by SM Reine
But why? It felt like she was freaking out. Surely ball-busting, tough-as-nails Suzy Takeuchi wasn’t afraid of a few nightmares.
“Oh God,” she moaned. “Stop. Let me out!”
Yep, she was afraid of a few nightmares.
But I wasn’t.
Last time I’d run across such a demon, I’d just about gone crazy. Hadn’t taken long. Couple of minutes. And David Nicholas had been alone.
Why wasn’t I going crazy in a sea of them?
“If you can hear me, Cèsar, follow the sound of my voice,” Fritz said.
“I hear you,” I said.
I clawed my way toward him, climbing the netting on the Apache’s walls and dragging Suzy with me. She didn’t make it easy. She went from clutching at me in a “Help me Cèsar, you’re my only hope” kind of way to punching at my arms in the “I’m ninety-nine percent certain you’re an axe murderer” kind of way in five seconds flat.
Suzy had a lot of fight in her whopping five feet of delicate woman. And even when she was blind, her aim was fan-fucking-tastic. She was great at using those bony little knuckles of hers to pound the shit out of me. It hurt. It hurt bad.
“Fritz?” I called, slapping lamely at Suzy’s hands in an attempt to deflect some of those blows. I could have done a lot worse because I was more than twice her bodyweight, but I wouldn’t. I never hit women. Even ones hitting me.
Shadow swirled through the helicopter. I glimpsed undulating gray among the black—skeletal faces, screaming mouths, bleeding eyes. Only a glimpse.
Yup, those were nightmares. Yet I still wasn’t going crazy with fear.
Not that I was happy about being where I was, either. I was afraid all right. Felt like someone was playing my spine like a marimba. I couldn’t stop shivering.
But hallucinations?
Nope.
“I found the door,” Fritz said.
I swept a hand through the murky blackness, searching for him. He should have been near. No way to tell—nightmares were too good at distorting perception.
Someone shrieked. Must have been the pilot. Suzy was still thrashing and making those awful whimpering sounds, so I knew the shrieking wasn’t coming from her.
I locked my arm around her waist. “Cut it out,” I said, hauling her off her feet. Her feet pounded against my shin. “Fritz! Where’s the door?”
“Here.” Another hand touched me. Thankfully, this one was billionaire-shaped, and not trying to punch the crap out of me. All it took was a brush of his skin on mine, and cool calm suffused my frightened brain. It triggered the bond and all the dopamine that went along with it.
I’d found my kopis. Instinctively, as his aspis, being touched by him made me happier than hugging a teddy bear. It was a primal, kinda childish relief. No homo.
The pilot’s screaming had become a horrible strangled sound, like he was trying to make noise through blood bubbling up in his throat.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. I have him,” Fritz said. The only way that I could tell he was beside me was when his shoulder bumped mine. Every brush of our bodies against one another was a brand new fizz of calm on my nerves.
“Is he dead?”
“He thinks he is.”
“Why don’t we feel like that too?” David Nicholas had messed with my head big time. Made me see things I could never forget. I’d made sounds a lot like those that the pilot was choking on.
“It’s the bond,” Fritz said. “It’s stronger than incorporeal nightmares.”
I’d known that being bound meant we were semi-immune to assault from the likes of nightmares, but I hadn’t expected to be quite that immune. Like, sane and alive, carrying-my-mindlessly-babbling-friend-out-of-the-wreckage kind of immune.
Yet here we were.
I was gonna give Suzy so much shit about it later.
“I can guide us out of the helicopter by touch. Grab the back of my jacket and don’t let go,” Fritz said.
“I’ll never let go, Jack,” I said. Hey, I warned you my sense of humor gets stupid when I’m stressed.
Suzy started screaming kind of like the pilot, then she went silent and limp. Had to toss her over my shoulder in order to keep a grip on Fritz.
We trudged out of the helicopter. Felt like we had to walk a hundred miles to get out.
I could only tell when we reached the door because I dropped over the edge of the Apache. It was still black outside. Really black.
