Demon Mania (Demon Frenzy Series Book 2) Read online

  She felt her palm tingling with the telekinetic force she was focusing into it, and when she thought she’d gathered a good ball of it she hurled it at the punching bag. Nothing happened.

  “You’re not concentrating,” Azura said.

  There was a loud yell from behind, and Amy turned to look. Each one of her comrades was paired off against one of Bill’s mercenaries, and it looked as if they were trying to break her friends’ arms and necks.

  Shane and Bloody Joe seemed to be holding their own pretty well, but Lucky and Nyx were clearly out-powered. The woman fighting Nyx was much taller and had shoulders like a quarterback. She suddenly grabbed Nyx’s arm, threw her up over one of those massive shoulders, and hurled her to the sandy ground.

  Nyx landed hard, and for a moment it seemed she might be unconscious. Then she forced herself up and hurtled forward with her head down, trying to head-butt the woman’s belly. The woman side-stepped and tripped Nyx, and as Nyx was falling face-forward the woman grabbed her right arm and wrenched it as if trying to break it.

  Nyx screamed, and a split second later Amy had leaped onto the woman and was riding her piggy-back. The woman tottered and fell face-forward. Still straddling her back, Amy grasped a handful of the woman’s hair and was about to smash her fist into the back of her skull when somebody pulled her off.

  It was Bloody Joe. He went to Nyx, who was still lying on the ground clutching her injured arm.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Fuck no,” Nyx said. “That bitch sprained my arm.”

  Joe helped her to her feet and faced the others. “From now on we train by ourselves,” he said. “If any of you assholes ever lay a finger on any of my people again, I’ll kill you.”

  He had his arm around Nyx’s shoulder, and as they walked past the broad-shouldered woman Nyx spit in her face. “I’m gonna kill you for this,” she said.

  When they were some distance away from Bill’s people, Joe said, “Let’s go back to our camp before somebody gets killed out here.”

  His Santa Fe was parked with the other vehicles in a big shed behind the bunkhouse. Amy helped Nyx into the passenger seat and got in back with Shane and Lucky.

  “How’s your arm?” she asked.

  “Hurts like hell. That bitch stretched every tendon like a rubber band. How the hell am I s’posed to throw knives with a sprained arm?”

  While they were driving through the two miles of desert to their camp, Lucky said, “Maybe we should have eaten lunch first. I’m hungry and I don’t think there’s any food at the camp.”

  “You can go back there and eat with those fuckwads if you want to,” Nyx said. “You can sleep in their stinking bunkhouse for all I care.”

  “I guess I can go buy some groceries,” Lucky said. “I’m too sore to train anymore anyway. I have bruises on my bruises. Tonight let’s build a nice fire and have a big feast and drink some good bourbon.”

  Amy’s phone rang. It was Bill.

  “I’m sorry about the unpleasant incident,” he said. “Please come to my office so I can explain some things.”

  “If you’ve got any explaining to do, you can talk to Bloody Joe about it,” she said. “He’s our leader.”

  She hung up, and a few seconds later Joe’s phone rang. He listened to it for a few seconds and then said, “First let me explain something to you. That woman with shoulders like a carthorse just sprained Nyx’s arm, and she did it on purpose. Your people are assholes and we want nothing to do with them. If they ever lay a hand on us again I’ll kill all of them, and if that don’t ease my temper I’ll kill you too.”

  He put the phone back in his pocket. When they got back to their camp Amy cut a strip of cloth from a blanket and made a sling for Nyx. She was barely finished tying it when Joe pointed at an SUV making a thick dust trail toward them through the desert. It was being driven badly, fishtailing in the sand and hitting bumps and rocks it could have easily avoided, and it nearly smashed into their tent as it slid to a precarious halt.

  Azura got out. She was no longer wearing her ugly baggy clothes. Now she had on a pair of extremely short blue shorts and a sleeveless blue top so thin that her nipples were trying to rip through the fabric. Apparently she didn’t mind if the men at this side of the property stared at her, and Amy wondered if she was planning to test her theory about Shane.

