by Sierra Dean
“I can work with that.”
We followed her out of the waiting room, Desmond taking one last look at the boy who had fallen asleep smiling. “Are you sure he’s okay?”
“Of course he’s okay,” Calliope replied, somewhat indignantly. “Do I look like a monster to you?”
Desmond, smart werewolf boyfriend that he was, said nothing. Calliope’s house could expand and contract in size according to necessity. The mansion was especially large today, meaning she had a full house. When we came to a stop in front of an intimidating dark-wood door with a series of carvings depicting monsters I’d never seen before, Calliope rounded on us and gave me a serious look.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Do I ever?”
“I’m serious, Secret. Do you know how to kill a demon?”
I stared at the sword in my hand. “Umm…no.”
Calliope reached for my katana, but the moment she touched it the sword emitted a piercing hiss. That was new. She withdrew her hand and glared at the Japanese weapon like it had insulted her. She grumbled something at it in a fae language, and the noise dulled.
“Where did you get that?” she asked me.
“Koreatown.”
“Hmm.” This time she turned to Desmond and held out a hand for his broadsword, which he gave her without question. The medieval blade didn’t respond to her touch in any way. I stared at my own sword again and marveled at what it had done. It had reacted similarly to the white-haired fae and the ogre. Was this what the fae shopkeeper was talking about when he told me about the katana’s darkness? Calliope cleared her throat to get my attention back. “There are two ways to kill a demon. Destroy the heart.” She mimed stabbing Desmond in the chest with the blade, and he and I both winced. “Or decapitation.”
“Oh, good old decapitation,” I said dreamily.
“But with either method, you must destroy the object completely. If you merely stab a demon in the chest, you will not kill it. If you cut off its head but leave the body and head together, it will regenerate. It would be easier to send it back from whence it came, but you need the demon’s true name for that.”
“I tried. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming when we played the name game.”
Calliope put a hand on each of my shoulders and pulled me close for a hug. With her lips next to my ear, she whispered, “One day you will die standing by someone you love, Secret. Today is not that day.” When she withdrew she gave me a meaningful look and squeezed my right hand in spite of the sword I held. The hand with the longer lifeline. She gave one last nod like she knew something she wasn’t telling me. Considering she was an immortal seer of the future, I was pretty sure she was holding something big as her ace in the hole.
“I thought you said my future was uncertain.”
“You have a destiny. I need to make sure you’re around to fulfill it.” She released my hand and turned to Desmond, mirroring the gesture she’d just made to me. When she pulled away from him, he smiled weakly and gave her a nod.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She patted his cheek. “Keep her alive tonight, and I can guarantee it.”
The pair didn’t look at me until their moment came to an end. Calliope faced me wearily and held out a hand. I placed my left hand in hers, palm up, and before I knew what was happening she withdrew a thin, twisted blade from God knows where and raked it across my skin.
“Ow,” I whined.
“Shush,” she instructed. “Now touch the door.”
I did as I was told and laid my bloody palm against the old wood, wondering for the first time how the door’s stain came to be so dark. For a beat nothing happened, then a bright, blinding white light appeared in the center of the door, illuminating a crack that hadn’t been there before. I stepped back in time for the doors to swing open towards us.
I’d expected the opening to be as luminous as that first light, but when the doors were ajar, all I could see was a pit of darkness so vast my vampire vision couldn’t penetrate it.
“Hold on to each other,” Calliope said, yelling. The darkness was howling like a fierce winter wind. “Don’t let go.”
Desmond took the instruction to heart and pulled me close, wrapping his arms around me and dragging my lips to his for a bone-trembling kiss. His eyes were damp when he pulled back. “Whatever happens,” he said, “know I love you.”
I ran my free hand down his cheek and hugged him tightly. “I love you too,” I whispered into his ear, not sure if he could hear me over the screaming black void.
