Baptisms of Fire and Ice
Page 22
Judging by the shock on Astaroth’s stolen face, she hadn’t seen him coming any more than Adara had. She tried to yank her arm out of his grip, with so much strength that the limb tore at the shoulder, skin splitting with the sound of tearing silk.
Yet Jefferson didn’t budge. Not one inch. Like his hand was powered by a hydraulic motor. He stood as still as a statue, unperturbed by the greater demon’s struggle, and unimpressed by her display of power as she raised her free hand to summon another vortex of flame.
“I think we’ve had quite enough of that today,” he said.
His other hand shot out and grabbed Astaroth by the neck. Before the demon could do more than shout a garbled swear, Jefferson hoisted her off the ground, shifted his body into the stance of a professional shot-putter, and hurled the demon into the air.
Astaroth careened upward as if she’d been shot from a cannon, cleared the roof of the library, and plummeted toward the quad that had been struck by a god shard yesterday afternoon.
She hit the ground with an audible crack, and the god shard embedded in the quad activated with a flash of golden light. With the library in the way, Adara could not see what effect the god shard produced. But whatever it was, it was apparently hostile to demons.
Astaroth let out a blood-curdling scream, and the ground beneath Adara’s feet trembled as if something was emerging from deep within the earth.
Jefferson shaded his red eyes from the glare of the setting sun and said, “Huh, that was a lucky throw.”
Turning on his heels, he ambled back over to the shard holder group, kicking imps out of his path like they were pieces of litter. One imp made the mistake of pouncing at him from a tree branch. Jefferson caught the foolhardy imp by the neck, looked into its beady eyes as it began to thrash in panic, and squeezed his hand until everything in the imp’s throat was reduced to mush.
The imp went still, faint wheezes spilling from its mouth. Jefferson casually tossed it over his shoulder. It landed in the basin of the fountain with a splash, and didn’t come up for air.
The rest of the imps looked from Jefferson to the imp floating like deadweight in the fountain and back to Jefferson again. Then they scattered, tripping over one another in their haste to get away from the vampire.
The other agents who’d been swarmed after the grenade blast scrambled back to their feet, bloody but not broken. They picked up their guns again and expertly shot at the fleeing imps, incapacitating almost half of them before the creatures were able to scuttle off to safety.
Jefferson halted at the edge of the defensive circle surrounding the shard holders. Smiling at Adara, he made a sweeping gesture toward the smoking entrance of the library, and said with the epitome of nonchalance, “After you, Ms. Caine.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The second wave charged the library as planned—though they were down a few members from Astaroth’s ambush—and secured the main floor. More imps emerged from the smoking stacks and attacked, but they were too slow and shaken up from the RPG blast to prevent the agents from reaching the stairwell that led to the basement.
Once the agents had a solid defensive line blocking off the stairwell door from the onrushing imps, one of them signaled the shard holder group. Jefferson then ordered the group to head out, and they all darted from the hazy entryway to the stairwell door, accompanied by intermittent gunshots and the shrieks of injured imps.
One of their SWAT agent guards kicked the stairwell door open. Two others quickly slipped past him, into the stairwell, and pointed their guns in opposite directions, hunting for any hostiles. When nothing jumped them, they both called out, “Clear!”
The rest of the group squeezed through the door and proceeded down the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairwell, the same three agents made to repeat their “kick and check” maneuver on the door that let out into the basement. But when the man kicked the door open, the stairwell was flooded with the hisses and shrieks of imps waiting on the other side.
One of the agents who’d been waiting to “check” reflexively snatched a grenade off her belt and hurled it through the threshold before the door swung back around. “Fire in the hole!” she yelled, and everyone took cover against the back wall of the stairwell.
The door slammed shut just ahead of the grenade’s detonation. The blast flashed brightly in the basement, and a minor shockwave slammed into the door. The small window in the door shattered, throwing glass at the group. But no one was seriously injured.
While they brushed the bits of glass off their clothes, the same three agents approached the door a second time.
The man with the strong legs kicked the now bent door open again, revealing a fiery scene on the other side. Disabled imps lay burning atop a few overturned shelving units, and smoke drifted toward the ceiling.
No imps came rushing at the stairwell, so the two “check” agents proceeded into the basement, sweeping their rifles back and forth as they surveyed the expansive room.
“More imps incoming,” the woman called out, pointing to the left side of the room.
“We’re going the other way,” Jefferson said, “so let’s continue. Hurry!”
They rushed into the basement and took a right, following the primary route that Jefferson had shown them on the tablet.
Every time Adara had been down here before, the layout of the basement had seemed innocuous enough. A few big rooms filled with tightly packed shelves. A few narrow corridors leading from big room to big room, with small rooms branching off from the halls every ten paces or so. There had never been anything that screamed “dangerous” to her.
Now, there could be imps hiding between or on top of each shelving unit, ready to pounce. Now, there could be a greater demon lounging in any of the small, dark rooms, waiting for the shard holder group to pass by so they could throw a huge fireball and roast all their foes in the blink of an eye. Now, each shadow created by the gaps in the ceiling lights could be a place where an enemy lay in wait.
