The Demon Behind Me

by Christopher Nelson

  Everyone nodded and I led our motley crew out to the back yard. An imp phased into sight and nodded to me. “We will open the portal at your word,” he said, stuffing a finger up one nostril. “The exit is clear.”

  I looked around. Caleb’s crew had shields and swords out already, while all the demons were poised to charge. “Do it,” I ordered. The shimmering portal was barely visible in the bright sun, but Caleb’s angels swept through as soon as it was large enough to allow entrance. I counted to five. “Go, Amon!” After another count, “Go, Leviathan!” Tink and I charged through right on the heels of the last demon.

  The gym was already on fire, which shouldn’t have surprised me. Hellfire pocked the walls and the angels were nowhere in sight. I took a sharp breath as I saw what had happened in a scant fifteen seconds. “Fuck,” Tink said quietly. By the looks of it, we’d interrupted a gym class in session. A good dozen teenagers were bleeding all over the gym floor, one of Amon’s troops leaning over them and checking for signs of life. The sole adult in the room, probably the teacher, had been bisected at the waist. “Clear, my ass.”

  “This is war,” I said, as much for myself as for her. The imp had lied and I didn’t understand why. “Let’s go.”

  We ran across the gym and up to the first floor. Screams were starting to ring out. Doors slammed and crashed. Glass shattered. An alarm started to blare. Demons growled and snarled as they smashed through obstructions and opposition. I pointed to the stairwell and led Tink up. One body lay crumpled on the switchback landing, a sword slash across his throat. I couldn’t avoid stepping in his blood, leaving crimson footprints behind me.

  The second floor was eerily quiet in comparison to the roaring downstairs. As we arrived, an angel pointed his sword in our direction, then whipped it away as he recognized us. Another one of the angels was guarding the other stairwell at the far end of the main hall. From their positions, they could cover anyone coming down from the dorms and anyone coming up from the first floor at the same time. Down the main hallway, Caleb and his fourth member kicked a door in. “Clear!” he shouted after looking inside.

  “Find anything?” I asked the nearby angel. He shook his head. “All right. We’ll check this way,” I said, indicating an offshoot of the main hallway. Tink and I kicked our own doors open. One was a computer lab with a single student just getting up from his desk. We had him down and zip tied before he could manage any sort of coherent magic. The next room seemed to be for practical magic study. Common attack runes decorated the whiteboards on the near wall. The far wall was decorated with blood, some red, some green. I snarled. “I hate it when Caleb’s right.”

  “Fuck these people,” Tink said. “Let’s go.”

  We hit the next room, which ended up being a huge auditorium, thankfully empty. At the lower end of the room was a stage with a professional looking array of stage lights. Luckily, the curtains were open, so there wasn’t a small army waiting to ambush us. The floor sloped slightly upwards toward the far end, filled with rows of chairs. It looked like every second row had been torn out at some point. As we surveyed the room, Caleb and his partner burst through the door on the other side. “Clear?” Caleb shouted the question at me.

  “Might want to check backstage,” I said, walking toward him. He pointed his partner to the stage. “Find anything?”

  “Nothing yet. I think we’ve swept this floor except for whatever’s back there,” he said, pointing his sword at a door in the back. “I hate to say it, but we might need to sweep the dorms.”

  “Clear!” called the other angel.

  I shook my head. “We’ll check back there first, I’ll check with the demons, then I’ll make the call if we need to go upstairs.”

  “Lead on,” Caleb said. We walked to the back door and I kicked it open. Something snapped into my chest and I staggered backwards. Looking down, there was an arrow lodged in my right lung, which wasn’t the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, but definitely found a place in my top ten. Caleb and his partner swept past me as I grabbed the shaft of the arrow and tugged a little.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Tink asked. “Want me to pull it out?”

  “I enjoy how calm we can be about potentially life-threatening injuries these days,” I said, snapping the shaft as close to my skin as I could. Getting the arrowhead out later would be easy enough with my ichor infusing the wound. “It hurts, but I don’t want to waste any time or ichor pushing it out until we’re safe. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ve seen you worse off.” Tink looked through the door. A teenager lay crumpled against the wall, blood pouring down his chest from a stab wound. “I don’t see a bow. It might be some sort of magic arrow. If so, it’ll probably dissolve once his blood dries up.”

  “Zay! Anna! Help!” We jumped up a short set of steps and saw Caleb and his partner hunkering down behind a sturdy table flipped on its side. Both angels pressed their shields against the underside of the table. A spell lanced out from behind a similar impromptu bunker, coming far too close to my face for my liking. We hit the deck and crawled to the angels. My chest burned where the arrowhead tickled the inner regions of my lung. “Two mages holed up,” Caleb said. “They’re strong. Our shields aren’t completely deflecting their spells. Whatever they’re throwing at us is dangerous. We could charge, but it’s not a sure thing. Should we call for backup or do you want to burn them out?”

  “Counter spell support?” I asked Tink.

  “On it.” She grabbed my hand and slashed it open, taking some of my ichor and mixing it with her own blood. The other angel looked back and turned pale, whispering something inaudible. I couldn’t blame him for his sudden onset of nerves. If a spell got through and sprayed some purity, our day could take a rather drastically unpleasant turn.

