Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
CHAOS
“That’s the question.”
Grim’s words sat heavy between us, the air filled with both anticipation and dread. For a city overrun with demons, it was decidedly quiet. A calm before the storm, perhaps.
“Those humans aren’t going to make it through the night,” Sin murmured as he leaned against the wall and pulled a chrome lighter from his pocket. He began flicking it open, then closing it, over and over. A nervous habit he’d picked up from his days as a rock star.
“And we care, why?” Malice asked.
“We don’t, I was just stating facts,” Sin murmured, his eyes still focused on the trio at the far end of the alley.
As I followed his gaze, I saw what appeared to be a shadow peeling away from one of the brick walls.
“Case in point.” Sin stiffened as he pushed himself upright and put away the lighter. “Do we help?”
“No.” Grim’s attention was trained on the humans as well, his brows pulled together with a look one might consider concern. “They made their beds.”
“Does this mean we aren’t the good guys? Cause I thought we were the good guys now. You know, because we’re trying to save humanity instead of damn it this time.”
Sin’s question brought me up short. Could horsemen ever be considered good? We were morally gray antiheroes at best, and outright villains to most.
“He has a point,” Malice murmured. “Maybe we should . . .”
“Shiiit, that’s a lot of them.” Sin’s words echoed my thoughts exactly, which was a rare occurrence.
A hundred or more demons crawled, slithered, and flew out of the shadows, all converging on the three humans in mere seconds. They didn’t even have time to scream before they were dead, their souls forfeit to hell.
“What are we doing, guys?” I asked, adrenaline surging through me at the promise of a fight.
It had been a long time since I’d got to use my full strength, most match-ups rarely requiring me to break a sweat.
But as I clocked several monsters that I knew hadn’t seen the light of the human realm in several centuries, I realized we were in for a serious battle.
These weren’t your run-of-the-mill minor demons.
Some of them were known as lesser gods back when I’d been alive.
They had the ability to do damage to the most powerful beings .
. . even us. The leather-skinned creatures stalking across the street were probably the least of a threat to us.
They were a mixture of a panther and a squid, with barbed tentacles extending along their spines like wings.
The claws and fangs were tipped in venom that would bring down a shifter in his prime, but would only sting one of us. I knew that personally.
I was a little more concerned about the floating eyeballs the size of cantaloupes.
They too had tentacles, these ones attached like legs.
I’d never fought one, but I’d heard stories of them.
Soldiers returning from battles, shells of themselves, plagued with nightmares of the effects these monsters had.
If the creatures locked you in their sight, they could manipulate your mind, forcing you to believe whatever they chose.
Then, once you’d served your purpose, they’d finish you with their tentacles.
If the tales were to be believed, this was generally done with a very unpleasant hug around the face, so the tentacle could penetrate all available orifices, before sucking the brain out until the skull collapsed and their victim was nothing but a husk.
“Should’ve brought my pickleball paddle,” Sin muttered. “They’re almost the perfect size.”
“Looks like we know who our spy was working for,” Grim said. “Fucking Lucifer.”
“That was fast,” Malice muttered beside him.
“Armor up!” I shouted, knowing the decision had been made for us. Our chance to flee was long gone. We were in this fight whether we wanted to be or not. “We have to kill them. Every last one.”
We all acted as one, calling our armor and weapons to us in a move too polished to be coincidence. We’d done this exact thing countless times before.
“Spread out. Take them down. Don’t let them touch you. Especially not the brain suckers. Avoid line of sight if you can, they have psychic attacks. Then they’ll suck your brain out, and we can’t afford to wait for you to regenerate.”
Sin shuddered. “It hurt plenty when my throat was ripped out. I can’t imagine how much it would sting to have my brain eaten.”
Grim was the first of us to stalk into battle, and I followed on his heels, albeit in a different direction.
A cluster of winged gargoyle-like demons hissed as they prepared to lob what appeared to be balls of fire they’d summoned.
Fire would be a nightmare, an added element for us to dance around when we could ill afford it.
The comforting weight of my sword in my palm helped me shore up my focus with every step toward the enemy. Mow them down. Send them back to hell where they belonged. Don’t let a single one survive.
Easy.
