The last outpost of civilization before we headed up into the mountains was quite a ways west of Fort Collins, Colorado, and consisted of a small grocery store proudly named Ericson’s. Marty knew the owner, and that’s where we’d be parking the Suburban before heading out on foot.
As everyone ducked inside the store for last-minute supplies, I snuck around the corner to call home one last time before I lost my cell signal farther up the mountain.
Mira answered on the second ring. “Hello!” There was water running in the background. Doing dishes, maybe? Laundry? I couldn’t help but try to picture what she was wearing today, how she had her hair done. Okay, I’d been gone twelve hours, and I missed her already.
“Hey, baby.” I leaned against the side of the store, gazing at the state of Colorado spread out all hazy clear to the distant horizon. “We’re getting ready to head up the mountain, and I wanted to give you a call before I left my phone here.”
“Well, we’re fine. Esteban’s mowing the yard and Steph took the kids to the movies, so I’m getting some paperwork done for the shop.”
“Oh.” That made me sad, actually. For some reason, I’d really wanted to hear my daughter’s voice. “Well, tell Anna I love her, okay? When she gets back.”
“I’ll do that.” She paused a moment, and I could picture her chewing her bottom lip thoughtfully, her green eyes dark. “Jess, are you okay? You sound a bit off.”
“Yeah… same shit, different day.” She knew what I was talking about. Lately, we’d been having rather… energetic discussions about my life outlook. “I fell asleep in the truck on the way out, and the dreams came.”
I heard her wince on the other end of the line. “Screaming?”
“No, thankfully. But didn’t make for a happy road trip.” I rested my head against the side of the building for a moment. “I’m trying, baby. I really am.”
“I know. And it’s okay. You’ll have fun and maybe you’ll be feeling more like yourself at the end of the week.”
“I hope so.” At this point, I was starting to wonder about seeing a shrink, and for me, that’s saying something. “Listen, if you need anything, call Ivan. Or Avery. The numbers are in my notebook.”
Avery Vincent, the champion out of San Francisco, could be on a plane and in Kansas City before anyone could find me in the wilds of Colorado. At least, that’s what I told myself.
“I know, Jess. We went over this like fifty times. We’ll be fine. You guys just watch what you’re doing, and don’t fall off a cliff or anything, okay?”
There was a squawk of indignation around front, and I peered around the building in time to see Duke tangle his leash around Will’s legs and send him sprawling off the wooden porch. Once downed, the big dog proceeded to try to drown his victim in wet slobbery kisses, despite Will’s vain attempts to shove the mammoth mutt off. “Maybe you should do some of that voodoo you do so well? I think we’re gonna need it.”
She chuckled. “Will’s hurt already, isn’t he?”
“Not yet, but he’s working on it.”
“I’ll put some protection spells on you all. Except Cam. I haven’t had time to ask his permission.”
“Then we’ll be extra careful with him.” I had to wonder, if Cam already had his own protection spells in place, would he notice the addition of Mira’s? There are times when I kick myself for not studying up on this magic thing more.
It did make me feel better to know we’d have my wife’s protection spells laid over us. Like a security blanket. One of those big fluffy ones with the satin binding around the edge. What? I have a five-year-old daughter. Daddies know about these things.
I said my good-byes and I-love-yous and tried to sound upbeat and cheerful. Mira wasn’t fooled, but I was hoping she’d appreciate my efforts.
In the store, Cameron and an upright-again Will were poking through bags of dried fruit and trail mix, and I headed straight for the rather large selection of Ericson’s homemade jerky, shouldering Cole aside in an attempt at playfulness.
“You got room in your pack for this?” Cole tossed me a package of jalapeno buffalo jerky. “Mine’s stuffed full already.”
“Yeah, I can probably manage.” I grabbed a pack of teriyaki for myself.
We took very few edible supplies up the mountain with us. Paintball gear plus sufficient ammunition wasn’t light, and we’d be walking several miles up rough terrain. Marty’s uncle was always good enough to stock the place for our arrival every year, so we could get away without packing staples. However, we would always make room for Ericson’s jerky. It was practically a food group in and of itself.
