Sacrifices (34 page)

They emerged into a street between storefronts, and Genevieve swore. This wasn't better. This was much worse. The area was reasonably well lit and open. Nowhere to hide.

Somewhere on the other side of the school, something exploded. A tower of flame shot to the sky and then vanished.

Genevieve looked back at the alley they'd emerged from. “Where do we go?” she asked Stash.

“I . . . uh.” Even in this light, she could see that he was pale, and as he approached she saw the slick red wetness all down his right arm, coming from a dark hole below his collarbone near the shoulder. The grip of his gun was also covered in blood, and it leaked down and dripped off the barrel, heavy droplets splattering the sidewalk. He looked back behind them, wincing as he turned his head. Then he made a face, straining and sweating. His arm bent slightly at the elbow for his trouble. “Can't move my arm,” he said. He staggered a few steps, and Genevieve rushed forward to catch him before he fell.

Now it was Freak's turn to look at the alley. “Give me the gun,” she said to Stash. “I can move faster alone than with this crowd. I'll give the motherfuckers something to think about.” To Genevieve, she said, “Got another one of them smoke bombs?”

“You can't have my fucking gun,” Stash said.

“You can't
use
your fucking gun. I trusted you this far, pendejo. Your turn.” She held out her hand.

Genevieve let go of Stash. Standing in place, he was able to support himself okay. She started working on what Freak had called her smoke bomb, trying to tune
out the distant music, the screams and flame, and, under it all, the approaching sound of coughing. She tried not to look at the alley from which their doom would be emerging at any moment. She tried not to let her hand shake. She didn't have a lot of success with any of it, but the glyphs accumulated on the paper.

Another cough. The alley lit up again, and white fire curled out of the end of it, setting a bag of trash alight.

“Give me the gun,” Freak said. “I could try to lead them away unarmed, but I don't like my chances.”

“Your chances ain't good even with the gun,” Stash said.

She set her jaw and shrugged.

“Don't fuck me over,” he said. He took the weapon in his left hand and gave it to her, grip first. Handed her a spare magazine. “That's it. All I got.”

The skinny guy emerged from the alley. Looming behind him, taking up the entire width of the alley, was the coughing monster.

“Now would be a good time for your smoke bomb,” Freak said.

Before Genevieve could say anything, Freak ran straight at the man and the monster. The guy grinned and spread his arms, beginning some kind of hellish incantation. Freak shot him in the gut and broke left. “Come and get me, motherfuckers!”

The monster lurched out of the alley, smashing the corner of one of the buildings to sticks and blowing out the big barred window as it moved. It seemed to be following Freak. For good measure, she shot it as she ran.

Genevieve finished her spell. Smoke filled the street, and then they were running again.

*   *   *

Anna had nearly finished the last of the glyphs when another of those shrieking, metal-grinding roars cut the air, this one much closer than the others had been. They were on the way. They must have been—nobody could miss the noise emanating from the back of the shop. She prayed that Abas would be done soon.

“Here they come,” one of the bangers said. Through the grocery's front window Anna could see men running, and in their midst something huge, blue-black, and writhing.

There should have been fear, soul-penetrating, paralyzing fear, but laughter erupted from Anna's throat instead.
Let them come. I will lay them to waste.
She bent back to the glyphs, finished the last two, and, smiling with bloodthirsty glee, began the incantation.

Moreno's boys started shooting. The glass broke out of the windows. One of the onrushing men fell. Another opened his mouth and blew a jet of flame across the front of the building. It was hot and scary, but ultimately pathetic. Anna crowed with a sudden, hateful joy.

The writhing thing smashed the door to shards and squeezed through, giving Anna her first good look at it. She didn't know how to wrap her mind around it. It was huge, far larger than the door opening, but flexible—a roiling mass of serpents, either a single creature clothed in snakes or some kind of cooperative, snaky mess. The snakes parted, revealing a pink-red maw in their center, ringed with blue-black teeth like hooked claws.

She finished the incantation, and exultation burst into bloody flower in her chest.

