Demon Accords 10: Rogues

by John Conroe

  “Agent Adler isn’t in our chain of command. And you need us, or this witch and her pack will be reanimating your corpses,” Declan said. Without waiting for a response, he turned and raised one hand to the wall of furry enemy waiting for them. The front line burst into flames, the unnatural fire racing back through the rest of the bodies. Stacia noticed that four of the burning red flares behind them suddenly burned ultra bright before shrinking down to nothing. She’d seen that before. Declan was pulling the heat and energy from the flares to burn the animal revenants, saving his own reserves as much as possible.

  “I say we keep them—sir,” one of the agents said as the team watched their enemies burn into ash.

  Hollis, too, was watching the effectiveness of Declan’s casual gesture. He looked from the young warlock to the beautiful blonde, who was thumbing more salt rounds into her stubby shotgun.

  “It’s either that or shoot you, I guess,” Hollis said.

  Declan spread his arms with a tight smile. “You’re welcome to try, but I’d save my ammo if I were you. You’ve already lost a man and you’re not halfway there.”

  Gunfire and screams came from above as the roof team met resistance. Seconds later, more shots sounded from the far back of the building. Glass shattered abruptly overhead and a screeching pterodactyl cry froze most of the team in their tracks.

  “That one is with us. Helping your roof team, I’d say,” Declan said.

  “Hunter Three is not responding,” Hollis said, signaling his men to move forward through the ash field. “Hunter Two has run into another force of those things,” he said, waving at the carcasses under their feet.

  “She’ll have kept her more powerful stuff closer to hand. She and the pack are likely upstairs and your roof team ran into something big and bad,” Declan said, leading the way across the floor of the old factory toward the back. They moved around a hulking metal mass and spotted the sharp, bright weapon lights of another squad, mixed with flaring bursts of muzzle flash.

  “Tell them we’re approaching so they don’t shoot us,” Stacia said to Hollis, who nodded and spoke quickly into his mic.

  Hunter Team Two was in worse shape, with two men down on the ground. This horde of roadkill was primarily rodents: squirrels and rats, but two black bear carcasses were wreaking havoc.

  Stacia picked up the pace, leaving Declan and the others behind as she raced up to the first bear. The tattered hide had bone and gristle showing through, but the zombie was standing on its hind legs, its left paw pulled back to rip an agent’s face off even as he pumped heavy 7.62mm rounds through its body with his SCAR-H rifle.

  She grabbed the bear’s paw with her left hand and one-handed the shotgun into an exposed gap in its fur with her right. The death strike felt like it would pull her arm from its socket, but she dragged it to a stop while the muffled pop of the salt round froze the creature in place. Pulling back hard, she yanked on the heavy rotted paw and fired the second barrel, pulling the trigger to send the bear to the ground as a collapsed corpse.

  A roar behind her froze her blood. She turned to find the second bear charging her while her gun was still pointing the other way. Despite her speed, it wasn’t going to matter.

  Three silver blurs smashed into the bear, ripping through its hips, shoulders, and head in that order, hitting so fast and so hard that the bear was actually yanked sideways. It stopped and started to collapse as Declan’s silver orbs simply froze in space and then reversed direction to crash into the dead beast from the opposite side. It continued to thrash its broken limbs until she shot it with a salt round.

  The rest of Hunter One ran up and started to dust the rats and squirrels with salt from Morton’s canisters. She looked at Declan. “I liberated them from Shorty’s kitchen,” he said.

  She shook her head, not caring about the damned salt. “Those balls of yours arrived in the nick of time,” she said.

  An agent nearby suddenly coughed hard, his eyes darting to her and Declan before going back to the wounded man he was aiding. He might have been covering a laugh.

  Stacia felt an uncharacteristic flush, if only for a moment. “I probably could have said that better,” she said.

  Declan raised one eyebrow, then shrugged. His silver balls were hovering on station above and slightly behind him. Hollis walked over, another agent in tow.

  “We have three men wounded. Two pretty bad and one mostly chewed up. Most of our guys have at least one or two bites. What can we expect?” he asked, speaking to both of them.

  “Sepsis, possibly,” Stacia said with a sniff. “Those things have some serious rot going on.”

  “While still animated, revenant bites might have a draining effect on your men’s… energy. But they’re all down and out, so like the lady said, treat for infection. Also, those wounded guys should be moved out of here,” Declan said.

  “If this area is clear, I can get a backup team to come in and remove them,” Hollis said.

  Declan looked at Stacia. She tilted her head, sniffed the air, and nodded. He squatted down and placed one hand on the ground, closing his eyes. Then he opened them, grimacing as he stood up. “This place is fucked up. Clear—but fucked up. Call your backup for extraction. The rest of us need to get upstairs to your other team.”

  “No shit. They’ve been fighting these things without help,” said the other team leader, whose nametag said Cochran.

  “From the sounds of it, they’re fighting something else,” Stacia said.

  “And they have help,” Declan said. “Tell your men not to shoot my dragon. I’ll be pissed,” he said, turning back to the dead carpet of carcasses.

  “Dragon?” Cochran asked Hollis.

