“They knew the risks going in,” Victor replied. “They knew they were expendable.”
“Aren’t you expendable, too?” I shouted. “Don’t you realize that there will be a hundred demons of my House here any minute, all of them looking for you?”
“Let them look! Let them come!” Victor appeared in front of the merrily burning apartment building, his two swords held crossed in front of him. “They won’t get here in time, demon. Not in time for you.”
I lifted my right hand and cut a clean slice across my palm, letting ichor pool there. “They won’t find anything but pieces of you.”
Tink smeared her bloody palm across mine, mixing the blood and ichor. I felt an unaccustomed warmth in my hand as her touch lifted. “We’ve felled far stronger than you with this,” she said. “You’ve been lucky so far, Victor. Now you’ve really pissed me off.”
“Oh, the famed amplification again?” He spread his arms wide. “Let’s see what you can do with it.”
I lit a ball of hellfire as she created the force rune. “I can’t believe he’s just going to eat this,” she muttered.
“Angels are weird,” I said. “Some sort of warrior honor, no doubt.”
“Whatever. Maybe it’ll convince them that we aren’t to be fucked with.”
“Maybe. Is this good enough?”
“It’s fine.” She balled her fist and grinned. “Say good night, Victor.”
Her fist slammed into the rune hanging in midair. The force pulse struck my ball of hellfire and carried it along. Instead of the contained streak of light we usually saw, the blast sputtered and spit out chunks of hellfire along its path. The force pulse itself seemed to stutter in midair, curving in its path before diving toward the ground just in front of Victor. The bolt took him clean in the upper thigh. What was left of the hellfire exploded, sending him flying with a howl of pain.
“That should have blown a hole right through him,” Tink said. She stared at her palm, smeared liberally with red and green. “This isn’t right. Look, it’s not mixing.”
I peered at her palm. Our blood usually mixed, but as she said, this time our blood had formed layers and was resisting the mixture. The combined spell had certainly been more powerful than either of us could have managed alone, but nowhere near what we had done before. “There’s something wrong here,” I said. “There’s something very wrong here.”
Chapter Ten
* * *
Before either of us could investigate our blood closer, Victor popped up from where he had fallen. Caleb took a step toward him, sword and shield raised. The archangel spun and started running away, stumbling every time his weight dropped onto his injured leg. “Discretion is, in fact, the better part of valor,” I said.
“I’m going to get him,” Caleb said, his wings shimmering into place. “Get him, bring him back here, and let you decide whether you want to end it this time.”
“You do that.” I watched him go, then felt a hand on my shoulder. “Hikari?”
“I’m going to start working the area,” she said quietly. “There’ll be a lot of injured civilians around, no doubt. I’ll put in a call to our conclave. We can at least start picking up the pieces here.”
“All right.” She walked off in the opposite direction from Caleb and I looked to Tink, who was still staring at the blood on her hands. She didn’t show any signs of wanting to talk, so I took a seat on the nearest car hood. The hood crumpled. I stood back up and reversed my transfiguration, resuming my human form. My muscles immediately started to protest my comparatively thin blood replaced my resource-rich ichor. I groaned and sat down on another car.
“Hey, demon. What went wrong?” I looked up. Tink wasn’t looking at me, her gaze still focused on her hands. “I’ve never seen that happen before, not through all the time we’ve been contracted.”
I opened my mouth. No words came out. Her head snapped up and she looked over her shoulder at me, almost as if she had read my thoughts. I looked down at the ground. I heard the scuffle of her shoes crossing the distance between us, then she grabbed my face and squeezed. “Ow, what the hell, Tink?”
“You look me in the eye, demon.”
“I am looking you in the eye, Tinkerbell.”
“You tell me, demon, what’s the status of our contract?”
I tried to keep eye contact with her. I tried like hell not to look away. I failed. “What do you mean, the status of-”
She squeezed again, almost bringing tears to my eyes. “Don’t bullshit me, demon.”
I reached up, peeled her hands off my cheeks, and sighed. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve been lying to me.”
I started to shake my head, but then stopped myself. “A lie of omission. You probably barely remember that night. You had a bit much to drink. Brought you back here, but Hikari-”
“But Hikari what?” she hissed. “She stopped you from forming a new contract with me? Did she put a knife to your throat?”
“No, only you do that,” I said. “She just said I had to choose between staying with her or contracting with you. She was tired of always being second to the contract.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, demon.” Tink spun around. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What would you have done?” I asked.
“I would have told you that you were a damned fool. I would have told you that you shouldn’t let her pressure you like that. That she doesn’t love you. That she’s just trying to isolate and control you.” Her shoulders drooped. “And then I would have let you do it.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You’ve told me so many times that it’s your choice to make, even if you’re being a complete idiot. Which you are, but it’s your choice to be a raging moron or not.”
“I don’t know what to say, Tink.”
“I’m not going to lie to you, demon. I’m not like you.” She whirled around and her expression was as cold as I’d ever seen. “I’m not going to tell you I’m not hurt, because I am. I’m pissed at you because you didn’t tell me. You probably weren’t ever going to tell me. I’m angry because you blew off our contract for that bitch. You know I can’t stand how she treats you and this is just reinforcing that image I have of her.”
