Demon's Play

by David McBride

  “Oh God,” I sighed. “Cassie, I’m sorry.” She seemed to flinch back at my use of her name.

  “God has to find a new house, Inquisitor, I’ve taken this one.” Christian’s smile fell away. “I am the only deity here now. Look upon me with your Sight and see it for yourself.”

  Fighting the unease that roiled through my stomach at the thought of looking at him with my Second Sight, I opened myself to my power and looked at the altar. The four men had dark green auras spreading from their bracelets that pulsed in time with a fabricated heartbeat. Dark power flowed off them like smoke and rose to the rafters above. The eyes of the two crows sitting on the cross glowed red with malevolent energy like harbingers of doom. They were his familiars, I realized; depositories of power that he could pull off of at any time, even during the daylight. That must have been how he raised the ghouls so close to dusk instead of waiting for full dark.

  Cassie was a cold spot in a room full of hot powers. Her being was suffused with a faint blue glow that pulsed weakly, a true spirit unlike the acolytes. She did not wear one of the empowered bracelets that bound those echoes of spirits to their former bodies, but was shackled to her dead flesh nonetheless. Christian had kept her as a trophy, trapping all that she had been in the shell before me. The one small mercy of it all was that her spirit remained unblemished by the corruption that the others seemed to suffuse from every pore.

  Of Christian himself though, there was nothing to see. He looked like a normal man wearing strange clothes. Even the tattoos had vanished leaving his gaunt features unmarred, his skin nearly as pale as the corpses around him. He cackled at my confusion.

  “The best trick a god can pull off is making people doubt his existence, yes?” Christian stepped from behind the podium and walked to the edge of the dais. “Now you know how I avoid the hounds of the Inquisition, those mutts known as adept trackers. Mud-blooded imbeciles!”

  “I’ve never seen a cloaking spell like that before,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t expect that you would have,” he countered, warming to the idea of having more extensive knowledge of magic than an Inquisitor. “My master has gifted me with it to prepare for my mission. But you hold your own secrets, don’t you, Inquisitor? When my eyes seek your soul all I see are two snakes entwined in never-ending combat. They try to consume each other, but to no avail. What spell protects you that could deny me?” I felt heat spread across my stomach as he sought to break through my protection. His lip curled in distaste when he failed. “No matter,” he said. “But after all these precautions I have taken I would know how you found me.” I felt power in the words, subtle and corrupting. They didn’t touch me.

  Lou, as silent as a tomb until now, spoke. “A gang leader named Andre told us where to find you.” He looked mortified that he had spoken, as if he had no choice in the matter.

  “Ah, the captain of the guard speaks!” Christian bellowed. “A human found us?” He looked at his assembled disciples. “Felled by a mortal? Have we become so careless? We’ll rectify that later. Right now we have new recruits to attend to. Darius, Caleb,” he nodded to the two men farthest to the left. “Would you be so kind as to bring our guests up here?” The two dead men smiled at us, their rictus grins showing blackened gums.

  Lou and I may have been from different sides of the merge, but there was only one way to handle a situation like this, no matter where you were from: start shooting and hope the bad guys drop before you do. Our guns were in our hands before they had taken their first steps off the dais.

  Movement above made me look to the ceiling. The shimmering blue energy of spirits swirled about the rafters, watching the two corpses come for us with their dead-man swagger. I swung my gaze back to the zombies as Lou fired a shot, taking Caleb high on the shoulder. It staggered him, but he straightened and continued at the same laconic pace.

  “You see them too?” Christian asked me, looking at the ceiling and frowning. “Perhaps you are not as blind as I thought, Inquisitor. Begone petty spirits that refuse my call!” he raged.

  Our guns answered his rants with thunder. After shooting the one called Darius in both kneecaps, I shifted my sights from him to Christian who spread his arms wide in anticipation. Two bullets hit him in the chest and one struck him above the right eyebrow, smashing bone and blowing bits of his brain out the back of his head. Impossibly, the body stood where it was, and the head that had been snapped back by the impact tilted forward. He smiled beatifically as the flesh around the quarter-sized hole in his head became like liquid and flowed into the wound, healing it. My heart sank as I watched.

