Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  Rage poured into her veins. A hot, frothing rage that bubbled up her throat and emerged from between her lips as a fearsome growl. An electric rage that shocked her spine and sent her legs into motion, coaxed her to rise and step out from her hiding spot. A bitter rage that rang in her ears like a chorus of church bells, both chastising her for being foolish enough to walk into this trap and insisting that she do something to end this massacre since she was already here.

  She marched back to the store’s main entrance, grabbed the now cracked glass door, and heaved it open. The sounds that had been muffled by the thick glass hit her all at once. Screams and sobs. Groans and gasps. The final breaths of the dying.

  From this new vantage point, no more clothing racks to block her view, Adara drank in the whole of the devastation. The countless bodies. The buildings on fire. The night-black horses still chasing people too slow to outrun them. The imps ambushing people from alleys and rooftops and wringing their necks or bashing their skulls in.

  At the center of it all stood the greater demon with a satisfied smirk on his face. He now loitered at the intersection between Maynard and Rosewood, the perfect position from which to observe the results of his clever trick.

  Every now and again, he whistled sharp notes, instructing the horses or the imps to kill certain people or destroy certain things. All to make the massacre as much of a spectacle as possible. He wanted the world to know his cruelty, to know without question he was evil, so that the city would throw all its resources at him and reserve none for the growing army at the library.

  I won’t let you get away with this, Adara thought. Any of this.

  The banishment spell she and Enzo had thoroughly studied before leaving Nadine’s sprang to the top of her thoughts. She ran her tongue through the series of syllables that had been written phonetically on the scroll in English letters.

  She had spoken the words aloud a few times but never with any conviction, not wanting to set off the god shard that was seemingly so eager to express its power. Now, she had all the conviction, a galaxy’s worth of conviction, and at the last touch of her tongue to the top of her mouth, she felt a spark of power dance against her cheeks.

  Her god shard was active. She could feel it in her soul. A sort of deep hum sending quick pulses of power through her in a way that transcended skin and bone but somehow tickled her tactile sense all the same.

  She intrinsically knew that it was searching for a water source with which she could merge, but she could also sense that it possessed the potential for other actions. Like casting magic spells.

  Adara held the incantation for the banishment spell at the forefront of her mind, which stoked the shard to burn brighter and harder, like it was a predator eager to hunt. That spiritual flame grew so large and hot that it began to break the confines of Adara’s mortal soul, and her body exuded a faint golden sheen that matched the color of the light pillar shooting up into the sky.

  Convinced that she was calling upon all the shard’s power, she turned to face the greater demon. He had already sensed her shard activation. He was staring at her with an expression on his crumbling face that blurred the lines between curiosity and disdain.

  As Adara stepped off the sidewalk and onto the blood-soaked streets, her fingers curling into fists that glowed a touch brighter than the rest of her body, the demon grasped that she meant to challenge him, meant to end his onslaught and save the pitiful humans who were not yet dead.

  The demon laughed the way a saw met metal, then whistled six more notes.

  Three of the spectral horses and three nearby imps set their sights on the lone young woman with the golden glow and the furious scowl. The horses dashed across the asphalt, sparks flying off their hooves, and opened their fiendish mouths to reveal sharp teeth and throats full of fire. The imps trailed the horses at a distance, loping along on their cloven hooves and disproportionate human hands.

  All the creatures crushed fresh corpses underfoot without a care in the world for the mess, much less for the desecration.

  Humans were nothing but garbage to the demons.

  Adara thought it fair to throw that treatment back at them.

  She met the greater demon’s gaze with one that displayed a total lack of concern for the spectral horses and rabid imps rushing toward her. At the mystified quirk of the demon’s eyebrow, Adara took a deep breath from the hot, smoky air and began to speak the banishment incantation.

  Though she had never studied the lyrical language before today, the syllables flew off her tongue in a cadence that was at once soft and powerful. She directed her voice at the greater demon, but encompassed the imps and the horses in her will as well, demanding that all of them leave her city, leave her world, leave her life.

  All the righteous anger they had wrought inside her since her first encounter with that imp at the pool, all the compassion and sorrow she felt for the dozens of dead strewn across the streets—all her raw human emotion acted like gasoline thrown onto a fire and turned the rhythmic incantation into a bellowing war cry.

  The words filled every nook and cranny, echoed through the subdued streets, searched the alleys, pierced the shadows, until there was nowhere left to hide.

  The instant the last syllable of the last word struck the air, every inch of space inside the boundary of the spell came to a sudden stop, like time itself had ceased to flow. Then the god shard let out a mighty wave of power that rippled through the air and mowed down every demon in its path.

  The imps both near and far, most of them stuck mid-leap, shattered like glass and clinked across the asphalt. All ten spectral horses were blown back into puffs of drifting smoke that mingled with the smoke from the scattered fires until the two were indistinguishable.

  The greater demon took the brunt of the spell, the golden pulse pelting him from all sides. His decayed body couldn’t take the strain and fell apart. An arm came free and landed with a fleshy thud. The jaw came loose at one joint and hung off the face at an awkward angle. A leg buckled and sent the demon to his knees.

