by Jenn Stark
Then a fresh horror struck. Angela was on the move, forced against her will into action, her pain escalating to a keening spike. There was pressure on her wound, but too little—too little! Enough to keep her alive, but not enough to stop the bleeding entirely. And she was moving down…down toward the amphitheater of death where he dispatched demons with the efficiency of a street cleaner. She stared around blearily, and through her eyes, Gregori saw what she saw, felt what she felt, and knew something she didn’t know.
He’d seen these corridors before. They’d been in the minds of the demons he’d dispatched back at Angela’s condo, the long hallways lined with cabinets, with rooms flashing by. The demons had been frightened of the rooms adjacent to those corridors, had dreaded them, and as he saw them through Angela’s eyes, recognizing them for what they were, he finally understood.
This was the area that held the artificial intelligence heart of the AugTech operation. This was where they took their captured demons and made them into something both more and less than how God had created them—the Augments. Terrorizing them down into their most scabrous forms with the help of the witches’ spells, immobilizing them, implanting them with the chips that had served AugTech so well. These implants allowed AugTech to control these pitiful creatures and drive them to do their bidding. Only one thing could break through that hold, it seemed: the hope of escape from their torture at humans’ hands. Even the wrath of God was more palatable than that.
And it had all started in these halls.
Gregori couldn’t see enough to get a fix on the true nature of the technology in the rooms Angela was racing by, but all of them were lit with a blue metallic glow, and as Angela passed lab after lab, he got a sense of how massive the operation was. Now, at least, he understood that AugTech’s hold on both the horde and the witches they’d enslaved was more impressive than he feared. How many witches had they stolen from their home covens and pressed into service to manage such a force? How many more were they subjugating to summon additional demons to the front? There was an endless supply of the horde, after all. What they couldn’t find on earth, they could find beyond the veil.
They had to be stopped.
At that moment, though, as the doors to the amphitheater swept open, Gregori’s thoughts exploded into a million shards of crystalline agony. He could feel Angela’s energy shoot into the room, her terror and resolution as she rolled off the gurney and hit the floor.
He wasn’t the only one. The demons could literally smell fresh blood, but beyond that, the wailing tenor of the witches surrounding the amphitheater changed, and with it, so did the demons’ focus. They didn’t have to go beyond the veil anymore. They could escape—truly escape—if they killed the wounded human.
Gregori would have laughed at the simplicity of the plan if he could breathe past the sudden knot of fury in his throat. No demon truly wanted to return beyond the veil, to face the Father’s judgment or their own permanent eradication. That it had seemed a better future than the ones provided them as prisoners had been telling, but temporary. Far better to simply kill, destroy, then retreat to the shadows. The demons were so damaged at this point from what they had endured, they believed what they were being told as simple truth.
You could push a demon too far, but the humans didn’t know that. There were a lot of things the humans didn’t know.
Such as, you could push a Syx too far as well.
Gregori hefted the pole that had bound him to the concrete, and brought it crashing down—only this time, he didn’t slam it into the horror-struck faces of his opponents, he struck the floor. The sound of metal hitting concrete sounded like the breaking of the world, and it had the effect of sending all the demons into a renewed agitation. The humans as well. Then he heard Angela’s voice loud and strident over the howling, though he couldn’t understand what she was saying—still, it was all he needed. He turned to where her voice had come from, straining to see…
The lights went out.
If anything, the screaming of the demons only got louder as Angela’s shouted words lifted above them, but instead of being disoriented, Gregori was able to continue tracking Angela’s location with one horrifying marker: the smell of her blood. He surged forward, clearing demons from behind, sending them to their judgment beyond the veil with increasing brutality as he struggled to reach Angela. There were too many demons, though, and only one human—and all the demons were focusing on her. Yet Angela’s voice remained strong, if muffled, resolute. She kept shouting. As long as she remained shouting, she was alive.
