Hard to Handle

by Christine Warren

  “Not a Demon. A demon.” Dag’s voice rumbled, and Ash thought she saw a glint of humor in his eye.

  Kylie grinned. “Lowercase d.”

  “Feck it,” he growled. “I need a bloody transcriptionist to keep track of all this shite. Can’t you people think up some original terminology?”

  “It is, perhaps, a bit late to think of such a thing,” Dag said.

  “Only by a few thousand years,” Kylie said.

  “We call all such creatures who come into being on the plane beyond the hellmouth, demons,” Ash explained. “That place is a storehouse of immense amounts of dark energy.”

  Drum made a sound of frustration and slumped back in his chair while his mother carried food from the kitchen to the dining table. Kylie quickly rose to lend a hand. When they set the last dish on the table, Maddie excused herself to bring a plate to her exhausted daughter upstairs.

  “All right,” he said as people began to serve themselves. “I think this is where someone finally explains to me the definition of a hellmouth.”

  Kylie plopped a scoop of fluffy colcannon onto her plate and shot him a sideways glance. “I always thought it was kinda there in the name. Hell. Mouth. Seems pretty self-explanatory. Didn’t you guys get Buffy the Vampire Slayer over here?”

  “Please, God and Saint Peter, don’t tell me we’re going to have to deal with the vampires.”

  Dag looked disdainful, which Ash had to assume did not relate to Maddie Drummond’s delicious stew. “Do not be ridiculous. Such creatures do not exist.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

  “As we have already explained, hell as a place in which human souls remain trapped in eternal torment does not exist,” Ash said. “However, there is a dimension located between this plane and the planes on which the Seven have remained imprisoned. It is the source of the hellfire you witnessed earlier as well as creatures such as the Shadow against which we fought. It is controlled by the Darkness, and the Darkness uses it as a breeding ground for its more powerful servants. The proximity it bears to the mortal world has always troubled the Guild and the Guardians alike.”

  “It certainly doesn’t sound like the sort of neighborhood you want brushing up against your own,” Drum said.

  Ash understood the human’s sarcasm, even empathized with the underlying anxiety that fueled it. Her own worry only increased with having to lay out the facts for another.

  “It is not,” she agreed, struggling to keep her voice even. Her food lay cooling on her plate, but as talented a cook as Maddie might be, Ash lacked much appetite. “That is the reason why the Guild has always monitored the borders between us and done all they could to shore up the barriers that separate our realities.”

  Kylie looked up from her plate and frowned. “Whoa, wait a second. That makes the fact that the Guild has pretty much ceased to exist over the last couple of years an even bigger deal than the rest of us were figuring. And we figured it was a megillah of a deal.”

  “It is.”

  Dag cursed under his breath and clenched his fist around his cutlery. “I had not considered these ramifications, but then none of us had believed the Order had regained access to one of the hellmouths.”

  Ash watched Drum wince.

  “One of the hellmouths?” he repeated. “How many of the buggering things are there?”

  “They have never been fully mapped,” Dag said. “What knowledge we had of them was entrusted to the Guild.”

  Kylie grimaced. “Which means it went up in flames when the headquarters in Paris exploded.”

  Ash shrugged. “I am not certain how much any records would have aided us in the end. The ancient locations of the hellmouths have all been deliberately obscured to prevent their use by the Order, but rediscovering them would not be the only options available to the nocturnis.”

  “This just keeps getting better and better. What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that with enough power available to them, the nocturnis could open a new hellmouth in a location of their choosing.”

  Drum blew out a long, unsteady breath. “But they have no reason to do something like that if they already have this one all ready and waiting for them, right?”

  Ash shifted uncomfortably. “It depends on the purpose for which they plan to use the gateway.”

  “That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?” Kylie asked. “If the hellmouth leads to a plane full of evil, nasty, human-eating monsters, I’m guessing that a group of warmhearted puppy lovers like the nocturnis want to use it to let the monsters out to play. What other reason could they have?”

