The Sword of Michael - eARC (18 page)

“She’s possessed, Sabrina,” I said. “Her body went out the back door. It said…”

“It said she gave herself to them,” Dillon said. “It said she did it for Marius. For us.”

“No,” Sabrina said. “She cannot be taken and she would not give herself that way.”

“It’s a possession,” I said. “She’s completely overshadowed.”

“Which way did she go? Where is she?” Otto said.

“It said it was going to take her somewhere, and…ah, I can’t say it,” Dillon said. He stepped aside and retched, a dry heave. His eyes ran.

“Oh, no…oh, no,” Sabrina said.

Otto studied my face. “This is how they will get to you.”

“They already have,” I said. “They already have.”

Chapter 22

We flew down the streets in Otto’s car. Sabrina and Dillon huddled like beaten children in the back seat. Otto steered deftly, his lips drawn thin, the long scar on his cheek gleaming pale. I closed my eyes and called…

…yes, Marius. This is how they have gotten to you, Tigre whispered.

First In Front floated cross-legged, right outside the passenger window as we sped through the city streets. How you choose, he said. Be careful how you choose. Everything hinges on you.

Burt was again, uncharacteristically silent. He flew right in front of the car, vectoring in on the energy trace left by Jolene…

“Turn left at the next light, go down two blocks, then right,” I said.

Otto nodded.

“Where?” Dillon said.

“Sharkey’s,” I said.

Dillon blew out a long breath. “Oh, that’s just fucking great.”

Sharkey’s was a notorious blue-collar bar that hosted at least one motorcycle club and a number of hangers-on, great blues and rock bands that played behind a classic wire mesh fence to prevent beer bottles and the stray bullet from hitting them. It was the last place I would want to go, and Jolene—my Jolene—knew it only from reputation and the occasional tale told…by Sabrina.

“I can’t handle this right now,” Sabrina said. Silent for a moment. Then a loud laugh from her. “But I guess I will, right? Right? At least it’s someplace I know.”

Dillon shook his head. “Why do you go there, Sabrina?”

“Because it’s simple and uncomplicated. I don’t have to be a practitioner, I can just go in for a bump and a beer, take a guy home. Simple. Uncomplicated.”

“There is nothing uncomplicated about you,” Otto observed. “It is not casual, casual sex. Especially for those such as you.”

Sabrina stared out the side window and was silent.

* * *

Sharkey’s: a sprawling parking lot, part dirt from an vacant lot with the fence torn down, part cracked asphalt sprouting greenery in the cracks. One story, brick fronted, metal front door with two huge black men perched on stools. Otto pulled right up in front.

“Is this wise?” I said. The car brought plenty of attention. So did Otto. As did Sabrina. Dillon and I were just side-acts to this circus.

Otto got out and we followed in his wake. He held up a handful of bills—hundreds by the quick look I got—and whispered something to the two bouncers.

They took the bills, nodded, waved us past.

First barrier.

They didn’t even pat us down, though one of them gave Sabrina a big leer as she passed him.

More Sharkey’s: heavy wooden tables, too heavy to pick up and fling, ringed by battered chairs, a low ceiling with slow-moving fans, packed with burly men in feed caps and jeans, women bursting out of halter tops and tight jeans, lots of beer and shots in hand, the elevated stage protected by metal mesh, jukebox blaring ’80s heavy metal rock, cocktail waitresses ducking in and out of the crowd, a group of bikers in cut off denim jackets with MC patches.

The jukebox switched tunes. “Dirrty,” by Christina Aguilera and Redman. Rocking hard stripper music. Good thing they…

A woman climbed up on a table, accompanied by loud cheers.

Jolene.

“Oh, fuck,” Dillon said.

She began to beat out the song, pumping the beat with her hips, and all the way across the bar it looked out of her eyes, leered and waved at us. Surrounded by a growing band of men, she began to roll the silk camisole up over her flat, toned belly, undulating to the increasingly frenetic crowd of men around her…

Sabrina ignored the men who waved to her in the room. “Marius, this will be a gang bang in a few minutes. We need to get her out of here.”

