Chapter 52
Hazel kicked open the small door, stepped into Perthrux’s second room, and found her throat too tight to swear. She knew her time was short, but for a second all she could do was shiver in the arctic chill and gape at her surroundings.
The walls were bone. Age had yellowed it and smoothed out the different shapes, many but not all close to human, but nobody could have mistaken the material for anything else.
An immense fanged mouth had been carved into each of the four walls, and a figure stood in each of those.
Two were bipedal—one looked human from a distance, while the other had wings—the third was a horned creature with six legs, and the final one resembled a tree with glistening scales.
Bone spikes stuck into each of their sides from the walls around them.
A low drone came from each throat, rising and falling with painful regularity. The gray, hairless head in the center of the room, floating above an obsidian dais, blinked its eyes slowly in the same rhythm.
Casper cringed back behind Hazel in the doorway.
He snarled, ears back and tail low. Hazel could relate.
Nothing in the room was particularly gory—the head simply stopped, with no sign of decapitation, and Hazel couldn’t see any blood around the spikes in the creatures’ sides—but just standing there made her want to go scrub herself until she bled.
“Hello?” She forced the word out and was glad to get no response. None of the room’s occupants even appeared to notice her.
Her guiding line didn’t fail, though, and it ran straight to the head.
Hazel eyed it without surprise as she stepped into the room.
The pulse of Perthrux’s name in her mind became one with the humming rhythm of the creatures around her and the pattern of the head’s blinking eyes.
Even in its absence, the demon’s signature roared like the tide against rocks, and thinking above it took effort.
Here was the anchor. She knew that without question, though she had no idea what Perthrux had done to make it, and as she advanced on the head, she knew her next steps without having to think about them.
Hours of fretting served a purpose after all: The mission had burned itself into her, and what came next was almost muscle memory.
She opened her backpack and took out the necessary supplies. Then she drew her knife, and the room exploded with blinding force.
* * *
Maxwell would have begged, but it wouldn’t have done any good. He tried to fight, but Perthrux’s grasp was iron and its magic held his mind pinioned. All he could do as they burst into the demon’s hideous inner chambers together was scream his denial to a universe that cared nothing for it or him.
No, not this, not her.
“Almost, almost,” Perthrux shrieked. It was laughing, but Maxwell knew the fury behind the sound. “You arrogant creatures. Mud and mind, and not much of the latter, and you think you have a say?”
The words came from far away, just as the chamber itself was a blur.
Another time, the bone walls and their prisoners would have horrified even Maxwell, used as he was to the worst of the ethereal.
The half-sentient construct feeding on those prisoners as it floated in the middle of the room would have twisted his stomach and hurt his brain.
He barely noticed. All he really saw was Hazel.
Their arrival had thrown her against the wall, across the room from Maxwell and Perthrux. She lay crumpled there with her knife in one outflung hand. For one endless moment, she lay still with blood running from her head, and Maxwell’s heart didn’t beat at all.
Then she was moving, shoving herself up with her free hand, not even looking toward him or the demon.
Instead, she focused on a small, gray, oblong object on the floor by the dais.
Maxwell couldn’t tell what it was, though he could probably have read the runes glowing on its surface if he’d been closer, but it was important enough for Hazel to sprint toward it, ignoring both Perthrux and the blood trickling down the side of her face.
“KILL HER,” Perthrux snarled.
All the force of Maxwell’s binding slammed into him in a second, more violent than it ever had been, a river that carried away his will. He knew he couldn’t resist and struggled anyhow, even as his body marched forward like a windup Christmas soldier.
The demon took the opposite route as it, too, dashed toward Hazel.
It either couldn’t or didn’t want to cross through the middle of the room by the head, but its spidery legs covered a lot of ground with each step.
As she bent to pick up the gray box, Perthrux lashed out at her, talons missing her neck by a hair.
She spun around to face it. For a second, they stood like chess pieces: the small woman with the upraised knife, the gaunt red demon towering over her. Then Hazel flicked the knife through the air, leaving a glowing trail behind, and shouted a few words in what sounded like Greek.
Blue light filled the space between her and Perthrux, throwing the demon toward the center of the room and away from Hazel.
She turned again and raced for the wall.
From there, Maxwell thought, she’d clearly try to get to the head from the opposite side, keeping herself out of Perthrux’s range. It was a decent approach.
It also put her directly in his path.
He threw himself against the binding, succeeded in doing more than locking his knees for a second, and then kept advancing. One of his arms snapped out, then turned over, leaving his cupped hand turned upward. A dark flame appeared in it. Maxwell drew his arm back.
Blessed pain shot through one of his legs. He staggered, the flame vanishing as his body’s response overwhelmed his magical training, and looked down to see a blue shape: Casper had locked his jaws on Maxwell’s calf. Here in the ethereal, it wasn’t only a gesture.
The dog shook his head back and forth, and Maxwell felt his skin rip.
Good boy. Very good boy.
Then the demon was shouting again—“Get it away”—and Maxwell’s body obeyed, grabbing Casper by the head. As his mind sobbed in protest, his hands yanked Casper off his leg and threw the ghostly dog against the wall as hard as he could.
Hazel cried out, but Casper made no sound, even when he hit.
Maxwell didn’t have the chance to see if the dog moved afterward. Perthrux’s commands were turning him back to Hazel, summoning the flame again, and the best he could do was control his own mouth for a moment. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Her eyes found his across the too-small distance between them.
Maxwell saw pain there, yes, but not despair.
She held his gaze as she raised the knife—it wouldn’t do much good against him, not when he had a spell ready, but he loved her for trying—and as she brought it down into the gray box with all her strength.
