Demon Frenzy (Demon Frenzy Series Book 1) Read online

  “Yes, very,” the woman said. “Before you leave I want you to write a full report. How did Sandoval conjure Zahbeezul, how did he dismiss him, what minor demons were present, and also describe the circle of protection as clearly as you can remember.”

  “I’ll do that, Milady, and I even took some pictures you can download on your computer. That should be pretty useful, shouldn’t it? So maybe in return for all this useful stuff, you’ll be nice to the woman.”

  She looked at Amy and said, “Come here.”

  Amy got out. The woman was close to six feet tall and slim but by no means frail. She wore faded blue jeans and a blue cotton work shirt with the sleeves cut off. Her long glossy hair was so black it must have been dyed, and her river-green eyes were cool and aloof. She looked to be about forty, her face smooth and beautiful but austere and unsmiling.

  She regarded Amy for a while without saying anything. Then she looked at Shane and said, “Did you bring her here because she’s pretty?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Pretty is better than ugly,” the woman said. “How much money do you have?” she asked Amy.

  “You mean with me, in my purse?” Amy said. “I don’t know, less than a hundred.”

  “How much can you withdraw from a bank?”

  “I don’t know, maybe I have five hundred in my checking account.”

  “I want a thousand. Tomorrow I’ll have someone drive you to a bank. In the meantime give me everything in your purse.”

  “What for?” Amy asked.

  “You want me to save your pretty ass, don’t you? Is your ass worth a thousand dollars?”

  Amy got her purse from the car and gave the woman what she had: sixty-two dollars and fifty cents. The woman stuffed it in her shirt pocket and said, “Give me your cellphone too.”

  “No way. I need it to call my brother.”

  “You won’t be making any calls from this compound. Give it to me.”

  “No.”

  “Give it to her,” Shane said. “Right now you don’t have any other options.”

  Amy handed her phone to the woman, who shoved it in her jeans pocket and said, “Have you eaten today?”

  “No, not since breakfast,” Amy said. “I’m pretty hungry.”

  “What did you eat for breakfast?”

  “Just a sandwich with lunch meat.”

  “Not good,” the woman said. “You’ll fast for the rest of the day and all day tomorrow. You can have nothing but water. Are you thirsty?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “Ivan, bring out a glass of water,” the woman said.

  Though she hadn’t raised her voice, a minute later a big man with broad shoulders and a black beard emerged from the house with a glass of water. He handed it to Amy and watched her sip it, his fingers on the butt of the revolver holstered at his waist.

  “Enjoy your water,” the woman said. “You can have two more glasses today, that’s all. Your cleansing will begin tonight at nine o’clock.”

  She and Ivan went back into the house.

  “That’s Neoma,” Shane said.

  “Is she always so friendly?” Amy asked.

  “No, sometimes she can be a bit difficult to get along with. You’re lucky that she likes you. There are some picnic tables back behind the house. Do you want to sit down?”

  “Yes.”

  They sat across from each other at a table shaded by poplars. Amy saw a few small log cabins clustered farther back in the woods with some cars parked beside them.

  “What is this place?” she asked. “It’s obviously not a yoga club.”

  “Neoma will tell you whatever she wants you to know.”

  “What’s this cleansing she was talking about?”

  “It’s a ritual to get rid of unclean spirits. It’s so Sandoval won’t be able to find you.”

  “So you mean Neoma’s some sort of witch?”

  “Something like that.”

  There was a burst of gunfire. It seemed to be coming from the hills behind the cabins.

  “What’s all that shooting?” Amy asked.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “There’s a shooting range back there.”

  “Funny kind of yoga club,” she said. “So how do you fit into all this?”

  Shane shrugged and said, “I don’t like what’s going on in Blackwood.”

  “And what exactly is that?”

  “Sandoval moved into town five years ago. He’s not alone, he has a big organization behind him. Years ago there were some stories in the papers about what seemed to be ritual occult murders in Central and South America, in places where the drug cartels were active. It seems some of the big drug kingpins hired magi—you know, magicians or sorcerers—to protect them from the authorities, and those sorcerers needed human sacrifices to do their work.”

  “Yeah, I remember hearing something about it.”

  “Apparently the magi were effective, or at least the cartels thought they were. They were very well paid, and even though the kingpins were happy for their service they were also afraid of them, so pretty soon the magi grew maybe even more powerful than the kingpins themselves. Well, they’re not all south of the border anymore. One of them is right here in Blackwood.”

  “Can’t you just notify the FBI or the DEA or something?” Amy asked.

  “No. These people have bought the authorities, even the feds. Especially the feds. Do you have any idea how much money they have?”

  “They can’t make all that much money in Blackwood,” she said, “even if everybody living here is cooking crank.”

  “It’s not just Blackwood,” Shane said. “The same thing is happening in isolated towns all over the country. Especially in the hills, where moonshiners used to flourish. Hill people are good at keeping their business private.”

  “So Billy was part of all this?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know. Dilkens is putting out the story that Billy blew himself up cooking crank, but I didn’t happen to notice any burnt rubble back there in the woods today, did you? And there’s another story going around that he was growing a lot of weed and refused to give Sandoval his cut so they killed him.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened?”