Thunder drowned out the creature's roar as a tempest burst from the glyphs behind Anna. Screaming winds blew past her, ruffling her shirt and picking up speed until they became a gale tearing through the store. A mist formed around her. Within a few feet it turned into driving horizontal rain, and lightning ripped from the air and speared the creature. She stood with the kids from the gang in the eye of a conjured hurricane, and she laughed.

The kids next to her fired into the beast, hurling profanity and improbable suggestions as they did.

A man came through the door behind the creature, slipped in a puddle of water, and flew backward as the wind caught him and slammed him against the shattered glass of the window. Another came in behind him, then another. One started shooting, another raised his hand to call down some fiery doom.

The creature surged forward. The men were ducking low, barely able to advance against the onslaught of wind and rain, but the creature would not be stopped.

Anna cackled and screamed, her left hand calling lightning, her right calling slashing, icy rain. The remaining windows exploded. A crooked, blinding worm of lightning blasted through a shelf, another blew apart the counter and the cash register, a third threw a man across the room. Bolts tore into the serpent creature, scouring it, lashing it with fire, and it roared and lunged.

Anna felt like she was flying. She wanted nothing more than to rush at the beast, carried on wind and rain, tear at it with her fingers, gouge its eyes, rip its tongue. She flogged it with lashes of lightning, and it snarled and writhed, and tumbled back, serpents lashing the air and hissing as it rolled.

Anna's muscles coiled as she prepared to rush forward, ready to administer the creature's death blow with her bare hands—and a hand descended on her shoulder. She whirled, fists pulled back to smite with lightning and flame.

One of the kids stood there, eyes huge and terrified. “Are you
insane
?” he yelled.

Hissing, the creature slid backward out the door. Anna shrugged the kid off and ran after it.

*   *   *

“Now what?” Nail asked.

Karyn shook her head. The assault on the church had ended shortly after the humming sound went up—no more shots fired, anyway, and the monstrous roaring sounds had moved toward where Anna, Abas, and the others were working. That had been, what? Two minutes ago? Ten?

“We're not doing any more good here,” she said. “We've bought all the time we're going to buy.”

There was only one thing to do now—get to Anna, Abas, and Sobell, and see if they could be any help there. Slow down the demons, insofar as that was possible. Too little, too late, most likely, and she didn't have a clue how to help, but what else was there? She got wearily to her feet.

The image of the church in her mind disappeared.
Instead, she saw a street she didn't recognize. A graffiti-tagged lavanderia next to a convenience store. The buildings to either side were blasted and smoldering. And—what the fuck? Anna was there, smudged and bleeding, throwing flame at some kind of hell monster that was bearing down on her, Genevieve, and Special Agent Elliot. Genevieve was on the ground, cradling an injured leg, and Elliot wiped blood from her face as she reloaded. The monster fell back, but down the street beyond, Karyn saw the gathering forms of eight or ten of Belial's new friends.

The vision vanished, and Karyn made a decision. Abas was on his own. He either had his shit together or not, but it was probably too late to do him any good.

“Still got bullets?” she asked Nail. “Anna's in trouble.”

“Ain't she always?” He checked his pockets. “I'm good on ammo.”

They went out. Outside the church, on the pavement where she'd faced down the demons, a crucifix had been erected. On it hung a beggar in rags, one hand fallen to his side, the other still tied to the crossbeam. “What the . . . ?” She looked to Nail. He was scanning the street beyond, looking for enemies, paying no mind whatsoever to the grim scene ahead. To the left, a pair of houses sent angry tongues of flame skyward.
Empty
houses, Karyn hoped.

She turned back to the crucifix. “Ah.” She thought back to her trip through the Gorow house to get the splinters, and the grisly signposts Amaimon had used to show her the way. “That way,” she said, pointing in the same direction as the man's bound arm.

She and Nail broke into a run.

