“Hey, assholes!”
Snow burst over me, raining from the demon’s hunched shoulders. He straightened, his immovable face turning to glare at the girl.
She stood close, legs wide and stance firm with her tiny jaw clenched. She cradled a second snowball in one gloved hand like a miniscule warrior. Her chin jutted with defiance. “It’s me you want.”
As if flabbergasted that a tiny elf of a human child would attempt to fight back, the demon holding me loosened his grip.
The girl threw her snowball. Good arm and good aim—it hit the demon holding me directly in his eyes. The beast roared, more infuriated than injured, and let go of my shoulders to swipe at his face.
I took advantage of the distraction. I jerked an arrow from the sheath buried beneath my body and jammed it in the demon’s neck from below. I could feel the resistance as my arrow slid through skin, muscle, and sinew, the violence of the blow sending shockwaves through my arm.
I squirmed away as the demon pitched forward, his big hands grabbing helplessly at the arrow. Too late for him—the blue liquid that functioned as blood in their frozen bodies was already draining from the wound while life faded from his eyes.
The remaining demon latched onto my coat and lifted me off my feet with a roar that made my insides quake. But see, ice demons were all strength and no brains. I whipped an arrow from the sheath and jabbed him in the throat, cutting his yell short.
They never learn.
He let go of me, and I stumbled as my feet hit the concrete. The demon fell sideways, his body cracking cobblestones in half under his massive weight. He twitched, gasped for air, then lay still in a widening puddle of blue blood.
I straightened my coat, irritated to see the bastard had ripped several buttons off. I wasn’t the best seamstress in the world, and I didn’t exactly have a plethora of winter coats lying around the cabin.
Why me?
The girl, who I’d momentarily forgotten, crept closer, her gaze on the line of demon bodies littering the alley. “Are they dead?”
“Yeah.”
She kicked at the puddle of demon blood. Instead of behaving like blood, it splashed like water. “They don’t bleed like us?”
“Sort of. You wouldn’t, either, if you were made of ice.”
“Whoa. Crazy.”
“Living la vida loca,” I agreed. It only took me a minute to figure out she would have no idea what I had said. A record, for me.
But the kid stuck out a hand with a grin. “I’m Liliya.”
“Gadreel.” I accepted her hand, and we shook. Her handshake was surprisingly firm for such a small creature. I motioned to the canvas sack at her feet. “What’d you steal?”
She flushed and picked up the bag, opening it to show me.
Food. A few bruised apples, a loaf of crusty bread, a wedge of cheese.
“You want some?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m good.”
“Thanks for saving me.” She kicked at the nearest demon. Her boot made a hollow thunk on his head. “They probably didn’t want to just talk, huh?”
“I’m not completely certain they can talk.” I straightened my ruined coat and stooped to gather the broken pieces of my bow. “Let’s get you home before reinforcements arrive.”
Liliya polished an apple on her threadbare jacket, then took a big bite. “Don’t have one,” she said, voice muffled by the fruit.
“Family?”
“Nope.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Anywhere I can.” She chomped thoughtfully on the apple, her blue-eyed gaze traveling over me. “You’re big.”
“You’re small.” I eyed the heavy flakes falling faster from the sky. “Gonna get bad. Come on, kid. Let’s get inside before it buries us.”
I’d already assumed Liliya stole the food because she was hungry, but watching her tear into my feeble attempt at bacon and eggs made me realize she was hungrier than I’d initially thought.
Liliya sat at my kitchen table, her knees tucked beneath her and Lacy curled into a ball on her lap. I could hear the cat’s purrs from across the room as Liliya’s fingers danced in her fur.
I wasn’t much for company, but at least my cabin had a default state of “clean.” Liliya didn’t seem to mind my quiet, unimpressive home. I left her to eat at her own pace, as I struggled with a needle and thread to reunite my buttons with my coat.
Having the kid here unnerved me. Not because she was an unnerving sort; she was clever and funny. She sopped up yolk with a half-eaten biscuit, and the innocence of it brought memories of my daughter front and center.
