by Mel Odom
“They’re already coming,” Heather warned.
More cursing followed.
When she swept the torch’s beam across the foyer, Heather saw three young men and two women standing in the tube station. They held pillowcases filled with canned goods.
Around them, skeletons picked clean of flesh lay in wild disarray amid piles of refuse. The foyer smelled like a urinal. Of course, the tube had reeked of piss on occasion even before the Hellgate opened, but the survivors now lived in its stations.
The men and women were young, no more than mid-twenties and worn-looking. Even then, though, Heather couldn’t imagine living to be so old.
“Why did you bring them down here?” someone asked.
“It wasn’t like I had a lot of choice,” Heather retorted.
“We can’t stay here, Byron,” one of the young women said.
The man she talked to stood six feet tall. He carried an assault rifle. Heather felt certain he had gotten it from one of the military men who had fallen in battle. But he appeared to know how to use it.
Byron took the lead and walked back into the tube station as if he belonged there. “What are you doing here?” he asked Heather.
“I’m looking for my brother.”
After he turned the corner, he followed the stairs down to the boarding platforms. His torch flicked on.
“Is your brother out there?” Byron demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“You lost your brother?” one of the women asked. Her tone indicated she believed Heather was incredibly irresponsible.
“I didn’t lose him,” Heather replied defiantly. “When I got up, he was gone.”
“Too afraid to go out and scavenge on your own?” the other women taunted.
“No. Neil’s my younger brother. I’ve been scavenging for the both of us since this thing started.”
Byron played his torch in both directions along the tube line. “Feeling especially lucky?”
“No,” Heather said.
“Make her go another way,” one of the guys said. “If she’s brought bad luck, she needs to take it with her.”
Heather held back a ripping curse. It wouldn’t do to alienate people who might offer a degree of safety.
“No,” Byron said softly. “We stay together. If the demons have our scent, one more person can help. There’s safety in numbers.”
No one argued.
Byron shined his torch both ways again, then moved to the left. Within a few feet they were jogging. Heather hated that because she knew the sounds would carry and she wouldn’t be able to hear the monsters coming.
“You called them demons,” Heather told Byron when they paused to catch their breath.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because they are demons,” one of the women said.
“Demons aren’t real.” Heather hung on to that thought. She didn’t want to believe in demons. Despite everything she’d been through during the last four years, it was easier—more sane—to think of them as monsters.
“You’re too stupid to live,” the other woman said quietly.
“She’s lived through this for four years,” Byron said. “Leave her alone, Julie.”
Heather was silently grateful for Byron’s interference. But she resented it at the same time. She hadn’t asked for help.
“The demons are real,” Byron said. “Most people don’t call them that. There are some who still think they’re aliens.”
“From another world,” the other man said. “Not from across the channel.”
Heather knew that. She’d talked to some of those people too. They tended to wear aluminum foil hats and tried to convince her that the aliens were sending out thought-control brain waves.
“We’re down here foraging,” Byron said. “But we’re also looking for the knights.”
Heather remembered the stories about the knights too. When her friend’s parents had called them into the living room to watch the breaking news reports, there had been some coverage of the knights battling the monsters near St. Paul’s Cathedral.
There hadn’t been much. The reporting team covering the titanic battle between the knights and the monsters had been killed within minutes.
But the image of those knights, all of them standing tall—men and women—in their gleaming armor, had left an indelible impression on her. The impression had been left even more strongly on Neil.
He’d only been twelve. He’d still believed in super-heroes and good triumphing over evil. During the early days when they’d been hiding out, Neil had told her they needed to find the knights, that the knights would keep them safe.
The stories they’d heard about the knights guiding people out of London hadn’t helped. No one knew if the stories were true. All those who had managed to leave London had never returned.
Heather wouldn’t have, either. But she didn’t know where she would go. All of her family, her parents and her uncles and aunts, had died. There was no other place to go. And there were rumors that other Hellgates had opened up around the world too.
“The knights aren’t real,” Heather said. The pronouncement came out automatically. She’d told Neil that on several occasions. Neither of them could allow to get their hopes up. She couldn’t get her hopes up.
“You don’t even know the demons are real,” Julie said. “The knights are real.”
“Have you seen one?” Heather asked.
The young woman looked away.
“Thought so,” Heather said. However, she regretted her words immediately.
They walked in silence for a time. Heather didn’t want to stray too far from the neighborhood where she and Neil were staying. She had never known the city well, and too many things were wrecked that had once existed. Getting lost was easy.
She stopped at the next station. “I gotta get back. Neil’s still out there somewhere. I need to find him before morning.” He might even have already returned to the building where they were squatting and be worried about her. It would serve him right.
“Sure,” Byron said. “We’ll come up with you.”
The two women protested his decision, but Byron ignored them.
Heather was grateful because she didn’t want to be alone. She couldn’t tell Byron that, though.
They went up slowly and without the torches. There was just enough moonlight to manage to get through the foyer and to the door.
