Beyond the Veil (Demon Squad Book 5)

by Tim Marquitz

  The smoke hadn’t really grown thicker, but it had become more fragrant. There were definitely bodies cooking nearby. Rala stepped around the edge of the building and gasped, her hands going to her mouth. I darted out behind her, guns leading the way, before slipping them back into their holsters. No one there would be causing me any trouble outside of giving me a raspy case of lung rot.

  I eased Rala back around the corner so she didn’t have to see any more than she already had. She was either one hell of an actress or she had no clue there would be roasted corpses at the site. There was too much raw emotion on her face for me to believe she was faking it. I used to screw a succubus. Trust me when I say I’ve been faked out by the best. Besides, judging from the frenzied chaos of the scene, which I saw spread out before me, I’d bet Baalth’s right nut this was Longinus’ handiwork. There were simply too many bodies and too much carnage for it to be anything else.

  Pieces of aliens lay scattered all over the place, sticking up wet and colorful from the ruin of what was some sort of building before Longinus had arrived. There was nothing left but the foundation and a couple of random, metal pipes, which had survived the holocaust, and now stood up out of the mess as lonely markers to the deceased. And there were a bunch of them.

  There were scorch marks on the street and sidewalk and the residual char of magical energy. It looked as if it had been relatively lower energy stuff, explosives and simple blasts before the melee started, but there was sufficient evidence to show Longinus was still running on fumes. At full power, there wouldn’t be any bodies left to smell, let alone see. There’d be a blackened pit in place of the wreckage.

  It looked as though he were still alive, though. Judging by the blast marks, he’d caught the Eidolon group by surprise, a point in Rala’s favor. If she and Vol had been setting us up, the group would have been a little more prepared, you would think. Then again, Longinus isn’t your average, ordinary victim.

  I shook my head before I could get caught up in more circular thinking. A deep breath later, to steady my nerves, I crossed the ruin to take a closer look. There wasn’t anything there I hadn’t seen before, me and death go way, way back, but I didn’t relish manhandling a bunch of drippy bits as I searched the place. Longinus hadn’t given me much of a choice, so I grabbed a piece of broken piping and used it to overturn the alien chunks that were still solid enough to be somewhat recognizable.

  “What are you doing?” Rala whisper-shouted from her perch near the wall.

  It was a good question. I wasn’t sure, so I just shrugged. On the surface, I was looking for tattoos, but there was something else that was drawing me in; a deep, subsurface tingle, which kept tapping at the door of my senses. There was nothing overt about it, just a consistent peck, peck, peck letting me know something was there. It was driving me nuts.

  I kept flipping gushy chunks of meat over as I made my way around the place. Here and there, I found the phoenix tattoos I’d been looking for, as well as bits and pieces I thought were the same markings but were just too mutilated to tell. The Raven poked and prodded until I knocked over a severed lump of thigh and spied a golden something or other underneath.

  Nevermore.

  I snatched the thing up and took a closer look. It was a piece of a weapon. The pommel of a dagger, I guessed, or a small rod of some kind. It had obviously held a mystical charm before it had been destroyed, but there was no telling what it was for. I had a good idea as to who it belonged to, though. It reeked of Longinus’s essence. The chill of his magical presence lingered like a shadow on a cold day. He’d definitely been here and laid a beating on these clowns, but where he was now was a mystery. Where the hell were Scooby and the gang when you needed them?

  Once more I tried to reach Longinus through the gem, but there was no sense of it working. The thing sat silent in my hand, so I put it away and returned to where Rala leaned against the building. She hadn’t vomited, at least. That was good. I didn’t have to worry about stepping in it.

  “Do you know where Ulverton Square is from here?”

  She grunted an affirmative and started off without saying a word, ready to go.

  “Hold on,” I called to her.

  Rala spun to face me, her stripes sickly pale against the orange of her cheeks. That was the last thing she wanted to do.

  “How about you just tell me how to get there? It’s probably best if you went home…just in case, you know?”

