Highway to Hell

  Sassy planted her hooves, her breath steaming in the rain. I pushed my hair out of my face and settled my feet in the stirrups, balancing my weight. “Okay, girl. We have to get past that thing and to the pipe fitting behind it. Ready to rumble?”

  She snorted decisively. I braced myself as she lunged to the left from a standing start. The atrocity in front of us galumphed into our path, moving surprisingly fast. I barely touched Sassy's reins and she cut the other way, trying to get around.

  The demon sprouted more legs on its bottom and scuttled over like a bug. Not fast compared to Sassy, but big enough to make one hell of a goalie.

  Nothing for it. What would Viggo do? Aragorn wouldn't be daunted by some butt-ugly Uruk-hai. He'd take Andúril and shove it through the monster's heart.

  Man, being the kick-ass brawn was way harder than being the smart-ass brain.

  Sassy gave another snort, as if to ask what we were waiting for. I flexed my fingers on the wooden handle of the branding iron, feeling the pull of scarred tendon and hoping my grip would hold.

  The nightmare charged, lurching forward on legs of all different lengths. I kicked Sassy into motion. The terror and adrenaline were too much to hold inside. They tore out of me in a yell, and I raised the branding iron like a lance.

  The monster pitched backward. As Sassy bore down, I drove the iron into the mouth on its belly, straight through, and felt a clang, an unyielding stop, all the way to my spine.

  The demon had backed up to the wellhead and lured us in. Sassy cut to the side, and no amount of instant-rodeo mojo could counter the laws of physics. I flew off her back and fell against the spongy flesh of the demon.

  My yell turned to a scream as the teeth raked my arm; how had I ever thought this thing was stupid? The malformed mass was dissolving around the branding iron, and at the same time my blood dripped into the oil seep, the greedy ground drinking it in with rain. With one dying action it had fed its rebirth.

  Something new was already burbling out. I scooted away and tried to stand. I had to use the wellhead to pull myself up by my left hand and get back on my feet. A piece of pipe fitting—a threaded ring of some kind—popped off in my fingers. I hoped it wasn't important and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans.

  The double-armed cross of the branding iron was wedged into the pipes. My right hand wouldn't wrap around the handle—not without setting all my nerves on fire—so I grabbed with my left, but it still wouldn't budge.

  Defenseless and horseless. Things kept getting better and better.

  Would the others know I was in trouble? Would Sassy go back to them or do the smart thing and run to the barn? Would Doña Isabel or Zeke sense something?

  Rain stung my skin like needles. I backed away from the writhing black mass that oozed out of the ground. This was a new demon, still unformed. The eyes opened, and it moved forward on stiltlike legs, trying to divide into a second body like some kind of mitosis.

  But the demon couldn't separate—not into distinct creatures, and not from the ground. It was still bound by the spell. Go, Lisa.

  Holding my aching arm against my chest, I broke into a limping run, intent on putting distance between me and the growing monster.

  Lightning branched across the sky, illuminating the land like a camera flash. The image seemed to stay on my retina even as the thunder rumbled. The grotto wasn't too far away. I could make it on foot as long as the demon stayed tethered.

  The hoof beats were close by the time I heard them over the pounding of my heart in my ears. Sassy was coming back for me. I was too out of breath to call to her, so I limped faster, until something caught my ankle, and I pitched face-first into the dirt.

  An impossibly long arm had snaked out to capture me. I felt a bite, and realized with horror that the claw had a mouth at the center of it. I screamed and kicked, but pulling just made the teeth dig in deeper. I could see the demon grow thicker and stronger as it sucked my blood like a tick.

  Then Sassy's beautiful neigh; her hooves trampled the appendage into demon paste, severing the connection.

  “Thank God.” I was praying, all right. Henry would be proud.

  I reached for the stirrup to pull myself up, and found it was occupied by a tennis shoe. From Sassy's saddle, Justin leaned down to offer me a hand. I caught it gratefully, and he hauled me up behind him.

