by AJ Mullican
Worry for Elena and her baby gnaws at me, and from the dark shadows in everyone’s life-lights, I’m not the only one. Even usually-gregarious Rick and Billy fall silent as they get ready. Cherry takes Holden on her motorcycle, Matt, Rick, Billy, and Callie climb into Geiger’s car, and the rest of us get in Holden’s van with Kamran behind the wheel. It reminds me that I really need to get my own vehicle, and I make a mental note to set aside some of my meager funds for a half-decent used car when this is all over.
I bite back a groan as I think about the task of teaching the fae to drive. That’s gonna be a comedy of errors in itself, though if a demon like Kamran can learn, I suppose it can’t be that hard.
Then again, I remember the issues I had teaching Kalen how to operate a smartphone, including what is and is not appropriate to share with others when using the phone. That poor salesclerk was probably traumatized. All she had asked him was what size underwear he needed.
If only he learned when not to share as quickly as he learned to use the camera.
Unsolicited dick pics aside, Kalen, Oren, and Finn have adjusted to life in Nowhere well enough, and they deserve to learn as much as they can about life in the human world, even if they’ve got their fae magics back. That means keeping the world a human one, which means stopping Hell on Earth. Time to expel the demonic infiltrators to return Nowhere to its sleepy-town state. Piece of cake, right?
In the back of the van, the diluted Molli-juice sloshes around every time Kamran takes a sharp corner—which turns out to be his specialty. Not that I blame him; he probably wants to find Lena ASAP. Still, I worry that we’ll lose all of our supply if he keeps this up.
Halfway to the warehouse district, my phone chimes with a message from Cal.
Callie: Molli, can I ask you a Q?
Me: Sure. What’s up?
Callie: Are you ever scared when you fight someone?
Me: Are you kidding? All the time. Even in the dojo or in an MMA arena. Totes.
Callie: I don’t want to lose my sister. She’s all I have left.
Me: We’ll get her back, Cal. I promise. It’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be scary, but we’ll get her back.
I wait for a response, but five minutes pass before she just texts kk. I want to try to offer more in the way of comfort, but I got nothing. Making empty promises that I can’t guarantee I’ll keep is all I’ve got in me right now, and it’s probably not what Cal needs to see or hear. Fuck, I’ve probably just made her feel worse by not straight-shooting and saying, “We might not win this.”
Elena and Ben could already be possessed, or worse: dead. We just don’t know yet.
Finn leans over the back of my seat to peek at my screen. He puts a hand on my shoulder and sends me some spirit magic. “We will prevail, my love. We are relying on your life magic, and you are the most alive of any woman I’ve met. I have no doubt that you will be able to fulfill your promise to young Calliope.”
I put a hand over his and give it a squeeze. “Thanks, babe. I hope we’re both right.”
“She admires you, Molli.” Kamran’s voice startles me, and I jump in my seat.
“Huh? You mean because of the martial arts?”
He shakes his head and takes another sharp turn. “No. She admires you because you are strong, yet young like she is. She looks up to you as the closest adult in age to her, and as a fellow female.”
I duck my head as a blush heats my cheeks. “I’m nothing to look up to. Just a kid who hit twenty, went on a stupid adventure, and got lucky as hell in the process.”
“I do not believe it was luck. You were meant to find these gentlemen.”
“No more than you were meant for Lena, or Cherry meant to find the Hunters. We’re all quote-unquote lucky, if that’s the case.” I point at his chest, which still glows with the light that connects his life to Lena’s, faint though it is right now. “Soulmates come in all forms, even in seemingly different species. You, Arman, Samsher, and Aistan are as soulbound to Lena as I am to my guys, as much as Cherry is to the Hunters.”
Kamran’s brows shoot up, and he risks a glance away from the road to look at me. “I cannot be soulbound to Lena. I am a demon; I have no soul.”
“Well, I don’t know if you had one to begin with, but you got one now, buddy, and it’s tied to Elena just as tightly as I am to these guys.” I squeeze Finn’s hand again.
