The Demon Abraxas (11 page)

“Helen,” Ana said with a long sigh. “Why did they kill her?”

“My guess is it was an accident. Whatever magic they were doing, with that many people and the setup you describe, it would have been tremendously powerful and it probably just went wrong.”

“Your magic…?” Ana started but then wasn’t sure what she meant to ask.

“Can kill,” Sabel said. “But I take a lot of care with it and I have mentors who train me so it doesn’t go wrong like that.”

“What do you call yourself?”

The little smile arrived on Sabel’s lips again. “A witch. It’s not a perfect name because it gets me confused with the Wiccans. But I like its etymologies and it’s what the Hecatines call themselves.”

“I like it,” Ana said and meant it. Something about the way Sabel said the word “witch,” combined with her black hair and fair skin and those blue-gray eyes, elevated it to a place of wisdom and power. “Do witches…” she began and paused because she didn’t know how to ask what she wanted. She started over, “The guy who grabbed me, they really thought they could summon a demon. Is that real? Can you do that?”

“No,” Sabel said. “I don’t work with demons.”

The flat, almost angry way she said it chilled Ana. By all accounts this thing in her head was a demon and Sabel made it sound like she wanted nothing to do with that, so where did that leave her? She’d been hoping that Sabel would say she could banish demons. Then Ana might be willing to admit to her about the voice in her head and the strange dreams, but not if it was an issue that would drive them further apart. She was suddenly glad she’d instinctively not shared the name of the last bookstore with Sabel.

“They exist,” Sabel said. “I’ve only ever met a few half-breeds. You did see something, didn’t you?”

Ana nodded. “I don’t know how to talk about it yet,” she said.

“When you’re ready, you can talk to me,” Sabel told her.

Ana managed to smile back at her, but if Sabel couldn’t get this creature out of her head, then it probably wasn’t worth having a conversation about it.

The bill came and Sabel picked it up. “I’ll get this one. You can get the next one.”

“Thanks,” Ana said, lighthearted that Sabel believed there would be a next meal together.

They walked out into the cloudy afternoon light and Ana paused a few steps from the door. Sabel turned and looked at her.

“Thank you,” Ana said and opened her arms. Sabel hesitated and then stepped forward and hugged her. Ana could tell from the quick tightening of Sabel’s arms that she meant it to be a brief gesture, but instead her body relaxed against Ana for a moment and Ana held her tightly. She rested her cheek against the side of Sabel’s head and inhaled apricot musk and wildflowers.

Sabel pulled away and went to the driver’s side of her car. Ana ducked her head to hide her smile.

“I forgot to bring your T-shirt and pants back,” Sabel said.

Ana was glad Sabel wasn’t looking at her just then because the reminder of that specific pair of pants made her blush.

“Whenever, it’s fine,” she said.

“I’m running errands tomorrow early afternoon.”

“Perfect. Why don’t we hit the other store then too. I’m feeling like I should nap. Everything’s not all mended up yet.”

She’d been developing a headache for the last hour or so, probably from too much moving around, and had put off going home so she could sit and eat with Sabel. But now that there was going to be a next time, she thought she’d better go lie down for a bit. Her body felt stronger than usual but at the same time more exhausted. Whatever the creature in her did to make them run so quickly seemed to have burned through all her reserves.

She went home and slept for most of the afternoon, then woke long enough to eat dinner and watch a movie with Ruben before she was ready to sleep through the night.

* * *

Sunday morning, Ana planted herself on the couch to watch a crime show marathon. She was eager to go see the Lily woman on the card from the bookstore, but she still felt a lingering exhaustion and a deep drive to keep her life seeming normal.

Ruben took himself off to the gym and he’d been gone about an hour when the doorbell rang. She considered ignoring it completely but after the second knock, she heard a woman’s voice say, “I guess she’s not home, do you think we could leave it?” Ana peered out the side of the living room window and saw a man and woman in casual clothing. Salespeople most likely, but she grabbed her phone on the way to the door in case she needed to call for help.

