“Hey,” I said. “I’m not done with you yet, prick.”
The inky form whirled toward me and I could sense its shock. It had thought I was dead. It was probably right. I had a suspicion that maybe I had been dead, at least for a second or two. That didn’t matter, though. I was alive and Abby was alive. Abby’s head swung toward me, her face shocked and suffused with sudden hope. God, I wanted to deliver on that hope. I thought about smiling at her, but I could taste the blood in my mouth. It’d probably just scare her even more. I settled for giving her a little nod.
“Hang in there, kid,” I said.
Maybe I couldn’t save her, but I could still buy her some time. I slid a hand around to my back pocket and wrapped bloodied fingers around the handle of the kris knife. Mere contact with it made my skin crawl. Like so much else, using the knife was a calculated risk. I didn’t think I could kill the demon with it. I smiled. It’d be enough for me just to hurt it. The inky figure came at me with impossible speed. Demon Tucker had blurred, but was visible. The inky thing moved so fast that I couldn’t distinguish it. I heard the impact of my body against the wall a moment before the pain slammed home. The demon had its left hand wrapped hard around my throat and the pressure grew steadily. The blood pounded in my skull as my brain fought a losing battle for oxygen.
I waited for the demon to start gloating or to toss off a comment about how it was going to kill me for certain this time, but it didn’t. Maybe it missed that day of bad guy training. Maybe it was just smart enough not to bother. I slid the knife out of its sheath and slammed it into the demon’s chest. It screamed in pain and bounced my head off the wall. I lost time there. When I managed to focus my eyes, the demon had yanked the knife free and tossed it aside. My vision was closing in around the edges, going dark and tunnel-like.
“You wish to trade pain, mortal,” it said, finally engaging. “Then let us trade pain.”
It drew its right hand back and slammed it into my chest. I think its goal was to plunge its inky claws into my sternum, but that’s not quite what happened. Its fingertips sank all of a quarter inch into my skin, which hurt so much that I couldn’t even scream. Imagine being stabbed with red hot metal, getting stung by a thousand wasps, breaking every rib at the same time, having dull razor blades scraped across every inch of your skin, slamming your hand in a car door, and having a mad dentist go to work on your teeth without giving you Novocain. Multiply that by a factor of about fifty million or so and that might, sort of, approach what it felt like to have those black talons sunk a quarter-inch into my chest. If it had managed to sink them any deeper than that, I expect the pain would have killed me on the spot.
Instead, I felt a blossom of cold on my chest exactly where one of the tattoos was located. Silver-blue light erupted from beneath my shirt. The demon screamed, let go of my throat, and yanked its hand back from my chest. Silver-blue fire engulfed the demon’s hand and, I couldn’t believe my eyes, simply ate the appendage as if it had been dipped in acid. The fire started crawling up the arm and the demon’s shrieks rose in pitch until I could no longer physically hear them, but the sound cut across my skull like a smoldering blade.
In its position, I don’t know that I could have done what the demon did, even if I had the strength. It seized its right arm at the bicep with its left hand and, with a wet, popping sound that was sure to haunt my dreams for ages, ripped the limb off and tossed it to the floor. Within moments, the limb was burned into nothing but memory. The demon turned its eyeless gaze on me, as anger and fear and disbelief washed over my psyche.
I flashed onto the image of a woman with raven-black hair, cold eyes, and a warm smile. Her face was my only memory from the night I’d been scarred and tattooed. I didn’t know her, but she knew me. Her eyes fixed on mine and, for a moment, it felt like my entire being was pushed aside and someone else used my eyes. The sensation faded, but I saw her throw her head back and laugh. It was a terrible thing, her laugh. I realized that laugh was echoing through the room and the demon recoiled from it, fell to the floor, and used its one arm to drag itself away from me, or the laugh, or both.
A basic rule of engagement, whether you’ve taken a captive or are trying to retrieve one, is to keep track of said captive. The inky demon was fixated on me, and I was in such a state of stupefied disbelief, that nobody paid attention to Abby. Abby, on the other hand, had paid very close attention to where the knife went. Maybe it was when the demon was hurting me, or maybe it was when the tattoo set fire to the demon, but Abby had grabbed the awful blade. Needless to say, there was a lot of shock in the room when she flung herself at the demon.
