by Nick Freo
A second before I was about to tackle him, he side-stepped me. I spun around, my fist cutting through the air. His body jerked to the left, leaving my fist swiping the air. I threw my other fist, but he took two quick steps back, dodging it. I swung my right fist again. He twisted his body around, and my fist only brushed up against his torn shirt. Frustration taking over, I rammed my body into his chest. We both fell onto the road. I scrambled onto my knees and slammed my fist at his face. He shifted his head just enough so my fist hit the asphalt.
Fucking. Hell.
In the first second that pain shocked my body, the Dead Man used his body weight to throw me off him. He jumped onto his feet with more agility than I would have ever thought possible, even after witnessing him treat me like I was shadowboxing. I scrambled onto my feet, ignoring the throbbing pain.
“Kyle, if you could—”
I threw my fist at his head. He dodged it. I lunged at him again. He ducked out of the way. I swung my elbow behind me. He evaded it.
“This is getting tedious,” he said. In my periphery, I saw him make a movement with his hands. I fell to the ground, my legs feeling like I’d run five marathons.
A sea of hellfire surged toward us. I waited for the inevitable pain, but it washed over the Dead Man and I like it was a mirage. As it stopped, I craned my head to see Lilah running toward a stop sign.
If I died, she would die too, and it seemed that she was incredibly motivated in not dying—enough to make stupid choices.
Why didn’t the hellfire affect me?
The question burst into my head as Lilah broke the stop sign pole and came running toward the Dead Man with the broken pole aimed at him.
Before she reached us, she slowed to a stop, staring at something behind us. I turned my head. At least seven street demons were running toward us. Donnie led them, a spiral of hellfire growing in his hand. The other demons began summoning flames, invoking images of a mob with torches.
A younger demon sprinted to the front. He must have been in his mid to late teens. He threw flames like bullets. They bounced off the Dead Man, collapsing down at his feet like small sparks. The demon grabbed onto the Dead Man at the same time as three other demons. The sound of rapid steps rushed toward me. Lilah’s cinnamon scent drifted over me as she crouched beside me.
“I told you—the demon community is close,” she muttered. She tried to pull me away from the fight but stopped and ducked as a ball of hellfire flew by us. I heard the clicking of heels and Cara appeared on my other side. She grabbed my arm, preparing to help Lilah.
A swift movement caught my eye. The Dead Man had slammed his arm against one of the demons. He hit the road hard enough that there was a loud crack, and I couldn’t be certain if the sound had come from one of his bones or the asphalt. The Dead Man shoved a demon’s face away from him. The moment his fingers touched the demon, the demon’s body went slack. The young demon froze. The Dead Man had barely touched his forehead—like he was anointing him. The demon collapsed to the road. A demon with a shaved head threw a punch. The Dead Man dodged it before hitting him back. The demon stumbled back from the hit before dropping to the ground. His chest didn’t move again.
Four demons, dead. The Dead Man must have been playing with me while we were fighting. He wasn’t even trying right now, and he had a body count.
Donnie and the demons who hadn’t rushed forward continued their onslaught of hellfire, but it fell over the Dead Man like gusts of wind. In the distance, Stephos and a crowd of more demons were running toward the fight. The Dead Man sighed. He turned to me, a frown engraved on his face. The top half of my body tensed and heat seared beside me as Lilah prepared for one final attempt. It was a nice and terrible thought to know we’d die at the same time.
The Dead Man shook his head at me. He pivoted on his heel and ran east, away from the demons, Cara, and me. His strides were long and fluid. Lilah jerked forward like she was going to pursue him, but stopped after her first step. Cara whispered under her breath—it could have been a prayer or a moment of gratitude. The sound of the demons changing direction to pursue the Dead Man roared through the streets.
Lilah settled down beside me again. She rested her forehead against mine. I stared at the dead demons around us, and I knew that this was nothing compared to what the future held. This was a brawl, but a crusade was coming, and somehow, I had managed to get into the middle of it.
