Sacrifices (33 page)

His eyes locked with hers, and there was no doubt in her mind that he recognized her.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. Whether he thought of her as an enemy or a friend didn't even matter—if the latter, it would take him and his cronies two seconds to figure out that Genevieve and her group weren't with the program, and a bloodbath would probably follow.

“Run!” she shouted.

“Fuck that,” Stash said. He pulled out his gun.

The group ahead parted. Behind them was—what the fuck
was
that? It reminded Genevieve of the huge slug thing that Anna and the others had conjured against Belial, but whereas that had been a giant, grotesque glob of featureless gray flesh, this was more distinct. The sluglike body was the size of a truck, supported on six or more elephantine gray legs, yet still low and seemingly boneless enough that it sagged and dragged on the ground. The front end sported a soft mouth of fleshy folds and tendrils, easily big enough to swallow a man.

The thing lifted its eyeless head and coughed. Gray-green slime spattered the sidewalk in front of it.

Stash fired. The possessed charged, laughing, and the beast coughed again and lurched forward. Stash squeezed off three more shots. One guy dropped, but the others didn't even slow, and if the bullets touched the monster behind them, it didn't show.

“Run!” Stash yelled.

Genevieve pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket. It wasn't much, but it was all she had prepared, and maybe the only thing she had in her repertoire that would help during a dangerous evacuation. She uttered a short incantation and tore the paper in half. Choking black smoke boiled up from the torn paper and swirled thickly in the air, reminding her of nothing so much as squid ink.

She threw the paper to the ground and ran after the others, already fleeing down the street as fast as their legs could carry them.

*   *   *

“Jesus, hurry the fuck up,” Anna said. The hideous roar that had split the air and rumbled through her gut was muted, but it couldn't have been
that
far off. Had the stand at the church collapsed already?

“You're bleeding,” Sobell said. Past him, the priest was still preparing the altar, or whatever it was. It looked suspiciously like a picnic table that had been stolen from a nearby park and hauled in here for the purpose. “Here” was the back room of a grocery store. Brown cardboard
boxes were piled up on shelves and on each other on the concrete floor, and everything had been pushed to the edges of the room to give Abas space to work. He'd thrown a white cloth edged in gold, presumably borrowed from the church, over the picnic table and gotten to work. Anna didn't know that she'd seen so many candles in her entire life.

“Huh? Oh, shit.” Her left hand, still bleeding from the spell she'd worked, pulling the shadows around the four of them—her, Sobell, and Clarence pulling a very reluctant Belial—as they ran from the church. She grabbed a hole in Sobell's polo shirt, tore a strip off the shirt, and began wrapping her hand.

“Was that strictly necessary?”

“Either that or bleed to death. No joke.”

He frowned and did his best to tuck in the remnant of his shirt. It wasn't long enough, though, and it hung loosely, just barely covering his belly button. Anna laughed. It felt good to laugh.

Nearer to where Abas worked, Moreno stood, chewing the inside of his mouth, anxiety cutting deep lines in his forehead. He watched the door and stayed silent.

“Here. Sit him here,” Abas said. He pointed at a folding chair at the head of the picnic table. Clarence obligingly dragged Belial over and sat him down there. He stood behind Belial, both hands pressed on the demon's shoulders.

“Shoe's on the other foot, huh, fuck face?” Anna said, the rush of anger filling her chest and head.

Belial ignored her. “Enoch,” he said. “You have cast your lot very poorly.”

“I have cast my lot with the people least likely to fuck me over,” Sobell said.

“Enjoy burning with them.”

“I am so tired of demons. All you lot, with your threats and bluster, your impatience, your dickering and your whining and your petulance. If I could be shut of you, I would.”

“After all we've done for you.”

Sobell paused, tongue poised for a retort, and then he just smiled and turned away.

Abas circled the table, sprinkling holy water. Then he circled again, this time with a censer, muttering in Latin. As he passed by Belial, the demon chuckled, the sight hideous on his lopsided, broken face.

