Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  According to her phone, it was already after noon. This hadn’t happened before. The demon always came home, nested, narrated its dark dreams in words too vague to make out, and generally spent each night creeping Genevieve out. The one time she wanted it to come back, it was gone. This is not good.

  She called Clarence. No answer.

  Now what?

  One option came to mind. She crawled into Belial’s stinking lair, using the light from her phone to find her way around the small den. The hairball was easy enough to find, but then she had a new problem. The idea of touching that thing with bare skin was more than she could stomach.

  “Jesus,” she muttered. She came out, grabbed a napkin from the bag that had contained breakfast, and went back in. Using the napkin as a sort of half-assed mitten, she picked up the hairball by a stray snarl. Small black specks fell loose from it, some of them crawling away as they hit the carpet. Her stomach roiled.

  She came out and dropped her disgusting trophy on the table. She groaned as she noticed a tiny insect that had crawled onto her hand, then rubbed it off on the edge of table.

  She fought down her revulsion and got to work. This stuff was basic Occult 101 shit. Pull a hair off someone, or a fingernail, or a few drops of blood, and track them down. There were a dozen problems with it, depending on the quality of the material you had to work with, and another dozen ways for an intended target to thwart it, but it was easy and it worked much of the time, so it would be foolish not to try.

  It took ten minutes to rig together a makeshift compass from a string and a pen and a few strands teased from the hairball, and two more minutes for Genevieve to make the requisite diagrams and perform the incantation. It took another thirty seconds of watching the compass sit there, inert, dead as roadkill, before Genevieve swore and gave up on it. She tried a couple of different tricks, a few alternative approaches, and got equally poor results.

  She sat, racking her brains for another way, but in the end she had to admit that she had nothing else. She’d need help, and there was only one place she could think of to get it. She cursed and went back to fiddling with the hairball.

  At two p.m., with still nothing to show for her efforts, she got a call from Anna.

  “We’re on track here,” Anna said. “You?”

  “No. Belial is gone. I don’t know where.”

  “Can you get him a message?”

  “No. Clarence isn’t picking up his phone.”

  There was a pause during which Genevieve thought she could feel Anna fuming at her through the phone. “Look,” Anna said, “this doesn’t work without Belial. It’s a total fucking no-go.”

  “I get that, but I . . .”

  “What? You what?”

  “I can’t just conjure him up. The usual stuff isn’t working.” She paused. There was the final remaining option. She hadn’t sold Anna out, she reminded herself—she was checking first to see if it was okay. Nevertheless, she braced herself for the explosion that would likely occur after her next statement. “I think I’m gonna need some help.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Anna said, her voice heavy with suspicion.

  “It means . . . Oh boy. It means I think we need to bring Sobell in on this.” She cringed as soon as the words were out. Here it comes. “I don’t have anything else. I don’t know anyone else who’s got a chance. I just don’t know what else to do.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “Look, he’s got nothing against you guys—against us—he just didn’t think you’d feel too well disposed toward him after that shit in the prison. He needs this. He’ll help.”

  Still nothing.

  “He needs this,” Genevieve said again, “and I can’t find the demon without him. There’s some chance I can’t find the demon with him, but I don’t know what else to do. I mean, we could just wait until it turns up again, but that could be a while, and I’m worried about what it’s up to in the meantime.”

  “Tell him we’ll meet. I’ll text you an address. We need to get moving,” Anna said.

  “Great. This is gonna work, you’ll see.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Genevieve called Clarence again. Still no answer.

  She called Sobell. He picked up right away. “Yes?”

  “Are you somewhere you can talk?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Anna and Karyn think they have the solution,” Genevieve said. “They need us to get Belial and meet them.”

  Sobell didn’t answer right away. He coughed once, then cleared his throat. “Let’s leave Belial out of this for now, shall we? If they’ve found the relic, I’d like to go have a look at it without a demon ranting in my ear. Discover if, perhaps, we can do without Belial entirely, though that isn’t the way my luck has been running of late.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Genevieve wished she’d thought this through a little more. “I thought we, uh . . .”

  She could almost see his face, that skeptical “don’t bullshit a bullshitter” expression. He could see right through her over the phone, for God’s sake.

  “Look, we need Belial,” she said. “The whole thing doesn’t work without Belial.”

  “There’s a ‘whole thing’ now, is there? Was there a whole thing last night, or is this a new whole thing?”

  She rushed past the question. “They found the answer, Enoch. They found it.”

  “So you said. What, precisely, does that mean?”

  “It’s the priest. Remember what you said about angels? He can call one. He swears it will wipe out demonic corruption. Cure Anna. It might do for you, too. This has got to be the answer. It has to be.”

  “Oh, it might do for me all right.” He tapped his index finger against his thigh. “Where does Belial come in?”

  “I guess when you go fishing for angels, you need some pretty major bait.”

  “Funny, isn’t it? Lack of a demon isn’t usually a problem to be addressed. Quite the opposite.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  Sobell made a clucking noise. “That’s your prerogative, but from my position, I’d have to say that if you don’t find any of this funny, you’ll find it unspeakably bleak.”

