Evanescence 17.…Jill’s Story

Chapter 17

I’m on my second smoke and my third coffee out in front of the lobby as my guys start coming back in from doing a scan survey of town. It seems like a hundred years ago since I’ve been here, been home.

I look at Bishop. “Okay get everyone over to the Hotel and order some food we’ll go over things there. Bishop…Get Shaker to start drawing up the circles in the convention room.”

They salute and give me a bunch of “Yes bosses, Ma’am and Colonels.” I head back inside and seeing Raine leaving with my parents and brother and Alecia leaving with Raine’s mom. Alecia’s staring right back at me as much as I’m looking at her. I know her from somewhere I do.

I take another sip of my coffee and my watch vibrates. I look around moving with my coffee to my lips.

There slipping into the stairwell a goth looking nurse? Purple sheened black hair, make up and black scrubs…sure, like they’d let you come to work like that honey. I look at the meter. Shit she’s rating a three hundred and twenty. She’s not human. I wait until I know she’s away from the door. I hit my ear mike. “Everyone stop, I’ve got a three-two-O here that just waltzed in her and hit the stairwell. I need back up.” I slip on my combat gloves studded with little German iron crosses made of cold shaped iron and pure silver in layers and both blessed and spelled. I pull my .45 it’s got rounds in it similar to the studs and I slip into the stairwell. I stop and listen and…up...she/it went upstairs.

I follow slowly sideways hugging the wall foot over foot. Holding my .45 in a double handed grip.

She’s knelt by the third floor door of the stairwell kneeling and sniffing. It’s not a human sound of smelling either. I move into position and she turns and stares at me quick, really quickly…her eyes are this solid deep sepia purple without any pupils and her teeth are all sharp and pointed, same with her ears and there’s black dark claws on her fingertips and her weird goth hair and pale skin just might be natural.

“Don’t move, if you know what’s good for you fae.”

She snarls and comes at me and I shoot and the girl I hit turns into a splash of water. I feel her to my twelve coming at me from right above me too fast for me to shoot. I move getting barely out of the way as she tears my suit jacket with her claws.

My instant reaction is a fast backhand, my hand connects with something and I hear a hiss of the metals striking skin. I follow it up with a gun punch with the other hand knocking her off kilter and she lashes out with claws that I block and use the studs to scrape across her limbs and we go at it back and forth for about two minutes before I hear the multiple clicks of guns being cocked and aimed at her. I step back panting but do a quick inhale and point my piece at her.

“You picked the wrong girl on the wrong day honey.”

She leans against the wall and laughs at us and starts to reach inside her scrub pockets.

“Easy? Slowly…” She takes out a pack of smokes and a lighter pulls one out and lights it up then she pulls out a black glass badge of a glass chain from around her neck. She gives us a sharp pointy toothed smile as she exhales the smoke in my face.

“You back off mortal, I’m her on behalf of The Morrigan.” She tosses me back my smokes and my lighter then she morphs back to her mortal look.

Great, just effing great that’s all I need. “And you’re here why?”

“The Whip has heard unsightly rumors of there being Dark Fae in this hamlet amongst the missing but that’s only secondary to me retrieving Shea.”

“Shea’s been impounded.”

“Un-do that, it means nothing.”

“Tell that to my bosses then.”

“I have a writ.”

“Produce it then.”

She glares at me. I take out my own cigarette and light it by taking the smoke out of her mouth and lighting mine off the heater (slang for cig ember.) there’s this intense look between us. Yeah…try and act all big and bad. I’ve seen worse. She passes me this little rolled up two inch wide scroll. I take it and pass it to Mitch. He closes his hand around the thing and does his psychic thing. “It’s good commander.”

“Good.” I look at her. “So, with Shea not being here what are you actually doing here?”

“Tracking.”

“Cute, stoic but cute. What are you tracking?”

“Fae business snack meat.”

“SDA business actually. I honestly wouldn’t care if you were the black bitch herself. This is my world and you don’t play ball there’s a really big mountain full of cells with wrought iron bars you can visit for a few centuries.” Her eyes shifted to fae dark again and pissed off.

“I’m tracking Shea’s foci.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an ancient tool used by cultures that existed long before you monkeys slank out of the trees and started fucking in caves. It’s used to con-cen-trate Ma-jik like a lay-ser.”

I’m not a real fan of her talking to me like I’m slow. I’m not a fan of the dark fae as a general rule. In the great school of life the light fae are the jocks and the rich kids and the cheerleaders, the dark fae are the cruel assed bullies that stomp on you for fun then bitch about scraping off their shoes.

