by Lincoln Cole
What on Earth was going on?
Niccolo forced the thought away, focusing only on the euphoric rage pumping through his veins.
“This,” he said, “has been a long time coming.”
ARTHUR REALIZED SOMETHING had happened to Niccolo, but he didn’t know what. He wore a glazed look of anger on his face and didn’t seem in control of himself.
But, if he had no control, then who did?
And why had Niccolo carried a real pistol with him?
“Why do you have ...?”
Niccolo held the gun steady. “You won’t stand in my way, Arthur. Never again.”
“What are you talking about?”
Suddenly, the front door to the office burst open, and two men came rushing into the room. Both armed with assault rifles, much like Naomi’s soldiers at the water treatment plant earlier, and both had vacant expressions on their faces.
More demons.
As Arthur turned his head to get a good look at them, he noticed something else. Through the window of the office on the right-hand side, the face of a young boy, just barely a teenager, watched them. He had climbed onto the side of the trailer and peered in at them, staring directly at Niccolo with an expression of intense concentration on his face.
Arthur didn’t know what was going on, but it couldn’t be good.
“Uh oh.”
He exploded into motion, reacting purely on instinct, and stepped in toward Niccolo. First, he pushed the priest’s arm wide to force the barrel away from his body, and then used his free hand to punch him in the face.
He hit the priest hard and didn’t hold back. Niccolo staggered under the weight of the blow. He hit the wall and dropped the gun, and Arthur rushed down and scooped it from the floor. This situation didn’t leave room for his conscience. The time had come for action and survival.
Now armed, he turned to face the two masked intruders. They raised assault weapons and aimed at him, and he didn’t have time to take aim and fire first.
Instead, he dove to the side through the connecting path of the two pre-fab structures. Just as they opened up with their rifles, he ducked behind the wall of that second mobile office.
A hail of bullets ripped through the area around him, and he crouched low while they shredded the material and sent dust and plaster flying. They tore through it like it wasn’t even there. Arthur stayed low to the ground so that the bullets passed over his head.
He rolled to the side and crawled deeper into this second trailer, moving as quickly as he could while keeping his head down. The hut contained a table, a sofa, a television, two large metal cabinets, and little else.
He made his way over to the cabinets. Made of metal, hopefully they would prove thick enough to protect him from some of the rounds. Arthur rolled behind them, took a deep breath, and then checked the pistol Niccolo had brought. He must have stolen it from one of Naomi’s mercenaries at the water treatment facility.
It looked cheap and had one full clip worth of ammo. The safety remained on—he doubted the priest had even known it had one—and looked as if it hadn’t fired a shot in a long time. Arthur just had to hope it wouldn’t jam.
Even with all of its problems, however, he still had to admit it felt good in his hand. Better than the light tranquilizer guns he’d carried. His instrument of choice, it felt like an extension of his existence.
No matter how far he ran from his true nature, he couldn’t lie to himself. He had become good at killing people—a fact he hated about himself.
A few seconds passed, and then the hail of bullets died down. The demons would have to reload. Then they would come through the first trailer toward him. This offered his opportunity, and he didn’t squander it.
He popped up over the cabinets. His guess proved correct. The first of his demonic pursuers just now stepped across the patched opening into the second trailer. A satisfying look of surprise settled on his face when he saw that Arthur didn’t remain hidden where he had expected.
The expression lasted only a second before Arthur fired. He took careful aim, still unwilling to fire a kill-shot if he didn’t have to. Instead, he shot the man in the left arm at the elbow and again on his right knee. Either wound would cripple the human whose body the demon rode. Without the body, the demon didn’t pose much of a threat.
The man fell to the ground, and Arthur changed targets. The other demon had just finishing reloading his gun and now raised it, but he moved too slowly. Arthur fired, hitting him in the shoulder and again in each knee with three rapid shots.
This one dropped to the ground. Arthur had done significant damage to the hosts they lived in—if the men even continued to live—but with luck, they would survive.
Two down, but he hadn’t freed himself from the woods yet. A second later, three more armed men came charging in through the doorway of the main trailer. He fired off two more shots, one hitting the first man in the stomach, and the second missing over his shoulder, and then the other two opened fire, forcing Arthur to duck.
These two didn’t seem as dumb as the first pair. One fired while the other waited, and then they swapped while the first reloaded. The pistol Arthur carried only had a few rounds left in it, which wouldn’t give him nearly enough to take down both men.
He looked around the room for something he could use as a distraction. The men closed in on him, and he was fast running out of time. He found nothing useful in range. The television had busted, riddled with holes, bullets had torn up most of the walls, and he hid behind the only real cover left in the room. Flimsy, it only managed to stop some of the bullets, forcing him to duck even lower than he would have liked.
Hopefully, Niccolo remained all right. Arthur had hit him harder than he probably needed to, and he hoped that either Niccolo wouldn’t manage to get up and join the fray, or he would have smarts enough to stay down.
