Demon Days

by Jan Stryvant

  'No! Don't go thr...'

  Roxy blinked as Sean disappeared right before her eyes, and the flow of people coming through the gate suddenly stopped. It was weird. She couldn't see the gate from this side, but she could see the demons coming out of it. Several of the wolves leapt into the gateway after Sean, while the rest circled around it towards her.

  "We need to run!" Hunter said, panting heavily.

  "But Sean!" Roxy yelled.

  "Made his choice!" Hunter growled, and just then a bright white beam of energy erupted from the gateway, scouring clean everything within a hundred-and-twenty-degree arc for a thousand feet before it.

  Then just like that, it stopped. The shock wave from the superheated air flew out at the speed of sound in all directions, knocking all the survivors to the ground, followed by air rushing back into what had become a near vacuum, causing a second, but weaker shockwave as the ground shook.

  "Sean!" Roxy screamed.

  Snarling, Hunter picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and ran like hell. If Sean was dead, this was the last place she should be. And if he was alive, he'd kill Hunter if he didn't get her out of here now.

  Roxy was beside herself with grief by the time Hunter got her back to the regroup point Chad had set up. She'd been hitting and clawing at him the whole time he'd been running, and when he finally dumped her on the ground, he collapsed as well.

  "Where's Sean?" Chad asked, quickly coming over.

  "He's dead!" Roxy cried.

  "What?"

  "He carried the bomb through the gate just before that beam of light came out!"

  "Dammit!" Chad swore. "I've told him we need him! How the hell could he do this to us!" Chad looked around and focused on Hunter, who was lying on the ground, bleeding. Obviously he'd hit the limits of his healing abilities.

  "Hunter, is this true?"

  "Is what true?" Hunter gasped.

  "Did Sean jump through?"

  "Yes."

  "Aw, fuck," Chad said and dropped down to sit on the ground.

  "Chad," Hunter said quietly.

  "What?"

  "First, please get me a medic. Second," Chad was shocked to find Hunter suddenly pinning him to the ground, yelling at him, "Get your head out of your ass and get back to work! Sean didn't do that just so you could drop the ball while feeling sorry for yourself!"

  Chad blinked as Hunter passed out on top of him. Pushing him off, he got back to his feet.

  "I need a medic over here! Ryan! I need you to grab Baron, Ray, Travis, and Keith. Scout the area around the battleground. See if there are any of our people out there who need help, and keep an eye out for the enemy.

  "Claudia!" Chad said, keying the radio.

  "What, Chad?"

  "Pull your people back to the south of here. We'll form up on the south side of the interstate.

  "Maitland!"

  "I heard you! I'll pull the reserves back there as well."

  "Great. Get the helicopters in here, we need to start airlifting out any who are wounded or who can't keep up. Trey! You on the line?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Great. Come over here; I need you to haul Roxy back to the ranch. I got a few others for you too."

  Roxy watched as Chad stood there, tossing out orders and planning strategy for dealing with the remaining demons. Preparing for the next onslaught through the gate. No one knew what had happened on the other side, and it would be another day and a half before it collapsed. She wanted to run down there, jump through herself, and see if Sean was still alive—but, but little Sean needed her. She couldn't abandon their son like that.

  She just couldn't.

  She sat there, numb as the helicopter came in, and slowly got on board as they loaded the survivors from Sean's group. They were all passed out from exhaustion at this point, all of them seriously wounded to the limit of their regeneration as well.

  When they landed, she just sat there until someone helped her off the helicopter and led her back to their bedroom. She shifted back to her human form and let the armor slide off her body to land at her feet as she felt the tears run down her cheeks.

  "Where's Sean?" Cali asked.

  "He's, he's gone," Roxy whispered.

  "What?" Cali said, shocked.

  "He went through the gate, with the bomb. It blew up. I, I don't think he survived," Roxy said in a whisper.

  "How can that be?" Cali said, looking around the room, "our Sean cannot be dead!"

  "It's Sean, Rox," Jolene said, coming over and wrapping her arms around her, "I'm sure he survived it. You know that asshole's always scaring the hell out of us, but he'll come through, he always does."

  "I don't know," Daelyn said slowly as her phone pinged. "It was a pretty big bomb. He would have had to get a good distance away from it."

  "Why'd you make a big one?" Roberta asked, her phone pinging too.

  "'Cause he told me to?" Daelyn said, looking a little worried.

  "Well, maybe if you all looked at your phones," Peg said, holding hers up, "you'd calm your asses down and chill."

  "Huh?" Roxy said and looked around the room for her phone, which had the message light blinking on it. Picking it up, she activated the screen and looked at the text message on it. It was from Tisha, the lioness in DC with Steve.

  The message simply read, 'Sean's not dead. He's not in our afterlife, so he's still alive.'

  "Afterlife?" Cali asked.

  "What Sean calls 'lion la la land'," Jolene told her.

  Roxy wrapped her hand around the phone and squeezed it so tight it shattered. "When I get my hands on him," she growled.

  "You'll end up pregnant again," Jolene snickered, "and you know it."

