The Seal of Solomon (Alfred Kropp #2)(26)

Thousands of demons—maybe tens of thousands— careened above us, diving, swooping, stalling briefly, then zipping away faster than you can blink, glimmering forms of men in flowing robes. They rode beasts with wings sparking with golden fire, the wings at least ten feet from tip to tip, with yawning mouths stuffed with fangs, hanging open as if frozen in midscream. I saw lions and tigers and bears and other beasts that I knew I should recognize. They reminded me of roadkill: you knew they lived once, but now they were twisted and smashed into distorted versions of what they once were.

Their screams mixed with the roaring wind and the whispering of the damned.

But they didn’t look like your typical comic book or movie demons—not like those hunkered gargoyles or the little grinning guys with pitchforks and horns growing out of their bald heads. These riders were seven feet tall at least. They wielded swords of fire, lances, or staffs that burned at the tips but weren’t consumed. This close to them I could see now the source of the orange and red light was the demons themselves; it radiated from their eyes and their open mouths.

Some wore flaming crowns, and the light springing from their eyes was especially harsh, purer and brighter than the light of the crownless ones, which was flecked with black. The light made it impossible for me to see their faces—not that I really wanted to see their faces.

Abby’s voice crackled in my headset, tinged with barely controlled panic: “Base One, Base One, this is Insertion Team Delta. We have a Level Alpha Intrusion Event. Repeat: confirm L Alpha Event! Request immediate air support at these coordinates!”

As I held down the trigger, the 3XD kept firing, and my shoulder began to ache from the kickback. I emptied my clip and fumbled at the belt for a fresh one, but then I couldn’t figure out how to eject the spent cartridge, and I wasted a few precious seconds yanking on it, trying to pull it free from the rifle.

The noise was horrible, the screaming of the flying road-kill, the howling of the wind, the shouts and static over the speakers in my helmet, the booming of the 3XDs. When a round slammed into one of the demons, it blew apart in an explosion of sparkling light mixed with black, but only for a few seconds. I watched, horrified, as the thing reassembled itself and was whole again. I remembered Op Nine’s words on the plane: What has never lived cannot be killed.

Holding them off was the best we could hope for, but our ammunition wouldn’t last forever, and then what?

I finally found the release button for ejecting the cartridge. It plopped hissing into the sand as I slammed a fresh one into the slot and yanked the trigger. About that same time, the demon swarm leaped straight up, dwindling into the velvet blackness of the desert sky.

A voice shouted in my ear, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

The noise died away until all I could hear was my own ragged breath inside the helmet. Even the whispering faded, but the memory of it lingered, like a slowly dying echo. We watched their shapes circle high above in concentric rings of fire, each ring turning in the opposite direction of the other one.

The eerie silence was shattered by a terrific roar, and my heart jumped. Ashley tugged on my sleeve and pointed toward the main body of demons about three football fields away. Something was coming toward us, moving slowly across the desert, bellowing as it came.

Beside me, Op Nine murmured, “ ‘Behold the Ninth Spirit, Paimon, the Great King, second only to Lucifer, in the form of a Man sitting upon a Dromedary.’ ”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I sure didn’t know what a dromedary was, but whatever it was, it didn’t sound good. Op Nine stood up and then everybody stood up and we waited for the bellowing thing to come.

It was huge, standing over ten feet from its hooves to the top of its slightly flattened head. Bulging red eyes, a neck thick and gnarled as a tree trunk, globules of slobber hanging from its open mouth.

“That’s not a dromedary,” I said. “That’s a camel.”

It stopped a dozen yards from our circle. It stopped, but the bellowing didn’t. This perverted memory of an animal was in some serious pain.

A man-shape balanced on the forward hump, with a shining face like those of the demon-lords who circled high above us, lean and almost girl-like with its large eyes, delicate nose, and full, sensuous lips. A crown glittered on its head, spewing radiant light, red and gold and aqua and green, that shot out from its brow like laser beams.

A dark shape fell away from the rear hump of the monster camel and dropped to the sand. It walked slowly toward us, and beside me Op Nine whispered, “Hold, hold.” He had pulled off his helmet, so the rest of us followed suit.

He was ordinary size, the man who now walked toward us, and he didn’t carry a flaming sword or burning staff or anything like that. His head was bare. He wore a white robe that had come open, so beneath it I could see his khakis and white Lacoste polo.

And, of course, he was smacking gum.

“Hey, guys, how’s it goin’?” Mike Arnold asked.

22

“Michael,” Abigail said.

“Abby Smith—hey, it’s pleasing as pickles to see you! I don’t care what they said in headquarters, you’re still a heck of a field agent in my book, and by the way you look just fantastic in that jumper.”

He looked at Op Nine. “Figured you’d be here, Padre. Sort of the culmination of your whole career, huh. No thanks necessary.”