Sacrifices (28 page)

“Nobody asked for your opinion,” Freak said.

“I really think—”

“Enough,” Moreno said. “She's family. That's all that matters.”

Abas paused with his tongue touching the edge of his front teeth, lips pulled back in a display of dismay. He swallowed it and said nothing.

“Everything settled up?” Anna asked. Abas nodded. Freak and her father kept staring at each other in a cross-generational battle of wills Anna neither understood nor wanted any part of. She guessed that meant they were in. “Let's work out the details, then. We got a lot to do.”

Genevieve's phone rang
as she got out of the car at the corner. Clap sped off, leaving her on the curb with the office building in sight. The phone rang again, and she took it from her pocket. Anna.

Glancing toward the building, Genevieve saw nothing unusual. The windows were dark, glassy eyes throwing back the indigo and red of the sunset, and if Sobell or Belial watched her from one, she'd never see him. She turned her back and answered the phone as she walked toward the 7-Eleven.

“Hey,” she said. “How are you?”

“Still cracking up. You?”

Genevieve sighed, the sound becoming a windy crackle in the phone mic. “I don't know what I'm even doing anymore. Thinking about leaving and not coming back one of these times.” She'd been thinking about it nonstop, actually. Have Clap drop her off somewhere, anywhere, and then get as far from Belial as her legs, a bus pass, and a sack full of cash could take her. The hell of it was, she didn't think she could leave Sobell. He'd drop her without a moment of reflection, shoot her himself if he had to, and she couldn't bring herself to do the same to him.
Stupid loyalty.
“Out in gangland again today. Just walking around this time. Killing time.”

“You think that's bad, I don't even know what I want
anymore. Half the time, all I can think about is food, sex, or violence, and the rest of the time I'm not sure which feelings are mine and which are . . . borrowed.”

Genevieve searched for words, found none.
Gee, that's rough
didn't quite have the right feel, but everything else she could think of was basically the same sentiment. After a long pause, she said, “We need a vacation. When all this shit is over, we should go somewhere.”

“Like where?”

“I don't know. We're not exactly strapped for cash. Be nice to live a little.”

This time, the pause was on Anna's end. Genevieve strained to hear her over a couple of guys shouting at each other over by the gas pumps and the beep from the 7-Eleven door as it opened ahead.

“About that,” Anna finally said. “Living a little.”

“Yeah?”

“I sure would like to.”

Genevieve nodded, regardless of the fact that Anna couldn't hear it. “I got nothing new. I—I wish I had something. Anything.”

“I got something.”

“For real?”

“For real.” Anna's voice was even, without a trace of the excitement Genevieve would have expected. She was in a place beyond tired, Genevieve thought. Exhausted.
Drained
.

“And?”

Another one of those long, tense pauses. Genevieve sat on the sidewalk next to the icebox and waited.

“I need you to do something for me,” Anna said finally.

“Anything. You name it.”

“I need you to bring Belial somewhere.”

“It's not very cooperative,” Genevieve said.

“No bullshit, now. No jokes. Either you can do this for me or you can't. I need to know.” A rustle of movement. “I need to be able to count on you.”

Genevieve's mouth tightened in anger and shame, and
she batted down a retort.
I deserved that,
she thought.
Regardless of circumstances.
“You can,” she said. “I'll . . . I'll figure it out.”

“You don't have to figure anything out. Just tell him you know where the relic is. I'll give you an address and a time.”

The relic. Of course. It might even work, provided she could set a demon up with a straight face. The thought was daunting enough to cause her mouth to go dry. Another thought, a truly awful one, followed close after. “Is Nail with you?” she asked. “Or Karyn?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I talk to one of them?”

“Why?” Suspicious. Angry. Not without good reason, Genevieve thought.

She tried to choose her words carefully, but there was no polite way to say this. “If I'm going to set up a demon, I need to talk to somebody who's . . . not so closely tied to it.”

A silence followed. It was impossible not to read resentment or maybe even outright hostility into it. The phone felt slick against the sweat in Genevieve's palm.

“Here.” One word, stripped of emotion. Then Anna said something away from the phone, something Genevieve didn't catch. Then:

“Hello, Gen.” Karyn's voice.

“How is she?” Genevieve asked. “Anna. She doesn't sound . . . good.”

“She has good reason.”

“Yeah. This setup thing—is it for real?”

“Yes. What else would it be?”

