by Peter Nealen
Father began the Rite of Exorcism again, and I assisted him. It went much the same as the previous times. We prayed, Father commanded the demon to come out, and it swore and cursed and spat its blasphemies at us. It threatened to kill Paul if we did not stop. It told us we were doomed to failure, that it owned Paul, body and soul. It spat more of the black, blood-laced bile at us, spattering it down Paul’s front and all over the bed.
Meanwhile, the house shook repeatedly as the thing outside raved and raged against us, adding its own curses and threats to the ones Paul’s demon was screaming at us. It was an unnerving cacophony, and it seemed to go on for hours.
Suddenly, Paul went quiet and limp again. The roaring outside ceased. I spared a glance at my watch. It was just after midnight.
Father continued to pray, and I followed right along with him. This wasn’t over yet; I had no doubt of that. I didn’t think that anyone had any such doubts at that point.
Trudeau had been remarkably quiet. We hadn’t heard from her or Miller in hours. They were shut up in her room, hopefully riding out the storm, though I feared what this was doing to Trudeau. She hadn’t been in the best of shape before, and the physical and spiritual violence being aimed at all of us was only intensifying.
The front door slid open, then closed again. Somehow, I knew that Magnus had just entered again. There was a different feel to the house, a strangeness that I realized followed Magnus. Presumably, it applied to any of his kin, as well.
“Jed,” Eryn said from the doorway. “You’d better come see this.”
“Come and help Father, will you?” I asked her. My throat felt raw and my knees were a bit wobbly as I passed her on the way out. It had been a long night already, and it wasn’t even close to over.
She caught my arm as we passed each other, gave it a squeeze, and stood on tiptoe to give me a quick kiss. “Stay strong,” she whispered.
I touched her hand and squeezed, then I was past and heading out into the living room.
Magnus had indeed come in. And he was carrying a body again. Only this time, it wasn’t a Renfield. As he lay the girl with the long, golden hair on the couch, I saw that it was Fand.
I had mixed feelings as I looked down at her. Her eyes were closed, hiding their golden weirdness, but she was still ethereally beautiful. Dangerously so. Her presence, the first time I’d met her, had almost been enough to knock me senseless. And what was more, she had known it, and delighted in it.
It bothered me, compared with what Magnus had told us about his family. Fand didn’t fit in with a clan of reformed Fae seeking to follow the path to God.
Magnus was standing over her, frowning. “The vampire is here,” he said, turning to look at me. “Fand confronted it, but she is…” he paused, as if searching for the right words. “She is the closest of us to the rest of our kin. You would call her the ‘black sheep’ of our House. She still wishes to play the old games, to get around our vow in any way she can, without breaking it outright.” From what I knew of the Fae, breaking a vow would break them, hence their notoriously slippery ways, deceptive without being strictly dishonest. “It means that she should have been the last to face such a being. Her clinging to the old ways made her vulnerable.”
“Are the rest holding it off?” I asked.
“For now,” he said, “but it is old, and strong. Its evil runs deep, and it has sipped of an ocean of blood to please its patron. We are weakening before it.”
Paul had commenced to howling again. The fight was still on. “How much longer can they hold?” I asked. “At least until sunrise?”
“Maybe,” he answered. “But the vampire is elusive, and it can speak in our very minds. Even now, it is calling to me, urging me back to the old ways, trying to show me how much pleasure can be had if we only join it in tormenting you, here inside.”
I watched him intently at that. I trusted Magnus from all the years I’d known him, even if I hadn’t known him as he was now, but the Fae are uncanny, and that a vampire was talking in his head was worrisome, to put it mildly. I suddenly wondered about the voice Eryn and I had heard in the bedroom. How strong was the memory of the millennia that Magnus had lived by the old ways, compared to his relatively few centuries that he had pledged himself and his kin to the Church and to Heaven?
But he met my gaze with those weird eyes. “Do not fear, Jed,” he said calmly. “It may be strong; it may be able to drive us back, make us weak, but it cannot make us break our vow. Fand may have been vulnerable, and have weakened and fallen more quickly, but she did not break. If she had, there would have been nothing left of her to bring inside.”