Marty was trying to struggle into his backpack and hold on to Duke at the same time when Cole and I came back out. My brother grabbed the dog, and I helped out with the luggage. “The clerk says the Quinns were by yesterday real early. Bet you money Zane’s waiting to ambush us on the trail.”
The Quinns were old family friends of Marty’s, and they looked after the cabin in the off season. Every year, they joined us up there to roughhouse and play paintball. We’d watched the only child in the family grow up.
“That means you get to go first.” Will pointed at Marty.
“Wuss.”
The rest of us hauled our backpacks out of the truck, struggling into the heavy monstrosities while Duke did his best to knock us all on our backs. As Will had proven, if the dog ever got us down, we’d be just like turtles, stuck there for the duration of whatever mockery would be sure to follow.
Cole was pawing through his things, looking for a place to stuff the extra pack of jerky he just had to have, and I spotted his holstered gun in there. And I don’t mean his paintball marker, I mean his real I’m-a-cop-and-I’ll-shoot-your-ass gun. “Um… little brother? You really think you’re going to need that?”
He glanced up, first at me, then pointedly at the hilt of the katana sticking up over my shoulder. Yeah, okay. Pot, kettle, all that. “Mine’s for exercise.”
“So’s mine. I want to do some target shooting while we’re up there.”
I left it at that. It wasn’t worth arguing over, and honestly I don’t know what to say to Cole ninety percent of the time anymore. Another goal for the camping trip: figure out how to talk to my once demon-sworn little brother. I was coming too close to dying too often to let things go unsettled between us.
“Guys, check this out!” At first, I wasn’t sure what Marty had in his hand, but I was pretty sure you could buy it only at a shop where you had to be eighteen to even walk in the door. It had rubber hoses and metal brackets and a flat leather pocket all attached by metal grommets.
Marty strapped the doohickey to his forearm, and I finally recognized it as a slingshot. A very powerful, lethal-looking slingshot. To demonstrate, Marty drew back on the leather pocket (it had a finger loop, how convenient) and let it go with a snap that echoed. “They say you can hunt anything up to the size of a coyote with this. I wanna do some target practice with it too.”
These are my friends. Give us a weapon of individual destruction, and we’re like kids at Christmas.
“Aren’t those illegal?” Cole raised a brow at Marty, who just grinned. My brother groaned and turned away. “I can’t know this.”
I elbowed him a little when the rest of the idiots weren’t looking. “Hey, you’re not a cop just now. Relax, remember?” He just rolled his eyes at me.
I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to haul all the paintball gear up a mountain once a year, but there are times when I think they need a kick in the shin. It’s not the markers that are so heavy, really, as it is the air tanks and the actual paintballs. Granted, we’d probably be out of air and paint both within the first couple of days, so the trip down would be a lot lighter.
We didn’t really go hiking so much as prepare for all-out war. Girding our loins, or something. Air tanks were affixed to guns, hoppers were filled with paint, masks were adjusted to fit properly.
We were a scary-looking lot. The paintball masks covered our entire faces, giving us a kind of anonymous storm trooper menace. (Except mine, which sported a smile made of silver spikes.) Even in borrowed equipment, Cam managed to look like he knew what he was doing, and once everyone was packed and loaded, Marty tossed the Suburban keys to the store clerk. We did a quick round of paper-rock-scissors to see just who got the honor of heading out first. Cole waved as he left the parking lot, disappearing almost instantly in the thick foliage. With his uncanny direction sense, he could be counted on not to get lost, and he’d break a trail for the rest of us on the grassy path.
Lucky me, I got to go last.
The way the plan worked was thusly: We would head out at ten-minute intervals, up a well-mown grass path through the woods. You could hide beside the trail and wait to ambush folks, you could jog to try to catch up with those in front of you. If you got shot, you had to wait where you were for another ten minutes before moving on again. Sure, it made the trek to the cabin drag out forever, but we always had a great time.
