Sons of Darkness

by Gail Z. Martin

  “Good.” Travis paused to take a bite. “Because Paige called me—the pharmacist with the ghost sister?” Brent nodded to show he remembered. “She says Penny is keeping tabs on the ghosts, trying to find any who might remember the last time everything went down. She got a lot of warnings about wells, mines, and fire—and that time is running out.”

  “I had a dream about Danny, and he said the same things,” Brent replied, sobering. “So I ran with it.” He gestured toward the big white sheets of paper covered with scribbling he had taped to the wall from a flip chart, and the area map he’d pinned up beside it.

  Travis plopped down in a chair, after snagging a beer and another slice of pizza. “Danny said ‘it’s later than you think.’ You got the feeling from Hazel and Penny that the clock was ticking. I think I know what they mean.”

  Brent pointed to the white chart. “I tried to track down the dates for the last two events. It’s hard to tell the start—sometimes an accident or a murder isn’t part of a demonic apocalypse,” he added with a grimace. “But it wasn’t hard to find the end of each cycle because it’s too big to miss. A mine collapse and fire. Burning most of the town. And before that, the 1868 event was a huge wreck with two big passenger trains colliding and exploding.”

  “Lovely.”

  Brent ignored his comment. He pointed toward the scribbles. “In each case, the event is one hundred and fifty days long. It might have an extra day or two on the front end, but the one-fifty is pretty solid. Which is where it gets tricky. Because depending on what you count as the beginning of this cycle…we have about four days left.”

  “Shit.” Travis nearly choked on his beer. “That can’t be right.”

  Brent nodded. “’Fraid so. Maybe a day less, depending on whether a car accident or a suspicious death counts, or was just bad timing.”

  Travis set the beer aside and found he had lost his appetite for the third piece of pepperoni pizza. “We’re not ready.”

  “I don’t think it cares.”

  Travis rose and walked over to decipher Brent’s handwriting. “What’s this?” he asked, flipping the page.

  “I started looking at the history of Cooper City and Peale,” Brent replied. “Making note of any old notable disasters. They might or might not have been part of old cycles. What I found was that while many of them were spread all around the area, one place keeps coming up over and over again.”

  He pointed to a spot on the map. “Bliss Memorial Gardens.”

  “It’s not an old cemetery,” Travis argued.

  “No, but the land has been unlucky for a long time,” Brent replied. “Which makes me think that it’s connected. Maybe not the hell gate, or where the genius loci hangs out, but home base for the grief demons? Maybe.” He took another bite of pizza. “I happened upon an article in the local paper—archived online—from when Memorial Gardens was dedicated back in the 1950s. The writer knew the area history. She mentioned that a cemetery was a suitable use for land that had been so stained with blood.”

  “Stained, how?” Travis moved to look at the map, noting all the red pins where bodies had been found.

  Brent shrugged. “It seems to have checked off all the boxes to qualify for ground zero in a horror movie. All that’s missing is a creepy overnight camp for horny teenagers. It was the site of a colonial-era settlement, which burned to the ground after its residents died from the plague. The local tribes avoided it—said it had ‘bad spirits.’ Over the last two hundred years, it’s been the site of an orphanage, a hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium, and a mental institution. None of them stayed open long, and all closed with tarnished reputations. Nothing fully proven, but allegations that there had been abuse, experiments, neglect, patients gone missing.”

  “Fuck. So maybe it wasn’t strange that the ghouls picked Bliss.”

  “Maybe not,” Brent agreed. “And the location is central between Cooper City and Peale. In fact, it’s on land that was included in the original charter for Peale, and got annexed later by Cooper City after the mining town shut down.”

  Travis rubbed his neck, feeling his muscles tense and knowing a headache would soon follow. “You think that’s where the grief demons are coming from?”

  Brent nodded. “Yeah. And the whole area is honeycombed with mines. They’re everywhere, and they’re all abandoned—some for decades. So if there are supernatural creatures down there, they’ve had the run of the place since the last cataclysm. Maybe the energy from the genius loci extends into the tunnels, too.”

