by Lucy Auburn
I blink at him. "You mean they can't go back there anymore?"
"Not now that the bond is set in flesh."
"You didn't tell me that was a side effect." I frown at him. "I only have a twin bed at the dorm. Where will they sleep?"
Ezra wryly points out, "I think we have bigger problems."
"Just try what he says." Mateo looks from me to Gaugin, then back again, seemingly eager. "I'd fucking love it if we never have to go back to that nowhere place again. You used to send me there every time I annoyed you."
"Or when you farted," Lynx adds, wrinkling his nose. "Oh god, we're going to have to smell his farts every time now, aren't we? Dani, undo the spell."
I ignore them. Gaugin is fading before our eyes, and if something went wrong with the spell, I want to know now, before he's dead, rather than later.
Fluttering my eyes closed, I take a deep breath, and try to dismiss the guys. I imagine them gone. Back in that nowhere place. Incorporeal.
When I open my eyes a sliver, they're still here, sexy as ever, their abs quite firm and corporeal. Not ghostlike as they once were, and not stuck in the nowhere place where they went whenever they weren't haunting me.
Biting my lip, I point out, "It'll suck if they can't be incorporeal anymore. That was one of the ways we would gather intel." Also, it always gives me shivers when they walk through me or brush up against me in incorporeal form. "Demons aren't supposed to be corporeal all the time, after all."
Mateo says, "Speak for yourself. I like having real bullets."
"They can still access their spirit forms." Gaugin lists backwards on the slab, looking like he might turn into a pile of bones and rotted flesh at any moment. "It's simply that they're in control of that part of themselves now, not you. The bond is physical flesh now. You'll always be able to call out to them, and to summon them to where you are. You'll each know where the other is when one is in trouble or needs aid. This is the gift I've given you—the gift of permeance. Use it wisely. Don't let yourself forget what love truly is."
Despite the greenish cast to Gaugin's face and the raspy sound of his voice—not to mention the tooth he spits out at the end of his speech, mouth going mushy—I'm touch by his words. It'll be a whole new thing for me and the guys, them always being around all the time, but if it means I'll never be without them, I'm glad for it.
Even with Mateo's farts.
They're real room-clearing stink bombs.
"I don't have much time left." Gaugin holds out a shaking hand, and I push down my gag reflex to take it. "I remembered her name, though. Can you... can you bury me near her plot? When you get the chance. Even if it's just my bones."
"I'll try," I vow. "Assuming we all lives through the battle to come, I'll carry your bag of bones there myself."
"Good." He looks relieved. "She should be somewhere nearby, on the continent. Her name was Cassandra. Cassandra Brown Mueller. Mother Emily. Father Patrick. When I knew her, she lived in... Calais. She should be buried there. In a protestant plot. Near the church with the... green... stained glass... windows."
As he finishes telling me this, Gaugin leans back on the slab completely and relaxed from head to toe. I feel the strength leave his hand, which drops from mine, and his eyes flutter closed as he breathes slowly out.
He doesn't breath back in.
The smell of magic in the air around us drains away all at once.
And his body, finally given leave to do what bodies are meant to do, collapses into ashes and dust around his bones. A few bits of him clatter to the ground, and I swoop to pick them up, wrapping my hand in my blazer and forming a little pile of them in the center of the slab. The guys help me, and by the end we have something like a little funeral memorial, with his skull at the top of a pyramid of bones and dust.
"I'll come back for you," I vow to him, "my strange, dead, super old brother."
Then I feel it: a twinge inside me. A bit of panic, and a string being pulled. My instincts tell me instantly what it is, and I know that the bond is working.
Sebastian needs our help.
"I'm not able to keep the pain at pay anymore," he says, pressing his hands against Petra's body as she bucks beneath him, moaning low in her throat. "My powers can only go so far for so long. Dani, can you help?"
"What can I do?"
