The Demonists (22 page)

She knew they were there, watching her silently, and she extended a hand to disperse the light from her body so that she might see them.

They were there as she sensed, a sea of evil and inhumanity, the ones closer to where she stood shielding their horrible eyes from the discomfort caused by her inner light.

A thousand demons. This was the number that inhabited her body, a fact that suddenly filled her head.

One of them was being cute, reaching out, providing her with answers to questions she had pondered.

“Well?” she said, looking at them all, showing them that she was unafraid.

And the demons stared back, but not as afraid as she imagined they should be.

“Which one of you is it?” she asked. “Which one of you wants to talk?”

They looked at each other, these horrible manifestations of evil, and eventually all turned their attentions back to her.

“All right, then,” she said, her patience waning. “I could force you—hurt each and every one of you, but I just don’t have the time.”

She had begun to withdraw, to return to the physical world, when she noticed across the sea of the demonic that a fissure was starting to form. That something was moving down the center of them, the monstrosities parting to let it pass.

Theo paused her return to the physical and waited.

The demons in front moved to either side, and a child emerged.

Theodora gasped, feeling a violent knife stab of emotion in her heart.

“You wicked, wicked things,” she muttered beneath her breath, wishing then and there that she was capable of killing them all in the most horrid and painful ways possible.

There was snickering amongst the demons as the child presented himself.

“I would have thought you would be comforted by this form,” the demon wearing the shape of Billy Sharp said.

Theodora glared, her anger simmering.

Billy Sharp had lived next door to the Knights when she was a young girl, a lovely little boy with a contagious smile and a mischievous way about him, who died two weeks before his sixth birthday from drowning.

Only a few years older herself at the time, Theodora remembered the nearly overpowering sadness at the loss of the younger child whom she treated like her baby brother.

It had always bothered her that neither she nor her mother had been able to communicate with the dead child’s spirit. That he seemed to have moved on to the afterlife without a trace.

“I found the image of the child just
floating
around your psyche and believed that it would put you at ease,” the demon wearing Billy’s form said. “It appears that I was mistaken.”

“You found him just floating around, did you?” she asked, reacting to the cruelty of the demon’s specific words, but what would one expect from a demon?

“Perhaps we should do this another time,” the demon said, starting to make his way back into the monstrous crowd gathered.

“Wait,” she called to it. She hated to think of it as a child—as Billy.

The demon stopped, turning toward her again. She noticed that he was wearing the striped shirt, short pants, and running shoes that Billy had been wearing on the day he died.

“You hinted that there might be answers to a particular quandary we are experiencing,” she continued.

The little boy slowly nodded. “There very well might be,” he said.

“And do you know what that problem is?” she asked.

“We know all your problems,” the demon said, smiling with the beatific face of a child.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Theo warned, her anger simmering just below the surface.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the demon child said.

The others roared, laughed, shrieked, and tittered their amusement, and the child turned his attention toward them.

“Silence,” he commanded, and they did as they were told.

Who was this mysterious demonic presence to warrant such a level of respect? Or was it something more akin to fear? Theodora wondered.

The child looked back at her, the expression he now wore vacant of any sign of innocence.

“You and your people are searching for the disciple of Damakus,” Billy said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But he’s not to be found on the earthly plane. Oh where, oh where could he be?”

“That is most certainly the question,” Theo said. “Lives are at stake,” she added. “The lives of children.”

“Yum,” Billy said, and for a brief instant his baby teeth were razor sharp and plentiful.

“Don’t,” she began.

“I know, I know,” Billy said. “Don’t fuck with you.”

“Well?” she demanded, growing tired of the dance. “Do you have answers for me or not?”

“It all depends,” Billy said.

“On?”

“On what you can do for me.”

Theo laughed at the monster’s audacity. “Seriously?” she asked. She extended her bare arms, presenting her sigils, the light that they threw bathing the child and the front row of demons behind him.

“You sound as though you’ve forgotten who’s in charge now,” she said.

The demons recoiled from their searing light, but the child stayed, averting his gaze ever so slightly.

“I’ve done no such thing,” Billy said. “Please,” he asked her, motioning for her to turn the illumination away. “If you wouldn’t mind, it makes it difficult to speak.”

Theo lowered her arms.

“I want that information,” she stated.

“And I will give it to you willingly,” Billy said. His face had blistered where her light had touched him. “If you will do something for me—forus.”

She shook her head. “No.”

The force of the child’s gaze was like being punched.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed,” Billy said. “But it is your choice.”

He turned and started to leave, the demons parting to let him pass.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “I didn’t say you could leave.”

He stopped but didn’t turn. “If you must know, I’m returning to my little pocket of shadow nestled nicely inside what remains of your soul.”

“You’re going nowhere without telling me what I need to know,” Theo said.

Billy turned.

“I could tell you everything, but it would do you little good,” he said.

She didn’t quite understand but said nothing, not wanting to show any weakness.

“You need me to comply—for us to comply,” he said, motioning with tiny hands to the demonic gathering about him.

“We could give you the knowledge . . . the talent to traverse the veil,” Billy explained. “To open a door normally closed to one such as you.”

She glowered at the demon wearing the form of her dead friend.

“I could force you,” she said, her hands clenched into trembling fists. The sigils glowed all the hotter in her frustration.

“You could try,” Billy said. “But I’d be willing to bet that you would have nothing for your troubles when it was all said and done.”

“I could try,” Theo stressed.

“And for that you would be commended,” Billy said. “Even though it would be useless.”

They stood like that for a while, neither wanting to budge, but then she thought about the children who could very well be still among the living, and the fate that awaited them if the disciple was to finish his chores.

