by Bill Bennett
He closed her door, then walked around and hopped in behind the wheel. He turned to her with a grin and offered his hand. ‘Hi,’ he said softly, his huge dark eyes locked on hers.
‘Hi,’ she said, shaking his hand, feeling his touch – rough, yet sinewy and strong. It sent a sensation through her body like she’d never experienced before; a delectable thrum, an exquisite shimmy of excitement.
‘So, you want to find a place to get some shut-eye? Or do you want to put some miles in?’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Lily said. ‘I want to get as far away from those goody-two-shoes as possible.’
‘Okay then.’ He started up the car. It stuttered, then grumbled into a throaty V8 roar.
Lily leaned back, her seat covered in warm cowhide, as Skyhawk pulled out from the darkened carpark. He drove slowly down the lamp-lit street, the throb of the car’s powerful engine rumbling up through her body. It began to soothe away her tension.
‘How do you know my Uncle Freddie?’ she asked.
He glanced across and smiled, a broad open smile that didn’t dazzle like Kevin Johnstone’s; it warmed her, told her everything was okay, that there was no need to worry.
‘He took a bullet out of my chest. I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him.’
Lily had never met anyone who’d been shot. He was becoming more intriguing every minute. ‘What happened? Who shot you?’ she asked.
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s a long drive.’
Skyhawk smiled. ‘I bet it’ll send you to sleep.’
‘I bet it won’t.’
So he told her. How he was born in a village on top of a pillar of rock called the Needle. It was a traditional Native American village and had remained largely untouched except for the influence of missionaries, until a casino was built nearby. With it came liquor, drugs and violence.
One night he came home to find his sister had been badly beaten by her boyfriend. The boyfriend worked at the gas station and hung out at the casino. He paid for his gambling losses by dealing cut amphetamines to truckers.
Skyhawk drove to the casino, pulled him off one of the slots and dragged him outside, but before he could even raise a fist the guy pulled out a gun and shot him point blank in the chest. Someone found his body some time later, but by then his vitals were barely registering. They bought in a medevac chopper and within an hour he was under lights in surgery with Dr Frederick Maguire peering into his bloodied chest. Later, Skyhawk was told that by rights he should have died that night, except Dr Maguire performed a miracle and saved his life.
‘Ever since, your uncle and I have been best buddies,’ he concluded, and looked across at Lily.
She smiled. Fighting to keep awake.
‘I told you it would send you to sleep.’
‘I’m awake!’ she laughed. ‘That’s an amazing story. My uncle’s a total legend.’
‘He sure is.’
Skyhawk’s eyes flicked up to the rear-view. Behind him, following a long way back, was the vehicle that had been tailing them ever since they left the police station. A silver SUV. Skyhawk looked at the road ahead, and accelerated.
He opened the fridge, looking for something to eat. This time of night, he got hungry. Then again, he was hungry most times.
Their kitchen was made of marble and granite and brushed steel. Without a woman, a mom, it was a cold and lonely place. The room had a wide expansive view out over the ocean, but now at night the windows were just a curtain of black, which only added to Kevin’s sense of oppression. Of feeling trapped in a shiny cage.
For nearly twenty years his father had been a cosmetic surgeon for Silicon Valley’s upper echelon. They’d lived in Palo Alto, and Kevin could recall, as a youngster, lunches and dinners with the tech industry’s famous and elite. His dad knew Zuckerberg before the world knew Zuckerberg. Mr Musk was a golf buddy with big dreams and wild talk. And so too was the venture capitalist that backed Google and whisked his mom out of their world and onto his yacht, never to return.
The divorce was messy, and costly it seemed to Kevin, because soon after his dad sold up everything and retired to where they now lived. He also bought land back up in the hills and started the berry farm, more as a hobby than anything. It kept him occupied most days, that’s when he wasn’t out fishing with his lawyer-accountant ex-CEO/CFO pals, or playing the futures market. And then there was his astronomy club, which he’d joined a few years back and kept him out several nights a month. Kevin looked forward to those nights, when he could turn his amps up to the max and rock the very foundations of the house with his impassioned guitar solos.
