Stones Unturned (37 page)

From the corner of his eye he saw Baalphegor and a quartet of demons he had never seen before — crablike monstrosities that had emerged from the oil-black darkness of the abyss beyond the world. The demons stalked toward Squire and Eve.

Danny faltered. His rage was inflamed, but his allegiance was torn between his friends and his father. In frustration, he took his anguish out on the closest thing to him. Danny grabbed hold of the still struggling animal's snapping jaws, exerting all his might as he pulled them apart, wanting so desperately to hear the sound of snapping sinew and bone.

"Want to bite me?" he growled with exertion, feeling the musculature of the animal's jaw start to give. "I'll show you what fucking happens when things try to bite me."

He smelled it before it struck, a strange metallic smell hanging heavily in the air. It reminded him of the way the night smelled after a heavy summer thundershower.

The bolt of lighting sliced down between him and the beast, severing their connection with the proficiency of a surgeon's scalpel.

Danny staggered backward and crashed into his bureau. Pictures fell, glass shattered. He clutched the edge of a half-open drawer and turned, baring his fangs in a hiss. Pain and rage twisted into hatred, and he longed to eviscerate whoever had dared to attack him, whoever had hurt him.

Then he saw Ceridwen, floating in the air in the middle of his bedroom, robes whipping around her in an unseen wind she had summoned. Her beauty was unearthly and heartbreaking. She was kindness and grace and the purity of the sky and the ocean . . .

And she glared at him as though he were her enemy.

"Leave the beast alone, Daniel," Ceridwen said, held aloft by a swirling funnel of wind. She held her staff out before her, its frozen, icy headpiece crackling with fire and mystical energies.

The shadow beast had received the brunt of her assault. It lay on its side, shivering as its ebony flesh smoldered. Danny could barely control his anger. Instinct made him crouch, ready to surge up into the air and bring her down, but he knew she could destroy him.

And that just made him all the madder.

"You love it so much," he snarled, grabbing hold of the dog-like animal and lifting its prone form up from the floor. "Why don't you fucking marry it," he screamed, tossing it away into the sea of darkness that composed the back wall of his room.

He looked at Ceridwen, a nasty sneer of defiance on his face.

"Not nice," the elemental sorceress said, the frozen sphere at the head of her staff flaring to life. It burned like the heart of the sun.

"Not nice at all."

Eve stood in a corner of the room, a curtain of dark hair falling in front of her face. She didn't like any of this. Not at all. Tensed for battle, she held her talons out in front of her and watched them elongate to wicked dagger tips. She bared her fangs and stared in dismay at Danny and Ceridwen squaring off over the body of Shuck.

This wasn't the way things were supposed to go. They were here to save the kid . . . to redeem him.

Not a person had ever walked the earth who knew more about redemption than Eve. And she knew very well that some could never be redeemed. But Danny . . . he was one of them. She cared for the little fucker, and now he was embracing the darkness.

Eve was going to have to rip out his throat, and then his heart. She was going to have to
end
him to save him.

It wouldn't be the first time she'd lost someone this way. But it never got easier.

And Shuck . . . she'd come to care for the stinking, slobbering beast. It hurt her to see it injured, just lying there on its side. She had to restrain herself from going to it. But as much as it pained her, there were bigger problems that required her attentions.

Before she got to Danny, there were grown-up demons to slaughter.

The first of the crab-things attacked with a chittering hiss, its razor-sharp claws snapping in her face. The demon Baalphegor held back, almost as if he were waiting to see how the crabs would do before deciding to join the fray.

All he had to do was ask. The crabs weren't going to do shit.

She lunged forward as the lead crustacean reached for her again, grabbing hold of its arm and twisting. The creature squealed in pain as she tore the arm away with a crack of carapace and an explosion of foul-smelling fluids. She held the limb, using it as a weapon to drive the other demons back.

"Pretty good, eh?" she said, licking the spatter of ichor from around her mouth.

"Not bad," Squire said, leaving her side, returning to the closet behind them.

