Firecracker Ch. 02

"It's okay, Will." Isaac said softly.

No. Willem thought. It wasn't okay. His employer didn't care about Isaac. If he didn't know what Bad Wound was capable of, he would have punted the little bitch across the campsite. He bent down to look at a sleeping bag that had been flayed open by claws. There was only one bloodspot. In the center. He snapped his fingers.

"Enchilada!" He barked. He spoke the binding words. The symbol of the contract they had bound between them.

The wisp rushed out of the headlight. Sliding over the ground rapidly until he was bouncing around Willem's feet. He was pulsing a soft indigo, bouncing and spinning weightlessly, a little cheerful ball of ectoplasm. Willem heard Isaac gasp.

"Why are you so happy?" Willem said sharply. "A little decorum?"

The wisp pulsed red once, then his light brightened and steadied so he was the same color as the hissing Coleman lantern.

"The bodies have already been taken by the Fish. The five that were in this campground were only taken." Willem picked up the shredded bloodied sleeping bag. "Sorry I snapped at you, Enchilada. But I want to find them. Can you find them?"

The wisp rushed up at him. Lit on the fingertips of his left hand and zoomed down his arm, across the span of his shoulders, and jumped dizzyingly off of his right fingertips. While he did so, he flashed in every color of the rainbow, and then some. Willem was forgiven. Then the wisp jumped inside the shredded sleeping bag. The bag rippled and twisted with the wisp flurrying around inside. Flashing red and blue, like a police car.

Willem looked over at Isaac, who had crept forward to watch the wisp work. Despite everything, Willem had to smile at the look on Isaac's face. He seemed slightly spellbound. "He's so... pretty. I thought he would be almost invisible, like the dreamer, or just a shimmer, like Izarys."

The wisp bolted out of the sleeping bag and dashed in three mad circles around Isaac, flashing bright purple. "No... Don't be afraid. He likes you, Iz. He's a vain little thing."

The wisp flashed green and bounced off of Willem's head before racing away through the trees, flashing red and blue again. The resemblance to emergency lights was not accidental.

"What are Fish?" Isaac asked him. Willem was digging in his suitcase, looking for that damned yellow candle. Whelk answered before he hand the chance.

"Fish just means officials, halfman." She took out a phone and sent a text. "And if you're done with the site, we have to get out of here. Boss only has so much sway with these Fish."

Willem was startled by Isaac gently shoving him out of the way and closing the suitcase. The slim boy unzipped an outer pocket and took out a fat corn-colored stub of candle. "The yellow is for connections, right? You were looking for this one?"

"Yeah, how...?"

Isaac rolled his eyes and picked up the suitcase. "You heard what she said. We have to get out of here, and you always forget when you leave something in the outer pocket."

"Your boy's right." Bad Wound had something that might have been a smile at the corner of her puckered mouth. "Hurry it up."

Willem flushed and lit the candle with a word, following them and cupping his hand around the flame to protect it. At least she wasn't calling Isaac a pet.

--

Isaac sat in the passenger seat of Jo-Ann's SUV while Willem sat in the back, cupping his candle and not moving an inch, or saying a word. A white rabbit-foot hung from the rearview mirror, and the far back was filled with a dozen pieces of matching red luggage. It smelled like menthol cigarettes and rancid cooking oil.

"Will?" He asked quietly, "Are you—"

The tiny woman behind the wheel reached over and snapped her fingers in front of his nose, startling him into silence. "Hesh. He's binding his mind with that little rainbow sprinkle, and he needs to concentrate. Pretzel?"

Isaac looked doubtfully at the bag in her hand. "I... I thought you didn't want me here."

She looked at him over her red horn-rims. "I don't. But that doesn't mean you don't want a pretzel. I was a bitch, and it's probably for the best that you're here." She gave the pretzel bag a little shake. "If that red cunt is after you, best to run with him. He's just about the only one who gives her pause. Even Boss is wary around her. So, pretzel?"

"Sure. Thank you."

Willem pulled out of his trance suddenly, startling the half-demon into dropping his pretzels.

"Shit. Shit. Shit shit-shit-shit... SHIT."

He pinched the candle out and threw his body back in the seat, snapping his head back against the headrest with enough force to make the seat tremble.

Isaac couldn't sit forward, he turned around, biting his lip, not knowing what to say. This wasn't like the other times. This felt a whole lot more real. People were dead, and they were in danger.

Jo-Ann broke the silence. "We weren't part of your little séance, Willy, I don't want to guess."