Outside again, Heather glanced along the street. Something slithered above her. Panicked, she turned and looked up.
A monster clung to the wall only a few feet above the entranceway. Moonlight splintered against its ivory grin. It twisted its head from side to side, and she felt it was showing off, letting her know that she didn’t have a chance against it.
It tracked me, Heather thought helplessly. Before she could step back into the foyer or take a fresh grip on the weighted pipe, it leapt.
White light suddenly flared through the night and a whirring sound of metal on metal echoed around Heather. Stunned, she watched as the monster’s advance changed in midleap. A silvery ball slammed into it, then spread into a delicate spider’s web that enveloped the creature. The bound monster dropped heavily to the cracked sidewalk beside Heather.
“Get back,” a hoarse voice ordered.
When she glanced to her left, Heather saw an armored figure striding from the shadows. As the figure came closer, Heather made out the feminine form. She was over six feet tall. Some kind of metal covered her from head to foot. A blank faceplate disguised her features.
As Heather watched, the armor seemed to pulse. The night’s darkness drained from the gleaming metal. By the time the knight reached Heather, the metal was silvery.
Above the tube entranceway, more monsters clung to the wall. One of them leaped from the wall toward the knight. Its jaws were wide open and its front forearms were poised to bring the jutting chitin blades into play.
The knight drew a long sword from her
hip. Runes glowed along the double-edged blade. A gem or some kind of device mounted in the hilt glowed bilious green. The knight stepped forward and swung the sword in mailed fists.
After the blade met the monster with a great green flare that left spots dancing in Heather’s eyes, the monster fell to the sidewalk in halves. The flesh smoked and showed burned spots.
Another demon had already been in motion and had leapt from the building as well. Unable to draw the sword back in time, the knight pulled one fist free and swung it backhanded at the monster. Just before the armored fist connected with the creature, it glowed incandescent green. Hooked spikes formed along the back of the glove. They sliced easily through the monster’s flesh.
Driven aside by the blow, the monster flopped to the ground. Before the creature could recover, the knight raised one of her feet over its head. A spike suddenly jutted out the side of the armored boot. Mercilessly, the knight rammed the spike through the monster’s head. The keen point not only punctured its intended victim, but also passed several inches into the pavement.
When the knight turned back to the creature bound in the gleaming silvery net, she flexed her hand and made a fist. Abruptly, the wire strands surrounding the trapped monster suddenly tightened and sliced through the scaly flesh.
The monster howled in terrified pain as the strands sank through its body. In seconds, though, the howls stopped and the creature had been reduced to chunks of meat and bone.
“Come on down,” the knight taunted the monsters still clinging to the wall. “Come on down and die.”
Heather didn’t know if the monsters could understand words. Somehow the idea that they were clever enough to understand spoken language made it worse. If they were just animals hunting it was horrible enough. But if they were intelligent and malevolent, the situation seemed even more insurmountable.
The knight dragged her sword tip across the pavement in a half-circle. Green sparks shot into the air.
The surviving creatures all backed away. They howled in anger. In a few more seconds, they hauled themselves back over the lamppost.
Heather gazed in wide-eyed wonder at the knight.
“It’s true,” one of the women with Byron said. “The story about the knights is all true.”
The knight raised her sword in both hands. She smiled fiercely as she turned to them. “Not knights,” she said. “Templar. We are Templar.”
As she looked into the knight’s—Templar’s—face, Heather saw the sickness in the woman’s features. She looked wan and hollow.
As if something’s eating her from the inside, Heather couldn’t help thinking.
The device on the sword, mounted just below the cross guard, grew brighter green. The illumination lit up the immediate area and chased the shadows back from Heather and the others. A wave of nausea twisted through Heather’s stomach.
Something’s wrong.
“You can save us,” Julie half-whispered. The words sounded too loud. “You can guide us out of London and get us to safety.”
“I want to save you,” the Templar said. “But I can’t.” She howled in pain and shook visibly. “You need to get out of here. I can’t control it much longer.”
Heather took a step back.
“It’s inside me,” the Templar said. “Inside my mind.” Tears slid down her face. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. I thought I could control it.”
“Tell me,” Heather said desperately. “Tell me where the safe places are.”
“Get out of here.” A paroxysm shook through the Templar.
“There are safe places,” Heather said. “We’ve heard about them. The knights have them.”
“No.”
Heather didn’t know what the Templar was saying no to. “I don’t understand.”
The Templar stopped quivering, looked up, and smiled. “There are no safe places anymore, fools. Now you’ll pay the price for your stupid, pathetic hope.”
Heather managed to turn and run, but she didn’t take more than three steps before she felt the sword thrust between her shoulder blades. All sensation below her shoulders left her. Her legs crumpled and she fell to the ground in a kneeling position. Only the sword held her up.
Several inches of it stood out from her chest. She gazed at the weapon in disbelief. The knights—the Templar—were supposed to be good. Neil had told her they were helping everyone stranded in London, and that they were fighting the monsters.
