Charun, forced to follow through on his swing, can’t prevent my last-ditch attack.
Screaming, I discharge a mighty bolt of lightning into the death demon’s head. My rings explode at the force of the shot, and the right-hand electricity ring backfires into my arm—which feels like a blow to the funny bone with a wrecking ball. But Charun, on the receiving end, takes the bulk of the blast directly to his nervous system, and he seizes up, muscles convulsing, spitting out a screech of pain.
The hammer slips from his grasp, soaring off into the nearby woods, where it shears straight through three trees before it finally bounces to a stop in the dirt. Charun wavers on his feet for half a second, as I’m coming down to a hard landing behind him, and then he pitches to the left, toppling over. His massive body strikes the earth like a car dropped from a junkyard crane, breaking the bricks beneath him and rocking the ground for a quarter mile in every direction.
My feet hit the ground with bruising force, and something twists the wrong way in my right ankle. I collapse under my own weight, vision-blurring pain shooting up my leg, and a soft cry breaks through my clenched teeth. Tears sting my eyes, but I blink them away and push myself up with what little strength remains in my body. As I rise, I yank my gun from its holster and flick the safety off.
I’m not finished yet. There are a few more steps to this insane escape attempt.
Rounding Charun’s twitching, groaning form—he’s not quite unconscious, but he’s close enough to consider out of the fight, for now—I hobble my way toward the park gate. The fire spirit is pulling itself out from underneath Brendon’s body when I reach the cement block, and by the time it manages to regain its bearings, my gun is aimed, point blank, at its mutilated face. Betty Smith’s face. Sorry, Smith, if you’re still in there.
The spirit thrashes its arms in an attempt to throw an attack at me before I shoot, but it’s not fast enough.
I fire. Once. Twice. Three times.
Bullet one eats a hole into Smith’s left eye, drives itself through her brain, and breaks out of the back of her skull in a burst of bloody gray matter. Bullet two rips her jaw halfway off her face, and numerous teeth fly out of her mouth, bounce across the brick. Bullet three—overkill—cuts through her neck like butter, and blood from a major vessel spurts out into the cool air as her heart, without the aid of a functioning brain, pumps two or three more times before it gives out. Smith falls, open-mouthed, dead when she hits the ground.
(Her death is my second regret.)
For a few stunned seconds, gunshots echoing through the woods around me, I watch entranced as the fire spirit tries to force Smith’s body to live on. Its visage warps Smith’s broken face, and it hisses and spits underneath her cooling skin, snake hair writhing. But despite its best efforts, the college girl’s body is just too damaged to be used anymore. As a host, or as a tool.
The spirit blasted out of DSI by stealing all of Johnston’s life force, and it later utilized the same energy to attack the boathouse. But the boathouse bombing expended the remainder of that store, so without a new, living host to feed on, the spirit can’t make a violent getaway again. Smith is dead and therefore has no energy left to siphon off. Your life force dissipates the moment you die.
The only thing the fire spirit can do is emerge from Smith as a faint red mist. When it does, I point my gun at Brendon (a bluff, but one the spirit buys) to make sure it doesn’t try to possess him next.
And me? Well, it knows better than to try to take me—it can clearly see I’ve had specialized training.
Thus, instead of attempting another assault, it hovers for a minute, as if looking over my shoulder at Charun, and then dissipates into the cool night air, on the hunt for a new, vulnerable practitioner to become its next host.
There’s nothing I can do to stop that hunt. I can’t kill the incorporeal, and I have no circle to trap a spirit with. Using a circle requires somebody with a lot more magic chops than I have, one of DSI’s minor practitioners at least, and a whole lot of study and preparation no one had time to do before this clusterfuck of a raid. So the fire spirit gets off easy. Tonight. Soon enough, though, I swear to every god in creation, I’ll send that fucker back to the hellhole it came from.
Sticking my gun back in the holster, I glance down at Smith’s corpse again. More likely than not, she was dead the moment she was possessed. Powerful possessions destroy the mind, rendering the host a vegetable. And given how the spirit likes to exit its victims, her body, too, would have died anyway. But looking at her bloody form, one intact eye staring, empty at the overcast sky, I can’t help the mountain of guilt and disgust that washes over me. I feel sick, stomach in knots.
