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  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “You should see him in a Nazi uniform.”

  “He play dress up?”

  She laughed. “Could be. But he was one in the war. Goes further back, too. Atlantis. He’s a Son of Belial.”

  I sighed. “Couldn’t be easy, could it?”

  “No, baby,” she said. “That’s the lot of a Son of the Light.”

  Yes. It is.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “You’ve thwarted him over and over. He’s obsessed. By you and how you’ve beaten him time and again. Every time he thinks he’s beaten you down, you fool him. Again and again. You know that great gift you have? For pissing the bad guys off? You’ve mocked him and defeated him again and again and again…so he’s obsessed with you. He gets away with it with so many others…but not with you. He’s so full of hatred, the need for control, he takes pleasure in hurting…he’s a bad one.”

  “Demon?”

  “Yes. He’s willingly possessed. Made a bargain, they’re bound together in an ancient pact. That’s where his strength comes from. It’s also his weakness. He’s a control freak, so he struggles against the demon’s agenda while at the same time playing along. That’s his dilemma. He’s not yet perfectly possessed, may never be. He thinks he’s smarter than everybody including his demon. But in this, you, they both want the same thing. You. Your downfall. For him it’s personal. He comes back lifetime after lifetime to get even. But he can’t, so he keeps coming back. The demon? I didn’t get too close…it’s a bad one.”

  She took another long drag on her cigarette. I heard her exhale slowly. “You’re high on the Dark Forces hit list, Marius. Because of your Work. How many souls have you rescued? How many have you brought to the Light? Each one of them is a failure for the Dark. And there’s a Being that keeps track. So the score sheet is getting unbalanced, and they sent a heavy hitter for you. Wouldn’t be the first time, if I recall.”

  “What’s the Nazi thing?”

  “He was there,” she said. “In the concentration camps. An officer. I saw that clearly. In his last incarnation. The sick pleasure of that is fresh in his mind. He loved being in control, able to hurt others whenever he wanted to. But he died. Badly. Terrified and alone. And that, my friend, brings us to the Cabal.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “The news just gets better and better.”

  “We’ve both run across them before, honey,” she said. “Once you’re in the Machine they’ll never forget about you. They hate shamans. All of us. Because they can’t control us and what we do on behalf of the Light. More of the Sons of Belial are incarnating; the stage is being set here in America for an epic replay of Atlantis. So where do they end up? Banking, politics, cops, military and spooks, computer companies…What are they doing? Same things they did before. Manipulate, confuse, muddle…they’re setting the stage for the final showdown between the Sons of the Light and the Sons of Belial. And they all work with or for the Cabal.”

  “Military. Intelligence. Law enforcement,” I said heavily.

  “And armies of snitches,” she said. “Legions of the possessed or controlled. This one must be strong with a very powerful demon if he can remote control four humans.”

  “At least one of them seemed conscious of it.”

  “His soul was fighting it, then?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I remembered the look of desperate fear, the violation apparent in every line of the man’s face. My Work was to prevent that, to confront it and stop it. And I felt rage rise in me as the attack on me had, at least in that man’s part, been forced into an otherwise innocent bystander.

  “What else, sister?”

  “What else?” she said. “It’s not clear. To me, anyway. There’s always a cloud around you; your spirits protect you with their shielding and it diffuses your presence. You’re hard to find and fix unless there’s a positive connection. You shrug off any attempts otherwise.”

  “Were you able to see through to the outcome?”

  “With you there’s always two paths, Marius. The red and the black. You walk the razor’s edge, like we all do, but you more than most. You’ll be tempted. You have to be aware of your reactiveness. Your desire to lash out. It’s your style, you know? Kick the cart over, piss on it, set it on fire.”

  She laughed, coughed. “Personally, I love that about you. But it pisses people—or entities—off, and keeps them pissed off. Not good when you’re dealing with people who come back time and again to try and even the score.”

  “I work on compassion,” I said.

  “I know you do,” she said. “I know. You put it into action. It’s not an abstract principle or idea with you. You practice it. It’s your path. You’ve got that whole Bodhisattva thing going and you bring that energy into the world. It’s a gift. People are grateful you do it…most wouldn’t or couldn’t deal with the things you have to deal with every day. You get big power, you get big challenges. You work on compassion, but you have a fiery temper. Your work is to heal and protect, but you love a good fight. So there you have it.”

  “How do I take him out, Sabrina?”

  “Do what you do best, Marius. You won’t be able to depossess him. He won’t give his permission. But you can draw him and his demon out and in the confrontation, the Law of the One gives you the absolute right to self-defense…you can do whatever you need to in defense of yourself…or others. He’s coming after you in any way he can. He’s coming. In every possible way.”

  Chapter 9

  When I have people coming for me, which is, unfortunately, a common occurrence in the life of a Warrior of the Light, there’s one place and one person I reach out to.

  Dillon and his lair.

  Where I sat right now, watching my friend prepare for the event we both felt hanging out there. When I’d shown up, he’d already been getting ready. He just pointed me at a chair and went about his business.

