Demon Mania (Demon Frenzy Series Book 2) Read online

  And then she realized she could actually see, though very dimly, the telekinetic forces like pale blue heat waves in the air, waves and ripples of virtually invisible power, and she thought their pale blue was the same blue as Azura’s eyes.

  The churning blue waves pushed her backward onto the mat, and she lay there gasping for air. They had probably been wrestling for only two or three minutes, but she felt exhausted as if she’d been swimming rough waters for half an hour.

  “I’ve gotta rest a minute,” she said. “I’m pooped.”

  “Maybe you’d be more comfortable resting on air,” Azura said.

  She held her hands palm-upward at waist level and slowly raised them, and Amy felt herself being lifted up from the mat.

  “What the fuck,” she said.

  Azura giggled and said, “Try rolling over.”

  It was difficult, as if she were suspended in heavy fluid, but she sort of swam her way over until she was face-down floating a foot above the mat.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  “I’m going to let you down real easy,” Azura said, and Amy slowly sank to the mat as if an air mattress had sprung a leak. She rolled over and sat up.

  “Incredible,” she said.

  “You don’t weigh much,” Azura said. “You should try doing it with a full-grown man. Now here’s something else I want to teach you.”

  She held her arms straight down at her sides with the palms facing the mat and shut her eyes. Very slowly her feet left the mat and ascended until she was standing a foot above the floor. She slowly let herself down, opened her eyes and smiled.

  “I think maybe that’s how Jesus walked on water,” she said.

  Amy was speechless; she just sat and stared. Azura came over and sat down facing her with her knees nearly touching Amy’s.

  “Break time,” she said. “I’m a little tired too. I think I must have put on a couple pounds.”

  She lifted two bottles of water that were sitting on the floor across the room and made one of them float into Amy’s hand and the other into her own.

  Amy unscrewed the top and drank. She felt a rush of confusing emotions, as if the invisible waves were inside of her now, buffeting her feelings around. Since Neoma’s death she had felt no attraction to women, but she felt it now and was deeply ashamed. She was a married woman, and besides Azura was just a child, probably no more than eighteen.

  “This needs to be a short break,” Azura said. “There’s a lot I want to teach you and not much time.”

  “How on earth did you learn all that stuff?” Amy asked.

  “Oh, my parents started teaching me when I was really young.”

  “Your parents?” And then Amy suddenly knew why she looked so familiar. Except for her age and her blue eyes…

  “Was Neoma your mother?” she asked.

  “Yes. Didn’t Daddy tell you?”

  “Daddy? Surely you don’t mean Bill?”

  “Yes, of course. Now we better get back to work.”

  ***

  Finally they hauled Sonny’s body away to the coroner’s office, but Jack Roamer could still see it all too clearly in his mind’s eye. It had been partially eaten and the flesh that was left was swollen to half again its normal size, as if he’d been bitten by a dozen rattlesnakes. No bullet or knife wounds were evident except for one—the index finger of his left hand was missing, and it seemed to have been sliced off neatly at the knuckle by a sharp instrument.

  Roamer, Bert Barker, and Carlos del Toro were standing by their cars watching Felix Gray crawl slowly around on his hands and knees in the grass near the garage looking for evidence one last time. After retiring from three decades of teaching forensic science at Duke University, Felix had returned to his home town and the city poohbahs had put him on some sort of part-time contract as the local forensic expert.

  Two old semi-retired men working on a case neither of them could understand, but Roamer was thinking it was fortunate that at least one of them wasn’t an old damn fool. Felix knew his stuff better than most of the big-city hotshots, and Roamer believed if there was anything down there in the grass worth finding he’d find it. And if anything was found, Roamer hoped it would clearly link Sonny’s death to the church so Judge Hawkins would put his precious signature on a warrant.

