Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  Anna pulled out a chair, swung it around, and straddled it, resting her arms on the back. “Relics,” she said. “I think Sobell’s looking for relics.”

  “Hmm,” Karyn said. “Are you sure?”

  “Not very sure, no, but one of my contacts told me it was Sobell’s lawyer that called her asking about it.”

  “Did she narrow it down any?”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Specifically, pieces of saint, and by ‘pieces’ I mean body parts. Tran’s not the only one looking, either, so maybe Belial’s got guys out, too, or something. Anyway, there’s a sudden, lucrative market for saint parts, and at least Tran is offering top dollar.”

  “Why in the— Oh. St. Sebastian,” Karyn said. She made a disgusted face and pretended to thump herself in the head with the heel of her hand. “‘Bound, naked, and shot through with arrows.’ Aunt Florence would kill me for missing that.” The words were part of the prophecy she had uttered, a part of the answers sought by Sobell and Belial when they’d basically made her prophesize at gunpoint. She’d committed the words to memory: Life, you seek life, one reprieve from the abyss, the other escape. In the valley of the garden, here in this Gomorrah, a man, naked, bound, and shot through with arrows, in dying finds salvation. In his salvation, you will find yours. The images that had accompanied it still drifted on her mind like light swirls of oil on water. A terrible blue light, a vision of the bound and dying man, other pieces she couldn’t clearly define or understand.

  “‘In dying finds salvation,’” Anna said. “I get how that could apply to a saint, but what about the other part: ‘In his salvation you will find yours’?”

  “His death, maybe? You don’t typically get body parts off living people.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Anna said doubtfully.

  “They looking for any old pieces, or something specific?” Nail asked.

  “If it’s something specific, nobody’s saying.”

  Karyn plopped down in the chair, hands between her knees. “It’s not much to go on.”

  Nail rubbed his face. “Look, we got a problem.”

  A bitter chop of laughter escaped Anna. “No shit?”

  “No, I mean, we got no occult support. Even if we find the damn thing, we ain’t gonna necessarily know we found it, and even if we do, we ain’t gonna know what to do with it, and even if we know that, the other side’s got all the guns. Sobell, Belial—fuck, they even got Genevieve.”

  Another touchy point, and Karyn watched Anna’s face. Genevieve had been the fourth member of the crew, a fairly talented occult practitioner and Anna’s lover. She had been tied in tighter with Sobell, her mentor, than Karyn was comfortable with, and when the ritual had been disrupted, she’d run off with Sobell and Belial. Maybe that had been circumstance—there had, after all, been a monster rampaging through the area, and the general panic had people fleeing in all directions—and maybe not.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “I saw Gen’s face when all that shit went down, and I don’t think she’s too happy about this. Just stuck with those guys. She’s been texting me like crazy.”

  Nail frowned. “Yeah, maybe. But listen: all three of them know their way around the occult, and we got nothing.”

  “I got a demon,” Anna said.

  “Man, I don’t even know where to start with that. We need support is all I’m saying.”

  “I got contacts,” Anna said, “but I don’t know . . . They’re useful enough, but nobody I’d want to let in on too much, you know? Anybody plugged into the local occult scene—pull on their strings hard enough, and Sobell will probably hear about it and come crawling out for dinner.”

  Nail put both hands behind his head and pulled forward, as if he was trying to stretch the back of his neck. He straightened with a groan. “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I think I can hook us up with another source of info.”

  Karyn didn’t follow, but judging by Anna’s expression, she’d made the connection instantly. “Your fed,” Anna said.

  Karyn almost laughed aloud in surprise. She’d been lost in her hallucinations while Nail was dealing with the FBI, but she’d gotten the story. An FBI agent working for some disturbing division she’d never heard of had approached Nail for information on Sobell. Or perhaps “approached” was the wrong word. The agent had put Nail’s brother, DeWayne, in a very bad spot and used that to squeeze Nail for anything she could get. In the end, she had been the one who put together the raid on the prison after receiving a tip from Nail. She wasn’t the kind of occult resource the team would usually use, but Karyn could see why Nail had thought of her. She was unaffiliated with any of the local occult practitioners, yet she was undeniably knowledgeable—her whole mysterious division focused on nothing but the occult. There were worse options.