Genevieve rubbed her face. “I don't know. I just had to ask. She's not quite herself these days, you know?”

“It's for real,” Karyn said.

There was a clunk and a series of indistinct thumping noises, and then Anna's voice came back on. “There. You done checking with Mom? Wanna check with Dad, too?”

“Just tell me what you need me to do,” Genevieve said.

She listened as Anna gave her the outline. It was brief enough, but after the conversation ended and she put her
phone away, she stood on the sidewalk for a while, thinking. By the time she let herself into the office building, it was full dark outside. It felt as though the sun hadn't gone down so much as slinked away, trying to avoid attracting the attention of the rats and darkness-dwelling creatures that always trailed behind it. An illusion, Genevieve thought, brought on by her own state of mind, but one she couldn't shake. It was no brighter inside the building than out, but there was still relief in closing the door against the vast darkness outside.

I used to like nighttime. The darkness.

She locked the door.

Belial wasn't home. She couldn't see much, the streetlights barely penetrating the blinds and sketching shadowy outlines of the furniture, but these days she could tell just by the stink. It was still foul in here, but noticeably less so, the difference between finding the abandoned lair of some terrifying, carrion-devouring monster and having your head between its jaws.

Her eyes slowly adjusted. She picked her way around the room toward her makeshift bed.

She froze when a miserable groan sounded.

Sobell.

“Do you have . . . water?” His voice sounded thin and wheezy, like somebody had slugged him in the gut.

Genevieve knelt next to the table and searched for the small battery-powered lantern they'd been using for light. She flicked the switch. A watery bluish light lit up the floor, reflected off the underside of the table, and spread weakly into the room.

Sobell had situated himself in an uncomfortable position halfway between sitting and lying down, his back bending at an awkward-looking angle in the middle so he could prop his shoulders and head up against the wall. His legs splayed out in front of him in a V, and his arms lay in no particular position at his sides. It looked like he'd been thrown there by an idle, bored giant. The only part of him that seemed to engage with the world was his eyes, which watched Genevieve intensely.

“Jesus, are you okay?” Genevieve asked.

“I suppose . . . I suppose that depends what you mean by the word.”

A plastic bottle of water, still half-f, sat near the table leg. “Can you stand?” Genevieve asked.

“Yes,” he said. He didn't move.

“Just lying around like that because it feels good?”

“If I sit all the way up, I get dizzy. If I lie all the way down, I can't breathe. This seemed like a reasonable compromise.”

“You're going to hurt your neck like that.”

“As of this moment, that is so low on my list of concerns that I fear I'll never get to it.”

She got to her knees and grabbed the bottle. It smelled okay, so at least Belial hadn't been using it for a toilet. She got up, came around the table to Sobell's side, and sat. She held the bottle out.

He sighed heavily and took it. After one sip, hardly a mouthful, he put the bottle back down.

He cleared his throat. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I believe I'm fucked even more severely than that would imply.
Wouldst
imply. Whatever.”

Genevieve looked down upon his wasted form. He seemed bent, angular, almost insectile. Knobs of bone stuck out at his elbow and wrist in a way they hadn't even twenty-four hours ago. Skin hung loose on his face, adding years to his apparent age.

“Are you sure you're gonna be able to get back up?” she asked.

“It looks worse than it is,” he said, not even attempting to make the words sound convincing.

“How much time do you have?”

“Left? Days. Weeks, perhaps. I can't really say. I've never died before.” He coughed. “Honestly, the worst thing is being so miserably tired. I'd almost welcome shuffling off this mortal coil, if I didn't know there were legions of demons waiting to get their claws in me.”

“Is that how it works?”

He raised an eyebrow. Wrinkles rippled across his forehead. “I would very much like to not find out. My life has been a kind of inverse Pascal's wager, and I'd like to keep it that way.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Do they teach nothing in college these days?” Another dry cough hacked its way up from his lungs. “Blaise Pascal. French rascal, who suggested life is a bet. If you bet that God is real, and believe in Him, there is a possibility of infinite reward with small downside for being wrong. If you bet that God is not real, there is small upside to being right, and you take an infinite risk for being wrong. He therefore concluded the only rational thing to do is believe.”

“Bullshit.”

“Aside from being obviously nonsense, it ignores the possibility of other options.” He grinned. “Bet that you'll live forever, and what you believe doesn't matter.”

