Premonitions (12 page)

The Taser hit him high in the shoulder, and he collapsed not ten feet in front of her. She kicked his gun away as she ran past and tugged at the Taser line. It didn’t budge, so she dropped the Taser rather than screw around trying to pull the darts loose and reel them back in.

Another flashbang detonated ahead and the remaining worshippers who weren’t stunned into immobility finally gave up and ran. A group of six came out of the tear-gas fog, scrambling over each other in their haste to escape. Karyn sidestepped them and stumbled into a rolling bank of noxious cloud. She gasped. The respirator did its job, mostly, but the air coming through had a noxious tang to it, and her eyes teared up as trace amounts slipped in around the seal of her goggles.

A shape ahead of her moved, light gray against the dark gray of the seething mob behind it. From the bulky headgear, she assumed it was Tommy. Another figure moved past him, running toward the house, arms clutching something to its chest.

The figure was gone in a moment, and Tommy followed.

Karyn started forward after them, then stopped abruptly and fell forward as something snagged the cuff of her pants. Half a second later, searing pain ripped into her calf.

Knife! He’s got a knife!

The man she’d Tasered clung to her ankle with one hand and clumsily swung a short survival knife with the other. Her calf was bleeding, the guy was surely going to stab her again, maybe do some real damage, and all she felt was confused surprise coupled with indignation that this was actually happening to her.

What the fuck? I guess I really did take too much.

* * *

The men moved at the first explosion, like sprinters leaving the starting blocks. In moments, they had disappeared over the low rise that had masked them from the house. Sobell took a moment to work a small spell that would scramble his appearance on any electronic equipment and ambled after them.

By the time he reached the front door, the two guards that had been posted there were dead, their bodies stuffed into the front coat closet. The low-ranking member of the team had already mopped up the blood trail, and the whole group stood at attention.

“Lead on,” Sobell said.

They moved through a short hall and into a spacious living room. Sobell couldn’t keep the sneer off his face. Mendelsohn’s place was a tasteless hat tip to Frank Lloyd Wright designed by somebody who didn’t understand the aesthetic, other than that everything must be squared off and, preferably, feature some kind of ungainly cantilever. Square blocks of uncomfortable-looking furniture lined the room in tiresome rectilinear precision. The room was dark, but Sobell felt certain that all the furnishings were black.

Ought to do good taste a service and burn this place down before we depart,
he thought.

Sobell’s team flicked on gun-mounted flashlights as
they moved to the basement stairway and began the descent. Sobell cast one last glance at the living room, shook his head, and followed the bobbing lights down. If his intelligence was correct, this level of the basement was carved up into perhaps a dozen rooms housing no fewer than thirty of Mendelsohn’s most devoted followers. They would be outside now, awaiting their peculiar version of the Second Coming. And good riddance.

Pullman, the squad leader, had done a good job memorizing the plans. He took two lefts and the next right without hesitation, dropping low just as he turned the last corner. The guardroom ahead was still staffed despite the activity outside—six men playing cards and waiting, guns at the ready.

Pullman wasted no time. He fired, dropping two of the guards immediately before the others scattered. The shots were uncomfortably loud despite the suppressor mounted on the gun barrel, and Sobell covered his ears.

The squad followed Pullman, and Sobell stepped back around the corner to wait until it was finished. An awful lot of shooting got crammed into the next few moments, and chips of concrete flaked off near Sobell as stray shots pounded the wall.

Then everything was quiet.

“Status?” Sobell shouted.

“Enemy’s down,” Pullman said. “Edgars got hit, but the body armor stopped it. We’ll have to move, though, sir. Pretty sure they got off a call to the others.”

Sobell walked around the corner, brushing dust from his shirt. “The others should be fairly busy right now. But your point is well taken. Shall we?”

The hall passed through the guardroom and continued around another bend, bringing them up short in front of a curious door. Sobell pushed the barrel of one of the guns up and across, playing the light over the surface. Black cast iron, rough, reminding him of nothing so much as the surface of an old frying pan. Somebody had etched it with a collection of runes and sigils. Probably Genevieve, Sobell figured. It looked like her work.

