Dragonsword

by Chloe Garner

  They settled into place, Maryann giving Sam her wrists without pause. Samantha glanced at Jason, who seemed like he had a better idea of what was going to happen than Sam did, then picked up the knife.

  She spoke words of power, binding words not dissimilar to the ones Mahkail had used to bind the angeldust to her body, and slowly began to trace her mark onto Maryann’s back. The girl’s body tightened, but she didn’t fight.

  The center of the mark was just below her shoulder blade, the furthest extremes only just making it to her spine. When Samantha had marked Sam, she had used his entire back, centering it over his heart, but this was a different process with a different purpose.

  She cut through the skin, through the muscle, until the blade slid along Maryann’s shoulder blade or her ribs, using the girl’s shirt with to wipe off blood as she kept the pace of the knife steady. About halfway through, the power of the mark began to amplify, and Maryann buried her face into the dirt and screamed. Moments later, she was fighting Sam and Jason, but only with the strength she would have had in a human body. Samantha had taken her demonic strength, and neither of the brothers had any trouble holding her.

  Samantha’s voice grew louder as she wove the power the way she’d seen it done before, magic and contract spun into one. The terms were nowhere near as specific as in a demonic contract, amplifying the inflexibility of the result. Blood oozed out over the skin that Samantha hadn’t sliced open, eventually ashing, but not fast enough to keep the girl’s shoulder visible. She screamed and thrashed, and Samantha put her knee down on Maryann’s back to hold her more still. The knife slid through undefended flesh, cutting new ribbons of dark red through the white skin, and the magic of the binding drew tighter and tighter.

  Maryann was sobbing in between screams now, begging Samantha to stop. She writhed and kicked, and at one point she got a wrist free and tried to push herself up off the ground, but Sam pulled it back out from under her, pulling her shoulders tight again. Samantha sent him sympathy as his stomach churned. Self-hatred. Sad that it was just part of the job.

  Samantha reached the end of the mark and took a breath. She only had a moment to pause, but she took it.

  “Anadidd’na Anu’dd Parroah’na Lahn,” she said, then plunged the knife to the hilt into the girl’s back, right at the center of the mark. Maryann’s voice reached a peak and cut off abruptly. Part of it was that Samantha had stabbed through her lung, but the other part was that, even with a knife through her lung, the ordeal was over. Samantha stood and met Jason’s eye, nodding. He let go of Maryann and the three of them took a few steps away as she curled, fetal, on her side and cried.

  “I didn’t know demons cried,” Sam said.

  “They all do, when you bind them,” Samantha answered. “They all think they’re ready for it, and then…”

  She sighed, closing her hands into fists to force them to stop shaking.

  “What now?” Jason asked.

  “Now we go get packed up and go to Chicago,” Samantha said. “Kill another demon.”

  “What about her?” Sam asked.

  Samantha knelt next to Maryann and put her hand on the girl’s arm. Maryann shuddered hard and curled tighter around her knees.

  “Shhh,” Samantha said. She put her hand over the mark. It had healed into a permanent black scar, the skin around it swollen and red in protest of the angelmark’s presence. It would never change. The tissue wasn’t hot, so Samantha slid the knife free and blew on it, ashing the blood. She put it into her boot and stood.

  “Go pull yourself together,” she said. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Maryann vanished without standing and Samantha closed her eyes. She couldn’t feel the girl, but she could feel the arc of energy out attached to her. Until she set the girl loose, that energy drain would be there.

  “You going to explain what just happened?” Jason asked.

  “I am collecting them all,” Samantha said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I am now the proud owner of one demon,” she said. “Mine to do whatever I want with her.”

  “Is it always that bad?” Sam asked.

  “Usually it’s worse,” Samantha said. “Sometimes they do a full ritual out of it. Can take days.”

  “Days,” Jason said.

  “We’re sadistic bastards,” Samantha said, brushing ash off her hands. “All of us.”

