“That?” Clarence said. “He ain’t never done that before. I don’t even know what the hell that was.”
“The drawing, I mean. The weird talking.”
“Since yesterday. He was one of just a couple guys got out when the feds came down on your shit the other day.”
“He didn’t do any of that stuff before?”
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”
Nail wondered how much to share. Clarence had stepped in something bad here. How much did he need to know? Nail hoped he could get a favor out of this, if he played it right, but it was just as likely that Clarence would call them barely even, no matter how much dirt Nail coughed up.
“You want to put him down,” Nail said. “It don’t need to be ugly, but you don’t want any part of this.”
“That’s my brother,” the bodyguard said, his voice an anxious whisper.
“My nephew,” Clarence said.
“He hurt anyone yet?” Nail asked.
Clarence shook his head.
“Hurt himself?”
“No.”
“He will.”
“He seemed okay,” the bodyguard said. “I mean, before whatever that was. Just, y’know, a little weird.”
“Sorry, man. It’s gonna get a lot worse.”
The bodyguard was just a kid, Nail thought. Nineteen, at most, and his eyes flicked from Nail to Clarence and back, verging on panic. “What do you mean? What’s gonna happen?” he asked. “What’s gonna happen?”
Nail reminded himself of the shit he’d done at nineteen. Yeah, the kid might be scared, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
“I didn’t do this,” Nail said. “Neither me nor mine. I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to, you understand?”
“What’s gonna happen?” Clarence asked.
Nail thought of all the shit he’d seen Van Horn’s entourage get up to. Leftovers from the cult known as the Brotherhood of Zagam, they’d become cackling, capering maniacs, doing God knew what by night, and holing up to work on their strange projects by day. Genevieve thought they were eating each other, which might have been true, but they were most certainly dropping dead after a while. Nail had seen that himself.
“He’s gonna do more crazy things. Miraculous, or bloody, or, shit, I don’t know. Conjure up more snakes, I guess. Make things fly or explode or disappear. That kind of thing.”
“Could be worse,” the bodyguard said. “I mean, we gotta do something about the snakes, though.”
“Then he’s gonna go completely psycho on you. And then he’s gonna drop dead.”
The guy got that panicky look again. “So what do we do? We can fix him, right?”
Nail looked at the bodyguard, who was now struggling to keep his tough face together. “I don’t know,” Nail said. “I don’t even know if that’s possible.”
“Who does?” Clarence asked.
“Don’t look at me, man. That shit is not my department.” He paused, thinking about Big John and the fiasco at the old prison, and something struck him. Clarence’s guys had had no business being there, unless . . . “How’d your guys end up out there, anyway? You got ’em on loan to somebody?”
“Maybe.”
Nail nodded. “Then I guess you know who knows about this shit.”
Clarence gave Nail a long, withering look. Without taking his gaze from Nail’s, he pulled a can of Copenhagen from his pocket and tapped it on his palm. “Sobell’s gone to ground.”
“Yeah. That’s what I heard. But, man, I don’t know what to tell you. I literally know more about nuclear physics than I do about this stuff.”
“Find me somebody,” Clarence said. Incredibly, there was no threat in his voice. “Then we’ll call it even. You, me, DeWayne—squared up.”
“I’ll do what I can. It might not be much. What about your other guys?”
“Don’t know. I ain’t seen Phil since, and the judge hasn’t set bail for any of the ones that got picked up yet.”
Nail searched Clarence’s face. There really was worry in it, something Nail hadn’t seen before today. Clarence was fearless. He didn’t worry about shit, just broke bones and collected cash, and capped the occasional fool too dumb to stay out of his way. Worry—that was for regular people.
He wasn’t faking it, Nail didn’t think. It wasn’t like the man would call things square with Nail if he didn’t have to.
“I’ll find out what I can,” Nail said. “Let’s just be clear on one thing: this ain’t my fault. Maybe I can help your nephew, maybe I can’t, but if he goes down, this ain’t my fault.”
