“Yes. And?” Roman said in a tone of annoyance.
That didn’t seem to be the response she wanted. “You could have asked me first.”
“That wasn’t necessary,” Roman said, his lip curled.
Mercedes rounded on him. “Not necessary? You need me, sir! You’d not have gotten this far without me!” Her fists were clenched; her bravado seemed to be masking terror.
“If not for you, I’d have found another tool,” he said, eyeing Tina as if to say, like this one.
What in the world was going on here?
I wasn’t going to find out, because Tina dropped, covering her head and hiding under the picnic table, and Cormac appeared from behind a nearby shelter, aiming the crossbow. He fired.
Roman turned to look, as if he’d heard the weapon’s string vibrate. He stepped, and almost dodged it. Stumbling back, he immediately straightened and glared at his attacker. He did not, alas, turn into a pile of decayed ash. The bolt hung from his right shoulder, a full handbreadth from his heart. The hit wasn’t going to kill him. So close.
Snarling, Cormac dropped the bow and swung the next off his shoulder, already loaded, and fired again. But Roman was running. I didn’t see where he went—he was a shadow, and all the shadows in the park seemed to get bigger, to swallow him up.
This time when I launched myself in a run, Ben didn’t stop me. In fact, he was right on my tail. I headed for Tina with some high-and-mighty notion that I could get in front of her and take whatever bullet was coming. I could take damage, she couldn’t, and we had to keep her safe. Ben aimed for Cormac. He had a stake in each hand.
Wolf could run faster. Wolf had better weapons for this. But I didn’t have time to shift.
Ben arrived at Cormac’s side and took a defensive covering position while Cormac winched back and reloaded the first crossbow.
Tina looked back to see me skid to a stop next to the table. I reached out with my hand, which she grabbed, and I pulled her out from under the table and shoved her behind me, backing away in an attempt to escape.
I expected Roman to appear in front of us—he’d be moving so fast I wouldn’t see him. He’d be a blur, a shadow shifting when a light turns on. I took short breaths, smelling as much as I could, tracking patterns in the air, which was suddenly filled with vampire. Calm, keep calm. I knew where Mercedes was, and I could only spot where Roman had gone if I could breathe and catch his scent. Standing tall, I hoped he’d go for me instead of Tina. A stray crossbow bolt wouldn’t kill me.
But Roman didn’t come after us. When he appeared again, a running blur, he went to Mercedes. She was ready for him, her teeth bared, her expression lethal. He made to slip behind her, arm around her neck for a quick snap and takedown, but she ducked, whirled past his shoulder, and got her mouth to his neck, fangs ready for a deadly cut. She wanted his blood, and therefore his power. If he’d been an inch slower, she might have had a chance, but his arm was up under her chin, shoving.
After that, I couldn’t follow the movements, which might have been choreographed, a dance instead of a fight, arms reaching, bodies slipping around each other. They dodged every strike the other offered, as if they could both predict a dozen or more moves ahead of what the other had planned.
Mercedes was the kind of person who recruited other people to do her dirty work. She usually watched from on high, her hands immaculate while chaos churned beneath her. I had assumed she couldn’t fight. My mistake. They were both old. Ancient, experienced, powerful. As much as I’d dealt with vampires, I hadn’t really understood.
“If they’d finish each other off, that would be ideal,” I murmured. I wasn’t macho. I didn’t have to get in the killing blow. It would be enough to watch.
Cormac must have thought this was a possibility, because he turned the newly loaded crossbow toward the car driver, who had a wicked three-foot-long spear in one hand and a semiautomatic pistol in the other. The pistol was up, aimed at Cormac and Ben.
“Ben, he might have silver!” I yelled, because he’d put himself in front of Cormac, thinking he could take the bullet. He couldn’t, not if the guy had silver bullets. I didn’t want Ben to test that.
“Police, drop your weapon!” Now Hardin was in on it, her own gun raised in one hand, her badge and ID held up in the other. Never mind that she was Denver PD, not Albuquerque, and didn’t have jurisdiction here. The driver didn’t know that.
