Demon Mania (Demon Frenzy Series Book 2) Page 2

  All of this she noted in a second or two, and then she turned and climbed into her car. When she pulled out of the parking lot onto the street she saw he was still staring, and even after she was a block away she could still feel his eyes on her.

  She lived nearly thirty miles from town and ordinarily drove in only on weekends to buy groceries, but today was Monday and she had brought her daughter in to see the doctor for a cough that the doctor said was just a mild cold. In fact she had thought it was nothing serious, but to Amy the world seemed fraught with danger, even way out here in the desert where logic told her that her enemies would never find her, and because of this she was nearly obsessed with making sure her daughter stayed safe and healthy. The world might boil like a cauldron with peril and evil, but Amy was determined that none of it would ever splash onto her child.

  On the outskirts of town she pulled into the parking lot of a small diner called Tia Marie’s. It was only 11:00 a.m., so the lunch crowd hadn’t yet hogged all the tables. She chose a small one in the back and was holding the baby seat in her lap when the waitress came by with a high chair to set it on.

  “Aw, ain’t she just pretty as a picture?” the waitress said. “What’s her name?”

  “Emily Neoma.”

  Emily for Shane’s mother, Neoma for the woman Amy still thought about every day, though she had known her for only a little while, but she didn’t tell the waitress that. She ordered a beef burrito, refried beans, and a cup of coffee. “And bring lots of that green hot sauce,” she said.

  She liked the jukebox here almost as much as the food. It had nothing but old country tunes, the same ones her father used to listen to when Amy was a child, and right now Merle Haggard was singing “Daddy Frank,” one of her father’s favorites.

  She wiped Emily’s mouth with a napkin and adjusted her soft green pajamas. This was the center of the world, this nineteen-pound munchkin. Though she was ashamed of the fact and had confessed it to no one, for the time being this tiny person was the only thing she was able to love.

  Ever since she had left Blackwood, Amy’s emotions had been flat and muffled like ears stuffed with cotton, and the world she walked through was distant and not fully material. Many nights she’d awake from terrible nightmares thinking a headless herky-jerky was thrashing on top of her, and in the daytime there were sudden moments of paralyzing fear that sprang unexpectedly from nowhere and for no apparent reason. But ordinary feelings seemed far away from her, out of reach and incomprehensible.

  Shane was very nearly a perfect husband, and she knew she ought to love him and probably she actually did in some deep part of her heart she was no longer able to reach, but she didn’t feel it. When he touched her she felt comfort and gratitude, but her pulse didn’t quicken and she had to force herself to find the right tone when she responded to his words of endearment. It was the same with her brother: she pitied him for his brain damage and hoped nothing else bad would ever happen to him, but she felt for him nothing that could be called love.

  She thought post-traumatic stress disorder was to blame. Shane and Billy were associated with her nightmarish experiences at Blackwood, so her emotions wanted nothing to do with them. PTSD, but what the hell was she supposed to do about it? She couldn’t very well tell a therapist that she and her friends had killed a bunch of men including a mayor and police chief. So this would have to be her therapy—Emily Neoma, the one thing in the world she was able to love. Whenever she nursed Emily she felt Emily nursing her as well, nursing her back to the world from which she lived at a numb distance.

  Marty Robbins was singing “El Paso” when the waitress brought her food. The burritos here were good, the beef long simmered in tangy seasonings that turned to pure fire when Amy spooned on the green sauce. She had eaten half of it and was getting ready to enjoy another juicy delicious bite when her ears began to hum again and she felt ice-cold bugs crawling down her spine.

  She looked up. The old man with the three-piece suit and gray fedora had just come into the restaurant and was walking toward her. She froze with the burrito halfway to her mouth and stared at him.

  He moved swiftly to her table and stood over her, his tarnished nickel eyes holding her like chains. He spoke three or four words in a strange language, words that sounded like thunder echoing in a cave, and then he turned and strode away.

