The kopis responded by drawing his gun.
James dove into the shop and went into the basement. There was a trap door. It was open, but the stairs had collapsed.
James!
Elise was screaming again. She wasn’t far. He could feel her through the earth, through the collapsed paths, just a couple miles away but completely unreachable.
Gunshots fired outside the shop. Bryce shouted.
Fear dragged on James’s heart. What was he supposed to do? How could he get to Elise when the only entrance to the undercity was blocked?
He shut his eyes, trying to see through their bond again. Where are you? How can I reach you?
Through her pain, he glimpsed a bone scepter and a stone knife. James fought to push back the sounds of fighting above him and focus on her vision, trying to see beyond the bare knees of the goddess.
A wall. Smoke. Window. And beyond that, pyramid. It was tall. The chamber, and the clock inside of it, was huge.
James’s eyes flew open. She wasn’t at the end of a labyrinth of demonic undercity—she was just under the surface, in the jungle not far from him.
He quickly paged through his Book of Shadows, seeing how many battle spells he had left. There weren’t many. The simple ones—casting fire, blasts of air—were almost gone. Everything else that remained were the powerful spells his aunt told him not to mess with. Horrible, deadly spells. He’d been carrying them around for years.
Whispering a short prayer, James ripped a handful of pages out of the Book and flew up the stairs to street level.
Bryce blocked the doorway with his body. Another one of the leathery gray demons had its teeth clamped down on the arm of his leather jacket. Dozens more demons rushed down the street.
James barely had time to register the sheer number of bodies before they crashed upon them. He was lost in a rush of blood and drool and growls. He dropped the shotgun. “Get down!” he shouted to Bryce.
The kopis threw himself to the ground, and James threw a scrap of paper.
Power ripped from him. A dozen hearts stopped beating at once.
They fell like dominoes, but James didn’t stop to watch it. He grabbed Bryce by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Move,” he said as the surviving demons clambered over their dead brethren. “Now. Hurry!”
The men sprinted across the road and into the jungle again. James could still hear Elise in the back of his mind, but it was faint. After another minute, he couldn’t hear her at all.
“Why aren’t we going down?” Bryce asked.
“We are going down,” James said. “But we’re not taking the stairs.”
After an eternity of pain, Elise awoke. She tried to sit up, but her hands couldn’t find traction. She slipped on something soft and slick. She looked down to see that it was a face with gaping eyes and no jaw.
Gasping, she jerked back. Something dug into her leg—an exposed rib.
There was nowhere safe to move. She slid to one side and rolled on top of a hairy chest with no head. When she slipped to the other side, her hand fell on a scapula.
The realization that she was in a pit of human meat came upon her slowly, and it was followed by emotional silence—a yawning void of feeling. Elise took one shuddering breath and stopped fighting to get away.
She settled back on the corpses and looked up at the steep walls around her. It was dark, but the occasional blast of flame revealed jagged rock. She could climb out. The clock was still rocking the earth with every beat of its human heart, and it sounded close.
She was still in the chamber. She was not dead.
But given all the pain she felt in her torso, she almost wished that were not true. No amount of emotional void could numb her cuts. Elise was slick with blood—both hers and that of the bodies—and she felt like she had gone through a cheese grater.
Her shirt was nothing but scraps, her weapons were missing, and there was a stab wound on her side. She flinched when she remembered the goddess burying the knife in her body. It was the last thing she remembered before waking up.
She must have missed all Elise’s important organs, but the goddess hadn’t known that before leaving her for dead. Thrown her in a pit of bodies. Forgotten her.
Elise decided to consider herself lucky.
She counted to ten and crawled to the wall of the pit. The clock continued to tick.
Digging her fingernails into a jutting rock, Elise climbed to the top with her teeth grit. Stretching her arm to find another handhold hurt her stab wound. Putting her weight on one leg to push made the bites on her hip burn.
She rolled over the edge and scrambled to the shadows on all fours, finding a dark corner to crouch before examining the situation.
Elise could see the back of the clock. It was only a hundred feet away. Her side of the chamber was empty aside from the pit, sheltered by half-rotten columns, and the occasional blast of steam from the floor grates made enough smoke to conceal her.
She couldn’t see many of those ugly gray demons around the clock, but she could feel them. There were hundreds. The goddess of death was talking to them, but Elise didn’t stop to listen.
She made her way to the other side of the chamber, sticking to the shadows, and climbed unseen onto one of the platforms with the dead cultists.
A flash of silver caught her eye. The goddess had dropped her staff of bone and was carrying one of Elise’s falchions as she paced across the dais.
There were four humans huddled beside her. It looked like a family. Their wrists were chained to the clock.
So that was the sacrifice. Elise wondered what it was about those people that made them a better sacrifice than her, the greatest kopis, who barely ranked as demon food. It would have wounded her pride if she had any.
She needed a plan, but she didn’t have any idea of how to cross the room through a hundred demons, prevent the sacrifice of four humans, and stop the clock with numerous injuries and no time. She didn’t even have her weapons.
Of course, that was fixable. If she could get one of her swords, she could bury it in the heart of the clock. It was the only thing she could imagine that might stop it.