He surveyed the offerings in the fridge. Cling-wrapped leftovers from the last few nights’ dinners. Some cold meat cuts, half a quiche. He grabbed a packet of goat’s cheese, pulled out some crackers from the larder, and sat down at a glass and steel table that could seat twelve, but only ever sat two.
He began to eat, distractedly.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Lily.
She’d obviously been distressed on the phone. And she clearly hadn’t been in a hospital, he knew that right from the start. So everything she’d told him, about being in ER and having medical tests and so on, all that had been a lie. But why would she lie to him?
She seemed particularly upset about her mother, as if she didn’t know where she was. Has she gone missing? Could those biker babes have abducted her, and was Lily now in hiding? If so, then where?
He put another chunk of cheese on a cracker, gulped it down in one bite. He stared out at where the sea should be, if not for the night.
Lily was becoming more of an enigma, more of a mystery. Was she in some kind of trouble? Or danger? Something must be going on because she’d refused dinner with him. What girl in their right mind would knock back a dinner with Kevin Johnstone unless there was something serious going down?
Lily Lennox.
Who is she?
Is she in danger?
Has she done bad?
Or has she been bad all along?
And who is this crazy biker chick who wants to take me into the dark? The deep dark?
He grinned.
There was only one way to find out.
The Fallen Priest drove fast along the highway but he did not travel on the road, nor was he above it, nor was he merely unseen. He was within the quantum construction of the road, moving along a different plane of existence, a different dimension – not passing other vehicles but moving through them, their drivers’ only perception of him being a slight, almost imperceptible, tug of the molecular space around them as he hurtled past.
He usually travelled without his vehicle, but he felt he might need the Lincoln Navigator once he arrived, the same way he needed his dog collar and silver cross and his well-thumbed copy of The New Testament. The Bible didn’t frighten him or nauseate him, as it did with some in Baphomet. He found the Bible quaint, at times laughable. It always amazed and fascinated him that so many people down through the ages had accepted the spurious writings without questioning all the lies and falsehoods, the aggrandisements and hypocrisies.
Some had even created a moral structure around the fevered scribblings, and he thought it the height of ignorance and self-loathing – that entire civilisations would attempt to live by a specious code inscribed by the detritus of an ugly time, well after the man called Jesus walked the earth and died an unheralded human death. It was laughable that they had elevated him to the level of a deity.
But they needed something. Someone. The fools.
Through this man called the Christ they had embraced the concept of guilt and elevated it to a dignity and status it did not deserve. They had enshrined their guilt and sanctified it and made it an institutional cat-o’-nine-tails, with the cross their whipping post. Guilt is what kept them all controlled, guilt is what kept them powerless. Guilt is what kept them joyless.
He didn’t suffer guilt.
His actions weren’t trammelled by hy
pocrisy or regret; they were driven by a need to satiate his passions. He did what he wanted, and his creed allowed him to have fun, whatever kind of ‘fun’ that might be, free from the punitive strictures of laws or morality or the imbecilic judgment of others.
He could never understand why more people hadn’t shifted their allegiance across to his ways, the ‘old religion’ as they called it, because the alternative was so utterly facile and boring, never mind that it was a complete lie.
Travel depleted him. It took an energetic toll on him as it did with all who used the technique, but he still had stamina and would be fully restored by morning when he would have to shift the woman and her daughter to the Deep Sink. It was one of the few earthly portals to the Palace of Fires, his second home, and where the Two Evil, His Lord and Master, Her Lady and Mistress, existed.
The Sink was quiet, safe, and no one had ever escaped. He needed a secure place for a woman this powerful. She would try every trick imaginable to save herself from her fate. She knew what was coming. She’d known it for generations. From what he’d been told, she would be his biggest challenge yet. The wayward bishop and the reluctant saint would be pushovers compared to Angela Maguire. He would relish his time there with her, and with her daughter.
