I ducked under a wild swing by the first goon, only to find my jaw directly in the path of the second asshole’s bat. I spun to one side, lashing out with my magical blade. I heard a scream as the first demonspawn vanished in a flash of light, then got stood up by a kick to the shoulder from the first goon.
I heard the flat crack-crack of a semiautomatic pistol and knew that Rebecca had joined the fight. A splash of blood across my face was the only warning I got when she shot a giant thug about to crush my head with a pool cue, but as soon as he dropped, another one took his place. I winnowed the cadre of asshole demon helpers down to a pair of the smartest ones before they managed to crack a bat down on my right wrist and disarm me. I knelt on the ground in front of the Cambion and closed my eyes against the home run I knew he was about to swing at my temple, but the blow never landed.
Instead there was a screech of brakes, then a crash of crumpling metal as a black Hummer pulled up beside Flynn and a giant black Adonis kicked the driver’s side door out. The door flew almost ten feet, and a figure stepped out of the truck with a football in his hands. He hurled the football at the head of the goon nearest me, and the half-demon went down, knocked completely unconscious. In all my days, I never, ever expected to be rescued by a hitchhiker demon riding the body of a franchise quarterback. But that’s exactly what happened. He reached back into the truck and hauled out football after football, flinging each one at a Cambion and either knocking it out or killing it outright.
“WHERE IS SHE, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Mort yelled, and I worried for the QB’s ability to call signals in the next game.
Orobas turned to Mort and smiled. “Mortivoid, my dear boy, whoever do you mean?”
Mort in the football player’s body covered the distance to Orobas in about five seconds, and he leveled the demon with an uppercut that would have killed a human. As it was, Orobas flew back several feet and crashed into the steps of Luke’s porch.
“Where is she, you fire-sucking son of a spite demon!” Mort stalked over to where Orobas lay on the steps and stood over him, fists clenching and unclenching with every furious breath.
“She’s inside, Mortivoid. What’s left of her, that is,” Orobas said, looking up at Mort with a smile. “I mentioned that you would regret siding with this piece of human excrement, didn’t I? It took me almost seven years to find the relationship, but once I began to suspect, it was obvious.”
“Get her out here. Now.”
“Of course. Anything for such an old friend.” Orobas stood, and Mort took a step back.
Glory stepped forward, her sword raised, but Mort raised a hand. “Not now, Glory. Not until he gives me my…until he gives me Christy.”
“Motherfucker,” I whispered. I looked at Mort. “She’s your daughter. Oh, fuck. That means…”
“Yes, Quincy, it means she is a Cambion, and one of the final components for the spell,” Orobas said with a smile. He waved his hands, and Christy appeared, standing in front of Mort.
“Oh, baby, I was so worried about you…” Mort’s voice trailed off as he saw it. We all saw it at the same time. Christy stood there in front of us, held in place by Orobas’ hand on her shoulder. But nothing held her head as it slowly tipped forward to land on the ground at Mort’s feet.
The lifeless eyes of the Cambion that I almost considered a friend stared sightlessly up at me, and I tore my eyes away from her to glare at Orobas. He stood behind Christy’s headless body, grinning at me over her neck like some perverted carnival cutout picture booth.
“You son of a bitch!” I screamed and raised my soulsaber. Orobas knocked me flat with a casual swipe of his hand, then shoved Christy’s body at Mort. The demon riding inside the quarterback dropped to his knees, sobbing like a man who’s lost the only thing on any plane of existence he ever cared about. Which he probably had.
Glory went at Orobas, her sword flaming again. She crashed into the demon and turned her head to me. “Harker, get in there! You have to stop Smith before he finishes the ritual, or everything we’ve ever done was for nothing.”
I looked back at Flynn to tell her to cover the door and saw her sitting on the ground with one last Cambion goon standing over her. He held a knife in one hand, and I saw the blood drip from the blade onto the ground.
