Sacrifices (25 page)

“You ain't got a whole lot of time before the situation on the ground deteriorates,” Nail said, interrupting Karyn's thoughts.

“How do you mean?” Elliot asked.

“Belial is out recruiting. Or infecting. I don't know what the right term is.”

Elliot chewed her upper lip. “Are you sure?”

“The guy that told me wouldn't have much of a reason to lie. He's freaking out.” Nail swiveled the chair to his left, then back. “Can't you just arrest the guy? Belial, I mean?”

A pained expression contracted Elliot's brow. “First of all, I don't know where he is. Second, and probably more important, I'll never be able to get a warrant.”

“A what?”

Her smile was equal parts bitterness and wry humor. “A warrant for his arrest. He hasn't committed a crime.”

“Un-fucking-believable.
He hasn't committed a crime?
”

“That we know about. That we can prove. Unless your friends are willing to testify.”

“I thought this is what you did,” Nail said, brushing right past the dirty t-word to Karyn's relief. “Arresting fucking crazy magic people.”

She shook her head. “There's nothing illegal about being a fucking crazy magic person.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” Nail said again, this time dragging the syllables of the word out over several seconds into an expression of patience at its absolute limit, looking up at
the sky like he was sending a particularly useless prayer up to the heavens.

For her part, Elliot seemed in good humor, which was baffling as far as Karyn was concerned. Maybe she liked the challenge, or the novelty of some new occult facet she hadn't seen before, or the intellectual exercise, but Karyn couldn't so much as find a smile right now, and Elliot's attitude was galling.

“So, what now?” she asked. “We just wait and see?”

“Now I go do some homework. Find out more about this Abas character, if possible, and see what I can link him to. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to figure out what he wants down in gangland, and what Belial wants with him. From there . . . who knows?”

“My God, Anna,
are you okay?” Genevieve's voice had gone up an octave into squeak territory, and the words spilled into the phone in one undifferentiated rush. She glanced over toward where Clap and company sat on the curb, eating oily noodles from cardboard boxes, and she took a few more steps away.

“Yeah.”

The faint static sound of the open line whispered in Genevieve's ear. There was a rustle as Anna moved, but no more words.

“Thank God. Wait—you're not calling me from a hospital bed somewhere, are you?”

A dry chuckle. “No.” More static, then: “How did you find me down there?”

“The picture you sent me.”

“Ah.”

Again, Geneveive waited, and again Anna added nothing to her single syllable.

“That place is going to hell,” Genevieve said. “I don't know what kind of crazy shit Gant Street is using to fend off the enemy hordes, but it won't last forever.”

“No.”

Across the street, a man covered in way too many layers of clothes for the weather hit up a couple of women at the bus station for spare change. With his wild beard and hair in all directions, he looked, Genevieve thought, like nothing so
much as a graying dandelion. He got a couple bucks from the first woman and nothing from the second while Genevieve waited for Anna to say something. By the time he wandered off, the silence had become perverse.

“Please,” Genevieve said, “talk to me. I miss you. This feels awful. Everything, and I mean everything, is going to shit. I've been holed up with fucking Sobell and a fucking stinky-ass demon for days, and I spend my days running errands for them with a bunch of hired fucking criminals. I was ten feet from a gunfight today. My breathing hasn't slowed down all the way yet. I feel like I'm one sudden car backfire away from a full-blown screaming panic attack. Please. Talk to me. Please.”

A silent moment during which Genevieve felt a scream building in her throat, and then Anna coughed. “Everything
is
going to shit.”

Genevieve could picture the expression on her face, just from the tone of voice, down to the last detail. There would be this little grin teasing the corners of her mouth, pulling at the lines of her face, but no trace of humor would register in her dark eyes. An expression that said,
This is funny, yeah, so I have to smile, but really it's not funny at all.

It softened something in Genevieve. Warmed her, just the thought of that fatigued, raw smile.

“I miss you,” she said again.

“Where are you?”