“This is not a good place for a fighting solution,” Otto said.

First In Front, twisting through the crowd, invisible to the eye but the patrons moving out of his way as though they sensed his coming…whispering in Sabrina’s ear…

Only maybe a minute into a three minute song, and already the men were chanting “Take it off, take it off, take it off!”

Sabrina grinned, grabbed Dillon by the hand and said, “Throw me up there.”

“What?” he said.

She pointed at the table next to the one where Jolene’s body writhed. “Toss me up there. But don’t tell the elf, right?”

He looked at her, puzzled, shrugged and handed her up onto the table. Sabrina threw back her hair and screamed, “Yeeeehawwww!”

And broke into her own beat with the song.

And took it up a notch. She beat Jolene’s body to the punch by stripping off her sweat top and shaking her large breasts to the riff by Redman.

And the crowd parted like the Red Sea before Moses’s staff.

Or something like that.

Not that Jolene (Jolene’s body, I reminded myself) wasn’t a show stopper, but Sabrina was a known quantity in this bar, and she was getting naked and wilder faster than Jolene’s demon, which was still getting a handle on her body…

And Sabrina was surrounded near instantly by the crowd howling for her as she began to work the waistband of her sweatpants around and down…and she inclined her head sharply at Jolene’s body, suddenly abandoned…

Dillon’s jaw dropped. I had to shove him out of the way. “Help me get her, Dillon!”

Otto watched Sabrina as he might have studied Mussolini’s mountain.

We elbowed a few of Jolene’s faithful out of the way, and the demon glared down at us.

“You can’t compel…” it began.

Dillon reached out and grabbed her ankle, tugged hard. It landed hard on her ass. “Oh, let me help you!” Dillon said. “Too much to drink?”

“You can’t force…” it began.

“He’s not,” Dillon said. “I am.”

He brought his hand around in a short sharp arc and the open hand caught her right on the tip of her jaw, snapped her head around and her eyes rolled up in her head as she slumped, unconscious, and Dillon caught her, slung her over his shoulder and turned, so fast that the other men were still trying to figure out what just happened, and he said, “Let’s do like the cowboys and Indians and get the hell out of Dodge.”

We made for the door, I was on point, and I shouted to Otto, “We’ll be back for…”

He held up one shovellike hand to silence me. Reached under his coat and pulled out his MP5K-SD. The crowd clustering tighter around Sabrina didn’t even notice. He did something to the muzzle and the short suppressor came off and went into his pocket. He looked up, then fired a burst full auto into the ceiling.

That, the crowd *did* notice.

We were at the door and stepped aside just as the bouncers came running in, leaving the door free and unguarded. Jolene’s body was limp between us. I turned and looked back.

The crowd parted before Otto, who walked up to the table and offered Sabrina his hand.

“Come, my love. Your chariot awaits,” he said.

Sabrina jumped down, breasts jiggling. Otto swept his greatcoat off and draped it over her shoulders, his MP5K ready in one hand. Then he offered his free arm, and Sabrina tucked her hands into the crook of his arm and he swept through the frozen and silent room to meet us at the door.

“We shall go, yes?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “We shall go. Let’s do like the shepherds and get the flock out of here.”

Chapter 23

“Is it usual for her to be out this long?” I asked Dillon. He had way more experience than I did in the art and science of knocking people unconscious, but Jolene’s body and the inhabiting demon hadn’t stirred once during the drive from Sharkey’s to my house. We’d laid Jolene’s body out on my table, bounded it with sacred sea salt and amethyst crystals, topped at the top of the table with a crucifix and at the foot with a figure of Mother Mary, a sheet emblazoned with the crest of the Great Mother of the Wiccans laid across her.

“I don’t know,” Dillon said. “Most people, they wake up in a few minutes. Some drunks, they stay out. Only if there’s a concussion.…”

“Did you give her a concussion?”

