Power Game

by Brad Magnarella

  “Get everyone up there,” I said. “I’ll work on Brian and the efreet.”

  Brian continued to sob on the ground beside the pool while the efreet stood over him protectively. She was still operating under his last command, but unlike with the dragon, her powers wouldn’t destroy, much less fend off, the demons coming to claim her.

  While Vega and Bree-Yark urged everyone up to the staging area, I scrambled toward the pool. The lead demons were only a few football fields away now. With their preternatural speed, that was nothing. Our best chance was for the efreet to transport us out. But for that, I needed Brian again.

  I grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. His red face was tear streaked and snot ran freely into his goatee.

  “Brian, listen to me,” I said, pushing power into my wizard’s voice. “Demons are coming for your efreet. I need you to order her to take us someplace safe.”

  Brian squinted away like a child and sobbed harder.

  For fear of how the efreet would react, I had to stop myself from slapping him. “Brian!”

  This time he tried to jam a thumb into his mouth, but it ran into the shield I’d gagged him with. He screamed silently.

  Dammit, it was no use. He was regressing, becoming more and more infantile. And I didn’t trust what he’d say if I ungagged him. Probably cry for his mother, whom the efreet would then be compelled to summon. And the last thing we needed was more people to have to carry out of here.

  Shots cracked and popped. I looked over to find Vega and Bree-Yark firing from their new position. Across from us, the lead demon—a middle-aged woman in a green pea coat—recoiled with a sharp hiss, smoke bursting from the bullet wounds. It was an encouraging sight, but the silver rounds were only going to slow them. It would take banishment to end them, and there were too many for me to handle. Thirty if I had to guess, and more arriving.

  I needed to get Brian and the efreet up to the others. There we could better defend them until Claudius got us the hell out of there. I could carry Brian, but I had no power to order the efreet. Do I risk an invocation to move her?

  Then something occurred to me. Still holding Brian up, I faced her.

  “You’ll be best able to protect Brian by staying close to him.”

  She looked back at me with that same placid expression. I wasn’t ordering her, but expanding the scope of what protecting him meant. Of course, the test would be whether she complied. I began jog-dragging Brian toward the others. When I looked back, I found the efreet following in powerful strides.

  Thank God, I breathed, surrounding us in a crackling shield.

  But we had to hurry. Several of the demons had managed to avoid the worst of Vega’s and Bree-Yark’s fusillade and were now only one level above us in the quarry. I turned and nailed one with a force invocation, throwing him backwards.

  When we hit the incline to where the rest of my team was, Brian decided to become dead weight. I wasted needed energy on an invocation to haul him along. If he hadn’t been the trigger to a world-shattering being, I would have dropped his ass. By the time we reached the others my lungs were on fire.

  I pulled Brian behind Vega and Bree-Yark who were still shooting out into the quarry.

  “We’re holding them off, but that’s about it,” Vega said.

  Bree-Yark snarled. “If they want to come closer, they can have a taste of goblin steel.” He paused firing his M16 to slap the belted scabbard that held the blade I’d seen him pull from the Hummer earlier.

  Mae emerged from behind cover. When she saw the sobbing mess in my grasp, she hustled over and together we helped Brian behind the mounds. The efreet followed.

  I found Claudius and Tabitha back there, but they couldn’t have been a starker study in contrast. While Tabitha stared around with puffed hair and pupils the size of dessert plates—a reaction to the gunfire as well as her proximity to so many demons—Claudius paced slowly, a fist propping his chin as he muttered variations of the same words, only to stop and shake his head. He could have been at home in his study for all the concern he showed.

  I was afraid to ask. “How’s the translocation coming?”

  “Well, I’ve eliminated a few incantations it’s not,” he said.

  Yeah, that sounds promising, I thought dismally.

  “The helo’s coming in,” Vega shouted above the gunfire. “They’re going to try to land it here.”

