Gorgon Read online

  Sam frowned, knowing she was right but not sure whether he didn’t still think they should call.

  She hadn’t been in pressing danger. Neither had he. They’d gotten away just fine, and they’d go in better prepared next time. That was all pretty normal, really. He didn’t know what would have happened differently, if Jason had been there. Probably nothing.

  Sam just would have felt a lot better having backup that they could count on.

  “We’re going to get through the first one, whether or not this is something we’d call him for, in the future,” Samantha said, stubborn but not intentionally trying to bully either one of them. It was just a deep-rooted sense of right, and he couldn’t argue with her.

  “It’s weird,” Sam said.

  “I know,” she answered. “It will get less weird.”

  “I guess,” he said, not sure that he wanted it to. “I miss him.”

  She smiled.

  “I know. I do, too.”

  <><><>

  Bane showed up at the hotel at daybreak the next morning. Samantha wasn’t sure that the man slept. She wasn’t sure where he’d been, when Sam had called him, but it certainly hadn’t been Louisiana.

  “Good morning,” he said evenly, handing her a tray with two coffee cups in it.

  “Morning,” she answered, rubbing her eyes and letting him in. Behind her, Sam was opening the curtains to let light rudely into the room.

  Such gaudy light, the light that you got off of the sun. She preferred endemic light, light that had no specific, single-point origin. Much cleaner, when it didn’t come from solar fusion.

  “Peter in on this one?” Bane asked, going to sit at the table.

  “It’s far enough outside the city that I didn’t think I’d ask him,” Samantha said. “Demons, anyway.”

  Bane nodded sagely. Peter was an expert in human magicians, and he held his own just fine with demons, but he was a bit of a specialist. Up against a demon even Samantha was concerned about, Peter wasn’t a good choice.

  “What about Argo?” Bane asked.

  Samantha shrugged.

  “Prefer there to be as few of us as possible,” she said. Of the people responsible for supervising regions of the country, Lindsay had been Samantha’s least favorite, and after that it was Argo. Lindsay was incompetent and egotistical. Argo was just angry, violent, and super egotistical. No contest, there, really.

  Bane grunted, settling deeper into his chair, folding his hands in his lap and closing his eyes. Sam looked at Samantha and she shrugged.

  “When you’re ready,” Bane said, settling once more and moments later beginning to softly snore. Samantha closed her eyes, fighting back annoyance and inappropriate amusement, then went back to preparing.

  Bane was an odd kind of a magic user. He thrived in natural magic, ritualistic magic that relied on patterns and words, most of which were instinctive to him. She’d asked him to explain it once, and he’d just given her an odd look. In a moment of generosity, Carter had explained that Bane was an aggregator of old magic, magic whose intrinsic power was based on the familiarity its user had with it. If he’d planned it out in advance, it would lose power.

  Samantha, on the other hand, had to be ready before she would even consider going back into that swamp. Rayray had given the name of the man who had rented them the boat the first time, and had called in advance to make sure it would be ready for them.

  Everyone was waiting on her.

  She mixed new potions, enchanting herbs, roots, rocks, anything that she thought would increase the power of the work against demons who were attached to the ground. The ground. It was the only thing she could think of that would have let Sam pass them over the first time, that would affect the water, that would explain the woman’s strange figure.

  There was a problem with that. Samantha had spent most of the night sitting up thinking it through, looking for another explanation, because of the gaping hole in her only theory.

  The ground was always, always natural. Earth, wind, and water were feeders for natural magic. It was a demon who introduced fire to that trio, putting in a foothold to most organic natural magic for centuries, but earth, wind, and water were pure. Light magic could claim them at need, but demons couldn’t. Not outside of certain, specific symbolisms.

  She’d heard of a cult of demons who had fixated on volcanic rock, for instance.

  But she’d done all three of them, the demon out in the swamp. Earth, water, and then there at the end, she’d conjured a myth of wind. She’d felt it on Sam’s skin, even as she’d been immune to it.

  So at least there was that. The woman could touch Sam, but she couldn’t touch Samantha.

  She could work with that.

  Maybe.

  “I’m coming,” Sam said, sitting down quietly next to her on the bed.

  “No,” Samantha answered. The fight was already over, battled back and forth mentally all morning. This was the formality, the shortened version they’d both felt coming.

  “I’m not letting you go alone,” he said.

  “Bane will be there,” Samantha said. There was a growling pullback, one that said she knew what he meant.

  “You know what I mean,” Sam said. She smiled to herself.

  “I’m not letting you go.”

  He resented her taking it lightly. Concern. Not quite fear, but close.

  “You’re putting yourself in danger,” Sam said.

  “My job,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Not without backup.”

  Bane would be there. Sam was underestimating him.

  “You can’t go,” Samantha said.

  “I’m not underestimating him,” Sam said. “But he doesn’t know you. You might not have made it if I hadn’t been there. Or Jalice. Does he carry a sword?”

  Samantha laughed.

