ANGEL ™: avatar

by John Passarella

  “Killing certain demons requires complicated rituals and such,” Doyle said.

  “Doyle’s right,” Angel said. “Killing a demon doesn’t always mean that it’s banished forever.”

  “Demonic loopholes,” Cordelia commented.

  “And this one’s a doozy,” Doyle said.

  “Through these body absorptions, essentially human sacrifices, the Vishrak demon is attempting to acquire a new body, to return to our physical plane.”

  “And twice-spawned demons are particularly nasty buggers,” Doyle added.

  “So it wants to have the perfect body? Same as everyone else in L.A.”

  Angel shook his head. “Not a particular body. A series of bodies. It’s trying to complete its ritual, a re-spawning cycle.”

  With a leap of understanding, Cordelia said, “So it needs the complete set to finish its collection, and then it gets a new body.”

  “Essentially,” Angel said. “Yes.”

  “So how does it complete the set?”

  Doyle frowned. “That’s what we don’t know.”

  “And what happens if it finishes the cycle before we stop it?”

  “A lot more people are going to die.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I’m confused,” Cordelia said. “If the demon has no body, how does it meet and kill its victims?”

  “With a willing human accomplice,” Angel explained. “Somehow the demon borrows some of the human’s body . . . his physicality to complete each kill. We’re not sure what happens to the human during this borrowing process, but it’s probably unpleasant. The demon exists in a state of flux, changing from an active, dangerous-matter state to a resting psychic state.”

  Doyle added, “And it’s only vulnerable in its borrowed physical form.”

  Cordelia frowned. “So we have to catch it in the act?”

  “Catch, kill,” Angel remarked. “It’s a fine distinction.”

  “But this is where it gets complicated,” Doyle said.

  “Let me guess,” Cordelia said. “The cult?”

  Angel nodded. “They also want to catch the demon in the act.”

  Cordelia held up her hands, palms out. “Wait a minute. The cult’s on our side for a change?”

  “Not exactly,” Doyle said, frowning. “They want to bind the demon and its powers to their will.”

  “A pet demon?” Cordelia asked.

  “And you thought pit bulls were dangerous,” Doyle commented wryly.

  “Apparently the cult has an ancient order of sorcerers who learn arcane rituals and magic to locate and bind the demons,” Angel said. “However, to bind the demon, they must confront it in its borrowed physical state.”

  Cordelia nodded. “So they have to catch it in the act. Literally.” Doyle nodded. “How much of this have you told Kate?” Cordelia asked Angel.

  “Only about the cult,” he replied. “That we believe a cult is harvesting organs for some ritual.”

  “Which isn’t far off the mark,” Doyle added, “if you combine the demon, his human servant, and the cult into one, uh, menace.”

  Cordelia brightened. “If this cult knows how to find the demon, maybe they can lead us to it.”

  “First,” Angel said, “we have to find the cult.”

  Walking down Sunset Boulevard, Christine Foust was enjoying her first ever cup of Arabian mocha java, while Stefan sipped at the Gold Coast blend. Chris was on a mission to try every coffee flavor that Starbucks offered. She could always go back to her favorites later, after her experimentation.

  She had light brown hair that fell almost to her shoulders, watery blue eyes, and a slightly uneven tan, evidence of an outdoor lifestyle rather than idle hours spent sunbathing. She wore a sleeveless white loose-knit sweater and stonewashed jeans over fresh hiking boots. To her mother’s dismay, she had never been comfortable in a dress, skirt, or heels of any elevation. Stefan was also dressed casually, in a blue and gold striped shirt, jeans, and loafers.

  Naturally excitable, even without the jolt of fresh-brewed coffee, Christine walked faster than Stefan, who seemed content with a more leisurely pace. She kept turning to face him, walking backward as they talked. Stefan was several inches taller than she was, with light brown hair, deep blue eyes, and a square jaw. Broad across the shoulders with a trim waist and muscular legs, he looked like the outdoorsman he had claimed to be in their e-mail and chat room discussions. Both of them had declared themselves to be better at scaling mountains than navigating computer keyboards, yet the computer, strangely enough, had brought them together.

