Panting, I held the torn shirt of the man I'd shot against the bloody wound on the right side of my chest. I could see a Line. It flickered like the edge of broken glass, right through the blackened, lightning shattered stump of a pine tree. A memory of my mother flashed behind my eyes. She was a few years dead now, hung herself from the branch of a dead ash tree like one eyed Odin.
The world bent with hellish hues of red and purple as I walked and felt the solid world pass like a stinging wind. A tingling sensation ran up my left arm and the world solidified again. I was walking down a dirt road, not entirely sure where. I coughed. The dirt was red and it coated my worn black boots and kicked up in soft clouds. I saw a shimmering Line off to the right and turned, passing a rusted mile marker. The solid world bent in colors and motion again, it lasted a little longer this time. When the world solidified again I had to lean against the brick wall of a building and catch my breath.
It was night time here. I was pretty sure this was Omaha. A neon sign burned above me. I walked down the empty sidewalk and towards a traffic choked street. Street lights flashed here and there and cars honked and splashed through puddles of dirty water. Orienting myself, I turned and turned again. A restaurant I recognized lit up the left side of the road. This was Omaha. That was good. I was almost there. I felt a trickle of blood escape from my makeshift compress and dribble down my skin. The wound throbbed and made me shudder. I had to find the next Line.
Mother had called them Paths through the Mist, Dad had called them Ley Lines. Cosmic threads that stitch the worlds together. Energy lanes that stretched from one corner of the world to the other. With the right know how a man could ride them like an express train.
Glancing around, I saw the shimmer of a Line right on the corner of Eighty-Six street and Dodge. I headed towards it, took a breath, and plunged right in the path of a box truck speeding through a red light. The truck and city curved and opened in a swirl of color and in a couple more steps I was on another empty road. This one was old asphalt, weeds sprung from cracks here and there. Foxtails and milkweed pulled at my jeans. A single, pulsing, red stoplight hung from a long cable between two dark buildings with shattered windows on Main street.
Hangman, Nebraska.
I walked right down the middle of the broken road. No cars here, except for the rotting husk of a '55 ford in front of the old courthouse. Even in the dim light of a half moon I could see something moving the shadows of the rusted wreck of a machine. I could see another Line, flickering right through it, but I didn't take it. The ache near my shoulder just above the wound had become a throb.
Most Ley Lines passed through the old and the forgotten pieces of the world. The only exception is when they crossed each other. When enough lines pass through the same point, that's when the real world starts taking notice. Then you get stuff like Stonehenge and the Aztec Pyramids.
Spitting on the ground, I stepped up to the one building with light burning beneath its front door. A sign reading, Two-Headed Tavern, swung in the breeze. I tore off my coat and threw open the door. A couple tables and booths spread across a floor coated in layers of old sawdust, lightbulbs hung from the ceiling.
Seamstress Abby, the owner, was already rounding the bar. Skin as pale as a corpse, concern sparked in her dark eyes. Slim in a simple gray dress, she didn't look a day over twenty-four. Her eyes though, those dark eyes looked like they'd seen the fall of empires.
"Elias!" she said. "Lie down in this table here!" She waved her assistant, a tall, sunken cheeked, man, forward to help.
With surprising strength in his thin arms, he helped pull me on to the table, sending a glass mug tumbling to the floor. I lied back, panting, blood pumping in my ears. He took my coat, disappearing it somewhere.
"Move your hand, child," said Seamstress Abby, pulling my right hand and makeshift compress from my bleeding chest. As she slid her arm away I could see the thick black stitching high up her wrist and another ring of stitches high up between her bicep and shoulder. She drew a pair of scissors from her gray dress and sliced my shirt open.
"The light!" she called. Her assistant plugged a lamp in the wall and held it over me. The humming yellow bulb was bright enough to make me close my eyes. She gently felt around the wound with ice cold fingers.
"Stabbed me with a piece of glass," I said, trying to keep still.
"Something for the pain?" she asked, hovering close to my ear.
"No," I almost whispered. "I've a job to do."
"It'll need stitching," she warned. "And you'll need blood."
I opened my eyes a crack despite the searing light. "Put it on my tab," I whispered, fighting off a wave of nausea. She nodded, smiling a little and yanked a strand of the long silken black hair that fell almost to her ankles out of her scalp. Then, she threaded a hooked bone needle, produced from a pocket of her dress. I closed my eyes again. Someone, presumably her assistant slid a leather belt between my teeth and I bit down.
Stinging fluid poured across my oozing wound, it felt like hot irons being pressed into unskinned flesh. I bit down harder. Then she drove the bone needle threaded by her own hair into my skin. Somebody pressed down hard on my shoulders and somebody else held my arms, keeping me motionless as I, almost unconsciously, tried to flinch and jerk away from the woman stitching the open wound back together.
