The Devil You Know (25 page)

I settled Cassie Berger on the bed. I wrapped my coat around her and gave her my bag of candy corn to eat. I was about to call down to Malach when the window behind me shattered inward like someone had punched a giant fist through it. Glass raked across my back, but luckily, my body shielded Cassie. I turned and pulled my gun at the same time. I fired on the almost Medusan visage of Billie Berger crawling through the broken shards of the window. Her visage was nearly blinding, but through the glow of her stolen power I recognized six wings beating at the air. Billie Berger was still Ascending. Soon she would have eight wings, the mark of an archangel.

My first shot nailed her in the head, the .50 round atomizing it. When the debris cleared, I saw a headless Billie Berger still crawling through the window, through the glass and the shattered window frame. I thought it was some delayed death thing but the body just kept on coming. A part of me wanted to deny this thing. My hands told my brain they weren’t interested in doing anything except stopping the monster coming after me and took aim again. But Billie moved too fast. She crawled across the floor with insane grace, sans head. Then she was upon me.

She was incredibly strong. She grabbed my gun hand and slammed it down onto the floor. The gun went flying into a corner. She held me down with her other hand. Her back arched like a woman in the throes of climax, and then her spine seemed to extend, a weird, bony knob forming at the tip. The knob grew in size, assuming a smooth, skull-like shape in mere seconds. Blood, muscle and gristle crawled across the bone like some kind of weird, time-lapse photography film, then liquid skin flowed over it all and a face formed. Dark blonde hair burst like a net around Billie’s savage, black-eyed face, and then she was whole once more.

Billie tried to bite me again with her newfound teeth.

I gripped her hair—it felt wet and alive, her entire head covered in a newborn mucus—and held it back, pulling her face away from me. Her wings flickered in irritation. If
this
was what happened when she bit me once, I did not want a repeat performance. Another bite, and I knew she would take the rest of my power. She would Ascend. Then we all would suffer.

Billie growled, her jaws snapping reflexively like some rabid wild animal. Her wings beat at me, nearing blinding me in their radiance. I heard footsteps on the stairs, faster than anything human. “Shoot her, Malach!” I screamed, straining with all my strength to keep her teeth away from me. “Shoot her now!”

But before that could happen, Billie let go and rolled off of me. Malach came bursting through the door, his gun drawn. I expected Billie to duck to one side, as any sane person would, but then I realized my mistake. Billie wasn’t human anymore. She wasn’t
anything
anymore. Instead of avoiding the shot, she took it full in the chest. Malach’s gun left an absolutely ginormous hole. I swear a small child could have crawled through it—not that Billie was going to allow something like that to ruin her day. She charged Malach, an athame in her upraised hand, a gunshot wound burned through the middle part of her body. Malach had forgotten that Billie was now more than human.

With a wet, warbling scream, Billie was upon him. She plunged the athame into the side of Malach’s neck. Malach screamed and blue blood burst heavenward. I had never heard Malach scream before. I had never heard anything scream like Malach screamed. It was the kind of sound that every cell in the body responds to. For a moment I was absolutely paralyzed by the sound of it, and by the sight of Malach writhing in agony through the hole in Billie’s body. Then, seconds later, the rift in her body seamlessly sealed itself up. Malach went down hard, like someone had exploded a grenade in his face, Billie on top of him.

Billie bent her head and bit into the side of Malach’s neck. Malach roared as Billie began to feed.

I stood up and aimed the Tanaka at Cassie. I said, “Billie, turn around! Turn around or I’ll shoot your daughter!”

Billie stopped feeding on Malach and turned to face me. Her face and breasts were soaked in Malach’s pale blue gore. Her eyes shone blindly, like portals into an unknowable white hell. I wondered if I was seeing God’s eyes.

“Lord of Flies,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I answered. It broke my heart to have to aim a gun at Cassie Berger’s head as the little girl cowered there on the bed, but I didn’t know how else to get Billie’s attention. “Let Malach go or I’ll kill the witch-child. No more power for you.”

