Vicious Circle

“She was a vicious, selfish bitch,” he said, when he could speak again. “She got exactly what was coming to her. Don’t judge me, Castor. And don’t try to make me feel fucking guilty, because it won’t wash. I’m only sorry I didn’t manage to get Fanke.”

“Fanke was at the house?”

“At the meeting hall, you moron.”

Which brought us full circle, I reckoned. And since he still didn’t seem to want to shut up, I might as well check that I was right about the endgame, too. “You got there late,” I said. “The ceremony—ritual—whatever they were doing, it was already under way.”

“It was already finished. All bar the shouting. Thirty seconds earlier—thirty bastard seconds—and I might’ve stopped them. If Mel had just told me where she was, instead of lying and squirming and lying some more. And you want me to feel sorry I got her killed? Fuck that. I’m only sorry I didn’t top her the first night I met her.

“They were all in costume. Dressed in black, except for Fanke who was all in red and had some kind of a crown on his head. Made him a perfect target, only—only I saw her lying there, in the circle, and I lost it. I just screamed and started shooting. Walked right out into the middle of them—blam, blam, blam. If one of them had had sense enough to whack me on the back of the neck with a chalice, or one of their other bits of fucking paraphernalia, that would have been the end of it. But they closed up around Fanke like I was about to take a penalty and he was the goal. Protecting him: making sure I didn’t muss his hair with a .45 ACP. And then another bunch came at me from the side: they must have been guarding the front door, or something. So I turned and sprayed them instead.

“I didn’t expect to be walking out of there, Castor. And Abbie was dead, so I didn’t care what happened so long as I did some serious damage. But right then something else happened, and it was as big a surprise for them as it was for me.

“Something started to appear inside the circle. It—didn’t have any shape, at first. It was like a shadow with nothing there to cast it. Like—I dunno, like a shadow in winter, when the sun’s low in the sky, because it was enormous and stretched out and sort of distorted. Then it moved and you could see that it had hands—arms. And it started to look darker. More solid.

“The satanists all went crashing down on their knees like someone had sliced through their hamstrings. Hunkered right down with their arms thrown out, shouting gibberish in Latin or Greek or it might have been the Mickey Mouse Club theme tune because I honest-to-God wasn’t listening.

“I froze. I knew what it was that they were trying to do, but seeing it was something else. It was a demon: Asmodeus, one of the soldiers of hell. One of their fucking generals, in fact. He wasn’t really there—not solid, I mean. I could actually see the angle of the wall right through him. And the air currents were moving through him, too, pulling him out of shape. But he was bending down over Abbie with this look on his face like Christmas had come early.

“I had a lightbulb moment, Castor. The words from Fanke’s Web site blinked on and off in front of me like I was back in school, spelling out from flashcards. ‘Spiritually and physically prepared.’ He needed her soul, as well as her body. He was going to—to eat her, to consume her, right there in front of me. I had to stop it. I had to stop it.

“What I did next—I just did it because it felt right. The demon was more like smoke than anything else: you can’t shoot smoke. And in any case, you’re meant to aim at the base of the fire. So I switched to automatic and I shot the pentagram. I shot their fucking magic circle.

“The Tavor’s a bastard on auto. It bucked in my hands and I had to lean down hard on it to keep from being thrown over backwards: but I was already so close to the thing, it was like using a pointer on a whiteboard. I swung the gun round in as small an arc as I could manage, given the angle, and a couple of arms of the pentagram got chewed to pieces. I hit a couple more of their guys, too: leg shots, because I was aiming down—and before you ask, no, I don’t give a fuck.

“Because it worked. All hell broke loose—no joke intended. The demon opened its mouth and it gave out with a sound I hope I never fucking hear again. Not a sound, exactly: I mean, it didn’t scream. It wasn’t even loud. But you could feel the pressure on your eardrums, on your goddamn skin, like when a plane hits turbulence and drops a few hundred feet when you’re not expecting it. It hurt. It hurt like things were tearing inside you.