I nodded, concentrating my magic into the hole I sensed in my twin’s lung. My hands shook and I doubled down the pressure to keep them steady. My ears rang with silent screams, an icy knife twisting my guts.
The world leached of all color, tunneling in and out of focus. No, no, no, no, no. This wasn’t going to end like Esther. Mandelbaum wasn’t going to take another person from me because I couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have Ari in it. I’d died and was given a Hail Mary, brought back by Lilith, but I was losing my twin, watching his life force bleed out in front of me despite all my efforts, with no tricks up my sleeve for that last-minute miracle.
I was losing him. A numbness filled my veins, my stillness mirroring my twin’s. I didn’t want to empathize with Sienna’s power draw to heal the wards, but yeah, I’d use every last drop of dark magic to make sure Ari lived.
The hole in Ari’s lung began to close, but he still wasn’t responding.
Rohan intensified his efforts.
My brother went limp… then coughed. A raspy, gurgling sound that was the most beautiful music ever.
Ro knelt back on his calves, one hand on Ari’s heart. “You okay, man?”
Ari stared up at the sky and nodded.
I grabbed the still-unconscious sniper and drowned him in magic.
The man bucked, his eyes rolling back to the whites. Flecks of foam appeared at the corner of his mouth.
I fried his brain synapses and destroyed his organs to the brink of functionality, to the brink of death. It barely took any effort at all. Humans were so fragile.
It was my duty to protect them.
Not all of them. I kicked the sniper in the ribs.
For every attempt to take what was sacred to me, I would send back ashes. Let them burn.
Chapter 9
Ari went to talk our parents into leaving, which left Ro and me deciding what to do with the intruders so Mrs. Jepson wouldn’t return home and find two half-dead strangers in her backyard. As it was, her freak-out over her ruined rhodos was going to be epic.
Ro talked me down from throwing the men in Mandelbaum’s abandoned warehouse and setting the entire thing on fire. Too bad. Sing some campfire songs, roast some marshmallows, obliterate some bad guys, I was really onto something here.
Dragging the unconscious minions by their collars, I popped into the foyer of the Los Angeles chapter of the Brotherhood, startling a couple of witches talking at the reception desk. “Get Sienna.”
They hesitated.
I burst into full-body silver magic. “Now!”
The two vanished.
So many memories to relive while waiting here, none of them good.
“You have a lot of chutzpah showing your face.” Sienna held a take-out coffee cup.
“Don’t touch my Rasha.”
“What’s in it for me?” She flicked a glance at the men I held.
“I won’t kill all your witches.”
“You think you could?”
“I’m very effective when motivated.”
“You wouldn’t hurt innocents.” She sipped her drink.
“There are no more innocents. You told me that.” I flung the two men on the floor in a heap. “I killed for Esther and I’d kill a thousand times over for Ari, Rohan, or my friends.”
Sienna prodded the mercenaries with her toe. “Then how come they aren’t dead? They must have done something for you to bring them here.”
“Death is a mitzvah they don’t deserve. You have a score to settle with Mandelbaum for torturing Tessa. Consider these two a gift and stay the hell away from the Rasha who got free. Do we have a deal?”
She appraised me coolly for a long moment. “When I figure out how to harvest magic, I’m coming for your friends.”
“You’ll have to get through me.”
She saluted me with the coffee cup.
Ro waited for me on my parents’ front stairs.
Mom protested being driven out of her home, but Ari and I forced the issue. She finally capitulated when I told her that hopefully she could stay with Rivka. Even though she and this Dr. Gelman hadn’t met, Mom and Esther had been friends.
I muscled down my guilt, wiped my hands on my thighs and dialed. “Hi. It’s Nava. I’m sorry…” For not saving your sister. “For missing the funeral.”
“You were dead,” Rivka said. “It seemed like an acceptable excuse. Am I speaking with a ghost?”
I gripped the phone. She had the same dry, scathing manner as Esther. “I was resuscitated. Was the funeral nice?”
Wincing, I slapped myself on the forehead.
