And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (29 page)

She had no choice, yet she hesitated. This was no bargain with an Asmodeus Mogart, it was a bargain with the sworn and ancient enemies of all the humans, demons and her own kind equally.

O'Malley, or the thing that O'Malley had become, sensed her hesitation and a vision started to appear in her mind-a vision of the great asteroid filling the skies of Earth, of oceans crashing inland, cities de-stroyed, millions-no-billions of lives swept away, their faces showing terror at the destruction, their faces, too, a mirror of her friends and relatives, those to whom she had been closest in life. With the vision came a strong thought, an argument.

All this has happened,
it seemed to tell her.
All this is the fate of your world. But winter
becomes sum-mer after a while; what seems like permanent desola-tion come December is
reborn in April's warmth and May's sweet rains. What is done may be undone if you so wish,
Jill McCulloch. Without shedding of blood there is no remission. Blood must flow that blood be
saved. It is your choice, Jill McCulloch. Your choice alone. Choose now, Jill McCulloch,
the voice inside her commanded.
Which lives will you choose? Do you accept the terms of my
bargain?

There was no choice. "I accept," she choked, hold-ing back tears.

"Know now the spell that I shall weave," O'Mal-ley's strangely distorted voice proclaimed. `Be you strong and agile, the best of the best of a warrior race. Feel the force and power of command flow into you, and feel the building of superior identity! Command, O Queen of Women, all of your sex who are the dissatisfied, the lost, the ones without direction, the yearning ones and the ones beyond yearning, the ones who dare to hope and the ones beyond hope! The outcasts, the misfits, the empty of soul and spirit! Draw them to yourself as a magnet draws iron, and command them with force of will! Command with invulnerable force! You have the power now!"

And she felt the power flow into her; felt herself grow strong and hard, knew and flexed the enormous forces now placed at her command. She was Jill McCulloch, yes, but she was far more than that now-the Queen of Darkness.

It was done. The alien shapes receded into the blackness until only the faintest echoes of their weird cry seemed to linger in the dead air; the flames of many colors sank and withdrew into their holders, giv-ing off but a pale glow now. The magic symbol traced in the air faded and dissipated like smoke into the faintly flowing colors of the pentagram and then was gone for good.

O'Malley was soaking wet and looked dead tired, as if some vital spark had gone from him, yet his eyes retained their nonhuman glow and that feeling of tre-mendous power and intellect. He looked at her across the little table and placed the wand almost absently in the box atop that table, closing the lid.

"Now you know I must keep the bargain," he said softly, his voice a faint whisper. "What I have done cannot be undone, and I dare not loose such a force as you upon this world. You must win the jewel and leave."

The figure to whom he spoke bore only a superficial resemblance to the Jill McCulloch who had entered the pentagram. It was a warrior queen who stood there, incomparably beautiful beyond man's fanta-sies, with long blue-black hair and flashing black eyes. Tall, bronze, she radiated a strength and power beyond any human's.

She felt it, knew that she was now more than human, a goddess of tremendous power, and flashed an evil smile at the sorcerer.

"You need not remind me of our bargain," she re-sponded sharply to him, the royalty of absolute con-fidence and command in her voice. "But you should know, too, what you have wrought. No man com-mands me, nor any human. I do what I do because I choose to do it, not because you order it. Least of all by your order, for you have sold out and betrayed your own race for power."

He grinned wearily. "I'll not bandy words with you. You now know who my masters are, and
what
they are. You know that nothing human can withstand them and that your power flows from them through me. I cannot turn it off, but I can summon them again."

The threat didn't disturb her in the least, yet she was curious about one other thing that seemed to con-nect with that threat.

"Tell me, Wizard, this one thing: with such power at your command that you can do such as this and present that power so casually, why cannot your alien friends break the spell? Why must one such as I do it?"

He considered the question and his answer carefully. "Let us just say," he replied slowly, "that just as we humans do not always act in concert, so, too, the other side is not unanimous and shares with us one common ground only-love of power and fear of power in others."

She nodded in understanding. "In other words, they fight with one another over who should be the ruler when they return-and other humans are betting on different favorites, including the one who cast this spell."

He nodded wearily and picked up a small bag under the table. It contained water and he drank deeply but carefully, coughing once or twice nonethe-less.

"That's why you're doing this," she pressed as full comprehension struck her. "Constanza means nothing to you. It's to break the spell of a rival!" Her new, bright eyes bored into him.

"There is something in the Citadel that interests your master and that has been denied it by this spell. The C.I.A. had nothing to do with it! Your own rivals cast that spell to deny you something there, and it was
you
who betrayed Constanza to force this! You! What's in there that you want?"

He was plainly weary and sank to the ground with a sigh. "What I wish is none of your concern, for you will leave this plane when the job is done. Let us just say it isn't a thing, it's the place itself-a thin spot, as it were, between their world and ours. That is why I influenced Constanza to build there in the first place. As to the betrayal, does one betray a rose when he replants it, or an ant in an ant farm by killing its queen? Only when I sensed your passage through the planes did all this develop; I traced you, I probed you, and I led you here. Does it make a difference? You are here to save your own world, a place alien to me. No matter what happens here, it is of no conse-quence to you."

She felt fury, a fury mixed with contempt, for this man who knew all and yet chose against his own kind. He and his rival sorcerers who stumbled on the truth had somehow contacted these alien creatures and bargained with them, and were now fighting a war with one another in which all humanity other than themselves was just a pawn in their power games.

She would go now and leave this miserable crea-ture. She would go and spill blood in his cause for the jewel she now knew he could and would give her.

