Axes and Angels: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Novel (Better Demons Series Book 1)

by Matthew Herrmann

  “In other words, these commandos don’t stand a chance!” Garfunkel said. “A rocket launcher wouldn’t do much good against Maximus’s armor. Try an electromagnetic rail gun or a mini nuke and maybe they’d stand a chance.” He glanced at a beast tamer wielding a cattle prod and snickered.

  There was a weapon down here I knew of that could harm Maximus. I knew because I’d used it to wound his sister Scorpio as well as Leo in Typhon’s Arena. It rested in an oaken box in Gan’s hands. But where was Gan?

  “Help me oh GoneGods no ahhh—!” a male voice cried out from … somewhere. The plea dragged across the walls and ceiling like a pinball machine ball, intermingled with the scraping of hard claw upon stone. Think Freddy Krueger, only a giant scorpion with a taste for goat-man …

  The mercs around me shared nervous glances, their fingers taut against their gun triggers as the tang of urine soured the air.

  Pebbles crunched from somewhere nearby and twenty gun barrels swiveled in unison. No one breathed.

  “Might wanna duck your head, Theo, before the bullets start flying,” Garfunkel said. “The tension down here is thick as pea soup.”

  “Actually I think that’s Maximus’s sleep spray,” Simon said.

  “Sleep spray?”

  Simon pulled at his shirt collar. “Sort of like a musk. I … may have left that part out.”

  “Yeah you did!”

  “But look on the bright side,” Simon said. “Maximus doesn’t spray acid from his stinger like Scorpio.”

  “But he’s still got a stinger!” I whispered, stifling a yawn. Crap.

  One by one, commandos started yawning all around me. Assuming I stayed awake longer, I’d be able to steal one of their weapons, except what I needed was the lava axe.

  I searched frantically for Gan—Typhon’s axe carrier—but the air was dense with the sleep spray.

  Double crap!

  And then my eyes found him, crouching with Echidna and still surrounded by commandos.

  My hair suddenly bobbed against my neck. “Simon, that you?” I whispered.

  I squinted at my right shoulder pad, at Simon’s head peeking out from inside.

  Crap, crap, crap …

  Turning slowly, I realized I’d positioned myself against the cobwebby opening of a passageway. From the side tunnel’s dark interior, another piece of loose dust crumbled.

  Although there were several guards all around me, I don’t think anyone else heard it. A headlamp passed quickly over the spiderweb gauze, too quickly for the commando to see it, but I did: a massive figure looming through the opaque barrier.

  I pressed my back against the wall behind me, felt the hollow opening of a burial opening.

  “Oh for the love of the GoneGods, don’t, Theo!” Simon said.

  I slid my butt up onto the ledge and silently tucked my legs against my chest. Just outside the crypt’s opening, a heavy dark claw pierced the spiderweb veil like the sound of slowly-tearing cotton.

  The pincer was so close I could reach out and touch it. I watched it glide through the air toward a commando turned the other way, about to stifle a yawn.

  Silence.

  I watched from my periphery as a drop of dark liquid dipped over the edge of the claw and bubbled up on the curved underside.

  Drip.

  The yawning commando jerked to attention but it was too late. The pincer dashed out at the stout satyr, clamped over his chest and back and side of his neck. With a rustle and a scuffling of boot soles lifting off the floor, Maximus yanked the guard from sight.

  The guards closest to him spun and faced their comrade, seeing only the two halves of the spiderweb fluttering eerily away from the newly revealed passageway.

  At first I thought they might not even notice their fellow soldier was gone. Then one of their headlamps settled on the drips of blood on the floor. There wasn’t much, but they were trained mercenaries …

  “Fire!” someone shouted and bullets rent the air outside my hiding place. Flames exploded from gun muzzles; I huddled back into the farthest reaches of the rocky shelf, careful not to fall out the other side. Bullets struck rock, spit up sparks like steel on flint, the spiderweb tapestry now ratty and full of holes.

  “Garfunkel, bindings please!” I shouted and held my bound wrists to the side as Garfunkel retrieved a pocket knife from his shoulder pad and went to work.