  I watched him run a silicon cleaning cloth over the metal and plastic furniture of a folding stock Yugo AK-47. When he handled weapons, or was working in harm’s way, he had a certain look on his face, an intense, almost studious face while he dealt with the problem at hand. His energy, and the guides around him, invisible to him but not to me, were both of the most intense warrior kind. He’d been a special operations soldier in the Army’s Special Forces, since he took particular care to distinguish between special operations, Special Forces and other special operations capable organizations. Those distinctions were lost on me till I’d met him; I’d never been in the military—in this life, anyway—though a part of me and my past lives resonated with that. Dillon and I had a past life there, too—the easy familiarity with which we worked together, in harm’s way or not, was testament to that.

  He set the cloth down on his work table, then adjusted the simple sling and hung the AK around his neck. He swung up a few times, aligning the sights with the short rifle punched out taut against the sling. With it hanging down, he could swing it up and punch it out and align the sights almost as well as if he’d extended the stock.

  “How you going to conceal that?” I said.

  He grinned, put on a three-quarter-length leather car coat, bulked up in the shoulders, over his black turtle neck. You could see the black strap of the rifle if you were close enough, but it didn’t draw your eyes, it just faded into the black. The rifle hung down but the coat was long enough to conceal the short muzzle.

  “You look like an extra in Saturday Night Fever,” I said.

  Dillon stepped smartly into a disco step, pointing his finger at the sky and began to sing, “Ah, ah, ah, staying alive, staying alive…”

  “I sure hope so.”

  “We will be,” he said. Paused. “No lycans on this, are there?”

  “I hope not. Cabal has some for their special forces.”

  Dillon considered that. We’d tangled with lycans before. Not pretty.

  “Standard ammo we’re running in this is brass and lead, steel core and an exposed
steel tip. That will knock down any Dark Siders that react to iron.”

  “No Faery in this. They don’t work this way or with demons.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of them,” Dillon said. He shrugged. “I’ve got silver made up in a separate mag if any Lycans show up.”

  “You rolled some silver bullets?”

  He tilted his head at the Dillon loading press (spelled the same way) over in the corner.

  “This place looks like Baghdad at Christmas,” I said. “Crossed with a Wiccan supply house.”

  He laughed. “It works.”

  “I appreciate it, Dillon.”

  When his eyes lit up and his teeth pulled back, he looked more like a Lycan than a non-transformed Lycan did. “I figure it’s my part in the fight.”

  “You’ve earned your place in the Light. And then some, brother.”

  “So have you, Marius. So have you. So. What’s the plan?”

  “Plan? I don’t need no stinking plan!”

  “You’re more Yul Brynner, dude. If I get to play McQueen.”

  “I’m part of a plan, but I don’t have a plan.”

  “That’s really comforting,” Dillon said. “I’d like to know which way to shoot.”

  “I hope we won’t have to shoot at all.”

  “There you go,” Dillon said. “Being all hopeful. What’s the fun of being the best back up to the best shaman, excuse me, practitioner if I don’t get to shoot some Dark Warriors once in awhile? And I kinda doubt we’re gonna miss that opportunity, the way things are going.”

  Planning has never been my strong suit. I have a Zen-like approach to living; stay in the moment. Shamanic practice reinforces that. Or so I told myself on occasions like this or when rationalizing my expenses in the face of my bill collectors. So the plan, right? They—a series of undead and possessed, remote controlled or outright possessed, hunting me down to do bad things to me ranging from killing me to torching my spiritual essence in some fiery corner of the Dark Realms—they are looking for me, right? So let’s make it easy. Let them come to me instead of spending my meager resources chasing them. Draw them out into the open and while my back up slows them down or takes them out, I search backwards to find the Controller, the one with the capital C.

  It’s like doing a demonic depossession. When there’s a true demonic presence, it’s hitched to a controller, a higher level demon, who in turn is hitched to another demon all the way down the line to the biggest baddest demon of all. If you want the Dark Forces out and to keep them out, you must track back to the main entity, and then step aside while the Archangels do the work of taking that demon-boss to the Place of Confinement and the Womb of Transformation.

  So I went with my default plan: kick the bad guy’s cart over, set it on fire, and see who comes running.

  I gestured Dillon close. We both closed our eyes. I took out my good rattle—a stretched leather ball filled with maize kernels, the handle an old piece of worn birch—and began to rattle gently, setting my intention and calling my power animals closer. The steady rhythmic rattle activated those places in my energy, my spirit, and cleared out all distraction so that I might shift from the Middle World into the Other Realms—

  —and I’m on a grassy hillside, looking over a beautifully forested valley, a sinuous river winding its way through, a hawk circling overhead…to my right my White Tiger, to my left my Black Crow…off in the distance I see darkness gathering on the skyline…light stabs down from the sky, a brilliant beam of light that shines on me, to my left and right, above and below, from within, the Light within me like a portal…because that’s what I am in the Great Game, a Portal for the Light, and the more that I channel, the more I am seen…on both sides…

  I felt the attention shifting towards me. Sending up the Light is like issuing a challenge to the Dark—“Here I am…come and get me…”

  My power animals laughed. “Never the easy way with you, Marius…can we kill them with kindness this time?”

