Chapter 13 Biblical
Biblical
Ishtar. That was why the eight-pointed star had stuck in Malachy’s sticky memory of that Calcutta night.
Ishtar, a spirit-coaxing Animancer corrupted by the Profane Arts into a passion demon, had riled the Victorians as a distraction to steal Clotho’s Spindle.
What nefarious purposes Ishtar and the Queen of Rot had used the spindle for, Malachy couldn’t remember.
The Tribunal had siphoned the memory of his first encounter with the late Necromancer, and all the following.
The symbol on Ishtar’s chest was here now at the Emerald Club, the center of a vortex where acts that stretched even Malachy’s ample imagination to the breaking point throbbed and twisted.
Francis had let Ishtar past his wards, and now she lurked somewhere in the frenzy, feasting off inflamed passions
Before he had liberated the cursed Bestiamancer’s head from his shoulders, Francis had mentioned the symbol was how the demon concentrated her magic.
Enough, Ishtar, the Queen of Rot had said. Disband your sigil.
That was it. Disrupt the symbol, break the energy source, dissipate the magic. But first, Malachy needed to overcome the demon’s intoxicating influence. He couldn’t banish Ishtar back to the Demon Realm while held under her silky thrall.
Wracking his mind, Malachy realized he had just the relic.
He traversed home and dashed into the locked room on the second floor.
He had magically extended the space to accommodate the bounty plundered from the late Marcel Durbec.
The middling Sanguimancer had been a prolific Profane relic collector.
The emptiness of the house, without a familiar feline to greet him, struck Malachy. Caoimhin, a demon’s accomplice, was dead in every sense of the word. At least Cora was safely back at his house, where she belonged, though he had no time to check on her.
He grasped the Serenity Chalice, opalescent and light as air, and filled it with a calming potion. He drank, and languidness infused his muscles, soothing and peaceful. Slumping against the wall, he sighed with a bone-deep sense of contentment.
Now to commit murder.
He traversed back to the club with the Serenity Chalice in his hand and vials of calming potion in his pockets. Depravities of every nature, and quite a few against nature, greeted him. He floated by, serenely impervious to the lustful exhibitions staining his furniture.
To disrupt Ishtar’s influence, he needed to destroy the eight-pointed star concentrating her magic, and he needed to move a mountain of moaning flesh out of the way to do it.
He set off through the madness in search of Dimitri.
Hydromancy was effective in crowd control. If only he could find the water mage.
At last, he found Dimitri buried under a dogpile of women in a curtained-off room. With great effort, Malachy extracted the massive Hydromancer and dragged him away to a chorus of disappointment.
Dimitri’s stream of Russian expletives at the interruption was silenced by the calming potion shoved into his mouth.
A ham-sized fist smacked the Serenity Chalice away, but the magic was already working.
The bloodlust in his eyes cleared. Stone cold stoicism returned.
Dimitri tucked himself back into his trousers.
“What now, boss?”
“You are going to hose every fuckin’ person out of the club. Then I’m going to get rid of the creature responsible for”—he waved at the general mayhem— “this.”
The Hydromancer nodded once. He stalked through the tangle of limbs to the sinks behind the golden bar and turned on every faucet. Ropes of water shot from his hands, blasting across the crowd.
At first, no one noticed they were getting drenched in a different kind of way.
Then came shouts of surprise, followed by screams, as the geysers gained momentum.
In a sweeping tidal wave, Dimitri flooded people out of their sensual stupor and into a stampede.
They clambered, wet and slippery, to the doors.
The eight-pointed star in the center of the dance floor, too, washed away.
“That was fuckin’ biblical, mate.”
The Hydromancer cracked his knuckles. “See them flee. Like rats, scurry into deeper darkness.”
“Poetic as always, Dimitri.”
For a moment—only a moment—Malachy took in the devastation of his club.
The fine leather furniture knocked aside and water-logged.
The bar, a decimated sea of broken glass.
Champagne and rum and most of his whiskey, sluiced away with the semen and glitter.
He’d need to launder even more money through the club to repair it all.
A problem for another time. Now, there was another demon to banish to the deepest pits of hell.
“Let’s find the bitch responsible for ruining my club. We’ve cut off her energy source, but she’s been feasting.”
“What is she?”
“A passion d—” Malachy gagged.
“Cat got your tongue?” purred a sultry voice.
A figure with yellow cat’s eyes and skin of gleaming midnight broke off from the shadows and prowled towards him. Her long limbs rolled with the grace of a lioness. On her breast blazed an eight-pointed star.
“Ishtar,” he ground out.
The demon laughed, a sweet and predatory growl, tossing her mane of golden hair. “We meet again, Realmwalker. On this side of the veil. We have been watching you, my sweetling, most closely. Infatuated with the Queen of Rot’s abomination, hm? How delicious.”
“Bind her, Dimitri!”
The Hydromancer started forward, chains of water swirling from his hands. Ishtar’s slit-pupils bled into the whites, and Dimitri fell into the snare of her inkblot eyes. Hypnotized, he staggered to a halt.
The calming potion from the Serenity Chalice was wearing off, given his massive size. With the Chalice nowhere in sight, the vials in Malachy’s pockets wouldn’t do much, in the unlikely event he could get close enough to Ishtar’s new meat puppet to pour it down Dimitri’s throat.
