Through the fire, p.24
Through the Fire, page 24
He fought it, but others didn't. Couldn't. A few actually ran, then shrieked as the diner doors slammed shut in front of them. "Not that way." Nick gestured toward the back of the restaurant with one hand, the other clenched like he was trying to keep the doors closed. "Chris, help."
"What do you need?" There was nothing out in the parking lot besides cars and a handful of people heading toward the front door. Before Nick could answer, he was at the door, wedging it shut, yelling for the cute waiter to bring the keys. The waiter yelled back, clearly thinking they'd lost their minds, and for a bad moment it struck Chris that he and Nick were both visibly armed young white men a handful of miles from Columbine. Yeah, he couldn't blame the waiter for flipping out. "Just get out! Get everybody out!" He got the door jammed shut and began pulling the shades down, clipping them in place where they could be. The diner became a lot less airy and friendly with the shades drawn. By the time he returned to Nick, his brother had both hands extended, power wobbling visibly through the air.
"There's something out there," Nick grated. "It wants in. It wants—"
The windows exploded inward, most of the glass caught by the drawn shades, although a few of them blew in so hard the shades shredded or ripped free, spraying and raining shards into the room. Chris caught his breath, about to ask a stupid question, when the first of the things flowed over the broken glass, and all the stupid questions were answered.
He'd never seen a demon, not as far as he knew, so his certainty that that was a demon was arguably unfounded. The first of them was a sleek thing with oily claws, with blackness where the eyes belonged, although it turned its head like it could see. Then it jumped, and if Chris had doubted what it was before that, it didn't do something normal like tear into the diner patron it landed on. It sank into her, disappearing like it had never been. She went rigid, then screamed, but not a strong sound, just a thin wail of pain and fear. The next demon took another customer the same way, and then there were too many to count, too many to see.
Chris grabbed holy water from inside his coat, trying to count the vials by feel and hoping it would work as well against demons as it did against vampires. They reminded him of vamps, a little. Something about how they moved, something about their sightless eyes. He vaulted a table to pour holy water down the first victim's screaming throat, and almost wished he hadn't. Her eyes bugged and she began to cough, clawing at her own skin so hard it raised welts, then bloody streaks. But between that, and between the screams, she rolled over and vomited the demon back out. It reared up, clearly nowhere near dead enough, and he poured another vial of holy water, and then a third, onto it.
It died then, mostly. Turned into a feeble bubbling ooze of goo, anyway, and that would have to do. He was never gonna stop them with the vials, though, and shot a frantic look toward Nicky. There were what looked like hundreds of the demons in the restaurant now, crawling across the floor, seizing the customers who weren't fast enough to get away. Several of them died as Chris watched, absorbed by the things attacking them. One of them fought so hard the demon took her over, but didn't seem to be able to drain her life the way the others were doing. She staggered to her feet, twisted and obviously in pain, but also visibly stronger than the unbodied things around her.
There were a few others like that, becoming hosts instead of just victims, and Chris didn't know which was worse. He drew a knife and cut one of the weaker ones away as it jumped at him, and the steel at least made it flinch. The first of the embodied demons reached Nick. Chris let out a hoarse yell, and his brother's hand snapped out, catching the woman by her throat. She screamed, a wretched painful sound, and Nick's gaze turned toward her slowly, like she was a bug pinned to a board. Or worse, maybe, like she was a snack. Chris yelled, "Nicky," hopelessly, and for a moment Nick's gaze came to him. "Let her go."
As soon as he said it, it sounded like a really stupid idea. Nick dragged her closer, anyway, staring down at her with his jaw clenched and his neck corded, the strain visible enough that for a heartbeat Chris really thought he would unhinge his jaw and bite her head off or something.
Instead he clawed his free hand against her chest and pulled.
Demon essence—Chris didn't have another word for it—stretched under his hand, then sank into his fingers, slowly at first, then with increasing speed, until suddenly the woman gasped and Nick dropped her, panting. She scrambled away, running for the back, and Nick stretched his hand out to grab another one of the half-demon humans. This time the extraction went faster, but his grin went nastier, his eyes darker. Chris said, "Nicky," again, but there wasn't a hell of a lot he could do. Nick could stop the things, and he couldn't.