“I don’t know, Marius, I don’t think so, but someone as fine boned as she is…”

I fought the anger inside me, another layer of the seething mass inside I tried to settle. Another layer to the onion, another tangent in the multifaceted attack the Dark Forces had orchestrated.

And I still didn’t have the name of the demon behind all this.

But I did have a name.

Wilhelm Eichmann.

A not-so-good German name.

We stood in my healing room, loosely ringing the table, not yet a Circle, but soon. Sabrina was relaxed, happy almost, for the first time since we’d fetched her back. I guess stripping in her favorite bar and being escorted out at gunpoint by a badass long-dead German commando suited her. Dillon, though, was another story. He’d slapped Jolene (or to be more precise, her body) into unconsciousness, watched the other woman in his life stripping in front of a bar full of bikers be rescued by his personal hero, and the events of the last two days were taking a huge toll on him.

Otto, though…more solid than solid and with a style all his own.

Arms crossed, head dropped, deep in thought—or in communion with his own spirits and guides.

And I still hadn’t gotten around to asking him the question on all of our minds: how come he wasn’t dead?

Or was he?

“We have a lot to talk about,” I said. “One of these days.”

Otto considered me. “I have a friend. American. He served in the American paratroopers. He has a saying I enjoy. ‘You got the talking part done.’ I like this saying.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The time for talking is past, Marius. We must act. Quickly. Things are happening all around us. We must retake the initiative, we must not only respond. Jolene’s soul is in danger. Sabrina has been attacked. Dillon is under attack…”

“What do you mean?” Dillon said. “Attack? Where?”

“They attack you in the way they always attack, my brave friend,” Otto said. “They prey on what you have in you. In what we all have in us. They prey on your guilt, your jealousy, your envy, your loneliness…your humanity. That is how they attack you. They seek to split us apart.”

Dillon looked at Sabrina who gazed back, calm and unafraid. At Otto.

“Like in
The Lord of the Rings
, right?” he said. “The splitting of the Fellowship. When the Ring worked it’s evil on the Men, right?”

Otto was puzzled. “This I do not understand. Lord of the Rings? Fellowship? What is this thing?”

The three of us laughed.

“When it’s all said and done, Otto, we’ll have a movie marathon. Then you’ll get it,” I said.

“Start with
The Hobbit
,” Sabrina said.

“And then all three of
The Lord of the Rings
, extended version,” Dillon said.

“Extended version all the way,” I said.

“Hmm. Yes. All right. When we are…done.” Otto inclined his head at Jolene. “So how do we approach this problem, Marius? We all stand ready to help you.”

I considered that. It was late night, the best time to work in the Dream Time, in the Other Realms. But this depossession would require more than me; I was the target and would be most vulnerable. And of course the Dark Forces wanted that uncertainty in me—so I couldn’t give it to them. While I was the most experienced depossessionist, Sabrina was a powerful and gifted healing practitioner…Dillon could hold the space, and Otto…

“Otto…” I said. “Are you skilled in journey technique?”

He studied me.

and my guides gathered round me…First in Front said it. He is powerful in the Other Realms, Marius…cloaked and hidden, carefully banked like a fire in the dark of night…he is your ally…

But not all is shown, Tigre said. This is for you to decide, to exercise the right discernment…

Burt said, Measure twice. Cut once. Use what you have, because all have been guided to you…

But beware, First In Front said, because there are Dark Forces prowling…

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been shown.”

Otto didn’t need to say anything, but he did. “Tell us what we must do, Marius.”

There was a gleam of headlights outside my house, and then the blue and red flicker of light bar lights.

More than one set.

Dillon peeked out the window.

“There’s a SWAT team out there,” he whispered.

I looked out, and Otto peered from the other window. Not the locals. These were black Suburbans.

Feds.

“Now who the.…” I said.

I saw the raid jacket on one of them. DHS. Department of Homeland Security. And standing back, in a raid jacket that said RESERVE OFFICER, was a sneering man I recognized so well: my old friend Wilhelm Eichmann his own self.