  Lou and I started backing toward the double doors at the front of the building, firing as if our lives depended on it. Darius and Caleb were now only a few feet away, Darius moved with a palsied gate from the bullets I had put in his legs. They didn’t seem to repair themselves as fast as Christian. Lou emptied his pistol into them with little effect, dropped out the spent magazine, and fished in his pocket for another.

  I looked again at the spirits hovering near the ceiling. They seemed to be circling around one certain point above Christian. An idea shaped itself in my head. I aimed at the small patch of wood that was free of the swirling specters and fired. The bullet blasted into the roof above and smashed a small quarter-sized hole. Dust and splintered wood rained to the floor. A shaft of light speared down from the tiny hole and struck Christian in the face. His tattoos immediately dimmed under the touch of sunlight. He screamed in rage and the ravens behind him screeched in sympathy. Darius and Caleb stopped and looked at their stricken master, unsure of what to do. Power erupted from him like lava, dark energy rolling through the building. It was like nothing I had seen or dreamed of; a roiling wash of green and black that engulfed everything, including Lou and I. It was shot through with dark red alien energy that I had seen before. It wasn’t something any Inquisitor who had seen it was soon to forget. He had drawn power from a Demon, and now it suffused his own, corrupting and twisting it further. It sucked the air out of our lungs and filled our noses and mouths with the taste and smell of death.

  We had to get out before it overwhelmed us.

  I stumbled to my feet, grabbed Lou under his arm, and pulled us both towards the doors. Christian rolled out of the light and his power began to fade, pulled back under the reforming obfuscation spell. A scorching heat rose on my chest as my shield tattoo came to life. I dropped, pushing Lou down in front of me. A pulse of green fire sailed over our heads skidding along my shield as it went. It hit the doors blasting them to splinters. Mid-afternoon sunlight cascaded in blinding everyone in its intensity. Darius and Caleb stood stunned, as if they had forgotten what daylight looked like. Christian was nowhere to be seen, nor were Cassie and the two other corpses.

  Lou and I ran for the light.

  13

  The crackling and buzzing of necromantic energy filled my head as we dove into Lou’s car. My shield had deflected most of the impact, but remnants of Christian’s power hung on me like a second skin, even as it lost its potency in the sun. I tried to focus, concentrate on Lou who was barking orders into the radio.

  “Just stay put, damn it!” His face contorted in frustration as he argued with one of the men. “Snow, I want two teams out here, fully equipped, and I want them here pronto.”

  “Already done, cap,” Snow’s voice came out sure and steady.

  “Good man. ETA?”

  Lou was holding out better than I was. He couldn’t feel the cancerous spell that had missed us by bare inches, couldn’t sense the massive amount of necromantic energy in the air, couldn’t taste death in his throat.

  “Less than five minutes,” Snow responded. “We called it in when we heard the first shot.”

  Grabbing Lou’s arm to get his attention, I rasped, “Their ward breakers?”

  He grimaced. “Gave out a couple of minutes ago, that’s why we didn’t get any back-up inside. Gillette is a few seconds from bolting for Mexico and he’s just sitting in his car
. Snow’s ex-army, he’ll hold his ground no matter what.” He clicked on the radio. “Gillette, you are relieved. Head down the road to the gas station and get your thoughts together. Clear?”

  There was a brief hesitation as Gillette pulled himself together enough to answer. “Yes, sir,” he stammered. A minute later his car came squealing out of the west-side entrance and on to the main street.

  I nodded at Lou. “He would have been a liability.”

  Sighing, he said, “Yeah, but that’s one less pair of eyes we have on the building till the teams get here.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You saw how easily Caleb got the drop on us. The cloaking spells they’re using are high-level stuff. And the magic that Christian’s channeling, I’ve never seen a human channel anything that strong before.”