  That would have to be our ticket out, but the pilot was going to need help. I looked around a mound in time to see a boulder flying toward the chopper. Aiming my staff, I shouted a shield invocation. I grunted as the boulder smashed into the hardened air and plummeted. More demons hurled rocks and small boulders at the descending chopper. Though I blocked them, each impact took a further toll on me.

  “Everson!” Mae shouted.

  I turned to find her pointing up the sheer rock wall above us. Three demons were crawling down it face first: two men and a woman.

  Shit.

  Holding the invocation around the helicopter with the staff. I used a force invocation through my sword to drag Brian away from the wall. Mae and the efreet followed him, but Claudius continued to pace, muttering to himself.

  “Forget the incantation!” I shouted. “We have demons!”

  Claudius looked up. The demons were swiping at each other now, competing to be the first to reach the efreet. I looked back at the chopper. The projectiles had tapered off as the demons converged into the lower quarry and fights began breaking out there too, every demon for him or herself.

  I turned back to find the demons on the wall in a tangle of hair-pulling and limb-twisting. They fell as a group, plunging the remaining thirty feet. They quickly disentangled themselves upon slamming to earth and raced for the efreet.

  I was halfway through a shouted invocation to stop them when a black void appeared in front of them. The void seemed to buckle as it swallowed them whole and closed again.

  “That’s the thing about a translocation spell,” Claudius said, lowering a trembling hand. “Getting it right doesn’t matter so much when you’re casting it on an enemy.” He had a point. I imagined the demons popping into a parallel plane with each other’s arms and legs sticking out of their sides.

  “Take care of any more that come down!” I called.

  Claudius was probably the last one here I wanted covering our rear, but I didn’t have a choice. I needed to land the chopper.

  Seizing Brian’s arm, I dragged him around to the front of the mounds, behind Vega and Bree-Yark. Once more, the efreet followed. The hovering chopper blasted sand and grit around us.

  I prevented another rock from smashing through the chopper’s blades, but the quarry was a full-fledged demon brawl now, the creatures’ proximity to the efreet stoking their power-hunger and violence. Stronger demons battered and tore apart weaker ones, then raced down, eager, it seemed, for the next encounter.

  Survival of the most hellish.

  Finally, the helicopter set down, and a side door opened.

  I waved Mae forward. She hustled toward the chopper with her head bowed, one hand holding Buster’s carrier and Tabitha’s leash while she fought futilely to keep her hair in place with the other. Bree-Yark covered her and then helped her aboard.

  I gestured for Vega to go next. I wanted to bring in Brian and the efreet while Claudius watched our backs. Vega nodded and ran ahead, pausing to take final shots at the nearest demons.

  I pulled Brian behind her and, running, shouted for Claudius.

  After several heart-pounding moments, he appeared from behind the mounds. He gave an embarrassed wave, as if I’d caught him in the act of taking a leak, and hustled to catch up. He had no idea four demons were behind him.

  “Turn around!” I shouted.

  Claudius craned his neck, did a double-take, then incanted to summon another portal. This time, I saw something massive and slug-like humping around in the depths of the void before it closed again, taking the demons with it. Probably a good thing he
hadn’t attempted to translocate the eight of us earlier.

  Sparks cascaded as a force broke through my shield.

  I brought my sword around, but a demon had already seized the efreet and pulled her into his embrace.

  35

  The demon holding the efreet had assumed the guise of a street tough you might find hanging out under the elevated tracks in Spanish Harlem. His face was a tapestry of black ink that matched his slicked-back hair, his plaid shirt fastened with a single button around the throat. He pinned the efreet around the neck with one arm, while with his other hand he aimed a Dirty Harry revolver at Brian.

  But his malevolent eyes were locked on mine.

  “You know how this works, cabron,” he said through a grin that revealed a flash of silver teeth. “You so much as flinch, and I’m putting a bullet through fatso’s head and blowing this entire show to shit.”

  Dammit. He understood Brian’s connection to the efreet.

