Demon Mania (Demon Frenzy Series Book 2) Read online

  “No you don’t,” Bill said. “The problem isn’t human sacrifice. I know many people I’d gladly feed to demons. The real problem is that for a major demon to serve a magus, the magus must also serve the demon. What does that mean? It means the demon permanently takes over a portion of the magus’s mind and spirit.”

  “You mean the sorcerer becomes possessed?” Lucky asked.

  “Yes, but not the way you see in movies, with the person spitting and convulsing and cursing and all that. That’s what happens when the person doesn’t want to be possessed and is trying to expel the demon. But with the magus it’s different. The magus willingly gives away a portion of his mind and soul to the demon, so the demon’s spirit forevermore dwells in him and takes over partial control of his brain.

  “This is called perfect possession. There’s no cursing or convulsing, just a grim symbiosis. The magus gains new power from the demon dwelling in his mind, but he has to give up a portion of himself to gain this power. For each new summoning he has to give up another portion, till finally the magus is nothing but a demon walking about in human skin.

  “So you see, those minor demons that he receives as gifts are quite costly. Myself, I’d much rather steal them than give up pieces of my mind to gain them.”

  ***

  They were sitting on the back porch watching the shadows disappear into darkness when Bill stepped out and said, “He just sent out his first batch. I expect we’ll be attacked in about two hours. You have some time, so you may as well relax.”

  And they did for a while, if you could call sitting around with fear burning like acid in your belly a way of relaxing. Azura brought out a tray with cream, sugar, and five tall glasses of iced coffee. She was wearing her baggy ugly clothes, probably because she’d be on the roof with some of Bill’s men.

  She went back inside and they drank their coffee while darkness thickened, and for some reason they started talking about their comrades who had died back in Billy’s woods, and the talk made Amy think of Billy and the fact that she had mourned him only for brief moments now and then when there wasn’t something else demanding her attention.

  After a while Joe said, “We better get our weapons together.”

  They brought their arms into the living room and sat inspecting them. Bill came in and said, “Does everyone have a rifle?”

  “I don’t like ‘em,” Joe said. “Too damn noisy.”

  Shane and Amy didn’t have any, so Bill brought in two SKS carbines and several boxes of ammo for them. “I don’t expect him to send gunmen or Nephilim,” he said. “But just in case.”

  Amy had never used an SKS, so Lucky carefully placed his beloved Winchester .220 Swift in its case and came over to show her how to load it with a stripper clip. Pretty soon there was nothing left to do, and they sat without speaking. Lucky pulled a flask of bourbon from his pocket and offered it to them, but none of them wanted any. He had a couple sips and put it back in his pocket.

  Bill came in and said, “You better go to the roof now. Nyx, you won’t be much use up there because of your bad arm, so I’ll want you out in the yard.”

  “Like hell,” she said. “I go where my buddies go.”

  They carried their weapons up the narrow stairs to the roof. There was little breeze, and the waning moon cast only a feeble and ghostly light. Four of Bill’s men were already up there, and the two groups ignored each other while Amy and her friends laid their guns at the sides of the roof. Lucky nestled the case containing his Winchester up close to the parapet so nobody would step on it.

  Azura came up with an extra sword for Amy. At her side she was holding the slender wand she had talked about. The wood was delicately carved and painted with smooth blue lacquer.

  “Where are your weapons?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t want any.”

  “You’re nuts,” Amy said. “I guarantee you you’re not going to feel very feminine if you get bitten by a demon.”

  Azura ignored her. Amy held the borrowed sword in her left hand with her own in the right and touched the blades together, hoping to hear a crackle of electricity, but she heard nothing. She aimed her own sword at a tree limb and tried to force her power through it, but nothing happened.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work tonight,” she said. “Maybe I’m too scared.”

  “When the harpies come we’ll sing together,” Azura said. “Then it’ll work. Our powers grow stronger when we’re intimately connected.”

  She tripped over the word intimately. Her smile looked coquettish, and Amy believed she was thinking of last night. Certainly she was showing no embarrassment for having barged into the bedroom.