Willem spoke without an inflection in his voice. Without lifting his head to make eye contact. "Seven dead, four missing. Tell the Fish that they'll find her at the bottom of the north face. And the southeast."

That couldn't be it. That wasn't all of it. Isaac reached and took one of Willem's hands, squeezing it. "What else?" He asked softly. Willem's hand was limp for a moment, and then he squeezed back. Hard, almost to the point of pain.

"It took the last four to the top of the rock. Unless we have a helicopter that I don't know about..."

Jo-ann already had a phone clamped against her ear. Her bun had come loose from it's moorings. It waggled at the back of her neck when she moved her head in small fast increments, looking out all windows, like a trapped animal. She started speaking rapidly in a different language. It took Isaac a surprised moment to realize she was speaking French.

"Willem?"

The older man didn't answer. Isaac could see his hands on the armrests of the backseat. Rhythmically clenching and unclenching. Isaac watched the knuckles go white, then pink, when white. This wasn't right. Willem was the one who had the answers. The one who was in control.

Maybe it's my turn to have the answer. The thought pushed Isaac to ask again. "Willem, do you know what this demon is? You said that the agency had been monitoring it before."

For a long moment, the only sound was Jo-Ann's rapid French, punctured by fragments of silence. Isaac wondered if he was even going to answer. Not for the first time that day, he wished that he had just stayed home.

"It was one of the dangerous kind, an Iblis. Most demons are insubstantial in this dimension, so their intelligence is also unstable. Fragmented. Most are stupid as rocks, and that's why they don't get into trouble. K'taal doesn't just have intelligence. It has speech, it has a thinking animosity towards humans. And he's gone insane. Dreamers, Incubi, Succubi, it doesn't matter. They only take as much energy as they need. K'taal is devouring whole human souls, and getting stronger with each one. It wont stop."

Willem leaned forward slowly, resting his head in his hands. "And it's hurting them. K'taal's angry at them and it's hurting them. It's not using Glammour or anything. It's too far away for us to reach it, and Enchilada was almost killed just trying to get a glimpse of it."

"Couldn't we lure him down somehow?" Isaac felt his stomach get fluttery and knotted up. He had an idea. A half-formed, awful idea.

Whelk tossed her phone onto the dashboard with an authoritative whap. "We can get the Fish to go up to the top for the victims, but we need to clear that freak out of there, first. Your boy-toy is right, Willem. What do you have in your box of tricks that could lure that thing down?"

Willem made them both jump by slamming his fist against the inside of the door. "Nothing!" He spat. "Nothing that will work. My cunt mother already made it wary. It's holed up on it's tower, and it'll attack any Fish that go up there. We need to find a way to get ourselves up there. And quick. It's torturing them. One at a time. Raping them. Killing them.

Isaac decided it was time to snap him out of it. "Willem, shut the fuck up." It was the first time he had ever said something like that, and the look that his lover gave him was almost enough to shut him up. Almost. "Punching the car isn't going to do a goddamn thing, and I don't see you suggesting anything. Forget about your mother, there are people getting hurt!"

It was time to ask. Time to ask about that terrible, awful idea. "You said he wasn't using Glammour. Can Glammour effect other demons?"

The guilty look on Willem's face evaporated instantly into something else. A new, stony kind of anger. "No. Absolutely not. Abso-fucking-lutely not. Don't even think like that."

Jo leaned over, eyes bright behind her red plastic horn-rims. "Shut up Willem, you said he could help, and he's being a better help than you, right now. So answer his question."

Isaac could see the cords in Will's neck. See a darkness in the look he threw at the old woman's way. He quailed only a little when Willem turned that look on him. His silvery eyes looked brighter than ever. "Isaac." He spoke softly. "This thing has already killed seven people. It didn't just kill them, no. It paralyzed them with it's breath before raping them, flaying their skin off an inch at a time. It eviscerated them. Desecrated their flesh. This isn't a human, that you can just swallow whole without a second thought!"

"Like what I did to my dad? Is that what you mean?" Isaac didn't know it was possible for his own voice to sound so cold. The air felt hot though. Very hot. He could see beads of sweat on Willem's brow. "Tell me Will. Can I use Glammour on this thing, or not?"

"Isaac!" It was the first time Jo had used his name. "He's a wretched son of a cunt, but calm down." The small wiry hand on his arm was rough as horn, but gentle. She didn't flinch away. Even though heat was emanating off of him in visible shimmery waves. "We're not going to let that Iblis touch him, Will. That's the point. You're boyfriend is ready, willing, and able. We have to do this. Every second we bicker, K'taal is skinning or eviscerating."