  “She ain’t my fed,” Nail said. “But . . . yeah.”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “She wants what she wants, and it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “Look at it this way. The feds got prisoners in your situation. With the demons and all. They look at it like a plague or something. They don’t want guys dying in lockup, and they sure as shit don’t want to be holding a bunch of demon-powered magicians. My guess is they might be able to make some shit up and feed it to the media if things go south, but it would be a whole lot easier if they can un-demon everybody. Special Agent Elliot at least ought to be on our side with this. It’s, like, basic public safety.”

  Anna shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Karyn didn’t need to predict the future to see it coming: both Anna and Nail turned in her direction. “Well, Chief?” Nail said.

  “I don’t have any better ideas. We have to be careful, and we have to do this right, but yeah. Call her.”

  “Never thought I’d have the FBI on speed dial,” Nail said, and he got out his phone.

  * * *

  Was this a dream? Karyn couldn’t tell. She thought she’d been in the loft, trying to get some sleep, and now she wasn’t there. Or she was, but her senses told her a story that didn’t help, and the image in her mind told her something else entirely. Had she fallen asleep?

  In the image, she was looking at a house. It was a familiar place, a sprawling nineteen-twenties-era mansion on a small lot in the less swanky section of Beverly Hills. The estate of one Mona Gorow, recently deceased. Locusts from the plague Sobell had unleashed on the city were still thick on the lawn, covering the sidewalk and street. No lights were on in the neighboring houses. No streetlights, either, just a wan crescent moon shining hazily through clouds.

  The scene moved. To the front stair, through the open door into the stinking cavern of the edifice itself. Karyn braced herself, but the smell—corpses, burned metal, oranges—was gone.

  Probably not a dream, then. A vision from her friendly onboard demon. Great.

  The image moved through the house’s dark interior. Karyn had come through here once before, though she hadn’t been quite so lucid on the way in—had not, in fact, been able to see much of the real world at all at the time. There were details here she’d missed. The elegant interior with its leather furniture and walnut wainscoting was a slipping mask, and it was easy to see the true nature of the place, written in a bloody handprint, a bullet hole in plaster, a door torn off its hinges. This was Hell, or at least a hell, for anybody who’d ended up here. Belial’s minions, mostly, and while it had once been difficult to feel sorrow for them, Karyn now saw them as poor dupes to be pitied. Reaching for something transcendent, they’d instead found themselves grasping something sick and stinking, like a rotting liver. They had changed, and Mona, in her quest to serve the very same demon that was now part of Karyn, had been only too happy to eradicate them.

  That’s Anna now, Karyn thought. Changed, or at least changing.

  She drifted through the house, toward the back, moving soundlessly through dar
k, damaged rooms, crossing over a half-eaten corpse and around toppled furniture.

  Mona’s body was lodged in a doorway of a small library at the back of the house, right where Karyn had last seen it. Her head was gone, replaced with a big smiley face, colorless in the dim moonlight through the window. Karyn wondered if all demons had such lousy senses of humor.

  The vision moved through the library and past the bare shelves to a door. The room beyond was dark, the window shrouded with curtains, yet Karyn could see a deeper darkness in the corner near the four-poster bed. An impenetrable, impossibly black shadow hid almost a fourth of the room, and even though she knew it was merely a vision, she could feel the hate and rage seething inside it. It was the kind of darkness where you imagined that if you put a hand in you’d pull back a stump or, incalculably worse, you’d feel something seize your arm, giving you just enough time to scream before it pulled you in and began tearing at your soft parts. Belly, eyes. Tongue. It was the same shadow the demon had shown her the first time she communicated with it, and she wondered if the demon was hidden in there, or if the shadow itself was the demon.