*   *   *

Where had the damn thing gone? Anna was soaked with conjured rainwater, her skin charged with electricity that crackled between her fingers, a lethal charge building and building, and she had nowhere to direct it. The ball of snakes had been right there, limping away and making a noise she interpreted as whimpering, and she had been poised to deliver the death blow when one of Belial's goons
took a shot at her. Things had gotten hazy after that. She remembered whipping her arm around and a searing arc of spitting electricity or flame or some utterly alien energy slinging from her fingers and cracking like a whip. She remembered laughing and the smell of burned hair. Somebody had hurled a garbage can at her and she'd batted it aside. Somebody else had been claimed by the ball of snakes, seized and torn into ribbons and crammed into its maw as it either slipped its leash or simply lost control. They were isolated moments, though, with all the connective tissue of the time in between obscured in a bloody battle haze.

She stood in the street now, staring at a smoking storefront. Had the ball of snakes gone in there? Or down the street next to it? She couldn't remember, and she was having a hard time thinking clearly over the weird chord that hummed in the air. She scratched at an itch on the side of her head and wasn't too surprised to discover that the burning hair smell had been coming from her. She wondered whether it was self-inflicted. Now that she looked, part of her shirt was soaked with blood, and she had no idea whether that was hers or somebody else's.

She kept turning. It looked like the apocalypse out here. A row of houses near the church was burning, and smoke choked the streets. Distant shouts and screams sounded through the murk, barely audible over the constantly increasing hum from behind her.

Something was happening. She was supposed to . . . What? Killing that snake thing was part of it, wasn't it? Or was that the whole thing?

She heard footsteps running toward her, and a blazing fury filled her body. She turned, ready to take them with tooth and claw, if that was what was necessary, only to see Freak and another three Locos come rushing toward her from over by the church.

“What's happening?” Freak asked, voice cracking with terror. “Where's my dad?”

With no other idea what to say, Anna pretended she hadn't heard. “What?”

“They're coming. They're coming here! What the fuck is going on? We need my dad!”

Anna tried to concentrate through the noise and the desire to do murder. Her dad. Moreno. That had something to do with why she was here, she was pretty sure. “He's . . . busy. Who's coming?”

A weird roar sounded, something like a heavy cough, subdued beneath the endless chord that hung in the air, but loud enough. Freak waved her hands helplessly. “That.”

“Your dad's . . .” Anna looked around, and some of the details filled themselves in. She hadn't gone far. The burned storefront was just a couple of doors down from a waterlogged mess of a grocery store with blown-out front windows. From here, she could see the door to the back, the one she'd been guarding. Blue light blazed from every crack around the jamb. A single Loco with a gun stood in front of it, the terror on his face so evident from even this distance that she judged it a miracle he hadn't run. “He's helping the priest. How many are on the way? And . . . what are they?”

“I don't know! A bunch. With a—”

“Oh, shit,” Anna said. A monster lumbered around the side of the church. It looked like a truck-sized leathery garbage bag with elephant legs. It had helpers, at least three people who skirted around it as it walked.

Something else moved in her peripheral vision, and she turned her head to see. More of Belial's goons, coming out of the alley she'd thought the snake thing had gone down. A bald guy with a limp gave her the finger.

She started backing up.

“What's happening?” Freak asked.

“We gotta stop them, right here, or we are all fucked.”

“But—”

“Get in the grocery store—now—and do not let anything come through that door.”

The bald guy pulled a gun and squeezed off a couple of shots. The rage swelled in Anna again, and her hands twisted into claws, but before she could rush the guy, Freak
fired back. She missed, but the interruption was enough to break Anna's momentum.

“Come on!” Anna said. She dragged Freak back into the store with the others following. Shouts went up from behind them, followed by another heavy cough. Anna pressed her back to the door. The glyphs had faded to unintelligibility, mere suggestions on the wall that could have been crazy patterns of shadow. The last of the power she'd drawn on there was still crackling in her body. Beyond that, she'd need time to prepare.

She turned to face the front door, Freak and three scared kids by her side. If she'd had any doubt where the coughing monster was headed, they were gone now. It stomped straight toward them.