by J. R. Rain
But something was above her, too. Above and a little behind her, and it was glowing with a furious intensity. She saw the white light of it reflecting off the tree branches and leaves before her, the same tree the little bird had just been sitting in.
And somehow, through all the wailing, she heard a fire crackling directly overhead. Crackling and spitting and roaring as if she were sitting in front of the world’s biggest fireplace. The now two-headed dog collapsed onto its front legs. Blood pumped from the open wound in the third neck, splashed over the ground. The nearest dog head tried desperately to lick the opening, but it seemed a futile effort, with all the blood.
Now, she slowly, slowly looked up.
And up.
Way up.
And saw fire, lots of fire. But the fire had shape too, the shape of a humanoid: two legs, arms, a torso, shoulders, a head. The head was a good deal taller than the roof of the single-story house. In its right hand, it held a fiery sword. In fact, where the hand ended and where the sword began was hard to discern.
She felt the heat, but it wasn’t unbearable. She also felt the wind too, which seemed to emanate from the fiery entity standing over. The heat and wind swirled and blasted her. It also had a chemical smell that she was not familiar with.
From her vantage point, she could see white flames snapping and curling out from the entity’s thighs and torso and chest and even his head. The flames turned to puffs of black smoke, and Tammy watched as blood sizzled on the burning sword. Sizzled and evaporated. There was a quiet calm about the entity standing over her. Perhaps strangest of all, she sensed her brother in there, looking out through an eyeless face, perceiving everything around them, including the demons that she could not see. Mostly, she sensed fearlessness and calm. Mostly, she sensed complete control and complete power.
Her brother’s focus shifted from the demons and the wounded hellhound, to something lower to the ground. The flaming sword in his hand shifted into the on-guard position. Now Tammy heard clapping from the sidewalk. It was the female jogger, who now stood just beyond the chain-link fence that encircled their property, the same fence that the hellhound had effortlessly leaped.
“Okay, now that was badass,” said the woman, as she continued to clap. “Seriously, I might not have seen anything like that in all my life. Except maybe when I watched you do the same to the werewolves. But this is no werewolf, is it? I have watched Cerberus single-handedly tear armies apart. In fact, until now, I had thought he was impervious to destruction. I guess I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong!”
Meanwhile, more dark blood pumped from the gaping opening, spreading like an oil slick across from the street. The creature’s screeching had turned to high-pitched whimpering howls. How neighbors weren’t pouring from their homes, Tammy didn’t know.
She cocked her head, listening, searching. Okay, she did know. The homes were empty. In fact, all of the homes in the cul-de-sac were empty, even many of those that stretched further down the street too. What were the chances that all the homes on the street would be empty?
“Not very good,” said the jogger, seemingly reading her mind. “Timing, after all, is everything.”
The female jogger stood with hands on hips and caught her breath and took in the scene around her: the dying dog, the fire warrior towering behind her. Interestingly, Tammy could no longer detect her father’s thoughts.
“Of course not, lass,” said the jogger, her voice suddenly a little grittier than it had been a few moments ago. “Your father—the sniveling, cowardly, no good rat bastard that he is—has been ejected to the Void.”
Tammy didn’t know what to think about the Void. The jogger before her was hard to read, but not impossibly so. The thoughts came quickly and were laced with fear and hate and anger and confusion. Mostly, there was something else going on. The jogger was thinking of... formulas? Arcane formulas. Secret formulas. All of which crowded her brain, filling the forefront of it enough so that Tammy couldn’t push through.
“I can’t have a little girl knowing my deepest, darkest secrets now, can I?”
The woman looked impassively upon the massive dog, which had dropped to its belly, whimpering. The severed head had long since stopped snapping. “A shame. There are, after all, only so many three-headed dogs in the world.”
“Will he die?” Tammy heard herself ask, although her voice might as well have been somewhere above her, somewhere in the area where the burning fire warrior was standing. But it was her voice, and it was distant and hollow and not quite filled with as much fear as she would have thought.
“Hard to say, lass. I’ve never seen anything hurt the old boy. I suspect he might power through. He is, after all, immortal too.”
“Maybe he can get by with just two heads?”
“We’ll have to see, lass. We are in uncharted territory, so to speak.”
“Why do you keep calling me lass?”
“It’s a good word for a young girl with spunk.”
“Spunk?”
“Grit.”
Tammy nodded and thought she might understand. It was a compliment, maybe. The jogger smiled, and crossed her arms, and something on her arm moved. Tammy was sure of it. Something dark—a tattoo perhaps—undulated around the arm. She had seen it in her mother’s memory, back when her mother had spoken to... the devil.
“You are a clever girl, aren’t you?” asked the woman, pacing now just outside her gate. Tammy could see sweat stains around her armpits and nape of her neck. A steady and dizzying stream of strange formulas reached Tammy’s inner ear. Tammy did her best to ignore them and push through them, but the strange words and ingredients only seemed to increase in intensity.
“Nuh uh, young lady. It’s very rude to read someone else’s mind without permission.”
“You’re doing it.”
