The Demon Abraxas (25 page)

Charles Johnson had a corner office in the sales department that he oversaw. It was about the same size as Detlefsen’s, but positioned on a wall of the building with more windows, so it looked larger. He had the same executive furniture as every other VP in the company, a U-shaped, cherry wood desk with a hutch on the wall-facing side, and a five-shelf bookcase. Detlefsen’s held books, Johnson’s held sales awards. He also had a small round table in his office with four chairs around it, plus two chairs facing his desk. He clearly liked to hold meetings in his office.

When he saw her in his doorway he gestured her into a chair. “Are you feeling better?” he asked.

“Yes, much better. Thanks for asking.” She paused, not knowing what to say next, though she’d practiced the conversation in her head a hundred times. “I think I have something you lost,” she said finally.

He moved a stack of papers from the front of his desk to the back, muscles shifting under the brushed cotton of his shirt as he spun in his chair to set the papers down, then turned back to Ana. Three more piles sat on the front surface of his desk and a couple on the back.

“I can’t imagine what,” he said.

“Then perhaps you should call your friend Drake and ask him if he’s lost something.”

He leaned back in his chair casually, but his face had lost its color. “You want to return the item?” he asked.

“Let me ask you something,” Ana said, feeling stronger in the face of his fear. “What did you want this demon for in the first place? Was it worth the price you paid?”

He frowned at her use of the word demon and looked around, as if he could see through the walls. Maybe he could. He shouldn’t have anything to worry about—anyone who overheard them would only think they were nuts, or role-playing geeks. She could see he was considering whether or not to answer the question, so she prodded. “Look Johnson, I’m eager to get out of this and once I’m out I don’t intend to ever think about it again. And frankly, anyone I did mention it to would think I’d lost my mind.”

“Then you probably shouldn’t talk about it.” He stood up from his desk and crossed his office to shut the door. “Ana, it wasn’t my choice to involve you in this, but I think I can help you out.” As he turned back around, he reached under his shirt and pulled out a large, flat amulet. It had squiggly words all around it and symbols in the center and he held it out, speaking a word that reverberated in the air like a shot. Ana opened her mouth to comment, but Abraxas shushed her.

Act paralyzed
, he said.
I want to see what he does.

Ana froze, wishing she’d shut her mouth first, but it was too late. Johnson smiled and touched his palm to the top of her head like a father patting a startled child.

I hope you know what you’re doing
, she told Abraxas.
Because this is uncomfortable.

Abraxas ran through her nerves and muscles, holding her motionless in a way that she never could by herself.

Johnson picked up his phone and dialed. “Ana’s in my office with the prize,” he said. “She’s immobilized.” Then he paused and listened for a minute. “All right,” he said. “No problem, we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

He opened his file drawer and pulled out a large, green bottle, uncorking it while saying a few words Ana didn’t understand.

Do these demons all ride around in bottles?
she asked Abraxas.
I don’t want to do this again.

I would like to test this one, see what I can learn from him.

Ana gave a prolonged mental sigh. At least it would be an opportunity to try the lessons Abraxas had been giving her. A thin vapor streamed out of the top of the bottle, across the desk to her.

This time, since she expected the pain, she thought it might hurt less, but it didn’t. Abraxas’s immobilization prevented her from screaming as the pain ripped down her throat into her lungs. From there, ribbons of agony rolled out her limbs. But this time, under the sheer repulsion of it, she actually felt curiosity. She could experience her mind thrashing around and still have a little awareness left over to voluntarily touch the pain and explore the size of it, the dimensions. It had edges, it didn’t engulf her whole body as she first thought; the parts of her that hurt were limited. Her skin didn’t hurt, nor did her head, just her muscles and lungs, and then her belly. Her nose felt fine, she thought and was almost able to smile about it.

As she examined the edges of her pain, it started to recede. It shrank inside her until it localized behind her left lung, pressing hard against her back, but bearable. Abraxas held her up during the attack but he no longer immobilized her and she lifted her head to smile at Johnson.

As her mouth turned up, the smug satisfaction on Johnson’s face vanished. He pressed his lips together so tightly they wrinkled and whitened. He looked sick.

