by Mel Odom
“Wait,” the voice said.
Merihim hovered nearby. Warren felt the demon watching through his eyes.
Frustrated and screaming for vengeance, Hargastor started forward. He managed two steps before the pustules began bursting and unleashed small salamander-looking creatures that immediately attacked their host.
The strength went out of the demon and he dropped to his knees. His face screwed up in disbelief and agony. “No! This can’t be happening! Fulaghar!” He held his hands up to the ceiling in supplication as more pustules burst and more salamander-things chewed on him. “Fulaghar! Save me!”
No one came, though.
As Warren watched, all semblance of life drained from Hargastor’s face. His beseeching arms dropped to his sides and his eyes rolled back up into his head. He fell forward and hit the ground without trying to stop himself.
The salamander-things started feasting in earnest.
You can go, Merihim said. Find the remaining two. Then we will destroy Fulaghar.
“We?” Warren thought weakly as he started at the demon corpse the salamander-things had been born in and now devoured. Merihim didn’t hear his thought, though, or chose not to react to it. Warren felt the demon draw away from him.
“It’s over,” the voice said. “Go while you’re still able.”
But Warren couldn’t. Too much remained yet to be explored. He stared at the Templar in dark blue and silver standing on the other side of Hargastor’s corpse.
“Warren, let me bring you back,” Naomi pleaded. “You’ve got to hurry. I feel you getting weaker.”
Listening to his own heart, Warren knew that he was dying—that he would die if he didn’t return to his body where Naomi watched over it. But he stared at the blank face of the Templar’s helm.
“You owe me,” Warren told the Templar. “You took my hand and bound me to a demon.” He tried to find additional energy within himself, anything to strike against the Templar. The man inside the armor was barely standing as well. “I will kill you.”
Without a word, the Templar lifted his sword in his left hand. Energy crackled across the blank faceplate.
“You’re in league with the demons,” the Templar accused.
Warren couldn’t believe it. “I just killed a demon about to slaughter you.”
“That’s your interpretation, mate.” The other male Templar had his pistol leveled at Warren. “We had him right where we bloody wanted him. And you’re not in a good place to be making threats.”
The slim black-clad woman pointed her rifle at him.
“Another time, Templar,” Warren said. He couldn’t help feeling the threat was lame, like it was ripped right out of a comic book that he’d read. But what else could he say that would get the point across?
He felt frustrated that his rage and hate could feel so strong and so sure, and that he couldn’t articulate it any better than that. But then he thought that maybe emotions felt so much could only be spoken of in simple terms. There was nothing complex about revenge.
“Another time,” the Templar agreed. He saluted Warren with his blade.
At first Warren believed the response was grandiose, driven by ego. But when he searched for the man behind the metal face, he sensed none of that. The gesture was eloquent and meant without hypocrisy or cheap theatrics.
“Warren.” Naomi sounded far away.
Silently, Warren let down his defenses and let her call him back across the yawning blackness that separated his sanctuary from the sanitarium. He felt as if he’d taken a step to the side and turned inside out.
THIRTY-TWO
S imon watched the man with the demon hand fade from view. In seconds, there was nothing left of him to show that he’d ever been there.
Except the dead demon stretched out on the floor. The body jiggled and jerked as the salamander-things tore chunks of flesh from it and devoured them in gulps.
Simon crossed the room and recovered his Spike Bolter. Lifting the pistol, he took aim and killed the salamander-things with quick bursts. Danielle and Nathan joined his efforts. No one wanted the things turning on them in case their armor offered no more protection than the demon’s hide.
He stepped to the fallen Templar. His name was Mathias Birch. He was a year or two younger than Simon.
“Are you still with me, Mathias?” Simon asked. He dropped a hand on the Templar’s armor and got a medical readout. Mathias was in shock and struggling to breathe. A broken rib had punctured his lung. There were other broken bones as well, but the lung was the worst of it.
“I am,” the Templar whispered weakly.
“I’m going to put you into stasis to get you out of pain,” Simon said.
“I can handle it, Simon.” Mathias lifted a quivering hand. “Just give me a hand up and I’ll be right as rain. You’ll see.”
Simon didn’t want to argue. If the younger man tried moving around too much, the lung could completely collapse or the rib might move farther and damage his heart. He took Mathias’s hand.
“Thanks, Simon. You’ll see. I’m not going to fall behind. And you’re not going to have to lose another warrior because I’ve let myself get bollixed up.”
“This isn’t your fault, Mathias.” Simon interfaced his suit’s AI with that of the younger man and overrode the other AI’s system. He triggered the stasis function and Mathias went limp inside the suit.
Gently, Simon laid the young Templar on the ground. He ran his hands over Mathias’s torso and locked sections of the armor into place so they wouldn’t move. They would also provide better support during transport.
“Stasis effective,” the suit’s AI said. “Mathias is resting. Life-support systems control subject’s autonomous system.”
