Authors: S. M. Schmitz
Chapter 8
Colin didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. He kept waking to make sure Anna was still lying next to him, still sleeping and dreaming and that her dreams were only
hers
. And they must have been, because he couldn’t imagine any archdemon invading her thoughts and forcing her to dream about a carnival with a Ferris wheel whose cars were made from giant shoes. Colin was a little freaked out when she made him get in one anyway, and she didn’t even pick the sturdy looking work boot: they had to sit in the espradille. He was also certain the only reason he knew it was an espradille is that he was checking on Anna in her dreams and she knew what an espradille was.
In the morning, he called Dylan and Max and asked them if they wanted to look at apartments with them. Really, Colin and Anna just needed a ride. They’d lost their car in the attack outside of the Italian restaurant. Immortals needed a different kind of help from the angels who had made deals with them: because they didn’t age, they couldn’t hold a job for a long period of time, and once the modern era hit and employers insisted on all sorts of paperwork, they often didn’t work at all. So Anna and Colin had a bank account that mysteriously never emptied, but they’d never questioned it either. But they still didn’t have a car.
Max and Dylan agreed to pick them up and look at a few places, and it was Max’s idea to check the classified ads for someone selling a car who would be willing to take cash. Getting the title transferred would be easy. Money wasn’t the only thing that mysteriously appeared in their lives when they needed it, like social security numbers and passports.
Dylan wanted to check out The Hill first, a trendy and beautiful area of the city next to the university. Colin and Max thought there were too many college kids there and didn’t want to be bothered by loud parties all the time. Colin may only
look
26, but he felt like he hadn’t acted his age in … well, almost four hundred years. They ended up finding a complex they could all agree on for no other reason than the name: that day, they signed two leases on apartments in the Devil’s Thumb subdivision of Boulder, Colorado.
Colin put a down payment on a third for Luca and called him to tell him to come sign his lease before leaving for Caracas, because there was no way they were
not
going to living in a place called Devil’s Thumb.
Luca joined them at Old Chicago’s for lunch and it was only then Colin brought up Anna’s dream and how something had awakened him just in time to feel her slip away again. Anna explained the part of her dream Colin hadn’t been able to sense for himself, the odd whirring noise, the complete blinding whiteness around her. Luca drummed his fingers nervously on the table, watching Anna uneasily.
“I know what my angel said, but maybe I shouldn’t go to Caracas right now. I shouldn’t leave with something like this going on.”
Anna protested before he could even finish speaking. “No! You have to go. We need Andrew so he can help us learn how to use this gift or it’s useless to us. And I’m positive it’s the only way to destroy these archdemons or The Angel wouldn’t have chosen this gift. Please, Luca, just go and don’t worry about me.”
The look on Luca’s face told everyone at the table that was going to be impossible. He stopped drumming his fingers and sighed, “My sweet Anna, I’ll go, but … don’t go
anywhere
on your own. Not even with another hunter. Stay with Colin. If you can stay with Colin and several other hunters, even better.”
“I was with a bunch of hunters when I was abducted the last time, remember? And I still have no clue how that happened. I can’t remember any of it.”
“
Well, that probably wasn’t the best thing to say when you’re trying to convince Luca to leave town,”
Colin told her.
“But I wasn’t with her,” Colin quickly added. “I was half a mile away.”
“
Nice save, my love,”
Anna responded.
Luca remained unconvinced.
“Besides,” Colin continued, “be quick about finding Andrew and get your ass back over here. Then we’ll have four Immortals in one city. That’s got to be some sort of record.”
Luca just shook his head. “Before this is over, we may end up with every Immortal in the world with us.”
Dylan and Max got fidgety with that pronouncement, but it’s not like Colin was terribly happy about the idea either. Congregating all of the Immortals in one place, wherever that place might be, would be one step short of Armageddon and who wouldn’t be nervous about that?
After lunch, Luca returned to the hospital and Dylan and Max took the O’Conners car shopping. Anna tried not to look incredibly bored as they threw around words like horsepower and torque. They were at their fourth stop when Anna decided she’d had enough. “I liked the white one.”
Colin and Dylan stopped talking and gaped at her as if simultaneously asking her if she was really choosing a car based on its color and not performance capabilities. “The white one, Colin. We’ve had good luck with Toyotas, it has low miles, and no one ever smoked in it. Get that one and let’s do
anything
else.”
Dylan snickered, but Colin shot him a shut-the-hell-up look. “When you’ve been married as long as I have, feel free to laugh when your wife tells you she wants something done and she wants it done now.”
Max nodded wisely, but it was a combination of I-totally-get-that and I’m-just-being-a-smartass. “Try being married for only ten years and not doing what your wife tells you to when she tells you to.”
