by M. R. Forbes
"Can you both stop?" I said. I wanted to be more sympathetic to Rose. I just wasn't in the mood, and their arguing wasn't doing anything for my headache. "Rose, do you know what happened to the angels that were carrying the Fists?" I had forgotten about them until now. If they had escaped, we were going to be in trouble.
"They caught us on our way to the car. That's how I got this." She pointed at the cut again. "It would have been deeper if I hadn't managed to get my knife up in time."
"They must have been initiates, the way they fought," Gervais said. "Clumsy."
"I hope that isn't true," Rose said. "I barely beat one of them in the same time he killed the rest. I know you wanted to train me, and to find others like me to train. I'm not feeling very positive about that idea right now."
I looked at her, trying to calm the doubts in my soul. I didn't just want to. I needed to. It was the only way I would ever be able to rest. If it took a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand. I could be patient as long as I knew the end would come one day.
In any case, she'd gone into this whole thing with a minimum of experience, and no real protection from the Divine. I wasn't going to tell her, but the fact that she was still alive was an achievement by itself. Her odds of survival would only go up once I could get her with Elyse. The Nicht Creidem knew every trick in the book for defending themselves against the Divine, and she would pass that knowledge on.
"You'll get better with more experience," I said. "I believe in you."
She smiled and wiped the tears from her face. "Thanks."
"Please," Gervais said.
He slowed the car as we went back out through the access point, and then we were away. He got us back out onto the highway and pointed us towards Santa Fe. We rode in silence for a while, taking comfort in the minutes of peace. I closed my eyes and worked to steady my breathing, to calm the storm of power in my soul.
My eyes were still closed when I felt a pressure on my leg. I opened them to find Rose's head there, the rest of her curled up on the seat next to me. Her eyes were closed, and a moment later a soft snore started rising from her.
"Touching, really," Gervais said. I saw his eyes watching us in the rear view.
"Do you have to be like... that... all of the time?" I asked.
He looked away. Was he actually embarrassed?
"You wouldn't understand, diuscrucis. You aren't capable."
"Try me."
"I miss my sister."
"You're kidding?"
"No. Think what you want. I loved her, in the way that I am capable. Especially when we were mortal. I protected her. I cared for her. Now she is gone. To where, I don't know, but her soul is lost. Never again will I sense it. Never again will I speak to her. I find I am capable of sadness and I feel it at these thoughts."
The honesty made me uncomfortable. "I miss her, too, but I know for a fact that her soul isn't lost. It's up there, a part of the universe, a shared part of all creation." She was with Charis, with Clara, with the essence of the Beast, and with all the angels and demons we had killed. With every soul that had finished its journey. It was pure energy, the energy that allowed all universes to be in the first place. It was part of the balance. "Nothing else has ever made you sad?"
"No. Angry, yes. Violent, yes. Not sad." He took a deep breath and sighed it out. "I will kill you one day, if someone else doesn't do it first. Now that you know this flaw, I have more incentive."
I didn't respond. I closed my eyes again, and started absently stroking Rose's hair. In that moment, I wanted the human connection.
"One other thing, Landon," Gervais said.
"What?"
"I have thought of a demon that can help you, if you can talk him into it. I'm going to bypass Santa Fe."
"Where are we going?"
"Mexico."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was a five hour drive from Santa Fe to the border. I slept for three of them, waking up feeling a little more composed and a lot more hungry. Rose was awake by then, too, though she had left her head on my lap, and shifted so she was laying on her back. I opened my eyes to see her looking up at me, watching me.
"Hey, handsome," she said.
For once, Gervais didn't make a comment.
"Me? No. How are you feeling?"
"A little better. I'd love a shower and a change of clothes."
It was true that the blood, sweat, and dirt hadn't done much for her smell. We had some extra clothes for her in the trunk. We'd need to do something about the shower.
"Gervais, any hotels coming up on the route?" I asked.
He pointed at the dashboard. "I don't know how to work this thing. The user interface is sloppy, the heuristics are terrible."
Rose sat up, leaning between the seats. "You whine too much," she said, tapping the screen until she got into the nav system. "I'll give you a pass because you're an old man, not used to this newfangled technology."
He glared at her. I smiled. She certainly seemed refreshed.
"Ten miles. Can we stop there?"
"Thirty minutes, max," I said.
"More than enough."
Ten miles brought us into Las Cruces, and we pulled off I-25 and into the parking lot of a Fairfield Inn. Rose grabbed the extra clothes we'd bought from the trunk and we went inside together. Ten minutes later I was sitting on the king bed in our room, listening to her singing in the shower.
She was quick enough that she only got through one song, popping out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. I handed her the stack of clothes, and turned my back when she dropped the towel.
"You're cute," she said. "You weren't so chivalrous when I was doing the pushups."
"Truth be told, I barely noticed you then."
"Oh." She seemed surprised. I imagine she wasn't used to men not noticing her. "What changed?"
"I've spent more time with you. I've been so distant from people for so long. I feel like I'm getting too close, too fast. I've known you for what? Two days? I hardly know anything about you."
