“Hey, kid,” Alex groaned. “The show’s a killer, yeah?”
Winking at the shocked boy (to encourage himself more than Archie), Doom pulled himself back up onto the roof. He was greeted by the sight of the Capricorn leader towering one roof below.
From that close, the demon’s grotesque body looked…even more grotesque.
Almost 1,000 feet above the ground, Alex stood facing a second-century legion demon, a monster almost as strong as the one Gribovsky had defeated in the late smuggler’s shop.
“You…not…my…prey…” The demon’s words were barely audible through all its growling and mooing. “Leave…my…hunt…”
Like it was nothing, Alex shook another cancer stick out of his eternal pack. He inhaled and brought his palms together.
“I need this kid alive,” he said in an icy voice. “Bad news for you, goat.”
Alex’s sleeves flashed with lilac fire and melted away. The magic symbols tattooed on his forearms glowed bright, his palms gleaming with otherworldly energy. When he spread them, the threads of Chaos energy formed a spindle that instantly transformed into a five-foot, blood-red staff.
Alex twirling the staff overhead, straightened up, and thrust it into the roof by his side. Like a wizard from an old book of fairy tales.
A black wizard.
“Come on, you big cow. Let’s see who’s stronger.”
The demon growled, pushed off the roof with hoofs that left it rocking like an autumn leaf, and took a crazy leap.
“Attacking a wizard with an axe? Are you that dumb?”
Alex slammed his demonic staff against the capsule roof.
[ERROR. ERROR. Structure cannot be recognized. The authorized agencies have been informed.]
Chapter 65
In a direct confrontation, outside the museum full of artifacts, unaccompanied by his Polish partner with his giant sword, and without an ace up his sleeve (like the single bullet the movie pirate kept over all his lonely years on the island), Doom didn’t stand a chance against a second-century legion demon.
He was going to have to prevail through craft and trickery. When the giant cow leaped at him, brandishing the axe, Alex stayed where he was to dispel suspicion and lightly tapped the roof with his staff. The move caused neither an explosion of terrifying spells nor a stream of red demonic fire.
Instead, a harmless but very bright red light hit the demon’s eyes. The infernal creature was taken aback, giving the seasoned black wizard enough time to gain an edge.
Holding out his left hand (and keeping the staff in his right), Alex said a few words, not to cast a spell but to refresh his memory. He’d last used the spell as a kid when he was playing with his friends at Follen School.
No seals came from his fingers (the spell was very low-level). Instead, trickles of green slime spread over the capsule. When the blinded demon landed on the slimy surface, it slipped right off the roof.
Alex peered over the edge to watch the demon land on one of the metal posts. The sharp end pierced its groin.
“That must hurt like the dickens,” Alex said, wincing, before squatting and called on his other source, the one full of chaos and disturbance. “But unlikely to keep it for long.”
The remnants of slime on his left palm vanished in a flash of red fire (with occasional flashes of colors beyond the rainbow inside). Doom ran his blazing hand over the metal roof. At his touch, the steel didn’t just melt; it disappeared, instantly turning to gray ash carried away by the wind.
“Grab my hand!” Alex yelled, reaching into the gap.
“Are you crazy?!” the boy yelled back.
Alex didn’t get it at first. Then, muttering a swear word, he extinguished the flames on his palm. He’d never learned the art of rescuing kids from fucking demons.
Archie deserved full credit for taking a firm grip of his hand once it was cleansed of demonic fire. His grip was so firm, in fact, that Alex gritted his teeth in pain.
The boy’s mom had apparently never taught him how to clip his nails.
And she wasn’t doing it for him.
Yanking Archie out onto the roof, Doom gave him a quick once-over.
“Five foot four inches,” he whispered.
“Five inches,” Archibald corrected proudly.
Who in their right mind would name their son Archibald? Names like that should come with a throne. A porcelain throne would have been perfect for Archie right then considering how pale he was. Still, he was putting a brave face on it.