Genevieve closed her eyes. Would it have killed Anna just to say the same words back? “Huntington Park. I think. Hanging with some paid lowlifes. I'm not sure if they're supposed to be helping me or watching me.”

“Sobell? Belial?”

“Not here. Out looking for answers, I guess. That's all pretty unstable, too. Sobell wants to kill Belial,” Genevieve said. Much as she wanted to try to draw Anna out, talk about anything but demons and criminals, it appeared playtime was over. “Just trying to figure out when and how, and if he needs the creep to get what he wants first.”

“Lots of people want to kill that creep.
I
want to.”

“I don't blame you.”

“I'm cracking up,” Anna said, the words at odds with her quiet, even tone. “Almost bled to death last night working some kind of way-fucked-up camouflage spell. It was like I had a huge cape of shadows or something. You would have liked it. It was cool. Up until I collapsed.”

“Jesus. Are you okay?”

Anna grunted. Genevieve could hear the shrug in her voice. “For now. Eating lots of red meat. Drinking lots of water.”

“Good. Um.”

“The diagram is a curse,” Anna said. “Heavy-duty bad luck to anybody who crosses it who doesn't belong. I broke it last night. Today, people died.”

“That was you?”

“It's not that I feel like I'm not in control,” Anna said, hauling the conversation in an abrupt new direction. “I feel in control. I feel like I know exactly what I'm doing. It's just that lots of things seem like good ideas that didn't used to seem like good ideas. Sheila told me this would happen. Before she died.”

Genevieve put her hand against a wall and lowered her head, leaning as if she was trying to push the wall over. “I told Sobell to hold off. We might need Belial. We're gonna get you out of this, I promise.”

“How can you promise? You don't know. Nobody does. You know what they call a promise when you don't
know
?”

“What?”

“A fucking
lie
.”

Genevieve reached for the stud at her eyebrow, and of course it wasn't there. She settled for pulling at the flesh beneath the eyebrow instead, tugging the skin, feeling the empty little hole there against her forefinger. She glanced at the curb. The two guys weren't eating anymore, but they weren't particularly concerned with her. They were shooting the shit, pointing at a couple of kids fighting over a skateboard across the street. Making bets, it looked like.

“Sobell doesn't know,” Genevieve said. “He doesn't know anything about how to help you, how to help himself. He says the diagram you saw is from an ‘alternative tradition,' whatever that means, but he was cagey about it, and I really think he doesn't know much else. Belial's got the answer, if anybody does, but of course he—it—isn't saying, and I don't know how to get it out of him.”

“We get what he wants first,” Anna said. “That's always been the plan. He helps us, or we destroy the relic thing.”

“That works if you're negotiating with somebody rational. I'm not sure that's the case here. He's . . .”

“I know,” Anna said, the two words loaded with quiet anger. Given that Belial had infested her with a demon for what appeared to be the pure fun of it, Genevieve supposed Anna understood better than she did herself.

“He's worse now. Worse all the time.”

“Me, too.”

Another long pause, and Genevieve couldn't think of a single thing to fill it. Anna was unreachable, hunkered down at the center of a forest of thorns and spikes, anger and betrayal, and it was impossible to cut a path through.

“I feel . . . ,” Anna began, pulling Genevieve from her thoughts. “I feel . . . you should get away,” Anna said, and Genevieve couldn't escape the feeling that she'd changed what she was going to say, as though it was too dangerous to approach directly. “Don't come down to the Gardens no more. It's gonna get bloody.”

“I know that,” Genevieve said. “You've got four gangs waiting to crush the Locos, just as soon as they can figure out how. You gotta get what you need and get it out of there, as soon as you can.”

“You gotta tell me what it is. You're close to both of them, Sobell and Belial.”

Sure. Just pry loose their most important secret and betray the both of them by handing it over to their enemies. That was insane. Impossible. Unthinkable. “Okay,” Genevieve said, without the faintest idea of how she'd even approach it. “I'll try.”