She finally finished, spreading something warm and greasy across the stitched wound. I saw the bright lamp light vanish behind my eyelids and opened my eyes. Her assistant was unplugging the lamp and returning it to a compartment behind the bar; the handful of rough looking patrons that had helped hold me in place were returning to their drinks. One bearded man I didn't recognize clapped me on the shoulder and stuck a cigarette between his yellow teeth. I nodded thanks at him and the others. Abby walked away for a moment, her long black hair bouncing a little.
I looked down at the wound in my chest and the hardening green substance smeared across it. "What's this?" I asked. It smelled like pine oil and lavender.
"Little blend of this and that," said Abby, returning. "It'll help keep everything together." She took the filled glass in her hand and slid it onto the table next to me. "How long were you traveling with a hole in your chest?" she asked.
"It took longer this time, to get back here," I said, sitting up and wrapping my fingers around the glass.
"Too bad," She said. "Your father told me he made it from Houston to Pocatello in one step, once."
"Yeah, he told me that story too," I said, taking a sip. The wound ached as I moved my arm, but it had stopped throbbing. Dad said a lot of things. He was in ADX Florence Penitentiary in Colorado, same place they held the Unabomber. I slid off the table and walked with careful focus over to my usual booth.
Abby waved her assistant forward and the pale, thin creature hung a blood bag from a hook on top of my booth and, with surprising care, wiped a bit of alcohol on my arm and slid a needle in my vein. Then he blinked his large black eyes and lurched away. Then Abby set a plate of steak and eggs on my table. The warm smell of pepper and seared beef made my mouth water.
"Thanks, Abby," I said as she handed me a fork and knife.
"Just don't die before settling up, alright?" she said, flashing a smile. Then she returned to the bar, scrubbing the counter with a sponge like nothing had happened. Her assistant shambled about cleaning the table I'd been treated on.
I stuck a bit of steak in my mouth and slid an old flip phone from my pocket. The one clue I had from the man I'd shot dead. The plastic was partially melted, the man's fingers pressed into it like molded clay. Abby's assistant placed my black coat next to me in my booth, then staggered off.
With some effort, I pried the phone open. The screen was blank but I could see something burned into it like acid etched lettering.
I almost failed to register the young woman who planted herself across from me. "Elias Kagan?" she asked, setting a large brown bag next to her.
Setting down the flip phone, I slid the tattooed thumb of my left hand to the black ring on my left trigger finger. "Those are two of my names," I said. A coldness settled around me, but I wasn't sure if it was her or just the fact I was shirtless and missing a pint of blood or two. I caught a whiff of something in the air that it took me a moment to classify.
She hadn't yet seen twenty, short black hair, Kabbalic symbols snaked up her olive-skinned neck. She smiled and lit a cigarette, the lighter cut a red reflection in her eyes. "I'm Isobel," she said. "Redecker sent me."
I raised the glass to my lips and took a long swallow.
"He has a job for you," she said, reaching into her bag.
"I'm already on a job," I said, setting the glass down and sliding my left hand onto the table.
She breathed smoke and slid a folder towards me. "Somebody answered that phone in front of you...right before sticking a blade in your chest," she said. "Is that right?"
I frowned and opened the folder, scooping a forkful of eggs into my mouth with my right hand. Born left handed, dad had taught me ambidexterity with his belt.
They were a series of crime scene photos, or rather, copies of crime scene photos likely from one of Redecker's many many soul bound sources. Corpses splattered in blood and viscera, each one holding a cell phone. One held an android, two held iphones. The phones themselves were burned and melted. One victim, Carolyn Banks, had torn her phone from her hand after they had somehow fused together, peeling a thick strip of skin from her palm. Then she'd hammered two and a half nails into her forehead, dying before completing the third.
"Most of them immediately try to kill themselves," said Isobel, lowering the cigarette. "Unless..."
"Unless somebody is there to stop them," I said, lowering the folder. My man, Jacob Fain, the man I'd killed, a thickset, balding, garbage man who'd lived in Missouri his entire life. I'd caught of whiff of the darkness hanging around him, followed him through downtown Kansas City and into the back of a local home improvement store. He'd stood staring at nothing next to a collection of bathroom mirrors, holding a galvanized masonry hammer in one hand. In his other hand he held his phone to his ear. He'd been holding that phone to his ear for almost an hour, listening and never speaking a word, wandering from place to place.
"I was hoping it was the phone itself," I muttered, flipping past another picture. There, at the bottom of the stack, on a thick strip of parchment the words, The Castaway, L.A.. were written in swirling black cursive script.