The van screeches to a stop, and I grab the dash to stop myself from slamming into it.
“I—I have a soul?” Kamran stares at me, wide-eyed.
“Yeah, dude. Of course you do. You all do.”
Behind us Matt honks, jarring Kamran out of whatever trance the whole soul thing put him in. He slams his foot on the gas pedal, and the van lurches forward. We go up on two wheels as he takes another turn, and I start to wonder if the Driving Miss Daisy version of Kamran I’ve come to know is an act and this Bat out of Hell Kamran is the real thing.
“I have a soul. I have a soul.” Kam repeats this news over and over again under his breath as he guns it for the warehouse. “We have souls.”
I don’t know what it is about souls that lights such a fire under Kamran, but it gets us across town in record time.
The sight of the warehouses in the distance as we approach sends a chill down my spine.
Black, inky miasma covers the area like an evil fog, pulsating with red demonic energy. We crest a hill, and it gives me a better view of the transformation the warehouses have undergone. Water towers and electric poles morph into spires of black rock, and flames take the place of lights. Winged beings of every size and grotesque shape imaginable take to the skies over the transformed buildings, and even at this distance their screeching grates at my ears.
“Kamran, I thought you said Hell was on the inside of the warehouses! What the fuck is going on?”
“It’s spilling into this realm…” His voice shakes. “They’ve gone from trying to populate Earth to trying to overtake it.”
I lean forward and squint at the horror in front of us. “Will our original plan still work?”
“I do not know. We can still weaken the demons, if nothing else.” He presses down harder on the pedal, though I would’ve thought we’d be at top speed by now. “We must get to Lena. She will know what to do.”
“Surprising that so few are trying to escape the encroaching darkness.”
Prompted by Oren’s words, I look to the side and gape at the sheer number of downtown Nowhere residents who just carry on their day through this shit, like Hell spilling out into our reality is no big deal. People walk down the street with nary a second glance at the nightmare spreading up the hill. Barely a handful are screaming in terror, while the rest just … don’t.
Upon closer inspection with my new fae sight, I tremble.
Nearly everyone on the street—and literally everyone who’s not panicking—glows a demonic red.
They’re all possessed. Almost every single one of them.
“Kamran, pull over!”
“What? We have not found Lena and the others yet.”
My fingers fly over my phone screen as I scramble to start a group call with Holden and Matt. “I know, Kam, but we can’t leave all these people possessed out here. We’ve got to stop the spread before all of Nowhere is taken. Once they have control over all these fucking ley lines, you know they’ll just keep going until the whole Earth is like this.” After my shaking hands hit my ex Mitch’s name on accident three times, I finally get the call set up right. “C’mon, pick up! Kam, pull over for Christ’s sake!”
Kamran yanks the wheel to the right and almost takes out a family of five when the van goes up over the curb onto the sidewalk. The five possessed humans turn as one, evil grins spread wide across their faces.
I shriek and jump back as far as my seatbelt will let me just as Holden and Matt pick up.
“Molli? What is it? Why did you guys stop?”
“Can you guys not smell that? Holden, everyone in this part
of town is possessed! We have to stop short and take care of this before it gets too far.”
After a brief pause, Holden growls into his phone. “Fuck! This screws our plan all to hell.”
Geiger’s car screeches to a halt next to us, and Cherry’s motorcycle swerves to miss a panicked human before stopping as well. Matt’s door flies open, and he steps out with the phone to his ear, his other arm shrugging out of his jacket. “Guess Lena’s gotta hold on a little longer while we deal with this. Shit.” He drops his phone and strips out of the rest of his clothes, shifting as he goes.
I don’t have Holden and Matt on speaker, but from the look on Kamran’s face, he heard the conversation just fine. I place a hand on his shoulder and make eye contact. “We’ll get her, Kam. We’ll save her and the other incubi, but we have to stop this first. We can’t let them take the town.”
