The Demon Abraxas (2 page)

She leaned her elbow on the bar and sipped her way through the rest of Ruben’s drink. Then she fished her phone out of her purse and texted the marine biologist to see if she was home, awake, and interested. She could just swing by Helen’s apartment building and see if the light was on, maybe call up and ask if Helen needed anything and then, having discharged her good Samaritan duty, swing a few blocks over and take care of some other pressing needs.

“Ana,” Sabel’s voice said next to her ear and she jumped. “Hold still.”

A warm touch brushed the back of her neck, sending a shiver down the length of her body. She felt a feathered kiss of fabric as well and then Sabel ran her silken fingertips along the neckline of Ana’s dress.

“There you go. Your tag was sticking up.”

Ana stared at her. Was she serious? Was she flirting? Was she somehow both flirting and serious?

“Thanks.” She was overly conscious of her elbow on the bar and straightened up. Not a single intelligent word came to mind. This close, Sabel smelled like fresh mint and wildflowers and apricot musk.

“Is Helen here?” Sabel asked. “I wanted to congratulate her.”

“No, she, um, emailed me earlier that she wasn’t feeling well. It is her kind of event. I thought I might go check on her, though I suppose it’s late.” Ana clamped her mouth shut. She sounded like an idiot.

“I think that’s thoughtful,” Sabel said. “Are you two friends?”

“We’ve worked together for a few years. She’s taught me a lot about public relations. I was just in marketing before.” Ana stopped but Sabel didn’t say anything else so she tried to come up with something to get her talking, “You’re a professor when you’re not training corporate geeks like us?”

“Religious studies with a focus on social psychology; diversity training gives me a practical application for it,” Sabel said and looked like she would say more, but Detlefsen called to her to come meet someone else and she apologized to Ana and slipped back into the crowd.

Ana waited, but the group of people standing around Sabel talking kept growing. Would all ninety percent of the men in the room, the straight ones who hadn’t watched Ruben’s exit, eventually magnetize to Sabel? I should go over there, Ana thought, just push into the group and talk about something meaningless for an hour.

But she didn’t know how to do that. She wasn’t used to feeling this flummoxed in a work setting. If only she hadn’t considered in detail how she wanted to get Sabel out of the charcoal gray suit she’d worn to the second training, then she might be able to carry on some sufficiently mundane conversation.

Ruben was going to kill her for leaving. She picked her purse up off the bar and headed for the door. Helen lived in Ashbury Heights in an old Victorian that had been cut up into large apartments. Of course there was no parking anywhere near it, even for the little silver and white Mini Cooper Ana had bought to navigate the horrible parking in San Francisco. She had to park two blocks away in a space that was marginally legal. Only after she locked the car and started walking in her heels did it occur to her that it was ten at night and she was trooping the streets in an evening dress and heels to intrude on her boss at home.

On the bright side, after she checked on Helen it was just another mile to the apartment of that tall and charmingly awkward marine biologist she’d hooked up with off and on for the last six months. Ruben was right, she had a thing for smart, inaccessible women, but tonight that could work to her advantage.

Helen’s building was in the middle of the street and when Ana rounded the corner, a BMW sat double-parked in front of it, lights out. She ducked into a doorway and peered around the corner. Could this be Helen’s mystery lover? Ana knew she had someone, but Helen never talked about him. It was a nice car: a 5-series. A man came out of the front door and motioned to someone in the car. Two more men got out, dressed entirely in black. Ana opened her purse and pulled out her phone and can of pepper spray.

The two men hauled something out of the backseat, long and heavy, wrapped in a blanket. Ana’s heart hammered before she fully realized why. This was the kind of scene she expected to see on television, not from twenty feet away. She wanted to believe it was a rolled rug, but the contours of hip and shoulder were too clear: they carried a body between them. They were carrying a body into Helen’s building and there were only three apartments they could be going into.

There was a chance, her rational mind suggested, that it was Helen and she was unconscious for some good reason, like having passed out at a party or…or… Perhaps if Ana meddled she would only embarrass herself and everyone involved.