Instead, around a cold sick feeling in his stomach, he started looking for a way to stop Nick. The unbodied demons started pooling toward Nicky, like he'd become a vortex, too strong to avoid, and the newly-taken humans launched themselves at him en masse, obviously trying to break him down. From the corner of his eye, Chris saw him grab two of the host humans at once, and watched the darkness from them flood into Nick before he released the shaken diners.
"Can't." Nicky's voice, harsh with effort, broke through his search. "Too many. Chris—" The last word had a note of warning, and Chris spun, barely avoiding one of the unbodied things as it threw itself toward him. Nicky's howl of rage rose, splitting the air, and a burst of power slammed through the room.
Demon essence ripped out of the hosts, leaving them to collapse in screams, but alive. For a heartbeat Chris thought the crap that had filled them would just be obliterated, but at the end of that heartbeat it snapped back, much farther back than it had started, sinking into Nicky. His skin lit up from the inside with black power, with edges of fire and eyes, way too much like Saboac, and he fell into a pool of goo, swirling unbodied demon grossness that hadn't had the decency to just die or disappear when his power had smashed the diner.
He croaked, "Chris," and Chris stopped caring about getting any of that crap on himself, it would come off or it wouldn't, it would take him or it wouldn't, but he couldn't leave Nicky to just fight the stuff off on his own. He hit the floor on his knees, grabbing Nick's shoulders, then his face. His brother's skin was cold, clammy, nasty, like it had forgotten how to human. "Nick, come on, c'mon, Nicky, stick with me, all right? Stay with me, I can get you outta here but you gotta stay with me, okay? Come on, Nicky. It's you, right? It's you in there. Come on, buddy. Gimme a sign, okay? It's me, man. It's Chris. I got you."
Nick went, "Hhh," a little sound Chris had heard plenty of times when they were kids. It gave him just enough time to throw himself sideways before Nick hurled, although it wasn't the spew of demon essence he hoped it would be, just regular old barf. A look of revulsion crossed his face, and Chris had to laugh. Maybe so he wouldn't scream or cry, but he'd take it, whatever the reason.
"Yeah, that's right, man. I was trying to get you grounded with food but I guess puking will do. Okay? Okay?"
Nick barely nodded, and Chris got himself under his brother's arm before Nick full-on passed out. "C'mon. C'mon, let's go, let's get back to Lucille, let's get out of here, buddy, okay? Okay. We're good. We're good."
They got more than halfway down the block before Nick collapsed into a dead weight who clearly wasn't going anywhere under his own power.
CHAPTER 17
Getting a dead weight into a fireman's carry from half standing was slightly—slightly—easier than from the ground, and it was only half a block. Chris told himself that about a thousand times in the half block. He didn’t want to haul Nicky's heavy-ass self for half a block, but he could, because it was better than any alternative he had open to him. He was gonna cut Nick’s legs off later, though, because two hundred and twenty pounds of little brother slung across his shoulders was way the hell more than any reasonable person should be expected to carry. Nick had been a nerd when he left for college, for God’s sake. He should have stayed that way, a skinny lanky kid who didn’t turn into a dead weight slab of muscle and bone.
Never mind that a dead weight slab of muscle and bone was better than Nick getting totally absorbed by—or absorbing—any more demons. He'd stopped. He'd heard Chris and he'd stopped and if that was the case, Chris couldn’t give up on him, so he could carry him for a hundred blocks if he had to. His head—his nose—hurt so badly from the extra weight that it was almost funny, if crying was funny, and every single etched-out word of thought and stab of pain and wave of emotion carried him another step back toward the van parked in the church lot.
It wasn’t until he got there that he wondered what the hell he was doing. Lucille was not gonna cut it. Vans were never gonna keep demons out. Chris shot a despairing glance at the church, which at least ought to provide some kind of protection, except Nick couldn’t cross the threshold.
Still, maybe being at the threshold would be better than in a stupid VW van. “C’mon, Nicky.” As if saying c’mon would make his brother any less of a dead weight, but it helped him get the last couple dozen yards across the parking lot. He staggered to the steps, turned, and dropped onto them like he weighed twice what he usually did.