“You can’t just leave her in here,” I said. “I trust you, Magnus, but I’ve met Fand, and she makes me nervous. I’m afraid of what might happen if she wakes up without you keeping an eye on her.”
“I’ll be here,” Ray rumbled from the back of the room. “And Fand knows better than to cross me.”
Magnus nodded. “I must go and rejoin the defense,” he said. “We can hold, but you must banish the demons and come to join us. We can only hold for so long.” Then he was gone, out the door in the blink of an eye, the door inexplicably shutting and barring itself behind him.
He might be a good guy, but Magnus could be eerie.
Paul’s noises had changed pitch. Something was happening in there. “Hold the line, and keep an eye on her,” I said, pointing to Fand. “I think I need to get back in there.”
When I burst through the doorway, Paul was no longer screaming or thrashing around. Instead, he was lying back on the bed, the ropes somewhat slack, and laughing. It was a human laugh, but it was still an awful sound. It was not a laugh of joy. It was a spiteful, vicious cackle.
“I told you that you were wasting your time,” he said thickly, presumably past the residual blood and bile in his mouth from the demon’s theatrics. “You and your hopes, your charity.” He spat the last word. “You’re all idiots! Cringing before your God, begging him to save you! I know where real power comes from! Your God is powerless, silent, as mine rages and fights to throw Him down. You think my master was lying when he said that I was his from the beginning? Oh, no. I killed my girlfriend to seal that pact. After that, it was only a matter of acting scared enough to fool you morons, and get inside here, inside your pathetic defenses. You were so gullible! ‘Oh, I’m so scared, please protect me!’” he mocked. “And you fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Now, before you die in agony, witness my ascension!”
He began chanting the same awful, blasphemous name that he had been screaming before. And as he did, as the vicious spike of pain from the terrible sound speared through my skull, he began to change.
I’d seen demonic mutations before. They never get easier to watch.
His flesh seemed to ripple. His already blood-drenched eyes burst into flame. Spines began to rip out of his flesh, along his forearms, his shoulders, and the backs of his calves. His skin seemed to blacken and shrivel, cracking and showing bright, bloody flesh underneath, that quickly hardened to ugly, putrid scales. His teeth elongated to needle points, as his bones cracked and his neck stretched. His knees bent back the wrong way, and talons burst out of his socks and from the tips of his fingers, emerging with bloody sprays.
I already had my .45 in my hand, pointed right at his head. He was thrashing and howling now, and the entire bedframe was creaking, groaning, and cracking alarmingly. The demon outside was getting more excited, hammering away at the sides of the house, the doors, and the windows. If the battle was still going on between the Fae and the vampire, we couldn’t hear any of it over the racket the demons were kicking up.
A rope parted. Then another. The thing that had been Paul sat up and reached for Father Ignacio, only snatching its taloned hand back when Father presented the crucifix. So, it was still afraid of that. That was no great surprise. There’s not a demon in the Abyss that is not fearful of the symbol of the Lord’s ultimate sacrifice and ultimate victory.
I took a
long side-step, to make sure I cleared Father Ignacio, and shot the thing in the head.
I’d made sure that my .45 was loaded entirely with silver-jacketed rounds. I hadn’t necessarily foreseen this particular situation, but with the amount of demonic activity going on, I had suspected that I was going to need silver a lot more than steel.
Gore splashed; demonic the thing might have been, but it was warping a corporeal body, and when they do that, they can be hurt. It didn’t put it down, though. It turned its burning eyes on me, reaching out another claw-like hand as it lunged toward me. It couldn’t reach me, but there were potencies such a creature possessed that went well past mere physical violence.
I avoided looking right into those pits of red flame that had replaced Paul’s eyes. That way lay madness. I still felt the constriction around my throat, at the same time that I was hit with a sensation like a million yellowjackets were stinging me at once.
