The Demon Abraxas (3 page)

Most of these men wore long black robes or tunics, only two had dark suits on, with bangles around their necks consisting of many pointed stars and symbols she didn’t recognize. The driver was the only one in the room who didn’t wear a hood. He was also the only one on the tarp not standing inside a circle.

One of the men glanced over at her. “She’s awake,” he announced to the room.

“Perfect timing,” Driver said.

Ana pushed herself up to sitting and turned to get a view of the rest of the room. There were no windows and only one solid-looking wood door on the far side of the room. A layer of sweat increased the chill that rose from the hard floor into her muscles. Her handcuffs had been tied with a length of rope, about ten feet she guessed, to a metal ring that rose out of the floor under the tarp. A small hole had been cut in the fabric for it. Hysterical laughter threatened to burst out of her mouth and she ground her teeth together so hard her jaw burned. Setting a metal ring into a concrete floor meant a lot of planning had gone into this event. What the hell was it?

If she could untie herself, she would still have to find a way to run, in handcuffs, past all these men and up the stairs. Perhaps if she knew what they were doing, she could use it to her advantage, maybe talk them into untying her. Under the cloying, woody smell of the incense, she caught the frozen metal scent of fear, not just her own. They weren’t unified; could she find the weak one and get him to help her?

A tremor ran up one of her arms. How long did she have until the insulation of shock wore off and the panic overwhelmed her?

She made herself count the men in the room: twelve. Some stood perfectly still while a few shifted from foot to foot. One had a censer like in a church that he dangled at the end of a chain. It smelled like hot sugar and pine trees. All the men had folded their street clothes neatly along one side of the room and she wondered if her purse was there with her cell phone in it—or had she dropped those outside of Helen’s apartment when she tried to run? If her phone was in the room, was it better to run to her phone or the door?

The men’s costumes weren’t uniform; some of the hoods were ski masks, others like lopsided pillowcases in black satin. A few looked like they had been sewn together by a seamstress of uneven skill. She marked the three antsy men with sloppy outfits as the weak ones. Although they all wore black robes or suits and cowls, she thought of the one in the center-most position as Black Hood, because his head covering was the most well-made and elaborate, giving the impression of a neatly sewn hood over a close-fitting cloth mask. He faced the empty circle and began to recite a series of words that meant nothing to Ana. He paused and recited them again. Then Driver called them back to him and the two of them chanted together.

Ana despaired of identifying any of them if…no,
when
, she told herself, when she got out and went to the police. She could only make out the breadth of shoulders under their robes, from narrow and skinny to wide and well muscled, and only a few had enough gut to round the front of their robes. Black Hood looked like an iron pillar.

They reminded her, oddly, of a group of boys at her high school who played at being dark wizards, thinking they could talk to the dead and amass mysterious powers. Those boys came from nice houses and had new clothes to wear each year, yet they managed to be dissatisfied because they were not handsome or strong, because they thought they lacked power and were looking for any way that they could compensate. A few of them liked to brag to Ana, to try to spook her with stories of late night trips to the cemetery—when they spoke to her, which was a last resort considering her dirt-poor, outcast status back then. She didn’t understand the kind of power they wanted; at that age, power to her was a fist or a sharp kick, and it was enough money and a car so that she could get away from there and never go back.

What did these men want? Was it the same kind of power as those boys back in school? Could she give it to them and survive?

Most of the men had taken places inside circles drawn around the outer edges of the tarp, and two suited guards took a handful of white powder from a dish by the door, carried it to a spot on the floor, then trickled the powder in a circle around them. Black Hood and Driver repeated the foreign sounding words until they all blurred together for Ana. Their voices rose in volume as they spoke, entreating at first and then threatening, dropping again to rumbling. The other men swayed at the sound of the chant. One slipped to his knees, but came up again still inside his circle. The air felt like the pause in a storm right before a twister forms.

