Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  “This is going to be such a comfortable ride,” he said, yanking his door shut with another screech.

  “I concur,” Adara drawled, following suit with her own door. “Assuming the car even starts.”

  She held up the key with a flourish, shoved it into the ignition, and turned it. The engine sputtered once, twice, three times, before it finally turned over and the little car chugged to life. Relieved, Adara checked all the indicators on the dashboard and saw that everything appeared to be in working order. So she buckled her frayed seatbelt, signaled Enzo to do the same, and dropped her hand to the gear shift.

  The car was automatic—a small blessing, as Adara hadn’t driven a manual in years—so all she had to do was press the brake pedal and tug the gear shift down to drive. That done, she eased off the brake. But the car didn’t budge, so she gently tapped the accelerator to give it a nudge.

  The car lurched forward, heading straight for Nadine’s porch. Adara managed to jerk the wheel to the left just in time, and the car skirted past the house and onto the short gravel driveway.

  “I see we’re off to a good start,” Enzo muttered.

  “You want to drive this piece of crap?” she snapped.

  “Not really.”

  “Then shut up.”

  He did, and Adara pulled out of the driveway in relative peace.

  That peace didn’t last very long though.

  At the end of the narrow two-lane road on which Nadine’s house was situated, they came upon one of Edgerton’s major highways. Yesterday, everyone except first responders and nosy reporters had retreated to their homes in the wake of the impacts, leaving the streets strangely empty and quiet. Today, it appeared the shock of the impact event and the resulting losses had given way to an incessant compulsion to return to life’s “regularly scheduled programming.”

  Everyone and their mother was out and about. Men and women in business suits, carpooling to the office. Delivery people struggling to navigate their bulky trucks through dense traffic. College students who’d survived the campus impacts by nothing more than luck, zipping along on their bikes and mopeds to find a new lease on life. And so on and so on and so on and so on…

  It seemed to Adara as if the whole damn city had taken to the streets.

  There was no stoplight at the end of Nadine’s road, so it took them almost ten full minutes to find a gap in the traffic big enough to fit the clunker. Once they were in the flow of traffic, they picked up a bit of speed. But it was hampered by frequent red lights and poorly planned lane merges and all the other nonsense that made rush-hour travel in a metro area a daily disaster.

  They spent over half an hour traversing the three-odd miles from Nadine’s house to the western edge of campus. As they neared the campus, the traffic thinned, cars and trucks peeling off toward the parts of town that had been less affected by the impact event.

  It wasn’t hard to see why people would want to avoid the area near the campus. There was still a great deal of debris on the road, including shards of glass and bits of twisted metal that could easily puncture a tire.

  Thankfully, someone had set out cones to mark the most dangerous patches of road. So Adara was able to navigate around the bulk of the obstacles that could send the borrowed car to the repair shop.

  The Edgerton campus was shaped like a large diamond, and none of the city roads cut through it. Thus, the perimeter of the campus was somewhat like a giant roundabout, all the city streets spilling out onto a single two-lane road that ran along the edge of the entire diamond.

  The road they were on now emerged at the northwestern point of campus, close to the gate Adara had stumbled through yesterday, reeking of vomit and holding back tears. When they rolled to a stop at the intersection directly across from campus, she scanned the low brick wall that marked the western edge until she found that gate. A police sawhorse barricade now blocked it off, along with several lines of bright-yellow tape.

  “You see any cops?” Adara said to Enzo as she looked both ways down the street, pretending she was double-checking for oncoming traffic, in case someone in the shadows was watching them.

  “The alleyway between Barrow’s and Joys & Toys,” Enzo replied.

  The street across from the western wall was lined with artisan shops. One of them was Barrow’s Candy Shop, famous for its fifty varieties of fudge. Another was Joys & Toys, which made custom puzzles, board games, and the like.

