by Anya Bast
They watched and waited until twilight tinged the sky myriad colors, shades of orange and red, then darkened from gloriousness into murk. Finally, footsteps sounded on the pavement. A middle-aged woman with short brown hair, dressed in business attire and carrying a briefcase, made her way across the parking lot toward the SUV. A girl of maybe seven years held her hand.
“They’re witches,” said Thomas. “I can feel it from here, two earth witches of middling power, mother and daughter.”
Isabelle’s breathing hitched and her hand curled around the door handle as the two figures disappeared momentarily behind the stand of trees that shielded their car from Alexander’s view. “I really don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“Alexander could be her boyfriend,” said Adam from the back.
“Yes, but he could be stalking them, too.”
Her intuition screamed stalk. Her gaze fixed on the little girl. She carried a Hello Kitty backpack and wore a navy blue private school uniform. The child looked so fragile walking through the parking lot, so innocent.
Her gaze ate up the distance between themselves and Alexander. If Alexander was the demon, they were too far away to be effective quickly. They couldn’t move the automobile, or they’d be seen. But…she assessed the terrain between the parking lots. There were many big trees for someone of her stature to hide behind. Thomas and Adam were too large to go unnoticed, but she could do it.
She turned to Thomas. “I want to go in closer.”
Thomas gave a sharp shake of his head. “Too dangerous for you.”
“Thomas, there’s a little girl! We can’t just hang back and hope she’s not going to be hurt. Let me go. I can get over there without being seen, and I’ll be closer if something happens. If it does, get your ass over there pronto.”
Thomas chewed his lip, mulling it over.
Not able to stand it a moment longer, she opened the door slowly and eased out. “Goddamn it, I’m going.”
“Be careful.”
She rolled her eyes at him and slipped away.
From the car, she’d mapped out a way to get from point A to point B via cover. The campus of this office building was blessedly tree rich. As the woman and her daughter progressed across the pavement, Isabelle traversed from tree to tree, a path that brought her just shy of Alexander’s car. There, Isabelle hid behind a huge oak and waited.
The dark-haired woman missed a step when she caught sight of the Volvo and kept her eyes on the vehicle as she approached. By now the couple had passed out of the blind spot the trees made and back into Thomas’s line of sight. Isabelle hoped he’d seen that hesitation in the woman’s step, which signaled her unease with the vehicle and the male figure behind the wheel.
Isabelle tensed as the woman and child grew nearer and the Volvo’s car door opened.
“Simon,” the woman called in a tired voice. “I don’t want to do this right now.” She remote unlocked her SUV, spoke low to the girl and the child ran to climb inside.
“Melanie,” said Alexander with his hands out as if to stop her from fleeing. “I’m sorry, but I miss you and Katie. Just a couple minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Just let me have a couple minutes to explain what happened.”
Melanie hesitated, and then walked to him. They spoke in muted tones for a few minutes and then Melanie fell into Alexander’s arms, crying.
Isabelle relaxed. This seemed like a run-of-the-mill domestic scene to her. She watched for a little longer, until she started to feel like she’d intruded on an intimate moment, and backed away to return to the car.
Backed away and hit something really big. She frowned. That tree hadn’t been there three minutes ago.
Isabelle stilled. Her nostrils detected a scent she knew — that same dry, earthy, acrid smell that had lingered in her bedroom after she’d had the nightmare. Magick flared along her skin, first tingling and then burning. Sensing malice melded with incredible power, she whirled.
A beautiful blond-haired blue-eyed man stood there, wearing a long black trench coat, and an amused smile on his soapstar handsome face. Isabelle blinked in surprise as the man strode past her as though she didn’t exist, toward Alexander and Melanie.
Demon.
This was the demon.
Dear Lady. The demon had been in her bedroom. Why hadn’t it killed her?
EIGHT
SHE RAN AFTER HIM, RAISING POWER AS SHE WENT. Casting her arm out, she forced a powerful bolt of magick at the creature, with the intent of freezing all the water in his body solid. The recoil from the amount of power she’d released sent her careening backward to hit a tree trunk. Isabelle cried out as pain lashed up her spine and she struggled to focus on the monster striding away from her.