Her time to plan ended. The death goddess stopped speaking and whirled with the stone knife. It plunged into the neck of the man at her feet, and blood spurted from his throat.
Elise leaped off the dais, launching herself toward the sacrifices.
But it was too late. With a few swift strokes, all four lay dead in front of the clock. The minute hand groaned into the twelve position, and the first bell chimed.
James found a place in the jungle where the trees swayed and the ground vibrated beneath his feet. The clock was below him, and Elise with it. He was certain.
But he also had a hundred demons following him.
He and Bryce had evaded some of them in the jungle, but not enough. The kopis fired randomly into the horde behind him. Whether any of the bullets hit their targets didn’t matter—there wasn’t enough ammunition to kill them all.
Stopping where the vibrations were strongest, he tucked the shotgun under his arm. “I need a minute!” James yelled as he scrambled up a tree. “Hold them off!”
Bryce didn’t respond. His fighting style completely lacked Elise’s grace, but there was no denying the accuracy of his aim or the power of his swinging fists. He was a force of nature.
“Hurry up!” Bryce shouted.
James wedged himself between two high branches, selected a couple spells from his Book, and took out a pen. He muttered words of power under his breath as he drew new spells.
The rocking earth shifted. The tree shuddered, and the air grew thick.
A bell chimed.
The reverberations above the pyramid were so powerful that the entire ground tipped. Bryce lost his footing. The demons swarmed over him. He didn’t get a chance to scream.
James tried not to watch as they overtook him. One demon leaped onto the trunk of his tree, then another, scaling it with their stubby
claws.
He carefully folded three of the spells together. A hand swiped at his foot.
Then he threw the pages into the air.
The earth split with a dull thud, ripping open beneath the trees while the first bell continued to toll. Hot air gusted through the hole. Demons slid into the earth.
Holding his breath, James leaped off his branch.
Twelve bells. Four minutes. Elise was out of time.
One.
A dozen demons plowed into Elise like athletes piling onto a football. The back of her head cracked against the ground.
She jammed her elbow into a biting mouth and jabbed her fingers into an eye. The bell vibrated through the temple. It shook her blood, her bones.
Elise lashed out with a foot and felt it connect with something. It didn’t do any good. There was no light under the pile of demons, no sense of gravity.
That was when the roof collapsed.
Two.
The rubble didn’t crush Elise. But it did crush the demons on top of her.
She shoved her way out of the pile. Dirt and rain showered through the hole in the ceiling. Beyond it, the sky changed. Gray faded to crimson as Hell and Earth began to merge.
Elise gasped and coughed through the dust. Half of the centuria had been crushed at once. Nothing so much as touched the clock.
A hammer swung. The bell struck again.
Three.
The third chime was louder than the first two. Her skull ached, and even when she jammed her hands against her ears, her brain rattled.
Something moved on the dais. The goddess had survived.
More demons began climbing toward Elise over the rubble. She stumbled toward the clock, slipped, and almost fell.
Her hand caught the side of the dais. The vibrations traveled up her arm and down her spine as she dragged herself onto it.
The goddess was laughing.
Four.
“It’s too late,” said the death goddess. “Hell is come upon Earth.”
That face. That laugh. Elise’s wounds ached with the memory of the knife. “Shut up,” she growled, raising her fist for a strike.
“Elise!”
She looked up. James climbed down from the surface, carefully making his way along a tipped column. The first thing that occurred to her was that his leg was fixed. The second was that he had a shotgun. Where had James gotten a shotgun?
The goddess saw him. She stopped laughing.
“Catch!” he yelled, tossing the gun.
Elise caught it, balancing it awkwardly between her hands. She’d only held a shotgun once before. Her father had taught her to shoot, but she hated them.
Still, she was armed. It was better than the alternative.
She whipped the butt of the shotgun across the goddess’s face. Her head snapped back.
Five.
The sky turned virulent red, and the world was falling. Elise’s senses screamed—demons everywhere, all around her, like she had felt in Dis so long ago—and the air tensed like something was about to snap.
Demons were climbing toward James. She was helpless to join him.
The goddess regained her footing and came at Elise, falchion raised. She braced the shotgun against her shoulder, took aim, and fired.
The goddess’s leg became a mess of red below the knee. She screamed in Latin. Elise smiled.
Six.
Elise tried to pump the shotgun so she could fire again, but the mechanism was stuck. Didn’t matter. She preferred the personal touch anyway.
She tossed the gun aside and ripped her falchion out of the goddess’s hand. The twin was next to the sacrifices. Elise grabbed it, too.
Holding both of her swords was like having her arms reattached. She was complete.
Seven.
Elise thought her skull might split in two.
The chime shook James off the pillar, dropping him in the crowd of waiting demons.
“James!” she shouted.
No response.
The dais rocked with the pendulum. She scrambled to keep her footing as the goddess lunged. Her stone knife slashed through the air and sliced into Elise’s arm, deeper than before. She cut into muscle.
The air thickened, darkened, grew sour. Air gusted from the grates. It stunk of sulfur, like the planes of Hell.
A man screamed.
Eight.