Gretchen was only six when the curse claimed the city, and a vast majority of the populace died—including her. She’d looked like her mother: big green eyes, shiny red hair, but with skin the color of dusk, three shades lighter than mine. I’d never thought anything in the world could be more beautiful.
“Thanks for feeding me,” Liliya said after putting away three eggs and half a fried pig.
I grunted in response, too irritated at myself to speak. I’d managed one button, and the damn thing loosened the moment I cut the thread. This was the reason I picked up odd jobs around the neighborhood to buy new clothes. I couldn’t sew to save my life.
Liliya bounded over to me and extracted the needle and mess of thread from my fingers. “You’re just putting holes everywhere. Scoot over. I’ll do it.”
I relinquished the settee to my young guest. As she worked—with a lot more swiftness than my awkward fingers were capable of—I added more logs to the fire and closed the inner shutters on the windows to block the chill.
Before I closed the last set of shutters, I looked out into the storm—nothing but whiteout as far as I could see. Neither of us would be leaving tonight.
“How old are you?” I asked Liliya.
Her tongue peeked through the corner of her lips as she concentrated. “Eleven.”
“How long you been living on the streets?”
She shrugged. “Two years.”
“What happened to your family?”
“Nymfa. My sister failed in the blood tithe. Got herself knocked up.”
Nymphs. Of course. I bit back a fatherly need to erase the phrase “knocked up” from her vocab. I’d saved her life; that didn’t mean I could adopt her like an orphaned puppy.
“How did you escape?”
She grinned. “I’m quick.” As if to prove it, she tossed my jacket at me, buttons good as new.
I stared dumbly at the three buttons. I couldn’t even see her stitches. “Impressive.”
“Ma was a seamstress. It’s in my blood.”
“Well. Thanks.”
Liliya stood and stretched, then released a burp entirely too deep for her frame. “I guess I should go before I get snowed in.”
“Hate to break it to you, kid. You’re already snowed in. You leave now, you’ll be another of mother nature’s statistics.”
“I walk in the snow all the time.”
“I’ll ignore how unsafe that is,” I chided her, welcoming back the long-dead father inside me. “You’ll stay here. You can have the bed.”
Her face lost its open, easy friendliness and drew guarded and unwary. “Okay.”
“I won’t hurt you,” I promised. Her wariness had probably kept her alive a time or two, but it still stung. “Just a place to sleep. You can leave anytime.”
I hated to think what could have happened to this kid to give her such a sense of distrust. Blonde hair and blue eyes weren’t necessarily common in Kremlin Circle. If that had made her a commodity for the underbelly of the Circle… The thought sent rage through me.
This fucking world we lived in.
I opened a drawer in my bureau and shuffled through several years’ detritus before I found a dusty pack of playing cards.
I held it up. “You play?”
Liliya grinned, losing some of the wariness. “I play a mean game of Go Fish.”
The sun shone
bright in a sky full of brilliant white clouds. There was nothing but blue sky and green grass as far as the eye could see. And the sun wasn’t the half-hidden white orb of Kremlin Circle. It was lush and orange and so, so warm.
Catie perched on a stool behind our cabin, peeling potatoes for dinner in denim shorts that bared every exquisite inch of her legs. Her toes clenched the rungs beneath her. Sweat beaded on her collarbone and trickled into her tank top, tracing patterns between her ginger freckles.
“You’re home.” She smiled and tilted her face up to return my kiss.
“Where’s Gretchen?”
“In the coop. We have chicks.”
“Mmm. More to eat.” I tickled her rib cage.
She batted away my hands and glared at me, though it lost some of its sting in the twitch of her lips. “Don’t you dare say that to Gretch. She’d never forgive you.”
“Impossible. She loves me best.”
“In your dreams, big guy.”
I passed from a scorching afternoon into the relative cool of the barn. Gretchen crouched over the nesting boxes in a cotton dress the exact color of the mid-day sun. She glanced up as I entered and grinned, exposing the gap where I’d pulled her tooth two nights prior.