Especially the daughter.
He laughed as he rushed fast through an eighteen wheeler, the doped-up driver’s lustful thoughts snagging at him as he sped past. The man had a crucifix dangling from his mirror. A candidate for Baphomet, the Fallen Priest thought, smiling. It was not hard to recruit new members. The church, with all its hypocrisies, made it so easy.
Hidden by shadows and away from curious eyes, he changed his Lincoln Navigator back into metal and rubber. That took an energetic toll as well. He had to use an advanced spell to pull substance out of a tangential plane and it required considerable effort, didn’t matter that he had centuries of craft to draw upon.
He stepped out of his vehicle a simple pastor. He stretched his legs. Yawned. Looked across to the run-down fish plant. A single light hung above the entrance. Somewhere a foghorn sounded. San Francisco. He hated the sea, the harbour, lakes and rivers. He hated salt air, and the soporific sound of waves on rocks. And he particularly hated fish. God’s creatures. They had scales and eyes that stared long after they were dead.
He preferred woods.
He preferred the smell of woods, the clinging moss, the early shadows, the critters that rustled through fallen skeletal leaves. You could hide in woods, you could do things no one would ever discover. You could wrap the woods around you like a cloak and watch and listen and wait for the unsuspecting, the unwitting, the lovers and fools.
He could feel her energy as soon as he walked inside. Putrid. Even under the influence of Sleep Eternal, she was still able to radiate a nauseating power. He walked over, lifted up the rotting sacks, looked down at her. She was bound and unconscious, harmless enough now. His Lord and Master, Lady and Mistress, would be pleased. They’d been searching for her since her birth.
He looked back at the familiar who was guarding their precious conquest. He had no interest in familiars. They lacked a soul. This one was a tall woman, black. Strong. A scarred face, but beautiful. If she’d been human, and younger, she would have been delicious.
She stood, and nodded out of respect.
‘Where is the girl?’ he asked, his words resonating contemptuously around the empty room.
‘They’re getting her,’ Andi said, her normally chocolate voice pinched and strained.
‘What do you mean “getting her”? I thought they were both ready for me to take?’ He was quick to anger. He didn’t wish to be here any longer than was absolutely necessary. He had to take them both to the Deep Sink. Only there could he prepare them for what was to come.
‘They’ll be back soon with the girl, I’m sure,’ Andi said, hoping he wouldn’t detect the obvious lie. A familiar was an impermanent and volatile part of their host’s etheric field, and although she could not be killed by a human, this servant of Satan could extinguish her energetic presence with a simple click of his fingers. For Kritta, it would be like having a vital organ suddenly ripped out of her. She would be able to function, but less effectively.
‘You are “sure”?’ he said, mocking her. ‘What does that mean, you soulless creature?’
‘My mistress will find her. Be assured.’
His eyes fixed on the familiar. They had no pupils, his eyes. They were like two black stones sitting on the bottom of an icy cold lake. He turned his attention to the woman.
‘You used the potion?’ he asked over his shoulder, staring at the woman’s every feature.
‘Yes, as decreed in The Book,’ Andi said.
The potion was called Sleep Eternal. It was a concoction of various ingredients that had taken Kritta months to find and prepare, all according to strict instructions laid down in The Book of Shadows. This was what Kritta had injected into the woman when she came out of the farmhouse.
The Fallen Priest stood. ‘I will not wait. I am eager to start work on this one. She will need time. Tell your mistress to contact the Hag when she gets the girl. You can send her to me.’
‘Where?’
‘The Deep Sink. Your mistress will know where that is. The woman is not safe here.’
The Fallen Priest looked down at the lifeless crumpled form of Angela Maguire. His thin bloodless lips curled into the semblance of a smile. He couldn’t quite believe it. They finally had her. She would need preparation before Unholy, and he would do that along the way, at the rubber dump, where he would have complete privacy. But right now her capture was something to celebrate. To savour. To enjoy.
