Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  Anna scoffed. “I doubt God’s work has much to do with killing dozens of people.”

  “Not killing—saving. The Locos.”

  “Funny enough, saving the Locos from the other gangs means killing a lot of people in the other gangs.”

  Moreno sat up. “He came to help. That’s what matters.”

  The priest nodded sadly. “They were vulnerable. They needed help. I needed to do some good. Penance and atonement—they’re a strong part of my faith.”

  “I see. God put them on earth so you could redeem yourself.”

  “God is more subtle than that, and a single tool can be put to multiple uses.”

  Karyn put her hand on Anna’s wrist. “Let it go. If he already has the relic, I don’t know what else we can do here.”

  “You find it by digging up graves, maybe?” Anna asked. Part of her thought she ought to let it go, that it was irrelevant, but another part wanted to shake Abas like a dog shaking a rat in its jaws.

  “No.”

  “You wanna tell me what that was all about, then?”

  “Penance and atonement,” Abas said. “Blood ties are powerful in the eyes of God. Important.”

  Blood ties. Nail had called it. Anna opened her mouth to retort, but Abas spoke first. “There is something you can help me with. Something that is in all our best interests,” he said, raising his hands expansively, whether to encompass the whole room or the whole neighborhood Anna couldn’t tell. His hungry smile made Anna want to hit him in the mouth.

  “Belial,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How does that help all of us?” she asked, waving her arms in mockery of his earlier gesture.

  “I will ask for intercession from an angel of the Lord.”

  This time, Freak did the scoffing. Anna didn’t look over. Instead, she looked into Abas’s eyes, searching for a lie or falseness of any kind. If it was there, she couldn’t see it. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Direct intercession. I will beg a mighty angel of the Lord to descend from Heaven. It will purge you of the demonic, protect the faithful, and destroy a great evil.”

  “You can just call one up? ‘Hey, come on down, do some demon smiting’?”

  “No,” Abas said. “Intercession will only happen for the greatest need. To purge the world of something so vile that it offends God Himself.”

  “I don’t understand,” Moreno said. He sat up, wincing as he braced himself with one arm.

  “Belial. An enemy of God,” Abas said. “A chance to bring God’s favor down upon us all, just as we discussed.”

  Anna glanced at Moreno, who had forced himself to a sitting position. He was listening intently, the avid expression on his face not too different from Abas’s.

  “This angel of yours will come down for the express purpose of wiping Belial out?” Anna asked.

  “And other demons. It will cleanse your soul. Bring Belial to me, and we can do this together.”

  “I can’t hand him to you, you understand?” she asked Abas. “He’ll be coming for you. You have something he wants. You’ll be bait, get it?”

  “That’s fair. I trust you’ll at least provide security.”

  “I need this as bad as you do,” Anna said. “Maybe worse. We’ll cover you.”

  “What do we gotta do?” Moreno said.

  “What? You’re more dead than alive,” Anna said. “You ain’t gonna be no help to us.”

  “He comes,” Abas said. “This is his neighborhood. These are his people.”

  “Jesus, you—”

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Freak said. “I don’t know nothing about any of this, but it all sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.”

  “Stay out of this, Luisa,” Moreno said.

  “‘Luisa’? Fuck you. I been watching corners and pulling triggers with every one of them homeboys out there, and now you call me fuckin’ Luisa? You ain’t cutting me out. Papa.”

  Anna expected an explosion, some kind of typical macho respect tirade, maybe fists, but to her surprise Moreno merely nodded. Resignation, or perhaps a deeper form of sadness, softened his face.

  “She should stay out of this,” Abas said.

  “Nobody asked for your opinion,” Freak said.

  “I really think—”

  “Enough,” Moreno said. “She’s family. That’s all that matters.”

  Abas paused with his tongue touching the edge of his front teeth, lips pulled back in a display of dismay. He swallowed it and said nothing.

  “Everything settled up?” Anna asked. Abas nodded. Freak and her father kept staring at each other in a cross-generational battle of wills Anna neither understood nor wanted any part of. She guessed that meant they were in. “Let’s work out the details, then. We got a lot to do.”

  Chapter 24

  Genevieve’s phone rang as she got out of the car at the corner. Clap sped off, leaving her on the curb with the office building in sight. The phone rang again, and she took it from her pocket. Anna.

  Glancing toward the building, Genevieve saw nothing unusual. The windows were dark, glassy eyes throwing back the indigo and red of the sunset, and if Sobell or Belial watched her from one, she’d never see him. She turned her back and answered the phone as she walked toward the 7-Eleven.

  “Hey,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Still cracking up. You?”

  Genevieve sighed, the sound becoming a windy crackle in the phone mic. “I don’t know what I’m even doing anymore. Thinking about leaving and not coming back one of these times.” She’d been thinking about it nonstop, actually. Have Clap drop her off somewhere, anywhere, and then get as far from Belial as her legs, a bus pass, and a sack full of cash could take her. The hell of it was, she didn’t think she could leave Sobell. He’d drop her without a moment of reflection, shoot her himself if he had to, and she couldn’t bring herself to do the same to him. Stupid loyalty. “Out in gangland again today. Just walking around this time. Killing time.”

