He might win and own Hell if Buddy wasn’t careful.
So Buddy decided to set his own PR machine into motion, making sure that while Buddy’s name was mentioned, Lars’ was more prominent.
It was just safer to start pumping Lars up now, impressing everyone with how important Lars was to the war effort, how the demons might have a chance because of Lars and the risks he’d taken.
Because in the end, when Lars failed and fell, he wouldn’t be taking Buddy with him.
Chapter Sixteen
Nik looked over the ingredient list that the demon had handed him. The demon herself was as tall as a giant, her head nearly brushing against the eighteen-foot ceilings in Nik’s shop. She wasn’t any particular class of demon, at least not as far as Nik could tell. If anything, he’d classify her as upper middle class, from a higher born family who still had to work to get ahead. She had the bony structure favored by them, with the flesh flayed off her torso and back. Her hands barely worked, as the ligaments seemed to be over stretched. He wouldn’t be surprised if she could bend her hand back and touch her elbow without really trying.
Her skin was at least dark enough to hide some of her more obvious sores and wounds. And her teeth had mostly rotted out, leaving her with a sweeter smile than she probably found comfortable. She had that sour cabbage smell that Nik would bet turned off other demons.
“Why are you looking for sweetened poisoned hemlock?” Nik asked, curious.
“None of your business, shopkeeper,” the demon replied.
Did she think it was an insult to call Nik by his chosen profession?
Probably. Demons thought that any being who wasn’t a demon was naturally beneath them.
“Just curious about it, that’s all,” Nik said. “Been seeing a lot of demons coming through and asking for ingredients used primarily in human spells.”
She shrugged and didn’t seem inclined to satisfy his curiosity.
He wasn’t going to ask why more demons were coming here and asking for demon spell ingredients. They had their own suppliers and shops. He generally catered more to humans and the kith and kin.
Were the demons just using up that much material that their own suppliers could no longer meet the demands?
Why?
Nik returned back to the list. “Sure, I can get you all of these.” He pointed to the virgin’s tears, pressed daisies, and frog tails. “These I’m going to have to order. They’ll be here tomorrow. Some of the other items though…they’re going to take longer.”
“Can’t you get in anything today?” the demon growled.
At least she didn’t try to press her influence against him. Maybe the few who had tried had warned the others about how quickly that would get them refused service.
More likely, most of them did try to influence Nik and just weren’t strong enough for him to even notice.
“I have at least half your list already in stock,” Nik said. “Do you want to purchase those items now, then come back and get the rest in, say, a week’s time?”
“No, I do not want to have to make two trips,” the demon snarled. “Can’t you at least deliver?”
“Certainly I can! It’s just that there’s an additional fee involved,” Nik explained. He quoted her a price, double to what he usually charged.
“All right,” the demon said, not even bothering to bargain. “I want it all delivered here.” She flipped the list around, stole a pen from the top of Nik’s counter (Nik knew she’d never return it) and wrote down the coordinates for one of the pocket worlds. “Need it all there.”
“If you’ll wait for just a moment, I’ll gather up the ingredients I already have on hand,” Nik said.
“No, deliver them all there,” the demon insisted.
She didn’t seem very interested in the price bargaining that followed, only knocking Nik’s starting bid down by about a third, instead of the two thirds that he was expecting.
“Is there a name I should put on the parcels?” Nik asked as he gave the demon her change.
“Matilda,” the demon said. “And Lars.”
The way she said it made shivers run down Nik’s spine, truly an impressive feat.
Not much was capable of disgusting him. However, the way she’s said his name implied just how deeply she was enamored with Lars. She sounded like a Korean school girl mentioning the name of her favorite singer of a boy band, her secret internet boyfriend.
It was a tone full of admiration, lust, and manic devotion.
How had Lars gotten himself a groupie?
Was Matilda not bargaining with Nik so much because she was paying for this herself? And wanted the bragging rights of how much she’d paid for Lars and his cause? Compared to the others in his entourage?
Matilda didn’t bother even leaving the shop through the regular portal, but disappeared rudely in a puff of smoke.
Nik was so glad that his own sense of smell had never been transferred with his consciousness to his wooden body.
He called up winds to blow away the stench and smoke that would be certain to disturb whoever came into the shop next. Then he started to collect the ingredients that were on hand, letting his hands do the work while his brain kept gnawing at the conundrum that was before him.
Nik would sell to anyone. And he never talked about the purchases made by his customers. That would not be ethical. He believed strongly in their privacy. And if he did ever break his neutrality, he suspected he’d get a visit from an angel.
However.
Was there some way to at least alert the humans that the demons were preparing themselves for all-out war? Could he somehow tell the Host? How could he let someone, anyone, know, without violating the principles that were the foundation of his being?
He would make money no matter who won the next Great War.
It would just be a much more pleasant experience if it wasn’t the demons.
