He walked over to the small store near the corner of the main street and felt the front door. Just as Jane had promised, the door was unlocked.
Caleb stepped inside and was immediately surrounded by the chaos of a store that had long since forgotten what it was supposed to be. It was filled with shabby antiques, cans of paint, endless piles of papers varying in quality, notepads, briefcases, and many other things that kind of went together, but not really.
Caleb couldn’t ignore the vague scent of decaying meat filling the store. He knew what it was because he had once spent a week next to a rotting corpse back in Iraq. The smell threatened to pull him back to the hot sand of the Middle East, the gunfire and the screams. So many screams. And so much blood….
…Caleb, not now! You have to get upstairs!
Jane’s voice found him just in time and he managed to tear himself away from the memories that plagued his mind.
Caleb walked up the stairs and found an apartment door slightly ajar. Again, just as Jane had promised.
Carefully he walked inside. It wasn’t hard to know where he was going because the small apartment filled up with the sounds of loud and eager moans. Caleb traced the wall with his back, sneaking ever closer toward the room where the expressions of lust and pleasure originated.
He reached the bedroom and found the beautiful woman on top of Jane. Their legs were entangled in a confusing mess of limbs, and they passionately grinded their groins together.
Caleb knew what his instructions were. He had to grab the beautiful woman and knock her out cold. With an iron will he ignored her exquisite beauty, and the boner it caused, and stepped into the room.
Fuck, wait, Caleb! Wait just a little bit…. Just a little bit….
Jane’s voice echoed inside his head and stopped him in his tracks. What was he waiting for? This was the perfect opportunity!
When he heard their voices intensify Caleb realized why Jane had prevented him from finishing their plan. He both understood, and resented her.
Jane’s voice exploded, “Oh fuck! Yes! Oh God…. Yes!”
Then all became silent and an eerie peace filled the room. The two tired bodies piled on top of each other, breathing heavily through the ecstasy slowly ebbing away from them.
Now… Caleb. Do it now.
Caleb pulled the beautiful woman away from Jane and tossed her against the wall. Before she knew what was happening he knocked her out cold.
Baal looked on with some amusement as he watched his daughter get carried from her store. Her hands and feet were tied and the strong Caleb carried her over his shoulder. They hadn’t even bothered to dress her.
Where they were taking her? There was clearly only one possible answer to that question, Baal thought.
Baal knew trouble when he saw it. Just like any other being older than the world itself, he had encountered trouble many times throughout his life. It came in so many shapes and sizes, too. Sometimes you lost, sometimes you won; that was the nature of things. Baal didn’t mind defeat whenever he faced it. If anything, he appreciated the sport of it all.
Who was hunting him? It was a small, young woman that had no real name. She went by ‘Jane Elring’ but the name had no meaning.
She was nobody, which made her capable of being anybody. She was both a saint and a manipulator, a savior and a plague, ugly and beautiful. What a delightfully terrible thing they had created in that laboratory of theirs.
Baal flew through the air, following the unlikely trio as they passed Pineview Baptist Church. The sober building stood out like an ugly tooth against the dark backdrop of the night.
In his earlier days Baal had resented religion as it tried to emphasize the good qualities man supposedly possessed. Soon Baal had learned that any organized religion was, at its core, a gathering of the most corrupt individuals mankind had to offer. He had grown to appreciate the ingenuity of the system over the years as he watched religion take the most from the people that had so little.
Soon Jane Elring and her lackey would reach the sandy road that stretched out between the pines toward the Toaves mansion. It was the same road where Baal had first begun his torment of the beautiful Ethan Walker. The young man’s guilt had a delicious aftertaste that he still relished, even though Ethan Walker had long since departed from his grasp.
Baal was a little less satisfied with what he had gotten from Ellie Aulding. Of course, he knew he had the small blonde monstrosity to thank for that one.
That was the dangerous thing about Jane Elring, Baal realized. It never mattered how strong his opponents were because no human being would ever be strong enough to beat him. You had to watch out for the smart ones. The tricksters. The ones that could gaze into your eyes and sell you the biggest, fattest lies without even so much as a blush. A good liar was fairly common, Baal knew, but an amazing liar was a rarity indeed.
Jane Elring was intelligent and, equally important, she was desperate. Baal knew that, in this desperation, she would resort to pushing the boundaries of human morality.
She had found the poor Caleb when he was at his weakest and decided that she could use that weakness to tie him to her. Baal could sense that the man had developed an unquestioning devotion to her; a less-trained eye would have concluded Caleb was in love.
She had torn the fragile, old mind out of the tired body belonging to Arthur Toaves. Not because she needed him to help Ellie, but because she needed him to see her help Ellie. At quite some risk! Extorting minds from bodies was a terribly dangerous thing to begin with, and older bodies sometimes didn’t survive the process.
The more Baal thought about it, the more he began to like Jane Elring. She had been given one hell of a deal and, all these years, she had been waiting for the right moment to change the tides.
She had waited until Dr. Greer’s ego imploded on itself and her outplacement became a fact. For years she had played according to the rules. Reporting for the monthly checkups, playing nice with her handlers. Baal admired her patience.
Now that Jane Elring had decided that it was time to finally claim the freedom she felt she deserved, she would stop at nothing to get it. Good for her, Baal thought.
The more he appreciated Jane Elring, the more Baal realized he had to be careful. The girl was an intelligent, patient strategist with abilities that far exceeded those of other human beings.
In his considerable wealth of experience Baal had never seen mankind produce something quite like Jane Elring. It made him wonder what else they would come up with in the years to come.
Baal watched from the sky as the trio reached the gate to the mansion. It was open. Of course it was open, Baal thought. Jane Elring had arranged all of this hours in advance. She had placed her hands on the foreheads of Ellie and Arthur and shown them exactly what Gold was. She had shown them the beautiful woman’s birth, her orgies by the oak and, of course, the cannibalism Baal had pushed on her.
Jane and Caleb ventured onto the path leading to the mansion, the unconscious Gold still draped over the black man’s shoulder. Even knocked out cold like this, with her blonde curls dangling messily around her face, she was beautiful. Baal was very proud of the work he had done with her. He had created something so appealing to man’s basic instincts that it was almost irresistible.
When the odd trio finally reached the mansion Arthur Toaves was already waiting for them by the door. Baal knew that the old man felt his presence right now. Even if Baal hid out of sight high up in the sky, he couldn’t completely erase his energy from the area. He and Arthur were so intimately connected at this point that there was no escaping the fact.