Jeremy Chikalto and the Demon Trace (Book III of The Hazy Souls) (20 page)

Mantel's guests began to edge away from
Jeremy.

“But what comes next?” asked Mantel. “I've
wondered for centuries. The prophesied birth of Apollyon from the
line of the fallen angel Vordin. The boy who sees behind the air.
And what now?” Mantel looked at Maren. “My Maze speaks to you, I
know. What does it say?” Mantel drifted closer to the globe and
black smoke wisped around him. “You have a halo, I see.”

Maren was beginning to emit a soft white
light from her crown.

“What?” Jeremy reached out to touch it and
the halo disappeared.

Mantel's eyes bulged at Maren. “Why do the
plants serve you? What does the Maze want with your baby? I created
everything in here. I am the lord of this realm.”

Jeremy's eyes flashed. “You won't touch a
hair on her head. Now that the Haze has collapsed, I am more
powerful than you can imagine.”

Mantel laughed. “No need for strong words,
we were merely germinating an idea.” He lifted his small,
fetal-like hand: in it was a single bean.

“What's that?” asked Jeremy.

“I trust that your reflexes have improved.”
Mantel dropped the bean and all the light left the room. Mantel's
banquet guests panicked and fled the room, the ogres stomping
through the crowd, and knocking Serious Steven aside. The various
odds and ends of creature-people managed to squeeze out, but Ms.
Fritz remained behind, a firm hand wrapped around Jasmine's wrist.
Jasmine, the stronger of the two, stood by Ms. Fritz, holding her
baby in her other arm, powerless.

Jeremy lit up the room with a blue light. It
was reflected back to him at a hundred different angles.
“Mirrors?”

“You could say that,” said a disembodied
voice.

The room was now a mirror maze, and Jeremy,
Maren, and Tina were partitioned off in a small, reflective
hallway.

“I can blow this place apart in a matter of
seconds,” said Jeremy.

“Try it and see what happens. Every shard is
the ashes of a cruel soul, burned to glass.” Mantel coughed, and
something large slithered out of his wet mouth.

“What do you want from us?” asked Maren.

There was a shuffling from somewhere within
the mirrored walls.

“Our work has not been in vain, my loyal
ones,” said Mantel.

Ms. Fritz and Jasmine cried out, fearing the
end was near.

“I have enriched the
soil
—
and now the
baby will flourish. Maren carries the seed. ”

“Mantel? What do you mean?” whispered Ms.
Fritz.

“Be at peace, my servant. Apollyon will call
out his demons, and we will test his worth,” said Mantel. The
reflective surfaces of the mirrors shimmered, and Jeremy saw two
faces of Mantel, one enraged, and one placid. All at once, the
mirrors vanished. Ms. Fritz and Jasmine were bound together and
sitting back to back in the center of the room. Jasmine's baby was
on her lap.

Mantel floated above them, dripping a pink
ooze and gagging on something in his throat. “It's the demon trace,
Apollyon. Your spirit animals crave it too, and will come to the
Maze. The soul will flee, but must be caught in the end, caught in
the great tide.”

“Don't hurt them, they have given everything
for you,” said Maren.

“Yes, they have given themselves over.
Everything must give itself over, everything must yield. The buds
spout from the wet ground in the spring, grow tall in the hot
summer, and bear fruit in autumn. Come winter, they shrivel to the
ground.” Mantel smiled at Maren. “I see you now, Maren Nononia, for
what you bring forth. As for you Jeremy, call on your demons, or I
will spill this mother's blood and summon them myself.”

Jasmine's baby began to cry.

Jeremy shot a ripple of blue energy up
through the ceiling.

A sound like an angry hive of bees began
vibrating through the banquet hall, and the room darkened. Shadows
with outstretched hands began to gather in the corners of the room.
A demon with the head of a goat stepped towards Mantel. It opened
its mouth, and a great wind began to suck through the room.

“Mantel!” Maren called out, and she stepped
outside of Jeremy's protective barrier. He was so focused on
keeping things out, he never thought to keep things in. Mantel
flickered and appeared in front of Maren, and she reached out to
him and touched the mark on his neck. The mark spoke to her in
strange words, much like the army of demons chattering in the
corners. Maren hesitated.

