by Ella Summers
“Use it if you want,” she said, shrugging. “It’s not like I trademarked the spell or anything.”
The whirlpool continued to pop out the convicts. Naomi and Cloud continued to knock them out, and Logan finished them off.
“This one is the leader,” the assassin said, dragging a man by his leather belt. He plopped him down at Naomi’s feet as the flood subsided.
The water spilled down gently, draining over the rocks and into the ocean. Makani and Alex were already jogging down the road. Alex looked uncharacteristically wiped out. Controlling that much water couldn’t have been easy. Alex usually tended toward hitting things hard and fast, rather than controlling every drop of water in a flash flood.
“What happened here?” Logan asked the convict leader.
“We came here, killed the guards, and released the prisoners. And we did it so thoroughly and covertly that no one on the outside even knew what was going on. In other words, we won,” said the hell-hardened convict. “Isn’t that obvious?”
He was pretty cocky for someone who’d just lost an entire army.
“How did you get to earth?” Naomi asked him.
His mouth split into a crooked smile, but he said nothing.
Naomi tried again. “There were hell beasts with you, which means you’re serving a demon. Which one?”
He folded his arms over his chest, his smirk growing wider. His fingers brushed across a sun tattoo on his arm. Magic burst out of him, throwing them all backward. A glyph activated beneath his feet. Logan darted forward, but even he wasn’t fast enough to beat the spell. The glyph sucked in the convict.
“Damn it,” Naomi growled, stomping her foot down on the spot where he’d stood just a moment ago. “He got away.”
“At least we cleansed Alcatraz of conspiring convicts,” Alex pointed out.
Naomi looked up the hill, her eyes panning across the broken windows and toppled tower. “Kai will be so pleased.”
Alex wrapped her arm around her. “Then let’s go tell him the good news.”
5
Demons Incognito
After their excursion to Alcatraz, Cloud got paged away to another mission in the city. Naomi, Makani, Alex, and Logan returned to their previous mission: a late-night snack at the Pancake Palace. Even at midnight, the place was full—or perhaps because it was midnight. Luckily, Sera and Kai had already secured a table.
“Sorry we’re late,” Naomi said as she sat down inside the banana-yellow booth. Subtle this place was surely not. “Will the commandos be joining us?”
Tony, Dal, and Callum—aka Kai’s commandos—had been working with Sera and Kai tonight.
“They went back to the office and ordered hamburgers,” Sera replied.
“A wise choice,” said Kai.
“Kai is positivity scandalized about even setting foot in this place,” Sera said, smirking at her fiancé. “He considers it too garish.”
“Garish? No, I believe the word I used was—”
“There are children present, sweetheart,” Sera cut in.
Her gaze shifted pointedly to the little boy and girl in the neighboring booth. What were they even doing up at this hour? In any case, both kids were gaping at Kai, their eyes as wide as the pancakes on their plates.
“You have fans,” Sera told him. “Give them a smile.”
Kai flashed the kids a big dragon smile. Nervous, ecstatic giggles burst from their mouths, then they hastily looked away.
“I’ll admit this place might be a tad over-the-top, but it has the best pancakes in the city,” Sera said.
“A bit over-the-top?” Kai glanced down at the animated pancake on the front of the menu. It was waving and winking at him. “How can I not be scandalized? This place is not dignified for a dragon.” His gaze slid from Makani to Logan. “Or even an assassin.”
Makani eyed the flashy neon sign on the window that advertised all-you-can-eat pancake platters. Smiley-faced silverware skipped around the pancakes in some sort of country dance.
Makani shrugged. “I’ve seen worse.”
Sera nudged Kai. “Hey, why don’t you think Alex and I would be embarrassed about the apparent lack of dignity here?”
“Because this place was your idea,” Naomi reminded her.
“And we have no dignity to speak of,” Alex told her sister, chuckling.
