Chapter 56: The Inquisitor

“I’m told it’s a free country, démon,” Aimée said, her entire body stiff. Like a first-year fool, she had broken the Cardinal Rule of the Inquisitor—Forever be vigilant in God’s holy mission, for Lucifer’s followers walk amongst us.

Even knowing that the demon would likely return to the scene of its crime, Aimée had felt safe with the broad daylight beaming down outside the café and had allowed herself to become completely absorbed in a disturbing article about a priest of the Faith from that morning’s paper; one that had given her full-body goosebumps and commanded her full attention as an Inquisitor. A young Father Erabus, with no prior history of depression or mental disorder, had gone to the local park yesterday afternoon and shot himself in the head immediately after delivering a perplexing sermon to his flock upon the rising of Satan and the sickness within.

Aimée set the newspaper aside so she had a better path to reaching for her gun.

The demon, oblivious, lifted her hand from the pulverized phone and shook bits of broken glass back to the table, then slid into the booth across from her. “So.” Deceptively—as creatures of darkness always were—she looked like just a girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, fresh out of high school, with death-pale skin and unnatural yellow eyes that were too big for her head.

“So,” the demon said, casually brushing bits of iPhone from her knuckles, “what’s up?”

Aimée scowled and said nothing. On her belt, one of her Spaniard comrades back in Eagle River chattered to the others, their voices merely a fuzzy whisper. Got the barghest in our sights. Has that feylord with him. Do we take them both out?

The demon cocked her head at Aimée, then reached across the table and, holding Aimée’s gaze eye-for-eye, yanked the radio from her belt. She turned the radio around, squinted at it, and turned the volume up.

Aimée’s heart hammered slightly at that. Usually, Satan’s followers were too ignorant and behind the times to realize what a radio was.

Negative, I want the feylord alive, Inquisatrice Deuxième Zenaida said, her voice carried clearly between the space in front of them. Wait until they’re separated, then kill the barghest and capture the feylord.

The demon’s unnatural eyes widened. She pointed at the radio. “Are they talking about Jessie?”

Aimée squinted at her, refusing to give the beast anything but her silence. Let them kill me, she thought. I have served my Lord faithfully…I am content to die.

“That guy who works the kitchen back there?” the demon demanded, shoving a thumb behind her. “He’s not a feylord.”

Aimée snorted with total disdain for her lies. “Of course not.”

The demon’s delicate brows furrowed in a scowl. “Listen, you stuck-up French bitch. He’s just some hapless dude that Björn kidnapped. Not a feylord.”

Allowing none of the demon’s words to penetrate her faith, Aimée just smiled. “And yet, an entire helicopter crew returned to base yesterday saying they had not only killed you and your barghest and disposed of the bodies, but that the twelve dead men that I found in the woods about a mile from here had lost their Faith and fled the battle like cowards.” It had been the first clue that something horrible—some Secondlander mind-magics, not the usual Thirdlander cord-magics—were at work. Aimée folded her hands on the table and leaned forward. “So, naturally, as the only ones present were you, the barghest, and the missing cook, the cook must be innocent.”

The demon’s mouth fell open, allowing Aimée a glance at her fangs. Which—startlingly—still carried the extreme white of youth. Could she really be that young? she thought, a bit stunned.

“It wasn’t the cook,” the demon muttered. She sweated and glanced over her shoulder, where Aimée saw a second demon, a tall and dark-haired man in plaid sitting unobtrusively across the aisle, listening all-too-carefully while pretending to read the menu.

That’s the vampire lord we were looking for! Aimée thought, stunned as she recognized him from the single blurry picture that an agent had taken almost ten years before, at a rare moment when the creature’s image wasn’t warded against photography by a demonic haze of seiðr. They had been tracking him for centuries, and he had always managed to uproot and slip away to some other part of the world just before they could close in. Her hand twitched, slipping off the table towards her gun.

“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the vampire lord said, without looking.

Aimée judged how quickly she could get the gun unholstered, hampered as she was by the confines of the table and booth, knew she only had a fifty percent chance of putting a bullet into one of the demons before the second one killed her, even more chance of firing into the group of kids sitting behind the vampire, and left her gun where it was, unwilling to risk the lives of innocents in the café around her.

“We should take this outside,” Aimée said, watching the little girl with pigtails wiggle on her bench as she ate her blueberry waffles only inches from the demon’s back. If they were to murder her, at least they should do it in private, and not expose the café’s patrons to their brutal deviancies.

“No, I think we should do this right here,” the female demon insisted, like the selfish child of Satan she was. “What’s your name? Why the fuck did you attack me?”

“If I had attacked you, you would be dead,” Aimée said. And, while pride in one’s work was a sin, time and again, it had been proven a fact that her Faith was one of God’s most efficient weapons. She was, after all, the one called in to clear up ‘problems’ that basic Inquisitors found in the field, and Zenaida and Imelda were both busy in the north with the escaped Arabic werewolf and her pet djinni.

“Isn’t pride the deadliest sin?” the demon in front of her sneered.

Aimée leaned forward, smiling. “It is not a sin to speak the truth, démon whore.”

The demon’s smile started to fade. “You’re one to talk. I’d never hurt anybody—well, maybe Masaaki, but he was mostly OK with it—before you gun-toting fuckers tried to kill me.”

“Oh, of course.” Aimée snorted again, surprised the vampire was wasting time lying to her. Then again, demons were such deceitful creatures…

The Thirdlander demon cocked her head at her. “You don’t believe me?”

