Sacrifices (35 page)

“We got this,” she told Freak. “I just took out something way worse than that dumb fucking elephant. We got this.” Repeating it seemed to make it just a little more real.

The bald guy poked his head around the corner and Freak damn near shot it off. He flinched as a bullet knocked off a chip of stucco an inch from his scalp and disappeared behind the corner again. This time, Freak shot the corner. Whether she got him, Anna had no way of knowing.

The coughing monster approached, its footsteps heavy thuds that Anna felt in her gut. One of the kids shot at it. Anna couldn't tell whether he'd missed or the bullets simply had no effect, but she suspected the latter. The damn thing was as big as a barn.

Another of the men, barely visible at the side of the monster, fired his weapon. A jar of olives exploded, and Anna's companions fired back.

The monster reached the hole where the front door had been. Its eyeless, tattered head took up nearly the whole space. It coughed, blowing a stench of corpses into the store that made Anna gag even this far back. Gobs of slime spattered the floor and the checkout counter.

Here it comes.
The battle joy rose in her once more,
her demon joining with her to sing songs of destruction. Had she thought she was out of options? The demon told her otherwise. There were spells to strip flesh and crack bone, to blast this abomination back to the hole it had crawled from, to burn this whole strip of miserable houses and impoverished shops to ash.

The monster pushed forward. Its shoulders caught on the doorway, holding it back for a moment before it simply shrugged its way through. The walls on either side of the doorway buckled and cracked. The beast swung its head around and demolished the checkout stand.

Anna screamed and brought forth the lightning. It leaped forth from her hands, blindingly bright, lighting up the entire inside of the store and leaving a searing purple afterimage across her vision. The thunderclap that came with it knocked two of the Locos down, and even one of the demon-possessed assailants threw himself to the ground, covering his ears and screaming.

The lightning bolt pounded into the creature's ragged, sagging maw.

It stepped back, crouching, the onslaught driving it to its knees.

Anna slashed her palm open, spat curses in an unrecognizable tongue, and slung her hand in an arc like a karate chop, throwing blood from her wound across the room. The droplets tumbled and swelled, growing to the size of baseballs and taking on an oily black sheen. Where they hit the ceiling, the walls, the shelves, great smoldering holes formed, sending up an acrid stench like fuel oil or jet fuel. A dozen splashed across the monster.

It coughed and inched backward again.

Once more, Anna threw blood at the creature. Once more, the droplets blasted the stock on the shelves and ate great holes in the floor. One hit the creature dead center in its shredded face. Anna screamed at it.

It got up. It stepped forward, seeming to stretch languidly.

It stomped forward. It let out another of its carrion breaths, this time in a long, hideous wheeze that threw
streamers of what looked like toxic snot over the interior of the store. Anna ducked. The kid to her right didn't. He went down screaming and clutching his face.

The monster made a chuffing sound that seemed to Anna like nothing so much as laughter, and stepped forward again.

It's not even hurt,
Anna realized, and the battle joy faltered.

“Run!” she shouted. “Get in back
now
!”

Two kids went immediately, dragging the screaming third. Freak looked wide-eyed from Anna to the monster and back, took one glance at her own useless gun, and ran after them.

That's it. We're screwed,
she thought as she followed Freak through the door.

*   *   *

Karyn turned off a side street, still at a run, her breath coming ragged through her lungs and throat. Amaimon's latest gory signpost tipped its head down the street. Nail jogged behind her. If she didn't reach the destination soon, she was going to ask him to carry her.

“Hey!”

She slowed to a halt, looking for the source of the voice.

Genevieve stepped from a nearby alley. Behind her stood a sweating Latino kid with one arm in a sling and still-wet blood covering the other, using the building to hold himself up.

“What's going on?” Genevieve asked. “Where's Anna?”

“She's not here?”

“No! What is happening? This place was crawling with monsters ten minutes ago. And—Jesus, that noise.”

Karyn glanced back in the direction they'd come, where blue light had begun permeating the sky like a false sunrise. The weird sound that had been building in the air for the last twenty minutes or so was half a mile away on the other side of the church now, still rising in intensity, as though the noise alone would purge the demons from the earth.

She whirled back to Genevieve, a horrible suspicion growing in her mind. “What about Elliot?”

“Who?”

“Elliot, Special Agent Elliot.”

