by Andrea Speed
As part of being magic, Ahmed could be physically much stronger than you’d anticipate, so if Ahmed hit them, Logan really hoped he’d learned to deal with it. Last time he punched something, Ahmed had admitted regulating his own physical strength was hard and not something he’d grappled with much. Which also brought up the question of how a guy made of sand could possibly be strong, but again, it could explode your brain making any serious attempt to comprehend this.
Speaking of which, the spider was closing in on them at speed, and a quick glance told Logan they were at the back of the cave. Behind them was a huge rock wall. There was nowhere to go. But he was glad he looked behind him because it reminded him he had Godslayer. “Hey, you think the sword still works here?”
Lyn, who was shaking out her arms to bring the feathers, gave him a look that was vaguely insulting. “Dude, that’s an inanimate object that has the aura of a living thing. It’s weird as fuck, and it will work here because it wants to.”
Although that sounded strange, Godslayer wasn’t your typical weapon. As if regular magic wasn’t enough of a head scratcher, Hell magic was somehow weirder still. It added an extra layer of malevolence and what-the-fuckery to a thing that was already teeming with it.
Logan grabbed the sword and pulled it out, suddenly aware the hilt was warm. Why? Was that normal for this thing? He was going to have to ask Ceri. The spider opened its mandibles, and Logan jabbed the sword right into what passed for its mouth.
For a second, the spider quivered there as if unsure what to do. Then what happened to most things hit with Godslayer started happening to it. It seemed to be turning pale, as if something were bleeding all the color from it, and its carapace cracked with a sound like a sheet of ice breaking on a lake. It collapsed, snapping its own legs underneath it.
“I can’t believe I ever forget how fucking scary that thing is,” Lyn said. Her arms were wings now and her fingers claws. Which was good because if there was another giant spider, it was doubly fucked.
Logan pulled the sword out of the spider’s face and put it back in the sheath. The thing was so dead he was already catching a whiff of decay from it. When Godslayer killed, its target went to the reaper three times dead. He had no idea how that worked, but again, Hell magic.
Gunshots suddenly rang out, and Logan felt like he’d been punched before Lyn tackled him and drove him behind a large rock. “Who the fuck is shooting at us?” Logan asked. He tried to look without getting shot. He thought he caught movement near the mouth of the cave, but it was hard to say.
“Shit,” Lyn said. He looked at her, not sure what she was referring to, and was surprised to see she was looking at him. He followed her gaze; blood discolored his shirt. That he followed to a fairly neat hole beneath his collarbone on the right side.
“Motherfucker,” Logan said, exploring the edge of the hole. So that was the punching sensation. Now that he was looking at it, he could feel the pain radiating from it like a piece of burning coal wedged beneath his skin.
He closed his eyes and made himself wish it away. He wasn’t injured; he certainly wasn’t shot. He was perfectly fine, and all his blood was in his body. After a moment of believing that so fiercely he almost gave himself a headache, Logan opened his eyes. The wound was still there and bleeding. “Shit. That should have worked.”
“This isn’t your average illusion spell if it got me too,” Lyn pointed out.
They both felt and distantly heard a rumble, and they exchanged a wary look. Was that an earthquake? Was it part of the illusion or something happening in the real world? Did Ahmed somehow do that?
But more urgently, they heard noises near the front of the cave. Something scrabbling, like a dozen footsteps quickly on the move. The good part about the huge, slowly decaying spider corpse was it made a better door than a window—it would save them from some bullets, at least for now.
More shots rang out and bounced off the rock walls, throwing chips of stone in their direction. Logan ducked, and suddenly he hit the ground.
No, not the ground—a floor. A bare wooden floor where the carpet had been shredded into the size of lint balls from a dryer. He glanced up and found himself in the room again. Ahmed was standing by the bookcase, looking as flustered as he ever could.
“I’ll have you know you almost got me with that bloody sword.”
