The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (2 page)

Old Bob had seen the news clips and read with greedy eyes all about the ghouls and demons that had turned New York into a ghost town of littered bones and burned-out buildings. He had begun to plan, thinking that he could have a better life when in truth, his life was already wonderful and so full of a thousand possibilities every day.

Old Bob had thrown all that away. He had opened the gate between worlds by drawing glyphs in stolen blood. They had been childish, simple.

And they had worked! A very hungry demon had come through and had taken up residence in Old Bob.

Now, a demon can’t simply step into any body it chooses. For the most part it has to be invited, although sometimes a “careening” demon can manage to slip into the weak: the nearly dead, or the child with “eyes” who was in that precious state where control was problematic. But how frequent did that happen? Almost never.

In the worst of circumstances, a demon sprung from hell could climb into a cold body. However, possessing a corpse was terrible. No breath, no heartbeat. It was a tease. It was the ultimate broken promise, and yet no demon would ever pass it up. You were just SO close to being free on earth.

But Old Bob, like a fool, had offered his body freely.

It was such a fantastic prize and was the reason why the demon in him ground his teeth, making a whining noise in his throat as he was trapped. He could have broken out, but that would have meant an end to the body and it was just too precious to give up, even so close to being sent back to hell.

It was a horrible feeling and a delicious one as well to know that he had only a few more seconds of real life. They were precious seconds, seconds that he would never in a million years get to experience in hell.

Visha Ra-aye finished his spell and Bob was good and stuck. He fought back as best as he could, but to no avail; the spell had anchored him in place. Bob couldn’t move as long as Visha held his concentration.

The woman walked closer and stared long at Bob, her blue eyes running up and down the ruin of his face. Even held as he was, those seconds were fantastic. From behind her back, she pulled out a radio. “It’s him. We got him.”

His body might have been frozen in place, but his mind was still sharp. He could feel the priests coming. Their ugly glaring white heat had been on his periphery before he had even seen the woman but, foolishly, he had let his hunger for her scent distract him. They closed quickly from either end of the alley. He was glad that he couldn’t turn his head to see their self-righteous faces.

He was almost out of time. He sucked in the aroma of the world that none of these beings had the whit to appreciate to its fullest. That one breath spoke to him. It described
her
hopes and
his
fears. It told him the priests were not paragons. One drank to deal with the stress and the other was a glutton and battled daily with his lusts—and lost daily as well.

No matter. They had their despised God. Their ultimate judge.

A cross was pressed against Bob’s forehead and words of Latin were whispered in his face. Whisper or not, the words were a sonic boom that split his ears and his head. He tried to fight it, just as his victims had. He struggled for those last few precious breaths, those last few beats of his heart, those last few moments.

Chapter 1

Akron, Ohio

Jack Dreyde
n

Jack was bent over on his hands and knees with blood leaking down his arm; in the dark it was black as demon blood. Nearby was the knife which would later be sterilized and re-sharpened; the cut had been too shallow and Cyn had nearly paid for it.

He was shaky and cold, his shirt drenched in sweat. As always after a tough casting, he began to shiver. It didn’t matter that it was midsummer, he still trembled. He thought that after a year and a half he’d be used to the feeling of putting his soul on the line, of letting it drain away to practically nothing. But no, he still shook.

It had been eighteen months since he had saved the world, a feat that had been underplayed by everyone. Everyone.

Cyn never brought it up, and when she did, she spoke of her mother, or Pastor John, or poor Detective Richards whose body had been discovered among the ruins of a Princeton hospital. Or she would speak of the heroics of Lieutenant Neilson and his platoon of Seals or the Pope or the soft spoken Father Paul.

Cynthia Childs was his lover, his best friend, and his third cousin, and yet even she never mentioned the fact that he had practically bled to death for her and had saved the world in the process.

She never did, and when he was straight, when his soul was intact that is, he was glad that she never did. Yes, he had saved the world, but he had also twice committed murder, stolen the blood of innocent people, and had made sacrifices to the Mother of Demons, all just to save his worthless skin. He had been a monster, and who wanted to bring that up?

The only people who ever brought up his heroics were the constantly hovering government officials. They were the most backwards thinking people he had ever met. They acted as though
he
owed
them
something! In fact, they acted as though they owned him. For the last year and a half, Jack had lived and worked with an indictment hanging over his head. In a fit of honesty, he had foolishly admitted to two murders as well as culpability in fifteen million others. The government men never let on which they thought was worse.

They dangled a prison sentence over Jack’s head and made him go here and there, chasing down stray demons—it was why he was in Akron where the humidity was off the charts and the people bowled for fun—hideous.

Jack didn’t trust himself to stand up just yet. His insides were vibrating like a banjo string in a beer keg. He felt empty and shaking. What he had done was what he dubbed:
Free Form Sorcery
, and it wasn’t easy.

