Chapter Eighteen
The demon was almost human-looking from a distance - bipedal, with smooth, dishwater-grey skin. Even from our vantage point I could feel the savage twist in my guts, telling me to kill.
It took Oriel less than a second to unsheathe Tempest. ‘Get behind me,’ he ordered. I really, really didn’t need telling twice.
The demon was cheetah-fast and covered the ground between us in seconds. Oriel stood, sword held loosely at his side, watching its approach with dark eyes. Still sprinting, the demon lowered into a crouch and sprang forwards through the air like a tiger, arms outstretched, screeching in triumph.
With the grace of a dancer, Oriel whipped his sword up quicker than any human should be capable of. But his sword never made contact. For a second everything seemed to slow as a tingling beam of energy rushed through me and the demon froze. Just, froze.
Oriel staggered slightly with the momentum of his sword and did a double-take at the demon, suspended in mid-air in front of us, surrounded by a shimmering, translucent bubble. The demon was perfectly still.
‘Did...’ The words almost died in my throat. ‘Did I do that?’
‘I think you did,’ Oriel said slowly, not taking his eyes off the bubble.
‘Is it dead?’ I whispered.
Oriel turned to look at me. ‘Does it feel dead to you?’ I consulted the ache in my bones, still telling me to destroy the demon. I shook my head.
I joined him at the edge of the bubble. It seemed to ripple slightly in the sunlight. Wonderingly, I reached out to stroke it but Oriel grabbed my hand. ‘Best not. Bubbles have a tendency to burst when you poke them.’
I looked at it carefully. ‘How am I even doing this?’ I could feel the energy flowing through me, feeding the bubble, keeping the demon frozen.
‘You tell me; you’re the Psion,’ Oriel said, shaking his head, studying the bubble. ‘Check it out.’ He pointed carefully at the frozen demon’s large, oily eyes. ‘It’s nocturnal. It must have been starving to have come out in the daytime. Probably thought all its birthdays had come at once, two of the Blessed wandering through its patch like this.’ I looked at him quizzically. ‘Our souls are tastier than normal humans’,’ he explained with a smirk.
‘What are we going to do with it?’ I asked. The bubble was holding the demon. For now.
‘How about we start by killing it?’ He flashed me a grin. ‘Do you want to do the honours? Test out your new crossbow?’
‘Um, okay,’ I gulped. ‘How do I, um, do it?’ I asked, with more bravery than I actually felt.
Still facing the bubble, he leaned in to me, resting his hand lightly on my shoulder. ‘Working out how to kill a demon all depends on its physiology. Anything that has a head will die if you cut it off. Anything with eyes will keep its brain just behind them. If it doesn’t have a visible head, or eyes-’ yuck, ‘-then you can hack at it with a sword or an axe, try to buy a bit of time while you work out what bit of its body it’s trying to protect, where its vulnerability is. It will have one, somewhere. Or if you don’t have a sword, you blast it with fire, freeze it, explode it, do anything to stall until help arrives.’
‘How do you know all this?’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone in the Jeopardy knows this stuff. Civilians use it to defend themselves. The Blessed use it when we hunt. That’s the only difference. You get the hang of it.’
I snorted quietly to myself; I had no intention whatsoever of getting the hang of it. I turned away to unstrap my crossbow from my pack, and as my gaze shifted away from the bubble I felt something slip and then snap.
I heard the demon before I saw it. The scream that had been cut off mid-flow, returned and Oriel barely had time to swear before the beast was on us.
As I stood there, gaping with horror, Oriel leapt to meet it, hurling all his weight into the demon’s side and knocking it off kilter. He grabbed the demon round its shoulders and used the momentum to swing it round and onto the floor where he held it from behind, clamping its arms and legs still. ‘ROANNE!’
I snapped out of my panic and fumbled for the knife in my boot. ‘Get its eye! Its EYE!’ Oriel growled with effort as the demon thrashed in his arms.
I jumped to where Oriel and the demon struggled on the ground. This close, the stench of decay was overpowering. Every cell in my body screamed at me to rush in and kill, but I swallowed the urge down and moved closer, trying to get a clear shot where I wouldn’t accidentally stab Oriel in the arm. ‘Hold its head still!’
