Raw Power: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Demon-Hearted Book 1) (25 page)

Thankfully that didn't happen, and Kubo explained why when I kept looking nervously towards the street. “Isabella's muffling our sounds. Moreover, the fire and smoke has been masked by an illusion of clear sky. In order to actually see what's going on, someone would have to come up to within a few feet of the scene. Relax.”

“Well, why not just have her make the side of the church disappear, so we can see where the witches are hiding?” I asked. She'd done that to the house we'd scoped out, allowing us to zero in on the nursery and find the kid before the witches could get to him.

“There's a ward in place, protecting the walls from being peered through. It's an elementary spell. The seal that's generating it passively is probably scrawled on a floorboard or something. Anyhow, if we were to do that, we'd only see darkness. They've effectively blacked out their windows to keep craft users from snooping.”

Isabella was standing beside Kubo, her entire body twitching with a fury I'd never seen before. Her hands and face were particularly animated, and she shifted from one exaggerated expression to the next, her freckled face contorting like mad while her hands continuously pawed at the hem of her burlap garment.

“I think you broke her,” said Joe, slapping me in the arm. “That coffee probably wasn't a good idea.”

This seemed to upset her, because Isabella got in Joe's face and wagged a finger, her cheeks reddening. “No, no, no, that's not true. Coffee is fine. Mother never lets Isabella have coffee, but Isabella adores coffee, and if Isabella says it's OK to drink coffee, then it's OK. Isabella can make her own decisions. Mother doesn't speak for Isabella all the time.” The words came so hot and fast, and her grip on the collar of Joe's jacket tightened so quickly, that me and Kubo had to pry her off. In the space of a second, she'd turned into a wild animal, and was even scratching and spitting at him as we pulled her away.

“Jesus,” I muttered. “What's her problem?”

Kubo stood between her and Joe. “It's complicated.”

For his part, Joe started laughing, hands raised. “When it comes to Isabella, I just don't ask questions anymore.” He looked at her and bowed his head slightly. “Sorry, babe. I didn't mean nothing by it. You drink all the coffee you want, long as the enchantments keep coming.”

Slowly, Isabella calmed down, smoothing out the locks of bristling black hair that spilled from the edges of her hood. She took a deep breath, and then started twitching again, her fingers squirming at her sides as though she were thumping on an imaginary keyboard.

Note to self: Don't ever tell Isabella what she can or can't drink.

She'd always been weird, but that outburst had served to change my opinion of her drastically. Though talented, something clearly wasn't right about Isabella. She was a loose cannon, a bomb waiting to go off, and if we weren't careful, we were going to get caught up in the blast.

Kubo waved her in, asking her to initiate a new spell. “Invisibility. If you need a few more minutes to gather the energy, take your time. It's no rush, Isabella.” Pulling his jacket away, he hit a button on a small black square that was fastened to his belt. If I had to guess, that was the device the Veiled Order strike team had given him. If he failed to hit it once every half hour, they had express orders to storm the church.

Isabella mashed her hands together without hesitation, mumbling to herself. She was a little red in the face, the color not having escaped from her cheeks since her freak-out, and seemed to be having a harder time of spell casting than usual.

Joe walked up behind me and explained why. “Isabella can only cast so many spells a day. It takes a lot of focus, and if she works too hard, she can literally give herself an aneurysm. Tricks like hers can be very taxing. I think that's why she acts so weird. Probably pushed shit too far when she was still learning the ropes and fucked up her head.” Joe knocked on his forehead and clicked his tongue. “Hollow up there, I'm tellin' ya.”

“I see. And who's her mother?” I whispered. “The one who doesn't want her drinking coffee?”

Joe chuckled under his breath, shaking his head. His pompadour fell out of place, a few locks brushing against his forehead. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“OK,” said Isabella, “it's finished.”

I looked down at myself, then over to Joe.

 
Well, we didn't
look
invisible.

“Did it work?” I asked, motioning to Kubo.

He nodded. “She made us invisible to others, not to each other.”

Nifty.

That meant we were all ready to dive into the snake pit.

