Chaos Falls

by Pippa Dacosta

  Anna asked, “If we can get inside that site, maybe we can reverse what they did?”

  It was a leap. Beyond a switch that said “press here to avoid apocalypse,” none of us knew what to look for. Adam was the only one who might, and he had admitted this wasn’t his area of expertise. “Why didn’t the staff reverse it if they could?”

  “And we still don’t know what or who Katrina B is.” Noah chimed in. “It crops up in the reports as a source, but nothing else. It could be a person. Maybe Katrina was in charge?”

  Too many questions. “We need to get on the ground and see.”

  “And what do we do about Kar’ak?” Christian asked, looking at me accusingly.

  “Aren’t you the demon hunter?”

  He smiled an insincere smile. “How many enforcers did it take to bring down a prince in Boston?”

  “Not including the snipers?” Adam paused to think. “I believe it was around thirty, each armed with etched rounds and equipped with PC-Thirty-Four injectors. Although, in the interest of honesty, we later discovered Mammon wanted to be caught to get access to our half-bloods.”

  Mammon, the Prince of Greed. My phantom wings throbbed. He had barred me from this world, stripped me of my title, and attempted to burn my wings to cinders. I recalled precisely how I had tried to kill him. While the two worlds had been peeling apart at the seams, all I’d seen, all I’d wanted was revenge. That had been a mistake that had cost me.

  I unclenched a fist I hadn’t realized I’d clutched tight. Mammon was gone, locked beyond the veil with the other remaining princes where he belonged.

  Carefully, calmly, against a backdrop of bad memories, I asked, “You have PC-Eighty, the same drug you took me down with?”

  “Yeah,” Christian drawled. “Not much, though.”

  He probably had a stash tucked away especially for me. “We’ll need it. Inside this house, you’re all safe, so long as Anna doesn’t invite Kar’ak in. However, he will eventually find us, and he’ll use anything and everything to manipulate you. He is the demon you all believed me to be. Don’t underestimate him. And don’t kill him.”

  “What? Why?” both Noah and Christian asked together.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I don’t think it’s complicated. I think it’s because you know him,” Christian replied. “He got inside our heads. We need to take him out.”

  “I do know him, but it’s not what you think.” Explaining how Kar’ak was also Torrent and how I’d promised to save him wouldn’t convince Christian of anything. The man had already made up his mind. Demons equaled bad.

  “If I can bring him down, I’m killing him,” Christian declared.

  “If you kill him, it won’t be me you have to answer to. It will be a pissed-off half-blood with a penchant for ripping out demon hearts. She’s not as friendly as I am.” Gem would chew Christian up and spit him out again. For all his demon-hunter talk, he was not ready to tussle with an angry half-blood.

  “She’s also my daughter,” Adam added. “If you can subdue this Kar’ak, Li’el, please do. Rendered unconscious with the help of PC-Eighty, we can bind them for a limited time.”

  Christian cursed under his breath, muttering about how I would get them all killed.

  “What happened to you at EcoZone?” I enquired. “You know, the place you left Anna to be captured by Kar’ak…”

  He glared. “I’m not explaining myself to you.”

  I could guess. Kar’ak had caught the hunter and sent him on his way with instructions to return to me. Christian had led the demon to my front door, leaving Anna exposed.

  Perhaps Adam was right. The hunter was a liability. He had yet to prove his usefulness. Perhaps getting us to the EcoZone test site would be his opportunity to shine.

  “It’s ten a.m.,” Anna said. “If we leave now, we’ll have a few hours to visit the site and get back before dark.”

  “We all go,” I agreed. “I want Adam there to decipher what we see. Anna on guard, Christian as our guide, and Noah, you’re the second driver. We’ll pick up Anna’s car on the way.” I could survive another car journey. After burning all my feathers and Kar’ak almost tearing my wings off, a road trip didn’t seem so bad a prospect.

