Damoren (13 page)

“
Who’s that?” Matt asked.

“
Anthony’s student. She probably stayed here to protect the vehicle.”

“
I didn’t see her name on the video.”

“
She didn’t have a tracker.” Anya shook her head regretfully. “We only gave them to the knights with holy blades. She would have stayed here and monitored the camera feeds as backup.”

“
Feeds?”

“
Knights place cameras before raids,” Malcolm said, sifting through the broken electronics. “Apprentices relay anything they see to the team, in case they miss something.”

“
Why aren’t we doing that?” Matt asked.

“
Turgen said no students.”

“
How many other students were there? Maybe one escaped.”

“
Just Selene,” Malcolm answered. “And we can assume she didn’t escape.” He shook his head. “Computers are gone. The cameras have internal memory. Maybe we can find them.”

Kazuo motioned to the road.
Chunks of safety glass lay scattered about. “The vehicle was here when they took her. They moved it after.”

Luc knelt beside the broken glass.
In the air, he traced a little trail of cubes smeared down a tire groove worn into the dirt road. “They drove away. They must have moved the van to make room.”

Malcolm nodded off to the right.
“Then let’s look at what they left behind.”

They slipped between the trees and climbed over a rusty pipe fence.
A brown barn stood across the field, nearly blocking out the farmhouse behind it. The sun peeked on the horizon, shining beneath the dark clouds above. In two hours it would be dark.

“
Look there.” Susumu pointed his bladed staff toward a dingy green cattle feeder. A hay bale rested inside the metal bars, bulging over the top like some giant grass cupcake. A small black tube, the size of a flashlight rested atop hay, aimed at the buildings.

“
Looks like one of our cameras,” Malcolm said.

Swinging wide, they approached the little camera.
A plastic antenna jutted straight out the back. From its angle it could see the entire barn and a quarter of the house.

Malcolm reached up
and plucked it off the bale. “Keep your eyes out for any more of them.”

They continued toward the house, attempting to follow the path the hunters had taken the night before.
Luc spotted another camera near the barn, its plastic crab-like legs wrapped around a fencepost.

They circled the building until it opened up into a wide gravel area.
A tiny white car sat off to one side. Five fresh, bloodied corpses lay scattered around the open area. Severed limbs lay beside some of them, many also sported deep gashes, showing bone and spilt organs. It smelled of blood and that acrid stink of guts that always reminded Matt of his mother’s body. Two of them were naked. Black flies scuttled across their bare skin.

Kazuo knelt and picked up a spent ammo casing.
Matt counted several more sprinkled across the white gravel.

More bodies lay on the other side of the house and two more beside a stone well house.
Nine in all. None were the missing knights.

Inside the barn they discovered four mutilated corpses piled on the floor.
Their withered eyes and shriveled skin didn’t look like any of the others. Two were children, the youngest no more than six. All wore pajamas or minimal clothes. Deep bites and missing scoops of flesh pitted their thighs, and torsos.

“
The demons killed these,” Matt said. “Bled them out. Ate part of them.”

Luc nodded.
“They must have lived here. Do you know what did it?”

He shook his head.
“Never seen bodies drained and eaten. Usually one or the other, but if there’s multiple breeds maybe they all took a piece.”

“
Maybe.”

Anya and Kazuo found another two
bled and gnawed bodies in a nearby shed.

The door to the house was unlocked.
The overpowering stench of death hit them like a wall. Covering his nose and mouth with one hand, Matt shook a line of gray powder across the threshold before he entered. The drained corpse of a black-moustached man lay in the first room, his throat torn out. Hideous bites covered the left side of his chest, exposing the ribs beneath. Then the next room, a body of a teenage girl slumped in a cushioned chair, her face half-eaten. Brown, dried blood stained her baby blue shirt. She wore nothing else.

Up three steps they found what
had once been a wide living area with a red brick fireplace. Toppled furniture rested against the walls, blocking the windows. Burned candles of various sizes and color blanketed every surface. Bloody symbols and designs covered the white walls. In the middle of the floor, five naked corpses were laid, arms and legs splayed out. Carved designs and mutilations decorated their skin. Broken shards of metal and wood jutted grotesquely from their bodies. Joined only by the toes, they formed a ring, leaving a star-shaped opening between their open legs.

The overpowering stink of burned rot
hung so thick Matt could taste it. Suddenly hating the effectiveness of Luiza’s medicine, he covered his nose.

“
My God,” Malcolm uttered.

Luc shook his head.
“God is not in this place.”

They were all there.
The scarecrow-looking Ramón, his nose no more than a triangular hole. Blood-stained teeth grinned out from where his lips should have been. Natuche’s slender long braids spilled out from atop a smashed and faceless head. The romance cover guy, Anthony, split cock to throat, peeled open like a dissected frog. Matt recognized Daniel and Yev from their photos. Yev, the man who had carried Tom’s sword when Tom was maimed. Now jagged slivers of blade protruded from his hands like nails. A bent and broken hilt jutted from his belly. Their skin that had faced inside the open star was burned away from the soles of their feet up to their mutilated genitals. Whatever had done it hadn’t affected the pink flesh beneath, only the skin. Unlike the rest of the floor around them, the tile inside the star was clean. Pristine.

Luc stood above Anthony, staring down
, his lips tight. He swallowed and looked away. Malcolm shut his eyes and mumbled what sounded like a prayer.

Averting his gaze from the blood-drenched bodies, Matt circled the room.
“These symbols, they’re different.”

