by Riley Mason
Whatever the cop wants, he has no interest in cuffing me. Instead he’s holding my hands together with my thumbs laced into one another. “What is this?” I ask.
“Shut up,” he says back to me.
It’s when his fingers actually touch my skin that I realize it’s an Identical. I didn’t know that there were any of them still running around this city. I can feel my skin burn as it touches me.
“I’m taking you to Sebastian,” he tells me.
Chapter 52
I sit in the van that I got into willingly which was either dumb or brilliant, I wasn't entirely sure which one made more sense just yet. As I take the seat, the Identical hands me a cell phone and shuts the door. I look at the screen and I see an international number based out of London scrolled across the screen.
“Hello,” I say into it.
“How are you back from the dead?” the voice on the other end asks me.
“Who is this?” I ask, I don’t know who Bash is but I’m sure it's not an enemy. I would’ve found out by now. Whoever the Identical was left me armed with two weapons.
“Shame to hear you ask that,” he says to me. “We had a really good friendship at the time, are you alright?” he asks me.
I’m not entirely sure how to answer. I still don’t know who I’m speaking too and I’m doing it in the back of a van. “Fine,” I say back dryly.
“There’s not to many of us left, it’s good to hear that. I heard the news that Gabriel finally caught up to you I’m glad you made it out alive of that. You were always a tough chick.” He paused.
“What do you want with me?” I ask and I suddenly sound softer and more cautious then I want too.
“To keep you alive a little bit longer,” he tells me. “The Identical you’re with was turned. He’s trustworthy as much as you might want him dead. He’s going to give you the information, I don’t want it given out over the phone. I need to see you, there’s a lot that you and I need to speak about.”
I want to tell him that I don’t know him, that I have no idea who he is or how I know him but I decide that I don’t want to do that. For some reason, something inside of me is pushing to trust which is strange because for what I know about myself, I don’t do that all that often. I can’t fight the feeling that I do know him and that there is something that I need to know.
“I’ll get the information,” I tell him.
The line goes dead and I bang my fist against the door and the man opens it up and lets me out. “Do you have transportation?” he asks me as he hands me another card. This one has a full address on it.
I look up at him, I know my eyes aren’t trusting but the cop doesn’t seem to care all that much about how I look at him. “Go to him, you’ll be safe there. Are you armed?”
I see him move for his own gun but I stop him. “I’m armed.”
“Then best of luck.”
Chapter 53
By the time I pulled the car into the warehouse, the demon was gone. Back somewhere buried inside of my body where it tried to tie my memories together for me.
As I got out of the car, I drew my sidearm and held it close buried in both my hands and I walked. I could hear nothing but silence and the occasional drip from a loose wet pipe that leaked down onto the floor, the sound caught in the echo of the open room.
“What are you doing here?” a man’s voice came from behind me.
I turn and kept my gun raised in the air. “You know why I’m here Azrael,” I said.
“Why do you need her?” he asked me.
“Why do you?”
“You're in so over your head darling,” he said to me.
I wanted to pull the trigger but something didn't let me. Some block in my finger didn't allow me to pull back.
“You think Gabriel and this wraith can really be controlled?” it asked me.
“They shouldn't be allowed to walk free,” I said back to him and saw a deepening look fall over his face.
“You think what my sister told you about the True Night is all there is to this. That all their doing is trying to get the gates opened once and for all despite that stupid effort the war gave you some hope for. That war is long over sweetheart.”
“Some of us are ready to fight it again,” I remind him.
“But most of you can’t. Not this time around. We’ve learned way too much from last time. Now there are protectors, spots in your world that are making sure the crevices stay open for us to leak out of them.”
I shoot but he moves out of the way and the bullet collides with the wall at the far end of the warehouse.
“I thought you had some brains especially since your body is holding my sister hostage,” he said.
“Your sister is more than welcome to get out anytime she wants,” I remind him.
A disgusted look formed on his face. “Is that what she told you? I guess maybe those memories gaps are bigger than Gabriel realized. If you don’t know something that big then maybe there are more ways than we thought to win this second coming.”
I want to shoot again but that lock on my finger is back and I can’t pull it no matter how much strength I’m trying to flood my hand with.
“Give me what I want to know then,” I tell him.
“Honey you know how this works. You don't trade with a demon if there’s nothing at the other end of that bargain.”
“Your sister,” I start.
“Can’t help you here. Demon negotiations are rigid in how their performed.”
Before I can open my mouth again, a gun goes off but it’s not mine. I’m sure of it. I can see a whole splash out of Azrael’s neck as black blood spit on the ground. I see smoke leaving his mouth like a wildfire spread out across a field of dead branches. A glow and a hiss of red show in his eye and he vanishes in a wave of smoke.
All my limbs are returned to me. I can feel the gun still in my hand. I know that the bullet came from close, the sound was still rattling around in the warehouse. “Arinna,” a voice calls to me.
