The Demon Abraxas (9 page)

“Police got a tip. Went to his house early this morning. I’ve got a good friend on the force keeping me updated. He was all fucked up on coke and started shouting at the cops about how Helen betrayed him. He was waving a gun around. He shot at the cops and they killed him.”

Ana pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment and stared at it. That didn’t make sense at all. “What?”

“They think Helen dropped him and he killed her, then saw you and…I don’t know what. Maybe he was going to punish you for what Helen did. He was pretty heavily into drugs, they say. Thank God you got away. Such a tragedy. I want you to take as much time off as you need.”

To buy herself more time to think, Ana switched into professional mode. “You’re going to have to come up with some statement for the papers.”

“Don’t you worry about that!”

“I think I can come in on Monday. If I stay home I’ll just worry.”

“I’ve upped the security in the building,” he said. “But with Drake gone I think it’s over. Ana, I’m very sorry and if there’s anything at all that I can do, tell me.”

“I will,” she said.

Ruben was watching her and sitting very straight in his chair, all traces of his casual, playful attitude gone.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she told him. “My boss says Helen was seeing this guy Drake and he shot at the cops and got himself killed, but she never said a thing about him to me. I need to look at something up in my office.”

“Lead on, Nancy Drew. You want me to carry you up?”

She shook her head at him but the image of him carrying her up the stairs like a pair of awkward newlyweds made her smile. He followed her into her tiny home office and watched as she woke up her computer and searched recent news for Nathan Drake. The story was on every local paper’s website.

Police had gone to Helen’s apartment minutes after Ana’s call and found her deceased in her bed with no signs of a cause of death. They’d initially suspected a heart attack until they received an anonymous tip from a man who said he was one of the group that had kidnapped a woman the night before—that woman was Ana, but her name was mercifully absent from the story. He said he was afraid of what his group had become: Nathan Drake had killed Helen when she said she was leaving him and wouldn’t go along with their ritual.

When the police showed up at Drake’s house that morning they’d found him intoxicated and with cocaine in plain sight. He’d appeared cooperative at first but then pulled a gun and started shooting, at which point the officers shot and killed him. The medical examiner’s report wasn’t complete, but they expected to find that an overdose was responsible for Helen’s death, presumably administered against her will by a vengeful Drake whose ranting to police before his death included a confession that he’d killed her.

Reading over her shoulder, Ruben made a couple of “Hmh” sounds and said, “Well, I don’t mind how that ended.”

The words foremost in Ana’s mind were:
I don’t think it’s ended at all
. She had the oddest feeling that Drake wasn’t done. His death felt staged, though she couldn’t imagine how. And there were still twelve other men out there who’d been involved. Maybe they’d let Drake take the fall for them. He was one of the few Ana could identify.

The police would try to find them but with the ringleader gone, Ana imagined this wasn’t going to be high on their list of priorities. That left a dozen men loose and dangerous in the world.

“I want to look into this more,” Ana said.

“Holler if you need anything, I’ll be downstairs hounding my agent—after I put that railing up, of course.”

She pulled her folio out of her work satchel. She’d dropped it there Thursday before she changed for the anniversary party. In addition to using the folio for note-taking in meetings, she kept her most critical information in the back zippered pocket. Along with her own passwords, she had a small note card on which Helen months ago wrote the password to her work email. They shared their work passwords in case either was sick or unreachable on a day when they had a big product release or announcement.

Now Ana used the web interface to log into the work email system as Helen. At first she thought she wasn’t logging in properly and then she realized that Helen’s email was empty. Everything had been deleted.

Puzzled, she clicked into Helen’s Sent Mail folder. This was full. Someone—Helen or someone else?—had deleted all of Helen’s mail but forgotten to look in here. Many of the outgoing emails were to Ana, many more were routine and work-related. Two months back, Ana found a glimmer of hope. Helen’s new upstairs neighbor sent her an invitation to a housewarming event. She must have written her personal email address on her business card because he’d sent the invitation to both addresses. Helen’s reply said she’d try to stop by and asked that future invitations only go to her personal email.

