Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (19 page)

Gina marveled that Lewis could be cool and calm and completely the disciplined guardian while she was attached to him like a limpet, but she couldn’t bring herself to let him go. He looked so good. Tough, in control, steely with determination. Safe, whole, hers.

“Where in Mérida is the demon?” Steve asked.

Fay and Gilda were simply heads down, gazes preoccupied, concentrating on discovering the answer to that. Both were skilled demonologists.

“I don’t know the precise address,” Lewis said. “But the Mexican drug lord who was originally targeted by the Group of 5 had a compound just outside of town, towards the coast.”

“A compound doesn’t sound good,” Shawn muttered. “On the other hand, I feel like a bit of violence.”

Gina glanced at him, startled.

“Being a PA is stressful,” he added.

Lewis grinned briefly.

“Got it,” Fay said. “It’s a few miles. We’ll need vehicles.”

Gina would never have thought of it, but Shawn and Steve acted as if it was standard practice. As the group cleared the congested, panic-stricken center of town, the two men peeled off to negotiate the purchase of battered vehicles from their owners. While the previous owners stared in bemusement at solid wads of cash in their hands, Shawn and Steve drove their cars out of sight around a corner and everyone piled in. Gina found herself sitting on Lewis’s lap in the backseat of a hot, old car that lacked air-conditioning.

“I don’t think you should run away without telling anyone where you’re going in future,” she said.

Shawn was driving, but Gina caught a flash of amusement in his reflection as he watched them via the rear vision mirror.

“I’ll remember that,” Lewis said.

“We have time for explanations, now,” Kora said from the far side of the backseat, two guardians whose names Gina hadn’t caught were stuffed in between. It was more than a tight fit. Only Gilda rode in solitary splendor in the front passenger seat. She was navigating, able—like Fay in the car in front of them—to lock onto the demon’s location.

“Go ahead, then,” Lewis said.

Gina bit her lip to control a giggle of relief and tension. Kora had evidently meant Lewis should explain himself. Instead, the commander of the guardians found herself reporting to him. She was brief and accurate, though, as she covered events at the Collegium headquarters.

“Right,” Lewis said when she’d finished. He readjusted his hold on Gina, his forearm pushing up under her breasts. “When we reach the drug lord’s former home we need to remember that this demon has shown a willingness to use both mundane and magical means. So we’ll have to disable both to gain entrance. Our role here is to support Fay and Gilda to banish the demon.”

Gina kept silent. If she said anything, he’d leave her in the car—with a guard—and she wanted to be at the confrontation. If she did nothing else, in an emergency, she could try beating the demon with her house witchery in the same way it whisked an egg. Demon soufflé. She giggled, and everyone stared at her.

“Sorry. Funny thought. Not worth sharing.”

Fortunately, Gilda took the attention off her by proclaiming the demon’s presence beyond the high walls of a compound just visible down a long driveway. The walls were an egg-yolk yellow stucco and topped with the glint of metal. Razor-wire, probably.

Shawn stopped the car alongside Steve’s in the shelter of a stand of jacaranda trees, and everyone got out.

Without a word, the guardians, including Kora, faded towards the compound.

Gina guessed it was what they’d trained for, storming magical and mundane defenses.

Lewis stayed with her. He stared towards the compound.

“The demon’s aware of us,” Gilda said.

No one responded.

The gates of the compound swung open. Shawn strode out, gesturing them in.

“Six minutes to disable technological defenses and guards, not to mention any wards.” Steve frowned at Fay. “Suspicious?”

She grimaced at him. “I’d say the demon wants to party.”

A shiver ran down Gina’s spine.

“Then we won’t keep it waiting.” Gilda stomped forward, very much the chief demonologist.

Lewis, though, looked to Fay.

She shrugged. “Without the demon’s true name, we need to see it to banish it. We have to know it in some way.”

The four of them caught up with Gilda and joined Shawn at the entrance.

“Only two guards,” he said.

“Good help is hard to find.” A stunning woman in a miniscule red bikini strode out of the modernist white house that sprawled within the stucco walls. She was model-beautiful, all boobs and flat stomach, her long black hair magazine-perfect in its disarray.

“Demon, I banish you by the words of the—” Gilda began.