But there was no other way to hold the demons. They were just too strong, even when they were encased in the
live
ones. “Back off, Father,” Jack said, his voice hoarse.

“We…talked…about this…Jack,” Father Timmons answered between great gusts of air. By his own admission, the forty-eight year old priest hadn’t run more than a mile all told in the last thirty years. It had only been in the last few months that he had given any thought to his conditioning and he wasn’t nearly in proper shape for this sort of work. He had sprinted a hundred yards and now he was bent over the demon, trying to spew Latin and breathe at the same time.

“Yes, we did talk about it,” Jack answered, half his mind still on the spell he had conjured to
hold
the demon. Any lapse in concentration would free the creature. “And I told you that we need the demon. He might have information.”

“He is…a man…we respect that.”

The second priest, Father Jordan came up then. He took out a vial of Holy Oil and began dribbling a circle around the demon. His Latin wasn’t nearly as good as Father Timmons
’
and he went slowly, sounding the words out like a first-grader reading aloud for the first time. The moment he was done, Jack sat back and looked up at the night sky. The demon was now pinned in place.

Cyn stepped forward and gazed down on what had once been Bob Chapman. He was rank and hideous. “I think he might be too far gone,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the smell of death coming off the man. “You should let us keep him. Really, if this bloke doesn’t fit the criteria, then none of them do.”

“That’s just it,” Father Jordan said, “None of them fit
our
criteria. He is human; that’s all that matters. He is a possessed person, not a thing, and we will not be a party to torture.”

Jack glanced down at his arm, thinking that they didn’t seem to mind his suffering. The cut was across his bicep; there were three more below it and five across his forearm, all freshly scarred or scabbed. Along his side were five pink lines and above his belly-button were six in the shape of sergeant’s stripes. There were others on his legs.

He was bleeding himself dry capturing demons and always letting them go, figuratively speaking, that is. An unbodied demon was a weak thing, unable to resist the pull of hell for very long. “This isn’t working, Captain.”

The last person on the squad, Captain Metzger of the US Army, had been across the way, perched on the roof of a back-alley Chinese herb shop. Akron had a hundred and seventy of these types of shops. Since the
Event
in which Jack had accidentally helped to release hell on earth and then nearly died trying to make amends, the herb shops had sprung up like weeds: unregulated and immoral, selling anything from ground tiger penis to crypt dust. Akron had more of these shops than they did McDonalds.

“I agree,” was all Metzger said. He was tall and broad, prone to moodiness and rarely spoke, at least to Jack.

“Then do something or piss off,” Jack snapped. “My God, Metzger, sometimes you are next to useless. Try growing a spine.”

The captain ground his teeth. He was in a tough position; he had zero authority over the priests. Yes, they were American and yes, they worked with the
Rapid Anti-Demon Response Squads
, what everyone called
Raiders
, but they took their orders from Rome and no amount of threats or screamed orders would budge them. If Jack didn’t need them so badly, he would have tossed them from his squad long ago. As it was, he did his best to switch out the priests he worked with as quickly as he could, hoping to find one that would listen to reason.

So far none would.

They came in pairs, already prepared to deal with Jack and his “satanic” ways. There were fourteen
Raider squads
fighting and exorcising the many strays, but Jack’s
Raider squad
was different.
He
was different. The Event had changed him. He had come out of the ordeal stronger…far stronger.

He was, as far as he knew, the world’s only sorcerer.

It was true that he only knew three spells, but that was three more than anyone else knew…except for his cousins: Robert and Cyn. Robert was no sorcerer. He was a necromancer dealing in sacrifices, stolen blood, demons and the dead.

And Cyn…well, Cyn was just a girl. Barely twenty-one and could already boast about having a hand in saving the world. She could boast, though she never did. She was “just” a girl and had no more pretensions than that. The secret that only Jack knew was that she wanted to be shut of the entire fight.

If she had her way, she would find a farm in Wales and raise geese. When they were alone in bed, with Jack trying to ignore the pain of his latest cut and the emptiness in his chest, she would talk about raising geese. The idea fascinated her and yet, when Jack, in true American fashion, asked if there was a market for goose meat, she was utterly perplexed at the question.

She wanted only to raise the geese; she didn’t want to sell them and surely didn’t want to see them die.

Jack loved that beautiful innocent, naive outlook. It was as precious as it was ridiculous. She would describe Hobbit burrows where the geese would live and local children who would come by in yellow rain slickers and boots, pink boots for the girls and muddy blue ones for the boys—to feed the growing squadrons of mellow-minded birds.

He would laugh at these strange fantasies, but the laughter was usually fake. Yes, Cyn knew spells and she thought she knew what it took to cast them, but she didn’t really.

