by J. R. Rain
***
I dove to the side—and promptly broke my collarbone all over again.
That said, the four sharp, black, curved claws that slashed the air just above me would have done a hell of a lot more damage. From my back, I parried the next slash and the next, each raining down on me faster and harder than the swipe before. Claws clashed against obsidian and metal in an explosion of light and sulfur.
Its next swing was less of a swing and more of a power drive; as in, it was meant to drive me down through the floorboards. But I saw the demonic hand coming down in time to turn my sword, tip up...
...and watched the point sink deep into the dark palm, itself surprisingly human-like in appearance, although easily three or four times the size of my own. The claws—or talons—clacked as black blood poured down the blade and flooded over my hand.
Some of the ceiling broke free as the demon reared its head back and screamed bloody murder. It pulled its hand free and lurched back, even as more of the black stuff sprayed me from the opening. I screamed, too, as the shit burned... and was just oh-so gross. I had just wiped my eyes free of the bloody poison, certain that I had gone momentarily blind in the process, when I took note of a considerably diminished demon. Now, it just rose right up to the ceiling, perhaps ten feet tall in all. And pissed as hell. The thing was, I knew, using up whatever fight it had left in it. Now was the time to attack. And attack, I did.
Having the thing slightly more diminutive wasn’t an advantage for me, although it might have saved the small house from further destruction. Truth was, it could move more freely, slashing at me faster than I remembered these things ever moving. Everything about this demon was different. It was bigger, badder, nastier.
It swung a clawed hand, then another and another, and I awkwardly fended off each blow, trusting my speed more than anything. I might be faster and stronger than ever, but I was still clumsy as hell with my left hand. And... well, that, and it was still late afternoon. The sun hadn’t yet set, and that was a damn shame because I really kick ass after sunset.
Its next swipe came at me sideways, its arm unnaturally long, made even longer by the claws. Unlike the movies, sadly, I wasn’t gifted with acrobatic abilities. Teleporting, yes. Mind reading, yes. Backward, graceful flips, not so much.
In this case, I parried the claws and leaped over the arm, but my heel got caught in what was the demonic equivalent of a thumb. The claw both slashed my New Balance shoes, and sent me spinning in the air. I landed on... yes, my broken collarbone, and tears sprang from my eyes. With my inner warning blaring loudly, I rolled to my left, screaming, just as four claws drove deep into the hardwood floor next to me.
The demon, now noticeably shrinking, yanked at claws that had been seemingly fused with the wood itself. The sword had gone skittering off, and like Thor, minus the pecs, I held open my hand for it and envisioned its swift return to me. It came slinging back with a metallic twang, and I caught it neatly, spun it, and promptly drove it into the demon’s exposed back, roughly where its heart would be, which I doubted it had, but whatever. It threw its shoulders back, screamed bloody murder, and crumpled to the floor, black blood spilled out like an oil slick. Seconds later, the blood... and body… began steaming and hissing. Moments later, there was nothing left but a demon-shaped stain on the hardwood floor... but even that began to fade too.
What happened next to the demon, I neither knew nor cared. I think Azrael himself might escort the demon back to the Origin, although not all the way back, since Azrael himself had claimed never to have seen the Big Kahuna.
I stood and stared, my body broken but already mending. Whoever thought vampires were immune to pain, were wrong. We don’t do flips and we aren’t immune to pain. A broken bone still hurt like hell; granted, it mended faster—a lot faster.
The thing is... yeah, the thing is... learning how to better control my body seemed in my best interest. Seemed like a damned good idea, in fact. Had I been better able to control my body, I would have at least spared myself some of the hard falls I’d taken.
Sure, I thought. I’ll just add tumbling classes to my To-Do List.
I was being facetious... but I really, really should add acrobatics to my repertoire. Maybe parkour, like Rand did. And being what I am, I needn’t worry too much about permanently hurting myself in the process. In the least, I could save myself some pain later, especially if I faced any more demons, which I thoroughly expected to do.
“That was unreal,” called a voice down the hallway.
Ah, the young artist who had created the tormented paintings. In the heat of the fight, I had almost forgotten about him. Almost.
I touched my shoulder and cringed. The bone was broken in two places, maybe more, one of which was poking up through the skin. “Real enough.”
The young man came toward me down the hallway, glancing in doorways as he came closer. He paused at the entrance into the living room, looked over the damaged corner and the seared claw marks along the wooden floor. I hid my damaged shoulder under my palm.
“That obvious?”
He nodded, his face wan and sickly. But I didn’t think it was white from shock. I thought it was ghost-pale because this demon had the kid holed up inside the house for quite some time, painting macabre scenes like a fiend, in every sense of the word. No, if anything, the kid looked like he’d recently awakened from a nightmare.
“Did that really just happen?”
“Me killing a demon?”
“Yes.”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t happen.”
“Bullshit. I watched the whole thing. I might have been out of it, but I wasn’t that out of it.”
“How out of it were you?”
