The demon hissed from the blow but didn’t relent. I managed to block two more of the blows, but the third one connected with the front of my chest. I flew backward into the wall.
I cried out as the blow once again broke ribs that had recently set. My vision blurred, and I knew the demon stalked me, but I could only gasp for precious air. Shabriri struck me again with the palm of his left hand, this time on the other side of my ribs. My vision looked like an old seventies movie, full of drugs and warbling guitars.
The demon stepped up to me and cocked his head again. The smile never left his face. Grabbing my shirt, he tossed me against the far wall as casually as Amanda would throw one of her dolls.
I hit the floor on all fours and spat up a pretty good chunk of blood. Breathing was like swallowing bits of glass. The rattling as I took a breath would’ve scared me if I didn’t have a demon strolling toward me.
I barely raised my head when the thing slammed a foot into my stomach. I skidded over onto my back and curled into a ball. The lights dimmed, or else it was my vision. I couldn’t tell.
Shabriri stood over me with a wide skeletal grin stretched across his black leather skin.
“Where are your jibes now, mortal?” he whispered in a soft hissing voice. I couldn’t tell if his lips moved or if his voice pierced my mind.
He kicked me again and my world became nothing but the pain.
“You think they are protected?” the demon whispered as he grabbed a handful of hair and yanked my head up. “We will feast on your corpses.”
He then slammed my head down again. My nose shattered and blackness engulfed me. The pain made a desolate wasteland of my mind. I don’t know how long the blackness took me, but when awareness faded back in, Shabriri stood on the other side of the room, arms raised. I couldn’t see out of my right eye, but my left eye showed me graceful swirls as the demon danced.
I closed my eyes. The wood floor cooled my fevered skin. Pain flared hot and bright, but a small blanket of peace settled over me. I had rolled the dice and come up snake eyes. It was bound to happen at some point.
I also realized, lying there in a pool of my own blood, that this was the final accumulation of five years of running. Running from my memories of Ann. Running from life. And now it was going to end in fire.
But at least I’d see Ann again.
That’s the coward’s way out, a voice whispered. A voice soft with memory.
Death was also the only way out.
Bull, the voice chastised. You want it to end, so it’s ending. Where’s the man I married? Where’s the man who didn’t believe in the no-win situation?
He’s captaining the starship Enterprise, I thought as I drifted. He sure isn’t here.
And Beth and Amanda? the voice whispered. You’re choosing for them as well?
I wanted the voice to shut up, but I also knew that I couldn’t. It hurt too much to hear it, but it also brought back sweet memories. Memories I didn’t want to run from anymore.
I broke down the door to the basement. Ann lay in a dirty bed, her face bloodied and her clothing ripped. She wept softly as I approached…
Cate came to my apartment, and I turned her away. I stared at the blackened corpse and wondered what would have happened if I had helped her. Would she still be alive if I had stopped running?
Beth lying chained to the bed, the horrors of her torture etched into her skin. The little girl lay on the floor, waiting for her mother to make everything better. Waiting while the flames leaped up around her…
All of them depended on me.
Use your strengths, love, Ann whispered. Tears stung my eyes. Her warm arms surrounded me. It doesn’t matter if you fail, it matters that you try. It’s all we can ever do.
And just like that a plan formed in my head. It was a frail thing, all drooping skin and wobbly legs, but it was there. She was right. If I didn’t fight to the end, there would be no other ending. It was time to get back in the game.
A new strength flooded through me. It washed away the fear. I lifted my head. The physical pain still struck at me with lightning claws, but I could push it down. My breath rattled like a tin can as I pushed myself up on all fours. Blood flooded into my right eye, turning my vision red. My shattered nose poured a river of scarlet down the front of my shirt. Yet I managed to stand.
“Is that all you got?” I asked the demon, blood spraying from my lips.
Shabriri hissed and stopped his dance. He turned slowly toward me.
My right hand went into the pocket of my ripped and bloodied jacket. Most of the objects had shattered during my impression of a pinball machine, but a couple remained intact. My questioning fingers found what I searched for.
I mirrored the thing’s grin and held out my closed fist. The demon stopped and I could sense his trepidation. He didn’t like it when the prey fought back. Hell, I was a rabbit who had decided to smack the wolf around.
I opened my palm, showing the demon the tiny chicken bone, decorated with a tiny red bow. Thelma’s idea.
“Let’s play again,” I whispered.
I snapped the chicken bone in half, and the lights in the house blew out in a series of sparking novas.
“Damn,” I muttered loud enough for the demon to hear. “Wrong one.”
As soon as the room plunged into darkness I switched on my night vision. A strange grating sound filled the air, like rusty metal yanked from the side of a burned mobile home. The darkness lit up in blue hues, and I realized what the sound was. Shabriri was laughing.
Play to my strengths, Ann had told me. I could barely stand, but there was one thing I was always good at.
I could bluff with the best of them.
I stumbled away from the demon and flailed wildly in his general direction. I had a moment of fear that the demon might know about my night vision, but Shabriri cocked his head and stepped sideways. I kept swinging into empty space, all the while keeping the dim form of the demon in my peripheral vision.