  “You think that’s bad, I don’t even know what I want anymore. Half the time, all I can think about is food, sex, or violence, and the rest of the time I’m not sure which feelings are mine and which are . . . borrowed.”

  Genevieve searched for words, found none. Gee, that’s rough didn’t quite have the right feel, but everything else she could think of was basically the same sentiment. After a long pause, she said, “We need a vacation. When all this shit is over, we should go somewhere.”

  “Like where?”

  “I don’t know. We’re not exactly strapped for cash. Be nice to live a little.”

  This time, the pause was on Anna’s end. Genevieve strained to hear her over a couple of guys shouting at each other over by the gas pumps and the beep from the 7-Eleven door as it opened ahead.

  “About that,” Anna finally said. “Living a little.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I sure would like to.”

  Genevieve nodded, regardless of the fact that Anna couldn’t hear it. “I got nothing new. I—I wish I had something. Anything.”

  “I got something.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.” Anna’s voice was even, without a trace of the excitement Genevieve would have expected. She was in a place beyond tired, Genevieve thought. Exhausted. Drained.

  “And?”

  Another one of those long, tense pauses. Genevieve sat on the sidewalk next to the icebox and waited.

  “I need you to do something for me,” Anna said finally.

  “Anything. You name it.”

  “I need you to bring Belial somewhere.”

  “It’s not very cooperative,” Genevieve said.

  “No bullshit, now. No jokes. Either you can do this for me or you can’t. I need to know.” A rustle of movemen
t. “I need to be able to count on you.”

  Genevieve’s mouth tightened in anger and shame, and she batted down a retort. I deserved that, she thought. Regardless of circumstances. “You can,” she said. “I’ll . . . I’ll figure it out.”

  “You don’t have to figure anything out. Just tell him you know where the relic is. I’ll give you an address and a time.”

  The relic. Of course. It might even work, provided she could set a demon up with a straight face. The thought was daunting enough to cause her mouth to go dry. Another thought, a truly awful one, followed close after. “Is Nail with you?” she asked. “Or Karyn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I talk to one of them?”

  “Why?” Suspicious. Angry. Not without good reason, Genevieve thought.

  She tried to choose her words carefully, but there was no polite way to say this. “If I’m going to set up a demon, I need to talk to somebody who’s . . . not so closely tied to it.”

  A silence followed. It was impossible not to read resentment or maybe even outright hostility into it. The phone felt slick against the sweat in Genevieve’s palm.

  “Here.” One word, stripped of emotion. Then Anna said something away from the phone, something Genevieve didn’t catch. Then:

  “Hello, Gen.” Karyn’s voice.

  “How is she?” Genevieve asked. “Anna. She doesn’t sound . . . good.”

  “She has good reason.”

  “Yeah. This setup thing—is it for real?”

  “Yes. What else would it be?”

  Genevieve rubbed her face. “I don’t know. I just had to ask. She’s not quite herself these days, you know?”

  “It’s for real,” Karyn said.

  There was a clunk and a series of indistinct thumping noises, and then Anna’s voice came back on. “There. You done checking with Mom? Wanna check with Dad, too?”

  “Just tell me what you need me to do,” Genevieve said.

  She listened as Anna gave her the outline. It was brief enough, but after the conversation ended and she put her phone away, she stood on the sidewalk for a while, thinking. By the time she let herself into the office building, it was full dark outside. It felt as though the sun hadn’t gone down so much as slinked away, trying to avoid attracting the attention of the rats and darkness-dwelling creatures that always trailed behind it. An illusion, Genevieve thought, brought on by her own state of mind, but one she couldn’t shake. It was no brighter inside the building than out, but there was still relief in closing the door against the vast darkness outside.

  I used to like nighttime. The darkness.

  She locked the door.

  Belial wasn’t home. She couldn’t see much, the streetlights barely penetrating the blinds and sketching shadowy outlines of the furniture, but these days she could tell just by the stink. It was still foul in here, but noticeably less so, the difference between finding the abandoned lair of some terrifying, carrion-devouring monster and having your head between its jaws.

  Her eyes slowly adjusted. She picked her way around the room toward her makeshift bed.

  She froze when a miserable groan sounded.

  Sobell.

  “Do you have . . . water?” His voice sounded thin and wheezy, like somebody had slugged him in the gut.

  Genevieve knelt next to the table and searched for the small battery-powered lantern they’d been using for light. She flicked the switch. A watery bluish light lit up the floor, reflected off the underside of the table, and spread weakly into the room.

  Sobell had situated himself in an uncomfortable position halfway between sitting and lying down, his back bending at an awkward-looking angle in the middle so he could prop his shoulders and head up against the wall. His legs splayed out in front of him in a V, and his arms lay in no particular position at his sides. It looked like he’d been thrown there by an idle, bored giant. The only part of him that seemed to engage with the world was his eyes, which watched Genevieve intensely.

  “Jesus, are you okay?” Genevieve asked.

