“Replacements,” Sheila had said. The first thought that had jumped into her head. It made sense. She’d looked at her hands, at the fresh spots of blood that had leaked from her nose onto her arms and shirt. The old ones were wearing out, so replacements were of course needed.
She had to find Van Horn. Had to find Belial. They could help. She’d clutched at the idea with desperation, trying not to think that replacements wouldn’t be necessary if the first of the Chosen could be made well again. Perhaps they were just more, not replacements at all.
Deanna had only shrugged. At Sheila’s insistence, Deanna told her where Belial and Van Horn had gone, though it hadn’t been particularly helpful. “That way. Inside.”
She’d gone into the darkness. Weakening. Taking slow, staggering steps through the depths of the building. She ran her bloody hands across the concrete walls. Her body was hot, boiling, and the cool touch of the concrete felt good even as her nerve endings screamed at the affront.
It was dark. She stumbled and nearly fell down a flight of stairs, catching herself on the cold steel pipe of the railing. Crying out and laughing at the pain.
She kept moving. Exhaustion dragged at her feet, trying to draw her down into the earth. She lifted one foot, dropped it heavily to the ground, then followed with the other. Over and over. There seemed to be noises coming from ahead, though she wondered if those were lies, products of a delirium brought on by her fever.
She stopped at a corner, pressing her forehead to the gritty wall. Belial couldn’t help her, she thought with a sudden certainty. Had he ever? All his gifts had come with a price far exceeding their value.
Rain, then. Rain had healed her once.
Somebody.
More noises—voices, she thought—and she pushed herself from the wall and trudged onward.
She walked a thousand years or so before the orange flicker of candles drew her out of her pain and back into the world. She could see, and now the voices were clearer than ever.
She approached a doorway and entered.
A ritual had begun, or preparations, and even now that stirred excitement with her, however weak. It was vast, much bigger than anything she’d done. The impulse was to become overawed by it, but as she picked out the figures around it, she remembered her purpose.
“Belial!” Sheila said.
Belial ignored her, continuing to draw at the edge of the diagram, but Van Horn stopped in the middle of pouring a fine white powder. One of the men near him held a flashlight on the work, and the beam illuminated a curl of fine dust floating in the air like smoke. “Now is not a good time, dear,” Van Horn said.
“I’m dying, Edgar.”
“Aren’t we all? It’s hell getting old.”
“I need help. Where’s Rain?”
Van Horn gave her an ersatz smile that didn’t touch the hardness around his eyes. “After. We’ll know what to do after. Just hold on, dear. It’ll be fine.”
Sheila paused, mouth open in the act of making a response. There isn’t time, she was going to say. Instead, she exhaled, letting her original words dissipate. “I see.”
“I’m here, Sheila,” Rain said. She got up from where she’d been sitting, unseen, on the floor. “Come. Come here.”
Sheila’s feet obeyed her long enough to haul her over to Rain. She searched the other woman’s eyes and had no idea what she found there.
“Sit,” Rain said. “You’re bleeding.”
“Can’t you do something? Please?”
Blood spilled from the corner of Rain’s eye. Rain wiped it away with the heel of her hand and showed it to Sheila. “I don’t know how.”
The strength left Sheila in a rush, and her knees buckled. Rain caught her under the elbows and lowered her slowly to the floor. She saw Van Horn watching her as she sat. There was something speculative in his eyes. Sheila wanted to gouge them out.
The moment passed, and he went back to pouring salt.
* * *
This is fucked, Anna thought. This is all wrong.
After the new woman’s arrival and the odd exchange with Van Horn, work on the spell or ritual or whatever had continued. Van Horn had restrained Karyn, the whole time offering up reassurances that the straps were so she didn’t accidentally erase one of the lines. Anna didn’t think Karyn could hear any of it, but Van Horn kept chattering nonetheless. He seemed happy, buzzing about from place to place, lighting candles, pouring out neat little mounds of yellow, white, or red powder.
