The Devil Dances, page 17
part #2 of Nick Englebrecht Series
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.
Down the slope a ways I spied Cernunnos’ altar. It stood charred amidst the fire-blackened landscape. John turned to look at it a moment, nodded to himself as he came around the back of the wagon. “Eli…” he said, and Eli turned to him.
“Yah, John?”
John walked up to Eli—then drove an athame I didn’t know he had into the man’s belly.
li screamed, and the forest rang with his screams. The trees seemed to scream with him. He dropped like a sack of lead ingots into the fire-ravaged grass and made whimpering noises as his blood bubbled out of the wound in his belly like molten lava. He clutched the wound, the athame, but the blood just flowed faster. It was too much blood too fast from such a small wound; the athame must be blessed, I thought. Or cursed, depending on how you were looking at things.
John Knapp quietly observed Eli’s death throes. He was a very ordinary man, not terribly tall, but not short either. Average height and build, with medium brown hair and medium brown eyes, neither handsome nor repulsive to look upon. I thought again how if he weren’t Amish, he would have made a very good FBI agent, the kind of man who could spy on anyone, anywhere, and never be noticed in a crowded room.
He watched Eli’s suffering, his clawing at the ground, with absolutely no expression on his face. Eli gave one last kick and then lay still, his blood draining into the hungry, cursed earth. The grove drank it up like tea and I saw new green grass pushing up in fast-forward where the blood had formerly been. Vivian was whimpering against the front of my shirt, from pain and from fear. I said one word: “Why…?”
I thought for certain John would say he was a witch as well, and smile that demonic smile I had come to associate with Abraham, but he only looked a little sad, like this act had brought him no pleasure. “It’s the way of things, Prince Nicholas.” He pulled the athame from the sucking hole in Eli’s body and stalked toward us.
I was about to demand a more explicit explanation, but Vivian surprised me with her strength and ferocity. Even with her hands still tied, and the cross holding us both down, she managed to lunge at John, trying for a head-butt. John, for his part, looked unconcerned. He raised his hand in warning and it was like she’d hit a physical barrier. It knocked her back against the tree and I heard her skull connect with a sickening crack.
She moaned, blood trickling into her eyes, and I scrambled closer and said, “Vivian…!”
She moaned again and her eyes fluttered as her head lolled back on her shoulders.
The rage jumped inside me and I turned like some cornered predator in the woods and bared my teeth at John. “Don’t you dare touch her!” My voice growled forth, barely human in pitch or timbre.
“I didn’t,” John told me reasonably, using that same calm, disconnected tone of voice he’d used when he was killing Eli. “She tried to attack me. She shouldn’t have tried to do that. She’s a daemon. She needs to learn to serve her masters, as you do, Little Horn.”
“What the fuck are you?”
But even as I said it, I realized what he was. I’d only caught a tiny glimpse of his two sets of wings as Vivian had launched herself at him and his power had flared, but it had been enough to trip my subconscious mind. It seemed virtually impossible that I’d missed the vibration coming off him until now. But then, my power had never been that exact, regarding John’s kind. The year before, I hadn’t picked up on Billie Berger either, not until she had begun to Ascend.
“You’re Arcana,” I said.
John hunkered down and looked me over, unconcerned with my statement.
“Do they know?” I persisted. “Do the Swartzcopf know?”
John blinked and cocked his head at my question. His reaction reminded me of Billie Berger. Like John, she’d been possessed of such an otherness, a separate-ness and coldness, that I’d thought she’d been on drugs at the time. But the truth was, all the Arcana were like this. It was like the act of eating angels’ flesh—the source of their power—wiped their humanness away completely. They operated like giant mechanical dolls, like angels themselves.
“No,” he answered. “Believe it or not, little Lucifer, the situation with Abraham has absolutely nothing to do with this. He doesn’t know. None of them do. This”—he showed me his athame. Unlike others I had seen and wielded, this one had a wickedly serrated edge, and was designed a little like the types of buck knives popular with the local hunters, the kind who liked to field-dress their deer—“has nothing to do with their foolishness. I just saw an opportunity and I took it.”
I stared at the knife as if mesmerized by it. It had angel kills on it, a lot of them. The athame was bathed in the blood of angels and pulsed with their power. That was the reason John had earned two set of wings. He’d been consuming angel meat for years, maybe decades. Beside me, Vivian moaned, trying to fight her way back to consciousness. I thought if maybe I could distract John long enough, she might be able to get away. “Amish Arcana? Are you shitting me?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said with something close—but not quite—like disgust. “The Arcana have infiltrated every nation and religion in the world, Daemon. They exist on every continent, in every community. There are Arcana of every race, faith, and orientation. There are Arcana in Blackwater. There are Arcana in the White House. Why should this surprise you?”
He was just close enough that it didn’t take much strength on my part to lash out at John with a kick. It connected squarely with his bread basket and dropped him to the leaf litter with a puff of breath. His athame skittered way, which made me happy. But the pain of the cross still made me want to piss myself when I tried to budge. “Vivian… run!” I barked.
