Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  Ironically, his wrist, in a splinted brace, looked like the least of his injuries.

  Without a greeting, Enzo pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sank down, blinking blearily at Adara as she scooped out the finished eggs into a bowl. “Food?” he rasped.

  “Almost done,” she replied.

  Slipping on a mitt, she opened the oven door and plucked out the tray containing the now crispy hash browns. She used a spatula to put one slice on each of the two plates she’d set next to the stove.

  Next, she turned off the oven and the stove burners, placed the tray on one of the burners to cool off, stripped her mitt, and grabbed the plates. She put one plate in front of Enzo, one in front of her own chosen chair, and grabbed the bowl of eggs and the foil-covered plate with the pile of bacon on it, situating both on the table between her spot and Enzo’s.

  “There.” She gave Enzo a bright smile that she hoped didn’t betray her poor mood. “Now all we need is utensils and paper towels.” She found the paper towels next to the sink, and the utensils in the drawer beside the dishwasher. After doling out the forks and a generous number of paper towel sheets, she added, “I think that’s everything. So bon appétit.”

  Enzo returned her smile with a ghost of his own, picked up his fork, and shoveled some steaming egg into his mouth. As he did this, he rested his left arm on the tabletop, drawing Adara’s eyes first to his splint and second to the star-shaped bruise on his bicep.

  He’s already been through so much, she thought sadly, and I’m going to have to put him through a whole lot more before all is said and done.

  She picked up a slice of bacon and pinched it between her fingers, the hot grease nipping at her skin. “Enzo, ah, last night, we never did get to talk much about, you know, the demons.”

  Enzo paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “No, we didn’t. I’m guessing there’s more to the story than ugly pig monsters and cool magic powers?”

  “A whole lot more, I’m afraid. And none of it’s good.”

  Enzo stared at the egg on his fork for a long moment, then set the fork back down on his plate and sighed in resignation. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I want to see them,” said Enzo exactly two minutes and forty-eight seconds after Adara finished recounting her tragic meeting with Selaphiel of the Heavenly Host.

  Adara, her hash brown poised between her teeth, replied with a muffled, “See what?”

  “The map of the barrier and the scroll with the spells on it.” Enzo shoved the last piece of bacon into his mouth and crunched it loudly. He’d cleaned his plate and then some during the course of Adara’s story, having become so enthralled with a true tale of gods and monsters that he’d forgotten all about his initial apprehension and had given in to his stomach’s gurgling demands for sustenance. “If I’m going to help you restore the barrier spell and defeat the evil demons, then I need to catch up on the reading.”

  Adara pulled the hash brown out of her mouth. “I didn’t ask you to help me.”

  “I know you didn’t. In fact, you implied the exact opposite several times by emphasizing certain words, avoiding the emphasis of others, and pausing at specific times in order to downplay the most crucial parts of your encounters with the angel and the demons.” He pointed his fork at her face. “But I will have you know that I was one of the star members on my undergrad debate team, and you’ll have to try a hell of a lot harder to dissuade me from making the obvious moral decision to help you stop an army of literal demons from overrunning the Earth.”

  Adara set her hash brown on her plate and sighed. “Enzo, you really don’t have to—”

  “I’m not made of china, Adara. I won’t break at the slightest bump.”

  “I know that.” She brought the hand that wasn’t covered in bacon grease to his bruised cheek and brushed her fingers against his skin. He winced at the contact, but he didn’t allow his determined pout, complete with puffy bottom lip, to falter in the slightest.

  “It’s just…I heard some of the things those men said to you before I actually saw you,” she continued, “and for a minute there, I honestly thought they’d hurt you in a way that you wouldn’t recover from.”

  Enzo’s expression softened. “Oh. I didn’t know you caught any of that.” He covered her hand with his own. “They, uh, said some pretty nasty shit, for sure. But most of it was just the typical gay-bashing bluster that insecure macho men always spit because they’re afraid of catching ‘the homo’ if they don’t aggressively overcompensate with the outward projection of their so-called masculinity.”

  He snorted. “Honestly, they didn’t even start spouting that BS until after they beat me up. They didn’t hurt me because I was gay. They hurt me because the first time they demanded I go downstairs with them, I couldn’t make myself respond. I just stood there, completely frozen, like a moron, while Hudson bled out on the floor in front of me.

  “So the guy with the pistol punched me into action, the one with the hunting rifle lugged me to the stairs by my wrist, and that dude with the knife, Rick, ripped my jewelry off because he thought he might be able to pawn it.”

  “None of that information makes me feel better about dragging you through the ringer again, you know?” Adara broke off a piece of her hash brown and tossed it into her mouth. Chewing thoughtfully, she added, “You’re already injured enough. If you tag along with me, you’re bound to end up worse off than you are now. Hell, you might even end up dead if that greater demon gets the drop on us.”

  Enzo squeezed her hand. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m afraid of dying in a horrifically painful way—like any sane human being—but I’m not so scared of a death that might happen that I’m going to throw my best friend to the wolves. You’re not fighting some crazy demon war alone. You’re not throwing yourself onto the sacrificial altar to be a martyr for some conflict that doesn’t even belong on this plane of existence. You’re not. Because I won’t let you. We are going to work together to win this fight. End of discussion. So let’s move on to the next topic.”