He looked at her, bug-eyed.
A woman screamed—Mercedes. My first thought was, aha, at last and good riddance, Roman had ripped her head off or drained her borrowed blood. But no—they stood apart now; she was clutching her throat, and he was holding an object: a coin on a leather cord. He’d ripped it from around her neck and threw it to the side like it was trash.
“This was never about you, and it was never about power.” He said this calmly, in the tone of someone laying off an employee. Mercedes stared at him, eyes round and in shock. She’d probably never been rejected in her life.
“You can’t do this,” she said, her ordinarily powerful voice gone reedy as she struggled for breath. “I have been loyal, for centuries I’ve followed you—”
“You overstepped yourself in London. You should have known.”
Mercedes’s expression turned stricken. “No. Oh no, no—”
Violence hung in the air, nasty and imminent. I bared my teeth, and Wolf tore at my gut. Change, attack, fight—
No, this wasn’t our fight. We were caught in the middle of something else entirely.
The wind changed, a slap on my face, and I smelled brimstone, heat, fire, anger. I dropped to a crouch, nose up, searching for this new enemy. Meanwhile, Tina screamed. It happened in a second—the wind, her scream, and me turning to look up into the face of a tall woman, monstrously tall, and powerful. She wore leather and weapons, spears and daggers, swords and javelins, all wood and silver, all made to fight monsters. Dark-tinted goggles strapped over her short-cropped hair covered her eyes, even in the dark. She backhanded Tina across the face, sending her flying a dozen feet. Air left her lungs with a gasp.
Then the demon turned to me and sneered.
Chapter 6
TINA LAY still. Unconscious? Maybe she just had the wind knocked out of her. I hoped. Meanwhile, the demon transferred a weapon—a long spear tipped with a sharp metal point, no doubt laced with silver—from her left hand to her right. I’d met this demon before, and her sole purpose was hunting creatures like me.
“Got new goggles, I see. Nice.” I winced. My mouth ran faster than my legs. Last time we met, I’d managed to rip her goggles off—Cormac had them now. Any light at all, even the dim streetlights of the parking lot, left her blind and slowed her down—briefly.
She didn’t credit me with an answer, just drew back in order to impale me. The impaling wouldn’t kill me—the poison of the silver in my bloodstream would. In the back of my brain, Wolf howled, furious. We could shift, we could attack, we’d driven her off before, we could do it again—
In the time it would take me to turn, run, shift, anything, she’d have me pinned to the ground. I backed away¸ delaying.
“Do you have a name?” I said, my voice rising. I couldn’t disguise my fear. “I keep running into you and I don’t know what to call you.”
“Won’t matter in a second,” she said. Her voice rumbled like breaking wood.
I could run. And she could throw that spear. I could charge her, get inside her range. But it would only take a scratch from that silver to kill me. Plus, she had a dozen daggers. No room to fudge this. I sat up from my crouch, bracing to do … something. Like, talk more.
“You told me you don’t work for Roman, then why are you here, covering his ass? Who do you really work for?”
“You’ll never know,” she said, and prepared to launch.
“No!” Tina sat up, wobbly. A cut marred her forehead and blood streamed down her face. Metal rivets on the demon’s glove had cut her badly. My heart sank, seeing what she was tr
ying to do. She should run away, just get out of here—
The demon turned, Tina charged, grabbed her arm—trying to turn the spear away from me. The demon shook her off easily, smacking her again for good measure, and again Tina fell hard.
But it was enough of a distraction. I grabbed the spear, dropped my weight, and wrenched the weapon out of the demon’s hands. Turned the point back on her, stabbed. She smacked it aside with her leather-armored arm, but I kept hold of it. She kicked, and I dodged, but not fast enough. I was fast, but she was a demon from hell. The blow struck my gut, knocked the wind out of me, but I kept my feet.
I had to get close enough to take those goggles—that had worked last time. I braced for the next attack, but the demon suddenly looked up, as if at a call or an alarm. Lips curled, teeth bared—wolflike—she ran, grabbing another spear off the collection of them strapped to her back. This one was sharpened wood, not silver. It couldn’t hurt me. She had a different target now.
