Devil's Punch

by Ann Aguirre

  The next level was downright wet. I tried to stay out of the downpour, but my movement swung me into the stream. I lost my grip on the rope and plummeted, slamming into the rock face, but the cord twined around my waist before I dropped more than a few feet. My heart pounded wildly as I hung there, swaying halfway between up and down.

  Magick. Yeah, magick’s good. I didn’t have a spell in my head. Fear drove them all out until I could only dangle upside down and helpless, listening to Butch yap above me. He knew I was in trouble. Good dog.

  “Are you hurt?” Chance asked, his voice taut with worry.

  “Fine.” Mostly. Bruises and scrapes on my right side, but without the demon rope, it would’ve been worse.

  Greydusk called, “Are you ready to resume?” like nothing had happened.

  Gripping the cord in preparation for the positional shift, I answered in the affirmative, and it spoke a command. The rope straightened, and I slid the rest of the way down, where the demon caught me. It set me on my feet without comment, and then Chance followed.

  “How much more of this?” he asked.

  I wondered too. It felt like we had already come that kilometer downward, but it might just be that I wasn’t used to such activity. Clearly I wasn’t. At the best of times, I didn’t like heights, and the dark made it worse. So much worse.

  In answer, Greydusk set off along a path that had become proper flat ground again, not just a slippery ledge. I strode after him, using the witchlight to assess the area. The primitive markings higher up had given way to more disturbing décor; I recognized some of the symbols from the harness that belonged to Caim. Which meant they were demonic sigils.

  “What do they say?” I whispered to Greydusk. The heaviness of the dark made it feel wrong to speak in a normal tone of voice. Plus the weird acoustics stole your voice and sent it echoing down distant passageways. Not a good idea, under the circumstances.

  The demon’s reply didn’t help. “Nothing you want to know, I promise.”

  On second glance, I noted the faint flicker of magick emanating from the runes. The air was cold as a freezer as we passed through, a dark and silent stream running beside us. Some distance along, the river expanded into a shallow underground lake, broad enough that I couldn’t see the opposite shore.

  Butch whined then, and Chance put him down so he could stretch his legs and christen the ground. The demon was patient with the dog’s needs, which was a surprising kindness, I thought. Then it knelt and touched the animal on the head with its long, strange fingers. Butch quivered, but didn’t flee, his big, bulging eyes fixed on the creature before him. He didn’t growl, either. Interesting.

  “A most intriguing creature,” Greydusk said as it rose. “Shall we move on?”

  I was tired, but didn’t want to camp down here; that was for sure. The sooner we got to the gate, the better I’d like it. So I nodded, Chance grabbed the tiny dog, and we set off.

  Here There Be Demons

  This time we marched for hours. The path led subtly downward, following the lake, wherein…things splashed. Just beyond the range of my witchlight, movement stirred, the hint of fins and tentacles bestirring the water, and that uncertainty was worse than knowing what danger I faced. I hastened my step as Greydusk diverged from the lake, charting a course across more uneven rocks that led to a natural archway painted in more demonic sigils. I hoped this would be the homestretch. Surely we’d almost covered the distance the demon had mentioned.

  Earlier we had paused for protein bars, rest, and bottled water. My thighs burned from all the climbing. I concentrated on Shannon. It didn’t matter how much this hurt me; I’d get her back.

  This is your fault. Her involvement with me led to her abduction. Yet if I’d left her in Kilmer, she’d be dead. And if I’d taken her away and then found somewhere else for her to stay, I had no guarantee that would’ve ended better. Sometimes there were no good choices.

  “What’s Sheol like?” I asked eventually.

  The demon answered without turning. “Darker than your world. Colder.”

  That didn’t tell me as much as I’d hoped. “Anything else?”

  “You’ll see when we reach Xibalba.”

  “I thought we were going to—”

  “Xibalba is a city.” By its tone, I could tell Greydusk wished I would stop pestering it.