There was broken asphalt under my feet now. I could see Fritz’s sleeve crushed in my fingers. Suzy’s hip was smashed to my cheek and her boobs pressed to my back. Not the worst place to have her—if only she hadn’t been acting dead.
Getting a glimpse of Fritz’s face gave me all kinds of warm tingly type feelings. Again, as I said: it was a teddy bear thing. The way he was looking at me, I thought my tough martial arts master kopis felt the same when he looked at me.
So fucking precious. We’d have to do the Christmas card together that year, ugly sweaters and all, just to announce our beautiful union to our families.
“So this Mother of All Demons,” I said. “Does ‘all demons’ include nightmares?”
“How could you tell?” Fritz asked.
Something gave a click.
A flashlight turned on, and its column of light blazed through the wispy nightmares. They dispersed from its path with shrieks.
Fritz had found a Maglite inside the helicopter.
He handed a second to me. I had to let go of him in order to take it.
I shined the light around, swishing it like the world’s least fatal lightsaber. The nightmares scattered. “You wimpy little fucks. Suck my D battery.”
Fritz was sweeping his light over the street as well, but he was only trying to see, not pretending to be a Jedi. “Well, this isn’t where I’d hoped to land. We need to head northeast.”
We’d been to Reno before, so I would have been able to tell which way was north if everything had looked normal. But it didn’t. The asphalt was Oreo cookie crumble under the soles of my shoes, the buildings looked like they’d suffered through a Michael Bay movie, and everything more than a block away was obscured by demon-fog.
“How far northeast?” I asked.
“Fernley,” he said.
That was very northeast. As in, an entire day of walking northeast. And only when we knew where we were going.
Fuck, we’re so screwed.
I shined my flashlight skyward. Nightmares scattered to reveal the buildings of the mirrored city. It was weird as hell looking up and seeing a city hanging upside down over us. The buildings were flaking apart to snow ash and dried ichor on our heads. The streets up there, they weren’t pavement like the ones under our feet. They were crumbling black cobblestone.
When I looked up, it felt like I was gonna fall, even though my feet were firmly planted on the wreckage underneath me.
That wasn’t gonna happen. Probably. I wasn’t too confident that the mirror city might not fall on me, though. The Union had built scaffolding between the real Reno and the fake Reno, but it was obviously meant to be a way to access the buildings in the sky, not a way to suspend them in place.
“What’s keeping that up there?” I asked, dropping the flashlight’s beam to my feet in time to chase away a few more demons.
“A mixture of dimensional distortion and ancient ethereal magic,” Fritz said.
“Angels, huh?” The shadows swirled to conceal the city above again. I was glad for it. Sure, it meant that we had hundreds of demons in close proximity, but it also spared me the mind-fuck of having to contemplate what was hanging overhead.
“They built the pocket dimension in millennia past to serve as an outpost in their war against demons,” Fritz said.
“But the Treaty of Dis forbids ethereal inhabitation of Earth,” I said. Not that I was an expert on angels—just that I’d been doing a lot of reading ever since I’d been nearly murdered by an insane fallen angel in Helltown. Un
fortunately, “a lot of reading” on the subject of angels was still minimal. They weren’t exactly open to sharing information about themselves.
“The outpost predates those laws. Angels weren’t driven off of Earth until the Treaty of Dis was drafted in the days of King Teleklos.” At my frown, Fritz helpfully added, “He ruled Sparta.”
“Do I wanna know how there are modern casinos in a city built before Gerard Butler fought the Persians with his ragtag band of Chippendales?”
“No, you don’t,” Fritz said.
I should have been happy with that answer. But I wasn’t. “Tell me.”
“Everything angels built was from the bone of slaughtered ethereal creatures, which were immortal. Their bones never stopped living or growing. The outpost changed as the city below did.”
Okay, he’d been right. I hadn’t wanted to know that.
