“Sounds like a plan.” He paused for a moment, pursing his lips and searching for the proper etiquette. In all his masks and years of deception, it sometimes became difficult to remember the basic niceties.
“Hey, all these years, I never asked your first name. What is it?”
Walking alongside him with her arm companionably pushed through his, she glanced up, smirking and arching a brow. “Hang out with a lady all night and don’t even know her name? Tsk-tsk. It’s Sheila, sweetie.”
That name made him feel as though he’d been kicked in the crotch. He must have paled, or at least stalled his steps for a moment, because he could hear her asking if there was something wrong with that.
Sheila. Of course, it would be.
For a moment, Damien felt all of it trembling, all the work of the past years and all the possibilities he’d tried to lay out, each and every one of them quaking in their foundations, about to be toppled by one single mistake, one accidental overlap. He pushed it away, devoting all of his considerable will into pushing things back onto the right track and forcing himself to start moving.
“No. It’s a beautiful name.” His voice sounded stilted and false to his own ears, but again, he stroked her mind with his, a brief nudge to knock her suspicion down a notch. She just nodded, grinning a little and almost leading him out.
“Of course it is. It’s mine, isn’t it?”
Today it is. But what was it last time, and what will it be next time? He wasn’t sure—not 100 percent—but all his mental alarms were ringing, and some of the old paranoid fantasies were creeping back in. No matter how many times he told himself to watch out for that sudden blow from around the corner, he always walked right into it, and it always threw him for a loop. Maybe someday he would learn his lesson, but apparently, it hadn’t happened yet.
“You want some coffee or something? Seems kinda disrespectful to just stand outside.”
Sheila arched her brow a bit higher. She added a playful tone to her voice while she knuckled him in the shoulder. “Oh, going to buy me some coffee? Is this a date now?”
Damien tried to repress a shudder; if this was what he thought it was, the concept of a date with Brokov was rated in his list of things he’d like to do somewhere above being dropped into the center of the earth and just below eating a rotten horse raw, but she didn’t—couldn’t—know. He kept his tone neutral as he shrugged and answered her. “If you want to think so. I just want something hot and black in me.” He feigned a grin, managing to appear genuine only with liberal application of his talents, but she laughed anyway.
“All right, Mr. Man. Then let’s have us a date.”
* * *
Karesh watched as others did, amused at their antics, how foolish they could be, unaware that the one so many of them were looking for was sitting right there, drinking alongside them and laughing on the inside. He wasn’t sure which he found more amusing: that he was sitting there, right in front of all these people who would gladly kill him if they could only lay hands on him, or that he was doing it and not a single one of them knew.
He was well aware that someone here—probably Drakanis, though it was possible someone else was like him in this way—was trying to pick him out, feeling the miasma he projected into the ether and trying to pierce it to the source. Such things didn’t worry him in the slightest, however. Many hunters over the years had tried their best to find him, and so far, none of them had caught him. Only one of them had even come close, and Karesh had enjoyed destroying him, had enjoyed it perhaps more than nearly anything he had done in service to his master, before or since.
He had watched as Drakanis and Parker slipped out, smiling at them in the manner of a normal person.
Just curious what’s going on. Pay no mind to me. Nothing to be concerned about. He had felt a brief flicker of fear in his heart, just a twinge—They know!—but it had faded quickly after he got a better look at their faces. Given the crestfallen look that both of them had, he doubted either of them knew much more than where the bathroom was, and even that was in doubt. There was nothing to fear from that corner; in fact, there was much to learn, as once they had left and he still felt the twitching at the edges of his mind, he knew he could safely exclude them from his list of worries. Even Drakanis, born to his task and his power, remained ignorant and unknowing, while someone else close to him somehow knew much more. Compared to Karesh’s power, however, this was like a cockroach attempting to assault a bulldozer. Apparently, the insect realized this, as a moment later, Karesh watched Woods and Brokov scurry out.
Interesting. Which of them is it? I wonder. I hope it’s the woman; she’ll be so much . . . tastier.
He could have sent his mind into theirs, sent his consciousness burrowing into whatever passed for their brains, rooting until he found the answer. To do such might be to give the game away though, and Karesh much preferred to play with his food.
He allowed his body and mouth to run themselves, moving about the room and saying his hellos and good-byes, ordering fresh drinks as he emptied them. He had long ago learned, even before coming into his power as the keeper of the talu`shar, to keep his mind occupied with things beyond what his body was up to and had spent many years perfecting the talent.
If asked, none of those he spoke to that night could have said they felt him to be distracted or in any way not paying attention, though in truth he was registering things only peripherally, as he considered how best to use the latent in his game with Drakanis. It would at least give him something exciting to do while he was waiting for apotheosis.
If only I can find time to work it into my busy schedule, he thought with a smile that managed to appear properly sorrowful to the assembled mourners, but that might have chilled anyone who knew him well. Unfortunately, he had killed all such acquaintances years ago. I suppose I’ll just have to make time.
