There was so much primal force at work here, so much relentless, inevitable death and so much desperate, aching life: the two surging, clashing, crashing. Someone like me—a magus, a shaman, fakir, medicine man, a miracle worker—could take those energies and stoke them, build on them to make themselves even more powerful, more like a god. The universe hits back though, and there was always a price paid for power culled from trauma. Believe me, I know all about that. I could teach a fucking class. Back home they called me a Wisdom.
The trail to Joey included two more dead bodies, another child and another adult, maybe a janitor. I was walking toward death yet again and I felt next to nothing, aside from a yearning not to be present in this awareness. The wider the doors of perception were thrown open, the more you began to wish someone would shut the fucking door and stop letting all the damned flies in.
Twenty feet from his last victim was an open door labeled STOREROOM. For a second, I wished I had kept the gun. I have never been big on dying for principle, but it was too late now. I stepped into the storeroom, more like a closet on steroids, shrouding myself in my own mystical and mental defenses as I did. Little Joey was sitting on the edge of a work table, the semi-auto .45 pistol in his hand. His skin was corpse-colored, glistening with sweat, and his eyes were fractured with broken blood vessels. He raised the pistol. The slide was locked back. It was empty.
“All out of bullets,” the boy said. His voice was wrong, too deep, too mature to be coming out of a nine-year-old’s mouth. He began to laugh as he dropped the gun to the floor. “Too bad. I was having a great time.”
“Recess is over, asshole,” I said. I aligned the energies inside my body, visualized them like jewels glittering in a vertical row, preparing them to begin. “Time to go back home, Dean.”
“How the fuck do you know who I am?” the monster inside the child rumbled. The kid was running hot; I could feel the heat coming off his skin from ten feet away.
“You’re also killing your host, like any good parasite does,” I said. “Joey dies, you go back in, Dino.”
“Then I’ll take this little fucker with me,” Dean said. “Last one for the road! Besides, it ups my kill-count.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’re done here.” I began to flex my Manipura chakra through my solar plexus, drawing all my personal energy in and the universe’s raw fuel to boot. I visualized it as a cleansing white light, growing, building, a storm of pristine purity. I felt Dean’s crimson Muladhara energy—his base, animal desire to survive at any cost—grow and thrash in reaction to my marshaling of powers.
“I claimed this child,” Dean snarled; some sounds like dogs ripping apart meat issued from the boy’s mouth. The temperature in the storeroom dropped to that of a meat locker as he stole its energy. Joey’s eyes were now blazing as if they were made of red-hot metal. “I am one of the Hungry, the lonely ones, pushed from the accursed radiance by jealousy and hubris. Your petty magics are no match, little mortal, for one who has embodied hate against your kind since the human heart first beat.”
I lowered my face. The boy was rippling with waves of heat, like hot asphalt, clashing with the numbing arctic cold. Dean hopped off the table’s edge and took a step toward me.
“I am Zepar,” he said, “the bringer of madness, and you are nothing to me, little cosmic speck.”
I looked up into the possessed child’s face; I couldn’t help but grin. “Horseshit,” I said, dragging the word out a bit with my drawl, and dropped my shroud of protective disciplines and gestured with a fist toward the child, launching a spear of pure cleansing light at the demon. The thing screamed, and I could hear the boy screaming too. “Zepar?” I said. “Really? Shit, Dean, that sounds like one of those medicines on the commercials where they tell you to seek medical help for a hard-on that lasts longer than four hours. ‘Check with your doctor to see if Zepar is right for you.’”
“It burns!” the demon whined. The light was pinning it in place.
“Yeah, I’ll bet it stings a bit. You’re not Zepar, the bringer of madness. Does old Z even know that you’re using his moniker up here? He’s going to be pissed when you get back, Dino. They have trademark infringement laws in Hell? Probably got enough lawyers down there with time on their hands.” The boy had dropped to the floor, first to his knees and then onto his back, writhing. His tongue was flickering in and out of his mouth, but the man’s screams and the buzzing of insects continued issuing from him, unabated.
“Your name is Dean Corll,” I said, “and you were a serial murderer of young boys. You raped, tortured, and murdered over twenty-eight kids before one of your scumbag accomplices shot you dead in 1973. You were a mortal speck, just like me, pal.”
“Please make it stop! It hurts!” Corll said. “It’s burning me … and the boy! It’s tearing his soul!”
“You’ve been everyone’s punk-ass bitch in the big empty for over forty years, Dino,” I said, “and you decided to make a break for it when Joey here and his mother moved into your old house on Lamar Drive. Isn’t that right? Now get your ass out of that mobile home and run on back to Hell. Your landlord’s waiting for you.”
“No,” Corll hissed. “This sweet little thing is mine, mine! I’ll not give him up.