  She heard a soft distant thud as the burrito she had dropped landed on her plate, and she felt her head and shoulders slowly sinking forward to the table, and then she was flying on the wings of an owl.

  Below her were rocky hills and bluffs, mesquite and acacia, a dry creek bed like a deep ragged scar cut in the rust-red sand, and the bright midday sun glaring off the desert hurt her eyes. She perched in a gnarled cottonwood to rest. Though there was no wind she heard a thin wailing in the dry air and thought it was the ghosts of Navajo warriors long dead.

  Not far away a black-tailed rattlesnake slid out of a wide crevice in a rocky hill and curled up to sun itself, and a moment later something else emerged from a dark cave near the crevice, something large and gray that stood on two legs like a fat naked man.

  It was a listener. It gazed up at her and grinned.

  ***

  “The waitress had to carry Emily out to the car because I was so wobbly,” Amy said. “I didn’t have any strength.”

  “Was the man gone by then?” Shane asked.

  He had just gotten home from work and hadn’t changed his clothes yet. He was sitting beside her on the sofa, smelling of lumber and the outdoors, his hands still dark from holding nails and tools all day. Billy sat across from them in his rocking chair, humming quietly and probably not understanding a word she had said.

  “Yeah. The waitress said she saw someone come in and say something to me and then leave, but she didn’t notice what kind of car he drove away in. She said she didn’t think she’s ever seen him before.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “Better, but I’ve been kind of a mess most of the day. Driving home was hard because my mind was all over the place, like it wasn’t completely attached to my body anymore. I had to pull over a couple times because I was afraid I was going to start spirit-traveling right there behind the wheel.

  “Then as soon as I got home things started flying around. First it was that lamp—I was changing Emily’s diaper when it flew off the stand all by itself. A little while later my coffee cup jumped off the kitchen table and smashed on the floor. Next it was a bottle of your cologne—it flew across the bathroom and hit the wall. Luckily it didn’t break or the whole bathroom would smell like oak moss or whatever’s in that stuff.”

  Shane smiled and said, “Cheap cologne, plastic bottle.”

  “So I put Emily in her crib and decided I better lay down for a while. The moment I shut my eyes I was spirit-traveling again, and then it happened two more times this afternoon. I’ve been flapping my wings all over the back forty like a government drone. For a year and a half I haven’t been able to do it no matter how hard I tried, and now all of a sudden it’s happening all on its own and I can’t control it. Oh and another thing—now I suddenly remember the spirit-travel chant and the telekinesis chant Neoma taught me. They’ve been completely gone all this time, and now they’re stuck in my head like pop tunes you can’t get rid of.”

  Shane didn’t say anything. That was one of his many good traits—when he had nothing worth saying he kept his mouth shut. But she wanted him to say something, anything.

  “So what do you think?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s just theory, maybe it doesn’t amount to anything,” he said. “I think ever since Blackwood you’ve been suffering PTSD like we talked about. Spirit-travel and telekinesis and the chants are all a part of that experience, and you’ve repressed your memories of them because you don’t want to think about that stuff.

  “So today you see some strange-looking old man, maybe a junkie like you said or a wet-head alky. He thinks he recognizes you, so he comes
up to your table and says what he thinks your name is. Maybe it’s a strange foreign name, maybe Polish or Romanian or something, and to you it sounds like the sort of magic words Neoma used to use, and so the fearful PTSD part of your mind suddenly believes he’s a sorcerer. This triggers a momentary breakdown, all the defense mechanisms you’ve built up suddenly crumble, and you remember everything you’ve repressed. You remember how to spirit-travel, how to move objects, you remember the old chants, except now you’re out of practice and you can’t control your powers. Don’t know if any of this is true, just saying.”

  Amy sipped her iced tea. She had been unusually thirsty ever since the experience at the diner. Billy rocked and hummed. Emily was awake but lying quietly on the sofa with her head on Amy’s thigh, smiling as she gnawed the wing of a bright plastic bird. She was a cheerful baby and she smiled a lot.