  <><><>

  Kelly popped into the backseat as the Chicago skyline came into view. Jason nearly drove off the road.

  “Cut me,” Kelly said.

  “Come again?” Jason asked, sitting forward to see Kelly in the rearview.

  “I said cut me,” Kelly said, shoving his arm between the two front seats.

  “Pass,” Jason said.

  “You figured it out, then,” Samantha said.

  “I did.”

  His arm didn’t move.

  “He really means it, doesn’t he?” Jason said.

  “I can regenerate,” Kelly said. “I know how to regenerate.”

  His arm jerked back.

  “You’re different. What have you done?” Kelly asked.

  “Who?” Jason asked. “Which time?”

  “Anadidd’na Anu’dd,” Kelly said. “It isn’t my job to care about you.”

  “Charming,” Jason said, settling back into his seat.

  “What happened?” Kelly asked.

  “We’re hunting demons,” Samantha said. “I’m training Jason. You missed a lot in your quest to master regeneration.”

  “And she picked up a demon slave at the market,” Jason said, just to stir the pot.

  “You what?”

  Jason heard Samantha sigh and felt her bury her knees into the back of his seat as she slid lower in hers. He grinned.

  “They cannot be trusted,” Kelly said. “They will betray you.”

  “You think I mangled the binding?” Samantha asked. “That’s insulting.”

  “They can’t be trusted.”

  “You really don’t understand what binding is,” Samantha said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kelly maintained.

  “It does.”

  “This is the demon you brought across from the other side?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your fondness for her is a risk. You have no right to take it.”

  “Are we going to have to have this conversation again?” Samantha asked. “I take the risks I choose.”

  There was a sullen silence.

  “So,” Jason said. “Where are we going, Sam?”

  <><><>

  Another day, another demon.

  Sam had tracked the network to Minneapolis and then Denver. They were taking their time and Samantha’s training hit a new pitch of intensity. Jason found himself waking cold and stiff, as if he’d been dead rather than asleep, twelve or sixteen hours after he fell asleep, with Samantha sitting on the bed waiting to push him again. Kelly watched with rapt attention, apparently reserving judgment until he understood what was going on better.

  “What’s up?” he asked, sitting up in bed the morning after the Denver kill. Sam was snoring in the next bed. Jason looked at the clock. He’d been asleep for eighteen hours. He didn’t remember any of it. His body confirmed that he had been unmoving for that length of time, and his mind knew that the time had passed, but there hadn’t been any dreams or any restless sleep. No waking to roll over and sleep again. Nothing his conscious mind could use to explain the missing time. It was just gone.

  “Where are we headed?” he asked.

  “New Orleans. How are you feeling?” she asked.

  There were so many kinds of ways to not be okay.

  “My whole body hurts,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “It’s normal, if that makes you feel any better,” she said. It did. She motioned. “Roll over.”

  He did, his shoulders and his hips creaking as they moved. The pressure of her hand on his back nearly knocked him
unconscious. She rubbed her thumbs along the tight muscles across his shoulders and down his spine and he clenched his teeth to keep from groaning. She tugged at his shirt.

  “Take that off,” she said. He pulled it out from under him and up over his head, leaving his arms tangled in the sleeves and laying like a piece of meat while she rubbed at his back. There was oil and there were things that smelled - earthy, sharp, sweet, things he couldn’t identify - and colors popped in front of his closed eyes as the muscles stretched back out and straightened back into their accustomed paths.

  “Damn,” he said. “That’s better than sex.”

  He heard her soft laugh as she worked through his lower back. His knees tingled.

  “All right,” she said many minutes later. “That’s about all I can do for you right now. You ready to work?”

  He rolled back over and pulled his shirt down over his head, then hugged her.

  “Thank you.”

  She hugged him back and kissed his cheek.

  “Don’t say that too fast,” she said. She turned to find Kelly. “I need you out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it could be dangerous to you.”