  On their second date, they planned to hike up one of her favorite trails, but for this first meeting Chris had chosen the coffee shop, a safe public location. Within minutes they had clicked. She felt so right, so natural, with Stefan. He seemed like everything she’d been waiting for in a guy. She just wanted to gobble him up.

  Growing up with three brothers and no sisters had played a significant role in her sensibilities. Consequently, she was as likely to ask a guy out on a date as he was to ask her. She had suggested this face-to-face meeting with Stefan, and she was about to take it to the next level.

  “A personal question, Stefan?”

  He took another perfunctory sip of his Gold Coast blend. “Fire away.”

  “How do you feel about public displays of affection?”

  “You mean, like holding hands while strolling through the park?”

  “I was thinking of something more affectionate.”

  He stopped walking, forcing her to pause in mid backstep. “Really? Should I be intrigued?”

  “Oh, if I were you, I would definitely be intrigued.” She glanced down the side street, which was momentarily deserted, gathered the front of his striped shirt in her hand, and tugged him in that direction. He let her lead him out of the glare of streetlights and passing cars. “Is this secluded enough for you?”

  “That depends on what you had in mind,” he replied, looking around for passersby.

  “Just . . . this,” she said, pulling his face down to hers.

  “I never complain when a woman makes the first move,” he whispered against her lips.

  “Good to know,” she murmured, opening her mouth to him.

  She heard his Gold Coast blend splash on the ground, thought, Oh, what the hell, and let her own cup fall behind him.

  She felt the tip of his tongue, his hands sliding up her arms to her bare shoulders, pushing against the edge of her sleeveless sweater. Something sharp jabbed into her throat. As she tried to cry out, his tongue went deeper into her mouth and became something else. She tried to scream, but her throat was being ripped open, her back, neck, and chest pierced. Biting down on the thing in her mouth proved futile, like trying to gnaw through steel. She pounded on his arms with her fists, kicked at his shins with her hiking boots, but none of her efforts loosened his hold. Worse, she could no longer breathe.

  She heard a distant screech and thought it might have come from her throat, but all too soon total darkness and utter silence claimed her.

  The Omni pounded the dashboard of the panel truck. “Faster! The Vishrak is near! The time for caution is past! Go! Go!”

  Willem 94 floored the accelerator. After more than an hour of aimless driving through the city, the Omni had ceased his chanting and turned his head to the right. “Yunk’sh has manifested over there,” the Omni had said, his voice quavering with excitement.

  “Over there” had been fifteen minutes and ten miles ago. The Omni had used the chanting ritual to attune his mind to the demon’s presence. Vincent had described it as a kind of psychic sonar. The signals rippled out and came back in a continual stream, revealing nothing until, finally, the Omni sensed the physical manifestation of the demon, which meant that Yunk’sh was about to claim his next victim.

  Vincent had explained their strategy. “The demon masquerades as a human, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He will want to lead his human sheep away from the flock, to a place of isolation,
before beginning the absorption. That is all the time we will have to intervene.”

  “Turn here,” the Omni instructed.

  Willem braked slightly as he swung out onto Sunset Boulevard, swerving slightly to get back into his lane. From the back of the panel truck, Willem heard several cult members tumble from their seats and bang into the sides of the truck. Muffled cursing erupted. Horns blared at Willem’s reckless driving.

  The Omni opened his wooden case and a vial of green salve within it. He dabbed a spot of salve on each fingertip of his left hand, then closed the vial and put it back in the case. He steepled his hands so that the salve would be on all ten fingertips. He looked down Sunset, his head darting from side to side like a bird’s. “Faster!”

  Willem weaved in and out of lanes of traffic to avoid an accident.

  The Omni’s fingertips had begun to glow a pulsing emerald green. “Turn left here! Now!”

  Willem slammed his foot on the brake and spun the large steering wheel, cutting across several lanes of traffic. All around the truck, car tires squealed as drivers fought to avoid collisions. Nevertheless, glass shattered and fenders crumpled as speeding cars stacked up like accordion folds. The panel truck, however, made the turn off of Sunset without any damage, other than to the cult members flung around in back.

  “There!” the Omni shouted triumphantly.

