Demon Song (6 page)

“Vicki Cooper. Remember her? My clairvoyant friend from Birchwoods?”

“Yeah. She’s dead.”

“Mostly, yes. Say hi, Vicki.”

Edgar made an odd sound and handed me the night-vision contraption. There was an amused expression on his face. Strange to see a vampire with a smile. “Here, take a look.”

As the goggles spun my way, I had to smile. I turned them around so Jones could see the lens, where, in tiny little print, a reversed
Hi! :)
appeared in frost.

I raised my brows and probably had a triumphant expression on my face. “Now it’s time to play the game my way. Vick, can you find the fly attached to this joystick and take it to wherever Kevin is? Maybe flick a light in the room or something if it’s on an outside wall?”

One blink of the flashlight.

“Is Ivy here, too?”

Two rapid blinks. I don’t know why that worried me, but it caused me to ask a stupid question about a ghost. “Is she okay?”

A series of rapid flashes didn’t make any sense to me. Maybe I needed to learn Morse code. It might be that Vicki didn’t understand the question or it was too complicated to answer. “Never mind. Not important right now. We’ll talk tomorrow. For now, find Kevin. ’Kay?”

One blink. And then the temperature returned to normal.

Jones was shaking his head silently, disbelief plain on his face. It made me shrug and comment, “Hey, you’re a mage, he’s a vampire, and I’m vampire-siren-human. Why not ask a ghost to help free a werewolf?”

“Freaking unbelievable.”

Jones, Edgar, and I huddled around the tiny screen. At first there was no change. The fly hovered in the air, waiting for instructions. Then a wind caught it and began to propel it down the hallway. The night erupted with howls from inmates who could either see or sense Vicki’s presence. Guards, alerted, could find no cause. No sensors were tripped, no lights glared red, and a fly floating on a breeze was ignored.

Sights moved past too quickly to identify, though I glimpsed a couple of stairways and various doors that might or might not lead to the outside. But I knew the fly was storing the images for later viewing. I wasn’t sure how big the hard drive was, but I was betting there was at least a gig or two of memory.

Finally the fly came to rest in a room and we got our first look at Kevin. He was stripped naked and chained to a table. He wasn’t dead—his chest was moving—but his limp position and slack face told me he was unconscious. “Did he have those bruises and cuts when you went in?”

Jones shook his head grimly. “Those are all postcapture. Normally, they’d have healed by now.” Normally, werewolves heal quickly, almost as fast as vampires. Something was keeping Kevin from healing himself.

The light began to flick on and off in the room and we all raised our eyes to the wall in front of us to see a corresponding flicker on the third floor, at the far end of the building. “Edgar, can you carry a person in flight?”

He gave me a small smirk. “I think there was a children’s movie once that said it best. With the extra weight, I can’t fly. But I can fall with style.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. I’d seen the same movie. “Jones, can we do
any
magic once we’re inside the barrier? Will my boomers or charms work in there?”

He thought for a long moment, tapping his index finger on the side of the fly remote. “The barrier’s goal is to prevent any magical tampering with the security of the facility—any magic that’s categorized as an attempt to effect an escape, for example. But there may be a chance to
enhance
the security system to our benefit.”

Ahhh.
“So if we made the barrier stronger in certain places—”

He completed the sentence with a smile. “Like in front of a breach to the wall for example … then yes, it might divert power from the rest of the barrier.”

Suddenly the fly’s control screen flashed red. Apparently the fly had a feature Creede hadn’t mentioned. The word “Demon” was blinking in red at the bottom of the screen. A demonic presence had walked into the room. She had taken the form of a doctor’s aide or nurse if the uniform was any indication and was carrying a skill saw. If I could pick the least likely place for a construction saw to exist, it would be an infirmary. She stared at the unconscious werewolf with undisguised glee and then plugged the saw into an outlet.

Fuck a duck. Our deadline had just moved up.

