McCoy unscrewed the cap from the bottle he was holding.
“How could I do that, Cynthia?” Baracheck asked. “I’ve been looking for you for seventeen years. Seventeen years. Do you think I could just walk away now?”
For a moment, Cynthia’s stern expression faltered. In that split second, she was a little girl again, lost and alone and longing for her father. “Go home!” she yelled, almost pleading. “I don’t want to see you get hurt!”
Now.
McCoy turned and splashed the holy water in Kenner’s face. The small man howled as the consecrated liquid burned into his flesh, and he dropped to his knees and clawed at the burning skin. Everyone had been focused on the exchange between Baracheck and Cynthia, but now they turned to regard Kenner with puzzled looks.
“Ostendo vestri!” McCoy whispered, loud enough for Kenner to hear but too faint for anyone else to make out.
The demon gave a wail of pain and fury and tore itself from Kenner’s body. As it had before, it assumed the fearsome canine-like visage. Amanda and Deidre gave startled cries. Big John’s eyes grew to the size of soup bowls.
“Subsisto!” McCoy hissed. Remain. The word effectively bound the entity, preventing it from escaping to another plane.
The demon rose to its towering full height and glared at McCoy. It threw back its head and uttered and unearthly howl.
“Enjoying your ringside seat to my demise?” McCoy whispered. Before the demon could respond, McCoy ducked behind Baracheck, who was still holding the shotgun in one hand. “Holy God! Shoot that thing, Dave!”
Baracheck, as stunned as the others over the demon’s sudden appearance, nonetheless raised the firearm and blasted a round at the evil entity. Since demons are not particularly susceptible to iron , this served only to piss the entity off. It swung a massive, clawed hand at Baracheck. McCoy, ready for the move, grabbed the back of Baracheck’s shirt and pulled. The demon’s swipe missed Baracheck by inches, and the startled man tumbled to the ground.
From her vantage point, Cynthia saw the demon materialize. She had never seen such a creature before, but she knew that it was not Fey. She watched as the cowardly Hoodoo man ducked behind her father, saw her father fire at the beast, and looked on in horror as the monster struck her father down.
“Daddy!” she screamed. She looked to her minions and pointed to the demon. “Attack! Kill!”
The Sluagh responded fiercely, partly because their Queen had ordered it, but also because they saw this newcomer as a threat to their newfound position in the Fey hierarchy. They swarmed the surprised demon, literally climbing over each other in an attempt to latch onto a body part and sink their sharp teeth into the fiend’s flesh. The demon, trapped in a corporeal form, was vulnerable to their attacks.
Vulnerable or not, the entity was far from defenseless. While the Sluagh were technically Fey, their grotesque little bodies housed mortal souls, and this made them fair game for the flailing demon. With an otherworldly wail, the fiend released a circle of hellfire. All of the Sluagh within a five foot radius fell to the ground, their fragile souls shattered and their bodies, which had reverted back to their human forms, burnt beyond recognition. Unfortunately for the demon, three dozen more Sluagh surged forth to take the place of their fallen comrades.
As the battle raged, McCoy helped Baracheck to his feet and assayed the man for any damage.
“I’m okay,” Baracheck assured him. He looked in awe at the demon. “What the hell is that thing?”
“Exactly,” McCoy answered. “Hell being the operative word.” He picked up the shotgun and tossed it to John, who barely tore his eyes away from the spectacle before him long enough to catch it.
“Get ready,” McCoy said. “There are hundreds of Sluagh, and only one little demon. We’re still gonna have a fight on our hands.”
Amanda walked over and hit McCoy in the arm. It was not a love lick.
“The next time you come up with some half-baked plan,” she said, “how about a little advance warning? I nearly peed my pants when that thing showed up.”
“Be mad at me later. Right now, help me with those trash bags.”
They each grabbed a bag. Amanda let out a surprised gasp and nearly dropped hers.
“Something’s moving in there!” she hissed at McCoy.
