Gouged out.
“Oh, if you could see your face, wizard,” the voice laughed.
But the rector’s mouth wasn’t moving. As if the infernal strings of magic suspending him had been suddenly severed, his body collapsed to the ground. I recoiled when his head rolled toward me. Above his decapitated body, a pair of violet eyes blazed, and a figure stepped from the deeper darkness.
“This is our domain, wizard.”
The figure resolved into the outline of a woman, a riot of impossibly long hair thrashing in every direction. When she thrust her arms forward, a tangled mass of energy stormed from her fingers.
“And you’re not welcome.”
31
In the violet light of Mistral’s attack, I got a full look at the demoness. She was wearing an airy midriff blouse and gypsy-like skirt. A headdress with a black gem at its center sent midnight hair down the sides of her curvy body in wild, thrashing lockets. Intricate, linear tattoos glinted across her exposed skin. The same tattoos accented her glowing eyes and rapacious smile of razor-sharp teeth.
Feeding energy from the banishment rune into my shield, I cried, “Respingere!”
White light pulsed out and blew through Mistral’s attack. The tendrils of infernal energy she’d sent from her fingers fell writhing to the floor. The demoness stumbled back with a grunt. Before she could recover, I thrust my sword and shouted, “Vigore!” Rune-enhanced energy emerged in a gusher of holy light.
But Mistral had spoken a demonic word, and a twisting mass of infernal energy gathered in front of her. The collision of magic sent out a shockwave through the sugar house that had me bracing against my shield, boots skidding over the floor.
Mistral laughed. “If you were expecting another Finn, you’re going to be severely disappointed.” She was referring to the Stranger who had infiltrated the merfolk. “And you couldn’t even destroy him,” she taunted. “He was recalled.”
That explained why there were still mercreatures about.
“And what can I expect from the other two?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll see to it that you never need worry about them,” she replied, confirming there were two more Strangers. But I wasn’t going to get their names through this kind of back and forth. I needed to put her demonic ass in a casting circle.
A sudden infernal attack writhed from her fingers. I strengthened my shield, but this one shot past me and into the wall of shadow I’d invoked to hide our light show from the soldiers. Before I could reinforce the darkness, her infernal energy tore through it. The demoness and I now stood out like beacons. The soldiers jerked back, muskets raised, while the prisoners moaned and rattled their chains.
“Hold fire!” I shouted to the soldiers in my wizard’s voice.
The last thing I needed was a hail of musket balls. The soldiers hesitated.
“Shoot him!” Mistral shrieked.
The balls wouldn’t get through my shield. Her aim was to sow confusion, making it difficult for me to focus on her. Seeing the fear in the soldiers’ eyes, I pushed more power into my wizard’s voice.
“Begone!” I shouted, the word thrumming with force.
The four soldiers dashed for the door at the same time, one of them dropping his musket.
Malachi remained standing in the center of the room. Holding up his cross pendant with one hand, he began speaking the Latin exorcism. But a tendril of Mistral’s magic slapped the Bible from his grasp while another lashed across his face, causing him to cry out. He staggered back, a hand to his jaw.
Mistral shook with malicious laughter.
I’d been gathering energy, and now I released it with a shouted “Vigore!”
Radiating with banishment energy, my sword shot from my hand. The blade skewered Mistral’s midriff. She fell to her knees and doubled over, the ends of her hair clawing the floor like hands. I was tempted to shout the Word that would send the full banishment into her and reduce her to dust, but I held back.
We needed info.
Mistral wailed a string of obscenities at me, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t been called before.
Encasing her in an orb of light, I drew a sleeping potion from my robe. Before I could activate it, her hair flew up and began lashing the inside of her confinement. I’d been stung by a jellyfish on Long Island once, the contact leaving blistering welts. The pain that seared through me now was similar, but deeper.
I bit back a scream as the manifestation failed in a cascade of sparks.
