The Unseen

by Bryan, JL

  “You offer yourself willingly?” the archdemon asked Cassidy.

  “Not as a gift, but as a trade. My friend Barb will be released and suffer no harm. My brother Kieran will be turned away—you will stop his initiation now, and put no spirit inside him, no matter what he wishes.”

  “Cassidy, no!” Kieran said. “You can’t take this away from me.”

  “I’m saving you,” Cassidy told him.

  Nibhaz chuckled, and the candles in the room flickered low.

  “We accept your terms,” the demon’s voice announced. “Clear the altar.”

  Scarlet-robed figures grabbed Kieran and lifted him, though he struggled and protested. They carried him past Cassidy, up the stairs, and he scowled at her. They tossed him into one of the theater-style seats and held him there.

  “Remove your clothes,” Nibhaz snarled.

  “I can barely lift my arms,” Cassidy replied, because it was true. She was fighting her body’s desire to give up and pass out from blood loss.

  “Strip her,” the prophet ordered. The men around her pulled her shirt over her head and peeled her pants down, leaving her barefoot in soggy underwear.

  “What is this?” Nibhaz recoiled at the sight of her.

  With the sliver of glass, Cassidy had carved hieroglyphs all over her torso, trying to replicate the symbols she’d painted on the two demon-catcher bottles. She swayed on her feet, woozy, but willed herself to stay awake.

  “You will not possess me, Nibhaz,” Cassidy said, her voice barely audible, but amplified somehow in the curved amphitheater. “I will possess you.”

  Cassidy began to recite the ancient Egyptian chant Ibis had taught her.

  “Stop! Stop her!” Nibhaz howled. The crooked body he possessed rose from the wheelchair, levitating in front of the enormous fire.

  Cassidy spoke faster as the scarlet-robed men grabbed at her. She didn’t fight back, but used all her strength to keep her lips moving while she turned her face from their grabbing hands.

  The dying, shriveled body possessed by the archdemon ripped open like rotten fruit, chunks of bone and meat spattering the ground and sizzling in the fireplace. The archdemon itself became visible, a thing made of black smoke. Though crouching and hunched, it was three stories high and barely fit into the sanctuary.

  It had row after row of teeth like swords, cavernous dark eyes that were the deepest black Cassidy had ever seen, as if they absorbed and swallowed all light. Immense horns ringed his head like a hellish crown.

  It bellowed, and its voice was deafening. Red heat glowed in its cavernous mouth, as if its insides were just a vast incinerator. Veins of fire crackled all over its body as its rage swelled.

  The floor shook, the walls cracked, and chunks of the ceiling broke loose and rained down. One black-smoke, claw-tipped hand larger than Cassidy’s entire body reached over the altar toward her. An acrid stench like burning bones rolled out from it.

  Cassidy continued on with the incantation, though she couldn’t hear her own voice in her ears over the demon’s endless shuddering roar.

  Reese grabbed Cassidy’s throat and choked her with both hands, but Cassidy continued moving her lips, barely blowing out any air with her words. The world was going dark again.

  With an effort, her eyes rolling back in her head and her body going limp, Cassidy whispered the final word of the spell.

  The demon’s furious howl shook the room, rupturing and cracking the stone floor like an earthquake. Its form twisted and coiled into a snakelike shape as it stretched forward, and all the black smoke of its body ignited into billowing flame.

  The fire and smoke punched right through Reese, who still clutched Cassidy’s throat, turning her body into ash and blackened bone. The others holding Cassidy burst into flames and released her, screaming as the intense heat and blinding smoke whipped through them.

  Cassidy felt the immense power of the archdemon flow into her, scorching her skin. It filled her up with horrific pain, torching her insides, her heart, her lungs, her guts. A scream escaped her lips. She could feel the archdemon thrashing within her, struggling to escape, and her skin bubbled and blistered...but the enchantment held, and after a moment, she felt the demon settle into its trap, like a white-hot whirlpool burning deep in the pit of her stomach. It radiated anger and power all the way out to her fingertips.

