by Rob Cornell
“Black witches have many talents. Than can twist a mind, blacken a heart, deceive the eyes. But their heritage has always centered around one particular skill.” She pressed her lips together. Her gaze became detached, searching the room, but not finding anything to hold to.
I thought I’d have to prompt her again, but she snapped her gaze back to me and leaned forward as if to share a secret.
“They summon demons.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sly looked grayer now. His skin tone nearly matched his hair except for the dark circles, like bruises, under his eyes. The respirator hissed and clicked, and the heart monitor sang its one note song. A clear bag hung off the side of the bed, filled with dark yellow fluid. Not a healthy color. Not by a long shot.
While only the occasional nurse, doctor, or other visitor passed by in the hall, I still felt self-conscious with that glass wall leaving me exposed as I worried over my friend. Every movement I caught in the corner of my eye made me jerk my attention away from Sly to whoever dared travel along the other side of the glass.
But nobody looked in at us. We could have been invisible. Which also pissed me off. My best friend was dying in here because a coven of fucking witches were playing with his soul, and those people could just walk on by as if it all meant nothing.
I couldn’t have it both ways. But I wanted it both ways, damn it.
Fear for us while you ignore us.
They should probably fear for themselves if Gladys was right.
Demon summoning.
Why would anyone want to do that? Did it ever really end well? Not for everyone. Never for everyone. If you brought a demon into this world, you had every intention of taking lives, whether on purpose or as collateral damage. But the trick wasn’t just in the summoning. Once you had that bad boy onto the mortal plane, you had to bind that thing to you. The last thing anyone wanted was a demon on the loose exercising its free will.
After dropping the demon bomb on me, Gladys admitted the Maidens could be using Sly’s soul for something else entirely. Unfortunately, she couldn’t give me any examples of what that might be.
I hadn’t walked away from our chat with nothing, though. First, I knew that if I got the piece of Sly’s soul back, I could probably bring him out of the woods and back to his normal self. Second, I knew if I didn’t get his soul back, he was as good as dead.
I also knew that witches of the Maidens’ caliber had the skill and knowhow to summon one of the larger available demons. So if that’s what they were doing, Detroit could find itself host to something seriously ugly. But I couldn’t know what, exactly, would happen until I knew what kind of demon they planned on summoning, and what they planned to do with it.
Maybe they simply wanted some cheap demon labor to keep their apartment tidy.
How’s that for optimism?
“What do I do, brother?” I asked Sly. He didn’t have any good ideas either. “What good are you?” I laughed and wiped my eyes, but they were dry.
January had a way of blunting the edge of the early evening light. A fuzzy gray cast came through the slats between the vertical blinds across the window, making Sly looked all the more washed out. He had developed that old sweat and stagnant breath smell you get when lying in bed for too long.
The lights flickered, and the readouts on the machines flanking Sly’s bed snapped and wavered. It startled me, but I quickly wrote it off as a power surge or something.
Then I heard the screams from down the hall.
A shot of adrenaline cut through my system and stood the hairs on my arms on end.
More screams and shouts joined the first. A small quake vibrated through the floor, and a second later I tasted a rotten kind of magic. It permeated everything, made me feel like a duck caught in an oil slick.
I stood and rushed to the glass wall, peered down the hall toward the direction of the screams.
A snarl of nurses and a pair of hospital security guards ran my way. And as they ran, the lights winked out behind them as if darkness itself chased their heels.
That putrid magic thickened. It coalesced all around me. My stomach clenched to fight off the coming nausea. I did not recognize the type of magic I felt. It didn’t belong to any sorcerer. But did it really take much of a leap to guess who it did come from?
Witches, of course.
The Maidens, specifically.
And I knew with impossible certainty why they were here.
They had come to collect the rest of Sly’s soul.
Chapter Fourteen
The screamers raced by Sly’s room, and the darkness formed a tidal wave behind them, killing all the lights. The lights in the room also went out, including the colorful glow of the machines’ various readouts and blinkers. But the machines themselves continued to operate. The heart monitor still blipped. The respirator continued its Darth Vader impersonation. So we weren’t dealing with a power outage.
Just a little old fashioned black magic.
As an experiment, I raised my hand, palm up, and called on fire. An orange flame rippled up from my palm, but its light remained within the actual fire, it did not project any kind of glow. It looked more like liquid than fire.
I could still see the last of the daylight through the window. But again, the spaces between the blinds looked like painted white stripes on a black background. None of the light continued on into the room.
This was some serious shit.
With my flame still flowing from my upturned hand, I felt my way back to Sly’s bedside. I reached blindly and gripped a handful of sheets. My heart kicked up into my throat. Had they somehow taken him already? Slipped him right past me in the unnatural dark?
I patted my way up the bed and found Sly’s ankle through the covers. I swallowed my heartbeat and released a clenched breath.
I didn’t know what to expect next. Something had gotten those people screaming, and I didn’t think it was just the encroaching, impossible darkness. They had seen someone.
Something wet and heavy thumped on the floor outside the room. A second moist thump followed. Then something growled in the darkness.