Her head snapped around and her eyes popped open. She gasped a breath and turned to look at me as if she were horrified that I should suggest such a thing.
“Run, damn you!” I shouted as I watched John dive for the knife, which had slid under some dry leaves.
With a cry she bounded to her feet, no small task with her wrists tied with hemp at the small of her back, and headed down the slope of the vale, running in the direction of the altar. She got a hundred yards or so before she stumbled, stopped, and whirled around to look at me with terror-stricken eyes. “Nick! I’m not leaving you!”
“Just run!” I kicked out again at John but missed him completely and wound up just sliding in the pine needles and leaf litter on my back.
John turned to face me, the knife back in his hand. His eyes were wild and determined. He pinned me to the ground, his hand on my chest. For once, his face showed real rage, pulsing and inhuman. He lashed out at my face, but stopped just short of slitting my throat. “It doesn’t matter,” he hissed in my face. “I don’t need the other Lucifer. I have you, Prince. With you, I can Ascend. I can be God.”
“Fuck you, you Almighty bastard,” I spat.
He cut me for that, a quick slice across my right cheek. The jagged wound burned. His eyes turned maniacal at the sight of my dark blue Lucifer blood, and he lunged like a hungry animal and snagged my head by the hair. My hands were still tied, the cross was still burning me, and he was too close to kick. I was helpless to resist him. All I could do was suffer and moan while he licked at the blood drooling down my face and neck. He licked and sucked at the wound on my face and I grunted when his teeth teased the uneven edges. I tried to jerk away, but my head might as well have been stuck in a steel vice for all the good it did.
“You are powerful,” he said between disgusting smacks of his lips. His lips and cheeks were rouged with my blood. He looked like a man who had been gorging on wild blackberries.
“Fuck you,” I growled through my gritted teeth. “I hope I give you indigestion, you fucker.”
He ripped my head backward and bit the wound in my cheek. My pain-filled screams echoed across the vale and made Vivian stumble and fall to her knees. She managed to right herself and climb back to her feet, but when she turned and looked at me, I could tell she was too terrified to go on, no matter how much I wanted her to. She hovered in the clearing, trying desperately to decide what to do.
Meanwhile, John drew back, my blood pouring from his mouth, and clunked my head back against the trunk of the tree. The sight of him sighing with satisfaction swam in front of me in a surreal miasma of blood and pain. “Ah, Christ, Nicholas, you taste like God…”
I spat in his face, not that it did much good, he was so lost in his own reverie.
He smiled as he drew his athame back and looked me over again, a little like a hungry child trying to decide which part of the Thanksgiving turkey to carve first. Finally, his fingers dug into my right thigh with an obscene amount of strength and he used the knife to slice my jeans open. I flinched even though he hadn’t cut my leg. “Hold still. If you jerk, I’ll cut you too deeply and you’re likely to bleed to death too quickly.”
“I’m going to bleed to death anyway.”
“I have power. I can anesthetize the places where we’ll begin so you feel no pain, and I can cauterize each wound, so you live through it much longer.” He squeezed the muscle of my thigh. “I can be merciful, Nicholas. But not if you resist me.”
I grunted at the pain spiraling through me. The bite hurt, but the cross hurt more—so, so much more—and my breath was coming in only shallow gasps now. His hand on my thigh grew almost painfully warm, and then it felt like someone had shot a massive dose of Novocaine into my leg. I couldn’t feel anything, and I was aware of only a dull, tugging sensation when he sliced into my thigh with the athame, quickly and professionally, slicing off a thin piece of raw, quivering red muscle that he then licked off the side of his knife the way you slice off pieces of an apple, my blood drooling out the corners of his mouth.
I started to laugh then, couldn’t help myself. I felt the situation warranted it. “Here lies Nick Englebrecht, eaten alive by the Arcana…”
“I’m glad you’re finding this amusing,” he said as he munched on that piece of me, his eyes glinting faintly with my stolen power. “Whatever you need to get through this…” He lowered the knife to take another slice of Nick du jour when I heard a faint roaring in my ears. I thought maybe I was on the verging of passing out, unable to handle the stress of any further injuries, but then my bleary eyes centered on Vivian, standing at the top of the knoll that led down to the vale where the altar was located. She’d come back for me.
She’d managed to burn away her binds and now stood there in her tattered jeans and red halter top, her arms and face extended to the sky the way Morgana did during her morning sun worship. But she wasn’t worshipping the sun… or the gradually rising moon… or anything else for that matter. Her head was tilted back, her eyes closed, her fiery red hair billowing out behind her like the licking flames of an inferno. She was casting, and she looked every inch the witch in that moment.
The buzzing was growing louder around her, a kind of angry hiss slowly growing in volume and intensity. A darkness like a halo began to surround her entire body. I thought at first that it was smoke or shadows. Then I recognized it for what it truly was: Insects.
Swarms of insects were surrounding her—smaller ones that were joining with other smaller ones to create much larger ones. The density and darkness of the swarms varied, and I realized that, consciously or not, Vivian was summoning her familiars. Bees, wasps, hornets, flies, yellow jackets, ticks, mosquitoes, even huge, rolling waves of fire ants and copious numbers of beetles and centipedes were swarming over her feet in a shining black carpet. Together they were creating a dense, dark storm that nature had never intended exist—anything and everything the region had to offer up. They hovered around Vivian, patiently waiting for their marching orders. The collective noise they made was enough to make the ground vibrate under me and my back molars ache.
