The Rising Read online

  “You want a glass?”

  In response, Rudy popped off the easy-pour nipple and started drinking right from the bottle.

  The bartender walked away. He was going to mention that the bottle was on the house, but he didn’t want to risk even the briefest of exchanges with the likes of Rudy. He’d seen his kind before. So he retreated to the far side of the long wooden bar and busied himself polishing tumblers.

  With a good buzz on, Rudy got back in the Taurus, smiling as a cop car passed him going in the opposite direction. Looks like the schmuck called the cops, he thought. He wasn’t afraid of the cops. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of much of anything, except for the Dark Lord himself and maybe Will Hunter.

  And he was going to please the former by killing the latter.

  He headed north and over a bridge, then cut down toward Lake Union and drove into Gas Works Park. It was a bizarre sight, the sprawling lawns surrounding the ancient rusting monster, the remnants of the last coal gasification plant in the United States. Someone on the city council must have thought it was cute or quaint or something, because instead of tearing the place down, they’d turned it into a park. It was a terrifically ugly place for lowlifes to hang out after dark. Rudy got out of the Taurus and walked toward the weathered, rusty tanks and connecting pipes. Surely there was some fun to be had here.

  Will had bird-dogged Rudy to perfection and was now looking down at the gas works. Wearing his night-vision contacts, he could see Rudy clearly as he entered the park. Minutes passed. Will listened to the blustery winds. A storm front was approaching. Rudy sauntered cockily up to a group of teens hanging out, drinking and smoking. Rudy took a cigarette when it was offered, lit it, and sucked in the smoke. Will couldn’t help but wonder what would possess a human being that they’d think burning leaves and sucking the smoke into their lungs was a good idea. He knew all about the drug nicotine and how it worked on the brain, raising dopamine levels, but still. How insane did you have to be? Though, if you were a demon, what did it matter? Will watched as the group moved to the central part of the gas works within the tangle of tanks and pipes.

  Will wanted a closer look, so he got out of the BMW and walked toward the park. He felt movement to his left and ducked and scanned. A dark figure rushed from the tree line into the gas works as the tanks and pipes started making creaking sounds in the wind. The figure looked slight enough to be a girl. Will kept watching, then rose as four more figures dashed out of the trees. All female, but moving incredibly fast, like phantoms.

  It was time for Will to act. He checked the Megashocker strapped to his leg, flipping a switch to power it up. He entered the gas works and ducked under a long connecting pipe, his eyes open wide, his senses on the alert. A girl’s scream propelled him forward. He ran with inhuman speed, only to stop in the darkness as his nostrils picked up the acrid scent of demons. He heard the scream again—more of a shriek, really—followed by another, then another.

  One of the phantoms shot out from behind a tank and flew at him. She was incredibly fast, but Will was fast, too, and he whipped out his Megashocker and swung it in her direction as she flew at him. In mid-air she jerked her body, cartwheeling, so that the Megashocker blow, which should have caught her full on in the face, only glanced across her knee. It was an indirect hit but it was enough to cause searing pain, and she cut loose with an unholy howl, then landed on the ground and limp-ran around a tank. Will was in hot pursuit, intending to wound her again, then hold her down until she gave up some kind of information. He didn’t even know what he was looking for yet, but he knew that he had to keep probing. The Dark Lord was out there somewhere, and these creatures were his best hope of finding him. If they suffered pain in so doing, then it would be all the sweeter.

  He ran around the tank and stopped cold, locking on the figure in front of him. It was the dark phantom girl he had wounded—only she looked no worse for the wear. In fact, she was smiling, her teeth sharp, her eyes blazing. And not only that—four of them were now surrounding him. Very clever, Will thought. They hunted in a pack like coyotes. One would “attack,” then act wounded and attempt to “escape,” leading the prey—in this case, him—directly into a trap.

  He rotated, trying to keep an eye on as many of them as possible. They were all wearing tall boots and black jeans and some kind of hooded ponchos, and they all had voluminous hair that whipped in the wind. They were just high school girls, demonteens, but something about them was different. They were faster, for one. Shedemons, Will thought. He wasn’t sure why the name came to him, but it sure stuck. Shedemons. The whites of their eyes glowed. They began to keen together in unison, an unholy chant of some sort, a prelude to malevolence.

