She turned and walked away, still wearing the heels and evening gown from earlier. The dress still framed the play of fine muscles in her back, coming down to a V that stopped on her tailbone. The heels made her sway slightly as she walked, hips swinging like a pendulum in a hypnotist’s hands. My attention was locked, steel to a magnet.
I ate my sandwich as she climbed the stairs, but I didn’t taste it at all.
25
Kat looked up from her monitor as I knocked on the conference room door. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Her ponytail was loose and in disarray, thick strands of honey-blond hair hanging around her face and neck. Normally she kept it as tight as a nun’s knickers.
Spinning slightly in the high-backed, ergonomic chair, she faced me. Her shoulders were hunched, pulled down around herself, closed off.
She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped.
I walked in and sat in my chair on the other side of the table from her.
We looked at each other. She had changed clothes. I couldn’t see her legs, but I was sure she was wearing jeans and Dr. Martens. They were below the edge of the table, but that was what she always wore. A loose-fitting Bella Morte shirt with a winged, neon-green skull wrapped around her chest.
I was still shirtless. The conference chair felt like sandpaper across the burn on my shoulders, so I leaned up, putting my forearms on the table. Silence hung between us, swollen and heavy-laden.
I’ve known Kat almost as long as I’ve been hunting monsters. Her sister was killed by a vampire, and she took it on herself to find the bastard, planning to kill them. Playing groupie, she infiltrated a local Kiss, letting them bite and drink from her while she looked for information. Somehow they discovered her plan. They handed her over to a sick, sadistic sonnuvabitch named Darius. He turned her into a bloodwhore.
By the time I found her chained in an abattoir of blood and body parts, Kat had survived torture and abuse on a level that would have killed a weaker person.
After helping her dust that bastard, my mission became her mission.
She was like a sister to me, in some ways even closer than that. I loved Kat and she loved me. Over the years we had shared many silences. They were always easy and companionable. The type of silence that is a comfort, knowing you and the other person are connected to a point that you don’t have to fill the air with words.
This silence was full of jagged edges.
It screamed out for one of us to speak, to fill it with words, to break it into a million pieces of hurt.
Tiredness fell on me like a hammer. I didn’t want to do this. Not now. Not ever.
There was a coal of anger behind my breastbone, red hot and ready to flare up with the slightest brush.
But that wasn’t what I wanted.
This was a crap situation in the middle of a shitstorm.
Kat stopped chewing her fingernail, looking up at me. “Deacon, I . . .”
I tried but just couldn’t keep the brittle edge out of my voice. “Just tell me what you found.”
Her mouth shut. A long second passed before she nodded sharply and spun her seat around. Her fingers began clacking on the keyboard. As she typed, her shoulders widened and her spine straightened. She settled back into what she knew best.
I watched the images flashing on the screen, relieved. Stick to the job. It’s easier.
Kat’s voice was steadier as she spoke. “The Wrath of Baphomet has been around in one form or another for the last seventeen hundred years. The first mention of them appearing in the Formicarius by Johannes Niders.” The screen split into side-by-side images.
One was an ancient book. The leather cover worn smooth from decades of handling, shiny spots formed by hundreds of hands holding the book open to read it through the years. The thick papyrus pages were frayed along their edges, and one or two had slipped the stitched binding, pulling out to reveal thick calligraphy in tiny, precise lines across the bone-ivory paper.
The other picture was a lithograph. Millions of tiny intricate lines swirled together to form a picture. The edges of the illustration were almost solid black, boiling out of the corners and breaking apart near the center in whorls forming three figures: one man and two women. The man dripped into being from the inky darkness. Tentacles twisted where his arms should have been, and he was carried by feathered wings like an eagle. The artwork was crisp, so detailed I could see individual vanes in each pinfeather.
The two women pictured were also swooping out of the dark. One of them wore a long robe. The artist captured the swell of her chubby body under the layer of cloth, the severity of black hair being pulled back, and the scowl that pulled her face down around two piercing eyes. If the illustration had been in color, they would have been a poison shade of absinthe.
