Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  It was time to let other people take the wheel.

  Jefferson languidly rolled up onto his haunches. His brown skin was washed out, and his eyelids drooped heavily over his blood-red irises. Side effects of Belphegor’s energy drain.

  Stifling a yawn, he said, “Though I’m sure we’d all love to take a power nap right now, we still have one more issue to resolve. Or fifty issues, depending on how you count.”

  Adara followed the vampire’s sleepy gaze, and groaned.

  The time bubble Gideon had used to capture all those imps had begun to shrink, and various demonic appendages were now sticking out beyond its boundary, including a few snarling heads. In short order, the first of the imps would break free and throw themselves at the weary fighters in the special collections room. Fighters who were in really, really bad shape.

  “Gideon? Solomon?” Adara called out in a raspy voice. “Can either of you cast the banishment spell?”

  Gideon responded, “Only if I drop the bubble.”

  A beat later, Solomon said, “I can try.”

  Adara glanced at the ceiling. Solomon’s storm had completely dissipated sometime after she had…turned into a pillar of fire. So he might have just enough juice left to handle banishing a group of imps.

  When she’d cast the spell back on Maynard, it wiped out a significant number of imps with relative ease. Only Belphegor had put up any real resistance.

  “Give it a shot, Solomon,” she said. “At the very least, you can thin the herd.”

  Solomon shuffled into the room and came to a jittery stop in front of the bubble. “You can do this. You can totally do this,” he mumbled under his breath.

  With an unnecessary flourish, he raised his arms above his head and recited the incantation for the banishment spell. Despite the nerves, he didn’t stutter a single word. In fact, the more words he spoke, the more confident he grew. Until his normally soft tone morphed into one of authority and command.

  As he reached the last sentence, he gave a subtle nod to Gideon. In response, Gideon released his time bubble, and all the imps spilled out in a snarling wave. They landed on the floor in a pile of kicking hooves and swinging fists, expecting to swarm Enzo and Victoria with a flurry of fatal blows.

  But Enzo and Victoria were no longer there, and so their hooves and fists hit nothing but air. After a few moments of pointless punches and kicks, the clustered imps ceased their frenzy, realizing that something strange had happened in between their jump and their landing.

  Confused, they turned around to face the humans on the opposite side of the cornerstone. Just as Solomon spoke the last word of the banishment spell.

  A visible shockwave shot out from Solomon’s body, as if he was the epicenter of a large explosion. It rolled over the shard holders like a light breeze, while it hit Jefferson and the SWAT agents more like a hurricane’s gale, driving them backward and knocking them down.

  The imps took the blow like a mirror took a strike from a baseball bat. Every single one, standing or lying, whole or broken, shattered into thousands of tiny pieces. Those pieces came down in a manner not dissimilar to hail.

  They pelted sensitive skin and left bruises. They bounced across the floor and rolled off into the corners. They plinked against every surface, chipped wood and left dents in tile. Until all the glasslike bits lay still and silent, carpeting the floor of the special collections room.

  Solomon, who’d shut his eyes as the spell went off, cracked one open and said, “Did it work?”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Jefferson picked up a handful of imp bits and stared at them curiously. “Yes, I believe it worked.”

  Solomon slumped back against an overturned bookcase. “Oh, thank god.”

  “That might not be the best turn of phrase anymore,” said Enzo, brushing imp bits out of his hair. “Also, I think we should thank ourselves. We do deserve a lot of the credit here.”

  Jefferson snorted. “You possess a god shard. Ergo, thanking god is thanking you.”

  Enzo took on a deer-in-the-headlights expression. “I hope that doesn’t mean you expect me to make godlike decisions.”

  “I don’t,” Jefferson said sardonically. “Which is in fact part of the problem. You people unexpectedly received all these awesome powers, but they didn’t come with instruction manuals on how to use them responsibly.”

  “Responsibly?” Gideon cut in as he slogged through the soggy detritus on the floor to reach the cornerstone. “We barely know how to use our powers at all. And ignorance, in my experience, can cause a lot more chaos than ill intent. People with goals, even criminal ones, usually exhibit some degree of control over their actions. But people with no idea what the hell they’re doing? Those are the people who drop matches by accident and burn whole forests to the ground.”

  “Eloquently put.” Jefferson rose to his feet, a test of his strength that was slowly replenishing in the wake of Belphegor’s departure. “That said, you all did perform admirably under less than ideal circumstances, so you should give yourselves a pat on the back.”

  “Gee,” Adara muttered, looking up at Jefferson with mild disdain. “I do so love backhanded compliments.”

  Jefferson shrugged. “Just telling it like it is. You’re not exactly professionals.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she shot back. “I didn’t realize we needed certifications to become professional supernatural entities.”

  “You joke,” he said, “but there are in fact federally funded courses on that exact subject.”

  Gideon scoffed. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I am not.” Jefferson brushed the wrinkles out of his suit jacket, as if that could make up for the massive tears and numerous bloodstains. “Overlock has quite an efficient system for the education of supernatural beings relating to acceptable conduct in human society—and beyond.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Enzo said. “Even the supernatural underworld has a bloated bureaucracy.”