“That’ll do just fine,” Calliope said, then shoved me and Desmond into the darkness and slammed the door behind us.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The sensation of falling was like something out of a bad nightmare, but the impact of landing was real enough. I crashed against hard cement, still clutching my sword, with Desmond on top of me, his own blade dangerously close to stabbing me.
I pushed him off me and rolled away from the broadsword, unsheathing my katana as I straightened up, taking in our surroundings.
“Well I’ll be giddy goddamned,” I muttered.
Desmond came to stand next to me and not for the first time that night was reduced to saying, “Wow.” This time, though, it was the only appropriate response.
Calliope had a magic door that could drop people on top of the bloody Empire State Building.
My mouth hung agape, and it was hard to process what I was looking at. I’d lived in New York for seven years and had tracked any number of paranormal creatures from one end of the island to the other, but never in that entire time had I come up to see this iconic view. I’d missed a lot of popular tourist draws, as was true for many locals. But standing here behind the raised bars meant to protect visitors from falling—or jumping—I wondered why I’d waited so long.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” a familiar British accent enquired.
Mayhew, still wearing his professor face, walked casually around the west corner of the observation deck, his hands in his pockets and his gaze turned out to the sparkling magical vista of the famous city. For one brief moment he looked a little sad.
I let my sword’s sheath clatter to the ground and lifted my blade in preparation. Desmond took a step back and held his sword by his side, waiting to see what would happen next.
The professor ignored my attack posture and peered around me like I didn’t exist. “It looks as though you brought one of your wolves. Did he get a chance to see the show?” Given how many times I’d experienced Mayhew shift forms tonight, one might think I’d have gotten used to it. But, no. There was no magic number of times that made it any less unsettling to see my face on a demon.
Desmond, witnessing it for the first time, swallowed a sound that might have been a yelp.
“Yeah, it’s fucked up, isn’t it?” I said.
“I thought you were exaggerating.”
Mayhew smiled, and his crazy-ass demon teeth ruined the illusion. “It was very considerate of you, Miss McQueen, to bring me your beloved so I could obliterate him.”
My grip tightened on the sword handle. “Believe it or not, that wasn’t my thought process.”
“Well, finding America wasn’t Columbus’s goal either, yet we still found ourselves here.”
Oh please let that be a turn of speech. I didn’t want to imagine this demon coming across on the Santa Maria and waiting around to play identity theft with the Native Americans and the first comers on the Mayflower. It was a bit much.
I edged down the wheelchair ramp in the opposite direction of Mayhew. Desmond took the hint, following at my heels. The demon didn’t seem to care much that we were moving away from him, but I’d witnessed firsthand how fast he was. We could be halfway to Connecticut and he’d still be able to catch us.
“Can I ask you something?” I wasn’t sure why I was engaging him, but I figured if he was being passive for the moment I might get some nagging questions off my chest. I doubted I’d get an hone
st answer from a demon, but it was worth a shot.
He cocked his head to the side, red eyes glowing, and chuckled. “You amuse me, halfling.”
I gathered I was supposed to take this as a compliment. I bet it was tough to tickle his funny bone after a thousand years of stealing people’s identities.
“What were you looking for at the museum? When I saw you there as the mousy girl, Ellory, you were searching for something. It couldn’t have been your next meal, because there sure as hell wasn’t anyone around for you to eat.”
His smile faded. Guess he hadn’t figured me for being blonde and smart. I was a true double threat. He took a step closer, and Desmond and I backed up instinctively, both of us raising our weapons.
“Do you know what it feels like to be trapped here, in this world, being forced to inhabit a human form?”
“Uhh, yes.”
“I was a destroyer of worlds. A master among the demon class.” His voice bubbled with rage. Now I knew what it sounded like every time I yelled at Lucas. “Then some half-rate mage calls me up by accident, mistaking my name for some idiot lust demon.” Mayhew’s lip curled, and he spat on the ground. “And suddenly I’m stuck.”
