Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  Before either man could reply, she jumped out of the car, clambered up onto the hood, and threw herself toward the mighty stream of water.

  I will not let one of you bastards get the better of me again, she thought to the greater demon. I will not only survive this time. I will beat you at your own game.

  Her body hit the rushing water, and then she was the rushing water.

  Merging with the geyser was a whole different experience from merging with the swimming pool or the stagnant puddle of beer on the bar’s basement floor. There was power within the geyser. Power like a raging river. Power like a stormy sea.

  The sense of it energized Adara and wiped out the lingering tiredness from Belphegor’s assault. She reared up, her humanoid water shape emerging from the top of the geyser, the point where the rushing water peeled away into a ring of fat, falling droplets. From this peak, Adara observed her new foe.

  The demon observed Adara as well. She’d conjured up more whipping tongues of black fire, and they danced to the rigid twitches of her fingers. She spat something in a language that wasn’t native to this world. But the meaning was clear, even seen through the haze of smoke and heard over the roar of water.

  Disgust. Hatred. Rage. This greater demon was galled that mere humans sought to challenge her. God shards or not, she didn’t believe they were worth her time.

  Adara would enjoy showing her just how wrong that assumption was.

  Adara commanded the geyser to wriggle and wind like the body of a snake. Then she launched her water form down the street, the geyser’s roaring bulk following at her feet. She rode the geyser like a mighty wave, covered the distance between the crashed clunker and the cross demon in a blur of churning water capped in white.

  When Adara was less than ten feet from her destination, the demon concentrated her whirlwinds of flame into three rotating black branches. She spat another word from that same infernal language, and the fire vortexes lurched toward Adara’s water form.

  Adara dove down to the asphalt and flattened herself, a transition whose peculiar feel she remembered from Hudson and Grail’s. Only her arms remained in a humanoid shape. She used those arms like the rails of a train track, guiding the bulk of the raging geyser on a circuitous path to the demon.

  Three pillars of fire and one pillar of water met in midair with a deafening hiss. Steam exploded outward in a huge white cloud that seared everything it touched.

  The steam rolled over Adara’s form, but she felt no pain, even as the water she had become began to evaporate in earnest. She had the brief thought that perhaps she could become steam the same way she became liquid water. Without practice though, she was afraid of screwing up when the margin for error was so small.

  Because the demon, despite being enveloped by the scalding fog, did not back down. Even as the skin of her meat suit boiled and sloughed off in wet, blistered chunks, she simply powered through and scoured the flooded street for the part of the water that made up Adara.

  Just like Belphegor, this demon felt no mortal pain.

  If I can’t hurt her, Adara thought, then I’ll just have to humiliate her. Wreck her body. Banish her being. Show her that you cannot fuck with humans and get away unscathed.

  Adara surged forward, dragging her flattened body over the debris-ridden asphalt. The rest of the water from the geyser followed her like a massive veil, its center point at what would have been the crown of Adara’s head had she not spread her form so thin across the road.

  The demon, following the arrow shape of the oncoming wave to its point, pinned down the rough location of Adara’s body. She readied four more swirling lances of black flame and slung her arms forward with such force that her shoulders nearly tore from their sockets, sludgy blood spurting from her joints.

  The fire lances mimicked that force and launched themselves toward Adara.

  Adara lurched out of their path and circled around the demon. At the same time, she split the long spiraling tail of the geyser into twin spouts. One spout followed Adara, and the other went off to the left.

  The four funnels of flame hit the ground right in front of the fork, the place where Adara’s body had been a moment before. The steam produced by the contact with the thin layer of water on the ground hid the fact that the geyser stream had split.

  Because the demon’s focus was on Adara, she didn’t bother to wait for the fog to clear before she made her next move. She spun to face Adara as the latter popped back up into a humanoid shape and led one stream of the punishing geyser into another direct assault on the demon.

  Adara lifted her water arm. The geyser stream rose with her. As she brought her arm down to sling the stream at the demon, the demon quickly conjured up two more pillars of flame.

  She didn’t get the chance to throw them. Because the second geyser stream slammed into her back, threw her off balance, and sent her tumbling toward her adversary. Adara then released the first stream, and it shot into the demon’s face.

  Adara drove the water up the demon’s nostrils, down her throat, into her lungs. Distracted, the woman lost her hold on the two flame twisters. They fluttered up into the air and dissipated into fleeting black wisps.

  Knowing how hardy these demons were from her ill-fated fight with Belphegor, Adara didn’t let up. She directed the two streams of water to converge again and spin around the demon, until they formed an undulating sphere of water.

  The currents in the water moved so hard and quick they made the demon tumble head over heels. She couldn’t get her bearings, much less get her feet on the ground.

  The demon screamed in fury. A fury that gradually resolved into a firm declaration.

  Adara faintly heard the demon’s acidic words, oscillating through the water that made Adara what she was.

  She heard them the way that all the creatures of the sea heard the calls of distant whales and intrinsically understood they belonged to something ancient and colossal. She heard them the way you heard the echo of a siren, a warning that something grim and dark was happening in a place that was neither near nor far.

