Hell Is Coming (The Watcher's Series Book 1) (24 page)

Twenty minutes later, Frank met me in the cellar as I was strapping a demon-killing knife to my ankle.

“You really want to do this?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“You realize we’d be taking a big risk bringing Abigor here. He may not be affected by the demon trap. He might just kill us then and there.”

“I don’t think so. Josh said he wanted me on his team. I’ll play along for a while. See what he wants.”

Frank held a Glock in his hand, checking it over. “This is a dangerous game we’re playing here. I hope you know that.”

“You said it yourself, Frank. It’s a game.” I finished strapping the knife to my leg. “And I’m willing to do whatever it takes to win.”

Chapter 19

Frank and I sat in the car outside a dilapidated building in the south side of the city. “That’s the building where Morgana is holed up,” Frank said. “It’s full of addicts; they shouldn’t pose much of a threat. They’ll be too smacked out to do anything.”

The demon Frank had chosen to go after as a blood donor was called Morgana. Morgana ran a kind of crack house for demons, only she didn’t sell crack; she provided her demon clientele with human blood in return for favors.

“Demons get high on human blood,” I said shaking my head. “Why does that not surprise me?”

Frank ignored me and went straight into the plan. “Morgana will have a few bodyguards around her but that’s it, nothing we can’t handle between the two of us. The hard part comes when we have to try and tap Morgana for her blood. We’ll need to put sigils around the building as well, so she can’t teleport out. Once we confront her we have to use a binding spell so she can’t ditch her meat suit. Once we have that in place we can cut her throat and get what we need. She’s strong though. She’ll kill us given half a chance, so it’s important we work together. No heroics. Are we clear on that?”

“Crystal.”

“Good. Follow my lead on this and we shouldn’t have any problems.”

I waited by the car while Frank spray painted the sigils around the four sides of the building. When he had finished, he came back to the car and tossed the spray can into the trunk. There was a plastic container in there, which I confiscated. We would need it to collect the demon blood. “Ready?” he asked and I nodded affirmative.

The front door of the building was made of steel, designed to keep out unwelcome visitors. “How do we get through that?” I asked.

“Watch and learn, kid.” Frank banged on the door, motioning for me to move to the side of him. A moment later a small hatch opened near the top of the door. From my  position I couldn’t see through, but I knew someone was looking out from the other side. Frank stood with his head down in front of the door. He uttered a couple of garbled words and just like that the door opened. Clearly he had given some sort of password for entry.

As the door opened, Frank hit it with an almighty kick, causing the door to fly back along with whoever was on the other side. He pulled his knife out as he rushed inside and I quickly followed suit.

 I saw Frank stick his knife into the demon manning the door. The demon cried out, the now familiar orange light bursting from the chest wound as his meat suit fell to the floor at Frank’s feet.

“Frank!” I shouted. Two more demons ran down the stairs towards us. Frank slammed into the demon nearest him, pinning it against the wall. I slid out one of the short swords from inside my jacket and used it to skewer the demon that closed in on me. My eyes met the demon’s as I twisted the blade and pulled it out of his gut. That was the first time I’d killed anything and a weird feeling came over me as I stared down at the dead demon on the floor. My instinct was to feel bad but I wouldn’t allow it. I did what I had to do and that was that. Killing is what my kind did. I had better get used to it.

Frank was on the stairs, wrestling with a demon in an oversized meat suit. The demon had Frank pinned to the wall, one hand around my uncle’s neck as it tried to squeeze the life out of him. With his free hand I saw Frank take his knife and ram it into the demon’s stomach before retracting the blade and shoving it hard up under its chin. He pulled out the knife and the demon fell heavily down the rest of the stairs like a mass of dead meat.

Frank stood breathing hard against the wall. “Having problems there?” I said.

He shook his head. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

We got to the first floor and headed down the hallway, checking rooms as we went. Most of the rooms where occupied by demons, but they posed no threat. They were either sitting on the floor or lying on stinking mattresses, their veins full of freshly injected human blood. They were as out of it as any human would be on heroin and no less pathetic.  Even demons had their vices.

