vital ink dry without using it for something else. She thought of the work at hand and an idea came to her, beautiful in its simplicity. First, two marks, one on the back of each hand, each a semicircular symbol she didn’t recognize and yet understood completely. Then she kicked off her boots. One fell on its side, and the other stood up, the top half drooping over forlornly. The sight struck her as funny, and she chuckled.

  Two more marks, one on the top of each foot. She thought, crazily, of pulling up her shirt and making another mark in her side, but while part of her found that hysterically funny, it wouldn’t help her any.

  She got out her phone and, using the screen as a poor sort of mirror, drew one last symbol on her head. She became aware of a sound droning around her, and then realized without much surprise that it was her voice issuing a chant or incantation of some kind. A rush of pleasure accompanied the last word, a tingling that spread from her chest out to her extremities, and she gasped.

  This was what Karyn didn’t want her doing.

  Not just Karyn, she thought. I really shouldn’t be doing this. The thought was a whisper in a hurricane, difficult to hear, impossible to heed.

  The streetlight above her blew out. Shadows tore themselves from doorways, from the undercarriage of a parked car, from every curb and gutter, a vast foul stinking black one from a storm drain, a faint and timid one from the streetlight itself. They flew toward her, inspiring an ecstasy of terror before they slid and slipped and entwined themselves around her body, thick streamers anchored at hands, feet, and forehead, curling about her in a shroud and reaching out like tentacles around her.

  She looked down at her hand and saw nothing but a vague shape draped in shadow, like something barely glimpsed lurking at the back of an alley. She wasn’t invisible, she didn’t think, but the next best thing. Hidden, even standing out in the open on the sidewalk.

  Holy shit. Where has this been for the last ten years? I’ve had to do everything the hard way all this time!

  She walked into Locos territory, now paying no heed to the crippled diagram on the wall. Instead of keeping to the back streets and alleys, she walked down the sidewalk, marveling at how the edges of her coat of shadows merged with and pulled at other shadows around her, making it unclear where each ended. The effect, in the low light of midnight, was to make it seem that wherever she walked, there just happened to be a confluence of shadows masking her.

  She made straight for the cemetery. Perhaps the priest would be there tonight, going about his morbid business. She could get close enough to watch, close enough to see everything.

  She wondered whether the shadows would cling to her in a fight, hiding her from an opponent’s view. Something told her they would. She itched to find out firsthand.

  The floodlights outside Nuestra Señora blazed brightly, brighter than before, it seemed, sending burning, blinding rays out in all directions. She squinted and held up a hand—and saw her fingers through the shadow.

  She turned around, slinking back behind the building. The shadows weren’t impenetrable, then, and, as she ought to have suspected, she’d need to stay away from strong light sources. No problem, really. She went back down the street a couple of blocks, then ducked into an alley. Out the other side, she saw the cemetery fence. The church still blazed in the distance, but it was the cold, feeble brightness of stars rather than the searching laser it had seemed before. Distant. Harmless.

  Anna walked to the fence, and the shadows thickened as the bulk of the church blocked most of the lights. Of course there were no lights back here—the priest wouldn’t want that any more than
she did.

  Too bad for her that he wasn’t here. The cemetery was silent, and nobody disturbed the graves tonight. Anna settled in to wait. He might not be coming tonight, but he might simply not have arrived yet. What had he said about his grave-robbing duties? “Do you think all that comes for free?” he’d asked, referring to hurting the Locos’ enemies. The Locos had a lot of enemies, and the grave-robbing fueled their defense in some way that Anna didn’t understand. He’d be back, Anna assured herself, and probably soon.

  She waited. No party livened up the street tonight. All was quiet. Boring, in fact. Anna tried to check her watch, only to find that she couldn’t see it. It had a light, but turning it on didn’t seem like the best idea right now.

  A cat walked toward her. The shadows reached for it. It didn’t hiss or spit, but it abruptly changed direction and crossed the street with a “That’s where I was going anyway” strut common to cats everywhere.

  How long had it been? It felt like about a week. Why wasn’t anything going on down here? Where was the party? Where was the damn priest?

  Anna forced herself to take a breath. She wasn’t all that patient by nature, but she recognized that she was rushing by even her own standards. In reality, she had to have been here only a few minutes. She leaned forward, pressing her shoulders against the iron bars of the cemetery fence, and sighed.

  She started counting, thinking she’d get to a thousand or so, then make a partial circuit of the cemetery, just to see, staying away from the lights out front. She made it to forty-three before she couldn’t take it anymore. She walked to the right, bouncing her left hand off each bar of the fence with a muted tap.

  That’s stupid, she realized after making it almost all the way to the corner. She put her hands in her pockets.

  She saw nothing moving all the way to the corner, other than the damn cat curling up on somebody’s doorstep. The emptiness felt strange to her, and only after she reminded herself that it was nearly one in the morning did the absence of people seem even somewhat understandable. The night fit her like a second skin, but that wasn’t true for everyone.