Mistral thrust a hand out, sending another wave of infernal energy my way. I recovered in time to reinforce my own shield, but the mass of tendrils stormed past again. Speaking quickly, I shaped protection for Malachi, who had recovered his Bible, but she wasn’t targeting him either. Snaps of metal rang out. In rustles of hay, the prisoners began lurching to their feet. She’d just freed them.
“Malachi!” I shouted.
He nodded quickly and made for the door. Mistral rose, a hand grasping the hilt still buried in her gut. She struggled to pull it free, but the blade was lodged, the banishment power bonded to her infernal energy. Black fluid oozed around her fist.
“That’s not going anywhere,” I said.
“Your soul will pay for this,” she seethed.
Yeah, see you in dreamland.
But as I spoke the words to activate the sleeping potion, her eyes flicked past me. Inside her snarling face, a small smile quirked her lips. I glanced back. The prisoners were up and lumbering toward me. I’d handled the soldiers in the street, and these weren’t armed. But I wasn’t looking at American rebels, I realized. An infernal veiling was dissolving from their soiled, shambling bodies to reveal slender, robed beings with glowing eyes.
The young woman in the lead raised an arm. A dark gold bolt shot from her hand and nailed my protection, causing it to waver. Having a demon-controlled sentry was only one reason Demon X had released the rebel soldiers. The other was to make room for his Strangers’ victims, effectively hiding them in plain sight.
These were Seay’s friends, the half-fae.
With the sweep of my staff, I sent a force wave toward them. Their inherent fae-ness neutralized the weight of the attack, but it was enough to send them staggering back several paces. Enough to buy me time.
I hurled the glass tube of sleeping potion at the floor in front of Mistral. It shattered, sending up a plume of pink mist. I then grabbed a neutralizing potion from another pocket, activated it, and without waiting for it to cool, drank it down. The still-charging potion burned my mouth and throat as it slid down.
Two more fae bolts hit me, dissolving what remained of my shield.
The neutralizing potion required another few moments to take effect, moments I would need to buy. I wheeled, staff raised to repel another attack. The closest half-fae aimed his hand at me, but before a gold shaft could break from his palm, he staggered as if something had clobbered the side of his head. Something had: Gorgantha’s fist. Glamoured, she was barely a ghost in the dimness.
“Go gentler!” Seay called from the doorway.
“Hey, you try pulling your punches when your teammate’s about to get wasted,” Gorgantha shouted back.
Seay shrugged as if to say the mermaid had a point before unleashing a series of shimmering bolts.
“Sorry, guys,” she said as more half-fae went sprawling.
With Seay and Gorgantha handling the possessed, I turned back to Mistral. The sleeping potion had enveloped her, but beyond the pink mist I could see that she’d used her hair to wrap her face in a protective cocoon, blocking out the magic.
Her hair opened suddenly, batting the mist in all directions.
“Protezione!” I shouted, manifesting another orb, this one around her head. Before she could rake it apart like she’d done the last one, I began closing it like a fist. She claimed to be a step above Finn, but I doubted she’d be able to withstand the kind of pressure I could bring to bear on her head.
Screaming through bared teeth, she
clamped the outside of the orb with her hands.
I responded with more power. Black ichor burst from one of her ears, then the other.
I could feel my neutralizing potion kicking in, meaning I didn’t have to worry about half-fae attacks. And from the sounds of it, my backup force was handling them fine. I cast a weak shield around myself anyway. But something broke through it and wrapped my torso in what felt like razor wire.
The hell?
Mistral’s hair. She’d sent a thick lock in on my blind side. It seemed to grow as it wrapped my body in stinging tendrils. I struggled to focus through the searing pain, to increase the pressure around her head. But she backed around a corner and into a corridor, her hair lifting me and carrying me after her.
She’s separating me from my teammates, I realized.
