Evil - Chapter 17
“Look for the girl!” Kimberly shouted. “I’ll check on the woman in the kitchen!”
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.
It's not easy being the Antichrist.
Anjelica’s mother never told her that she was a demon. Now, all she wants is her old life back, but that’s not possible for her. Not after what she’s seen.
Anjelica used to be a popular cheerleader with an awesome life, but that was before an evil cult of demons tried to use her blood to open a portal to Hell and start the Apocalypse.
She was rescued from that fate, barely, and because of the imminent threat to her life, her saviors ripped her from Los Angeles and brought her to a safe house in the middle of nowhere.
They said it was for her own good, but she would rather be dead than stuck in boring, old Bronard, Missouri. She was from the big city, so a sleepy, rural life wasn’t for her.
She longed for excitement.
So, when she met a young witch with a mysterious past who promised to show her everything she knew about opening portals and traveling between distant lands, they bonded immediately
I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, right?
It’s not like they would open an intergalactic gateway to another planet and get thrown into a brand, new world with no way to get back to Earth, right?
Join Anjelica in her own solo adventure and find out what happened to her immediately after the events in Magic.
I rushed through the living room, offset from the foyer. “MARGARET!” Past the living room into what was probably a tasteful dining room before somebody flipped the table over. The scorch marks on the walls indicated there had been a battle.
“Any luck?” Kimberly said, running into the room.
“Not yet. What about the mom?”
“She’s super dead,” Kimberly said. “Looks like a couple of hours ago. Keep down this hall, and I’ll go to the other side of the house.”
I nodded and passed through the dining room. The pictures on the wall had been torn down, and the glass that encased them smashed on the ground. “Margaret!” I screamed as I pulled open the first door on my right, only to find a bathroom. Something massive was under a torn shower curtain, and I pulled it back to see a burly man with dead eyes bleeding from his mouth.
“Shit!” I shouted as I stepped back. I recognized the man as one of the agents who had chased us through the mall.
“Are you okay?” Kimberly asked, storming in, daggers drawn.
“Yeah, it’s just—” I pointed to the man in the tub.
Kimberly smirked. “Well done, Margaret.”
She took too much joy in eyeing the dead body. I pushed her back out the door and continued down the hall.
The next room was the mother’s room, where there were two more dead men on the floor. The window was shattered, and the television had blown off a nightstand across from a singed bed.
“Over here!” Kimberly shouted. I followed her voice into an open door at the end of the hall. It was filled with bookcases and books strewn across the ground. I saw something that made my stomach churn: Margaret’s wheelchair had been turned on its side.
“Margaret!” I screamed, unable to contain the terror rushing through my body. “Margaret!”
“She’s not here,” Kimberly said, matter of fact.
“How can you be so calm?” I replied. “How can—my friend—she’s gone!”
Her face turned hard. “When you ask me why I don’t think you’re ready, why I try to protect you, think back to this moment. I don’t want you to harden to this kind of thing, but this is what it takes to do the work I do. It takes ice in your veins and steel in your heart.”
“I—I—I don’t think—”
“Pull it together!” Kimberly shouted. “You’re in it now, and while I would love to call in somebody else for support, there’s no time.” Kimberly knelt and examined the books strewn across the floor. “You have to be strong if you want your friend back. Whatever they are planning, it’s happening right now.” She stood. “Remember when I said you were lucky to survive your kidnapping? Remember when I said how most people don’t?”
I nodded. “I do.”
“This is what I mean. The only thing standing between your friend becoming a statistic, and maybe even the end of the world as we know it, is us. I need you to be strong. Can you do that?”
I fought back tears. “Yes, yes I can.”
“Good,” she said. “Now, I need something, something important to her. Look around for it.” She turned to me. “I need it to be important to both of you.”
What could be important to both of us? I barely knew her; all we did was drink tea and go to the mall—then I saw it. Strewn on the ground in the wreckage of the room, the black opal necklace. The chain was broken as if it had been ripped off her neck, but the pendant was intact.
“Here!” I shouted, reaching for it. “Will this work?”
“Was it important to you?”
I nodded. “It was. You gave it to me when you left me that first time with Junebug and Carl. I gave it to her that first time we hung out, after the mall.”
Kimberly nodded. “Let’s just hope it was important to her, too.”
She reached up before I could protest and yanked two hairs from my head, then ran into the bathroom. When I found her, she was pulling hair from a brush in the bathroom as the dead man looked on. The sight of him made me jerk back.
“Come on.” Kimberly pushed me into the kitchen. “This part is going to make you gag.”