Throwing power at a solid brick wall would’ve had more effect. He continued across the parking lot toward the unsuspecting couple like nothing had happened. All she’d succeeded in doing was beating herself up.
Frantically, she cast about for other weapons to use and came up empty. She’d never dreamed her best weapon, her magick, would be useless.
She did have the small, pretty copper blade Angela had given her sheathed to her left wrist. It wasn’t very practical, considering she’d have to get close to the demon to use it. The blade was more for looks, anyway, not for actual maiming. Also, according to Micah, a demon’s blood was acidic, not conducive to stabbing wounds since she’d be in spurting and dripping range.
“Damn it!” She would have brought a bazooka if she’d known.
Isabelle peeled herself from the tree and ran at him as he grew near the couple.
“Mr. Boyle!” exclaimed Alexander with a confused look on his face. “Er…hey! Melanie, this is Erasmus Boyle—”
Melanie screamed and backed away. As a witch, she undoubtedly sensed that what approached them was not human. Boyle was hardly masking his nature.
Not knowing how else to slow the demon, Isabelle launched herself at Boyle’s broad back, wrapping her legs around his rock-hard waist and her arms around his thick neck in an effort to choke him.
From behind, she heard the squeal of tires on pavement. Thomas. Thank the Lady.
The demon grunted, but continued forward like she wasn’t even attached to him. He grabbed Alexander and threw him up and over the Volvo to land on the pavement on the other side. He landed with a sick-sounding thump and didn’t move.
Melanie stood her ground, her eyes wide. She inserted herself between the demon and her daughter, who sat pale and staring in the passenger seat of the SUV.
Isabelle tightened her grip on the demon’s neck, squeezing until she wanted to cry out from the effort, but the demon barely noticed her. She sank her teeth into the demon’s ear, but quickly remembered the acidic blood and released it. Instead, she coursed magick up through her chest and down her arms, willing the water in the thing’s body to boil.
Please boil, she prayed to the Lord and the Lady. Please.
This time she got a reaction, though it wasn’t the one she’d been looking for. The demon backed up fast and hard against the Volvo. Isabelle’s back made impact and her breath crushed out of her. Exploding pain clouded her vision white for a moment. Her grip faltered and she fell to the pavement at the thing’s feet.
The demon just continued on as though he’d swatted a gnat.
As soon as she was clear, Adam and Thomas attacked. From her left came a pulse of power. The air sizzled as Adam threw a fireball at the demon, followed quickly by a rush of solid, powerful earth magick that felt as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon.
The demon blocked the fireball with one hand, extinguishing it, but Thomas’s bolt rocked him to the right a little. That much magick would kill a witch or a non-magickal, but it only made the demon stumble.
The creature turned and shot alien magick at them. Thomas threw a barrier up in front of himself and Adam just in time, but the blast still made them stagger backward. The air rippled with the backlash of power. Oddly, it felt like earth magick, th
ough the blast held that same dry-bitter dirt scent, the scent of demon.
Boyle turned back to Melanie. “I’ve come for your daughter, not you,” he said in a deep, smooth voice with just a trace of a strange, inhuman accent. “Stand aside.”
“The hell you’re taking Katie!” Melanie pushed her palms against the demon’s chest and funneled all her power through her hands.
Earth magick pulsed. Isabelle’s ears popped and her mouth went dry with the taste of dust. The demon staggered backward, then gripped Melanie and threw her over the Volvo to land near Simon.
Katie screamed and clamored to the driver’s side of the SUV. Isabelle heard the doors unlock and relock as the girl verified her perceived safety. Those locks wouldn’t keep a demon out. Inside the vehicle, the child stared in the direction Boyle had thrown her mother and sobbed. Melanie wasn’t getting up.