While we waited, I tossed my cell into Marty’s glove compartment along with everyone else’s. There’d be no signal at the cabin, and if I lost and/or broke one more phone, Mira was going to kill me.
“Just stay in view of the trail. It leads right up to the cabin. You can’t miss it,” Marty assured Cameron, who was the second to depart. “And I’m coming right behind you, so once I’m done lighting you up, you can follow me.” He grinned and thumped Cam on the shoulder, sending him off.
One by one, the guys (and Duke) headed out, and when my time came, I shouldered my pack and sword, and flicked the safety off my paintball marker. Last year, Cole had stayed just inside the trees and shot me in the face the moment I left the parking lot. I’d be ready this time.
No one jumped out at me when I stepped off the asphalt, and I took this as a good sign. Maybe I’d get a chance to admire the scenery for a few minutes before I was blinded by unnaturally colored blobs of paint.
This was damn beautiful country. The trees towered over me, branches blocking out the slowly darkening sky as the day drifted toward early evening. About a million different kinds of birds chirped and called all around me, and in the underbrush, small furry things scampered and rustled, fleeing before the terror that was me, I’m sure.
I loved this place.
I also established within the first few minutes that my injured leg seemed to be functioning as intended. I even broke into a light jog, determined to overtake Will, who should have been about ten minutes in front of me. No way he’d be running; I could catch him.
I paused often to listen for any movement up ahead, but it was hard to hear with my own breath whooshing in my ears. I kinda felt like Darth Vader, all wheezy in my mask.
Once, though, I stopped at just the right moment to hear the soft thud of a paintball marker up ahead of me. Hunkering down, I let my eyes relax until the forest blurred into fuzzy shapes that made no sense whatsoever. Only then could I see the motion that didn’t belong, the sign of something foreign moving through the trees. Quietly, with the stealth of a ninja (no really, a ninja!), I started tracking.
It took me about ten minutes to work my way up behind my prey without alerting him. The curly ponytail said it was Will, and I grinned as I took aim.
Thup-thup-thup, a perfect bright green line right up the middle of his back. “Ack!” He whirled, trying to find the source of his attack, and flipped me the bird when I waved from my concealment.
I made my way to his side. “I heard you tag someone, who’d you get?”
“Either Cole or Cameron. Short-haired and tall, couldn’t tell the difference.”
We nodded and parted ways, Will parking where he was with his marker over his head. He was out for ten minutes, but whoever he’d tagged earlier should just be moving again. I ducked into the brush, grinning inside my mask.
Somewhere up ahead of me was my little brother-or Cameron, which was just as good-and I was on the hunt.
Twice more, I heard the distant sounds of brief paint-splattery battle, but it was a good half hour before I found anyone again.
Coming around a large oak, I spotted Duke standing in the middle of the trail, looking rather bewildered. There was no sign of Marty anywhere, and the big dog stood as if frozen.
A cold chill slid down my back, and I scanned the underbrush for signs of my friend. Had something happened? Was he hurt? I strained my ears for any sound of movement, but even the wildlife had fallen silent, no doubt spooked by my own clumsy passage through the brush.
Risking giving away my position, I called out in a hoarse whisper, “Marty?” Just as I debated on abandoning the paintball gun for my sword, I took four hits to the chest and one directly to the mask. Blue paint smeared my vision and splattered through the grille enough that I could taste it. (Let me assure you, the paint may smell like hot chocolate, but it tastes like crap.)
Wiping the paint off my mask, I finally spotted Marty in his camouflage gear, lying right under his own dog to fire off a few shots. No wonder the poor animal looked confused.
“No fair using the dog as a shield, man!” By the way his shoulders were shaking, he was laughing his ass off. That’s how he wanted to play it, hmm? “Duke! Sit!”
Obediently, the two-hundred-pound mutt sat, right in the middle of Marty’s back.
“Jesse, you rat bastard!”
