The Trouble with Demons

by Shearin, Lisa

  A strong, deep voice came from the shadows just beyond the columns. Mychael’s voice. “Release her or share your guard’s fate.”

  Just what I didn’t need—a hostage situation and a standoff all rolled into one.

  Mychael’s statement was a warning; his words were raw power given voice. Demanding, compelling, those words gave the demon queen a choice, and one choice only—obey or die.

  The queen swayed as if from an unseen breeze, but her hold on me never lessened. Mychael’s voice had gotten to her, and for a brief instant he had controlled her.

  Her fiery eyes blazed with renewed rage. “Show yourself, mortal!”

  I heard the sharp echo of Mychael’s boots as he stepped up on the stage and into the light, but he didn’t pass between the columns. He knew better. Mychael’s left arm was extended; the light beam coming from his index finger was leveled like the deadly weapon it was, never wavering from its target. In his right hand, his sword blazed with pure, white light. His entire body was surrounded by a glowing nimbus.

  When the demon queen saw him, her full lips curved in a satisfied smile. “You. I should have known. Come to me, and I will allow the elfling to live.” Her words had power of their own, not the magical compulsion of a spellsinger, but the smoothly seductive tones of a temptress with millennia of experience.

  “Release her and you will not die.” Mychael’s voice was calm, but unyielding.

  The seductive smile twisted into a sneer. “You think you can destroy me? I will rule when you are dust. Come closer, paladin.”

  “Sir, no!” Vegard shouted.

  “I can feel the distortion from the gate,” Mychael assured him, keeping his eyes on the demon queen. “I need not come any farther. And neither do your brothers.”

  Backup. Guardian backup. Now that was some much-needed good news.

  “More flesh for my children,” the queen said in approval.

  “More gifts for me.”

  Mychael’s beam flared in intensity, searing a blackened circle into her forehead like a brand. The queen screamed in pain and fury, and her claws contracted. I clenched my teeth against the pain. I wouldn’t scream again.

  “My children will feast on you!” she shrieked at him.

  “Your children are prisoners.” Mychael’s voice was relentless. “Release her.”

  “Impossible, there were hundreds.”

  “Now they are captives.”

  “You lie!”

  “Then where are they?” he asked quietly.

  The demon queen didn’t have an answer for that, and neither did I. But I had connected some dots, and I knew she wasn’t going to like the picture it made. When I told her, she’d either let me go or finish the bloody job she’d started. Anything was better than a naked demon queen on top of me.

  I tried to speak without moving my throat, which was easier said than done. “You have no Scythe,” I rasped. “Saghred coming here . . . Guardians already here . . . Only I can touch the rock.” I swallowed, or at least I tried to. “And you have a beauty mark that’s about to become fatal.”

  The demon queen smiled, sure and confident. “Not all of my servants are here.”

  Several things happened more or less at once.

  The demon queen half jumped—but mostly flew—straight up into the shadowed vaults of the ceiling like she’d been shot from a cannon.

  Then she vanished.

  It had to be a cloak, one so complete that it left no sign that she still existed. I knew better; she wasn’t leaving without everything she’d come for. If she could cloak, it meant she was outside of the Hellgate distortion.

  It also meant that she could do anything magically speaking; and from up there, she could do it to anyone.

  I scrambled for the last place I’d seen the Scythe. I was bleeding, but it wasn’t life threatening, at least not until I collapsed from blood loss and woke up on the wrong side of that Hellgate.

  Both of Tam’s hands were sunk into the Hellgate membrane on either side of the slit. All around him, forms writhed and pushed against the milky surface—big forms, hulking; one hand trying to press its way through was twice the size of Tam’s head. Tam saw that massive hand and his incantation sounded more like a snarled string of goblin obscenities. There were bigger, meaner, and more dangerous things desperate to get through that Hellgate before it sealed.

  If Tam could seal it.

  I ran up the stairs to the dais, and to Tam.

  “What can I do?”

  The demon queen’s voice rang out from the vaulted beams supporting the ceiling. I didn’t know the words, but I knew what it sounded like.