The third woman was a monstrosity, wide bat wings trailing tails of inky blackness. The artist put a lot of work into rendering the swirl of ramhorn around a diabolical face.
The artwork was exquisite.
“Doré?”
Kat spun to face me. The flush had drained from her cheeks and her eyes didn’t look as raw. “Yes, the illustration is by Gustave Doré. It’s one of a set that he etched for the Vatican-sponsored, but never approved, Malleus Maleficarum.”
I knew I recognized that artwork. Gustave Doré was a prolific illustrator in the 1800s. He hand etched thousands of illustrations on steel and copper, making lithographs of images from a myriad of literature. Most of the images you associate with Dante’s Inferno, Don Quixote, and the Book of Revelation are probably his.
He was one of my favorite artists. Mostly because Nana Chalk had prints of his artwork from the Bible framed in every room of her house. Whenever I would stay over, I would sleep in her small spare bedroom under a print of The Crucifixion that was bigger than the bed it hung over. I would turn, putting my head to the bottom of the bed, and stare up at that etching. With my nose filled with the smell of linen, mothballs, and cold cream from the handmade quilt, my young eyes would trace every meticulous line, drinking in the suffering of the Son of God.
Doré’s work haunted me, driving deep into my soul. When I got older, I hunted out his work, devouring it both as an artist and a Catholic. When Nana Chalk passed on, I fought for that picture, threatening bodily injury to my cousin Sean if he tried to take it for himself. It hung over our home altar in the living room after my wife and I bought our house.
It was one of the many things that had been lost when that part of my life was destroyed.
Kat watched me with a look on her face. I had seen that look a lot over the years. She got it every time I drifted into memory. Kat knew the story of my family. She wasn’t there from the beginning like Father Mulcahy, but she had come into my life shortly after. In the years we had been friends . . . No, fuck that, in the years since we had been family, she had seen me through many bad times when the memories were too strong to handle. Times when the bottle and the Rosary fought to comfort me.
Times when neither one was enough.
I sat up straighter, looking at the picture on the screen. “This is the Wrath?”
“Yes.”
“I see Selene and Athame, but that isn’t Ahriman.”
“No, that is an illustration from an earlier incarnation of the coven.” She went back to the keyboard, fingers tapping quickly. “Ahriman apparently joined the coven just before they crossed the ocean to come to the Colonies in 1762.”
“So they’ve been in America since the beginning?”
“Pretty much.”
“Who’s that in the illustration, then?”
More finger tapping. “He was a Russian warlock named Chernobog. He founded the Wrath of Baphomet with Selene. They were a couple, terrorizing ancient Europe for centuries. The list of atrocities connected to them is extensive. An outbreak of leprosy that threatened to destroy half of Spain in the dark ages was their fault. Athame is their daughter. She appeared with them as a child.”
“What happened to him?”
“The coven was driven from Ireland after they laid waste to a monastery, a nunnery, and a children’s home. The Vatican dispatched a team of witch hunters equipped with the cutting edge in weaponry at the time.”
The screen flashed as the images changed. Another illustration came up. This one was an ink-wash painting, a head shot of a man with gaunt cheeks and dark eyes under the wide brim of a Puritan’s hat. The expression on the face was dour, thin lips in a down-turned line, brow creased over a bladed nose.
“Chernobog was killed by this man, Solomon Kane. It was a long battle that took the lives of every witch hunter except Kane. He fought on his own for two days before killing Chernobog. Selene and Athame fled, disappearing until they arrived on this continent with Ahriman as a part of the coven.”
“What happened to Solomon?”
“He traveled to Africa and never returned.”
I tried to sit back in my chair. The leather was rough as I eased against it. It took a second, but I finally found a place where the burn settled to a low buzz of annoyance instead of feeling like someone was flat-ironing my shoulders. As comfortable as I was going to get, I pointed at the screen. “Okay, backtrack to the first picture.”
