Hell Is Coming (The Watcher's Series Book 1) (16 page)

“Okay. So what are you doing here?”

Good question
.

“Eh, we got a lead that Josh may be being held in the basement of this building.” I hated lying to her. She was my best friend, but what was I supposed to say? That there’s a demon serial killer in the basement?

Kasey looked like she was struggling to believe me. “That’s fucking crazy. Why down there of all places?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. You can see why I want you to leave for a while though, right? It might not be safe here.”

Kasey flopped back on to the bed, a sheen of sweat covering her face and neck. She didn’t look well at all. “I knew there was something going on down there. Remember I told you about the screams? They must be torturing people or something. You really think Josh is down there?”

“We’ll see.”

“Why not tell the cops, let them sort it out?”

“Come on, Kase. You better than anyone know how cops are. They’d just think I had something to do with Diane’s murder. Better to keep the cops out of it.”

She nodded. “I’m with you on that one. Cops are useless assholes.” She coughed suddenly, her chest heaving as she lay on the mattress. “Oh god…”

I went and sat beside her. “You’re really sick, huh?”

“Yep, as a fucking dog, man.” Snot was running from her nose and she wiped it away with her sleeve and sniffed heavily. “I ain’t going anywhere. Just come see me when you’re done.”

I squeezed her leg and stood. “Alright. Just keep an ear out for trouble, okay?”

“I always do,” she said, too weak to even smile.

“When I come back I’m getting you to a doctor.”

“Fuck that, man. No doctors. It’s just the flu.”

“People die from the flu.”

“Whatever.” She lay back and closed her eyes. I knelt down and fixed the blankets over her, wishing I could stay and look after her.

“I’ll come back,” I told her as I moved towards the door.

“Princess?”

“Yeah?”

“Nice outfit.”

I smiled and shook my head and left her in the cold, damp room, worried already that something was going to happen to her. She was on the third floor; the demon was supposedly in the basement.

She would be fine
.

“I take it she ain’t leaving?” Frank said when I met him in the hallway again.

“She’s sick. She can hardly move, poor thing.”

Frank didn’t look too concerned. “Nothing we can do then. Let’s go.”

A few moments later we reached the basement stairs and I followed Frank down. It was colder than the rest of the building and I shivered when I got to the bottom of the stairs, as much from fear as from the temperature. The vampire incident was still fresh in my mind and I couldn’t help worrying that I’d end up in a similar situation again, only this time with a crazy demon who would probably kill me straight off.

Frank lowered his voice. “Stay sharp. Don’t hesitate to kill this thing if you get the chance. Stay close to me at all times.”

He sounded concerned. Maybe he didn’t want any more family deaths on his conscience. I nodded and took out my knife—the one that used to belong to my dad—and gripped it tightly, taking scant comfort in the fact that at least a part of my dad was with me in some way. That’s what I told myself anyway.

We ended up in a room that smelled like a sewer, water dripping off the ceiling and from leaky old pipes along the walls, making the floor wet and slippery. Frank led the way, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. I followed behind him, shining my own flashlight around the room. One thing I didn’t mention to Frank was that I suffered from claustrophobia on occasion. In one of my first foster homes, the man of the house used to lock me up in a closet any time I did wrong in his eyes, which was all too often. He would leave me there for hours sometimes, in a small space with little air, cloaked in total darkness. It used to terrify me, to the point that I’d never gotten over it.

The basement, with its low ceiling and almost total darkness, brought those past feelings back. My chest tightened, my throat constricted, making it hard for me to breathe. I had to resist the urge to panic, to run back out again. The only thing that was tempering the panic was the Light Energy that pulsed in me, but not by much. Frank must have sensed my unease because he turned and shone the light at me. “You alright?”

“Fine,” I said nodding, trying to sound strong, not sure if I succeeded. I shook my head at my own weakness when Frank shone the light ahead of him again.

What kind of Watcher has claustrophobia?

