by Devin Hanson
“You won’t need that. I think. Shit, shit! Do you see a tall man? White, shaved bald, glasses?”
Sam half-rose and peered through the windows of the SUVs on his side of the gathered vehicles. I searched the ones I could see into from where I was, but I didn’t see Steven Martin anywhere. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. If the Satanists were fleeing America to avoid the Red House, then Mahlat probably wouldn’t be going with them. What she wanted was here in LA, Red House or not.
“No, I mean, I can’t see much, but I don’t see anyone particularly tall.”
“Okay. Okay. I need to think.”
“What did we just walk into, Alex? Tell me!”
“Short version, it’s a bunch of possessed people trying to flee the… country.” Trying to explain the Red House to Sam was an exercise in futility.
The argument seemed to reach a conclusion and I twisted around to peek around the edge of the SUV again. The tattooed men were walking toward the shipping containers and the robed Satanists were going back to their cars.
“We have to stop them, Sam,” I said urgently.
“Are they being taken against their will?” Sam asked.
“You don’t wrap someone in twenty pounds of chain if they’re going willingly,” I pointed out. That wasn’t a direct answer, but it would have to do. Depending on the possessed person, they may or may not be willingly traveling. Most of them though, like the guy suffering from stigmata, weren’t in any condition to speak.
“Fine. Stay back, Alex. This is police business now.”
“Wait, Sam, I don’t think—”
Sam ignored me and stood, giving Lara a jerk of his head. I didn’t know what to do. One of these days I was going to have to explain to Sam just how dangerous some of the supernatural world was. Maybe using crayons and playdoh, but even then, I doubted he’d get it. Sam just wasn’t wired for caution. He was going to have to learn through experience and hopefully stay alive until then.
I watched the alarm bloom on the faces of the Satanists as they saw the two detectives step out into view. They froze, throwing glances at each other. I could tell there wasn’t a leader among them, but their panicked paralysis wasn’t going to last forever.
With a last glance after Sam, I pulled back behind the SUV and put my back against the bumper. Then I did what Sam should have done before walking out into the open. I called for backup.
“This isn’t a good time, Alexandra.”
I was just happy Tovarrah had picked up the phone. I gripped my phone tighter and tried to keep my voice from raising into a panicked shout. “Did you raid the church?”
“Yes. It’s empty.” I could hear the accusation in her voice. She was too polite to blame me for giving her false information, but it was there in the back of her throat.
“No shit! That’s because there’re six Escalades full of possessed people ten feet from me. They saw you coming and had a bolt-hole all set up and ready.”
There was a pause while I heard Tovarrah shouting orders to return to their vehicles. Then, “Where are you?”
“You have a pen?” I put Tovarrah on speaker and pulled up the map app on my phone, then read out the GPS coordinates when she indicated she was ready.
“You’re at the docks? What are you doing there?”
“Chasing a lead on the ghoul. When can you get here?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen.”
“Make it ten. I don’t know how long I can stall these guys.”
“Be safe, Alexandra.”
“Sure thing.” I hung up and checked the time. It was 7:30, still another hour before the tide started going out.
I peeked back around the corner. One of the Satanists had gone running after the tattooed crewmen and the rest were facing off against Lara and Sam. Over the noise of the idling SUVs I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but so far things hadn’t escalated into violence.
Lara pointed back toward the office building at the front of the dock and held up her phone. Her body language was clear as day: come back to the office with me or I will call them and check your permits.
There was a tense moment, then one of the Satanists lashed out with a hand and knocked Lara’s phone skittering across the pavement. Sam took a measured step back and his pistol cleared his holster and was leveled at the Satanist’s face in one smooth movement.
“Down on the ground,” Sam said, his crisp order loud and clear.
The Satanist who had knocked the phone from Lara’s hand gathered himself to launch toward Sam. I saw Sam’s finger drop to the trigger. The second dragged out, then a yell from the containers pulled the Satanist’s attention from Sam.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” one of the tattooed men shouted as he came running back. It was a little hard to tell who the man was referring to, Sam or the Satanist.
