Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  With that bit of power added to what else Belphegor could now conduct through the partially dead cornerstone, he doubled the size of his churning fireball. He then pointed the tips of his claws at the two fraught humans desperately trying to complete the repair spell.

  The fireball shot toward Enzo and Victoria, threatening to burn them alive.

  “I win,” spoke a rumbling voice that resonated up through the hole in reality, “and you lose.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The fireball never reached Enzo and Victoria. Because Adara jumped in front of it.

  With a shield made of water, she met the fireball head-on in a mighty collision of hot and cold. As she’d done during the fight with Astaroth, Adara commanded her water to freeze solid and drain the heat away from Belphegor’s attack.

  But this time, that tactic didn’t work. The fireball was ten times hotter than any flame Astaroth had been able to conjure. It sublimated Adara’s ice as fast as she could create it, filling the air with so much steam that visibility dropped to zero.

  All Adara could see was the raging fireball before her as it bored through her water shield, inch by inch, creeping closer and closer to her body.

  Adara didn’t know exactly what would happen if her body turned into a cloud of steam, but she did know that losing her water form would cost her the fight. Enzo and Victoria would then suffer the consequences of her failure.

  So Adara had to come up with something, anything, to stop the advance of the fireball.

  Now would be a good time for Gideon to throw up a time bubble. But he was still holding fifty-odd imps in another bubble, and there was no guarantee he could conjure a second without losing his grip on the first.

  Additionally, so much steam had filled the room that it was doubtful he even knew what was happening. He couldn’t very well form a useful time bubble if he couldn’t pinpoint the problem.

  So Gideon was out.

  What were Adara’s other options?

  Think, Caine. Think hard, she told herself, as more and more of her water hissed away into the air. If you can’t destroy the fireball, then figure out a way to divert it.

  That was easier said than done, however.

  The steam billowing toward the ceiling was disturbing Solomon’s rainstorm, so there was less rain falling to join Adara’s pool on the floor. The water pipe in the hallway was still spitting water, but the flow was coming in from the opposite side of the fireball from Adara, so most of that wasn’t reaching her either.

  She was once again running out of water. And if she moved left or right in an attempt to collect more, she would expose Enzo and Victoria to a deadly degree of heat.

  Adara hunted the contours of the white haze all around her, searching for something that could help her. But she found nothing at all.

  Nothing in the books she’d cherished so much that lay wet and molding on the floor. Nothing in the myriad people on her side, who were injured and exhausted, or preoccupied with other monsters. Nothing in her own mind or memory, even among the many lessons her father had taught her before the specter of cancer came to collect yet another middle-aged man with a zest for life and love.

  Nothing except a brief flash of a half-forgotten childhood moment. Adara and her father. Sitting on a low hill. Observing the glow of a distant fire in a grassy field. Smelling the acrid tang of smoke on the warm midsummer air. Listening to the sirens of fire trucks as they raced down a country road toward the blaze.

  “Are they going to use the hoses to put the fire out?” preteen Adara had asked.

  “Maybe,” her father said. “But they might also use a controlled burn to create a firebreak, and then let the fire wear itself out. It depends on exactly how the fire is spreading.”

  “You mean they’re going to fight fire with fire? I thought that was just an expression.”

  Her father laughed. “Sometimes, it’s also a fact. You can fight fire with fire in the right situation.”

  Adara snapped back to the present. Could it really be that simple?

  Selaphiel had claimed her power was “elemental coalescence.” At no point had he said it was restricted to water only. She had assumed as much because water was the element she’d originally merged with—and she’d never accidentally merged with earth or air or fire, despite encountering all three several times over the past two days.

  But what if her ability had a much broader reach? What if water was simply the easiest of the elements with which to merge because the human body was largely made of water?

  She’d learned during the fight with Astaroth that she could lower the temperature of the water she merged with. It made sense that she could also do the opposite. And if she could withstand extreme heat as well as extreme cold while her shard was active, then perhaps she could physically join an active source of fire, just as she could with available sources of water.

  There was only one way to find out. She had to test the theory. Now.

  Adara didn’t breathe while in water form, but her chest mimicked the motion of a deep breath anyway as she stared into the looming blackness that was Belphegor’s raging fireball. Mere inches of bubbling water remained between her liquidized body and direct contact with the black flames. At the rate it was evaporating, she had under a minute to work out a foolproof method of saving Enzo and Victoria from a fiery death.

  Better to die trying your hardest to save them, she thought, than sit idly by and watch while they burn. You have to try it, Caine. You have to.

  That assertion held firmly in her mind, Adara pushed her right water hand through what remained of her shield and held it directly against the churning surface of the fireball. Her fingertips steamed away instantly, and she was almost overwhelmed by the odd sense of being in two places at once. She felt her fingers, now in vapor form, float toward the ceiling.

  But she didn’t back off. She couldn’t back off.

  She plunged her entire hand into the fire, willed her body to shed the guise of water and instead merge with the roaring black flames. She poured all of her fear and all of her resolve into the mental push, demanded that her god shard allow her to become what was needed in order to save her friends, her city, her world.

  I need to be fire to beat this demon, she shouted into the ether, so I will be fire!