Abby didn’t have much in the way of form. She had, however, spent the day being terrorized by that thing. She made up for inexperience with hateful enthusiasm. I was a little bit proud. She stabbed it repeatedly, eliciting mind-piercing screams from the monster. Unfortunately, she had no way to know the knife just wasn’t powerful enough to kill it. She hurt it plenty, but the demon managed to get around the binding enough to toss her, knife still clutched in hand, about six feet. She didn’t hit the wall or land as hard as I did, but it clearly hurt her.
“Abby,” I croaked. It hurt to talk. “Come over here.”
The demon’s fury was palpable, almost crippling in its intensity. Things hadn’t gone its way. Now Abby was armed with something that could hurt it, and semi-protected by the binding. It had taken a shot at me and paid for it with an arm. It couldn’t know that I had no clue how that happened or how to make it happen again. Abby looked at me with pain-befuddled eyes, and I could see she didn’t understand.
“Abby,” I croaked with all the authority I could muster. “Come here.”
She struggled to her feet and made her way toward me. If all of that had happened a minute sooner, we might have gotten away clean. The inky demon’s fury changed to something vaguely smug. There was that same, impossible, space-ignoring speed and the demon ripped the knife out of Abby’s hand. I watched in horror and with no tricks left in my bag as the demon hefted the knife and prepared to kill Abby.
The truth hit me. Night had fallen. I stumbled toward them, knowing I’d never cover the distance in time. I think I screamed.
Chapter 49
Something a blinding, iridescent white exploded to life between Abby and the knife. The demon howled in frustration and slashed with no effect at the white light. More of the lights exploded into life around the room, leaving me all but blind with purple splotches in my eyes. Their arrival also lifted that nausea-inducing, world-spinning echo of pain from my mind. The exit of that pressure was such sweet relief that the physical pain I was in seemed almost negligible, but I knew that couldn’t last. I staggered toward Abby and came up against a solid barrier. Whatever the lights were, they were making sure nothing could get at Abby. That also meant that Abby was stuck.
My overtaxed brain finally made the connection. Helena had done it. These were the souls that the demon had trapped. It wasn’t working out the way I expected. They were inhibiting the demon, but not attacking it. I’d just assumed they would, or would at least act to let me get Abby out, but neither of those things was happening.
“Let me get to her, dammit,” I screamed at the blinding lights.
They ignored me. I tried to figure out why. Why weren’t they attacking the stupid demon? After all this time, they should want some epic-level vengeance on that thing. If they weren’t taking it, it meant they probably couldn’t do more than what they were already doing. They could keep it off Abby, but if they lightened up that interference, it would probably get at her. They needed a channel, I realized, just as that demon needed Tucker to work its power in the world. I almost yelled for them to use me, but I stopped myself. I wasn’t sure if they could use me. Whatever magic in the tattoos had lashed out at the demon with such fiery results might also harm the souls. That only left one other choice.
“Abby!” I screamed. “Let them in! Take down your walls and let them in!”
; Aside from my own prayer that I hadn’t just advised Abby to participate in lobotomizing herself, the next few moments were hard to comprehend. One second there were hundreds of those iridescent lights crowding into the room; the next, everything went black. Everything didn’t really go black. There were still lights on in the room, but the illumination shift was simply too monumental and fast for my eyes to adapt. I didn’t see much of anything except lots of purple blotches for about ten seconds. By the time my vision started to come back in, Abby was standing in perfect stillness, head down. The inky demon was standing just as still. The big difference was that I could feel the uncertainty in the demon. I couldn’t feel anything from Abby. I guess the demon decided to try its luck while the trying was good. It leapt forward, swinging the knife toward Abby’s throat.
“No,” said Abby, with a negligible twitch of her head.
