The Demon Beside Me (27 page)

With that, the angels drew back for a moment. Some sort of conversation seemed to be taking place in the rear of their lines. Caleb and Opheran took that time to catch their breath. “Invigorating little fight,” Opheran said loudly enough for all of us to hear. “Choir Internal Security isn’t as well-trained as I had been led to believe.”

“Remember that this is Victor’s doing,” Caleb said. “He’ll gladly sacrifice his underperformers just to tire us out.” Several of the angels in the front line stepped back at that. I grinned.

“Zay, they’re working on the side door,” Hikari said.

“No surprise,” I said. “Are they close to getting through?”

“Yes.”

“That’s surprising.”

“All talk and theory,” Tink said. “But when the chips come down, she starts flubbing her runes and patterns.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Tinkerbell,” Hikari said.

“I’m so terribly sorry to upset you, Hikari-chan.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “While listening to the two of you try to make the other seem as small as possible is great entertainment, do remember that we’re in a bit of a sticky situation here.”

“It’s not hard to make her seem small,” Hikari pointed out.

“Bitch, I will cut you. Again.”

“Anna,” Jase said.

“Sorry.”

A shouted command from the back brought all of our heads up. Opheran flexed and brought his hands up. Caleb stopped leaning on his sword and hefted his shield in front of him. The angels faced off against the two of them, and at another shouted command, started marching forward. Each of them brought a large shield up in front of them, then materialized a short spear in their main hand.

Caleb and Opheran exchanged glances and I muttered something foul in demonic under my breath. “This seems to be a problem.”

“Why’s that?” Tink asked.

“Don’t you know anything about primitive tactics?” Hikari broke in before I could answer. “Look at how they’re moving in. They’re making a shield wall to push Opheran and Caleb back from the door. It’s like a porcupine. Once they get those two out of the doorway, they’ll be able to flank them and come after us.”

“It’s pretty smart,” I said.

Tink stretched and yawned. “They’re forgetting something.”

The shield wall was succeeding for the moment. Opheran and Caleb gave up ground, step by step. Neither of them had been touched yet, but they hadn’t taken any pieces of the wall down either. When the angels had forced them a full step back into the sanctuary, Tink walked to one of the front row pews, tore it from the ground, and lofted it toward the shield wall. I could see heads crane as the heavy dark wood floated serenely through the air, then come to a stop directly over the shield wall.

There was a certain degree of consternation among the angels at that point. Either they could lift their shields in an attempt to protect themselves from that impact, in which case Caleb and Opheran would have a field day, or they could keep the shields low and hope that the pew didn’t hit them directly. Even without any magical assistance, the drop would flatten their wall. If Tink added some more force vectors, it would be like a wooden bomb going off in the midst of their line.

She did neither. The pew simply hung above the line. A second line of angels rushed forward, lifting their shields overhead to cushion against the potential impact. As the last one of them locked into position, Tink finally dropped the pew. It crashed down on top of the shield wall, hanging absurdly on top of a few shields, but finally stable. The shield wall lurched forward and the pew fell back behind them.

“So what was the point of that?” I asked.

Tink looked over her shoulder and grinned. She held a hand up, an unfamiliar rune scribed on her palm. When she clenched her fist, the pew exploded. The dense, thick wood blew outwards in splinters, a wooden claymore that shredded the rear line of the angelic shield wall. Angelic skin was as tough as demonic skin, but that explosion could have torn through steel. Purity sprayed from thousands of slices as splinters tore through angelic flesh.

The rear line was gone, dead or incapacitated. The concussion and impact hit the shield wall from behind, staggering several, knocking them out of position. The angelic forces in the church foyer had taken a chunk of the burst as well, keeping them from coming to the aid of the suddenly broken wall. Opheran and Caleb wasted no time, tearing into the weak parts of the wall.

“Withdraw!” shouted a voice from the back and the shield wall wasted no time doing so, dragging bodies back with them.

“They’ve broken through my wards,” Hikari said quietly. “I don’t think they’ll get through Anna’s in time. She doesn’t have as many, but hers are substantially more dangerous to attempt.”