I’ve never shot another person before.
I can already see my depressed, alcoholic future waving in the distance…Christ.
My body shakes from head to toe as I bend down to recover Brendon, who’s a little worse for wear, bruised and scratched in several places, but alive and breathing. I turn him over so I can pick him up again, haul him onward to my original destination, the parking garage where my getaway car awaits.
But as he flops over onto his back, I catch sight of a small object lying next to him on the bricks. Leaning closer, I realize the object is secured to a necklace, looped around Brendon’s neck with a thin, black chain. The object itself is a…key? An old-timey, Victorian-era key, large, clunky, and rusted over.
Huh. It must have been tucked into his shirt.
I reach over and pick up the key to evaluate it more closely, wondering why Brendon was carrying…
I don’t know what happens next.
My assumption is that Charun shakes off my lightning blast, recovers his hammer using his mysterious ability to silence himself at will, and then throws his hammer, along with a mighty burst of power, in my general direction. But I can’t be sure of the exact sequence of events—because the second the energy field smacks my body like a speeding train, all my senses go on the fritz.
There’s a brief, blurred glimpse of Brendon’s head exploding on impact with the hammer, a sensation of being covered in blood and brain and bone fragments, warm and sticky, the sound of a dozen church bells, ringing in my head, the weightlessness of flight and fall, churning my stomach, and, finally, the feeling of ramming into a hard surface, butt first, going fast enough to break every bone in my body. Somehow, though, my bones remain intact, even as my left shoulder is wrenched out of its socket. Which, I imagine, is the “lucky” result of landing on the windshield of a car instead of the asphalt on the road.
Had Charun sent me flying four feet to the left or right, I’d have missed the car and broken my skull, neck, back, and pretty much everything else in my body. As it is, I come to rest with my rear end jammed through the windshield of somebody’s brand new BMW, parked across from a sidewalk bench on Compton Street.
The impact leaves me breathless, dizzy, disorientated, and my limbs feel like sacks of liquid attached to my torso with Velcro pads. My vision is so distorted, my mind so messed up, I mistake the cloudy night sky for the ocean at first. And my ears, filled with static, hear nothing but a thump, thump, thumping vibration coming from somewhere nearby.
When my brain finally reboots from the shock, I realize where I am and what must have happened and that I am royally fucking screwed. Because the first thing I see when my eyes refocus, my head tipped backward over the side of the car, is an upside-down view of Charun storming through the gate, out of the deserted park, and into a heavily populated neighborhood of the city. Where anybody can see him. And where anybody can see what he’s about to do to me. Me and every other breakable object in my immediate vicinity.
And that’s where my third regret comes in—the BMW. I don’t regret that I broke the windshield with my apparent buns of steel. Oh, no. That was a lifesaver. Instead, I regret what happens to the poor car next, when Charun, hammer in hand, spots me lying on top of it.
To the owner of the new BMW: I really hope you have good insuran
ce.
Chapter Twenty
I am saved by a manhole cover. The BMW is not.
It takes Charun all of five seconds to track me down again, lying prone on the BMW’s broken windshield. His hellish, glowing eyes lock onto my injured form, and he bellows out a word in Etruscan that echoes through the alleys and walkways of Compton Street. I can’t guess the exact meaning of the word, but his tone indicates he’s pissed at me. Pissed enough to power up his hammer with another surge of energy in the hopes of taking my head off my shoulders in a bloody explosion. Like he just did to Jack Brendon, whose limp body rests in a heap of tangled limbs against the bars of the park wall, where it was thrown by the hammer’s strike.
Stepping closer to me, the death demon lifts his mighty weapon to launch it through the air. The thrum of power in the hammer forces my eyes into magic sensing mode, almost a physical tug on my sockets, and the aura around the hammer shifts from a subtle blue glow to a vibrant cobalt radiance, six feet in diameter, with the hammer’s head at its center. Arms wound back in the perfect throwing position, Charun yells the same word at me again, like he’s cussing me out.
