Bound by Light (16 page)

"Stay back," he commanded in a spine-digging rasp. "Let me handle this."

Merilee thought about arguing with him, but instinct kept her mouth tightly closed. Her breath kept catching and jerking, and she had to force herself not to look away from him. This Jake she didn’t know. Not at all.

Uncertainty rattled her down inside, and her muscles alternated between shocky slackness and painful tightening. Maybe she should be more afraid of the demon eating her than the slowly descending god.

Jake gnashed his scary teeth, then turned and strode away from her, leathery wings flexing with each step he took. His arms were stiff and rigid by his sides, and a dark, dangerous energy radiated from his presence.

Murder. Devastation. Challenge.

Violence hung around him in the night like a prickly ebony cloud.

Merilee’s hands shook as she took her bow from her shoulder and worked harder than usual to nock an arrow. Each action felt like knives ramming into both of her sides, but she ignored the pain and stared at demon-Jake.

How stable is he in Astaroth form?

Will he take out the god, then come back to kill me?
She couldn’t go there.

Not now.

Right now she was a broom, even if she had no triad. Jake would fight, and she’d keep her vantage point and help. If necessary she’d clean up the mess. That was her job, right?

Merilee gathered her air energy and focused it around her arrow. Her eyes narrowed, tracking Jake, and she held her breath as the Vodoun Loa reached the ground.

The red cloud coalesced rapidly into what looked like a ten-foot crimson man with a bovine head and three horns. The air took on a new smell, the stinging rotten-egg odor of sulfur. The god screamed as it assumed its full form, and that scream sounded like the wounded, enraged cry of a baited bull.

Merilee’s chest squeezed, making her shout with pain.

"Bosou Koblamin," she muttered, gasping, coughing from the sulfur stench and fighting back the misery of her ribs.

As she called its name, the strongest of the fiery Loas in the Petro Vodoun tradition lowered its horned head and charged across Fresh Kills, straight at Jake.

"Shit!" Pain made Merilee’s grip waver, and her bow twitched up and down as she cursed again and tried to steady herself. Her mouth went dry as the pulsing red god closed in on Jake, who hadn’t slowed at all. Demon and god barreled straight for each other.

She had to do something. Now. If that thing got its hands on Jake . . .

Merilee sucked in a rib-stabbing breath, let her Sibyl instincts claim her awareness, and loosed her arrow. With every ounce of elemental strength she possessed, she drove the shaft forward, aiming for one of the god’s bull-faced eyes.

At the same moment, Jake launched himself off the ground, pumped his wings, and shot forward.

Merilee’s arrow landed on target, lodging in the beast’s right eye.

It let out a satanic bellow. One huge hand grabbed for the arrow. The other flailed and knocked Jake aside like a big white fly.

Merilee’s gut twisted as Jake slammed into the landfill, sending up a spray of dirt, water, and trash.

She was at least three hundred yards away. No way she could reach Jake.

New tears blurred her vision. Her ribs screamed in protest, but Merilee ground her teeth, drew another arrow, fired, and powered the shaft toward the lumbering, roaring god.

This time, her shot went slightly wide and bounced off the thing’s thick bull skull.

It wheeled to face her full-on, right eye bleeding and obviously out of commission. Behind it, the Brooklyn coastline glittered, and to its left, the Manhattan skyline etched itself into Merilee’s consciousness.

Her city. The people she was supposed to protect.

But Jake . . .

He still hadn’t moved.

Even with her intense Sibyl vision, Merilee couldn’t pick out his fallen form from the jumble of debris around him. And she didn’t have time to keep looking.

The god’s intact left eye swiveled down to glare at her. She fumbled with the arrow she had drawn, sweat coating her skin under her leathers as she tried to focus despite her jagged breathing and the hot-poker sensations lancing her ribs each time she shifted her weight. Artemis and arrows, she was going to puke from the pain and from worrying about Jake and from not wanting to die at the hands of a ten-foot bull god in the middle of a stinking landfill.

The god let out a grating howl and stormed toward her, covering ground so fast Merilee barely had time to fire.

The arrow left her bowstring, screaming forward, pushed by all the wind she could hurl without killing herself outright.

The god’s gigantic head snapped backward as the arrow took out its remaining eye. It pawed at the bleeding hole in its bull-head—but it kept coming, blind and hard and fast.

As the god reached her and swept out its deadly hand to grab her or squash her, Merilee threw herself sideways. She struck the ground with brutal force and momentum, rolling through the trash-studded dirt. Her bow and quiver tore from her shoulder. Pain lanced her ribs. Her mind almost went blank from the torture and she wailed louder than the blinded god. She couldn’t help it. The sound would draw the beast down on top of her, but Hecate help her, she couldn’t stop crying out with each jam and jar and bounce.

The ground shook beneath her as the god stomped after her, no doubt tracking the noise she was making. Merilee couldn’t breathe at all anymore. Debris and foul mud rammed into her eyes and nose. Her body felt like it was splitting apart at her rib cage.

I’m tearing in half.

And if she didn’t, the god would crush her to bits in a matter of seconds.

She rolled to a stop, wheezing, her breath actually bubbling up her throat, liquid-filled and hot. Barely understanding, barely perceiving, she dug filth out of her eyes and watched the bull-faced god lower its horned head and bear down on the spot where she lay, absolutely unable to get out of its way.

A flash of silver-white caught her attention.

The flash streaked into the god, slamming it so hard and fast the big creature toppled sideways. It struggled to rise as the silver streak lashed at it again and again. Bloody streaks appeared all over the god’s powerful body.