Chapter 13
A wave of heat billowed over my skin. Lilah and Cara stood up. I lifted myself onto my elbows to see Stephos and all his subordinates running toward us. The hellfire in their palms flickered, except for Stephos’, which blazed. Their scowls were visible from a distance, which I couldn’t understand when they had risked their lives to save us.
Stephos’ eyes were locked on Cara.
I grabbed Cara pulling her down behind me. She stumbled, her hand falling on my shoulder to steady herself. Lilah took several steps forward.
“Lilah,” I hissed. If she joined them—if she was consumed by her hatred of Cara and her disappointment in my distrust of her—Cara and I were fucked.
Lilah and the gang congregated ten feet in front of us.
“What’s going on?” Lilah asked. “Where did the Dead Man go?”
“He’s gone. He turned a corner and vanished. I still have a couple brothers looking around,” Stephos said. “But I’m sure he’s gone, and I’ve still got four of my brothers dead, which is troubling because I also see a breathing angel here. If I do the math right, minus four demons plus one living angel equals the fact that I need to break her neck.”
“She’s working with the Arbiter,” Lilah said. He tried to take a step forward. She blocked him. “And if anyone is going to break her neck, it’s me. Spinal columns are my favorite bone to break.”
Stephos took a step closer to Lilah. He stood about a foot taller than her, but she didn’t make any indication that she was intimidated. Her palm was turned away from him, and I could see the flicker of a flame, ready to burst into something violent. They stared at each other, Stephos’ eyes cold and his jaw clenched, while Lilah almost had a smirk on her face. Her fingers fluttered around the flame like they were playing a jaunty piano song.
“Fine,” Stephos said. “But she better get out of here. And you better remember which side you’re on.”
“I do,” Lilah stated as he started to turn around. He paused before nodding and walking away. The other demons followed him, carefully moving around the dead demons.
Lilah turned around, kneeling beside me.
“Thanks. That means a lot to me,” Cara said.
“Shut up and heal Kyle.”
She nodded, placing her hands over my knee. A deep cold sunk into my leg and small arctic blue globes of light rose above her hands. The light drifted back down to my leg, sinking into my skin. She raised her hands. I tried to move my legs, but nothing happened.
“Is the healing power supposed to be instant?” I asked. Cara nodded, biting her lip.
“What the fuck, Cara. This is why you’re here,” Lilah snarled. Cara shook her head.
“He’s gone too far to your side. My powers won’t work on someone who’s this far aligned with demons. We can heal flawed humans, but not someone this demonic. If we could heal demons, your side would have kept us as prisoners.”
“Oh, fuck off. We wouldn’t want to spend more time with you than we needed to. Besides, we rarely get injured.”
Cara gestured to the dead demons. “The current circumstances beg to differ.”
They glared at each other. It was within the realm of possibility that at least one more dead body was about to be added to the pile.
“Hey,” I interrupted. “Lilah. Why didn’t your hellfire hurt me?”
She glanced at me, the anger fading from her eyes. “It’s likely the same reason you can’t be healed. You’re thoroughly demon-like, so it won’t hurt you. Demons take less damage from hellfire. Little or no damage from your own. Apparently
, you’re immune to mine, too. Congrats.”
“But that immunity also applies to being healed by angels.” Cara took a deep breath. “There could be a way around that. It’s against the natural order for an angel to heal someone who is strongly aligned to demons, but that’s because it’s a transfer of power. If you healed yourself, it would be your body repairing itself without any transfer. If you could somehow enter a second soul-marriage with me, you could gain healing powers, and it shouldn’t matter how demonic you are.”
“You conniving bitch.” Lilah grabbed Cara’s shoulder, yanking her away from me. “You take a problem like this and turn it into your chance to get some human soul? Why don’t you prioritize figuring out how to heal him instead of jumping straight to soul-selling, which he already said he didn’t want?”