“You’re welcome!” I gave him a jaunty wave and found a nice fallen tree to sit on and wait out my time-out. He wrestled his way out from under his dog, and the pair of them disappeared up the path.
Of course, yelling out like that put Marty and me on everyone’s hit list. Cole got me from behind not twenty yards up the mountain. I managed to tag Will and Cam both before they saw me, and somewhere along the way, Marty closed the distance and lit me up again. It got so I was spending more time sitting than walking.
I was taking advantage of my enforced rest stop to answer nature’s call when I heard a soft “Hsst!” behind me. Thinking one of the guys was about to ambush me, ten-minute rule or not, I pretended not to hear it, taking the time to zip up my jeans. No way I was gonna let them surprise me like that.
I bent down, pretending to tie my boot, but really, I was reaching for my own marker. Maybe I could get a shot off first.
“Hsst!” There was a bit more insistence in the noise this time, and when I refused to respond, it was followed with a hissed, “Over here!”
That… didn’t sound like the guys. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it sounded like me. Oh hell. I yanked up my mask and perched it on the top of my head to get a clear view. “Axel?”
“In the flesh.” There was a skittering sound and I looked up in time to see a fat gray squirrel disappear around the trunk of a tree and reappear on the other side, bushy tail twitching spastically. The furry beastie gave me a red-eyed grin. “Who did you expect? It’s too early for Santa.”
The animal was a dark charcoal gray, almost black, and it had to outweigh my squirrels back home by a good chunk. Its ears were adorned with enormous tufts of hair. Looked like my great-uncle Walt.
“In someone else’s flesh, you mean. Nice ears.”
“Yes, they are rather nice, aren’t-” He preened with one front paw until he realized what he was doing; then he looked at his offending foot in horror. “Oh hell no. Wait there.” With a flick of his brushy tail, he disappeared around the tree again.
“Slipping into something less furry?”
“You could say that.” The face that appeared around the tree a few moments later was all too human looking, Axel taking his usual pierced, Mohawked guise.
How he did that, I will never know. I mean, most demons, they can hide their true form, make an illusion over it that looks human. Even the weaker ones, the Snots and Scuttles can manage that much. Guess it helps them relate to their victims. Touch them, though, and your hand will go right through it, like a hologram.
The true forms, the actual demon bodies, are constructed of solidified blight. That’s how we’re able to banish them, cutting away bits and pieces until they lose concentration and the ability to hold themselves together. Demons come in a lot of different forms: the Snots, barely more than brainless oozes; the Scuttles, often insectoid and a bit more intelligent; the Skins, usually some kind of fur-bearing animal, strong and cunning; and the Shirts, the ones who have evolved enough to look vaguely human. I’d fought them all, at one time or another. I thought I had a pretty good handle on what to expect.
But Axel… If he was a Shirt, he was the most human-looking one I’d ever seen, and his constructed body was rock solid. Which meant that he was either way more powerful than any demon I’d ever seen or… or I don’t know what. Yet another of those mysteries I was unlikely to solve anytime soon.
The squirrel, now unpossessed-dispossessed?-shot out of the underbrush like a gray rocket and up the nearest tree, chattering its displeasure.
“What are you doing here?” I stood up, glancing around warily. The last thing I needed was one of the guys catching the demon here. I’d never be able to explain that away.
“Looking for you.” Axel rubbed at one of his ears, then frowned at his hand. “Damn rodents.”
“I’m not that hard to find.”
The squirrel was still scolding him from the branches above, and Axel shot a red-eyed glare. “Watch it, or I’ll eat your entrails.” His answer was a walnut launched at his head with surprising accuracy. I liked the squirrel already. Axel bared his teeth at his former host, then turned his attention back to me. “I’d have caught up sooner, but that damn mutt was too close.”
Okay, supreme beings, bless Duke in all his furry glory. I was so getting that dog a huge rawhide bone when we got home. “Stalker much?”