“You mages are substantially more dangerous than they thought,” I said, lifting my chin toward the entrance to the sanctuary. Dark splinters littered the ground and pocked the walls, purity glistening from many of them. “Even after those other attacks, they still don’t take you seriously.”

“Do you?” Hikari asked.

I shrugged. “It’s a question of surprise. Once the Choir starts watching for your surprises, it’ll be much harder to kill them. Or us, for that matter.”

“You can’t watch everyone, everywhere, all the time,” she pointed out.

“Neither can human mages,” I said.

She grunted, then tilted her head. “I think they’re about to try something new.”

Something new for the angels was another bull rush. Once again, Caleb and Opheran dispatched their vanguard, but it was obvious to me that they were starting to slow down. The angels facing them seemed tougher as well. This didn’t appear to pose a significant problem. Opheran simply drew himself up even taller, manifested hellfire in each clawed palm, and thrust a lance of the yellow-green flame all the way through the sanctuary doors into the foyer. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out it was visible from the street. The angels fell back once again without even trying to force their way through the gap.

“I must remember to be properly thankful to my congregation for their faith,” Jase said. “The hellfire that Prince Opheran is flinging about with wild abandon doesn’t seem to be affecting the structure at all. In fact, I’d say the most damage is from your little trick with the pew, Anna.”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said.

“Oh, so you apologize to him for destruction of property?” I asked.

She scowled at me. “What property of yours have I destroyed?”

“I’ve lost multiple cars and apartments while I’ve known you.”

“That’s not what I’m asking and you know it, demon.”

Hikari cleared her throat. “They are working on your wards, Anna.”

“I know,” Tink said. “They’ll pop the nested force frost one next, and then the electrogravitic ward will come into play. If they’re not careful, that one will also give them some nasty chemical burns.”

“Oh my,” Jase said quietly.

“So, how does it feel to be labeled a heretic?” I asked him.

The pastor shrugged. “I find myself in rare company. To my knowledge, I am the only human branded as a heretic by the supernatural equivalent of the Inquisition to date. I suppose I should be flattered. I would be, if I wasn’t aware of what would happen if they caught me.”

“Yes, Victor has a certain taste for such acts,” I said.

“Don’t judge him too harshly, Isaiah,” Jase said. “He believes in the righteousness of what he’s doing.”

“And if I believed in murdering anyone who disagreed with me, you wouldn’t judge me too harshly?” I shook my head. “Jase, there is such a thing as evil.”

“The demon should know,” Tink muttered.

“I understand that,” Jase said. “But there is a difference between simple cold-blooded murder and what Victor does. He believes that what he’s doing is the right thing to save his people.”

“Save his people? They’re trying to obliterate mine!”

“Don’t you understand?” The pastor’s eyes met mine. “The Choir fears the Host, Isaiah. They’ve never understood the schism that split your race.”

“And they want to destroy what they don’t understand?” I snorted. “I can’t speak for every demon, but we don’t want to fight them. We just want them to leave us alone.”

“They can’t,” Jase said. “If they do, they admit that you were right.”

“Fuck them.”

“Language, Isaiah.”

“Sorry, Jase, but I won’t take that one back. If they’re willing to kill every last one of us just to salve their pride, then there really isn’t any way to resolve this except to break them,” I said. “Break them by any means necessary.”

“You’re going a little far afield there, demon,” Tink said.

“The girl who declared war on House Lucifer is trying to tell me I’m going over the top? I don’t think so.”

“Zay,” Hikari said. “I don’t like this.”

“Don’t like what?”

“They’re about to do something unorthodox.”

“Unorthodox from an angelic perspective, or from our perspective?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and a window shattered as something came flying through it. I didn’t catch a perfect glimpse of it, but it looked like a bottle with a flaming rag stuck in it. It hit the far side of the sanctuary and promptly burst into flame. As if that had only been a test, another three Molotovs came arcing in through different windows. The sanctuary began to fill with smoke and I realized that the odds had just turned against us. “We need an exit plan,” I said, trying to make myself heard above the crackling of the flames.

“Well, we can either go that way,” Hikari said, pointing at the front door, “or that way,” pointing at the side door. “Either way, there are quite a few angels in the way.”