  The tallest of the four raised her hand and tossed her hair back coquettishly. She was beautiful in a mean-looking way and had a blue streak in her hair. As the wind died down and the night went quiet, she crouched low, her scarlet fingernails extending. The others followed suit, and Will was faced with forty deadly little red knives, as sharp, no doubt, as scalpels. Good thing, he thought to himself, that I brought the Cloakers. He reached for them in his jacket pocket. His hand made it into his pocket but didn’t make it back out before the pack attacked in a flurry. It took everything Will had to drop and swing his legs and the Megashocker in a circular motion. They flew past him, getting close but not making contact.

  As the attack continued, astonishingly, Will didn’t hit a single one of them. He finally managed to get the Cloakers out, but when he threw them, the shedemons were able to feint and duck and avoid them entirely. Meanwhile, their keening grew in intensity. They climbed the tanks and pipes alarmingly fast, racing to and fro. Just like Will, they were masters in the art of Parkour, or l’art du deplacement, a physical discipline of French origin wherein one climbed and ran rapidly while negotiating obstacles like rails or columns—or, in this case, tanks and pipes and each other.

  Will felt a pain in his back and realized he’d just been deep-clawed by one of them. Blue Streak. He whirled and kicked and managed to catch her under the chin, sending her screeching skyward. She slammed into a tank and dropped to the ground. The blow would have killed a mortal and badly wounded any other creature. But Blue Streak wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. She leapt up and—much to Will’s astonishment—began braying with laughter. He was distracted by the shedemon’s bravado, so when the other three struck, he was caught off guard. They hit him hard. Their fists were like hammers, their fingernails like box-cutters. They pummeled and slashed at him, and he staggered on his feet. As their fists found the bones of his face, he caught glimpses of the rings they wore. They were imprinted with the image of a winged creature.

  The whoop of a siren pierced the night. Three blue-and-white Seattle Police Department Crown Victoria cruisers pulled into the gas works parking lot. They blocked the stolen silver Taurus in, front and back. This was in the event that the perp—who was not visible but could easily have been ducking down—decided to make a break for it. Six officers emerged from the cars with weapons drawn. But they quickly saw that the vehicle was empty and began a foot search.

  “Do you hear that?” one of the cops asked. “It sounds like . . . like some kind of weird bird or something.” He was hearing the shedemons’ protracted, shrill screams as they were about to go in for the kill.

  • • •

  Will’s brain was scrambled. He was seeing double, watching with amazement and more than a little respect as the eight—of course there were only four, but he now saw eight—shedemons crisscrossed past him, slashing and punching and kicking. He realized that he had met his match. There was no way he was going to survive these beasts. They were insanely fast and deadly. Demons were fast, demonteens often even more so, but Will had never seen anything like these shedemons. They were a whole new breed. And they were going to bring his life to a very painful end.

  Will thought about Natalie and his mother and how he’d ultimately let them down. He shook his head again and again, tryi
ng to clear his brain. But he’d been had. They’d lured him and trapped him, and their punishment would be exacting and deadly.

  Anger began to build inside Will. Anger tinged with red. He used to call it the red curtain, because once upon a time it would fall in front of his eyes and turn the world into an ugly place, a place where he wanted only one thing: to inflict pain. As the red malice surged through him, he flipped over and fought with renewed ferocity, managing a couple of powerful blows to the shocked shedemons. But they still overwhelmed him.

  “You’re going to die,” said Blue Streak.

  This was it; this was Will’s Waterloo. He was going down, and going down hard. The air was thick with evil and Will’s head felt like it was going to explode. He reached to his Power Rod retrieval patch in one last-ditch effort to save his life, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to call it down in time.

  Will saw a quick movement to his right, then heard a small explosion. He saw a flash of light and was enveloped in a cloud of intoxicating gas. He began to cough. One of the tanks must have exploded, he assumed, flooding the area. Will’s head was spinning, but the shedemons reacted to the gas too, coughing and regrouping. Blue Streak spit some commands at her cohorts and they advanced, coughing more violently now. Will knew he should use their distraction to escape, but he was powerless to do anything but breathe in more of the heady gas. He was certain that the shedemons were going to finish him off.