  Roamer stood there watching Felix, feeling sad and miserable and entirely responsible for what had happened. Last night he had seen something running away from his dining room window, something that no doubt had been standing there for some time listening to him and his deputies piecing together their half-ass plans for going after the church. He had seen the thing, but instead of grabbing his gun and pursuing it as any competent lawman would do, he had convinced himself it was a dog and had done nothing. Now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure it had been running on two legs, and it didn’t take Dick Tracy to figure out that dogs don’t run on two legs. But Roamer had sat down and sipped his whiskey and ignored the threat.

  What was the thing? He tried to picture it in his memory and saw only a blur of something gray running in the faint moonlight, maybe upright on two legs or maybe not. He didn’t believe it had fur unless the fur was very short, like on a Dobermann or Weimaraner. If it really had been a person, it was a short, fat, naked person with gray skin. But then he’d already seen a woman who looked like a wolf, so anything was possible.

  The point was, he had known all of this last night, and still he hadn’t run out of the house and pursued the thing. Why not? Maybe he’d had too much to drink and was old and tired and lazy, but he didn’t believe that was the whole answer. He’d been afraid of making a fool of himself, chasing around a dog in the middle of the night. The truth was, he hadn’t wanted to make a fool of himself in front of Doris Murdock.

  And why not? Because even though he found her annoying, he was also attracted to her. He was a seventy-year-old damn fool attracted to a woman, so he hadn’t done his job last night, and now Sonny Fisher was dead and horribly mutilated.

  Sonny had been his friend for at least forty years, and Roamer had let him down. There was no excuse for it. He was an old fool and had no right being a sheriff. He decided he was going to resign immediately before he caused anyone else to get killed.

  He drove back to the office, and when he got there he saw five vehicles he didn’t recognize parked in the lot. Obviously the city poohbahs would be hunting his scalp, but they wouldn’t come here and do their dirty work face to face, so these cars must belong to some regular townsfolk wanting to tar and feather him. He didn’t blame them, and if they decided to burn him alive he’d be happy to light the match.

  He strode into the outer office, where Doris Murdock sat behind the desk and six other people sat in chairs against the walls. They stood when he came in, and he recognized all of them: Bo Diamond and his wife Jill, Pete Hane, Stu Wilkens, Carl Haskill, and Jim Blaine, good people all of them, but it pained him to see Jim Blaine among the scalp hunters. Jim’s father had been Roamer’s friend since high school, and Jim was like a nephew to him.

  Oh well. Old fools who let their friends get killed didn’t deserve friends or nephews. Roamer removed his Stetson, nodded to them, and placed his badge on Murdock’s desk.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “What the hell does it look like?”

  “It looks like something that belongs on your shirt,” she said. “Sheriff, these people all want to be deputized.”

  He turned and looked at them. They were all young and capable people and reasonably sober if it wasn’t a Friday or Saturday night.

  “Jack, we’re all friends of Sonny, and we don’t want to put up with this crap anymore,” Jim Blaine said. “We heard you intend to take a stand, and we want to help out.”

  “I can’t pay you nothing,” Roamer said. “The city poohbahs won’t allow that.”

  “We don’t expect to be paid,” Jim Blaine said.

  “Well then. I don’t expect any of you need firearms training?”<
br />
  “No sir.”

  “There’s laws and rules you have to know. We play by the book around here. Murdock, can you set up some kinda course for these folks on the laws and rules and such?”

  “Can do,” she said.

  “Well then, Deputy Murdock will set up some kinda lesson with you, and as soon as she tells me you know the laws and rules I’ll deputize you. But I want to warn you, what you’re getting’ into is some very dangerous territory.”

  “Yes sir, we know that,” Jim Blaine said.

  “Well then, I’m much obliged to all of you.”

  Roamer snatched up his badge from the desk and retreated to his office. His phone was already ringing when he walked in, and it kept ringing all afternoon, but the calls weren’t from scalp hunters as he expected. They were from dozens of friends of Sonny, Doris, Carlos, and Bert, and they all wanted to be Irregulars.

