A LIGHT SHIMMERED IN the center of the fantastic concrete pool, glowing far below as if the image of cement was merely a reflection. The deafening drums rumbled louder, and as the accent beats kicked in, Jovienne’s feet itched to dance.
She recalled a photo of her mother wearing the traditional Hawaiian grass skirt. Her forebears danced on ocean sands surrounded by blazing torches. Maybe that was why the tribal rhythm filtered through her skin and resonated in her bloodstream, begging her body to answer this need to move, but she dared not surrender. If mired in the dance, she might be lured into the pool to drown…or worse.
Reaching over her shoulder, her thumb flicked loose the snap that held the gladius in place. Her fingers wrapped around the hilt molded to fit Andrei’s larger grip. Touching it, she felt more resistant to the drums.
In moments, one of the burnt-looking things that Gramma aptly called ‘cinders’ would rise. The coming of these things caused the visceral reaction in her and Andrei that sent them into the heights every sunset. She knew the cinders freed the demons, somehow.
An idea occurred to her: she was here to kill a demon, but what if she killed the cinder instead? Normally, they moved too fast to catch, but the warehouse wasn’t that big and this one would have to do its work here first to bring the demon to test her. It would be busy. Distracted.
Putrefied hands reached through the center of the concrete circle before her. What little skin clung to the white-tipped phalanges was blackened. The finger bones clicked as they curled to latch onto the watery cement and part it. The head crowned slowly, twisting and bobbing, before wresting its way into the world.
Desiccated flesh stretched tight to form its face. Its eyes had long ago rotted out. Even so, the thing’s black sockets were trained on Jovienne as if it could see.
Her mouth went dry, but her palms were slick with sweat. She readjusted her grip and drew the sword. The circle’s size would not allow her a solid step close enough to strike, but maybe she could get closer after it arose.
The torso lifted, covered with decaying flesh like a moth-eaten jacket. Underneath, a black, rotten heart pounded in time with the drums. Scraps of scorched muscle hung from the arms. Tendrils of burnt rope encircled the wrists. The ribcage gave way to a single column of white spine before widening out to hips and down to legs as ruined as the arms. Its half-fleshed feet also dragged a short length of burnt rope.
A fetid scent made her gag, and she held the weapon one-handed to pull the neck of her tee shirt up to cover her mouth and nose.
The thing’s face contorted, ripping the dried flesh at the corners of its mouth like dusty sackcloth. The jaw opened much too far. With a groan, the cinder twisted away and disappeared into the darkness, moving as all its kind did: in accelerated jumbles of fast-forward, concealing its actions in blurry spurts with awkward twists and abrupt turns.
Jovienne tried trailing it, but the thing zigzagged around the warehouse, misdirecting her. When it finally stopped in the left corner, it crouched and became a blur of movement. Jovienne closed in and positioned herself to behead it, determined to make a forceful chop.
As she swung, the creature sped away in a jagged path. She gave chase, but the bony feet reached the exact spot of its entry before she covered half the distance. Since it wouldn’t engage her, she drew a star from her pocket, aimed, and threw. The point lodged deep into the cinder’s spine.
Its scream was a sound like sandpaper on sandpaper. Skeletal hands clenched. It spun and reached for her, then sank, swallowed up by cement. The sound of drums followed it into nothingness.
Her ears rang in the silence.
Gooseflesh rippled in fast waves over her body.
Over her shoulder, she studied the left corner.
Step by slow step, she returned to that area. No more geist entities pretending to be demons for training purposes. Some Hell-spawned monster was coming.
The ground rumbled and protested. Something was digging and scratching under the surface. A demon, having clawed up from the depths of the earth, slammed against the bottom side of the cement, cracking it.
She angled her stance, ready to slay it as it emerged, but the demon broke through in an explosive blast that knocked Jovienne off her feet. She curled up protectively until the chunks and debris stopped raining down, then scrambled to her feet and brought the sword into a defensive position.
Hot, dusty air crawled over her and the stench of brimstone filled her nostrils. Tense, like a constricted throat aching to scream and afraid to betray her position, she remained motionless and listened.
A dark head pierced the haze. The red mouth opened wide, glowing red-orange from within and roared its wrath. When the bellow ended, its eyelids didn’t so much as open as slither back, recoiling into the head. Eyeballs missing, the glow of hot coals filled the spherical scarlet sockets too high and wide to be even vaguely human. Deep grooves spiraled into the inner skull, where purple shadows could lead the weak-willed into the demon’s mind and down an eerie path into the heated abyss.
The roar ended and its lips curled as it hissed at her. It unwrapped leathery wings to flap them like a bullfighter snapping his cape for attention in the center-ring.