Caught between the three prongs of Isaac, Jo, and logic, Willem finally gave in. Leaning forward. "It will work, but Iz?"

Isaac had cooled down, but the air all around him still felt hot and soupy. Jo-ann was looking at her fingertips, pink and scalded. He looked at Willem, feeling scared and angry and very cold.

"Listen to everything I say, Iz. I mean it. K'taal is wary. Twice-shy. If I put any protection on you, even a protective circle, K'taal will smell it, will know it's there. I'm going to use you as bait, and bait usually gets..." Willem could barely choke the words out. "Bait gets swallowed. You don't have to do this, Isaac. I can't promise that I can protect you, so please."

Isaac pushed the car door open. Willem mirrored his movements. When they were standing outside, in the near-dark, Isaac squeezed the older man as hard as he could. Burying his face into Willem's shirt, smelling sweat, not caring. "I do have to, Will. I killed my own dad. I can save these people. Don't try to take that away from me."

Willem kissed the top of his head. "That's my Firecracker. You're right. Let's get started." He sounded about as enthusiastic as a man getting ready for surgery without anesthesia. "No goddamn time like the present."

--

Bonds were hard to establish. But far harder to break.

So while Willem prepared his partner to be a fucking worm on a hook, he could feel Enchilada in a corner of his mind. The wisp loved bright colors, and had tied his emotions to them. Blinding white pulses of fear and wretched dark veins of pain bled through the back of Willem's mind. He couldn't get the wisp to stop. The little thing was so afraid that he was huddling in the headlight socket, weeping in the only way he knew how, by strengthening the bond between the two of them and sharing the awfulness of what he had seen in vibrant skewed images and splashes of bleeding color.

He needed to concentrate. Enchilada, while exceedingly bright for a wisp, was frightened out of what little speech and clarity he possessed.

"Will?" Isaac's voice snapped him out of the chromatic bruise of Enchilada's fear. "Will, wh-what is this for?" Willem caught the tremor. Isaac's hands were already untying the drawstring of his sweatpants. But he wanted an answer. His coal-red eyes were fixed on Willem's. Despite his composure, he was probably as scared as the gibbering wisp in Willem's head.

Willem reached and pulled down the zipper of Isaac's sweatshirt. He was gentle, sliding the sweatshirt off of his shoulders. "I'm going to mark you as a sacrifice. It will extend the range of your Glammour, but just to him. You're going to stick in his craw. He wont be able to ignore you." Willem pulled Isaac's t-shirt over his head, the young man lifting his arms to help. It was very dark. The only light now came from the stars and the faraway emergency lights, pulsing in time with the blood in Willem's temples.

In the almost-dark, Isaac's thin chest glowed like ivory. Willem bent down to his suitcase, opening it up. He moved his finger past the rows of candles and boxes of chalk. To a rarely opened pocket containing half a dozen plastic bottles of body paint. He'd bought them at craft stores, and added one or two ingredients of his own.

Isaac kept his sweatpants up as Willem squirted some of the bright red paste on his finger. The stuff wasn't red like Isaac's eyes. It was a flat plasticky candy-apple color.

Jo could barely see in the dark, but she saw him pause. "We don't have time to fuck the dog, Picasso, get painting."

Willem was running on his own short fuse, clouded by Enchilada. It was only Isaac's hand on his shoulder that quieted him. The young man looked up at him. "C'mon, Will. She's right. We don't have time." He took a shaky breath. "Just slather me up, before I lose my nerve."

He started at the base of Isaac's throat. When he had first seen him, those collarbones had stood out in sharp contrast, like wings. He dabbed the paint into the hollow, and Isaac gasped at the coldness of the paint. Willem traced a quick practiced circle. The apogee was level with the notch of Isaac's collarbones, the bottom curve at his solar plexus. Willem slashed the circle in five places, breaking it with hyphens of red paint.

"Turn around, Iz." Willem murmured. Isaac did as he was told. His vestigial wings were folded tightly to his shoulder blades. Willem touched one with his clean hand, he could feel Isaac trembling. Willem kissed Isaac between his shoulders, on soft downy skin between his wings, before replacing his lips with cold candy-apple paint.

The markings for a sacrifice were very specific. Broken protection circles, not in protective blue or standard white, but in a sickly red. The color of supplication, invitation, invocation.

