The Demonists (21 page)

“It means that Damakus is close,” Theo said. “The fear and belief of the families chosen are being collected—harvested—in order to return him to life.”

“Damakus . . . a demon is coming back to life?” Isabel asked, as if saying it out loud would help wrap her brain around the insane concept.

“As crazy as it sounds,” John said, “that’s what we think is happening.”

He knew that there was something different about Agent Brenna Isabel, that she suspected that the world was changing, that darkness was becoming that much stronger.

She walked closer to them, turning her attention to the map.

“So the kidnapper . . . this disciple of Damakus,” she said. “He’s harvesting.”

“Yeah, I think he is,” John said.

“Then there’s a chance,” she said, still eyeing the map. “There’s a chance that the kids . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“That the children are still alive,” John finished for her. “Yes, I do believe that’s a possibility.”

“We need to find them,” Agent Isabel said, a sound of desperation in her tone. “We have to find where he’s taken them before . . .”

She didn’t want to believe what they had told her. John could see this in the way she hesitated, but there wasn’t any other way around it. A demon lord was attempting to return to life.

“Before Damakus can be reborn,” John finished, so she didn’t have to.

Agent Brenna Isabel hung up her cell phone after communicating with the last of the police departments connected to families of the missing children. She’d informed them to be on full alert for anything out of the ordinary, that the kidnapper might be returning to the scenes of the crimes.

She’d gone no further than that, not quite sure how she would have explained the resurrection of an ancient demon lord.

“Can I get you anything?”

Brenna turned to see Stephan.

“No, thank you,” she said, sliding the phone into the pocket of her dark blazer.

“A sandwich maybe? Or a bottle of water?” he suggested. “It’s no problem really.”

She smiled at his kindness as she stood outside Fogg’s office door. She could hear Fogg and his wife talking heatedly inside.

“So, how long have you worked for them?” she asked, pointing toward the door.

“John and Theo?” he asked, thinking a moment. “I think it’s been close to six years now.”

She nodded slowly.

“You want to know what it’s like, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s different—unlike any other job I’ve had before.” He smiled, nodding.

She looked to the door again, and then back to him.

“Are they nuts?” she asked. It came across as joking, but there was a vein of truth to it. She needed to know—she needed to be sure. There was a part of her that hoped that they were. It would have made things
so
much easier, but deep down she knew.

“They’re probably a little bit crazy, yeah,” Stephan answered. “But at the same time I’ve never seen two people more dedicated to the field of paranormal research. Even after the Halloween event—”

Brenna went rigid with the mention of the holiday, immediately thinking of her own situation. The image of her baby son lying perfectly still in his crib exploded inside her head, and she couldn’t get it to leave no matter how hard she tried.

“Are you all right?” Stephan asked. “Do you want to sit down?” He took her arm as she found herself starting to swoon.

“No, I’m good,” she said, getting a hold of herself. “But maybe I will take that water if it’s not too much bother.”

He excused himself as she pulled herself together. She’d known that there was some sort of accident that Fogg and his television crew had been in, but never made the connection with the fact that it had happened that last Halloween night.

The same night that her son . . .

The voices inside the office had grown a bit louder, and she moved toward the door, knocking before she entered.

“Is everything all right in here?” she asked.

Theodora was standing at her husband’s desk, holding something in her hand. It took her a second, but Brenna realized what it was.

The missing piece of evidence. The tooth.

“Hey, that’s—” she began.

“You need to put that down, Theo,” John said, moving toward his wife.

“I have to do this,” she said, backing away. “The longer we wait, the less chance we’ll have of finding them alive.”

“She’s talking about the kids, right?” Brenna asked. “What is she getting at, John?”

“My wife wants to do something that I feel might be dangerous to her health,” John explained. “Theo, please . . .” He held out his hand to her, moving his fingers for her to hand the tooth over.

“I need to do this, John, I’m sorry,” she said, backing into the corner of the room and popping the tooth into her mouth as if eating a breath mint.

“What is she doing?” Brenna asked, now moving in her direction as well.

She began to chew, the crunching sounds emanating from inside her mouth sounding incredibly painful.

“She’s eating our evidence,” Brenna said, not believing what she was seeing.

Stephan came into the room with her bottle of water and immediately froze.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

No one answered as Theodora’s eyes rolled back into her head, and she went limp, falling to the floor.