“I wish this hadn't gotten so fucked-up,” Anna said. “I miss you.”

Genevieve closed her eyes and pressed the phone tightly to her ear, as if she could just keep the words there, echoing forever.

Sobell rested trembling
hands on the table in front of him. Belial was out, doing whatever it did—and that would have to be discovered, and soon—and Genevieve was playing games with gang members in a particularly awful neighborhood in East L.A. There were facts piling up here, and Sobell did not like the look of any of them. This mystery priest with his God-damned sigils and wards right at the center of what Sobell was increasingly sure was the location referred to by the prophecy. Add to that the prophecy's note about Gomorrah, and he started to get a glimpse at the underlying structure of the thing, and he was not happy.

He was out of allies. Tired of living in this hole. Tired of
hiding
. It had been years since he'd had to hide, and now what? His underlings in the underworld—both criminal and occult—were so desperate to get away from him and the shit storm that he'd wrought that many of them were actually leaving town. His so-called allies in the city government, fair-weather friends at best, had distanced themselves and were probably already preparing to testify against him. His
lawyer
had abandoned him, which he frankly would have put beyond the realm of possibility, as long as his money was green.

Oddly, he missed Van Horn. They'd been friends once, or as close as practitioners tended to get, before they had mutually screwed each other—over what? A moldering
grimoire fragment that they probably could have simply shared if they could have brought themselves to trust one another. It had seemed important at the time.

Sobell stood, trying to ignore the shaking in his hands. Something moved in his peripheral vision, but he didn't even bother to look. Something was always moving in his peripheral vision these days. Clouds of black smoke, swarms of flies that vanished when he looked at them head-on. They were coming for him soon.

He opened the blinds that covered the window nearest him. Merciless sunlight glared down on every corner of the room.

“Ye gods,” Sobell said. The place was a disaster, he'd known that, but it hadn't looked so
seedy
in the dimness. The white plastic 7-Eleven bag they'd been using for trash had fallen over near the door, spewing burrito wrappers, used Kleenex, and a bottle of Clarence Wilkinson's spit—cap on and screwed tightly shut, thankfully—across the floor. Genevieve's row of Red Bull cans was similarly disgusting, the top of each empty ringed with sticky yellow goo. The floor just outside Belial's lair seemed to ripple, because it was covered in thousands of tiny black ants.

Sobell crossed the room and opened the blinds next to the door. He gritted his teeth against the pain in his aching body as he bent down to pick up the trash and put it back in the bag.

Time's almost up,
he thought. He knew more than he had a week ago, but he wondered if he was really any closer to pulling his ass from the fire. It seemed as though the options were only getting worse, the needle harder to thread.

He tied the bag shut and set it next to the door. Then he walked back to the table and stared down at the drawings on it, but he wasn't really seeing them. For the first time, it occurred to him that he might
really
die. That this hadn't all been a fabulous lark that would, of course, come out with him on top. And what would he leave behind? A pile of money the government would likely lay claim to, if they could navigate the legal morass surrounding it. A bunch of
weird objects that were already in an evidence locker somewhere and might never come out. And a criminal empire that his worthless would-be criminal heirs would fight over and carve into bits, just like worthless heirs of kingdoms in the days of yore.

The door opened, startling him from his reverie.

“Oh my God,” Genevieve said. She froze in the open door before coming to her senses and rushing in, slamming it shut. “What in the world are you doing?” She reached for the blinds nearest the door.

“Leave them open,” he said.

“Are you insane? First of all, somebody could look in, and second—
gross.
I never wanted to get a good look at this.”

“Just leave them. My eyes hurt.”

She walked to the table and stood across from him. “Hey. What's going on?”

He shuffled a few of the drawings around, then pulled up his gaze to meet her eyes. “Remember that rubbish I told you regarding an alternate tradition of magic and all that rot?”

“Sure.”

“It's not entirely rubbish. It is, in fact, true.”

“Okay. What does that mean?”