  We pulled off the road a mile before the roadblock and hiked from the highway through the gardens of several sprawling villas and upward onto oak-lined trails. Christian led the way. I followed behind the others. Both him and Anna were armed with small handguns, scrounged on our way past an abandoned police substation. Their rounds might slow down a lesser if they were good shots, but it wouldn’t keep demons down for long. Fortunately, Christian assured us he also had several PC-Eighty injectors on him.

  Heat beat at us from all sides. The sky stretched a brilliant blue toward a backbone of tree-speckled hills, and above it all a ribbon of light twitched. The veil. This could almost be the netherworld. All it needed was a few demon howls and the purplish hue coating everything. Home sweet home.

  Anna dropped back, joining me at the end of our train. “How are you holding up?”

  Sweat beaded at her hairline. She’d bunched her shirt around her middle and tied it in a knot, revealing glimpses of her curvy waist. I would have rather enjoyed running my fingers along those curves.

  “I am quite fine,” I assured her.

  “Quite fine, huh?” She arched a brow. “Are you really English?”

  “Not in the least. I adopt any accent and language to suit the circumstances. Chi cerca mal, mal trova.” Italian rolled off my tongue as easily as Arabic or Russian. Some languages had died out centuries ago, their spoken variants living on in my memory alone.

  Shielding her eyes from the sun, she studied my face, puzzling out my motives. “What did you say?”

  “Roughly translated, He who looks for evil will find it.”

  Christian stalked ahead. Anna caught my glance and understood without a word.

  “So, why English?” she asked. “Why not speak Italian the whole time?”

  “Because in LA, English attracts attention. It sparks conversation and is easily understood. I am designed to attract and seduce. English is the most economic language.”

  She stepped around brushwood and wiped perspiration from her forehead, thinking on my explanation. “Everything you do is minutely manufactured, right down to what you’re wearing?”

  My trousers and shirt were a simple enough illusion. All part of the act. “Yes.”

  “So, what’s the real you?” She swept a few loose strands of her hair back.

  “The real me?”

  “Yeah. If it’s all an act, then there’s another you underneath. The real you. Say something in demon.”

  A human had never asked me that before. I wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t sound as though I was threating to slaughter her offspring. I settled on a few words, the most basic terms, and ground them out. The tone was off and the words were too smooth to be true demon. I preferred Italian.

  “That sounds complicated.” She cleared her throat and attempted to speak it back.

  I winced, stopped on the trail, and pressed a finger to her lips. You wouldn’t think you could butcher the demon language, but you’d be wrong. “Human tongues aren’t designed to speak it.”

  It occurred to me that we had stopped walking and I still held my finger to her lips. An urge to trace that finger around her heart-shaped mouth proved almost impossible to resist. But I wouldn’t stop there. I’d slip my hand into her hair, free her braid, and tilt her head back. By the agreement in her gaze, she would let me.

  I switched my touch to brush my thumb across her lips, relishing their softness. Their corners gently lifted, a smile peeking through.

  “C’mon…” Noah called from around a bend in the trail.

  I withdrew my hand and stepped back. Now was not the time to indulge in pleasurable detours. I left her with a smile of my own and nodded ahead. The others were leaving us behind.

  She cleared her th
roat again and matched my pace through the brush. “I’m afraid to ask what it meant.”

  “It’s probably best you don’t know.” I may have suggested she and I get personal in all the right ways, and many of the wrong ways too. Especially the wrong ones. “I suggest not repeating it in demon company.”

  She laughed loud enough for Christian to shoot us a scathing glare. “Did you teach me how to swear in demon?”

  I tempered my smile. “Something like that.”

  “And your demon form is what I saw last night?”

  “I have two. What you saw last night, with the wings and my splendid nakedness on display, that’s my natural state, and my second state is purely as my element. I occasionally merge them. Wings and air, half there, half not. It’s suitably dramatic.”

  “So, you can appear just as air?”

  “You’ve seen me as air several times.”

  “It’s difficult, though. I mean, for me to really understand what I’m seeing.”