  Bane was in his sixties and he had arthritic knees and fingers. He moved like it, too. Samantha hadn’t been sick since she’d died. There were certain things you could hold off by turning your systems on and off right, by having that much power running around in your body. Getting old wasn’t one of them.

  The fair-skinned black man coughed in his sleep and turned his head. Samantha watched him for a moment, listening to his snore, wondering passively if it was a lie. It didn’t matter.

  “He doesn’t use weapons,” Samantha said. “You know that.”

  He could have resigned, if he’d wanted to. Could have tried to retire. The protection of being one of Carter’s people was probably the only thing keeping him alive, right now, and they all knew it. However it came, he was probably going to die badly, on the job or off, the victim of a demon who got too close before Bane got a grip on the situation. Or one that was too slippery for Bane to hold off at all.

  In the meantime, he did what he did, same as any of the rest of them. Mostly, that was on their own. Occasionally it involved calling in backup.

  No one liked having to do it.

  “So who’s going to keep the dogs busy?” Sam asked. “You can’t take on all five of them on your own. Not and think.”

  “Four,” Samantha said. “The one ought to be dead.”

  “He didn’t ash,” Sam said. Samantha had to concede that. Demons were supposed to ash. It’s how you knew they were dead. Certainly the demon woman couldn’t bring him back from that, though. Certainly she couldn’t. Decapitation was decapitation. Even demons couldn’t finagle their way out of that.

  Surely.

  Sam sent her scathing skepticism and she pushed him away.

  It didn’t matter.

  “You aren’t coming, even if there are five of them,” she said.

  “You need more than one person,” Sam said. “There were four of us last time.”

  It was true, if she’d asked Argo, he would have brought his entourage. Maybe even Lange. Bane didn’t travel with anyone. He didn’t keep anyone.

  Samantha wondered passively how he’d managed that. Would be nice to not have the h
ouse overflowing with demons, for one, and she’d already turned away gray humans looking for patronage.

  All the same.

  “There are two of us,” she said. Like it or not, her people were powerful, well beyond the capacity of demon hunters or any of the other rogue groups who were variably aware of demonic participation in the world.

  “Maybe if it were Jason,” Sam said. “He’s got a sword.”

  It mattered more that Jason knew her.

  She needed to know, to prove, that they could get through something without Jason being there. Otherwise, they’d start a habit and just keep going back to it.

  It was unfortunate that they’d run up against something so significant so quickly, but that didn’t matter.

  Was she being foolish? Sam thought so.

  “I’m not being rash,” Samantha said.

  “You need to let me be there,” Sam said. “I can watch your back.” Literally. And his own. And everyone else’s.

  She wanted him there. He knew that. He was tending to that instinct to not go in blind, like she would, trying to get it to overcome the certain knowledge - she pushed that thought at him hard - that the demon had set traps that, if he crossed them physically, could do any manner of bad things to him.

  “You remember the warehouse in Seattle?” she asked. He grumped at her, but had no specific argument against it.

  She looked at her weaponry.

  Highly charged with pure light magic, avoiding any earth elements that she wasn’t absolutely positive wouldn’t interact with the strange ability of the demon to use natural magic, there were specific attack spells, there were retreat paths, there were things that would lock demons in, that would send them away, that would break protective magic, that would purge broad spectra of dark magic.

  She’d had one of Peter’s people deliver a package of goods that morning, and she’d thrown everything she could think of at it. It was going to be hard to get all of it stashed away so she could carry it, but she wasn’t taking in her backpack. She wouldn’t be able to get to it, and it would be a crutch, letting her misappropriate priorities in a vain hope that the things that went in the backpack would matter.

  “I think that’s it,” Samantha said. There was a sort of sick reaction from Sam, knowing that the argument was over and he had lost. She wasn’t going to let him go.

  He’d known it even before the mental wrestling had started that morning when he’d awoke. There had, from the beginning, been a buried resignation that she’d done her best not to notice. It didn’t help anything. He’d had to get it all out, but now it was time.

  Except.

  “I’m going to wear the hair pin,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked, spiking new anger.

  “Because I’m crossing a physical threshold that blinded you, psychically,” she said. “It’s basically the same thing in inverse to what you did last night. You psychically crossed a physical barrier and it spiked you. Today, I’d be physically crossing a psychic barrier with you attached to me, and the same thing could happen, only I’d be on the wrong side of it to pull you back.”

  She was just going to leave him here, blind, not knowing what was happening. Yes.

  He was going to go see what happened when she came out, to see the result.

  She jerked at him hard, a reprimand. She didn’t think he would have done it; it was a threat to express just how upset he was at the idea.

  She was sympathetic, but unyielding.

  This was how it was going to be.

  Bane stood.

  “I’ll be outside,” he said. Samantha looked at Sam, wishing he could accept it, but knowing that that wasn’t possible - that she didn’t even want him to. If he hadn’t fought it, he wouldn’t have been who he was. He put his hands on her face, fingers behind her ears, and kissed her, resting his forehead against hers for a moment.

  “Come back to me,” he said quietly.

  “Whatever decisions I have,” she whispered. “That will be my goal.”