  A call to arms.

  Volghuls poured like purple tides through four of the five mirrors.

  Tam’s black eyes blazed. “Get the Scythe!”

  I didn’t want to leave him there.

  “Now!”

  I jumped over the side of the dais to where the Scythe hopefully still was. There it was, gleaming in the dark, the first thing to go right all day. I snatched it up and a mini-Volghul came with it. I shrieked; I couldn’t help it. The little bastard sunk his teeth up to the gums in my leather sleeve, his claws raking my bare hands.

  My shriek gave way to swearing, which led to stabbing. The thing was trying to eat me from the fingers up. The Scythe was a knife, and I used it. A couple slashes and a stab later, one less Volghul was going to reach adulthood.

  Mychael and his Guardians were battling the Volghuls coming out of the mirrors. Piaras had joined his soon-to-be brothers. Those mirrors needed to be shattered. Anything thrown through magically linked mirrors would go in one side and out the other. But if something were coming through at the same time, it’d be like two people trying to come through the same door from opposite sides. Except in this case, the thrown object would break the glass.

  Broken glass, no more Volghuls.

  I desperately looked around for something, anything. The Assembly was a ruin, there had to be chunks of stone, something. I spotted one. It was close to the mirrors, but I had one shot at it, so I needed to be as close as I could get. I scooped up the rock, saw a demon head coming through, and threw it with everything I had.

  The mirror shattered, leaving one less demon door, and hopefully a demon with a concussion on the other side.

  “Raine!”

  It was Phaelan. My cousin was in the safest place a non- magic user could be in a room full of magic-flinging mages and demons—behind Carnades’s stone altar.

  You know the saying “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy”? I did, and I wished I didn’t. If Carnades Silvanus wasn’t my worst enemy, he was at least in the top five. I’d have liked nothing more than to have left him right where he was, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t a particularly nice person, but I wasn’t a murderer.

  I’d unlock his manacles, but first I’d take what I needed from him.

  The Scythe was good and sharp. Carnades’s white linen sacrificial robe was nice and clean. My throat needed a bandage. I grabbed the hem just above the elf mage’s ankles, plunged the blade through the material, and slashed my way around the robe.

  Carnades screamed in appalled rage through his gag and tried to kick me with his bare, manacled feet. If he could have made some coherent words, I’d probably have been turned into a slug.

  “I’m not trying to kill you,” I snapped.

  I wrapped the cloth around my throat a couple of times to try to stop me from getting any more light-headed from blood loss than I already was.

  I flipped the Scythe point down and reached for Carnades’s ankle manacles to pick the lock.

  Phaelan couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We have to let him go.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do. We’re not killers.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  I ignored him and kept working. A second or two later, Carnades had free ankles.

  A pair of spells col
lided, ricocheted, and sent a comet of green flame shooting straight for us.

  “Incoming!” Phaelan yelled. He ducked behind the altar and pulled me down with him.

  The flame smashed into the stone tiers behind us, blasting a hole that was big enough to sit in. I popped back up and went to work on Carnades’s wrist manacles. They clicked open just as another green comet blazed toward us, twice the size of the first. Phaelan swore, I added to it, and we both grabbed handfuls of robe and hauled Carnades over the side of the altar. He landed hard and face-first.

  I didn’t mean to do that. Really.

  Carnades sat up and tore off his gag in fury. “You planned this from the very—”

  That did it. I didn’t hear the demons; I didn’t hear the explosions. It was just me and a mage who had blamed me, degraded me, and pissed me off for the last time. I got in his face.

  “Let’s try this again,” I said between clenched teeth. “I am saving your life for the second time in two days. I tried to warn you, but you didn’t listen. I don’t like you, I don’t believe in anything you stand for, but I don’t stand by and let people get killed. If I can help, I will. That’s the kind of person I am. You can believe it or not; right now I don’t give a damn!”

  Carnades was speechless. Phaelan was checking out his robe.