"Where do you think you're going?" she demanded, still holding the crustaceans at bay.

"Give me a sec," the hobgoblin said, diving into a pool of shadow at the back of the closet.

"You little shit," she hissed, just as another of the creatures attacked. She stabbed with the limb, its point puncturing the carapace that covered its belly. This beast squealed as well, falling back to join its brethren. Beyond them, the back wall of the room pulsed with living darkness, some hell dimension or other on the other side. Baalphegor had ripped a hole between the planes.

Conan Doyle was going to be pissed.

Eve braced herself for another attack, then heard a clatter behind her as Squire returned, tromping out of the closet.

"You better have come back with a really big axe," she snapped.

"I've got something better than that," he said. And then she heard the unmistakable sound of a clip of bullets being loaded into a weapon.

Eve chanced a quick look behind her and saw that the hobgoblin had returned with one of the largest, semiautomatic rifles she had ever seen. It was huge in Squire's grasp, but he held it like a pro, flipping the safety to the "off" position.

"If you would be so kind as to get out of the way," he said, absurdly formal.

She barely had enough time to dive to one side before the little shit opened fire.

The weapon was a modified 50-caliber, semiautomatic rifle that Squire had picked up from the manufacturer down in Tennessee. Guns normally weren't his thing. He preferred the simpler killing tools like swords, knives, and battle-axes — preferably enchanted. But every once in a while a firearm came along that captured his fancy. The last one had been back in 1920, when he'd first laid eyes on the Thompson Machine Gun. It had been love at first sight, and he hadn't been smitten like that again until he saw the 50-caliber in action.

The hobgoblin planted his feet, screaming for Eve to get out of his way. As she moved, he pulled the trigger, spraying the demonic crustaceans with a shower of bullets modified to deal with the infernal. John Paul himself had blessed the steel-jacketed babies that were ripping through the creatures' shells like they were papier-mâché, a favor that Squire had called in just before the Pontiff joined the heavenly choir in 'oh-five.

The crustaceans squealed in agony, as parts of their bodies were turned to paste and dark shards of carapace. They started to retreat, the survivors hurling themselves back into the ocean of darkness at the back of the room. Squire continued to fire the weapon into the throbbing void, hoping for a few more lucky hits.

In his excitement, he'd lost sight of Baalphegor, and it wasn't until he heard Eve screaming above the noise to watch his ass that he realized the demon was crawling across the ceiling above him. He raised the heavy weapon, preparing to shoot the son of a bitch down, but just as he pulled the trigger, Eve leaped to his aid.

Squire screamed at her, but it was too late. Blessed bullets erupted from the gun and strafed both Eve and Baalphegor.

The hobgoblin cursed and jumped out of the way as they both dropped from the ceiling in a bloody heap. He tossed the weapon aside and hurried to kneel by Eve.

"Come on, speak to me, darlin'," he said, reaching out and rolling her over, gasping at the number of holes the bullets had punched in her clothes and in her flesh. Blood soaked her blouse and jacket.

Her eyes snapped open, bright red with her curse, and she hissed at him, baring her fangs.

Squire gave her his biggest smile. "Would it help if I said I was sorry?"

Eve shot up a hand and clutched his throat in an iron grip.

"Do you
see
this outfit? Do you have any idea what this cost? I'm gonna make you hurt as much as I hurt now," she hissed, blood still leaking from her wounds.

Explosions of color danced around the outskirts of his vision as he tried to breathe, but Squire caught sight of Baalphegor, the demon's body leaking precious fluids as he pushed himself up from the floor. He tried to get Eve's attention but she was too caught her up in her petty nonsense to notice.

She looked as though she was just about to do something awful to his eyes, when he managed to squeak a single word.

"Demon."

Baalphegor had propped himself halfway up, and his claws were sketching the air, halfway through the process of casting a spell.

Eve saw that Squire was focused not on her, but behind her. She twisted around, tossing him aside, but it was too late. Tendrils of black magic erupted from the demon's hands, pulsed once, and then simply exploded, the sheer force of the magic summoned obliterating the structure around them.

