CHAPTER SIX
It hadn’t been peak Boy Scout season at the camp. Jonathan and Michael had gone to the top of Urraca Mesa, where no one was officially allowed.
The place had more lightning strikes than anywhere else in the state. Compasses didn’t work there because the ground was full of lodestone. The entire area was shaped like a skull. Two different legends claimed the eye in the skull, a depression in the earth, was a gateway to the demonic plane.
Cassie interrupted Jonathan to ask, “Why does a demon want to hurt people? Just for fun?”
“That’s how they survive and grow. Demons start out as ghosts of evil men and women, and they become more powerful by turning others evil and absorbing their life essence. It’s like how a dust storm gets bigger when it rolls over the desert.”
“I thought demons would be totally different from humans.”
“Some of them are centuries, even millennia old. This one, for instance. There’s nothing human left in them anymore.”
He explained that local stories called the Urraca Mesa demon “Dakos.” The name was a bastardization of the Navajo word for a bunch of clouds. For as long as anyone could remember, people had seen clusters of glowing blue clouds on the top of the mesa.
When Jonathan and Michael had arrived at the site, everything had been quiet. It had been September, and the cottonwoods had been turning gold down by the creek.
Once they faced Dakos, they’d say an incantation over a fire of palo santo wood. That would send it back into the abyss. Their boss could have sent another Mage with Jonathan, but a demon in a human body commanded brutal strength, and Mages weren’t trained in combat. Jonathan’s powers allowed him to maintain a psychic barrier around himself and another person. He’d done it several times before, most recently with Michael a few months ago on a mission in Oklahoma where a malevolent spirit had been persuading drivers on a particular stretch of highway to crash into one another.
On Urraca Mesa, dusk was a few hours away, and demon and ghost spell work rarely succeeded in daylight hours, so they waited. Michael complained about missing the qualifying football match between Mexico and the United States. Several of their friends were watching it on the big screen in the cantina at their headquarters. Michael found a deck of cards in the glove compartment, and almost as a joke, they played gin rummy, which their grandfather had taught them. They hadn’t played it since they were boys, but they wound up really getting into it.
As dusk gathered, they found a big, flat rock near the portal, which looked like a small cave. Jonathan painted the summoning circle with the proper sigils. He used rust-colored oak gall ink, to which they’d added a little powdered bone from the demon’s victim in Taos, because a body that had housed a demon became connected to it. The complicated symbols took longer to render than he’d expected, and by the time he painted the last one, the night had deepened enough that Michael held the flashlight so he could finish.
Michael crossed the sticks of palo santo wood in the middle. He sprinkled them and each symbol around the circle with oil of frankincense from the lost city of Ubar. He straightened up again and gave Jonathan a grim, amused look like, Well, here we go. They’d been going on most of their missions together for almost two years by then, so Jonathan knew the look well.
Jonathan closed his eyes and pulled up the energy and power from within his mind. He was aware of Michael’s psyche, like something shimmering in his peripheral vision. Although he didn’t venture into his brother’s consciousness, the link brightened and strengthened. When Jonathan opened his eyes, Michael was cutting his forearm with his black tactical knife. He sprinkled blood over the frankincense on each of the symbols in turn. Jonathan held the psychic barrier over them both. Until they banished Dakos, he needed to keep his concentration steady so the shield didn’t slip.
Michael wrapped up his arm. As he recited the incantation, he flicked his lighter and set fire to each symbol. They burned because of the oil mixed with the blood, but only for a few seconds. When he said the last words and lit up the last symbol, however, the flames shot up higher than his head before they burned out.
A sharp sideways wind cut through Jonathan’s clothes to the skin. The dark trees above them hissed in the sudden gale. Horror dragged through his body like a heavy chain. It knocked against his bones, twisted around his brain, and then pulled tight, trying to strangle his thoughts. Jonathan forced himself to keep the psychic barrier smooth.
Dakos arrived, not in a human’s skin, but as a shadow in the shape of a man’s body—faceless, ten feet tall. Glowing blue clouds gathered where one might expect a head to be. Lightning slashed to the ground from one of the clouds, and everything went bitterly cold.
Humans. You are disgusting.
Jonathan wasn’t sure whether he heard the demon’s words, or whether they resounded directly in his mind. Either way, the voice threatened to deafen him. He covered his ears.
Walking bags full of blood and shit and piss. At best, you are meat.
No demon he’d ever faced before had emanated this much power. The iron chain of terror pulled tighter, about to crack his skull. Michael must have felt the same thing. They stood welded to the spot.
You scarcely live longer than insects. Your only hope of greatness is being subsumed into myself.
Jonathan struggled to keep his defenses in place. He drew on more power to strengthen the shell around them. Michael shook himself and lit the palo santo wood in the center of the circle. The demon’s hand reached for his head.
Lightning struck Jonathan, crackling through his head and down his spine, and the pain—
But no. Nothing had struck him. Michael had stopped speaking. Jonathan had let the barrier slip, for a moment, but surely not long enough for a demon to slither into his brother’s skin. He wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer, though. He screamed at Michael, “Finish it!”
