by D V Wolfe
“Alright, no sword in with the...remains?” I asked Noah.
“Nope,” Noah wheezed, covering his face. “Just heads and fingers and…”
“You can stop there,” Nya said.
“How’s the girl doing?” I asked Noah when he’d climbed back down and we were following Nya back into the house.
“Ok, I think,” Noah said. “She’s asleep on the couch. I think the shock wore off and the alcohol from the bar kicked in.”
I nodded. “Did she say anything?”
Noah shook his head. “Not yet.”
I stopped back in the bedroom where Kosmas was chained up right behind Nya.
“Shit!” Noah yelled from the living room. I jogged back down the hall to him.
“What is it?” I asked.
“She’s gone,” Noah said, gesturing at the couch. He turned and ran to the front door and I went to check the other bathroom and bedroom. No girl.
Noah came back from looking outside. “Any sign of her?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She’s gone.”
“Well, this is probably fine. She woke up in a strange house, maybe she thought she had too much to drink. She called a friend to come get her and she took off to meet them,” I reasoned.
“Doing a walk of shame with bandages on her neck?” Noah asked.
I shook my head. “If I had a dollar for every morning I woke up with injuries that I couldn’t immediately remember how I got, I’d be a millionaire.”
“And if I had a dollar for every time you injured yourself while you were drunk, I’d be a millionaire,” Nya said, coming out of the bedroom.
“The girl’s gone,” I said.
Nya nodded. “I heard you and Noah. It’s fine. Kosmas is coming around, let’s get what we came for.”
I looked at the clock on the wall. It was just past five a.m. We’d been searching the house for three hours, looking for the damn sword. Oh well. Even if this was just a hoax and he wasn’t actually the bearer of some sword that could kill a top-level demon, we could just kill him and that’s one more in the win column. I needed to check in with Festus. I had the ghoul, werewolves, and now hopefully an incubus to add to the tally. I couldn’t count the demon in Kansas City. One, because it was exorcised rather than killed and two, because Gabe did it.
When I got back into the room with Kosmas and Nya, Nya had pulled out her grow light and was looking for a place to start. Kosmas was coming around, his hand was still bleeding in his pants.
“Noah,” I asked. “Can you do something about his stumps there? It probably wouldn’t be helpful if he bled out before we found out what we needed to from him.”
Noah nodded and Nya watched as he cauterized the finger stumps on Kosmas’ hand. He started screaming and Nya clamped a hand over his mouth to muffle it.
Noah stepped back and we all looked down at Kosmas’ blackened finger stubs. He’d stopped screaming and Nya took her hand away. “Nice job, Noah,” Nya said and she beamed at him. I swear Noah stood an extra three inches taller after she said that.
Nya turned her attention back to Kosmas and the smile on her face vanished. “You’re ceasing to be, tonight, Kosmas,” Nya said. “The only choice you have is how much pain do you want before we put you out of your misery?”
Kosmas spat at Nya. “You bitch, you think I’m scared of you? I eat your kind for three meals a day.” He looked around at the three of us. “Yours too.”
I cut my eyes to Noah. “Did you fry some of his brain when you worked on his hand?”
Noah looked at me. “I don’t know, it’s not like my hands came with a freaking manual. Did I fry your brain when I worked on your arm?”
I shrugged. “Not that I’d noticed.”
“You have no idea,” Kosmas began.
“Who we’re messing with?” Nya asked.
“Why girls like you?” Noah added.
“Why your crotch is bloody?” I asked.
Kosmas looked down in horror at his crotch. Nya nodded. “Yeah, pretty sure we have an idea about all three. And we still don’t care. Where is the Ukkin sword?”
There was the faintest hint of dark purple light filtering in from between the shades in the window. Kosmas started laughing and it drew my attention back to his face. It was joyless, disbelieving laughter.
“You have no idea what kind of a bomb you’re stepping on by coming after me,” Kosmas said.
“You working with some pretty hard ass ghouls?” Nya asked. She glanced over at Noah and I. “Don’t worry, they ganked a ghoul earlier this week, I’m sure they can handle it.”
