by John Levitt
“Are you all right, Mason?”
I nodded. “I think so. You?”
He gravely inclined his head. “I believe that I am.”
“What the hell just happened?” I asked.
Eli started to raise his hands to his head, forgetting his bad arm. He flinched and dropped it back to his side. With his other hand he started rubbing his forehead. Apparently I was not the only one with a headache.
“The demon,” he said. “A most devious entity. It was never its intention to tear off our heads. It didn’t need to. It just twisted our thoughts and emotions and we did the rest ourselves.”
“Boy, did we ever. But what happened? What made us stop?”
Victor gave a hoarse croak and gestured toward the table where the brazier had been burning. I stumbled over and immediately understood what had happened. At some point after the smoke had filled the room, Lou and Maggie had jumped up on the table and relieved themselves of every drop in their bladders, straight into the container, extinguishing the smouldering material. Lou had supplied most of the volume, but Maggie had provided that distinctive cat reek which first caught my attention. She had paid a price, though. Louie had just lifted his leg and aimed, but Maggie had needed to squat directly over the flames in order to douse them. The fur on the back of her haunches was singed and there were several places where the bare skin showed through, blistered and red. I hadn’t known she had it in her. She went up several notches in my estimation. Victor came over, picked her up gently, and looked closely at the burned spots.
“She’ll be okay,” he wheezed.
Eli walked up to him and started hesitantly to speak, obviously embarrassed. “Victor, about what I called you…”
“Prick? Believe me, I’ve been called worse.”
“Still, there’s no excuse…”
I interrupted. “If you want to apologize, Eli, how about saying you’re sorry for trying to kill him? And oh, by the way, he was trying to kill me at the time. And I was trying to kill you. So it all comes out even, really.”
“I just…”
“And if it makes you feel any better about what you said, you don’t want to know what I was thinking about you.” I shook my head. “I’m ashamed.”
Eli smiled, the first real smile I’d seen from him in days. “Oh, I think I might have some vague idea. Seriously, Mason, none of us are as evolved as we would like to think. Right below the surface lurk primitive emotions carried over from before we were even human. Survival mechanisms. Aggression toward rivals. Distrust of all that is not-me. That entity was created to bring out the fears and prejudices everyone has buried under their civilized veneer. We’re not really quite that vicious—those emotions were amplified and distorted in truly malevolent fashion, magnified by the smoke in the room. There’s your true black magic. A little magical enhancement, and voila—we’re at each others throats.” He glanced at Victor. “Literally.”
“It didn’t take much, did it?” I said, sadly. “By the way, Victor, what exactly was in your mind when you were trying to squeeze the life out of me?”
He shook his head and pointed at his throat, miming inability to vocalize. Yeah, sure. I turned my attention back to Eli.
“What about Harry Keller?” I asked.
“Clearly we misjudged him,” he said. “I think he summoned up something more than he could handle.”
“You think? No, I mean, where is he?”
Eli had started poking around in Harry’s cabinet, examining the items inside. “Right now I’m more concerned about where that demon might be,” he said, picking up what appeared to be a human skull. “If it dissipated, fine, but if it escaped the room it could cause real havoc on the outside.”
I tilted my head to listen. Outside, I thought I could hear the sound of distant voices raised in anger and confusion. Then, quite clearly, the sound of emergency sirens. We stared at each other.
“Not good,” I said, fighting the urge to say I told you so.
“This is our fault,” said Eli. “We need to do something about it before people get hurt. I don’t think the demon will be as potent out in the open air, but the average citizen won’t have even as much resistance to it as we did, which wasn’t much. It will be capable of some real mischief.”
I remembered the aspect of the demon, and shuddered. “And how do we go about that?”
“If we can find Harry Keller, he should be able to help us,” Eli said, putting down the skull he’d been examining.
“If we find him, I’ll kill him myself,” I said. “I’m not so sure he didn’t intend this all along.”
He hadn’t. At the bottom of the stairs he lay curled up quietly, as if asleep, except that his head was tilted at a bad angle. Without the smartass attitude, he looked a lot younger, almost a teenager. Perhaps the demon he’d summoned wasn’t restricted to psychic attacks. Or maybe he had fallen down the stairs in his panicked flight and broken his neck. There was no way to know, and I guess it didn’t matter to Harry now.
“My apologies,” I told him.
Victor bent down to examine him, although there wasn’t much doubt. He shook his head. “He’s not going to be any help to anyone,” he said.
When we walked outside, the sounds of shouting and police sirens were louder. I looked over toward the Mission District where the commotion was coming from. It had started raining lightly again, and it was too far away to see exactly what was happening, but I could just make out a dark, smokey swirl like a giant dust devil hovering over the streets.
We piled into Victor’s BMW, a better pursuit car than my rattletrap van, and sped off down the hill. It was easy to follow the trail; on every street corner people were fighting, throwing clumsy punches or wrestling ineffectively on the ground. It could have been much worse—not that many souls wander the streets of upper Potrero Hill at night. Those few who had been out walking were instantly caught up in madness, but the same blind rage that fueled their fights also dulled their intellect, keeping them from coolly considering the best way to kill each other.