“Sorry, I was fighting a giant spider.” Logan pushed himself up until he was sitting on the floor. Lyn sat up as well, her arms still wings. “Did you shred the entire carpet?”
“I had to do something, and destroying the sigil seemed like the best thing.”
Lyn shook out her arms, making the feathers retreat. “What the hell was that boom? Or was that the illusion?”
Ahmed shook his head. “It was outside. Is it not too early for the apocalypse to start?”
It was only after Logan got to his feet that he realized he was still bleeding. “What the fuck…?”
Ahmed stared at him. “Do you have stigmata now?”
Before Logan could tell him to piss off, Lyn saw it. “Shit! It carried over into the real world?” Her hands and arms were back to human standard, and she grabbed his jacket and shirt to see if she could find a bullet hole. She didn’t in the coat, but she found one in his shirt. “What the hell…? How strong was that spell?”
“Strong enough to follow me out.” That burning-ember sensation beneath his skin was still present, and he wondered how much it would take to drink it away. Well, Ceri would probably heal him, but still.
Lyn tore a piece of his shirt off, and before he could object, she crammed the fabric in the hole, which hurt like a son of a bitch. But it was absorbing the blood, so he guessed it kind of helped.
That reminded him he still had his backpack on, and he shifted it toward her. “Grab the tape out of there, will you?”
She gave him a look that shouted “Since when am I your servant?” but dug into the bag, most likely out of curiosity. It took her a moment, but she pulled out a silver-gray roll with a scowl. “You don’t mean the duct tape, do you?”
“I do indeed.” He took it from her, measured off a good-sized piece, and ripped it off with his teeth before patting it over his spectral bullet wound. He put the rest of the roll back in his pack. “I also have superglue, in case the cut’s too big for tape.”
She shook her head. “How are you still alive, you goofyass bastard?”
He shrugged. “General misfortune.”
“He’s like a flea,” Ahmed said. “Too small and powerless to really notice until it’s eaten you alive.”
“Hey.” The funny thing was that was almost a compliment from Ahmed. Still, who liked being called a flea?
Lyn started walking toward the empty bookcase and said, “Mind if I shortcut this?”
“Be my guest,” he replied.
Ahmed stepped aside as Lyn cut to the chase and started punching and kicking the fuck out of the bookcase. She put holes in it immediately, and slivers and chunks of wood went flying. She still had harpy strength in human form; she was just more judicious in using it. She could pass for human until she put a hole in a car, and then it became clear she wasn’t.
Another rumble reached Logan through the floorboards, and he wondered what the hell was going on outside. Had the angels come back with weapons? That would have been really stupid of them, but it couldn’t be ruled out. The approaching apocalypse had made them and the demons a bit more reckless. They really wanted this to go off on time, no matter that the key figure to it—Ceri—wanted no part of it. His feelings had never mattered. He had a destiny to fulfill, at least according to them. It was nice when people decided your life for you. Like the angels decided he and Gill had to join them. Well, fuck all of that. Every last bit of it. It made Logan’s heart hurt to think of Gill giving up and going along with it, but he tried not to think about it. Denial could be your friend sometimes.
Lyn had revealed that the bookcase led to a narrow, dark passageway. Ahmed eyed it and
sighed. “You’re gonna make me scope it out, aren’t you?”
Logan flashed him a brief smile. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
Ahmed rolled his eyes but headed into the dark space. “The things I do for you people. I sh—” Ahmed’s sentence was cut short by some sort of flat, heavy metal object that fell from the ceiling and squashed him with a thump that vibrated the floor.
Ahmed oozed out as sand and re-formed into a human shape beside it. “Rude.”
“See why you went first?” Logan said.
Ahmed stared daggers at him, and Logan shrugged, as that was fair.
“Why am I doing this again?” Ahmed asked.
“Because if the world ended, you’d be left all alone with no more haute couture,” Lyn said.
Ahmed scowled. “Oh, right.” He sighed again but went farther into the darkness. “I hope you people appreciate this. At minimum I want a statue built in my honor.”
