by Eve Langlais
“Zane helped me take care of it. We sank it in a nearby swamp.”
“The car is still registered to him.”
“Maybe no one will find it.”
The queen flung up her hands. “I give up. Doesn’t anyone read anything about modern forensics?”
“We were working under pressure,” Ella grumbled. “Now, if you’re done giving me heck, why are you outside during daylight? And who are these people in your bedroom?” Her eyes widened. “Did we interrupt something?”
As Felicia gasped, “No,” Tariq couldn’t help but sidle close, slide an arm around her waist, and purr, “Yes.”
She elbowed him, and while it didn’t hurt, it did make him chuckle.
Stiff at his side, Felicia replied, “No, you didn’t interrupt. It’s just the djinn contingent who arrived somewhat earlier and via unexpected methods.”
“Real genies?” Ella’s eyes lit, and Tariq almost groaned because sure enough—
“Did that child just call us…g…g…” Azzam couldn’t say it.
“That child is a ridiculously powerful ánima veneficus, which means she can slap you on the butt and call you Sally if she likes,” Felicia said dryly.
“But why would I do that?” Ella’s nose crinkled, making her look even more innocuous. How powerful could someone that cute be? Still, this was who the queen had insisted they find. What luck she came to them. Now perhaps they could get down to business.
“We’ve located your allies. Now what?” Tariq asked. “Do you have a plan to help us fight the demons?”
“No. Up until a few hours ago, I thought they were ugly bodyguards used by the dwarves. Suddenly, it turns out they can take over bodies.”
“They are possessing those with flesh only until they can free their own. There is a crack in the seal keeping them prisoners. If we cannot repair it, then they will spill into our world,” Azzam announced. Tariq didn’t bother asking how his grandfather knew. It wasn’t worth the cuff.
“Can’t you just pour some cement into the crack?” Ella asked, earning a few stares. “What?”
“It’s a rift into another dimension,” Jamaal retorted. “It’s going to need more than some quick fix. Not to mention we have to find it first.”
“It’s in the desert,” his grandfather offered, not being helpful at all.
“If the demon crack is in the desert, then why are they possessing Ella here in America?” Felicia asked, a frown creasing her brow.
“Because their plan is to spread all over the world.”
“Why?” Ella asked.
Azzam sputtered. “What do you mean why? Because that is what demons do.”
“Why can’t they live amongst us? Nothing wrong with diversity.” The very innocent nature of Ella’s question didn’t prevent it sounding ridiculous.
“Demons are killers. Because of them, we have no home. No people. And we are just the start,” Tariq announced, his tone grim. “Which is why we’re here. We need help fighting them.”
“Fight?” Ella’s head tilted back, and her voice emerged several octaves lower. “You’ll never win. I am the adversary, and you will spill your blood to free me.”
Seven
Channelling a demon, quite possibly from another dimension, had a way of changing how people looked at you. Ella wasn’t surprised at all to see everyone gaping at her.
“She is possessed!” The genie’s giant sword swung, only to be blocked as her ghostly friends formed a shield before her. Good thing they also held Zane back because he snarled at the attempt.
“Would you both stop it? I am not possessed.” At the moment. But Mr. Rude-Pants-Demon was starting to annoy with his attempts to jump into her body.
“But you don’t deny the demons are using you as a conduit,” stated the genie.
“Tariq, leave Ella alone. She’s not the enemy,” Felicia barked.
Not today she wasn’t, but tell that to his wide-eyed, suspicious gaze. You’d think she’d be used to the way people looked at her by now.
How many times had she done something at the asylum? Something weird even by their standards, which got her put in solitary—a.k.a a room with padded walls chasing butterflies because of the drugs. Her friends in the attic loved to play pranks. Never mind they got Ella in trouble. Their petty games amused them in the afterlife, and Ella got used to people staring at her—and calling for her to die.