Two clicks of a mouse switched the screen to the illustration by Doré of the three original witches. All three of them had the pentagrams around their necks. “Any hits on that symbol they all wear?”
She tip-tapped the keys. The screen filled with a picture of the amulet that all three witches wore. Blown up giant size, the face on the goat was even nastier, like it would bite you if you got too close. “The symbol was made notorious by Malachai Ephraim in the first century. Representing the ‘Goat-Headed God,’ it has been a symbol of use in satanic ritual throughout history.”
“Goat-Headed God?”
“Yep.”
“So these assholes are worshipping a demon named Baphomet who has sold them a line of shit about being a ‘god.’” My fingers stabbed air quotes around the word god. “Pretty much.”
Witches and their kind are always getting suckered by demons proclaiming godhood. Baphomet was just the latest in a long line. Hecatae, Cernunnos, even Astaroth were all just demons. Powerful demons, arch fiends of Hell, but demons nonetheless.
The world of monsters ranges pretty far and wide, with an ass-ton of creatures claiming deity they don’t deserve. Hell, I’ve put a number of them down myself. Delusions of grandeur or demonic deception at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter, there is one God and one God only. Everyone else is just an asshole with ulterior motives.
I thought for a second. “We know Selene and her crew are planning something big or they wouldn’t have made such a high-profile move. I wonder if this is the old ‘bring me to earth and rule it with me’ shell game.”
Demons were always trying to be pulled into this plane of existence. They traded in the chess game of temptation and torment of the mind and soul for a corporeal body with which they can cause actual death and destruction. Most of them settle for possessing people. For a demon, it’s like boosting a car. They joyride around in some poor person’s body, burning it up in a high-speed chase of torment and chaos.
Apparently it really blows their skirt up. They never want to let go of their host, running around in that body until the person is completely destroyed and everyone they love has been hurt.
When a demon manages to become corporeal, they don’t have the limitations of a human body. It’s like they hijack an F-150 fighter plane armed with thermonuclear warheads and fueled by crack cocaine.
The demon will run amok killing as many people as it can, sowing a path of destruction in its wake. For a demon, it’s the ultimate high. They hunger for it like a junkie needs a fix.
Thankfully, it’s next to impossible for this to happen, making the occurrence rare. If every half-ass, pimply-faced teen with a hate on for Mom and Dad could spin a record backward and call the Devil, then the world would be in some serious shit. No, it takes a convergence of ritual, power, and just the right circumstances.
Selene? She could pull it off.
That was the scary part of all the shit that had happened so far.
Kat spun her chair around. She leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Could be. When you were talking to the witches, Selene said something about the Blood of the Trinity. I did a search for that term.”
“Anything pop?”
A smile crossed her face. It was small and guarded, but it was there. “Well, it’s a fairly popular anime and the title of a not nearly as popular Celtic praise and worship CD.”
It was nice to see my friend smile. “Somehow I don’t think that’s what she was referring to.”
“No, probably not.” Her smile widened, lifting her cheeks. Her hands moved up, fingers snagging the elastic band that held her ponytail. She pulled it loose with a tug, static electricity cracking. She gathered the loose strands up, slicking them back from her face.
Kat’s hair is some of the thickest I have ever seen. Bone straight and heavy like brocade, she wears it pulled back in a single ponytail that rides high on the back of her skull. I’ve seen it down only a handful of times. Pulled back, it revealed her girl-next-door looks. Full lips, straight nose, and big blue eyes made a face that you would marry after meeting the girl at Sunday school in middle Ohio. Pulling her hair back, she looked almost normal.
She looked like my friend Kat, not the person I was pissed at.
“I did find this.” A finger click and the screen switched to an image of a parchment page. “This is a prophecy from the Necronomicon Ex Mortis.”
