by D V Wolfe
“Hook it up,” I said to her. She hooked it up to the tube running into his arm and opened the line.
“Dumb bastard,” I breathed. His dark hair was curling into his eyes and before I could stop myself, I pushed it aside, running a finger across his forehead. He made a noise in his throat and I jerked back to myself. I looked up at Rosetta. She quickly raised a hand to wipe at her mouth and, I suspected, the smug ass smile she wore.
“What?” I snapped.
“I didn’t say anything,” Rosetta said. I glared at her and she glared back. “I mean, I know you’re sharp like a sponge, but Bane, pull your head out of your ass.” She nodded down at Gabe. “You don’t find ones like that under every rock.”
I shook my head. Why didn’t she get it? Why was she hell-bent on making this harder than it already was? She knew. She knew I wasn’t making it out of this alive. Why would she want me to drag Gabe through that hell along with me?
I almost had a handle on my anger and I was definitely not about to call her a “church choir busybody” which Rosetta considered to be the real “c” word when the trailer door banged open. Rosetta and I both turned our heads to see Noah...well, Noah’s legs, under a stack of pizza boxes topped with three brown paper bags. Gabe was stirring feebly against me and I tightened my hold around him to keep him from slumping over. Noah swore on his way in as he tripped over one of Stacks’ stained rugs that Stacks used to cover bigger stains on the carpet. It was almost a marvel as to how fast Stacks had broken in his new trailer. Rosetta hurried over and took the bags from the top of the pizza boxes, uncovering Noah’s face.
“Bane!” he said when he saw me. Gabe was moving again and Noah’s gaze dropped to him, his expression becoming more strained. “Both of you... you’re alive.”
I nodded. “We live to fuck up another day.”
Gabe leaned back and looked up at me. “Am I...am I drunk?”
I rolled my eyes. “Now what would make you think that?”
Gabe gave a one-sided shrug and blew a breath out, making his wiry mustache flutter. “Cuz I can taste ‘deathbed cure’. In my mouth. It’s kind of a warm taste.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You were a little too giving in the bodily fluids department, so we hooked you up to a refill.”
Gabe leaned his head back on my shoulder and I felt myself falling backward behind his weight. I looked down and my gaze met his. “Not just that,” he said.
“Why else do you think you’re drunk?” I asked. I glanced up at the bag and saw it was down to half full. He should be snapping out of this pretty shortly as his body rehydrated itself.
“Cuz you’re here,” Gabe said. “And you’re touching me. And that only happens when I’m drunk.”
I felt the heat rising in my cheeks. “That’s not true. You remember Memphis? You were judge-sober when I stitched you up. Well, the first time.”
Gabe snorted. “Yeah, but you weren’t. And you were the one with the needle.”
I rolled my eyes and pushed him forward, trying to shift to let him lean back against the front of the couch. “I offered to stitch you up first. Whoever is second to get stitched always has a drunk surgeon. Maybe if you’d drank a little faster as I was getting started…”
“That rotgut? Jesus, Bane. You didn’t even have Stitch’s whiskey at that time. I don’t know how you have organs left at all with those gross marshmallow chickens...and the crap you drink,” Gabe spat.
“And he’s back,” I said. “Anytime Gabe insults my Peeps and liquor of choice, I know he’s on the mend.”
“Was that why you were so violent the last time you were stitching me? I was only trying to explain why Scotch was better than Irish whiskey,” Gabe started.
I made sure he wasn’t going to slump over and then I got to my feet, a little unsteadily. “No,” I said. “That time was because I just wanted you to shut up.” I glanced around and my gaze fell on Noah. I gave him a nod and scratched the back of my head. “So it looks like you came through all that pretty well.”
Noah shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never slapped people in a church before, let alone with fiery hands, so new first for me.”
I nodded. “Good new first to have.”
There was a scraping noise coming from down the hall and I automatically reached back for my gun. Which wasn’t there.
I moved towards the hallway with Rosetta and Noah right behind me. “You’re lucky I don’t have my gun,” I said to Stacks who was coming up through the floor hatch. “Why are you even bothering with that? Noah came through the front door.”
“He what?!” Stacks barked.
“I had pizza boxes in my hands. I wasn’t going to crawl through the tunnel with that.”
“I did!” Stacks and I both said.
Noah shrugged. “Well you two are bigger idiots than I am, it would seem.”
“Speaking of,” Rosetta said. “Let’s eat and figure out to what degree we are screwed.”
I tossed a couple of pieces on a plate and handed them to Gabe before grabbing a piece and sitting down on the pile of cushions next to the couch.
