Most people assumed that Ed—a retired detective sergeant—never charged Whittaker out of respect. While I knew Ed respected the Commissioner, I also knew that Whittaker owned a third interest in the bar and had put up the initial capital to buy it when Ed lost his leg and took early retirement. No one but Ed and I—and possibly Whittaker—knew that I owned five percent. Ed had been my partner, and if I had been a little quicker the night he and I ran into a snake monster from the Bay, he still might have had two legs. But I always paid my bar tab.
Whittaker made his way across the room, carefully balancing his drinks while acknowledging people who called out to him and occasionally stopping to chat with someone.
“Clear a space and get him a chair,” I ordered.
Mychal jumped up, found an empty chair, and brought it to our table. People scooted around to create a space. A couple of people got up as though to leave.
“Sit down,” I growled. “Nobody’s going anywhere until he says you can leave.”
A couple of startled looks, then everyone settled in their chairs.
Eventually, Whittaker came to our table, set his drinks on it, and collapsed in the chair we had provided. He looked around the table, his gaze pausing on every face. Then he picked up his shot glass and held it out.
“To law and order and survival,” he said. “One hell of a clusterfuck, and I commend you all for getting out of it in one piece.”
We all clinked our glasses together and drank.
Whittaker set his half-empty shot glass on the table and said, “Okay. I’ll get your official reports tomorrow. Tonight, tell me what happened. What really happened.”
I started, but everyone had a tale to tell him from their perspective and experience. It took a lot longer to tell than it had to live through.
When no one had anything else to say, I asked the question we all had. “What happened to the demon woman?”
Whittaker chuckled and downed the last of his whiskey. “She plowed a fifty-yard path of destruction between the temple and Rock Creek Park, then disappeared. We’re not sure if she crossed into the Rift, or into the Waste. She incinerated any drones we sent after her. Slaughtered any troops that got in her way.”
He pulled out his phone and projected a hologram into the middle of the table. The carnage was even worse than I feared. In addition to the people killed and injured during the battle at the temple, Akashrian was obviously in a hurry, and her trail could easily be followed—a straight line of devastation that included bridges, roads, forests, buildings, and housing developments. It looked like a killer tornado had torn through the area.
He fixed me with his eyes. “You called her a ‘demon goddess’ at one point.”
“My father variously called her a demon queen or a demon goddess. He said he didn’t know which, or if it mattered.”
He sat back in his chair and took a pull on his pint, only to find it empty. He raised his hand and a robowaiter was there immediately.
“Another round, and tell Ed to put it on my tab,” Whittaker said.
I noticed that the robot trundled over to the bar, and Ed loaded its tray with drinks already waiting. The robot was back within a couple of minutes of its leaving.
Whittaker cast his gaze around the table again. “I assume no one here is driving. There will be cop cars waiting outside to take you home.” He raised his glass again. “Sláinte.”
The cop Whittaker detailed to babysit me and Carmelita dropped me off at Aleks’s building, then drove her out to the Domingo estate. I was still able to walk, but barely. Aleks steered me into the bathroom and helped me undress. I popped the top on a vial of Kirsten’s hangover cure and drank it before I fell into bed.
The following morning, Aleks and I hit the Kitchen Witch for breakfast, and then he dropped me off at my house. The day was sunny and clear, not too cold, so I hauled out my motorcycle and drove up to Mom’s house.
I sat in her kitchen with a cup of an herbal tisane and a fruit pastry, and told her and Dad about the disaster at the Harvesting Souls temple.
“I haven’t seen the official reports yet,” I said, “but I’m sure there are hundreds dead, hundreds injured, and I doubt anyone will ever know how many missing.”
Dad was most concerned that the weapon I built seemed ineffective against Akashrian.
“You know,” he said, “that Akashrian knows only two humans, you and me. This setback will enrage her. You’re going to need to be extra careful.”
“If she was unprotected, then maybe I could have killed her,” I told him. “It certainly vaporized a demon lord, but he was holding that avatar-statuette, and it was unharmed. She shielded herself, and nothing anyone threw at her penetrated.”
Mom had different worries. “No one has any idea where this Akashrian went?”
I shook my head. “Whittaker said either the Rift or the Waste. I’d bet the Waste. I don’t think she’s very happy with her situation. She probably didn’t plan to stay in this dimension.”
Dad snorted. “The problem is, there has never been a demon as powerful as she is on earth. She’s an apex predator, and if she’s stuck here, she’ll seek complete world domination. She can command every demon in this world.”
“But she has the avatar,” I said. “She can open a portal anytime she wants to.”
Dad shrugged. “Let’s hope she wants to. It may take a demon lord to do it, and she doesn’t have one handy.”
He wanted to take a look at the projector weapon I had made from his instructions, so we went out to the workshop. I had questions about the device, and wanted to take the opportunity to explore the theory behind it. It was canon that there were three kinds of magitek devices—enhancers, converters, and disrupters. Enhancers and converters were used to channel magik into operating electrical and mechanical devices. Disrupters did the opposite, and except for specific uses, were illegal.