  He tugged Adara’s hand away from his cheek. “Scrolls, please.”

  Adara knew there was no way to change Enzo’s mind once he committed to something. She also knew that since she’d admitted her “quest” put her in serious danger, he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight so she could slip away to go it alone. He was a stubborn ass like that, and gallant to boot.

  That was why she liked him so much.

  She reclaimed her hand and said, “All right. Have it your way.”

  Retrieving the two scrolls from the side pocket of her pack, she slipped them both out of their silken ties and unrolled them on the kitchen table. Enzo perused the two spells first, and fixated for a moment on the one that could be used to banish demons.

  “Why didn’t you try this spell last night?” he asked.

  “Because I hadn’t had time to read it, much less memorize it,” she said. “I went straight from my apartment to the bar after my escape from the greater demon. And I didn’t anticipate the imps showing up at the bar because I wasn’t planning to use my god shard there.”

  Enzo hummed a sour note. “My bad.”

  “Not your fault.” She shrugged. “It’s not like you knew you could walk through walls.”

  “I still don’t know how I can walk through walls.” He slid the spell scroll aside and took hold of the map marked with all the barrier cornerstones. “I feel like I violated some laws of physics, just falling straight through the door like that. How on earth does it work?”

  Adara threw up her hands. “Hell if I know. Although, if God did in fact create the universe, then I suppose it stands to reason They could use Their omnipotent skill set to subvert the universe’s laws however They pleased.”

  Enzo tilted his head. “Why do you keep saying ‘They’ in reference to God?”

  “That’s the pronoun Selaphiel used. I’m guessing God d
idn’t fit neatly into the mainstream human gender binary. Which makes sense, considering They were an immeasurably powerful force of pure will that could shape the very nature of reality.”

  “Hm. You have a point. ‘They’ it is.” He frowned. “Or rather, was.”

  “Hard to grasp that there really was a God up there all this time, and now They’ve been reduced to tiny pieces scattered all over the planet.”

  “Pieces that are literally inside us,” Enzo tacked on. “You’d think we’d feel different.”

  “I do feel different when I’m using the shard.” Adara leaned back against the countertop, contemplative. “I’m guessing that since the shards only make up a small part of our souls that they don’t have any noticeable impact on us unless we specifically invoke their powers.”

  He let out a dry laugh. “Nice to know there won’t be an easy way for the government to identify us as ‘abnormals’ when the inevitable military-backed roundup begins.”

  Adara snatched her used paper towel off the table and threw it at Enzo’s head. It bounced off his nose and landed on his plate. “Enough with the cynicism. I’ve already got enough of my own to fuel my nightmares for the next ten years.”

  He downed the last sip of his orange juice and tipped the empty glass toward her. “Yet another thing we have in common.”

  Scoffing, she changed the subject. “What do you think of the map? It seems a little imprecise to me. The triangles are too large for us to pinpoint the exact GPS coordinates of the cornerstone spells.”

  “I agree.” He held the map close to his face and scrutinized the triangle drawn over Edgerton. “But assuming that the spell is housed, or anchored, or whatever you want to call it, in the exact center of the triangle, then we should be able to print out a more detailed map on the same scale and determine a smaller search area. I think we might be able to get it down to half a square mile or so.”

  Enzo was very good with maps—a requirement for a historian—so Adara nodded along and said, “Well, if you’re so keen on helping me, let’s get to it. We’re on the clock, and remember, we don’t know where the countdown is.”

  “Right.” He pushed his empty plate across the table. “You got your laptop with you?”

  “Sure do. It’s in my pack.” She’d snatched both her laptop and cell phone off her coffee table as she was packing last night. “Let me grab it.”

  Returning to the foyer, she dug through her pack until she found the laptop, along with her phone. She brought Enzo the laptop, and he immediately got to work. He opened Google Maps and did some mental math so he could match the scale on the screen to the scroll map.

  As the work consumed his attention—he took on that scholarly hunch all PhD candidates developed after countless hours of poring over books and other documents in the musty bowels of college libraries—she drifted away from him, back into the living room.

  Highlights from the impact videos were still flashing across the TV screen, a constant red ticker at the bottom declaring all sorts of breaking news. Tired of the constant reminder of the state of the world, Adara snatched the remote off the coffee table and changed the channel to Cartoon Network. Then she sat down on the lumpy couch and checked her phone notifications.

  The cell network had apparently become unclogged at some point, as she’d received several texts overnight.

  One of them was an official announcement from Edgerton College. It stated that classes were canceled indefinitely, and additional details, including a campus damage report and the final student death toll, would be emailed to all students and faculty by end of day Friday.

  The tone of the message struck Adara as odd, and it took her a moment to figure out why: the message was worded in the same manner the college used to explain everything from snow days to student suicides.

  As if all of this was just a passing misfortune.