“Let’s survive the apocalypse first. Then we’ll talk,” Logan told him, as he thought he heard more strange noises outside.
Whatever was going on, he hoped Ceri was kicking all the ass.
CERI MEANT to strike Astaroth down with a punch, but after he launched himself at his “uncle,” he sensed an energy field around him, and while Ceri was sure he could break it, a shocking amount of pain sizzled up his arm as he hit it, and he fell back, the energy field around Astaroth remaining intact. “You think we’ve gone these centuries without having some tricks to contain and deal with your dad? They’ll work on you too, you know.”
Goddammit! That was how they’d hurt him in the last dustup he’d had with his father’s army. Of course with the help of his friends, he had still managed to defeat them, so all it meant was it would take longer and probably hurt him. Well, fuck. How many times had he healed Logan? He’d have to get busted up a little too. No one said he could aid in stopping an apocalypse without getting his own ass kicked now and again.
The sorcerer threw a spell their way, but Esme threw one of her own. Ceri could see magic; it was an energy wave, and sometimes it had colors that tipped him off as to the contents of the spell. The one the sorcerer threw was pitch-black, a sign of both his intentions and the deal with Astaroth that gave him his power. All he could channel was dark magic, which would kill him faster than the apocalypse could.
The spell Esme answered with was a translucent blue, protective and elemental. She wasn’t a white-magic wielder, as she was bruja born and carried a lot of baggage that wasn’t her fault, yet still infused her magic. It made her the most powerful witch in existence because rather than choose a side—light or dark—she straddled them, pulling a little from each. Most of the time, trying to do that got witches torn apart. But she was born in the storm and got accustomed to it before it could destroy her. That’s probably how she ended up with her special ability, her evil eye.
Astaroth was a roiling black cloud shot through with what could have been lightning bolts but were in fact signs of his power and corruption. If he was in an area long enough, he left a trail of corrosion that could be followed like rotted bread crumbs. He left behind a taste like chewing on tinfoil. If a human shuddered for no apparent reason, Astaroth could be the cause of it.
Astaroth was striding toward Ceri, helpfully concealed inside that force field of his, and Ceri knew he was kind of screwed without Godslayer here. But was he really? He was Lucifer’s son—he wasn’t without abilities.
Trying to physically attack Astaroth while his shield was up was a waste of energy. It would hurt him more than his so-called uncle. His demon friends started stampeding toward Ceri and Esme alike, so he crouched, put his hand flat on the ground, and reached out with his senses, narrowing down their energy signatures. Astaroth was a nuclear furnace, like a star on land, while Esme was a prism, a refraction of light, and the sorcerer a void, a place where light went to die. The demons were dim flickers, torches on a medieval castle wall, and Ceri reached inside himself to the thing hidden at the center of his being.
It was what he imagined his father meant when he called him the Destroyer. There was a darkness within him, a hole in his chest, and if he opened it, he could probably swallow Earth whole. He opened it a tiny bit, a mere sliver, and inhaled, pulling in the life force of the demons.
Usually he did it by touch, but he never had to. He could, like now, simply channel it through an object they were both in contact with, such as the ground. He could tell Astaroth tried to protect them, but it wasn’t enough.
Ceri drank deep of their life force, the energy filling him and making him want more. The void in him could expand, and he had no idea where it stopped, if it stopped. Maybe that was why he was the Destroyer—maybe he was a black hole in humanoid skin. Maybe his true destiny was to swallow the universe.
The demons collapsed, and their life force running through his veins charged Ceri to a previously unprecedented degree. It was like cocaine mixed with lightning, or an orgasm mixed with a supernova. He was invincible. His head was filling with light, and he was about to explode into a second sun. He was sure he could break that barrier around Astaroth.
Could he, though? Or was it simply the high from mainlining so many souls at once? He wasn’t sure. He wanted to try.
