by Jenn Stark
The creature turned and stared through the sandstorm, and from my position near Nigel’s elbow, I saw him more clearly. He was pretty much man shaped, and if he was dead, which surely had to be the case if he could be summoned by a Deathwalker, he was remarkably well preserved. Stocky and powerful, his face had flat features and dark eyes, the whole of him radiating a malevolence I could sense even from outside the circle.
“What is the information you seek?” the trapped warrior boomed, and something shifted slightly in his expression. His skin rippled with the force of that shift, making my veins ice up. This wasn’t…quite a man. Maybe possibly a demon, in fact.
It was too late to go back now, however. Nigel and I had discussed what he would say at length, since any dinosaur who demanded a man speak with him wouldn’t take kindly to a woman spouting off from the sidelines. My Ace cut straight to the point.
“A war is coming,” he said. “Gods seeking to tear through the veil and return to Earth. We would know who seeks to enter our world, and where, and when.”
“Do you know who I am, pale warrior?” the creature in the circle asked sharply, a new emotion skating across his mobile face, and not a happy one. “Do you know whom you have summoned from the crypt of honor beneath the stones of fallen Atlantis?”
Oh, freaking great. There was a whole lot more anger pouring out of this guy than was strictly helpful. I leaned forward, staring hard at the cards, then reached out and drew three in quick succession.
Ace of Swords. Truth was being spoken here, at least.
The other two cards were The Emperor and Ten of Swords.
Uh-oh.
“I served the first Emperor of the Arcana Council,” the warrior suddenly snarled. “And he damned me for my service. Who are you to demand any more of me?”
Yup, definitely a demon.
Chapter Two
Nigel didn’t hesitate. “You answered the summons, and you are bound to speak,” he said, infusing his voice with an impressive amount of hauteur. “Who seeks to pierce the veil?”
“You all will die,” the demon spat, and with his rage, a little of his veneer fell away, giving a better visual of the impact of several thousand years of damnation. His skin seemed to slip from his face, revealing the bone beneath before resettling. His eyes and mouth shifted too, first appearing healthy and whole, then becoming three yawning black holes in his skull.
I drew another card. Seven of Swords.
“Stalling,” I murmured, and Nigel took an aggressive step forward.
“Who will come?” he demanded again. “I want their names.”
“The she-beast Vigilance,” the man growled, the words strangled in his throat. “And with her, the snakes of her reign.”
Snakes? That seemed an odd detail. A quick card pull produced the Hermit. Slip-n-skin was telling the truth. Great. So, snakes.
He kept going, though. “Taranis of the Celts. Moloch. Kali. Asmodeus. All those the world most fears.”
I continued to pull cards as quickly as he spoke, but I didn’t like what I was seeing. I was getting minors, now, and a useless mixture of them at that. The dead guy had started to lie.
“He cannot lie.” It was Danae who spoke, and I jerked my head up to meet her eyes, which seemed to pierce me, lit with a subtle glow. “He cannot. He may not be telling the truth, but it is the truth as he knows it.”
“Then who—”
But Nigel was already on it. “Warrior,” he shouted, cutting off the demon’s tirade. “Who gave you this information? How do you know that these are the gods nearest to the veil?”
“Because they are the ones who hate the earth the most, the earth and what it’s become,” the demon snapped back, spittle flying from his lips as he refocused on Nigel. The gobbet burst through the air, then sizzled to nothing as it hit the wall of magic that made up the protective circle.
The demon reached up and wiped a meaty paw against his mouth. “All the powers I speak of have long lain in wait for their vindication. The ghost warriors of Onryō seek to ride with their brethren once more, laying waste to the foolish and weak.”
Another card, this one the Knight of Swords. This one could be real. But Moloch? Really? I flipped another card: the Five of Swords. That didn’t make me any happier. So, not Moloch, but something worse. Great.
Still, our informant had become an unreliable witness, and if so, we were wasting our time.
