“As good as anything can sound in this situation. Let’s do this.”
“You got it, hot Crow.” Erica raises one of her hands and makes a gesture that means nothing to me but must be a signal to her comrades to enact the plan. “Wait until the path is completely clear. Don’t move a second before that, you hear? Too soon, and you might get caught in the crossfire.”
“Whatever you say, boss lady.”
She snorts. “Careful there, Cal. Careful.”
Before I can think of a smartass comeback, she rolls out from behind the tree and rockets forward into the clearing. The DSI agents, who’ve now regrouped at a safe distance from Charun (minus the woman who almost died a minute ago), drop whatever strategy talk they were having and direct their attention to Erica’s fearless charge. Charun, who was winding up for another attack on my colleagues, also tears his bloodied, ferocious gaze from the agents and locks onto the witch’s advancing form.
Erica’s hands flare up with that blinding green aura again, and her trees, suspended twenty feet off the ground, begin to spin like drills, faster and faster. She runs straight at Charun, and the death demon lifts his hammer to parry her impending attack and then smash her into a thousand bloody chunks. My heart skips a beat the moment Erica’s body crosses within striking distance of Charun’s wrath, and the demon moves to bring the hammer down in a bone-crushing blow.
But the instant he reasserts his grip on his weapon to wipe Erica’s life off the face of the Earth, a rock jets through the air, as fast as any bullet, and bites into the side of Charun’s neck. Skin tearing, blood spurting, Charun fumbles his attack, and the hammer slips out of his grasp again, smacks the ground with a boom that rebounds through the trees. Stumbling, choking, the distracted demon loses sight of the oncoming witch, and before he can collect himself, Erica has shot right past him, slid to a stop, turned around, anchored her feet against the ground, and, with a scream of a spell invocation, called her trees to attack full force.
Three hefty pines blast out of the woods. The first drives itself into Charun’s side going forty miles per hour. The blow sends his massive form flying through the air, and he crashes to the ground at the edge of the clearing, bones snapping on impact. He scrambles to recover, but the second tree is on him before he can even stand. It rams into his already injured shoulder, gouging what’s left of his burned flesh away, ripping tight cords of muscle clear off bone. The tree then glances off the demon and flies into the woods again, where it slides to a loud, grinding stop somewhere out of sight.
Charun screams, his ruined arm limp at his side, a second before the third tree nails him in his right knee. The assault rips him off his feet again, and he lands flat on his face in the dirt so hard the ground quakes a hundred yards in all directions. His scream becomes an ear-splitting shriek of agony, two limbs now wholly out of commission. But he doesn’t surrender, not yet, not even separated from his hammer. He claws his way to a standing position with one good arm and leg and turns to face the witch who dared to maim him.
Erica, out of trees, rises to meet him as an equal and tilts her chin up in a manner that clearly states a sense of superiority. “That all you got, honey?”
Charun growls out something in Etruscan and makes to tackle Erica to the ground. But, from the dimness of the surrounding trees, another bullet-rock shoots out and buries itself in his back. Then another drops out of the sky like a meteorite and rips a chunk of flesh out of his hip. And two more arc around in the air, boomerangs, give him a one-two punch in the chest, knock the air right out of his demonic lungs. Charun falls to his one good knee, crying out in surprise at the ruthless pelting.
Marcus steps out from behind a bush, dusts off his pants, and draws closer to the edge of the clearing. As he saunters forward, a hundred, no, a thousand more rocks appear, levitating in the air, following their magic master at a distance. Marcus throws a quick nod at Erica, and the witch casts her magic once more, reclaiming the same, now damaged trees she used in her devastating onslaught. They rise from the ground, bathed in her earthy magic aura.
Tuchulcha, hard at work on the circle, finally notices what’s happening to his boss and stands up to help. The second he stops his circle drawing, however, a powerful stream of water blasts out from behind a tree and decks him. He rolls a good eight feet away from the circle, in the opposite direction that Charun went a minute ago, creating a path down the middle of the clearing for me to recover Cooper Lee.
