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Gabriel shrugged on his jacket and snapped the fasteners of his black leather gloves. Cradling an oblong object wrapped in a plastic bag, he walked toward the back entrance of the café on Fourth Street.
The Fat Mule was his usual haunt and it would do as long as the ape hangers didn’t give him sideways looks, mouthing obscenities and squeezing empty beer cans with one hand. He threw the object in the flatbed of a nearby truck and grinned as he did it.
Collapsing with a big sigh on a hard bench, he couldn’t feel his legs and all he could hear was a drone of conversation on the far side of the room. Looking around, his senses began to soak up every atom. Five aging bikers at a corner table, two of them stroking handlebar moustaches and staring at him as if he had no clothes on.
Gabriel continued to look out of the restaurant window at a cornfield with rolling ruts and red dirt. He could hardly see it in the dark, only as far as the light from the windows would allow. But he could imagine the endless rows of brittle stalks and the secret trails that ran between them. A meeting place. A hiding place.
He almost smiled at the attention he received, watching the old men from the corner of his eye, knowing with half a chance they’d beat him up in the bathrooms. He combed a hand through his hair, black and shiny and almost down to his shoulder. Except for light brown eyes, he could easily pass for Hispanic.
He saw the detective three days ago in the school parking lot. Studied him from the confines of his van. The same man who caused a lump in Gabriel’s throat and a heart that threatened to stop beating. Saw him on TV a few times, and then followed him to a white house bordered with cottonwoods on Guadalupe Trail. Found a derelict house nearby so he could breathe in the same air. There wasn’t much Gabriel could determine from under that tree in the darkness and he assumed the detective lived alone like he did.
“You can’t be loved by everyone,” Demon whispered.
Gabriel took no notice. Instead, he couldn’t stop thinking about the detective framed behind that window, a dark silhouette in front of a reading lamp. He wanted to take a photograph to keep the memory locked on paper, but there hadn’t been enough light. The house was wired for movement, two strobe lights flashing on the closer he got, not to mention the incessant barking from next door’s dog.
There would be other times, other ways to get the book. And besides, Demon had wings. Why couldn’t he just fly in there and get it himself?
“Don’t be stupid. The Hierarchy don’t have wings,” Demon muttered.
No, the Hierarchy had bodies like humans, spoke like them too. You could pass one in the street, sit next to one on an airplane and never know it. It was the Inferus, the lesser kind, that fluttered about over rooftops and perched in trees.
A sudden prick of sadness when Gabriel remembered Los Poblanos Academy and the familiar scents of a place he once called home. Alice Delgado, suicide girl, was still there, somewhere. Her spirit wandered along those trails where trees arched overhead like a series of spiny tunnels and where crickets pulsed in the summertime. It would have been green and fragrant with honeysuckle then. But it was winter now and everything was dead.
“Coffee?”
Gabriel bit the inside of his cheek as he looked up at the waitress. Late fifties, blonde hair tied up in a messy do, flabby cheeks and a little too much makeup. He mumbled a yes.
“Looks like you’re in love,” the waitress said, leaning forward a little and flashing those deep brown eyes. “It’s one thing when they’re good to you. It’s another when the world’s full of trash like mine.”
She didn’t wait for a response. Just shuffled off to the other tables, smiled, poured more coffee and then brought him a cup. The air in the room suddenly turned gray and it was difficult to breathe.
Gabriel wiped his hands on his jeans, wrapped them around the coffee mug and leaned back against a vinyl bench. It was nicest thing anyone had said to him in a long while. The waitress was right. The world was full of trash. Except the detective. Simply put, he was magic.
“Take your time,” Demon said, interrupting his thoughts. “Watch for signs.”
“What signs?” Gabriel whispered, eyes restlessly wandering over the heads of the people in the coffee shop.
“See those men? Who do you think they’re staring at?”
The floor seemed to open up and Gabriel felt he was falling, spinning, heat rising in his face. He jerked back against the bench, unconsciously shaking his head as if trying to dismiss the stares.
He began to enjoy that bitter tasting coffee, wondering if it was worth asking the heavily jowled lady behind the counter to give him a fresh cup. Only he’d have to stand then, walk in front of the gawking bikers and watch them size him up out of the corner of his eye.
He was fit, but he wasn’t overly muscular. No matter how many weights he lifted, how many sets, how many repetitions, his body would never be like theirs, stocky and well fed. He hadn’t the stomach for it.
He fumbled through his pockets and retrieved a wad of crumpled toilet paper, gave his nose a loud blow and coughed a few times. The two staring bikers resumed their friendly chatter, hands instinctively covering their mouths.
“Can you believe it,” Demon said. “Men always stare. Size each other up. They even stare at women as if they’re the last goal in a football match.”
Gabriel studied his coffee. He couldn’t remember what he was doing there, couldn’t remember where his car was parked either.
It was Demon that made him forget. In hindsight, he knew he shouldn’t have opened his mind in the first place, shouldn’t have caved in to the fear.
