Enzo produced a noncommittal grunt.
She sighed inwardly. This is not how I imagined the beginning of my “quest” to prevent the full-scale demon invasion. How can I protect the whole wide world if I can’t even protect my best friend?
Filing away her grievances for the time being, she guided Enzo out of the long row of shelving units stacked high with beer kegs. The cellar doors lay nearby, a set of slick, concrete steps leading up to them. With a hushed warning for Enzo to watch where he walked—though he’d used these stairs many more times than her—she cautiously ascended the steps and approached the doors.
With an ear pressed to the damp wood of one door, she listened intently for any alarming sounds. To her dismay, she heard something: The unmistakable scraping of hooves on gravel. Coming from more than one pair of feet.
There were already imps in the back lot. A group of them. They were waiting for her to emerge from the storeroom, at which point they’d try to tear her to bloody bits. And they’d be far more formidable adversaries this time, with a numbers advantage on their side. Adara had barely managed to survive the overbearing strength of a single one.
Cursing under her breath, she backtracked down the steps—and proceeded to slip on the bottom one. Enzo was jerked from his daze by the sight of her tumbling toward a shelf lined with wine bottles. He lunged forward just in time to grab her arm and reel her in. Her head came within an inch of the end of a bottle, and the view of the wrapped cork skipped across her vision as she swung back around and regained her balance.
“Damn.” She planted both feet firmly on the stone floor and hunched over, waiting for her heart rate to settle. “That was close.”
“You’ve got to watch that bottom step.” Enzo rubbed his good eye, like he’d just woken up and was trying to ward off the seductive urge to go back to sleep. “Water collects on that step whenever it rains, so that sunken middle part is perpetually wet, and—”
A loud thud resonated through the room. It came from the door that let out into the basement hall. Two seconds later, another thud sounded. And then another. And then another. Each one louder than the last.
The fifth time, the door began to give way with the sharp crack of splintering wood.
“Slick steps or not, I think we should leave,” Enzo said.
Adara grimaced. “We can’t. There are more of them in the back lot. We have to figure out how to get past them, or they’ll swarm us.”
Enzo gave her a deer-in-the-headlights look. “Can’t you just shoot them or something?” He gestured to the gun tucked into her waistband. “You’ve got more rounds in that thing, don’t you?”
She touched a finger to the pistol. “I don’t know if bullets will be effective. These creatures aren’t entirely…natural.”
“What does that mean?” His nose scrunched up in bewilderment. “What are they? Diseased boars? Zombified pig monsters? Runaway science experiments from the world’s most unethical laboratory?”
She was going to have to tell him regardless, so she decided to just rip the band-aid off and be done with it. “They’re demons.”
Enzo blinked. Seven times in a row. “Huh?”
The imp in the hall hit the door again, and a large dent formed in the center.
“Demons,” she repeated. “As in, monsters from Hell that have clawed their way up to Earth and now want to wreak havoc on humanity.”
He vigorously rubbed his temple. “Am I having a nightmare?”
“No, Enzo, you’re awake.”
“A bad acid trip then?”
“Afraid not.”
“So all this is real? Completely real?” he said in dismay. “Hudson’s dead? There are demons at the doors? And I can phase through solid matter like some kind of mutant?”
“Yes…Wait.” Adara’s eyebrows shot up. “What was that last part?”
“A minute ago”—he winced as the imp rammed the door again, the hinges bending with a high-pitched squeal—“when you told me to unlock the door, I fumbled the key and dropped it on the floor. I went to grab it, but that guy with the rifle showed up and started shooting. I panicked and desperately wished I could just go through the door, and then…then I was in the storeroom.
“I thought I’d lost time or something, a quirk of my brain in panic mode. But now you’re telling me that demons are real—and I believe you because there’s no way that freaky boar creature is anything ordinary—so I figure that whatever crazy magic shit is happening in general was also responsible for me suddenly phasing through the door.”
Adara reviewed his ramble half a dozen times in her head, trying to make sense of what his claims implied. And it came to her. Oh, don’t tell me.
“Enzo,” she said, “did you by any chance notice a star-shaped bruise somewhere on your body after the impact event?”
“Star-shaped bruise?” He drew his lips into a thin line, pondering the question, before he glanced at his left arm. “Now that you mention it, I did notice this when I was checking myself for injuries after the rocks stopped falling”—he tugged up the sleeve of his black T-shirt to reveal his upper arm—“but I thought I’d just rammed my arm into the corner of Professor Prescott’s desk or something.”
There, spread across his bicep, clear as day even in the gloom of the storeroom, was a bruise in the shape of a many-pointed star. It looked just like the one on Adara’s back, only smaller.
I didn’t draw the imps here, she realized. Enzo did. He used his god shard by accident, just like I did in the pool.
“Well, now I feel both better and worse,” she murmured.
“What?”
She raked her fingers down her cheeks, wondering how much more complicated this night would become before the sun finally decided to shed some light on the solutions to this ludicrous puzzle. “I’ll tell you later. I’ll tell you everything later. Assuming we don’t die horribly in the next few minutes.”
The door rattled again. This time, the dent in the middle gave way, revealing the mottled flesh of the imp’s meaty hand.