Not true, Heather thought as she felt her body turn cold. Not all of them.
The sword blade blazed incandescent green. Heather felt herself dwindle and grow small. Then she was sucked into darkness.
ONE
Y ou have found them, vassal. Now I want them dead.
From the third-story fire escape, Warren Schimmer gazed down at his prey and tried not to think of them as human. Not that it would have mattered too terribly much. With his life in the balance against theirs, he would save his own life every time. That was how he’d done things for the last four years.
Do not hesitate or your own life will be forfeit.
The deep, rasping voice in Warren’s head belonged to Merihim, a demon who had chosen Warren as one of his pawns in the demonic wars playing out over England. To disobey orders would be to die in a most horrible fashion.
Warren was afraid of dying. He’d nearly been killed by his stepfather when he was a boy. His stepfather had just succeeded in killing Warren’s mother. The sound of the gunshots still haunted him at night.
But those dreams were less scary than the ones of the demon.
The five people below moved cautiously. Four of them, three men and one woman, were security guards. Warren knew that from the way they moved and the weapons they carried. They also wore hard-shell Kevlar vests and Kevlar helmets.
The fifth person was a man in his middle years. The others had bundled him up in body armor, too, but he moved uncomfortably in it. He clutched a package tightly to his chest.
Merihim wanted the package.
Warren didn’t know what it was. He rarely knew what Merihim sent him after. During the last four years, the demon’s primary command had been to watch and grow stronger in his powers. Warren knew that Merihim often watched through his eyes. The demon’s flesh bound them.
Occasionally, when Merihim’s guards were down, or because Warren was growing stronger in his powers, Warren sometimes got glimpses of the things the demon saw. When Merihim caught him spying, as he did most of the time, Warren ended up getting migraines that left him sick and hurting for days.
Worst of all, those episodes left Warren defenseless. He’d had to rely on others to keep him safe. Dependence had never come easily to him. These days he hated it worse than ever.
Control had always been a big part of Warren’s life. Now, what little control he did have was just an illusion. Merihim controlled him. But he also protected him.
It was a suitable trade-off. Most of the people Warren had met over the last four years had died hard deaths. Living, even as a demon’s vassal, was better than dying.
Even when it meant killing others.
The five men entered the alley and walked beneath Warren’s position. A small object, no larger than a racquet-ball, trailed them from a discreet distance.
Warren gestured. The object changed course immediately and came to him. He caught it in his right hand, the demon’s hand that Merihim had given him after he’d lost his own in battle against a Templar named Simon Cross. It was the hand that bound Warren to Merihim so tightly.
Covered with silvery-green scales, the hand was proportioned to his own. In the first few months he’d had it, it had changed. Except for the coloration, the scales, and the black nails, most wouldn’t give it a second glance. Unless they’d heard the stories about him.
The object squirmed inside Warren’s hand.
“Stop,” he said softly, too quietly for the men below to hear.
The thing stopped trying to escape.
Wa
rren opened his hand and examined it. The object was an eyeball he’d plucked from a dying Blood Angel. As the demon had expired, Warren had worked the binding spell that Merihim had coached him in.
When he’d finished, the eye had been his and he could see through it as Merihim could see through his eyes. Over the years, he’d made more of them. He’d created other things as well. They sometimes moved and jerked in the demonhide bag he carried slung over one shoulder.
None of the other Cabalists he knew had been able to make such things. Of course, none of the others were bound to a demon.
He pushed the Blood Angel’s eye into the bag and shook off the attempts of the other things in there to get free. None of them could escape the bag. His power bound them there.
Do not fail me.
Warren summoned the power within him. He felt strong. On those occasions when he directly obeyed the demon’s orders, he had discovered that his reservoirs of power were a lot bigger. Tonight he felt especially strong.
He threw the demon’s hand before him, fingers out-spread. Force shimmered against his palm. He felt it, and he saw it as a rippling wave of smoke. With a flick, the force shot from his hand and struck one of the two rear guards.
The man went down without a sound. He sprawled in a loose tangle of limbs.
The other rear guard shouted a warning, then hunkered down into a half-crouch with his weapon raised in his hands. It was some kind of machine pistol. Warren knew that from countless online First-Person Shooters and RPGs he’d played.
One of the other two guards clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder and jerked him into rapid motion. The man, overburdened by the body armor, almost tripped and fell. The guard managed to keep him upright and moving.
The other guard half-crouched as well and looked around the alley. His eyes drifted up and locked onto Warren. Too late, Warren saw that the man had flipped down lenses from the Kevlar helmet. Obviously they offered some kind of infrared or night-vision capabilities because the man had no problem spotting Warren.
Even as he felt the man’s gaze on him, Warren leaped from the third-story fire escape landing. No human could have survived the drop without serious injury. Warren landed and barely flexed his legs to absorb the shock.
