The door opened.
“See?” Darcy flashed her gap-toothed grin. “My mom got fired from a cleaning crew once for leaving the back door unlocked, and somebody came in and stole a bunch of stuff. People come out to smoke or to throw trash into the Dumpster, and they don’t lock it again until the end of the night.”
“So there are cleaning people in there?” I frowned. “I thought the building would be empty. I don’t want them to get caught in the middle of something.”
“Well, let’s start in the basement, then. Usually the cleaners spend the most time on the public areas and the bigwig offices, which are on the upper floors. At least, that’s what we did this summer when I temped with my mom,” Darcy said. “Besides, if these really are demons, don’t you think they’d be … you know? Down?”
I concentrated hard, trying to sense something that would help. I’d felt demons before, so it seemed like I ought to be able to tell if they were around. But the air was full of that choking blackness, and I couldn’t sense a darned thing. So I quit trying.
“It sounds like a good enough place to start,” I said. “Let’s go.”
She opened the door wider. Something slithered out of it.
So far, all the demons I’d seen had been creepy for sure, but they’d been just human or canine enough to slide under the radar as long as you didn’t look too closely. But this thing was totally alien. All I could see was a burst of tentacles, sucking mouths, and sagging flesh. I had the instant, immediate sense that I was in the presence of something other, something that didn’t belong here and never would. My mind recoiled; I wanted to run away, but I forced myself to step forward instead.
Darcy crumpled to the ground, babbling incoherently, and the door would have swung shut if the thing hadn’t grabbed it with a tentacle, ripped it off its hinges, and thrown it across the loading dock. The door hit one of the floodlight poles with a clang, and the light rocked back and forth in sickening arcs before it hissed and went out entirely.
Strangely, that was better. Now that I couldn’t see the creature very well, it was much easier to advance on it. I felt numb; my hands tingled with adrenaline, and it seemed like everything was suddenly moving in slow motion as my body readied itself for those instantaneous decisions that could mean life or death. I remembered this feeling from my black belt test, the sinking knowledge that yes, I was going to get hurt, but I was going to do this anyway.
One of the tentacles wrapped itself around Darcy’s leg and started pulling her through the doorway. Red streaked the ground underneath her, and she moaned as her body skidded facedown over the broken glass and small pebbles strewn in front of the doorstep.
The smell of blood hit me, and it only managed to piss me off. If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have come. I had to protect her.
Suckers dotted each of the tentacles; I could see Darcy’s jeans steaming where they came into contact with the greenish flesh. No way was I going to touch that. Now I was doubly glad we’d brought the arsenal. I grabbed her staff from the floor of the loading dock and spun it into action, whacking the tentacles wrapped around her leg with a swift double strike. I expected to feel the usual heat and vibration that came with using a Relic.
But it didn’t happen.
I couldn’t understand. There was no reason it shouldn’t have worked. Maybe I couldn’t use another hunter’s Relics? It sure would have been nice if Michael had told me that.
The useless weapon clattered to the ground as the demon continued to drag Darcy inside. I needed to keep my hands free to defend us, so I knelt on her back to hold her in place. She screamed as I mashed her into the assorted sharp things beneath her. But it was better than her getting dragged into the darkness.
Now that I knew she wasn’t going anywhere, I fumbled at my side for my kusari-fundo, a length of chain with a heavy weight at either end, but it was all tangled up in my belt. I batted away a searching tentacle with one hand and struggled with the chain with the other. This was not going well. At all.
“What the hell is that thing?” Ruthanasia yelled.
She was frighteningly pale, and the ground in front of her was splattered with puke. But she was still there, holding my necklace in one fist and a flimsy pocketknife in the other. You’d think she would have gone all pointy-teethed and fiery-eyed by now if she really was a demon. This would be an ideal time to strike, and bang! Two hunters out of commission. We had to have been wrong about her. Strangely, even though I’d never liked her, I wanted to be wrong.
“Casey?” she shrieked. “What do I do?”
