The Judas Line

by Mark Everett Stone

  “Mike, when God created the world, he used a Word. The Word. First there’s nothing, then poof! God says the Word and there was light. Then he says the Word again and poof! Our happy little planet. All the Words are mere reflections of the Word, like copies of a copy of a copy ad nauseum until all you can see are a few smeared, broken letters.

  “Elemental and Botanical magic are different, man. They are leftover divine sparks when God spoke the Word bringing life to this world. The elements had their Primals to keep the balance just so, while plants grew into their potential, each one with a capacity for a kind of magic … Protection, Purification, Healing, Wisdom, Strength, etc.”

  Soon all seven cups had their smears of paste and he laid six in a circle with the seventh in the center. Then he poured the holy water into each cup until it barely touched the white paste.

  “Botanical magic is the most versatile,” he said quietly. “The subtlest. So many uses for the spark of divine magic in each plant. The Family has always regarded Botanical magic as the weakest, because it requires so much preparation and the ingredients aren’t conveniently located in one spot. However, with a little discipline, a little patience, you can achieve miracles Words or Elemental magic can never touch.

  “Now, as you’ve read in my … memoir, only males in my family can use the Words. In fact, the magi not related to my Family are all male, at least as far as I know, my exposure to magi outside the Family has been rather limited. However, the use of Botanical magic is not gender specific, nor does it require you to be a magus. All you need is a slight … sensitivity to magic. Male or female, if you have that sensitivity to magic, you have the ability to use Botanical magic.”

  Like firecrackers on a string, words popped out of his mouth faster and faster while I listened, rapt. “That’s where Wiccans come from, you know. Back in the day someone stumbled onto their magical heritage, usually by accident, and formed a religion based on nature.” The words trailed off. He looked up at the clear sky, staring at the slew of stars overhead. “Nature’s not a bad thing to worship, really. It’s all about balance and acceptance, realizing that things have their time to live and die. There are worse things to worship … much worse.”

  I couldn’t keep quiet any more. “Why are you telling me this, Jude?”

  “I love the stars, man. Always have. People look at the stars and think that Heaven must be there, despite what the Hubble telescope shows.” He laughed and the sound was like cracking ice. “Did you know that Christ had two brothers and a sister?”

  The conversational whiplash nearly spun my head about. “What?”

  “God used the Word to impregnate Mary and she was still infused with the divine spark when she gave birth to the other three children. Not surprising really, considering zero birth control and what kind of a loving God tells people to go forth and multiply, but leaves her without the ability to have more? That doesn’t make sense, considering she was married. So that little bit of divine spark got passed to her kids. The line of Joseph and Mary has some of the most powerful magi that have ever existed. The Sicarii have been trying to eliminate them for two millennia, man. And failing miserably.”

  “Jude-”

  “No, you have to hear this, man. Please. It’ll prepare you for what’s to come.” A deep sigh. “You know Luke 22:3–6 and John 13:27 … the Gospels that said Satan entered Judas and that led to the betrayal of Jesus?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course … look who I’m talking to. Think about this: Satan never enters anyone else in the Bible, does he? Not until Revelations. Whom does Satan merge with in Revelations, Mike?”

  An easy one. “His son, the Anti-Christ.”

  “Good. Now put two and two together here, man … Satan only enters his son, or relative maybe because they are strong enough to be entered, to be able to contain Satan’s might. Reasonable, yes?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “So logic dictates,” Jude broke in. “That he can only enter a family member, like his son, or grandson, someone with resilient flesh.”

  I stroked my moustache. “That’s possible, I guess.”

  “When Christ comes at the end times, who comes to oppose him?”

  “The Anti-Christ.”

  “Good, we’re getting somewhere. Okay, big question here … so who opposed Christ two thousand years ago? Who betrayed him? And who is most likely to be seen as a kind of Anti-Christ?”

  Oh, my … his words tumbled about in my head like pachinko balls ding ding dinging against my skull and knocking about everything I’d ever learned in Seminary. “Judas …” I breathed.

