Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Copyright
Dedication
To Jan, because otherwise my German would suck.
Chapter 1
The black dragon dive-bombed above me. The demon the size of Earth’s tallest skyscrapers bellowed in front of me. My Pegasus tried to gallop to me, but with two deadly enemies surrounding me, it stood little chance of helping me.
The dragon exposed its sharp teeth, and the black ball of energy in the demon’s hands stopped growing, preparing to fire. This is the end. I came this far, but I cannot defeat two monsters at once. I tried. I did what I could.
The dragon let out a bellow which knocked me to the ground with powerful sound waves. I closed my eyes, grateful that the end would come with my senses knocked out.
But after three seconds with my life still intact, I opened my eyes and gasped at what I saw.
The dragon had swooped up at the last second, breathing a blast of orange-colored energy (I could say with certainty it was not fire) at the demon. The demon, at first, paid no attention, rearing its hand back as it prepared to unleash all of the black energy of hell upon my relatively lithe human body.
As the dragon got closer, I understood why. Though the dragon was massive to me, perhaps the size of multiple 18-wheelers put together, to the demon, it was like an earthworm, large enough to pick out but not large enough to cause anything other than annoyance. I could only hope whatever the dragon had in mind would work, because nothing I had done had succeeded. The demon had not even flinched from the dragon’s initial burst of orange energy.
“You do an admirable job fleeing, Sonya,” the beast roared. “But your end is near. You cannot run from me anymore. And—”
The dragon bit into the demon’s arm, the sharpest of all incisors in the animal kingdoms tearing through the scales of the monster. The demon roared in agony, throwing its arm through the air, trying to shake the dragon off. The black mass of energy dissipated, and for now, the dragon had given me a second chance. I whistled to my Pegasus, which galloped to me.
“We’re fighting hell, not training for the National Finals Rodeo,” I teased as I kicked my leg up and mounted its back, grabbing the reins and placing my legs just behind its magnificent white wings. “Up!”
The Pegasus obeyed, climbing the chamber of the demon, no longer under the threat of a sword or great blast of energy. Now that I could swing toward the monster, I sought to get a clear shot at its ugly face and give it a makeover.
But the demon had grabbed the dragon with its free hand, yanked it off, and launched it at me. I narrowly dodged the great beast hurtling through the air, the Pegasus darting and diving to the side at the last second. I felt I was in free fall before realizing that the Pegasus still had me on its back.
“You think an annoying fly will prevent your death?!” the demon yelled, its tone no longer as confident as before.
“Hold on, let me answer you to your face.”
I came eye level with the demon and stared down its right eye, easily the size of a school bus. Up this close, I could see all sorts of gross things crawling on its skin and near its eye—snakes, cockroaches, maggots, worms, just to name a few. I could also see blood pumping through the veins. It desperately needed a face lift.
“The answer is hell yes.”
I yanked on the trigger of Ebony and Ivory as blasts of blue energy smashed the creature’s eye. The demon shrieked in horrible, hellish sounds as blood squirted out and smaller animals tumbled from its eye. I then turned and aimed for the other eye, producing a similar effect with my trusted black and white M1911 pistols. I wished I could’ve gloated in victory, but with the demon’s hands waving wildly, I had to retreat.
But I didn’t succeed in time.
One of the creature’s nails clipped the left wing of the Pegasus. We didn’t go into free fall—that, more than anything else, would’ve spelled death—but we did tumble toward the area where the dragon lay, breathing but injured. I cursed as I tried to get the Pegasus to at least land slowly, but I knew well before we got halfway down it was going to be a rough fall, like skydiving without a trained jumper. I braced myself, squeezing the neck of the horse tight.
As soon as we collided with the dirt, I rolled about two dozen feet from my Pegasus. The first thing I did was check for Ebony and Ivory. I still had them in my holsters, and quickly brought them out for more fighting. I groaned as I rose, wondering if I’d broken something in my back. I turned around just in time to see the demon throwing four red energy spears at me, similar to the ones I’d encountered in my battle with Nuforsa. Unfortunately for the demon, he’d forgotten to distract me with fake images of my dying friends, so I rolled to the side as the beams pierced the ground, creating holes to nowhere. I moved forward to the lake, unsure what I would do but certain I wasn’t going to back down. I waved my guns at the monster, jumping up and down.
“I know it’s hard to hear me, Demonic Burj Khalifa, but I just want you to know if you give me a way out of here so I can finish my mission, I’ll pay for your visit to the eye surgeon. Really, I’m so sorry.”
“Silence!” the demon roared. Well, I can say I at least tried the diplomatic route. “It still amazes me that after all this time, you still don’t quit. No matter. I have a little surprise for you.”
“As do I,” I said, raising my guns toward its face.
But before I could unleash more rounds, out of the fiery lake rose a figure embroiled in molten lava, one frail, thin, about my size, and bent at the head. The figure, still covered in lava, walked to me in a casual, haunting strut. I fired Ebony and Ivory at it, but the bullets simply bounced off of the fire. I charged my weapons, but the blast did nothing. I holstered my guns. I readied to fight with my Krav Maga, but then the fire demon stopped about three feet in front of me. The lava slowly dissipated, revealing an all-too-familiar foe, and a cruel smile awaited me.