“You touch my curse,” said Mantel with a
gruesome smile. “Is that what you were looking for?”

“Nisi,” she said, reading the Latin
inscription. “Except, only...?

“Yes,” he replied.

Jeremy's energy globe reformed around Maren,
and he blasted Mantel to the ground, burning away the cloak to
expose the shriveled, pink form. Mantel rose again into the air,
naked with knobby limbs pushing out of his gut. His body began to
swell, his skin growing thin like a horrible balloon, and faces
inside him wailed and pressed against skin, gnawing to break
free.

Jeremy unleashed the demons onto Mantel, and
they swarmed him like bees from a broken hive. Jeremy relocated
Maren and Tina to the corner of the room. As the demons tore into
the bloated Mantel, and the souls inside him raged against their
prison, the ceiling began to shake, and large chucks of stone fell
to the floor, releasing beams of torchlight into the room from
above.

Jeremy, Maren, and Tina watched from inside
the safety of Jeremy's fortress.

“It's time to leave, Jeremy,” said Maren
with a frown.

But Jeremy wasn't leaving yet. Beads of
sweat rolled down his face, and he felt the ecstasy of the demons
doing their work.

“There's one last loose end to tie up,” he
said. Then out of the chaos, a lone demon drifted through the
membrane of energy surrounding them, and approached Jeremy. Maren
and Tina gasped and recoiled. The demon was skeletal and clothed in
black rags. It had the face of a boy. Jeremy and the demon merged
together, and its darkness receded into his body. Then his chest
glowed red. Maren and Tina watched in horror.

Jeremy summoned more demons, and what was
left of Mantel shot up through a hole in the ceiling, the demons
flowing after him in a black stream. Across the room, huddled under
the banquet table and the rubble were Ms. Fritz, Jasmine, and
Jasmine's baby.

“Let's get them and go, now's our chance!”
Maren tried to run over to them, but couldn't get through Jeremy's
energy barrier this time.

Jeremy called out across the room. “Jasmine,
you and your baby may join us.”

Jasmine crawled out from under the table
with a wailing baby, and dashed across the room and into Jeremy's
protective globe. Just then Mantel's body crashed back into the
room, and the demons poured in after him.

“But what about you, what do you deserve?”
asked Jeremy as Ms. Fritz crawled out from under the banquet table.
Mantel was battling the demons in the corner.

Jeremy left his globe around Maren, Tina,
Jasmine, and the baby, and flashed over to Ms. Fritz and picked her
up by the throat.

“Jeremy!” cried Maren, pressing against the
wall of Jeremy's energy. “Are you out of your mind? Get us out of
here!”

“Have a nice view, Gorda?” said Jeremy,
nodding in the direction of Mantel and the swarm of demons.

Ms. Fritz's eyes bulged and she flailed in
Jeremy's grasp. He threw her to the floor and kicked her in the
ribs.

“Jeremy, stop!” yelled Maren.

“This woman took me from my parents when I
was a child. It's only right that she suffers now.” Another demon
swam into Jeremy, and another. Jeremy grabbed Ms. Fritz's hand and
pulled a finger from its socket. He laughed as she screamed in
pain.

Jeremy ignored his friends, and the globe of
energy imprisoning them shimmered and weakened. Tina burst through
the barrier and ran over to Jeremy. She grabbed him just as he
reached for another of Ms. Fritz's fingers. Another demon flew into
him, and his eyes flashed at Tina.

“This is none of your concern,” he
barked.

“Don't hurt her.”

Jeremy swatted Tina aside. He seized Ms.
Fritz once more, this time twisting her arm behind her until it
popped.

Tina got up and jumped on his back, biting
his shoulder with all her might, and he flung her down again.

“Stay out of this unless you want the same,”
he yelled.

“This isn't you anymore!” shouted Tina,
baring her teeth.

Jeremy glared back at her, breathing hard.
He reformed his protective shield.

“The demons are in you,” she said.

“They always have been.”

The banquet room was a war zone of crumbled
stone splattered with Mantel's slime. The demons were in a frenzy
in the corner, and still Mantel fought them. He cast them off with
a deafening blast, and demons were scattered everywhere. Mantel
rose into the air again, and the pink ooze painting the room began
to bubble, and all the pieces of Mantel gathered back into him like
a reverse explosion. Mantel floated into the center of the
cavern.

