We had debated the alternatives. If we went into the old warehouse mid-building, we could be right on top of the demon before we got our bearings. And if the demon sensed us – a very likely possibility – it would be over before it began. I would have preferred it if we could have made a circuit of the building to locate the demon, but odds were, if we located him he would also locate us. I figured he already knew we were here. He was confident, waiting for us to come to him. I just hoped we could turn that confidence against him.
We crossed the short expanse of asphalt between buildings, staying low and keeping to the shadows.
Even so, I felt watched. I wasn’t sure which was worse: being outside and exposed or going into Building Four where we knew a demon was waiting.
We got to the building and Sorren bent to pick the lock on the door, but it was unlocked, and swung open at a touch. Just as I feared: we were expected.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
WE OPENED THE door to hell.
The old warehouse stank of death. The air was heavy with the smell of blood and the stench of rotting flesh. It was a compliment to compare it to a charnel house, because the bodies here weren’t treated with respect and certainly weren’t embalmed awaiting proper burial. It smelled worse than a slaughterhouse, unless the meat being cut up happened to be weeks old and left out in the sun to rot.
Blood streaked the walls and steel doors of the warehouse. Blood pooled on the floor. Gobbets of things best unidentified were dried on the walls where they had been flung in an orgy of gluttony.
Maggots churned in masses that heaved under their own weight. Even the spiders and the roaches had quit Building Four. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here…
Mangled soldiers had breathed their last within these brick walls. Prisoners of war had prayed to die.
Slaves had toiled here under the lash. Workers had died here, under unconscionable conditions.
Epidemic victims had seen fevered visions. And on the land beneath the building, pirates had been hanged and buried while their bodies were still warm.
Their spirits were still here.
But in the shadows all around us, as blue-white orbs hovered and dodged, I glimpsed more recent spirits, ghosts for whom death was still a shock. Jimmy Redshoes. Kevin Harvey. And the five-man crew of the Privateer, still following their captain, Russ Landrieu, beyond the grave.
There were others as well. Fred Kenner, Stor-Your-Own’s murdered owner. I saw faces I knew only from their obituaries, the drifters and vagrants who had been fodder for Moran’s demon. They stared at me from the shadows, as if there was something I could do to end their torment. I felt no threat from them. Moran and his demon were threat enough.
Our night vision goggles cast the interior in foxfire shades, a sickly green luminescence. The ghosts weren’t alone in the darkness. Shadow creatures prowled in the hollow sockets of the empty units, misshapen, distorted energies that had never been men, creatures that fed on terror. Here in the presence of their master, they did not bother masquerading as human. Their true form showed in grotesquely elongated limbs, twisted forms, and lantern-jawed heads. They were just waiting for orders.
At every cross-corridor, Lucinda put a barrier of salt and iron nails, trying to seal off those hallways so nothing could come behind us. It was a nice idea, but I wasn’t counting on it working. A glance down those corridors told me they were littered with garbage and abandoned possessions. Apparently, Moran and the demon had made themselves at home. Lucinda lagged behind us, chanting softly to herself, calling on the Loas for protection and help.
The air stank of bile and sulfur, rot and shit. Now that we were halfway down the corridor, we could see that the demon had rearranged the place to suit himself, battering down the thin metal panels that separated the individual units to make the back third of the corridor one large den.
The blackened skins of the murdered men hung on the walls like trophies. Symbols of power were daubed in blood above and below the skins. The bones and decaying carcasses of small animals littered the floor: stray dogs, feral cats, unlucky rats, and rabbits that ventured too close to a demon starved for blood. In the center of the area, on a low wooden table, dozens of candles burned in a tawdry shrine.
“Come to finish me off?” A deep, mocking voice echoed through the storage building.
Corban Moran stepped out of the shadows. Without his hat, I could see his shriveled features clearly, quite a difference from the man I’d seen in the photo with Jeremiah Abernathy. Sorren had left him for dead. Moran may not have died, but the cost of that encounter was clear.
“You are supposed to be dead.” Sorren’s voice was low and dangerous. I was watching two predators face off against each other, and I hoped Sorren was the biggest bad-ass on the block.
“You certainly tried.” Moran’s tone was thick with contempt and hatred. “I knew Abernathy’s demon was still unbound, and I knew no one had ever brought back the most powerful artifact from the Cristobal. I needed that piece to recover my power.”
“And you killed the salvage team that almost beat you to it,” Sorren said.
Moran shrugged. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world.” He smirked. “I tried to buy them off, tried to scare them off. They wouldn’t leave it alone. Now they’re dead and I have the artifact.”
He held up a crystal sphere the size of a bowling ball. Inside was a blood-soaked mummified goat’s head. “The Baphomet Orb,” he said, holding it like a trophy.
I shivered. I’d found a reference to that artifact in one of Uncle Evan’s old journals. A Baphomet Orb was difficult and dangerous to make, and thankfully rare. It gave the owner power over a demon called by name. The orb held the head of a goat severed under a full moon, soaked in the blood of a murdered man, into which a candle made with fat rendered from a hanged man was placed and burned, then the whole thing was bound in strips of human skin and encased in glass, sealing in its power.
“It won’t bind the demon forever,” Sorren warned. “You’re a fool if you think you can control that thing for long.”
“I don’t need forever,” Moran replied. “I just need longer than I had left.”
“And what’s in it for the demon, besides what’s left of your soul?” Sorren asked. It was like the rest of us weren’t there, the continuation of an old pissing match. I didn’t need magic to feel how much the two hated each other.
“I promised him the city for his taking,” Moran said with a grand sweep of his arm. “That should keep him well fed and return my full magic – and then some.” “You followed Cassidy,” Sorren accused.
“I figured she’d lead me to you,” Moran replied with a sneer. “You’ve always been soft about your pets. I wanted to kill her like I killed the others and leave her for you to find – a reminder of the old days.”
Our group subtly shifted positions. Moran was only part of the threat. Mirov was scanning for the demon, and Chuck was close to him. Lucinda had moved up near Sorren to handle Moran and his magic.
That left Teag and me for the minions and shadow men, and any vengeful ghosts or other nasties that might be waiting for us.
Even so, we weren’t really ready for it when all hell broke loose.
I can’t describe a demon’s shriek, because words don’t suffice. But if you put a live horse through a wood chipper, and lit a lion on fire, and put the two awful death cries together, you might be close.