“Did we get the book?” I asked. I knew that I’d dropped it and I thought I remembered Noah saying he had it, but everything after that was a hazy blur of Gabe’s breathing and the smell of leather and pine.
Stacks leaned over the armchair and picked up the black book. “It’s not the fulcire. In fact, I don’t think there is a fulcire. I think you were right about the contracts. I think that’s how the demons are controlling them.” Stacks tossed the book to me. I instinctively reached up to catch it, the pizza still in one hand.
“Eww,” Noah said, watching me wipe the grease off the cover. Some cheese was sticking to the closed pages. “You just wiped pizza grease and...cheese on those guys’ souls.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not actually their souls, Noah. Just the paper where they signed them over to Hell. Or at least that’s our guess.” I dropped my pizza onto Gabe’s plate and wiped my fingers on my jeans.
Gabe snorted. “Hard to tell if you just made your hands dirtier or if you made your jeans cleaner.”
“Speaking of which,” I cut my eyes to Rosetta. “Please tell me you were the one who changed my clothes?”
Rosetta snorted. “I helped. You were a dishrag and every time you flailed around you were spraying blood. It was a danged mess until Gabe got you stitched up. If Gabe hadn’t been around to help…”
I gingerly touched a hand to my side and I could feel the gauze pad taped over the stitches. “Note to self, never be unconscious.” I turned my attention back to the book. It looked fairly ordinary. I flipped the cover open and started flipping through the pages. A few pages in, I stopped breathing. There it was. The symbol. Not the legion symbol. It was the symbol from the necklace. And then it dawned on me. Where I’d seen it before. The reason I hadn’t thought of it before was because it wasn’t a symbol. It actually was a backward letter “f”.
“What is it, Bane?” Gabe asked. His voice was soft and he’d leaned back to get a better look at what I was staring at.
“It’s not a symbol,” I breathed. “I recognize it.” I closed my eyes and I could almost feel the hot, dry Kansas wind against my skin. The low sun was dancing across the stranger’s paper. It was oddly yellow, almost orange. And covered in words I couldn’t read. Not English. And this letter was in the top left corner. “Facio,” I said.
“Facio?” Rosetta, Gabe, and Stacks repeated.
I opened my eyes and saw Noah looking lost. I glanced between Rosetta, Gabe, and Stacks. “Yeah,” I said. “What does it mean in Latin?”
“Well, depending on the context in Latin,” Stacks said. “It can mean several things. Usually, it’s the verb for ‘do’, like ‘I do’.”
“Yeah,” Rosetta said. “But I’ve seen it used in grimoire texts to mean, ‘sacrifice or be of service’ or ‘experience trouble and suffering’.”
I felt a grim smile forming on my face.
“Why,�
� Gabe asked. “Where do you know it from?”
“My contract,” I said. “It was the first word on the paper. And the ‘f’ in ‘facio’, looked just like the symbol.”
Gabe shook his head. “So they are contracts. The poor saps going to that place, thinking they’re going to church, are just going through the motions because they already signed the book and the contract.”
I flipped the pages, four pages had names written on them. Three full pages. The fourth was over half full. I counted the lines. Forty names per page, twenty-two on the last page. “One hundred and forty-two souls from this little ploy of theirs. Not a bad haul for what are probably fairly high-ring to mid-range demons.”
“High-ring?” Stacks asked.
I nodded. “Festus explained the high-ring demons are the ones that can only travel by Empty House. The lower seven ring demons take more effort to make it upstairs. He said more powerful high-ring demons can possess people, which I think is what we’ve got here.”
“Do you think this could be a blood sacrifice? To raise one of the low-level big dogs?” Noah asked.
“Why bother with contracts then?” I asked. “Why not just kill them? That’s what Scratch was doing in St. Louis. And Ornias...they just needed murdered humans to raise them out of the hot box.”
“You think this is just a sales team trying to bump their numbers?” Stacks asked. “Like some of them were around a water cooler in Hell one day and said, ‘You know what would be a great idea? We should start a religion topside and get people to sign up for it, but they’ll actually all be signing contracts. Bam! Souls out the south-end in no time.’”
“All the hairs just stood up on the back of my neck,” Rosetta muttered, moving a hand to her neck. “That is terrifying.”
I nodded. “Not as terrifying as these assholes bleeding out all the church members to raise their boss, but still terrifying none the less. Can you imagine if they franchised it? And then there’d be all these ‘churches’ all over the place with people just happily signing their names in the book of soul contracts and the demons wouldn’t have to give them anything in return. No overhead and they’re pulling in the religious types. Can you imagine how pissed off that must make the folks upstairs?”
