The Demon Abraxas (30 page)

“Quite a night, huh?” Lily asked.

“I can’t believe Johnson…okay, I can, but damn we were so close. I wonder if there’s anything else we can do to nail him. He was such a smug bastard with his little folder of evidence. I bet he’s had that prepared for months. Sabel said he called her yesterday afternoon and he wants her to help him with something today.”

Lily shook her head but didn’t say anything.

“She’ll be okay, won’t she?”

“The Hecatines are subtle but powerful when they want to be,” Lily said.

Just thinking about Sabel rekindled an ache of longing in Ana’s gut. She wanted to tell Lily about the energy leash and the whole situation and how infuriating it was, but she didn’t want to give her any more reason to dislike the witches. Still, she couldn’t help but remember kissing Sabel and wishing they had had more time together.

Abraxas shifted low in her body and she felt a hot echo of her own desire. He wanted Lily the way she wanted Sabel…well, maybe not exactly the same, but it was in the ballpark. His desire burned fierce and clean while Ana’s felt deep and smoldering and complex.

You’re thinking at least one of us should be able to get lucky?
she asked him silently.

Not in so many words
, he said with more than a touch of humor.
It would settle both of us.

How does this work? Do you just take over my body?

In answer he pushed lightly on the back of her skull and she relaxed back against the couch and let him pour through her nerves like hot wind.

Lily looked up from taking a sip of tea and her eyes widened. “Abraxas?” she asked.

“Yes.” The voice that passed Ana’s lips wasn’t quite hers. It held notes of her voice but also a whispered resonance of a deeper tone.

“Is she still conscious in there?” Lily asked.

“She is.”

“Go look in the mirror and show her what you did.”

The feeling of her body standing up without her conscious will was dizzying and she couldn’t focus on their movement across the room, but when they stopped in front of a mirror she saw what Lily meant. The irises of her eyes were no longer brown but rather a golden fire like the sun, and the copper and gold colors in her hair shimmered and glowed. She looked like an artist’s depiction of some ancient sun goddess.

Nice
, she told Abraxas.

I thought it would be important to distinguish between us
, he said.

No kidding.

He moved them back to the couch and sat next to Lily who smiled and traced their face with her fingers.

“Lucky for you I’m not picky with my genders,” she said. “Though you’d do so much better in a man’s body, it’s almost a shame. Now, where to begin?”

“Perhaps,” Abraxas said softly, “you should stop talking.”

Lily laughed. “I’m nervous,” she said. “You’re a little out of my league.”

He touched a finger to her lips. Lily leaned forward and kissed him…except to Ana it felt like Lily had leaned forward to kiss her. Now that she wasn’t startled, as in the kitchen the other day, Lily seemed to know everything about kissing. Her lips were firm and soft, and when she opened them, Ana felt a tongue that was rough as a cat’s. A hot thrill ran from her chest down to her feet and was met by a pang of loss that this wasn’t Sabel. She wanted Sabel so badly now that it was a physical pain, but that only reminded her of the leash and the real pain she inflicted on Sabel.

Do you want me to shut you out of your senses?
Abraxas asked.

Would that just put me to sleep?

Yes, or I can send you out of your body for a walk.

Can I try that?

In the next instant she was standing by the near wall of the room watching herself and Lily tangle together on the couch. She had to pause for a moment and stare at herself. Ruben was right, she looked fine with a few extra pounds on, softer around the edges and more filled out. That shirt was the wrong shade of peach, it made her hair look pale gold rather than ruddy; she’d have to remember to toss it into the Goodwill pile when she got home.

Is that how she really looked kissing someone? She could imagine that same scene with Sabel in Lily’s place and picture their dark and light hair tangling together. When Lily’s fingers started to pull her blouse out of her pants, Ana turned and fell through the wall and down. She landed on the sidewalk outside of the store, though there was no impact and she had the sensation that what stopped her was the idea of the sidewalk, rather than any actual surface.

