Hellbent Halo Boxed Set

by E. A. Copen

  I took a swing only to find Ira gone.

  The clock on the wall started ticking again, and I collapsed onto the bed, holding my head. If I never saw my guardian angel again, it’d be too soon.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  KHALEDA

  “So how do you know Josiah?” I asked the troll.

  He’d been ignoring me in favor of staring at the wall of computer monitors. I peeked over his shoulder to see what could possibly be so interesting. Each screen had been divided into four sections showing snowy streets. Some were empty while brave drivers still crawled over others like little bugs, all scurrying home. Only one screen wasn’t focused on a street, and it played a continuous news station with the sound turned off.

  Reggie’s fingers stopped moving over the keyboard just long enough to tell me he paused to think. “He saved my life once. Feels like another life, honestly. Another world. I barely go up to the surface anymore. I like it down here. There are no bridges here.”

  I looked around the grimy platform. It could use a good power wash, but it wasn’t too bad for an underground lair. Still, I’d never choose to live there. “I thought trolls liked bridges?”

  “Some trolls.” He stopped typing and turned his chair around to face me. “Did you know there are over two thousand bridges in New York City? More than enough for every troll to have one. Except that’s not how it works. Some trolls own two or three. Some have none. I was one of the ones who didn’t have a bridge to call his own. I tried, but…” Reggie sighed. “I don’t really like bridges. It was never important to me, you know? I just like things. According to some, that means I’m not a very good troll. Bridges are very important in troll society, you know.” He rolled his eyes.

  I shrugged. “What kinds of things do you like if not bridges?”

  Reggie’s eyes lit up. He stood and stomped excitedly over to another curtained-off area. “My collection,” he announced proudly and pulled the curtain aside.

  Shelves lined the tiny alcove beyond, each one stuffed to bursting with trinkets. Tools, books, plastic containers, cutlery, picture frames… Common, everyday items that didn’t seem in any way connected to one another.

  Reggie picked up a baseball. “I know it might look like junk to you, but that’s the beauty of it. They don’t look like much, but each one of these things is magical.” He let go of the baseball, but it remained suspended in the air as if he were still holding it.

  I put my hand under it, and it fell into my palm just like a normal baseball. “So you collect magical odds and ends?”

  “Things nobody else wants.” He gestured to the shelves. “Most of these things don’t do much. The baseball, for example, just floats. Good if you need to work on your swing, I suppose. Useless for anything else. I have books whose pages turn blank once you’ve read them, self-cleaning coffee cups, a spool of thread that never knots… This plate turns blue if you put anything with peanuts on it.”

  I frowned. “How is that useful?”

  “It’s life and death for someone with a peanut allergy.” He shrugged and put the plate back to pull out a length of yellow rope. “This rope is made of Korrigan hair. Do you know what a Korrigan is, Khaleda?”

  I started to say that I didn’t, but he charged on ahead, too excited not to explain.

  “In Lower Brittany, they’re a sort of a cross between a fairy and a siren. All female, with hair and clothes made of gold. In most stories, they lead travelers off their path, never to be seen again. In truth, they prefer wizards. They lure them off, and drain anything magical of its powers. The hair, once they get it wrapped around you, effectively shuts off all magic until it’s removed. Nasty pieces of work, the Korrigans.” He held the rope out to me. “Here. Do yourself a favor. Once this city is saved, go tie Josiah to a post and leave him there with this. You can thank me later.”

  I took the rope in my hand. Magic lashed out and bit into my skin, tasting, searching for something. The hunger inside me rose to meet it only to back away and dissipate into nothing. I stared at the rope and tried to awaken the hunger on my own. Come and feed, you monster. It stirred but refused to surface.

  “Is everything okay?”

  I draped the rope over a pipe sticking out of the wall and smiled. “Of course. You have an interesting collection, Reggie. It’s just… You said Josiah saved you, yet you don’t seem to like him much.”

