In desperation, I pulled out the pet wood, extending it with a flick of my wrist.
“I like the way you think, Maddie. Lay it on me. I can’t wait.” He spread his arms wide and puffed up his chest.
Bridget regained her feet and launched herself across the desk. I speared the pet wood at Tim and grabbed her knees. We went down in a tumble of limbs, sliding the desk back in Tim’s direction. Bridget fought me with absentminded cruelty, shoving and pushing and climbing me to get to her demon. Her knee landed on my stomach, punching the breath from me in a painful rush. She used her advantage to push off my chest to her feet. I grasped at what was left of her skirt and it came away in my hand, tripping her at the last second. She sprawled across the dirty office floor with a shriek.
Panting, I scrabbled after her, pinning her in place with my body. She craned her head to the right, where she could see Tim’s feet beneath the front wall of the desk, and she stretched for him with her free hand, mindless of me and the rest of the world in her urgency to touch him.
I gazed down at her sullied profile. This wasn’t Bridget. This wasn’t my best friend who I’d roomed with in college and told my darkest secrets to. This wasn’t the intelligent woman who had breezed through law school while the rest of us were still doing undergrad work. This wasn’t even a person with her own will. The demon had stripped it all from her—her identity, her personality, her morals and will and inhibitions. Tim had done so much worse than cover her soul with his evil taint. He’d made her a plaything.
My world narrowed to that moment, pausing for infinity on that second, pivoting as my thoughts realigned. I’d accepted what I was when I changed Max. I’d confirmed it when I saved the kittens. But in that moment, in that endless second, I knew what it was to be an enforcer. I saw the precipice of no return, hovered at its edge. Behind me was a normal life, or what qualified as one for me. A life where I could see how good or evil a person was, where I could watch evil creatures and people’s evil actions taint the lives and environments around them. Ahead was a yawning abyss of possibility in which I could make the world a better place. It was scary, and exciting. And required me to take action.
The second passed. Time resumed, blurring to catch up to normal speed.
I lunged under the desk where I’d kicked my purse. The knife practically leapt into my hand, then I shoved my feet against the front wall of the desk. The desk and I parted ways, sliding in opposite directions across the room. I came out of my slide already turning. Tim dodged the desk and stood beside Bridget, who was struggling to her feet. With a cry, I launched over Bridget and embedded the knife to the hilt in the demon’s chest.
My jump slammed the demon backward. Tim staggered against the wall, shock etched in the inky features of his deformed face. Clutching the hilt, I shoved a whirlwind of lux lucis into the blade. A web of white light skittered across the demon’s body. Tim scrabbled weakly at my hand, and I shifted to a two-handed grip on the hilt. Lux lucis poured through both my arms, gushing through the blade. It spread over Tim’s body the way electricity might, in waves and arcs, radiating from the blade outward, the lux lucis made more powerful by the physical damage of the knife’s metal blade buried to the hilt in his chest.
I knew the exact moment the demon died. Lux lucis backed up into the blade with nowhere to go, then backwashed into me, leaving me jittery like I’d received a caffeine jolt straight into my veins. The demon’s body slumped to the floor. I released the blade and admired my handiwork.
“Dice?” Bridget’s voice wavered, small and childlike.
I glanced back over my shoulder and watched as Bridget collapsed, a puppet whose strings had been cut. The sound of her hitting the floor jolted through me. The horror of what I’d done smothered my elation.
I scrambled backward, knocking into the desk and falling to the side, crab-crawling until I collided with the wall. My feet continued to push against the tile, flattening me against the wall. If I could climb it, I would have. I knew I should check on Bridget, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the dead body on the other side of the room.
The hilt stuck obscenely from the demon’s chest. The body was slumped half upright against the wall, like he’d fallen asleep, though the knife screamed otherwise. Looking at him was no longer like looking into a consuming void. Nor was he charcoal, the color of nonliving things. He was black, solid atrum. But even as I watched, atrum bled from him, pooling first beneath the body, then spreading like blood across the floor. Unlike blood, atrum climbed the wall behind the body, too, defying gravity, oozing outward in all directions from the limp body.