“Who is giving you your information?” Nigel asked again.
“My information comes from the most powerful god of all, the god you know nothing about, though you think you do…oh yes, you think you do.”
Card flip: Ace of Pentacles. Definite truth. And there was something about the nature of the demon that seemed to shift as well. His manner seemed almost desperate, as if he was flailing against a wall for all that he was standing still. As if he thought he might be able to get something for all his trouble.
Something like vindication? Release from his eternal demon torment?
“Ask him his story,” I said to Nigel.
To his credit, my Ace didn’t question my direction, his face showing only the slightest flicker of confusion. “How came you to die, warrior?” he asked.
“What?” The demon stopped his trembling, refocusing on Nigel. His lips curled harshly as he glared. “I told you my story.”
“You told us the Emperor of the Council betrayed you. Tell us more.”
“Betrayed me! He did more than that. He damned me to an eternity—as this.” The creature lifted his arms as if they were an abomination, and I wondered what he saw, what life as a demon must truly be like. When he dropped his arms, he seemed to have aged a thousand years, and in his hands, he now held a walking staff, which he planted heavily into the floor in front of him.
I didn’t have the luxury of considering the stick further as he continued. “His were the words of betrayal that cracked the Council in two. As then, so today, it is written. He will betray you again.”
Another Ace, this time of Swords. Crap. I didn’t have time to deal with the Emperor right now. I’d thought he would be busy for a while trying to sort out his own issues.
Another creepy laugh escaped the demon in his haunting, snuffling voice. “And what is your curren Emperor doing, warrior? He is no different from the Emperor of the Council in my day. He too pulls demons close to do his bidding, but he does not seek to save them. He seeks only to betray. Betray them like the dogs they had become when the light was ripped from them and they were eternally condemned.” The demon’s mouth stretched wide in a mirthless laugh. “The Syx. They were the most powerful of all of us, which is why they survived their punishment to serve anew, though that was no life.”
Despite myself, I perked up. The Syx were a half-dozen demons currently allowed to remain on Earth through the auspices of, the warrior here nailed it, the Emperor. But Viktor was giving the Syx safe harbor, not betraying them, I’d thought.
Then again, this was Viktor we were talking about.
Nigel, as if sensing my interest, leaned forward. “Powerful how?”
“Enforcers,” he sneered, the end of the word obscured by a hacking cough. “But they too are finally doomed.”
This was getting off track, but I found my gaze riveted on the demon as he leaned heavily on his walking staff. Now there was no pretense of him as a tall and broad-shouldered warrior. His back was stooped and hunched, his head hung low, his face became elongated as large fangs now poked their way out of his mouth. His ears were laid flat against his head, pointed now, and his hands had stretched into long gnarled claws. The once-bright clothes hung from his emaciated form, and he wobbled.
“He will do to them what he and the Archangel did to me,” the demon rasped, and I hesitated only a second before I reached out with a trembling hand, flipping over another card. The Hierophant. The demon spoke truth. “He will rob them of their energy, husk their bodies from their souls, and leave—this,” he said, gesturing to his form. “Until
it falls and molders in the ground, dead but tied to this earth, unable to break free. Beholden to whatever foul Deathwalker should summon me to do her bidding.”
As if for the first time, the demon seemed to realize that a ring of men and women stood at attention around him, and that each of them wielded a blade. His lips stretched back from his fangs, and his guttural laugh rasped from his throat. “Twelve!” he exclaimed. “Thirteen with the Queen of Death herself. I must have moved up in the world for such an honor.”
I sent a surprised glance to Danae, but she appeared unfazed. “We have had the opportunity to speak with Daniel before. Normally, he is more helpful.” She leaned forward in her makeshift throne, her voice going silky with menace. “You’re not looking too well, Daniel. There’s something you’re not telling us, isn’t there? I command you to do so now.”