What she didn’t expect was an old man, who looked like he’d stepped out of the Bible with his long beard and robes, to beam. “The gods are smiling upon us. A soul witch to save us all.”
Not exactly the kind of endorsement she’d expected, but it would look cool on T-shirts.
“What are you saying, old man?” Tariq turned his green gaze onto the other guy.
“That she is the reason we came here. The one who can help us.”
“Her?” asked the tall genie, his gaze intent. “What kind of forces do you wield? Have you fought demons before?” As he hammered Ella with questions, she could feel the heat rolling off of him in huge waves. The pungent aroma of cinnamon made her yearn for icing-covered hot cross buns. Mmm.
Poor Zane must have caught some of her interest because he bristled and stepped in front of her. “Slow down, Aladdin.”
“Aladdin was the thief. Malik was the djinn in that travesty.”
“Don’t care. Back away from my wife.”
Yes, wife. In a lovely midnight and moonlight ceremony attended by three hundred of their closest paranormal friends. The pool had to be drained the next day after the mess the mermaids made.
The old fellow held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “You misunderstand. We don’t wish her harm. She might be the only one who can help us. So say the gods.”
“Gods?” Zane scoffed. “Don’t tell me the mighty djinn believe in those fables.”
“Just because many have passed from this world doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are still a few.”
“And you know them?” Ella asked.
The old guy nodded. “Yes.”
Felicia interjected herself. “Gods are all well and good, but they’re not the issue right now. Ella, Zane, meet my guests. Tariq, Jamaal, and Azzam.”
“I don’t care about their names. What do you know of the demons?” Zane asked. “Why are they harassing my wife?”
The younger man with the scarred countenance, who must be Jamaal, turned his sloe-eyed gaze on Zane. “I don’t know why they would want a human witch, but I would imagine it has much to do with her magic.”
“The demons need all the magic they can muster,” the old guy muttered.
“What for, Azzam?” Felicia asked.
“Freedom, of course. It is why they attacked the djinn first, for our magic is mightiest.” Azzam puffed out his chest, which might have been more impressive had it not sported bird poop on it.
Tariq sighed. “We only have theories about the demons’ motive. What we do know is they have captured all the bottles they could find and killed the djinn who opposed them. We three are the last free djinn that I know of. Given they hunt us still, I fear we might not be for long.”
“Aha. I was right. You did drag trouble with you.” Felicia jabbed a finger at his chest, not daunted at all by the fact the guy was way taller and a genie. Which Ella was pretty sure trumped vampire. But the queen didn’t seem to care. She was utterly fearless.
Ella wanted to be Felicia when she grew up.
“Our trouble now,” Tariq remarked. “But it will become your issue once we are out of the way. The demons we encountered are relentless.”
“What do they want?” A question that kept coming back.
Jamaal sneered. “Everything. They’ve breached our world and plan to conquer it.”
Ella clapped her hands. “Oh, wow, this is just like an episode of Ash Versus the Evil Dead.”
Zane leaned close. “Not really. Demons don’t turn people into zombies.”
“Yet.” She held up a hand. “Bu
t they can possess people and make them do stuff. They did it to the genie staff. That’s how Tariq’s people got taken.”
His mouth rounded. “How did you know?”
“Esfir told me.”
“Who?” Tariq asked.
Zane replied for her. “One of her ghosts.”
That had all three of the genies staring at Ella. It probably didn’t bode well that they were so impressed.
“For real?” Jamaal asked.
“I told you she was a soul sorceress.” The vampire queen almost rolled her eyes.
Tariq faced her. “I thought you were perhaps mistaken in your application of the title. It’s been a long time since one of her kind roamed the earth.”
“They are rare,” Azzam added to the conversation. “So rare that finding you might not be enough. The last time the demons managed to penetrate our world, a coven of thirteen converged upon the rift and used their combined power over the dead to seal it.”
“Thirteen?” Tariq exclaimed. “You mean we need to find twelve more? How is it you’re only mentioning this now?”
