(6)
FUBAR
.
That sounded like a woman’s voice, and Duncan liked it even though it had to be a cooked-brain hallucination. He could use a good woman. A strong woman who could drive away the darkness that hunted him like Satan on safari whenever he tried to dream.
Did women like that even exist—and if they did, why would they consider a banged-up piece of meat like him?
Duncan’s muscles screamed and burned as he trudged across the sand, which was more rock and flint than anything else. Two dead. Radios shot to hell. He would have carried Johnston and Simms back with him, but he knew he’d never make it, so he’d recorded the spot on his map, and now he was trying to get home. Such as it was. Bunch of shacks and tents in the middle of nowhere—but they’d go back for Johnston and Simms. A sun as big as five planets hammered him with each step, turning his already tanned skin into some new grade of leather. The cuts on his neck from the IED explosion burned like somebody had poured acid on his face.
Second-degree burns. Almost lost part of my nose and some of my fingers
.
“Don’t forget the cough for a year, after sucking down all this dust,” he mumbled, hating the parched burn in his throat, and the fact that he couldn’t stop taking this walk even though he had survived it years ago. “Why does everything always come back to this place?”
“Because we never really left Afghanistan,” John Cole said, and Duncan realized his best friend was beside him and matching him step for step, across the endless desert. “Not completely.”
Duncan glanced at John, who had short hair instead of long. He was wearing his best dress uniform, ribbons and all, pressed and perfect, just like all his buddies who went home in bags—after the Dover Military Mortuary cleaned them up spotless for that last ride home.
“Can’t hide, sinner,” John said with a wry smile, putting a little tune to the words.
“Fuck, John.” Duncan kept walking, because he always kept walking, because if he stopped, he’d fall down and fry under the merciless Afghan sun, or get chewed to pieces by a nasty bunch of camel spiders. “You’re dead.”
John was quiet for a few strides, then said, “Technically.”
Duncan squinted at the baked brown ground, blinded by the yellow-gray afternoon light. If he was back in camp—and he wondered if he’d ever get back—a screwdriver would be so hot it would scald his palm if he touched it.
But … that was then, wasn’t it?
That was back in the war, after one of more than a dozen roadside bombs went off and blew two jeeps all to hell.
And this was a dream.
Maybe … a new war? One he didn’t even understand yet.
Duncan wondered if John’s body would be patched up and sent home to Georgia. Would his friend get the fabled flag-draped casket treatment, all these years after they made it out of the damned desert that killed a part of both of them?
He drew another breath of boiling air. “Am I dead, too, John?”
“You’re hard to kill.” John laughed, staying shoulder to shoulder with Duncan as they walked faster, as if speed would somehow beat the heat. They found a rhythm, a left, right, left, right that suited them. Duncan could almost hear some stiff-dick drill sergeant calling cadence. Sweat coated his face.
He thought he should probably wake up.
Shouldn’t John being trying to—he didn’t know, find the light or something? Duncan would have asked him, but he knew John wouldn’t answer.
A minute, or maybe it was an hour or half a day later, John said, “There
is
a woman, Duncan.”
When Duncan turned his head to answer John, his friend was gone.
In his mind’s eye, even as he tried to charge through his nightmare desert, Duncan saw the woman. Her dark hair. Her dark eyes. He remembered a sword and leather. A light scent of almonds and berries. The way her lips felt against his ear.
Keep fighting this
.
That’s what she’d told him, and he’d felt her voice all over his body, like it was inside whatever made him breathe and move.
Duncan kept walking, because that’s what he did, and what he knew how to do. “Now that’s a woman worth living for,” he told the desert, like the desert cared about anything at all.
(7)
“He’s handsome, isn’t he?” Andy moved beside Bela, her footsteps loud and clunky on the Central Park path. Camille was walking to their far right, and Dio was a few paces behind them, in typical broom position in case they had to fight while they were on patrol.
“Duncan Sharp almost changed into … something.” Bela glanced at Andy, who had her leather face mask on but unzipped. The ends of the zipper gleamed in the moonlight. “He said a bunch of crazy shit, and I thought he was going to eat me.”
