End Chapter 6 pp 61-64

Finsternis stopped short, causing Lucia to bounce off him into a pile of lances and spears. “Finsternis, we need to get out of here now!” Lucia did not want to see an Agent. She could only picture them as eight foot tall spiders, dripping viscous fluids smelling of rot. Diseased, hairy, eight foot tall spiders dripping rotting fluids, chittering and squelching as they moved.

“Not through the back of the shop. If the agents come in here, they will sense the power of the items hidden here and Earth will be doomed, not to mention what they would likely do to Bayarma,” he explained.

Lucia could see his point. She certainly didn’t want the kind old woman harmed in any way, nor did she want to let anyone loose with the Spear of Destiny. Yet she could not make herself move towards the agents. She couldn’t. It would have been easier to breathe water.

“You’re going to have to drag me. I just . . . can’t,” she said weakly.

Finsternis raised an eyebrow. “You suffer from a phobia?” She nodded. “Something about the power of the agents, their mandate, feeds phobias.” He picked Lucia up, threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and dashed out the front door. It was all Lucia could do not to howl and kick to be let go. Finsternis, not nearly as sensitive to agents as Lucia, stopped suddenly, turned and ran in the other direction.

Lucia twisted her head to look. No spiders, just an Orthodox priest, a nun and a man in khakis and a mint green polo shirt, silently chasing them down the street. They voiced no threats or warnings, only followed with grim determination. Lucia blinked, shook her head. It was the most unlikely trio of all time, the setup to most of the jokes she knew, in fact, but they were hardly—

For a moment the agents had too many legs and chitinous shells covered in oozing disease. Lucia blinked again. A priest, a nun and a man. Blink and they were insectoid. Blink and they were normal. Blink and the flesh dripped off their bones in rotting rivulets. Blink and they were healthy. Two blocks down the street and it was the ever-changing nature of her visions that was upsetting, not the visions themselves.

Finsternis had put some distance between them and the agents. The agents ran with fixed determination, but none of them were wearing shoes for running, the priest and the nun were both over fifty and the man in the polo shirt had at least thirty extra pounds spilling over the waistband of his khakis. Still, Finsternis was fit and physically young and should have been able to outrun the trio easily. The agents’ legs moved like pistons, untroubled by terrain or pedestrians. They were all red-faced, sweating and panting for air, but didn’t even wipe the sweat dripping into their eyes. Apparently, the agents were as unaware of their own physical states as they were the pedestrians they knocked aside. The hair at the back of Lucia’s neck stood up as she watched them.

Finsternis ducked into an alley between two Tibetan restaurants. Lucia’s first impression was that Tibetan restaurants must have the best Health Department ratings in New York, but then came the feeling of disease and despair and terror that heralded the agents of Yhwh coming from the end of the alley Finsternis was running towards.

“Fin—“

He skidded to a stop, dropping Lucia to her feet. There at the end of the alley stood a Hasidic Jewish man and a Muslim woman in hijab. Lucia giggled. Finsternis looked at her alarmed. She spread out her hands. “It’s just . . . all these people, normally at each others’ throats, united in killing us. If not for the killing us, I’d be really happy to see Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Muslims working together.”

“Yes, well I have noticed that nothing brings humans together like killing,” said Finsternis, the last word echoing in an atonal chorus. He flared, purple fire surrounding his form, then it abruptly winked out. “No need to bring angels into this, too.”

The Muslim and the Jew stopped, the priest and the nun and the man in the polo shirt slowed in their approach. So many different races and creeds, but all shared the same expression: vicious but vacuous, like a rabid dog. They shared something else, Lucia noticed, brass knuckles. Her stomach knotted. Brass, the only weapon against a demon, and all five were armed with it.

The nun acted first, lashing out with a fist faster than Lucia would have thought possible for a woman her age. Lucia idly wondered if all nuns received martial arts training. Finsternis blocked the punch with a heavy boot, breaking the nun’s arm. Lucia winced in sympathy as the nun’s arm bent at a brand new joint between her elbow and wrist, but the nun had no reaction at all other than to follow up with another strong fast punch, left-handed this time.