I realized that the voice I heard wasn’t really Abby’s. It came from Abby’s general vicinity and probably from her lips, but it wasn’t Abby. At least, it wasn’t the Abby I had played cards with or helped get clear of a fire. The first clue I had was the way that lone syllable felt like a gong resounding in my chest. The second way I knew was that the knife was ripped from the demon’s hand, taking several inky fingers off on the way. It flew across the room and hovered in front of me until I took it. When Abby finally looked up at the demon, her eyes were that same blinding, iridescent white that the lights had been. Her skin was luminous and the demon fell back from her. She advanced on it, with measured steps.
“Sad little remnant,” she said.
With every resounding syllable, fragments of the demon flew outward from it and evaporated into nothing. I stared in disbelief. My best shot, apparently arranged by someone I couldn’t remember, had cost it an arm. Abby’s mere spoken word was dismantling the thing. That was power of a kind that made me want to run away in blank terror. Instead, I stood rooted to the spot in mute, horrified fascination.
“Millions of years, wasted in pointless hate,” she said, still advancing, as more pieces of the demon flew off. “Trapped here, you imagined, by the vindictiveness of your God.”
Pieces flew away from the demon even when she wasn’t speaking, as if the thing could no longer hold itself together. The power of her words and her presence was starting to make me feel drunk. Was it some kind of contact high? Was proximity to things that powerful just plain dangerous for mortals? Jesus, what was it doing to Abby’s mind? Had I killed her?
“Had you but thought for a moment, you would have realized the truth. You could have left here any time.”
“Lies!” the increasingly insubstantial demon howled.
“No. It was not your God who bound you here, but your hate. If you had abandoned hate, you could have gone home. Now, you will simply cease.”
With that, Abby reached out and pressed her index finger against the demon’s chest. There was a sense of compression, as if all the air in the room were drawn in by huge lungs. The demon shuddered and then exploded. Pieces of it went everywhere, some evaporating immediately, others traveling inches or feet, and one passed directly through me. There was a flash of knowledge. I saw the huge statue Lil had shown me and understood that it had not been a metaphor. It was a literal truth. That statue had existed, had been alive in some way that I’d never grasp. It came to blows with whatever god it worshipped, for reasons I’d also never grasp. The statue lost that argument.
How powerful, how nigh omnipotent must that statue have been for fragmentary ghosts of its existence to prove so unbelievably powerful? More troubling still, how much more powerful was the thing that destroyed it? I shuddered at the thought, and found myself rather grateful that I understood less about the universe than I thought I did. I looked up to see Abby staring at me with the iridescent white eyes. It was scary as hell. She held her hands out to both sides, fingers spread like fans and the light expanded out from her eyes.
I experienced another hazy gray spot, not from pain, but simple sensory overload. When the gray cleared out, I saw Abby slumped to the floor. I tried to run to her, but my leg threatened to give out and I went dizzy with pain and fatigue. I limped to her, lowered myself into an unsteady crouch, and turned her head. She blinked up at me with unfocused eyes. Her head lolled from side to side.
“Abby, can you hear me?”
She blinked a few more times, eyes still bleary. Jesus, I thought, it fried her. Her eyes snapped into focus. She grabbed my arm hard.
“They asked me to say, thank you,” she went a little out of focus, then zeroed in on me again. “They said you need to get to the cemetery.”
Fear washed over me. “Helena.”
If I was a real tough guy, or some kind of movie hero, I’d have carried Abby out of that building. Since I wasn’t those things, I needed her to help me limp my sorry, bleeding ass up those stairs and out to the car. I was very tempted to tell her to drive, but thought better of it. She’d probably never driven anything more complicated than a bumper car. Or a horse, I reminded myself. Abby huddled in the passenger seat and shivered. I hadn’t expected to survive, let alone get her out, so I didn’t have any of things I’d normally bring to a violent scene. Things like first aid gear, food, or blankets. I turned up the heat as we drove, though it didn’t seem to help much with her shivering. I felt cold too, but that was probably blood loss. That thought triggered something in the back of my head, a vague nagging.