“Did you have breakfast?”
“No. Why do you ask?” The boy was growing even paler. Although he couldn’t see the climbing demon, he could feel the wheel rock under its weight.
“Magic relies on precise calculations, Archie.” Alex turned thoughtful, dozens of formulae and calculation tables darting before his mind’s eye.
“Uncle Alex!” Archibald leaped back, pointing at something behind Doom. Wasting no time turning around, Alex just trusted his ears. They reported a metal clang, then a loud screech. It had to have been the big cow sending its axe crashing through the capsule roof and almost getting up.
“Don’t bother me, kid…” Alex smacked his staff against the roof again, spending another portion of strength from his demonic source and leaving around 200 points. He was down to about a quarter of his total capacity. Behind him, the searchlight flashed again, flooding the space around them with a bright red light.
“…when I’m inventing a new spell on the go,” Doom finished. Wasting not a second more, he took a running start and, picking the screaming Archie up, leaped off the edge of the capsule edge. In the process, he also extinguished the glowing tattoos on his forearms, dispelled the red staff, and lifted a hand to send some energy from his black-magic source to the seal forming above him.
The sky and the ground stopped battling to see who would end up on top. The air stopped whistling past his ears. The only thing disturbing Doom’s zen was Archibald’s yelling.
His forced partner had at least one thing going for him: the volume he could command would have put a fire alarm to shame.
“We’re falling!” the boy bellowed.
“Just flying downward,” Doom said through gritted teeth.
As a black wizard, he hated lots of things. The fae. White bed sheets. Teddy bears. Demons with giant battleaxes jumping over enormous Ferris wheels like mountain goats in an attempt to get down to the ground faster than a levitating wizard.
But the thing he hated most was children screaming.
“What’s with the Smurf head?” Archibald pointed up at the huge blue air balloon hovering over Doom’s seal. “What if it doesn’t work and we die?”
The great inflatable ball created by Doom’s magic really did look like a Smurf, only with a black hat instead of the white one and a gaping maw with yellow fangs in place of the bright, shiny smile. Also, the eyes were more like a vampire’s.
However, they were unlikely to die—there was still a second left in the levitation spell in Alex’s shoes. Enough for them to survive.
“Kid, you’re asking too much from an improvis—”
Doom felt a tingling sensation in his fingertips, though there was nothing he could do about it. His best option was to drop the oversized ten-year-old’s dead weight and dodge the big cow’s blow. But that would have meant saying goodbye to his month-long vacation and wasting all the effort he’d already put into saving the kid.
“Hold on!” Alex screamed, dismissing the spell. He unclenching his fingers to let the giant, black-magic Smurf air balloon fly away, getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared up into the sky.
The two of them, still some thirty feet above the ground, dropped like rocks. Alex gritted his teeth again, that time the anger coupled with pain.
The red wave washing off the big cow’s axe blade cut his hand, albeit slightly. Clutching Archie to his chest, Doom’s blood drizzled onto the boy.
Like any other black wizard, he tended to be pretty conscious
of keeping his blood to himself.
Particularly when falling head-first right onto hard cobblestones.
Chapter 66
In the split-second before what would have been a lethal impact, Alex activated the last bit of levitation in his shoes. That cushioned the impact, keeping it from killing them if still leaving it awfully unpleasant.
Alex hit the cobblestones with his back, a zombically (if that’s even a real word) pale Archibald clutched to his chest, and rolled with him to crash into a trader’s cart abandoned by its owner.
Funny as it may seem, a small bucket of popcorn, someone’s last order, was still on the counter. There was a bloody palm print splayed prominently on the side.
“Hide behind the cart!” Alex shouted, pointing behind his back.
Thank the abyss, Archie obeyed without arguing. He crawled beneath the cart to hide behind a large tank of fizzy water probably diluted with the plain stuff. Or maybe not, judging by the sky-high prices featured on the holographic sign.