Isabelle shot to her feet, ignoring the wrench of pain across her chest where she thought she’d heard something crack. Her vision dimmed for a moment as she gathered her power again. She didn’t have much in reserve, not that it mattered. Their magick was just an annoyance to him. Thomas and Adam took up the slack while she recovered by hurling blast after blast of magick at the demon.
With no clear way to reach the girl since the demon stood between her and the SUV, she joined the fray, tossing every trick she knew from her water magick arsenal, while she edged herself well away from Boyle’s range.
The demon turned toward the three of them, blocking and parrying their attacks. He made a frustrated growling/gurgling sound deep in his throat. If she’d needed any reminder of what they were fighting, that completely inhuman sound provided it. It raised every hair on her body.
Thomas and Adam moved to the right and she moved to the left, trying to get clear enough to make a dash for the girl. The men grasped her intention and began drawing the thing to the side more and more, farther away from the SUV.
The demon made the animal-like noise again and something on his hands flashed — he’d unsheathed some viciously long claws. Boyle turned toward her and images of how he’d used those claws on Angela swept through Isabelle’s mind. Her knees went weak and her heart thumped faster.
She cried out under the demon’s directed mental assault — Angela screaming, skin parting, blood spurting. A phantom pain in her chest flared, echoing what Angela likely felt when her magick had been ripped from its roots. Isabelle’s knees gave out and she caught herself on the hood of the SUV, sobbing under the attack.
Bastard! He knew exactly who she was!
“Come on! Over here,” taunted Adam. “You’re neglecting us, you cute widdle demon, you.”
The demon swung its head back to the men and the attack on her blessedly ended. Demon power crackled along her skin and that same dry/acrid scent filled the air. Her ears popped and her stomach heaved from the strength of it. The creature was raising a hell of a lot of power.
Adam charged him in a suicidal move if she ever saw one. He ran straight toward the demon, war cry pealing the air and fire ripping across the pavement on either side of him.
“Aeamon, you irritate me!” Boyle bellowed.
Judging by the strength of the magick filling the air, the thing had just been playing with them up until that moment. Now, Boyle was getting serious.
Thanks to Adam, he was also sufficiently distracted.
Knowing she only had this one opportunity, Isabelle shot to the driver’s side of the SUV and motioned for the girl to exit. Inside, Katie froze. Her eyes went wide and she hesitated, as if thinking over the wisdom of leaving the vehicle.
Oh, no. Isabelle frantically mouthed, Now!
The girl unlocked the door and slid out into her arms, tears streaming down her face. Isabelle tapped the dregs of her reserves and used a quick burst of magick to influence the water around whatever was injured in her chest. It coalesced and soothed, eased the pain, as she picked up the child and ran as fast as she could without looking back.
Thomas called her name right before a blast of magick hit the men like a lightning bolt. The backlash of power rippled and rolled like a tidal wave behind her. Isabelle heard the rush of it, tasted it like dirt on the back of her tongue, but she couldn’t outrun it.
It hit. She tripped and toppled face forward. Right before they made impact with the pavement, she twisted to break the child’s fall. White-hot pain washed through her chest, making her vision spot.
It was nothing like the magick that followed it.
It seared her skin and filled her nostrils with sweet-burning yuck. Gasping, unable even to breathe, she rolled over onto her stomach and saw the girl sitting a short distance away, a look of horror in her dark eyes, her long chestnut-colored hair a tangle around her face.
“Run!”
The demon was coming.
“Run!” Isabelle managed to scream at her once more as a meaty hand closed over her ankle and pulled her backward.
Gravel scraped her skin where her shirt had ridden up. Her fingernails clawed the pavement as she attempted to find some kind of purchase to halt her backward slide into hell.
She was going to die like her sister.
Isabelle reached into her left sleeve and grasped the handle of the last tie to Angela she possessed in that moment. A pretty bit of artistic fluff disguised as a knife.
It came down to this; an earthly weapon to use against an unearthly beast.
Oh, this so wasn’t going to go well.
