The Demon Abraxas (19 page)

Leonard’s gaze flicked to the door, making sure it was shut all the way. “Where did you hear this?”

“What I want to know is whether or not I’m wasting my time here. There’s a group of men in the city that I want to be a part of. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I think I do,” Leonard said. “Tell me again in plain English.”

“There are spirits you can call and bind to do things for you. This group knows how to do that.”

“And you know how to do that too?”

“I’m just not powerful enough on my own.”

“What you think you do know is probably wrong. Why do you think people call spirits, provided that’s even possible? To curse people or even to kill them? You just saw something in the paper, didn’t you, and thought it looked like fun?”

“If I really needed to kill someone I could hire it out. You don’t use demons to kill people, you use them to get information.” She was reaching now into the depths of her memory, frantically pulling together shreds of reading she’d done over the years. Automatically she slipped into her lecturing voice, smooth words rolling out of her mouth. “Since ancient times, demons have come at the bidding of magicians to offer knowledge, glimpses into the future, higher magics, curses on your enemies. A demon isn’t a blunt weapon. These are highly intelligent creatures who are only bound by people of strong will and then usually at great cost. There are people in this city who are willing to chance the danger that a demon brings.”

“Are you one of them?” Leonard asked.

“I am,” she said, hoping that lying about such matters wouldn’t come back to haunt her in an awful occult way. “Are you?”

Leonard shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Sabel pushed herself smoothly up from the chair and leaned for a moment over the desk. She hadn’t been planning for this so her shirt wasn’t adequately low-cut, but it would have to do. She picked up Leonard’s notepad and pen and wrote down her name and phone number. Then she walked out.

For the eighth day in a row Ana woke before dawn. She wondered if she was developing insomnia from the trauma of the kidnapping, but Abraxas assured her that she needed less sleep with his energy in her body. Gunnar said early morning was a good time to break into a place, so they decided to meet at Helen’s at six a.m. She’d waited with poor patience through two days at work that seemed ridiculously boring compared to everything going on in her life.

Now that it was the day of the big break-in, she still had an hour until she was due to meet him at Helen’s. She checked the street for strange cars and then, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, went for a short run. Her usual two-mile jog seemed effortless.

“You’re changing me, aren’t you?” she asked Abraxas. “Will this reverse when you leave me?”

You’ll need more sleep again
, he answered.
Do you want me to put the rest of your body’s systems back the way they were?

She sprinted up the street toward her house and it felt good. There should be some trade-off for the fact that she couldn’t kiss Sabel without Abraxas experiencing it as well.

“As long as my eternal soul isn’t in jeopardy, I think I’ll stay like this,” she told him.

Showered and dressed in her best breaking-and-entering clothes, she drove over to Helen’s building and waited around the corner. She’d gone business casual for this with gray slacks and a light cashmere sweater. In this neighborhood, no one would look twice at a woman in that outfit.

Her phone rang and Gunnar said simply, “I’m in front.”

Shaking her head, Ana got out of her car and walked around to the front of Helen’s apartment building. The day she heard her brother put together more than a few words at a time would be a miracle. But she shouldn’t complain, he’d driven out here to pick a lock for her, not something an ordinary brother would do. Nothing about their relationship was ordinary, and she just wished that most of it weren’t quite so broken, and that she hadn’t been the one who broke it.

He stood by the front door like a stone statue wrapped in rumpled and stained denim, ending in enormous boots. His tool belt hung low on his waist. Somehow he managed to bring South Dakota with him all the way to San Francisco, except in this city his farm-boy hands and rough demeanor seemed more charming than threatening. Ana smiled at him and watched the lines around his mouth deepen in what passed for expression on his face. He held open the door for her.

“Seen better security in a 7-11,” Gunnar said as they walked up the central stairs together.

“Nothing you would want in there or here,” she replied.

He made an eloquent grunt, indicating that he agreed, he’d never bother to break in to a place like this, this was a favor for his little sister, and even if there was something worth stealing, he was long past that now.

Faced with the locked door to Helen’s apartment, crossed with police tape, Gunnar raised one side of his lip. From out of his tool belt came a slim black case, and from the case a couple of tiny silver rods. Ana didn’t know how he could maneuver them into the dark opening above the doorknob, but he did. She watched his little movements in awe. Her brother had finally pulled his life together enough to marry a very decent woman, and now made his living as a silversmith on the art show circuit. The few times she went to his workroom it amazed her to see her tall, lean brother turn a tiny pair of earrings between his blunt fingers. She loved the idea of him working on women’s jewelry, but she didn’t visit often because most times she would see the scar that ran across his left hand and feel the hot pain in her belly and the pressure in her head to not cry. A few years ago, when he moved to the city where she lived, Ana didn’t even know if she’d be able to see him at all. Now she just limited their time together.

It was Mack’s fault, she wanted to believe that, but that idea just never took root in her. Mack wasn’t that much older than either of them, but he was a lot stronger. She knew as young as eight that something wasn’t right between Mack and Gunnar. Two years later, Mack started hitting her too. It should have brought her and Gunnar together. If they’d been allies, maybe they could have stopped Mack, but she was never sure back then how much she could trust him or anyone. They rarely spoke to each other. If they had, how would it have been different?

Gunnar’s hands made tiny motions as he rotated his tools in the lock, and Ana saw clearly the ridged white scar across the back of his hand. He had smaller but longer scars on his chest and one thick scar across his thigh.

The image came up suddenly of her fingers curled white around the handle of a knife. The motion of the blade through the air, cutting white cotton and skin, blood dripping between the fingers of Gunnar’s left hand as his right hand reached for the knife. He’d been the one between her and the door when he and Mack came into her room that night. And he’d been the one holding the knife, though she knew that Mack made him do it.

