For a while the only sound was the distant roar of traffic from the expressway and the lazy rush of Fresh Kills River. Then Marlow’s friend, the boy called Charlie, laughed. It was high-pitched and desperate, and there was a hint of lunacy in it. Pan knew the sound, she’d made pretty much the same one when she’d first been told about the Engine. She’d also told Herc to go screw himself and various members of his family, then slapped him across the face for wasting her time. She looked at the old guy and smiled warmly. Seemed like an eternity ago that he’d walked into her cell and told her she had choices.
It wasn’t easy to hear, though, she knew that much. Marlow and Charlie were staring at her with big, vacant expressions. She knew exactly what they were thinking. She would have felt sorry for them if her heart had been whole.
“The Devil?” said Marlow.
“It’s not…” How had Herc explained it to her, all those years ago? “It’s not the Devil, not the way you think. It’s not something you’ll ever find in the Bible. It’s something older than that, something nobody really understands. The Devil’s just a name for it. All we know is that you make a deal with the Engine. You ask it for whatever you want and it grants your wish. But not forever. You get twenty-seven days and change.”
“Twenty-seven days,” said Charlie. “Random.”
“Six hundred and sixty-six hours, to be precise,” she said.
“Then what?” Marlow asked. “You lose your … your powers?”
If only it were that simple.
“No, you don’t lose them, you keep them till the end. Not that they’ll do you much good. No, you make a contract with the machine, a contract signed in blood. You get whatever your heart desires for six hundred and sixty-six hours. Then, when the contract expires, you pay up.”
“Pay up?” Marlow and Charlie asked together.
“With your life,” she said. “And … and something else, too.”
“There’s something worse than losing your life?” snorted Marlow.
“Yeah,” said Pan, turning and looking at the river, at the island beyond. It looked like a paradise now, flowers and trees and switchgrass. But she knew that underneath lay half a century of trash and rubble and ruin. Just like my world, she thought. Everything looks okay, but scratch the surface and there are horrors there, things that you could never have imagined. And once again she thought of Mammon, heaving himself up the road, just too big, too powerful to fit in this universe.
“What’s worse than that?” Charlie asked.
“It takes your soul,” she said eventually, knowing how stupid it sounded even though she’d almost lost hers so many times. Charlie laughed again, and even Marlow was smiling. A solar flare of anger erupted inside her head but she bit down hard. “Why is that so hard to believe? You’ve seen them, the demons. You’ve seen them with your own eyes.”
“The things in the parking lot,” Marlow said, “they were demons?”
“It’s just our word for them,” Pan said. “We don’t know what they are. All we know is that you do not want to let your contract expire, because that’s when they come. They can’t exist in this world, they can only possess things.”
“Like the Exorcist?” Marlow asked.
“Kind of,” she said. “But like the opposite too. They can’t possess anything living. They can’t get inside you or another human or an animal. Not even a plant.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Marlow said. “They were coming out of the walls, out of cars.”
“Not out of them, they were made from them.” Pan closed her eyes and saw them there, clawing their way from the ground, from tables and chairs, from trucks, from anything and everything. “They can only possess inanimate objects, things without a soul. But that’s worse, that’s a whole lot worse, because you cannot hide from them. There is no place on Earth you can be safe.”
“But you can kill them, right?” asked Marlow. “I saw you.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Once your contract is up you’re finished. You still have your powers, right up until you die, so you can fight them off for a while. But only for a while, no power can keep them at bay forever. Shotguns slow them down, but you have to blast the hell out of whatever they’ve possessed—literally blast the hell. It takes a huge amount of energy for them to form in this world, this plane. They’re strong, but only as strong as the material they possess. If you destroy the host, then you destroy the parasite—but only for as long as it takes the demon to build up the energy to cross over again for another possession. You can hold them off for a while, but you’re only delaying the inevitable. If your time is up, they will take you.”
“Take you where?” Marlow asked. Pan shrugged. She’d asked Herc the same question. She’d asked Ostheim too. The truth was that nobody knew, but she had a good enough idea. She’d seen it too many times, the demons dragging you into the molten earth, into the fire. She’d felt it too, the other day when she thought her time had come. A huge, gaping, burning emptiness, the weight of eternity on her shoulders.
“Take you somewhere you really don’t want to be,” she said.
There was a moment of silence, broken only by a meaty fart from Truck’s direction. It didn’t do much to relieve the tension.
“So how come you’re still here?” Marlow asked. “How come the demons didn’t take you the other day? You survived.”
“I survived because my contract was broken,” she said.
“Broken?”
This was always the hardest part to explain. Pan took a deep breath.
“The Engine is a machine. It brokers a contract. Years ago, centuries, when the machine was first built, the contracts were unbreakable. I mean, there are so many moving parts, so many variables, that nobody would have been able to crack the deal. But things have changed. Technology has improved. We’ve cataloged the machine, we’ve made digital maps of every section—well, the sections we use—we have a much greater understanding of how it works and a team of Lawyers who work nonstop to break the contract before it expires.”
“Lawyers?” Charlie asked.