  “No one disgraces a grand duchess of Hell,” the greater demon bellowed. “No one disgraces the name of Astaroth, least of all a lowly human. You will not get away with this, little girl. You will not get away from me with your life!”

  As those words bobbed through the crushing currents, Astaroth curled herself into the fetal position. Her body like a rock, she sank to the bottom of the churning sphere, slowly spinning with the water’s motion.

  At first, Adara thought the demon had given up. But then, tiny bubbles began to form on the demon’s reddened skin. Seconds passed, and those bubbles multiplied from a dozen to a hundred to a thousand. As the bubbles peeled away from the demon’s body and were caught in the currents of the sphere, Adara finally felt exactly what it was the demon was doing: boiling the water.

  Adara observed the top of the sphere. Sure enough, great curls of steam were rising from the water’s surface. And, she realized with a start, it wasn’t just the water in the sphere. The water on the streets and the sidewalks was steaming as well, hot white fog rising from the earth in eerie columns that swirled about in the wind.

  Astaroth hadn’t curled into a ball for no reason. She had intentionally sunk herself close to the asphalt so that she could channel heat through the ground and attempt to evaporate all the water at once.

  But she can’t possibly get that to work, Adara thought, not when the water volume is being constantly replenished by the break in the main…Oh shit.

  Adara whirled around, but it was too late. Black fire blasted out of the ground right next to the downed hydrant and ripped away an enormous chunk of concrete and asphalt. So close to the heat, the front end of the clunker car melted, and an amalgam of liquid metal and rubber oozed on down the street.

  The progress of the steaming sludge was inhibited by only one thing—the gas in the tank igniting from the extreme temperature and blowing the car to kingdom come. A giant ball of
fire consumed the skeleton of the clunker car, and the frame wailed and warped and bent and snapped until it collapsed in on itself and the car was no more.

  Well, that sucks.

  What sucked even more was that the raging column of black fire had eaten a sinkhole into the street and sheared off part of the water main in the process. Instead of shooting upward, the water from the hydrant spout was now flowing into the hole and soaking into the dirt.

  The natural high pressure that Adara had used to bolster the strength of her water attacks faded to a mere trickle. Suddenly, the energy requirements to retain the bruising currents of the sphere prison shifted solely to Adara’s god shard, and the strain rapidly sapped the power from her soul.

  Inside the diminishing water sphere, Astaroth chuckled. She redoubled her efforts to steam away all the water, and since Adara could no longer easily restock her supply—she was too far from the broken main, and even the water that had been standing in the street was now draining into the sinkhole—she was rapidly losing the fight.

  Adara had to come up with an alternate plan. Fast.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Adara glanced at the sky.

  Solomon’s storm was still forming. The immense heat from the apartment fire and the huge column of dry smoke were impeding the development of the rain. Solomon, who’d relocated to the mouth of the alley across from where the clunker car had gone kaboom, was on his knees, arms held above his head, visibly straining to jumpstart the flow of water in his manufactured cloud.

  He would eventually get there, as he drew in moisture from the air farther away from the burning building. But that would take time Adara didn’t have. She would run out of water in less than a minute. If she retreated and dove into the sinkhole to collect the water there, she would lose her hold on the sphere prison and release Astaroth.

  Though the greater demon’s body was in shambles, flesh boiled away to white bone in some places, she could still channel her power through it. Which meant she could attack Solomon, or Enzo, or the man who could stop time.

  If only I could do something to counter the heat, she thought. Like drop the temperature.

  While she was racking her brain for a speedy solution, Adara noticed that her hands were growing stiff. Immediately, she feared her body was losing its hold on the water form, that the thinning puddle left on the street wasn’t enough to keep her shard power active.

  But when she lifted one of her arms from the outer surface of the sphere prison, she found that her hands were not returning to flesh. Instead, small caps of ice had formed on her fingertips.

  Her water body had responded to her sincere thought about lowering the temperature.

  Holy crap. Does this mean…?

  She could do more than just merge with water, she realized with a start. She could also change the physical properties of that water, the same way she could control how the water moved.

  Galvanized by this discovery, Adara plunged her ice-tipped fingers through the surface of the bubbling sphere. She imagined the ice spreading outward until it enveloped the entire sphere and the demon trapped inside.

  The water took the cue from her desires, and bits of ice began to form between the bubbles. Those bits gradually became chunks. And those chunks gradually merged together. And those larger chunks gradually consumed the entire top half of the sphere.

  The bottom half of the sphere, where Astaroth lay, was more stubborn. When she noticed what Adara was doing, she redoubled her efforts to boil herself free from the water prison. Each time the ice encroached on her space, she beat it back with a wave of heat that flash melted the creeping, frosty tendrils back into whipping streams of water.

  Aggravated, Adara combatted Astaroth’s efforts with every ounce of power in her god shard. The last vestiges of the water to which she was connected were slipping over the edge of the sinkhole. In thirty seconds, maybe less, she would lose her hold over the coalescence and revert to human form.