“Good,” Simon said. “Take care of him.”
“I will.”
“Christopher,” Simon said.
The other young Templar standing nearby came forward. “Yes.”
“I need you to get Mathias out of here,” Simon said. “In case we run into any more trouble.”
“All right.”
“Nathan. I’ll need a hand.”
Together, Simon and Nathan lifted the unconscious Templar and strapped him to Christopher’s back. Once they had him in place, the Templar walked back down the passageway.
Simon hoped that both of them would arrive safely. Then he freed his Spike Bolter and continued down the corridor to find the Goetia manuscript.
“Did you know him?” Nathan asked as he and Simon checked another pair of cells. “The man with the demon’s hand?”
“His name is Warren,” Simon answered. If the suit’s AI hadn’t retained that information from the two encounters he’d had with the man, he knew he wouldn’t have remembered. There had been too many things happening since that time in the basement four years ago and on the train Simon had arranged to take so many of London’s survivors from the city.
“Warren what?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know him?”
“The last time we saw him, he tried to kill us,” Leah said.
Nathan turned to her. “So you know him too?”
“Yes. But that’s all we know about him.” Though her faceplate remained implacable, her voice took on another timber. “We’ll know more about him next time.”
“‘Next time?’” Nathan snorted. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but that guy just bloody leveled a demon that was about to hand us our heads.”
“I thought you didn’t see it that way,” Danielle said.
“I was trying to sound convincing. I did sound convincing, didn’t I?”
Simon kept going forward and ducked into the next cell. The manuscript had to be somewhere up ahead. They were running out of places to look.
Rage and helplessness, both old and familiar companions, surged through Warren as he returned to his body. He’d battled both when he’d lived with his mother and stepfather, then again throughout his foster care. He knew what to e
xpect from them.
But the weight across his chest was totally unexpected.
Weak and somewhat disoriented, Warren opened his eyes. Naomi lay stretched across his body. At first he feared that she was dead. Guilt ratcheted into the emotional cocktail exploding through his veins. If he’d stayed too long, if he’d cost her too much, he didn’t know how he was going to handle that.
A shallow pulse beat at the hollow of her throat. Her breath coasted across his cheek.
Tenderly, Warren moved her weight off his body so he could breathe easier. She slumped to the floor beside him. The fear didn’t go away. Just because she was breathing didn’t mean some kind of brain damage hadn’t taken place. He’d seen several Cabalists suffer severe mental problems brought on by trying to get closer to the arcane energies the demons wielded.
On more than one occasion the Cabalist seeking to improve his or her understanding of those energies had been completely mind-wiped. When they’d returned from the trances they’d undertaken, they’d been vegetables. Others lost motor control of parts or all of their bodies, reduced to physical cripples that could no longer even care for themselves.
A few others hadn’t returned, but things—lingering impressions of the dead who had once lived in the house where the arcane procedure took place and demons—had come back in their stead. Usually those instances were just as devastating for the Cabalists around those afflicted by possession of one sort or another.
The “lingering impressions”—called ghosts by some, not because they believed in ghosts but because they lacked anything better to call them—were usually malevolent and displaced. Those impressions knew nothing of the world today.
Some of the Cabalists, those who believed in unquiet spirits, also chose to believe that the spirit world was trying to connect with them to give them more information. Warren didn’t think that. The dead were dead and gone. That was the long and the short of it.
He forced himself up and into a kneeling position as he checked Naomi. He checked her airways and found them unobstructed, then watched the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. When he felt for her pulse, it was slow and steady.
Nothing appeared wrong.
“Naomi,” he called.
She didn’t reply, but one eyelid flickered a little.
“Naomi.”
Still no reply.
Warren slipped a hand beneath her head and shook her shoulder a little. She didn’t react. He felt tired and drained, as if he was going to fall over at any moment.
“She’s all right,” the voice said. “She’s just sleeping.”
“How do you know?” Warren demanded.
“Because I do.”
“You’re a book. You don’t know everything.”
The voice was silent for a moment. “I’m not the book, Warren Schimmer. The book is merely a gateway, a conduit I use.”
“You said you’ve been locked away for years.”
“I was. I still am.”
Warren looked down at Naomi and tried to will her awake. He didn’t want to be alone right now. Not when he felt so horrid and about to throw up because he was sick and scared.
“How can you be locked away?” Warren demanded. “You’re here. With me.”
“No. That book is the key to allowing me to interface with this world.”
“What are you saying? That you’re not here?”
The hesitation stretched out again. “I’m here, Warren. In this world. Just locked away from it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was…bound.”
“‘Bound?’ Bound by whom?”
“The demons.”
“Why would they bind you?”
“Because I don’t want them to have the power here that they want.”
Warren thought about that as he held Naomi. “Could you have kept them from it?”
“It’s possible I could have kept them from this world entirely.”
“How?”
“Now isn’t the time to go into that.”
