Child, page 15
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“You sound like it could be dangerous,” Kara said.
“Did they break your nose last time, or did you break someone’s nose?” Kelly asked. “I can’t remember.”
“You insult me,” Jason said.
“And these are your new friends?” Kara asked. Jason slammed the door and waited for her to get out.
“Never said they were friends,” Jason said. “Just that we needed them.”
Kara opened the back hatch and pulled her shirt off. Kelly turned his back to her, spine straightening and stiffening, and Jason watched for a minute, then went to stand next to Kelly.
“You’re going to have to get used to being around chicks,” he said. Kelly was buzzing with nervous energy.
“That is not normal,” he said.
“Nothing I do is,” Kara answered, breezing past them. Jason whistled quietly. She was in a skin-tight vest that left her entire waist exposed and her black leather pants. Her hair came down her back in thick waves that covered her entire shirt and made her look like she was topless, from behind. Jason settled Anadidd’na’s harness over his shoulder and followed after her, not checking to make sure Kelly was following. The angel could take care of himself, if Kara’s attitude was too much for him.
“This is where Sam learned to dress like she does, isn’t it?” Kara asked as Jason caught up, referring to the predominantly leather and mesh wardrobe his brother’s wife wore when she was in New York.
“It is, but she doesn’t wear it like you do,” he agreed. Kara flashed him a grin.
“No one does.”
Jason shoved the front door open and stepped through. A jaded woman who was curled on the stairs stood, giving Kara a careful once over, and turned to walk down a hallway. Her hand flipped lazily over her shoulder.
“He’s waiting for you.”
Jason counted three sets of footsteps as they followed the woman. Kelly had joined them.
They walked through the house and into a vast sunroom on the back of the building where Ian and a large number of his people were lounging. Ian eyed him down from a couch against the wall of windows.
“Here they are,” he said. Jason looked around the room.
“How many of you are demons?”
Easily half.
“Get out.”
He heard Kelly’s snort of approval, and he tried to signal to the kid to keep his opinions to himself.
With an abundance of disdain, they trickled out. Ian glowered, but remained silent until the last of them were gone.
“They can pull a demon just as good as anyone,” he finally said.
“No,” Jason said. “We both know how big a lie that is. Don’t try to pull that with me.”
“How big a group are we talking about?” Ian asked.
“Twenty, maybe twenty-five.”
Ian shook his head.
“No way you can do that with this group.”
Jason stepped to the side.
“Can with him.”
Ian laughed.
“You want to go into an organized demon hive and your big champion is the hundred pound weakling?”
“No,” Jason said calmly, reaching back over his shoulder. Anadidd’na rung a clear note as she drew clear of her demon alloy sheath. “He’s just the one who’s going to pull the demons out.”
“You don’t walk into another man’s home and draw your sword, boy,” Ian said. Jason grinned at him as Kara tossed her hair and rested her elbow on his shoulder.
“Yeah. You do. If you’re me.”
Ian stood.
“What is it that you want?”
Jason knew he was dancing on a minefield, here. Samantha’s people had their own rules, and demonstrations of power were going to lay claim to a lot of responsibility Jason had no interest in, if he wasn’t careful.
“I’m going to tell you where the colony is, and you and your people are going to go there and help me root them out and pull every last demon out of them.”
“I’m not risking my people like that.”
“You are, because it’s your job. You want to sit here in this pretty house with all your little sycophants fawning over you, you have to turn up.”
“Turn up, sure. Put a bullet in every one of them, and chop up the ones that are still walking.”
Jason shook his head.
“This is me standing in between you and what you would normally do. You’re going to agree to do it my way, or you’re going to fight me.”
Ian drew a pair of shorter blades from behind his back and held them out in front of himself like a praying mantis. Jason heard one of the remaining women say something and Kara answer, but he was focused on Ian. Ian stared at him with calculating eyes.
Jason bent time, losing track of the voices and the people around him as he and Ian circled very slowly.
Ian attacked, a quick slash-slash motion that Jason easily deflected, just feeling him out. He’d actually been wanting to do this for a while. Jason had only ever fought with a few people in practice, and he understood the rules of the game, but he didn’t know where he would actually fit on the pecking order. The trick was to come as close to contact as possible without actually touching the other person. He’d seen Samantha shave whiskers off of Lange’s face while the two of them were competing.
Ian came at him again, and Jason stepped to the side, getting a feel for Ian’s balance and timing. Jason found his brow folding as he spun over his toe and brought the dragon sword down toward Ian’s unprotected back. Kha’shing, the dragon sword’s name in hellspeak, screamed for blood. She wasn’t good at skirmishes. Jason made a quick slashing motion, slitting open Ian’s shirt without touching his skin, then kicked the man in the back of the knee.
The room went silent.
Jason wondered if he should have waited longer to win, just to avoid any unintentional consequences.
“Son of a…” the woman to his right muttered, moving toward him. Jason raised his sword, but she only made it a couple of steps.