  Willem’s jaw dropped as he drove the panel truck right over the curb before bringing it to an abrupt stop. In the dim light of the side street, he saw a tall, muscular man leaning over what obviously had once been a human being but was now just a long, withered skin inside a pile of collapsing clothes. Only the man was not a man, but a demon, with long whipping tentacles where his fingers should have been, each tentacle segmented and tapered to a dangerous point. From his mouth sprang another tentacle, dripping with blood and gore. Although Willem had seen sketches of a Vishrak in its feeding state, still he was unprepared for the reality.

  Vincent pounded on the wall behind him, loud enough for the rattled cult members in back to hear and shouted, “Go! Now!” The back door trundled up on its track; then the truck began to shake as cult members poured out. The Omni pushed open his door, careful not to wipe the glowing salve from his fingertips. Vincent shoved Willem to break him out of his stunned trance. “Out! Move it!” Willem fumbled with his door, but Vincent had already jumped out the other side by the time Willem emerged.

  The exhilaration Yunk’sh experienced after the absorption was short-lived. Another sensation intruded. A pressure building within his skull, an itching beneath his false human scalp. Claustrophobia and panic filled him with an overwhelming need to flee. Instinctively, he sensed a power attempting to bind him to its will. The cult! he screamed silently.

  Dropping the empty skin of Christine Foust to the ground, he looked over his shoulder just as a panel truck swerved toward him, jumping the curb and screeching to a stop. Cloaked figures poured out of the back, but Yunk’sh was more interested in the figure who first stepped out of the passenger side of the truck, a bald man with fingertips glowing a bright green. Their sorcerer, he realized. Their Omni, drinker of Vishrak blood, binder of Vishrak demons.

  The Omni’s hands were like the doors of a cage, closing around him. Yunk’sh knew without knowing how he knew that if both hands touched the flesh he now inhabited, he would be bound for eternity to the Omni and his cult, forced to submit to their will, be their servant. Yunk’sh backed away.

  “Yunk’sh,” the man called in a deep voice, a voice that reverberated with the power of magic. “I bind you to our will and to our purpose. You will live to serve us.”

  “Never!” Yunk’sh shouted at the man, but seemed frozen before the cult members, almost mesmerized. “I will not play cobra to your mongoose, mortal.”

  The Omni strode forward, hands outstretched, fingers bathed in the emerald glow. “I bind you now. Live to serve.”

  Yunk’sh stepped away. He could not let the Omni get close enough to touch and thus complete the binding. Wearing identical black robes with crimson linings, the other cult members fanned out to surround him. One of them crossed his sight line, momentarily blotting out the glowing hands. In that moment, Yunk’sh felt his will return. Avoiding the hypnotic hands of the Omni, the demon glanced left and right. With the exception of the Omni and the oldest among them, they all seemed nervous. Yunk’sh retracted his tongue and finger tentacles. Until he completed the re-spawning ritual he could not risk absorbing a random human. Each sacrifice in the re-spawning ritual had to be unique within the cycle. A duplication would nullify the whole ritual and all would be lost. He would have to wait almost two hundred years in a psychic limbo, before he could attempt the ritual again. Unacceptable! he raged.

  While he couldn’t risk another absorption, there were many other ways to kill mere mortals. As the Omni filled in the last gap in the circle of cloaked cultists, Yunk’sh looked around hastily and targeted the smallest among them. Even though his demonic life force endowed his current borrowed form with the strength of several men, attacking the weakest link in the chain was the most expedient route to escape. His fists curled into the cloak of the short cult member and hoisted him up in the air. But the face looking out at him from the hooded cloak was that of a woman.

  “Let us bind you, Yunk’sh,” the woman said, grinning fatuously. “It will be glorious.”

  “Imbecile,” the demon roared and hurled her into a brick wall to the sound of pulped flesh and shattering bones. The fool, he thought. Doesn’t she realize that what she offers is an eternity of enslavement?

  Approaching sirens filled the night.

  “Gary! Samuel! Grab him!” the elder shouted.

  Overcoming one fear in the face of another, both men approached.