“You won’t be needing this.” Doom reached for a woman’s arm stretching out from beneath a smoldering tent enshrouding a bunch of human (and non-human) bodies. In one sharp movement, he ripped the sleeve off and, using his other hand and teeth, wrapped it around the wound left by the big cow’s blow.
The flow of blood slowed but didn’t stop. And there wasn’t time for Alex to work any more magic.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me this was the kind of entertainment they have here?” Alex sighed indignantly as he watched the giant demon leap off the Ferris wheel. It landed on its right knee, buckling the cobblestones to form a small crater. “Like some fucking movie superhero.”
Whenever Alex was in grave danger, he chattered on and cracked his jokes. That helped him stay focused.
The demon straightened up, spread its upper paws, and uttered a powerful roar. So powerful, in fact, that a few smelly, sticky drops of saliva landed on Doom’s face thirty feet away.
“Damn.” Doom wiped his face with the edge of the sleeve he’d taken off the dead body.
The big cow, apparently unimpressed by the gesture, pushed off the cobblestones and raced ahead. The axe over its head glared with demonic fire capable of destroying any metal except for adamantius, even breaking down spell structures.
That fire was the reason unexperienced demonologists dropped like flies, confirming Darwin’s theory. No wizard, even the most powerful, could directly attack a demon. Or an angel.
With no museum full of artifacts close at hand, all Alex could use was…a cemetery.
He ran his bloody palm over the ground, mixing his blood with the still-warm pools shed so recently. At the same moment, his mind seemed to subdivide into parts. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. And so on, until his field of vision was a kaleidoscope made up of over five hundred facets.
It was the strongest raising Alex had ever dared to attempt. The effort forced red trickles from his nose, eyes, and ears, but his mind held up under the pressure.
Gray seals formed by ash and death flashed in front of him, though they didn’t hit the big onrushing cow. Instead, they spun like creepy sprockets as they sank into the blood.
When the demon lifted the axe over Doom, who was lying prostrate in his own and others’ blood, it was literally swept away by the flow.
A flow of growling, bleeding, drooling, cut, slashed, ripped, limbless (or dropping their limbs as they went) zombies.
Like a school of piranhas, the scores of walking dead attacked the demon, burying it under the mass of bodies so recently still alive and full of hope. Hundreds more of them were climbing out of the ground.
Out of the corner of his eye, Alex spotted the same fat couple he’d doused in coffee, complete with their beloved son.
“The citizens of Myers City are always ready to lend a helping hand to those in need,” Alex said, handing a dead arm to the fat zombie still stained with coffee.
It was the same arm he’d ripped the sleeve off of. And it looked like the arm was actually on its own—the lady it had previously belonged to was skipping on her only leg toward the demon, baring her teeth and oozing pus from where her other leg had been.
The fat zombie accepted the helping arm from Alex, waved it like a flag, and rushed into battle with a speed that belied its physique and undead nature.
[ATTENTION! Prohibited spell used: RAISING of the Blood, Darkness, and Death School. Mana consumption: N/A.]
“That one is prohibited, too?” Alex was surprised. When he’d left to spend four long years down at the resort, Raising was a spell that was permitted for wizards who hadn’t had their magic source altered. The black wizards who escaped vivisection at the hands of the glorious warriors of Light.
“Bitches,” Doom concluded in disappointment.
Sure, no one would have let him raise five hundred zombies at once, but…the city barely had a hundred wizards capable of that outside the Abyss’ membership.
It wasn’t even a questionn of their magic power. They just weren’t skilled enough.
“Adelia would laugh her guts out.” Doom, still down in the pool of blood, recalled the female necromancer who’d taught him the art after a couple rounds in bed. She’d have raised the whole park, feeding half the demons to the undead.
His gift was no match for hers.
While the demon fought off the undead, crushing them with the axe, ripping them apart with its bare paws, trampling them with its hooves, and just squeezing out every bit of fun it could, Alex caught his breath and crawled over to Archie.
