Institutionalized (Demon Squad Book 10)

by Marquitz, Tim

  She hopped up and stuck her hand out. I took it, ignoring the tingles that erupted in my palm at the contact, and clambered to my feet. I pulled my hand away as soon as I was up, eyeballing it, wondering what the hell was going on.

  “Want to talk about it?” she asked.

  I drew in a deep breath and shook my head. “Not particularly, no.”

  Unlike Thud, Kit was smart enough to put the pieces together and had to have seen the news footage when it first aired, the media blaming me for the death of Karra. She’d known why I’d broken down, why I’d exploded on Thud, but for all her unexpected kindness, I couldn’t have that conversation with her yet; not with anyone.

  “You’re damn well going to discuss it with me, Triggaltheron,” a loud and entirely too familiar voice boomed from the end of the hall.

  I spun to see Maximus marching toward me. Given the option of talking about Karra and dealing with Maximus, I’d choose his bullshit any day of the week. “Sure thing, el jefe pendejo.” I gestured for Kit to leave us so she didn’t catch any of the fallout from the argument that was bound to happen. She looked more than happy to run off, pressing against the far wall as she passed him, seemingly trying to put as much distance between them as possible. Couldn’t say I blamed her.

  Maximus ignored Kit, his gray eyes, like glaciers, jabbed my way. “Not only did you allow Shaw to lay the blame for Fantasma’s attack on the organization, but you did nothing to stop her from revealing the location of all our assets?”

  The words thudded into my ears, my brain still soggy from my breakdown. “Wait, what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know!” He screamed so loud I was afraid he’d knock me off my feet with all the bluster.

  “Well, we, uh, had a bit of an incident here,” I answered. “Seriously though, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Maximus growled, getting in my face as he had the last time. “On top of that pathetic work of a video released to the media, Shaw has revealed the location of each and every one of our assets on the internet, giving detailed information such as the security codes to access them and what resources are locked away inside. It’s like Christmas for the supernatural set.” He stiffened, looking ready to hit me. “This is all your fault, Triggaltheron.”

  “Careful with the finger pointing, buddy. You aren’t exactly blameless here, seeing how all this shit started under Shaw’s watch…and yours. I’m just here to clean up after you, remember? Be your damn scapegoat when everything goes south.”

  He grinned, turning the malevolence up to eleven. “No, you’re absolutely right, Triggaltheron.” I could damn near see the wheels churning in his head, sparks flying. “It’s up to me to fix this mess. I see that now.”

  “That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense.”

  “Then that’s exactly what I’ll do.” His grin widened. “You have forty-eight hours to find and kill Shaw or I’ll raze the organization to the ground and everyone involved with it.”

  “That seems a bit, uh, extreme, don’t you think?” I asked, caught off guard by just how mercenary the guy was.

  “Extreme problems require extreme solutions,” he countered. “If Shaw isn’t rotting in a grave in forty-eight hours, I will take you down and lay waste to everything the others care about, to include their families locked away inside my prison.”

  Maximus chuckled as if he’d just farted and turned his back on me, starting off down the hall. I was too surprised to try to stop him.

  “Two days, Triggaltheron, no more,” he called out when he reached the door. “Then this all ends, one way or another.”

  I watched him leave, only then realizing I’d been holding my breath. He was serious. And while it wasn’t likely he could do much directly to me or the rest of DRAC, ensconced in Hell as they were, he could certainly make it so they could never leave again, a torture unto itself. However, for some strange reason, I was more worried about Grace and the others right then. They were caught in the middle of everything thanks to me and Shaw and the moves we’d made that had led to this point. This was on us, and she sure as hell wasn’t gonna own up and fix things, her hatred of Maximus and his bosses as palpable as mine was for Trinity.