"Redecker has good handwriting," I said, dropping the folder and taking another bite. I switched to my left hand. My right arm still had a needle in it. The wound was feeling better and better though. Abby knew her work.
"The Castaway is a nightclub," said Isobel. "He found me in New York, gave me this job and that strip of parchment then sent me to you." She breathed in more smoke and tossed a couple strands of her dark hair out of her face.
"Why?" I asked, taking a sip from the glass by my hand.
She shrugged and put out the cigarette, dying ashes glittering across her glossy black fingernails. "Maybe he knew you were dealing with the same bit of mayhem."
"And what's in The Castaway?" I asked. I could make out some of the Kabbalic spells running up her neck and guess at the ones tattooed down beneath her clothing, guesses led to other guesses. I took another bite. The salty savory flavor rolled around in my mouth.
"An augury," she said. "Something's going to happen there, and it's connected to all this death." She reached out and gathered the folder, sliding it back into her brown bag. "And I wrote it and performed the divination, not him. Redecker gave me the scrap of parchment, torn from a seventeenth century anatomy book. The book itself was bound in the skin of dissected murderer."
"Strong connection to death and desecration," I murmured. I could almost hear my blood starting to pump faster. "How long do we have?" I asked.
"Depends, Redecker said you know the Ley Lines better than any man alive. How fast can you get us to L.A.?" she asked. The hint of a smile pulled at her red lips.
"Abby!" I called, sliding the plate away from me. Disapproval burning from her ancient eyes, she and her assistant slid the needle in my arm free, bound it up and handed me a plain white shirt. "Thanks again," I said, slipping on my black coat. Isobel rose from her seat and slipped the strap of her brown bag over her shoulder.
"Drink this," said Abby, handing me a small black bottle.
I drank, and almost choked. A taste like the smell of bubbling tar filled my throat and coated my tongue. "What the...hell?" I sputtered, reaching for my drink on the table.
"Since you won't finish the transfusion; that should keep you from fainting," said Abby with a vicious smile. I coughed as she returned to her place behind the bar filling drinks.
"Let's go," I croaked, guiding Isobel to one of The Two-Headed Tavern's side doors. I could see a the flicker of a Line crisscrossing it. The thing about the Lines is that most of them only go one way; the ones I took here would only be good for going here. This one, at the tavern's west facing door, would take us part way to the West Coast, but we'd have to take another to get back.
I reached out and Isobel hesitated a moment and then took my right hand. With a couple of steps, light and color bent around us and the air cut right through my bones. Isobel tried to pull away and I clenched my hand harder around hers. Shadows gathered in front of my eyes, dark shapes tinged with red and purple light. Despite whatever Abby had given me I was suddenly very aware that I was short some pints of lifeblood. My head grew lighter and my steps heavier, but the Ley Lines were about focus, focus on one single task. If a man had that kind of focus, he could shut out his own frailties...for a time.
I kept us moving forward as the world shifted and warped, then we turned and stepped back into reality. I shuddered as we both nearly stumbled into an empty field by a stretch of two lane blacktop. A line flickered in the middle of the road and I led us into it, still gripping Isobel's hand. I heard a car in the distance as the world bent around us again. A few more steps into a violet haze and we were back into reality.
Sweet perfume and bracing sweat smells filled my nostrils. The club flashed with blue lights that illuminated the contorting mass of people below. The Castaway was written in humming pink letters across one wall. Music pulsed and pounded against me and I grabbed the clear glass railing with both hands, finally releasing Isobel. She leaned back against an empty table. The flashing blue light reflected across her skin and dark eyes. Gathering herself, she moved towards me.
"How did you know a Ley Line that would lead us right to this club?" she asked, shouting above the music, and still barely audible.
"The Lines' locations are sort of generalized, that's why traveling takes focus," I shouted back. People below our balcony were jumping and dancing and screaming lyrics to the music. I could barely distinguish one from the other. Spilled alcohol mixed with the smells of old perfume and sweat, creating a mixture almost strong enough to remove the tar taste from my mouth.
Isobel shouted something I didn't understand and then gestured for me to follow. I let her guide me through across the balcony and down the clear glass stairs. Lasers lit up in patterns across the black walls. Isobel shouldered through a circle of dancers and through a nearly invisible door the same color as the wall. The door was thick and padded, as it closed behind me the music faded, faded just enough.
"I doubt anybody's answering a phone outside here," said Isobel, holding a drink in her hand that she'd apparently stolen from someone. She drained it and set the empty glass on a chest high black counter that ran across one wall. People pressed against each other in this side room, a dull roar of voices mixed with the rumbling of the music, but it was still quieter than the club proper.
