The Demon Abraxas (16 page)

“As easily as you can travel and talk. Now, you asked what I am and I do not know how to answer you save to say that I will never seek the destruction of your spirit and I will work to protect you from forces that would.”

“But if I try to put my hand on a hot stove you’re going to scare the living daylights out of me?”

“Precisely that.”

“The Black Hood Gang, they weren’t trying to get you, though, they wanted someone else, one of the bad ones. Why would humans summon one of those? It seems like a really bad idea.”

A warm wind spiced with an acerbic plant smell brushed against her cheeks.

“Shaidans are not opposed to being used against other humans,” he said. “Many of them relish the opportunity. They believe part of their challenge to humanity is to make power available to them. Naturally they are also likely to betray the ones who summon them when they get the chance, so it is, as you say, a really bad idea.”

Ana wondered what would be worth that risk.

“Power over an enemy is a common request,” he said. “Also wealth, which is its own power.”

That made sense, but what caught her attention was the fact that he had answered a question she hadn’t voiced. She’d been hoping he could only hear her when she put distinct words to her thoughts and projected them across her own mind, but apparently not. Did he know everything that went through her head? Every annoyance she had with Ruben, every time she looked at a woman on the street, every desire-laden thought about Sabel, every petty judgment she had about a person’s weight or looks or way of speaking—did he hear all of that?

“Yes. All of it,” he told her.

“Oh fuck.” She put her head in her hands, swearing into her palms. “Fuck this. It’s bad enough…everything else. I don’t want you to…” she struggled for the words, “… to know me like that.”

“You are afraid,” he said. “That is all. You can handle it and you will.”

Her fingers scrubbed away the tears that had started down her cheeks. She wouldn’t cry like a frightened kid, even though she very badly wanted to. Any time in her life that she had felt lonely and longed for someone who could know her intimately now seemed pathetically short-sighted. Being known completely from the inside terrified her in a way she could hardly explain to herself—but Abraxas probably could explain it to her and she hated that even more than her fear.

“Do you believe you are your thoughts?” he asked. “Do you think you are made up solely of these uncontrollable, fleeting notions?”

She wished she could go somewhere and puzzle his question through without him in her brain eavesdropping. This was probably the kind of thing that Sabel was good at. She would have the answers. What did Ana know about thinking? Thoughts just happened, didn’t they?

“I’m not just my thoughts,” she said. “I mean, they’re part of me. It’s like asking if I’m my hand.”

“Try this: don’t make a fist.”

She opened her hand, palm up to the bright sun of her dream.

“Now, don’t think about a horse.”

Of course she immediately pictured a large bay gelding she’d known from the farm down the street as a kid, and then Black Beauty from the movie, and a cartoon horse that had recently plastered the city on movie posters.

“That’s not fair. How can I not think about something? As soon as you say it, it’s already in mind.”

“So your thoughts are not like your hand that you can open and close. Maybe they are more like your ears. Perhaps the mind is a sense organ like sight or smell. Are you afraid of me being able to hear what you are hearing? If not, then why be afraid that I hear what you are thinking?”

“Because thoughts are personal. They’re inside me and some of my thoughts aren’t nice at all.”

“Then be grateful I’m not an angel.”

“Would that be bad?” Ana asked.

“That was a joke,” he replied and his rich voice held a wry turn to it.

“Was it funny?” she asked.

He paused beside her and then after a moment he started laughing and so did she, though hers held more of an edge.

At last he said, “Just consider that you are not the sum of your thinking. Perhaps you are not your thinking at all.”

“Then what am I?”

“Good question.” He was silent for a while and then said. “Ruben is awake and moving in the house. I must give you back to your body so we don’t startle him by letting him see me sitting up reading in your body.”

“Do I look different when it’s you running my body?”

“Your eyes do.”

And then she woke up in the chair with the book open in her lap. Why hadn’t she told Sabel yet about Abraxas? She should call her and apologize for being so abrupt after the kiss. Was it better to meet in person rather than just apologize in a phone call, or was she looking for an excuse to see Sabel again?