“The ‘typical' occult practitioner derives power from communing with demons.
This
tradition,” he said, pointing at the nearest drawing, “purports to commune with something else.”

Genevieve scowled. That's what he'd always liked about her—she was a quick study. “Angels,” she said. “You're gonna tell me it's angels, and I'm gonna cry bullshit, and then we're gonna have a big ol' argument.”

“I'm not talking about blond gentlemen with togas and white wings,” Sobell said.

Genevieve groaned.

“I'm not even talking about anything recognizable as angels in any contemporary sense. More like things out of the most demented parts of the Bible. Head of an ox,
six wings, four faces. Things with seven horns and seven eyes. Much, much stranger things. Things that would give children nightmares for a month.”

“What am I supposed to do with that information? Join a convent? Take up snake handling?”

“If there's a god behind all the beating of wings and the rustling of feathers, so to speak, it's frightfully shy about showing itself,” Sobell said.

“They just sound like a different kind of demon to me.”

“That's an acceptable interpretation. The salient difference, for our purposes, is that this alternate tradition has its own practitioners, with which I do not . . . see eye to eye.”

“The priest.”

“The priest. I presume.”

“Well . . . the whole problem is that we're surrounded by demons. Maybe this priest is actually part of the answer.”

Sobell lowered his head. A moment later, he looked sidelong at Genevieve. “I fear that may be true.”

“Why? Maybe he can help us.”

“If he has all the facts at his disposal, he feels about me the same way the remnants of the Brotherhood of Zagam feel about you.”

“You broke up a party? Interrupted a ceremony? Stole something?”

Sobell laughed through his nose and shook his head.

“I killed what he thinks of as one of his god's servants. What he, in all probability, calls an angel.”

“You . . . what?”

“The blade you ended Zagam with cleaves flesh of all kinds, my dear,” Sobell said with a trace of his old charm. “As for the seraph, well . . . I killed it and fed part of it to a demon. I am—how best to put this?—not well liked among that contingent.”

“Jesus. Look, what is it you think this guy can give you? Let's get your goddamn answers from him and get away from him, before he gets the news.”

“I don't know what it is he can give me,” Sobell said. “Only that I am afraid.”

*   *   *

“I see,” Sobell said into his phone. He stood out on the sidewalk in front of the office, shading his eyes against the sunset. “Thank you.” He hung up, unsure of what to make of the latest news. It had been Simon, cowardly, stupid Simon, who was one of the few occult brokers who was still sticking his head up, trying to make a buck. Cowardly, stupid Simon had called to let him know that in fact somebody
had
come to him looking for a relic, as well as various and sundry other items. Except . . . it hadn't been the priest. It had been a leper, according to cowardly, stupid Simon. “Or, like, some dude with like fuckin' flesh-eating bacteria or something,” Simon had said. “Beard all coming out in clumps and shit. I didn't wanna get near him.”

Belial, of course. Simon wasn't in the area he was supposed to be searching, but that wasn't the only issue of concern. Belial had apparently brought a shopping list. Failing news of a relic, he was happy to get wormwood, a dozen black candles, and a handful of other items that boded ill.

Sobell sat on the sidewalk and waited. He'd been out here since shortly after Genevieve's return, unwilling to spend any more time in the stinking den, and then cowardly, stupid Simon had called.

Sobell mulled Simon's news over until a car pulled up and Belial got out. Then he stood.

“We need to talk,” Sobell said as Belial approached.

Belial halted on the sidewalk, weaving slightly on unsteady legs. He stared at Sobell, uncomprehending. A runnel of reddish yellow goo oozed down the side of his face from a fissure between his eye and nose, looking like a gory tear. Something was badly wrong, Sobell thought. Belial had managed for months with a minimum of deterioration, but this was insane. How had he gotten so much worse so fast? It was as if the man was rotting away in front of him, almost in time-lapse. Blink, and another piece would have fallen off. Maybe his condition was accelerating for reasons Sobell didn't understand—and maybe it was because Belial was tapping into powers he ought not be. That certainly dovetailed well with Simon's news.

