The Demon Abraxas (5 page)

The senses of her surroundings expanded, rolling out on all sides like a hologram. There was the bay and the docks on one side and the park on the other. Neither of those were good directions. She needed to shake her pursuers and then find someone who could call the police, not get pinned down in an underpopulated area where the summoners would have time to look for her. She wished herself to go northwest, deeper into the residential streets and her feet obliged, turning them that way.

She wanted to run up to one of the houses and pound on the door, ask the inhabitants to call the police, but she couldn’t be sure the house she chose would be occupied and during the time she was standing on the porch making a racket, the black hood gang could find her. Even if she got into the house, she couldn’t be sure that the lights and commotion wouldn’t draw enough of them that they’d just push in and grab her again. The yards here were large and beautifully kept with enough trees to look lush but not enough to hide her. She spotted a gazebo.

As soon as she thought how good it would be to hide there, her body wheeled and sprinted newly with no hint of fatigue. The door slipped open with a metallic whisper. Inside was a large hot tub and on the far side a wooden bench with a few towels set out on it. Ana crawled under the bench as a car drove slowly down the street in front of the house.

The luminescent sight and extra sense were gone. Wind rushed by her ears and the inside of her skin itched as if filaments were being drawn across it. It wasn’t a painful feeling, just intensely discomforting. She shivered uncontrollably and her legs burned. A hundred small hurts made themselves known: her lungs and throat ached, the bottoms of her feet had been scraped by the asphalt, and her eyes burned. She blinked and brought her fingers up where she could watch while she wiggled them.

She was alive, she reminded herself, and there were a dozen crazy men out there looking to catch and kill her. She had to assume they were still combing the neighborhood on foot and in cars; she’d seen Drake’s face, so clearly she could identify him and he hadn’t planned for her to survive the night. From her occasional morning jogs, she could estimate that she’d run about two miles but not all in a straight line because she had to avoid the men, so she was at most just over a mile from where they’d had her.

When Ana could bear to move again, she rolled to her right and used her arms to push herself up to sitting. The muscles in her legs felt like oil set on fire, liquid and burning. Sitting and leaning back against the wall she saw that the soles of her feet were bleeding, not as badly as she’d have thought from the pain, but oozing blood and plasma onto the wooden floor. Her pantyhose were trashed and the sight of the frayed ends around her ankles made her chuckle. That turned into a laugh and then she couldn’t stop crying.

She let her arms stay at her sides, lowered her head and wept in hacking but nearly silent, dry sobs. A few tears made it to the lower lids of her eyes but there wasn’t enough moisture in her to let them fall. It hurt to cry, it all hurt, and she wanted to use that hurt to fuel her anger. She pulled the emotions in, breathed deep and held that breath until it ached, then rubbed one dirty hand across her face to scatter the half-shed tears.

If she waited until morning, would she be safer? She tried to think it through but she couldn’t. The fear and pain took over and insisted she get help now. She inched herself to the door of the gazebo and pushed it open far enough to see out. A large backyard stretched up to a broad two-story house with the gazebo off to one side, thankfully at the bottom of the lawn. She was about twenty feet from the house and the enclosure was edged with gravel. Ana didn’t think she could hit the house from where she was, but the strength in her arms surprised her. The first few fell short, but then she hit the back windows squarely.

The clatter of the stones sounded impossibly loud in the night. What would it take to wake the homeowner? After a few minutes when no lights went on, she decided she needed to move in case the summoners heard her. She crawled out of the gazebo and moved from one clump of shrubs to another. Where was she?

Another car crunched slowly down the road and turned a corner. In the distance, she heard it turn again. It was circling the block. She had to keep moving before all the men closed in on this area. She ran from cover and crossed an expanse of lawn heading for the street where the car was most recently—wanting to cross behind its path and get back under cover before it returned.

Her feet stung on the cool street surface and she was across and looking for a new hiding place.

“There,” a man called softly.