I turn and see a man with a scarred face running towards me, a heavy black beard on him, a large man with muscles and tattoos. “We need to get the hell out of here.”
I turn and look down at the floor and can see a woman lying there on the ground. She’s badly beaten, bruises and blood cover what shows of her skin and what’s dried into her clothes. For a moment, I’m struck with vague guilt and curiosity and then the next words out of my mouth I’m not entirely sure are mine. “She needs to come with us.”
Chapter 54
We barely talk until we pull in a driveway somewhere up in Connecticut off i95 but somewhere in the woods where the highway doesn’t meet city but rather trees and forest. We’re at least an hour and a half out of it at this point.
The man that had fired a shot was another Identical. He kept the woman in the backseat taped and unconscious, sprinkling drops of holy water in her mouth as he went.
When we parked, he grabbed hold of her and brought her into the house.
The inside of the house looked like some strange cross between an occult bookshop and an armory. There were weapons all over the wall that were mixed with old volumes and texts and scrolls scattered around the walls.
I watched as Bash put the girl down on a table and quickly lit the four candles at each end of the table and watched as they glowed a wicked black.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, my hands wrapped around my chest.
“She’s possessed, she's not too far gone, I can bring her back but the demon is trying to latch onto her soul. Your boy Azrael is a Herder, he doesn't need a body for himself, he seeks them out, finding new Identicals to get his brothers up here to this side.”
Bash is younger then I think he would be or I should remember him to be. Maybe not everyone that was in the war was older when it happened. I didn’t think that I was the only one that fought in the war, it's strange to see that after all this time I still have an ally somewhere. Part of me thought they were all killed off
with my memory or by their own suicides or overdoses.
I watch as he reaches a muscled arm into a bowl of water and cups it and drops it on her face and steam rise up. Cuts form on her face and then heal themselves. A voice, deeper than a voice that should belong in a female vocal chords leaks out of her.
Bash speaks in Latin and the woman on the table is writhing in pain. It almost looks like she’s on fire.
“There’s some salt by the front window, I need you to salt the door and window panes,” he says to me and I turn and do it. I trust him even though I’m not entirely sure why.
I go to the bag on the floor, the one that’s marked rock salt and cut it open and begin to pour. I cover all the landings to doorways and windows that I can, as sparingly as I can but then I decide that excess is the better way to do it. I doubt Azrael is dead and I know demons, they aren’t restricted by distance like humans are. It wouldn't be beyond him to show up and be waiting there in the woods until one of us slips up and he can get her back.
The sounds of the screams are louder now and I hurry back into the room, I see her hovering above the table. Bash is standing there, his hand out in front of him, his eyes closed, his face tied to whatever thoughts and words were coming out of her mouth even though she couldn't hear them.
Slowly the girl lowered back down to the table and the screams subsided. I watch him go to a cup, this one smaller than the one that he had pulled the holy water from. From his fingers I could see the red stuck to his skin. “What is that?” I ask.
“My blood, the blood of an ordained, it needs to rest in her and block the path of the demons’ way in,” he said as he rubbed his fingers over the girl's lips. “It’s banished but I don’t know how far it’s gone off course.” Bash lays his hand on her head and her body shudders but then it calms instead of fights. “Give her time now,” he tells me as he washes his hand in a dish that’s filled with ice water to get his own blood off his fingers.
When he’s done he turns away from me. I have a thousand questions for him.
“How did the Identical find me or better yet, how is an Identical ordained?” I ask him as my eyes pass over the girl laying on the table. I want to move my hand closer, it’s been a long time since I exercised a body and I never like the feeling that came after it.
“I wasn’t the only one that was after you,” he said to me, his face cold, the grey in his eyes almost glowed even in the massive shadows that covered the house. Bash is big, wide, attractive, and muscular. I put him just about at six feet maybe an inch more and he’s strong. I know from experience that it’s not easy to lift and handle a demon. I can see tattoos on his body with scars on part of his forearm and scratches that were dug into his neck.
“We hunted together?” I asked him.
“For a long time, yea,” he said back to me, I see sadness in there, something different in how he answers that question.
“Where are we?” I ask him looking around the house again.
“A converted Chaser safe house. There aren’t too many of us anymore, no reason for the safe-houses to be too close together anymore.”
“Why is that?” I’m curious. “Why did so many of them change after this war ended, there was still work to be done.”
I see his eyes change and I know it's not the reflex from the exorcism. There’s something else in there that he doesn’t want out but I can’t rule out it's my own paranoia acting up either. “You can only condition a soul to deal with so much. Most of us have seen more than a lifetime's worth of dark shit really early on in our lives. Killing something that’s dead already is a never-ending profession. A lot of them started to realize that they were just hit-men for the dead.”
“So, they just all ran and commit suicide, overdosed, got themselves killed in the process of adapting back to civilian life?” I’m sarcastic even though I don’t want to be, that’s my life that I’m speaking so cavalier about.
