Child, page 37
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“Like clams,” Jason said.
“Yes, an entire tectonic plate made up of crushed clamshell,” Carter called, half a flight below them.
“Like clams,” Samantha said. “Calcium ionizes too easily for it to turn up on its own, but living creatures separated it out and use its really nice crystalized properties to make structures out of it. Coral and mollusks and all of them on up to us.”
“For bones,” Jason said.
“I’m losing the desire to live,” Carter called.
“Do you have to make such an easy target of yourself?” Samantha asked.
“I can tell it annoys him,” Jason said. She flashed a grin over her shoulder at him as Carter hit the door at the bottom of the stairs.
“So. There are a few sects of demons who wear a layer of calcium powder. Or something like it. Especially when they’re on this side. They’re masking themselves. To most demons, though, it smells about the same way that rotting flesh smells to us, especially if it’s been used symbolically.”
“Hate symbolic baby powder,” Jason said.
“Charming,” Carter said.
“What are you waiting for?” Sam asked.
Carter looked from Sam to Samantha to Jason.
“I don’t drive,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason said. Carter raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms. Jason took out his keys.
“Load ‘em up.”
<><><>
Samantha gave Jason directions to the docks where the twins held a substantial property. She didn’t like this region of town. For all the time she spent around demons and the buildings they owned, the docks just felt creepy, especially at night. Power demons didn’t tend to tolerate the type of decay that just seemed natural at commercial waterfronts, but the twins reveled in it. They ran a crew of scrub demons, just strong enough to cross and hold a body together, and treated it like a classic company town. Everyone who worked for them simply went further and further in debt to them as they worked. It would have been a labor violation, had Carter put his hand to creating such things.
The docks would be crawling with them.
The twins provided all of the entertainment on site, since the demons working for them didn’t have anything to pay for it in the outside world, which meant that they had a standing army of demons desperate to earn favors that might get them off of the docks and into the wider ecosystem where they at least stood a chance of gaining power and independence.
And there were piles of trash, shadows, broken things everywhere.
Samantha swished Lahn through the air, eyes sharp. Sam was afield, scouting, but it was too dark for him to see much. He couldn’t even tell them if the twins were here.
“How do I recognize them?” he’d asked on the drive over, right before Kelly had reappeared and asked what he’d missed.
“Couple of fat dockworkers,” Carter had said.
Sam had looked at Samantha and she shrugged.
“You’ll know them when you see them.”
They looked like the bosses in a demented video game, grotesque and bigger than everyone around them, pointedly, as if they took satisfaction in being the ugliest thing going.
“Are they identical?” Jason asked.
“Jude has a big wart on his chin,” Carter said.
“That’s Babe,” Samantha had corrected him.
“No, Babe has the tooth that sticks out,” Carter had said.
“No, Jude has the tooth and the one eyebrow.”
Carter had grunted.
“You’re right. Babe is the one with the scar on his stomach.”
“You’re kidding,” Jason had said.
Samantha shrugged again, looking at the city rolling past the dark window.
“They play to our archetypes.”
“So they’re ogres?” Jason asked.
“You know what an ogre is?” Sam asked.
“They’re in the movies,” Jason said.
“Mostly we just call them the twins,” Carter said. “It doesn’t matter which order I kill them, not to them, not to me.”
And then, with driving and walking and a distracted sense of time, they were there. Standing on the last really public street before the twins’ property started. Enough humans came and went on various business tasks that they couldn’t really lock it down, but there was a sense of foreboding and forbiddingness that Samantha knew wasn’t just in her head. They’d have security to keep people from just wandering in.
Carter took a bottle out of his pocket and handed it to Samantha, pointing.
“Lock ‘em in.”
He drew Diana and walked in the direction opposite the one he had indicated. Samantha glanced at Sam.
“We won’t be long.”
She looked at the bottle in her hand, then opened it and sniffed it.
Twisted her head to the side.
Carter mixed strong stuff.
She walked along the front edge of the property, imagining the bright red line she would be drawing in a symbolic sense. Visualizing it made it stronger. The demons would hit it and the really frantic ones would simply ash. The ones that were in better shape would just bounce off. Carter would be chanting various demonic curses that she’d never learned; his half would be stronger than hers, but hers would hold.
She got to the property line, one she could feel even more than she could see it, and she poured most of the bottle on the ground, then she turned and walked along the line toward the shore, staying on the neutral property. Someone had left a fork truck parked on the boundary, and she climbed through it, keeping a straight tack toward the water. She had to go over a container next, but a stack of crates gave her enough of a boost to climb it and drop down on the far side. Mostly, though, the line was clear. The people - real, live people - who worked on the other side would instinctively avoid crossing it, or putting things where they would have to cross in order to retrieve them.
She poured the remainder of the bottle in the water, imagining the pair of symmetric triangles and the rectangle that the four points would form across the property. Only at great need would the demons inside cross those lines. The clock started ticking, now. They still had surprise on their side, but as the demons realized that they were cordoned off, by luck and happenstance, they’d figure out pretty quickly that someone was coming for them.