But if there were any way to deny him his spoils, she would take it, for although she was a Queen of Forces, she was still of human issue and the enemy of what he stood for. He could not undo her power; he had admitted as much. Perhaps the man, Mac Walters, might secure the jewel before she had to fulfill the bargain. Perhaps, then,
he
could return to save their world and she would be loosed fully upon this one with the power and knowledge she now possessed.

She was Queen of Women, and it hurt like hell to know that whether or not she could do anything de-pended on the actions of a man.

4

For two days Mac Walters had studied the informa-tion from Jill's own canvassing, and for two nights he had gone forth to look over the area himself in one or more of his many guises. It was a big city; a demon could be anywhere within it and permanently hidden, and there seemed no way to break through the brick and concrete barriers and the hundreds of square kilometers of civilization spreading out in a star-shaped pattern from the edge of Lake Michigan.

There were rumors, yes. He hadn't even needed Jill's information to pick those up-that the Boss of Bosses, Constanza, had a true demon held in thrall somewhere within the city limits of Chicago who did his bidding and devoured the souls of his enemies. But where?

Constanza's enemies wanted to know as well, as did the federal government. The only thing that had come out was that the demon was held by a pentagram but had freedom and creature comforts within his prison. But what sort of pentagram?

"Creature comforts" implied a large area, much larger than a chalk circle on the floor of a bar or even the standard magician's working area. How large could a pentagram be? Or, perhaps the question should be: how large could a pentagram be without its being obvious or giving the demon too much free-dom to move?

Mac had spent his nights checking over Constanza's known property, finding nothing. The rival gangs and the feds were checking that angle, too, and he knew that the mob boss wasn't stupid.

There were other areas not under his direct control, though; these, under other, lesser figures, would have to be ruled out. He couldn't trust anyone with this kind of secret who might turn out to be a rival or sell him out to a rival, and all the mob bosses paid big money to black magicians to protect themselves from assaults on that score.

Constanza's magician was named O'Malley, Mac learned, but that didn't help much. O'Malley himself lived in a comfortable house with lots of servants up on the North Shore, but the property was actually Constanza's. As far as Mac could determine, O'Malley owned nothing he didn't carry with him and spurned money and most material possessions. Wealth simply wasn't important to him, and Constanza could give him whatever he wanted or needed.

Still, it had to have been O'Malley's power that had trapped the demon; it had to be O'Malley's power that maintained the prison. Constanza would not be the one to give the demon commands; he would com-mand O'Malley, who would then face the demon.

That implied that the demon would have to
be somewhere close to where the magician usually lived.

As a bat, Mac Walters approached O'Malley's lakeshore house again. He'd flown over it many times before, but to no avail. Clearly, the place was large but built on a shallow foundation to avoid any troubles with the creatures of the underworld. In front of the three-story house, which must have had twenty or more rooms, was a long, bright green lawn dotted with some shade trees leading down to the lake itself, where an artificial beach had been constructed and a small pier built.

The feds at least had gone over the house, but he decided to have a look of his own. In his mist form he could penetrate places that might be missed by even the best human investigators. He let the air currents lift him and turn him up and to the left, toward the house. He avoided the lake itself, since it was running water-he could fly over it, but should he ever allow himself to touch it, it would suck him in, engulf and drown him. It glowed dangerously to his vampire's eye, a threatening reddish glow broken only by the black dots of the thirty or more yachts and fishing boats tied up just inside the breakwater, shelter for the craft of the very rich who lived along this area.

The house was not vacant. A staff of thirty or more young men and women ran the place at all times and maintained it in tip-top condition. They were too close to being perfect physical specimens to be merely the hired help. That much was apparent from his peeks inside the windows. The men were extraordinarily handsome and muscular, like some sort of Mr. Amer-ica contestants' gathering, and the women were all incredibly beautiful. He wondered idly whether they were human at all, if they were not some supernatural forms conjured up by this most powerful of wizards. It took some time for him to observe them through the windows, going about their duties and in most cases making ready for bed, and to conclude that they were, in fact, real people-albeit possibly made more so than they were by magical aids-and not the nonhuman. They behaved too normally, even with one another, and betrayed the usual human emo-tions of boredom, of cursing when they stumbled, that sort of thing, to be supernatural perfection.

It did not surprise him that there were no religious artifacts like crosses about. O'Malley, it was rumored, was a former Catholic bishop who'd "crossed over" to the black side when passed over for promotion. Such religious artifacts as would disturb him would also disturb O'Malley.

The lack of other safeguards surprised him a little, but this reeked more of O'Malley's overconfidence than of any sinister traps. Mac had discovered the un-willingness of his fellow vampires to come near this place. O'MalIey was tremendously powerful and his vengeance could reach throughout the world. Nobody dared cross him.

Nobody but somebody who didn't plan to be on this world very long.

He could not get into the house on his own; someone would have to help him, this he knew. He checked the second- and third-floor balconies and the widow's walk around the attic. The staff roomed upstairs, and many were just preparing for bed or were already asleep. One room, in which four beautiful sex symbols slept in flimsy nightgowns, particularly inter-ested him. Three were asleep in their beds, but the fourth tossed and turned and seemed to be having problems.

Mac alighted on the balcony and turned back into his human form.

He could not enter, could not raise the window, although it was half raised as it was to accommodate a screen. It wouldn't have mattered if the window had instead been wide open French doors-he had to be invited. There were ways, though, to finagle an invitation.

Not having taken blood from the woman, he had no real control over her, yet he did have great mental powers. He rejected merely tapping on the window-doing so might just raise an alarm or wake the others. He concentrated hard on the restless woman in her bed, projecting one simple thought, one action, that he needed.

It is stifling hot,
he projected.
You need some fresh air!

For a minute or two he was unsure that he was get-ting through; you just couldn't tell about such things. Then he saw the woman sigh, sit up on the side of her bed, and rub her eyes. He kept projecting.