Still, by the time we reached the Mission, there were plenty of people out and about, and in the Mission a good many individuals walk around with handguns as a matter of course, everything from Saturday night specials to Technines. Some of them might be clouded enough by rage to forget they were carrying guns, but not all. Already I could hear sporadic gunfire up ahead.
We swung down Valencia, and as we passed by a doorway on Nineteenth Street, a round fired and a neat starred hole appeared in the windshield. Victor cursed and punched the gas, getting out of harm’s way. I wasn’t sure if he was more upset at getting shot at or at having his beloved Beamer damaged. Everywhere, sirens blared and tires squealed as streams of black-and-whites started arriving. Victor pulled over to the curb to avoid them.
Now we had another problem. The cops were arriving in droves, and they would soon be affected by the demon, too. Cops are no strangers to the emotions of rage and fear—and what they do in those situations is to fall back on their training. And their training focuses on guns. And they all have guns. And the combination of blind rage and firearms is not a good one. Not only that, but if we got too close to the demon ourselves, that same madness would reinfect us and keep us from doing anything effective.
I peered down Valencia to Twenty-fourth Street, where most of the black-and-whites were now clustered. Around them, a miniriot surged. Trash cans hurtled through the air, scraps of lumber rose and fell as people brandished improvised clubs, the sound of angry screams and glass breaking echoed down the street. A mass of late-night commuters from the underground BART station at Twenty-fourth and Mission boiled up and joined in the festivities. Right above the chaos, swirling ominously, was the familiar black cloud. It grew larger and stronger by the second, spinning wildly, feeding off the emotional energy it evoked. The cops seemed oblivious to it, probably because they had more obvious problems right in front of them. Or maybe they couldn’t perceive it at all. Several of the co
ps were opening the trunks of their patrol cars to get at their riot guns and I heard the distinctive sounds of shotgun shells being racked into shotgun breeches. We had maybe a minute before guns started going off and blood started splattering.
I thought frantically. The demon was composed of smoke, so a strong wind might disperse it. I knew practitioners who had some control over weather, but unfortunately I wasn’t one of them. Besides, a wind might just drive it to some other part of the city to start all over again. I glanced over at Victor, who was staring intently, but he didn’t seem to be having any better luck with ideas than I was. Lou was sitting up, observing with curiously detached interest. Maggie appeared to be taking a nap and Eli was leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed. I hoped he was furiously calculating and hadn’t decided it was time for him to take a nap as well. I had just about resigned myself to the coming bloodbath when Eli’s eyes flew open.
“It’s a small tornado,” he said. This was not the brilliant insight I had been hoping for. He rushed on. “A tornado feeds off a rising column of air in the center. As the—”
For once it was Victor who interrupted the lecture on weather dynamics. “Eli!” he almost shouted. “Focus! We have no time.”
Eli stopped in midsentence and nodded. “The demon is feeding off energy, not moist air, but since it’s taken the form of a tornado it’s still dependent on physical laws. Interrupt the energy flow of the central column and it will collapse.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Hopefully it will lose cohesion and dissipate, or at least return to wherever it came from. Mason, can you construct some sort of shield?”
At last, something I was good at. I scrambled out of the car and cast around for something helpful. In winter months, a lot of umbrellas are carried against the ever-present threat of rain, and many of them were now lying scattered on the street where they had been dropped in mad haste. I used them as a strong template, gathered the concept of protection from the innumerable cops running around, and above all, fed off the energy running wild in the street. I threw it with all my force toward the bottom of the swirling black mass, about twenty feet above the street. The only problem was that I didn’t think I had the strength to hold it against the ever growing power of the demon. I mean, it was a tornado after all.
Victor, however, had no such doubts about his own ability. He spoke some words, raised his arms with sweeping theatrical gestures, and gathered power. Like I said, Victor presets a lot of his spells; it’s a very different way of practicing the art than mine, and a lot less flexible, but for accessing raw power it can’t be beat. He flung out his arms in a final grand gesture and power rolled off his fingertips into the shield I’d constructed.
It stopped the demon’s energy flow dead, as if a huge cover had capped an out-of-control oil gusher. The demon was too strong for us to contain it for long, but we didn’t have to. The instant the energy flow stopped, the tornado form collapsed. The rest of the demon wavered, then simply drifted apart, leaving only small clouds scudding along as if after a violent storm. The smoke drifted down and combined with the rain-slick streets, forming a thick oily sludge.
For a few moments, I thought we’d acted too late. The crowd had taken on a life of its own. People were surging forward, triggered by long standing grievances and frustrations that needed no supernatural influence to keep them alive. The cops still had their shotguns out, and for a tense moment it looked like no demon would be necessary for real disaster.
But for the cops, at least, training prevailed. San Francisco cops have their problems; some are a bit too badge heavy and it’s the only large department left in the country which promotes exclusively on seniority, with sometimes disastrous consequences. But the average cop, the cop on the beat, knows how to handle just about anything.