  “That’s comforting,” Lou muttered.

  Looking out at the church, I let my power search over the grounds. My hands kept busy with reloading my pistol while my mind wandered. The snakes roiling across my belly were a cold comfort, a reassurance that his ward wouldn’t touch me. My questing senses felt nothing; not even the power coming off of Christian’s disciples, and I wondered how far he could spread his influence of invisibility. In a dark corner of my mind that I refused to acknowledge some part of me wished that I had that one last vial of dreamscape. It itched at my brain as I pushed out farther and farther looking for something, anything. Would it make a difference if I had that power-enhancing drug coursing through my veins? I knew I could never approach the raw magic that Christian had, but something inside me told me that if I just had some small edge, something that could level the playing field, I might be able to beat him, Demon-gifted powers or no.

  “We can’t go back in there,” Lou grumbled. “Even with the two teams coming we’d be committing suicide. Sure they can fight through the minor stuff—Charlene saw to that—but full-on wizardry?” He shook his head. “We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “We’re not going in,” I replied, slipping the full magazine into the pistol. “We’re going to bring the church down around him, make him come out into the light.”

  “The hair on my head is still smoking from that wall of fire he threw at us.” Lou swung a hard gaze on me. “If sunlight is the biggest advantage we got then we are in it to our necks, Frank. I won’t throw my people into a damn meat grinder. You need to get a hold of Ben and Terri fast.”

  Our eyes locked in challenge for a heartbeat that seemed to last forever before I looked over his shoulder at the two STS vans coming down the street. His words had stung, as the truth often did, and I was determined not to let him see that. Besides the other matters that Ben and Terri were attending to there was another reason I would not allow myself to call on them for help. Ben had been my mentor when I was new to the Inquisition and still guided and aided me when I needed it. But my need to prove my worth again and again had made me ever reluctant to ask him for anything. And Terri, well that was much more complicated. Part of me sought to keep her safe from the true horrors that plagued the Second City, the things like Christian that would turn everything that we had accomplished since the war to ash, and laugh while they did it. But another part of me knew that it was purely ego that kept me from calling on her. She was my apprentice, my inner voice would whisper now and again, a mere witch yet she can do things that I could only dream of. Was she more deserving of the position of Inquisitor than I was?

  My voice was a hard monotone as I said, “If you’re not going to help then just stay out of my way.” I opened the car door and stepped out as the two vans came around to flank us. Fully equipped tactical squads poured from the opened backs of the vehicles. Lou called after me as I started walking across the street towards the church. He started shouting orders to his troops, swearing all the while. A smile crept across my face at Lou’s predictable loyalty. Even though he hated me at the moment, he wouldn’t let me face something like this alone. To use it against him was a low blow, but Christian had to be stopped here and now regardless of the risks.

  My smile died as I came to the front lawn of the church. Smoke was coming form holes in the plywood sheets that covered the windows. I looked around at the two squads moving as silent as ghosts among the tall grass. None of them had gotten close enough to set fire to the structure yet. So why was it burning? I held up a fist and the teams stopped to either side of me. There was no cover here, we were completely exposed. The soldiers swung their weapons slowly over the grounds searching for something that they could feel but couldn’t see. Open ground…a soldier’s worst enemy. It made you feel phantom fingers closing around your neck, an imaginary target on your back.

  “Lou,” I called over my shoulder. “Has Snow reported any movement on his side?”

  “Negative,” he yelled back. “All clear.”

  The squawking of birds brought my attention to the steeple. Two ravens sat on the edge of the roof, beaks open in silent laughter, eyes like black stones in the sun. The birds took wing in a flurry of feathers and departed to the east.

  “Pull back,” I said to the soldiers next to me.

  “Sir?” the one on my left asked.

  “Everyone back,” I yelled. “Now!”