“How do we stop ourselves from dying exactly?” Enzo asked.
“I don’t know.” Adara scanned the storeroom. There was nothing in it other than various kinds of alcohol stored in bottles, kegs, and other containers. “I don’t suppose there’s a secret tunnel leading out of here?”
Enzo shook his head. “Sorry. This place was built after Prohibition ended.”
“Right. Then we’ll have to figure out a way to distract or defeat them.” She looked over her shoulder at the cellar doors then back at the door to the hall, which was falling to pieces under the imp’s ceaseless assault. “There must be something we can do other than burst out of the basement guns blazing and hope for the best. Something smart. Something strategic. Didn’t you study battle tactics in some of your undergrad history courses?”
“I did,” he said, “but those typically involved more than two people. That and cannons. Lots of cannons.”
“Are you sure you can’t close your eyes and wish a cannon into existence the same way you wished yourself through the door?”
“Believe it or not, I already tried that.”
“Bummer.”
They both stared on in growing alarm as a huge chunk fell out of the door and clattered to the floor. The hole left behind was mere inches too narrow to fit the imp’s misshapen head. It peered at them through the hole with its beady black eyes and let out one of its awful screams. Yellow saliva sprayed across the floor and dribbled down its chin in thick, sticky streams.
Enzo gulped. “You don’t have any magic powers you could try, do you?”
Adara opened her mouth to reply in the negative, but no words came out. Because at that exact moment, an idea popped into her head. An idea so obvious that she wanted to smack herself for not having considered it a hundred times already.
If Selaphiel is currently watching you from wherever angels go when they die, she thought, he’s probably seriously regretting his choice of “hero.�
�� You’re an idiot, Adara Caine. A total freaking moron.
“Enzo,” she said, “what percentage of beer is water?”
He shot her a curious side-eye. “Um, about ninety-five percent, I think. Why?”
She lifted one finger, and with it, quickly counted the beer kegs stacked up on all the shelves in the expansive storeroom. When the final tally, a satisfying number, sat front and center in her mind, she answered, “Because I have a plan, and to make it work, we need to build ourselves a swimming pool.”
Chapter Sixteen
Harrowing was the only way to describe the next ninety seconds of Adara’s life.
A harrowing mad dash through rows and rows of shelving units piled high with beer kegs. A series of hard tugs on tight spouts that resulted in streams of beer spilling across the floor, making each additional step more harrowing than the last. A number of harrowing near misses, where Adara and Enzo almost ran smack-dab into one another, half blinded by the dark shadows between the shelves and half consumed by the urgency of their work. A harrowing race to drown the storeroom with thousands of dollars’ worth of prime product before the imp in the hall tore down the rest of the door and lunged for their throats.
They won the race too, by the skin of their teeth.
After emptying the last keg in the room, Adara sent out a high-pitched whistle. A signal for Enzo to head to the cellar doors and quietly pull the bolt that locked them tight.
The imps in the back lot hadn’t made any attempts to enter the storeroom, content to let their buddy in the building drive Enzo and Adara into an ambush. So if they heard the door being unlocked, they made no move to take advantage. Perhaps assuming that a pair of pitiful humans would soon come spilling through the doors in fright. Easy pickings.
Adara would take great pleasure in defying their expectations.
She positioned herself at the end of the center aisle in the room, a straight shot to the cellar doors, and steeled herself for a repeat of what had happened in the pool. She threw a glance over her shoulder, at the imp struggling to tug its bloated body through a hole a tad too small, and held up one hand, middle finger extended.
“Nice try, asshole,” she said to the demon. “Maybe next time.”
The imp responded by snapping its jaws and frothing at the mouth. Though Adara could’ve sworn there were actual words buried in there somewhere.
Returning to the task at hand, Adara looked down at the inch-deep pool of beer at her feet, a layer of white foam clinging to the rubber rims of her hiking boots. She steadied her breathing, clenched and released her fists, closed and opened her eyes, as she allowed the memory of her nightmarish afternoon to consume her once again. She recalled the fall into the pool, that sudden shock of cold water, that instant of terror when the air gave way to something she could not breathe.
She remembered the weight of the imp, pinning her to the bottom of the pool. The unnaturally strong hands wrapped around her throat, tightening and tightening and tightening.
She dwelled on the existential fear of death all humans confronted in times of great crisis. Both personal and impersonal, both expected and unexpected, both believable and unbelievable.
She ruminated on that spark of defiance that welled up in the souls of most people when faced with the prospect of their ultimate demise. The end of everything they’d worked so hard to achieve.
She drowned herself in that feeling, that surge of resistance, that intense desire to keep on surviving no matter the cost, no matter the consequences. And she brought forth that resistance now, here in the storeroom whose floor was submerged in a liquid largely made of water.
Water, the thing she had become. Water, the thing she could become again.
“I will not die here,” she said, to herself, to the imps, to the breaking world. “I will survive.”
With that, Adara Caine commanded her body to merge with the beer.
At first, she felt nothing. And she had a sudden burst of anxiety that she had even less control over her god shard than she realized.
