by Riley Mason
“What does it?”
“Do you mean like demon blood, sacrifice,” she says back at me angrily.
“Then what do you want?!” I’m losing my patience now.
“The pit of Thra’vin,” she says. “That’s the only thing that can restore what I lost and the wraith is working quicker than I can find it.”
“What about him?” I ask looking to the general standing there.
“He’s not for me,” she says to me. “He’s for you.”
“I’m fine, I don’t need protection.”
“Your chewing antipsychotics to make sure that mind of yours doesn’t bleed out bad enough that someone can get control of you. This process, this entire ordeal comes with strings and realities that have to be respected,” she says to me. She looks at me and her eyes are glowing stronger than they were last time. “Do you know what it’s like to see all realities melded into one single series of visions and have no power to change or alter it. My control didn’t follow me to the surface, that pit is the only way to get it back.”
“So, you’re giving him to me?” I ask.
“I’m giving you a protection that you don’t have. Right now, your willingly allowing someone that you hate and despise, a demon to walk freely inside of your head and your allowing it to get a slice of your own memories back into your own hands.”
It sounded ridiculous coming out of her.
“He’ll help you find that pit. I’m protected as long as I’m left in here, away and cut off from the path of the wraith. I can’t reveal myself to it until I have those powers back inside of me.”
“How long do we have?”
“Less than a week before the third seal is broken and Lucifer can walk before he has control. That’s when the armies of hell will walk again on this surface and fight their way into heaven to dethrone the one they want revenge on.”
Chapter 89
Syllis and I are back in the car sitting right where it was parked before I walked into the alley and killed the demon. I reach into my pocket and pull out the pills that I had hidden in there and snap the cap off and take another dosage a few hours before the bottle wants me too.
“What’s step one,” I ask him, starting up the car and pulling out of the
spot. We’re heading down 7th now.
“I need to make contact with Azrael, I need to see the bar that he sent you too,” Syllis tells me.
“How did you wind up with her?” I ask. My eyes are getting heavy, I
can feel the pill going to work again on my immune system. “How does the Angel get stranded on our side.”
“Two hundred years I’ve been one of the seven. Killed by a set of demons and sent directly to Lucifer once I crossed over. I was stationed back here in your realm to ensure that demons had a path to follow once they got here. That they had someone to watch over them and that someone could instruct the others that are sent up to me.”
“Why did you trade sides?” I asked.
“The Angel is the one that oversees Lucifer on the other-side, it's only natural to serve the higher rank on this side.”
“So, she stole you?” I ask. “From Lucifer.”
“She did, I didn’t see the value in that path anymore and as a result I was exiled and branded an enemy and a traitor to Hell.”
I decide that I don’t want to know anymore. Everything he has given me is more than enough.
I pull up to the caution tape that's still over the bar and park the car. The rain is starting to pick up again. I get out, Syllis does the same and we move around back of a gate, I pick the lock and go back to the back room where they take out the garbage and all the dumps are. Back there is another lock to pick but I get through it and I take Syllis through.
I stand there looking at him as he walks. Nothing about the place is familiar to me. It’s as if it’s the first time that I’ve stepped foot in there. I don’t know what happened that night aside from the fact that I killed another flesh and blood, my second now because of a demon. I can’t deal with that weighing on my conscious. I can’t be a slut to a demon who is driving me to kill everyone that he doesn’t want.
Suddenly, as Syllis is looking at something on the floor, I remember something. I have no idea where it comes from but it plants in my head and I move to the opposite side of the bar where the bartender would work and find a lockbox. I kick it open with my heel and pull out Uzi that’s under there. I checked the clip and see that’s its filled to the brim before I snap it back into place.
“Find anything good?” I ask.
“Entry points,” he says to me.
“Of?”
“Where the demons were sent back,” he says touching the ground with his fingers. “There was more than one demon in control of you the night that you did this. This is too much for just one possession.”
“What do you mean?”
“Only a handful can send demons back without tools to do it. You did this with your bare hands and took on a bar of at least twenty, they should've killed you. Even with that type of shielding in your head, their persuasion should’ve been far more than your mind could hold onto.”
“So there’s more than one person pulling my strings.”
“I’d say two maybe three are responsible for this. The question is why and how your body is dealing with that stress.”
Chapter 90
Gabriel left the wraith on the hill as he took a small platoon into the Hummer, all of them loaded up with army fatigues, black Kevlar vests, and M-16s with all the dressings on them. There were five of them in the truck but it didn't matter for that, they were moving to explore a town that had just gotten killed. Every last one of them. This was the final sacrifice that had to be made before the third seal would show itself to him.
The Hummer trudged down the mountainside and into the town. Cars were collided in the middle of the street. Bodies fell exactly where they were when the wraith had called on them to die.
They parked in front of a small police station where they all got out, Gabriel standing there, his hand right in front of the curved clip, the other one on the handle with a finger on the trigger.