“What is it you want?” she asked.

Billy almost smiled but seemed to know better.

“We ask for only one thing,” he said.

“What?”

“Permission.”

“Permission for what?”

And Billy’s smile grew wider, and wider still, and she listened to what the demon wanted, and what only she could grant them.

And the answer she gave was—
Yes.
. . .

John knelt beside his wife.

He watched her carefully for signs, paying extra-close attention to the markings on her flesh. They had been flowing—realigning—quite heavily for a moment, but now appeared to be calming.

“What’s wrong with her now?” Agent Isabel wanted to know.

“Hey,” John called, leaning in to the woman he loved, placing a comforting hand upon her back.

Her eyes were closed, and she appeared as though she might be asleep.

“Maybe we should get her inside,” Isabel suggested, coming to assist him.

“Give it a sec,” John said, watching his wife.

“Those kids don’t have a second, John,” Isabel answered sharply.

His wife’s eyes opened.

“No, they don’t,” she said, rising to her feet.

“What’s up?” John asked her.

“Are you two ready?” his wife asked them, moving to a more open area alongside the house.

John looked at Agent Isabel.

“Ready for what?” she asked.

“I’ve got our answer,” she said, and John noticed the pained expression on her normally beautiful features. “The solution to the problem.”

“What did you do, Theo?” he asked, concerned.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” Isabel said. “Yeah, we’re ready.”

John wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be ready for, but he guessed that now was probably as good a time as any, especially with the lives of children at risk.

Theo wasn’t waiting any longer, standing there, her posture sort of crouched. It looked as though she were getting ready to jump—to leap from the tallest cliff into oblivion.

And in a strange kind of way, she was.

He knew where she had been moments ago, the darkness inside her so tempting with its twisted power. She had gone back to the well for further answers, and appeared to have found what they were looking for.

But at what cost?

“Come closer,” Theo summoned them, her eyes focused on an area of open air directly in front of her.

He could see that her body was trembling, and yes, the sigils were on the move, flowing and swirling in an attempt to keep up with the dark power that was attempting to manifest.

She let out a horrible, pained moan, and he wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms, to comfort her, and lend her some of his own strength to endure whatever the task was that she was attempting.

“All right, you twisted fucks,” Theo snarled.

Agent Isabel looked at John, but he knew that his wife wasn’t talking to them, instead she was addressing those that infested her soul, those that had somehow provided an answer to the problems now confronting them. And again he considered the high cost of such knowledge.

“Give me what you promised,” Theo demanded, and then emitted a low, thrumming growl, as what—
who
—she was speaking to finally responded.

Her arms shot out before her as if beckoning for some invisible offering. John winced, and held back his need to go to her when the sounds of cracking bone and morphing flesh again filled the air.

Theo’s arms grew incredibly long, and John was reminded of the front limbs of a praying mantis. Her hands expanded, doubling in size as each finger grew longer, her fingernails turning to claws, the tips becoming crystalline and razor sharp.

“Jesus Christ, John,” he heard Agent Isabel say beside him as she watched the latest transformation before them.

He didn’t respond, unable to find the words. Tears streamed down from his wife’s eyes, and he was compelled to stop whatever it was that she was doing, but he couldn’t. She had done this for them . . . for the missing children . . . and he couldn’t allow what she had sacrificed to be for naught.

Long black spines had erupted from her back, sparks of electricity arcing from their ends to dance in the air above her head. It was this power that she seemed to require, reaching up behind her with obscenely long arms to pull the threads of crackling energy from the air. And in her monstrously altered hands, begin to manipulate this strange power.

To begin to create something.

The crystalline claws at the ends of each elongated finger teased the bluish energy, stretching and kneading the humming substance, and then adding to it from the source leaking from the spines on her back.

John was reminded of a spider as it wove with its silken strands, making a web—or imprisoning its prey. He watched in a combination of horror and wonder at what his wife was creating. At first he couldn’t quite understand what it was, but as the shape grew, he saw that the crackling strands of unearthly energy were being knitted together to form a kind of hole.

A passage from this reality to another.

The doorway hung within the air, humming and crackling like an impending summer storm.

“I don’t understand,” Agent Isabel said again as she stared at the pulsating circle of darkness as it floated there weightlessly.

“There’s very little to understand,” Theo said, her worlds garbled because her mouth was now filled with far too many teeth. “We need to get to where the disciple is performing the final ritual . . . where he has taken the children. This will bring us there.”

As Theo spoke she continued to weave, her long, spindly arms moving in the air as if she were conducting some silent orchestra.

The opening in time and space grew steadily larger, and soon was emitting a mournful, moaning sound. Theo moved back from the passage, a corona of cracking energy surrounding an iris of absolute black.

“It’s done,” she said, admiring her demonic craftsmanship with a tilt of her head.

“Yeah,” Agent Isabel said warily. “Now what are we supposed to do?”

John walked close, feeling the pull of the hole in reality. “We go through,” he said.

“I don’t know if I can do that,” the FBI special agent said, stepping back.

“Do you want to stop this guy . . . save those kids if possible?” John asked her.

She remained silent, but her eyes said everything.

Theo darted in front of him, pushing him out of the way as she plunged her mantis-like arms into the blackness of the passage.

“I’ll go first,” she said, drawing her body toward the center, and finally she was gone, passing into the eye to the other side.

“Are you coming?” John asked, about to follow his wife. “I hope that you are, because I don’t have a gun or any weapons.”

Agent Isabel hesitated, coming forward but stopping. She was scared, and he didn’t blame her. Feeling the pull of the passage before him, John held out his hand to her.