Demon Squad 6 The Best of Enemies (16 page)

Up front, and impossible to miss, was a werepanda, razored fangs jutting out beneath its dark nose. Its round face, tubby body, and black-circled eyes lent it a cuteness that was unfortunately overridden by its annoying battle cry.

“Wu Tang, motherfucker!”

“You’re not even from China, are you?”

The panda hissed at me as one of the larger werewolves stepped forward, apparently asserting his dominance.

“Hobbs sends his regards.”

Which was pretty impressive considering he was strung up in Gailbraith with an electrical cord wedgie. Semantics aside, this was either retaliation for my snatching the vampire, his were-allies looking for a little retribution, or they had no clue I’d already scooped his ass up and were still running on plan A. Not that it mattered. They were volunteering to be punched in the face, which was pretty much all the motivation I needed

“Come get some,” I said, wiggling my fingers to call them on.

The pack responded with enthusiasm. I like that in an enemy.

The werehounds charged as if they were a part of a Kibbles N’ Bits commercial. I kept expecting to see the chuck wagon as they came at my heels. The werewolves flooded forward right behind them, and I waited a couple seconds to let them get close. Just a few feet separating us, I willed my magic to life, peeling back a chunk of the street as though it were a banana. The weres howled and cursed as they slammed into the three feet thick blockade, momentum and their buddies at their back pushing them forward. I cut the slab loose of the ground and put my foot into it, pouring power into the kick so the impact struck the makeshift wall even across its width. A massive
boom
echoed through the night as asphalt and were-critters went flying, their screams and complaints mowed down the slab of street that careened through their ranks. Those that I’d missed spilled around the edges and came at me.

The panda leaped over the mass of wolves and hurtled toward me, all teeth and flashy claws. I envisioned a bamboo shoot propped up at my back and slipped some energy into its creation, blocking the view of it by standing my ground and waving the cute little bastard on. Just as the panda closed, I sidestepped.

“Wu Tang, mother—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, watching his eyes nearly explode with surprise. “Heard you the first time.”

The panda shrieked but there was nowhere to go but down. The sharpened end of the shoot pierced his guts, bursting from his back. Gravity took care of the rest. The panda slumped as he slid down the length of the shoot until his face hit the ground. That was when I released my magic. He stayed put, a dark puddle forming around him.

Hopefully he wasn’t on the endangered species list, but there wasn’t time to worry about it as the other were-critters were on me. Claws slashed at my back and gouged out grooves of flesh. An amused chuckle slipped out. The pain only motivated me. A paw flashed in front of my face, and I leaned back, slipping the attack, a silver blur filling my vision. In close, I could do something to gain some space or get down and dirty.

I laughed. It wasn’t much of a choice.

With nothing more than a casual thought, swords of pure energy appeared in my hands. I spun and put them to work. The blades cleaved through everything and anything. Weres screamed as I cut them in half, severed limbs, and decapitated more than a couple. The stink of wet-were mingled with the aromatic funk of gooey blood, the air thick with it. The weres faltered as those closest reeled back in neatly shorn pieces. Ginsu would be proud.

One of the hounds bit into my ankle as another went after my hamstring. I cut away the lower one, leaving his twitching head still attached to my leg and knocked the other to the ground with the back of my hand. He hit with a muffled
thump
, scrambling to get his feet beneath him. Before he could, I put my boot to his ass. He yipped and flew over the heads of his buddies, trailing a golden stream of his disappointment.

The werepanther streaked at me low to the ground, only the deeper darkness of his coat alerting me to his approach. I spun away, lashing out at the flash of claws seeking my throat. He grunted as my sword and his paw collided, all the odds in my favor. His paw bounced away, cut clean at the wrist. The panther hit the street and, in an impressive display of rubbery spine and intent, he pivoted on his back legs and swung his other paw at me. I put my foot in his ribs and knocked him into a nearby lamppost, his skull ringing out against the steel.

“Luke, I am your father…” The panther stared at me, eyes swirling in their sockets. Poor Luke.

It’s hard to be a geek sometimes.

