Why was I destined to meet my brethren once more?
"So," I hissed. "It's been a game the whole time."
This stinks big time. We've been set up to take the heat. He said it as if he was enraged, but I could tell the fun and excitement was there too.
Crawling, I tried to grab hold of the wall and haul myself up, but I couldn't make it to my feet and slid facedown against the cold stone floor, groaning. I'd bitten through my tongue and my mouth filled with blood. Self wouldn't budge, continuing to maul and wash himself in the boy's remains, until I couldn't fight the pain anymore and was forced to ask.
Please help me, I begged.
But of course.
It had come to this before, the acknowledgment of need. I always hated seeing that grandiose look in his eyes, the arrogant smile so similar to my own. Is this what my love had seen in me? Self said, I'm here. He climbed out of Walt's chest and clambered across my shoulders, tore open my shirt, and lovingly licked and kissed my shattered back, claws prodding away the agony like acupuncture.
His invocations were in different archaic languages every time, as if he didn't want me to learn them. I moaned in relief, his palms gently massaging ruptured muscle. He kept thinking of what he wanted to do to Mel's girl, as if I might consider rewarding him with more blood. He stuck a pinkie into my mouth and scratched at my tongue until it fused together. Vertebrae and slipped discs audibly snapped back into place while I held in more screams, his healing hands and love mending me.
Thanks.
Always my pleasure.
When I could function again I brought the girl upstairs. I laid her on the couch in the living room and bundled her in crocheted blankets, untied the copper wires, and did my best to massage circulation back into her limbs. Maybe with a lot of therapy her hands and feet wouldn't be a total loss. Her breathing was shallow and erratic, heartbeat somewhat arrhythmic. Highly stylized sigil scars and glyph burns would forever mark her for other attentive demons to notice, but she'd make it for now. Using the phone in the kitchen I dialed 911 and left the receiver off the hook.
Self danced down the hallway to the bedroom and cried, Yowzah! What's with the penguin?
Bridgett sat on the bed dressed in a nun's full habit, with the cats curled in her lap, drinking a White Russian.
No wonder she'd smelled of church. I should've recognized it from the start but I'd fought too hard to forget. God's breath told me I was going back. Her leather coat had been thrown over a settee near the door. I touched it and it was dry. She'd been in the house the entire time.
She wore her habit the way folks at costume parties wear their clothes from the 1970s-as kitsch. Bridgett lifted her glass in a toast, gave an utterly false sloe-eyed gaze, and patted the covers beside her. "You did quite well," she said. "I think you deserve a reward."
Self clapped happily and said, Thanks, baby, I knew I could count on you! The beauty of blasphemy and depravity drove him nearly out of his gourd.
I grabbed her by the wrists and yanked her to her feet until our noses touched. "So you're the real executor behind tonight's display."
She laughed in my face until the killing hexes seeped from my hands. "Hey now," this wife of God novitiate said. "None of that."
"Who are you?"
"Very admirably handled. Apparently going rogue hasn't diminished any of your skills. We weren't altogether sure you'd survive the encounter with Prince Arioch."
I knew who she meant when she said "we" and I sucked the last drops of blood from my torn tongue down my throat, enjoying the taste.
Under her skirts skittered her familiar. Rosary beads bounced as the demon climbed up her chest to suck at her witch's teat, a tiny misshapen nipple near her collarbone. Colorless fluid dripped from her teat as the familiar finished feeding and worked its way out of the garments to sit on the brim of her habit, kissing those luscious lips. It cocked its head at me, crimson eyes glazed, with a smile that twisted with a hundred curved teeth.
Self yipped that name again and now I recognized the word: Thummim. An icy shiver worked up into my hairline.
Self said, Mom?
Bridgett's jaw line jutted even farther, showing off the sweet angle of her neck. That juicy mouth kept trying to draw me in like Baphomet. The migraine hit at once, white-hot spikes driving into my forehead.
I let out a grunt and she grinned. "Jebediah sent me, but you already know that. Your days as a solitary are at an end. He wants you back and the new coven isn't complete without you. We need our Master Summoner. Say yes and we'll help you raise that bitch Danielle from the dead."
Chapter Two
Somewhere between Mullen and Lincoln, Nebraska, tooling east into the dawn on the dark expanse of I-73, Brenda Hasselman pulled her eighteen-wheeler Blue Moon iron box sharply into a truck stop.
Six diesel islands lay as empty as the four hundred miles and half dozen weigh stations beforehand. She said, "Listen, if you don't start making a little conversation soon I'm gonna boot your ass out right here. And believe me, this coffeepot called Myra's Home Cookin' ain't the place to find yourself thumbing at five in the morning. Myra's real name is Freddy Calhoun and once he starts talkin' about Oswald you got to hear it all. The Mafia, Monroe, Ruby and the Mexicans, KGB, and how it was LBJ himself really up in the book depository. This is the last stop for me until I slide into Aurora and get my six hours' sleep. I'm not asking for a life story, y'understand, but I'm not especially fond of silence. Reminds me of my tight-lipped ex-husband. That man couldn't string a simple sentence together between two cans of beer."
With ratty sneakers and oily duck hunter neon jacket, Brenda Hasselman cut anything but an imposing figure even inside her own Kenworth cab. She drove wearing huge gloves that made her look like a little girl dressed in her father's clothes. She had a kind but aggressively high pitched voice that brought derisive comments from the night radio chatter every time she picked up the mike.
She had the mark of fire on her forehead, the touch of Iblees, king of the Djinn. Jebediah and the others took great pride in matters of detail and had already set my course. I either fought or followed, and the breath of God allowed me the advantage of already knowing what I would do. Brenda Hasselman was just another part of the fetch, a way to see me home again.
She shut off the engine. "You better be well versed in the magic bullet theory. You sure are the weirdest son of a bitch I've met in my last four runs. Not quite as fucked up as the honcho who wanted to sit naked on the roof of the cab and sing 'Hail Columbia' but you got a few knots. You and Freddy Calhoun'll get along just fine."
We were six days from the full moon. The next major sabbat wouldn't be until the Feast of Lights, Oimelc, on February 2, and the next minor not until the winter solstice of December 22. Bridgett was almost certainly the Maiden of the Coven, and she'd clearly been tutored in Jebediah's melodramatic style.
"So, you gonna talk or not?" she asked. "I'm not," I said.
She stared at me for a long time, the touch of djinn marring her otherwise pale and soft face. "I had that feeling. Okay, forget I asked. Good luck to you."
"You too."
I scanned the truck stop and spotted a middle-aged man coming out of the diner with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He looked tired and I offered to drive and pay part of the gas. He didn't even bother to look me up and down. "Okay," he said. "Sounds good to me."
"I appreciate it."
His forehead burned with the scrawl of Iblees, who had been created out of fire, grown with the angels, and ruled the world before Adam. In refusing to bow before man he had been cast aside like Lucifer. "Where you headed?"