Demon Accords 6: Forced Ascent (19 page)

A cluster of four agents, FBI jackets on their backs, was doing a walk-through, trying to recreate the events that had taken place.  They were having difficulty and after a moment, I knew why.  A vision started to run through my head, and within the first few scenes, it showed me Brianna jumping over one of the cars and spinning in mid-air to land behind a hapless police officer who promptly lost his head… literally.

My vision was interrupted by Grim sliding into control of my body.  His attention was focused on a small Hispanic woman in a blue dress who had moved to within a few yards of us.  She was short and rather unattractive, and something about her was driving Grim crazy.  He was also bothered by a small white Ford Transit flower delivery van parked near a standalone bank branch at the corner of the mall lot. 

Whatever was bothering him about those two disparate things was tied to smell.  Whiffs of something too miniscule to identify but hinting at just enough to concern my inner monster.

The door of the Transit opened and a black-suited priest got out.  At that same moment, the Hispanic woman slid a pace closer and the wind changed, giving me/us a smell.  Moving so fast that air displacement blew the Hispanic woman’s wig off, Grim grabbed Tanya and pulled back from the line.

Under the wig was a mannish head that was starting to turn our way as petite hands reached, molasses slow, into a fold of the bright blue dress.

Of much greater concern was the priest who was moving at normal speed—normal to us—around the back of his van.  Everyone on site was moving slow except Tanya, myself, and the priest.  A memory flash blinked across my mind, the body of a priest on the floor of a bedroom, the wall behind him a swirling black doorway to Hell.

I reached the back of the group of onlookers at the same time the priest opened the back door of the little van.  Something black and red flowed out into the well-lit night at about the same moment that a black pistol was just starting to emerge from the assassin-in-drag’s pocket.

Dropping Tanya to land on her feet, Grim pulled a quarter from the belt at my waist, throwing it with a backhand snap at the Smith & Wesson M&P Compact now visible in the assassin’s hand, then turned my attention to the heavy thud of feet as a four-footed demon beast rushed at me, butting bystanders and cops out of its way. Observer-me felt sure Grim would use aura against the monstrous form that was shredding asphalt with its massive claws as it closed the distance.  He didn’t, instead pulling another quarter that he tossed into the air six feet over our head.  The flipping jump that followed put my body upside down another three feet higher than the quarter which was just reaching the top of its toss, the apogee of the arc, when the red and black body crossed underneath it.  My aura-lined hands clapped at the quarter and a streak of white plasma shot straight down at the demon below us.  The beast was faster than I had thought, the explosively formed projectile just catching its rear left foot in a non-fatal blow that still caused it to roll up like a ball and crash into a CBS affiliate news van, crumpling the side like a soda can. Reporters and onlookers dodged and screamed as best they could, all moving as if stuck in quicksand.

Tanya, who had pulled two bowie knives from back sheaths, turned to engage the priest, who had followed his beast demon into the fray.  Dodging her first attack, the thin, bony priest smiled maniacally as he casually picked up a fat male bystander—who had to go three hundred pounds—and threw him at my vampire.  I saw her dodge the portly projectile, her left hand somehow grabbing the fat man’s jacket as he went by and changing his potentially fatal flight into a swinging arc that left him rolling across the tarmac with bruises and a torn collar.  How she did that without dropping the Bowie in her hand, I don’t know.  A slim figure shot through the crowd, sliding around between—and in some cases over—bystanders like an eel in weeds.  Trenton had arrived to help his queen.

My attention refocused on the monster that was now unfolding from its roll, shaking the damaged back leg but staring with red viper eyes at me.  It was big, real big.  Like rhinoceros big, but shaped like a bull, if in fact, bulls were covered in red and black scales, had an eight-foot tail tipped with a bony knob, and weighed two tons.  Then there was its head. A forest of needle-tipped spikes grew straight from the bony face and forehead, framing the red eyes.  Two to three feet long, they guaranteed impalement to anything that came at the demon head on.

Pawing the ground with one foot, scraping up chunks of asphalt before leaping forward, straight at me.  I jumped up and to my right, but the monster had been paying attention.  It stopped abruptly, curving its body into a sharp
C
shape and snapping its tail in an arc.