  “White robe, chained to an altar—what are you, some kind of sacrificial virgin?”

  “I am not a . . . virgin.”

  Carnades almost choked on that last word. Highborn elves were notoriously uptight when it came to sex. It was a wonder there were any of them left.

  “I bet you don’t even wrinkle the sheets,” I muttered.

  The next explosion made all three of us duck and cover. That was way too close. As the blast faded, I heard tearing or peeling or . . .

  . . . Oh crap.

  I looked up and saw a Rudra-shaped indent in the Hellgate. The goblin was gone. Escaped.

  Phaelan and I swore and scrabbled away from that altar. It was cover but it was also a death trap if Rudra Muralin was crouched on top. He had weapons; between Phaelan and me, we had one knife. Carnades stayed put. Fine.

  An explosion shook the Assembly, and the stage floor buckled from underneath, slabs of the stone jutting up at sharp angles. Phaelan and I were already on the floor, and after that, so was everyone else. Two mirrors toppled and shattered. That left only the citadel mirror and one other. We had to reach that mirror.

  My mouth was bone-dry, my body was determined to bleed to death, and breathing was entirely too much work. “Phaelan, I need you to—”

  A Volghul slammed into me from behind and tore the Scythe out of my hand.

  Carnades had to have seen it coming and the son of a bitch didn’t say a word. Phaelan was right; I should have left him on that altar.

  In a flash of opalescent flesh, the demon queen dropped from the ceiling attached to what looked like a spider’s web. I didn’t want to know what part of her it had come from.

  She landed in a crouch at least twenty feet from the citadel mirror. The distance didn’t matter; she covered it in two leaps and dove through, the Volghul with the Scythe right behind her. Rudra Muralin dashed out of the shadows where he’d been hiding and was right on their clawed heels.

  The demon queen, Rudra Muralin, and the Scythe of Nen—all in the citadel, close to the Saghred.

  If she got to the rock and opened it, the disembodied souls of the demon king, Sarad Nukpana, and the worst that could ooze out of the Saghred would possess the first bodies they could find, and those bodies would be Guardians. They would turn the most elite magical fighting force in the seven kingdoms into the most elite and evil magical fighting force.

  All under the command of the king and queen of demons.

  Chapter 29

  “Mychael!”

  It was Tam, he was up to his elbows in Hellgate, and the damned thing still wasn’t closed.

  It was trying to open farther.

  And it was no longer milky white. It was stretched so thin it was almost transparent. A riot of color pressed from the other side; faces and limbs and misshapen bodies surged against it. The tips of multiple and impossibly large claws punched repeatedly at the membrane, trying to puncture it and tear their way through. If they succeeded, it wouldn’t destroy the Hellgate.

  It would destroy the need for a Hellgate.

  The barriers between our world and theirs would cease to exist and the way would be open. Permanently.

  Tam’s shout was for Mychael. His eyes—and his thoughts—were for me.

  His thoughts. I could hear them. Tam was telling me all this. I knew nothing about Hellgates, but Tam did, and his thoughts were in my head.

  He could use his magic again.

  But only if he touched the Hellgate.

  Tam needed Mychael and me. Rudra Muralin hadn’t been able to control an open Hellgate, or the demon queen that came with it. And the queen had to stay within inches of the thing to keep it under control. Together, we might be able to control it, possibly close it—unlikely, but possible—but it would take the three of us and everything we had.

  It would take the Saghred.

  In that instant I knew true fear. The paralyzing kind. Icy terror that freezes your blood and clenches your heart in its fist and won’t let go. I couldn’t move, and believe me, I wanted to. In the next few minutes, I was going to die by demon or Saghred, or maybe even both. Horribly, painfully killed. If it was death by Saghred, the rock would kill me first, then it would take Mychael and Tam.

  After our failure, the demons would be free to take everyone else.

  And they would start with Piaras, Phaelan, and Vegard.

  A roar came from beyond the Hellgate and an impossibly large head thrust its gaping maw against the membrane with such force that I could see every curved fang, each longer than my hand. It wanted out. And unless we closed that Hellgate, it was coming out. People I loved were going to die—or pray for death.