"How did you know about this room?" I asked as a couple of guys in black suits pushed their way back out to the dance floor.
Isobel shrugged. "Divination is more about the feel of a place or a thing or a person than anything else. I felt this place before I saw it, and when I did see it, I saw the souls inside it and the stains in its aura before I saw its name and location." She looked far more at home here than I did. Shrugging off her dark coat, she wore a dark purple dress that shimmered with the light like spun silk. I took off my own black coat because of the rising heat from pressed human bodies, and watched the lights play dully across my plain white shirt and jeans.
"But you didn't see what was actually going to happen?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Given that you work for Redecker, I'm surprised you know so little about divination and augury," she said, glancing toward an early thirties man talking on his phone in the far corner of this oblong room.
I followed her gaze and then caught sight of a young woman against the wall answering a phone call, and I watched her instead, while trying not to look like I was watching her. "My first job was finding people who didn't want to be found," I said. "But it was innate, a gift. With something of theirs I could follow traces of them like a scent right to their location, but I would never gain information beyond that, not about them or their aura or life or anything." As I spoke I caught a whiff of something in the air. Like with the people I had once tracked, it wasn't exactly a scent or an odor. It was something that tickled a sense beyond smell or sight. A wrongness in the air.
"Who were you finding people for?" asked Isobel, amusement and curiosity lightened her features. She had another glass in her hand but wasn't drinking it yet.
A woman behind her in a short black dress was reaching into her small purse for her ringing phone. Her hair was red and done up and she was laughing at something the woman next to her had said.
"Isobel," I said calmly, as the red haired woman pressed the phone to her ear. "Move out of the way." I slid my thumb to the black ring on my left hand. Knowing the Lines wasn't just about traveling, it also meant knowing about the bits of reality pressed and wrinkled against other bits, spaces just out of eyeshot, and with the right know how you could fit some real things in these hidden spaces. You could keep an armory in thin air.
Isobel moved slowly out of my line of vision. The red haired woman listened to whoever whispered on the other end of her phone. A light flickered across her eyes, like dancing flames.
Jacob Fain's eyes had flickered the same way. Then he'd smashed the mirrors, picked up a glass shard that bled his own fingers and threw himself at me with a hammer in one hand and the bloody shard in the other.
The girl reached into her small handbag, dropping her smoking, blackening phone to the ground. She pulled a pink gripped .22 pistol, letting the bag fall to her feet. Malice burned across her face and shadows slid around her like living things.
With the touch of my black ring and a thought, my own pistol slid from a hidden pocket in reality into my waiting hand. Ivory grips and cold cold metal materialized in my fingers.
When Spanish Inquisitors tore down a Santa Muerte shrine built by half converted Aztec shamans, a piece of its steel was melted down to make an assassin's blade. A couple centuries after that some enterprising worshipper of the Death Saint melted that blade down and made a revolver, the Hechizada, for the notorious Pancho Villa. It had served him until a rival stole it and shot him dead. From there, it had passed from outlaw to outlaw. The metal was layered and veined like the grain of dead wood, or the pressed metal of Damascus steel.
A hiss tickled up my spine as my finger found the trigger. Some things just feel right in your hand. Screaming and the beginning of screaming mixed with the suppressed music from the club just outside the door. Stepping to the right, I cupped my firing hand in my empty right hand. The red haired girl shrieked and fired over and over again, shattering glasses and bottles, catching one bystander in the cheek.
The cartel hitman who had taught me to shoot whispered in my ear. Thumb on the hammer. Cold, calm precision, aim at the trunk, point at the heart. Let out the breath you're already holding, squeeze the trigger. Once, twice. Two shots to the chest, arteries and lungs. Breathe.
The revolver roared, reverberating against the walls, drowning the music and the screaming for less than a second. The girl flung back against the wall, still trying to fire her .22 her face twisted in hate. her last bullet whizzed by my left ear, and my second shot tore a hole beneath her left collarbone. Blood streaked across the back wall.
Someone came for me at the edge of my vision. I hesitated as I turned, thinking it was a would-be hero trying to stop this madness. Then I caught a look in his eye, fire danced in his pupils and red veins stuck out of his face and neck, straining his skin. A sizzling phone thumped against the floor. He grabbed for my gun hand, already closing the distance. Grunting, I turned with him, letting his own weight and momentum carry him behind me and into the small crowd pushing towards the door. He howled, managing to cling to my weapon with one hand, but now he was in front of the barrel and on the floor. Thumb on the hammer. One shot, two shots.
Something cold ran up my neck and quick movement jerked just across the edge of my vision. I jumped forward and something sharp and fast tore across the skin of my spine. I pitched forward, rolling towards the wall next to the door as the room emptied. Twisting and raising my weapon, I caught sight of what we were up against.