  They stared at each other for a minute as Jason got up and found his pants. Eventually it seemed Samantha won the contest, because Kelly vanished.

  “So what’s up for today?” Jason asked. He hoped she wasn’t going to make him turn off his digestive tract again. He’d gone without it for two full days, and he’d never realized how much he could miss eating.

  “Flame,” Samantha said, rising and stretching out.

  “What?”

  She lifted her hand, closed and palm up. She opened her fingers like she was letting a grasshopper go, and a tiny black flame sprung up over her palm.

  “Hellfire,” she said. “Not to be played with. Angels can’t cross it, and it devours life. You are going to control it.”

  Maryann glitched into the room and Samantha’s head jerked. Jason left the demon to her, staring at the flame.

  “What are you doing here?” Samantha asked, curious rather than angry.

  “Something changed,” Maryann said. “I thought you might be calling.”

  “No, but you can stay if you want. “We’re working.”

  The girl folded her legs underneath her and Jason reached out for the flame. He had to know.

  He put his fingers through it, fast at first, like he would with a candle flame, just letting it lick the bottoms of his fingertips as he waved them back and forth across it. It was cold like summer cement on bare feet - so hot his body couldn’t describe it and it read as cold. Samantha was watching him, not stopping him, so he kept playing. He opened his hand wide, rolling his palm across the top of the flame. Only the spot where the flame touched reacted to it; there were no thermal currents trapped under his hand to burn him. Just the one spot.

  “Take it,” Samantha said.

  He felt the size of the flame grow and he rolled his hand to the side to see that it had gone from candle-sized to torch sized. He put his hand over it again, magnetized by it, feeling a path of connection through it, down his arm and through his shoulder. He could feel his heart beat.

  It was touching his heart.

  Realizing it, he felt the white-hot point of contact in his chest where the flame touched and he nearly jerked away. That wasn’t it though. The fire hadn’t burned its way into him so much as it followed a path of fuel and now originated there. He turned his hand over, feeling his chest heat and the radiant path the flame took down his arm. He held a deep black flame in his palm. Samantha closed her hand and stepped away.

  It didn’t hurt. It was just against his nature and he wanted away from it, and at the same time, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. It glittered like a gemstone, consuming light. He pushed it higher, and it broke, covering his hand in flame and sucking greedily at him. He tried to pull away and it rushed up his arm. The floor broke out, and a wall across the room from him. Samantha put three fingers in front of her mouth and turned them out in a sweeping wave and the flames extinguished.

  “You have to learn to control it,” she said. “Before I’ll teach you how to summon it. And then maybe we’ll see if you can control angelflame.”

  Jason was staring at his hand.

  “That’s…”

  “Scary. That’s how I’d describe it,” Samantha said. He nodded. “It burns your own spirit. Not your soul. Different thing. It burns your spirit, and you have to be careful how much of yourself you feed it.”

  “The mall,” Jason said. Samantha gave him a pinched smile.

  “It’s a good thing I’m so stubborn,” she said. “That’s what Carter always said.”

  Jason flexed his hand.

  “I’ve never seen you use it before.”

  “It’s not something I like to use,” she said. “You get stronger at most everything else, and it stops taking it out of you quite so bad, but this is always going to drain you. I did tell you that I could do it, though. That you couldn’t hold me against my will?”

  “With Tabitha,” Jason said. She nodded, flicking her fingers across her palm again.

  “If you focus right, it’s hot enough to burn through metal. Other than the way I showed you, I don’t know of any way to keep me from being able to get away, if I want to bad enough.”

  She closed her hand and flicked it open again, this time revealing pure white flame. There was a noise as Maryann shifted away, then she was gone.

  “Angelflame can ash metal, if you know what you’re doing.” She closed her hand. “There aren’t many of us who can control angelflame. I’m dangerous with it unless I’ve got the right context.”

  “Music,” Jason said. She nodded.

  “I can’t explain it, but I can flame dance.”