  “Once she’s ready, you two flank,” I whispered as another spell blazed out, smashing into the table and drawing a grunt from Caleb. “I’ll throw hellfire and charge right up the middle a second later.”

  “On your count, Anna,” Caleb said. He gave the other angel a quick series of hand signals. “We’re ready.”

  Tink finished drawing up her circle, crouching in the center of it. “Three. Two. One. Go!” The angels were gone as she hit one, and I vaulted over the edge of the table before I had any more time to be terrified. I sidearm threw a ball of hellfire into their table, saw the angels flying around the sides of the room, felt a spell shatter against Tink’s counters, and jumped over their table with a surge of ichor. Two human faces stared up at me as I held a ball of hellfire over their heads, ready to drop it, but I didn’t. My amazing leap turned into an awkward flop as I tumbled to the ground behind them.

  “Don’t kill them!” I screamed as I flipped myself around. The arrowhead had twisted in the wound and I nearly choked on blood. “Don’t kill them!” Caleb and his partner had swords at their throats already, but both of them snapped their attention to me. “Hit them and zip them!”

  One of the mages tried to twist toward me when she recognized my voice, but Caleb put a fist into her face, none too gently. Before she could recover, he had a zip tie snapped around her wrist and she was out. The other mage fared no better. I crawled to my feet and spat some blood to the side.

  “Why’d we spare these two?” Tink demanded. She trotted to where they lay and took a deep breath. “Oh. That’s why.”

  Chrissy’s bloody face stared up at us, her eyes open but no one home for the moment. “That’s why,” I repeated. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Our mission was mildly successful, as Opheran put it when I called him. Amon’s team had found Kyla and one other survivor chained to the wall of the headmaster’s office. The headmaster hadn’t lasted long against three enraged demons, but he had taken one of them with him. House Leviathan had plenty of time to compromise nearly every computer in the offices, including the headmaster’s personal system. Kalil had been entranced by Venora’s technobabble a
bout what they’d done. Maybe I could push the House union off onto him.

  Including kids, we had taken seven prisoners. After a brief discussion in the gym, we left the kids behind. They weren’t likely to have any information we needed and the media would crucify us enough as it stood. We only took Chrissy and her partner through the portal, and then back through to another location, ending up with the two of them lying on the floor of the Council chamber in Camp Asmodeus with a half dozen guards consisting of all three Houses blocking the doorway. The Princes of Amon and Leviathan were on their way to discuss the prisoners with Opheran.

  Tink was in the process of drawing a magic circle around them to bind their magic, which the onlookers found most interesting. I was giving her a hand with the minor runes and a dollop of ichor. “What do demons usually do with prisoners?” she asked.

  “Eat them,” I replied. “Human tastes like chicken. Angel is more like turkey. Darker meat.”

  “What about demons?”

  “That’s disgusting. Do I look like a cannibal?”

  “You are joking, aren’t you?” Caleb asked. He stood outside the circle, slowly pacing around it. “I mean, I know you are, but it’s still a little on the dark side.”

  “Of course I’m joking. Can you imagine what would happen if a demon ate any part of an angel?” I paused in my drawing to look up at him. “You know, I wonder if it actually would cause a reaction. There’s no blood in our stomach. Unless we have an ulcer.”

  “I can regenerate. Do you want to try?” Caleb asked.

  “You two are fucking sick,” Tink said. “Can we just get this done with?”

  I chuckled and finished my last inscription. Tink’s magic had grown far beyond the simple circles of the past. This one fused a reactive force barrier with magic dampening. Another pair of runes made sure anything they said within the circle was audible outside. The last pair would let her shock the mages into unconsciousness if they did something unexpected and wake them back up afterwards. The combination of blood and ichor would make the circle far too strong for them to break.

  Tink stepped back to admire her work. “Some of my best yet,” she commented before kneeling and drawing the final curve to complete the circle. The runes flashed to life with red and green pulses. The translucent force barrier flickered before vanishing into quiescence.

  “So now we just wait for them to wake up?” Caleb asked.

  “Yeah, but no one answered my question. What do demons usually do with prisoners?” Tink looked at me.

  I looked at Caleb and toyed with the arrowhead I’d pushed out of my chest. It was slowly turning to mist as the spell holding it together faded away. “We don’t usually take them. The Choir has a tendency to cut themselves if they get a chance so they can take some of us with them.”

  “Demons do the same thing,” Caleb said.

  “Your people are under orders to do it,” I said. “We’re not. We just get told if you can’t escape, might as well take a few of them with you.”

  The angel shrugged. “Regardless, what will be done with human prisoners? This is a new situation, isn’t it?”

  I looked back to Tink. Her knife was in her hand and she didn’t look happy. “It would be up to the Princes,” I said carefully, watching her arm tense. “Of course I wouldn’t recommend killing them, but releasing them seems unlikely. We’ll have to find a place to put them until the war’s over.”

  “We can put them to work,” said an Amon guard, standing near the entrance and listening intently. “Override their will and make them serve us, like they want us to serve them.”