“The words of Satan’s spies are seductive lies, all,” Aimée said, quoting one of her favorite passages of the Manuel Sacré de l'Inquisiteur. “I’d be better served listening to the chitterings of a possessed hyena.”

“Wow you have an attitude problem.” The demoness cocked her head at Aimée as if considering a problem. Aimée smiled at her over her mug and sipped her disgusting, tepid American coffee, waiting for the right moment to draw her weapon and put a bullet between her unnatural yellow eyes.

From across the aisle, the Thirdlander lord said in his low Norwegian rumble, “Satisfied that they’re all just brainwashed sacks of shit yet?”

“Shush,” the queen said, still frowning at Aimée. “You realize I’m one of the good guys, right?”

“I did not know that Lucifer’s children had taken up comedy.” Aimée set her cup down and leaned forward. “You’re a natural.”

“That’s it,” the vampire lord said, slapping his menu shut and standing. “Shannon, we’re going. You too. Walk or be dragged. Too many kids here to do what needs to be done.”

The vampire queen frowned at him. “What do you mean, what needs to be done? We’re just talking to her.”

“Get up,” the demon said, coming over and snagging the radio off the table. “Both of you. We’re going outside before she axes the kids trying to get to us.”

Aimée blinked at the vampire lord’s unexpected intent to spare the children, then immediately felt her heart harden again, knowing it was yet another ruse, just an attempt to make her think he cared about massacring innocents in their holy war. She certainly didn’t object, of course, much rather going to her Lord without those deaths on her conscience than see them die because she tried to struggle.

Still, knowing she went to her death, an unclean death that most Inquisitors ultimately met, one which would most likely end in her soul captured or tainted, her spirit banished from Heaven for its contamination, she had to fight a sudden shaking in her hands. From her first days as an Inquisitor, she had known the possibility of an unclean death at the hands of the demons she fought existed, had even expected it, but nonetheless found its arrival sooner than she had anticipated. To hide her sudden apprehension in the face of what was to come, she languidly plucked her napkin from her lap, made a show of slowly wiping her mouth, and stood, her expression as placid as she could make it.

The vampire lord easily swept in behind her and took her gun from her belt. Without taking his eyes off her, he yanked the magazine free, and emptied the silver cartridge onto the floor. All hidden carefully between her body and the booth, out of sight of the rest of the patrons.

“You don’t really think she’d kill kids, do you?”

Aimée couldn’t see the vampire lord’s expression, but by the face that the demoness made, it was enough. “Oh,” the queen said, standing. The look she suddenly gave Aimée was one of both nervousness and…disgust?

“I would no more kill a child than question an angel of the Lord,” Aimée said.

Behind her, the vampire lord laughed. “Angels. Right. And barghests play with Barbies. Just go.” He shoved her with the muzzle of her own gun. “Shannon, lead her out.”

Aimée gave the two demons what she hoped was a fearless smile. She knew, of course, what the vampires would try to do to her. If she was lucky, the lord would enthrall her and proceed to rape her drugged and willing body until he grew tired of his new toy, then rip off her head.

If she was not, the demoness would enthrall her with the intent to use her as a spy against the Church.

It was why, as soon as they were out of sight of the children, Aimée would pull her backup weapon and start firing. She could not turn the muzzle upon herself, but if she could goad the beasts into killing her prematurely, she would still be allowed to meet God.

“Silver,” the vampire lord said, holding up the magazine and looking at the queen. “I know a couple somebodies who might enjoy one of these babies in the brainpan.” He seemed completely oblivious to the gun tucked in the small of Aimée’s back, which was just as well. Let him think he had the upper hand…

“Come on,” the demoness said, leaving the booth first. Coolly, Aimée followed, careful not to let the other patrons see her distress. As the uninitiated, this fight did not belong to them. The queen stiffly led them to the door, the back of her head mere feet from Aimée’s body. I will put a bullet in her, first, she thought. It would be a simple thing…so close she couldn’t miss.

Then she was opening the door, stepping outside.

“Let’s go around back,” Theo said, gesturing to the right, around the building. “This won’t take long.”

Yes, Aimée thought on a wave of hatred for the loathsome creatures. Try to perform your aberrant ritual out of sight like a coward. It will be the end of you. She kept her face unreadable, but her kept her arms loose, ready to draw on the queen the moment they were around the corner.

The demoness, for her part, seemed utterly oblivious. She turned the corner, Aimée close behind—

“Thank you for cooperating, Ma’am,” the vampire lord as he yanked the gun from the small of her back, just before Aimée reached for it. “I thought maybe if you thought you’re gonna catch us off guard and shoot us in the face, you might actually come along willingly.”

No, Aimée thought, on a wash of horror. He knew about the gun all along… She spun to kick him, then, but the vampire lord shoved her almost casually into the shadows beside the store, out of sight of the road, a dark look on his face. He handed the gun and the walkie-talkie to the demoness. “Hold this while I deal with her.”

The queen didn’t take the gun. “What are you gonna do?” she whispered. Like she actually cared about Aimée’s fate.

Probably because she wants me herself, Aimée thought, her heart starting to hammer. She didn’t give the demons the satisfaction of seeing her fear, however, and instead fashioned a sneer to take its place.

The lord scowled at Aimée. “Something I’ve been wanting to do to one of these self-righteous fucks for a very, very long time.”

Seeing the dark look in his gray eyes, Aimée lifted her chin to face her fate, knowing it was better than that of falling prey to the poison of the demoness. Still, when the vampire lord shoved her against the wall and drove his fangs into her thigh, Aimée screamed.