"So you're saying you aren't looking because you have more respect for me?"
"Kind of. I have more awareness of you. Of your humanity. And of my own. I admire your strength, your courage. I think you're beautiful."
She put her hand on my shoulder. I glanced back. She had her clothes on, so I turned around.
"I don't get what the problem is," she said. "You know I'm not shy. I don't care if you look."
"I care. Even so, it's not the physical part of it. It's the emotional. I don't trust what I feel. Not in this. It's too easy for me to latch onto the first person I spend time with. Because I'm really attracted to you? Or because I've been alone for so long? Or because I'm just glad to feel more human? I can't answer any of that right now, and that's before I factor in all of the complications that go with being near immortal."
If she were someone else, someone less self-assured, I might not have felt as comfortable saying those things as I did.
"You're probably also afraid you'll get attached, and I'll die."
That was her response. She said it straight, just part of the conversation.
"There's that, too."
She leaned down and kissed my cheek. "It's okay, Landon. I understand. I'll try not to be so obviously sexy around you. Just know that I'm here, and right now I'm interested. Varium et mutabile semper femina. That's Virgil. Dante probably heard that one straight from the horse's mouth. If and when you want to talk about it, tell me."
A shifty, fickle object is woman, always.
I laughed and stood up. "Time to go."
We went back down to the car. Gervais was standing there, drinking coffee.
"You like coffee?" I asked.
"More than blood," he replied. "I never had to resort to such grotesquery as an archfiend." He tipped the cup up and downed the rest, and then threw the empty paper onto the sidewalk. "I do prefer it in a nice porcelain."
We swapped drivers. Rose took the wheel, I rode shotgun
, and Gervais regained the back, spreading himself out on the seat.
"So, you were right that we don't know each other very well," Rose said a few minutes later. "We have some time."
"I don't know. You might want to be careful about what you say in front of him."
"You think I care about her family, or her childhood, or her favorite color? Or yours for that matter?" Gervais said.
We'd already talked a lot about her sister, her time at school, and a little bit about her parents during our first day together, when we'd gone shopping for the clothes to attract Gervais, and the food that was probably going to spoil before she got to eat any of it.
"Have you ever been to Mexico?" I asked.
"No, believe it or not. My father was born in Mexico City, but he came to the States as an illegal back in the '70s. He started out mowing lawns, washing cars, working hard until he got his citizenship. He never wanted to go back. He said to Anita and me, 'Forget that culture. This is our home, this is our culture. Be proud of where you are. Trees have strong roots, and when there is a drought they wither and die.'" She took on a deeper accented voice to mimic her father.
"Your father sounds like he has a good approach to life," I said.
"I think so. He's a strong man, and he made sure to raise us to be strong. He never wanted us to fall into bullshit female stereotypes. 'Anything a man can do, you can do. You know why that makes you better? Because you can do something a man can never do.'" She laughed. "I know he was never that happy with Anita and me when it came to some things, but he raised us to make our own decisions, to stand on our own. He always respected us as much as he respected our mother, and I love him more for that. What was your father like?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. He ditched my mom and me when I was a baby. From that, my guess is that he was an asshole."
Gervais laughed at that statement. "It sounds like he was smarter than you give him credit for."
I ignored his remark.
We spent the next hour telling stories. Gervais was mostly quiet, save for his occasional jabs and barbs, though he did share one tale about a time he and Josette had collected money for the poor, and then used it to buy themselves candy instead. Their parents had discovered the deceit, and punished them for their trickery. I had heard Josette tell the story. She had made her parents sound stern and well-intentioned. To hear the demon tell it, they were self-serving idiots who sacrificed their own well-being and comfort in search of some kind of emotional fulfillment from an unresponsive and useless God, and took His ambivalence towards them out on their children. He blamed them, and he blamed God. It was what made him who he was today.
It was four in the morning when we reached El Paso. The city was quiet this early, and we cruised through without having to slow for too many lights. I was thankful we had made pretty decent time down from Los Alamos. I was also nervous. I didn't know how long it would take Adam to get free.
The border crossing was open twenty-four/seven, and it was relatively quiet. We waited in line for ten minutes before reaching the Mexican side, and we were fortunate enough to get the green light and avoid a search by customs. A little bit of misdirection and sleight of hand by Gervais to manage our passports, and we made it through as uneventfully as I could have hoped for.
"So, we're in Mexico," I said. "Now how do we find this demon of yours?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
"His name is Espanto," Gervais said. "He's a fiend. A fiend with more power than he deserves. Whatever bad things happen in this city, they happen because he wants them to."
"Espanto?" Rose said. "Terror?"
"Yes. I sent Izak to speak to him once, when he still had his tongue. Izak wasn't afraid of anything, but he was wary of him."
"So, you don't actually know Espanto?" I said. The idea of Izak being cautious around any demon made me a little uneasy.
"I know of him. I know where to find him. I know he has a rift, and that he can use it. The rest is up to you."
We drove through the streets of Juarez. It was more brown here, more sparse, more poor. There was a lot of traffic for the early hour, the border crossing providing plenty of reason for people to be passing through. Gervais followed the navigation to a place called 'Ghost Salvage'.