With any luck, the twins would be here, and they would be up above everything for now, insulated from the chaos that she and Carter would cause on the way in…
“Think the water will hold them?” she asked Carter as she returned to Sam and Jason. Kelly was bouncing on his toes, sword streaming blue flame.
“It’ll hold the little ones,” Carter said. “I’ve got better for the twins. Will you put that thing out?”
Kelly dropped his head and his sword extinguished.
Jason drew Anadidd’na and a shiver went down Samantha’s back. She wouldn’t trade Lahn for any sword in existence, but for a sheath like that, one that rang metal on metal in a declaration like that… It wasn’t Lahn’s style, but Samantha was jealous of that noise.
She checked in with Sam. He hadn’t found anything but some dark spots that he couldn’t get into. Those were good enough.
She pointed for Carter, giving him a direction for the closest one, and he nodded.
“Nothing but ash,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he started forward. “Try to keep up.”
He drew a symbol, black on black, on the first door, then exploded it with an ambiguous combination of magic and the heel of his patent dress shoe.
They were announced.
There was shrieking and scratching, and Samantha and Jason followed. Kelly glitched the length of the building, intent on driving the crowd toward them, and Sam stayed outside to keep watch. He wasn’t thrilled with it, but with three blades in close proximity and very little light, more bodies only increased the odds that they’d hit each other.
Carter took the first kill.
And the second.
The cluster of demons hit them, then, and orange flame leapt off of Anadidd’na as Jason named her, illuminating the press of bodies, demonic and human, as the demons tried to find escape.
There would be none.
After the first thirty seconds, Samantha lost track of Carter and Jason, no longer having enough spare attention to make sure they were doing well enough. These were boggy demons, true, but they were also New York dock workers, mean as snakes and twice as quick. Even without being able to glitch - Carter’s magic was quick and potent - they came at her out of the dark and vanished into it with boggling speed.
Time and again Lahn met them, severing bits and pieces and ashing whole bodies with mechanical precision. She bent time, ignoring the babble of hellspeak around her. Minutes later, the room began to glow blue and Kelly joined them, casting fearsome light off of the angel sword he wielded. The battle, never against them, turned further now, the four of them slaughtering demons that had no place to go. No mercy.
One of them body checked Samantha from outside of her peripheral vision and she felt teeth on her shoulder, then the soft flow of ash across her as Diana stopped short of her side.
“Keep up,” Carter scolded, then he was away again. She grunted, rubbing her shoulder and rolling her eyes mentally for Sam’s benefit. She’d had him. There were just too many bodies in too little space.
Eventually the throng broke up, now not hoping to crush them in numbers, but rather to survive in hiding. Samantha and Kelly swept the building, killing demons as they cowered or as they charged in final desperation, slavering and raving. Jason and Carter stood in the first space, waiting. Samantha suspected that Jason would have helped sweep the building if Carter hadn’t been too good to do it.
“Good enough,” Samantha said, coming down the stairs. Carter nodded and led the way to the next building.
“I’ve never seen him work before,” Jason said to her as they walked. “He’s…”
“He’s the best there is,” Samantha said without hesitation. “I know.”
Jason shook his head. He’d been unable to say it. It’s not the kind of thing you say about someone you resent that much.
“You are here as a courtesy,” Carter called back. “Not as spectators.”
“We’re carrying our weight,” Samantha said.
“Well, he is, at least,” Carter said, casting a stray motion back at Sam. Sam and Samantha exchanged raised eyebrows and Samantha grinned. “Your angel’s pincer motion leaves something to be desired, and if these were vampires, you’d be one, too, by now.”
“Everyone knows they don’t change that fast,” Jason said. “You got bit?”
Samantha sighed.
“It wasn’t that bad. He just…”
“Saved your life. Again,” Carter said.
“Got to him before I did,” Samantha said dourly. Carter marked the next door and destroyed it, not waiting for them.
<><><>
A bar, a dormitory of sorts, a cafeteria. The bar had been easy. Dark, but easy. The dormitory took forever, and while it was much better lit, Samantha wished she wouldn’t have had to have seen the things that demons did in their time off, in bedrooms, behind doors. Not again. Even having seen most of it before, it wasn’t easier.
Carter did an entire floor himself. Kelly refused to participate after the first room. Jason had tried to protect her from it, but she wouldn’t let him go in alone. Not if he stumbled across someone with some real power.
The dormitories had some of the traditional magic on them, magic that made play more fun. Demons didn’t ash until they were good and dead, and their body parts, fluid, tissue, and bone, remained intact separate from them far longer.
The gore was incredible.
Sam pleaded for her to come back out and stay with him and Kelly, to let Jason do it on his own, but she ignored him.
“You’re sure?” Jason asked halfway down the first hallway as they stood outside a door. Barring major surprises, they were at reasonably low risk, here. The level of noise, yelling, screaming, violence was like a stylized asylum, and they could take each room individually, cutting down the odd straggler outside of the rooms easily. They never stopped to warn anyone else, and they couldn’t get out. It was just a systematic extermination that involved demons at play.