My muddled mind finally sharpens enough for me to realize I need to move before I end up Kinsey slurry on the top of a BMW. Wriggling my butt out of the hole in the glass, I use my right arm—the one not dislocated at the shoulder—to haul myself off the windshield and roll down the hood of the car.
None of the glass cut through my combat gear, but the force of the impact bruised half my sensitive skin (and probably a couple of ribs). And so, as I tumble, every bump against the aluminum sends spikes of pain shooting through my entire body. I brace myself for pure agony as I slide off the hood and onto my knees on the asphalt in front of the grille. The landing causes me to seize up, jaw clenched to prevent a scream from sounding off like an alarm on the quiet street, until another rush of adrenaline floods my system at the sight of Charun flinging the hammer at my head.
With my one good arm and leg, I dive out of the path of the oncoming enchanted hammer and shakily somersault to a stop on the sidewalk the instant before the hammer slams into the BMW. The front end of the car implodes, an ear-splitting squeal of bending, breaking metal. And then the massive store of energy in the weapon discharges. The entire car skids backward, wheels barely skimming the road, glass shattering, frame crunching, until the hammer runs out of power. The ruined car collides with the side of a closed convenience store and flops to a stop with a resounding boom.
For a couple of seconds, the car alarm—that, for some reason, stayed quiet when my ass hit the glass—attempts to shriek about a “break-in attempt,” but its sound warbles and gradually dies, the alarm mechanism too damaged. Silence envelops the BMW as the vehicle rests at a shallow angle, pinned to the wall, with the hammer sticking out of the warped front end, half-buried in the car’s metallic guts. Totaled. Doomed to one last trip to the junkyard in the sky.
I scramble to my feet with the help of a nearby light pole, cringing at the sight of some unfortunate person’s brand new ride rendered a piece of scrap on the opposite sidewalk. That and the fact several windows in the nearby apartment buildings light up, indicating numerous occupants suffered rude awakenings to the sound of a giant hammer striking a car with the force of a battering ram. Any second now, they’ll pull back their curtains and peer out into the street. And ultimately, they will bear witness to a creature that shouldn’t exist killing an injured young man next to Holden Park.
I need to get Charun back inside the park, out of sight. Now.
But how?
I can’t run with my damaged ankle. I can’t even crawl on my hands and knees because, hello, dislocated shoulder. Swears break through my heaving breaths, along with groans of frustration, as I cling to the light pole, unable to do anything but watch Charun stalk across the street to recover his hammer from the wrecked BMW. He grabs it with one hand, and though it should be firmly trapped in the car’s inner workings, he yanks it out with ease, as if plucking a flower. He spins the hammer around and sits it on his shoulder. Then he turns back to me, a wicked grin etched into his ugly blue face.
I may or may not whine in terror like a puppy driven into a corner by a pack of hungry wolves—I’m not listening to myself well enough to confirm or deny such an embarrassing noise slips out of my mouth. But I know for sure that I push away from the light pole and stagger backward into the park wall, one shaky hand held in front of my bruised face, like a shield of bone and skin will do anything to Charun’s next attack except make it bloodier. My breath seizes up in my aching chest, and my brain frantically sifts through a dozen half-baked ideas, trying to figure out something, anything that’ll get me to safety before Charun throws the hammer again.
No weapons. No strength to run. You’re out of options, Kinsey. This is the dead end.
Charun winds up for another toss, one guaranteed to catch me in its explosive range, and shouts out that same, dirty-sounding Etruscan word again, like the death demon considers me a piece of filth. About as worthy to be in his presence as a piece of gum on a shoe. As if my inept attempts to defeat him have rendered me an offensive laughing stock that needs to be flung into the nearest dumpster to rot with the rest of the trash. As if—
A manhole cover soars through the air and knocks the hammer out of Charun’s hands. And by “knocks,” I mean the hammer flies out of the demon’s grasp, spinning end over end, and crashes through a jewelry store window two blocks away. The manhole cover hits the asphalt with a bang and rolls down the street, until it skims a parked pickup truck and falls flat on its side, ringing like a tuning fork struck with a careful finger. The bright green aura around the manhole cover dissipates after it comes to a complete stop.
