Shade Chaser (City of Crows 2)

by Clara Coulson

  “We aren’t s-safe…” His voice finally wavers. His eyelids droop. His head bobs. “None of us are safe. They’re coming for us. Coming to eradicate us all. An army of…of…”

  Allen Marcus passes out from blood loss. Twenty-seven seconds later, he dies.

  And forty-four seconds after that, the gaping maw of the Egyptian Underworld rips the concrete floor in half, and Ammit, Devourer of Souls, rises from the Eververse.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I’m not sure I’ll ever witness a scene more repulsive, more horrendous, or more heartbreaking than an Ancient Egyptian monster swallowing whole the screaming souls of the dead.

  Ammit climbs from the depths of Duat like a predator on the hunt. Lion claws peek over the lip of the hole in the basement floor and sink into the concrete, as if the stone is soft as butter. Next comes the head of a crocodile, long and green, with rows of sharp teeth. Black eyes perched above her massive jaws dart left and right, up and down, absorbing every detail of the dank, depressing place to which a mortal dared to summon her. The scaly head is followed by the rest of her body, a nightmarish chimeric combination of lion and hippo, as she heaves herself out of the portal and into the basement room.

  Without pause, the monster stalks across the room, scattering candles, until she reaches the tallest clock stack near the center of the back wall. Her crocodile snout nudges one of the clocks, and a wave of energy washes over the entire wall. Every clock begins to shudder and emit a shrill whine, which grows louder and louder as the blue glow grows brighter.

  (It’s only in hindsight I realize this sound is the trapped shades screaming in terror.)

  Ammit lets out a hum, and it carries a clear tone—she is pleased. Her lumbering body backs away from the clocks, and the crocodile jaws fall open. Wide. Wider. Wider still. To the point where it seems like her lower jaw should tear free from her snout with a mighty snap. But it doesn’t. Instead, her mouth extends to an impossible angle, almost one-eighty, as if it’s made of rubber, presenting her slick, fleshy, squirming tongue aching for a meal.

  And then Ammit makes another sound. One that seems more like a word. A human word. It rolls off that disgusting tongue the way I would say hello, goodbye, clear as day, sharp and crisp, the beginning and end of a conversation dominated by one party. By an authority. By a higher power. By a god.

  This word rebounds off the walls, the ceiling, the floor, worms its way through the tiny gaps along the wooden seams of every clock. For a brief moment, all the clocks go still. The wailing stops. There is no sound at all except the harsh, panicked breathing of the three mortal onlookers, and the expectant sigh of an ancient beast.

  The clocks explode.

  The souls emerge.

  Before the splinters even hit me, Ammit inhales, creating a vortex in her throat. The translucent shades tumbling through the air are suddenly drawn in toward the creature. They scream. All of them scream. So loud it nearly deafens me.

  Hundreds of faces, young and old, black and white, from all walks of life, fly past me into Ammit’s distended mouth, and there’s nothing I can do to help. I reach out on impulse, to a young woman—she can’t be over twenty-one—but my hand slips right through hers, and she vanishes into the abyss of Ammit’s maw, shredded into ribbons of soft blue light on impact with the monster’s flesh.

  It’s over in thirty-two seconds.

  All the sinful souls are devoured.

  And the lab falls dark and silent.

  As I’m watching the Eververse portal in the floor evaporate like dry ice, leaving nothing behind but the circle of blood, I casually lean to my left—and vomit. I don’t know when I fell to my knees (I didn’t even feel the impact with the floor), but I’m glad I’m not standing. Because I heave and heave and heave, everything I’ve eaten in the past few hours splattering against the concrete and overturned candles. When I finally run out of stomach contents, I gag on air, doubled over, hands clutching my abdomen, tears stinging my eyes.

  You’re having a panic attack, whispers a voice in the back of my head. Calm down, Cal. You’re still in danger. You have to get up and fight, or that thing will…

  A disturbance in the air in front of me.

  I slowly raise my gaze from the floor—and find myself staring into Ammit’s black crocodile eyes. The edge of her scaly nose is an inch from my own.

  How did she get so close without—?