Reducing it to nothing but rubble and the stench of brimstone.

It was as if Danny had been removed from the passage of time.

The energy from Ceridwen's staff had expanded outward, engulfing him in a light that seemed to permeate straight to his soul. He was frozen, hanging in the air, powerless.

She floated like a goddess before him, her robes flowing around her, moved by a wind that he could not feel. Lightning sparked from her eyes, and a cold blue mist churned around her hands like tiny, twin storms.

"This is not you, Daniel," she said, her voice booming in his ears.

He wanted to scream that she was wrong, but the pain was too great for him to speak. The ice-cold blazing fire generated from her staff engulfed him, attempting to burn away the darkness within him.

How could she understand what it was like to know, to finally understand, that he was evil to his core? That he had been born a demon, a creature of darkness, and that he still was this thing? Whatever chance he'd had to be human, he had surrendered it when he stood by and let his father slaughter that old woman, when he had tasted her blood, when he had not balked at the murder of the delivery man.

Ceridwen might blame it on his sire, but she did not realize that his bestial nature had been festering inside him for months now, becoming harder and harder to control with every passing day. The sorceress saw what she wanted to see. She was trying to convince him that the monster that existed inside him could be caged — controlled.

But what if he didn't want it to be? What if he wanted to set it free, to allow it to mature? To allow it —
him
, to achieve his special destiny, whatever the hell that was? He had loved the humanity his mother had given to him, cherished all of the memories and experiences and emotions that even now existed inside the tough, fleshy growth on his chest.

His soul. His humanity. And oh, God, it hurt so much. To have those feelings, that humanness, be a part of him and to have done the things he'd done and seen the things he'd seen . . . to know what he was . . . the guilt and horror and anguish was just too much for him to withstand.

Better to surrender to evil than have to feel the sorrow and regret.

The darkness welled up inside him, pushing back the light. Danny opened his eyes to see the shocked expression on the Ceridwen's face as she sensed the change in him, and he used it as his opportunity. He attacked her; slashing with his claws, raking a bloody furrow across her shoulder.

He was free of her power.

And then the world exploded around them.

Rising up from the burning debris, Baalphegor-Moabites shrugged off the effects of the explosion, ready to continue the battle.

The demon peered through the thick black smoke and fire, unfazed by the hellish conditions.
It's just like home
, he thought, taking in a lungful of dirty, searing heat,
only much, much milder
.

To say that he was angry was an understatement. When he'd first been approached by the mysterious gathering of hellions, spouting their fearsome knowledge of the Devourer's coming, he saw their offer as the perfect opportunity. Here was the chance to survive when so many would perish, and all he need do was harvest the collected life experiences of his spawn littered across the forbidden planes, save one.

In exchange for one humanity sack, from a changeling left upon the earthly plane, the hellions would provide him an opportunity to flee the coming devastation, to travel to pristine dimensions where the demonic had yet to tread.

It was an opportunity he could not afford to lose, and now it had gone horribly awry.

Baalphegor heard the wails of sirens piercing the night, the puny creatures that thrived upon this world attempting to extinguish what his rage had wrought. In his anger he decided that he would kill them all. He began to move through the gathering of humanity, just outside the perimeter of smoke and fire, longing to vent his anger and frustration in an explosion of slaughter.

The demon paused.

There is still a chance that this can be salvaged
, he thought, searching the rubble around him for signs of life. If his offspring still lived — and if even only recently slain — the organ could be harvested, the exchange could still occur.

Ignoring the temptation of wanton death and murder, Baalphegor extended his senses, searching for his son within the burning debris of the ruined home. And, stronger than the pungent odor of blood upon the air, he found the scent.

With a shriek of victory, Baalphegor dug deeply into the wreckage, past the shattered wood, crumbled plaster, and brick and found what he so desperately sought.

"There you are," the demon hissed, extracting the limp body of Daniel Ferrick from the smoking remains of his home.