Danny stared, a big grin widening on his face as he scrambled from the chair. Turning down the page to save his place, he approached the desk, where the flickering candle light crafted oddly-shaped shadows on the features of the ugly little man who sat behind it.
"Squire! How long have you been sitting there?"
"Just arrived, kid," the hobgoblin replied, with an uncharacteristic sadness on his face that Danny noticed and then chose to ignore.
"Are you staying this time?"
Squire drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the grain of the wood a moment before lifting his eyes again.
"You've been a hero," the hobgoblin said. "You've proven that evil is a choice, that you can follow another path. But you've always been a reactor. Your mother pissed you off and you reacted. Eve wanted you to fight monsters and you reacted. But the time's come, Danny."
Danny reached up and scratched at the dry skin around the base of one of his horns.
"Time for what?"
Squire's yellow eyes gleamed in the shadows behind the desk. "Time to grow up, kid . . . Time to stop pretending that you're not your father's son."
Phoenix's World
Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, USA
Charlotte stared out through the shattered hospital windows and felt the embrace of despair. Legions of demons had already come into this world and now she and Octavian and a handful of Shadows were supposed to destroy them all? Since Cortez had made her a vampire, she had done nothing but fight and kill, and the constant conflict exhausted her. In crisis after crisis, she did nothing but fight to stay alive, but from the moment Gaea had banished her kind from Earth — her Earth — Charlotte wondered what, precisely, was the point of continuing the battle. Her ordinary life had come to an end when Cortez had turned her, and she had wished many times that he had finished the job.
Instead, he had resurrected her, tried to remake her in his own image. She had rejected that, chosen to follow the path Octavian had paved. But she had not expected to spend her every moment in combat, with the fate of worlds riding on their success or failure.
She stared out at the hospital parking lot and the town beyond. She didn't know the name of the place, but by morning there wouldn't be anything left of it. More fires were burning in the distance and plumes of smoke turned gray-blue against the night. Alarms sounded in the distance and she could hear screams. The demons chanted, most of them gathered as if waiting for some signal, though others moved into the trees on the far side of the lot or shambled or slithered down the drive that led away toward the town. Over the trees she saw a river, the lights on the far side giving it some sense of breadth, but dark things flew overhead, tendrils hanging beneath them, and she knew those on the opposite bank were not safe. No one would be safe in this world.
"You'll be all right," Octavian said, stepping up beside her.
She glanced at him, so handsome with his stubbled chin and lopsided grin and the salt and pepper in his hair. Much too old for her, of course, though that seemed to matter less now that she was immortal. More than anything, what was remarkable about looking at Peter Octavian was just how ordinary he seemed. Good-looking and fit and usually fairly intense, but otherwise just a man.
"Will it ever stop?" she asked. "The chaos and the evil, the damned fighting."
"When we win," Octavian replied. "Or when we lose."
Alex and Kazimir went past them, a carpet of broken glass crunching beneath their boots as they stepped out into the demon-infested night. Alex glanced back at Charlotte and Octavian in the moonlight, her lovely features gleaming.
"Chaos is an ocean," Alexandra Nueva said. "It ebbs and flows and sometimes it rises to destroy those who build their lives beside it. But if you're clever and determined, you just might find a way to hold back the tide."
Charlotte watched as she transformed, her human shape giving way to something much larger, a kind of winged harpy creature, ten feet tall and with fingers like hooked blades. Perhaps she had seen something like this in Hell, or it had existed in the strange history of the world of their birth.
"What is she?" Charlotte asked, as Alex flapped her leathery wings and shot skyward.
"Deadly," Kazimir said. He transformed as well, becoming a massive creature not quite man and not quite bear, perhaps some kind of ursine deity from the region of Kazimir's birth. He spoke again, his words a growl. "Use the gifts you have. You can be just as much a monster as any demon. And don't be afraid to use the sky. They might come at you from above, but you could do —"
Kazimir halted mid-sentence, staring past Charlotte and Octavian, back into the hospital lobby behind them. Charlotte began to turn to see what had caused the giant bear's eyes to widen, but Octavian shouted at her and then flung himself toward her. He wrapped his arms around her as he knocked her to the ground, both of them twisting upon impact, hurrying to rise.