“I give myself over, and
you want revenge? You are not worthy of my submission, Apollyon.
Leave Gorda alone. End this,
now
.”

Jeremy burst into a white flame, and Mantel
pushed all of his darkness out, and the two forces met in the
middle, and spread out in all directions. The demons swarmed
together at the edge of Jeremy's energy, and then burst into
Mantel's darkness. Jeremy summoned more demons, which flew like
dark spears through Jeremy's white aura and into Mantel. Finally,
all the demons inside him shot out to join the mass. Jeremy closed
his energy around the darkness, and compacted it like a black
hole.

And Mantel was torn into a thousand shreds,
all screaming in agony. The demons' work almost complete, they
sucked each fragment in, and the mass turned a fiery red as Hell
reclaimed its children. There was silence, and the demons dispersed
from the room. Jeremy's light faded.

A single strand of Mantel inched along the
floor towards Jeremy's feet like a worm. Jeremy raised his foot
over top of it to stomp it, but then he heard Ms. Fritz cry. He
turned to her and then a great “Mew!” came from overhead and Lyrna
flew down from the blasted hole in the upper level of the banquet
hall and past them, brushing Maren's shoulder. The fizdruft swooped
down on the fragment of Cain, and took it gently in her teeth. She
swam upward, and the fragment glowed white and illuminated the
room. Lyrna disappeared again into the hole in the ceiling and the
cavern felt empty.

Chapter 39

The Mark

The banquet hall had been stripped of its
former glory and utterly demolished. Even the torchlights, with
their ethereal flames, had been extinguished. A small amount of
light trickled into the banquet room from some far-away chamber
above. Yet it seemed that a lightness hung about the place. Jeremy,
Maren, and Tina clustered together, and Maren extended a hand to
Ms. Fritz and Jasmine. Ms. Fritz, still shaking in pain and
heartache, accepted. Jasmine did the same.

“A small part of Mantel
still wanted to go back to the One. It wanted to yield, to be
redeemed,” said Maren. She turned to Jeremy. “Nisi.” She pointed to
her neck. “I saw the Mark of Cain on his neck. I think it's the
spell to lift the Mark of the Beast. Let's get back to the
others
—
I have an
idea.”

They made their way back to their friends
and family mummified in spider webs hanging from the ceiling of the
root network. As they approached the door to the oasis chamber, the
smell of iron was strong—blood. Jeremy nudged the door open and
they could see that the blood was pooling deep on the ground.

Before heading down into the root network,
Jeremy reluctantly popped Ms. Fritz's arm back into place at
Maren's request. After the procedure, Jeremy ferried them to the
ground below, and they were knee deep in a dark red blood, almost
brown, and thick clots were forming everywhere.

“Hold on,” said Jeremy, and he waded through
the blood a short distance and then blasted the ground with a
controlled beam of energy. The blood sprayed, and then drained into
the deep hole he'd created.

“Thanks, I think,” said Tina, wiping the
drops of blood off her face.

“Let's do this.” Jeremy stared up at the
sacs illuminated by torch light from the oasis room and the dull
glow of the root network.

“All right Maren, what now?”

“The Mark of Cain is the spell to lift the
curse of the Mark of the Beast.”

“What if it just makes things worse? What if
it's just another one of Mantel's tricks?” asked Tina. Ms. Fritz
scowled.

“How would we know the difference?” said
Jeremy.

Maren shook her head. “Wisdom is proved
right by her children. Jeremy, fly me up to your dad, and you'll
see.”

Jeremy paused. “I trust Maren,” he said
finally. He wrapped his arms around her, and they hovered up to the
sac.

“Nisi,” said Maren as she ran her fingers
over the Mark.

χξ
?

“Nisi!” she repeated. Nothing.

They set up camp as best they could next to
the oasis. Despair was beginning to set in, and they were
exhausted.

“I'm going to lay down for a while,” said
Maren, and she retreated to a mat of moss in the corner. Her mind
drifted as she lay on the moss, and soon she fell asleep.

There was a temple made of wood, and two men
approached with offerings in their arms. One man approached with
the fruit of his harvest, and the other with a slain lamb. They
placed the offerings on a stone altar in the temple, and sat on the
ground, their heads bowed in prayer.