Carrie Vaughn - Kitty in the Underworld

Yeah, so she recognized me, too. Great.

“My Master will know of you,” she said.

The target I felt painted on my chest seemed to get a whole lot bigger. “Your Master—and Roman’s Master?” Because I couldn’t stop poking. “Roman couldn’t stop me, why should I be scared of you, or your Master?”

She pulled another spear from one of several strapped to a kind of bandolier across her back, hefted it in her left hand, and drew a sword from a scabbard at her belt. It seemed molten in the firelight, and I was absolutely sure it had some amount of silver in it. The wooden weapon might not hurt me, but the sword would.

The wind tore through the space with the noise of rusty nails on steel. My hair, tangled mess that it was, whipped into my face, and I couldn’t keep it pulled back, I couldn’t see anything. The remaining tongues of flame from the torches seemed to be drawn into the spiraling debris that climbed up the mine shaft. It might have been beautiful, if I wasn’t in the middle of it.

Zora said she’d cast some kind of protection over the place. Whatever she’d done hadn’t worked against this. And me—I’d seen magic, but I didn’t know the first thing about working it myself. My wounded back itched.

The last time the demon appeared had been much like this one: a ritual to open doors or lower barriers gone awry, opposing forces gathered. Cormac had stopped her—he’d been ready with one of those inexplicable spells. But he hadn’t been able to finish her off; in the end, she’d just left, or been taken, or banished herself.

Zora stood staring at her, mouth open, unmoving. Disbelieving. She didn’t have a clue.

Kumarbis, however, was attempting to recover some of his dignity. He climbed to his feet, clutching at his cassock, which had become twisted in the fall. “How dare you?” Kumarbis said. “How dare you?”

The demon laughed, openmouthed, full-lunged. Like she thought this was hysterical.

“Kumarbis, get down !” I hissed at him. Her spear was a length of sharpened wood, an ideal vampire-slaying weapon. He had to see that. He had to get away from her, but this cave had no damn cover. Only the door on the far end of the antechamber. We had to get out of here.

The vampire ignored me. “Who sent you?” he demanded of the thing. As if he were still in control here.

“You of all people should have some clue,” she said. “Kumarbis, is that what you’re calling yourself? You’ve been around such a long time … I can smell it on you.” Her nostrils flared, taking in the scent. “But you are still a traitor. You are all traitors.”

Kumarbis turned on the magician. “Zora, what is this, what’s happening?” She could only shake her head, her mouth working wordlessly.

I grabbed the vampire and shoved him toward the tunnel. I had to put my shoulders into it. How did such a wizened old guy get to be so heavy ? “We have to get out of here, right now !”

He resisted. “No, we must finish the ceremony, we’re so close!”

Not a chance. Couldn’t he see the circle was already broken, the spell had already failed? Backfired, rather. Zora had successfully opened a door, but Roman wasn’t on the other side of it. He’d sent a proxy, one who couldn’t be killed by a shaft of wood.

The demon arced the silver-laced sword toward me, and I scrambled away, waiting for the cut to bite into me, sure the strike would land. The walls were in the way, I had no place to go, and Wolf’s claws dug inside my skin.

Enkidu and Sakhmet jumped at her in a beautiful, coordinated attack, Sakhmet tackling low and Enkidu grabbing for the demon’s throat. They hit at the same time, and she stumbled but didn’t fall. She should have fallen, with two lycanthropes crashing into her like that. But her feet spread out, and she kept her balance.

“Watch it, her weapons are silver!” I shouted, and they both sprang away, agile enough to reverse course almost in midair. When the demon stabbed a dagger toward them—and when had she had time to draw that?—they were scrambling backward, out of range.

We were spread out around the chamber now, and the demon circled, not willing to turn her back on anyone. Taking time to choose her next target.

“Who is she?” Enkidu called to me. “How did she get here?”

“I told you, you open a door to them, they can come through it, too,” I said.

“That’s not Dux Bellorum,” he said.

“No. But she works for the same guy he does.” The conversation was rapid, breathless. I was backing away, staying out of range of those silver-alloy blades.

“The ritual—” Kumarbis panted, trying to catch enough breath to speak. “Where is Dux Bellorum?”

“You flushed him,” I said. “He’s gone. You failed.”

“No, we haven’t, we mustn’t, he’s here, he must be here—”

The demon picked her target, and accompanied by another blast of inky wind lunged forward, drawing the spear back for a strike. Kumarbis was present enough to notice and managed to pull out some slick vampire moves, dodging aside too quickly for the eye to follow, shoving the demon out of his way and into the cave wall, springing into the center of the chamber, giving himself more room to maneuver. He glared at the demon like he was finally ready to fight.

He grabbed up the coin from its place in the middle of the pentagram. The mummified dove had blown away.

“I defeated Dux Bellorum once before,” he called to the demon. “I will do it again! Again and for all time!”

“I don’t care,” the demon muttered and hefted her wooden spear for another strike.

We needed a weapon, but what would work against an only semicorporeal demon? We needed to banish her—did Zora know how to do that? Not that she could do anything in her current state. Fallen to her knees, she clutched the box around her neck. Hard to access a computerized book of spells when you didn’t have your laptop. Not that she would have had a chance to sit down and read anything at the moment anyway. She seemed catatonic, staring in awe, unmoving. She had seen the unknowable and it had broken her. So that was what that looked like.

I ran to her side and grabbed her shoulder, trying to shake her out of it. I must have looked like a monster, my teeth bared, eyes red with smoke.

“Zora, she’s a demon, like in the stories, Faust and crap. You have to banish her. Do you have a spell for that? Can you banish her?”

She seemed to wake up a little. “I didn’t … I didn’t summon anything—”

“I know you didn’t, but can you banish her?”

Eyes still round and shocky, she pawed at the amulets on her chest, picked one—a Maltese cross—then went to find her bag of supplies, which she’d left lying against the cave wall.

Maybe she really could do it. We just had to hold out until then. I stood guard between her and the demon, hoping I could protect her long enough for her to do something. Hoping I could keep out of the way of those blades. I was back to the problem of weapons. As in, I needed one. I swallowed; my mouth was dry.

Weapons, what weapons did we have besides rocks and bad intentions? That plastic tub with the tranquilizer gun—suddenly, I was intensely curious about whether a tranquilizer dart would work on a demon. Too bad the demon was standing between me, the doorway to the passage, and access to the gun. Shouting across to Enkidu, “Hey, why don’t you go get the gun,” would not do us a lick of good. The demon would only redirect her attack at him. And start guarding the doorway.

I wondered if we could wear her down with continual harassment, like a pack of wolves nipping after a deer until the animal simply couldn’t run anymore. I had a feeling demons didn’t really get exhausted. I could go Wolf and just rip her throat out—if it weren’t for those sharp silver weapons. In addition to the sword and dagger, along with the spear tucked under her arm, she had more knives nested in sheaths on her belt. Unless we could get rid of the metal, the three of us lycanthropes were useless.