Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  At her other side, Genevieve cast a glance and a nervous, conciliatory smile in her direction. Anna ignored her.

  The group stopped in a sort of waiting area, a bench-filled anteroom between admitting and the depths of the jail proper. It felt like being in some kind of poisonous air lock. The door to the inside of the jail was held shut with a loop of chain that went through the knob hole and disappeared inside. Locked from inside. A series of symbols was drawn in a spiral on the door. Probably nothing bad in there.

  They sat on the benches at Van Horn’s instruction and waited.

  “We’re gonna get out of this,” Genevieve whispered. “He’s working with Sobell, he’s gotta be.”

  Anna gave her a skeptical look. “I don’t know what to believe right about now.”

  “Give me a fucking break, would you?”

  “Hey!” Van Horn barked. “Do I need to separate you two?”

  They lapsed into sullen silence.

  A short while later, the chain on the inner door jangled. Then a clanging slap as somebody let the heavy length fall slack against the metal door.

  The door opened on darkness.

  A cracked voice, hoarse and unstable with some unidentifiable emotion issued from the blackness. “Edgar.”

  Next to Anna, Genevieve startled. Anna looked over despite herself to see Genevieve’s eyes wide, her face pale, and small beads of sweat fattening on her forehead. A droplet slid into the lower orbit of her left eye, pausing before free-falling down her cheek.

  “It’s Hector,” Genevieve whispered.

  Hector Martel, former leader of the Brotherhood of Zagam. Presumably the guy who’d murdered Nathan Mendelsohn. The last time Anna saw him, she’d been shooting at a monster, and he’d been standing at the edge of the fray, howling his rage.

  Anna thought she might be sweating a little, too, now.

  Hector walked out of his den into the candlelight, and Anna knew there was something wrong with him, something terrible. In just the two months since the showdown at Sobell’s, the man had undergone the kind of transformation she associated with terminal illness. His flesh had melted away, and his arms, protruding angularly from a dirty white wife beater, seemed little more than bone, with prominent knobs at shoulder, elbow, and wrist. The beard had gotten wilder, as had the hair, draping his head and neck in a black shroud. Even by candlelight, Anna could see that his skin had become blotchy. Somehow the bare feet below stained gray sweatpants only served to accentuate the sense that this man was gravely, gravely ill.

  “Mona’s dead,” Van Horn said.

  Hector’s face contorted in a sneer. “Poor Mona. Poor Mona. Bitch. Eat her corpse.”

  “Ah, Antawn and Jude did an admirable job of that.”

  Hector smiled, showing his teeth.

  “Sobell is on his way with most of what we need,” Van Horn said.

  “The oracle?”

  “Dead. I got us a new one, though.”

  Van Horn pointed toward Karyn, at the end of the bench the three women sat on. Hector’s gaze swept past Anna and Karyn and locked on Genevieve.

  “Genevieve,” he said.

  “No, no, no, no,” Genevieve whispered. The word faded in volume, but her lips kept moving, and she shook her head in tiny, rapid denials.

  He approached, and Genevieve stood. Anna could see the curve of her spine where the sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to it.

  “Did you miss me?” Hector asked, echoing a moment later with a whisper: “Miss me?” The whisper thing was deeply creepy, more so because she got the impression he didn’t know he was doing it. He stopped in front of Genevieve at a distance that was just a hair too close to be comfortable for normal conversation. Genevieve stood stiffly, and it looked to Anna as though she strained not to lean back, like trying not to show fear to an angry dog.

  From this viewing distance, it was obvious there was a lot more wrong with Hector than she’d even thought at first glance. Dark lines ran up and down his arms in parallel tracks, as though he’d been scratching himself rather viciously. The stink coming off him was weeks of sweat, dried blood, and rotten meat. Anna had no idea if those latter two were from things he’d eaten or rubbed on himself or if they were coming from some horribly damaged, festering part of his person that had remained mercifully covered.

  His skin was twitching, she now saw. Pushing up in little tented points, as though somebody were pulling on little hairs, stretching the skin out. A wave of the points rippled up his arm, over his neck, along the side of his face.