  But he did not yield to the spell’s force. He did not return to Hell. Even as his remaining skin peeled away in sheets and landed in damp, bloody piles at his feet, the demon held his ground.

  Adara pushed and pushed at her god shard, directing the spell to grab hold of the demon and drag him off the face of the earth. But it didn’t work.

  Selaphiel had been right. The power of a single shard just wasn’t quite enough to overwhelm a greater demon.

  The haunting song of the banishment spell faded into an echo, and the greater demon remained to fight another day.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dizziness slammed into Adara like a speeding truck. She doubled over, gasping. She had pushed her shard to its limit and strained her soul in the process, her whole existence trembling from the conceit of commanding a piece of God.

  But even as she struggled to hold back the bile surging up her throat and breathed so fast she started seeing stars, she applauded herself for a job well done. She might have failed to banish the greater demon, but she’d taken the imps and the spectral horses out of play.

  There were roughly a hundred fifty people dead on the streets and sidewalks. But somewhere around three hundred people had been in the area when the horses charged, which meant close to half had made it out alive. By the time the greater demon was able to amass more horses and call more imps, all the survivors fleeing from Maynard Avenue would be long gone.

  Adara hadn’t won, but her enemy hadn’t either.

  The greater demon shook off the last vestiges of the banishment spell and stood up. His body was in terrible shape, more decomposed corpse than usable costume. But the demon’s real power was independent of the body’s condition, so all that external damage did nothing but reduce how fast he could cross the distance between himself and Adara.

  This small development gave Adara a bit of extra time to come up with a new strategy, so she tried to make the best of it. She thorou
ghly examined the area for anything that could help her damage the demon’s host body to the point where it became completely inoperable. But none among the fallen were armed, and most of the fires sparked by the horses had been snuffed out by the drizzle from the nearby rainstorm.

  That drizzle reminded her that Enzo was not far away, and he might very well have already been attacked by more imps dispatched from the library. She hoped that the commotion here on Maynard had spurred him into a retreat to the grocery store, whether he had found the source of the shard power or not.

  She knew that was as far as he would’ve gone though. He wasn’t going to leave her behind. If she didn’t head back to the clunker car sooner rather than later, he would come this way in search of her and put himself in the greater demon’s line of fire.

  Her hand drifted to the pistol tucked into her waistband. The magazine held eight small-caliber rounds, more than enough to mow down any human. But the decrepit body of the greater demon shambling toward her, leaving trails of bloody footprints across the field of death that the street had become, wouldn’t fall to a few more holes or tears. A bullet to the head or to the spine might take the body out of commission, but Adara wasn’t confident she could make such a shot.

  Damn. If only I hadn’t lost my shotgun at the bar. I could’ve ripped this bastard’s body to shreds with a few buckshot rounds and finished it off with a slug to the skull.

  As it was, she’d have to let loose and pray her aim was true. And also pray the demon didn’t shoot back with something more substantial than bullets.

  Tugging the gun out from underneath her shirt, she gripped it hard in both quaking hands and aimed the weapon at her opponent. There was so little skin left on the demon’s faux face that Adara couldn’t determine if he had an expression. But there was something in the way he held his shoulders, in the way his head tilted slightly to the left, that gave Adara the impression the demon was amused.

  Something on her own face must’ve betrayed her confusion. Because the demon opened his broken jaw so wide the chin hung at his clavicle and spoke without using his lips or his tongue. The voice emerged from a flickering black fire whose fingers licked the back of his soot-stained throat.

  “I must admit, little girl, that I’m rather impressed,” the demon said, his voice spitting like flames against metal. “I didn’t expect any of you hapless humans to put up much of a fight, but that was quite a sound attempt at a banishment. My essence actually quavered for a second.”

  “I was going for a bit more than a quaver,” Adara retorted. Her throat was raw from invoking the banishment spell; the magical words had grated against her vocal cords like sandpaper. “And if you take one step closer to me, I’ll make another go of it, and we’ll see exactly how much that meat suit of yours can handle before it disintegrates.”

  The demon quirked his split lips. “You put on a brave face, girl, but your human frailty betrays that bravado. Between the raspy voice and the fact that you’re wavering to and fro, it’s painfully obvious that you don’t have it in you to cast the spell a second time. Which is hardly surprising. A human soul can only handle the smallest fragments of God, which means it can only wield the smallest portions of God’s power. That banishment spell hit your limit and almost pushed you overboard. You can cast nothing stronger than your first attempt.”

  “Not alone, maybe.” She pressed her finger to the trigger of the gun in warning. “But I’m far from the only shard holder.”

  “So I am all too aware.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his deformed mouth. “Lucky for me, humans are slow to accept great change, for they are loath to alter their world views and core values. By the time any of you ‘shard holders’ are able to gather a group strong enough to banish a being on my level, our army will already be on the march. Your city will be in flames, and your world as a whole will not be far behind. Face it, little girl, you humans just don’t have what it takes to—”

  “Adara,” she spat.

  The demon blinked his oily black eyes. “Pardon?”

  “My name is Adara. Not ‘little girl.’”