A wave of putrid yellow light surged past them, boiling the air as it enveloped Kazimir. The bear-creature put back its head and shrieked. The stink of burning fur filled the air and Charlotte had a moment to think that Shadows could not really be burned, that it could be nothing truly damaging, and then Kazimir's flesh began to ripple and shift and stretch in all directions as if his body were taffy being pulled by a machine . . . and then he seemed to explode in slow motion, flesh becoming a spray of sparks that burst off in every direction, hardened and hit the ground, skittering amongst the broken glass and then exploding again, this time into sparks almost too small for the eye to see.
Octavian shouted Kazimir's name.
Charlotte spun toward the interior of the lobby, where Kuromaku stood with five red-horned, black-hooved demons flanking an olive-skinned man whose very ordinariness put the rest of the scene out of kilter. But the company he kept and the sickly yellow light that flowed and blurred around his hands and wept from his eyes meant she could not mistake Lazarus for anyone else.
"Kuromaku!" she shouted. When he glanced her way she saw the deep purple light gleaming in his eyes and she understood that he was in no danger from the demons; Lazarus had made him an unwilling ally.
The sorcerer turned toward Charlotte and Octavian, thrust out one hand and let loose another volley of magic. Octavian threw up a hand and a shield of sizzling emerald static instantly appeared, deflecting Lazarus's spell. Charlotte glanced over to where Kazimir had been, expecting him to reincorporate, but she saw no evidence of it.
"What did you do to him?" Octavian demanded, rising to his feet, extending that shield into a sphere that surrounded himself and Charlotte.
Lazarus smiled. "Oh, Peter, you have made me very happy tonight."
"That spell!" Octavian snapped. "What was that?"
"Think of it as negative polarity," Lazarus said with a wave of his hand. "The creatures can control their own molecular structure, just as we both used to be able to do. They can reorganize themselves however they want, into whatever they want, but . . . if those molecules are mutually repellent, they simply can't come together again. Into anything."
Lazarus glanced at Charlotte. "Surrender yourself, and I'll let this one live."
"You already killed the woman I loved!" Octavian raged. If he feared for Kuromaku, he did not let it show. "There'll be no surrender for either of us. And your portal is shut — there's nowhere to run!"
"Run?" Lazarus said, glancing at one of his black-hoofed demons as if they shared some joke. "Do you honestly think I'm going to run? I'll admit, the doorway being closed made me furious, but only because it meant a delay in hunting you down. Now you've saved me the trouble. Trust me, there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here with you."
Octavian glanced at Charlotte. She saw a manic light in his eyes, but with it there were lines she had never seen upon his face before. He carried the rage and thirst for vengeance that drove him, but also an air of fresh sorrow.
"What are you going to do?" she asked. "Kuromaku —"
"Go kill demons," he said quietly. "Go and live, and don't be
afraid."
Charlotte started to argue, and she saw in his eyes that he'd known she would. Octavian gestured toward her with his left hand and a bolt of silver light struck her chest, picked her up, and hurled her backward through the parking lot. She crashed into an old Audi, shattering the windows and caving in the driver's door, and then collapsed to the pavement.
Disoriented and angry, Charlotte rose just as a massive demon slid toward her on a serpent's tail. Its opalescent skin shimmered in the moonlight as it reached for her with thin, three-fingered hands and what she'd thought of as its head opened in a sticky vertical slit, its face like a Venus flytrap. Without thinking, she tore the broken door off of the Audi with a shriek of metal, turned, and beat the demon to death. She struck it again and again, until its stinking viscera puddled at her feet.