Andy snickered. “Yeah, but he’s drool-level gorgeous.”
“Yes, damnit, Andy, he’s handsome.” Bela rested her palm on the hilt of her sword and wondered what Camille and Dio were thinking. Neither had said a word since they headed into the New York City night.
Did they have a clue that she barely had her mind on tonight’s patrol? That where she really wanted to be was back at the brownstone, checking on Duncan Sharp’s progress with the Mothers?
Some mortar I am. I can’t even unify my own quad, and I’m worrying about a stranger instead of what might be lurking in those trees
.
Andy, who hadn’t and probably never would master the art of silent movement, definitely had a clue. She kept giving Bela a look like,
cha-cha-cha
. Plus, she kept talking, like she knew Bela needed the distraction. “Mrs. Knight, the new neighbor, came by and asked about all the noise and shaking and shit. I told her we had a water heater malfunction.”
The rich smell of dirt and trees and dew-coated grass grew stronger as they moved farther into the park. The creak and whisper of battle leathers mingled with a light breeze, and Bela heard the tap of Camille’s sword’s leather scabbard against her leg as she drifted in closer.
“Water heater,” Camille muttered. “That’ll work exactly once.”
“Maybe a few times.” Andy shrugged. “Could be a lemon of a water heater.”
Dio spoke up, the sound of her voice startling Bela. “Mrs. Knight won’t stay. Nobody lives next door to Sibyls very long.”
“I bet that realty company would love to burn down our brownstone.” Andy glanced to her left, into a dark clutch of trees. The leaves shivered as they passed.
Bela’s instincts itched, but she couldn’t sense anything unusual, at least not anywhere close to them. She let the quad walk a little farther, just to be sure nothing really crazy was happening on the streets.
So far, it was quiet.
Too quiet?
Her instincts itched again. More like a tickle, or a shiver.
One more time, Bela let her earth senses spool away from her, into the fertile ground on every side of them. Here and there, her terrasentience detected humans walking, or sitting, or jogging, or … yep, right there behind a big rock, doing what humans liked to do most.
Despite the hitch-and-go in her heartbeat, it seemed like a fairly normal night.
As she started to draw her earth power back to her, it took some willpower not to let her awareness slide back to the brownstone, to the basement, to be sure Duncan was still breathing.
Damn, she needed to get a grip—and keep it.
They reached the south end of the Mall and the Olmsted Flower Bed. Even in evening light, Bela’s sensitive Sibyl vision catalogued the vivid pinks and purples and whites of the plants gracing the area as if midday sun were playing off the blooms. Seemed as good a place as any to get more organized. She found a private spot and stopped the quad by holding up her hand.
Dio, Camille, and Andy pulled into formation around her as she unzipped her leather face mask and tucked it into her weapons belt. She studied each unmasked face but found no sign of tension outside the normal angst of patrol and trying to work together. “Anybody got anything?”
Camille shook her head. “No communications through my tattoo.”
“Nada in the water around here.” Andy dripped and shrugged.
Dio said, “Some idiot kids are smoking weed near the bandstand. I can smell it. But no, nothing supernatural. So, does that mean we’re to go over what I found in the archives and see if we can hunt down these assholes?”
Bela nodded, and noticed that Camille and Andy were nodding as well.
Dio unzipped the top of her leather bodysuit, reached inside, and pulled out a folded piece of art paper. “Okay, then. These are the creatures that almost kicked our asses in DUMBO.”
Her golden blond hair seemed almost white in the moonlight, and Bela held back a sigh as she tried to focus on what appeared to be pencil drawings. Air Sibyls were supposed to be a study in controlled chaos, but Dio seemed to be dedicated to self-regulation to the point of austerity. Her leathers were so clean Bela wished she could smear double handfuls of dirt all over the elbows, just to make Dio feel more normal to her.
Dio’s gray eyes landed first on Bela, then on Camille as she held the sketches toward them. “Rakshasa,” she said. “Ancient cat-demons.”