  Travis snagged another beer and returned to his seat. He flipped the cap between his fingers as he thought. “I don’t think creatures like the ghouls and the spriggan and the grief demons—or that psi-vamp you killed—are actually part of the main event. I think we were right about them being the vultures on the battlefield. Doesn’t mean we don’t want to shut them down, but they’re the symptom, not the disease. Seal up the hell gate for another fifty years, and we cut off their energy. They’ll either go elsewhere to find new hunting grounds, like wolves when the deer herd gets too thin, or they’ll go dormant until the next cycle.”

  “I think you’re right. And we’ve taken care of a bunch of them already. But we haven’t seen more come to take their place, so maybe there isn’t an infinite number.” Brent pointed out. “Or maybe we’re too close to the main event for them to regenerate?”

  “In Hazel’s notes, she speculated that it might not be possible to stop the cycle, but someone could close it down early to prevent the big bang at the end,” Travis said. “Getting rid of the grief demons before we go after the genius loci and the hell gate means one fewer set of enemies in the final battle.”

  “We don’t have much time left to figure out how to win that big fight,” Travis continued. “Or what it means to have an ‘inside connection.’ But Derek said he’s willing to fight the battle with us, and if there’s a traitor on the other side, a necromancer should be able to make use of it.”

  “Anything from your other Night Vigil folks?” Brent reached for a cold bottle, and then grabbed last congealed slice of pizza from the greasy box.

  “I told you about Paige and Penny. Angie’s a clairvoyant. She said she’s been dreaming about green fields with white flags on them that suddenly catch on fire and burn like the sun. No idea what, where, or when, but she’s been dreaming the same dream for over a week. Trece is a trucker. His far sight comes and goes, but when it hits, he sees something far away like it’s happening in front of him. He called me with a warning.”

  “About what?”

  “Green and black smoke, filling tunnels underground,” Travis replied. “Sounds like demons gathering for the big finale.”

  “Ellie called. She said that Rachael is still in the hospital, but they expect she’ll recover,” Brent told him. Rachael had been one of the two Silverado killer’s abductees to make it out alive. “And she didn’t forget her promise to track down old stories. She typed up everything she found and sent it to me. I forwarded it to your email.”

  “Every needle we find in the haystack helps,” Travis replied. He watched Brent drink the beer and hesitated before speaking. “You think CHARON could be any help?”

  Brent sputtered a little, then cleared his throat. “No. They’d show up with their black SUVs and throw their weight around, probably get us all killed because they won’t listen to anything we’ve figured out and want to start from scratch, only there isn’t time, and we all just get our asses handed to us.” He shook his head. “No. Definitely not.”

  Travis nodded. “I figure the same about the Sinistram. If they wanted to be part of this, they’d have beaten us to it, which means we’re the cleanup crew. Us, and the Night Vigil.”

  “Don’t forget Doug and Father Ryan,” Brent reminded him.

  “I’m not. Michael—that sniper I mentioned? Said he’s in. And Jason, the fire starter. What about your friend Mark? He’s a hunter.”

  “I asked. He’s got a situation up by th
e New York border that’s going nuts, and there’s no one else to cover it except him. Monsters don’t schedule these things to let us synchronize our calendars, I guess,” Brent replied.

  “Too bad. I think we’re going to need all the help we can get.” Travis paused to let the cold beer burn down his throat. “So…you think the place to fight the grief demons is Bliss cemetery? What did you have in mind? Because if we blow it sky high, even for a worthy cause, they’ll probably haul our asses to Rockview, lock us up, and throw away the key.”

  “Blowing up the mausoleum won’t do squat to demons,” Brent replied. They had both fought enough of them to know. “I figure that with all your priest-y stuff, you know plenty of exorcism variations, and one of them might work. But there might be a ritual specific to grief demons, and if you didn’t find it with your sources, maybe Chiara could find it with hers.”