Chapter 10
9:30 pm, September 20, 1992
Damien Woods—still memorable, still someone people stop to talk to—pounds his fists against the wall, screaming at the top of his lungs, glaring down at the shape on the table in front of him. His eyes are wild, a long cry from the placid green-eyed gaze he will gain in later years; they roll in their sockets like those of a rabid dog, and white scum is gathering in the corners of his mouth.
He’s been like this for nearly an hour, rabid with rage and grief, unable to think a coherent thought or speak an intelligible word. The others, those who had led him down this broken path, had fled when it began. It would be years before he saw any of them again. Then it would be very different, but for now, there is only Damien and the shape on the table.
It had begun simply enough, as such things often did, but before anyone had noticed, things had turned very sour, very fast. That had culminated tonight, when they had, in typical teenage ignorance, decided to try to summon something, call up one of those things named in the books they had thought were just so incredibly interesting.
None of them had paid for it; there’d been no penalty, no harm, no foul for them. Or so they’d thought. Then they had come back to Damien’s place, dispirited and wondering what they’d done wrong—nothing had answered their calls, nothing had taken their sacrifices—and chattering about it as they came up the stairwell to the top floor and the shitty apartment Damien shared with his girlfriend.
When the front door opened and Damien got a look at what had opened it, he’d begun to realize the price that was paid for playing with things that were beyond them.
Damien had been expecting to see Sheila, probably with sleep still in her brown eyes, yawning and scrubbing at her face in a futile attempt to wake herself up. He was making silent bets with himself on whether she’d answer the door wearing the jeans and T-shirt he’d last seen her in or a bathrobe. He tapped his foot expectantly and waited for her to open the door so he could see his friends in, get them a
ll a beer, and then sink his fingers into her hair and forget about the rest of the world for a while.
What came to the door wasn’t wearing jeans or a bathrobe. The Sheila-thing that answered the door came naked, though only the criminally insane would have found the sight erotic. Her body had been twisted, the spine bent at odd angles, her shoulders dislocated, and the joints broken in a fashion that brought to mind the worst nightmares he’d had about insects as a child. Her face was a mask of hate, the flesh rotting away, the lips entirely missing and thus failing to conceal the mouthful of fangs and the serrated tongue that just hours ago had been warm and soft and pink when it ran across his lips, kissing him good-bye.
The others—Tim and Janus, Richard, Alice and James, all of them—saw what was waiting for them, heard it beginning to laugh, and felt something deep inside them quake in fear. Faced with this horror, they lost all sense of innocent fun in their activities, turned tail, and ran.
Damien could not run. His feet had been rooted to the spot, as if God Himself had decreed that it was his task to witness what he had done—Damien couldn’t find any dissent within himself, any part that said this was not his doing—and pay the consequences of his actions. Only when it had turned its baleful red eyes on him was he able to move or speak, but he managed to speak the words just the same, the ones they hadn’t felt a need to bother with, those that supposedly banished this creature.
When his voice came from his throat, at first, it was lacking any authority or conviction. The words poured from him, coming out with perfect recall, though he would have sworn just the day before that his mind was a sieve, filtering out any useful information. The thing that had once been his girlfriend continued to advance, her facial muscles twitching. Damien realized she—or it—was trying to smile at him, trying to comfort him in some twisted fashion. That drove him deeper, calling on names and words of power that he hadn’t even realized he’d known, each spilling from him, not as he thought of it, but simply as if he was being used as a vessel for something else that wanted to speak its piece.
As he spoke, energy gathered in the air. He smelled the bitter tang of ozone, heard the rumbling of distant thunder. He saw every pore, each of them writhing as the taint filled it, and he saw the pain in her eyes as he sensed whatever was left of Sheila trying to push out the thing that had taken up residence in her body. None of that stopped him from finishing though, even though he’d known what the consequences would be. Nothing could be inhabited, twisted like that, and live once it was gone. He’d known, and still he’d gone on.
So here he was, standing over her corpse, the twisted features once again serene and human but with no life left in them. He raged over it, speaking all the words of all the rites he knew, hoping against hope that some combination would unlock the doorway beyond death and let her pass through. Nothing was working, and he doubted anything would by this point. But that was unthinkable, so he kept on, all through the night, feeling his grasp of the powers he’d tapped growing and yet feeling Sheila drifting farther and farther out of his reach.
If he’d been the man he would one day become, the man who had harnessed the power within him and who had grown to understand the rules that governed it, he would have stopped then. Even as the grief rose up to kill what was left of him, he would have walked away then. But he wasn’t that man, not yet, and so he compounded his mistake by lashing out with his energy, using it to tie a tether around the last fleeing part of the soul that had been Sheila Orlan and binding her to the world of the physical. How he did it, he couldn’t say, even now, but somehow, he did, needing no ritual, no special words, just raw will.