Shadows danced around it like extra limbs. Thin flesh burned off it in patches, glistening black bristles of hair burst through a wrinkled suit of human skin. It was more the bulky form of some man-sized arachnid than anything mammalian. A human mouth remained and one ice blue human eye. Claws extended from its hands, too long, too bladelike for anything in a rational world. It roared at me, screaming something in guttural language that made my skin prickle. It jerked forward on human legs, its human clothes and skin shedding and bursting. Then it turned.
Isobel stood in the far corner, holding some king of pendant in her hand. She chanted in a quick staccato rhythm. She trembled before the monster, but I realized that it was this spell that was holding it in place and forcing it to drop its human guise. Having heard magical incantations since before I could understand words, I grasped the spirit of the thing. She was commanding the monster as the child of a demon by the angel who had cast that demon into the fire. Segmented red eyes burst from its crumpling human face.
I raised the Hechizada, thumb on the hammer, one shot. The gun pulled in my hand as I released a breath. The bullet tore through its torso, painting black ichor across one wall. It hissed and roared cringing at Isobel's incantation and the sudden wound. Then it turned its eyes towards an empty corner of the room.
Realizing its intention, I shot it two more times in quick succession. Fist sized chucks of its jellied innards and hairy exoskeleton blasted across the wall and floor, but it was already moving and even with the Isobel's melodious spell and multiple gunshot wounds, it was a quick devil. In two jerking movements like the strikes of a viper, it threw itself through a shimmering Ley Line arched across the corner of the wall. I fired one more shot after it, and the bullet disappeared into nothing. Then I lowered my pistol, panting. Blood pumped and beat against the inside of my chest.
Isobel was slumped against the wall. She'd lowered the pendant she had been holding while chanting her spell, and now it rested in her lap, though she kept a white knuckled grip on it. With a thought and wave of my hand, my revolver vanished back to one of the hidden spaces between reality. The black ring on my hand tethering it to this world went hot and then cold. I approached Isobel, crouching next to her. My back stung from the creature's attack, but I didn't feel bleeding yet.
"Thank you," I said, catching my breath. "I felt that thing almost tear me in half."
She was taking short quick breaths and staring at where the monster had disappeared. Even, the black blood and innards I had blasted out of it had vanished now. Now she finally looked at me. "The bullets, the bullets you shot it with...can you retrieve one of them?"
Frowning I slid my thumb against my black ring and, with a thought, a blackened bullet, free of its cartridge appeared in the palm of my hand. Parts of it were eaten away, as if it had been left to dissolve in acid.
She smiled.
"The music's stopped outside," I said. "We need to leave before they send SWAT after us." She nodded and took my hand as I helped her to her feet.
"You probably can't follow that thing to wherever it went, can you?" she asked.
I shook my head. "That Line goes to the middle of the U.S. but there's a lot of miles in its radius."
"Then take us somewhere in that radius," she said.
I nodded. She took my hand and we plunged through it. Violet and red haze touched my vision and the world bent and curved as we walked. Colors and shadows stretched on forever like a palace of mirrors, then a couple more steps and we were walking into an empty barn somewhere in South Dakota.
The sun was starting to come up, but the sky was overcast. Gentle raindrops began pelting the ground outside and leaking through a hole in the roof on the far side of the barn.
"You said you can find people who don't want to be found as long as you have something attached to them, right?" asked Isobel, pulling her dark coat back on over her purple party dress.
I looked down at the bullet in my hand. "People, people I can find," I said. "Sometimes even people infected or haunted by the kind of darkness we just witnessed, but that thing wasn't human. I can't track it, not with this."
"I can," said Isobel, holding out her hand. I handed it to her. She placed it in a circle she had drawn in the dirt. Then she began whispering an incantation. With a silver knife from her brown bag she carved more symbols into the dirt around the circled bullet. I recognized some of them, Adamic and some variant of Enochian. The overall geometric pattern was layered to spread across the connected realms of existence. Mother had done similar magic in her day, of darker origins and for a darker purpose, but I'd only ever seen it in fragments. She'd never wanted a male pupil, and if even if she had I wouldn't have wanted to make the pacts she had made to pry her knowledge from the Night Realms and the Qayin.
Isobel stood back to look at her work. The elaborate patterns had stretched across an entire corner of the barn, carefully drawn so that none of the ongoing rain would ruin it. She stowed her silver knife and sat down next to me, her face flushed with excitement. She checked the time on her phone. "Eight hundred and eighty eight seconds," she said. "Then we'll know."
"This is angelic magic, correct?" I asked.
She nodded, some surprise on her face.
