Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They flipped a coin to determine who went where. Adara, in the true fashion of a rookie gambler, made a poor call on tails and got stuck with the pillar of light.

  Telling each other to be quick and careful, she and Enzo took off in opposite directions. Him heading into the tiny rainstorm, armed with an umbrella. Her heading into the buzzing crowd, armed with something more.

  She had on her a bowie knife and the handgun she’d pilfered from the leader of the thugs who’d broken into the bar. The cool metal of both weapons brushed against the bare skin of her back as they bobbed up and down in her waistband, hidden only by her shirt. That touch made her feel protected, made her feel dangerous, made her feel like someone who wasn’t to be trifled with. And she used that feeling as fuel to plow straight through the crowd.

  Three blocks out from the pillar, only the tiniest gaps existed in the throng. Adara forced her way through them, even the ones that were beanpole thin, by jabbing her pointy elbows at anyone who stood in her way. Her roughness earned her a litany of angry shouts and swears. More than one person called her a bitch and made a half-hearted swing at her head. But she ignored all of those people. Because they were not important.

  The only important thing in Adara’s world at this moment lay ahead, at the base of the golden pillar.

  After what felt like years of pushing and shoving, Adara finally reached the front of the crowd. A straight line of people packed like sardines that stretched the full breadth of the four-lane Maynard Avenue. The line wasn’t straight because the people were orderly, but rather because the city police had driven the crowd fifty feet back from the glowing office building from which the pillar of light had burst forth. The same sort of sawhorses that blocked the entrances to Edgerton College now marked a police perimeter around the entire building.

  The building in question, according to the sign above the main entrance, was the headquarters of an accounting firm, Barnaby and Pruitt. It had taken a direct hit from a god shard, dozens of dark windows shattered inward, a star-shaped mark scorched along its face.

  Since the impact event, it appeared that the god shard had made additional alterations to the building. The underlying steel skeleton was lit up like a Christmas tree, and the otherwise flat and featureless rooftop had become a massive spotlight.

  Adara drank in the odd sight, and sighed. There wasn’t a shard holder here.

  The shard that hit the office had fused with the building materials in much the same way that the shards that hit people fused with their souls. Something had set the shard off, perhaps interference from the cops or firefighters. Now it was exerting its influence, changing the building into something that better fit whatever aspect of God that particular shard contained.

  Adara had no clue what that aspect was—unless it was the “let there be light” shard—and she didn’t have time to stick around and find out. A building couldn’t help her defeat the demons, no matter how pretty a light show it could put on.

  The imps were bound to reach the outer edge of the crowd any moment. In short order, people would start screaming, followed by stampeding. So if she didn’t leave ASAP, Adara would get trapped in the chaotic mass.

  She briefly surveyed the crowd. Almost everyone had their phones out, taking pictures or recording videos or live-streaming this weird occurrence to their various social media followers. Whatever happened with the building would be posted on the internet ad infinitum.

  Adara could catch the highlights later and determine if the building presented any sort of threat to the public that the authorities couldn’t handle. For now, she needed to get the heck out of here and rejoin Enzo in the parking lot of the grocery store.

  Hope he had better luck than I did, she thought as she began to worm her way back through the tightly packed crowd. For all I know, the rainstorm might just be the manifestation of a god shard that hit a pond or something. This whole excursion might’ve been an exercise in futility and…Why did it suddenly get so quiet?

  Adara froze as an unnatural hush fell over the crowd. Where before there had been excited chatter as people debated the cause of the strange light phenomenon, now a heavy blanket of unease was rolling over the area.

  The phones stayed held aloft, recording the building. But the awe drained from faces, the nervous smiles faded, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, as if an arctic wind had just blown into Edgerton.

  Adara spun back around and raked her gaze across the area. The two dozen cops positioned across the block stood stock-still, facing the main entrance of the accounting firm, hands resting on their holsters. Roughly the same number of firefighters were on the move, backtracking toward their bright-red trucks. They knew that whatever was trudging through the empty space where four pairs of glass doors had once been was far beyond their purview.

  And what was lurking in the entryway to the building? It was hard to say at first.

  In the shadows, all you could see was a man-shaped black mass, slowly but surely trudging toward daylight. Somehow, the golden glow of the building’s frame did not touch this creature. In fact, it almost seemed like the creature was exuding a miasma of thick, inky darkness that repelled the building’s light.

  The creature took a step forward, and another, and another. With each step, the tension of the crowd grew thicker, and thicker, and thicker. Until it was so hard to breathe that Adara felt like she was on the cusp of drowning in thin air.

  Everyone can sense the malevolence rolling off that creature, she thought as panic burned through her veins, setting her nerves alight, screaming for her to choose flight. You don’t need to have a god shard to sense evil. You don’t need anything special to sense evil. Because evil wants to be sensed, wants to be known, wants to be feared. And great evil seeks to instill great terror.

