Smoke and Ashes

by Tanya Huff

  At a quarter after midnight, they were in Richmond, driving slowly south on No. 3 Road past the old Canadian Pacific Railway lands.

  “Feeling’s getting stronger,” Leah murmured, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel. “It feels like I have slugs writhing in my navel.”

  Tony hurriedly chewed and swallowed his eleventh glazed chocolate Timbit. “Thank you for that image.”

  “Any time.” She turned left on Alexandra, slowing further. “We’re close.”

  They found the weak spot halfway up the side of a building, anchored on a crack in the masonry. There were a few taxis down the street by a hotel, but other than that, the street was empty. Quiet. Once they parked, nothing moved.

  “Is this because of the weak spot?” Tony wondered as they crossed the street. All the empty was beginning to creep him out.

  “No, it’s because it’s Thursday night and the bars don’t let out for a couple of hours.”

  “Right.” Head cocked to one side, eyes rolled up and over, Tony frowned and lost sight of the blazing line of energy spilling out of the crack as his face realigned.

  “See, this is why you learn to do it properly.” Hands on her hips, Leah glared up at the building. “Unless we break and enter and dangle you out the third-floor window—which I’m not philosophically against—you’re going to have a little trouble just shoving the runes through this one.”

  Feeling he should protest, more on principal than because he actually had something valid to say, Tony squinted the crack back into alignment. “This one’s a lot brighter than the last one.”

  “It’s a lot deeper. Better hurry.”

  “I could probably throw them into it.”

  “Whatever. Just do it.”

  Her tone, bordering on panic, pulled his attention off the weak spot and that, he realized as he took Leah with him to the ground was probably all that kept him from being blinded as light flared brilliantly purple and something big burst out of the crack.

  She slapped the asphalt on impact, grunting as Tony’s weight drove the air out of her lungs. “Get! Off!”

  “You’re welcome!” As the light show from the building dimmed, he rolled off, scrambled to one knee, and aimed his left hand down the road, blinking away afterimages and breathing heavily. He wouldn’t be able to see the cheat sheets through the sparkly purple blotches, so he’d have to do this his way.

  Not that sparkly purple blotches suggested imminent danger.

  On the other hand, the large asymmetrical shape in the middle of the road did.

  Bright side, large was easier to hit.

  Eyes watering, he scrawled a very quick go home and threw it.

  Blue sparks on impact.

  Blue sparks, purple blotches. It’s like demonic Lucky Charms.

  A sound like wet sneaker tread dragged against tile. A giant wet sneaker tread.

  “What have you done?”

  “I told it to go home!” He grabbed Leah’s hand and dragged her with him as he rose to his feet.

  “It didn’t work!”

  “I know!” Rapid blinking brought the street into partial focus. The demon still looked a little blurry around the edges, but Tony had a bad feeling that wasn’t his eyes.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work!”

  “You’re not helping! Just stay behind me and…” He squinted. “I must’ve done some damage, it’s…” Running seemed as close a description as he was going to get. “…running away.”

  Leah grabbed for his sleeve as he started moving. “Where are you going?”

  “After it. To stop it from killing people who aren’t you,” he added when she didn’t seem to understand. “Come on. It’s not going that fast.” Mostly because bits of it seemed to be moving in opposite directions.

  Her fingers tightened to the edge of pain. “What part of ‘if I die the world ends’ are you still missing?”

  “The part where it’s not after you.” When attempting to jerk free only proved that Leah was stronger than she looked, he waved his free hand toward the demon. “Hello! You’re here, it’s there!”

  She frowned. “Right.” And let go. And smiled. Well, showed teeth. “Come on!”

  They were no more than three meters behind it as they rounded the corner onto the section of Alexandra that curved to meet up with Alderbridge Way. The demon turned an eyestalk toward them, put on a surprising burst of speed, and crashed through a poster-covered door into the only lit building on that end of the street.

  Ginger Joe’s.

  “Raise your hand everyone who’s surprised by this,” Tony grunted as they ran after it.

