Mackie

“Hel-en!” the monster said.  A pair of its arm-legs were raised in fury.  “Hel-en!”

“If you can create a Sanctified shield, you can’t be Feral,” she said.  “And that’s really, impossibly strong Sanctity.”

“Hel-en!”

“So, I guess we can be friends after all.  Sorry about trying to kill you and all but it was an honest mistake.”

An honest mistake?  Friends?  But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t almost happy to see her.  For one thing, if this monster sensed a connection with us then I supposed we really were family and I’d never had a sister before.  For another, she was an infinitely more rational enemy than the demon.  And, of course, the demon hated her so she must have hurt it and perhaps she could hurt it again.

“Hel-en!” the demon said.  It sidled closer to her.

“Have we met?” she asked it.  “Because you’re just plain rude.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out an outrageously large gun.  The creature paused then sped forward.

“Not it’s eyes!” I shouted.  I don’t know where I got the oxygen from.  Breathing had become impossible. I was drowning in blood.

“Right,” Helen said.  She shot it square in the forehead.  How did she handle a hand cannon like that?   Helen’s bullet hit and the demon cried out.  She followed with two or three more shots, all placed around its head.  Each bullet exploded through the creature and sent its mucus-like blood in all directions.  When the blood splattered on our holy shield—as Helen called it—it burned away instantly, leaving a truly repugnant smell in its place, like a rotted egg turned into a Limburger omelet.

The monster slowed but it reached Helen anyway.  It hacked at her and she nimbly jumped forward and sideways into a row of pews, disappearing from my view. 

“Hel-en!”  it said.  “You kill my kin, I kill yours.”  For a second, nothing happened.  The monster started searching through pews. 

Helen reappeared—on the opposite side of the church, balancing on the edge of a pew.  “What is it talking about?  Kill its kin?”

She looked at me and I found myself shrugging. 

“Shoot it,” Father Paul said.  Not really a very priestly suggestion but nonetheless a good one. 

Helen fired another two rounds.  Her bullets clearly hurt the creature much more than mine had but they didn’t stop it.  It found and threw a candleholder at Helen with great force.  But Helen flipped over it, landed just where’s she’d been balancing, and fired twice more. 

“Fuck!” she said.  She started rummaging through her back for another clip.  The demon recognized an opportunity.  It jumped onto the pews and charged towards her.  Helen ignored it and concentrated on rooting through her purse (presumably for a spare clip). The monster closed and slashed at her.  It missed her but Helen’s purse flew out of her hands and she scurried back away from the monster.

Without considering my options or thinking clearly, I seized the light around Father Paul and me.  A piece of it broke off into my hand and—now this was odd part—became a solid spear.  Well, it felt solid but it was clearly light.  The sense of it defied me but sense had fled my life forever.  I tossed the spear at the monster with all my newfound might.

“Goddamn it!”

I missed.

The spear continued to the wall and terrible thoughts about what might happen assailed me.  I could picture it going through the wall and killing someone on the other end.  Thankfully, it dissipated harmlessly as if my worrying could destroy it.  Which, I realized, was exactly the case.  I controlled this light.

Helen, meanwhile, survived without my intervention but not without injury.  The monster had cut her shirt open and drawn blood but the wound seemed shallow but would slow her down.  Was I worried about her?  Yes, somehow, I was.  The irony—and this took a while to get my mind around even when I discovered it was true—was that Helen was considerably more injured than I was.  I should have been the one fighting this monster hand to hand. 

I tugged at a chunk of the holy light and formed another spear. 

Helen bounced from pew to pew flipping deftly.  The demon followed, bowling over pews, using its bizarre hand/feet to slide up and down pillars, and otherwise creating a ruckus that would surely attract attention.  Once in a while, Helen would lash out at the monster with a foot or a fist.  But her blows seemed ineffective and hollow while the monster delivered small, annoying cuts time and time again.  The monster, forced into responding to Helen’s kinetic fighting style, traveled so erratically that I never had a clear shot.  

“Keep praying,” I said to Father Paul.  We still had a good deal of holy shield left.  I shifted my spear to my left hand and grabbed more light.  Ignoring the strangeness of holding light as if it were a real material, I concentrated instead on the strangeness of commanding it into a shape a desired.  A lasso.  I kept the bulk of the lasso tied to the shield.  If I was right, the shield would anchor the rope and I could hogtie me a demon.

Helen danced and fought with the monster but she apparently never lost sight of what I was doing.  Before I could verbalize my intent, she lured the monster within my range.  She headed to the back of the church and then cut up the aisle.  The monster, at last having clear running space, seemed delighted to pursue her.  They rushed towards me. 

But then a sprinting Helen slid sideways to a halt just like an ice skater.  Her sneakers screeched on the church marble.  The monster closed on her and seemed destined to grab her.  She dove under its legs and slid out the other side.

The monster stopped itself even more efficiently than Helen.  It just dug its toes into the floor and changed direction. 

Now!  I tossed my lasso around its torso and this time my aim was true.  The monster bellowed in fury—more so since the lasso instantly encircled it, no tugging on my part was necessary.  I tugged anyway.  Hell, I yanked with all my strength and pulled the monster off its feet.  The tiles on the church floor came out with its toes but it was on the ground. 

