The Devil Dances (28 page)

Vivian half-turned but I grabbed her arm and planted my other hand on Isaac’s shoulder to keep him from looking. “Don’t turn around.”

“What is that…?” she began.

“Don’t turn around,” I repeated more urgently. “Don’t look at it.”

“But
what
is it?”

“Ophanim. Angels,” I explained as I tried to rush my two companions along faster through the tall grass even though it seemed to be trying to snare itself around our legs. “Throne-keepers. Normally, they stand in a circle around the Throne and guard it against invasion by other forces. But since there’s no Throne anymore, I guess they’ve gone mercenary.”

I heard the soft
shush-shush
noise of the angel stalking through the tall grass behind us, maybe fifty yards, maybe less. It wasn’t hurrying. But then, it didn’t need to. Throne-keepers were notoriously sedentary, or so my dad had told me once, the Terminators of the angel world, he called them. After millions of years of doing the same job—standing sentinel around the Throne—most had physically atrophied. But the thing about Ophanim were, they didn’t need strength or physical prowess to do their job. Wind whispered gently through the soft feathers of its fully extended wings… and I knew what was on those wings, all over them, in fact. It was going slow, but then, it had no reason to go fast. Slow and steady wins the race.

Isaac tried to twist around again but I increased the pressure on the back of his head.

“I said don’t look at them! They don’t move fast, but if you see its eyes, it’ll freeze you into a statue, trap your soul and body in one solid block of stone forever.”

“You can’t be serious,” Vivian guffawed.

“Deadly. Abraham had Ophanim poppets among his wards. He must have trapped a pair of them and forced them to serve him, or maybe he made some kind of deal. Either way, we don’t want to tangle with them.” I was feeling panicked, walking too fast; we were stumbling over rocks and logs, barking shins. I forced myself to slow down, to glance left and right, looking for the second angel, the telltale glimmer. So far—nothing. I knew there was a second one, though. They were slow, so ambushing us was the only option they had.

“So we won’t look at their eyes,” Isaac reasoned. “Easy.”

“They have them all over their body and wings.”

“Well, shit,” Vivian said, echoing my thoughts exactly.

We kept going, not hurrying, but not tarrying, either. At around the three-quarter mark, with the farmhouse only a few thousand yards ahead of us, I caught the second telltale glimmer amidst a small copse of trees just ahead of us—the place where the horses were known to cool off during the hottest parts of the day.

“Shit, this is not going to work.” I steered my charges hard left. “They’re trying to block us in, force us to look at them.” I broke into a run, and Vivian and Isaac ran with me. We cut diagonally across the field, hearts pounding, legs working, sweating pouring down our faces and the backs of our necks in the insect-laden heat of the night, heading back toward the line of trees that marked the beginning of the grove. It was another Band-Aid solution at best, but I’d decided it was better we had some trees rather than open fields between us and the angels.

As soon as we were back inside the grove, I stopped and pulled Vivian and Isaac close against me. We were all breathing hard, suffering side stitches, leaning against one another for strength. “Do you think they’re going to follow us?” Vivian said, breathing in huge gulps of air.

“Count on it.” I looked at her in the dark as an idea slowly formed in my head—not a good idea—frankly, it sucked—but at the moment, it was all I could come up with. “Do you think you can do that thing again… that thing with the bees and wasps?”

She looked at me, the moonlight making her face a stark, carven statue of fear and uncertainty. “You mean… call them?”

“Call them. Control them. They’re your familiar to call,” I reminded her.

“I don’t know, Nick.” She swiped at the sweat on her brow. “I was scared John was going to kill you. I wouldn’t know how to do it otherwise.”

Isaac stiffened at the sound of twigs breaking underfoot as something moved steadily into the grove. “We might need to try something soon,” he said.

I told her my plan. She even managed to listen for a few seconds without looking frightened and cynical. “I don’t know,” she said again, her voice ending on a high note of panic and desperation. “I don’t know if I can do that, but I’ll try.” Leaning against a tree, she closed her eyes and her face darkened with concentration.

While she worked on summoning her familiars, I plucked the angel-eating athame from my boot and went to work on my coat. I tore long, thick strips off the hem and my coat quickly went from knee length to a short, jaunty summer jacket with a ragged hem. It occurred to me that this sad, ugly stretch of fabric had given just about all it could in the last twenty-four hours. I swore to God if I survived this, I would bury it with honors.

More twigs and pinecones crackled and popped as the angel made its unhurried, unerring way toward us like it had some kind of supernatural guidance system. Isaac’s head snapped around and I saw Vivian jerk in response. My dad once said the Ophanim have an almost preternatural sense of direction, but, personally, I think it’s just all the eyes. When you can see in every direction at once, it makes it hard to get lost in the woods.

Vivian let out her breath and nodded sharply. “They’re coming.” She opened her pale, pupil-less eyes and I could hear, distantly, a dull roar gathering distantly overhead. “It was surprisingly easy, Nick.”

“You’re just surprisingly powerful,” I told her as I started tying one of the strips of fabric, an impromptu blindfold, around her eyes. For a moment I was afraid she might panic—being blindfolded in the forest in the middle of the night with something stalking you? Couldn’t blame her. “Try not to be afraid,” I told her with a peck on the lips. “Isaac and I are counting on you.”

“Okay.”

I made sure Isaac’s blindfold was tight, then slipped on and knotted my own. I’d hoped that maybe being blindfolded would accent my hearing, make me super aware of my surroundings like in all the movies. It didn’t. I just felt a little more panicked. Around that time, I heard the roar increase as Vivian’s billions of familiars responded to her call. The air was suddenly vibrating with life I couldn’t see, which just added to my unease.