“Ghouls?” Kosmas said. “You dumb cu-” Nya shoved the grow light in his mouth and Kosmas started to scream.
“Boring conversation anyway,” Nya said. “And I really hate it when people call me the ‘c’ word.”
“Can’t argue with that,” I said. There was smoke starting to pour from Kosmas nose as the grow light fried his tongue. “Probably good for persuasion purposes,” I said to Nya.
She nodded and pulled the grow light out. “Where is the sword?”
“Screw you,” Kosmas said. He closed his eyes and he started to chant. I didn’t recognize the language. It wasn’t Enochian. The iron chain began to disintegrate into ash and fall off him.
“Oh shit,” Noah said. That about summed it up. Nya pounced on him, straddling his lap, pressing the grow light to his skin and doing some chanting of her own. Kosmas reached over his shoulder with his uninjured hand and drew something long and silver out of thin air. The sword. I’d lunged to help Nya and with a single back-handed swipe, he threw us both off. Nya hit the wall harder than I had.
“Noah, watch out!” I yelled. Noah narrowly missed getting hit by the sword and he dived after Kosmas as he left the room, catching him around the legs. They both went down as I scrambled to my feet.
“He’s trying to summon help,” Nya wheezed. “You have to stop him, Bane.”
I had a bad feeling about this, but Nya had gotten us this far. I just had to get the sword and kill the damn incubus. I needed to get him outside and into the sunlight. The timing was going to be key. The sun was starting to rise and I could see shafts of light filtering in through the UV filmed skylights and between the cracks in the blinds. Kosmas was getting to his feet, kicking out at Noah. I heard Noah cry out in pain and curl into a ball on the floor. I drew the sawed-off and pumped two shots into Kosmas’ back. He howled in pain and slowed to a labored gait, but that was it. I dropped the gun and drew my machete. I threw myself onto Kosmas’ back and held on, doing my best to press the machete against his neck.
“You have no idea the balance of power you are fucking with right now,” Kosmas said, his voice booming and darker than it had been. “You pathetic fly. Release me!”
“You didn’t say the magic word,” I grunted, wrapping my legs around him to try to hold on until I had a better plan of how to get him outside.
Kosmas flung me forward over him, knocking the machete out of my hand. He threw me to the floor and pinned me, leering over me, his face an inch from mine, the sword at my throat. The front door was behind him and I could see the morning sunlight streaming through the tiny window at the top, framing his murderous face like a halo. I could feel the blade of the Ukkin sword at my neck. He wasn’t going to hesitate with me. So I couldn’t either. I head-butted him as hard as I could. I could feel the prickles from his power with us so close together. I was noticing how him being on top of me was doing things to the Empty House I was wearing. Things that usually only a few had ever made me feel. He was an incubus, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The blade of the sword bit into my neck and I turned my head to try to get it away from my jugular. I saw Noah crawling towards me on the floor just as Nya staggered out of the room and started stumbling towards us.
“The door,” I hissed to her as loudly as I could. The pressure of the blade pushing down, pushing the air out of me was worse than the stinging slice of its edge in my skin. Nya stumbled past u
s and pulled the front door open. Kosmas was coming out of his daze from the head butt. My forehead felt like it had been cracked in too and I was seeing double. It wasn’t enough though, the murderous rage in his eyes was back. All four of them. I blinked, trying to clear my vision and think about what to do. I had less than a second. He was a monster, but he was also a man. I raised my knee and crushed it into his junk as hard as I could. He tensed and screamed through gritted teeth, close to my face, and I shoved him to one side, trying to roll him off me. Someone was helping me. I looked up to see Noah next to me, grabbing him by the shoulder. The two of us were still too weak to pull him off. A third pair of hands appeared, grabbing the sword by both ends and pulling. Nya. Between the three of us, we were able to get Kosmas off of me, but Kosmas was shaking off his testicle relocation and if anything, he looked more pissed than ever. He shook off Nya and Noah, throwing them back. He turned to kick them away and Nya shielded Noah as best she could, taking the full force of his kick in her back. I grabbed my machete off the ground and launched myself at Kosmas. I stabbed him in the back and he stopped kicking Nya. He turned slowly towards me and I let go of the machete which was buried to the hilt in his back at an upward angle. Kosmas was almost calm as his eyes focused on me.
