Day of Execution

by Lily Luchesi

  “That’s insane,” she heard Daniel whisper behind her. He must’ve meant the demonic essence only psychics could see.

  “Your essence sits right here,” she told it, speaking low and calm. The knife pressed into the chest, not nearly deep enough to dispel it. “I could do it. Just let it out slowly and enjoy your demise. But I won’t … if you give me a reason.”

  “Go to Hell,” the demon said, just as calmly.

  Angelica moved her wrist and stuck the knife into the wound that was already festering with the garlic oil. The demon screamed, and then tapered off into breathless moans as she trailed the knife from one wound to the other, connecting the three bullet holes like she was playing Connect the Dots in his flesh.

  Blood flowed freely from the wounds, and she gestured to Danny as she had done many times before. He handed her a syringe filled with holy water this time, his hand gently caressing hers as he pulled away.

  It was his way of telling her he was there with her, that he understood she did this out of necessity, and that he loved her. He knew how she hated demons above all else after what had happened to her in Hell, and he was assuring her that he was there to hold her when this was all over with. And to remind her to calm down and treat this clinically.

  It was one of the many reasons she loved him.

  She sprayed the holy water into every inch of its wounds, and its pained howls filled the little room. Daniel had to cover his ears as he inched backwards. Angelica wondered if he was preparing to run. She wouldn’t blame him if he did.

  “Why were you possessing a vampire?” she asked again. “Why did you want to get in the PID so badly?”

  It coughed, spitting out blood and mucus. “Vampires still don’t like you. They’ll look for anybody else who won’t censor them like an Undead FCC. This one I’m possessing? He wanted to kill you. So did his nest. And many others do, too. That skin changer started a revolution, an uprising. And you’re going to be powerless to stop it. You and that little lapdog who calls himself the Emperor.”

  So she’d been partially right. Dakota’s smear campaign against her had worked. She needed to nip that in the bud, but feared that it was too widespread now. She could only ride it out and hope that more would remain loyal to the Empire.

  “I’ll ask you again, what the Hell are you doing here?”

  “Scouting. Hell wants to help slaughter you … and him.” It gestured with its head toward Danny. “Your days are numbered, Angelica. This has been a long time coming. You’re not going to be able to stop this one. We’re already inside the wound, festering.”

  Heart pounding as the fear she hated feeling made her lightheaded, she grabbed the next syringe on the table. She jammed it into the jugular of the demon/vampire and watched as the liquid entered its bloodstream.

  It went rigid almost immediately. Because of the location of the injection, it was working even faster than usual. Its eyes began to leak blood, and its nose followed, gushing as though it had been broken. It began to cough, blood flying from its lips and coating its chin.

  “What is that?” Daniel asked, his voice hushed.

  “Dead man’s blood. This corpse’s blood was harvested about ten years ago. It kills vampires, but not demons. So this little prick gets to stay inside this vessel and feel it die, fully cognizant of each cell decaying. … How’s it feel?” Angelica asked, kicking its leg, which was becoming dry and brittle.

  It screamed, but the scream was muted because of its deteriorating vocal chords.

  “Any last words?”

  It coughed, trying to open its throat. “The PID is an infection, and we’re going to clean the wound. Now go … to Hell.”

  “I’ve been. The climate didn’t agree with me.” She stabbed the demon in the chest, where its essence rested, and it threw its head back, only able to let out a soft wheezing sound before the evil soul was disintegrated.

  She realized that she was breathing hard and tried to get it under control. The demons wanted them to panic and make a mistake. She refused to give them the satisfaction of being right.

  Hell had a new Lieutenant. And he or she apparently wanted Angelica’s head on a spike. Well, they would have to fight for it. She’d faced down much worse than a demon with an ego problem and lived to tell the tale.

  Angelica called an emergency meeting, which she asked Alec to attend. Danny thought that that was probably a good idea. With demons popping up, Alec needed to teach Daniel how to control his powers around them.