The demon circled me, obviously enjoying my wild flailing. The laughter died down to a low chuckle, and I turned and swung wildly in its direction. I didn’t have to fake my fear. That was real enough.
Shabriri slowly moved around me while I gazed wildly where he used to be. He didn’t strike. Most demons have the same Achilles’s heel. They all like to play with their food.
The demon stopped right at the edge of my vision. He stood a little less than two feet from me. I pretended not to notice.
The demon reached out slowly with the spur until the tip was just a hair’s breadth from my face. He savored my fear. It took all my willpower not to flinch away from the point.
It was also what I needed. I waited until the spur came close enough to touch. My strength surged. Adrenaline spiked. My nerves sang like live wires strung along the highway. With a wild scream, I grabbed the demon’s weapon arm with my left hand and struck forward with my right. I put every ounce of strength I had into that thrust, and the demon's shoulder shattered like glass.
The demon screamed and flailed back. But the surprise wouldn’t last, and the moment of strength I held onto began to fade as quickly as it came.
I followed the demon, still holding onto his limp arm. A scream peeled forth from my lips again as I twisted the shattered arm and braced my feet. The demon did what I thought he would. He tried to get away from me.
He yanked hard, but I was ready. Using every last bit of strength I had, I pulled at the exact same moment the demon yanked backward.
For a moment we strained like two kids on the opposite side of a deadly tug a war. Then the arm ripped apart like wet, soiled paper, and I flew backward. Hot fluid washed over my face and chest. I smelled spoiled meat. Landing hard, I could do nothing but hold onto my treasure and breathe.
I barely had time to stand up before Shabriri came at me in a rage. The terrifying silence disappeared as he howled his fury, vibrating painfully across my eardrums. Dark blood sprayed from the empty shoulder socket.
The demon’s momentum pushed the spur in deeper, and I had to move before he took me down with him. He bent over, blood pouring from his chest.
The edges of my vision went gray. I was detached from my body, as if I was standing outside a store window as a group of thieves ransacked my life’s savings. The pain was white hot and consuming, but I didn’t really care anymore.
Instead I bent down as my vision tunneled. I didn’t have much time before blacking out, but I couldn’t leave it. Not without a reminder.
“That’s three, you son of a bitch,” I wheezed.
Shabriri tried to howl again, but instead he coughed up a chunk of blood and gore onto the floor. He shuddered. Blood flowed from his torn shoulder and chest.
He did everything except dissolve into goo. Instead his body shook, and the same rusted metal laughter echoed faintly through the room. I stumbled back as he slowly leaned back and pulled the spur from his chest with his remaining arm. Black ichors ran down him in rivers, but he managed to stumble to his feet.
I had missed the heart.
I willed my body forward. Willed it to strike while the demon was damaged. The detachment stayed, and my body told me where I could shove my commands. I slumped against the wall. The demon ignored me. He knew I couldn’t fight, and I found myself weeping with the irony.
The demon didn’t come after me. He didn’t need to. Instead, bleeding and stumbling, he began to dance again. Sparks shot from his heels as he did a disjointed and broken jig.
It took me a moment to realize the trap. I could barely walk, let alone try and fight the demon. The spur had missed the heart, but it had managed to mortally wound him. His movements became weaker, but flames still licked his feet.
He was going to take us all down with him.
I stumbled blindly toward the back room as the demon began to smoke. The wall behind him blackened.
Candles still lit the bedroom. I heard the hungry roar of flames behind me as I stumbled toward the circle. Agony lashed my brain. I couldn’t quite understand what I was doing or even where I was going.
I fell as I came to the golden circle. The world dimmed. My world became nothing but pain.
Then arms cradled me again, except these were arms made of iron. Hands shook me gently, and I realized that someone called my name.
“Nick!” The voice carried me up out of the darkness. Except this time it wasn’t Ann’s voice that lifted me up and gave me strength.
It was Adam.
“Nick!” he yelled. I came back to myself, sitting on the floor with my back propped against the foot of the bed. A small shape clung to me roughly. I absently patted Amanda’s small head until I realized my hand was leaving blood in her hair.
“You look good for a dead man,” I told Adam, my voice little more than a croak.
He frowned and looked down at his bloody shirt. Like before, the shirt was shredded, but there wasn’t a mark on him. “Is that smoke?” he asked.
I nodded and shifted painfully. Amanda’s grip was like someone pushing broken glass through my lungs, but I didn’t dare push her away. Not after the horrors she’d been through. Her silence was more frightening than her sobs.
Instead I focused on Adam. And he did look good for a dead man. The skin behind the bullet holes was smooth. His eyes were alert, if terrified. So I was right. I had had a hunch a few days ago. A little seed of an idea that Adam had now confirmed. Cate told me to trust my instincts, which was why I had brought Adam in the first place.
“We have to go!” he yelled. “The fire‒”
“It’s up to you now,” I croaked to Adam. “Get Beth and Amanda out of here.” There was a roar coming from the other room. In his death Shabriri had managed to doom us all, unless I could convince this man to be something he didn’t want to be.