Anya wiped her eyes and studied the gruesome writing across the plaster.
“You’re right.”

“
Any idea what it means?”

She shook her head.
“It’s obviously a summoning, like the others, but more...more elaborate.”

Malcolm circled the swirling script painted between each of the dead knight
’s heads, forming two rings of writing. “Don’t know what this says, but I can tell you what it is.” He pointed to a row of larger symbols, partially smudged. “That’s its name. They weren’t just calling a certain type of demon, they called a specific one.”

Luc pursed his lips and growled.

“
What are they saying?” Susumu asked.

“
That they summoned a specific monster by its name,” Matt answered.

The samurai gave a solemn nod.
“This is not good.”

“
How do you mean?”

“
Because,” Kazuo said, sifting through a pile of torn and bloody clothes. “When the laws of the universe are called and powers are invoked or bound by their true names, waves are felt everywhere. That’s when prophecies come true. Things change.”

“
Like what?”

“
Everything. All worlds feel the ripples.” He pulled a metal chain out from the bundle. A red-smeared white box dangled from the end. “I found the trackers,” he announced.

“
Gather them up,” Malcolm said. He knelt beside the symbols, the back of his hand across his mouth. “Look at this.”

Luc stepped up beside him and gazed down at the smudged writing.
“What is that from?”

Matt stepped up between them.
“Is that a...” he turned his head, trying to get a better angle without having to step inside the circle, “footprint?”

Malcolm measured it with his hands.
It was long, slender at the back, but wide at the toes. It had to be eighteen inches, at least. “I’ve never seen anything this huge. Make sure we get some good shots of it and any more it might have tracked.”

“
I do not see the student,” Susumu said.

Kazuo
scanned the room. “He’s right. Selene isn’t here.”

“Spread out,” Malcolm said. “And keep your radios handy. This…feels off.”

They searched the house.
Dark patches of dried blood stained many of the tattered beds where the sleeping owners had met their end. The digital clocks beside the beds all blinked, 12:00. In the kitchen, the green oven light read 17:23. The two dots inside the time blinked.

Matt checked his watch.
7:40.

“
You notice the time it says?” Luc asked.

“
Yeah, it’s off by two hours seventeen minutes. Same time the trackers flipped off.”

“
Have you seen that before?”

“
No. You?”

Luc frowned.
“I have not.”

Matt opened a washroom door when the pink fluid in the bottle suddenly cleared up, forming a crimson bead toward the outer wall.

He thumbed the radio. “There’s one outside!” There was a door beside him with a window. Matt pulled the curtain back. The rear yard was empty. Dämoren in hand, he stepped out.

Matt looked in the direction the blood compass pointed.
Fiery hues tinged the sky around the lowering sun. A tin shed rested twenty feet away. Beyond it, there was a dense cluster of trees across a field. The compass pointed toward them.

“
Look!” Luc yelled.

Three men moved through the grassy field toward the house.
One carried a wood club, like a sledge handle or some other tool. Another clutched a metal pipe. The third, a bald guy, held an old varmint rifle.

A sharp cry came from somewhere inside the house.

The shed door groaned open and two gray corpses shambled out, their skin drawn and wrinkled. Their dead eyes turned toward Matt and Luc. A gurgling groan resonated from their torn throats.

The four desiccated bodies emerged from the barn and shuffled toward the house.

The compass didn’t indicate they were demons, and Dämoren’s ammo was too limited. Matt holstered the revolver and raised the slung Ingram. Holding the thick suppressor in one hand, he aimed at a black-haired teen and fired. A short burst of rapid, metallic
tinks
and the boy’s face erupted into jagged chunks. The creature didn’t seem to notice. It opened what was left of its mouth. Broken bits of teeth and tongue tumbled out.

Matt fired again.
Silver hollow points tore its head nearly off.

It kept coming.

He stepped back. “Luc?”

The hulking hunter charged forward, mace in hand.
He hit the first one, a young girl, in the head. It burst like a melon hit with a shotgun. Luc whirled Velnepo around and struck the side of the teen Matt had shot. Its body flew back twenty feet as if hit by a bus. Bits of brown gore stained the flanged mace.

Holy shit
,
Matt thought, awed by the mace’s power.

The bodies rose
back up.

Matt glanced at the bottle.
Two red beads. The men were half-way across the field now.

One of the other dead creatures neared the front of the house.
Susumu’s naginata shot out from the open doorway. The blade drove through the corpse’s chest and out the back. The blade jerked free and the limp corpse dropped. The samurai stepped out.

Malcolm came out behind him.
Chunky blood coated his machete. “The heart! Stab the heart!” He thrust his left hand out toward the nearest monster, the crimson eye tattooed inside his palm opened wide. The creature stopped, as if frozen. “They’re stronger than they look.”

Susumu lunged, skewering it.
He pulled the naginata out and whirled the long blade around, clipping the legs off another walking corpse. He twirled the weapon up, over, then stabbed down into the creature’s chest.

Following their lead, Matt aimed at the headless girl and fired.
Her chest burst with gelatinous holes and she fell. He turned toward the one Luc had knocked back. Splintered bone jutted from its smashed ribs. Its head little more than a malformed bag of hair and bloody skin. It limped toward Kazuo. The short hunter sidestepped and stabbed his katana down into the creature’s long shadow. A triangular hole opened up in the corpse’s chest and it went slack like a marionette held by only one string. Kazuo pulled the blade out from the shadow and the monster crumpled.