I ran after her.
Mercedes called a name—her driver, I assumed—and made to retreat to her car. Stricken, the driver looked back and forth between Hardin and his mistress—and the demon.
Cormac stepped up, ignoring Mercedes now to face the demon—shifting his focus to the baddest bad guy. He held a cross in one hand and a burning torch in the other. And where had he gotten a torch? Ah, he’d made one, out of a crossbow bolt and a scrap of cloth. Maybe doused with fluid from a lighter. He had a whole warehouse of useful items in his pockets.
The demon ignored him and continued after the vampire.
Mercedes sprinted, but the demon was faster. A thrusting spear stabbed through her back, driving her off her feet. The point planted in the ground.
“No!” Mercedes growled, an unmusical noise coming from her throat. She grabbed the spear protruding from her chest and twisted, as if she could wrench herself off it. But she was already crumbling. Her hands fell apart, her arms turned to dust. She kept saying no, grimacing with bared teeth, lips moving after sound ceased.
The decay of the grave, many hundreds of years of death, caught up with her all at once. Her body, even her clothing, dried, shrank, fell in on itself, and crumbled. Even dying, she was still angry, still fighting, hate and fury written on her face, until her face vanished. Crumbled to dust.
Gone, just like that.
The moment of shocked stillness that came after lasted only a breath. Cormac—Amelia—marched on toward the demon, chanting in Latin. Fearless, as always. Even years after him leaving prison, seeing him weaponless was still odd. Before prison, he’d have had a shotgun in hand, firing over and over, a relentless assault. And it wouldn’t have worked, not against the demon.
The demon sneered, hefting another spear from her collection—this one tipped with metal. But she didn’t move forward to meet him. She took a step back.
“It’s a litany from an exorcism,” Tina said. Her voice was hoarse, obviously in pain. She was still bleeding horrendously from the cut on her head. “But since he’s not an ordained priest I don’t know if it’ll work.”
I tore off a piece of my shirt and put it on the wound. She hissed, but held the makeshift bandage in place.
Cormac kept on, and again the demon stepped back. Straightening, she lowered her weapons, waited—and a whirlwind rose around her. Made of smoke and fire, stinking of ash and brimstone, it swirled liked a curtain, a cape. Biting sand reached across the park, and I ducked against it. When the storm collapsed, the demon was gone. A strategic departure. The wind roared for a second, then faded to nothing.
The park turned still, quiet, as if nothing had happened. Not a clump of sagebrush was out of place, not even smashed from all the fighting. The pile of ash that used to be Mercedes had blown away in the whirlwind.
Roman was gone. He was the one who’d taken advantage of the distraction to get out. His work here was done, evidently. I supposed I could comfort myself that he deemed us enough of a risk that leaving was a better option than sticking around to finish us off.
Either that, or we simply weren’t a threat at all.
Time for roll call. “Ben? Hardin?” I helped Tina to her feet, and we met up with the others.
Ben came over, put a hand on my cheek, leaned in to smell my hair, and I took a deep breath of his scent, which meant home, safety. Maybe things would be okay. His T-shirt had provided the scrap of cloth for the torch. I looked at his shredded shirt, and mine, and had to chuckle. What a pair.
“You’re psychic—can’t you see these things coming?” Ben demanded. He was fuming. I hoped Tina realized he wasn’t angry at her, he was just angry. Burning off anxiety.
“It doesn’t work that way!” she shot back. Then, quieter, “You know it doesn’t work that way.”
“Is everyone okay?” I asked, cutting through.
No one answered right away. I would have been worried, except I could see them all, Ben and Cormac, Tina and Hardin. All awake, all conscious, all catching their breath as we gathered at the edge of the parking lot.
Ben said, “You stopped that thing, right? It’s not going to come back?”
He hadn’t ever seen the demon before. Cormac and Hardin had. I’d faced her down twice.
Cormac sighed. “I didn’t stop her. She decided I wasn’t worth fighting. Just like last time.” He threw down the torch and stomped out the flame.