“So true,” Sera said dreamily. She opened her menu. “Look here, Kai. Sausages, bacon, and hamburgers. There’s plenty of meat for you to eat, just like I promised.”
He looked somewhat mollified. But only somewhat.
After they’d all ordered and their blue-haired fairy waitress sauntered away, Naomi said to Kai, “Right before we came here, we cleaned up Alcatraz for you.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a problem.”
“No one was.”
“Escaped convicts and beasts from hell had taken it over, killed all the guards, then freed the criminals imprisoned there,” Alex summarized.
Kai’s jaw cracked. “I warned the Council that their security measures were insufficient for a prison which held that caliber of criminal.”
“Honestly, Kai, no security measures are truly sufficient to withstand an invasion from hell,” Naomi said.
“Perhaps you should start from the beginning,” Sera suggested.
So Naomi told them about their mission at the gala and their fight with the demon Dandrion.
“On our way to meet you, we ran into some hell beasts. That’s when we met your Red Knight,” she said to Kai.
“Oh?” His face was perfectly neutral, as though she’d just told him they’d picked up a bag of sugar at the grocery store.
“Yes, he was tracking the hell beasts and a group of criminals who’d escaped from hell.”
“We went to Alcatraz with him to force out the convicts who’d taken over the prison,” Alex said.
‘Force out’ was good. She and Makani had literally forced them out with a flash flood.
“I got to blow up the water tower,” Alex told Sera. “I think that beats the time you burned down the old brick tower.”
“Was that really necessary?” Kai said with strained patience.
“I find such condemnation ironic coming from someone who regularly collapses buildings and shifts into a dragon to step on his problems,” Alex shot back.
Kai snorted.
“And besides, I wasn’t the only one causing magical mayhem,” she added. “Makani helped.”
“I’d hardly call controlling the stream of water to follow a precise, predetermined path ‘magical mayhem’,” Makani said.
“Makani and Alex used their elemental magic to direct the stream of water from the water tower into the prison, breaking all the windows,” Naomi explained.
“Breaking all the windows?” Sera repeated, shaking with suppressed laughter. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“My life was simpler before you and your friends waltzed into it,” Kai told her.
“Simpler.” Sera smirked. “But less exciting.”
Kai’s laugh was something between a growl and a purr. “Indeed.”
“The water killed the beasts. We took care of the convicts,” Naomi continued. “We tried to question their leader, but he escaped through a transportation glyph.”
“I really hate those things,” Sera said.
“So do I,” agreed Alex.
“The beasts and the hellish escaped convicts must be connected to the demons. Somehow. What I want to know is how the convicts escaped from hell.” Naomi frowned. “I’ve long since sealed any tears in the veil.”
The waitress arrived with their food. Burgers, sausages, bacon, eggs, and potatoes dominated the guys’ plates. Sera had ordered Belgian waffles topped with strawberries and a generous helping of whipped cream. The dish came with bacon on the side. When Sera scooped the bacon strips onto Kai’s plate, he gave her a look that was almost sappy.
Alex and Logan shared, sampling from each other’s pl
ates.
“Cute, Slayer,” Kai told Logan when Alex fed the assassin a bite from her fork.
“It’s not too late to kill you, Drachenburg,” Logan replied serenely.
After just a few bites of food, Alex already looked better. The color was returning to her pale cheeks. That last battle had really wiped her out.
Naomi was feeling pretty wiped out herself. She grabbed a bowl of fairy root flakes and sprinkled them all over her pancakes.
“Does that taste good?” Alex asked her.
Naomi squirted whipped cream onto the pancakes. Then she sprinkled on even more fairy root. She took a bite and declared, “Now it tastes good.”
Alex cut off a piece of Naomi’s pancake. “Wow. That has got to be the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted. I think my teeth are going to fall out.”
“More?” Naomi asked her.
“Yes, please.” Alex cut off another piece from the pancake. “Sera, you have got to try this.”
