The Demon Abraxas (4 page)

Ana crossed the line of the circle and a cool breath raised the hair on her arms.
Don’t psych yourself out
, she told herself firmly. Did some part of her want to believe this could work? Not that she would be possessed by a demon, but finally proof that this other, unseen world she’d suspected and pleaded to for so long was at last unfailingly real? A little dizziness rose up in her, making that next step toward the center of the circle a staggering affair. She went down on her knees. Was she losing consciousness again? Maybe when Drake knocked her out her head had hit the floor; this in and out wakefulness made it so hard to think of escape. She just wanted to lie down and sleep for days. Was that the sign of a concussion?

She was on hands and knees with only a small square of the off-white cloth visible to her, feeling dizzy and nauseous, when someone turned out the lights.

“Damn it!” she yelled and then clapped a hand over her mouth. She was supposed to pretend she was possessed, not swear at them. Or is that what demons did? She needed time. Could they still see her with the lights off? She let herself slump down, falling slowly onto her left side, going limp.

She hadn’t actually seen
The Exorcist
, but Ruben had dragged her to see
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
and judging by that movie she should writhe for a while, speak in a deep voice, and maybe bang her head against a wall. That last part wasn’t going to happen with this possible concussion. Which way had the door been, was it the corner in the direction of her out-flung right hand?

She threw her arms out to the sides and snaked on the floor and then started crawling on her belly in that direction. When someone tried to stop her, she decided, she’d let loose with the demonic voice. The room was so silent now it should have a good impact. But she couldn’t even hear the men breathing; that wasn’t right. She should hear someone shifting at least or a quiet cough, and now she’d crawled a good ten feet without running into a single person’s legs. Either they’d all cleared out of the room after they shut off the lights or the much more likely answer was she was no longer conscious and had actually passed out when she dropped down to fake it.

Ana rolled over and sat up. It was still the kind of profound dark that only happens in interior rooms, where the sole movement came from flecks of color swimming in her own eyes. She filled her lungs and let out the deepest bellow she had in her. “I am here!” she roared.

The sound sank to the ground and no one answered.

“Oh great, I’m not even conscious,” she said, relieved to be hearing her own voice, even if it was in a dream stage of injury.

The words felt so small after they fell away. This wasn’t a room she was in, but a vast, empty place, or perhaps a non-place. Then came a sickening lurch in her gut and the cold fear that she hadn’t passed out from her injuries. If possession were real, is this how it would feel? Could some entity be walking around in her body even now?

“Help me,” she yelled upward into the dark. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” It became a sobbing chant and she rocked, arms holding knees. The words didn’t even make sense to her—shouldn’t she plead for freedom? But the animal part of her convulsed in terror that this could be its end.

Far above, a small light became visible, like a star in the void, growing larger. As she watched, it flared to the size of the sun, similarly blinding and yet still observable without pain, and her fear vanished because she knew for certain now she was only dreaming. The sun fell from the sky, down at her like a comet and dropped in a massive lump only feet from her, its blaze illuminating a vast space of nothingness where she sat. The fire separated into a thousand flaming serpents writhing over, under, around each other. She crawled away from it but then turned to look.

The serpents were joining together, twining in long strands to make the shape of a huge body. She put her hands over her face. The afterimage of the blazing, shifting body remained on her darkened sight: a slender man about twelve feet tall standing on a base of snakes.

“I want to wake up,” she whispered, but it didn’t work. The fear that she could never get back to her body edged into her lungs, crushing them tight.

A voice spoke, saying words that were hopelessly foreign in a tone so near the middle of the spectrum that she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, until she took her hands away from her eyes and saw a luminous man on his knees in front of her. He was smaller now, about her height, and only a few blazing snakes remained in place of his feet. He looked to be about her age with copper skin and a cleanly shaven skull. His honey-brown eyes squinted at her, puzzled.