“The hypocrisy pouring out of you must be setting a world record.” Cara moved around Lilah. Lilah watched her. “This is your fault. You escalated the problem when you attacked the Dead Man. You were the one who wasn’t prioritizing Kyle’s safety. You just wanted to show off. And that was all after you took advantage of his ignorance of our world and tried to use the soul-marriage to influence his decisions without him knowing.”
“You’re a soul-sucking worthless angel!” Lilah yelled. “The whole reason you’re here is to be the medic and to protect humans and you’re failing at both! You’re useless!”
“Not to interrupt your fight,” I said. “But we should get back to the mansion. Can someone help me up?”
Cara quickly stuck her tongue out at Lilah before offering me her hand. I took it and she pulled me up. I leaned against her. Since I was taller than her, my feet dragged on the road. This was a disaster.
“You know what? Fuck the mansion. Fuck magic. Fuck the Dead Man. I just want to go home. My apartment is on Cable Street. 1871. If someone could drive me there, that’d be great.”
“I don’t know if that’s smart,” Cara said.
“The angel is right,” Lilah added, wrapping her arm around my other side. “Your father’s mansion has wards—we’d at least see him coming and be able to prepare.”
“I need one night without all this bullshit,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll be fine for one night.”
“If that’s what you want,” Lilah muttered.
I could feel them exchanging glances behind my back as we made our way to the BMW, which only pissed me off more. The only time they seemed able to get along was when they were telling me what I couldn’t do.
Lilah helped me into the passenger seat while Cara sat in the driver’s seat. Lilah sat in the back with me. Cara drove around the dead demons, the car lurching a couple of times to avoid them. I leaned my head against the headrest, trying to calm down the brutality that wanted to destroy everything. I watched the city crawl by. I had always seen the city as depressing—the ruins of a once thriving area—but now everything resembled the Dead Man. It looked like shambles, but it was lethal and holding back its worst intentions for a moment when you least expected it.
So, the next moment shouldn’t have surprised me.
The drive to my apartment was only seventeen minutes long, but the closer we got, the more congested the roads were. We were a couple blocks away when I saw the billows of smoke. It rose up to the skyline before blending into the rest of the cityscape.
“Son of a bitch,” I spit out, sitting up straight.
“It could be any building…” Cara said.
“Bullshit,” I muttered. She slowed down at the intersection we needed to turn in on. The street was filled with fire trucks, their sirens blaring, and my apartment was engulfed in fire.
“That’s the one?” Cara asked. From her tone, she must have already known the answer. “Kyle, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I stared up at the flames. They were tall enough to cast a glow over the whole street. There was nothing particular that I was attached to in my apartment, but they were still all my things. I’d had the couch in two different apartments. I’d found the lamp that barely lit up the living area in a college dumpster. I had just bought frozen chicken to cook for the weekend.
I looked forward. Cara’s hair glowed in front of me, nearly halo-like. “Let’s go to the mansion.”
“Are you sure? We can talk to one of the firemen. Maybe some of your possessions are okay—”
“No,” I cut her off. “We’re going to the mansion. Whoever did this made a mistake. I’m not going to take the night off. If someone wants to try to fuck up my life, I’m going to make them regret it. If this is going to end with me dead, I’m going to make as much trouble as possible before I go. Go back to the mansion. We’re going to summon Mr. Gray and do the soul-marriage.”
Cara hesitated, but she kept driving. Lilah seemed oddly silent, so I turned to check on her. Her face was cast in shadows, but she didn’t seem fueled by anger like I was.
“Are you okay with this?” I asked, the words coming out more like an accusation than a question. I had meant it as a question about the soul-marriage, but I might as well have been asking about everything that had happened.
“I want what you want,” she said. We both knew it wasn’t true, but I let it go. Maybe that was all I ever needed to do to become who I needed to be.
Chapter 14
Lilah pulled a chair into the entrance of the mansion. With my arms wrapped around Cara’s shoulders, I managed to sit down on it.