  “No. Billy wasn’t stupid enough to refuse Sandoval his cut.”

  “So what happened?”

  “My guess is that Billy was sitting in his deer stand one evening, waiting for a nice fat buck to walk by, and he happened to see a sacrifice. Somebody must have spotted him, and that was that.”

  She let that sink in for a minute and then said, “So they did that horrible thing to Jerry Jefferson just because he owed Sandoval some money?”

  “No, that was just an excuse. The demon that protects Sandoval—I guess Neoma called it Zahbeezul—demands to be paid in blood, so every few weeks Dilkens and his boys round up some poor sap to sacrifice.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened to Billy?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not. Amy, I need to go in and write my report. It’ll take a while, and I don’t want to get back to town late enough to arouse suspicion. Every Monday I turn the bar over to my assistant so I can supposedly go fishing or hunting, so there’s nothing suspicious about me being gone today. But today of all days I want to get back early and peek into the bar and act as normal and innocent as I can. If anybody suspects that I saw that sacrifice…”

  “I guess they’d kill you.”

  “Yeah, but first they’d probably do some things worse than that.”

  “Before you go, I just want to ask you one thing. You left this town, Shane. Why the hell did you come back?”

  “When my father died I came back to clear out his house and sell the bar, but it didn’t take long to see what was going on here. And then I began to think that maybe they’d murdered my father.”

  “Did they?”

  “I think so, but I’m still not sure. So I decided to run the bar for a while and see what I could learn. If you want
to be an undercover snoop, there’s no better job than tending bar. People say things to their bartender they wouldn’t say to their closest friends. It makes me very useful to Neoma.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “Nobody finds Neoma, she finds you. A couple months ago one of her people recruited me.”

  “So what does she have here, some sort of resistance group?”

  “I’ve said enough,” Shane said. “Good luck, and I’ll try to get back out here to see you when I get a chance.”

  He got up and was heading toward the house when Amy called after him: “So what am I supposed to do now? Just sit out here all day?”

  “Yep,” Shane said. “Just sit there and be good till Neoma tells you to do something else.”

  “What if I need to go to the bathroom?”

  Shane shrugged and said, “Well, I guess you can duck behind a tree.”

  Chapter 8

  Amy sat at the picnic table for a long while, and eventually she did find it necessary to duck behind a tree. Not far from the tables there was a circular clay hut with a domed thatched roof, and she was staring at it when she heard a familiar clanking sound behind her.

  Two men were fencing in a small clearing between the tables and the cabins. Both wore fencing masks, so she couldn’t see their faces, but one man was short and wiry and the other was tall and muscular with long blond hair. Amy watched them with interest; she had learned to fence as a physical education elective at OSU, and after finishing college she had joined a fencing club that met weekly.

  But this was different than the competitive style of fencing she was used to—this was more like a martial art. There was no strip or piste, no en-garde lines, no referee, and seemingly no rules. Amy was much better than the tall blond man, who was obviously an awkward beginner, but the small man seemed more skillful than any instructor she had ever faced.

  Two other people emerged from one of the cabins and came to the clearing, a man and a woman, but they were carrying sabers instead of foils, and soon they were hacking and slashing at each other so furiously that Amy was afraid one of them would be seriously injured. But neither was. She wasn’t familiar with this style of fighting, but she soon realized that their lunges and ripostes were calculated to barely touch the opponent instead of wound.

  She heard the bang of a screen door at the house and turned her head to see Shane walk to his Jeep and drive away. It was a little after 6:00. The fencers soon returned to their cabins, and before long several other people emerged from other cabins and headed toward the cluster of tables where she was sitting. There were eight of them, two women and six men ranging in age from maybe twenty to sixty, and they looked ordinary enough except they all had revolvers or pistols holstered at their waists and a few of them wore swords.

  They all stared at her and said nothing, and she stared back. They started some coals on one of the two stone grills and began putting food out on two of the tables near hers. When they put hamburger patties on the grill she went to her car and sat because the smell was nearly driving her mad. She was hungry and very thirsty.

  It was almost 7:00 when a slender man with a close-cropped red beard came out of the house and said, “She wants to see you.”

  She followed him through the back door into the kitchen, where Ivan was standing by the stove stirring something that smelled like beef stew, and the aroma made her stomach grumble as she followed the guy with the red beard upstairs. He tapped lightly on a door, opened it, and waved Amy inside.

  It was a small room with two chairs on either side of a small wood table and some bookshelves filled with exotic-looking ornaments and figurines as well as books. Neoma sat in one of the chairs, tapping the end of a ballpoint pen against the table.

  “Shut the door and sit down,” she said.

  Amy did. Neoma sipped what looked like iced tea from a tall glass and stared at her for a minute across the small table, her eyes as unreadable as green glass. “Have you ever shot a gun?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I learned how to shoot when I was a kid.”

  “Can you hit anything?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “We’ll see about that. Any self-defense skills—martial arts, karate, boxing, anything like that?”

  “No, but I’m pretty good at fencing.”