Two of them stood down along the street, one pointing in her direction. She bolted, but one was already closing the gap between them. He tackled her but his grip was loose. She rolled as she went down. He was trying to move up her body and get a better grip on her.

His face looked pale and soft in the yellow streetlight glow. This wasn’t a man used to fighting. Ana drove her elbow into the side of his head and he dropped—onto her legs. She struggled to pull free, but the other man was standing over her now, pointing a boxy, black stun gun at her.

He fired it.

A million points of pain exploded under her skin. Her body jerked hard as every muscle spasmed. A fog covered her vision. Under the pain and the dizziness, under the thick refusal of her muscles to move, she felt that other presence moving in her body. It whispered along the paths of her nerves and set them right again.

The man with the stun gun was standing a few feet away. He had his cell phone out and lifted it to his ear. Ana knew she had to get the unconscious body off her legs and incapacitate this guy, but her muscles wouldn’t do anything she wanted. The presence had cleared her mind, but it was still working to right her body. She looked around desperately for anything she could use but even if she found a weapon, she wouldn’t be able to lift it.

* * *

The hair bound around Sabel’s fingers tugged and she turned right and then quickly left into an alley. After being dormant for hours, it was active again and directing her toward Ana. She’d entered this neighborhood and driven in fits and starts, trying to figure out where Ana was going. Ana had paused for a few minutes and that nearly allowed Sabel to find her, but then she started moving again.

She had a window cracked so she could scent the air as she drove. Power lay heavy around these houses and once she caught a flash of something acrid and hateful. When the witches asked her to watch Helen, they gave her everything they had on the woman. Helen had studied with the Hecatine witches but left after just a year. She didn’t fit their slow, measured discipline. She’d wanted more power at a faster rate of speed.

The Hecatines usually checked in on former pupils, and in the last year they’d seen Helen’s fate entwined with dangerous powers.     

“Let’s hope it’s just hedge magicians,” her mentor, Josefene, told her.

“What if it’s demons?”

“Your role is to report to us,” Josefene said. “You may not become involved if there are demons in this. You’re too valuable.”

Well what was “involved” exactly? Sabel was going to be in trouble when she reported in about tonight’s activities, but she couldn’t leave Ana to whatever these people had planned—not after seeing Helen dead. The other Hecatines were cautious, sometimes to a fault, but Sabel agreed with their philosophy that the greater one’s power, the greater care one must take with it. She had been studying with them for just over a decade and what they’d taught her was beyond anything she imagined when she began her training. Whatever Helen sought, Sabel doubted it compared to the full power of the Hecatines.

Sitting in the alley, she let the car idle for a moment so she could give the neighborhood her full attention. The tug on her finger moved right and right again. Ana was running perpendicular to her. The night air smelled of eucalyptus, a banked barbecue fire, and fog, but it tasted like bitter power and the burning metal of raw need. And there, a half-block toward the direction Ana’s hair pulled, she heard two men speaking in short bursts and the slap of their shoes on the pavement.

She kept the lights off and drove silently down the alley. When she saw caught sight of people again, two bodies struggled against each other on the ground. Ana’s hair flashed golden in the porch lights. Sabel slid silently out of her car and ran crouched in her stocking feet along the inner edge of the lawns where the hedges gave her some measure of cover. She saw the standing man point at Ana’s prone body and heard the zap of a stun gun and an agonized half-sound from Ana’s spasming mouth.

The standing man had his back to the houses and was intent on the cell phone that he dialed with shaking fingers. This wasn’t a man accustomed to chasing women along dark streets at night. He was in a black robe over jeans. No luck on the hedge wizards, this looked like an amateur, but successful, demon summoner. That put at least one demon out here on the streets with them and probably more.

Focus. Sabel straightened up and drew in a long breath of air. The air went all the way to the bottom of her lungs and its power continued through her abdomen to connect everything from the bottom of her pelvic floor to her throat. She opened herself to the power and drew it up. She didn’t have to speak loudly to use the Voice, she only had to have breath pass her lips and have the listener hear what she said.