Sam didn’t back down a hair. “Are you in charge here?” he called, his voice level and calm.
“No, that’s the captain, but I can help,” the tattooed man assured Sam.
“You can tell your people to get on the ground,” Sam said firmly.
“Maybe we better start at the beginning,” the tattooed man said. He slowed to a stop and held his hands wide in a gesture of reassurance. “I’m Sasha Markovich. Who are you?”
Lara bent down to scoop her phone off the ground and checked the screen before pocketing it. She brought out her badge wallet and flashed it at Sasha. “Detective Lara Moreno, Los Angeles Homicide. This is my partner, Detective Sam Friday. Want to explain why you have multiple vehicles carrying restrained individuals?”
A motion off to the side caught my attention and I spotted a figure crouched low slip behind the furthest SUV. The reflected light from the headlights was just enough for me to make out the tangle of tattoo marks on his arms and face. His face was turned toward the pool of lights, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Moving slowly, I eased around the SUV I was hiding behind so the bulk of the trunk was between the man and myself. It looked like he hadn’t noticed me yet. If his eyes were anything like mine, staring toward the collected headlights had completely wrecked his night vision.
Sasha was spinning a vague story, gesticulating widely as he talked. I wasn’t paying any attention to him anymore. Sasha was just a diversion.
The second tattooed man crept toward me, his eyes still locked on the confrontation in the headlights. He reached the SUV Lara had been hiding behind and he dropped into a crouch. Light gleamed from something in his hand. I leaned out a little further, trying to make out what he held. It was a long, slender blade with a slight curve to it that came to a wicked point.
Before I realized what I was doing, I had stepped out from behind the SUV and deliberately scuffed my shoe on the pavement. The man’s head whipped around. He saw me and sprang toward me with no pause or hesitation.
My training saved my life. In the darkness behind the SUVs, I caught the man’s arm as he lunged and I twisted away. I felt the point of the knife scrape on my jacket as he went by and I clung to the man’s wrist with a strength born of panicked terror.
The man stumbled and jolted to a stop, his arm twisted the wrong way. I felt something pop in his elbow and almost let go. I wasn’t on the training mat this time. A heartfelt apology for an accidental injury would only get me killed. Instead, I planted my feet and pulled. I heard the knife clatter to the ground and felt more than saw the man surge toward me.
I had my footing wrong. I knew it even before the man’s full weight crashed into me and we went tumbling to the ground. We hit the ground with his weight on top of me and the breath was knocked from my lungs with a gasp. I struggled for air and something hit the side of my head. My vision flew apart and I pulled my arms up to protect myself.
Another blow, again from the right, this time with the impact deadened against my arm. I rolled my shoulder higher, still struggling after breath. I could feel the way he was straddling me, felt his instability as I shifted. I lashed out a
nd caught his right elbow in my grip. His breath caught and he twisted away. I hadn’t managed to find a good grip and he escaped, but I was able to roll over and push myself to my knees.
He threw himself at me again. He had easily eighty pounds on me and I could read his strategy easily enough. He would push me to the ground, get me properly pinned this time, then beat me to a bloody pulp.
Two months ago, it would have worked.
How many times had I drilled this exact scenario? Me on my knees and my sparring partner rushing in trying for the pin. I turned his charge over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of his tattooed face twisted in surprise as I caught his leg and heaved upward.
The man flipped over my back and slammed to the pavement. I held my grip on his leg and swung my weight around so I was essentially sitting in his lap with my hips against the top of his thigh. I wrapped my arms around his booted foot and hauled backward with the strength of my back.
It was a textbook leg bar. I could feel the tendons tremble under my grip and for the first time the man made a sound. He snarled wordlessly and battered at my back with his left hand. On the practice mat, the objective was never to hurt your opponent. Once an incontestable pin was made, you tapped out and that was that.
