Axes and Angels: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Novel (Better Demons Series Book 1)

by Matthew Herrmann

  The mace frosted over in the creature’s chest, and I lifted a shield from the wall with both hands—the heaviest item yet!—as another creature waddled up to me. The shield took the creature’s attack and, setting my heel against the floor, I thrust the shield forward, bashing the creature backward. It whinnied and I found myself back-to-back with Spider Face. His fist connected with one of the creature’s jaws.

  I glanced out the broken windows—at freedom—but snarls and whinnies erased any ideas of trying to escape that way. The Zeus gang patrols probably hadn’t stood a chance against these monsters in the dark.

  A chimera leapt at me and I deflected it to the floor. I hefted the shield up and brought it down on the creature’s chest, and the shield’s bottom edge decapitated the beast, but its clawed wings kept scratching out at me while the jaws of its disconnected head snapped aggressively at me a few feet away. I stepped back, releasing my grasp on the shield as the spreading frost rushed upward toward my fingers.

  I turned to Spider Face and Don off to the side scrabbling behind a marble pedestal. “I’m all out of weapons,” I said. “How much farther is this reliquary?”

  “Just around the corner,” Spider Face said, wiping his forehead.

  Don’s face contorted even more so than it usually did. “We must push through!”

  One of the chimeras tilted its head at Don and fired an icy projectile. I reached out and pulled my employer out of the way as the marble pedestal behind him frosted over with mini stalactites. Then the beast lowered its head to me, doing the gurgling routine again.

  Spider Face’s magic barrier materialized just in time, protecting me from the ice blast.

  “Stay close to me!” he shouted before grabbing both Don’s and my wrist and charging down the rest of the icy corridor. Chimeras bounced aside when struck by the bluish barrier, and from Spider Face’s straining, I knew he was burning some serious time to maintain the effort. All the while, more chimeras continued to flop onto the floor all around us.

  He braked to a halt in front of a steel door with three different locks on it as well as scrolling Latin script on the door. Warded.

  Which meant that if there was any place in this building I really, really wanted to get into—AKA snoop around in—this was it.

  Spider Face released his grasp on my wrist and placed his palm against the door. He uttered something in Latin and the door glowed. Then he drew a set of specialized keys from around his neck and inserted the key into the first lock.

  A creature roared behind us and I kicked it, my leg passing through the forcefield. My shoe struck the chimera a glancing blow off the shoulder and it stumbled, but it managed to catch my leg with one of its bat-like claws. I tumbled outside the barrier’s protection.

  “Ahhh!” Simon yelled.

  Behind me, heavy lock bolts started clanging.

  “Sweep the legs!” Garfunkel shouted.

  Liquid ice foamed from the chimera’s head as it gargled, lining up its shot right at me.

  And I would have been turned into a human popsicle had a pair of burly arms not grabbed me from under my arms and hoisted me backward and into the open doorway of the Reliquary.

  The ice blast pounded against the other side of the steel door like an iron knocker or a lead punch as Spider Face shoved it closed. I expected the door to freeze over and then crumble inward like fairy dust. It held.

  Simon gasped and I spun to face the safe room’s interior. And well … I gasped too.

  Before me lay rows upon rows of metal shelving containing very ancient and very magic artifacts as far as the eye could see.

  “Look but Don’t Touch (AKA Mission Impossible)”

  “Whoa,” I said, completely oblivious to the sound of the chimeras beating on the door behind me.

  Don gazed at me solemnly. “Don’t touch anything.”

  I started touching things: a diamond-encrusted leather gauntlet, a shrunken monkey’s paw, even a shiny gold lamp (sans genie). The room bore the feel of an immaculate torch-lit warehouse, everything neatly arranged and tagged by alpha-numeric shelf labels. The lighting came from floating orbs of, as odd as it sounds … smokeless fire. That’s the best explanation I can give. The color flickered an eerie bronze color, bright and extremely clear, and you could look at it straight on and not have to blink.

  “Miss Apollonia,” my employer called after me.