“Hello, Sonya,” Nuforsa said.
I didn’t waste any time. I charged her, reared back my right fist, and thrust it to break her jaw. She blocked my punch and placed a firm hand on my head. I began to scream as Nuforsa crushed my skull and dropped me to my knees.
“You thought you killed me?!? You can never kill me, Sonya! But it is not the same for you! You will die! Sonya!”
I screamed louder, my world starting to shake as the large demon laughed and the dragon behind me groaned in pain.
“Sonya!”
The pain stopped. My eyes opened. I had left hell behind in a nightmare and awoken in a small cabin in a train. Yes, a train departing from Amsterdam and headed to Berlin.
Awfully realistic for a nightmare too. And a continuation of the one on the plane. The hell?
I was leaning against the window of our cabin, my legs stretched out between DJ’s feet. To my left was Brady, two seats over. Across from him was Richard and Nicholas. All of them looked at me like I was a patient in the psych ward on the other side of the window. I gave a fake smile and dismissively shook my head.
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“Would you mind?” I said. “A girl’s got to have some time when she’s not being ogled at by men. Ask any of your female friends, they’ll know what’s up.”
Richard and Nicholas mumbled about how that made sense, but DJ and Brady didn’t buy it.
“You were doing it again, Sonya,” Brady said, his voice firm but without the usual patronizing that accompanied it. “You were mumbling in your sleep and screaming at something. We all heard it.”
“Even with our headphones in,” DJ said, without anything resembling a joke.
I could understand Brady’s seriousness. But if DJ, a man who used his good looks, Australian accent, incredible confidence and flirtatious demeanor to make me break my own rules, maintained a courtroom-level seriousness… maybe I had done something bad.
“So I was having a bad dream, I did just fight the sociopath of all sociopaths,” I said. “It’s called PTSD, it’s going to happen.”
“We just want to make sure you’re OK, love,” Nicholas said.
I rolled my eyes, but did so with a smile, giving everyone permission to laugh gently at my gesture.
“I’ll be all right. Thanks, hate,” I said, drawing more laughs from the room.
At first, I felt relief that the conversation seemed to end there. Everyone felt comfortable returning to what they were doing before. But as the laughter subsided and people turned back to their books or music, I couldn’t help but acknowledge the dream did disturb me. I remembered what Mundus had done after I destroyed Nuforsa—he’d warned me that I had not seen the last of her. Of course, it was Mundus, anything he said could be a lie, but it played into a fear I had. When I killed these demons, where exactly did they go? They weren’t “living” like humans were. There was no spiritual realm for the spiritual realm, as far as I was aware. I hadn’t seen any demons tell me that I’d killed them once, but I’d only been on this trip for about three days, not three months. I expected the demons to need a little more recovery time if they came back. And if they came back, then how could we ever win the war?
I’d have to ask Carsis when we got to Berlin. That got stored in an Evernote document I had of all the questions which were accumulating. It got stored between “if I die, can I keep fighting?” and “could I become a shifter and use the powers given to me against Mundus?”
For all of the fretting I did, I felt confident about my opening dance with the devil. I’d killed one of Mundus’ greatest soldiers and sent all of the demons in Amsterdam scuttling back to the hell hole they’d come from. For that reason, at least temporarily, I could focus on one thing—my damn vacation!
It was why I was here. I was on a well-earned, dream-of-a-lifetime vacation. I had met a hot, handsome man that pushed my boundaries like no other man ever had—not even close—which made for a fun game of how long I could keep him at elbow’s distance. So far, I was winning.
So far.
I’d met two British brothers, the goofballs of Manchester who played off each other so well and provided such comic relief that I wanted to film their interactions and post it to YouTube as an audition for an HBO stand-up special.
And finally, I’d met a man who looked like nothing more than a hostel owner before revealing he was actually a Power angel, the equivalent of the border guard between the human realm and the spiritual realm. He had taken on the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi to my Luke Skywalker, or should I say as a woman, he’d become the Luke Skywalker to my Rey.
In other words, the vacation had given me interesting people whom I’d get to travel with and interesting moments. I just wished that “interesting” meant the same thing in both cases.
I looked outside at the setting sun—and about nothing else. Wherever we were in the Netherlands or in Germany, we were in the rural parts, the places where farms prospered about every dozen acres, hills rolled like the American Midwest, and single roads led to small homes. The occasional windmill appeared in the distance, but I’d seen enough on our bike ride that it didn’t quite capture my attention as it had in Amsterdam.
Once I got enough of the scenery—and, admittedly, dealt with some of the motion sickness that came from having objects near the train blur by—I unlocked my phone and looked at the list of things we had planned for Berlin. The Berlin Wall, obviously. Who would go to Berlin and not see that? “The kickass view from the top of their capitol building.” I’m sure that made sense when I typed it, but right now, I just assumed it was a gorgeous rooftop view of the city. Historical war museums. Other things that probably made sense when I wrote them down—why did I write “aquarium in hotel?”—and a few German words which I couldn’t place with an actual location. I figured DJ and Brady would take care of it.