  He scratched down their names and phone numbers and email addresses and had Doris email them photos of Shane and Amy Malone, and before long dozens of them were calling back claiming they’d seen one or the other or both in grocery stores or shopping malls, sometimes in other cities as far away as Albuquerque or even Tucson. Others reported seeing people so weird-looking they hardly seemed to be people, and Roamer told them to get license plate numbers if they could but otherwise keep their distance.

  There were far too many leads to follow up on, but Roamer underlined the ones that looked halfway promising. Someone called in to report a deserted hacienda way out in the desert more than fifty miles southeast of town, and the peculiar thing about it was that even though the windows were boarded up there were plenty of recent tire tracks in the driveway.

  It didn’t sound interesting to Roamer until the person added that the windows weren’t simply boarded up, they seemed to be covered with steel on the inside. He thought of the steel-plated windows at the church and wondered if there could be some connection. Was it possible the church had a second facility, some sort of hideout in the middle of nowhere? Maybe a drug warehouse or something of the sort. He wrote down the directions and underlined them, and maybe if he found himself out that way he’d have a look.

  It was nearly 9:00 p.m. when he realized he hadn’t eaten any lunch or dinner. He picked up his hat and was surprised to find Doris still sitting at the desk in the front office.

  “You still here?” he asked.

  She smiled, and her smile made him feel foolish for asking such a stupid question.

  “I sent all the newbies a link to an on-line course,” she said. “After they’ve studied it, there’s a test they take.”

  “I’m much obliged. Have you had any supper?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe you’d let me buy you something?” He was annoyed to feel his face turning red, as if he were a high school kid asking a girl to the prom.

  She smiled and said that would be nice. They shut off the lights, locked the door, and went to his car. He opened the passenger door for her and was about to open his own when he noticed something stuck beneath his windshield wiper.

  It felt like a short stick wrapped in a napkin, and Roamer thought of the wolf woman’s comment about a carrot or a stick. But when he unrolled the napkin he saw it wasn’t a stick. It was an index finger.

  Chapter 14

  As soon as they arrived at the hacienda Wednesday morning, Azura took Amy to the training room.

  “There’s a way to throw your energy in a great big powerful burst,” she said. “Hold your hand open like this and gather your power in it and then squeeze it together like a ball. Picture it like a baseball in your hand, and make it as tight and hard as you can and then throw it.”

  Azura swung her arm as if pitching a baseball, and with a loud crash a foot-wide crater appeared in the plaster wall.

  “Crap,” she said. “Daddy’s going to get really pissed about that. We’re supposed to do this kind of stuff outdoors. But you can see how useful it is, especially for knocking harpies out of the sky. I think if you hit them just right you can probably paralyze them for a few seconds without using near as much force as I did, and they’ll fall out of the sky like rocks.”

  “So you’ve never done this with a real harpy?” Amy asked.

  “No, but I’ve tried it on some of Daddy’s men, and it knocked them down like a stun gun.”

  “Have you ever fought demons before?”

  “No, not yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I think it’ll be fun. Anyway, one thing you have to do is conserve your energy. Use the bare minimum you need, or when the demons attack you’ll wear yourself out in a couple minutes.”

  She fumbled the word minimum, and Amy wondered why she had such a hard time getting her tongue around certain words. There was something childish about the way she spoke and maybe her mannerisms too. In some ways she seemed like a child pretending to be an adult.

  “You’re right, I’ve never been real verbal,” Azura said. “I’m not a word person, I get tongue-tied. But I’m not a child.”

  Amy stared at her. “Did you just read my mind?” she asked.

  “Oh. Sorry about that. It’s so easy to do that I sometimes forget how rude it is.”

  Amy was embarrassed. A minute ago she’d had some other stray thoughts about Azura, and she very much hoped they had remained private.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Azura said. “Please don’t be embarrassed. I mean, I find you really attractive too, and somehow I keep forgetting that you’re married. Let’s not be embarrassed around each other. I’ll teach you a good way to block your thoughts and in the meantime I promise not to listen to them.”