It took him a few precious seconds to realize she was shouting in Serbian, and an electric kind of joy lit him from the inside. She was remembering, recalling the powerful words she’d spoken as a child and she was no longer afraid of those words. She was willing to use them to save herself and give him the precious extra moments he needed to reach her.
Pride suffused his entire body, almost literally giving him wings. He bolted forward, disintegrating the demons in front of him to ash, and finally reached Angela. In the glow of the emergency lights high above, he could see her plainly. Her dark hair, normally so perfect, was snarled and hanging in clumps over her shoulders, coated in demon blood and gore. Her pale skin was flushed, her hands and face marred with a dozen different wounds. Blood oozed from one thigh, staining her pantsuit, and she stood with her weight balanced on her other leg, well within the glistening circle of blood swept around her by her own hands. She turned and turned again in a pained, jerking movement, holding off the band of demons that lurched and lunged toward her, mad beyond all reclaiming.
She was beautiful, terrified, and terrifying.
She was his.
He stepped inside her circle.
“Gregori!” Angela gasped, whirling to him. And then her arms wrapped around him, her face on his chest. Only it wasn’t his chest anymore, it was the chest of the creature he’d been made into at the moment of his demonization. His scaly, rotten skin, his ragged scars, his claw-like hands. She didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to see anything except some image she had of him in her mind that was true and right, special and good. He knew this because he knew her. Her emotions were completely intertwined with his, her mind and his were linked, her heart and his were one. The way she saw him was nothing short of a miracle.
“I know the answer,” she blurted. “I know how to break free!”
No sooner had she spoken than another sound assaulted them from the far wall. A crease of light appeared, and new demons surged into the room, wild with terror. Gregori leapt forward, even as Angela cried out, “No!”
But Gregori didn’t stop to think. He rushed forward, only to realize it was a different kind of assault he now faced. Not demons anymore, not exactly. These creatures were the Possessed. God’s children, trapped and enslaved by the horde. He couldn’t kill them. He didn’t want to hurt them. But at the same time, extracting the demons from within them, which he was morally charged to do, would take more time than he had. He might be able to grab three, even five, but the rest would get by him. The rest were also going directly for Angela. There was no solution here. There was nothing he could do but defend her.
He fell back to his original position as quickly as possible, gratified to see that the circle of demons surrounding Angela had widened enough for him to step inside. She beamed up at him.
“You came back,” she gasped, the moment seeming caught in time.
He stared at her, startled. “I’ll always come back.”
In a flash, the connection between them expanded so dramatically that he rocked back on his heels. Once again, he had a glimpse of the being he’d been so many millennia ago, a creation of light and magic. A creation worthy of the love that now shone in Angela’s eyes.
The first of the Possessed reached them. Angela’s shout turned from surprise to horror as she recognized the creatures for what they were. These were humans. Seeing them through Gregori’s eyes, experiencing his emotions, she co
uld perhaps still see the demon within them, but she more recognized that these were her own kind, bent on attacking her, attacking him.
She tried to stand—couldn’t. “Zaustaviti!” she cried in Serbian, her voice strident with pain. “Stop!”
But whatever she thought her exhortation would accomplish, she was wrong. The creatures kept coming, and Gregori reached over her, protecting her with his body as he dispatched them one at a time. He was on the fifth when he noticed the horde had begun to falter. He was on the tenth when Angela slumped against him, then slid to the floor. He crouched down, protecting her, and realized there were no other demons left on the floor—only him and collapsed humans.
“Angela!”
“Gas…” she whispered, and finally, he scented the wrongness in the air. You couldn’t kill a demon, but you could kill a Possessed human—or at least incapacitate it for a short while. It appeared that AugTech had figured out a way to get the demons back under their control. If they were smart, they’d also identified a battle unit the Syx wouldn’t kill.