She went along the street floating. Something connected her to her body, like a rubber band that tugged harder the further away she got. It was the same kind of connection that jerked her through the window of Lily’s store when Sabel cast Abraxas out of her. But it was thinner and longer so that she could go a lot further from her body than Abraxas could.

Without her body she could travel much more quickly than walking. If she looked at the far corner of the street and thought about being there, she crossed the intervening space in an instant to be at that corner. She practiced going a block at a time and then a couple of blocks.

People couldn’t see her, but she could sense that there were other disembodied creatures in this city and took care to avoid them as best she could. First, she wished she could go look in on Sabel during her meeting with Johnson and make sure that she was okay, but she didn’t know where they were or even what time the meeting was. It might not have started yet. Of course if that was the case, then maybe she could go peek in on Sabel showering or something like that. No, it would upset her to have someone look in on her like that, she wasn’t going to do it to Sabel.

Then she stopped and smacked her forehead with one insubstantial hand. If she could move through walls and travel unseen, why not return to the house where she’d been taken when she was first kidnapped and look for evidence of Helen’s death? She couldn’t find the house when navigating by eyes and memory, but without her body the whole world felt different—a map of ideas and feelings. Why hadn’t Abraxas suggested this sooner? Maybe he didn’t know what it was like to be a human outside a body. If she found the address and the evidence, she could call the police and send them in with a search warrant to get it.

Orienting herself with the sun, as she had never been able to when camping, she leapt across the intervening streets in the direction Drake had driven when he kidnapped her. Soon she could pick up the traces of her own remembered fear, which she followed to the gazebo where she’d hidden. Then she ran backward along the route she’d taken when she first fled that house. In her body, she would have been lost, but all she had to do was orient toward the sensation of terror and she knew she had the right path.

To her eyes all these houses had looked so alike, but now one stood out vibrant with her fear as if it had been this morning that she was kidnapped. She slipped in through the back wall and found herself standing in an expansive, spotless kitchen with glass cupboards and gleaming metal sinks. Moving into the dining room, she spotted a man at his table. He looked up and she froze. It was Charles Johnson. Could he see her? His eyes danced over the wall behind her but found nothing to focus on, even if he could sense a shift in the room.

Ana wasn’t sure how much time had passed while she was moving around the city without her body, but probably less than she thought if he hadn’t left for his meeting with Sabel yet. Strange that he would be at home and not at work, but he’d likely been up most of the night with Detlefsen, covering his ass. In fact, that shirt was the same one he’d been wearing the day before. He must have stayed at Roth all night and just come home recently. He was finishing a microwaved meal, reading a cooking magazine. She watched as he took the empty tray into the kitchen and put away the magazine neatly in its rack.

Ana smiled to herself and slid out of the room. She went up the stairs. Here at the end of the hallway was the bathroom. Across the hall a door stood open to a huge, fantastic study with a desk that curved around three quarters of the room and held two flat-screen computer monitors, plus a flat-screen television bolted to the wall. The other half of the upstairs held two ornate bedrooms, both with richly appointed king-sized beds. She went back and forth trying to decide which was his.

She decided that he slept in the less gothic of the two rooms. The other had a mission oak dresser that stood empty. This one held a couple of locked chests, a dresser and a walk-in closet filled with business attire. The bed had six pillows, two of them the funny-shaped pillows that chiropractors recommend for neck comfort. If Ana hadn’t seen the iron muscles in his arms, she’d have thought Johnson was a real softy. As she smiled at the bed, he ascended the stairs and entered that room.

Unable to resist, Ana watched him strip out of his shirt and slacks. He was a handsome man, standing in nothing but his crisp, white boxer briefs that showed the tan of his skin, tall and lean, but with enough muscle to look strong. If he hadn’t been evil, he might have been cute. With the strange out-of-body vision, she could see shadows of his innards, the muscle glowing, and she realized that this body of his had outside help in its formation. Did her body look like that now that Abraxas lived in it and strengthened it?

