Hellhound on My Trail

by D. J. Butler

  “No.”

  “Ha. Well, they can drown, too, when they’ve chained themselves to human bodies. Doesn’t destroy them, of course, but it messes them up and they don’t like it. I’m not sure, but I think it’s kind of like getting your horse knocked out from under you if you’re a cowboy.” Adrian stood up, and Mike realized he’d forgotten something.

  “Didn’t you get shot?” he asked. Adrian looked unscathed.

  The organist snorted. “Ward of shielding,” he said, as if that explained it. “Stung like the dickens, but didn’t break the skin. Stupid angel’s been out here on his own in the boondocks so long, he’s forgotten how the game is played.”

  The fight below sounded like a storm, shotgun blasts and the terrifying bellows of demons.

  Mike risked a look around and found Twitch. She was on the ground on the far side of the kiva from Jim and Eddie, in horse form, kicking with hind legs at the Baal Zavuv. The big grey and black demon bellowed and squealed and swiped at her with both hands, and there was bright red blood on the horse’s flanks. A cloud of Zvuvim buzzed around, clutching with shiny steel mandibles, and Twitch bit back with enormous white horsey teeth.

  Mindful of the archangel he held prisoner, Mike squeezed the taser’s shock button with his left thumb. At the same time, he raised his semi-automatic in his other hand and squeezed off a handful of rounds, bang! bang! bang! pulverizing several Zvuvim in mid-air and even, he thought, landing a shot or two on the big tusked fly-pig-demon thing. It didn’t seem fazed by the bullets.

  Adrian set the flashlight down on the edge of the platform. “Now,” the wizard told him, putting away the chalk and dusting his hands off against each other, “you got the most important job of the evening.”

  “Yeah?” Mike asked, keeping an eye on Twitch in her strange, circling and kicking dance-fight against the Baal. “What’s that, then?”

  “You gotta keep me awake.”

  That got Mike’s attention. “How do I do that?” he asked. “There’s something Twitch does with her voice, but I don’t—”

  “Yeah, she has Glamour.”

  Mike felt relieved that he wasn’t the only one. “Yeah,” he admitted, “I guess I think she’s glamorous, too.”

  “Doesn’t always work. Nothing always works. Just—look, keep an eye on me, and do what you gotta do. Pinch me, shout, hold me up, whatever. Best you don’t shoot me with the taser, though.”

  “That’s a nasty curse,” Mike said, remembering Adrian’s earlier insistence on the fact of his being cursed, and not just naturally narcoleptic.

  “And keep an eye on Raphael,” Adrian added, rolling up the crisped and burned sleeves of his suit jacket and stepping to the edge of the platform. “Heaven’s up to something here. I don’t like it.”

  “Heaven help us,” Mike ventured with a grin. “Et cetera?”

  “Not very damn likely,” Adrian snorted, then turned to his incantation. “Per Wepwawet Mercuriumque,” he started chanting, waving his arms. His eyes grew distant in concentration. He was focusing so hard he looked like he was in a trance.

  Mike looked away from Adrian just in time to see a big Zavuv that had gotten past Eddie and raced in his direction. He pointed his pistol at it and squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  “Huevos.”

  No time to duck, and barely any time to move at all. The fly rushed for his head, metal mandibles clicking like scythes hungry for the harvest—

  Mike swung his fist backhand, pistol-whipping the Zavuv across both eyes—

  crash! the demon-fly’s eyes shattered and sour, reeking fluid like pus sprayed all over Mike. He flinched, and the Zavuv’s body collided with his shoulder, knocking him back two steps and making him teeter on the edge of the super-kiva’s platform for long, dizzying seconds. When he had windmilled back into balance, the Zavuv was gone, its body indistinguishable in the carpet of shredded black demon-flesh scattered across the sand around the pyramid.

  Mike looked around the super-kiva, checking in on the rest of the band. Jim and the Hound were so close together in their struggle they might have been wrestling. Eddie swung with the butt of his shotgun at the flies swarming around him, ducking and trying to reload. Mike grabbed for his spare clip, meaning to reload his own weapon and clear out some of the Zvuvim assailing Eddie.

  “Mike,” he heard a voice say.

