“Robyn, baby. Who do you want to shut up? No-one’s speaking.” Mika held a hand out to her, still vaguely patchy in burnt spots but not enough for anyone to notice. Why had he burnt himself on purpose then, and why did he find it so easy to forget it now. Everything he did faded in time.
Robyn refused his hand, not deliberately ignoring him, but more not seeing him. She stood a few inches away from one of the walls, a large section of whitewashed plywood with no computers or other equipment cluttering the white space, and held her fingers hover above it, shaking slightly as though with nerves.
“What are you doing?” asked Carly.
“Don’t you hear it? Doesn’t it whisper to you?”
Carly was confused but that was nothing new. None of her senses and reflexes could even compare to hers, but even Mika, a fellow demon, looked almost bewildered. This, in turn, was no new experience to him as his lady was much more sensitive than him. But both remained curious at her actions and simply looked at her in puzzlement, with one questioning eyebrow slightly raised.
“Don’t you hear it?” she whispered. “You can feel it… humming in anticipation. The room. It’s alive.”
“The room is alive?” The shaman sounded doubtful. “This computer centre is a living, breathing thing? Yeah, and the prize for most wacko statement goes to…”
“Don’t you dare call my Robyn a wacko,” snarled Mika, just stopping himself short of lunging at him. “She may not be the most stable one around, but that’s just the way I like her.” He smiled at Robyn, but she didn’t see, and he grinned at Carly.
“Word of warning,” Carly told the shaman. “Those memories you planted in his head made him very emotional. Now is really not the time to make him angry… unless you want me to witness your gruesome death.” She’d really seen way too many untimely demises over the past week, demon and human. “And what about you, Andy? You look kinda scared.” It nearly made her giggle to use such a familiar yet teasing voice on him. Before Ricky had died, there was no way she would have had the nerve to lead this type of conversation with people who had once been her superiors, but now there was no-one else who would protect her and do things for her.
“Observation. That was part of what I taught you.”
“No, this isn’t really observation. It’s more the big petrified waves coming off you. In fact, I’m surprised Mika hasn’t commented on how the smell of fear makes blood so much more tempting.” If it was simply a scare tactic used to drive him into the next stage of panic, it worked.
“I swear I don’t know what you need to do to stop it. We didn’t think about there being a need to stop it, so we didn’t research it.”
“He’s babbling. I tend to hurt people who babble,” Mika threatened.
Carly shook her head at him. “I can’t remember disking anything about how to stop it. Sorry. If I knew, I’d say but… unless they looked into it after you caught me.”
“This does not bode well for our hostages.” He glared in turn at the three mortals, dismissing the girl out of hand. Carly seemed like a long-lost part of his tiny family and he could not imagine losing her. Demons were not supposed to feel that way about humans, were they? However, Andrew and the shaman were nothing to him.
“Hostages?” whispered Andrew.
“Hostage. Person held captive and/or against their will,” the shaman supplied. He would have thought a university professor knew the definition, and took comfort in the fact that he was able to retain his composure. The protective rock still hung heavy around his neck, hiding his unusual dress from the others. Why he still felt it necessary to wear it was a mystery to all, but something told him that it could hide more than what he wore. If ever there was a time to take a theory on pure faith, it was now – after all this was their last chance.
Suddenly there was a loud bang that made them all jump, followed by the sound of crumbling plaster. They looked immediately to Robyn who was completing a roughly executed roundhouse kick. After the falling plaster had settled on the floor, they all peered through the large hole in the wall, waving their hands in front of their faces to clear the air of dust that stick filled the air. The room she had opened them to was dark but for a globe of light that stood atop a real earth globe, hovering aabout a foot above it by some unseen means. This was where the big stuff took place, the ritual bits. Mika balled a fist and began to punch his way through the wall, making a hole large enough for a person to step through.
“The Crash Room’s just the cover,” he realised. “We spent all that time in there, worrying about what to do. When we should have been in here all along.” Mika squinted his eyes and turned on the shaman with an animalistic growl. “I hate it when people hide things from me.”
The shaman shrugged and stepped through the gaggle of mortals and immortals.
“Hey!” Carly reached for him but he slipped through her grip on his arm. It was times such as this that she longed for the superhumanly fast healing Mika and Robyn went through – just without the worrying demonic status. Her hurt shoulder hadn’t been painful enough for her to notice whilst she had not been excessively moving it but now that she stretched it so quickly and further than usual, a fresh bout of pain washed over her. New tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and shone brightly against her sewer-grimed face.
The shaman turned round to them and opened his arms out to them, inviting them through. “It’s perfectly safe.”
Cautiously, the other four entered the tiny room and left the white Crash Room behind them. For some reason they couldn’t figure out, Robyn seemed as reluctant to go through as Andrew. Carly would have thought the typically feisty redhead would have been one of the first through but she seemed to be sensing danger in the room. Inside, the shaman set down one of the candles he had been keeping in his pocket and lit a flame with a suitably human match. “Want to see what you’re doing, I take it.”
