Premonitions (13 page)

Ah. There was an obvious answer. A miserable, terrible, degrading obvious answer, dragged up from his past and fraught with every kind of risk he could think of.

“Forcas,” he whispered, unable to bring himself to speak the name more loudly.

A new image, that of a wolf, snarling, muzzle stained with blood. It lunged at another, smaller wolf and tore out its throat, spraying red over snow.

Great. Apparently they’re not friends.
“How do you think
I
feel about it? I’m the guy who fucked it out of a
hundred years it never wanted to give me. How I’m going to fuck it out of another hundred is quite beyond me right now.” He wouldn’t, he knew. There would be a full bargain this time. A bargain, and amends. Probably some kind of gruesome payment with interest.

What choice did he have?

“Can you tell me how to contact it? Or find someone who can?”

A pay phone. A gold-inscribed summoning circle, with candles blazing at the points of a pentacle inside. The meaning was obvious.
Just call it.

“I don’t do that anymore.” Sobell sighed. “I
can’t
do that anymore. Can’t risk it.” Summoning was serious business, unbelievably dangerous at the best of times. In his current situation, it would be an open invitation for something nasty to move in. It crossed his mind to subcontract the job—just get somebody else to summon the thing—but he ruled it out immediately. There was nobody he trusted enough to act as an intermediary between him and a demon, and nobody he’d trust with the knowledge of his current vulnerable state. “I just need some information. Some way to get started.”

A little boy, maybe five years old, arms crossed and lower lip thrust out, pouting. A slick-looking salesman, leading a woman from one car to a different one.

“There’s nothing else I need,” Sobell said. “No matter how unpleasant it is for you to send me to one of your rivals, I promise it will be more unpleasant for me. It’s this or nothing.”

Another long pause. Then, at last, a floating, disembodied Cheshire cat grin.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” In five minutes, his hopes had sunk from getting his life extended to maybe getting some information on it, to maybe getting some information on whom to talk to to talk to another demon he’d already pissed off once in hopes of reconciling their differences. This was weak indeed, but the sad fact was that he didn’t have much left in the way of options. If there had been other avenues remaining, he wouldn’t have orchestrated this goddamn foolish episode and be down
here in an idiot cult leader’s basement, fucking around with a demon. “Very well. Let’s do this.”

Judas dickering with some Romans. A hand extended, palm up.

“Cute. How’s this for payment?” He opened his satchel and pulled out a bundle about the size of a shoebox, wrapped in black cloth. The bottom shone brightly, silver light tearing through every seam. Sobell was surprised to see that the light didn’t stop at the runes on the floor, but penetrated into the cloud of darkness beyond. For a split second, he almost looked deeper into the darkness—then he recovered his wits.

A sense of vast, deep hunger enveloped him, and something in the darkness moved. He turned around, rather than risk getting a look at it.

“One angel heart,” he called over his shoulder, “for your personal collection. You can eat it, keep it, or fuck it for all I care. In exchange, I need a hundred years.”

More images—an empty safe, a penniless beggar.

It had been worth a try. You could never tell when they were just being cheap. “Very well. I need you to tell me what I have to do, who I have to talk to, deal with, or kill, to meet with Forcas
without
having to summon the damned thing.”

Bloody fingers held together. A smoldering wax seal smashed onto parchment.

“Done.” He took a deep breath, dreading the next few moments. The demon had to keep its bargains, or so he’d been told. Such had been his experience, as well. Nevertheless, how could one really know? Even his vast experience held only a few nuggets of wisdom regarding these creatures, and if the ones he’d dealt with in the past were bound by their word—or merely abided by it because it amused them to do so—who could say whether those rules applied to the incalculably ancient and powerful creature behind the sigils?

He set the heart on the ground. Then he took a small blob of clay out of his satchel, dropped it on the floor, and used his shoe to smear it across one of the runes, filling the carving and, for all practical purposes, erasing it.

