by Nazri Noor
I frowned. “So you’re indentured to him?”
“Not exactly. As far as I know, all Belphegor wants from me is the equivalent of a few days of gardening, but only when I’m fully awake and at full power. It’s like a weirdly specific favor, but you know how it is. Demon princes, am I right? Look. I’m not lazy, man. I just – I’ve been asleep a long, long time, and being awake in a world that I don’t understand? That takes a lot of getting used to.”
I squinted at him. “Exactly how long have you been asleep, Rip van Winkle?”
He looked down at his hands, scratching at his chest before he started clumsily counting out on his fingers. After a few seconds, he looked up at me glumly and forced a little smile. “About a hundred years.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah. Imagine being asleep for a full quarter of your life.”
My eyes bulged out of my head. “You’re four hundred years old?”
“Thereabouts.”
“Hot damn. You dryads live a long-ass time.”
“Yeah,” he said, chuckling uncertainly. “Us dryads certainly do.”
“You’ve probably seen some shit.”
He chuckled again. “Let’s not get into that. But rest assured, it’s why I’m so confident about brewing the good stuff.” He thumped his chest with his fist, smiling brilliantly. “I’ve put in a lot of practice.”
“Lots of practice drinking the stuff too, I’d bet.”
“Hey,” he said, throwing his rucksack over his shoulder as we moved to our next gathering spot. “How are you going to gauge the quality of your product if you don’t partake?”
I nodded. “Fair point. Look at these flowers. Can you use those? Don’t some people make wine out of flowers?”
Florian approached a shrub with tiny purple blooms, nodding as he sifted through them. “I don’t think anyone’s ever made wine out of morning glory, but there’s always a market for this stuff with the fae. They love flowers, and this is going to be exotic and enticing for them. We’ll mark it up, make it rare and exclusive.”
I shook my head, pushing my hands into my hips. “Look at you being all entrepreneurial. My capitalist roommate.”
Florian beamed at me, as if the sound of the word ‘roommate’ was a significant upgrade from ‘man who sleeps on the couch.’ Which it was. There was a lot I didn’t know about the guy, and I appreciated getting a better understanding of who and what he was. This harebrained moonshine plan might just work after all.
Speaking of moonshine, though – I spotted something just in the distance, over at the opposite corner of the arboretum. A thin shaft of moonlight – just the one – had touched down on the grass, slowly expanding into a silvery pool, like the beam of a spotlight. I narrowed my eyes, puzzled by the sight, when a woman descended from the moonbeam, like an alien abduction, but in reverse. She stepped onto the grass lightly with two sandaled feet, her hair’s brown, lustrous curls reflecting the silver of the moon and the stars. I thought she looked familiar, even from that distance, but it wasn’t until I saw the bow and quiver of arrows strapped to her back that I truly recognized her.
“Well, hot damn,” I breathed, talking more to myself than anyone else. “Artemis? Is that you?”
13
That was definitely her. The waves of brown, curly hair, the sandals she liked to wear, whether or not she dressed in ancient Grecian garb or more modern outfits, but especially the bow and arrows twined around with fresh vines that never wilted. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, had returned to Valero.
“Dude,” I muttered. “Florian. Are you seeing this? It’s Artemis.”
He craned his neck over to where I was pointing, then looked at me questioningly. “Who?”
“Greek goddess of the moon? And the hunt? I thought you were a dryad, you’re supposed to know this shit.”
He nodded hurriedly, his eyes flitting from my face over to Artemis again. “Oh yeah, sure, I know her. Goddess lady, sure, sure. Why don’t you go over and say ‘Hi?’”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I should.”
We had a little bit of history, Artemis and I. Nothing negative, mind you. I’d interacted way more with her twin brother Apollo, but as far as entities and ancient gods went, those two were pretty okay in my book. The problem was whether she was going to tattle to any of my old friends about seeing me. They were safer with me away, sure – but having a friendly goddess in my court could be a good thing. It was worth the risk.