When she cracked the door, the woman and man were facing away. She opened the door another inch, leaving the chain on to stop further motion, and keeping the phone ready in her left hand where they couldn’t see it.

“Yes?” she said. They came back up the two steps they’d descended. She didn’t recognize either one.

“Ms. Khoury?” the woman asked. “I found your purse, I wanted to bring it back to you.”

This could be the bright spot of her day, still Ana didn’t move. The most likely people to have her purse were the people involved in the ritual, although they didn’t have any women participating as far as she could see at the time.

“Where did you find it?”

“Outside our apartment building, in the street. If you had any cash, I’m afraid it’s gone.”

Twenty-five percent chance, she figured, that these two were telling the truth, and seventy-five they were trying to lure her out to grab her. She should tell them to leave it at the base of the door and back away, but she was tired of feeling that paranoid. She undid the chain but braced her foot at the base of the door so that anything short of a battering ram wouldn’t move it.

She reached out a few inches through the narrow opening, forcing the other woman to come forward to hand her the purse. Her fingers closed around the soft leather and she was starting to feel optimistic about the whole transaction when she saw the man’s hand come up quickly with something in it.

Ana pulled her hand and purse in the door, but before she could slam it, the man popped the lid off the small, gray glass bottle he was holding. A cloud exploded out of the top and slammed through the narrowing crack in the door to flood Ana’s face even as she shut the door and threw the lock.

Fire raced over her nerves and she would have screamed but her mouth wouldn’t move. It felt like hot liquid was being forced under her skin, as if her body were being inflated. She wanted to fall to the floor and curl into a ball but her muscles weren’t responding to her mind anymore. She could still feel her body breathing, but the man on the other side of the door said a few words and her sight went dark. It wasn’t like the time in the vast, open place when the man came down from the sky and kissed her. That pain had come on softly and given her time to adjust. This burning took her over immediately.

She still felt every detail of her body, the air shifting the tiny hairs on her arms, her blind eyes blinking, heart beating, but she could not do anything. Wherever she reached out with her mind to move a muscle, there was a searing wall of pain.

What’s happening?
She cried out desperately into the darkness of her own mind.

The original creature in her didn’t answer in words, but she understood suddenly that they’d put another demon inside her and this one was made to overtake and control its host.

There’s another demon in me?
she asked and the answer came at the same time as her question, allowing her to feel this new demon distinctly. Its borders created that puffy, hot feeling under her skin. Its impulses overran her own neural commands and laced pain along the pathways to keep her out of her own body.
How many damned demons can I hold? Get it out
!

Anger or frustration, not her own, flashed inside of her. He was trying to push the other demon back out of her. His will inside the landscape of her body was like a wall of white fire. She felt a flash of unwelcome pity for him, to have traveled all this way and now be as much a prisoner in her body as she was. He had been very powerful once, she understood, he could have taken care of this easily, but it had been so long and the journey here made him weak like a child.

The pain created a fog across her mind, she wanted to crawl far away from it, but the first demon, the protector spirit, whatever he was, pointed her toward it as if he’d taken her head in his hands to direct her gaze. He wanted her to look into it. At first it was like reaching into a fire, but as she pushed into the pain it cleared the haziness in her mind and she became more aware of the boundaries of the two creatures fighting for control of her limbs.

The guy on her side was hot and bright, like the sun on sand. The other demon felt and smelled like smoke and mold. She pushed against it but it kept shifting and moving around in her.

A new pain lanced through her, radiating out from the top center of her chest, blazing out from her spine. It pulled her attention into her core and away from her right hand that had begun to slowly unlock the door. The demon fought her for her muscles. Underneath the pain, the alien presence ran its information through the nerves of her body telling it what to do. Her lungs started to fill again with air on the inhale, but then the creature stopped them.

