by Rowan Casey
The stairs terminated in a large round chamber lit with torches that sparked and guttered in iron sconces. The room was also completely made of stone and windowless. Far above was a circle of dim light. There was a lingering smoke smell from the torches but the air was clear enough that Dani guessed there was some kind of chimney above them, or perhaps the ceiling was open to the sky, though the chamber seemed too clean for that.
“Wait, we have to stop this bleeding,” she said.
“I know this place,” Sophie said. “We’re in the cursed tower.”
Dani sagged down against the wall. “What tower? What curse?”
“My great-grandfather built it. He was obsessed with the paranormal. He murdered his three sisters here and nobody has come near it since.” Sophie pulled off her t-shirt and used Dani’s knife to rip it into two pieces as she talked.
“And I thought I had a weird family history,” Dani muttered through gritted teeth as Sophie pressed the makeshift pads to the wounds.
“I don’t have anything to tie it with,” Sophie said, looking around.
“Cut strips off my dress. It’s ruined anyway.” Dani closed her eyes, forcing her heart to slow its pace as she evened her breathing; her heart beating faster would just pump her blood out that much more quickly. “Are we close to town?”
“That’s the good news,” Sophie said as she tied a rough bandage around Dani’s thigh. “We’re about two miles, maybe a bit more out from town. And it’s getting light. Not so far.”
Dani chose not to respond to the other woman’s optimism. “Help me up,” she said instead.
Sophie helped pull her to her feet and handed back the knife Dani had taken off the hunter. Dani curled her right hand back up over her heart and clutched the knife in her left. She took a step forward and stopped, staring at the floor.
Carved into the stones was a double circle. Between the lines of the inner and outer circle someone had etched runes into the floor and inlaid them with copper. Runes Dani recognized from the hunters’ book.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Keep that gun ready.”
Leaning on Sophie, Dani hobbled toward the heavy, wooden door across the chamber, hoping it wasn’t barred from the outside. She doubted it, given that the hunter below would have had to somehow lock it behind him or have a way to signal for someone to open it. Their quick search of his body hadn’t turned up a key.
“Ssssstop,” hissed a guttural, inhuman voice behind them.
Sophie stumbled as she tried to spin while still holding onto Dani. They both jerked around, Dani holding the knife out at the ready, Sophie half-kneeling in an effort to not drop Dani and still keep her balance.
Richard, or what used to be a big human with a beard named Richard, stood at the top of the stairs. Blood coated his grey shirt, wounds gaping but no longer bleeding. Bone showed white in places where Dani had sliced deep. His face was a death’s mask, his teeth pointed, his jaw elongated and inhuman, his eyes glowing red like coals in a dying fire.
“Holy fuck!” Sophie said. She froze at Dani’s side.
“You ssstupid girlsss,” the demon said. “The Caeg will be oursssss.”
“Then come get it,” Dani said. She wasn’t strong enough to cross the distance on her wounded leg. She didn’t understand how the thing wasn’t dead, but her mind flashed back to Grimm’s gathering. It had taken a great deal of damage to defeat the creature in that room.
The demon grinned wide and its yellow teeth gleamed in the torchlight. “Only need one of you,” it said. “Other, I eat.”
“Which one of us do you need?” Dani said, hoping Sophie would unfreeze and shoot the damn thing. She gave Sophie a nudge with her arm and winced as it jolted her broken wrist.
The demon started moving toward them, its gait slow and pained. She hadn’t killed it, but it wasn’t feeling so great. Small blessings, Dani thought.
“Do not know,” it said. “Do not care. I hurt. I hunger.”
“Now, Soph,” Dani said, praying her companion would figure out what she meant.
Sophie looked at Dani and her eyes widened. Then she pressed her lips into a thin line and raised her right hand, emptying the revolver into the demon with impressive speed and precision.