Anna crossed her arms and scowled at them, but she was just teasing them. “We are not your masters. Sometimes, you’re just helpless without us and you know that.”
Max smiled. “More like all the time. My wife saved me from a life of eating corn from the can for dinner.”
Dylan shrugged. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh Dylan,” Anna sighed in the most patronizingly maternal voice she could manage, “so much potential. You’ll be just fine in the right hands.”
Max patted him on the shoulder. “Enjoy the corn while it lasts, buddy.”
Dylan drove them back to the second house so they could buy the white Toyota Camry, but before leaving, he asked if they could meet them back at their hotel. He wanted to talk about Anna’s dream.
Dylan and Max were waiting outside of their room when they got back, but Anna honestly didn’t know what else she could tell them. She’d already shared the part about Leipzig, the strange noise, being surrounded by the bright whiteness everywhere. It was eerily similar to the pattern of dreams she’d suffered while imprisoned by the archdemon in the camp near the Amite River, except she’d never dreamed about hunting demons before. She was always with Colin in a happier life, a simpler life before hunting became their existence. But then those dreams would dissolve into a horrifying nightmare that didn’t feel dreamlike at all but far too real. And she hadn’t been asleep long enough to know if that white world she’d been thrown into would have been the same.
As they let Dylan and Max into their room, Colin noticed Dylan was holding a paper bag. He reached inside and pulled out a six-pack from a local brewery. “I kid you not, this place is
meant
for people like us. Check it out. Demons of Ale.”
Colin laughed and took a bottle out of the cardboard container. “Mephistopheles?” He was reading the label but it came out as a question.
Dylan nodded, grinning at Colin and Anna for the first time since finding out Jeremy was still alive. “Right? There are two other flavors. We’ve got to try them all. I’ll go back for The Beast when we break in our new apartments.”
Max popped one of the bottles open then choked on the black liquid inside. “Holy crap,
that’s
what they serve in Hell.”
Colin smelled it. “I’m Irish. I haven’t met a beer I can’t drink.”
Anna actually backed away from the bottle when Dylan tried to hand her one. “I’m English. I’ve met plenty of beers I don’t like.”
Colin shrugged. “It’s not so bad. You should try it with a can of corn, Max.”
Max squinted at him. “Everyone knows Purple Haze goes with canned corn.”
Dylan nodded and tipped his demon beer at Max. “Good point. Abita has a beer for every food. It’s the Louisiana way.”
Anna sighed loudly. She didn’t need to taste a black beer to know she’d prefer her Abita Amber, and she didn’t eat corn from a can, so she really just wanted to know what other information Dylan and Max were looking for. Dylan set his Mephistopheles’ brew down and clasped his hands in front of him. “What happened with those three demons in Leipzig? I’m assuming it was a real event, right?”
Anna sat on the edge of her bed and nodded. “Yeah, we isolated them from the troops, chased them out of town and killed them. Why?”
“Well, I was just wondering why that memory? If this archdemon is back messing with your mind, why choose a memory where you killed three of its minions at a time?”
Colin yawned. He hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before and the beer was pretty strong. “It’s not the first time it’s messed with our dreams. Shortly before Anna’s abduction, we both started having dreams about different experiences. I dreamed about being back in Berlin at the end of World War II, Anna dreamed about being in Paris during the French Revolution.”
Max looked up from his drink he was still eyeing suspiciously like he actually expected Mephistopheles to materialize from it. “And those were memories. Not dreams.”
Colin and Anna both acknowledged they had been real experiences. “But no demons in those dreams?” Dylan pointed out.
“No, but maybe we just woke up too soon. In both of those cases, we ended up fighting demons later in the day. In Berlin, we found an older woman dying of pneumonia or something like it, so I tried to find help but that was in April 1945. The Russians were at our doorstep and everyone was hiding. You can’t blame them. You can’t imagine the stories we heard.”
Dylan snorted. “Worse than what you must have been hearing about the Germans?”
Colin shook his head. “There’s no scorecard. Doing terrible things to innocent people is evil. Period.”
Dylan tilted his beer back and grimaced as he drank from it, and Colin finished his story. “The woman died later that day. By then, the Russian tanks had rolled into the city and it had already started. Those early days were the worst. We meant to put hunting on a backburner for a while to go around the city to find people, mostly women, we could help, but the city was crawling with demons. There are few times in history we’ve seen that many in one area. They were literally crawling all over the city – over buildings, through the streets, riding on the tanks. They were everywhere.”
“Holy shit,” Dylan mumbled.
“Yeah,” Colin agreed, “it was pretty damn terrifying, honestly.”
