The Demon Abraxas (7 page)

Hell, even as a kid, she fought. In the trickle-down economics of their family, their father’s frustration and rage was passed on to her oldest brother Mack, who doled it out to her and Gunnar with all the brutal simplicity of a child. He hit them when he felt like it, choked them and laughed at their panic, and most often simply threatened and then mocked them. It was such a natural part of their lives, Ana used to think all families were like that and then she hit puberty. Mack stopped hitting and wrestling her and his attentions took a crueler turn, until the day she went after him with a knife. He never touched her again, but much about that day and all the days before it left her feeling like a monster.

The familiar heat of rage simmered under her breastbone and she wanted to strike out. She put her hands under the water and forced them open. She’d given all the details she could to the police. She had Drake’s name and she’d seen the faces of two of the men and had listened carefully to all of them. Although she couldn’t identify most of them, or where they’d taken her, she would use every resource at her disposal from the police to the media to the Internet, and she wouldn’t stop until these men were found and arrested. This time the right people would get hurt.

When the warm water had eased some of the soreness in her muscles, Ana picked up the soap and washed as well as she could without hurting herself more. Then there came the problem of getting out of the tub. She opened the drain and let the gray water out. That made it easier to turn sideways and put both feet over the side of the tub. She levered herself up until she was sitting on the edge of the tub and then snagged a towel.

She wanted pajamas but she was so tired she didn’t care enough to get them. She stood up and grabbed Ruben’s huge, white fluffy bathrobe and pulled it on. Then she limped into the hall and paused at the top of the stairs.

“I’m going to bed,” she yelled down.

“Good.” Sabel’s voice rose from the direction of the living room.

“Thanks for bringing me home.”

Sabel came into view at the foot of the stairs. “You shouldn’t be standing,” she said. “I’m going to stay for a bit.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Doctor’s orders. I’ll just stay until Ruben gets back. You’re not supposed to be alone.”

Sabel walked back toward the living room. Ana didn’t have the strength to argue. She took the few steps into her bedroom and collapsed across the bed.

In the darkness behind her eyelids images flashed like a slideshow: Drake’s cruelly beautiful face, the hooded men, the circle, her dream in the darkness of the falling sun, blazing serpents, running, and the feeling that something outside of her conscious mind moved her arms and legs.

She rolled onto her back and sat upright because she smelled hot sunlight. Was she dreaming now? Could she dream just a smell? Her fingers edged their way around the band of her skull as if she could pry it open and feel inside. The right side was too tender to put any pressure on.

What had really happened to her? Whenever she’d been hit in the past, she hadn’t seen visions or blacked out for long periods of time during which, apparently, she’d acted without the benefit of being conscious. And she’d been hit enough that if this was going to happen, it should have happened before. Was there some kind of lasting damage from the abuse that just now showed itself? She put her hands over her ears, wishing her freaked-out brain would just shut up for a while. She felt hands covering hers, larger and warmer, but when her eyes snapped open no one was in the room.

“Who’s there?” she whispered.

No one should be able to answer that, but the liquid voice from the man in her dream rolled through her mind. The words came with perfect clarity from the back of her skull into the gray space between her ears like any other thought she’d ever had, except for the pure alien quality, a tone utterly unlike any she’d used with herself, and a language she never knew.

She screamed with surprise and then she couldn’t stop. Deep screams came up from her gut, rough and tearing in her throat. “You fuck! You son of a bitch! No!”

She made a fist and hit the side of her head by the temple. Pain wracked her already sore skull. It triggered her body’s alarm that she’d damage herself even worse and that cut through her panic. She hit herself again, harder, and meant to again, but someone had her wrist and was forcing her hands down from her face.

Sabel knelt on the bed, her knees on either side of Ana’s legs, her hands on Ana’s wrists. Ana didn’t want to fight her, but her body reacted to being trapped with rage and renewed panic. Her right hand got loose and grabbed a fistful of Sabel’s jacket, trying to drag her off while her legs kicked.