  “I suppose . . . I suppose that depends what you mean by the word.”

  A plastic bottle of water, still half-full, sat near the table leg. “Can you stand?” Genevieve asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He didn’t move.

  “Just lying around like that because it feels good?”

  “If I sit all the way up, I get dizzy. If I lie all the way down, I can’t breathe. This seemed like a reasonable compromise.”

  “You’re going to hurt your neck like that.”

  “As of this moment, that is so low on my list of concerns that I fear I’ll never get to it.”

  She got to her knees and grabbed the bottle. It smelled okay, so at least Belial hadn’t been using it for a toilet. She got up, came around the table to Sobell’s side, and sat. She held the bottle out.

  He sighed heavily and took it. After one sip, hardly a mouthful, he put the bottle back down.

  He cleared his throat. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I believe I’m fucked even more severely than that would imply. Wouldst imply. Whatever.”

  Genevieve looked down upon his wasted form. He seemed bent, angular, almost insectile. Knobs of bone stuck out at his elbow and wrist in a way they hadn’t even twenty-four hours ago. Skin hung loose on his face, adding years to his apparent age.

  “Are you sure you’re gonna be able to get back up?” she asked.

  “It looks worse than it is,” he said, not even attempting to make the words sound convincing.

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Left? Days. Weeks, perhaps. I can’t really say. I’ve never died before.” He coughed. “Honestly, the worst thing is being so miserably tired. I’d almost welcome shuffling off this mortal coil, if I didn’t know there were legions of demons waiting to get their claws in me.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  He raised an eyebrow. Wrinkles rippled across his forehead. “I would very much like to not find out. My life has been a kind of inverse Pascal’s wager, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do they teach nothing in college these days?” Another dry cough hacked its way up from his lungs. “Blaise Pascal. French rascal, who suggested life is a bet. If you bet that God is real, and believe in Him, there is a possibility of infinite reward with small downside for being wrong. If you bet that God is not real, there is small upside to being right, and you take an infinite risk for being wrong. He therefore concluded the only rational thing to do is believe.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Aside from being obviously nonsense, it ignores the possibility of other options.” He grinned. “Bet that you’ll live forever, and what you believe doesn’t matter.”

  Whether it was his frail state or the apparent moment of relative closeness, Genevieve felt inspired to ask him something more personal than she ever had. “How old are you?”

  He exhaled, and some life seemed to seep out of him on the moment. He held one shaking hand out, stretching the fingers, and studied the back before finally answering. “Not old enough.”

  She glanced toward the dark mass of Belial’s lair. “Belial here?” Safer to ask, even though she was pretty sure of the answer.

  “No. I believe it’s out assembling a mob of half-wits with the goal of relieving itself of the burden of requiring our services.”

  Now. Here was the decision: let Sobell in on this and hope he could help them in the end—hope he wouldn’t actively screw them over in the end—or cut him out. Deliver Belial herself and leave Sobell to work his own problems out, or at least put him in a spot where he’d have to negotiate, which would undoubtedly piss him off. What was it Anna had accused her of before everything went to shit at the old prison? Wanting everything
to work out for everyone. She’d said it as if Genevieve was hopelessly naive, the assumption being, Genevieve supposed, that trying to thread a path through everyone’s conflicting desires without committing to any side was a sure recipe to piss all those people off. Now here she was again.

  “You said at one point that maybe we ought to just kill it,” Genevieve said.

  “Yes. You talked me out of that course of action.”

  “Still feel that way?”

  He studied her, the blue light painting his face a deathly color. “Why? What do you have in mind?”

  She picked at her fingernails, felt like a horrible, obvious liar, and stopped. “I don’t know. Just thinking out loud.”

  “Hmm.”

  Nothing else was said, and after a few minutes she excused herself and settled in to her corner, bracing herself for what was sure to be a long, sleepless night.

  Chapter 25

  “Dammit,” Genevieve said. She put her phone back in her pocket instead of throwing it against the wall and continued pacing the office, fighting the urge to do as Sobell previously had and open the blinds to let the daylight in. The text she’d just received from Anna had been simple enough—an address and a time for later that night. Delivery address for Belial, if she could get it there. Any time after eight p.m.

  Too bad the demon hadn’t come home last night. She’d waited up like an anxious mother—though in this case she thought the world would likely be better off if the stand-in for her wayward progeny actually did drive off a bridge or something. She didn’t know when she’d finally dropped off to sleep, only that it had been fitful, as she’d jerked awake every time Sobell moved or a car drove close by. When morning finally came, like gray dishwater poured over the windows, she thought maybe she’d slept through his return. She’d covered her mouth and nose and peeked inside his lair. Only a ratty sleeping bag and, inexplicably, a snarled black ball of hair about the size of a basketball were inside.

  She’d already gone out, gathered the morning’s disgusting breakfast food, and returned. Sobell had eaten nothing before his departure with Four Door and company, and she’d eaten a protein bar with the consistency and taste of pressed cardboard, so the quartet of breakfast burritos still sat untouched on the table, adding their aroma to the hair-curling stink of the place.