  We trudged on, catching up with the others. I pushed a branch aside and let her through. “Your human mind says it isn’t possible, so it doesn’t see all of it. A shame, really. I’m naturally a delight to behold as air. That confusion you experience is how demons who came here in antiquity could hide as myths.”

  We fell quiet for a few strides. I enjoyed silences with her. They were comfortable. She had my feather on her person, pressed somewhere close to her skin. Its warmth molded with mine. That too was a comfort. “I am pleased we met, Anna.”

  My words or a root tripped her stride, but she recovered and brushed her braid back. “Me too. You are… erm… interesting.”

  “Interesting. Hmm. I will have to work on that.”

  We walked in that silence for a few strides more. “Do you think we’ll fix the veil?”

  “We will.” One way or another.

  “I believe you. I shouldn’t, but everything you’ve done to help us can’t be a lie. Does that make me crazy?”

  “No. It makes you reasonable. Unlike some…” I nodded at the demon hunter striding ahead.

  “Christian is trying to do the right thing.” And she couldn’t help defending him.

  “Someone’s right is often someone else’s wrong.”

  She mulled over those words for a while. “I think, when this is all over, I would like to know you. Not your acts, just you… wings an’ all.”

  “I would like that.” When this was over, it would probably be too late for me, but I wasn’t about to dash her hopes. She needed a little hope. All humans did. It kept them moving forward and inspired them to achieve seemingly impossible things.

  The beginnings of a fence glittered in the undergrowth. The closer we got, the more obvious the fence became. We joined a road that had been abandoned for some time. Christian wasn’t wrong. The fence was too high to climb over, and it was topped with extended razor wire. The ten thousand volts warning signs were disturbing.

  “Holy shit.” Noah whistled. “What were they trying to keep out? T-Rex?”

  The warning lights weren’t active. I couldn’t feel an electrical charge around the wires. The fence was dead, but it still proved a formidable obstacle for anyone who couldn’t turn themselves into air and filter through the links.

  We walked along its outer edge toward a smaller personnel gate, but the keypad was dark.

  “Can you do your lock-whispering thing?” Anna asked.

  “Not on electronic locks.”

  “Nobody brought wire cutters?” Adam asked.

  “Right, like any of us own wire cutters,” Noah snorted. “Damn, I must have left my breaking-into-top-secret-government-facilities kit behind.”

  “Over here.” Christian had wandered farther along the fence where it curved away toward a creek. He stood back, admiring an obvious bow in the fence. Something had wanted to get inside badly enough to open a wide gash in the wire.

  “Maybe it was a T-Rex?” Noah mumbled.

  The hole stretched almost to the top of the fence. Its edges had frayed and buckled. Parts had been cut clean through, others stretched and torn.

  “Lessers, perhaps?” I thought aloud.

  Whatever had gotten inside had left no tracks in the leaf litter. Impossible.

  “Or maybe something wanted out?” Adam mused. “The edges are curled toward us. That suggests something broke out, not in.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Lessers could have pulled it open.”

  “I’m starting to wonder if power wasn’t the only thing EcoZone was working on,” Anna said, scanning the trees around us for threats. There weren’t any. I would have sensed anything large moving through the air.

  “Whatever it was, we still need to get inside.” Christian clambered through the hole.

  It took another twenty minutes of walking before a squat and unassuming EcoZone building came into sight. Considering the dramatic fencing, the building looked like nothing more than a single-story warehouse tucked into a natural quarry.

  “The bulk of the facility is likely underground,” Adam said as we approached the entrance blocked by industrial steel doors. “Especially if their activities weren’t publicity friendly.”

  “Are we walking into an Institute situation here?” Christian asked. “You experimented with all kinds of shit. Made half-demon kids, merged different demons together, all kinds of illegal BS. Is that what EcoZone was doing? Are we gonna find demons in there?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam replied, making it sound like maybe. “When the Institute’s true nature became public, the government or the military could have created another branch.”

  “Because the Institute failed at everything it did?” I enquired.