Just before his foot crossed the line, he closed his eyes.

Heat engulfed him, seeming to come from inside rather than out, welling up from a tiny core in his belly to burn his body, spreading outward to his shoulders, elbows, knees, out to his fingertips and toes, so intense that he felt he must burst apart as all the fluids in his body reached a boil. A series of images was burned into his mind as he stood there, bewildering in its apparent randomness. A bony, sharp-faced man of middling age with a scruff of patchy beard. When he opened his mouth, it was teeming with slimy white worms. A woman with serpents for arms. Thirteen vultures circling a stone slab. And lots of blood. Of course.

The last image was that of a seedy-looking man in a fedora and a moth-eaten pin-striped suit, holding three dice carved of dull black bone in his hand, and Sobell felt a shock of recognition. He knew that guy, or had years ago.

That was a place to start, then.

The heat dissipated as suddenly as it had come. Down the hall, men screamed.

Sobell opened his eyes. The heart was gone.

Alone in the corridor, he began to laugh.

* * *

The goggles were amazing, and Anna would have liked more time to simply marvel at them. The fog and smoke were practically invisible through them, while the screaming and scrambling bodies were lit up like billboards outside a car lot. It took almost no effort to avoid the frightened cult members as they caromed off each other and fell down and crawled away from the sudden eruption of chaos. This was gear they should have sprung for a long time ago.

She turned to grin at Genevieve, but the other woman was already cutting a path toward the altar. Anna picked up speed and followed.

Between the goggles and the respirator, she felt weirdly isolated from the scene, as though she were watching a movie or playing an incredibly realistic video game. The only thing tethering her to reality, it seemed,
was the irritation of the exposed areas of her face caused by the clouds of tear gas that still hung in the air. If she could just rinse that away, this would be nothing more than entertainment.

Dangerous way to think, girl. None of that shit.

Ahead, a figure approached Genevieve, whether seeking help or accosting her, Anna couldn’t tell. Anna lifted her Taser. Genevieve held out a hand. Nothing happened that Anna could see, but Genevieve’s interlocutor fell back, clutching his face.

A moment later, Anna caught up.

“You OK?” she yelled.

“Yeah. Come on!”

Between the shouting, the screaming, and the chattering bursts of Nail’s machine gun, the noise was nearly intolerable. Anna grimaced and wished she could put her fingers in her ears, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Tough to carry a weapon and fend off the angry hordes of the Brotherhood without using your hands.

Genevieve pushed aside a couple of crouched bodies and moved past to the altar. She looked down at something Anna saw as a huddled gray blob of heat pressed against the stone, then up.

“Shit! Help!”

A second later, Anna joined her. “Is he breathing?” Genevieve shouted, pointing at the body on the slab.

“Jesus, I—oh.” It had been hard to tell through the goggles what she was looking at, but the spreading pool of warmth on the surface of the altar told her most of what she needed to know.

“No. He’s dead.”

“Oh, God.”

Jesus Christ, what a mess.
Anna moved toward where she thought the house was, stumbling around a couple of downed cult members. Somebody threw a wild punch, and she dodged, getting all tangled up with the guy and turned around. He went down gagging a moment or two later, but by then she had no idea where Genevieve had gotten off to. Fifteen steps through the crowd, and a familiar voice reached her.

“Come on!”

Tommy. And, sure enough, ahead and to her right, a man-shaped warm spot was taking off like hell after another figure, farther in the distance.

She lit out after them.

They had quite a head start, but Tommy was in no great shape, and the guy ahead of him seemed even worse off. By the time the two of them reached the main house, Tommy was slowing and the other guy was practically stumbling, slowing down with every step. Anna put on a surge of speed as the two men went in through the sliding glass door ahead. Her feet slipped in the wet grass, but she flailed and kept her balance. Moments later, she burst into a huge open space with glass on one side and a wall of stone, still radiating warmth from the day, on the other. Her footfalls were harsh slaps on stone as she pounded through the room, nearly catching up with Tommy by the other side.