She also wanted to ask Sabel these questions that Abraxas raised, but how could she bring them up out of the blue? Sabel wasn’t afraid of magic, but did that extend to demons? Did it extend to a demon being in the same body with the woman she’d kissed? Could Abraxas hear her thinking that? Double creepy.

* * *

The circumstances hadn’t given Drake enough time to properly prepare his death. That was usually how it went, but still it annoyed him to have to drag himself along the lines of old power he’d laid down rather than being able to hop from vessel to vessel. There was that awful moment when he had to wonder if any of his minions would try to turn against him and bind him while he was disembodied. He could destroy them, of course, but it would be a waste of time and power.

The creature he’d put in Simon Drake’s body had been instructed to make it strong and vacate it when he needed it. Now it whined and begged and he had to draw smoke and fire around himself and threaten it. Once inside the body, Drake thought he might actually like the set of these shoulders better. This body was narrower than the Nathan body, but rich with lean muscle. He’d have to arrange for the next to be like this one. Reliable bodies were easier to come by these days now that the world population was so immense. He preferred a living but soulless body to any other conveyance, but he’d also had golems made over the years and on occasion impregnated a woman to birth his next body for him. That last was a terrible way to go because of the long childhood. Granted, it let him create with more detail and finesse than picking up a lost body and rehabilitating it from the addiction, abuse or trauma that drove out its original soul. Those lost bodies also held unfortunate energy patterns from their creators. He was looking forward to advances in cloning that someday soon might allow him to make endless copies of his favorite vehicles.

Nathan and Simon had come to him through a combination of great luck and significant preparation. They’d been brothers in life until a boating accident put both into a vegetative state. He’d watched over them for two years to make sure the boys had truly moved on and wouldn’t be coming back, and then staged their final death and a subtle accident in the hospital that allowed his human minions to get out with the still-living bodies. He’d renamed them, of course.

He put lesser demons into them for a few years to strengthen the bodies until he needed them. Nathan was the older of the two, a high school athlete at the time of his accident, and he bulked up more over the years because he had one of those frames that put on muscle easily.

Now that he was in Simon, he could feel the lightness of this body and it suited him. The only disappointment was that the man still looked young. Chronologically he should have been about twenty-seven, but the lesser demons had been instructed to make the body lean and to age it faster than normal. Despite those efforts, he still looked to be about thirty, even with the fat gone from his cheeks and strands of gray in his short brown hair. Well then, Simon would play the prodigy.

He levered himself off the bed where the body had lain and stood in front of the mirror admiring the lines. Then he thumbed open a channel on his speakerphone to his best legal assistant.

“This is Simon,” he said. “I’ve just arrived in town to take over Nathan’s business and I need some documents drawn up. I believe Nathan had an illegitimate son, find out what I need to do to recognize him as my heir.” That would be his next body, of course. He’d have to start watching for a suitable accident to furnish him with the actual physical part of this plan. “My schedule is open, tell the attorneys involved in my inheritance that I’m at their complete disposal for the next few days. I’d like this to be seamless so I can continue the deals my brother was involved in.”

He opened the closet and looked at the outfits hanging there, the lush carpet feeling sweet on the soles of his feet. They’d had to fly the Simon body out here on Saturday and put him up in this hotel while he worked his way back from Nathan’s corpse through the paths he’d created to get him to Simon. It was hard to do with Simon’s body in transit for some of that time, but his other option would have been to put himself into a thing and be carried here, and he just didn’t trust these people well enough to risk it. They could decide to try to bind him instead of release him. So it took him three days instead of a few hours and he’d have to make up for lost time now. Along with Simon came a wardrobe of six different styles. He never knew what he wanted before he took a new body, and so in the hours before Nathan’s death as he settled the details that he could, he’d asked the professional shopper to choose a variety for him.

Not the expensive suits this time. That became cloying after a while and they made him look like he was trying too hard. But this time not too casual either. He considered a British style but it would make him appear too effete. Well then, upscale surfer meets Kenneth Cole: loose khakis and a zip-front, long-sleeve cardigan in classic navy over a white silk T-shirt. For the finishing touch he selected a pair of small, rimless eyeglasses that he had no real need for other than making this young face look uncannily smart.