  His look was bitter as vinegar. “Yeah. And because he was entered by Satan and, in the end, opposed Christ …?”

  I wanted to puke. “The Anti-Christ?”

  Jude nodded. “Yeah, he was Satan’s first born son, the one sent to betray Christ.”

  The ground was warm and sandy under my butt; however, something prickled my left cheek. A thorn perhaps, but I didn’t feel it, not as pain, more as a minor irritation. That pachinko ball continued to bounce off the soft gray matter, scattering my thoughts, so I fell back on the only thing that could offer any comfort.

  “’Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name …’”

  I guess it was a kindness that Jude let me finish.

  “You okay, Mike?” he asked when my voice trailed off.

  Centered again, I nodded. It came to me that anyone else would haul Jude away to the laughing academy, even if they believed in magic, but in all my time in the army, as a priest, I know when someone is lying to me or delusional. Jude was neither. I just wished he were. “I’m fine.”

  “Good, because here comes the fastball. Judas Iscariot … do you know the origin of the name Iscariot? It’s not a family name. Judas claimed to be the son of Simon. No, the name comes from the band of rebels he formed, fanatics who would do anything to drive out the Romans, led by a man who practically foamed at the mouth. A group of assassins called the Sicarii.”

  “Judas Iscariot is-”

  “The Founder. Founder of the Sicarii and of my Family. Except the spark that created the magi in the Family is not quite divine, is it?”

  “Oh, dear Lord.” Ding ding ding. Why was he hitting me with all this? Was the sand shifting under me? No, I was lying flat on my back, staring at the stars. They winked at me, impervious to the shock my system had just received.

  “Trust me, He has nothing to do with it.” There came a soft thump as Jude sat down beside me. “Sorry to hit you with all this, Mike, but you had to know. It wasn’t all in the memoir and we’re about to enter the lion’s den. It’s here, right before the plunge that you have to decide whether to fish or cut bait, man.”

  Kind of him to give me the option, although it wasn’t needed, not by a long shot. Some things you feel right down to the bone because the people you share your strange little worlds with, the people you let inside the walls of your life and who let you into theirs, deserve the benefit of the doubt. But one essential truth shone like the light of the Lord:

  He was my friend.

  “Let’s see what we catch, then,” I said.

  The phones little LED cast a harsh light on Jude’s features, turning them a ghastly green. Dit, Dit, Dit … He dialed, pressed the SPEAKER button, and gently balanced the phone on the center cup inside the ring.

  Only three numbers? I thought.

  Three numbers or not, a tinny ringing noise came from the cell. Two, three, four then five rings without an answer.

  “Olivier, my boy, I am so glad you called.”

  Oh my … that voice, the Voice. It had to be … It rolled out of the tiny speakers as if thrumming from the very atmosphere we breathed, bypassing any mere mechanical contrivance built by man. Smooth as silk, almost greasy, deep and vibrant with a paternal undertone that set my teeth on edge.

  John Noble, I thought. The voice sounded like that of John Noble, the actor who played a crazy scientist on a sci-fi
show called Fringe (a priest who watches and reads sci-fi, who’da thunkit?). The Voice had the same cadence and inflection, but there was a deep … wrongness to it that reminded me of a shark swimming just below the waves, dorsal fin breaching to declare its menacing intentions.

  “Hello,” Jude said distantly, as if he didn’t care a whit about the Voice.

  “You’ve blocked me. I’m impressed; no one has ever done that before. It just proves to me once again how special you are.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t need you tracking me or blowing a phone up in my face.”

  “You’ll just have to forgive me that one, boy. I lost my temper. Won’t happen again.” It sounded sincere, but I could see the big muscles at the corner of Jude’s jaws clench.

  “I think I’ll have to opt out of believing you this time.”

  “No problem, my boy,” the Voice purred. “Come on home soon. All is forgiven, you have my guarantee. No one will gainsay me, you know that.”

  “That’s true.”