He will pay for this crime dozens of times in the coming years, finding that fragment embedded in countless others, each of them accusatory and raging by the end. More than a handful of them will try to kill him, some subconscious part of them—the Sheila part—smelling death and misery on him, scenting the remnants of his crime and seeking to punish him. They will fail each time, but only by narrow margins, and only when he throws his power at them, letting it go without the leash of focus or ritual, and each time, he only exacerbates the problem.
But all of that is ahead of him, and though some small portion of his mind, the last remnant at that moment that remains sane and capable of understanding what he’s doing, tries to warn him, to stop him. It sees what is coming but is powerless to stop the coming storm of energy.
His fury is only made worse as what he had hoped for doesn’t happen. The corpse on the table remains stubbornly dead, even falling rapidly into decay, months of it settling in all at once until nothing rests on the table where his love had lain except for dust and a handful of gold fillings. The spirit he’s tried so hard to catch and bring back flees from his grasp—not beyond this world, he can tell that much, but no longer here, either—and the blindness falls upon him again, preventing him from remembering what else he did that night, what other black magic he tried to work, what demons he called upon, and what curses he laid on the heads of those who brought him to this point.
He remembers none of it, not now, and not later, but when he at last opens his eyes to the world around him, opens them and sees and thinks about what he is seeing, he feels a sense of duty and purpose. A single word—his name, his title, in a way, he somehow knows—echoes in his mind, and with that word comes a sense of atonement, a chance of forgiveness for what he’s done. Disciple.
Disciple of what? he asks himself—or whatever has planted that word in his mind—but there is no answer, just that single word ringing in his mind.
Chapter 11
1:00 am, December 14, 1999
Damien blew another streamer of smoke through his nose, caught it in his mouth, and gave it a double pump. Lying back against the leather sofa, he stared at the streamers of smoke drifting toward the ceiling, trying to see the patterns in them. It was an exercise he’d picked up when he first started smoking, long before he’d even considered that there really could be patterns in such things. He’d just done it, like children who watched the clouds for animals. He’d been awake for nearly three hours, doing nothing but staring at the smoke and trying to get some kind of fix on what the hell was wrong with things.
He knew enough to know it was going to happen soon, but not enough to pinpoint it or have any idea on how to stop it. He’d managed to forget about the mess for a little while. Whether he was being paranoid about Brokov or not, she’d been fantastic in the sack. One thing about sex was that if it was going right, it managed to push the rest of that shit out of his mind. But then he’d made the mistake of falling asleep, and the dream had come, like it always did when he was about to stray from the path, leaving him wakeful and contemplative. So he was sitting naked on an unfamiliar woman’s couch in the middle of the night, chain-smoking and waiting for inspiration.
So far, it hadn’t come. That was not unusual, even though he was supposed to be the great and mighty champion of something or other. But when he woke up, biting back the scream that wanted to come so he wouldn’t wake Brokov, he’d learned different. The voice that sometimes spoke to him at such times, telling him where to go and what to do, was back in his brain, but it wasn’t telling him what to do; it was just pointing out a little something that he should have known but had apparently forgotten to remember.
Drakanis is the key; his blood was the door, his blood is the road, and his blood is the tithe.
He’d forgotten he wasn’t the hero of the piece, even though he’d known within days of parking his sorry self in this sorry town that Drakanis was different somehow, that he was what Woods was there for. He hadn’t heard that voice in a long time. The last time it had been obvious that it was speaking was when he got the job in the first place. But he’d stuck around, watching and waiting to see why he’d come there, in the meantime deluding himself into thinking that he had some world-shaking role to play there, that this time might pay for all and he’
d be done with the whole mess.
What the patterns in the smoke and the voice in his head were telling him didn’t necessarily prevent that from being so, but they were telling him that he was supposed to be in the background, giving Drakanis a little shove into his own destiny. There’d been other little signs along the way, trying to point it out to him, but he’d ignored them—probably deliberately, he figured in hindsight. His own ego and desire to be free had gotten in the way of this thinking, and when that happened, trouble always followed.
Now that his mind was a little clearer, he could admit this, if only to himself. Now the only question was what to do about it. He could tell by the looks on their faces yesterday that Parker and Drakanis were starting to go down the right path, but he had to figure out how to shove them down it, to make them commit 100 percent. On such subjects, the smoke and the inner voice were both silent, but he was beginning to get some ideas of his own. Now he just had to buck up and get to it, before the shit hit the fan.
Then there was the matter of the psychic static that was settling into his life, a blinding fog that made everything that much harder to get done. He was almost certain whoever was putting it out had at least something to do with the murders and beyond that, the talu`shar. Once or twice it had even occurred to him to wonder if it was possible that the killer himself could have been there, laughing alongside everyone else, filled to the brim with glee at what he’d done.
If he was that close, you’d have noticed him before. Maybe. It wouldn’t have been the first time that something so glaringly obvious had escaped him, while he deluded himself into thinking he was absolutely correct. Gods willing, it wouldn’t be the last either, but the smoke had also whispered other things to him, and he wasn’t so sure he was going to survive many more mistakes.
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