Anna couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so wretched, so suffused with fear. They’d said they wouldn’t hurt Karyn, but what if they lied? And what happened after this? And would they really let Anna and Genevieve go, or was that a lie? The fear took on a bloody tinge of rage.
“What’s it going to do?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know,” Rain said. She had one hand on the newcomer’s back. Sheila, that was what Rain had called her. Sheila was in rough shape, leaning against Rain as though she’d fall over otherwise. “I don’t recognize it, but I—I’m new at this.”
“Will it hurt her?”
“I don’t know.”
Anna closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall. Her body felt as if it was warm enough to catch fire, and now she was nauseated, too. She wondered what it would be like to tear out Van Horn’s throat with her teeth. Hot. Bloody. Like a rare steak. The thought calmed her stomach some. She thought she ought to be worried about that.
“I’m hungry,” Rain said.
Anna’s stomach grumbled in answer. “Don’t even talk to me about that.”
“I’m always hungry now. I think I’ve eaten parts of six people.” Matter-of-fact. Like she thought she ought to be worried about that, but it was academic, like maybe eating people was bad for your cholesterol and one day that might be bad for you.
“They’re never gonna let her go,” Anna said.
“They’re never gonna let you go, either,” Sheila said, her voice cracked and quiet.
Anna opened her eyes. The other woman met them. Anna recognized her now—one of Van Horn’s entourage, Sheila had been there the night they kidnapped Van Horn.
“Karyn will fuck them up if they don’t.” Anna didn’t know if she really believed that, but at least Karyn had leverage. Even simple refusal to cooperate might be enough. Might be.
“Oh, they’ll probably let you walk out of here. But they have you now. Just like me.” Sheila looked down at the bloody, dirty bandages covering the stumps of her fingers.
“And me,” Rain said.
Anna felt the urge to move away from the two of them—the newcomer, Sheila, was freaking her out. It was her facial expressions. Like Hector, they veered from one extreme to another, many of them wildly inappropriate. There was a muted tenderness in her eyes, sadness pulling down the corners of her eyebrows, yet her gaze kept flicking to the blood, and she pulled at her lips with her teeth and kept swallowing. Anna couldn’t tell if she wanted to hold the other woman or eat her.
Van Horn glanced over, catching Sheila’s attention. Maybe it was too dark, or Van Horn was too far away, but he didn’t act like he saw the hatred pouring off her. Anna was too close to miss it. He went back to work. Sheila watched him like if she stared hard enough he’d catch fire.
This is a tinderbox. How many factions are represented in here? There was Hector and Van Horn, who seemed like they were on the same team, and they might even be. Sobell was not, though he might find it temporarily convenient. Genevieve? Who could tell? Anna wasn’t sure if she and Sobell had fucked her over or not, wasn’t quite sure they wouldn’t pull some clever trick and walk out of here with Anna and Karyn, the four of them fighting off all comers, but if Sobell was making the call she thought it more likely that he’d walk out of here and feed the two of them to the dogs the moment it looked as though they were getting too close to his heels. Then there were Hector’s minions—and Sheila. The others seemed loyal enough, but Sheila was obviously cracking.
&n
bsp; The right catalyst could blow this room apart. If Sheila sided with Anna and Karyn, and Sobell threw in with them, the fight would be even. Too bad Anna couldn’t count on either Sobell or Sheila. She made a frustrated noise.
There had to be an opportunity here. Somewhere.
Van Horn took a thick gold hoop from Sobell, arranged it carefully on a set of intersecting lines at Karyn’s feet, and then retreated to the outside of the circle, above Karyn’s head. Hector went to the position opposite him across the circle. Sobell took the spot to the west, if the Van Horn/Hector axis was considered north/south, and Genevieve took the spot to the east.
Hector raised his hands and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, a couple of his new disciples rushed into the room.
“We got a problem, boss,” one of them said.
“What? What the fuck is it that’s so goddamn important?”
“Cops,” the guy said. “A whole lot of cops.”
“Kill them.”
“It’s . . . It’s a lotta cops.”
“A thousand?”