As the group jogged down the first confined hall, heading to the very room where Adara had meant to sit down and peruse her primary source documents yesterday afternoon, a smothering sense of impending doom weighed heavily on her chest.
However, as the group entered the room and cut a left across the stacks to reach the hall on the opposite side, she realized that the oppressive sensation wasn’t the result of her unease. There was something external, something in the basement, that was causing the sensation. And it wasn’t a demon.
They reached a gap between two rows of towering shelves, and Adara glanced in the direction from which she believed the sensation originated. In her peripheral vision, she noticed that all the other shard holders did the same thing, their heads swiveling in time with hers. But none of the agents looked. Because they couldn’t feel it.
The magic was emanating from the next room over. So strongly that Adara swore the cinderblock wall at the far end of the room was visibly pulsing. It was almost like the wall was made of water, and someone was casting stones at the same place over and over, producing a continuous series of ripples.
Adara leaned toward Jefferson and said, “I think the cornerstone spell is in the next room over, the special collections room.”
“You sense something?” he asked.
Gideon answered, “We all do.”
“Think it’s the energy that powers the spell,” Enzo said. “It feels like it’s pressing on our souls or something.”
“Or rather the god shards in our souls,” Solomon mused, huffing and puffing from the exertion of the jog.
“It’s a bad feeling though,” Victoria said. “Like something is seriously wrong.”
“The spell breaking down?” Gideon peered through a gap between the shelves, taking another look at the illusion of the undulating wall. “Or maybe more demons crossing the barrier?”
“Maybe both,” Adara said. “Regardless, the solution is the same. Fix the spell. Stop the demons.”
They crowded into the second hall, hyperaware of the imps that were hot on their tail. Roughly fifteen of the ugly little monsters were tearing through the collection room along the path they’d just traveled. Three of the rear guards hung back and popped off shots to keep them at bay. A fourth readied another grenade, prepared to make the toss if the imps rushed the hall in force.
The group advanced at a methodical pace, sweeping each small room along the hallway for hostiles. When they cleared the last room before the doorway to the special collections room, Jefferson ordered everyone to halt. He pointed at Adara then to the exposed water pipe running along the ceiling.
Adara nodded in understanding and swapped places with Solomon so that she was positioned directly under the pipe. She gave Jefferson a thumbs-up, indicating she was ready to transform at a moment’s notice. On that assurance, Jefferson motioned for the forward guards to pull ahead and secure the doorway to the room.
Two agents broke off from the rest and slid along the wall until they reached the threshold. The female agent removed what looked like a pocket mirror from a pouch on her belt and carefully extended it past the edge of the doorway in order to glimpse the interior of the special collections room.
Whatever she saw in there elicited a gasp—something Adara would not expect of a seasoned agent, unless the situation in the room was truly dire—and she motioned for Jefferson to come take a look.
Jefferson obliged. Instead of using the mirror, however, he just stuck his head past the edge of the doorway and scanned the room with his bright-red eyes. As he pulled back, a grim expression took hold of his face.
He looked over his shoulder at the shard holders and made eye contact with each one in turn, impressing upon them the gravity of the situation. Lifting a hand, he beckoned everyone to come forward at a cautious pace.
“I don’t think they’ll attack unprompted,” he said. “You’ll see why.”
The rest of the forward guard took that to mean they wouldn’t be butchered if they passed the doorway. Two of them strode across the gap and took up positions on the other side, while the third joined the pair who’d acted as scouts.
The two who crossed over—and who inadvertently glimpsed the interior of the special collections room in the process—went white as sheets before they even got into position. One of them crossed himself in the Catholic manner and whispered a short prayer.
Unsettled by the effects of the room on these experienced Overlock agents, the shard holders shuffled onward at a sluggish pace. When they were a few steps from the doorway, Gideon nudged Adara’s arm and indicated that he should expose himself first. Just in case Jefferson was wrong, and “they” attacked the instant the shard holders appeared in their field of vision.
Adara gave Gideon a tentative nod and mouthed, Be careful.
Gideon took four long strides, past the edge of the doorway and directly into the sight of whatever was waiting inside the special collections room. No reluctance in his gait. No fear written on his face.
Then he stood there, back straight, shoulders tight, posture proud. The very picture of a courageous and dedicated soldier. And from that place of both power and weakness, mind totally calm and collected, body totally exposed to the wrath of whatever lay beyond the threshold, Gideon assessed the situation.
He remained stock-still for ten whole seconds, and nothing attacked.
“Adara,” he said at last, “come here.”
Trusting his judgment, Adara marched over to Gideon’s side and finally took a gander at the special collections room. A room whose interior she had once known well. A room whose interior had been so transformed that it didn’t even look like it belonged in a library.
Dozens of shelving units with protective glass covers had been overturned and piled up near the walls. All the glass was broken. All the shelves were cracked. And all the books were spilled.