  “I don’t know anything either. Just pass the word not to shoot the damned thing when we see it. I don’t think we want to piss that kid off,” Hollis said as they moved to organize their men.

  Stacia, who had heard every word, smiled. No, you certainly don’t, she thought.

  Declan, who had just lit two borrowed flares, waved his hand and the furry bodies on the floor, including the two bears, burst into greasy smoke and fire. The red flames flared ultra bright like red stars as he transferred all the heat to the revenants, burning the road flares down to stubs in seconds. The smaller animals were already ash as the combined squads moved out, one man left behind to guard the wounded men and await the extraction team.

  Chapter 27

  Pounding up the stairs, the remnants of teams one and two, originally numbering a combined fourteen but now down to nine, plus Stacia and Declan came upon a scene from Hell.

  Light streamed down from a set of broken skylights, illuminating a single space in the center of the massive room. Three men stood back to back, aiming weapon lights out into the blackness of the rest of the room. What looked like human bodies—or possibly parts of bodies—littered the floor around them. Massive hulks of metal surrounded the open area where the men huddled. The sound of flapping wings came from the darkness and flame suddenly blossomed, illuminating a massive humanoid figure and a flying creature from whose mouth poured flame directed at the monster.

  The huge man shape suddenly moved, dodging the fire and somehow getting past the bat-like wings of the mini-dragon. It grabbed one of the three men like a child and pulled his arm off at the shoulder.

  Three streaking orbs hit the monster as one, entering from its side. Hips, armpit, and head were all pounded by silver and steel moving over three hundred and fifty miles an hour. The humanoid dropped the agent and somehow still stood, then turned to face this new threat, apparently unharmed.

  “It’s a guardian spirit. Kind of like a duppy, I think. We can’t hurt the body because it’s all ectoplasma-type shit. But somewhere inside it should be the skeletal remains of the poor bastard she made it out off. We need to get that and burn it,” Declan said to Stacia.

  She tossed him her shotgun and started to run at the monster, stripping off her shirt and ammo bandolier as she ran. From one step to another,
she was suddenly two feet taller, two hundred pounds heavier, and covered in white fur.

  “Don’t shoot my partner,” Declan yelled to the men around him, never taking his eyes off the massive yet lithe form that bounded and leapt to meet the charging humanoid.

  The spirit thing was huge, easily matching her seven feet, but much heavier. Dressed in a long coat whose sleeves were too short and burned on one whole side, a wide, floppy hat that still smoldered from Draco’s fire, its feet were bare, and its face long and pale, almost greenish. The eyes burned with red fire, which reminded her of numerous demons she had seen over the last two years, although this was slightly less intense. Oddly, this last bit helped her to settle her raging beast and focus on the enemy.

  Werewolves in two-legged combat form make insanely efficient fighters, but the very rage that drives them is also their biggest weakness. Stacia had been trained, and trained, and trained until she’d learned to harness her rage and to fight with intellect and skill. And her trainers were all world-class fighters, each easily able to dump her on her werewolf ass every time she lost her focus.

  So as she bounded at the guardian, she studied it. It was big and heavy, yet moved forward in eye-blurring bursts that seemed more spirit-powered than body-powered. Her amulet, Declan’s crystal ward, flared hot against her fur as the distance between them closed with shocking quickness. The spot of heat on her breastbone reminded her that she stood between this challenger and her male. She roared and lunged for it.

  At the last second, she put all of her inhuman speed into sidestepping the monster’s charge and ducking under its sweeping arms. Her lycan body didn’t move the same way as her human one; the joints and muscles attached differently. In her human form, she might have spun down into a leg sweep, but this body didn’t extend its reverse-jointed legs that way. Instead, she stepped and crouched, spinning on the pads of her feet and swiping one massive front paw at the monster’s ankles. Its feet ripped out from under it, the spirit monster slammed face first into the floor. Then she was on it, shoving one clawed hand deep into its back. The coat tore easily, the greenish flesh resisting like old, moldy rubber. Her fingers brushed something hard and knobby in the repellent, waxy flesh, but couldn’t get a grasp. Her time ran out. The creature shoved itself upright, her weight inconsequential, her body flying backward. It turned and blurred toward her, arms sweeping in to grab her own limbs. Her amulet flared: white hot, a burst of actinic light pulsing from inside the crystal. The monster reared back, arms flailing at its own face.

  “It’s made from spirit and it’s powered up from all the agents it just killed. The amulet hurts it and keeps it from bringing its full power to bear on you. Fire just seems to damage its clothes,” Declan yelled, having moved up behind the thing. He was firing off salt rounds into its back with her shotgun, which it noticed, but only in the way a bear notices a bee’s sting.

  The monster spun toward him then blurred forward, too fast for anything bound by mere physics. It should have been on the boy instantly, but suddenly it was stuck fast, feet frozen to the ground even as its arms strained to reach her very breakable partner.

  Declan let the shotgun swing down on its sling, studying the monster with a thoughtful eye before dropping down to the ground and producing a piece of chalk. It was only then that Stacia noticed the crudely drawn circle and symbols on the concrete floor. He was adding a string of runes to what he’d already drawn. Tricky male. Setting a warded circle to trap it while she was fighting it.