Ana opened another window in her browser and tried logging in to Gmail with Helen’s personal email account name and the same password she used for her work account. It worked!

Her sense of victory was short-lived because there were almost no emails in Helen’s personal account. She’d been deleting them as she went and the oldest was from Wednesday. It was the same in the Sent Mail folder. Helen didn’t want information sitting around in this account, apparently. There was some junk mail and then a very short note in Helen’s Sent Mail dated Wednesday morning, “Jacob, I don’t need anything else for tomorrow night, thank you. But I’d still like to see you tonight. Call me after work.”

Ana’s memory flashed on the dark men in the underground room and the young-voiced one saying, “I hear her, Jacob, I hear her.” He hadn’t been talking to Drake but to Black Hood, the other leader of the group. Maybe that was the man who turned Drake in to the police. It sounded like he, and not Drake, had been Helen’s lover. Why would Drake confess?

She picked up the phone and called Andi, a reporter for one of the local dailies. Andi answered her phone as always, even on a Saturday. She could have been downhill skiing and she would answer her phone, a habit that had cut short the second of their two dates and insured no third date.

“It’s Ana,” she said. “I saw your story on the murder and abduction.”

“Yeah, what the hell happened? They grabbed some other woman you work with? The police are being tight-lipped.”

Ana took a deep breath. Last week, she’d talked Andi into running a short piece on the Roth Software anniversary party, even though it was barely news. That put her in Andi’s debt. She intended to repay that debt in a moment, but she couldn’t say so much that she got herself in trouble.

“This can’t get out,” she said and paused to make sure Andi muttered assent. “I need your help, so you’ve got to promise me that we’re so far off the record I don’t even exist.”

“I promise,” Andi said.

“It was me.”

She laughed and then stopped so abruptly Ana thought she’d hung up.

“Andi?”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” she said.

Her voice changed from light and joking to hard-edged, “Do you need me to come over? Are you all right? I can be there in ten minutes.”

“I’m fine. Ruben’s here and I’m okay.”

“What happened?”

Ana told her, obscuring some of the details about the possession and outrunning a dozen men barefoot.

“Demon-summoning ritual?” she asked in a dubious tone when Ana finished.

“I’m serious, Andi. Plus, if I were going to start lying to you, I wouldn’t begin with something so ridiculous.”

“Ruben didn’t put you up to this? He was an extra in that possession movie, right? It’s kind of down his alley.”

“I need you to help me figure out who these guys are,” she said, ignoring the question. “And I need to know exactly where Drake lived.”

“All right, let me see what I can do with what you’ve told me so far. I’ve been getting some strange reports from Roth, including people up all hours at that building. My contacts say drugs, which I think is a lot more likely than black magic.”

There was a pause while she fanned through her notes. Ana heard the paper rustling. With Andi nothing from her notes made it to a computer until she started writing the story itself.

“Nob Hill,” Andi said. “Drake was renting a condo there.”

“Okay, keep me updated.”

“You too,” she said.

Ana found herself staring at the wall a foot to the left of the computer screen. Drake had driven her to Marin, so either he had another house there or it belonged to one of the hooded men, probably Jacob. Helen had emailed Jacob, so he was her primary connection to the summoners.

Whether she’d been involved willingly or not, maybe the ritual had killed Helen. But that wasn’t what the summoners expected to happen. They drove her body back to her apartment to make it look like a natural death. They clearly didn’t want to be discovered.

When Drake saw Ana watching them, he probably thought he could kill two birds with one stone—taking her so she couldn’t identify him to the police and using her as Helen’s replacement. He didn’t expect her to survive, at least not as herself. He hadn’t worried about her seeing his face. After she escaped, he’d framed himself. She believed he’d made the police shoot him on purpose, but why? And how?

Friday was one long blur to Sabel, from running out of Ana’s house in the morning to staggering through her afternoon classes on very little sleep and then failing to make contact with Josefene. That night, she fell into bed and lay awake for hours in the darkness thinking about Ana struggling against her in bed. That wasn’t the sort of memory of Ana she wanted to have right now, but her brain kept dredging it up.