Demon had turned him into someone he no longer recognized and, like a drug, he had chemically reprogramed Gabriel’s brain, his loyalties, his interests, even his loved ones. Memories faded away into the past and all that mattered was the next high. He craved Demon more and more, and he knew if he had a few days without him his mind came back in flashes, if it ever came back at all.
I can’t go on, he thought, can’t keep killing. Weren’t two deaths enough?
“Two down, three to go.” Demon reminded, nails clacking on the table top. “Remember what they did to you. Remember how it was. Onwards and upwards.”
“What if I get caught?” Gabriel whispered.
“Then you’ll be incarcerated in one of New Mexico’s finest correctional facilities and you wouldn’t like that, would you? Wouldn’t like all the―”
“No, no, don’t say it!” Gabriel begged. The images were bad enough.
The bikers fell into silence, fingers raking their nicotine stained beards. They were all looking at him now, wondering why he was talking to himself, wondering why his hand was suddenly in front of his face, head lowered.
“Get away from me!” Gabriel whispered to the seat next to him.
He could feel warm breath on the inside of his hand, feel the vibration of his voice. If Demon didn’t go away he’d threaten him with a name. The pastor on 19th, the one who had counseled him at school.
“Remember the rules,” Demon reminded. “No pastors, no prayers. Or there’ll be no peace.”
Demon was always full of rage and fire, and the pastor’s name always seemed to whet down the kindling. Gabriel was beginning to feel like an actor in a poorly directed film, where he was standing on an empty street without a bullet proof vest. For some reason Demon had been voted in all those years ago and he’d been a dictator ever since.
Gabriel was halfway out of his chair when the whole room began to lurch. He waited, felt the ground harden beneath his feet and tried again. This time he made it to the door, stepped out onto the low concrete step and didn’t look back. He knew they were watching, stroking those long gray beards and wondering what he was all about. That was the trouble. They’d remember him if they were asked.
Pulling out of the parking lot, he veered sharply onto Alameda, headed west along a familiar stretch of road that would have led to a familiar house. All he could think about was Asha’s laptop, tucked away in his bedroom and wrapped with an extension cord.
He wanted to see how many emails there were because he’d already replied to a few of them. Kept the momentum going, kept up the pretense.
Too many deaths in one week would only arouse suspicion and the girls would be missed in a day or two. Better take a break and breathe in some good fresh air. Better rethink the whole thing, because the detective had been asking questions at the school. And that could only mean one thing.
“Number three,” Demon said with a melodic giggle. “A car drowning I think. Poor little chinless. She’s there every Friday night.”
“Where?” Gabriel’s mind was scrabbling for a reason to slow down. He could read Demon’s face without turning. It was like a sunny spot in a cloudy sky, lips set, cheeks dimpled. Everything was a game to him, the more intricate the better.
“The cycling path under Alameda Bridge,” Demon said. “Nice and quiet.”
“You can’t get a car anywhere close to the river.”
“There is a place. On the bank. No concrete wheel stop. Clean drop all the way to the water.”
“I need time.”
“Time for what? For the detective? Looks like you’ll have to kill him too.”
Gabriel took one hand off the steering wheel so he could flip a finger. “You’re actually jealous.”
“I’m actually worried.”
Gabriel had his own theory but he said nothing. Demon had been by his side since school, cold limbs clutching and cleaving like ivy to brick. “You wouldn’t like it if I found another friend, would you?”
There was no reply from the passenger seat, not even a whimper as they turned right into the parking lot.
Damn him for showing up as someone familiar. All dark ones do that. Nothing new. But Demon had to be handsome, had to be the legend plastered in everyone’s subconscious, the one you couldn’t ignore. And now he sat there in silence for once, all because he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I could lock myself in a room,” Gabriel blurted. “Course you’d try to get in. But you wouldn’t have much luck if I renounced you.”
“You’re being flippant now.”
“You don’t exist.”
Gabriel tried to rationalize how it all happened. How a bond was sworn over a secret book and how that same bond could so easily be broken.
I renounce and forsake the master demon and his false claims of allegiance.
That night, six women dismissed reason, sense and sanity for a touch of the absurd. Just to see if it worked. To see if it was real.
I renounce the spirit that has made me a slave to drugs and destruction.
The pendulum swung from hard right to hard left. Their lives would never be normal again because Demon had the power to kill them. Hadn’t he proved it with the first three?
I renounce the evil one who has filled me with hatred. The one who manipulates and controls.
Alice, Asha and Kenzie were dead. Rosa, Zarah and Adel were almost. In these six women Gabriel had created family, a distant memory he kept in his head. But he had been the victim, the one they hated, the brilliant one they didn’t understand. The pain still stung sharp just as it had at school.
Drowning? Rosa? It suddenly made no sense. She was an opera singer. Got lungs larger than a blue whale.
I renounce the fear that has held me captive.
Like a fever, the nightmare broke and Gabriel began to feel a strange sense of control, if only for a moment.
“Rosa Belmonte,” he whispered, pushing his foot hard on the gas. “Let’s hear you sing.”