“Wait,” Max set his mostly untouched beer down on the hotel table. “What about Paris? During the Revolution? Did you see the same thing?”
Anna and Colin glanced at each other, but Anna answered, “Not as bad. Not nearly as bad, but yes. It was during the Reign of Terror and they flocked to France in those days.”
“And in Leipzig?” Dylan asked excitedly. He must have felt like he was about to grasp some piece of a mystery, but Colin and Anna didn’t think it could be
that
easy, could it?
“Well, there were the three and then once the battle started, more came. Napoleon was eventually defeated and chased back to France and they followed the armies,” Colin said.
Dylan slapped his knee. “It’s a pattern. For some reason, they’re sending you these memories of all the times you had to fight a bunch of demons at once. But why?”
Colin and Anna shrugged. How were they supposed to know?
Max still looked deep in thought. “You said Berlin was one of the worst you’ve ever seen. Doesn’t sound like Paris or Leipzig was bad in comparison. What could compare?”
Colin and Anna looked at each other uneasily then Colin took a deep breath, clearly uncomfortable having to relive this event. “The only thing that ever compared was Bosnia.”
Chapter 9
Srebrenica, 199
5
. Colin and Anna had been in the Balkans for the past couple of years. When the civil war started, they had recognized all the telling features that this conflict was going to turn brutal and horrific, and after centuries of chasing brutal and horrific acts by their fellow humans, they also knew there was little hope that the world would step in and stop this conflict from becoming so deadly. And of course they’d been right.
They followed the Serbian army into Srebrenica even though it was supposed to be protected by the United Nations, but they had little faith in the U.N. to protect the people here. After all, the town had been subjected to violence and ethnic cleansing for the past several years. They expected nothing to change now.
Anna watched nervously as another man collapsed in the street before her. People had been starving to death due to the siege by the army surrounding the city. This was nothing new either. Colin helped her drag him out of the street and into the shade of a nearby building. He was still alive, but Anna couldn’t imagine how. He was emaciated and delusional, and Anna couldn’t understand any of what he was trying to tell her. She suspected even if she spoke the language, she wouldn’t have understood him.
Colin reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of water. The people who lived here, especially the refugees, hadn’t had clean drinking water since the siege began, but Colin nor Anna had ever seen anything like this. The Serbian army was preventing most of the U.N. aid from reaching the city. They had witnessed mass starvation when the Soviet Union began collectivizing, but
this
was intentional.
This
was an effort to eradicate everyone within the city without having to fire a shot. And Colin and Anna, in all of their years on this Earth, had only found themselves this angry at their fellow humans once before.
Colin and Anna hadn’t been in Srebrenica for long. They had traveled throughout the region and had just arrived from Sarajevo. Fifty years ago, they had stayed in Germany; they had never traveled to Poland to witness the atrocities of the death camps. They had never seen genocide in person. Sarajevo had scarred them. Colin and Anna had begun to wonder if their faith in humanity could ever be restored after this.
There was so much hatred here, so much of everything within humans that demons fed off of that the entire region was swarming with them. Like stray cats, they roamed the streets littered with debris and bodies, searching for weak victims and Anna and Colin couldn’t possibly keep up with the influx of evil personified.
Summer had just arrived in the Balkans when they made it to Srebrenica, following the rumors that this supposed U.N. enclave was about to erupt into explosive chaos. Like every other city they’d been to in Bosnia, Srebrenica was teeming with demons, but they had no idea yet how bad it would get.
It was early July now, and the hot humid weather was doing nothing to help the starving and sickly inhabitants of this city. Anna and Colin had come to save souls, but found themselves trying desperately to save bodies instead. In one of the few miracles they would ever experience and would only ever talk about one time since those traumatic days in Bosnia, they walked the streets of Srebrenica with a single bottle of water that never emptied and a single backpack with several MREs that were always there, no matter how many people they handed them to. Anna and Colin would never know how many of those people survived the next few weeks anyway.
They had just stopped to help a woman and her child when they heard the shelling in the southern part of the city. Everyone froze and stared at the sky like it would promise them it had only been in their imaginations. But the next barrage assured them it was real.
Neither Anna nor Colin could speak Bosnian. They’d picked up a few words while hunting here so Colin used one of the only words he knew and told the woman, “Hurry!” and gestured toward a flat squat building with a deep basement where others were running to try to find someplace safe. The child had started to cry.
Colin and Anna weren’t worried about mortar attacks. As thousands of people pushed their way toward the center of the city, away from the southern barrages, Colin and Anna fought against the swarm of bodies and headed south. They had no real purpose in heading toward the Serbs; they couldn’t stop them, they couldn’t stop this war, they were powerless. But they were furious and there was only one way to take out their anger: by finding as many demons as they could and killing them.