Up ahead, the room narrowed into a corridor. It was all I could do to control my breathing as I moved along behind Frank in the confined space, darkness all around except for the thin beams of the flashlights. The smell in the air was getting worse as well. Like dead animals mixed with the now familiar sulfur smell.

Are there bodies down here?

Our footsteps sounded loud on the wet floor. We both froze when I kicked a piece of metal on the ground, making a loud clanging noise. I gritted my teeth, sure that I had now alerted the demon to our presence.

Fuck.

Frank glared at me for a second and then kept walking until we came out of the narrow entry and into another room, this one bigger than the last. The ceiling was the same height but the room was wider, longer.

I almost walked into Frank when he stopped dead in front of me. “What?” I whispered urgently.

Frank shone his flashlight out into the room and I gasped when I saw what was in there. A few feet away, a body hung from the ceiling, some sort of meat hook in its back, the hook attached to a chain that hung from the ceiling.

Jesus
.

I counted six different bodies suspended from the ceiling.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

Every body was horribly mutilated, cut open from chest to groin, the insides pulled out, bits of intestine still dangling from the cavities. The sight of the corpses hanging there almost motionless, in combination with the atrocious smell, made my stomach heave and I turned and vomited, the bile in my stomach hitting the wet floor with a loud slapping sound. I did my best to be quiet about it but it was hard to be sick and quiet at the same time.

I stood, breathing heavily, and wiped my mouth with my sleeve. I shook my head apologetically at Frank, who gave me a pained expression, knowing there was nothing we could do now. If the demon didn’t know we were there before, it did now. “Fuck it,” he said, raising his gun. “Alright, demon, you know we’re here, we know you’re here. Show yourself!”

Almost recovered from my vomiting, I moved along with Frank into the room, knife held out in front as I tried not to touch any of the hanging bodies around me. I shone the flashlight to the back of the room, looking for signs of the demon and seeing none.

Maybe it isn’t here after all. Maybe Frank’s intell was wrong.

I hoped it was wrong.

“Come on, demon,” Frank said, his voice loud and booming in the confined space of the basement. “No point in hiding. We’ll find you eventually. Come out now, get it over with.”

There was no answer but I could see what Frank was trying to do. He was attempting to goad the demon into showing itself, though it wasn’t working so far.

I spotted a large metal table at the back of the room. Pointing the flashlight I walked over to it to see another body splayed out naked and eviscerated on the cold steel. It was the body of young boy, no more than sixteen. The face was frozen in a wide-eyed expression of terror. As grossly distorted as the face of the boy was, I still recognized him as the one who had run into Josh’s car a few days ago, which meant that the other boy who was chasing him at the time had to be the demon.

I was about to tell Frank about this when something caught my eye, up high in the corner of the room. Frowning, I shone the flashlight up towards the ceiling and was startled to see someone hanging there upside down, two shiny obsidian eyes glaring back at me. “Frank!” I shouted, keeping my torch beam trained on the demon who still hung from the ceiling like a huge spider.

Frank fired his gun at the demon, getting off two shots as the demon leapt back like some grotesque monkey and landed on the floor in a crouch. I did my best to keep the light on it so Frank could see. I shone the flashlight directly in the demon’s face. It was indeed the kid from the other day, still dressed in the same scruffy clothes. His young face should have been innocent looking but the demon inside him contorted his features so much that he just looked monstrous and nasty as hell. The dried blood around his mouth only added to the sadistic killing machine look, which was probably all the rage in the demon world. Clearly possessing the body of a kid made the demon’s job easier when it came to luring other kids to their deaths.

Before the demon could move again Frank fired three shots into it, one hitting it square on the forehead, sending it reeling back. I ran forward, planning on sticking it with my knife, but as I did I heard a loud screeching sound and in the beams from the flashlights I saw the demon on the floor, seemingly dead. Then the body of the young boy arched up and out of his mouth came a thick cloud of black smoke that trailed into the room.

What the hell is that about?

“Shit!” Frank said. “No!”

“What?” I asked in a panic.

“It jumped out of the meat suit. Motherfucker!”

Meat suit?