“Just stay there.” I finally freed my weapon and began to swing it, gaining momentum. “I’ll handle it.”
“No. These things took my sister.” Her eyes flashed in a very familiar way.
“Wait!” I yelled, but it was too late. She leapt toward the thing, and a mass of tentacles shot toward her. They whipped around her body, curling up to encircle her neck. One quick twist, and she’d be dead.
“No!” I leapt to her rescue. But once I let Darcy go, the demon jerked her through the doorway. I heard her faint wail of panic from somewhere in the darkness. She sounded impossibly far away.
I hovered indecisively in the doorway, torn between my friends. How was I supposed to decide which one to save? I knew that if I didn’t choose fast, I’d lose both of them, but how could I choose? There was no right answer, nothing I could choose that would make it easy to live with myself later.
Ruthanasia struggled against the constricting tentacles, her hand worming free. I saw the glint of the cross in her hand.
“The necklace!” I yelled, even though she was only a few feet away. “Use the necklace!”
“Duh,” she replied.
Then her wrist twisted, and she shoved the bright silver right into one of the gaping mouths. The tentacle whipped away from her like she was made of acid, and then the beast stiffened in what looked like pain. I felt more than heard it shriek with frustrated hunger. Then it exploded, raining greenish goop and gobs of flesh onto the loading dock. And on us too.
I ducked, covering my head with my arms to protect myself from the globs dripping off the building, and charged inside. It was even more disgusting in there; the creature had been stuffed into the small hallway beyond the door, and I found myself wading through knee-high muck. When my foot hit something hard, I recoiled in disgust because I was sure that I’d just kicked a demon bit, but then I thought I saw a hint of yellow down there in the slop.
Darcy. She’d been wearing her jersey. I plunged my hands into the quivering, jellylike stuff and pulled her out, willing her to gasp or scream or something. But she just hung limply in my arms, rivulets of putrid guts running down her face. Was she breathing? I couldn’t tell. I dragged her out onto the relatively firm ground of the loading dock. Ruthanasia rushed to help as soon as she saw what I was doing.
I couldn’t remember CPR; my mind was whirling so fast that I couldn’t think straight. Lucky for me, Ruthanasia knew what to do. She tilted Darcy’s head back with what looked to me like an expert hand, stuck a finger into her mouth, and pulled out a clump of demon slime. Then she tilted her gore-streaked face to listen at Darcy’s mouth.
It felt like my heart stopped beating and my head would burst any second. If Darcy was dead, those demons would pay.
She started coughing. I nearly lost it right there, but then she tried to sit up, and I forgot about the stupid hysterics and knelt down to help my friend.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “What happened?”
“You almost suffocated on demon goop,” Ruthanasia said as if this were something that happened all the time. But when I looked, her hands were shaking.
I felt so grateful that I thought I might faint. But I stayed conscious through sheer willpower. “We should get out of here,” I said to Ruthanasia. “Darcy needs help.”
“I’m not wussing, Kent,” she growled. “I took that thing out, remember? We can do this.”
I closed my
eyes, trying not to remember. “I know. And thanks. But it’s insane to do this when one of us is already hurt. Let’s get Michael or get a plan or a flamethrower or something.”
“You have a flamethrower?” She eyed me skeptically.
“Well, no. But Darcy’s injured. You can’t deny that.”
“No!” Darcy croaked. “Don’t even try to send us home now. Because we’re going into that warehouse with or without you.”
Ruthanasia hauled her up, and they folded their arms and stared me down with identical expressions—stubbornly set jaws and narrowed eyes. Going into the warehouse wasn’t the best idea, but I couldn’t abandon them now. I was sure by this point that Ruthanasia wasn’t demonic—the whole dissolving-her-demon-brethren thing seemed to have eliminated that option—but she had no idea what she was up against. Darcy did, but she could barely stand up straight. So I had no choice but to give in and try to make the best of it. It was time to stop yapping and start moving. Because if the demons hadn’t known we were coming before, they had probably figured it out after we’d exploded one of their buddies on their back porch.