"I need you to lend me your strength. Here, take my hand." As Lynx kneels down to help restrain Petra, Sebastian pulls his hands away from her and reaches out to me. I take his palm in mine, a little thrill going through my at his touch, even after everything. "Our powers are often stronger when you've just summoned us. This should help."
He puts his other hand against her forehead and murmurs, "No pain, no pain, no pain." Petra calms down, relaxing against the ground again, silent for the moment. "We need to get her to a clinic or a hospital right away. Anything that can treat her."
"Let's bring her to the helicopter landing pad," I tell him, doing calculations of the distances in my head. "Once we've safely dropped her off there, then the hunt begins."
"There's so much to tell you," Mateo says to Sebastian, his hip cocked, gun holstered near his ever-hovering hand. "Dani has a cool ass burn tattoo now. And we know how to give this asshole as good as he got. Plus, we're anchored to her forever now—physically and spiritually."
Sebastian's eyes briefly flicker up to me at this news, something slightly shadowed in his expression, but he nods sharply in acceptance. "Sounds like a good idea, if we're going to be fighting poltergeists who can steal our connection away. Now, Lynx, help me with Petra—I need to be in contact with her physically at all times to keep her pain at bay."
As we move towards the helicopter pad, Petra draped in Lynx's arms, Sebastian's hand resting on her ankle, I sneak little glances at his face. There's something there, a secret he's not telling me, and I have the feeling it has something to do with the mysterious past all the guys share together but have never really talked about much to me.
Whatever it is, I hope I'll find out when we get the time.
I want all of them. Every single bit. Darkness included.
The helicopter blades are still over my head. I hold Petra's hand, her eyes frowning up at me, a scowl forming where her blonde brows meet. "You're not doing this without me."
"Pretty sure you're not in fighting form," I tell her, wishing she'd stayed knocked out. The stubborn wolf shifter might just jump out of this helicopter mid-trip if it meant fulfilling her duty as my Shield. "If you try to come with me, we'll spend more time hauling your ass around and protecting you from getting hurt than actually fighting the Manslayer."
"Are you saying I'm dead weight?"
She's completely prone in the back seat of the helicopter, strapped in and peaked from all she's been through, but I swear the glare she shoots in my direction could scald. I have to fight not to wince and back away. "Petra..."
"Fine." She looks away from me, bits of mist in the corners of her eyes. "I'll go back home. But I swear, the instant these wounds are on their way to being awesome scars, I'm coming back. I don't care if you've killed him already. Someone's gotta make sure he's dead."
I laugh a little at her fierceness. "Fine, fine."
Stepping back and away from the helicopter, I slam the door shut and give a nod to the pilot, who's been waiting here to take all of us back. Of course, there aren't seats for the demons, who are inconveniently corporeal now and still figuring this whole physical bond thing out. The pilot nods back; he was reluctant to leave without me, part of his assignment, but I convinced him.
As the helicopter takes off, flattening the grass beneath it, I step back and watch it go. In thirty minutes it'll be at the local private airplane hanger. An hour and a half after that, Petra will be at a hospital getting treated, and by tomorrow she should be back on the Phoenix Academy campus—unless she manages to fight her way out of it, which wouldn't shock me either.
Once the helicopter has turned into a blip in the distance, Ezra steps up to
my elbow. "Ready to slay the beast?"
"Ready," I assure him. "First, though, we have to find him."
Chapter 4
If there's one thing I learned from my classes with Meyer and that book A Guide to Demonic Summoning for Beginning Grims it's that certain lower class demons have the best noses. Better than bloodhounds by a few thousand times. Capable of picking up not just physical scent, but the actual scent of a soul. And unlike an upper class demon like Malavic, they don't require great amounts of energy and control to summon.
They do, however, stink to high heavens. As I etch the summoning circle into the ground, Mateo whines, "Do we have to use a daeschund? There are trash barges that smell less than those things. I don't even know how they pick up scents through all the stank on 'em."