As far as she could tell there was nothing inside one empty circle in the center of all of them. Everything else about this pageant was so real she almost expected to see something, a dark twisted figure or a cloud of smoke like a movie genie. How long would it take these men to admit their ritual hadn’t worked? Her fingers struggled with the rope knotted tightly against the short metal chain of the handcuffs. She’d untied tough knots before; you just had to work at the rope persistently until it moved. It was only a matter of time, but how much time? Sweat covered her fingers, making them slip over the smooth rope.

The man who had fallen to his knees suddenly shook, once, violently and threw his head back with a shout. “The woman! She is calling for the woman!”

Oppressive silence filled the room. Ana bit her cheek so hard she tasted blood. She wouldn’t scream for these men.

“Bring her!” Driver roared at the shaking man, his voice so loud it echoed.

The man staggered out of his circle toward her. “I hear her,” the man was saying over his shoulder to the others who stood rooted to their positions around the room. “Drake, I hear her, like a wind roaring.” He clapped his hands over his ears for a moment and then tore them away.

* * *

The mask hid the water pooling in Jacob’s eyes, though he was certain the demon who called himself Nathan Drake could smell his grief and its accompanying rage. It should have been Helen here to take this possession, not this blond popsicle. Jacob still couldn’t accept that she’d died; he had never meant for circumstances to play out the way they had. Why hadn’t he forced them to wait? It had been so long already, what would another month or two matter? He’d been impatient himself, that was the sad truth of it and he’d been willing to believe Drake.

Drake said the stars were right, the omens—it wasn’t worth it to wait. Earlier that night, when they’d first tried this, Helen had come down the stairs in her garnet red gown with the grace of an antelope, steady against her fear. He’d been so proud of her. Now Ana Khoury shrank away from them with all the poise of a whipped dog.

Jacob hadn’t minded Ana in the office when they worked together. He’d even admired her shape, nicely put together though a bit on the sturdy side, and she was a fine publicist, did her job with enthusiasm and success. But she knew nothing about magic and demons. Drake said she was hot-blooded and that she had darkness in her. What did she know about darkness? His fingers strayed down to touch his right hip where the scars began, the decades-old pain forged into strength.

He’d caught his first demon when he was sixteen and back in the hospital for the fifth time. The creature came to feed on his pain, but he saw its smoky form and wrestled with it until it spoke in words he could understand and promised to bring something that could teach him. Twenty-five years he’d been studying, experimenting, and perfecting himself. He’d called Drake to him and now Drake presumed to tell him how they would perform this ritual and with this ignorant girl.

Helen had studied with him for two years and she’d been a surprisingly quick student. Tears closed his throat and he swallowed them down along with his rising anger. Only a fool let his emotions play freely in a summoning ritual. Jacob had learned the hard way; now nothing offered these creatures an entry into himself except his pure will. He reminded himself this ritual was only a stepping-stone, a formality for Drake, then they would get to the real work at hand. Let this one have his moment, Jacob thought; he could wait now that he’d seen the consequence of pushing forward too quickly.

Drake called again for Ana to be brought into the center circle and the young summoner they called DK left his own circle to walk drunkenly toward her. Jacob wanted to drag the man bodily back, but it was too late, he’d already broken his protection. If he picked up some creature drawn to this power tonight it was going to take weeks to get it out again.

“I hear her, Jacob, I hear her,” DK kept repeating in a murmur. Poor idiot. They called him DK because the summoning name he chose, “Demonknight” was too embarrassing to use regularly. They all had summoning names that masked their identities. The group kept DK in the coven because of his extraordinary sensitivity to the ethereal world. He’d been the first to hear The Woman last time also. Jacob did not envy him.

“Please,” DK begged Ana who flinched away from his grasping arm.

This is a disaster
, Jacob thought and then banished the idea;
Focus or fail
. He couldn’t speak aloud, Ana might recognize his voice from the office, but he bent his will toward her, lending strength to DK’s efforts.

Drake had no such limits on his voice or appearance. He didn’t care who knew he was involved here because he didn’t expect Ana to survive, at least not as herself. “Come and get in the circle,” he purred. “Or I will put you there.”