The reality of this horror struck him hard. The Syx wouldn’t be facing purely demon soldiers—but Possessed human soldiers, humans they couldn’t outright blast beyond the veil. He’d inadvertently given AugTech the tools they needed not only to take down their mortal combatants, but to stymie the Syx as well.
“Forgive them,” Angela murmured. “It’s…it’s the only way.”
Even as she spoke the words, he rejected them. The same way it wasn’t his place to judge God’s children, it wasn’t his place to forgive them. And it certainly wasn’t something he had any interest in doing now. Rage boiled through him as Angela choked in his arms. He could heal her and let the others die, but that was no solution either. And the archangel remained maddeningly quiet.
He was a demon, not a Fallen now. He could not forgive. He could not impart the grace of the Father—and he could not heal as he once had. It was forbidden.
But he hadn’t forgotten how.
The gas pumped with greater force, and without even making a conscious decision, Gregori placed his hand over Angela’s mouth, over her eyes. Drawing on abilities he hadn’t used in millennia, he quieted her heart, slowed her lungs, ignoring the renewed scream of pain that pounded in his skull. These were not his powers to use anymore. These were not his abilities to command. This was not the grace a demon was accorded, and there would be literal hell to pay when all this was through.
But not yet.
“Rest, child of God,” he murmured. “Simply rest.”
She slumped to the floor.
His shoulders shuddering under the pain that assaulted him from all sides, Gregori staggered back, then stood, tilting back his head to stare blindly at the lights blasting down from the ceiling, illuminating the carnage all around him. “What is it you want?” he demanded.
“You,” came the response over the loudspeaker, immediately. With his heightened awareness, Gregori knew what the disembodied voice was saying. He was the supersoldier they craved. He was the one they continued to think they could control. He was the one they thought they had controlled, with the lever of Angela Stanton and the Possessed, whom he wouldn’t harm. They wanted him in turn as a lever against the Syx, against any who might oppose them or interfere with their plans. They were humans, and they were making use of every opportunity, every break, every strategy.
He’d have to give them something more to keep them busy.
“You want me?” He growled the question. “Come and get me.”
He scooped up Angela, then ran toward the one thing the owners at AugTech cared about even more than their stable of demon soldiers. Their technology. And as he did, he opened his mind once more. Not to pray…but to summon.
“Shemael, Barzac, Mithra,” he whispered, calling the demons he’d freed from Angela’s parents. He had a job for them to do, and he was sure they would do it. “Mortain, Rickmalid, Zehim.”
Gregori followed the direct trajectory that both Angela and the Possessed had taken, tracking their steps backward to the doors that had most recently opened onto the amphitheater. If this was where they housed the tech systems for their AI, it was reasonable to assume there would still be humans working in the section. Doctors, technicians, he didn’t care. The moment he blasted open the door, those humans would be at risk of inhaling the same gas that was currently flooding the amphitheater. That meant the assholes high above would cut it off. Maybe.
The door was electrified, but it served as merely another layer of pain that barely raked across Gregori’s senses. He burst through the barrier with the force of a charging bull, ducking his shoulder to protect the fragile body he clasped in his arms. He stumbled, then staggered into the bright lights, recognizing immediately the same corridor that he’d seen both in Angela’s eyes and in the minds of the demons he’d attacked. He was close. Alarms sounded all around him, and an initial row of charging, armed soldiers collapsed, none of them wearing masks.
Gas.
More alarms blared, and he ducked into a side room where a bed on wheels sat pushed against the wall and monitors lay quiet and dormant all around. He laid Angela onto the bed and raised his hand, sealing her safety with a benediction that made his fingers bleed, then raced back out, knocking two more soldiers flat before they could get their guns up. These ones were wearing masks. But they were fully human, and he wasted no time with them.
