by David Mack
A man with a banker’s fashion sense hurled lightning at him.
Cade raised his shield of AZAEL and deflected the forked bolts, only to see them ricochet toward Anja. She used her own shield to send the lightning caroming into the ceiling, where it cut a jagged wound that bled smoke.
She swatted Cade aside. “Down!”
Her left arm snapped forward, and a spectral whip blazing with green flames lashed at Hans, who parried it with a spirit sword that appeared in his left hand. The whip tangled around the blade. Anja jerked her arm but failed to disarm Hans or free her whip.
Cade hurled a fireball at Hans. It erupted against his shield, then vanished inside it. Hans threw a jet of arctic cold at Cade, who ducked low while trying to block the attack. The numbing bite of magickal frost stole the feeling from Cade’s arm.
Earsplitting cracks made Cade wince. Anja was firing the pistol at Hans. Her left hand steadied her right, and she aimed her shots with a marksman’s precision. Her first few shots—head, chest, gut—would have been killing blows if not for being deflected by Hans’s shield.
She changed her target and put a bullet through Hans’s left foot. The leather of his shoe ruptured, spewing blood and bone.
Hans staggered forward as fog choked the room.
Anja cried “Tempestas!” Wind blew from her outstretched palm. It tore framed photos from the walls, toppled small tables in the hallway, and blew open doors as it scattered Hans’s camouflage—but by then Hans had vanished.
Anja closed her fist, ending the gale. “Koshka!”
At the risk of angering Anja further, Cade shushed her. He invoked the sight of SATHARIEL and spotted Hans, cloaked in demonic invisibility, creeping down the stairs … and leaving bloody footprints. Cade conjured another fireball—
Anja cried, “Cade! Get down!”
Hans pivoted and struck with a tentacle just like the one that had killed Cade’s parents. A whiff of briny putrescence confirmed this appendage belonged to LEVIATHAN.
It swatted Cade against the wall, and nearly through it.
As Cade collapsed to the floor, Anja stepped between him and the demon. Her wand unleashed demonic arrows that sent the monster into retreat, along with Hans.
Dazed and aching, Cade was barely conscious as Anja pulled him upright. She held his sleeve until he stopped swaying like a willow in a storm. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah. Let’s get him.”
They moved toward the stairs. A cacophony from below stopped them before they took the first step down. It was the whistling of steel slicing through the air then cutting through flesh. Screams gave way to gurgling sounds, followed by a grisly patter of fluid and shredded meat that filled Cade with disgust. When he dared to look downstairs, he saw the walls of the lower floor festooned with viscera and wild sprays of blood.
Acid pushed up his throat, but he forced it down. It took all his focus not to be overcome by the carnage. When he looked at Anja, he was somewhat relieved to see that she, too, looked revolted by the abattoir at the bottom of the stairs.
Down below, Adair stepped into view, taking care not to tread in the deepest puddles of mangled sinew. “’Sall right. I finished him. You can come down.”
Cade trudged down the steps to join the master and met him with his head bowed. “Sorry. I froze.” He looked up the stairs and tried to ignore Anja’s accusatory look. “When that tentacle hit me, I thought I was finished.”
“We’re alive and this tosspot’s dead. You’ve nothing to be sorry for.” He spit on the shredded remains of Hans’s body. “One down, three hundred to go.”
Adair tossed a handful of fire up the stairs, turning the second floor into an inferno, and then he walked out the front door, into the storm.
Cade moved to follow him, only to be halted by Anja’s iron grip.
Her words dripped with contempt. “Learn to think before you act.” She pushed past him, out the door into the rain. “And before you get us all killed.”
11
MAY
The screaming stopped when gusts of fire blasted out the chateau’s windows, peppering the road outside with molten glass. The stately manor had become a crematorium. Niko stood in the midst of the inferno, as intangible as a dream, and watched it all burn.
It would have been a lie, he knew, to think there had been any art or style in his attack on the Thule coven. The truth was simple and ugly. His assault had been a brazen display of power. Twenty dabblers under the wing of a halfway proficient Nazi karcist might have posed a danger to him had he given them a chance to fight back. He hadn’t.
