Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Kainda
I climbed around Elijah the next morning without waking him when someone knocked on the door. Althea had come to the bunkhouse to invite us to breakfast. I needed to get Elijah up and moving out; we have a demon to catch, after all. When I turned her down, Althea offered to bring us a plate to go. I got out my phone and locked myself in the bathroom to call the few female demon hunters that had worked with my father, we were all that remained of the organization. Elijah and I couldn’t take Uttu down without some backup.
“Evin, I’ve got a lead on Uttu. Are you and the girls ready to roll?” I asked when she answered.
“Yeah, they’re all here. Kainda, you need to give us some idea of your plan of attack. We’ve got no clue what we’re walking into. How are you going to take her down without the amulet? And besides that the last time they banished her it took the magic of multiple gods, an ancient tribe’s elders, and a huge coven of very powerful witches. We don’t exactly have access to those things. I’m not keen on walking into a suicide mission.”
The hesitancy in her voice was hard to hear. Evin was one of my father’s strongest demon hunting witches. Barely older than me, she’d tutored me as a teen on my magic when my mother’s coven had refused. If she balked, I’d find myself up shit creek without a paddle and the boat taking on shitty water. I needed the remaining members of my father’s team if I had any chance of success. But I did have one ace in the hole she didn’t know about.
“I have the amulet. Before Dad took the amulet into battle, he had it spelled so that Uttu couldn’t touch it. It’s the equivalent as silver is to a werewolf. Hida brought it back after the battle.”
“Okay, our snowball’s chance in Tartarus just went up from snow to mercury’s chance in Tartarus.” Evin sounded almost giddy now. I almost hated to burst her bubble with her inaccurate facts.
Almost, but not strong enough to keep my mouth shut. “You do realize mercury stays a liquid unless the temperature drops below negative thirty-seven point eighty-nine degrees. It has the lowest melting point of all metals. It’s more likely to melt in Tartarus than snow. I believe the metal you’re looking for is tin. It has a melting point of four hundred and forty-nine point four degrees.”
“Bitch, I don’t care about the melting points of metals. How do you even know that? Tell me what you’ve got up your sleeves for this shit show we’re going to be running headlong into.” Cranky witch.
“Put me on speakerphone, so we can strategize.” I had no desire to repeat this plan again.
A long pause and static followed as Evin moved around on the other end of the line. I could hear her talking, but couldn’t make out the words. The longest of all long shots, and convincing them we can pull this off could very well require divine intervention. These kick ass warrior women— I’d swear were valkyries in a previous life— were no one’s fool and contrary to their chosen profession’s mortality rate didn’t have a death wish.
“Go ahead, Kainda.” Hida spoke, taking over the conversation from Evin. After Theron died, Hida became the informal leader, except in this mission. The woman was an ancient magical being of some species or another. As far as I knew, no one knew exactly what she was other than grumpy.
“I found the surviving victim. He’s been a treasure trove of information. There is a psychic connection between him and Uttu. We can use it to track her back to her lair. He is also her weakness. She’s almost fallen in love with him, or as close to love as a demon can get.”
“That’s all well and good information to have, but that’s not a plan.” Hida’s scolding, I hadn’t missed that while tracking Uttu down. She always acted like this aloof grandmother to me, even though she looked young enough to be my sister, never physically aging.
“Elijah is willing to be bait. We’ll lure her in once we’re close enough to her lair using his connection to her. The connection is very strong. I think it’s strong enough to draw her out in the daylight, which weakens her. Once we’ve got her in the open, we’ll close a circle trapping her temporarily in place and allow Elijah to run like Hellbeasts are after him outta there.”
“Sorry to interrupt, Kainda, but I’m not keen on using the human as bait. If Uttu kills him this time, his blood will be on our hands. She lost him once, and that has to chap her ass; she won’t let him escape a second time, even if she loves him. I’m not convinced that she loves him, it’s more like obsessed or intrigued. There are also a thousand ways this can go wrong.” Delmira, the only one besides me and Evin who had gone to the battle when my father got himself and nearly all of his team killed.
“Elijah offered. I hadn’t considered that as an option until he offered and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’s refusing to be left behind on this mission, no matter what I say or how I feel about it.” I swung my feet back and forth where they dangled over the edge of the bathroom counter.
“How you feel about it? You shouldn’t feel anything about this situation other than a strong will to keep his untrained, under prepared human ass out of it. He doesn’t belong within a hundred-mile radius of this mission. You do whatever it takes to make him stay put. Am I understood?” Hida’s displeasure came through loud and clear.
I didn’t appreciate her latest attempt to force me out as leader of this op. She could kick rocks if she didn’t like my leadership. We might default to her as the leader in any other situation, but not this time. Even if it killed me, I’d have my vengeance.
“To be frank, Hida, I’m in charge of this mission. If I try to leave him behind, he’s already told me he’ll follow me. He’s safer if he goes with us and follows our instructions. I’m not thrilled with the situation, but I’d rather him be with us than bumbling through the woods like a stupid sitting duck in alligator infested water. Now, can I get back to telling you psychos my strategy?” We might call each other names and have the occasional brawl, but these ladies were the only family I had left. Besides, calling each other names was our love language, and we liked to call them terms of endearment.