  A spike of pain rips through my head, and my body contorts like I’m being electrocuted. Unintelligible sounds pass through one ear and out the other, yanking my brain to and fro. Something warm and wet and thick—blood—leaks from the corners of my eyes. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I can’t hear my own thoughts.

  And then—words. English words.

  “Young man,” says Ammit the Devourer, without moving her crocodile mouth, “tell me: is this the realm of Earth?”

  My jaw unlocks like someone released a spring, and an answer slips out. Involuntarily. “Yeah,” says my voice in a flat tone, “this is Earth.”

  “Oh?” Her nose creeps closer to my face, and she audibly sniffs. “How strange. I thought mayhap I’d gotten lost along the path from Duat. You smell”—another sniff—“more like the denizen of another underworld than a man trudging through the dust of mortality. Why is that?”

  My hand moves by itself, even as I struggle to keep it by my side, and tugs down the collar of my coat. Revealing the scar on my neck left by Vanth’s sword. “I’ve been to another underworld. In life,” I add automatically.

  “Really?” replies Ammit. “How bold you mortals have become since I last walked the Earth. Traipsing into realms made for the dead and the eternal.” An amused snort puffs out of her nostrils, right into my face. (Her breath smells like decay.) “But then, I suppose it matters not. If I am in the right realm, then the mission of my summoner remains the collar on my neck.” She turns her crocodile head away from me and looks to Marcus’ slumped, bloody form. “Pity, though, he did not live to see the fruits of his efforts. May his afterlife be filled with equal delights.”

  Unless I’m imagining things, that sounded sarcastic. Seems like Ammit is none too happy about being used as a murder puppet.

  But even so, she can’t break free of the summoning contract, can she?

  And the contract terms were…

  The black eyes flick back to me. “I assume you are an enemy of my summoner, young man. In which case, I’m afraid to say, you will be visiting yet another underworld all too soon.”

  Fuck.

  I try to move, but my body won’t budge. It’s like the Etruscan lot all over again. I’m outmatched. So outmatched I’d laugh at the absurdity of it all…if a large pair of crocodile jaws, lined with crooked teeth, weren’t aligning themselves around my neck.

  A strangled groan clambers off my tongue, the only voluntary sound I can produce, and bloody tears pour down my face. God, and I thought death by werewolf in the torture shack was bad. This is—

  Green lightning thunders across the room and strikes Ammit in the chest. The creature careens to my left, toppling head first into the clock debris and the half-melted remains of the candles. The instant Ammit’s face smacks the floor, her magic releases its hold on my body, and I slump sideways. Only to end up in the arms of one Ella Dean. She lifts me, effortlessly, like I weigh nothing, and retreats toward the door. While Erica the witch, bathed in a vibrant green aura, storms up to the Egyptian beast with sparks dancing across her fingers.

  “Hold on, Cal,” Ella whispers hoarsely, “I’m going to get you out of here, okay?”

  “But, A-Ammit…” My words run over my tongue like water, uncontrollable. “Erica?”

  “She’ll hold it off until we’re clear, and then retreat—Ow!” She winces. There’s a large clock splinter sticking out of her neck, weeping blood, but she shrugs it off and presses on to the door. “We can’t beat this thing, any more than we could beat Charun. We’ll have to call in ICM reinforcements and hope to god that Ambrose
isn’t in on this shit too, or—”

  Ammit rears back onto her feet with an ear-piercing yowl. Coal black eyes settle on the witch who challenged her. She stomps her lion paws on the concrete, shattering the floor to dust. My eyes, half-blocked by Ella’s arm, spot the quick flash of powerful magic drilling into the exposed foundation underneath the beast.

  And then it happens. The entire building rumbles, stone floor quaking violently. The walls crack. First in the corners, rustling cobwebs. Next across the entire room, trailing up and up to the ceiling and arcing across the thick wooden beams supporting the first floor above us. Finally, the basement lets out a death rattle.

  And collapses.

  Two tons of broken building materials drop down on top of us.

  A swinging support beam catches Erica in the chest and tosses her into the corner of the room. She slams into the wall with an audible thud, and the last I hear of her is a sharp, breathy gasp of pain. I don’t see if she lives. Or if she dies.