He had expected something to happen, but not quite with this level of force.
Also, Arthur realized that the bishop had played him. Everything he had said about his family had just given a distraction to keep him busy while Leopold’s allies mounted a rescue. Arthur had allowed himself to get emotional and lose focus, and as such, they had now landed in a desperate situation they might not survive.
Unarmed and ill-prepared to deal with a threat of this magnitude, it meant trying to face-down two men armed with assault rifles with only a few rounds left in this pistol and his tranquilizer gun with its three shots—it would mean suicide.
He couldn’t deal with them from in here. So, Arthur did the only thing he could—he shot out the nearest window and jumped into the shipyard.
ARTHUR SPRINTED AWAY from the office and through the empty shipyard, hoping to create as much distance as he could between him and his pursuers so that he could find some way out of this situation. He needed to turn the tide against them and force them to face him on even footing.
When he’d jumped through the window, he’d cut himself on his left arm with a glass shard, but the scrape didn’t look too deep.
About halfway through the empty shipyard, movement came from behind him.
“Stop!”
The voice sounded commanding, though it came out high-pitched as if from a little kid. Arthur’s legs locked, and he stopped running. All at once, he lost control of his body.
It felt intense and horrible, and he became powerless to keep moving forward. He looked back. The teenager who’d watched through the window stood next to the office and stared at him.
A thin and frail kid, his eyes glowed with an intensity and hate that filled Arthur with dread. Those eyes showed someone willing and able to kill if need be, and right now, they focused on Arthur.
The Hunter fought back, trying to reconcile his thoughts and regain control over his body. What a painstaking thing to do. Actions that would, normally, come as second-nature required actual thought. Mentally, he had to examine the process of walking and fire his muscles to get one of his legs to move.
He took a step forward.
“I said stop!”
Arthur focused on the other leg, and this time, it came a little easier. The other presences in his mind receded when he retook control. Another step, and then another, and gradually, he regained mastery over the motion. It felt like an hour passed during the struggle, but most likely only a few seconds had elapsed.
The presence remained in his mind, and his thoughts felt jumbled, but he managed to continue moving. He kept going, heading forward to the shipping containers.
NICCOLO’S HEAD SPUN, and his jaw hurt as he fumbled his way back to reality. The jaw he could explain because Arthur had punched him in the mouth and knocked him to the ground, but his head proved fuzzier and harder to understand.
It felt like all of his thoughts had jumbled together and distorted. He found it difficult to focus on anything in particular like someone had gone through and reorganized his mind. It felt ... foreign.
Gunshots resounded in the room all around him. After a few seconds, though, they all went silent. People spoke, but he couldn’t make out the words. Vaguely, he understood what had happened, and realized that they had come under attack, but he hadn’t had any control.
What he had said to Arthur horrified the priest. Even worse, they had all come from his deepest thoughts. He had buried them in his mind and would never have said them aloud, yet they had risen up and found release. It seemed as if his most basic of impulses had become unleashed, and he had become helpless to stop it.
The feeling of helplessness had disappeared now, but that didn’t help him understand what had happened any better. When he managed to drag himself back to reality and look up, he saw the barrel of a rifle aimed at his face. A man stood above him, and beside him stood what looked like a teenage boy.
“He went out the window,” a voice called out from the right. It took Niccolo a moment to recognize the voice as that of the bishop, and then his heart skipped a beat.
He meant Arthur. The Hunter had fled, leaving Niccolo behind.
“Should we go after him?”
“Yes! Nitwits. Go get him. But cut me loose first.”
“What do we do with this one?” the other man asked, the one aiming his gun at Niccolo. He turned his head away from the priest and toward the bishop. “Want me to kill him?”
A second later and the first armed man had cut the bishop free. Glasser sat rubbing his wrists where the duct tape had bound him. Then he stood and walked over to where Niccolo slumped on the floor.
“No.”
He looked down at Niccolo, a grin spreading across his face. A shiver ran up the priest’s spine.
The bishop said, “Leave him to me.”
Chapter 15
Arthur rushed over to the stacks of cargo containers running along the northern edge of the docks just as the bishop’s men came out of the office to give chase.
The kid disappeared and had probably gone back into the building. His presence went from Arthur’s mind, as well, but that didn’t make the effect any less disorienting. The residual thoughts remained, making it hard for Arthur to think straight or focus on the task at hand.
His head ached, and he felt sick to his stomach from the recent invasion of his mind. That kid had crazy abilities, which also offered an explanation as to what had happened to Niccolo back in the trailer. No wonder Niccolo had lost it there for a while.
Arthur wracked his brain for a plan. The tranquilizer gun he had brought with him wouldn’t prove effective against these demons, and the pistol he’d taken from Niccolo had run down to its last four bullets.
Arthur had no idea what had happened to Niccolo or if he even lived. The deck had stacked against them, and things looked grim.