Jones apparently agreed. “We’re going in. Now.”

Edgar was already moving toward the hole under the wall and I followed with as much mobility as my trapped-for-too-long legs would muster. Thankfully, Vicki isn’t just any random ghost. The lights went out in Kevin’s room as we raced the length of the building, which was a good block long. Edgar had just started to float up the three floors to the darkened window when a metal chair crashed against the bars, shattering the glass and showering it down on me and Jones.

Of course that set off the alarms, but it was too late to stop the party. I was still carrying the fly remote and glanced down to see Vicki create a wind that whipped the cord out of the wall and repeatedly slammed the plug against the nurse’s face. When I moved the fly so I could see Kevin, the nurse noticed it.

She plucked it out of the air and stared into the two fly eyes, which put her whole face on one side of the screen. While there was no sound pickup on the device—which I’d suggest to Creede as an improvement—there was no mistaking what she said: “Hello, Celia.”

I dropped the remote as I felt a stabbing sensation in my chest. Not long ago, I’d had an exorcism done to sever my ties to a particular demon. It had left scars on my chest that looked like claw rips. At first I’d thought the scars were burning, but the feeling went deeper … like something had grabbed my heart and squeezed. Not good.

I’d known there was the possibility that the same greater demon might be behind this, but running into him so soon after my death and resurrection by doctors and priests was terrifying.

Part of me wanted to freeze and scream, but training and common sense overrode the impulse. Guards were running in our direction. By sheer instinct I pulled a boomer from a vest pocket and tossed it while I scooped up the remote. The boomer went off with an effect that was closer to a party popper than the deafening, blinding incapacitation that I’d become accustomed to. Damn. But it wasn’t the only thing in my arsenal. I tossed a mudder. Full of concentrated water, it created a three-foot-square patch of thick mud. The guards stumbled and fell to their knees, the ground literally stolen out from under them.

As Edgar began to pry the bars away from the concrete window frame, Jones pulled the pin on a military grenade and threw it at the wall, simultaneously casting a spell that silenced the explosion.

The barrier reacted to the explosion by sealing the breach, taking power from everwhere else in the system. I could feel the pressure against my body lighten and I could move almost normally.

My next boomer worked perfectly and the guards were down for the momentary count. I looked at the screen to see the possessed nurse flying around the room. Let’s hear it for ghostly tornadoes. I needed to wake Kevin and get him ready to go. Because none of us were going to be able to carry him once he was on the ground—we were all going to be watching our collective backs.

“Cover me, Jones!” I called, but because of the silence spell no sound came out of my mouth. So I tried the siren trick I’d learned on short notice while on the Isle of Serenity. I stared at the back of his head as he pushed air around, making it impossible for the guards to get off a shot at any of us.
Jones,
I thought. He flinched and turned his head slightly.
I’m going to try to contact Kevin. Keep them off me. I won’t be able to see them coming when I’m concentrating.

He didn’t respond either verbally or in my mind, but he shifted position so he was directly between me and the guards.

It was very odd to have people moving and fighting in utter silence. Even the tornado upstairs was soundless. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t contact Vicki. Because while she was doing a great job keeping guards out of the room, she was likewise preventing Edgar from getting in. Frustrated, he was now on the ground, helping Jones keep the guards off me.

I concentrated on Kevin. Beaten, battered, and unable to protect himself. Yes, he was an ass, and yes, I was furious at him. But that didn’t mean I’d let some demon hag cut off his limbs.
Kevin. C’mon, buddy. Hear me. Wake up.

There was a smooth, blank wall of quiet inside his head. This wasn’t just from being knocked unconscious. This took drugs and lots of them.
Kevin. Wake up. Amy needs you.

Thankfully a werewolf metabolism is an amazing thing. The more I called his name, the thinner the wall in his head got. I don’t know how I could feel it, but I could.