  It was a sweet voice, so sweet he had to listen. It might have been a woman’s voice, it was so sweet, but Mike didn’t think it was. The voice didn’t turn him on, but it warmed his heart and made him feel thrilled.

  “Mike,” the voice said again, “we can be on the same side.”

  Some part of Mike’s brain knew that he still stood on top of a half-pyramid underneath a rock overhang somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, surrounded by minor minions of Hell and assigned to keep a narcoleptic wizard from nodding off, but that wasn’t what he saw. He saw hills, green and rolling under a carpet of flowers, and beyond them a forest and the sea and overhead a brilliant blue sky and all around were fruit trees and friendly wild creatures and birds and butterflies and he smelled warm pollen on the gentle breeze and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. And there on the hillock with him stood his good friend Rafael, the little kid who was so funny and brave and charming, and he smiled at Mike.

  “Mike,” he said, “let’s do some good together.” And when Rafael said it, Mike wasn’t sure exactly what he had in mind, but he really wanted to cooperate.

  “Do some good,” he mumbled. “Do some good, and go to Heaven.”

  “Heaven loves those who do good.” Rafi smiled wisely and warmly. The kid’s voice was so sweet, Mike felt like it was healing the burnt skin on the back of his neck just to hear it.

  But behind Rafael stood someone else. Scalp askew, scarred and bleeding, his grudge open on his face, he could have been Rafael’s bigger, terrifying, evil twin.

  Chuy.

  “Bullshit, cabrón,” Chuy sneered. “You’re going to Hell, and when you get here, you’re mine.”

  “What?” Mike stumbled.

  “I know it,” Chuy said, jerking his thumb at Rafael, “he knows it, and you know it.”

  And Mike did know it.

  “I’m sorry, Chuy,” he said. He felt tears on his cheeks. “I was wrong.”

  Chuy spat blood onto the stone. “Vete a la chingada.”

  “Mike,” pleaded the Angel Rafael. The voice pulled sweetly on Mike’s heart.

  “Shut up, bitch,” Mike mumbled, and he thumbed the shock button on the taser.

  Chatta-chatta-chatta.

  Then the garden was gone, and Chuy was gone, and the kid Rafi—the archangel Raphael—lay on the super-kiva’s platform, jerking spastically again. Mike released the shock button, knees buckling. He shook his head to clear the smell of flowers out of his brain and turned to check in on Adrian—

  who lay unconscious on the ground, face-down in the middle of his chalk diagrams.

  “Fundillo!” Mike shouted.

  He grabbed Adrian and shook him. Pinched. Kicked. Slapped in the face. The buzzing of flies filled his ears, and Rafi groaned.

  “Adrian!” he yelled into the wizard’s ear.

  Adrian snored.

  Eddie and Jim backed up the side of the super-kiva. Eddie’s shotgun hung at his side and he swung his fists at the Zvuvim, while Jim still slashed and poked. The big man moved like an acrobat, dodging blows by rolling to one side or the other, or leaping into the air and somersaulting over them. Eddie was surprisingly quick, too—he looked like he was using karate on the demon-flies, knifing them aside with the blades of his hand in short, economical motions—but they were still backing up, and getting close to the top of the platform.

  On the other side, Twitch retreated, too. She was in human—human-like fairy, anyway—form and her movements looked slower than usual. She was bleeding, and she swung her two batons to keep the Baal at bay, as it lumbered and crashed its way up the side of the pyramid.

 
; “Adrian!” Eddie yelled.

  “Adrian!” Mike yelled.

  Adrian snored.

  Rafi stirred and groaned.

  “Cojón,” Mike grumbled, but he had an idea. His heart raced and his head swam from the adrenalin, but he remembered that his clip was empty. He managed to switch out the old clip and slap in the full one without dropping either, and then he placed the muzzle of his pistol against Adrian’s buttock.

  And squeezed the trigger.

  Bang!

  Blood gushed out onto the diagrams, and Adrian shook awake.

  “Ouch!” the wizard roared. “Hey!”

  Mike stared at the blood. “I thought …” he said. “You said it didn’t break the skin … wards of shields, or something. …”

  “Moron!” Adrian roared, and stumbled to his feet. He clutched his backside with one hand, blood welling out between his fingers. “The wards wear off!”

  “Well, you’re awake, anyway,” Mike muttered.