But then, as if she was in a box and someone flipped it upside down, her perspective abruptly shifted from the cellar doors to the ceiling of the storeroom. She was looking straight up from a very low position near the floor. So low in fact that there was no way she could’ve gotten her eyes that close to the floor without removing them from her skull, or…
Adara commanded her hand to rise. An arm made of swirling beer currents pulled itself out of the beer pool and hung in the air without losing its shape or shedding a single drop.
Understanding clicked into place. Her body had indeed merged with the beer when she willed it to. But the beer pool was so shallow that her form had flattened itself out in order to fully submerge her.
She was literally a sentient beer puddle.
That’s a new one, she thought lightly in an attempt to ward off a deluge of thoughts about what could happen to her if she didn’t retain a cohesive shape. Among the things that came to mind was having a part of her scooped out into a mug and chugged down by one of the alcoholics that hung out at Hudson and Grail’s seven nights a week. The concept of traveling through a person’s digestive system made her want to retch, even though she currently had no stomach.
No time for terrible daydreams, she reminded herself. You’ve got demons to drown.
Before she did anything though, she had to take a moment to adjust to the restrictions of her form.
She didn’t need to breathe because she had no lungs, but she kept trying to anyway. She couldn’t walk because her legs were flat, but she kept trying to replicate standard locomotion in order to move toward the cellar doors. She also kept trying to move herself specific distances in precise directions. But she was discombobulated by the altered size of her body and the way it rippled across the floor like an ocean wave.
I’m going to need to practice with this. A lot.
Behind her, another panel of the wooden door loudly cracked, though Adara didn’t hear the sound quite as much as she felt the vibration through the floor. She had no ears after all.
Recalling her earlier transformation, she thought it’d be best to try and replicate the actions that resulted in the imp being cast out of the pool in a vortex of water. She had been acting purely on instinct in that moment. But her movements must’ve been logical enough given the physics of her shape to make the outcome occur.
She considered what she’d need to do to create a similar vortex with the beer, and once again desperately wished she’d taken more science and math classes in undergrad. Some knowledge of fluid dynamics would’ve really come in handy right now.
As it was, she’d have to wing it.
Adara imagined herself gathering into a more humanoid shape, with the rest of the beer pulling at her like a heavy blanket. That picture firmly in mind, she willed it to be so.
After a short delay, it happened. The beer that comprised her body reshaped itself into a human silhouette and rose from the beer, all the way to her ankles. The remainder of the beer cascaded from her shoulders, reminiscent of a cloak, reaching to every corner of the room.
She concentrated on holding her form steady and gestured with her fluid arms, side to side, back and forth, up and down. The rest of the beer in the room danced to the motions of her hands, growing from a still, tepid puddle to something that resembled a wind-tossed lake, white crests crashing into one another, beer splashing up the walls.
Next, Adara began to spin. Slowly at first to keep her balance, and then faster and faster once centripetal force took over and pinned her on an upright axis.
The beer was collectively so heavy that it resisted her spin. But she pushed and pushed, harder and harder, faster and faster, until the beer had no choice but to obey. The agitated liquid formed a virtual whirlpool with Adara at its center. From there, she lifted her arms and drew the beer up into a twisting funnel, turning it into a water spout made from hops and barley.
When the top of the gyrating spout was inches
from the ceiling, she pointed her hands straight at the cellar doors. And with a silent shout of monumental effort, she launched the beer vortex.
The swirling beer thundered across the room, hit the cellar doors, flung them open, and barreled out into the night. The four imps on the other side never knew what hit them.
One got whacked in the face by the swinging cellar door and went down spurting orange blood. The three standing directly before the doors took the funnel head-on. Two of them were ripped right off their feet and carried off into the darkness. The other was dragged across the ground underneath the funnel, the rough gravel ripping it to shreds.
Adara kept the funnel plunging forward until every last ounce of beer left the storeroom. At which point she immediately reverted to human form.
She stood there for a stunned moment, lungs seized up, hands outstretched, entire body shaking like a leaf. Then immense exhaustion dropped onto her shoulders, and every twitch made it feel as if she was trying to move with sandbags strapped to her limbs.
Something hit the back of her leg. Adara turned her heavy head to find it was a piece of wood.
The imp at the door was halfway through, its portly stomach stuck in the hole it had made in the wood. It was ripping chunks of the door panel out to make the hole wide enough for its lower half to pass, and it was seconds from achieving its goal.
A last-ditch surge of adrenaline flooded Adara’s veins. She took off for the cellar doors at a plodding jog. As she neared the doors, she spied Enzo, already at the top of the steps. He was staring, befuddled, at the injured imps writhing on the ground.
She let out another whistle. Enzo jumped, glanced at her, and got the message:
Now is not the time for gawking. This is not a zoo.
Enzo hopped off the top step and moved out of Adara’s way. She skipped the bottom step so she wouldn’t have another nasty fall and took the rest in two strides, emerging into the crisp night.
Her clothes were damp from her transformation, her skin covered in a thin film of beer. But she shrugged off her shivers, kicked the imp with the head wound out of her way, and grabbed her pack from the place she’d dropped it off earlier.
Baptisms of Fire and Ice Page 9