Tommy tore his respirator off and let it bounce against his chest as he rushed forward. The other man—Mendelsohn, she guessed—was old and slow, and there was only one way this footrace could end.

“Come on!” Anna yelled, and she sped past Tommy.

Everything was dark in here, and roughly the same temperature, and damn near impossible to see. Anna missed a turn and rebounded off a wall, hard. She pulled her goggles and respirator down around her neck. The corridor she was in was dark, but not too dark, swathed in shades of gray, and Mendelsohn ran toward the far end. She rushed forward, caught up, and lunged, just missing the fluttering fabric of Mendelsohn’s robe as he pushed off the corner and bounced into a large living space.

Halfway across the room Mendelsohn’s foot caught on the edge of the carpet, and he tripped.

Got you!
Anna thought, and then a sound like an exploding train, still rushing forward on its tracks, smashed the world open.
Something
burst from a stairwell near the edge of the room, something shrouded in darkness.

Ahead of her, Mendelsohn let loose a scream of
terror unlike anything Anna had ever heard, a high-pitched, wavering shriek more like a mortally wounded animal than a human being.

Anna didn’t know what the thing in darkness was, but she
felt
it, and the hate radiating from its heart set her body trembling with fear. Her screams joined Mendelsohn’s, and she threw herself to the side, back, in any direction at all that would get her away from it.

The fucking bone wasn’t worth this. She managed to orient herself and began to flee back to the corridor, just as Tommy rounded the corner and rushed into the room. He took half a dozen halting steps into the room, seeming to stare blankly at the thing in darkness. His goggles blew apart. He fell to his knees, mouth still hanging open.

To Anna’s left, the darkness reached out and enveloped Mendelsohn. There was a horrible wet, crunching sound. Incredibly, Mendelsohn’s scream grew louder. Across the room, Tommy began clawing at his own face. Anna ran toward him.

Ahead of her, somebody else emerged from the corridor behind Tommy. Whoever it was fired one shot, a brief bright blaze in the darkness, stumbled back and fired again just as Anna reached Tommy.

Warm wet blood sprayed across Anna’s arm, and Tommy collapsed to the floor.

Mendelsohn’s screams stopped abruptly, and suddenly the darkness and hate were gone.

“Tommy!”

The blood was forgotten as Tommy’s screams ripped the air. Anna knelt next to him, mindless of the hot wetness that soaked the knees of her jeans. She pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on.

“Tommy, are you all—” The question fell dead from her lips when she saw the tattered hole in the front of his shirt. For a moment, she could do nothing but stare. Then Tommy’s screams tapered off. He curled up, huddled into himself, and shivered.

Genevieve rushed into the room, stopped, and looked around helplessly. She ran past Anna, doing something
in the darkness, something that involved a lot of wet, squishing footsteps, but Anna paid no attention.

There was no more time for this. Anna pressed a button by her hip and spoke into her headset. “Tommy’s down!” she yelled. “Abort this fucking disaster. Nail, get the van out front. Now!”

“Fuck! Fuck!
Put him down, here. No, here. Christ, not on the ground, put down a blanket or something!” Anna ran her hands through her hair, smearing sweat, blood, and grime across her forehead. “Where’s Lau? Where’s the fucking doctor?”

They’d fled to the junkyard after the debacle at Mendelsohn’s. Anna had stolen one of the cars out front and hauled ass to meet Nail, transferring Tommy to the van outside the estate. Tommy had screamed and cried during the whole ride, but now he was alarmingly quiet.

“He’s coming,” Nail said. “Fast as he can.” Sweat shone on his face, gleaming in the van’s headlights. Destroyed cars hulked around them. They seemed to lean inward, grilles spread in grim metal smiles, to watch the bloody spectacle.