Jack hid that part from her. It was easy. He smiled, enjoying the stretch of skin and the working of the muscles on his face; he touched her arm, relishing the million of cells involved in the simple act; he kissed her hungrily as if he had never tasted lips so wonderful.

And he hadn’t…even if he had just kissed her a minute before. The spells drained him. They drained every part of him. They took that part of him that remembered these tactile experiences. They took the love that he and Cyn spun. And that was both good and bad.

It was good because he was constantly falling in love with her. Every day it was a new love. Every day it was exciting…but also everyday he would wake up feeling only a fraction of what he had felt the day before. It frightened him because what would happen if he missed a day with her? Would he forget his love for her entirely? Would he wander? Would he care?

Caring was a real issue with Jack. He looked upon Bob Chapman and wondered why they weren’t beating information out of him. It wasn’t an evil feeling, not like when he was sacrificing the blood and the souls of others; that had been horrible. This was just a lack of empathy.

Clamping a hand over his latest cut, he struggled to his feet and went to the edge of where the Holy Oil had been poured. The proximity of it made his already squirrelly stomach flutter. For a sorcerer, the concept of God could be just as hard to deal with as that of the Devil—they both took you. They both owned you. They both demanded obedience and sacrifice.

As Jack watched the priests exorcise the demon in Bob, Cyn pulled her medkit out of the backpack she had kept stashed behind the dumpster. She cleaned out Jack’s self-inflicted laceration, smeared it with bacitracin and then wrapped it tight; the process took all of a minute—she’d been doing this for over a year now and was quick and thorough.

She then unzipped the light jacket she wore and pulled off the Kevlar vest that had been hidden beneath it. She was red-cheeked and sweating from the heat and with a practiced hand, she spun her thick blond hair into a bun to get it off her neck.

“Who’s ready for sushi?” she asked, as if there wasn’t a filthy, diseased ravaged man lying on the floor of the alley, screaming his lungs out.

“What I want are new priests,” Jack said, jumping back into his argument. He too pulled off his vest and forearm guards. “These two aren’t cutting it.”

“I can’t fire them without cause,
”
Metzger replied. In spite of the humidity and the warm night, he stayed “gear-up,” his shotgun at the ready. Akron wasn’t the same as it had been. It was dangerous now and the screams of the demon and the prayers of the priest were attracting a crowd.

“Here’s a cause: they suck,” Jack shot back, uncaring that the two priests were five feet away and well within earshot. “You saw how long it took Timmons to show up and don’t get me started on Jordan. Really, Jordan, what the hell was that about?”

“If you can’t tell, I’m a little busy here,” the younger priest hissed. The two priests were panting and sweating with the spiritual effort of forcibly removing a demon from a living host. The ones that had been invited in were always the hardest to evict. They had their claws dug in deep. They acted as if it was their body and they fought tooth and nail to stay.

“Maybe Jordan is getting shy,” Cyn suggested in a low whisper. When the two men looked at her nonplussed, she leaned in closer and said in an even lower tone: “That’s English for saying that maybe he’s becoming a coward.”

The suggestion was certainly not unheard of. Facing even one demon was a difficult thing, but to do it on a weekly or even a daily basis was hard on the psyche.

“All the more reason he should go,” Jack said, also keeping his voice pitched low. More than anyone he knew the fear and the stress of fighting the undead and for the first time in a month he felt a tinge of empathy for the priests.

Even this logic didn’t stir Metzger. “In case you haven’t noticed, there is a worldwide shortage of priests. There are very few who want to be on the front lines fighting a war on demons and even fewer who want to work with you, Jack.”

“Me? Why wouldn’t they want to work with me? I’m a sorcerer for goodness sakes.”

“It’s precisely because you are a sorcerer,” Metzger answered. “They are Godly men, Jack, and you with your blood and your pagan symbols. It’s extremely off-putting. Also, you’re a bit of a jerk.”

Jack threw his hands in the air. “A jerk? Me? Cyn, can you believe this guy?” She only shrugged, which shocked him. “What? You think I’m a jerk, too?”

Another shrug. “You can be a little tough when we’re on the job. I know it’s the stress and the spells and the fact that no one has heard from Robert in so long.”

After the dust had settled from the Event, meaning after the blame had been well established—Jack and Cyn getting more than their fair share, mainly by being honest about the events that had led up to the destruction of the city—they had been flown to Egypt under escort to search for Robert.

It had been a waste of time and sweat. Despite money being splashed around and the Egyptian government fully on board, no one could remember seeing Robert anywhere near any of the hundreds of historical sites that dotted the country. They had been there for three months poking about. During that time, Jack had worked on his tan, which became a warm brown, and also worked on his spells which drained the tan away.