Kevin Hearne - Hexed

“You have an interesting assortment of friends,” Mary observed as Coyote’s boots crunched away on the gravel. “A Native Amercian deity, a pack of lycanthropes, a vampire, and a coven of Zorya worshippers.”

“I wouldn’t call them all my friends,” I said. “More like acquaintances. Mrs. MacDonagh and my dog, Oberon, are my friends.”

“Then you have chosen your friends wisely,” Mary said kindly. “My work here is finished. Yours is just beginning, I fear. You will most likely need to pierce Basasael more than once before he is undone.”

“Basasael?”

“That is his name. He was mighty before he fell with Lucifer.”

“Christ,” I whispered without thinking.

“My son is confident of your victory,” Mary said.

“No kidding? Tell Jesus I said hi, and we should have a beer next time he’s in the neighborhood.”

“I will relay your greetings. Now go, child. You have my blessing upon you.”

“Peace be with you,” I said, and as I turned to resume my journey with Coyote, I added under my breath, “and asskicking be with me.”

“I gotta admit, Mr. Druid, I didn’t think we’d be seein’ anythin’ like that. You kinda surprised me. How’d you know that shiny white lady’d be there?”

Coyote was dressed the same way as I had seen him the night before, except now he was wearing dark sunglasses. His expressions tended to run to either amused or inscrutable, and right now he was showing me the latter. Perhaps he mistrusted me. I shrugged my shoulders as I steered the SUV south to U.S. 60. “I just had faith, I guess.”

“Pfffft. You don’ have any more faith’n I do for the Christian folks.”

I felt myself slipping automatically back into the rhythms of Coyote’s speech. “Yeah, but I had faith in a Cath’lick friend o’ mine. She did the prayin’ for me.”

“Well then, why didn’ she just pray for Jesus to come down and smite the demon or somethin’? We coulda slept in.”

“ ’Cause Jesus don’ like to come down very much. People keep thinkin’ of him bein’ nailed to a cross or wearin’ a crown of thorns, or else he’s got huge bloody holes in his hands an’ feet, an’ that’s just gotta be damn uncomfortable. Plus they think he was a white guy with straight brown hair, but he was dark-skinned. Shucks, I bet you know what that’s like, when people think o’ you like one o’ them stylized sandpaintings or a fetish animal. You don’t wanna go prancin’ around lookin’ like that, do ya?”

“Hell, no.” Coyote grinned. “I tried appearin’ as one o’ those sandpaintings once. My body was so stretched out I completely lost track o’ where my ass was.”

We shared a laugh over that as we turned east onto U.S. 60 and the clouds that had been threatening to dump on us all morning finally let loose. Big fat drops splattered noisily on our vehicle, and it reminded me of those drumrolls you hear before a circus acrobat does something remarkably stupid without a net. I had difficulty figuring out how to turn on the windshield wipers, and Coyote sniggered at me until I got them on.

“So how many fallen angels you killed afore this, Mr. Druid?”

“This’ll be my first, I reckon.”

“Shee-it.” Coyote shook his head with a rueful grin. “We’re gonna die.”

I looked sharply at him. “Are you approachin’ this like a suicide trip? You figgerin’ it’s okay to die and leave me there without no one to watch my back, ’cause you can just come back from the dead anyway? I’ll tell ya right now, Coyote, I’m plannin’ on livin’ a long time after this. If you ain’t plannin’ on survivin’, tell me straight and I’ll go get someone else to help me.”

“Aw, cool your britches, Mr. Druid. I ain’t gonna walk on up to ’im and ask ’im to eat me.” Coyote threw up his hands. “All I’m sayin’ is this ain’t gonna be no picnic. A fallen angel’s gonna be a far sight smarter than a reg’lar demon, and more’n a little stronger too.”

“All right, then. You got any idea where the demon is?”

“Last I saw, he was perched on one o’ their buildings overlookin’ a courtyard area. It’s got some grass and trees in it, so you can draw power there.”

“We’re gonna have to go through the school building to get there, though?”

“That’s what I ’spect.”

“We’ll have to go camouflaged. School officials tend to get worried about people bringin’ weapons onto their campuses.”

Skyline High School is a monolithic building of stucco-sprayed cement block trimmed in hunter green. I parked in the no-parking drop-off zone, because I just didn’t care about parking etiquette. I cast camouflage on both myself and Coyote, then got out and opened the cargo area, where I camouflaged both our bows, the quiver of arrows, and Fragarach too. It didn’t make us completely invisible, especially in the rain, but it sure helped. Once inside, we’d blend into the bland institutional décor without trouble. Coyote pitched in by giving us something he called “Clever Stalking,” which really meant we wouldn’t make any noise when we moved. (I’m not sure why he didn’t call it Silent Stalking; I suppose Coyote thought it was clever of him to think stalking should be a silent exercise.)

We glided by the reception desk without disturbing the matronly woman sitting there; she seemed to be emotionally involved with a game of solitaire on her computer. There were two full-time employees working at the attendance window (because taking attendance and getting money from the state is the most important job at public schools), but they were listening to parents lie on the phone about why their children weren’t in school that day, so they weren’t even looking up to see what was dripping all across the industrial carpet in the hallway. The doors to the courtyard gave a high-pitched squeak when we opened them, and the sound of pouring rain caused the attendance clerks to look up, but we slipped out without them spotting us.

Class was in session and the courtyard was deserted. We were underneath a roofed area that traveled around the perimeter, providing shelter for rare rainy days like this but usually offering shade the rest of the year. Thick ropes of runoff water slapped noisily on the concrete before coursing in swift rivulets toward drainage grates.

I turned on my faerie specs and had no trouble figuring out where Basasael was lurking. He was directly across from us, perched on the steel roof, in a Doppler-shifted cloud of wrong. The feathered wings he had eons ago were now leathery and batlike. The rest of him was still humanoid in appearance, just blackened and spiky and pulsing with evil, like a subwoofer vibrating a car’s windows and blurring the view.

What made him particularly repellent at the moment was his open mouth, out of which dangled another teenage victim’s leg—some poor kid who’d been on his way to the nurse’s office, perhaps, or called down to see the counselor. As we watched, the fallen angel’s teeth crunched down and his lower jaw slid sideways in a grotesque chewing motion.

Coyote saw it at the same time I did. “Too late to help that one, I reckon,” he whispered to my right. I couldn’t see him in the normal spectrum, but with my faerie specs on, he looked like a colorful collection of light streams, shifting chaotically within his form but not unpleasantly—just unpredictably. I handed him six arrows out of the quiver.

“I’ll put my first arrow through his head; you go for the heart,” I whispered back. “Then just keep shootin’ until he fuckin’ dies.”