Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  “Get away from me, all right?” a familiar voice said. “I’m fine. I have literally never been better, I think. Fuck off, okay?”

  “Anna!” Karyn picked her way through the people toward where Anna was pushing away an EMT and struggling to sit up.

  “Jesus Christ, yes, I’m refusing treatment. Go away.” Anna gave the guy one last shove as Karyn reached them. “Help me up, would ya?” she said, extending a hand. She was soaking wet, her hair straggling across her face, dirt and grit stuck to her skin from exploding construction materials, her cheek striped with half a dozen tiny cuts, and a swath of hair burned off her head, but she was smiling like Karyn couldn’t remember ever having seen before. A huge, wide, toothy, goofy smile of such pure, childlike joy that Karyn’s own smile widened just to see it.

  She took Anna’s hand and pulled her up. “You good?”

  “Never better.”

  “The, uh, demon?”

  “Toast. Ashes.” Anna laughed. “Hell, particles. You would not believe the shit that went down in here.”

  Karyn scanned the room. There were still a bunch of the guys from the church steps here, though none gave her a second glance as they nursed their individual wounds. “And these guys?”

  “Don’t know,” Anna said with a shrug, “but I bet they’re as clean as they day they were born.”

  “The angel . . . ?”

  “I . . .” Anna blew through her lips. “I don’t know what that thing was. But I will tell you it ate a dozen or so demons for breakfast, and it was still plenty hungry afterward. Look, I’ll fill you in later, okay,” she said, with a fearful glance back toward the tarp. “Away from here.”

  “Just one thing—Elliot said they didn’t get Belial. Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really see at the time. I did see them put his severed arm in a bag before the tarp went up. Nail and Gen?”

  “They’re fine. Everybody’s fine. It’s a miracle, actually.”

  Anna’s smile faded, her face clouded over for a moment. “Let’s not talk miracles, huh? I just had about all of miracles I care to have, and I hope to—somebody—I never need to have another one.”

  * * *

  Anna went with Karyn outside, still smiling. It was a hot, shitty night, and she was wet and bruised and cut up, but no incipient rage simmered in her mind. She didn’t feel like eating a pound of raw ground beef with her bare hands. No strange drawings hovered behind her eyelids. It was the first moment she could remember feeling genuinely good, with no trace of anxiety or trepidation, in months.

  Genevieve and Nail stood outside the cordon that the feds had set up, leaning against each other, each using the other as a bulwark against exhaustion. “Anna!” Genevieve shouted.

  Anna went over, Karyn still by her side. A woman in an FBI jacket glared at them both. Whatever.

  “You putting the moves on my woman?” Anna asked Nail.

  “What? Fuck no. She got spooky powers. I get her mad, she’ll make my junk fall off or something.” He gave Genevieve a light push as she rolled her eyes.

  “Everything cool?” Genevieve asked.

  “Cool enough,” Anna answered, and she pulled Genevieve close to her.

  The fed cleared her throat. “Special Agent Elliot says we’re going to need all four of you for questioning.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Anna said.

  “Hey!” A woman’s voice, angry. Anna turned to see the source. Freak stood a dozen feet away, close to one of the ambulances. A bruise swelled under her eye, and she balanced on the balls of her feet as if she was ready to throw down. “Don’t fuckin’ come back here. You ain’t welcome here no more.”

  It was only for a second, but an unearthly blue shone in her eyes. Anna looked around for a blue light, but the ambulances were flashing red and white. There was nothing of that color anywhere. “Freak?”

  “Yeah?”

  She searched for that light again, wondering if it had been a trick of her own overtaxed mind. This time, she saw nothing but anger shining from Freak’s brown eyes. “Nothing. Be cool, huh?”

  “I mean it,” Freak said.

  * * *

  Sobell came to in an ambulance. Somebody bustled above his head, Special Agent Elliot knelt to his left, and he had been strapped with various unrecognizable devices. The siren wasn’t on, so he supposed he wasn’t dying.

  “How are you feeling?” Elliot asked. He moved to sit, and his hand came up short against handcuffs.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “Where are we going?”

  “According to the paramedics, you’re stable and healthy, which means . . .” She paused and gave him one of the slimiest, most hateful grins he’d ever seen. “You’re going to jail.”

  “I see.” Stable and healthy? He did a quick inventory of his body. Toes moved. Fingers, too. He winced out of habit as he moved one of his legs, expecting a twinge in the knee, and then stopped wincing with surprise as the leg moved smoothly. No pain. Same with the other leg. His hands, he realized, no longer shook.