Florian shrugged. “Suit yourself. It sounds like you know her. If you’re friends, you should go over and say something.”
I almost laughed. It was strange to think of entities as friends. They were fickle, only ever working for their own interests and purposes. The last I’d known of Artemis, for example, she’d lost a huge chunk of her domicile, the dimensional safe space where a supernatural entity could live without risk of permanent death, and she was working on getting it back. See, in most cases, entities were vulnerable when found outside their homes. Oh, sure, they were still powerful as all hell, and good luck trying to kill one, much less give it a flesh wound. But there were things out in the cosmos that most definitely possessed enough eldritch might to destroy even the deities of ancient myth. I shuddered.
“You know what? Fine. No harm in this.” I pushed through the foliage, sticking my hands in my jacket pockets to stave off the cold as I made a beeline for Artemis. She hadn’t spotted either of us, busying herself in a little clearing among the vegetation, and seemed to be focused on something on the ground. As I approached, I realized that it was a little stone statue of a fox, no bigger than your average bottle of water. It was her tether, that much I remembered. It marked one of the many hidden entrances to her domicile.
I cleared my throat as I stopped just short of the clearing. Artemis jumped, then did a tight one-eighty. Her hands were a blur as they flew for her armaments. By the time she faced me, she already had an arrow nocked and pointed directly at my heart.
“Whoa,” I cried out, holding my hands up to show her I meant no harm. “Whoa there. Don’t shoot. It’s just me. Mason.”
Artemis’s eyes were wild at first, searching my face with a frantic, contained fury, but then they widened, and she loosened her string, dropping her bow arm. “What in the – is that really you, Mason? I heard you left town. Wasn’t expecting to see you, of all people.” She gestured around herself. “And here, of all places. You being a bad angel, kid? Breaking and entering’s pretty naughty, isn’t it?”
I chuckled. “It is how it is. I’ve got kind of a project going on. I’m just keeping my distance from the Boneyard for now – and the Lorica, honestly. Nobody needs to know I’m still around. It’s easier that way. You do understand, don’t you? You’ll keep my secret?”
“Only if you keep mine,” she said, placing a finger over her lips.
I looked around her, noting the assortment of leather satchels and cardboard boxes stacked by the statue of the fox. “Are you moving back in? Is that what’s happening here?”
She nodded, grinning. “You boys helped me recover just enough spiritual real estate. I was getting real tired of sleeping on Dionysus’s couch, and Apollo kept bringing his dates home back when I crashed at his domicile. What a nightmare.”
“Yeah,” I said. “My living situation isn’t all that great at the moment, either.”
She shook her head sympathetically. “Them’s the breaks.”
The sudden rustling from behind me put her on high alert again. Quick as lightning, Artemis nocked another arrow, this time pointing it at Florian’s heart.
“He’s a friend,” I shouted. “Sorry, sorry. I should have mentioned I wasn’t alone.”
Artemis glowered, her gaze sharp, deadly. She wasn’t the goddess of the hunt for nothing. Her eyes traveled very, very slowly down Florian’s body, then back up to his face. She frowned harder.
“Hi,” Florian said. “I’m Florian.” Which would have come off more polite if he wasn’t clut
ching his knees and breathing so heavily, his hair like a tangle of vines across his face. “Listen, no time to talk.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “We’ve got company.”
Artemis’s entire body swiveled with the terrifying mechanical precision of a machine gun turret. Her eyes went even darker, her voice hoarse. “Who is it? What do they want?”
I craned my neck to look for signs of the interlopers. My blood ran cold. “Oh. That sure as hell isn’t night security.”
There was a group of people headed directly for us, maybe seven of them at a quick count, unless they had more hiding out in the trees for an ambush. That was the sneaky kind of shit demons loved to pull. How did I know they were demons, you ask? Because that last woman from back at the alley – the one who’d pelted me with fireballs – was leading their charge, like the tip of a flaming arrowhead.
