by Chloe Garner
He could, when she let go, use her body as a puppet, using his half-second advantage and bent time to fight just as effectively as she did, freeing up her mind to focus on other things. She turned her attention now to the dark creature coming up out of the ground, getting a note of apology from Sam as she finally made sense of it.
And wished that Jason was there, fighting alongside her, rather than Jalice.
<><><>
Sam hadn’t registered her, when he’d seen her. She’d felt like a wisp of dark, something organic and integral to the structure of the cave system, not a demon. He’d missed the dogs, too, sleeping at her feet like stones or bodies.
He’d had to go back through what he’d seen, following her back to where she’d started, to find her and recognize her.
He didn’t know what it meant, but he wished he’d been able to warn Samantha.
“What in hell?” Rayray had said when the dogs had come leaping up out of the ground and attacked the two women. The dark woman left Rayray speechless.
Sam was too busy keeping Samantha free to address the dog headed at them, and he’d never mastered the art of speaking while he had time bent, so he only managed a loud grunt that stole Rayray’s attention back to the dog rushing down the hillside toward them. The other man started to empty the clip of his gun into the animal. Sam had time bent hard enough that he could have watched each bullet at leisure as they traveled from the gun to the dog’s body, but he didn’t have that much attention to spare. Having done what he could to protect himself, he returned his full attention to Samantha.
She gave him a gentle tug, offering to take over the fight again so he could manage his own threat, and he shook her off. The woman coming up out of the ground, one slow, sweeping stride after another, was going to need all of her attention.
He didn’t know why he knew it, really. He was realizing that he could identify demons by looking at them in vision, which was nice when he went to Nuri’s club. The humans and angels there weren’t fluffy and cuddly, but the demons were terrible to him when they thought Samantha wasn’t going to notice. They knew he was a psychic, that he was a constant target, and that he was under her protection, and there was something about their nature that made them need to push the envelope. They were never violent toward him, but he preferred the company of non-demons if he wanted to find his chair where he left it and his drink unpolluted.
Demons vibrated funny in his visions. Not in the way they looked or moved. It wasn’t something he could feel, not even a sense he could have put into words, like the idea of a color scent or a sound temperature. They just vibrated. And the more powerful they were, the more they vibrated.
Nuri was different. She was gray. The world certainly bent around her the way it did particularly powerful people, but it wasn’t the same as with dark demons.
And this woman was dark. And powerful. More powerful than any demon Sam had seen in vision since Cassie, and Cassie could have killed Samantha. There had never been a guarantee that Samantha would win, the way there often was with lesser demons. Sam sensed, saw, in this woman the same potential.
And something about the way she moved freaked him out. He was partially taking over Samantha’s fight so that he didn’t have to look directly at her, hoping that when he looked at her again, it would have passed.
For her part, Samantha was as bewildered by the demon woman as Sam had been. The dogs had confused her, too, though Sam didn’t know the specifics on why. Everything was wrong, here, and he worried, far away in the part of his mind that wasn’t actively involved in swordfighting a pack of dogs, that they’d stepped into a bigger trap than Jalice or Samantha had expected.
Four dogs.
A quick glance revealed that Jalice seemed to be mastering the one that she was fighting, and Rayray had pulled out a marked-up machete to meet the bullet-ridden one that was approaching the boat at somewhat reduced speed.
Samantha, though, was having a hard time connecting blade to flesh in a meaningful way.
It should have been easy. Fighting an animal with nothing between Lahn and bone but skin and muscle should have just been a question of where to hit them to give them the quickest, most merciful death possible. The animals, though, shied away, predicting where she would be and avoiding her, drawing her one way with an attack so that another could get close. He’d managed a few minor hits, but given the one with a dozen bullets in him was still going, Sam could hardly be surprised that they hadn’t backed off after a few cuts.
That was when he noticed that they vibrated, too. He’d been so overwhelmed by the woman that he’d failed to notice that the dogs were demons, too.
Well, that explained some things.
Generated a bunch more questions, certainly, but it explained some things.
Jalice fought back the dog, getting a good stab into its chest, and it yelped, dodging away. The woman knelt, putting out her hands, and the dog ran to her. She put her arms around it, and for a moment - Sam was trying hard not to watch too closely - the two of them seemed to be one creature, and then the dog sprang away, pursuing Jalice with renewed vigor.
Samantha could keep this up for a long time. Sam had seen her fight a demon for an entire night, only gaining an advantage when the sun came up the next day. Sam was less sure of Jalice or Rayray. If the woman could heal the dogs of injury indefinitely, though, it would hardly matter. Even Samantha couldn’t beat that.
She was working on something, but she was no more confident than he was.
Particularly when one of the dogs got in close enough to bite her off-arm.
He had been moving the arm away, using it for balance and a distraction to one of the dogs when another had come in faster than he’d been able to react to and gotten it.
She sent him a playful reprimand and he apologized, too busy to feel guilty.
Samantha jerked his attention toward the entryways to the underground maze, and pulled control of her body away from him. He let go tentatively, making sure she was ready before he left, going to do a quick search of the network of tunnels.