It was a junkyard.
The gates were closed when we pulled up to it, a ten foot tall, faded green fence blocking our view of the inside of the property. We rolled to a stop and Gervais got out of the car, beckoning me to follow him. A moment later, a face appeared at the top of the fence.
A vampire.
"We're closed," he said in spanish, peering down.
"Don't be your usual annoyingly polite self," Gervais whispered. "Espanto respects toughness and power above anything else."
"Even if I kill half his servants?"
"You can kill every servant here. He'll enjoy that. He has plenty more. This entire city is his. Not just the Divine. The murderers, the drug lords, the pimps and prostitutes, even the crooked corporate suits."
"Why isn't he an archfiend?" I asked.
"He's not as, shall we say, ambitious, as some of us. He's content with his single city."
"I said, we're closed," the vampire repeated. "Get lost."
Gervais raised his eyebrows at me.
"Fine." I used my power to pick up a small piece of cement, and threw it at him. It struck the vamp between the eyes, knocking him from his perch.
"This should be fun," Gervais said, reaching down and finding his dagger. Rose hopped out of the car, already armed.
"What's going on?"
I reached out and took hold of the wooden gate, pulling it and breaking it into splinters that exploded to either side of us. I could see the junk behind it now: stacks of cars both crushed and whole, mounds of scrap metal and engine and wires. It was arranged in a chaotic pattern, organized to prevent a quick rush into the center of the yard.
I started moving in.
They started shooting at us.
"Guns?" I said, as the pops echoed in the night, the bullets whizzing past, or digging into the dirt around us. I looked back and saw Rose duck behind the car, covering her head to keep from being hit while bullets pinged against it and shattered the windshield. "You could have warned me."
"I didn't know," he said, dashing away, towards a pile of junkers to the right. I could see the light of muzzle flashes coming from there. More gunfire was pouring in from the left.
Only for a second. I threw out the energy, pushing the stack of cars over, crushing the vampire beneath it.
The shots stopped from the right as well, Gervais having reached the demon and put him down. He rose from the position, firing back at another stack.
A bullet hit me in the leg. Another in the chest. I cursed and pushed them out, healing at the same time I got the spatha to my hand. I leaped forward, landing on the stack of cars and tumbling over. They had been arranged so that the open space was a nest in the center of a square of junk, and four vampires all turned as I came down, trying to get their weapons trained on me. Enough bullets would slow me down long enough to lose my head.
I ducked low, sweeping the sword across, making deep gashes into two of their legs with the blessed side. The afflicted vampires stopped aiming and began to scream, their wounds hissing and steaming. The other two dropped the guns and jumped at me, claws and teeth bared.
I punched one in the face, rocking him back into the cars, turned and grabbed the other by the neck, throwing him into the wall. The first bounced back up, only to impale himself on the sword. The second managed to get his claws on me, scraping through my shirt and drawing a line of blood.
Everything paused for a second, while he waited to see the black lines of poison spread from the wound. When it vanished instead, he put up his hands.
Toughness and power. I cut off his head.
I leaped to the top of the stack, catching another bullet in my thigh for the effort. I had passed the first row of cars, and from up here I could see
there were three more before we would reach an aluminum barn in the center. I looked back for Gervais, finding him and Rose crouched under cover, returning fire. I didn't know how well Lucifer had protected him from normal projectiles, but he didn't seem too keen on being blasted.
I jumped from one stack to the next, coming down on the shooters and ending their lives, before hopping back up and heading for another. I was nearly done with the second row when the doors to the barn opened, and a man and woman walked out.
The woman shifted, her body morphing and growing into the massive form of a Great Were. The man found me, and then launched a heavy blast of hellfire my way. I jumped backwards, coming down behind the cars even as they were turned to molten slag. I made my way back to Rose and Gervais.
Espanto was starting to take things a little more seriously.
"He's got a Great Were," I said.
"Oh, did I forget to mention that?" Gervais replied with a grin.
I heard it coming, the snarling and scraping moving at speed through the garbage. Great Weres were the most physically strong and agile demons on Earth, their strength borne of the gift of power bestowed on them from a higher order demon. They were vulnerable to scripture like any Hell spawn, but that was only useful if you could hit them hard enough to pierce their thick hides.
The Were barreled around the corner, planting claws off the cars to change direction and launch itself towards us. Rose and Gervais opened fire at her massive, fourteen foot frame, even as I pulled a car from our right and slammed it into the creature. She tumbled to the side, the shell of the car landing on top of her. She kicked it away and started to roll back to her feet.
I hadn't forgotten the other one, the fiend who had shot the hellfire at me. I spun, pushing the dry ground outward around us, lifting up dust and debris and sending it out like a sandstorm, using it to give us cover. Rose and Gervais opened fire through it, and I heard the Were yelp as she was peppered with bullets. They would only slow her down for a second or two.
"Get out of here," I said to Rose, pointing to the window of a car, aiming her towards the center of one of the nests. She got up and ran to it, climbing in, with Gervais right behind.