Kev—ahhh!
It was the scream that finally woke him. I tend to react unfavorably to bullet wounds. My whole body spun around when the bullet entered my shoulder and I found myself on the ground staring up at a lot more people than had been there when I’d started to contact Kevin. The pain was intense and caused a reaction I should have expected. The vamp inside totally came out and I leapt on my nearest enemy before I could stop myself.

But that tiny bit of me that was still human refused to slam fangs into the man’s neck, despite the scent of blood that filled the air.… Instead, I grabbed the rifle and ripped it from his hands and used it like a club across his jaw. He went down like a rock and lay still. The glowing red eyes I’d glimpsed before he fell told me that the nurse wasn’t the only possessed person here. I slid my blackened knife from its sheath and laid the flat of the blade on the man’s chest. Even unconscious, he screamed—silently. Hopefully I had just sent the demon back to hell where it belonged.

Sound returned just then and my ears were assaulted by screams, shouts, sirens, and gunfire. Louder than all that was a howl of pure rage and pain from above. As I put the knife back in the sheath, I looked up to see Kevin at the window, his hair whipping from Vicki’s storm. The guards looked up also and aimed their weapons in his direction.

No. They would not shoot him. That I could prevent. I leapt into the nearest guard just in time. The guard’s shot went into the cinder block a foot away from Kevin.

We went down in a tangle of limbs that made my shoulder erupt into intense pain. I struggled to keep from screaming a second time. Edgar jumped on the guard directly to my left before he could pull the trigger. He perched on the man like a spider, holding down each limb, hissing, fangs bared. I turned away just as Edgar’s head thrust downward and the man screamed.

A different movement caught my eye. Kevin had decided not to stick around long enough for anyone to get off another shot. He’d jumped from the window. A human might break his legs, hitting the ground from three stories up. But Kevin just landed in a crouch, his face contorted into a snarl of fury.

A hand grabbed my wrist and pulled. It was my bad arm, so I hissed in pain and reacted, my fist sizzling toward whoever was attached to the hand. Jones is nimble; I’ll give him that. He shifted his head so that my fist sailed past his ear.

“Time to go.” He raised his other hand and his eyes blazed with power.

Air pressed against my head until I thought it would explode, and then the world dissolved to white.

5

“Y’know, vampire
healing isn’t your friend in a gunfight.” The voice, male and pure Jersey, brought me back to consciousness. My eyes popped open as I recognized the speaker. Gaetano, a medic who’d patched me up before, shook his head and cut deep into my shoulder with a scalpel. Thankfully I couldn’t feel anything other than pressure, which probably meant I’d been treated with a combination of morphine and a sedative spell.

“You healed right over the bullet. If I don’t get it out, it’ll sting every time you move your arm.”

“I’ll take healing over the alternative, thanks.” My tongue felt thick and unresponsive and it was impossible to keep my head straight. Good thing Gaetano was one of the good guys—or at least less bad than those who had shot me. Of course, I had been breaking out a prisoner, so maybe I was a bad guy and so was Gaetano. “By the way, are we the good guys or the bad guys?”

He smiled then and let out a snort. “Depends on the day, Graves. Today we were the good guys.” I remembered the glowing eyes of the nurse, who’d smiled with a saw in her hands, and agreed with a shudder. Gaetano’s hands pushed my shoulder down harder on the bed. The click of metal on metal said he’d probably reached the bullet. A weird sensation in my shoulder told me I was starting to metabolize the drugs. It was going to hurt soon, maybe before he finished. Maybe it would be better to concentrate on something else.

I was in a bed. The softness and the sheets gave it away. But whose bed, and when did I get there? Without moving my head, I looked around. I seemed to be in the basement of a house. A hot-water heater stood in a corner and I could see the back of a staircase beyond Gaetano’s muscular arm. “Where are we?” The direct approach is often the best.

“Safe house.” His voice held concentration. “Quit talking. It makes the drugs wear off. You’re starting to flinch.”