"Do you want to find this Manslayer or not?" I shoot back. "He tricked us all. Nearly killed Petra. Made me think I was speaking to my mother—" I take in a sharp breath of grief, "and stole our bond so thoroughly I thought I was going to die and never see you four again. So I think holding your nose is worth tracking him down."
Mateo sighs, then nods sharply. "Fine. But I'm going to work on that whole 'being incorporeal on demand' thing. My spirit form doesn't have as much of a nose."
Ezra cuts his eyes at Mateo, then says to me, "Just summon it, Dani. We're wasting time on Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest over here. I'm itching to sink my blade into that bastard."
"Same," Sebastian agrees. "And unlike this wimp, I can hold my nose."
There's grumbling back and forth. I slice through it with a sharp hand through the air, and my quartet falls back, weapons at the ready in case this summoning goes wrong.
It shouldn't. Truthfully, a child raised in a Grim clan could summon a daeschund. There's a reason why their name is so close to the German dachshund—they're basically a breed of dog, but with demonic features. That doesn't make me less nervous that I'll somehow fuck up the summoning circle and wind up getting a voltari instead, straight from the bowels of Hell like the ones Lainey used to try to kill me. I still feel so out-of-touch with my Grim side, even though I've used that side to summon powerful demons and control other Grims' summoned demons.
Staring down at the summoning circle after I'm done, I frown. "Should that look more like a loop?" I compare it to the drawing I have in my journal, which frankly isn't the best. "I think I drew it as a curlicue on purpose, but I can't really be sure since it's been a while since I took that class—"
"You're doing it right," Lynx says, his calm voice cutting through my anxiety. "This is something you can handle, Dani."
"That's what I thought about the seven immortals and Gaugin's bracelet, and look how that turned out." Taking a deep breath, I shake the thought off. "But you're right. There's no time for self-doubt. Now is the time for action."
If I've learned anything by now, it's that when you don't know what you're doing, fake it, and things will probably turn out okay—eventually. Licking my lips, I say the simple summoning words to bring the daeschund into this world, and step back as the summoning circle glows with brimstone heat.
The stench is immediate, and almost unbearable. I try breathing in through my mouth and gag at it. The daeshund arrives with a pop in the air and the glow of a small, work-like dog things, which curls up in the middle of the circle and raises its many-fanged mouth towards it with a tentative sniff.
Then it hisses, and the smell of its breath is enough to make me regret being alive. Even my appetite is gone from the scent of it, and I'm pretty much always hungry. Lynx turns around and plugs his nose, Ezra backs away with a grimace, and Mateo shoves his fingers up his nostrils. It's only Sebastian who looks stoically, perpetually unperturbed—probably he's smelled worse, or has somehow tapped into the air of zen and not giving a fuck.
"Hush," I tell the daeschund, even though it hurts a little to breathe in and speak. "We're looking for a scent. One in particular. A soulless man. Find it, and I'll reward you with a treat."
I have dried beef jerky in my pack. It was meant to last for whatever trek we needed to make out here through Danish villages and empty countryside, but I'll give it to the demon if it finds the enemy I'm searching for.
Like a dog with a bone in its future, the daeschund pops its twelve little legs out of its body, whips around, and scurries into the undergrowth. It takes effort to make myself follow it, but the good thing about the demon's stink is, even an asthmatic with no sense of smell would be able to follow the trail it leaves behind. The demon smells the Manslayer, we smell the demon—like a circle of scent or a snake eating its own tail.
Lynx falls in beside me as we play follow-the-garbage-heap. "What are we going to do once you catch up with the Manslayer? He's a formidable immortal soulless Grim, after all. A plan is necessary, especially given what's at stake."
"I know." My stomach clenches, and it's not because of the scent wafting through the air and sliding down my throat. "I have to basically carve this rune into his body. Which means getting close. So I'm going to need the four of you to help me with everything you've got."
Staring at me, Lynx nods sharply, his hands flexing at his side. "Sebastian can weaken him with poison. I can tie him up. Mateo, of course, can shoot him. And Ezra can run him through with a sword. As long as our bond to you can't be messed with by this asshole's poltergeist, we'll be okay. But Dani... none of what we do to him will mean a thing until he's made mortal again."