  “The special library at Duquesne has a lot of manuscripts from the Vatican,” Travis said. “What kind of resources is she using?”

  Brent grinned. “Italian witches, Mafia sorcerers, Polish mystics. The Vatican isn’t the only game in town, you know. Plenty of other people with powers have figured out how to handle things without involving the guys from Rome.”

  Brent’s laptop chirped, indicating a new email. He glanced at the screen, tapped a few keys, then hunched forward, reading the message. A smile spread across his features.

  “It’s from Chiara,” he reported. “And it’s the details for the ritual.”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about using a synthetic ritual,” Brent grumbled.

  “Syncretic, not synthetic,” Travis replied. “It’s the difference between blending two cultural traditions, and being made out of nylon.”

  “I don’t do the woo-woo stuff,” Brent replied. “But it seems like sticking to the recipe would get the best results. Doing a mash-up sounds dangerous.”

  “And going up against a nest of grief demons isn’t dangerous?” Travis chuckled, despite the situation.

  They had spent the previous evening comparing the exorcism variations Travis had uncovered from his last trip to Duquesne’s secret library with the rituals that Chiara’s practitioners unearthed. Brent had admitted that it was all mumbo-jumbo to him, so he deferred to Travis to make the call.

  Travis poured over the texts, dismissing some as questionable, others as outright fakes, but in the end, half a dozen litanies had both power and history in their favor. Yet none by itself seemed right to bind entities like the grief demons and send them back to the abyss or the primal darkness.

  “I didn’t ‘mash up’ the rituals,” Travis replied. “More like layered the appropriate ones to reinforce and amplify each other.”

  “Have you ever done it before?”

  Travis fixed him with a glare. “You mean, have I ever tried to bind an entire nest of demons at once? No. But I don’t see how there’s a choice in the matter. We’ve already expelled the ones we heard about, but that’s not all of them. And we don’t have time to hunt them down one at a time.”

  He knew his short temper with Brent came from his own nervousness about the unfamiliar liturgies. He had done a conference call with Chiara and Simon, and they had given him valuable insights, but he was the one who would be making the invocation. Travis had done his best to recall everything he’d learned in the Sinistram, but he could not remember the elite group taking on such a large foe.

  And maybe that was why the Sinistram and CHARON weren’t here doing the real work, he thought with annoyance. Maybe they cherry-picked their battles to be the ones most likely for them to win, not those with the most lives at stake. The thought only strengthened Travis’s resolve to steer clear of the organizations. Although having that level of skilled help going into a situation like this would have been fucking awesome.

  Sunset came early in autumn, so Travis and Brent went out to Bliss in the late afternoon. Jason and Lyle were waiting for them.

  “Here. Take one of these. They’ll help to deflect the demons from attacking you—or using you to attack me,” Travis said as their group assembled—Father Ryan and Doug, then Derek.

  He handed out protective amulets that he and Brent had made the night before for all of the participants, acting on directions and advice from Chiara and Simon. Father Ryan had given him several of the silver crucifix necklaces his church usually gave to those making First Communion, making sure to bless them and anoint them with holy water. Travis and Brent had wrapped each necklace around chunks of oak they had cut from the forest after Travis carved protective runes into the wood and added drops of blessed oil.

  Travis also wore several religious medals for protection, along with a silver ring and a bracelet with silver, onyx, and agate. Brent didn’t hold much with saint’s medallions in general, but he wore one for St. Michael and St. George, patron saints of law enforcement.

  The first step in their plan for the night was to place a warding on his helpers. Travis had worked the warding into the blessing on the amulets, and he felt the protective connection expand as each person took their charm and closed their hands around the blessed silver.

  They all turned as a newcomer in a white truck drove up.

  “Who’s that?” Brent asked, eyes narrowing. Out of reflex, his hand fell to his gun.

  A short, sandy-haired man swung down from the driver’s seat and grabbed something from the back. He sauntered toward them, and between his buzzed hair and the way he carried himself, he was clearly ex-military.