  Between those two businesses lay an alley that acted as a thoroughfare to the courtyard behind the artisan shops. It was meant for foot traffic, but it was just wide enough to fit a car. Today, a black-and-white cop car sat at the opening of the alley, its front end facing the campus wall.

  “All right,” Adara said. “I’m going to make a loop around the campus so we can get an idea of how many cops we’re dealing with. You keep an eye on the alleys and cross streets. I’ll keep an eye on the road ahead.”

  Enzo hummed a note of agreement, and Adara turned onto the street that bordered the campus. The cops in the alley gave them a passing glance as they drove by, but no more, and they proceeded around the entire campus perimeter unimpeded.

  They counted four more police cars situated near the campus border, one for each side of the diamond. The cars were roughly positioned across from the middle of each wall, a good vantage point from which the cop pairs could keep an eye on all the gates on their respective sides of campus.

  At the same time, however, it meant they couldn’t see what was happening near any of the other walls. So as long as Adara and Enzo managed to distract one pair, they’d be able to sneak inside.

  “What you think our distraction should be?” she asked as she took a right onto a backroad and parallel parked in a street-side space. “I don’t want to do anything too destructive, but at the same time, we need our fake emergency to look convincing.”

  “But we don’t want every cop in the city to come running, just the ones watching the western wall,” he picked up. “So fire and smoke are out of the question. Maybe we can do something that makes just enough noise to reach the alleyway between Barrow’s and Joys & Toys?”

  “Whatever we do, we’ll have to do it fairly close to the alley. But we also need it to be far enough away that it takes the cops a few minutes to travel the distance and resolve the…”

  Something in the sky caught Adara’s attention. She leaned over the steering wheel, peering up through the dirty windshield. “What the heck is that?”

  Enzo leaned forward as well. “Uh, I have no idea.”

  About four miles north of their location, a beam of golden light had suddenly shot high into the air. At first, it resembled a spotlight, its intensity washed out by the sun, the beam barely a blip against the light-blue backdrop of the sky. But as they watched, the beam grew brighter and brighter, until it looked like some kind of humongous laser being fired from a sci-fi spaceship.

  Adara’s heart skipped a beat as her mind compared the beam to the swirling column of fire Selaphiel had raised to hold off the greater demon. But she buried the dim hope that the angel was alive before the thought even fully formed.

  The beam wasn’t made of fire. It was made of energy, and she recognized the energy by its rich golden color. She’d seen that color, hundreds of times, splashed across the cell phone videos taken during the impact event. It was the color of Providence. The color of God’s shattered body.

  “There’s a god shard over there,” she stated with absolute certainty.

  Enzo gasped, but when he didn’t say anything, Adara turned to face him. Only to find he was no longer paying attention to the beam of light. Instead, he was staring at one of the nearby campus gates. Staring at something—no, several somethings—that were rushing toward the gate from the campus side.

  Imps. A horde of imps. Twenty or more.

  There was a terrible moment where Adara imagined their fragile clunker car getting overrun by imps and torn to pieces before they made it a block down the street. But th
at mental scenario unraveled long before it came to pass. The imps didn’t even spare the car a glance as they loped through the gate, knocking over the sawhorse and shearing right through the police tape.

  The creatures had eyes for one thing only: the beam of light. They were drawn to it the same way they were drawn to Adara and Enzo. Something that belonged to their mortal enemy had awoken, and they wanted to destroy it.

  Adara tightly gripped the steering wheel while she sorted her scattered thoughts by priority. The most important revelation was obvious. “The imps came from the western side of campus. The demons must have a base there.”

  Enzo smacked the dashboard with an open palm. “Crap. They’re guarding the library.”

  “So we can’t get to the cornerstone.” She swore. “The greater demon must’ve figured out why Selaphiel paid me a visit.”

  “We’ll never get inside the library with even half that many imps on patrol.”

  “So what do we do? We have to repair the spell, or the world will literally end in a demon apocalypse.”