  She realized that, with the archdemon as her captive, its power had become her power.

  Cassidy rose up from the floor and levitated above the frightened, confused crowd, looking down on all of them. She could see right through them, to the lesser demons trembling inside. Her grin was evil, her teeth unnaturally sharp, but she felt she was in control.

  “Kneel,” she commanded, and all the scarlet-robed disciples knelt. Only two people did not—her brother, who huddled in a seat halfway up the amphitheater, clutching his knees to his chin and watching her with undisguised fear. The other was the prophet Eli, who stood by the altar and the roaring fireplace, glaring at her.

  A great burning path into the future opened before her. Each of these smaller demons was bound to Nibhaz, whom she now controlled herself. With her own powers fused with the archdemon’s, and a legion of demons possessing human bodies, she could do anything at all. She could rule as a god if she wished. The temptation suddenly seemed overwhelming.

  Cassidy shook her head. That was the demon within, infesting her thoughts. Perhaps she was less in control than she’d imagined.

  “I cast you out,” she commanded, her voice booming through the amphitheater, shaking the walls just as the archdemon’s voice had done. “You will depart the flesh. All of you.”

  Mewling, screeching, and crying, the legion of demon poured out of the human bodies in a storm of fire. The humans collapsed, shivered, or screamed at the sudden loss of their powers and patron spirits.

  “I cast you all into the abyss,” Cassidy said. “I cast you out of the world of the living and into the darkness below.”

  A great chorus of screams went up from the disembodied monstrosities. They swirled and shrank away, leaving the sanctuary cold, empty, and shattered. The candle sconces had cracked and the candles themselves had blown out, and the great fire at the center of the sanctuary had shrunk by half.

  The disciples in their robes looked among each other, realizing what had happened. A few began to make their way up the stairs, casting wary glances back at Cassidy’s levitating body. When she did nothing to stop them, more stood and ran up the stairs, rats scurrying from a hopeless shipwreck.

  Cassidy descended to the broken floor to look at Eli, who wasn’t running.

  “You’ve ruined everything,” he said.

  “You have tried to take everything from me,” Cassidy said. “My father. My brother.”

  “I did what was needed.”

  “Come,” Cassidy said. “Come to me, and I will pay you what I owe.”

  Eli’s face turned into a mask of hate. He charged at her, raising the long iron tattoo needle, and swung it toward her eye. She let him get very close.

  Then Cassidy seized his arm, lifted him into the air, and flung him across the sanctuary.

  The demonic prophet struck the cracked stone-tile wall with a sound like smashing glass as his skull and every bone in his body shattered. His corpse fell to the broken floor.

  He was nothing, Cassidy realized. With Nibhaz inside her, she saw the larger picture. In a chamber below the sanctuary were the thirteen monks, those who had sent Eli to create the church, the true servants of the demonic world.

  She looked up at her brother, shivering in his chair.

  “What’s happening?” he asked. “Cassidy? Is that still you, or...?”

  “It’s me. Go find Barb.” Cassidy gave him directions to the cells with the bolted doors. “I have one more thing to do.”

  She looked down at the broken floor between her feet and willed it to break open even more. The ground rumbled. Broken chunks of concrete spilled away, opening a long sh
aft into a concrete room with a thirteen-point star painted in drying blood on the floor.

  Cassidy descended through the rough, jagged shaft. With the demon in her, she could move almost as freely while in her body as when she traveled outside of it.

  She landed softly on her feet in the center of the star. Cracks had opened all over the ceiling and walls, and she could feel the underground structure trembling towards collapse.

  The monks were gone. All of them. They had left through some means, some secret door or passage unknown even to the archdemon, and they had enchanted it or otherwise hidden it beyond her powers to divine. If she searched long enough, she might find it, but the entire chamber was crumbling. She had people above who needed her help.

  Cassidy leaped up to the sanctuary again. Her brother had already left, and the hidden door in the sanctuary wall stood open.