John recognized the immediate danger as well. He stopped shaving off pieces of my flesh to turn around and face the daemon-witch and her army of familiars.
Vivian’s eyes flashed open and her head lolled forward. Her eyes were bright white, with neither irises nor pupils, like a woman gone blind. She opened her mouth but no sound came out, just a yawn of power as she breathed out her magick. She lowered her arms and swept them forward.
Then the black swarm of death was upon us both.
John screamed.
It was a teeth-grinding noise, like someone was ripping the meat from his bones, like he was being turned inside out. I didn’t know, of course. I couldn’t see him—he was just a moving, panicked figured tarred a glossy black with the insects crawling all over him, two wild white eyes rolling in his head. His arms flailed, beat at the suit of insects he wore, but when that brought no relief, he dropped to the ground and rolled, making a shockingly loud crunching noise as he crushed millions of his insect attackers. Millions more flew to replace their fallen comrades, and very soon I saw John’s efforts growing feeble. He lashed out, kicked, cursed, tried to spell his way loose, but I could tell he was losing the battle. He was also losing mass, seeming to shrink as the insects collectively stripped him of every edible morsel on his body.
At last, he stopped moving and lay in the grass, making a low, groaning noise that continued until his vocal chords had been completely consumed by the legions of flies crawling over them. When the billions of insects began to flit away, I saw that only shiny white bones remained, picked clean of every soft part. The skeleton twisted one final time, not quite dead yet, and the empty white jaws clacked open on a scream that John no longer had the power to emit.
I breathed in and out, in and out, vibrating with a terror I hadn’t felt in years. It took me a moment to realize I was hoping he would die. I was hoping his suffering would end, which was pretty funny, considering what he had been doing to me.
The wasps and bees descended on me next, filing my ears with their savage roar, crawling over my eyes. The ants and centipedes cascaded over my legs and up my body. Every inch of my body felt alive with tiny scuttling legs and tiny feelers. I closed my eyes and didn’t breathe. I didn’t do anything but hold absolutely still while my entire body felt like it was receiving warm pulses of energy. When the insects finally crawled or flew away, I realized the weight of them had collapsed the cross stuck in the earth. I could move again, and, even better than that, I saw the black, bleeding gouge in my thigh was replaced by a thick white scar. Vivian had generously fed her magick into me, to heal and revive me. Within seconds, I felt twice as strong, strong enough to snap the hemp binding my wrists. I felt almost ready to climb to my feet.
Vivian jogged toward me. Her eyes were a piercing sapphire once more, more like our father’s eyes, and the moment she reached me, she dropped to her knees and threw her arms around my neck. “Nick… Nick… did I do well? Did I do really well?”
“Yes, Vivian,” I said, gathering her tight in my arms, my eyes set on the skeleton lying so bloodlessly in the burned grass, “You did really, really well.”
I leaned against a sycamore tree and lit a cigarette, the glowing ember the only light in the dark of the night forest. A full harvest moon was riding high over the treetops, but its light barely penetrated the canopy. I realized, somewhat despondently, that this was my very last cigarette. Vivian and I shared it before starting back toward the colony.
Yes, I know it would have been more prudent to have gone in the opposite direction, away from danger, but I also knew that Mulberry Grove eventually gave out to a fifty-thousand acre national park about five miles west of here. If we went that way, we were likely to stumble blindly through the woods for days before we were rescued, and neither of us were survivalists. We needed the Jeep to get back to civilization—or, barring that—just a road where we might hitch a ride back to Blackwater.
“What if they’re waiting for us?” Vivian asked, walking beside me and clutching my arm.
I’d stumbled a few times in the dark, once over some fallen trees, but so far, I’d stayed upright. Vivian’s healing magick had done good work on all my injuries, and her hand on my arm continued to feed me the strength I needed, as well as the comfort we both craved. I knew if we stayed on this route, we’d reach the colony soon. Already, I could seen some dim lights a mile or so ahead, through the trees.
I’d found a half-eaten 3 Musketeers bar in my jeans pocket, imagine that, a little melty but still edible. I divided it in half and gave the bigger half to Vivian. “No, they’re gone. No chanting.”
“Are you sure?” she said, chewing slowly and meditatively on the chocolate.
“If they were, we’d be writhing around the leaf litter right now.”
“I suppose you’re right.” I watched her eyes as they darted frantically around the forest. An owl hooted from up in the boughs of a pine tree, and something unseen flitted over the dry leaves at our feet. City folks at heart, every sound made us flinch. The moonlight was growing stronger by the hour, and I could see there were lines in the corners of Vivian’s eyes that I had never noticed before, and a streak of silvery grey in her hair that I knew hadn’t existed before tonight, but I chose not to say anything about it. She looked older to me, harder, and now she sported a witch’s streak. The price of magick, I thought.