According to her training, demons came in hundreds of breeds, colors, and sizes. Regardless of those factors, however, they fell into one of three classes: possessors, imps, and changelings. Defense tactics wouldn’t change much, but knowing how to slay this beast meant figuring out its class.
Before she could make that determination, dark figures materialized before her and glided up from under the curled corners of the old tiles.
A legion of the geist.
These spirits, nearly mindless like feral animals, fed on blood or carrion energy. They were drawn to violence and the promise of a painful death where they could feed their hungers the most.
Their faces warped as they mimicked the demon’s form and taunted, snarled, and cackled at her. They crowded around her, circling like a ghastly carousel, hovering up and down and surging back and forth. The discordant moans created a harsh and mournful dirge.
Although normally neutral, geist would follow the lead of the true evil in their presence. This demon’s presence inspired their aggression and a few even bolted forward to shriek in her face as if she was the scary thing.
When all of them showed empty eyes and wicked wings, they bolted to the right where the demon joined them and they all ascended the steps.
Jovienne followed, but used the ghost hands to determine the lay of the room beyond before entering. Inside, the ceiling was much lower than the warehouse below. Desks corralled a heap of chairs piled against the eastern wall. Strewn across the industrial tile flooring was silt, small pebbles, and the feather and bone remains of some feral cat’s long-ago feast. On the western side, the geist gathered around the demon.
Extended use of the ethereal hands advanced the initial tingling to a numb, cold-in-the-bones sensation. Even so, she wrapped them around her like a shield. In time, this would fatigue her physical arms, but the quintanumin made her hyper-sensitive to the presence of geist and this many overloaded her. She had another reason to shield herself, too. A demon’s lingering touch could sense details and memories of a soul, and then use mind tricks to manipulate her.
Drawing the concealed dagger from her right forearm, she held it ready to stab. This put her thumb and forefinger close to the end’s decorative screw-cap, which hid the hollow hilt with blessed water. Thus, she entered the upper room facing west.
Weak shafts of the last light fingered through broken windows in murky upward slants. It darkened the wall below and hid her quarry.
When she neared the center of the room, the horde rushed to circle her again. She assumed a defensive pose as they bobbed to varying unheard beats and floated at different speeds. Her senses congested by geist, finding that one polluted demon presence among the many was not going to be easy. She could work her way through them all or she could do something different.
Stretching one arm out before her and loosening her grip on the dagger, she let the energies they stirred flow over her palm. Long ago, Gramma taught her to feel energy. It did not take long to detect one that provoked her disgust. Moving counter to their ghostly flow, she sorted through this whirlpool and pinpointed the lone evil among the multitude.
A daring spirit surged close behind her. She swung the gladius wide.
The blade’s daily swabbing with hallowed water caused the geist to fizz and bubble. It gave a shriek of pain, and then writhed free. Falling in on itself, the geist reformed as it swirled back into the melee.
Her fingers twitched around the hilt of the dagger, sharpening her senses like fine-tuning a radio station, and re-discovered the position of that certain manifestation that felt fouler than the rest.
Changing direction and moving with the dreadful mob, she aligned herself with the real demon. Tapping the fifth aspect of the quintanumin, a stream of glistening and powdery purple light radiated from her palm around the small hilt and flowed outward to mark her prey.
Thunder boomed. Rain fell on the depository’s metal roofing like applause. Geist howled and retreated to the distant edges, but did not leave. The demon made a vicious show of grinding teeth that seemed to merge together.
It looked solid, but that vaporous overlap revealed that this was a possessor.
Shielded by the ghost arms, the threat of her being possessed was minimal. She needed to stab it, anchor it with a ring of blessed smaller blades—which it could neither touch nor pass over—and then splash it with hallowed water.
She considered which attack to lead with, but the demon saved her the trouble and charged.
She leapt, twisted mid-air, and landed behind the demon.
It slithered to a stop and its face melted through the back of its head into the front.
The demon lunged. Jovienne blocked. They traded attacks for a long minute, Jovienne dropping the blessed stars on the floor all the while. She’d laid a half-circle of steel when the demon dived to the right, giving her an opening. She swung with all her might.
The dive was fake. The demon ducked under the sharpened steel and thrust itself toward her. She fought her own momentum to bring the weapon back into a defensive position, managing to bring the pommel down on its skull. The blow lacked enough force to stop the demon. It tackled her.
Jovienne’s head cracked against the floor. Her ghost hands disappeared. Her lungs burned as though replaced with hot coals and tiny fireworks sparkled and trailed in her sight.