  “I already know the trick with the brick wall,” Amy said, “but I can’t go around thinking about a brick wall all the time.”

  “There’s a better way. I’m surprised Mother didn’t show it to you. Or maybe she wanted to know what you were thinking. Anyway, let’s go outside so I can teach you how to throw.”

  Amy followed her and was surprised when she started up the stairs instead of out the back door. “Come with me,” Azura said. “This’ll just take a minute.”

  Amy followed her into a large bedroom that looked much cleaner than the rest of the house. There was a soft smell of incense instead of dust. Though the windows were shuttered, they were decorated with pretty blue curtains, and the same pale blue was plentiful in the room: blue lampshades, blue upholstery on the chairs, blue sheets and blankets on the poster bed with a blue canopy hanging over it.

  On the dresser were two framed photographs, and one of them caught Amy’s eye. It took her a moment to realize the woman was Neoma. She picked up the photograph and gazed at it.

  “Wasn’t she beautiful?” Azura said.

  “Yes, very.”

  “Were you and Mother good friends?”

  “Yes.”

  Amy set the photograph down and glanced at the other one. This was a very pretty girl maybe twelve or thirteen years old with a wide smile and bright red hair.

  Azura picked up the picture and said, “It’s my sister, my half-sister. She’s my very best friend. I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, but I talk to her every day.”

  “You mean with telepathy?”

  “No, I’ve never been able to contact her that way, though I try. So it’s just imaginary talk, but I’m sure she does the same thing every day with me. I know she misses me very much. She’s the only one who loves me.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At Godson’s church. That’s the only reason I’m staying here and helping Daddy. I want to rescue my best friend.”

  Azura set the photograph down and stripped off her blue pajamas. Amy looked away, but not before glancing at her slender naked body, her tiny breasts and slim legs, her smooth flat belly and shaved pubis.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asked.

  Azura smiled and moved up so close to her their breasts were nearly touching. “Oh, I always change my clothes before I go outside,” she said. “I put on the ugliest clo
thes I have because I can’t stand having men stare at me. Men are horrible things, don’t you think? Big and clumsy and hairy and stinking—I can’t imagine how anyone can find them attractive. My mother was in her twenties before she realized she preferred women, but I have a big head start on her. I figured it out when I was just twelve.”

  Amy turned away and pretended to be interested in the big oak dresser. “Don’t forget I’m a married woman,” she said.

  “Yes, I know,” Azura said. “But I wonder—if your husband was standing here would he have the same scruples?” She fumbled the word scruples a bit. “Don’t you think he’d want to touch me?”

  “I think he prefers women to spoiled little girls,” Amy said.

  She picked up a locket with a light blue cameo and pretended to look at it, and Azura giggled. After a minute she said, “Okay, I’m dressed now, so you can turn around and quit thinking about brick walls.”

  She was wearing baggy brown pants and a baggy brown shirt, and it was hard to tell there was an attractive young woman beneath them. They went outside and walked back to where the others were, about half a mile behind the sheds. That’s where they trained, far enough back that no one could see them from the road. They were working on martial arts at the moment, and the fighting looked so brutal that Amy was glad she wasn’t practicing with them.

  For some reason there was an old school bus parked out here beneath a half dead tree. A large punching bag hung from the other side of the tree, and Azura did the trick with the invisible baseball again. She threw it at the punching bag, which flew back on its rope as if punched by a heavy fist.

  “I used just a little bit of force that time,” Azura said. “If I used too much the bag would explode. Try it.”

  Amy cupped her right palm as if clutching a ball and tried to focus her power into it, but she was distracted by the thumping and yelling going on behind her. Yesterday she had trained for only a couple of hours with Bill’s mercenaries, and she hoped she wouldn’t be asked to today. His people fought as if they didn’t mind killing you.