I knew my leg bar was good, but maybe the man was too jacked up on adrenaline to know when he was beat. I hauled back harder and heard his ACL creak. He still didn’t give up. The blows against my side and ribs only came harder, his snarls more furious.
Then, abruptly, his knee broke and folded backward in my grip. His snarl turned into a high-pitched yelp and his blows turned into frantic shoving motions. Bile surged in my throat. I rolled off him and scrambled to my feet, sickened by the way his knee had felt beneath my hands as the joint had finally given way. My foot hit the blade he had dropped and I scooped it up. The woven handle dug into my fingers as I gripped it tightly and held it out in front of me.
Except for the single yelp when his knee had broken, he still hadn’t said anything. He climbed awkwardly to his good leg and braced himself against the back of the SUV. His right arm hung limp at his side and his left leg wobbled loosely as he shifted his weight, turning to face me.
“Give it up, man,” I rasped at him. My breath was coming hard with fight adrenaline and the knife I held out in front of me shook a little.
He pushed off the back of the SUV and hopped toward me, his face locked in a twisted rictus of pain and fury.
Was this another ghoul? No. Blood was seeping from a scratch on his face where he had hit the pavement at some point. The body wasn’t dead. Still, I had never heard of someone with a broken leg looking to pick a fight.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” I asked.
The man lurched toward me, his damaged leg dragging on the ground after him. Every hop must have been agony. I watched in fascinated horror as he inched his way closer to me. A few hops away, he put his weight down on the wrong leg and it buckled. On the way down, he stretched out his arms to catch his weight and the elbow I had tweaked earlier folded beneath him.
He looked up at me from the pavement, his limbs a twisted tangle beneath him. There was nothing human on his face, just animal rage and the raw desire to do harm. The knife in my hand felt heavy. It’d be so easy to take the two steps forward and ram it home into the man’s throat.
I couldn’t do it. My stomach was already churning from the way his leg had broken in my hands. As much as the man frightened me, I couldn’t bring myself to end his life. I stepped up to him, reversed the blade, and brought the pommel down on his temple.
The fight, the rage, the homicidal fury, puddled out of him and he slumped down to the pavement. I swallowed and knelt down cautiously next to him. I pressed two fingers against the hollow of his neck and felt his pulse still thumping softly. He was still alive. For the moment, at least.
I pushed myself back upright and looked back toward the pool of light. Sam and Lara were still talking with the other tattooed man. None of them had heard the noise of my brief fight, and now that I looked back on it, I realized the whole thing had been over in less than a minute.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Lara said dryly. She had her arms folded, but her right hand was only inches away from her holstered pistol.
Sasha smiled ingratiatingly and leaned to the side to look beyond Lara and Sam. His eyes squinted as he fought to make out detail in the dark on the other side of the headlights, then surprise flashed across his face. He had seen me.
No point in hiding now. I came out from behind the SUVs and walked forward into the glare of the headlights. The Satanists saw me, recognized me, and froze in indecision. I tossed the knife up into the air and caught it by the handle as it came back down.
“I took this off the man you sent behind to kill these detectives,” I said angrily. “A knife? What kind of sloppy fucking show are you running? And you lot, why are you still here? Didn’t my mother give you specific orders?”
Every eye in the pool of light was staring at me in confusion. Sam picked apart the nuances of the situation first and his dumbfounded expression blinked through understanding to caged excitement to belligerent anger. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
Lara was close on the heels of her partner, but she didn’t have the same background of understanding. Still, she played along with Sam nearly flawlessly. Her outraged, “What is going on here!?” could have been directed at anyone.
“You, ah, your mother sent you?” one of the Satanists asked doubtfully. He kept glancing back toward the darkness where the shipping containers were.