Her words seem to have a galvanizing effect on the demon. He jerked straight, one hand gripping the staff more urgently as his eyes widened. For the first time, I realized that the creature’s tremors were caused not by his past infirmities so much as a very real and present pain. The direct command served to rip away the last of the demon’s glamour. His skin peeled away from his face, and his body became a mass of scars and crumbled bone.
“Unfortunately, Danae, you’re not the only one who is capable of commanding me in this putrefied state,” the demon growled. “Would that I only have to worry about you. But that is not the lot of the demons trapped on the other side of the veil, clinging to any life they might live, any light they might see. Eventually, even the light of death becomes preferable to the endless darkness.”
That…sounded ominous. I reached out for another card. Ace of Cups. Bad attitude or not, the guy was speaking the truth. Or, as Danae said, the truth as he knew it.
“When will the first strike take place?” Nigel asked sharply, bringing us all back to the matter at hand. “Will the gods seek to tear the veil all at once, entering at multiple points, or will they enter in stages?”
The demon grinned, a singularly unsettling expression. “What do you think? Their only chance is keeping the Council and its allies in disarray. It’ll all come at once, with a flurry of activity meant to obscure, distract.” He sighed then, looking almost chagrined. “They’ll succeed in reaching Earth, somehow, some way. You must know that. It won’t be a matter of keeping them out, just what you do with them when they come.”
“How do you know this?” Nigel asked sharply.
A sudden whoosh of air surged out of the center of the circle, setting the demon into a paroxysm of laughter and causing the witches surrounding the space to step back briefly before firming their stance.
“He knows because it is already happening.”
That… was a new voice.
Danae stood, her sudden focus doing more to unnerve me than anything the cackling demon could have done. She shouted something in an ancient-sounding language, and the tiki torches all surged with sudden intensity, the flames reaching high and sending the shadows dancing.
In the center of the circle, the demon arched his back as if he’d been shot through, his arms flung to the side, his head tipped back. He gasped in genuine pain, but suddenly, he wasn’t the only entity in the circle. The shadows seemed to rush in from the wide corners of the room, giving the space behind the writhing demon a depth and dimension it hadn’t possessed before. A creature of smoke and darkness seemed to grow even as it was already stretching the bonds of the circle, like a child trying to fit into last season’s jeans.
“Hold the circle!” Danae cried, and while there was steel in her voice, there was also panic. I didn’t need to be told that this had never happened before. She flew off her makeshift throne on her dais, brandishing two athame blades, and took her place as part of the circle of witches. Together, their chants soared higher. The whipping smoke of demon and creature didn’t breach the edge of the pentagram. The chalk melted a little at the edges, but the circle held. The Deathwalkers braced themselves more firmly, their shoulders leaning into the power that was pushing out from the center of the circle, but their magic held.
Still, there was something terribly wrong with what was going on inside the circle. A new being was taking form, its edges indistinct at first. The cadence of Danae and her coven’s orders grew more strident, but the thing paid her no mind, pulsing larger and then smaller again, as if trying to figure out how to present itself in the constrained space of the circle. As it grew more distinct, the demon Daniel finally collapsed to the ground, his edges seeming to fray even as the new demon took form.
No, not a demon. A dragon.
A dragon I knew all too well.
Llyr.
“No!” I leapt to my feet, the cards scattering in the sudden maelstrom that had erupted from the center of the circle.
My sudden movement didn’t escape Llyr’s notice. He arched his neck, the sinuous coil curving his head around until fiery eyes of red and gold fixed on me. His head was all that could fit in the circle at first, and then, with another pulse, the whole of him shrank until I saw the top edges of his wings for a single heart-tearing moment, before once again they slipped out of view. This wasn’t a kid trying to fit into new pants, it was a creature of claw and bone trying to scrabble out his prison… and it couldn’t happen on my watch.