  “I gotta pee,” Nyx said. “Why isn’t there a bathroom up here?”

  “Why don’t you hang your ass over the side of the house?” Lucky said. “We won’t watch.”

  “Why don’t you hang your ass over a nice hot fire, Lucky? You can roast your dingle berries.”

  Amy looked over the side at the backyard. Bill’s people were milling about down there, and Amy saw one of them climbing a rope ladder up into a tree. Bill was sitting on a chair maybe thirty feet behind the house with his walking stick across his lap. He looked as calm as a theater-goer waiting for the show to start.

  “Heads up,” Nyx yelled.

  A harpy was flapping down toward the roof, two harpies, three. Amy aimed her sword at one of them and tried to send her power through the blade, but nothing happened. It was swooping down fast, and she gave up trying to summon her power and was preparing to slash it when it suddenly let out a fierce squawk and fell to the roof with one of Joe’s arrows stuck in its belly.

  It was still thrashing and squawking behind her when the other two harpies plummeted to the yard with their wings hanging uselessly as if broken. Amy didn’t know if Azura had paralyzed them or if something else had happened, and there was no time to think about it because more were swooping down, a big flock of them.

  The air was black with them, and Amy’s hair blew around her face in the reeking wind stirred up by their huge batwings. Some were male and some female, their naked humanoid bodies maybe four to five feet long, thin and wiry, their skin slimy gray, and their faces snarling masks of horror with long fangs and evil red eyes.

  Amy scraped the blades of her two swords together, but there was no telekinetic spark, no feeling of power. She aimed both swords at one of the winged demons, but it darted straight toward her unfazed. Its claws were nearly touching her when she ran one of her swords through its neck and the other through its skinny torso.

  It fell flopping at her feet, and she jumped aside a split second before its fangs would have chomped into her ankle. Many more of them were swooping toward her, and she slashed furiously with both swords, hacking and cleaving while arrows and knives flashed through the dark air piercing oily gray flesh that reeked of rotten eggs.

  Three of them dove at her all at once, and as she was backing away from them, jabbing and thrusting feverishly, she felt the parapet against the back of her leg. It was too late to stop her fall; she had already lost her balance and was beginning to topple backward off the edge of the roof when somebody grabbed her arm and pulled her upright.

  It was Lucky. “For God’s sake, don’t try to walk out on us now,” he said, but before the words were fully out of his mouth he turned and severed a wing from a slimy body.

  Amy was trying to move to a safer place away from the edge of the roof but was making slow progress. With a lucky jab she pierced a harpy through its eye, but even as it was falling another one swept toward her. As she jumped back to avoid it, she tripped over something and fell onto her back.

  It was a dead male harpy, and she was lying on one of its open wings. But no, not quite dead after all—his red eyes opened and stared at her. His talon-like hand suddenly shot out, grasped her wrist and jerked her closer, her bruised back sliding across his broken wing until her face was touching his, his hot breath against her cheek smelling like sewage a
nd blood.

  He smiled and his drooling mouth opened wide to feast upon her neck. Then the talon let go of her, and she rolled away and sprang to her feet. Shane had severed the harpy’s arm at the elbow, and now he was piercing its heart.

  Amy had dropped both her swords and was kneeling to retrieve them when she saw a harpy with a broken wing sprinting toward her on its thin bandy legs, its mouth dripping with thick slobber. One sword she couldn’t reach, but she grasped the other just in time to behead the thing. The head rolled toward Bloody Joe, its sharp teeth still chattering, and she kicked it away before it could bite his ankle.

  She raised her swords and looked up but didn’t see any more in the air. Had they all been killed? Two of Bill’s men were slinging a net over the back side of the roof, and two more grasped another net by both ends and ran with it to the front side. Nyx went over to her box of knives and began refilling her sheath, and Joe started refilling his quiver with arrows. Shane and Lucky stood watching the sky for more monsters, blood dripping from the tips of their swords, but none seemed to be coming.