Brenna reacted, moving toward the unconscious woman. John’s hand shot out, grabbing her by the arm, stopping her from reaching his wife.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Something’s wrong—she’s probably choking. We need to—”

“She’s not choking,” he said with a sad shake of his head.

“Well, whatever’s happening we have to help her,” Brenna said, yanking her arm back.

“I wouldn’t get too close,” John warned.

She was about to ignore him to help the woman but noticed something strange. The tattoos that covered quite a bit of the woman’s flesh appeared to be moving. The woman’s body had begun to vibrate, every inch of her thrumming so powerfully that Brenna could feel it through the soles of her shoes on the hardwood floors.

“All right, spill it, John,” she said, backing up ever so slightly. “What the hell is happening?”

“My wife is afflicted with an unusual condition,” John started.

They were both watching her now, the dark markings flowing on her skin like ink injected into water. And then her limbs began to snap—to bend in impossible positions—to change.

“John, that’s . . . that’s not normal,” Brenna said, watching in awe as the woman’s body reconfigured, becoming something . . .

“No, it’s not,” John said. “The night of the incident—”

Halloween. It happened on Halloween. For a moment she saw her son, lying in his crib. Did she remember him dead or alive?

“She became inhabited . . . possessed by a number of demonic entities.”

The woman’s changing body flipped, landing on her stomach, where her newly elongated limbs lifted her onto all fours. She resembled some sort of giant reptile now, a purplish forked tongue shooting out snakelike to taste the air.

It was taking everything Brenna had not to pull out her gun and shoot the horrible thing dead.

“Recently, with the help of some—associates—we able to gain some control over the problem.”

The woman’s body had continued to shift and alter, spiny protrusions pushing out from her already bruised flesh, giving her a strange, armored appearance.

“This is control?” Brenna asked, not liking the sound of panic she heard creeping into her tone.

John’s wife sprang up to her feet, the sound of her spine snapping, popping, and reconfiguring incredibly grotesque.

“Hello, fuckers,” the woman said through a mouthful of incredibly sharp teeth, a thick stream of bloody drool oozing from the corners of her mouth to puddle at her clawed feet.

Brenna went purely on instinct, pulling her gun from its holster and aiming.

“There’s the gun,” Stephan said from the far corner of the room where he cowered. Brenna hadn’t remembered that he was there.

“I hope that won’t be necessary,” John said, moving over to her.

The monstrous woman laughed to herself, admiring her new form by holding out her long, spindly arms and flexing her spiderlike hands.

Brenna continued to aim; a head shot would probably be best.

“Put that fucking thing away,” the demonic woman roared, her neck stretching incredibly long to glare at her.

John moved toward his wife.

“Theo,” he said. “Theo, are you there?”

The demonic entity glared at him with yellow, red-rimmed eyes.

“She wants to be,” the demon said in a low, ominous tone. “But I’ve decided to—”

The demonically afflicted woman went suddenly rigid, her terrible eyes going wide. She shook her head wildly from side to side, sending tendrils of thick, bloody mucus through the air as she did.

Brenna aimed down the sight of the weapon, just in case, but the monstrous woman suddenly grew calm, turning her attention back to them.

“You can lower the weapon, Agent Isabel,” Theodora Knight said, though her voice did sound somewhat strange—raw and ragged. “I’m in control now.”

Theo held out her hands, moving the long clawed fingers, examining what her body had become.

“This is awful,” she said in a sad, sad whisper.

“What the hell’s happened to you?” Brenna asked, lowering her weapon, but not by much. Still, just in case.

“Let’s just say I’ve gotten in touch with my inner demon,” Theo said. “Or at least one of them.”

Brenna’s phone started to ring, and she was tempted not to answer, but . . .

“Yeah,” she said, lowering her gun even more and turning her back to them for privacy. The voice on the other end was from the main office, rattling off information that made her brain hurt.

They wanted her to come in, to return to the office to regroup, but she knew that wouldn’t help.

She hung up even as the person on the other end continued to talk. She would have to make up some story about her phone, how it had for some reason cut out, refusing to work.

“The disciple or whatever the hell you want to call him has tried again,” she announced to the room, John and his wife looking at her. “Multiple attempts over the last hour or so in multiple states.”

“And was he successful?” Theo asked.