His brother turned around and smiled. Jonathan could barely see his face in the light of the burning wood, but it wasn’t a smile he’d ever seen before. Michael spoke, and he wasn’t Michael. “I will never go back.”
Jonathan felt like his insides had been ripped out. My little brother. The one person he’d always been told to protect. The one he loved more than anyone else alive. This was the moment he had to kill him, because he’d failed him.
That was the protocol. Kill a possessed person immediately. Attempts at exorcism almost never worked, and the possessed human became a powerless witness to the demon’s depravity. A bullet is a mercy.
No. He would finish the spell. Save his brother. To protect himself, he drew his knife—not the gun, not while Michael housed the demon—and opened his mouth to speak the next words.
Michael exploded. The bright shimmering cloud dissipated and fell like dust and disappeared into nothingness.
Jonathan had shouted his brother’s name. There had been nothing to shout at. Invisible now, the demon had pried at Jonathan’s psyche like a locked trapdoor in the top of his skull. Jonathan had slammed up an extra barrier and roared the final words of the spell that Michael had begun. A burst of energy and a huge flash of blue light had blinded him and knocked him to the ground. His head had smashed against the big stone with the circle. All had gone dark.
“When I woke up, there was nothing,” Jonathan told Cassie. His eyes were burning, his throat tight. “Just darkness, silence. Dakos gone. Michael gone.”
After a long moment, she told him in a low voice, “It wasn’t your fault.”
He’d heard that before, and it didn’t mean a thing. “When one of your own falls, it’s your job to recover the body, even if you risk your own life. I—I scrambled around on the ground, trying to find anything that had been him. Everything looked the same. Just dirt.” He tightened his hand on his knee into a fist.
She took his hand like she’d done once before, and he wrapped his fingers around hers. “If you guys go on these dangerous trips and fight evil demons, terrible things must happen. This couldn’t have been the first time.”
“No,” he admitted.
“And if someone gets hurt or killed, do you blame the people who were with him?”
“They weren’t me.”
She frowned down at their joined hands. “Why did you tell me this story? It can’t be easy to go over it again.”
“To shut you up, I guess.” His voice was wry, making fun of himself more than her. “I don’t know.” She didn’t say anything. The story had succeeded in making her a lot quieter than usual. “I didn’t see Dakos get pulled into the void, since I got knocked out.” This fact still troubled him.
“How many demons have you killed? Or…sent back, I guess?”
“Seventeen. Eighteen, counting this one. It must have worked. There haven’t been any signs of possessions since.”
“Thank God for that, at least,” she murmured.
When Nic had heard what happened, he’d directed Jonathan to a nearby motel, saying he shouldn’t be behind the wheel. He’d met Jonathan there a few hours later and had driven him home in silence. Jonathan had been numb, staring out the window. They’d been maybe a half hour from home when Jonathan had broken down. Nic, who wasn’t one to share his own feelings, had kept driving. Then after a minute, he’d pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, and hugged Jonathan close to him, and Jonathan realized that Nic was crying, too.
Jonathan shifted where he sat. The memories were fresher and more painful than the wounds on his back. “I have these dreams where…in the last one, Michael and I were at this place we went to sometimes, outside of Albuquerque. He always said their pork back was good for a hangover.” He smiled briefly. “And I’m eating my eggs, and I think there’s too much pepper on them, but then I realize it’s…that sparkly dust. That he was turned into.” He hadn’t told anyone about this, not even Val, to whom he told almost everything because she’d been his friend since childhood. She had regular and official access to his psyche, anyway. “My whole plate is full of it, and my mouth. And then there’s nobody else in the whole restaurant. Just the sound of the wind, like up at the mesa. That howling wind.”
“It’s horrible. I’m sorry.” The sympathy in her voice soothed the raw places inside him. She squeezed his hand. “You were a good brother.”
The words meant more to him than she could know.
After a few moments, she asked, “It sounds like it bothers you that you couldn’t bury him.”
“Yeah. He doesn’t have a memorial. Though I made a stack of stones above the portal.” The cairn might have been knocked down already.
She said, “When my grandpa died, we did cremation.”
“We do that, too, a lot of times. But even then, the night before the cremation, the body is laid out in a room full of candles. The people who were closest to the person—husband or wife, family, whoever—they each get at least a few hours alone with the body. The body’s not left alone all night.”
She pursed her lips, considering this. Maybe to her, accustomed to typical American funeral services, it sounded creepy. “Do you stay with them so you can pray for them?”
“If that’s your tradition. Yeah, that’s what I would have done. A lot of people believe—I believe—the spirit is still hovering close by during the vigil. But I didn’t get to have the vigil for him.”
They were still holding hands, and she stroked his with her thumb, a gentle touch that both comforted and alarmed him. “If what you believe is true, his spirit would have been there with you anyway, before the funeral.”