“All right. But you two promise to stay behind me and watch our backs. I don’t want to get flanked by a bunch of demons and have no way out.” I looked them over. “Deal?”
Darcy nodded reluctantly, and after a moment’s thought, so did Ruthanasia.
That would have to be good enough. I went through the door. The sludge was noticeably shallower already, about ankle height now. Either this stuff was draining out somewhere or it was dissolving. I voted for the latter, because the thought of demon guts in the water supply was enough to make me swear to drink canned beverages for the rest of eternity.
Doors on either side of the hallway led to rooms full of maintenance equipment and empty pallets, but I checked them briefly just to be sure demons weren’t waiting for us to pass by before they jumped out at us. Maybe I was being a little paranoid, but that’s the kind of thing that keeps people alive in combat situations—being thorough. Darcy and Ruthanasia hung back as I explored, Darcy muffling the occasional cough into her slimy sleeve.
The rooms were clear. But I did find a crowbar on top of an unopened crate of toilet paper and tossed it to Darcy, since she’d lost her staff. She took it and swung experimentally.
“You should Relic that up,” I said. “Or do you want me to do it?”
“I’m not that damaged,” she said, looking irate. “I’ll handle it.”
I pointed down the hallway and said, “This way.”
At the end of the hallway was a door clearly marked with a glowing red EXIT sign. After what had happened outside, closed doors made me nervous. I motioned Ruthanasia and Darcy back until they were hugging the walls again, and cautiously opened the door. We didn’t get tentacled, spewed on, or otherwise demon-assaulted, so I slowly looked around the door. Nothing there. We all let out breaths that none of us would have admitted we’d been holding.
The stairway was about as generic as they come. It had cream-colored tile walls. Metal steps that made more noise than I would have liked. Bright fluorescent lights overhead. But I could have happily stayed there forever.
We looked at each other cautiously, and then, without saying a word, we turned right and took the first step down. My instincts told me that Darcy was right. That was where the demons were.
I held the kusari-fundo loosely in my hands, the chain clanking softly as we descended the steps. Ruthanasia had her pocketknife, and Darcy watched the rear with the crowbar held high. No way were we going to be taken by surprise.
As we got closer to the bottom of the stairs, the smell of burned plastic filled the air. The scent was undercut with something rotten that turned my stomach. I refused to think about what it was and started breathing through my mouth. Dingy brown paint covered the entire door—even the little window—so there was no way to see inside. No sign on it either, although I hadn’t really expected one. Finding a door marked DEMON SOUL-SUCKING MACHINERY INSIDE would have been too easy.
I jerked my thumb toward the wall, and the girls flattened themselves against it. When I put my hand on the door, nothing happened. It wasn’t particularly hot or cold. It didn’t vibrate, bulge, or do anything else that you might expect from a demonic factory door. When I turned the handle and pulled, it swung open soundlessly. Nothing jumped out. I edged inside, using all my senses in an effort to catch the demons before they pounced.
I shouldn’t have bothered. They were out in plain sight. The door opened smack in the middle of a giant basement. The room was dominated by long rows of machines crusted in the same black stuff that ringed the door. It looked like a bunch of alien assembly lines, studded with wires and tubes and all kinds of stuff I didn’t understand. A big iron vat loomed against the wall opposite us, and the right side of the room was obstructed by stacks of boxes that reached to the ceiling.
Those giant stacks seemed crazy high. I didn’t see any forklifts around, but the demons obviously didn’t need any. The worker demons didn’t seem very familiar with this thing called gravity. They were giant spiderlike things about the size of tigers, with black glossy bodies and blurry-fast legs that defied my attempts to count them. The demons climbed up the sides of the machines and the wall of boxes; one hung upside down from the ceiling, its legs fiddling with a loose tube that dangled overhead.