Correction: They had seen something.
The demon the Maidens had summoned? Why come for Sly if they had already raised the beast? No. This couldn’t be the main event. This was only one creature set loose on the witches’ way to the big time.
The thing in the hall snuffed. I felt its breath spray me with a nasty sewage stink. I couldn’t see it, but I sensed it in the doorway. Based on the size and push of its breathing, it was something big, too. My imagination had a field day flipping through possible visuals. The thought frenzy pushed me close to mindless panic.
I closed my eyes. The only thing that changed was my fire disappearing from sight. The darkness looked exactly the same. I tried not to let it freak me out. I tried to stop all thought, taking deep breaths while listening for movement from the thing.
A heavy step, and then another. It grunted like an old man as it walked. I pictured massive legs and elephant feet. The force of its presence drew closer. A magical aura preceded it. The magic’s touch set my teeth on edge. The beast growled again. Hot air roiled toward me, and it smelled like a waterlogged open grave.
I opened my eyes. I saw my flame again, but nothing else. My other hand still held fast to Sly’s ankle. I had the idiot notion that if it took Sly, it would have to drag me along with him. I wouldn’t let go. I would not.
I drew my flaming hand back like a pitcher, then threw a fiery fastball where I thought the creature stood. If it was as large as it seemed, I could hardly miss.
The fireball burst into a shower of sparks as it impacted with something. A howl cut the darkness and sent ice through my veins.
In the next instant, something slammed into me, sending me flying backward, Sly’s ankle slipping easily from my grasp. I crashed into the blood-pressure machine—I think—and it clattered to the floor with me. I managed not to hit my head on anything, but I lan
ded on my right arm and torqued it too far one way at the elbow. I felt the tendons rip, and pain quickly followed.
The creature made another huff sound, like an over-sized horse—and by over-sized, I meant tank-like proportions. If I ever managed to get a glimpse of this thing, I wondered if its true ugliness could live up to the horrors conjured by my imagination.
Probably.
I scrambled to my feet. I didn’t want to get too far from Sly, but I backed into the corner, my shoulder thumping into one wall before I was ready for it, startling the breath out of me. I was no good to Sly as a demon snack. Problem was, I had lost track of where his bed was, and had no clue where the beast stood in relation to it. If I tried another fireball, I risked hitting Sly.
Something knocked against something else with a hollow, plastic clunk. The beast moving around the machines. One of them crashed to the floor to join the blood pressure machine I had fallen into. The sound of the movements seemed wrong. If I could picture the scene properly, the placement of Sly’s bed, the equipment around him, the distance from the corner by the window to those things…
The beast wasn’t going for Sly.
It was coming for me.
Oh, shit.
How dumb was I? They didn’t need Sly to access his soul. Gladys had said as much. No, they didn’t need Sly himself. They needed me out of the way.
These thoughts no sooner came together when I felt a wet muzzle press against my chest, the mucus soaking through my sweater and sliming my skin underneath. Between the weight of the creature and its smell, it felt like getting bulldozed into a landfill.
It continued to push against me, crushing me into the corner until I couldn’t breathe against the pressure. I don’t know why it didn’t eat me, or at least bite me. I didn’t know anything about it. I would die without knowing what the fuck had killed me even as it pressed against me.
What a messed up way to go.
My face started to throb. Lack of oxygen spun my head.
I almost let the thing crush me before I remembered I could burn the motherfucker.
I lit both hands, slapped them down on the thing’s lumpy, rubbery back, and expanded the flames, rolling them across the length of the creature. The fire expanded out about twelve feet before stopping, like a fiery tape measure.
The beast reared away from me. The line of fire down its back swayed like a serpent, the creature’s attempt to shake off the flames. But my fire didn’t quit so easily.
Using the fire line to triangulate the creature’s location, I tossed a twin set of fireballs toward where I thought its head was.
Its scream shattered the glass wall. I could hear thousands of pieces of glass rain against the tile floor out in the hall. With it came another burst of screams. I tried to imagine all those people out there, pinned down by literally impenetrable darkness, with no idea what any of it meant.
If I lived through this one, I would look forward to seeing how the Ministry smoothed this event over with the uninitiated.
I didn’t give the beast time to recover. I threw more fireballs in its direction. A couple seemed to miss and hit the floor. I tried to keep my aim low in case anyone was still out in the hall. I didn’t want to cook any civilians, thank you very much.
Most of my fireballs struck home. And I knew I was making progress when the darkness split open, then drew away like a massive, tattered cowl. A great sign, but it also meant I had to see the monster.
I had burned most of the flesh off its back. I could see the ridges of its long spine exposed. The creature as a whole looked like a cross between a lizard and a centipede. A round, long body that tapered into a thin tail. Scales all over. But an insect-like head with a hundred eyes peppering the entire front of it. A number of the eyes were burned out to hollow sockets. The rest blinked at me in unison. I couldn’t see any kind of mouth, which would explain why it didn’t eat me.
I had pictured its feet about right. It had three pairs of legs, each the circumference of a trash can. A trail of slime ran from the door to its twitching tail.