  He nodded and kissed her again, the feeling of his mouth against hers echoing back and forth across the bond as he kissed her harder, wrapping her slowly against his chest. His breath was warm against her face, and this, here, was where she went. Even without him emphasizing it, it was a simple fact, knowledge that didn’t require words or proof. It simply was.

  She sighed, turning her face away to rest against his chest.

  He put his chin on top of her head.

  “Does Bane carry a cell phone?” he asked.

  “No,” Samantha answered. The rest of them did, save Spake, but not Samantha or Bane.

  She felt the shudder through her skin.

  Sam knew that, if Bane didn’t carry a phone, the odds that he would dial one were as small as the odds that Samantha would.

  Once she left, he wouldn’t know she was safe until she came back and walked through the door.

  “I’ll pull the pin as soon as I can,” she said. She wouldn’t make him wait all the way back. He nodded into her hair.

  “Go,” he said, squeezing her hard once and then letting his arms fall. “Go now.”

  She grabbed the bag of stuff off of the table and found her keys in her pocket, pausing at the door, then put in her hairpin and left.

  <><><>

  The boat rental man took her money without comment, going out to make sure the engine turned over for her, and then she and Bane were off through the swamp. She tried to remember the path they had followed the day before, but the swamp didn’t have a lot of distinguishing features and she was quickly lost.

  Bane sat at the front of the boat, fingers woven across his rounded stomach, eyes closed, the picture of patience.

  Eventually, Samantha found where Sam and Rayray had been hacking through the undergrowth, and she followed the path through to the clearing, across it, and, as the water grew blacker and blacker, to where the island came into view.

  There was no activity, as Sam had noted. She cleared her throat for Bane’s benefit, then assembled her kit, putting things in pockets and slots, hiding and stashing as she always had until she was ready. Bane stood and watched her with benign, static amusement, then hopped down out of the boat. She followed, wading to shore. She glanced back at the boat, admitting that she wished she had someone to cover it, then followed Bane toward the holes in the ground, drawing Lahn.

  Bane stopped, putting up his hands, palm-front, toward the demonic anthill. He murmured a slurry of words that Samantha didn’t pause to catch. They wouldn’t work for her, if she even understood them. Argo had once mocked Bane for using tongues.

  The skin on the back of her neck prickled as she approached the rugged entrance the dogs had sprung from the day before, slashing Lahn through the air once more and dropping a bag of enchantments on the ground, sensing for the wave of power coming at her from behind.

  Bane might be old, and he might be uncooperative, but he was good.

  Pushed onward, she took the first step down into the tunnel, finding the earth churned and torn as if by elemental force. She had a hard time keeping her footing as she stooped, taking out the glowsticks from her hip and cracking them one by one, dropping them on the uneven floor as she went down.

  Demons had a strong relationship with fire; she preferred not to trust it for light if she could help it. Electricity was a bit more independent, but still close enough to fire that certain individuals could get ahold of it, changing how it ran, or shorting out electrical circuits. When Samantha was most concerned about what she was dealing with, she preferred to use chemical light. Recent enough a creation, it had no residual power from centuries of superstition and stories.

  The problems were the intensity of the light - weak - and that, as a result, she had to keep dropping glowsticks to make sure she could find her way back out, making a considerable dent in her ability to carry other useful things.

  Sam had been able to see down here. It must have been lit. Even psychics couldn’t see in the dark. She
sniffed at the air, catching the subtle smell of smoke underneath the reek of bog demon and rotting flesh.

  As she got deeper underground, the smell got worse. After a little ways further, she turned off her ability to smell, overwhelmed and distracted more than informed. Breathing got easier, though her mind was still aware that she was breathing in the putrescence of human beings somewhere not far out of sight.

  It was only a few more steps before she found the first storage room. Forcing her analytical mind to the front and shoving any emotional reaction far, far away, she recognized the costuming that Sam had identified. Human body parts, in various stages of decay, sorted by type, hung or stacked on shelves the way a prop room might be, with a collection of them in the center of the floor, discarded.

  She turned away, dropping another bag.

  No demon would ever go into that room again.

  She heard nothing.

  The demon woman was more powerful than she’d guessed, if she was able to keep that many squish demons quiet as Bane’s magic forced its way down the tunnels. They’d be feeling it by now, wherever they were, and they were silent.

  Samantha hadn’t been able to keep them engaged; that was the first time she could remember it happening, with such low-level demons. She’d used some of her favorite curses, and yet the woman had been able to recall the demons at command.

  And now she was keeping them quiet.

  Samantha smashed a vial against the wall, smearing the oily contents down the wall as she walked. They sizzled under her hand, briefly breaking into flame.

  She was getting impatient, anxious. They should have hit by now. She was basically offering herself up as bait, now, far too far underground to retreat effectively, well away from even the echoes of sunlight that would have helped power her magic, blind to everything but the shadows behind her. She was taking a huge risk, coming down here on her own. This was exactly what Sam had not wanted her to do, but here she was, just herself, Lahn, and a handful of glowsticks.