1 Blood Price

by Tanya Huff

  “I haven’t got time for this,” he growled.

  340, 342, 344, 375a. . . .

  A cross corridor carried the numbers off in two directions. Henry paused, there were voices and they were saying things he couldn’t ignore.

  “Well, what do you expect when you call out the name of a Demon Lord in his consort’s temple?”

  Temple? Consort? Were there now other groups involved in calling demons or had his assumption that only one person was involved been wrong from the beginning? He didn’t have time to check this out. He couldn’t afford not to.

  Down the cross corridor, around a corner, and the door at the end of the hall showed light behind it. There appeared to be several people talking at once.

  “I suppose this means the demon has Elias?”

  “Good guess. What are you going to do?”

  “What can we do? We wait.”

  “You can wait,” a third voice rose out of the tumult, “but Lexi boots the statue and screams, ‘Ashwarn, Ashwarn, Ashwarn, you give him back!’ at the top of her lungs.”

  Henry paused, hand on the door. There were six lives in the room and no feel of a demonic presence. What was going on?

  “Nothing happens.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Just what I said, nothing.” The young woman sitting at the head of the table spotted Henry standing, blinking on the threshold and smiled. “Hi. You look lost.”

  They were playing a game. That much was obvious from the piles of brightly colored dice. But a game that called on demons? “I’m looking for student records. . . .”

  “Boy are you in the wrong place.” A tall young man scratched at dark stubble. “You need the WOB.” At Henry’s blank look, he grinned and continued. “The West Office Building, WOB, that’s where all that shit is.”

  “Yeah, but the WOB closes down at five.” Carefully placing the little lead figure she’d been holding on the table, one of the other players checked her watch. “It’s eight minutes after eleven. There won’t be anyone there.”

  Eight after eleven. More time wasted on fruitless searching.

  “Hey, don’t look so upset, man, maybe we can help?”

  “Maybe we can play?” muttered one of the others. The rest ignored her.

  Why not? After all, he was looking for a man who called up demons. The connection was there, however tenuous. “I’m looking for Norman Birdwell.”

  The young woman at the head of the table curled her lip. “Why?” she asked. “Does he owe you money.”

  “You know him?”

  “Unfortunately.” The group drawled out the word in unison.

  They would have laughed, but Henry was at the table before the first sound escaped. They looked at one another in nervous silence instead and Henry could see memories of nine bodies, throats ripped out, rising in their expressions. He couldn’t compel a group this large, he could only hope they were still young enough to respond to authority.

  “I need his address.”

  “We, uh, played at his place once. Grace, didn’t you write it down?”

  They all watched while Grace, the young woman at the head of the table, searched through her papers. She appeared to have written everything down. Henry fought the urge to help her search.

  “Is Norman in trouble?”

  Henry kept his eyes on the papers, willing the one he needed to be found. “Yes.”

  The players closest to him edged away, recognizing the hunter. A second later, with the arrogance of youth, they decided they couldn’t possibly be the prey and edged back.

  “We, uh, stopped gaming with him ’cause he took the whole thing too seriously.”

  “Yeah, he started acting like all this stuff was real. Like he was bumping into wizards and warriors and long legged beasties on every street corner.”

  “He’s such a dork.”

  “It’s just a game.”

  “It’s a game we’re not playing,” someone pointed out.

  “Is Norman in bad trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  They stopped talking after that. They didn’t have the concepts to deal with the tone of Henry’s voice.

  Grace handed him the paper tentatively, although not entirely certain she’d keep her fingers in the deal.

  “Wait a minute,” the tall young man protested. “I don’t like Norman either, but should we be giving out his. . . .” Henry turned to look full at him. He paled and closed his eyes.

  As he slammed his car into gear and burned rubber the length of the parking lot, Henry checked his watch. 11:36. So little time.