I turned back to the others only to find a few still willing to engage. A few seconds of sword work and that number had dropped dramatically, bits and pieces of them scattered across the street like a broken piñata. Most of the pack had only just begun to pull themselves free of the asphalt slab as I strolled over to them, dispersing one of my swords. I snatched one of the werewolves up.

“Quick question, Teen Wolf. What does Hobbs have planned for Old Town?”

The wolf growled, and I cut his snout off, tossing him aside to grab another

“Same question.” I got the same answer, so I drove my sword into his gut and set it on puree.

I hadn’t really expected any of them to know anything seeing how the were-critters were mostly used as enforcers by the vampires, but I could hope. A few more met untimely ends choosing to snarl at me rather than answer my question, but by the time I was finished with those ones, the rest had scattered, disappearing into the night with their tails between their legs.

The cold chill of satisfaction oozed over me as I watched them run. I let my other sword fade as the dying weres moaned and groaned around me. Severed limbs twitched, still imbued with the remnants of lycanthropy and memories of life.

“Old Town is mine,” I shouted, my voice washing over the neighborhood as though I’d used a bullhorn.

As the sound died away, and I realized I was standing in the middle of a bloody street with my arms and legs spread like some B-grade movie villain, I shuffled off through the red sea of were-parts. By now, Veronica had done what she needed to do and would have some answers for me. She’d once claimed she could charm any sentient creature as long as she could have her way with them. Well, she’d had that and more with Hobbs so it was time to figure out what he knew. Bile tickled the back of my throat at the thought.

I glanced at the sky as I walked, trying to clear the memory of Veronica’s
interrogation
from my mind when another thought intruded, for which I was very grateful. The power out, the stars had appeared in its absence. They sparkled above, littering the sky with winking eyes. It was a beautiful night for a puzzle.

Sixteen

It was a foregone conclusion that Hobbs had blown the power plant, not that it’d ever been a question of who so much as why. What purpose did it serve cutting off all the electricity to a portion of the city you wanted to conquer? You’d just have to go back and fix it all if you planned on keeping the place. Weres and vampires could see in the dark, so that might have something to do with it, but they had to know demons could too. They weren’t exactly gaining any sort of tactical advantage by blacking out the area so it had to be something other than that. But what?

I knew Veronica would have pulled the information from Hobbs, but the thought of having to rely on her stuck in my craw. I didn’t need her to figure this out. Hobbs wouldn’t have blown the plant without a reason. He either needed Old Town dark, which didn’t make much sense, or he needed to deprive someone of power, which also didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t like he was fighting the electric company. None of Baalth’s defenses relied on electricity so that wasn’t it either.

Unless…

The duke’s warning came back to me then, bringing a smile to my lips. ‘Uriel has a fantastic view from up there,’ he’d said, and he was right. There was a third option I hadn’t thought of until right then. Wasn’t sure it made any more sense than the first two, but there was only one way to find out.

I glanced back at the sky and put some energy into my thoughts. It was easier than I expected. Just like when Rahim was in my face—however unconscious that had been—I drifted upward, my feet leaving the ground. My smile grew, stretching my cheeks as I defied gravity and floated toward the twinkling stars.

At first it was like riding a tramway, the street pulling away turtle slow. The view expanded around me in an almost leisurely manner, a hot air balloon on a still day. It was more inches a minute than miles per hour. I put a little more oomph into it and increased the speed without scaring myself. It amazed me how refined my control was despite having never levitated before. It had to have been some instinctual thing left over from Longinus that I didn’t understand, but I certainly wasn’t gonna complain about it. I wasn’t a pro with my magic yet, but I was light years ahead of where I’d been a few months earlier.

The magic was well and truly mine now. That was a satisfying feeling.

I’d avoided real power my entire life, fearful of what it might do to me, fearful of what might change because of it but none of that mattered anymore. Shit was falling apart before I was powerful. It was a trend that had yet to stop. The only thing I’d lost by claiming Longinus’ power was Karra and our baby.