The shotguns went back into the trunks, the batons came out, the crowd control formations materialized out of nowhere. Police lines were formed, but instead of confronting the angry crowd en masse, the cops targeted only the most vocal troublemakers. They formed a solid cordon, shoulder to shoulder, with officers stationed behind it in groups of three. Whenever an angry crowd member got too close, the whole line stepped forward in unison, not attacking, but opening up instead. As soon as the cordon had stepped past the offending individual, it closed ranks again, neatly trapping him behind the line. The waiting groups of officers behind the line then snatched each one up and hustled him away to a waiting police wagon. The less excitable crowd members were easily diverted down side streets where, without any focus for their anger, they began to disperse. As soon as things were somewhat under control Victor motioned for us to get back in the car.
“Come on,” he said. “We need to go back to Harry Keller’s house.”
“What on God’s earth for?” I asked, forgetting that my van was still there.
Victor gave me his world-weary, do I have to explain everything look. “Mop up,” he said. “Do you really think we can just leave a dead body lying around for the police to find?”
“He fell down the stairs,” I protested. “It was an accident.”
“And the police will investigate. And they’ll talk to the neighbors. And they’ll find out there were several people visiting that night, a couple of strange cars, and, if I remember correctly, a lot of cursing and screaming about the time of the ‘accident.’”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Eli said.
“So we ‘mop up’? What does that mean?”
“Don’t worry,” said Victor. “I’ll take care of it. You just follow instructions.”
Following instructions isn’t my favorite thing, especially when they come from Victor, but this time I was happy to let him take the lead. We traveled the short distance back to Potrero Hill in silence. I gave a huge yawn; the digital clock on the dash read 11:50 p.m., but it felt more like four in the morning. I had the irrational fear that Harry’s body would be gone when we got there, either magically revived or spirited away by God knows what. But he was still where we had left him, crumpled at the foot of the stairs.
Lou sniffed at Harry’s remains and looked back toward me reproachfully, as if what happened had been my fault. Or maybe I was projecting. Victor bent over the body, but before he could do anything, the sound of the front door opening made us freeze. Hesitant steps echoed from the hallway. The hackles on Lou’s neck were raised and Maggie puffed up like a porcupine. I tensed up, but as soon as a figure appeared in the doorway I relaxed. I started breathing again, relieved but embarrassed to realize I had been holding my breath. It was Sherwood.
“Sherwood!” Eli exclaimed. “I was starting to worry about you. How on earth did you find us?”
“You should be worried,” Sherwood said, and then I was.
The voice was hers, but it wasn’t. Totally flat, uninflected, it seemed to come from a great distance. She wore an ordinary expression, but not any that I had ever seen on her face before. She wasn’t herself tonight, you might say. A priest would have had no problem understanding the situation. He would instantly denounce her as possessed, and that wouldn’t have been far off the mark.
“Well, well,” she said. “The triumvirate has gathered.”
I was too horrified to utter a word. Victor was surveying her, shaking his head in either disbelief or sorrow. Even Eli seemed fazed.
“Christoph,” he said. “It’s not possible.”
“Oh, but it is. You’d be amazed what’s possible to me now.”
Sherwood smiled without it changing her face in any way. She walked over toward me, and I scrambled out of the way as if a poisonous snake had just slithered into the room. I didn’t want her anywhere near me. In my haste I almost tripped over Lou, who was as eager to get away from her as I was. Then, as if the smile wasn’t creepy enough, she laughed, a flat, staccato heh-heh-heh-heh, a perverse parody of the old Beavis and Butt-head cartoons. She looked down at Harry’s body.
“Hmm,” she said. “That didn’t go as well as I�
�d hoped.”
“So he was working with you,” I said, unable to keep quiet.
“Well, he thought he was. But I guess this time he bit off more than he could chew.”
She walked into the living room and eased herself into one of the less bloody looking chairs, ignoring the way her skirt rode up almost to her waist. We trailed in after her, not wanting to, but unwilling to let her out of our sight.
“What’s the matter, boys?” she asked, humorless smile firmly in place.
Eli answered, which was just as well since I was too creeped out to respond coherently.
“How did you do this? And what have you done to her?” he said.
“Who, Sherwood?” The smile continued. “Nothing much. Just using her for a while.” She shook her head sadly. “Poor Sherwood. She really isn’t that bright, you know. A minor illusion was all it took.” Sherwood’s smile took on a mocking cast and she turned her head to address me. “One that even you could have managed, Mason. Your little doggie there, dragging his hind legs down the street and whimpering piteously. She came running out of Victor’s oh-so-safe house without a second thought.”
“What is it you want?” Eli asked, refusing to get drawn in.
“Want? Why, Mason, of course.” Sherwood pointed a slender finger at me and the smile disappeared from her face. “You have been nothing but trouble. You have no idea how much power it takes to fashion those gems. Or what I’ve had to go through to get them. And freeing those Ifrits—well, that was the last straw. If you’d taken the deal I offered at your house, none of us would have to be here.”
“What deal?” I asked. Christoph was making no sense.