“It’s gonna be OK, man. You gonna be OK.” Nail knelt next to Tommy, holding his head up and trying to give him water. It spilled down his cheeks, and Tommy coughed twice, violently. Dark specks appeared on Nail’s skin and glasses.

“OK,” Genevieve said. She paced back and forth between the stacks of cars and repeated this pointless bullshit to herself. “OK. OK. It’s going to be O-fucking-K. OK.” Anna thought she was hyperventilating.

Anna knelt on Tommy’s other side, opposite Nail, and pushed like hell on the wadded-up shirt that was holding
Tommy’s guts in. It was soaked through already, and her hands were slimy with blood.

“Where’s the fucking doctor?” she shouted.

“He’s coming! He’s coming, goddammit!” Nail said.

“I need more bandages. Now!” She didn’t know whether she needed more bandages or not—where was Lau, fucking Lau, the fucking doctor?—but she had to do something.

Nail handed her his shirt. “It’s all I got.”

She took it. She threw the old, blood-soaked shirt to the side. The light wasn’t great, but even so, she gagged at the sight of Tommy’s wound. His T-shirt was shredded, a ragged hole blown through it by the bullet that had mushroomed and fragmented as it plowed through his body. A hole big enough for her to put both fists in poured blood from high in his belly.

He coughed again, less violently this time. A thick trickle of black blood ran from his mouth.

“Can’t breathe,” he said. His voice was barely audible, a low sound like softly tearing paper, but Anna felt a crazy relief. They were the first coherent words he’d said since she and Genevieve had found him. “No air.”

Anna crumpled Nail’s shirt into a ball and jammed it into the wound, trying to ignore the slippery, squishy feel.
Apply pressure,
she thought.
You’re supposed to apply pressure
. Really, though? Were you still supposed to apply pressure when the bandage was going into the guy’s stomach cavity, and your hands were going in after it? Was that really how it was supposed to work? She didn’t know, nobody knew, and Lau wasn’t there and nobody could tell her anything, so she pushed until the wound was packed and her fingers were touching things she didn’t want to think about.

Tommy didn’t even wince. Anna watched his face for any sign of emotion or engagement, but he’d checked out again since his earlier comment. She hoped he was drifting somewhere without pain.

Anna looked up, past Tommy and Nail. Karyn stood in the center of the clearing. Her face hung slack,
seemingly without comprehension, but wetness gleamed in her eyes. By her sides, her fists hung loose, closing and opening in uneven twitches.

Like Tommy’s heart, Anna thought.

Nail dropped his hand to Tommy’s wrist. “I can’t find anything,” he said. “Come on, man, give me something here.” Worry creased his brow, and his eyes were in constant motion, moving from Tommy to Anna to Karyn.

The twitching in Karyn’s hands weakened, then stilled.

“What are you doing?” Anna yelled. “Fucking help us!”

Karyn stepped back, still staring at a spot somewhere past Anna. The sound of her boots grinding the rocky sand was louder than Tommy’s breathing. “I don’t—”

“Didn’t see this coming, did you? You don’t think maybe you coulda cracked open the future and looked around for
this
?”

Karyn flinched. “I couldn’t, it doesn’t—”

“You couldn’t what?” Tears mingled with the sweat running down Anna’s face. She didn’t care. “You couldn’t what?”

For the first time, Karyn focused on Anna’s face. “You know it’s not that easy,” she said. A note of pleading had wormed its way into her voice. Anna found herself taking a small, petty satisfaction at that. “You know that.”

Nail’s voice, low and jagged: “He’s not breathing.”

Anna pulled her attention back to Tommy. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead, and blood from his mouth and nose pooled at the base of his neck. His chest didn’t move.

Nail closed his eyes. He started to speak, let out a half-strangled syllable, then shook his head.

Anna met Karyn’s eyes and summoned every ounce of venom she had. “You were supposed to stop this,” she said.

Karyn’s gaze lingered on her face for one long breath. Then, without a word, she turned away and started walking.