“Stop it, Bane,” Rosetta growled.
“Wait,” Gabe said. “This can’t hold up in court downstairs. I mean yours…”
I shook my head. “Mine only went to court because of the ‘dragging everyone else in Ashley to Hell with me’ clause. That’s the only part of the contract that was overturned and in case you forgot, only if certain stipulations are met.” I shook my head. “Nope, if you sign the line, you do the time.”
We were all quiet for a moment and I could feel four sets of eyes on me as I stared back down at the book. One name, Tara Birch, had dotted the ‘i’ in her last name with a little heart. My best friend in school, Maggie Clark, had dotted her "i"s with hearts, just like that. I felt the dull aching squeeze around my chest like slow suffocation, thinking of what would happen to all the Maggies and Taras in the pit. “Well, at least we know we were right,” I said. “Not that that gets us any closer to any kind of a solution.” I flipped through the pages. Latin calligraphy filled the first few. The words were camouflaged amongst decorative drawings of stained glass windows and ferns. The people signing probably never saw these pages. Even if they did, if they didn’t read Latin or were more drawn to the pictures, they still wouldn’t have any clue as to what they were really doing. I wasn’t going to be much more help with this book. Tenth-grade reading level and no Latin experience made me a glorified bookshelf with the book sitting open on my lap. I closed it and passed it to Stacks. “Maybe you’ll see something useful in that Latin.”
Stacks nodded, but he looked as hopeful as I felt. He opened the book on his lap and I turned my attention to the other three.
“What kind of time do you all think we have before the dear brethren at New Covenant find us?” I asked.
Stacks shrugged, not looking up from the pages of the book. “Well if we’d all used the tunnel instead of the front door, I’d say our odds were better.”
“Well we didn’t,” Noah said. “Besides Rosetta never used it. Neither did Gabe!”
Stacks cut his eyes to Noah. “Rosetta is a crotchety Baptist woman and Gabe is…” His gaze shifted to Gabe and I saw Gabe raise an eyebrow. “Gabe is...really lucky.” He turned his attention back to Noah. “Which is much more than I can say for you, me, or Bane.”
Noah snorted. “Especially Bane. I mean, I get nervous even standing next to her. Afraid I might get hit by lightning that was meant for her.”
“When did this become about me?” I asked, throwing a piece of pizza crust at Noah. It bounced off his head and he turned to give me the finger.
“Put that away sonny,” Rosetta said. “If you want to keep it.” She glared around at us all. “So anyone besides Bane want to take a crack at coming up with a plan of what to do next?”
I glared at Rosetta, and I was about to tell her about my plan to make her left butt cheek match her right when Gabe spoke up.
“What do we know? There’s no known way to break a deal. At least a regular deal. What if this one doesn’t follow the same structure? I mean, what about that brass pen? I’ll bet they were having to sign with their own blood.” Gabe said.
I nodded. “That’s standard issue as far as I know. It hurts like a bitch too. Makes you feel sick.”
“Wouldn’t that have tipped the people off?” Noah asked. “I mean if signing the book hurt, wouldn’t they have stopped and said, ‘Hang on something ain’t right here’?”
Rosetta snorted. “You don’t know many religious folks, do you? Suffering is one of the pillars of religion.”
Gabe’s gaze was pained as his eyes met mine. “Ok,” he looked away. “So maybe not the pen. What about the altar it was on?”
I nodded. “And that platform. It was almost like it drew people to it. I mean, if I hadn’t been there to steal the damn thing, I might have signed it. Anything to make the itching stop.”
“Itching?” Rosetta barked.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Itching like you normally feel around churches?”
I shook my head. “This was way worse. Almost like I would have done anything to make it stop.”
Rosetta swung her gaze to Noah and Gabe. “Did either of you feel it?”
Gabe shrugged. “I didn’t, but you know me.”
Gabe’s family had some serious benefits in their gene pool when it came to dealing with supernatural crap. Rosetta nodded quickly and turned to Noah, who shook his head. “Maybe it only affects...um...women?”
“And only in the sanctuary?” Gabe asked, raising an eyebrow. We all thought for a moment and then Gabe’s eyes lit up and he turned to look at me. “You didn’t wear a hex bag.”
I nodded. “You think those bags kept you all from feeling like you had demon eczema?”
Gabe shrugged and scratched his beard. “I mean, what if it was a demon curse or something that they put on the place. You know, it makes anyone uncomfortable who’s name isn’t in the book. And it gets so bad that they’ll sign, even if they’re morally reluctant, just to make it stop?”
“How would they know that signing would make them stop itching?” I asked.