There was no doorknob or handle of any kind, but
that didn’t bother him. He touched the door in three spots, said a few words. A white-hot line flared up around the outer edge of the door, causing the soldiers to step back and cover their eyes. A moment later, the door swung open.

“Don’t touch that,” Sobell said. “It’s hot.” He pushed up one sleeve of his shirt where it had unrolled and slid down. “After you.”

The stairs turned out to be metal as well, though of a much more utilitarian flavor: rough treads, handrails made of galvanized pipe. The hall below was similarly Spartan. The walls were unadorned cinder block, and the ceiling was left open to the bare structural members and floor above. This level was dark and unguarded. That made sense, Sobell thought. There was, after all, only one way in.

Sobell followed the men. He noticed a faint, odd smell as they started walking—something dead, certainly, but also the foundry smell of scorched metal, something with the acrid chemical tang of paint thinner, and something that was, unless he’d lost his mind, lavender. It turned into a full-on stench within just a few dozen steps. He swallowed roughly once or twice. The men in front of him coughed and rubbed at their eyes.

After about a hundred feet, the corridor turned sharply left, but before they reached that spot, Sobell called a halt.

“Stay here. Don’t come around that corner unless you hear me scream bloody murder.” He considered. “Actually, don’t come then, either. I’ll be fucked in that case, and there won’t be anything you can do about it. Just stay here and cover my behind. I need some quiet time. No interruptions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s the spirit. Hand me that flashlight, would you?”

One of the men unclipped the light from his gun and handed it over. Sobell took a deep breath and turned the corner.

The light dimmed immediately, the hot white glare
dropping to a feeble orange glow.
There’s confirmation for you, if the smell didn’t do it.
He stared at the wall to his right until his eyes began to adjust. The only sounds came from his breathing and the quiet rustle of his clothes when he shifted his weight. Nevertheless, he felt a presence in the gloom, felt the will of a conscious
something
concentrated on him as if it were a weight trying to crush him to pulp.

When his eyes had adjusted enough to see the cracks between the cinder blocks in the wall, he turned. This time, he kept his eyes on the floor ahead of him as he moved forward. The sense of
presence
screamed at him, and at the edges of his vision, he saw the unearthly darkness shrouding the end of the hall.

Cold sweat popped from his skin, wet beads down the length of his spine, and it took an intense effort of will to keep putting one foot in front of the other. He passed a hall that led off to the right, the place where—if his intelligence was to be believed—that ridiculous jawbone was kept. He stifled the urge to run down that hall, to get away from that crushing weight.

Three steps more and he stopped at a line of symbols across the floor. His light had dimmed to a tiny red worm of filament, as though the battery had nearly run down, and the faint illumination it emitted ended abruptly at the other side of the line. Hatred, palpable as pummeling fists, surged from the darkness and boiled the air around him. His stomach churned, and terror coursed through his body—and he had the very clear sense that the hate wasn’t even directed at him.

Dear God.
Genevieve had told the truth, he’d known that all along, but he doubted she knew exactly what was down here. Even garden-variety demons were nothing to fuck around with, but
this
 . . . Whoever had conjured this thing up must have been profoundly lucky, and this thing must have been having an unusually stupid day.

He summoned his courage. “Bit cramped, innit?”

Images assailed his mind. A man’s head in a vise, eyes bulging and mouth open in a silent scream as somebody turned the crank. A bat with its wings systematically
shattered by tiny hammers. Something he caught only a glimpse of but looked like a grown man folded up and jammed into a very small metal box. Before the image was gone, he saw splinters of smashed bone protruding from nearly every bit of exposed flesh. Others crowded in, most gone too fast to register.

“Ah, nonverbal. Rather old school, as they say, but we can work with that.” A complete bluff, that, but it was never good to be seen weak or uninformed. Although, the thing could plant images in his mind. Did that mean it could also pull things out? Better not to dwell on that. Better just to get what he needed and get out.

An image of a tattooed skinhead, lips sewn shut with black thread, giving him the finger.