  “What do you want?” Joe asked.

  She smiled very sweetly and said, “I want to look at Nyx’s arm. I have healing powers and I brought this incredible ointment.” She held up a little jar for them to see. “Plus I need to teach Amy how to do some things. She’ll be up on the roof warding off harpies when the attack comes, and I need to show her the best way to do it.”

  “What attack?” Joe asked.

  “Oh, Daddy will have to tell you about that. I don’t pay much attention to that kind of stuff, but he thinks a big attack is coming soon. I’ll work on Nyx’s arm in that tent.”

  “Like hell you will,” Nyx said.

  “Maybe you should let her look at it,” Amy said. “I’ll come along and make sure everything’s okay.”

  “Bring your gun,” Nyx said. “I don’t trust this floozy.”

  Azura smiled sweetly, like a child who’d just been complimented by a teacher, and Nyx and Amy followed her into the tent. Blankets and sleeping bags were stored in here when they weren’t being used, and Azura told Amy to make up a comfortable bed with them. She told Nyx to sit on it, and she carefully removed the sling and Nyx’s shirt.

  “Lay back,” she said.

  She started rubbing ointment on the injured arm, making long slow strokes with her fingertips. At first Nyx was scowling the sort of scowl that would curdle milk, but this soon faded and her eyelids kept falling shut.

  “I’m wiping the pain away from your arm,” Azura said. “Can you feel it fading away?”

  “Yes,” Nyx said in a sleepy voice.

  “Now feel the warm sweet waves of healing flow into your arm from my fingers,” Azura said. “Your muscles and bones are soaking up the healing like sweet warm honey, and you can feel the soothing warmth flowing through your arm taking away the hurt and giving you new strength like soft sunshine giving life to fresh new leaves in the spring.”

  Nyx was asleep, snoring softly. Azura covered her with a blanket, screwed the lid back on her ointment, and quietly left the tent with Amy behind her.

  “She’ll sleep for at least two hours,” Azura said. “We need to practice throwing. Let’s get far away so we don’t disturb her.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t very verbal,” Amy said. “You sounded pretty verbal back there in the tent.”

  “Oh, that’s just some healing words I memorized.”

  They worked on throwing for a while, but Amy couldn’t get the hang of it. Whatever telekinetic power was, it didn’t seem to her like something she could hold in her hand and squeeze together into a ball.

  “I thought you said I’m going to be up on the roof fighting harpies,” she said. “In that case I’m going to be holding a sword, so how the hell am I supposed to do this throwing trick?”

  “Oh, I didn’t know you were planning to use a sword. I don’t think women should use swords. It’s so unfeminine.”

  “Well, excuse me if it’s not feminine,” Amy said. “Maybe I should just bat my eyelashes at them.”

  “Then I’ll show you how to use your sword as a wand. Every sorcerer needs a wand. They use it to focus their power. Daddy’s wand is his walking stick, and he can do amazing things with it. I have a wand made of a slender oak rod, very delicately carved and painted, but I don’t use it often.” She tripped over the word delicately.

  “I’m not a sorcerer,” Amy said.

  “Oh, but you are. Sorcerer, witch, warlock, they’re all the same thing you know.”

  Amy looked behind her and saw Lucky was standing there staring at Azura like a gawker at a strip club. It was no wonder—her top was as thin as paint and her shorts were ski
mpier than most panties—and Amy wondered again which one of them she was trying to entice. Despite Azura’s comments about hating men, she had a hunch it might be Shane, but at least he was off gathering firewood with Joe.

  She glared at Lucky, and he said, “Well, I guess I’d better go get those groceries.”

  Amy got her sword out of Joe’s car and Azura told her to focus her power into the blade. She tried but nothing happened.

  “Look at that little rock over there and aim your sword at it,” Azura said. “Make your power run through the steel. Think of your sword as a lightning rod, except instead of drawing in the lightning it’s shooting it out.”

  After several minutes of intense concentration, Amy made the small rock budge an inch or two.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “This isn’t working.”

