by Chloe Garner
“Let her do it,” Sam said. “She wouldn’t do it unless she thought it was the only way.”
“The only way what?” Jason asked, making Sam say it.
“The only way to get them to back off.”
“To keep me safe.”
“Yeah.”
Everything in him wanted to argue, but he realized he couldn’t. Less than twenty-four hours ago, a demon had cracked him over the back of the head and dragged him out of Doris’ house. Maybe she was right. He glanced at Sam.
“I’d do it, if she thought I could,” he said.
“I know.”
They waited.
After about fifteen minutes, Sam jerked his head roughly to one side.
“What is it?” Jason asked.
“She started,” Sam said. “It…” He jerked his head again. “It hurts.”
“Why? Why does it hurt her?”
Sam blinked, listening.
“Because she’s good at it.”
<><><>
Samantha flicked the blood off her hands and wiped them on her pants. She was glad the blood would ash when she let him go, because otherwise the stains would be more than she would be able to bear. She was covered with his blood, solidly coated up to her elbows, and smeared with it everywhere else. She was holding him here, now, and so his blood didn’t ash, but it would later, and everything would be clean again. Everything on the outside, anyway. The demon - no longer human enough to call Brandt - whimpered. She picked up a bottle and poured anointing oil over her hands. The demon blood boiled and hissed, but her skin was immune. She rubbed her hands together, then slid her thumb into the deep gash in the demon’s thigh, pushing up towards the artery. His other leg was stripped most of the way to the bone.
He screamed, a raw, undisguised hellscream, as the flesh boiled and peeled away from the oil. He tried to flinch away, but between the decimation of his body, the gold pins keeping his smaller muscles constrained, and the heavy iron shackles holding the greater portion of his body taught, there wasn’t much for him to do.
She found the artery with her thumb and pushed it flat. It gave a satisfying throb as it collapsed, and she dug her thumbnail into it, turning her thumb over and pushing it into the artery. His foot twitched and he screamed again. She pulled a long gold pin out of the fabric of her pants where she had stashed a row of them and pushed it through the red flesh and down toward her thumb, holding the artery open as the pin punctured its way in. The demon screamed again, with impressive volume, given that one of his lungs was on the floor next to her. She’d tied it off with silver wire, so that he could continue to speak.
She stood and faced him. His face was stripped of skin, and he was entirely scalped. He hung limp from his wrists, rocking to a weak beat.
“Let’s begin,” she said. He looked up at her.
“What do you want to know?”
“Why are you after Jason?”
The demon swallowed, the muscles in his throat shifting along his esophagus visibly.
“He is kha,” he hissed, his mouth turning up in a mockery of a smile.
“So?”
“We will have him,” the demon said. He was drunk on pain, and enjoying her ignorance.
“So you aren’t after Sam?”
“I will have him, too. Once you are dead.”
The demon let his head wobble from one side to the other.
“You only have so many years,” he said. “You won’t be immune to us forever.”
“Is that so?”
“We know how long you were on the other side.” He coughed. “Between your time on our plane and how fast Sam is draining you…” Dark eyes glittered at her with demonic hunger that the body normally camouflaged.
She put her hand to her chest, feeling the trickle of power that tied to the pendant Sam wore that kept demons from being able to possess him. The eyes glittered again.
“Why does Jason matter?” she asked.
“Kha always matter,” the demon said.
“He’s a dragon. Why is that important?”
“He’s kha,” the demon said, then turned his head away.
“Who else is there?” Samantha asked. He was beginning to ash. Even her magic couldn’t keep him together after a certain point. She had minutes, maybe as much as an hour, but he was falling apart. She needed to finish up so she could make the rest of her point.
“Many,” he said, laughing bitterly. “Many, many, many.”
“And they want Jason?”
“They will have him.”
She put her mouth next to where the demon’s ear used to be, putting a silver-and-iron knife up through the bottom of his jaw so he couldn’t turn his head toward her.
“You tell them that coming after him is a mistake,” she whispered. “I am angry.” She dropped the words slowly, pacing herself as her heart began to race in anticipation and fear of what she knew how to do. “You tell them Anadidd’na Anu’dd is angry.”
She stepped away, pulling the knife out of his jaw and putting it back into her boot. She pulled out a pair of gold pins, five inches long, each, and looked at the demon’s body critically. He didn’t need to be able to talk, after this.
<><><>
Sam was curled around his knees, leaning against the wall. It had been hours, and it seemed to keep getting worse. It had plateaued for a while, and then Sam had jerked his head against the wall and gasped.
“What’s going on?” Jason had asked.
“It was just the beginning,” Sam had said. “There’s more.”
Jason stared down the hallway numbly, tired of waiting and always just one minute away from storming back downstairs and demanding an explanation, and never getting to the end of that minute.
“Is she okay?” he finally asked. He didn’t know how else to make Sam talk to him again.
“She isn’t her,” Sam said. “It’s…” He swallowed and dropped his head onto his own shoulder. “It’s like she was after I died, only she’s owning it.”
