“Yes.”
“I can feel it,” she whispered. But she couldn’t see it. A small blessing.
The haggish looking spirit had grotesque skin that reminded me of maggots behind the other-worldly glow it cast. We were a contrast in color, its garment a ghostly white that matched its face and mine as black as night. It flexed its fingers as it watched us—macabre-looking, skeletal things on disturbingly long hands and arms that stretched down past the knees of its spindly, spider-like legs. Enormous, tattered, leathery wings stretched over its head—deformed structures that could never have carried it if it had a physical body. It was an angel whose outward form was now a reflection of his inner corruption, the way a tumor corrupts the healthy tissue it once was.
Strange laughter echoed off the buildings around us.
“What was that?” Celeste whispered, crouching down closer to the horse’s neck. She could hear it, then. Unfortunate, that.
“Stay on the horse, Doveling.” I vaulted off the horse and landed on my feet with my scythe held aloft. Without taking my eyes off of the demon in front of us, I spawned a pair of shadow hounds and placed them on both sides of her mount. I would only be able to sense them and the horse peripherally, but I wanted to make sure she was protected at all times, so I granted them as much autonomy as I was able.
The demon leaned backward a fraction, and that was the only warning I got before it hurled itself at me head-first at high speed, the long strips of its ghostly garment flapping wildly in a wind I couldn’t feel. I ran toward it at a full sprint, determined to keep it as far away from Celeste as possible. Pitching my weapon forward, I slid my hands to the end and swung it as hard as I could with the goal of keeping myself away from its long claws.It’d be nice if I could take a piece of it with me as well. Preferably its head.It was a false hope.
The creature swooped up at the last second to avoid my strike, reaching out with a long arm to reach over my weapon at my face. I morphed my reaper’s scythe mid-swing into a double-bladed war scythe, bringing the back end up to sink it into the demon’s arm. A piercing shriek let me know I’d hit home, but I had less than the blink of an eye to step out of the way of its other arm. We were locked into our deadly dance—spinning, dodging, striking, deflecting. I put all the effort I could into injuring the demon badly enough that it would have no choice but to flee.
There was very little in the way of shadows for me to pull magic from, with the sun high and the overcast sky diffusing the light. I wanted to throw even more at him, to overwhelm him as quickly as possible, so after another swing of my scythe, I morphed the weapon into my staff and lantern, slamming the butt of it into the ground between us. Multiple portals to the underworld opened up in the ground around us, pulling larger tendrils of darkness like thick, black tentacles up from the depths. I used them to boost my own magic, but also to grab at the demon and hold him in place while I struck out at him. His cackling laughter turned into more shrieking when we were suddenly blasted from behind me by a pulse of magic so powerful it rocked me forward. I had to catch myself with my weapon to stay upright.
The demon released an ear-splitting scream as it collapsed in on itself, until abruptly,shockingly, it wasgone. I was heaving for air, trying to make sense of the sudden silence, never before having seen a demon disappear like that unless an angel killed it. They always fled when I bested them, turning and flying away like cowards. Theyneverdisappeared. Not unless an angel intervened.
I turned and looked at Celeste, still perched upon my wraith with her head held high like a tiny queen, her wings out and spread wide again. The color was drained from her face and her eyes looked exhausted, but her mouth set in a grim line of determination.
“Did you just kill that demon?” I asked.
“I thought it was going to kill you with all those tentacle things.”
I blinked at her before glancing around at the dark tendrils of shadow stretching into the sky around me, flailing wildly now that there was no focus from me. “Those are mine,” I said, snuffing out the portals and all of my magical conjurations in an instant, so that only her horse was left.
She merely frowned at me.
The implications of her having the ability tokilla demon made my brain spin out in a dozen different directions. “Are you descended from the angels?” I asked, eyeing her feathered wings with new interest as she folded them up and they disappeared. I didn’t know how that could even be possible, since angels were spiritual beings, not physical ones. They didn’t reproduce.
Celeste simply shrugged, clearly flagging, and I jogged over to hold her steady when she swayed in her seat. “There are old legends that claim the royal lines have some kind of ‘angelic’ ancestry, but I’ve never believed any of it. That seems like just the kind of hubris royalty would claim about itself, you know?”
My mind flickered through the scraps of ancient texts I’d seen that hinted at angels having offspring, but it seemed like such an odd concept to me. I’d have to ask my grandmother if she knew anything.