  “According to Chekhov,” Leah panted, “you should never hang a coffee shop on the wall unless you plan on using it.”

  “Chekhov? The navigator with the bad wig on classic Trek?”

  Leah took a moment to sneer. “Read a book.” She paused as they reached Ginger Joe’s. “Didn’t this used to be the Café Cats Escape?”

  “How would I know?” Tony asked her. “For that matter, how do you know?”

  Inside the coffee shop, cymbals crashed and someone screamed.

  “Never mind.”

  They jumped the debris of the door together and skidded to a stop. The demon had gotten tangled in a drum kit left on the small stage when the night’s live music had ended and lay half sprawled across two tables—although since it still had two legs on the floor, it wasn’t exactly lying. Just past the wreckage a young man crouched, leather-kilted butt in the air, head to the floor, hands over his head, the chrome studs on his heavy leather wristbands gleaming in the dim light. Tony could just barely make out two more pale faces up against the back wall, their terror lending the whole Goth look a certain authenticity.

  It took him another agonizingly long moment to find Amy because the demon’s bulk blocked his view. A meaty squelch gave her position away just before she danced into sight, black-rimmed eyes locked on the enemy, the hand holding the skull shaped candle holder raised to land another blow.

  “Enough staring already!” Leah snapped, racing by him. Seemed that the relief of not being the target was making her a little reckless. “Make with the runes!”

  Tony pulled the papers out of his jacket pocket as Leah went up and over the demon, planting her hands between the spikes and flipping in the air to land on her feet on the coffin-shaped bar. Possibly not just coffin-shaped…

  The first rune formed as Amy smacked the demon again while Leah kicked it in the head.

  It roared, lunged at Leah, got tangled in the snare drum stand, and stumbled, allowing her to leap over the clawed tentacle whipped around toward her.

  The world rearranged itself in Leah’s favor.

  Amy wasn’t so protected.

  As Tony threw the last loop on the second rune, it wrapped a hand—or whatever the hell it was on the end of its arm—around Amy’s neck and squeezed.

  Screw the runes!

  One more Powershot probably wouldn’t kill him.

  As he pulled his right arm back, Amy reached behind her, scrambled amid the debris, grabbed a full cup of coffee, and threw it in the demon’s eyes.

  It shrieked.

  Dropped her.

  And charged for the door.

  One meaty appendage smacked Tony in the chest, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the side wall. He spent a moment really, really hoping the crack was one of the fixtures and not a rib, then spent the moment after that trying not to scream.

  He could sort of hear Amy yelling that the demon had broken into the wrong damned coffee shop as he raised his left hand and sucked the two runes he’d finished back into his body. It wasn’t exactly hard to find his place in the universe now given how well pain seemed to be defining it.

  This is me.

  This is everything else.

  Everything else doesn’t hurt.

  I do.

  Turned out the crack hadn’t come from one of the fixtures.

  Breathing shallowly,
he focused his attention on the broken ribs, smoothing the jagged halves. Pain exploded into a thousand razor-edged shards.

  When he regained consciousness, Leah was kneeling beside him and frowning down into his face. “When you heal yourself,” she said softly—not kindly, but softly, “you still experience the same amount of pain you would have had the injury healed normally.”

  “I do?”

  “Every last bit of it. All at once.”

  He supposed he was glad of the explanation. “That totally sucks.”

  “It’s why most wizards don’t do it.”

  “Most wizards,” he muttered, pushing himself up into something close to a sitting position. “Right. Why don’t we get some of those fuckers to help?”

  “Can you stand?”

  Since there was only one way to find out, Tony let her help him to his feet. It was a little lopsided, but it was standing. Except that Amy’s date was now having hysterics on a chair instead of the floor, nothing looked like it had changed. “How long was I out?”

  “Couple of minutes.”

  “You really…” It wasn’t as easy to mime jumping a demon as he’d expected. “You know, went after it.”