  That was when I realized my options were withering on the vine and I was gonna have to do something drastic soon. Something I so didn’t want to do. My throat seized at the thought but I found some sliver of relief that I wasn’t there just yet. Still, in order to keep Maximus and his masters from doing something horrible, I couldn’t see many ways around having to do something equally horrible in order to head them off. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  I sighed, letting my head loll back so I was staring at the ceiling, my eyes playing connect the dots with the holes in the ceiling tiles.

  Now was a shitty time to start developing a conscience.

  Eleven

  “You’re not going to like this, Frank,” Grace said, waving me into the conference room before I’d even completely opened the door.

  It was a safe bet I wouldn’t like anything right at that moment. “What now?”

  “We’ve reports that two of our remote locations are under attack by supernatural forces.”

  “Fantasma,” Kit said, joining the conversation, staring over her laptop from where she sat at the head of the table, her gaze lingering. “They’ve apparently gathered some intel on us in the last day.”

  I shook my head. “They have all the intel,” I corrected. “Shaw’s been busy. Maximus just made it clear she dumped the DSI’s address book on the net, most likely to the highest bidder. Now all the jackals are gonna circle the corpse, hoping to get a bite before it rots.”

  “That’s poetic,” Styg said, speaking to me for the first time since he’d failed to resurrect Karra.

  “Figures you would think so,” I said, chuckling, able to muster some small measure of amusement since the elephant wasn’t in the room. And by that, I meant Thud. He and Poe were somewhere else but I couldn’t bring myself to ask where. I wasn’t ready to face Thud yet, still unsure whether to apologize to him or finish what I started.

  “What do we do?” Grace stared at me from across the table, her slimline headset and mic visible as she fielded the incoming calls from the other DSI properties, her brow scrunched in frustration. “The security forces are holding but there’s no certainty that will remain the case for long.”

  I looked to Kit, meeting her eyes. “What does your chatter tell you?”

  “It’s all over the place, and building fast,” she answered, glancing at her screen then back at me. “Fantasma has hundreds of targets now, not just the few they had days ago. There’s no way for me to pin down their next move with any clarity as the field is too wide open.”

  “There’s no need to, I don’t think. They’re gonna hit them all,” I said. And sure enough, Grace’s next statement confirmed what I expected. Fantasma and friends weren’t planning on holding back.

  “Another location is under siege, Frank, this one in Old Town. Holding for now. Orders?”

  With all the people at these locations under my watch, such as it was, I was being forced to make a decision. “Withdraw them all,” I told her. “These attacks, while likely just distractions or acts of opportunity, are going to reverberate through the city, spilling out beyond our properties. Too many people are going to be hurt by this. Get our people out of there. Out of everywhere.”

  “You sure?” Grace asked. “We can’t house those kinds of numbers, let alone protect them.”

  “Yes, we can.” I closed my eyes and reached out for Poe, focusing on the tiny spark of the telepathic connection he’d implanted in my skull.

  “Yes, Mister Trigg,” he answered an instant later.

  I need to make a collect call to Hell. You up for it?

  “Indeed.”

  Not long after, I’d reached out to Rachelle through Poe and had her and the mentalist organizing an evacuation of the DSI per
sonnel to Hell, starting with the locations currently under attack.

  It was a heck of a task but it was the best I could do given the circumstances. While I was essentially giving away billions of dollars in government assets by leaving them empty, at least the employees would be safe and accounted for. Besides, I really didn’t give a damn about Maximus’s lost assets. He could explain that shit to his bosses.

  “What about those here?” Grace asked.

  “Organize a skeleton crew, including Officer “Stinkmouth” Barnes, to keep the place up and running, then send the rest down to Hell with the others.”

  “Did you seriously just use air quotes?” Kit asked, laughing at me.

  “How else would you catch the emphasis?”

  She shook her head at me while Grace relayed the orders.

  “So we’re just going to let them ransack the properties,” Grace asked once she was done conveying everything.

