The blow hit soft tissue. The monster roared in agony and backhanded Ephraim across the side of his head.
Spots danced in his eyes, and the world went briefly black as he tumbled away from the fiend. His armor skin might protect him from the physical punishment of his opponent’s strikes. But he could still be concussed. And if he blacked out and dropped his defenses . . .
It raced towards him, trying to press its advantage. Ephraim rolled back to his feet, his legs still wobbly.
The beast threw a fast series of punches. Ephraim got his arms up and parried each blow. But he couldn’t find an opening for a counterstrike. The demon attacked so furiously, all he had time to do was block.
It struck at his head, forcing him to bring his cover up high. As he took the blow on his forearms, the giant kneed him in the groin. His steel skin prevented that from being the devastating blow it would have been to most men. But it was still powerful enough to lift him off his feet again. He was knocked back a short distance before hitting a rock wall.
All the air rushed from his lungs. He slid down and landed in a heap on the ground as his head spun.
The demon pressed the attack once more. It leaped on top of him, put its ugly face right in Ephraim’s, and exhaled a thick cloud of black smoke.
He choked. The heavy smell of ash and brimstone filled his senses, and he couldn’t see or breathe.
With Ephraim blinded, the brute went to work on his abdomen, punching him over and over, assailing his ribs with all its strength. Ephraim couldn’t move. Pinned against the earth by the demon’s enormous body and his head encased in smoke, he could find no way to fight the beast. Eventually, it would knock down his shield, and then he would be battered into paste.
As he began to despair, the thing roared in agony. It got off him, grabbed his legs, and flung him bodily across the landscape. He had only a moment to panic before he crashed into an outcropping, bounced off it, and tumbled to a stop some twenty feet from the creature.
Ephraim lay on his back, covered in pain. If he hadn’t had his armor skin, he’d be dead by now. He didn’t see how he could take much more of this punishment. His head was woozy, his bones ached, and he was weary.
Absently, he wondered why the demon wasn’t coming after him immediately again. He rolled into a sitting position and saw the beast was licking its fists. Its knuckles bled profusely, and it looked sorrowful.
So. It was not invulnerable. It might be enormous and strong, but it couldn’t punch through his metal skin. It was grievously wounding its hands.
An idea occurred to him. He dropped his armor, hoping he wasn’t still covered in acid from the previous trial. When his skin didn’t burn, he shifted into a kneeling position.
“Hey!” he cried. The creature ceased nursing its wounds and gazed on him. “Yeah, you, you ugly piece of trash. I’m vulnerable now. Let’s finish this.”
It flashed him a look of suspicion and confusion, staring at him like a wounded wolf uncertain it could take a hurt animal.
“Come on, you bastard,” Ephraim taunted. “You used up all my power. Don’t you want to kill me? Don’t you want to finish what you came here to do?”
Still the monster regarded him doubtfully. It cocked its head.
“Look at your fists,” Ephraim said. The demon did as he instructed. “Don’t they hurt? Doesn’t that piss you off? Don’t you want to make me pay for doing that to you?”
The behemoth’s countenance changed. Cold anger settled on its face. It turned its head and stared at Ephraim hungrily.
“That’s it, you gruesome son of a bitch. Come get me. Let’s end this.”
The demon was unable to resist. It roared its outrage and charged. Ephraim steeled himself for the attack. This would require precise timing. He had to let it get close, had to let it think it was going to win.
The giant reached for him and opened its mouth wide, looking as though it wanted to stuff Ephraim’s whole body into its feral maw. He activated his armor and drove his fiercest punch into the fiend’s mouth. Its jaws clamped down but found no purchase on the metal. Its teeth shattered on the steel.
Ephraim’s fist hit back of its throat, shredded the skin, and continued into its brain pan and out the back of its skull.
The beast looked comically surprised for one second. Then the light left its eyes, and it slumped to the ground dead.
He struggled to get free of it. His whole arm was buried in its head, and its lifeless body seemed to weigh a ton. He put a foot to its shoulder and pushed hard, until he at last slid his hand back out of the wound it had created.
When he had finally extricated himself, he stood with his hands on his knees, covered in black blood and panting with exhaustion.
“Well done, Ephraim Silverman,” he heard. “Your final trial awaits: Loyalty.”
In the blink of an eye, the scene shifted again. He stood inside a stone chamber, lit with candles. Before him, on a dais, was an altar with a winged demon tied spread-eagle on its back with iron chains.
He approached it cautiously. When he stepped up, he saw it was a succubus. It was Miriam.
“Prove your loyalty to us, Ephraim Silverman,” the master called, its voice the sound of live vivisection. “Sacrifice the woman you love in our name.”
Ephraim’s eyes popped open wide at the command. He felt something in his hand. When he looked down, he saw it was a knife.
Seven
Devlin and I finished our breakfast, paid the check, and departed for Union Station. I left the server a nice tip. Working people need all the help they can get. Trust me, I know.
Chicago is a big enough hub that the train station is actually manned. There was a ticket booth and everything. I got us two fares to Denver, paying in cash. Nice and untraceable.