Finsternis dodged that one, narrowly avoiding a kick from the man in the mint green polo shirt. Lucia removed her necklace. It was heavy, its weight around her neck already uncomfortable. It also had sharp points. She grasped it by the chain, swung and hit the priest in the head as he moved in. The crunch as the heavy stylized sun connected with his skull brought tears to Lucia’s eyes. He crumpled to the ground without a sound.

“What happened to these people, Finsternis?” she whispered.

He snarled, ducked back from a punch thrown by the man in the polo shirt. “Pray enough and you get what you ask for—a life lived only to serve Yhwh. These people are not human any more, not in any way that matters.” His boot hit the man square in the abdomen. Lucia swore he could hear his spleen explode. He slid to the ground, expression never changing.

The Hasidic Jew lashed out, brass knuckles connecting with Finsternis’ left cheekbone. The skin sizzled and blackened. Finsternis growled and Lucia swung the locket across her body, turning into the swing. A point of the sun caught in the man’s neck, tearing out his windpipe as Lucia finished the spin. He made a wet gurgling sound as blood sprayed Lucia and Finsternis, but dropped without even putting a hand to his ruined neck.

That left the nun on one side and the Muslim woman on the other. They jockeyed for the next punch while tears flowed down Lucia’s cheeks and Finsternis growled, a low rumble that bounced off the walls and pooled in the shadows.

The nun stepped past Lucia, who realized that with a demon present, she was invisible. No doubt once they finished off Finsternis, they would turn on her, but for now Lucia might have been a cardboard box for all they cared. Understanding hit her. In the churches Lucia was familiar with, the most devout were so obsessed with demons as to be unseemly even to other fundamentalists. It made sense now, it was a symptom of becoming an agent.

Lucia took the locket in her right hand, the heavy gold chain dangling free, and crashed into the nun from behind, bringing them  both to the ground. Lucia shut her eyes and brought her arm down, smashing the stylized sun into the woman’s skull. The nun bucked, trying to throw Lucia off. Again Lucia smashed her hand down as hard as she could. Eyes still closed, again. From somewhere far away, Finsternis howled, bones broke and again.

Lucia raised her arm again- how many times, what would she see if she opened her eyes- and a hand grasped her wrist, held it back. She turned with a snarl of her own and opened her eyes. Finsternis held her arm. “Finsternis? Are you—“ No, he wasn’t okay. The left side of his face was swollen, his left eye a slit of violet. His hands, his elegant fingers, were scorched, the skin peeling back, several purple fingernails missing. His breathing was harsh and pained, but he was alive, standing and holding her wrist.

Lucia stood up. A brief glimpse at the nun showed a ruin of bone and blood and gobs of something she didn’t want to think about. Lucia clenched her teeth against the bile rushing up her throat.

“What-“ She swallowed. She refused to throw up on Finsternis’ boots. “What happened to your hands?”

Finsternis considered his hands briefly. “It is not as bad as it looks.” He gestured at the Muslim woman lying on the ground, her neck obviously broken. “She had on a brass collar under her hijab.”

“Clever of her,” said Lucia. Despite the churning of her stomach and mind and a desperate desire to start screaming and never stop, she sounded quite calm.

“Yes, it was. Luckily, I only touched the fabric over the collar, not the collar itself. Otherwise, I could have lost my fingers altogether.”

“Yes, lucky us.” Lucia sounded as empty as she felt. Perhaps her soul had fled, running away from the blood that covered her face and hands.

Finsternis spun with a pained gasp at the sound of footsteps in the alley, but Lucia could only look with disinterest. What did it really matter? She’d kill another agent, another ten, another thousand. She was damned. Satan was her father, she’d started off that way and now it was official.

It was Bayarma. She carried a bag and evinced no interest in the bloody corpses littering the alley. She looked at Lucia with concern. Lucia laughed hollowly. “He’s the one who’s hurt. I’m just damned.”