  Demons did two things to precognitives, and one of those was suffuse them with anguish and emotional pain. The other was that they liked to feed off of psychics’ energy. Danny had experienced it before, mostly with Leander Price. It had taken Brighton Sands a few hours to make him feel normal again, and a few more weeks to learn how to keep them out. Now Daniel needed to learn, or else the demons would drain him dry until he died.

  Once the three of them had explained to Sean and Alec what had happened, Danny said, “We dealt with this before, and that was without the anti-demon wards placed in the PID. This new Lieutenant isn’t getting in.”

  “But he is sending his low-level demons,” Sean said. “Can we stop them from coming through, too?”

  Angelica shook her head. “They can get through using blood portals, as long as they’re as low-level as we’re thinking. Plus, they can be summoned, but it’s actually rare to summon a real demon, so I don’t think we need to worry much about that.”

  She rubbed her temples and her eyes, careful not to smear her eyeliner. A little bit of sweat dripped down her face, by the side of her eye, and Danny had a flash of that vision, where he’d seen her bleeding from her eyes, nose, and mouth.

  “Um, Angie … the dead man’s blood… Does it make every vampire bleed like that?” he asked.

  “Yeah … why?”

  “My vision, I saw people dead like that. I think we should stop using it, get it out of here as fast as we can,” Danny said. He usually didn't make authoritative statements, knowing that this was and always would be Angelica’s circus and her monkeys, but he made an exception this time. His visions were his only real contribution, in his mind, and while he had little control over them, he knew they could help and had in the past.

  Angelica nodded. “We’ll lock it up for now till we can get proper disposal without it being a hazard to the city. Holy water is good enough.”

  “What else can we do?” Sean asked.

  “Hope that the new Lieutenant has delusions of grandeur,” she replied. “Because unless we can seal the blood portals — and we can’t as far as I know — all we can do is keep the wards up and keep the fucking vampires in line.”

  She tapped her long black nails on the table, her nerves showing just a bit.

  Danny was worried as well, not as much about the vampires alone, because he knew she could handle them, but about the demons. He remembered the quote, “The Devil doesn’t come in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you ever wished for.” For these vampires, the Lieutenant of Hell was coming to give them the freedom to feed on and kill and use humanity as they had always wanted.

  Alone, the vampires could never rise up against the Empress and Emperor. They needed a leader, they always had. For some reason, vampires were directionless unless there was someone in charge. Which was the Emperor and Empress’ job. For the defectors, they too needed guidance.

  First Leander Price was going to lead them, but he needed Angelica to help. Then Dakota was willing to provide that leadership. And she had nearly succeeded. Now there was a new head honcho of Hell, and that worried him. Each adversary gained strength, so how was this new Lieutenant better than Leander? Leander had nearly destroyed the PID, had gotten Mark Evans killed.

  Why couldn’t they have stayed in Sicily, where it was all fresh blood spritzers and moonlit strolls along the Mediterranean?

  “So, I need some education here. Vampires have the Empress and Emperor,” Daniel began. “Hell has a Lieutenant.
What do other species have, and where’s Satan?”

  “We think Lucifer uses the Lieutenant so he doesn’t have to be bothered,” Angelica replied. “Werewolves have many leaders, Alphas. They monitor and lead individual packs in each designated area. Of course angels have Archangels and God. No one else has any leaders. Vampires, angels, and demons are the only creatures with set leaders. Vamps have us,” she gestured to her and Danny, “angels have God, and demons have a Lieutenant, because Lucifer does fuck-all for them.”

  Daniel nodded, seeming to mull it over in his head. “I didn’t know that about Hell.”

  Angelica arched an eyebrow in a silent “WTF does that matter” and then went on, “Sean, get agents on patrol to search for vampires acting oddly, mediums who might have seen or heard something in the spirit world, and triple the wards on the portal in the sub-basement.”

  “Portal?” Daniel asked.

  Danny snickered at his obvious discomfort. “Yes, there are six portals directly into and out of Hell. One of them is one hundred and two floors below us right now.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, “You could've told me sooner!”