  Karyn shuddered. “You’re in my head,” she whispered. “Why are you showing me this?”

  The darkness shrank away, shriveling into wisps that themselves disappeared between minuscule cracks in the wooden floor. Karyn swore under her breath, frustrated at the apparent pointlessness—and then a board popped up. It pulled itself from the floor with what should have been a shriek of nails but remained soundless, as all the demon visions did. It snapped off halfway and dropped to the floor.

  The image moved to show her the inside of the hole. Despite the darkness, Karyn could see fine, a perfectly detailed world in shades of gray. At first, she only saw curls of shredded newspaper, ancient insulation, and the dark pellets of rat shit. At the very end, though, was a small clear space, showing the lath backing of the ceiling below. Lined up side by side on the wood strips were five black splinters, about the size of toothpicks.

  Mona’s stash. Five splinters, identical to the one in Karyn’s thumb that allowed the demon to communicate with her in its peculiar fashion. Allowed her to see.

  As if she didn’t get the point, the image showed her hand reaching into the hole and gathering the splinters.

  Then the image was replaced by that of the loft. Her surroundings, her makeshift bed. No moon shone through the windows, just streetlights.

  “I don’t need more of these things,” she said. “One is plenty.”

  The demon showed her an image of a little boy in a striped shirt, pouting. Then what looked like an ice-cream sundae, which Karyn didn’t understand until she saw the cherry. Pretty please, with a cherry on top. She shook her head. This demon, I swear.

  “No.”

  A new image. A man sitting in a van crowded with electrical equipment, watching what looked like the interior of a seedy bar on a tiny monitor. Men in pin-striped suits and fedoras played poker on the screen. A Thompson machine gun lay on a counter nearby.

  “I don’t—”

  The image shifted again, this time to the actual room with the poker-playing gangsters. A quick view of the room, then a close-up on a piece of trim above the door, where a small black splinter rested. Then a quick jump back to the van. The TV screen showed the room as viewed from the same location as the splinter.

  “Oh,” Karyn said as she put it together. The demon wanted her to get the splinters, probably for its own purposes, but it was also trying to sell her on their utility as bizarre occult bugs that could beam images into her head. That could be handy, but really it wasn’t a problem for today.

  “Later,” she said.

  The image in her mind vanished. Not just the gangsters or the toothpick—everything. Her surroundings were gone, relayed to her only via her treacherous eyes.

  Her heart rate kicked up a notch, and she felt her body trying to drive itself into panic. “This was not the deal,” she said, as evenly as she could manage. “You get to stay, I get to see. That’s it.”

  The image didn’t return. She sat, waiting. This was stupid—the situation was bad for her, and it couldn’t be much good for the demon, either. She wondered if it would cut off its own nose to spite its face, and she was afraid she knew the answer. Still, she waited.

  There was no telling how much time passed. She got bored waiting and counted to five hundred, then got bored counting. She considered trying to sleep it off, but she wasn’t remotely sleepy now—terror at being stranded in this state again had wound her up too much for that. For a few moments, she watched her hands, but they had begun flickering through dozens of possible futures. Sometimes they were her normal hands, moving as she told them. Sometimes they were ancient, or cut up, or wearing gloves. Sometimes they weren’t visible at all. She didn’t know what that meant. When she looked around, the room was an equally confused slop of overlapping images.

  “Okay, fine. Pull this stunt again, though, and I will dig you out with pliers. Got that?”

  The image abruptly reappeared, showing a handsome, middle-aged man dressed in a charcoal suit and solid red tie, as if he was running for Congress. He gave Karyn an ersatz smile and a thumbs-up. Then the room returned.

  Karyn texted Nail.

  Forty minutes later, she was standing in front of the house in question, Nail by her side. The neighborhood was healing, it seemed. The locusts were still thick on the lawn of the Gorow place, but they had been swept from the street and the sidewalks, and most of the remaining neighbors had removed the ones in their yards as well. There was a light burning in one of the upper rooms of the house to the right of the Gorow place.