  That was not going to happen.

  I might fail; I’d probably die. But every living thing on this island was going to die if I didn’t get my ass moving and do something to stop it.

  I ran to Vegard’s side. “Take Piaras and Phaelan and get through that mirror. Now!”

  Vegard’s face was the calm of the soon-to-be martyred. “I’ll take them, but I’m coming back.”

  I didn’t believe this. Nobility was a disease around here. “Why? So you can—”

  “And leave you with him?” Phaelan jerked his head in Carnades’s direction. “You’re better off with the demons.”

  “I’m staying,” Piaras insisted.

  I clenched my teeth and I tried for calm; all I could muster up was barely controlled infuriation. Why wouldn’t anyone just do as I said?

  “There’s nothing you can do here,” I told Phaelan and Piaras. I’d given up on Vegard. “I’m not sending you to safety; the citadel’s a war zone by now.” I blew out my breath. “Piaras, just please go to your brothers and do what you can. Go save some lives.” I felt myself smile, fierce and feral. “And Phaelan, go make Rudra Muralin pay for this—and make it hurt.”

  Mychael barked orders and about a dozen Guardians ran out of the dark beyond the stage, armored for battle and armed for Hell. I thought I’d seen every weapon that could be forged from steel, but I was wrong. The Guardians’ weapons had sharp hooks and curved jagged blades—and the metal was green. If it was steel, it was no steel that I’d ever seen. Those blades had been made for a purpose, and from the black demon blood coating them, they and the grim-faced Guardians who wielded them had been doing their jobs.

  A pair of them stopped in front of the only other remaining mirror. The tide of Volghuls had slowed, but not stopped. The Guardians had to wait less than two seconds for another horned demon to emerge. When it did, the Guardians impaled it as it was coming through, shattering the mirror. The men extracted their blades with a quick twist, and the upper half of the dead demon fell out of the mirror
’s frame along with shards of shattered mirror. Severing the magic that linked the mirrors severed the demon coming through. And people thought mirrors were harmless.

  Six of the Guardians charged through the citadel mirror in pursuit of the demon queen and Rudra Muralin—and hopefully to keep anyone from breaking the mirror from the other side and trapping us here. The remaining Guardians formed a protective circle around the mirror, steel in their hands since spells were worthless this close to the Hellgate.

  In the dark beyond the stage, flashes of blue flame and demonic screams told me that the rest of Mychael’s men weren’t limited to steel. An intense volley of fireballs lit the entire Assembly as bright as day, and I saw what was out there.

  Our situation just went from critical to unsurvivable.

  Volghuls were everywhere. I had no idea how many there were, but there were too many, and they were too fast. While I was freeing Carnades and dodging green comets, those mirrors must have been belching Volghuls. Either that or some had survived whatever had happened out in the halls. The demons weren’t winning, but they weren’t dying, either. The Guardians were holding their own. Barely.

  Volghuls weren’t our worst enemy; that distinction went to the elf standing entirely too close to the citadel mirror. Phaelan was right; I’d be better off with the demons.

  Carnades Silvanus was a mirror mage, and he hated Tam and me and wanted to get rid of Mychael. I couldn’t read minds and in his case, I didn’t need to. I knew what the highborn SOB was thinking. Get through the mirror, destroy the one on the other side, and leave us all here to die or worse.

  Take care of the Hellgate first, Raine; deal with the self-righteous jerk later.

  Mychael took the stairs four at a time to Tam’s side, and I was right behind him.

  Tam’s breathing was ragged, and his bottom lip was bleeding from where his fangs had bitten through in his effort. He tried for a weak smile. “This isn’t going as well as I planned.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around.” I looked up and up some more. The Hellgate had grown taller, or maybe it was my terrified imagination. Taller, wider, longer—it didn’t matter. The damned thing was a Hellgate. Smaller wouldn’t make it any better, and bigger couldn’t make it worse than it already was.