Azzam shrugged. “I thought the soul witches extinct. But where there is one…there could be others. We must simply find them.”
“How?” snapped Tariq. “It’s not as if we can place an advertisement seeking them.”
“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Ella chimed in. “According to my friends, I’m the only one. But if it makes you feel better, they say I’m strong.”
“One strong sorceress isn’t the twelve needed for a spell. We are well and truly doomed.” Tariq rubbed his face. “We wasted our time coming here.”
“Why did you come here?” Zane asked. “Why travel so far?”
“Because my grandfather”—Tariq glared at the fellow—“had a vision that our only hope of survival was with the vampire queen.”
“I’m pretty sure whatever survival he was talking about isn’t going to be found in my bedroom,” snapped Felicia. “Can we move this somewhere else? Say like a room meant for the telling of stories.”
In other words, the library. Ella’s favorite room in the house because it not only spanned three stories, with floor-to-super-high-ceiling bookcases, it also had ladders. On rails!
Ella only wished she had a decent singing voice for when she went wheeing around the room.
But today wasn’t a day for a ladder race with Felicia. Who wasn’t uptight when just the pair of them hung out.
Today they had to do serious talk.
At least nowadays when Ella had serious conversations, it wasn’t with a doctor trying to increase the number of pills she took. Her asylum days were over. Zane had saved her. Helped her to find herself. And love.
“…and now we live super happily together in Zane’s giant house. Which would be even more awesome if he let me get a kitten,” she exclaimed as she regaled the genies with the story of her life.
They were awestruck and silent. The ghosts were sobbing around her and attacking the spirits that ridiculed. Ella’s childhood was nothing to mock.
“No cats. I’m allergic,” Zane claimed.
“Which is totally unfair. You have werewolves.”
“Who would eat a kitten,” he argued, not for the first time.
“Not if I got a big one. With stripes.” Ella offered him a smile and a bat of her lashes.
He groaned. “For the last time, I am not getting you a tiger or a lion, moonbeam.”
“You will get me a pet.”
“He will,” agreed Azzam with a sage nod of his head. “Two of them. So say the gods.”
Ella clapped her hands. “Yay.”
“No.”
“Can we get back to the demon problem?” said the serious spoilsport named Tariq. And here she’d thought him brave and playful when he dared to touch Felicia without permission. Ella had seen people lose arms and get beaten with them for less.
Ella cocked her head as a voice, reedy and thin with age, whispered in her special ear. “Esfir says it all began with an excavation and a tomb. Just like a movie.” It made Ella long for an Indiana Jones whip and hat or the long cool hair of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider.
“Less movie, more nightmare,” Jamaal said with a sneer.
“You saw it happen?” she asked with wide eyes.
“No. None of the djinn were present, or we would have stopped the idiots that cracked the seal and released the demons.”
“Idiots as in someone did this intentionally?” Felicia asked sharply.
“They probably didn’t know what they were doing. We never had a chance to question them. Those present when the seal to the demon rift was broken all died,” Tariq informed.
“If they’re dead and you weren’t there, how do you know what happened?” Zane asked.
“Because not all of them died that same day,” Tariq explained. “Some managed to run away but took ill. The doctors said they succumbed to tomb toxins.” The gases of the dead could become potent, especially over time.
“If they suffered from grave poisoning, then their account of events can’t be taken seriously. It is a documented fact that the inhalation of those gases can cause strange behavior, including hallucinations and the sensation of voices talking. Perhaps they only thought they released demons.” Zane played devil’s advocate.
“Are you saying we imagined the demons attacking our people?” Jamaal growled. “Because I did not imagine this.” He pointed to the scars slanting across half his face.
“I am not saying you weren’t attacked,” Zane said, standing firm. “However, you are expecting me to believe that some ancient rift opened and loosed some super demon ghosts on the world. Which seems unlikely. Perhaps they’ve been here all along.”
