the Jeep raced along Beltline. I hoped all the cops were at the Marriott, because I was way past the speed limit.
“How do you know where they are?” Justin asked me, one hand clinging, white-knuckled, to the roll bar. The wind whipped my hair around my face and I had to drive with the skirt of my dress tucked tightly under my thighs. I never found my shoes.
“I just know. It’s the way the quest always ends. Luke goes all over the galaxy, but he still has to come back to the Death Star to meet Darth Vader.”
“You know this isn’t a movie, right?”
“Yes. That ugly bastard has my best friend, and I have no idea how to fight it.” I zipped through a yellow light. “Now think. Why did the salt work before, but not tonight?”
“It might have to do with its solid form.” He shook his head. “All the supernatural traditions say it should have worked. Jewish folklore uses salt to bless a baby and keep the demons away. Chinese women take salt baths for the same reason …”
“So what do we use instead? Crosses? Holy water?”
“Azmael predates the birth of Christ. I don’t think either of those would affect him.”
I whipped onto the street that ran behind the school, my mind racing through the problem. If Azmael predated Christ, then he, it, also came way before Morton.
With a squeal of the tires I turned the Jeep in a tight U, changing directions as quickly as my thoughts. “We’re using the wrong salt.”
“What?”
“Azmael isn’t going to be afraid of easy-pour, iodized, table salt. We need the real unprocessed thing.”
“Where are you going to find sea-salt at this hour?”
I pulled up in front of a corrugated aluminum building and pulled the brake. “Landscaping shed. They keep fifty-pound bags for deicing the sidewalks in winter. Grab the bolt cutters in the back, will you?”
Justin stared at me, wasting precious moments on bewilderment and perhaps a little awe. “You were a Girl Scout, weren’t you?”
“Nope. But Nancy Drew was always prepared.”
My bare feet met the cold tile of the natatorium with a quiet slap-slap; the diving board loomed above, and I saw the man-shaped darkness waiting there.
It was all about knowing the rules. Quests were circular; Azmael held to tradition, obviously. The accident at the pool had been the first time I’d glimpsed the Shadow. Even if the accident had misfired because Stanley wrote my name down wrong, it was still where the demon had come for me.
And of course, the deep water terrified me. Lisa knew, so Azmael knew; there was simply no other place they could be.
The smell confirmed this, faint but distinct. Chlorine and brimstone and rotting flesh. It was a good thing I had nothing but dread churning in my stomach.
Outside the gym, Justin had helped me shoulder my backpack and balance the weight. “Can you carry all this?” His paladin’s face pinched with worry.
I grinned. “I’ve been in training for twelve grades.” Then sobering, I went over our hastily constructed plan. “I have to go in by myself, but once I have him distracted—”
“I’ll be there.” His hands rested on my bare shoulders as he looked down at me, a riot of emotions in his eyes. If this were a movie, he might kiss me now, or tell me to stay alive, no matter what, or vow to rescue me. And I might be wearing shoes and have less mascara running down my face.
Though come to think of it, “I’ll be there” had been the perfect thing to hear just then.
“Are you alone, Magdalena Quinn?” The demon’s reedy voice echoed in the big, empty gym. The water in the pool beside me shivered, then returned to placid lapping.
“Yes, I am, oh great and powerful Az.”
“You took your time. One would think you were leaving your friend to reap her own wickedness.”
Judge not, lest you be judged. I remembered that much from Sunday school. Lisa would have to answer for her ancillary role in the events of the past two weeks, not to mention tonight’s carnage. But not to me.
“Lisa is my friend. And I don’t let jumped-up, minor demon jackasses take my friends.”
The smell intensified with said jackass’s anger. “Then come up and try to rescue her, mighty demon-hunter. I’m waiting.”
I guess that was netherworld speak for “Nyah nyah nyah, I’d like to see you try it.”
Ahead, the diving pool glimmered darkly; diffuse light reflected on the surface, but did not penetrate the inky blackness at all.
“Leave the backpack on the ground,” Azmael said. “Do you think I’m a fool?”
An ominous growl rumbled out of the shadows. I saw the gleam of teeth. Great. Another doggie. We’d destroyed the ones at the prom, so the demon must have regained enough … power, mojo, whatever … to create more. Not the best news I’d had all evening.
“I’m leaving it,” I shouted up at him. “Call off your dog.”
“When you obey me, stubborn child.”
I had to get my burden to the pool, so I walked forward, the beast shadowing me, its claws clicking on the tile. The growl deepened as I reached the base of the diving platform, the claws sped, leapt. In a practiced move, I slipped one shoulder from its strap, let the weight of the pack swing down, around, to meet the dog’s attack. The monster sank its teeth through the nylon and pffft! disappeared without time to whimper.
Whoa. It had barely touched the salt inside, hadn’t taken a dousing at all. I wish that had worked as well on the Jacobson’s dog when it had chased me to school every morning of fifth grade. I began to think this insane plan might actually work.