Brenna shook her head. “No, local law enforcement was ready and waiting,” she said, thinking again about what she had been told over the phone. “Shots were reportedly fired in each of the attempts, and the perpetrator was hit.”

“Let me guess,” John said. “No body was found at any of the scenes.”

“How is that even possible?” Brenna asked, feeling her grip of reality loosening that much more. “All over the country in the matter of an hour, hit by multiple gunshots?”

She waited for something—
anything
—to be said to return the world to some semblance of normalcy, but doubted that it was coming any time soon.

“I’d say Damakus is very eager to return,” John said. “Which leads me to believe that our timetable has likely been sped up.”

“Which is why I did this,” Theo stressed, holding out her arms and showing the state of her form. “One of the things inside me. This thing.” She looked at what she had become again with total disgust. “It is a tracker . . . a bloodhound of the demonic. With a single drop of blood . . . a strand of hair, a fingernail . . .”

“Or a tooth,” Brenna added.

Theo slowly nodded. “It could track the little one from whom it was taken to the ends of the Earth.”

She then dropped to the floor and extended her neck and head. There came an awful, regurgitating type of sound, followed by the smacking of lips.

“Do I even want to know what you just did?” Brenna asked.

“No,” Stephan called from the back of the room. “I would rather we didn’t.”

Theo’s head began to move from left to right, her enlarged nostrils flaring as she attempted to capture the desired scent.

Still on all fours, the woman scampered from the office incredibly fast, stopping outside on the landing to test the air again. She jumped over the railing, falling to the foyer below.

“Follow her,” John said, and he and Brenna took a more conventional path down the stairs.

Theo had already found her way outside the house and was squatting on the lawn, head tossed back, her eyes closed.

“Well?” Brenna asked, coming up behind her.

“He’s gone,” Theo said. “I’ve lost him.”

“I thought you said that you could track him anywhere on Earth?” Brenna asked angrily.

“Anywhere on Earth,” Theo said, turning her elongated neck to look at her. “He’s not on Earth anymore.”

C
hristopher Waugh was dying. They all were.

The boy sat in his seat, in the stifling heat and stink of the classroom, trying to keep his eyes from closing, fearing what would follow if he should fall asleep.

He looked around the room at the others and felt his hope begin to slip away. They were dying. He was dying.

There was a part of him that wanted to quit, to give in and escape this living nightmare.

The sound of something splashing in the tank behind him made him sit rigidly upright in his chair. The thing that had been inside the Teacher’s stomach was becoming more active. Christopher knew that it could very easily escape the fish tank, throwing its horrible form over the side of the tank and slithering across the floor to get them.

The thought was terrifying, and the more he imagined it, the more active the thing in the tank at the back of the room seemed to become. It was as if the thing could sense his fear.

Christopher attempted to calm himself, to remember a time when he wasn’t in this terrible place.

The thing in the tank continued to splash, slapping its many arms against the glass. It was hungry. Christopher could practically hear its thoughts inside his head. Damakus was hungry and soon they would all be food to sustain his awesome glory.

For a moment that seemed perfectly fine to him. Perfectly reasonable. They were all here for Damakus. . . .

The thing in the tank was inside his head and he found himself sickened by its psychic touch. Christopher screamed briefly, nothing more than a pathetic yelp really, bringing his forehead down as hard as he could upon his desktop to drive away the squirming sensations inside his head.

He knew that this was the beginning of his end, that the thing in the tank—Damakus—would slither itself into their brains and prepare them for their deaths. They were going to be its sacrifice, one of the final steps of returning the creature—this god—to its former glory.

As it had been inside his head, Christopher had gotten a glimpse of what was inside the creature’s.

Did it even have a head? He didn’t think so.

The question was enough of a distraction for him to begin to panic. He didn’t want to die, and he knew that if he didn’t do something very quickly, that would most certainly be his fate.

He could feel it trying to slither even farther into the crevices of his brain, to assure him that everything was just fine, but Christopher didn’t want to hear it.

The boy decided that he had to do something. He had to get away from this room—from this building—from the thing inside the tank.

Damakus.

He reached beneath his desk, grabbing hold of the filthy chain and pulling with all his might. It was foolish for him to try—he already knew that, having done the same thing over and over again—and still the chain was too strong.

But he knew that the answer to his problem was somehow connected. The chain was what kept him here, in this room.

The chain.