  Cassidy walked through it.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Since her clothes were burned and scattered, Cassidy stopped by a dressing chamber near the sanctuary and stole clothes from the cult members. The jeans were too tight, and the button-up shirt was baggy and loose, but it certainly beat walking around in the singed threads of her underwear.

  Cassidy found Kieran helping Barb through the hallway—fortunately, he’d stopped to grab clothes for himself, too.

  “Barb!” Cassidy hugged her friend and supported her from the other side. “Are you okay?”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Barb asked. “Peyton and Reese...”

  “They’re both dead,” Cassidy said. “I think I might have cracked the foundation of this place. We’d better get out of here as soon as we find Ibis.”

  “He’s involved in this, too?” Barb asked.

  “Without him, tonight would have gone differently. We’d all be screwed.”

  “I saw that thing they were going to put in me.” Kieran shook his head. “I can’t believe I went along with it. So it’s in you now? What does that mean?”

  “It’s my prisoner for now. I need Ibis to help me get rid of it.” Cassidy remembered that Reese had said Ibis was dead, but if the man had already lived seven centuries, then death might be a flexible notion for him.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Barb said.

  “I was in the middle of it and I still don’t understand it,” Kieran said.

  In another of the bolted chambers, they found a body on the raw concrete floor, covered in a sheet. Barb and Kieran stayed out in the corridor while Cassidy approached. She crouched on the floor, and with her hand shaking, she pulled back the sheet.

  The body beneath was impossible to identify with certainty—skinned, broken, and burned, traces of skull visible through the damaged remains of flesh—but it was tall enough to be Ibis.

  Cassidy let out a pained gasp and covered it again. She clutched her head, trying to figure out what she might be able to do. She remembered the healing symbols she’d painted on her own leg, but she wasn’t sure if that would be powerful enough to bring him back.

  “I don’t think we can help him,” Barb said.

  “Wait, let me think.” Cassidy considered what Ibis had said about his past. The priests of Thoth had believed he was the offspring of a fire spirit dwelling deep inside the Sahara.

  Cassidy slipped her arms under his body and lifted him up. Between all the body mass he’d lost, and her new demonic strength, he was as light as a bag of feathers.

  “What are you doing?” Kieran asked.

  “Yeah, we need to get out of here,” Barb said.

  “Go ahead if you want.” Cassidy carried his body out into the corridor. Kieran winced in disgust at the sight of it and backed away. Barb trailed after Cassidy, looking like she might be concerned for Cassidy’s sanity. Kieran reluctantly followed.

  Cassidy carried Ibis’s body into the shattered sanctuary, over the cracked stone floor to the fireplace, and laid him on the marble hearth in front of the large fire.

  “Whoa, you’re burning him up?” Kieran asked. He and Barb had stopped on the stairs, hanging back from the broken floor of the central depression with the gaping hole in the center.

  “Cassidy?” Barb asked.

  Cassidy ignored them. She gently raised Ibis’s butchered hand and eased it closer and closer to the fire. She winced as the heat scalded her own hand, then moved his fingers even closer.

  Ibis’s fingertips smoldered. She watched intently as the remnants of his flesh bubbled...then formed into solid, dark, healthy skin.

  She moved his entire body into the flames. The heat was painful to her, but didn’t seem to do any real damage.

  The fire sputtered, then swelled to surround his body, as though eager to consume him.

  “Can we go now?” Kieran asked.

  Fire billowed up and out, and Cassidy covered her eyes and jumped back.

  When the fire calmed down, Ibis rose from the flames—naked, hairless, but clearly alive and entirely healed.

  “Holy shit!” Barb gasped.

  Ibis looked around, blinking. He smiled at Cassidy.

  “How did you know?” he asked her.

  “Witch’s intuition,” Cassidy said. “Or demonic intuition. I captured Nibhaz.” She lifted her shirt to show him the markings she’d carved.

  “Clever. We have to get him out of there before he poisons you.”

  “That’s why I brought you back.”

  “It wasn’t the pleasure of my company?” Ibis asked.

  “Maybe a little.”