“Well, you tell me who I was supposed to hurt,” I said. “One way or the other, someone was getting hurt, and that’s not even counting myself.”
“Don’t expect me to believe that you agonized over it.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I agreed to it to shut her up. I hoped that we’d get a chance to quietly renew it down the line after she had calmed down.”
“Are you fucking stupid?” She spun around again and stepped right up to me. “Demon, you’re not going to be able to keep playing both ends against the middle forever. Can’t you see that? She’s going to keep demanding more and more of you until she has exactly all of you that she wants. Then what? You’ll be completely reliant on her, isolated from all of your friends. You know it’s already started.”
“What about you?”
She flinched back. “What do you mean?”
“Are you trying to pull me in the other direction? Into your orbit?”
“I’ve said this already, demon, but are you an idiot?” She shook her head. “Even with all of this shit going on, I’m trying to help you. I know you well enough to see that you’re going to be unhappy if you stick with her.”
“This is all very touching.” The voice that cut in was so unexpected, we both jumped. “I hate to interrupt, but we have unfinished business, you and I.”
I looked toward the ruined apartment building, where Caleb had run in pursuit of Victor. The archangel stood there, uninjured, his wings folded behind his back and his arms crossed. Two angels stood at his flanks. “Apparently you’re tougher than I thought,” I said, standing up. I had bled off enough ichor that I wasn’t ready for a fight, but I’d be more ready than Tink.
“Apparently you’re more gullible
than I thought,” Victor said. He unfolded his arms and his twin scimitars appeared in his hands. “I’m not the only angel to prefer these.”
“Then who is Caleb chasing?” I asked.
“Someone else,” Victor said. He started walking forward, his swords held low. His guards brought their own weapons out and joined him. “Truly, halfbreed, don’t you understand simple tactics? Never divide your force in the face of a superior opponent.”
“Your forces weren’t exactly superior after we took most of them apart,” I pointed out. Tink was already preparing runes while they slowly advanced on us. “That was a waste of manpower.”
“That was to bleed you.” Victor laughed as he came within twenty feet. “Do you truly think I would spend so many lives for nothing?”
“Demon, light me up,” Tink whispered. I lit a candle flame of hellfire and held it up in front of the two of us. “Come on, give me more than that.”
“You want to carry me?” I whispered back. “Besides, you know it isn’t working right.”
“Trust me. Give me just a bit more.”
I flicked the flame a little larger. “Come on, Victor. You know you want a taste.”
“But it isn’t working right!” He mimicked my voice, then laughed again. “Demon, give me your life and perhaps we will spare your people.”
“Which people?” I asked.
That halted him for a second. “The demons, of course. The humans are no threat.”
“Tell that to Throne Jordan.”
His expression clouded as he started advancing again. “Perhaps they do deserve more attention. Once your type is dealt with, we can proceed to subjugate them.”
Tink shook her head and took a deep breath. “Subjugate this, asshole.”
Instead of a focused beam of force and hellfire, Tink lit off a cone of fury, directing it right toward Victor’s face. Without any sort of focus, my ball of hellfire sprayed across the entire cone of force. Tink grabbed my hand and pulled me away from her rune, which was still belching fire, long after my hellfire dissipated. “The hell did you do?” I asked as we broke into a run.
“Set it up to continue burning for a bit. No one likes walking through fire, even if it’s not hellfire.” She stumbled and I grabbed her arm to steady her. “It’s a little draining, though.”
“Don’t faint on me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, demon.” We made it to the far side of the parking lot without any active pursuit, as far as I could tell. The road was disturbingly empty for this time of day. We jogged across and made our way down a short alley to get to the other side of the block. “Think we’ll lose them doing this?” she asked.
“Not a chance,” I said. “Our best hope is to just draw things out until Kibs gets back with some help.”
“Shouldn’t he have been back by now?”
I shrugged and turned left. While my apartment wasn’t quite downtown, it wasn’t terribly far away either. The angels might expect us to head in that direction, to hide among the crowds, or simply to discourage them from using overwhelming force in order to avoid human casualties.
They would find us, and they wouldn’t care who got in their way. We were heading away from downtown. Tink was starting to breathe all too heavily, so as soon as we made it past another intersection, I held her back. “He wasn’t kidding when he said he was going to bleed us,” she wheezed.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, thumbing through the contact list down to Caleb’s name. The call hit his voicemail after a few rings. No surprise. I thumbed further down to Hikari’s name. She picked up on the second ring. “Zay?”
“Hikari, we’re in trouble.”
“No shit. I’m glad I don’t have a loud ringtone.”
“Are they chasing you down too?”
She laughed, sounding a little bitter. “I’m holed up here in that convenience store around the block. I have half a dozen wards keeping them from noticing me, but I’ve still counted four different angels poking their heads in here. Five, now.”
“Are you in any danger?”
“I don’t think so.” Her response was a bit slow. “He’s gone now. There’s no way I can leave here without getting spotted, though.”
“Did you get an emergency call out to the conclave?”