Chapter Seventeen
Ty turned around in the tiny, rock-strewn pocket world, sniffing for all his might. All his nose could find was the smell of sunbaked rock and the leading edge of the rain that was due in later that afternoon.
Damn it! He’d lost the trail. Again.
When Lars had broken out of prison, of course the other demons guarding him hadn’t reported it right away. They’d probably thought that maybe they could find him, bring him back in, and perhaps pretend that it hadn’t happened at all.
Only when the regular Host who audited the demons showed up the following week was it reported.
Then the Host had sat on the information for a while. Ty didn’t know what bureaucrat had decided that it was better to hide the news rather than act on it. He did know that he was likely to string the bastard up if he ever met them.
Now, the trail was cold. It hadn’t taken much persuasion for Ty to get himself assigned to the case, though it was offering a suspiciously low bounty for someone like Lars.
Maybe the Host realized just how dangerous Lars would be when he got cornered, and figured that they’d pay out in hospital and healing costs, and so didn’t want to offer a lot of money for his recapture.
Or maybe there was some other conspiracy going on, a cooperation occurring between the Host and the demons, that Ty didn’t want to think about. Not without driving himself absolutely batshit nuts.
Instead, Ty focused on the trail and finding Lars.
The Host had actually provided Ty with access to the prison that Lars had been held in. Ty had brought all of his gear: powders that would react to all types of magic, not just demon magic; crystals that would glow in the presence of hidden portals or pockets of goods; as well as the giant mechanical sniffer that he wore on his back, which had reminded more than one person of those industrial backpacks that ghostbusters had used.
The Host had also provided Ty with a deadening spell, so that he wouldn’t be fully aware during his time in Hell. It was a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, Ty hated how much the spell muffled his sight,
hearing, sense of smell, even taste.
On the other hand, being able to forget actually visiting Hell was a blessing that Ty wasn’t about to turn down. Hell was the only place where Ty’s control of the beast within was threatened.
The place was too damned hot, while the ground was too cold, a feat that only a demon could manage. The guards had already put another demon into the cell that had been inhabited by Lars. (Were they trying to cover up their mistakes? Or spoil the path and any evidence?)
Ty spent the morning there, using every powder, spell, and trick that he’d learned to figure out what had actually happened.
First of all, those idiots had let Lars obtain human form. It was probably in the official report, the one that Ty had not been permitted to read. But the traces in the cell were obvious. A human-like creature had resided there for a while.
The guards—two huge, horse-faced guards who seemed genuinely upset about what had happened on their watch—eagerly answered every question Ty had, even about the frog-like demon that Lars had summoned as a distraction.
“But there was more,” Ty said as he prowled the cell. The traces were difficult to pinpoint, like trying to find the delicate footprints left behind by a dinosaur after a rave had been held on the excavation site. “There had to be a pocket here, someplace, where he hid all the ingredients.”
The guards looked at each other and extravagantly shrugged their shoulders.
Which meant they knew exactly what Ty was talking about, having either thought of it themselves or been told about it after the fact, and now they were going to play dumb.
It didn’t matter. Ty had learned all he needed to know.
Lars hadn’t gone crazy while he’d been imprisoned. Instead, he’d gone where few demons ever went, deep inside himself, where he plotted and planned. The pockets where Lars had hidden his materials were at least a year old. Demons weren’t known for their long-term thinking. Yet, that was exactly what Lars had been doing.
Ty wasn’t going to like finding out the details of Lars’ schemes, that much he knew.
From Hell, Ty followed the trail through half a dozen pocket worlds. Lars hadn’t spent much time in any of them. He was obviously trying to muddle the trail.
Which Ty could appreciate. He kept finding then losing the trail. He honed his senses to detect a single rock out of place, the thinnest of scent trails, the slightest tremor of the magical sphere.
Now, Ty stood on a tiny pocket world, barely big enough to contain a single rock island. Mists surrounded it, hiding the other inhabitants of the world. If Ty stared hard enough, he saw figures in the mist, beings that he really didn’t want to see. They hissed at his presence, sending chill, foreboding winds down his spine and ruffling the fur on his face, but they hadn’t attacked.
Yet.
Ty knew that Lars had stepped through here. However, he’d probably only stayed long enough to call up another portal to someplace else.
How had Lars been able to skip so quickly from one world to the next? It was difficult to form a portal to someplace you’d never been before. Had Lars really traveled to all these locations at one point?
Or did he have an accomplice?
Ty took a moment to retune his senses, then cursed himself again.
Right there, in front of his nose, was a second demon scent, different than Lars’. If Ty retraced his steps, he was certain that in many of the locations he’d traveled through there would be different additional demon scents.
Ty had been so focused on Lars that it hadn’t occurred to him that there might be traces of other demons. Or if there were other traces of demons, they were only a distraction.
For Ty and the other races he was familiar with, portals worked going from place to place.
Was it possible for a demon to create a portal to travel from person to person?
That would actually explain the behavior of the demons who Ty frequently chased. They frequently had a brother, sister, or cousin who traveled with them, or that they traveled to go see.