Billie straightened up and regarded me carefully. She was almost painful to look upon, not as painful as my dad when in archangel mode, but close. It was like staring into the sun. “You are the Evil One,” she said. “The new young Lucifer. I
know
you. You should die.”

I narrowed my eyes at her but forced my hand not to waver where I pointed the gun at Cassie’s head. “You can call me all the names you want, bitch, but at least I don’t go around eating my own children.”

She bared her teeth, strong and white and faintly hooked. They were hungry angel teeth. “You will eat the world, Dragon.” She smiled, wisely, the way my dad can. “You will walk the earth, and where you walk, hell will follow you. You will bring hell to this earth, devil, you and your Whore of Babylon.” She extended her hand and made the sign of the ward, two fingers out and two down. “Satan,” she shouted, “Get. Thee. Down!”

I braced myself and waited for a tremendous otherworldly power to force me to my knees, but nothing happened. I wondered about that. And then it hit me. I knew. I knew and I laughed. Emily had power over me because she
believed
. It was her faith that gave her power. “You don’t believe, Billie,” I said, dropping the gun. It was useless to me now. “Who does God pray to, after all?” I pulled the angel athame out of my boot and approached her.

Billie looked at me in rage, and then in fear. All her badassery seemed to vanish in that moment. “The Throne is empty, devil,” she told me, stumbling back away from me. “Would you keep it that way?”

I smiled. I knew it was an evil smile. I even enjoyed it. “I’d rather have an empty Throne than a God that eats angels and children.”

I saw real panic in her eyes. She turned to grab at the athame that was still stuck in Malach’s shoulder, but it was wedged in his flesh. And anyway, I was faster than her. I was on her in seconds. I grabbed a greasy handful of her hair. I rocked her back against the front of my body until her back was bowed and her belly fully exposed. I plunged the angel athame into it. The blade had been baptized in the blood of her victims, the metal pure white like bone, and sharper than a tooth. Billie screamed. Her wings shushed all around me. Her arms flailed, hands grasping at air as if to beseech someone. But
she
was God . . . or the closest thing to it at the moment. There was no one else for her to cry to. I kept my hand firmly entrenched in her hair and my athame buried in her belly. I dragged the athame up, unzipping her flesh easily. Then I dropped the knife and I sank my hand up to the forearm in her burning wet guts until I found what I was looking for.

It burned cold. Somehow, I just wasn’t surprised. I closed my hand over Billie’s second heart and ripped it from her belly. Some of her gory insides came out with it like a net, a deep, troubling merlot color. She had not yet made the full transformation to a blue-blooded angel, but she was close. Billie fell limp in my arms, the light slowly fading from her eyes. In the last seconds, I showed her what I held. It burned bright white in my hand, like a dove on fire, but the moment I clenched my fist, the light began to fade and the heart began to harden. In mere seconds I held only dry powdery white angel ash in my hand. I let it crumble between my fingers.

“Devil,” she said with her rattling last breath.

“Say hello to my dad when you see him,” I told her. I let her go and she crumpled lifelessly to the floor at my feet.

In the silence that followed, Cassie began to cry.

I spent eighteen hours in interrogation down at the Blackwater Police Department.
They tried to book me on manslaughter—I had been found with Billie’s blood all over me—but I told them the truth. Billie had come after me when she’d realized I’d found her daughter and planned to take her away. She was insane, her strength enormous. She’d gotten the gun out of my hand, so I had been forced to use the only weapon I had available to me, the athame I used in ritual Wiccan practice.

In general, I’ve found that the truth usually works out pretty well; you just have to remember to remove the supernatural parts. When they questioned me on how I knew about the cabin, I again told them the truth: I saw photographs in the house when I’d been there. I had just followed my nose, with a little help from Google and the kind folks down at the Uni-Mart who had told me the location of Thom Berger’s cabin.