“It was a delight. Esther’s grave plot was neither too big nor too small, I’m stocked to the gills in bagels and chopped liver, and putting the cloths on the mirrors to sit shiva gave them a nice shine.”
I silenced my sarcastic retort. I’d lost my friend, she’d lost her sister. She got to be angry. “I just wanted to give you my condolences and say that I would have been there had it been possible.”
We’d find somewhere else safe for Mom and Dad.
“You think I don’t know that? Nava.” Rivka’s voice softened. “Isaac told me what happened to the Rasha who killed Esther. I’m furious, but not at you, child.”
I swiped at my damp eyes and decided to be brave and stop running from this hard shit. “Okay. In that case, could I please trouble you to put up my parents because Mandelbaum is targeting them?”
“Send them over.” She reminded me that I still had to get my inheritance and I promised I’d come see her soon. All in all, it went surprisingly better than anticipated. It was tough, talking with Rivka, but not impossible.
A weight eased off my chest.
Ari ignored all my nagging and insisted on shadow transporting himself back to Demon Club to recuperate under Kane’s watchful eye after helping my parents pack and getting them to Rivka’s house.
I gave in, hugging my parents and telling them that if they sensed any trouble, to call us.
“Mission accomplished,” I said to Rohan, unlocking my car door and sliding behind the wheel. Sort of accomplished. I’d bought some breathing room, but Sienna would crack the harvesting problem eventually, no matter how many Rasha lives it took.
I started the engine.
“What’s wrong?” Rohan said.
“Ari was just shot.” I eased into traffic on West Twelfth Avenue, bound for the chapter house in the Southlands area of Vancouver near the University of British Columbia.
“That all?”
I fidgeted with the A/C vent.
“Nava.”
“I’m going to tell you something but you have to swear to me on Asha’s memory that you’ll stay calm.”
“Not with a lead-in like that.”
We drove through the upscale shopping district of South Granville.
“Sienna wants to…” I tried to find a better word, but there was no better in this situation. “She wants to harvest Rasha magic.”
Rohan slapped off the A/C with an appraising look. “Yeah.”
“She doesn’t know how to do it, but I might, because Lilith created Rasha. Sienna wants to poke around in my head and find out.”
“Good idea.”
“Are you crazy? Zvi died. Maybe I could prevent more deaths, but maybe I’d be arming Sienna with info that’s best left hidden.” I turned onto leafy West Sixteenth Avenue with its predominance of Arts and Crafts homes. “I’ll step up my efforts to find the ring. Sienna doesn’t have concrete proof that Rasha magic would fix the problem. Could be a case of needing more healing magic and we could harness demons for that.”
Rohan gently squeezed the back of my neck. “If things get worse with that rift and the wards and we still don’t have a solution, promise me you’ll do what you have to.”
Why was everyone so chill with asking me to let dangerous people play around in my mind? Thank you, next. I gunned it through a yellow light. “We might be able to use the ring—”
“Sparky, we k
eep humanity safe, no matter what the cost.”
“No! You said you wanted everything with me. What if taking your magic kills you? It’s not like when you lost your powers when Ferdinand attacked you. You could live without access to it because it was sealed off, but can you physically survive if the magic is ripped from your body? Zvi couldn’t. Being dead isn’t everything, Rohan. It’s the end of everything.”
“If that rift opens, there won’t be an everything.”
The silence in the car grew to stifling proportions.
I pulled up to the scanner at Demon Club, waiting for the light to change green. The iron gate swung open and I turned the car into the long, winding driveway.
My phone rang.
“Get that?” I cocked my hip.
Ro dug into the pocket of my sundress for the phone. He dragged his fingers over the inside of my thigh. “Promise me.”
“Dirty fighting,” I chided.
“If it’s the only way,” he said softly. “Promise me you’ll sacrifice the Rasha.”
“Damn you, Rohan. I promise.” Only if this was my last resort and we were absolutely positive that we were all out of options.
The ringing stopped, leaving us in a different type of silence. Not a barbed one, a soft and wistful one.