Jason didn’t know what that meant, so he tried to keep Sam talking.
“How much longer do you think?”
Sam closed his eyes, lifting his head slightly.
“This is the last part.”
Jason shook his head.
“How much longer?”
“I don’t know. She sees the end. She’s working toward something.”
“You know what?”
Sam focused hard, listening.
“Revenge.”
Jason swallowed. He’d been through a lot. If she meant to make up for even part of it… It was more than his mind could contain. He rubbed his arm, feeling cold.
“Should we go in there?”
Sam shook his head.
“Now more than anything, she doesn’t want us there,” Sam said. “She doesn’t even remember us.”
“And you can’t see what she’s doing?”
Sam had tried before and found the way blocked. Even with Samantha in there, he couldn’t see.
“No.”
Jason sighed. He hated the inaction. He hated the dependence. He hated the not knowing. Sam’s mouth fell open and he gaped at something Jason couldn’t see, like a fish trying to suck oxygen out of the air. That’s when the scream came echoing down the hallway.
They hadn’t heard a thing the whole time, but that scream was penetrating in a way Jason’s mind couldn’t grasp as it reeled away from it. He stumbled back into the wall, twisting his head away from it, knowing instinctively that covering his ears wouldn’t help. He saw Sam try it, anyway. The pitch went up and the volume grew, and then it cut off. Sam slid sideways onto the floor and Jason broke into a run.
He hit the door to the room in the basement at speed and the metal gave a sharp crack as it snapped. Samantha was standing before a vaguely humanoid figure that was falling to the floor in fluffy clumps of ash. She looked at him, hostile, feral, then jerked her face away at the moment of recognition. The room was streaked with blood.
Even in the dim light and against the dark floors, Jason could see the extent of it. Tissue was ashing where it stuck to the walls.
“It’s done,” she said.
“Get out,” he answered. “Go sit with Sam. I’ll get your stuff.”
She looked at him with reddening eyes, and he put an arm out to her. She ran against him like a creature seeking shelter from a sudden storm and he held her. Her arms were still red and sticky with blood as she cried.
“Why did you do that?” he asked.
“I had to,” she said.
“I could have done it,” he said. She shook her head.
“No. You couldn’t have.”
“Then why could you?”
He didn’t mean to ask, but he had to know.
“I worked a hellfactory for six months,” she said. “It was a thing… with Carter…” Jason pulled her back a fraction to watch her face, and she looked down and away. “He didn’t make me. He made me stay hellside… I was the one who volunteered at the factory.” She licked her teeth. “I was curious. I wanted to know. And they let me. They thought it was funny… I didn’t realize until later…” She covered her face with her hand. “The things I’ve done Jason…”
“It’s okay,” he said, hugging her again. The red on her arms, already dark, was turning darker still and flaking off. “Get out of here,” he said. “Go sit with Sam. You guys need each other.”
She nodded into his shirt and left.
He picked up the various tools and weapons and put them haphazardly into the backpack, then, for his own satisfaction, kicked through Brandt’s ashes. He found metal with his foot and pulled out piece after piece, slowly realizing what had happened.
“Damn,” he said, shaking his head. He put the pins and the wires into the backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and left without looking back.
<><><>
He’d found them huddled on the floor where he’d left Sam. Samantha had had her head buried in Sam’s chest, and Sam’s expression told Jason when he got there that it was over. Samantha was upset, but Sam wasn’t worried about her. Samantha had looked up when she heard Jason approaching.
“I need to go to New York,” she’d said. “I need to talk to Nuri.”
“Not tonight,” he answered. “We’re going to dinner and then we’re going to sleep before we do anything else.”
Sam’s look had agreed.
Normal. They all needed a little bit of normal.
They checked into a nice hotel on the riverfront - Sam paid in cash, which bothered Jason for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on - and they’d gone out for steaks.
“So,” Jason asked cautiously. “What did you find out?”
They hadn’t talked about it at all yet, but with the application of food and water, Samantha had seemed more stable.
“Pieces,” Samantha said, chewing. She swallowed and put her fork down. “He wasn’t going to tell me what I wanted to know, but they think they’ve won something important. I don’t understand yet, but Nuri is the one who I talk to when I find demon riddles like this one.”
“What did he say?” Sam asked.
“That Jason’s ‘dragon’. Not a dragon. He is dragon. I don’t know what that means, but Brandt was very specific about it.”
“You worked him for three hours for that?” Jason asked. “I mean, if it’s important, I appreciate it, but…”
“How do you know he wasn’t lying to you?” Sam asked.
Samantha cocked an eyebrow at Jason then looked at Sam.
“There’s a point in the pain cycle way out beyond human consciousness, where the mind is so preoccupied with pain that it can’t build fabrications any more. You can’t get someone to tell you just anything, but you can reach a certain level of confidence that anything he said was true.”
She picked up her knife and fork again, then sat back in her chair, holding up the steak knife in front of her and looking at the serrated edge.