“Special . . . ?
What the hell is going on?
We've got evacuees here, Freak just took off running for
that
, and I haven't seen Anna in hours.”

“What the fuck?” Nail asked.

Karyn's suspicion flared. If, as she'd guessed, the priest's summoning would wipe out
all
the demons in the area, including the one she carried, Amaimon would have wanted to get clear of the area even more than she did. It would have wanted to prevent her from getting any closer for any reason. What did it care if she wanted to help Anna? This was all a ruse, all bullshit to get her away from the epicenter.

“I've been had,” Karyn said.

In her mind, an image of a thin man with a white collared shirt and suspenders. He shrugged at her as if to say,
What can you do?

Sirens and flashing lights screamed down a nearby street.

*   *   *

Fear seized Sobell, embraced him, crushed his body and his soul in its many arms, and bore him into itself. His mind had given up, and only his body with its primal responses unbeholden to intent or direction was capable of reaction, dumping its entire payload of adrenaline into his system, urging his overtaxed body to run at top speed, setting his heart to a smashing jackhammer rhythm. Yet he couldn't run, and he couldn't fight. Running would imply a place to run
to
, and fighting was so far beyond hopeless it was laughable. He was a gnat, a speck, a dust mote drifting where the currents of air told him, and if he survived it would be because he was beneath notice, not because he was capable of any meaningful resistance.

The noise had become a choir, not angelic or of the damned, but of the cosmos itself, subatomic particles dancing to the decree of forces beyond comprehension, and the light was a searing blue fireball sun. Moreno had
lain down
in it, and now it consumed him, spreading to
his extremities, wrapping him in a cloak of fire, armoring him with the very heart of a star. Clarence had passed out at some point. Sobell didn't even know when, just that he was no longer holding Belial, and that Sobell could see his open hand sticking out beyond one edge of the picnic table-cum-altar. It was possible that he hadn't passed out at all and that he'd simply died.

Was there a noise outside? Did it even matter?

Moreno
changed.
His flesh bubbled and swelled, humping up from the center of his chest, rising to a grotesque column even as it pulled his arms and legs in.

Abas screamed a high-pitched wavering note of such terror and intensity that it was, incredibly, audible over the godly godless goddamn choir, and he dropped to his knees.

Sobell thought that was a pretty good idea. He did likewise. Something cracked on impact. He didn't really care.

The door behind him smashed open, and a bunch of kids rushed in. Local gang kids, probably Moreno's. Anna followed close behind.

They all came up short, staring in awe at the frightful thing forming before them.

The picnic table collapsed under the growing weight of the angel. It thrust upward, growing to the ceiling, a roughly cylindrical pile of gray and undulating flesh covered with thousands of slits, like gills or something. Wings unfurled from the creature, and Sobell laughed hysterically. They were storybook angel wings, white and feathery, nine feet long. There were seven of them, at seemingly random spots on the angel's body, and what purpose they served was beyond Sobell, as there was no way they could support the thing's bulk.

The door behind him blew off its hinges and another horror burst into the room.
Why, it's an elephant made out of refuse,
Sobell thought, and it occurred to him that he had no idea what it was. Another angel, come to join the party? Or a demon? It opened a fearsome mouth and cut loose with a noise that was more emphysemic cough than roar. Sobell wondered if he'd gone deaf.

The creature charged the column of flesh, and a dozen
or more men, some bleeding, some snarling, all insane, ran in after it.
Thirteen vultures circling a stone slab,
Sobell thought.
Of sorts.

As the trash elephant leaped toward the angel, all the gill slits on the column of flesh opened wide, revealing them for what they were—eyes, thousands of eyes, brown and blue and green, some with misshapen pupils like those of goats or octopi, some clearly human. Sobell's screams joined Abas's, drowning out every sound in his head.

The angel—the
destroying
angel—swept one of its terrible wings in front of it. A golden light crackled around the tip of the wing, and a keening sound piled on top of the cacophony.

It touched nothing that Sobell could see, but the effects were immediate. The elephant disintegrated. Half the onrushing men collapsed. Anna fell to the floor. The angel moved a second wing, slashing invisibly through the other men. Sobell saw the tip of its wing as it described an arc that pointed straight through him, and by then it was too late to move, whether out of fear or otherwise. Pain and ecstasy cut a searing line through his chest. His cells exploded and reformed, foul, stinking bile boiled off from the spaces between constituent particles he had no name for or knowledge of, and his soul, if he had such a thing, was shredded and reconstituted before the tip of the wing had even passed his shoulder. He fell back on his ass and hit the wall.

