Burned (20 page)

Unfortunately, as I stared at the burner phone I’d stolen, one finger poised to dial her number, I realized I didn’t know her number. I tried to think back, but the only phone number I knew was the one Baal had given me, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to call him. I slumped down in the dirt on my knees. I couldn’t even call my girlfriend after failing to save my family. It was almost pathetic

Tears filled my eyes and dripped down my cheeks, but I was pretty sure it was because I’d gotten sand in my eyes because I was Mac Brennan and I didn’t cry. I didn’t fucking save my family either. I lashed out, striking the sand hard with my blackened fist. For all I knew, they were dead or worse. I wasn’t exactly sure what worse would be, but since I’d been pissing off actual creatures from Hell, I was pretty sure death could definitely be followed by a worse.

“How could I be too late?” I screamed into the darkness falling over the otherwise silent desert. Even the wind wasn’t whistling through these dunes. “How, after everything I’ve done to get them back, could I be too late? It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair.”

I’m ashamed to say it, but I sat there for a long time. Part of me wanted to go back to town and look for my family, but I didn’t even know where to start, and I still wouldn’t have been able to contact Ricky without showing up at her building. The chances of that place not being surrounded by hostile werewolves was so small as to be insignificant, but I had no other leads. I’d have to try. Besides, I’d have given almost anything to see her. If I had to kill the shit out of some werewolves to do it, well, that was okay with me.

I took a few steps toward my Harley, intent on doing just that when a thought struck me. There might be one other way to find them. Get Baal to tell me where they were. He had to be the one who had taken them. It was probably why he’d shown up to broadside me just before I got here. If everything had gone according to his demonic plan, I’d have told him to piss off, gone to find my family, found them gone, and accepted his deal when he showed up to hand me a lifeline. Of course, thanks to Vassago that hadn’t happened, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t reach out to the demon. I couldn’t offer him a deal without pissing off Vassago, but there was more than one way to skin a demon.

All I needed now was a way of finding Baal and making him talk. How hard could that be? I glanced at the fragments of bat in the sack on the Harley, even if I could put the bat back together again, I had no idea what the symbols meant. The last thing I wanted to do was use the wrong one or draw it incorrectly and be turned into a smudge on the ground. However, I knew someone who could probably help me with both of my problems.

I pulled out the burner phone and started dialing numbers in the call log. It took me three tries before I heard the response I was looking for.

“This is Maya, and this better be good because I know for a fact the owner of this particular phone is dead.” Silence filled the line.

“Maya, this is Mac, and believe it or not, I want to make a deal with you,” I said, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice. “Before you hang up, just hear me out, okay?”

“Mac, you shouldn’t be calling me. It’s not safe… for either of us,” she paused and I got the impression she was thinking. “What’s your deal?”

“Have you heard of Vassago?” I asked rhetorically.

“Yes…” she said, stretching out the word as she spoke.

“Well, after we parted ways, Baal grabbed me, and wouldn’t you know it, Vassago went all Babe Ruth on Baal’s skull. Do you know what he left behind?” I asked, grinning despite myself.

“I’m guessing not your manhood since you can’t go three seconds today without needing to be saved,” she replied before sighing heavily. “Can we just move this along?”

“He left behind fragments of the bat he used. A bat full of demonic symbols that blew Baal straight back to Hell.” I let my words hang in the air for a long time. “Would you like the fragments?”

“Yes,” she said after a slight pause. “What do you want for them? If it’s pervy, I’m just going to hang up on you. I’ll be honest, bat or no, I’m leaning toward that anyway.”

I told her what I wanted and waited, my heart sinking with each passing second. She had to help me. If she didn’t, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I guess I could go to Danton, but I had a feeling he had his hands full with not getting his ass kicked by his wife, and Ricky, well… I wasn’t sure what she’d do, but somehow I didn’t think summoning a lord of Hell would be high on her list of things to do.

“If this goes south, we’ll both get dead,” she said after a pause so long I thought she wasn’t going to go for it. “You sure you wouldn’t rather just do something pervy? I bet I could show you some things you’ve never seen before.”