There was nothing to link me to the murder of Thom Berger—Billie took the heat for that one. Actually, she took the heat for everything. A forensic doctor was able to match Billie’s bite to the marks on little Cassie’s arms and legs, so the idea that Billie had been insane, killed her husband, and was trying to feed on her own daughter wasn’t entirely farfetched. Weird and sad, and great fodder for Shelley Preston and Mountaintop Radio, but not impossible.

I suggested DNA testing to prove what I already knew to be true, that Rebecca Berger and Billie Berger were the same person, but by then, the forensic team was already on my side. After all, Tay-Sachs syndrome is most commonly caused by close inbreeding—or so they told me. Two days later, the case mounted against dead Billie Berger disqualified the evidence found on Vivian’s computer, which led to Vivian’s charges being dropped. Microscopic traces of Brittany’s blood had been found on a hammer in the Berger cabin. The police believed that Billie Berger had gone to Vivian’s house to plant evidence on her computer, but Brittany had surprised her when she’d come home early after breaking up with her cheating boyfriend Mark. Since Billie couldn’t allow Brittany to talk, she had taken a hammer to the girl, then gotten the body into the trunk of Brittany’s car and driven her to a secluded area. I actually believed Billie’s choice of victim had been more personal and premeditated, but I kept my mouth shut on that one. I figured if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I think Sheriff Ben felt I knew more than I was letting on, but he was bound by the law, and the law requires evidence. I knew he’d keep the Kachina doll, just like I knew he’d be keeping an eye on me from now on. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t decide if I was a hero or a villain. Funny, neither could I. But he couldn’t hold me on suspicion of murder without evidence.

For little Cassie Berger, it was touch and go for a while. But the hospital filled her full of food and antibiotics, and bound all her terrible bite marks with bandages. It turned out she was a much tougher young lady than she seemed.

When I heard that she was asking for candy—candy corn, to be specific—I went to see her at the hospital. I brought candy corn and candy pumpkins and sugar Peeps. The nurses let me sit with her in bed and feed Cassie candy while they looked on in horror. I even brought a book with me,
The Velveteen Rabbit
, which was probably my favorite book growing up. Cassie loved it. She fell asleep before the Velveteen Rabbit became a real rabbit, but I knew I’d be back the following day to finish the book with her.

I left the book with Cassie and went downstairs to visit the gift shop. I hunted high and low until I found a rabbit that looked very much like the Velveteen Rabbit, though plush. I thought maybe I’d tell Cassie it was magic the next time I saw her, that the rabbit in the story had become a real toy rabbit. The idea excited me. My dad never read me any books when I was growing up. He never told me about magic. I had had to learn everything on my own.

While I was shopping, I noticed someone very familiar hanging out in the waiting room. The shop had a little section of old, used books and VHS tapes, so I went over them until I found the perfect gift, then took my purchases to the counter.

Malach was leaning against the wall, watching the nervous people in the waiting room with cool, remote eyes, when I stepped out of the gift shop. “You saw the girl,” he said at once.

“You’re not hunting her, are you?” I said. I decided that if Malach was contemplating hurting little Cassie, I might have to bust him up. How I would do that I didn’t know, but I’d find a way.

“There is something wrong with her.”

I nodded at that. “Billie bore Cassie after she’d begun the ritual of eating angel flesh. So Cassie is part angel as well as part witch, which was the reason Billie was eating her child slowly, a bite at a time. That about cover it?”

“Something like that.”

“That makes her a nephilim, not a daemon, Malach.”

“Yes. I know.”

As far as I was aware, nephilim, though not exactly encouraged, were not really hunted either, not like we daemons are. After all, we daemons are
evil
. . . or so I’ve been given to understand. I turned to glare at Malach. I can glare as fiercely as any angel. “You don’t honestly believe that I would hurt Cassie?”