Demon Underground (2)

by S. L. Wright

  He wasn’t going to be any help.

  Maybe Mystify would.

  I started jogging, weaving between people and taking to the street when I could. Runners say that you get into a meditative state. I don’t know about that; I’m usually running for my life if I’m running. But I tried it this time, tried to let everything go, clear my head.

  The park was emptier than the streets, so I made good time heading uptown to the Metropolitan Museum. Once again I reached Cleopatra’s Needle without anything to write on.

  So I kept on running, taking a big look around the reservoir and back down and around. I wasn’t sure if it was working, this meditation thing, but it was better than going back to the bar to wait alone for someone to show up. I loved the old place, but I was done with holing up there.

  As I ran, I passed and was passed by other people. Some were joggers who couldn’t forgo their usual late-night run. But others were clearly not prepared to be hustling along in their suits and stiff leather shoes, lugging briefcases as if it was hours after they had started the struggle home.

  As I circled around for the third time—bless my demon lungs—I felt Mystify’s signature appear quite suddenly, as if he emerged from underground. He was waiting by the obelisk as I finally ground to a halt, breathing much harder than I had expected.

  “I knew you’d be here,” he said. “It’s like we’re connected somehow.”

  He was back in his young Theo Ram guise, even though he knew Ram didn’t like it. But I was glad to see a friendly face. “What do you think of this, Mystify? Dread’s pulled off the resurrection without Vex.”

  “He learned at the knee of the master. We have to expect that he’ll spread his wings now that he isn’t under Vex’s thumb. But he’s moving fast, and that means he’ll make mistakes.”

  “Dread seems to have everything under control. I was just at his last production at NYU Medical. Zeal pulled the trigger.”

  Mystify’s brows went up. “I saw a clip of it. It reminded me of that awful infomercial Dread showed you.”

  I gave him a sharp look. “How do you know that?”

  “Ram was watching through the bug he had on you.” He reached out to touch me, expecting a big reaction from me.

  I moved away so he couldn’t. “Yeah, Ram told me.”

  He wasn’t expecting that. Telling me Ram’s secrets was one of his biggest holds on me. Now he was thrown. “I know you almost as well as he does.”

  “A lot has happened since you were born.”

  He smiled, looking a lot like Ram. “I don’t think you’ve changed in essentials, Allay. Your desire to help people, to give them a second chance, even someone like Dread. It’s because you want to spread comfort and relief. It’s your nature to be forgiving, to shun killing because it’s the antithesis of what you are.”

  That took me aback. “You’re saying that came from my demon side, not my human side?”

  “Yes, just like Ram will always be aggressive about getting what he wants. And Dread will always inspire fear and terror. And why Shock takes pleasure in tragedies. Those deepest desires form our personalities.”

  I was used to thinking my finer impulses were purely human. But maybe he had a point. Not that I was going to talk to him about that. “Ram wanted this to happen.”

  “He expected it would. There’s no way to undo it now. But at least Cherie won’t last long. Hybrids never do.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I wish everyone would stop saying that. Some of us do fine.”

  Mystify held up his hands, silently asking forgiveness.

  “If only I could get to Cherie. She doesn’t like what Dread’s doing, I can tell.” I gave him a considering look. I needed to share what I’d learned. “I want to talk to her. If I can get her to change her mind, she could stop this.”

  “You want to convince her to abandon her religion? Good luck.”

  “Why not? It’s what demons are good at—talking people into things.”

  “Some demons are better at it than others.”

  “You’re not like the others.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant by that, but his eyes lit up. “Can you help me find a way into the Prophet’s Center from underground? We have to get past the ERIs that Dread installed.”

  “That place is ringed by demon guards. You can’t get within blocks without being detected.”

  I smiled. “They won’t even know I’m there. I was standing in the same lobby as Dread at the hospital and he didn’t notice me. Zeal wasn’t much further away, and she didn’t, either.”