“Demons.” The word hit Bela hard, and her skin crawled at the memory of the Legion and their monstrous servants, the Asmodai. Asmodai were nothing but elementally stacked killing machines, soulless and mindless and hungry. Thank the Goddess they were gone from the face of the earth, and no one was busy creating more of them.
The Legion had created other types of demons, but they weren’t pure nothing-else-but-evil like the Asmodai. Cursons, for example, were half-breeds, with human mothers and human souls. Cursons could learn to manage their demon essence, and lots of them worked for the Occult Crimes Unit. Some had even married Sibyls. Full-blooded Astaroth demons also worked for the OCU and forged deep bonds with Sibyls. Most Astaroths had been young human children when their Legion masters converted them into supernaturally powerful, intelligent, winged creatures—but the Legion discovered, to their great harm in their final battle with the Dark Crescent Sisterhood, that Astaroths retained their humanity and free will, and most preferred to battle for truth, justice, and peace.
Nobody even thought of Cursons and Astaroths as demons anymore, not really, because demons—demons meant pain and war and loss. Demons meant … death.
Don’t go there
, said the ghostly voices of Nori and Devin, but it was too late.
The faces of her lost fighters rose to haunt Bela, and her belly cramped from the force of the sudden grief. “We haven’t had to fight demons for almost three years. Just psychic con artists and pissed-off locals with a splash of elemental talent.”
Camille didn’t say anything, but her sudden tension grabbed Bela’s heart. Camille stood fiddling with the leather face mask she rarely wore; her long auburn curls were tangled from all the time she spent twisting them with one delicate hand while everybody else talked.
Did the faces of the triad sisters Camille lost three years ago loom in Camille’s mind like Nori and Devin haunted Bela’s brain? Bela thought they probably did.
And did those dead triad sisters accuse Camille of failing them?
But she was young—and she wasn’t a mortar
.
Swallowing hard against the tight muscles in her throat, Bela made herself stare at the drawings. Colors and lines from the top page danced through her mind, making no sense.
Demons.
Demons, for the sake of the Goddess. Again.
“Did you say cats, Dio?” Andy sounded like she really didn’t want to believe that little detail. “As in ‘Here kitty kitty’ cats?”
Dio moved the paper closer to Andy. “I said demons. I drew them, hunted through the archives until I found them last night, then dug through even older archives to find all we know about them. Definitely demons.”
Bela winced as the
d
-word pierced her chest again. She finally took in the images on the paper—hand-drawn pictures of man-sized tigers just like the ones they had seen in DUMBO, with a nondescript Sibyl sketched in the margin for size comparison. “They’re as huge as I remembered,” she muttered, staring at the papers with Andy, and her mind went straight back to Duncan.
What kind of determination had it taken for him to fight huge, feral demons with his bare hands? How had he done such a thing?
And now—those scratches. The infection of demon energy. Did that stone-solid determination give him any chance at all to stay alive?
Drawn to the exquisite pictures, Bela reached out carefully, because the creatures seemed so real they might jump off the page and bite her. She traced the tip of one finger across the sketches of heavily muscled chests and arms. Dio had rendered three Rakshasa, one with white fur, one with golden, and one with black, wielding swords as their fanged mouths hung open in silent, terrible roars. Dark stripes marked the edges of powerful arms and legs, and the creatures wore an odd sort of armor that looked like chain mail, except the chain links were actually tiny spikes. The eyes. That’s what really set them apart from all the demons Bela had battled in the past. A malicious intelligence gleamed from those golden depths, as if the Rakshasa were using Dio’s drawings to project their essence straight into the park. Especially the white one.
Just looking at the white tiger-demon gave Bela shivers. He was strong. Maybe too strong. He felt like their leader to her, and she was almost sure of that. Next time, the bastard might succeed in killing one of them.
The leaves and blooms in the Olmsted garden gave an odd, off-kilter rustle.
Everyone jumped at the sound and movement.
Bela let her earth senses fly across the pavement where they stood and drove her awareness into the ground, letting it spread in all directions. Moments. Barely seconds. The vigor in her body began to drain away as she focused all of her attention on detecting abnormalities in the energies touching the nearby earth, but she still didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Not even anything supernatural.