Llyr was the most dangerous of all the gods beyond the veil, a dragon who had once wielded the magic of Atlantis itself. His acolytes were the mightiest wizards and warlocks on Earth. They commanded the elements, gravity, and the deep-seated power of the land, sea and sky to do their lord’s bidding. It was Llyr’s overreach of that power that had caused the establishment of the first Council, and for all these long millennia, the Council had been successful in holding him on the other side of the veil. It looked like it was time to reinforce his cage.
“No,” I said again. The cards forgotten at my feet, I settled my weight onto my heels and held my hands out, palms up. Fire raced around my fingers, setting them alight, and Llyr hissed.
Only, it wasn’t a hiss. It was a laugh.
“Sara, Sara, Sara… the time for your magic tricks to catch me unawares is long past.” The dragon didn’t speak aloud, exactly, but his voice filled my head, sounding like it was spoken through the bones of the world. “Instead, this is the moment where you realize how powerful your betters are.”
With that, the dragon opened his mouth.
I’d heard Llyr roar before. When the Magician of the Arcana Council and I had combined our efforts to keep Llyr behind the veil as he tried to break through the fountains of the Bellagio Casino, the dragon’s roar had been a thing of power and beauty and rage.
This was nothing like that.
When Llyr stretched his jaws wide, it wasn’t exactly sound that came out. It was darkness. Darkness that took form and flight and raged into the circle with the screams of a thousand tortured souls. Demons, I recognized at once. Far stronger than the pitiful creature still moaning somewhere beneath all the smoke roiling at the base of the circle. These were brutal, powerful creatures at the full height of their strength, their almost-human faces contorted with fury, their heavily muscled bodies rippling with scars and motes of flame as Llyr’s fiery breath set them alight. And they kept coming. First twenty, then a hundred, then still more.
In a matter of moments, it was too much. With a wailing cry they burst through the bonds of the circle and immediately attacked the witches standing guard on this side. Nigel took up the battle alongside the coven, borrowed blades suddenly flashing in his hands. My fire seemed anathema to the demon horde, all of them splitting away from me to take down any other foe.
I turned back to Llyr, but there was nothing left in the circle—the dragon had not fully been able to enter this powerful place after all. He’d gotten only close enough to pour his foul gift of demons into our midst, as if they’d been wrenched from his guts.
And the demons were doing plenty of damage. They ripped through one witch, then another, taking
down fully half our number before the coven sent up a furious cry of power that incinerated at least a fourth of the demons mid-shriek. That sent the rest of them fleeing, and of course, where else could they rage to but the lead bars blocking the only way out of the cave?
The ancient protections held for one long, blessed moment, allowing the remaining witches to cut down the number of demons further, but then, something shifted. For all their shrieks of pain, all the rage that came with the demons hitting those warded bars, it seemed the layers of scars scoring the demons’ winged bodies somehow dulled the impact of the magic infused into the protective gates. Before I could reach the barred entrance to stop them, they shattered the bars, and dozens of them poured through until I sent another blast of blue fire into the hole. That served to explode some of the demons back toward us, while flinging countless others forward. Their escaping forms tunneled deep into the passages. In my mind’s eye, I could imagine them finally bursting out of gopher holes and upturned root balls, splashing through the duck ponds of the tony Chicago parklands and screaming into the night.
There was nothing I could do about that for the moment, though.
We had enough screams of our own to deal with down here.
Chapter Three
“Sara!”
Nigel’s call reached me a second too late. The rake of a demon’s claw down my back sliced through my shirt and plunged deep to the left of my spine. Instead of jerking away, I fell with the demon, slipping off its curved talon before it could make mincemeat of my entrails. Pain didn’t so much lance through me as drown me in a wave of agony. I recognized the poison that had been pumped into my system with an almost eerie detachment as I rolled to one side, slipping in my own blood, and leveled a blast of blue fire so virulent that the only thing left of the demon who’d gored me was the shadow of his twisted form.
Then that too was gone.
Normally, I wasn’t a big fan of killing anything, but whatever tried to kill me first was fair game.