“You stain. I’ll end this before it begins.” Then he lunged for me. I stumbled backward out the front door and onto the porch. I had to get the sword away from him. Without it, he was just a strong super. With it, he was deadly. I grabbed the hilt and the blade, feeling it dig into my hand. He had come at me with such force that when I jerked the sword towards me, it threw him off balance. He started to fall down the stairs, me still attached to him, not letting go of the sword. His eyes met mine and his face shifted from the murderous rage to horror and realization as his grip on the sword relaxed and the sunlight touched his skin.
There was no sound. No screams of pain and flames. He turned to gray ash just like his chains. I had the sword but I was still falling with him. We hit the ground. He hit first, almost a perfect statue of gray ash. That is until I fell on him and he disintegrated into a pile. I coughed and spit, trying to get the ash out of my mouth.
“You forgot to close your mouth, didn’t you?” Nya wheezed, from somewhere near the front door.
“Rookie mistake,” I heard Noah choke out, somewhere near her. I rolled over onto my back, holding the sword against me and I raised an arm, giving them both the finger.
20
Thankfully, it was just before six a.m. and the rest of the neighborhood wasn’t awake. Or at least they weren’t coming outside to see the aftermath of their neighbor turning to ash after being attacked in a fight over a sword. Nya was standing over me a minute later. She limped to my side and offered me a hand up. I had a headache and the wind knocked out of me, but I was doing pretty good, despite that. I also had this crappy feeling in my gut.
“I feel like crap,” I groaned, trying to brush the ash out of my neck wound as I carried the sword back to the house.
“I bet you do,” Nya said. “Join the club.”
I nodded. “You and Noah got it worse than I did, I think. But this is different, it’s not a physical pain.”
“It feels like you’ve been let down?” Nya asked. “Like something you were looking forward to isn’t going to happen?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, something like that. Like a pit in my stomach that something isn’t right.”
Nya nodded. “It’s the Incubus Revenge.”
I nodded. “That’s probably it.”
“What do you mean, Incubus Revenge?” Noah asked, dragging himself up to sit on the couch.
“Incubi give off a toxin in the air wherever they are. It’s like lithium or like laughing gas, but instead of it making you laugh, it acts like pheromones and it makes you attracted to them,” Nya said, turning on the tap at the sink and filling three glasses with water. She handed me one and headed over to the couch to give one to Noah. “When they leave, in this case, involuntarily, the toxin is gone but it gives everyone else a withdrawal that lasts for a couple of hours. Longer, if they’ve been with the incubus for half a day or more.”
“You feeling it too?” I asked Noah.
Noah looked confused. “I feel something, but I like girls. Why would it affect me?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a pheromone toxin, Noah. It doesn’t care who you’re attracted to.”
I plopped down on the couch next to Nya and the three of us stared at the blank screen of the big screen TV across from us.
“Well, what do you want to do?” I asked Nya on a sigh. “There’s blood in the bedroom.” I looked down at the living room floor. “And in here. And a pile of ash on the lawn.”
“Leave it,” Nya said, groaning as she pulled herself to her feet. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got the sword and now we’ve got a demon to find.”
I got to my feet and moved over to pull Noah up. “Yeah, for once, I’m actually hoping he’ll just come after me and save us the trouble.”
“Bite your tongue,” Nya said, double-checking to make sure she had everything. She tucked her grow light back into her bag. “Even with the sword, we’re going to need every trick we can think of. Including the element of surprise.”
We trekked out of the house and closed the door. I didn’t bother locking it. Who cares? Maybe his victim would come back and clean him out. That TV alone was probably close to a thousand dollars.
I got behind Lucy’s wheel and the other two climbed in beside me. Something popped into my head and I sighed.
“What?” Noah asked.
“I just feel sorry for the landlord,” I said, pulling onto the road.