  What I do see is what happens to Ella Dean, the woman cradling me in her arms like I’m something more precious than her. (But god, I’m not.) Ella struggles to dodge the oncoming wooden beams and boards and dented metal vents. Debris strikes the concrete all around us, small, sharp pieces nicking our skin, until, three steps from safety, one of the largest support beams in the basement comes down.

  I watch it fall in slow motion, my brain hyperaware that my skull is less than a second from being crushed beyond repair. My muscles tighten, and I curl inward, pressing my head against Ella’s collarbone, a silent apology to Cooper and Riker and Desmond and Amy—because I failed. We failed. We weren’t able to stop Marcus from summoning Ammit, and now…

  We’re going to die. The beam draws closer.

  We’re going to fall here, and Riker and Cooper, none the wiser, will be mowed down by Ammit in short order. The beam draws closer.

  We’re going to end up in the Eververse, moments from now, no more tangible than the shades Ammit just ate, and realize we left our friends to face death on their own. The beam draws closer.

  And Ella Dean throws me.

  My body sails through the warping doorway. I hit the floor—there’s a boom behind me—bounce twice, and skid across the concrete, ramming the metal worktable in the study. My broken ribs shift out of alignment. My damaged tibia snaps. At least four lacerations rip free from their stitches and cry blood. And my head whips back into the side of the table, in the exact same place that earned me a concussion on Lombard Street.

  But I don’t care about any of that.

  I spit swears at the floor until the pain recoils in terror, and then push myself to my knees to face the summoning room.

  A pile of shifting rubble blocks the door. There is no Ella in sight.

  She didn’t make it.

  No. My breath hitches. No! This can’t happen again. Not to this team.

  I slump against the worktable and try to stave off the gathering tears. Air clogs my throat, repelled by lungs that won’t inflate, pressed flat under the weight of Ella’s loss.

  I grasp at straws: She could be alive. Trapped under the rubble, with a small air pocket to tide her over until I’m able to dig her out. She could be inches from the door, close enough for me to simply shove my hand through the dust and yank her free. She could be…could be…

  Dead.

  My vision wavers, spots dancing before my eyes. Pulse racing. Limbs shaking. A sob caught between my teeth. And—

  Movement.

  Tremors resonate through the rubble, weak at first, and then stronger and stronger, until broken bits of wood, clumps of drywall, chunks of stone topple off the pile and skitter across the floor of the study. A fist-sized hunk of concrete smeared with blood shakes free and rolls to a stop at my feet. The hole it leaves behind in the rubble heap is large enough for me to glimpse the thing tearing through the remains of the living room floor.

  A sharp-clawed lion paw.

  “Shit,” I mutter, and reach for the edge of the tabletop to heave myself to my feet. Ella, if you’re still alive in there, I send in prayer, please hang on. Because there’s no way I can help her right now.

  Not as the lion paw breaks the surface of the pile, dust puffing up into the air, a billion ash-gray particles reflecting the dim light of the oil lamp on the table behind me. Not as Ammit suddenly thrusts her face through the hole made by her paw, those dark crocodile eyes landing on me the moment the fine debris settles again. Not as the Egyptian beast lugs the rest of her powerful body forward. Pulling once. Twice. Three times. Before the rubble gives way to an avalanche that loosens the broken beams enough to allow Ammit’s enormous form to enter the study.

  Besides the prominent burn mark on her side from Erica’s lightning blast, there’s not a single significant wound on Ammit’s chimeric body. Just a layer of whitish dust and a few shallow splinters poking out of her thick hide. As she saunters into the room, she shakes off the lingering bits of rubble, opens her mouth, and…yawns. Like she’s bored. Like this whole nightmare—like dropping the goddamn ceiling on my friends—isn’t even worth her time.

  My fear erodes in the face of fury. I stand up straight, numb to the pain in my leg, and search the tabletop for a weapon. (My handgun was lost in the fray, probably when I fell into the panic attack and started vomiting.) But my fingers find nothing except wrinkled, worn pages, a few short pencils, a basic blue Bic pen, and—of course—the oil lamp.