Now they were a mound of charred corpses piled in the house’s root cellar, thanks to Niko crushing the floor beneath their feet before dropping a burning ceiling on their heads.
He was thankful he hadn’t hesitated when the time came to shed blood, and grateful his yoked demons had proved stronger than the coven’s patron. There were a thousand ways the battle could have gone wrong, but for tonight, he had prevailed alone against many.
Cracks and groans announced the collapse of the roof. Sparks shot from the gutted house as its upper floor plunged into its basement.
The conflagration would draw the neighbors, and Vichy-loyal police from the nearby town of Limoges would soon investigate. Niko needed to be gone before they arrived.
Time to move on.
He willed his ghost form to drift out of the house. When he was a safe distance from the fire, he let his flesh return to its normal state, and then he walked south from the chateau, knowing his Maquis allies would be waiting for him down the road.
This might be a good time to check in on Stefan.
He pulled his enchanted mirror from inside his coat and clutched it in his right hand. “Fenestra, Stefan.” His reflection in the looking glass darkened to a shadow.
Stefan’s visage appeared. “Niko? You look unsettled.”
Angling himself and the mirror to show Stefan the burning chateau behind him, Niko replied, “I just killed a house full of dabblers.”
Stefan reacted with grim recognition. “Much as I did last night here in Warsaw.”
“Have you had any leads to the Kabbalists? Or the grimoire?”
“No. All I find, everywhere I go, is this.” Stefan shifted his own mirror to reveal the squalor behind him: a tiny space with no furniture, in which ten Jewish refugees lay piled on top of one another, huddled on the floor. Another turn of the mirror brought Stefan into view. “Every place I go is the same.”
“Stacked like cordwood. Mon Dieu.”
In recent weeks, each conversation with Stefan had brought news of some new atrocity the Nazis were inflicting on the Jewish people of Poland. First it was being rounded up into ghettos; then Stefan had shown Niko dozens of Jewish temples that had been vandalized, burned, or gutted to serve as stables or supply dumps for the Nazis. Inside the gravestone walls of the ghetto, the Jews’ furniture and valuables were stolen to be redistributed to Germans and Polish Christians. Then came the beatings in the streets, followed by the removals of anyone deemed unfit for manual labor or potentially subversive.
So grim were the latest reports that Niko began to think even his worst tale of misery could only offend Stefan, who dwelled amid horrors too numerous to count.
“I wish I could help. If there is anything I—”
“Cigarettes?”
Niko reached into his pants, pulled out a crumpled box of Gauloises, and passed them through the mirror. “Half a pack. It’s all I have right now.”
Stefan snatched the pack from his side of the mirror. “It’s enough.” He plucked a brown cigarette from the box and lit it. He savored a long draw, then blew smoke through the mirror to perfume the air around Niko with the aroma of Turkish and Syrian tobaccos. “Thank you, brother.” Another drag, and he seemed almost his old self again. “Your fight goes well? The Maquis make good allies?”
“Good enough. So far they’ve helped me find three Thule covens in Vichy France.” He smirked at t
he snap and pop of burning timbers he had left behind. “Eight or ten more, then I just need to cut off the head in Paris. How about you?”
“I cleared Prague and Poznan before Warsaw. Tomorrow I leave for Kraków.”
Niko saw headlights closing in. “My ride is almost here. Travel safe.”
“We will speak again soon. Velarium!” With the link between their mirrors severed, Niko tucked his inside his jacket as a Maquis-driven lorry pulled up alongside him. He opened the cab’s passenger door and climbed inside. “Nice night for a drive, eh, Etienne?”
Etienne Charbonneau, who had been a professional bureaucrat before becoming an amateur gunman and getaway driver, looked ready to shit himself as he laid eyes on the burning chateau. “My God! What’ve you done, Niko?”
“I sent the enemy a message. And I plan to send many more.” He took out a map that had been marked by his informants and pointed to their next destination. “Head south. There are Nazi spies in Toulouse I need to kill.”