“That’s the demon?” Gina whispered to Lewis. She’d never seen one before.

She was overheard. “In the form of my summoner’s choosing.” The woman posed in the middle of the courtyard, hand on hip. If the demon was concerned at being the focus of a circle of Collegium mages, it didn’t show. “He was rather juvenile in his tastes. Insecure, possibly, about his sexuality.”

“Was?” Lewis asked while Gilda continued her banishment spell and Fay edged sideways with Steve.

The frown between Fay’s eyebrows was not reassuring. She seemed puzzled.

“The woefully undereducated idiot who summoned me did so because he feared a rival drug lord. Before I could eat his heart, his enemy shot him.” The demon squeezed its left fist closed.

Gilda’s spell faltered. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She rocked and fell backwards.

The guardians surged forward. All of one foot.

The demon held them.

Except Fay. Fay kept moving and Steve, a were and immune to magic, shadowed her. Fay spoke as she circled the demon. “A drug lord who summoned a demon lord. He had ambitions.”

“Evil but smart. I could have done a lot with him.” The demon turned its head to track Fay’s progress.

Gina’s body was heavy, as if turned to lead. Her bones ached, too. Possibly that was the fury of her magic clashing with the demon’s. No wonder the demon was confident. It had inhabited this place for over a year. Its power was grounded in it, and its power was significant.

“You’re strong.” The demon stared at Fay. “I’ll have to kill him.” Abruptly, the demon dropped its human form and lashed out at Steve in its incorporeal body.

The incandescent flames that were the demon’s true form roared at Steve.

But he wasn’t there.

He leapt aside, and in that instant’s movement, he shifted into his leopard form.

He was three times or more the size of a real leopard, beautiful and predatory. He snarled and swiped at the air in front of the demon.

In mage sight, Gina saw his claws rend the demon’s warding.

Fay danced past him, a knife in her hand, tearing further at the warding, her expression intent. They moved together in a swift, practiced fighter’s dance. This, obviously, wasn’t the first time they’d fought a demon. Blood appeared on Steve’s right shoulder, then on Fay’s face.

“Enough,” Lewis whispered.

“Not nearly.” The demon’s voice was a roar of flame. “But at least let me end this for you.” The demon evaded Steve, slashed at Fay, and its whole fiery, powerful form lunged at Lewis.

Without magic, without any protection at all, Lewis would die.

Gina flung a fire-dousing spell at the demon, intensifying it with all she had.

The demon laughed and, undeflected, completed its lunge at Lewis.

Lewis saw the demon fling itself at him. It wasn’t that time slowed. The Deeper Path couldn’t alter time. Morag had said as much. But his guardian training had always brought him into the moment. During a fight, he was at his most Zen.

What clarity of sight did give him was an appreciation of the demon’s true form. Not flame. Not even magic. The demon was something completely other-worldly, and he saw how the human mage’s summoning of it remained. Fetters cut into the demon’s incorporeal form and festered, bubbling blisters of noxious purple. Agony that the demon ignored.

As the demon launched itself at him, Lewis pushed Gina behind him. Untrained in demon combat, she’d die. His own wards, placed by others after his magic burned out, would barely resist the demon’s touch. But with clarity of sight, balanced not quite in the silver world Morag inhabited, nor in the golden threads of magic, but in his own mother of pearl moment, he gathered that aurora pearl light and threw it as a net around the demon.

The demon paused. It flicked back into its human form, a naked gorgeous woman. “What is this?”

But Lewis had already seen the truth. “You’re in agony. I’ve seen the wounds of the summoning. Why do you stay? Why not return to your realm?”

“Because here there is a feast of despair, of violence and hate, of fear. Such delicious fear. It is worth the agony.”

And in that moment of gloating, gluttonous enjoyment, Fay struck.

The blade she’d used on so many demon banishment’s tore into the demon’s human form, released its true form, and tore it, too. In fact, Fay tore open an entrance to hell.

Lewis stared at the copper blaze that opened between the realms of Earth and the demon’s true home. Then the rip sealed. The copper light vanished. Lewis released his clarity of sight, sinking gratefully into the real and familiar three dimensional world.

In this world, Gina was warm, solid and clutching at the back of his shirt. “Is it gone?”

