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

by Matthew Herrmann

  I struck him across the jaw, he shoved me upon my back. He brought his knife down; I raised the lava axe, searing off part of the edge. He adjusted his stance, held the knife poised down at me anyways. I blocked his thrust with the flat of the axe.

  He laughed coldly. “Your weakness is, you will not kill me.”

  “I can’t kill you,” I grunted as I kicked him behind the leg. I pivoted past him, pulling his weight over my shoulder.

  His back connected with Atlas’s head and he regained his footing, but then a flying dragon head launched itself at me, deflecting against Orion’s shoulder as it swooped low. I sidestepped and buried the molten axe into the side of the dragon’s jaw, stepping back to watch as the entire head ignited and dropped away like a comet. When I turned back to my partner, Orion’s horror-stricken face as he fought to regain his balance hit me like a punch to the gut.

  He toppled over the side.

  A thick veil of rain parted us but I could just make out Orion’s body as he smacked Atlas’s shoulder with a grunt. He tried to stand up but his boots slipped off and his scream was swallowed by the pounding rain.

  “No! Orion!” I shouted, falling to my knees.

  “Theo!” Garfunkel said. “Typhon’s nearly to the Heart!”

  With bile in my throat I wiped the flood of rainwater from my eyes, careful not to lose my own footing as my heart wept.

  Fifty yards below me, Typhon clung to Atlas’s chest, the claws of one hand sunk into the stone to give him purchase. He slipped the claws of his other hand under the final suture and raised it up with a flicking, crushing sound. Then, maintaining his grip on Atlas, he reached in and pried both sides of the stone chest apart. The warm burst of pure energy that emanated from within, sucked the air from my lungs.

  “Oh no, we’re too late!” Simone shrieked.

  Typhon grinned as he plunged his fist into the chest cavity.

  “Clash on the Titan”

  Before I could react, my shoulders lit up in a bright flash and my familiars morphed into Libra. Eight-feet tall. Silver armor over bronze skin. Sword in one hand, scale in the other.

  “Get on!” she said in a voice like that of a Power Rangers Megazord—slightly robotic, full of badass.

  “Get on?” I said, realizing what Libra was about to do—leap off Atlas’s forehead and plunge downward into Typhon.

  Throwing all caution to the wind, I grasped her around the waist and held on.

  Then we were falling.

  Libra landed on the inside of Typhon’s enormous outstretched wrist like Voltron showing up at the last minute to save the day.

  Voltron or Izenborg … depending on how geeky you want to go.

  Not that Typhon got the memo that he was done.

  He didn’t even budge as Libra tucked her head and charged along the length of his arm all the while slashing Typhon’s wrist and arm with side-to-side hacks as she propelled herself onward around the bend of his elbow and up toward his shoulder.

  Demigod blood splashed up on my shoes as I clutched tightly. Typhon started groaning at some point as we continued forward. And before I knew it we had stopped and Libra gripped her sword in a downward thrust and shoved it into Typhon’s chest over his heart.

  Typhon’s giant head swiveled to face ours. “Ow,” he said in a slow, gravelly, pissed off tone. He began to raise his free hand to swat us but Libra swung her two-ton brass scale across Typhon’s face.

  The bones in his nose crunched and another spray of demigod blood sloshed out and over Libra’s silver shoulder pads, and down my hair and back and clothes.

  Libra drew her blade out and was hacking at Typhon’s bulging neck cords when his hand clamped down around her eight-foot-tall warrior’s body.

  I leapt off before his fingers could crush me, gripping onto his dark squiggly chest hair, clinging tight as more blood rushed over me like a tide, threatening to rinse me away to my death far below as prior experience suggested that if Libra fell, my body would slingshot to hers and we’d both die.

  Libra’s bones crunched as Typhon suspended her at full length above his head. “Theo—” she gasped, her once-strong voice now that of a choked-off canary.

  In my far-off periphery, Typhon’s goons had somehow turned the tide against the Arena-bound Others, herding them back into a corner of the room where they’d be slaughtered …

  From the amphitheater rim, a Zeus acolyte drew back a lightning bolt. One of Typhon’s floating dragon head nipped him in the side and he collapsed in a sunburst of electrical energy.