When he was done, Isaac was naked, and marked, shivering on a dirt road under and overturned bowl of dim alien stars. The monolith of Devil's Tower blotted out the remainder of a clotted purple sunset.

"Lucky for us, K'taal made it's nest on top of a ley line. We're on it, too. Bad Wound and I will be off the line, so it wont sense us. Don't breathe in if it tries to get close. The breath will paralyze you. We're going to be a hundred yards away, Iz. I'm going to have Min, and I'm going to put a protection on myself. When it comes..."

Willem took a hard angry breath. "When it comes, you'll have to trap it. We can't come in unless it's guard is down... Or if it's trapped." Willem clenched his fists and his teeth. "This is sick. This is so fucking sick."

"I can do this, Will." There it was. That vein of steel Isaac always had in him. "Hell. I'm made to do this. Of course I'm scared out of my mind, but I have to." Despite the brave words, Isaac's tail was pressed firmly between his legs, trembling.

"I know you will, Firecracker."

Isaac wanted to kiss him, Will knew. But he had paint on his lips. Willem kissed his hairline between his polished black horns, and ducked into Bad Wound's car.

Isaac looked so small behind them.

--

Once, Isaac had stumbled in the dark like a human. Since that day, that horrible black day when his tattoos faded and his wings grew, his night vision was almost as good as his day vision.

He couldn't see the SUV though. It was too far away. He had never felt more alone in his life.

He turned his eyes up, to the apex of the mountain of nowhere. K'taal. He thought. We're coming for you, K'taal.

He hadn't used his Glammour since Willem picked him up. Had never used it on purpose. But doing it again felt natural as breathing. Comfortable as slipping on a pair of old shoes. It felt like casting a net, thinner than spider's silk, stronger than bone.

And he was trawling for one very special catch.

He could feel what Willem had called the ley line. It was humming under his feet, only a few inches wide, but it amplified the Glammour, let him cast it further and farther. He could sense life. All sorts of life. Human, animal, even demon. But they slipped through his Glammour. They weren't what he was looking for.

Isaac stood in the middle of the dirt road, his bare painted feet straddling the ley line. To a watcher, it would look like he flinched without reason.

He could sense the Iblis. Sense a massive slavering thing, thrusting and furious. A tangle of rage and lust and pain. A maddened animal, tempered by a cold vicious intelligence. It went against all of his Incubi instincts, but he tightened his Glammour on K'taal.

Isaac gave a shuddering gasp as the Iblis lunged. He was alone and naked on the dirt road, and he could feel the thing rushing closer, careening down the tall sheer face of the starless lichstone outline. He could hear rocks tumbling from the cliff face to the sloping hill of scree and boulders below. Stones that had held steady for millennia, shaken loose now by a demon on the hunt.

"I can do this." He whispered. "I'm half-Incubus. I was made for this. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck."

K'taal had halved the distance between them in less than ten seconds. Isaac just barely muffled a shout to Willem. The Iblis would certainly hear him. The creature was maddened by Glammour, but not helpless with it.

He could see it. Oh fuck, he could see it. A huge humped shadow lunging down the boulders of the scree hill. A beast, but with too many legs. A beast that moved faster than any mortal beast that had any business in North America.

It was everything he could do not to run. He faced down the thing that made the ground shake. The tremors numbing his bones through the soles of his feet. He could see it's hide, black and shiny like crude oil. An impression of a hideous elongated snout, not an upper and lower jaw, but more like a cruel three-pronged beak. A mane of long stiff quills that clacked and rustled like dry bones, a dozen dragonfly wings, thrumming and humming, lashing Isaac's face with veils of grit and stench. The thing stared at him with an asymmetrical ring of oilblack eyes around it's long tearing mouth. The eyes were loose and jiggling in their sockets, like jelly, or a cluster of soft poisonous eggs. There was a cold mad intelligence in those eyes.

Isaac took a shaky breath, and drew in his net. It took ignoring every instinct he had to lure in the rapid freak in front of him. "Come on." He squeaked. "Come on, then."

The thing hissed. Isaac moaned and covered his ears. The hissing hurt his ears. It was like a million wasps, a death rattle, the thing's breath washed over him, reeking of dust and rotten meat, cold as a grave. Isaac closed his mouth and eyes, not letting any of it in. It circled him thrice. It was too fast. Isaac was choking with fear. It was all he could do to keep up the Glammour. Will was right. The Iblis wasn't buying it. It was already wounded. Two of it's muscular shadowlegs dragged. It's tail ended two feet behind it's hindquarters, dripping noxious black fluid from the thick wounded stump.