What unsettled me more was the awful smell in the building. I noticed it as we went in, but it was much stronger on the floor with the addicts. It was a mixture of the familiar sulphur smell and  decaying flesh with undertones of other stenches I couldn’t quite place. It was a foul odour that reminded me of the basement where Frank and I had hunted the demon serial killer, the one who had almost killed me.

I covered my mouth and nose as we moved through the building. Frank didn’t seem all that affected.

On the second floor it was more of the same, some rooms empty and some rooms with smacked out demons who didn’t give a shit who we were or what we were doing there. The silence of the floor was punctuated only by low moaning sounds that came from the rooms housing the demon junkies. Occasionally I heard one of them speak, muttering garbled nonsense to itself.

The third floor was a different story.

The rooms on the third floor contained humans, in some cases two in each room. They lay unconscious on filthy old hospital beds. Each person had tubes coming out of their arms, their blood draining into bags that hung from metal IV stands. I walked into one of the rooms to find a boy, no more than sixteen or seventeen, lying naked and unconscious on a filthy looking gurney, his blood being slowly drained from him into a plastic bag. “This is fucking disgusting,” I said to Frank. “We have to help these people.”

“Help them how?” Frank asked, his own face full of disgust. “They’re all unconscious. And anyway, that’s not why we’re here.”

“I know but…it’s just a kid, for God’s sake.”

“I know it’s not nice, but we have to go. Once we get Morgana’s blood we can see about helping these people. Come on.”

Reluctantly, I left the room and followed Frank into the hallway so we could make our way up to the next floor.

At the top of the stairs was a locked door that prevented us from going any further. It must have been where Morgana stayed. Plainly she didn’t want her junkie customers disturbing her. Frank banged on the door and I readied myself with the sword, placing the plastic container on the floor beside me.

A second later I was surprised to see the door open. Maybe the demon who opened it thought it was one of its cronies we just killed  or maybe it thought it was one of the junkie demons looking for another fix. Whatever the reason the demon looked shocked when it saw us and as it came forward through the door to attack, Frank stabbed it in the eye with his knife, burying the blade to the hilt in the socket, blood jetting out and spraying his face. More blood jetted over Frank as he pulled the blade out and the demon fell dead to the floor. I didn’t have time to consider the gruesomeness of what I’d just seen. Frank quickly moved through the door, expecting more demons to come at us.

He was right.

Two more demons came running at us from down an immaculate hallway. The complete difference in the place compared to the other two floors jarred me for a second and the next thing I knew, one of the demons, a woman, smacked me hard in the face. The blow made me stagger back into the open door and I dropped my sword on the floor along with the plastic container. Frank was busy fighting the other demon so he couldn’t help me.

I was on my own with this one.

The woman demon had one hand around my throat and was punching me in the face with the other. I tasted blood in my mouth as her fist slammed into my face for the third or fourth time.

As dazed as I was I fought back, punching the demon on the side of the head with my fist which seemed to be having no effect, even with the Light Energy behind my blows.

The demon just smiled and hit me again and the back of my head slammed against the door I was up against, causing me to momentarily see stars. The bitch stood before me smiling, which was a mistake on her part for it gave me time to reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the bottle of holy water that was there. Ever since the vampire incident I decided I would never leave home without it. I popped the cap on the bottle and splashed the demon’s face with the holy water just as she was about to come in and hit me again. It was satisfying to hear the demon’s screams as the holy water burned into her face. She staggered back, both hands clamped over face as acrid smoke rose from her, the smell of burning skin and flesh.

Before the demon could recover I rushed forward and emptied the whole bottle of holy water over her, causing her to burn and scream even more. As the demon fell to her knees, her face and neck looking like it was melting, I aimed a kick at her head, catching her under the chin, white light bursting from my foot. The demon’s head snapped back and I heard a loud cracking sound just before she hit the floor and lay there unmoving.