By the time I reached the first one, my grin had to be just this side of sane. I needed this release for more reasons than one. Violence coiled in my belly, deadly and ready to be unleashed. It was time for me to prove why War hand-selected me to be his replacement.
Swinging my blade in a powerful arc, I sliced the demon’s head clean off its shoulders, the stinking, acrid scent of the monster’s blood only serving to amp up my bloodlust. On the return swing, I caught another in the belly, her humanoid form making her an easy target as I cleaved her in two.
Just that quickly, I was lost to the thrill of the fight, mowing down foes until I had to literally tread over the smoldering remains of their bodies.
“Has anyone ever told you you stink, you weird cat thing?” Sin shouted as a tentacle lashed out at him from where the displacer beast had appeared.
He swung his weapon and attempted a strike, but the creature disappeared before he could make contact.
“You stink, but you’re fast as fuck. I’ll give you that. ”
He had no clue just how much danger he was in.
But I did.
The beast appeared behind him, one of its razor-sharp tentacles already snapping forward to stab him.
I started moving before the creature fully manifested, placing me in range to swing my sword as it appeared. I severed the tentacle before it could land its sneak attack, then quickly lobbed off the others before they could strike.
The beast howled, baring its teeth in a feral snarl. Saliva dripped from its teeth, little drops of acidic spit falling to the ground where they immediately started to sizzle and eat through the asphalt.
“Not today, Satan!” Sin shouted, swinging his double-headed flail and bashing the fucker’s head in.
“That was fucking awesome!”
The voice came from behind me, pulling my attention and setting me on edge. I was millimeters away from taking his head before I clocked Hades beside him and realized he wasn’t a threat. He was with our allies.
“Now’s not the time to fanboy, Remington,” Lilith said, her hand on one hip, brows lifted. “It seems we’ve appeared in the midst of a fray.”
Usually I wasn’t one to need backup, but I wasn’t about to turn down eight able-bodied fighters. For as many demons as we’d already taken out, several more swarmed to replace them. More fighters meant we would be able to end this sooner.
I quickly shouted out orders. “Stay away from the brain suckers! Don’t look at them. Focus on the lesser demons, let us handle the others.”
“How are we supposed to tell them apart?” the one called Remington asked, glancing around.
“Follow my lead,” Gabriel said, his eyes glowing with his angelic grace.
I couldn’t say I had the Messenger of God showing up on my apocalypse bingo card, but I wasn’t going to bitch about an angel fighting on my side.
“Ben . . . Did he say brain sucker?” Remington asked a man who looked identical to him.
“Y-yes.”
Heaving a sigh, I struck down an approaching brain sucker, slicing it straight down the middle. It fell to the ground with a disgusting squelching sound. “That is a brain sucker.”
“Noted,” the man said, his eyes glowing as he shifted into a massive alpha wolf. His twin followed suit, and together they dove toward a smaller group of what appeared to be pestilence demons.
From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Grim and Malice, backs to each other as they fought a group of gluttony demons.
They were deceptively slovenly, waddling as they approached, but their wide, toad-like mouths could swallow down anything, the acidity of their saliva able to dissolve down to the bone.
I was about to shout out another warning to the newcomers, amongst them two vampires and the fae beside Lilith, who I vaguely recalled meeting, but they didn’t need my help.
The vampires worked together to dismember the demons gathered closest to them while Lilith and Drystan used a combination of their skills I couldn’t quite pinpoint to deal with several others.
My curiosity was piqued, but now was hardly the time to sit back and watch. My blood was calling for me to rejoin the fight.
“Watch yourselves,” Hades warned from across the street as he caught three demons in his shadows and squeezed until their eyes popped from their sockets.
My attention snapped to where he was looking and who he was attempting to warn, but I was too late. Grim was face-to-face with a gorgon, her hood already dropping as she used her snake-like bottom half to raise her eyes to his.
“Don’t!” I shouted, but it was futile. As I watched on, his skin turned to stone and she smiled.
Throwing my blade with all the force I had in me. It landed in her chest, knocking her to the ground, but I knew she wasn’t finished. Nothing short of removing her eyes would stop her.
What the fuck was it about eyes tonight?
Charging forward, I rapidly closed the distance between us, pulling my sword free and closing my eyes in one fluid movement.