  The shadowy figure sauntered across the field of broken glass in the entryway, each crunch like a gunshot going off on the subdued street. Until at last, it reached the edge of the glass carpet and stepped onto the cracked concrete of the sidewalk. Its veil of darkness slid from its shoulders like soft silk and made it seem as if the creature ambled out of a midnight dream and emerged into midday.

  Adara had known what she would see the moment the creature stepped over the threshold. Even so, she still gasped along with everyone else.

  It was the greater demon who had come to Adara’s apartment. He wore the same suit and tie. He had the same pitch-black eyes. But the halo of skin made from soot had grown three times larger, and his face was heavily pockmarked where putrid flesh had sunken in. The demon’s host body was falling apart, too weak to withstand the immense power of his essence in perpetuity.

  Adara knew better, however, than to think he was growing weak.

  He was every bit as powerful as he had been the night before. Or perhaps even stronger, since the cornerstone spell had further degraded since then.

  Like the imps, she reasoned, the greater demon wasn’t afraid of exposing himself to armed humans. Because he knew they couldn’t defeat him. Not in any way that mattered.

  Still, she wondered why he would intentionally pit himself against the city police, intentionally reveal himself to all these people before the full demon invasion was set into motion. God shards or not, the human authorities could surely interfere in the demons’ plans in some way, shape, or…

  Unless this reveal was part of the plan.

  An alarm bell went off in Adara’s head.

  She needed to get out of this crowd.

  Now.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Adara barreled through the crowd without restraint and with great remorse. She bowled over no less than six people, most of them smaller and frailer than her, including an elderly woman and a tiny teenage girl. She shoved a tall, willowy man into the back of a burly bruiser, who immediately spun around and punched the innocent guy in the jaw. And lastly, she rammed her elbow into the gut of a cop on the sidewalk who’d probably thought that crow
d control would be the safer choice when the only other option was standing next to a mysteriously glowing office building.

  He was wrong. There was no safety here.

  When he spun away, clutching his gut, Adara heaved herself free from the crowd and lunged toward the glass doors that marked the entrance to a large sporting goods store. A few of the people whose dignity she’d damaged made a grab for her flailing arms or her tangled hair, but they all missed by an inch or two and spit swears at her instead.

  Adara tugged one of the doors open before anyone could catch up to her and slipped inside the store. She raced across the floor till she reached the place where the free-standing metal clothing racks gave way to much sturdier floor-to-ceiling shelves. She grabbed the edge of the first of these shelving units and flung her body around it, then skidded to a stop on the tile floor and dropped to her knees.

  Through a small gap between the rows of shelves, she peered back at the entrance. The cop she’d assaulted had recovered from the blow and was waving off worried bystanders.

  As the cop adjusted his uniform shirt, he spun to face the sporting goods store and unclipped the strap on his holster to make a show of force as he pursued the woman who’d dared to strike a cop. Watching him march toward the doors, proud and seemingly unperturbed, Adara wished a bruised sternum was the only wound the man would gain today.

  But the reason she’d so urgently raced to the store for cover was because she knew that most of the people in the crowd were about to sustain wounds far, far worse than any damage she could deal in human form. And the creature who would cause those wounds was the greater demon standing just outside the accounting firm of Barnaby and Pruitt.

  The moment the cop reached out to grasp the door handle, Adara’s worst fears came to fruition. Through the wide display windows that took advantage of the store’s corner location, she observed an unfolding catastrophe.

  The greater demon took a gander at the anxious crowd. Then he contorted his stolen face into an expression that none would call a smile.

  The lips stretched too far to either side. The teeth inside were far too sharp. The skin of his cheeks wrinkled and tore, sending more black flakes floating up and up. A tongue, bloated and bulbous and black, peeked out from behind those predator’s teeth and dribbled dark fluid that steamed on the air.

  The demon raised one hand and snapped his fingers.

  Bright sparks leaped from his fingertips and spiraled through the air until all ten were positioned in a straight line on the edge of the sidewalk. Each sizzling spark swirled about in a matching circular manner and left little trails of black smoke in their flittering wakes.

  Smoke that grew denser and not thinner as it spread. Smoke that took shape as it grew and grew. Smoke that gained texture as it molded itself into something more than murky clouds. Smoke that transformed from an amorphous mass into the mockery of an animal.

  Four skinny legs. A long, soft tail. A flowing mane. A snorting snout. And two bright, intelligent eyes.

  Horses. The sparks had become horses. Horses with coats black as night. Whose manes and tails moved like ocean waves. Whose hooves struck the pavement and produced the beats of drums. Whose eyes were the same solid black as their cruel creator’s, seeing all the fear that teemed around them and reflecting it back to their quaking prey.

  Spectral horses. Steeds from Hell.

  The greater demon cocked his head to the side, admiring his creations, and let out a high-pitched whistle.

  The horses charged. Their hooves kicked up trails of orange sparks so hot they set off tiny fires. Their nostrils flared and huffed out smoke that whipped past their heads like ghostly reins. They moved like the wind and stepped like a storm, and booms of thunder rocked the street. As they neared the line of parked police vehicles blocking off the office from the crowd beyond, they let out screams that undulated with the sound of breaking glass.