  Kieran let out a long, annoyed sigh and tapped his foot impatiently. He’d clearly seen too much to be shocked by the sight of a dead man brought to life in a bonfire.

  “Can we please go already?” Kieran asked.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  They returned to Cassidy’s mom’s apartment. The four of them spent a few hours talking over what had happened, particularly filling in Kieran and Barb on everything they didn’t know.

  Cassidy and Barb weren’t in a hurry to return home and deal with Stray and the inevitable police investigation into the three dead bodies mangled by claws and fangs. Cassidy wondered what the cops would make of it. Now that the crazed events of the night had passed, she had time to really feel terrible for what had happened to Allie, and to Whitley and Chet, even if those guys had kind of been self-absorbed jerks. They certainly hadn’t deserved a horrible death. She felt responsible for Tamila’s death, too—her long-lost friend had died helping her.

  Kieran and Barb kept asking Ibis questions about his long life, which he answered with grace and humor without actually divulging very much.

  Cassidy was tempted to have a glass of her mom’s whiskey, but decided against it. Blotting out the unseen world hadn’t protected herself or anyone else, and had only left them vulnerable to some very real danger. Tamila, Allie, and the others might still be alive, she thought, if not for her own stubborn refusal to face reality.

  One by one they dozed off, exhausted. Kieran slept in the armchair, either unwilling to be alone or deciding that he didn’t feel like sleeping in his own bed, in the room where Nibhaz had once been summoned via Ouija board.

  Cassidy slept fitfully, suffering hellish dreams and feeling feverish, her insides burning. She slumped between Ibis and Barb on the couch, her head on Ibis’s shoulder, Barb’s head on her hip, and felt comforted by the presence of her friends.

  “What’s all this?” her mother asked when she arrived home. Early daylight streaked in through the glass door to the balcony.

  Cassidy rose up, blinking. She smiled drowsily at her mom. The other three remained asleep.

  “Morning,” Cassidy said.

  “Who’s this?” Her mom nodded at Ibis. “New boyfriend?”

  Cassidy looked at his closed eyes and his beautiful face, trying to determine how she felt about him. “I don’t know what you’d call him. A friend.”

  “What did you kids get into last night?”

  “We saw some of the things you didn’t want
Kieran and me to know about,” Cassidy said. “I understand why you wanted to protect us from all of it. We can’t hide from reality forever, though, Mom. You grow up, and reality finds you, whether you want it to or not.”

  Her mother looked upset. “What exactly happened?”

  “Any chance I can tell you later? It’s been a long night. Also, you really need to keep your phone charged.”

  “Oh, this damned thing.” Her mom pulled the smartphone from her purse. “It’s so greedy for electricity. It must be charged constantly. I miss my old phone—that one wasn’t so delicate and needy.” Her mother frowned. “But everyone’s all right?”

  “Yeah. I think so.” Cassidy looked at Kieran. “Better than before, even.”

  Her mother looked around the room again and sighed. “It’s nice to have both of you kids here again.”

  “It’s nice to be home, Mom,” Cassidy said. Then she added, “I love you. Kieran loves you, too.”

  Her mother’s eyes glimmered for a moment, and she hugged Cassidy. “I suppose you’ll all be needing breakfast.”

  “I’ll take care of it. You should rest.”

  When her mother went on into her room, Cassidy tried to sleep again, but couldn’t. She had too many questions left, and very few answers. She wondered where those thirteen monks had gone, and whether she’d only succeeded in making herself new, more powerful enemies.

  She decided that she probably wouldn’t be able to rest again until Ibis performed the exorcism and sent the archdemon back to Hell.

  Cassidy slid out from under Barb, stood, and stretched. Moving as quietly as she could manage, she crept past Kieran slumbering in the armchair and opened the squeaky balcony door. Cassidy stepped out on the balcony and lit her last cigarette, looking out at the weedy sinkhole in the early morning light. A miniature golf club just wasn’t the most effective weapon for defeating an archdemon, she thought.

  After a minute, Kieran stepped outside with her, his eyes still heavy with sleep.