Taken By Storm (35 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

My first thought is that Mason can't be in here, because there's nothing alive in here.

The room is all gleaming, smooth-surfaced white except where it is red, red, red.

It's the size of a gymnasium, but the ceiling is only fifteen feet high or so.
 

I see a patch of dark brown on the floor, and that patch of dark brown is his hair. Mason. And there, a twist of flesh that is his arm, splayed out and shackled to the floor beneath him. He's spreadeagled in his own blood, and there's a lot of it. Too much of it. I don't know how much blood loss it takes to kill a shade, but they heal so quickly there could be two, three humans worth of blood spattered around the room. He's not moving. I can't see his chest lifting up and down. His hair looks like a patch because it's splayed out in the blood and over his forehead.
 

He's not moving.
 

The knowledge sways me on my feet. All this time, Gregor's mostly had his people do his fighting for him. Me. The shades. More shades. Mechanics and hells-zealots. Old witches and scads of demons. Right now, though, this is all his handiwork. This is the true version of the man who helped train me, raise me, then betray me.

I don't even see Gregor at first, because he is covered in Mason's blood like he bathed in it. Maybe he did. He's stripped naked to the waist, knives in each hand. The blades drip blood onto the floor.

"Hello, Ayala," he says. It's just like what he carved in the arrow that went through my brother's torso.

Gryfflet mutters behind me, his words unclear but insistent, and I know he's doing some sort of spellwork.
 

A hand touches the small of my back. Riley. "He's alive," she whispers so low even I can almost not hear her.

It puts a little steel in my spine.

"Hello," I say, and my voice seems to come from far away. It doesn't sound like me. Right now I'm not sure who or what
me
is.
 

Gryfflet's muttering behind me grows more intense. I feel the others shift, hear the whisper of blades leaving scabbards. I don't draw mine yet. Don't see what they're doing behind me or why.

I have eyes only for this blocky stump of a creature who has spent his life working to end mine and those of everyone I love.

My feet move me forward. There's air stirring to my right, a swirl of energy I feel in my core. Heat that draws my eyes. I turn my head, expecting to see something Gryfflet's doing, but it's not Gryfflet.
 

The air shimmers and moves, and a rift appears through it, like holding up a half-shredded piece of paper and seeing the room behind it. Except it isn't this room visible through the trailing flaps.

It's the pink glow of a jeeling.
 

"Hells-hole," Mira breathes.

Gregor says nothing from where he stands, but the door slams shut behind us, and I know we're trapped.
 

This is why we had no trouble getting in. If he can open a hells-hole underground here, getting in isn't the problem.

Getting out is.

The pink glow isn't the first thing through the rift. The first thing through is a golgoth demon, dripping slime and stench like it's walking bubonic plague. It kind of is. They're as tall as a jeeling and wider, covered in dripping pustules that burst when you fight them.
 

The second thing through is a shade.

Alamea's breath hisses in behind me, and I know the sight of a shade coming through is as much of a shock to her as it is to me. I knew the hellkin could cross this way and back, but I never thought of the possibility of a shade going to a hell dimension and popping back out through a hells-hole.

At first I think the psychics aren't armed — they don't have swords or even guns. But when I turn to tell them to keep behind those of us with blades, I see that they've linked hands with Gryfflet. His eyes are cloudy grey like the sky outside, and a conduit of energy flickers across them. It travels from his eyes to Riley's, to the man, to the other woman, looping back to Gryfflet.
 

He's harnessing their energy.

Demons pour out of the hells-hole, so many I can't count. Every kind I can name and some I can't. The howl of a markat makes the scars on my back twinge, and beside me, Mira flinches. Gregor stands with one foot on either side of Mason's body, a smile creeping across his face as if he knows damn well he's safe from these monsters. He may as well have a bowl of popcorn in his hands instead of a pair of knives.

I feel like I'm in a cage match. The feeling of however much ground above our heads and being stuck in this enclosed space with a seething mass of demons fills me with near-panic. Two more shades come through, their bodies slick with sweat and slime, eyes wild.
 

"The shades have to be first priority," I say. "They're smarter and faster than most of the rest of these fuckers."

Three Mediators. Three shades. Three psychics and a witch. Against all of these demons.
 

The boom we heard while we were in the elevator — if Gregor could open a hells-hole here, there's no doubt he could open one upstairs too.
 

I don't have time to think about my friends up there and whether they're okay. None of us are going to be okay if we can't stop these demons.

The demons rush us, their piercing shrieks filling the underground box we're in.
 

And I find out what Gryfflet's doing.
 

A ripple of pressure passes through me, seeming to shift my internal organs. I gasp and almost stumble, but what only grazes me hits the advancing line of demons square on, and they don't stumble. They fly backward.
 

Gregor lets out a roar of anger.

"We'll hold them back as long as we can. Trying to close the hells-hole." Gryfflet's voice sounds overlaid with the voices of the others, an eerie resonance that filters through the entire room and vibrates against my skin. "Get Mason away."

I'm already moving. I can hear the howls of the demons trying to advance and coming up against an invisible barrier. I had no idea Gryfflet was even capable of such a thing.

Behind me there are footsteps, and I run toward Gregor as fast as my altered-body can move.
 

He's not fully aware of how fast I am, and it's the only thing that keeps Mason alive.

Gregor's knife begins to fall toward Mason's neck, and then I'm there, kicking it out of my way and slipping in Mason's blood. My swords are still in their scabbards, and my hands find Gregor's pressure points, hitting them with all the strength I can muster. He yells, and his pain strengthens me. The feeling of my body making contact with his after everything he's done to me and the people I love bolsters me. I use the slippery blood pool and throw my weight through it, sliding at Gregor where he's stumbled backward. My fist lands in his stomach. He doubles over, his hand going for another knife in his boot.
 