The shots were painfully loud as they echoed around the chamber. The revolver wasn’t high enough caliber to knock the creature back, but the shots hurt it, stopping it in its tracks. One had torn a piece out of its cheek and red-black blood flowed from the gaping furrow.
“Ssstupid,” the demon yowled, throwing its head back.
Dani hated to throw away her only weapon, but her shot was clear, the demon’s throat exposed. With a muttered prayer, Dani threw the knife.
Silently she blessed Perce for daring her to climb that tree. Learning to use her left hand as well as her right saved their lives for the second time that night. The knife wasn’t balanced for throwing, but the distance wasn’t huge and Dani had been throwing knives, stones, axes, and other objects her whole life.
The blade slammed into the demon’s throat, cutting off its cry. Dani lurched forward, closing the distance as quickly as she could. The demon fell to its knees as it tried to pull the blade from its neck. Dani slammed her open palm up into its nose and grabbed for the handle of the knife as the demon reeled back. She ripped the blade free.
Sophie ran up beside her and kicked low and hard into the demon’s cut up torso.
“Grab its head,” Dani told her.
Sophie took a fistful of the twitching demon’s hair and yanked. Its throat was a mess of spurting blood. Dani cut deep, sawing back and forth with the blade. The demon stopped moving but she didn’t stop until she hit bone and couldn’t go further.
“Roll it over,” she told Sophie.
“I think I’m going to vomit,” Sophie said but managed to roll the demon over.
“Go ahead,” Dani said to her. It was a natural reaction, she guessed. She chalked it up to blood loss and shock that she wasn’t feeling anything much at all right now except a desire to get the hell out. But first she had to make sure this thing stayed dead. She set to work severing its spine, hacking with the knife until its head rolled free. The demon’s head and body started smoking. Dani crawled backward as within seconds the demon had turned to ash, clothing and all.
Sophie had backed away, but she wasn’t throwing up. She was half-murmuring, half-singing something in a language Dani didn’t recognize. The tone was clear enough, however. It sounded like prayer.
“That looks dead this time,” Sophie said as Dani wiped the knife and her good hand off on her ruined dress as best she could. She mostly just smeared blood around.
“I think so. Not a lot of things survive losing their head and turning into ashes, right?”
Sophie managed a half-smile. “It’s good it did that on its own. I don’t think we have time for full dismemberment.”
“Let’s get out of here before its brothers come back,” Dani agreed.
“Gun is out of bullets, sorry,” Sophie said.
“Leave it,” Dani told her. They were probably screwed if they encountered the rest of the demon brothers anyway, even with a gun.
The door wasn’t locked. They stumbled out of the tower and onto large stone pavers that surrounded it in a perfect circle. Sophie had been right. Nothing grew here. No moss or lichen, no weeds or wildflowers dared sprout in the cracks between stones.
It wasn’t quite dawn yet. The sky overhead still carried a weak sprinkling of stars fighting to shine through the pre-dawn glow. There was enough light that they could just barely see their way into the woods.
Agony ripped through Dani with every other step. She staggered even with Sophie’s help. It felt like all the roots and rocks and fallen branches reached out to snag her bruised feet in an attempt to bring her down. She glanced behind them after an eternity and realized she could still see the tower through the trees. At this rate, Dani figured it would take them half the day to go two miles. T
he plus side was the pain or blood loss would knock her out before she bled to death or got eaten by demons.
She clung to Sophie as long as she could. Step by painful step. The world faded into one foot in front of the other, the distance measured in jolts of pain instead of inches. Dani didn’t notice when she fell. One moment she took a step forward, the next she was staring up into Sophie’s panicked face.
“We’ll rest a minute,” Sophie said, her voice eerily calm.
“I’m done,” Dani said. She felt it in her bones. She wasn’t getting back up.
“I’ll carry you,” Sophie said.
Dani laughed, the sound as raw as she felt. “We’re nearly the same size, Sophie. You’re barefoot and exhausted, too. You have to leave me. It’s getting lighter, you can go faster. Go get Perce. Go get help.”