‘What WITH?’ Oriel shouted, desperately trying to keep the demon on the ground as it thrashed in his arms. ‘Just get on with it!’
Oriel was losing his grip, one more wrench and the demon would break free. I had to do this now. I plunged forwards, the long stiletto dagger in my hand and thrust it towards the demon’s face.
The sickeningly smooth resistance of the demon’s eye socket told me that the knife had hit its target. Reflexively I let go of the dagger and jumped away as the demon went slack in Oriel’s arms.
Oriel shoved the demon’s body away and lay on his back, panting. He squinted up at me and shielded his face with the back of his hand. ‘Nice move,’ he grinned, and jumped fluidly to his feet. ‘See? I told you you’d get the hang of it.’
I hadn’t realised how badly I was shaking until he pulled me against him into a hug. ‘Roanne, you did really well. Really well.’
Steadying myself against him - the intense joy at killing a demon did not mix well with the general queasiness of stabbing something through the eye - I put my hand on his shoulder, only to pull it away tacky and red with blood. ‘Oh god, you’re bleeding,’ I squealed.
He twisted round to see. ‘Oh no,’ he murmured, with the vaguely inconvenienced tone of someone who’d just been told he had lost a button on his shirt. ‘I think it caught me with its claw.’
He pulled his tunic to one side and twisted round to survey the damage. Squeamish coward that I was, I didn’t even dare to look. ‘Is it bad?’ I whispered, doing everything except holding my hands over my eyes.
‘Um, it’s not great. My shoulder’s kind of fucked. It’s bleeding quite a lot.’
‘Oh god,’ I whimpered. ‘Are you going to be okay?’
‘Yeah, yeah. It’ll be fine by the morning. I just need to sew it up.’ Again with the slightly-damaged-shirt metaphor. He pulled his tunic back over his shoulder, wincing, and ran his hand through his hair. ‘I need some fresh water, quite a bit. And until I’m patched up I’m not going to be able to use my sword arm, so we’re going to have to…’ He gazed into the middle distance for a moment before shaking his head to snap out of his daze. He jolted slightly, putting one foot out to steady himself. ‘Oh no,’ he said faintly.
‘What?’ I almost screeched. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I think…’ He closed his eyes slowly and opened them again with effort. ‘I think, possibly, the demon was poisonous.’
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked trying to make it sound like I wasn’t panicking. He was being so bloody calm.
‘There’s a place not far from here. It’s just an old gamekeeper’s hut, but it’s got a pump and it’s hidden well enough for us to hide out overnight. I’ll need to sluice this wound out and sew it up. We won’t be able to meet up with the others until the morning, I’m afraid.’
Oriel lurched again and I steadied him. He clung to my arm. ‘We should probably go quite quickly,’ he said.
The gamekeeper’s hut was a good mile away. I’d slung Oriel’s good arm round my shoulders to steady him, but I was still shaking from the chase and the kill and apart from stopping a couple of times to check his shoulder we walked through the fields in silence.
The fields turned into woodland and the sunshine dimmed. Rustling sounds coming from the undergrowth made me shiver uneasily.
After a while Oriel guided me off the main path to an animal track which opened out into a wide clearing where there stood a tiny stone cabin. It looked dark
and unused, but the short grass in the clearing suggested someone had been by recently.
Inside, the cabin was one large room with a stone sink in the corner and a large fireplace over the other side. It smelled of moss and damp.
There were still plenty of daylight hours left but I lit some oil lamps anyway and they seemed to take some of the chill from the air. A chest by the door contained blankets and rugs - joy - and I spread a few on the floor.
I steeled myself. ‘Alright, come over here to this lamp, would you? Let me take a look at that cut.’ Clenching my jaw to stop the chattering of my teeth, I beckoned Oriel over with a jerk of my hand.
He brought another lamp over, setting it on the table, and gingerly shrugged off his tunic. The blood had spread across the back of his shirt and he groaned faintly when he saw it.
Without touching him, I looked through the torn sides of his shirt. The demon’s claw had left a laceration as long as my hand stretching straight down the side of his shoulder blade. There was dried blood everywhere, and a greyish residue. Poison.
On the plus side, the sides of the wound were neat and the bleeding had stopped. It wasn’t great, but equally it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.