That was when Kara smashed her in the face.
Kara shook her hand out and Jason did a quick scan to find Kelly scrapping with a pair of young men. He considered letting it play out, but this was a bit silly. He cleared his throat and Kelly stood straight, getting himself clocked pretty good. Jason ducked his head and covered his mouth with the back of his hand to hide the smile. Sure he felt bad, but the kid had to learn.
Ian climbed from his hands and knees, pulling his shirt over his arms and picking up the swords. Jason shook his head.
“That’s enough. We’re going now. When this is done, I’m leaving.”
Ian came to stand close.
“Carter trained you, didn’t he?”
“A couple of times. So?”
Ian nodded, then sneered and turned away.
“Load up,” he said, spinning a finger in the air.
There was a certain amount of antipathy among the rest of them, but they went along. Jason went back out to the Cruiser and led the way out to the location Simon had indicated.
“You can pull a demon out of someone, can’t you?” Jason asked Kelly in the rearview.
“Sure,” Kelly said. “But I need to touch them.”
Jason wrinkled his nose and turned his attention back to the road.
“Sam can do it a lot easier than that.”
“I bet she can,” Kelly said. “She’s got a lot of stuff at her disposal that I don’t. But she can’t do what I can do, either.”
“Fair enough. I need you to go get Maryanne.”
The angel made a face, but after a moment, rolled his eyes and vanished.
“You have a plan?” Kara asked.
“Figure it out when we get there,” Jason admitted. She nodded.
“Okay. Tell me about the last ones,” she said. He scratched his head.
“The first time, we just had the one girl we got out. I met her before she went in to get herself possessed, and so we went in and we got her out. And then Sam called Ian and he went in and killed the rest of them.”
“Why didn’t you save the rest of them?”
“They were all terminally ill. That was how they were getting everyone in. They were a last-ditch chance to save yourself, and instead they possessed them all. There was one boss demon who was actually manifest, and then the rest of them. And back then, Sam just didn’t have the juice to take them all out.”
“Why not?”
“She walked away from the life, for a long time. Just wandered. When we came out here, last time, I don’t know, just whatever it is she does to make herself as bad as she is, she hadn’t been doing it. So she couldn’t even kill the main demon, not to mention hold off the minions and not kill them.”
Kara sat back in her seat, looking out the window.
“If you didn’t know what you know, how do you think you’d deal with it?”
“Honestly?” Jason asked, looking over at her. She raised an eyebrow at him. “This is one of the ones that we don’t come home from.”
“You think so?”
“We would have gone busting in there, guns blazing, and we wouldn’t have killed a damned thing.”
She pursed her lips.
“Maybe you wouldn’t have…”
He didn’t want to patronize her. He loved the Rangers, and everything that they had done for generations. But there was a reason that Samantha had dismissed them as unimportant, and he hated feeling like she had been right.
He also missed Sam and how he would have been sitting in the passenger seat with a folder of printouts in his lap, putting together some kind of a plan.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“Twenty, thirty people all possessed in one place?” she asked. “I’d call you, Tanner, Carson, Krista, a few other people, and we’d have had a party.”
He grinned.
“You do any of that kind of stuff lately?”
“Yeah. You missed the last few. Tanner had us all out at this ranch in Montana. I swear I’ve never seen so many goblins.”
“Like a flock of birds?” Jason asked. She nodded.
“Yeah.”
Jason swallowed.
“Anything bigger?”
“Like what?”
Pit lords. He and Sam had never seen them before Samantha, so they didn’t have a Ranger word for them.
“Dunno. We were hunting chupacabra a while back, and they were with a whole mess of goblins. Scary dudes.”
“No, nothing like that,” Kara said. “We actually ended up skeet-shooting most of them. Once we got there, they just took off. I spent the next three weeks hunting down little nests of them and wiping them out.”
Class three and class four demons didn’t work out very well in big groups. The infighting would eventually drive them into splinter groups. It took a more powerful demon, pit lords, specifically, to keep them in line. The pit lords had just bailed when the Rangers had turned up. When Sam and Samantha and Jason had done it, he’d had to use a special rifle with tungsten-tipped bullets to kill off the pit lords. Anadidd’na could do it, now, and so could Lahn, but the Rangers just didn’t have access to the kinds of tools that it took to kill even a wimpy demon like the pit lords had been.
There was just so much.
<><><>
The drive to the little commune was a couple of hours. Jason pulled over about a half mile outside of the town and got out. Including the three of them, he had eleven people to work with.
“Who here is the least important?” he asked. Ian jerked a thumb at a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. Jason nodded. “You ever do anything exciting. Kill a demon? Have a conversation with one?”
The kid looked at Ian, who looked at his fingernails, bored.
“I’ve been learning the magic to exorcise demons,” he said.
“You practice it yet?”
The kid looked put out.
“Once.”
Mmm. In fairness, it meant he was probably better at it than Jason was.