When the edge of the pool touched Bridget, she moaned. I scooted across the floor, kicking the desk to the side, and dragged her limp body back with me to the farthest corner of the small room. Keeping one eye on the expanding stain of atrum, I took off my coat and covered Bridget from her waist to her knees. Her skirt was in tatters under the desk next to my pet wood.
My legs were shaking too much to stand, so I crawled under the desk and grabbed the pet wood. Numbly, I evaluated my soul.
“You’re not looking so hot, Dice,” I said, and the raw sound of my voice scared me silent.
I checked Bridget’s pulse. It was steady. Her breathing was relaxed. Without the draw of lust from Tim, Bridget had finally succumbed to intoxication. Not even shaking got more than, “Again? I’m sleepy. You start and I’ll catch up.”
I slumped in place and stared at the demon’s body. I knew I needed to think. I needed to find a way out of here. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it yet. The door, our only option, was still blocked by the atrum barrier. Not even Tim’s death had brought down the soul-eating blockade.
Tim’s death. I was already thinking about it in past, distancing myself from it like it had happened naturally to a stranger. But it hadn’t.
I watched the encroaching atrum with numb dread. I knew there had to be a smart way of handling the situation, but my brain was short-circuited. Instinct was all I had left. Gathering lux lucis in my hands, I spread a ward in front of us on the floor and crossed my fingers.
When the tide of atrum slithered against my ward, the white line weaken, but the atrum turned aside, taking a path with less resistance. I strengthened the ward. The atrum slid along the curve of my ward until it hit the wall. Then it climbed the wall and rushed straight across the vertical surface toward where I’d leaned Bridget. Hastily, I smeared a ward in an arc on the wall until we were completely circled by lux lucis. Atrum washed against the ward. It held. The tide of evil shifted and crawled up the wall. I took a deep breath and let it out.
Danger averted, I looked back at the body, drawn by those dead eyes that stared back at me. Tim—the demon— I’d killed—
I rubbed my hands together. The sensation of the blade sliding into the demon clung to my skin. Over and over again, I felt the blade slide without friction through flesh and organs, before catching against the spine.
I would have thrown up, but I didn’t have the energy left.
Atrum breached an internal barrier in the demon’s body, and the remaining evil gushed from Tim in a tidal wave. I regarded Tim’s final, post-mortem attack, with dull fear. As far as tidal waves go, it was pretty insignificant, a mere foot tall, but it rushed up the walls and across the roof in a gravity-defying act no real tidal wave had ever accomplished. It also came straight at my barriers across the floor, and in my weak, exhausted state, it might as well have been a ten-foot wave.
I held my wards by sheer willpower and carefully doling out my limited lux lucis. When the tide receded and equalized in a thick layer about the room, I collapsed sideways across Bridget. I’d lost at least two square feet of clean space, most of it along the wall behind us. As long as I didn’t sit back against it, I would be fine, and Bridget, where she lay up against it, was safe, too.
Against my will, my gaze slid back to the body. It looked fragile now in a way that Tim had never looked, in normal sight o
r Primordium. The antlers were blunted and gray, the beak nose and wide-staring eyes softened and blurred, like I was looking at the demon through a soap opera dream screen. The only thing solid about him was the knife hilt protruding from beneath his ribcage, a hard black line of a handle, and a dull, light gray of a blade.
I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, amplifying my sense of guilt by making me see things that couldn’t be possible—like seeing the blade buried in the body. Then the knife shifted.
I screamed.
It was a tiny, whimper of a scream. I didn’t want to draw the body’s attention.
The body was beyond caring. As I watched, the blurry, dreamlike edges of it collapsed, folding down on itself like a pile of dust that had lost its structure. Then it fell into the depths of the atrum coating the floor and disappeared. The knife clattered to the linoleum, only the slight shine of the blade visible across the room. I strangled another scream.
The demon was gone. I didn’t dare blink to normal vision to check, but I knew that any human who walked into the room wouldn’t see a body. They wouldn’t see atrum coating the walls and ceiling, either, turning the office into a solid black box of death, with one tiny, misshapen circle of lux lucis light around two dim souls. They’d see a knife and two girls huddled in the middle of a tornado-strewn office.
