Demon Bait (Keeley Thomson) (27 page)

They spent a long time eating
then, after letting Zack know that he'd be paid for the food, which he already
knew. Then they ate and chattered back and forth for a long time, until even
the embers were gone.

Finally Darla stood up, and waved
to each of them.

"This, is the end of Xenses.
The Defiler. Killed thrice, never to walk the world again. It was a long time
in coming, and my only regret is that I didn't kill you more."

It was as far from being a prayer
for the dead as was possible, but still clearly heartfelt. Zack didn't add
anything, but Keeley did, not realizing what it was going to be until her mouth
moved, almost on its own.

"This is the end. Goodbye,
brother. The world is better for you leaving it. Don't come back. If you do, we
won't be as kind."

Then they pushed dirt over the
remains of the five blazes and packed things up, leaving to their own places in
the world. One that, as she'd just pointed out, was better for not having a
certain Greater Demon in it. That might not last, since when one Demon died,
another
always
tried to take its place. An insane being like her brother
might well be replaced by something just as bad, or worse, but that, she
decided, wasn't her problem.

Neither was all the rest of what
people wanted her to do. Hunting the
other
Greater Demons to the death?
Trapping them in far off realities? Even if she could manage it, she really had
to wonder if that was the best course of action.

Tarsus had said that trapping
them away from the world was the best thing to do, and that all of the universe
might be destroyed if those others were allowed to stay in it with their full
powers. He was even
right
, given what he knew.

The thing there was that he
didn't have all the information, and even if he had it, he wouldn't be able to
understand what he was really seeing. It was crippling and led him to errors,
unknowing. Keeley couldn't see a way to fix that either. Really, if she had it
right, it was all part of a plan. Maybe she
was
supposed to kill those
Greater Demons? Or, just possibly, she was supposed to help trap them, just
like Tarsus wanted?

There was also the chance that
she was supposed to get herself out of it all, somehow. Beg off in a way that could
be acknowledged as sensible by everyone involved without getting her killed?
For some reason, even if not backed with facts, that last one felt right. She'd
go and... Well,
that
was the hard part. She couldn't explain to anyone.
That Zack had heard the word
Angel
and not laughed at her was a vast
deal, and she knew it. Tarsus would probably ignore her, thinking it a clever,
or possibly stupid, ploy to get out of risking herself.

Which would be totally fair of
her to try, so not unexpected.

Michael, well, she didn't even
remember talking to the man.
If
that part of things existed, then she'd
have to deal with that too. Somehow. Maybe by having Gregor do it for her? How
did you deal with things that you simply couldn't think about or consciously
hold on to as a real concept? Humans did it, all the time, but most of the
problems they had in life were due to that very fact about themselves. They
constantly had to make decisions about things that they couldn't comprehend, and
it led them to the wrong answers, over and again.

There was trouble coming however,
if she didn't work it out...

Or was there? What, really was
her part in this? Tarsus might try to kill her if she didn't do what he wanted,
as a show of force, but that wasn't likely. She might not be a real threat to
him, but she was still a Greater Demon and she might
just
get lucky, if
it came to a fight. She'd done all right with Xenses, hadn't she? Yes, that
wasn't all her, but that was a real point too. She had friends. Keeley had
worked out what was needed, and took him from a direction he wasn't prepared
for. Then used the others to remove the being. No one was prepared for that
kind of thing, she didn't think.

So, for a small period of time,
or possibly one
not
that tiny, she, Keeley Thomson, The Mistress of
Souls, had an edge over all the other Greater Demons. She could, possibly, take
them all and force them to be her slaves, doing what she wanted.

The idea was thrilling, but
ultimately a thing she didn't want to bother with. Oh, power was grand, and
she'd get around to gathering that for herself, but holding onto hundreds of
crazy Greater Demons was less than a thrilling idea. So that left her with
what? A bit of a threat to leave her protected?

That didn't mean much, if Tarsus
was right, did it?

Really, what she needed to do was
talk to someone that actually knew what was
supposed
to happen. There
just wasn't anyone around like that. Not unless God wanted to make an
appearance and explain it all to her?

On thinking that she carefully
looked around her living room, being a bit playful about it, but not expecting
anyone to actually show up and give her a sign. No one did, naturally, since
God, as she knew, was make-believe. Being a bit at loose ends she went to make
food, knowing that skipping out was a bad habit.

When a knock came at the front
door she ran to it, throwing it open, to find, not God, but The Vile, standing
right there, his face made to look nice for her, and his scent a bit like
roses. For a being that thought that corruption and the scent of death was
somehow the correct way to be, it was
ever
so polite of him.

"Mistress of Souls. I have
come to visit."

"Vile.
Wonderful
. I
have some food going. You can pay me for it. Or trade some stories of equal
value?
If
this is a date, I mean."

"That would serve. I know
that this is the wrong day, but I'd hoped that you'd see me anyway."

She nodded, her mouth moving on
its own again, which was
wrong
. It shouldn't do that at all, but after a
moment, she got the idea. She was being guided into place, wasn't she? By...
She looked around, but didn't see anything.

"I wanted to talk to you
anyway. What do you know about The Rage?"

There was a hint of a pause and
then a soft smile.

"I know that he is violent
in the extreme, and looking for you. It seems that he has taken offense at your
careful handling of the situation you dealt with for us. The Lover... Well, she
is in hiding. Nearly thrice dead at his hands, already. I too am hunted, as is
the Cartographer. I do not know if we will live through this. Worse, The
Chaotic has been notified, as had the Helmsman. We are, I would hazard, about
to live in interesting times."

"Oh? Well... Don't worry,
I'll deal with this. That's my job, after all." She sounded really
confident, and even felt that way, but didn't know where the words were coming
from.

