The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

by Peter Meredith

  He was almost out of time. He sucked in the aroma of the world that none of these beings had the whit to appreciate to its fullest. That one breath spoke to him. It described her hopes and his fears. It told him the priests were not paragons. One drank to deal with the stress and the other was a glutton and battled daily with his lusts—and lost daily as well.

  No matter. They had their despised God. Their ultimate judge.

  A cross was pressed against Bob’s forehead and words of Latin were whispered in his face. Whisper or not, the words were a sonic boom that split his ears and his head. He tried to fight it, just as his victims had. He struggled for those last few precious breaths, those last few beats of his heart, those last few moments.

  Chapter 1

  Akron, Ohio

  Jack Dreyden

  Jack was bent over on his hands and knees with blood leaking down his arm; in the dark it was black as demon blood. Nearby was the knife which would later be sterilized and re-sharpened; the cut had been too shallow and Cyn had nearly paid for it.

  He was shaky and cold, his shirt drenched in sweat. As always after a tough casting, he began to shiver. It didn’t matter that it was midsummer, he still trembled. He thought that after a year and a half he’d be used to the feeling of putting his soul on the line, of letting it drain away to practically nothing. But no, he still shook.

  It had been eighteen months since he had saved the world, a feat that had been underplayed by everyone. Everyone.

  Cyn never brought it up, and when she did, she spoke of her mother, or Pastor John, or poor Detective Richards whose body had been discovered among the ruins of a Princeton hospital. Or she would speak of the heroics of Lieutenant Neilson and his platoon of Seals or the Pope or the soft spoken Father Paul.

  Cynthia Childs was his lover, his best friend, and his third cousin, and yet even she never mentioned the fact that he had practically bled to death for her and had saved the world in the process.

  She never did, and when he was straight, when his soul was intact that is, he was glad that she never did. Yes, he had saved the world, but he had also twice committed murder, stolen the blood of innocent people, and had made sacrifices to the Mother of Demons, all just to save his worthless skin. He had been a monster, and who wanted to bring that up?

  The only people who ever brought up his heroics were the constantly hovering government officials. They were the most backwards thinking people he had ever met. They acted as though he owed them something! In fact, they acted as though they owned him. For the last year and a half, Jack had lived and worked with an indictment hanging over his head. In a fit of honesty, he had foolishly admitted to two murders as well as culpability in fifteen million others. The government men never let on which they thought was worse.

  They dangled a prison sentence over Jack’s head and made him go here and there, chasing down stray demons—it was why he was in Akron where the humidity was off the charts and the people bowled for fun—hideous.

  Jack didn’t trust himself to stand up just yet. His insides were vibrating like a banjo string in a beer keg. He felt empty and shaking. What he had done was what he dubbed: Free Form Sorcery, and it wasn’t easy.

  But there was no other way to hold the demons. They were just too strong, even when they were encased in the live ones. “Back off, Father,” Jack said, his voice hoarse.

  “We…talked…about this…Jack,” Father Timmons answered between great gusts of air. By his own admission, the forty-eight year old priest hadn’t run more than a mile all told in the last thirty years. It had only been in the last few months that he had given any thought to his conditioning and he wasn’t nearly in proper shape for this sort of work. He had sprinted a hundred yards and now he was bent over the demon, trying to spew Latin and breathe at the same time.

  “Yes, we did talk about it,” Jack answered, half his mind still on the spell he had conjured to hold the demon. Any lapse in concentration would free the creature. “And I told you that we need the demon. He might have information.”

  “He is…a man…we respect that.”

  The second priest, Father Jordan came up then. He took out a vial of Holy Oil and began dribbling a circle around the demon. His Latin wasn’t nearly as good as Father Timmons’ and he went slowly, sounding the words out like a first-grader reading aloud for the first time. The moment he was done, Jack sat back and looked up at the night sky. The demon was now pinned in place.