  Soaked with blood and rain, and clinging to the chest hair of a giant demigod, with a god-killing axe in my free hand, I drew in a hard breath. Two or three dragon head shadows circled upon me like an ever-shifting shroud draped over my shoulders.

  I had to act.

  I had to act now.

  As a dragon head shrieked on its downward plummet, I hefted the weapon and hacked down at his chest with the force of a blacksmith slamming down an anvil.

  The axe blade’s white-hot edge melted through Typhon’s chest.

  Upon contact, his chest dermis swelled up like the bubbling skin of a roasting whole hog, crackling and popping as lava sank into the cut, infecting the blood.

  “WHAT? No!” Typhon roared, sending his hand back toward Atlas’s Heart as I raised my weapon again.

  “Yes!” I shouted, burying the axe head once again into his chest.

  I never knew a demigod could scream so loud (of course, some of it probably had to do with the amphitheater’s acoustics).

  “Agghhhh!” he screamed as if his insides were slowly boiling inside—which they probably were.

  I swung the axe sideways under his arm, the blade passing through bone just as easily as skin and flesh. Above me, still crumpled within Typhon’s clenched fist, Libra flashed me a weak smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a creature or being so close to the verge of dying.

  “Let. My. Family. Go!” I hacked with every new word, lava spewing forth like a volcanic eruption from the wounds lining Typhon’s enormous side and chest and neck and chin.

  I watched in crazed bewilderment and semi-horror as Typhon’s blood vessels bulged beneath his skin like pressure-laden oil pipelines under siege. There was a moment, just before the veins glowed red, that I locked eyes with Typhon, his eyelids drawn back like animal skins pinned to a wall.

  Then, with the sound of a water balloon exploding, blood and lava spewed forth like geysers from torn, snake-like veins helixing outward from Typhon’s neck and chest and arms and forehead.

  “What have you done?” Typhon’s mouth dropped open as if unhinged, lava splashing out from between his boulder-sized teeth. “No!”

  Again, that insides-slowly-boiling howl. It hurt my insides just to hear it, and for a moment I empathized with him. I wouldn’t wish that torture on anyone—not even Typhon.

  It was ironic, the very weapon he’d had forged to kill Zeus—among other gods—was killing him, although not exactly surprising given there was a prophesy and all that. I mean, he was as good as dead. The only thing that could possibly save him would be for his fingers extending into Atlas’s chest to graze the motherlode of creation crystals …

  “No!” I screamed and raised the axe like Luke Skywalker thrusting up his lightsaber, and I brought it down upon Typhon’s arm just below the shoulder.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next: full of coursing lava—or was it magma?—his arm literally exploded off at the shoulder!

  Typhon gurgled before swaying backward, like King Kong on the Empire State Building. Which meant I was falling with him, along with my familiars still grasped above me in his fist …

  As Typhon’s body fell backward, I scampered up and along his extended arm and to the hand clamped over Libra, and with a grunt I brought the axe down so that it nicked Typhon’s palm and wrist.

  With the tendons severed, his fingers relaxed and I rushed to Libra’s crushed and broken body.

  �
�No …” I whispered as I stopped before them and fell to my knees on Typhon’s palm. As wind resistance ripped at me, my feet lifted airily. I reached out for Libra’s hand.

  As I grasped it, I met Libra’s eyes, one iris white, the other black. Balance. Eyes that looked so weary. So tired … so close to expiring. Her mouth opened, slowly.

  “Theo, you, did it.”

  I shook my head. “We’re falling. We’re going to die.”

  A tear streaked down from both eyes. “No, we, won’t.”

  And in that moment, her light and dark eyes intensified like that of a swirling, dying supernova—Libra burning time.

  A halo of light enveloped my body.

  “Love Hurts”

  I’m not exactly sure how it happened.

  A lot of magic on my familiars’ part.

