“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 f**kin’ dies.”
“Wow, you learn all that strategy from the U.S. Army men?”
I grunted in amusement. “No, I learned it from Attila the Hun, who lived an’ died without ever knowin’ you were here.”
The two of us drifted apart naturally, hunters of old. We did not need to discuss strategy. When it’s two against one, the two should separate so that if the target counterattacks one, his back is left open to the other. When we’d formed a triangle—Coyote and I at the base and Basasael at the top—we nocked our arrows and nodded at each other. I slid out of my sandals and stepped into the rain so that I could draw power from the earth. First I filled my bear charm back up, in case I needed to cast something on the sidewalk, then I drew enough to pull back the bow, just as Basasael was finishing off his teenage repast. I held up five fingers to Coyote, folded in my thumb, then my index finger to indicate a countdown, then pulled the bowstring to its limit. I took quick aim and let fly in time with the countdown.
I was already grabbing another arrow as our first volley sank home. My arrow pierced the fallen angel’s left eye, and Coyote’s thudded solidly into the center of its chest. It screeched on several wavelengths and shuddered my bones as it toppled backward onto the roof, surprised and clutching at the shafts.
Normally, if you shoot something in the head with an arrow, it doesn’t have enough motor skills left to reach up and pluck the arrow out. And shooting a critter in the heart generally robs it of the strength to stand up and roar defiantly at unsafe decibel levels. Basasael wasn’t normal, for he did both of those things.
A white bubbling wound was left behind in each case, but the fallen angel threw both the arrows down into the courtyard, spread his wings, and crouched in preparation to spring at one of us. He saw us both clearly; my camouflage spell kept us hidden from human eyes but not from his.
“How many arrows we gotta use to kill this thing?” Coyote yelled.
“All Mary said was we’d have to pierce it more’n once.”
“Yeah? Well maybe you shoulda pinned her down to a specific number there afore we left, dumbass!”
I agreed with Coyote wholeheartedly, as we let fly with another volley. Basasael knocked Coyote’s missile aside with a blurred sweep of his left arm, but mine sank directly into his swollen gut. The force of it toppled him backward again, but this time he knew better than to stay still and let us reload. Ignoring the arrow that was turning his black skin into a white froth before bubbling away to gray, he gathered his legs underneath him and launched himself straight up into the air with a single, powerful stroke of his wings and another mighty bellow of rage I could feel in my teeth. At the apex of his ascent, he folded his wings and dove after his chosen target—me.
The eternal whine of self-pity—why me?—flashed through my brain as I aimed one last shot at the fallen angel. The answers came flooding in: I looked like nothing more than a puny human weakling; I’d shot him in the head and the gut; I was standing in the open, where he could get to me easily, while Coyote was shooting from underneath the shelter of the roof; and, because of the binding Aenghus Óg had put on him, he couldn’t leave the area until he killed me. I let fly with my shot and it sailed above his right shoulder, much to my chagrin. Dropping my bow because there’d be no time for another shot, I leapt back under the roof and drew Fragarach with my right hand and another blessed arrow from my quiver with my left.
I positioned myself behind one of the roof’s supporting steel posts so that Basasael would have to pick a side to attack from and reduce his speed accordingly. It turned out the post was not something he considered to be an actual obstacle. He simply bashed it aside with his right arm as his wings spread to brake his flight, and the post obligingly ripped out of its moorings and buckled a portion of the roof as if it were made of Nerf rather than steel.
“Don’t you feel the least bit ill right now?” I asked. I could see the courtyard through the yawning white hole in his head. It was still boiling and hissing, eating away at his substance—as were the other two wounds—but in terms of real damage it only seemed to have pissed him off.
His feet touched down on the concrete rather than the earth, so Cold Fire was out of the question; he answered me by belching a gout of bright orange flame at my face. It looked exactly like the ball of hellfire Aenghus Óg had thrown at me. “Hey!” I shouted as the flame passed over me, giving me a brief sensation of heat but otherwise leaving me unharmed, thanks to my amulet’s protection. “You’re the bastard who made a deal with Aenghus Óg! You’re the one who’s been behind it all!”
I heard the squeal of the office doors opening to my right: Someone was coming out to investigate what all the ruckus was. They wouldn’t be able to see me or the demon, but they’d sure see the mangled post lying in the rain and a dangerously drooping roof. They’d also be in mortal danger. It’s the sort of situation that gets duelists killed: a split second of distraction, flicking the eyes away for a shadow of a moment, and suddenly it’s all over. Basasael was counting on it; perhaps he saw my eyes move, perhaps he didn’t, but he shook off his surprise that I didn’t burn and took advantage anyway. He was still a good four feet away from me, but his right arm shot toward my chest and his fingers extended, then his claws did likewise, telescope fashion, aiming for my heart. He wanted to pull one of those Mola Ram maneuvers, ripping my still-beating heart out of my chest and then laughing at me as I watched him eat it. I dodged to my right as quickly as I could, raising my left arm to let the claws pass under, but I wasn’t quick enough. I felt four rotten black spikes pierce my side, scraping against the outside of my ribs and penetrating clear through to keep me pinned to the wall.
I grunted in pain and retaliated quickly, because part of him was pinned too: I drove the tip of the blessed arrow down through the back of his corrupted hand and on through the palm. He howled and yanked his hand away, withdrawing the evil claws from my side, and in that moment of reprieve I risked a quick glance to my right.
A wide-eyed female administrator in conservative dress was talking rapidly into a handheld radio. “There’s some damage to the courtyard roof and some strange animal noises, but I can’t tell what’s making them.”
“Get back inside, lady!” I yelled. “For your own safety!” That was the best I could do for her just then. Basasael looked as if he was going to move in closer and tear my head off, so I raised Fragarach in a defensive stance and winced at the burning in my side. As the fallen angel bent his knees and hissed at me, arms spread in a wrestler’s stance, preparing to spring, it occurred to me that maybe Coyote should have managed to shoot an arrow or two during the fracas.
Where was the trickster? Had he taken off and left me to face the fallen angel alone? He’d been known to do that in several stories told about him: Get the white man to agree to a course of action, then take off at the critical moment and make him look like a fool. I didn’t know what more I could do to this creature by myself. Four holy arrows had obviously done some physical damage; he’d loudly announced that he felt pain from them, but he still kept coming. A morbid thought wandered into my consciousness and said hello: If Basasael ate my dumb Druid ass, would the Morrigan be able to bring me back fully functional, resurrected from—what? Angel poop? That raised another question, at once metaphysical and profane: Do angels, fallen or otherwise, have a**holes?
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.