  “You could’ve asked,” Angelica replied with a smirk. “Now, Alec, we’ll need you to help them, especially Daniel, with their emotions, but it’s past three in the morning. We all need some rest, and Danny and I haven’t fed. The sun rises in three hours.”

  Everyone nodded and stood, Daniel giving a little yawn. “Hey, Angelica, I have one more question for you. Do you ever talk first and stab later?”

  She smiled at him and replied, “Sometimes.”

  Daniel made the trip home with the cold hand of fear firmly grasping his beating heart. I’ve been talking to the leader of Hell, he thought frantically. No wonder he made me … oh God. Oh no. What have I gotten myself into?

  He could barely get his key into the lock of his apartment door. As soon as he did, he slammed it behind him and went straight into his bedroom. He unceremoniously shoved aside the piece of rug he’d torn up to reveal the intricate sigil painted into the floor beneath.

  With shaking hands and sweat running down his temples, he unlocked the chest hidden under a trapdoor in the floor and removed everything Crowley’s book had told him he’d need: clay bowls, mugwort, star anise, eyebright, and bilberry. He grabbed the candles and lit them as he mixed the ingredients into their separate bowls.

  He ran the candle’s flame over each bowl, creating steady streams of smoke from each one, all mingling and coalescing together in the center.

  “Concatenatio,” he said, blowing out the candle so that the only thing lighting the room were the streetlights outside.

  “You rang?” asked the voice he was now getting used to. Clipped, accented, deep. A voice that could have read him his Last Rites and made it sound like music.

  “Hell,” Daniel blurted out. “You’re the Lieutenant of Hell!”

  The Lieutenant chuckled. “Oh, you found that out. Was it my minion that Angelica tortured?”

  “Yes, partly. The other half was filled in by Angelica,” Daniel said.

  “You know what I am and yet you still chose to contact me, instead of washing your floor and forgetting that we ever connected. Interesting. I think that says quite a bit, don’t you, Mr. Castorini?” he asked.

  Damn him. “I don't understand. What do you want with me?”

  “What do I want, dear boy? I want to help you discover your true potential. You were born destined for greatness, only to have Danny Mancini hide it all away, making you think you were merely human.” He spat the word ‘human’ like it was a curse. “They still want to keep you cowed, denied of your right to your place in the Empire. If that siren hadn’t went out to you because they needed a psychic, you’d never have known.”

  Daniel was silent. They’d discussed this before. He had been miffed that Danny never thought to seek him out, just went on living his life of luxury in Europe while he had family just sitting there, mourning him.

  Mom would’ve wanted to know he was alive, vampire or not, he thought. And I needed him, I needed guidance and what I got instead was mental torture from those fucking shrinks.

  “And let us not forget that when he did meet you, he proceeded to use you and not care that you could have died or had permanent brain damage from Dakota’s brainwaves,” the Lieutenant added. “And Angelica didn’t seem to care, did she?”

  Daniel was mad at his great-grandfather, but he was hesitant to say anything against Angelica. Not only was she regarded as a hero, she was also a little scary.

  “She had a lot more than me on her mind,” he said cautiously.

  The Lieutenant scoffed, making the cloud of fragrant smoke bubble. “You’re a reminder of Mancini’s human life. Trust me, she’d kill you herself if she thought she could get away with it.”

  Daniel’s heart dropped and he wondered why he hadn’t realized that before. Angelica was his wife, of course she’d not want a reminder of a time when Danny was happy and in love without her.

  He didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t want to add that darkness to his heart, a heart that was already crowded with hate and confusion and had been since he was eight. What he wanted was to find his rightful place in this world, and the Lieutenant seemed to be his best bet to do that.

  “You said that my Pops and Angelica are the keys to my happiness. How? I deserve answers.”

  A chuckle this time, making the smoke curl. “Making demands now, are we? You’re certainly brave, speaking in such a manner to me.”