12
JUNE
Everything depended upon timing, Adair had said, and Anja had taken the master’s warning to heart. Wearing the form of a rock dove, she circled above the center of the Belgian city of Ghent, her eyes trained upon an ivy-clad house along the River Leie.
Below her, Cade sprinted across the narrow river using his newest demonic talent. Despite using magickally enhanced sight, she was unable to spot Adair, but she knew he was preparing to assault the manor’s front entrance as a diversion.
The witching hour, three o’clock in the morning, drew near. When it arrived, the Thule Society’s Coven of Ghent would summon a great minister of the Descending Hierarchy to work a charm that would entrench them in the city’s body politic, like ticks burrowing into flesh.
That was an outcome Adair, Anja, and Cade would not permit.
At the river’s edge, Cade reached the house. His body became a wisp of smoke that slipped inside the building through gaps around its storm-beaten windows. That was Anja’s signal to begin. She plummeted toward the house’s roof. Just before reaching it she leveled out and fluttered her wings, alighting behind the guard.
The young man turned, noted what must have looked to him like a common pigeon, then resumed his lonely vigil, staring out across a sea of rooftops.
In silence, Anja shed her avian form.
The sentry was faced away from her. She had a choice of means for disposing of him. Her savage impulses wanted to drive a knife into his back, to feel the resistance of bone and sinew as she twisted the blade to grind his lung into pulp—but Adair’s teachings compelled her to dispatch him with speed and as little commotion as possible.
She conjured a bone javelin and hurled it at the guard, piercing his spine and heart. The weapon vanished as soon as the dead man collapsed onto the rooftop.
Anja stepped over his body and approached the door to the house’s main stairwell. A glimpse through the eyes of VOS SATRIA confirmed there were no charms of protection on the portal, no magickal guardians set to warn of intruders. Confident the path was clear, she opened the door, slipped inside, and hurried downstairs, eager not to miss the battle to come.
Unlike the house she and Cade had invaded in Amsterdam, this one seemed modest. There were no decorations, no carpeting, no accent furnishings. Just blank surfaces and narrow, empty hallways lined with closed doors.
Every step she took toward the house’s basement heightened her dread. As much as she had tried to forgive Cade’s clumsy mistakes in Amsterdam, she feared that he would put her or the master in danger again, not out of malice but out of incompetence. That was something she couldn’t allow—not with so much at stake.
Shy of the first floor, she stopped. She heard the breathing of a Thule sentry standing beside the bottom of the stairs. Before she could devise a plan of attack, she heard a rising wind outside the house; then the front door slammed inward, pushed by a hurricane-force gale. The sentry drew a wand in one hand and a pistol in the other as he pivoted to face the open door.
Anja sprang from the stairs, locked one arm around the dabbler’s throat, and thrust her athamé into his spine. It gave her satisfaction to feel his vertebrae snap under her blade.
Adair strode through the open front doorway as Anja broke the Thule guard’s neck with a twist. She dropped his body. It sagged to the floor and landed with a slap. The master paid the corpse no mind as he walked past it and led Anja through the house’s ground floor. “It’s almost time. Let’s get downstairs.”
She followed him down the hall and through the kitchen, to the basement door. As he opened it, she asked, “What about Cade?”
“If he did as I said, he’s already there.”
He opened the door.
Howls and rumblings emanated from the darkness below. A musky fragrance of sandalwood saturated the basement; it was almost strong enough to mask the odors of mold and mildew lurking beneath it. Adair whispered over his shoulder to Anja, “They’re trying to raise BELIAL.” He closed his eyes, then vanished from sight. His disembodied voice added in a cautious hush, “Tread with care, lass.”
Muffling her steps with the tufted paws of PSYTHRIOS, Anja descended the steps with slow caution, just to make sure she didn’t collide with her now-invisible master.
Halfway to the basement, the steps reached a platform that led to a switchback. Pausing there, Anja saw the experiment taking shape mere yards away. A Thule coven master stood at the operator’s position inside a grand circle of protection, backed by a pair of tanists. Outside the grand circle were six more dabbler adepts, each secure inside his or her own pentagram.