  Cyn stepped forward and gazed down on what had once been Bob Chapman. He was rank and hideous. “I think he might be too far gone,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the smell of death coming off the man. “You should let us keep him. Really, if this bloke doesn’t fit the criteria, then none of them do.”

  “That’s just it,” Father Jordan said, “None of them fit our criteria. He is human; that’s all that matters. He is a possessed person, not a thing, and we will not be a party to torture.”

  Jack glanced down at his arm, thinking that they didn’t seem to mind his suffering. The cut was across his bicep; there were three more below it and five across his forearm, all freshly scarred or scabbed. Along his side were five pink lines and above his belly-button were six in the shape of sergeant’s stripes. There were others on his legs.

  He was bleeding himself dry capturing demons and always letting them go, figuratively speaking, that is. An unbodied demon was a weak thing, unable to resist the pull of hell for very long. “This isn’t working, Captain.”

  The last person on the squad, Captain Metzger of the US Army, had been across the way, perched on the roof of a back-alley Chinese herb shop. Akron had a hundred and seventy of these types of shops. Since the Event in which Jack had accidentally helped to release hell on earth and then nearly died trying to make amends, the herb shops had sprung up like weeds: unregulated and immoral, selling anything from ground tiger penis to crypt dust. Akron had more of these shops than they did McDonalds.

  “I agree,” was all Metzger said. He was tall and broad, prone to moodiness and rarely spoke, at least to Jack.

  “Then do something or piss off,” Jack snapped. “My God, Metzger, sometimes you are next to useless. Try growing a spine.”

  The captain ground his teeth. He was in a tough position; he had zero authority over the priests. Yes, they were American and yes, they worked with the Rapid Anti-Demon Response Squads, what everyone called Raiders, but they took their orders from Rome and no amount of threats or screamed orders would budge them. If Jack didn’t need them so badly, he would have tossed them from his squad long ago. As it was, he did his best to switch out the priests he worked with as quickly as he could, hoping to find one that would listen to reason.

  So far none would.

  They came in pairs, already prepared to deal with Jack and his “satanic” ways. There were fourteen Raider squads fighting and exorcising the many strays, but Jack’s Raider squad was different. He was different. The Event had changed him. He had come out of the ordeal stronger…far stronger.

  He was, as far as he knew, the world’s only sorcerer.

  It was true that he only knew three spells, but that was three more than anyone else knew…except for his cousins: Robert and Cyn. Robert was no sorcerer. He was a necromancer dealing in sacrifices, stolen blood, demons and the dead.

  And Cyn…well, Cyn was just a girl. Barely twenty-one and could already boast about having a hand in saving the world. She could boast, though she never did. She was “just” a girl and had no more pretensions than that. The secret that only Jack knew was that she wanted to be shut of the entire fight.

  If she had her way, she would find a farm in Wales and raise geese. When they were alone in bed, with Jack trying to ignore the pain of his latest cut and the emptiness in his chest, she would talk about raising geese. The idea fascinated her and yet, when Jack, in true American fashion, asked if there was a market for goose meat, she was utterly perplexed at the question.

  She wanted only to raise the geese; she didn�
��t want to sell them and surely didn’t want to see them die.

  Jack loved that beautiful innocent, naive outlook. It was as precious as it was ridiculous. She would describe Hobbit burrows where the geese would live and local children who would come by in yellow rain slickers and boots, pink boots for the girls and muddy blue ones for the boys—to feed the growing squadrons of mellow-minded birds.

  He would laugh at these strange fantasies, but the laughter was usually fake. Yes, Cyn knew spells and she thought she knew what it took to cast them, but she didn’t really.

  Jack hid that part from her. It was easy. He smiled, enjoying the stretch of skin and the working of the muscles on his face; he touched her arm, relishing the million of cells involved in the simple act; he kissed her hungrily as if he had never tasted lips so wonderful.

  And he hadn’t…even if he had just kissed her a minute before. The spells drained him. They drained every part of him. They took that part of him that remembered these tactile experiences. They took the love that he and Cyn spun. And that was both good and bad.