“I get that,” Clarence said. Still no threat there. That made Nail almost as nervous as a straight-up “or else” would have.
“All right. Then I’ll be in touch,” Nail said.
Chapter 5
Karyn woke, unmoving, eyes closed, mind feeling around for a hold on her reality. There had been shouting, fire, Genevieve and Tommy dancing to an eerie waltz—a dream. Just a dream. It was so hard to tell sometimes.
But there was a sound, still, even as the collage of disjointed images faded. A scratching sound, like a claw dragged across a wooden floor. Rhythmic. Even. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. A pause. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Was even that real? It seemed an odd thing for her mind to pluck from the disordered stream of noises around her.
She opened her eyes. They told her nothing useful, daylight blending with darkness, too much going on to pick out any one thing. The demon image, though, showed mostly darkness, with only a faint haze of blue-white light coming from the opposite corner of the room—the same area the scratching was coming from.
The noise was real, then, or likely so. She sat up. The light shone on a spot on the floor. In the circle of light, she saw hands and the glint of a knife.
“Anna?”
The hands froze, and outside the light a shape, limned on one side with reflected light, turned in Karyn’s direction. Karyn squinted. As best she could tell, Anna was sitting cross-legged on the floor, working on . . . something.
“Did I wake you up?” Anna asked.
“I’m not sure. What are you doing?”
Anna looked down at her hands. The knife—just a pocketknife, really—and something roughly the size and shape of a pencil dropped to the floor with a clatter. “Uh. Whittling, I guess.” She stared at the objects in front of her. “I couldn’t sleep,” she added, as though that explained anything.
Karyn wasn’t sure if her ears were tuned to the right frequency, so to speak, or if the hallucinations had interfered. “Did you say whittling?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
With a groan, Karyn got up. She walked to Anna and sat across from her. Anna’s expression was nervous, almost fearful. From here, Karyn could see that she hadn’t been working on just one “pencil.” There were half a dozen of them arranged in a row next to where she’d dropped the knife. Each was a little longer than her hand, maybe six or seven inches, and not quite regular. Not quite straight, not quite cylindrical, and it was easy to see why—next to the row was a small pile of the raw material. A piece of a wood chair leg, a fragment of lumber, a busted broomstick.
Each of the completed pencils had been, yes, whittled to a sharp point on both ends and carved with tiny symbols along its length.
“Anna . . .”
“I didn’t—I don’t . . .” Anna’s eyes were frightened, the whites gleaming in the light from her tiny flashlight. “It wasn’t something I was thinking about. I just sort of, you know, started. It seemed like the thing to do.” She ran one hand back over her head, briefly grabbing a bundle of hair in one fist before relaxing and letting her arm drop. “I told you, you gotta stop me when I start this shit.”
Karyn nodded. That spooked look hadn’t left Anna’s face. Karyn could understand why. Anna had to
ld her about Van Horn’s entourage—their midnight forays, random bursts of conjuration and violence, and the sudden collapse that took them in the end. Karyn had been preoccupied when the last two died, but she’d seen the aftermath. Two women, lying in spreading pools of their own blood. She hoped that wasn’t a portent of some kind.
“I’m not kidding,” Anna said. “Seriously, I’ve looked after your ass for a decade. You gotta cover mine now.” The tone was flippant, but she was deadly serious. The note of panic underneath was impossible to miss. A flash of anger welled up in Karyn—what, you’re gonna rub my face in it now?—and then was gone. Anna was right.
“I will,” Karyn promised. How she was going to do that every second of the day, she hadn’t figured out yet.
“Do you know what they’re for?” Karyn asked, pointing at the pencils. Before Anna could answer, the demon image showed Karyn a leering old man casting a handful of sticks like these, brown with dried blood and red with fresh, onto the ground. He leaned over it, nodded, then got out an umbrella.
“I think they find things,” Anna said. “Answer questions. They need blood, of course.”