When a second stream of water shoots through the air, and as Erica is preparing to pummel Charun again, I tuck my gun into its holster, hop out from behind my cover, and, before my anxiety or the pain in my ankle can deter me…I run. Channeling my long-ago days in high-school track, I push my body as fast as it can go, legs pumping, heart pounding, sides in stitches from the start, line of sight narrowed to the straight shot between me and the archivist who’s lying half-dead on the ground because of my foolish blunder. I’m coming for you, Cooper. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Got you!
I skate to a stop on my knees beside Cooper’s prone body, monsters and magicians waging war on either side of me. As gently as possible, I scoop Cooper into my arms, ignoring the ache in my damaged shoulder. He’s semi-conscious, doused in pain, and he moans softly when I shift his broken arm onto his stomach. But he’s alive, and I have him, and that’s all—
A number of very serious things happen in the span of forty-two seconds. A jumble of events so loud, bright, and confusing that I don’t fully understand the order or the outcome until all is said and done.
First, it turns out that the two wizards assaulting Tuchulcha severely underestimated the spirit’s power—or should I say how much power Veronica was packing until Tuchulcha possessed her? After two more streams of water knock the spirit down again, he pounds the fists of his flesh puppet against the dampened ground, hisses like a pissed-off snake, and sets himself on fire.
And I mean on fire.
A raging inferno engulfs Veronica’s body, devouring her pale skin and hair in seconds. It’s the same way Ally Johnston died, rendered ash by Tuchulcha’s escape from the DSI building, but this time, the spirit doesn’t use the fire to blast his way out of a prison. Instead, he creates one. A fifteen-foot-tall wall of flame flashes into existence, evaporates another oncoming water stream, and then winds off in two directions, forming an arc. A closing circle. That I will never be able to escape in time.
Doesn’t stop me from trying though. With a panicked gasp on my tongue, I haul Cooper up and run for my life, over the summoning circle, toward the quickly closing exit to the ring of fire. Outside the fire wall, safe and sound, my DSI companions look on in abject horror. Riker, leaning against a tree, shouts at me to hurry my ass up, and Ella, a few feet away from him, appears torn between staying put and running into the circle in a vain attempt to help me. She almost chooses option two, but Riker grabs her arm, holds her back, prevents her from throwing her life away.
My captain knows I’m doomed.
Always the vote of confidence.
Always correct.
The circle of fire closes when I’m six feet from crossing the line to safety. I stumble to a hard stop before the towering inferno, stretching higher and higher every moment. Waves of heat radiate toward me, sweat forming on my skin, and I have to back away because the flames are so hot I cannot breathe. Panting, panic in my veins, I peek over my shoulder and witness the full horror of the burning spirit standing behind me.
Veronica’s flesh has been seared away. Her muscles are dissolving. Blood boils from her bursting veins. Her eyes are long gone, empty sockets, and her brain seems to be bubbling inside her skull, visible through the shadowed holes left in her face. How her body remains standing I will never know, but Tuchulcha, still inside her, walks her burning corpse across the clearing, back to the circle, and finishes his line work by scorching marks into the earth.
Then he slams his palms onto the outer edge of the summoning-turned-banishment circle, Veronica�
�s fingers no more than bones held together by melting tendons. Somehow, even with the body’s vocal cords destroyed, Tuchulcha yells out the incantation to a spell, and, when the last syllable leaves a mouth that has no lips, the circle activates. All the lines and symbols in the circle flash a bright red-orange, and a pulse of energy blasts through the air, so powerful it flings me off my feet.
I lose my grip on Cooper, and his injured body bounces off across the clearing, rolling to a stop far out of my reach. My own body smacks the ground less than eight inches from the wall of fire, and I have to scramble on my hands and knees away from the whipping flames before they catch me, eat me alive, pick the flesh right off my bones. I try to make it back to Cooper, I really do, with every ounce of energy I have left, breathing in the hot fumes of the fire all around me, lungs convulsing every time I inhale.
I’m too slow.