"I'll get close enough to carve that mark into his skin permanently," I vow, a little surprised by how much I want to see the bastard twist, bleed, burn, and die. "You can count on it."
"Then let's find this piece of shit. The sooner he's in the ground, the better."
I just hope we'll be able to get close enough to take him out.
With the power of six immortals in that bracelet on his wrist, he might be too powerful now for even four upper class demons and a Black Phoenix to fight.
The first dead body is sitting by the side of the road, cut entirely in half, the torso on one side of the road, legs on the other, a twisting trail of intestines and blood in between. There's no sign of the head, for whatever reason.
I close my eyes to steady myself, think about what I'm going to do to the monster who did this, and open them with a grimace. "He must be close."
"Stay alert." Ezra draws his sword, eyes wary. "If it comes down to it, and fighting him isn't working, we have to be willing to run. Also—keep in mind how much power he has. It'll be better if we do a little surveillance on him before engaging."
"Agreed." I focus on the putrid stench in the air and follow it towards the little Danish village in the distance, trying to prepare myself for what comes next. I've stashed a little knife in every accessible pocket or sheath I can think of, and have my phoenix fire at the ready, but I know better than to believe we're prepared for this. "Whatever happens, we fight together, run together, or even go down together if it comes to that. Though I hope it doesn't."
"All of us do."
I keep my eyes on the road ahead of us as we break into town, all of us with weapons at our fingertips and a wariness to our steps. It's not just Manslayer I'm worried about, but his poltergeist; even if he can't fuck with our bond anymore, he's still terrifying, capable of causing incredible pain. A madman's soul detached from his body and turned into a woman—I can't imagine anything more sinister or harder to fight.
Souls don't have dicks you can rip off.
But there are things that can be done to fight them. Ari is the only witch I know, and Auerbach the only mage, but when I was being haunted by what I thought was my mother's spirit, they gave me a few tricks. Salt is a bit of a help, though all I have with me are some restaurant packets I stole from the helicopter as we dropped Petra off. Holy water will be hard to come by, given the unholiness of my current companions. But the real trick to spirits is to acknowledge them, believe in their existence, and dismiss them, just like I learned how to dismiss my quartet when they were essentially haunt
ing me.
Even four demons like mine aren't as scary as this poltergeist is to me. Or as infuriating—the fact that he imitated my mother, even used my birth name to trick me, makes me want to wring his incorporeal neck. It'll be hard to dismiss the thing and move on, but I try to center myself and keep my emotions in check even as we near the village, prepared to have to fight the toughest battle of my life.
The worst part is all the bodies.
A man leans out of his window, throat cut, eyes dead. Two women protectively cradle something between them that I can't look at without wanting to be sick. The houses are locked down and barred, cheery windows empty of light, cars missing. I send up a little prayer to whoever-the-fuck that some, or most, of the people here got away.
Sleepy Danish villages aren't exactly prepared for attack by immortals hellbent on violence, after all.
"We came through this village not that long ago last night. I..." Trailing off, I jerk my eyes away from the sight of a small child-sized lump in the distance. "This is all my fault."
Ezra's voice is soft. "That's a dog, Dani." I swallow down my nausea long enough to focus on the body and look away, still feeling a stab of guilt in my middle. "And it's not your fault. No one predicted this—no one could have predicted this. We didn't have all the information, but that isn't something you can blame yourself for. The only way to go is forward. Looking back won't help a thing."
"Maybe it'll teach me something," I shoot back. "Like the value of... I don't know. Not acting without thinking? Which we're about to do."
Stopping abruptly in the road, I pull the guys with me down a narrow alleyway, certain that we'll be able to catch up to the daeschund and its distinctive scent no matter how much of a detour we take. Insistently, I tell the four of them, "We've got to make sure we have a plan. A good one. Just because Gaugin gave me this rune doesn't mean we'll be able to fight him."