  Oh, my dear, are you in for an unpleasant surprise.

  He reached for a short spell he knew. No diagram required, merely a concentrated sequence of thought followed by a short incantation. The cuffs would fall away, and then, perhaps, he could make a break for it.

  The spell was . . . gone. He reached for it, and it wasn’t there. Like going up a flight of stairs in the dark, taking a step toward the final stair, and finding that you were already there. No step at all, just a sudden jolt up your leg and spine as you fell forward and clutched the rail to keep from falling.

  The words were gone. Even the thoughts were gone. The angel had healed him, but it had also completely severed him from what had been the source of his power for centuries.

  He let his head drop back to the stretcher, mind flailing for purchase as his entire sense of direction was kicked spinning.

  “I need to call my attorney,” he said.

  “Yes. I imagine you do.”

  Chapter 30

  Karyn sat and contemplated the couch in the new apartment. It was a hell of a thing, that couch. Not fancy by any stretch but clean and new and a calming shade of blue. From her chair in the alcove where she and Anna had put the card table, it looked nice against the soft gray carpet. A couch. They had, very occasionally, owned couches in the past. Never new ones, though, and on two occasions just furniture hauled up from where somebody’d left it on the curb.

  “That is a damn fine couch,” Anna said. She’d just come from her room and picked her jacket up off a barstool.

  “I was just admiring it.” They didn’t have to say more. For years, there had been the agreement that furniture would be kept to a minimum—less stuff to pack or throw away when they inevitably had to move. It was no less inevitable this time, Karyn thought, but different. Anna had spent money like water during the time Karyn was out of it, but together the two of them were still sitting on over three hundred grand. Not enough to retire on, but enough that, if they did end up abandoning the place in a year or two, Karyn wouldn’t mind having blown eight hundred bucks on the couch.

  “Elliot called,” Karyn said. “Sobell’s in custody. He claims he will be ‘mounting a vigorous defense.’”

  “About what I’d expect. She still want us to testify?”

  “Yeah, but she thinks she can nail him without it.”

  Anna shrugged on the jacket and started putting on her boots. “She’d better. We’ve been through too much shit to risk having some contract guy whack us in the parking lot.”

  Karyn nodded.

  “How’s your head?” Anna asked. “All the . . . you know.”

  “It’s okay. Getting a handle on it.” Karyn sipped water, swallowed, put the cup down. “Hey, uh, it’s not a problem we need to worry about today, but I don’t want to rely on this demon
forever. I don’t like it, and I don’t trust it.”

  The room image in her mind vanished, replaced by a gigantic close-up of a pouting clown face. Karyn shuddered, and it vanished.

  Anna smoothed her jeans down over her boots. “We’ll get on it. It’ll be a lot easier without running odd jobs for Sobell and trying to avoid mobs of demons and shit like that.” She walked closer, pausing at the place where the carpet gave way to linoleum. “I was thinking I’d head over to Genevieve’s. Spend the night, probably. You gonna be all right?”

  Karyn smiled. “Yeah. Nail’s coming over. We’ll play cards and talk about you and Gen behind your backs. Apparently, that guy Clarence wants nothing more to do with him or his brother, so he’s got a roll of cash burning a hole in his pocket. He’s going to leave here penniless.”

  “No cheating,” Anna said. She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “I think things are gonna get better now. I really do.”

  Karyn studied Anna’s face. Anna still wasn’t sleeping much, and Karyn sometimes heard her cry out in the night, but the purple blotches under her eyes had diminished, and the sharp edge of her jumpy, birdlike anxiety had been blunted. Maybe things were actually getting better. “Yeah. I think so, too.”

  “Don’t wait up,” Anna said, and she left.

  Karyn tapped her fingers on the table, and she thought about what that word meant—better. There were still ridiculous quantities of things to worry about. Sobell was the least of them. Karyn still had a demon in her head. Still had visions. Belial had vanished. Nobody knew how or to where, but odds were that he hadn’t retired to the country to plant flowers. Somehow, though, she still felt that Anna had been right, that they’d pulled out of the terrible spiral they’d been in. Things would get better.

  For the first time in over a decade, Karyn thought of the future, and she was not afraid.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jamie Schultz is the author of the Arcane Underworld novels, including Splintered and Premonitions. He has worked as a rocket engine test engineer, an environmental consultant, a technical writer, and a construction worker, among other things. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

  CONNECT ONLINE

  jamieschultz.net

  twitter.com/jamiedschultz

  Looking for more?

  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

  Discover your next great read!