Sera took a tentative bite from Naomi’s pancakes. Her lips pursed together. “Whoa, that one bite is like two hundred percent the recommended daily sugar intake.”
“Not for a fairy,” declared Naomi.
“You’re only half fairy,” Sera pointed out.
“Which only means I need more sugar to compensate.”
The sisters laughed.
“So, Kai,” Naomi said between bites. “How did Cloud come to be working for you?”
Confusion crinkled Sera’s brow. “Cloud? As in Cloud Silverstride?”
The last time Sera had seen Cloud, she and Naomi had just discovered that he’d betrayed them.
“Cloud is Drachenburg Industries’ Red Knight,” Naomi told her. “The question is how that happened.”
“I needed someone to track down hell beasts,” Kai said. “And he was desperate to work off his sentence while breathing fresh air rather than remaining holed-up in a cell in Atlantis.”
If they’d captured Cloud a few months later, he might have ended up in the Alcatraz prison rather than the Atlantis one. As a prisoner of Alcatraz, he’d have faced the same choice its other prisoners had: join hell’s convicts or be killed by them. That might have led him down the path of destruction rather than the path of redemption.
“Cloud has skills,” said Kai. “He has inside knowledge of the supernatural criminal underground. Mostly the magic drug dealers, but he has contacts with other crime syndicates as well. Those connections and skills paid off tonight. He was able to track the convicts and hell beasts to Alcatraz.”
“We took care of that for you, Drachenburg,” Logan reminded him. “Expect an invoice from me.”
“He’s even more of a mercenary than we are, Alex,” Sera laughed.
“Well, he has to be if he wants to afford those fancy cars he shows off to naive, impressionable women,” Alex said, fluttering her eyelashes.
“And you think you’re one those naive and impressionable women?” Naomi asked her.
“Of course. People say those are my best features.”
When they were all done laughing, Naomi asked Sera, “How was the party?”
“We struck out. No signs of anything remotely hellish or demonic. Just a lot of supernatural elite from old magical dynasties rubbing elbows and making smalltalk.” She made a sour face.
“You must have been miserable.”
“Five minutes after we arrived, I was already praying for a demon to unmask itself. Or for one of the party guests to go batshit magic crazy. Or for monsters to crash the ball. Something—anything—to spare me from the dull monotony and false pleasantries.”
“Next time you attend a fancy party, I’ll go with you,” Alex promised her sister. “We’ll set the table runners on fire. It will be fun.”
Sera laughed. “Or we can get Naomi to spike the drinks with some of those happy fairy drugs. Everything is more fun with happy fairy drugs.”
Naomi took a big bite of her fairy-approved pancake. “Definitely.”
“Out of curiosity, what exactly does fairy root do to you?” Alex asked her.
“Besides making everything taste like two hundred percent sugar,” added Sera.
“It’s a cleanser,” Naomi told them. “It replenishes your energy and refreshes your aura.”
Naomi took a few more bites of pancake. It was taking the edge off her low energy. Makani watched her, nodding in approval. Dragons always approved of eating.
“With Dandrion gone, that brings us from four down to three demons left on earth,” Naomi said.
One of those three demons was causing trouble in the city. There was nothing fun about a demon’s beasts attacking innocent people, but as long as they did it, at least there was a trail to follow.
The other two demons hadn’t made so much as a peep since they’d escaped hell two months ago. Demons weren’t subtle beings, but somehow, inexplicably, these two were keeping their heads low. Victims had been found with the marks of every other escaped demon. These two hadn’t attacked anyone, at least as far as the enforcers could tell. It was as though they had simply vanished into thin air.
But the demons had to be here somewhere. As long as they remained on earth, they needed bodies to possess. And they needed to feed on magic. There should be a trail of dead bodies left in their wake, something to follow. And yet there wasn’t. How could two demons go by unnoticed for this long?
Six phones chimed simultaneously. Everyone at the table pulled theirs out.