Oriel twisted round, almost spinning in a circle trying to see it properly. ‘Bugger. Pass my pack, would you? I need to wash this out and sew it up now or I’m going to have a massive scar,’ he said, fumbling open the buttons on his shirt with one hand.
Trying not to get too close, I looked at the gaping wound and shook my head. ‘You can’t sew it up; you won’t be able to reach it properly.’ Not to mention that his hands were starting to shake something rotten. His forehead was already looking clammy and even paler than usual, if that was possible. I took a deep breath. ‘I’ll do it for you.’
He looked at me for a second and blinked rapidly. ‘Alright. Thanks.’
He peeled his shirt off, gingerly unsticking it from where dried blood had plastered it to his shoulder while I sorted through my pack, hunting for the medi-kit Neve had given me, the one I’d chucked at the bottom of my stuff, certain I’d never need it. ‘Listen,’ Oriel called over his shoulder, ‘stitching up the wound is fine, but the real problem is going to be the poison. Just sluice as much out as you can. Anything that’s already in my bloodstream will just have to run its course. We’ll have to hope it’s not fatal.’
I found the medi-kit and turned around. Oriel was standing in front of me, looking slightly awkward, wearing only his trousers. My mouth, which was about to berate him for saying morbid things, just kind of hung there for a second.
I took in the sight before me, whilst at the same time trying not to look like a creepy pervert so my eyes ended up doing this weird flicker thing ricocheting towards Oriel and away again.
He was beautiful. I’d honestly not given much thought to the physique that might be lurking beneath his selection of Hot Topic t-shirts, other than to hope that carrying my inert form ten miles to Rivermead hadn’t damaged his back irreparably. His pale shoulders were dappled with freckles and tapered down to a narrow waist where his low-slung trousers hung from his hips. There were definite muscles there, but nothing bulgy and weird. Granted I had nothing to compare him to, not in real life anyway, but holy hell.
I made a tiny noise that sounded like hrrrmmm, before clearing my throat. ‘Um, no problem,’ I said blushing furiously, trying to assemble my features into an expression that said this was no problem, boys were always taking their clothes off in front of me. ‘Let me just, um...’ I started threading a needle with shaking, sweating hands, which is even more difficult than it sounds. ‘Okay, you’re going to need to lie on the floor,’ I said, surreptitiously wiping my palms on my breeches. ‘I’m not going to be able to do this if my arms are seizing up.’
As he turned away from me, his back came into view in the lamplight. It was covered in an intricate tattoo, a series of wide looping curlicues spreading across his shoulders and narrowing along his back before spreading out and disappearing underneath the waistband of his trousers.
I allowed myself precisely three seconds to admire the view and regain my composure. ‘Nice tattoo,’ I managed as he lowered himself on the floor with his good arm, keeping his bad arm crooked so as not to - ack, ack, ack! - pull at the sides of his wound.
‘Huh? Oh, yeah, um, thanks. It’s a Protectorate thing. The tattoos are recorded at our headquarters for identification, in case we’re killed while we’re out on a hunt and not, er, easily recognisable in any other way.’
‘Please be joking.’
‘Afraid not.’
I washed the wound out with water from the pump outside. The grey stuff sluiced away easily, but I washed it out again anyway. ‘In your medi-kit, there should be a small green bottle. Fish it out, you’ll need to pour some on the cut,’ Oriel said, his voice half muffled by the rug. His voice was starting to slur a little, like he was mildly drunk, or high.
I twirled the cut-glass bottle between my fingers. It looked like something Alice would have taken a sip from in Wonderland. It was neatly labelled, but the runes meant nothing to me. ‘Is it some kind of magic potion?’ I wondered.
He made a tsking noise. ‘Again, there’s no such thing as magic. It’s antiseptic lotion.’
I dribbled some of the clear liquid across the wound. ‘You have antiseptics here?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Yes. We have antiseptics. We also have painkillers, anaesthetics and antibiotics.’ He shifted his head and looked at me slyly. ‘We’re not complete savages.’
I ignored him, instead concentrating on the task at hand. It’s just like cutting up a steak, I chanted inside my head. Pulling the two sides of the wound together with one hand and trying very hard not to heave, I positioned the needle against the side of the wound and pushed it through.
To Oriel’s credit, he didn’t even flinch. I wondered how many times in the past he’d had to be sewn up.