  The cops, stunned by the appearance of the horses, didn’t respond until it was too late. They lifted handguns and shotguns and fired at will, pelting the asphalt of the road, the concrete of the sidewalks, the siding of the office building, and everything in between.

  But the bullets went right through the horses and did not draw a drop of blood. Because the horses had no blood to shed. Because the horses had no life to lose.

  They weren’t creatures with heartbeats and pulses. They were extensions of the greater demon’s power, willed into being from his dark imagination.

  The demon stood on the sidewalk, watching with glee that glowed blood red in the obsidian pools of his eyes. The bullets that plunged through the phantom horses hit the greater demon too, punched holes in his torso, sheared skin from his limbs. But he either didn’t notice, or he didn’t care.

  That body was a costume after all. Once he wore it threadbare, he would just discard it.

  The horses reached the cop blockade and jumped the cars. As they came down like smoking comets, they all opened their mouths, and instead of screams, they belched out orange fire. The fire was based on a liquid accelerant, and so it sprayed across the line of cops and set them all ablaze.

  Every cop went up like kindling, bonfires made of melting flesh. Some of them ran. Some of them rolled. Some of them screamed and beat themselves, trying to put out the hungry flames.

  But the flames didn’t obey the laws of man, much less the laws of physics. They burned too fast. They burned too hot.

  Before the phantom horses even landed in a gallop, half the cops were dead and smoking, and the rest were on their way.

  The horses didn’t even look back to see the fruits of their labor. They set their sights on the massive crowd of bystanders, too densely packed to flee fast, too shocked to leave in an orderly fashion.

  The horses screamed in glee. The humans screamed in terror.

  Between one blink and the next, Chaos came to Edgerton, Massachusetts.

  And there was nothing Adara Caine could do but watch.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  At some point amid the fear and the death, Adara figured it out. The glowing building. The spectral horses. The greater demon exposing itself for all the world to see.

  The answers seemed to fall perfectly into place one after the other, like a line of dominoes. Just as hard and just as loud as the burning bodies of the slain fell to the ground outside the sporting goods store.

  This was a distraction.

  The cop Adara had elbowed rushing to cut off the horses but tripping over a woman who’d fallen down and dropping his gun in the process. A distraction. The burly bruiser screaming like a frightened child and throwing people from his path as he fled from the evil creatures. A distraction.

  The horses taking careful aim at the most densely packed parts of the panicked crush before they breathed wide streams of fire that engulfed dozens at a time. A distraction. The imps that had surrounded Maynard Avenue and cut off the fleeing flow by tearing people limb from limb. A distraction.

  God shards, Adara was certain, did not activate on their own. They activated as the result of a significant external stimulus.

  In a person, a god shard reacted to fear and determination. But an inanimate object, like a building, didn’t feel human emotions. So the event that provoked the shard embedded in the firm of Barnaby and Pruitt to glow brighter than the sun must have been something more tangible than emotion, something more physical. Something rougher than first responders clearing the floors for dead and wounded. Something that caused actual damage to the shard’s container.

  The greater demon. He’d gone to the Barnaby and Pruitt building to set off the shard on purpose. In so doing, he had drawn the entire city’s attention to the accounting firm, caused curious people to amass nearby, spurred the creation of hundreds of videos that billions could view on the internet.

  The whole world had been captivated by the pillar of light, then awed by the appearance of a being that clearly wasn’t human, then shocked by the massacre in progress.

  Ever
yone in Edgerton, everyone on Earth, was watching this revolting slaughter.

  And no one was watching the Edgerton College campus.

  The demons had manufactured a decoy war zone to draw attention away from their real staging area. To keep the gullible humans occupied for a few hours more, until the full breadth of the demon army was ready to ride across the city and burn the whole thing down.

  A war zone complete with broken bodies lying still on cracked concrete. A war zone complete with men and women butchered indiscriminately. A war zone painted red with blood and frosted with black ash. A war zone doused in smoke like fog and lit by smoldering fires. A war zone juxtaposed against the backdrop of the brightly shining miracle that was the accounting firm of Barnaby and Pruitt.

  Of course, demons would do nothing that didn’t make a mockery of God.

  A thump against the store window drew Adara’s attention from the floor, where’d she cast her gaze so her eyes would stop drinking in the terrible sights. The petite teenage girl Adara had knocked to the ground a scant few minutes prior was sliding down the window glass, leaving trails of bloody fingerprints.

  Half her face had been burned away by the arcing flames of the spectral horses. Somewhere along the way, her throat had been slit and was dribbling dark blood down the front of her snow-white blouse. She sank all the way to her knees, her mouth moving without sound, her eyes blinking but not seeing, fear etched deeply into her face even as her muscles slackened.

  She mouthed one word that Adara understood—help—before she slumped over and succumbed to her wounds.

  The girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.

  Adara stared at the bloody marks the girl had left on the window, and something inside her heart, inside her soul, inside her tattered mind, tore through the bars of its cage and broke free.