"How did you know which of the Powers to call on?" I asked.
She smiled a little. "Will you tell me what people you would track down for your first job?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, looking at her.
She pulled a burnt phone from her bag. "See this?" she asked, showing me the cracked screen. I nodded, looking at the tiny symbols burnt like acid etched glyphs into the plastic.
"I saw numbers on the phone I took from the man I shot, just before we went to that club," I said.
"Same numbers are burnt into every phone," she said. "Not phone numbers, they're numerological. Calculate them out and they're the name of one of the Dark Princes, Belial the Beast of Hell. I wasn't a hundred percent sure but when that thing came for you, I tried the angelic counter to Belial's power and it worked. This spell," she gestured to her elaborate pattern, "is based on the same power."
"Are you saying we're facing a Prince of Hell?" I asked, something between fear and excitement stirred inside my chest.
She shook her head. "No, no, no," she said. "Actual Belial walking around would be apocalyptic. We're dealing with a sorcerer who's made pacts with him and so has been granted a portion of power."
"And he's bolstering that power with human sacrifices," I said. "That's what these killings are about.
"Cheaper than whatever he traded with the Beast," she said.
"Or maybe the killings are part of that trade," I said, mulling it over. Though, in truth, it didn't really matter, a mad warlock murdering people through their phones would catch a bullet no matter what his intentions happened to be. With that on my mind, I slipped my revolver into my hand, then a couple of silver bullets and reloaded each chamber. Spent rounds I dropped in the dirt. Unspent, non-silver rounds, went back into the cracks between reality. Silver had a special significance against demonic beasts, and Belial was the Beast of Hell.
Isobel watched me for a moment, then checked her phone again. "So, your first job?" she asked. A glint of mischief in her dark eyes.
I slid the last bullet into the chamber, but kept the pistol in my hand. I looked out into the soft rain and green farms looking brighter against the dull gray sky. "My mother was the property of the Juarez Cartel when I was a child," I said. "She'd do witchery for them from time to time. When I was about five and she figured out my talent, the cartel would use me to find people who had betrayed them."
One memory came back smoothly. I was a child again in the back seat of some old van that stank of cigarette smoke and urine. The upholstery was brown and stained. Miguel was driving, Joaquin was in the front seat. Their weapons were stowed under their seats. I held an object from the man we were hunting, something with blood or hair was best. This one was an old sock, sold to the cartel by his ex-girlfriend for ten thousand US dollars.
I held it in my hand, muttering directions. Right, left, right again, left again, straight. Joaquin would hiss for me to speak up and Miguel would tell him to shut up and let me work. We'd drive day and night, stopping only for gas. Most of the cabrones would try and hide in the mainland US, some would go to Canada or Alaska. It didn't matter.
Three day trip. I waited as Miguel and Joaquin stepped out of the van. Wait right here, Chico, eh? said Miguel as he slammed the door shut. They were out front of a hotel, parked on the street. Not too many cars around but the smog and reek of exhaust still hung in the air. I drank my sprite slowly, not wanting to drink it all before they came back. Sometimes it took a while.
This time it didn't. They came back within a few minutes climbing into the van and slamming the doors shut. Joaquin had blood on his shirt. They both smiled and I got ice cream two towns over, as much as I wanted. That was part of the deal. This particular time, I'd ordered some kind of ice cream challenge. I ate until I puked.
"How long did it take you to figure out what they were doing?" asked Isobel.
"My mother told me after the first time," I said. "But it didn't matter what I wanted, my mom was their property and so was I. It was easy enough to pretend like nothing was happening since I usually just waited in the car. There was only one trip where I actually saw them clip the cabron."
I looked over at her. Isobel was staring at her phone. Her red lips mouthed silent words.
"Isobel," I said, rising to my feet. A whiff of darkness rose into the air like Sulphur and cold sweat.
"I th-thought that it had to b-be a phonecall," she mumbled. A flicker of firelight burned in her eyes. Hissing black smoke rose from the phone in her hand. She snarled as I tackled her to the ground. My pistol was back in my storage space with a thought and a wave of my hand. Her eyes burned red and she snapped at me, chewing into my shoulder. I sucked air through my teeth and slid handcuffs out of the air and into my black ringed hand. She struggled with renewed strength, veins standing out against her skin.
Then the spell, her spell started coming alive. Light gleamed across the geometric patterns and occult symbols, burned red, and puffed in a slow trickle of smoke like an extinguished fire. I barely had time to witness it though I caught the smell of ozone, like a smashed fluorescent bulb. She bit and spat and clawed at me, blood, my blood colored the corners of her mouth. Finally, I cuffed one of her hands and then the other, behind her back. Then I cuffed her ankles together. She flopped around like a snake with a broken spine, roaring and hissing at me. Blood mixing with her saliva and dribbling into the dirt.
