Demon (GAIA) (21 page)

Then an arm went around her neck and she was pulled up, on her back. She struggled for a moment but the arm tightened until she was nearly choking. She coughed up water, and relaxed. Chris pulled her strongly through the water toward the shore.

He got her to a rock in the middle of the stream where she could cling with her torso high and dry and not too much current tugging at her.

“Hang on!” he told her.

“Get him, Chris!” she shouted, hoarsely.

He was already away.

She pulled herself higher and looked over the top of the rock. The kidnapper was maybe a hundred feet ahead of Chris, and the gap was narrowing. But the water ahead was extremely rough.

A kind of frozen lethargy settled over her. She was exhausted, had been near death, and it was all she could do to hang onto the rock and watch events unfold before her eyes. They didn’t seem to have much relation to her. She was able to wonder if the thief could make it through the rapids and keep Adam alive, but unable to connect his survival or death to herself. A scream kept bubbling up in her throat, but it didn’t have anywhere to go.

She heard the Titanides crossing the bridge, making a sound like an avalanche. She turned, and saw Serpent pointing toward Chris, saw Rocky leap over the railing and float down, forelegs first, then hit with a splash that sent water fifty feet high. His head came up and he was swimming strongly as Serpent and Valiha went through the front door of Tuxedo Junction, not bothering to open it.

There were sounds of something crashing through the brush, and Robin turned in time to see Cirocco pounding along the edge of the river. She passed Robin’s rock, passed Chris, reached a suitable place for take-off and leaped. Her body followed an almost flat trajectory and she was forty feet from shore before she hit the water.

And she didn’t sink. She had arched her back and held her arms in a swept-back position, like a jetliner, and held her chin high as she hit, and she skipped twice, like a flat stone, then body-surfed another precious five feet before the water had her. She was thirty feet behind her objective and swimming strongly.

Robin found herself balanced on her knees, her fists tight and her teeth clenched, willing Cirocco onward. Dimly she was aware of the sounds of Valiha and Serpent diving into the water somewhere behind her, but her eyes never left the woman she would always think of as the Wizard. It looked like Cirocco would tear the bastard into tiny pieces when she got to him, and there was nothing in the world Robin wanted to see more than that.

She heard shouts behind her. A wide shadow swooped over her with breathtaking speed, then all she could see was the skimpy rear profile of an angel, twenty-foot wings at full extension, the tips skimming the water.

It folded its wings the tiniest bit, seemed to hesitate in its headlong rush. Then it snatched Adam with the effortless grace of an eagle hitting a steelhead. It soared up, converting forward momentum into altitude. At two hundred feet it began to flap its great wings, and in a little while it had vanished into the east.

Luther had a Sight on the way to Tuxedo Junction. He knew it wasn’t going to work out well for him. He thought Gaea might be goading him with this information. And sure enough, when he reached the high hill overlooking the lake, the tree, and the treehouse, he was just in time to see the ending.

The Sight was still with him. It didn’t rely on his single eyeball; trees, walls, and distance were no hindrance to it. He could see Kali’s troops in the house, the child playing alone in the room. He watched as the half-Titanide heathen raced up and down the stairs, saw Cirocco Jones come running into the scene, knew when the two humans and three Titanides hit the water.

For a moment he dared to hope, when the Demon dived into the water. Much as he hated Jones, he knew none of Kali’s band was her match—nor, for that matter, were any of his own disciples. Nothing would please Luther more than to see the Demon rend Kali’s slime-spawn into component parts. Then the child might be his….

He watched in disbelief as the angel swooped down.

“Angels!”
he shrieked. “
Angels?
Wy God, wy God, why hast thou forsaken we?”

His disciples shuffled nervously beside him, anxious to go. Having no minds of their own, they were somehow attuned to his emotions. They received his towering frustration, his hatred of the Demon and of Kali…and his quick and virulent fear at the mortal sin he had just uttered.

Luther carried a special Cross in his belt, made of bronze, razor-sharp along all its edges. He pulled it out and began slashing at his own legs, feeling the arms biting deep, glorying in the mortification of the flesh.

He heard a gobbling sound above him.