She woke feeling gritty and trying to muster up some kind of steely resolve, but it felt more like soggy paper resolve. With tea and a bowl of fruit and oatmeal, she sat at the dining room table she used as a desk in her compact three-room duplex. She had a copy of the police reports about Helen Reed and Nathan Drake that she’d talked a friendly forensic expert in Anthro into getting for her, plus she had the news stories about Drake’s death.

She’d scanned them the night before, but now she read them carefully. She already knew that Helen had wanted power over life and death—that was the reason she began training with the witches and the reason she stopped her training. The Hecatines didn’t deal in immortality. The idea of it was offensive to them; they were on the side of time, change, and transformation. To their way of thought, death was necessary and important. At the same time, Sabel could empathize with Helen because when she contemplated her own mortality, she wasn’t nearly as level-headed about it as she was in the abstract.

Helen must have thought she could get some serious power from the summoners in exchange for her cooperation. Because the Hecatines had selected Helen as a initiate, Sabel could assume she had a good amount of raw talent or power to offer. The Hecatine witches weren’t a big group and they were highly selective. Whatever Helen had planned with the summoners, she must have reasonably expected she could pull it off. What went wrong?

Her phone rang and she glanced at the faceplate. “Ruben Cooper.” The only Ruben she knew was Ana’s roommate. She snatched up the phone, realizing it was Ana.

“How do you feel?” she asked Ana in what she hoped was an even tone.

“Pretty good really,” Ana said. “I hope it was okay to call, I just…I need to know more about what those guys were trying to do and I thought maybe I’d go to some of the occult bookstores tomorrow and ask around.”

“What time?” Sabel asked.

“I didn’t know if you’d want to come along.”

“I’m looking for answers too,” Sabel told her. She didn’t add that her answers were of a different order than Ana’s. Maybe there would be a time to talk about that later.

There was a prolonged pause on the other side, then Ana said, “I’m sorry about kicking you. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

“Not even my pride. When do you want to hit the bookstores?”

“Let’s start around elevenish tomorrow and we can get lunch while we’re out?”

“Why don’t I drive?” Sabel offered. “I’ll come pick you up.”

“Thank you.”

She hung up and stared at her phone. Bad idea? Probably. How bad? Medium bad. On the one hand, this gave her a chance to see how Ana was doing and follow up on the line of investigation about what the summoners had done to her. On the other hand…the other hand wanted to brush along the soft side of Ana’s jaw, cup her chin and find out if her lips felt as agile as they looked.

* * *

“I thought we’d start at the Dark Knife, unless you know a better one,” Ana said when she got into Sabel’s car late Saturday morning.

Her gaze ranged from the floor mat to the inside door panel but she couldn’t see any traces of her blood from Thursday night’s escape. It looked like she’d never been in the car and Sabel was similarly impassive, as if none of the events had even occurred. The arch of her dark eyebrows was just visible over the top of her narrow, oval sunglasses. It was hard to tell if she was smiling or not because the corners of her small mouth turned up naturally. They rode to the bookstore in silence.

The Dark Knife sat at the bottom floor of a decaying old house on the less prosperous side of San Francisco State University. It was not a stately old house, just an old wreck of a place with parts of its plank siding coming loose and a cracked window that had never been replaced. Ana eyed it dubiously as they walked up the crumbling concrete steps.

A narrow hallway ran the length of the house. The door to the bookstore was on her immediate left and she pushed it open to an alarming jangle of deep-toned bells. The décor was early gothic revival, complete with wrought iron candleholders that looked like miniature lanterns spaced along the one wall that held art rather than books—though it was a stretch to call some of it art.

As Ana and Sabel walked in, a group of five kids clustered around the cash register all straightened up and stared at them as if controlled by a single mind. Between facial piercings and necklaces, they wore enough jewelry to accessorize a small tribe. Ana’s eyes flicked back and forth, working to take it all in at once. One of the kids was behind the register, presumably the sales clerk, and the other four leaned against the long, rough-hewn wooden counter that was crowded with iron candlesticks and goblets. A display case held pentagram necklaces and small, ornate knives. Three walls of the room held thick-planked bookshelves crammed with dark-spined tomes.