  The gunfire went on for nearly half a minute as gun magazines were expended and new ones slapped into place. There was a collective, uneasy sigh among the mercs.

  “Think we … g-ahhh-t it?” a commando asked.

  “Ahhh sure hope so,” another bleated.

  “Don’t see nothin’,” a third one said.

  The first satyr shuffled his hooves across the spent bullet casings littering the crypt’s floor. “Why don’t you go, ch-ahhh-ck it out then?”

  “Me? Why me? You ch-ahhh-ck it out—”

  “PANSIES. I shall SEARCH FOR ITS CORPSE.” The Minotaur shouldered past the bickering guards, knocking down the tattered remnants of the cobwebs, his hooves clopping against the stone.

  His bulk disappeared into the tunnel, the satyrs’ headlamps illuminating the bull-man’s back as he searched.

  “It must have ESCAP—OOMPH!”

  The Minotaur’s body soared out from the mouth of the passageway, ejected like a punted American football, crunching against the opposite wall.

  Silence.

  “Oh GoneGods I’m too y-ahhh-ng to die!” someone bleated.

  The mercenaries checked their weapons, fumbled for their sidearms and other equipment tacked to their vests.

  The Minotaur groaned.

  From the rock shelf directly overhead, dust and dirt crumbled down into the main passageway.

  And as the commandos tilted their heads upward, Maximus leapt upon them with pincers thrown wide.

  “Maximus Attack (‘in Us)”

  Maximus landed with a squishing crunch on a couple of hapless commandos. When the guns began to fire again, it hefted one large pincer like a shield, and with its free pincer, it swept guards to the ground where it pummeled them with flat efficient hammer strokes. With its shield claw still raised, it advanced upon the mercenaries before it, dispatching them with ease.

  Bile rose in my throat and Garfunkel shouted, “Theo, dive!”

  I’d been so caught up in analyzing the Other’s fighting maneuvers, I’d nearly missed its claw swinging right at my hiding place.

  I dove out through the other side of the rock shelf as the bone fragments of my skeletal bunkmate splintered out and over my back and shoulders.

  I rolled to a stop against a wall and twisted against my bindings. Garfunkel hadn’t finished cutting all the way through, but he’d done enough. I ripped my wrists apart and tore back the cloth covering my tattoo. “Simon, light!”

  A veritable spotlight burst from my wrist.

  “Not that much light!”

  The blinding glare decreased to a throbbing color-shifting glow and I considered telling Simon to just pick a color—any color—when Maximus knocked into the rock shelf behind me. It teetered toward me like a giant domino. Skeletons slid off their shelves, raining their disjointed bones upon me.

  Scrambling to my hands and feet while Simon wailed bloody murder in my ear, I lunged, my shoes barely clearing the edge of the shelf as it collapsed in a detonation of dust and stone and more bone fragments.

  “It’s. Raining. Bones!” Simon wailed as I rounded the corner right as a terrified commando came into view. He raised his rifle and I jump kicked it to the side. Delivered a chop to his neck and a follow up kick to the groin.

  I spun to the side as the scorpion’s tail uncoiled and lashed out at me like a whip. Diving yet again, fragments of bone and stone shattered over my calf and lower back.

  “Ow!” I said as I pushed myself back into an adjoining hallway. The central hallway was full of shouting and gunfire and darting figures. I crept along the lower part of a rock shelf as bulle
ts scraped overhead along the burial spots.

  “Do either of you see Orion?” I asked from my crouch.

  Simon wheezed on some dust. “Can’t we just hide?”

  The clopping of goat hooves turned the corner of where I was hunkered down. “You!” bleated the wiry satyr guard who’d minutes before had been urging me on from behind.

  Before he could react, I backhanded him in the face—ow!—and kicked the gun out of his hooves. While he reached for his handgun, I threw myself into a rock burial shelf, sliding headfirst into its skeletal inhabitant, and flopped out on the other side of the shelf as the commando fired a few rounds through the opening.

  “Shooting to kill,” Garfunkel remarked. “I guess you did kind of make him look bad, escaping his custody and freeing your hands and all.”

  “C-ahhh-m on out,” the goat-man called out as I vaulted through another burial opening in the opposite shelf. He fired, bullets whizzing at my shoulder and pinging off stone.

