by Callie Stone
I figured that I would not call out Alexander on his faulty logic—he could not work with us all day since he was a vampire—and he would return the favor by not trying to call me out for having no real reason to venture around Madrid on my own.
Despite being intelligent and observant, all of the team did have a tendency to think that I was just some frail girl who needed looking after. If I was going to be looked after, I would rather it be for a more substantial reason than just my non-boy status. After brushing my teeth and combing through my long-suffering hair, I strode swiftly towards the door of our hotel suite with no set plan.
“Where are you going so fast, Natasha?”
Kieran put a crimp in my half-baked notion by questioning it.
He was sitting on a leather sectional near the suite door, along with Michael and Alexander. They were all nursing mugs of coffee from the suite’s French press, and as I saw them I realized they were staring straight at me as I was trying to essentially run out the door. Kieran’s entertained little half-smile told me that he knew I could not think of an excuse if I wanted.
“You’re not going to go searching Madrid for the portal on your own, are you?” The simper remained on his face as he asked.
If Kieran was amused, I expected Michael to be on the verge of breaking into hysterics. Yet, as my eyes traveled over to his I saw a surprising concern.
“I know we’re already missing one team member,” he said, referring to Troy who had gone to the fae kingdom to confront his father. “We don’t want to lose another.”
The unexpected wash of kindness from Michael had tears almost about to form, and I blinked hard to hold them back.
“Hey, hey,” Michael continued. “It’s okay. Troy’s right here.”
And indeed, Michael had shifted into the shape of Troy to cheer me up.
He gave me a humorously overwrought and earnest pep talk in the style of Troy:
“There is a term the fairy-folk in my old kingdom use, Natasha, to describe the type of men our teammates are. That ancient term is ‘schmucks’. While these schmucks, as they would be known in my realm, may not possess your angelic beauty nor my exquisite taste in ball caps, it is advisable to let a couple of them go with you as you traipse about Madrid.” As much as I wanted to laugh, there was a strange sadness holding back my smile. At least, until Michael continued: “And above all, remember you are good at what you do. You can handle anything.”
There was no fighting the smile I felt spreading across my face after that.
Any nascent tears had fully dried by the time Kieran and Michael had deposited their mugs on the coffee table and risen to come join my search for the portal in Madrid.
I noticed Alexander was standing as well.
“You...you cannot be considering joining us as well.”
“You know I can’t.” Alexander grinned warmly as he stepped closer to me. “But I just wanted to remind you that our team could never do without you. So please, be careful.”
After a final step towards me Alexander leaned down to punctuate his words with a soft kiss upon my forehead.
I bit back a giggle as the red in his cheeks grew darker, but he took a gentlemanly step back to regard me, his eyes full of friendly affection, admiration, and, yes, respect.
“Alright, alright.” Michael called. “The mushy stuff can wait until after the mission. We’re one Troy down as it is and Alexander can’t even come with us. Kieran, we’ll need you to start leading the way.”
Kieran’s eyes widened adorably as Michael pointed towards him.
“Me?”
“Yes you,” Michael confirmed. “You’re good at this stuff. We need that lycanthrope nose of yours, buddy.”
Kieran looked at me as if he needed final approval, which I did grant him with a slight smile and a hearty nod.
“Then let’s go.” Kieran puffed his chest, reminding me a bit of how well-toned and muscular it’s always been, and swaggered towards the door of the suite.
“Kieran,” I called.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think they’re here? I mean, if, when we find the portal, will we need to deal with... you know.”
His eyes opened a bit as he considered his answer. “Um…it’s possible. But according to Hask’s intel, there’s at least one more portal besides the one here in Madrid. But, if they’re about, well, we should be able to handle them. Because...”
“Because we’ll have no other choice,” Michael said, finishing Kieran’s sentence.
“We’re not here to fight the big cheese and his half-demon little cheese,” Michael continued. “But if we have to, we will.”
I had to look over to Alexander, who was subtly grinding his jaw and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, naturally unable to bear the idea of letting us face that fight alone, if it came to it.
“If it comes to it, I will find a way to do whatever needs to be done.” Alexander sat back down, his eyes looking focused and confident at the thought of possibly having to risk his own safety if necessary. “Kieran, make sure your phone is charged so you can keep me apprised.”
“Oh, it is charged,” Kieran held up the device. “And my nose is charged, too,” he jested.
“Whatever happens, we need the portals shut before they get the chance to invade.”
I looked at the two and could see on their faces that this was much more than just an assignment to them. It was to all of us. This meant everything to every soul in existence who had anything to exist for.
There was a renewed sense of purpose I could feel in the air amongst all of us as Michael and I followed Kieran out of the suite and towards the hotel lift.
“Any hunches yet?” I asked Kieran.
“Only what Hask mentioned about the Madrid transit system,” Kieran answered without turning around, focused on summoning the lift and leading the way.
“I think that’s the most likely place to check, but I wouldn’t discount any of the other places.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Did Hask mention other places in Madrid?”