The urge to argue and push for answers gripped Warren. He pushed that feeling aside and tried to concentrate on Naomi instead. “When will be the time?”
“I don’t know. There’s still so much you have yet to learn.”
Warren laughed at that, but tears rolled from his eyes. “I won’t have a bloody lot of time to learn whatever it is you’re going to show me. I’ve still got two demons to kill. And Fulaghar.”
“I know.”
“Unless you know of a way I can destroy Merihim.” The thin hope dawned inside him before he knew it.
“You have to be patient. Merihim sows the seeds of his own destruction. That isn’t for me to do. Nor you.”
“I’m bound to him.” Warren was conscious of the tears streaming down his face.
“You don’t always have to be.”
“How can I separate from him?”
“Now isn’t the time for this.”
“I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Neither does the world.”
Warren wiped his face. “What are you saying?”
“I’m here to save the world, Warren. If events work out well, I’ll save you too.”
With Danielle at his side, Simon led the way through the passageway. They walked through the area where the demon Hargastor had been holding the humans it had captured.
“Why was the demon holding captives here?” Leah asked.
“Because this is where it was,” Simon answered as he looked down at the corpses of Darkspawn and humans. Part of him felt as though he’d failed. There shouldn’t have been any innocents on the battlefield, but he knew that wasn’t how this war was going to be fought. The innocents were the prizes the demons sought.
“I don’t understand,” Leah said. “The demon said it was down here looking for a book. I assume that book is the same manuscript that we’re looking for.”
“This place isn’t stocked very well as a library, now is it?” Danielle asked.
“No, but that doesn’t explain why the demon would have people caged down here while it searched. There isn’t anyone alive in these levels. It had to have brought them here. I don’t understand why it felt the need.”
“To torture them and kill them,” Simon said as he moved on.
“That doesn’t make any sense. Having prisoners involved in an operation is a colossal risk.”
“The humans were entertainment,” Danielle said.
“I have trouble believing that.”
“This is what the bloody demons do,” Nathan said. “They torture and they kill anything weaker than they are. When they don’t have humans around to subjugate and terrorize, they prey on each other.”
Simon listened to the words and remembered how his father had told him similar things all his life. As a child he’d accepted his father’s teachings without question. But as a young man he’d challenged everything—including the existence of the demons.
“You’ve lived through this mess for four years,” Nathan went on. “Surely you’ve learned a few things during that time.”
“I’m trying to get a better idea of what they’re here to do. Understanding an enemy’s wants and needs are tantamount to fighting them.”
“Do you believe in good and evil?” Danielle asked.
“They’re concepts,” Leah said. “Architecture for processing behavior patterns.”
“No,” Nathan said. “Good and evil exist. At least, evil does. And in its purest form, evil is the demons.”
The words sounded eerie and prophetic in the empty passageway. Simon felt chilled inside his armor and thought maybe that was a reaction to the injuries he’d received and the drugs in his system.
“They don’t operate on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs,” Nathan went on. “They live to kill everything weaker than them. From what we’ve learned, they’ve destroyed hundreds of worlds before they found this one.”
“But they’re terraforming th
e city.”
“The Burn?”
“Yes. They’re remaking it into something they want.”
“They’re remaking it into a place where anything human can’t live,” Nathan said. “They’re taking away the hiding places and home of their prey. Have you ever seen a forest fire? Not the fire itself, but the aftereffects.”
Simon had. He remembered how the grass had been burned to black ash and the trees had been stripped of leaves and small branches by the hungry flames.
“Yes,” Leah answered.
“The Burn is like that. It strips and changes everything. The animals that are there, the ones that miraculously lived through the fire, are generally sickened by exposure to the fire. And they have no place left to run.”
“We—I—thought that the Burn was meant to acclimate our world into something resembling theirs.”
“So they could live here?”
“Yes.”
Nathan laughed. “You’re naïve.”
Leah whirled on the Templar and brought her rifle up. Simon halted and turned back to watch even though he could see everything that was happening on his HUD. Danielle started to step forward.
Simon placed a hand on Danielle’s shoulder and opened a private communications channel. “No.”
“She’s going to attack him,” Danielle objected.
“Wait.” Simon watched Leah. After having known her for four years, he felt certain that if she’d decided to attack Nathan she would have already done so. However, the possibility of an attack still lingered.
THIRTY-THREE
“I ’m not naïve,” Leah said in a hard, cold voice. Anger twisted violently inside her. It was everything she could do to keep from hammering the Templar before her with the butt of her rifle.
The sights she’d seen down in the sanitarium were horrible even before they’d encountered the demons. She’d grown up with man’s inhumanity to man. Her own family was dysfunctional. She’d become what she’d become in order to get away from them.
“I’ve spent four years watching men, women, and children die and have been unable to do anything about it,” she continued in a thick voice. “I know how evil the demons can be. I just want…I just want to understand them more.”