The driver of the town car had fallen to his knees, dropped his gun and stake, and held his face in his hands, crying. Mercedes’s human servant, grieving. I almost felt sorry for him. Hardin stood nearby, gun holstered and handcuffs in hand, but she seemed to reconsider arresting him. Finally, she picked up his gun from the pavement.
“Get out of here before I change my mind,” she said, backing off.
He looked up at her, his expression stark. Made his own calculations and climbed to his feet like a creaking old man. “This isn’t over,” he said. “You’ll pay for this.”
“We didn’t even kill her!” I exclaimed. He glared at me. It obviously didn’t matter.
Hardin crossed her arms. “I’m about to change my mind.”
He hurried into his car, started the engine, and swung around on squealing tires.
“Not sure that was the best idea,” Cormac said.
“What did you want me to do, shoot him?” Hardin answered.
Cormac raised a brow as if to say yes. Hardin shook her head and turned to the rest of us, focusing on Tina, with the wadded-up cloth clamped on her head. The bandage was soaked red, and blood was still dripping.
“That’s going to need stitches,” Hardin said.
Tina closed her eyes, sighed. “Ashtoreth,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s her name, or a type of demon. But if you want to call her something, it’s Ashtoreth.” That was how the psychic thing worked. Flashes of insight, slivers of knowledge. Hardly ever the whole picture. It wasn’t predicting the future, it was untangling puzzles.
The name didn’t mean anything, but I had a stack of reference books and an Internet connection at home that I was sure would have a listing. But right here we had Amelia, a walking reference library.
Cormac spoke—the words were Amelia’s, more precise, less brusque. “The name is a derivation of Astoreth, a Canaanite goddess cast as a demon by later Judeo-Christian mythologists wishing to discredit pagan religions. Some alchemists and demonologists began to use the term to refer to a collection of female or hermaphroditic spirits. She appears in Milton: ‘With these in troop came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians called Astartè, queen of heav’n, with crescent horns.’”
I didn’t have the whole thing memorized like Amelia did, but I’d read Paradise Lost. This sounded like the listing of demons, the followers of Lucifer. As if this could get any more ominous. This still didn’t tell me anything more about her. It didn’t give me anything useful about stopping her. She was little more than a metaphor. I couldn’t do anything about it, I could just handle what was right here in front of me.
I
hunted over the ground where Roman and Mercedes had had their confrontation. The place had gone back to desolate and peaceful so quickly, it was hard to imagine that anything had happened here. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find it—but there it was, a dull glint against the pale desert earth. Mercedes’s coin, a bronze circle the size of a nickel, old face and writing barely visible.
“Does someone have a hammer we can use on this thing?”
Cormac did, in the back of his Jeep. As we had with all the other coins of Dux Bellorum we’d found, we put it against the concrete and smashed the hell out of it, until the face and writing were mangled smears of bronze, negating its connection to Roman.
“Okay, now we go to the doctor,” I said, pulling Tina toward the car.
So, we hadn’t stopped Roman, but we’d all gotten out alive. For now, I counted this one a victory.
* * *
WE RECONVENED at a local urgent care. After some discussion, Tina and Hardin went in by themselves, because Hardin thought the whole troop of us would have looked suspicious, and two people could keep their stories straight better than five of us. Especially if one of them was a cop. Not that “tripped and fell” was that hard of a story to keep straight. That was what they were going to say, not “smacked by a demon in the middle of a vampire war.” Damn, this needed to be a movie. No one would believe it.
While we waited for them, the three of us claimed a booth at a Denny’s down the road. The coffee was terrible and delicious at the same time. I had finally stopped shaking from spent adrenaline.
“Well?” I said finally.
“Could have gone worse,” was Cormac’s curt assessment.
I snorted. Technically, he was right—we could all be dead.
Cormac added, “My second shot would have got him if that other vampire hadn’t shown up.”
I let loose. “And what was that all about? What the hell was going on there?” Whatever it was, we didn’t have a clue, and wasn’t that always the case. This was just such a dramatic revelation of it.
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