“What do you need from us?” Delmira always the peacemaker.
“I don’t have access to most of my magical tools, so you’ll need to bring anything I don’t have with me. Demon protection candles are definitely one thing we’ll need. You need to inscribe them specifically for Uttu. I’ve got everything we need to cast a circle. The biggest thing we need is power because Evin— I can’t believe I’m going to say this, oh that might’ve been a little it of vomit— is right, the four of us don’t have enough power on our own.”
“How exactly do you plan on getting power? Witches don’t exactly get involved in the fight against demons unless the evil critter is affecting them directly. Most humans still pretend the magical world doesn’t exist, and they don’t have any magical power to speak of. Where else can we draw power from? And we don’t have access to any godly magic, there is no replacing or acquiring that level of power.” Evin as the other witch in our hunting party always liked to throw out there that witches held strong prejudices. Couldn’t blame her, her familial coven had thrown her away as a toddler when her magic didn’t immediately manifest. Bunch of bigots, the lot of them.
“I know a few ancient elementals, their magic is almost on par with god magic. With enough of them, we might have a chance of replacing the god magic. I’ll contact them to see if they can help us.” Hida shocked the shit out of all of us with that statement. One of these days I’d find out her species.
“We could always turn to the creature communities to replace the tribesmen. They only possess a minor amount of magic, but they’d be better than humans.” Delmira as the human in our group was most likely to get a response from the creature community as they wouldn’t see her as a threat.
“Okay, so Hida is going to talk to some ancient elementals and Delmira is going to approach the creature community. Who are you going to bring to this hunting party, Evin?” She didn’t get to slack off on my watch.
“I haven’t a clue. It’s not like I’m involved in any of the communities. I suppose I could reach out to other demon hunting societies, organizations. Not sure how likely they’ll be to help or even work with non-humans, since most of them are human only groups.”
“Just don’t approach any of the kill anything supernatural on sight, no questions asked groups. As long as you at least try, I don’t give a damn if they don’t join us. I mean, I’ll be disappointed because we could use all the help we can get. Just keep in mind ladies that Uttu will attack and kill men, but she doesn’t have a murderous rage toward women. Make sure you are up front and crystal clear on that with our potential allies.”
“Once we have her in the circle, what is your plan, Kainda? Those circles won’t hold for very long, and they drain a lot of power to cast and hold them. When the circle collapses, we’ll have only pissed her off, and we’ll all be in danger. Just because she doesn’t purposely go after women doesn’t mean she won’t try to kill us if we get in her way. I barely made it out alive when your father led us into battle.” Hida always knew how to drive home a point, and she stretched the truth there about barely escaping with her life.
“To be dreadfully honest, I don’t have one yet. I’m still working on it. Open to ideas, though. We have to find a way to weaken her more than just what the cold and sun will do. The weaker she is, the easier it’ll be to banish her. Spiders don’t tolerate the cold, so the colder it is the better. However, that being said, we need to attack during the brightest part of the day, so we have plenty of sunlight to finish her and play on our advantage. Bring a metric ass ton of salt, too.”
“What if we could get her to transform? The thorax of a spider is soft and vulnerable. You could inflict damage there, and any type of injury should weaken any living creature.” Evin always wanted to kill or maim something. I’d love to maim and kill this evil bitch, but somehow I didn’t think that was going to happen. A girl could dream.
“She should be more vulnerable to physical injury in her weaker human form. Besides, I’m not sure how we could get her to transform in the first place. There is no record of her doing so after she was raped.” I’d done as much research on the former goddess as I could since the murder of my father at her hands. “She did a partial transformation when she tortured Elijah, I saw it in his memories.”
“She didn’t transform at all in the last battle. I have to wonder if she lost that ability when they stripped her of her goddess magic. She seemed impervious to our attacks on a physical level. I think magic is going to be our best bet, but if we use too much magic in weakening her, we won’t have enough magic to trap her back in Gehenna. We have to keep that goal as a top priority. Weakening her will do us no good if we can’t get rid of her.” Hida said with her logic and motherly wisdom.
“Okay, so we’ll work under the assumption that she can’t fully transform anymore. But Hida is right, she should be weaker in her human shape. If we combine physical attacks with battle magic from the creatures and reserve the witch and elemental magic, we might have a chance. I’m going to speak to a few of the witches here and see if they can help us.”
“Don’t hold your breath, Kainda.” The loathsome tone from Evin held an edge of bitterness this time.
Evin had only been five when her mother’s coven had gone to war with a neighboring, rival coven. The deep-seated hatred had come out and bloodshed had reigned, unlike my birth coven, Evin came from a coven of battle witches. They trained in battle magic and protection. Evin’s mother had met my father during one of his hunts and begged him to take Evin. When she couldn’t get a commitment from him, she left, only to return in the middle of the night and leave Evin in his camp, abandoned. My father had raised her, but he hadn’t been the kind of parent to preach letting go of the past.
“I never do. Take some time to think through some strategies, and we’ll talk soon. I need to eat and get Elijah moving. We’ve got things to do before we head into war.” I hung up before taking a shower.
The days to come would test us all, and I could only pray to Gaia that we came out of this alive, with Uttu banished to Gehenna.