“What about those… things?”
“Demons,” Dani said. “At least I think that’s what they are. We can’t do anything about them in this state anyway. Leave me with my knife. Get help, find my brother.”
“Demons,” Sophie said, her voice a rough whisper as though she didn’t mean to speak the word aloud. “My great-grandfather said that dire creatures had come and killed our elders, my great aunts. Nobody believed him. They hung him out here in these very woods and left the body for the wolves and bears. His bones were scattered, unmourned.”
“Help me sit against this tree,” Dani said.
With some effort and pain so sharp Dani nearly lost her mind, she and Sophie managed to get her propped against the tree.
“Now go,” Dani told her.
Sophie stood over her, biting her already swollen and cracked lower lip. She nodded after a moment.
“I promise I’ll come with help,” she said. “Stay alive.”
“I’ve got a little magic left,” Dani lied. She didn’t feel like she had an ounce of power left in her. She wondered if she even had an ounce of blood left. Her leg bandage was soaked, blood dripping down her thigh and creating a dark trail on the lichen.
“I’ll be back,” Sophie said in a weird accent. It seemed like maybe she was quoting something but for the life of her, Dani had no idea what. She watched the other woman turn and jog away, moving far more quickly into the trees than they had been able to go with Dani’s injuries.
Dani leaned into the tree and gripped her knife tightly. If she wasn’t unconscious, she’d be ready to put up whatever fight she could against the demons.
She wondered if Grimm would send another Knight after their piece of the key if they failed. She looked at the slowly brightening forest and silently called out for her twin.
“Let him live, Lord,” she prayed. “Whatever this curse is, whatever you have in store for us, please. Let my brother live.”
Chapter Eleven
The hounds had stopped baying, which Perce thought might be a bad sign. Twice now they had attacked from stealth and in silence. The woods had gone quiet.
Perce heard the snap of a branch off to his left and then the unmistakable sound of a woman cursing. He knew that voice. Sophie.
He changed his direction and headed toward the sound of her moving quickly through the woods. She had no grasp of stealth or she was fleeing something, he couldn’t tell. He hoped Dani was with her, but he heard only what sounded like one person crashing through the bits of low brush and dead branches.
Fighting down his rising fear for his sister, Perce beelined for the sound of Sophie’s movements.
“Sophie,” he called out when he was close. He couldn’t yet see her through the trees but he’d heard another unladylike word from what had to be only a few dozen feet away.
“Perce?” she called out.
He moved around the trees until he saw her standing at the base of an ancient spruce. She was filthy, covered in blood and dirt. Her beautiful face was bruised, her lower lip split. Perce realized she was wearing only a lacey black bra and quickly dropped his eyes. She didn’t have shoes on.
She ran into his arms, heedless of the knives he carried in his hands. Perce had to quickly adjust his weapons away from her as she clung to him for a moment before pulling away.
“Sorry,” she said. “I am so glad you are alive.”
“Where’s Dani?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
“The blood isn’t mine,” Sophie said. “Dani is back there, I’ll take you to her. She can’t walk. I didn’t want to leave her but she can’t walk. I had to find help. There are demons.”
Her words flowed in a panic and she stopped to gasp for breath.
“I know,” Perce said. He had all but forgotten his mask of stupidity. There wasn’t time for such nonsense now. All that mattered was Dani’s life.
“Come on,” she said. Sophie started back the way she’d come.
The howling began again, ringing out through the forest. Closer now. Apparently the hell hounds were abandoning the stealth tactic. Perce looked up into the trees above, judging the branch height and strength.
“Sophie,” he called out. “Come here.” He sheathed his knives despite the drying ichor on them. He could worry about taking apart the sheaths and cleaning them later, when they weren’t all about to die.
“We have to go,” Sophie said. She pointed away from them. “Dani is hurt.”
“Do you hear that howling?” Perce asked her.
She nodded. “Wolves, they do that. Aren’t demons more our problem right now?”