  “We need more support,” Enzo said plainly.

  “More shard holders, you mean?”

  “And maybe law enforcement too.”

  He pointed at the cop car parked across from the northern wall of campus, partially obscured by the shade of two trees with generous canopies. The cop pair, a young black woman and an older white man, emerged from the car with their guns drawn as the imps raced past less than thirty feet from their position.

  The slack-jawed cops stared at the creatures, not quite believing what they were seeing. Eventually, the man snapped out of his daze, raised a hand to the radio clipped to his shirt, and made a frantic call to dispatch.

  “I can’t believe the demons just revealed themselves to the public in broad daylight,” Adara murmured. “Don’t they realize that’ll draw attention from the federal government, who commands a large military with extremely powerful weapons?”

  “I’m sure they know,” Enzo said. “But whether they care is up in the air. It could be like you said last night. Maybe they’re resistant to mundane weapons. Or maybe their physical bodies can be destroyed, but their spirits or souls or whatever can just recycle themselves into a new body. I seriously doubt that the angels would’ve found the demons to be difficult opponents if they could be beaten by mortal means.”

  “Damn. You’re right.”

  Humans had a great many weapons of varying type and strength. Some of them were strong enough to wipe all life off the planet. Only the foolish or the self-assured would risk stepping on humanity’s toes hard enough to convince them to use those weapons.

  Adara knew, from those scant few seconds where she peered through her balcony window at that thing garbed in a human skin, that demons were not foolish. They were sure they could win a war against humans, as long as they had the numbers.

  “The cornerstone spell must be close to breaking,” she said. “That’s why they’re being so blasé about showing themselves. They think that by the time word gets out to the people that matter, and the human military is deployed to Edgerton in force…”

  “They’ll have their own army ready to fight back,” Enzo finished. “Shit. We really need to get into the library. But we can’t just charge in there without a solid game plan. And given that the library is likely a demonic stronghold now, a solid plan includes ample backup.”

  Adara racked her brain for ideas, and her gaze drifted back to the pillar of light. “You think that’s the work of a shard holder, or just some weird effect of a shard that hit the ground?”

  “Can’t be sure either way without checking it out.” Enzo picked at his swollen lip. “But it might be worth the risk of racing the imps there.”

  “Think this hunk of junk can beat those imps to the light?”

  “If we leave in the next five seconds.”

  Adara put the car in gear. “Hold onto your breakfast. This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  When they were halfway to the pillar, it began to drizzle. Which was odd, as the sky had been cloudless the last time Adara checked.

  After swerving around a group of pedestrians who were standing in the middle of a crosswalk, ogling the brilliant golden light, she craned her neck to peer up at the sky. A sky that was indeed entirely blue and crystal clear—save for one spot that just so happened to coincide with their current location.

  The lone gray storm cloud was dumping rain on roughly ten blocks of the city. Even stranger, it wasn’t moving with the wind. It was sitting perfectly still in the sky and continuously dumping water.

  “Well, that’s not normal.” Enzo gawked at the cloud over the rims of his glasses. “Another god shard? Or the same one producing the pillar of light?”

  “My bet’s on a different one.” Adara jerked the clunker to the right and forced two wheels onto the sidewalk in order to avoid crashing headlong into the back of a pickup that had abruptly stopped on the road ahead. The driver was leaning out of his window and filming the pillar of light with his cell phone.

  Once she cleared the truck, she pulled the car back onto the lane. The two wheels hit the asphalt with a grinding clank that made her worry the axles were on their last legs. “From what I’ve seen so far,” she continued, “the shards impart one specific ability. And I don’t see what a light pillar and a rainstorm have in common. Also, the centers of the two phenomena are a few blocks apart, which suggests two different points of origin.”

  “So we might have two recruits waiting for us.” Enzo rapped his knuckles on the dashboard. “If this keeps up, maybe we’ll actually gather enough troops to storm the library before all hell literally breaks loose.”