Her sin had been bringing a boy home, never mind that once she kissed him, it turned out not to be nearly as cool as the girls at school made it sound. The house had been empty when they arrived, though she was still an idiot for bringing him home at all, and then they were too wrapped up in their exploration to hear Mack sneak in. He’d seen the boy’s bike outside and he came in silently and got a hunting knife out of his room, then collected Gunnar from the front porch. He didn’t share his plan with Gunnar, but Ana knew the moment she saw him in the thrown-open doorway of her room that Mack planned to rape her and make Gunnar his unwilling ally. His mistake was giving Gunnar the knife. Though it satisfied his personal sense of sadism to turn Gunnar into an abuser, Gunnar could only stand still and hold it halfheartedly.

Ana had snatched it from his hand and slashed him from rib to collarbone. He was the one between her and the door. When Mack closed on them, Ana went for his face but cut his ear instead. She slashed furiously at him and Gunnar, but it was Gunnar who tried to grab the knife from her and that’s when she put it through his hand.

She ran, meaning to get away to anywhere, but she was thirteen and in a T-shirt and jeans, barefoot with no cash, so later that night she returned home. Mack told their parents it was an accident, a game gone wrong. The hospital staff barely believed that story and Ana ended up with a few months of surprisingly helpful anger management counseling. Gunnar avoided her after that and Mack’s harassment lessened to the level of cruel jokes and an occasional hard shove.

She and Gunnar didn’t talk about the past. Their conversations were all about silver and public relations, and who would have a baby first. But every time she saw him it was all there in front of her again.

The door clicked open, bringing Ana out of her reverie. She paused at the threshold and then stepped into the suite of rooms that had been Helen’s home until the previous week. The police had obviously been through everything. Ana had been here once before to borrow a book from Helen and knew the apartment had been relatively neat before men rifled through all the drawers and closets. She didn’t know what she could find that they would have missed, but she had to look.

“Kitchen,” Gunnar said, inclining his head in that direction and then following with his feet. Ana nodded to his retreating back. She picked the bedroom to start with because of her suspicion that Helen had been sexually involved with her killer.

A half hour later she had been through every drawer, under the bed, up and down the closet and found nothing useful. Gunnar poked his head through the door, looked pointedly at her and said, “Try the desk.” As she traversed the short hall, she heard him in the guest bedroom opening the closet door.

She sat down at the desk and opened the file drawer. There were gaps in Helen’s filing, and Ana assumed the police had taken anything that seemed suspicious. That left a bulk of folders from work that Ana was tempted to skip. But she started through the files, thumbing old press release drafts, company statements, contact lists and clippings.

Two-thirds of the way through the drawer, a folder brought her up short. It was titled simply “Clippings” which wasn’t so strange in and of itself, except that Helen tended to be more precise in her organizing. When Ana held it open, its contents perplexed her. Most of the media clippings that interested Roth’s public relations group were from national technology magazines, but these were all stories from local papers in California and Nevada. Some of the stories had to do with Roth software executive promotions, but there were other clippings from out-of-the-way papers that seemed to have nothing at all to do with the company.

Ana spread them out across the top of the desk and started grouping them by location to see if Helen had been working on some kind of map. But the various geographies had no logical connection. Not all of the stories were about technology or business. The stories got older toward the back of the file, dating back two years. As she looked at them, she saw the same names repeated over and over again. Why would Helen keep stories about a dozen men…

The pattern connected in front of her eyes: all the stories featured people succeeding or gaining wealth. Here were short promotion announcements, awards, patents, changes in local real estate, a wedding announcement, in one case a winner of a small, local lottery, another was the sale of a small company to Drake Investments. Helen had kept track of a dozen men who when put together would seem to have extraordinary luck—or extraordinary help.

You said demons confer money and power, right?
Ana asked Abraxas silently. Her brother didn’t need to think she’d started speaking to herself, and he certainly didn’t need to hear the word “demon” if he was listening.

I think you’ve found it
.
Helen knew enough to be watching and these are men that she either knows or suspects were in this group.

Why did they kill her?

I’m not certain they intended to. Many unexpected events can happen during a summoning. I saw her standing between life and death. She refused their demon.

Ana stacked the clippings and slid them into the folder. This was Helen’s backup. She’d been collecting information about the identities of all the summoners in case she needed leverage against them, and because she worked in PR and her files abounded with news clippings, they would never have suspected that this was her way of tracking them. She whispered a quiet, “Thank you” to Helen’s departed soul.

“Gunnar!” she called softly and he came noiselessly out of the back rooms. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

She let him walk her down to her car. He gave her a rough hug, the steel edge of his shoulder hard against her cheek, and then opened her car door for her. The desire to talk to him, to reach out, came over her. Would he understand if she told him about the demons, about Abraxas riding around in her own mind? He would probably think she was being metaphoric, speaking about the “demons” they both brought with them from South Dakota.

While she thought this through, he shut her door and walked to his truck, his left shoulder a fraction lower than his right. He always cradled that side of his body and Ana wished she could reach across the gulf between them and straighten him up again, as if none of it had ever happened. He waited by the door of his truck, his mouth turned down. When she pulled away down the street he was still standing there watching her.

* * *

The day’s schedule was clear of appointments, as Fridays often were, and so Lily had spread her materials over the back table. She was trying to work backward from certain mentions in the texts in order to find out exactly how big this vessel was going to need to be. The sound of the bell on the door jerked her upright. Very few of her regulars would understand what she was trying to do and if it was one of them she intended to keep them away from this area. All the rare books that made up her retail business lined the walls at the front of the store. This area was for marketing clients.