“I know what a foci is sugar-brain, I meant what it is?”

She looks at me, then the rest of us. Yeah you’re not going anywhere without us now. I’m not letting a three hundred plus just waltz around unescorted if I can help it.

“It’s his Shileigh.”

“Okay then, that’s better. Let’s go find this thing.”

She gives me this peel paint look but moves past me and back to where she was and starts literally sniffing around.

We end up heading into another stairwell and back down to the main floor. One of the guys met us there and gave me my flight jacket and we followed the fae to a garbage can where she pulled out this old but ornate gnarled but worn smooth walking stick. She sniffed it and pulled back making a hissing face and sound.

“What?”

“Demon….”

“A demon? Here?”

“No, Demon power, energy was here, very strong, thick…sour…”

“Was here?”

“Yes. It was here but it left.”

“Can you track it?”

“Yes….”

“Will You?”

She looked at me, sharp teeth sort of chewing on her lip. She closed her eyes and opened the human looking again. “Alright, but I’m not doing this for you. This is something I have to investigate for The Morrigan.”

“Fine by me. Let’s go.”

It was slow going with her walking. The fae almost never will go inside a vehicle. One they’re too cage like and two there’s just too much iron in the steel of them it makes most of them pretty sick. I don’t need a sick fae; it’ll mess with their powers.

I use the time to my advantage and call it in. The guys I have plus a possible clean up team, a couple of paladins (Military chaplains with both combat experience and contact with the enemy.) It takes a few hours of seemingly randomly going through some of the worst and crappiest neighborhoods here in my hometown.

This recession thing has turned a good third of the town I remember into a goddamned slum. There’s stuff in just so much I don’t give a shit disrepair and shops closed and places boarded up and I see people I knew and went to school with here and there looking like their out of work or out of hope or both. We used to have three plants here Mack truck, John Deer a bottling plant for General Foods all of them closed up the jobs gone or moved. Most of the good stuff the malls and stuff that people go too is all out by the highway, the older general neighborhoods and in town stores mostly gone because of the Wall-Mart and Cost Co. effects. The old money neighborhoods aren’t affected because they weren’t affected like everyone else, they took hits sure…but the effect is really shitty. I fought, bled and killed for my country to come back to this?

We’re getting looks with the escalades around and patrolling around looking for signs as we’re following the dark fae. I’m more than sickened by how many drug houses there are and that we’re going to. There seems to be though not that many junkies flopped out her. I’ve been in a few of these places on raids and they’re not this empty.

There’s spray painted hell signs around though. Glyphs of darkness and things that represent evil things…none have power in them but it’s chilling to see a ward thing that stands for rape or incest or other stuff like that…charged up it’d shed those meaning like light from a fucked up light bulb.

They’re all in lime green spray paint and there’s crude depictions of an angel too. And in Latin crudely written “The angel with the green eyes…the serpent is the angel.”

It’s just getting dark when we hit the nest. It’s an old condemned building out near what was the industrial park. The fae hisses and she shifts even more her skin changing now kissed by purple almost floral fish scales…she actually got more beautiful if in an alien kind of way. If you’ve ever gotten a thing for a sci-fi character on screen who wasn’t human you know what I mean. I actually don’t like that…she’s dark fae, that’s all part of her beguiling bullshit.

I give Mary a hand sign and she nods from the back of the escalade and there’s this static pop in our heads for a second like your ears are popping without them popping. ~Boss, We’re linked~

~Thanks Mother Mary, let’s play this by the numbers people. Keep out of the way of the faeling and watch out for nasty surprises everyone.~

Mary Sommers is a rare find a hive mind telepath. We got her out of a crazy house because she kept hearing voices. She don’t read minds and can only link to someone willingly but most telepaths are vulnerable to surface thoughts. Mary is very powerful and was receiving enough it drove her nearly insane. We use her because when she opens up she can link close to forty people in a two mile area. All we have to do is picture who we want to think to.

I’m almost scared if some governments kept such people for military ops. We try to squash that and get those people into our organization.

We moved in and the place was packed and covered in the hell-signs and graffiti in nasty dead languages. Live ones too, giving me this nasty case of the squicks. I feel it effecting others, Mary tries to pull us together, hold our shit together as a group.

There must be close to three or four dozen people here. A crude altar is set up and there’s this charnel smell as they’ve been sacrificing strays around and probably a few local pets are well. There’s metal of some kind being played and they’re mosh dancing, fucking, eating the rotting and dead animals and rubbing the blood and entrails over their bodies. Whatever their eyes were they all are shimmering green.