Of course, there were security cameras everywhere. I wished I had a hood I could put up to conceal my identity a little. I really didn’t want anyone randomly checking footage and realizing I was that missing girl from Cincinnati. Knowing Felicia, she’d probably put out an APB on me and wasted the money I gave her on a private detective.
Regret and guilt squeezed my heart tightly. Felicia deserved better than me. Not that she saw it that way. I’d tried to tell her that when she’d insisted we get together in the first place. I am a good girlfriend for nobody, especially the person I care most about in the world.
Anyway, I’m sure she’d bawled her eyes out for hours and then set to trying to find me. Even though I’d explicitly told her not to do that. And they say I’m stubborn.
I had to hide my katana in the guitar case again. I hated that. As soon as it was out of my hands, I felt weak. I’d needed it to kill that CarFax demon at the motel. What if we were attacked again?
We boarded the train with plenty of time to spare. Unlike getting on in the middle of the night in Cincinnati, the car was crowded. It was midafternoon in Chicago, and a lot of people were apparently looking to get out of town. Devlin and I were lucky to find seats together.
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back as we waited to get underway. His knee rubbed against mine, sending soft waves of pleasure through me. Damn it. I needed to get that under control. Wasn’t I just mourning the loss of my girlfriend – the closest thing to my One True Love I was likely ever to find? What was the matter with me?
Before I had time to start making a list to answer that question, the doors shut. A few seconds later, the train shuddered into motion. My brief stay in Chicago was over. We were headed west.
***
The first part of the journey wasn’t pleasant. The train was packed full of people leaving Chicago, and our first stop in Naperville put even more people onboard. Amtrak seats are wide, which is nice. But it still felt every bit as claustrophobic as the bus from my daily commute in Cincinnati. It did nothing to make me relax.
Worse, with that many people, Devlin refused to teach me shit. He was too worried about breaking The Veil. He wouldn’t teach anything, and he wouldn’t even dis
cuss it. Until the passenger load thinned out some, I was getting nothing from him.
Boredom set in pretty damned quick. I’m not ADHD – at least not as far as I know; Mama never had me tested – but sitting still quietly and doing nothing isn’t exactly my strongest suit, you know? I mean, I like reading. But I didn’t have an Amazon account anymore, and I couldn’t set up a new one, since I’d have to use my credit card, which would leave a footprint someone could trace. So I couldn’t just download a book.
Besides, I wasn’t in the mood for that. I used to read to pass the time on my commute, but I was too damned worried about everything. I was grateful for Devlin’s presence and partnership. Not only was he someone to talk to, I didn’t have to face all this danger by myself. But he didn’t want to discuss training me or anything to do with the magical world at all right now. And I still didn’t feel safe. I was on the run, after all. Ephraim was out there.
Plus, Devlin was hot, and that was making me uncomfortable. My heart still belonged to Felicia. It didn’t feel right to be drawn to this guy. But I was never going to see her again, so it seemed stupid to ignore the urges he was generating in me. But aside from knowing he was on a three-hundred-fifty-year-old revenge mission, I didn’t know much about him. And that made getting involved with him risky and foolish.
Of course, I could just fuck him. That would feel good and relieve some tension. But despite being fairly promiscuous and unashamed of it, jumping into bed with this guy so soon after breaking Felicia’s heart seemed . . . I don’t know. Slutty?
So sitting next to him being unable to talk about what I was interested in and unable to get a book and not knowing what else we could talk about, was making me kinda crazy. This is how my brain works, you know?
With a heavy sigh, I pulled out my phone and logged into Amtrak’s free wi-fi service. I opened the Internet browser and went out to The Mary Sue. If I couldn’t read or watch my favorite shows, at least I could consume feminist analysis of them.
It didn’t take long before I’d read everything I’d missed in the last few days and had to find some other form of entertainment. I couldn’t risk logging into my Snapchat or Instagram accounts, which was a real pain in the ass, since that would at least feed me content from friends and people I followed. I could always make up a new account, but then I’d have to start over following feeds. It didn’t seem worth the effort.
So I just cruised the Internet, looking for semi-interesting stuff and being bored out of my skull. If Devlin didn’t start talking to me soon, I might kill him just to give myself something to do. This was a level of tedium I was not accustomed to, and it was slowly making me insane.
***
The crowd didn’t really thin out until we reached our fourth stop, Burlington, Iowa. Evidently, most of the people who’d left Chicago with us weren’t keen on actually crossing the Mississippi River. It made sense to me. Iowa wasn’t exactly my ideal place to visit. As far as I knew, it was a whole state that looked like I-71 between Cincinnati and Columbus.
But we didn’t pull into the station until almost 5:30. Which meant I’d been sitting in shoot-myself-in-the-face boredom for three-and-a-half hours.
Devlin had taken the opportunity to doze. So even though people had started getting off the train by the second stop, he hadn’t really been around for even casual conversation.
We were down to ten people in our car, spread out pretty broadly. I turned to Devlin and leveled my most serious stare at him.
“All right,” I said. “I cannot stand this any longer. You are gonna have to teach me something. There is hardly anyone else aboard, and I am going stir crazy in this aluminum can. If you don’t give me something, there may be a murder aboard, and I can’t guarantee you won’t be the victim.”