  “Are you happy?” I shouted over the noise of Sassy's hooves carrying us back to the grotto. Feeling myself slipping from her back, I wrapped my arms tight around Justin's waist; with him there, the cowgirl magic seemed to have vanished. “You got to ride to my rescue after all.”

  He answered without a shred of self-congratulation. “Ask me again when we're actually safe.”

  The lights of the trucks in the grotto made an aura in the drizzle. I realized that the storm must be moving off. When the lightning flashed, the thunder took its time rumbling. I didn't know if that was good or bad.

  What was bad was Lisa and Zeke's situation when we reached them. I could tell as soon as we got to the hollow. The old folks had emerged from the truck, and they watched anxiously from outside the circle, unable to break the line to assist. Hector shot me a quick look of relief when we rode in. Doña Isabel, however, didn't take her eyes from her grandson.

  Henry helped me off of Sassy's back. “Interpret for me, Maggie.” He sounded frustrated with his own helplessness. “I can't tell what's going on.”

  Inside the circle, I could see that Lisa had combined the ingredients into the brass bowl, where they smoldered. A silken cord wrapped it vertically, bridging the embers three times. Zeke and Lisa faced each other over it, her hands covering his as they cradled the brazier between them.

  “The burning stuff will represent … um, wholeness, I think. The cord is symbolically binding. Zeke's hands are actually in contact with the bowl, and that looks like his blood smeared on the rim. He's trying to take control—”

  Justin interrupted. “I explained all that as it was happening. He means, what's going wrong.”

  So even they could see it. Zeke's skin looked gray beneath his tan, Lisa was goth-pale with exhaustion. The cord across the mouth of the bowl was charring and the only thing that seemed to be fueling the spell at the moment was their combined willpower. Even the campfire inside the circle was burning out.

  “Come on.” I grabbed Justin's hand and trusted Henry to follow. Limping up the side of the knoll that sheltered the icon of the virgin, I reached the top and found an excellent view of the pasture, all the way to the wellhead I'd just visited. “Watch.”

  The next flash of lightning illuminated, for a terrible second, the monstrosity squeezing itself into existence, slowly but relentlessly. Henry said something, which was drowned out by the roll of thunder. It was probably just as well.

  “That's what they're trying to keep together. It's fused, and bound to the rest below the ground.”

  Justin stared into the darkness where the monster struggled, half in and half out of the earth. “But as long as it doesn't feed anymore, it will stop growing, right?”

  “For as long as Lisa—Zeke, really—can hold it together.” I could look down into the hollow and see them at work. “Stubborn as she is, I don't think even Lisa has enough willpower to keep it going much longer.”

  Justin asked a very good question. “Then how are they going to have the strength to put it back in the ground?”

  Lisa spoke up from below us, annoyance lacing her weary voice. “Whatever you guys are discussing up there, you want to get on with it?”

  “How is this a balance?” demanded Henry, surprising me with his anger. “This thing is kicking our asses.” He threw up his hands and shouted to the black sky. “Come on, God. How about cutting the side of the angels a freaking break here?”

  Somehow, I had the energy to be shocked. “Is that how they're teaching priests to pray nowadays?”

  Justin cast me a desperately humorless glance. “If we were ever in need of divine inspiration, it's now.” r />
  Be careful what you wish for. When the lightning flashed again, I could see in my mind's eye the terrain laid out in front of me like a contour map. The grotto, the wellhead two miles away—they both got a cell phone signal because they were close to the Big House, with its cellular relay in the tower. The tower was the first place I'd seen the dragonfly. A dragonfly like the origin of the Velasquez brand I'd just shoved into the wellhead. Suddenly the lines of the pattern all connected in my head.

  “Maggie!” shouted Lisa. “Where's that piece of the pipe fitting?”

  “Hang on!” I turned to the guys, seized by—I fervently hoped—true inspiration. “We need the storm back. This Ruach Elohim … can we summon it?”

  The same guy who'd just asked God for a freaking break gaped at me, horrified. “You can't summon the Breath of God.”

  “She means invoke.” Justin corrected my vocabulary. “And yes, we can.”

  Henry narrowed his eyes. “Far away from here, Brother Mathias is having six litters of kittens right now, and he doesn't even know why.”