The humans were in bad shape, but they had been before that as well. The halls were littered with body parts that had formerly been part of costumes, but he didn’t find any demons until he got down to one of the larger spaces, right at water level.
They were cowering.
Cowering.
The same demons that had rushed at Samantha and Jalice with no hesitation at all.
He left, coming back into his own body for a break, and sending confusion to Samantha. She’d gotten a rough picture of what was underground by his position and his reactions, but they’d have a lot to talk about later.
If there was a later.
He hadn’t been afraid for her in a while. It would have been novel if it hadn’t been what it was.
The dog in the water was circling the front end of the boat, looking for an opportunity. Rayray held out the machete menacingly, keeping the long blade between himself and the injured dog.
“It’s a demon,” Sam said quietly.
“No kidding?” Rayray asked. “Any ideas?”
Sam frowned, then glanced at Samantha’s bag.
Actually.
He pulled the white oil out, a substance Samantha had once referred to as a phosphorescent light bomb, and splashed it over the edge of the boat.
The dog squealed, then roared a distinctively demonic noise, springing up out of the water and racing up the hill toward the woman demon.
Everyone on the hill stopped, turning to see what had happened, save Samantha, who decapitated one of the dogs in the window of opportunity.
“Go,” she yelled. Jalice responded immediately, running backwards down the hill and into the water. Samantha wasn’t far behind her.
The dogs stopped at the water.
“What was it?” Samantha asked. Sam held up the bottle, looking past her at the willowy demon. She put her arms up into the air, like tree branches, and a wind picked up.
“We need
to go,” he said.
“Agree,” Samantha answered. “I need time to prep for this.”
“Hate to run from a fight,” Jalice said, kneeling on one knee at the front of the boat.
“You aren’t the only one,” Samantha answered as Rayray started the engine and began backing them slowly away.
The dogs stood on the beach until they were out of sight.
<><><>
“Choke,” Kara murmured throatily, her lips brushing against Jason’s ear and making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
He pulled the trigger, watching the bolt fly true, and Kara sat up to check his shot, rolling onto her back with a laugh.
“All right, fine, I’ll do the mechanical bull tonight.”
Jason stood, helping Kara up.
“I’ve gotta get me one of those,” he said, handing back her crossbow.
Damn, it felt good to be doing real work again.
<><><>
They went back to Jalice’s house with Rayray, meeting several other demon hunters there. Samantha and Sam sat at a carved kitchen table while the demon hunters talked in the next room. Rayray came in to check on them once, then left again with a bemused, apologetic shrug.
“Are they really going to ostracize us all night?” Sam asked. Samantha looked up from her notes.
“Hmm?”
He laughed.
“Doesn’t bother you at all does it?”
“Just normal,” she told him. “They don’t want to hear what I have to say, anyway.”
“What’s that?” he asked. She pushed the page over in front of him, and he read over it quickly.
“You think it’s that bad?” he asked.
“We wondered, even back then, how anyone was keeping that many low-level demons organized in a single place. I should have asked why, even though it looked self-apparent at the time.”
“What about the dogs?” Sam asked.
“Demons,” she answered. “Just in a very stylized form.”
He nodded.
“So what does it mean?”
“I don’t know who she is, but I think I know what she wants. With some research, I might be able to find out more about her, but…” she shrugged. “It’s entirely possible I wouldn’t. With a body and powers like she has, she’s probably another mist demon, and it’s possible no one really knows about her. That’s how they work.”
Sam scratched his head, then put his chin down on closed fist on the table. He knew a little about demon hierarchy. It was hard not to pick up some of the details, just spending time around the demons in New York, but the classifications and what they meant hadn’t ever really been important. He knew there were four kinds of demons: power, blood, fire, and mist, and that most of the demons in New York were power demons, as were most of the rest of the demons he’d met in any kind of a human form.
He couldn’t explain what that meant, though.
He knew that mist demons kept to themselves; they’d met a werewolf at one point that Samantha had explained was just a mist demon trying to keep humans away.
He let Samantha feel the hole in what he understood, and he waited. It didn’t frustrated him, the not knowing. She was shaman and he had long come to understand that her preoccupation with knowing things was peculiar, well beyond his own native curiosity or capacity to remember. He liked to know things, but you didn’t throw down with Samantha in a demonic trivia battle - no one did.
“Can you tell me about her?” Samantha asked. Sam closed his eyes.
“What do you want to know?”
“What is she doing right now?” Samantha asked.
Sam wandered out, taking his time to find the island in the gathering dark. The water around it was so inky that it was like the island was floating on empty space.
He creased his brows.
“I don’t see any demons,” he said. “Not outside.”
“They might all still be hiding inside,” she said. He nodded and pressed forward.
And hit a wall.
Samantha pulled him back before the trap bit him hard, but he felt it, a dark psychic whoosh that nearly blacked him out. He blinked, finding himself unable to see, either with his psychic mind or his own eyes.