Adam looked helplessly at his hands. They were bloody and raw. “I can’t!” he cried. “I’ve tried to get the handcuffs off, but there is no key.”
I shook my head slightly. “Not that,” I gasped as a wave of pain almost blacked me out again. I forced myself back.
Smoke came pouring in from the room next door. “You need to remember who you are,” I told him. “This form can’t break the metal, but the other…the other one can.”
“You’re mad,” he whispered.
“You must remember,” I told him, my voice cracking. The pain lashed through me again. A cough wracked my chest, and I had to pull away from Amanda as the pain became my world again. I spat up more blood.
We didn’t have much time. I looked up at this man who was in love with a mortal woman. I looked up at this man who had fought beside me. He had wept and cared and bled, but he couldn’t die.
He also wasn’t a man.
“You need to stop running,” I whispered, “Azazel.”
Adam blinked and stood there for a moment.
“No.”
“Then we all die,” I told him. “The woman you love, her daughter. I can’t get them out, Adam can’t get them out, but Azazel can.”
He looked past me to the bed, then down at the girl in my arms. An orange glow filled the room. Smoke billowed along the ceiling. Amanda began to cry again, and I hugged her to me.
Finally Adam sighed, and his shoulders slumped. He knelt down and touched Amanda’s forehead. She looked at him and smiled through her tears.
“Sleep now,” he told her. Amanda closed her eyes and her body went limp. The roar of the flames filled the world as he stood and went to the bed. A snap of metal cracked the night.
The pain came in waves, sending my vision into flutters of darkness as the being once known as Adam knelt in front of me again.
“I didn’t think it would be that easy,” I coughed.
“Nothing is ever easy,” he said. “As you’ll find out soon enough.” He touched my forehead with fingers as cool as the night itself. “Now rest,” the fallen angel whispered.
And I did.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the old mahogany dresser. The front was chipped and faded, and the handles were missing from the top drawer. I gently leaned forward and touched the initials carved into the bottom drawer: ATA.
The black suit itched, but I couldn’t take it off. Not yet. The dirt I had put on her coffin was still fresh under my nails.
My gaze went around the room we had shared for so long. Her porcelain dolls all sat on a bench in the corner, their painted faces nothing but shadows in the darkness. Her Star Wars poster hung alone by the closet, a memorial to her love of all things fantastical.
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. Tears threatened to spill again as I pulled the suitcase out of the closet and plopped it on the bed.
I reached for a baseball hat but stopped. It was a San Diego Zoo cap, with the face of a lion on the front. Ann always liked to tease me, saying that I’d probably be buried in a backward cap.
I couldn’t breathe.
I left the hat there and hurried downstairs. Darkness suffocated the living room. I almost flexed my night vision, but stopped. That part of my life was sitting six feet under a nice manicured lawn. I stepped off the last stair and around the old cloth couch. The memories of her next to me in the deep cushions drowned me. I rushed past it, dragging the suitcase.
I went past the kitchen, where she would sit and watch me cook. I passed the small table by the front door, where she would throw her keys when she came home from work. A million objects, all burning their memories into my mind.
I panted like a madman when I ripped open the front door and flung myself outside. I stopped, hands on my knees, and the suitcase flopped on the grass. The cool night air shivered against my feverish skin.
“Going somewhere?” a voice asked from the darkness.
I bit back the tears and strai
ghtened up. A shadow detached itself from where it leaned against my old tan truck in the driveway.
“What do you think?” I said.
Cate stepped into the cone of light from the street lamp. She wore a black dress, and her skin was pale white, almost luminescent. Her red hair was in a ponytail that went down her back.
“I just came back. I had to see her,” Cate told me.
I simply grunted, picked up the suitcase, and hauled it past her. At the last moment she grabbed my arm with a cold hand. I stopped walking, but kept my gaze from hers.
“At least tell me where you’re going,” she said.
I sighed and the anger drained out of me. That’s how my days went. Emotions flooded in and out, with no way to control them. It’s why I needed the change.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Somewhere in the Northwest maybe. She…” I choked a bit. “She never liked the rain.”
“When are you coming back?”
I turned and took a deep breath. She dropped her hand. “I’ll come back to sell the house…but it’s over. I’m not coming back.”
She stood perfectly still, and not like a normal human. It was more than stillness. It was a shutdown I’d seen before in others of her kind.
Her kind. What screwed-up world made me think about Cate like that?
“I can’t be here anymore, Cate,” I told her. “She’s everywhere. I can’t look at anything without the Pain coming back. I can still smell her, even out here…” The tears threatened to spill again.
Cate’s stillness broke. She reached forward, but I pulled away. “I have to go,” I said.
“You can’t run from this, Nick,” she said as I turned away. “What about the business? What about me?”
She grabbed my arm, but this time I pulled it loose. Anger flared again. “You’ll be fine.”
She followed me around to the driver’s side, her own anger sparking with mine. “You think you’re the only one who’s hurting? You think what they did to me is a cakewalk?” I tried to open the door, but she slammed it shut. “I couldn’t even go to my own sister’s funeral!”
“What do you want me to do?” I said softly. “I can’t fix it.”
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