Cancer's Curse (The Zodiac Book 4)

by Sating, Paul

  "Or?"

  "There isn't an option."

  Chax chuckled and dug into his pocket for a fresh cigarette. "You'd risk upsetting the Balance for scum like her? Oh, that's pathetic."

  I slapped him across the cheek; I don't know what overcame me. He reeled, half spinning toward the picnic table, leaning on it with an elbow and whimpering. I hadn't even used a quarter of my strength.

  Bilba's mouth hung open. Ralrek just smiled and bounced a pebble off the back of Chax's shoulders.

  My sensitivity to my surroundings told me what I would see before I turned. The empty road confirmed. No pedestrians or vehicles. We were still okay. For now.

  "You just tried to cast, so don't act like you're concerned with upsetting the Balance. I'm not playing around. Tonight, I'm grabbing the note and then we'll meet up for chow in the morning and I'll get it to you. And if that doesn't work, then whatever you have to do; write a letter to your mommy and daddy, beg your auntie to stop this silliness, make an elixir, whatever. Stop the curse before it causes more harm."

  He turned to face me, which must have been difficult. Shame filled his eyes behind crocodile tears.

  "You're a damn fool for believing everything the Nijal scum tell you."

  "Seems like he is itching for another beat down," Ralrek mocked. "Maybe you should slap him again?"

  Chax flinched without me making a move.

  "No. But I will do much worse if he doesn't fix this."

  Hand still pressed against his cheek, Chax whined. "She's got you eating out of her hand, believing every word. Her family aren't the victims, let me tell you. They've been putting curses on us just as long as we've been cursing them. This didn't start with some stupid spat, like they lie about. It goes back longer than that. You don't want to get involved in this, Private … Sunstone." He read my name tag that was exposed when I slapped him and my rifle strap shifted. Well, bless it. "Trust me."

  I swatted away his threat. "Don't tell me what I want to do, Chax." I refused to refer to him by his mortal sergeant rank, no matter how much he embraced it. "I'll get involved until you take care of this. All you have to do is put an end to it. You do that and we're good. You don't, and—"

  "I know, I know. You're going to make my life a living heaven." Chax paused, holding up a single finger. "But what you don't understand is that you'll never be able to do that before I crush you. You have no idea who my family is, but trust me, they're more powerful than an army of yours. If you're screwing with me to protect precious little Cancer, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life."

  There's something to be said for confidence. Doubt fell around me like a blanket. What had we stepped into? Demons rarely acted like he was now unless they had good justification. I couldn't deny that I might have agreed too quickly to take Cancer's side. Just because she was a giving and caring nurse to the mortals didn't mean that back in the Underworld she and her family were free of guilt. I mean, really, I didn't know her from Shiva. Had I made a wrong and regrettable miscalculation? Had I just ruined not only my life, but Bilba and Ralrek's as well?

  "Chow." I snarled. "That's when you stop this."

  As we made him hand over his security card to get his unit's information to find him whenever we needed, I stuffed my hands in my pockets to prevent him from seeing them shake.

  Ralrek tapped him on the head. "Be a good boy and don't let us down."

  "Yeah, Zeke is small, but he's as vicious as a hellhound when he wants to be," Bilba grinned dumbly, obviously enjoying the pile-on. Unfortunately for me, in his exuberance, he'd also just given Chax my nickname, after the incubus already had my last name.

  Great. Would that come back to bite me?

  After getting the information we needed, we walked away. Ralrek and Bilba's humored reflection of how scared Chax looked faded into a blur of noise. I reflected on the incubus's confident statement that I would regret this for the rest of my life. We hadn't made it back to our trailer before I believed Chax was telling the truth.

  14 - Baghdad

  Chax didn't show up for chow, and avoided us throughout the three weeks since our confrontation under the overhang. I did everything I could to get him alone, but he kept himself surrounded by others. Making him recite the counter-spell had proven impossible. On some level, it probably qualified as stalking, but I stopped caring about Chax's priorities from the moment he opened his arrogant mouth and dropped his first threat.