“Fuck,” I muttered. “No way we can outrun them. They’ve got us cornered. We’ll have to fight our way out.”
Florian cracked his knuckles, making a sound halfway between the popping of joints and the creaking of dried tree bark. “Bring it,” he growled.
Good thing we had a goddess on our side. I turned around to ask Artemis for her help, but all that remained was a puddle of moonlight. Artemis and all of her moving boxes were gone.
See what I mean? Goddamn entities.
14
It wasn’t even a question of how friendly or close you were to entities. Everyone I knew in the arcane underground had told me that the entities returned loyalty despite how flighty and fickle they could be. I’d seen what Artemis could do in a fight. She could have dropped these demon fools in seconds.
And yet, there we were, two against seven. Wait, nope, nine. There were two shorter ones mixed in with the group. Great. Just great.
“I don’t like these odds,” I murmured to Florian as I began to tap into the energies of the Vestments.
“We can take ’em,” he said, scratching the end of his nose, looking just a little too relaxed for my taste.
That was the good thing about having friends to count on, an actual support group. We had people to fill different roles. The nine demons slowly approached us in a semicircle. What we could have used was someone who could blast their asses back to hell with a few dozen fireballs. I could fight up close with the Vestments, and Florian was sturdy enough to punch several lights out, maybe even break some spines. We could handle the melee. We needed ranged specialists. Covering fire, essentially, but our artillery had already skipped off in a beam of goddamn moonlight.
Ugh. Entities. I held my hand out just as a golden sword materialized between my fingers. No maces this time, in spite of how much I enjoyed using them. There were too many enemies here to risk leaving anyone alive.
The first fireball came whistling towards us, aimed directly between me and Florian.
“Scatter,” he shouted, diving out of the way as the fireball exploded into a massive wave of flames. Clever. The fire-woman was trying to divide us. Sure enough, their pack split into two. Four of them, fire-woman included, chased after Florian. The other five closed in on me.
“Not fair,” I shouted, beating a hasty retreat.
I hit the outer wall of a hedge maze. Maybe that was a good thing. I had to fight with my back against something, to avoid being surrounded. Of course, that also meant a better chance of being cornered, then captured. I cursed under my breath, turning to face the five as I stopped short of the enormous hedge looming above us.
Where the hell was Raziel when you needed him? Wouldn’t he have special angel powers he could use to drive the demons off? And who was it that kept sending these assholes after us?
I flourished my sword at the demons. “How many more of your brimstone-smelling asses do I have to send back to hell?”
If one of them had taunted me back, I would have gotten pissed. But none of them answered, even as I grunted further threats, and that just drove me over the edge. Everyone has their limits, and not knowing who or what I was up against was making my blood boil. How many years did nephilim even live? How many more of these demons would I encounter in my lifetime? Under my breath, I cursed Artemis, and Beatrice Rex, and my father.
Two of the demons wielded weapons, if you could call them that, their baseball bats gleaming in the moonlight. The other three were unarmed, which always made me so much more cautious. That meant that they were potentially armed with spells. Someone who knows magic is a walking, loaded gun, after all. But the three demons brandished their hands, lifting them into the air, fingers pointed up. Their nails grew longer, and longer, until they had sprouted into slick, enormous claws.
Damn it. I knew I was right. If the thing that wants to kill you isn’t holding a weapon, it’s got something much worse in store. Always.
The five demons closed in on me, bats and bare hands tipped with kitchen knives at the ready. One demon got too close, swiping at my chest with long, sharp talons. I slashed in an outward crescent, severing the demon’s head from his body in a single blow. The armaments of the Vestments were lightweight, and beautiful, and elegant, but they could probably cut through anything. And I was fighting with the weight of my own anger driving each of my strikes. I was furious, the glyphs on my skin burning hot in response, my torso lighting up the gardens like a firefly. The other demons staggered away from me as the headless body of their former friend toppled onto the grass.
