“You don’t want me to call you Vitüshka?” she asked with a grin.
“It’s kind of a mouthful,” I muttered wryly.
It didn’t take long before our ride arrived, and I opened the door to the back seat for Celeste and showed her how to use her seat belt. Once I was seated beside her and we were moving, she commented that she was still mystified that the vehicle “drove itself”—meaning it wasn’t pulled by anything. I tried to convey internal combustion in the simplest terms, grateful that our driver didn’t speak Common Tongue and was unaware of how badly I was mangling my descriptions of gasoline engines. Her attention split between the driver, the car itself, and the passing scenery as we rode, which was useful because it meant she didn’t notice the swarm of spirits that began following us a few minutes into our journey. These weren’t just ghouls, they were demons.
The truest scourge of the Void, they often traveled in packs, and while a living human didn’t usually have much to fear from them, a dead one was another story. Without an angel to stand guard over their souls, they were entirely vulnerable to eternal destruction. Unfortunately for the magical races, they werejustas vulnerable without a body in this land unless one of my people stood against the demons.
The ones following us were lower-level spirits, and I felt them before I saw them. Not especially intelligent and driven by hunger, they would continue to chase their prey until I drove them off. My kind weren’t capable of killing demons, only the angels were capable of that. I peeked out the back window to find them floating along behind us about a half a block back as we moved through traffic. If we’d been faster, we could have just outrun them, but there wasn’t going to be any chance of that in heavy traffic like this. Being stuck in a slow-moving car while trying to defend us and not draw attention was frustrating beyond measure.
I took hold of my magic, pulling from the very few shadows around us at this time of day, and cast a flock of shadow birds into the sky as discreetly as I could. As far as I was aware, crows didn’t even exist on this continent, so I tried to shape them with more generic features and hoped no one would notice that they weren’t simply local birds. Keeping an ear toward Celeste’s absorbed murmuring about the enormous cemetery we passed, I directed my flock at the largest of the demons and attacked it with far more magic than necessary. I wanted to drive them off as quickly as possible.
The largest demon of the pack—the leader—dropped back to fend off my attacks, and the rest of them spread out when I directed my birds back to focus on them. As a focused effort they shot a volley of what looked like flaming arrows at us, entirely invisible to the humans surrounding us on the street and sidewalks. I tossed up a temporary wall of shadows that arced over the moving car to shield us, just long enough for the arrows to impact it and fizzle out, and then ripped it away to strike the rejoining leader with a bolt of magic as thick as my wrist. The shadow birds swarmed the weaker members of the pack, pecking and diving to force them away, and within minutes the whole group fell back and faded into the distance.
“They painted the bridge rainbow colors!” Celeste gasped happily, with her face nearly pressed to the car window.
I spent the rest of the ride on edge, searching the skies and the road around us, as we nudged through traffic. Celeste’s occasional cheerful remarks about the passing buildings and the samba music playing over the tiny hatchback’s radio made a surreal backdrop to my nerves. We made it to our destination—a Gateway in a large park that housed an odd white dome and circular footpath—without any more skirmishes. I grabbed all our bags, thanked the driver, and practically hauled Celeste bodily out of the car.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Demons,” I muttered, tucking her under my arm and wrapping us both in my cloak of shadows to hide her from sight.
We passed through the gate into a town next to Oar’s Rest, and an hour of traveling later stepped from a Gateway in Oar’s Rest into Seattle, the city where I lived.
Chapter 26
Grim
Itwashardtosay for sure, but Seattle might have been my favorite city. There wasn’t anything that truly stood out about it compared to any of the other cities in the Void or the Boundlands. And certainly not compared to Faery. It was a small city—especially compared to somewhere like São Paulo. It wasn’t flashy like New York or opulent like Golden Laurel, back in the Boundlands. It was overcast and rainy nine months out of the year, and the other three months were plagued by heavy smoke coming up from the forest fires in California lately. But it wasgreen, quiet, and had a fantastic library system. Most importantly, it felt like home. Especially the older neighborhoods here in North Seattle, with little postage stamp yards, the elderly neighbors chatting over their hedgerows, or a new family following a toddler on a tricycle down a sidewalk. I wondered what it looked like to Celeste. Quaint, probably. Perhaps even a little shabby. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.
“I’m not sure that taking you to my apartment is a good idea.”
“Because of the demons?” Celeste asked me. She’d had no knowledge of them until I’d explained that they were this world’s version of ghouls… only worse.
“Yes.” I pulled out her cloak and helped her into it before pulling the hood up to shield her face from the falling drizzle. “How are you feeling?” I asked her. I didn’t want to be trapped in a car again if I needed to fight—I didn’t like not being able to move and counter them myself if needed—but I wasn’t sure if she felt up to riding the wraith again. I’d carry her myself if I had to.
“I’m certainly feeling the travel,” she admitted, rubbing at the muscles in one of her legs. “But we don’t have too much farther, right? I’d really love to see your home.” Her shoulders dropped at the last part, and her disappointment hit me harder than I might have expected.
I frowned at her before glancing down the street. The Gate into Dry Gulch was only a little way from here, and my current apartment wasn’t terribly far off the route. “Why do you want to see it so badly?” I asked.
She raised one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Because it’s yours.”
I scanned the street again, my heart squeezing at the thought of denying her this simple request. Maybe if we hurried… “Do you feel like you can ride a horse again?”
She perked up considerably. “If it means getting to see where you live, I can ride for leagues.”
I made myself release my clenched jaw, took a deep breath, and nodded. As long as we didn’t see anything suspicious, I would take her. I tried to ignore the weird butterfly feelings that filled my chest when her happy smile spread from ear to ear. It might have been the most pleased I’d ever seen her.Well… outside of physical relations…I pushed that thought away and made myself focus on the task in front of us.
This would be okay.
I gathered my magic and created our mount, giving it strong legs and a sturdy frame. I wanted a war horse this time, not a racehorse. Celeste and our bags went on first, and then I hauled myself up, wrapping us both in shadows to hide us from view. We set off at a slow, plodding walk down the tree-lined sidewalk, in an effort to make as little noise as possible.
Cars rolled by and a pedestrian crossed the road in front of us and entered a hardware store we passed, but there wasn’t much in the way of traffic here. Most people were at work or school and the area was largely quiet. The falling mist and the turning leaves gave the air a sweet, crisp scent that mingled with car exhaust and the smell of drying clothes from a nearby laundromat. I watched carefully as we rode, my eyes never stopping in my search for anything that could cause Celeste harm.
But as diligent as I was in my surveillance, it was already watching us before I spotted it. My adrenaline spiked almost painfully before my mind had even made the connection of what I was looking at—a powerful overlord demon staring me right in the face. It was at least a foot taller than I was on horseback. He leered at us from where he hovered near the corner of a dingy 7-Eleven on a main road in the middle of the day, staring me dead in the eyes with its gruesome, gaping eye holes.
My wraith halted without a conscious command on my part. Instinct took over, and I pulled magic into my body so forcefully that tendrils of darkness erupted from the ground around us, stretching upward and coiling over on themselves, searching for an outlet for release. The scythe that materialized in my hand was the heaviest I’d ever carried, and the handle stretched nearly to the ground from where I sat on horseback. I intended to drive it right through this monster’s neck.
“Is there a demon?” Celeste breathed, fear rattling her whispered words.