  Revulsion wrote itself all over Genevieve’s face. She coughed. “I killed Mona,” she said.

  “You’re quite the killer these days. Killed my brother, too. Our brother. One of the great ones.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She must, Anna thought—even Anna had a pretty good guess. During the catastrophe at Sobell’s, Genevieve had been the one to swing the sword and destroy that jawbone thing.

  “You know. You know. You know.”

  “That was . . . a misunderstanding. I’ll . . . I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  “Oh? Then I shall put you at my left hand. You will rain fire upon our enemies. We will smear ourselves with their ashes, drink their blood from wineglasses. Glasses. Wineglasses. Blood.”

  Anna couldn’t tell if he was mocking her or being sincere. Given the erratic changes in tone between each word or phrase, she wasn’t even sure if he knew. Maybe both. What the hell was wrong with him? Was this what happened when you’d been host to a demon for too long? Was the demon itself insane?

  “Great. So, uh, what’s next?”

  The door swung open, and a dozen people turned their heads to see. Enoch Sobell walked in, strutting like he owned the place and he’d come to demand back rent. Just behind him, a cholo in the obligatory khakis and tank top carried a briefcase and did his damnedest to look tough.

  “Let’s talk business, shall we?” Sobell said.

  * * *

  Sobell made a quick assessment of Hector—Forcas—whatever he was calling himself these days—and fear seized him by the base of the spine. It wasn’t the man’s physical transformation. He looked gruesome, yes, but he’d obviously deteriorated, not grown more fearsome. It wasn’t the look in the possessed man’s eyes, either, though the last time Sobell had seen that look, Hector had shot him in the head. It was mostly, as best he could assess with the old hindbrain machinery broadcasting Run, you idiot directly into his motor system, the horrible sense of vitality the man exuded. Sure, he was breaking down, but it typically took demons a matter of weeks, sometimes days, to destroy their hosts, usually as a result of insane, insatiable lusts combined with no impulse control whatsoever. Forcas had been running Hector’s equipment now for, what? Eight months, maybe? More? He had no right to look even this hale, no right to be ambulatory. No right to the gleeful sneer on his face.

  For the first time, Sobell wondered just how badly he’d missed in his evaluation of the situation. He put on a smile, though, and forced himself to take one more step toward the man.

  “It’s not like you to hide, Forcas,” Sobell said.

  “It’s not like you to ignore what’s in front of your face.” Hector made an odd swallowing noise, then repeated “Your face.”

  “Can’t spot everything. You could have said something before you shot me in the head. Had the common decency to gloat a little.”

  “You and your women killed my brother. Our brother. My strong right arm.”

  The amplifications and amendments were delivered in a jerky, hitching cadence, interspersed with convulsive swallowing. It reminded Sobell of fishing with his grandfather as a young boy. The old man had caught a too-small fish and thrown it down on the beach, watching it flop and gasp in the sand before finally kicking it in the head and killing it.

  “They’re, ah, not actually my women. Free agents. And just in case you find yourself in polite society, that sort of language went out of fashion five decades ago.�
�� Hector made no response, so Sobell continued. “In any case, rock and a hard place. Believe it or not, I am here to make amends, just like I told Edgar.”

  “Good. Good. Fuck you. Good.”

  Even his communication had deteriorated since Sobell last spoke with him, and it had been erratic before. His brain was probably little more than neuron soup by now, held together by malign demon will. “Since you called me, can I assume that you have some idea of how my atonement should take shape? Or is this simply for making threats and other social overtures?”

  “Kill him,” Hector said. Nearly everybody in the room jumped to their feet.

  “Stop!” Sobell yelled, voice reverberating back to him from the hard walls. “If anybody moves, shoot him,” he said, pointing to Hector. Enrique dropped the case and pulled out an enormous chrome revolver.

  Sobell dropped his arms to his sides, palms facing front. “Last time you tried to kill me, it didn’t work out so well. Do you really feel like trying your luck again? I had a much more profitable relationship in mind.”

  “You fucked me,” Hector snarled. “Fucked.”