  Last Living Souls

  Sean landed on the other side of the gate, his jaw dropping in shock as he saw the scene before him. It was the world of his visions! Everything was black, or shades of black; there was so little color, it was surreal. Like something out of one of those old television shows from the sixties they used to show them back in middle school.

  There was a large stone keep, or maybe it was a small castle, about a hundred yards away. It had banners and flags flying on it, all of which were in shades of black and gray; there was no white to be seen anywhere around. And the encampments around it! There were dozens if not hundreds of them, everywhere!

  And then there were the demons. Thousands of them. They were all mustering up to march through the gate, or at least they had been, and he was now standing right smack in the middle of a group of biskops who, along with everyone else, were staring at the lion who had just suddenly appeared in their midst.

  A lion who suddenly realized the device he had dropped on the ground had now started to beep, which he could barely hear over the sound of a dozen swords being draw around him as three wolves came flying through the portal behind him and immediately set to fighting with the biskops, who were quick to recover from their surprise, and immediately set to slaughtering them.

  Turning to the left, Sean took off running just as fast as his four feet could carry him, looking for a hole, any kind of hole, to hide in, because he figured he had about four seconds of life left.

  Three.

  Two. Wait, over there, what was that? A darker spot? Turning, Sean ran smack into it. It was a tunnel, a drainage tunnel of some kind, and several of the demons had followed him into it. Sean cast the strongest shield spell he knew behind him and shifted back into his hybrid form so he'd have some sort of armor, just as the world went—

  WHITE.

  Even with his eyelids closed, he could see the whiteness of it. Feel the warmth, the heat, the burning hot heat, as all of his fur caught fire and his flesh started to burn, his shield long since dissolved.

  But there must have been silver in the blast, because the shield on his tag kicked in just as the shockwave hit him, and blasted him down the tunnel, rupturing his eardrums as his eyes burned out from too much light, and everything suddenly went black as his body slammed into s
omething hard, and he fell, unconscious.

  He woke slowly. He was tired. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He hurt. Oh, how he hurt. He hurt everywhere. His skin felt like a thousand insects were stinging at him, and his eyes could only see sparkles of strange colors. Calling up his base framework, he checked his mana levels. He was positive, but just barely, and his body was using it as fast as it came back to regenerate.

  Or maybe he should have said as slow as it came back. He was barely alive, but he was alive, and he was healing, albeit slowly. And painfully. Very, very painfully.

  'If you're going to kill me, Dad, now would be a good time,' Sean thought as he laid there, panting.

  There was no response.

  He would have blinked if he'd had eyelids.

  'Dad?'

  He could feel it. There was nobody else there. Well, nobody but his own beast, who was trying very hard not to whimper from the pain they were both in. Testing his nose, which still seemed to work, Sean could smell nothing that he or his lion could identify. His ears were still healing, and who knew how long it would be before he could see again?

  Not that it mattered, because he didn't think it would be at all healthy to try and move until his skin and body healed. Sean's only guess as to why he was even alive was that the bodies of the demons behind him and his shielding had blocked enough of the blast that the damage hadn't overwhelmed his lycan constitution.

  But what had happened to the First? Why wasn't he in Sean's head anymore? Sean remembered several times, back when this had all started, that the First had said they'd be stuck together until Sean died.

  But Sean wasn't dead.

  And he hadn't gone to the dreamland when he was unconscious either. Something very strange had just happened. Sean thought over what he could remember of what had just taken place, slowly. He'd pushed Roxy out of the way because he was fairly certain that the gate would focus the blast in one direction. Assuming it came through at all, of course.

  The First had been yelling at him, and then suddenly his voice had just ceased as Sean had gone through. Originally Sean had planned to jump through, toss the bomb, and jump back. But there was that pack of biskops he'd landed in the middle of. The only reason they hadn't killed him was the three wolves who'd followed him through the gate and attacked immediately, while Sean had wasted an entire moment being shocked at what he'd found.

  Well, one thing was certain, everyone was dead. All the demons, that is. If they weren't dead, they would have come in here, wherever here was, and killed him. So his only move right now, as he saw it, was to lie here very, very still and not to whine or whimper or do anything to draw attention to himself. To just be another dead body, deep in a tunnel, with lots of other dead bodies.

  Or something like that.

  But oh, did it hurt. Sean had felt pain before, but normally his body healed fast enough that it didn't last all that long. But everything was so messed up, and it needed so much mana to fix it, mana that was coming in so very slowly, that all he could do was just lie there and try not to make a sound.

  To try and take his mind off the pain, he tried to redirect the healing to concentrate on his ears first. Being blind and deaf was about as unpleasant an experience as he could think of. If he could fix his ears, at least he'd know if there was anyone else around.

  It was during this process that he realized, as his ear drums finally grew back, that his ears had been burned off, along with all his fur and probably half of his tail.

  That made him whimper, just once, the echo of it off the walls driving him back into immediate silence, as without his ears, he couldn't get any kind of direction from any noise he might hear.

  Some very long and very fearful time later, he could tell that his ears had finally grown back, and the pain had lessened enough that he fell asleep. Or perhaps he simply passed back out.

