to hold her up to continue the Dolorosa.
“Enough” is all I can get out. Traven stops. I’ve never seen that look of fury on his face before. It’s happened. He wanted to do more and he walked into the belly of the beast. Ghouls. Jabbers. Murderers and hit men. All in a day. The good man that came in the house is gone. The man I’m looking at is still good but in an angry, wounded way that matches Traven’s lined soldier’s face.
Traven looks to where Lula slid down the wall into a sitting position. She’s unconscious and twitching. Eyes rolled back and breathing hoarse as her body tries to absorb the Dolorosa poison.
I whisper, “Help me.”
That wakes Traven up. He looks at me in a dazed way. Recognizes what’s happened and flips through all the books in his head. He takes the knife from inside my coat and slits the canvas, ripping out a piece to break the circle. Suddenly I can take a decent breath. I can even stand. Slowly. I spit blood and go to where Traven is bent over Candy.
I collapse onto my knees next to her body.
“She’s alive,” Traven says. “But the other woman. I think I might have killed her.”
“Who cares? Dead now or dead later. Either way she’s hellbound.”
He looks at me with a mixture of sorrow and shame. The preacher inside is still hanging on by his fingernails. Traven understands damning someone but not being an executioner. Maybe later I’ll tell him that the first one is always the hardest. Maybe not.
“Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth?”
“Yes,” he says. “The Red Cross came to the seminary.”
“Get her to the car and do what you can. She’s just paralyzed now but we don’t want any brain damage, do we?”
“No.”
“Get her out of here.”
Traven nods. Picks Candy up in his arms and runs with her through the cursed rain.
I go to the hole and look inside. Lula plugged Teddy five or six times. There are lots of bone fragments in the dirt. She hit Cherry too.
I shouldn’t do what I’m doing but I’m still doing it. I pick up the Imp’s skull and throw it on the floor as hard as I can. The marble cracks and the skull explodes into a thousand pieces, destroying Lamia’s connection to this world. I don’t have to kill her. She was never really responsible for what she did. She was a slave killing for a sick bastard. I did plenty of that in Hell. With any luck, she’ll be just another ghost in the Tenebrae now. Maybe she’ll be strong enough to squeeze out whatever hole she came through and go home to the Angra. Who knows, maybe freeing her will buy humanity some brownie points when the Angra come back to eat our lunch. They can keep us around like sea monkeys and teach us tricks. Why not? One God fucked with us at the beginning of time. What’s one more?
I pick up the jerry can and spread gasoline all over the floor. Before I light it, I find the kitchen and rip all the gas hoses out of the walls. I go outside and light a Malediction, letting the house fill with fumes. When I’m halfway through the smoke, I open the front door and toss it inside. The house catches. Windows blow out, sending burning debris onto the perfect lawn. Traven starts the car. The flames light our way down the long hill.
