Kevin Hearne - Hexed

Coyote provided an answer in singular fashion. I heard a sickening, juicy squelching noise, and Basasael forgot all about charging me. He stood straight up on his clawed toes, feet together like a wooden nutcracker doll, his black eyes bulging and his throat ululating in a bean sidhe howl of agony that made me clutch my ears—or, rather, my one good ear and my one mess of pathetic cartilage niblets.

Coyote shouted “Ha!” once and then began to yip in amusement, scampering across the courtyard in his animal shape, taunting the fallen angel, and Basasael launched himself skyward to give chase.

While he was thus diverted, I took the opportunity to sheathe Fragarach and grab the school administrator by the collar, dragging her back to the office doors. She yelped in startlement, and I shouted at her as I tossed her inside, “Put the school in lockdown now! Just do it before someone else gets killed!” Every school in America had a lockdown procedure they followed to keep students safe in an emergency.

“What? Who got killed?”

“Take attendance and you’ll find out. It’s what you’re best at, because the gods know it’s not teaching them English. Damn kids don’t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb!” I needed to shut up. Stress was making me take my frustrations out on this poor frumpy lady who probably never got laid.

“Who are …? Why can’t I see you?”

“Lockdown! Attendance! Stay inside!” I slammed the door shut for extra emphasis and hoped that would galvanize her to the proper course of action. Turning back to the courtyard, I saw that Basasael was trying to fry Coyote from the air with his great balls o’ fire. Coyote was thus far a mite too fast for him, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last or if Coyote would be able to withstand a direct hit of hellfire.

I scurried over to where I’d dropped my bow in the courtyard. It was still camouflaged, so I couldn’t see it, and it took me a few frantic moments to stumble into it. The act of bending over to pick it up exacerbated the wounds in my side, and, duly reminded of them, I drew power to close them up and begin the tissue-mending process.

Two arrows left. Coyote had presumably dropped the remainder of his somewhere. I nocked one and tried not to laugh at the image of Basasael flying around with a feathery shaft sticking out between his cheeks. I chose my own target carefully, and the bowstring thwocked as the arrow sailed up and through the fallen angel’s right wing. It tore a magnificent white hole through it and began to widen, which caused Basasael to screech and tumble ignominiously to the earth—precisely where I wanted him.

“Dóigh!” I shouted, pointing my right index finger at him and drawing strength from the earth as I cast Cold Fire. I immediately felt weaker, as if I were suffering from low blood sugar; my muscles were like leaden weights and sluggish to obey my commands. It wasn’t as bad as the first time I’d cast it, when I completely collapsed from the effort, but it was a fact that I wouldn’t be pulling that bowstring again today. I’d have to lie down and spend some time recuperating.

The school’s loudspeaker crackled to life, and a stern voice of authority boomed metallically off the courtyard walls. “Teachers, please go into lockdown at this time. Once again, teachers, please go into lockdown immediately.”

Apparently the repeated unholy shrieks from Basasael and random jets of flame in the courtyard had convinced the administration something was amiss, and this, on top of the commands delivered from a mysterious disembodied voice who seemed dissatisfied with the school’s English instruction, compelled them to act.

Basasael began to rise slowly from the ground, the arrows clearly (and finally) bothering him now. As yet he betrayed no sign that the Cold Fire was working on him, but I had hope it would take effect in short order.

Coyote, returned to human form, had dashed back to where his bow and arrows were and called to me, “What’d ya do to him, Mr. Druid?”

“I’m not sure if I did anything,” I called back. “You might wanna shoot him a couple more times.”

“Oh yeah, that brilliant strategy ya learned from Attila the Hun. Almost forgot.”

As Coyote nocked an arrow and began to pull the bowstring, Basasael was ripping the arrows from his hand and his belly and making horrible noises in the process. He was gingerly trying to deal with the final arrow (Mercutio’s phrase about the “blind bow-boy’s butt shaft” took on new meaning in this situation) when Coyote’s shot took him straight in the throat, choking off all further screams. It allowed us to hear the sound of approaching police sirens.

“Yeah!” Coyote whooped and pumped his fist. “Sit down and have a tall glass of shut-the-hell-up!”

I was quickly turning loopy because, as the fallen angel was nonverbally communicating his distress with an impressive array of spastic twitches and concomitant white ejecta from his wounds, I was thinking, It’s too bad we’ll never get a chance to talk over a cup of tea. Besides the Morrigan, I rarely had conversations with beings older than I was, and I treasured them whenever they happened along.

My doubts about whether Cold Fire would work on a fallen angel were soon allayed: The bubbling mess inside Basasael’s wounds began to spread all over his body, so that his legs and arms were roiling like maggots running rampant under a corpse’s skin. The next second, he tried to curl inward on himself in a mockery of the fetal position, and then he exploded in a slimy mass of purulence and gore. His tarlike substance polluted the courtyard, covering grass, trees, steel, and cement alike with the remains of the partially digested teenager splattered liberally amongst the mess. The falling rain was a benediction now, for the earth had been cleansed of an ancient evil, but it would never be able to wash this away before school got out, much less before the cops got here.

“That’s right , son!” Coyote shouted at the remains. “You don’ come into my house an’ ’spect to live!”

“By Balor’s evil eye, what are we going to do about all this goo?” I said.

“What’s this ‘we’ you talkin’ about, Mr. Druid? Ain’t my demon, an’ it ain’t my mess.”

“Yeah, I know. But I can’t get any ghouls out here now to clean it up. People are gonna have to deal with it and rationalize it away somehow. They can call the Ghostbusters to take a sample o’ the ectoplasmic discharge or whatever. Or they’ll have to bring in Mulder an’ Scully, because there ain’t no CSI on the planet that’ll ever be able to explain this.”

“I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about, Mr. Druid.”

I didn’t care to explain. I just pointed at the carnage and said, “This right here will be the birthplace of a thousand conspiracy theories about aliens an’ most likely a sign of the comin’ apocalypse. You watch, it’ll be in the Weekly World News. ”

Coyote shrugged. “Hey, I don’ care. It’ll be a damn funny story whatever they come up with.”

“We should get the arrows,” I said. “Better not leave them lyin’ around.”

“Yeah, good idea,” Coyote replied. I put my sandals back on before venturing out to wade amongst the hellish mess, then joined Coyote in tracking down the arrows. Police officers began to stream into the courtyard, but we kept our mouths shut, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to hear us or see us, except as a flicker of movement they’d dismiss as a trick of the rain.