I remember being fascinated with the squat, bony ankylosaurus dinosaurs as a kid.  You know the one, all covered in sheets of bone, with the huge knobby block of a tail. It was often depicted in models or pictures smacking T-rex with that bony bludgeon. I always wondered how hard it could hit with that tail.  I found out.

The block of bone at the end of its built-in-flail hit my shoulder and collarbone at a downward angle like a cannon shell.  I felt bone crunch as my in-flight progress to the right stopped and reversed direction abruptly.  Slamming into a parked car, I heard more than felt a couple more bones break, probably in my spine.  It takes a lot to break my bones these days. The car broke, too.

My shoulder and collarbone were almost fully healed when the demon arrived at my landing spot.  My spine wasn’t nearly as patched up as I would have liked it.  One of the handy things about Grim is that he just blocks all pain, pretty much shutting down the nerve endings almost completely.  So when he forced my body to jackknife my legs up and roll backward over the roof of the partially crushed Cadillac CTS, it didn’t hurt like it should have, even though the partially rebuilt vertebrae were all rubbing together in my back.

Spike-face hit the car right where my torso had been, his face pikes punching through the metal without any real resistance.  For just a moment, he was left wearing a steel face mask that wouldn’t come off.  In the same moment, a black-and-tan-furred car-sized bear entered the fight by landing on its back, slamming the massive demon flat on the ground.  As I rolled to my feet, I saw two blurring-fast paw strikes hit the hell beast’s neck from either side, causing some bone crunching of their own. 

A glance sideways showed Tanya sparring with the priest, whose arms had somehow become praying mantis claws armored in red chitin. Her foot-long knife blades were being blocked at every strike.  Trenton moved to attack from behind but caught a backclaw strike that threw him twenty feet.  Arkady, having been regulated to staying with the cars due to his un-disguisable size, was bounding from car top to car top to get to the fight.

Spine realigned, I moved forward to help with the coup de grace on the spike bull, but I was too slow.  Bucking its body upward, it flung my thirteen-hundred-pound were bear through the air to land on the asphalt, crumpling the pavement in a twelve foot circle.  A regular bear would have been severely injured. Awasos, not so much.  He rolled upright and roared, enraged at being thrown by another opponent.

His roar captured the demon bull’s complete attention, which let me leap to its neck, my left hand holding one of the spikes jutting from its face, my right wreathed in aura.  Spearing my right hand down, I went for its brain cavity… and failed to even scratch its bony plating.  My mono edge had cut everything I’d ever tried it against, but it bounced right off the demon’s hide.

Grim accessed another memory; me standing between Lydia and a pair of glowing red eyes seven feet off the ground, a shield of aura pressing against a monstrous bearish outline and having little or no effect.

Not one to spend a whole lot of time reminiscing in the midst of combat, Grim improvised.  My body Clung to the bucking bull from Hell while my left hand pulled against the horn it was gripping.  The face spear was super hard, but not so flexible.  It snapped at the base and the bull let out a bellow of pain, increasing its bucking like a mechanical bull on a power overload.  People were still running, screaming and getting trampled. Several cops took shots at the monster despite me being on its back.  When a bullet glanced off the red and black hide and tweaked my leg, Grim called an audible and sent an aura burst out to disable the guns around us.

Hell bull used the distraction to flick his head, jarring my newly healed spine but failing to dislodge me as I jammed the three-foot length of horn right through his neck. Its bellow changed to a deeper tone, this one conveying both outrage and fear. It tried to roll over on me, but a half ton of pissed-off bear slammed into its side, keeping it upright while his diamond-hard claws tore into its flank.

Two more horns snapped under my hands, one punching through his skull and the other his shoulder, his body freezing up into a shuddering immobility while Awasos continued his gruesome disembowelment.  Bellowing one final time, the beast timbered over, crushing an unfortunate bystander.  Shaking, it finally collapsed, a greasy black torrent beginning to flow from its nostrils.  The inky ooze moved on its own until my left hand grabbed and flung the whole brimstone-smelling, garbage-can-sized mess up into the air.  Kirby came at my mental call, grabbing the massive blackness with both taloned feet, flapping giant shadow wings against the metaphysical weight of the demon.  Then he was gone.

