The Devil Dances (20 page)

Vivian was already there in our room, waiting for me. She was fully dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Viv. I’ve brought company,” I said. I thought how this was just the thing to finish off the night. She and I and Isaac. I thought about how much fun the three of us could have, bundled together in bed, kissing and licking, how much we needed this after the past few days, a return to normalcy.

But Vivian stood up, looking worried. “We were supposed to huddle, just the two of us. Nick, you’re doing it all wrong!”

Her outburst surprised me. I decided she was taking this bed courtship thing a little too seriously. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Vivian, there isn’t a damned thing we haven’t done together already. What about David and Sean? And Kara? We’ve had fivesomes, for Chrissakes.”

Isaac tensed up between us. “Maybe I should leave.”

“Don’t,” I told him, keeping my hand on his arm. “I want to be with you. My girlfriend would want to be with you, too, if she was in her right fucking mind. If she wasn’t under
their
influence.”

“I like them!” Vivian shouted, her fists clenching up. Her face contorted into a mask of misery and wild rage. “I like being here, and I like these people!” She gestured wildly toward the window, toward Zion. “Do you have
any
idea what it’s like to live with the things I’ve done? The things that were done to me? Or are you so wrapped up in your own world you can’t see that? Here, at least, that doesn’t matter to anyone… no one judges me… no one thinks I’m evil or a freak!” She had started to cry.

I hated seeing her cry. I hated more the idea that I might have caused it. “Vivian…”

She jerked away, raising both hands. “Don’t fucking touch me, Nick! Just get away from me!”

Shit. I felt the charge in the air just before she attacked me.

She was incredibly strong. How had I underestimated her? She was my fucking sister.
His
daughter. Of course she was strong, and tonight her power was propelled by fear and idiot rage. Too late, I realized Morgana was right: Vivian was something of an idiot savant, a loaded weapon with no safety on it. Her power equaled my own. Christ, when she was only a teen, she had set her boyfriend on fire. He had burned with the intensity of a fucking cremation oven. Soon, she would be able to squash me like a bug.

Her psychic blow knocked me straight to the floor like someone had shot me in the gut with a big caliber gun. My head hit the edge of the bed frame and I saw literal stars for a moment. Isaac gasped and backed away. I shook my head and realized in a hazy, strangely detached way that my arms were on fire.

“Fuck!” I stood up and turned and Isaac threw the water from the pitcher onto me. The flames sizzled out.

They’d chewed away the coat the nice Amish people had lent me, but the shirt, and more importantly, my arms, were intact—which was good. I’d seen people on fire, I’d smelled burning human flesh, like sizzling morning bacon. I didn’t relish experiencing it firsthand. I turned to face my girlfriend, to bark something into her face, but the look there—the bare, white-faced shock—stopped me.

Her mouth moved but no words came out at first. She held up both hands, then stared at them as if she wielded the touch of death. “Don’t touch me!” she screeched and raced for the door. “Just don’t fucking touch me!”

I thought about pursuing her, but I was afraid of what else she might do to me. Instead, I sat down on the edge of the bed in my burned coat and hung my head. “Sorry, Isaac. Looks like I’ll have to take a rain check on that second round.”

carried the gas can and my bag of goodies—purchased at a five and dime one town over—through Mulberry Grove.
I figured I must be losing it, because I realized I was talking to myself.

“First, all those girls. Sarah. Then Elsie Knapp. I put up with that. Granted, I shouldn’t have. I should have been more proactive, but I wasn’t. I thought, ‘Wait and see. Know your enemy.’ All that Kung Fu happy crappy. But then you went after Vivian. You went after my woman, and
that
I won’t tolerate. You don’t get me, do you? I’m not really Kung Fu. I’m not Kwai Chang Caine. I don’t fight with right and might. I fight dirty. I’m a nasty bastard from off the streets of New York, and now you’re going to find that out.”

I stopped a good distance from the clearing with the altar in the center of the lush, green, flowering, fairytale vale. I set the gas can down and reached into my brown paper bag and pulled out the big, plastic water gun that was supposed to be modeled on the Lone Ranger’s six-shooter. I loaded it from the gas can and moved down the vale, getting as close to the altar as I could, the plastic six-shooter in my hand.

“When I was a kid, I used to watch
The Lone Ranger
. I wanted to be Ranger Reid so much that I even remember his creed: ‘I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one. That all men are created equal, and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world. That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.’ Let’s stop there, because I really fucking like that one.”

I aimed for the altar and squirted the high octane fuel all over it. When the six-shooter was empty, I threw it at the altar and lit a cigarette. “You want to know something… whatever you are? Something about me? When I was a kid, I used to read a lot of comics. I watched all the TV shows. Hell, I wanted to be a superhero.