Abraxas extended out from her, tickling her skin, his cloudy form enshrouding her body. When he spoke, his voice came from somewhere above her head.

Tell your master he can’t hope to take me. If I come at all, it will be willingly. If he makes a good offer.

Then he swirled back down into her. Ana pushed off the chair and stepped toward the door, more slowly than she intended because of the stabbing pain in the area of her left kidney.

“Ana?” Johnson asked. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She turned and glared at him. “I really don’t appreciate being possessed,” she said. “And I wasn’t well-disposed to begin with, so maybe we’d better drop this for now.”

“You don’t know what kind of deal you’re making. You can’t just go around in life with that…thing in you.”

“Watch me.”

She opened the door and stalked, as best she could, into the hallway. From her cubicle she grabbed her purse and beelined for the elevator before Johnson could recover himself and come after her.

In the elevator, she let herself sag against the wall. “Shit that hurts.”

You did very well
, Abraxas said.

“I never could have done it without you,” she told him, wondering if there was a camera in the elevator through which someone could see her talking to herself.

Practice
, he said in his smiling tone.

“Just get me to my car.”

She called Sabel on her cell phone on the way and told her it had gone well and that Johnson had called someone when he thought he had her immobilized. Sabel volunteered to talk to her police contact and see if she could find out who. Ana didn’t notice until she’d pulled up in front of Lily’s store the familiar truck that had been following her. Despite the shooting pain, she jumped out of the driver’s seat and spun around to it before the driver could get out.

“Gunnar, what the hell?”

“Followed you,” he said.

“Why?”

“You’re in trouble.”

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“I see that.” He was out of the truck now, leaning against the door, his baggy jeans riding low on his hips and bunching around the ankles of his work boots.

Ana found herself looking at him for what seemed like the first time. In the past all she’d seen was his sloping left shoulder and the scars, visible and otherwise, that she’d cut into his body. She hadn’t noticed that his weathered face was good-looking, from his solid jaw to the way his eyes crinkled when he tried not to smile. He had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans, long-fingers splayed on his narrow thighs. Absent the burning memories of her own guilt, she could see how he’d grown up into a careful, introspective man. She’d taken his silence as a reprimand to her and everyone else living, but now she wondered if he was just shy or didn’t believe in talking much. He looked comfortable in his body. He’d told her three months back that his wife was expecting, and she could imagine those hands around a baby—what a father he would be, strong and tender. Somehow he had erased from himself the traces of their childhood, before she could erase them from herself.

Ana blinked away the tears in her eyes. “Gunnar, want to come in? Meet a friend?”

He shrugged, but she caught the corner of his mouth turning up. “Sure.”

She took the steps slowly and Gunnar reached out to cradle her elbow. “Someone hurt you?” he asked.

“More complicated than that. Actually, it’s all kind of weird.”

“You always were,” he said.

Ana laughed, which made her grab her side with a gasp at the pain. He opened the door for her and Lily looked up from the counter. Ana made quick introductions and then got to the heart of the thing. “Johnson tried to get us with a demon but Abraxas seems to have it trapped in my left kidney, which I’d like to add hurts like a bitch, so if you could get it out I’d be a lot happier.”

Pain doesn’t prevent happiness
, Abraxas said.

Okay, okay
, she shot back.
I get it, Little Buddha. But can we get this thing out?

Lily ushered them to the back of the store and then disappeared even further back.

“Demon?” Gunnar asked.

“It’s a long story,” Ana said. Lily saved her from having to tell any of it by returning with a stone box.

“Let’s try this one. Ana, just lie back and shut your eyes, Abraxas and I will do the heavy lifting. With the ban on summoning in the city, they should be running out of these little guys.”

Ana closed her eyes, grateful for the rest. She felt a stab in her left side and then another, and took a moment to enjoy the irony that she was sitting here with Gunnar who had a curving scar that ran up from his lower rib on that side, which she had given him, and now she got to feel that pain. It made those scattered bits of her life make more sense. As the little demon was torn out of her body, she opened her eyes.

Gunnar sat forward in his chair, hands clasped between his knees, his mouth in a single, straight line. “Demon,” he said when he saw Ana looking at him. “Never saw one before.”