Behind the demon, Clarence stood with eyes wide and worried.

A second roar sounded, the bellow of an enormous lion with a metal grinder in its throat. “What is out there?” Anna asked.

Nobody answered.

Anna felt it in her feet first—a vibration, too deep to be audible at first, but then rising to something just below the threshold of hearing. It traveled up her body, settling in her gut.

At the center of the circle Abas walked, the picnic table had begun glowing an unearthly blue.

*   *   *

Moments after the second earsplitting roar, something immense crashed into the church door, setting it to shivering in its frame and sending Karyn diving back to the ground.

“What now?” she asked Nail.

“What are you asking me for? What the hell is that?”

“This is your department!” Nail shouted. “I just do guns and electronics and shit!”

“So shoot it!”

“And what? Hit the magic doorstop? I don't think so.” Back pressed against the column, Nail checked his gun. “You getting anything? Anywhere?”

She checked with the demon. Nothing. She kept moving. Her hand slipped on the floor as she backed up, and she banged her elbow. She winced, propped herself back up, and moved next to Nail. “No. Nothing.”

Another burst of gunfire threw splinters in the air. A bullet hit the altar, another knocked a piece off the corner of a pew, a third ricocheted and put a hole in a window.

“Ah, shit,” Nail said. “Windows.”

“Now, what the hell is that?” Karyn asked.

“What's—oh.” Nail stopped and put his hand on the floor as he felt it, too. A deep vibration coming up through the floor.

The vibration worsened, sending an ache through Karyn's legs and her butt, and rose in frequency until it turned into a deep bass note. As the volume rose, a second note blended with it, a harmonic sitting on top of the main tone, at an interval so perfect it was hard to identify as a separate note at first.

The shooting stopped.

“They done?” Rigoberto asked.

“Or they've conjured up something even worse,” Karyn said.

*   *   *

The light coming from the altar had become almost blinding. Belial was blocked from Anna's view totally, and only Clarence's head was visible. He had closed his eyes tightly shut and turned his face away, and his mouth was twisted in pain. The sound was now deafening, a chord of unearthly beauty that churned Anna's gut and brought tears to her eyes and incited part of her, a part hidden back in her mind, to the desire for frantic, savage violence.

“I hope you're preparing defenses,” Sobell said, yelling over the noise. “This isn't exactly subtle.”

Defenses. What an idea. What did she know? There had to be something. “Come on, demon—now's the time,” she whispered, waiting for that disorienting feeling of a strange, insistent idea blooming in her head. What she wanted was something to hide the whole damn building. Drop it under an impenetrable shroud . . . or . . . or pull the neighboring buildings in around it like a blanket, effectively making it vanish. Nothing like that came to mind, though. Instead, she got pyrotechnics, a dozen methods of creating flashes and bangs, lightning storms, something she was pretty sure created goddamn tornadoes of fire, which would be a great way to burn the
building down around her and everyone else. The rage built in her—the demon's pointless, directionless rage, her own frustration lighting aflame.

“Still got my marker?” she asked.

“You don't have a spare?” He shook his head and then produced a marker from his pocket. It was a different one than what he'd used in the car. “Basic tool of the trade.”

“Not my trade,” she said. She stepped out into the store. Two of Moreno's boys stood outside the door, somebody's laughable idea of security. She nodded at them and began drawing on the wall that separated the stockroom from the main floor.
This is stupid. I don't know what I'm doing, and I have no time
. She also had no other options. She drew as a dance of destruction turned deadly pirouettes in her mind.

*   *   *

The sound was going to vibrate his skull apart, Sobell thought, and that was if the light didn't vaporize him, leaving him nothing but a shadow on the wall, which itself would soon be obliterated.
It's not
that
bright,
he tried to tell himself, but it was a difficult sell. It was like standing a hundred yards from the surface of the sun, and he kept thinking it should have been
hot
. He wanted to sweat, and he expected his clothes to start smoldering or his beard to catch fire, but the room was no warmer than it had been when Abas got started.