  Mystify frowned slightly, taking a moment to sense my signature. “Hmmm ... Your signature does sort of fade into the background. Especially when there’s another demon around.”

  “See?”

  “Yeah, but getting inside the Prophet’s Center isn’t the hard part. What are you going to do when you find Cherie? What makes you think she’ll talk to you instead of sounding the alarm?”

  I gave a little dance at the base of the obelisk. “Because you, my friend Mystify, will be wearing Zeal’s signature and guise when we go in. She’ll think you’re her good buddy Missy van Dam, and we’re just going to have a nice chat. ...”

  13

  I was ready to set off for Brooklyn right away, but Mystify insisted on doing some research first. So we took the underground tunnels back to his place deep under Grand Central. It wasn’t as weird and frightening this time, though I couldn’t get over the rustle of rats and cockroaches scurrying away from me—sometimes right over my shoes. But now I had learned to be especially careful in the wet areas where the multicolored nastiness would smear on my clothes and get in my eyes.

  This time instead of going through the condos, Mystify took a “shortcut” that required us to walk sideways along a ledge inside an active subway tunnel. We were halfway there when I felt the suck of air. A train was coming.

  “Get into the niche!” Mystify ordered, pulling me along faster. He shoved me into a depression in the wall, barely larger than the rest of the ledge. “Flatten yourself against the wall. Hang on tight with your fingers. There’s going to be massive blowback.”

  His last words were shouted over the squealing racket bearing down on us as the white headlight bored into my skull. I wanted to run but that would put me right in its path.

  Then it was on me, the screech of metal on metal and the suction of air lifting me from my feet. If I hadn’t been a demon, I wouldn’t have had the strength to hold on.

  But the cars moved past much slower than I expected. The faces blurring in the windows were crammed together, eyes rounded in fear, as if they were in cattle cars heading for the gas chamber. The city had been turned inside out by Dread’s stunt.

  The train rumbled to a halt. The people who were closest to the window inside were staring at us in growing surprise. I put my finger to my lips in urgent plea that they not point us out to everyone.

  The car jerked as the train started moving again. I counted three more cars and then it was gone. “Let’s get out of here, Mystify, before another one comes.”

  “It’s not far,” he assured me.

  We reached a door I recognized—Mystify had brought us out this way last time. Now I knew how to find it again. I lightly ran down six flights of metal stairs until we reached the power room. Down the catwalk and through the archway was the catchments room. A long metal ladder was bolted down the side of the wall. The enormous tank nearly filled the round space.

  Mystify went first, pointing at the dark rectangle about halfway up. “That’s where it is. I have to lean out and stretch to grab hold of the rope. But I’ll be able to pull you in once I’m inside.”

  It looked perilous the way he swung out to the side, holding on with one hand and one foot. His arm stretched, making my stomach turn from the wrongness of it. As if he were made of rubber.

  Mystify swung from the lip of the opening, holding out one hand to me. I reached out and took hold of it. “Jump,” he ordered.

 
; I shifted so I could get a good launch off the ladder, and warned him, “Okay, here I come!”

  I leaped for the opening in the wall. It helped that the wall was curved to fit around the water tank. Mystify lifted me with his supporting hand, pulling me in so I landed neatly beside him.

  We were in a recessed compartment, a small square room no more than eight feet wide. It smelled of bleach and was bare except for a card table and folding chair.

  Mystify pulled the laptop from where it was concealed on the underside of the table. “Just in case someone gets in and steals everything. But nobody can reach the rope now that I cut off the handle in the wall. I planted a broadband wireless relay at the top. The Grand Central network is really good.”

  I quietly sat on another folding chair that Mystify unhooked from the pipe running across the ceiling. There were a couple of plastic shopping bags from the Gap and Old Navy hanging there. An extra pair of sneakers dangled from their laces. “Where did you get all this stuff?”

  He busied himself with booting up the computer. “Do you really want to know?”

  It took me a second. “That means you stole it.”