Whether it was his frail state or the apparent moment of relative closeness, Genevieve felt inspired to ask him something more personal than she ever had. “How old are you?”

He exhaled, and some life seemed to seep out of him on the moment. He held one shaking hand out, stretching the fingers, and studied the back before finally answering. “Not old enough.”

She glanced toward the dark mass of Belial's lair. “Belial here?” Safer to ask, even though she was pretty sure of the answer.

“No. I believe it's out assembling a mob of half-wits with the goal of relieving itself of the burden of requiring our services.”

Now. Here was the decision: let Sobell in on this and hope he could help them in the end—hope he wouldn't actively screw them over in the end—or cut him out. Deliver Belial herself and leave Sobell to work his own problems out, or at least put him in a spot where he'd have to negotiate, which would undoubtedly piss him off. What was it Anna had accused her of before everything went to
shit at the old prison? Wanting everything to work out for everyone. She'd said it as if Genevieve was hopelessly naive, the assumption being, Genevieve supposed, that trying to thread a path through everyone's conflicting desires without committing to any side was a sure recipe to piss all those people off. Now here she was again.

“You said at one point that maybe we ought to just kill it,” Genevieve said.

“Yes. You talked me out of that course of action.”

“Still feel that way?”

He studied her, the blue light painting his face a deathly color. “Why? What do you have in mind?”

She picked at her fingernails, felt like a horrible, obvious liar, and stopped. “I don't know. Just thinking out loud.”

“Hmm.”

Nothing else was said, and after a few minutes she excused herself and settled in to her corner, bracing herself for what was sure to be a long, sleepless night.

“Dammit,” Genevieve said.
She put her phone back in her pocket instead of throwing it against the wall and continued pacing the office, fighting the urge to do as Sobell previously had and open the blinds to let the daylight in. The text she'd just received from Anna had been simple enough—an address and a time for later that night. Delivery address for Belial, if she could get it there. Any time after eight p.m.

Too bad the demon hadn't come home last night. She'd waited up like an anxious mother—though in this case she thought the world would likely be better off if the stand-in for her wayward progeny actually did drive off a bridge or something. She didn't know when she'd finally dropped off to sleep, only that it had been fitful, as she'd jerked awake every time Sobell moved or a car drove close by. When morning finally came, like gray dishwater poured over the windows, she thought maybe she'd slept through his return. She'd covered her mouth and nose and peeked inside his lair. Only a ratty sleeping bag and, inexplicably, a snarled black ball of hair about the size of a basketball were inside.

She'd already gone out, gathered the morning's disgusting breakfast food, and returned. Sobell had eaten nothing before his departure with Four Door and company, and she'd eaten a protein bar with the consistency and taste of pressed cardboard, so the quartet of breakfast burritos still
sat untouched on the table, adding their aroma to the hair-curling stink of the place.

According to her phone, it was already after noon. This hadn't happened before. The demon always came home, nested, narrated its dark dreams in words too vague to make out, and generally spent each night creeping Genevieve out. The one time she wanted it to come back, it was gone.
This is not good.

She called Clarence. No answer.

Now what?

One option came to mind. She crawled into Belial's stinking lair, using the light from her phone to find her way around the small den. The hairball was easy enough to find, but then she had a new problem. The idea of touching that thing with bare skin was more than she could stomach.

“Jesus,” she muttered. She came out, grabbed a napkin from the bag that had contained breakfast, and went back in. Using the napkin as a sort of half-assed mitten, she picked up the hairball by a stray snarl. Small black specks fell loose from it, some of them crawling away as they hit the carpet. Her stomach roiled.

She came out and dropped her disgusting trophy on the table. She groaned as she noticed a tiny insect that had crawled onto her hand, then rubbed it off on the edge of table.

She fought down her revulsion and got to work. This stuff was basic Occult 101 shit. Pull a hair off someone, or a fingernail, or a few drops of blood, and track them down. There were a dozen problems with it, depending on the quality of the material you had to work with, and another dozen ways for an intended target to thwart it, but it was easy and it worked much of the time, so it would be foolish not to try.

It took ten minutes to rig together a makeshift compass from a string and a pen and a few strands teased from the hairball, and two more minutes for Genevieve to make the requisite diagrams and perform the incantation. It took another thirty seconds of watching the compass sit there,
inert, dead as roadkill, before Genevieve swore and gave up on it. She tried a couple of different tricks, a few alternative approaches, and got equally poor results.