  “I’m going to drain off some of its power, then we can yank the remains out and burn them,” he said.

  She growled.

  “Yeah, okay, so you’ll have to yank the bones out. You’ve got longer arms in that form than I do,” he said, giving her a little grin.

  A blur of fur and muscle shot out of the darkness and bowled him over, the form several times his size.

  She started forward, but instinct or smell or some small sound made her look behind her. Two more werewolves bounded her way. She dropped back down, hooking one of the wolves with her claws as it shot by overhead. Three of her long claws caught and tore the whole front of the wolf open, effectively disemboweling it. The wounds would heal with time, but for the moment, she was free to deal with the other, which had shot by her and jumped over the one that was on top of Declan.

  Her wolf almost went insane when it saw the massive beast sitting on her Declan. But she could see the lights of the Hunter teams shining between their bodies. He had his shields up, supporting the full weight of the thing that was trying to chew his head off. Its feet and claws scrabbled against the invisible wall of willpower that was the only thing protecting him from being shredded.

  “Bad dog,” he breathed, eyes a little wild, holding one hand up in a mock pistol gesture, aiming his finger at its head. His thumb dropped like a revolver hammer and the whole top of the werewolf’s skull exploded into steaming brain and smoking bone. Everything from the lower jaw up was just gone, blasted by the explosive fire that had suddenly formed deep inside its brain. Tattoos squirmed around his body as he put everything he had into bench-pressing the beast’s dead weight off himself and to one side.

  The wolf that had overshot them rolled to its feet and reared back to leap, but before its nerves could fire off the steel muscle of its legs, a single beam of green laser light lanced it from behind. Its eyes bulged and a spray of blood erupted from its open mouth, the sound of the rifle shot reaching them before the first spatters of grisly mist could.

  Declan waved at the sharpshooter, who was lowered his rifle and nodded back.

  A man stepped up on top of one of the hulking machines, fluidly shouldering and firing an AR-15 into the sharpshooter’s face from seventy yards away, then dropped back down with inhuman speed.

  Without uttering a word, the suddenly brain dead sharpshooter, his face a bloody ruin, dropped in a heap.

  Declan snapped around, the remnants of his smile turning to instant rage. Bringing up both hands, he shoved them at the machinery the sniper had ducked behind.

  Stacia knew he was strong in magic. She’d seen him call lightning from the skies and stop a runaway elevator with a thought. But this was sudden rage translated into instant death.

  The machine, some kind of paper roller, streaked with corrosion and rust, was the size of a delivery truck, ten feet high and almost fifteen feet on a side, fastened to the floor.

  With a high-pitched twang, the steel bolts that were driven deep into the concrete floor either snapped or tore free as the entire mass of the unit flipped up and away from the insane blast of mental power. Her sensitive eyes saw a dark blur barely escape being crushed by tons of metal crashing down, shaking the entire building.

  He raised his hands and she growled, a questioning warning growl. He turned to her, blue eyes enraged, but saw her head tilted and both arms held open to get his attention.

  Frustrated, she willed her muzzle to more woman-like. “Ttttaunt youuu. Madden youuu. Dddrain youuu,” she said, voice twisted around inhuman vocal cords.

  Light dawned in his eyes. The glint of icy blue rage turned to something more thoughtful.

  “That was the soldier. She wants him to anger me into spending my power,” he said. She chose to just nod, the words hard to form. “Tricky bitch,” he said, putting his hands down. He was a little shaky, but she didn’t know if that was from having four hundred pounds of werewolf on top of him or from the expenditure of so much internal magic. Probably both.

  Stacia turned to finish the wounded werewolf, but a silver orb found it first; pounding its head to jelly with three eye-blurring blows, the metal ball actually bouncing back up off the floor with each hit.

  The man with the rifle darted around the side of another machine, raising his rifle with well-trained skill and speed, pointed right at her. For a micro-second, her vision tunneled down to the bore of the gun that could be her death.

  Then granite talons slammed shut on the weapon, tearing it from the man�
��s hands as Draco swooped down from the darkness of the ceiling. The little dragon turned its head to the man and loosed a stream of liquid fire that flowed over his head and shoulders. The man, who had to be Tacchino, screamed and flung himself away. He disappeared behind the metal, still screaming, but the high-pitched human sound changed to the roar, snarl, and whine of a wounded beast that moved away from Stacia and her Declan.

  “Thank you, Draco,” Declan called out. A pterodactyl cry sounded from the gloom of the ceiling and the two broken halves of the rifle fell to the ground halfway between their spot and the blackened, burnt machine.

  Hollis and his men arrived, faces grim. “Bad enough we get torn apart by this thing,” the commanding agent said, waving at the massive spirit guardian that was straining to get free. “Now we got ex-soldiers sniping us.”

  “Burnt ex-soldiers. Even Changing into his wolf form won’t heal those burns,” Declan said. “But I need to destroy this thing before we go further. Can’t leave it behind us.”