“Sam?” he asked.
“I’m here,” she said, forcing calm and light at him. “Are you okay?”
“Am I here?” he asked.
“You’re here,” she said evenly. “Relax. It’s in your head.”
He had to laugh.
“What’s that, exactly?”
“The idea that you aren’t,” she said. “Relax and be here.”
He closed his eyes, feeling the mechanical response of his body to his mind, then reached out with his other senses.
There was the feel of the table under his hands, the chair, his own clothes against his skin. His hair hanging, tucked behind his ears on both sides, the weight of it on his scalp. The smell of cooking days ago against the damp smell of air conditioned New Orleans. If he focused and was very still, he could feel his own heartbeat in the soles of his feet. Through the bond, he could feel Samantha there, sitting next to him, calm, listening, just waiting for him to get organized and come back. He nodded, opening his eyes again. It was still black.
“I’m blind,” he said.
“You aren’t,” she answered. “You’re just afraid you are. Focus.”
He closed his eyes again, listening, feeling, and then Samantha reached across the table and pushed the pewter cross he wore around his neck against the skin of his chest. Four points of metal, the temperature of his own body, long familiar. She’d cast magic on it to protect him from possession, using blood she’d drawn from her own arm. He’d worn it every day since then, with one regrettable exception.
It was startlingly calming and he opened his eyes, trusting that she knew what she was talking about.
The kitchen was there, just like it had been before.
“What happened?” he asked.
“She knows about psychics,” Samantha answered. “How does she know?”
He shook his head.
“Can we take a step back? What happened?”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s just another trap. There are endless iterations of them. If you’d slammed into it at full speed and hadn’t protected yourself, it probably would have killed you.”
He’d done it before, hitting a psychic booby trap that had injured his brain. Each time it happened, Samantha had managed to stitch him back together, but it felt like one of these times one of them was going to get him.
“Why couldn’t I see?” he asked.
She looked at him with an opening curiosity.
“It’s interesting,” she said. “You remember that time in Memphis? When I got taken?”
He did.
“There are rules. Stacks and stacks of rules about who demons can touch and who they can’t. And one of the ways they get around those is by making you believe they can touch you, and then making you believe that they have. I don’t know if I was paralyzed because I thought I was, or if he paralyzed me because I believed he could, which is a subtle but very important difference,” she said. Sam waited, and she nodded, watching his eyes. “It’s the same, here. I don’t know if you lost your vision because she got you or because you thought she did.”
“But how would she make me think I lost my vision?” Sam asked. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
She shrugged.
“Demons are really good at what they do. I’m not sure I can answer the how.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?” he asked her. She frowned.
“No, I guess it does. You probably shouldn’t go back, just yet. In case. Just working from memory, then. What was she doing when you first saw her?”
“I thought she was a part of the tunnel,” Sam said. “Same with the dogs. I didn’t even see them until they started moving.”
“What did you see?” Samantha asked.
“Just…” He looked f
or words. “Black rocks.”
“And the water,” Samantha said. “To have magic involved in the water.”
He waited. She looked at her notes, at the sketches there.
“Red eyes… water,” she said, picking up her pencil and tracing over the sketches again.
Jalice came into the room.
“We’ve contacted Bane and Argo,” she said. “We’re washing our hands of it. Whatever is going on, it’s something that you are responsible for, not us.”
It sounded like an accusation to Sam, but Samantha took it well.
“I don’t want you guys involved,” she answered. “I’ll do what needs to be done and I’ll send you notice when it’s over.”
Jalice seemed satisfied with this, as satisfied as she got. She nodded to Samantha, then crossed her arms. Samantha stood, gathering her notes and putting them into her backpack. Sam frowned.
“What, we’re just kicked out?”
“Demons aren’t welcome here,” Jalice said. Sam glowered, but didn’t rise to the bait this time.
“Until next time, Jalice,” Samantha said, picking up her backpack and heading out to the Mustang.
“Where are we staying tonight?” Sam asked.
“Could go stay with Peter,” Samantha said. “Or we can just get a hotel.”
“Hotel,” Sam said, thinking of the weirdness that had gone on the last time they’d stayed with Peter. Samantha had been unconscious the whole time, so there was hope that she would have kept it under better control, but he didn’t want to risk it. Samantha grinned at him.
“Someday, you’re going to have to tell me everything that happened, that time,” she said, starting the engine.
“Do you want me to call Jason?” Sam asked. He’d prefer to work with Bane over Argo, if they had to pick between the two of them, but he knew both he and Samantha would have preferred to have Jason here today.
“No, we’ll get by,” Samantha said.
“Are you sure?” Sam asked. Samantha glanced at him as she drove.
“You want him here and I want him here,” she said. “Is it that you know we’d be better off with him here, or is that you miss him?”
“Both,” Sam said. She nodded.
“Me, too.” She took a breath and sighed. “We have to learn to get along without him. He isn’t part of our normal, any more. We’ll call him when we really need him, but we need to learn the difference between being disappointed that he isn’t here and actually needing him.”