The Demon Abraxas (6 page)

“How did you find me?” she asked.

Sabel almost told her the truth, but at the last second she turned the first syllable of “magic” into, “Masterful detective work.”

Ana’s broad mouth quirked up, but her dark eyes swam with pain. “Why?” she started but choked on the word.

The silence in the car was absolute as Sabel released the brake and moved through the intersection. She couldn’t think of any right words to say. Had this bright-haired, clever woman really just fought her way free of a dozen men and then tried to ask why Sabel would bother to come after her?

As they were pulling up at the hospital, Ana tried again in a lighter tone. “I thought you were just a professor,” she said.

Sabel made herself laugh a little. “I’m not
just
a professor. Let’s get you looked at.”

The hospital staff let her go into the exam room with Ana and she didn’t ask if Ana preferred for her to wait outside. She told herself that she needed to stay close to Ana to find out what kind of magical damage had been done to her—but the truth was that she felt a shockingly strong need to protect her. Ana was bigger than Sabel and her body displayed years of casual athleticism, but tonight that easy physicality was covered in dirt and blood. Ana’s wheat and gold hair was matted with blood on the right side and decorated with bits of twig and leaf. The lovely silk dress hung in tatters under her knees and the bottoms of her stockings were completely gone, worn away from her running, and along with them a lot of the skin on the bottom of her feet. She’d limped into the hospital leaving bloody footprints that made Sabel wince.

From the way Ana gingerly sat herself on the exam table and levered herself back on it by inches, Sabel understood that her whole body must be burning with pain and fatigue. She wanted to take Ana’s hand and tell her it would all be okay, but she didn’t dare. She remembered the words of her mentor: “
Maarevas
, when you become emotionally involved, you put everyone in danger.”

It was a little late for that. She’d become curious about Ana when the HR director at Roth volunteered her to help set up the diversity training sessions, but she’d assumed Ana was just another corporate pretty face. Now that she was soundly proven wrong, she didn’t know what to do with all the emotions colliding together inside her.

Sitting in the cold, plastic hospital room chair, she bowed her head for a moment to compose her thoughts. When she looked up, Ana was watching her with dark, curious eyes. Sabel straightened up in the chair by reflex and Ana’s look turned to one of dismay.

“Oh no, your suit.”

Sabel glanced down. A long stain of blood ran from her shoulder to the curve of her breast. She touched it with a curious fingertip. It was Ana’s, from whatever head wound she’d sustained. She liked the suit a little better now, but she could hardly say that out loud.

“It’s all right. I’ll get another,” Sabel said.

“But Ruben made it sound ridiculously expensive…”

“Not if you get it from eBay.”

Ana smiled.

“Should you call him? See if he can come pick you up?” Sabel opened her purse and pulled out Ana’s phone.

“Where did you find that?” Ana asked.

“On the street down from Helen’s apartment.”

“And that’s how you knew I was in trouble…but what were you doing there?”

“I thought you were right to be worried about Helen,” Sabel told her.

“Did you see her? Is she okay?”

Sabel stood up in alarm. “You didn’t go in?” she asked, hoping she was wrong.

“No. I just saw them carrying in what looked like a body. Oh no, no, no. It wasn’t Helen. Tell me it wasn’t Helen!”

Sabel couldn’t deny the truth, even if she didn’t say it aloud. Realization broke in Ana’s eyes and she rolled on her side away from Sabel and started crying. Sabel wanted to put her hands on Ana’s back and comfort her. She wanted to pull Ana into her arms and let her cry herself out but she was afraid that would embarrass her more than comfort. She put the cell phone on the table and slipped out of the room.

In the hallway, she leaned back against the wall and slowed her breathing down so her thoughts would settle. She lifted the left side of her jacket and put her mouth close to the dried blood. Cupping her tongue just under her palate, she drew air in slowly—there was a woody, balsamic scent like myrrh and then a lance of pain across the roof of her mouth. She gasped and jerked her head back.

Whatever happened to Ana, it was tremendously powerful—but she hadn’t felt any of that energy rolling off her in the room. Had it passed through her and gone or was it lying dormant in her body? What kind of demon magic left that signature? She hadn’t been around a lot of demons in her life, okay none, because the witches didn’t let their precious
maarevas
do that work, and the few times she smelled the magic of little, bothersome demons, it was nothing like this.

