“The building has shielded generators. The power will be back on in the next three minutes. We need to move.”
Through the goggles I can see a sigil burning on Saint Nick’s door. It’s a circle with designs I don’t know. Tentacles and tree trunks and human limbs. At the bottom of the outer circle in letters like something off a beer--hall menu it says DER ZORN G?TTER. Of course. Pickman Investments. Heavy money. Heavy power. We’ve just blown the Angra’s Vatican bank. Yes, we need to be out of here as fast as we can.
The lock pops and Julie slides open the door. I look around for hidden hoodoo or trip wires. There’s nothing. These -people are pretty confident that their power and magic will protect them. I guess they have for all the years it’s taken to put the Angra’s return plan together. Personally, I don’t want to meet them or their Gods in anything bordering on a fair fight.
Saint Nick stands up with his arms at his side. He looks like he’s in his mid-to late thirties. A nondescript guy. Brown hair and eyes. Flat nose and thin lips. No one you’d ever notice on the street, but isn’t that how it is with serial killers? They’re the most boring -people in the world until cops dig up the basement and the news vans show up. “He was always so quiet and polite. I would never have guessed . . .”
He isn’t cuffed or shackled. There’s nothing in the cube with him, not even water or a slop bucket or any sign he’s ever had them. That means he isn’t locked in all the time. Does that mean he’s not a prisoner? This isn’t the time to worry about that.
Julie approaches him slowly and takes his arm. He lets her, and when she pulls him, he follows her out of the cube. She nods at me.
“Okay,” she says. “Take us out of here.”
“You have another glow stick?”
She lets go of Saint Nick’s arm. He sways, looks around like he’s never seen the place before. And steps into a circle.
Lights come on all around us. In the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Julie and I pull our goggles off. I shove mine in my pocket. Saint Nick looks around. Points to the far side of the room.
Qliphoth claw their way out of an altar built into the wall. A Digger comes first. It gets out and slams into the far side of the cube, clearly not getting the difficult concept of transparency. More Qliphoth crawl out behind it.
“What do we do?” says Julie.
“It’s too light. There are no shadows. How far to the roof?”
“It’s right above us.”
“Come on.”
I get down on one knee, lay the Colt’s barrel flat on the floor, and pull the trigger. The bullet cuts a groove in the plastic tiles all the way to the door at the end of the room.
“Come on.”
“What about the circles?” says Julie.
“I hope the bullet broke them. Otherwise we’re dead.”
That makes Saint Nick giggle.
I grab Julie and she grabs Saint Nick. We run for the door. Nothing comes out of the floor to bite off our legs, but the Qliphoth across the room are finding their way around the cube.
The door is locked. I start to blast it open, but if I do that, the Qliphoth will be able to follow us through. Julie doesn’t need me to tell her that. She has another lock--picking device out and attaches it to the door.
The Qliphoth are coming at us fast. I manifest the Gladius and slice it through the air. The front ones come up short and the rest bunch up behind them. They growl and grab at us, but none want to chance becoming Gladius meat. Then it hits me. They don’t have to rush us. They can just keep us here until guards find us or some Diggers tunnel through the floor and come up behind us.
“Any time now, Julie.”
“Working on it.”
Then:
“Got it.”
When the door opens I concentrate, flaring the Gladius to star bright. I have to cover my eyes, and the Qliphoth shrink back from the light. I go backward through the door and slam it shut, praying that it’s demon--proof. Just to make things more interesting, I run the Gladius around the edge of the door, welding it to the frame.
Saint Nick is standing in the stairwell smiling at nothing. I flash on Candy in the hospital and want to smash his face.
“Stark!” Julie yells. “Guards are coming upstairs. What’s up on the roof?” she says.
“Shadows. I hope.”
We run up a fight of stairs to a locked door. I kick it open and we’re on the roof. Where it’s pitch fucking black. The city lights haven’t come back on yet. Probably no one left downtown to hit the reset button.
Julie breaks a glow stick and holds it up.
“Forget it. It’s too open. There’s not enough light up here.”
“I didn’t want to do this,” she says.
She pulls out a phone and punches in a code.
I say, “Why isn’t that fried?”
“It’s shielded from the EMP.”
“Calling us a cab?”
“Better. A chopper.”
I can already hear it in the distance. As much as I hate the Vigil, I’m suddenly thrilled with them and Uncle Sam for blowing all that money on a helicopter and the fuel it’s going to take to rescue my sorry ass from a bunch of demonic accountants.
We move to a clear area near the street where the chopper can get in close. Julie sets off a blinking light and drops it at our feet. The chopper circles around, finally coming back to the building and hovering over us.
The thing about helicopters is they’re very loud. Loud enough for a metric ton of security guards in night camo to sneak up on the roof behind us and open fire.
Someone gets a lucky shot and hits the tail rotor. The chopper spins in a wild circle. It tilts away from the building like it’s looking for somewhere to land, but it’s way too out of control for that. It swings back around, the guards still firing, and crashes into the roof, punching through and into the floor below. There’s a small explosion, smoke, and the stink of burning rubber and fuel.
Now that the chopper is down, some of the guards are looking lean and hungry in our direction. I seriously do not have time for more bullshit tonight. I bark some Hellion and use a version of the hex I used on Candy earlier tonight. The one that knocked her off me. Only I don’t hold back and rip the hex as hard and long as I can.
It’s like a giant bowling ball blown by a hurricane. It knocks over the twenty or so duckpin guards, tossing some off the roof and others into the hole where the chopper went down.
But we still need a shadow. There’s only one good light source in the area and only one wall that’s going to have shadows.