  Jason rubbed his arm, then looked over at Sam again.

  “He’s really asleep, isn’t he?”

  Samantha nodded.

  “You should be asleep, too, shouldn’t you?”

  “I turned it off,” Samantha said. “I need to be awake when you’re awake.”

  Jason shook his hands out.

  “New Orleans, you said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get him in the car,” Jason said, “then you get some sleep. Okay?”

  He could see her consider fighting with him, then she nodded.

  “Okay.”

  <><><>

  There was a long culvert along a highway that they were walking down when the demons showed up.

  Somewhere, down at the end of the culvert, there was a camp of demons trying to lay low while they figured out what to do next - the target Sam had identified. These were not those demons. Samantha knew that immediately, from Sam’s reaction. She drew Lahn and she heard Jason draw Anadidd’na, but that’s where things stopped being normal.

  Jason’s feet scuffed along the ground as a demon cast him sideways, and something grabbed Sam and threw him the other direction. Samantha reached out mentally to grab hold of the pendant and get Sam loose, but the demon who had him was stronger than she expected. And three demons were too close for her to sacrifice her focus. Sam hit a cement pillar, hard, but he was otherwise okay. She felt his consciousness leap out of his body as he tried to get her the information she needed to defend herself.

  The shock of the ambush gave way to astonishment and then fury as the demons grew closer, five of them in all, fighting as a trained team and only missing Samantha by the narrowest of margins, time and again. Sam warned her that there was a sixth one, but she couldn’t even think about it.

  She found her words, lashing at them in angeltongue and hellspeak, and giving herself a little more room, when Sam slammed her onto the ground. She heard the gunshot as the air rushed out of her lungs.

  Great.

  A hand snatched at her waist, hooking through the chain there, and she found nothing underneath her for a moment as the demon jerked her back and forth by the chain. It didn’t give, but
she felt it bury into her flesh on the other side of her body, and her diaphragm locked up, trying to protect her.

  She hit the ground unprepared for the impact, rolling, bewildered, into a demon’s ankles as flight instinct took over and she curled, trying to protect her body as she forced her lungs to work again. There was another shot, and she felt chips of cement spike against her back.

  Up.

  It was her own instinct combined with Sam’s panic that pulled her to her feet. Lahn hadn’t abandoned her, and she put the thick blade through the demon whose hands were preoccupied trying to find the satchel in the tangle of shirt over it. His arm ashed, but he remained solid, otherwise. It was all Samantha could do to not stare down at Lahn in her hand, unable to process.

  Sam kicked her again, mentally, and she ducked, hearing the blade cut the air and another gunshot. She rolled, getting clear, buying space. She needed time to react. She bent time, giving her mind time to process, but the chemicals were overwhelming. Panic. Fear.

  They were going to kill her.

  She heard Jason roar as he struggled against the force pinning him to the side of the culvert, and she identified the demon holding Sam and Jason.

  Target.

  She needed allies. She needed Sam to not be crushed against a pillar, and she needed Anadidd’na cutting a swath through the demons. The demon turned to face her, like a moving painting, his greasy hair hanging down across dark, watery eyes. She forced the panic further away, making individuals out of the other demons.

  One very heavyset black demon, the tank.

  Two fast-footed demons, one man, one woman, who came at her as a team, like a mated pair of wolves. A second woman, Amazonian in build, who appeared to be in charge. A demon with a gun, twelve or fifteen paces off, pointing it directly at her. Sam was watching his finger, trying to predict his shots. The last demon was behind her, how far, she didn’t know.

  She spun, letting her ankles cross and one foot glide across the rough concrete, moving to not present a stationary target as well as to find the last demon, then rolled to one side. Her chest hurt, and her heart pounded hard enough to shake her. Her right hand was unreliable, likely to give if she put weight on it, but her left was strong, trained. Lahn was on balance and ready. Samantha pushed a steadying shudder through to Sam and he pushed back, ready.