  Since my questions could distract from important matters, such as our safety, I shut up, but we hadn’t been walking long when that faint flutter of wings got louder. The demon’s reaction told me that wasn’t good. Not just bats like I had been telling myself for half a kilometer. This wasn’t the small flutter of many leather-winged creatures, but a deep and powerful snap-snap-snap. For reasons I couldn’t articulate, the sound chilled the marrow in my bones.

  “It appears we shall encounter heavy resistance,” Greydusk observed. “Prepare to fight.”

  The passage had a high ceiling, which wasn’t good. It gave whatever was coming too much room to maneuver. I had five spells swirling in my head, and one of them made light. Not helpful. So really I had four spells at my command, plus the touch, and unless the monster coming for us was wearing some article of clothing, like the knight had been, it probably wouldn’t help. Beside me, Chance crouched in a fighting stance; he had knuckle knives on both hands. Before, I’d always seen him fight without weapons, but a demon’s hide wouldn’t take damage from a human fist.

  Even if he’s only half human.

  The creature shrieked and dive-bombed us from the shadows, moving too fast for me to get a good look at it. I had a fleeting impression of a monstrously female face grafted onto the body of a humanoid pterodactyl, and I saw claws that shone like diamonds as it dove a second time. Chance slashed at the wings, trying to bring it down, and I mustered my resolve, firming hands that shook as I raised my athame. While this spell might not save us, it wouldn’t hurt either.

  The power swelled inside me, burning, hurting, but I let it center me. Pain means I’m still here, fighting. I envisioned it swelling in my hand in a seething rush, gathering, gathering, and then I sent it out on my resolve like a dark and winged thing riding the magickal wind as I whispered, “Hostes hostium caecus.”

  The enemy sightless.

  I knew nothing about this demon, but it would help if the monster couldn’t see us. Its face looked so hideous that I wondered if this thing might have inspired the Harpy legends, thousands of years ago, but its skull didn’t seem shaped for sonar. A second later, it proved it had no special neural navigation when it screamed and slammed into a wall. The collision stunned it, and the thing dropped. Chance sprang to finish it before it could recover, but Greydusk raised a long, unsettling hand.

  “Please. Allow me. Its death can serve us in two fashions if I do it.”

  Though I didn’t know if this was a good idea, I nodded, mostly because I wanted to see firsthand what it could do. That might save our lives later, if it gave me time to prepare some defense. My spells weren’t super-blow-the-door-off-the-hinges powerful, but properly deployed, they might save us.

  Greydusk strode in, dodged a blind and desperate strike, and slammed both hands—with sucker pads—on either side of the misshapen skull. The creature seized, grand mal tremors rocking it from head to toe. Steam hissed from the point of contact, and an awful purple light ran up our guide’s spindly arms. An orange glow sparked in Greydusk’s skull and then the attacker went limp.

  “You killed it?” Chance asked.

  It had done more than that, but I waited to see how it would reply.

  “I drained it,” the demon corrected. “Its knowledge, memories, and skills are now mine. Sadly, in this form, I cannot use some of them.”

  A joke, I thought, if not a funny one. It reminded me of the way a cat licked its whiskers after a mouse. I smiled uneasily.

  Chanced stared down at the still-smoking corpse. It was smaller, withered, as if Greydusk had taken more than information, terrabytes of data streaming in magickal light.
The exchange set my teeth on edge. I wanted to blind Greydusk, and then let Chance kill it, but then I’d leave Shannon stranded in Sheol. I couldn’t do that, so once again I proved myself willing to work with the devil in order to achieve my own ends. Is this what evil feels like? How it begins? You started with a slippery slide down the slope of good intentions until you were mired in the blood and mud at the bottom, unable to see any light no matter which way you turned. Heart dark and heavy, I wondered how far I would go, and what I would become when I got there.

  If you care for no one, a little voice whispered, if you remain firm and steadfast and will not act to save the ones you love, in the name of some abstract good, is inaction not the same as evil? I couldn’t fashion an answer; it was too much, too confusing, but I did, unfortunately, see how good and evil were almost like a wheel, and that if you went far enough down one road, the two became virtually indistinguishable. People had done terrible things in heaven’s name, too.