  “For fifteen years you’ve evaded me and the Family. That ought to prove to anyone with half a brain that you’re the One we need, my boy, despite the fact you have the Liar’s talking monkey traveling with you.”

  Jude’s alarmed gaze met mine. “What?” he asked. “You talking about the priest who tried to help me fix a flat when one of your gate crashers attempted to trim my hair down to the neck? He was just passing by.”

  “I think you’re using him to help you find the Liar’s Cup.”

  Jude grimaced. “No, I’m not, but something tells me it’s no longer where I think it is. You’ve got it, don’t you? Or, I should say, one of your party boys has it.”

  “Ah, so you’ve spoken with the lovely Ms. Winchester, have you?”

  “Not really spoken. More like she screamed all she knew before I bled her out like the pig that she was.” I shot him a surprised glance, but he shook his head slightly.

  “Good boy, nice to see that all your years in America have not dulled your killer’s edge.”

  “Yeah, talk to Burke about it, man.”

  “Burke was good, no doubt about it, no doubt at all.” A brief moment of silence. “You sound so very American, Olivier, the cadence, the inflection. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I spent a long time trying to blend in. Cultural camouflage.”

  “So come home to us, boy. Tell me where you are.”

  “I don’t think so, sir. I’m not strong enough yet to take on Julian.”

  The laughter that burst forth from those speakers made my hair stand on end. “Boy, you have the Silver. With that you can remove Julian handily.”

  Jude scratched his head. “Yeah, but I don’t have the Silver anymore.”

  If the laugher was unnerving, the silence that followed was horrifying. In place of menace there was a thick, gelid sense of evil that froze the breath in my lungs and drained all electrical impulses from my brain, leaving me in a senseless limbo.

  That limbo stretched to infinity and back before the Voice spoke again. “You are lying,” he said, breaking the pregnant pause with a snap.

  “No,” Jude refuted. “I’m not. Three years ago in Libya I located the Ark. Took some working, but managed to smuggle it home in a tramp freighter out of Benghazi named Star of Rawiah. I had placed the Silver inside so you couldn’t track it, surrounded by all that holiness, but somewhere off the coast of Sardinia the ship went down with all hands. For all I know, the Ark is at the bottom of the Med with the Silver still inside.”

  Oh, Lord … I felt it before it happened.

  Screeeeccchhhhhh! Razor blades slicing through skin, fingernails on chalkboard, the ripping of tin and high pitched whine of a stressed turbo as it headed toward failure. The sound that leaked through those tiny speakers was all those and more; a mix of noises so ghastly it was if someone had stuffed them into a blender and hit frappe.

  Mere seconds passed, but to my poor tortured ears it seemed a lifetime. Just when I thought the fine bones of my middle ear would shatter, the cell’s LED screen cracked with a soft pop and let out a curl of dark smoke.

  “Well, that pissed him off.”

  If that was an example of being pissed off, I sure didn’t want to be around when the Voice gave vent to some serious anger issues. I stared numbly at my friend as he removed the phone and threw it out deep into the desert before empting the cups of holy water. Surprisingly, there were only a few drops left in each.

  Jude caught the edge of my curiosity. “The presence of holy water acts like buffer between the real world and the Voice so he can’t track us, but the sharper his focus, the more holy water is dissipated.”

  “Jude,” I said slowly, my brain refusing to engage past first gear. “That … that Voice, the Patron of your family … he is, is he … ah …” My mouth didn’t want to work right and I felt unyielding pressure bearing down upon my shoulders.

  “Yeah, man.” Jude nodded. “It’s who you think it is. My many time great-grandfather, Lucifer.”

  I watched the hardening of his tortured features, his expression more eloquent than a scream. I didn’t respond. Words wouldn’t suffice to console a man with Hell in his blood.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mike

  Late that night or early next morning-depending on how you wanted to look at it-we paid our freight at a hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, that had beds with mattresses only marginally softer than limestone. Both of us moved as if on autopilot, the events of the past few hours having drained us so much that the beds could’ve been made of razor blades and rusty nails and we wouldn’t have noticed.