Karyn gave her a sickly smile. “Always.”
“I don’t even know how to use them. I just kinda got fixated on making the fucking things.”
“Well, let’s get rid of them,” Karyn said, leaning over to grab the pile.
Anna’s hand flashed out and seized her wrist. “Don’t!” she said. Her teeth were bared, her other hand squeezed into a fist.
Karyn’s fingers opened wide.
So did Anna’s. She rubbed her forehead with the palm of her other hand. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Get rid of it. All of it. Next thing you know, I’ll be huddled around that shit calling it ‘my precious.’”
Karyn tried to grin, but it didn’t feel convincing. “It’s going to be fine,” she said, and immediately regretted it, thinking of all the times she’d been told the same thing, and how much she hated it. Anna didn’t say anything either way.
After that, Karyn couldn’t sleep. She lay back down and contemplated the night sky, which, for the moment, she could see right through the ceiling. She wondered when it was from. Sometime after the building had been knocked down or collapsed, obviously, but how far in the future? Or maybe it wasn’t even a real future, just a possibility that would fade as the moment got closer.
It wasn’t a bad view, though only a handful of stars were visible over L.A.’s vast light pollution. Still, it made her feel exposed, as though the entire world were looking in at her, and she wished she could view a time where the ceiling still existed.
A haze, a sketch of an outline, overlay the sky. The exposed rafters of the ceiling. She could still see the sky through it, but there was at least something. Something like this had happened a couple of times since the night she allowed the demon to come on board—the same night as Belial’s unpleasant ritual. Yesterday it had been something as trivial as wondering when Anna would come home—moments later, a ghostly Anna had slipped into the room, taken two steps, and faded out. It was hours later when Anna actually arrived, but her movements and the particular shade and angle of the lighting were identical to those in Karyn’s vision.
Karyn’s affliction was changing, she thought. Maybe she’d been changed by contact with otherworldly forces. Not the demon, she thought, but the ethereal strangeness she’d touched during Belial’s ritual.
God, just imagine if she could get a handle on this. Control it.
She concentrated harder on the ghost of structure above her and watched it fill in ever so slightly. A piece of ductwork, oddly bright in a vision from some future daytime, obscured a star. Then it was gone, so completely that Karyn wasn’t sure if it had ever been there at all, or if she was just playing mind games with herself. A sudden wave of dizziness and fatigue washed over her.
Hours passed, but the view didn’t change. Maybe it was stuck this time, finally fixed on one frozen moment, the only time she’d ever see again. She wondered if that could happen. If it did, would there be any significance to the moment, or would it be a random, useless snapshot of no particular time?
The demon image in her mind showed her the light changing, though, and when she sat up, it showed her Anna’s prone form in the watery light of dawn. Anna, at least, was getting some rest.
Karyn got up. She made some coffee and sat at the table—a folding card table, not too different from the one she’d left in her old apartment before abandoning the place. It had a sort of comforting familiarity to it even though it was a different table. These cheap card tables were all the same.
She picked up a book she’d scavenged from a roadside sale of random crap. There was a half-naked guy on the cover who looked as if his torso had been carved out of granite, one arm wrapped around a swooning raven-haired beauty. Anna gave her a lot of shit for reading books like this, but she liked them. Like the table, they were comforting. It was amazing what the power of somebody else’s happy ending could do for her, even when the somebody else wasn’t real.
Today, though, she wasn’t in the mood. Even reading seemed exhausting. She slid the book aside.
“How about you?” she asked her demon. “Any suggestions? Any way through this mess?”
An image appeared in her mind—a woman, maybe, but she didn’t even really absorb it before groaning. More of the pantomime, the guessing game. “Seriously, can you just talk to me? Write a letter? Anything? Please?”
The image in her mind changed to that of an emaciated man clad in rags, his wrists locked in heavy manacles in front of him. He held them up, face creased in pathetic apology.