More than, actually, since Nicky outweighed him. His brother slid off his back, thudding onto the porch, and Chris went, “Woo,” straightening as his weight changed and he felt suddenly and unexpectedly light. He was sweating like a horse and needed a drink of water, but the van seemed impossibly far away and he didn’t want to leave Nick exposed on the steps even for a minute.
It took a very long time to grasp that Nicky was on the steps of the church.
A jolt of panic and relief sent Chris to his feet, not really thinking. He stepped over Nick, tried the church door, and found it unlocked, mumbling, “Thank you,” to…he didn’t know who. God, maybe, not that he generally considered himself on speaking terms with any celestial beings.
Except Saboac, obviously, and now a bunch of frickin' demons, he guessed. He muttered a curse, propped the church door open with a chair he found inside, and dragged his brother in before closing the door again. He didn’t know if ‘demon-infected but unconscious’ was a holy ground loophole, or if carrying Nick across the threshold had made the difference, but it didn’t really matter. Being inside a holy place had to be better than not.
Turned out there wasn’t anybody there to ask about possessions, anyway. Just leaving a church unlocked and unattended seemed somewhere between stupid and appropriate, like, he was pretty sure Jesus or somebody would approve, but also it seemed like a good way to get stuff stolen or wrecked.
Not that there was all that much in this place to steal or wreck. Pews, yeah, but the interior walls were plain white, kind of bright and refreshing. There was a large, but very simple dark wood cross at the far end above a pulpit and what Chris guessed was an altar. There wasn’t much else to steal. Whatever kind of church this one was, they apparently mostly went for the ‘no graven idols’ thing, and thought that random people in search of shelter should be able to find it in their place of worship. Chris was grateful as hell.
He sat down hard on the floor and dropped his head. "What're we gonna do, Nicky?"
Unsurprisingly, Nick didn't answer, and for a few seconds the only real sound in the church was Chris's own tired breathing, louder than Nick's. The walls must have been thicker than they looked, blocking out the sounds of evening traffic. Either that or it was just that serenity churches sometimes had, like they actually were a shelter from the outside world. Shelter was good. Shelter was great. Too bad Chris needed a god damn miracle.
A sharp laugh jerked through him. Well, he guessed he was in the right place for miracles. "Hey, God, you wanna…" For some reason, the faint humor of it fled, and he mumbled, "You wanna help out some? I mean, I'm not really into the whole God thing, but I guess if there's demons and shit there ought to be a god, so…"
Even he recognized that wasn't much of a prayer. With a worried, half guilty look at his brother, he got up and went to the front of the church, looking beyond the crucifix, but at the joining of the ceiling and wall beyond it. Somebody had done a nice job of lining those joins with sculpted moulding, concealing the actual join. There was a word for that stuff, like baseboards except for on the ceiling. Nick and his big stupid brain would know the word.
“I don’t really know who I’m supposed to talk to,” Chris growled toward the ceiling. “I don’t know if you go straight to the top when you need something from God or if you gotta go through, like, middle management first. I don’t think I’ve got time to Karen my way to the top, though. I kinda need…”
His shoulders rounded and he looked back toward Nick, still unconscious back by the door. “I need help. My brother needs help. He’s a good kid, God, or whoever the hell I’m—sorry, whoever the fuck—I’m talking to, but I can’t…this is above my pay grade, guys. I can’t stop a demon horde. I can’t protect him from that. I don’t know what…” He sighed and knelt, not so much because of the supplicant-to-God thing as he was just frickin' tired, like, bone-weary and beat down. Sat on his heels and bent forward, hands under his forehead to support himself on the little step that led up to the altar or whatever it was. His jeans cut into the backs of his knees, slowing circulation immediately, but even so, he thought he could probably just fall asleep there.
Which wouldn’t do him or Nicky any good, so he shoved back onto his heels, gaze fixed on the step in front of him now. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask for. I don’t know who I’m supposed to ask. But if there’s anybody listening, angels, saints, gods, whatever…please help me. Help me help my little brother.”