When he looked up, there was Kali, climbing down from her perch in a tree. A pair of binoculars clattered against her improbable bosom. Her body-slave, a naked boy in his eighth year, scuttled after her, nimble as a monkey, with a golden collar attached to four feet of golden chain that bound him to Kali.

Kali was all gold and putrefaction. The slave chain was fourteen-carat, but the scores of rings she wore on fingers and toes were pure, soft, and fine. She wore a genuine brass bra, buttressed like a gothic cathedral to support the mammoth ochreus breasts. Her legs and her four arms were encircled by a hundred ornate bands and rings, each too small for the limb it squeezed, so that her flesh oozed around them. Her waist was constricted by a gold girdle ten inches in circumference, then her body swelled to a steatopygous abundance. The phrase “hourglass figure” might have been invented for her alone.

Her fingernails were six inches long, and made of bronze.

Her face…it was not completely accurate to speak of Kali’s face, since she had three heads. But the right and left ones were simply tacked on. Each had a strangler’s noose drawn tight. When one rotted off she would replace it from the supplies available to Gaea. At the time she dropped from the tree and walked toward Luther—in a grotesque, hip-sprung gait, a whore in a mortuary—one of the heads was pretty ripe, and another was a recent addition. The old one had been female and white. It was now extremely mortified, and purple, with red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue. It hung backwards by a scrap of flesh. The other head had belonged to a black man whose color had been changed very little by the act of strangulation. This one lolled drunkenly forward, swaying as Kali walked.

The central head had been—in the same sense that Luther had once been the Reverend Arthur Lundquist—a priestess named Maya Chandraphrabha in her previous life. Of Maya, only the head remained. In life, hers had been a boyish, awkward and sterile body. She who now called herself Kali never suffered a moment’s regret, never experienced even the brief torments that sometimes beset he who was now Luther. She gloried in her virulent fecundity. Her womb was prolific as a jellyfish; each
kilorev she whelped a new squalling monstrosity for the greater glory of Gaea.

She wore a belt fashioned of human skulls.

Kali’s face was dead. Her eyes could move, but she could not blink, smile, frown, or close her mouth. Her jaw hung, and her tongue sagged out of her mouth. The gobbling sound Luther had heard was Kali’s laughter.

Kali was the avatar of atrocity.

She gobbled at Luther, and the fingers of two hands traced intricate patterns in the air.

“Shesez where the hell has you been, Luther,” the boy droned.

The boy had been the heir to a large fortune. He was about a year older than the War. When he and his family had emerged from their shelter in the mountains of Mexico one of Gaea’s mercy missions had picked him up. His mother had been deaf, which had given him a skill now useful to Kali. He had once been a bright, healthy, and alert six-year-old. Now his body was the sort a political cartoonist might draw, purposely exaggerated, and label World Hunger. His eyes never left Kali’s hands. He was about eighty years older than he had been two years ago.

“Gaea gave we the right to take the child,” Luther thundered.

Kali gobbled even louder, and her fingers flew.

“Shesez Gaea dint give you no right to get it lessen you got to it first,” the boy chattered. “Shesez you was too fuckin late. Shesez you is a prodisint—” Kali slammed a hand across the boy’s bruised face.

“—shesez you is a prod—”

Again he was slapped.

“—protisent—”

And again.

“—prot…is…tent…shesez you is a protestant muhfuckering ig…ig…ignor-a-mouse shitheaded buggerin christian. Shesez you is too ugly to live. Shesez whyn’t ya go suck on the Pope’s prick.”

“Whore of Vavylon! Harlot of Gomorrah!”

“Shesez damn straight. Shesez she gonna take on you and your whole asshole crew. Shesez lessen you tooken a vow of sebisiss—”

Kali hit him again.

“—sebila—sela—cellba—celili-li-li-li—celibin—celiba…cy.”

The boy sighed his pleasure and relief when he got it right and Kali stopped hitting him.

“Celibacy, celibacy, celibacy,” he muttered. He would get it right the next time, no question.

“Fofery!” Luther hissed, meaning
popery.
Arthur Lundquist, whose faint ghost informed the actions of the thing he had become, would not have known popery from plenary indulgences, being a thrice-Reformed Lutheran and a spiritual ally of most of the Catholic sects. But it amused Gaea for all her Priests to be fundamentalists, and she had a long memory, and so Luther was further enraged.