  Before Jude could crash for the night, I asked, “What did you mean when you told Leslie that her son was ‘under the influence’ and why did you tell the Voice all those lies?”

  He showed me his molars in a jaw-cracking yawn. “Told the Voice lies because I don’t want him knowing exactly what we’re about. Best thing to do is to keep him thinking that I want to gather my own base of power. As for Alexander, I think he’s under the influence of Hell, Mike. Baphemaloch is the name of a parasite, like a demonic tick. Instead of sucking blood, it infects the host with negative emotions. The longer it’s attached to the host, the more control it exerts until the host’s soul withers and dies.”

  I could have gone the rest of my life without hearing that. A parasitic … what? Proto-demon? The image of an evil virus slipping into Alexander’s cells and replicating, bursting forth in a black flood to infect more cells with damnation made me shudder.

  “Why call the Voice, Jude? Why take that chance?”

  He replied through lips numbed by fatigue. “You had to know what you were really up against, man. Not just in your head, but in your gut. We could die trying to destroy the Silver and I wanted to give you the chance to walk away.” He paused. “I thought it might be best for you to let me face the crap festival I bought tickets to alone.”

  Fat chance of that happening! I bit back a sour retort, realizing that he wanted me to go, that he was trying to protect me, like a good friend would. Another question reached my lips, but remained unvoiced. Jude had fallen asleep, a forearm draped over his eyes, soft snores bubbling through his lips.

  No way I could’ve slept, so it was time to continue my journey into my friend’s past.

  Tripping the Silver

  Wham! My butt and back hit the mat at the exact same time; knocking what precious breath I had left out of my lungs.

  “You have got to do better than that!” bellowed Sarge.

  At five-eight, a hundred sixty pounds, Sarge didn’t look like much with his short, bone-white flat-top haircut, round face and gray moustache that was so perfectly level I swore that he used a ruler to trim it. In fact, Sarge looked more like an athletic accountant stuffed in camo pants and khaki t-shirt than a wet-work instructor. You got the impression he would rather be petting Chihuahuas than slitting throats and I’m pretty sure a few of his victims thought the same thing before they died.

&nb
sp; Julian had confided that Sarge was indeed ex-U.S. military. That and one of the most successful serial killers the world had ever seen, racking up a body count somewhere north of three hundred. A killer so effective that for twenty-five years he had the FBI and Interpol scratching their heads in bafflement, astounded by the preternatural ability he’d displayed at eluding them.

  He didn’t elude Julian, though, who was so impressed by the man’s skills that he made an offer the aging murderer couldn’t refuse: teach wet-work skills to the young Family members. In return he would be well paid. Also, he could kill whenever he wanted, as long it was on his own time and didn’t lead back to the Family.

  For ten years that arrangement had worked quite well.

  From my vantage point on my back, staring up at Sarge’s angry face as he yelled at me, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth like silt at the bottom of a river, I thought that he just might break his promise about permanently harming Family.

  “Olivier, you are about as useless as a sack of smashed assholes, you got me, boy?” Sarge yelled. “Now get up off your flabby ass and at least try not to embarrass yourself when fighting your cousin!”

  The aforementioned cousin was not Burke, who routinely kicked my ass up one side and down the other with great frequency and enthusiasm in these little practice bouts. No, this cousin was someone who could actually give Burke a run for the sadistic money-Cousin Annabeth.

  While my Family is terribly misogynistic, there are those women who showed such promise in the red side of the business that instead of being used as honey traps or breeders, they were allowed to work as true Dagger Men.

  I considered Annabeth as I groaned my way vertical under Sarge’s disappointed gaze. An inch shorter than myself, tall for a woman, her shoulders were strong enough to carry all my troubles with room for a couple of hundred pounds. Her slim hands were calloused to hammer hardness and her muscles slithered under her bronze skin in all their chiseled perfection. Underneath a cap of short black hair, her dark eyes blazed out of a heart-shaped face, smoldering with subtle contempt at my contemptible fighting skills.