A small, blond woman in scrubs came down the hall and went into Ana’s room, and Sabel followed her back in. Ana was half sitting against the raised top half of the hospital bed and staring at the phone in her hands.

“Do you need a ride home?” Sabel asked.

“I don’t want to trouble you.”

“I’m taking you home.”

Ana’s mouth quirked up in the ghost of a smile.

“What?” Sabel asked.

She shook her head. “Just a joke with Ruben earlier about the security system.”

The doctor interrupted before Sabel could ask what the joke was and gave instructions for the care of Ana’s injuries. Most of them were straightforward, but the doctor did think she had a concussion and recommended someone be with her for the next twenty-four hours. If Ruben didn’t show up, Sabel resolved that she was staying over whether Ana asked her to or not.

While the doctor was talking about how to change the bandages on her feet, a police detective came in to get a statement. He assured Ana they would do everything they could to find the men who abducted her. She gave a very full description of the space she was in, but she changed something in the middle. Sabel noted a pause in her story and a distant look in her eyes. She said she’d pretended to be possessed and used the distraction to escape, but Sabel could tell more than that happened. Had she seen other magic at work?

Ana invited Sabel to chime in for the account of the rescue. The Hecatines didn’t approve of average humans finding out about the magic operating in the world and it was surprisingly easy to keep it from them. A fundamental aspect of this material world was its resistance to persistent magic. When Sabel had asked the Hecatines why they didn’t tell more people, they’d only said that it wasn’t time.

Sabel explained that it was pure dumb luck that she found Ana and said she’d taken down the man on the phone with a solid double-handed club strike to the side of his head.

“That self-defense class finally came in handy,” she added with a wide-eyed smile.

* * *

“You can’t find him?” Jacob asked again, the annoyance clear in the tight clipping of his words.

“He is riding in her body. She let him in. No, I cannot. There is no way to distinguish her from any of the other millions of people in this city. But we know who she is, we will wait and then go take him,” Drake said.

They were standing in front of Jacob’s house, having sent the men home after the woman got into the unexpected rescuer’s car and escaped. Drake stroked his fingers along the back of the stray orange tabby that wandered by and let it rub its soft head against his knee. He’d take this one home too except he already had three women living at his house and they wouldn’t tolerate more than the couple of cats he had. It was always easier to pass up a new friend than to make trouble with women. In another day that wouldn’t be an issue. Maybe he should have Jacob hold onto the cat for him. No, Jacob was too focused and Drake didn’t want to use up his favors.

“She saw you,” Jacob said. “And she heard you named ‘Drake.’ She’ll know you and the whole deal at Roth is in jeopardy.”

Drake sighed. “We’ll just have to kill me.”

“I assumed you had another body handy,” Jacob said. Drake didn’t appreciate the hint of a smile he saw on Jacob’s face.

“We’ll plant evidence that I killed Helen and then we’ll get me killed. Case closed. I’ll be back in a few days as my brother who, in case of my death, inherits my business.”

“Perhaps then we can get on with the real plan,” Jacob said.

Ana felt four kinds of grimy—layers of fearful sweat and exertion, dirt, and emotional smudge. Five layers, if embarrassment counted. She directed Sabel toward the garage under the house because there was no available street parking and Ana didn’t know how far she could walk. Tomorrow she’d have to send Ruben to get her car, if he ever showed back up from his wild night. She gave Sabel the code to open the garage door and watched her glide out of the car to the number pad and back again. There could not be a worse way to spend time with this self-possessed, beautiful, cryptic woman.

The soles of Ana’s feet were thickly bandaged and she wasn’t sure if she could walk across the basement floor on them. The process of cleaning them at the hospital hurt at least as much as running on them, and now they both stung and ached despite the prescription dose of painkillers they’d given her. If Sabel wasn’t here, she’d seriously consider crawling out of the car and up the stairs.

“How can I help?” Sabel asked.

“Could you just go up and open the door for me? I need a sec.”