  It was good because he was constantly falling in love with her. Every day it was a new love. Every day it was exciting…but also everyday he would wake up feeling only a fraction of what he had felt the day before. It frightened him because what would happen if he missed a day with her? Would he forget his love for her entirely? Would he wander? Would he care?

  Caring was a real issue with Jack. He looked upon Bob Chapman and wondered why they weren’t beating information out of him. It wasn’t an evil feeling, not like when he was sacrificing the blood and the souls of others; that had been horrible. This was just a lack of empathy.

  Clamping a hand over his latest cut, he struggled to his feet and went to the edge of where the Holy Oil had been poured. The proximity of it made his already squirrelly stomach flutter. For a sorcerer, the concept of God could be just as hard to deal with as that of the Devil—they both took you. They both owned you. They both demanded obedience and sacrifice.

  As Jack watched the priests exorcise the demon in Bob, Cyn pulled her medkit out of the backpack she had kept stashed behind the dumpster. She cleaned out Jack’s self-inflicted laceration, smeared it with bacitracin and then wrapped it tight; the process took all of a minute—she’d been doing this for over a year now and was quick and thorough.

  She then unzipped the light jacket she wore and pulled off the Kevlar vest that had been hidden beneath it. She was red-cheeked and sweating from the heat and with a practiced hand, she spun her thick blond hair into a bun to get it off her neck.

  “Who’s ready for sushi?” she asked, as if there wasn’t a filthy, diseased ravaged man lying on the floor of the alley, screaming his lungs out.

  “What I want are new priests,” Jack said, jumping back into his argument. He too pulled off his vest and forearm guards. “These two aren’t cutting it.”

  “I can’t fire them without cause,” Metzger replied. In spite of the humidity and the warm night, he stayed “gear-up,” his shotgun at the ready. Akron wasn’t the same as it had been. It was dangerous now and the screams of the demon and the prayers of the priest were attracting a crowd.

  “Here’s a cause: they suck,” Jack shot back, uncaring that the two priests were five feet away and well within earshot. “You saw how long it took Timmons to show up and don’t get me started on Jordan. Really, Jordan, what the hell was that about?”

  “If you can’t tell, I’m a little busy here,” the younger priest hissed. The two priests were panting and sweating with the spiritual effort of forcibly removing a demon from a living host. The ones that had been invited in were always the hardest to evict. They had their claws dug in deep. They acted as if it was their body and they fought tooth and nail to stay.

  “Maybe Jordan is getting shy,” Cyn suggested in a low whisper. When the two men looked at her nonplussed, she leaned in closer and said in an even lower tone: “That’s English for saying that maybe he’s becoming a coward.”

  The suggestion was certainly not unheard of. Facing even one demon was a difficult thing, but to do it on a weekly or even a daily basis was hard on the psyche.

  “All the more reason he should go,” Jack said, also keeping his voice pitched low. More than anyone he knew the fear and the stress of fighting the undead and for the first time in a month he felt a tinge of empathy for the priests.

  Even this logic didn’t stir Metzger. “In case you haven’t noticed, there is a worldwide shortage of priests. There are very few who want to be on the front lines fighting a war on demons and even fewer who want to work with you, Jack.”

  “Me? Why wouldn’t they want to work with me? I’m a sorcerer for goodness sakes.”

  “It’s precisely because you are a sorcerer,” Metzger answered. “They are Godly men, Jack, and you with your blood and your pagan symbols. It’s extremely off-putting. Also, you’re a bit of a jerk.”

  Jack threw his hands in the air. “A jerk? Me? Cyn, can you believe this guy?” She only shrugged, which shocked him. “What? You think I’m a jerk, too?”

  Another shrug. “You can be a little tough when we’re on the job. I know it’s the stress and the spells and the fact that no one has heard from Robert in so long.”

  After the dust had settled from the Event, meaning after the blame had been well established—Jack and Cyn getting more than their fair share, mainly by being honest about the events that had led up to the destruction of the city—they had been flown to Egypt under escort to search for Robert.

