Raven's Peak (3 page)

The Reverend patted the loaner pistol at his side—a snub nose revolver that looked like a peashooter—and headed through the trees. He had a few other implements with him, including the knife and a vial of holy water, as well as the satellite phone, but he didn’t bring much else.

The phone was off for now: anything technological had a tendency to fail around the supernatural and was more of a burden than anything else. He’d considered leaving it behind as well but decided to hang onto it. He was supposed to report in every hour and give Frieda a status update, but that definitely wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t about her, and it sure as hell wasn’t for her.

Instead, he followed the tracks.

Those tracks weren’t even hidden: broken branches, scraps of discarded clothing, and dried blood. Arthur felt like he was being led somewhere rather than chasing something. Never a good sign. After killing two members of Arthur’s order, this demon had to know there would be retaliation. Whatever Arthur was dealing with, it wasn’t afraid of him at all.

He walked for a few hours, stepping lightly and feeling his body limber up as he went. The air tasted perfect. He’d grown used to the stale oxygen from the caves, piped in through the elevator shaft and having an oily, metallic flavor. This air tasted of trees and nature. He hadn’t even known how much he missed clean air, and he could feel it rejuvenating his soul.

He paused at a tree line looking over an empty mining town. It was built into the side of a hill and consisted of around twenty dilapidated buildings. The tracks led him here, and he knew the demon was somewhere in the town, waiting for him.

Squat houses that were rundown, decrepit, and overgrown with vines surrounded a broken down Church. This was an old country-store town, abandoned in the woods and falling apart in the preceding years.

Four spikes adorned with heads were standing in front of the Church. Each had an expression of horror and served as a deterrent: a warning.

He remembered how a sight like this would have bothered him when he was a younger man. Two of the heads were the missing Hunters, and the other two he didn’t recognize. When he was younger, knowing that this creature had killed his friends would have made him furious enough to charge headlong into the Church and start blasting everything in sight. The depravity of it would have bothered him.

The only thing that bothered him now was how little he cared. 

A mist hung in the air as the sun rose, dew clinging to his boots. He felt a breeze of wind and tasted moisture. It was quiet in the clearing, filled with foreboding.

He walked through the overgrown street toward the Church. Broken shutters and roof tiles littered the dirt road as he went. It felt like a ghost town: empty, uninviting, and threatening.

The sun flitted through the trees overhead. It was eerily quiet, not even birds or insects chirping. They could feel the supernatural presence, the sheer
wrongness
of it, as easily as he could. Even the forest could sense something was amiss.

The Church was bigger up close, built on a hill and dwarfing the buildings around it. Part of the ceiling was caved in and it was covered in mold and vines. He guessed it to have been built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It must have been abandoned not long after.

He stepped past the spikes, barely noticing the grotesque expressions of pain and terror on the faces of his friends. He’d seen worse in his time.

He’d done worse in his time.

He moved to the door and slipped the snub nose revolver from his belt. It felt comfortable in his hand, ready and waiting to deal death.

The door was cracked. Inside, he heard the creaking of a board as someone strode across the floor.

“Whoever I find inside,” he said, “I will kill.”

A moment passed in silence, and then a silky, smooth voice came back to him. It was a voice he recognized instantly:

“That…”

The Reverend felt a shiver run down his spine and his heart skipped a beat. “No, no, no,” he muttered.

The door opened smoothly in front of him and he saw Abigail standing there, a lascivious smile on her face.

“…would be a shame,” she finished.

She was older than he remembered, no longer the little girl he’d rescued so long ago. She had deep black skin, high cheekbones, and brown eyes. She also had a scar on her right cheek that never fully healed, a gift from her earlier life.

But she still looked so young and vulnerable to him, standing in the antechamber of the Church. She was barely older than twenty, little more than a child. As soon as he saw her a thousand emotions he’d kept bottled inside spilled loose, overwhelming him with raw intensity. Fear, love, loss, grief, it rocked him to his core, but one emotion stood above them all.