“All right. I want you to walk your way into town. Just kind of, you know, whistle to yourself, hands in your pockets. Anyone talks to you, you say you’re out for a walk. You find the biggest building you can, with the fewest windows, and head for it. I want every one of them following you, by the time you get in the door. You got it?”
The kid looked at Ian again and Ian raised his eyebrows at him.
“Don’t look at me.”
“I want four of you to head south with Ian, and you are going to come with Kara, Kelly, Maryanne, and me north. We follow along as he walks in and close in on the building.”
“You’re an idiot,” Ian said. “And you’re going to get every one of us killed.”
“How come he gets to bring a demon?” one of the girls muttered.
“I’m making it up,” Jason said. “Stay in contact and stay flexible.”
“What about me?” one of the women asked.
“You’re staying here,” Jason said. “Anyone comes this way…” he sighed. “You shoot them.”
She gave him a morbid little grin and nodded.
“Got it.”
“That’s it?” Ian asked.
“You want to shred another shirt?” Jason asked.
“I want to be there when you challenge Carter,” Ian answered. “He’s going to stuff Diana down your throat.”
“Are we ready, then?” Jason asked.
Ian waved dismissively and headed off into the hills to the south of the little dirt road that eventually dead-ended at the end of the town. Jason checked to make sure the add-in from Ian’s group was following and he made his way north, keeping an eye on the kid as he started to walk.
As they went, he motioned for Maryanne to join him.
“I need to know what that kid is walking into. Keep your head down, okay?”
Maryanne winked, nodded, and disappeared.
“Who is Diana?” Kara asked.
“What? Oh. She’s Carter’s sword.”
“Who names these things?” Kara asked.
“We do,” Jason said. “When they’re born.”
“Born,” Kara scoffed. “So I can see why you people never work together.”
It took a moment for the new girl to realize that Kara was addressing her.
“Us? Whatever.”
“So do you, like, belong to him or something?”
Jason looked over his shoulder as the woman snorted derisively.
“No.”
He wasn’t sure what word he would have used to describe that relationship.
“Yeah, you do,” Kara said after a moment. “Who does Jason belong to?”
It took everything Jason had to keep walking. He could feel Kara’s grin without looking.
“You wouldn’t understand,” the woman said.
“What’s your name?” Kara asked.
“Glane.”
“You’re not one of us,” Jason said. It was an instinctive reaction, one that he simultaneously regretted and defended to himself. He had gone through a lot to prove that he had the power to belong. Samantha had been thorough and unforgiving, training and testing him. This girl, regardless of what else she might have accomplished, didn’t have the bearing of someone who had done that. And something about her name suggested that she was insinuating herself into it because Kara didn’t know better, and maybe Jason didn’t either. When he glanced back at her again, she looked sullen.
“I’m Tina.”
“That was cold,” Kara observed. “So why do you do it, Tina?”
The reply came with an audible sneer.
“You have no idea. What’s out there? Who’s important? You’ve got no clue.”
“So you snivel to these guys and hope that someday one of them will validate you? That’s prostitution.”
This, again, nearly brought Jason upright, but he kept hiking up into the brush, trying to get high enough to be able to see the town through a rifle scope.
“Better to be a king’s whore than no one at all,” Tina said.
“Did your parents not love you enough?” Kara asked.
Tina cursed at her in hellspeak and Jason answered her in the same, warning her to behave.
“Why do you care?” Tina asked.
“I expect you to treat my friends well,” Jason told her. “I don’t care who you are.”
“No. The pond scum down there. Why not just nuke them all?”
“Because they’re people,” he said, a little outraged that he even had to explain it.
“Why risk your life to save them?”
“Has anyone ever risked their life to save you?” Kara asked.
“No.”
“These people suck,” Kara said to Jason. “I was getting ready to be offended that you never asked me to join your little club, but you can keep it. Why does Sam even hang out with them?”
“You think she belongs with you, instead?” Tina asked.
Mercifully, Maryanne reappeared and interrupted whatever Kara might have said back.
“They’re weird.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “We don’t think they’ve really got the whole impersonating people thing down yet. What else did you see?”
“Most of them are in the church and community center,” Maryanne said.
“Which one is going to make the best target?” Jason asked.
“No, one building,” Maryanne told him. “The church and community center. It says so out front.”
“Always the churches, with these guys,” Jason said. “Okay, so how many more do we have to attract, what are the best approaches to the building, and how are they going to get away?”
“Twenty-eight of them, six already at the center. I really don’t know how much attention you’re going to draw. They might just never move. They’re really weird.”
“It’s fine,” Jason said. “What about getting down to the building? How many doors, how many windows?”
“There are three doors,” Maryanne said, kneeling and drawing in the sandy dirt. “Front door, side door, and back door. The front door and the back door are both double doors, the side door is metal and just one.”
Jason nodded.
“How far do we have to get without cover?”
“Ian and the people with him have an open hillside to get down to some sheds, and then it’s just a little way. You’ve got a long way.”