I pulled into park, the engine idling.
Rohan stroked my cheek. “I do want everything.”
I leaned in toward him, and shrieked as two sharp raps rattled my window.
Drio scowled at me through the glass. “I want access to the demon dark web and Harry’s out of town and off-grid.”
“Ask Leo.” I shut off the motor, pocketing the keys.
“You have Harry’s login,” he said.
I opened the door right into his gut, earning a soft grunt. “Between being woken up so rudely this morning and freaking me out right now when I was about to kiss my boyfriend, no, I can’t say I remember it.”
Drio glared at Ro, who shrugged. Drio stormed off.
It had been worth a shot to get him to call Leo. I wasn’t hindering the Hybris search in any way. I’d never do that. Rohan had the login.
Ro watched him leave. “You’re a terrible liar,” he said.
“And you’re disturbingly good at it. Anything I should be concerned about?”
He flashed me his rock fuck grin and jogged after Drio.
Liiiiilllith.
A demon sat perched high in the feathery cypress tree towering just outside the ward lines to the property. His head resembled one of those cow skulls bleached by the desert sun, his thin lips bared in a grimace exposing his disturbingly large gums. Two fat ram’s horns, their ends splintering into smaller spirals, protruded off the sides, his ears two triangles sticking straight out. His body, vaguely humanoid, was a misshapen bulky block under a blue robe with a black star embroidered on his left arm.
Come out and play. His perfectly audible whisper was dried leaves and rotting breath, scratching on a loop against my brain.
I clutched the top of the car door, the pit of my stomach falling somewhere into my feet. Come on, Nava. Can’t show weakness to the creepy demonic fuck out here. Put on your performance face and let’s go. Slamming the door shut, I shot the demon the finger and went to see a dominatrix about Plan B.
I’d graduated from caves that contained demon crabs or were some kind of spawn monster’s stomach to sewer systems: pitch-black tunnels hewn from solid rock and teeming with raw sewage. Despite my protective clothing, face covering, and oxygen tank, the stench was unbearable. I shuffled through the concentrated shit and urine running through the overburdened sewer system in the Kidron Valley in Israel, all in service of bypassing any potential booby traps that Sienna had set up. But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to break into Brotherhood HQ in Jerusalem. We needed their library, so here we were in the sewers.
The tunnels were too low to stand in, so I’d been hunched over for about twenty minutes. The screaming pain in my neck and shoulders was a welcome distraction from the “ack, what was that squishy that just brushed me?” game I was stuck playing.
Ms. Clara and Leo were with me, but since I couldn’t even see the end of my nose, only the lap of sewage water and the tug of the safety line harnessing us together let me know they were still with me. I’d been warned that any magic use might set off the toxic gases down here, so obviously I wasn’t about to risk exploding us for a magic nightlight.
It was slow going. According to Ms. Clara’s guy Yitzak, in roughly a mile down this passage, we’d find a set of notches in the wall that would lead upward to another, drier set of tunnels that wound under the city and emerged at HQ. Bypassing the disgusting sewage tunnels wasn’t an option, because the sewer system was our only way to access the other set. Thank you, paranoid long-dead rabbi wanting a hidden escape tunnel out of the chapter.
I wore thin rubber gloves, my hand on the wall at all times for fear of missing the notches and wandering in here until I died. There was so much sludge on the walls that despite my hyperaware attention to every bump under my fingertips, I almost slid right past them.
Yitzak hadn’t been kidding about them being notches. These toeholds were barely carved into the wall and without any Olympic rock-climbing abilities, impossible to traverse.
I fumbled along the safety line until I hit the first human-shaped lump: Leo. I felt down her body, trying not to grope her too much, until I found her hands. The oxygen tanks that we wore didn’t allow for speaking, and I wasn’t about to suck down a lungful of the noxious gases down here.
I positioned her hands together, then, gripping her shoulders, I let my demony bestie hoist me up. Good thing she was strong, because it took a few moments for me to grope blindly, pushing on the rock to the right of the topmost notch in order to release the secret panel that would lead to the second set of tunnels.