“You have to be kidding me. Why?”
The vision vanished, returning to that of the room around her. She thought that was all the answer she was going to get, that the demon had gone off to sulk yet again, and then another image flashed before her.
A man tied to stakes buried in dusty earth. Another man stood above him, leering, heaved a maul over his head, and swung it down into the man’s knee. Flesh tore, and bone exploded, and Karyn was suddenly glad she didn’t get sound as well as vision. Then that image was gone, and a woman was being locked inside some tiny rat-infested dungeon. The man holding the key was the same as the man with the hammer.
Lastly, as if she hadn’t gotten the point, a young man chained down in some inquisitor’s chamber. Flames raged in a brazier, and sweat flowed in slick rivulets down his face. Two cloaked and hooded figures held his head and opened his mouth while another man approached with pincers. The pincers forced their way past his lips and teeth, seizing his tongue.
The man with the pincers was the man with the hammer was the man with the key—and Karyn recognized him. Hector. Or, actually, Belial.
“Okay, I get it, stop,” she said, before the pincers could finish their work.
A stern-faced woman replaced the torture scene. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her arms crossed, her eyebrows raised in an angry question. Karyn wasn’t quite sure what that was supposed to mean, but she guessed it was something along the lines of “Any more questions?” Or perhaps, “Satisfied?”
It could be a lie, she thought. The demon in her head hadn’t ever displayed an outright lie to her, that she knew of, but she also knew it wasn’t above supplying an image that could be interpreted in misleading ways. On the other hand, one of the few things she knew about it was that it hated Belial with a frightening intensity. That was consistent with Belial having silenced it somehow.
And now, if I had any doubt, I’m certain I’m in the middle of some kind of damn demon feud. Ugh.
She went to the box that held the few incidentals she and Anna had brought to the loft and pulled out a pack of Bicycle playing cards. She cut the deck and looked at the card. Four of clubs. She wondered why the demon could convey numbers and text from the world to her but it couldn’t write its own. The d
ifference between reflecting a painting in a mirror and painting your own, maybe, or perhaps some vagary of demon rules she’d never understand. It was a pain in the ass in any case.
She dealt a hand of solitaire. A lousy game, but it would pass the time.
A few minutes before ten, her phone buzzed. The number was blocked. Karyn picked up anyway.
“Belial,” a woman said, and a moment later Karyn recognized her as Elliot.
“Yes?”
“What do you know about it? What’s going on?”
This didn’t seem like idle curiosity to Karyn. Although Elliot was fiercely curious, probably more so than was good for her, the shock on her face when Anna had dropped the name had been too genuine, too deep to be purely academic. Why the questions now?
“Your prisoners. One of them said the name,” Karyn ventured.
“Several, in fact. We thought it might be a general use or a stand-in for another word. Fact is, we didn’t know what to think, but I’ve been trying to get up to speed.”
“What did they say?”
A pause, probably while Elliot considered whether to tell her anything. “Threats, mostly.”
“You know they’re chock-full of demons, right?”
“I don’t know that. This is the twenty-first century. We tend to be extremely careful about calling aberrant behavior demonic possession when it might simply be mental illness.”
“Seriously? Under these circumstances?”
“None of them appear to have any history with the occult, that I can turn up, let alone the kind of lengthy history that results in end-stage possession . . .” Elliot spoke quickly and precisely, dressed it all up with technical-sounding jargon, but a note of uncertainty clung to her voice like a parasite, sucking the life out of it.
“If they aren’t doing magic tricks yet, they’re going to start.”
“They’ve started,” Elliot said, and now fatigue piled on top of the uncertainty in her voice. Karyn wondered if she was frightened. She ought to be. “There are several facts here that don’t fit the normal pattern, but that’s the one that concerns me. A man melted a steel lock to slag last night, and nobody has any idea how. Well, that’s not true—I know of a few ways to do it, but I don’t know how this man could possibly have managed any of them.”
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