  It had been a waste of time and sweat. Despite money being splashed around and the Egyptian government fully on board, no one could remember seeing Robert anywhere near any of the hundreds of historical sites that dotted the country. They had been there for three months poking about. During that time, Jack had worked on his tan, which became a warm brown, and also worked on his spells which drained the tan away.

  There was an amazing amount of leeway with the spells...well not his own spell, perhaps. A portal into hell was either there or it wasn’t; he could get it to encompass larger or smaller areas, but so far that was it.

  Robert’s spell to control the demons had implications that Jack had yet to test. He thought it was possible that a few changed words within the spell could allow him to control demons that had already come through the portal. The one problem was that he had yet to find an incentive for a demon to comply. The original spell allowed entry into the world as a reward for doing the bidding of the spell’s master, but if a demon was already here what would make it go against its nature and serve Jack? So far that was an unknown.

  Although it had seemed to be the weakest of the three spells, Cyn’s protective spell was Jack’s “go to” spell, especially as he practiced and discovered that his soul was both a source of power and the finest of tools. He had discovered his ability to manipulate his blood by accident.

  He had been battling a demon in a Sarasota neighborhood. It had already killed a priest and two soldiers, and things could not have been worse. Jack’s sword arm was mangled; there were three deep scores in it that went right to the bone. The demon’s poison was in his system working its way to his heart and his blood ran in waves down his arm, but that was nothing compared to the predicament Cyn found herself in seconds later.

  She had thrown herself at the beast to protect Jack

  With her shotgun empty, she had gone to her sword. She was laughably inept with it and the demon attacked and attacked until she broke and fled. She took off around the house, but the demon easily ran her down.

  In a perfect state of terror, Jack hobbled after. “Hey!” he had cried, miserably, trying to get the creature’s attention. “Hey! I’m doing a spell. I’m calling a fiend!”

  That had earned Cyn one second of grace and she used it to dive into the pool that she had been trapped against. She had planned to simply swim to the other side, but the demon had blown its ice breath over the top of the water, freezing it and trapping her below.

/>   The demon had then turned on Jack, who was light-headed and close to blacking out. He had dropped to one knee with a brush in hand and could do nothing but try to throw up a protective ward around himself to buy time, but unfortunately his left hand was inept at drawing and the pain of the poison was so great that the glyphs dribbled and smeared. Panic nearly seized him, but he forced his mind away from the fear and directed all his energy to the spell, and when the next drop of blood fell from his wound it was almost as if he “caught” it in midair.

  The blood slowed and he simply willed the next glyph into proper shape.

  His mind alone had formed the glyph. The drop had struck in the exact shape he had needed. It had been amazing and had Cyn not been trapped under the ice and likely seconds away from drowning, he would have laughed aloud.

  Instead, he forced his mind to do more and it responded with alacrity. The spell was formed exactly as he needed and then he spoke: “Prt m hrw Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd. Hrr ah huroon ksa hrer, mkr,”...My sacrifice holds those called to walk in the day and binds those unbidden to remain in its place of darkness.

  Somehow this worked and the spell froze the demon in place.

  To say that the beast fought this imprisonment was an understatement. It went wild and, seeing as only the force of Jack’s mind held the spell together, it was a hard battle that was fought between them. They fight was wholly in the mind and in the realm of the will.

  It was a strange battle and not one that Jack was used to. On top of that, he was deathly afraid for Cyn, who had been under the ice for close to a minute. Jack began to sweat and to shake and there was what felt like a stab of molten steel in his brain. The demon slowly strained forward until it was almost within reach and in another second it would have killed Jack with a swipe of its bone-claws, but just then there was an explosion from the frozen pool.

  Cyn had detonated a grenade in the shallow end. Breaking through the ice, with her ears bleeding, she had lurched out of the water, sword in hand, looking like an avenging angel, hell bent on slaying the demon—and she had.