Wild Night Road(22)

“What are those things?” Tasha whispered.
“Wants the bright yellow,” the second one crooned in an eerily melodic voice.
“Mine,” said the first one.
“Mine,” said the second one.
The two forms coiled together like intertwined snakes, hissing and rustling.
Lilith could feel Tasha quivering behind her like a leaf in a brisk wind, but she didn’t have time for the woman. She clutched at facts randomly, trying to understand.
This…whatever it was…was the source of the strange energies she’d been feeling all night. The harshness, the discordant flows. Frantically, Lilith flipped through everything she’d ever learned about demons, succubi and the various denizens of the shadowlands that bordered conventional reality. She’d memorized at least three catalogues of horrors over her long life, but found nothing to match what faced her.
She didn’t know what it was, but she supposed the closest comparison might be a demon. However, Lilith hadn’t seen a proper demon in the last hundred years or so, and none at all since she’d sailed from Europe.
Why she hadn’t seen demons in North America was something she’d never given much thought. It was like discovering a chipped plate you’d stashed in the back of the cabinet was missing. You’d never noticed the absence previously. It was only when you remembered the time you’d chipped the damned thing against the porcelain-coated, cast iron sink and tried to recall what you’d done with it, and then it was like oh yeah, I put it on the top shelf…
She shook herself, and her skin tingled like a pianist played drills with a feather-light touch up and down her arms.
The things had done this, she realized:  thrown an otherworldly net of dullness over the two of them.
She didn’t need to read a magickal encyclopedia entry to recognize the act of a predator.
Pure menace rolled off the swarming, tangling things like the stink from an open landfill.
Lilith dragged herself up from the web of malaise and lifted one hand. It felt like she was lifting a full keg. The muscles in her arm quivered with effort. When her arm reached shoulder level, something cracked, and then she could move freely again.
With fingers flying so fast that sparks flew, she sketched a protection spell. When the last link of the red and gold pattern joined and the spell took form, she stepped back, also propelling Tasha further away and allowed herself to breathe again. It wouldn’t hold them off forever, but maybe long enough for Tasha to run and grant Lilith precious seconds to figure out what she was dealing with.
The protection spell hovered in the darkness between the women and the creatures. The shadows flowed and bumped against it, murmuring and chattering.
“Tasha,” Lilith said softly, “they’re going to break through my spell any minute now.”
“Oh, crap.”
“Yeah.”
“Got another spell?”
“Nope.”
“What’re we going to do?”#p#分页标题#e#
“When they break through,” Lilith said, “you need to run.”
“What about you?” Tasha’s voice had gone up an octave.
“I’m going to go the other way and meet you back at Chill.”
“What if—”
“The dark one is mine,” the second shadow said with finality, as it had won a contest. It swelled larger and a puff of stench fanned outward.
“Ride the bitch,” said the first shadow, and the twin shreds of blackness surged forward, shattering Lilith’s spell.
“Run,” Lilith screamed.
Tasha hesitated.
Lilith screamed again.
Tasha took off, one of her shoes clattering to the sidewalk.
The first shadow shivered, and when it looked like it might follow Tasha, Lilith uttered a curse—an old one, from a language so ancient no record of it survived save in the secret books of witches.
Both shadows stilled and turned toward her, their shapes shifting and shredding and re-forming with every movement. Whether the pulsing was due to the evening breeze or the winds of another reality, Lilith couldn’t tell. It was enough that Tasha had escaped, and they had not followed her.
The demons liked the old curse and seemed to be drawn to it, almost quivering with excitement.
Lilith grabbed hold of this fact like a lifeline.
She retreated slowly, all the while singing variations on the ancient curse, teasing them to follow her. They hissed and whispered, the roundish parts that might have been heads, leaning close then drifting apart.
Follow her they did, leaving a trail of black and rotten fragments on the sidewalk with their passing.
As she pulled them out of the cone of light from the parking lot street lamps and into deeper dark down the street, Lilith noticed something shining orange deep within the gloom that formed the creatures. It was a glow more than a thing, but it pulsed in an odd pattern. They’d gone far enough downhill that the marquee lights no longer shown through the creatures, and Lilith realized she’d assumed the orange glow was from the theatre lights.