  “So it goes.” Jefferson beckoned the SWAT agents in the hall to enter the room. “But we can work through those quibbles at a later time, preferably when the sky is not threatening to fall on our heads. For the time being, I think we’d be better served by getting medical attention, followed by having a lengthy debrief with Dawes…and our many concerned bosses back in DC.”

  “Dare I ask who those bosses are?” Enzo said. “Or what they are?”

  Jefferson slapped on a placid smile. “I wouldn’t ask either question.”

  “Then I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “Good choice.” Jefferson patted him on the shoulder as he walked toward the approaching SWAT agents, who’d begun to sweep the disaster zone of a room for any demonic stragglers.

  Gideon watched him go for a moment, then muttered, “We’re going to have a real fun relationship with these spooks. I can already tell.”

  “Could be worse,” Solomon said. “At least they don’t see us as the bad guys.”

  Gideon cocked an eyebrow. “Yet.”

  Solomon wilted. “Thanks. Now I’m going to be worrying about that all the time.”

  “Always better to be realistic than naïve,” Gideon quipped before he crouched beside Adara, the only person still on the floor.

  With a careful hand, he peeled back the tatters of her pants leg to reveal the bloody calf beneath. Four barbs had dug in deep and torn through both skin and muscle, but they’d been narrow at their tips, so the lacerations were only as wide as Adara’s thumb. She would need a lot of stitches, and she’d probably spend the next few days on crutches.

  “You’ll live,” Gideon said casually, as if he examined gory injuries on a daily basis. And at one point in his life, that likely had been his experience morning, noon, and night. War zones were not the kindest of places, as Edgerton had learned over the past two terrible days.

  “The bleeding’s already slowed to a dribble,” he added, “so I’ll leave it for the medics to bandage. Doubt you can put any pressure on the leg though, with
your muscles in that condition. So how about a helping hand?”

  Adara had no qualms with receiving help. Acting prideful when you were in a vulnerable position was the hallmark of stupidity, her father had taught her ages ago. That was how people died from exposure, or from wild animal attacks, or from tiny slips of the foot above huge drops, or from any of the other dangers that the environment loved to throw at fragile humans.

  “Thanks for the offer.” Adara lifted her arm, expecting Gideon to sling it over his shoulder and help her up on her one good leg.

  Instead, he bent down, scooped her up into his muscular arms, and lifted her in a bridal carry like she weighed no more than a stack of folded towels. As he stood, however, she spotted the slightest twitch around the corner of his lips, a sign of pain that he would never confess to feeling. His scarred knee ached under Adara’s weight.

  She considered whether to call him out on hurting himself to help her, and decided to hold her tongue.

  Out of all the shard holders, he’d technically done the least amount of work; even Solomon had done more by banishing the imps. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, of course. He’d done the job to which he was best suited, and he’d done it perfectly.

  But he’d also stood in the hall and watched everyone else do far more dangerous things. And she knew how much shame that perceived lack of effort must’ve stirred in a man like Gideon, a former Army Ranger, among the most elite of soldiers.

  The wound to his knee had banished him from the playing field, and he’d been sitting on the sidelines ever since. The Shattering of God had given him the opportunity to do a great deal more.

  But by virtue of random chance, the power he’d gained was better suited for clever strategy than direct assault. Which meant that the sort of combat he’d grown accustomed to was still off the table, a fact that had almost certainly left Gideon sorely disappointed. In himself. In the world. In God.

  Adara was sure he would get over that disappointment one day and use his time manipulation powers to do things far more impressive than anything he’d done as a regular soldier. Like all of them though, he would need time to accept his new reality and grow into his new abilities.

  For now, she would let him have his pride at the sacrifice of her own, if that was what he needed to feel useful.

  Just to double-check though, she softly asked, “Doesn’t your knee hurt?”

  Without missing a beat, he gruffly replied, “Not as much as your leg.”

  And that was the end of the discussion.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Their march out of the building made for a sorry victory parade.

  SWAT agents at the front and rear thoroughly cleared each room they passed. Occasionally, an imp leaped up from underneath a table or down from the shadowy hole where a ceiling tile had once been. But the imps were so few in number now that they were easily dispatched by a short burst of shots from a rifle or two.

  After each went down twitching and gargling, the agents tossed it into a duffle bag someone had brought along so the imps wouldn’t get left behind to heal and attack another day. Once the shard holders had recuperated a bit, they would sweep these remaining imps back under the rug of Hell. Until then, Overlock had the resources to confine the imps and shoot them as many times as necessary to keep them complacent.

  Following a slog up the stairs, the procession reached the first floor of the library. The fighting had ended here as well, and the agents of the second wave who’d stayed upstairs to tackle the imp infestation among the stacks had emerged victorious.

  As the shard holder group headed toward the series of twisted metal frames that had once been the entryway, they passed a pile of mutilated imps being guarded by three agents. The rest of the agents were searching the stacks for any imps in hiding.

  One of the imps half buried in the pile weakly grabbed at Adara’s hair as Gideon carried her past. She batted its hand away with almost no effort, but a few strands of her hair pulled free. She hissed, less in pain and more in annoyance.