“This thing violates the laws of magik, at least as I learned them,” I said, laying the device on a workbench.
“Yes, it does, but that’s because those laws encompass insufficient knowledge,” Dad said. “It incorporates a concentrator, which is something I learned about in the demon realm. It’s the principle behind Akashrian’s avatar.”
“The avatar is a magitek device?”
He shook his head. “No, because they don’t have technology in the way we know it. All their efforts to make me build a magitek device for them failed. The laws of physics are different there. An internal combustion engine doesn’t work. Gunpowder doesn’t explode. But they are much farther advanced in magik than we are, and I learned how to concentrate magik. In their world they use it to create things like the avatar, but I figured it would work on mechanical or electrical devices in this world.”
I watched as he took my device apart, both physically and magikally, studied it, and put it back together.
“What would happen if you coupled it with an enhancer?” I asked.
I received an astounded look in return. I told him of my experience adding an enhancer to the magitek lightning box he had made for me decades before.
Dad shook his head. “Interesting question. If it will vaporize part of an island and a demon lord in its present configuration, I’m not sure I want to enhance it that much. Enhancement of some technologies can have disastrous results.”
“Like a magitek nuke?”
“Yeah, like your grandfather found out the hard way.”
“Yeah, like that.”
He got a far-off look in his eyes and stared off into space for several minutes. Eventually, in a dreamy tone, he said, “But if we could regulate how much enhancement…”
“Like the step switch on the lightning box?” I asked.
“Maybe something like that. Do you have the lightning box with you?”
“Always.” I handed it to him.
He placed it on the workbench next to the concentrator. Then he started pulling parts out of various bins, and I could feel his magik as he began work
.
Chapter 37
Two days afterward, I led a SWAT team from the Arcane Division into the Harvesting Souls Church in downtown Baltimore. Simultaneous raids were conducted at the other facilities owned by the church.
“Captain James,” Reverend Wilding greeted me. “How good to see you again. May I be of service?”
I handed him a search warrant and said to the cops following me, “Please show the Reverend outside and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
About that time, there was a sound like an explosion from the alley in the back of the church. Reverend Wilding’s cheerful expression froze, and he reached for me. I expected that reaction after we proved Carmelita’s theory at the temple. All of the church’s clergy had been possessed.
I drew and fired in one motion, the Raider’s magikally enhanced incendiary-explosive round catching him in the chest. That slowed him down temporarily as the human body died and the major demon inside re-manifested itself.
The real Reverend Wilding was blue, seven feet tall, with scales, gills, and horns, and his muscles were clearly delineated like a weightlifter’s. His teeth and claws appeared capable of ripping through an armored car, and he no longer wore that happy-to-see-you smile.
Back-peddling, I fired again. Twice. Both shots hit him, and I managed to create a little space between us. I shifted my aim to his head, but by the time I pulled the trigger, he had jumped out of the way.
I hesitated, as the demon moved past a cop a few feet to my left and I didn’t have a clean shot. The cop didn’t react quickly enough, and the demon tore off his head in passing. I fired at the demon’s back, and then half a dozen guns discharged all around me. The demon’s head exploded, and his body stumbled forward and fell.
“Heads up, ladies and gentlemen,” the SWAT captain called out. “This isn’t a garden party.”
The head of the dead cop sat on the floor, staring at me accusingly.
A fireball whooshed past me, and I triggered my airshield box. A bolt of lightning flashed from my right toward the hallway where the fireball originated. A fusillade of bullets followed the lightning.
Half of the SWAT team was assigned to enter the basement through the door to the alley behind the church. I heard an explosion from the basement, and demons boiled out of the stairwell to the left of the nave.
I fired the Raider until the magazine ran empty, then pulled out the concentrator, switched it down to its lowest power setting, and discharged it. The three demons closest to me disappeared, but it didn’t blow a hole in the wall of the church. Encouraged, I slipped behind a pew for cover, and started picking off demons as they came out of the basement.
The fight lasted about half an hour. When it was over, we had lost a dozen cops and had killed at least nine major demons, seven standard demons, and taken sixteen demons into custody. Mentally, I could add to the tally seven more demons who had been vaporized. The SWAT team captain led me downstairs into the basement.
“There’s also a subbasement,” he said, “But it’s full of water.”
Understandable, considering how close to the harbor we were.
“The demon in charge of this place was a water demon,” I said. “Check that subbasement out thoroughly, but carefully.”
The only light available in the basement was the dark-red light. I paused and put on a pair of night goggles. The basement was similar to other demon dens I had seen. A large, open space with low divans and tables. There were a lot more sleeping places than the number of demons we had encountered.
I looked toward the stairs leading to the alley.
“Yeah,” the captain said. “I think we should post some people here to see who else comes home. Looks like a center of activity.”
“I agree. With Lucifer’s Lair closed, I knew they had to be hanging out somewhere.”
Carmelita wandered over to where we were talking.