  The proximity to Atlas’s Heart or maybe the lava axe itself. Heck, maybe even luck. But one moment I was plummeting, holding onto Libra’s hand like a prayer—the next moment, I was on the amphitheater’s flat and cratered base sprawled out next to one of Atlas’s shattered kneecaps which was the size of me. And my familiars …

  They were cuddled into the crooks of my elbows.

  Sleeping.

  Or unconscious.

  The main thing was they were still breathing and they no longer looked all broken in Libra’s form. It would probably be a long time before they morphed back into her, if they even still could.

  Had Libra died?

  And just how much time had she burned to get us safely to the ground?

  “Help … me …”

  The words were clipped and dying. Typhon.

  He looked … well, he was back to his regular human form. No extra heads. No clothes. Just his tanned, muscular skin streaked with blood, shriveling like a prune. His one arm hanging on by sinewy threads.

  For a man who’d nonchalantly enslaved Others to fight to the death in his Arena, he looked like a man who’d gotten his just desserts.

  He lifted his head with the strength of a naked, newborn bird, his eyes searching as a blind man’s. When he found mine, he sighed, his mouth gummy and absent of teeth. “Theo.” He reached out his good hand to me and I batted it away.

  “I am … sorry,” he said. “The power of the Heart. It corrupted me. Everything I did was to reach it. To fix … what the gods had broken, had destroyed.” He paused and drew in the largest, most gaping sob I’d ever seen anyone take barring TV dramas.

  “I was a fool. I know now that it is too powerful for any one being to possess. You were up there next to it. Surely you felt its pull. Oh, what … what have I done?”

  I thought it was all for show. But Typhon’s bloodshot eyes and labored breathing suggested he was a dead man confessing his sins. He continued.

  “I didn’t use to be this way. I didn’t always want to rain down ruin and death upon the gods as my creation had been intended for. I had hoped to find my own way, to … stamp on the Fates’ threads. But the gods tempted me. They should have left me alone.”

  He sighed. “Perhaps I was always just Fate’s fool playing some predestined part. But not anymore. I shall stop fighting the poison melting me from within, rendering me into a husk.” He chuckled, horribly. “Perhaps Zeus truly meant for Atlas’s Heart to be a ‘gift,’ a chance to create the world anew now that the gods have left. But I say this ‘gift’ is cursed—more apocalypse than salvation. I know that now.”

  His eyes lolled beneath crisped eyelids. “You’ve got to destroy it. It’s … too powerful for human or Other to possess.”

  I wanted to scoff. I wanted to kick Typhon when he was down—literally. But I couldn’t. There was a sincerity to his words that unnerved me. Plus, he’d once told me that he’d never lie to me. And what good would lying be on one’s death bed? Especially in the GoneGod World where death was final.

  Suddenly, he shot a bloodstained hand past my shoulder and up at Atlas’s chest.

  I turned. A Zeus acolyte was scaling the chest, nearing the glowing core that was Atlas’s Heart.

  “No,” Typhon muttered, and with a grunt, sent a burst of magic toward the climber. It struck the hooded acolyte, and he fell with a mottled scream. Typhon’s hand fell back to the floor. “So too am I sorry for your familiars. I don’t expect you to forgive me.” Fluid rattled in his lungs. “I entrust you to keep the Heart safe from my … followers, for they are greedy and untrustworthy and cherish only wealth in this world. Don’t let them …”

  I scoffed and glanced down at my familiars still sleeping or unconscious in my arms. “This is crazy. And so unfair. I’m just a girl. Why me?”

  “I see something in you,” Typhon gasped.

  “But,” I huffed, “how would I even destroy the Heart? Can it be destroyed?”

  Typhon didn’t hear me. Without eyelids to shield them, his pupils fluttered up at the ceiling, twitching as if trying to lock onto some invisible specter.

  The Jersey Devil’s mission suddenly reverberated in my mind: retrieve the sundial pendant. I glanced about for the shreds of Typhon’s clothes. They were lying just off to the side. I scurried over to them and felt in the pockets.

  Nothing.

  “Where is the sundial pendant?” I asked, gripping my enemy’s shoulder.

  “The … what?” Typhon said.

  “The pendant for controlling Others’ deaths in the Arena.”