“That’s because I invented being rude.”
Tammy wasn’t sure she was following.
“Never mind. It was a joke, lass. But let’s just be clear: I can never, ever allow you into my mind. Ever. I am certain you would not like what you find there. I am certain it would drive you instantly crazy. Do you understand?”
Tammy wasn’t so sure about that. Tammy, in fact, was quite intrigued with what she would find there.
There. Tammy briefly caught a train of thought, and, yeah, it wasn’t a pretty one. The entity before her—the entity that might very well be the devil—had come to entice her brother. No, to turn her brother on everyone. Except, yes. The entity before her had just realized he/she might have come across a new target. A potentially better target.
The boy will not give up his father. The boy, at least in this form, scares the shit out of even me. The boy might be untouchable, at least for now. But the girl, ah, the possibilities...
And then the thought disappeared again, to be replaced by a long series of rambling codes and numbers and strange ingredients, effectively blocking out even Tammy’s powerful telepathy.
“You heard that, didn’t you?” asked the woman, who had resumed her pacing before the chain-link fence.
“You planted those words for me to hear,” said Tammy.
Further down the road, a car turned down the street, headed in the opposite direction. Which was just as well. Tammy knew that if the driver looked in his rearview mirror, he would see a dying three-headed dog in her driveway. Oh, and a twenty-foot-tall fire warrior. Tammy also knew, after quickly dipping into the driver’s head, that the driver had no intention of checking his mirror and was perfectly content to get off the road and into a shower.
“So, so, so powerful,” said the woman.
“I’m just me,” said Tammy, shrugging.
“Well, you, young lady, are the most powerful telepath I might have ever come across.”
“That’s not true,” said Tammy, catching a quick snapshot into the woman’s head. Or, rather, into the devil’s head. “There was another, long ago.”
“Yes. Very good.”
“She had a son
who was nearly as strong.”
“Very, very good, lass.”
“It is the same woman who possesses my mother.”
“Indeed.”
“You want her too.”
“I want them all, little girl.”
Tammy cocked her head and searched between the streaming, foreign words, words that she was certain were not in use in today’s languages. They were, she was certain, a secret language that only a few knew, and fewer still knew how to use.
“So perceptive,” said the woman.
“You are flattering me on purpose,” said Tammy, for she had caught that as well, although the flattery came naturally to the entity before her. Using people came naturally. And so did hurting them. The entity before her enjoyed hurting them best of all. And if it couldn’t hurt them, it enjoyed ruining them. And if it couldn’t ruin them, it enjoyed scaring them. At the very least, it enjoyed being in their thoughts. Human thoughts, that was. No, that wasn’t quite right. The entity before her needed to be in mankind’s thoughts. Without which the devil would cease to exist.
“And we can’t have that, right?” asked the jogger.
A picture appeared within Tammy’s mind. It involved religion and the afterlife; heaven and hell; sinning and forgiveness; love and hate and fear. In particular, fear of the unknown. But mostly, the picture in her mind centered around belief. Belief in hell. Belief in the devil. Belief in punishment. Tammy understood that the entity currently pacing in front of her chain-link fence like a caged animal, had created an empire of fear. The empire was vast and multifaceted and reached down into the lives of most people, and for that, the entity was most proud and most grateful. Proud because of the work it had done, and grateful because it virtually guaranteed its continued existence.
Tammy wasn’t sure if she was reading the devil’s mind, or if the imagery was being purposely planted there. She suspected a little bit of both, as the codes and formulas were still there, but they seemed more in the background.
“So powerful,” the woman said.
The tattoo had moved further down the woman’s arm, just as it had when the handsome biker had been talking to her mother. Back then, her mother had watched the tattoo slowly undulate over the man’s forearm. A living tattoo. It was, she was certain, the mark of the devil.
“You want to use me,” said Tammy. “Or use my brother. Or use both of us. My mother, too, if you can.”
The jogger stopped pacing, faced Tammy, and placed both hands on top of the chain-link fence. The tattoo had coiled tightly around her wrist. Somewhere inside the woman, through the chanting and stream of ancient words, she sensed a woman inside who had very much regretted making a deal with the devil, a woman who regretted losing all control of her body, a woman who was certain she might not live out the day, a woman who knew her own personal hell was being set up for her even now, with special tortures designed explicitly just for her.
“She chose poorly,” said the devil, and Tammy heard the low growl now. It sounded nothing like how the jogger had sounded earlier. “She was nothing, just like the man before her. Lost souls, each. Adrift in this world, looking for a little excitement. I gave it to them, for a short while. But you are different, lass. We can work together. Your brother... your brother is a lost cause, I fear.”
And in that moment, even through the strange verbiage, she saw what the devil saw. It was a brief glimpse of the future and it involved her brother helping those who couldn’t help themselves. Her brother who would become a sort of urban legend. Whether the vision was true, she didn’t know, but the devil seemed to believe it.