“We’ve got a problem,” I said.

Dillon started for the front room, where his guns were.

“Don’t,” I said. “They’ll want us shooting, and we’re not…”

“No,” Otto said. “We must not fight. The women will be caught in the cross fire, and we will all…no. I will speak to them.”

“What?” Dillon and I said simultaneously.

The SWAT team formed up on the run, making the snake and inching up on my doorway. No announcement, and more than likely no knock—they were coming in. Other Suburbans across at the park, and at least one long gun mounted up across the hood of the vehicle, a sniper watching us. From the street behind me, on the other side of my back side neighbor, blue and red flickering lights.

Surrounded.

“What can you do?” I said.

“More than I want to,” Otto said. “But if we wait till they enter, anything can happen…”

Happens all the time. After all, when the dust settles, the gun smoke clears, who’s to say who shot first?

Only the survivors.

And we were heavily outgunned at this point.

Dillon wasn’t having it. I could see that in his face.

“We don’t even know if they’re really DHS,” he said. “They’re Cabal, maybe more of those damn goat-soldiers or the clones…”

“This is my home neighborhood, bro,” I said. “We can’t destroy the whole neighborhood…”

“I will talk to them,” Otto said. “Wait…”

He swept by us, went to the door, turned on the porch lights. The SWAT team froze like a deer in the headlights, or a SWAT team in the spot lights.

“SWAT team!” Otto bellowed. “Officer coming out! Plain clothes officer coming out!”

He opened the door.

Dillon and I looked at each other.

“Plain clothes officer? What the fuck?” Dillon said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Sabrina watched. “He’s more than meets the eye.”

“Yeah,” Dillon said. “But is he a Decepticon or an Autobot?”

“What?” Sabrina said.

“Good question,” I said. “Or is he an Autobot pretending to be a Decepticon?”

“Or vice versa,” Dillon said.

Otto stepped out. Multiple weapons lights trained on him, and so many red laser dots he looked like a terminal case of the measles. He held a small case open in his raised right hand, the hand so big it hid most of what he held.

“Plain clothes officer!” Otto showed. “My credentials are in my right hand!”

Two SWAT officers converged on him.

“You may enter!” Otto said. “They will not resist. They are unarmed! They will not resist.”

They entered hard, sweeping through my front room, shouting “Clear! Clear!” as they moved quickly to the healing room.

“Down! Keep your hands in sight, cross them behind your head, get down!” the leader shouted.

We did.

One of them swept his muzzle across my altar, wiping all of my sacred objects onto the floor.

“Whoops,” he said. He crushed a statuette of Mother Mary beneath his boot.

I looked at him. Square head, black hair, black eyes.

Eichmann or a clone?

His name strip said Eichmann.

“You’re a credit to your name, Eichmann,” I said.

He kicked me hard in the side. “Shut up, Looney Tunes.”

“Knock it off!” the team leader said.

“By the Power of the Three,” Sabrina started.

“Don’t, Sabrina. Let his consequences be his own…”

“I said, SHUT UP!” Eichmann screamed.

“Just like his daddy,” I said.

“Hey Winter,” the team leader said. “Shut the fuck up. You’re under arrest. Eichmann, outside. Ma’am, you’ll have to be quiet, too.”

He looked up at one other team member. “What you got?”

“Fucking full auto weapons in the front room, Loot. One of them a M4, and there’s at least one hand grenade we’ve found. Just like the CI…”

“Shut the fuck up,” the team leader said. He grabbed the team member by the arm and hustled him into the other room, and began a dressing down I could feel but not see.

CI. Confidential Informant.

That means someone had tipped them off.

Wasn’t hard to figure out the who or how.

The why was another story, though. Why arrest us and not just kill us?

They picked us up and marched us out; a stretcher team came by and rolled Jolene, handcuffed, onto the stretcher. As they took us out, we passed Otto, arguing vehemently with a man in a raid jacket with the look of The Boss; the elder Eichmann sneered and gloated as we were taken by.

