by Anthology
As well as other things.
She sighed heavily. She wished the head pain was the worst of things she’d woken up to.
Her vision had been bad. Very bad.
In three days, all hell would break loose.
Three days before the terror that had begun today turned into a citywide demonic fest. And she was the only one who knew about it. Scrambling back into the front seat, she took a minute to think things through.
“I just wish I knew how to stop it this vision from happening,” she said hoarsely. Because no matter what it meant, she knew the screaming crowds of people were never a good sign. She wondered if it was a level-three demonic attack. Maybe even a horde of undead. Whatever it was, she had to warn the council…as soon as she got to her current job.
If she called Michael now, her current boss was liable to only chop off her head for being late and for not keeping her head in the game, i.e. not focused on her current job.
Licking her suddenly dry lips, Rhiannon dropped the keys in the cup holder beside her and she put her foot on the gas and pressed the bright-white start button to turn the car on.
Flicking a knob a second later brought the car to life and Rhiannon fought back a sob as she listened to what the reporters had been trying to tell her all morning.
New York City was under attack.
It wasn’t a fire that ravaged the skyscrapers she’d been seeing in glimpses on the television screen off and on all morning.
It was a deadly assault, and what’s more…it was just the beginning.
Muttering some curses, Rhiannon pulled out of park and took off down the road with a screech.
Her body was shaking and she felt more than a little numb. The visions of the panicking crowd, the sense of terror, and worst of all—the screams. They were all still there. In her head.
She wished she could say that the welling feeling inside of her, the feeling of slight terror turning into full-blown panic could be attributed to what she had learned moments before. That NYC was currently under some sort of assault. But it wasn’t. Because as horrific as that was, it was nothing compared to the sights and sounds she had seen.
What she knew was coming.
It had been twelve long years since she’d woken up as a child barely out of middle school and told her aunt that she was starting to have visions. They tested her and probed her until they realized for the sure that she was one of the ‘lucky’ few to be blessed with steady and even reliable visions. Some people only got them once in a blue moon. She had at least one a week if not more since childhood. Visions that she could see, remember, taste, and feel as if they were memories that she had actually experienced, she had never dreamed about the present. It was always the future. The future that was indistinct or clear as day, but it was coming. And never for her—always for something else.
So Rhiannon sighed and clicked off the radio. Then she clicked it back on in irritation. She listened to the frightened radio announcer tell her more about what she already knew. What the world knew now.
That the skyscraper in New York was a coordinated attack.
That New York and the country was in panic.
She grimaced; she knew the feeling well. The problem was, now she was worried about more than just one skyscraper. She was worried about a citywide attack in just three days and she had nothing more to go on than the fact that it was happening in Times Square.
Gulping, Rhiannon heard the announcer say, “A second plane has entered the towers. The second tower.”
Rhiannon cursed. “What in the world is going on? A plane?”
Unsaid, she let the thoughts drift into her head, What kind of demon attacks by plane? If not a demon, then what?
It could have been a mortal attack on mortals, but for the most part humankind had left off attacking, killing, and brutalizing each other after they realized they had bigger problems than Y2K when the new millennium hit.
Namely demons and angels that wanted them dead or enslaved or both more than anything else.
Fighting a separate and sentient number of species had the delightful effect of bonding humankind. Even against the witches and wizards that protected them.
“Ungrateful asshats,” Rhiannon muttered as she made a sharp right and flipped off a guy with enough bright-green paint on his truck to open his own luminescence shop.
“All right, Rhiannon, focus,” she told herself. “The World Trade Center is under attack and there’s another attack coming in three days. One attack might be human-involved. But the other definitely had demonic overtones.”
As much as she hated to admit, one was definitely her purview and the other wasn’t. Even if they called in a federal task force in New York, they wouldn’t call her.
She needed more information. Concrete facts.
But she wasn’t going to get it from the radio. The voices of the hosts wavered with shock and horror, their words rambled together with suppositions and hazardous guesses. She knew it was too soon to really know what was happening. On this plane of existence anyway.
Rhiannon smiled; some days it paid to be witch. She would bet her mortgage that the faeries knew what was up and she knew just whom to ask. As soon as this day was done, she was calling in a favor.
Her tires squealed as she made a sharp right onto the main road that led to the construction pit.
Rhiannon had barely turned the car off before she looked up and someone had reached inside to snatch her out through the door of her little mid-sized car.
Not through the window, through the damned door made of solid carbon steel.
She screamed as she lashed out to fight her attacker. She managed to scrape his hands with her perfectly manicured nails. Considering they were as blunt as a spoon when she really needed a knife’s sharp edge for this fight, they didn’t do much damage. But that was all right.
Because she had a back-up plan. She always did.
She bit him.
He howled and dropped her in the red southern dirt next to her car.