She dipped her finger into the pool of blood and drew a circle. Inside, she drew what looked to be a bunch of squiggly lines and wrapped the pendant with both my hair and Margaret’s before placing it in the middle of the circle. “Give me your hand.”
“Gross,” I said, placing my hand into Kimberly’s bloody one.
She held my hands, pulled me into the middle of the circle, and bowed her head. “Sanguis sanguinem, vinculum ex corde, duce nos utu nus ex nobis.”
The pendant rose into the air, shaking violently, and then exploded into a bright white light, covering us in its white glow. Kimberly pulled me close and hugged me so tightly I could barely breathe, and then, in a flash, we disappeared.
***
We reappeared in a room bathed in light. My eyes hurt, fighting their natural instinct to close at the sight of the brightness. A pulsating whirl echoed off the stone walls and concrete floor as I wobbled to my feet. I never much enjoyed the ether but combined with the sights and sounds of the room, I was more disoriented than I normally was when rematerializing.
Two shadows dotted the white light on the other end of the room, and I held my arm up to shade my eyes. As I stepped closer, the shadows molded into shapes that I recognized. One, a girl, my friend, Margaret. The other, a tall, bald man, one of the ones that tried to chase us down in the mall. Maybe the last one left.
“Margaret!” I screamed at her.
“Anjelica?” Margaret’s voice was brittle and cracking. “You have to run!”
“I’m not going anywhere without you!” I shouted back, stout and resolute.
The man’s shadow eclipsed the source of the light, and he towered over me, holding a serrated knife. He had a thick Australian accent, and his teeth were moldy from lack of brushing. “We’ll see about that.”
The man sliced at me, and I jumped back to dodge. He missed me once, but he was quick, and when he swiped again, he sliced me across the shoulder. I stumbled back. The cut didn’t hurt much, at least not as much as I expected, for the size of it.
“You made a mistake coming here,” the man said. “Last one you’ll ever make.”
“We’ll see about that,” a voice grumbled. I turned to see Kimberly leap toward the man, knocking him back with a kick to the sternum. Blue, ethereal wings fluttered behind her as she tapped her feet on the ground and readied her daggers.
The man shouted and rushed forward, but Kimberly ducked his attack like a matador taunting a bull. He sliced at her, and she slid out of the way. By his third attack, she was done playing games. She knocked the knife out of his hand with one swipe and stabbed him through the chest with another, sending him flying backward into the white light, where he disappeared.
“Margaret!” I shouted, rushing over. She was tied to the chair, blood from a cut in her stomach pooling on the ground.
“It’s a summoning circle,” Kimberly said, pointing down to the circle surrounding Margaret’s chair. “This isn’t good.”
“Cut her free,” I said.
“She’s in the middle of the summons. If I do that, I could kill her.”
“Keeping her in there will kill her.” Tears flowed down my cheeks. The man’s knife was on the ground, and I grabbed it. I started hacking away at Margaret’s rope bonds. “I’ll do it if you won’t.”
Kimberly grabbed my hand. “You don’t understand. Magic this powerful could destabilize the whole world, and then she’ll be dead, and you along with it.” She knelt down. “I have to break the summon first, but this is more complicated—it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Margaret’s eyes rolled back in her head. She needed a hospital.
“You have fifteen seconds, and then I’m cutting her out. She’s not dying today.”
“That’s not enough time,” Kimberly replied.
“I don’t care.”
Kimberly cursed me under her breath, but I didn’t care. I had made one friend since I came to Missouri, and she wasn’t going to die. Not if I had anything to say about it.
“Last chance,” I said.
Kimberly looked down. “You realize I could kill you right now and then—”
“Then do it!” I screamed. “Kill me or let me cut her free. Three, two, o—”
She took a deep breath. “I hope this works.” She took her knives and cut through the summoning circle, breaking the line of blood. The light flickered, and the sound undulated unnaturally. Both pulsated faster and faster, faster and faster, until a thunderous explosion shot me backward. A torrent of wind sucked me forward, and I tumbled through the room until—it was over, and I fell on the ground.
My head slammed on the floor. Something was different. I wasn’t lying on cold concrete but warm hardwood. I looked around and realized I was no longer in a shady basement, but a bright, airy coffee shop. All of the patrons eyed me and an unconscious, bleeding Margaret laid in front of me. Across the shop, somebody tended to a dead man with one of Kimberly’s knives dug deep in his chest.
“Kimberly?” I whispered, groggy and concussed. She was nowhere to be found. I was alone, and I had no idea where I was. Perfect.
This is a portal fantasy series with mythological roots and action-adventure tendencies. You can search through all my work on my website.