The demon had tackled her! She thought back. Her pommel had slammed against a physical skull. Now, its weight crushed her. It restrained her forearms with what might as well have been vises in glistening black flesh. She couldn’t bend her wrist to raise the sword she still gripped. Worse, its lower form was coiling about her legs. She kicked to no avail. The geist gathered closer.
Possessors should have no substance to bind her like this. It’s one focus should be getting inside her. This demon wasn’t a Class One, it was a Class Three.
A changeling.
The clues were all there: the real sound of clawing up and physical banging from below right before it broke through, the ‘snapping’ of its wings. Though they seemed so obvious now, she’d missed them.
The rarest class, a changeling’s main attribute was altering its form at will, which made them the hardest to identify, but there was no solace in that detail now. Defeating a changeling meant altogether different tactics and cleaving its head… something she’d never do while her wrists were pinned.
The demon yanked her arms up and slammed them down while stretching her as if it meant to break or dislocate her arms. Pain shot through her. Again, the demon repeated this assault until she was certain the impression of her was embedded in the tiles. When a dull clang followed the thump of her body against the floor, the demon finally stopped. Realizing her sword-hand was empty, a muffled cry escaped her throat.
She struggled, but gained no leverage.
“Yes. Fight me,” the demon said, letting its full weight immobilize her. “I prefer it violent. Bleeding.” Its voice was like smooth metal being scoured with steel wool, and its breath was Hell’s sulfur furnace. The stink made her eyes water. The heat blistered her skin. “Blood tastes better when you’re afraid.” Its boiling black tongue tasted her cheek.
Fighting panic, she considered what weapons she might still access: a dagger in her left sleeve, the little jeweled one on her lapel, throwing stars in her pocket. No aspect of the quintanumin could aid her.
She might as well have been weaponless.
“You’re going to die,” it snarled into her ear. The tongue wagged out of its hot mouth again and licked a burn across her throat.
For the first time in her life she understood the difference between fear and hopeless terror as the pit of her stomach erupted and an icy river coursed throughout her body. Thought failed her. She knew only coldness and trembling. Her eyes closed.
“No. Look into me.” The demon’s growl garbled the words so she barely understood them. “Look while I savor your flesh.”
She kept them shut. For her disobedience, it jerked her whole torso up and slammed her down. Her skull bounced. Stars winked through the darkness behind her eyelids.
“Look at me!”
She would not obey. She would not follow those grooves into its abysmal mind. Her aching head lolled to the side. She hoped it thought she’d blacked out.
“You will beg me to stop. I know you will.”
She felt the button of her jeans slip. Death would release her, but only after the most atrocious acts of brutality were inflicted upon her. She could not feign unconsciousness. She strained and wrestled, but like a child combating a bear, her desperate efforts achieved nothing.
The demon laughed at her. “When you beg, I’m going to rip your eyelids off and eat them first.”
Though her struggles continued, a deep quiet settled into her heart, mind, and soul. Within this strange serenity, she conceded that this had always been her fate. Her father had provided a hostile childhood void of sympathy. The recent years without him were a dream, a good dream of hope, but a dream nonetheless. He was her true pedagogue. Only his teachings mattered now because it was his lessons, “You’re a God-damned, good-for-nothing freak and we’d all be better off if you were dead,” that prepared her for this inevitable failure.
The changeling bit into the collar of her t-shirt and reared back, splitting the fabric completely.
Her mind sat in that quiet place within, watching and separate from her body as the demon shredded her laces and tore the boots off her feet, as her jeans were thrust down her legs and her buttocks touched the cold grit of the floor.
Jovienne gave up the fight.
She called the ghost arms. She would keep them until her body was completely numb. She tapped the signaling energy and started releasing it without focus. She’d use it until her mind shut down. She would sink into a coma, and this time she wouldn’t ever wake up.
She’d failed. She deserved to suffer an unspeakable death.
“Unspeakable?”
Jovienne’s eyes widened.
The demon had touched her long enough to tap her soul and read her thoughts.
“I can give you unspeakable.” The demon’s massive figure altered into something smaller. Something human sized. Something she shut her eyes to avoid seeing.
Acceptance evaporated. Her mind wasn’t in that quiet spot separate from her body anymore. She was fully present and she knew what horror her eyes would behold if she dared to open her eyes.
“Look at me when I talk to you.”
Her breath seized up in her lungs. The scouring metallic voice was replaced by a familiar one.
When she glimpsed his blue eyes and blond hair, the breath caught in her lungs burst forth in one haunted whisper: “Father?”
He laughed. “You always wanted me to love you.” He kissed her cheek tenderly. He smelled like Brut and cigarettes. “You always wanted me to hold you and make you feel good.”