“I told you what I want. I’ll be there soon to collect,” I replied, getting on the Harley and ambling back toward the road. “If I’m not, just wait longer. I’ll be there, or I’ll be dead.”

“Yeah, I didn’t really want to sleep with you anyway. You’re way not my type,” she said and hung up.

I pocketed the phone and turned my attention to the road. I wasn’t exactly sure how well I could trust Maya to hold up her end of the bargain, but then again, I was pretty sure she was more or less professional. While I had no doubt she’d set up a contingency plan in case I backstabbed her, something told me, she wouldn’t go out of her way to stab me in the back. At least not in this case. The payoff was too huge, and she had an easy out. I could work with that.

A couple hours later, I pulled up outside of an abandoned building and parked. There were no cars outside, which was somewhat surprising since Maya should have been here already, but then again, I didn’t know if she drove. For all I knew, she had come here in Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.

I pulled out the burner phone and dialed her number. Maya picked up by the third ring. “Hello,” she said breathlessly into the phone. It sounded like she’d just run a marathon.

“I’m outside, where do I go from here?” I asked, getting off the bike and heading toward what I thought was the entrance.

“Yeah, the door is warded so don’t touch it. I’ll be right there, but I have to make another call to make sure we’re good,” she said, and the line went dead. A couple minutes later, the door in front of me opened. Maya stood there in ripped up jeans and a powder blue Care Bears T-shirt with her hair tied back in pigtails. Blue light sparkled from inside, dancing out of the threshold in a way that made me think torches.

“You warded the door?” I asked, pocketing the phone and moving toward her as she stepped aside and gestured for me to follow her inside.

“Yes. I warded pretty much every inch of this place against your kind. The last thing I want is to get blindsided by demons.” She swallowed hard and met my eyes with her own. The fear in them was obvious. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” I said, tossing her the bag of shattered baseball bat. She caught it deftly out of the air and looked inside.

“I still can’t believe he left this behind,” Maya whispered, reaching in and taking out a fragment. “These are actual demonic wards.” She pointed at one with a green fingernail. “I’ve never even seen this one, and I’ve seen a lot of these. It’s got to be some kind of trick…”

“Well, have fun figuring that part out,” I said, holding my hand out expectantly. “Now that’ve I’ve shown you mine, show me yours.”

She blushed slightly and put a .357 Colt Python into my hand. “Mine’s bigger.”

Instead of replying, I popped open the revolver’s cylinder and dumped the six shots into the palm of my hand. They looked normal enough, but then again, looks can be deceiving, and besides, I had no way of knowing what I was looking at. I reloaded the gun and realized just holding the .357 magnum felt pretty good.

“You ready for this?” I asked, and she nodded anxiously.

Maya dropped the bag with the bat onto the floor, took my hand in her clammy fingers, and led me out of the room. The next room was filled with torches, all burning with soft blue light like Hades’s hair in the Disney version of Hercules.

The floor of the room was painted in blood with crystals of all shapes and sizes placed at key points throughout. A whole cage full of parakeets sat in the very center, but as far as I could tell, the birds were already dead. I had half-wondered if I’d have to watch her kill each and every bird. It made me glad I didn’t have to do so even though I felt responsible for their birdie deaths.

“Once I light this candle, there’s no turning back,” Maya said, releasing my hand and gesturing vaguely toward a twelve-inch black candle at least six inches in diameter. “This is your last chance to back out.”

“No, I’m good,” I said, hefting the gun in my hand. Its familiar weight reassured me. “Go ahead and summon Baal.”

Chapter 30

“Well then, one demonic lord of Hell coming up.” Maya swallowed hard and began to chant in a language that was mostly guttural growls. With each grating syllable, the shadows in the room darkened and stretched across the floor, ceiling, and walls. Without missing a beat, she pulled out a zippo lighter with a skull etched into its metallic surface and flicked it to life. Flames danced in her hands as she lowered it to the candle. It caught, and as it did, the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

I shivered involuntarily as she turned toward the dead parakeets and began chanting in a completely different language that sort of reminded me of Latin. I had no idea what she said, but as the words left her mouth, the parakeets within the cage burst into black flame.