  “Yup. Maximus conveyed his displeasure with our lack of success and has offered us motivation in the form of nuking us from orbit if we don’t handle Shaw in the next forty-eight hours. He clearly thinks it’s the only way to be sure. As such, fuck the properties. We have more important things to worry about.”

  Both Grace and Kit froze, staring at me as if I’d spoken in tongues or something, my words sinking in.

  “Aw, fuck,” Styg muttered, pretty much summing up everyone’s feelings on the subject.

  “Indeed. This threat includes all your albatrosses, if you get my meaning.”

  Grace slammed her fist on the table, making it clear she understood. “We can’t let that piece of mother—”

  I cut her off with a raised finger. “I don’t intend to let him do anything of the sort.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I smiled. “Maximus isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.” Too bad the same applied to me.

  I had an inkling of an idea with regards to the teams’ loved ones but I wasn’t ready to share it with them just yet. Much as I hated to leverage their family against them even more than was already being done, I didn’t have a choice. Without that particular insurance, none of the team had any reason to hang around and help put out fires. They would simply up and vanish and I’d be stuck doing this shit by myself.

  Altruism would have to go fuck itself for a bit.

  “I won’t let him hurt your families.”

  “How will you stop him?” Kit asked.

  “I just will,” I answered. “You’ll have to trust me on this one, hard as that may be.”

  No one said anything outright, but there was no mistaking the uncertainty in their eyes. Faith wasn’t something any of them had, and trust might as well have been a foreign word for all they could muster, especially when it came to me. Still, they were used to working under the Sword of Damocles that was their situation. They’d keep working until they had news of their families, one way or the other. That was how they coped.

  “Kit, keep on the chatter,” I told her. “This is Shaw sowing chaos, not her real agenda. We need to see if we can find out what she really plans on doing.” I turned to Grace. “Organize everything we’ll need for a temporary base of operations and have Poe help you get it to Hell. I want to be able to function even if we’re forced to run ourselves.” Styg looked up and met my gaze then, realizing he was next in line to receive marching orders. “I want you with me.”

  He groaned, not bothering to hide his displeasure, but he shuffled to his feet and nodded. Glad I didn’t have to explain myself, I started for the door.

  “And you?” Kit called after me. “What are you going to do?”

  “Whatever needs to be done to end this.”

  Outside in the hall, Styg at my heels like a beaten puppy, I reached out to Poe. I need some things. Where can I find them? I asked, sending him a mental picture of my request.

  “Right this way, Mister Trigg,” he answered, leading me with an ethereal arrow.

  Once I’d collected what I needed, with Poe’s telepathic assistance, I stashed the stuff in a backpack I could easily carry and keep my hands free and glanced back at Styg. “You up for a road trip?”

  He shrugged.

  “Atta boy. I love your decisiveness.”

  Before he could respond—not that he probably would—I whisked us both away, thinking I should have been a proctologist.

  I had yet another asshole to see.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Triggaltheron?”

  I grinned at Maximus as Styg did his best to stay behind me, out of sight.

  Poe had clued me in to where the asshole was operating out of and me and Styg popped in and strolled right up to his makeshift office, hidden away in a quiet suburb of El Paseo; the last place Shaw would look for him. Right out in the goddamned open.

  “I already told you what you needed to do,” he shouted, his cheeks gleaming with crimson when he saw us, “so why aren’t you off doing it? I don’t want to see your face until—”

  “Seriously, shut the fuck up,” I told him, stepping forward and decking him with a Wanderlei Silva right hook. He took it on the jaw, mouth wide open, and crumpled.

  “Oh…fuck,” Styg muttered.

  “To make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs.”

  I really needed to work on my metaphors because now I was picturing running off and invading an IHOP.

  “What are you doing?” Styg clearly didn’t want to know but he no doubt felt compelled to ask.

  “Making breakfast,” I repeated. “Come on, man, you need to keep up.”