  “Fuck that,” Tink snapped. The Amon bristled. “You’re not going to do that to them. No human slaves or I will cut your nuts off.”

  “Not as slaves,” I said. “But what if we enforced a suggestion on them to refrain from participating in any Conclave action until the end of the war? It’d take a stronger demon than me to get something so complex in their heads, but the Princes could do it.”

  Tink twirled the knife in her hand. “I don’t like fucking with people’s minds, but if it’ll keep them alive, I can deal.”

  “They seem to be waking up,” Caleb said quietly.

  We turned to look into the circle. Chrissy was starting to sit up and her partner was stirring. “Where…what?” Her voice echoed through the chamber and Tink looked very satisfied with herself. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in Hell,” Tink said, approaching the edge of the circle. Chrissy turned to face her. “The literal one, not the metaphorical one.”

  “Not enough fire,” Chrissy agreed. “It’s certainly hot enough though. So, how long do we have until they rape our minds and kill us?”

  I cleared my throat. “That’s not-”

  Chrissy’s eyes widened as she turned her head toward me, and then bodily flung herself in my direction. The force barrier came to life and bounced her backwards on top of her partner who grunted in pain. Before I could say anything more, she ripped at her thumb with her teeth, drawing blood. As she started to draw a rune, the power simply drained away from it, leaving her with nothing but the blood itself dripping to the floor.

  “Chrissy, stop!” Tink shouted. Chrissy’s eyes didn’t leave mine until Tink shouted her name three more times. “What the fuck are you doing? You know what this circle does!”

  “I can’t always control it,” Chrissy said, sinking down to sit on the floor, turning her back on me. “Especially under stress.”

  “Can’t control what?” I asked.

  Her back stiffened. “My name is Christina Peters. My rank is master. I will not speak, eat, nor drink until release or death.”

  “And if you weren’t held prisoner, you’d be trying to kill us instead, so it’s a moot point,” I said. She maintained her silence. “Look, Chrissy, I don’t want to see you hurt, you were a friend once. If you don’t talk to us now, you don’t have long until a bunch of High Princes walk in, and they will actually force your mind until you answer our questions. They’re not known for patience or gentleness.”

  Tink shook her head as Chrissy stayed silent. “I’m not going to let them kill you,” she said. “But we’re giving you the choice between the hard way and the easy way. Trust me on this, you don’t want one of their Princes working on your mind. They’re stronger than any other demon you’ve dealt with.”

  “Shut up, traitor,” snarled the other mage, who was finally sitting up. “Turncoat demon whore.”

  “We can do bad things to this one,” Tink announced. “I’m cool with it.”

  “My name is Warren Blackburn. My rank is master. I will not speak, eat, nor drink until release or death.” The mage crossed his arms over his chest and moved to sit back to back with Chrissy. His eyes locked on me and he spat to the side.

  “I am not comfortable with this situation,” Caleb said. “Prisoners should be treated with dignity and respect. Assaulting their minds for information is a form of torture.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. Remember what your own people did to you? And to me and Tink?”

  He turned to me. “I do remember,” he said quietly. “That’s why I stand by what I said.”

  I had to look away. The Choir had tortured both of us and there was no point arguing about who had it worse. “Yeah. Well, it’s better than being chained to a wall except when you’re being used in live fire exercises.”

  Tink leaned forward. “I saw you blink. You weren’t a fan of that either, were you? Shit, Chrissy, fucking Azriphel took you as prisoner, and I bet he didn’t treat you as poorly. You know demons, you were friends with this one, and now you’re working with the Conclave. You’re willingly working with them, and you know what they’re like. You know what they’re doing.”

  “You don’t know anything, whore,” snarled the man.

  “I thought you weren’t going to speak?” I asked. “Stay strong, Warren. Stay strong.”

  Tink crouched close to the
edge of the circle. “Look at me. Chrissy, look at me. I know the demons did a lot of shit to you. I remember Julian too. But it doesn’t make doing worse to them right.”

  “Are you really trying to appeal to my sense of morality?” Chrissy finally responded. “I’m sorry, Anna, but it doesn’t matter here. The demons have to go, by any means necessary. They aren’t human. We can’t apply the same rules of human morality to them.”

  “They’re not human,” Tink said. “But they’re people! Demons, angels, and humans, we’re all people.”

  “They’re monsters,” Chrissy said. “You’re working for monsters, Anna. What happened to you?”

  “I take offense to that,” I commented.

  “At least you’re only half monster.” Caleb approached the circle next to Tink. “We’re not all monsters, Chrissy. Some of us try to do the right thing, even when it’s hard, even when it might cost us our lives. Some of your people do horrific things under the pretense of doing what is right. I can see you’re torn. I can offer you something the demons can’t, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  No one spoke for a long moment until Warren started laughing. “Forgiveness!” He stood up and grabbed his belt, turning to face Caleb. “This is what I think of your fucking forgiveness.” I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but when I heard running water, I had to keep myself from laughing.

  Caleb maintained a straight face until the mage was finished. Chrissy had scooted as far across the circle as she could. “I’m not impressed,” the angel said. “The barrier protects you from me as much as the other way around. You wouldn’t dare do such a thing if we were face to face.”