  Ash winced. She had really hoped not to contemplate all the myriad possibilities. Especially not the most probable one.

  She felt Dag’s gaze on her and met his eyes. She and her brother shared a grim and unhappy moment. Finally, he turned his gaze back to the humans and grunted out an explanation. “Ash told you that this plane accessed by the hellmouth sits between the one we occupy now and those occupied by the Seven pieces of filth. If a hellmouth is a gateway between this dimension and the next, then a gate opened in that middle plane…”

  Drum picked up where the Guardian trailed off. “It would open a gate into one of those prisons. Dear sweet Jesus.”

  Kylie set down her fork, beginning to look a little green around the edges. “And then something could pass straight from those outer planes onto this one. Got in himmel.”

  “And this mouth/gate may just be yawning open, vomiting evil into my family’s fecking backyard? What’s to stop a thousand more monsters like the Shadow from coming through and killing everything within twenty miles? What’s to stop one of these capital D Demons from coming through? A No Trespassing sign? We have to do something!”

  Dag held up a hand. “Calm yourself, human. The gate remains closed.”

  “How can you know that?” Drum demanded. “That Shadow thing came through, didn’t it?”

  The Guardian scowled. “And we destroyed it—”

  “That only the Shadow attacked us is actually reassuring,” Ash interrupted, leaning forward to draw the eyes of the males from their brewing confrontation. Now was not the time for arguing among themselves. “If the hellmouth were already open, we would have faced an unending horde of Dark spawn. A single creature without reinforcements is a good sign.”

  “And how do you figure that?”

  She sighed and fumbled for the words to explain the situation for a man so new to the realities of magic. She only hoped she could draw an adequate picture that would reassure Drum for the moment without downplaying the serious and precarious nature of the situation.

  “Imagine an open field between two villages,” she began. “The far village represents the outer planes, the prisons holding the Seven. The near village is the mortal plane, where we are now. The open field is the hellmouth.”

  Ash watched Drum carefully. She could see that he was listening, but that he struggled against fear and impatience. She could understand that, but she needed him to pay attention.

  She continued. “When the hellmouth is closed, it is as if that open field between the villages is seeded with land mines. Their locations are not marked, and no one possesses a map to guarantee safe passage. If an inhabitant from one village seeks to cross over to the other village, he risks stepping on the land mine and exploding. It is possible that by sheer chance an individual could cross the field safely, but the odds stand against it and make it almost impossible for groups of any size. Does that make sense?”

  Drum nodded, and Kylie echoed the motion. Even Dag appeared to be paying attention.

  “This explains how the Shadow came to be in the cave,” Ash said. “It crossed the field without stepping on a mine through plain dumb luck. Now, if the hellmouth is open, the situation changes drastically. Open the hellmouth and you remove the land mines. With the mines gone, anyone can cross the field in safety. In fact, higher armies could move from one village to the other with ease. It would n
ot be a matter of a single Shadow entering that cave. An endless stream of Dark spawn would already be charging through. To tell the truth, if the hellmouth were open we would not be speaking now. This battle would already be lost.”

  She fell silent, along with the rest of the group. Everyone needed a moment to digest her analogy, or maybe just the bottom line. They could feel relief that the gate to the plane of Darkness remained closed, but they knew, all of them knew, that if the Order had its way, it would not remain closed for long.

  “And on that happy note…” Kylie broke the silence and pushed away her half-eaten dinner. “Don’t you think—”

  Three sharp, imperious raps on the front door took them all by surprise. Ash frowned and looked at Drum. “Is your mother expecting company?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t mention anything. Besides, none of the locals would bother with the front door. Everyone who knows Ma knows to go around to the kitchen.”

  “Door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman?” Kylie asked, her humor sounding a little too close to fear for anyone to laugh.

  “Not out here.”