  In actuality, I was taking a page out of his book. I grabbed Maximus by the scruff of his neck and picked him up, teleporting all of us away. In a blink of an eye, we were in Hell. However, instead of appearing in my chambers or out where the mass exodus of DSI people was occurring, we materialized in a quiet, private area of my domain. The God-proof room, a gift from Yahweh Himself to my father, Satan. Styg recognized it immediately, having been there before.

  “Aw, come on, man. Seriously?”

  I nodded. “Serious as a late night booty call in prison.”

  Styg shuddered, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  The last time we’d been there was when Karra had been killed. These chambers, sealed off from the rest of Hell, were where I’d brought him so he could magic Karra back to life. It hadn’t worked out as I’d planned, with me learning only then that necromancers, because of their weird relationship with death, something having to do with feeding their soul to the void to do what they did, couldn’t be resurrected.

  It was a shitty lesson to learn.

  But that hadn’t been all that had happened here. I’d also brought the last surviving members of Trinity into the room, the Father and Holy Ghost, ending their lives in solitude and terror, surrounded by fifty feet of unyielding gray stone.

  “Here, hold this,” I said, handing Styg the backpack.

  With a wave of my hand, a section of the nearest wall rippled like murky water, the stone splitting open. A waft of old death gushed from the room, smacking me in the face, sickness and satisfaction washing over me in equal measures. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Styg blanch, his face turning shades whiter than the ivory it already was.

  In my fury, I’d left the members of Trinity in the holes where they’d died. In this case, it was the chamber where the Father had met his end. I’d triggered the great walls, making them close in on him, squeezing the life out of him like gory jelly. When the walls receded, they’d spread his remains about the room. That’d been over six months ago. Now, what was left of him, trapped in a sealed room, spilled from the door on a rush.

  Without a thought about the mess, I dragged Maximus inside the long tunnel leading to the room. “Wait out there, Styg,” His complete lack of movement told me he was gonna do that regardless what I told him, which was fine with me. The walls crept shut at my back, blocking Styg’s view and any hope of Maximus’s escape.

  “Wakey, wakey, slit thro
ats and trachey,” I told Sleeping Beauty, kicking him to emphasize the words.

  He grunted and rolled to his hands and knees, his senses coming back online just enough for him to realize what he was crawling about in. Maximus scrambled to his feet, covering his mouth with the back of his hand, face pale.

  “What is the meaning of this?” His gaze darted around of its own accord and it was clear he didn’t like what he saw. “What are you doing, Triggaltheron?”

  I countered his snarl with a smile. “What I should have done from the start, Maximus.” I waved at the room. “You insist on playing hardball, so here is my answer to that. And the irony of it all is, you’ll be spending some time in an isolated prison, cut off from the world and everyone you know.”

  He growled. “Do you think this will keep my masters from following through with my threats, demon?”

  “Indeed I do.” I nodded. “It’s most likely that you haven’t informed them of your plans yet, seeing how you just left headquarters not too long ago. But even if you did, they’re unlikely to jump on something so drastic considering they have no clue as to where you might be.” I chuckled. “Will they really push the red button if they think you’re in the kill zone?”

  “I supposed you’re willing to risk your life to find out just that, aren’t you?” A hint of the cocksure Maximus reappeared then, manifesting in a sly smile that stretched the dark bruise already forming on his jaw.

  I shrugged. “Yup. Looks like we’ll see what happens. Regardless, you’ll be out of my ass hairs for a while so I can do what I need to without your interference. That alone is worth the effort.”

  He glanced around one more time, drawing in a shallow breath through his mouth in hopes of avoiding the stench. “You’re going to regret this.”

  “Probably, but it’s what I do, Maximus. React and regret, react and regret, ad nauseam. And if you’d have researched me as thoroughly as you should have before you offered me a job, you’d know that.” I turned and waved my hand at the wall, the stone creeping open to let me out. “Enjoy your stay at Chez Funk. The amenities suck, but you can’t beat the atmosphere.”