The other mages were moving again, no longer caught in the power of the demon lord.

“Yes.” Fay returned her knife to its wrist sheathe, the blade disappearing swiftly as a result of years of practice. She approached Steve in his massive leopard form.

The demon had torn his shoulder open, exposing the muscle. Fay tickled Steve’s whiskers. It seemed an idiotic thing to do, but even as the couple stared at one another, the wound to his shoulder began to knit together.

“Wow,” Gina murmured. She stood beside Lewis, leaning into him, their arms around each other. That felt healing in a different way.

“How?” Kora exclaimed. Magic oughtn’t to be able to heal weres.

Fay didn’t answer.

Steve rumbled a growl that sounded amused. Leopard laughter?

“None of our business,” Lewis said. He had his own secrets to keep. “Wait! This isn’t over.”

Guardians who were already on the move to give the villa a more thorough investigation, as per standard procedure, halted.

“The demon is gone.” The chief demonologist was conscious, but remained seated on the ground.

“We have to clean up,” Kora added. “We don’t know what it left behind. We can’t let mundanes just wander in. The two guards, when they wake up…” Her restatement of the obvious petered out as no one paid her any attention.

Healing complete, Steve shifted back to human, reappearing fully clothed. “What have we missed?”

“I don’t know,” Lewis said. It frustrated him. His instincts told him there was something, but perhaps it was magic, something he could no longer see clearly. However, he had more than instinct to go on. “The demon let us in too easily. Perhaps the bonds of its summoning were an agony it wanted to escape, but still…”

“Only two mundane guards,” Fay said thoughtfully.

The house loomed in front of them. Unlike the yellow stucco wall that surrounded the compound, the main house had the stark dramatic lines and quality of a billionaire’s retreat. It was sharp and new. Its front door stood open.

“There’s no one else in there,” one of the guardians said. “We’ve already swept it once.”

“Cursorily,” Kora said. She looked at Lewis. “Do we need a specialist crew? Oh dear God.”

Gina whimpered. The animalistic sound simply crawled up her throat and out. It was born of fear and the utter wrongness of the creature lumbering out the front door that the demon had left handily open. The thing might have lumbered, but it was fast. It closed with the nearest guardian, a man in his late thirties, and even as the guardian kicked its legs from under it and the others slammed it with magic, the thing fastened its teeth to the guardian’s thigh and bit.

Flesh and blood sprayed as magic shoved the thing back hard.

Thing? It was human, or had been once.

“There’s more,” Kora said tensely. A warning.

The things were emerging from the house through the door, around the far left corner of the house, from windows.

“They smell of rot,” Steve said.

“Zombies.” The word came from half a dozen mages.

Two guardians ran to scoop up their injured comrade. The bitten guardian snarled, snapped at them, and tried to bite them while on his hands and knees. The blood that should have pumped from the torn artery instead clotted black. His teeth snapped an inch from one guardian’s hand before a powerful, invisible force slammed him back against the house.

“Heavier than human,” Fay reported tersely. “Or else, somewhat resistant to magic.”

The guardians drew back, clustering with Gina, Lewis and the others.

“Retreat.” Lewis crossed to where the chief demonologist had managed to haul herself up, swaying. He lifted her in a firefighter’s hold, ignoring her protest at the indignity. “Out the gate. I want to see if they have a boundary.”

It was as if the zombies understood him. They charged. They were all kinds of people and all ages, still wearing the clothes they must have died in. Gang members and housekeeping staff, model-beautiful women and security guards. A drug lord’s household.

The Collegium group scrambled back and through the gate, Kora swinging it closed. She waited near it, magic balled around her right fist. If the zombies made it through the gate or over the wall, she’d prepared a surprise for them.

Gina never got to see Kora’s idea of a zombie surprise.

The things halted, keening, on the inside of the gate. They were visible through the wrought iron bars of it. They sniffed the air hungrily; mindless things on a hunt.

“Zombies are impossible.” Gilda glared at the horde from the shade of the palm tree Lewis had braced her against.

No one bothered to argue the obvious.

“It explains why the compound was eerily empty,” Fay said. “The demon turned its denizens into zombies. The question is how, and what exactly a zombie is. Is it a disease, something they can be healed of? Is it contagious?”