She laughed. “Well there are plenty around, apparently.” Then she looked at Lily who was sitting on the table, one boot resting on the seat of a chair across from her. “What are we going to do next? Sabel’s trying to trace the call that Johnson made, but I want another way to find out who he’s working with.”

“I could follow him when he leaves your building,” Lily suggested.

Gunnar looked so confused by this interchange that Ana quickly summarized the background information about Helen having been killed by a group of demon summoners of which Johnson was the leader. He nodded as she spoke and didn’t seem nearly as startled by the demon summoning part as he should have been.

When she finished, he said, “Following’s dangerous. Criminals develop good paranoia.”

“Could we track him with magic?” Ana asked. “Don’t you and Abraxas have some woo-woo thing that would do the trick?”

“He’d probably know what it was,” Lily said. “He’s not new to this.”

“Transmitter,” Gunnar said.

They both looked at him. He smiled, a sort of lopsided, bashful affair that raised the left side of his mouth and lowered his eyes. “Made a few as a joke last Christmas. Nothing James Bond. Good to about a hundred and fifty yards. You can follow out of sight. Don’t know how you’ll get it on him, though, it’s not small.”

“How big is it?” Lily asked.

“Cell phone sized.”

“Hmm, we could maybe disguise it as a large amulet and tell Johnson we’ve put Abraxas in it,” Lily said. “We could even use that small demon he used to make it look animated, but I think he’d figure out pretty quickly that it was the wrong one. But maybe he’d have to take it to wherever he does magic and then we could tip off the police.”

“Why don’t I just slip it into his briefcase?” Ana suggested.

Gunnar looked at Lily who shrugged.

“If you can do it without being seen, it’s less risky than the amulet ploy,” she said.

“His admin likes me. I’m sure I could just find out when he has a meeting and slip into his office. When can you get us the tracker?”

“A day,” Gunnar said. “I’ve got an old one around. Have to tune it up.”

“Bring it by here and show me how to use it,” Lily said. “Once it’s in place, I can follow him for a day or two and we’ll have a good idea of all the possible locations. Ana, can you stop by tomorrow for that other project we’re working on?”

She meant the project to remove Abraxas from her body to another, more fitting, vessel. Ana agreed readily.

Gunnar walked her out to her car. She hugged him hard, smelling the leather and soap scent of his neck. He thumped her back with the ball of his hand. “Gonna be okay,” he said.

Again he watched her drive away. He was scared for her, she realized, and almost turned the car around to go reassure him, except that she couldn’t think of anything really reassuring to say.

* * *

The next day, Ana called in sick. That afternoon Lily took her to the second floor over the bookstore. Instead of going to the sunporch she’d used for banishing the small demon the day she and Ana met, Lily moved to the center of the room and picked up the coffee table, which looked far too heavy for her slim frame to heft.

Here in her own home she didn’t wear her boots and Ana couldn’t help watching those inhuman feet move across the rug. With each step, the first segment of the three forward digits and the one backward-facing all curled down a fraction to grip the carpet below them. Lily carried the coffee table to a wall of the dining room, each step impressively solid. Then she picked up a smaller end table and put it in the eastern part of the living room. Ana realized that on any surface she could grip, Lily would be much harder to knock over than a person with regular feet. That didn’t make her feet attractive, but Ana could be open to appreciating them.

“Sit down,” she told Ana. “It’ll take me a little while to set up.”

Ana settled into a golden armchair while Lily stepped lightly into the kitchen. Ana realized she was used to the clomp of Lily’s boots. Barefoot, Lily seemed to float above the smooth motion of her legs.

Lily had called the previous evening, after Ana got off the phone from bringing Sabel up to date on Gunnar’s plan, and explained that she was set up for the ritual that would draw Abraxas out of Ana and into another vessel. She hadn’t wanted to get into all that in front of Gunnar, but it was time to give this a try. Ana felt a pang of loss at the thought of Abraxas no longer existing inside her, but ignored it because this was clearly the best option for all of them. The summoners would have much less reason to hunt her. Plus Lily could take him and run away until he grew more powerful and could take on these demon-summoning men on his own. Johnson might try to come after her, but clearly his people wanted Abraxas. If Ana could prove she didn’t have him and demonstrate that she could expose them if they came after her, maybe they would leave her alone.