“And I say they’ve been imprisoned for eons.”
Ella raised her hand. “Um, rather than argue, I can show everyone what really happened.”
Everyone blinked at her, except Felicia. “Can you really?”
Pursing her lips, Ella rolled a shoulder. “Guess we’ll find out. Can you turn on the television?” Before Felicia could move, one of Ella’s eager ghosts had already found the remote and powered it. The painting above the fireplace slid upwards to reveal an LCD screen. It lit and briefly flashed a news channel before flipping inputs to sit on one showing only staticky snow.
Closing her eyes, Ella centered herself. Displaying rather than telling a spirit’s experience took more out of her, but it also forestalled questions.
Let everyone see what the ghost showed her.
“Come on, Esfir. Show us through your eyes.” Let me ride along in your memories.
With an invitation, the female spirit that claimed to have seen it all dove into Ella. There was a brief struggle for control. There always was when spirits suddenly got a chance to wear flesh. But this was no demon. Ella could and did control the ghost. She aimed the esoteric juice she wrung from its memories at the television.
It crackled and flashed, the feedback wince worthy. Then cleared.
The view proved slightly dizzying as they literally saw out of someone else’s eyes. Someone high above the ground riding in a helicopter. The view outside the windows was of an arid place, built of hard-packed dirt and rock. A barren, uninhabitable plain suddenly broken by a rift. The helicopter dove into that abyss, deeper than expected. Mountains of sandstone rose in steep cliffs on either side, and while there was distance between the walls of rock, the split appeared fresh.
Those watching couldn’t know this, but the ghost whose memories she borrowed remembered the satellite images of three months ago showed no sign of the crevice.
The new gorge didn’t go unnoticed. Or unexplored. A camp could be seen on the dusty, rubble-strewn ground. Tents of thick, tan canvas, the kind not easily seen from above by spying eyes, littered the area, hiding in the shadows of the cliffs.
When the helicopter lurched to land, Ella’s stomach went with it.
The perspective on screen was that of a first-person shooter type video g
ame. Wobbly as it moved, with no real control of where it turned to focus. For example, Ella wanted to more closely examine the tent with the odd symbol on it, but the person running this movie was more interested in exiting the helicopter and heading toward something on the other side of camp at the base of the mountain where the crack ended.
People spoke, and despite not knowing any language other than English, she knew it to be some Arabic dialect. She understood it, too.
“The satellite eye won’t be watching again for another three hours. Get the helicopter to return to town for supplies.” Because they only moved when nobody watched.
“I hear we’re having lamb tonight for dinner.”
“Let’s hope this time he doesn’t burn it.”
Inane chatter that was left behind as her ghost walked them past the tents to a slit within the rock at the vee where the crevice ended. Within, instant quiet, and cool. The heat of the sun didn’t penetrate this far. The slim aperture, less then a pace wide and barely high enough for a person to walk, went on for several minutes. Several minutes where even the sound of huffing breath seemed too loud.
Like the gorge, the rock appeared freshly cut, the edges sharp rather than smoothed by time. A heaving of the very ground itself that unearthed a treasure.
The unnatural muffled quiet ended abruptly, the shadowed passage suddenly emerging into a cavern bright with lights and full of noise.
Ella was among many to gasp as the view on the screen changed. She couldn’t help but mutter, “Just like a movie.” And by that she meant the temple on the screen. The columns rising several stories, buried inside the mountain itself, almost as if the stone had been grown around it. Every section of the pillars was carved, the symbols intricate, and unreadable thus far.
Unreadable by the spirit whose memories they followed, but not by a really old djinn. “They should have heeded the warnings that were carved,” Azzam said, making Ella crease her brow as the voice caused the vision to waver.
“What does it say?” Tariq asked. “I don’t recognize some of the symbols.”
“I’m gonna guess it says bad shit ahead, don’t touch,” was Jamaal’s sarcastic retort.