Devlin laughed. I could have punched him.
“You’re so impatient, Sarah,” he said.
“I’ve waited three-and-a-half hours,” I growled. “Don’t talk to me about patience. Delayed gratification ain’t my thing.”
He chuckled again. I swear, this fool was asking me to put a giant dent in his face.
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s work on the basics. That should be possible without breaking The Veil.
“I want you to tap into the magic around you. There is eldritch energy in the air. You should learn to detect it, so you can pull it to you and shape it as you desire.”
I shook my head. Apparently, I hadn’t been clear with him about my ability. Or he hadn’t been listening. Probably the latter.
“That’s not how it works,” I said. “I have to receive the magic. Someone has to direct it at me.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because that’s how it’s always worked in the past.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
Was I not speaking English? What the hell was the matter with him?
“Because that’s how it’s always worked. That’s what A— That’s what my first instructor taught me.”
“How did he know?”
God damn it, I swear I was going to belt Alistair Devlin if he didn’t quit asking the same question. Seriously, why wouldn’t he believe me?
“Because he was the expert,” I answered. “He did the research, and he worked with me in the field a couple times.”
Devlin frowned. He still wasn’t buying it. That was really pissing me off.
“Did he ever ask you to try tapping into the latent energy around you?”
I opened my mouth to snap at him, but I suddenly realized he was right. Ash had taught me a lot of things, but he had never explicitly said I could reach out to the magic allegedly swirling all around us. He’d never even suggested such a thing was possible, let alone I might be able to do it.
“No,” I admitted.
“Then how do you know he is right?”
There it was – the obvious question. The perfectly simple idea that had never even occurred to me. I realized I’d been relying on Ash, and to a lesser extent my trainer, Erin Brinson, to teach me about the magical world. They’d told me what I needed to know to accomplish whatever objective The Order had for me.
But until Ash had hit me with his theory about me being able to reshape the magic I absorbed on our way to rescue Felicia, no one had attempted to help me develop my powers. My own abilities were sort of taken for granted or forgotten. They’d initially hired me to kill a dragon, because they’d known I’d be immune to his fire-breath. But no one had thought to teach me that I could use that energy. I’d gotten there on my own, using instinct.
So maybe there was all this stuff that I could do – that The Order and maybe Ash, too, knew I could do – that hadn’t been developed. Maybe it was there, and they didn’t want me to know. Maybe they didn’t want me to learn. I’m the N’Chai Toroth. Everyone’s afraid of me. So maybe they thought keeping me ignorant was a good idea.
“There is magic all around us, Sarah,” Devlin said. “If you are capable of absorbing it when it is projected into you, it stands to reason you can also draw latent and potential power to you.”
I nodded. That made total sense. I was suddenly pissed at Ash all over again. Had he known this? Had he suspected it? And if he didn’t, why the hell not?
There were no answers to those questions that I liked. Thinking about it just made me angry.
With a sigh, I focused on Devlin’s pretty, blue eyes.
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“First, you must learn to perceive it,” he answered. “Open your mind and stretch out your senses to the world.”
“Jesus, you really are Yoda, you know that? You should be speaking like a Muppet and reordering the words in your sentences.”
“What?”
“Reach out with your senses you must,” I said in my best Yoda voice.
“I don’t understand.”
“You haven’t seen any Star Wars movies?”
When he continued to stare blankly at me, I shook my head. What the hell d
id this guy do with his time? He’d been alive for three hundred, seventy-one years, and he hadn’t had time to see one movie?
“Never mind,” I said. “How do I ‘reach out with my senses’?”
“Close your eyes,” he instructed. With a sigh, I obeyed. “Now, lean back in your seat and relax.”
“You sound like you’re trying to hypnotize me.”
“Sarah, you must concentrate. Put aside this penchant for sarcasm and focus.”
Put aside my penchant for sarcasm? Did he want me to change sexes while I was at it? Maybe I could become an elephant. Seriously, it was like he wanted me to be a completely different person.
I squelched the snarky remark that was rushing from my mind to my mouth and tried to do what he told me. With a deep breath through my nose, I purposely let all the tension drain from my muscles. This was no different than learning a new kata or getting ready for a tournament. I needed to relax and focus.
“Okay,” I said, when my brain was quieted. “Now what?”
“Let your thoughts reach out to the world around you,” he instructed. “Feel the magic in the air.”
I suppressed a snort. Magic in the air. Sounded like some sort of half-assed commercial for Disney World.
Damn it, Sassy. Focus.
I sucked in another breath through my nose to relax myself. Then I tried to “see” with my mind’s eye. Nothing happened.
“I can’t get it,” I said. “I can’t see anything.”
“Open your eyes.”
I did what he told me. Back in the Amtrak car, the world was mundane, boring.
“Look out the window,” Devlin said.
Once again, I obeyed as though he were my sensei. There wasn’t a damned thing out there. It was just rolling meadows punctuated by the occasional farmhouse. There wasn’t even any corn or wheat to look at. It was too early in the season.
“Do you see the world?” Devlin asked.
“Yeah, I see it,” I replied, making it plain there was nothing to see.
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