  Yunk’sh felt their hands on his arms. He drove his fist into the face of the first man, squashing his nose flat against his face. Screaming, the man dropped to his knees. Yunk’sh grabbed the other one and hurled him at the dangerously close Omni. Both men fell back in a heap. The demon turned, darted through the gap in the circle behind him, and fled down the street.

  In a few moments his mind calmed enough to allow him to will himself out of the physical plane, out of this location. The shadow his body cast weakened to palest gray, and his heavy footfalls faded to whispers and then to silence. Once again he became psychic energy floating in the ether and let his link to Elliot—a lifeline and a homing beacon—pull him home. The memory of the Omni’s glowing green hands chased him all the way.

  “Get off me, you moron!” the Omni shouted at Gary.

  Gary climbed to his feet and backed away from the sorcerer, then helped Samuel to his feet.

  Vincent called to the others. “Everyone back to the truck! The police are near.”

  “Dora’s dead,” Willem told Vincent.

  “Leave her,” Vincent instructed. His face was drawn in harsh lines, his fists clenched in frustration over their failure. They all piled back into the truck. Willem drove them away from the approaching sirens.

  Pressed against the passenger door, the Omni held his hands in front of his face. The salve smeared on his fingertips no longer glowed.

  Vincent turned to the Omni. “That wasn’t the last sacrifice, was it?”

  “No,” the Omni admitted. “But I sensed he is very near completion. Two more sacrifices, no more.”

  “So we will have other opportunities.”

  “Know we were very fortunate to catch the demon this night. With only two opportunities remaining, we must have a contingency plan ready.”

  “We follow as you lead us, Omni.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Elliot Grundy was an Ultimate Quest level-twelve shaman, the only magic user in his group, engaged in magical warfare with a level-four mage in the Forest of Splintered Doom. Should have been no contest. I’ll toast the little twerp, Elliot had been thinking—right up to the moment the level-four mage hit him with a dissolution spell. Just like that, two months of ca
mpaigning down the tubes. Elliot slammed his mouse down on the desk, cracking the molded plastic case. Dissolution meant no corpse, no possibility of his group taking the body to a forest temple to petition for resurrection. His carefully crafted character was lost forever.

  Inevitably, the messages began to appear on the bottom of his screen, the first from Jason, the barbarian swordsman in his group. “Elliot, you buttwipe! You just got fragged by an eleven-year-old newbie!” Another, from Billy, “You are such a total loser.” And from Milton, “Hey, Grundy, you spaz, I’d accuse you of hacking into level twelve, but hacking takes brains!” Finally, from Curt, “Hey, maybe the kid can take Grundy’s place.”

  Elliot typed back his own message before quitting the game, “Like I need you morons!”

  As Elliot cursed and ripped the pages of his shaman’s profile into confetti, the walls of his bedroom began to vibrate. At the same moment he felt the telltale pain in his head begin to swell, from throbbing nuisance to splitting headache.

  The desk trembled, the fractured mouse jittering across its Marvin the Martian mouse pad. Several panes in the bedroom window cracked. Books tumbled from his one freestanding bookshelf. And the only picture hanging in his bedroom—an acrylic painting of various fantasy creatures looking in awe upon a gargantuan medieval castle—fell off its hook and the glass panel shattered. Shirley had given him the painting when she found out how involved he was in on-line fantasy role-playing games.

  The air in the bedroom shimmered before his eyes. Elliot staggered, thrusting out his malformed left arm to catch himself against the wall. The arm was coarse and gray, wrinkled like an elephant’s leg from his shoulder down to the thick thumb and two fingers. Also, because the demon sucked vitality out of him whenever he manifested in physical form, Elliot felt as if he hadn’t eaten or slept in days. The demon was about to appear again, but something was wrong.

  Shimmering air coalesced before him, becoming a thick mist, then a soupy evening fog. Limbs and a head appeared with the consistency of cotton candy. Features began to resolve as the shape stretched and gained an appearance of weightiness. Yunk’sh solidified as Stefan, the last form he had taken, which required less energy, but some of the features were off. Not that anyone but Elliot would have noticed. Yunk’sh was already slipping back into his neutral state. Something had weakened him.