“Enjoy your stay,” the elder Eichmann said.

“Somewhere there’s a village short it’s idiot,” Dillon said.

“And Hell’s short a little minion,” I said.

“Shut up!” the elder Eichmann screamed.

“Shut up!” screamed his son.

We laughed.

Because the Devil hates laughter.

* * *

I’ve always hated being in jail.

It’s not just the loss of freedom, the being in a cage.

It’s being surrounded by so much negative energy, so many of the possessed, both the keepers and the kept, and feeling as though you’re at the bottom of a maelstrom, a whirlpool of negativity. The constant din and hum, the simmering violence right beneath the surface, the hopelessness, the gaming of the inmates against each other and the jailers.

This time they had me in a holding cell, after the obligatory fingerprinting and photographing and processing. Apparently I was under arrest for domestic terrorism and plotting terrorist acts; more than one had snickered at “the rock worshipper” in the holding cell.

Eichmann the younger, the cop one, had said through the door, “They say *I’m* crazy? He’s the one who worships rocks…”

Apparently the presence of sacred objects, including stones, on my altar prompted that commentary.

“Freedom of worship?” I shouted back. “Sounds like an officially sanctioned hate crime!”

“Shut up, Looney Tunes!” he’d shouted back.

I laughed.

First In Front nodded, and shuffled through a power dance. Live as though you are dead, he chanted, hoka hey, hoka hey…it is always a good day to die…hoka hey, hoka hey…

There was a vision I had been gifted once, of the Warrior Angels during the First War of the Angels, when Lucifer, the Son of the Light, was cast down for his betrayal and his rebellion against the One. In the vanguard, an angel, first into battle, who threw himself against Lucifer himself…Lucifer with his long lance of light, the hooked halberd of the Angels, against a warrior angel armed with his sword…the warrior pierced through his middle, and pulling himself along it, straining to reach the Great Adversary…

…laughing as he did so.

In the face of the enemy.

Remember, the Devil hates laughter.

So I lay down on the metal ledge that passed for a bench slash bed, and crossed my legs and closed my eyes, let myself slip into journey…

…Tigre said, stay in your body, Marius…you are surrounded by the Dark Forces. There are Light Warriors here among them, but you must stay focused and aware, you are in great danger…

…he’s a hardhead, Burt said. But God must have need of this particular hardhead, because he keeps coming and coming…

…First in Front kept dancing, twirling in a circle, his coup stick glowing in his hand…

I opened my eyes, made sure I was still in my body, then closed my eyes again and counted my breaths, one, then two, one, then two, for however long it took before the cell door opened up.

It was a long, long time.

Or so it seemed.

The SWAT team leader was there. Otto behind him.

“Get up, Winter,” the team leader said.

Otto drooped one eye slightly in a wink.

The SWAT gestured for me to pass in front of him. He escorted us without a word through the processing area, where more than one set of curious eyes followed us. Otto led the way to the exit door, shook the SWAT’s hand, and took me outside.

The sun was bright and shining. Midafternoon. Better part of twelve hours in lock-up.

“Where’s Dillon and Sabrina?” I said.

Otto led me to his car where several local cops stood and stared. As one, they all gave him their back. We got into the car. He started it and drove out of the parking lot, past rows of parked police cars.

“Where’s…”

He held up his finger, took an electronic device, a meter of some kind, out of the center console. Turned it on as he pulled over to the curb, and studied the meter.

“Say something,” Otto said.

“What?”

“That’s good,” he said. “It doesn’t appear that they bugged the vehicle. They had access to it, but it’s more difficult than it appears to get into—or around—this vehicle.”

He pulled away and started towards my house.

“Dillon is being held on federal charges,” Otto said. “Illegal modification of weapons, possession of full-auto weapons without a transfer tax, explosives. I can’t get him out—yet—but I’m working on it. Sabrina was released without charges and I put her in a cab to a hotel. I’ve got it covered. You are released without charges…but there’s an investigation pending as to whether you were practicing counseling or medicine without proper licensure.”