Wheezing as she rubbed her raw neck, she glared up at her opponent with fury in her eyes.
“You son of an ass,” she shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving your life,” said the tall and broad-shouldered demon.
Before she had time to blink, he threw himself down on top of her and before she could do more than yell a protest at the sudden weight of a two hundred-pound demon, tail and all, on top of her, the ground beneath her swallowed them both.
Rhiannon had the sensation of falling through the air, like she had jumped from a plane in mid-flight.
Not that she would ever jump from a plane in mid-flight, but it was the only visual that came to mind when she thought of dying and flying in the same breath.
She and the demon continued falling like sacks of potatoes through the air that was getting thicker by the moment.
Instead of vaporous cloud, she could feel the space around her turning into a sludge, thick, wet, and oozing.
Panic set in. She may not have wanted to plunge to her death like an idiot skydiver.
But she certainly did not want to die of suffocation in what felt like muddy quicksand.
She opened her mouth to whimper and the vicious liquid substance got in her mouth. Up until now she had been hoping it was a figment of her imagination. Like a ghostly touch that didn’t grip back. Unfortunately this wasn’t case.
Ughhh, I’m going to die in slime, she thought.
She couldn’t open her eyes, but she could take a mental inventory of her situation without visual confirmation. It only took her seconds to realize that her situation wasn’t good. The only useful thing she had on hand was a knife inconveniently strapped to her side. Even then, what use was a knife, even a sharp one, when she couldn’t breathe?
She was vindictive enough to wonder if she could still summon the knife into the palm of her hands and take out her captive along the way. She would use it to knife the stupid broad-shouldered
demon with dark blue eyes in the chest just before she died.
Unfortunately it wasn’t possible and she couldn’t. A witch who couldn’t speak, couldn’t cast.
If it had been, she would have done it, no questions asked.
Rhiannon Slater was many things, and one thing she would readily admit to was being vindictive enough to kill someone out of retribution in the moments before she died.
It was only right, after all. No Slater daughter would ever be accused of not getting their mark.
Not if she wanted to face their formidable mother the next day and live to tell the tale. Her mother had a saying: “You can bring your tail home alive and victorious, or defeated and dead. I’d prefer the former, but anything else is unacceptable.”
Rhiannon had taken that to heart. So had her sisters. So far it was the encouragement they had needed to finish the job. If they had learned one thing from their globe-trotting mother, it was do what needed to be done and, if necessary, finish what your siblings had started.
Now she wasn’t sure if she could finish the job. If she didn’t though, she knew that her four sisters would move Hell and Heaven to make sure it got done.
What else were sisters for?
5
Rhiannon was starting to wonder if she should say a prayer to ease her way into the afterlife. Then she started to wonder why she wasn’t dead yet. She hadn’t been able to breathe for a least a minute.
And yet I’m not blacking out, she thought.
If she had to guess, she would have said that was good. Before her thoughts could move on the subject further, she and her captor emerged from the sludge encasing them like two divers surfacing from the ocean’s depths.
She felt cool air around her and sucked in a desperate gasp of air before she realized that maybe she should wait to see where they were before breathing in that atmosphere.
It could be hallucinogenic. Or worse—poisonous smog.
But her lungs quickly assured her it was pure air. Or at least purer than the smog-fest she’d left back in her natural realm—she’d give it that.
The demon set her down on the ground and she wasted no time in punching him in the chest and pushing herself away with a huff.
He didn’t look fazed.
She pursed her mouth in irritation. He hadn’t even flinched. He could have at least flinched. A girl had her pride, after all.
As she looked around the area in which they stood—a forest clearing, it looked like—with grass so green it was unnatural and a gentle breeze that caused the leaves in the trees to waft in the air, she palmed the knife on her right thigh and shifted her weight.
He was big. Bigger than her, and until she knew what realm of the Void they were in she wouldn’t risk an incantation. Words had different meanings in different realms and she was as likely to kill herself as she was to kill him by rushing into the spell work.
The knife would just have to do, and lucky for her he wasn’t the type of demon that came with body armor.
‘Chitinous shells’ were the formal term. She liked to call it beetle armor because when the demons who had it weren’t wearing clothes and the armor encasing them had the black inky look of a hard beetle shell.
Of course, tell them that and they acted like she had insulted the honor of their entire race.
Which she probably had, but she didn’t care. Anything that put them off-balance, put her on the advantage.
“We need to move,” he said in a smooth voice.
“We aren’t going anywhere, tall, dark, and handsome,” Rhiannon said as she edged to the right to get to higher ground. The land sloped upward to the east and she could use the height to launch a better physical assault.
She had already considered the fact that he had at least seven inches on her, not to mention enough bulk that meant her ribs would be hurting like a bitch if he landed a punch.
Well-timed or not.
