The Devil Dances (25 page)

He stopped, his work mostly done, my right wing hanging by a literal thread. “
Wonnernaus
, English. What business is it of yours? You had no right coming here, prodding into Swartzcopf business.”

I shook my head as best I could. “You can’t call a god like that… without consequences.”

“The god does my bidding. I control the god!” Enraged, he ripped my remaining wing away so I screamed and my vision swam with glowing streaks of redness. “We were dying out before the god! The Swartzcopf way was dying!
I
fixed that!
I
brought our people back from the brink of extinction!”

“You killed Caleb!”

“Caleb was dead to us already! I tried to make Elsie understand that, but the old woman was as unmovable as a mule! Our people will be strong again! Our people…!”

“Those aren’t people, you stupid man!” I cried. “What you are making aren’t men! Cernunnos will use them to take the world. He’ll destroy it…”

“What do I care about the English world with its murderers and fornicators?” he said, grabbing the hilt of the athame in his hand, no doubt with an intention of ripping me wide open. “I care only about the colony!”

“There won’t
be
a colony, Abraham!”

“I control the god! The god does my bidding!”

Christ, was he really this stupid? Pain and rage animated me, and like that first time, with Cernunnos, I felt a dull
whooshing
noise and suddenly Abraham was blown back against his own blood-splattered wall. I was fortunate in that the act also pulled the cursed knife from my back.

Suddenly I could breathe, move, again. I tried to scramble to my feet, but my injuries and the blood loss were too much, and I wound up crawling out the door. I had to get out of here, had to warn Vivian that they were onto us. It had become my sole reason for living…

Abraham appeared several seconds later. I assume he must have used the water in the pitcher to put himself out, or some form of dark magick, because he was still smoking even as he stalked me down the hallway. And when I dared glance over my shoulder, I saw he was clutching the big cross from off the wall in his steaming, bloodied hands. The sight of the cross struck me with an almost debilitating, heart-pounding fear like a bad, B-movie vampire. Whatever else Abraham had become, he was still a believer in God, and that gave him the advantage over me.

His voice rang out: “Most glorious God, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Come to the assistance of men whom God has created to His likeness and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the Devil…”

I clawed desperately at the hardwood as Abraham’s exorcism prayer began to sink its terrible, preternatural claws into me. Each word was like a small, ten-penny nail being pounded into my flesh, slowing my progress and making me grunt under the relentless spikes of pain. I felt each word go into me like a hammer blow. Each word pinned me to the earth a little bit more. I was only three or four feet from the stairs. I knew if I could make it, I could throw myself down them. Then, maybe, I’d have a chance in hell of escaping. Probably not, but it was the best I could do, and in the end, I just needed to get away from that damned cross, that holy man and those prayers.

“The Holy Church venerates thee as her guardian and protector; to thee, the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of Peace to crush Satan beneath our feet…”

I gasped as something that felt like invisible cat claws raked down my back. The pain animated my whole body, worse than having my wings cut off, worse than anything I’d ever felt, making me flail like a fish out of water. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t think. My fingernails gouged the hardwood under my chin in my mad panic to escape. I knew those spiritual claws weren’t real, not in the physical sense, anyway, that it was just the prayer, the exorcism, but that realization didn’t make it any less painful.

“…that he may no longer retain men captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us; take hold of the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan…”

I was two feet away, but I could feel my limbs turning to lead, the pain suffocating me. I could feel the prayer pinning me to the floor the way it was meant to. I trembled and scratched in blind defiance, but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

“… bind him and cast him into the bottomless pit so that he may no longer seduce the nations.” Standing over me, Abraham said in a hoarse, resonating voice, the voice of a man used to being heard in big, wide-open places, “Daemon, return thee to hell!” He laid the big cross between my shoulder blades.

He might as well have dropped a cartoon anvil on me. I screamed, and then darkness slowly overtook me at last.

They say sound is the last to go. I heard my cell phone going off, probably Vivian to tell me she’d been overrun by the Swartzcopf men, but I was in a place of pain and suffering where I no longer had any power to do much of anything.

It wasn’t like in the movies. I didn’t pass out cleanly and stay out for hours. That might have been nice.

Instead, I came to several times. Each time I did, I could hear voices—men talking over my prone body, discussing what to do with me. One of the voices was Abraham’s, and he was directing the other men in his colony to take my cell phone, tie my hands, and take me to the town center. There, he said, they would sacrifice me to Cernunnos, and deliver Vivian unto him as his bride. Several of the Swartzcopf reached down to haul me up by my bound hands, big, powerful, work-hardened men who had no trouble dragging me away, and I’m not exactly a flyweight.

The cross was gone, but the shifting, quivering pain, and weakness in my body remained, making made me black out again. Shortly thereafter, I was aware of them carrying me down the stairs and through the front door. I even grunted as they dropped me on my belly in the back of a flatbed wagon as if I were a big bag of flour. When the horses started up and the wagon began to lurch, taking me toward the town center, the pain was redoubled and I passed out again. Eventually, though, someone threw a bucket of very cold well water over me, and that brought me around once and for all.