“Those aren’t wolves,” he said quietly. “Those are more demons.”
Sophie started cursing again.
“Sophie, please,” he said. “I can’t protect you both. You have to climb this tree. Get as high as you can. I’ll get Dani and come back for you. If I don’t return, wait until full light and then make a run for town, okay?”
She looked up into his eyes and took a deep breath. “Save Dani,” she said.
“Need a boost?” Perce asked. The first real branch was a dozen feet overhead. He could have jumped it, but a normal human probably couldn’t.
Sophie gave him a wild grin. “I grew up here, remember?” she said. Then she turned and started climbing the big spruce, her hands and bare feet catching onto the nubs of dead lower branches as though she’d taken lessons from squirrels all her life.
Perce watched until she was safely into the higher branches. Then he picked up her obvious trail and started to jog through the forest toward where he prayed Dani was still alive. In his mind he told her to hang on, that it was just a little longer and soon he’d be there. In his mind, if they were together, nothing truly bad could happen.
It was an illusion of hope he clung to with all his heart.
Dani heard the demon dogs howling and knew her time was short. She’d left a blood trail from the tower so obvious a drunk city-bred teenager could have followed it. She straightened up against the tree as best she could. The bark dug into her back. Her leg had stopped being painful in a sharp way and joined the cacophony of aches in her body.
She sensed the demons before they arrived, their ill intent casting a long metaphysical shadow forward into the woods ahead of them.
The brother she thought was called Gary stepped out of the trees, a rifle in his hands. His finger wasn’t on the trigger but he had the barrel pointed at her.
“Don’t shoot her, we still got time,” said the other brother as he emerged behind Gary.
“She killed Rich,” Gary said, spitting to one side after he spoke.
“She or that other one. It doesn’t matter, we need her.” The demon advanced on her. His features were still human, though his eyes gleamed red. His aura was a roiling mass of darkness and hatred.
Dani gripped her knife. She wasn’t going down without a fight and she had no intention of letting them take her alive. She wouldn’t be a pawn in some demonic ritual. This was not her fate, damn it all to hell.
“I killed him,” she said. “I sawed his ugly head clean off. That other girl ran away as soon as we got the ropes off. I killed Richard and
it was awesome.”
The demon’s eyes flared brighter red and his human features faded away for the space of time between blinks, revealing the demonic face lurking within. Good, thought Dani. She wanted them mad. She wanted them focused on her and thinking that Sophie had a bigger head start than she did. If Sophie could get back, could find and warn Perce, there might be hope to still get Farchog’s knife, to save the world.
She couldn’t save herself, but that didn’t mean her death had to be a waste.
“The others will get here soon, hurry up and grab her,” Gary urged his brother.
“Drop the knife or I’ll let Gary shoot you,” the demon said.
“Go to hell,” Dani replied.
The demon snarled and advanced on her, his body half-blocking his brother’s shot as Dani had hoped would happen. She braced to stand, visualizing how she’d stab him once he was close enough. She wanted to wait until the last minute, to look weaker than she was. Draw him in. Let him underestimate her in his rage.
“Jason,” Gary cried out. His words were cut short as a knife bloomed crimson in his throat. It was like déjà vu, only she hadn’t thrown the knife this time.
Perce appeared out of the trees like an avenging angel. He crossed the distance to the stunned demon with speed that was difficult for Dani’s tired, swollen eyes to track. A knife blade flashed as it caught the light. Jason released all hold on its human guise, teeth and claw emerging as the demon turned to face the new threat.
She couldn’t let her twin fight alone. Dani forced herself to stand but Perce and the demon were circling each other now, moving around the trees too quickly for her to follow.
Gary was gurgling on the ground, trying to work the knife out of his throat with one hand. His legs twitched uncontrollably and his other hand lay at his side unmoving. Perce had thrown it with his superhuman strength and Dani guessed the blade had hit the demon’s spine.
That demon was a problem she could handle.