“Becca!” I screamed, and ran for her. The Cambion turned toward me, a nasty smile on his face, and I shouted “Separato!” without breaking stride. He kinda exploded. It looked a lot like he was drawn and quartered, only there were no horses, and he fell into a lot more parts.
I got to Flynn’s side and knelt there, patting her face and sobbing. “Becks, Becca, baby, please no. I can’t lose you, too. I can’t. I don’t know what I’ll do. I swear to God if you die, I’ll fucking kill everything. Oh fuck, Rebecca, please don’t die…”
“Don’t be such a fucking pussy, Harker, it’s just a flesh wound.” Flynn’s voice snapped me out of my hysteria like a splash of cold water.
“But I…I couldn’t feel you in my head.”
“That’s because he knocked me the fuck out. He slammed me into the car before he tried to stab me. My vest isn’t great against knives, but it turned the blade enough that all he did was cut me. He didn’t get in very deep.”
“Are you sure? Let me see.” I reached for her stomach, but she slapped me away.
“Harker!”
I snapped my head up. Flynn looked dead into my eyes. “I’m. Fine. Now would you please go kill that motherfucker Smith and keep him from summoning more demons?”
I kissed her on the forehead and turned to the house, charging into a heap of shit one more time, just to save the world.
Chapter 17
There wasn’t even enough door left to slow me down, so I just barreled into the foyer and whipped my head from side to side looking for Smith. I closed my eyes and strained to hear inside noises over the sounds of a shrieking Mort and the tumult of Glory and Orobas throwing down. Either Luke had some oblivious neighbors, or he had someone cast a hellacious masking spell on this place.
I heard chanting to my right, so I sprinted in that direction, taking the library doors right off the hinges. I walked into something out of a horror movie, complete with asshole bad guy in robes and a no-shit goat mask. Smith had a casting circle drawn on the floor, and he had a large pentagram scribed inside it. At the five points of the star sat five jars full of blood, and I knew exactly where those came from. Staked to the floor with the same nails he’d used on the kid at the church, naked as the day he was born with Enochian sigils drawn all over his body in blood, lay Renfield. I couldn’t tell if he was unconscious or dead, the magic of the circle screwed with my vision just enough.
“Oh, you are so fucked now, Smitty,” I said as I stopped just outside the circle. I couldn’t get in to kill him myself; the circle protected him. I’d have to find some way to take down the circle to stop the casting. “Luke’s going to rip your head off and shit down your neck when he hears about this.”
“Then it’s good for me that I’m planning on burning this house down to the earth when I leave, isn’t it?” He gestured toward the desk, and I noticed for the first time the pair of gallon jugs with a digital clock attached to them. The readout displayed eleven fifty-seven, and somehow I just knew that the big boom was planned for noon.
“It’s not nearly as good as midnight, but really, there is a lovely symmetry to it, isn’t there?” Smith looked at me and grinned. “You truly are a stupid bastard, aren’t you, Harker?”
“You’ve been working for Orobas all along, haven’t you?”
“I’ve been working for Uncle Oro my whole life. You could say I’m just carrying on a family tradition.”
“What kind of shit are you spewing, Smitty? Am I supposed to believe you’re related to Sponholz?”
“I don’t care what you believe, Harker. In three minutes, you’ll be dead, and I’ll be the new ruler of this plane. It’s too bad my little brother’s dead. This could be just one more thing I bea
t him at.”
Brothers? It made a kind of sense, but I’d never heard of any woman bearing a demonspawn and living through the trauma. “Wait a second…Uncle Oro? He’s not your father?”
“No. Little Richie thought he was, but that’s just because Mom and I never bothered to tell him any different. It served her purposes for him to think she was the only human in history ever to birth a Cambion and live, and I just didn’t care enough to tell him.”
“Your mother was a succubus. She was the demon half, and you had a human father.”
“Fathers, actually. Mating with a succubus can be a…draining affair for many humans. Dear old Daddy didn’t have quite enough stamina to keep up with Mummy’s appetite.”