And adding the kid to the mix made the tipping point. The child brought a wildcard that Arthur had not expected. Would never anticipate. He’d faced down a lot of crazy things in his time as a Hunter, but he had thought demons the worst creatures he would ever have to deal with. Some demons had innate power and proved dangerous, and occasionally, had telepathic or telekinetic abilities.
But those monsters Arthur had faced in his past paled in comparison to this Vatican Child working with the bishop. He had made Arthur feel like a ragdoll, completely unable to control his body.
If Arthur hadn’t managed to break free of the kid’s mental hold on him, then he would still have stood there, helpless, when the demonic mercenaries came outside to finish him off. The ease with which the kid had taken hold of his mind terrified Arthur.
He had to find some way to nullify the teenager’s abilities if he planned to make it out of this alive.
The pursuers renewed fire, forcing Arthur to duck around the containers for cover. They remained a long way off, well out of range, but it still gave enough prompt to draw him out of his thoughts and back to the situation at hand. He wouldn’t have the ability to do anything to stop the kid or get out of this situation while pinned down like this.
More gunshots thudded into the shipping containers and bounced off the metal. Some bullets created huge dents in the sides of the containers, and others ripped clear through the metal.
He ducked low to the ground and crawled away from the mercenaries, moving the short distance to the edge of this shipping container. Satisfied he remained out of their sight, he stood and ran toward another container about ten feet away. Then he slid behind it before his enemies could spot him and track his movements.
They would keep pursuing him into the lines of containers with the goal of flanking him. Arthur couldn’t afford to stop moving and had to stay one step ahead of them to get the upper-hand. He could use their singular mission against them.
If only he had a plan or at least a distraction to give him the upper hand in this fight. He felt sorely unprepared for this and wished like hell for an extra clip of ammunition. Four shots meant that he couldn’t afford to waste a single one, and still, they might not give him enough to take down both men.
He moved to the next container, ducking around the side to get a bead on the bishop’s men. As expected, they had split apart and moved in parallel through the shipyard, trying to catch him in the middle.
They believed they had done themselves a favor and made it easier to catch the bishop. All they had done, in fact, was give him an edge.
BISHOP GLASSER REACHED down and dragged Niccolo to his feet. The priest struggled to fight back, but the bishop had considerably more strength than appearances indicated and lifted Niccolo with ease.
The fight had decimated the office around them. The wind whistled in through bullet holes, and the northern wall looked as though it might collapse at any moment.
A teenager stood grinning at him from the other side of the trailer, and two men lay on the ground with gunshot wounds, moaning in pain.
Given everything that had happened, it took him a moment to recognize the kid and remember where he had last seen him.
“Jeremy,” he said on a heavy breath. No wonder the kid had sounded familiar. Niccolo had met him back in Everett.
“The one and only.” The kid spread his arms and took a mocking bow.
Niccolo had met the boy at the bishop’s estate when he’d first shown up in Everett. To think that the bishop had become so brazen as to keep the child with him even then, hiding him in plain sight. Niccolo had never even suspected.
“These two are losing control of their vessels,” the kid said, speaking now to the bishop. He gestured toward the two men writhing on the ground. Arthur must have shot them. The wounds looked painful but not mortal.
“Then, help them maintain it. Get them back on their feet.”
The kid fell silent for a moment, a thoughtful and intense look on his face. After a minute, he blinked and shook his head.
“I can’t. The demons inside have grown too weak. The vessels have retaken control.”
The bishop sighed, reached for his belt, and drew out a pistol. He walked over to one of the men who lay writhing on the ground. Wordlessly
, he fired off two shots, putting each bullet into the man’s head.
Then, he walked to the other side of the office and did the same to the other man. The gunfire echoed through the trailer, leaving behind only silence. Jeremy watched the bishop execute the men with a savage look on his face.
Finally, the bishop slid his gun away and turned to face Niccolo. He shrugged apologetically.
“It’s so difficult to find good help.”
“Maintain control,” Niccolo said. “Jeremy gave you the ability to control the people of Everett, didn’t he?”
The bishop looked pleased. “Yes, he did. It took just a few trips into town. He’s like a nuclear bomb in demon possession. I did Rose personally, but the rest were Jeremy’s pets. A few more weeks and I would have been able to wipe Everett off the map. How is that for waking the world?”
“You would kill all those people just to prove that demons exist?”
“Not kill,” the bishop said. “They would become my army to let loose upon the world. Fanatics in a cause much bigger than themselves.”
“They would have gotten slaughtered.”
“The entire point. I expected someone like you to show up. Eventually, the Vatican would respond, and I would have had little trouble in getting you out of my way. I just didn’t expect the Council to come to your aid so quickly. Not until after I had Haatim under my control, at least.”
“Why do you want him?”
“I told you, he means everything to me. The things I could do with him and Jeremy together ... everything else just makes child’s play.”
“You call summoning and controlling demons child’s play?”
“Trust me,” the bishop said. “If you think me evil, you have no idea of what that child is capable. I could awaken Haatim’s powers and turn him into a living weapon.”