Shame.

He was ashamed that he hadn’t been there for her for these past five years. He’d fallen apart, lost everything, and she’d suffered because of it. He hated himself because he’d allowed this to happen to her. He hadn’t been there to protect her like he should have. Like he promised he would be.

Abigail was not his child by birth, but she was the only family he had left.

And now she was possessed by a demon.

What stood before Arthur was only the shell of the girl he loved. Something else was in control. He could feel the rage and hatred emanating from Abigail’s lithe body. Her skin was covered in a heat rash, her flesh barely containing the demonic presence within.

Except something was wrong. The process was happening too fast. This demon was destroying Abigail’s body at a prodigious rate. Hours: that was all the time she would have before the demon’s essence consumed her and finished wrecking her body. Then the demon would be forced to find a new host or return to hell.

“That’s why you took the children,” he mumbled in horror. “Vessels.”

The demon grinned. “These bodies are just so…weak. I took this one this morning, and already I feel her giving out.”

“You can’t be here,” he said.

Arthur’s hands were shaking as his mind struggled to understand what he was dealing with.

“Nevertheless, I am.”

“I mean you
can’t,
” Arthur said. “It isn’t possible.”

He’d never seen or heard of a creature this powerful on the surface before. It made normal demons seem like candles beside a bonfire. Hell spawn destroyed bodies over years, months if they were more taxing than normal, but never weeks or even days.

Hours? That was unthinkable.

“And yet here I am,” Abigail said. The demon stepped back, holding the door and gesturing with her arm. “Might I invite you in?”

The Reverend felt a sharp pang of fear rip through his stomach, something he didn’t expect. He’d faced terrible things, battled demons, torn cults to the ground. He’d always assumed he’d faced the worst the world had to offer.

He’d been wrong.

And now it was too late to fully appreciate his overconfidence. Frieda’s overconfidence. The Council’s arrogance. They had all underestimated this, and their response was too small. They should have called in every asset they had available and sent them in. With sheer numbers, they might be able to take something like this down.

By the time this creature was returned to hell, the path of devastation in its wake would be immense. The body count in the thousands.

He couldn’t run. He wouldn’t make it more than a few steps before the demon brought him down. The gun he was carrying would be useless, except as a distraction. He’d faced the possibility that in coming here he might die, but he’d never felt it was more than a small chance.

Now, the reality was he would die as a failure.

He forced himself to breathe normally and stepped into the Church.

“That’s the spirit.”

“How are you here?” he asked.

“Maybe you should ask God.”

“She and I aren’t on speaking terms.”

Abigail roared with laughter as though Arthur had said the funniest thing in the world. The demon wiped her eyes, little pieces of skin flaking away.

The Reverend glanced around the Church. Most of the pews were old and rotten, the floor was rough and covered in dust, and a section of the north wall had caved in. Stained glass adorned the windows along the right side, one of which had shattered. Glass shards littered the floor

Upon a raised platform at the front of the Church lay three little girls, unconscious, maybe six years old. They looked unhurt, though it was difficult to tell from this far away.

On the left side of the room lay a rotten corpse covered in flies. The stench filled the air. Skin was sloughing off, and it appeared to have been boiled.

“That one lasted six hours,” the demon said, following his gaze. “One of the better ones.”

“Who are you?”

“Does it matter?” the demon asked. “Who are you?”

“Arthur Vangeest,” he muttered. The demon perked up and grinned.

“
The 
Reverend? The legend himself?” It walked around, eyeing him like a prize pig. “You don’t look like much.”

His mouth tasted like cotton. It felt like his body was wrapped in a coating of lead, weighing him down.

“I heard you went off the reservation. That you were out of commission.”

“What do you want?” he asked, ignoring it.

“What does anybody want?” the demon replied. “I just want to live, to experience this world for a while. It’s been far too long.”

“You’re lying.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.”

“I can’t allow it.”