  “You destroyed the rune that would have let it damage me back there on the street when you burned go home right across it. After that, I was safe enough. Although,” she added pointedly, “it didn’t go home. We need to get back to the studio.”

  “Hang on.” He shuffled toward Amy who left her date to meet him halfway. The hug nearly knocked him on his ass, but he appreciated the sentiment. “You okay?” he asked as they pulled apart.

  “Not really, but I’m faking it well.”

  “This is going to need a creative explanation.”

  Her eyes regained a bit of sparkle. “I’m all about creative explanations.”

  “Good, ’cause we’ve gotta…”

  “Go. I know.” She waved a shaking hand in the general direction of the door. “So go! Kick ass.”

  The demon was nowhere in sight as they emerged onto the sidewalk. There was a taxi pulling into the hotel on the corner but no other people in sight. After what had just happened, the whole area seemed strangely quiet. Strangely normal.

  Totally devoid of demon.

  “We’ll never catch it.”

  “We don’t have to,” Leah reminded him. “We just have to get to the soundstage.” She took him by the shoulders and leaned him up against the side of the nearest building. “I’ll go get the car. You wait here.”

  As she ran off, Tony concentrated on staying upright. He knew why the go home hadn’t worked—it had come to him just before he healed himself. Standing out on the street, blinking away the aftereffects of the demon’s entry, he hadn’t been connected to the universe. Well, no more than usual anyway; not in a round peg/round hole kind of way. Back in the parking lot, panic had pushed him into place. Here, just now, it had been pain. Actually, there’d been pain in the parking lot, too. Pain seemed to be compulsory.

  I bleed therefore I am.

  To bleed or not to bleed, that is the question.

  Ultimate cosmic power! Itty bitty bandages!

  This could be the beginning of a beautiful laceration.

  Man, I really need a coffee….

  Nine

  “CLOSED COURSE. Professional driver. Do not try this at home.”

  “What are you muttering about?” Leah demanded as, with a screech of rubber against pavement, she deftly maneuvered the car around a corner at significantly more than the posted speed.

  “Nothing.” The best part about the level of exhaustion Tony’d reached: he just didn’t care. He didn’t care when Leah ran two stop signs and a red light. He didn’t care when she passed on the right using four empty parking spaces. He didn’t care when she ignored a detour and took a shortcut through some roadwork, fighting the car through six blocks of chewed-up pavement and scraping the undercarriage on an exposed sewer grate. Actually, he cared about the last bit, since he’d be the one paying for repairs, but not enough to do anything about it.

  Licking the last of the chocolate donut crumbs off his fingers, he watched the streetlights go by so quickly they were very nearly a continuous blur. If he turned to look through the driver’s side window, the cracks in the glass refracted them into a thousand flares of moving light. “When you said before you were a stunt driver…you went to stunt driving school, right?”

  “Top of my class.”

  “Because you knew you couldn’t be hurt?”

  “That, and because I really like to drive fast.”

  For a Thursday night not long after midnight, the streets were unusually empty. Tony wondered if that was Ryne Cyratane’s spell helping to keep his Demongate from dying in a fiery car crash. “So that was a wicked move you made, back in the coffee shop when you used the demon like a vault and flipped up over its head. Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “I played second bull dancer in a Greek production of The Minotaur once. Except that I wasn’t in a loincloth and the demon wasn’t tranked out of its little bovine mind, it was essentially the same stunt. With less ouzo, of course.”

  “I thought you said the bull was tranked.”

  “Him, too.”

  That probably made sense in a world where he wasn’t so tired his eyes kept crossing. “Do you think we can beat the demon to the studio?”

  She snorted. “In this car?”

  “Since it’s the car we’re in, yeah.”

  “There’s a chance. After all, it’s not a speed demon.” Snickering, she flashed him a smile. “Speed demon. Get it?”

  “Yes.” The chance to fight back had put her in an interesting mood. Using the may you live in interesting times definition of the word. “Please watch the road.”