  Despite our efforts, the issue of a curse had not been resolved, at least by Cancer's prescribed method. Bilba said he thought he remembered there being other ways to break spells, but without guide books, all of which were back in Hell, he could not be sure. We couldn't be sure if Cancer had found another way, or even tried to find another solution, because we had not patrolled her neighborhood since the fateful day she revealed herself to be a succubus before sharing her family's struggle.

  Until I could see Cancer again, I was going to stick to Chax like the pages of a young imp's succubi magazine. I caught him leaving the rec tent one night with three other soldiers, and I followed them back to his unit's housing area. We already knew his unit, so I knew the general area of where he bedded down, but not the exact trailer. Now I did. And I made sure he was aware I knew where he lived and used that to keep the pressure on. He reminded me, carefully, since there were three clueless mortal witnesses, that I would pay. We maintained a mutually hostile relationship. Working toward resolution with him wasn't a priority until I confirmed that Cancer and her family were free of the curse, which wasn't possible from my current position, flat on my back, listening to a podcast.

  Bilba burst into the trailer he and I shared, one hundred square feet of intimacy. "Oh my Lucifer, Zeke. Did you hear?"

  I sat on my bed, listening. "I don't hear anything."

  "Ha, ha, funny," Bilba said, his back to me as he closed the door and began stripping off his uniform.

  "No, seriously," I said, closing my eyes and ready to push the earbud back in my ear to resume the podcast I'd been trying to enjoy, "what am I supposed to be hearing?"

  "Not literally," Bilba corrected. "I'm talking about the rumors." When I didn't respond, he clarified. "About our next patrol?"

  "What about it?"

  He collapsed to his bed with a frustrated grunt. "We're heading back into Cancer's part of Khadra! Maybe we can finally get this business of the curse over with."

  At the news, I sat up, podcast forgotten. "Don't screw with me."

  "I'm not. That's what I heard."

  Finally. Cancer would hear our news about Chax, if the curse wasn't already lifted. We could put this behind us or keeping looking for a way to isolate Chax. Either way, we'd have clarity on the situation, and that beat this ambiguity every day of the week.

  "This is the first time I'm looking forward to going to work after chow," I said, a sly smile spreading across my face.

  "I thought you would like that."

  "I do, my friend. For the first time since we got to this horrible place I feel like we're doing something worthwhile, if that makes sense?"

  Bilba laid back on his bed. "It does." He wrapped his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. "But it isn't the only thing we've done, Zeke. The picture may too big to see the entire thing, but our time here hasn't been wasted. We've done good for the mortals."

  "I think the Russians and insurgents would disagree." I rolled onto my side and looked at my best friend. "Do you really believe we're making a difference with what we're doing? Do you really think anything is going to change for any of them by the time we leave? Honestly, sometimes it feels like we're just pushing the cyclops down the road, hoping someone else will deal with it."

  He turned his head, hands still locked behind it. "What else can we do?"

  I rolled onto my back, sighing. "I don't know. Something." Thoughts rolled through my mind of all the things I would do if I was Lucifer, all of them more active than the role us demons in the Overworld were servin
g now. "Instead of sending us to pass the time until we go home or died, maybe we could do something that would change the course of this situation."

  "That's not how it works, Zeke. Politics are tricky. You can't just force change."

  "There won't be change if no one does anything more than dance around the subject, hoping they don't flinch when the other side says boo."

  Bilba's bed creaked when he spun and sat up, facing me. "You would want an all-out war?"

  I looked at my best friend, whose eyes had grown wide. "What?" I laughed, short. "No. I want to go home, and preferably not in a coffin. I'm talking about real progress. Look at how these mortals live. This was happening to them before we got here and it will after we leave. Heavens, it has for generations now. What life is this for them? And all along, right under their noses, there are demons and angels being pulled by Lucifer and Yahweh, positioned and counter-positioned. For what? Nothing changes."