The demon beckoned Dimitri with a crook of her taloned finger.
Ishtar sauntered around the Hydromancer in a slow circle, appraising him.
“Mm, yes, beneath that anger beats the heart of a poet. It is not your verses I crave now, my sweetling, but your strength. Your rage. Yes, yes.” Her black-on-black eyes flashed to Malachy. “Kill him.”
Dimitri turned. Face blank and eyes glazed, he bent at the waist and charged like a battering ram. Malachy attempted to traverse away, but ropes of water wrapped around him like a vise, strangling the breath and concentration out of him.
A moment before impact, Malachy could only brace himself.
The Hydromancer plowed into him in a bright burst of pain, knocking him several feet back.
Malachy slid over splinters of the furniture that broke his fall.
He clutched his spasming ribs, struggling to find the air that had whooshed out of him.
A large shadow fell over him. He was spared the effort of peeling himself off the wet floor as the bewitched Hydromancer hauled him bodily to his feet.
A white-knuckled fist reared back, and Malachy could barely breathe, could barely concentrate on traversing away from the inevitability of that impact.
Right before the fist connected with his jaw, a scream rang through the club.
Dimitri stiffened, dead-eyed, then dropped Malachy on his arse. The Hydromancer stared at his hands as if they belonged to someone else, his chest heaving in great billows.
“Oh. Mal. How—? Oh no. S-sorry.”
Another scream. Ishtar’s.
Malachy climbed painfully to his feet. His head spun in search of the passion demon.
There. In a pool of water and whiskey and blood stood Ishtar. And behind her was the Unweaver.
Black-veined hands were wrapped around the demon’s neck. Cora’s grip tightened, cutting off Ishtar’s scream. Ribbons of midnight flesh peeled off the demon’s throat and splashed onto the wet floor. Spires of white bone and red sinew peeked through.
Cora released her hold, and Ishtar collapsed. Blood dark as pitch streamed down and soaked the eight-pointed star on her chest.
“Cora,” Malachy said, a prayer and a plea. “I told you to stay home.”
She met his gaze. With an unrepentant fire in her eyes and blood splattered across her face, she looked like a reckoning in a black dress. Beautiful.
“I wasn’t going to let you fight a demon alone, Mal.”
A wet gurgling sound interrupted his reply. He swung to the demon, curled in on herself like a nautilus. From the pulpy remains of Ishtar’s rotted throat emerged a pained rattle. Blood and words dribbled out of her mouth.
“Need Necromancer… alive…”
“You can’t fuckin’ have her.” Malachy drew his gun.
Cora stilled his hand. “I’m not taking any chances.”
Kneeling beside the demon, Cora planted her palms over the eight-pointed star. Necromancy unwove Ishtar at the seams. Flesh peeled away to white bone and red muscle. Cora reached between the cage of ribs, grasped the black dregs of the demon’s heart in her fist, and squeezed.
Ishtar gasped, fathomless eyes going wide. “My… queen…”
With the faintest of sighs, the passion demon died.
Cora twisted the rotted remains of Ishtar’s heart out of her ribs and hurled it across the club. The heart landed with a squelching thud. She rose to stand, wiping her gore-caked hands on her dress. “That oughta do it.”
Malachy’s gaze raked over her. An hour ago, they had been lust-crazed as he tied her to a bed. Now, she was splattered with viscera after defying his order and saving his arse.
Her eyes lingered on him. By the color rising on her cheeks, she burned with the same awareness of what they had done under Ishtar’s spell.
“Cora, I—”
“Mal!” John O’Leary, shirtless and spectacles askew, rushed over, slipping on the wet floor. “Coppers are swarming the place. Dimitri can’t keep them at bay much longer.”
“Jesus." He raked both hands through his hair and forced himself to think. The best defenses they had right now were the solid wall of muscle that was Dimitri and the legalese O’Leary was fluent in. "We’ll need a plausible excuse… a gas leak. There was a gas leak on the premises. We are handling the situation. If the coppers insist, demand a warrant. If they have a warrant, make them forget about it.”
“Right away.”
Malachy caught Cora’s eye as the solicitor hurried away. A chasm of unspoken words gaped between them, and there was no time to fill it. There were too many loose ends to tie in front of too many witnesses. Later, when he was reasonably assured Lt. Potts wasn’t about to arrest him, they would talk.
After banishing the demon’s corpse into the darkest depths of hell, cleaning up the aftermath became its own undertaking.
The devastation of his club, wet and defiled, laid around Malachy in dripping shambles.
Ravi Shah’s Aeromancy dried what it could, but the repairs would take several days if Malachy was being optimistic, and he was not often prone to such flights of idiocy.
Thinking of Cora, though, made him feel optimistic in another way. His eyes sought her, as they had countless times since she had disappeared upstairs to wash off. The temptation to knock on her door, slip inside and lose himself in her, was overpowering.
Only a single, cold fact halted his steps. The reason she had lost her memories for months, the reason she had lost her inhibitions tonight, was him. Demons stalked him, and she was caught in the crosshairs, as his brothers and sisters had once been.
Tonight, and for every lonely night after, Cora was safer without him.