“Get ready to shoot,” Fritz said, shoving a handgun at me. I didn’t have a hand for it, between Suzy and the flashlight. And I wasn’t real keen on dropping either of them.
I took it in the hand that I had wrapped around Suzy’s shapely thighs, aiming it awkwardly toward the ground. If Suzy had been awake, she would have screamed my ear off about gun safety. “What? Why do I need a gun? Nightmares can’t hurt badass kopides and aspides like us, you bitches!” That last bit was shouted into the cloud of demons. I might have been getting a little confident. But hey, last time I’d gone toe-to-toe with nightmares, I’d lost my marbles. I had a right to feel awesome.
“They can’t hurt us, but those can.” Fritz shifted his grip on the pilot’s body to point up the shattered street.
Another wintry gale pushed the fog of nightmares aside.
The creatures crawling down the street were the same shade of inky black as the mirror city. They dripped with it. I couldn’t tell what the ichor was dripping from—arms or legs or tentacles or whatever—because whatever I was looking at was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I’d have been real happy to have never seen them at all.
There was a head or two on each body. Mouths opened and shut in the center of flat chests. Gorilla arms dragged melting legs behind them.
Each was about the size of the chopper we’d left behind, and three of them were coming around what used to be a casino down on the corner.
“Oh fuck,” I said. Fritz’s handgun felt like a freaking peashooter in my hand when I looked at those. “What are those?”
“Brutes,” he said.
“Well yeah, they're fucking massive. But what are they called?”
“Brutes,” he said again. “That's the name of the breed.” Whoever had named them weren't very creative. “Shoot for the eyes.”
“They have eyes?”
I couldn’t identify their weak spot among all the drippy blackness, but the so-called brutes definitely had ears. At the sound of my voice—which, yeah, might have been a little shrill—they turned to look at us.
And they started dragging their nasty, melted bodies in our direction.
Fuck. Fuckety fuck fuck.
Fritz was using his flashlight to hold the nightmares at bay, so I dropped mine. It vanished among the broken asphalt.
I lifted the gun to aim, but it was hard to tell if I was doing it right with Suzy draped on my shoulder. I’m not much for shooting. I’d been practicing, but not with a sexy OPA agent’s full unconscious weight dangling over my back. That scenario wasn’t in the training manual.
The brutes coming at us were slow, luckily. I had a lot of time to stand there and freak out.
But they were also huge. They blocked the whole street when they moved shoulder-to-shoulder. There was no way to get around them.
Eyes, eyes, where are the goddamn eyes? All I could see were gnashing mouths on the broad chests of the brutes.
“We gotta run,” I said.
“That’s not happening,” Fritz said. “Not for me.”
I’d almost forgotten that he had a prosthetic leg. The guy was so good at kicking ass that it slipped my mind, even though I’d been with him the day he’d had it amputated. Another lovely result of our fight against that fallen angel.
Guess Fritz’s enchanted prosthesis wasn’t enchanted to handle the weight of a pilot as well. Or else the crash had damaged it.
Either way, I wasn’t going anywhere without Fritz.
My eyes flicked from building to building, street to street.
Where could we climb out of the city? How could we escape without scaling anything a dude with a peg leg couldn’t manage?
The first of the brutes started dragging itself faster.
A lot faster.
Its chunky fingers punched holes into the rubble. Biceps flexed as it hauled its stubby legs behind it, slicking the ashen stone with ichor.
“Fuck!”
My gunshot drowned out the sound of my voice.
The bullet vanished into the mass of black slithering across the ground. Did I hit it? There was no way to know.
It sure didn’t slow the brute.
Fritz laughed at me. “God, you’re awful, Cèsar.”
“You’re the one who gave me the gun!”
My kopis dropped the pilot, who crumbled with all the fight of a potato sack. The nightmares swarmed him, swirling on his face, his hands. I kicked at them. “Hey! Get off, you little shits!”
“If you need something done right…” Fritz drew a second gun now that his arms were free. “Give me that back.”
I surrendered the handgun. “I thought you’d never ask.”