Her gut told her to call the cops now. She ducked back into the darkness of the doorway and dialed 911.

“Please state the nature of your emergency,” the operator said.

Ana whispered the address and told her, “There are three men in black here, they’re carrying a body into the building. It’s Helen Reed’s apartment, I’m afraid she’s in danger.”

“Are you in danger?” the operator asked.

“I don’t think they saw me.”

“Can you stay where you are?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I have police and ambulance on the way. Can you stay on the line? I only want you to keep talking to me if it’s safe for you to do so.”

“Let me look,” Ana whispered. She turned, crept to the edge of the doorway again and looked.

A man stared at her from two feet away. “There you are,” he said as if he’d found a lost pet.

Ana pepper-sprayed him in the eyes, then ran. A heavy weight, much too large to be a fist, hit her in the head and knocked her into darkness.

* * *

Sabel stood in the doorway to the bedroom and stared at the unmoving figure on the bed. She couldn’t risk touching her and leaving fingerprints, but she knelt by the bed, held her own hair up and back, and leaned an ear over Helen’s mouth. Yes, she was dead and no more than a few hours gone based on the warmth still radiating from her skin.

Her instructions were to watch and inform—and not get involved. She still felt like she’d failed. She hadn’t been able to figure out what Helen was mixed up in and now the woman was dead.

She straightened up and went back to the doorway. Then down the hall, across the living room and out the front door. She used a soft cloth to pull the door shut and then a touch of magic to remind the door that it had been locked before she went in. The bolt clicked back into place.

Had Ana come by to check on Helen? Had she rung the bell or just seen the lights off and assumed Helen was sleeping off an illness? Sabel stepped out of the front door into the cool air. There were sirens in the distance coming closer. Were they for Helen? If so, who had called the police?

She started walking quickly back toward her car, but the glint of a streetlight against a piece of metal on the sidewalk caught her eye. It was a cell phone. She picked it up and walked around the corner where she could look at it without being spotted by the police.

Last number dialed: 911.

The number before that: Helen Reed.

And there was a received text message from a woman named Shery: “I’d love to see you, come by any time tonight.”

Sabel smiled at that, but the other two were troubling. She navigated to the email app for confirmation and, as she’d anticipated, the emails were all addressed to Ana Khoury. So Ana was here, called 911 and then dropped her phone?

She opened her mouth and took a long inhale of the evening air. The taste of power prickled between her tongue and palate. Magic recently used left this trace in the air like the charged ions before a storm. Ana didn’t have magic, so someone had used it on her.

Sabel hurried back to her car where she could focus. In the driver’s seat, she opened her purse and pulled out the short golden hair she’d taken from the back of Ana’s dress earlier in the evening. She’d taken it to use in case she needed to follow Ana to Helen—if Helen wasn’t really at her apartment—but now she could use it to find Ana herself. She wrapped the hair around her fingers doubling and tripling its potency, then she brought her hand close to her mouth and breathed over it the words, “Lead me.”

The hair tugged her hand toward the north. She started the car and drove, feeling the pull of the hair around her fingers. She’d just crossed the Golden Gate Bridge when the sensation cut off abruptly.

“Shit!” she said, “shit, shit shit,” and hit her fist against the steering wheel with each repeat of the word.

If they had killed Ana too, the hair would still tug for hours. No tug meant Ana was deep inside someone else’s magic. For that to happen to a woman with no magic of her own… Sabel had no way to know exactly how bad that could be, but it was very bad.

Ana opened her eyes on the dark blur of a moving road. She was slumped in the passenger seat of a car—from the look of the hood it was the BMW she’d been watching—and she couldn’t move.
I’ve been drugged
, she thought in some far corner of her mind. Through force of will, she made her head roll left enough to see the man driving.

Pay attention
, she told herself,
you have to stay awake and find a way out of this.

He was extraordinarily beautiful, in a rugged, thick-featured way. In profile a brutally strong cheekbone framed a darkly-lashed eye and thin, sculpted lips. At least he wouldn’t be hard to describe to the police, even if she only saw one side of his face. The fingers of her right hand twitched and then crept together into a fist.