Then I knelt down, pinning her serpentine body to the ground with a knee to her chest. She writhed beneath me, but I used one hand to hold her head in place, quickly sheathing my sword with the other.
Pain bloomed across my forearms as she clawed at me, long, sharp nails scoring my skin.
I would not be deterred. My thumbs found their home in her wicked eyes, and I shoved them deep, well past the point of feeling them pop, until she ceased all movement.
Threat handled, I allowed my eyes to open.
The scene around me was grisly, to say the least. Everyone was fighting, except Grim, who was stuck playing statue.
His stone form would eventually fade, but there was no way to know how long that would take.
On a mortal, a gorgon’s gaze was fatal, but he was a horseman.
It was simply—and unfortunately—a matter of time.
From my knees, I swept my gaze over the melee. The demons just kept coming, more and more pouring in. A harsh bark came from my left, calling my attention to one of our wolves, pinned on his back by a displacer beast, a tentacle shoved into his chest.
“No!” I called out, helpless as I watched him shift from wolf to human, the shock of the attack clearly forcing him to revert.
A pulse of power washed over us, the air growing thick with it as everything around us stopped. For a second, I thought we were all frozen in place, but then I heard a strangled shout.
“Ben!”
Someone had frozen everything other than the fighters on our side. That was some powerful fucking magic. I didn’t know of a single being capable of such a move. My eyes darted between the newcomers, trying to suss out who was the source.
When my gaze landed on the fae, I knew I’d found my answer. He was not simply a weather fae as I assumed, but something far greater. He had to be royalty of some kind; they were the only ones with access to the type of power required for such a feat.
“I can’t hold them much longer. There’s too many,” he gritted out, sweat dotting his brow.
“We have to retreat,” Lilith said.
“We can’t leave Ben. We fucking can’t.” Remington raced to his brother’s side and moved to rip the beast off him.
“Stop.” Drystan was trembling now, but his voice was forceful. “If you remove that tentacle, you risk doing more harm.”
“What the fuck do you suggest we do then?”
As they shouted at each other, Sin and Malice moved to my side. The three of us exchanged wary glances.
“This didn’t go exactly as planned, did it?” Sin asked softly.
“When does anything go according to plan?” Malice muttered, eyeing the others with interest.
Drystan swallowed, seeming to have considered the shifter’s question before biting out, “We portal out of here together and leave the monster behind. As soon as we’re safe, one of the vampires can heal him.”
“I’ll do it,” one with an Irish accent offered.
“There’s no way he’ll let anyone other than Rosie do it,” the other countered. “He has trust issues with vampires.”
“Work that out between yourselves.” Lilith leveled her gaze at me. “Come with us. This fight isn’t winnable in our current state.”
Everything in me protested the thought of a retreat. War did not retreat. War razed entire armies to the ground single-handedly.
Reading the conflict on my face, Lilith snapped, “What’s more important to you, Chaos? Getting Merri back or staying to finish this?”
Grim’s voice broke through my thoughts. “Merri. Let’s go.”
“Oh, he’s back. Have a nice little nap?” Sin quipped.
“Where are we going?” Malice asked.
Lilith shook her head. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Then she opened a portal and stepped through, leaving the rest of us to follow in her wake.
The vampires were quick to slip through, followed by Gabriel. Hades hung back until the four of us reached the shimmering air, pausing only long enough to slap a hand to my shoulder.
“It’s fucking good to see you boys.”
“We have a lot to catch up on,” I said, and he nodded before ducking through the portal.
“Wait!” Remington called. “Do you really just expect me to leave him?”
“I’ve got him,” Drystan said. “Trust me.”
With no little uncertainty in his eyes, Remington went through the portal.
Drystan looked to us. “Go on. I will be there with him. I swear it.”
“We really doing this?” Sin asked.
“We came here to find Lilith and get help finding Merri. I’d say we’ve accomplished the first part,” I pointed out.
The others exchanged glances and nodded before we all jumped through the portal.
The magic closed behind us, sealing us in an unfamiliar place. The instant it was closed, Remington began panicking.
“Fuck! Ben! Oh fuck!”
There was a moment when I thought perhaps we might have to restrain him, but the fae appeared with Ben in his arms.
“See? I told you to trust me.”