Magic Revenge: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Spirit War Chronicles Book 2)

by Stephen Allan

  And with his back to me, facing the dragon, was Paul Stephens.

  “You got wind we wanted to start the party early,” Paul said before he slowly turned around, a sly smile on his face. Even now, with the cocky attitude, the evil intentions, and the manipulative smile, I still saw the Paul who mentored me, trained me, and took care of me. Not much messed with my head in the middle of battle, but this threw me for a loop. The demon in the form of Paul Stephens… ? “I’m so grateful that you came to the party instead of us coming to you. It’s a shame, honestly. This was going to be a surprise party, and my gift to you was to let you see your friends die the way I did.”

  I heard DJ’s breathing intensify and I gripped his wrist tightly. Now was not the time to transform into a dragon. He would get eaten alive. We had to give me a chance to bind the beast’s throat before he had a chance to do anything—but that wouldn’t happen as long as other demons were around us.

  “I suppose instead that we’ll start with your lover over there. You can know how my wife felt.”

  “Paul!” I shouted. Maybe some psychological warfare back would work. Maybe it would break the illusion of him actually being Paul Stephens. “This isn’t you. The Paul I knew didn’t hate. He loved.”

  Paul let out a raucous laugh that, I almost wanted to say, sounded nothing like him. But it didn’t make me think this was a demon in disguise. It just made me think hell had changed him drastically for the worse, and I didn’t like it at all. But then again, who could live in a place like that for eternity and not become manipulative, aggressive, and sociopathic?

  If it is a demon in disguise, it’s doing too good of a job.

  “You are responsible for that Paul dying, Sonya. And now, I will be responsible for your death!”

  On cue, he raised his hand, and a hundred demons appeared out of nowhere around the perimeter of the Berlin Wall, all of them growling and waiting for the mark to pounce. This was really, really, really bad. Paul had a psychological grip on me and I couldn’t shift into the mentality of fighting.

  “I will be watching from afar, Sonya. If you survive this, come and find me. I will be with the person you most love in this world.”

  With that, he let out a demonic laugh and vanished into a puff of smoke. The demons let out a battle cry, their jaws shaking as they roared, and charged us.

  “Sonya!” DJ shouted, and I turned back just in time to see him transforming into a dragon. I wasn’t about to argue with the timing now. “Ride!” he shouted, his command turning into a dragon’s battle cry as his vocal cords shifted.

  Paul…

  Is gone. Time to fight, Sonya. Do what you do best.

  Talk some shit, take down some assholes. Let’s get physical.

  “Hey!” I shouted to the onslaught of demons who were now about thirty feet away and closing fast. “Got fire?”

  I mounted DJ, patted his neck, and commanded him to shower the mass of demons with flames. As he did so, I turned my attention to the massive beast above us, who seemed to relish a second chance at killing us. He leaned back, thinking we hadn’t noticed…

  And I raised my arms and bound his head. It felt like trying to hold Jello with wet hands—the dragon was resisting my grip, and doing a damn good job of it. But he also wasn’t breathing fire. In the game of “survive at all costs” I was winning.

  But then I heard a snicker of a demon and had to drop the spell to turn toward a demon on DJ’s tail. A quick shot from Ivory took care of the ugly asshole, but my dropping the spell had allowed the massive dragon to unleash his fire. Fortunately, in his effort to break my spell, he had fought too hard and the fire blasted over our heads. It actually worked out well, given that it incinerated a few of his fellow demons.

  By the thinnest of margins, though. I was pretty sure I’d have to get some hair work done in the afternoon. Hopefully DJ didn’t mind paying for me to visit a stylist as worker’s comp.

  “Fly!” I commanded as I refocused. DJ had managed to knock off about a dozen demons, and the massive dragon’s inaccuracy had decimated the back row, but that still left a few dozen demons. If we took to the air, we could handle them with ease. We’d be right in the large dragon’s territory, but I liked my odds better against one massive monster I could temporarily freeze than dozens of crawling insects that we couldn’t exterminate quickly enough.