  Bilba put his hands on his knees, his shoulders slumping like a father trying to be patient with a stubborn child. "Maybe that's all the Balance is? Maybe it doesn't move. Think of it like a metal ball braced between two blocks of wood. You hold one and I hold the other. We have to push against each other's block to keep the ball steady in the middle. Too much tension and one of us will shift the ball and it will spurt right out. Too little tension and the ball just drops to the ground. Maybe that's what this, the Balance, is? Maybe this is all it will ever be?"

  Bless him and his insight. How did you argue against something like that and how could anyone be satisfied with a reality like the one my friend proposed? What was the purpose of our existence, the angels, heavens, even the mortals, if Bilba were close to pinning the nature of the Balance?

  "Hey, if nothing else, it gave us something to think about to pass the time until we can get out of here."

  "A little callous, but I get where you're coming from." I swung my feet over the edge of my bunk. He might have moved on easily, but I wouldn't. I couldn't. So, I needed to force a break before my thought train took me down a trail I didn't want to walk. The podcast wouldn't do, but food would, because there are few things incubi enjoyed more than food. "Want to grab chow before we report in? I am absolutely starving."

  Bilba rocketed out of the bed at the mention of food. "Me too. Let's go."

  It was one of the best meals I'd had yet during this deployment, something I really needed to shut up my dark thoughts. Before long, we were cutting our way through the side streets of Khadra.

  We turned the corner to Cancer's clinic, and I nearly stumbled. Something was wrong. Not one person hung around the building. The street was quiet, but some locals were out, at least until we came around. But the small clinic was different than ever before, as if everyone had abandoned the building.

  "Sir," I said, and Sergeant Jones stopped the patrol.

  "What, Sunstone?"

  I nodded at the building. "Can we check in?"

  "Again?" he sighed. "Is she really that cute to you?"

  I shook my head, the gravity of the situation blocking any thoughts, true or not, about how attractive Cancer was. "It's not that, sir. I think something is wrong."

  He turned, looking at the building. "I don't see anything. We keep going."

  He didn't notice the quiet; he couldn't have. He didn't notice the way the door wasn't fully closed even though no one waited outside; he should have. He didn't notice the marks in the door that hadn't been there before and signaled that it had been forced open from the outside.

  I drew a deep breath through my nose, stopping from calling him out in front of the entire squad. Jones seemed to sense my frustration.

  "Jesus H. Christ, Sunstone. Go ahead."

  I raced into the building without waiting for him to change his mind or to assign any of the other squad members. Delay was not an option.

  Pushing the door open, I halted in the doorway. Sniffing, I gagged and turned from the wrecked room when the pungent, rotten rust smell hit me. The clinic was empty, of people, medical equipment, and beds. Blood-stained sheets were coiled on the floor. The cabinet was smashed like someone had beaten it with a bat and tipped it over. The privacy curtains hung in shreds, as if someone had taken a sword to them.

  My hand slipped to my leg. My rifle wasn't appropriate in these small confines with concrete walls that could ricochet a bullet if I fired. But Creed's magic would work, and I was willing to chance upsetting the Balance to save Cancer, even though my more rational part of my brain said this destruction happened well before today.

  Inching Creed up so that the knob poked out of the flap of my pocket, gripped in my fist, I made my way to the rear room, extending my senses for any sight, sound, or spell that might be waiting.

  The rotten rust smell was worse back here. Empty shelving greeted me. The refrigerator and single stool were gone, along with every blanket and bottle of medication. The floor was covered in dried blood, the source of the funk. Violence.

  Everything, all of Cancer's work, ruined.

  I moved to the front room in a daze, not sure what to do. Too many thoughts buzzed, too many ways to respond and no way of knowing how to do them or who to do them to. The rot and decay told me we'd abandoned Cancer to this.

  "Chax," I growled. This wasn't about a curse. This was demon–made, done out of vengeance.

  I stepped out into the day, and Sergeant Jones' gaze hardened when he saw my face. Bilba and Ralrek raced to me.