"Nothing personal," I said, turning away from her to look at the spell. I touched one of the bites, fairly shallow, not too much blood oozing out. I looked from the bullet to the pattern and walked around the whole thing slowly. "Don't suppose you could help me here?" I asked.
She snarled and bit into the dirt, flopping against the restraints. Her eyes burned like glowing embers.
I looked away and then up towards the flicker of a Line near the back of the door. Scratching my chin, I slipped the revolver back into my hand. "I'll be back for you," I told Isobel, glancing back. Thumb by the hammer, I walked through the Ley Line.
Isobel's spell had changed it. Colors still warped and bent around me, but the motion guided me more as I walked, buffeting me like a pinball into a slightly different direction. The ground pulled against me, almost knocking me off my feet. Shadows hissed by my head, and then, with no choice on my part, I was dropped from the Line. I fell to my knees in wet grassland. The Hechizada in my hand I turned this way and that, but it was another empty field. Water cooled the leather of my worn boots but didn't quite make it over the tops. I lowered the pistol and looked at the one building about a hundred yards away.
A broken down relay tower. Cracked and corroded metal stabbed at the sky. Stained concrete below formed the building in which people had worked telecommunications back in the nineteen fifties. I walked slowly towards it. Such a strange relic of a bygone age left to rot. I caught the scent of it. The darkness within. Softly at first, then it hit me like a wave. An evil inside it was so strong I could almost feel it coating my skin like mucus. I held the pistol at the ready. Then, thumb on the hammer, I kicked the rusted metal door open.
Red light erupted from within spreading across the ground and coloring my clothes and skin. Squinting my eyes, I walked inside slowly. Steps led down deeper into the ground. I walked step by step glancing at the red lit walls and exposed wiring. At the bottom, an underground cavern spread out before me. Concrete columns and walls. Old shredded electrical equipment rusted in piles.
Horror gripped me as I looked around. Bodies, corpses of men and women were spread across the edges of the chamber eyes blank and empty. Their limbs thin and angular. Their clothes torn and ragged. Some of them had their mouths open in silent screams, their tongues black and lolling. Questions slid unbidden through my mind. Who were these people? How had they come to be here? A smell, not my sixth sense of darkness and evil, but an actual smell of musty rot filled my nostrils and I coughed it out and spat trying to remove the palpable flavor from my mouth and nasal cavity.
Towards the back of the chamber, a figure hunched over what had been some kind of control desk. I could hear him whispering spells in some forgotten language. His voice so soft that the echo of my own footsteps almost drowned it out. I raised my revolver, left hand on the trigger, right hand holding it steady. A breathless rage almost compelled me to shoot the man in the back right here and be done with it. Instead I walked a little closer, stopping in almost the dead center of the chamber.
"Turn around, sorcerer," I said, watching him down the barrel of Hechizada.
He did not turn, though he shifted enough that I could see he was reading from some massive tome on the ancient control panel.
"And what is this?" hissed a voice, not the sorcerer but one of the dead eyed corpses on the floor.
"Another seeker of power within my sanctuary?" asked another, this one from the other side of the room. I saw only his mouth move, the rest of his body was still.
"I've come to end this," I said. The red light was hurting my eyes and I could feel a headache pushing towards the front of my skull. The scratches across my back from the monster stung like fresh wounds.
Soft laughter rose from the sorcerer with his back still turned. The many corpses lining the walls all spoke together through hoarse, lifeless throats. "Kneel where you stand, intruder, or join the choir of the dead and damned that line these walls."
Even in the red light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, I caught a misshapen shadow uncoiling over me. I jumped back, raising my weapon. The creature from before, its human form shed like old skin, dropped from the ceiling. Dark hairy limbs and claws, teeth from multiple orifices, and segmented eyes that glowed brighter than the red light drowning everything, the thing attacked like a crooked hand. It spat and roared, the sound echoing against the walls and the dead eyes of the corpses watching it.
I was already firing, round after silver round. My thumb cranked back the hammer and my finger squeezed the trigger, almost of their own accord. I fired again and again rounding it on one side, stepping over the dead eyed bodies of the sorcerer's "choir." The bullets tore chunks from the beast and its claws and limbs flailed, tearing towards me again and again, but only grazing me. Its claws and spiked, knuckle-like, joints tore thin scrapes across my skin as I jumped and ran and threw myself around the room. Cold air stung my skin, my shirt was falling off me, my jeans little better. Just a little deeper with many of these cuts and I'd be watching my lifeblood pour out onto the concrete floor. My first wound of this entire ordeal, the one from Jacob Fain, was angry and red, weeping clear plasma, but Abby's stitching held despite everything.