  She drew a breath and nodded, clearly grateful for any reason to not have to see more toast-crispies. Can’t say I blamed her. We walked off together, but it was a while before she found the energy to say anything. She gave me directions in a monotone voice, repeating the way several times to ensure I had them memorized, and then I was on my own. About a block from where she’d taken us to meet Vol, she gave a terse goodbye, directed me once more, and darted into the shadows.

  I watched her go, wanting to feel bad for her, but I just couldn’t get there. Karra was all alone…no, that wasn’t quite true. She and the baby—our baby—were together. Wherever they were, a psychotic fucking alien held them hostage. My head swirled at the thought, but my feet kept their course, slapping the concrete one step after another. The gray of Desboren flitted by, the emptiness of it understandable now. The Alitereans had been using the place as a staging point from early on in the conflict. And now God was doing the exact same thing; raping the planet and its people to fuel the war machine. Some things never change. Head down, my stomach fluttering, I went on, trying not to think about it all. Fortunately, Ulverton Square appeared just a short while later.

  I darted over to the gate and was surprised to see Calar standing within its circle. He stared at me through his golden eyes, his perfect face with just the slightest hint of disgust tinting the edges of his expression. It looked as if he’d expected me.

  “I need to send a message to Lucifer.”

  He sneered. “I’m no messenger service for demons.”

  “God damn it,” I spit back and felt his magic ramp up.

  “Do not take the—”

  “Yeah, yeah, buddy. Blow it out your pristine starfish. If you won’t pass a message on to Lucifer, then maybe you’ll pass one on to the Old Man or his boy.”

  Calar stiffened and took a short step forward. His hands were clenched tight, and I could see the budding of his wings, their energy peeking out from behind his shoulders.

  “Maybe I’ll just let myself upstairs.”

  I suspected provoking him wasn’t the most rational way to summon a supervisor, but I wasn’t gonna get anywhere with Mister Perfect. A threat to the gate, however, would warrant a response. They couldn’t let that go unanswered.

  A sudden wash of energy set Calar on his heels, and I smiled. Mission accomplished.

  The smile fell away when I realized who’d come to deliver the spanking.

  Fifteen

  “Come now, Frank. Have you nothing better to do with your time?” Lucifer asked as he waved the angel away with a polite, and obviously manufactured, smile. The old animosities were still in place, which was an odd comfort given how much else has changed. Calar gave me a dirty look and gated out of sight without another word. Daddy Dearest looked back to me after he’d gone. “Still the rebel without a cause, I see.”

  “No, I’ve plenty of cause these days. Seems you left some rather large shoes to fill back on Earth.” I really hadn’t expected him to come down in person. It threw me off a bit. This wasn’t how I wanted to start off, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  He smiled. “Indeed I did, and I hoped you might have grown to fill them by now, but it seems I’ve spit into the wind all these years.” Lucifer came to stand before me, his eyes narrowing, but the smile still clung to his lips. “Good to know I could count on you.”

  Fifty years ago, a jibe like that might have had me scrambling to apologize, to make up for being a stupid twit in a world I wanted nothing to do with, but not now. I straightened and met his eyes. “I’m jus
t following in old daddy’s footsteps, pissing on trees and marking my territory so everybody knows the scent.”

  “Admirable job, Frank.” He gave me the slow clap.

  The slow clap. Seriously? I grunted. We were getting off track…and fast. “Damn it! I don’t want to do this.”

  “Then don’t,” he answered with a dismissive shrug. “I have no intention of apologizing for the things I’ve done, my reasons my own. It’s also clear you have no intention of letting go and washing the sand out of your vagina, so get to the point of why you needed to see me so badly you were willing to shit on God’s emissary.”

  Well, since you put it that way. My resistance gasped a dying breath and crumpled beneath the surgical strike of his apathy. “I—” A quick swallow put some words in my mouth after the false start. I decided I might as well do as he asked. “How do you feel about being a grandpa?”

  Lucifer stared at me, his upper lip inching back into the Elvis sneer. “I’d have to say, it’d mostly be the same way I feel about being a father.”

  He wasn’t gonna make this easy. “This isn’t about me,” not really, “it’s about you.”