I was a little nauseated by the conversation, but the longer I kept him talking, the less incantationizing he was doing. He finally stopped walking his circles and looked at me. “Huh. I’m monologuing, aren’t I? Isn’t that what we used to laugh about when we talked about stupid things the bad guys do? I should probably stop.” He stepped to Renfield’s head and nudged the manservant with one foot. Ren stirred and looked around, dazed.
“Good morning, Renfield. Time to die.” Smith dropped to one knee, picked up a ceremonial dagger lying in the pentagram, and stabbed Renfield in the chest.
“NO!” I screamed, drawing my soulsaber and charging the circle. I slammed the blade of pure energy into Smith’s magical barrier, hard. And again, and again, and again, until the hilt tumbled from my numbed fingers. The hilt tumbled to the floor, the mystical blade winking out of existence as soon as I was no longer holding it, and I slammed into the magical barrier of the circle.
Smith just laughed from inside his safe haven. “You can’t break my circle, Harker. You’re not strong enough to break one demonblood circle, let alone two.” I looked down and saw what he meant. Two lines of dried brown blood twined around each other like snakes, making two tangled and interwoven circles. I opened my Sight and saw the magical energy braided together, making something much stronger than the sum of its parts. There was no way I was ever going to BS my way through that thing.
Smith knelt by Renfield’s body, cutting open his chest and pulling out his heart to drip blood into a bowl by the topmost point of the star. He reached to one side and picked up another bowl of blood that I assumed came from Christy. He began to chant as he poured a small amount of the Cambion blood into the bowl of Renfield’s, and I felt the pressure of a great magical working taking place near me.
I studied the woven circles in front of me, tracing the paths of their power, and realized the flaw in Smith’s plan. One casting circle, formed properly and invoked by a strong wizard, could probably keep me out. Two circles, one inside the other, would be an even bigger deterrent. But two circles woven together? That formed a stronger whole, a circle completely impervious to brute force.
But not to penetration.
I straightened my hands into knife edges, then focused my will on my fingers, extending my personal energy outward into a narrow tip extending out from each hand like a needle. Then I inserted the needle into the woven energy, just like splicing a rope.
Or like stabbing through a bulletproof vest. I shook my head, throwing aside all thoughts of Becks and her injuries for the moment, because if I couldn’t focus right now, there was no question she was going to die. If I could get this right, then I could see if she was lying about her wound or if she was really fine. But right now, I had to focus.
I pushed, and the hole in the circle grew wider. Smith looked at me, and his eyes went wide, but he didn’t falter in his incantation. I got both hands into the circle’s barrier up to the palms, and rotated my arms until my palms faced away from each other. I flexed my shoulders and pulled the magic of the circle away from itself, spreading the woven fibers of magic apart to make a six-inch hole that could only be seen in the Otherworld.
“Hey Smitty,” I said. He looked into my eyes, and I said, “That was my friend, you son of a bitch.”
Then I drew my Glock, jammed the barrel through the magical circle, and put fifteen nine-millimeter bullets into that traitorous half-demon motherfucker. I shot him full of holes from his guts to his eyeballs, and he slammed backward into the wall of his circle, shattering the casting, shattering the circle, and shattering the remains of his worthless skull when he hit the floor. I felt the magic dissipate, the casting broken, and the portal to Hell remained unopened, at the cost of one of my few friends. Again. I was really starting to want to kill Orobas.
I took one step toward Renfield, then looked again at the huge vault door that led to Luke’s private sleeping chambers. It looked intact, but scarred, which was a pretty good way to describe me right about that moment. I holstered my gun and knelt by Renfield’s side. I closed his eyes, pulled out my handkerchief, and wiped the worst of the blood off his face.
Then the timer on the gallon jugs of gasoline reached triple zeroes, and for the second time in as many days, I was burned to a goddamn crisp.