  I began to come back.…

  Dillon opened his eyes. “I felt that one.”

  I nodded. “Somebody else might have, too.”

  Outside, we both heard car doors slamming shut.

  Dillon grinned his crazy grin. “Guess it’s show time?”

  “Yep.”

  Dillon’s been a warrior for many life times. When it’s time for a fight, he runs to the sound of the fight, not away. He was already bounding up the stairs while I was still shaking off my journey trance. I grabbed a handy long-gun, a cut-down Remington 870 stoked with Dillon’s hand-loaded buckshot, and chased him up the stairs. He was at the front window, peeking cautiously through the curtain gap.

  “Four,” he whispered. “Stacked up. Like cops…”

  The heavy tread of boots at the doorway and then, without pause, the crash of a kick against the door.

  Somebody’s foot was going to hurt.

  If they were human, that is. Dillon had steel fire doors mounted in reinforced frames front, back and side. It would take more than a few undead kicking those doors to get inside.

  “We’ll go out the side,” Dillon said. “We’ll flank ’em.”

  “Is that a real term? Flank ’em?”

  Dillon’s grin got even more feral, if that was possible. “Find ’em, fix ’em, flank ’em, finish ’em.”

  “Um, okay.”

  I followed him through the front room and the kitchen, where he quick peeked out the window, and then went out the side door.

  “Pull it locked, Marius,” he said.

  I did. The heavy latches fell into place. So no retreat through this door.

  We edged wide around the corner of the house. Dillon had his AK up, I had my shotgun ready, every other step I looked back to make sure no one came up behind us.

  In front one man in plain clothes kicked again and again at the front door. The three behind him, also in plain clothes, held pistols to cover the front windows. Plain clothes, acting like cops…but none of them uttered a word.

  The last man in the stack saw us. He raised his pistol and started shooting—no warning, no announcement—in our direction.

  It was his last action.

  Because all of a sudden it got like Quentin Tarantino meets John Woo.

  Gunfights at close range get violent very suddenly. It’s often over before you know it, too fast for conscious recall, or else it’s one of those that hang in front of you in slow motion.

  This was a slow motion event.

  I saw the ejected casings hanging in the air above the pistol from the guy shooting at us. He was focused and intense as he concentrated on his sights (not a good sign since zombies don’t have the fine muscle coordination necessary to shoot well with a handgun); I watched Dillon’s leather jacket crinkle (one of those weird details you remember after a fight) as he shifted his weapon mount and fired POW POW POW three fast shots from the AK and hit that first shooter, whose look of sudden surprise and his arms out flung reminded me of that picture from the Spanish Civil War. It was time for me to get in the fight, so I let fly with the 870 and Dillon’s custom buckshot (a .45 caliber ball on top with 00 buck beneath) and watched the door-kicker spray red and stagger back off the steps before he fell out of the line of fire.

  Dillon aggressed on them, a steady cadence of aimed fire, crouched over his rifle and walking like Groucho Marx in an experienced roll of heel and toe, me to his right, BOOM BOOM BOOM of my shotgun before it ran dry and then I cleared my Glock and continued shooting…

  Silence, then.

  Everyone was down except for us.

  The shooting part was done.

  But the fight wasn’t over.

  The ground shook. The grass of Dillon’s lawn lifted and pulled itself into a larger than man-sized form, a man made out of the lawn.

  I was still disoriented from my journey and the loud shots ringing in my unprotected ears. And I still couldn’t help but think, The Lawnmower Man?

  Dillon watched his lawn rearrange itself
into a huge green opponent. Two glaring red eyes rimmed in black appeared in the head.

  “I think it’s your turn to lead,” he said.

  The entity turned towards me, and I felt anger rising like a red tide within me.

  What I do both is and isn’t what is thought of as “magic.” Magic involves combining your intention and emotional content in partnership with entities and powers in the Other Realms to get specific results: money, sex, power, secrets. Shamanic light workers are primarily Travelers: we go into the Other Realms and gather information, retrieve that which has been lost or stolen and bring it back. We put in that which has been taken and we take out what doesn’t belong. And for that, we work with our allies, our guides, our power animals—but there’s a fine line that we walk between the use of that energy and what we call sorcery, the exercise of power-over, controlling—and that’s what we were running into here: controlled humans and a thought form, something constructed with intention and filled with hate, that Dark energy over riding the life it was controlling.

  To a shaman, even the grass and dirt has life and Spirit. To override that in the service of the Dark…

  That just pisses me off.

  This thought form looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy run through a sod farm. It swung a rusty length of pipe in one paw.

  “There goes the sprinkler system,” I said.

  Dillon considered that. “Should I shoot this thing?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  Dillon opened up. Divots of grass and dirt flew like a bad day on the driving range.

  The thought form lumbered forward and swiped at Dillon’s head with the pipe.

  We both ducked.

  “Maybe it would hurt,” I said.

  “Gee, thanks, Marius,” Dillon muttered. He crouched low and tried to get behind the Lawnmower Man/Dough Boy.