  I speed-walked down an aisle away from him and Spider Face. Shelves upon shelves upon shelves … my dad—the historian that he was—would freak if he saw this place. This Brotherhood of Zeus reliquary made Typhon’s storeroom look like a trash heap. Seriously, I doubt there was even a speck of dust anywhere. Their housekeeper deserved overtime pay.

  “The chimeras,” Don said, and I paused.

  The futile pounding of the chihuahua chimeras upon the metal door re-registered in my mind, and I thought, Oh yeah, there’s a reason we came here: to get the lava axe. But then what?

  I was about to ask Don when Garfunkel said, “Hey, isn’t that the ring from the cemetery job?”

  I stopped mid-aisle as my eyes fell upon the glinting sapphire of the Ring of Adamas—the item that had gotten me in trouble with the Zeus gang in the first place. The ring rested on a shelf at waist-height next to a familiar oaken cask, branded with the sigil of a volcano surrounded by lightning bolts.

  The lava axe.

  I reached out to unlatch the lid …

  And pulled back as a pale hand swatted me away.

  “Ow,” I said, blinking at the being standing behind a blazing bronze orb of smokeless fire.

  “Mitts off my display, young lady!”

  I tensed, unsure what to say. Before me, her face etched with a crescent moon scowl was a …

  I turned to Simon who whispered, “Djinn.”

  “A djinn?” Garfunkel said. “That’s not a djinn. Djinn are fierce warriors. They have horns on their heads. That … that’s … no this is all wrong.”

  The djinn before us was nearly seven-feet-tall and corpulent but muscular. Also she was nude. Of course, you couldn’t tell because she had elaborate, thick black stripes painted across her arms and legs and chest and abdomen. With the patches of black, you couldn’t see anything underneath. She was interesting and intimidating all at the same time. And stout.

  “Uh heh, you must be the curator,” I said.

  She glanced down and straightened the gold name tag stuck to her chest reading Mel -Curator. “Yes. And you. Are intruding.” She flicked me with an impressively-sized feather duster. “Out! Out before I sic living fire on you.”

  “But I need this axe.”

  “It does not belong to you—” Mel started but was interrupted by Don clearing his throat from the end of the aisle. Behind Don, Spider Face kept watch on the metal door.

  “I’m afraid,” Don began, “Miss Apollonia is entitled to that item.”

  Mel’s eyes crossed for a moment as she placed a protective palm over the cask. “What? But she is not its rightful owner.”

  My employer tapped his foot, threw a worried glance over his shoulder at the door before turning back to the djinn curator. “Remember that deal I made with you? That you could stay here and tend to the reliquary if I could but have a single item—no questions asked—when I deemed the time necessary?”

  “Well, I …” Mel fidgeted.

  “This is that time,” Don said. “There is a horde of beasts on the other side of the door intent on claiming it—”

  “For its true owner,” Mel said thrusting her finger up in the air.

  I smirked. “You’re a real stickler for the rules, aren’t you?”

  Mel bowed. “It is my duty, in the capacity of chairwoman of the Association for Others’ Orphaned Artifacts to return lost possessions to their rightful owners. Others have so few rights in this GoneGod World. Aren’t they entitled to an organization devoted in returning to them what is rightfully theirs?”

  “I never thought about that,” I said.

>   “Yes,” Don said, “and you assume temporary ownership over all these artifacts until you can ascertain if their true owner stayed behind and/or survived the GrandExodus. But I must assume ownership of this axe. Now.”

  “But—”

  “Your oath,” Don reminded her, and Mel relented, drew her palm off the oaken cask just as a particularly loud thud sounded from the other side of the metal door.

  “I’m not sure how much longer the door will stand!” Spider Face called out.

  Don flashed me a look and I reached out, undid the clasp and lifted the lid. The lava axe gleamed dully from its housing. Wow. A weapon so powerful it could kill a god, and yet so small I could slip it under my jacket and remain unnoticed, assuming I didn’t receive a pat-down or go through a metal detector—

  Mel’s hand shot out and clasped my wrist.

  “Hey now,” I said. “You uh, swore an oath.”