  “That’s where I was headed, yeah.”

  “A word of advice.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re young. You’re unquestionably talented.”

  Genevieve smiled, surprised at how the words hit her. In the past, Sobell had nodded at her small successes and made words of bland encouragement, but this acknowledgment felt like a victory. She wished circumstances were such that she could just sit here and savor it.

  Sobell coughed. “The world is your oyster, as they say—whatever the devil that means. Mentors, lovers, and even enemies—these all come and go. You can outlast them all, dance on their graves or mourn them as appropriate, but you can outlast them. This storm may be the end of me, but it will be nothing more to you than a mildly interesting paragraph in your history, a slight breath of wind that alters your course imperceptibly toward whatever end you finally choose. I hate to damage your ego, but you’re not even a starring player in this drama, so don’t let this latest round of foolishness break you.”

  “Was that supposed to be inspiring, or were you encouraging me to cut and run?”

  “Take it either way. Whatever helps.”

  “So, are we going to do this?” Genevieve asked.

  “As plans go, this one is remarkably high on conjecture and low on assurances. I’ll need to meet with the priest. Your erstwhile compatriots as well.”

  It was all Genevieve could do not to swear aloud. “I don’t know if I can arrange that.”

  “Find out.”

  * * *

  Sobell sat on a bench, elbows on his knees, hands clasped tightly together to keep them from shaking, and
he stared at the diagram. The effaced one, that even now was beginning to vanish under layers of graffiti. Somewhere beyond that drawing was the priest, and a solution that would deliver Sobell or destroy him. He had no way of knowing. He could go house to house, searching. He could bring Belial in and sweep the neighborhood with a tide of flame and destruction. Both options seemed equally likely to result in nothing or catastrophe, with a thin chance of success.

  Genevieve said the priest was prepared to do all the dirty work, if they’d just bring him Belial. Belial said it was prepared to do all the dirty work, if they’d just bring it the relic. Which way to go? Did he believe a cut-rate aspiring mad hermit or a self-proclaimed Lord of Hell who seemed to have only a tenuous connection with what everybody else called reality? One of them must be right, Sobell thought. If only because I need one of them to be right.

  He’d come here alone for no reason he could name. Clarence’s men hadn’t shown up that morning, which was surely a bad sign for somebody, but Sobell wasn’t sure how to take it. Advantage: Belial, or just more meaningless happenstance? Eventually, he’d gone stir-crazy. He could have continued hassling the remaining occult brokers and lowlifes he knew, but he was in no condition to do more than make threats he couldn’t follow up, and it was pointless anyway. Endgame had begun, and shuffling pieces that weren’t even on the board was no way to win. On a related note, it was profoundly stupid for him to be sitting out in public where any random cop—or, he supposed, even bystander—could call him in and wrap this whole thing up. He was too tired to care, he supposed. He wanted a martini and a newspaper. A feather bed. Sex sounded good in theory, but as soon as he thought of the details, it all seemed so tiring.

  Sunlight threw dappled shadows through the leaves of a half-dead maple tree. Across the street, a middle-aged woman went into the lavanderia with a black plastic garbage bag full of clothes. One of the windows had a bullet hole in it. All of them had bars. He wondered why anybody would need to put bars on the windows of a laundromat.

  Something moved in the reflection from one of the windows, a hooded dark shape, and Sobell turned away.

  I am spending what may very well be my last afternoon on the planet on a bus bench in the barrio. Even that thought had no power to move him.

  His phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, being careful not to look at the glossy back, and answered.

  They’ll meet, the text message said, followed by an address and a time. Four p.m. Not long. He put the phone away, trying to ignore the black swarms at the edge of his vision. He could feel them now, almost hear a whispering from them. Nothing coherent, but they seemed to plant thoughts in his head. Step in traffic. Eat a bottle of Tylenol. Buy razor blades. They weren’t compelling thoughts, not yet, but they were relentless. He couldn’t tell if the black spots were demons crowding around him or mere hallucinations, a sort of autohypnosis created by his own dread.

  A destroying angel, Sobell thought, and he shook his head. It was as though he was waist-deep in rats, they were surely going to eat him alive, and somebody had handed him a magic whistle that would summon a dragon to come wipe them all out with a single blast of scouring flame. Whether there would be anything left of him after the flame was a question nobody else cared about.

  He glanced up, alarmed, as he heard somebody approach. The sudden fear dissipated when he saw Tran.

  “I didn’t know if you’d actually come,” he said.

  “If I’ve been followed, you and I are both screwed.”

  “I trust that you’ve been careful. Did you bring the will?”

  “Of course.” She handed him a fat sheaf of papers. It was an odd sensation, holding a set of what could very well become his last instructions from beyond the grave. He’d never had one made before. Never thought it would come down to this, not for real. And now that he had the document in hand, there was no time to read it. He’d have to trust that Tran had done her job correctly. She always had before.

  “Did you find a way to give yourself a little something out of this?” he asked.