“We can see alright.” Demons apparently nearly always had the ability to soo in the dark. Maybe they were better than humans in the sense that all their reflexes and abilities were 100% - probably more – improved, but the part about living off human blood brought them right back down to their level.
“He was thinking about us mere mortals,” shot back the professor, an edge of bitterness creeping into his voice. Sure, he was scared of them – he’d read in books what damage the Old Ones were capable of. It didn’t mean he couldn’t be angry though.
No-one noticed as the shaman sat cross-legged behind the single candle and began a low chant. They could see what he was doing but it didn’t seem important enough to ask about it. Carly tentatively worked her shoulder joint round and round, grimacing when pain lightning bolted along her arm. Her old professor stared at her in wonder, pondering the question of exactly when it was that she had grown up so much, for it had certainly not been while she was in his charge. She wasn’t any older than she had been back then, not really, but her face told a different story. A story of far too much tragedy in a young girls’ life.
“My life? Try the last week,” she mumbled through gritted teeth. She frowned at him. “That was weird.”
“Weird. Is that what you call it? We call it magick,” sang Robyn. She didn’t seem tired at all, even though she had crouched down on the floor, her back to the wall. Willed away, her old wounds were fast fading. “What’s the point of living without the magick? Something you can’t explain but somehow makes everything alright.”
“Robyn!” snapped Mika. He held up his hand to signal for them to be quiet. “Do you hear something? Low, like a humming noise.”
She giggled and drifted over to the globe in the middle of the room. It was not plugged into anything but the orb seemed to glow brightly. Carly hitched up her jeans and stared at it. Where was the light coming from? This had tp be the big thing that controlled it, the statue that represented the Plan. “I’ve never seen this room before. I o
nly knew about the Crash Room.” Carly looked sideways at her ex-tutor with her eyebrows raised. She’d bet money that he knew about this. “You know, though.”
“Yes, I did know about this room. This was where the important stuff happened. The globe is the world and the orb of light is the sun. it means the ritual is nearing completion, the brighter it gets. But I don’t know how to shut it down,” he half-lied. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“I used to respect you… Andy. I looked up to you. I thought everything you did was right. You taught me lessons, but I was the only one who learned anything. You’re just a misguided, self-righteous git.” How she had managed to stay so calm, and keep her voice so even, she would never know. Maybe the fear and doubt on his face had contributed something to her effort, but maybe her time with Mika and Robyn had taught her something. “See, these two might be evil. And they’re demons, which probably doesn’t fill anyone with confidence, but whatever they are, at least they have morals… however twisted.”
As the old professor and student carried on their blunt conversation at one side of the room, Mika was about to initiate his own. For a while, he had been staring at the shaman. The stone he wore had draped some kind of veil over his activities. He could see the blanket fogging the vision in his head. Unbeknownst to the shaman the memories Mika had been experiencing had left his mind just out of place enough to see through the veil. The shaman carried on chanting, utterly oblivious to the approach. Mika called out to Robyn using his mind, not wanting to draw attention to himself, and she followed his line of sight to the shaman. She smiled and wandered over, knowing what he was thinking.
The shaman looked up and saw the two demons crouching before him, with something akin to murderous intent glinting in their eyes. He stammered and stopped chanting. His cloaking stone hadn’t worked. Why hadn’t it worked?
“When we kill regular people, they usually stay dead – unless we really, really like them,” Mika began in a conspiratorial whisper. “But you’re supernatural.”
“And we really don’t like you.”
“So, now I’m wondering what would happen if we killed you. And we’d really love to find out, wouldn’t we baby?”
“Mmmmm. Maybe he’ll grow another head like a wormie worm.” Robyn leaned over and ran her hand roughly through Mika’s short dark hair, making this affectionate gesture seem like a form of torture by the twisted grin she wore while pulling his hea back. She stared at her lover with eyes that flashed gold when he growled at her.
“You growl?” the shaman blurted out in shock. He was not surprised or taken aback by this but he just hadn’t expected to hear it. “I heard you growl.”
“Your point being?” Mika shoved Robyn off him and sat back up. Robyn huffed in disappointment – she’d hoped to play a lovely game with him, but maybe they could play it together with the shaman. She got to her knees and shuffled back over and slid her arm through his.
“Crap. You can see can’t you?”
“We see everything. Specially my Robyn here. She sees what people are hiding, what’s inside people. And if she sees things, she knows things. She was always good with those kind of things.” Mika plucked the lit candle from where it stood in its’ pool of melted and hardened wax, and sat playing thoughtfully with it. He did not blow the flame out, or burn himself with it. “But, I saw this time. My head isn’t right yet from those memories I should never have felt. And that means that I can see behind things now.”
“What are you gonna do with that candle?”
“Carly…”
“Don’t Carly me. You shouldn’t even have the right to say my name. not so long ago, I thought you could do no wrong, how stupid was I?” How could he have changed so much in such a short space of time? “I know about pain, I’ve seen enough of it lately, but this hurts too. I’ve known you since I was 17, but you’re a stranger now. My tutor with the strong morals and… all that bull.” She couldn’t stop herself from letting out a small chuckle. “There’s nothing left of him now, is there?”