  With a swift shake of her head and the flaring intake of breath through her nostrils, the curator said, “I smell something on you.”

  “Body odor?” Garfunkel suggested.

  Mel’s grip grew tighter. “Yes. It is very old. Full of immeasurable power …” She lifted her eyes to mine. “And it’s inside your jacket.”

  Inside my jacket? I thought. And then I remembered what I’d taken from Lucy in the woods before the Zeus gang kidnapped me.

  Too late, because Mel’s hand had already darted inside my jacket and come out clutching the rolled-up laminated Nyx scroll.

  “Aha! This is not yours.”

  I didn’t much like the accusation in her eyes. Even more so, I didn’t like the sound the metal door made as it rattled within its frame at the front of the room.

  I extended a hand to the housecleaner/curator. “Hi. We got off badly. I’m Theo. And I respect your handiwork. But I’m going to need that scroll back.”

  She just looked at me. “Do you know what this is?”

  I shuddered at the sound of clanging metal. “Not really, but maybe you’ll tell me before the door caves in …”

  The curator unrolled it with a careful snap of her wrist. “This is the night goddess Nyx’s ‘Recipe for Creating Constellations.’ Wherever did you find it?”

  Constellations? Why had Typhon ordered Lucy to steal a goddess’s constellation recipe?

  “A crazy dwarf had it,” I said, wondering why Nyx’s name kept coming up. Orion had once said the goddess had been the master of the constellations. And something about her being mad at the gods that her two sons couldn’t be made into constellations to join her after they died.

  Mel gave me a stern look. Accusation dripped from her voice. “Excuse me. Did you say you stole this from a dwarf?”

  “No,” I said. I had stolen it from a four-armed Indian goddess’s bodyguard. “I uh found it, is what I meant to say.”

  “This is not yours!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “First off, can’t you hear that beating on the door? Secondly, you uh, obviously aren’t up to date on human laws.”

  Mel raised her eyes at me, unimpressed.

  I continued. “I claim this scroll by virtue of uh, the ‘Finders Keepers’ clause found in Article VII, Paragraph 5 of the United States Constitution.”

  “Uh Theo, that’s not right,” Simon said.

  Garfunkel laughed. “Finders Keepers clause?”

  Mel squinted at me. “I am unfamiliar with this human document.”

  I crossed my arms matter-of-factly before risking a glance at the shuddering metal door. “It’s a thing. You’re mortal now—you’ve got to abide by Mortal Laws.”

  “Not if the scroll’s original owner is still present on this plane.”

  “Well,” I said. “Nyx is a goddess. The gods left …” I turned to my familiars. “What do you guys think? Nyx was your cosmic overseer. Would she have been allowed to leave with the rest of the gods?”

  “She was a pretty big deal,” Simon mused as he nibbled his fingernails.

  “Yeah,” Garfunkel said. “A full-fledged primordial goddess.”

  I exhaled loudly and focused on the curator. “Nyx is gone. Now gimme.”

  “Maybe,” Mel said. “Maybe. But this is too powerful an artifact to trust to human hands. I shall hold onto it for safekeeping until it can be verified that the rightful, legal owner is no longer among the living. I’ll add Nyx to my inordinately long list of owners to track down. If I can’t find her …” The curator drew her lips back from her pearly whites. “… then you may have it back.”

  Grr … Others could be so obstinate. Well, so could I. I crossed my arms. “What’s so powerful about it?”

  Mel carefully rolled the laminated scroll back up. “It details the process of Re-Life, an arcane, powerful ritual.”

  “Re-Life?” I asked. “I thought it was a constellation recipe.”

  Mel’s resolute scowl suggested she would say no more.

  A thundering boom echoed from outside the Reliquary’s steel door and the walls and shelves around us shuddered. It came again, this time closer, and I found myself recalling the scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex’s stomping ripples some puddle water. What the hell was Typhon sending at us now?

  I rushed to where Spider Face was standing and caught a closer glimpse of the door.

  Oh crap. It was subtle, but frost had starting to seep its way along the doorframe’s seal. Guess ice trumps magic metal door …

  Mel must have seen it too, because she straightened her posture, wielding a feather duster like a dagger.