  The voice had been teasing, borderline friendly, and in the snap of a finger, it turned cold and threatening. It reminded him of Angelica. Daniel got a shiver down his spine, now knowing that this was the leader of demons.

  “Do you have any idea what I’ve done to get where I am? Not just to get into Hell, but to be ruthless, cunning, and intelligent enough to replace the old Lieutenant?” the voice continued.

  “Can’t be anything worse than what you made me do when we got Crowley’s spell,” Daniel said, for once glad that he had inherited Danny’s bravado.

  “Made you? Dear boy, I never made you do anything. You saw what the spell called for, and you leapt into action. I admit, it was sloppy for a first kill, but much better than mine. Bugger didn’t even die properly.”

  Daniel wasn’t sure what to respond to that. “You’ve killed people?”

  The voice laughed, and Daniel was instantly reminded of when he had heard Angelica laugh: there was a hint of cold madness there, the kind of laugh a sadist would make as he or she watched someone being tortured.

  “You are naive, aren’t you? Doesn’t matter. I do have a way to let you get revenge on your ‘pops’ for ignoring you, but you are going to have to do a bit more legwork…”

  Angelica sat in her office two nights after the demon kill, a bit unnerved that there was now total silence from Hell and other vampires. She’d sent out a message, carefully worded, warning against demonic collusion. Even if other vamps had a problem with her, Hell was not the answer.

  Could she convince the vampires of that? She hoped so.

  Checking the clock, she saw that Danny and Daniel were almost done with their mental training session with Alec, and it wasn’t even nine in the evening. They needed to come up with a plan, and they needed to do it quickly. Before more demons possessed their subjects.

  What was it with Hell and their obsession with the Undead? Was it because Augustus, the first vampire, was a human who made a deal with Lucifer and then broke the contract? Immortality meant that Lucifer couldn’t collect Augustus’ soul, but she’d killed him. So didn’t that fulfill the contract? Why couldn’t demons leave them alone?

  As always in her life, she had too many questions and not enough answers. But also as always, she had the ambition to get those answers, whatever it took.

  Sean entered her office without knocking, as he was wont to do. “Hey, I just thought of something.”

 
“What?”

  “Demons could know that Daniel is technically next in line to the throne. Shouldn’t he have some protection?” he asked.

  “What can they do? They’re demons, not like they can turn him and awaken his powers,” Angelica replied. Then she remembered her own ordeal. “But they could kidnap him and try to force him to help them.”

  As if he’d overheard them, Daniel entered Angelica’s office, Danny in tow. Danny looked furious.

  “Uh-oh. Who did what to whom?” Angelica asked.

  “This is my birthright,” Daniel burst out. “I was born with vampire blood in my veins, prevalent or not. I want to help you with this. And Pops here thinks I’m crazy.”

  “You are!” Danny cried. “You’re mortal, for what it’s worth. Enjoy humanity. Don’t embroil yourself in this, because once you do you’ll never leave. I love the PID, and making a difference, but you can’t abandon your life.”

  Daniel scoffed. “You need help. You’re my family. Don’t lock me out of the one place I was literally born to be. Vampires are my people just as much as they’re yours and I want to help them.”

  Danny turned toward Angelica and Sean. “Can you two talk some sense into him?”

  Sean glanced at Angelica and said, “I’m just the director. Leave me outta this.”

  Angelica was torn. She wanted to side with Danny and keep the kid safe, but she wasn’t afforded the luxury of putting family first. She was the Empress, and her first priority was to her subjects.

  “I am afraid that I see Daniel’s point, Danny,” she said quietly, hating herself. “Sean and I were just discussing his needing protection. While he’s here, he’d only need a guard when he goes home to sleep. And we need all the allies we can get.”

  Danny’s mouth dropped and she hated having to hurt him this way. But the survival of vampirism as they knew it was at stake. To quote Daniel, this was her birthright, and she’d do whatever it took to save her people and keep them from going darkside. Even blatantly use Daniel’s eager, slightly naive willingness to assist.