She sat, racking her brains for another way, but in the end she had to admit that she had nothing else. She'd need help, and there was only one place she could think of to get it. She cursed and went back to fiddling with the hairball.

At two p.m., with still nothing to show for her efforts, she got a call from Anna.

“We're on track here,” Anna said. “You?”

“No. Belial is gone. I don't know where.”

“Can you get him a message?”

“No. Clarence isn't picking up his phone.”

There was a pause during which Genevieve thought she could feel Anna fuming at her through the phone. “Look,” Anna said, “this doesn't work without Belial. It's a total fucking no-go.”

“I get that, but I . . .”

“What? You what?”

“I can't just conjure him up. The usual stuff isn't working.” She paused. There was the final remaining option. She hadn't sold Anna out, she reminded herself—she was checking first to see if it was okay. Nevertheless, she braced herself for the explosion that would likely occur after her next statement. “I think I'm gonna need some help.”

“I don't know what that means,” Anna said, her voice heavy with suspicion.

“It means . . . Oh boy. It means I think we need to bring Sobell in on this.” She cringed as soon as the words were out.
Here it comes.
“I don't have anything else. I don't know anyone else who's got a chance. I just don't know what else to do.”

Anna said nothing.

“Look, he's got nothing against you guys—against us—he just didn't think you'd feel too well disposed toward him after that shit in the prison. He needs this. He'll help.”

Still nothing.

“He needs this,” Genevieve said again, “and I can't find the demon without him. There's some chance I can't find the demon
with
him, but I don't know what else to do. I mean, we could just wait until it turns up again, but that could be a while, and I'm worried about what it's up to in the meantime.”

“Tell him we'll meet. I'll text you an address. We need to get moving,” Anna said.

“Great. This is gonna work, you'll see.”

“I hope you're right.”

Genevieve called Clarence again. Still no answer.

She called Sobell. He picked up right away. “Yes?”

“Are you somewhere you can talk?”

“Obviously.”

“Anna and Karyn think they have the solution,” Genevieve said. “They need us to get Belial and meet them.”

Sobell didn't answer right away. He coughed once, then cleared his throat. “Let's leave Belial out of this for now, shall we? If they've found the relic, I'd like to go have a look at it without a demon ranting in my ear. Discover if, perhaps, we can do without Belial entirely, though that isn't the way my luck has been running of late.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Genevieve wished she'd thought this through a little more. “I thought we, uh . . .”

She could almost see his face, that skeptical “don't bullshit a bullshitter” expression. He could see right through her over the phone, for God's sake.

“Look, we need Belial,” she said. “The whole thing doesn't work without Belial.”

“There's a ‘whole thing' now, is there? Was there a whole thing last night, or is this a new whole thing?”

She rushed past the question. “They found the answer, Enoch.
They found it
.”

“So you said. What, precisely, does that mean?”

“It's the priest. Remember what you said about angels? He can call one. He swears it will wipe out demonic corruption. Cure Anna. It might do for you, too. This has got to be the answer. It
has
to be.”

“Oh, it might do for me all right.” He tapped his index finger against his thigh. “Where does Belial come in?”

“I guess when you go fishing for angels, you need some pretty major bait.”

“Funny, isn't it? Lack of a demon isn't usually a problem to be addressed. Quite the opposite.”

“I'm not laughing.”

Sobell made a clucking noise. “That's your prerogative, but from my position, I'd have to say that if you don't find any of this funny, you'll find it unspeakably bleak.”

“That's where I was headed, yeah.”

“A word of advice.”

“Yes?”

“You're young. You're unquestionably talented.”

Genevieve smiled, surprised at how the words hit her. In the past, Sobell had nodded at her small successes and made words of bland encouragement, but this acknowledgment felt like a victory. She wished circumstances were such that she could just sit here and savor it.

Sobell coughed. “The world is your oyster, as they say—whatever the devil that means. Mentors, lovers, and even enemies—these all come and go. You can outlast them all, dance on their graves or mourn them as appropriate, but you
can
outlast them. This storm may be the end of me, but it will be nothing more to you than a mildly interesting paragraph in your history, a slight breath of wind that alters your course imperceptibly toward whatever end you finally choose. I hate to damage your ego, but you're not even a starring player in this drama, so don't let this latest round of foolishness break you.”

“Was that supposed to be inspiring, or were you encouraging me to cut and run?”

“Take it either way. Whatever helps.”