It was more of an honest answer than I’d anticipated. More of one than he’d planned to give too, apparently, since he was now glaring at me. “There is a way to unlock the binding. That is what I was looking for. The key to my freedom. Only a stupid girl with a sword interrupted me. She seems to spoil all my plans.”
“I’m a notorious buzzkill,” I agreed.
Using kill in relation to a discussion about me might not have been my most genius play on words to date.
Mayhew advanced another half-dozen steps. “Hac nocte morieris.”
I didn’t understand the words, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone had threatened me in a language I couldn’t translate. It would be the first time I’d challenged myself in a battle to the death, though.
I looked at Desmond and indicated the ramp with the slightest darting of my gaze. “Head and heart,” I whispered.
He inched away from me, staring at the advancing demon. When I lunged for Mayhew, Desmond was a blur in the corner of my eye, bolting past us. It was the last peripheral thing I saw before I collided with my spitting image, and we fell to the ground in a tangle of gnashing teeth and flailing limbs.
“Vile girl,” the demon seethed, this time in English. “Killing you will be my greatest triumph in a lifetime.”
I rolled off him and crouched a few feet away with my sword poised, ready to spring. “In whose lifetime?”
Mayhew wiped a thin trickle of blood off his lip. I don’t know when I landed a punch, but I had gotten lucky at some point. I smiled maniacally, but my victory celebration was short-lived. As it turns out, demons only like to see blood when they’re drawing someone else’s.
“Insolent half-breed freak.”
“There’s no need to resort to name-calling.” Yeah, that’s right, Secret. Keep poking the hornet’s nest.
He clambered to his feet, rising over me in my supine position. His glowing eyes glimmered brighter than ever before, and in one swift motion he grabbed me by the hair and hoisted me off the ground.
Self-defense classes warn how long hair and ponytails can be used against you by potential attackers. It’s true. But let’s be clear about this, in a fight against a demon any hair could be used against you. I might as well have been bald given how Mayhew’s clawed fingernails dug into my scalp, sending a radiant aura of pain through my nerve sensors.
Who knew hair-pulling could hurt so badly? I took back every catty thing I’d ever said about the ladies on Jersey Shore.
The major pitfall of hauling me around this way was it left Mayhew’s midsection exposed and kept him one arm short.
As he went to toss me off the building—or to attempt it, since the wonderful safety-minded keepers of the tower had seen fit to add lovely high bars as a barricade—Desmond made his move.
Had I not been dangling by my hair, precariously avoiding a substantial fall, I would have taken a longer time to enjoy the visual of my strong, handsome boyfriend running into the fray with his broadsword raised, like an extra from Braveheart. The only thing missing was the battle cry, but Desmond darted towards us quietly so as not to draw attention to himself.
I would have to stock the visual away for late nights when I was home alone.
Desmond swung the sword in a horizontal arc aimed for Mayhew’s neck. He would have done it too if Mayhew hadn’t sensed the attack and shifted forms. As me, or as the professor, he was short enough to be lobotomized by Desmond’s swing. As Angie, who might as well have been a part-time supermodel with her mile-long legs and stupid heels, he was now tall enough to take the hit in the arm instead of the neck.
Goddamn shape-shifting demons.
The force of the blow was enough to make Mayhew release me. I kicked off from the wall when his grip slackened, and rolled away before bouncing back to my feet. For the time being Mayhew had forgotten all about me, which was awesome except for one problem. It meant he was now focused on Desmond. The demon looked intent on following through with his promise to murder my live-in loved one.
Mayhew struck a hard blow and knocked Desmond to the ground.
The werewolf backpedaled, moving himself out of the path of Mayhew’s next strike. The punch landed on concrete and left a disconcerting crater where my boyfriend’s head had previously been. If I left Desmond fighting the demon on his own much longer, the next crater would be in his skull.
I climbed onto the ledge on the outside of the observation deck, avoiding a bank of viewfinders and using the metal bars to guide me along the narrow path that rose and fell in height like a brick wave. I got within a few feet of their tussle and waited for my opportunity to show itself.