“Daddy! Come see the babies.”
I joined her on the ground, dropping a kiss to her head.
“This one is Jacket.” She pointed to a ball of fluff with a dark spot on his wings. “And next to him is Meteor.” She continued introducing me to the new chicks, each name stranger than the next: Cheddar, Fence, Tribe. I had no clue where she got such a vivid imagination. Her mother’s family, surely. Something about that fae Celtic blood.
The first indication something had gone terribly wrong came in the form of a crack loud enough to shatter the sky. The crack was followed by a blinding flash of red light and a concussion blast that knocked me on my ass.
Gretchen burrowed into my side as dust rained from the ceiling. I shook off the stupor of the blast and stood, swinging my daughter onto my hip. I hurried from the barn to check on Catie.
The sky, so blue and pure only moments before, had turned to tar and raining flame.
I awoke disoriented, my back sore from the hard dirt floor. I sat up, bones and joints creaking angrily, and then stilled. Listened.
The wind howled like a banshee outside. Liliya slept above me in my bed, one arm tossed out to the side and her mouth open. Tiny snores emitted from her lips. Lacy was curled against her torso, sound asleep.
What had awakened me?
I pushed back the blankets and tugged on my boots, not bothering to tie them as I heaved myself from the unforgiving floor.
Pain had been a difficult concept to grasp when God stripped me of my powers for falling in love with Catie. I’d existed for millennia in a body that knew nothing of aches, and a heart that knew nothing of breaking. I learned fast that every day meant pain in this world, and every day without my family meant heartbreak.
I pushed aside the heavy fur covering the front window and cracked open the shutters. The storm had abated some in the night, revealing white drifts and untouched layers covering sidewalks and roads through the falling snow.
And nymphs. Lots of them, gliding silently toward my cabin.
4
I dropped the fur as if it’d burned me.
My heart stuttered in my chest. Ice demons didn’t bother me—they were all idiot muscle and no smarts, no skill. Nymphs were a different creature altogether. They were intelligent, fast, and brutal.
I didn’t care about myself. I hadn’t cared whether I lived or died in years.
But the small girl asleep in my bed deserved to live.
I shook Liliya gently, placing a finger to my lips when she opened her eyes. I grabbed her shoes and coat and tossed them on the bed, indicating for her to get dressed.
She didn’t question me. She didn’t speak at all. For the second time that day, I wondered what kind of life she had led where being awakened in the middle of the night and told to stay quiet and get dressed was normal.
We donned our jackets in silence. I watched Lacy climb expertly up into the exposed eaves as if she sensed the danger and wanted to get far away from it.
I could see questions in Liliya’s wide blue eyes, but I didn’t trust that speaking would be safe. Even through the roaring wind and the walls of my cabin, those things could hear. Sound and touch were all they had to work with.
I grabbed one of my spare bows and my sheath of arrows. I carefully raised a window, saying a silent thank you that I kept them clean and oiled and thus, silent. I slid through the gap into the cold night, head first, and rolled, snow crunching beneath me. I cringed as I came to a stop on my knees: the snow might as well have been glass breaking.
By the time I climbed to my feet and turned to assist her, Liliya had already dropped to the snow, quiet but for the soft crunch of her boots.
Then we ran.
How do you hide from omnipotent demi-demons? Every time my boots hit the fresh fallen snow, I expected the nymphs to appear, driven only by sound and the need to destroy. I’d never come close to a fight with Belias’s demonic ladies-in-waiting. If push came to shove, I wasn’t one hundred percent positive I would win. They weren’t ice demons, half dumb and clumsy as fuck. Nymphs were smart. Intelligent.
Way too deadly.
I darted down a dark alley, Liliya tracking close behind me. The kid was light on her feet. More silent than me, even. And fast. If I paused to survey the roads, to decide whether to go left or right, I ended up with her hands on my back as she rear-ended me.