Kam grumbles but cuts the engine and gets out of the van. His knuckles are white against the hilt of his twin demonblades as he faces off against the possessed family, who have surrounded the van.
“May your God have mercy on their souls if Lena is harmed.”
His ominous words are the last thing I hear before it all goes to shit.
Chapter 21
Otherworldly screeching assaults me as I step out of the van. The family that we almost hit all have their hands raised with fireballs primed, and everyone on the street has gone from pretending like they’re human to arming against our small group. As a unit, the demon-inhabited humans turn towards us and prep fireballs, lighting bolts, and whatever the fuck else demons have as weapons, and they all scream in a pitch that has me cupping my hands over my ears.
A hand wrenches my arm away from my head, and I shriek before I realize it was Finn who grabbed me. He shoves a milk jug full of berry juices into my hand and yells over the cacophony.
“Remember the plan! Save your personal stores for when we find Elena. Use this for these curs, so you have energy to spare later.”
I heft the jug and nod, then back up against Oren, whose fae water is needed for this part to be efficient. “Ready, baby?”
He wraps an arm around my waist and kisses the top of my head. “Always, my love.”
I realize a fraction of a second before we begin that I’d never considered the best way to dispense the juice into Oren’s water spray. If I dump too much of it, we’ll waste precious resources. Too little, and the solution won’t exorcise the demons. My hand shakes as Oren’s blue fae light flares, and I grit my teeth while I pour some of the contents of the jug into the stream of water he conjures, praying that it’s enough.
The demons’ shrieking crescendos, and they writhe and spasm as they’re ripped from the human bodies they inhabit. Once freed of their stowaways, the humans fall to the ground, unconscious, likely passed out from the shock of everything happening around them.
Our first wave of fae magics exorcises a full dozen demons, and the Hunters’ wolves jump in the second the beasts are out of the human bodies, their fangs and claws rending the demons to pieces and slaughtering the nasty buggers before they can recover from the forced exorcisms. Finn, Kalen, and Kamran leap into the fray, protecting the shifters by deflecting as many of the incoming fireballs as they can. Thankfully, the demons’ weapons that we stole seem immune to the hellfire, making them perfect for the job.
One of the wolves yelps, and Oren stops his spray for a moment to throw a bolt of healing energy to the injured shifter. Without looking to see what effect his healing had, he turns on his heel and aims another blast of fae water at the demons behind us, and I scramble to spike it with the life-infused juice before it goes to waste.
More demons ejected from their human hostages, more monsters slain, yet more arrive to take their place almost faster than we can work. Wave after wave of fae magic undoes the possessions, and wave after wave of possessed come to take their places. Unconscious humans of every age—infant to elderly—litter the ground, intermingled with the bodies of slain demons, and I hope nobody’s getting terribly hurt by all this. I want to check on them, but we just don’t have the luxury of stopping.
I don’t know how long we fight, but after the fifth wave of hosts things start to die down, and I see both demons and possessed humans retreating down the hill towards the Hell-zone. I whirl around, scanning the area for furry bodies, and breathe a sigh of relief when I see all five wolves standing on their own four feet, safe and sound. Soaked from the fae magic stream, but safe. I’ll take the smell of wet wolves over the reek of demons and rot.
Kalen, Finn, and Kamran put away their weapons, and Oren pats me on the shoulder before going off to check for injuries that need healing. Thankfully, it seems that whoever was caught in the stream also benefitted from the healing properties of Oren’s magic and only ended up a little damp for it. A handful of people have broken limbs from falling to the ground when they passed out, but Oren takes care of them quickly.
Minimal casualties and some confused-as-fuck townsfolk, but overall, a successful battle.
Too bad the war’s still in full swing down the street.
“What do we do now?” I turn to the biggest wolf to ask Holden about the next plan of attack, then facepalm when I remember that he can’t speak while shifted.