She shook her head. Hot tears poured from her eyes unchecked. “No.”
“You would have done anything for my approval. Even this.” His lips pressed against hers and his tongue slipped into her mouth.
She bit him.
“C’mon, princess, that’s no way to be.”
When he called her ‘princess,’ she sobbed.
He kissed her cheek again, and then arched his body to keep hers pinned as he ran his tongue down her neck. To maintain his hold and continue, he pulled her arms a few inches lower.
Fingers splaying, something moved under her finger. She couldn’t tell what it was, but it wasn’t gritty. Her attention latched onto that strange, unidentifiable item, desperate for anything to distract her. It was a black feather.
He bit the mound of her breast. She screamed at both the pain and the fact that he would not let her mind escape the moment.
“You don’t like it rough, honey? Your mother didn’t either. Not at first. But she learned to like what I did to her. So will you.” He bit another spot, bruising her, but not breaking the skin. “See? That’s not so terrible, is it?”
Disgusted and humiliated by the desire shining in his eyes, nausea churned in her stomach and her sobs became dry heaves.
“Don’t cry, princess.”
“Princess? Princess?” She choked on the words. Her throat was so tight, making any sound hurt. “I’d have died to hear you call me that.”
She despised the pitifulness of her own voice.
“I know,” he said adoringly. “I know, honey. But Cali was my princess then. Now she’s dead.” His tone grew sharper and menacing. “Your mother’s dead too. That leaves you. Just you. You’ll be my pretty little fuck princess now. Won’t you?” With his feet and knees, he forced her legs open.
She hated him. She hated everything he’d ever said, everything he’d ever done. She hated him for beating her mother. She hated him for keeping her mother from coddling her. She hated him for pushing her grandmother down the stairs. She wanted to make him suffer as he had made her suffer. She wanted him to feel pain and fear.
But she could do none of that. All she could do was rob him of some tiny scrap of joy. Letting her head loll to the side, she prepared to summon and release all the quintanumin energy she could, ready to let the coma comfort her and steal his victory.
But it would take minutes to have any effect. The acceleration aspect would drain her quicker, but until it did, every second would feel longer. Either way, she was going to suffer.
His breath was hot on her ear as he said, “Are you ready, honey? You’ve waited a long, long time for my love. I promise it’ll be everything you hoped it’d be. And more.”
The black feather fluttered against her hand. She grabbed it. As soon as she held the fibers, a mental curtain drew back and the language of years past surged from her throat: “‘Alala! Lohe ko’u ho’okalakupua kahea!”
Chicago, Illinois
SOMEONE ALWAYS THREW up on Saturday nights. Always.
Nathan Marshall got to clean it up.
The bar was small and, as he understood it, crowded from open to close, but he never patronized this place. He believed it was a sex ring front due to the copious amounts of used condoms in the garbage he emptied in the two ‘offices.’
The syringes didn’t decrease that suspicion. Or the fact that the boss paid him in cash. Nathan didn’t ask questions. He just washed away the vomit, scrubbed the toilets, mopped the floors, and took out the trash.
He wasn’t fond of the work, but he clung to the thread of hope that the unclean environment would tarnish him so much he would stop making his own messes. That wish hadn’t come true, yet. And, as the sensation began, like worms squirming all over his skin, he knew it wasn’t coming true tonight, either. He dropped the garbage bag and pushed up his sleeves. He kicked off one shoe as he reached for his belt, but he didn’t get it unfastened before his whole body went numb. He felt himself leave the ground and everything went white.
Consciousness rushed back into him as he was falling. He remained numb, though, and couldn’t move even to keep his head from cracking against the bathroom tile floor. He laid in a pool of his own blood, wondering if it had lasted seconds or minutes or hours. Control of his body would return, and when it did, everything would hurt.
Worse than that pain, however, was the knowledge that it would, without warning, happen again. This will never end.
Twinkling lights burst before his eyes and his aching body became his own again. He’d promised himself that next time would be the last time. ‘Next time’ had arrived.
Shaking fingers scrabbled under his pant leg and into his blood-soaked sock. The gun was small but loaded with .380s. It would be enough.
He clicked the safety off as he shoved the cold steel between his teeth. The front sight tore the skin on the roof of his mouth. His tongue flicked along the muzzle. Gun oil made him gag. The unforgiving solidity of that barrel could end his torment, but he began to shake. There wasn’t enough air. Not enough strength in his finger to pull that small trigger.
His ‘next time’ pledge proved to be another useless mental bargain discarded atop the shards of choices he would never get to make. He could not choose to stop being stigmata. Neither could he choose to die.
This life isn’t yours to take.