  I nudged him down the hill, back toward the grotto. “Get Doña Isabel to start praying for the storm to come back. You help. It's time to put all that righteousness to work.”

  “The storm—”

  “Henry, you have to trust me.”

  He stared at me a moment longer, until Lisa started yelling again. Then he hurried to do as I said.

  Turning to Justin, I wiped sweating palms on my soaking wet jeans. “You said we can invoke this …” I couldn't say it twice. I was already terrifying myself.

  He dug into the cargo pocket of his trousers and pulled out the map and a pen, explaining quickly. “Ruach is Hebrew for ‘spirit,’ or ‘breath.’ The Kabbalah is a system of mysticism which says every Hebrew letter has a secret meaning that can be invoked for enlightenment.”

  I glanced down the face of the hill, where below us, Henry was helping Doña Isabel to kneel in front of the shrine. He knelt, too, leaving Hector the only one monitoring Lisa and Zeke. “Lecture less, Professor. Magic more.”

  “Okay, okay. The letter that corresponds to Ruach is Shin.” Bracing the folded map on his left hand, Justin drew a symbol like a twisted W over our location. “By inscribing it, we can invoke the qualities it represents.”

  I waited for something to happen, looking warily up at the sky. The rain had fallen off to a drizzle. “It didn't work.”

  He pointed to Doña Isabel and Henry. “Intent.” And to the map and letter. “Ingredient.” Then he pulled a lighter from his pocket. I was beginning to think he was as compulsively overprepared as me.

  “Power source. Because the other thing that Shin corresponds to is flame.”

  Handing me the lighter, he held the map steady while I lit the corner. It shouldn't have burned at all, since it was so soggy. But the flame caught and raced across the paper as if it were soaked in lighter fluid instead of rain.

  In the silence of my held breath, I could hear Henry's deep voice intoning his own invocation, and Doña Isabel's Amen.

  Where was the earth-shattering kaboom? You'd think something like the Breath of God would give you immediate results. But I guess it didn't work that way.

  Then my hair tickled my cheek as, almost imperceptibly, the wind changed direction. The sky was too dark to see the clouds, but I could feel the shift in the atmosphere, circling the storm back around.

  A crack of lightning arrowed from the sky, and sparks bloomed from the metal dragonfly weather vane atop the Big House. The tower, tiny on the horizon, was lit for a moment like a photo negative, and then the electricity arced across miles of desert, completing a circuit with the double-armed cross that tipped the two feet of iron rod I'd wedged in the wellhead. The effect was like a match hitting a fuse.

  The explosion rocked us back, even from this distance. A pillar of flame shot into the air, three hundred feet or more, until I thought I heard the clouds sizzle.

  The spout of fire looked like a piece of Hell on earth. And writhing, tortured, at the base of it was the demon, slowly being eaten away by the flame.

  31

  I was never, ever going to complain about not learning anything useful from my dreams. Even when it came from the unlikeliest source.

  Zeke and Lisa had dropped their concentration, the bowl, and the spell. “Oh my God!” cried Zeke, staring at the jet of flame shooting into the sky. It was so big, it looked within spitting distance. “What happened?”

  “Oh my God,” echoed Henry, helping Doña Isabel to stand up. “It worked. The storm came back.”

  The matriarch looked up the hill to where I stood, still reeling like everyone else. “What have you done?” she demanded.

  “Heat and flame.” Justin sounded dazed. I probably should have warned him what I was hoping would happen.

  “What about the binding?” Hector was justifiably alarmed, after all that trouble to hold the demon together.

  “Everything aboveground is being consumed,” I reported, shading my eyes against the light and heat. “Even the parts that break off. Come and see.”

  “We can't,” said Lisa, meaning her and Zeke. “The rest can burn off, but we have to set the seal on whatever is left underground.”

  She sounded bone weary. I had never heard that from her. Zeke looked a hairsbreadth from collapse. He swayed on his feet when he bent to pick up the brass bowl they'd dropped. “So let's get to it.”