“Yes, lass. We can work together, me and you. I feel the darkness in you.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again. She was certain, no, she was positive that the devil was wrong. And yet, she felt a stirring in her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
The woman standing at the fence smiled broadly, then raised her right hand. She snapped her fingers and something miraculous happened. The now two-headed hellhound was once again a three-headed hellhound. The severed head slowly disappeared from its resting place on the driveway, where its thick tongue had hung out. First it was there, and then, after a few seconds, it wasn’t. The blood on the street disappeared too, and now the hellhound leaped to its feet, turned in a tight circle. The two original heads promptly snapped and bit and growled at the new head; soon, all three were fighting ferociously. Blood and fur flew.
“Kids,” said the jogger, shaking her beautiful head. She looked from the devil dog and back to Tammy. “You think about what I said, lass, and I will be seeing you again.”
She turned and jogged off, her ponytail swishing from side to side, her jogging form nearly perfect.
The three heads quit snapping at each other long enough to turn and growl at Tammy. Next to her, the fire warrior shifted, and now the dog turned and ran swiftly down the center of the street, only to disappear in the blink of an eye.
Chapter Twenty-two
I came home and the kids were being very well behaved.
As in, both were in their rooms, and both were doing their homework. No fighting, nothing broken, no blood, no TV blaring, no video games, no YouTubing, and their phones lay quietly next to them, seemingly forgotten. Both smiled at me when I checked in on them, although Tammy rolled her eyes. Gee, I wonder where she got that from?
She was about to turn the page of her textbook when she paused, looked up at me. “You know what happened.”
“Of course I know.”
“Who told? Wait. Your angel,” she said, obviously scanning my mind.
“Not exactly my angel, not anymore, but that’s another story.” Ishmael had appeared in my minivan, in the passenger seat next to me. Although he had waited for me to stop at a stoplight, his sudden appearance had elicited a scream that I wasn’t very proud to admit had come from my mouth.
“It was nothing, Mom, really. We had it under control.”
“You had the devil under control?” I heard the words as I spoke them and could only shake my head.
“Then you probably have some idea what happened to the dog. Anthony took care of it. I wasn’t scared.”
My son, the fire warrior. I took in some air and continued processing the information I had been given by Ishmael only a few miles ago. Ishmael had, of course, been by their side, invisible, ready to fight, although my son, apparently, hadn’t needed much help. If anything, I sensed awe from Ishmael, although it was hard to sense anything from a being that might not have real emotions. Certainly not human emotions.
“I can’t believe your angel told on us. What a snitch!”
“Snitch? You’re irritated that my ex-guardian angel told me that the devil had visited you. That the devil, in fact, had had a nice little conversation with you; that the devil, in fact, had enticed you?”
“Quit being so dramatic, Mom. It was nothing.”
Except my guardian angel had said otherwise. My guardian angel had sensed Tammy’s interest, even as she tried to resist it. I didn’t have to voice this, knowing Tammy had picked up on my thoughts and memory of my conversation with Ishmael.
“Geez, Mom, if you think about it... who wouldn’t want me on their side? I can read anyone’s thoughts, even your angel’s, even animals. Besides, your angel can’t read my mind. Only your mind. He doesn’t know what I was really thinking.”
“And what were you really thinking?”
“That the devil was a big weirdo.”
I sensed evasiveness. Pure, motherly instinct. “Were you or were you not interested in what the devil had to say, young lady?” And the fact that I was having this conversation, really, really pissed me off to no end. I needed to speak with the devil, and I needed to do so now.
“No, Mom. He’s long gone now.”
“He’s not as far away as you think.”
“The lady that he’s using—”
“Possessing.”
“Okay, whatever. She�
��s busy doing other things for him right now.”
“And you know this how?”
She opened her mouth to speak. But then closed it again.
“Tell me now, young lady, or so help me, you will never see the light of day again.”
“Like you?”
I glanced at the alchemy ring on my hand that let me go into the sunshine and not get fried. “Never mind that. Answer me.”
She bit her lower lip, and I didn’t have to read her mind to know what was going on: she was deciding how much to tell me.
“It’s not that, Mom.”
“So what’s going on then, young lady?”
“Ever since I connected with the devil—”
“You connected, why?”
“I didn’t mean to. I felt him coming. Felt a sort of pulse of evil coming. I don’t know. I tuned into it, to see what it was.”
“Okay.” I waited.
“And ever since I tuned into it, it hasn’t really gone away.”
“What hasn’t gone away?”
“My connection,” she said.
“To the devil?”
“Yes. In particular, to the woman he’s using.”
“And she’s where?”
“In Santa Ana.”
“Doing what?”
“Working as a prostitute.”
“And you can see this?”
“Yes.”
“I command you to stop seeing this.”
“Whatever, Mom.”
“I mean it.”
“Fine, I will.”
“Block him. Something.”
She opened her mouth to speak, paused, then looked away, and I suspected she couldn’t block him. Not at the moment. At least, not for as long as the woman lived.
My daughter caught my eye again, and her simple look confirmed my suspicion. The devil and she were connected, at least, for the time being.
“Baby,” I said, “you have to resist him.”
“I will, Mommy. I swear.”