Now that they were out of the car they had to call to each other in hand signals only. Gabriel was specific to that point, he wanted hand signals and radio silence from here on out.
As they made their way through the main door of the precinct, the one precinct that was in the town, he saw that everyone was dead on floor, laying there, blood and spit running out of their mouths. All of them dead because the figure on the top of the hill wanted it that way.
Chapter 91
That night I can’t sleep. Every time that I close my eyes with the intention of putting some sleep into my body dreams take me to a place where that just isn’t possible. They’re unusual dreams. Not the ones that I’m used to. More often than not I can’t remember my dreams, I supposed on some level that has to do with my mind's ability to retain information. Things that are devised through certain parts of my brain never stick, they always seem to slide into some oblivion where they can’t be absorbed into actual memory. The only things that manages to take hold up there are things, tangible things that my eyes can actually see and my skin can actually touch.
Tonight, it’s different. It’s like my mind is being pulled out of my head and being put into something else entirely. I’m not myself, it's like my consciousness is moving around to wherever best services its purpose. It’s not a normal dream, that’ much I’m more than certain of. I also don't know how far Syllis is from me, it's not that he gives me the creeps but I don’t like having someone so attached to me. To see an importance that I can hold and I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s hard to have someone know me so intimately when I know so little about them.
I can see where I am though. Right now it looks like I’m perched in a tree looking down at a trailer that I can recognize.
It’s Bash’s.
For a time, I assume that he’s at the center
point of my dream because he’s called me and I haven’t bothered to call him back. This is just a little out of the league of my own understanding and right now my trust with anyone is severely strained. Someone just joined me from purgatory, I can say that I’m a little more than on edge and this goes just above what my daily routine would've been of drinking and hunting. Now it seems like it’s taking turns that I just can’t handle anymore.
As I watch though I can see Bash walk out of his trailer. He’s in jeans and a black undershirt. There’s anger in his eyes and I can see a sipper, a flash in his hand and he’s pulling back on it like he wants every single last drop that’s in there. There’s something else in his other hand. It’s a sawed-off shotgun, I recognize them because it's’ one of the choice weapons for the Chasers. For one reason or another, I think at one point it was all because everyone like the name and the look of it, now I’m sure that it just has to do with tradition more than anything.
As I’m perched in this tree looking down at him, even in the night I can see the red color his face and I hear his phone ring. I watch as he looks at the screen to see who’s calling him and I wonder if the anger that flushes his face again is because it’s not me on the other end of the line finally returning all the calls that he made to me. “I’m here,” he says into the line.
Over the course of the next few minutes all he does is agrees, disagrees, and say’s yes or no in somewhat of an orderly fashion. I’m sure at one point that its Gabriel who’s on the other end of that line. I figure no other person could keep someone like Bash that calm in the moment and make him savor all the anger that’s inside of him while its licking the inside of his body dying to come out.
Everything pauses when the phone leaves his ear and he closes the phone, and he screams out at the top of his lungs, “FUCK!” and after he throws the flask and throws the gun into the air, aims at something and fires off two shots that cut through the night like explosions. “I’m going to fucking kill that bitch,” he roars.
I see him go into his pocket again and this time he pulls out his phone with more eagerness then before. He’s more anxious to make this call then he was to pick the last one up and press it to his ear. As the figure on the tree I train my eyes and watch. “I want you to find this Arinna cunt and get her fucking ass to me, she can’t survive the next forty-eight hours.”
Chapter 92
When I wake up I have no idea where I am for a second. Part of me still expects to be perched on that tree overlooking the trailer where I saw Bash furiously firing his shotgun. There’s a cold sweat laced on my face and I wipe it off with the back of my hand.
I get out of bed and I walk through the place that I’m in for the night. There’s no sign of Syllis. I call his name out twice but I can’t find him anywhere and he’s not coming when I call out to him.
I have to do a lot of thinking in a very small amount of time. I know that I’m playing a very dangerous game when it comes to Bash and how much trust that I was willing to funnel into that relationship and what I thought his true intentions are now. Despite what happened to him and me in the past, the war and what had changed, he knew things about Gabriel that meant that he never should've trusted him but now here he was working for him. That was something that had passed through my mind with some elegance but now it seemed to be bulldozing right through my consciousness.
There were other factors to consider. How much mental persuasion was left inside of Gabriel for him to use. How far did it work, could it be accomplished through the phone or did he need to be there. There was that and the fact that I started to see the danger that I was really in. For whatever it was worth, everyone around me seemed to see the resemblance between the Angel of Death and me. There was some link that was holding us together that I didn't’ really seem to understand but everyone else seemed to have the right idea and no one was really speaking about it.