Every mile or so, Abby whipped her head around until she saw me. That seemed odd to me, until I realized she was probably dozing off. Sleep, I thought. I could sleep. I was so tired. I remembered that I needed to get to the cemetery. Helena and Patty were there. They might be hurt. I managed not to crash the car on the way to the cemetery. Once we were there, I just sat in the car, staring out at the graves through the cast iron gate.
“Cemetery,” I said.
“What?” Abby screamed, jerking awake.
I blinked and tried to arrange my thoughts. “Why are we here?”
Abby squinted at me, frowning hard, like she was struggling to remember something. “They, the others, they said you needed to come here. Is someone here?”
It came back. “Helena!”
I got out of the car and stumbled toward the gate. I ran into it, jerked it open and staggered in the general direction of Cavanaugh’s tomb. The door was open and I saw a light moving around inside. I tripped up the steps and stared around the empty space, wild eyed and barely sane. I saw Helena on the ground. Patty was kneeling next to her, finger against the side of Helena’s throat.
“Is she alive?” I demanded.
“Yes,” said Patty. “Abby?”
“In the car,” I mumbled.
‘Oh thank god! I think Helena needs to get to the hospital. Does she have anyone we should call?”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice tinny to my own ears. “Her girlfriend, Laurie.”
“Okay. I’ll see to it. I have to say, Hartworth—” she said, swinging the flashlight onto me.
A voice from a long way away said something like, “God damn it, Hartworth!”
I felt a sensation like falling, only I didn’t land on the marble floor. I landed on the beach. I lay with my face in the warm sand and tried to figure out what happened.
“So you saved the girl.”
I pushed myself up and brushed some of the fine grain of sand off my face. A barefoot man of indeterminate race stood there in white slacks and a white shirt. I glanced around, not sure what to make of the scene. I nodded to him.
“I guess I did. Sort of. Abby and Helena did all the heavy lifting. I was just the distraction.”
The man shot me a curious look, as though he didn’t quite believe what he heard.
“What?” I demanded.
“It’s a remarkably narrow view of events. You facilitated everything. You determined the nature of the threat. You secured the knowledge regarding the smoke bindings. You drew someone who possessed the ability to release them. You eliminated t
he minor demon. You even told the child how to use the weapon you provided. Perhaps it was you who did the heavy lifting, and they merely enacted your will to save her.”
I stared up the man with absolutely nothing to say. I guess it happened to everyone sooner or later. Finally, I shrugged. “So, why am I here?”
The man shot me another curious look. “You seek answers to universal questions?”
“Definitely not. I just got an answer to a question I didn’t know I had and it scares the hell out of me. I meant why here, in this place, where we are right now?”
“Ah. So I could meet you again under less dire circumstances. Also, because she asked me for it,” he said, pointing down the beach.
I looked past him and saw Marcy walking toward us. What he said sank in. “Wait, when did we meet before?”
The man smiled at me and vanished. Words echoed from nowhere.
“Work on your grammar.”
“Holy shit,” I said to no one in particular.
Marcy walked up and sat beside me. We held hands for a long time. After a while, a question surfaced from the recesses of my mind.
“So, Cavanaugh told me I didn’t understand the nature of this relationship. You shouldn’t have been able to—” I frowned, “touch my consciousness the way you did.”
“Plenty of mysteries in the world,” she said. Her tone was cheerfully cryptic.
“I’m serious,” I insisted. “What don’t I know?”
She looked at me and started to speak, but stopped. She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“It’s one of those things, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said.
My life had just moved into the category of things that the dead know but can’t communicate. Lovely. I was quite certain no good could come of that.
Chapter 50
I did not wake up dead. I wished I had, but the doctors assured me that I was, indeed, going to make it. One doctor cheerfully told me that it took stitches in the high double-digits to put me back together. Another gravely warned me that that I had eight cracked ribs and, in combination with my still-recovering lungs, breathing was going to be a chore for some time. Most of my first day or two was spent in a chemical-induced, euphoric haze. I’d have to be careful not to get too used to that feeling. That haze did account for why I had no idea how Lil appeared on my hospital bed. I never got a clear explanation as to why the nurses didn’t demand she be removed. Self-preservation instinct, I expect.
The Midnight Ground Page 32