The First Sacrament (The Demons of Stone Chapel Book 1) (3 page)

“You two make a cute couple,” she said.

Brother Luke and I exchanged wary glances. I think we could both agree that he wasn’t my type.

Three

“She's been regressing for the past few weeks,” Brother Luke explained. He pushed a steaming cup of coffee into my hands and poured one for himself, stirring in a spoonful of sugar. We retreated to the break room after security hauled Rosie back upstairs. “Both physically and mentally.”

No way. I never would have guessed. My wrist ached from where she grabbed me. “Is there anything we can do? I read online the other day that there was this new drug being tested in Japan. Lessens the effect the demon has.”

Brother Luke heaved a sigh. That didn't sound good. “I'm going to get in trouble for telling you this, but I overheard her doctors yesterday.”

I took a big sip of coffee. Scalded my tongue in doing so. Tears sprung up in the corners of my eyes.

“She's got a couple of months left, Beatrice,” he said. “Give or take a few days.”

I choked on my sip, spitting the coffee back into my cup.

Two months. That was it. I knew it was going to be soon, but this soon? Sixty measly days were nothing in the grand scheme of things. We had so much we wanted to do. So many plans. We were going to get out of this hell hole. Do things with our lives. She was going to draw comics and get famous and I was going to direct horror movies and win a ton of Oscars. Implausible goals, maybe, but they were goals nonetheless.

And her disease was robbing them from her. Robbing her from
me.

Rosie was my best friend. My sister. I didn't want to believe that she was dying. I'd been denying it for years, because denial was easier than facing the truth. I knew there wasn't much use in it now. I knew I needed to suck it up and prepare myself. But I couldn't. Not yet.

“Beatrice?” Brother Luke said.

I blinked. “Yeah?”

“Are you all right?”

Yeah, dude, I was
thrilled
. I took another sip of coffee, stared down into the cup and tried to sort out what I was feeling. Sadness, grief, confusion, everything I expected to feel upon hearing the news. Underneath it all, something deeper than sadness festered inside of me. Something like rage, hot coals in my stomach.

I've never been one to curl up in a ball and cry when things got bad. In fact, I distinctly remember being royally pissed off at my parents' funeral. I hated them for what they did. Hated that they died on me, left me alone in this scary world to fend for myself. Years passed and that hatred cooled to apathy. They were dead. Whatever. I wasn't the first kid to lose her parents and I wouldn't be the last.

Rosie was different. I didn't hate her for dying. I didn't hate her for attacking me or saying those horrible things. She didn't choose to be born with Faustian Syndrome. Her mother didn't choose possession, no matter what those stupid pamphlets from that CADP lady said.

I hated the
demon
. I hated what it made her. I hated that it tortured her, sickened her, corrupted her. I wanted to reach inside of her and grab it by the throat, murder it like it was murdering her.

But I couldn't. That was the worst part.

“Thanks for the help, Brother Luke,” I said, putting my coffee down on the counter. Grief swelled in my chest. I wiped at my nose with my sleeve. Mother Arden hated when I did that. “I'm gonna go. Tell Rosie bye for me.”

“Beatrice,” Brother Luke’s watery eyes filled with concern. “If you need to talk to someone―”

“I’m fine.”

I didn't need to talk to anyone. What I needed to do was go back to my apartment, dig out the two hundred dollars I kept under my couch cushions in case of emergencies, go to the pawn shop, and buy a gun.

I couldn't save Rosie, that much I had to accept. But with a little bit of luck and some help from the internet, I might’ve been able to safe myself.

My mind was made up before I even left the sanatorium.

I was going hunting tonight.

***

Getting a gun in Stone Chapel was as easy as getting gas at a gas station. The guy who owned Eighth Street Pawn wasn't picky about where his money came from. I walked in, flashed my two hundred dollars (plus the change I found in my pocket), and his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.

He didn't ask questions, kept his opinions to himself. I pointed to the one I wanted―a small pistol that would surely pack enough of a punch to kill a demon―and he unlocked the glass display case and got it for me. No background check. No paperwork. No disapproving stare. He understood, gun laws be damned.

Living in this city meant living in a constant cycle of decay. You had to keep up unless you wanted to rot along with it. Buying a gun was one method of staying afloat. Using it was another. And I certainly planned on using mine.

But before I could do that, I had to prepare. I hiked back to my apartment, narrowly avoiding Marion and his questions about the rent I owed, and got to work.

Between downing iron pills—demons hated the stuff—and loading my pistol with plenty of bullets, I checked Armageddon Now. Max messaged me back. He warned me again about what I was doing. Reminded me to perform the cleansing rite after I made my kill. I replied with my plans, thanked him for the hundredth time, pressed send, then clicked on the boards.

Since I didn't own a TV, I got most of my news, local or otherwise, from the internet. The first thread, written by Max, was posted two hours ago and titled “MULTIPLE HOMICIDES UNCOVERED IN STONE CHAPEL, MAINE. – URGENT!”

Murder wasn't rare here, but multiple ones committed in a short period of time? I hoped we didn't have a serial killer. That would suck.

Dear Readers,
the post began.
Many of you, myself included, live in Stone Chapel and it is because of you that I write this. You may have already seen the reports on television. Five bodies have been found in the old Harker Meats warehouse on Barton Avenue by the harbor. The police claim to have a handle on things. They don't.

Great. Barton Avenue wasn’t even ten minutes from my apartment.

The police think these people were murdered.

They were. But we have a reason to believe they weren't murdered by human hands.

Oh, shit. We couldn't just have a normal serial killer, could we? We had to have a
demonic
one.

The Boss has done some investigating of his own.

The Boss, taking some initiative. Good job, Boss.