  “Wait.” Inspiration wasn't done with me yet. “Don't cap it. Call it out.”

  They stared at me in various attitudes of horror or confusion, depending on how much they understood what I was saying. “What do you mean, call it out?” asked Hector.

  Lisa's expression had gone cold as soon as I'd said it, and she answered in a flat voice, “She means, summon the demon.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Henry asked. “Look at that thing. That's just the part aboveground. And you want to let the rest of it out?”

  “Yes.” I flicked a glance at Justin. “Heat and flame. Zeke, you can wait to see what turns up the next drought, or you can vanquish this thing forever.”

  “You're sure?” he asked. “You're certain this will kill it?”

  I let him read it in my eyes. “As certain as I can be.”

  He turned to his grandmother, and she spoke with quiet confidence. “I haven't been given this vision, Ezekiel. But I know this thing is Evil. Magdalena says this will destroy it. Not bury it, not allow it to grow and fester.”

  Lisa met his gaze levelly. “All I need is your permission, Zeke. I can do this on my own.”

  He looked confused. “Don't I need to do it? My link to the land?”

  She took the brass bowl from him and set it on the concrete bench. “You've started the spell. I'm not rewriting the whole book, I'm just changing the ending.”

  He shook his head. “I took on this responsibility. If something goes screwy, I'll be here with my magic bloodline. And I'll take the heat if I have to.”

  “Zeke,” she snapped, “I'm not being noble and self-sacrificing here. I've got nothing to lose, karmically speaking.”

  I knew what she meant; she was the only one of us who had summoned a demon before. Zeke didn't know that, but he had the unanswerable argument.

  “I can't leave you to do it alone, anyway.” He pointed to the white circle. “If stepping over that makes it defunct, you don't have a way to redraw it. You used the last of the salt.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it. Looking thunderous at having no rebuttal, she said, “Fine. Just stay back.”

  Pulling out her pocketknife, she took the brass bowl in one hand and the knife in the other. The heat of the embers made eddies of mist in the damp air, wreathing her face. Her expression was determined, and in a way, serene.

  Far away, the demon pieces, outlined in fire, fought the pull of the well. Hector and Doña Isabel came up to watch, but Henry stayed below with Lisa and Zeke.

  Ceremonially—I couldn't hear her words o
ver the roar of the flame—Lisa cut the cord around the bowl. Still speaking, she took the vessel in both her bare hands, shaking the embers so that they flared to life, then raised her arms parallel to the ground, holding the bowl over the campfire in front of her.

  “You might want to move,” she told the guys, voice taut with strain. Then she dropped the brass bowl into the fire, where it cracked into shards of metal.

  Instinctively, I raised my arm to shield my face. I caught Lisa in the same motion, and the guys turning away. Then the light from the fire went from orange to yellow, and a terrible sound, like the groan of an earthquake, bridged the space between the well and us. A wave of dry heat carried an acrid stench, and when I lowered my arm, I saw the demon forced out of the wellhead like a glob of Jell-O through a straw.

  It took shape in the pillar of fire, pushing it outward, changing each time I blinked but never really altering, as if my mind was impressing on it the shape of fear. It grew until it loomed over the desert, not just a demon but a fiery god.

  “Please, please, God, don't let me have screwed this up.” I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until Justin's arm tightened around me and Hector laid a hand on my shoulder.

  The red beast began to writhe and twist, and the roar of the fire multiplied with its agony. As the flames consumed it, the plume became again a narrow jet spewing into the clouds. It grew smaller as I watched, like a lighter running out of fuel, then burned itself out with a whoosh, leaving the desert in darkness once again.

  All seven of us stared; the air was unnervingly quiet.

  “Is it gone?” Zeke sounded afraid to ask.

  Doña Isabel wasn't afraid to answer. “Yes.”

  She would know. But I felt it, too—a peculiar emptiness where there'd been something nasty stuck to my subconscious. Cleansed by heat and flame.

  Justin wrapped his arms around me and kissed my hair, which had to smell wretched. “You really are brilliant and resourceful.”

  “I have good resources to lean on.” I laid my head on his shoulder for emphasis.