Pockets of Darkness (29 page)

Thirty Eight

Bridget sat on the stoop in the alley, outside the restaurant’s back door. Otter’s restaurant now. The yellow light that hung crooked above her made the buckle in her fingers gleam darkly. Ijul squatted across from her between a Dumpster and a garbage can. The demon had snared a large rat under a taloned claw, and it dribbled blobs of acidic goo on the helpless creature. Ijul looked up, maybe expecting Bridget to tell it not to play with the thing. But she didn’t react. The demon grinned and thrust a talon into the rat; it squirmed and squealed and fell silent.

“You killed it, you eat it,” Bridget said in Sumerian.

“As you command.”

She closed her eyes and focused on the buckle. The metal was faintly warm against her skin. Bridget was cold everywhere else. The temperature was in the low teens, snow was falling and had been since the funeral. The forecast suggested the city would get ten to twelve inches over the next two days. Despite the weather, more than two hundred had showed up for the reception in the restaurant. Perhaps they came for the free food—good Italian food that Otter had requested. Certainly some had shown up simply out of respect for Otter. His girlfriend and her parents were inside. Lacy, right? A pretty girl. Bridget had only briefly talked to them before she came out here. Even Adiella was inside. Bridget saw the witch inspect the kitchen before sitting at a table to eat.

“Tell me a little,” she coaxed the buckle, dipping her senses inside. She was prepared for it to wholly sap her, as it had before. The effort tugged considerable energy from her, but it was not as taxing as her first foray.

Perhaps because she wasn’t trying to go as far back.

Bridget watched Elijah Stone take the briefcase from a man who appeared unaware during a high spell in pedestrian traffic outside of Grand Central Station. Stone’s steps were light as he hurried away, giddy at his acquisition. In less than a day he saw the demon.

“Command me, master,” Ijul had said in Sumerian.

Stone, unable to understand it, looked horrified.

“Command me, master,” Ijul repeated.

Bridget saw the demon’s eyes glimmer, perhaps with the realization that Stone could not understand it.

“As my master before me,” Ijul continued, “you ignore me. I will rip out the hearts of your loved ones, master. I detest you. Free me, master. Free all the Aldî-nîfaeti in this world. Command me, no? Then I am free to act.”

And so the slaying of Stone’s loved ones began, and the beast’s babbling became threatening. “I will rip out the heart of your mother unless you free the Aldî-nîfaeti, master. I will—”

Bridget nudged her mind farther back, saw the man Stone had stolen the briefcase from, saw the man who had owned it before that. Earlier a disheveled woman had it, though it was affixed to a worn purse then. The woman had found the buckle near a railroad track in a southern state—cannas and butterfly lilies were thick along road, and Bridget caught a whiff of fragrance. Before that woman, another man owned it; he’d carried the buckle in his pocket and had committed suicide on the track when he couldn’t bear to have another of his loved ones slaughtered. Back and back, Bridget sent her senses, the faces of the previous owners flashing in a corner of her mind.

Usually the buckle passed from hand to hand by thievery; someone coveting the shiny trinket, but sometimes a misfortunate soul simply came upon it because the owner could not live with the demon and so killed him or herself and left the buckle abandoned. The owners’ faces were careworn, beautiful, young, old, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, male, female. One had been a boy of eight or ten.

Always death was linked. Although Ijul’s penchant for eating the hearts of loved ones was not as pronounced or frequent the farther back she looked. Perhaps the demon discovered through the decades that if its owner would not issue commands, it was free to wreck havoc, to threaten and demand the release of its hellish brethren. Perhaps it simply got more brutal and hungry through the years.

“Farther,” Bridget coaxed. Her face felt numb from the cold, and she briefly thought about retreating inside to the kitchen, where it was warm and the smell of the Italian food would combat the stench of Ijul and the foulness of the alley. But she needed to be alone for this.

Cars passed by out on the street, their tires slushing up snow, rap music spilling from the open window where one driver didn’t seem to mind the bone-numbing chill. A siren wailed, crescendoed, and then cut to nothing; probably a simple traffic stop. Laughter came from out on the sidewalk, people leaving the restaurant.

Bridget let it all drift to the background and thrust her concentration farther into the buckle and felt her throat go dry and a familiar headache sprout behind her eyes. It had never been a buckle, that’s just what she called it because it looked like a buckle on a briefcase. She discovered it had originally been a decoration on some burial effigy, discovered in Iran before oil and religion turned the land into a warzone—touched by gloved hands, never human skin. That had been the trigger, the touch of skin. The effigy also had been in a museum, not a big one, a small building in a small city where children and their mothers came to look at artifacts that had been dug up locally. Bridget watched Ijul sleeping at the base of the exhibit, bound to the buckle, eyelids twitching as if caught in some malevolent dream.

The effigy was stolen—finally touched by human hands, sold but continued to come back to the thief until someone in turn stole it from him. Later it ended up in a British museum, stolen again, finding its way to California, where its owner died and a relative pulled the buckle off the effigy and added it to other belongings. With each owner, Ijul had tried to communicate without success.

“Farther.” Bridget wanted to go back to the beginning, where she’d watched the woman forge the metal into its odd shape. She’d had to back off when she’d done this before, the effort too taxing when she’d already been so tired.

The cold of the alley was keeping her awake, and her determination was riding out the pain caused by the mental link. In her mind’s eye she was back in the ancient metallurgist’s workshop, at the woman’s shoulder.

Was this in Hilimaz’s day?