She dropped the door and backed away, glanced around and froze. A spindly bone-demon clambered over the top of a pickup truck parked nearby, intent upon her. A pair of winged skeletons, like the charred corpses of angels, began to circle above her. With a buckling of metal, a massive demon with twin rows of horns up its chest — and little devil faces between each set — landed on the hood of the Audi. She saw devils and several imps, and beyond them, towering so high in the sky that it would never even notice her, the squid-mantis-like Demon Lord that Lazarus had summoned into this world.
With Kazimir dead and Alex off somewhere, Charlotte found herself alone. She had done stupid things, done cruel things, but she had also done heroic things in an effort to atone. This, though . . . not long ago she had been just another nineteen year old girl trying to figure out what to do with her life. She couldn't handle this. Not alone. But the alternative frightened her even more.
Go and live, Octavian had said, with an air of finality that unnerved her.
"Fuck, yeah," Charlotte muttered under her breath.
The bone-demon died easy. She leaped at it, let it spear her through the chest with one of its spider legs, snapped off one of its other legs, and stabbed it in the head three times as it twitched and shat itself and bled out. Turning, she yanked the sharp limb from her chest and willed the wound to close, molecules reknitting themselves.
This, she thought, is what it's supposed to feel like. What we're supposed to be.
Terror had inspired an epiphany. A leather-skinned devil rushed between cars at her wielding a sword of flame, and so she turned to fire and let it pass through her, drifting past it and reforming behind it. With swiftness even Hell could not mimic, she shifted into the body of a gorilla, grabbed the demon's head and twisted it so hard that bones snapped and skin tore and dark green blood gouted from exposed arteries.
Charlotte caught the flaming sword as it fell, changing even as she reached for it, and in a blink she was herself again. The huge demon with the horns and faces like an infernal totem pole on its chest dropped down from the Audi's crushed hood and reached for her.
She transformed herself into mist, transforming the sword along with her own flesh and bone. As mist, she slid through its twenty nostrils and ten mouths, and took on flesh again, reforging herself into a gorilla. Her transformation tore the demon apart from the inside and she stood there, breathing deeply out of habit instead of necessity. The flying things still circled above her, but the devils and imps and putrid, reeking things that surrounded her now hesitated to approach.
Charlotte's fear abated. She felt alive.
Only the two sorcerers had the power to kill her, and they were still inside the hospital's atrium, trying to kill each other. There were hundreds of demons here, and more around the world, she was sure, but all she needed was time.
Provided Octavian could stop Lazarus.
A broken, eviscerated devil crashed to the pavement ten feet from where she stood. Manifesting the sword again, Charlotte spun to see two figures striding toward her in the moonlight, and she felt herself grin. The demons backed away even further, some of them actually retreating, wanting to be anywhere be here.
"Well, well," Allison Vigeant said, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear. "Look at you, with the flaming sword."
She gestured to the woman beside her, whose angled blond hair partially veiled the wide-eyed amazement of a newborn Shadow.
"Charlotte, meet Phoenix."
"You turned her?" Charlotte asked, staring at Allison.
"Just turned her. She insisted."
Charlotte nodded to Phoenix. "Good to meet you. You want us to buy you a few minutes to get your bearings?"
Phoenix's eyes narrowed and she turned to scan the demons, searching the crowd.
"The only thing I want is to kill these assholes. One in particular."
Charlotte glanced at Allison. "I like her."
Together, the three women turned to face the hordes of Hell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Phoenix's World
Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, USA
Octavian killed two of the black-hoofed demons guarding Lazarus with a muttered spell. The magic surged up from deep within him, cloaking him in a white-hot brilliance, and entropy seized them, racing their natural physical degradation forward at such speed that they withered into ancientness in seconds, collapsed and died and began to decay. Even demons did not live forever.
Lazarus began slowly to applaud. "Well done," he said. "Are you trying to show off, Peter? There must be hundreds of ways you could have dispatched them without expending so much —"
Kuromaku drew his katana and started toward Octavian, then faltered. He blinked like a drunk trying to regain his senses.