  “Theo, you’re bleeding!” Simon said.

  I glanced down at where a bullet must have punched through my jacket and nicked my upper arm. I winced. “I’ll live. Can you patch it up?”

  Simon bobbed uneasily on my shoulder. “Can you not get shot again?”

  I dropped onto my belly and rolled into a floor-level shelf grave. A few moments later, amid the screams and cries moving farther down the hallway, a hoof crunched down right beside me.

  The satyr stopped and sniffed.

  Surely he can’t smell me … I caught a whiff from under my arms and thought maybe I knew the answer.

  The wiry satyr commando shifted to face the shelves and started to bend down when an Agadzagadza trickster lizard zipped past my elbow. On impulse, I swatted it away from me, its luminescent body flicking across the aisle and sticking to the far wall like a spider on a web. The commando spun away from my hiding place to investigate when a pair of boots stepped up silently behind him. There was a thump and then his body was rolled into a shelf in the rock.

  I held my breath, my hands ready to assault whoever was standing outside when Orion’s bristly face appeared.

  He held out a hand and I accepted it.

  “Took you long enough,” I said.

  Orion chuckled. “You get the pendant?”

  “No,” I hissed. “Shi—poo kinda hit the fan.”

  Orion nodded. His face and his jeans bore cuts and scrapes that his jacket hadn’t been able to protect him from. Slung across his shoulder was his crossbow and tactical pack. “Maximus is blocking the entrance, but I know the way to Atlas’s burial chamber.” He grabbed my hand. “I say we go for it. Hole up there until the action winds down and Maximus is …” He waved a hand in the air. “… done.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d feel better with the lava axe—”

  Orion opened his leather jacket and held out the lava axe.

  “Wha—how?”

  Orion smirked. “Let’s just say I took it from Gan, and he’s probably not too happy with me. Now we need to go.”

  I stared alternatingly between him and the axe, which I accepted, feeling its cool, balanced weight against my palm. “I think I could kiss you,” I said, and then, “You’re really scared of giant scorpions, aren’t you?”

  “One did kill me in my first life,” he said. “Now let’s go!”

  I glanced behind us, saw Gan, Echidna and a mercenary dashing through a side alley. Gan saw us and pointed a pistol our way and I followed Orion’s lead as gunfire spit at our backs.

  “You sure you know where you’re going?” I asked a few minutes later after we came to a five-foot-across spike pit blocking the corridor.

  We’d taken numerous sharp turns and descended multiple sets of stone stairs with Orion leading the way with a tactical light he’d acquired from a commando. I’d had Simon dim my tattoo glow so that it didn’t paint too large of a target on us if someone happened to see it.

  Orion wiped his face with his jacket sleeve. “We’re almost there. I can feel it.”

  After Simon closed his eyes, I took a running start and leapt across the pit, executing a solid roll on the other side. I was about as back to my full strength as I was going to get. Orion cleared the spike pit as well, patting the dust from his pants and jacket as he rose.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But you said that in the Minotaur’s labyrinth too. Speaking of which, when are you going to tell me the Minotaur’s and your embarrassing secret that got stricken from the history books?”

  He gave me a curious look as we rounded a corner and then he nodded at a set of fourteen-feet-tall silver doors.

  “Woah,” my familiars both said in unison.

  I sprinted up to the doors and joined them in their woah-ing.

  Orion sauntered up and crossed his arms. “I think I deserve an apology.”

  He said it flirtingly; I didn’t pay it any attention. I was too busy scanning over the doors.

  Beside the doors, a polished gold plate bore engraved Egyptian hieroglyphics. A fist-sized square hole was set in the wall beneath the gold plate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Now can you please translate this? It’s the secret to getting in.”

  “Twenty-fo’ karat yo!” Garfunkel said.

  “This looks like a trap or something. Maybe we shouldn’t try to translate it …”

  Orion inspected the inscription. “To gain admittance, prove thy loyalty to the god of the sky.”

  I glanced at the square hole in the wall. The god of the sky was Zeus, but how did I prove my loyalty?