  Ash did not even need to glance in Dag’s direction. He had already risen from his chair and stepped around the table to her side. She didn’t need to have heard Drum’s assessment to know that whoever stood outside had not come for a friendly visit.

  The Guardians placed themselves between the front of the house and the more vulnerable human occupants. Ash itched to shift into her natural form, but the confined space inside the house could not accommodate her wearing wings, let alone another like her if Dag should feel the same urge. It put them at a disadvantage, something she disliked on a deep, deep level. And that made her cranky.

  Her mood failed to improve when the visitor decided to forgo knocking a second time. Instead, someone lobbed a dark burning fireball straight through Maddie Drummond’s front window.

  Forget cranky. Now Ash was pissed. In case anyone wondered, they could tell by the way she threw herself out of the shattered window and changed in midair.

  By the time she soared up to the level of the roof, she had called her battle-axe to hand and was screaming her rage into the night sky. Also, Dag had joined her, wrenching open the front door and shifting almost before he finished crossing the threshold. He swung his war hammer in great circles around his head, generating a fierce momentum that he carried with him as he threw himself into an approaching band of shambling, human-shaped figures.

  Ash paused only long enough to shout for the Wardens to guard Drum’s family. Then she tucked her wings against her sides and swooped down on the hooded figure gathering his Dark magic for a second strike. As far as she was concerned, this attack on the sanctuary of the Drummonds’ home amounted to a declaration of all-out war.

  As she believed modern humans would say, they could bring it. Ash was more than happy to grant their wish. If the Order wanted war, war they would get. She would carry it to them on the blades of her axe.

  And the Darkness take any who stood in her way.

  Chapter Twenty

  Drum listened to Ash explain what sounded to him like the end of the world and contemplated how irredeemably bolloxed his life had become in a handful of days. In less than a week, he had gone from life as a respectable Dublin publican to someone who had dinner table discussions about the gates between alternate dimensions and the Demonically inspired lunatics who wanted to tear them down. He had been attacked not once but several times by the forces of evil—the literal Forces. Of. Evil—and had begun practicing how to hurl streams of magic at the equivalent of demon ghosts. And worst of all, it was all beginning to seem just a little too close to normal.

  Luckily, someone chose that moment to knock at the front door and nipped that thought in the bud.

  Ash frowned and looked at Drum. “Is your mother expecting company?”

  He shook his head, already wondering what could possibly happen next. “She didn’t mention anything. Besides, none of the locals would bother with the front door. Everyone who knows Ma knows to go around to the kitchen.”

  “Door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman?” Kylie asked, her words light but her tone worried.

  “Not out here,” Drum growled. The Guardians rose from their chairs and moved into new positions, forming a kind of two-person shield wall between the front of the house and the dining table behind them.

  Something bad was about to happen, he thought. Imagine his satisfaction when the visitor chose that moment to lob a ball of fire into his mother’s living room. There was always a certain amount of satisfaction to be had in being right, even when being right sucked.

  Someone shouted. Actually, more than one someone, and Drum thought he might be one of them. The mayhem lasted for maybe two seconds before it descended into utter chaos.

  The window glass barely finished cracking before Ash launched herself through the opening, enlarging it by a significant margin as she shifted on the fly. Dag followed swiftly after, though he elected to use the door and slammed it shut behind him. “Throw the locks,” he bellowed.

  Kylie grabbed the pitcher of water from the dining table and rushed forward to dash the contents over the fire smoldering in his mother’s carpet. They should count themselves lucky that the fireball had hit nothing else on the way through and had landed in an empty space, otherwise the entire room could have gone up in flames.

  Drum was stomping on a few scattered embers when Ash’s warning shook the walls around them. “Maeve and Maddie!” the Guardian roared. “Keep them safe!”

  His heart plummeted into his stomach and then kept going. Without even pausing for breath, Drum flew past the startled American and raced for the stairs to the second floor. Later, he would not be able to say whether he took the steps two at a time or leaped them all in a single bound. He only knew that terror and panic lent him speed he could never have imagined.