  “Do tell, Frank”

  “You remember that alien you kept locked away in a magical containment case down in Hell? Gorath. Yeah?”

  He nodded, the smile growing.

  “Well, he’s the reason I’m here. He intends to draw you out.”

  “Gorath?” He barely managed to get the name out before he started to laugh. “You came all the way here to warn me of him?” His laugh boiled over and spilled out into the square in a basso rumble.

  I hadn’t expected him to be scared, that just isn’t in his nature, but I also hadn’t expected him to crack up like I’d pulled my pants down, either. “He’s dangerous, and he’s coming after you.”

  Lucifer shook his head. “He might well have been dangerous once, Frank, but he is no threat to me now. His time in the containment chamber will have worn upon him. It will have drained his energies over the years, burning it away so he can never recover it.” He shook his head as if he pitied me. “It’s a shame the scum has broken free, as I had such glorious plans for him, but he is of no consequence…certainly not to me.”

  That lit the fuse. “No consequence? Fuck that! He has my woman, the mother of your grandchild to be…my child!”

  “And thus we come to the truth of why you were so insistent.” Lucifer drew an easy breath. “Are you still so enamored by that little gash between a woman’s legs that you can’t see the truth of its poison?”

  Kaboom! “What about my mother? What about Charlotte? Are you gonna sit there and lie and say she never meant anything to you?”

  The smile fell away. “No.” He drew closer, his gaze drilling into mine. “She meant everything to me…once, which is why I stand here and bear your affronts. And now she’s gone and the truth of it all is leaking out of the cracks.” A sharp finger pressed into my chest, and I felt his strength through the casual gesture. “Blood was spilled for your mother, the blood of her people, the blood of my own brother, and all for what, Frank? Do you know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing but betrayal, boy.” He pushed me back with an easy poke. I stumbled to catch my balance. “Your mother played Arol and I against each other, set us to war for that tiny slice of Heaven on Earth, for this love you so casually speak of but know so little about. She drove the sharpened point of it into my chest.

  “That is God’s greatest joke upon mankind: love. It’s nothing more than a siren’s call, a trap set out to ensnare even the greatest of us, drowning us in the depths of a warm grave, ecstatic until the end. God’s curse brought upon the world through Eve’s curiosity, the blame laid forever at my feet.”

  Unable to speak, I just stared. I’d never seen him direct such animosity, such hostility, at my mother before. He’d always been quiet about his feelings, leaving me to assume she’d meant more to him than he let on. Apparently that was true, but in the opposite of everything I’d imagined. “She—”

  “She was a whore, Frank. A worthless, fucking whore. She deserved her death.”

  The words were arrows piercing my heart. A red fugue filled my skull, fury spilling into the wounds, and I leapt at him. That was as far as I got.

  His fingers seized my throat, and I was on my back, the ground vibrating beneath me. My vision tunneled, and then exploded, white dots filling my eyes. Lucifer’s blurry form appeared through the haze, sharp and menacing.

  “For too long have I catered to your insolence, your childish tantrums, but no more, Triggaltheron.” He tightened his grip and his visage swam before me, my hands clasped vainly about his wrist. “You are the true seed of your mother, a failure in flesh with no purpose but to destroy those foolish enough to stand too close.” His hand pulled away and I gasped to draw air as he stood and stepped back.

  “The Hell I left to you was no inheritance, but rather a punishment. You are nothing more than a reminder of my foolishness and it is only just that you wither in the world I left behind.”

  I met his dark eyes, barely visible through the rain of my tears, but the weight of his words settled over me like the lid of a stone sarcophagus. He turned his back on me and stared at the gray sky. I could only lay there and listen.

  “I killed your mother when I found her with Arol.”

  The confession stole my breath. My stomach roiled as my heart pounded to be free of my chest. A sudden, sharp agony thrummed at my temples.

