It stopped to look at Vivian. The things feeding on her immediately pulled off and backed away. She collapsed, but it caught her by the hair as she dropped and raised her back up.
She was healed already, the gashes and rips all closed. The creature ran a finger down her face, almost caressing it, then yanked her head back by her hair and bit out her throat.
Blood gushed out in a plume. The thing thrust its jaw in the air and swallowed, savoring the mouthful.
With a snap of its head, it looked through the wall. Straight at Hatcher. Strings of blood dripped from its lips, its mouth widened into a smile that was almost crocodilian.
Forcing himself to disregard the pain, Hatcher bucked wildly against the Sedim, shaking and yanking. His face darkened, veins and tendons protruding in his neck as he strained. He heard a scream, someone sounding like they were on fire, realized it was him.
“Relax,” Valentine said, glancing back. “She can’t be killed in there. Beyond that wall, everything is forever.”
The thing held her by her hair, her body dangling, throat torn out. She was reaching to touch it, brushing her hands over the wound in a mindless panic. She was unable to breathe, choking on her own blood.
“Stop it, Valentine!” Hatcher said, his body finally letting loose his lungs and sagging. “Bring her out!”
“Out of my hands, I’m afraid.” Valentine dipped his head toward the wall. “Talk to him.”
Hatcher was breathing in huffs now, chest heaving, jaw clenched.
“That’s not even Hell you’re seeing, by the way,” Valentine said. “It’s more like damnation’s green room. There’s probably elevator music playing.”
“You can have me, okay? I won’t even fight it! Just let her go!”
Valentine peered back through the cordon of Sedim. “Honestly, brother, I can’t. She’s theirs now. This ring is the only way out, and I’ve already promised it in exchange for . . . other considerations. If it makes you feel any better, you’ll be joining her momentarily.”
He turned back and jutted his chin at Sankey. “It’s time.”
Sankey nodded. He squared himself to the wall and pressed his arm into it, taking Valentine’s with it. The arms sank together, submerging into black Jell-O, stopping at the shoulders.
Asmodeus let go of Vivian’s hair and took a long, deliberate step toward them. It raised a hand, reaching toward Valentine. Reaching for the ring.
Hatcher clamped his eyes shut. He could only think of one thing to try, had no idea if it would work. Wasn’t even sure if he wanted it to.
There were two Sedim between him and them, one directly in front of the other. Hatcher began to pull again, less violently this time, trying not to trigger too much of a reaction. The pain was excruciating, but he only needed them to tense up. To become unmovable.
Beyond the wall, Asmodeus took hold of Valentine’s hand with huge fingers like curved daggers, fingers Hatcher realized were similar to Sankey’s, only more numerous. The demon slid the ring off of Valentine’s finger.
Hatcher filled his lungs with air, held it there. It wasn’t much of a plan, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
I’m so sorry, Vivian.
With an abrupt jerk of his body, he swung his legs up, pulling his knees to his chest, and exploded them out, smashing his heels into the Sedim in front of him.
The Sedim he kicked whipped forward, head snapping back, slamming into the one in front of him. That one stumbled, trying to catch its balance, head and shoulder lowered, plowing ahead. It rammed into Sankey.
Without a sound, Sankey disappeared through the wall. An orange flash merging into the ebony. Hatcher caught a brief glimpse of Asmodeus, hideously intelligent eyes flaming as the demon looked up. The next instant he caught sight of Vivian, just healed again, still in the clutches of dark creatures, a flicker of understanding breaking through the terror on her face.
And then the wall was just a wall. Solid, opaque. Nothing but smooth black rock.
Only this rock had a middle-aged man sticking out of it, his arm buried past the shoulder, part of his face submerged with it. Like someone stuck in solid black ice. He was pushing against the wall with his other hand, letting out a scream more painful than Hatcher could ever recall hearing. And he’d heard plenty.
