New Title 1 (25 page)

Slowly, one by one, they dumped all three backpacks’ worth of fuel into the pit. Ally hoped the churning, thrashing motion of the serpents was coating their scales with gasoline.

At last, Jarret reached the bottom of the pack. He held up the tiny camping stove and can of cooking fuel and mimed lighting it and pitching it into the pit.

Ally nodded. She slid the flashlight back out of her waistband and pointed toward the stairs, then drew an arc with her finger from the stairs to the pit. She raised her eyebrows.

He paused a moment, then gave her a thumbs-up.

They retreated through the gore-covered room back to the stairway, then put their heads together.

“When you throw it, we run,” Ally whispered.

“What if I miss? Or it doesn’t work?”

She made a face.

“We wait long enough to make sure it goes in. If it doesn’t work...” she shook her head. “I don’t know what to do next.”

He regarded her gravely.

“It’s a good plan. If it doesn’t work, it’s not your fault.”

“Thanks.” She shivered. “Let’s try it.”

Jarret knelt on the stair, fiddling with the stove a moment before turning on the gas and holding a lighter to the edge. It popped and lit with a blue flame.

He cranked the flame up as high as he could, then hoisted it. After a second, he gestured to Ally and walked closer to the doorway.

Ally chewed on her bottom lip, tense.

He crossed the room about halfway, then heaved the stove forward.

The stove’s flame flickered and Ally gave an involuntary squeal as the mechanism arced and dropped.

Jarret turned and ran back, his sneakers slipping on bloody chunks of meat.

Yellow flame leaped up, and the serpents suddenly, spasmodically, jerked.

The ground jolted, and Jarret lost his footing, stumbling and falling.

Ally ran forward to help him up as the world split open.

XLI

Todd opened the door and found himself standing on the edge of an inferno. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he’d somehow mistaken a passage back to his world for a doorway deeper into hell. Then he heard a girl screaming and realized he was looking at normal flame.

“Be careful,” he said tersely as he stepped through, angling sideways to avoid plunging into a pit of gasoline-fueled fire.

His soiled loafers slid and he grabbed the wall, looking around to get his bearings.

Two students huddled in the room, on their knees in a slick mess of raw meat and blood. One of them was holding the beam of a torch on him, and he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare.

“Stop that!” he demanded, annoyed.

“D-Dr. Todd?”

A hand grabbed his arm and he turned, helping Markham through the door and to the side.

“What is this?” the older man breathed, looking around with horror at the firelit butchery. “Are we on earth?”

“Yes.” Todd turned to the two youths. “Who are you?”

“Uh—Ally? And Jarret? From class?”

Todd turned and saw Amon standing on its back four legs, its front four pressed against its stomach. The devil stared into the fire with a curious intensity. Markham was helping Jack through the door, which immediately collapsed behind them.

Deciding there was no good way to explain how they’d entered the room, Todd went on the offensive.

“Did you start this fire?”

“Yes?”

“Is this where the serpents are lairing?”

“Uh.” Ally looked at Jarret, who was staring at Todd’s bloodstained shirt and tattered trousers with a look of horror on his face. She turned back to him. “I think so. They were, like, squirming around in the...the blood. Uh, is that Professor Markham?”

“Are you the only ones down here?”

Another jolt shook the ground, and dust sifted off the roof.

“Yes. I mean, Peter, my boyfriend, was here, but he left? Before we set the fire? Wh-what—”

“Good.” Todd cut off the question. “You’ve done well. Now get out of here, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

“But, how—”

“Go!” he roared, throwing out a hand and pointing at the stairs.

The two students scrambled to their feet.

When he turned back, it was to find Markham blessing Jack again and Amon slithering through the flesh-covered floor, sliding its body over the gobbets of flesh with degenerate pleasure. It headed toward him, its mirroreyes blank but its tongue eagerly lapping up the puddles of blood and slime.

“Enjoying yourself?” Todd asked, glaring down at the demon with a touch of revulsion. “Have you forgotten why we’re here?”

“No,” it hissed. “But I can do nothing until
they
are finished.”

“Why did Raphael assist you?”

Amon cocked its head, looking up at him.

“The dragons of
רוקניא
threaten all of us.”

“It could have stayed for the fight.”

The demon snapped its beak with disgust.

“B'nei elohim! Useless.”

Todd frowned, troubled. But then, the hosts of hell weren’t rallying to the battle, either. That was the problem with the mal'akhim—their thoughts weren’t human thoughts, and their ways weren’t human ways.

Which meant they could be extremely irritating.

He checked the probabilities and saw that they were bubbling as erratically as before, spinning and boiling in macropatterns and minichaos.

Markham finished making the final cross over Jack, who got to his feet, ignoring the gore smeared over the front of his jeans, and walked several paces away from the door and inferno.