Charun blinks his glowing eyes, and what might be a look of confusion comes over his face. (It’s hard to tell with the tusks.) His head snaps to the left, and my own eyes follow his line of sight, to the end of the block. Next to a UPS mailbox stands a woman in dark clothing, more heavy manhole covers floating in the air beside her. Each cover is wrapped in that same green aura, visible through my magic-sensitive eyes, and each one spins slowly, in time with the subtle twitches of her fingers, which are also tinted by her aura.
The woman steps forward under the glow of the nearest streetlight, revealing herself.
It’s Erica the witch.
Her braid has been pinned back tightly against her skull, and she’s exchanged her casual work clothes for a leathery battle outfit, not dissimilar to DSI’s standard garb. A couple of curved blades hang from her belt, their sheaths covered in intricate gold patterns and words written in a language I don’t know. Her face is set in a hard frown, narrowed eyes locked onto the Eververse creature that has dared to invade her city. Her fingers curl inward, and the manhole covers begin to spin faster in the air, gearing up for another attack.
Charun stares at the witch for a moment, growls, and then bounds off for where his hammer landed. He’s fast, faster than something his size should be. But Erica is even quicker. With a furious battle cry, she launches another manhole cover, using a hand motion that mimics throwing a discus. The cover jets through the air in an arc-shaped trajectory, looping back around to pick up as much momentum as possible, before it strikes the side of Charun’s head with a sickening crunch.
The Etruscan death demon stumbles back toward the entrance of the park and falls to his knees. Blood pours from a gaping wound in the side of his head, skull cracked. He looks dazed for a minute, the glow in his eyes dimming, but he shakes away the pain with a snort and pushes himself to his feet again.
I gape, sputtering, horrified that he can brush off such a serious injury, like a skull fracture is on par with a broken nail. But then my brain dredges up my memory of the academy course I took on the Eververse. Creatures from the Eververse, especially creatures mentioned in human history—AKA, the powerful ones—tend to be far more resilient than Earth beings. A number of them are rumored to be genuinely immortal, and I would guess tha
t a guardian of an underworld is one of the types likely to be immortal. Charun might not be killable at all.
But that doesn’t stop Erica from nailing him hard. Charun manages to grab his hammer this time around, but he’s not quite fast enough to lift it in defense before two of Erica’s manhole covers wallop his chest simultaneously. This time, instead of bouncing off Charun’s tough form and rolling away, the covers push Charun backward, a continuous exertion of a massive amount of energy, more than I could ever pull into beggar rings. And even though the monster braces his feet against the ground to hold his place, he begins to slide.
Five feet. Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Charun passes through the park gate again, and when the back of his knees hit the concrete blocks, he trips over them and lands on his own ass with a ground-shaking thump. The manhole covers slip off his chest, circular blurs in the night, and vanish into the tree line, where they crash to a stop against some hefty trunks in a collision I don’t see.
My face is plastered to the metal bars of the park wall, attention on Charun, who’s trying to maneuver his hefty legs over the cement blocks so he can stand up again. Awe thrumming through me, I peel my gaze from the death demon and cast it to the witch now darting toward the park gate, trailed by four more manhole covers floating in midair. Erica passes in close proximity to me, and as she’s heading inside the park, she acknowledges me for the first time. With a wink. And a sly grin that evolves to a mocking air kiss.
Then she crosses into the park turned battlefield to continue her bruising onslaught. As soon as she does, four blurs dart past me, moving at a dizzying pace, far faster than any normal human could manage. They turn the corner of the sidewalk and streak into the park on Erica’s tail, two of them glowing with magic auras, two of them yet to “power up.” The last guy in the lineup slows for a split second, to survey the situation before diving in, and I realize, from the glimpse of a strong beard, that it’s Allen Marcus, the ICM leader. The other blurs must be the backup wizards and witches he called after our task meeting.
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 14