So why had the plants moved with no breeze—and why did she still have the shivers?
Camille’s gaze fixed on the shivering flowers. “It’s not me. I can’t—it’s not—” Her expression tightened as the bushes and blooms fell still again. “I thought I sensed some energy, but now it’s gone. Maybe I was mistaken.”
“No, you weren’t,” Bela and Dio said at the same time.
“But I couldn’t get a read on it either,” Dio admitted. “All I can say is, it didn’t come from the Mothers over in the brownstone, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t whip down from headquarters in the northeast.”
Andy was at full alert, one fist doubled against her wet leather-clad leg. “I sensed something, too. No idea what. A crawly feeling on my skin, like somebody touched the back of my neck.”
“Or like something brushed against the elemental locks on our suits,” Dio said, referring to the elemental energy layered through their fighting leathers.
“At random?” Bela asked the question even though her instincts told her otherwise. That had been a targeted touch, subtle and quick. Maybe a testing of strength, or a sampling of their defenses.
As if pulled by a powerful magnet, her eyes returned to the drawings of the Rakshasa. A second or so later, she realized her whole quad was studying the feral demons again.
“Okay, only Tarzan could call these ugly shit-brains kitty cats.” Andy flicked her pointer finger against the white tiger-creature. “Was it them that just gave us the jumping creepy heebie-jeebies?”
“Whatever it was, it’s gone now.” Camille’s frown was epic as she slumped, jamming one toe against the pavement. “I’m sorry. I should have been able to catch a signature, a hint, but I’m not that fast.”
Bela risked putting her hand over the fire Sibyl’s knuckles, almost hoping she’d get burned. “No one is. You can’t be perfect, Camille, and even if you are perfect, stuff will still slip past you sometimes.”
Camille raised her gaze to meet Bela’s, and Bela saw gratitude and relief on the younger woman’s face. Warmth rushed through Bela, followed by a small measure of relief. The tiny triumph was almost enough to chase away the case of the creeps she had gotten from the drawings and the odd rustling of the leaves—but not enough to take the sting out of Dio’s angry glare.
Bela was sorry she had glanced at the air Sibyl, because all the warmth ran straight back out of her. This was such a damned roller coaster. Up one hill and slam-boom down the next one.
“Dio, you’re really talented,” Andy said, either oblivious to Dio’s sudden rage or all too aware of it. “These drawings are better than photographs, and you did them so fast.”
Camille mumbled her agreement, and Bela heard a note of awe in the unnaturally quiet fire Sibyl’s voice.
A splash of red spread across Dio’s cheeks. She glanced at the ground for a moment, then seemed to compose herself. “Rakshasa have been around since recorded history, mostly in Eastern and Far Eastern areas.” Her recitation sounded as perfect and modulated as a PBS special. “They kill without conscience, and everything I read suggests they enjoy murdering and eating humans, especially for personal gain and to increase their own standing in the world.”
“Great.” Andy, who would never narrate a PBS special, belched so deeply Bela could smell the French roast and three hazelnut creamers from the vat of coffee she’d drunk before they hit the streets. “So, where are they, and how do we kill them?”
Dio kept her focus on her papers. “Rakshasa are rudimentary telepaths. They shapeshift, and they can look like anybody they choose to copy—but only for a few seconds or minutes.”
Andy’s lips pursed, like she was committing all that to memory. “Sociopathic, shape-shifting, mind-reading kitties. Got it. Now, where are they, and how do we kill them?”
Dio’s fingers curled against the edges of her drawing. Bela knew she was sticking to the list of points she had created when she was preparing her research presentation. Dio was like that. Lists, numbers, order. Andy’s cut-to-the-chase questions had to rake Dio’s nerves worse than demon claws on stone.
“They can take an incorporeal form, too,” Dio added. “To travel.”
“The blue flames we saw at the end of the DUMBO battle?” Camille stood straighter now, like her interest had been captured. “Three columns, tall and flickering. They moved like the wind.”