He spoke again but she shook her head, “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

His expression was tight-lipped. He shook his head too, the mirror image of her gesture.

“Are you stuck here too?” she asked. “Are we someplace? Are you that snakey thing and you’re just trying to look pretty for me?”

He shook his head again and held his hands open to her, palms up. His fingers had no knuckles. Yes, he was the snake thing; whether he meant her to understand that from his gesture or not, she didn’t know. He was the only light here, glowing golden like the dawn. Ana reached out her right hand and touched his left, tracing the lines of his fingers with hers.

His right hand came forward slowly and paused a foot from her eyes, fingers forward. Pointing with his whole hand, perhaps?

She tapped her chest. “Ana,” she said.

He bobbed his head and shoulders forward in a bow that was a nod and spoke a string of sounds that made so little sense to her that they were gone from her mind as soon as he finished.

“I can’t call you that,” she told him.

Puzzled look. He shook his head. Then he raised his hand pointing to her again and then tapped his chest as she had hers. Lastly, he brought his hands together, palms cupped as if he held something and flung them up and open like a man releasing a bird to fly. Escape!

Ana nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes,” he repeated in his liquid voice with a smile. He reached for her very slowly, his eyes staying on hers, watching. She gave him no sign of refusal. Either it was a dream and she was in no danger or it wasn’t a dream and this seemed the only way out. She really wanted it to be a dream. His hands closed on the sides of her face. He looked worried as he came toward her and that was the real reason she let him put his lips on hers. His face held no cruelty.

It must be a dream if this strange and beautiful man was going to kiss her here in the middle of a plane of nothingness under a fallen sun—and if she was going to let him. She relaxed. Everything was going to be all right when she woke up. His tongue touched her lips gently and she opened her mouth to him. First his tongue touched hers and then withdrew. Then he breathed into her, a warm sweet breath, and on the tail of that more heat burned her lips. It went on and on, searing pain and bright pleasure, and she knew that what passed through her lips was one of those flaming serpents.

She couldn’t scream as it slid into her throat and then he rushed into her like a forest fire, tongues of heat and pain searing narrow channels under her skin. The air forced out of her lungs, the last breath sucked from her mouth. Pressure crushed her from all sides. She screamed in her mind for release as molten lava ran down her veins to her heart. Then she dropped into her body from a vast distance, like a stone statue toppling from a cliff, and her wakefulness shattered when it hit the ground.

* * *

Oh the joy of nonbelievers, that this woman would saunter so easily into his circle, Drake thought. She crossed the line like a girl going into a strange store, and once across it dropped to her knees and then fell motionless. That was all his human eyes saw, but with his greater power he knew she’d gone through the door. He hummed with anticipation, vibrating like a hummingbird’s wing. How long would it take in this world for his consort to find her in that world and take her?

The men were restless, except for Jacob who stood unmoving as ever, blazing inside but cold as stone in appearance. Yes, Drake wanted to bring that one the money and influence he craved, even shore up his doomed control over his world. And maybe one day he would loosen up a bit and let Drake inside him to consume some of that bright fire of rage. He could almost feel it on his lips now, inside his mouth. But first, he needed his other half, the fuel to his blaze.

In the center circle, Ana’s body jerked like a puppet. She rolled onto her back and her hands flopped independently like two fish. Then they settled and pulled in toward the body, feeling up and down the torso, touching her face. Drake hoped his consort was pleased with her new home. He wanted to rush forward and crush her in his arms, but he had to let her break the circle to know she had full power to come into this world. Ana’s body sat, eyes still closed, and rocked forward into a crouch. She stood unsteadily and walked to the edge of the circle as if it were a wall.

She bent down, legs wide and ungainly in her dress, and touched her fingers to the inside of the line like a blind man feeling gently forward. Then her hand pushed through, swept right and broke the binding. She was free! He crossed the room to her. She stood and opened her eyes to him.