The goddess was fast. Too fast for a woman with a ruined leg. She twisted and spun, meeting the blades of Elise’s swords with her stone knife, swift and agile and skilled beyond imagining.
She deflected every swing, every strike. The ritual knife was a blur. Blades met, and Elise shoved her away. She couldn’t take down a goddess.
The clock was her last chance—the only way she could stop the collapse of the wall between Heaven and Earth.
Nine.
The goddess flashed in front of her. The knife bit into Elise’s injured side. She cried out, and her voice was silent under the bell’s roar.
Pain seared through her body when the goddess shoved her against the clock. Elise’s ears rang. Her vertebrae shook and scraped against each other.
The stone knife slashed open her brow. Blood cascaded down the side of her face.
Rain showered upon them. It tasted like acid.
Ten.
Her back was against the clock. She was right there, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. The goddess’s stinking breath heated Elise’s face as she smiled, baring bloody teeth.
If she couldn’t reach the heart of the clock, there was another heart she could reach.
She kicked the goddess away. Just enough to have room to move.
A wave of demons crashed against the dais, clambering over the edge. Their mouths were bloody. Elise wondered if any of that belonged to James.
Eleven.
She plunged her sword into the goddess’s chest.
The heart in the clock exploded blood, splattering against the inner workings. The hammer shattered.
The dais pitched and everyone fell.
The twelfth bell never rang.
When the eleventh bell died off, Elise was the only one left standing.
She clutched her sword in both hands as though it was her last line to life. Its blade dripped, her knuckles were white, and her gaze was empty. Her mind was a thousand miles away.
The pendulum no longer kept in time with the seconds. Its hand slowed with every swing.
Nearby, gray matter slipped out of a crack in a demon’s skull, oozing across the tile. It trickled into one of the iron grates and dripped onto underground fires a hundred feet below. Brain hit flame. It gave a hiss and smelled like barbecue.
Barbecue. Her stomach lurched.
The sword slipped from Elise’s fingers. Metal clattered against stone. The death goddess was sprawled at her feet, her necklace of skulls shattered, and her face had lost all its malice in death. She almost looked human.
The fires darkened and the heat faded.
Elise’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling. Her fingers twined through the curls at her scalp as her mouth opened in a silent cry. She had screamed too much earlier in the night and no longer had a voice.
Her knees weakened. She collapsed.
The clock’s pendulum continued to slow.
James pushed the bodies of demons off of him. Emptying every page of the Book—even the terrible ones he had sworn never to use—meant they had died in a thousand ugly ways. Ruptured organs. Suffocation. Burning from the inside.
His foot caught the pentagram-marked binder as he climbed free, but he didn’t pick it up. He didn’t want to look at it. He never wanted to cast a spell again.
The clock wasn’t ticking with that terrible pulse anymore, and the sudden silence made his ears ring. Coughing, he slipped to the bottom of the pillar. “Elise?” he called, voice muffled in his ears.
He nudged a demon’s body onto its back. The slash of its mouth gaped open, and the remaining air in its lungs sighed out with a whiff
of sulfur. Covering his nose and mouth with his arm, he moved forward. James scrutinized each body he passed, half expecting to see Elise beneath them.
The room depressurized, and the demons began to rot.
Their skin dissolved to reveal bone. Their chests spread and tore. Organs twisted like worms within their guts as they vanished. One by one, they rotted away until the only body left was that of the goddess in the front of the room.
A glint of steel caught his eye. His gaze moved from the sword to the legs beside it, and he realized the goddess wasn’t alone.
“Jesus Christ…” He scrambled onto the dais. Elise’s skin was shredded and her chest was blackened with blood, and his stomach flipped when he realized it was all hers. “Elise—oh, Lord, Elise…”
Her eyes fluttered open. “James?”
“Are you all right?”
She sat up carefully, wincing. “I’m not the one with a sword through my chest.” It wasn’t funny, but he laughed. Even a hint of humor after that fight was enough to drive him toward hysteria. “Let’s not do this again.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” He helped her stand, and then picked up the sword she dropped. Elise turned to leave. “Don’t you want the other one?”
She glanced at the falchion buried deep in the goddess’s chest. Her lip curled. “No. Hell can keep it.”
The bladed clock swung once more, and it stopped midway on the down stroke, forever frozen between tick and tock. The earth shook.
“We need to get out of here,” James said.
Slowly, painfully, they climbed to the surface. Night had fallen, and the rain had stopped, leaving the air sticky and hot. They staggered almost a quarter mile before collapsing.
Elise shuddered like a tree in a hurricane. Her wounds looked agonizing.
“Can you heal me?” she asked. Her voice came out in a raw whisper.
“I’m sorry. I have nothing left.”
She nodded without speaking. Her face was very pale.
They stared up at the vast black sky together. The clouds thinned, revealing stars and endless black sky. They waited until the sky faded to the deep navy of false dawn, and the sounds of night were replaced by birdsong.
When the sun broke the horizon, the light shone in Elise’s hollow gaze.
Demons & Djinn: Nine Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Novels Featuring Demons, Djinn, and other Bad Boys of the Underworld Page 182