I’d broken the demon’s neck. Just to make sure I took my knife out and plunged it into her chest. There were no screams from the demon, just a burst of orange light from the stab wound before she went limp.

Frank was on the floor not far from me, a demon on top of him, its hands wrapped around his throat. I was about to run over and help when he stuck his knife in the demons neck, unleashing a jet of blood that matched the colour of the walls. The demon released Frank’s throat and grabbed its own neck to try and stem the blood and a second later it fell over dead into the wall. Frank sprang to his feet, out of breath. “At times like these I wish my powers were back at full strength.”

“Frank!” I said. He looked up to see a woman standing at the end of the hallway. She stood in a room with a large window at her back, light pouring in around her.

It was Morgana, the demon we had come for.

“You have some nerve coming here,” Morgana said in a voice that was calm but full of barely concealed rage. “You just signed your own death warrants. Idiots! Come and get me if you can.” With that she went left and disappeared out of sight.

“When we get in that room I’ll say the incantation,” Frank said, still struggling to catch his breath while I felt fine, apart from the raging headache the demon had given me. I still felt strong though and the angel energy pulsated through every inch of my body. “You just kill her. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said, focused. My sword was back in my hand and I carried the container in the other.

We moved up the hallway and entered the room, hardly able to believe the opulence of the place compared to the filth pits in the floors below. The room was spotless and furnished with expensive furniture. It even had a bar in one corner.

Morgana sat in a white leather armchair. With her flowing red hair and white pantsuit she looked as beautiful and immaculate as the room we were in.

Frank didn’t wait, immediately starting his recitation of the binding spell.

Morgana laughed and stood up. “I’ll kill you before you’ve even finished the spell,” she said.

Frank took his gun out and fired off four shots that hit Morgana dead center, the iron tips of the bullets the cause of the look of pain on her face.

She looked down at the bullet holes in her chest and the blood seeping from the wounds. “You just ruined this suit,” she said and I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her clothes or the body she possessed.

Either way she wasn’t happy.

She shot out an arm in Frank’s direction and Frank dropped his gun and grabbed at his own throat as if someone was choking him. The demon raised her arm higher and the next thing I knew Frank has hovering three feet off the floor, still grasping at his throat.

I knew if I didn’t do something she would kill him, but Frank was way ahead of me as he took out his knife and threw it at the demon. The knife stuck in her chest and Frank dropped to the floor, coughing and spluttering before continuing with the binding spell.

The demon screamed with pain and rage as she pulled the knife from her chest and threw it back at Frank, who ducked just in time, the knife sailing past him and lodging itself in the drywall behind him.

Still he kept up with the spell, which I knew was working because I could see the panic in the demon’s eyes.

As Frank said the last few words of the spell, I ran forward with my sword out in front of me, intending to run it through her.  A bit of a gung-ho move, but I wasn’t thinking. The point of my blade inches away from her, Morgana sidestepped causing me to overreach and miss her.

The next thing I felt was her forearm around my throat as she held me up off the ground with one arm, taking my sword with her other hand and tossing it away.

“Let her go!” Frank shouted, having finished the spell. The demon couldn’t leave her meat suit now.

She was trapped.

And so were we.

“No further or I break the pretty one’s neck,” Morgana said. I struggled against her grip but I had no leverage as my feet were not even on the floor. I practically hung from the noose her arm was making. My head spun as she squeezed tighter. “Stand aside. You let me leave and I might let her live.”

“Okay, okay,” Frank said. “Just let the girl go.”

Anger flushed through me on hearing Frank say that. I thought to myself that we had come this far, that I wasn’t about to let him allow this bitch to walk out of there just like that.

No way. I needed the demons blood and I was going to get it.

Keep her attention, Frank.

I had a knife strapped to my right ankle. As light-headed as I was, I swung my leg up straight, reached out and pulled the knife from the straps that held it.