Christopher slid out of his chair again to the floor beneath his desk. He’d done this all before, but he could not help himself as he inspected each and every link of the chain, stopping at the metal ring that encircled his boney ankle.

He grabbed at the circle, turning it around on the chafed skin above his foot. Christopher became entranced, staring at the metal cuff, wondering if the thoughts that were taking shape inside his mind could be translated into some form of reality.

He knew that he had lost weight since being brought here, since the ring had been placed around his ankle. The ring was sized for how he had been.

Not how he was now.

He sat on the floor and pulled his foot closer to him. Grabbing the ring, he attempted to pull it down over his heel, but there was still too much foot.

But not as much as there had been before.

The fact of too much foot did not deter him, and he continued to pull down upon the ring, twisting and turning with all his might. The process was painful, and he temporarily considered any other alternative, but there wasn’t anything else at the moment.

Christopher continued to work, trying to ignore the pain and think of how things would be when he was able to escape. The thoughts of his murdered father just fueled his efforts all the more, giving him that little bit of extra strength to try and force the ring down over the top of his foot and heel.

Time was his enemy. He had no idea when the teacher might return. The pain was making him dizzy, but something told him that if he was to stop he would never begin again and he would die here with all the other students.

The thing in the tank at the back of the room became more active, splashing about in its filthy habitat.

Christopher’s heart raced, and he was panting from the exertion.

Wouldn’t it better if you slowed down for a bit?
asked a voice from somewhere inside his skull.
Wait a few minutes for the pain to recede and then
—No.

His actions became all the more furious. He wondered if the others noticed what he was doing, roused from their stupor to see that he was going to try and live, that he was not content to sit here and eventually die, sacrificed to whatever that nasty thing in the tank— It responded violently, throwing its muscular form against the aquarium glass.
Is it trying to get out?
Christopher wondered.
Is it trying to break free to stop me from—
He chanced a fleeting glimpse at his foot, and nearly died then and there from the shock of what he saw.

An empty metal ring.

It took a moment for that to sink in, to permeate through the cloud of agony.

The ring was no longer around his ankle. Christopher wasn’t sure if he was seeing that properly, maneuvering himself on the filthy wooden floor for a closer look, just to be certain.

Yes. Yes, the ring was empty.

He was free. He’d done it. He was free.

He scrambled to his feet, expecting the others to be watching him with curiosity, but they remained silent and still, heads down on their desktops.

Waiting for their end.

The thing in the tank called to him, a horrible tickling sensation, an itch that he was unable to scratch.

Holding on to the side of his desk, he cautiously looked toward the back of the classroom where the tank waited. The thing in the filthy water watched him, multiple sets of yellow eyes pressed to the glass.

It compelled him to come closer, but Christopher chose instead to look toward the front of the room, and the open doorway beyond it.

“I’m leaving,” Christopher announced to anyone who was listening, moving out into the center of the classroom aisle and almost falling.

The pain in his foot was nearly crippling, but he couldn’t let that stop him. He had his eye on the prize, and that prize was the open doorway and an eventual path to freedom.

He was limping crazily, but he was making progress.

He was getting closer to the doorway.

With that realization the thing in the tank surged up out of the filthy water, thick black tentacles covered in razor-sharp spines glistening in the faint light of the room as they hung over the lip of the aquarium.

It beckoned to him, the thing that would eventually become a god extending its muscular limbs and calling him back. Again he felt it inside his head, telling him to return to his seat, that all would be fine if he only came back.

Christopher actually caught himself turning back, but then he saw her. The little girl with no teeth had raised her head, and was looking at him with dark, hollow eyes.

Go,
she mouthed.

And he did as she told him, practically throwing himself toward the open doorway and the darkness behind it. He would do it for her. He would get out into the world and bring people to help her and the others, before it was too late.

Christopher experienced a surge of strength, adrenaline coursing through his veins as he made it out into the hallway of the schoolhouse. He had no idea of the size of the place and was surprised to see how small it was. It was practically a one-room structure, like something that would have been used in the olden days, he thought as he searched the darkened hall for an exit.

There was a door up ahead of him, the exit sign above it dark. He limped to the door, slamming all his body weight against the metal bar and pushing it open to freedom.

Freedom.
Christopher wobbled upon the top concrete step that led down into . . .

Nothing.
There was some grass that circled around the front and to the back of the building, but beyond that there was . . .

Nothing.
It looked like fog, but it was more than that.