  Adam’s mouth tightened. “We didn’t fail. If it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have etched rounds or the PC drugs to bring down demons. If it wasn’t for our research, the Fall would have been even more catastrophic. Like it or not, one of our half-bloods helped restore the veil—”

  “I sincerely hope you’re not talking about Muse,” I interrupted. “For one, she was never one of yours. Her sacrifices and choices were hers to make and had nothing to do with you.” I managed to keep the growl from my voice—barely. But the threat was threaded through each word. I’d left Gem with Muse in Boston for a reason. More than any human or demon, Muse had fought for what she believed in. She had won, saving countless lives, but at a great cost. For Adam to claim her victory as his, he would soon discover how natural selection worked, and that my being the dominant predator demanded I finish him off and feed his remains to the lessers.

  “All right, boys.” Anna’s voice of reason broke through my murderous throughts. “Let’s all put our claws away. How do we get through this door? I don’t see a lock.”

  I revealed my actual claws, thrust them into the centre of the door, and pulled, popping it off its hinges. We were met with a clean and sparse foyer, complete with security booths and one-way glass to observe staff coming and going. Hot air wafted out, carrying the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh and emptied bowels. The fetid odor of death.

  The group recoiled and spluttered.

  We soon found the first body. Something had torn a security guard apart, painting the floor with his intestines—now shriveled and dried. No insects had gotten in to accelerate decay.

  Noah retreated outside to sounds of heaving. Anna had paled, and Adam had merely paused to peer grimly at the carcass. Christian sniffed, commented “lessers,” and continued.

  The air in here was hot and ripe. There would be much worse to come.

  Noah stumbled back inside and leaned against a security table.

  “Stay here,” I told him. “Keep an eye on the trees. If you see anything suspicious, call out. I’ll hear you.”

  He nodded, relieved, and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. “I’m not made for this shit.”

  Few people were.

  Deeper inside, tight corridors and numbered doors lined our route. We came across m
ore bodies, torn up and tossed around the hallways in a manner that could only be demon.

  “I think we know why nobody tried to fix the veil from inside,” Anna said. “This place is a tomb.”

  Emergency lights flickered and buzzed, illuminating a path to a central elevator hub. A floor plan on the wall showed a conical-shaped structure beneath us. It narrowed to a point like a stake in the ground. The subterranean building had three levels. None were named or marked, just numbered.

  “Guess we’re going down,” Christian mumbled.

  There were only four of us, and the building was vast. As air, I could extend our search perimeter, but it would still take hours. “We can’t search the entire facility before nightfall.”

  “Then let’s go straight to the bottom,” Adam suggested. “Whatever they were working on, my guess is it’s there.”

  Christian jabbed the elevator call button. It didn’t respond. “Stairs it is, then.”

  I delayed by a few strides and fell in behind Anna. “If you need help, touch the feather.”

  Her hand went to her hip, betraying where she had tucked my feather away. She managed a smile. “I will.”

  More bodies littered the stairwell. Some were armed but few had freed their weapons in time. Whatever had hit them had hit them fast. The deeper we descended, the heavier the air became. Anna coughed into her sleeve.

  Down and down and down we walked, until the air cooled and stilled.

  At the bottom, a red emergency light blinked over a closed steel door.

  “Wait,” I warned them.

  A low hum emanated from beyond the door. My elemental had stalled in front of it and invisibly lapped at the seams, unable to break through. Whatever was beyond was perfectly sealed inside. I reached farther, sending tendrils through vents, but all were closed and sealed tight.

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  “I think we found what we’re looking for.” I shook off the “handsome man” and revealed all of me, keeping the bones of my wings tucked in close. “All right.”

  Anna stepped back and cupped her gun in her hands. “Get behind me,” she told Adam.

  Christian tested the grip on his handgun and slowly pressed down on the door handle. The seal cracked. Air breathed through the slim gap like the inhalation of an enormous beast waiting in the dark. He kicked the door open.