“Well, Lilith wasn’t around,” I rolled my eyes. “Clearly her fear that you weren’t up to this simple fucking task was well founded. Why aren’t the SUVs unloaded yet?”
“Lord Martin never said anything about unloading the vehicles,” another Satanist said irritably. “That’s the whole problem. There isn’t medical support for this many—”
“Be silent, you fool!” Sasha snarled. He turned on me and leveled one tattooed finger at my face. “Who are you, and what did you do to Nicolai?”
“She’s the Nephilim,” one of the Satanists said. “She came by to meet with Lord Martin in the church.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” Sasha growled without looking away from me.
“The idiot isn’t wrong,” I shrugged. “As for your friend, he’s sleeping off his latest bout of bad decision making.” This soon after the fight my nerves were still raw, and it was everything I could do to maintain the blasé calm I was projecting.
“Excuse me!” Lara snapped. She had stepped away from the confrontation and had drawn her sidearm. “I think I’ve heard enough. All of you, get down on your knees!”
“Better do as the officer says,” I drawled at the Satanists. “I’ll deal with this.”
To my surprise, the robed men and women exchanged glances then started to awkwardly comply. I turned to Lara and held my hands out wide. With my back to Sasha and the Satanists, I felt my scalp crawl. It was like turning my back on a tiger. Only the fact that both Sam and Lara had their guns out and half-raised kept me from bolting.
The glare of the headlights cast the detectives in high relief. Their faces were all but blotted out, but I knew mine would be brightly lit. I winked at Lara. She didn’t seem amused. However this clusterfuck sorted out, she would have strong words for me later. “Take it easy, there, detectives. Didn’t they teach you de-escalation in police school? Maybe you need a refresher.”
“Just finish this already, Nephilim,” a Satanist called. “We don’t have all night.”
I looked back over my shoulder. “Give it a rest, you useless wank.”
I turned back around, my mind racing as I tried to come up with some way to stall a few more minutes. How long had it been since I had called Tovarrah? Five minutes? Probably not more than that. Could I reasonably expect Red House reinforcements in the next handful of minutes? She had given me a timeline of fifteen minutes on the inside
.
Shadows shifted behind Lara and Sam, and in my distraction, I didn’t register the movement until a figure stepped out from between the SUVs. At first, I thought it was the tattooed man I had disabled, but Nicolai had had dark, ratty hair, and this man had shoulder-length blonde hair. Other than that, they could have been brothers; same grungy clothing, same prolific tattooing, same hungry-for-violence grimace.
Sam must have seen the alarm on my face because he spun around and backed toward me, his pistol held centered on the new arrival’s chest. Lara stepped further into the pool of light, turning slowly as she scanned the shadows. Two, three, five more of the tattooed men stepped out of the darkness and loomed at the edge of the light.
“Ah, shit,” I muttered.
“I’m assuming you have a plan,” Sam hissed at me.
“Nephilim,” Sasha called, “I’m beginning to doubt your sincerity.” He had a nasty smile on his face, which only broadened when he saw me looking at him. He reached behind under his jacket and pulled out a compact submachine gun.
More guns were produced around us and I swallowed against a dry throat. So much for having a tactical advantage. The Satanists were looking at each other and the most vocal among them was already climbing to his feet, struggling against his robes.
“I’m thinking,” I said under my breath to Sam. “We need to buy time. Help is coming.”
“Well, think faster. How much time do we need?”
“Ten minutes? Maybe less.”
Sam sighed and lowered his gun. “I see.”
“I told you to stay back,” Lara growled at me.
“Oh, come on. That guy I took out would have stabbed you in the back.”
“What, no witticisms, Nephilim?” Sasha laughed.
There wasn’t anything I could think of to say that wouldn’t make our situation worse. Under the watchful cover of the armed tattooed men, Sasha directed one of the Satanists to take my knife from me and disarm the two detectives. Reluctantly, Sam and Lara handed their weapons over.
“Now, what are we to do with you?” Sasha asked.