There were more spiders than I could count. These were not the kind of odds that made me comfortable. I took a step into the room and started to swing the kusari-fundo in wide, lazy loops. Good thing I’d picked the one with the heavy weights; the light ones probably wouldn’t have had the power to get through those hard outer shells.
But the demons didn’t attack. They barely seemed to notice us. They scurried busily over the clanking and hissing machinery, packing boxes and making imperceptible adjustments to the various gauges and valves dotting the instrumentation. I glanced back. Darcy was still in the stairway, guarding our line of retreat, but Ruthanasia stood a couple of steps behind me, and she looked as confused as I felt. Didn’t the demons care that we were here to destroy their soul-jar-bobblehead-machine thingies? Weren’t they supposed to be trying to kill us?
This was way too easy. We crept toward the machines, the air getting hotter with every step. Sweat began dripping down my temple. I held a hand up to Ruthanasia, pointed to the machine, and indicated that she should back out of the way. Once she and Darcy were out of range, I reached toward a valve and twisted it.
The valve let off a huge blast of steam and nearly took my eyebrows off. That got their attention. A spider demon dropped to the floor a few feet away. I backed up hastily, letting the steam form a barrier between us.
The demon reared up onto its hind legs, towering over me. I twisted my arm, swinging the kusari-fundo at the chitinous belly of the creature, and the weapon crunched into the thing with a flash of white light. Greenish blood sprayed onto the floor. I spun, maintaining the momentum of my swing, and the free end of the chain wrapped around the demon’s standing legs, the weight snapping one of them clean off.
The beast wavered and toppled to the ground, its balance destroyed and the remaining legs wiggling in the air. I stayed in a crouch, ready for the onslaught, but none of the other creatures attacked. They didn’t seem to care if you killed their buddies, only if you dorked around with their stuff. Which meant we’d have to figure out how this machine worked and take it down strategically in one shot if we didn’t want to fight them all. One at a time was doable, but I didn’t think it would be so easy if they swarmed.
Where were the souls? Without them, this would have been just another bobblehead factory. All I had to do was free them, and we could get the heck out of here. I took a deep breath, ignoring the thick, nasty taste in the air, and felt for them. They were here; I just knew it. But I couldn’t afford to guess where. I had to be right the first time.
My eyes were drawn to the vat opposite the stairway door. There was only one vat, compared to the twenty o
r so assembly-line machines, so was this it? It sat in the middle of a bristle of wires and was covered with a lid full of pressure dials and blinking lights, so I couldn’t just look to see what was inside. But five spider demons crawled along its surface, compared to only one or two for the other machines. I didn’t need any other proof to know that the vat was important.
“I need to check that out,” I said to Ruthanasia, and pointed toward the vat. “Stay with Darcy and be ready to make a quick retreat.”
Ruthanasia looked up at it. “Okay. I’ll head for the doorway. We’ll keep the exit open.”
She backed away, but I was already focused on the task at hand. It was time to free some souls.
I stepped cautiously toward the vat. Cables crisscrossed the space; I stepped carefully over one and ducked under another, jerking the kusari-fundo up hastily when it almost connected with the cable on the floor. On the vat, one of the demons paused in its fussing to look at me with faceted, alien eyes, waiting to see if I’d make contact with its precious machine. The abrupt motion threw me off balance, and I wobbled dangerously close to one cable and then another. The spider thing drew closer, chittering to its fellows. A second one joined it, watching, waiting for me to put a hand down, to skim the black web of cords with my shoulder, to place a single foot wrong.
Slowly but surely I made my way to the vat. It was at least two stories tall and bigger around than our town house. That was what it felt like, anyway. I felt tiny and insignificant. No way would I ever manage to win this fight. I figured I should just give up and go home.
What the heck? I blinked, shaking my head, and my vision miraculously cleared. Sure, it was big, but not that big. More luxury-sized SUV than house. And there was no way I’d quit like that. I eyed the spider demons swinging from the cables as if the wires were a giant, mechanized web, and I said, “Get out of my head. I’m not giving up.”
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