From the ashes of the demon arose a bevy of imps, the dark side’s single-celled amoeba, brainless, with the drive only to feed and propagate; atrum’s first evolutionary step.
You’re losing it, I thought. This isn’t a Nova show. It’s your life.
They bounced around in mass confusion until the first one spotted Bridget and me crumpled in the corner. As one, the others turned to look at us. With bounds and leaps, they approached.
I looked down at my dim body. It would be ironic if I killed a demon, only to be taken out by imps.
When I looked back up, the imps were dancing to Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back.” I bobbed my head with them, acknowledging that I’d finally tipped over the mental edge.
“Your ass is ringing,” Bridget mumbled. “I’ll get it.”
She groped me. I jumped, coming out of my trance.
“Medusa!” I scrambled to pull my cell phone from my back pocket.
“We should go clubbing,” Bridget said. She raised one arm and waved it in the air, smacking me upside the head. “Oops. Sorry!” She giggled.
I unlocked Medusa with a shaky finger. “Niko?”
“Where are you?” Niko demanded.
The strength in his voice made my last shred of courage crumble. My hands started trembling so badly I supported my left with my right to keep the phone to my ear.
“Staring down a pack of imps. I think they’re going to kill me.” The imps had stopped inches from my feeble barrier.
“Tell me where you are—”
“Tim’s dead. I killed him,” I confessed.
“Good, now—”
“Does that make me a bad person?”
“Stick with me, Madison. I’m in the bar. Where are you?”
“You’re here? Oh, thank God!” I smiled, and my face felt like it would crack under the strain. I turned to look down at Bridget. Her soul was coated with atrum. She hadn’t moved more than her arm from her fetal position. But she was awake. Drunk and awake. And safe. “We’re going to be okay,” I told her.
“Make your butt sing again,” she said.
“Okay. Niko, call me back.”
“Madi—”
I clicked the phone off, then stared in horror at what I’d done. The phone rang, playing “Sexy Back” at full volume. Bridget grabbed the phone from my fumbling grip and struggled to stand so she could dance.
“Wait! I need that! No, don’t put your hand there!” I wrestled with Bridget to keep her within the confines of my ward. She laughed, holding the phone out of reach.
“I love you, you know,” she said in a wash of cosmopolitan fumes. “You saved me.” She lurched toward me to hug me, and we both went down in a sprawl of limbs.
The door splintered, and Niko burst into the room. Through the veil of Bridget’s hair, I watched him pause, take in the room, the imps, my ward, and finally Bridget mashed atop me, her bare, thong-clad butt exposed to the world. “Sexy Back” was still playing in Bridget’s outstretched hand.
“Hey, is this Mr. Dark and Deadly?” Bridget asked, pushing up to straddle me with a complete lack of modesty. “You’re right. He’s hot!”
I tried to morph into a piece of linoleum.
Niko pulled his phone from his ear and ended the call. Medusa went silent.
“Aww. What’d you do that for?” Bridget asked.
The imps abandoned me and rushed Niko. Or the open doorway. I wasn’t sure which. Either way, their lives were short. Niko turned and laid down something across the doorway. A sheet of lux lucis raised across the opening, blocking the encroaching atrum from exiting.
With the confidence of an optivus aegis, Niko strode across the atrum-coated floor, leaving footprints of lux lucis behind that the atrum oozed back over. He scooped up the knife, then took the two remaining steps to the edge of my ward.
“Hi, I’m Madison’s best friend Bridget.” Bridget raised her hand to shake his.
“I can see that.” Grinning, Niko shook her hand. Atrum smeared across his palm from Bridget’s, only to be wiped clean a moment later. He bent down and did something to my ward. The faint line sparkled with energy and expanded two feet in every direction, eating atrum as it moved.
Finally Bridget remembered she was sitting on me. She swayed to her feet, and I scrambled up beside her, snatching my jacket up and wrapping it around Bridget’s lower half, using the sleeves to tie it tightly in place.
“‘Sexy Back’?” Niko asked.
“What other ring tone do you give Mr. Dark and Deadly?” Bridget asked.