  “What happens to demons when they die?”

  “Nothing,” it said.

  “There’s no afterlife? No hell?”

  It flashed its teeth. “According to your lore, Binder, we’re already there.”

  “But Maury told me—”

  “Ah, yes.” Its tone became disapproving. “You have…contacts, do you not?”

  “I guess. What kind of demon is Maury?”

  “He is of the Birsael caste, the bargainers. They are easy for practitioners of your world to call because they long to cross over. They are…playful?”

  “Playful?” I thought about what Maury had done in Kilmer, and shivered. I did not want to meet a non-playful demon, but I was on my way to a city full of them.

  “Over time—and many summonings—they become attuned to a certain human…trait.” That hadn’t been the word it meant to use at first. “And then they hunger for more of the same.”

  “An acquired taste,” Chance put in.

  “Just so.”

  Maury’s thing was stagnation, as I recalled. Entropy.

  “What is Dumah’s affinity?”

  “Hunger,” it replied. “Greed. Need.”

  Shit. And I’d unloosed her on the world. Hopefully, the way I’d crafted the bargain would keep them from wreaking too much havoc. Guilt plagued me, but Greydusk was saying, “I have no doubt that Maury told you that Sheol is another world. The fact that our citizens enjoy playing in yours has given rise to interesting stories over the eons.”

  “You view people as toys?” I was indignant, even if I couldn’t afford to be.

  “Entertainment, certainly. To us, it is no different from how human children toy with insects or set anthills on fire.”

  “Only bad kids do that,” I muttered.

  “Yet I am not here to argue with you.”

  “How come it attacked us? I thought the demons wanted me in Sheol.”

  “Some do,” Greydusk replied. “But there are…factions in play, and others want different things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Power. Or to preserve the status quo.”

  “What did you learn from that?” Chance nudged the corpse.

  “Many things, but the most important? Who hired it. You have enemies, Binder, and some of them prefer you never reach Xibalba at all.”

  “Why?” God, it was too much. I just wanted to rescue Shannon.

  “Because you presage change, no matter what you decide. The caste structure has been etched in blood and bone for thousands of years, and you could topple it.”

  “I don’t plan to topple anything.”

  Secretly, I thought I might die, and if that meant saving Shan, then I was okay with that. It was a peaceful thought that she could go back to Jesse, and have the life I’d wanted—holidays with his family, nieces and nephews, maybe children someday, although she was so young that the relationship might not last. At the least, she had to live. I’d settle for nothing less, even if I had to level Sheol to make it happen.

  Greydusk watched my face, guessing my thoughts, I half suspected, from the tightness of my mouth and the set of my jaw. “Intentions seldom match results.”

  “Maybe not. What is that thing?”

  “Aronesti.” It spat the word like a curse. “They are the snatchers, and they have no honor.”

  The snatchers. Of what?

  Chance asked, so I didn’t have to.

  “Flesh. They crave it from the dead. Carrion feeders, the lot of them.”

  “Do they ever cross over? I mean, obviously this one did…” But we killed it before it could go out and swoop around the battlefields in a ghastly feast.

  Greydusk nodded. “From time to time. It is my understanding that the Nephilim hunt them down.”

  Among other things. So Kel might be out there right now, hunting demons, along with killing people he was told would start the apocalypse. How the hell did you trust in orders like that? I wanted to see him, talk to him, shake him. Everything I learned about his world made me understand him less.

  “Can they be summoned?” Chance asked.

  “Most demons can be called by a practitioner of sufficient skill and power. Aronesti are sometimes found in the bodies of cannibal killers.”

  What a horrible thought, but also better, if I could believe many of the ghastly things humans did came from demons. Unfortunately, I didn’t think so. People could be evil without any help at all.

  Chance sounded thoughtful. “Is that because they sense a sympathetic hunger in the host or because the demon drives the person to it?”