  Azura was standing in the center of the roof, smiling sweetly amidst the dead harpies and the pools of blood, looking as serene and blissful as a child standing in a meadow of lovely flowers. Her eyes almost seemed to be incandescent, glowing soft blue with calm pleasure.

  Amy glanced over the edge of the roof at the back yard, which was palely illuminated by a couple of floodlights. It was full of demons, some of them in nets and some not. Bill was hurrying around from net to squirming net, aiming his wand at them and jabbering words in some foreign language while his men raced around stabbing demons with swords or attempting to throw nets over them.

  A small mob of listeners was clustered beneath a tree; a net fell out of it and two of Bill’s people ran over and pulled it shut with a drawstring like a Seine net. Bill aimed his wand at it and jabbered some more.

  Amy was still looking down when the red skull-face of a babbleboon appeared over the edge of the parapet. It leaped at her with a shriek, and she cleaved it in half in the air. Now two more of them appeared over the parapet. She decapitated them both with one swing of her sword and peered down at the side of the house. Dozens of demons were crawling up the side of the house, grasping downspouts, windowsills, and the rough convolutions of the stucco with their claws.

  She yelled, and two of Bill’s men hurried over with a net. They lowered the edge of it against the side of the house, causing some of the demons to lose their grip and fall while some others clung to the net. The men let it fall and the demons fell with it, some scampering away screaming as they hit the ground and some others trapped beneath it, fighting one another savagely as they struggled to find their way out.

  “Here come some more!” Shane yelled.

  Amy looked up and saw more harpies and some other sort of monstrosities she’d never seen before. They looked something like enormous stingrays with triangular wings or flaps, their bodies maybe five feet long with slender tails almost as long as their bodies. But unlike stingrays they had heads, hairless like their bodies, their faces half-human and half-fish with wide shark mouths. Their wings didn’t flap; the things seemed to soar and float effortlessly like kites.

  “Come over here, Amy, and sing with me,” Azura called softly.

  Nyx was throwing knives with her left hand, Joe was shooting arrows, Lucky and Shane were slashing furiously with their swords, but Azura was standing at the center of the roof smiling calmly, her delicate blue wand in one hand while her other hand beckoned Amy with the carefree gesture of a schoolgirl wanting her chum to join her so they could play together.

  Feeling almost like a traitor to the others, Amy came to her. Azura began to sing the telekinesis chant, her voice sweet and lilting, bringing a sense of childlike innocence to the horrific scene, and a moment later Amy joined her. Their voices merged as one, and Amy felt the blades of her swords begin to vibrate like tuning forks with the sound of the melody.

  She swung the tip of one sword in the direction of a harpy, and it plummeted to the yard. She aimed her other sword at one of the floating demons, and it let out a startled cry and sank like a punctured balloon. Azura swept the tip of her wand across the sky, and four harpies screeched and fell out of it with their wings hanging paralyzed at their sides.

  Amy felt Azura’s voice in her brain as if it were a part of her own mind and soul, and she felt an almost unbearable sense of sadness and loneliness in the voice: sadness, loneliness, and also a terrible strength. She felt the strength flashing through her, rushing up her arms through her hands and into the blades of her swords. She touched them together and heard them sizzle with strength far greater than the two of them. She pulled them apart and swung them swiftly back together, and the sky filled with cries and screeches as demons tumbled to the ground.

  She was still holding her swords up to the sky like steeples, feeling the great power surge through her, feeling very nearly invincible, when she realized the attack was over. Joe had lowered his bow and the others had lowered their swords, and she lowered her own almost reluctantly. A strange calm had descended on her, and though she was exhausted she still tingled with ebbing waves of unearthly energy.

  Azura put her lips to Amy’s ear and whispered, “Now we’re closer than you and your husband will ever be.”

  Amy turned to say, “You’re wrong,” but Azura was already walking away.