“I meant the other portals. So far, they’re all very public places,” Kieran explained as the lift doors opened and were boarded. “And the big cheese, as Michael calls him, is going to want to send large waves of demons through at a time, as fast as possible, to collect maximal souls as Hask told us.”
“So you think it is more likely to be there?” I asked. “Or are you all still following the lead of what Emilio told us. Because, you know, the power of suggestion and all that.”
“You know what the tube is like in London, right?” Kieran asked as he, Michael, and I formed a huddle as the lift took us down to the lobby.
“Of course.” I smirked. “It can’t be nearly that crowded on the Madrid metro. Can it?”
Michael and Kieran shared a look. “Imagine that crowded, or more,” Michael began, “and smaller stations, and no English over-politeness.”
I considered this as the elevator slowly lowered to the lobby floor. “Surely people still say excuse me if they accidentally bump into one another.”
“Maybe,” said Michael. “But there’s less of a general awareness of personal space. It’s part of the Spanish culture to be closer to one another. To share one another’s air, as it were. Like this.” He took a step toward me, and before I could back away he leaned in close to my face.
Kieran and Michael both started laughing loudly as the lift doors opened.
“Let’s just say things are prone towards chaos already,” Michael said as we stepped out into the still empty hotel lobby.
“They’ve done their research,” I added, considering the various portal locations and what they signified.
“There may have been ritualistic reasons for the other portals,” Kieran started explaining in a hushed voice as we walked past the bored front desk lady. “But they’ve all been tactical, too. We really don’t know yet, or at least I don’t.”
Despite his words, Kieran’s
body language betrayed some intuition as he marched straight through the revolving door and made an immediate left turn onto the pavement. Michael and I followed him without question, walking slightly behind as Kieran led us through the midday Madrid sun, leaning subtly forward with his nose angled ahead of him.
It was not clear whether Kieran was taking his reputation for sniffing things out a bit literally, or he was just relying on his superior olfactory out of habit, or as part of some mélange of canine instinct buried deep within him.
It was probably all of the above.
Michael and I shared a glance as we walked next to each other behind Kieran. While neither of us spoke, letting our teammate concentrate, we seemed to share the same uncertainty about this blind search around Madrid on foot.
I ran my hand lightly over my satchel containing my magic feather and scroll, hoping I would not be needing those items anytime soon. I also had what was left of the magical healing blanket, but the possible need for that seemed remote at best.
Still, I found myself whispering, “God forbid,” as we followed Kieran’s lead, almost backtracking on ourselves to reach a quieter, almost deserted side street.
Kieran had slowed his pace and was already sniffing at the air. He stopped and tilted his head as he tried to make sense of which way the scent was blowing.
“Got something?” Michael asked.
“I do,” Kieran replied quickly, a little too with purpose. “It’s faint, but I know it.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come on.”
Kieran turned down a narrow alley between two buildings. We followed closely. The alley was long. At the end of it was a large metal door, with a sign on it reading: No entry.
“It’s in English,” I said quietly. Kieran turned towards us and nodded as if to say: I noticed, and that did seem strange.
“So what?” Michael scoffed loudly. “That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Maybe it’s not important.” I was still whispering, partially to indicate to Michael that it was better to be safe than sorry.
Kieran slowly approached the door. It was heavy and metal, with a wheel at the bottom for lifting it. He sniffed around the doorframe before walking in a slow circle around the outside of the door.
“It’s here,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “This is where they’re coming through.”
“What is this building?” I asked, my voice growing quieter although I was not even sure what the purpose of that was. “Is it anything to do with the metro here, or?”
My words, my actions, were starting to make less sense to me as I observed them. It felt like the side-effects of my sleep deficit, maybe. Or something else.
“I’m going inside,” he said, disappearing through the door with a quickness that seemed to defy the laws of physics.
“No, wait!” I called out, following him through.
The darkness vanished as light flooded into my eyes. As my vision returned to me, I saw we were in a large room with a high ceiling and a long counter. Behind the counter was a security guard, snoozing in his chair. We were not alone.
A man in a dark, hooded robe stood staring at us. His eyes were not like my eyes, nor my teammates’ eyes nor anything with a vestige of humanity; there was no white, only blackness. Two black holes, drawing my gaze in as I could not look anywhere else.
Even as the horribly familiar sounds of panic and chaos were starting to erupt from somewhere beneath the floor where I stood, and somewhere in the distance in front of me, I could not look away.
Eyes like two portals into an abyss I had fallen down once before. Eyes that had looked upon the very same scenes of chaos and destruction I had witnessed, in battle, in nightmares, in the dreadful daydreams which arose during the worst moments of anxiety, and relished in all of them. Eyes that had been closed for decades, but were now open again. I stepped back instinctively, bumping into someone, or rather something, as I did so.
It was not a pleasant experience.
I took another step back, and bumped into something else, and then something else again.
It felt as though the very walls of the room were breathing and shifting form as the sounds of mass panic ebbed and flowed from all directions.