“I dunno. I mean, not that many.”
“Then kill them. Draw them away from this room, and kill them. All of them.”
“Uh . . . okay.”
“If we are interrupted, I will personally seek you out. Do you understand?”
The man nodded. “Yessir.”
“Good. Go.”
* * *
In Sobell’s experience, there were few things that would bring the wrath of God down on a man like murdering a police officer. He supposed that circumstances warranted it this time—he might not get another shot at this, after all, and he was painfully aware of how little time he might have left—but Belial’s manner in giving the order gave him pause. There wasn’t a flicker of hesitation or even a moment of consideration. No thought of consequence, only of what he needed right now.
Fucking demons. He’d essentially thrown in with them for his whole life, but after all this time, they had become a tiresome lot. And the fact that either Van Horn had bait-and-switched him, or Belial had simply tossed old Forcas back into the abyss, was worrisome. Trucking about with garden-variety demons was bad enough, but Belial’s name was written throughout a dozen or more occult texts, usually in reverent or terrified tones. Encountering it in the flesh was like running into Jehovah at a bakery one morning. It was one of the ones you didn’t mess with, not ever. Sobell felt as if he’d gone trout fishing and somehow ended up with a great white shark on his line.
Maybe it’s lying, Sobell thought. But it had been his experience that demons didn’t lie. It was said they couldn’t, but he didn’t know if it stretched that far, just that he’d never known it to happen.
There was nothing to be done for it. Not now. Just proceed, and hope he got the answers he needed.
Once the peon had fled to either take on the cops and die, or more likely hide somewhere and wait until it was over, Belial started up again. He held his hands over his head and intoned some ominous-sounding words in a language Sobell didn’t recognize at all. Not Greek or Latin, those old occult staples—likely it was no human tongue at all.
For the first time it occurred to him to wonder: if humans entreated demons to work magic on their behalf, to whom did demons turn? Why couldn’t Belial just do whatever it was he was trying to do, rather than go through all the occult negotiations? Was he hampered in some way, bound in human flesh?
Van Horn nodded at Sobell and knelt. Sobell and Genevieve, having been instructed to follow along and do exactly as they were told, also knelt. Van Horn held a candle to a pile of yellow powder that flared up in front of him with a bright yellow flame. Once again, Sobell and Genevieve followed suit.
More chanting from Belial. More nonsense. Ordinarily, Sobell would have paid close attention to every particular of the proceedings, but ordinarily, they would have made at least a shred of sense. The diagram would have had some familial relation to others he was familiar with, or at least some of the same components, and the incantation would similarly be constructed of borrowed and repeated phrases, and it would be possible to divine, if not the exact nature of the working, at least some general idea of its intent. This, though, was nonsense. Only the star in the middle and the circle at the outer edge were familiar diagram components to Sobell, and they were so generic as to be useless. The rest was incomprehensible. Alien magic.
What, exactly, am I participating in here?
The others began walking around the circle—widdershins, of course, Sobell noted wryly—at least that much was typical. Once more, he followed, lagging a little. They stopped at a quarter revolution, each taking up the station formerly held by the last person, so that Sobell now stood at Ames’s feet. The subject of this whole experiment waited patiently in the center. No struggle, no noise. The restraints seemed superfluous. She’d said she would cooperate, and she was doing just that. If this didn’t kill her, and Belial had said it wouldn’t, Sobell would have to throw her a bonus. Provided, of course, he got the answers he needed.
Belial started another verse. An unsteady keening noise, like one of those monstrous singing saws, or a wet finger along an edge of finest crystal, filled Sobell’s head, seeming to originate somewhere just above his back teeth. The sensation was beyond unpleasant. His eyes watered, and he swore it felt as if the crown was going to vibrate right off one of his molars. He kept his teeth clamped shut, but he wasn’t sure how much good that would do as the sound got louder.
Is it just me? he wondered, but the question was answered immediately. Tears shone on Van Horn’s face, and Belial had begun chanting louder.