  Chapter 17

  Amy and her comrades were in the yard with flashlights searching for knives and arrows. Some of them were stuck in the decomposing bodies of harpies, and pulling them out wasn’t a pleasant job even though Bill had given them disposable plastic gloves to protect their hands from the foul putrescence.

  But even less pleasant was the job of retrieving weapons from recomposing bodies. These were the first kills. They had already dissolved into thick puddles of malodorous goop, and now the puddles were squirming and reforming themselves into new bodies, some of them already pulsing with new heartbeats, some already breathing, eyes and talons and teeth beginning to appear in the gelatinous mess.

  Up on the roof some of Bill’s men were using ropes to lower big metal basins of the goop. The bodies that hadn’t yet decomposed they had already unceremoniously thrown to the ground.

  Nets with their drawstrings tied shut squirmed in the yard. The squirming was less violent now because Bill’s calming spell apparently worked, but it didn’t seem to work for long because he had to keep returning to nets he’d already calmed and mutter his spell over them again. Obviously he wouldn’t be able to do that forever, and Amy was afraid the moment he stopped the nets would burst open and the demons would attack again.

  Two of his people had been killed, a man and the broad-shouldered woman who had injured Nyx’s arm. Nobody had time to do anything with the bodies, and they just lay there horribly puffed up with demon venom, thick foamy slobber still clinging to their faces like shaving cream.

  A tractor pulling a two-wheeled wagon emerged from one of the sheds and came to the back yard. Men dragged one of the nets up into the wagon, and the tractor hauled it to the barn. It soon returned with an empty wagon to haul another net, but this time Bill hitched a ride on the wagon and disappeared into the barn. He didn’t return with the tractor, and the nets still in the yard seemed to be squirming more energetically now that he was gone.

  “Those are going to rip open in about one more minute,” Amy said.

  “Where’d that ass-clown go?” Nyx said.

  “I guess he’s trying to placate the demons in the barn,” Lucky said. “Maybe he’s singing them a lullaby or telling them bedtime stories.”

  One of the nets began to rock violently and the demons inside it started howling and shrieking.

  “This is the stupidest damn shit I’ve ever seen in my life,” Nyx said. “I’m going inside and I’m gonna lock the doors behind me.”

  “I’m coming too,” Lucky said.

  They all went inside. Lucky slid open th
e steel shutter of a back window and they looked out at the dark yard. The net that had been rocking was torn now, and Bill’s people were jabbing demons with their swords as they emerged from the hole. Pretty soon Bill came riding back out with the tractor and waved his stick at the bag and muttered some words.

  “I’ll have some of that whiskey now,” Bloody Joe said.

  “The flask is empty but I have a fresh liter in my room,” Lucky said.

  When he returned with it they went to the kitchen, got five glasses from the cupboard, and sat around the table drinking. Every few minutes one of them would get up and look out the window to report on the outdoor activities.

  “All the nets are gone from the back now,” Lucky said. “But there must be some more out front because that’s where the tractor’s headed.”

  “If he thinks he’s going to keep those demons all nice and quiet and friendly he’s way overdue for a padded cell,” Nyx said. “This takes stupid to a whole new level.”

  ***

  “Behold, I walk amidst demons and remain unscathed,” Bill Sorrows said.

  He was walking up and down the floor of the barn past horse stalls filled with demons. Harpies stared down at him from the edges of the haylofts, and above them hell-kites floated in the darkness near the roof.

  “I am your lord and master, and you shall obey me always, and me alone shall you obey,” he said.

  Listeners peered balefully out at him from two of the stalls, babbleboons from two others, grimsnuffers, and jabber-suckers from some others. A stickman glowered from one of the stalls, housed by itself because even ensorcelled it was a danger to the others, and a snakewalker had another private stall for the same reason.

  The stench was nearly intolerable, and Bill wished he could hold a handkerchief soaked with camphor to his nose. But he didn’t, because it was essential for the demons to learn to recognize his face.

  “I am your lord and master,” he repeated, “and you shall submit to me as your king. My every word is an indestructible commandment carved in your brains.”