  Orion perked his head to the side and drew his crossbow from his back. “Hurry and figure it out. Someone is coming our way.”

  “Well excuse me, Mr. Mythical Hunter Dude …” I crouched before the square hole and shone my tattoo light inside. It was deep but it looked normal. No hidden daggers or needle holes inside. No dried blood residue … I pulled back my jacket sleeve on my non-tattooed arm.

  Simon shrieked. “You can’t be serious. This is obviously a trap. You’re going to sacrifice your hand?”

  “What? You think a guillotine is going to come down on my wrist?”

  Behind his crossbow, Orion said, “I wouldn’t put it past Zeus. He was big on subservience.”

  “Yeah but …”

  Garfunkel yawned. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Uh, she loses her hand!”

  I ran the inscription over in my mind again. Prove thy loyalty … The thing about loyalty, the gods loved it. But fealty wasn’t always derived from sacrifice. Sometimes it came in the form of a mark. A mark just like …

  I raised my magic tattoo. Located on the inside of my forearm, it would fit in the hole in the wall. Before Simon could protest, I thrust my hand into the wall, nearly up to the elbow.

  There was a click followed by the ticking of gears and the doors opened outward into an enormous chamber of a room.

  My mouth fell open. “Holy crap …”

  “Sutures And Ladders”

  The light from my arm tattoo glittered off the crystalline walls on both sides of the door as we passed through the darkness. Orion ensured the door clicked shut and locked behind us as I raised my tattoo light.

  The light refracted through the crystalline walls and ceiling, magically igniting the entire room, exposing an enormous chamber pulsing with the gentle blue hue of lightning.

  As breathtaking as the phenomenon was, what lay beyond us under the crystal-blue light made the air catch in my lungs: a hewn-out amphitheater the size of the largest modern-day sports arena with stone benches protruding from its multiple tiers like a giant’s ribcage.

  And down at the center, sitting upon a tall stone dais with a straight back and outstretched arms was an enormous, calcified Titan. Bulging shoulders, stone biceps rippling with muscles. The sight was more impressive than Michelangelo’s David because it was a hundred times larger than any sculpture known on earth.

  “Houston, we’ve found Atlas,” Garfu
nkel said.

  “Wow …” Simon said.

  I’d uncovered a few priceless artifacts in my days (had even stolen a few) but I’d never discovered a Titan. I mean, a friggin’ Titan! Back before the gods left, I just thought they were myths, my dad’s bedtime stories. Now I was standing before one, and I wasn’t even as tall as its pinky toe!

  “This is truly wondrous,” Orion said, his voice amazingly crisp in the colossal chamber.

  I glanced over the rim of the amphitheater down at row upon curving tiers of stone benches carved from earth. The construction was impeccably perfect even in its rugged condition.

  I allowed my eyes to roam down the steep central aisle of steps leading to the raised stage at the bottom, where Atlas’s knees bent downward at ninety-degree angles. Up the naked leg and muscular thigh to the compact waist, up the chiseled abs shiny as gigantic pebbles worn smooth by the ocean. Across the extended arms at either side, the upward facing palms brushing the outer rims of the amphitheater as if in a yoga pose. Back to the sculpted lines of the pecs. Up and over the bunched-up beefy shoulder muscles …

  I dropped my eyes back to the Titan’s bare chest at a stitched-up scar running just over his … heart.

  Crap …

  The GoneGodDamned Heart of Atlas was really a heart. Encapsulated by stone maybe, but it was an actual heart.

  Kameno tost!

  So this was what Typhon was after? This was what he’d risked years of digging through creation-crystal-bomb-laced earth and stone to uncover? This was what he’d risked passing through the Underworld Scorpion Maximus’s lair and a long-forgotten crypt laced with spike pits and other booby traps.

  I laughed softly to myself. Well, there was no way Typhon was escaping Maximus’s dining pleasure. And without a mark of Zeus on his arm, he wasn’t getting into this burial chamber either.

  I’d won.

  Of course, Gan might’ve had a magic Zeus tattoo too—I’d never actually seen Gan without a shirt or his suit coat. But Maximus was just so imposing and deadly and … big. It would be a miracle if he didn’t wipe out Typhon’s entire crew.