  Raphael groaned and twitched. For good measure, and because he felt embarrassed and didn’t know what else to do, Mike shocked the angel again, and this time held down the button good and long.

  Chatta-chatta-chatta-chatta-chatta-zotzpf!

  The taser died in his hand, a shower of sparks scorching Mike’s skin.

  “Oh, Hell,” Adrian said, and whipped his lens to his eye to look at the platform again. Holding his own butt and squinting through what amounted to a monocle made him look almost silly, and Mike started to laugh out loud.

  “Is it wrecked?” Mike asked over the roaring of the Hound and the bellowing of the Baal Zavuv, both drawing closer up the sides of the super-kiva.

  “I never yet saw a spell ruined by the addition of human blood,” Adrian growled, putting away his lens. “Including this one. Stand back.”

  Mike stepped back, standing at the edge of the platform beside the unconscious boy-angel and pointing his pistol at Rafi, just in case. Rafi stirred, slightly. Eddie and Twitch both backed to within a step or two of the height of the pyramid, batting at the beasts that pursued them and the Zvuvim overhead. Mike was afraid to take his pistol off the prone angel, so he swung when he could with his fist at the fly-demons, batting them away without doing any real damage.

  “In Wepwawet nomini,” Adrian shouted dramatically, despite his funny gimp posture, with all his weight on one leg, one hand waving in the air and the other clutching his own wounded buttock, “aperiri te mando!”

  The flat space atop the kiva, with all Adrian’s chalk markings on it, disappeared. A pit yawned beneath Mike’s feet.

  ***

  Chapter Nine

  Mike teetered on the edge of the pit, unsure what the others would do. He had expected to see stairs down, and the gaping hole caught him totally by surprise. He flapped his arms like that would keep him in the air and looked for handholds or a rope or anything. He didn’t find any, but in his flailing he knocked away the flashlight.

  Adrian didn’t hesitate. The wizard stepped forward and threw himself into the pit and the darkness. Probably had wards of bouncing, or something crazy like that on him, Mike thought, but the bellowing Baal and roaring Hound and the buzzing Zvuvim left him no choice, and he jumped in right after, clenching his teeth hard so he didn’t scream.

  He fell—

  a beam of light tumbled in after him, spinning around—

  looking up, hands pawing at the air, through the square of dimmer darkness above him, glimmering with multicolored flames, he saw shapes pass—

  bodies falling—

  Splash!

  Water closed over Mike’s head. So cold, Mike couldn’t imagine why it wasn’t ice. He fought for air and sucked in water instead, coughing and choking and flailing to get out. He sank, and in the dark water around him he felt other objects hitting the surface and thrashing about, and then beams of light from Eddie’s Maglite cut the darkness, and finally, lungs searing with pain, Mike tried to swim.

  He wasn’t a very good swimmer, had always lived in desert country and had never been a gym rat, but he managed to fight to the surface. He coughed out cold fluid, feeling like a piece of his lung went with it, and kept fighting his way forward. Fists and feet thrashing in the darkness hit his shoulders and back and he tried to ignore them. Someone screamed wordlessly, a sound that echoed huge in the dark space. Mike worried that it might have been him.

  After a few long strokes, Mike’s hands slapped against something that felt like a brick wall, and he clung to it.

  He’d lost the pistol, he realized, somewhere in the pool. Chingado. He groaned with effort and dragged himself out of the water. He heard the sloshing sounds of others doing the same, and lots of gasping for air. Mike was dimly aware that overhead, somewhere, danced the strange colored fire of the Hellhound. For some reason, it wasn’t diving in right after them.

  But it didn’t sound very happy, either.

  In the dark, he heard puffing breath and muttered curses, and then Eddie shone his light around and Mike could make out a little better what was going on.

