Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (39 page)

“I want you,” he blurted, love and
lust an indiscernible tangle in him. “
I
love you.
”

Suddenly, Nehema stopped moving. Her
hands retreated from his belt line and for the second time she shoved him away,
this time hard, with her bare feet.

He was afire now, and he rushed back
at her. She slapped him hard with both sides of one hand, then, as an
afterthought, slashed his cheek with the nails of the other.

He backed away, holding his face.
The sharp, stinging pain, the blood running down, it blew him out of the crazed
passion he had been in, like a gust of wind blows away a fog.

“You
love
me?” she repeated in open disgust. Her face was a mask of
outrage, and she drew her shift about her like a woman wronged. “You
love
me? You
bastard!
My
rescuer
…my
hero
…did I not risk my very
existence
for you? Did I not undergo
agonies
for you? I expected the
abandonment of Lucifer. But
you
?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can it be you do not know?” she put
her head in her hands for a moment, then eased off the woodpile. When her face
rose again, her cheeks were running with tears. “I am a succubus, Rider. A
Queen of Hell. A dark angel of prostitution. When I went against my mother and
sisters to aid you, when they learned of what I’d done, Lilith damned me. She
gave me the worst punishment she could inflict. As her daughter I am bound by
her commands, and she directed me to marry the first virtuous man I came
across, then she sent her eyes out into the world and found this Harry Haddox,
and she set the
ruhin
on me and drove
me across the desert to him. I enticed him. I tried to corrupt him, but I could
not. He proposed to me, and I was condemned to accept.”

She held up her hand, and her
wedding ring glinted on her finger.

“Now this band of gold chains me to
him. Every night he comes to me,” she hissed, and ran her fingers like swarming
spiders up and down her body, “and gropes my body with his gentle, clumsy
caresses, with
love
in his heart.” She
began to sob. “He whispers hateful endearments into my ears, dripping with
perverse honesty and vile devotion. He fills me with shame. He rapes my dark
soul again and again, night after night with his selfless affection.”

The Rider shook his head, unable to
comprehend. Not wanting to.

“Lust and corruption and debasement
are my joys. I want to be the pillow I was, the glorious receptacle of mortal
baseness and wantonness. This is
my
hell!”

“What did you expect me to do?” the
Rider stammered.

“Kill him, Rider. Free me.”

The Rider swallowed and turned away.
He found his gun belt and picked it up.

“You will do this thing for me?” she
asked eagerly.

“No,” said the Rider, buckling his
belt. “Of course not. Why didn’t you just seduce some saloon bum?”

“I cannot be unfaithful. I am bound
by the wedding vow. Till death do us part, they say.”

“You came pretty close to being
unfaithful just now,” the Rider chuckled bitterly, stooping to pick the ground
for his talismans.

“You are different. You are the only
one who can break the spell because Lilith’s curse doesn’t have any bearing on
you. You have no name.”

“How did you know I had no name?”
the Rider said sharply. He glanced at her. Had this been some kind of plot? Had
Lucifer somehow anticipated Kabede’s solution to the problem of Lilith’s
ruhim
? Had he orchestrated all this to
strip him of his name, make him a weapon against the Lilith and the Outer Gods?

Her expression told him nothing. She
was only concerned about herself. Just as she always had been.

“Never mind,” said the Rider. “I don’t
care.”

She came forward and grabbed his
elbow.

“Rider. I can’t even bear children.”

He pulled away from her.

“By children you mean
ruhin
, those dream demons you and your
sisters churned out by the hundreds in Tip Top. Well, they almost killed me, so
you’ll excuse me if I don’t shed too many tears.”

“But they didn’t kill you. I saved
you.

“At Lucifer’s command. What did he
promise you?”

She saw that pleading would do
nothing, and wiped away her tears.

“Only that Lilith would be kept from
Samael.”

“Your father. Your lover. The Angel
of Death. Lucifer said he’s imprisoned in his own dimension. You can’t even be
with him.”

“Lilith will not be with him either.”

“What’s Samael’s part in all this?
What do the Old Ones want him for?”

“I don’t know. Only Lilith does.”

He shook his head. He looked about
for his talismans, hunting them up on the dark ground.

“Rider. I have had to make due with
the sweaty dreams of a boy till now. This golden band contracepts my powers,”
she said, holding up her hand. The plain wedding band shined in the night. “For
all the seed he spills, I can conceive neither
shedim
nor
ruhin
. I
thought I could turn him against Harry, but his damned love for his father
confuses him. He lusts for me, but he won’t consummate. He won’t kill for me.”

“Neither will I, Nehema,” the Rider
snapped, shoving a handful of his wards into his coat pocket.

“You’ve got to. Oh, if only you didn’t
love me. Then you could just free me. Why did you have to say that? You don’t
mean it do you? Not really.”

“No,” said the Rider, standing,
looking down at her. “No, I guess I don’t.”

She smiled, and with one motion
stepped out of the cotton shift.

“Yessss,” she hissed, and began to
sway, closing her eyes. “You see? You can do it. Remember Tip Top? I felt your
sweet lust for me then. And you were so good. So chaste. Have you been with
anyone since?” She sniffed at him, like a dog testing the wind. “Mmmmm…no. You
haven’t. Come here…”

She reached out for his hand again,
but he had his spectacles on and was staring at her in all her true, monstrous
ugliness. The spell was broken.

He turned away.

“Rider,” she snarled, flapping her
drooping bat wings and stomping her cumbersome mule leg. Then, she put one of
her clawed hands to the side of her grey, sagging face and screamed. Long and
loud, dragging her hooked nails through her own flesh as she did so.