  My gaze flicked past him to the demon hosts that lay in his wake, the demons themselves scattered into the ether like smoke until they could reconstitute themselves. Of the first wave, the Chicano was the lone survivor. Late arrivals hung back on the upper levels of the quarry, knowing the minute the Chicano’s master possessed the efreet, they wouldn’t be scattered, but destroyed. And judging by the way the efreet wasn’t reacting to Brian’s danger—or indeed, her own—the demon master was partway there, already infusing her form with his evil essence.

  But how in the hell did the Chicano get to us without anyone seeing?

  I spotted a hole in the ground at his back. The son of a bitch had used his preternatural strength to burrow his way under, then up, the dust storm from the chopper concealing him. And he’d managed to emerge from under that tonnage of rock and dirt looking immaculate.

  “Call off your posse,” he said with a smirk, his reedy voice somehow penetrating the noise of the rotary blades.

  Up ahead, Bree-Yark and Vega were aiming their weapons from the chopper. Behind me, Claudius had a hand raised as if he was going to incant another portal into being. He wore a look of deliberation on his face, weighing the odds of success. I was cycling through my own options, but with the demon’s preternatural speed, we wouldn’t be able to do anything he couldn’t beat us to. And the sadistic glint in his eyes told me he would absolutely put a bullet through Brian’s head, even if it meant erasing himself from existence.

  Fuck.

  I gestured for Vega and Bree-Yark to lower their weapons and for Claudius to do the same with his casting arm.

  “Where are you taking her?” I shouted.

  “I don’t need to take her anywhere. I’ll take her right here,” he said lewdly.

  He flicked his tongue out and ran the tip up and down the side of her black, burnished neck. The gesture spoke to the horror of what he was doing—taking a godlike elemental against her will and making her not just a servant, but a demonic host. Fusing her to his master for her inexhaustible energy.

  I watched an emptiness spread over the demon’s face as he acted as the channel between master and efreet. Meanwhile, malevolent flames I’d not seen before were taking hold in the efreet’s eyes.

  “Do you think your master is going to keep you around once he has her?” I shouted in a last-ditch attempt to get the demon to reconsider what he was doing. But the demon only laughed in the lazy way of someone who had just taken a hit of morphine.

  “Does it look like I care?” he said. “I serve at master’s pleasure.” He shuddered as if he’d just been given another dose.

  His demon master’s sedating him to make sure he completes the task, I realized. But will that also slow his reflexes?

  Either I stood there and did nothing, and once the possession was complete the demon-efreet hybrid would destroy us. Or I risked an invocation.

  Even in the demon’s euphoric state, I could still be too slow. That would mean a bullet through Brian’s head and an explosion that would take out the entire Northeast, but at least the second option gave us a chance.

  I glanced over at Vega. She met my gaze and nodded.

  I turned back to the demon and drew a shaky breath.

  God, forgive me if I bone this up.

  But I hesitated. Something was happening behind him.

  The demon hosts he had wasted, or who had wasted each other, were rising to their feet. So soon? They began moving toward us in a lurching run. Within moments they were scrambling up the plateau. The demon must have seen my reaction because life flashed back into his emptying eyes, and he spun his head around.

  My chance, I thought, adrenaline surging through me.

  I couldn’t risk a spoken invocation—the demon’s gun was still aimed at Brian—so I made a quick sign in the air. The efreet’s eyes flickered as the portion of demon master that had infused her caught the movement.

  The gun banged three times.

  The demon master was willing to sacrifice the efreet and his servant to prevent anything else from claiming her. But in the time it had taken him to communicate my action to his underling, I’d opened my cubbyhole in front of Brian’s head. Bits of paper and binding burst out like confetti as the rounds impacted the books I’d stored inside. A small price to pay to be able to invoke.

  “Protezione!” I shouted, willing a shield around us.

  The ensuing gunshots flashed off our protection.

  “Vigore!”

  The force invocation smashed the weapon from the demon’s grip and twisted it apart. I wasn’t sure the Chicano demon even noticed. He was more concerned now with keeping the arriving demon horde from stealing his prize. And he was no longer acting as a channel, I saw. The demon master’s essence was draining from the efreet’s eyes.