Unable to turn without upsetting the sword balanced across the tops of his white shoes, the coven master spoke over his shoulder to his adepts. “It is vital that none of you talk during the ceremony. Even the smallest sound will risk breaking my control over the demon. And I am sure I don’t need to remind you what will happen if you leave your circles, so don’t move.” He raised his wand in one hand and opened his grimoire with the other.
That was the cue to attack. Cade was nowhere in sight, but Anja didn’t dare wait: once the dabblers raised a demon, anyone outside the circles was as good as dead.
She struck the two adepts on the left. She broke the man’s neck with the fist of BAEL and throttled the woman with the whip of VALEFOR.
Adair, still invisible, slew the pair in the middle with simultaneous stabs between their shoulder blades. Both men twitched and gurgled up blood while impaled on his knives of the Art.
Cade appeared from a patch of shadow behind the men on the right. With a twist of his open left hand he magickally spun one man’s head to face backward with a crunch of splintered bones. The other man he skewered on a ghostly spear. It took the shocked dabbler a few seconds to die and go limp on the weapon’s barbed shaft.
All six dead adepts dropped to the ground at once.
Inside the grand circle, the coven master and his two tanists spun about. The master was older, balding with pinched features and beady eyes. His tanists looked to be in their forties; the man sported blond hair, a pencil-thin mustache, and wire-rimmed glasses, while the woman had a long nose and a squarish chin, giving her an equine quality.
The coven master seethed at the sight of his dead adepts. “So brave against the defenseless.” Forked lightning leaped from his hand, with one tongue each directed at Anja, Cade, and Adair. All three invoked magickal shields as they spread out to flank the dabblers.
The two tanists moved apart. The man lobbed fire at Anja as the woman sprayed icy needles at Cade, leaving their master to train his lightning upon Adair, whose charm of invisibility faltered, leaving him visible.
Anja used her shield to absorb the male adept’s assault, and she fed it into a focused blow from the hand of BAEL. She hoped it would shatter the man’s leg, but the attack was blocked by another demon’s protection.
On the other side of the room, Cade reflected the female tanist’s needle attack. She, too, deflected i
t with a demonic shield—only to find her feet entangled by writhing serpents.
The male tanist filled his right hand with electricity and cocked his arm to throw it. Anja occupied his shield with LERAIKAH’s envenomed arrows—and in the same thought racked him with the agonies of XENOCH. His screams were drowned out by the premature detonation of his lightning strike. The blast threw him against the wall. His blazing corpse dropped to the floor.
The coven master and Adair traded furious barrages of electricity and ghostly missiles, with neither gaining a clear advantage. Then, as the female tanist collapsed, overwhelmed by a riot of serpentine, Cade hurled a sphere of light at the coven master. It exploded against the man’s shield in a blinding pulse. Aided by that distraction, Adair disintegrated the concrete beneath his opponent’s feet. The coven master plunged through the hole and splashed into waist-deep water—which came alive in a vortex, spinning him like a leaf in a gale until Adair ended the man’s abuse by bifurcating him at the waist with one cut of a spectral scythe.
Everything went quiet.
Anja watched Adair survey her handiwork and Cade’s. “Not bad. You hit your marks and you stayed out of each other’s way. It’s a good start.” He clapped his hand on Cade’s shoulder. “Distracting him with a light charm: brilliant! And the waterspout was a fine touch.” He gestured at Cade and Anja. “As soon as you two learn to match your attacks, we’ll be ready to take down the coven in Calais. But for tonight—” He gathered the gunk from his throat and spit on the dead coven master. “We’ve earned our wine.”
The master returned to the stairs and left the basement. Cade looked around the room, then at Anja. “I liked watching you work tonight.” A wan smile. “It was … educational.” He followed Adair upstairs, leaving Anja alone amid the carnage they had wrought.
Conflicting emotions left her rooted in place. She envied the raw power Cade had learned to wield in so short a time—far more than she’d ever been able to harness at once—and she resented him for it, though not as much as she had a few months earlier. In weeks past, she would have used his meek compliment as an excuse to insult him. But tonight, when the naïve young American had smiled at her, she had almost smiled back.