Another sound intruded, a muffled short bang, like somebody slamming a car door or a firecracker going off in a barrel. A gunshot, surely. How far away? How long did they have?
Van Horn lit a pile of red powder. Sobell nearly toppled over as he knelt, but he steadied himself with one hand and lit the red powder with a candle held in the other.
More gunshots, a whole fusillade of them.
Belial sped up his chant. The four men stood again, and Belial began moving once more around the circle.
A hot trickle of blood spilled from Sobell’s nose and dribbled over his lips.
* * *
“They’re killing her,” Anna said.
Rain, transfixed by the ritual in front of them, didn’t look at her. “No.”
“They’re killing us, then.” The noise was going to vibrate her head to pieces. On balance, she might be grateful for that. “We’re not getting out of here alive, anyway, and Karyn’s not getting out at all.”
Rain nodded. Her mouth hung open, and a sticky strand of spit depended from her chin. Slumped against her, Sheila moaned and held her head with both hands.
“Look at me,” Anna said.
Amazingly, Rain did.
Now what? They could take Hector, probably. Maybe kill Sobell or Van Horn. Not all three of them though, and there were still two of Hector’s faithful minions standing by the door, watching. Attacking Hector might stop this shit, but so what, if it got them all killed and eaten?
The idea of being killed and eaten, repulsive as it was, actually made her stomach growl. What the fuck?
“Hey!” she said. “Magic!”
“What?”
“You said I’d get warm—I’m warm. You said I’d start having gross thoughts—Jesus, am I ever. But you said I could do magic, too. Can I?”
“Maybe. Probably. Do you have any ideas?”
“Ideas? No. But you can, right? Teach me something? Anything that will help?”
Rain’s face was still and blank, and Anna saw her head slowly rotating back toward the ritual.
“We have to stop them, Rain! We have to stop this. We have to hurt them.”
Rain didn’t acknowledge this, but the smile that spread across Sheila’s face was truly chilling, a hungry, feral grimace coupled with a sudden glee in her eyes. She lowered her hands and touched Rain’s shoulder.
&n
bsp; When she had Rain’s attention, she pulled a marker from her pocket and began drawing on the floor. The dance out on the main floor continued another step, and blue flame flared up. The tone in Anna’s head took on a second pitch at some god-awful dissonant interval with the first. Blood dripped from Sheila’s ear.
One of Hector’s minions by the door fell down, convulsing.
“Gather in a circle,” Sheila said. “Take my hand in your left, Rain’s in your right. Repeat after me.”
“Wait, what are we doing?”
“We’re stopping this,” Sheila said. “We’re hurting them.”
* * *
The sound of a gunshot echoed off a nearby structure. Before the echo could die out, a dozen more followed it. “You hear that?” Nail asked.
“What, do you think I’m deaf?” DeWayne asked. “Your cops. Hope they don’t get anyone killed.”
This side of the building, much of the foundation was exposed to provide access to what looked like a loading dock. Stark concrete retaining walls held in the mounds of dirt to either side of the dock. A pair of heavy steel doors had been put in place back here next to a giant overhead door. As Nail and DeWayne approached, Nail saw a heavy chain and padlock holding the doors shut.
“Don’t suppose you got any tricks up your sleeve for that?” DeWayne asked.
“Not handy, no.” He walked up the stairs to the door and inspected it.
“Can’t you just, you know, shoot it?”
“If I wanna blow my own balls off, yeah. Maybe. Not sure it would work anyway, but even if it did, with a steel door and concrete everywhere, one of us might catch a ricochet. You in a hurry to get shot?”
“Fuck,” DeWayne said.
“Yeah.”
Nail looked at the chain again. It was wrapped around the door handles three or four times, and—
“Oh, that’s cute.”
“Huh?”
“Somebody already took some bolt cutters to this thing.” Nail unwound the chain. It fell into two pieces, linked by the padlock. He pulled the door open. Beyond, the inside of the loading dock was a dark, dry space that smelled of motor oil and detergent. At the far end, he could see a faint suggestion of stairs in the gloom.
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