Ty stood lost in thought for a moment. Yes. Almost every account he’d heard of, when a demon had recounted their travel, had been about visiting someone with a portal.
They rarely talked about visiting a place.
Damn it! Now Ty was going to have to rethink his entire approach to demon hunting.
In the meanwhile…the mists had moved closer to the shore. Evidently they were more cautious about a stationary creature than one who was moving.
Ty followed the trail of the second demon straight to where the portal leading away from the island had been formed.
Now, was there only one? Had Lars gone through that one? Or had he formed his own?
Ty couldn’t guess. He was going to take it a little easier on himself for the moment, though, and follow the more obvious trail.
If it tuned into yet another dead end, he could always come back here and see if he could tease out where Lars had actually gotten to.
Because at the end of the day, it didn’t matter how many trails went cold on Ty.
He’d track down each and every one of them until he found his charge.
Ty stepped into a green world. Surprised, he held himself still as he looked around. Tall trees surrounded him. Dappled sunlight came through the branches. He heard the song of robins, the clicking of juncos, and the chittering of squirrels. Soft, fragrant breezes blew among the branches, tossing around the light at his feet.
Trails led through the underbrush of ferns. Pine trees lent their scent to the air. Maples, oaks, elms, and others grew wild.
Ty kept looking up, worried that perhaps some large cat or other creature was about to leap down and attack him. Nothing tracked him through the trees, however, other than the blue sky and sunshine.
This wasn’t a demon world. Yet, Ty had followed a demon here. When he lifted his head and focused his nose, he caught the scent of a large group of demons who had passed through the area. It wasn’t a fresh scent, maybe a few days old—possibly as much as a week. The rank smell momentarily overwhelmed his nose. He gagged, shaking his head, trying to clear his senses.
What was this world? And why had the demons come here?
Ty took two more steps, nearly tripping over a fallen log across the center of the path.
Then the scent of death rose up and he turned back.
It wasn’t a brown log laying there, but a fawn. Its dead eyes still looked terrified. It had been shot in the back with a spell that had burned through its body, exiting out the front.
Had this fawn just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had it been skipping merrily along this path when the demon—or demons—had appeared?
Ty hurried on, this time stepping more carefully.
He came across more dead fawns, over half a dozen of them. He could easily follow the scent of death.
They’d all been killed a while ago. Not weeks ago, but certainly days.
Why had no one come for the bodies? Tended to them and given them last rites?
Ty’s fur was black, as was his face. Yet he could feel himself blanch and grow pale when he finally made his way out of the forest and into the small village.
Fawns were barely three feet tall, a shy race that kept to themselves. Tiny thatched huts ran along either side of the trail that had now widened into a dirt road, big enough for a wheeled cart.
Everyone in the village was dead.
No one had been spared by the demons. Babies as well as ancient fawns had all been killed. Many still bore the frenzy of battle, even in their endless sleep, with broken weapons in their hands and despair in their eyes.
What had the fawns done to the demons to rate such an attack? And why hadn’t their natural magical abilities protected them? He should be finding more evidence of a fight, but it was as if the fawns had been so overwhelmed they hadn’t taken out a single demon.
After poking around for a short while, Ty realized that the demons hadn’t taken any pris
oners. That surprised him. Demons liked torture. The fawns would have been particularly susceptible. Why had they all been killed instead?
Had all the demons left the pocket world of the fawns? Ty didn’t think so, though it was difficult to distinguish the scent of a living demon from the army that had passed through.
He needed to explore this world and figure out what had happened. What the demons were up to.
Before another world (and its people!) suffered a similar fate.
Chapter Eighteen
Christine wasn’t sure what Ty meant by the text message he’d sent the evening before.
Be ready to fight tomorrow morning
Fight whom? Or what? Had Ty heard about the failed wrestling match with her ex? Though she didn’t think that Ty had thought much of Alan.
Or had he heard about her considerable failure with Jose the orc? While Jose was sympathetic to her cause, he was more interested in what he could get out of her, rather than selflessly joining her eventual fight against the demons.
Christine had been disappointed, but she had difficulty judging just how much of a failure it was. She’d been recruiting for the last five years, and had built up quite an army.
Was it enough? How many beings did she need for the war? Twenty? One hundred? One thousand? How many demons would they be facing? How many fronts and battles would be run simultaneously? She knew that it was considered a weakness that she was allowing her enemy to choose the battleground. She didn’t want to challenge the demons and get them to attack. What if she lost?
So while Christine was frustrated by the lack of details in Ty’s text, that morning she still dressed in her version of the king’s guard outfit: a solid blue jacket reinforced with steel plates and enough magic to encourage weapons to slide off, tough breeches that would also take quite a beating, along with heavy black combat boots. She debated wearing the peaked metal helmet, gold instead of silver, and in the end slung it around her neck. Hat hair notwithstanding, it was better for her to protect her head.
The Troll-Demon War Page 11