“No, don’t…don’t!” Ana heard herself panting. She was trying to convey that Sabel needed to get off her and not try to hold her down. Constraint always made her fight, and in her already overloaded body it was so much worse, but she couldn’t make the words.

“It’s okay,” Sabel said as a counterpoint. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

How could she be safe if the threat was inside her own head? Her body fought reflexively, spurred by the panic of being restrained. She wrenched at Sabel’s jacket again making her lose her balance and slide to the right. The pressure of Sabel’s weight came off her legs and she kicked up with her shin and knee. The force of Ana’s kick shoved Sabel to the edge of the bed and momentum carried her over the side. Ana heard the breath rush out of her as she hit the floor between bed and wall.

Ana crawled to the edge of the bed, her right hand in a fist, not sure what to hit next. Sabel stared up at her from the floor and her blue-gray eyes shimmered with a golden fire around the pupils. Her lips parted as she took a long breath in through her open mouth. The voice that came out of her held a deep resonance, as if each sound was a struck bell.

“
Sit down. You will not hit
.”

Ana’s body obeyed and sat her back on the bed. Her fist fell open and she stared at it. The rage was still there and it swelled in her arm, trying to close her fist again. She watched her hand slowly curl inward. How the hell did Sabel do that? Why couldn’t she just ball up her fist like normal?

Sabel pushed up from the floor. Her slender fingers touched Ana’s closing fist and gently opened it. For a moment she held Ana’s right hand in both of hers and pressed the muscles with her thumbs until they relaxed. Then she pulled back the corner of the blanket.

“
Get into bed
,” she said in the resonant voice.

Ana did.

“
This is a dream
,” Sabel told her. “
You will remember feeling safe. You will not wake fully until you are rested. Sleep.
”

* * *

Sabel stood over the bed watching Ana slip from light sleep into deep sleep almost instantly; she needed the rest badly. Sabel hated having to use the Voice on an ally—and especially with the power and intention she just put into it so that her command would last for hours. Usually she gave short, light commands that held for a few minutes.

One of the first lessons she learned when the Hecatines began training her as one with the gift, or curse, of the
maarevas
, “the dangerous voice,” was that if you commanded a person too often, you began to destroy their mind. Command a friend and you started to destroy their trust in you as well. It could become impossible to relax around someone whom you knew could make you do whatever she wanted.

She rubbed her hip where she’d hit the floor. So far so good, she’d managed to terrify Ana at least once and get herself bodily thrown out of the woman’s bed—could she count this as the worst first date ever?

She shook her head, trying not to think that way. She wanted to touch Ana but she stepped back from the bed to put more distance between herself and that temptation. This was not the time. Very few people could fight against the Voice, and she replayed the moment in her mind when Ana struggled against her command to make a fist. Did she have that much anger in her or was there another power alongside the anger?

What had set her off in the first place? Was it a memory of something in the past or had the summoners magicked her? Just because Sabel couldn’t smell it on her now didn’t mean there was no magic working in her. It had to extend a little outside of her body to become something others could perceive, because the human body itself was one of the most effective tools to hide magic. Sabel really needed help on this one, but she dreaded the restrictions that came with that help.

She paced out of the room and down the stairs. It was possible to contact Josefene from here if she could manage enough focus to concentrate. It was what she should do. The problem was that she wasn’t just remembering Ana trying to close her hand into a fist or Ana fighting off two men in an A-line dress and torn stockings; she had a very clear image of Ana leaning over the side of the bed to see where she’d thrown Sabel, heedless of the fact that her robe was open. She’d seen just enough to have a very clear idea of how divine Ana’s breasts would feel in her palms. She shook her head. There were ill-intentioned men and demons afoot and all she could think about was sex—some witch she was.

Sabel went to the kitchen and hunted through the cupboards until she found mugs and tea. They only had two kinds of tea, but one was a calming blend so she filled a mug with water, nuked it and dropped in a tea bag. She started sipping it as soon as it was cool enough to drink.

She liked this kitchen with its cutout window to the dining room where people could sit and talk to the cook. It was a galley kitchen, the same as most of these narrow houses, but well-organized and pretty. Did Ana cook? She took her mug of tea into the living room and set it on an end table. In the mirror over the fireplace she caught a glimpse of herself in the bloodstained Armani suit.