Something hit the ground near him. A wing, severed, blue-white blood sizzling from the wound.

What the hell?

He glanced up. Incredibly, Belial stood behind the awful angel thing, a seething black blade sprouting from the demon's blackened left hand. Belial had cut off one of the wings before it could sweep through and destroy the demon, Sobell saw with horror. Another wing swung around, and Belial lurched forward, lunging with what had to be the very last of its body's strength.

Belial's right arm went flying as the wing traced its path through the shoulder, but the demon's left, the one holding the blade, plunged forward, impaling the angel.

All sound stopped.

The angel's eyes closed in their thousands, the wings slumped. Blue blood, more light than fluid, shone through the room. Belial clung to the back of the angel, face buried in the wound, sucking and biting.

Sound leaked back into the world. Sirens. Men and boys weeping. Abas wailing.

Sobell collapsed.

“Let me through,
let me through,
let me the fuck through
!” Karyn yelled, shoving at FBI guys in black windbreakers. They'd descended on the neighborhood like—well, like a plague of locusts, and they were now blocking off the grocery store where everything had gone down. Karyn didn't know if she'd bought enough time before getting distracted by that prick of a demon, if the slaughter had been averted, and, more important, what had happened to Anna, and these
assholes
weren't letting her through, and she was going to start raising every kind of hell she could think of in about—

“Hey!” she shouted. Elliot was walking in front of a stretcher, to which Enoch Sobell had been handcuffed. Instead of beaming with smug triumph, her face was drawn, ashen. “Hey!” Karyn shouted again.

Elliot looked over wearily. She had a bandage on her forehead, and it took her a moment to even recognize Karyn.

“The prisoner transport got all fucked-up,” Elliot said.

“Yeah. I noticed.” Karyn pointed at the wreckage in front of them. “Belial?”

Elliot shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak, then shook her head again. She turned to one of the guys blocking Karyn's path. “If she wants in so bad, let her in.”

Karyn didn't care for her tone. It reminded her of the old story about parents catching their kids smoking.
Oh,
you want a cigarette? Here's a whole pack. Don't come out until they're gone.
“Don't let her touch anything. We'll want a statement from her afterward.”

The guy took Karyn's elbow and escorted her in. The grocery store was a mess. Broken glass lay everywhere, boxes had been torn open and their contents scattered, and the place was full of water, high enough to come up past the soles of Karyn's shoes and wet her feet. At the back, a door had been utterly destroyed. The FBI man took her back there.

The back room was full of people, mostly lying on the floor, some hurt, some bleeding, most conscious but groaning with misery. Eight or so EMTs moved among them, checking for wounds, asking quiet questions like “Are you hurt? Can you move?” One had strapped an oxygen mask and some kind of nebulizer or something to a guy's face and was talking to him in a soothing tone while he gasped for breath.

A tarp had been hung like a curtain, partitioning off the last third of the room in a rather sloppy way. Karyn could see around the edges to the back wall. A guy in a white coat came out from around the curtain and braced himself against the wall, his mouth working soundlessly, his head shaking.

“Get away from me, all right?” a familiar voice said. “I'm fine. I have literally never been better, I think. Fuck off, okay?”

“Anna!” Karyn picked her way through the people toward where Anna was pushing away an EMT and struggling to sit up.

“Jesus Christ, yes, I'm refusing treatment.
Go away
.” Anna gave the guy one last shove as Karyn reached them. “Help me up, would ya?” she said, extending a hand. She was soaking wet, her hair straggling across her face, dirt and grit stuck to her skin from exploding construction materials, her cheek striped with half a dozen tiny cuts, and a swath of hair burned off her head, but she was smiling like Karyn couldn't remember ever having seen before. A huge, wide, toothy, goofy smile of such pure,
childlike joy that Karyn's own smile widened just to see it.

She took Anna's hand and pulled her up. “You good?”

“Never better.”

“The, uh, demon?”

“Toast. Ashes.” Anna laughed. “Hell,
particles
. You would not believe the shit that went down in here.”