  And for all that, he still arrived seconds too late.

  He froze in the door to the room Maeve and Meara had shared all throughout their childhood. He took in the scene with a single glance and felt his breath strangle in his throat. His mother lay draped across the foot of a narrow bed, her fingers curled into a fist as if she could maintain a desperate hold on her youngest daughter’s ankle. Maeve was halfway outside, something black and sinister clutching her beneath the arms as it hovered outside the open window.

  Drum saw it all in less time than it took to blink and raised his hand on a rush of adrenaline and instinct. He didn’t stop to think or to strategize, or even to wonder what he thought he was doing. He simply aimed his palm at the nightmare outside and let the magic rush through him.

  Once again the energy emerged in a burst of pale golden light that had almost started to feel familiar. It was the same attack he had used on both sets of shadelings with satisfying success, but this time when he released the power, nothing happened. The thing outside leaned to the left so fast that the bolt of magic missed it completely and sailed harmlessly into the night.

  Drum bared his teeth in a furious snarl and threw another blast. This one grazed the shape, he would have sworn it, but the creature did not so much as blink. It just yanked his screaming sister out through her bedroom window and flew away on a shriek of triumph.

  Maddie screamed as well and slammed her fist onto the mattress. “Michael, something took my baby girl!” She choked on a sob and buried her face in the disheveled blankets.

  He took the words in his gut and doubled over in pain. He had caused this. At the very least, he had let it happen. He had allowed himself, had allowed his family, to become caught up in matters no human had a right to meddle with. It didn’t matter what gifts a person might possess. He had just seen the evidence of that in living color with fine detail. Human beings shouldn’t be messing around with magic, and because he had ignored his conscience in this matter, his family was paying the price.

  Feeling numb and helpless, Drum stumbled across the space between them and put a comforting
arm around his mother’s shoulders. She leaned against him, her sobs quieting though her tears continued to fall. Then he just sat there and stared at nothing.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs a moment before Kylie appeared in the doorway, her expression strained. “Michael, we need to get out of here, and we have to do it without using the stairs. The nocturni out there has gone flame happy, and he set the house on fire. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t keep up,” she said. She paused, frowning, and glanced around the room. “Where’s Maeve? We kinda need to get moving.”

  “Gone,” he said, trying to shake himself out of the strange lethargy that despair had woven around him. Honestly, he couldn’t think of a reason to put up much of a fight. “They took her. It’s over.”

  “Over?” Her voice rang with incredulity, but it sounded almost muffled somehow. “You putz, what the hell are you talking about? Nothing’s over. This farkakte conversation isn’t even over, so get your stupid Irish ass in gear, and let’s go!”

  Drum just shook his head and looked down, his shoulders slumping. His mother continued to cry softly beside him.

  “Maddie? Mrs. Drummond?” Kylie softened her tone, sounding confused. “Come on. Help me talk some sense into your kid, here. You can see the smoke already filling up the air in here. We need to get outside someplace safe. I promise, we’ll go after Maeve just as soon as we get everything here secured. Please.”

  Maddie trembled and wept. “Michael is right. It’s too late. They have my baby, and there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Nothing we can do? What kind of meshugas is that? Is the smoke messing with your heads? You two sound ins—” Kylie broke off and jerked back as if someone had slapped her. Her eyes narrowed as she looked between Drum and his mother. “Oh, I get it. This isn’t coming from the two of you, and it’s not the smoke, but something is definitely messing with your heads. Wynn told me the Order likes this trick. Now, what did she say I should do if they tried it around me?”

  Her voice trailed off and she appeared to be deep in thought for several seconds. Drum felt a sluggish trickle of relief now that her American accent had stopped hammering at his aching head. He wished that she would just go away, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to tell her to leave. It didn’t really matter. Nothing mattered much anymore …