  Sobell knew he’d have to deal with this. Demons held such grudges, and he’d really screwed Forcas back when. It must have been humiliating back at the demon social club, but it wasn’t Sobell’s fault the demon had negotiated like a neophyte. “I exchanged three lives for one hundred years. That was the deal.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your deal.”

  Sobell paused, his head slightly cocked, eyebrows drawn together in puzzlement. “Our deal,” he said.

  “I made no deal with you.”

  “Is your memory going, Forcas?”

  “I ate Forcas. I chewed it, swallowed it, digested it, shit it out.”

  Sobell’s bad feeling soured further. “That’s, ah, charming,” he managed to say.

  “I am large. I contain multitudes. But Forcas no longer.”

  Sobell tried on a smile, but as his stomach sank through the floor, dragging his heart with it, he felt sure it looked more like a nauseated grimace. This was beyond bad. Was Forcas here? Truly dead? Could demons actually die? With whom was Sobell now conversing, if not the demon he sought? “Shall I just call you Legion, then?”

  “I am Belial.”

  There suddenly seemed to be no air in the room. “I . . . see.”

  Then, whispered: “I am Malphas, I am Amon, I am Volac, I am Orias, I am—”

  Hector laughed wildly, then said it again: “I am Belial.”

  Sobell had set a rat trap and caught a Gorgon, a titan, a colossus—something awful and terrible that could smite him so thoroughly that there wouldn’t even be atoms left, erase him from existence, or Hell knew what else. Belial, Prince of Hell. The name was unmistakable. Was there another demon that showed up more times in the literature, that was responsible for more atrocities, whose name was linked to more terrible magic? If so, Sobell couldn’t think of one. And it appeared that Belial was not alone in there, not by some distance. A Prince of Hell and a dozen or a hundred other demons, crowded into one man’s body until it was fit to burst. What in the world was going on here?

  If anybody could help him, though, surely, surely Belial could. That hope, however bleak, was worth clinging to.

  Hector pointed. “Kill—”

  Sobell recovered his wits quickly. “Rhino here is an excellent shot. Fancy a trip back to Hell?”

  The expression on Hector’s face was fascinating to watch, twisting through rage to hilarity to rage again, sweeping through indecipherable intermediate emotions on the way. He didn’t give any orders, though, merely stood with his face doing its unnerving thing.

  “Listen to me, Belial.” Sobell looked to each side of the room and frowned. “Actually, would it be possible to speak in private?”

  A wild, hectic laugh burst from Hector’s face. “No. It would not.”

  “All right, then. You have my sincerest apologies for our earlier misunderstanding. My earlier misunderstanding. I had Mona killed as a gesture of goodwill, at Edgar’s suggestion. I brought the torc and the cash by way of atonement, though I shudder to think what use you have for them. I have one more thing you want, besides the cash. You have something I want. I think you know what it is.”

  “You have nothing more that I want.”

  “I have an army,” Sobell said.

  Hector pouted, though Sobell saw, or hoped he saw, avarice in his eyes. “I had an army.”

  “Yes. Well, that turned into a complete cock-up, didn’t it? I’ve brought you a new one.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty or forty. Hoodlums, parasites, and highwaymen, to be sure, but I suspect you’re disinclined to be picky.” To underscore his point, he made a show of looking around the room.

  “And you want what?”

  He leaned forward, close enough for Hector to bite his throat out if the whim took him, and he whispered, “I’m dying. I need more time.”

  Hector nodded, then shook his head and sneered. “I can’t help you.”

  There had been emphasis on the pronoun there, and Sobell was sure he hadn’t imagined it. “Don’t play word games with me. Maybe you can’t help me, but somebody in there can, or you know someone, some way. Something.”

  “Someone. Some way.”

  “You make an introduction, I’ll hand over my legion of loyal followers.”

  “You first.”

  “It appears trust will be somewhat hard to come by. Halfsies?”

  Hector nodded convulsively.

  “Seal it in blood?”

  “Of course. Blood.”

