Demon Jack (29 page)

“No,” Lucy said finally.

Maggie nodded, seeming to turn that over. There was a pause, broken by the chirping of her cell phone. She pulled it from her pocket, checking the small screen. She tilted her head curiously and stood.

“Excuse me,” she said, heading towards the back and somewhere a bit quieter.

Lucy looked towards me.

“You okay?” I asked.

“No. No, not at all. People keep asking me if I’m okay,” she said finally, “That’s making me a lot less okay.”

I squirmed in my chair. This was awkward.

“I...” she said, her voice trailing.

“You did,” I said, nodding.

“That’s how I survive now,” she said, her tone carrying a note of finality.

“’Fraid so.”

“I... Jack...,” she said, fighting for words. Indecision was all over her face, tears running down her face. “I hate this.”

“I know... I, shit. I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Nothing, don’t say anything,” Lucy said. “There's nothing to say.”

“Still...”

“Don't, Jack, just don't.”

“We should go,” Maggie said, approaching the table and sliding the cell phone back into her hip pocket. Her eyes were set, jaw lined with grim determination.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Yavetta’s dead,” she said, her voice hushed, face drawn together in a mask of barely contained pain. She was trembling.

Lucy and I both blinked, the surprise on my face no doubt doubling that on the vampire’s. I didn’t know what to make of it, I had seen the green in Yavetta’s eyes, Legion’s eyes, and had assumed that was that. I had seen him possessed, and yet now he was dead. If that was the case, that meant that it had been the Padre. Maggie, not believing me, would act on his orders if he got the urge to impart some harm on yours truly.

The best thing I could do for the moment was play along, go with them, try and sort this out on the fly. If nothing else, it'd get me close to Hernandez, that I get a chance to put this to an end.

Chapter 29

We stepped outside, the three of us, to a haze of gently falling snow. Apparently, Mother Nature didn’t think ice was bad enough. She wanted to compound the nasty. I could feel the ache in my side pulsing in time with my chest, slowly knitting itself back together. Maggie led the way, walking across the street to a parking lot. Lucy and I followed a few steps behind her.

“Hernandez found his body at the church,” Maggie said quietly.

“What happened?” I asked.

Maggie cut her eyes back at us, the answer evident on her face. Legion happened.

“Hernandez wants to ask Lucy to see what she can dig up. So to speak,” she said.

My eyes cut to Lucy. She was walking head down, ignoring the conversation. She seemed lost, the corners of her eyes strained, the stains of tears still on her cheeks.

“So what 'appened with Adam?” Maggie asked.

“I’d rather not get into,” I said, my tone flat.

“I’d like to know.”

“Yeah? Tough shit.”

Maggie glared at me for an uneasy moment, then turned her attention once more to the parking lot.

The snow started to blanket everything. At this rate, we'd be under six inches by morning. Maggie switched her messenger bag from one shoulder to the other, fumbling in it for her keys as we approached her car.

“I take it Hernandez is meeting us?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Where the bloody 'ell are my car keys?” she said and began muttering to herself, her voice trailing off, hand rifling in her bag. I realized a second later that she wasn’t muttering in English.

I saw Lucy’s head snap up just as the discharge of wind caught her under the chin, a basketball size blast of gale force wind that slammed into her, sending her sailing forty feet through the air and into the side of a parked car. The door buckled under her, the whole thing, a massive SUV rocking up onto two wheels from the impact. She lay propped against it, moaning quietly, dazed from the sheer thunderous force of the hit. The car alarm went off, a rapid keening of noise that echoed off the nearby buildings.

“What the fuck?” I yelled, taking a step back. She pulled her hand out of her bag, the cut lining her palm pouring blood. She started chanting in Gaelic, opening another cut on her palm. I shot forward, closing the few feet of distance between us in a couple of steps. I managed to get one hand on her before the Gaelic became an indecipherable alien tongue. She had blessed the ground... Again. Instantly, pain from my wounds and the burn of addiction settled over me. I nearly collapsed under its weight. I shuddered, my stomach rolling over itself, my lungs struggling for air. I fell to one knee, my hand weak and loose on Maggie’s shirt.

“What… What the fuck are you doing?” I gasped, already winded. The culmination of my injuries and pain had become too much in a matter of seconds. Moving at all was like trying to swim through wet concrete.

“Sorry, Jackie boy,” she said quietly. “Turns out Legion’s 'ere for you and your little pal Alice. We’re gonna 'ave to get rid of that demon after all. Orders are orders.”

I struggled, fighting against the leaden weight of pain to push to my feet, to stand. The world tilted, the horizon dipping one way and then the other, before simply spinning like some kind of vomit-inducing carnival ride. I fell back down to my knees and then collapsed on my side in an ungraceful heap.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I don’t like it. I really don’t,” she said, and her voice sounded tired. “But it 'as to be done so no one else dies.”

She reached down, scooping up a handful of gravel. She muttered another bit of Gaelic, holding the small stones cupped in her palm. She dripped the blood from her bleeding hand over the rocks and tossed them on the ground in front of me. I stared at them, the crimson staining the mottled gray and black of the rock to a darker hue.

“Maggie, it doesn’t have to be like this,” I said, fighting against the tightness in my chest.

“It does.”

“No,” I said.

“Jack, don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be,” Maggie said with a sigh.

“Maggie. Please, just listen.”

She spoke another bit of murmured Gaelic and the stones began to spin, caught in a tiny whirlwind. They coalesced, rising slowly from the ground like steam. They shot forward, spinning around my wrists. She said something else I couldn’t understand and the rocks shot inwards, towards my flesh. There was a flash of heat and a set of solid stone handcuffs held me restrained. Maggie opened the back door of her car.