  “We’ll sing together,” Azura said.

  She began to sing the telekinesis chant. It had sounded jagged and harsh when Neoma used to sing it, but the same song in Azura’s voice had a lilting, childlike sweetness that made Amy think of some mysterious old folksong she couldn’t quite remember.

  “You have to sing along with me,” Azura said.

  Amy did, awkwardly at first, but soon their two voices joined as one, and the melody ran like a stream of clear glittering water trickling through the most private recesses of her mind. She aimed the tip of her sword at the rock, and it flew twenty feet through the air and smashed into a tree.

  She felt Azura’s power as well as her own surging through the steel blade like electricity. She swung the tip in the direction of a dead tree twelve feet away, and a limb fell out of it.

  “Do you have another sword?” Azura asked.

  “I can borrow one.”

  She got Shane’s sword out of the back of the Santa Fe, and Azura said, “Let’s sing again.” They did, and as their voices joined Amy felt intimately connected to her. An hour ago Azura had seemed like a childish, conniving little tart, but now Amy sensed sadness, loneliness, and a painful sort of tenderness in her voice.

  Amy held the two swords out in front of her at arm’s length and felt the power of two witches coursing through her hands into the blades. She touched them together and thought she heard them crackling like electrodes. She swung them apart and brought them swiftly back together like scissor blades, and the dead tree crashed to the ground, its trunk cut in two as if by a chainsaw.

  She was exhausted but elated. She stood with the swords at her sides, feeling very nearly invincible, and for the first time since the kidnapping she believed she would win this fight and get her daughter back.

  “You see how powerful we can be when we’re together?” Azura said.

  It sounded like what Neoma used to say, and Amy was thinking about this when Azura leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.

  “Do you have a sister?” Azura asked.

  “No.”

  “Then let me be your sister.”

  ***

  Terra was lying in bed with Godson in his big round bedroom. He loved mirrors, and the circular wall was covered with them. He was a vain man, but Terra was just as vain and she stared at her naked body in the big round mirror on the ceiling. She liked her long red hair and her wide, beautiful lips. She liked her lovely pear-shaped breasts, which didn’t flatten appreciably even when she was lying down, and she liked her slim stomach and long slim legs. The only thing she didn’t like was her color, which was much too pale—but of course that was Godson’s fault.

  “Was I hot ‘nuff?” she asked. “Do I have the stuff?”

  He smirked and said, “I’ve had better.”

  She smirked too, because she knew he hadn’t. He regularly had sex with all of his disciples, male or female, except the ones he found homely, but he enjoyed her much more often than any of the others. She spent many days and nights in his bed, and that’s why he had made her his first lieutenant and why he’d given her a bedroom bigger and nicer than the tiny rooms where the other disciples slept.

  She looked at his reflection in the ceiling mirror. He still looked no more than thirty, though he was older than that, and she knew he would look thirty for many years to come. But he didn’t look quite the same as he had fifteen years ago. Then his long mane of thick black hair had framed an angelic rock-star face, but now his face was pudgy and his stomach flabby.

  “The son of God is a busy man,” he said. “After a good fuck I must turn my attention to the affairs of Heaven.”

  That meant he wanted another shot of Blue Heaven, and she got out of bed and went to his dresser to fix it for him.

  Blue Heaven was the Lost Society’s most successful designer drug. It was now popular in every city of the United States and Europe, and Godson’s church manufactured it by the truckload. Though Terra hated drugs and had never taken Blue Heaven herself, it was said to cause a wonderful calm lucidity, giving the user’s world a sort of blue-tinted slow-motion serenity that had earned the drug its name. Fortunately for the Society, it was also powerfully addictive, and it was said that people who used it just two or three times would want to use it for the rest of their lives.

  Godson was deeply addicted, all the more so because Terra subtly increased his dosage week by week. Most users dropped just one of the small blue tabs each day, more serious addicts dissolved one or two tablets and skin-popped them with a needle, and the most serious addicts mainlined the stuff. Godson was a mainliner.