  He nodded. “I …”

  Footsteps crunched gravel and we both glanced to the side as Echidna and Gan approached us, passing through a cloud of dust. When they were a few feet away, they stopped, and Echidna laughed, coldly.

  “Sweet-ums,” Typhon managed to utter through his gummy lips.

  “Dear,” she said sarcastically. She turned to me. “Theo, excellent job.”

  “What …?” Typhon croaked. “Sweet—”

  Echidna pressed the spike of her heel into Typhon’s wrist and he screamed. Her smooth beautiful face took on sharper features as she sighted down her nose at him. “Don’t call me that again,” she said primly, giving her ankle a twist.

  Typhon choked back a sob. “Who are you?”

  “Not your wife,” Echidna laughed.

  What? I thought, creeping backward so that I wouldn’t get roped into … whatever this was.

  “No,” Typhon said after a pause. “You, aren’t my wife. Deep down … I guess I’ve known for some time.” He coughed and spat out some blood and a tooth. “Who are you? What are you?”

  When Echidna only laughed, Typhon propped himself up on one elbow even though it clearly pained him. Echidna crouched over, sank her claw-like fingernails into his shoulder and pressed him back against the floor.

  “What did you … do to my wife?”

  “Oh she’s dead.” Echidna traced one sharp fingernail across Typhon’s cheek, marking a frowny face in the dried blood there.

  “What?”

  She laughed dismissively. “I killed her within the first minute of the gods’ GrandExodus. See, I’ve had my sights on you for a very long time, ever since I’d first caught whispers of the gods’ planned vacation.” Pausing, she sat back on her heels and struck a dignified pose with her fingertips braced upon her collar. “Sure I could have joined them, but why enjoy someone else’s paradise when it will never be yours?”

  Pain and fear etched Typhon’s face. “I don’t … understand. Why did you kill my wife?”

  “Access to your resources. It’s not easy for an Other to amass wealth and power in this GoneGod World. But you—with your natural-born drive and initiative, you made it look easy.” Echidna tapped a tooth seductively with a fingernail. “Besides, instead of concentrating on making money, I needed to devote all my time and effort to my plan.”

  “Plan? What kind of plan?” Typhon’s eyes suddenly shot open and wavered on the Heart of Atlas high above us.

  She laughed. “Oh that’s only part of it. You won’t live to see the rest of it.”

  Typhon shook his head and coughed, bloody spittl
e flecking his lips. “Maybe if I hadn’t had this damned undiagnosable condition, I’d have figured you out.”

  Echidna arched her slender eyebrows. “Your cough? Yeah, you don’t actually have one.”

  “Then what—”

  “My green smoothie concoction. It mimics soothing your throat but really it’s a poison coursing through your veins—well, what veins you have left.”

  “You … bitch—”

  Echidna twisted her spiked heel once more and Typhon nearly passed out. “Bitch.” She let it linger on her lips, tasting it. “The gods and constellations used to call me that behind my back. Mumbled it when they thought I couldn’t hear. Oh well.” Her smile brightened. “Good thing I’ve got thick skin.”

  A trickle of blood dribbled from Typhon’s mouth. “Who … the hell … are you?”

  Echidna snapped her fingers and darkness descended upon her like a cape. When she raised her hand, the darkness vanished like a trick, her appearance changed completely. She stood tall, dark and steamy with hourglass-shaped hips and a smooth dusky face draped by lush dark hair unspooling from her crown. A robe of the deepest violet compressed against her bare skin, living starlight twinkling from the canvas of the night sky painted on it. The sundial pendant hung between her plunging neckline and her perfect, white, sharpened teeth.

  Typhon’s eyes bulged. “Nyx?”

  “The Darkest Hour is the Bitterest (Like Dark Chocolate)”

  She grinned. “Primordial goddess of the night. Does it finally make sense? All the stuff I asked for you to procure for me over the years. Most recently, that mortar and pestle and …” Nyx threw a glance my way. “My Scroll.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Where is it, Theo?”

  She took a step toward me, her legs sharp and angular like the slice of a knife.

  “I don’t have it,” I said as I shook my familiars, still cradled in my arms. “Wake up, guys.”