Unable to purge the demon through the bond, she was left with an enchanted blade.
A moan-scream sounded, and I looked over to find Arnaud staggering from the bus. With Caroline’s energies spent, her enchantments had fallen from him. The vampire-demon thrust his bound hands toward Caroline and Angelus, while his jaundiced eyes implored me with the urgency of whatever he was trying to say.
Listen to his words.
I flicked an invocation off my sword, and Arnaud’s muzzle released and fell to the street. He was already shouting in a strained voice, but with the surrounding commotion, I couldn’t hear the message.
I labored to read the shape of his lips.
Not him! he was saying. The demon isn’t him!
I looked from Caroline to Angelus. Was Arnaud trying to spare Malphas’s demon, or was Caroline about to make the biggest mistake of her life? Off to my right, the fae were recovering from the cantrips. They leapt to their feet and began repelling the druids with bolts of fae light. The twins recovered their blades from the street, and the air whistled as they sliced at the retreating druids.
Aiming my sword, I shouted, “Vigore!”
The force invocation slammed into Caroline’s hand and knocked the dagger from her grip. As it went clattering away, I hoped I hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of my life. Pulling her hand to her chest, Caroline’s shocked face snapped toward me. Though I felt my mind tugging at the question, I refused to revisit it.
It’s not her.
But if the demon wasn’t Caroline or Angelus, who did that leave? I looked at Arnaud, but he was scanning the action from the steps of the bus. To be safe, I cast an invocation that bound him to the door.
The druids were holding their own against the weakened fae. But the stalemate wasn’t going to last, not with the fae’s magic returning. And the twins were no longer engaging the druids. They’d disappeared. As I searched for their pale-blue faces, I reflected on their likenesses to Angelus.
Half-siblings, I thought suddenly.
If their other halves were human, they would have been vulnerable to the demon that Malphas planted in Faerie—and I’d heard of a single demon possessing twins. A shadow demon. In the pixies’ song, Pip and Twerk referred to the one claimed as “they”—not gender neutral, but truly plural. The fae twins would have been capable of influencing Angelus through their common bloodline.
As I looked around anxiously for the twins, I imagined their early meetings with Angelus. Malphas’s goal would have been to undermine Angelus’s trust in Caroline, to convince him that she had been compromised. Everything the twins advised him to do would have been with the purported goal of restoring his wife. And Angelus would have responded out of his love and devotion to her, when, in fact, the goal was to prevent anyone from disturbing the 1776 St. Martin’s site.
The twins had been too late to stop Osgood from sending us the first time, so they took measures to ensure I couldn’t go back. They murdered Crusspatch in the Fae Wilds, but failed to find Caroline or Arnaud.
I threw myself flat an instant before a blade broke through my shield. I’d been around fae glamours enough now to have sensed the subtle distortion at my back. When the male twin materialized, he was grinning wickedly. I scooted back and leveled my sword at him, banishment light already bathing the length of my blade. But in a blur of his sickle, my sword went clanging from my grip.
I still had ahold of my iron amulet and shouted until power haloed the metal and then my body in a field of blue light. The twin drew back, his free arm across his face. He might have been a demon, but he was still packaged in a fae’s body.
“Turn that off,” he hissed.
“Yeah, or what?” I said, upping the power.
Behind me, Caroline cried out. I looked over to find a sheet of her hair wrapped in the female twin’s fist. The demon’s lips pinched upward as she raised her blade and said, “Or your friend loses her head.”
43
I looked around desperately. Angelus, who was still recovering from the attack through his heart vow, remained down, his skin a sickly shade of blue. The battle out in the street had turned against the druids, who were in retreat. Bree-yark had dropped his shotgun to drag Gorgantha to temporary safety behind a bus shelter—she was moving at least, but it didn’t look good for the allies. Not good at all.
My eyes cut to where I’d contained Arnaud, but he was no longer there. The manifestation I’d used to bind him to the door must have fallen when the twin sliced through my shield. The little bastard had fled.
But at that moment we had bigger problems.
“Turn it off,” the demon-fae backing away from me repeated.
His sister yanked Caroline’s hair, drawing a small cry from her. The demon’s blade was still raised, the edge glimmering with the same magic that had disintegrated the wereboar. A dusty cloud of his remains happened to blow past us at that moment.
“Yeah, yeah, all right,” I said.
I withdrew the power from my amulet as slowly as I thought I could get away with. I still had one last recourse—my magic’s wisdom. Focusing past the adrenaline-fueled pounding in my head, I listened.
My magic nodded.
That’s it? That’s all you have to say?
When my magic nodded some more, I lost it.
Well, what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?
The last of the blue halo glimmered back inside the amulet.
“Toss it aside,” the demon above me ordered.
I complied weakly, watching it roll and then rattle to a rest. At the first opening, I’ll reclaim it with an invocation. The demon-fae swept his blade toward the amulet like a golf pro teeing off, and an invisible force launched it into the sky. Or not, I thought as the amulet disappeared from view.
The wail of approaching sirens grew through the silence.
“Everson Croft,” the demon said in a taunting voice. “The wizard who doesn’t quit.”