  Reggie shrugged. “He saved my body from certain death, but he ruined my life.” He ushered me away from his collection and closed the curtain behind us before returning to his chair. “I was going to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge. Would’ve been easy, except they put up those huge panes of safety glass. No problem for a big strong guy like me, right? But standing there, realizing I had to break the glass just to do it, I stopped to think. Then he strolls up. ‘Oi, ugly,’ he says, ‘You gonna jump or what? Yer blockin’ the walkway an’ I got places to be.’ Bastard.”

  I nodded. “Sounds just like him.”

  “When I didn’t answer him, he offered me a cigarette and stood there and talked to me.” Reggie shook his head. “I don’t know why he listened. Or why I talked. It was weird. No one had ever cared. Humans all think I was disfigured in a fire or something. They run away. And the other trolls, they laughed at me. Pushed me around because I didn’t want a stupid bridge. No one listened. But Josiah did. Listened for the better part of an hour and told me I was being a fuckwit. Wasting my time. Jumping off that bridge wouldn’t have done anything but made a mess for someone else to clean up. I’d just be another problem for someone else. But, if I lived, maybe I could be useful. Maybe I could find something that’d make me happy, even if it wasn’t a dumb bridge.”

  That sounded like him too. Josiah had a way of changing how you looked at your problems. He was mean, he was rude, and he was the biggest asshole I’d ever met, but he cared in his own way.

  Reggie cleared his throat. “Anyway, a bunch of punk kids showed up and took a cell phone video of him putting the broken glass back together with his magic after I’d broken it. Put it up on the internet as proof that trolls and magic were real. Started talking all about things no one is supposed to know about. Supernatural things that could get normal people hurt. Every troll in New York was pissed at me, and so were the fae, and everybody else. I spent eight months cleaning up that mess on the net.

  “Lucky me, I found out I was pretty good with computers and finding things. So that’s what I do now.” He gestured to the wall of monitors. “I scrub security footage all around the country of supernatural happenings and keep magical creatures out of the news. I sit here, and I stare at screens all day. Every once in a while, some asshole threatens to cut me into little pieces because I missed something, and I wonder how the hell I got into this mess. The answer is always the same: Josiah fucking Quinn.”

  “He is a walking disaster, isn’t he?” I suppressed a chuckle and leaned in for a closer look at the monitors. “Any luck finding that connection he was looking for?”

  His chair spun around. “Not yet. A circle that big would run out into the Atlantic, and there’s nothing out there. Saltwater notoriously breaks up magic energies too. Whatever he’s using to mark out the area of effect for the spell, it isn’t a circle.”

  “What else could it be?”

  Reggie shrugged. “Something atmospheric maybe? Radio waves. A television broadcast?”

  None of those fit. With what little I knew about magic, even I knew that. People might be glued to their televisions while the parade was on, but not everyone. Enough people would either be there, physically at the parade to watch, or have their TV off that the spell couldn’t cover enough area.

  I pointed to the map he had on one monitor. “What about the parade itself?”

  Reggie enlarged the map with a click, spreading it over all the screens to show the highlighted parade route. “I ran the numbers, and there wouldn’t be enough people along the route either, even if the parade was packed. If he’s shooting for ten mill
ion souls, he’d need something to hit every home in New York City, all five boroughs and beyond. Nothing I can find would do that.”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall. Almost four. We had just over six hours to figure this out, or we were all screwed. Staring at the screens and trying to figure out how Danny was going to launch his attack so we could stop it was pointless, especially without Josiah. But he was beat and needed rest if he was going to be any good in the upcoming fight. Which reminded me…

  “Hey, Reggie, could you do me a favor? Find me everything there is to know about a Noelle Islana.”

  Reggie’s eyes got big. He gulped in a mouthful of air. “Noelle? What the hell are you two doing tangling with the Winter Knight?”

  The Winter Knight? Well, at least that confirmed who she was. I knew a thing or two about fae knights, even if I didn’t know this one. Father had cut deals with most of the courts at one time or another, but we’d never had any dealings with Winter. Explained why I didn’t know her. It also told me her weaknesses.