  The chamber was a cube of mud brick. In the center of the floor was a round sunken pool, and to one side, lying on the ground, was a pole-ladder like the one Mike had ruined outside. Water flowed into the pool through a brick channel from one wall, and flowed out the other. Eddie and Adrian crowded over the channel and looked closely at it. Teeth chattered, breath steamed and drops of water hit the floor off all their bodies while the guitar and organ players examined the sluice, and Twitch flapped in the air above them in falcon form

  Above, Mike saw the flame of the Hellhound’s body as it shoved its neck into the hole at the top of the super-kiva. It didn’t seem to be able to fit, and as it jammed its head into the opening, it shouldered out the Baal. The fly-demon bellowed and squealed in irritation, and the Hound barked and screeched in return. The Baal’s minions, the Zvuvim, crowded in through the hole and buzzed in a cloud below it, but didn’t descend. Something was stopping all of them from jumping down in the hole after their quarry. Mike cringed at their noises and wondered what was saving his life; whatever it was, he was grateful for it.

  “Isn’t that just Hebrew?” Eddie sounded puzzled.

  “Guys,” Mike’s teeth rattled in his head as he shivered. “Whatever you’re doing, can you hurry?”

  Twitch dropped out of her bird form and stood beside the other two. It looked like stretching downward, the falcon’s legs growing longer and longer until suddenly the drummer stood there in person. The only thing that didn’t shift or change in the process was Twitch’s silvery horse’s tail.

  Mike blinked.

  “It’s the names of God,” Adrian said. “Very old warding, very powerful. The water flows over all the names of God and into the cistern.… Hey! My butt!” The wizard slapped his own backside and Eddie shone the light on it. “No wound!”

  It was true; through the hole he’d blasted in the organ player’s pants, Mike could see the guy’s buttock. No wound, no blood.

  Mike felt goose pimples on his arms that had nothing to do with the cold, and he probed the back of his own neck. It didn’t hurt, and the skin under his fingers felt soft and new, more like a baby’s skin than his own coarse, hairy body.

  “Holy water!” Mike blurted. He remembered enough about church to remember holy water. “The names of God must turn it into some kind of holy water. You know, like for healing, I guess. And good against vampires.” He trailed off, unsure whether or not he was sounding like an idiot.

  “And evil spirits,” said a voice in the darkness.

  Eddie whipped around and shone his light on the source of the sound. Rafael stood on the other side of the cistern.

  “Don’t let him talk!” Mike shouted.

  “Don’t worry, big guy,” Adrian reassured him. “Twitch isn’t susceptible to the Whisper of Eden. Neither is Jim. If this bastard tries anything, he goes down.”

  “Maybe I should kill him anyway,” Eddie growled, and Mike heard the emphatic snick
er of a shell being popped into the underside of the shotgun. “Why aren’t you wet, you rotten weasel?”

  It was true, Mike realized. Rafi was dry as a bone. Twitch was too, but of course Twitch could fly. “This is the pool where the leader of the rebels was imprisoned,” Rafi said, ignoring Eddie and pointing at the water. “Of course you know that, it’s why you’re here. The water was sanctified, and it held him down. Paralyzed by the pain.”

  Mike scratched his head. The same water that had healed him had kept Satan imprisoned, because it hurt the fallen angel? What kind of holy water was that?

  “What happened?” Adrian asked warily. “He got out eventually, so what was it? Did one of the names erode off? But that can’t be it, can it, or the water would be ordinary mundane liquid now.”

  Rafi nodded. “There was a drought,” he said. “When the water got low enough, Azazel managed to kick his way out.”

  “That’s when he chipped his hoof,” Adrian concluded. “Guess he was so excited to get out, he didn’t notice.”

  Rafi shrugged. “Or he hurt too much.”

  Eddie guffawed his derision. “It figures you’d build a prison that depended on water in the desert.”

  Rafi smiled. “There was water enough,” he said. “Until the flood. But when the fountains of the great deep spat forth their waters to obliterate the wickedness of the children of men in the days of Noah, the rock seep dried up.”

  “And in forty days, the prison evaporated.” Adrian shook his head. “Serves you right, you idiots.”

  The demons above raged.

  Mike’s head whirled among astonishment and curiosity and disbelief and fear, like the spinner of an old Snakes and Ladders game, whizzing in circles while all the players watched to see how many spaces Mikey would get to go, and whether he’d step on the bottom of a ladder or the top of a snake. Mike felt like there were snakes all around him, and no ladders anywhere in sight. He pawed at the cluster of holy amulets on his chest, but they didn’t help.

  “What do you want, Raphael? You can’t talk us out of anything.” Eddie’s voice had a hard, flat edge to it, and it snapped Mike back into focus on the here and now. “And I have the gun.”