He gets his fingers around the hilt before my knee connects with his face. The cartilage in his nose cracks with the impact, and Gregor falls backward on his ass into the blood.

"I can't get the shackles off!" Mira yells it at me.
 

Gregor smirks from the floor, licking blood from his upper lip as it trickles down from his broken nose.
 

"You're not getting him out of here," he says. "I tossed the key into the last hells-hole days ago."

A yell from behind me makes me turn. The demons are getting through the barrier that Gryfflet's raised.
 

"Better go, Storme, or your pals are going to get splatted."

Anguished, I make myself look at Mason. There's no way I can break steel chains even as strong as I am. If I leave him here, Gregor will kill him. His body is covered in scattered scars. Deep cuts between each of his ribs must have been sliced and healed multiple times, because they're angry red now. His cheeks bear gouges the same way. He's missing three toes and a finger.
 

I have to help the others. But I can't leave Mason here to die.
 

I do the only thing I can do. I kick Gregor in the face as hard as I can. He skids fifteen feet across the floor and comes to an unconscious halt. Even when he wakes up, he'll be seeing double.

The hellkin are spilling through Gryfflet's barrier.
 

It's been a while since I've seen Alamea in action. She moves like a warrior god, her body spinning through forms so fluidly it's like she has no bones and is only an extension of her sword. She carves through the golgoth demon that's pushed past a pack of slummoths and a markat. Carrick dismantles the markat with a clawed strike at its throat, pulling its corrosive spittle-valves out and flinging the slimy lump into the face of an oncoming jeeling. Evis and Jax fall on the jeeling together, Jax swinging from its shoulder spikes to come up behind it in a piggyback and rip off its head. He throws the head like a hurling ball at the breach in Gryfflet's barrier where the demons are writhing through. It smashes into a slummoth's face, knocking the demon back.

My shades don't fight with the usual weapons, but they make weapons out of whatever it is they're fighting.

One of the feral shades is coming straight for me and Mira.

We put ourselves between him and Mason, who is still unmoving on the floor.

I remember the first time I killed a shade, down by the train tracks in Nashville. The shade I killed then was scraping his teeth on the femur of a frat boy.
 

"Take core," I bark to Mira as the shade lunges.
 

She's not as fast as he is, but she reacts quickly enough to follow what I said. Her blades flash out, and she buries them in the shade's stomach. It gets its hands around her neck, and grabs her hard. In one move, I unsheathe my swords and scissor them across the shade's neck from the back. The points of my blades pass only inches from Mira's face, and she jerks backward, free of the shade's grip, eyes wide.

"If you ever do that again, I'm going to cut off your nose while you sleep," she gasps.

Beyond where Alamea's cutting swaths through waves of harkasts, Gryfflet and the psychics are glistening with sweat. Even from here I can see the energy circling around the four pairs of eyes. Whatever they're trying to do to close the hells-hole, I sure as fuck hope it helps soon. Beyond the failing barrier they erected, the other half of the room is packed full with demons.

Gryfflet barks a single word.

Beyond the barrier, something explodes.

Chunks of demon go flying toward us, and Mira and I drop and cover our heads.

It's then I see that the barrier Gryfflet erected wasn't to keep the demons from us — it was to shelter us from
that
.

The bits of bone and metallic, slime-oozing skin hit the inner wall of the barrier and drop onto the heads of the demons. A spray of the hellish shrapnel makes it through the rift in the barrier, but only a bit.

Then Gryfflet and the psychics collapse, and the barrier falls with it.

The remaining scores of demons rush us.

A surge of slummoths and harkasts come barreling at Mira and me. She kicks aside the shade's head, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with Mason's unconscious form behind us.

Carrick, Jax, and Evis have formed a line protecting Gryfflet and the others, whose bodies are slumped to the floor. Alamea stands alone, her sword dripping slime and blood, facing the demons down with a look that says she's been dying for the chance to work out some of her aggression.

And then the hellkin reach us, and I forget everything but staying alive and protecting Mason from any more harm.

I spin through slummoths, swords cleaving their skulls in half. Mira fights like a boxer, striking out and dancing back, leaving a growing heap of harkasts and slummoths on the floor in front of her. I've lost track of the two other shades, but I know they're somewhere in the heaving throng around us. A jeeling comes at Alamea, a slab of golgoth flesh stuck to its right shoulder spike. Behind the slummoths we fell are a trio of rakath demons.

Even though we're trapped in a box underground with a horde of hellkin, I see Mira smile. One of our most memorable escapades involved both of us getting backs full of rakath spines at age seventeen. We tag team the quill demons before they can shoot us full of spines, punching through their clavicles to sever the attached tendons that allow them to fling their barbs at us.
 

Then I see the other two feral shades.
 

In the raging sea of demons and death, they're standing stock still. Staring. At me.

I feel a tingle in me, like a pulling sensation.
 

Back and to my right, I'm aware of my brother and the other shades fighting like dervishes of death. The demons around us are dying by the dozen, and we're winning.

But why are these two waiting?

I try to keep my eyes trained on them as Mira and I take down another wave of slummoths. The sounds of death surround us, the tearing, crunching, slicing, spitting, growling, snarling death that has been the soundtrack of my life. I've lost track of how many we've killed, but the bodies are heaped before us, enough that new attackers have to clamber over the corpses to reach us. Still the shades don't move.