Was it some combination of blood and magic that made her react so strongly to Ana right now? The jacket’s button was gone, a consequence of being thrown out of bed, so she shrugged out of it easily, folded it and set it across the couch’s arm. There was blood on the shell under the jacket too. She sighed and headed back up the stairs. Was it worse to borrow clothes from Ana or Ruben? He was almost a half foot taller than Sabel, so Ana it was.

With Ana sleeping soundly, she took time to look around the simple bedroom. The bed sat on a plain wooden frame and the worn, broad bedside table looked like it had been passed from person to person for the last twenty years. The dresser was another mismatched hand-me-down. Did Ana not care what her bedroom décor looked like or were these pieces from past relationships or past homes that she did care about? Sabel ran a finger along the edge of the dresser. The wood was thick and heavy, warm in color and scuffed with use. Next to the dresser the open closet showed all of Ana’s work clothes hanging in no particular order above a half-full laundry basket.

Sabel opened the middle drawer of the dresser to find two neat stacks of T-shirts with a couple of extras tossed to one side. She picked up one of the extras. It was charcoal gray and so well worn that the collar had frayed all the way around.

She knelt and opened the bottom drawer. Sweatpants and pajama bottoms. She pulled out the top pair of sweatpants but they had elastic at the ankles so she folded them and put them back. Again there was a clothing item crumpled to one side of the folded stacks—soft black pants by the look of them. Sabel lifted them out and held them up. Perfect.

When she looked down again to shut the drawer, something else caught her eye and brought a rush of blood high into her cheeks and a ripple of heat down her body.

“Oh,” the word breathed out without conscious intent.

She touched the worn leather with a cautious fingertip. This was not the time to imagine Ana wearing
that
…but the picture formed in her mind anyway. It would fit her well and the other part of the ensemble, yes that would be perfect. It made her ache from the base of her spine to the roots of her teeth. There was no magic at play here, blood-based or otherwise: she just wanted Ana.

She shoved the drawer closed and hurried out of the bedroom. On the first floor there was a tiny bathroom behind the kitchen and she changed there. She scrubbed off her makeup and put her jewelry in the small side pocket of her purse. In the living room she knelt on the hard stones of the hearth as a concentration aid to pull her mind back to the problems of the night rather than its secret revelations. Despite the painful pressure of the stones on her knees, she kept thinking back to that moment when Ana began making a fist again—defying the power of Sabel’s Voice—and she wanted to curl herself inside those fingers and be the one who felt protected for once.

Ana dreamed she was walking in a desert, surrounded in every direction by gigantic sand dunes. She knew she was dreaming but that knowledge didn’t cause her to wake up. It was a relief to be in a true dream, to be able to set down her expectations about reality and her concerns and just look around at this golden setting. Maybe if she stayed lucid she could fly. She was walking barefoot, but the sand didn’t burn her, and she had on some kind of white dress or tunic that blew around her knees in the hot, slow wind.

A man walked beside her, but she couldn’t turn her head to look at him. The best she could do was to look down at an angle and then she recognized his feet, if you could call them that: the flaming serpents of the vision.

“I know what you are,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know that you’re using this dream to lull me into some sense of safety so you can lay your sympathetic story on me. As soon as I figure out how to do it, I’m getting rid of you.”

They crested a rise and overlooked a valley. The moving air held the kind of heat Ana only felt on vacations, and it slid in through her pores and relaxed her muscles. She only half cared about his response to her words, more interested in the fact that she didn’t hurt, or fear, or want to scream.

A vision appeared in the valley. It was historical. She didn’t know how old, that wasn’t her thing, but old enough that everyone looked dirty. They were pulling stone blocks with oxen to build something enormous. It wasn’t a pyramid. From the finished side it looked to be a rectangularly shaped building. Alongside some of the people were creatures of smoke and fire who were helping them, by showing where to lay the stones to make them strong, and talking about foundations and arches. In the strange manner of dreams, she understood the meaning of what they discussed without knowing the words.