“What about out through the broken windows?” I asked, just as an angel dropped in through one of those windows. “Scratch that. Can’t you just put the fires out?”

“That depends,” Tink said, flexing her fingers. “Do you want the fire out, or do you want to fight off the angels that’ll be dropping in? I don’t think we can do both.”

Another angel dropped in, this one holding a Molotov. He looked toward us, grinned, and chucked it sidearm directly at us. One of the mages, maybe both, immediately threw force spells at it. I spun around, just in time. The crack and sudden wash of heat told me that the bottle had shattered instead of being flung back at them. “Could you please be a little more careful with glass?”

“Zay, you’re sort of on fire,” Hikari said.

“That would be sort of your fault,” I said as I fully transformed into my demonic form. My shirt being on fire was no longer an issue, though it was comfortably warm. “So, what sort of exit do you suggest now that everything’s on fire?”

Another crash of breaking glass foretold another arrival into the sanctuary, but this one wasn’t an angel. Instead, it was a demon, his eyes glowing green and balls of hellfire already clutched in his hands. “Prince Opheran! We are under heavy assault!” he called out.

“Extract the humans at all costs!” Opheran shouted.

At that point, everything began to go sideways. Victor must have gotten pissed off. The building shook as if someone had grabbed it by the foundations, and the fires left by the Molotovs suddenly jumped and flared. Thick black smoke began pouring off of the flames even as more angels and demons dropped into the sanctuary. Even my demonic vision couldn’t see clearly through the smoke and I heard Jase start coughing. “We need to get out of here,” I said. “Hikari, can you stay with Jase? Keep a shield around you two?”

“I’ll try,” she said.

“What are we doing, demon?” Tink asked.

“I’m considering using an amplified force blast to open a hole for us to get out,” I said. “There’s something wrong with the structure now. I think every bit of sanctuary this place has is gone.”

“Caleb assured me the building would hold up to any demonic siege,” Jase said, a little unsteadily. “I don’t know what happened.”

“No time for investigations,” I said. “Can we do it, Tink?”

Whatever answer she had was cut short as an angel loomed through the smoke, a short sword glittering in his hand. I stepped between him and Jase, manifesting a whip of hellfire in my hands. The angel stepped forward but stumbled. I flicked the whip toward his throat and let go. The hellfire coiled around his neck. When he dropped his sword to claw at his throat, I kicked him squarely in the stomach. He fell back into the smoke and vanished from sight.

With him gone, I turned to see Tink drop as an angel backhanded her. He advanced and took one more step toward Jase and Hikari, but I was already in motion. I sunk my claws into his side and pushed hellfire from my fingertips. The angel staggered away, leaving scorched purity on the tips of my claws. I flicked them in his direction and snarled. “You all right, Tink?”

She bounced to her feet and wiped blood away from her mouth. “I’m fine.”

Another figure loomed through the smoke, but this time it was a demonic form. “Asmodeus?” I called. The figure raised a clawed hand before vanishing back into the brawl. “This is ridiculous. I can’t see a damn thing. For all I know, Caleb or Opheran are two steps away.”

“If we take an amplified shot, we’re taking a big friendly fire risk,” Tink said. “Damn. I can’t believe I just said that killing demons would be friendly fire. What have you done to me, demon?”

“Can’t we just shoot out the back wall?” I asked.

We looked back toward where Hikari and Jase were. They weren’t there. There was only smoke. “This complicates things,” Tink said.

“No shit,” I said. “Can’t we clear this smoke?”

“Sure. Give me two minutes to work up a windstorm of that magnitude. Never mind what it’ll do with all that fire. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s getting hot in here.”

“Going to take off all your clothes?”

“Is that all you can think of at a time like this?”

“I have a reputation to uphold as a member of House Asmodeus,” I said. “Let’s worry about the stripping later, though. I vote we find our way to a wall and make a gigantic hole in it.”

“I think that’s the best idea you’ve had all day.”

We clawed our way through the dense smoke, Tink alternating between resting a hand on my back and clutching my arm. If she let go, I spun around. Twice, it was due to an angel showing up. Another time, a demon fell in with us for a few steps and then vanished again.