Fire bright gold, burning like the sun! Her whole body was lit with it. This was wrong. Where was his consort? Some other creature had displaced her, taken her vessel as its own. Drake would take this burning power and consume it to add to his own.

“Grab her!” he shouted. Half the men would not move from their circles but the others did. He began the words of a binding against the creature in the woman’s body.

The first man reached her at a run and she turned without having first looked and struck him in the chest with both palms. He was thrown back off his feet and knocked down a second pursuer. The other men hesitated and the creature in Ana’s body sprinted for the stairs.

Drake finished the binding and threw it as an invisible net. It fell where he intended but as it hit the body it evaporated. The creature was not possessing her. She’d let him in willingly. He owned her body now. Dammit! What power she’d given away in her ignorance.

She was on the stairs and the man who reached her and grabbed her arm received a quick blow from her elbow that stunned him. He tumbled down the few stairs he’d climbed while she continued up to the door. Drake dodged him and pelted up the stairs after her.

On the landing, she threw the bolt back and pulled the door open, but the action bought him time. He caught up to her in the doorway and closed one hand around her upper arm, the other raised to ward off any blow. She didn’t strike him. He turned her, closing his hand over her other arm so that he held her immobile.

Her eyes were golden. “Shaidan,” she whispered and then a series of words so old he couldn’t at first remember their meaning.

A flash of light came from her, bright and stinging. Then her hands struck the inside of his wrists and broke his grip while he was blinded. When he could see again, she was across the yard and sprinting faster than a human body should. He might catch her on foot, but the humans would not. In cars, they could get ahead of her. He bounded down the stairs.

“We have to catch her,” Drake said. “Put on your street clothes and pair up. Two pairs on foot as spotters, four in cars. Go.”

“You didn’t tell me she was going to run,” Jacob said.

“
She
wasn’t,” Drake said. “That is not my consort.”

“Who—?”

“Power, Jacob, great power if we can bind it. Come, you and I will take my car.”

* * *

This time when she came back into the world, Ana’s body wasn’t tied up or immobilized. She was already running. That sensation felt familiar enough. She knew how to run and get away from men. It was possible for her body to do that on autopilot. She didn’t remember how she’d made it out of the cellar, but she could worry about that later. The night air was cold on her skin and the pavement abrasive against her bare feet.

At first she thought her vision was blurred but the edges of the houses and trees weren’t fuzzy—they glowed. In the night the trees should have been gray but they were bright green as if the sun shone through each leaf. The houses had colors that didn’t match their exteriors, some of them different from room to room. They looked like stained glass windows of themselves.

She’d have to ask for an MRI or CT scan at the hospital, or whatever they used to check for brain damage. For now she had to hide herself better. She was running down the middle of the street and any moment they’d be coming in cars to find her. She tried to turn but her body wasn’t responding to her. In her periphery she watched the houses flying by. How fast was she running? She had to turn off the street and get behind those houses.

Her feet turned and sprinted between two houses and then took a sharp left so she ran behind them. They came to a privacy fence and her hands grabbed and catapulted herself over it. She could never have done that before. Adrenaline? Or was there something else inside her now pushing her on? The thought should have caused her fear, but she didn’t get cold or feel tingly. She really wasn’t in charge of her body.

Later
, she told herself,
I can panic all I want.

She ran across more yards, setting off some automatic security lights. That couldn’t be good.

Her sight wasn’t the only sense that had changed. She smelled each plant in the neighborhood separately, like notes in a symphony. And she had an extra sense that told her where everything was around her. She didn’t need to see the houses to know where they were or to see a fence that was coming three yards away to know how high it was. She felt the men who were chasing her before she heard or smelled them. There were two falling further and further behind, but they must have called others because she heard a car come up the road and slow when she triggered another security light.

We need to hide
, she thought loudly, hoping whatever controlled her body could hear and obey. She accompanied the words with mental images of crouching under shrubs or in a small building if they could find one, like a shed.