“So, how exactly do we summon Mr. Gray?” I asked, trying to rearrange my useless legs. “Is there a magic telephone?”
“If we had his number, we could call him on a normal phone, but a lot of people involved with the Celestial Court don’t like newer technology,” Cara said. “They don’t trust it, and they’re very secretive.”
“I figured that out,” I said, “after the third or fourth time I was referred to as confidential. Since we can’t use a phone, how do we do it?”
“I need some paper,” Cara said, wandering into the library. She returned with a white legal pad and a pen. “I just write his name on here and give it back to the earth.”
“Back to the earth,” I repeated. “Are you burying it?”
“Oh, lover,” Lilah laughed, her arms circling around my chest. She kissed my cheek. “Just watch.”
Cara finished writing and gave the pen to me. I tossed it on the floor. She pressed the paper up against the earth carved into the front door. The paper seemed to age, turning yellow and fragile before disintegrating.
“Oh. How long before he shows up?” I asked.
Cara shrugged. “He could be busy.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Or he could have been waiting to be summoned,” Cara added. She opened the door. Mr. Gray stood at the threshold, still wearing the exact same gray clothes as before.
“Hello, Cara. Lilah. Mr. Bishop,” he said, stepping in. “You requested my presence?”
“Hi, Mr. Gray. How are you doing?” Cara asked.
“Extremely busy. Please be prompt.”
Cara flushed. The anger that had sown inside my chest flared to life. I didn’t care who Mr. Gray was associated with. He could be a dick on his own time.
“Of course. So, there’s been evidence that Kyle didn’t fully give his soul to Lilah,” Cara said. “She’s not able to influence him like she should have been able to.”
Mr. Gray’s stoic expression didn’t change. “The theory that the soul-marriage didn’t manifest as it should have manifested was a notion I had entertained.”
“That means he could marry his soul again, right?” Cara asked, bouncing on her toes, which caused her heels to click against the floor. “He could give me part of his soul—or lend it to me—and I could give him some of my power?”
“Certainly,” he said. I watched him. I had known him to be unnervingly calm, but this seemed excessive.
“You seem awfully unsurprised by all of this,” I said.
“As I said, I had noticed a discrepancy when we initially pe
rformed the ritual.”
“Do you know why it didn’t work?”
“I have my suspicions.”
He didn’t elaborate. If my legs worked, I might have pushed the issue forward, but not having functional legs tended to give me tunnel vision.
“Can we do the soul-marriage now?” Cara asked.
“Certainly,” he repeated. He turned to me. “You are a willing participant, Mr. Bishop?”
I nodded. Without hesitation, he pulled out his pen, sliding it between his fingers. The pen began to glow, brighter and brighter until it was the same beam of light he had stabbed me with before. I concentrated on the light, focusing on the idea of killing the Dead Man and not on the impending pain.
Mr. Gray plunged the beam of light into my heart.
The pain was different this time. Instead of the sensation of the fluids in my body being replaced with sand, it felt like my veins were being forced to expand and my blood became ice, cold and solid. When he pulled out the beam, the gold flecks were still there, but instead of black streaks, there was an iridescent string that formed a spiderweb-like design.
The ring on my finger turned ice cold.
Mr. Gray turned and stabbed the beam of light into Cara. The gold and iridescent string dissipated. As Mr. Gray pulled the light out, my body began to warm up, and for a split second, I could feel my blood pulsing through me. Mr. Gray held onto the beam of light as it shrunk back into a pen. He placed it back in his pocket.
Cara touched her face, looking around the house. “Wow. This mansion gives me the strangest feeling. It’s like…I feel sad and happy at the same time. It reminds me of the way the world used to be.”
“That’s nostalgia,” Mr. Gray said. I pressed my palms onto my legs. When I had triggered hellfire, it had been a simple matter of concentrating on the thought of how the hellfire would feel coming from inside me. I played through the memory of Cara trying to heal me—the bitter cold sinking into my bones and the pale blue globes of light floating above her hands.
