The Demon Abraxas (12 page)

“What did you bring me?” she asked as she approached the driver’s side. The woman had the door open and her left leg out, but she seemed otherwise frozen. Fashionable sweatpants but no shoes and there were patches on her hips and shoulders smeared with dust and dirt. She’d left somewhere in a hurry.

“Can you walk?” Lily asked.

With her left hand, the woman pointed at her right arm and leg, then shook her head.

“I’m going to loosen your tongue, is that all right?”

The woman nodded with her eyes wide and hopeful. Lily took the bitumen salt out of the kit and pinched a few grains between thumb and forefinger. With her other hand, she forced the woman’s jaw open. It wasn’t hard to do; whichever demon was in charge of shutting down this woman’s ability to move and communicate had his non-corporeal hands full. She dropped the salt onto the woman’s tongue and was rewarded with a series of obscenities.

“Jesus, Mary Mother of God that’s nasty,” the oaths concluded, and then the woman said, “Oh, I can talk. Thank you.” After another pause she added, “I’m Ana and you’re Lily, right? Can you help me?”

Lily got the impression that this woman didn’t know the half of the trouble she was in. But the local powers-that-be paid Lily to take care of situations like this, and besides, she enjoyed it. She laughed with the light, upbeat sound that made demons of control cringe. Then she blew into her right hand, shook the bracelets down from her wrist so they rested at the base of her thumb and tapped Ana’s right knee. The creature that had been holding it immobile jumped back reflexively, curling itself into Ana’s arm and freeing the leg.

“Thank you,” Ana said and pulled herself out of the car. She winced when she put that foot on the ground but tested her weight on it and nodded.

Lily took her into the entryway and then slowly up the stairs to the apartment above the store. The creature that now huddled inside her arm and upper right chest had more power than it should for its size and yet it seemed frightened. There was a second being in Ana’s body, something so strange Lily wasn’t sure it could be classified as a demon, though she didn’t know what else she’d call it.

Her apartment had the basics: living room, kitchen, personal library, plus a sunroom converted into a summoning or banishing circle. She kept her bedroom and any truly private items on the third floor because of the number of people she had to bring up to this circle in the course of a year. She was among the best, if not the best, banisher in the city. That didn’t mean she got a flood of work. There weren’t that many demons running around in the physical world, but when they did get through in San Francisco, they tended to end up here.

Ana balked at the edge of the circle, or rather the young demon in her did, grabbing control of her right leg again. Lily was going to shove her over the line but Ana threw her left leg forward and dragged the unmoving side of her body after her. Not bad for Ms. Midwest. Lily spoke the words of consolidation, the shortened version she’d created for herself, and watched the demon trickle out of Ana like smoke. She traced her left hand in the air, defining the boundaries he was permitted to inhabit. She gave him a square foot of space and he chose a crow shape, gray and indistinct.

“You’re a young one,” she said. “What were you offered? No, ignore that question. Who brought you over?”

“Drake,” it hissed. “Calls himself Drake.”

“He’d dead,” Ana said.

“What kind of dead?” Lily asked. “Human dead, banished or destroyed?”

“The police shot him,” Ana told her.

“Little crow,” Lily addressed the trapped demon, “could you remain here if the one who called you was destroyed?”

“I can if you let me serve you, dark woman.”

“No.” She made a gesture to avert connection. “You will not serve me. You will answer me thrice more and that in payment for the binding you put on this woman. How could I bring myself to the demon who called you into this world?”

He pointed with one wing, “You could walk in that direction for about eight-hundred breaths.”

“What did he command you to do?” she asked.

“Take the woman and hold her still for the humans.”

“What is his name?”

“I don’t know it! Woman, I answered true, let me serve you and stay!”

“No, this is not your world. Go home.” She spoke three words of banishing and struck her palms together with a crack. The smoke crow was gone, back to whichever spirit world it had been pulled from.

“Now, let’s see about this other one?”

“Can you get him out too?” Ana asked.

“I don’t see why not.”