“This is what I do,” Samantha said, waiting for him to open the next door. The doors were locked and while she could have opened them with some concentration and some force, they weren’t booby trapped, and Jason was much more effective breaking them in.
“It isn’t,” he told her, still waiting.
“Carter is going to finish upstairs and we’re still only going to be halfway done,” she said. Jason shook his head.
“Don’t care. You don’t have to do this.”
“I do,” she said firmly.
“Sam and I can do this.”
She took a moment, listening to the words and giving him the credit for saying them.
“Jason, you are powerful. And capable. And odds are very good that you could walk through this with any run-of-the-mill steel blade and end up without a scratch on you. But there are still things in this world that can kill you, and I’m not going to be standing outside when one of them does.”
“They can’t kill you?” he asked. She smiled, choosing diplomacy.
“They’re going to have a hard time getting through both of us, aren’t they?”
He grinned.
“Damned straight.”
She nodded and he put his hand on the door, then waited.
“How about him?” he asked, motioning at the ceiling. “Who can kill him?”
“Nuri,” she said. “A few others. Given the right setup, a lot of others. But with Diana in his hand on surprise on his side… Probably not.”
“If you had to kill Nuri, how would you do it?” Jason asked.
“Don’t ask me that,” she said, then shook her head. “Keep moving. I’m not going to just let you stall.”
He shrugged.
“Can’t blame me for trying.”
He opened the door. A man, hanging from the ceiling on meathooks, put a hand out to them, mid-scream. The fingernails clutched, anger, not pleading, and Samantha ducked as a fist cut through the space where her head had been. Anadidd’na severed the arm it was attached to, and Samantha went after the hanging demon. Sex games, three on one. Sometimes it would be consensual, with a revolving victim, and other times it would be a band of wolves, taking a weaker demon at chance and toying with him like this.
She’d seen it both ways.
<><><>
“Offices,” Sam said, standing outside of a building right on the water as the sun began to rise. “The reception isn’t guarded.”
“If they’re here, this is where they’ll be,” Samantha said, looking up at the three stories of windows.
“You ever been up there?” Carter asked.
“Once,” she said. “Early.”
He nodded.
“Not a lot has changed. They’re still up on the top floor, eating all the best food and planning their war councils.”
She remembered.
Carter took a black bottle out of his pocket and put it on the ground. Samantha took a step back at the same time that Sam did, he driven by the same impulse that had made her want to get away. She knew what was in that bottle.
Sam grabbed Jason and pulled him back.
Carter laid a kerchief over the bottle and smashed it with his foot.
Kelly vanished.
“Figured that would happen,” Carter said without looking up. The stench was overpowering. Carter wiped the sole of his shoe off on an opportunistic weed and stood and watched as it wilted and ashed.
Samantha coughed. Carter turned and pulled a small metal container out of his pocket and opened it, rubbing his thumb across what appeared to be shoe polish, then moving to mark Samantha with it. She stood for it. She didn’t like it, but she allowed it.
It wasn’t shoe polish.
Carter moved on to Sam.
“What the hell?” Jason asked. Sam turned his face away. Carter waited, unmoving.
“Nothing in that building is ever coming out,” Samantha said. “Including us, if we go in without the right protection.”
“And that stuff is going to do it?” Jason asked.
“No, I just think everyone should have their game faces on,” Carter said sarcastically. “I will go in without you.”
Sam relented. It was harder seeing the black marks go on him than it had been letting Carter put them on her. She’d gotten most of the ingredients for him. She’d gotten most of the ingredients for most of his potions, back when she’d lived with him. That one, though, had things she wouldn’t touch in their natural state. Things she wouldn’t ask for, wouldn’t pay for, wouldn’t walk away with. Things she’d seen extracted from unwilling donors. It worked better if they were unwilling.
Life with Carter was full of compromises.
Like wearing demon bile on her face.
Jason made it extra clear that he was only going along under protest, and then, carefully, they each crossed the smoldering, black-stained cloth and went into the reception office.
The woman at the desk took one look at them and tried to glitch out. She ashed.
“Damn,” Jason said. “Did you do that just by looking at her? You’ve got to teach me that.”
“Shut up,” Sam and Carter said at the same time. Carter gave Sam an approving look, and Jason looked shocked.
“Since when have the two of you been on the same side?”
Sam looked at Samantha and she shrugged. She was as shocked as anyone.
The elevator was keyed.
“Stairs are over here,” Sam said, finding the door. Carter shook his head.
“Stairs’ll make you dead,” he said. Samantha nodded, standing next to Carter and watching the streaked reflection in front of the elevator doors.
“You have a key card?” Jason asked.
“Don’t need one,” Carter said, putting his hand over the panel where a keycard would have gone. There was a buzzing and then a sharp, electrical snap, and the doors began to open with a droopy ding. Samantha worried that he might have destroyed too much of the controls for the elevator to continue working, but as the four of them got in, the doors closed again and the whirring and gasping elevator began to rise.