“Come here, love,” I murmured, pulling her down from the saddle along with our bags and allowing the wraith to dissipate. “You rescued me again,” I told her with a small smile and watched her lavender eyes sparkle as they locked on to the curve of my mouth. “We’re going to have to skip the apartment this time, but I’ll find a way to show you my things if you would like.” Her energy was completely spent.
Tucking her head under my chin, I held her against my chest and slung our bags over my other shoulder, and then carried her in my arms to the next Gate. She needed rest, and I knew just the place where she could do that.
Chapter 27
Grim
“Huck,youhavetobe gentle with her,” I warned, speaking with a calmness I didn’t feel. The adolescent dragon that lived near Levi was territorial and protective, and viewed the property and all its inhabitants ashis.It had been an amusing quirk when he was the size of an average dog, but he had grownincrediblyrapidly over the last few years and was currently the size of a small bus. Spikes had erupted through the black scales on his forehead and lined the back of his neck, and his jaw and throat had grown so thick and muscular that he made a fully grown alligator look like a dainty lizard. Teeth that had once been used for catching crickets and mice now brought down adult cattle. I didn’t like how close he was to my wife as he loomed over the top of her, or the interest he was taking in sniffing her hair. His head was larger than her whole body, and when I reached out to take her wrist her hands were shaking. That upset me. She’d been through enough today. “Huck,back up,” I told him firmly.
Unfortunately, there was only one person this dragon listened to, and it wasn’t me. He cocked his enormous, horned head and narrowed an eye at me, before growling his response—a deep thrumming bass that could be felt more than heard. Celeste silently turned wide, panicked eyes on me, so I tucked her behind me. Huck had never given me a problem before, so I hadn’t even thought to forewarn her, but then I usually entered the property via a portal and was with one of my friends—the inhabitants he trusted—before he ever noticed I was present. This time we were entering through the main gate and approaching the house the way a normal guest would, and he had landed in front of us with a ground shaking thud almost immediately, scaring the daylights out of Celeste.
While I was capable of defending her against Huck, I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Sidney loved this creature.
I took hold of my magic and formed my staff—half a second from either thumping him on the end of the nose with it or opening a portal between us—when I heard a door open and a gasped, “Oh, shit,” come from up the hill. Huck flinched, just a hint of a crouch, but it gave the impression of a cat laying its ears back.
Sidney—Jordan’s partner and Elara’s best friend—stood on the front porch of the small stone house that she shared with Jordan on the back of Elara’s property. I only caught sight of her for a fraction of a second before she collapsed in on herself and emerged from the neck hole of her shirt as a Eurasian magpie. Her clothing dropped to the front steps as her black and white feathered form shot up into the sky. She made a beeline straight for us, yelling about “oversized lizards with zero brain cells,” in the reedy-sounding bird-version of her voice the whole way. She shifted again when she reached us, landing to my left in her “human” form, naked as the day she was born, her long fair hair hanging loose down her back. She hollered at her dragon and shoved his cowering bulk backward with all of her might. Sidney was muscular and fit, but it would take a lot more than her strength to physically move a dragon this size. “Humphrey Herbert Hucklebee, you listen to me right now! You are not allowed to menace our guests! YouknowGrim, you big overgrown goofball! Gohomebefore he turns you into a ghost-dragon.” She pushed on his face with both hands, and he cringed back from her with a sullen-looking posture, huffing and puffing in irritation but inching backward nonetheless.
“He’s not going to eat her, Grim,” Sidney shouted at me over her shoulder. “He’s just making sure she smells safe. Don’t hurt my baby.”
“Your—” Celeste paused in confusion for a beat.“—baby?” I glanced down to find her peeking around my arm, her face painted in bewildered awe.
“Well, sure.” Sidney lowered her voice and leaned forward to wrap her arms around the dragon’s enormous head, somehow ignoring the way the spikes across his forehead pressed into her naked flesh. “This is Huck, my dragon baby.” A pigeon flew up at that moment and alighted on one of the dragon’s horns, and she didn’t even need to look up to know which bird it was. “And that’s Pidgy, Huck’s emotional support pigeon.” Without looking she waved her hand at the completely standard looking city pigeon, who began to bow and coo at her repeatedly—something she’d referred to in the past asflirting—at her acknowledgement. She ignored him. “Together they make up the brainless duo.”