“I got information out of him,” she said, her mouth working for a moment at a bad taste as she put the knife back down, “but I also put a flag on you. I’ve never done it before… I’ve seen it done before, but…” She swallowed and looked at Jason. “Anyone who comes after you is going to do it with the knowledge that I’m going to do that to them, if I find out who they are and if I can catch them. They come after you again, they’re going to have to do everything they can to keep who they are a secret.”
Sam leaned over and kissed her temple, leaving his face pressed against her for a long moment. When he let her go, she turned her face away.
“Thank you,” Jason said. It wasn’t enough, but anything more was worse. She nodded.
“I didn’t do it for you, but you’re welcome.”
“So what about Carter’s war?” Jason asked after a long silence.
“Everyone else will go back to their normal lives and wait to be called up,” Samantha said. “We’re probably the only ones who will chase it down out of our own initiative.”
“Classy,” Jason said. Samantha picked up her water and drained it again. Sam eyed the empty glass as he hunched over his meal, swapping it for his own when Samantha looked away.
“It’s the way it should be,” Samantha said. “You really don’t want more than one or two of us in the same place at the same time unless we’ve all got the same enemy that we’re actually fighting. Otherwise we start killing each other.”
“Why is that?” Jason asked. “What is it about your line of work that’s so attractive to sociopaths?”
“You mean what’s the difference between us and the Rangers?”
Jason shrugged a sure and she nodded, picking up Sam’s water and draining half of it. She frowned and focused somewhere over Jason’s shoulder.
“Where?” Sam asked, sitting up. She glanced at him.
“That’s frightening,” she said “I’ll deal with it later.” She looked at Jason again. “I think it’s the power.”
He looked over his shoulder.
“What is?”
“That makes us the way we are. You guys go into your life for honor, for justice, as a manifestation of personal power, or because of tradition. We do it to get power. So you take a bunch of people who were power-chasers to begin with and you add a bunch of power. They turn into that,” she said, tossing her hand over her shoulder.
“And you never asked for it,” Sam said. She nodded.
“Doesn’t make me immune. Power corrupts. Makes you feel invincible and invincibility makes you think you get to choose right and wrong. You ever wonder why the Greek gods fought so much?”
“Never thought about it,” Jason said. Sam grinned. “We should go out dancing tonight. When was the last time you guys went dancing?”
Sam looked a Samantha and back down at his plate.
“There hasn’t been much music since you disappeared,” he said.
“Not since you left,” Samantha said. “I don’t remember.”
Jason tipped his head to the side.
“What’s wrong with you guys?”
Sam shrugged and chuckled.
“I don’t dance.”
“Well, that’s certainly true, but you should still take her.”
“Why?” Sam asked. Jason raised an eyebrow at him, and Sam turned his head, listening to Samantha as though she were speaking.
“Oh.”
“That’s a good idea,” Samantha said. “I think I’m done.”
She drank the last of Sam’s water and Jason finished his beer.
“Let’s go then,” he said. He winked at the waitress and she brought the check. Sam covered it with another stack of bills. When the woman came back to get it, Jason held up a finger.
“If you were to go out dancing tonight, where would you go?” he asked. She glanced at the cash on the check and put it in her pocket and gave him a name. She looked at Sam and Samantha appraisingly then back at Jason.
“Maybe I’ll see you there,” she said. He grinned.
She smiled a promise at him and he found Samantha looking at him with exasperation.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re something else,” she answered. Sam laughed.
“Your mistake, expecting anything different,” he told her.
She glowered at him, and they left. The air had changed outside. It was going to be a good night.
<><><>
She was still dressed for demon hunting. Tight black pants, tall boots, and a tight black shirt that drew more attention than Sam liked. It was true that, dressed as herself, none of the guys at the club would have noticed her, and Sam knew that she knew it, but she liked the attention, anyway. She was scintillating and she moved like sex. And it amused her that he was jealous.
She didn’t like it when guys tried to dance with her, because they mostly couldn’t keep up, but she liked that they wanted to dance with her. It was power. She hated them for it, as people, but she loved leading them around, drawing eyes and hands and rejecting them.
“You could go dance with her, you know,” Jason said. “If it bothers you that much.”
“I’d just slow her down,” Sam said. Jason set his beer down.
“You ever think she wants to slow down with you?” he asked. Sam shrugged. Even bending time, he still didn’t move well. He was more accurate, but he didn’t have a sense for it. He could see that the way she moved was aligned with the music, he didn’t understand it. He could step back and forth with the drum beat, but that was about it. Jason shook his head at him.
“It isn’t that hard.”
“Easy for you to say,” Sam said. Jason grinned and motioned for another pair of beers.
“If you’re still worried about what people are going to think, it’s because you haven’t had enough to drink yet,” he said.
“It isn’t that simple,” Sam said, checking his own bottle to find it empty. “We aren’t like that anymore.”
“Like what?”
Sam scanned the dance floor, finding a couple that was only a couple layers of fabric away from intercourse and jerking his chin at them.
“Like that.”
Jason tipped his head forward incredulously.
“Any more? I can’t believe I missed it.”