  “Ah.” His smirk returned. “Well, if it’s an introduction you’re after, Adara, then I am delighted to tell you that I am His Royal Highness, Belphegor, the Low Prince of Sloth.”

  “Belphegor, huh?” Adara spoke the name like it was poison on her tongue. “An appropriately ugly name for such a monstrous creature.”

  “Oh please,” the demon scoffed. “Name-calling isn’t a productive way to—”

  Adara pulled the trigger. The bullet struck Belphegor right between the eyes, and his head snapped back. Black sludge sloughed out of the hole and dribbled down his face.

  Before the demon could recover his composure, Adara shot him again. This time, the round struck his good knee and shattered the joint. Already unbalanced from the first hit, the demon tipped over backward, landing with a splash in a deep puddle of blood.

  With his head tilted back, Adara could line up a perfect shot at his neck, which would destroy practically everything Belphegor needed to keep his body in motion. But as she went to adjust the aim of her gun, she found that her body had suddenly grown weak and sluggish. Her legs were on the verge of buckling and sending her down to the bloodstained street, and her fingers were rapidly losing their ability to hold onto the gun.

  “What the hell?” she muttered with a tongue that was oddly heavy.

  On the ground ten feet away, Belphegor sniggered.

  A low whine broke through Adara’s teeth as she lost her ability to stand upright and sank to one knee, the blood on the asphalt soaking through the denim of her jeans. “What did you do?” she growled.

  “Sloth,” the demon said. “I’m a prince of sloth, silly girl.”

  At the same moment she’d first pulled the trigger, she realized with rising fear, Belphegor had ensnared her with some kind of demon magic. This “sloth effect” was bleeding all the energy from her body. If she didn’t break out of the demon’s hold in the next few seconds, she was going to end up lying listlessly on the road, unable to fight, unable to run, unable to even think.

  Meanwhile, Belphegor was already recovering from the gunshots, bending and breaking his body into the shapes necessary to bypass the damage she’d dealt him. He rose to his feet with the body’s knees twisted sideways and the hole in his skull plugged by a thumb he had ripped off the hand of a nearby corpse.

  Head lolling to the side, flayed face splashed with rancid black goo, Belphegor gave her a mutilated approximation of that same wicked grin he was so fond of throwing at those he intended to kill. He grinned so hard his jaw fell off and hit the asphalt with a fleshy thud.

  “Oh bother,” he said with no tongue. “I’ll have to swap this skin out for a new one sooner than I’d planned.” He raised his arm and made a tsk-tsk motion with his crooked fingers. “Look at what you’ve done, Adara. I wanted to play with you until the human police arrived in force to take a hilariously pathetic crack at me. But now I’ve got to go find a replacement host before this ruined thing degrades into a pile of dust. There’s nothing worse than running around with a desiccated corpse as a host, you know.”

  Adara made a valiant effort to lift the gun again, but her hand didn’t budge from her lap. What little energy remained in her body was dedicated to holding her upright, and even that was failing, her head and torso slumping to the left. In a moment, she’d fall over and that would be it. No more defiance. Belphegor would be able to waltz right up to her and beat her or burn her to death.

  Her gaze slid to the thin pool of blood on the road. Like beer, blood was mostly water. Theoretically, she should be able to merge with it. But despite the number of bodies lying in her immediate vicinity, people of all ages and ethnicities killed with equal ruthlessness, she wasn’t sure there was quite enough blood in one place to jumpstart the transformation.

  “Are you still trying to find a way out of this?” Belphegor staggered toward her, his legs bowing out at the
knee with each step, showcasing all the bones and tendons within. “Because there isn’t one. The human authorities are still blocks out, their vehicles unable to bypass all those parodies of funeral pyres. By the time they get here on foot, you’ll be long dead. And despite that glint in your eye that speaks to a clever idea, I will not be giving you the chance to do anything more than cry out in shock before I…”

  What was left of Belphegor’s face went slack as something behind Adara caught his attention. Not a second later, a fat drop of water landed on Adara’s head. Another followed it. And then three. And then twelve. And then too many too count.

  In the time it took Adara to heave her head around and peer over her shoulder, she went from being bathed in smoke-tinged mist to being soaked by a mighty downpour.

  At the center of this downpour, beneath the billowing black storm cloud that Adara and Enzo had identified as a shard effect, was Nadine’s chugging clunker car. Though it was hard to see through the dense rain, Adara spied Enzo at the wheel of the car. He was hunched forward in the seat, bouncing up and down as the car straddled the road and the sidewalk, allowing him to avoid running over most of the bodies scattered across Maynard Avenue.

  A second man sat in the back seat of the car.

  The shard holder who’d created the storm.

  “Oh great,” groaned Belphegor. “Not another one.”

  Just as he said this, Enzo yelled something indiscernible to the man in the back seat, and the man bowed his head. The rain immediately grew lighter. But it wasn’t because the man was losing his hold on the storm. Rather, it was because he was focusing his efforts on something other than rain.

  From the slate-gray storm cloud that roiled above, there came a bright flicker of light. An enormous, forking lightning bolt burst forth and zigzagged down to the earth. It struck Belphegor in the chest with a blinding flash and a deafening peal of thunder.