by Chloe Garner
Jalice was watching her.
The water boiled.
Samantha dropped it on the deck, grimacing.
“That’s not good,” she said.
“What was the oil?” Jalice asked. Samantha tossed it to her, letting the woman smell it and test it between her fingers with a nod. Say what you want about her manner, Jalice was among the best of the best at what she did.
“They’ve charged the water somehow,” Jalice said, standing.
“I think it’s more subtle than that,” Samantha answered, kneeling to look at the black stain the water had left on the aluminum deck. “I think the water is either absorbing magic, or they’re intentionally casting on it.”
“Why would they do that?” Rayray asked.
“Probably a lot easier to swim in,” Sam observed, his vision off at a distance again. “It’s hard to find the edge, because the rest of the water is so dark anyway, but…” He was spreading out farther, nodding to himself. “Yeah, I can see it. It’s mostly around the hill they’re nested in, but I think there’s a current.”
“There would be,” Rayray. “Slow or fast, all water heads out to sea, ‘round here. It’s cool that you can see it.”
“What does it mean?” Jalice asked. “We should avoid touching it until we know what it is.”
Samantha agreed silently, taking another sample of the water and going back to her bag.
“What have you got in there?” Jalice asked, coming to join her.
“All kinds of evil things,” Samantha answered. “Stuff for potions.”
Sam mentally scolded her for being difficult, and gave him a glum acknowledgment that he was right. It would be easier if she and Jalice could at least pretend to get along for a while, and she was going to have to play along at being nice if she wanted it to last.
“I tried to bring everything that might be useful without being ridiculous,” Samantha said, trying again, as she unloaded the rack of vials and started getting out the larger assorted bottles and bags, cuttings and shavings and powders that she’d carried for several years, before she’d met the twins and had a more consistent place to store them than the gigantic backpack.
“Is this flywing?” Jalice asked. “You can’t get that down here.”
“You should try the markets in New York,” Samantha said. “There are a couple of demons who are sourcing it from out west.”
Jalice nodded.
“I don’t like to go that far north for my material.”
“You can have it when I leave,” Samantha said. “I can get more, easy.”
“They give it to you as tribute?” Jalice asked. Samantha couldn’t tell if it was intended to be a joke or a jab, so she ignored it.
“It’s powerful, whatever it is,” Samantha said.
“It’s repulsive,” Sam said. Samantha flicked her eyebrows, noting that it did have a bit of a foul smell. “No,” Sam pressed. “It’s pushing us away. Can’t you feel it?”
She sat up, trying to quiet her mind enough to catch what Sam was telling her, and, yes, there it was.
“It’s dark,” Sam said, when she wondered why she hadn’t noticed it. “Pushes at me harder.”
“You feel the dark?” Jalice asked.
“All the time,” Sam said. “Like being underwater. You just feel it all the time.”
Samantha listened to it, for a moment, just being aware for the sake of being aware. It was far away, a part of Sam’s awareness that was only just barely on the edge of his human consciousness, and she knew it would be a lot more important to how he experienced the world, but she could take it on for a moment, as an act of sympathy.
“You should flee from it,” Jalice said. “Reject the darkness before it consumes you.”
“Said the one heading for a demon hill,” Samantha said. It was out of her mouth before she could stop it. Jalice narrowed her eyes at Samantha.
“Clearly he has an affinity for it, if he’s already taken it into himself, as you have. Some of us are more resistant than others.”
She’d had this fight. So many times. And yet, she couldn’t help the need to fight it again, to tell Jalice how wrong, how hypocritical she was.
Sam gave her a firm push to be strong, and she bit back the next thing that occurred to her, and the next.
“I need to find out what it is that the magic is pushing against,” she said. “It might help us.”
“What are the options?” Rayray asked. “I don’t feel nothing.”
“You have to focus,” Samantha said. “It’s subtle. It’s designed to deflect people who might accidentally end up at the island.”
“Why would they want to keep people away?” Sam asked. “They’re using them as costumes.”
“They’re what?” Samantha asked, nearly standing. She saw a similar instinct flash across Jalice’s face. Sam sighed.
“You heard me.”
“What parts?” Samantha asked. She internally cringed, apologizing that she was going to make him think about it, but she had to know.
“Arms, legs, hair,” Sam said, stiffening his resolve against the depravity. He reviewed what he’d seen, rather than looking again. “Intestines. Some organs I probably can’t put the right name on.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Jalice said. Samantha frowned, searching her mental database of weird stuff demons did, and shook her head.
“Me, neither.”
That made the boat go quiet.
It should.
Samantha shook her head. She’d spent years studying demons. In the couple of years between when she’d died and when she’d left Carter, she’d gained special skills at gathering information. She was a shaman, someone preoccupied with knowledge by nature, but after her death, she’d gained access to the paradise plane in the form of a small, lush valley that existed in her head. Paradoxical as it seemed, she could bring material into it with her when she crossed, and read at her leisure, taking notes that she could reference later. She’d spent decades there, going through the contents of numerous libraries around the country, and for a short period in Singapore. She knew more about demons than any human alive, save Carter, and it was possible she knew more than any human who had ever lived, again save Carter.