  “. . . and one final join here.” Norman straightened up and beamed proudly down at his apartment floor. The white outline of the pentagram had almost been obscured by the red and yellow symbols surrounding it. He caressed the open page of the grimoire, tracing with his fingertips the diagram he’d just finished reproducing. “Soon,” he told it. “Soon.”

  The smell of the acrylic paint so close to Vicki’s face added to the nausea and made her eyes sting and itch. She no longer had the strength to ignore it, so she endured it instead. Scrubbing out a bit of the pentagram before it dried had seemed like a good idea until she realized that it would only release the Demon Lord to the slaughter that much sooner. But there had to be something she could do. She would not, could not, admit Norman Birdwell had won.

  Coreen stared from the pentagram to Norman and back to the drying paint. It was real, all of it, and while she’d always believed, now she began to believe. Her mouth suddenly dry and her heart beating so loud she felt sure the skinny geek should be able to hear it, she tried harder to free her right leg. When Norman had tied her back up after taking her to the bathroom, she’d worked a bit of slack into the socks. Ever since, while he’d puttered about doing who knew what, she’d been working them looser, stretching them little by little. Sooner or later, she’d have her leg free. For now, her mind refused to deal with anything beyond that point.

  The five candles Norman placed around the pentagram were new. Red and yellow spirals had been much easier to find than black candles of any description. He kept the grimoire with him, tucked under an arm when he needed his hands free, clutched close to his chest when he didn’t. He had begun to feel incomplete without it, as if it had become a part of him, even taking it to Canadian Tire that afternoon when he bought the new hibachi. Holding it, he knew that his wildest dreams were about to come true.

  The throbbing in his head had become louder, wilder, and more compelling. Its tone varied with his actions . . . or possibly his actions varied with the tones—Norman was no longer entirely sure.

  As he pulled the tiny barbecue out of its box and set it up by the balcony door, he checked to see if his audience was impressed. The older woman had closed her eyes again, her glasses having slipped down far enough for him to see over them, but she was still breathing and that was really all that counted. He’d be pissed if she died before he killed her ’cause then he’d have to use Coreen and he had other plans for her. Coreen didn’t look impressed either, but she looked scared and that would do for now.

  “You’re not laughing.” He prodded her in the back with the grimoire, noting with pleasure the way she flinched away from its touch, then squatted to set up the three charcoal briquettes.

  “There’s nothing to laugh at, Norman.” Coreen twisted around in her chair. He was a little behind her and to one side and she hated not being able to see what he was doing. Although she wanted to shriek, she tried to keep her voice from rising too high. You should talk softly to crazy people—she’d read that in a book. “Look, this has gone far enough. Ms. Nelson needs a doctor.” A little pleading wouldn’t hurt. “Please, Norman, you let us go and we’ll forget we ever saw you.”

  “Let you go?” It was Norman’s turn to laugh at her. He didn’t think the Demon Lord could give him anything he’d enjoy so much. He laughed at her the way everyone, all his life, had laughed at him. It grew and grew and she shrank back und
er the weight of it. He felt it echo in the grimoire, felt his body begin to reverberate with the sound, felt it wrap in and around the pulsing in his head.

  “Norman!” It wasn’t very loud, but it was enough to cut the laughter off. All right, so maybe there is power in a name. I’ve been wrong about other things lately. Vicki tried to focus on the young man’s face, couldn’t manage it, and gave up. The insane hysteria of the laughter had stopped. That was the result she’d spent her strength for and she’d have to be content with the victory she’d won.

  His brows drawn down into a deep vee, Norman scowled at the woman on the floor. He was glad she was going to die. She’d chased the laughter away. Still scowling, he lit the candles and flicked off the overhead light. Not even Coreen’s quick intake of breath at the sudden twilight was enough to put him in a better mood. Not until he got the briquettes burning and the air in the room grew blue with the smoke from a handful of frankincense, did his expression lighten.

  Only one thing left to do.