“Another potential sighting,” Kai said. “Near Atlantis.”
So far, all the demons had been found within San Francisco. Naomi had thought the demons were planning something in the city. Something terrible. Well, it looked like that terrible thing had finally gone global.
Naomi slid out of the booth. “Maybe we’ve finally found our incognito demons.”
6
Atlantis
First, it was the supernatural prison on Alcatraz and now Atlantis. This wasn’t a coincidence. A demon was filling the ranks of its earthly army by emptying the world’s supernatural prisons.
This might be their chance to catch it in the act—if they could get there in time.
Luckily, Naomi knew a shortcut to Atlantis. She opened up a passage in the veil, bringing them to a magic highway in the third circle. The glowing, glistening river of spirit magic lay before her, beckoning her forward.
These fast tracks were speckled across the spirit realm. Ghosts and spirits used them to close great distances in a matter of minutes, but they were also accessible to anyone with enough spirit magic. For instance, a Spirit Warrior like Naomi.
She and her friends linked hands, then she plunged them into the river of light and magic. Like a high-speed train, it shot them across the city. Streets and buildings bled away on either side. Exits whistled past. They moved beyond the city, out onto the great expanse of nature. Houses gave way to black trees. Streets faded into fields of pink grass. Faster and faster the exits flashed by.
Somewhere in the Midwest, two ghosts popped into the magic stream. The first was the ghost bride Chastity, a pretty teenage girl with big blue eyes and long hair that flowed like a river of fire. Like always, she wore the white wedding gown she’d died in five hundred years ago.
Chastity’s companion was her husband Valor, the Oracle of Hell, a ghost with the power to see through the eyes of other ghosts. He was sporting a new outfit today: a muscle t-shirt and a pair of jeans with a big buckle. He looked like a cover model from a cowboy romance novel, not a sixteenth century fairy. And he certainly didn’t look like what you’d expect when you heard the name ‘Oracle of Hell’.
“Naomi,” Chastity said, her voice dreamy, her skin shimmering like moonlight.
“How have you been?” Naomi asked her.
“Busy.” Chastity’s gaze flickered to Valor. She erupted into girlish giggles.
The two ghosts had died on their wedding day—then had to wait five hundred years to be reunited for their wedding night.
“But we’re not here to discuss our sex life. Though we totally need to get around to that later.” Chastity’s face grew serious. “We’ve come to warn you that there is a tear in the veil.”
That would certainly explain how the convicts had escaped hell. But how had the tear occurred? The last time the veil had torn, it was because Sera had broken Arkan’s magic so hard that she sent the demon back to hell. Sera wasn’t a Spirit Warrior. She couldn’t open passages between realms and then neatly seal them shut. When she’d ripped the demon from its host, she’d ruptured the veil.
But Naomi had already tracked down and repaired those tears in the veil. This must be something new.
“Where is the tear?” she asked the ghosts.
“Right in the middle of Atlantis,” Valor told her.
Yeah, this was all connected all right.
“What caused the tear?” Naomi asked.
Valor shook his head. “I do not know.”
“We’re headed to Atlantis now. We’ll close the tear in the veil and take out some escaped convicts all in one.”
“You could be walking into a trap,” Chastity said.
“Perhaps,” replied Naomi. “Or we might just catch a demon with its pants down.”
Alex made a face. “God, I hope not.”
“A demon with its pants down? That’s not something any of us want to see,” Sera agreed.
Going to the Pancake Palace had been an excellent idea. The midnight snack had really spiked everyone’s energy. And their mood too. Naomi smiled. The light banter with the people she loved was what made the horrors and terrors of the many realms bearable.
“We have to run now,” Chastity said.
“Thank you for warning us about the tear.”
The ghosts nodded, then jumped out at the next exit.
“We’re coming up on Atlantis soon,” Naomi told the others. “Our timing is crucial. We’ll have to jump out of the stream, then immediately hop back to earth. We cannot afford to linger.”