  “We’ll see about that too. Now tell me who you are, why you’re here, and everything you’ve seen and done since you got here.”

  “Can I please have some water first?” Amy asked. “I’m very thirsty, and you said I could have three glasses.”

  Neoma tapped her pen impatiently and said, “That can wait. Start talking.”

  Amy was hoarse before she finished. Neoma had been sipping iced tea and jotting notes in a notebook the whole time. Now her glass was empty except for the ice cubes melting at the bottom, but Amy still stared at it thirstily.

  “The thing you saw in the closet is called a listener,” Neoma said. “Sandoval probably planted it in your brother’s house to see if anyone would come snooping around there. You probably weren’t meant to see it, but listeners aren’t highly intelligent—though arguably they’re more intelligent than you. It stole your hairbrush, and now Sandoval can use your hair to track you.”

  “Can this listener find me here?”

  “No. This place is protected.”

  “By what?”

  “By me,” Neoma said, and her eyes seemed to flare with a strange green light. “I’ll ask the questions, you just shut up and listen. After the listener saw you, Sandoval planted the crying man in your brother’s house to scare you away if you decided to return. He wanted to scare you out of town before you learned anything important.”

  “Are these things really demons?” Amy asked. “The crying man, the listener?”

  “Yes, of course they’re really demons,” Neoma said. “Sandoval has many different kinds of them at his beck and call, in all sizes and shapes, and they can all kill you in the blink of an eye.”

  “But the crying man talked to me just like a person,” Amy said. “I mean, can they all do that? And why was he crying?”

  “Do you think I have time to sit here all night answering stupid questions? The next time you see him, why don’t you ask him what he’s crying about? Maybe the two of you can have a good cry together. Give me your car keys.”

  “What?”

  “You weren’t smart enough to leave when you could, so now maybe you’ll try to leave when you can’t. You wouldn’t get far because one of my people would shoot you before you got off the property, but I don’t want the mess. Give me your keys.”

  Amy got them from her purse and put them on the table.

  “One more thing,” Neoma said. “All the others are here because they were chosen, and they in turn chose to join us. That’s not true of you—you weren’t chosen, and you didn’t choose to be here. Tomorrow you’ll swear an oath of loyalty, but I don’t trust oaths sworn by those who weren’t chosen and didn’t choose. So let me make this perfectly clear: if you ever speak one single word about us to anyone outside the circle, if you ever betray us in any way, I’ll track you down and kill you. If I don’t kill you personally, I’ll send one of my people to do the job. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. While you’re here your name will be Mary. Now go downstairs, Mary, and sit in the living room. Your cleansing will begin at nine o’clock.”

  “May I please have that glass of water now?”

  “Tell Ivan to give you half a glass. After the cleansing you’re going to be a lot thirstier than you are now.”

  Amy sat on the sofa in the living room and watched Neoma, Ivan, and the red-bearded man eat beef stew at the table in the dining room. It was maddening the way they sat there murmuring quietly among themselves, casually dipping luscious chunks of buttered French loaf into their bowls, slurping happily from their spoons and sipping from their wine glasses, completely ignoring her while she sat in the next room with her stomach g
rumbling and her tongue sticky with thirst. When they were done eating they opened another bottle of wine and took their time drinking it, laughing occasionally though they were speaking too quietly to let Amy in on their jokes.

  Neoma and Ivan finished off the second bottle while the other man cleared the table and carried the dishes to the kitchen. Ivan looked at his watch, and he and Neoma stood up. She waved her hand at Amy and said, “Come on.”

  Amy followed the two of them out the back door of the kitchen to the circular clay hut out back. It was completely dark now except for an orange glow where a man stood tending a fire that smoldered in a pit near the hut.

  “John and Jake,” Neoma said, and two men got up from a picnic table hidden in the shadows and stepped forward. One of them looked about twenty with a fresh boyish face, and by his long blond hair Amy recognized him as one of the men who had been fencing earlier. The other looked at least sixty, his face bronzed, weathered, and mostly hidden by a full grizzled beard.

  “John, did you peel your branch properly?”

  “I think so, Milady,” the young man said.

  “Let me see it.”

  John handed Neoma a slender branch about four feet in length. She ran her fingers over the bare green wood and said, “Very well. Undress and stand against the hut.”

  The young man’s pale face blushed pink. He turned his back to the two women, took off his shoes, shirt, jeans, and underwear, and leaned forward with his hands against the small circular building.

  The long switch suddenly whistled through the air, and the boy gasped as it bit into the skin of his back. Neoma swung it again and again, and soon the young man’s buttocks, thighs, and back were striped with angry pink welts. He gasped each time he was hit but otherwise didn’t cry out.

  Amy watched with horror, but she also felt some sort of dark, primitive lust stirring in her loins. Deeply ashamed of herself, she looked away. Ivan and another man were using long-handled shovels to dig red-hot rocks out of the fire pit and load them into a steel wheelbarrow, and Amy wondered if they too were going to be used to inflict pain, maybe on herself.

  Neoma tossed the switch to the ground and said, “Mary and Jake, get undressed.”