I usually didn’t care to rely on boys to help, but in the case of Berlin, it was more of an indulgence to the two of them. Brady had basically planned this entire trip around visiting Berlin and Munich, and DJ, upon us boarding the train, had told us he had a place we could all crash at. Which, thank heavens, the last thing we needed to do was drag more hostel roommates into our adventures with demons and hell.
I read through the entire list on my phone, locked it, and grew bored looking at everyone staring at their electronic devices with massive headphones on. I tapped Brady, who was reading from his Kindle, and asked him how much further we had to go. He shrugged and I rolled my eyes.
“OK, wise guy, how long have we been traveling?”
“Two hours, maybe? It hasn’t been that long. Still have the majority of the trip to go.”
Damn. Two hours, and I’d already had a hell of a nightmare that would keep me up until we got there. At least by the time we got to Berlin, it would be well into the night, I’d be exhausted, and we wouldn’t have time to do much and get in the way of demons. Brady went back to his Kindle, making his message clear—he, like everyone else, wanted a few hours of complete silence to themselves before Berlin.
I tried to put my headphones in and listen to some of my favorite music—Pharell was my top choice right now, although I could always go for a little EDM with Zedd or Calvin Harris. I hoped I could get out my head and just imagine myself at a nightclub in New York or Boston, just gleefully dancing, lost in the moment, moving to the beat and nothing more.
It worked for a bit. When I kept my eyes open, glancing at Mr. Trouble or the Humor Brothers across from me, I felt good. My shoulders bobbed, my head swayed, and I fell into the rhythm of “We Found Love” by Calvin Harris. But whenever I closed my eyes to try and get deeper in touch with the music, my mind would just keep flashing back to the demon’s lair. To Nuforsa. To the words of Mundus. To Carsis…
My eyes shot open. I prayed that I’d get rid of the thoughts. Carsis could help with that. Carsis had not joined us on the train, but as a Power angel, he’d told us he would have no problems meeting us in Berlin. I appreciated the extra space to spread out, but I began to think I would’ve appreciated a comforting angel more.
I closed my eyes again, hopeful but not optimistic a concentrated effort could keep the memories away. It didn’t work. I was unable to shake the terrifying thoughts racking my brain.
Looking for something to do—something to get me active, out of my head, whatever—I stood up and slowly walked down the train, bracing myself against the wall thanks to the sometimes not-so-gentle swaying of the train cars. The next two train cars were the same as ours, nothing but little cabins with six seats and small overhead luggage racks. Some people got lucky and only had two people per cabin. Others were at max capacity, with at least three groups of people who probably didn’t know each other and just wanted this eight-hour train ride to go by quickly. All things considered, we hadn’t done too badly to get a cabin all to ourselves. And by we, I basically mean DJ, who rearranged all of our things.
Like I said, he’s Mr. Trouble for me.
I reached the dining car, empty except for the lady behind the cash register, and took a look at the menu, which had all the fanciness of a Waffle House double-sided shee
t at 3 a.m. Though the sheet listed hopeful extravagances like currywurst and sausage, a quick glance behind the woman told me there was only a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a salad, orange juice, water, and Coke available. It was the kind of thing that I’m not even sure a prison would’ve limited itself to. But for an eight hour train ride, having not eaten since Yevon knows when…
Good Lord, it’s already happening.
“Ja,” the woman said, and while I knew German, I was too tired to flip over. I could only hope she spoke English. And if she didn’t, well, I’d charge through.
“May I have the ham and cheese sandwich?”
“Yes,” she said. Why do I worry. Everyone here speaks English. Kind of disappointing, really. I wanted to be challenged.
It did leave me feeling guilty, playing the role of stereotypical monolingual American. I would only get to converse in German if I initiated in German. More than being afraid of looking like an English-only American, I didn’t want to butcher the German language with such little sleep and a decent amount of stress.
I gave her five euros and she gave me a one euro coin back, which I pocketed. Almost in the time it took me to pocket my euro coin, she had the ham sandwich in front of me, somehow already warm. I didn’t have the greatest feeling about this, given that McDonald’s took more time to prep their food, but this was the trade I accepted for a scenic train ride over a quicker flight.
Which was an amusing lie to think about since we really made that choice because we couldn’t afford multiple flights, not because we had the luxury of choice.
I took a seat facing the door to the remaining cabins. I bit into the sandwich and I got exactly—no, actually, it had some sort of spread on it. Mustard, maybe? It was very tangy, but whatever it was, it actually made it quite good! Maybe things in Berlin wouldn’t be so bad after all.
I heard the door swing open, but didn’t look up from my sandwich at first. I’d have enough time to look up if anyone—
“I never thought I’d see someone as fit as you eating that,” DJ said.
Magic Revenge: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Spirit War Chronicles Book 2) Page 1