Yet my eyes were still drawn to those two black holes. I could not catch sight of my teammates; I could not tell what was real. The sounds faded and I felt the space around me open up again as everything faded like a bad dream.
Everything, that was, except for the figure and its two black holes that my eyes were unable to escape.
“So…”
That voice.
I had never in all my years encountered such a voice. It surely belonged to a demon, that was certain, but it was higher than any I had heard before, effeminate even, yet with a grumbling, almost subsonic undertone which shook the world around it. It was cold and dark like the abyss, and just as unforgiving. I could not see its face, yet I knew those eyes would be staring at me, sizing me up as they had done before. His presence seemed to command the very air around him to tremble in fear as it continued.
“...you’re the angel that’s been causing me so much trouble.”
14
The Demon’s Rationale
Zavier
You would think that a demon as intelligent and cunning as my father would not fall for the same tricks twice, let alone three or four times. He may have argued, if confronted on the matter, that everything was falling into place perfectly, somehow.
The reality of Paris, and of Zurich, ran counter to that, and then Madrid, too, fell to pieces.
The angel and her allies had ensured that the plan succeeded. My father may have been able to salvage something, with the aid of my previous successes, if he had stopped there. Yet he did not, and so it all fell apart.
It was easy enough to see, from some wrongheaded prerogative, of course, that he was a slave, a slave to his own pride on one hand and the whims of the angel on the other. He could have let victory ensue in Zurich, at least that’s what it appeared to me when I made the mistake of trying to understand the larger machinations at play.
Yet, I realised, that was my own perspective, a perspective which was surely still coloured by the vestiges of a mortal, human consciousness which was a long way from fully understanding the enduring machinations, the eternities upon eternities spent witnessing the cycles that transcend the fiercely limited, earthly views of creation and destruction, life and death.
My view, I knew, was still nowhere near my father’s view. His perspective was far wider than that of any human, or even angel, and stretched back through the mists of time to the birth of this infernal world.
The portals distilled hope, as well as creating it. The correct use of them could alter the course of events across infinities.
Through the portals, one could travel vast distances in the blink of an eye. These portals, at least those to the lower realms, were immensely difficult to create, and only a demon of my father’s power could have pulled off the ability to change the nature of these junctures from their anciently established limitations to open crossroads of free egress.
Yet it seemed that my father was naïve, or had appeared to be, to what must have been a flawed estimation on my part. However my father’s plan was blossoming, in that moment he appeared to be struggling against the forces of five part-humans and the annoyances of the lower demonic legions.
It had hardly been a week, I had felt, since I set up the portal at the site of the sixth-century Parisian abbey known as the Célestine, a place of worship rumored to have been used by the Frankish rulers and aristocracy at the time for secret Pagan rituals. Like them, it was Catholic for political expediency only—most had secret Pagan beliefs, and this was one such place for them to practice discreetly.
Additional reasons for choosing that spot were far more pragmatic. The region had an abundant amount of ley-lines converging upon it, and thanks to the rites I had enacted, that was only th
e beginning.
The fact that the church was long considered cursed and had been razed to make way for a supermarket was just entertaining icing on the cake.
Unlike my hard-earned portals in Rome and Switzerland, I could feel the pride of that portal connecting Paris, the fae realm, and the underworld still standing as I manned the tedious post guarding this bardo-like passage between the lower realm, the fae realm and the Earth side of the Madrid portal. It seemed it was all so my father put on a show for the angel and her little friends.
“You know that it’s been collapsed,” a tinny voice buzzed from somewhere annoying close to my ear.
“It is?” I asked, my voice sounding too tinged with angst for my own liking as the dragonfly demon buzzed around to face me.
“The team drove us all out,” the sickening little thing buzzed at me. “The circle lost its power.”
“Quit eavesdropping on my thoughts,” I snarled, swatting at the thing while trying to hide my disappointment that yet another piece of work had been destroyed.
“It was your old school chums,” the insect demon buzzed as more of his kind started buzzing towards where I stood guard. “And I wasn’t eavesdropping. You project your thoughts pretty loudly.”
“Bullshit,” I snarled.
“It’s true,” the demon insisted as it landed on my shoulder and crawled down my chest to my waistband where I shoved it away from my crotch to my back. “Quit projecting. It’s annoying.”
“What are you on about?”
“You’re still on about the damn girl.”
“What!” I exclaimed before swatting fervently but uselessly as more little creatures started swarming in and out of the small bardo. “You’re all mixed up in your tiny brain.”
“Shhh,” the demon said, crawling back up to my shoulder. “You’re a failure, and I’m tired of listening to it, you human loser. You’ll never be a demon.”
“I am a demon!” I protested, my voice beginning to rise.
“If you were a demon, you wouldn’t be stuck in this bardo with us, scuttling around in the dirt. Ha! If you were a demon, your father would be working for Lucifer, not languishing in the pit of agony he is in right now, thanks to his son’s incompetence.”
