Hexed_ The Iron Druid Chronicles - Kevin Hearne [35]
“Yeah!” Coyote whooped and pumped his fist. “Sit down and have a tall glass of shut-the-hell-up!”
I was quickly turning loopy because, as the fallen angel was nonverbally communicating his distress with an impressive array of spastic twitches and concomitant white ejecta from his wounds, I was thinking, It’s too bad we’ll never get a chance to talk over a cup of tea. Besides the Morrigan, I rarely had conversations with beings older than I was, and I treasured them whenever they happened along.
My doubts about whether Cold Fire would work on a fallen angel were soon allayed: The bubbling mess inside Basasael’s wounds began to spread all over his body, so that his legs and arms were roiling like maggots running rampant under a corpse’s skin. The next second, he tried to curl inward on himself in a mockery of the fetal position, and then he exploded in a slimy mass of purulence and gore. His tarlike substance polluted the courtyard, covering grass, trees, steel, and cement alike with the remains of the partially digested teenager splattered liberally amongst the mess. The falling rain was a benediction now, for the earth had been cleansed of an ancient evil, but it would never be able to wash this away before school got out, much less before the cops got here.
“That’s right, son!” Coyote shouted at the remains. “You don’ come into my house an’ ’spect to live!”
“By Balor’s evil eye, what are we going to do about all this goo?” I said.
“What’s this ‘we’ you talkin’ about, Mr. Druid? Ain’t my demon, an’ it ain’t my mess.”
“Yeah, I know. But I can’t get any ghouls out here now to clean it up. People are gonna have to deal with it and rationalize it away somehow. They can call the Ghostbusters to take a sample o’ the ectoplasmic discharge or whatever. Or they’ll have to bring in Mulder an’ Scully, because there ain’t no CSI on the planet that’ll ever be able to explain this.”
“I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about, Mr. Druid.”
I didn’t care to explain. I just pointed at the carnage and said, “This right here will be the birthplace of a thousand conspiracy theories about aliens an’ most likely a sign of the comin’ apocalypse. You watch, it’ll be in the Weekly World News.”
Coyote shrugged. “Hey, I don’ care. It’ll be a damn funny story whatever they come up with.”
“We should get the arrows,” I said. “Better not leave them lyin’ around.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Coyote replied. I put my sandals back on before venturing out to wade amongst the hellish mess, then joined Coyote in tracking down the arrows. Police officers began to stream into the courtyard, but we kept our mouths shut, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to hear us or see us, except as a flicker of movement they’d dismiss as a trick of the rain.
Once the quiver was full again, we dodged around a few police officers and administrative types to get back to the office door. I remembered one last detail before we left the scene: I had to get rid of any blood that may have dropped after Basasael stabbed me. I found a few drops near the wall, not as much as I’d feared; it had mostly been soaked up by my shirt. I grabbed a few handfuls of water from the continuing runoff and washed it away, erasing evidence for the coming forensics specialists and leaving nothing behind for witches.
The bell rang, signaling the end of class and beginning of lunchtime. Since the school was in lockdown, the kids would remain in class and simply go hungry for a while. But they’d be safe now.
Feeling pretty good about ourselves, the two of us walked back through the office building to our stolen SUV waiting in the drop-off zone. It was surrounded by police cars. Oh well.
We kept the