  “I appreciate your optimism.” Adara laid on the horn, scaring a jaywalker so badly that he tripped over his own two feet and fell on his ass. Thankfully, he fell backward onto the sidewalk. So Adara didn’t end up running him over and jarring the car’s damaged suspension.

  Enzo gritted his teeth at the near miss. “You said I was being too cynical earlier, so I decided to change it up.”

  “Good decision.” Adara breathed through her teeth, her stress level so high that her heart was dancing a jig behind her ribs. “I need a bit of levity right now.”

  The appearance of the light had drawn hundreds of curious spectators onto the streets, like moths to a flame. As the car drew closer to the epicenter of the light phenomenon, the crowd grew larger and denser. Until people were spilling over the sidewalks, further congesting the already crowded streets.

  Soon, traffic would be at a total standstill. She and Enzo were going to have to abandon the car and continue on foot.

  “Maybe we should park halfway between the pillar and the storm cloud,” Enzo said. “That way, we can split up and check out both phenomena at the same time.”

  “Splitting up will be dangerous.”

  “But it’ll also be practical. Those imps aren’t but so far behind us. If both the pillar and the rainstorm are the work of shard holders, and we only reach one of them before the imps arrive…”

  Adara sighed and yanked the wheel to the left. The car veered onto a one-way side street that would take them to Latham Court. It was a small neighborhood comprised largely of high-end townhouses that separated the commercial area in which the pillar was shining brightly from the children’s play park that lay beneath the center of the lonely, low-hanging storm cloud.

  “I agree with you,” she said, easing the car through an intersection. “We need to cover as much ground as possible before the demons get here. But please, Enzo, be careful. And be fast.

  “That greater demon showed up at my apartment after I alone used my god shard. There are two shards active right now within a few blocks of each other, and we’re bringing two more to the same area. It’ll practically be a god shard buffet. So I seriously doubt that greater demon will just hang back and twiddle his thumbs while the imps have their fun.”

  “I understand the risk
. I’ll be quick. But…” Enzo turned around in his seat and looked at the undulating mass of transfixed people gathered on the main street behind them. “What about those people? What’ll happen when the imps get here?”

  “Hopefully, they’ll take one look at the ugly bastards and run for the hills.” Adara examined the buildings on either side of the road leading up to Latham Court and spied a small, independent grocery store right on the corner.

  Convenient shopping for the well-off people in the neighborhood. Convenient parking for the clunker car.

  “There’ll be a stampede.” Enzo turned back around and sank deeply into his seat. “People will be hurt, maybe even killed. And if the imps get ahold of anyone, they’ll be butchered.”

  “I know.” She cut a hard turn across the left lane, coasted into the parking lot, and rolled straight into a spot at the far end, beside a rusting dumpster. People wouldn’t give the car too much notice if it was next to a regular eyesore.

  “But,” she added, “we can’t spend our time or risk our lives trying to protect every individual. No matter how guilty it makes us feel to leave them vulnerable. That’s the sacrifice you make by taking on a big task like saving the world. When you dedicate yourself to the big picture, you have to let the small ones fall to the wayside.”

  Adara turned the key, and the car shut off with a grumble.

  Enzo closed his one working eye and took an unsteady breath. “I hate it when doing the right thing makes me feel like a bad person.”

  “Me too.” Adara unclipped her seatbelt and grasped the door handle. “But if you do the wrong thing to satisfy your conscience in the short term, you’ll end up feeling a whole lot worse when the long-term consequences of your failure to do the right thing come to pass.”

  He let out a bitter laugh and kicked his door open, the hinges screeching loudly. “You keep spouting advice like that, I’m going to recommend you switch to a philosophy program.”

  Adara elbowed her own door open and stepped out into the cool mist wafting off the rainstorm. “No chance of that. After all this shit is over, I’ll have spouted enough mollifying moral philosophy to last a lifetime.”