Octavian thrust out his right hand and an arc of golden light leaped from his fingers and hurled Kuromaku back through the atrium lobby, where he dropped amongst the wretched, mutilated corpses of the fallen portal.
He had turned his focus away from Lazarus for a moment, and now he realized his mistake. The magic inside of him, deep in his core, felt as if it were being drawn away like a wave receding after crashing upon the shore. Octavian spun just in time to throw up another shield. Lazarus shouted in fury as his leeching spell struck harmlessly against the shield.
No, Octavian thought. Not harmlessly. The spell drained at his magic, disrupted the shield he'd summoned. He knew the same spells, could return the favor, but even as he began to sketch his fingers in the air to cast the hex, the three remaining black-hoofed demons rushed at him.
Octavian held his left hand out, palm up, and muttered a spell in the arcane tongue of the earliest druids. Two of the demons turned and attacked each other with claw and fang, brutal and bloodthirsty and blinded by fury, but the spell had missed the third. As it rushed at him, Octavian felt himself slow. His heart beat once and then paused; even his breathing dragged, a single inhalation lingering on and on. His thoughts raced unhindered, but he could not even turn his head toward Lazarus to confirm what he knew — the sorcerer had cast a spell that caught him in time, slowed reality around him. The final black-hoofed demon raged toward him.
Lazarus had underestimated him. Some spells required him to sketch sigils in the air with his hands or to speak arcane incantations, to manipulate the magic already in the world around them. But Octavian had many enchantments and hexes ingrained so deeply within him that they were second nature. Instinct.
The demon careened at him, grabbed hold of his face, about to tear the flesh and muscle right off of the bone. Octavian began a long exhalation, but it required only the very first moment of that breath for the spell to work. The demon blew backward and upward, rising as if on a breeze before it began to flail. Weightless, it snarled and clawed the air but of course it could find no purchase.
The air around Octavian turned a deep purple and he felt pain in his bones as the flesh on his arm began to turn to stone, but he'd been able to collect himself, now. With a whisper, he released a burst of burnished copper light that freed him from his paralysis and blew out across the atrium, shaking the entire lobby. Lazarus staggered backward and Octavian stalked toward him.
<
br /> "You're bleeding," Octavian said.
Frowning, Lazarus wiped at his nose and stared at the blood on the back of his hand.
"You're turning to stone," the sorcerer said.
Octavian did not even glance at his arm. He could feel the skin warming as it changed back, his magic healing him.
"What happened to you?" Octavian asked.
Lazarus sneered, his hatred like a poison inside him. "You dare ask?"
"You knew the stakes when you entered Hell to find me," Octavian replied. "The portal was closing and you'd been impaled. You were being torn apart, burned by the same living crystal that had caged me. Without the proper spells from the Gospel of Shadows, we were sure that by the time we could figure out a way back to you . . . you'd be dead."
"You could have tried!"
"We intended to, Meaghan and I . . . planned to go back one day and make sure, when there wasn't a crisis to deal with."
"Always a crisis, while I burned in Hell?"
"And then Meaghan died. And I changed . . . went through the metamorphosis," Octavian said, drawing magic into his hands, copper light turning a bright gold. "Eventually, we forgot you. I forgot you."
Lazarus seethed, black light spilling from his eyes and sheathing his forearms and hands.
"You forgot? Do you expect that to mollify me?"
Octavian shook his head as the two mages began to move in a circle like wolves fighting for supremacy of the pack.
"You were the favored of God, Lazarus. You broke bread with His Son. He had brought you back from the dead once, and so we thought you must be under His protection. We didn't know we were your only hope."
"I burned!" Lazarus said, and unleashed a hex bolt that Octavian could not identify. That troubled him, not knowing what spell Lazarus had cast. It signified more skill than he'd shown thus far.
Once, Octavian would have felt guilt. But images of his love, Nikki Wydra, murdered in her hotel room were seared forever into his memory. Into his soul. Lazarus had ordered her murder, and thousands — perhaps tens of thousands, across many worlds — had died because of his madness and his thirst for vengeance.
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