“His name is Niko.”
“Mr. Dark and Deadly by any other name is still—”
“Shut up, Bridget.”
19
Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History
Niko took pity on me and helped my drunk, traitorous friend and me across the atrum-coated floor without asking any more questions. Walking through the sheet of lux lucis perked my energy up a little. For Bridget, it was like walking through a shower; when she reached the other side, most of the atrum had washed away, leaving patches of darkness in the areas where she’d lingered against Tim.
Niko called Joy, who said she’d meet us out front, well clear of the interior evil minions who would have gleefully feasted on her pristine and shimmering soul. Niko would remain behind to clean up, and he set another lux lucis barrier at the main entrance to prevent anyone from leaving as an unwitting host. By the time we’d hustled out of the bar, Bridget’s intoxication had turned on her. She sagged against the storefront, one hand on her head, the other on her stomach, while I filled Niko in.
Niko made me describe, in minute detail, how I’d used the knife, and how the body had disintegrated, until he was reassured the demon was well and truly dead. I skipped over how Bridget had lost her skirt. I didn’t mention that I could still feel the impact of the knife against Tim’s—against the demon’s spine. I emphasized how I’d tried to follow protocol and orders, but with my friend’s life in jeopardy, I’d had to act when I did. Surprisingly, Niko agreed.
“You had a busy morning, too, I hear,” Niko said.
“I did?” It took enormous willpower to recall twelve hours earlier.
“Brad said you went back to the construction site.”
“I didn’t. I went—wait. He knows? How?”
“He’s a warden. He can sense what happens in his region.”
I groaned and pinched the bridge of my nose. “There’s no such thing as enforcer jail, is there?”
“Another unauthorized adventure?” Niko guessed.
“Not exactly.”
“Brad told you to do
it?”
“Not exactly.”
Niko laughed. “You’re lucky you were successful. Brad didn’t know if he should tie you to your cubicle or commend you.”
“Really? He was pleased?”
“Was. Partially. I’ll let him know you did really well here. Maybe that will help.”
Neither of us expressed our doubts about the good that would do me. I had directly defied Mr. Pitt. Again. There was going to be more yelling.
I decided now was not the time to think about it. Instead, I savored the fleeting glow of Niko’s approval.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said.
“Just one? You do learn fast.”
“About Tim. The demon. Why was he so much more attractive now?” I stopped myself before confessing to having met Tim the day I was hired—and again on Friday—and not recognized him for what he was. For the first time, I had performed like a competent enforcer in front of Niko; I didn’t want to give him a fresh reason to think I was an idiot.
“You looked at him with normal sight tonight?” Niko asked.
I shook my head. “But the other women in the bar did. It was like no one else existed but the demon.”
“It’s part of a demon’s makeup: The more they can corrupt a region, the more power they gain. In this demon’s case, he used his power to make himself irresistible to women. I imagine that made it a lot easier for him to spread his corruption, too.”
I shuddered when I thought of how impossible it had been to think when I’d looked at Tim with normal vision at the hotel. Niko had a point. Whatever magic Tim had used to change his appearance, he’d used it well to exert his dominance over my region. It was comforting to know he was no longer a threat.
My hand tingled with the phantom feel of the jolt of the knife hitting the demon’s spine. I wiped my palm on my pants.
Joy arrived while I was around the side of the building with Bridget, holding her hair back while she emptied her stomach. I convinced Bridget to let Joy drive her Prius, and once we were in Joy’s company, Bridget was happy to do whatever the Illuminea wanted. Fortunately, it wasn’t much, but it did include slipping on a pair of pants Joy had brought with her. As per Niko’s instructions, I found myself at Mel’s diner for the second night in a row, this time with my best friend and Joy. I didn’t need Niko’s reminder to order a huge salad and vegetables. I ordered the same for Bridget, who protested she wouldn’t be able to eat anything right up until the moment the food arrived, then she ate with the appetite of a starved wildebeest. I didn’t comment, too busy stuffing food into my own mouth. Joy daintily sipped a lemonade and maintained an endless stream of meaningless comments that managed to soothe rather than be annoying.
A Fistful of Evil: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 1) Page 28