The “rearrangement” of these items had left the center of the large room emptied of everything but a few wooden tables and matching chairs. Which someone or something had set ablaze and burned right down to glowing embers. The ash from these fires had created a black ring that encircled the border of the cornerstone spell.
A hundred imps, at least, stood before this black ring. Every single one faced the doorway where Adara and Gideon were standing, but none of them made to attack. The reason why was obvious.
They had formed a blockade around the cornerstone made up of so many bodies that it would be almost impossible for the sixteen people in the hall to break the line. Even if all the shard holders utilized their powers and Jefferson used all his vampire strength and speed, the battle to bring down so many imps would be long, arduous, and painful.
People would be hurt. People would be killed. And the imps would just keep on coming.
At the center of the imp blockade, the fracturing cornerstone crackled and sparked. The spell was a circle of golden light that hovered slightly above the floor. Inside the circle were thousands upon thousands of moving symbols that resembled those Adara had seen on Selaphiel’s wings.
She couldn’t read any of the symbols, but some of them struck her as familiar. She guessed that those symbols corresponded to the words of the repair spell.
Most of the symbols that she vaguely recognized were broken. Thousands of cracks ran through their golden forms. Along the faults of those cracks, the golden glow had dimmed to almost nothing. A few of the symbols were barely glowing at all and possessed so many cracks that they’d begun to fragment, bits and pieces flaking away.
The thick boundary line of the circle was cracked as well, and the light produced by the line was continuously flickering.
The barrier spell was on its last leg.
Minutes, she knew from the overwhelming oppressive force that now pressed against her soul. We have minutes left to fix the spell before it completely shatters.
But how on earth were they going to get to the cornerstone?
The instructions Selaphiel had provided said they needed to physically touch the spell’s structure to form a connection between the spell and the god shards in their souls. But with so many imps between here and there, the odds of any of them being able to maintain contact long enough to complete the repair spell were slim to none.
And, as if the situation wasn’t already dreadful enough, there was an additional complication.
Belphegor.
Like Astaroth, Belphegor had found himself a new host: a middle-aged Asian man with a pair of wireframe glasses and a prim gray suit. As with Belphegor’s previous host, this body was crumbling away in black bits and pieces that floated up to join the infernal halo circling the head.
This time though, the body seemed to be disintegrating much faster. The skin of the man’s face and neck had been almost entirely stripped away, and three fingers on each hand were missing the final joints.
Adara couldn’t say for certain why this host was already falling apart, but she had a sneaking suspicion it had to do with the state of the cornerstone. The weaker the spell grew, the more of his essence Belphegor could slip past the barrier. But the more of his essence that he infused into a human body, the faster that body degraded.
It was like the demon was made of acid, and he’d poured so much of himself into the stolen body that he was rapidly eating away at the flesh and bone.
That body would not last long. But Belphegor didn’t need it to.
The moment the cornerstone broke, he’d come through to Earth in his true form.
Belphegor stood just inside the imp blockade. The thumbs of his mutilated hands were tucked into the pockets of his suit jacket. The toes of his leather shoes tap-tapped against the scorched tile floor. The hummed notes of a happy song overlapped with the sharp cracks of the cornerstone breaking down. The smile on his face showed no signs of worry whatsoever.
The greater demon directed that smug sm
ile at the woman standing in the doorway and said, “You’re just in time for the grand finale, little girl.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Adara’s father had not died peacefully. The pancreatic cancer had metastasized to his lungs, and he’d spent the last few weeks of his life slowly suffocating. On the day his beleaguered body finally gave out on him, Adara spent seven hours at his bedside, holding his hand and reminiscing with him about their hiking adventures.
It was a crystal-clear afternoon, Adara remembered keenly, sunlight spilling through the window of the hospital room. And though that day was filled with sorrow and pain, she had preferred that sunlight to rain. It reminded them both of better days, and spurred her father to smile instead of frown, laugh instead of cry, even as he drew closer and closer to death’s door.
Finally, at the hour appointed by fate, or circumstance, or perhaps God, as Adara’s beloved father spiraled down toward the cardiac arrest that ultimately stole the remaining scraps of his life, he grasped his daughter’s hand as hard as his thin, trembling fingers could manage, and he spoke.
Through the wheezing and the coughing and the breathlessness of dying, through the haze that befell those about to tip over the edge, he took hold of one last burst of lucidity, and he told her something she had taken to heart:
“Never give up on living,” he said, his ravaged voice a remnant of the strong, deep bass he’d once had. “Fight until the battle is over. Walk until the pathway ends. Live until there’s absolutely no more living you can do. Don’t stop before then, not even for a moment. Because if you give up before you reach the end, you’ll miss out on so many precious moments.”
He squeezed her hand, his grip barely there, all his strength withered away. “Like this. This is a precious moment. It’s a painful moment. It’s a sad moment. But it’s still a moment worth experiencing. Any moment that involves the things you love is worth experiencing, no matter how much it hurts. And since every moment can involve the things you love, every moment is worth fighting for. So never give up, Adara. Always keep fighting until the bitter end. Okay?”