  I grab the lamp by the handle and launch it at Ammit’s smug face. It shatters on impact, dousing her with what remains of the fuel, which ignites on the small flame and flares up into a brief burst of blinding fire. Ammit rears back with a surprised shriek, stumbling into one of the bookcases that line the wall. She tries to squash the flames by smacking a paw over the wisps of yellow creeping across the curves of her snout, burning the flesh from green to pink to black. But the bookcase implodes with an earsplitting crack when she flails one of her hippo feet into the center shelf, and dusty books rain down, beating against her skull. Several of the books tumble open, and a few get too close to the wriggling flames.

  The pages go up in smoke, and Ammit is instantly standing inside a ring of fire.

  As the heat pricks at her feet, she trains those dark eyes on me again, and a familiar ache bores into the back of my skull. She’s trying to subdue me with the same magic as before.

  “Like hell I’ll let you take me twice, you bitch!” Before my limbs lock in place, I take off for the secret door back to the main basement.

  Ammit angrily snaps her burnt jaws, winding up to lope through the fire and give chase.

  I emerge into the dank basement, focus on the stairs that seem much farther away than they did when I came down here minutes ago. My broken leg screams with each step. Sharp bits of my ribs bite into tender flesh. My skull throbs, dizziness pecking at my balance. Every part of my body wants to surrender, fall out onto the floor and just die already.

  But I can’t give up.

  For Riker, who’s already lost so much. One teammate in France. And possibly another right here in Aurora. Right here in this basement.

  For Cooper, to whom I swore I wouldn’t embroil myself in the danger of this case, that I wouldn’t get myself killed. He shouldn’t have to attend to my funeral. He shouldn’t have to stand at my gravestone and ask why the hell I lied.

  For those kids who suffered and died during the Etruscan case, led on by Marcus and Halliburton and their cohorts, tricked into performing such dangerous acts because the real practitioners involved were too cowardly to ever steal Vanth’s key themselves.

  For Mac, whose murder still remains unsolved. Whose vampire killer is out there somewhere, prowling around. Perhaps in another city. Perhaps in another country. Waiting for the perfect time to add more kills to his bloodstained list.

  No, I can’t give up now.

  I sprint to the bottom of the stairs, clearing the banister as Ammit leaps through the secret door. Her broad chest skirts the narr
ow frame, tearing flesh from her ribs, but she doesn’t falter. She races up behind me, skin on fire, black and bleeding, scales peeling back to bone. The crocodile jaws are open wide enough to tear out my throat in a single blow, paint the room with my blood. Or simply separate my head from the rest of my body, roll my skull across the floor into one of the moldy boxes.

  My hand grabs the staircase railing to swing me around without losing momentum, and I make to charge up the creaky steps toward freedom—when my busted tibia shears right through my skin.

  My leg gives out.

  I slip off the first step, plunging back down to the basement floor. My shoulder takes the brunt of the blow, the joint straining to stay in its socket. My jaw clips the edge of a baluster, knocking out two more teeth. I land contorted like a pretzel, vision swimming, blood pooling around my broken leg, leaking out my mouth, along with tiny bits of teeth.

  Ammit scrabbles to a stop on the floor next to the staircase. Her jaw closes slowly, like she isn’t sure what to do, and she bends down, eyes blinking at me in bewilderment. The end of her snout nudges my head, but my body is so wracked with pain I barely feel it. I can’t move.

  Face pressed against the floor, limbs twitching, breaths halting and shallow, all I can do is lie there and wait for Ammit to kill me.

  I don’t look directly at her, but she’s so large and so close that I get a good image of her slumping body in my peripheral vision. She seems almost…disappointed? Like she wanted a good chase out of me. Like this was a game. And my fuckup cost her the opportunity to play in a way she hasn’t in years. (Or perhaps centuries.)

  Scuffing her hippo feet against the floor in frustration, she turns her head toward the stairs, peering up into the darkness on the ground level. She pauses, considering what to do, then makes a motion that looks suspiciously like a shrug. Her crocodile jaws fall open again and sink toward my head. To finish me off. Before she moves on to her next target.