  With a cop’s nose for contraband, Jack had found the deck of cards shoved in the back of a drawer over in the carpentry shop. Wiping the sawdust off them, he whistled softly.

  “Now these,” he said, returning to the chaise, cards in hand, “are hard core. You wouldn’t be interested,” he added as Henry stood, “it’s all man/woman action.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be interested?”

  “I thought you and Tony were…You know.”

  “We were. That doesn’t prevent me from being interested in women.”

  “I thought not being interested in women was the point?”

  “For some men. Not for me.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for shar…” About halfway through the deck, he froze. “Holy crap. I don’t think that’s possible!”

  Henry leaned around Jack’s shoulder for a look. “It’s possible, but the second woman has to be very flexible. And his back’s going to ache afterward.”

  Jack stepped away, turned, and stared at the other man. “How the hell old are you, anyway?”

  “Older than I look.”

  “Let’s hope so.” If he’d been asked an hour ago, he’d have said the guy was Tony’s age, early twenties, maybe a couple of years older. Now, he wasn’t so sure. There was something strange about him, something more than just being ass-deep into the weird shit that went with having a wizard for an ex. Maybe it was the whole romance writer thing—that was definitely a little creepy. Maybe he’d researched exotic positions for one of his books. More comforting a thought than the possibility he’d spent his teens as a pornographic gymnast. Jack sighed. “You play rummy?”

  “Penny a point?”

  Because he’d noticed that the queen of hearts was unnaturally worn—noticed and then refused to think why—Jack was up forty-two dollars when Henry stiffened and dropped his cards.

  “What is it?” Damn if it didn’t look like the guy was sniffing the air.

  “Something’s coming.”

  “Something?” Jack tossed his cards aside and stood, pulling his weapon from his shoulder holster. “The something we’re here for?”

  “Probably.”

  To Jack’s surprise, Henry flipped the chaise up on its side and
shoved it toward the wall. “Get behind that.”

  “Up yours.”

  “You’ll have a place to brace your weapon as well as some small amount of protection.”

  “And you’ll be where?”

  A loop of rope dangled from one hand. “I’ll be attempting to…”

  A rain of cherries cut him off.

  “What the hell?”

  Henry looked up and moved just enough to avoid being hit. “It’s our warning. The demon is through the wards.”

  Jack winced as a cherry bounced off his cheek. “You think?”

  And then there was no time for thinking as all at once, tentacles and claws and spikes dangled from the light grid, filling the space between the grid and the floor. It took a moment for the parts to become a whole and when it did, Jack wished it hadn’t. Monsters didn’t scare him—over the years he’d seen too much of what people could do—but this one gave it the old college try.

  With a shriek of rending aluminum, one of the struts tore free and Jack decided that maybe being behind the fancy sofa wasn’t such a bad idea. It had seemed solid. Well made. Likely to survive. He dove over the piece of furniture, rolled, and came up on his knees, ready to fire. Suddenly a line of yellow nylon rope was around the bulk of the demon’s body. And then around most of the legs, snugging them in tight.

  The demon screamed.

  Something snarled an answer.

  Jack’s hindbrain sent up flares. Fight or flee! And flee seems like the better idea!

  Right at the moment, denial seemed like a much better idea, but it was way, way too late for that.

  Jack popped off three quick rounds at the demon’s…head and held back the fourth when Henry Fitzroy caught a heavily muscled arm in another loop of rope and began fighting it to the demon’s side.

  It seemed the not very tall man was stronger than the demon.

  Stronger.

  Faster.

  More fucking scary.

  “That’s not possible.” Under the circumstances, a stupid thing to say, but Jack was having just a little trouble coping. Romance writer, my ass.

  The demon hit the floor with a noise somewhere between a crash and a squelch.

  A writhing tentacle-like arm split the air where Henry had been seconds before, twisted around for another blow as a second clawed tentacle came straight up out of the demon’s body. No way Henry could avoid both. No way Jack could get off a clear shot. Trying not to think about what he was doing, Jack went over the chaise and tackled the arm.