Before starting into the church, Kubo drew one last thing from his pocket, handing it over to me. “You'll be needing this.”

I accepted a small glass vial, filled with green liquid. “What is it?”

“Another gift from Mona. Take it now. It takes a little while to kick in.”

 
I eyed it suspiciously, giving the vial a shake and then wrenching off the rubber top. One whiff of the stuff was enough to make me retch; it smelled largely of moldy grass clippings and vinegar, with hints of dead fish. “
Whoa
, that's foul. No thanks, chief. Whatever it is, I'm sure I don't need it. You be sure to thank Mona on my behalf, though. Real sweet of her.” I prepared to pour it out, but Kubo caught my hand.

“Bottoms up, princess. This one isn't optional, since you're apparently unwilling to carry your gun. Either you guzzle it or you take it as a suppository. We don't have time to sit around and wait for you to make up your mind. It's a strength tincture.”

Gritting my teeth, I looked back down at the vial and felt my mouth water. That always meant one thing. I was about to puke.

And I hadn't even sipped it yet.

 
The very
idea
of drinking it made me want to barf.

The team was all ready to head into the church. They were just waiting on me to take my pungent new medicine. Holding my nose, I opened wide and poured the stuff straight down my throat.

And then I started coughing.

The stuff burned like hell, scalding my esophagus as though I'd guzzled literal fire. I struggled to breathe afterward, throwing the vial into the lawn and gasping for air. “O-oh... Oh God...”

Kubo wasn't paying attention. After I'd swallowed the stuff, he'd turned and started into the church, Isabella close behind him.

Joe snickered as I clutched at my throat and crept in after them. When I finally recovered enough to see straight, I followed, tears in my eyes.

 
I don't know what was in that, but it'd better do something impressive, else that old snake lady is going to be next on my list.

THIRTY-FIVE

 
I didn't know exactly what was in that tincture, but apparently Gadreel frigging
loved
it, because from the minute I set foot in that church and started looking out for witches, my heart started to pound like mad.

 
Gadreel
. It felt weird, being able to name to the demon. For so long, he'd been something of a nebulous outsider, someone relegated to the margins of my personality and only coming to the fore when I was out of my depth. Now I knew his name, had some idea of his hobbies. Apparently he liked screwing human women and getting into fights.

Frankly, I'm surprised we weren't acquainted sooner.

My heart was going so hard I was nervous that everyone else could hear it. My muscles were tensing, and despite the relative coolness of the room, I'd broken into a sudden sweat. The fever was back. Gadreel knew it was his time to shine, his time to make an appearance. Surely, in the fight ahead, there'd be a whole lot more of Gadreel than Lucian participating. The strength tincture only seemed to be making things more intense. As if the demon's influence over me in the past wasn't intense enough. This was Gadreel on steroids. Never mind Kubo's claims; the thing had kicked in quickly. If it kicked in any more than this, my head was going to pop off my shoulders like the cap of a shaken two-liter.

Kubo had his gun out, and was training it on each and every of the battered, dusty pews that we passed. It was a rather small church, with a tiny altar, three sets of wooden pews and little else. The rest of the fixtures had either been moved elsewhere or lifted by thieves since the building's official closure, and bits of garbage had been left in their places. The floors, cement, had probably been carpeted once, but now wore empty Coke bottles and crushed packs of empty cigarettes. Dead leaves, too, were aplenty, and as they skittered across the room in the draft, I couldn't help but shudder.

It was pretty clear that there was no one else in this room with us, but Kubo marched on in a slight crouch as if he were inching through a war zone. Far behind the altar, and to the left, was a door hanging slightly off of its hinges. To the right was an open doorway, leading to a hallway.

We were going to have to go down one or the other, but how the hell were we supposed to know which way was the right one?

Kubo, though, the marvelous bastard, had it figured out before I could even ask. “We're going to the right,” he said after a short pause. He'd bent down to touch the floor, and had apparently sensed movement in the hall that extended to the right of the altar. “The witches are underground, in the cellar. I can feel them. We need to go down that hall and find the cellar door.”

