Sins of the Fathers
Page 50
TWENTY SIX
THE DEMON CHILD was awake and waiting for them with a big, toothy grin when Calvin and Tiesha opened the back door of the van. It had managed to sit up, legs crossed like a kid hanging out in front of the boob-tube. Really the only differences were the thatch of dark scratches on its face, the wild roving eyes and the stench. Tie tried not to wrinkle up her face, but it wasn’t easy. Once, when she was a kid, she and her daddy had been part of a volunteer group cleaning up a neighborhood park. She’d found a sick pile of human feces at the bottom of a garbage can. The kid kind of smelled like that. It greased its eyes up and down Tie and ran a sandpaper tongue over cracked lips.
“Man,” Tie gasped. She waved a hand in front of her nose.
“Interesting,” Calvin noted. “Didn’t smell that bad in the van.” He leaned in a little closer, a zoo patron scrutinizing, “I think he can influence the odor intensity.”
The demon-boy just stared, smiling, proud.
“He was drugged in the van,” Calvin said. “But now that’s he’s awake, he can control it again.”
“How’s that possible?” Tie asked, breathing through her mouth.
“Not sure,” Calvin said. “I’ve got a lot of theories, but I want to get inside first.” He raised the black medical bag he’d taken from Emma Grouwe. “You gonna’ play it cool, Linda Blair, or do we need to shoot you another fix?”
“We’ll walk,” the demon rasped, then blew a kiss to Tie.
She recoiled as if jabbed her in the face. “Oh, man. Komodo Dragon morning breath.”
Calvin and the demon both burst out laughing. They stopped and stared at one another. The demon winked.
“Get up, then,” Calvin said. “C’mon, let’s go.” He stood back as the boy scooted over to the edge of the bumper. “Stop,” Calvin commanded. The demon looked at him. “You fuck with me even a little and I’ll make you sorry for it.”
The demon’s head tipped to one side. “With your drugs? A lancet for a sword, paladin?”
Calvin’s left hand, dangling easy at his side, whip-cracked off the side of the boy’s face. The demon loosed a muti-layered cry: surprise, pain, rage. Calvin waited for it to stop, counted to three, then hit him again. Tie’s hand flew up to her mouth, but she kept quiet. A large red palm print filled in on the boy’s cheek and tears spilled over his face. Calvin looked at the boy as if he faced nothing more than a piece of stone, a worthless hunk of shale. He slowly raised his hand for another blow, giving the demon a moment or two to consider the new sensation it was feeling and whether it wanted to feel more. It didn’t need much time. “Please,” it blurted, squinting, a deep shame dragged at its features.
“Let’s go then.”
It slid the rest of the way out of the van and stood. Calvin marveled at the strength in that wasted body. That Jeremy had enough juice left in him to stand after all the abuse he’d sustained at the hands of the demon was remarkable, but Calvin wasn’t taking any chances. Even the weakest person can summon hysterical strength. The demon seemed to be able to call on any of Jeremy’s bodily functions at will. Father Calvin didn’t feel like being hoisted off his feet by the balls today. He walked behind Jeremy and kept Tie behind him a few paces.
“Stop,” he said. The boy stopped, his bony shoulders rose, expecting the blow. Calvin smiled. It was a fast learner. Good. “Tie?” Calvin said. “The key should be in a little iron frog sitting in the planter on the porch.”
“Gotcha’,” she said and trotted up the front steps, giving Jeremy a wide berth.
The demon emitted a pleasurable rumble as she passed. Calvin cuffed it on the back of the head. The boy grated around to face Calvin.
“Time,” it promised, then turned around, eyes on the ground.
Calvin smirked. “Indeed,” he said, but his palms were damp. “Get moving.”
They entered a two story great room paneled in hand-hued wood, the well-oiled walls glowing. A fieldstone fireplace hulked mammoth on the north wall. Two doors that Tie guessed were bedrooms squatted on either side. A small kitchen backed the cabin, separated from the main room by a breakfast bar. Had they not been running from a murderous psychopath and dealing with his demon-possessed son, Tie thought it would have made a perfect vacation spot.
“Nice,” she said.
The demon birthed a popping flatulence in reply. Calvin thought about striking it again, but hell, he’d been holding one in for a while too, so he ignored the infraction. He and Tie might well be awash in a sea of love-at-first-sight pheromones, but they weren’t quite to the “Honey, pull my finger” point in their relationship.
“Tie,” he asked, “Could you please go to the van and get the big black duffel and my valise? I need to get started.”
“Sure,” she started to say, the word dissolving into a yawn. “Sorry, yeah. Don’t you want to get some sleep, though? You’ve been up for how many hours?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She looked at the boy-troll and left the room.
Calvin pushed the demon into the bedroom on the right of the fireplace. The room was little more than a monk’s cell, perfect for meditation, or exorcism, Calvin mused. The bed was simple but solid; a twin mattress and an iron frame. There were no windows. He told the demon to sit down.
Calvin flicked on a light switch, only a little surprised when the bulb glowed into life on the ceiling. The Jesuits, it seemed, paid their utility bills on time. He closed the door and leaned against it, his arms crossed.
The demon’s left eyebrow rose.
“Now that you’re locked in the kid’s body, you seem to have lost some of your more super-natural abilities. If Jeremy can’t do it, you can’t do it. Would that be a correct assumption?”
It grinned. “Eat shit.”
“Fair enough,” Calvin said. “Since you can’t tell the future anymore I’ll lay out the next couple of days for you. Or,” he ran a hand through his hair and sighed, “couple of months. It’s all up to you.” He stared down at the boy, tried hard not to see the child in the shell, just the monster, and said, “I’m going to torture you until you leave.”
It blinked. “You won’t, Templar. You won’t hurt the child.”
Calvin showed his teeth, white and square. He leaned forward a little. “I don’t give a shit about some mobster’s brat. This is about me and you. If the kid survives, I’ll consider it a bonus.”
“Why not simply kill the child yourself, speed us into darkness?”
Calvin looked thoughtful. “There’s a good chance that’ll happen anyway. I don’t know how much more the kid’s body can take.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you gotta’ gamble, though, right? In any event, I want you to live for a while at least. There’s so much I have to pay you back for. I could fill a book with the fun n’ games I’ve got planned.”
The demon’s eyes shifted for an instant to a shadow below the crack of the door, then locked back on Calvin’s. It allowed a note of fear into its voice. “You truly plan to hurt this poor child to roust us from the meat?”
“Like I said, if it happens at the end of all of this that I get you out of the kid, then yeah, that’s beautiful, but mostly I’m doing this just to hurt you.”
“But why, Templar?”
“You’re fucking kidding me?”
It tipped it’s head to one side, a child’s gesture of open curiosity.
“You ruined what life I had left. I was a street kid, dying—no check that—I was fucking dead.” Calvin slashed the air with his hand. “Then you grabbed me back and proceeded to use my body to hurt people. I don’t remember what you did to me in the process, but I’m sure as hell willing to bet there’s a reason for that repression.”
“But we delivered you to your benefactor.”
“Yeah, you indirectly got me recruited into the Pope’s ninja army. What? I’m supposed to thank you for throwing me into a life of one calculated murder after another?”
“But you excel in your good works.”
“I’m good at wasting people, but I can’t have a home, or a family…”
“You can now, Johnny.”
Calvin took a step toward the scabby boy on the bed and raised his hand. The demon cringed. “Don’t you use my name. Don’t you do it.”
The demon peeked out from behind its raised hands and dealt a plain blow. “If you torture the boy, the woman will leave you.”
Calvin’s face drained. He lowered his hand.
* * *