Chicagoland Gail Martin (best novels to read for students TXT) 📖

“What about the other items?” Sarah asked. “What do they do?” She pointed at the gris-gris bags and tablet.

“They’re a first line of defense for the box,” Kinsella said. “So we eliminate them right away.”

We took our places. Kinsella laid down a thick line of salt from a container in his bag along the doorway and locked the steel door. Then he set a silver chalice on a table that we dragged to be near the safe. He put down another salt line around the edge of the broken concrete surrounding the safe so that all of us were between the two protective barriers.

Clearly, none of us wanted to touch the items inside the vault. Kinsella took the dice, pocket watch, medallions, and carved elephant and placed them in the chalice. Then he added enough holy water to cover the pieces and added sacred oil from a separate vial. The priest withdrew a wafer of the consecrated Host from a portable monstrance and held it carefully between his palms as he folded his hands in prayer. His lips moved silently, and his brow furrowed with concentration. With a whispered “amen,” he gently placed the wafer on the surface of the water.

“I abjure the powers of Darkness and cast out all traces of the infernal. By the blood of Christ, the breath of the Holy Spirit, and in the name of the most holy and Almighty God, you have no dominion here. Get thee hence!”

Kinsella struck a match and cast it into the chalice. It caught in the oil and sent up vivid blue fire. At the same instant, the fragile linen of the gris-gris bags burst into flame, and the tablet split with a crack like gunfire and turned to powder.

Ness crossed himself. West’s eyes went wide.

“Son of a bitch,” Sarah muttered quietly.

Kinsella drew a deep breath and rolled his shoulders, proof that he wasn’t as unflappable as he appeared. “With those out of the way, we can get to the main event.”

He glanced at each of us in turn. “I’m going to say Last Rites for any spirits trapped here or for any ghosts who might have been sacrificed to the demon. Then I’ll say the Rite of Exorcism, but I’ll pour the elements directly into the vault rather than trusting the transference of power from the chalice.”

Kinsella licked his lips in what I guessed to be a nervous tic. I couldn’t blame him for being edgy. “There will be a moment when the boundaries between realms may thin, and the demon may show himself. It can’t hurt us—so long as the protections remain unbroken.”

Otherwise, those thin boundaries might not hold the demon at bay.

The priest made a careful circuit of the room, checking the candles, saying a short prayer for protection to the four archangels—Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel. He returned to the center and began to slosh salt liberally into the vault, each time with a prayer for deliverance from evil. He followed that up with a drizzle of holy water and then sufficient sanctified oil to set the remaining contents of the safe on fire.

I felt waves of energy coming off the demon box. The entity inside might be bound, but its anger and malice transcended its fetters. Despite my protections from Krukis, I took a half step back, a gut reaction to the embodiment of evil.

Father Kinsella gripped a silver crucifix and began to say the Last Rites. The temperature in the room dropped. My heightened senses picked up chaotic energy, as if the demon hurled itself against the confines of its prison, sensing that it had been unearthed and had a shot at freedom.

This felt different from the imp at the murder house, a matter of scale between a light summer breeze and a fierce, deadly storm at sea. I thought of the mayhem Holmes had been able to achieve with the help of his minor spirit and shuddered at the thought of what this full demon could enable Capone to do.

Father Kinsella faced the adversary with a grim expression, jaw set and eyes hard. His wide-legged stance and squared shoulders made it clear that he would not be moved.

Krukis didn’t offer any suggestions in my mind, but I knew that his eternal enemy was Veles, god of the underworld, so his sympathies would be with us, which was clear in his assent to share his magic with me. Despite being god-touched and nearly immortal, fear bloomed in my belly. Only a fool faced a demon without apprehension.

As Father Kinsella transitioned from the Last Rites to the exorcism, a loud crash somewhere close by shook the room. I put myself between the priest and the doorway, staying within the salt circles. West, Sarah, and Ness readied their weapons and faced the entrance.

The steel door groaned as an unstoppable force ripped it free of its hinges from the outside, bending the metal before tossing it aside. The violent opening broke the salt line, scattering the grains.

Capone’s rogue vampire stood in the doorway. Despite the disappearances and bodies in the coal ash tunnels, the creature looked starved, corpse-white skin drawn tight over the bones of its face, fangs protruding over pale lips, eyes sunken and wild.

A barrage of gunfire echoed deafeningly in the small room as silver bullets tore into the vampire at close range. In seconds the creature’s chest was a mess of black blood and ribbons of dead flesh. That didn’t stop the monster from sending West sprawling with a backhanded blow, hurling Ness across the room and shoving Sarah hard enough to send her tumbling.

They all aimed for center mass instead of splattering the vampire’s skull into pieces.

Kinsella never faltered, keeping up the cadence of the Latin as he neared the end of the exorcism. The energy in the demon box roiled within its confines, and I sensed that if the spirit broke free, it would slaughter everything in its path.

Which left me as the last redoubt against a