What am I doing now? Waiting?
That was pretty much it. Waiting for the dragon flame to scour away the rats, and hope it left him more or less untouched afterward. His fate was now out of his hands, unless he wanted to throw in with Belial at the last minute. That idea held no charms whatsoever.

“Rogelio,” Abas said. He held a hand out to the other man, who stepped forward. “It's time.”

Moreno nodded. He climbed up on the picnic table and lay down.

There's no relic,
Sobell thought.
None at all. There never was. Just this poor bastard who's going to sacrifice himself.

Abas kissed Moreno on the forehead and resumed chanting.

*   *   *

“They coming or what?” Stash asked.

“Don't invite trouble.” Genevieve shot a glance over her shoulder. She couldn't see pursuit, but that didn't mean anything. They'd slipped down another side street, then back into yet another alley, this one running alongside the block wall of the elementary school. They'd taken enough twists and turns that she couldn't even see the black cloud from here, let alone any of their pursuers, but instead of reassuring her, that just put her on edge. The bad guys could be around any corner.

Stash stuck a finger in his ear and pretended to dig around in there. “What is that noise?”

“Don't know.” Abas, she hoped, because it was getting loud enough even here that she had to raise her voice a little, and if it was the demons, they were up to some bad shit indeed. She supposed that Abas himself was up to some bad shit indeed, but at least he was on their side. Ostensibly.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“About five blocks south of where we need to be,” Freak answered. “And not getting any closer.”

“What do you want to do?” Stash snapped. “You want to head back that way? Make some new friends?”

“Just sayin', that's all.”

Genevieve got out her phone. If they weren't being followed, then their pursuers would have broken off to join Belial, which wasn't good. She texted Anna.
More on the way.

Faster through the alley, with intermittent flashes from Stash's phone to guide them around trash barrels and a pile of old palettes and a big old hole in the pavement. They hugged the chain-link fence to their left, just a few feet from the wall of the school building. Gaps between buildings yawned to their right at irregular intervals, each an impenetrable black hole in which anything could be hiding.

“Goddammit,” Stash said.

“What?”

He pointed. The silhouette of a man blocked the end of the alley ahead of them. As they watched, another man joined them. Any thought that the two might have been friendly vanished when one man conjured a swirling ball of blue-white flame in his hand.

“Back,” Stash said.

Freak stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Nope.”

“Don't you—” He broke off as a familiar coughing sound echoed from the alley behind them.

“Fuck. Hurry up!” he said. He ushered the families into the nearest branching alley. Genevieve stood by, praying nothing horrible was down their escape route, and watching the slow approach of the oncoming men.

“Move it!” Stash whispered. The last stragglers disappeared into the tunnel-like passage.

The man with the flame threw it, underhand, in a high arc. Stash, Freak, and Genevieve ducked back as it hit the ground and splashed, spreading out in an eye-searing white pool. The skin on Genevieve's face dried and tightened instantly.

Stash pointed his gun into the unknowable darkness past the blaze and fired. Somebody cried out.

To left, in the direction from which they'd come, came a heavy crunch and the sound of falling bricks, followed by a wet, growling cough.

“Go!” Stash said.

Genevieve ran, pulling Freak after her. Stash ducked as somebody returned fire and bullets ricocheted off the walls at the mouth of the alley. He shouted, stumbled, and then came running after.

Ahead, something clattered and crashed as somebody tripped on debris and fell, cursing. After the brightness of the flame, it was even harder to see here than before, and Genevieve felt as if they were running in an endless black dungeon. Only her fingers trailing along the left-hand wall gave her any sense of bearing, or even any clear indication that she was moving at all rather than running
in place in one of her nightmares, in which she could never escape some pursuing monster.

A vibration came up through the soles of Genevieve's feet, a deep thrumming in harmony with the distant bass note from before.

“What the fuck
is
that?” Freak asked. “Is that my dad?” Genevieve, too out of breath to answer, just pushed her forward. Did this alley never end?