“It’s, um... I might need a few minutes. I just sort of...”
“Got out of a dark enchantment?”
“Yes.”
“Take your time.”
“Your shoulder is broken. Wait, it’s your collarbone. Or both. I can take a look at it. I went to EMT school.”
“But didn’t graduate?”
He came over to me. “What can I say? I listened to the muse.”
“You dropped out to be a painter.”
His hands moved toward my shoulder and paused. “I was always a painter. I just decided to start making a living at it. Seemed a better choice than the alternative.”
“Working for the Man?”
“Something like that. You must be in awful pain.”
“I was, but it’s healing now.”
“Healing?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have a closer look?”
“Knock yourself out.”
He did so, tentatively touching the bone that was poking outside of my collar. Most importantly, it was poking outside of my skin too.
“Do you realize you have a compound fracture?”
“I do, yes.”
“Oh, shit!”
“What?”
“The bones just... moved. Wait... they’re aligning and retracting, slowly, back inside your skin. Skin is smoothing over. Healing fast. Am I still dreaming?”
“No.”
I gave him a small prompt to calm down and to accept that I quickly healed, that all was well with me, and that the demonic fog that was still hanging over him, which I had to push through, was clearing rapidly.
“My name is Sam. I’m here to help. Tell me about the demon,” I said.
He did. He had moved in about five months ago, and all was well. His paintings were selling more and more and he’d just landed a contract with an ebook publisher to produce original paintings for their books. Who knew ebooks could sell so well? He certainly didn’t, and he wasn’t complaining, the pay was good... and most importantly, it was steady. All was well with his creative work until three months ago.
“What happened three months ago?”
“I bought that.”
I followed his pointing finger. Even for a room filled with the horrific, one painting stood o
ut from the rest. It featured a grinning man with a snake going through his ears, eyes and mouth. Blood poured from all orifices. In the background were burning hills and burning cave openings. Twisted figures writhed in the flames. And rising behind it all, looming, was a horned demon with red eyes. Okay, I hadn’t seen the horned types yet, but, yeah, that painting was creepy as hell.
“What made you buy that painting?”
“It, um... called to me.”
He told me more. It was at an estate sale where the previous owner had burned to death in a house fire centered in and around only the kitchen. Much of the house survived, including this painting. He couldn’t take his eyes off the bloody piece. He hated it instantly, but felt himself drawn to it nonetheless. With buyers swarming all around, he was lost in the painting. He was certain, yes, he was certain he could see the fire crackling. And was that a distant scream he heard? What was happening?
And then he heard the voice.
In particular, he heard his name being called. Garrett.
“It was a whisper at first,” he said to me now, as we sat together on his couch. The sun was damn close to setting and I was getting jittery. I caught my knee bouncing, stopped it, caught it again then just let the damn thing bounce. “But then the voice got louder and louder, and I was certain I was losing my mind.”
“So, you did the obvious thing... you turned and ran.”
“Trust me, a thousand times over, I wish I’d turned and run.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was... fascinated. I was horrified. I was electrified. It was a painting that talked to me, for chrissakes. I was certain that something greater was happening. You see, I’d wished for so long for greater success... I don’t know. I just saw the painting as an answer to my prayers.”
“Paintings with people burning in them are rarely answers to prayers.”
“I know... it’s just that...”
“You were willing to do anything for success.”
“Yes, Sam. Anything.”
“Even to buy a demonic painting against your better judgment.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “I can’t look at it anymore.”
“You won’t have to.”
“You will take it, then?” He shot me both a relieved and horrified look. Indeed, within his aura, something black and oily roiled and coiled... but it was faint. I suspected, with the demon in the house, it had been thicker and more prominent. But there was still an attachment to it. The painting had him, and if it wasn’t this demon, it would be another.
“Yes.”
“I... I don’t know what to say... or think.”
The painting wasn’t just any painting. And neither were the hellish paintings scattered throughout the house. They seemed... real. As if, yes, as if they were depicting real scenes of hell.
“What happened after you returned home with the painting?” I asked.
He did. Almost immediately, his own work shifted. Darker and darker, bloodier and bloodier. He painted like a man possessed, which he undoubtedly was. He painted into all hours of the night, and, at one point, he painted for three straight days, until he collapsed. When he ran out of red paint, he often used his own blood, bleeding onto his palette. Worse, he liked using his own blood. He liked cutting himself.
The blood, I suspected, had been a sacrifice of sorts. Or a feeding frenzy for the demon. That I required the same sustenance was too depressing to contemplate for too long, so I encouraged him to continue his tale.
“My world was turned upside down. I lost contact with friends and family and clients. I lost whole weeks, Sam. Months bled into the next. Literally. I lost all sense of who I was and what I was doing. But still I... had to create more and more...”
I didn’t tell him what I thought. I didn’t tell him that he was, undoubtedly, a creator, and his skills were being used to either create a world of nightmare, or to bring this world of nightmare here to earth. Perhaps a little of both.
“Okay, bud. We have work to do.”