“Subtle. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you want out of this charming little cell? I mean, it looks cozy and all, but it does seem like it must get awfully dull.”

Nothing. No images or sounds, just blackness ahead of him. Waiting. He found himself wondering just how good the wards were.

“As it happens, I need some information. You need out of this hole so you can presumably wreak whatever unspeakable vengeance you’ve been plotting in there all this time.”

Another flurry of horrible images battered his mind, grotesque images that made the man stuffed in the box look like a mural on a nursery wall. They were permutations of the demon’s unspeakable vengeance, he was sure. Sour acid rose to the back of his throat.
Fuck, don’t vomit here, do
not
vomit.
His mouth flooded with saliva, and he swallowed once, then twice. Then the images were gone. He had a grim feeling that the residue they left behind would stay with him for a long time, probably resurfacing at midnight every night for the next, oh, rest of his life or so.

“Okay, then. In exchange for getting you out of here, I need two things.”

A series of barter images rose to mind. A man that looked like a seventeenth-century farmer trading a chicken for a rake. A woman trading a piece of jewelry
for a rug. Two dirty, naked children trading marbles. Each image, he noticed, had the participants trading one thing for one other thing.

Fucking demons.
Nowhere to go, no way out, and it was determined to stick to some bizarre set of arbitrary rules it had established for itself. He’d never understood it. Demons were creatures of almost pure appetite, and even the oldest and most crafty seemed hard-pressed to resist sating immediate urges in favor of longer-term objectives, but there were strange exceptions to that general rule. It seemed most had an OCD streak, and certain kinds of rules were inviolable, at least as far as Sobell could tell. This one would surely wait if he wouldn’t deal. Its patience may not have been limitless, but as far as Sobell knew, its time was. Eventually, the wards would decay just enough, or an earthquake would crack them, or something, and if its terms weren’t met, the demon would wait until then, its anger growing fiercer and hotter by the minute.

Still, this wasn’t his first demon-wrangling rodeo. He’d come prepared.

“First, I let you out. In exchange for that, you don’t hurt me or my men.” A stupid thing to have to barter for, but probably necessary. Demons could be unbelievably petty about payment, and this one was likely furious and frustrated beyond measure, itching to wreak hideous violence on the first victims it could find.

A handful of pebbles. The seven of spades. A cluster of seven grapes. The subtext was clear:
That’s not one thing, that’s seven.

Sobell sighed. “Fine. You don’t hurt me. What you do aside from that is your business.”

A handshake, a letter signed in blood.

“Done,” Sobell said. “Second, you may have noticed that I am not a healthy man.”

A sense of vast dark amusement surrounded him, and his mind swam with images of a horrid demonic feast, chunks being torn off a living body and devoured by laughing monstrosities. The body, he was not surprised to note, was his own.

“Yes, well. The dark arts are
such
a wear and tear on one’s soul, and, yes, one day I’ll have to deal with that problem, too. But I’m afraid today’s issue is merely this vessel of flesh that carts around your future dinner.”

Merlin. Methuselah. A thousand-year-old man crumbling to dust, parts breaking off as he took each step toward some invisible goal. And, as if the demon might actually have some kind of sense of humor, a fossil embedded in shale—a skull of some kind, and part of a rib cage.

“Not that old, sadly, though I’m working on it.” Sobell licked at dry lips and wished for a glass of water. “I am in a hell of a bind, though. My body dies, and you bastards get my soul. I use much more magic to extend my life, and you bastards get my soul before I even get to vacate the premises. So, I need you to give me another, say, hundred years or so.”

A man with his pockets turned inside out, a sheepish look on his face.

“You
can’t
?
What the hell good are you?”

At first, there was no response. No images at all, though that oppressive sense of hate seemed to gather its focus uncomfortably close to Sobell. Then, a new set of images: A little girl, whispering something into a little boy’s ear. High school kids passing notes in class. A phone book. A set of encyclopedias, for God’s sake.

Information. It can give me information.
Sobell’s spirits sank further. What question could he even ask? What information was any good to him now, other than a straight answer on what to do to extend his life?