Looking deeper, she saw the traces of struggle on his bones from a childhood of cancer, the places in him that had been damaged. He had built over these places with a framework so strong that no disease could ever get in or out again. That’s what he got from his demons, not just the money to buy his fancy toys and nice clothes. He wanted physical power and the security of knowing he couldn’t be hurt ever again.

Ana’s hand went to her jaw, though she couldn’t actually touch anything. That motivation of his she understood. She’d made a few bad bargains in her own life to get away from physical pain and know she wouldn’t ever be beaten again. She’d even slept with a man she had no interest in when she knew he could help her get out of the crushing poverty she’d been born into. But, unlike Johnson, she would never go so far as to kill anyone. Was it so much better to have been willing to sacrifice herself rather than someone else?

He walked into the bathroom. Whatever evidence he might have had from Helen’s murder, he wasn’t going to keep it in a box in the bedroom, lock or no. She passed back down the stairs and through the kitchen into the basement. In California, the land of no basements, it was a very strange addition to a house. They’d put a concrete foundation under the house, as was usual here, but they’d left a hole in the foundation through which descended a flight of stairs.

It was well disguised and Ana found it only in reverse. She didn’t relish the thought of finding herself head-deep in dirt, but probably better to try this without a body than with one. Kneeling as best she could without knees, she stuck her head through the floor. Boards and wiring passed over her and then she was pushing through the concrete and finally looking, upside down, into a large room. She dropped through the floor into the chamber below.

Spotting the staircase she followed it up to a trapdoor. It was set into the bottom of a closet in the back of the house so that no one would find it if they didn’t know what to look for. No one in this city would expect that this house carried a basement underneath its slab. The design was insane, but effective.

Now that she knew how to get in, she walked around the room. It had been laid entirely in concrete, like a bomb shelter, but then covered with drywall and painted black. The dimensions of the room were the same as the house, which made it huge. Halfway around she found the black wood chests that held extra robes, various ritual implements that she didn’t care to know the purpose of, and the evidence of Helen’s murder. The sheet was in there, more like a canvas tarp now that she looked closely at it, about thirty feet to a side and painted with lines of blood. Disgusting.

If the blood was Helen’s, it must have come from her days or weeks before her death, since the police didn’t find any fresh wounds on her. But even if it wasn’t here, Ana knew this was the cloth on which Helen died and it had to have trace elements from her: hair or saliva or tears. Time to call the police.

She wanted to look in on Johnson one more time before she left, to see what he was doing. Eager as she was to call the police, she could spare a few more minutes to let Abraxas and Lily have their time together. Johnson had no idea she’d been in his house, so he wasn’t likely to move the evidence when it had already been in his hidden basement for two weeks.

She found him upstairs, coming out of the shower. Ana couldn’t help it, she watched. Shouldn’t she know the full measure of her enemy? Really, she thought, she just wanted to have this over him, not that it would ever be of any use, but it would make her feel more powerful to know that she’d peered on him in the most bare circumstances. She watched him shave, put on deodorant and select a pair of khakis and a silk shirt. He had just finished dressing when the doorbell rang. She followed him, wondering if it would be Sabel at the door.

The door swung open. Drake stepped past Johnson into the house. His dense presence commanded the front hallway and next to him Johnson looked plain. He turned his head, sniffing like a dog, and fixed his eyes on her.

“Ana!” he said. “What a surprise.”

His eyes were two holes of darkness. She snapped back like a kite in a strong wind. Faster than thought, she followed the trail back to her body.

Ana jerked back into her body and was overwhelmed with sensory data: lungs breathing, heart pulsing blood through her veins, bare skin warm on hers. She fought like a fish on a line, trying to move away but unable, prevented by Abraxas’s control of her and the floor against her back. Above her, Lily’s eyes opened wide and her fingers touched Ana’s lips tentatively.

“Stop,” Abraxas said with her mouth.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked.