by Julie Kenner
“Five stones to raise me,” Cami said, her eyes turning black. “Six to bind me. The blood of three vestal virgins, flowing but not alive, to protect me.” Her smile was white, and I flashed on a memory of Cami, laughing in flannel pajamas as she stood at the sink next to mine and dutifully brushed her teeth every night. I blinked back an unwelcome rush of tears and reminded myself to focus. Somehow, I’d stop this demon. And I’d do it for Cami.
“You know your Roman history, don’t you, Katie? You, who’ve grown up in this ancient city? There are no vestals left, of course, but I have found a worthy substitute. For what were the vestals but secret-keepers? And what females now, within the seven hills of Rome, still keep such weighty and clandestine confidences?”
I knew the answer, of course. As a Demon Hunter, my very life was a secret. As for the rest—
“And you are, of course, pure. Like my host and the young Greta? Your male cohorts I assume are pure as well, but since history requires a female . . .” The demon trailed off, then approached me. Cami’s body was slowing down, becoming paler. I tried not to think about that. On the one hand, the departure of the demon would be good news for me. At least until one of those demons beyond the gates rushed in, overpowered Eric, and slit my throat.
The demon leaned closer, bathing me in its rancid breath. “So tell me—just between us girls—are you still capable of serving Vesta? Or would you have been buried alive for betraying your vows?”
I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. I was only fifteen years old and Catholic. Raised not only in the Church but in the Vatican itself, my only father figure a priest. The answer was obvious, and the demon knew it.
“And Katie makes three,” the Cami-demon said. “Now where is the stone?”
“Gone,” I said, silently thankful we’d dropped the damn thing. Not such a bad move after all. “You should have told your thugs not to attack us.”
For an instant, I saw a flash of the true demon inside—red eyes and bulging skin, as if thick spines were about to burst forth. Then she gave a shake of her head, and everything settled into place, her smile so friendly and her eyes so bright that my heart skipped a little. This was Cami. Except, of course, it wasn’t.
“Not to worry, little ones.” She turned, then faced Eric. I struggled against my bonds, terrified of what she might do to him. But my worry was unfounded. With one wave of her hand, she swept him aside, as if an invisible hand had picked him up and pitched him like a dirty sock against the far wall. He crashed there, smashing against one of the pedestals and sending it tumbling. Oil spread on the ground, still burning, so that it looked as if we were already walking through hell’s fiery landscape.
But it was what I saw when I looked back at Abaddon that really had me cringing. He held Cami’s hand outstretched in front of him. In the archway, the demons dropped to their knees, their murmured chants now rising to full-bodied voices. An eerie light seemed to fill the chamber through which we’d entered, and after a moment, I saw a shadow in the distance. I squinted, trying to figure out what was happening.
And then I saw it. The stone, brought up from the depths of the pit. Now it floated through the air, drawn mystically to Cami’s outstretched hand.
I shivered, my mind racing as I cut a glance toward Eric. He winced, shifting his position to a crouch, ready to take the first possible moment and spring. He looked at me, his eyes burning, and I knew he wanted to go for it right then. I shook my head, hoping he understood. Attack her now, and he’d surely die. The battle was a loser even with weapons. With only my knife, Eric would be dead meat in no time.
No, the time to fight was coming, much as I wasn’t crazy about the details of the window of opportunity. Abaddon had to leave Cami’s body and enter mine—that much, she’d made clear. The time to attack was in those few brief moments before I died, thus saving the world and saving my life. All in all, a nifty result.
I only hoped Eric could make that window.
With the stone in hand, the Cami-demon came toward me, her walk a bit wobbly. Her skin was so pale she seemed translucent. She held the stone out, and try as I might, I couldn’t break my bonds and knock the treacherous impostor out of her hand.
“Now, Kate. There’s no point in fighting. All I ask is that you do me one teensy little favor.” And then she shoved the stone into my mouth, pushing it so far back I almost gagged. “Safe keeping,” she said. “Wouldn’t want you not touching it when the ritual words are spoken. That,” she added, “wouldn’t do at all.”
And with that, she collapsed to the ground, the last drop of life having stained the stone floor.
I wanted to mourn for Cami, but there wasn’t time. With Abaddon back to being incorporeal, someone had to come perform this big-deal ritual. Which, translated, meant that someone had to come kill me.
My best guess was that it was going to be one of the hundreds of demons now bursting through the archway like a swarm of hornets. The swarm parted, half heading toward Eric, the other half forming a circle around me.
One tall demon with midnight-black hair stepped out of the group and walked toward me. He looked up at the ceiling, which seemed to pulsate with an odd glow. Abaddon, I realized. The demon’s essence hung suspended somewhere between the ether and our world, caught by the power of the still-unfinished ritual.
The demon in front of me, I knew, had come to bring that act to a close.
He moved toward me, and I thrashed uselessly, the stone making it impossible for me to even scream out for Eric, who I desperately hoped was still alive. I could no longer see him, but I pinned my hope on the fact that the demons were still clustered there, going after something. Surely if he were dead, they would have joined their cohorts in the circle.
The demon pressed his thumbnail against his cheek, then rent his flesh, drawing blood. Then he reached for my forehead. And though I tried desperately to sink into the wooden post behind me, he managed to paint a bloody mark on my head.
He stepped back several paces, then kneeled, his head lowered so that I couldn’t hear his words. Panic gripped me. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a lengthy incantation. Worse, I suspected it culminated with slitting my throat.
I tried to scream for Eric, but I couldn’t get past the stone in my mouth. I tried to break my bindings, but they were too tight. In other words, I was pretty much screwed as the demon lifted his head, flashed a grin filled with rotten teeth, and then marched toward me, the knife held high with an air of ceremony.
He muttered an incantation as he walked, a mix of Latin, Akkadian, and Hebrew, from what little I could hear. I heard him call various demons by name and swear allegiance. And as he stepped up behind me, I heard a reference to blood, bile, and “the blackness into which our sacrifice would fall.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw him lift the knife. Instinctively—cowardly—I closed my eyes, my thoughts focused on Eric and God and the life I was leaving behind. I forced myself not to think of the vile thing that would soon fill my body, choosing instead to remember all the good I’d done in my short tenure as a full-fledged Hunter.
I tensed, expecting the sting of the blade across my neck. Anticipating the nothingness to follow.
But oblivion didn’t come. Instead, I heard a high-pitched whzzz and then a thud as the demon hit the ground. I opened my eyes to find the demon at my feet. Across the room, I saw Eric on the ground, one arm outstretched. I realized he must have burst through the horde of demons, flinging himself onto the ground and into the burning oil even as he’d let fly the dagger that had saved me.
Now his shirt smoldered as hidden demons pulled at his legs, dragging him through the hot oil and back into their close. His face was a bloody, bruised mess, and I wanted to cry out in desperation and frustration.
With one hand, he clawed at the floor, but his other hand was clenched tightly closed. He lifted his face to me and our eyes met. “Do you trust me?” he called.
Always, I screamed in my head. Unable to spea
k, I nodded.
As I watched, baffled, he unclenched his hand, and I saw that it was filled with ash. He drew in a breath, then blew out violently, sending the ash into the hot oil spreading across the floor, a small blue flame dancing gleefully atop it.
Immediately, the blue flame erupted and waves of deep red flames followed the path of the oil, reaching high toward the chamber’s ceiling and eviscerating everything in its path—demons, pedestals, and, I feared, Eric.
That fear, thank God, was unfounded. As the living, lurching flame turned the demon horde to dust, Eric lunged forward into the center of the room, away from the flame snaking around the perimeter.
He raced to me, breathing hard and unsteady on his wounded leg. With one quick motion, he snatched his knife out of the fallen demon’s eye. In seconds, I was free, and I ripped the stone from my mouth and tossed it into the moving flame.
“What the hell did you do?”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said.
I stared at him. “You don’t know?”
“Later,” he said. “Right now, let’s survive.”
“Good plan,” I said. “How?” I looked around, quickly realizing that the situation was more dire than I’d anticipated. The fire that surrounded us was now arcing up, forming a canopy over our heads. It burned wildly hot, destroying everything it touched, including the ceiling. Rock and mortar dripped down on us like molten lava, and in the center of it all, I saw a shimmer that I knew had to be the essence of Abaddon, writhing as if in agony.
That, I figured, was good. If we were going to die a fiery death, at least we were taking one demon down with us.
“I love you,” I said to Eric, as the circumference of fire tightened around us.
“I know you do,” he said. “But this isn’t over yet.”
“Are you nuts?” I retorted as the fire seemed to sniff us out, a living thing seeking new prey. Through the shimmer of heated air, I could see the archway, through which lay the safety of that first chamber. There was, however, no way from here to there.
“Every thing around us is ashes,” I pointed out. “Burned to a crisp in milliseconds. I’m all for optimism, but that’s taking it a little too far.”
“We’re going through,” he said, pointing to the doorway. “Run. Don’t stop. And don’t look back.”
I took an involuntary step to the side, away from him. “We can’t. There’s no way we’ll—”
“You said you trusted me,” he reminded me, taking my hand and tugging me back toward him. And toward the flames. “Didn’t you mean it?”
“I meant it,” I said, realizing even as I said the words just how much I meant them. “I do trust you.” No matter how absurd—no matter how terrifying—I knew that I would follow Eric anywhere.
Even into the fires of hell.
"Katherine? I am so sorry. Forgive my rudeness, but I have been dealing with many fires these past few days, and—”
“Fires?” Father’s soft voice pulled me from my memory, and I blinked, almost surprised to find myself unscathed and no longer wrapped in those queer flames. “Oh. Right.” I rewound his words. “No, no. That’s fine. I, um, I had a lot to think about.”
“Yes,” he said, and I could imagine him nodding. “I imagine that you would.”
“Are you sure?” I asked Father, my voice little more than a whisper. “Are you absolutely positive it’s Abaddon?”
“As sure as I can be without Abaddon himself speaking his name. But the demonic attacker’s pronouncement suggests no other conclusion.”
“Why?”
“Cardinal fire,” he said, as if that explained everything.
To him, it probably did. To me, not so much.
“The ash that Eric tossed into the burning oil,” he explained after I expressed my cluelessness. “It created cardinal fire. That is, of course, how you escaped even as the demons and their lair were eviscerated.”
“I figured out the escape part,” I said. “After all, I was there.” After we’d raced unscathed through the fire, Eric confessed that he’d had no idea what the ash would do, or whether we could survive. But he’d trusted our alimentatore, who had given the ash to him with instructions to use it only in the direst of emergencies. “It’s this ‘cardinal fire’ stuff that is news to me.”
“It is the ash of an alleged heretic wrongly burned, who forgave his accuser, the Church, and the cardinal who ordered his death at the very moment the flames consumed him. The ash is extremely rare . . . and also extremely dangerous. Wilson provided it to Eric without Forza’s approval or authorization, ” he added, referring to our very first alimentatore, Wilson Endicott. “Fortunately, no harm befell you.”
“Just the opposite, I’d say,” feeling a bit testy. “That fire is what saved our lives. If you’re saying we shouldn’t have had it—”
“I am saying that cardinal fire is inherently dangerous to some. It is not a thing to be trifled with.”
“Dangerous how?” I knew Wilson, trusted him completely. He would never have intentionally put me or Eric in harm’s way.
“Katherine,” Father said gently, “we face new problems today. I tell you this only because it is the reference to cardinal fire that makes clear the enemy you face today.”
“Right,” I said, duly chastised. I needed to keep my head in today’s game and not preoccupied with twenty-year-old battles and their enigmatic consequences. “So why now? He hasn’t only recently regained his strength, has he? Did this cardinal fire put him that long out of commission?”