  “You were in the fields when she stole away with my brother, Azrael having led him to her after all the years. She gave in to Arol without resistance, welcoming him into her once more as if they’d never parted. The smell of their deceit filled the barn, the rancid stench of their carnal betrayal. Arol left her to her fate and fled when I arrived, and Azrael turned tail and told me where my brother had gone.” He spun back to glare at me. “After that moment, all that was left of my love, of my family, was the bitter ash of memory in my mouth…and you; my spent and wasted seed.”

  The declaration was a physical blow. I slumped to the ground, as wounded as I’ve ever been.

  Lies!

  Everything I’d believed was a lie. All this time, I’d been living with the man who killed my mother. Arol had been a distraction, a means for Lucifer to use me, to focus my anger and to keep me from learning the truth, to keep me docile and under control. I hadn’t revenged my mother as I’d been led to believe, but had only been used as a puppet, slipping the leash about my neck without resistance. It felt like a noose, and I was dangling in the gallows of my own stupidity.

  Lucifer came over and knelt beside me. I tried my best to shrink into the ground, but it held fast. My breath froze in my lungs.

  “If you would submit to the lie of love, Triggaltheron, I suggest you do it soon.” His voice was a jagged knife. “If Gorath truly came here to use your seedling against me, then it won’t be long before he realizes he’s made a mistake and has no further need for Longinus’ daughter.” His hand clasped the back of my skull and pulled my face closer to his. I could hear his steady pulse in the wrist that lay across my ear. A whining hum filled my head, waves lapping against the shore. “God has a mission for me, far from this universe, from which I might never return. I will be gone before you pick yourself up from the dust of your shame.” He smiled and released me, the reverberations of his echoing voice slipping away as he rose to his feet. My head thumped to the ground. “My last piece of advice to you is, be careful whose words you let slip serpentine into your ears. I am not the only snake to whisper lies.”

  Lucifer returned the gate, stepping into its confluence of energy. The circle glistened, and I felt the cold chill of the portal coming to life. “When you’ve done what you must, go home, Frank. This world is not for you. Hell is your home now.” He tossed something just before he disappeared, the thing clinking to the ground beside me. The image of his face lingered in the flux of power for just a moment longer. I though
t I saw a hint of sadness there before that, too, faded away. Calar stood in his place, golden eyes bright with amusement.

  Numb, too weary to think, I reached over and snatched up what Lucifer had thrown, some instinct inside telling me to be sneaky about it. I pulled it to me and cast a furtive glance. It was nothing more than a small, red gemstone. It was beautiful, swirls of ebony in its depths, but I felt no magic in it, no life at all. I pulled myself to my feet, turning away from the angel so I could slip it into my pocket unseen. There was plenty of time to worry about it later.

  My expectations had been low when I set out to speak with my father, but even those had been stomped into the ground and skull-fucked without the mercy of lube. His admission struck me once more, and I couldn’t help but remember my mother, dismembered, her pieces cast about the barn like refuse, trash to be thrown away. A slow, trembling breath forced its way past my lips.

  Lucifer had killed my mother, and I was nothing to him.

  A strange flicker of satisfaction settled over me at the thought. I couldn’t place its source, but it was if I was suddenly free. Free of the expectations put upon me, free of the shadow over my life that was the Devil. Free of everything. He was gone.

  Baalth’s words came back to me then. God had failed and wanted nothing more than to rein in his mistakes and begin anew. The demon lieutenant had said God would turn on Lucifer when the opportunity presented itself. Was this that moment?

  Why should I care?

  The question was a pinball, clanging about inside my head. Why?

  I had no answers, but where there should have been burning, murderous hatred for my father and what he’d done, I could only muster a vague emptiness, an abysmal void barren of feeling. There just wasn’t anything there. It was if I’d been drained of my anger, my disgust...sadness. It was just gone, embers at the death of fire.

  My visit with Lucifer had done nothing but waste more of Karra’s precious time, the clock winding down every second Gorath still held her. With no target for the alien’s rage, I could see Karra falling into the crosshairs. He didn’t know she’d been fed to the wolves by Lucifer, but he would soon enough. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen to her then, to our child. My heart sputtered as a stray thought broke through my defenses, its sad, pitiful voice wishing for a quick and painless death for them both.