  Then he heard footsteps. Voices. Beams of light slashing across the gas works.

  Blue Streak came over and kicked him in the head and hissed, “We’ll meet again.”

  And then, as quickly as they had appeared, the pack was gone, swallowed up by the surrounding darkness.

  Now that the immediate threat was gone and the gas was starting to clear, pain rushed into Will’s body. He felt like he’d been stung by a thousand killer bees. He rolled over and clawed at a zipper on his coat, pulling out a packet of chemical patches he’d pre-soaked with his special healing salve. He went for his face first, smearing on the salve. In seconds, his flesh began to repair itself. He lay still. And then he heard a voice.

  “Hey, you! Are you alive? Can you hear me?”

  A girl appeared out of the night. She was dressed in a long duster coat and wore a bandana to cover her mouth and nose against the rapidly dissipating gas. Her hair was strawberry-blonde and her eyes were a disarmingly beautiful shade of green so clear he could see them even there in the dark. They glowed like jewels. She pulled her bandana down and he could see her face. She was amazing.

  “They messed you up pretty good,” she said.

  “I’m okay,” Will lied. He was about as far from okay as humanly possible. But he was alive. He was going to make it; he wasn’t going to die after all. His attackers had somehow been frightened off. He sat up.

  “Who were ‘they’ anyway?” he asked the girl.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  “Trust me, I really do want to know. I want to know badly. Where are they from?”

  She paused, as though deciding between telling the truth and being evasive. “Let me give you some advice. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay as far away from them as possible.”

  “The thing is,” said Will, “I never seem to know what’s good for me. How do you know them?”

  “They’re—” She stopped speaking as the cops’ flashlight beams moved closer. Her eyes widened to full alert.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Wait. What were you doing here?” Will asked.

  “Listen to me. Forget this night. Forget you ever met me.”

  One look at Will’s burning, intense eyes would have told her that he would do exactly the opposite. He would not forget this night, and he would definitely not forget her.

  “You over there! Freeze!” a cop’s voice rang out.

  Will turned to look at the advancing cops, so he didn’t even see the girl with the emerald eyes leave. Their .45s drawn, the cops surrounded him and made him lie facedown as they circled him, cuffed him, holstered their pistols, and took his I.D. from his back pocket.

  He wasn’t in the database, and when they asked him about the Taurus, he said he had no idea what they were talking about. When they saw how badly he’d been roughed up, they un-cuffed him. They wanted to call an ambulance, but Will told them to forget it.

  “Who did this to you?” one of them asked.

  Will couldn’t think of any reason not to tell them the truth. Or at least part of the truth.

  “Four girls.”

  The cops took a moment to process.

  “You’re telling us that four girls did this to you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you get a good look at them?”

  “No. I hardly saw them at all. It’s dark.”

  “Four girls?” muttered another cop, shaking his head.

  “And that’s why you don’t want the ambulance.”

  The cops all exchanged knowing looks. Sometimes it was good to be male. Will let the cops assume that he didn’t want to report the crime because he was ashamed that some girls had beat the holy crap out of him. Since he’d come up clean on their database, they weren’t inclined to arrest him for the theft of the Taurus, a decision that was reinforced when he showed them that he had driven his own BMW.

  They let him go, but not before one of them lobbed a macho jab: “Maybe you should think about staying away from the ladies for a spell.” His cohorts chuckled.

  If they only knew, Will thought. If they only really knew. And for a brief moment, he wished the four phantoms would show up and put the merciless toes of their boots to these cops. But such thoughts were pointless and distracting, so Will swept them out of his mind as he climbed into his BMW and drove away.

  Rudy had followed the script and performed as Will had predicted. He’d gone straight to a pack of demons. Now it was time to recapture him. Will switched on the tracking screen to see where Rudy was.