  “Yeah, isn’t that how demons get what they need?”

  I thought about my patrons and how I took energy from them, stealing it away without them knowing. Shock did the same with her patients. What was more important than sustenance? Still ... “I think it’s bad enough we’re parasites. Why do we have to be criminals as well?”

  Mystify shrugged. “You had Vex. I don’t have a benefactor.”

  That shut me up good. It finally dawned on me that this was Mystify’s home. A hole in the wall. He might look like Ram’s younger brother, but he didn’t have any of the wealth or power of Ram. He had nothing but what he scratched up day to day, living on the edge.

  It also occurred to me that other demons probably looked at my ratty little bar and thought the same disparaging thoughts about me.

  As Mystify clicked through NYC government Web sites and library files, he kept up a running commentary about the proximity of the Prophet’s Center to the water, which apparently wasn’t good. It was also far away from subway lines. So he focused in on the Williamsburg Bridge, accessing engineering plans that he got by hacking into the city DOT Web site.

  So now I was an accomplice to cyberhacking on top of everything else. Apparently I had started at murder and was working my way back down the criminal scale.

  I knew the Williamsburg Bridge well because it was the closest one to my bar. It was a lot like the Lower East Side, utilitarian to the extreme. Artists didn’t paint it. I’d never seen a photograph of it. It was the ugly step-sister among the city bridges, and I loved it for that. Who needed fancy doodads and design thrills? The lattice of truss-work exposed raw mathematical formulas in all their glory.

  It was also built in an era when security was not a concern. Mystify finally started exclaiming over a number of possible ways to get underground.

  Once he had downloaded what he needed, he slid his laptop into a messenger’s bag. He was so eager to get started that I said, “Why do you want to help? This could be really dangerous.”

  “Anything that mucks things up for the big boys is all right by me.” The way he slung the bag over his shoulder and held on to the strap made him look much younger. He had nothing but this.

  Now that he was focused on something other than trying to confuse me, I was starting to really like him.

  Getting into Brooklyn wasn’t easy. Too many people were flooding into Williamsburg to get to the Prophet’s Arena and the Prophet’s Center, where Cherie was said to be ensconced. The police had barricaded the bridge going into Brooklyn, and all of the streets on the Manhattan side were jammed up.

  Though it was dark when we started out, by the time we walked across the Manhattan Bridge, south of the Williamsburg Bridge, the sun was rising. We couldn’t find a cab for love or money, and there were no subway tracks in that direction, so we had to circle several miles around the Brooklyn Navy Yard on foot. It was cut off by manned security gates and tall wrought-iron fences with large shepherd’s hooks at the top. The streets were littered with cars that had been abandoned in the chaos, snarling the early morning traffic.

  Mystify was wearing Bliss’s signature. It was almost as mild as mine, and most demons hadn’t sensed it yet so they might think it was their own adrenaline pumping from the turmoil. Even though her signature was so light, I was hoping it would still cancel out mine, which was far more recognizable among Vex demons.

  We didn’t sense any demons on our approach, but things got really hairy when we entered the Hasidic neighborhood of south Williamsburg, marked by wrought-iron cages over the windows used to separate the dishes during holy days. Usually the streets were filled with men in old-fashioned black suits and women with their heads in colorful schmattes watching over dozens of children playing on every block, their bicycles and toys scattered across the sidewalks. But all of that had disappeared in the midst of the gridlocked cars with honking vans and trucks desperate to deliver their wares. Everyone ignored the lights, trying to fight their way through, so we had to wind across the street between stalled cars, avoiding the shouts around us.

  The people who were out hurried by with their heads hunched, concerned only with their own destination. But Mystify stared around with a broad grin on his face. “Exciting, isn’t it?” he said with a wink, when he caught me looking at him.

  At the same time, he brushed his hand across the arm of a woman shoving past us. His aura sparked rusty orange as he soaked off her panic. He shuddered slightly, briefly closing his eyes in delight.

  He was feeding off her.