“Are you going to get in voluntarily, or do I 'ave to drag you in there?”

I didn’t say anything. I really couldn’t. I was still too dazed, the pain too intense, the thundering nervous clawing of addiction rattling through my skull. I didn’t so much as stand, as crawl up onto the back seat. A part of me was happy to lay down and rest.

Maggie slid into the driver's seat and started the car. Once we were rolling, she looked into the rearview, peering back at me. She seemed torn, her eyes softening. She mouthed unspoken words, and tightness returned to her features, eyes narrowing as they returned to the road.

I didn’t say anything.

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry, Jack. I know what’s in store for you when this is all said and done, but you did it to yourself.“

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

Her eyebrows shot up. I bit down on the inside of my cheek, trying to block out the myriad of agony with a new, fresher pain. It was impossible to focus, everything kept hazing in and out. Even the front seat of the car seemed far away, Maggie’s voice coming down a tunnel. I felt hot bile in the back of my throat, mixed with the coppery taste of fear. Maggie was right, there was a whole lot in store for me when this was all said and done. At the top of that list was a long trip to Hell, sans hand basket.

I was quite literally as hopeless as a newborn kitten in a yard of pitbulls.

“Yavetta’s not dead is he?” I asked her.

“No. ‘E’s the one that put two and two together, complete with proof.”

“Proof? Well that should be fucking enlightening. You should get a fucking Emmy for that little bit of acting you did in the bar to, by the way.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You do realize that either Yavetta or Hernandez is Legion, right?” I said.

She laughed, a sound of total disbelief and amusement.

“Seriously? You’re going to try that now? That’s the best you can do? The same tired story?”

“At the coffee shop, I saw it.”

“At the altercation that you initiated? Of course you saw it, you orchestrated it. You knew Legion would come for you there, so you put the three men that had you under their thumb in its way, hoping it would kill them and you could weasel your way out of this.”

I rolled my eyes, fighting back a choking cough. Granted, while the thought hadn't crossed my mind, it would have been one hell of an awesome display of the rule of unintended consequences. Still, there was nothing I could say that could make her believe me, that much was obvious. She had made up her mind. Her faith in The Three –now Two- trumped anything I could say.

“Where are we going?” I asked finally.

“The church.”

That was interesting considering what had happened there. It would more than likely be considered a murder scene by now. Granted, given the pull the Ordo had displayed, I suppose they could have had it opened or just quashed the issue altogether. More than that though, is what the church had become. It wasn't holy ground anymore. Maggie could bless small bits of ground fast, but she couldn’t do something that covered as much acreage as the church without a lot of time and work. At least I was hoping that was the case, for my sake.

“Maggie, this isn’t going to go the way you want it to,” I said, trying once more to talk sense into her.

“'Asn’t since the beginning, Jack.”

“Well, this isn’t going to make it any better.”

“Well, it can’t make it any worse,” she said, quietly.

“Yeah. Not at all,” I said.

Chapter 30

The church came into view, looming like some sort of monolithic castle out of a Gothic novel. It seemed that the whole aura of the entire block had changed since we had found the janitor's body, morphing into something dark and sinister. A heavy sense of foreboding hung thick in the air. The streetlights, as far as I could see, were all dead or flickering, casting weird patches of light and darkness over the asphalt. Shadows bathed windows that on any other night would have offered the warm glow of sanctuary. The doors had been repaired and the lack of crime scene tape didn’t really surprise me.

Must be nice to have connections.

Maggie pulled the car to the sidewalk, slipping out the door with no preamble. My door opened a second later. She reached in, grabbed the stone cuffs, and practically dragged me out onto the street. I relied on her to keep standing. I fought back a choked scream as my body twisted, tearing at the wounds in my side. She reached into her bag, pulling out a small swatch of white silk. She wiped it over my side, staining it with my blood.

“Oy, c’mon. Let’s finish this,” she said, her voice resigned and weary.

I stumbled, working to keep my footing on the snow and ice. I managed to get upright enough to walk, though every step sent fresh jolts of fire across my nerves. My head throbbed, a piercing pressure just behind the temples. A crawling, pins and needles sensation had set into my skin around my restraints and every tug on the stone made it feel like hundreds of tiny insects working their way under my muscles.

I pulled back against Maggie in a last ditch effort at escape. The cuffs tightened around my wrists until it felt like the bones in my arm were grinding against each other. I let out a small whimper that sounded like it was somewhere between a gasp and gag. Maggie gave the cuffs a quirk jerk, sending me stumbling forward and kept walking, half dragging me behind her. She didn't bother with so much as a glance over her shoulder. She led me up the steps, throwing the door to the church open and leading me inside.

The first thing that hit me was the cold. The interior of the church had to be somewhere in the negatives. It was a biting, knife-like cold. It was the type of cold that snaked its way into your lungs, threatening to freeze you from the inside out. The second thing that stood out was that the pews had been moved, leaving the church’s interior all but empty. They now lined the walls, stacked neatly on top of each other. Three massive circles had been drawn in the middle of the floor with chalk, forming a triangle. Candles sat on the outside of each, each one positioned in the center of some sort of hand-drawn symbol. They had been arranged so that each one would correspond to a point on a five-pointed star.

Maggie pushed me into the circle at the back right corner of the triangle. I landed on my side and lay there for a minute, eyes closed, trying to think. I had to figure something, someway out of this and I should probably be getting around to that pretty quick. She kept her eyes on me, pacing backwards as she put herself in the circle at point.