Not unless it was the hand of God
himself, messing with her. If so, she would have preferred another note. One
not in her head this time, if it was all the same.

The meal she shared with Vile was
a bit strained and tense, but not much more than she might have suspected it
would be. He was polite and even friendly the whole time, but worried about how
he was going to survive. That, she realized was a thing that they all had in
common. All the Greater Demons that existed
really
wanted to live.

Humans, and a lot of other beings
could just hang on and survive day to day, but you didn't live long as one of
her kind unless it was a fundamental desire from deep within your heart. She
felt it, and so did all the others. Sane or not.

When he left, she promised to
handle things and asked for a week or two to get the real work done. It was
probably a poor plan, but she decided to handle this one alone. If she messed
it up, no one else would need to die for it that way. If, as she suspected, it
was actually God that was influencing her in this, then... Well, she was either
gone off in the head, or kind of required to give it her best shot.

She
did
go off into the
national forest area for it however, since she didn't particularly want to
trash her new house. It had taken a lot of work to get it the way she wanted,
and keeping her things nice was important to her. She also ate more first and
drew power the whole time. She wasn't at full capacity, if such a state
existed, but she was flush with energy and power when she repeated with The
Rage what she'd done with her brother.

Grabbing his being at a distance
and forcing him to not respond when she called him to his death.

It... Didn't take long, once she
decided on the course of action she had to take. It was incredibly dangerous,
but he was removed before she knew it, his head on the ground beside her.

It was a nice head, she decided.
Large, since the body it had been on was about ten feet tall. Pretty too. Rage
filled or not, the giant thing was a work of art. It had armor under the skin,
and while it didn't look very human, being gray and a little warty on the
outside, she was able to understand that this was a being that she
couldn't
have beaten in a real fight.

Everything about him had been
designed to help support the fire of rage within. The waiting she did, sitting
beside the corpse as it cooled, was simply so that no one could come along and
bring him back to life. There would be no tricks this time. No revenge or fancy
ways to make him dead. Just a whole lot of sword blows and then silent waiting.

She had to call and cancel with
Kait, but did that while she sat outside her house, after heading back a day
later. Anyone in the world that wanted to look could have seen what she was
doing, but she didn't care. No one that mattered would notice and if the NSA
wanted to spy on her, they were welcome to. They played in such different
realities that even if they saw every illegal thing she did, they wouldn't
bother to notice it.

A lot of things took place then,
all in a row. First she got on her cell phone and checked in with Felecia. The
bottle redhead was up, and even had good news, since she'd been able to secure
the building that the former drug den had been in,
and
had used those
people to start their blood operation. Not exactly in the way that Keeley had
intended, since she was using them as blood sources, which was a little hard on
the system, as most of them were just kicking drug habits, too.

It worked for the time being and
they could get real, community sourced blood going in a few weeks time, if they
worked at it. Poor people would sell theirs if the money was good enough. They
didn't need as much as the Red Cross did either, and could afford to pay more
for it, so people could donate weekly. It wasn't the same as a full time job,
but if you needed food for your kids, an extra thirty dollars a week could add
up. The woman seemed scared, when she realized that the actual plan had been
different than she'd thought, but Keeley didn't truly mind. Minor
miscommunications happened, didn't they?

When night fell, Keeley traveled
the inroads and picked up the massive corpse of The Rage, then walked into the
forest with it. She had to run and get tools, not able to just call Zack to get
them for her, since her cell reception had dropped off when she moved too far
from the city. Where she'd been earlier had been a sweet spot that way.

When morning came she thought
about it for a while, and then worked out how to take Helmsman and The Chaotic
as well. Those needed to be done well away from her, physically. It baffled her
for a while as to how to get that done, until she realized that she could take
Helmsman first, then The Chaotic and have them both kill each other, never
exposing herself to their powers directly. She did have to do a physical check
of the area they met in and then make the bodies vanish, but that worked well
enough.

The forest had new fertilizer
that day, in a certain spot. She just hoped that it would be over then. That
taking out those three threats really did something, and the whole thing wasn't
simply doomed to restart. Not soon at least. Worse, Keeley had to pray that it
wasn't really the opening salvo in a war against her kind by the Angels.
Heaven, if that was a place, setting it up for her to do the hardest work just
to start things off.

She worked fast, and buried them
deep, since having bodies found was never a great idea. Even if she couldn't be
caught for it, that would cause trouble. So she didn't stint on the elbow
grease and managed to have it all done by the time she absolutely had to go
back home, to get some food.

Then... She didn't really know
what else to do. There had been that thing with the Vile however. Her mouth
working, without her conscious input. That kind of thing was familiar to her,
from when she was a girl, but now it just didn't happen. It meant that someone
else, or some
thing
, had done that for her.

Her guess wasn't going to be God,
either.

More like one of his lackeys. If
they really existed. If not, Gregor had best have his affairs in order, since
she was done now. Almost. No one got to control her like that. If it was God,
and that was real, well,
then
she didn't have a choice, did she?

If it was an Angel...

Well, she
might
not have
much of a choice there either. Except that there was something that Gregor had
mentioned to her that suddenly made some sense. Greater Demons were better
fighters than they were. On average. It meant that, personal skill aside, the
things could be
destroyed
. Otherwise fighting did no good at all.

Not knowing what would happen,
she readied a new packet of information, building it for a specific purpose in
her mind. This time steered toward an Angel. More to the point, one that
pretended to be a Swiss Guard. She needed information, and the first part of
that was knowing if that sort of being was susceptible to her that way.
Telepathically it didn't work, so she went in person, to find that as hard as
she tried to take him. It not only didn't do anything, he didn't seem to notice
when she tried.