Karyn scanned the room. There were still a bunch of the guys from the church steps here, though none gave her a second glance as they nursed their individual wounds. “And these guys?”

“Don't know,” Anna said with a shrug, “but I bet they're as clean as they day they were born.”

“The angel . . . ?”

“I . . .” Anna blew through her lips. “I don't know what that thing was. But I will tell you it ate a dozen or so demons for breakfast, and it was still plenty hungry afterward. Look, I'll fill you in later, okay,” she said, with a fearful glance back toward the tarp. “Away from here.”

“Just one thing—Elliot said they didn't get Belial. Is he dead?”

“I don't know. I didn't really see at the time. I did see them put his severed arm in a bag before the tarp went up. Nail and Gen?”

“They're fine. Everybody's fine. It's a miracle, actually.”

Anna's smile faded, her face clouded over for a moment. “Let's not talk miracles, huh? I just had about all of miracles I care to have, and I hope to—somebody—I never need to have another one.”

*   *   *

Anna went with Karyn outside, still smiling. It was a hot, shitty night, and she was wet and bruised and cut up, but no incipient rage simmered in her mind. She didn't feel like eating a pound of raw ground beef with her bare hands. No strange drawings hovered behind her eyelids. It was the first moment she could remember feeling genuinely
good
, with no trace of anxiety or trepidation, in months.

Genevieve and Nail stood outside the cordon that the feds had set up, leaning against each other, each using the
other as a bulwark against exhaustion. “Anna!” Genevieve shouted.

Anna went over, Karyn still by her side. A woman in an FBI jacket glared at them both. Whatever.

“You putting the moves on my woman?” Anna asked Nail.

“What? Fuck no. She got spooky powers. I get her mad, she'll make my junk fall off or something.” He gave Genevieve a light push as she rolled her eyes.

“Everything cool?” Genevieve asked.

“Cool enough,” Anna answered, and she pulled Genevieve close to her.

The fed cleared her throat. “Special Agent Elliot says we're going to need all four of you for questioning.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Anna said.

“Hey!” A woman's voice, angry. Anna turned to see the source. Freak stood a dozen feet away, close to one of the ambulances. A bruise swelled under her eye, and she balanced on the balls of her feet as if she was ready to throw down. “Don't fuckin' come back here. You ain't welcome here no more.”

It was only for a second, but an unearthly blue shone in her eyes. Anna looked around for a blue light, but the ambulances were flashing red and white. There was nothing of that color anywhere. “Freak?”

“Yeah?”

She searched for that light again, wondering if it had been a trick of her own overtaxed mind. This time, she saw nothing but anger shining from Freak's brown eyes. “Nothing. Be cool, huh?”

“I mean it,” Freak said.

*   *   *

Sobell came to in an ambulance. Somebody bustled above his head, Special Agent Elliot knelt to his left, and he had been strapped with various unrecognizable devices. The siren wasn't on, so he supposed he wasn't dying.

“How are you feeling?” Elliot asked. He moved to sit, and his hand came up short against handcuffs.

“I'm not entirely sure,” he said. “Where are we going?”

“According to the paramedics, you're stable and healthy, which means . . .” She paused and gave him one of the slimiest, most hateful grins he'd ever seen. “You're going to jail.”

“I see.”
Stable and healthy?
He did a quick inventory of his body. Toes moved. Fingers, too. He winced out of habit as he moved one of his legs, expecting a twinge in the knee, and then stopped wincing with surprise as the leg moved smoothly. No pain. Same with the other leg. His hands, he realized, no longer shook.

Oh, my dear, are you in for an unpleasant surprise.

He reached for a short spell he knew. No diagram required, merely a concentrated sequence of thought followed by a short incantation. The cuffs would fall away, and then, perhaps, he could make a break for it.

The spell was . . . gone. He reached for it, and it wasn't there. Like going up a flight of stairs in the dark, taking a step toward the final stair, and finding that you were already there. No step at all, just a sudden jolt up your leg and spine as you fell forward and clutched the rail to keep from falling.

The words were gone. Even the thoughts were gone. The angel had healed him, but it had also completely severed him from what had been the source of his power for centuries.

He let his head drop back to the stretcher, mind flailing for purchase as his entire sense of direction was kicked spinning.

“I need to call my attorney,” he said.

“Yes. I imagine you do.”