My kopis lifted both pistols, one in each hand. He stood with his weight on his good leg and shifted his shoulders. He put some of his weight on mine. The calm of being in contact with the guy I’d bonded to only applied to magical fear, not the real McCoy—it did nothing for the flop sweat panic I felt as the demon horde approached.
The brute was close enough that I could hear it breathing. Wheezing.
But Fritz didn’t fire.
“Any time would be great,” I said. “They’re slow, but not that slow.”
“Don’t move, Cèsar,” Fritz said.
He opened fire.
Tremors rippled through his arm to mine as he fired both guns, one after the other, like he was a fucking cowboy in the Wild West.
Bullets vanished into the masses of demons. One of them stumbled and fell. Fritz aimed at another of them. Was he humming under his breath? Something like “Eye of the Tiger”?
Unfortunately, he’d taken too many bullets to knock down the first of the brutes. He only popped two shots off at the second before his handguns clicked on empty.
“Damn,” Fritz said, still way too calm.
“Now we’ve got to run.” My mind buzzed with the logistics of it.
I’d managed to choke down a lot of strength poultices that morning before jumping into the chopper with Fritz. I could run with Suzy, and maybe one other person. But could I haul all three of my companions? Not a chance in Hell. I couldn’t ditch the pilot to bolt with Fritz and Suzy, either. Just wasn’t in my nature.
“Got more ammo?” I asked.
“At the helicopter,” Fritz said.
The helicopter we’d left behind while trying to escape.
Another brute appeared. There were three of them again, and they were rushing toward us.
“Ideas would be great,” I said.
Fritz put two fingers to his ear. It was only then that I realized he was wearing one of those Bluetooth earpieces. “Who needs ideas when we have backup?”
Explosions thundered over the street.
For a second, I thought something worse was coming than the brutes—something nasty and unimaginably deadly.
Then a couple of big black tanks came around the corner.
Yes, tanks. Like you might see in a war zone.
They discharged artillery at the brutes, and the mortar rounds didn’t vanish the way the bullets did. They didn’t have to aim for the eyes, either.
It didn’t take much to make
ichor splatter.
It also didn’t take much to rip apart the buildings around us.
One of those shells sledgehammered into the parking garage to my left, ripping through a couple of important supports. The third floor started collapsing.
I yanked Fritz behind the relative safety of a half-wall. My head split with the roar of cannon fire as I crouched over Suzy and the pilot, trying to keep them from getting hit with debris.
Unfortunately, in the midst of protecting the unconscious people, I failed to protect the conscious one.
Fritz dodged too slowly, being the clumsy gimp that he was. He took a piece of rock to the cranium. His face blanked and he fell on top of me.
“Oh, man,” I groaned, elbowing him in the gut. His unconscious weight flopped onto his side next to me. Pain radiated through the bond.
Just what I needed. Three bodies to carry.
But as soon as the volley of fire started, it was over.
“Thank God for the cavalry,” I groaned, peeling myself off of the people I’d been trying to protect.
I stood up. Looked over the wall.
One of the tanks popped open, and a man leaped out, yanking his helmet off to reveal messy brown hair and an eye patch.
“Oi! Over here!” he shouted.
It was Malcolm Gallagher, a Union commander, kopis—and today, my savior.
CHAPTER FOUR
STORY TIME.
COUPLE YEARS ago, I’d been to Reno for another investigation. It had involved a werewolf named Cain who was leading a cult called the Apple, and to be honest, the whole mess was so convoluted and miserable that it’s not worth talking about.
It had been a while and I still wasn’t sure we'd won the fight against Cain. Yes, he’d been arrested. The Apple had been defeated. But we’d left Reno under control of demons.
Obviously that hadn’t gone too well for Reno or anyone who lived there.
The only highlight of that last trip had been Malcolm Gallagher. He was a Union commander who now wore all the stripes that said he was commanding multiple units. He’d saved my ass a couple times. He’d also told me about aspides before I had any clue I’d have to become one myself.