They did all kinds of strange things out of a sense of ritual, developed over millennia spent hellside, and sure, she wasn’t going to get a million years of history to fit in her head, no matter how long she studied, but…
They’d found a demon in Detroit a while back who had taken the tip of a woman’s tongue as a trophy. She’d known demons who collected toenails, hair, teeth, and skin from the right knee, among the more common collections: heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, stomach, brain, and so on. Some of them wore them as trophies, certainly, the way big game hunters would. But the way Sam had said it cast a different tone on it. As costumes. Like they were pretending to be human. His distaste seemed to indicate that it was a perverted idea of humanity, certainly, but…
She chewed her lip, tasting blood after a moment. Sam scolded her absently, both her lip-chewing and his scolding long accustomed for them both.
“We’re getting close,” Sam said.
“Do you want to stop here?” Rayray asked. Samantha shook her head.
“No, they’ll know we’re here, with the number of demons they’ve got running around out here. The faster we get there, the more advantage we keep, I think.”
Jalice nodded. Samantha knew the caped woman preferred action.
“And when we get there?” Rayray asked. Samantha looked up at him.
“How good are you?” she asked.
“Rayray’s solid backup with a gun or a blade,” Jalice said. Backup. Check. She could hear and react to that.
“You and Sam stay with the boat,” she said. “There’s a good chance, if they’ve got anyone up there with a functioning brain, that they try to cut us off.”
“Better to leave the boat open for us to get away,” Jalice said. “Otherwise we go down figh
ting.”
Samantha nodded. It was the next level of strategy, but she knew Jalice well enough to know that both of them would go down fighting before they’d abandon the hive. The other woman’s eyes danced. Jalice lived for killing demons. She was an extremist, even among the demon hunters, and she held her radical beliefs strongly enough that she wouldn’t hesitate to kill a human for being a ‘demon’, but Samantha herself had killed humans for extreme abuse of magic. She believed, deep down, that Jalice found it just as hard as Samantha did.
Since Samantha’s people were the ultimate authority among the magic-using community, the enforcers of all of the rules, if the demon hunters had gone too far, started killing innocent people or punishing human magic users for lesser crimes, Samantha would have heard about it and she likely would have been involved in the house-cleaning that would have happened.
But it hadn’t happened. The demon hunters reviled human magic users as demons, but they kept their hands off, unless that magic involved external violence. As nuisancesome as Jalice was, she was a solid ally, and she wouldn’t ever turn her back on a fight.
“They’re waiting for us,” Sam said. “It’s all gone quiet up there.”
There was a sickening feeling as he watched, seeing whatever it was they were doing, the things that they had abandoned.
Humans.
Samantha forced herself to hear it. They were walking away from torture victims to come and address the threat coming across the water in the boat.
“Do they know you, demon?” Jalice asked.
“No reason they would,” Samantha said. “The crush demons don’t have the ability to recognize human faces, typically. Unless they’ve got a psychic who knows me… no.”
“No psychic,” Sam said. He would know.
“Then they just know we’re coming,” Samantha said.
“Probably think we’re food,” Jalice said.
“With the warding on the island, though,” Samantha said. “I don’t know.”
Jalice drew a long, thin blade from behind her back, standing. There was nothing special about the origin of the blade. An artisan in New Orleans, a fellow demon hunter named Siobhan, had made it. It contained no magic outside of its natural constitution.
That said, it was a phenomenal work of demon-killing design, for something imagined and created by a human with a very normal, human lifespan. Angels and demons spent eons imagining ways to kill each other. Their swords were works of art well above the comprehension of any given human. Samantha knew this from her own blade, as well as the studies she’d made on Jason’s sword. Jalice’s blade, though, was remarkable for the insight it showed in the use of physical design and material to create something that would go through some of the more powerful demons Samantha had known.
It was a mix of gold, platinum, and titanium, sometimes in discrete patterns and sometimes as alloys, creating an almost oil-sheen of white, silver, and gold colors across its limited surface area. Samantha had admired it on more than one occasion, though Jalice clearly thought that this alone was damning to the blade, and she’d since learned to keep her opinions to herself.
Samantha drew Lahn, feeling the normal rush of energy and focus that came with drawing the short sword, and the two women went to stand at the ready at the front of the boat as Sam and Rayray dragged them the rest of the way through the thick swamp.
They rounded a wide-rooted tree and the island came into view, swarming with bog demons like ants riled into a defense. Samantha glanced at Jalice, who didn’t return the look.
“You want to keep each other’s backs or just plow through in parallel?” Samantha asked.
Jalice blinked, then drew her hood up.
“I’ll take you at my back so long as you kill the demons who would otherwise be there,” the woman said. Sam snorted, but otherwise kept his mouth shut. Samantha shook her head.
“All right, then.”
The boat nudged gently against the shelf of debris that constituted the edge of the island, and Samantha glanced down, wishing she was wearing some taller boots, then hopped down, her feet immediately beginning to sink into the silt. She raced Jalice for the drier dirt several yards ahead of them, charging the demons there, who began to scatter.
