Adara gave Solomon a smile. “You did a good job tackling Belphegor. Better than me. Thanks for the save.”
Solomon waved his foil-wrapped sandwich around in a dismissive manner. “You should thank Enzo, not me. He was the one who kicked my butt into gear as we were driving down Maynard. If it had been up to me, I would’ve run the other way.”
“And I wouldn’t have faulted you for running,” Adara said. “You had no clue what was going on and no grasp of the nature of your new powers.”
Enzo shot Solomon a pointed look. “As long as you don’t run away when we’re making our move at the library…”
Solomon blew air through his teeth. “Not going to lie. I’ll be tempted to do exactly that, especially if any demons come gunning for me. But I will try my absolute hardest to stand my ground. You’ve impressed upon me the high stakes of this situation, and I understand what will happen if we fail. So I’ll put my life on the line. I’ll be terrified the whole time, and I’ll probably piss myself. But I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Enzo nodded. “Good man.”
They fell into a grim silence as they ate their toasted sandwiches, sweet potato chips, and assorted fruit cups, all of them brooding over what would undoubtedly be the most dangerous trial of their lives.
The plan was to attack at dusk. Since power had been cut to most of the campus after the impact event, they would use the long shadows of twilight to hide their approach to the library. Once Adara and Enzo were close to an entrance, Solomon, some distance away, would summon a dense fog.
A number of the demons guarding the library would peel off to hunt down the shard holder, their speed impeded by the lack of visibility. Then Adara and Enzo would use the gaps left in their line to sneak in through a side entrance. All the library doors were locked using an electronic card reader keyed to college IDs, and the readers had electronic backups that lasted a few days in case of blackouts. So they wouldn’t have to make any significant noise getting into the building.
It was after they got inside that things would get hairy. Adara figured that the cornerstone spell was likely somewhere in the building’s basement, or perhaps somewhere farther down in the foundation. In order to get to it, they’d have to access one of the three stairwells that went into the bowels of the library.
There were more than enough imps, Adara was certain, to guard those three stairwells. So they’d have to fight their way down. And as soon as they confronted the imps, any greater demons inside the library would be alerted to their presence.
At that point, time would become a precious commodity. Every second they spent fighting the imps was a second that a greater demon had to catch up to them. If they had to use the banishment spell on a greater demon, they might end up with too little energy to fix the cornerstone spell.
All these potential problems could be remedied with the help of two or three more shard holders, but they couldn’t spend the rest of the day scouring the city for a couple needles in a haystack. Everyone in Edgerton was living on borrowed time. Adara, Enzo, and Solomon had to act before the cornerstone collapsed.
After they finished eating, they’d head to the campus and begin preparations for the library breach. There would be no rest for the wick—
Enzo choked on a chip and coughed out, “Holy shit!”
Adara yanked herself out of her thoughts and looked at the TV. In place of the live aerial footage of Maynard Avenue that had been playing a moment ago, the news chopper was now filming something else. An eight-story apartment building four or five miles from Barnaby and Pruitt—and not more than two blocks from the southern edge of Tarly Square—which appeared to have suddenly burst into flames.
As the cameraman zoomed in to get a close-up shot of the fiery carnage, the top half of the building violently exploded. Flaming debris shot a hundred feet into the air, and an enormously powerful shockwave rippled outward from the epicenter of the blast.
Adara threw her plate on the coffee table and yelled, “Get down!”
All of them dropped to their knees in front of the living room furniture and covered their ears.
The shockwave hit their building a split second later.
The balcony doors shattered inward, spraying the entire apartment with sharp shards of glass. The surface of the coffee table cracked like thin ice but held its shape. The TV tipped over and smacked the wall, leaving a deep dent in the plasterboard.
Paintings rattled themselves off their hooks and fell to the floor. Decorative side tables overturned and dumped their paperweights onto the carpet. And a sound like a speeding train rolled across the apartment, shaking bones just as hard as it shook the steel frame of the building.
When it was over, Adara used the couch to hoist herself up. She peered past the gaping frame where the sliding-glass balcony doors used to be. Through the gaps in the swinging blinds, she could see that a massive plume of smoke and flame dominated the skyline, even more so than the eerie pillar of light.
Large pieces of smoking debris were falling from the air, landing on rooftops, on roads, on cars—and setting them ablaze. People on the street were fleeing from the rain of fire, and some of them weren’t making it to safety.
Adara spun back to the TV, which was still miraculously working despite a dead line running through the middle of the screen. The news footage being shown was from the ground, not the helicopter, and Adara watched in muted horror as the ground crew filmed the news chopper spinning uncontrollably and crashing onto the rooftop of a bank.
Instead of waiting to see who, if anyone, emerged from the smoking, crumpled copter, the reporter on the ground who was narrating the events ordered the cameraman to turn away from the downed chopper, as something else had caught his attention. The cameraman swung the hefty camera back toward the apartment building that had just exploded.
The ground crew was a good distance away from the building, but their camera had excellent zoom capabilities. The cameraman pushed the zoom to the max and focused on something around what had been the middle of the building but was now effectively the top since the upper half of the building had been blown clean off. Amid the rolling orange flames and dense gray smoke that had enveloped the building, there was a noticeable splotch of pure black that didn’t look like it was part of the structure.