  The urgency of the situation fueled her determination. So as she threw all her strength at the greater demon, she wrapped her entire water form around the half-ice sphere and flattened herself out. Until she was exerting power equally across the entire surface. Then, with a shout of rage that emerged as the roar of rushing water, she shot spikes of ice at Astaroth from every direction.

  The spikes struck the demon’s body. They didn’t hurt her, but they did distract her. Just enough to tip the balance of the duel in Adara’s favor.

  With one last monumental push of will, Adara froze the rest of the sphere. And Astaroth found herself immobilized as the bitter cold leached the demonic heat from her stolen body.

  Assuming the ice wouldn’t hold her forever, Adara gathered up all the remaining water in the vicinity into a tiny but powerful spinning spout and shot it at the side of the sphere. The impact sent the sphere rolling down the street, and because the street was set on a slight decline, it picked up speed as it went.

  It barreled through the nearest intersection, kept on going for another fifty feet, and slammed into the brick wall of a bank. The sphere exploded on impact, and Astaroth’s stiff body rebounded off the cracked bricks and flopped onto the sidewalk.

  When the demon’s body came to a halt, it was in more than one piece.

  That ought to keep her occupied for a minute, Adara thought. At least long enough—

  A wave of vertigo sent Adara reeling, and suddenly, she was human again.

  Adara braced her hands against her knees and took a moment to catch her breath. The sheer amount of effort she’d used to overcome Astaroth had drained all the energy from her god shard yet again, along with most of the energy from her self.

  When she straightened up, she swayed from side to side, her equilibrium slightly off. Each time she lifted her legs to take a step forward, it felt like there were lead weights strapped to her ankles. But she continued on regardless—though she almost lost her footing and smacked into a bent light pole—because there were still things she had to do.

  With the clunker car destroyed, they needed a ride out of this neighborhood. There were several cars and trucks parked on the street, and a few of them hadn’t been flooded by Adara or burned by Astaroth. Of those, there was a silver four-door pickup truck whose engine was on but whose cabin was empty.

  The driver’s side door hung open, keys in the ignition, indicating someone had jumped out and left the area in a hurry. Probably a response to a fiery piece of debris landing on the hood of the truck when the top half of the apartment building blew off.

  Adara staggered over to the truck, nudged the chunk of charred flooring off the edge of the hood, and grabbed hold of the open door to steady herself. She examined the truck inside and out. There was a big dent on the hood, but otherwise, the truck seemed to be in working order.

  The driver had simply been spooked and abandoned the vehicle to flee on foot. Or maybe to take cover in a nearby building or a sheltered alleyway.

  Whatever the case, Adara had a new ride.

  A stolen ride, but it would do for a quick escape.

  That item ticked off her list, she turned toward the time bubble. Or rather, the space where the time bubble had been.

  In the minutes Adara had spent fighting Astaroth, the blond man had finally lost his hold on his shard power, and the bubble had collapsed. The debris it had been holding up had rained down onto the street, along with the imps that had been frozen in midair.

  The debris had missed hitting anything important, notably people. But the imps now had their sights set on the blond man—and on Enzo, who was leading the man away from the building.

  Adara looked on in dismay as three imps lunged at Enzo and the man. Enzo, however, saw them coming and activated his shard. The ugly little creatures went right through him and the man.

  All three imps landed face first on the asphalt. Dazed, they didn’t immediately get back up, and their two targets raced on past them.

  So Enzo can phase other people through so
lid matter as well? Adara’s mood brightened. Between that ability and a well-placed time bubble, we should be able to charge straight through the demon horde at the library to reach the cornerstone. It still won’t be easy, but it should at least be doable.

  Adara felt the weight on her shoulders lighten even more when a few big drops of rain landed on her head. Her gaze drifted to the sky again, where Solomon’s rainstorm had finally matured.

  Centered over the dark plume rising from the burning building, it had started to dump a massive amount of rain. The downpour was heavily concentrated over the quarter block covered by the apartment complex, and farther out, it thinned to nothing more than a drizzle.

  Solomon had built the storm exceptionally well. He had an impressive amount of control.

  She looked to the alley where he’d taken cover and found him slumped against the grimy wall. He’d expended himself as well.

  She whistled to get his attention and gave him two thumbs-up. He returned the gesture with a trembling hand.

  Adara signaled for him to hurry over, and after two failed attempts, he hauled himself to his feet and staggered over to the commandeered pickup truck. She grabbed hold of him, led him around to the passenger side, and helped him up onto the front passenger seat.

  Once he was secure, she closed his door and opened the back door so that Enzo and the blond man could dive inside quickly. They were half a block out and closing fast, with four imps hot on their tails.

  It was going to be a close call.

  She whistled again, a sharp note, and when Enzo looked her way, she indicated the open door. He nodded in understanding, so Adara jogged back around to the driver’s side and climbed in.

  One hand gripping the wheel, she shifted the gear into drive and tensed the foot she held against the brake, prepared to switch it over to the accelerator the instant Enzo and the blond man jumped into the vehicle. Through the rearview mirror, she watched their hasty approach.