She said the words of consolidation as she had with the first and something began to take shape but it didn’t conform to the size she’d given. In the faintest mist she saw the form of a man as if he were standing beside Ana with his arm around her protectively. He looked young and clean-shaven. Even his head was smooth except for the hint of brows. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t draw enough substance to himself to make sound.

She took a handful of ash from an incense burner set inside the circle and blew it into the air where he was. It fell to the ground. He pointed to the candle next to it. Lily shrugged. She wanted to talk to him before she sent him on his way, what could a candle hurt? She lit it and pushed it across the floor to the base of where his form was.

The tiny flame of the candle turned into a lattice of fire, each line a tiny filament of flame so thin it was almost invisible. He made a body of fire out of lines so small they gave off virtually no heat. Ana stepped sideways and he disappeared.

“Could you stand by the candle? I know it seems strange, but he can’t be any distance away from you and I’d like to talk to him.”

Ana rolled her eyes but Lily saw the white of fear in them alongside the dramatic exasperation. She stepped back to the candle. He appeared out of her without Lily having to call the consolidation again. Had he learned her words of power already? How could he use them on himself?

“What are you?” she asked.

He answered in another language.

Lily shook her head. “I don’t understand you.”

He tried another and it sounded slightly familiar.

Lily tried Spanish but he shook his head.

Then his eyes lit and he spoke again. “I am a traveler,” he said in Hebrew.

Lily translated that into English for Ana. “From where?” she asked him. His dialect was strange, but she could make out the words and apparently he could understand her well enough because he answered.

“Years ago I left this world. I do not know when I am now.”

She gave him the date by the calendar of the Sangkesh demons, which was almost a thousand years older than the 2013 date of the Roman calendar. If he spoke Hebrew, he might be a distant relative, which meant he would calculate the current date from the building of the Temple. “It’s 2974,” she said.

He hissed in surprise, “I remember the year 1997. I have been gone nearly a thousand years. No wonder this world is so strange to me.”

“What were you before you left?” Lily asked.

“I have been many things but I was known most often by the name Abraxas.”

“Oh.” The gasp escaped her before she could close her lips on it and Ana stared at her in alarm.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He’s very old.” That was the best short explanation she could give. Ana looked exhausted and on the edge of panic. The last thing Lily wanted was for her to bolt and take this fascinating creature with her. In Hebrew to Abraxas she said, “You’re one of the Protectors, like I am, yes?”

“I am Sangkesh, a demon of Solomon.”

That was enough for her to understand she wasn’t going to toss him out of Ana as she had the little crow, and she didn’t want to. He would do this woman no harm and she could learn so much from him. Lily called down her circle.

“Ana, come sit on the couch. We should talk about this and you’re swaying on your feet.”

“You can’t get him out?” Ana’s voice held a protest, but when Lily took her arm she let herself be led easily to the couch in the living room.

“Not quickly, no. I’m sure there is a way. There’s always a way. But…you might want to keep him for a while.”

When the small, dark-haired woman said “You might want to keep him,” Ana almost bolted for the door, but it felt so good to sit after having fallen down the stairs and dragged herself here that she stayed. Plus Lily was the first person she’d met who seemed to know something about demons. She had banished one, and compared to everyone else’s track record, that was a great start.

“Tea?” Lily asked.

“Please.”

The apartment was decorated in oranges, reds and golds with accents of mahogany and black lacquered wood. This couch and the love seat were thickly cushioned with plenty of extra pillows. The side tables and narrow table along the wall looked antique. There were a few pieces of art on the walls, two of them paintings Ana didn’t recognize and the third a photograph of a person in a white robe standing in a beam of sunlight that filtered down from a round hole in the roof of a building that looked like a mosque or temple. Three large glass cabinets held a variety of items, vases, books, statues and stones.