He guessed her intent, and broke
into a run. He turned the corner of the wood stack and ran headlong into
Robert, skulking in his long underwear.

“You son of a bitch!” the boy
shouted.

“Wait, Robert,” the Rider said. “It’s
not what you think.”

“Help me,” Nehema called behind him.
“Harry! Harry!”

“You dirty son of a bitch!” Robert
yelled, and took a wild, boyish swing at the Rider, glancing his chin. The
Rider turned and pushed him, the boy’s momentum sending him clattering against
the wood.

He kept going. He had to get out of
here now. Haddox would come. Haddox would try to kill him, and then he would
have to kill Haddox.

He turned another corner. Robert was
sending up a ruckus clambering out of the wood. Nehema was wailing now,
sobbing.

Lord, what a nightmare this was.
What a damn fool he’d been. What the hell had he been thinking letting an
illusion govern him like this? His teachers had all warned him against falling
for such demonic wiles. He’d successfully resisted them for so long, he’d taken
them for granted. Now, to have fallen for this simplest, this most obvious of
tricks. Hadn’t Kabede, hadn’t Dick Belden even told him? He felt like an idiot.
Like a dog on the tracks.

He had come to save a demoness. Why
hadn’t he thought about what her punishment might entail? What were the fire
and rape and torture he had imagined to one who had been born in Hell? How else
could evil be rescued, except by evil? Somewhere, Lucifer was watching all this
and laughing.

Maybe Adon and Lilith too.

Maybe HaShem and all His angels
even.

He had worried so much about Lilith
and her
shedim
, he hadn’t even
considered Nehema’s rescue itself could have been a trap.

He came out of the woodyard to see
the house lamps lit. The front door was open and Haddox was standing on the
porch pointing a shotgun.

Damn, thought the Rider. How could
he possibly get out of this without hurting or killing this man? Haddox loved
Nehema. How much of that was her demonic glamour, he didn’t know, but Haddox
loved her, and he would fight for her. And if he fought the Rider, he would die
for her too.

Robert was out of the woodpile and
running down the twisting path. Was he headed for the Rider, or to Nehema? If
he came to the Rider, maybe he could take the boy hostage long enough to escape…

How had he even come to such a
thought? Could he really hold his pistol to an innocent boy’s head to stay his
father’s hand?

No, of course he couldn’t.

Maybe it was better to just let
Harry Haddox kill him. He was a father to those children. They needed him. Who
needed the Rider? The world had Kabede to defend it from the Great Old Ones. At
the rate he was going the Rider would wind up in the Creed himself.

He stood at the edge of the woodyard
and raised his hands to his shoulders. Maybe he could explain somehow.

But Haddox wasn’t aiming at him.

“What do you all want?” he called
out into the dark.

Then the Rider saw them, standing at
the mouth of the path little Emory had led him down this morning, just at the
edge of the light thrown out by the open door.

Twelve riders, and a black buggy
between them just inside the woodyard. Murky shadow men and shadow women with
soulless all white eyes and a single, black gowned, black veiled woman seated
in the buggy.

Beside the driver, a diminutive
shape stood up in the seat and said, in a pleasing, almost musical accent the
Rider knew too well;

“We don’t want you, old man. We’re
here for
him
.”

All the horsemen turned in their
saddles, following the stubby gesture of Mazzamauriello, who had spied the
Rider emerging from the woodyard to their left. They eased their horses
forward, and the house light touched their faces. Some of them were hideously
misshapen. They all bore the rosette badges and guns; rifles, carbines, braces
of pistols, each with murder and hate in their eyes. One, a leering hunchback,
wore a bandolier of cartridges around his mangy head. Another, with a humongous
distorted face like some kind of obscene, newspaper caricature brought to life,
flipped a feathered tomahawk over and over idly in his hand like it was a toy.

The Rider took off his spectacles
and put them away. He lowered his arms slowly, and hooked his
rekel
coat behind the butt of his
Volcanic pistol. He had eight salt core bullets loaded, and eight more .41
caliber rounds on his person. The onager had the rest of his salt ammunition.
He had his cold iron Bowie knife with its talismans, and the Volcanic’s seals
had damaged demons in the past when he’d used it as a club, but he doubted he
would ever get that close.

“Get back in the house, Harry,” he
called.

“Rider? Where’s Robert? Where’s
Nemmy?”

“They’ll be alright. Get back in the
house.”

Rifles slid from saddle rings, and
hissed out from scabbards. He heard hammers clicking back in the night.

The woman in the buggy stood, a mass
of black silk ruffles, her disfigured face and head of weedy, sparse hairs
obscured beneath a long black mantilla that hung to her toes like a great
spider web.

“Rider,” she croaked.

Lilith the Demon Queen, still
bearing the wounds of their unfortunate first meeting, in which she had been
badly burned.

“Lilith,” the Rider acknowledged.

“I didn’t think you would really be
so stupid.”

“But you hoped.”

“I wouldn’t have spent the last six
months in this shithole otherwise.”

“What the hell do you people want?”
Haddox demanded.

Lilith turned to her line of
subordinates, and singled one of them out.

“Tentennino.”

The hunchback with the bandolier
around his head raised and fired his revolver faster than the Rider could
think.

Harry Haddox let out a surprised
scream and spun as the bullet blew his wooden leg out from underneath him and
sent him crashing to the porch, the shotgun falling across the threshold.

“Daddy!” Emory screeched, and ran
out of the house to throw herself over her father.

A ripple of laughter worked its way
up and down the line of
shedim.

Robert burst out of the woodyard and
echoed his sister’s cry. He would have run across the yard if the Rider hadn’t
caught him up in a clumsy bear hug and stopped him.