  Ξ

  There was a keep. He was sure it was a keep, because it looked like so many of the ones he'd seen in his high school history classes. It was a large round tower, with two smaller towers to one side, and walls connecting each of them in a triangular shape. It appeared to be made out of the same grayish stone as the structure he'd seen when he came through the gate, but the design was different; it was more...human.

  He could see creatures toiling around it; they looked to be gnashers and other small demonic creatures. They worked with a purpose, but what that purpose was, he just couldn't tell. As he was watching, a figure came outside, tall and dressed in dark plate armor. But that wasn't what drew his attention.

  They were brown.

  Everything he'd see so far here was black, white, or gray. White was rare, but on occasion he'd spied it. Black, true black, was a bit more common, but everything else was the many shades of gray. Complex half-tones of many different shades. He'd found it easy to get used to.

  But here, here was a being that was brown. Different shades of brown. The helm both covered and distorted the lines of their head, and many of the lines of their body were equally covered, and therefore confused. But he could still see it in many of the places that the armor didn't cover.

  Brown.

  Sean knew this was something he needed to investigate, that he needed to see closer, and just like that, he found his point of view zooming in. They turned away from him as he drew near and started to walk out to the fields, talking to the many demons working there, examining things around the keep, and for all the world, it looked like they were carrying out an inspection.

  Sean could hear nothing as he followed, which he found curious, but now that he was closer, he hoped they would turn around so he could get a glimpse of their face.

  When they finally did turn, however, his point of view followed from behind, so he could look at what they were looking at, still for all the world acting like he was peering over a shoulder.

  The head twisted back and forth several times then, as if looking for something. A sword came out in one hand, while the other started to bat around their head, as if trying to chase off a fly or mosquito. When they saw nothing, they turned and quickly strode inside, with Sean still following over their shoulder.

  Inside, there was a fairly typical stone hallway, with small black torches on the walls, giving off black flames and, Sean guessed, providing light. They strode down one hall and into another, then turned into a room, closing the door behind themselves.

  The room looked to be a comfortable one, with a large bed dominating the whole of it. Sheathing their sword, they dropped to their knees beside the bed and pulled out a small, flat box. Sliding it out, they opened it. There was a pile of cloth inside, a mottled pattern of greens, which was tattered and worn. They quickly unwrapped the cloth, and in the center, there was a necklace that had been cut open, the cut ends looking to be both melted and tarnished.

  Picking up the necklace, they quickly went over and sat down on one of the padded benches in front of a nightstand. Setting the necklace down on it, they grabbed the helmet with both hands and pulled it up and off, a cascade of long, thick, black hair tumbling out.

  Giving a shake of their head to settle their hair as they set the helmet down, they grabbed the necklace and put it around their neck, and as Sean watched, they carefully touched the ends together.

  The moment they touched, everything disappeared, and Sean fell back asleep.

  Ξ

  The next time Sean awoke, things felt normal. Strangely normal. He wasn't hungry, he wasn't thirsty, and he was only in a small amount of pain. Getting slowly to his hands and knees, he was sore everywhere, but everything seemed to work. Well, he couldn't see anything, but he didn't know if there was anything to see. He was in a tunnel, after all.

  His mana was still low, but it was finally starting to recover. Taking a small risk, he cast a small light spell in the palm of his left hand, and then shone it around like a flashlight.

  Behind him the tunnel had collapsed, and there was a lot of tar there, so the only direction he could go was forward. Sta
rting down the tunnel, Sean examined the walls. They were all cut stone, so this had obviously been made for a purpose, by someone. When he came to the first change in the tunnel, it was an opening above him that went up about twenty feet, and then ended in some sort of plate.

  The metal rungs set in the wall had all been destroyed, rotted or rusted, so there was no going up. So he continued on.

  After the fifth one, Sean realized that none of them were going to have any kind of ladder he could climb up, so he examined the stonework. Flexing his claws, he hooked them into the cracks between the stones, and started to carefully climb up the side into one of the openings.

  Once up inside it, he was able to brace his feet against one side and his back against the other, as it was fairly narrow, and work his way up to the top. He found the cover at the top was heavy, but it wasn't locked in place, so with some grunting and straining, he pushed it to the side and climbed up out of the tunnel, into a pile of blasted rubble.

  Pushing up through the rubble, Sean looked around. Obviously the castle had been leveled by the explosion, and he couldn't see any remainder of the encampments that had surrounded the area. With any luck, that would set the enemy's plans back, at least for a little while.

  It took Sean a moment to figure out where the gate was, mainly because it was no longer there. This meant he'd been unconscious or healing for at least forty hours, if not a hell of a lot longer. But he could see the crater where the blast had gone off; it was more a bowl of black glass now, and everything within a thousand yards had either been incinerated or knocked down.

  Pulling himself up out of the hole, Sean checked himself. His armor was dirty, but it was whole, and mostly undamaged. His large sword was still strapped to his back; his necklace was still in one piece, though his silver tag had melted again. It hadn't burned its way into him because he'd been face down when it'd happened this time. His only guess what that it had been overloaded by the silver ions in the explosion.