They spent several exhausting days fighting almost non-stop. But on the fourth day, everything changed. The small Muslim force that had been defending the city was defeated and the road to Srebrenica lay open: the Serbian army advanced into the heart of the Bosnian refugee town and began separating the men from the women and children. Anna and Colin could do nothing but watch with a sickening dreadful premonition of what was to come.
Thousands of men were led out of Srebrenica on a march many wouldn’t survive, but thousands of others stayed in the city while the women and children were put on buses and sent away. Anna and Colin didn’t know where they were being sent. For the most part, the O’Conners were left alone by the Serbian army because they assured them they weren’t journalists and had simply gotten trapped here when the war started. It wasn’t a very convincing lie, but the soldiers had more pressing matters on their minds than a couple of western Europeans who didn’t seem to be causing any trouble.
Over the next week, Colin and Anna learned the intended fates of those Muslim men, or some of them just boys, who had been separated from their wives and children, their mothers and sisters. And it was then that Srebrenica became a Hell on Earth.
Anna and Colin had never been so frightened. Demons
oozed
from every orifice in the city, every window and doorway and every drain on the street. They clung to the broken street lamps and telephone poles, dangled from signs and metal support beams jutting from gutted buildings. These weren’t like stray cats picking through the litter on the streets now; they overran the city, crowding the roads and sidewalks and communicating in some shrieking warbling cacophony that sent chills through both Colin and Anna.
They had backed inside a building to hide from the onslaught of demons invading the city. While most of the humans here were either hiding from the Serbian army or were part of the army rounding up civilians to either pack them onto buses or massacre them, Colin and Anna held each other’s hands and watched the city teeming with these monsters, some of which had morphed into animal shapes while others kept their amorphous forms. A few bothered to look human but amidst this chaos, it seemed like wasted effort.
The city was flooding with them. The weight of their presence in Srebrenica pushed at the windows and doors of the building Colin and Anna were hiding in, and they backed away from the wall, but the rear of the building was no different. They were surrounded by the tidal wave of evil that had swept through this place. And Colin and Anna were trapped.
They each gripped their daggers in their free hand but what good would a single dagger do against thousands of demons? How could they fight their way out of a deluge of malevolence? The sounds of glass shattering in the back of the building alerted Colin and Anna that they were inside now; they had been discovered, and they were hunters. Demons didn’t leave hunters alone.
Anna and Colin crept toward the back of the building where they’d heard the shattering glass and watched as the amaranth hued lynx worked its way through the broken window. They stabbed it as soon as its head was inside the building and its growling moaning roar sent new waves of demons pressing against the doors and windows. Glass shattered all around them as multiple windows broke and a rainbow of beasts infiltrated the room they’d been surrounded in.
“
Oh my God, Colin. What do we do?”
Colin backed against a wall with her and looked around him. There was no passage, no escape. The room was filling with the rotten decaying smell of the beasts around them, their eyes all fixed on the prizes in front of them.
Colin grabbed Anna’s hand again and squeezed it tightly.
“This is it, my love. Don’t be scared. I’ll be with you forever.”
“Pray with me.”
And so Colin did. In their long lives, they had experienced few miracles. They had often hunted feeling like they were on their own. But since arriving in Srebrenica, things kept happening they couldn’t explain, like the water in the bottle or the pack of MREs that never emptied. And as Anna and Colin prayed in that building swarming with demons, knowing their lives were about to end on Earth, they were confronted with one more inexplicable event, one more miracle they would only ever talk about once.
As the putrid odor of those demons drew near them, a blinding light filled the room, causing those dozens of demons who were descending upon Colin and Anna to shriek and wail in what sounded like painful cries of agony. But the light didn’t hurt Colin or Anna; they watched as the demons shrank away from it, scampering back through the openings they’d created to get inside.
At first, Colin and Anna didn’t move. They were terrified of going outside where thousands of those monsters were waiting to tear them apart: two hunters killed, two trophies for Hell’s game room. But when Colin stepped toward one of the windows to see if the demons were waiting right outside the door, Anna noticed the light was surrounding him.
“
Colin, the light. It’s around you.”
Colin looked back at Anna and gasped. “
It’s still around you, too.”
“We’re meant to leave now. Get out of the city. Our Angel is protecting us.”
Colin nodded and took her hand once more. “
We saved no one,”
he thought sadly.
But Anna shook her head at him. “
We can’t fight the world, Colin. We do what we are asked. She wants us to leave because she still needs us.”
So Colin and Anna fled Srebrenica, a city overflowing with demons because of the massacre of thousands of innocent people, under the protection of their Angel. And they vowed to never speak of that city again.