Bruising pain shot through my shoulder as she slammed me into a brick wall. I dug a hand into a pocket and seized Grandpa’s ring. Holy energy from St. Mark’s Chapel sang inside it. I thrust a finger through the band and pulled my hand from my pocket.
A healthy blast should take the starch out of her.
“Liberare!” I shouted.
The ring’s power released with a satisfying whoomph. For a moment, I was worried I’d summoned too much. I wanted Mistral incapacitated, not annihilated. But though she winced, the power that broke around her had little effect. And I was going into the wall again. I tucked my chin. The collision bruised my upper back and shot electrical pain down my spine. I congratulated myself for sparing my skull, but when she brought me upright, I saw that the orb around her head had come apart.
I incanted to restore it, but my casting prism had dissolved as well.
She grinned at me through a set of bloody teeth, then dropped her gaze to my ring.
“The holy power here doesn’t pack nearly the same punch as in your world. And your friend has been helping to build our immunities.” She glanced past me to indicate the body of Rector Harland. “Unwittingly, of course. He thought he was ministering to soldiers, the poor man. In fact, he was empowering demons. A little exposure here, a little there… After a time, we became inoculated.”
That explained why Demon X had allowed the rector to come here. Harland was a shadow exorcist. He’d recognized the possessed states of the soldiers and half-fae, but though he’d tried, restoring souls was beyond him. His attempts had effectively immunized the Strangers, making the ring worthless here. Blocking out the sharp, stinging pain that enveloped me, I started into a centering mantra.
“It has truly been a pleasure, Everson Croft,” she said. “But you’re too little, too late.”
A tendril broke from the mass around my body. Knowing where it was going, I thrust up a hand before it encircled my neck. The tendril seared my palm and drove my knuckles against the cartilage of my throat. I gagged. Out of good options, I dropped my watery gaze to where my sword still speared her midriff. Her own gaze must have followed, because her hair tightened in desperation.
Too little, too late, indeed.
“Liberare!” I shouted.
Gathered power shot through my restored mental prism and out the banishment rune. A star of white light took hold in Mistral’s center, then blew out in all directions along with her final screams. Her mass of hair dissolved from my body, and I fell to the stone floor at the same time as the impaling sword. In the light of the blade’s dimming rune, nothing remained of the demoness.
I recalled my sword with a force invocation, then took a moment to catch my breath. Infernal burns lingered over my body where her hair had seized me, but it could have been much worse. Spending as much time as I had in St. Mark’s had infused my body with holy power. The demoness might have become immune to that power, but it had blunted me from the full extent of her infernal wrath.
Pushing myself to my feet, I took a final look around the empty corridor and swore at myself. I’d banished Mistral, but without eliciting a name or any information. And there were two more Strangers.
I was returning to the main room when I nearly ran into Gorgantha.
“Was just coming to see what was up,” she said. “All the half-fae went down a couple seconds ago.”
“Yeah, I took the Stranger out.”
She frowned. “You sound disappointed.”
“I didn’t get a name. Are Seay’s friends all right?”
“She’s checking them out.”
Gorgantha stooped and thumbed away the blood from a cut above my right eye I hadn’t realized I’d suffered. Back in the main room, the twenty or so half-fae were indeed down. Seay was kneeling beside a young man. Fae light glowed from the palm of the hand she was touching to his forehead. I wanted to ask how they were doing, but the lines across Seay’s brow told me she was deep in her work.
“C’mon, Darian,” I heard her whisper. “Wake up.”
I glanced over at Gorgantha who was watching the soul-healing intensely. I couldn’t read her expression, but something told me she was thinking of the lost members of her pod. “Hey,” I said. “I never told you how sorry I was that we weren’t able to…” Gorgantha let out a sound of surprise, causing me to trail off.
The half-fae Seay was tending to shifted on the floor, then raised his head. He looked from Seay to his surroundings and murmured, “What is this foul place?”
Seay slipped her arms around his back and pulled him gently against her. “I’ll explain later, dumbass.” Fae light glowed warmly with their contact. “Right now I need you to help me with the others.”