  Sobell wasn’t sure how haggling with demon lords was supposed to go, so he opted for the old standby. He produced a piece of paper, dickered over the basic terms, and then they drew up a short contract. Sobell played no games with it. Forcas might have been easily fooled, but it would be insane to try that sort of thing with Belial.

  Finally, Hector drew some kind of figure over the words, they each cut a finger and smeared some blood on the paper, and then Sobell burned it.

  “Bring them,” Hector said.

  Chapter 27

  Sobell’s gofer brought a couple of guys in, a heavyset bruiser and a reedy-looking guy with a sparse beard and a big hole where one of his front teeth had been. They didn’t look like Sobell’s usual class of criminal, and Anna wondered where the hell he was coming up with these people.

  Van Horn’s creatures moved subtly around them, and without making a big thing out of it, they quietly cut off the path to the door.

  “I’m Jerry. What do you need?” the skinny guy asked, grinning widely.

  “Are you with us?” Van Horn asked. “Are you truly one of us?”

  “Uh, yeah. I mean, I guess.”

  Van Horn’s forehead wrinkled in grandfatherly concern. “Are you sure? There will be an initiation. Nothing painful, I promise, but you will be tested. You are among the elect now.”

  Jerry’s grin became cockeyed and uneasy. “The elect, huh? I like the sound of that.”

  “Your new family awaits you.”

  “This is, like, some kind of Mafia thing?”

  Van Horn gave him a kindly smile. “Yes. Just like that. Nobody messes with a made man—isn’t that right?”

  “Fuck yeah. Uh, I ain’t gotta whack anybody or nothin’ like that, right?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  Van Horn stepped aside, exposing Hector to view. Jerry’s smile faltered.

  “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Hector said. He spread his arms, palms up, and cocked his head. As his smile spread across his face, Jerry’s withered.

  “Hey, I was just looking for a little action. I don’t know about all this.” The guy looked around the room, his eyes saying, A little help please, and noticed that the door was now blocked.

  “Just ritual, Jerry,” Van Horn said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Now kneel before your lord and savior,” Van Horn said.

 
; “Been a while since I been to Our Lady of the—”

  “Please,” Van Horn said. “Are you with us?”

  “Yeah, just—”

  “Then kneel. When you rise, you will be greater than you have ever dreamed.”

  Jerry lowered himself shakily to the floor. He lost his balance and tipped forward, catching himself on his arms. Then he got himself back into a kneeling position. “Now what?”

  “You, too,” Van Horn said, gesturing at the heavyset man. That guy obliged without any hesitation. From the gang tats, Anna guessed that initiation was old news for him.

  One of the entourage, the one called Raul, Anna thought, came up behind Jerry and tied a rag around his head, making a crude blindfold. Another performed the same service for the second man.

  Van Horn handed Hector a little folding knife, blade no longer than a couple of inches. In Hector’s hands, it took on a sudden menace. A machete would have been no more frightening, Anna thought.

  Hector approached the kneeling man, flicking the edge of his knife with his thumb.

  Anna couldn’t look away.

  Hector stopped inches from Jerry’s body. The knife grew to enormous proportions in Anna’s mind, taking up all her attention.

  Hector pulled up his own shirt. As Anna stared, he pinched a fold of skin above his hip and cut off a slice of skin about the size of a quarter, his face betraying no more pain than if he’d been idly scratching an itch. Blood ran into the waistband of his sweatpants. He spoke an incantation in low, incomprehensible words.

  Hector finished his chant and held out the slice of bloody flesh. “This is my body,” he said. “Take it. And eat.”

  “Open your mouth, Jerry,” Van Horn said.

  “And what?”

  “It’s like Halloween. You put your hand in the box and—”

  “And, like, feel the eyeballs and stuff,” Jerry said.

  “Exactly. If you’re brave enough. Open up.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Anna said. Van Horn shot her a warning glance and put his finger over his mouth.

  Jerry opened his mouth. Hector put the skin on his tongue.

  “Swallow,” Van Horn said.

  Jerry closed his mouth. He gagged, cheeks inflating, but to Anna’s surprise he didn’t spit Hector’s grotesque communion wafer out. He swallowed it.