  “I still think he was a sorcerer,” Amy said. “You should have seen his eyes. They were like metal and when he stared at me they almost seemed to glow. And then there was the listener.”

  “Are you sure you really saw it?”

  “I’m sure. It wasn’t some kind of hallucination. I was really traveling and I really saw a listener. And a rattlesnake.”

  “You didn’t recognize the terrain? It wasn’t anything on this property?”

  “No. There were some low hills and bluffs.”

  “Maybe someplace east of here,” Shane said. He reached for the phone in his shirt pocket and said, “I’m going to call the bossman and tell him I won’t be in tomorrow.”

  “No, don’t do that. I’m going to ask Alejandra to come over for a few days until I get these spirit-traveling fits under control. Besides, I don’t think your boss is real sensitive to neurotic wives and family leave and all that.”

  “He’s a jerk, but what can he say?” Shane asked.

  “Well, for one thing he can say you’re fired.”

  ***

  Alejandra was a retired widow who lived half a mile away, and there was nothing she enjoyed more than babysitting Emily. She was part Navajo, part Mexican, and part German, or so she said, and though she stood less than five feet tall she was as strong as an ox, or so she said, from decades of helping her husband coax crops out of the arid soil of their small truck-farm. Right now her capable hands were deftly changing Emily’s diaper while Amy washed their lunch dishes.

  “How’s your migraine?” Alejandra asked.

  “Better.”

  Amy didn’t really have a headache, but she had told Alejandra she did to explain why she wanted an extra hand with Emily for a few days and also to use as an excuse in case she suddenly happened to black out the way she had at the diner.

  But she no longer was afraid of that happening. For the past three days she’d been practicing spirit-travel and telekinesis and seemed to have her powers fully under control now, in fact more fully than when Neoma was her tutor. The powers seemed stronger now, as if they had matured while in hibernation. Yesterday she had telekinetically lifted a rock that weighed at least fifteen pounds. It had hovered four or five inches above the ground for several seconds before exhaustion had forced her to drop it.

  “Mind if I step out for some fresh air?” she asked.

  “You go right ahead,” Alejandra said. “Looks to me like Emily’s thinking hard about taking a little nap, and I’m thinking hard about watching some TV while she does it. A show I like is coming on pretty soon.”

  Amy got her .357 Magnum Ruger revolver from a kitchen drawer and tucked it in the waistband of her jeans. Once she had told Alejandra she liked to keep the gun handy in case of rattlesnakes or rabid coyotes, and Alejandra had replied, “I like to keep one handy in case of assholes.”

  Amy and Shane kept guns stashed wherever they might be needed: the revolver in the kitchen, a shotgun in the coat closet, a .45 Springfield 1911 in their bedroom, and locked in a bureau drawer in the living room a small Kahr 9 millimeter suitable for concealed carry. Shane’s sanctified sword was in a rack on their bedroom wall, and the one Amy had taken from Sandoval’s house was hidden in the garage beside a .30-30 Winchester lever rifle fully loaded. They didn’t know if the Lost Society knew who had killed Sandoval and his cronies, but they wanted to be prepared just in case.

  Back behind the garage was a small weathered barn where they stored an old tractor and some tools, and Billy was painting the barn bright red. He had already painted the house and the garage. He liked to paint and he did a good job.

  “How’s it going, Billy?”

  “Okay I guess.”

  He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his wiry torso and arms were streaked with red paint.

  “Do you have enough paint?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  Beyond the barn was wilderness: rocks, scrubby mesquite, weeds, yuccas, some wild daisies, patches of tall yellow grass struggling in the stony soil, a few cottonwoods and junipers, and more rocks. And solitude, lots of solitude, which was what she loved most about it. Mountains were distant but visible.

  As soon as Emily was old enough for school, Amy hoped to find a job, though her degree in chemistry probably wouldn’t be useful anywhere nearby. And after she found a job she hoped they could afford to buy a horse. Whenever she hiked this rocky terrain she imagined riding through it on a horse, her revolver in a holster by her hip and a Stetson hat on her head.