Without warning, Gorgantha seized me under the arms and hoisted me into the air. When she caught me, she brought me into a fierce hug. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t have to. Her joy that Seay had recovered her friends despite, or maybe because of, the loss of her own pod touched me. Half laughing, half choking, I clapped her thick back.
When she set me back on the ground, tears glimmered in her large eyes. I smiled up at her, almost forgetting my disappointment at failing to get anything actionable from Mistral.
But now that I thought about it, maybe I had gotten something.
32
Fresh air broke against my face as I pushed open the door of the prison and stepped outside. The British soldiers had drawn back to Broadway, but their numbers had grown. All watched me over aimed muskets.
“Don’t shoot!” Malachi called. “He’s one of ours.”
He hustled to meet me as I walked toward the road. I was still wearing the priest’s robe, but I’d lost the wig, and my cravat had come undone.
“I told them about the demon,” he whispered. “I told them you were exorcising it.”
“And they accepted that?” I asked, peering past him. I couldn’t see the soldiers’ faces in the darkness, but they were murmuring among themselves while keeping a safe distance from the building.
“It’s 1776,” he replied, which was true enough. “So what happened in there?”
“The Stranger wasn’t Rector Harland. She and the others were using him to immunize themselves against the holy power in the time catch. I banished her, but not before she killed him. She was holding the half-fae captive inside, veiling them so they’d look like prisoners. Seay is helping to restore them.” She and Darian had been working on two of the other half-fae when I left. “Once they’re all up, we need to clear out.”
“The British commander is demanding an account,” Malachi said.
At the front of the troops, a tall soldier with gold epaulettes on the shoulders of his red coat stood stiffly. When he saw us looking over at him, he marched toward us, two more soldiers flanking him.
“Wonderful,” I muttered.
“I am Captain Saxby,” he said when he arrived. He had a serious-as-cancer face, coal black eyebrows standing in sharp contrast to the white wig under his hat. “What happened here tonight? Where is Mister Harland?”
“He was killed, sir,” I said.
“Killed?”
“Yes, by a demon I’ve just exorcized.”
He watched me for a moment. “You are visiting from Boston, you say?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
Though I was using my wizard’s voice, I had expended so much energy in banishing Mistral that I couldn’t gauge how effective it was. Judging by his next question, not very.
“May I see your papers?”
I drew the parchment from my robe again. As he unfolded it, I glanced around. More soldiers were trotting in from the tent camps west of Broadway. There had to be at least sixty amassed in the road now, all armed. Even with my depleted power, I was confident we could handle them, but I wasn’t ready to declare war on England. Not with thousands of troops in the city and two more Strangers to track down.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
I looked back to find the captain holding up the parchment, his dark brows crushing together. Crap. With Seay using her magic to restore her friends, she was no longer glamouring the parchment. It was blank now.
I patted the pockets of my robe. “I must have, ah, dropped it inside.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not a minister, are you?” Before I could answer, he turned to the troops. “Detain these men!” he ordered. “And search the prison for collaborators!”
A group of Redcoats hustled forward, separated Malachi and me, and surrounded us with aimed muskets.
“They’re coming,” I whispered into the bonding sigil to warn Seay and Gorgantha.
“Take his cane!” the captain barked.
I reflexively redoubled my grip on my weapon. When one of the soldiers seized the other end, I considered invoking a shield and blowing everyone back. It wouldn’t have been hard, but there were my teammates to consider, not to mention the half-fae, most of whom were probably in no shape to fight.
As my hold on the cane began to slip, I spotted the boy soldier I’d spoken to earlier. He was part of the group encircling me. Still under the influence of my wizard’s voice, he looked between me and my opponent with uncertainty. In a moment of magical insight, I twisted my cane free and held it toward the boy. He hesitated a moment before taking it. I wondered myself what I’d just done.
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