If Desmond saw me, he made no indication of it, keeping his eyes fixed on Mayhew and preparing himself for the next assault. Mayhew was like a cobra, swaying in place to some internal melody and looking almost benign as he waited for the right moment. The demon was a predator in the truest sense of the word. Instead of diving in willy-nilly, he wouldn’t move again until he thought he could strike a death blow.
There was definitely a death blow coming. It just wouldn’t be delivered by the demon.
There was no better time than now to make my move, and if I waited any longer, Desmond might be dead and I’d never get another chance.
I leaped through the air with my sword angled for a heart strike. The blade hit first, piercing the bare skin of Mayhew-as-Angie’s back. My weight collided next, and we both pitched forward. My momentum rammed the sword through flesh and bone until it crashed into Mayhew’s sternum and thrust out the other side.
Direct hit.
We were falling, and I realized a moment too late where we were going to land.
“Roll, roll, roll,” I screamed, but Desmond didn’t hear me or didn’t process the words in time.
Mayhew landed on top of Desmond, and I was still firmly on top of Mayhew. All three layers of the pile were connected via the sword like a demon-werewolf shish kebab. Over Mayhew’s shoulder I saw Desmond’s eyes widen and his mouth form a surprised O. He’d been hit by the blade, there was no doubt in my mind.
“Are you okay? Desmond, are you okay? Oh God I’m so sorry. Desmond?”
He blinked a few times, fighting back tears, then wheezed, “Get him off me.”
I got to my feet, bracing my heel against Mayhew’s back like he’d done with Gabriel, and tugged on the sword, expecting it to slide out easily. It didn’t budge. I pulled harder, but still the sword wouldn’t move. Even if the blade was embedded in a stubborn bone shard, there was no way it would be stuck like this. Every time I pulled, Desmond winced.
“I’m sorry, I’m trying.”
That perfectly ideal moment was when Mayhew decided to come to. The demon was face-to-face with Desmond, and the werewolf had no way to protect himself if Mayhew went for his th
roat. I started yanking on the blade harder and harder, standing with both feet on the demon’s back as I tried like a would-be Arthur to remove the stubborn Excalibur from its lodging.
Then I felt the heat.
The katana’s handle grew warmer as it had at Calliope’s. Warmth transformed into heat, and heat into an unbearable fire. I wanted to let go but found myself unable to release the weapon. The phoenix inset on the handle of the sword glowed bright red to match the searing pain.
Mayhew must have felt it too. Instead of finishing off Desmond, the demon reared back his head and let out a terrifying bellow. His body bucked, trying to knock me off, and both his hands reached around in an attempt to withdraw the blade.
My skin bubbled and split, my open palms fusing to the phoenix design. The dragon pattern of the blade began to glow. It started out faint, but as Mayhew’s blood flowed up the blade—an impossibility of physics—the light turned white and so intense I couldn’t look directly at it. When the demon’s blood reached the hilt of the sword, there was a loud pop, the same kind you hear when a jet breaks the sound barrier.
The sword suddenly yielded to my desperate pulls, and the weapon and I tumbled backwards, the handle still melted to my skin. Mayhew staggered to his feet, no longer holding one form. He shifted through all the human identities he’d had, dozens of them I’d never seen before, then they all started getting mixed up. My hair would end up on the professor’s face, or Trish’s head would find its way onto the body of a German SS officer. That one was especially off-putting.
Finally the transformations stopped, leaving his form a bizarre Frankenstein monster mishmash of all the people he’d been. He pointed at the sword, which was still glowing red and white in my hand but no longer hot enough to burn me. Or maybe I was numb to the pain.
“You,” he raged. “You had it all along.”
I looked at the sword. The phoenix inlay was made of some kind of metal alloy. The dragon was gold. Or at least that was what they appeared to be to the untrained eye. Where had I found Mayhew at the museum? In the geology department. He said he’d been looking for something to send him back. The lights emanating from the sword pulsed as if to congratulate me on my understanding.