“Billy says that Holden says that we should move in. Stick to the plan to get Lena and the others out.” Callie’s voice comes out soft, and she twists her braided hair around a finger, as though embarrassed to speak up on behalf of the wolves. “He says we should keep going like this, taking down a few groups of demons at a time, then regroup before we enter Hell.”
“You can talk to them?”
The teen shrugs and nods. “Yeah. Lena calls it ‘witchy two-way radio.’ It’s how she communicates when she can’t be talking out loud. I can do it, too, but only to one person at a time ‘cause I’m not fully trained yet.”
Hm. So even with her limited powers, Callie can translate wolf for us. Good to know. “What does Billy say that Holden says about once we regroup?”
“That he’ll figure it out when we get there.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and bite back a sigh. “What are we gonna do about the vehicles—and the juice? I could drive Geiger’s car if Kamran wants to take the wolves in the van, but no one in human form right now can drive Cherry’s bike. Then you have to think about all those gallons of fae life-energy juice; I’d rather avoid doing a Chinese fire drill every couple of blocks to clear the way.”
Callie’s brows knit together as her eyes unfocus, and she frowns. “He says we should have me ride with you guys and leave Cherry and Geiger’s rides here. Says the wolves can keep up well enough on foot, provided Kamran, and I quote, ‘slows the fuck down.’”
Kamran snorts and rolls his eyes but otherwise doesn’t comment.
“Oh, and he wants Kalen and Finn to run alongside, so they can keep deflecting fireballs for the Hunters. He also says we—you, me, and Oren—can just stay in the van to dispense the juice while they take out the exorcised demons out here. Y’know, we toss our Molli-water mix out the door, and they all deal with the aftermath.”
“I don’t like this,” Kam grumbles as we start off on our slow but surprisingly effective descent down the hill towards Hell on Earth. “We should be plowing through these beasts to get to Lena faster, not stopping every few yards to save their souls. Who knows what tortures my love must endure while we dally?”
I sigh and roll my eyes as Oren scowls, turning to Kamran while he conjures more water to cleanse the hordes on the street. “We are not ‘dallying,’ we’re taking out clutches of demons along the way. That means fewer to close ranks on us from behind when we pass and enter into Hell.”
“Okay, that’s enough of that. Let’s get busy and get moving. No more bickering. Kamran, we will rescue Lena and your brothers; you just have to be patient as we deal with this.”
Just then, a demon hiding behind an umbrella, of all things, breaks past our wall of water and grabs my wrist. Pan
ic surges in me. With one hand on the frame of the van and one trapped in the demon’s grip, I can’t break free. Remembering Lena’s demonstration back at the Hunter house, though, I reach inside and pull a small amount of fae energy, channeling it through my arm into the demon. The scaly monster howls and lets go of me, falling to the ground to be slaughtered by a snarling wolf.
To my relief, more demons retreat than advance, and by the time we get to the bottom of the hill and the warehouse district proper, the streets are clear of the enemy.
The warehouse district, however, teems with demons in their various naturally unnatural forms, and the large iron gates on either side of the street create a sort of weird doorway between this world and the encroaching underworld. The miasma I saw earlier stretches as high as I can see, and it threatens to black out the periphery of the horizon as well. The only light that penetrates the noxious cloud is that of the various hellfires ablaze inside, casting the street in a hazy red glow.
After another short healing session—I hope Oren doesn’t wear himself out with this—we all gather around the van with the remaining jugs of juice on the sidewalk. Holden relays his plan through Callie.
“So Holden says, ‘Okay, much as I hate to admit it, we need to split up. If we go in as a group, we’ll just be sitting ducks. They attack en masse in there, more than out here, so we have to give them more targets, make them split as well.’” Callie stops and cocks her head to the side. “He says the wolves will go one way, and we’ll go the other. They want me to come with you guys because I can communicate with Billy over a fairly long distance. I don’t know how well this will work in Hell, though. I tried telling them that, but Holden insists.”
I nod and crack my neck to loosen the tightness building there. “So what happens if the wolves need a hand—literally? Someone’s gotta go with them to provide opposable thumbs.”