As I turned to my vampire’s fight, I noticed that the hapless victim under the bull was the dress-wearing assassin who had kicked off the whole fight.  He was staring at me with eyes that quickly dimmed of life.

The priest was weaving a herky-jerky combat dance that looked awkward but was effectively holding the most dangerous fighter alive at bay while avoiding Arkady’s attempts to cut him in half.

I took the opportunity to snap off two more spikes, both about three feet long.  Waiting for my moment, I threw the first like a javelin, straight for the priest’s back.  The black spike of super-hard demon bone shot like a missile, only to get knocked off target by a blurring mantis claw.  The spear sliced through a police cruiser’s trunk, its point coming out the bottom and sticking into the asphalt below.  The priest demon was fast enough to simultaneously block my best throw and Tanya’s righthand Bowie swing at his feet, his thin body jumping and spinning at the same time.  He wasn’t, however, able to stop her
left
knife blade from slicing through his spine right at the waist.  Our link had stepped up to combat levels and the demon lord inhabiting the priest’s body wasn’t fighting two combatants, but one entity with two bodies.  Even as her foot-long blade cut deep into his lower back, my second spike was spearing through his torso with enough force to pin him to a CNN news truck.  For a moment, he looked like a bug pinned to an entomologist’s collection board, mantis arms waving all over.  But the moment was brief… a mere micro second, as Tanya and Arkady took him apart with their blades in a flashing ginsu-on-steroids blur of steel.

The essence of the demon roiled forth from the priest’s mouth, a cloud as big as the news van, bigger than any demon I had ever seen before.  I raced toward it, but the Devil hadn’t sent a lowly pawn on this mission.  The cloud shot into the body of a policeman who was standing open-mouthed, the greasy cloud pouring into his ears, nose, and mouth.  A split second was all it took for the Hell lord to take possession of the cop’s body and all his cop gear.  I threw aura at the handgun that blurred from its holster.  Calling
>Kirby<
mentally as I arrived, I grabbed the cop and threw his body up into the waiting claws of the Collector.  Talons of smoke clutched right through the chest then slid like vapor through the solid mass of the cop’s body, letting it fall back to earth and leaving a writhing mass of black that fought the raptor with all its might.  With a screech of anger, the God raptor flashed out of our world, taking the demon lord with it.

For a brief moment, the scene was still, the flashing lights of a half-dozen emergency vehicles the only motion.  The screaming began, as human-slow perceptions caught up to events, processing the unreal scene as best they could.  Shocked silence gave way to painful cries and angry shouts as both adrenaline and pain hit the police and reporters and the wounded of both.

Tanya moved to check on Trenton, who was still lying among a couple of bystanders who were trying to rouse him.  A man in a dark mechanic’s coverall was shaking Trenton’s shoulder when she got there and he just backed away, eyes wide, while a woman in a business suit took a step away.  Ignoring them, she turned her attention to Trenton, missing the mixed flash of fear and determination that crossed the mechanic’s face.  She also missed the hypodermic that the mechanic jabbed into her neck.

Pain flooded my link, bringing me to my knees.  She was burning up, searing from the inside out as the poison raced through her veins.  A ghost image of Tanya clutching her face in agony as silver powder burned her flashed through my mind. Mercifully, she passed out and the haze of agony diminished as she did.

The mechanic and the businesswoman grabbed my stricken vampire and hauled her limp body toward the SWAT tank, the armed response team opening the doors.

  Something inside me clicked free, a release of constraint.  The part of me that observes things when Grim is out felt it… like the safety of a gun snicking off or maybe the twist of the arming keys for a nuclear launch.

They were fifty yards away but I was there in an eyeblink, reaching the armored vehicle as the mechanic slammed the heavy rear door shut. I threw him out of my way, not looking where he landed because the driver shifted into gear and the assault vehicle started to rumble forward.  An object arced out of the crowd, a high def digital video camera, professional grade, and smashed into the armored glass windshield hard enough to create a small spiderweb of cracks and cause the driver to veer into a cop car.  A glance at the crowd showed a platinum blonde figure standing fifty feet away, a camera-less cameraman at her feet, the Chatterjee girl by her side.  The camera had to weigh thirty pounds, but Stacia had thrown it like a baseball, causing enough distraction for Grim to go to work.