  “I told you, that would be unethical.”

  He chuckled. “Attorneys never cease to amaze me. All of it goes to Genevieve Lyle, then?”

  Tran pursed her lips. “There will likely be nothing left, if you die and the FBI confiscates everything.”

  “But she’ll get every bit of that nothing?”

  “Every bit.”

  He leaned back, musing on the decision. “I thought there might be some redemption in that. That it would make something feel worthwhile. It still all seems like a waste, though.”

  Tran reached past him and flipped to a yellow plastic marker on the last page. “Sign here.”

  He signed.

  Tran took the papers and put them back in the brown accordion folder she’d brought them in. “Good-bye, Enoch. It’s been . . . interesting,” Tran said.

  “I’m not dead yet.”

  She walked to her car.

  The black spots, which had receded, came back in force, crowding around until they were no longer in just his peripheral vision. They must have blotted out a quarter of the world now with their teeming and curling, twisting into fantastic shapes. The whispering was louder now.

  To destroy, or to be destroyed. Wasn’t that what Belial had said?

  It wasn’t too late to contact Belial. Turn over the priest and the others, and hope the demon could extract what it needed. Further hope that it held by its promises; that it had not, in fact, been up to some skullduggery with Simon’s goodies; that it would help Sobell at all. More time and perhaps he could figure out how to do it himself, but he had no more time. That option was gone, leaving him with just two possible paths: trust Belial, or call the dragon and pray that it didn’t scour him from the earth in its eagerness to destroy the rats that plagued him. A lousy choice. The tiger or the tiger.

  He texted Genevieve. I’ll be there.

  Chapter 26

  Anna frowned, turning away from the welding shop’s window where she’d been watching the street. “I’m hungry.” She made a sort of disgusted growl. “Goddammit. I’m trying to focus, really I am. Abas said he’s got the place. Wants us to pick up a few things and meet him there.”

  Karyn’s misgivings about Anna’s frame of mind were only growing. She kept seeing Anna with a bloody grin and a wild-eyed expression from which sanity had wholly fled. How long? Was that tonight, or some long-distant possible future that crept closer with every passing moment?

  “What kind of things?” Karyn asked.

  “I texted Nail. He’s on it. Same kind of shit Tommy would have wanted. Normal stuff. Candles, chalk, frankincense and myrrh, and all that weird shit we used to get from Pendergast.”

  “Used to?”

  Anna shrugged. “He liked Tommy. Don’t want nothing to do with us now. I got another hookup.”

  Another hookup. Another of a thousand odd details that had changed while Karyn was checked out of the real world. Sometimes she had the feeling she’d woken up in another world entirely, or, worse, that she’d never woken up at all. That this was all just debris dredged up from an increasingly out-of-touch—and morbid, apparently—mind. She almost wished that were true.

  “Sobell’s a go,” Anna asked. “We should get going.”

  “Look, about this ‘wiping out all the demons’ thing . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  Karyn held up her thumb. “I’m not sure what will happen to this guy when that happens, but I think I’ll want to get myself clear at that point. I’ve kind of gotten used to being back in the world, you know?”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “All right. You ready to go?” Karyn asked.

  “Yeah. If we can stop and grab a taco or something.”

  “I’ll buy.”

  The site Moreno and Abas had chosen was the church, Nuestra Señora de las
Misericordias, the same place Abas had been working at nights and sometimes robbing for parts, as Anna was quick to point out. It didn’t take long to get there, even with a side trip to get an afternoon snack. Nail’s car was parked out front, a couple of Locos nearby watching over it.

  “This can’t be a good idea,” Anna said as they approached the building. “Who holds demonic rituals in a church, of all places?” To Karyn’s surprise, she looked genuinely uneasy.

  “You’ve already been in there, right? You’re not going to explode or anything.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  Karyn laughed and held up her thumb, the black line of Amaimon’s splinter visible through the nail. “Wanna bet?”

  “Great,” Anna said, grinning. “We can explode together.”

  Karyn opened the tall front door, and adrenaline, the urge to flee, sent an electric bolt through her entire body as she saw what was inside the church. Anna didn’t move, though, and in a moment Karyn realized that the awful, disjointed scene before her was in her eyes, not her mind. It wasn’t real—not yet.

  “What?” Anna asked. “What did you see?”

  “Uh . . .” Lots of things, and it took a few moments of concentration to start pulling them apart into separate, coherent tableaus. “A war, it looks like,” she said. It was still hard to tell. There were gang members sporting at least three different sets of colors. Shots were fired, kids went down clutching holes in their bodies or screaming. Splinters flew from pews and railings. A shape formed of darkness and flame—surely representing Belial—loomed behind the altar, surrounded by a dozen or so creatures wrought from some grim, misbegotten interpretation of myth, half human and half animal—a satyr, a werewolf, other, much weirder things with clutching hands and tormented faces. The monsters quailed and shrank back from a blazing pillar of blue light in the nave. A bright counterpart to Belial’s darkness rose from the altar, sword cutting a shrieking swath through the air.