“Do you want the dragons here?” he asked, pacing around the room and scraping a wide circle in the blood with the point of his boot. “For sure?”

“For sure,” Todd said, mimicking the man’s phrasing. Jack nodded. He planted his feet right outside the circle and wiped his mouth once on the back of his jacket sleeve. The firelight from the serpent pit created eerie shadows that played across his sharp features. He tossed his braid back over his shoulder and drew in a deep breath.

“I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, dragons of
רוקניא
,
to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in a fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name of Iah and Vau....”

Todd felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. Jack’s voice had been powerful enough when he’d conjured Raphael, but that was nothing compared to the force that echoed in it now, above and below the range of audibility. This, Todd realized, must be the sword that the archangel had given him, the weapon to wield against their enemies. A sword that emanated from the conjurer’s tongue; a sword of words.

“...by the name Anaphexeton, by the name Zabaoth, by the name Asher Ehyey Oriston, by the name Elion, by the name Adonai, by the name Schema Amathia, by the name Alpha and Omega...”

Space ripped before them, and a ghastly phosphorescent light spilled through, the same unworldly light that had played around the dragons the first time they’d appeared over the north campus field. Todd tensed, watching the spheres and tubes pushing through and pulsing from shape to shape, twisting and stretching as Jack’s words wove a trap around them.

“...I do exorcise and command thee, by the four beasts before the Throne, having eyes before and behind, and by the holy angels of God, I do command thee that thou appearest here to fulfill my will....”

High-pitched shrilling sounded from the room beyond, and a serpent’s head thrust out of the door, jaws snapping, scales burning.

“
Apage satanas
!” Markham snapped, and the serpent reared back, its head crashing into the low ceiling and sending more concrete dust and broken shards spilling down on top of them.

The creature within the circle—the
creatures
within the circle—took perceptible form, crammed into the restrictions of three dimensions. They coiled tightly around each other, confined by a barrier too small for them, and Todd was glad for the compression, because they were the most inhuman things he could have imagined. Their edges flickered and shifted in a sickening fashion, passing between dimensions, but what was firmly in this plane was a hideous, unfeasible amalgamation of sensory organs and rending limbs that made Todd’s mind hurt and his gorge rise.

If this was what they looked like “without deformity or tortuosity,” he had no desire to see them in their own dimension.

The ground beneath them rolled and heaved. The serpents had plunged beneath the cellar—fleeing? Putting out the flames? Rallying to their masters’ support?

“For the love of God,” Markham said, sounding horrified, “what do we do with them
now
?”

“...so I command and abjure thee, that thou give to me thine flesh to eat and thine blood to drink, this very moment, without delay,” Jack finished, his eyes wide and his face taut as he struggled to impose his will over beings he could barely comprehend.

Startled, Todd looked back at the two dragons and saw them twisting and coiling around each other, talons flashing as they clawed at the barrier, teeth bared in multiple mouths scattered across their improbably shaped torsos.

“Yesssss,” Amon hissed, its belly against the ground and its limbs held tightly against its sides. Its mirroreyes were fixed on the dragons and its narrow body quivered.

“Jack, are you—”

“Give me thine flesh to eat and thine blood to drink!” Jack demanded again, taking a step forward, closer to the circle. Razor-edged tentacles whipped out toward him and fell short, stopped by the circle of magick that constrained the creatures. “Throw that part of thyself out of the circle and then be still!”

Great, misshapen heads thrashed against the commandment. Then, one of the dragons twisted and clawed at itself, one of the mouths along its flank ripping a hunk of membrane from one of its limb-panels. It spat the pulsing, pinkish tissue to the floor, on the opposite side of the roughly drawn circle.

“
Be still
!” Jack took another step forward and picked up the envelope-sized piece of flesh, then cried out. He shoved the meat into his leather jacket and rubbed his hands against his blood-slicked jeans, his face twisted with pain. “It’s acidic,” he gasped.

“What are you doing?” Markham sounded appalled. “You don’t think we’re going to
eat
that, do you?”

“Yes.” Todd slowly nodded. “Of course. How else can we achieve communion with them?”

“It could kill you! It’s not even from this dimension!”

Jack was fishing a pocketknife from his jeans and unfolding the short blade. Amon slid through the gore and stopped a foot away from him, watching like a hungry dog waiting for a scrap from the dinner table.

“I’ll hold it,” Todd volunteered, knowing his numbed nerve-endings wouldn’t register the pain as acutely as Jack’s. The occultist hesitated, then nodded, pulling the membrane out of his jacket and tossing it over.

Todd stretched it taut and Jack sawed it into four roughly equal chunks. A thin liquid oozed from it, and Jack looked down at the darkening metal of his knife, then tossed it aside.