  “Yeah … that ain’t gonna work,” I said. I slid my hand over the lava axe’s handle.

  A temporary flareup beside me caused me to turn as the curator djinn uttered something I didn’t understand, and then the orbs of bronze smokeless fire spread throughout the room whooshed to her at her beckoning. She stretched out her hands before her and the orbs linked up together like a great flaming whip. She snapped her wrist and the flaming whip ululated like a jump rope, like a living snake.

  “OK,” I conceded as I hefted the lava axe. “That might actually work. Do I get one?”

  But she wasn’t listening to me—her chanting drowned out my voice. Beside me, Spider Face sweated as he passed glances between the slowly frosting door and his weary biceps. His face looked like it had aged a few years since I’d first met him, the consequences of burning time.

  A soft crack permeated the dustless stillness of the storeroom as a hairline fracture appeared down the frost-glazed metal door.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  I waited for the lava axe in my hand to get all lava-y but it just stayed cold. At least it fit in my closed hand like a glove, having conformed to my grip the first time I’d used it in Typhon’s Arena.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  I glanced around me at the countless artifacts contained in this room. Too bad my father wasn’t here. We could’ve bonded over items of lore as we awaited certain death from a mob of chimeras …

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  I turned to my familiars. “I know you don’t want to turn into your Lady Justice/Libra form … but that thing sounds big.” I gripped the cold axe. “Hopefully we don’t die.”

  My familiars didn’t say anything. Sweat now rolled down Garfunkel’s forehead and stained the armpits of Simon’s lighter colored suit.

  All eyes were on the steel door.

  Boom.

  The door shuddered and then held still, the icy sheen over it glittering like freshly fallen snow. I held my breath.

  Silence. Utter silence.

  There was a final boom and then the door blasted inward with a terrible screech.

  “Walking (and Fighting) in a Winter Wonderland”

  The metal door didn’t just blast toward us; it shattered inward like a crystal rain. Chihuahua chimeras poured through the opening—small ones first, stomping like hungry toddlers over the glittering remains. Spider Face swept them to the side with ease with his forcefield-fingery hands. As I sprinted toward the d
oor with the lava axe, some medium-sized chimeras rushed in. I smacked one of them in the jaw with the flat of the blade, staggering it, grateful when the lava axe didn’t freeze up like every other weapon I’d used against them. But all the same, it didn’t turn all lava-y, which is what I really needed right then.

  Chimeras shouldered past me. There were too many of them to fight; I backed against Spider Face as he put up his blue forcefield. And that’s when it happened …

  The Big Daddy of chimeras burst through the doorway, knocking away the sides of the doorway as it bellowed and whinnied like a horse out of hell. (What? Bat didn’t seem appropriate.)

  Spider Face attempted to block the beast but he didn’t stand a chance. The beast flung him back into the recesses of the store room. I couldn’t tell if he was still alive or not. He wasn’t moving about. And his boss, Don … I didn’t see him anywhere—must’ve been cowering behind some shelves, reliving his worst nightmare.

  So much for our plan to strike and take out our common enemy and rescue Orion …

  The jumbo-sized chimera tromped toward me, icy breath fogging the air in front of its devilish maw, and now, I didn’t have a protective barrier. The beast didn’t gargle; it just opened its mouth and liquid ice roiled out, breath that would have frozen me into that human popsicle we keep talking about had it not been for the whip of smokeless fire the curator djinn lashed forth with a piercing crack! The two forces of (super) nature crossed streams and canceled each other out in a loud explosion of ice shrapnel and sputtering fireballs.

  Mel sent out her fiery whip again, lashing onto the chimera’s arm. The beast opened its mouth to expel ice breath and the djinn ripped the flame to the side, sending the beast in a vicious turn, its icy breath inadvertently encasing two entire rows of metal shelving (containing artifacts) in slippery ice. The djinn gave a war cry, charged and was perfunctorily knocked aside in the opposite direction that Spider Face’s body had travelled. She landed with an oomph so I knew she was alright—for the moment.