Though his twin had relaxed her grip on Caroline’s hair, her blade remained poised above her neck like a guillotine.
“What do you want?” I growled.
The male demon signaled to the fae, and in the next moment, Jordan and the druids were bound up in enchantments. Bree-yark and Gorgantha too. Caroline, Angelus, and I remained unfettered, but Angelus was in critical shape, and the twins had Caroline and me under the threat of their sickles.
“We’re going to play a game,” my demon said, tossing his blade from hand to hand. “It’s called the Will of Croft. Your tenacity, while admirable, can’t go unpunished. The game is simple. You choose the order in which your comrades die, and their deaths will be swift. No tortures, no cruelties, no pain. The only catch is that those tortures they would have undergone will be conferred to you.”
“How original,” I said dryly.
There had to be a reason my magic was acting so damned nonchalant. I scanned the empty sidewalks down both sides of Broadway. Here and there, faces peered from windows, but they were no one I recognized.
“Pay attention!” the demon shouted.
He extended a hand toward a street-level drugstore. The plate glass window shattered as a man in a blue business suit came flying out. The demon-fae caught him around the neck and drove his blade into the man’s gut. With a severed cry, the man crumbled to powder. Even though we were in a time catch, I reacted, reaching an impotent arm toward the victim. The demon grinned as he wiped off his hand on his hip.
“A little demonstration of the kind of swiftness I’m talking about,” he said. “So go ahead, choose your first one.”
“Release her…” Angelus said.
He had struggled to his hands and knees and was pawing toward the female demon, fae energy warping the air around his outstretched fingers. The demon brought her blade down. Angelus’s severed hand fell to the street. Caroline cried out as her husband pulled his arm to his body and collapsed again.
“Choose,” the demon above me repeated impatiently.
&nb
sp; Past him, down Broadway, someone peered around the cornice of a building and quickly withdrew. It was me, Everson.
Is he the answer, somehow?
“You’re not paying attention!” the demon roared.
He thrust his arm back. Stonework crumbled from the cornice, and then my time catch counterpart was sailing through the air, coat flapping. Like the businessman moments before, Everson landed in the demon’s grip.
The demon paused, looking between us. “Well, isn’t this interesting.”
“No!” I cried.
He drew back his blade—and the whole block went bright white.
I crouched against the street, arms over my head, but the light vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. In the place of the demon was a smoking pile of sulfurous debris. A figure stood beside the remains, but it was no longer Everson. A glance back showed me that the female demon had been smoked too.
Freed, Caroline wrapped an arm around Angelus and spoke into his ear. The remaining fae were down as well, no longer a threat.
The figure approached me. “I believe this belongs to you, to you.”
I stood, accepted my sword, and embraced Malachi. “You son of a gun.”
“I told you I’d meet you.” He hugged me back in the awkward way of someone without much experience in human contact. “And look who I brought, I brought,” he said, turning and waving down the street.
A block away, Seay and the half-fae appeared. Everson was with them.
I shook my head, still dazed at our sudden reversal in fortune. “They glamoured you to look like me.”
“I felt that a holy blast would be more effective, more effective at close range,” he said. “We arrived at the castle after you’d left, but you—I mean, Everson—told us about the bus.” Spying on my future self sounded like something I would have done. “We took the most direct route until we reached the pileup, the pileup.”
“But how in the hell did you make it out of 1660?”
“There was a portal down in New Amsterdam, but from there it took a lot of detouring to arrive here.” He shook his head wearily. “A lot of detouring.”
I kissed his forehead and ruffled his hair. “Let me check on everyone.”
Freed from their confinement, the druids had begun helping the injured. Jordan and his wife looked to be all right. In fact, Delphine and another druid were assisting Gorgantha, while Bree-yark looked on in concern.
The five fae, dropped following Malachi’s holy blast, gained their feet. No longer under the influence of the demon twins, they made their way toward Caroline and Angelus. Upon arriving, they knelt around their prince, each placing a hand on his back. I was worried he had perished until Caroline spoke.
“He needs your strength,” she told Angelus’s loyalists.
Currents of energy flowed from their touch, encasing her husband in a corona of healing light.
“Is there anything the druids or I can do?” I asked.
Caroline’s eyes were puffy when she stood. “Anything done here can only sustain him. He needs elder fae magic and quickly. I’m so sorry, Everson, but we have to take him to Faerie. I’ll send Osgood back to help you.”
“Do you have a way of getting there?” I asked, still brooding on Arnaud’s disappearing act.
“The line they arrived by is still active. With our collective power, we’ll be able to traverse it, but it must be soon.”
Had we not been through so much together, I would have been deeply suspicious of what she was telling me. Now, I nodded without hesitation.
“I understand.”
She glanced past me. “The Upholders are reunited.”
“Thanks to you. With Malachi back, we can destroy the final demon and take down whatever Malphas has built at the St. Martin’s site. I’m thinking this was his last-ditch attempt to stop us before we got there.”
The fold between her brows deepened. “Where’s Arnaud?”
“He took off, but he’s still warded. He’ll be easy to track.”