He nodded. “We’re close now. They can sense the Sluagh.”
“What can sense the Sluagh?”
“The poppets. Hold on tight. Don’t let any of them out. Not just yet.”
“Let them out? They’re little dolls made out of grass.”
“Keep telling yourself that. Any minute now Cynthia is going to realize she’s been tricked. When I tell you to, dump the poppets out. Not before. Once that’s done, grab a gun and stay close to me.”
“You’re a hell of a date, Finn McCoy.”
“I bet you tell all the handlers that.”
Amanda looked genuinely surprised.
“There are others?” she asked.
***
With a greater relief than she would have expected, Cynthia saw that her father was unharmed. She almost ran to him, but then she remembered her place and stood her ground.
Returning her attention to the battle before her, she saw that her forces were gaining the upper hand. The monster’s retaliatory strikes were becoming weaker and less frequent. Still, she had lost dozens, and would perhaps lose dozens more before victory was theirs. She felt no remorse for the fallen Sluagh; in truth, she loathed them nearly as much as the people of the town. But at least they had not rejected her, and had, in fact, made her their Queen. That gesture alone placed them a few rungs higher on the ladder than the cold, heartless townspeople.
She glanced at her father again. She could have sworn that he had been struck by the monster, the way he had fallen when it had swung at him. Perhaps he had taken a lucky fall at just the right moment.
Or perhaps the Hoodoo man had jerked her father out of the way. Why would he do that, when he had been cringing so cowardly behind her father only moments before?
Her eyes began to dart back and forth between her father, the Hoodoo man, and the monster.
It had been a trick. It had all been planned. She had fallen for it as blindly as the little girl she’d been when the Sluagh had taken her away. And now she was depleting her forces on a senseless attack while the Hoodoo man sat idly by and watched.
With a cry of fury, Cynthia began to sprint toward the Hoodoo man and his group, her plans for the town and even concern for her father’s safety temporarily forgotten. The remaining Sluagh who were not actively involved in fighting the demon raced behind her, bloodlust tingeing their bulging black eyes.
***
“Now!” McCoy shouted, and he and Amanda dumped the poppets onto the dew-covered ground. As soon as they were free of the bags, the little dolls began to shake and squirm as if the earth beneath them were trembling violently.
“Time for some magic,” McCoy said.
“I really can’t take much more,” Deidre said as she stared at the dolls. “I’ve seen more in the past few hours than I ever wanted to.”
“Stay focused,” John told her, but he was also watching the poppets with an uneasy eye.
As the Sluagh charged closer, the poppets’ movements increased dramatically. They began to mutate, their brittle little bodies growing and elongating. Grass and straw was replaced with skin and fur. The heads, featureless except for two black stones which served as eyes, began to grow snouts and mouths with tiny, razor-sharp teeth. By the time the Sluagh had crossed half the distance to the group, the poppets had morphed into creatures which resembled small but extremely vicious and pissed-off baboons.
“I dreamt about this,” Baracheck said. His voice sounded faraway, and his eyes had a vacant look as he gazed upon the things he had come to know as grass monkeys. “I saw them changing in my sleep.”
“Earth to Dave,” McCoy said urgently. “You need to get back here, right now. There’s no guarant
ee that Cynthia will be able to protect you during this.”
Baracheck shook his head as if coming out of a deep slumber. He looked at McCoy and nodded.
Almost as a single entity, the poppet/monkeys charged the oncoming Sluagh onslaught. The front of the Sluagh line slowed as the fairies recognized the fray’s new combatants; they had not been prepared to face this ancient magic. Some of them actually stopped, but the majority of the horde kept coming, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm as before.
“How did you do that?” John asked McCoy. “How did you make them change?”
“I didn’t. The magic was in the poppets themselves. Whoever made them put it there.”
“Dalton said she was Native American,” Baracheck said as he watched the spectacle with amazement. “Cherokee, I think.”