Tuchulcha whistles a high-pitched note, and a split second later, Charun’s enormous form bounds straight through the fire wall, over my head, and lands in the center of the banishment circle. He catches fire, robe-like clothing set alight, but the death demon doesn’t appear to notice the lick of flames. They lash at his skin, leaving black, crispy marks, and he doesn’t flinch. He leans to the left, retrieves his fallen hammer from the edge of the fire ring with his uninjured hand, and then grunts something to Tuchulcha.
His fiery assistant responds by storming toward Cooper’s vulnerable form and grabbing the archivist by his broken arm. I yelp in terror as Tuchulcha’s burning hand sears into Cooper’s wrist, skin sizzling. Cooper, half-asleep, whimpers in pain at first, but as the fire bites into him, deeper and deeper, his low whines morph into gasping screams. Tuchulcha, now barely more than a walking, flaming skeleton, cares nothing for Cooper’s unbearable agony and drags the archivist by his broken arm across the clearing.
Rage floods my veins, overriding my fear, and I yank my gun from its holster. I surge toward the fiery spirit, toward Charun waiting for his ride out of town, and empty my clip. Three shots into Charun’s face. Three into what’s left of Veronica’s body. The rest into empty air, poorly aimed. But neither Charun nor Tuchulcha is affected by such petty annoyances as bullets at this point. Charun doesn’t even attempt to kill me with his hammer, and his assistant simply keeps advancing on the banishment circle, Cooper in tow.
And here’s where it happens.
Here’s where I kill myself.
Tuchulcha, after a nod from Charun, shouts another incantation, and the banishment circle flares up even brighter. There’s a vacuum sensation in the air, as energy is pulled into the circle, around Charun’s form, where it coalesces into a vibrant red magic aura. When the last ounce of power passes into the circle’s outer boundary, a pillar of light shoots up into the midday sky. A deafening hum fills the clearing, gouging my eardrums like sharpened steak knives, and immediately, Charun’s form begins to fade. The death demon, on his way back to the Underworld, peers out from the circle, one last time, before he vanishes entirely.
Charun the Etruscan Psychopomp smirks at me, victorious.
That little shit.
I’m pretty sure it’s the cocky expression on his face that pushes me over the edge. Literally.
Charun vanishes back into the Eververse, and the banishment circle deactivates.
Tuchulcha doesn’t waste any time. The instant his boss disappears, he holds up his fiery hand, nothing but a few bones dangling from half-eaten sinews, and, with a simple push of magic energy from Veronica’s depleting store, rips a portal open between Earth and the Eververse, the kind only an Earth-born being can pass through. Somehow, someway, Tuchulcha’s fire-wrecked form still counts as human, as he proves when he passes his hand through the veil to double check.
He, too, cranes his face toward me, but since his face is nothing but a skull engulfed in fire, his attempt at a smile comes off more like a grotesque sneer: a fleshless bottom jaw, complete with a row of charred teeth, cocked to the right at a severe angle. If I wasn’t drowning in fury at this moment, I would stop to vomit every piece of half-digested food in my stomach. But I am drowning, to the point where I can’t think straight.
Which is how I kill myself.
As I close in, ten feet, eight feet, six feet, Tuchulcha lifts the archivist’s limp body by his broken arm, and, with a sound that might be a laugh, throws Cooper Lee into the Eververse. He follows his prisoner a moment later, leaping across the veil, and his fiery form lands with a puff of smoke on the other side. Safely out of my reach, he believes, the spirit turns back to the unstable portal, his visage rippling and blurred. He peers through the hole in the universe and gives me a friendly salute. Goodbye.
Hoisting up Cooper Lee by the same, burned wrist, Tuchulcha starts walking off into the Underworld as the portal begins to seal itself, no longer connected to a magic source. And it’s because he’s not looking at me, because he’s so dismissive, because he’s so sure I’m either smart or a coward, that he doesn’t anticipate what happens next.
You know, that I kill myself. By doing the one thing human beings should never do.
Yup.
Calvin Kinsey, ballsy as hell, idiotic beyond belief, leaps through the portal into the Eververse, lands on his feet in the Etruscan Underworld, points a finger at a flaming skeleton, and yells, “Not so fast, motherfucker!”