Astaroth snickered as his demons fell dead around him. “It could be this way all the time, you know. You could feast on a whole host of demons. We’ve got too many of ’em as it is. You’re supposed to be a god, Cerberus. You can’t be on Earth.”
“That’s supposed to be encouraging?” Ceri asked. He didn’t want to be a god. He wanted to be him. That seemed inconvenient for Hell.
Ceri launched himself at Astaroth, fist raised, energy gathering there, and slammed it against Astaroth’s shield with a force so great the ground rumbled. Pain shot up his arm again, but this time there was a definite crack, and tiny lightning bolts spider-webbed the protective bubble. Astaroth looked as surprised as Ceri felt.
Esme had also thrown a dark-magic spell, one that looked like a translucent black scythe cutting through the air, and it slammed into the shield the sorcerer had erected. It caused cracking too, and the male witch reflexively bent over, as if he’d taken a shot to the stomach. Considering the spell was meant to cut him in half, he’d gotten lucky. But it also meant that both antagonists had overestimated their own strength, or underestimated Ceri’s and Esme’s.
The sorcerer and Astaroth exchanged a look, and Ceri and Esme did too, but they were very different. Esme gave Ceri a smile that was mostly teeth, a feral grin that seemed to indicate that blood was about to be spilled.
Esme threw another dark spell, but it was simply distraction for what she really did—she let out her evil eye.
If Esme hadn’t already been a rare witch, this made her top of the heap. Basically, when she used it, there seemed to be a golden glow in her right iris. Her evil eye automatically inflicted curses on whoever she turned it on. It could be a slow curse that would dispatch them in a year, doom them for life, or kill them very quickly. It all depended on what she threw. Ceri didn’t know what she was going to cast, but his money would have been on the quick kill… although maybe not that quick.
While the sorcerer waved off the initial spell, his shield crumbled under the psychic and metaphysical weight of her evil eye, and he screamed as boils erupted across his face, moving like living things. Blood began to dribble from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, and his skin reddened like it was being burned. He appeared to be trying to throw a counterspell, but he couldn’t. He collapsed to his knees, his facial features pretty much lost in a sea of boils, and it looked like he was trying to peel the skin off his face with his fingernails. He was pulling off flesh in thin bloody rivulets, but it did no good.
By the time he fell over dead, his head looked like a huge infected boil, surrounded by smaller, also infected boils. It was a nasty way to die, but it was hard to argue he’d deserved any better. A deal with a devil never ended well.
Ceri sensed an ener
gy buildup from Astaroth and knew his “uncle” was probably getting ready to bail. And why not? He was now alone and had figured out Ceri was more powerful than he thought.
Ceri reached out with the sense that allowed him to read the energy waves and closed Astaroth’s escape route. He had no idea how he did this; like many of his talents, he seemed to have been born with it. At least he didn’t have to understand it to use it.
Astaroth was aware of what he had done. His eyes narrowed. “I’m not gonna kill you, boy. I’m gonna beat you to within an inch of your life and throw you back at your father to deal with.”
Ceri smiled at him. “Try.”
A part of him knew he shouldn’t be relishing this. But he was.
THE SMALL, dark room the group inside the house had uncovered was full of traps and sigils, meant to get those strong enough to have survived all those previous challenges, but they were still useless against a man made of sand. Every now and again, Logan and Lyn would hear a noise, and Ahmed would click his tongue or say “Typical” shortly thereafter. But eventually he came out carrying a thick book with a leathery black cover and small decorative chains stitched across the front.
“Kinky,” Logan said, reaching for it.
Ahmed jerked it away from him. “I found it. It’s mine.”
“It’s probably better to let him hold on to it,” Lyn said. “Some of those old codices have weird spells attached to them.”
“What, they make your clothes smell like mildew?”
“Or make you go insane. Yeah, things like that.”
There was a huge gap between smelling of mildew and insanity, but Logan was going to let that one go. Ahmed could definitely cuddle the cursed book all he wanted. At least they had it now. What they were going to do with it was another story.