“That would make sense,” McCoy agreed. “Native American magic is based on elemental nature. They probably started making these things centuries ago.”
Cynthia saw the monkeys coming, but it was too late to do anything about it. For a brief moment, she remembered playing with a similar doll as a child. But her mother had thrown it away, and the Sluagh had come for her soon after. When they had taken her from her room, her mother had been there, but she had done nothing to try to save Cynthia. She had just sat there on the bed, as still as a mannequin, and done nothing.
Her dear father had tried to save her, but he had been too late. He had never given up on her, though. He had scoured the woods and forests all these years, searching for her, never giving up hope.
Was this how she was going to repay him?
Cynthia faltered, then slowed, then came to a stop. She stood looking at her father, saw the age in his face, the way his posture stooped more than she remembered, and she wondered what she was doing. Throughout all she’d been through, there had been someone who had never stopped loving her and whose only wish was to have her back in his life. She could have gone to him many times, but she’d been so blinded by hatred that she had failed to see the only avenue that mattered, that made any sense at all.
Suddenly, with the force of an avalanche, Cynthia wanted her Daddy. She wanted the madness to be over, wanted nothing except to be held in his protective arms, to let him stroke her hair and tell her everything was going to be all right.
But now she had put him in danger. She needed to get to him, to stand beside him and protect him from any member of the horde which might try to attack him.
“Daddy!” she yelled, and took off at a sprint just as the Sluagh and the magical poppets collided in a frenzied mass of shrill cries and gnashing teeth.
***
Unnoticed by the humans, who were now watching the battle between the Sluagh and the poppets, the demon had silently gained the upper hand in its own battle. With the majority of the horde now engaged on the other front, the entity was able to slay enough of its foes to gain some breathing room. It was hurt, yes, but it was far from being vanquished. It also found renewed strength in the one task that it wanted to perform before McCoy banished it back to its own plane.
It wanted to kill the bitch that had sicced the bloody fairies on it.
The fiend knew that it had no hope of hurting McCoy, not in its present weakened state. The man had too much magical protection. If it had been stronger, perhaps, but even then the outcome would be questionable. The girl, however, possessed no special protection at all. Since escape was not an option thanks to McCoy’s binding spell, the demon could at least relish in one final kill before it was banished.
It fried the last of its attackers with one final, powerful burst of hellfire. Its magic was nearly spent, but that would not matter now. It still owned a powerful body with sharp teeth and nasty claws, and it had just enough energy to close the distance on the girl and rip her to shreds.
The girl was presently running toward McCoy’s group, a worried expression on her face. Apparently, she had undergone a change of heart and now wished to join the other humans. That was too bad.
She would never make it.
The demon smiled and launched itself at the unsuspecting girl.
***
McCoy watched the pitched battle between the Sluagh and the poppets with only slightly less awe than the others. He had seen a lot during his lifetime, but this was definitely a first. The monkeys were outnumbered about two to one, but their magical origins and aggressive fighting style made them more than a match for the evil fairies.
Still, the numbers were on the side of the Sluagh. They would probably overwhelm the poppets at some point, but McCoy was hoping that their ranks would be decimated enough to allow he and the others to finish the job with their iron-loaded firearms. Between the poppets and the demon, the ranks of the Sluagh had dwindled enough that McCoy was fairly certain they would have little trouble disposing of the remaining fairies.
As he thought of the demon, he glanced in the direction of the other battle to see how it was progressing. To his surprise, he saw that the demon had vanquished its Sluagh attackers and was now moving quickly across the field. His eyes followed the entity’s projected path and he was even more surprised to see Cynthia running toward them. At first, he thought that she was on the attack, but then he saw that her attention was on her father, and he saw the fear and concern on her face.
Something had snapped within her, and now she was just a frightened young woman running to the aid of her father.
Unfortunately, she was also about to become breakfast for a maddened demon.
Uttering a silent curse, McCoy dropped his walking stick and raced to intercept the rapidly advancing fiend.