He waited a minute, then gave another sharp little laugh, loud enough to bounce off the walls this time. "Yeah, okay, I don't know what I expected there. St. Peter to waltz in through the door or something, I guess. Fuck." He got up, shoved his hand through his hair, and went back to Nick, who was still asleep. Unconscious. Part of him wanted to try waking him up, but there was a whole potential host of things wrong with waking him up, too, and maybe Nick knew it. Maybe he was just trying to stay out of the world until Chris figured out something to do. His breathing was steady, anyway, and his color didn't look bad, so short of going to a hospital, which could be full of potential demon hosts, Chris didn't know what the hell else to do but leave him on the church floor and try to come up with a plan.
The fleeting thought to call Jake or the Geography Girls crossed his mind, but none of them were close enough to help right now, and explaining the scene in the diner—which would probably end up on the goddamn evening news, or social media, now that he thought about it—was more than Chris thought he could cope with.
"'cause it's a lot easier to deal with it all myself," he muttered to Nick. "Super good coping skills there, right? Or whatever you'd call it. Using my support network." After a minute, he did text Jake, and then the girls, although by the time he finished he wondered why he hadn't just used a group chat.
Four or five messages later, Dakota asked if he was updating everybody individually, and then a new group chat came up with "Chris is an idiot, guys, he's talking to all of us, let's just congeal."
Consolidate, Jake wrote.
You knew what I ducking meant, didn't you?
*FUCKING
Cheyenne came up as a series of dots that became I just got you put back together, Chris, why are you getting Nick beat up now
Never mind why. Where are you? I'm in the truck. That was Jake, and Chris exhaled a little stress. It didn't really matter that he couldn't do anything. The fact that he would come helped.
Little church on, lemme check maps… Chris flipped to a map app as the church door opened. He shoved the phone in his pocket, scrambling to his feet with his hands extended. A tallish white guy, good-looking, sandy-haired, wearing a good suit with a complicated belt under a long, expensive coat, came in, his eyebrows rising as Chris stepped protectively in front of Nick. "Look, I'm sorry, my brother's hurt, I know this isn't a great place to have him lying, but I couldn't figure out where else to go—"
"I know. You called me."
"What?" Chris felt for his phone, wondering if he'd butt-dialed somebody, and the guy grinned. Bright grin, friendly and welcoming.
"No, not that way. That way." He pointed up, and Chris looked up like there would be a cell tower there or something.
Obviously there wasn't, and half a second later the penny dropped with a rush of disbelief. Chris twisted toward the altar at the front of the church, then double-took at the guy. "No fucking way."
"I think the response 'way!' is several decades out of date, but…'way.' You said your brother needed help. That demons are…above your pay grade? You can call me Ari." The big guy—he was almost Nick's size, but paler—crouched at Nick's side, studying him without touching him. "What happened?"
"Uh." Nerves, part disbelief and part hope, ran through Chris, making his skin tingle. "I. How."
Ari glanced up, the grin returning with a crook this time. He had perfectly symmetrical features, so symmetrical he didn't look quite real. Heavy eyebrows, but not too heavy, like he kept them under control. Deep-set blue eyes and a straight nose that reminded Chris for the first time in several minutes that he'd been punched in the face recently. The grin was disarming, easy to trust, and both the first and the last thing Chris wanted to do was trust it. "You prayed. I heard."
"How do I believe you're—"
"An emissary of God? Well, for one thing, you're supposed to take that on faith, Christopher R—"
"Shut the fuck up."
Ari had an amazing fucking laugh that rolled right across the church. If he started singing, Chris thought it might sound like actual choirs, and hoped he didn't. "Faith is not our strong suit, I see. Very well. Will the halo do? The wings…are hard on suits." He brightened as he spoke, not a ring above his head, but a glow of power that spilled all around him, glimmering at the edges like starlight. It surrounded him, not quite touching even his suit, and faded in a stretch across his back like it encircled something Chris couldn't see. Just before it got too bright to bear, it winked out again, leaving the frickin' angel crouched at Nick's side, his expression one of amused expectation.