A lightning bolt of agony speared my head right then, and I suddenly felt heavy, the earth reclaiming its hold on me. I started to fall. In a panic, I pushed everything out of my head except for what I needed to remain afloat. It worked, a magical hand seeming to catch me after I’d only fallen a couple of feet.

“That’s what I get for thinking,” I muttered, wiping the sweat from my brow. It’d been close.

A quick glance down made it clear how uncomfortable a landing from this height would have been, and I really wasn’t up for testing my physical resistance. The new me was pretty sturdy, but a two hundred foot drop might test that in ways I didn’t want to experience. I sucked in a deep breath and willed myself higher, focusing solely on keeping myself airborne. Concentration was key, as it had been during the firefight. I needed to stop worrying about all the other shit and get my head in the game. Find out what Hobbs was doing, deal with it, and then worry about all the other drama rearing up after I was done.

The night was quiet as I drifted into it, Old Town buried in a shroud of pre-dawn gloom. The horizon had brightened in the time it had taken me to rise above the city but the world loomed before me in inky blackness. Well above the tallest of Old Town’s buildings, the view was breathtaking.

El Paseo shimmered a short distance away, people’s electric bills shining in the darkness as the city stretched out for what seemed an unimaginable distance. The city had always been large, but to see it from this angle was to be amazed by its serpentine crawl across the desert. It wouldn’t be but another generation before there was no space left between El Paseo and its neighbors. Only the occasional patch of emptiness dotted the network of lights, some small, undeveloped area having yet escaped the machine of society.

I willed myself to spin slowly around, so I could take in each part of the city as it filled my vision. Downtown was a mix of lights and darkness as the electrical lines were drawn in the sand. Much of the business district still shone with power, but the tail end, the area that bled into Old Town, had gone black. It was an odd diorama from where I hovered, brilliance cut short by a wall of ebony. The morning commute in those areas would be hell.

My gaze drifted across the swath of nothing, scanning for any hint of the third option I’d thought up. I knew there was more to Old Town than what I could see because I was hovering above it, but damned if I could see any. The emptiness went on and on, merging into the distance where I knew the desert butted up against the city. There was nothing, shooting my theory in its ass.

I sighed, surveying the area one last time before I gave up, willing myself a little higher to make sure I saw all I could. Ten, twenty feet higher I went, but there was nothing. Out of frustration, I pushed further and further. Fifty, one hundred feet, my body spun slowly, methodically as I floated upward, my eyes on a swivel.

That was when I noticed a glimmer I hadn’t spotted before. It was as if a streetlamp had suddenly been turned on, a flashing brightness that cleaved through the dark at the edge of Old Town. Right where it shouldn’t be. Unconsciously, I floated that direction, trying to imagine the layout of the city as I did, overlaying my location with that of the strange light in the overwhelming ocean of black. It might well be a residence or business, which just happened to have a generator on hand for situations such as this, but there was no reconciling its out of the way placement. As far as I remembered, there wasn’t anything out that way except…

I exhaled hard as I realized what the place was, my excitement dwindling.

The light was coming from the reserve power plant set on the outskirts of the city. It hadn’t been operational for over ten years, but this was the kind of situation it had been maintained for. The repair crews were probably there to bring it online to augment the other plant and bring power back to downtown and Old Town. Seeing how the other plant had been blasted to bits, it made sense they’d need to resurrect the dinosaur get the city back to operational.

I continued moving that direction for a lack of options, peering through the darkness as I angled lower and lower to the ground for a better view. Only the singular light remained lit as I drew closer. There wasn’t any hint of vehicle or work lights illuminating the area, which struck me as odd. There might not be much in the way of utility lights to brighten up the plant, but anyone working there would need a hell of a lot more than one to do their job.

As I drifted nearer, I noticed the outer gate was still closed, a massive wad of chain still wrapped about its poles, a thick padlock in place. My eyes scanned the road up to where the light shone, but there was no one there: no vehicles, no workers, nothing. I followed the line of the road back toward the city and didn’t see any vehicle headlights anywhere along the way, my gaze circling back to the single lamp post that flickered near the center of the plant. There was no way it could be a coincidence.