“Hell of a day, huh?” he asked, poking the boy in the shoulder.
The kid was sobbing, clutching a stick with both hands. Does he know that was just someone’s cane? Most likely, it had belonged to the old man latched onto the big cow’s nostrils in an attempt to stop the demonic beast.
Alex sighed.
He felt like he had about 200 mana points left in his demonic source and half as much in his main black-magic one.
“I’ll be honest, partner—things are about as shitty as they get.” Doom sat down on the fizzy water tank. The tingling in his fingertips was growing stronger—there must have been more demons coming to the aid of their leader. “We’re only going to get one last shot. So, let’s think.”
“Th-th-th-think-k-k-k?” the boy stammered.
Alex glanced over at Archibald. At least he hadn’t pissed his pants. Although Doom at his age had already…well, it wasn’t really the time for a trip down memory lane.
“As a good friend of mine named Robin used to say,” Doom mumbled as he stood up, “there’s no such thing as too much soda. Not when the soda is pressurized, boiling, and filled with black magic.”
As he said that, Doom lifted both his hands. A red seal flashed over his left one, draining his demonic source, and a black seal appeared over his right palm to do the same to his other source.
With no idea whether he’d messed something up with the seals that time, Doom placed both hands on the fizzy water tank and applied the last of his physical and magic strength to hurl it in the direction of the already subsiding battle.
The undead were no match at all for the infuriated demon. In just a few moments, he’d shredded five hundred zombies (a record yet to be broken by any of the military branches).
The last few scores were still holding the big cow’s attention when the soda tank slammed into its back and exploded immediately, not with cola but with a brown, sizzling mass that dissolved the demon’s armor and infernal flesh like acid.
Bellowing in pain, the demon collapsed at the feet of the surviving zombies, who attacked it again, that time meeting far less resistance. The big cow fell silent a few moments later, showing no more signs of pseudo-life. Its flesh and armor spread across the ground as shapeless plasma—demon bodies didn’t retain their normal look in this reality when bereft of their supporting magic power.
“I’ve got two pieces of news, partner.” His hand trembling, Doom retrieved the second-to-last cigaret
te from his pack. It was time to restock. “The good one first: we smashed the big goat, though we made his kids really angry.”
Surrounding Alex and Archibald were dozens of horned bastards eager to rip them to pieces.
“And now the very good news: the cavalry’s here.”
As soon as Alex said that, the red-haired Pole came slashing through the demon ranks with his physics-defying sword.
Hell’s bells. Never in his entire life had Doom been so happy to see law enforcement.
Chapter 67
The operations staff was organized around the same long-suffering trader’s cart not far from the metal tables of the terrace café where Alex had had his chat with Miss Perriot half an hour before.
Half an hour?!
Damn. It felt like it had happened at least a year before.
Doom wasn’t ready for his life to become that eventful.
Little Archie, curling up beneath the plaid, was sleeping magically. Literally. Being a fae, Lieutenant O’Hara had the incredible ability to make human children sleep.
For many thousands of years, the fae of the Winter and Summer Courts alike had practiced stealing babies from their cradles, replacing them with vile changelings.
Major Chon Sook, crossing his legs and sticking out his little finger, drank from his flask as he watched people in unmarked radiation suits collect the dead bodies as well as the plasma left by the dissolving demons.
Gribovksy tapped the table nervously.
Lieutenant O’Hara took the seat furthest from Doom. A wise decision.
Sitting at the other tables were a dozen members of various races. There was even a huge, one-eyed orc dressed in a large business suit that was still very tight on his muscular body. He sat there honing his axe, a sight was so mundane and unnatural at the same time that it made Alex wonder if he’d gone crazy (him, not the orc).
“Mr. Dumsky.” As usual, the major’s voice was devoid of emotion. “The fact that you happened to be in the very museum where our masked friend decided to summon a demon is an amazing coincidence. But I don’t even know what to call the fact that the same thing happened here.”
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