  A shrug. “That I do not know.”

  This frank discussion of flesh-feasting demons and cannibal killers in a scary cave with a dead thing at my feet? Not. Helping. I decided to get us back on track, stepping over the monster and moving farther down the passage.

  “But you’re contracted to make sure I reach Xibalba in one piece.” It was my way of saying let’s go already, but without meaning to, my word choice apparently questioned its integrity.

  Its eyes gleamed like onyx. “I will ignore the affront, this one time, but ignorance of our ways does not excuse your discourtesy.”

  “Explain,” Chance said.

  “Very well,” the demon replied. Stiffly. Its movements were jerkier than they had been. Anger? I guessed so. “As we move, I shall.”

  Good going. You pissed off your protection. Given how I’d needled Kel while he guarded me, it appeared I had a knack for it. We started down the passage, leaving the corpse behind us. It was more than a little creepy that everything that had been in the demon’s head, Greydusk now knew. How powerful did that make it, exactly? Not something I cared to fight, if it could unmake me with a touch.

  “I am Imaron,” Greydusk said, like I should know what that meant. At my obvious confusion, it added, “That is my caste.”

  Ah. It had mentioned castes earlier, how I could break the whole social structure of Sheol. That wasn’t on my to-do list.

  “Would you tell us about the castes?” Chance was still looking to increase his knowledge base, and he would use everything he gleaned from Greydusk to prepare for whatever we’d face in Xibalba.

  “There is no reason I cannot,” the demon replied. “It is information freely available in the archives.”

  Booke would love the sound of that. He was a friend and a research specialist in the UK. I’d never met him in person, but maybe one day that would change. And if we didn’t get back soon, he’d worry when I missed our weekly chat. Then he might call Chuch and Eva. Maybe I should have e-mailed them, but a message like Going to play demon bait, back soon, would only make the situation worse.

  “Thanks,” Chance said. “Start with your caste?”

  “The Imaron are known as the soul-stealers, but we abide by our contracts. It is death to act otherwise.”

  Soul-stealers. Awesome. But at least they were all lawyerly about it. Somehow that didn’t make it better; no wonder humans thought Sheol was hell.

  Chance spoke again, soundi
ng pensive; his puzzle-solving brain would help so much on this venture. “Death? Is breaking the contract fatal or is the offending behavior punished?”

  It was a good question. Greydusk angled its slender neck in an unnatural fashion to give Chance an approving look. “The former. When we sign a contract, we do so in blood, and there is a magickal ritual. Should I break my word, the blood turns to poison in my veins, and I will perish instantly.”

  Wow. The Imaron took their promises seriously. I felt bad for doubting him. Treachery would kill this creature, so I had nothing to fear for sure. While I might question its intentions and its abilities, self-preservation ranked pretty high on the list of things I felt sure of. I thought about that in silence for a little while, listening to our steps scrape over the stone.

  And then I asked, “What happens if you fail? I mean, not through a breach of contract, but just…overwhelming odds? Do they hold that against you?”

  “Then I am already dead,” it said simply.

  It walked on.

  If I had a thousand dollars for every time I followed a demon down a dark and terrifying tunnel, well…I’d have a thousand dollars. Because this was a first, even for me, in a weird and unlikely life. Greydusk lost its interest in talking, though it had promised to explain the caste system to us. It wouldn’t happen right now, anyway, as it appeared to be listening as we moved.

  Finally I had to ask, “Is something coming?”

  That wouldn’t surprise me. I just had to get ready for it.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is it hard to pass the portal?” Chance asked.

  “Yes. It requires power and sacrifice.”

  Good to know. I hated the thought of anything like the weight-sensitive doors at most major shopping centers, where the minute you approached, they slid open, linking our world to Sheol. But it made sense that these natural portals required opening. Otherwise, the demons would’ve overrun us ages ago. Wouldn’t they? Some of them might be perfectly happy at home, despite what Maury had said. After all, not everybody loved to travel.