  I looked at the enormous dragon to decide what to do. The dragon and I seemed to be playing a game of chicken—he knew that I could freeze him, but I knew turning my attention away from him would allow DJ to become his breakfast.

  “Attack the demons down below, I’ll keep the dragon at bay!” I shouted as I kept my eyes on the demon above.

  It seemed so absurd it was almost funny. DJ, despite being a dragon with size that would terrify any human, had to take out the demons, while I, a 5’8, 130-pound woman, had to hold off a dragon large enough to eat the White House.

  I guess gender roles are fluid in the spiritual realm.

  The move worked well at first, as the dragon and I remained in a standoff. There were a couple of frightening moments when DJ decided to descend without warning, giving me the illusion of free fall, but for the most part he did a good job making sure I never felt unsafe.

  Finally, the dragon made his move. He lifted high into the sky… frighteningly high, actually.

  So high up that it dawned too late on me what he was doing.

  He was soaring to the heavens so that my magic could not reach him and he could rain down fire from above. Very apocalyptic. I’ll give you style points for that.

  Much to my chagrin, my fears were confirmed when, upon lifting my hands and feeling the magic course through them, I could not reach him. Figuring it wouldn’t much matter now, I turned my attention back to the ground just in time to see one demon grab DJ’s leg and rear a dagger back to stab him.

  “Dude, knife to a gun fight, hello,” I said as I leaned over and shot him, letting him disintegrate as he fell to the ground. By my count, only two demons remained—impressive work by DJ. I’d have to reward him later. Maybe buy one of his books or something. As long as I get it autographed.

  But first, I had to dispatch of them.

  “Can I get the buy one, get two special deal?” I said as I saw them lining up in parallel. I waited for the exact moment… just… as… we… lined up and fired! A single burst of charged energy shot through the air, tearing through the first demon and ripping through the second one, dropping them both to the ground. “Whoooo! How you like that, Mundus? I’ll incinerate—”

  But my words were cut short when a massive fireball exploded just a dozen feet away from us, pelting debris toward my face and onto DJ. The right lens on my glasses cracked and I could feel blood trickling from my cheek. Just flesh wounds. Carry on. Carry on, carry on, carry on!

  “To the heavens!” I yelled to DJ, and he obeyed, flying as high as he could.

  It was, to put it simply, a risky maneuver. We had anticipated flying near the ground, where I could control the dragon and have DJ destroy it. In retrospect, such a battle was probably too easy for us and we should have predicted that the dragon would fight back. It may have been a demon, but demons still had brains and the capability of fighting intelligently. As intelligent as it needs to be. Doesn’t make it smarter than us.

  As the ground became smaller and smaller—to the point that I felt more like I was on an airplane than a dragon—I got the incredibly sickening feeling that all it would take would be one mistake to screw up and die. The great dragon in the sky could do nothing and all it would take was DJ taking an abrupt turn, tossing me to my death.

  But, then again, how often had I found myself in that spot, where a single error would result, at best, in a quick death, and at worst, an agonizing torture?

  More often than I went on good dates.

  The bellow of the dragon became audible once more, and within less than a dozen seconds, we had gotten in range. I took a deep breath and raised my arms, doing
my best not to think of the heights

  “Time to feel like a pigeon next to a jet engine.”

  Seconds later, I latched onto the creature’s neck and held it in place. The monster fought with all its might, and now two things felt like slippery oil—the dragon in my metaphorical hands, and the dragon between my legs. Hah, dragon between my legs. I had to balance the act of keeping the demonic beast in my control while making sure DJ didn’t let me fall. It was an act that, I’m sure more than once, resulted in momentary freedom for the enemy dragon. But it seemed to work, because on DJ’s first pass, he bit the enemy’s neck as we soared away.

  “Nice one!”

  The celebration was fleeting as a wave of heat brushed on my back and DJ buckled in pain. The enemy’s flames had not quite hit me, but they had hit DJ’s tail.

  “Come on, stick with me! Don’t turn this into Castaway!”