“What did you do to me?” she asked, slurring and stumbling through the words.

His visible eyebrow lifted. “You can still talk? Delightful. Too bad I can’t keep you around.” The way he sighed at those last words made her cold inside.

Her fear came with a bottomless grief. There had been kids in her hometown, the well-dressed ones with good colleges in their futures, who had expected her to die young and would be surprised to know she’d made it to thirty. She’d promised herself she’d outlive all of them and she had a long way to go yet to pull that off.

“Where are you taking me?” Ana asked. Her mind seemed blessedly clear in contrast to her uncooperative body.

He laughed and the rich baritone sound was bitterly silky in Ana’s ears. “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “You’re a gift for some friends.”

“You must not like those friends very much.”

He didn’t reply and they drove into Marin, winding into a neighborhood of well-kept houses with large yards. Soon he would stop the car and she was going to fight her way out. The old familiar adrenaline of anticipated pain flared inside her, burning off the remaining sluggishness in her limbs. She hated men who thought a busty blond woman like herself could neither think nor fight, and she aimed to make this one pay for his mistake.

He pulled up a long driveway lined with young sycamores, their leaves yellow-gray in the moonlight. As the car slowed, Ana clicked open the door and threw herself out. Her body hit the ground at an angle and she tumbled. The ridiculous part of her mind swore about the dirt grinding into the silk dress as she scrambled up, her muscles still slow and clumsy.

“Grab her!” a new voice shouted from behind. Molasses seemed to encase her, like running in a dream, her legs wouldn’t do what she wanted and she stumbled down the driveway at half speed, moving by the slope’s gravity and sheer force of will. A hand grabbed her shoulder and she lurched away, falling forward to hit the asphalt hip first and then with the side of her head. A blast of pain flashed across her skull.

Ana rolled over fighting the man who came down after her, jabbing fingers at his throat while her right foot kicked for his knee. It wasn’t the driver of the car, but some goon with a dark hood over his face. His head dodged her jab, but the instep of her shoe connected and he yelped in pain. She’d crawl away if she had to. A second man, wearing a loose ski mask, grabbed her flailing arm and locked an icy metal cuff around her wrist.

She made a fist with her left hand and cracked it into the side of his head, and she started yelling. She yelled for help and yelled, “Fire!” and a string of obscenities. The first man recovered from her kick and his hands grabbed her free wrist while both men forced her onto her belly. She scissored her legs like a swimmer, trying to connect with anything. The driver’s black leather shoes came into her field of vision.

“Enough,” he said from above her head. His fingers touched the back of her skull and she blacked out again.

She woke on her side on pale canvas, with her head throbbing and her hands cuffed behind her back. Her body told her only minutes had passed: her mouth wasn’t dry and her pulse was still elevated from her attempted escape. She heard a man’s voice, but the words sounded foreign. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dimmer light and she looked up at a wide, bare ceiling. The pain in her head was so fierce she didn’t dare sit up yet, so she talked to herself silently, trying to calm down, take the measure of this place, find a way out. It didn’t do any good to panic; that could come later when she was away from here.

You’ve got to survive
, she told herself.
Don’t think about what they might do. Don’t add to the fear. Breathe slowly and use the brain God gave you. People have escaped worse situations. Damn it, girl, this is not how you die.

Dominating the vast room was a large white cloth or tarp spread across the floor with designs drawn in black and a few unsteady brown lines. In the center of the tarp, near her, were two concentric circles with foreign letters in strings between them, and inside those circles stood a man in an unbelted black robe with a dark cowl cloaking his face. Around him were three other men each in a smaller circle and facing him was an empty circle inside a triangle. More men stood around the outside of the tarp on the bare floor. All of them were masked, some with plain knit masks, others with hoods that looked like silk or satin pulled over their heads with only the eyes showing.

She wished Ruben were here. He was strong enough to give these men the beating they deserved. But the image of Ruben hitting these men felt so alien to her, she found herself picturing her brother Gunnar instead, breaking the nose of this one and the arm of that one. She’d never seen Gunnar hit anyone, only seen him get hit, but she was certain he could do it. All the men in her family could.