“You don’t have a choice,” the demon replied. “But, in the spirit of fairness and out of respect, I’ll make you a deal. I will 
not
 kill indiscriminately. I will only take what I need to survive and accomplish my mission.”

“You took children,” Arthur replied.

The demon shrugged. “They last longer.”

She said it matter-of-factly, as if the explanation was self-evident.

“And the best part,” the demon said, “is that I’ll let you walk away. You get to live.”

The Reverend felt the words sink in, the realization awakening him from a dream. A dream of that had lasted for the past five years; it began with the death of his family and culminated in this moment. It was why he’d taken Frieda’s offer, why he was standing here at all.

He turned, stared the demon squarely in the eye, and smiled. All of his fear evaporated.

“You don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t want to live.”

He drew the snub nose revolver and fired right in the demon’s face, but the demon wasn’t there anymore. It moved in a flash, anticipating and countering. It ducked under the shot and quickly stepped to the side, falling into a fighting stance.

Arthur fell into his old self, the fighter, the Hunter, and let his muscles do the work. He spun, dodging an attack, and fired another bullet at the demon.

This shot went wide as well but gave him enough time to slip a short blade out of his boot. He aimed the gun, pulled the trigger, and stabbed at the same time. He caught the demon off guard, drawing a long cut across Abigail’s stomach as the demon avoided the shot.

The demon punched back, grazing his chin and sending him staggering. Arthur ducked, stabbed, and twisted his body to avoid a kick from the demon.

It followed with another series of precise punches, but Arthur managed to dance away from all of them. He slashed with the blade and drew another cut on Abigail’s forearm, drawing a thin line.

They separated, both panting, and the demon leaped to the far wall. It bounded straight into the air with a superhuman jump, catching a beam and sliding up. It hung from the rafters, legs curled like a praying mantis, hissing down at him.

Arthur felt his heart pounding in his throat. His muscles were loose, and adrenaline coursed through his veins. This was what he lived for, the thrill of it.

“Not what you were expecting?” he asked.

“
Exactly
what I was expecting,” the demon replied. “I like to play with my food before dinner.”

The demon pounced down at him, and he dove out of the way. He rolled and came up dancing, moving his body gracefully to avoid the demon’s attacks. He moved with practiced ease, dodging blows with only millimeters to spare, no wasted motion. The Order thought it was a blessing, a gift from God that he could move so fluidly and quickly.

It wasn’t. Years of training and thousands of fights gave him this skill. He’d received his fair share of scars and bruises battling demons and humans, but it had turned him into a practiced machine with one purpose. There was never a divine substitute for the real thing.

Another attack, another dodge. He countered an uppercut by sliding just out of reach, stabbing out with his blade and drawing another cut on Abigail’s shoulder. He hated hurting her, but this wasn’t her anymore, and anything he could do to weaken the body increased his chances of survival.

The demon grew frustrated and called on its inner nature to gain the upper hand. It lashed out at Arthur with a fist and then telekinetically threw a wooden pew at him. He dodged both attacks, and then spun out of the way of a second pew followed by a roof beam. The building shuddered under the blows, and the floor tilted a few degrees, throwing them both off balance.

He danced back, quick-stepping over the pews and dodging another attack. The demon pursued, using Abigail’s body and the Church itself as weapons. It tore down a section of roof and threw it, but Arthur ducked out of the way, diving under a pew. The roof exploded into dust and rained shards of desiccated wood around him.

When Arthur came back up, he cut with his short blade, stabbing the demon in the knee. It hissed in anger, bounding away from him.

It raised a hand and telekinetically threw three pews through the air at him at the same time. They were spread apart to cover a large area. The demon laughed, knowing they would be impossible to dodge.

So Arthur didn’t.

With a roar he charged forward, launching his fist into the center pew. It shattered into dust and small fragments with a resounding boom. He walked through the cloud of particles hanging in the air, panting. He felt dust cling to his sweaty skin.