The fae taps my arm and points to this skeevy looking junkie dancing with four girls, I went to school with two of them. He’s got this glowing emerald on a chain in one hand and he’s touching their foreheads with the thing and there a bit of light that sinks into them and I can see a little bit of silver light leave them and go into the stone and some into him through his fingers. They look like they’re in pure bliss…rocking this orgasm I can almost feel too. The whole place has this heady sexually charged feel to it that’s sinking in…I want…I shake off the feeling.

He turns and looks right at me.

We all hear the smashing of glass in our heads. Jerry Cannon, Brian Norris, Andrew Fontaine getting beaten and bludgeoned and stabbed to death outside with the vehicles…Then the wedge end of a tire iron get violently shoved through Mary’s head…

We all feel her death scream in our minds.

“Fucking get them, babies, fucking get them all. They want to stop us, stop our heaven.”

That’s the guy with the gem and his voice is boosted but almost laconic, nonchalant.

The other’s go nuts and come at us like they’re insane…and on drugs. I open fire, going for him while I have the shot and Brenda Lee on of the women, on of the ones I went to school with walks in front of my shot this human shield…smiling.

Then I’m fighting for my life. They’re demon energy touched infested, infected so where I hit the skin blisters and burns but there’s too many, all of them nuts and PCP strong. We’re getting chewed up with these people, things…It’s like getting attacked by those Reaver things out of that show Firefly.

I don’t have any choice but to shoot them. I whip out glass balls filled with holy water but from the river Jordan and strongly blessed. I run out of those fast and I pull out my snap blades.

Yeah blades, I have to fight for my life here. Built like a security baton but of the agencies own metal called silver carbide? No idea how it’s made but don’t care. The ends are weighted inside to help with the force of my swings and they’re razor sharp, it’s kind of like using pop out rapier blades with no guards on them.

I hate shit like this. These people are victims, and as I take one out after another I can see the flare of green go out of their eyes and it takes everything in them with them…Do you know how hard it is to kill someone and know because of whatever they did you’re condemning them to be literally consumed…Their death cries have that final realization of that death…true death, souls destroyed.

If I don’t kill then they’ll kill me, us. They’re so juiced up on demon power they don’t really stop when you take chunks off of them. Even as good as we are I’m losing people and we’re boxed in.
The fae is like a wild thing unleashed, water doubles messing with her foes, she’s tearing them to parts her claws grown out to three inch blades. Nixie…I’m pretty sure she’s a Nixie…dangerous…lethal by what I’m seeing.

The guy does something and the gem flares in his hand and there’s this feeling washing over the place. Things start flying at us, junk, sharp bit’s of glass, metal and anything that can hurt us.

I drop three more people when he points at me and I’m assailed by a few flying wooden palates and then some cement cinder blocks. I dodge the palates…ducking one, rolling over another, I take a cinder block to the ribs and about a half dozen more come at me and Then I’m soaked?

I’m soaked an standing where the Nixie was and she gets hit by the fusillade of cement blocks. They crash into her shattering in a cloud of dust and pebbles, She steps out of the dirty cloud with this Keening scream at him and shaking off the dirt and dust and cement bits like she got pelted with snowballs.

She saved my bacon. Don’t you hate it when someone you’re pretty sure you don’t like turns out not to suck so much?

She runs right at him and his minions are trying to get in her way. I run out in front of her like I’m protecting the guy with the ball trying for a touchdown. I get as close as I can before ten of them swamp me trying for a wall of freak between him and us.

I feel a foot catch my back pocket like a foothold the another on my shoulder as she goes up and over with another Keening primal war scream and comes down right on him.

I lose her after that as I’m getting punches, kicked, stabbed and beaten…they start ripping at my clothes and I’m trying to cut but I lose my blades, I punch, kick hitting at killshot martial points if I can get them but some of those don’t work…

Then there’s this ….this…
I’m Hallucinating…
I have to be…!

Heaven…Molly…My Molly…she’s there in the chaos for a second…? Forever? And she’s dead and gone…OD’d while I was in my basic training for the agency…I feel her Kiss me…I feel her kiss me…

~Goodbye Jill…I loved you, I still love you…never lose that, never forget that…I didn’t want to leave you…I never wanted to die…You…It was you Jill, You saved my soul…~

She fades and there’s another voice… Raine’s…I see her kneeling, on her hands and knees in one of Shaun’s tee-shirts. I can see through her, but she’s looking at me, looking around and she extends her hand at me palm out wards and there’s a wave of wind? It blasts some of them off of me and I see her look around as I’m scrambling to my feet and with a gesture like she snatched something up and threw it at me two of the guns from one of my downed agents fly to my hands like she used the force.