Indeed, finding him was going to be a minor pain in the ass more than anything.
“Thank you for everything,” Caroline whispered, and pressed her lips firmly against my cheek.
I nodded and watched her kneel beside her husband and the other fae.
“I’ll send Osgood,” she repeated.
In an implosion of fae light, they disappeared.
44
“That wasn’t dramatic or anything,” a voice said at my shoulder.
Turning from the lingering point of light where the fae had just been, I found Seay and immediately pulled her into a hug. “You came.”
“The collapsing reality didn’t leave me much choice.” When we separated, she turned serious. “I took your potion.”
Crap, I’d all but forgotten about that. “And?” I asked carefully.
A shadow crossed her face as she cradled her belly. “He’s been quiet. Probably sleeping.”
I felt the brick in my stomach again, but before I could follow up, Gorgantha limped toward us. “Is that the prego?”
“Gigi!” Seay exclaimed, running over and throwing her arms around the mer.
Gorgantha was banged up from her encounter with the fae, but powerful druidic magic moved through her.
“They told me you were big, girl,” she said. “But dayam!”
Malachi looked as if he were trying to keep up with the rapid exchange that followed, but he was fidgeting with his Bible, anxious to get going, it seemed. I shared the sentiment. I was about to say something when Seay’s laughter cut out suddenly. I followed her pinched gaze to where Jordan was approaching.
He stopped several feet away, quarterstaff planted at his feet.
“Before you say anything about what happened in 1776,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
Seay stared at him another moment, then eased from her bowed stance and nodded. “In that case, get your stubborn ass over here.”
Jordan chuckled as he walked up and hugged her. “I am sorry.”
“It’s history,” she said. “Literally. It’s lovely to see you.”
“You too, and congratulations.”
The remaining druids and half-fae, who had all been encamped in 1776 Brooklyn together, took their cues from Jordan and Seay and began greeting one another. Hugs and a few kisses went around.
“Holy thunder,” Bree-yark said.
He was standing off to one side, staring between me and my time catch counterpart, who had stopped on the verge of the reunion. Everson looked as if he’d been debating whether to intrude or slip away.
“It’s all right,” I said, waving him over.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know the original plan was that I wouldn’t be involved beyond the park, but well…”
“Believe me, I understand. At least this way, I get a chance to thank you.” I gripped his hand and pulled him into a bro hug, clapping his back with my sword hand twice. “The disruption field worked to perfection.”
“Good,” he said.
Embracing ourselves seemed to make us both a little self-conscious, and we didn’t linger. When we moved apart, Everson’s eyes dipped to the street before looking up again. “Listen, I had some time to think while I was setting up the copper stations. And you can, you know, give it to me straight.” He squinted as if someone were about to throw a baseball past his head. “Is this a time catch?”
“You know about time catches?”
“I did some extra reading over the summer. In a tome on alternate planes, there’s a small section on them.”
Shit, that had been this summer. I looked at my younger self for a moment, considering how—and even if—I would have wanted to be told I wasn’t really me, but actually a spliced-off echo in space and time.
“Yes,” I said at last. “This is a time catch.”
He inhaled solemnly and nodded to himself. “I feel better hearing it from you.”
I’d figured he would. The fact a future version of me was still living s
uggested things were going to be all right, somehow.
“But I have to ask,” he said. “That woman who just disappeared…?”
“Caroline Reid,” I confirmed. “Your colleague. And it’s a long story.”
“No doubt,” he muttered.
“Are you going to be all right?”
The revelation about the time catch had turned his face a shade of bone and given him a thousand-yard stare, but he snuffed out a laugh. “Maybe this will get me to take more risks in my personal life,” he said.
With Vega, Tony, and a little girl on the way, not to mention all the people I could now call my friends, it was easy to forget how lonely I’d once been. But the man in front of me was testament to that solitary period.
I nodded. “That’s a good plan.”
“In the meantime, what else can I do to help?”
I was about to thank him for the offer and tell him he’d already helped enough, but I still had to move everyone out of there. I gestured toward the bus. “We’re going to need to get this big guy downtown.”
“Past the Wall?” When I nodded, he checked his trench coat pockets before looking up in sudden realization. “Do you happen to have any more of the stealth potion you cooked at my place?”
I pulled out a vial. “Last one.”
As he palmed it, he said, “All right, take Broadway south. By the time you get to the Wall, I’ll have that checkpoint open.”
I punched his shoulder. “Thanks, kid.”
He punched mine back. “Don’t mention it, old timer.”
I smiled sadly as he ran off to hail a cab.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” Bree-yark said, walking over, “but that might be the wildest thing I’ve ever seen.”
When I peered around, I noticed that just about everyone had been watching my reunion with myself as well. Meanwhile, the approaching sirens had stopped somewhere beyond the far side of the bus.
“Is everyone here?” I called.
When Jordan and Seay answered that all of theirs were accounted for, I waved them toward the bus. As they boarded, I filled them in on where Caroline had gone and that we could expect Osgood shortly.
Night Rune (Prof Croft Book 8) Page 32