  Terra poured a few drops of salt water into a small cup, added five of the small tabs and stirred gently with a spoon until they were dissolved. She drew the solution through a needle into an eyedropper.

  Godson had already tied a rubber hose above his knee as a tourniquet and was lying on his stomach waiting impatiently. She slapped up a good vein behind his knee, ran the needle into it, let a bit of blood run up the dropper’s neck, and then slowly injected the drug.

  Godson loosened his tourniquet and said, “Ah! Heaven, Heaven, my one true home.”

  He rolled onto his back and smiled foolishly. “It’s true,” he said. “Heaven is the only true home of the son of God. It’s sad that I must sojourn here on this annoying planet for a time and a while to do the work of my father. All this exhausting work in a foreign land makes me hungry. I’ve had my needle, and now it’s time for yours.”

  “I’ll go fetch a disciple,” Terra said.

  “No, yours always tastes the best.”

  “Please, Jeshua. Look how pale I am. You’re making me ill.”

  He simpered the way he often did when he was stoned out of his head. “Don’t argue,” he said. “You know I need it.”

  In fact she knew he didn’t need it. It was just another perverted kink he had developed, along with all his other perverted kinks, but she knew she didn’t dare argue. She went to the dresser drawer and got her works, a hypodermic needle attached to a rubber tube with a clamp in the middle of it. She handed it to him and lay down on the bed.

  “Roll over,” he said.

  She rolled over, and he slapped up a vein behind her knee and clumsily worked the needle into it. He put the end of the tube in his mouth, opened the clamp in the hose, and sucked greedily.

  Terra felt herself becoming faint. “Please, Jeshua, that’s all I can spare,” she said, but he kept sucking.

  Finally he pulled the needle out of her vein, and she lay there on her stomach lacking the strength to roll over.

  “Someday you’ll kill me doing that,” she said.

  Godson licked his bloody lips and said, “Oh well.”

  Chapter 15

  When Nyx came out of the tent for dinner she wasn’t wearing her sling. She sat down beside the fire and used her right arm to spoon beans onto her plate.

  “How’s it feeling?” Amy asked her.

  “Better,” she said. “I don’t like that little floozy, but she did something good for my arm. I can’t throw knives with it though.”

  “I want you to sleep in the tent tonight and have a good long rest to
heal up,” Joe said. “I don’t know what this talk about an attack means, but the rest of us need to stay wary. I’ll take first patrol out back tonight and somebody needs to patrol the front.”

  “I will,” Shane said.

  After they finished eating, Lucky opened a fresh bottle of bourbon and passed it around the campfire.

  “Don’t drink too much of that,” Joe said. “You and Amy won’t be getting much sleep ‘cause halfway through the night you have to get up and patrol. I don’t want nobody sneaking up on us again.”

  Shane glanced at his watch and the time, 7:21, suddenly caused him to remember Jim Blaine’s phone number. He’d been trying to remember it for the past couple days and hadn’t wanted to turn on the cellphone it was stored in for fear of giving away his location to the FBI.

  “Nyx, I have a stupid question,” he said. “I can make a call on my pre-paid phone, can’t I, without the FBI tracing it?”

  “They can trace it if they want to,” she said. “But they probably won’t since they don’t know it’s your phone.”

  “Who do you want to call?” Joe asked.

  “A friend from work. I want to hear some news from the real world. My last contact with the big world out there was Sunday when I called Agent Bradford. For all I know, Emily’s been found by now.”

  “She hasn’t,” Nyx said. “I check my phone every couple hours for news.”

  Shane walked away from the fire and keyed in Jim Blaine’s number.

  “My God, where the hell ya been?” Jim said. “Everybody thinks you’re dead or in Cuba or something. Is your wife okay?”

  “She’s fine. She likes the weather here in Cuba. Have you heard any news about my daughter?”

  “Hell yes. There’s some crazy hippies living out in the desert, and the sheriff thinks that’s where she is. He wants to go after them, but it’s no walk in the park.”

  “Do you know the sheriff?”