  And then she was.

  It began as five tiny white sparks. The curls of vapor her fingertips had become zipped back down into the fireball and rejoined their respective appendages. But they didn’t cool back into liquid form.

  Instead, they shifted from white gas to white fire, so fast that Adara didn’t see the transformation so much as she felt it. A surge of extreme yet painless heat that traveled through her hand, up her arm, to her chest, and stirred an army of boiling bubbles that tickled the surface of her water form.

  Then, like the hand of God suddenly turned the world on its head, her entire body became a pillar of raging white fire.

  The water her body had been fell away and splashed against the floor, dousing Enzo and Victoria, who were hunched over behind her, straining to push the last few lines of the repair spell through their gritted teeth. The water she had been controlling, that veil cascading from her form, receded like a falling tide and settled in the sunken corners of the room.

  At the collapse of the water shield, physics dictated that the giant black fireball should’ve shot forward and killed Enzo and Victoria. Yet it didn’t so much as budge, all of its momentum stalled.

  The woman whose fiery white hand lay embedded in the depths of the fireball was now the person to whom the flames owed their allegiance. Belphegor had lost control of his own fire to Adara, and he couldn’t get it back.

  The fire didn’t belong to him anymore. It belonged to her. It was her.

  The roiling currents of black flame untangled themselves into rippling streams, each one attached to the end of Adara’s fiery fingers. Their black hue gradually ceded to the same pure white Adara’s form had adopted, indicating t
hat the flames were no longer infernal in nature.

  Now, they were whips of holy fire, born from the power of the Shattered God, and they roared in anticipation of smiting the greater demon who’d dared to intrude upon a world that was not his.

  Adara slung the flame whips at the scrabbling claws of Belphegor’s emerging hand. They sheared the ends of the claws clean off, the black blood that burbled up boiling at their touch. Belphegor’s claws recoiled, almost slipping back across the barrier. But the demon held his ground, refusing to go home.

  So Adara marched toward him. Or rather, floated.

  Her new form produced weak but continual propulsion. Her fiery toes didn’t quite touch the ground. She ghosted overtop the broken segment of the cornerstone, scorching the floor tiles beneath the darkened marks of the spell.

  When she reached the hole Belphegor had torn in the fabric of reality, she raised her hand above her head and brought her fingers together.

  The whips of flame merged, forming one bright and burning vortex. A vortex hot enough to melt steel in mere moments. A vortex big enough to consume whatever foul creature lay on the other side of the barrier. A vortex that mimicked those Astaroth had thrown at Adara and her allies earlier in the day—the slightest touch of irony that Adara hoped Belphegor never forgot as he nursed his wounds in Hell.

  Looking down her nose at the wriggling claws with a sense of righteousness fueled by the fire she had become, Adara drove the flame vortex down into the tear between two worlds that were never supposed to meet. The fire incinerated what was left of the claws and continued down, down, down, turning everything it touched into black ash and dashed hopes.

  Belphegor’s true voice bellowed up from within the hole, a thunderous scream of rage and resentment crossed with a shrill whine of humiliation. He couldn’t believe that Adara was on the verge of defeating him—him, a prince of Hell—and that disbelief in the potential of mortals stoked the glowing coals of satisfaction inside Adara’s fiery chest.

  She pushed the limits of her literal firepower as far as they would go, siphoning every shred of heat she could produce down into the hole. Until finally, her god shard sputtered like a car on empty, and in the blink of an eye, she was human once again.

  Dizziness backhanded her, and she gasped. A big mistake. The air around her was so hot that it burned her trachea.

  Choking, she stumbled away from the smoking hole between worlds and collapsed on the edge of the cornerstone.

  For what felt like years but was only seconds, she rolled back and forth on the damp floor, clutching her chest and begging her seizing lungs to breathe. Eventually, they acquiesced, though each inhale hurt going down her seared throat.

  Once she was no longer on the verge of passing out, Adara looked at Enzo and Victoria. At the perfect time.

  The last word of the repair spell left their tongues like the beat of a drum. A pulse of light shot out from their hands, zipped through all the lines of the cornerstone spell, and passed underneath Adara’s sprawled body. The thick border of the spell began to vibrate, and when Adara placed her palm against it, she could sense the spell coming back to life.

  It felt like a flower blooming under the warmth of the sun.

  As Adara watched in sweet relief, the glow from the active portion of the spell intensified, and the configurations inside the dead section slowly lit up again, one at a time. In addition, the jagged hole torn through the damaged section started to close, as if an invisible hand was methodically stitching the split skin of a fresh and ragged wound.

  For each inch of the hole that closed, the atmosphere of the room perceptibly lightened. The oppressive sensation that had made her feel so heavy was rapidly dissipating.

  Hell had literally been bleeding onto Earth. Now, the bleeding had been staunched.

  They had won. They had actually won. They had beaten two greater demons and a horde of imps, and in so doing, they had prevented a global invasion—

  A barbed tail shot out of the healing wound between worlds, wrapped around Adara’s leg, and yanked her back across the cornerstone.

  Straight toward the hole that led to Hell.