I’m not stupid or foolish to not use this. I open fire at the things around me, taking out some of the ones on top my team, turning the tide of the battle with the infected ones.

I hear the Nixie scream as the guy’s punching her with the stone and the chain wrapped around his hand. She’s got him sliced up like sushi but he’s healing his cuts glowing green and scarring up. I can see green lines of power pouring from the rock into his veins and he’s getting bigger, five ten to six ten in a minute…slapped on about two hundred ponds of twisted muscle as he’s literally losing his humanity…lost his humanity, my watch registers him at six hundred and rising…

He choke slams the nixie into the concrete floor and repeatedly bashes her head into the floor making it shake, cracking the cement…I open fire as he stands and smiles at us. The remaining members of my team that can fight, fire on him with everything we’ve got…

There’s that sick green shimmer in his skin now and something coming off him like a heat shimmer…the bullets hit it and just vanish.

He cracks his neck one way than another and the sound keeps going down his spine as bone blades pop out his skin, his hair turns thicker and become these dreadlocks made of white hair and beaded with what looks like finger bones. His skin ashes out whitening, he grins at me and comes at me with a push off with one foot like he’s skating…so powerful the concrete floor gravels under the pressure and he’s not running so much as pushing himself at me like a car with the pedal stomped to the floor. He’s a demon, a real on earth manifested demon not some skin suit…we’re so fucked.

Every round I fire does squat.

He swings at me and there’s this flicker of light.

Raine’s there.

Not see through but really there, in a way too big tee-shirt and panties and she gets in between me and the demon.

She swings too screaming like in some fucked up stereo and my watch blows off my wrist and she catches that fist coming at my in her hand. There’s a whump of shockwave force that send me flying like a concussion grenade went off.

Then there’s this scream from the demon as the catch she caught has the chain and the rock still wrapped around it. I hear her say

“No.”

I swear she sounded like Heaven…Like Molly…

She crushed his fist, the gem and the chain as she says that and it’s screaming inhumanly so and she steps back ripping the stone, chain and several fingers off completely from him and her hand flares as she staggers back and she’s chanting something in Creole?

Silvery mote of light and soul energy are rushing from the stone and her hand and swirling around her in a storm.

There’d the war scream of the Nixie, covered in her own blood and I see her land on his back one of my blades in her hand burning herself but ignoring it. She flips off his back as he tries to snatch here off and she lands a balance beam dismount in front of him and takes his head off with a two handed swing.

Raine points the gem to the sky as the demon falls and there’s a beam of light and soul energy that comes off of her five-six feet wide blowing through the roof and into the night sky…she’s gone…?

It’s suddenly so quiet…

Then the people infected that aren’t dead start moaning, freaking out falling, getting sick.

I hear the sound of our back up getting here by car, truck and choppers arriving plus the sound of sirens.

I hear the Nixie drop my blade and stagger away from the demon’s body that’s turning to stone…she staggers towards me, downshifting and staggers and falls, reflexes kick in and I catch her and she drools a little blood on me. She’s digging her fingers in a little tightly and leans on me.

“What…what in the eight realms just happened?…was that a goddess?”

“I don’t know? Honestly I don’t know?”

I look at her and she’s woozy, I can feel her body shaking involuntarily in my arms things just twitching…blinking like she’s concussed. “Hey you going to be okay?”

“Sloan…My name is Sloan…” and she passes out in my arms.

I stare at her and pick her up the rest of the way into my arms. I can’t help it. She trusts me in a way that’s really big….really big…She didn’t say they call me Sloan…she said her name is Sloan. That’s a big thing with the Faerie.

I hold her as people start coming in and some other agents…Dragon and Wyvern both are here…

I wait for them to get to me and I look at Sloan but I can’t get Heaven…Molly out of my head…

My head hurts worse than my body and my heart ten times worse than that. I’m crying by the time the guys are there as things start to hit me…Molly…all those people we had to take down.

I’m only vaguely aware of them getting me to one of the escalades and putting me in the back. Sloan’s in another one with one of our mages keeping the metal from hurting her further.

That’s when there’s the thing that leaves me curling up in the backseat…just faintly turned down but just loud enough that I can hear…The radio in the truck is playing Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.”