Chapter Thirty
The Etruscan Underworld—at least the road to its front door—takes the form of a mountain pass tucked in between sheer, rocky cliffs. My feet hit dry dirt when I come to a stop on the other side of the portal, and a cloud of dust puffs up into the air, toward a sky that might be overcast or might be utterly empty, a black, starless dome above my head. Yet, despite the lack of light, a thousand flowers grow in the cracks of the craggy cliffs, red and blue and violet blossoms peeking through the shadows.
This place is a contradiction, signs of life and death situated side by side. Or maybe this is how all afterlives begin: with a shade walking the last path touched with life before they reach the realm of eternal peace. Maybe that’s how my afterlife will begin, since I, too, now stand in the middle of that path. And since I choose—a brilliant move, Kinsey—to insult a powerful demonic spirit on its home turf.
As soon as the word motherfucker leaves my tongue, the reality of what I’ve done drops onto my skull with the force of a wrecking ball. I just jumped into the Eververse, like a maniac. Assured my own demise. Set up what will likely be my painful suicide. I might as well have written my own obituary blurb before I loped past the veil, left it on the other side for my DSI comrades to find. That is how hopeless this situation is.
I’m a dead man walking. (And I won’t be walking much longer.)
Because the instant I finish insulting Tuchulcha, the flaming skeleton drops Cooper, whips around, and storms toward me. With each stomping step, Veronica’s skeleton disintegrates, more and more, bones dissolving to ash in the air, drifting off like the dust from the ground. For a few seconds, Tuchulcha is nothing but a six-foot-tall fire, vaguely shaped like a human being. Then, eight or ten feet away from me, the flames begin to coalesce, and by the time he’s within striking distance, the fiery spirit is fiery no more.
Tuchulcha solidifies into the visage I glimpsed a couple times during his possessions of Johnston and Smith. A humanoid form disfigured by a variety of downright creepy demonic features. A head of hair made of hissing snakes, like Medusa. Donkey ears that poke out from the snake nest, long and furry. A shiny black beak for a nose and a mouth, plus two slits for nostrils. Pale, pinkish skin that resembles raw poultry, with a sheen that might be sweat or some sort of slime. The most human thing about him, other than his overall shape, is the robe-like garment he wears, tied at the waist by a belt or sash.
I’m not sure who’s uglier, to be honest, him or Charun. They were certainly drawn from the same bag of grotesque things.
The spirit stops less than three feet away from me, too far to imply a hand-to-hand fight but way too close for comfort.
Which is the point. Part of his play to intimidate me. Along with a booming, growling voice that shouts out a string of Etruscan, and then repeats, in English, “Turn back, foolish warrior! You have no business in this realm.”
I’ll be honest. Between his terrifying appearance and the voice that hits me like a physical blow, I’m scared shitless. And there’s a millisecond where I almost obey his command, almost turn on my heels and flee back through the still-closing portal, with my balls withdrawn completely into my body. But then my eyes, desperate for relief from his monstrous shape, cast their gaze beyond him, where Cooper Lee lies on the ground, wracked with spasms, sobbing. Another burst of that adrenaline-fueled determination floods my system, and I take a half-step closer to the fire spirit. A challenge.
“I have no business here? You had no business kidnapping him from my home, from Earth.” I point at Cooper with an accusatory finger. “He played no part in the theft of Vanth’s key. He’s an innocent. And you hurt him!”
Tuchulcha blinks his dark, beady eyes at me, and his snake hair tangles itself into knots. “No part, warrior? I do not understand. I found the fair one”—he gestures to Cooper—“with the key in his possession after I followed you to the gathering place of your brothers and sisters at arms. He was the last human to possess the key stolen from my Lady Vanth, and therefore, he shall face the judgment of her sword.”
I groan in the tone of a prissy teenager grounded for throwing a booze-filled house party while the parents were away. “No, you idiot! No! That is not how theft works. Cooper did not steal the key!”
“He will face judgment, regardless of your arguments.”
“What? And you’re not going to ‘judge’ me? Like you and Charun did to all those other kids?”
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 22