Chapter Fourteen
Amanda saw McCoy take off at a sprint out of the corner of her eye. She turned and saw him, Cynthia, and the demon. It took her only a second to realize what was happening.
“Finn!” she screamed. “No!”
McCoy paid her no heed. He raced toward the demon, which was only moments away from reaching the girl. Cynthia, her attention fixated on her father, had not even realized the danger she was in.
Baracheck, alerted by Amanda’s scream, turned and saw what was happening.
“Cynthie!” he yelled. “Cynthie, look out!”
Cynthia heard her father shout and followed his gaze. At first, she saw the Hoodoo man racing toward her and thought that he meant to intercept her, but then she turned her head a little further and saw a massive shape closing in. Startled, she tripped and went sprawling to the ground just as the demon lunged at her.
The demon saw her go down, but it was already committed, in mid-flight. Trapped as it was in its corporeal form, it had no choice but to follow the laws of physics. It knew it was going to miss on the first pass, but that would be all right. It could turn as it landed and be upon her before she had a chance to get back to her feet.
Even as the demon thought this, something slammed into it, changing its trajectory and plowing it into the ground. The entity turned its head to see McCoy, winded but irate, scrambling to get on top of it.
“McCoy!” the demon growled, enraged to see that the bane of its earthly existence was trying to step between it and its prey. The demon had thought earlier that it had little chance of beating McCoy because it had assumed the man would never allow it to get close enough for a physical attack. Now that the two were grappling in close quarters, however, all bets were off.
The entity snapped its head forward in an attempt to bite McCoy, but the handler deftly dodged the attack and planted a punch of his own on the demon’s snout. The fiend wailed in rage and pain. It struggled to get out from under the pesky human and mount its own attack.
Cynthia had been frozen by the spectacle taking place on the ground beside her. Shaking herself out of her daze, she jumped to her feet and ran to her father. She fell into his arms, sobbing with relief. Baracheck held her tightly and stroked her hair.
“It’ll be okay,” he told her. “I promise you, it’ll be okay.”
Amanda turned to John. “”I’m go
ing to help Finn. You and Deidre watch those two.”
John nodded. He turned and surveyed the battlefield. The fighting was intense and the combatants were dropping fast. It would soon be over, and from the looks of things there would still be some Sluagh to deal with. He motioned Deidre closer and they positioned themselves between the fray and the newly reunited father and daughter.
Amanda stopped long enough to grab McCoy’s knapsack. She quickly rifled through it, but doing so did her little good. She didn’t know what most of the items were, and had no idea which, if any, might be effective against a demon. She cursed herself for not having learned more in the previous six months. With a squeal of frustration, she closed the knapsack and ran toward McCoy.
***
McCoy realized he was in a tight spot. If he could put some distance between him and the demon and get a little breathing room, he would be able to banish the fiend with little trouble. As it was, locked in hand-to-hand combat with the entity, it would be nearly impossible to do. He was constantly having to dodge the demon’s teeth and claws, and more than once he had narrowly escaped being disemboweled by the thinnest of margins.
Physically, they were pretty evenly matched. The demon was drastically weakened from its fight with the Sluagh, while McCoy was fairly fresh and rested. Had the entity’s strength not been drained, it would have been able to easily overpower McCoy. The outcome of this battle hinged on which one would tire first. McCoy knew that his age and lack of exercise put him at a disadvantage, but he fought on determinedly, hoping for an opening that would allow him to escape the demon’s clutches and escape.
Something came swishing through the air and caught the demon squarely in the face. It howled, spun around to see what had attacked it, and caught another blow to the head for its trouble. There stood Amanda, her feet set wide apart, swinging McCoy’s walking stick like the Queen of the Home Run Derby. Her blue eyes were wild, and the look of manic ferocity on her face struck fear into both the demon and McCoy.
Homecoming (A Finn McCoy Paranormal Thriller Book 1) Page 12