  “These things just don’t give up, do they?” she muttered.

  Gideon gave the bloody imp a sharp look, and it sagged back against the tangle of other bodies. “I’m guessing the imps aren’t exactly at the top of the intelligence pole. They do what they’re told, and they keep on doing it until one of their bosses tells them to do something else.”

  “You know, if they weren’t literal creatures from Hell, I would feel kind of bad about inflicting so much pain on them. They’re more like attack dogs than soldiers following commands. Too simpleminded to make conscientious objections to amoral orders.”

  Gideon snorted. “They wouldn’t if they could.”

  “I know, but at least then we’d be hurting creatures that chose to be evil.”

  He made a thoughtful noise as he stepped carefully through the field of glass around the entryway. “Guess that does make for an interesting ethical debate.”

  “Maybe so,” said Enzo wearily, shambling up beside them. “But I think that’s a debate that can wait until Earth is no longer under siege from the denizens of Hell. For the time being, we might want to reserve our brain power for more pertinent concerns.”

  Victoria, hobbling alongside Enzo, added, “Personally, I don’t care if we ever consider the ‘ethics’ behind shooting the crap out of demons.”

  She held out her arms to showcase the raw red burns that stretched from the backs of her hands all the way up to her elbows. Most of the burns were superficial, but a few were going to scar quite badly. A permanent reminder of how close she’d come to brutally dying at the hands of Belphegor.

  Enzo had similar burns, but his were even more extensive, crawling up the right side of his neck and tapering off just under his ear. Adara guessed he had used his own body to shield Victoria from the worst of the fireball’s heat. An act of heroism that he would be reminded of every time he looked in the mirror for the rest of his life.

  Adara felt another pang of guilt for bringing Enzo along on this mission. But she swallowed it down instead of expressing it because she knew he would find it patronizing.

  Enzo was an adult, same as her. He’d made the choice to stick out his neck and risk getting his head chopped off by monsters beyond imagination. She had to respect that choice and the consequences that had resulted from it. No matter how much it hurt her to see him suffering.

  Instead of feeling guilty, she told herself, you should feel motivated to do better next time. Come up with craftier strategies. Put everyone at less risk. Use this experience as a lesson, not an excuse to mope.

  That was what her father would have said. So that was what she’d do.

  As they wove around the frames where the glass doors had once been, something caught Victoria’s attention. She peeked through what little remained of her curtain of hair—most of it had been singed off—and said, “Hey, isn’t that the faerie lady?”

  Sure enough, Dawes was approaching the library with a small group of SWAT agents in tow, and they all looked like they’d been through the ringer. Dawes’s sleek blond bob was now a tangled bird’s nest spattered with blood and speckled with debris. One of her pants legs had been torn at the knee, revealing a bite mark around her shin that had a distinct tusk-like impression. And finally, there was a bullet hole in her shoulder weeping fluid that was a bit too pink to be mistaken for human blood.

  Jefferson broke away from the shard holder group and jogged over to his partner. “You all right? What happened?”

  Dawes blew a blond lock out of her face and replied, “A daring escape.”

  “Who escaped?” he asked, then answered his own question. “Astaroth.”

  “After the first wave finished clearing the imps from the campus grounds”—Dawes swept her arms from side to side to indicate the area around the library, now painted with a garish mix of orange and red bloodstains, where the fallen from each side had lain a short time ago—“they went around to that quad on the east side of the librar
y to apprehend the greater demon. But she pulled a fast one on them. She jumped from the body of that overly tan blonde and possessed one of our agents, then started shooting at the others.”

  Jefferson frowned. “Our agents have anti-possession training.”

  “For ghosts and spirits, yes. But apparently that’s not good enough to help them stave off a greater demon.” Dawes picked something out of her hair that looked far too much like the tip of a finger. “Anyway, after spraying bullets into twelve agents and critically injuring four, she made a run for the wide perimeter line. It was hard to tell she wasn’t human from a distance, so by the time anyone realized they needed to gun her down, she was close enough to vault right over the perimeter, barricades, Humvees, and all.”

  “So she got away scot-free.” Jefferson stomped his foot. “Damn.”

  “Sorry, partner,” Dawes said, prodding at her bullet wound. “I made an effort to pursue, but I had to turn back because she called a bunch of imps who’d been hiding in the neighborhood buildings to assault the perimeter guards so we couldn’t chase her in force. We lost three more agents during that fracas.”

  Jefferson ran a hand over his shaved head, morose. “How many did we lose total?”

  “Eighteen confirmed dead,” Dawes said. “Twenty-four injured. Of those, eleven are critically injured and already in transit to the nearest hospital.” She pointed at the shard holder group. “Any life-threatening injuries there?”

  “No, but we should get them to the ER sooner rather than later. A couple of them have serious burns, and Ms. Caine had the pleasure of being speared in the leg by a greater demon’s spiked tail.”

  Dawes pursed her lips. “Sounds like you had a blast.”

  “Oh yes,” Jefferson drawled. “It was practically a vacation.”

  Enzo snorted. “Yeah, if Hell is your favorite exotic destination.”

  “The weather was terrible,” Solomon said. “Far too hot, and rainy to boot.”