  The fae knights inherited their powers from their title, which was much more than just a position of honor. The Winter Knight would be expected to guard her kingdom against intruders, protect her queen’s interests and holdings, and secure alliances that would enhance Winter’s standing. As such, the queen would confer the mantle of knighthood on her chosen knight, granting them special powers associated with the office. Winter was a season of cold, harsh weather. Ice and snow would be her power, iron and flame her weaknesses. And I had seen her fight. She was good, at least as good as me. Fighting Noelle would be a challenge.

  I glanced at the curtained-off bedroom and rubbed my injured shoulder. I’d need to heal first. With stitches in my leg and arm, I was worthless even if I had an appropriate weapon, which I didn’t. With only a few hours left on the clock, the chances that I would heal enough to present an obstacle for the Winter Knight, let alone a challenge, were non-existent.

  Unless I fed the Hunger.

  I turned back to the troll. “Reggie, do you have any weapons in your collection? A sword, maybe?”

  He shrugged. “Probably, but I’d have to go up the line to the bigger storage unit. I don’t keep things like that here.”

  I flashed him my best, most seductive smile, satisfied when his pupils dilated and his throat worked to swallow. “Could you please go and find one or two for me?”

  Poor Reggie couldn’t get out of his chair fast enough.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  JOSIAH

  With my bag missing, I felt naked. The worst part wasn’t the missing bag, though. It was knowing Milly was out there all alone. She hadn’t been crushed by the rubble when the building fell; I’d have felt that. Milly and I were psychically bonded to be able to sense each other with the tiniest spark of magic. The old girl was more than just a pet. She was as close as someone like me could get to a familiar spirit, though that term didn’t quite fit either. Milly was a magic spider, crossed over from a world where magic was more common than tech. More than that, she was a friend.

  And friends don’t abandon friends.

  Laying in Reggie’s bed, my body aching from Ira’s healing, the magic slowly seeped back into my body, a sparking live wire that struck nerve endings with renewed pain. I let it fill me until I was itching with it and then closed my eyes to reach for her across town.

  The first time I touched her spider mind, I’d recoiled and vomited. The shock of crawling into another creature’s brain was too much, and hers too different. Though she was intelligent and powerful for her size, Milly was still a spider in all the ways that counted, and spiders didn’t think like humans. Now, it was second nature. I needed only to close my eyes and hover on the edge of a dream in the place where distance and reason didn’t exist, the birthplace of both magic and madness. They were, after all, two faces cut from the same stone.

  I let myself fall into that state of waking sleep and called to her. Milly, where are you?

  Empty night flew by, fat snowflakes spinning out of control toward the silent streets. I flew on the wind, propelled toward some far off destination. Over sleepy neighborhoods, closed shops, across the East River, twisting through tall buildings toward SoHo. Red and blue lights flashed against dark windows as if speaking some advanced form of binary code, red for danger and blue for calm. Tired faces huddled near the open rear doors of ambulances, blankets pulled tight around hunched shoulders.

  Not here.

  Past the police cars and up the block lay a broken heap of brick. The once-proud building full of upscale flats had toppled on the southern side, leaving the guts of the building exposed to snowfall. The top floor was mostly intact, but Danny’s penthouse hadn’t survived the fall. Everything from the kitchen forward was gone, crashed into the floors below as if it’d never existed. I let my consciousness hover over the rubble a moment, hoping to catch the familiar pull of Milly’s mind.

  She’d already moved on.

  Over here. Her voice called me down the alley we’d fled into. A tiny shape crawled briskly through the darkness, making the rats scurry away from their garbage feast.

  There you are. The pull of her magic drew me in, and I surrendered to it.

  Darkness makes for good hunting, but there’s not much worth hunting in this alley. The crickets have all gone away because of the cold, and the rats have taken their young into the deep nests underground. The city is awash in dark magic. It tickles the hair on my legs with every step.