And the bodies show signs of demonic tampering. On each victim's abdomen, there is a branding of some sort. It's unclear what the symbol is right now, but it's definitely demonic. The killer at work here is extremely dangerous. Use caution when out at night. Take extra iron to protect yourself against possession. Be safe and if you know anything about what's going on, please contact me.

- Max

The subsequent comments ranged from panicked to grotesquely curious. I hovered somewhere in the middle. I was freaked out, yeah, but I had plenty of questions. Who was The Boss? Why was this killer so dangerous? What did this mysterious symbol look like? Should I really go hunting tonight?

All I had to do was take a gander at the mounting pile of unpaid bills on my kitchen table to find the answer to the last question. The others I could merely speculate about.

In an effort to avoid any more bad news, I closed my laptop and directed my energies toward the task at hand. I had everything I needed for a hunt spread out on the floor in front of me. Gun, bullets, chalk, dagger, a diagram of the banishing seal―the symbol used to purge a demon's spirit from its physical body―and a list I printed out from the government's Department of Demonology website detailing the ways to identify a possessed animal. I probably wouldn’t need the diagram, seeing as we spent an entire week in third grade learning how to draw the seal as part of Possession Prevention Week, but I wanted to bring it just in case my brain shorted out like it often did under pressure.

No one knew exactly where demons came from. A lot of people used them to prove the existence of Hell while others believed they hailed from a parallel universe. I didn't care one way or the other. They were here and they weren't showing any signs of wanting to leave.

What we
did
know, however, was that a demon couldn't survive long without a host, hence possession. They were parasites, feeding on whatever living thing they could sink their nasty claws into. According to demonologists, animals were easier to possess because they lacked the free will humans had. They couldn't fight back. Humans were trickier but the payoff was enormous. Possessed humans were stronger, faster, smarter, meaner. Capable of anything.

I had to be careful. One false move and I'd end up in the sanatorium with Rosie.

The rest of my preparations weren’t as exciting. Shower, shave, find some hunting-appropriate clothes. The majority of my wardrobe was comprised of school uniforms, tattered jeans, old Converse, and one color: Black. Black shirts, black pants, black shoes, black fishnets I'd worn to last year's screening of
Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Black was easy. Safe. Unassuming. And it matched with everything.

I settled on a tanktop, a zip-up hoodie with a faded imprint of the Batman logo on the front, a pair of jeans that had seen better days, and my trusty combat boots. Good enough, I guessed. I completed my look with a braid, crudely done and slightly crooked, then went to go check myself out in my cracked bathroom mirror. What I saw startled me. Just as the wicked girl at the sanatorium wasn't Rosie, the girl in my mirror wasn't me. Her red hair was dull and shabby and in desperate need of a trim, her blue eyes ringed with the shadows of unrest and weighed down with more baggage than an airport terminal. Her skin was too pale—a side effect of pretty severe anemia she never had time to worry about. She had too many freckles. Looked far too much like her dead mother.

“You look like shit,” I told her. “Invest in some makeup the next time you're at the store.”

Turning away from my corpse-like reflection, I went to grab my backpack, dumping the school stuff out and packing the hunting stuff in. A queasy brew of adrenaline and anxiety burned hot through my veins. Tonight was either going to be a miserable failure resulting in my grisly death or a spectacular success that would earn me loads of cash and my own TV series.

Beatrice the Demon Hunter. Had a nice ring to it.

***

The fun began when the clock struck twelve. I left my apartment and crept down dimly lit streets and crooked alleyways, not entirely sure where to go or how to start. I knew demons preferred dark, dirty places. Places where sin could thrive unabated, and in Stone Chapel, that could've been anywhere.

But the Old Quarter was particularly vulnerable.

A short stroll from my apartment building, the Old Quarter was the diseased heart of the city, infected by crumbling infrastructure and haunted by poverty. The decrepit mansions hidden here between the gnarled pines offered brief glimpses of centuries past, of magnificence stolen by time and indifference. I often wondered what it was like before the demon infestation got so out of control. Who lived in these giant houses? Did they worry about possession? Did they, in the back of their minds, fear walking out their door every day?

It was hard for me to imagine not having to deal with demons. They were an integral part of billions of lives the world over. We’d all become accustomed to them. Accustomed to fear. I never felt truly safe. Not even with my gun on my hip.

I wandered aimlessly around the decayed neighborhood for what felt like an eternity, the quiet making my skin prickle. Trees swayed listlessly in the chilly wind and I thought I heard an owl hoot somewhere among them, but other than that, silence prevailed. Creepy, dead silence.

I had to remind myself that this wasn't a horror movie as mansions faded to boarded-up storefronts. Those storefronts then evolved to one tall and jagged and unforgettable silhouette, shooting into the night sky like a syringe.

The church was the Old Quarter's single saving grace. Here in about nine hours, these same streets I crept along would be filled with cars and the empty pews inside would be brimming with worshippers. The bells would toll and the sermon would begin and the wretchedness we all were drowning in would be forgotten until it was time to leave.

But, for now, it was a midnight landmark. A sprawling feat of neo-Gothic architecture complete with a graveyard in the back and a pair of gargoyles out front. Not that it played into clichés or anything.

The closer I got to the massive church, the greater my paranoia became. I wanted to cling to the naïve notion that demons couldn't enter hallowed ground, but I knew better. The power of Christ didn't compel them. The cross didn't hurt them. A passage from the Bible bored them. I was as screwed out here as I was in there.

So why, then―paranoia and all―did I feel drawn to it? Pulled toward it like a moth to a flame, an apostle to a martyr?

It didn't make sense, but the compulsion was too strong to resist. I needed to get to the church. No matter what.

I shambled across the street, boots scraping the rain soaked asphalt. A car honked as it sped by. I must have walked in front of it, but I couldn't bring myself to care. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the church.