“Oh that’s nothing. I almost mistook your brother for you, until I heard him speak. That could have been… awkward.”
I went from being creeped out to pissed off in zero seconds flat. “You stay away from him. He’s off limits and you know it.”
Axel held up one hand to forestall my incoming rant. “Now, now, no need to get feisty. I didn’t come here for that.” Another walnut pelted him in the head, and he snarled at the branches above. “You’re a furry hors d’oeuvre, I swear…”
I snapped my fingers to get his attention. “Focus, Axel. Why did you come here?” The more I looked at him, the more I thought there was something… off. Something in his usual smile, some tightness around his mouth, or his eyes. The way he sagged against the tree, almost like he actually needed it to keep himself upright. “Are you okay?” Part of me wondered why I even cared.
He ignored my question but seemed to take it as a challenge, pushing off the tree to stand on his own. It didn’t escape me that he wrapped one arm tightly around his ribs, holding himself in pain. “I came to give you a message.”
I saw how he stayed close to the tree trunk, dodging as much of the fading sunlight as he could. Now, I’m pretty sure the light doesn’t physically harm them, but man, demons don’t like it. The forest canopy provided just enough shade where he was standing to throw his face into darkness.
“Step into the light.” Unlike most demons I’d dealt with, Axel had never made special efforts to avoid the sun. Something was wrong. Well, more wrong than usual.
“I’ll stay here, thanks.”
“What’s up, Axel?”
“Let’s just say I’m not at my best today, hmm? Now shut up and let me give my message.” His eyes flashed red and stayed that way. I was pissing him off.
“From who?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He moved one step closer, and as his face passed out of the tree’s shadow, I could see it clearly for the first time. His lower lip was split and swollen, and the right half of his face was a lovely shade of eggplant purple. Axel had obviously had a very bad day.
“What the hell happened to you?” More importantly, how the hell had it happened? I’d never seen a demon with visible injuries. At least ones I didn’t cause myself. Damn, how much damage did it take to bruise blight?
He managed a pained grin, running his tongue over his teeth. “A fairly accurate description, actually. You ever see those videos of family Thanksgiving dinners that turn into all-out brawls? Think of it like that.”
“You had a family food fight?”
He chuckled. I will never get used to hearing my laugh come out of a demon’s mouth, and the muscles in my back twitched as I tried not to shudder. “I guess you could call it food. If it’s any comfort to you, I came out on the winning side.”
“I’d hate to see the other guy.”
“Oh yes. You would.” The smile faded quickly. “You need to get off the mountain.”
Normally, I would laugh in the face of any order Axel gave me, but there was something in his eyes, something in his borrowed voice. It sent another wave of chills down my back. “You’re the one that told me to come up here.”
That earned me a frown. “You ever hear of reverse psychology?”
“Yeah, and you suck at it.” I finally closed the distance between us, just so I could lower my voice. Who knew where the guys were? “Did you flatten Marty’s tires?”
His mouth twisted as he contemplated the answer. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
“And turn Will’s alarm clock off?”
“Hey, that was just him being a moron. I had nothing to do with that.”
I could feel the beginnings of a headache, somewhere behind my eyes. “Any particular reason why?”
“You’ll find out. But get somewhere public. Somewhere you can put your back against something solid.”
“That sounds like a threat, Axel.”
He shook his head. “Not from me. I’ll swear it if you like. Just. .. do as I ask, this one time.”
Everything in me screamed no. You don’t do what a demon asks, period, the end. Even if (especially if) they phrase it to be for your own good. I eyed him warily, as if I could drag secrets from him with the power of my charismatic gaze. Or some shit. “What’s in it for you? You don’t give out information for free.”
The demon’s eyes flared red again in the dappled shadows, and he spat a curse in a language I didn’t understand. Even so, the single word made my vision swim and the trees around me tilt at bizarre angles for the space of two breaths. Demonic speech is not meant for human ears. The cussing that followed in English was easier to follow.
“Damn you for your stubbornness, Jesse Dawson. You are the most infuriating creature on this planet.”