That’s not even the best way to describe that pain. It drove me to my knees, my pistol falling from my hand as the agony tore into me. It was beyond excruciating. It was torture such as I’d never experienced.
Help me, please! It was about the only remotely coherent prayer I could form under the circumstances. My skin was on fire, and my mind along with it. I was choking, unable to draw breath.
Father Ignacio fell to his hands and knees next to me, gasping. He was under attack, too.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pain receded. Just for a split second, I thought I caught the briefest glimpse of deep-set eyes in a craggy, weathered face with a white mustache.
I grabbed for my 1911. As my fingers closed around it, a shotgun blast boomed from the doorway, and the creature that had been Paul, and was now an unholy fusion of demon and man, was blasted back against the already cracked headboard.
Eryn stood in the doorway, calmly racked her Remington again, and shot it a second time. The noise was deafening, and I could actually feel the shot pattern go over my head.
From where I knelt, I raised my pistol, put the front sight on the ruin of the thing’s head, and emptied the magazine.
The 1911’s report was considerably softer than my Winchester’s, but it still roared in the enclosed space of the room, the harsh bangs quickly deadening my hearing. The thing that had been Paul fell back against the bed with a spatter of hot gore, the silver-jacketed bullets having smashed its skull like an eggshell. The blood and brains that splashed against the headboard steamed and smoked like hot acid, the wood darkening and smoking under the stain.
While it’s vessel had been destroyed, the demon wasn’t quite finished. Inky, oily black smoke began to roil around the shattered skull, spreading tendrils out to cling to the deformed body. Slowly, the thing started to sit up again.
Eryn shot it twice more, as Father Ignacio lifted his crucifix in one hand and his flask of holy water in the other. I reached for my own flask, that hadn’t left my back pocket, at the same time.
Father splashed holy water in the Sign of the Cross over the thing. The body began to smoke on contact with the blessed liquid, and there was a high, thin scream of pain and hate. When I added my own holy water, it suddenly let go of the corpse.
A billowing cloud of greasy black smoke, that might or might not have had five or more glowing red eyes somewhere in its depths, suddenly reared up out of the body and, with an ear-splitting howl that sent blinding spikes of pain through my head and almost drove me to the floor again, it dove through the shuttered window above the bed and disappeared.
With that demon gone, the other one suddenly subsided. Once its roaring and cursing went quiet, along with its assaults on the doors and windows, we could hear the fight outside again. And it didn’t sound good.
The screaming and hooting had taken on a stronger, more strident tone. Gunshots were rolling and echoing through the night. The horns of the Fae sounded weaker, more desperate somehow.
Magnus and his kin were not faring well.
I picked myself up off the floor. Father Ignacio was sagging against the footboard. The corpse that had been Paul, scabbed, burned, and deformed, stank so bad that I thought I might retch, right there in the room. Eryn stepped to my side, gagged at the stench, almost turned away, then forced herself to put a hand under my arm and help me up. I was almost too heavy for her, but she helped as best she could.
“We have to get out there,” I croaked, “before Magnus gets overrun.”
“Hold on,” Father Ignacio said, sounding about as bad as I felt. “You can’t go charging out to face a vampire alone and unprepared. All you’ll accomplish is to get yourself killed, or worse, bitten, and leave the rest of us with one less to defend this place.”
I pointed to the window. “We don’t have a lot of time, Father,” I said. “Not judging by the sounds of that. Magnus and his cousins, or whatever they are, are about to get overrun.”
“What are you going to cut its head off with?” he countered. “How much holy water is still in your flask? Think, man!”
I bit back the urge to curse. It would have been an especially bad idea at that point.
Miller had no such compunction. He had just stepped into the doorway, and swore loudly as he saw what was left of Paul on the bed.
I rounded on him. “Watch your mouth!” I snapped. “Haven’t you figured out yet that the rules about these things are stricter than you’re used to? Careless words have consequences, particularly when there are demons lurking around!”
He looked a little taken aback, but recovered. “I need help,” he said. “Something’s wrong with Karen.”
