Page 58 of Helsing: Demon Slayer
She could no longer see beyond the car's windows. An impenetrable fog surrounded them now.He knows about the ghostly figures.
Dianne felt a chill enter the car. Disembodied fingers began to run over her skin. The charm bracelet Germaine had given her felt cool against her wrist, a sensation that crawled up her arm like a whisper she couldn’t quite hear.
“Miles,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “Can you teach me St. Benedict’s Prayer? The one for exor—”
He cut her off. “Absolutely I will. There are three lines. It startscrux sacra sit mihi lux.”
“Crux sacra sit mihi lux,” said Dianne. When she opened her mouth to repeat the line, her throat constricted, the words catching as if something inside her resisted.Her voice shook a little, but each word resonated. She imagined eyes and maws pressed against the windshield.
An unholy chorus of whispers filled the car interior, pushing against the words of the prayer. The fog thickened, tightening an invisible noose around her throat. For an instant, the thought skittered through her mind: what if the prayer wasn’t enough?
“Non draco sit mihi dux,” said Miles, his words clipped, his tone sharpening like steel.
As she repeated that line, her own voice strengthened. Light seemed to emanate around her and Ryan. An answering glow radiated from the pendant he wore, just as it had done last night when thedaemonsattacked on the ship. The beacon pushed the fog back, casting fleeting shadows over it.
Thedaemonicfaces sneered in response. The whispers turned to growls and hisses, and the temperature in the car dropped further. Grotesque shadows flickered like smoke around the edges of the light enveloping them.
“Vade retro Satana.” Miles’s voice hardened into command.
The glow from Ryan’s pendant flared higher and brighter with each line of the exorcism prayer, its light weaving into the cocoon around them.
“Vade retro Satana.” As Dianne struggled to repeat the final line, thedaemonswrithed and twisted as they breached the barrier of the windshield, their forms rippling like molten shadows. In an instant they were on her, their claws and teeth burning where they touched her skin. A cold, sharp pain lanced through her chest as thedaemonssmothered her, a sensation she couldn’t explain but knew wasn’t entirely their doing. She jerked the steering wheel, a scream caught in her throat, forcing the Opel’s tires to grate across the pavement.
As the unnatural night swallowed them, Dianne braced herself, one thought looping in her head:Vade retro Satana.
Without knowing why, she knew what the Latin said.
Get behind me, Satan.
In the silence that followed, the words of the prayer hung in the air like the glow of Ryan’s pendant—fragile, yet unyielding, a thin thread of hope against the encroaching void.
Sixteen
Betasawtheflarean instant before András, but only because he’d focused his internal radar on their surroundings in order to identify human threats—necessary as they drove through the benighted city of Shkodër. They’d had to travel in a 1994 Land Rover Defender 110, which Mihàil had bought at an auction of decommissioned NATO vehicles and retrofitted for his personal security while he traversed the poor roads on Albania’s mountains. While newer, sleeker luxury SUVs had replaced the faithful Defender, Mihàil’s loyal steward and chauffeur, Pjetër, had kept it in pristine working condition. It had started readily with a jumpstart using a portable harmonic generator, but it lacked the modifications with which Miró had outfitted thezoti’s current vehicle.
“Five klicks ahead,” said Beta, her voice steady as they neared the southern outskirts of the ancient Albanian city in the foothills of the Albanian mountains.
The flare was faint but undeniable—a pulsating burst of energy rippling across the horizon to the northwest. She narrowed her eyes, herElioudsight, enhanced with harmonic googles, teasing out fragmented shapes: twisting shadows clashing against a cocoon of flickering light.
András, who sat in the front passenger seat next to Edvard, their driver, turned his head from scanning their eastern flank to stare into the distance in front of them. “It’s them. I recognize Helsing’s signature. But we’ve got to hurry. It’s so weak I fear we might lose him. And thedaemonshave nearly gained control of the other signature.”
Beta said nothing, just pressed her lips together and squinted out the front windshield, her arm clutching the Disrupter combat shotgun in its sling across her chest. Miró had released the prototype harmonic weapon to her only after he’d caught her liberating it from the armory lab where it had been stored for testing and evaluation. Then again, she’d held his icy gaze until he’d backed down.
But Edvard, her fellow Czech, said what was better left unsaid anyway. “The other signature? That’s thezonjë’s sister, Dianne Markham, correct?”
András threw a look at his wife and then looked out again at the lightless mass of Shkodër in front of them. “Yes.”
Edvard whistled. “We’re too late then.”
“No, we arenot,” said Beta, exuding smoky-hot air that quickly filled the confines of the Defender. She leaned forward and angled her voice into his ear, barbing her words with the heat of her ire. “And if we are, it will be because you cannot drive.”
Edvard visibly shuddered. And then accelerated as if trying to outrun her approbation, the sound of the engine growling loud on the deserted highway.
András didn’t look at either of them again, just studied the eerie glow whose dancing shadows resembled a fire that didn’t burn. “I read only half a dozendaemons.” Again, he looked at Beta. What he didn’t say this time was for Edvard’s benefit: thedaemonshad a signature unlike any he’d ever seen before.
Almost all of Beta and András’s speech—or judicious lack thereof—was for Edvard’s benefit. TheElioudcouple communicated telepathically as allElioud, descendants of the Watcher Angels who’d mated with human women in prehistory, could. At least those with more than a drop of angel blood, and usually only those with some self-awareness. Until five years ago, Beta, along with Olivia and Stasia, had had no idea that they owed some of their talents and skills as operatives to their angel blood.
Beta kept her thoughts about what they would find to herself. She knew that András burned with fury at what had happened to Mihàil, who’d been like a father to him, rescuing him as an orphaned twelve-year-old from the brutal attentions of a street gang. But beneath András’s fury laid an unsettling and unfamiliar fear. He’d never seen Mihàil so badly wounded. And despite facing one of the condemned Watcher Angels in the form of a seven-headed dragon last December, András feared these unknowndaemons, whose manifestation had already shut down the world’s power.