“You been talking to my wife?” When in doubt, resort to being a smart-ass.
Axel was not amused. His gaze swept the forest around us, and he finally pointed at my feet. “There. Pick that up.”
“That” proved to be a small branch, probably fallen off one of the trees overhead. Small, nondescript, definitely not something that could be used as a weapon. I bent to retrieve it, carefully keeping my eyes on him.
He held his hand out to me as I straightened up. “Hand it to me.” Cautiously, I extended the stick out to him, and he snatched it out of my hand. “There, now you’ve given me something. We’re even.”
At the risk of sounding mushy… where was the Axel I had come to know and hate? He would never have let a potential deal go without at least trying to bargain for something bigger, and his insistence on it had almost cost me my life last spring. “Axel, what’s going on? You’re not usually this… accommodating.”
“Don’t worry, Jesse. I still want your soul. But for right now, I need to keep it attached to your body until I can come collect.”
“So you’re saying I’m in danger. From what?” He stepped away from me, started to retreat into the trees. “Dammit, Axel, you can’t just drop this on me and bail!”
“I can’t say more. My hands are tied. If I could-” Whatever he was going to say next was lost as he suddenly stumbled.
I admit, it’s instinct. Someone falls, you catch them. I jumped forward, caught his arms and eased him down as he sagged toward the ground. A bout of wracking coughs shook his wiry frame, ending all conversation for a few long minutes. Eventually, he turned his head and spat something dark and sticky off to the side, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Are you okay?” I asked again. It felt strange, asking him that. Why should I care if the demon was hurt? Damn, could he even be hurt? They could be banished, yes, evicted from whatever physical form they’d taken. But actually injured? That opened up a whole new realm of “evil things Jesse can do to demons” if it was true. I made a mental note to roll this over in my brain later. There had to be something here I could use.
He took a few deep breaths, testing, before he nodded. “Yeah. Just a bit more banged up than I realized.” He raised a brow, glancing at my hands still on his arms. “Are you gonna kiss me, or let go?”
“Fuck off.” I released him immediately, but I had to stare at my hands, rubbing my fingertips together. There was nothing there. No tingle of magic, no scent of cloves, no electric spark. Under normal circumstances, I should never have been able to touch the demon, not with my wife’s spells of protection laid on me. But they protected me only from someone who meant me harm…
“Get off the mountain, Jesse. That’s all I ask.” The voice, my stolen voice, was distant suddenly, and I looked up in time to see Axel fade from view before my eyes. There was a faint scent of sulfur and ozone, and he was gone. His last words were whispered from thin air. “They’re coming.”
Well… fuck. That was as deep and meaningful as I could manage. Who was coming? When? Where? I cussed Axel up one side and down the other as I stood and debated my options. This was all pertinent information I could have used, dammit!
A nut bounced off my paintball mask with a loud clack. Glancing up, I saw my irate rodent friend still watching me. “Yeah, I know. I know. And you better git too, before he does come back and eat you.”
The animal gave me a firm chitter and vanished in a swoosh of fuzzy tail.
I couldn’t just “get off the mountain.” My friends were out there in the woods, and they’d freak if I didn’t show up at the cabin in pretty short order. Not to mention that the Quinns were already up there, and if something bad was coming for me, I couldn’t just leave them.
“Okay, first things first. One, stop talking to myself. Two, gather up the guys.” I’d figure out what to tell them when we were all in one spot. “Hey guys, I got a message that we need to go.” “From where?” “Um… little bird told me?”
I mean, here I was with an enigmatic warning from a creature I couldn’t trust any farther than I could throw him. Except… the spells hadn’t tripped. I should have zapped the hell out of him when we touched, pun intended, but nothing happened. What did that mean?
I quickly dismantled my marker and stowed it in my pack, suddenly preferring to leave my hands free for my sword if need be. I found my way back to the trail through a few yards of intervening scrub brush, then set out at a determined jog. I had to find my friends, and fast.