“Fofery!” he repeated, and his Apostles fuffed and fawed sympathetically in his wake. “Fofery! Vy what right do you take the child?”

“Shesez Gaea told her to. Shesez she did a hell of a lot better job than you and your fuckoffs did.”

“Vut the
angels.
I…” Luther stopped, enraged but unable to do anything about it without the possibility of blasphemy.

Why had Gaea given her angels? Luther had no angels. He had
never
had any angels, had never been told he might even
get
angels.

“It won’t work,” he tried. “Your angel can’t reach Fandewoniuh.”

The boy watched the hands again.

“Shesez it will too work. Shesez she’s got a shitload of angels. Shesez she’s got enough to relay the little muhfucker all the way to Pandemonium. Shesez howdja like to take a big juicy bite outta her big juicy—”

Luther shrieked, and hit the boy. The boy absorbed it, as he had absorbed everything for the last two years, never taking his eyes from Kali’s hands, never pausing in his vile curses. He had learned that
nothing that could come from anywhere else could ever rival the things that came from Kali.

He was wrong. Luther swung his cross and the boy was instantly dead. He turned on Kali and his Apostles followed. They all tore at her. She did not resist. She lay on her back and gobbled contentedly, and her laughter enraged Luther further…

Until he noticed that all his Apostles were dead.

They gathered in the room from which Adam had been taken.

Conal watched them come in, one after the other. His head still hurt something awful, but it was minor compared to the feeling of fear that was stealing over him.

The three Titanides were wet, and ignoring it. Cirocco was wet, and didn’t seem to notice. Chris had a towel and was drying himself off. He seemed exhausted, and distant. Conal didn’t know the special hell Chris was going through, but he could see some signs of it.

Robin was wet, and shivering. Chris handed her his towel when he was through.

Nova…

She still wore Conal’s coat. She was holding it over her shoulders with one hand, shivering almost as badly as her mother. And, though she wore the coat, and though she was holding it in place, she was making no attempt to cover herself. It only reached to her waist, anyway, so it wouldn’t have done her much good, but she held her injured arm out for Rocky to work on, and was unconcerned that one breast was revealed.

Nova seemed to have no body modesty. Conal was used to that in Cirocco, and saw it frequently in long-time residents of Bellinzona. But it was unusual in new arrivals.

He remembered her pressed against him up there in her bedroom. It was a moment he was not going to forget. And now he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.

“This is going to hurt badly,” Rocky said.

“Doctors don’t say things like that,” Nova said. “They promise you it isn’t going to hurt much.”

“I am not a doctor. I am a healer, and this is going to hurt a
lot
.”

Rocky poured the antiseptic solution over Nova’s cuts and started to clean them out. Her face froze, then turned very ugly, but she didn’t scream.

Conal thought she was foolish. He had been treated for zombie wounds. Rocky had to probe deep to be sure he got out every particle of corruption. To have a zombie breathe on you was enough to put you in bed for a week. To be torn up like Nova…

He had to look away. He’d never had a strong stomach.

Cirocco had been waiting like stone for everyone to assemble. Now that they were all here, she wasted no time.

“Who was in the room with Adam when he was taken?” she asked.

Conal’s heart froze.

He saw Chris looking around, frowning, trying to put it together.

“Me and Robin were out in the Witch room,” he said. “When I got here—”

“I’m asking a simple question,” Cirocco interrupted. “I just want to know who was in here. We need a place to start.”

“Nobody was in here,” Conal said, and swallowed hard.

Cirocco turned to face him.

“And how do you know that?”

“Because when I heard the scream, I ran upstairs…”

Cirocco kept looking at him. She was not in the mood to waste time, so her look couldn’t have gone on much more than two seconds, and those seconds didn’t take much more than twenty years to go by.

“I told you to protect him, at all costs,” she said, tonelessly. For an instant the doors were open over the twin blast furnaces. Then she looked away, and Conal could breathe again.

Chris spoke up.

“That’s not fair, Cirocco. What was Conal supposed to do when he heard Nova scream? Ignore it?
There’s no way he—”