Familiar but deeply disturbing snarls filled the night as Jake pummeled his blind, shrieking rival. Gashes opened on the god’s face and neck. As it managed to get to its feet, black liquid spurted onto the landfill dirt, sulfurous and sizzling through whatever it struck. Merilee coated herself with wind to be sure none of the acidic, poisonous blood fell on her.

Her vision swam and flickered, but she saw plainly enough that Bosou Koblamin’s essence was beginning to fade.

Jake didn’t seem to know he couldn’t kill a god.

Didn’t seem to care.

He sailed in and out almost too fast for Merilee to see. Darting, striking with his claws, ripping with his fangs. Then he simply attached himself to the god’s back and seemed to be trying to tear off the ten-foot creature’s head.

The god’s essence rippled.

It let out a brain-rattling bellow and vanished.

The entire earth seemed to shake and buckle as the god fled back to its own plane of existence in one massive elemental surge.

Jake shot past the space where the creature had been, wings pounding, claws raking into empty air. Merilee heard his inhuman shout of triumph and shivered at the sound.

Then she wrapped her arms around her ribs and groaned and coughed up some blood of her own. Her vision swam again, and this time she almost faded out of awareness.

Clawed hands cupped her face, but didn’t scratch her at all. The touch was gentle, concerned. Probing, yet very cautious.

This time, Jake’s snarl sounded more distressed than anything.

Merilee’s eyelids fell shut, and she couldn’t open them.

Pain gripped her again, blotting out everything as Jake’s strong arms lifted her off the filthy landfill ground. She almost didn’t have time to hope he didn’t drop her before her mind shifted into complete nothingness.

(11)

The Keres. I hear them shrieking.

Black feathers brushing my face, falling loose . . .

Why are they so loud?

What in the name of all the goddesses do those bloody fanged monsters want with me?

I can’t—oh.

Oh, Hecate save me.
He’s
here.

The Stone Man is with me.

Merilee screamed.

Her fists closed around black feathers and she held them as she ran even though her body was cleaving into fiery halves, stumbling across a vast landscape of trash and twisted metal. Seconds later, she was scrambling up the side of a familiar mountain. Bone-icing cold grabbed at her, and a chilled, heavy fog coated her in suffocating moisture.

Broken ribs
. . . Cynda’s voice drifted across her awareness, from somewhere very far away.

Punctured lung
. That was Riana, louder, seemingly closer.

Andy came next with,
What the fuck
?

But Merilee was still on the mountain—was it Káto Ólimbos?—and the Stone Man was still coming.

He scrabbled up the sheer rock below her, chewing up the distance between them until she was sure she could feel him breathing down her neck. Hot breath. Flames. His presence burned her like he had changed into a fiery, murderous Vodoun god.

Then she wasn’t burning.

Just . . . warming.

The mountain began to lose form, turn softer.

She heard the Stone Man’s enraged roar. He grabbed her ankle.

She jabbed a fistful of black feathers at his eyes and he dodged. His fingers dug into her flesh, bruising and tearing.

Merilee
.

Jake’s voice, reaching for her, guiding her to him. She searched for him, saw nothing—but wait. A light. There beside her, and it was getting brighter.

The warmth in Merilee’s body grew stronger.

Yellow-white light blazed in her mind. She felt it deep inside her, like a huge anchor weighing into her soul, diving into her mind, her blood, her cells, binding her together, at first holding her down, then drawing her inexorably forward. Toward the brightness. Toward the heat.

Merilee
.

Jake’s call and that light shielded her from all the horror around her. She focused on it, drew the resonance into her body, and drifted toward the sound, her wind energy building as she flew.

The Stone Man tried to yank her back, but he couldn’t hold her, not with the strength of Jake’s power dragging her in the other direction.

She slipped out of the Stone Man’s grip and fell—no, no, not falling.

Waking.

Naked. Cleaned off. Under silky covers, in a soft, soft bed.

Her
bed, in the library of the Upper East Side townhouse. She inhaled the smell of old books and aged paper and wood polish, felt the brush of her satin sheets against her bare skin. For a long moment, she waited for the nightmare to snatch her back—or to be hit with a brutal blast of pain from her injuries—but neither came.

Merilee almost sobbed from relief.

She opened her hands to be sure she wasn’t holding on to any black feathers, and she was so glad to find them both empty.

Riana stood on one side of her bed, wedged between two piles of documents on ancient demons. Cynda and Andy stood on the other side, crammed against piles of notebooks holding details and facts Merilee had amassed over the last few years. Behind them, huge bookcases towered toward the ceiling, crammed with more notebooks and cups full of pencils. Merilee wasn’t sure she had ever seen such comforting, beautiful things—her triad, Andy, and her books and papers.

Her triad and Andy leaned over her, all wild-haired, wild-eyed, and dressed in nightgowns. Cynda’s gown was smoking, and Andy’s, of course, was dripping. They had their hands outstretched, healing elemental energy flowing from their fingers directly into her needy, aching bones. Merilee could taste Riana’s earthy contribution. She breathed in the heat of Cynda’s power combined with the cooling, wonderful trickle of Andy’s water ability.

Merilee realized she felt more healed than she should be, even with all of their efforts. It must be the water energy pushing things along at a faster pace. Merilee had no other explanation for why she felt so much better than she expected.

Even while Riana, Cynda, and Andy filled her with so much positive energy, their expressions were tense and worried.

Merilee’s eyes moved to the foot of her bed where Jake stood, shimmering between human and demon form. One second he was all man, dressed in jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt. The next, he was naked and translucent, winged and fanged and clawed, golden eyes flashing a mix of rage and worry.