Child, p.38
Child, page 38
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“Not a big fan of all the good guys being trapped in a small space like this,” Jason said. “Too easy to flood the space with poison gas and end the whole thing.”
“Who said we’re all good guys?” Carter asked.
Jason looked at him.
Carter smiled, watching the doors.
“I need them alive,” Samantha said as the elevator continued to chug.
“I’d certainly like to be alive, at the end of this,” Jason said.
“She wasn’t talking about you, genius,” Carter said. “She needs to interrogate at least one of the twins before I end them.”
“How many demons are we talking about up here?” Sam asked.
“Could be none. Could be just the two of them. Could be a whole pack of high-levels.”
“Could be Nuri and Kjarr,” Samantha said softly. Carter glanced at her.
“They don’t slum it like this.”
“You don’t know that,” Samantha said.
“You think they’d come within a mile of anyone who they knew was plotting to attack Abby?” Carter asked.
“You assume they knew,” Jason said.
“They’d know,” Samantha said.
“And they wouldn’t warn you?” Sam asked.
“They’re demons,” Carter said. “Don’t ever forget that.”
The elevator dinged, like a dying insect, and the doors cranked open, clicking and sticking, and somewhere a hydraulic cylinder hissed as it lost pressure. Carter stepped through and Samantha, Jason, and Sam looked at each other for a moment. It felt very much like a last stand, like they would never get out again.
“Creepy,” Jason said. Samantha nodded.
“Yeah.”
Jason shook himself.
“Let’s end this.”
Sam was watching the room in front of them.
It was just as Samantha remembered it.
<><><>
Two great desks sat at the far end of a cluttered room. The lights were low, orange, and hung in broken fixtures over a tangled mix of broken furniture. It smelled like moldy food and something Sam didn’t want to put his finger on quite too confidently. Samantha was wound all the way tight, but Carter stood loosely facing the empty space. Sam breathed a quick sigh of relief when nothing but the two desks was occupied, but then the occupants of those two desks drew his full attention and he got nervous again.
They were exactly how Carter and Samantha had described them, but without saying exactly how grotesque they were. They were huge, three-hundred pounds apiece, easy, built like classic blue collar guys, meatpackers or dockworkers, men who were used to throwing their weight around and using their physical stature to intimidate the people around them. But nothing about them felt right. Like the scent, his brain dodged from actually putting words to why they were off, but it was something about the color of them, the shape, the way their eyes moved.
And then they stood up.
The two demons moved the same way, both leaning to the inside as they shifted weight onto an arm and pushed themselves to their feet, then the swaggering back to center and leaning over their ratty, abused desks to watch as Carter came into the room.
“You’re accused of a crime,” Carter announced, stepping forward. Sam followed, letting Samantha lead to one side as Jason eased to the other, avoiding broken chairs and the skeletons of wooden crates.
“You getting soft?” the one on the right sneered.
“You brought muscle,” the other one said.
“Skeeeny muscle,” said the first. They walked around the desks, one working the knuckles of a fist into the opposite palm, the other crossing meaty arms across a dirty white shirt.
“I brought witnesses,” Carter said, moving down a relatively clear path through the center of the room. Sam took out his obsidian glasses and put them on, slipping away easily to be able to take in the whole room at once, while he continued to pick his way through after Samantha. “If they should choose to pursue a claim with you after I’m done, I see no reason to stop them,” Carter continued.
“You back at heel, little girl?” the second one asked. The first one huffed.
“You two need to get out more,” Carter said, coming to stand in front of them. “She’s going to stand and ask you questions while her sin-eater over there dismantles you bit by bit. And I’m going to watch.” He turned his head to look at Jason. “First to talk gets to die?”
“Works for me,” Jason said. He and Carter drew at the same time and the twins looked at each other. Samantha had Lahn out. Sam stopped feeling so silly for having stood outside the other buildings and started feeling silly being here, now. Samantha tugged at him. Game faces. She needed him.
“You said there was a crime,” the first one said.
“You attacked my psychic,” Carter said, his voice sounding strange now.
“Did not,” the second one said. The first one shifted his feet and the second one looked at him. “We didn’t.”
“Do not lie to me,” Carter said, his shoulders broadening as he took a double-handed grip on Diana. Something felt weird. The world was stretching in strange directions in a dimension it felt like Sam had just missed up to now, and the scratching, the scrabbling, the dark clicking and chirping, it was close now. Samantha tried to calm him, but Sam was distracted. Something was wrong.
“We don’t owe you an explanation,” the first of the twins said, dropping his hands to his sides and shuffling his shoulders like an old boxer.
“You owe me everything,” Carter howled.
“You can kill us or not,” the second one said. “You don’t get to play like that, boy. We’re going to see you on the other side.”
Diana trembled in Carter’s hands the way a lightning rod must just before the strike. A roar like a tornado coming down out of the sky peeled through the room and a door flew open somewhere. Demons poured into the room and Samantha and Jason were in motion just to defend themselves.