“Anyone else hear an echo out here?” she said. “Yes, Lawyers. But not like ambulance chasers or suits. These are more like … They’re essentially quantum mathematicians. Cleverest guys on the planet, probably. We just call them Lawyers because it annoys the hell out of them.”
“And they, what? Take the Engine to court, get a restraining order?” Marlow said.
He turned away and she locked her reply deep in her throat. Arguing wasn’t going to help anyone right now.
“You’ve seen it,” Pan said. “You want the truth, just think. How else is any of this possible?”
“And what about the thing that chased us up the road?” Marlow asked. “That a demon too?”
Pan sighed. “No, not quite. Mammon is something else entirely, something—”
“Hey!” It was Herc, yelling from the van. He clapped his big hands together. “Enough with the socializing, our guest’s waking up.”
Pan jogged over, peering into the darkness to see that Brianna was starting to stir. Her blond hair was a mess, her clothes filthy and torn. She sat up, blinking away sleep, and Pan saw the moment of blissful unawareness before her memory clunked back into place. She scooted back on her ass, hitting the back of the van. Her brow furrowed and Pan felt a stab of pain in the left-hand side of her brain. Herc must have felt something too because he unholstered his pistol and aimed it at her head.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, clicking back the hammer. “I feel so much as a probe up there and we’ll be reading your mind when we wash it off the back of the van, understand?”
The pain in Pan’s head vanished as the girl nodded.
“Brianna,” Pan said. She looked at Pan, a rabbit in the headlights. Truck appeared, blocking out the light. Night was there, too. Pan reached in and grabbed another bottle of water from the duffel bag and offered it to the girl. “Thirsty?” Brianna shook her head like she’d been offered a bottle of poison.
“She’s young,” said Night. “Too young to be fighting for them.”
“I’m seventeen,” the girl replied, showing none of the confidence she’d had back in the school. “Just.”
“Well, happy goddamned birthday,” Herc said. “You must know what’s going to happen now.”
“You’re gonna ask me questions,” she said, some of that bluster returning. “And I’m going to lie.”
“Then we’re gonna stop asking so nicely,” Pan said. “Where is your Engine?”
“You should know,” the girl said. “It’s up your butt.”
“Where is Mammon?”
“Coming for you,” she said, meeting Pan’s eyes, not blinking. “He knows all about you, all of you. He’s going to end you.”
“Yeah?” said Pan. “From what I saw back there he couldn’t even get his fat ass up the street.”
But something in her expression must have given away her fear because Brianna smiled.
“He’ll eat you alive,” she said. “I just wish I could be there to see it.”
“Why won’t you be?” asked Herc. “Got a vacation planned?”
She just shrugged, sadly, and glanced at her watch. It must have been broken, because she rattled it, then looked up and asked, “Anyone got the time?”
“Yeah,” said Herc. “Time you woke up, kiddo. Mammon’s got his agenda but you don’t have to be a part of it. There are other ways of doing things.”
“Like your way?” she said, looking at Herc as if he were a piece of dog crap she was cleaning off her shoe. “I’d rather die.”
“Yeah?” Pan said, resisting the urge to reach for her crossbow and grant the girl’s wish. “You guys make me sick. You’ve got all the power in the world and you live like this, you waste it.”
Chaos, bloodshed, rot, and ruin. It’s all the Circle cared about.
“All you have to do is give us the location,” said Herc. “Last chance.”
“She’s never going to do it,” said Pan. “It won’t even matter if she does. She could tell us exactly where it is, longitude and latitude, and we won’t find it. How many times do we have to do this dance? Tell us about Mammon. How can we find him, and how do we kill him?”
“You don’t need to find him,” she said. “He’ll find you. I told you, he’s going to find your Engine, and when he does this will all be over. Please, does somebody have the time?”
The fuse on Pan’s patience burned up and the fury detonated in her gut. She reached out and snatched Herc’s gun from his sweaty hand before he even saw it coming, stepping into the van and pressing the weapon against the girl’s temple. She hissed with pain but the look she gave Pan showed no sign of weakness.
“Mammon,” Pan said. “Now.”
“Pan!” Herc said, but she ignored him. Having one of the enemy right here, at their mercy, was a rarity. They had to make the most of it.
“Go on,” said the girl. “Do it.”
“You’re willing to die for him?” Pan asked.
“I’d do anything for him,” Brianna said. “Anything to stop you—stop Ostheim—getting what he wants. Now, please, would somebody tell me what the time is.”
It suddenly clicked, why she was so desperate to know.
“Oh crap,” Pan said, lowering the gun and hopping out of the van. “She’s expiring.”
“Now?” asked Herc, swearing. He started to back away. “Not in the van goddammit.”
Pan stood by the door, refusing to believe it. There was no way the Circulus Inferni would let her expire, not like this. Mindreading was an easy contract to break, one of the easiest. The Circle’s Lawyers would have no trouble. Mammon was an evil bastard but surely even he wouldn’t give up one of his own without a fight. Brianna looked up, her eyes full of a sad, tired resignation.
“You’re fighting for the wrong side,” she said. “Mammon would welcome you. He welcomes everyone.”