Lily came back carrying two thick ceramic mugs filled with a creamy, dark liquid. It smelled like chai and when Ana sipped it, she found it very sweet and spicy. She could drinks cups of it. Lily settled into the other side of the couch, a pillow propped between her back and the armrest. She tucked one booted leg up under the opposite knee with the grace of a habitually unconscious gesture. Ana wondered why she didn’t just take the heavy boots off. Maybe they were magic anti-demon boots. The thought made her smile.

“Why won’t this one just come out like the other one?” she asked.

“If you told me what happened, I’d be better able to answer that.”

Ana told the story, this time with as much detail as she could remember about the ritual and the men performing it. Lily’s brown eyes seemed to darken to near black as she talked.

“A group of men are summoning in the city?” she asked when Ana finished, but didn’t wait for an answer. “From your account, they have a powerful demon guiding them and they wanted to bring over his consort, to make him more powerful. But something went wrong, perhaps connected to your friend Helen’s death, that prevented the consort from coming through into this world and instead you found…someone else.”

“I think he found me,” Ana said. “But that other thing the little demon said, that you could find Drake by walking in that direction.” She pointed. “What does that mean? The police shot him.”

Lily shook her head. “They shot the body he was using. He’s not gone. He’ll find another body.”

“How?”

“Accident, illness, addiction, there are quite a few ways.”

“Does that mean some of the people out there just walking around on the streets are really demons?”

“Yes,” Lily said. “Now, the situation you’re in, sharing your body willingly, that’s very rare.”

“I wouldn’t say willingly.”

Lily smiled sympathetically but her eyes were still bright with curiosity. She asked, “May I speak to him more?”

Ana shrugged and stared down into her tea mug. This whole experience was so…beyond. But now that she felt a measure of safety with this woman and her circles and spells, or whatever they were, she had to admit in the far corner of her mind that she was starting to feel curious too.

Lily brought over a few short candles and set them on the narrow table that ran along the back of the couch. Filaments of light streamed from the flames and built a lattice of glowing threads in the shape of a man sitting cross-legged between them.

Lily said something to him in the staccato language she’d been using when they were in the circle and repeated her full name. As he replied, Lily translated for Ana and added her own commentary.

“He says he has had many names, but that Abraxas is one of the more recent and most pronounceable by humans,” Lily told her. “He also says Nathan Drake is a demon strong enough to cause bodies to be shaped for him.”

“What does that mean?”

Lily looked up and her mouth drew into a pensive line. “Bodies are key for powerful demons who want to operate in this physical world. If a demon doesn’t have a body, it can be banished or controlled. A body is freedom and power.”

“For demons?”

“For anyone. Abraxas is saying that Drake has the resources to get human bodies to inhabit that have been vacated by their original owners. He probably uses lesser demons to keep the body alive until he needs it.”

“He really isn’t dead,” Ana said suddenly. “That’s why they shot him. If he can have more than one body, he just set it up so the police would stop looking into Helen’s death and my kidnapping, but he’s still here.”

“Yes,” Lily told her.

Abraxas went on talking. Ana thought she had his name right, but then if memory served that was also the name of a Santana album, which contributed to the feeling that she wasn’t really in her own life anymore but in some strange television montage of history and pop culture. Feeling so profoundly outside herself was a form of shock, she assumed. It was useful; it kept her from running screaming from the room.

After a few minutes, Ana held up her hand. “Can you explain some things to me?”

Abraxas and Lily stopped their conversation to stare at her.

“I thought all demons were evil,” she said. “Well, I mean…I thought they didn’t exist but if they did they would be evil. And Abraxas says they aren’t, but couldn’t he just be lying to me?”

“Anyone can lie,” Lily said. “But his answers are on track for what he says he is. The Sangkesh demons are protectors of humanity.”

“A protector demon? That’s a real thing? Wouldn’t that be an angel?” Ana asked.

“Angels are messengers, they don’t usually choose to live in this physical world like demons do.”

“But they fight the demons?”

Lily shook her head. “That’s in movies and books. Demons fight demons. The Shaidans, the adversaries, harass humanity, and so the Sangkesh came into being as the protectors, who keep humanity safe from other unseen beings as best they can.”