  Chapter Forty

  The sharp barbs of the tail pierced the denim of her jeans and punctured her skin, hooking her to the tail like a fish to a line and reeling her in. Adara screamed, fueled in equal measure by fear and pain, and scrabbled at the floor, trying to grab hold of something. But all that lay beneath her was cracked tile that came away in bits and pieces.

  The tail yanked her over the edge of the half-closed tear in time and space, and Adara fell into the blackness of the pit. She frantically grasped the edge of the hole—and caught herself by the skin of her teeth.

  But the sudden stop nearly popped her shoulders from their sockets, and burning pain lanced up her arms. One hand slipped off the edge, sending chunks of floor tile tumbling down to Hell.

  Somewhere in the darkness, those chunks hit something that sounded distinctly like flesh, and a rumbling growl emanated upward, vibrating through Adara’s bones. Gulping, Adara looked down…and bore witness to a sight that would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.

  Belphegor’s true form.

  The head was the size of a small car and held a shape so asymmetrical that it looked as if it had been repeatedly dashed against the ground. The face was a writhing mass of bare muscle weeping oily orange blood whose every fold and wrinkle teemed with skittering, stinging insects.

  The mouth took up half the face—which accounted for Belphegor’s unnervingly wide smiles—and it contained at least four rows of rotten brown teeth filed to sharp points. And the eyes, all six of them, were nothing but enormous black pools that reflected Adara’s fearful expression back at her from an abundance of angles.

  Belphegor opened his repulsive mouth and spoke with a bulbous tongue that crawled with ants. “You’re not getting away from me, you stupid mortal bitch. I will not be bested by a little girl playing with ice and fire. So if I cannot kill you quickly on Earth, I will take my time and destroy you in Hell.”

  The barbed tail tugged hard, tearing through Adara’s skin and jeans—and tearing her one hand free from the edge of the hole. Adara belted out an ear-splitting scream of terror as she plummeted down toward Belphegor’s gaping maw.

  Then, without warning, a hand shot through the hole between worlds. It caught her wrist in an iron grip and pulled with nearly impossible strength, stopping the barbed tail in its tracks.

  Jefferson leaned over the edge of the hole, one hand extending past the edge of the world to hold Adara tight, the other hand firmly anchored onto something out of view.

  Beside him stood Enzo, who had never looked worse in his life. His skin was a patchwork mess of bright-red burns and bruises, and his clothing was badly scorched.

  Yet grim determination still smoldered in his gaze, as he pulled the pin on a grenade he’d pilfered from a SWAT agent, dropped it through the hole in the universe, and said, “Bombs away.”

  The grenade fell right into Belphegor’s mouth and exploded.

  Flesh burned. Teeth shattered. Blood sprayed.

  The shock of the injuries sent Belphegor’s tail into a whipping frenzy, and the barbs tore free from Adara’s leg. Agony surged through her torn skin and muscle, and she let out another cry of pain just as Belphegor let out a gurgling moan, his mouth filled with so much blood that it flowed past his lips and ran down his insect-ridden body in thick orange streams.

  Even as Adara struggled to breathe through her own pain, a sense of triumph bloomed in her chest. The feeling grew all the stronger when Jefferson used his superhuman strength to heave her back through the hole. The actively closing hole that was now just wide enough to fit Adara’s body.

  Adara sailed over Jefferson’s head and came down hard on the floor, rolling to a stop near the edge of the cornerstone. Jefferson rolled after her, putting distance between himself and the hole, while Enzo quickly scuttled back and ducked behind an overturned book
case.

  Smart decisions, they learned a moment later, as the barbed tail poked back through the hole in search of another target.

  This time, however, the hole was so small that the tail could only extend a couple feet onto Earth. It thrashed back and forth, pounding the tile floor, a vain attempt by Belphegor to snag one of the people who had dared to grievously harm him.

  But they were all beyond the tail’s short reach, and soon, Belphegor was forced to pull it back through so the healing wound between worlds didn’t cut the end clean off.

  Twenty tense seconds after those wicked barbs vanished from the face of the Earth, the jagged hole that Belphegor had torn in the cornerstone sealed itself completely. After that, the lines and symbols of the spell that lay above the scar in the fabric of reality began to reactivate one at a time with little flares of golden light.

  It was slow going, the work of the repair spell. By the looks of things, it would be the better part of a day before the entire spell structure was gleaming gold once more.

  But the prospect of breaking through a continually strengthening cornerstone must have been too daunting for even a prince of Hell. Belphegor’s beating fist did not make an encore appearance. He had, it seemed, finally given up.

  Thank god, Adara thought, or whatever force is controlling the universe now.

  She lay on the floor, sucking in deep breaths through clenched teeth. Blood seeped from half a dozen deep lacerations in her leg, soaked her jeans, and pooled on the floor. It mixed with the thin layer of water that hadn’t been steamed away during her duel with the fireball and curled across the tiles in thin red rivulets.

  Between the blood loss and the exhaustion from pushing her god shard to the max, Adara couldn’t entertain the idea of sitting up, much less walking. So she stayed where she was and did absolutely nothing but attempt to process all the ludicrous things that had happened to her over the past two days.