“Yeah,” said Pan. “I can see how much he cares. He’s going to let you expire.”
Brianna shrugged.
“Happens to us all, eventually.”
“Not like this, though,” said Pan, and she had to bite down on her lip to stop the lump in her throat from exploding out of her mouth. “Not like this.”
There was a crack of static as loud as a pistol shot, powerful enough to dent the van and rock it hard on its suspension. Brianna let loose a scream, clamping her hand to her mouth. Everyone scattered but Pan held her ground, even as the ground beneath her trembled and cracked. It was like the earth was splitting in two.
“He can’t do this,” she said. “It’s not right.”
A bolt of brilliant blue light fizzed past her, a rip in reality that breathed out a blast of hot air. Pan gagged against the stench of sulfur, staggering away and wiping the tears from her eyes. There was another crunch, an invisible fist hammering a crater into the roof of the van. One of the tires exploded, the headlights shattered. Pan looked into the growing darkness, Brianna just a lump of shadow with two diamond-bright eyes. She stared back, full of fear, full of defiance.
“Last chance,” Pan said. “You don’t have to die for nothing.”
“I’m not,” she replied, her voice almost lost in a growl of thunder. “I’m dying for him. He saved me. He’ll save us all.”
“He’s sending you to hell,” Pan said, then she had to throw her hand in front of her face against an explosion of light. A shock wave hit her in the chest like a tackle and she lost her footing, landing painfully on her back and rolling in the dirt. She felt hands under her armpits, dragging her away, and by the time she’d opened her eyes again it was over.
At first it looked like the van was inside a compactor, the metal crumpling like tin foil, shrinking. Then something began to pull itself free of the wreck, a vaguely bestial shape with a head made up of the wheel arch and half a tire, the body formed of the back bumper. It unfolded with an ear-shredding metallic squeal, the whole rear of the vehicle tearing away. The demon shook itself like a dog, gas spurting from the ruptured fuel line and pooling on the asphalt.
Something else was rising from the ground like a corpse dragging itself out of its grave. It looked like a turtle, a shell of asphalt over a body of orange dirt. A metal pipe ran the length of its midsection like it had been speared. It wriggled, its legs thrashing, until the pipe snapped free, then it hauled itself out of the hole, opened a maw of concrete, and screamed.
“Jesus Christ.” Pan heard Marlow’s voice by her side and glanced at him, seeing the terror etched into his face. He was chewing his knuckles like he hadn’t eaten in a month. She ignored him, turning back to the van.
“They won’t hurt you,” Herc told the boy. “Not unless you get in between them and her. They only want what they’re owed.”
Her soul.
The metal demon sniffed the air, then darted forward like a scorpion, pushing its snout into the gaping hole at the back of the van. Brianna groaned, jumping out of the door and making a run for it. Both demons howled, like dogs catching scent of their prey—a noise like a thousand fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. Pan slammed her hands to her ears and gritted her teeth against it. Every fiber of her being was telling her to go, to get the hell out of here before the demons discovered she was there. But Herc was right: they wouldn’t come for her, not this time.
“Can’t we do something?” Marlow said. “Help her!”
Brianna skidded around the front of the van, almost tripping. The concrete demon reared up in front of her, twelve, thirteen feet tall, showering the parking lot with dirt. It swung a fist made of rock and Brianna only just managed to duck beneath it. It struck the remains of the van and sent it rolling across the ground, spraying glass and shrapnel. The girl scrabbled on her hands and knees but she only made it a dozen yards before the van demon caught up with her.
“Please,” Marlow said.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Pan replied, her voice made of ice. “She signed a contract.”
The demon clamped a hand around Brianna’s chest, hoisting her into the air. The girl tried to scream, batting her hands pathetically against the metal fist. The dirt demon loped over, uttering another hellish screech. Already the ground was growing soft beneath them, the skeletal remains of the van starting to sink into the melting asphalt, the spilled gas bursting into flame.
I’m sorry, Pan said, knowing that Brianna still had the ability to hear her. It should never be like this.
Brianna stopped struggling and looked right at Pan with those red-rimmed eyes. She breathed in a long, desperate breath. Then she spoke, and even from where Pan stood, even over the deafening clatter of the demons and the roar of the fire, Pan could hear her.
“I’ll see you in hell.”
The metal demon’s jaws snapped shut around the girl like a bear trap, cutting her in two. The other demon attacked, its gaping maw engulfing her. All three of them were sinking into the earth, the air dancing around them, so hot that Brianna’s blood ignited, hissing and steaming. Pan wanted to turn away but she forced herself to watch as the demons fought over the girl, devouring her like wild dogs until all that remained were charred scraps of meat.
Then, just like that, it was over. Brianna vanished beneath the scorched earth. The demons collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut, the metal one crashing to the ground, the other one dissolving in a hail of dirt. The parking lot fell quiet, the ground becoming solid once again, but Pan swore she could still hear Brianna, a distant, unending scream as the very essence of her was dragged into the depths.
Only when that, too, had faded did Pan finally close her eyes, and start to cry.