I grab Julie and Saint Nick and bring them to the edge of the hole where the chopper went through. The fire is at the rear of the copter. Its fuselage throws a nice fat shadow on the wall. Julie sees it too. I lead her and Saint Nick a few yards away from the hole.
“The chopper blocked the stairs,” Julie says. “How are we going to get down there?”
“Do you believe you can fly, Wendy?”
Her eyes narrow. Saint Nick snickers.
“What?”
I grab them both and run like a son of a bitch, jumping at the last second, hoping really, really hard that carrying two lumps of meat with me hasn’t fucked up my aim.
Turns out it did a little, but not enough to kill us. Saint Nick catches the edge of the wall with his forehead. We come out of the shadow rolling like someone threw three Raggedy Anns from a car at a NASCAR race.
Eventually, we stop, and lie there on the cold Vigil floor like the lunch meat we are.
I push myself up on one elbow.
“You okay?”
One of the Vigil guards pulls Julie to her feet. She wobbles but with help stays up.
“Saint Nick is bleeding,” she says.
I look over at our cargo. Ten Vigil guards stand over him with nonlethals while a -couple more squirt restraint foam over his hands and ankles. Nick has a nice gash on his forehead, but he’s blinking and looking around, lucid enough to know he’s out of the cube and with -people who probably aren’t much friendlier than Der Zorn G?tter.
“Damn,” he says. “That’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
He rolls over and grins at me and Julie. His face is covered in scars and sutures.
“Look at you. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Saviors of the little -people.”
I kick him in the ribs.
“Don’t talk to me like you know me.”
He rolls up into a ball, hurting and laughing.
“Don’t be a killjoy, Jimmy. Come over here and give me a hug.”
It’s like someone opened me up and emptied me out. I’m cold and hot at the same time. I want to throw up. I look down at Saint Nick. His face is different, but I recognize the voice.
It’s Mason Faim.
ONCE UPON A time I was a regular jackass living a regular jackass life. I was part of a Magic Circle. There were six other -people in the circle. All of them are dead now because I killed most of them, including and especially Mason Faim. Why? Good question. Because he was the prick who sent me to Hell and the others were the assholes who stood by and watched.
But that wasn’t enough. Mason had my girlfriend Alice killed. That was just one little thing too much. I escaped Hell and came back gunning for everyone in the circle, Mason most of all.
Like any Sir Galahad asshole, I went for the worst revenge I could think of—-I sent him to Hell alive to live among the slickest, sickest Hellion torturers in the universe. Only fairy tales are full of lies and Mason is the best liar I know. He just wouldn’t take his punishment like a well--behaved villain. Mason cut deals, cut throats, and used his considerable hoodoo to try and become the new Lucifer. Did I mention that he stole Alice’s soul from Heaven and dragged it to Hell? So I had to go after him all over again. It was during that little barn dance that I lost my left arm.
I killed him once and for all in a rigged game of Russian roulette. Watched him blow his brains out, and felt just fine about it. After that, I made sure Mason’s soul was exiled in Tartarus, the Hell below Hell, where he was going to spend the rest of eternity alone in darkness.
And I lived happily ever after.
The end.
Okay, the happily--ever--after thing didn’t exactly work out, but the one thing I knew I could count on was never seeing Mason Faim alive again. And now here he is. The universe has a fucked--up sense of humor.
Of course, the lump of meat squirming on the floor isn’t entirely Mason. His real body is long gone in Hell—-I made sure of that—-so all that existed of him was his soul in Tartarus. It took some massive hoodoo to bust him out and plant the worm in one of the chop--shop bodies. I should have looked closer at Saint Nick’s eyes when we snatched him. Even if the body is all wrong, I can see Mason clear as day, staring at me from his mismatched brown and green peepers.
Still, there’s only one good thing about this moment.
I pull the Colt and point it at his hand.
I get to kill him all over again.
“Stand down, Stark,” shouts Wells.
He pushes my arm out of the way and gets between Mason and me.
“Your presence here is no longer required. Get out of here until we sort this out. You can give me your report in the morning.”
I stand there, just breathing. Mason lies on the floor looking around at the assembled Vigil morons who don’t have a clue about what’s happening but know that it’s really, really bad. Worst of all, no matter what happens after this, Mason knows he’s won the war we’ve been waging for eleven years. Just making it back to Earth and into a skin suit puts him one up on every civilian, Sub Rosa, and angel that’s ever lived. Which doesn’t mean I’m giving up. I sent him Downtown once before and I can do it again. And this time I won’t get fancy with Tartarus or anything else. I’ll kill his body and destroy his soul, wiping him out of existence.
“Stark,” says Julie. “Did you hear Marshal Wells?”
I look at him. He’s still in reach. I could toss him across the room and kill Mason before anyone could stop me and he knows it, but he stays put. Slowly, it sinks in that maybe there’s more to all this than Mason and me. There’s a dozen bodies in a meat locker and around ninety more in an asylum. And how many more that we don’t know about yet? And it’s all tied up with the Angra. Kill Mason so we can’t get any answers and it might be the biggest favor I can do for the end of the world.
I put the Colt away.
Wells nods to his crew.
“Get this thing out of here. Max lockdown. No one talks to him but me.”
They haul Mason to his feet and hustle him away to the cells at the far end of the clubhouse. He hums “Onward, Chris-tian Soldiers” until I can’t hear him anymore.
“Marshal Sola, see Stark out of here, please. When you’re done I’ll take your report in my office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Julie leads me behind some storage crates where there are a lot of deep shadows to leave through.
“Are you going to be all right?” she says.
“I just need to get out of here awhile and think.”
“I’ll probably be here all night, so I can brief you on anything that happens tomorrow. Okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.”