“To
talk
,” Sobell said. “Communicate. Engage in an exchange of ideas, hopefully to our mutual benefit.”

With a start, as though suddenly waking up, Belial focused on him. “I know what you mean. Talk.”

“I know what you're doing,” Sobell said. “We're both in peril of Hell, and you're out making new friends and spreading your awful form of good cheer. Are you lonely, Belial?”

A laugh that quickly turned into a racking cough erupted from Belial's chest and throat, startling him. Flecks of blood dotted Sobell's pink polo shirt.

“I am
never
lonely, Enoch,” Belial said. “I am legion.”

“And it's doing such wonderful things for your complexion. I'm sorry,” he added immediately. Baiting the demon was poor sport, entertaining as it might be, and adverse to his goals. “I shouldn't have said that. We're both in a hell of a fix, as they say.” He paused, scanning the empty parking lot, searching the street beyond. Few cars passed by at this hour, in this commercial strip. He wouldn't be eavesdropped upon, which was nice, but if Belial decided to eat him, nobody would be around to intervene. “Let us talk of the celestial,” Sobell said.

Belial's eyes narrowed. “What do you know of the celestial?”

“Not as much as I should, and far more than I'd like. What are we looking for, Belial? You already know.”

“Do I?”

“‘Something pure, to take on the taint of corruption in my stead.' Sound familiar?”

A sneer distorted Belial's face. The runnel slipped down into his beard. “Yes. Of course. So what?”

“We're in this together, you might remember.” From Belial's expression, Sobell guessed he didn't remember, or didn't care. “Oh, for fuck's sake, Belial, just tell me about the angel.”

Belial surprised him by looking around, to the parking lot, even behind himself. “We need one, you and I. To take the corruption. To cleanse us of rot and decay, that we may continue.”

“Were you thinking about telling me this at some point?”

“The search is the same. We have found no relic. No sacrifice that can call down the divine. Without that, there is no hope.” He showed his teeth in a grimace that Sobell could interpret as either a smile or a threat. “More bodies means a better search, and since your man Clarence was so cheap with his aid, I sought to remedy that.”

“Very . . . enterprising. Any other activities about which you'd care to enlighten me?”

“The search continues,” Belial said. Nothing else.

“As it happens, I do have one fairly major concern,” Sobell said.

“And that is?”

“There's that word in the prophecy—Gomorrah. I mislike that word. It has . . . connotations.” He lowered his voice, a sudden stupid superstition kicking in. He hated himself for it, but he did it anyway. “There are angels, and there are angels,” he said.

“So there are.”

“Yes, well, going up against the lowliest janitor among the angels would be bad enough—believe me, I know—and the word ‘Gomorrah' implies something else entirely. Let me make this clear to you: the very,
very
last thing I want to fuck around with is a destroying angel.”

The grimace was a smile, Sobell was pretty sure, and among the nastiest he'd ever seen. Belial stretched it farther, pulling more bloody tears from his eye. “Have you seen one, in all its awful splendor? No man should go to his rest without gazing upon such a thing. ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they
were
all dead corpses.'” Belial was unable to get the last words out without giggling.

“That is profoundly unfunny.”

“I am a Lord of Hell. Think on that, and tremble. If we must slay one of the divine host, then I shall slay it.”

Sobell thought back to the seraph he'd killed, the one whose heart he'd ended up donating to the God-damned
demon that had led him down this path. The creature had been terrifying, even crippled, trapped, and with much of its power stripped away. He hadn't casually talked about killing the thing—had never, in fact, spoken of it before mentioning it to Genevieve. That was not a rumor he wanted floating around with his name pinned to it. For Belial to openly boast about wanting to kill that thing's angry great-granddaddy suggested the demon was completely detached from any sort of perspective about its place in the universe.

“So you need your mob to find the relic, the relic to summon a—fuck me—a destroying angel, and then a miracle to kill it.”