If they were going to use trash as the vessel, they should not have chosen Ana. He understood Drake’s logic: that if it went wrong and she died it would look like someone had targeted the publicists at Roth Software and they could frame the ephemeral “drug dealers” in shipping they’d set up months ago. Ana was too pretty, too young, too charismatic to use as a vessel, though those very characteristics were what Drake wanted. Some of the less disciplined men were hesitating now. DK seemed afraid to touch her and in his peripheral vision he could see two others fidgeting nervously.

“Come and get me,” Ana spat back at Drake.

Drake crossed the room as fast as thought and hauled her to her feet so swiftly that Ana’s gasp choked in the back of her throat. Drake’s voice was pitched low, but it carried through the still room. “This will go more easily if you enter the circle willingly. It’s less likely to kill you that way.”

Ana’s eyes flicked past him to the grand circle on the floor and up to Jacob’s masked face, then past him. She was a bright girl, looking for the powerful and the weak in this group. Maybe this would work after all. If only it had been Helen.

“Fine,” she told Drake. “If you uncuff me.”

Drake shoved her forward to her knees and tugged at the handcuffs. They clicked open without benefit of a key and Ana had to throw her hands forward to avoid pitching on her face from the momentum of that sudden freedom. From where he stood on the far side of the grand circle, Jacob saw the expressions flick across her face as she crouched on hands and knees: the relief of having her hands free and the dismay of the distance still to cross to reach the exit, not to mention that most of the summoners were between her and the door.

What had killed Helen? If he knew he might tell Ana to prepare her to accept the demon that waited for her, even breaking his silence to do it, but he had no idea why Helen had failed. Jacob never had a problem letting demons into his body, only getting them out again. The bone cancer of his teens had given him a lot of practice with invasive procedures. He thought Helen had been open; had she only put on a brave face for him? If he could go back he would change so many aspects of tonight.

Ana’s eyes were neither willing nor unwilling, they were furious. Jacob hoped that was enough. He did not want to have to prepare for this particular ritual again.

“Into the circle,” Drake said. “No running.”

Ana rolled over from hands and knees to sitting and unbuckled her sandals. Drake’s eyebrows shot up and Jacob suppressed a chuckle. She really thought she was going to get a chance to run. But of course she did; she didn’t believe in demons and thought this was all for show. She had no way of comprehending what was going to happen to her when she crossed that double line and probably thought it was just a silly design. She didn’t understand it was the boundary into another world. He wouldn’t have believed it either if so many years of experience hadn’t shown him how the worlds really worked.

A pang of sympathy stabbed up from his hip with the memory of the times he’d let demons come into him, the mind-shattering pain of it and the violation of the last bastion of self. If they weren’t going to take the time to train up another adept like Helen, they should have used someone older and less alive. It was a shame to destroy her.

The men waited for her to move, but Ana hadn’t decided whether it would be better to run for it or bluff. She stood up and paused at the lip of the first line. She could see the door now and one of the men between her and that exit was shuffling nervously from foot to foot.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked the driver, the one the shaking boy had called Drake.

“My demon lover is there to meet you,” he said. “And ride you out.”

Demon
,
he actually said the word “demon.”
And Drake had called the demon his lover. She wasn’t going to ponder the implications of that too graphically, but if he was well disposed toward this demon lover then perhaps if they believed she was possessed they’d give her enough space to get out the door without being tackled by multiple men.

Ana wasn’t the best actress under normal circumstances, but with her life on the line, she surely could pretend. It was telling that although they clearly thought they had called some demon, none of them were willing to get into the circle and face the fact that they had failed.

Ana pictured herself stomping around the room, ranting and shouting commands, and felt the first lift of hope in hours. If it didn’t work, she couldn’t possibly be any worse off. She intended to walk slowly to the center of the empty circle, stand for a few moments and then shake like the other man, maybe scream a little, and then fake a demonic voice.