Her chest was being crushed; she couldn’t breathe. Ice-water fear flooded through her, pounding her heart and turning her bones to liquid. Her field of attention narrowed as she began to lose consciousness, her senses pulling themselves in from her fingers and toes, from the surface of her skin. Her mind was closing itself down to conserve power.

As the sensation from her body grew more distant, she watched the man on the porch turn the knob and swing the door wide. Burning consumed her left arm as the protective demon used it to lash out and slam palm-first into the chin of the man. He flew backward, missing the first three steps completely and then tumbling down the last seven. The woman glared at Ana and commanded, “Stay!” and then ran down to him.

Her left foot stepped back and dragged her body behind it. The good demon—that was a funny thought—had taken control of most of the left side of her. She realized she could help him.

I’ll move
, she said.
You hold him back
.

A rush of affirmative feeling passed through her and then her guy forced himself into the middle of her body, making a barrier. The foreign demon had shut down her right side on the command to stay. She could barely feel anything and the sensation of half a body terrified her, but not quite so much as the possibility of having no body at all.

With her left hand she slammed the door shut and locked it. That wouldn’t hold for long; they could make it through a window given a few minutes and she couldn’t speak to call for help. She held onto the wall for balance while she shuffled backward with her left foot, unable to feel her right leg at all. Step after step she dragged her way down the hall to the door above the garage steps. She opened it, snared her keys off the hook by the door, and looked down the steps. There was no quick and easy way to get down there.

She bent her left knee and tried to swing her right foot down to the step, watching to make sure it had solid footing. Holding the railing tightly, and silently thanking Ruben, she shifted her weight to it. The knee buckled. Her body hung for a moment sideways, supported entirely by her left hand. Then she let go.

On her left side where she could feel, the stairs hit her shoulder and hip. She landed at the bottom and lay still for a moment. In a little while, when all sensation returned to her right side, she was really going to be in pain. Now she crawled on her good side around to the driver’s door. The demon on the right side, who’d been told to hold her still, seemed confused about what to do and his efforts to get her standing again made the crawling easier.

She pulled herself up into the car and thumbed the garage door opener. She had to reach across and use her left foot on the gas pedal, but she made it out without hitting either wall of the garage. Then she floored it down the street. They’d seen her leave, she’d caught a glimpse of the woman’s face at the side of the house, where she was probably trying to jimmy a window, and they might try to follow in their car.

First she focused on getting distance, but as soon as she had to stop at a light, she fished along her body into her right pocket and pulled out the business card she’d put there that morning like a talisman. The further she got from her house, the more pain she had in her right side. Bones felt bruised, then her skin scoured with glass, then it all became so cold. She clenched her good hand around the wheel, ground her teeth against each other, and drove.

* * *

Lily Cordoba had no appointments, no client meetings, nothing at all that she had to do that morning, so she took her chai down into the store to sit with the books.

The long, narrow space included glass cases for the rare books, two display desks, and a meeting area for the marketing work she did. Books had been her passion for the last fifty years, but she didn’t mind this new addition of a profession that also relied on words and cleverness. Along the left wall of the meeting space was a couch with throw pillows and she sat against an arm with one of the newer acquisitions: a book she’d bought from a friend about the building of the Temple. It wasn’t a classic, just aligned with a hobby of hers.

Outside a car horn blared. It sounded again and again, irregular, not an automated alarm. She lifted her face toward the front door and opened her senses. Other demons, two of them. Yes, that was a call for her. Who would bring her two demons on a Sunday morning, she wondered as she set the book down and slipped her feet into her boots. On the way out of the store she grabbed the kit of useful tools she kept on the sill and clipped it to the waistband of her pants.

There was a silver Mini Cooper pulled sloppily into one-and-a-half of the two visitor parking spaces in front of her store. The woman in the driver’s seat looked on the surface like a contestant for a Midwestern beauty pageant turned surfer girl. Very blond spiky hair and that amber-honey color white women got when they tanned naturally. Lily couldn’t see the demons or tell what kind they were, her powers weren’t that strong, she could only feel them like a density of space.