  “Giddy-up, ol’ Paint,” she said quietly.

  About a quarter mile from the house was a large flat rock that looked very much like the rock at Secret Place. This was where she had been going the past three days to practice spirit-traveling. She sat on it for a while, gazing out at the quiet landscape and enjoying the sun on her face. The sky was intensely blue with no clouds and the breeze, as usual, was as hot and dry as air from a hair dryer. She lay back, shut her eyes, and began to intone the spirit-travel chant, which she now remembered with perfect clarity.

  She suddenly opened her eyes and sat up. Something was wrong. Her ears were humming and she felt ice-cold bugs crawling down her spine.

  She looked carefully in every direction and examined every tree and rock. Nobody could be watching her because there was nobody out there. And still she felt it.

  She thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye sneaking toward her, a coyote or a big dog, but when she looked nothing was there. As she was looking away she thought she saw it again, something creeping up closer just at the edge of her vision, but no, there was only empty air.

  Maybe Shane was right, maybe she really was experiencing some sort of momentary breakdown making her prone to hallucinations. The bugs were still crawling down her spine, but she ignored them. There was nothing out here, no coyote and nobody to watch her. She lay down on the rock and began to chant again.

  The song was soothing like some ancient lullaby, and soon the rock began to feel as soft as a mattress. She seemed to collapse into herself and became utterly weightless, like a warm ball of living energy peering down from the sky.

  She was perched in a tall cottonwood looking down at herself lying as if lifeless on the flat rock beneath the tree. But something else was peering at her body as well.

  It wasn’t a coyote, it was a big silver-gray wolf sitting on its haunches exactly where she had thought she’d seen something, and it was watching her unconscious body. Then it looked up into the cottonwood tree and stared at her astral owl body, its luminous brown eyes cunning and keen with human malevolence.

  And then she knew what the coyote was. She remembered Neoma once saying that most people can’t see astral bodies. Most. She was looking at someone’s astral body, and that astral body was looking at hers.

  And she knew whoever was looking at her was no friend.

  Panic told her to return to her body, but the panic was for Emily, not herself, so she took to the air and flew toward the house to make sure her baby was safe. Something was going on there; two dark blue SUVs were parked in the road in front of the house, and several figures dre
ssed in black with black ski masks hiding their faces were emerging from them and darting through the yard to the house. They all carried rifles.

  The owl shrieked.

  Chapter 3

  Amy opened her eyes, leaped up from the rock, and set off running for the house as fast as she could. She tried to form a plan as she ran. She had seen at least six figures, and there was no way she could overcome six armed assailants if she burst into the house with no plan.

  Billy was standing behind the barn with the paint brush in his hand, but he wasn’t painting. “There’s some people went in the house,” he said when she got there. “I think they have guns.”

  “I know,” she said. She drew her revolver and peered around the corner of the barn at the house but couldn’t see anyone.

  “Follow me and keep quiet,” she whispered.

  She ran along the side of the barn that faced away from the house and peered around the front corner. From here she could see the blue SUVs still idling in the road but couldn’t see if anyone was inside them. Billy wanted to have a look too, but she held him back.

  “I’m going to run to the garage,” she said. “After I get there follow me and try not to be seen. Can you do that?”

  “I guess so.”

  The garage was about thirty feet away. She ran to a thick oak about halfway there, ducked behind the trunk, and then ran the rest of the way to the back of the garage. She looked back and saw Billy slowly shuffling toward her, still holding his paint brush which was slopping red paint on the grass and his blue jeans.

  “Damn it,” she whispered, expecting him to be shot, but at last he made it to her safely.

  “You remember where that rifle’s hidden in the garage?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “I’m going to make a run for the back of the house,” she said. “If I get there without getting shot, then you kick open the garage window on the side away from the house and try to climb in without getting cut on the glass. Think you can do that?”