‘So, not to doubt your mad survival skills,’ Oriel began, ‘but how do you know how to stitch up a wound?’
‘My dad taught me.’
I saw the back of his head flinch in surprise. ‘Your dad? I mean, inside I’m rejoicing that you didn’t just say “I saw it done on television once”, but your dad?’
I re-threaded the needle with shaky hands. ‘Yeah. Let’s just say I’ve developed a healthy scepticism for the phrase “Hey, I’ve found something really fun for us to do at the weekend!”’
‘So what other things has he taught you to do?’ he prompted.
I could tell he was keeping me chatting to take my mind off the job at hand, which was absolutely fine by me. ‘All sorts of things. Whatever popped into his head. It’s the joy of being home schooled: your parents are constantly fretting that you’re not getting a well-rounded education, so they teach you how to do all sorts of random crap to compensate. We’ve got a load of land out the back of our house and one weekend when I was about thirteen he taught me to drive. That was pretty cool. He even showed me how to hotwire the engine. Um, what else? Orienteering. Electronics. Karate. Dirt biking. Archery. Meditation. All sorts of things, really. I can say “I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle” in fourteen languages.’
I chatted on about everything and nothing. Eventually I looked down at a neat row of sutures and nodded, satisfied. Homeschool Freak for the win.
I flopped down by the fire on a rug as Oriel put his shirt back on with unsteady hands and started unlacing my boots. Bliss. The boots were comfortable, but miles and miles of walking had still rubbed red raw patches on my heels and toes.
Oriel sat back down on the rug next to mine. ‘Thank you,’ he whisper-slurred.
‘You’re welcome,’ I replied, surprised that he was still awake. ‘How did you even know this place was here?’ I asked, handing him a blanket. He pulled it up and arranged himself onto his good shoulder before flaking out on the floor. ‘It’s completely hidden from the track.’
He put his forearm over his e
yes, like the light was too bright. I dimmed the lamp nearest to us. ‘I know the area around here really well. I grew up here.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. I mean, not in this cabin, obviously. At Rivermead.’ He stopped and stared at the ceiling for a moment before shaking his head and continuing. ‘When the war was over and my father was crowned, we moved to the Citadel. He donated Rivermead to the Protectorate to use as a training house…’ His voice slowly petered off. I pushed the layers of blankets off my legs and reached over to feel his forehead. He was burning and clammy, his eyes shut and flickering.
I bit my lip, not really knowing what to do. My medi-kit yielded nothing of use, so I settled for mopping his face and neck with a damp cloth.
I leaned over to check his face again when suddenly his eyes opened wide. They were glassy and shot with red and he stared at me unseeingly. ‘Jesus! Are you okay?’
Despite all evidence to the contrary, he nodded. ‘Listen,’ he said in a croaky whisper. All signs of slurring had vanished. ‘The poison’s taking effect. If I die-’
‘Oriel, don’t say that-’ I said desperately.
He reached out and clamped his hand to my wrist. ‘Just listen. If I die here, take Tempest and go straight to the Citadel. Don’t try to find the others, just go to the Citadel and find…’ He frowned his eyes rolling back in his head. ‘Vincent. Find Vincent. Your trainer. That’s the most important thing now.’
‘Okay…’
‘Promise me, Ro.’ He swallowed painfully.
‘I promise. What can I do to help you?’
He closed his eyes and shook his head, sinking back onto the rug. ‘Nothing. Just…wait.’ Shakily I covered him over.
After a minute, he started speaking again. The drunken slur was back. ‘Ro-o-a-anne,’ he wavered, not opening his eyes. I eyed him and carried on mopping. ‘We were…rudely…interrupted earlier. By that naughty demon.’ The mopping stopped as I waited to hear what he would say. ‘I thought that’d get your attention,’ he mumbled with a half-smile.
He opened his eyes and reached out to take a lock of my hair that had escaped my bun. His eyes crossed slightly with effort as he tucked it behind my ear. ‘You truly are the girl of my dreams,’ he slurred.
I snorted. ‘You sound like you’re pissed.’
He laughed a papery laugh. ‘And you sound like you’re remembering.’ His eyes rolled back in his head and in less than a minute his breathing evened out into soft snores, leaving me sitting on a blanket clutching a damp cloth.
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