He stepped into his boxer briefs and the khakis and then hit another number on the phone. This call went to his on-staff hacker who knew a few things about his nonhuman abilities.

“I’m Simon now,” he said without preamble. “Can you doctor my school records? Give me a PhD in consumer psychology or something like that. Send me an outline of what I should know. Make me look brilliant but with a history of trouble in my early twenties that held me back from early success.”

“Consider it done,” his hacker said. “Welcome back.”

Welcome indeed. He pulled the silk shirt over his head. He wanted to call Jacob next but couldn’t. The man was at work and Simon didn’t have an untraceable cell phone yet. He decided to pull out a little invisible minion to go whisper in Jacob’s ear, both to deliver the message and as a reminder of his power. He always had many small creatures waiting just outside the physical world to be pulled in for his tasks. They loved being able to come to this place and run around fueled by his power.

He spoke a few words, to hear his own voice say them, and reached with both his physical hand and his power into the realm of demons closest to him. His fingers touched nothing and his power slammed into a barrier. He swore and shook his hand as if he’d stubbed it against a wall, then tried again. A smash against his reaching power, like a concrete wall in the middle of an open room.

He howled and swore. The locals knew! He’d been so careful to hide himself and now they’d shut the gates on him and he could only work with what he already had in this physical realm. Who could have done this? Was he betrayed? No, that woman, Ana, she could not have known what to do, who to contact. He should have given better instructions for dealing with her while he was out of circulation. If it turned out to be her, he was going to destroy her. Killing wasn’t enough, he would ruin her completely from the inside out.

His phone rang and he punched the line open, “What?”

“Jacob here to see you,” his admin said.

There was a reason he enjoyed working with this man. He was intelligent and anticipated. Simon crossed the room in a few steps and slammed the door open. Standing by the broad windows, Jacob didn’t flinch, but only barely. Simon saw the hard set of his shoulders against the reflex.

“The woman, where is she?”

“She hasn’t come into the office yet,” Jacob told him. “But they say she’s coming in this afternoon.”

“Where has she been? Has she been watched this whole time?”

“Not all of it, why?”

“Someone tipped off the locals. They know I’m here. They’ll be watching now, we can’t play fast and loose with power as we have been. We must be smarter.”

“Why not leave off Ana and go back to summoning your consort? Ana will be hard to get to now.”

Simon snarled, “We can’t do any more summoning. The local powers have blocked it. We need that creature in Ana. He is much older than my consort. You can’t imagine what his power would allow us to do. I need you to begin to prepare the others for a ritual to remove him from her when we do snatch her up.”

“We’re short one,” Jacob said. “DK took off. Left the city, actually.”

“So find someone.”

“He’ll need to be disciplined and have some training already.”

“Then you know what to look for. I’ll send an apology gift and work on getting back in with your company. Maybe we can two-birds-one-stone this whole situation. We have to move more slowly. It will give you time to find another member for us. Does Ana know what she has inside of her?”

Jacob gave a half-smile. “You’re the demon, you tell me.”

“I need to get closer to her. Get me an appointment in your office.”

“One step at a time,” Jacob said. “I have a couple of the senior execs under my thumb, they’ll push the others to see you.”

Simon stared at the man for a moment and then smiled. It was fun to have a person around who didn’t simper in awe and fear all the time. He might actually give this one everything he wanted…for a while.

By Tuesday afternoon, Sabel felt like she’d been dragged over rough ground. After her office hours on Monday she’d hurried home and started working on finding the names of any of the summoners. She made calls to her few magical contacts in the city and when that didn’t pan out she tried to use her own magic. The trouble was that her abilities in the field of magic governing information were very limited. Her only gift in that arena was the ability to send herself information over short periods of time. She could stutter time and she could reorganize the information in a person’s brain with her Voice for a short duration, but she had no way to look across the city and find what she wanted. There were witches who could do it, but they would all know the bargain Josefene insisted on and wouldn’t work with her unless she took the leash.