  Disgusted, I snapped, “Can’t you leave them alone? They’re already being traumatized enough.”

  “I’m not hurting anyone,” he protested.

  “It’s the principle of the thing.” Disappointed for reasons I couldn’t even articulate, I added, “I almost forgot you were a demon for a second there.”

  He nodded patiently as if he understood.

  I got mad real fast. “Now you look like Ram.”

  “Ram knows you liked him better when you thought he was human. That’s when he was pretending to let you be in control. I bet he’s doing exactly what you tell him right now. At least until he gets his hooks good and deep in you.”

  Vividly I remember ordering him to be honest, with Ram meekly answering my questions with almost sickening honesty. Was that more manipulation? Of course, how could he resist turning me this way and that? As if he was playing with a fantasy doll made in the image of his one great love.

  It made my stomach drop to think of Hope. The goddess. The perfect dead wife. She had shared lifetimes with Ram, fought and loved him. She was the original while I was a pale, insipid copy. So nice. And malleable.

  Mystify laughed. “I’m right, aren’t I? Pretty soon he’ll have you thinking it’s your idea you two should be together.” He laughed again. “I bet he would hate you being here with me.”

  I remembered how Ram had flared up at the mention of Mystify, right before I threw him out and ordered him to leave his offspring alone. “Oh, yeah. He would.”

  “Is that why you’re with me?”

  “No.” I thought about it some more. “I knew you were the only one who would agree to help.”

  “What about the ever-adored Shock?” Mystify asked. “I thought she supported you in everything.”

  “She’s working,” I hedged. Then I had to admit, “We’ve been arguing a lot. About Bliss. And Ram. Even you . . . She thought I was crazy to go off with you without calling her.”

  Mystify got a faraway look, as if he was seeing a memory. “That’s the way it is during chaotic times. You never know who’s going to turn on you. It could be the person you trusted the most.”

  “You’re thinking about Hope.” I had seen that look in Ram’s eyes. “She must be pretty amazing to be able to mesmerize you secondhand.”

  He shook him
self out of it. “It’s the stuff of legend.”

  Ouch. I managed to not say it out loud.

  He was watching me closely. “Are you sure you want to do this? It could get really bad if we make a mistake. Dread’s got that cage ready and waiting. Though I suppose Ram wouldn’t let you stay cooped up for long.” He paused. “Unless he’s trying to prove a point, like you need him—”

  I flung up my hands. “Stop it! I don’t want to hear any more about Ram. I can deal only with my own responsibilities. I could have stopped all this if I hadn’t been so afraid for my own soul, my own precious human soul. I should have killed Dread when I had the chance.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask. Why in heaven’s name did you kill Pique instead of Dread?”

  “I was in complete shock when Ram revealed himself. I shut down. I couldn’t kill Dread. I just watched as Ram killed Vex.” I gritted my teeth. “And now everyone is paying the price because I was weak.”

  Mystify stayed silent. He agreed, but was too polite to say so.

  That just hardened my resolve. “Don’t worry. I’m going to fix it.”

  Mystify showed me an access door set in the base of the roadway leading up to the Williamsburg Bridge. It was several blocks away from the Prophet’s Center, but I could feel the fringes of demon signatures in the distance.

  It was definitely Goad, and maybe Stun. I figured their range was longer than my own, so Mystify hurried to break inside the door. I should have known he would be good at picking locks, any locks. Ram probably could have gotten us out of that cage any time he wanted to. But he had intended to give Dread to me, drained and tied up with a bow.

  We entered a square passageway made of poured concrete. It was much cleaner than the tunnels. This was a worksite with exposed bulbs strung along conduit fastened to the wall just above our heads, providing a constant light.

  Far down the corridor, we reached an abrupt end. The cables from the suspension bridge, each fatter around than my head, slanted down through the room. They were looped around an enormous drum lying in front of us, filling the corridor from wall to wall. Each cable fanned out to each fit into a groove in the drum.