The Sedim, including the ones gripping Hatcher’s arm, seemed stunned. They stared at the spot where Sankey had stood a moment before, looking on in disbelief. Confused. A low groan started to build among them, rising in volume, until they all threw their heads back and howled in unison.
Hatcher felt the grip on his right arm loosen a bit. Just enough for him to yank it free. The pain in both of them made it hard to even move, but he knew he wouldn’t have another chance. Summoning all the strength he could, he lifted his foot and gave a violent stomp to the side of that Sedim’s leg. As soon as it released him, he swung around with his free arm and smashed the one still holding him in its batlike face. Once, twice, three times in rapid succession.
The blows seemed to daze it, but only just. It maintained its grip, shaking its head and snarling. It reared back with one arm, talons ready to slash. Its eyes grew wide in a show of fury.
Hatcher launched one more strike, a straight right, only this time, he pointed his index and middle finger, pressed together as one and slightly curved for strength, and stabbed them straight into the creature’s eye.
They penetrated down to the knuckle and stayed there for a full second before he tugged his hand back. The thing finally let go, both hands shooting to its face.
He spun to defend against the other one, certain even a well-executed heel stomp to the knee like he’d just delivered wouldn’t incapacitate one of these things, only to find that it was limping away. Joining the rest of them as they crowded around the wall. Valentine was still screaming, yelling something unintelligible, but the sound was muffled by the press of creatures around him. A demonic mosh pit. Clamoring for their idol.
“They’re mourning.”
Hatcher spun to his left at the voice. It was Deborah, standing next to him. She looked down at his hand, blood and tissue dripping off his fingers, and wagged her chin.
“You really are a nuisance, you know that?”
He braced himself, but she made no move. Nothing in her demeanor suggested she was planning anything.
He realized the other Carnates were beginning to disperse. They were breaking up into pairs and groups, shrugging and whispering, looking like people who just realized a show had been canceled.
“Vivian,” Hatcher said, a demand, not a question.
Deborah rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Look at that wall! Do you really think anything is getting through there? Any chance you had of getting her back—and I gave you that chance—went away when the Path did.”
Hatcher said nothing. His fists clenched and unclenched as he contemplated whether snapping her neck would kill her.
“Don’t look at me that way. None of this would have happened if she had just stuck with the deal. But like I told you, she got cold feet and tried to back out.”
“As if you would have honored it. Why don’t we ask Lori how trustworthy you are?”
“You know very little, Hatcher. She was trying to save your soul. The bargain was, we’d see what we could do. The person we’d have double-crossed was Valentine, not her. Once Asmodeus got the ring, what that overbearing boor wanted was irrelevant. As for the other woman . . .” She glanced up, eyes toward the profane idol of human and animal parts suspended near the platform. “That was Valentine’s thing, not ours. We tried to tell him that part wasn’t necessary, not if he opened the Path, but he was such a nervous Nellie. Not wanting to leave anything to chance. The whole scheme was his idea, so we had to do it his way. Mostly.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Believe what you want. The ring only works with a human. Few other than him would be willing to hand it over to Asmodeus in exchange for your body and Hell on ea
rth. Nobody but Valentine could have engineered a plan that would have worked. He was essential, to a point, but frankly, he’s an ass. Bossy and overbearing. We owed him no allegiance.”
Hatcher stared at the throng of Sedim. They were silent now, hunched over. Upset.
“Everything you told me really was true, wasn’t it? That’s how you tricked me. With the truth.”
“Yes. For this to work, none of us could actually lie. Not when it counted, anyway. Not about the ring. It was part of Solomon’s spell. He was a cunning bastard.”
“Bartlett?”
“The real deal. He’s probably bunkered down in the mountains by now, armed to the teeth, a small army with him, waiting for Armageddon. He’s been planning for years. All it took was a little pharmaceutically enhanced smoke, and he was hearing the word of God.”
Hatcher said nothing.