I assumed he was referring to the demon’s human host. The black smoke must have been the spirit of the demon. “What does that mean?”

“It means it will jump into the next body it finds and get away. Come on.”

“Why not one of us?”

“They can’t possess Nephilim. Let’s go!”

I ran after Frank, almost bumping into one of the hanging bodies, my head way too close to an exposed stomach cavity. I dodged around it and kept running after Frank as he rushed up the narrow corridor and out into the other room. It wasn’t until I got to the stairs that the meaning of what he just said hit me.

It will jump into the next body it finds.

Kasey!

I sprinted up the stairs. Frank was already at the top, looking around for signs of the demon. “I’m going to check on Kasey,” I said, rushing past him.

“Wait!” Frank shouted, but I was already running up the stairs, heading for the third floor, taking the steps two at a time, dropping the flashlight on the way up but retaining the knife in my other hand. It didn’t take me long to get to the third floor. As I ran down the hallway, Kasey came walking out the door ten yards ahead of me. I stopped running. “Kasey, are you alright?”

Kasey walked towards me, a bit too casually I thought, but otherwise she seemed normal. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just heard gunshots. What’s going on? What’s with the knife?”

I stood, looked hard at her, but I saw no sign that she had been possessed. No flickering face or demon eyes. “Everything’s fine. You need to go back inside now.”

“Okay.” Kasey made to go back into the room but Frank’s voice made her stop.

“Get away from her!” Frank shouted as he moved down the hallway with his gun pointed at Kasey.

“Frank, its okay” I said instinctively walking in front of Kasey as if to shield her.

“You don’t know that. Move away from her. It could be hiding its true form.”

I didn’t even know demons could do that
.

I looked at Kasey again and was shocked to see that her eyes had turned coal black.

I jumped away from her and Kasey ran back into the apartment. Despite Frank’s protestations, I went in after her. She stood in the middle of the room, her eyes black as tar and a menacing smile on her face. “Stupid little bitch!” she said—or rather the demon inside her said. “Let me go or I rip your friend apart from the inside out. Throw me the knife now.”

I jumped when the door slammed shut behind me.

Did the demon do that?

A second later Frank was banging on the door.

I held my hands up, the knife still in one hand. “Don’t hurt her, please,” I said.

“Throw me the knife.”

“Just take me instead. Let her be.”

The demon cocked its head at me. “Are you as dumb as you look? Demons can’t possess Nephilim. The knife!”

I shook my head. “No.”

The demon looked perplexed. “No?”

I walked towards it. “No. Kasey, I know you’re in there. You have to fight this thing. Force it out.”

The demon just laughed in Kasey’s voice, but in a way that Kasey had never done. “You really know nothing, don’t you? That can’t happen. Don’t come any closer!”

I stopped, and two gunshots resounded behind me.

The door burst open. Frank stood with his gun raised. “Kill that thing!” he said.

“But I’ll kill Kasey!”

“She’s dead anyway. Kill it now or I will!”

Dead anyway? That can’t be.

“He’s right,” the demon said. “No human ever survives a possession, at least not from me.” It started laughing.

“Kill it now!” Frank had his knife out. He was walking towards the demon who was backing itself into the corner of the room.

“Wait!” I said. With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I moved towards the demon who looked fearfully between me and Frank. I raised my knife, ready to do what had to be done when the demon’s eyes changed back to Kasey’s. She looked at me like an injured dog as she crouched in the corner.

“Please,” she said in a small voice. “Don’t hurt me, Leia. Please.”

“It’s not her,” Frank said. “Do it!”

I stood with the knife raised, about a foot away from Kasey, who cried, pleading with me not to hurt her. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just stab my best friend.

I lowered the knife.

And that’s when the demon leapt toward me.

Too late, I saw it had a knife in its hand, Kasey’s knife that it must have found in her jacket. She carried it for protection. I felt the blade go into my stomach and then get pulled out again, the demon grinning into my face as I staggered back. I dropped my knife and clutched my belly, blood already pumping profusely from the wound.