I couldn’t read it. The lettering scrawled across the screen in flamelike slashes and geometric shapes. They were vaguely rune-ish, written with dark reddish brown ink on flesh-colored papyrus. Symbols and sigils had been etched in relief behind them.
The letters began to twist as I studied them, growing fuzzy and squirmy. A tickle of pain started behind my eyes, the pinprick beginnings of a headache that would blossom into a full-blown migraine. The top of my nasal cavity felt full and moist. Sloshy.
Pinching the bridge of my nose to keep it from bleeding, I looked away. “What the hell kinda language is that?”
Kat clicked the mouse and the screen went black. “Sorry. That was Kandarian.”
The pressure in my skull bubbled, dissipating. “I’m assuming there’s a translation or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”
“There is. It’s a minor prophecy and some of it is indecipherable, but it mentions the Goat’s Trident, the Blood of the Trinity, the Mating of Enlil and Ishtar, and the Pentacle of Heaven.”
“None of that means anything to me.”
“Well, the Goat’s Trident could possibly be Selene, Athame, and Ahriman. Baphomet is the Goat-Headed God, there are three of them, and in witchcraft lore, a trident is a symbol of power and retribution.”
I stood up, the snappy patter comfortable to me. I had my friend back for a moment and I wasn’t willing to let it go. To hell with that. I didn’t have enough friends not to cling to them. Push shit aside and deal with it later. I’m good at that. Hell, I’m a world champion at it.
I began to pace. “Okay, I can stretch to that. I don’t know what the other references are. Enlil and Ishtar knocking boots and a Pinnacle of Heaven? I got nothing.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Kat typed with a smile. “The Mating of Enlil and Ishtar and the Pentacle of Heaven.” The screen filled with a picture of space: pinholes of white and tye-dyed planets interspersed among them. It was an artist’s rendition, full of purples, indigos, and magentas. “Enlil was the Kandarian king of the gods and Ishtar the goddess of fertility or love. The Romans called them Jupiter and Venus, and named the planets after them. Those two planets will align, appearing as one tomorrow.”
“In other words, mating.”
“Yep.” She typed and the picture on the screen tilted, planets sliding up to form an artistic interpretation of someone looking down at t
he universe. “And when the two planets align, they form a configuration of planets that can be traced into a . . .” Lines traced between the planets forming a star shape. Kat waited on me to supply the end of her sentence.
“A pentagram. Just like the one on their amulets.”
“Exactly!”
I thought about it. “I can see that. So the Blood of the Trinity seems obvious in that light too. The witches are after the blood of three children.”
“Not just children, but lycanthrope children who shouldn’t have ever been born. They are unique.”
“Witches do love them some unique shit.”
“They do. Unique means powerful.”
“And we know their blood has power because . . .” I stopped short.
The unspoken words sat between us like a dead thing.
Larson stepped into the room.
“Because I can walk now.”
26
Larson’s hands were up, palms toward me. He had also changed clothes, now wearing a pair of jeans and a dark blue button-up shirt. He’d taken a pair of clippers to his hair and beard, shearing away all the singed pieces. Bright copper-orange hair was a short buzz, and his tangled beard had been trimmed to a neat goatee. The hollows around his cornflower blue eyes were still soot black like a domino mask.
His voice was hoarse, but strong. “Deacon, I’d like a chance to explain.”
Every bit of ease I had pulled together burned away in a flash fire of anger. “Explain what? Explain how you were somehow right? That somehow you aren’t one hundred percent to blame for the death and destruction that has been brought here? Whatever the hell you did to get your legs back, that is what drew these witches out of hiding and sicced them us and Sophia’s children. Explain that motherfucker.”
Kat spoke up. “Deacon, please—”
My finger stabbed the air in her direction. “Don’t. Larson wants to stand behind what he did, then by all means, I want to hear it.”
Larson took a step toward me. His eyes flashed. “Don’t you dare take any of this out on her. You’re pissed at me, then fine, but you leave her out of it.”
Blood and Magick Page 11