“So, are we going to do this?” Genevieve asked.

“As plans go, this one is remarkably high on conjecture and low on assurances. I'll need to meet with the priest. Your erstwhile compatriots as well.”

It was all Genevieve could do not to swear aloud. “I don't know if I can arrange that.”

“Find out.”

*   *   *

Sobell sat on a bench, elbows on his knees, hands clasped tightly together to keep them from shaking, and he stared at the diagram. The effaced one, that even now was beginning to vanish under layers of graffiti. Somewhere beyond that drawing was the priest, and a solution that would deliver Sobell or destroy him. He had no way of knowing. He could go house to house, searching. He could bring Belial in and sweep the neighborhood with a tide of flame and destruction. Both options seemed equally likely to result in nothing or catastrophe, with a thin chance of success.

Genevieve said the priest was prepared to do all the dirty work, if they'd just bring him Belial. Belial said it was prepared to do all the dirty work, if they'd just bring it the relic. Which way to go? Did he believe a cut-rate aspiring mad hermit or a self-proclaimed Lord of Hell who seemed to have only a tenuous connection with what everybody else called reality?
One of them must be right,
Sobell thought.
If only because I need one of them to be right.

He'd come here alone for no reason he could name. Clarence's men hadn't shown up that morning, which was surely a bad sign for somebody, but Sobell wasn't sure how to take it. Advantage: Belial, or just more meaningless happenstance? Eventually, he'd gone stir-crazy. He could have continued hassling the remaining occult brokers and lowlifes he knew, but he was in no condition to do more than make threats he couldn't follow up, and it was pointless anyway. Endgame had begun, and shuffling pieces that weren't even on the board was no way to win. On a related note, it was profoundly stupid for him to be sitting out in public where any random cop—or, he supposed, even bystander—could call him in and wrap this whole thing up. He was too tired to care, he supposed. He wanted a martini and a newspaper. A feather bed. Sex
sounded good in theory, but as soon as he thought of the details, it all seemed so tiring.

Sunlight threw dappled shadows through the leaves of a half-dead maple tree. Across the street, a middle-aged woman went into the lavanderia with a black plastic garbage bag full of clothes. One of the windows had a bullet hole in it. All of them had bars. He wondered why anybody would need to put bars on the windows of a laundromat.

Something moved in the reflection from one of the windows, a hooded dark shape, and Sobell turned away.

I am spending what may very well be my last afternoon on the planet on a bus bench in the barrio.
Even that thought had no power to move him.

His phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, being careful not to look at the glossy back, and answered.

They'll meet
, the text message said, followed by an address and a time. Four p.m. Not long. He put the phone away, trying to ignore the black swarms at the edge of his vision. He could feel them now, almost hear a whispering from them. Nothing coherent, but they seemed to plant thoughts in his head.
Step in traffic. Eat a bottle of Tylenol. Buy razor blades.
They weren't compelling thoughts, not yet, but they were relentless. He couldn't tell if the black spots were demons crowding around him or mere hallucinations, a sort of autohypnosis created by his own dread.

A destroying angel
, Sobell thought, and he shook his head. It was as though he was waist-deep in rats, they were surely going to eat him alive, and somebody had handed him a magic whistle that would summon a dragon to come wipe them all out with a single blast of scouring flame. Whether there would be anything left of him after the flame was a question nobody else cared about.

He glanced up, alarmed, as he heard somebody approach. The sudden fear dissipated when he saw Tran.

“I didn't know if you'd actually come,” he said.

“If I've been followed, you and I are both screwed.”

“I trust that you've been careful. Did you bring the will?”

“Of course.” She handed him a fat sheaf of papers. It was an odd sensation, holding a set of what could very well become his last instructions from beyond the grave. He'd never had one made before. Never thought it would come down to this, not for real. And now that he had the document in hand, there was no time to read it. He'd have to trust that Tran had done her job correctly. She always had before.

“Did you find a way to give yourself a little something out of this?” he asked.

“I told you, that would be unethical.”

He chuckled. “Attorneys never cease to amaze me. All of it goes to Genevieve Lyle, then?”

Tran pursed her lips. “There will likely be nothing left, if you die and the FBI confiscates everything.”

“But she'll get every bit of that nothing?”

“Every bit.”

He leaned back, musing on the decision. “I thought there might be some redemption in that. That it would make something feel worthwhile. It still all seems like a waste, though.”