The Demon Accords Compendium, Volume III

by John Conroe

  “What are you two up to?” Tanya asked, brows arching.

  “Show her,” Barbiel said to me.

  I reached for my sword, pulling it from whatever dimension it existed in. Then I put it back.

  “Your turn,” I said to my vampire. She frowned prettily.

  “Time for you to get your sword… or I should say swords, as you seem to favor two,” Barbiel said. Then he reached a hand into nothingness and pulled back out with two silver, glowing short swords clutched in his grip. When he turned and held his arm out in Tanya’s direction and opened his hand, the two glowing blades shot across the room and Tanya caught them by reflex. Immediately, the twin blades sang a note of crystalline purity that took my breath away. The look on her face was priceless—sheer wonder.

  “They weigh nothing,” she said, swinging first one and then the other experimentally, the tone of each changing as they sliced through the air.

  “Each has the mass of a big truck—except to you,” the angel said.

  She jumped, spun, swung low with one and then high with the other, twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, and stabbed in two opposite directions at once. Then she pulled herself upright and turned to the two of us.

  “Why now? I can’t use Heavenly weapons in this fight.”

  “Correction: Heaven can’t enter this fight,” he said. “You aren’t in Heaven; you have chosen to fall from it.”

  “We aren’t full-blown angels anymore, Tanya,” I said. “Barbiel explained it to me earlier. While our angelic weapons and armor are technically of Heaven, since we chose to leave it, our weapons are still ours. We received them when we were formed; they’re a part of us. So we can use them against the Vorsook. Our job is to protect this world, whether it’s demons of Hell, Queens of Fairie, or alien telepaths.”

  “Armor? You said armor. Do I get armor too?” she said. Well, that was the fastest she’d ever accepted an explanation from me. Ten minutes to talk about why I choose a particular brand of diapers when the twins were still wearing them but instant agreement when it came to Heaven-crafted weapons. Go figure.

  The next two hours were spent teaching her how to reach for them and how to put them back, along with accessing her armor, which I have to say looked amazingly badass on her. Then there was some discussion and theory about the swords and what they actually were.

  “You can’t practice with them against any other weapon except another angelic sword,” Barbiel warned her. “So the two of you can spar with them, but be extraordinarily careful. They cut anything they touch. No Earthly metal or mineral will hold up to them. Nor will any flesh and bone, even vampire-enhanced.”

  “We could have used these against the Ancient,” she mused.

  “You were not ready for them. That fight was your last test, so to speak, and Christian’s aura blast was really the weapon of choice. You’ll recall that she never let him get directly in front of her until Galina distracted her,” Barbiel said. “He would never have had a chance to bring his sword to bear.”

  “How is Mother?” she asked, lowering her blades.

  “She is fine and watches you and your family often. If you feel like she’s near, then trust that she is,” he said. “Now put them away and retrieve them—again.”

  She got the hang of them faster than I had my own, but I like to think she got to experience it through me before she ever had to on her own. At least that’s what I tell myself.

  Finally, Barbiel told us that his time was up. He said goodbye and disappeared as he usually does, quickly and without fanfare.

  My vampire was still elated, brimming with the wonder of being reunited with her swords, but she was quiet in the elevator. I broke the silence.

  “Now, in my opinion, I think we’ve covered all the bases. We’ve trained Declan and Stacia to adapt and overcome; we’ve been trained to fight off the mental attacks of the Vorsook and are training Coven forces to do the same. Our witch can blast a soda can at twenty thousand miles going over seventeen thousand miles an hour and more importantly, he communicates with elementals all over the world from almost anywhere. Omega has seeded the solar system with drones and battlecraft that have similar power and capabilities to the Vorsook weapons. Advanced weapons have been cached around the world for human soldiers to use against alien shock troops. The world’s governments are finally engaged in preparing resources for their citizens, and the internet’s more awful aspects have been tamed by Omega himself. And you, my dear, have your swords back.”

  She smiled at me, then held up one finger. “You mentioned bases. Omega, how far along is the new base?”

  “It is approximately sixty-three percent complete. There is room for Father, Stacia and your immediate combat team now, but I am still excavating deeper into the granite of the mountains. Final completion is scheduled for seventeen days from now.”

  “Including all infrastructure and technology?” I asked.

  “I will be using nano technology, which will require just fifty-six hours to completely outfit the base.”

  “You think it will be more protective than the Tower?” Tanya asked. She wasn’t happy about leaving her tower but she knew that making a target of New York City wasn’t an option.

  “Father and your children will be under enormous amounts of stable granite bedrock, supported by almost fifty Earth elementals of various sizes. The ley lines that intersect will make Father’s work easier and the mountain terrain will favor you and the Elders for hunting Vorsook.”

  “That’s all great and good as long as you remember that whatever we plan for won’t be enough, that the enemy will come at us unexpectedly and without mercy, that we have to be ready to change everything on a dime,” my vampire said.

  “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” I paraphrased.

  “Agreed.”

  “But until then, we train.”

  “We train,” I agreed.

  Author’s Notes:

  I’m always surprised to realize how much I love to write these stories that show other facets of the Demon Accords Universe. In this case most of them are obviously lead up to the next few books – the beginning of the endgame so to speak.

  Some, like the King’s Daughter, demonstrate how much there is still left to explore in the DA, which should, I hope, assuage any fears that everything will end when the final battles are joined.

  2020 has been a hell year for everyone. Some fans have asked if I’m writing about Covid-19. I think I already did in Web of Extinction. I’d rather write about deadly telepathic aliens. The real world is too scary.

  Next on my writing list is the second book of the Shadows of Montshire series, A Flight of Ravens. Not all of my fans liked my foray into full fantasy and in hindsight I realize some of the reasons why. This second book will, I hope, be more to DA fans liking while still not losing any of the differences that I personally wanted to see between the Shadows’ world and DA.

  After that, I will turn to the first of book of the Vorsook battles. I don’t yet know if it will take two or three books to tell the whole of the fight for Earth. We’ll have to see. Then another Shadow book, A Mischief of Rats. Whether the Shadow series continues after that will depend on how the second and third books are received.

  And obviously, there is a lot of Fairie to explore, and when I finished the Zone War trilogy, I knew I wanted to revisit Ajaya and company, after giving them some time to deal with the events of Web of Extinction. So many thoughts, so much to write.

  Of course, all of this depends upon you, dear reader, and I thank you all so much for riding along this imagination train. If it all stopped tomorrow, I would feel blessed for what has been so far.

  As usual, I thank Gareth Otten for converting the scenes in my head into art worthy of covering a book. Susan Helene Gottfried continues to correct my grammer and point out the errors of my ways.

  And as always, my wife, Robin and my girls, continue to inspire me, support me, teach me, and ground me. I am truly blessed.
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