“Yes. They’re going to ground.”
“Good. I wanted to make sure you’re ok. Victor’s chasing us down. I can’t get in touch with Caleb.”
She swore quietly into the phone at great length. I glanced over at Tink, who was still trying to catch her breath. “I’ll try and reach Caleb. What about the Asmodeus reinforcements?”
“No idea. Opheran’s next on the calling list.”
“All right. If I see any of them, I’ll call you.”
“Thanks. See you later.” I closed the phone before she could respond, then thumbed down further to my direct line to Prince Opheran.
He picked up practically instantly. “Stay wherever you are.”
“Not possible, my Prince. They’re chasing us. Lucky to get a couple minutes to make a couple of phone calls.” I saw a flicker of white down the street and grabbed Tink’s arm. She hissed out an exasperated breath and followed me. “What’s the delay?”
“There’s a company’s worth of Choirboys blocking the direct routes. We’re starting to filter people in through the back routes, but it’s slowing us down. Can you make your way toward one of them?”
“Give me a place to be,” I said. “We’re on foot, though, heading toward the outskirts of town.”
“Shit. Most of our portals are downtown. I assumed you’d be heading that way.”
“I assumed they thought that too. We can double back.” I pointed across the road and Tink nodded. We’d cross that block and then head downtown.
“Better yet, can you double back to where your apartment is? They might not expect that.”
“Where it was.”
Opheran hissed. “Damn.”
“Yeah, my insurance company is going to drop me like a hot potato after this. They still haven’t forgiven me for the last time.”
“Insurance is-”
“The least of my problems, my Prince. I know. We can try to double back there. Hopefully Victor and his clowns won’t be expecting that.”
“Victor,” Opheran said. He growled softly, the sound hissing over the phone line. “That one is more trouble than I thought he’d be.”
“You’re not the only one who’s underestimated him, my Prince.”
“Demon,” Tink said.
“Isaiah, if you get the chance, make sure he doesn’t get the chance to cause us any more trouble.”
“Of course, my-”
Tink tackled me. The phone went flying out of my hand and the wall behind us took the bolt of holy fire meant for me. Heat washed over me, sharp and sweet, then faded away. She grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the spot as quickly as possible. “You talk too much, demon,” she snarled.
“You didn’t even give me a chance to finish my call! Did you see where my phone went?” I scrambled to my feet and followed her running around a corner. Another bolt of holy fire struck the ground right behind us, throwing shards of concrete and asphalt at our legs.
“I am pretty sure you are never going to see that phone again,” she said. “We’re doubling back?”
“Opheran said we should rally back at the apartment. Choir’s stalling their main forces. This place has become a really unhealthy neighborhood in the past couple of days, you know.”
“They’re probably closing a loop around us here,” Tink said. “Should we run like hell?”
“I don’t know how well either of us can run at this point.”
“Try to run like hell, then.”
She took off sprinting ahead of me. I admired the view for a second before following. We made good time for a couple of blocks before she slowed to a stop and started sucking wind. Before we could completely recover, I caught sight of white wings in the sky
ahead of us. I pushed her sideways to try and hide around a corner, but she stumbled and fell. The commotion attracted attention and the angel swooped down toward us.
“Not good,” I said.
Tink gasped for breath, then held her knife high in a trembling hand. “Get ready.”
“For what?”
The angel swooped down around the corner. He held his sword and shield ready in front of him, clearly expecting trouble. What he wasn’t expecting was for Tink to leap over his head. His sword and shield automatically went high and he started to turn. I reached out and grabbed his wing as it fluttered toward me, then invoked hellfire on my ichor-streaked palm. The feathers ignited instantly and the angel squawked, mostly in surprise. He turned to spin back toward me, but then Tink landed on the opposite side. She dropped to one knee, then sprang up toward him, her knife thrusting ahead of her. The blade caught the angel right around where a human kidney would be and he stiffened. She shouted a word of command and pulled away.
The angel caught fire.
I scooted backwards. “Tink, what the hell did you do?” I shouted over the angel’s sudden screams.
“You know how you told me that would never work? I fixed it!”
The angel’s screams took on a new intensity. The flames coating his body started to flicker, taking on a pronounced greenish hue. What was left of my blood started to turn cold. “Tink, did you have any of my ichor on that knife?”
“What if I did?”
“Run like hell! Again!” I sprinted for her and grabbed her around the waist. She folded with a gasp and I struggled onwards. Behind me, I heard the angel’s screams rise in pitch, then abruptly stop. Before we could make it halfway down the block, the reaction peaked.
I had never witnessed a volatile reaction before. I almost failed to witness this one. Stark white light flashed behind us. I heaved Tink toward the marginal safety of a mailbox and dove down on top of her, drawing another gasp and grunt from her.
A roar nearly drove my ears into my skull. White light flashed again, but this time, the light was nearly bright enough to blind me, even facing away with my eyes closed. The shockwave came next, the ground bucking beneath us, and then I felt the mailbox tear loose and slam into my back before bouncing away. I felt something crack and hoped it wasn’t my spine. The next shockwave tore me away from Tink and sent me spinning through the air.
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