  "Something happened. An attack," I said in an exasperated voice. "There's blood. Cancer."

  The squad moved in my direction before Jones instructed two guys to head inside to confirm what I saw, while the rest secured our surroundings. "Go see what they know," he said to Muhammad, pointing at a pair of locals who sat at a small table outside a closed bakery.

  "What happened?" Bilba asked.

  "Is she …?" Ralrek followed up.

  I pointed back toward the empty doorway. "I don't know. Someone robbed her and destroyed the clinic, and there is blood everywhere. At best, she's injured. At worst …"

  "We'll find her," Ralrek said, grabbing my rifle strap and giving it a tug. "Head up, Zeke. Focus."

  My eyes flickered. He was right; we would find Cancer. And then I was going to find Chax Vicu. I rubbed my face. "Let's go."

  "How?" Bilba turned, looking around the street as if it would answer.

  The dusty road became my focal point. The swirling thoughts clouded my mind. The urge to run in every direction at once, invading every home regardless of how dangerous, safe, unethical, or taboo pulled at me. My skin prickled with the burning desire to whip Creed out of its hiding place, activate it, and go looking for Chax, even if I had to walk all the way back to the post. Right now, even an entire company of mortals could not stop me from putting an end to this.

  "Zeke? Are you okay" Bilba's voice drifted in through my fog. I tried to reach back out to him, feeling myself falling toward the emotional tumult raging inside.

  A sturdy hand on my shoulder pulled me further from the doorway. In my clouded state I didn't recognize who it was. It wasn't until the vice grip led me around the corner of the building, away from the rest of the squad, that I looked into the eyes of Sergeant Jones.

  "Snap out of it, Sunstone," Jones ordered, holding me by both shoulders and leaning his head in towards mine. "What's going on? Give me a status."

  I recapped what I found in the clinic.

  I saw something in his eyes, something beyond the Army, mortal and beautifully human. "We'll find her," was all he said, before straightening and allowing the harshness to return to his face. "Now, get yourself together. We've got a job to do."

  He disappeared around the corner, leaving me to follow. After a few seconds, reassured, I felt better, my head clearer, and rejoined the squad. Just before I reached the front of the building, something scraped behind me. I expected a stray dog, hoping for a precious meal, or a rodent trying to avoid the hot Iraq sun. The small boy was neither.

&
nbsp; "Soldier?" said the tiny, frail voice in Arabic.

  I looked into the eyes of a familiar young boy. He stood on one leg, using makeshift crutches to navigate.

  I rushed to him and got down on a knee. "Hi," I said awkwardly, careful to not betray my ability to speak the native language to my squad. I gestured to the boy's missing leg. "How are you feeling?"

  He smiled. "It doesn't hurt anymore. It aches sometimes, but Miss Cancer said that's normal. She told me I'm so brave and strong that it will keep getting better."

  Cancer? The boy she'd saved talked about her as if they'd just had a conversation. I wanted to hug this kid.

  "Is Miss Cancer okay?" I tilted my head back toward the clinic. "Do you know what happened?"

  The boy's big, round eyes drifted to the building. He nodded so subtlety it looked like he was fearful of being watched and didn't want to give anything away.

  "What? What happened?"

  His eyes locked on mine, defying his age. His cheeks held the robustness of youth, round and smooth, but in that moment, when his lips pinched, they took on a solid defiance, a sort of internal rebellion of someone three times as old. "Mean men came a couple days ago and took everything. They hurt Miss Cancer, soldier. Hurt her bad."

  My throat seized. "How bad? Is she okay? Do you know where she is?"

  This time the boy nodded viciously, a wicked smile of victory spreading across his lips. I liked this kid's attitude. "Yes, soldier. I know where she is, and she is okay. She sleeps too much, though."

  Without thinking. I rubbed the boy's arm. He hobbled backward at my touch and almost toppled.

  "I'm so sorry. Please forgive me?"

  The boy still smiled, trust unbroken.