Now that his plan was set, his attention focused on only one thing. The machines. A second later, the demons he’d summoned blasted into being beside him, and together, they became a full demon wrecking crew, grabbing up whatever was closest at hand and trashing the electronic bays in every room. The fact that Gregori was here, that he had eyes on this equipment, meant there was more damage he could do than simple brute destruction too. Though brute destruction was working pretty well. No, the Fool of the Arcana Council had made sure to outfit Gregori with his own tech, and was doubtlessly seeing what Gregori was seeing. If that meant Simon could figure out how to get into the network of this abomination, to keep them from ever setting up such a foul operation again, so much the better.
All Gregori knew was that he had to destroy as much as possible before they caught up to him. Because they would catch up to him and set on him once again with demon-infested humans, too many for him to combat without more bloodshed, more murder. And then he would be forced to do the unthinkable, what Angela had exhorted him to do before she’d lost consciousness.
He would be forced to play the god that he was not, and he would burn for it.
25
Angela came back to consciousness with a jolt of fire and pain. Chaos surged all around her, but not directly attacking her, which she supposed was a good thing. The demons racing past the doorway paid no attention to her, in fact. Thank heavens for small favors.
Her gaze shot to her leg and the shreds of her pantsuit. She pulled aside the ripped material, shocked to find her skin unbroken, a starburst of bright pink, healthy skin replacing the scorched hole that’d been there before. Blood still streaked the skin around the wound, but as she bent forward and ran her hands down her thigh, her leg felt normal, healed as if it hadn’t been pierced with a metal slug. She twisted her leg to see the exit wound, but once again found only smooth, healthy skin beneath its veneer of dried blood. Her head spun, her stomach roiled, and she fought the urge to vomit from adrenaline and fear, but she was okay. She was whole.
She was healed.
“Gregori?” she asked aloud, but the enormous demon was gone. She thought she heard a violent crashing sound from far off, and she half limped to the doorway as more demons raced by, heading down the hallway for the exit—she assumed it was an exit—where she’d been pushed through minutes earlier. Had it only been a few minutes? She’d lost all sense of time.
But where were they going? Another resounding crash in the distance drew her attention, and she saw more demons racing out of the darkened amphitheater, while others seemed to be destroy
ing everything they could in the labs farther down the hall. She needed to join the fleeing demons, to leave before the last one ran screaming through the exit. She couldn’t wait until they’d all gone, or Martin Filmore or his thugs would come for her.
“Hold!”
Too late.
Angela whirled to take in the woman who’d appeared in the hallway—only it wasn’t one woman, it was three, holding their hands up as if to constrain her. The first woman was the tallest, an imperious Amazon with dark red hair falling over her shoulders, her sturdy body encased in a long tunic and pants with embroidery at the edges, somewhere between a lab tech’s scrubs and ceremonial gear. The women behind her, both pale-skinned brunettes, were far shorter than the first woman and wore the same style scrubs. They all held their arms high, shouting at her in a language she couldn’t understand.
What was the point of that? Angela wasn’t a demon. She wasn’t even a witch. They couldn’t hold her.
Ignoring the women, she turned to run, but she found she couldn’t move. Her eyes snapped wide. “You have no power over me,” she gasped.
The redheaded witch merely grinned at her, a terrible and manic expression. More demons writhed just behind the trio, crouching against the walls of the corridor— new demons. They acted wrong—or more wrong, anyway. They twitched and jittered. Angela could see the spark of electricity at their necks. Indicator lights? What fresh hell was this?
“Take her,” breathed the head witch. Angela stiffened with renewed fear as she realized she was talking to the demons. Gregori was gone. She was alone. She had no more protection against these demons than any human—other than the witches, anyway.
Other than…
“No.” Angela held up her hands as well, the ancient book of witchcraft and its dictates once more springing to her mind. Back in the amphitheater, she’d believed in the circle and so it held power, but these witches clearly didn’t need the circle to perform their magic. They hadn’t needed it in the field when the demons had attacked the “hostage” next to AugTech’s van, and they weren’t standing in a circle now. Which meant it was only the words she spoke that were important. The words and her belief in them.