Still flaming in spots, the beast growled softly (so it had to have at least a small mouth somewhere), it blinked its eyes a couple more times, then flopped to the floor, dead, its short legs sticking out of its sides like truck tires.
I scanned the hall and didn’t see any poor witnesses to the dead monster on the floor. But with the darkness cleared, some curious souls would come soon enough. I hoped they didn’t expect me to explain.
Through all of this, Sly hadn’t stirred. The creature had knocked the bed askew on its way toward me. The tube from the respirator (now on the floor with everything else) had wrenched loose. At least the IV hung from a tall post attached to the bed itself, so that hadn’t gotten yanked out of him, too.
I squeezed past the creature, both slime and ashen flakes of burnt flesh rubbing off on me. I doubted it would come out in the wash. I doubted I wanted to even challenge the washer with trying.
I leaned over Sly and stared at his chest until I saw it rise and fall. Still breathing without the respirator. Still totally unconscious—which was probably a good thing. But his stillness disturbed me, nonetheless. If a monster ramming its way into Sly’s room didn’t so much as rouse him, I worried nothing could.
I did know one very important thing, though.
The Maidens did not give a damn about what they were doing to Sly. And they wanted to make doubly sure I did not interfere.
Someone behind me choked on a scream.
I closed my eyes and hung my head. It was gonna take some time getting out of this.
Chapter Fifteen
The Ministry extracted me before law enforcement could get their hands on me and start asking questions the Ministry didn’t want me to answer, and that the cops wouldn’t believe anyway. Even with the monstrous evidence on the floor of Sly’s room.
That didn’t mean I got out of a good grilling.
I was taken to a Ministry black site, which meant they took my sight for the duration of the trip and didn’t give it back until they had me in a small room that probably didn’t look much different than the one the regular police would have put me in. No two-way mirror or anything like that in here. Oh, and the only light came from a quartet of bright glowing orbs floating in each corner of the room.
They must have given off some heat, because the room was stifling. My sweat mixed with the monster slime that had soaked through my sweater. I smelled like a trash heap. I would need at least three showers. The sooner the better. At least the waiting gave me time to heal the broken tendons the creature had given me.
An iron door was the only entryway in the room. The walls were concrete, which made me think we were probably underground. The whole setup intimidated me like it was supposed to. I’d never had a formal Ministry debrief after a public incident. Not even after having a dragon tear apart the MGM Grand downtown while it tried to eat me. I had gotten out of there before the Ministry had arrived.
At the moment, I sat in the room alone. I waited a good hour before someone finally came through the door. The woman who entered looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She had a thin, stern face, and her dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a sharply tailored, charcoal pantsuit. The white blouse she wore underneath practically shined. Either it was brand new or she had a line on one hell of a dry cleaner.
Unlike the standard interrogation rooms you saw on cop shows, this one had no table. I sat on a plain wooden chair made of thick, heavy wood that had a medieval feel—like I should have been gnawing on a big turkey leg. A matching chair faced me with about seven feet between them.
The woman took the empty seat, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at me with an utter lack of expression. She had three rings on the fingers of her left hand, and another on the thumb of her right. A couple had red stones. The others were plain metal bands—a gold one, an onyx one, and a silver one. Each one obviously magical.
I pegged her for a mage. T
hey liked their magical trinkets.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry about the mess, but that…thing didn’t give me much of a choice.”
She continued to stare at me without talking.
Some kind of interrogation technique? I didn’t know why it was necessary. The story was cut and dry. I was attacked by a demon or something, I fought back and won. Simple.
“Look, I’ve got a lot on my plate. I really hope this doesn’t take long.”
Her eyebrows went up. “What do you have on your plate?”
I would have loved to tell her. Having the Ministry swoop in and save the day with my witch problem would have made things a lot easier. But trafficking in souls—even your own—was against Ministry law. I could get Sly in a lot of trouble. What good would saving his life do if he ended up in a Ministry prison…or worse?
No. I’d save the Ministry for a last resort. Besides, after what I had just gone through three months ago with those high-ranking Ministry conspirators, I didn’t feel all that comfortable dealing with them. I was pretty certain, despite the house-cleaning going on by the Global Ministry Faction, that the Detroit Ministry still had a few bad apples among them, and those apples would not feel too friendly toward me.
“The man I was visiting at the hospital is a good friend, and he’s very ill.”
“The Ministry could assist. We have some of the best healers available.”
Oh, yeah. That’s all I needed. I had to appreciate the offer, though. Prefect St. James’s regime probably wouldn’t have bothered.
Thinking of St. James set off a light bulb.
“You’re the interim prefect,” I said. “From the GMF. Rachel Strand.”
She nodded. “And you are Sebastian Light. A rather famous fellow around Detroit.”
“What can I say? I had an interesting end of the year. My New Year’s resolution for this year is to do a whole lot of non-exciting stuff.” And, already, I was failing.
Ms. Strand must have thought the same thing. She smiled, not that it made her look any less stern. “How’s that going for you?”