The ground beneath the cage turned molten, and the room shook. Once the last bird had been reduced to ash, a thorny blood-red vine sprung forth from its ashes and caressed the sundered floor. The cement cracked with a shriek that rang in my ears like a trumpet call. Burning wind whipped up from the chasm, covering me in a sheen of clammy sweat that made my clothes stick to my body. As the vine burrowed down into the chasm, sparks of pure darkness leapt from its thorns like miniature bolts of lightning.

“They say that if you time it just right during the full dark of night, you can climb the blood vine all the way down to Hell itself,” Maya said from beside me. She reached out and gripped my hand, and I realized she was shaking. “I’ll admit it, I’m scared. Really scared. Are you sure this is going to work?”

“Yes,” I lied, squeezing her hand and trying to ignore the icy snakes encircling my gut. Everything about this felt wrong in a way I couldn’t fathom, and with each passing second, that wrongness increased until it weighed upon my shoulders like a thousand pounds of lead.

Black smoke drifted from the molten crack in the floor, and as it did, the smell of sulfur kicked me in the face. The smoke slowly took shape before us, forming into the rough shape of a man. Only it was much, much bigger. As it solidified before my eyes, I realized I was looking at Baal, but not the human Baal I’d grown accustomed to seeing.

The demon stepped forth from the sulfurous smoke on cloven hooves that cracked the concrete and stared at us with beady black eyes. Black fire danced along his flesh like burning fur, making it seem like he was covering in living, breathing flame. A trident of serpentine chiton tails snapped behind him like a bullwhip as he turned his antlered head toward us and smiled. It was like looking into a shark’s mouth, only sharks didn’t have nearly that many rows of teeth.

“I’m surprised you would summon me in my true form, Mac Brennan. I’m guessing you’ve realized your family is gone now, and you’ve come to accept my offer?” His smile grew wider as he shifted his gaze to Maya before bringing it back to me. “Your
creature
has done a good job.” He sniffed at the air. “Neither Vassago nor his ilk will be able to disturb us. Tell me, what do you offer?”

“Death,” I said and raised the Colt.

“Seriously?” he asked, raising one scaly eyebrow. “Are we really going to do this again?”

I shot him in the face, and just like I thought he would, he opened his mouth to catch the bullet between his teeth. The bullet struck him in the center of his mouth, and as he bit down upon it, a sound like crashing thunder reverberated through the room. The echo of it rebounded off the walls as Baal staggered backward, collapsing to his knees as gore poured from his bloody, shattered jaws. His hands came up, and he reached up to touch the wound in disbelief.

“What have you done?” he said, the words thick and wet with blood. “You’ll pay for this with your life, Mac Brennan!” He tried to take a step toward me, but as he did, Maya began to chant. The symbols along the ceiling and walls came to life, spilling the same golden light from before across the tiny space. The torches around us exploded, filling the air with blue fire.

Baal screamed, reeling backward and covering his eyes as the gateway to Hell closed, leaving him trapped before us. His black, sulfurous blood hit the cement and began to sizzle, but I ignored it as I lined up my revolver on the demon and put a bullet in each of his wrists. His arms fell uselessly to his sides as white light spilled from the three wounds in his body.

“See,” I said, pointing the gun to his right knee and pulling the trigger. The blast sprayed black goo across the cement and more light spilled from the wound. “I had a thought, and it went something like this. I bet no one had ever taken those demon binding wards and etched them into a bullet. You seemed pretty cavalier about the whole getting shot thing before, so I figured I’d get one good shot off. I’m sure you can put two and two together.” I shot his other leg on principle, and he collapsed to the floor in a heap. His muscles strained as he tried to move, but it didn’t seem to matter much. My plan had worked, by pumping him full of warded bullets, I’d incapacitated him completely.

“You insolent toad. I will tear off your balls and shove them down your throat. I will find every person you have ever known and sunder them from this earth—”

I shot him in the chest. It sort of felt like a waste since I only had six shots, but Baal probably wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m betting these won’t kill you, but somehow I don’t think you’re going to be doing a whole lot of moving.”