“You want them?” Samantha called.
“Bring them down on us,” Jalice said. Samantha nodded with a grin, calling down angeltongue curses that frenzied the near-mindless demons. After two or three feints, the swarm rushed them, a coherent mob of spindly arms and legs, cracked black teeth, and scorched flesh. Some of them flew, giving them the feel of a flock of birds, flapping and churning. Samantha and Jalice tore into them like tissue paper.
The risk of a horde of demons such as this one was losing your footing or not keeping a good enough partner behind you to keep them off your back. Even as foreign as Jalice and Samantha were to each other, personally, they clicked martially, and Samantha worked her way through the insensible demons like she would have picking fruit. It was a job.
The harder part would be ahead of them, when they encountered the demons who actually ran the place. They would be harder to manipulate, if Samantha could do it at all, and would have much more evolved tactics.
The demons receded suddenly, pulling away and back toward a network of holes in the ground, and Samantha called them forward again. They screamed and hissed, trying to charge back at herself at Jalice, but continuing to back as if dragged by chains.
Samantha looked at Jalice, and they gave chase.
There was screeching and complaining somewhere out of sight, and the ground underneath their feet was churned with claw marks. Samantha slowed, letting Jalice get a step or two ahead of her, trying to figure out what she was missing. She had time bent, but not hard, just out of habit, and now she slowed it further, seeing the ash covering her arms. The ground here was clean of ash. The demons were surrendering ground without any fight at all, and that wasn’t like them. Not with angels’ curses ringing in their ears. Not these demons.
She’d never seen anyone control splash demons like that. They were class three demons, creatures deprived of sufficient power to even retain significant memories. They operated on instinct, habit, fear, and reward, much like mongrel dogs. They responded in predictable ways, usually, so it made Samantha very nervous when they did anything unexpected, especially in light of the water.
Water full of black magic.
Underling demons who didn’t attack mindlessly when provoked.
A hive of them.
It took an act of will to keep this many class three demons together. In packs of six to perhaps twelve, they thrived, but any more than that and there started to be power struggles and simple, bored conflicts. They killed each other back down to optimal numbers. Samantha had seen it once before, with the low-level pit lords keeping the dregs in line and using them as raw labor. She’d never expected to see this many at once again.
She stopped.
“Jalice,” she said, shaking her head as the ground in front of them exploded.
She and Jalice sprang back, but too slow, both of them landing hard on their backs as a pair of hellhounds came rocketing out of the new gaping hole in the ground, bearing down on them with fast, intelligent fury.
Samantha was the first to get her feet back under her, but only by a fraction.
Hellhounds.
They weren’t real.
They weren’t real.
She’d heard the rumors. Of course she had. Everyone had, who knew who to listen to. Occasionally the rumors gave her good information, but like a demon’s library, you had to get very good at filtering the nonsense and the lies from the truths.
Hellhounds were a capitulation to popular, old traditions of how hell worked. Cerberus and all that. But there were no dogs in hell. Samantha didn’t know if animals had souls - she’d asked, but no one would tell her - but they didn’t have freewill, so they couldn’t have guilt. They wouldn’t belong in hell.
Too late, she put tog
ether the inevitability that mist demons would take on a popular form, adopting it as individuals and as cults, forming their identity around the idea of a hell hound instead of a fiend from the pits, the way the slime demons did it.
Teeth, claws, and sleek, nimble muscle came at her in a flash of red eyes and saliva, and she defended herself, only just keeping the animal at bay.
Jalice could bend time if she had to, but she didn’t like to. She wouldn’t have had the time to react that Samantha had, and Samantha hoped the other woman was bending time now. It was the only way human reactions had any hope of keeping up with the predatory ones of the hellhounds.
There was a gunshot, and Sam pulled her fractionally to the side to keep her away from the path of the bullet, and the dog yowled, turning toward the impromptu beach and sprinting for it. Samantha was going to chase after it, but another dog came up out of the hive, attacking her before she could go after the first.
They were powerful. She wouldn’t have predicted that.
Mist demons weren’t a part of mainline demon society. They were class ones, but the politics and the power flows weren’t to their taste, and most of them lived outside of hellcity in small groups. On the earth plane, they tended to live on their own or in very, very small numbers. It was hardly a recipe for amassing power, and she’d never met one with any power of significance.
These demons were, again, different. Sam hadn’t fired the shot, so she didn’t know the gun or the ammunition Rayray was using, but he wouldn’t be using simple lead bullets. If nothing else, they’d be marked and marinated to increase their power. If they had prepared correctly, they’d be steel.
They cut through squish demons like the creatures were made of ash, but a class one demon had more resilience against bullets. Samantha would have expected a wound and a slow ash.
Instead, they got an angry dog.
She saw a figure coming up out of the hole as another pair of dogs charged in, and for a moment Samantha was too distracted to manage to think about anything but keeping the three dogs off of her, then Sam stepped in.