  But there was a problem. No blinking light. No Rudy. The subcutaneous chip must have malfunctioned. Or maybe Rudy had found it and ripped it out. Either way, he was gone. Will’s heart raced. He’d lost Rudy! He should have cured his friend for real, instead of using him as a pawn.

  He tapped his fingers and wondered how he could have blundered so badly. Then he calmed down. Because he had a sudden hunch he knew just where Rudy would go. As he steered the BMW up onto Queen Anne Hill, he prayed that his hunch was right.

  Chapter Ten: Pursuit

  Will drove back to the mansion and slipped into his laboratory without making a sound, passing right by the gaming room where Natalie and Emily were dutifully practicing again with their staffs. But he couldn’t help himself from backtracking a bit to glance in at them. They were both getting better. Soon he would introduce them to their real weapons. He only hoped that they would never have to use them.

  Once in his lab, he took off his jacket and pants and covered his myriad wounds with the healing salve. He looked at the hundreds of little stab marks the shedemons’ talons had made. He remembered how freakishly fast they had moved. This new breed was something he would have to reckon with. But first he had to get Rudy. He stripped, used a spray can of the healing chemical to coat his body, then carefully pulled his clothes back on and lay down, meditating while the chemicals did their work. In thirty minutes he got up and zipped the Demon Trapper into its case and slung it over his shoulder.

  Out in the garage, he eschewed the Mitsubishi and the BMW, figuring Rudy would spot him immediately if he was prowling around in either of them. So he chose his jet-black Suzuki Hayabusa GSX 133R, the fastest motorcycle in the world. The machine was a beast, a veritable crotch rocket that would blast him around like he was riding lightning. Not wanting to have to explain what was going on to the twins, Will silently coasted the GSX out of the garage and down the driveway. The iron gates made a slight noise when they opened, and five seconds later, after kicking the Suzuki to life and t
wisting the throttle, he was gone like a shot fired out of a cannon.

  He parked the GSX on the hillside looking down at Dick’s Drive-In and waited. The helmet he wore he’d built himself. It was equipped with a visor that could pick up heat sources at two hundred yards. Will hadn’t used it before, but he was confident it would work. Demons ran six degrees hotter than humans, so if Rudy showed up he should be easy to spot, no matter what direction he came from. So far the area was pretty quiet, the only noise coming from passing cars and a pissed-off pit bull barking his head off in a nearby alley. Will’s helmet also played MP3s, and he settled in for what he figured might be a long vigil.

  Rudy had been a skinny weak kid when Will first rescued him from being dunked in the toilet in the boys’ room. But that changed when he succumbed to temptation and went to the dark side. It was a tragically simple process, though you had to be sixteen—like he, Natalie and Emily, and Rudy were—for it to work. If you were in the right frame of mind—feeling mad at the world, like you didn’t belong anywhere, like nobody gave a damn about you—you could hear his voice, the voice of the Dark Lord. He would say your name three times. And then, if you let yourself be overcome with malicious thoughts, evil thoughts, about things like bringing harm to other people, and if you cut yourself so that your blood was exposed to the air—one drop was all it took—then boom, you’d be infected. Then you would slowly morph from a normal human into a demon. It had happened to Rudy on Will’s watch, and Will still felt guilty about it. This time, he promised himself, if he was lucky enough to recapture Rudy, he’d cure him right away—no tricks.

  Rudy had a powerful craving. What he’d just seen had shaken him to his core, and he’d attempted to calm his nerves by chugging a half bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey with some sleazebag demonteens from an Edmonds cell. But it only seemed to jangle his nerves as the alcohol ripped straight on up to his brain. The feel-good buzz that Rudy had felt when he first gulped down the JD had turned ugly, and now he felt like someone had driven rusty spikes into the back of his skull. Every time he closed his eyes, the world was sucked into an explosion of spinning stars, and when he kept his eyes open, the pressure in his head built up so bad he was sure his eyeballs were going to pop out. He needed a fix. He needed salvation. He needed some Dick’s double cheeseburgers. He pulled out the wallet he’d gotten from the terrified owner of the Taurus. There was $128 in cash, which he pocketed, and then he tossed the wallet in the gutter.