“Give me the name of your prince,” I roared.
Silence. Pure silence. My blood rushed to my temples. Around me, the trees and their leaves glowed gold from the light of my sigils. Something like blind rage overtook me, and I fell upon the demons, hacking, slashing, razing through them with my sword. One demon fell, then another, the stink of their disintegrating husks corrupting the perfect floral freshness of the arboretum.
Emboldened by my kills, I bulldozed forward, closing in on the last of the demons, lifting my sword overhead with both hands. But before I could bring the blade down, something red flashed before my eyes. I cried out as a white-hot pain ripped into my skin, followed by a quickly cooling wetness. One of the claws had caught me in the chest. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a gleam of horrible crimson drawn in an ugly gash across my torso, seeping into the dark of my torn jacket. My fingers tightened even harder around my sword. I was going to make this bastard pay.
But I didn’t reach him in time, with either a fist or my sword. The demon launched into the air, lifted by some bizarre force. I caught the shape of the thing looped around his leg, as long and as huge around as an elephant’s trunk, only green, the color of new saplings. Then another vine snaked out of the bushes, then another, until four tendrils had restrained each of the demon’s four limbs.
The vines pulled, all at the same time.
The man screamed. So did I. Frankly, I was shocked. I’d never see a man ripped into four pieces before, even if it was just a demon’s husk. I backed away as more vines reached for the last of the demons, snaking around his torso, then squeezing hard enough to snap his spine. I shouldn’t have looked. I should have covered my ears. I knew I was going to have nightmares.
I brandished my sword in front of me, wary, bordering on terrified by this new threat, until I found the source of the sentient vines. Florian walked towards me calmly, the grass around him wavering and bending as if dozens upon dozens of snakes were slithering through. His shoes were gone, his feet bare, his eyes glowing bright green. This was him. This was all him.
“Hot damn, Florian,” I said, lowering my sword.
“Yeah,” he croaked, looking at his empty hands, like he didn’t know what to make of himself. “I guess I did all that, then.”
I was right yet again. Never, ever underestimate the empty-handed.
15
I looked on with open awe as Florian reached out his hand to calm the vines, as they retreated back into the bushes, back into the earth, to sleep once more. Standing there in the moonlight, the touch of silver from the night sky made the curls of
his hair glow a strange, deep jade green. For possibly the first time, I saw him for what he really was: a powerful ally, and a threat to everything that opposed us.
“Thanks for saving my ass,” I said, dismissing my sword and clapping him on the shoulder. “That was amazing. Disgusting and maybe excessively violent, but so amazing.”
He clenched his fingers, then unclenched them, staring and still dazed. “It’s been a long time. I guess I don’t know my own strength anymore.” He looked up into my face, the bright green of his frenzy fading from his eyes as his magic waned. “And it’s easier – or maybe harder to control once it goes wild, because of all this nature around us.”
Florian gestured vaguely at the arboretum, just moments ago the site of an incredibly dangerous and incredibly short-lived fight. But with the demons and their husks gone, and with Florian’s pet vine monsters gone dormant, it was peaceful again, just a beautiful, sprawling botanical garden.
Except there was that weird crimson light heading towards us.
“Oh no,” I groaned. “Not this again.”
I was grateful for the fact that a lot of the entities – and a lot of mages, for that matter – tended to express their magic in singular, signature colors. It made it easier to find your allies on the battlefield, and conversely, to pick out your enemies. Of course, I never could tell whether the bearer of the crimson light was our ally or our enemy. You never can tell with demon princes, especially one as moody and morose as Belphegor.
The crimson light faded as he approached and joined us under the looming shadow of the hedge maze’s outer wall. I wanted to run in there, get lost, far away from Belphegor, from the demons, from the entities. From all of them. But I burned with a need to know as well. Why did he keep showing up? What did he want from me? And, most important of all, I wanted to know what he had to do with all these attacks.