She stepped up to the man quickly and silently, stopping with her mouth about a foot from his ear, the one that didn’t have a cell phone to it. It was important that Ana not hear this word. The last thing she needed right now was to have to drag an unconscious Ana to safety.

“
Sleep
,” Sabel commanded him.

He dropped to the pavement. Her word had enough force in it that the fall didn’t wake him. He’d be out for at least an hour or two. She bent and grabbed the phone from his lax hand, hitting the red button to end the call and then throwing it as far into the street as she could.

Ana stared at her wide-eyed. At least she was awake; she hadn’t heard the command. One of her hands was jerking toward the other of the two men. This one lay across her legs. Sabel wanted to curse the stupid stun gun, but at least it hadn’t been a bullet that hit her. She braced herself next to the unconscious man.

In a nearly inaudible whisper, she commanded herself, “
Strengthen
.” If Ana heard that one, so much the better, though she hated to use the Voice on allies.

Her muscles seemed to firm and thicken, though she knew there was no visible change. She heaved the man and he moved easily off Ana. That revealed the ruin of Ana’s stockings and the bloody soles of her feet. How far had she run already tonight?

“Can you walk?” she asked Ana.

“Don’t know.” The words came out with minimal slurring and even Ana looked surprised.

Sabel had another minute of increased strength at best before her body burned off the magic’s augmentation. She grabbed Ana’s closest arm, her right, and put it around her shoulders. Then she slid her left arm behind Ana’s back and pulled her up to sitting. Ana’s right hand closed on her shoulder. She was getting muscle control back very quickly. From the length of the stun gun zap, an average person would have been immobile for twenty minutes. Sabel was prepared to drag her if she had to, but walking would be faster.

“Up we go,” she said softly and pushed up hard with the strength in her legs. Ana teetered but Sabel gave her a moment and then she nodded. She half-dragged Ana into the shadows of the nearest house. With each step, Ana seemed to gain significant control and soon she was moving at a fast walking pace.

Sabel’s car waited around the corner where she’d parked in a pool of darkness. Behind her, men shouted as they found the two unconscious bodies. As she pulled Ana around to the passenger side and helped her fold herself down into the seat, she tried to pick out the voices. Four men? Five? How big was this group?

Two men reached the end of the street and spotted them in the mouth of the alley. They yelled to their companions and started running toward the car. Sabel darted around the front of the car and jerked open the driver’s side door. She slid into the seat and slammed the door shut as her fingers hit the ignition button and the engine purred. A dark magic grasped toward them but the general protection magic she had on the car prevented it from sinking into the hoses or the tires and causing a catastrophic failure. The next attempt would be more specific and get through.

She gunned the car into the street. For the first few blocks she kept accelerating and turned as soon as she could, hoping that none of them had the presence of mind and ability to see her license plate and that the stronger magic couldn’t reach them. When she saw the signs for the highway, she started to relax.

“How many are there?” she asked Ana.

“Twelve,” Ana said in a flat voice. She stared out the windshield but her eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything. Sabel understood that feeling—she was having a version of it herself at the moment.
Twelve
! A full complement of summoners. How did Ana escape?

Sabel took in Ana’s condition in a series of quick glances as she drove. There was a bruise forming on her left shoulder under the thin silk strap of her dress where she’d hit something hard enough to make the skin purple up quickly. Her wrists had angry red lines on them where she’d strained against restraints. In addition to the bloody soles of her feet, a thick trail of blood was drying on the right side of her dress from some kind of head wound. She looked like she’d battered her way out of whatever captivity these men planned for her.

“I think you need a hospital,” Sabel told her, keeping her voice as gentle as possible. “Do you have a preference?”

Ana shook her head so Sabel turned off at the next exit where she knew they’d find a good hospital. They drove in silence for another minute and then when they’d stopped at a light, Ana turned to her.