He laughed. A mirthless sound, ageless and empty, that reverberated around the fish plant and echoed out into the night. Soon, the fun would begin.
Lily woke, gripped by a cold brittle terror. Her skin prickled, her mouth was dry, her insides felt shrivelled with fear.
She’d had that dream again. Of running down a dark stone corridor in an ancient castle, flaming torches in brackets on the walls flickering and guttering as she passed, running from something truly evil. A hurtling beast, with two heads – a goat and a boar. She could hear its hooves on the paved floor. She could smell its rancid breath. It was getting closer. Up ahead was a door. A huge oak door with metal studs and a bronze latch. She lunged at the door, grabbed for the latch, the beast almost upon her.
And then she’d woken.
She looked around, confused. Panicked. Where was she? She looked over and saw a gorgeous boy with long dark hair at the wheel of a car. And then she remembered. Her mother, taken. Oh my God, yes. And the police station. The woman detective. And the boy who’d come to take her to Santa Fe. Hopping in the car with him. What was his name? Skyhawk.
She was gripped with a sudden panic. What had she done? Who was he? Where was he taking her?
She looked out the window. They were in the desert somewhere. There were no lights, no dwellings of any kind, just flat featureless land dotted with stunted brush and the occasional tree. How could she have been so stupid to get into a car with a perfect stranger, when her mom warned her not to trust anyone?
She sneaked a glance at him – this flashing-eyed, dark-skinned young man who had presented at just the right moment as a friend and helper, someone who could get her out of the clutches of the cops and Child Protective Services.
Who was he really? Could this be a trap?
From the side, his features were near perfect. His face was sculpted, like someone of noble birth. Like a prince. His dark flowing hair, straight and shiny, fell to his shoulders and yet there was nothing feminine about him. Lily noticed that his arms, stretched taut holding the wheel, were lean but muscled, his triceps flexing with the movement of the vehicle. There was dirt under his nails yet he didn’t seem unclean in any way – there was something honourable about his working hands, something true and honest. Surely this was someone she could trust.
But then she remember
ed her mom’s letter, about how she shouldn’t trust anyone. How her adversaries would present as charming and handsome, but it would all be a ploy, an attractive lure, to entrap her.
Skyhawk glanced over at her. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, concerned. ‘Did you have a bad dream? You were jerking around like you were being attacked or something. And you were crying out.’
‘Was I?’ Her voice was tight. Was he pretending to be worried about her so she would trust him? Was this all part of his act?
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘I need to stop and get some gas.’
Up ahead, Lily saw the lights of a twenty-four hour gas station, glittering like a ship afloat in a dark desert sea. ‘I’m starving,’ she said. She could use the stop to sneak off and call her uncle, make sure he was who he said he was.
Skyhawk slowed and turned in, the old Cadillac bouncing and crunching over a dusty ditch. He pulled up at the pumps. The gas station was eerily empty. There were no cars, no trucks, and even though the diner’s lights shone bright, there was no one inside, not even any staff.
It didn’t seem right, Lily thought. It was very late, sure, but shouldn’t a truck stop on a main interstate have a few customers?
Skyhawk looked across to her. ‘Wait in the car until I’m done filling up, okay?’
‘I want to use the rest room.’
‘I won’t be long. Just wait, please. We’ll go together.’
‘To the Ladies?’
Skyhawk smiled. ‘I won’t be long.’
He hopped out of the car, walked around to the bowser and grabbed a pump, unlocked the tank, and began filling up. Lily watched him in the side wing mirror. He looked relaxed, but she could sense that he was alert, and if needed he could move fast. There was a coiled power in his lean frame. He’d be tough to beat in a fight, she thought. Friend or foe, she wasn’t sure, but he looked totally cool. She noticed that his long-bladed hunting knife now hung from his belt. Had he taken it out of the glove compartment while she was asleep? Why was he wearing it now?