Sam was dumbstruck.
“You. Will. Not. Have. Her,” Carter said as the bright sheen of metal in his hands began to alter. It radiated and sucked in light at once, and Sam’s entire world reoriented to the length of Diana’s edge, like a compass to a magnet. She was black, but not like light failed to bounce off of her. She was black like she had opened a hole into the void, into nothing, and was pushing that absolute emptiness back into this realm. She was still a sword, still a shape that he could see, but she was…
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t move.
He was only vaguely aware of Samantha trying to get his attention, to the chaos of demons in the room, the Jason tearing through them with his giddy brand of glee and of Samantha trying to keep them away from Sam.
Like windchimes in an earthquake.
Carter was in motion, teeth bared, eyes manic, ashing demons without so much as touching them. His feet flew under him as though they bore no weight at all, across garbage and jagged wood like house slippers on grass. Everywhere around him demons fell. Ash slid and drifted across the floor. Nothing could stand before him. Sam worried for Samantha. For Jason. Nothing could live before that great blade.
Diana.
The first of the twins put his hands up in front of himself, sneering, defiant, and fell to ash on the floor. Diana came up again and the second of the twins turned away, looking for escape.
“Carter!”
Diana froze, inches from finishing her work, from ending the fat, gibbering demon. The room was silent. Sam had no idea when that had happened.
Samantha walked up the main aisle, eyes casting information to Jason that Sam was too wildly distracted to decipher.
Diana was cooling. The brain-piercing darkness faded and then was gone. Sam shuddered and sat on the floor.
“You are avenged,” Samantha said softly. “I need him.”
Sam watched with disembodied shock as Carter allowed Diana to droop all the way to the floor. He nodded like a schoolboy and trudged back to sit on the dirty floor next to Sam. Samantha looked at Jason as the remaining twin gathered himself for a new fight.
“He’s all yours.”
<><><>
It was a sad day when torture became routine. Jason didn’t even need tools to do it; Anadidd’na seemed to be built as a weapon specifically against earth-plane demons. Which shouldn’t have surprised her, and yet it did. Swordmaker had a twisted sense of humor.
Sam and Carter seemed to be recovering nicely somewhere behind her. She hadn’t really been there the last time he’d gone into a demonic rage, but having been the conduit of that much power herself, she understood his reaction. Sam, though, had caught her off-guard. He’d never reacted at all to her righteous fury and she’d expected the same reaction to the rage, but it had distorted his sense of reality badly enough that she’d worried she was going to lose him again.
Jude screamed again, and Samantha judged that they were about at the point where she needed him to be. She pulled the wand from her back pocket and motioned Jason aside. She held it up where Jude could see it.
“You remember this?”
His eyes were animal, rolling in between blinks, and his human form was almost completely gone. It made her queasy, knowing that she had taught Jason how to do that. She stood taller, commanding more authority.
“You will speak to me.”
“You are marked, Renouch.”
The name the demons had given her.
“That may be, but it’s not what I came here to discuss,” she said. She pulled the hairpin out of its pocket and quickly twisted her hair up, stabbing the pin through it and latching it. The link to Sam severed, but that was secondary. She didn’t want an audience for this conversation. Carter, behind her, grunted, and she turned to find a bottle flying at her head. She bent time to catch it, opening it and sampling it by smell.
Yellow placard, reduced jellyfish, angel hair, among other things.
Mute juice.
Expensive, but worth it right now.
She poured the million dollar potion on the floor at Jude’s feet.
He understood.
She spoke the words in angeltongue over the wand to force truth through it, then pressed it to Jude’s throat.
“How did you find him?”
He gagged.
She waited.
He gagged again.
She waited.
“We waited until the psychics were both gone,” he said. She shook her head.
“You should have known that that wasn’t skirting the rules by enough,” she said. “How did you find him?”
Those eyes.
Demons hated forced truth. They liked to play with it, to shade it, to add just the right flavor of deceit to it to manipulate a result. The wand forced a response that was completely forthright, and she’d met demons for whom such statements were physically uncomfortable.
Which appeared to be the case for Jude.
He twisted his head away and Jason menaced him.
“You answer everything, and then you cross just like he did,” Jason said, motioning to the considerable pile of black ash behind him. Samantha had underestimated the twins, but Jude had deflated without Babe. Much of their power had been interwoven into their centuries together and, no matter how much Jude wished it otherwise, he needed Babe in order to tap that accumulated power.
“How did you find the boy?” she asked again sternly.
Jude’s eyes swung to her and he regained a measure of his own self again.
“How do you find the ocean?” he asked. “You walk downhill long enough.”
“I’m not looking for riddles,” she said, pressing the wand harder against his throat. “Tell me.”
“He distorts the world. You can’t see it and you can’t feel it, but we can.”
“Who is we?” Samantha asked.
“Me. Babe. Your darling Nuri. The skinny little waif you bound. All of us.”