  Adara exited the messaging app and connected the phone to Nadine’s Wi-Fi using the password she’d included in her note. Naturally, every news site and social media site was being choked by reports about the impact event and its ramifications. So Adara avoided her usual haunts and perused funny cat videos instead.

  She needed a pick-me-up after all that had happened over the past twenty-four hours, and cute cats acting silly was a surefire way to make her chuckle.

  Twenty-eight hilarious cat clips later, Enzo hesitantly called out, “I think I’ve got it.”

  Adara set her phone on the coffee table and headed back into the kitchen. At some point, Enzo had slipped into Nadine’s small office across from the guest room and used her printer to produce the correctly scaled map. He’d compared the scroll map, which had no cities, towns, or roads marked, to the printed map, which had all of those things and more.

  Next, he’d extrapolated from the center point of the triangle on the scroll map a much smaller triangular area in the middle of Edgerton, which Adara guessed was that half square mile he’d promised. She examined that area closely, trying to figure out exactly which neighborhoods in the city they’d have to search. Enzo wasn’t immediately forthcoming with that information, to her mild annoyance.

  It was only when she registered exactly which “neighborhood” he’d pinpointed that she realized why he was being so quiet.

  “That’s the campus,” she whispered faintly, as if saying it aloud would somehow make it more true. “The cornerstone spell is on the Edgerton College campus?”

  Enzo nodded. “And more than that, I’m pretty sure it’s in, or under, one particular building.”

  Adara gave him a hard stare. “Which building?”

  Enzo averted his eyes. “The library.”

  Adara slammed her hands against the kitchen table, rattling their discarded plates and utensils. “I was there,” she groaned. “I was right fucking there. I walked right past it. I could’ve ended all of this yesterday, immediately after the impacts.”

  “But you didn’t know that at the time,” Enzo said sympathetically. “So you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  “I’m not blaming myself.” She huffed. “I’m just frustrated. It’s going to be a hell of a lot harder for us to get back on campus today than it was for me to leave yesterday. The cops have probably cordoned off the entire campus, and they’ll be guarding the entry points to make sure nobody wanders into the damaged buildings until they’ve all been thoroughly checked for stability…and bodies.”

  She groaned. “That could take days. And we can’t wait days. So what do we do?”

  Enzo leaned back in his chair. “Use our combined PhD-candidate intellect to figure out a way to sneak past a cop blockade?”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “It might be easy, if the cops are still as overwhelmed as they were yesterday,” he pointed out. “If we can create a distraction near one of the campus gates, we might be able to draw the cops on watch away from the gate long enough for us to sneak past. I seriously doubt anyone on guard duty has a backup team lying in wait. That sort of thing isn’t a priority in this type of situation.”

  “Huh, that’s a workable plan.” Adara rubbed her chin. “But it’s risky. We can’t exactly do a test run because even the greenest cops aren’t going to fall for the same distraction twice. So we’ll have one chance to sneak onto campus unseen, and if we screw it up, we’ll probably end the day in handcuffs.”

  “Or dead,” he said cheerily.

  “Yes, or that.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Clunker” was almost too kind a word to describe the car parked next to Nadine’s toolshed. The white two-door compact had seen its better days, and those days were at least a decade gone. Lines of rust trailed up the doors and around the wheel wells like dead vines on the wall of a crumbling house. The paint job had last been refreshed so long ago that the car was less white and more yellow, and countless patches of paint had peeled off, revealing the bare aluminum beneath. All in all, the car did not look road worthy, but Enzo and Adara decided to give it a try anyw
ay.

  Enzo, not one for driving, tossed the keys to Adara and called shotgun. He strode through the shin-high grass to the passenger side of the car and had a valiant battle with the door, which ultimately popped open with a creak loud enough to pass for an emergency siren. As the sound echoed across the neighborhood, Enzo let out a breathy groan and rubbed his head. In addition to his general soreness, he also had a pounding headache that even the max dose of aspirin could only dull.

  Adara halted in front of the driver’s side door and asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to stay here and rest? I can do some reconnaissance around the edge of campus first to see what we’re up against and swing back around to pick you up later for the ‘infiltration.’”

  Enzo shook his head. “Nice try. But I know the second I let you out of my sight, you’ll take it upon yourself to do all the work, no matter what it costs you. I’ve already told you we’re in this together, and I’m standing by that, even if my brain is trying to claw its way out of my skull.”

  “You’re a stubborn little bitch, you know.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  Adara cracked a smile at that and gave up trying to convince Enzo to bail—for the time being. She then had a short fight with her own door that surprisingly didn’t end with the door being ripped clean off its hinges. Bending down, she surveyed the interior of the car. It was as worn down as the exterior but much cleaner, indicating that Nadine did at least take it to the shop every now and again.

  Adara tossed her hiking pack onto the back seat. When the car didn’t collapse in on itself from the added weight, she said, “Now, for the real test.”

  She and Enzo sat down carefully, unwilling to be too rough on the old car. The sunken seat cushions nearly swallowed them whole. Adara, who wasn’t particularly short, had to crane her neck to see over the dashboard. Enzo was a few inches taller than her, but even he looked like he was sitting in a circular pool float with his ass hanging down in the water.