  We turned, banking harder than I would’ve cared for, as I did my best not to look down at the ground. Would falling from the sky be the same spiritually as physically? I didn’t want that question answered as we advanced on the beast. I held my arms up and froze him, and this time, DJ hit his eye.

  But he also climbed upwards immediately after, and I had to grab the back of his neck to prevent myself from falling.

  “Dude, I do not want to die from friendly fire!”

  I knew DJ couldn’t give me a response, but I had to guilt trip him just a little bit. When he became human, I’d give him the white girl shame in heavier doses.

  We came for another pass, and the strategy was working just fine. The culmination of it all came when, with the demon dragon blind and with one wing broken, DJ made one last pass for the last good wing of the enemy.

  “Slice it,” I said.

  With a well-placed bite, DJ did so.

  Suddenly, I felt myself flying through the air.

  “DJ!” I screamed, my voice reaching a higher pitch than it ever had before. As I tumbled, I scarcely noticed the enemy’s tail whipping the belly of DJ, the last attack of a now dying monster. DJ accelerated into free fall, clipping his wings behind him as he hurried toward me. Good. Now would be a bad time to ghost me.

  I had no idea how high in the sky we were. But by my best guess, we had no more than a minute before I became dragon soup.

  DJ was doing his best to rescue me (ugh, I hated being the damsel in distress), and it seemed like he was gaining ground. But every time I glanced back down, the ground was gaining more, well, ground on me. It was coming in too fast, and it would take miraculous speed to catch me.

  But as the features of Berlin came into clearer view, I had an idea. I had no idea if it would work, and I could only hope I would do it right. If not, DJ and I might both suffer.

  But I closed my eyes and focused on teleporting to DJ’s back. This was so much different than anything before. I had only teleported to stationary targets, never a moving one. Would I wind up hundreds of feet above DJ? Or would I somehow fail and splat on the ground? Could I just picture his back, or would I have to anticipate the exact space to teleport to?

  No thinking! Just fucking teleport!

  I closed my eyes, thought of DJ’s back, and felt the energy pulsing in my body. Suddenly, a scaly, thick body sat underneath my butt. I opened my eyes and found myself on the back of DJ, with no grip.

  That changed rapidly. I tightened my legs around him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and screamed, “Land!” as the ground came into view. I shut my eyes for the rest of the descent, not wanting to know if I was about to die or crash.

  Well, as it turned out, we crashed.

  But I didn’t die.

  I got cut, sure, and my ass felt like someone had taken a steel beam and slammed it against my tailbone. My glasses had cracked more, and I could already tell which parts of my body would feel sore the next morning.

  But I was alive. I was breathing. My heart was beating. And I was conscious of all of these facts.

  Behind me, a cloud of dust was parting as DJ morphed back into human form. He staggered a bit, but walked without much difficulty. I ran up to him, my heart now beating faster, and squeezed him tight.

  “I thought you liked the thrill of the chase,” he said as he rubbed his right shoulder.

  “You have a very different definition of chase than I do… Jack.”

  I annunciated his real name for effect, like a mother using a child’s first, middle, and last name to signify they were in trouble. I got an unexpected laugh from DJ as we embraced each other tightly.

  The joy was short-lived, though, as an explosion sounded off in the distance, followed by a loud cry. A laugh echoed in my head. Not a demonic laugh. A human one.

  “Well done, Sonya, my little trainee. You indeed won the battle. But now, you must come to me before I finish your brother off. You will find me at the place I died. I don’t think that’ll be hard for you to figure out.”

  I tugged on DJ’s shirt and pulled him close.

  “You’re going to have to go back into dragon mode, and DJ, I’m not sure you’re going to like what I have to say.”

  “I always like what you say,” DJ said, but he quickly dropped the humor when he saw my seriousness.

  “I need you to fly to southern Turkey. We need to rescue my brother. And you need to do it now.”

  I knew what this entailed. An extremely high altitude. Other monsters along the way. I had no doubt hell had other terrible things in store for us. A lack of oxygen. Fatigue.