“I saw one of the two guards we rendered unconscious. He should have still been down and out, but he was lumbering with a fresh bite on his arm.” The guardian who spoke looked ready to throw up.

“Fast-acting, but contained for the moment,” Kora said.

Behind the gate, the zombies stilled.

“The demon must have had them hidden until its banishment. Shackled. A nice surprise for us.” Fay had her knife in her hand.

“Are they alive?” Lewis demanded of a mage who’d been quiet till, now.

Belatedly, Gina noted the discreet healer’s tattoo on the man’s inner right wrist.

“They’re dead,” the healer said flatly. His outstretched hands, extended to sense energy from the compound, dropped. “There’s nothing living in there.”

“Then worst case, we destroy the compound,” Kora stated.

“Would that then break whatever ward the demon left to contain the zombies?” Steve asked. “I’m not in favor of acting without knowledge.”

“Nor am I,” Kora snapped. “I said worst case scenario. We need to get in there and see how these things were created. There should be remnants of the magic the demon used. This big a magic must have required a spell.”

“It’s horrible,” Gina shuddered. “Not only are they the living dead, but they’re the mindless source of death for others. It’s awful, but in a terrible way I’m glad they are dead. To be alive and know that you were doing this, reduced to this, would be hell.”

“Like the children with bombs strapped to them,” Lewis said slowly. “That was the demon’s sick joke, a foreshadowing of this.”

“Which is worse?” Gina murmured. One horror was mundane, the other magical. Both were nightmares.

“If the zombies get out…” The healer wrenched his gaze away from the things at the gate and stared around the countryside. The compound was off the main road, at the end of a long driveway, but it was still near the coast. Locals and tourists, farmers. Innocent people. Victims.

“I can go in,” Steve said. “I’m were, immune to magic.”

Fay gripped his bare arm. “Not all magic.” They shared a long look; haunted on her side, determined on his.

“Someone has to restrain the zombies,” Steve said. “You’re strong in magic and you said you felt resistance to your efforts. How much help will the other mages be?”

“Good point.” Kora pushed magic at the zombies standing silently peering through the gate.

One or two zombies went back a couple of steps. The others merely leaned back a moment before regaining their balance. However, the magical attack restarted their keening.

The sharp, lamenting, yet hungry cry shivered across Gina’s nerves.

But none of the zombies tried to get through the gate that was closed but unlocked. They were truly bound to the house.

Cold dread filled Gina’s stomach, curdling to nausea. It wasn’t hope she felt, although a thought challenged her that perhaps she could help.

No, no, no.
Even as the chant of resistance echoed like a mantra in her mind, she cast her house witchery magic towards the house and compound. She didn’t try to use the magic, just let it slip into the walls and land, into the essence of the structure and surroundings that made it a place of habitation.

Her magic had been coiled and ready for so long; pitched first to find and save Lewis, then to save the children in Mérida, and finally, to save Gina from the demon and its workings. Now that she let it act, and to choose its own familiar path through a residence, it acted swiftly and returned its knowledge to her.

Gina stumbled away and vomited behind a tree.

Lewis handed her a water bottle and stepped away while she rinsed her mouth. “We have no idea how long the zombies will be limited to the compound. The binding may fade with the demon’s passing or collapse at sunset.”

“It won’t,” Gina said. She didn’t feel embarrassed that everyone had seen her retching. Matters were too serious. “The zombies are tied to the compound. They’re part of it. I’m not sure how, but my magic—I’m a house witch—recognizes the zombies not as people or one-time people, but as mobile extensions of the house. As such.” She took a steadying breath, reminding her stomach that it was already empty. “I can control the zombies.”

“You?” Kora asked skeptically.

Lewis gripped her shoulder. “Are you sure?”

Gina concentrated on the zombies by the gate. She needed to demonstrate her power over them, but at the same time, she wasn’t willing to waste her magic. She started the zombies sweeping the gravel. Since they lacked brooms, her house witchery magic dropped the zombies to their knees and had them sweep the gravel with their bare hands.

A couple of the guardians swore.

“I’ll hold the zombies,” Gina said. “You go find how the demon created them.”