“Oh, and your nephew is safe in his mother’s arms, halfway to Montana by now. Just like we promised her he’d be. All she had to do was dig down and play her role. Quite the little method actress. Though I’m going to guess sleeping with you wasn’t too much of a stretch. Don’t be too hard on her. We promised her your body would still be alive and kicking when it was all over. We didn’t say anything about your soul. But I guess that point is moot.”
Hatcher let the information leach down through the layers of his mind. They’d tricked him by being honest, knowing he’d assume it was all a lie. How easy it had been. Plant a bunch of pictures of the general on the internet to look like they were hiding the real ones. Plant a fake death certificate. All an illusion. They didn’t need to lie. They could bank on him deceiving himself.
“You don’t seem all that upset, considering I messed up all your plans.”
“Oh, you didn’t mess up that much. Sure, it would be nice to raise Asmodeus. But we’ve released him from the spell, given him the ring. He’ll be more than grateful. The person who’s upset is Valentine. He was the one who was supposed to get a new life in your body. Of course, he’s got more to worry about now, facing eternal torment and all that. And I’m sure Mr. Sankey didn’t wake up this morning with a one-way trip to damnation on his mind. But us? Hell’s chief executive officer is pleased. And the second stage of the Prefiguration is complete. That’s all that matters.”
“The what?”
“I’d love to sit and explain, but at the moment, unfortunately, there’s another promise we have to keep.”
Hatcher looked at her, trying to infer what she meant. Her expression was unreadable.
“She’s talking about me,” Edgar said.
The large knife in his hand flashed as he spun it once around his palm. It was the same one he’d given Hatcher in the car. He flicked his free wrist, and another blade appeared in it.
Deborah backed away, cocking her head to the side with a shrug and pursing her lips.
“That was the one thing they had to promise me, that if you lived, if anything went wrong, they’d let me kill you myself. So I either got to see you dragged to Hell or got to send you there personally. All I had to do was feed that tyrant Bartlett a bunch of disinformation. And play the role of a lifetime with you.”
Edgar swept the blades in a crossing motion over his chest several times, audibly slicing the air, and twirling each over his knuckles with a flourish at the end of each move. Two different knives, vastly different sizes, but he had no problem manipulating them without a hitch.
“This blade, by the way? Fitted with a custom tracker in the handle. Let everyone know exactly when you’d be arriving.”
Hatcher didn’t respond. He should have realized something was fishy with that knife. But it hardly seemed like the stupidest mistake he’d made, and he figured he didn’t have time to beat himself up over it. Not now.
He bent his knees, adopting a defensive posture. He circled away, continuing to face Edgar as the man moved toward him.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Edgar said.
Hatcher’s eyes never left the blades, but his mind tried to follow the words. He wasn’t sure what they meant. They didn’t make sense.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m exactly who I said I was. Edgar Evans.”
The name meant nothing. He searched his recollection but was certain he’d never met the man before a few days ago.
“Maybe you remember a good friend of mine. A really good friend.”
Something vague flickered in Hatcher’s memory, something about their first meeting.
“His nickname for me was Mr. E.”
Davis. The guy who had fucked up Operation Rose Garden. The guy who cost them the mission, whose antics resulted in three civilians dead and two team members in a medevac chopper. Hatcher was the only one who knew Davis had left their flank open and blown their position by sneaking off to take a piss behind a hut. Where he’d also happened to sneak a cigarette.
And where he’d disturbed a family, a family he ended up killing, trying to keep them quiet. First the man, then the wife, then the little boy who’d seen him kill his mother. All with a knife.
Corporal Ronald Davis’s story was he’d left his position to investigate something, stumbled across a family the Taliban had killed, encountered enemy fire. It was complete bullshit, and Hatcher knew it.
Why don’t you ever talk about women? the guys always asked him. Because I like a little mystery, he’d always say with a secretive smile.
“You want to kill me because your BF was court-martialed? I thought they let him plead out to three months and a BCD to make it all go away. That’s a slap on the wrist.”