“What kind of work?”
“Do you have a machete?”
“No.”
“Big knives?”
“Pretty big.”
“Good enough.”
Chapter Twenty-six
It was a lot of work to destroy his demon-inspired art, but we did it.
With my broken collarbone and shoulder well on the way back to normal, thanks to my vampire powers, we sliced and shredded and tore, and slashed through it all in a frenzy of destructive activity. Still, I wondered if we were doing any good. I had met another such creator, a writer. If Charlie Reed, say, destroyed the pages of his manuscript... did that mean the World of Dur was destroyed, too? Or parts of it? And what if some version of the story lived on as a backup, or in the cloud, whatever the hell that is? And, of course, what if it had gone to print and many thousand copies of it existed worldwide? Hell, I had a copy of it in my email somewhere and so did Allison. I remembered sneakily emailing it to us. Would all versions have to be destroyed? Or, as a creator, if his intention was to destroy part of his world... would that be enough?
The thing is... I suspected so, which was why I let Garrett have a hand in all of the paintings’ destruction as well. So, I made sure his intent was clear before destroying any of the paintings. At first, he had been reluctant to harm his paintings... until I pointed out that a) they sucked, and b) he hadn’t really painted them from a good place inside of him, and c) his feelings and artwork were the after-effects and products of having been demon-possessed for the past few months.
“Was I really demon-possessed?” he asked.
“How long has it been since you changed your shirt?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long since you called your parents?”
“My dad is dead.”
“Since you called your mom. And I’m sorry to hear that.”
“A few weeks.”
“Weeks?”
“Okay, months.”
“Do you have much memory at all of the last few months?”
“Just painting like a crazy person.”
“Or a possessed person. When did you shower last?”
“I smell that bad?”
“Worse.”
He nodded. And so we cut and hacked, and basically made a mess of the place, all while Garrett came more and more to his senses. “I loved painting those paintings. It felt good painting them. I felt alive. I felt like I was a part of something big. But also...”
I had just stuck a heavy-duty steak knife through the heart of a painting that I was sure was something no one, nowhere, ever wanted to meet, in this world, or the next or anywhere. The thing dripped evil, and it was bad to the bone. I could almost, almost hear it cry out. I cut it again and again, until only remnants of its red eyes, long hair, long nails, and long face remained. A jigsaw puzzle from hell, truly.
“Go on,” I said.
“I was scared, too.” He looked up from his own cutting. “I was afraid... all of the time. I sensed I was creating something bigger than me, something important. But I also knew... yeah, I also knew something bad was happening, too. I was painting something that should not exist, that didn’t belong in this world. In particular, I was painting a man, over and over.”
“Which man?”
“Hold on.”
He got up and disappeared down the hallway, then came back a few seconds later lugging a dozen or so more paintings he’d had stashed in the backroom. He set them before me, and each depicted the same tall man in a black suit. He was bald and had slits for eyes, and long, long fingers... fingers that ended in curved nails. Blood dripped from the slits in his eyes in each of the paintings.
I swallowed. “Any idea who he is?”
“Yes, Sam. I was told who he was, and I was told he would come for his paintings.”
“Did he come?”
“Yes. He took some of them
, not all.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Maybe a few days ago. Maybe a few weeks ago. I’ve lost all track of time.”
“Fine. Who is this man?”
Except as soon as I asked the question, I knew the answer. I didn’t have to read the kid’s mind to do so, either. I merely had to look at the face in the paintings. No, I didn’t recognize it, but I recognized the evil.
“He said he was the devil. The new devil, whatever that means.”
The bastard was back—or a version of him. This shouldn’t have surprised me. There was just too much belief in him. Too much fear of him, too. The good news is... and I hoped it was good news... was that the devil might just put a kink in the dark master’s plans. Then again, I also knew this to be a new iteration of the devil. A new version. A new everything. Did he step into the mindset of the past devil, basically picking up where his predecessor left off? Or did he come in fresh, with his own ideas, his own plans, learning as he went along? I suspected the latter.
“Sam, what are you?”
“I’m just a mom.”
“I saw you take on that demon. I watched it all.”
I dipped into his mind and gave him a suggestion to get off the subject of me, and to focus on destroying the last of these evil-ass paintings. I was pleased to see his mind was, in fact, clearing. It seemed with each painting destroyed, the hold on him was less and less. Indeed, even the slinking blackness coiling through his aura had diminished to just a thread. The blackness, I suspected, might always be there, although the demon was long gone. Once you opened a doorway to the devil, it was always open. In the least, he would always be susceptible to later possession. I might want to follow up with this one.
While I was in there, I gave him a few more suggestions. I instructed him to burn all the remaining paintings... every bit of them. I gave a delayed command, too, something I’d only recently realized I could do. I suggested to him that once he was done burning the paintings that he would have no memory of the devil or demons or of his possession. He would have no memory of me either. The command would go into effect when the last of his paintings were gone... and after he had showered for an hour. Yes, an hour.