  But if Paul had taught me anything when he was good, it was that while fatigue made cowards of us all, courage turned us back into heroes. We had to push.

  Without another question, DJ roared, turned into a dragon, and I mounted him, the two of us soaring into the skies, so high that I was shivering and feeling lightheaded immediately.

  Only a few hours of this to go.

  Chapter 17

  For the first couple hours, we ran into no trouble. Sure, I could hear demons, and some of them roared at us as we flew, even at the height we were at. But for whatever reason, none of them bothered attacking us.

  I wondered where the hell Carsis was. Had he disappeared to take on his own battle?

  A terrible gut feeling came to mind, one that I wished wasn’t true but one that I suspected had to be. We had only entered from one spot into the spiritual realm. If the demons there had permission to fight and go through the portal, hundreds, if not thousands, of demons had probably swarmed Berlin by now. Perhaps Carsis, sensing this, had stayed behind and was fighting the onslaught of demons.

  Whatever the reason was, he had not failed me. I trusted that he was doing the right thing. There was far more to this fight than a sad battle of former allies.

  I looked down from DJ, trying to see how far we had come, but the whole thing was just a waste of time. Until we passed over bodies of water and I could get a general sense of where we were, there wasn’t going to be anything to give me the sense of location. We were just flying southeast, that’s all I knew. By my best guess, we were already into Turkish borders—at least in the human realm—but we could’ve just as easily still been in Greek territory.

  The first wave of demons came when I looked up.

  The same ugly bats which had reared their ugly heads in Nuforsa’s chamber screeched at me. I rolled my eyes, unleashed Ebony and Ivory, and went to work. I knew that there would be an unlimited amount of these Dracula wannabes, but I also knew that as long as I got to Paul in one piece, I’d get the battle he wanted. So intent was he on fighting me that I felt sure he’d tell Mundus to back off if it meant getting a chance to kill me.

  I wish I’d known, I thought in between waves of bats. I wish I’d known that he resented me so much. I could’ve apologized. I could’ve done something. I should have done something. But I did nothing. This is my punishment. This is my hell for what I did to you, Paul. I’m sorry.

  Demon in the form of Paul…

  A trick of Tyrus’. To make you cold-blooded. You
can be when it’s right. Don’t be now.

  The dreaded thoughts vanished as more bats came, and then something else came—they looked like eagles, but with red domes instead of white ones. And they breathed balls of fire—not quite as deadly as the dragon we’d just slaughtered, but certainly far more numerous and more obnoxious. And heavens, their screech made nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart. Once more, I had to put Ebony and Ivory to use as I blasted away the ugly creatures. The difference was this time, they got a few hits in on DJ, who let out a few groans.

  “Stay with me, big man,” I shouted. “If you think this is painful, wait till we to spend time together.”

  The dragon let out a roar that I laughed at. Hey, sometimes in moments like this, laughter was all one had. Let’s face it, it’s been all we’ve had so far.

  The demonic eagles and the bats kept coming, and though I managed to keep them mostly at bay, DJ was taking hits that I knew would accumulate or, worse, slow him down.

  “Sonya Ferguson,” Paul suddenly said, his voice stirring in my head. “Your time is running short. I grow tired of waiting for you. You have forty minutes to get here before I take your brother for myself.”

  I shook off the voice, but I was decently sure that forty minutes was pushing it for our arrival. Worse, I knew we would encounter even more traps along the way.

  And that’s when my worst suspicions were confirmed when, out of nowhere, what could only be described as a horse-dragon combination rose to the sky, galloping as if the sky was the ground. It let out a bellow as it galloped ahead, smoke coming from its nose. I lined up Ebony and Ivory.

  “Those in favor of living. Say aye. Those against, say neigh,” I said as I yanked the trigger.

  To my disappointment, though the dragon horse dodged the attacks with ease and unleashed a fire straight for DJ. We had to duck to avoid it, but the result was a loss in speed and a moment of disorientation for me.

  “Hell no, I ain’t losing here,” I said.