“Tighten the rope,” Helen shouted.

“How?” I said.  It was true, the line was slack. 

“It’s your energy!” she said.  “Imagine it taunt!”

That’s what I did and the rope obeyed.  The demon went mad.  It seized the rope but its “hands” burned.  I realized the rope injured it.  Maybe I should just tighten it and I started to do so…

“No!” Helen said.  She was now, impossibly, next to me.  “The light’s not that strong!  Throw the damn spear!  No!”  The last no was because I missed again. The monster, with all its thrashing about, eluded the weapon. 

Now it was leashed but a leash only keeps an animal chained to one area.  The demon realized that and stopped struggling.  Instead, it headed towards me.  Helen jumped maybe twenty feet straight in the air.  My lord!  No wonder she’d survived my couch-bat.  She’d probably rolled with the force, let herself be thrown, then probably landed and ran.  Or maybe…

The monster charged.  God, if only I’d known how truly strong and solid I was it would have been one sorry demon.  But instead, like Helen, I leaped away.  And like Helen, bad knee or no, I leapt maybe twenty feet. 

Of course, she bounced to a pillar, twisted her body, and leaped in a different direction, eventually ended up in the upper pews.  I hit the pillar, broke my arm, and spun in the air before landing hard on that now broken arm.

The amazing thing was how clear headed I was after the head trauma that should have resulted.  My arm hurt impossibly but by now the pain was everywhere so what was one more wound?

I heard Helen scream, “No, run away, don’t just stand there!”

Father Paul.  I stood up in time to witness in the most agonizing and slow way, the death of Father Paul.  The shield no longer protected him—I had torn too many pieces away—but he stayed put and kept praying.  He must have known he would die but he probably thought the shield came from his faith alone.  The shield was mostly mine, I knew, but it was too late to tell him.  The demon hit Father Paul with awesome force and he was projected backwards and up over the tabernacle.  I’d seen so much impossible power that somehow I thought, he’ll survive, but of course he couldn’t possibly.  He left blood and brain against the dove mosaic as slid slowly down until his body splayed over the tabernacle itself.

“No!” I shouted.  My light spear!  Where was it?  I got up and ran towards the monster. 

The demon attacked the chunk of light chaining it.  It chipped it away like a jackhammer and pieces of light hurdled in all directions.  Most of these chunks dissipated instantly but a clump landed near me.   

I scooped up the clump with my broken arm before it could dissipate.  I missed entirely the impossibility of doing anything with a broken arm—maybe at the time I didn’t believe the arm was broken.  The chunk became a spear and, yes, broken arm notwithstanding, I hurled it straight at the monster.

This time, I hit it perfectly.  Almost too perfectly.  My spear actually traveled into the lasso but luckily my light power can overlap.  The spear skewered the creature and I had the satisfaction, quite limited at this point, of hearing the monster scream.  It lashed out at the light shield and took out a big enough chunk that it tore itself free.  Staggering, the beast sped away, the light lasso fading now that it was deprived of its source.

Helen landed on the creature’s body.  Savagely, she pounded her fists into it, stunning it for just a second.  Then she put her hands on the light spear and twisted it cruelly. 

Except the cruel part was only that her hands went straight through if it were, well, light and the monster, stunned no longer, twisted its body one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.  Helen fell right off.   It stomped at her but she was already rolling backwards.

The monster fled from the church, I guessed, but my attention shifted to Father Paul.  I rushed to him as if speed could somehow save his spent life.  His body had came to rest on the tabernacle which seemed obscene to me.  His eyes were opened in surprise but they seemed serene.  Not horrified at all.  I lifted him from the tabernacle because that would never do.  I laid him gently on the ground.  My head pressed against his chest and of course the tears came, my physical pain forgotten in the grief.

All that he had fought and struggle against, all the people he had helped, it had all been true, every word.  For if demons existed, then so, surely, did God.  I knew these were his dying thoughts because I suppose they matched mine and because I was now very good at mystically reading the righteous (though of course I didn’t realize that now). 

Father Paul…  I thought of the times we’d laughed and mock-flirted: of his eating an oatmeal-raisin cookie and “oohing” with delight only to find out later he hated raisins; of his bragging about his fishing skill then returning with the tiniest, throw-back-in-the-water-please sorts of fish, then insisting I cook them up; of coaxing me into preparing ten batches of cookies for a charity I’d never heard of;  of couching basketball when he’d never played a single game but somehow inspired the kids to winning through his sheer enthusiasm; of confessing and getting his constant, “what did you say?” because the man was probably hard of hearing which explains why he didn’t run away but he was too stubborn to go to an ear doctor and I suppose even if he had he would never have worn the hearing aid…

I heard the shlick-click of an automatic being cocked.   My head lifted and I shifted my eyes to Helen.  Warrior’s eyes, had Helen, cold and determined.  But her face showed respect for my grief and pain.  I noticed, wildly, that she’d found her purse and its strap was now broke.   

“We’ve got to go,” she said.  Her voice was gentle and childlike. “Revenge may be a dish best served cold (with a side of bitterness and cruelty desert).  But I prefer my revenge piping hot.”

“Revenge!” I screamed.  “Revenge won’t bring Father Paul back!”

“Whoever told you that?”