I led her away from my neighborhood, deeper into the old warehouse district. There were places we could disappear in those abandoned buildings—if we could cover our tracks. Snow still fell thick and wet, which could easily hide our path, though that didn’t mean we would be hidden from the nymphs.
I hooked a left, then an immediate right. I scanned the dark, silent facades of the old warehouses around us, looking for an opening—somewhere we could slither to safety.
Liliya tugged on my jacket, startling me from my mad dash. She pointed, and then took off into the swirling snow.
Eleven years old or thirty, the kid had been living on the streets. If she knew of a safe house, I was man enough to follow her lead.
Liliya hurried through these streets like she knew them, which gave me a little bit of comfort considering I’d handed the reins to a kid. She veered off the sidewalk down a back alley, where we crawled beneath a broken board into a fenced yard between two buildings. The snow piled in drifts up to my elbows, which meant I had to dig my way through. A little easier for her seventy pounds than my two hundred, but somehow I squeezed in after her.
Detritus littered the disused yard of what looked to be an auto care company: an old block engine, several oil cans, some small machines and jacks. We hadn’t had automobiles in Kremlin Circle since the rift, so places like this were some of the first to die, lying forgotten in the dark corners of the Circle. A testament to the past.
A garage door opened onto the yard, though the door itself was long gone. Beyond the gaping hole, the garage was empty, the floor stained shades of gray by years of oil leaks and manual labor.
I followed Liliya through the dark interior, past cubicles of broken Plexiglas and an empty break room with a soda machine that hadn’t seen cans of pop in ages. We descended a flight of stairs into a white-washed basement hallway, our wet boots squeaking on the linoleum. Liliya motioned for me to duck into an office. She closed the paper-thin door behind us and pointed to her lips.
I blinked at her: tiny finger pointed at her mouth, eyebrows crooked as if I could read her mind. It took me a minute to realize she was asking to speak.
“I think we’re okay to talk now,” I told her, though I kept my voice low—just in case.
She threw herself into a rolling chair and opened her arms wide. “My family owned this place. My great-grandfather was a mechanic. Isn’t it weird that the
re were once jobs we’ll never need again?”
“Weird,” I agreed. I noted the pile of heavy blankets in one corner, and a shelf of dry goods along the wall. “You sleep here?”
Liliya shrugged. “Sometimes. I guess technically it belongs to me now, right?”
“Technically.”
“Why’d we run?”
“Nymfa,” I said quietly.
Liliya paled. “Do you… Do you think they were coming for me?”
“I don’t know.”
As fast as the thought occurred to her, it flitted away. Liliya leapt to her feet and skipped across the room, snagging a small bottle of water from the shelf. “You want some?”
I shook my head. This bouncing bean of a girl had nothing to her name but a rusted-out warehouse, and she was offering me a drink of her bottled water. Bottled water was not a cheap commodity. I felt a rush of affection for the kid. Tough and compassionate. You didn’t see that often in Kremlin Circle.
Liliya returned to her chair. “Do you think we’re safe?”
I didn’t feel comfortable making that judgment. I hated the cave-like quality of the room, the lack of windows to spy outside. If the nymphs did show up, we were cornered with nowhere to run.
“I don’t know.” I felt like an idiot, repeating the same unhelpful phrase to her every question. But I didn’t know. I was out of my depth here.
Liliya twirled lazily in her chair, her brilliant blue eyes trained on the ceiling. “No one can ever be safe from the nymfa.”
A crash from above shook the walls of the office. Liliya stilled in her chair. I turned to the door, straining to hear anything beyond the rush of wind outside the walls.
“No way,” Liliya breathed.
I held up a hand to hush her, then treaded carefully over broken linoleum and placed my ear to the thin door. Nothing greeted me but the echoing silence of the warehouse halls.
Liliya had a point. There was no way they could have found us. All the empty fucking buildings in this part of the city, and they tracked us here? In driving snow?
I considered it logically. In an old building like this, anything could have collapsed. The weight of snow piled on a single point could lay as heavy as the weight of the world and cause a cave-in to a disused room. That could be it, really—just physics.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 20