“I know what’s right and wrong.” Andrew was not quite sold on that himself. “This is wrong, I see that. But it’s always been wrong. We’re trying to make the world right again.”
“You’re - you know what, never mind.” Carly held one hand on her stomach to stop herself from moving it and tucked her grimy hair behind her ears with the other. It fell back over her face almost immediately as she ran the few steps to Robyn and grabbed hold of her arm. Instinctively, she reached up and gripped the hand ready to crush bone, but checked herself just in time.
“Robyn,” she gasped, trying hard to wrench her eyes away from the scene before her where Mika was taking great pleasure at using the candle to burn and peel the skin off the shaman. “We’re seriously running out of time here. We need to shut this thing down.”
“But we haven’t found out how to do it yet. Mika’s beginning his interrogation.”
This was an interrogation? Why didn’t they just use thumb screws and the rack and have done with it? The shaman hadn’t made a sound yet and Carly had to give him credit for that. “We haven’t got the time for him to decide he wants to talk. He’s not giving us anything. I think we’ve gotta figure this out for ourselves.”
Of course it hurt. It was nothing the shaman couldn’t handle though. He’d been through much worse in his time. Burning him and stripping the broken skin wasn’t particularly inventive of Mika but the pleasure he took in doing it was certainly new, if not refreshing. And the practice had not been used before in such a setting, nor ever by such creatures. He was coming to the conclusions that the speciality of these two demons was not the simple hunt, feed, kill motive of many others, but mortal torture. They were unlike many other demons he had read about in the fact that they genuinely had the ability to love, and because they didn’t let themselves get taken away by their animal instincts. No, they thought about things, and schemed. And they were more dangerous for it.
He wondered if anyone in the room knew why he had only created barriers against Mika and Robyn stopping it, but he could see a depth in Mika’s eyes that said he knew. Even though it would kill them to do it personally, they were reported to be the only two Earth-bound demons tough enough, and smart enough, to stop the ritual from coming to completion. So, he had created the terrorvision images for Mika, Banked on Robyn getting carried away with her fantasies, put Haven spells up to protect his home. And that should have been enough to keep them well away from the site. He hadn’t banked on humans coming too.
Robyn and the other girl were standing to the side of them talking heatedly about how to shut this thing down. If it didn’t hurt so much to move and crack his blistering skin, he would have laughed at them.
“I know you know what to do!” Mika snarled, getting to his feet and dropping the candle to the floor. The flame burnt for a few more seconds before fizzling out on the cold cement. The shaman refused to reply and just lay there, watching the girls talk. The professor looked from the shaman to the trio to the statue and back again. He was too scared to move and to be honest, no-one would have noticed if he wasn’t there.
“What’s wrong with him?” Carly nodded at the shaman lying stiff on the ground, but soon realised she didn’t actually care. He wasn’t going to say anything useful so it didn’t really matter. It didn’t really matter what happened to Andrew for that matter, but he might have his uses.
“I think he got sleepy.”
“I think you put him in a coma.”
“Not intentionally,” he defended himself. “Okay, intentionally but he’s still conscious. Probably.” Ah, he was getting back to his old self now. The most vicious of his kind – after Robyn, of course – was back in business, or would be when this was over. “Oh, who cares?” Robyn remained mesmerised by the orb of light that came from no visible source, and Carly gave some semblance of a shrug. Andrew
couldn’t help but stare at the stiff form on the ground in horror, and wondered how anyone could torture some-one so and leave them so close to death without feeling anything. But, of course, the shaman was not as badly hurt as he was making out, though he was too injured to speak out.
Seeing his look, Mika put his arm casually round his shoulders in faux friendship. “That’s nothing, mate. You should see me in full swing.”
“I’m not your mate. And I’d rather you didn’t touch me.” He shrugged Mika’s hand away and stepped back. “You people disgust me!”
“Uh, point.” Without looking back. Carly raised a finger and spoke. “They’re not exactly people. I guess you didn’t need to be reminded of that.” So, naturally he had an aversion to demons, the way most humans did, but he’d thought it was fine and dandy to bring them down to destroy the world? That was some kind of screwed. She shook her head and made a noise with her mouth that said ‘why the hell am I talking to you?’ Just a few short months ago when she was working here, Carly would never have dared to be so dismissive of her old professor. Maybe her week with Mika, Robyn, and for a short time, Johnny, had hardened her to the outside. It might have been as simple as she didn’t need to care any more.
Robyn reached out a hand and held it in the pool of light that the ball threw out. “It’s warm,” she informed them.
Already the cogs were turning in Carly’s brain. The process of thought was written into her dirty, too old face. “This is a solar representation, right? I mean, the light gets stronger like the sun and the globe is the Earth as it gets covered by the sun.” Carly wondered over and planted one foot on the shamans’ chest. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” he breathed. Her foot was putting enough pressure onto his chest that it was getting difficult to breathe. But the girl was mortal, human, so why did she not appear to show any remorse. Carly was wondering that herself. “You’re right.”
Twisted Evil Page 32