  “Never thought I’d come back here,” Nail said. “You sure about this?”

  “Sure enough.” Barely. “It’s not like they’d come back here.”

  “I ain’t worried about that.” His jaw was set, his eyes fixed in a glare on the house. He scratched the back of his head, the sound of his fingers against stubble like sandpaper. “More like . . . Shit, I don’t know.”

  “Like what?” His hesitation was odd. He wasn’t for mindless action, but once a course had been decided, he rarely looked back.

  “I ain’t saying I believe in, like, ghosts and shit, but if a place was ever gonna be haunted, you’d think it’d be that one.”

  “You’re talking to a woman with a demon living in her thumb or her brain or both. I’m not saying I don’t believe in ghosts at this point. I don’t know what to believe in, but I’m not willing to rule out much just on principle alone.”

  Nail grunted. “So, we going in the haunted mansion, then?”

  “We did come all the way out here.”

  He looked up and down the street and then pulled a pistol from the back of his pants. He chambered a round.

  “For ghosts?” Karyn asked.

  “I ain’t willing to rule out bullets just on principle alone. They might work, and I got nothing else.”

  “Plus, it makes you feel better.”

  “That, too.”

  She let him lead the way up the walk. Cops had been in and out of the place, judging by the crossed yellow tape on the door and the crude path that had been kicked through the locusts. Karyn followed Nail, trying not to listen to the crunching footfalls as she walked. The front door was locked, but it took Nail all of a minute to deal with that. He put his lock picks away, readied his gun, and put his hand on the knob.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She stepped to the side, just to be safe. “Yeah.”

  He yanked the door open. Nothing moved. Nobody screamed. No animals snarled or banshees wailed. The only thing that came out was the stink, every bit as foul as Karyn remembered it, and it had possibly even ripened since. The burned metal smell had faded, but the corpses and the rot had settled into the house’s very bones and festered in the heat of the enclosed space.

 
“They’re gonna have to burn this thing down,” Nail said.

  Karyn nodded. She went in. Nail came after her and shut the door. There was a moment when pure, suffocating darkness wrapped itself around her, the smell enveloping her, and she had the terrifying thought that she’d somehow crawled inside a giant corpse that was going to digest her even in death, and then she turned on her flashlight.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to find the room,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to walk around here in the dark for hours without losing my shit. So walk fast.”

  “A little help, please?” she said softly.

  “Huh?”

  She rotated, and a scream leaped to her lips. A corpse had appeared at the base of the stairs where she shone her light. It was grinning, pointing up the stairs. Maggots squirmed over its teeth and plopped to the floor. Somehow she stifled the scream, turning the sudden rush of air into a cough. “Never mind,” she said, as understanding came to her. There was no body. This was her demon’s idea of a signpost.

  Wasn’t it?

  “You see a dead guy there?” she asked, pointing.

  “No. Um. He don’t look like me, does he?”

  “It’s not the future,” Karyn said. “Just the world’s worst road sign. Follow me.”

  The path was easy enough to follow, though she wished the demon would be less inventive in its signage. Bodies marked every junction, every doorway, exhibiting various states of decomposition and damage. With the stink, it was almost impossible not to believe they were really there.

  By the time they reached the back of the house, Nail had settled down, and Karyn had become jumpy. The thought had wormed its way into her head that one of the corpses would turn out to be real—and not quite dead. It would jump up or reach out a cold, slimy hand and touch her ankle. She’d scream then, for sure.

  It didn’t happen, though as they entered the library Karyn didn’t think her heart could have beat any faster if it had. She exhaled shakily and walked around the spot where Mona had fallen. The spot where she’d picked up the original toothpick and, heedless of its origin, jammed it into her thumb. She supposed blood-borne pathogens were the least of her concerns these days.