The other problem with crawling was how many muscles she’d have to use. Her shoulder was sore from hitting the ground and she didn’t want to have to put weight on her arms. She clenched her teeth and stood up. She’d sprinted on the balls of her feet and they’d taken the brunt of the damage, so she put her weight on her heels and hobbled to the stairs. She hated Ruben for a moment for forgetting to reinstall the railing after he’d painted months ago, but she put her good shoulder to the wall for balance and went up one slow step at a time.

If only Ruben were there, he could have picked her up and carried her. She’d texted him a few times from the car, but there was no answer. Clearly his night at the clubs had turned out the way he planned. She’d also sent a quick email from her phone to Detlefsen to let him know that she wouldn’t be in the office that morning. She assumed the police would be contacting him about Helen and he’d have his hands full without worrying about Ana’s absence.

Sabel waited in the hall. She didn’t say anything as Ana continued her painful progress up to the second floor. Ana made it to the bathroom and then paused in the doorway, swaying slightly, because she couldn’t figure out how to turn on the tub and get her clothes off.         

“Oh by everything holy, let me help you,” Sabel said.

“But you already—”

“Let you get kidnapped? Took forever to find you? Yes, I’m batting a thousand tonight. Go. Sit.”

The bitterness in her voice surprised Ana. She limped to the closed toilet lid and sat on it. At least she’d used a bathroom at the hospital so she was spared trying to figure out how to navigate peeing, bathing, and Sabel.

“You knew I was going to be kidnapped?” Ana asked.

Sabel turned on the bath water and rinsed out the tub, letting the cold water swirl down the drain.

“You’re going to have to get in first or you’ll soak the bandages,” she said. After a pause she added, “I thought Helen might be in danger. I had no idea it would spread to you. If I’d known more, I’d have warned you. But I should have come with you to Helen’s. If I’d just come with you…Hindsight. It’s hard to know what I should have known.”

Sabel’s gray-blue eyes were storm cloud dark. She held her fingers under the running water for another moment and then turned off the faucet. Ana had too many questions trying to get out of her mouth at the same time. Why hadn’t Sabel come with her? Was it just because they were strangers to each other? Why did Sabel seem to think she could have prevented both of them from being taken? What did Sabel know about Helen? And, when Ana was running at random through an unknown neighborhood, how could Sabel pinpoint her?

She asked the most radical question that came to mind: “How did you drop the man with the stun gun?”

“Why don’t we take care of you first, okay?”

The four feet between the toilet and the bathtub looked like a chasm, but Ana nodded resolutely. “I can do this,” she said. She wanted some answers, but she wasn’t sure she wanted them now.

“Yell if you need me,” Sabel said. She paused in the doorway and gave Ana a stern look. Her face, framed by the open collar of her black shirt and her loose, windblown hair, looked like an ivory carving of some fey queen with fierce sapphire eyes. “Promise?”

Ana nodded. When the door shut, she slumped against the back of the toilet and tipped her head back. At least Sabel hadn’t offered to undress her. The shock and fear were still dampening every other sensation in her body, but some part of her mind warned her that tomorrow she was going to feel unbelievably horrified.

She hitched the dress up and struggled out of it, then threw it into the far corner of the room. Her bra followed and then the underpants. This part of a crisis was familiar to her: get clean, shake and cry from the shock, remember to eat something as soon as she felt hungry, and get to sleep if she could manage that; otherwise maybe she could stand some mind-numbing television.

She took the opportunity to put a tad of weight on her feet. They didn’t hurt as much as she expected from the trip up the stairs—the painkillers must be doing their thing. She was able to get to the edge of the tub with minimal ache. She braced on her hands and slid back into the cold porcelain basin, propping her heels up on the sides to keep the bandages out of the way. Then she leaned forward enough to close the drain and turn on the water. Sabel had run it until it warmed and made sure that it wouldn’t freeze her.

As the warm water embraced her, the shivery adrenaline of the last hours began to ebb, uncovering her deeper fears. She wasn’t supposed to get hit ever again in her life, or have to fight and run. San Francisco had been safe for her the last nine years, nothing like where she’d grown up. She hated the way that part of the evening felt familiar: feeling afraid and threatened, being trapped, the anticipation of pain that was as bad as the real pain when it came. But this was different, she insisted to herself. This time she could fight back effectively. She wasn’t a kid anymore.