Edgar narrowed his eyes at Hatcher. He held his gaze that way for several beats.
“He killed himself the first week behind bars,” he said.
Hatcher said nothing. He hadn’t known. He’d accepted a special duty assignment he’d been offered, one until then he’d been planning to turn down, and left the unit because of that incident. His new job made him the kind of asset no one talked about. Or to. Regular army news didn’t even reach him much the first year in the field, let alone gossip.
Then again, even if he had known, he wouldn’t have cared. Davis was an arrogant fuckup, a guy who killed a family of unarmed peasants and tried to cover it up.
Of course, that wasn’t exactly an argument he could make to the man’s revenge-minded lover, even if he were in the mood to defend his actions.
Edgar scraped the edges of the knives against each other, creating a smooth sound of sliding metal. A sharp sound.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to hide who you are? Skulk around in the shadows because you’re different? Conceal something you want to be proud of? The way everyone else is? Sure, now they say they’ve repealed that. But do you really think anything has changed?”
“What happened to Davis had nothing to do with that.”
“No? Are you going to pretend you didn’t know what he was? That you would have acted the same way if he’d been one of the boys? If he hadn’t been different?”
There was no way to answer that, so Hatcher didn’t. He’d had his suspicions about Davis but hadn’t given it much thought. Had those suspicions influenced how he’d treated the man? How he’d judged him? He suddenly had a flash of a different scenario, one where Davis couldn’t rely on his teammates, one where he’d been forced to do things alone, one where cigarettes were taken in solitude, because you couldn’t trust those around you not to make a big deal of it. He pictured a soldier surprised by an irate Afghani, shouting in the night. A panic response, wife screaming, child wailing. The cover of night being pierced, certain to alert the target. Him making a split-second decision. Maybe doing it to save himself, maybe doing it to save his teammates. Was it possible? Hatcher couldn’t say. He’d never considered it before. Now didn’t seem like the best time to start.
“You John Wayne types,” Edgar continued. “So wrapped up in your own masculinity, wearing it like a costume to hide your failures, your ins
ecurities . . .” He twirled the blades again in his hands, spinning them first in his palm, then tumbling them over his fingers. “You think life is all one big action film, where you’re the hero. You don’t care about anything but feeding your ego. You think you can just save the day, then ride off into the sunset. Well, you’ve watched too many movies.”
The blades made a whiffling sound as Edgar slashed the air in front of him, carving a complex, overlapping pattern in rapid strokes. He started forward, arms still moving like a threshing machine.
Hatcher stabbed his hand into his pocket, withdrew it in the same fluid motion.
“And you obviously haven’t watched enough,” he said, pointing the mini-gun and pinching the trigger.
The pop sounded like a firecracker. The tiny flash scalded Hatcher’s finger and a whiff of gunpowder braced his nostrils. Edgar flinched, then stood motionless, hands swooping low and hanging there, looking confused. After a few seconds, both knives slipped to the ground and he raised his hands to his throat. A rope of blood flowed out of the corner of his mouth and down his chin.
He gurgled once and sank to his knees. Hatcher couldn’t tell if he was trying to cough or vomit, but he was definitely bleeding. A lot. The shot had caught him directly in the mouth.
I knew the moment I read that note I was going to have to kill you, you little shit.
A sharp noise broke Hatcher’s focus. Someone clapping. He swung around to see Soliya, slowly giving him mock applause.
“Always a surprise when a big man packs such a small gun in his pants.”
Hatcher glanced down at the tiny weapon in his palm, then stuffed it back into his pocket.
“What are we going to do with you?” she said.
“Vivian,” he said. “Tell me how to get her back.” He took in a breath, swallowed. “Please.”
Soliya frowned, dimpling her cheek. “We really don’t know of any way. You could pick up where Valentine left off.” She glanced over to the wall. The Sedim were huddled low, crouched down as if in prayer. Valentine’s body hung limp from its shoulder.
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