“We do not believe so,” Father said. “Our understanding is that the fire either cleans an area of an obvious demonic presence and destroys its temple and talismans, or it reveals a hidden presence so that the presence can be battled and defeated. But as demons do not exist in our world, the victory is temporary only, sending the demons back to the ether until they are able to once again get a toehold in our world. Unlike what you have experienced in the past, cardinal fire does not trap a demon in any sort of talisman.”
“Which takes us right back to my question. If Abaddon wanted revenge, why wait so long? Why come after me now? And why me? Why not Eric, too?”
“The answer, it would seem, lies in the Sword of Caelum. ”
That, at least, was an answer I’d expected. After all, the Watson demon had made a big deal of the sword thing. “Okay. But what is the Sword of Caelum?” A thump echoed in the hallway and I inhaled sharply, suddenly fearful I wasn’t alone.
“Katherine?”
“One second.” I eased across the room and opened the door, peering out down the long hallway. “Stuart?” I called.
A pause, and then his answer drifted up. “Are you looking for me?”
“I heard something,” I explained. “Just making sure you’re okay.” Not the entire truth, but workable.
“Fine,” he assured me. “There’s air in the pipes. Made a hell of a racket thumping around when I turned the water back on.”
“Okay, cool. I’m going to keep investigating up here.” I stuck my head back in the warm wooden room and shut the door, cutting off his answer, but not too worried that he’d be offended. If he was actually going through the motion of inspecting the plumbing, I could probably stay on the phone for an hour and he’d never notice I was missing.
“Sorry, Father,” I said, getting back to the nitty-gritty. “Go on.”
“Ah,” he said. “Of course.” He cleared his throat, and I could hear the rustle of paper as he looked at his notes. Even in his late seventies, the man had an enviable memory, and I knew he didn’t need to rely on his jottings. Having them there was merely a comfort, and I smiled a little as I pictured him sitting behind his simple oak desk, a portrait of the pope on the wall behind him.
“Most believe that the Sword of Caelum does not really exist,” he began.
“Is that a fact? The demon I met last night seems to think it does.”
“A rumor only,” Father Corletti said. “Mist and magic. F
or centuries, there have been stories about the Sword of Heaven, brought down by the Archangel Michael to aid the worthy in the battle against evil. Most believe it is the equivalent of a fairy tale for demons. A story told to frighten, with no substance behind the words.”
“And you believe that?”
“I cannot say with any certainty whether it does or does not exist. If the demons believe that it does, and believe that you wield it, that is enough to put you in danger. And, perhaps, to give you an advantage.”
“The danger I get. The advantage, not so much.”
“I understand. But Katherine, if the sword does exist, it would be a miraculous thing indeed. Charged with the power to strike down a particular high demon when wielded by the prophesized one whose familial blood burned in the flame that forged the blade.”
I ran that through my head twice and couldn’t make it compute. “Come again? Did you say a particular demon? And what’s that about the forging?”
“According to legend, the sword has the power to strike down—and prevent from ever rising again—the kith and kin of one particular demon named during the ceremony that blessed the blade.”
“Abaddon?”
“That is certainly my assumption.”
“And he thinks I’m the one who can wield it.”
“Apparently so.”
“Why?”
“That, I do not know. For that matter, we do not even know for certain that the sword exists. The full legend instructs that a knight—his name long lost to history—struck down the demon Themoratep in the year 504 B.C. That was the first use of the sword, which was then reforged, its blade primed for a new owner and a new victim.”
“That’s an awful lot of detail for a legend,” I said.
“I agree. And it is those details that suggest the truth behind the legend. It is also interesting that we have historical artifacts referencing Themoratep. But all predate the birth of Christ by more than five hundred years.”
“You believe this,” I said, certain I was reading him right. “This isn’t smoke and mirrors to you.”
“No, Katherine. It is not.”