Epilogue
I stumbled into the church smelling like smoke and death. I hit my knees in the center aisle and just stayed there for a long moment, gasping for breath. I looked up, and the famous fresco that once made up the entire back wall of the sanctuary looked down on me, its scenes of love and redemption looking empty to my eyes. The last time I prayed was the night my father died, the night that unbeknownst to me, to all of us, first tied me to Quincy Harker and set in motion the string of events that led to me kneeling soot-smeared and bloodstained on the stone floors of St. Peter’s.
I looked at the fresco, looked around at all the trappings of faith, and felt something well up inside me. It bubbled up from deep within me, something I didn’t know I still had. I dragged myself to my feet, using the pews for support. I stood, feet spread wide and weaving in the aisle. I looked at the altar, looked at the stained glass and polished wood. I looked around at all the little reminders of God and all His glory, and I screamed. I screamed with a rage that flowed out of every atom of my being. I railed at God, cursed Him and His inattention, cursed His willingness to let good men die and monsters live, and poured out all my fury in my words.
I shrieked and cursed for a good five minutes before I ran out of words. I collapsed onto a nearby pew and sat panting, bent over with my head on the pew in front of me. I had no tears. I hadn’t cried since I watched the other policemen pull my father’s casket out of the hearse. All I had was rage. Rage, and pain, and more rage.
“You feel better?” I knew Glory’s voice. She manifested herself to me more than once, just so I wouldn’t think Harker was crazy.
“No. And fuck off.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No really, fuck off.”
“Can’t. You’re my problem now. I just got a new assignment, and you’re it. Seems like somebody thinks you’re important enough for your very own guardian angel.”
“For all the good it did the last guy.”
“That’s cold, Rebecca. I know you’re angry, but I didn’t make Q go after Smith alone.”
“But you didn’t stop Smith, either.”
“I couldn’t. I can’t interfere with any malevolent creatures that Harker might piss off. Same goes for you now.”
“Is he dead?”
“Which one?”
“Harker. I don’t give a fuck about that lying asshole Smith.”
“You’d better. Because Harker’s alive, and Smith isn’t. And it would probably be easier for everyone involved if it were the other way around.”
“He’s alive?” My rage pulled back a tiny bit. Just an iota, but enough that I could look up at Glory without wanting to strangle her.
“He’s alive. He’s running like the hounds of Hell are on his trail, but he’s alive.”
It felt like my heart started beating again. I reached out through our link, and she was right. I could feel him. It was faint, like he was weak and far away, but he was alive. That was the first moment I had felt his p
resence since the explosion. Harker, or my own fear of what I would feel, had been keeping our connection severed until then.
I let out a sigh. “Good. If he killed Smith, he’s got to get out of here. Homeland Security will come down on him like an avalanche of assholes. Even the goons Smith hired were Homeland agents.”
“That’s what he said. And he told me to give you this.” The angel held out her hand. Dangling from it was a small black box. A jewelry box.
“Oh, hell no. If he wants to pull some shit like that, it’s going to have to be in person. No way is he getting you to do his dirty work. If he’s giving me a ring, he’s gonna sack up, get down on one knee, and ask me like a man.”
Glory laughed. “That’s almost exactly what I told him.”
“I bet you didn’t say sack up.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Rebecca. I don’t know if any of us are going to be okay by the time this thing ends.”
I stared at the angel for a second, then we stood up and turned to the door. I had just stepped into the aisle when the door exploded off its hinges. In the doorway, smoke wafting from his once-immaculate suit, stood the man Harker introduced to me as his Uncle Luke.
Except the urbane businessman I knew was nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t a multi-millionaire with an extensive jazz collection, legendary wine cellar, and deep knowledge of European history. This was a pissed off vampire with half a millennium of killing under his belt, and a lust for vengeance in his eye.
He stalked down the aisle to me, stopping just out of arms’ reach. “Is he alive?”
“Harker? Yeah, he’s alive. He killed the Cambion, who also happened to be our boss, but then he had to get out of town.”
Heaven's Door (Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Book 6) Page 11