And so we went.

But not before Kubo stopped dead in his tracks.

He'd just walked past the last pew and had glimpsed something behind it that made him take aim with his gun.

I rushed up behind him, pushing Joe and Isabella out of the way, and found a number of blank-eyed, presumably cockroach-infested kids in rags sitting against the concrete.

Familiars.

Four of them.

Kubo stayed his hand, didn't fire upon them even though they were easy targets. They couldn't see us; Isabella had made us invisible and had dampened the sounds we made in order to allow us a discrete entry.

Unfortunately, that didn't stop me from lashing out at the familiars and breaking the carefully-laid illusion like a pane of glass.

I gave into the pounding of my heart, and Gadreel incited me to violence. I reached out and batted at the nearest familiar, knocking his bloated, misshapen head against the nearest pew and watching as a swarm of roaches burst forth.

That was all it took.

They could see and hear us now, and they were all looking at me. These things were dumb automatons, largely incapable of emotion or self-directed thought, if my previous dealings with them were any indication. But, as I struck one of them down and suddenly came into view, I noticed their eyes widened in something like shock.

And so did their mouths.

The familiars began to shriek, scrambling across the room and running circles around the four of us. The sounds that left their lips were unlike anything I'd ever heard, and were so grating that I couldn't help but wince. For those who are unaware, some species of cockroach are capable of making noise. It's a shrill, high-pitched sort of chirp, and to hear even a single roach vocalize in such a way is enough to make my skin crawl.

Now imagine the many thousands of dark roaches that must've filled the hollowed-out bodies of these vacant-looking familiars.

That chirping was amplified a million times, and packed such a wallop I was left stunned. The familiars were calling to their masters, informing them that the church had been infiltrated by unwelcome outsiders.

That is, the jig was up.

And I'd just blown it.

In a bit of quick thinking, Isabella held out one of her hands and began to shriek along with the chorus of insect-ridden shells. “Stop! Stop!” she pleaded, her fingers waggling furiously.

And then, they did.

Glancing narrowly at the three remaining familiars, my ears still ringing, I noticed their mouths had vanished. Isabella had done something, whipped up some sort of spell that had effectively erased their mouths and prevented them from screeching.

 
Kubo charged forward, cursing. “Take care of them, Joe. We're going downstairs,
now
!”

With a nod, Joe flipped his lighter open and took to burning the three remaining familiars. Their thin skins gave way, and the hordes of insects within were subsequently burnt to a crisp.

There wasn't time for high-fives or celebrations, though.

“Lucy, get the fuck over here,” said Kubo, taking my arm as he went on. “You and me are up front. Joe, get behind Lucy. Isabella, you need to stay in the back. This is the real thing, so get ready.” He led us down the hall, no longer bothering to creep around or mask our approach.

The witches knew we were there.

They had to. There was no way that ungodly cacophony had gone unnoticed.

The hallway was short and branched off into a couple of different doors, but upon throwing them all open and scoping out each new room with his gun raised, Kubo found them all empty. One was a restroom, left in an awful state of disrepair. There was also a closet, along with a room that might've once stored religious objects. The door to the cellar was the last on the right, and as it banged open, we were greeted by a dense darkness.

This was it.

Kubo led the charge.

THIRTY-SIX

I wasn't sure what I expected to find once we got down there.

At the time, Gadreel was more in charge than I was, and I was content to sit back as a spectator, only poking my head out when the others spoke to me. We hustled down those stairs, arriving on solid floor which was quickly illuminated by Kubo's signature will-o-the-wisps.

It became clear that the basement of this church was enormous, and our immediate surroundings were cluttered with refuse. Busted chairs, mounds of clothes, a couple of splintered coatracks and upturned shelving units.

The garbage had been cleared from the center of the room, and taking a couple of exploratory steps inside, I could see why. A large circle, with a circumference of roughly thirty feet, had been drawn in what seemed to be a mixture of blood and ash. I couldn't quite tell in the low light, but the color looked about right. Kubo's hushed mutterings shortly thereafter confirmed my suspicions.