As the cameraman put this splotch in center frame, it moved. Right up to the end of a crumbling fourth-floor balcony. The movement revealed that the splotch was actually a swirling vortex of black fire. It came to a halt on the ledge, and the currents of black flame peeled away to reveal the form of a woman.
A woman with dyed red hair, ghost-white skin, a heavily freckled face, and oil-black eyes. A ring of charred flesh bits floated above her head and slowly spun as if trapped in some kind of orbit.
The greater demon peered down at the debris-strewn street and smiled in a way that spoke of cruelty not for cruelty’s sake, but for the sake of efficiency and nothing more. It gave Adara the impression that she was doing what she needed to do in order to achieve her goals, but that she took no particular pleasure in the acts she had to commit. In fact, despite standing in the middle of a raging inferno, the demon looked rather bored.
“Is that Belphegor again?” whispered Solomon, whose cheek was bleeding from a long, thin cut, courtesy of the flying glass.
“No,” Adara said decidedly. “That’s a different demon.”
He snatched a napkin out of an overturned café bag and pressed it to his bleeding cheek. “How do you know for sure?”
“The way she’s acting. Back on Maynard, Belphegor acted like slaughtering people en masse was extremely amusing. This demon seems to feel mass murder is a dull chore, like mopping the dirt off the floor or taking out the garbage.”
Enzo brushed bits of glass off his shirt and eyed the woman on the screen. “So there is more than one roaming around.”
“It was inevitable that there would be,” Adara said. “Even if it takes several hours for a greater demon to pus
h through the barrier, they’ve had since yesterday afternoon to get a small group across to Earth. And as the cornerstone spell continues to weaken, more and more of them will be able to cross faster and faster. If and when it breaks completely, they’ll be able to cross in their full forms—and at their full power.”
Solomon glanced at the ruin of his apartment. “I think maybe we should head to the campus now.”
“I think you’re right,” Enzo said. “It’s not dark yet, but if we—”
“Hold on.” Adara leaned toward the glitching TV. “What’s happening on the street there?”
Enzo and Solomon shuffled closer and scrutinized the area, which was partially obscured by the dead pixels. But after a few seconds of fruitless squinting from all three of them, the news switched from the ground crew to a feed from yet another chopper, which had just taken off from a helipad at the small airport outside Edgerton.
The copter soared in low across the city skyline. A panning shot showcased the glowing beacon that was Barnaby and Pruitt, along with the growing plume of smoke from the burning apartment building. The pilot, wisely, didn’t pull in too close to the building, lest a secondary explosion send the second copter crashing to the ground like its predecessor.
The radius at which he circled the building, however, was just close enough for the camera attached to the bottom of the copter to get a solid shot of the action taking place at the base of the apartment building. Or rather, not taking place.
Because everything within half a block of the building’s front door was frozen in time.
This “time bubble” extended upward about thirty feet. It had captured in its grasp a dozen imps that had leaped from a high floor of the building to ambush someone on the street below. Their target was clearly a young blond man in a black T-shirt and jeans, who was wearing no shoes and was covered in streaks of soot. A resident of the building. And no doubt the person the greater demon had come to kill.
The camera zoomed in to highlight the man. This revealed that he alone was moving inside the bubble of frozen time. He was slowly but surely stepping backward, closing in on the edge of the bubble.
The man’s face, blistering from the fiery flash of the explosion that had consumed his building, showed a great deal of strain. He was pouring all his strength into maintaining the integrity of the bubble.
Adara knew he’d run out of energy sooner rather than later. The starburst bruise on the back of his neck was only so large. The sliver of God that had fused with his soul possessed only so much power.
The moment he ran dry, his bubble would collapse, and those imps, along with a ton of smoking debris suspended in the air, would fall right on top of him.
“Another shard holder,” Solomon muttered. “He must’ve used his power by accident and brought that greater demon sniffing around his building.”
“Am I imagining it,” Enzo said, “or is he literally stopping time in a localized field?”
“You’re not imagining it.” Adara plucked a large piece of glass out of her hair. “That’s exactly what he’s doing. And that’s exactly what we need to help us navigate the minefield of demons at the library so we can get to the cornerstone spell.”
Enzo peered over his shoulder, at the glow of the fire visible through the glassless balcony doors. “That area is going to be swarming with cops in the next ten minutes.”
“Cops?” Solomon huffed. “According to the news, the governor deployed the National Guard right after the incident on Maynard. If they’re here in the city, we could end up driving straight into a military intervention, with tanks and machine guns and drones armed with missiles.”
Adara gave them both a disapproving look. “Then we better stop jabbering and hurry down to the car. Because I’m not letting an ability that useful slip through our fingers. Now get your shoes on, and mind the glass.”
She snatched the car keys off the edge of the cracked coffee table. “Oh, and Enzo? I’m driving.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Adara gunned it down the street, pushing the clunker as fast as it would go. The engine whined and stuttered, but she didn’t let off the accelerator, even as she reached the edge of the field of rubble that had pelted the streets after the explosion. She jerked the wheel left and right, dodging sections of hardwood floors and fully intact doors that had been blown out of their frames.