I heard another growl, and figured a second minion had come to ensure my compliance. But hell-dog number one had done me a favor, ripping a large hole in the fabric. In the blind spot beneath the platform I set the pack on the edge of the pool and let the big crystals of the unprocessed rock salt pour into the water.
“Okay. I’m coming up. No backpack.”
I hiked up my dress and began to climb the ladder to the high dive, another thing easily accomplished by heroines in movies, but a major pain in real life. In my next battle with a creature from Hell, I would definitely forgo the formal wear.
An eternity later, I crawled onto the wide platform, winded and trembling from fatigue and nerves. Turns out I like heights only slightly more than I like the depths. There’s irony for you. I stayed on all fours as I fought off the vertigo and tried to catch my breath. I was one scary demon-fighter, all right.
Azmael stood in the center of the dais. Lisa lay unconscious near me. If we survived this, she was going to be pissed that she’d been cast in the helpless female stereotype, getting kidnapped and fainting.
“No quip, Maggie Quinn? No witty repartee?”
I stared at the creature’s feet, as not-quite-right as the rest of its mistake of a body. “Just wondering if you shouldn’t have cloven hooves.”
“I am exactly as I should be!” Its voice rang against the steel beams and concrete. “Exactly as I have been for ten thousand years.”
Slowly, I got my legs under me. Movie heroines never have to hitch up their tops, either, but I’d be darned if I’d give Azmael a thrill by falling out of my dress. “Ten thousand years, huh? No wonder you go around with the veil-o’-stench. You must be pretty sorry to lose it.”
The demon lurched toward me, angrily. I sidestepped, letting it drive me farther from the ladder. Live and die by the wisecrack. Sir Justin had a gift for prophecy.
“No matter.” Old Smokey recovered its aplomb. “I’ll rebuild my form quickly.” Lidless yellow eyes burned more deeply with hunger. “How I love every neurotic, apprehensive, irrational member of your generation. I will feed on your kind until I have power to build an army of shadow hounds.” It looked down at me with an eerily human expression of distain. “Then we will see who is the minor demon.”
“Don’t feel you have to prove yourself on my account.”
“Insolent insect!”
Our dance of quip, lunge, and dodge drove me toward the pool. I thought I saw movement below, knew I heard a growl. But I couldn’t warn Justin about the hell-dogs without drawing their master’s attention to him.
“I feel your terror, Magdalena.” It moved again, herding me. “It boils below the façade of your bravery.”
“That’s my acid indigestion.” Prickles of sweat broke out on my skin as I reached the edge of the platform. I guess this is what they mean when they say “Between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
“I can smell your fear.” It drew a noisy breath through the two elongated ovals of its nose, and smacked its misshapen lips. “Your stubbornness hides a bounty of dread.”
The balance tipped with my final step; the effect was tangible, an inevitable teeter-totter slide into the depths. Azmael’s horrible mouth curved into something like a smile.
An updraft caught at the bell of my skirt. The familiar, irrational terror of the deep—of sinking into the abyss—crawled around in my brain like a parasite, and I gave it rein. I hung my heels over empty space, and opened my mind to my ravaging phobia.
The demon couldn’t resist. It sprang at me with a voracious scream, like an animal, a feral, starving thing. I fell back, into the void, and the creature jumped after me.
Dear God, let this work.
I hit the water with that prayer, and then wished that I’d listened to Coach Milner’s instructions on how not to die a horrible death coming off the high dive. She might not have covered the part with the Hell-born psychic vampire, but at least I might have known that surface tension was not my friend.
The impact felt like hitting a wall at five or ten miles an hour. As the water closed over my head my entire being, down to my cells, screamed in protest. Then I heard the demon splash down beside me. It sank, grabbed on to me with long, sinuous arms and pulled me deeper, drinking in my terror and my despair.
Part of the plan. I chanted it in my head as my skirt billowed up around me like a shroud. Part of the plan, a salt bath, a cleansing, a solution. But the Maggie that curled up in my brain, catatonic with fear, only knew the tentacles of a monster dragged me down.
Part of the plan. The creature’s limbs had gone amorphous and pliable. The demon was losing substance, and its elongating fingers entwined my arms and legs like slimy, rotten vines. With a spark of hope, I started to kick.
My legs churned the water, sped the process as each molecule of NaCl bound to a demonic atom, making it inert. The snaky fingers that gripped me broke apart. I reached blindly out, stretched my arms into the water and grabbed double handfuls of the protoplasmic mess that remained of Azmael. Now that it was shadow-substance again, I could hear it in my head, flailing mentally in fury.
And then it disintegrated completely. My hands held nothing, and my mind was empty.
Numbing panic rushed to fill the void. I swirled my arms and legs through demon-free water, but I had no idea which way was up. The burning in my chest grew intolerable, and little dots of light jumped at the edges of vision.
A hand grabbed my arm, a solid, human hand, pulling at me insistently. I tried to kick, tried to move my arms, but it was like moving through Jell-O. My skirts wrapped around my legs, trapping them. I was so tired, and the dancing sparkles flooded the whole of my sight.