“I don’t know.” Because there had been no body and no vigil, he’d gone to el huerto, the level where they grew fruit, rice, and vegetables, out of some primal instinct to be surrounded by life. In the long hours he’d prayed, he hadn’t sensed Michael’s presence. He’d never felt so alone. “I didn’t mean to talk so much.” He felt almost as depleted as he had after fighting the bear.
Her eyes glistened, reflecting his sorrow and lessening it. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Uh.” Jonathan was trained to deal with all kinds of unexpected circumstances, but she could throw him off with a few words or a gesture. “Why would you thank me?”
“Because it’s personal, and you trusted me with it.” He’d burdened her with his pain, and she talked about it like a gift. “And I was your first mission after that… You must have been ready to kick some evil ass. I’m lucky you didn’t just shoot me in the head.”
He tensed. “We never kill humans without being absolutely sure they’re guilty. They sent me because I can Read people. So there would be no question.”
“Thank God for that.” Her thumb traced his hand again. He should tell her to stop doing that, though he struggled to remember why. “Was Michael a lot like you?”
He considered the question. “In a lot of ways. But he’s…he was funnier than me. And he, uh, flirted with people a lot.”
She smiled. “So he was pretty popular with the girls?”
“Yeah. Some guys, too. And he was a smartass. Always questioning everything, even as a kid.”
“He must have been a handful for your parents.”
“He was really their favorite.” She stopped smiling at that. “It’s, uh… My mom isn’t with us any more.”
She cringed. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” It wasn’t, at all, but he didn’t want to discuss it.
“Was your brother psychic like you?”
“No. He was just a warrior— I shouldn’t say just. He was great.” Michael had been the best fighter Jonathan had ever seen, except for Samir and Freya, who both had telekinesis. They’d started training even younger than Jonathan and Michael had, because as far as Manus Sancti was concerned, children who could move objects with their minds were destined to be warriors. Michael’s secret weapons weren’t psychic gifts, but speed and fearlessness. Guilt cast long shadows over his mind again. His brother wasn’t only a loss to him, his father, and to everyone who loved him. He was also a loss for the cause, for humanity…
Cassie dipped her head to meet his eyes. “I think you’re pretty great yourself.”
A force like gravity pulled them toward one another, difficult to resist, impossible to ignore. He stared at her mouth. God, he wanted to kiss her, just once. She leaned closer, laying her hand against his cheek. Yes. At the simple touch, his instincts roared to life, every part of him straining for more.
No. This isn’t right. He’d indulged himself and drawn out her sympathy, and he was a heartbeat away from taking advantage of an unfair situation. Gently, though it almost physically pained him to do it, he removed her hand and detached himself from her, standing up. “We shouldn’t.”
“Why?— Oh, God.” She scrunched her face up and pressed it into her hands. He turned his back to her, waiting for his body to get itself back under control. She said, “Sorry, I was married a long time. I don’t know how things work anymore.” She forced a laugh. “Maybe I didn’t ever know. Anyway. It’s been a weird couple of days.”
She thought he was rejecting her. “Cassie, it’s not—”
“Let’s forget it. No big deal.” Her voice rang with false cheer.
“No, listen.” He turned around to face her. “You are—so beautiful. And you’re brave, and I… But it wouldn’t be right.”
“You have a girlfriend.” Horror passed over her face. “A wife.”
“Neither. Cassie.” His kept his voice deliberate. “You have Stockholm Syndrome.”
“I do not! I forgot what that means.”
He felt the corner of his mouth tugging up at that, but then he sobered. “When someone gets captured, or abused, sometimes they get emotionally attached to the person who did it to them. It’s a classic coping mechanism. They want to give the person in power whatever he wants.” She frowned, processing this. “I guessed before. At Morty’s.”
Her cheeks darkened in a blush. “I felt bad about your brother.”
“It’s not normal to feel bad for someone who threatened to kill you.” Self-reproach barbed his voice. “Nobody’s that nice.” He didn’t like standing at a distance, and he didn’t want to sit too close to her, either, not while he was barely managing restraint. He came over and dragged the chair a short distance from her before sitting down again. “I terrified you, hurt you, forced myself into your psyche. And I am so sorry.”
“You already apologized. I get why you did it. These people getting hurt, Rick getting his throat ripped out…you had pretty good reasons.” She gestured toward his back. “And you paid for it.” He didn’t see it that way and didn’t want to argue. She hugged her arms. “Okay, let’s stop talking about this. When people are telling me why they don’t want to kiss me, I like to keep the conversation short.”
Frustration rose up in him. “It’s not about what I want!” She jumped. He was scaring her again. In a quieter tone, he explained, “Whatever you’re feeling right now is a response from trauma. Trauma I caused.”
“Right.” Her eyes flashed with annoyance. “It has nothing to do with you turning out to be this good, caring person. Who doesn’t mind when I say what I think. And oh yeah, who can speak a bunch of languages and beat up bears.” He smiled before he could stop himself. She said, “I know how I feel.”
Maybe she did. Maybe she genuinely liked him. His resolve was slipping, but he made a last-ditch effort to resist her. “You’ll feel differently later.”
His phone buzzed.