I suddenly imagined Trudeau undergoing the same metamorphosis that Paul had. She would be the next logical candidate for the demon to go after. Straightening, I reloaded my pistol as I went through the door, Eryn and Father right on my heels. I was hoping that if she was possessed, we could exorcise the thing again, but I wasn’t taking chances anymore.
But when we got into the room, there was no sign that Trudeau had been possessed. She was sitting on the bed, curled up in almost the fetal position, staring at the footboard, shaking. She didn’t react to our entrance. She wasn’t making a sound, either.
“She’s been like this for the last five minutes,” Miller said from behind me. “During the worst of the noise, just before the shooting started over there, she just went…still. She hasn’t moved or made a sound since, and I can’t snap her out of it.” There was genuine, deep concern in his voice. I couldn’t tell at that point if it was only concern for his partner as a professional, or something deeper. Nor did I especially care.
“Special Agent Trudeau?” I asked, stepping closer to the bed. She didn’t turn, didn’t move, didn’t even blink. It was as if she hadn’t heard me at all, or didn’t even realize that I was there.
“Is she…possessed?” Miller gulped.
I shook my head, though after everything else we’d seen over the last two nights, I was far from sure. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Father?”
Father Ignacio was studying her carefully, through slitted eyes. It made him look even more grim and sinister than usual. But he shook his head after a moment. “I doubt it,” he said. “It’s not impossible, but this feels more like simple shock to me.” After a moment, I realized that I felt what he was talking about; there was less of an oppressive feeling in that room than there had been next door, with the possessed Paul. It was hard to put my finger on, but it was there. The air in that room was…cleaner, somehow.
Father stepped closer, put a hand on Trudeau’s head, and closed his eyes, praying quietly. She still didn’t react. She didn’t even twitch at his touch.
When he finished the prayer and took his hand away, he looked at Miller. “Watch her carefully,” he said. “Pray over her; any prayer you know. She’s vulnerable, more so now than she was before. She’s retreated to somewhere else in her mind, and without faith, it is easier for the forces of darkness to find her there. And harder for her to fight them off, if she even know
s at this point that she must. She is confused and frightened, and therefore susceptible to deception and suggestion.”
Miller looked at him oddly. “Did you just…read that in her mind?” he asked.
Father stared at him for a second, nonplused. Then he blinked, and shook his head ruefully. “No, no,” he said. “Nothing of the kind. I’ve only seen similar cases enough times to see it for what it is. There are patterns to human behavior, patterns to the soul and its preparedness to fight the forces of the Abyss. I’ve seen a lot of young people approaching life in a similar way to Miss Trudeau, and when attacked by the kind of things that lurk in the darkness between this world and the Abyss, they are poorly equipped to resist. That’s all.”
Miller nodded jerkily, though the expression on his face suggested that he still wasn’t entirely sure. He’d just had his entire worldview rocked, and he wasn’t sure what was what.
“Believe me,” Frank told him, suddenly looming in the doorway, “it never gets entirely normal. But you learn to cope.”
Miller just looked at him for a second. He was definitely more shell-shocked than I’d thought. Frank had adjusted far more easily, and Frank had seen some pretty weird stuff along the way. “I’ll take your word for it,” he finally said. He turned back to Trudeau, and the rest of us seemed to kind of fade from his attention.
Whatever Miller had come looking for, it was now forgotten. His investigation was a distant memory, here in the weird darkness of the very world that he hadn’t been sure even existed.
No one goes looking into the Otherworld and the Abyss and comes out unscathed. I should know.
The front door opened again, then slammed violently. That didn’t bode well.
When we came out into the living room, Magnus and four more young men who looked very much like him were standing just inside the door. They looked like they’d been through the wars. Bloodied and scarred, their shimmering shirts were torn and rent. I couldn’t tell if it was mail or something else. With the Fae, who knew?
Magnus face was grim. “We have failed. We are all that is left. The rest of the Honor Guard has fallen. The vampire has won through to the mine shaft.”