  “Michael. Glad you could join us.” Travis welcomed him with a handshake, then introduced the sharpshooter to the others. He had to smile despite the circumstances as Michael and Brent eyed each other in a testosterone-fueled challenge.

  “Save the arm wrestling for later,” he remarked, and both men stepped back warily. “We’re all on the same side.”

  Michael did a slow turn, taking in the surroundings. “I do my best work from up high,” he said and pointed to the tall white bell tower not far from the mausoleum. “How about there?”

  Lyle nodded. “There’s a maintenance ladder that goes up the side, and a platform just beneath the clock and bell mechanism. It’s not roomy, but it’ll hold your weight.”

  Michael flashed a wide smile. “That’ll do. Probably better than a lot of places I’ve been.”

  “Once I start the litany, the demons themselves should be compelled to enter the mausoleum,” Travis told the group. “What we don’t know is whether the energy will draw other creatures. That’s where Michael, Doug, and Brent come in to make sure that nothing gets past the perimeter once we start the working.” He gestured toward the line of burning pillar candles that formed a large circle around the big granite building.

  “We’ll make sure of it,” Michael promised. Brent clenched his jaw and gave a curt nod.

  “Father Ryan and I will handle the liturgy,” Travis continued. “Lyle and Jason will back us up, in case the demons break the containment area I’ll set up.”

  “And then what?” Doug asked. He had a shotgun as well as his sidearm, and Travis knew from overhearing his conversation with Brent that the man had plenty of iron and silver ammo.

  “Then with luck, you have a very boring night, and all the action happens in there,” Travis said, pointing. “Just make sure we don’t get interrupted. I don’t know what’s likely to happen when we start the banishing. As far as we can tell, no one’s tried before.”

  “Let’s get to work,” Brent said grimly, and the participants veered off to their places.

  Travis felt a knot of nervousness. He had practiced the liturgy, and he knew the wardings that were needed. He had drawn on Wiccan and other old traditions outside of Catholicism for the amulet and elements of the warding and containment, spells more than sacrament, but he reminded himself that the Sinistram never had any qualms about using such things in the heat of the moment. The invocations would raise strong energies to counter the demons, and Travis sincerely hoped he could control that po
wer so it would not destroy him.

  “Can’t say I expected to be wrangling demons when I came to Cooper City,” Father Ryan remarked, jostling Travis from his thoughts.

  “And people think nothing ever happens in small towns,” Travis replied.

  He and Ryan followed Lyle and Jason into the mausoleum. Derek stayed outside with the shooters, where he could use his necromancy to deflect an attack by zombies or ghouls.

  Travis sent the others up to the second level inside the mausoleum, while he made a circuit of the first floor, laying down a cordon of salt and iron filings at the edges of the walls, and tracing protective symbols every few feet onto the granite with blessed oil. The sigils were currently invisible to the human eye, but they would blaze brightly in the presence of demons. When he finished, he joined the others and looked down on the wide front entranceway.

  “It’s showtime.”

  The ritual’s complexity lay in its many parts. The wardings were as complete as Travis could make them without creating a barrier that the demons couldn’t cross, which would be counterproductive. The containment spell that he placed on the first floor of the mausoleum could be snapped shut with a word once the demons were inside. And after that—Travis stopped himself from going back over the plan. They would have to survive each step to get to the “after that.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Father Ryan asked, coming up to stand beside Travis. Lyle and Jason kept watch from the other side of the open balcony. Travis and Lyle had guns, but if they needed them, the cause was already lost. Jason’s fire starting provided some protection, but as they’d seen with the ghouls, the demands of his gift regulated his stamina.

  If the ritual didn’t work, they were screwed—and so was Cooper City.

  “Veni, immundus spiritus… ” Travis began the litany, which was basically a reverse exorcism. He had worked out the wording very precisely with Simon, Chiara, and Father Ryan so that he did not find himself besieged by every demon in range. Just the grief demons, and only those in the immediate area. Precision mattered when dealing with supernatural creatures. Souls had been lost over bad phrasing.