Didn’t have the same feel, and so Bridget guessed it was farther back in time than when she’d stayed with Hilimaz, judging by the home’s construction and the tools. Though just how long in the past she couldn’t tell.

“Ninlil, I have done as you said.” The woman bowed before a figure in the doorway. The woman had the voice of someone who drank and smoke, rough and interesting. Bridget watched the scene play out. “Ninlil, I have followed your perfect instructions.” Flames from her fireplace stretched out to show the figure the woman addressed. It was only vaguely human-looking, and Bridget guessed it was the mysterious figure she had half-glimpsed on her first foray. “Praise to Ninlil,” the woman continued.

Ninlil stepped into the fireplace light. She was tall and thin, skin a glistening pale blue with darker blue veins visible behind it. She had three fingers on each hand, long and slender like bird talons. Her head was bird-shaped, too, with a small beak for a mouth and white feathers for hair.

Ninlil.

Bridget had heard the name before. Ninlil … she had read it when she’d searched the Internet for Enlil, the Sumerian god who taught his chosen how to capture demons. Ninlil was the goddess he’d raped and so found himself banished to hell for a time. Ninlil was inhumanly beautiful. But Bridget doubted she was a god. A creature, yes, Bridget would believe that, maybe a demon. Certainly something with magic. Maybe a witch.

Ninlil stretched out a talon and touched the buckle, made a chirping sound like a bird. The buckle glowed bright blue with motes of light dancing around it.

Finally the bird-woman spoke. “My brother Enlil teaches his followers how to banish demons. Se-Kol-trem, I teach you how to harness them. Bind one to your soul and take its power. Become invincible and strong. Command it and nurture it. This city will be yours.”

The metallurgist bowed deeper, brought the glowing buckle to her lips and kissed it.

“You can give this to no one,” Ninlil continued. “Do you understand? It can never be given away.”

“No, I would never give it away,” Se-Kol-trem returned. “I understand.”

Hence why the owner was stuck with it, Bridget surmised. Part of the magic was that it could not be
given
away. But apparently Ninlil hadn’t thought of theft. Maybe thievery was not such a consideration then.

“I will call a demon tonight,” Se-Kol-trem said. “I will become invincible. I will take this city.”

Ninlil’s beak worked into what Bridget guessed was a smile. Her eyes sparkled with bright motes. Then she vanished.

Bridget watched the metallurgist summon one demon after the next, using spells similar to what Hillimaz had used, dismissing each one except Ijul, the smallest of the lot, who she bound to the buckle. She’d seemed to find Ijul acceptable. Se-Kol trem bent over and patted Ijul’s warty head, and the two plotted late into the evening about how they would crush her enemies.

“Free the Aldî-nîfaeti,” Ijul begged her. “As Enlil has taught others to catch them, Ninlil wants them released. Together, we will take this country. Free the Aldî-nîfaeti.”

“We will free all the Aldî-nîfaeti,” Se-Kol trem purred. “The ones caught, and the ones others are catching now. We will free them all.”

Bridget felt sick to her stomach, sensed the evil swirl around the woman and her pet demon. She fast-forwarded the image and witnessed Se-Kol trem and Ijul lead a dozen of the vile Aldî-nîfaeti against the city’s primitive guards. Blood and fire rushed across the streets, and everywhere there was death.

Even Se-Kol trem died, not as invincible as she’d believed. It took a strong force of men armed with spears to finally bring her down. Her body was a pincushion, and yet still she thrashed, Ijul ripping out the hearts of her attackers. One strong man thrust his spear through her forehead, ending the woman’s plans. The freed demons continued the slaughter and Bridget pushed time forward to get past the slaughter.

Se-Kol trem was buried with others in a mass grave, the buckle on a leather strap around her neck buried with her. No one had thought to take it … and thereby unwittingly take on Ijul.

Centuries passed in the blink of Bridget’s eye, and the archaeologists came and uncovered Se-Kol-trem’s skeleton and the buckle. A gloved hand reached in and took it, and later affixed it to an effigy they’d acquired from another dig and that seemed to be missing its ornamentation.

“And eventually you ended up with me,” Bridget said. She disconnected her senses from the buckle and put it in her pocket. “So what the hell do I do with you?” Bridget looked next to the Dumpster, where Ijul was eating another rat.

“Free the Aldî-nîfaeti,” Ijul said.

“You know that ain’t feckin’ happening.” Bridget stood and worked a kink out of her neck.

“Where are we going, master?”

“Inside,” she told the demon. “I’m hungry.”

“Mmmmmmmmmmm.”

“I’ll see that you get a heaping plate of Rigatoni con la Pajata.” She looked down at the disgusting beast. “Then I guess you’re going to Italy with us.”

“It-tal-ee.” The demon tried out the word then belched a cloud of noxiousness.

Bridget glanced out at the street as a taxi sloshed by. Streetlights made the pavement shiny, but snow was building up along the curbs.

There was more laughter, and a muted conversation, people out on the sidewalk beyond her line of sight. She heard another siren—always there were sirens in this city. It sounded desperate.

And then there was another and another, all muffled by the canyon of buildings.

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About the Author

USA Today
bestselling author Jean Rabe has penned 31 fantasy and adventure novels and more than 70 short stories. When she’s not writing, which isn’t often, she edits … two dozen anthologies and more than a hundred magazine issues. Her genre writing includes military, science-fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, mystery, horror, and modern-day action. She lives in central Illinois near train tracks that provide “music” to type by, and shares her office with three dogs and a surly parrot. She is a member of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, International Thriller Writers, and Novelists Inc. Visit her website: jeanrabe.com.

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