“Because of the bloodstains?” Noah asked.
“No,” I said, turning back towards the main drag and Nya’s motel. “Because of the box of body parts in the garage.”
We were quiet as we wound through town. I pulled into the space next to Nya’s S10 and cut the engine.
“No offense, Bane,” Noah said and I looked at him. “Ok, some offense. You smell like someone set a herd of cattle on fire and they stampeded through a fish market.”
“Well don’t hold back,” I said, climbing out.
“Oh good, we can do this now?” Nya asked. I cut my eyes to her. “Because, Bane, I love you, but you smell like a hearse caught fire on the way to the cemetery and made a detour into a meatpacking plant.”
“I get it,” I said. I handed Nya the sword. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Good,” Noah said and I could hear the glee in his voice. “Because you smell like a burning bandaid on a severed foot, stuffed inside a steamer trunk in my grandma’s attic.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said, breezing into the bathroom. “How is the bandaid burning if it’s in a steamer trunk with no air?” I closed the bathroom door behind me and started stripping.
“Well,” I heard Noah approach the door. “They let the bandaid on the foot burn and then as the fire was dying, they threw it into the steamer trunk…” I turned on the water to drown out what he was saying.
I rinsed out my clothes to get the ash off and put them back on wet. It was summer. I probably wouldn’t get hypothermia or pneumonia. I put a hand to my stomach. Man, the Incubus Revenge was hitting me hard. I’d never hunted one before, but I’d heard stories from other hunters about how bad the Revenge could be. It was a feeling like I was responsible for everything awful the incubus had ever done. And he hadn’t screamed. Just turned to ash and disintegrated. I hadn’t heard that part from the hunters.
I rejoined Nya and Noah in the main room. They had the sword laying on one of the beds and Nya was digging through her bags, pulling books out. She glanced up at me.
“Much better,” Nya said, sniffing the air. “Why are your clothes wet?”
“I rinsed them out since my smell was so offensive to you two.” I gave each of them a sarcastic smile.
Nya shook her head. “That bag on the floor.” She pointed to a
black shopping bag. “There’s some clothes at the bottom. They’re clean. Put them on and get back in here. I don’t want you rubbed raw by wet jeans and for that to be the reason that the demon takes you down.”
“Fine, mom,” I muttered as I picked up the bag. “Do you have the summoning ritual?”
“Somewhere around here,” Nya said, turning back to look at her bags.
“Good hunting,” I muttered as I headed back into the bathroom. I came back out five minutes later wearing a pair of Nya’s jeans, my wet sports bra, and a black t-shirt.
“Happy?” I asked Nya.
“Ecstatic,” she said. “Now get over here and help.” She handed me a book and I’d just cracked the spine when there was the sound of frantic knocking.
Nya and I exchanged a look and Noah got up and took a few steps away from the door. Nya picked up one of her Glocks and I grabbed my .45 from the tabletop.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Housekeeping,” a familiar voice spat. “Let me in.” I dropped the .45 and moved towards the door.
“What are you doing?” Nya hissed.
“It’s Festus,” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” Nya asked. “Don’t let him in. We’re about to summon a demon. The last thing we would want involved in this is another demon.”
I shook my head. “It’s Festus. He’s helping us.”
“Yeah, right over a cliff,” Nya said, frowning. “He’s still a demon. He’ll use you to help his position. That’s what they all do. He’s probably going to get a promotion if you go down ahead of schedule.”
“That’s not Festus,” I said. He’d had plenty of opportunities to tell the bigwigs downstairs our plans, or where we were, or what we were doing, but he hadn’t. They had beaten some information out of him, but we were still alive and that had to mean that he was helping us more than helping them. Before Nya could argue, I opened the door and Festus barrelled in. I closed it behind him and started to lock it, but he stopped me.
“No, I can’t stay for long. I think I’m being followed,” Festus said quickly. He was panting and his suit was disheveled. His jacket hung open and I could see the tail of his shirt and his loose tie. His face was starting to heal, but there were new angry burn marks on his exposed neck and his hands as he ran them through his mussed hair.