The monster roared and screamed, great chunks were torn from the concrete columns and walls as it tried to rip me apart. Then, as I ran near and over the corpses. bony fingers reached out and seized my left ankle. I managed to kick it free and stumble across the floor, but the beast was already coming for me. It was slower now, weakened by seven silver rounds. Thick black ichor oozed and puddled from its wounds. It wheezed towards me, and I held my pistol with its last bullet to the head of the sorcerer, still hovering, unmoving over his open tome.
"End it!" I shouted. "Call off your beast!"
He moved then and his body was thin, his eyes as empty and dull as the bodies surrounding the chamber. His dead mouth moved in whispery reverence, uttering the words from the tome. The beast tore at me with two of its limbs and I shoved the walking dead man in front of me. Claws shredded the husk, leaving it in pieces that flung across the chamber as I jumped over and behind the old control panel. Grabbing bullets out of the air with my black ring, I reloaded my pistol as the beast rounded the panel and the book to attack me from the right. I crawled the left and saw another corpse rise to its feet, its dead mouth hissing spells. I'd managed to chamber four rounds and I spent one, blasting the corpse's face and cracking his jaw. Unable to enunciate, he dropped to the floor and another rose up, chanting.
The beast was on me again, but despite its dexterity it continued to chase me around the control panel and the open tome rather than climbing over it. Finally, the truth of the situation clicked. Keeping the beast at bay with two more rounds to its already bleeding center, I made the pistol vanish and seized the tome. The beast screamed and all of the corpses rose to their feet, staring at me with dead eyes.
"I am the Lore of Belial, the Dragon that circles this earth!" They shouted. "I seek merely to serve my purpose and grant his powers and hidden arts to a mortal man!"
I looked at the tome in my hand and the serpentine glyphs filling its weathered pages. Dark smudges crowded its edges and it whispered with voices that didn't belong to the dead eyed corpses in the chamber.
"The Lore of Belial," I said before the trembling beast and the dead eyed bodied. "Belongs in Hell!" I sealed the tome, slamming it shut. The red light vanished, plunging the chamber into darkness. In the sudden black, I heard the sound of dozens of bodies collapsing like unstrung puppets. As well as the heavy, wet drop of a beast, incompatible with reality, ending its wretched existence. Pulling my belt from my shredded jeans, I buckled the grimoire closed, just to be sure, and felt my way, carefully through the darkness and out into the wet grassland. After a short walk, i slipped through a gleaming Ley Line and back to the barn in South Dakota.
Isobel was unconscious when I unlocked the shackles and set her free. She opened her eyes after a moment.
"I taste blood in my mouth," she whispered with distaste, moving her stiff arms and legs.
"Let's get back to the Tavern and get you something to drink," I said, helping her up and through a couple of Lines, back to Hangman Nebraska and Seamstress Abby.
"So it was that book?" said Isobel over her drink, a healing concoction Abby had whipped up, after I filled her in on what had happened and got a change of clothes.
"I've heard stories," I said. "Some things are saturated with evil for long enough that they start gaining minds of their own. I've never seen one in real life, but it's been harvesting souls for centuries. Phones just let it play its tricks from further away" I laid my hand on my belt, still fastened snuggly around the leather bound parchment. "And to a wider audience," I continued. "Who knows how powerful it could have become if we hadn't stopped it."
She took a drink and rubbed her head. "And Redecker?" she asked.
"I'm meeting him now," I replied.
At a crossroads in an empty field in Wyoming I met with Redecker. He rode a black stallion with lightning white eyes that rode out of the air from no Ley Line or visible path. Violet fire and red lightning poured off it, slowly disappearing into the air. Black chains clattered from a saddle lined with brass skulls. Redecker himself, a black rider a head taller than the tallest mortal man I've ever met, dropped from the saddle, his iron spurs sparking across the brown earth. He wore a tall black hat that put me in mind of Buffalo Bill Cody or George Custer. His eyes a gold that caught flashes of light like a wild animal.
I handed him the book, and he took it in a large hand the color and appearance of old leather. He smelled of rain and burnt matches. His stallion huffed and fire flared from its nostrils.
"Another bit of Hell returned to Perdition," said Redecker, his voice a tectonic rumble. Then he handed me a strip of burnt, cream colored paper.
"Another job?" asked. "Already?" Scrapes and wounds crisscrossed my face and most of my skin. I had to shift my weight to keep the soreness in my legs from seizing up my muscles.
"Demons are loose upon this world, Elias, a whirlwind reaped by mortal man," said Redecker, slipping the tome in his saddle bags.