Gross. It was gummed up with literal shit. I placed the palm of my rubber glove against it and gently channeled a super low dose of magic into the panel, hoping I didn’t cause an earth-shattering kaboom.
With a slow grinding noise and a whoosh of air, the rock slid away to reveal a tunnel dimly lit with some kind of motion sensor. The mouth of the tunnel was illuminated but the rest fell away to darkness.
I wriggled inside on my belly, then huffing and sweating, I turned around enough to lean halfway out of this tunnel and help Leo and Ms. Clara up, swearing as they clambered over me into the new tunnel.
The panel rock swung back into place, cutting us off from the sewage. I ripped my oxygen tank and protective face mask off, inhaling the sweetest breath of stale air.
“You owe me so hard for this.” Leo pushed her matted, sweaty red hair out of her face.
Ms. Clara clapped her gloved hands together. “We’re having an adventure!”
“You’d think you got enough adventure with your moonlighting gig,” I said.
“Eh. Being a dominatrix is kind of getting routine, and there’s no Brotherhood job anymore. I need to change things up.”
Roughly-hewn out of rock, this tunnel was dry, which was the only good thing about it, because it was also hot and twisty, with an uneven path that was so narrow we had to walk single-file. Three times we took a wrong turn, hit a dead end, and had to backtrack. We took turns singing to get through it. Leo sang her way through the Fugue State Five songbook, I stuck to pop hits, and Ms. Clara snarled her share of punk rock standards. She did a mean version of The Ramones hit “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
I was mangling “Blank Slate” when we hit the metal grate that marked the entrance to Jerusalem HQ.
Baruch hadn’t even known about this way in. Luckily, years ago, Ms. Clara had befriended Yitzak, a now-retired janitor for the organization. She visited him, bringing him treats and listening to his stories over mint tea every time she was in Jerusalem, and when we needed a way in, she’d known just who to contact.
Yitzak had sworn that the tunnels were top secret, need-to-know, and he’d only learned about them because
his uncle had been in charge of the Executive eighty years ago.
Ms. Clara and I helped Leo shimmy out of her protective gear, revealing her catsuit. I judiciously applied my magic to the bars, removing the grate, but ensuring that I didn’t trigger the laser alarm system that lay beyond. The witches might not know of this entrance now, but if we set off the alarm, they’d find out in a hurry. At least we could portal out afterward.
I pulled a smoke grenade cylinder out of my hip belt, twisted the wire ring sideways and tossed it into the room beyond. It rolled into the center and exploded with a soft pop, filling the room with plumes of green smoke in under thirty seconds, and revealing the crisscrossed grid of laser beams.
When Ms. Clara had first told me about this alarm system, I’d suggested that she could navigate and disarm the lasers via the panel on the other side.
“I am not a contortionist,” Ms. Clara had said frostily.
“I’ll pay you your dominatrix rate if you provide photos,” Baruch had said. Then he’d guffawed like a rusty seal.
There was no way I could slither through the lasers. Even back when I was dancing competitively, I was never super flexible and this required yoga master skills. So, I’d convinced Leo, my other pint-sized friend, to help. I’d presented her with a choice: crawl through a poo tunnel and then contort herself through lasers that might actually cut her in half, or discuss with me the true meaning of her outburst with Drio.
Leo had gone for door number three and punched me. I’d upped my game and sent in the big guns: my boyfriend. Ro sung her favorite Fugue State Five song, “Ugly Century.” That failed too.
Then Drio arrived at her apartment, demanding she translate a post from some demon language that he’d found like she was the Google Translate for all things evil.
Yes, the boy was all finesse.
Leo had told him to go fuck himself, she didn’t speak demon, and she was busy helping me. I took the win.
She tucked her hair under a close-fitting knit cap and slid her goggles on to protect her eyes from the smoke. She stretched out her shoulders, then quads, and double-checked that there was nothing sticking out from her clothes that might trigger the alarm. Basically, she looked like a badass super-spy.
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 155