  When Vicki next opened her eyes she came closer to panic than she had at any time that night.

  When did it get so dark?

  She could see five flickering points of light. The rest of the room, Coreen, Norman—gone. And the air . . . it smelled strange, heavy, it hurt to breathe.

  Dear God, am I dying?

  She tried to move, to fight, to live. Her arms and legs were still bound. That reassured her, slowed her heart and slowed her breathing. If she was tied, she wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  The lights were candles, could be nothing else, and the air reeked of incense. It must have begun.

  She didn’t see Norman approach, didn’t even realize he was there until he gently pushed her glasses up her nose. His fingers were warm as he wrestled with her arms and pushed the ties back to expose her left wrist. She thought she could see the faint line where Henry had fed the night before and knew she was imagining it. In this light, at this time, she couldn’t have seen the wound if her entire hand had been chopped off.

  She felt the cold edge of a blade against her skin and its kiss as it opened a vein. And then another. Not the safe horizontal cuts she and Tony had made but vertical cuts that left her wrist awash in darkness and a warm puddle filling the hollow of her palm.

  “You have to stay alive through the invocation,” Norman told her, pulling her arms away from her body, making them part of the symbols surrounding the pentagram. “So I’m only going to do one wrist. Don’t die too fast.” She heard the knife clatter down on the floor behind her, and his footsteps move away.

  Fucking right I won’t. . . . The anger tired her so she let it go. Essentials only now, never say die. Especially not when die meant bleeding to death on a dirty floor and delivering her city, not to mention the world, into Armageddon. Sagged over onto her left side, her heart could be no more than four inches off the floor. By concentrating everything she had remaining on her right arm, she managed to get it under her left, elevating the bleeding wrist as high as possible. Maybe not four inches, but it would help to retard the flow.

  Pressure’ll be low. . . . I could hold on for . . . hours.

  It might only be a matter of time, but as much as possible she’d make it her time, not his.

  Through her ear pressed against the floor by the weight of her head, all she could hear was a soft rhythmic hissing, like the sound of the ocean in a shell. She lay listening to that, ignoring the chanting rising around her.

  He could have identified the specific building in the complex even without the address. The power surrounding it, the expectation of evil, caused every hair on Henry’s body to rise. He was out of the car before it had completely skidded to a stop and through the locked door into the lobby a moment later. The reinforced glass was not thick enough to stop the concrete planter he heaved through it.

  Norman spat the last discordant word into the air and let his left hand fall down to the open grimoire balanced on his right. His throat hurt, his eyes stung, and he was trembling with excitement, waiting for the telltale shimmer of air that would signify his demon was arriving.

  It never came.

  One second the pentagram was empty and the throbbing beat out a glorious rhythm inside his head. A second later, with no warning, it was full, and only echoes remained in the silence.

  Norman cried out and fell to his knees, the grimoire forgotten as he raised both hands to cover his face.

  Coreen whimpered and sagged against her bonds, consciousness fleeing what it couldn’t accept.

  Vicki attempted to breathe shallowly through her teeth, glad for the first time she couldn’t really see. Every fear she’d ever held, every nightmare, every terror from childhood to yesterday came with the ill-defined shape in the pentagram. She clamped her teeth down on the urge to wail and used her physical condition—the pain, the weakness—to insulate her from the Demon Lord. I hurt too much now to be hurt any further.

  The thing in the pentagram seemed amused by that.

  Colors ran together in ways that colors could not, creating shades that seared the heart and shades that froze the soul, and they built a creature with blond curls and blue eyes and very, very white teeth. Slender and hermaphroditic, it laid no claim to either sex while claiming both of them.

  “Enough,” said the Demon Lord, and the terror damped down to a bearable level. It checked the boundaries of its prison and then the lives around it. Coreen, it ignored, but by Vicki’s side of the pentagram it squatted and smiled approvingly at the patterns of blood on the floor.