“You know how we live. Survival of the fittest, our souls are always on the bargaining table. Some of them wanted to sell out to the demons that were left, some of them couldn't deal with what their lives became, I can’t say I blame them.”
“Then why did you come to me tonight? Why not just contact me sooner?”
“Most of us didn’t know if you survived or not. When the gate was shut and they stopped pouring out, we all watched Gabriel syphon off some of what came out. No one knows exactly the deal he made but he had abilities before this war got jump-started. You were everything to him, he was obsessed with you. He took you from us and forced all of us to forget that you ever existed. Whatever deal he struck, whatever ability he got in exchange, his control over minds is almost beyond what demons can do.”
It’s hard to hear that. I knew by coming here, slices of my past would be presented to me because if Bash was an ally which I’m beginning to feel that he was, he would know this thing and he would speak freely about them because he would know those events were connected to me. It’s hard hearing that you’re a victim. That someone victimized you in a crowd of people that you swore were your brothers and sisters and not one of them had the power to do a thing about it, to leave you there raw, naked, and absent of any remorse.
“So that was it. He took me with me, convinced me to go by his side and just erased me from everyone’s memories. Why would he just take me, he fought for our race right? Against the demons?”
I watch as Bash runs his hand over his mouth like he’ll be able to see the words spelled out there for him. As he looks into my eyes, the signal that I give him tells him that there’s no such luck for that. I want to know, I need to, because in the end I don’t know what he has to say.
“No one knows,” he says and I can see a pain in him as he says it. “What level of demon he struck a deal with, what’s inside of him, or why he wanted you. A lot of what you did started to get public a few months after he took you. In the beginning we investigated you as a dark spirit or another demon on the loose, even an Identical. Look, no one blames you for what he made you do while he controlled you.”
Those words are like a knife cutting into my stomach and ripping up. It shoots my heart into the lower part of my throat and begs to bring tears to eyes that haven’t felt them in more years then I can count. It’s not that Bash is being cavalier about it, I can see the pain that's in him as he describes it but he can’t relate to what this is doing to me. To know that I was treated like a puppet for something else. That I became a slave to things that I’ve devoted my entire life to killing. I need a minute, a long one, I need to breath, I need to put my thoughts into an order that make sense.
“What did he make me do?” I say. I can’t even look him in the eye. My hand is on the back of a chair, I’m trying to control what little balance I have. “I need to know,” I say through shaking lips. “I need to hear it.”
“That wasn’t you,” Bash insists.
I don’t care what he thinks, this isn’t really his choice.
“FUCKING TELL ME!” I scream and the first tear in years that stretch back into the blackness of my own memory fall out of my eye and I can feel the blossom of red inside my face. I’m embarrassed, I’m ashamed, I’m more lost than I really ever thought I could get.
Chapter 55
I see him come to me, he wants to hold me, he wants to let me know that it wasn’t me again like that’ll push the stream of shit that’s flowing down my head carrying guilt and anger with it as it moves through my chest.
“Get the fuck away from me,” I say, swatting his hands away from me and backing up.
The tears are under control but my emotions are everywhere. I’ve spent years dulling them with prescriptions and it’s like they’re coming back in full force in defiance of me slaughtering them.
“It wasn’t your fault what he made you do,” Bash tells me again. His face has gone to stone. He doesn’t want me to see the regret on his face, I know it's in there though, I can see it, it’s so thick that I can almost taste it.
&
nbsp; “What did I do, what did that fuck make me do?!”
The hands of surrender went down, Bash wasn't trying to get near to me anymore. Instead there was a worry stretching on his face almost in slow motion. He didn’t think I was stable enough to hear what he was about to tell me, I can’t say that I blame him. I don’t know if I’m stable enough to hear it but I know I’m going to. I know that this is the closest that I’ve come to hearing things about the last few years and I’m not going to let my own heart be the obstacle that stops it, I don’t really care what it does to me.
“He had you kill off all the Identicals, everything that had a piece of a demon’s spirit inside of it, he made you kill it off. In the end, almost a hundred were killed in the time that he had you. Humans, spirits, he had you kill all of them.”
It’s a strange sensation that’s running through my body. I’ve killed before but because I had too. It’s because the supernatural doesn’t really beg a morale choice when the trigger is pulled. I did this, despite who was in my head at the time it was done, it was my flesh that killed these things. “How many?” I ask while I have enough control over myself to ask the question.
“Arinna,” he starts.
“How many Bash? How many before you guys took note of me? How many before the drunk and drugged up Chasers realized that I was a threat and wanted me dead, how fucking many was it.”
“Seventy-nine Identicals, that was the flesh count. Demons, the occult, could've been more you know they don’t leave evidence like that,” he said, it was quick, blunt, exactly how I wanted it to be, exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
“Then how did you remember me again? Why would you want to save someone that could do that?” I wonder.
“You’re not someone like that. You’re a strong girl Arinna, you’re a strong Chaser but that wasn’t you in there when he had you committing those murders. It wasn't you in control.”