As they neared the burning apartment building, Enzo, gripping the handhold above the passenger door, muttered, “You know that chopper probably has us in its sights already, don’t you? Our fully identifiable faces are going to end up on TV the second we step out of the car.”
“It’s a risk we have to take. That guy who can stop time might be our best chance for successfully reaching the cornerstone.”
“I thought the two of us were going to tag-team the demons in the library,” he groaned.
“That was the original plan, and it sucked. Too much could, and likely would, go wrong. One of those time bubbles strategically placed in the library will substantially reduce our risk of dying.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” mumbled Solomon from the back seat, where he was hunched over with his hands gripping his head. As if he expected the car to get crushed by something falling from above. “But fighting this greater demon will increase the risk to our lives, so I feel like you’ve just exchanged one dangerous scenario for another.”
“The difference,” she protested, “is that we know what this situation is, thanks to the news coverage. But we don’t know exactly what’s going on in the library.”
That assertion shut them up. They couldn’t deny she was right.
She couldn’t deny that they were also right. This was a dicey move, and she desperately hoped it would pan out in their favor.
“You two have the banishment spell down pat, yeah?” She swerved around a piece of smoking drywall in the middle of the right lane. “Because all three of us might need to cast it in tandem to punt that demon back to Hell.”
Enzo grunted in the affirmative, and Solomon, who’d studied the spell before lunch, gave her a nod that didn’t look entirely confident. She would take what she could get though.
Peeling her eyes to cut through the haze of smoke that had descended around the base of the apartment building, she located the man who could stop time. He had almost reached the edge of his bubble, but the continual strain to keep the bubble intact had worn him down.
His chest was heaving from a lack of air—which would get all the worse when he passed the bubble’s perimeter and ended up in the thickening smoke—and a sheen of sweat was visible on his bare arms and neck, reflecting the orange glow of the raging fire.
He was nearly at his limit. And the bubble was echoing his imminent failure.
It was shrinking at an alarming rate. Any minute now, the imps stuck in midair would be beyond its reach on either side, and only the four who’d jumped directly for the man would fall back into it. Then the man would have imps rushing at him from both sides.
To make matters worse, the greater demon, seeing the man was nearly beyond the safety of his bubble, decided to act while Adara and the others were still seventy feet out from the building. She leaped from the inferno that had consumed the fourth floor, her bands of black fire swirling about her, and dropped straight down to the sidewalk in front of the building’s main entrance.
Near the ground, she flicked her wrist. The black fire currents dove beneath her feet and acted like the diminishing exhaust of a rocket bringing a spaceship back to earth. The greater demon landed with a mere bend of her knees and a puff of ashy debris.
Straightening up, she casually began to circle the shrinking boundary of the time bubble.
The man spotted her, but he was between a rock and a hard place. Nothing he could do would allow him to escape from all his enemies.
It was up to Adara, Enzo, and Solomon to save him.
“Solomon, conjure up another storm and make it rain, hard. Try to douse the fire. The
re might be people trapped in their apartments,” Adara said. “Also, see if you can charge your storm up for another lightning strike. I know you said that bolt you threw at Belphegor almost made you faint, but if we end up in dire straits, we’ll need a trump card.”
Between his rapid breaths, Solomon replied, “You got it. One thunderstorm coming up.”
He brought his bruised arms together, like he was focusing his concentration into the mark left by his shard. The bruise gave off a faint flicker of golden light, and a moment later, the first curl of a dark cloud formed in the sky ahead of their car.
The greater demon sensed the shard activation and paused her death march toward the man who could stop time. She spun to face their oncoming car, her black eyes alight with the image of the burning building beside her. Her gaze shifted up, at the steadily growing storm cloud, and recognition set in.
She knew who they were: the same people who’d disrupted Belphegor’s massacre plot. Judging by her nasty sneer, she wasn’t planning on letting them wreck her plan to murder the struggling blond man. She held up her hand, directing the currents of black fire to converge before her palm and compress themselves into an enormous black fireball.
“Um, Adara?” Enzo said nervously.
“Tell Nadine I’ll pay to replace her car”—Adara sighed—“after I finish paying off my student loans.”
The greater demon let out an incoherent shout, and the black sphere of fire shot forward as if blasted from a cannon. Adara yanked the wheel to the right and veered the car out of the lane. The fireball zipped past and melted off the driver’s side mirror. And the car slammed into a fire hydrant.
Exactly as Adara had planned.
The fire hydrant popped off the top of the water main. A massive geyser of highly pressurized water erupted into the air. As it began to rain down onto the hood of the car in heavy sheets, Adara calmly unclipped her seatbelt and opened her door, allowing the water’s roar to rattle through the clunker’s bones.
She called out to Enzo, who was rubbing the whiplash from his neck, “Go grab our friend who can stop time. Use your shard power if anyone, or anything, tries to stop you.” She glanced at Solomon. “You, go find a place to hide.”
Baptisms of Fire and Ice Page 16