“Then one day I grew up, and I learned I wasn’t the Lone Ranger. I’m not Spider-Man or Captain-Fucking-Marvel. I’m not a good man, and I never will be. My name is Nicholas Englebrecht, and I’m the heir to Hell. I’m the Angel-breaker. I’m the goddamn son of the fucking Devil, and now you’ve pissed me off, which is bad for you.
Sayonara
, motherfucker.”

I threw my lit cigarette at the altar.

And all hell broke loose.

The altar screamed.

I thought how there was nothing like a cleansing fire to fuck shit up even as I listened to the fingers-on-blackboard-intense roar of agony tearing into my head and soul. It was coming from the blood-splattered stone, the woods… everywhere.

Within seconds, the owner of the altar began to shimmer and materialize in the midst of the crackling, snapping flames consuming the altar. It was a huge, hulking, bullish creature, clearly manlike, but not a man by any stretch of the imagination. I thought the god must be eight feet tall, muscular, with a face no mother could love. His little yellow eyes were loveless and crazed with pain. He was covered in wooly, bison-like hair, and he was long-legged and cloven-hooved, with enormous, elk-like antlers protruding from his head. His equipment made me wince when I thought about what had been done to those poor children…

It pointed at me with one clawed hand and bared its impossibly sharp canines.
“You…”

“Yeah,” I told it as my rage mounted moment by moment. “Fuck you, too.”

“Angel-breaker… I’ll break your spine like kindling.” Its rumbling voice made the ground under my feet tremble. The sound echoed like summer thunder through the trees, making them sway. “I’ll tear your balls off. I’ll rip your soul to shreds…!”

“Bite my ass,” I taunted it. “I’m not afraid of you, princess.”

“Little Prince… little man. Run home to your father with your tail between your legs before it’s too late.”

I kicked some rocks at it. “You’re good at threats. You’re good at preying on women. Try picking on someone who can handle you, you worthless little limp dick of a shit.”

In retrospect, I probably could have picked my taunts a little better. Obviously, the Horned God was very sensitive about his equipment. I suddenly remembered my foster father—or, come to think of it, maybe
he
was doing that to me—and I remembered one of my foster sisters, Sheila, hiding in her bedroom, crying. I was fourteen at the time, and she’d been bleeding all morning and I knew damn well why. I knew why she’d stayed home from school, why she wouldn’t let anyone into her room. I’d found my favorite stickball bat and waited until my foster father came home from the garage where he worked. When he walked in the door, I’d played knick-knack-paddy-whack on his left knee. I’d lost my courage after that, ran away and never went home again, but I never regretted doing it. I only regretted not taking out his right knee, as well.

“Don’t play games with me,” I told the beast as he stomped free of the flames consuming his altar. “And don’t try to fucking crawl inside my head, fucker. You won’t like it in there.”

It eyed me savagely, kicked at the dirt and small rocks in his way, then bellowed like a train and charged me. I never saw it coming—he was that fast. In less than the blink of an eye, he was lunging toward me. His antlers missed me—they were spaced a little too far apart—but his thick skull connected with me and the two of us went hurling backward into the nearest tree.

I felt the impact of the big elm trunk against my back like a hammer blow. It literally knocked the breath from me, leaving me wheezing and gasping. The antlers of the Horned God had sunk inches deep into the bark, so now the massive creature loomed over me, with me trapped against the tree. The stench it gave off—like musk and urine—was enough to make me want to heave.

“How dare you!” it roared in my face, flaying me with stench and saliva. “You dare approach me, a pathetic ragman? Whelp of the Devil, pretender to your father’s throne! I’ll take your female and bend her over my throne! Her body will birth my nation…!”

I couldn’t breathe, but my anger surged—as well as something else, something alive and separate from the rest of me. I breathed out my magick in a silent, rage-inspired scream.

There was a blinding explosion of fire and a heat so intense I felt it wilt the lovely forest foliage for half a mile around us as the shockwave blasted over us both. For one second I knew I was on fire—my hair, my clothes—a cleansing fire, a hellfire, yet I didn’t burn. I wanted
it
to burn. I wanted
it
to burn for eternity for the very thought it had of taking Vivian from me…

My fire blew it a hundred yards back, right against its burning, throne-like altar. The altar crumbled and it smashed down with a bellow into the flames, writhed around, and finally turned to glare at me with pure hatred spitting from its eyes. “Damn you, Lucifer…” it snarled as it began to dissipate in the inferno. The flames licked higher, almost as high as the treetops, but the beast was nowhere to be seen.