What I did know for certain is that the wraith was still summoning bodies and demons to its cause and I was still left with seals that had to be guarded so that I did not allow Lucifer and the Angel of Death to be separate. One needed the other to hold onto the control that needed to exist and to some extent, in that grand scheme, I played a role in that, whether big or small I played a role inside of it.
I decided that I had to go to Bash. I had to speak with him and I wasn't entirely sure if it was going to end there. The thought that Gabriel could've slipped something into his head to make sure that the second his eyes fell on me he would want to kill me, give his entire body to make sure that I was dead was a strong possibility. I knew about the phone call but I didn't’ know about the true content of the phone call. Anything could've been said and with that anything could have been advised and instructed.
I had to plan carefully but I wasn’t entirely sure what part of me would make it up there. Syllis had more than convinced me that there was something calling the shots in my head and that those things up there were conflicting with something else entirely, I already knew about the girl, the question now was what else was in there besides her brother. I don’t know who really knew the true story or how to decipher that any one entity was in charge at any single time. Azrael could've left some part of him up there too that summoned the demon killer that he wanted and that he set loose on the other Chasers.
I grab my handgun and my blades but my trust is with the handgun tonight. I have some feeling that that’s the one that I’m going to want to use for this. Somewhere, somehow someone needs to find a way to give me a truth, it doesn’t matter if it has to do with me or with someone else. There has to be a truth at the end of all this because I don’t think that my mind will be able to handle much more of this sharing. It’s going to break, I can already feel the cracks running through my subconscious.
Chapter 93
When I got into the car and pushed over the ignition, I didn’t drive right away. It wasn’t because I didn’t want too, it was because there was something else weighing on my mind.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my prescription, the one that I had threatened the therapist for. I slid the lid off the bottle and looked down into the damage I had done to the dosage already. There were more than a few days gone already and I hadn’t had it for that long.
I spilled out the bottle and dropped three into my hand and threw them between my jaws as my molars crushed them before my head could put up some objection to it. I needed one mind in control, that’s all it was, that’s all that I wanted. I wanted one mind at the head seat and to make sure that that one head was where it needed to be before I did this.
I backed out of the spot that locked in the Challenger and I drove.
I parked the car about a quarter mile from the house. The engine was way too loud to get closer than that. I didn’t know for sure how Bash slept, assuming that he was sleeping, Chasers usually got about an hour or two of rest per night if that assuming they weren’t out hunting. After the phone call that I saw I get, assuming that wasn’t just some stray dream, I doubt that he would close his eyes once tonight.
Rounding the last bit of trees that lined the quiet back country road by his trailer, my gun was already drawn and my eyes skimmed over where the moon spilled some of its light on the front dirt surrounding his trailers entranceway.
Nothing.
I went to the door and used one hand to squeeze the handle, I figured that it was going to be locked but I took the chance anyway and pulled out two needles from the inside pocket of my jacket and want to work on the lock. Within seconds, I had the deadbolt sliding backwards and I was in the house, resting the door on my shoulder as my hands locked on the gun slid into the house.
I see him there, sitting in one of the chairs we had our first conversation in after I had found him after the war had ended. He was there, his back towards me, his head slouched like he was sleeping, a glowing television danced scenes from some show in front of him spreading light throughout the room.
I wasn’t sure if the pills were
doing my body any justice, it was working on instinct I just wasn’t entirely sure whose instinct that it was but the gun was stuck in my hand and that familiar anger that swelled inside of me before I made a kill, that familiar slick and wet feeling somewhere inside my chest reappeared.
The nozzle of the gun pressed to the back of his skull but I didn't’ feel a shudder, instead, the gun fell as the figure that it was perched up against vanished. “Shit,” I said as I went and turned but the gun was already knocked out of my hand.
Bash stood there behind me, his eyes bathed in a horrific black that seemed to be running out of his eyes.
“Was it Gabriel that did this to you or were you like this since day one,” I asked as I took my steps, pacing, and sliding out the blade that was propped to my back.
A grin spread on his face like fire. “I was so close so many times to killing you but he kept me patient. I want that soul in your body more than I want to walk on the surface.”
I twirl the weapon and it looks like it excites him.
Anger bubbles again inside of me and I swipe the thing in a spited anger and I can see the impression that flashes across the skin of his right palm as he used it to try and catch the blade. What I didn’t expect to see was it close so tightly so quick. The cut vanished in front of my eyes.
“It’s going to be a longer night then that,” he says to me. “There’s a lot more then s’ar demons running around since the wraith got its power.”
Chapter 94
Bash’s hand is on my throat and he’s pressing so hard into my neck that I can feel his fingers moving the veins and muscles that ride like a highway under the thin skin of my neck. The air is being separated from where it needs to be pulled into and where it needs to replenish.
I’m thrown, hard, like I’m flying out of the crack windshield during an accident. When I hit the bookcase, I knock down three flights of books and crack the wood where the weight of my body collided.