“The number of demons we saw here was nothing compared to the number who used to hang around Lucifer’s,” she said. “This church can’t be the only den.”
Unfortunately, I had to agree with her. I wondered if anyone in the Police Department had informants among the sex demons. They were the only ones who still populated the city in large numbers, and they weren’t involved in the war—at least not overtly. But they had answered to Ashvial just like the other demons, and I assumed to Besevial. That meant they answered to Akashrian.
No one knew if a demon lord was born to that status or elevated to it, but the suspicion was they rose in the hierarchy. With Besevial gone, that left a void. Would Akashrian bring one over from her realm or promote a major demon already in our world? After I got back to my office, I called Dad through my implant and asked him about it.
“Well,” he said, “that doesn’t have a simple answer. The closest analogy I can make is that a demon lord is prepared rather like a queen bee in our world. They’re born as normal major demons, but at some point, when they’re very young, they’re selected and from then on, they receive special food along with training and education.”
“Is it the same for the top of the hierarchy, like Akashrian?” I asked.
“Not exactly. She was bred to be what she is, then fed specially. At some age—I’m not sure when because I wasn’t there when it happened—she and her eleven twin sisters engaged in a battle royale, and Akashrian was the survivor.”
Reports from the raids at the other churches contained similar information to what I had seen in Baltimore—clergy revealed as being possessed by major demons, demon dens in the churches’ basements, and evidence of human worshippers being abused, eaten, or conned into crossing the Rift.
Unfortunately, the demons hadn’t felt the need to keep records of the humans they ensnared, so we had no way of knowing how many unsolved missing-persons cases were due to the Harvesting Souls Church’s activities.
Archbishop Rodrigo and his counterparts in other religious denominations lost no time condemning the Harvesting Souls Church and banning any contact or interaction with them. They also set up a couple of counseling centers to help deal with those people rescued from the temple and its outlying churches.
The major question I had was what Akashrian’s next gambit would be. I had no illusions that she would give up trying to build an empire in our world. As long as the Rift existed, humans would have to deal with the Rifters. And as long as demons viewed other species as prey, there would be conflicts.
Chapter 38
Akashrian’s response came quickly. A wave of demons poured out of the Waste, overrunning Akiyama’s positions between the Waste and the airport. Obviously, the demon goddess didn’t care much about Ashvial’s carefully nurtured alliances. That didn’t mean she was targeting the Council’s enemies. The Akiyama forces just happened to be the first humans to get in her way.
At least the Akiyama forces provided a buffer that gave the Council time to prepare. Caught between the demons and Whittaker’s mercenaries, Akiyama’s soldiers were unable to retreat. The anti-Council threat to the airport and the seaport was decimated.
The demons from the Waste were one threat, but not the only one. Carmelita’s comment that there had to be more dens in Baltimore than the one housed at the Harvesting Souls church was prescient. We had demons everywhere, especially downtown and in the harbor area.
“If the police don’t control these damned demons,” Kirsten said as she served Mychal and me dinner, “I’m going to stop paying bribes, and you two can feed yourselves. Business has completely dried up.”
Mychal snorted. “We’d have to nuke the city to get rid of them all, and that wouldn’t be very good for business, either.”
“Or you could modify your business model,” I said. “Try stocking the kind of goods that appeal to demons.”
Kirsten glowered at us. “You’re treading on very dangerous ground.”
Mychal and I set out for downtown the following morning, but I had gone no more than a mile or two when I was presented with a wall of brake l
ights in front of me. I hastily sketched a rune in the air in front of the dash. A matching sigil lit up in red, and I sent my magik into the converter. The sigil turned silver, and the car lifted off the ground.
Traffic accidents on the freeway were uncommon, given modern collision-avoidance systems, but not unheard of. And I always kept in mind something my father told me when he was first showing me how to use my magik.
“Dani,” my father had said, “it’s almost impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so damned creative and persistent.”
As we rose into the air, I could see the traffic jam extended in front of us for miles. And in front of all the cars there was indeed a wreck. A massive one.
“There’s something going on with the train, too,” Mychal said, looking out the window on his side of the car. “It’s stopped, and people are abandoning it.”
“Call it in,” I said as I angled the car so I could better see the freeway. As Mychal talked to the dispatcher, I realized what was going on below us. At least a dozen demons were wreaking havoc on cars and their drivers and passengers—smashing windshields, ripping off doors, and hauling the terrified occupants out to be maimed or killed.
“Tell them we need a Rapid Response Team out here ASAP,” I said. “And probably another one for that train.”
If the demons were launching an all-out assault on the transportation systems, I shuddered to think what might be going on in the underground metro. That would be the perfect hunting ground for demons. There would be no way for their prey to escape.
“Dispatch says the same thing is happening all over the Metroplex,” Mychal reported. “The freeway from the south is also under attack, as well as the east side of the DC beltway. Do you mind if I call Kirsten so she doesn’t get caught up in this mess?”
“Yeah, call her.” Kirsten usually drove in later than Mychal and I did.
Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 19