  “So, you are the life that opens the way for my power.” It smiled and Vicki gave thanks she could see only a shadowy outline of the expression. “But you’re not being very cooperative, are you?”

  Only the non responsiveness of her muscles gave her time to fight the compulsion that she lower her bleeding wrist back to the floor. A sudden shock of recognition lent her strength. “I . . . know you.” Not the face, not this creature specifically, but the essence, oh. the essence she knew.

  “I know you, too.” Something writhed for a second in the Demon Lord’s eyes. “And this time, I’ve won. It’s over, Victoria.”

  She really hated that name. “Not till . . . fat lady sings.”

  “A joke? In your position? I think that your strength might be better spent pleading for mercy.” It stood and dusted its hands against its thighs. “A pity I can’t allow you to live. I’d get such pleasure from your reactions to my plans.”

  All Vicki wanted at that moment was enough saliva left to spit.

  It turned to Norman, still cowering by the hibachi. “Stand!”

  Scooping up the grimoire, holding the book like a talisman, Norman rose shakily to his feet.

  “Release me!”

  Norman’s lower lip went out and his expression grew decidedly mulish. “No. I called you. I am your master.” He had the power, not this thing. He did.

  The Demon Lord’s laughter blew the windows out of the apartment.

  As though there were strings attached to his shoulders and the Demon Lord was the puppeteer, Norman began to jerk toward the pentagram. “No,” he whined. “I am the master.”

  He’s fighting, Vicki realized. She would have expected his will to be swept aside like so many matchsticks. Conceit and self-interest made a stronger defense than she thought.

  As Henry stepped out of the elevator onto the ninth floor, the smell of blood almost overwhelmed him. It rose over the pervasive demon-taint and drew him to the door he needed. The door was locked.

  The metal held. The wood of the doorjamb splintered and gave.

  Vicki heard the noise as though it came from a great distance away. She recognized it, understood its significance, but just couldn’t seem to care much.

  The Demon Lord heard the noise as well but ignored it. It kept its attention on Norman who stood inches from the edge of the pentagram, sweating and shaking and losing the battle.

  The word seemed mostly consonants and it tore at the ears as it to
re at the throat.

  The Demon Lord snarled and turned, its patina of humanity slipping as it moved. When it saw Henry, its features settled and it smiled. “You call my name, Nightchild, are you the champion here? Have you come to save the mortal world from my domination?”

  Henry felt it stroke at his mind and swatted the touch away, his own snarl barely less demonic as he answered. “Go back to the pit, spawn of Satan! This world is not yours!”

  “Spawn of Satan?” The Demon Lord shook its head. “You are showing your age, Henry Fitzroy. This world does not believe in the Dark Lord. I will enjoy teaching it differently and you cannot stop me from doing exactly as I wish.”

  “I will not allow you to destroy this world without a fight.” He didn’t dare take his eyes from the Demon Lord’s to look for Vicki although he knew it was her blood scent that filled the room.

  “Fight all you wish.” It bowed graciously. “You will lose.”

  “NO!” Norman stood, splay legged, grimoire tucked under his arm, clutching the AK-47 with enough force to turn his fingers white. “I called your name! I AM THE MASTER! YOU WILL NOT IGNORE ME! YOU WON’T! YOU WON’T! YOU WON’T!”

  The short burst sprayed across the pentagram, almost cutting the Demon Lord in half. Howling with rage, it lost control of its form, becoming again the maelstrom of darkness it had been at the beginning.

  Firearm violation, Vicki though muzzily, as the slugs tore up the kitchen cabinets behind her.

  The noise startled Coreen into full consciousness. With panicked strength she began to fight against her bonds, throwing herself violently from side to side, bouncing the chair legs inches off the floor at a time.

  Like night falling in on itself, the Demon Lord reformed and the temperature in the apartment plunged. It smiled, showing great curved teeth it hadn’t had before. Once again, Norman began jerking toward it.