“What is that?” Isaac said as the swarm descended on us.

“Don’t ask. Don’t look,” I told him. “Start walking. We go single-file. Vivian takes the lead, Isaac between us. I’ll bring up the rear. Don’t stop, no matter what, but try not to hurry either, all right?”

They made agreeable noises.

We moved deeper into the forest. I told Isaac to keep his hand on Vivian’s shoulder at all times. I kept mine on Isaac’s. We’d only gone maybe a hundred feet before Vivian stumbled over a fallen tree and cursed loudly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Insects don’t see the way humans do, Nick. Fucking compound eyes and all…”

“Take your time.”

She took a deep breath as we continued on, one twig-crunching step at a time. The buzzing hovered claustrophobically close around us like a force field as we walked in slow lockstep, the noise deadening the sound of the angel’s footsteps not far behind us. I’m not sure if that was a blessing or a curse. I kept my athame in my free hand. It had been bathed in the blood of dying angels, so it was our best defense if the Ophanim caught up to us. It might not kill it—I wasn’t sure what would—but it sure would give it a hell of a bellyache if I stuck it just right.

“So what’s the plan, oh great leader?” Vivian whispered as she made a slow, jerky detour around a thorny bush in our way.

“We’ll try and get to that national park… what’s it called?”

“Chick’s Rock?”

“That’s the one. I figure it must have a ranger’s station, some cars we can steal.”

Isaac spoke up. “There’s this station about two and a half miles in, if we can get that far. I know because Caleb and I sometimes crossed the grove and into the park to be alone.”

“Good man.”

Twenty minutes later, we reached a clearing of some kind—or, at least, that’s what Vivian called it. From her description, I thought it might be an old campsite probably used by hunters and moonshiners. Isaac had stumbled a half mile back and had nicked his knee on a sharp stone. Now he limped along like a lame horse. He asked if we could stop and take a breather. I wasn’t a fan of the idea, but I told him to sit down on a log the campers had set up around the stony artifact of a pit fire so I could check his wound.

I pulled the blindfold off long enough to see the nick was more of a gash. While I cut yet another strip of coat-cloth to bind it, Vivian came up behind me and said, “I really think we should go.”

“What did you see, Viv?”

“
They
saw something about two miles back…” she said, referring to her familiars. She pointed west. “The other angel is in the woods now… and something else.”

“Not… him?” I answered as I bound Isaac’s knee.

“They couldn’t tell. He kept flashing in and out. Not like the angels. Like he’s using portals or something. And he’s going a lot faster than they are.”

“Shit.”

I got Isaac on his feet and we all put our blindfolds back on and started out again, moving probably too fast. We’d just crested a hill when I felt Isaac slip and go down a sharp incline full of loose stones and scrub bush. He yelped. I grabbed at the back of his black jacket, but he went too fast for me to get a good hold on it, and I suddenly found myself swearing and ripping away the blindfold.

The incline was steeper than any of us had imagined, about twenty feet down and full of sharp rocks. Isaac lay on the bottom on his hands and knees, panting and ripping away his blindfold so he could better find his footing. His suit was tattered and his knees bloody where he’d fallen. “Stay here,” I told Vivian, and started down in the dark, doing what they call a “scree run” down the incline, which was basically a jagged half-run, half-scramble over the loose rocks. I’d heard about it in survivalist TV shows, but didn’t think it actually worked until I reached the bottom of the incline fairly intact. Discovery Channel does have its virtues. I grabbed Isaac’s arm and yanked him up. “You all right?”

Isaac shook his head like he was trying to knock something loose. Bits of gravel went flying out of his dusty blond hair—he’d lost his hat back on the ridge—and there was blood at his temple where a rock had gashed his head. His glasses lay at his feet, cracked and mangled. I realized he’d knocked his head good in the fall and might not even understand me.

“Isaac, are you all right?”

I shook him and he nodded his head, blinked his eyes. “Y-yes, I’m okay.” He stood up, rubbing away the blood dripping into his left eye and reaching for his lost glasses. Seeing they were ruined, he tossed them aside.

Far above us, at the top of the incline, Vivian suddenly screamed bloody murder.

She wasn’t a screamer, my Vivian. Even when she climaxed during sex, in her most unguarded moment, she was a moaner, not a screamer. I knew it was serious as I whirled around.

I recognized Cernunnos’ hulking, moon-silvered outline in the dark, and that was both good and bad. Good, because I’d forgotten not to look directly at whatever was manifesting itself between the trees, and if it had been one of the angels, I’d have been seriously fucked. Bad, because Cernunnos was fast and far more nimble than I’d given him credit for. In my mind’s eye, I saw him as he’d been back at his altar, snorting and mountainous, taking his time as he stalked me slowly through the flames.

But the creature that burst through the trees and was briefly illuminated by the moon that was even now gliding back under the clouds was swift and nimble like so many forest animals, there and gone so quickly that you had to stop and wonder if you’d imagined it. Vivian was standing there, and then she was gone, her scream cut off as the huge hulk of a beast disappeared into the forest once more, barely stirring a leaf on a tree. It was like the forest had swallowed them both alive.

“Fuck!” I roared, and about a hundred feet away a bush caught on fire and began to burn merrily in the dark.

Isaac shirked at the sight.

I turned to him and said, “Can you keep going on your own toward the park? I need to find Vivian.”

He nodded as he hopped up on his sore leg and got his balance. “I’ll meet you at the ranger’s station.”

“It’s a date,” I said as I turned to scramble back up the scree of loose, jagged rocks.