Or less.
He carefully stepped down to the grass, limping to where it suddenly stopped, peering into the white of . . .

Nothing.
Balancing on one leg, Christopher shoved his hand into the wall of white. It was incredibly cold within and he quickly pulled back.

His thoughts were a jumble as he studied the area, the schoolhouse sitting on top of a small piece of land, an island in a sea of . . .

Nothing.
At first Christopher wasn’t sure what was happening; it had been so long since he’d last experienced the warmth of the fluids spilling from his eyes.

Tears. He was crying. He hadn’t used them all up after all.

It was no consolation as he stood there before the wall of shifting white, trying to understand where he was. Christopher was so deep in thought that he didn’t hear the sound of the Teacher’s arrival.

“And what do we have here?” the Teacher asked, stepping from the cold embrace of nothing onto the grassy island.

The boy jumped back, losing his balance and falling to the grass.

The Teacher’s filthy clothing was covered in blood and pocked with holes. He strode across the ground to loom over Christopher, two bubblelike spheres undulating in the air around the man’s head. They reminded Christopher of jellyfish that he’d seen on a school field trip the previous year.

“You,” the Teacher said with a snarl, obviously remembering the trouble that Christopher had caused before. “I’m surprised, really,” he said, reaching down to grab him by the front of his pajama top and haul him up to his feet.

Christopher’s eyes were drawn to the bullet hole in the middle of the Teacher’s forehead, but he forced himself to instead watch the strange spheres that floated around the Teacher’s head. They were like bubbles of very thin skin, and he could see that something moved around frantically inside the weightless globules, as if trying to escape.

“You almost make me doubt my skills as an educator,” the Teacher said, tossing Christopher over his shoulder and heading back for the schoolhouse.

“But that just means I’ll need to work a little harder.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Agent Isabel asked frantically.

Theodora listened to the woman’s question. She’d fallen forward to the ground outside the house, trying to return her body to its human shape. To push the demon back where it belonged.

“He’s not here anymore,” she said in between pained grunts and the popping of joints. “He’s not here . . . or at least the child isn’t.”

The FBI special agent looked around, not quite sure what she should be doing now.

John came to kneel beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, concern in his tone.

Theo started to stand, her spine cracking noisily as it returned to its natural—
human
—shape.

“If he’s not here . . . on Earth, where?” Agent Isabel asked, confused by the whole affair. “Mars? Is he on fucking Mars?”

Theo shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “The child isn’t on this plane of reality,” she attempted to explain.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” the agent asked again, not understanding this in the least.

“It means exactly what she said,” John said, coming to his wife’s defense. “Somehow the child has been taken away from this reality to another. That probably explains how he’s been able to travel unnoticed all over the country in such short periods of time to collect his victims.”

Agent Isabel listened, tried to digest, but obviously had little luck.

“You’ve completely lost me,” she said. “Are you saying that our perpetrator could be on some other planet or something? That he could actually be on Mars?”

“Not another planet,” Theo interjected. “Another plane of reality . . . another dimension. A world that exists alongside this one . . . an other side.”

Theo watched the woman. She seemed to get smaller, crushed beneath the weight of this latest revelation.

“So there’s no way to get to him . . . to track the children,” she said.

“I’m sure there’s a way,” John said. “But it would probably take days of research to find exactly what we’re searching for, and by then it will likely be too late.”

Theo could see the frustration working on her husband as well.

And then she heard the laughing somewhere deep inside her skull. The demons were amused by their human antics, their human perception of things. She silenced them with a thought, but there was one voice that remained. One that said that it just might have answers to their questions.

She moved away from the others.

“Theo?” her husband called to her.

“So, what now?” Agent Isabel demanded to know. “Do we just sit around and wait for some resurrected demon god to show up and—”

“You don’t want that,” Theo heard her husband say. “That would be very bad.”

Theodora ignored the sounds of her husband’s concerns, standing alone in a patch of darkness to reach out.

To communicate.

“Theo,” she heard John call to her again.

“John, please—just a moment,” she said angrily, holding out a hand to stop his progress.

She let her thoughts go, traveling inside her mind to the deep darkness where they waited.

Where answers might still be found.

The demons had gone deep, driven to hide in the nooks and crannies of her subconscious.

“I’m here,” she announced, the sigils on her flesh creating a shimmering corona of yellowish orange around her.