“What is he?” she asked.
Jude sneered at her. The blood on the floor around him was beginning to ash. It was forming long black streaks under her feet.
“He’s nothing you’ll ever understand.”
“Try me,” she said.
It frightened her that he could say she wouldn’t understand, even under the wand’s influence. He licked his lips, eying Jason.
“Explain sunlight to the dust on the bottom of the ocean,” he said.
“He’s awfully literary for a longshoreman,” Jason said.
“Did you just say literary?” Samantha asked. Jason shrugged.
“Why do you want him?” Samantha asked, turning back to Jude.
His face stiffened and he looked at Jason again.
“Power,” he said.
“Say more,” she said, drawing Lahn. “You’re trying my patience, and Lahn is jealous that Anadidd’na is getting to have all the fun.”
“Power,” he said, drawing the syllables out, blood and spittle flicking from his lips. “He’s a great big battery that some big bad somewhere is going to plug into their power grid and party until he tips over dead.”
“How?” Samantha asked. He shrugged.
“We just want the cash.”
“How?” Samantha asked again.
“I don’t know,” he said emphatically, tipping his chin up at her.
“Who does?” she asked. His nostril twitched at her.
“Transactions are anonymous.”
“Who would know?”
There was a moment of quiet as he met her eyes.
“The ones who were there last time.”
This almost knocked her backwards.
She knew what he was talking about. She’d read about it. The siphoning darkness. It had happened a couple of times before, demons taking over vast quantities of space, manipulating enormous numbers of humans. Usually it involved human sacrifice on mind-boggling scale. Human history glossed over it, yes, it was bad, but people are bad and we’re all better now.
“A child does that?” she asked, thinking out loud. Jude’s eyes sparkled at her.
“If you know what you’re doing with it.”
“Him,” she said quietly. “They aren’t going to stop coming after him, are they?”
He shook his head.
“Say it,” she said, her voice loud and sharp in the sudden quietness of the room. Carter had figured it out, too.
“No,” Jude spat. “Kill him.” There was a leer. “If you don’t want the trouble, put a bullet through his squishy little brain.”
She swallowed.
Stood, letting her arm drop back to her side.
“You tell them, when you get back over there. You tell anyone who cares. He’s with me. You guys, none of you are going to get him.” She took a step back. “E’la o’na led’dd.”
She turned her back, giving Jason a quick nod, and she heard the quick transition from growl to falling ash.
<><><>
Samantha was leaning against Gwen’s front bumper. Jason got Sam and Carter squared away - she’d had to tell him several times that she was sure Sam was going to be okay before he’d believed her; he’d never seen Sam go quite that wonky - and then came lean next to her.
“What now?” he asked her after a minute. The sun was coming up and he was struck, once again, by how much he hated this city. Dawn was a traditional turning point in fights with most of the things his dad had taught him to kill, and the city made it ugly, just a return to the previous day’s smell and noise, without being able to see the sun for a while, yet.
She was staring off at the horizon like she could see it through the buildings.
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded so far away. And so sad. He shifted, looking at the warehouses they’d spent the night clearing out. Something called to mind the dormitories and their hellish playgrounds.
“So that’s what did it to you, hmm?”
“What?” she asked, still distant.
“I get it,” he said. “I do. It’s messed up.”
She followed his gaze and abruptly looked at the ground as she figured out what he was talking about.
“I had a very bright-line education on the difference between light and dark and where sex was on that line.”
He nodded.
She’d given him examples. In her halting, shady-details kind of way, she’d tried to tell him. And he’d told her he’d seen it all.
Not even remotely.
He wished again that he’d been able to talk her into letting him do the floor on his own.
But still.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “we’re not angels and we’re not demons. We’re not light and we’re not dark. We’re gray. We get to choose.”
She gave him a small smile.
“You scare me when you talk like that.”
“Risk you run trying to teach me stuff. Sometimes I pick it up.”
She smiled down at her shoes now, putting her hands into her pockets. She looked back up at him again.
“You can call me Samantha. If you want. Sometimes.”
He nodded, trying to find his serious voice.
“Okay.”
She bounced her shoulders and took a breath, remembering something.
“Oh. Um. You can pick a name, too, if you want to.”
“I like Samantha fine.”
She shook her head.
“No. For yourself. You’re one of us now. You get to pick what name goes with that identity.”
He frowned.
“Who else would I be?”
She laughed, watching the toe of her boot as she played with a piece of stray gravel.
“You think Bane’s mother called him that?”
“Hope not,” Jason said. “Though it would explain some things.”
“Argo? Spake?”
“It isn’t French?”
She snorted.
“Anyway. If you want.”
He shook his head.
“Jason is fine. I don’t need to be anyone else.”
She nodded.
“Tell that to your eyeliner,” she said and he grunted. He’d forgotten.
“Is… Is Carter his real name?”
She nodded.
“Yeah. Like Elliott.”