  I want to go back into my burrow where it’s warm and be away from this spell. The human and I have done lots of magic together, dark magic. Blood magic. He’s a good student. But this is not our spell. This is the magic of a breath held. Like a cricket caught in my web, the city struggles in its grip, feeling but not understanding that the end is nigh.

  A hot spot appears in my vision ahead, a pool of cooling orange against a sea of ice blue. Lighter, colder orange wafts from it. Blood. A larger predator has been here. I should keep to the shadows.

  Voices drift on the frigid wind from around the corner. Josiah wants me to listen to them and see what I can learn. I crawl onto the wall, going high to see from above. There are three of them, two human males and a female fae. At the sight of her, I’m frozen. The blood in the alley isn’t hers, but she is part of it. I have found the predator.

  “Relax,” says the predator female to one of the males. I glean Josiah’s mind and come up with a name: Noelle. “This doesn’t have to change anything. The spell is still primed for use at any time.”

  “Yes,” growls the smaller of two males. Josiah says this is Danny. “But if we wait, we risk losing access to the souls. It has to be tomorrow. Without the circle in my solarium, I’ll need direct power to get a circle up and running. Divine blood, and we’re painfully short on that type of sacrifice, Noelle. You shouldn’t have killed him.”

  Noelle smiles. “How many do you need? Just one? Then bleed Josiah when he comes back.”

  Danny moves into striking range of the predator, challenging. “What if he doesn’t come back?”

  “Danny, Danny, Danny.” She adjusts his shirt, picking off invisible lint. “That’s not my problem. I’ve fulfilled the terms of our agreement by blanketing the city in snow. Once you’ve collected your souls, we stand prepared to support your claim, but until then you must prove yourself worthy of the title. What kind of Devil would you be if you can’t even secure a proper sacrifice?”

  Danny turns to the other male. “Is the body secure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take it to the office. Then I want you to contact God’s Hand. Tell them we’re calling a truce and instruct them they can collect him, and my surrender, from the rooftop tomorrow morning at nine sharp.” Danny flashes his flat teeth at Noelle. “Will one of them do?”

  “Perfect,” says Noelle. She turns her head, eyes gleaming red. She’s seen me.

  In a panic, I skitter up the wall and over the building. Where are you, Josiah? I don�
��t like this city or that fae. She wants to squish me.

  She’ll do worse than that if she gets you. We’re at the 76 station about ten miles east. How long’ll it be, then?

  I have eight eyes and roll all of them. It’s a human gesture I’ve picked up just for him. Two hours if I hurry, but I’ll be tired.

  No worries. Did ya happen to see my bag?

  Danny has it.

  He says nothing, but I feel the hesitant fear. It’s more than just a fear that Danny will uncover some secret buried in the depths of that bottomless pit. He’s worried he’s just returned a gift.

  Really, Josiah? This is hardly the time for human cultural protocol. Besides, Danny is hardly a suitable mate. He didn’t even dance for you.

  Tarantulas can’t laugh, but if I could, I would laugh at his exasperated insistence that I stick to advising him about magic. D’ya know how he’s doing it, then?

  I tap my feet in a smug rhythm. Of course. You should, too. He all but admitted it openly.

  Not only did Danny not know how to dance, but he also didn’t know how to keep a secret. A bad mate, indeed. But then, Josiah was no catch. Good thing humans didn’t mate for life.

  Now’s not the time to be smug, Milly. Out with it.

  I should tell him. He’s clearly exhausted. Whispers of pain have trickled from him into me. But he didn’t listen to me when I told him not to call on Ira’s power. I told him it might cause extensive damage to the structure. He also didn’t listen to me when I told him not to go into that bar. In fact, Josiah hasn’t been listening to me since we left New Orleans. Plus, he’s kept me locked up in that tiny box, and wouldn’t let me make the succubus scream whenever I wanted. He would never learn if I gave him all the answers.