The demon flipped her like she was made of aluminum foil and came down on top of her. He looked less human now, maybe because of the power he’d relinquished to defend himself.
And how had Adam and Thomas fared under that power, anyway? Lady, she didn’t want to imagine.
Boyle’s skin glowed with an unnatural reddish cast and his eyes had bled to complete and utter black, disconcertingly like Thomas’s. Then Boyle’s lips peeled back and Isabelle got a glimpse of a double row of too sharp teeth bracketing a whiplike tongue.
Teeth strong enough to crack human bones for the marrow.
“I know you,” he said in a low, soft voice, like a lover’s. His gaze traced the lines of her face and bitter vomit crept into her throat. “I’ve been hunting you.”
Images once again flashed through her mind of Angela’s ruined body, but this time they came from her own subconscious instead of the demon’s.
She choked down an anguished sob. “I’ve been hunting you, too,” she gasped through the demon stench a second before she brought her fisted blade upward, straight into the thing’s jaw.
The wound smoked and the demon screamed. She watched in surprise and horror as the stab wound opened even more, the flesh peeling away at the edges like burned parchment.
Blood dripped onto her chest, singeing a hole right through her shirt and burning her skin. Isabelle screamed and pushed herself away from him. In the melee, she’d forgotten about the blood.
She expected him to come after her, but the thing recoiled, screaming, and holding his jaw. Her realization came swiftly — for some reason the demon had trouble healing injuries made by her blade.
Looking down at the knife in her hand, she examined the beautiful, intricately etched copper handle and shiny blade.
Copper? Could it be?
Maybe she had a proper weapon after all.
Isabelle ripped her shirt off, trying to get the acidic blood away from her skin. While the demon turned away from her, nursing his injury, she wound the fabric around her right hand and wrist to protect her as she wielded the knife.
Just in time.
The demon turned and roared, his jaw nearly healed. The skin where she’d wounded him looked red and puckered but no longer smoked and bled.
She didn’t waste a moment. She rushed the demon and stabbed him in the chest, in the leg, in the arm, anywhere she found available flesh.
More smoking, burning wounds. More demonic bellowing. More acidic blood that Isabelle danced to avoid.
The demon backe
d away from her, obviously in pain. He roared again, this time sounding like a wounded animal. Boyle lifted a well-clawed hand and then disappeared.
Quiet. Silence.
Isabelle stood on shaky legs, staring at the empty space in front of her with wide eyes. All of her injuries rushed up to meet her…just like the ground. The last thing she remembered was the vision of the newly starry sky above her head.
And then darkness.
NINE
“ISABELLE?”
She winced as pain registered in her chest — a long, slow rip followed by a lingering throb. Her eyelids fluttered open and she saw Thomas’s head blocking the stars. Ignoring the pain, she focused on the important thing. “Thomas, you’re okay.”
“So is Adam. Shields kept us alive, but not conscious. We’ve all been out for a while.”
“Boyle’s gone,” she whispered. “How’s the child?”
“She’s fine, the woman and the non-magickal male are also okay, if a little beat up and upset.”
Movement caught her eye on her right side. “Hey, champ,” said Adam, limping toward them. “Just can’t manage to keep your shirt on, can you?”
She raised her right hand. She hadn’t lost her death grip on the knife’s handle even in unconsciousness. The blade was bloody and rusted in places and the material of the shirt she’d used as a hand guard was crispy and eaten away.
“I don’t think it likes copper,” she said, a wide smile spreading over her mouth despite the pain burning like bonfire in the center of her chest.
They were going to make that demon pay.
“COPPER,” MUTTERED MICAH, FROWNING AS HE RAN his finger down a page of printed text. “Copper…Oh, yeah, here it is.” He mumbled to himself for a moment while Thomas shifted impatiently.
“Demons are greatly injured by copper weaponry and have difficulty healing wounds inflicted thusly,” Micah read. “Copper is also known to cause a weakening of the beast’s overall magickal structure and an allergic reaction in the physical structure.” He looked up from the text with raised eyebrows. “Huh.”