I sat up too quickly, my head throbbing. We were parked in the town center, and the whole landscape spun crazily for a moment, making me sick to my stomach even as cold droplets of water rolled off my face and into my collar.

“Welcome back, Daemon,” Abraham said in what I felt was an annoyingly gloating voice. He stood beside the wagon while one of his men carefully bandaged his burned hands. The right side of his face was still gashed open, and much of his beard had been burned away by my fire, but he didn’t seem to notice that. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

I shifted around with my hands tied uncomfortably behind my back and tossed my cookies in response, which made Abraham and his men step back a little. But I didn’t have much in my stomach—Coke and Snickers, mostly—so it was a little anticlimactic. I tried to sit up so I wasn’t kneeling in my own vomit, but my body was having none of that at the moment. I hurt all over, and I felt about as weak as a kitten.

“Abraham,” I gasped out in a last-ditch effort to talk the man down, “think about what you’re doing. Think about the harm…”

“You don’t think I have considered every solution?” He spread his bandaged hands like he was going to bestow a benediction over the whole proceedings. “
This
is the only way to maintain our way of life. But that’s something you and your English world fail to understand…”

“Murdering people?” I said, eyeing him savagely. “Letting your daughters be impregnated by that
thing
…?” I was prepared to rant some more, but I spotted another wagon pulling up, bearing a heavy load of Swartzcopf men—colony elders, I think, John Knapp among them. Sitting in the back of the wagon and bouncing around the flatbed was Vivian, hunched over, her arms tied behind her back the way mine were.

They pulled up alongside our wagon. “Viv, you okay?” I asked her.

There were streaks of dirt on her face, her hair was snarled, and gravel was sticking to her cheeks. Several of the men sitting with her had deep red scratch marks down their faces. I imagined the catfight she’d put up before the men had overwhelmed her and it made me proud.

“Y-yeah,” she said uncertainly as the men manhandled her into the flatbed beside me and she struggled to find a comfortable position that wouldn’t aggravate her bound arms. “I’m okay, Nick. They threw me around a little, but I’m a tough bitch. I’ve had worse done to me.” She lifted her chin bravely and I saw the angry, determined flare of her eyes through the mask of dirt and dust on her face. But when she looked me over, some of her courage flagged. “How about you? Jesus, what did they do to you?”

“I’ll survive,” I told her and coughed up a glob of blood, which didn’t help my case much.

“What the hell happened to your wings?”

Before I could answer her, Abraham interrupted. He was carrying the cross again, which he lifted before him like a defiant Joan of Arc about to meet an army of enemies head on. The sight of it kept me down on my knees, my eyes averted, but Vivian screamed like Abraham had scalded her with boiling oil. “We have decided that John should dispatch you, Devil, and deliver your concubine to the god as his wife. You’re to be taken into Mulberry Grove, to the altar of the Horned God, and slain.”

He transferred the cross into the hands of one of the other elders, a short, portly man named Eli, if I wasn’t mistaken. Eli settled on a crate near the head of the flatbed, the cross in both hands, and gave us a dire look that suggested we better not give him any trouble.

I looked over at Abraham. “Can’t do it yourself, witch? You need a god to repopulate your people and minions to do your killing for you? Isn’t there
anything
you can do for yourself?”

Abraham narrowed his eyes as he rubbed at his bandaged hands. “I thought you might appreciate spending the last few moments of your accursed life with your mate. Be happy I’m giving you
that
, Devil,” he said and spat on me. As his phlegm raced down my face, I glanced beyond him and saw John standing near the horses. I expected the same look of crazed obedience on his face as Eli, but he surprised me by discreetly winking.

I looked back at Abraham and said, “Fine. We’ll do it your way, witch.”

Vivian and I leaned against each other for support as we bumped along the rocky ground between the trees of the grove on the way to the altar. John Knapp drove the horses and Eli sat over us in the flatbed, wielding the cross like he was carrying a sword. Abraham and his supporters had stayed on the edge of the grove, cowards that they were, but I could hear their collective prayers going up. Their voices were faint, but their faith strong enough to keep the two of us weak and bundled down together. The cross and prayers hurt, despite the fact that my physical injuries had all but healed themselves at this point.

We finally reached the clearing. Abraham and his men’s voices were very distant now, a low murmur I almost couldn’t hear anymore. That didn’t mean their prayers didn’t continue to hurt, though.

“Let’s stop here,” John said to Eli, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. The rocking of the wagon was making me feel sick again.

The two men exchanged a few words in Pennsylvania Dutch, and Eli stood up and drove the cross forward, forcing us to scramble without use of our arms down off the flatbed. Vivian and I dropped down clumsily in the grass and huddled together like a pair of frightened children against the shelter of one of the old elms. Eli drove the long bar of the cross into the ground in front of us so the shadow of that symbol in the last vestiges of daylight burned a crossbar against my back where I was trying desperately to shield Vivian from its effects. I could smell the slow burning of my clothes and I hoped that John was planning on doing something very soon: Vivian was shaking and moaning against me like she had a bad fever, and the slow cooking of my flesh was making my stomach lurch with nauseous pain.