Static roared into the room in waves that drowned out all other sound, not just louder than before but more resonant as well, with pure silvery notes behind it that Maxwell could almost make out and couldn’t hear fully if he listened for a thousand years.
He heard Hazel’s voice, though, cutting clear and warm through the chaos.
“Maxwell St. James Redfern,” she called as he reeled from the onslaught, “I bind you to the world where you were born, to the man you want to be, and to a far larger power than the demon Perthrux.”
Her voice shook the universe.
* * *
Black flame slammed into the pinioned figure a few feet away from Hazel. The shape crumbled away in seconds, leaving the humming chorus one throat short, though Hazel couldn’t hear any difference above the static. Music appreciation wasn’t her main priority just then, anyhow.
Maxwell couldn’t be either. He stood frozen in front of her, mouth open and eyes blank.
The rune-engraved portable radio, the knife, and the incantation had done something, that much was clear, but Hazel had no idea whether she’d freed him, stunned him, or completely wiped his brain.
She didn’t have time to find out, any more than she had time to check on Casper.
Her last resort protection spell had shoved Perthrux away and maybe dazed it for little while, but no more, and she could hear the demon charging toward her.
She’d taken the leap, and now the ground was coming up fast—either she flew or all of them hit hard.
Hazel yanked her knife free of the radio, which spit sparks at her, and threw it blindly in the direction of the thudding footsteps.
As it hit the ground, she whirled and sprinted toward the floating head.
Maxwell became only a shape in the edge of her vision.
Hazel thought she saw him start to move, but couldn’t spare a look to find out.
Perthrux was coming up on her other side, ignoring its previous reluctance to go near the dais.
Its tongue snapped out toward her again, but she knew that trick now.
As the black, barbed column reached for her, she fell to one knee and ducked under it, then rose and veered around Perthrux as it rushed onward.
Momentum took her past the demon’s body and back toward the dais. She crouched, leaped—
—and a blow from Perthrux knocked her sideways. She tumbled down, hitting the floor stomach-first and clipping her chin too. Black spots exploded in her vision.
Shit shit shit oh God gotta get up.
Her body wouldn’t move. She didn’t have enough air.
Hazel could hear the demon stalking toward her as she feebly tried to push herself up, and its burned-tire odor fell on her, stinging her eyes and closing her throat.
“This will be fun,” it gurgled. One clawed hand closed on Hazel’s shoulder, and Perthrux picked her up with ease, dangling her in the air in front of its maggot-white eyes. “Too fast, but fun.”
The demon opened its upper mouth.
A bolt of crackling black energy hit it squarely in the back, sending up a cloud of dark, reeking smoke.
Perthrux’s claws opened as it convulsed in agony, and Hazel wiggled free, falling to the floor again.
This time she got her legs underneath her quicker and rose in time to see Maxwell launch himself toward the demon, his face grim and his eyes blazing green.
“You,” Perthrux shrieked. One side still turned on a dime as it pivoted toward Maxwell, but the other lagged a fraction behind, not quite in sync any longer. “You can’t.”
Maxwell’s laughter filled the room. “I beg to differ, you bastard,” he snarled back. At his gesture, a wall of dark fire rose up in front of him. “I had a century to learn from the best, didn’t I?”
The flames began to spread.
Perthrux’s claws scraped divots in the ground as it stalked forward. “Oh, you’ll learn.” The words came out barely recognizable as rage stripped its ability to speak in human tongues. As the fire reached for it, it made a gesture of its own with one too-long arm, and the flame shrank back.
From behind the flames, Maxwell met Hazel’s eyes for just a moment, and he gave her one calm nod. She realized what he was doing: not hoping to kill Perthrux, which would probably take an army of sorcerers, but buying her time.
One knee throbbed. Hazel ignored it. Blood was hot on the side of her face.
It didn’t matter. She was pretty sure she’d torn at least one ligament, a series of laddered cuts staggered up her side where Perthrux had struck her, and her shoulder might never be the same. She put them all out of her mind.
Two steps to the dais. One.
She pulled herself up, faced the gray head, and flung her knife straight between its eyes.
* * *
The air itself screamed around Maxwell, almost drowning out Perthrux’s wail. He couldn’t see beyond the demon’s form, but he knew that its advance stopped abruptly, though its face twisted, and it writhed where it stood.
Maxwell didn’t move either. The fire he’d called kept draining him, and he knew he’d come to the end of his strength soon.
That was all right. What better use was his power, now that it was his again?
He held on, watching Perthrux struggle, and smiled as the force that had stopped it slowly started to draw it backward toward the center of the room.
The bone constructs on the wall behind him fell apart, the clacking briefly audible over the howling noise from the dais, and their prisoner hit the floor with a thump.
It faded quickly into thin air, hopefully into a more pleasant place than it had known for however long Perthrux had held it captive.
Out of the corner of his eye, Maxwell saw that the walls to the side were missing their carved mouths as well.
Finally, he could see the place pulling Perthrux in: a spreading point of blankness where the floating head and the dais had once been. The demon was still twisting, struggling against the vortex, and Maxwell met its gaze one final time.
He smiled.
Then he let go of the flame.
It died almost instantly, letting Maxwell see the rest of the room as the center rapidly disappeared. Perthrux was distorting, its voice gibbering ever more faint words in a language he never wanted to know, but Maxwell had better things to do than watch its exile continue.
A woman sprawled against the far wall, black hair dark against bone, both of her hands empty. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and her mouth twitched up into a smile as her blue eyes focused on Maxwell.
He saw nothing else as he ran toward her.