  The Chicano cast an infernal invocation through his hand, torching the first arriving demons in black flames. But still they came. And they weren’t behaving like the demons of earlier. They weren’t tearing each other apart. If anything, they seemed to be acting cooperatively, closing in on the Chicano from three sides. Some even shambled right past the landed chopper, which also struck me as strange.

  When the Chicano saw he was about to be overrun, he clutched the efreet tighter and turned.

  And my father’s sword was there to meet him. The demon’s eyes popped wide as I drove the blade through his gut.

  “Disfare!” I shouted.

  The blade’s topmost rune glowed white, and then the entire blade flashed with holy light. The enchantment broke through the demon, reducing him to a burst of black smoke that dispersed a moment later—banished. Unlike the demon in the pump house, there was no host to land in my arms. The Chicano had been the demon’s form.

  Instead, I caught the efreet.

  Have you ever held the power of the Earth’s molten core in human form? Me neither, and it overwhelmed my magic and mind. My body short-circuited until all I was aware of was a primal flicker of white flame that existed at the heart of all flames.

  I stared at the flame for lifetimes, it seemed, and then I realized someone was catching me and that only the briefest moment had passed. I expected to find Bree-Yark or even Claudius holding me, but it was the efreet.

  The demon master was gone from her eyes, and in the backs of them I glimpsed the same white flames I’d seen a moment before. The efreet’s eyes were impossible to read, but the being seemed to be ensuring I was all right.

  As the being placed me on my feet, reality rushed back to my senses.

  And it was frigging chaos. Firing had taken up from the helicopter again, and bodies were falling around us as demon heads exploded. I hauled Brian up from the ground and waved Claudius toward the chopper. He was busy opening and closing dysfunctional portals on more demons, a skill which had proven useful after all.

  As we boarded the chopper, the rock-hurling resumed from a new wave of demons. I invoked a shield to deflect the projectiles. Following her order to protect Brian, the efreet took out any that got past me with bursts of fire. Vega
gave the pilot the liftoff sign. My stomach lurched as we rose straight up in a powerful thrust, the pilot no doubt as anxious as anyone to escape the hell she’d found herself in.

  I peered around the inside of the chopper, not quite able to believe we had all made it. I had placed a still-sobbing Brian beside me, the efreet taking up a position on his other side. Bree-Yark was perched halfway out the door, firing down on the demons with barked threats and promises, most of them not very nice. Mae was sitting across from us, mouthing a prayer with closed eyes, while Tabitha, who was no fan of flying either, had managed to wedge herself between Mae’s right hip and Buster’s carrier.

  Claudius, who had taken a seat beside them, leaned toward me. “Anyone going to miss this quarry?”

  “Probably,” I replied. “Why?”

  He gave me a sheepish look as though to say, too late.

  I looked out the window in time to see the sides of the quarry sliding down toward an enormous portal he’d opened at its bottom. The pool Drage had been summoned from dropped out, and five and ten-story rock faces cascaded down. The hordes of demons were caught in the sinkhole too. They had barely enough time to scream before they were crushed and buried. The sheer volume of material disappearing was incomprehensible. Moments later, the portal closed, and all that remained was a massive moonlike crater.

  “Just rocks and dirt, right?” Claudius said.

  “And demons,” I added, staring at the settling cavity. “How does the crew seem to you?”

  He looked the pilot and copilot over and shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Everson?” Vega asked.

  When I looked over, she was peering into my eyes, trying to read them. I’d been thinking about the demons who had attacked the Chicano. Only they hadn’t been demons, I understood now. They had been zombies. Someone had resurrected the dead hosts. I had a strong suspicion who that was, and an even stronger one that we were playing into his hands somehow. Arnaud was as cunning as they came. He was also a survivor, and I knew for certain he had not been sucked into the abyss just now.

  But there was too much noise to attempt to explain all of that to Vega.