  Everyone turned and ran as one, sensing that something was building and that we were too close to it. No sooner had we made it to the street before an explosion ripped through the building, tearing the plywood slabs from their moorings and sending them sailing in pieces out across the yard. For the second time I was face down on the ground with heat rolling across my back. Turning over and looking back, I saw flames eagerly licking at the edges of the windows trying to climb their way up the façade.

  Groaning, I got to my feet and checked myself for injuries. The men to either side of me did the same, one of them pulling a dagger-sized splinter from his back. Luckily they were all wearing bullet-proof vests, otherwise that sharpened shaft would have cleaved its way into him.

  Lou came over to me grim-faced and angry, but I didn’t know who that anger was directed at. “Looks like you weren’t the only one that planned on burning the place down.”

  “Yeah,” I said dejectedly. “He knew what I’d do and used it against me. He got away.”

  “At least no one was hurt, thank God.”

  I nodded, allowing myself to feel grateful for that at least. Without looking up I said, “But what happens when the sun goes down.”

  14

  “So the rogue is still on the loose, eh?” Ben asked, taking a puff on his cigar and looking thoughtful. “That was damned stupid of you to try to take him on by yourself.”

  After the debacle at the church, Lou had taken me back to STS headquarters where I retrieved my car and contacted Ben to find out where the meeting was supposed to take place. We stood in the middle of a park, the cool air rustling through the leaves of the trees around us, the dew-softened soil beneath our feet. I pulled my coat tighter around myself. The sun was hidden behind large puffy clouds and wasn’t warming the late-autumn day even when it was out. It was a serene place that didn’t fit in my mind as a place to set up a meeting with a Demon lord. Then again, no place seemed right for that.

  “I wasn’t by myself,” I answered, keeping my gaze fixed on the horizon and the skyscrapers that lined it. “Lou was there, and then two STS teams were there when we attempted re-entry. I had a lead and I felt that time was crucial.”

  He took another pull off his cigar then squinted at me through the blue smoke that wreathed his head. “Time is always crucial in our line of work, Frank. For all intents and purposes you were alone. What would those STS soldiers have done except die?”

  That hung in the air between us with nothing but the susurration of the leaves to break the silence that followed.

  After a moment, he spoke again. “Look, Frank, I don’t mean to be harsh but your judgment has been questionable of late. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  I looked at him, eyes narrowing. “I could ask the same of you.” His eyes
widened in surprise. Deciding that I had nothing to lose now, I persisted. “You and Simon have been keeping things from me. Not just about the necromancer, but about this Demon too. What are we really doing here, Ben?”

  He grimaced. “Always the suspicious one, eh Frank?”

  I shrugged. “It’s what you pay me for.”

  Smirking, he puffed on his cigar. “You’re right about that my friend. Unfortunately my station as Inquisitor General forces me to keep some secrets, not just from you, but everyone. Anything Simon is keeping from you is for his own reasons, so I can’t help you there.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me anything.”

  “All I can tell you is what I’ve just found out. The council called me to tell me about what body this Demon will inhabit.” He paused then, seeming to mull things over in his mind. When he finally looked at me I could see the sadness in his eyes. “They picked an eight year old girl. She has terminal cancer and would be dead by next year. Even the healers can’t fix her. So the father made a deal with the council: his daughter would be the vessel for this Demon if it agreed to take the cancer from her upon its departure.”

  My jaw hung open in disbelief. Whenever Demons had appeared on this plane before they usually fashioned their own bodies out of free-floating magical energy. That had drawbacks though, as they were affected by seemingly mundane things like sunlight, holy water, and blessed salt. With a human body they were nearly unstoppable; bullets, poison, fire, things that would kill a normal person could easily be fixed by the residing Demon and its powers. At least with the Inquisition watching over this deal we would have wizards craft a contract that would limit the Demon’s abilities while in possession of the girl. The fact that it had to take a malignant disease from her was just a byproduct of that deal. The Demon wouldn’t care one way or another if the girl died. What the father must have gone through to lead him to this as the best solution I couldn’t even imagine.