He flashed a smile that might as well have been a snarl as he said, “I don’t know what your problem is, but—”
“My problem,” she said with a bark of laughter, “is that you kidnapped me.”
“You hired me to do just that,” he snapped.
“I don’t know what fantasy world you’re living in, Looney Tunes, but—”
“Lucius,” he interjected.
“What?” she said as she finally got into the position she’d been seeking all the while his eyes were roving to keep watch of the land around them.
Good, he was distracted.
“My name,” he said while firmly pinning his eyes on her with a gaze that was beginning to turn red in irritation. His irises were glowing garnet-red.
Find with her, he could get as angry as he wanted. She was already pissed off. He could join the club.
“Whatever,” she said dismissively. “I didn’t seek you out or hire you, but I am certainly about to kill you.”
“You could try,” he said.
She crouched lower to get ready to spring up in a leap. Wariness roiled through her tense stomach. He wasn’t acting like a demon about to be overcome with emotion. Usually hatred.
He sounded calm. Calculating. Which made him much harder to read and that much more difficult of an opponent.
She twitched her shoulders. She needed to get him off his game. Because right now, jumping him would be as effective as jumping a rhinoceros. He was solid muscle. Shirtless and armor-less solid muscle, but solid muscle nonetheless.
Easing up out of her crouch, she twirled the knife in her hand and said casually, “I thought you said you were here to save me…not work for me.”
He tilted his head to the side, never moving his eyes off of her.
She felt a tiny bit of pride surface like a warm glow. Looked like he had finally realized that the individual he needed to watch out for was standing right in front of him. Not some phantom in the shadows or whatever it was that he had been seeking out in the tree line in the distance.
“I can’t do both?” he said in a measured tone.
She smiled. “I don’t need saving from my underlings and certainly not from you. Try again.”
“Do you even know what I saved you from?”
She raised an eyebrow.
He cursed. “Don’t they tell you witches anything?”
“Now listen here, little Hades,” she said.
He cut her glance.
She stopped abruptly. “What was that for?”
He smiled. “I’m not from the Greek myths.”
“Should I care?”
“Since your contract had you meeting up with a demon to hunt in the Void with, you should.”
She narrowed her eyes. All right, point to him. It was truth. There was only a certain level of demon that she could partner with in the Void and if he was who he said he was, he would know that.
“Who’d you speak with?”
“The name Michael ring a bell?” he drawled.
She swallowed harshly and tapped the flat of her knife against her thigh in irritation.
That only proved that he had a good source. One more test.
“The confirmation phrase?”
“Cat litter,” he said with no little satisfaction.
“Hell’s bells,” she grumbled as she flipped the knife around in the palm of her hand in irritation. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
He stared at her in disbelief.
“Before you snatched me out of my car like a drowning kitten in a well,” she shouted in irritation at herself and anger at him.
“As I said you were in danger,” he said through tightly clenched teeth. “I had to act quickly.”
She glared at him. “That’s my life. That’s every damned day. By the way, you still haven’t told me what I was in danger from.”
“A seer.”
“A seer,” she repeatedly slowly. “Like a demonic one?”
“No,” he said in a hiss. “Now come down from there and let’s go.”
She crossed her arms and sh
ook her head. “Not until you tell me more.”
He glared. She glared back defiantly.
He grimaced and kicked up a soccer ball-sized clod of dirt.
Make that large enough to break my ribs if he punched me, she thought to herself clinically.
“She’s a witch,” he finally spat out.
She couldn’t help it. She laughed. “Why would one of my coven sisters want me dead?”
“You truly are an inept witch, aren’t you?” he said in disgust.
Then before he could say anything more she turned away. “That’s it, I’m leaving.”
She may have had to take insults from Michael, but she certainly didn’t from a demon-for-hire with a bad attitude cramping her style.
He sighed. “She wants you dead because you can influence what’s to come.”
“Dead or removed from the picture?” Rhiannon asked casually. “Those are two very different things.”
“I hardly think it matters at the moment,” he said.
“Fine, but I’ve seen a lot of things,” she said she swept her eyes from left to right, looking for a telltale ripple in the fabric of the atmosphere. A ripple that would take her home.
She hadn’t lied to him. It was true. But rarely were her visions as disturbing as the one she had witnessed less than half an hour ago.
“Including the final fall of New York City and the rise of the new world order?” he said from a few feet behind her.
A chill went down her back as she paused. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t see the fall?” he said with hint of hesitation.
She laughed darkly. “I’m not so certain of what I saw, but I definitely didn’t what you thought I saw.”
“And how would you know that?” he asked.
She turned around to pierce him with her gaze. “Because as traumatic as my vision was, it wasn’t the fall of civilization.”
He smiled. “Who’s talking about the fall of your civilization? Why would I care about the colonial downfall?”
