Chapter 5 #3
Pippa’s scream turned into a gurgle. The demon’s scabbed face wavered in her sight, and she scrabbled at the leathery hand with her nails in an effort to breathe. Its skin was too thick to do any damage. She needed more of a weapon than fingernails.
Ah.
She had a weapon, though retrieving it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
The demon’s fingers tightened.
Well.
Bright flashes appeared in Pippa’s vision as her body slowly came to terms with the lack of air. Although it felt counterintuitive to stop fighting the hold on her neck, her hand dropped and her fingers found the knife hilt in her thigh. She grabbed it, squeezed her eyes shut, and pulled.
She would have cried out if she had any extra oxygen, and she would have collapsed if she’d been using her legs. Stars, taking the knife out hurt almost as much as getting stabbed by it.
The demon let out a short growl of displeasure. Pippa didn’t know what it would try to do in response, and not wanting to find out, she summoned her remaining strength and shoved the knife into the demon’s chest. The blade pierced between its ribs and into its heart. Boe demons had those, at least.
It dropped Pippa. She thudded onto the ruined elevator floor, her throat an aching, bruised mess. The demon staggered and stared at the knife in its chest, then collapsed, convulsing once before it stilled.
Maxim cursed from across the elevator. He staggered over, then fell to his knees beside her and began to strip out of his jacket.
Too tired to wonder what he was doing, Pippa lay in the rubble and embraced the simple joy of breathing. Now that the knife was out of her body, she should be able to—
Oh no.
Her head gave a throb of protest when she bolted upright.
Maxim reached for her shoulders, said something about how she should take it easy, but she ignored him. She still couldn’t feel the magic. Even though she concentrated on those intangible, awful walls separating her from power, they held firm.
She looked over at the knife. It was covered with her own blood, the yellowish slime of the demon’s blood, and whatever green tinge coated the blade.
The green could have been a poison, designed to block access to her magic.
Pippa swallowed back her nausea. If it was poison, it couldn’t last forever, right?
Her body would be able to process it, digest it somehow, and then it would wear off. Unless . . .
The other magic, the darker magic, the squirm that urged her to twist and pull and manipulate, lurked in a corner of her mind, alive and itching for her to use it. Those walls might never dissolve, it said. Who will you be then?
No. It would be temporary. It had to be. Panic fluttered within her gut like a captured hawk, all sharp talons and slashing beak. Maxim tightened his hands on her and pushed her to her back.
“Just . . . please,” he said. He couldn’t stop staring at the gash on her thigh.
Which, when Pippa looked at it, looked rather bad.
There was a lot of blood. Hadn’t that been part of some first-aid training years ago?
Leave the knife in so you don’t bleed out?
And with her magic gone, she didn’t have the ability to heal herself.
It was temporary, she told herself. It was going to be temporary.
Maxim wound his jacket around her injured leg, tying the arms together so it formed an impromptu bandage.
“I’ll be fine,” Pippa said, though she couldn’t summon the energy to bat his hands away. “You’ll ruin your suit.”
“Not the first suit you’ve helped to ruin,” he muttered. The uncomfortable look he gave her implied he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “I, uh—” He cleared his throat. “I’ll manage. I have plenty.”
“Fine. Next time I won’t save you.”
“I think you’re running out of threats if ‘not saving me’ is the worst you can think of.”
Pippa let out a halfhearted grunt. “Something tells me you’ll ignore them anyway.”
His lips twisted in something bizarrely smile-like. “My stubbornness might surprise you.”
“No,” she said, “It really won’t.”
Maxim settled on his heels and swept the back of his wrist over his forehead, then frowned at the residue he’d managed to wipe off onto his cuff.
The fine fabric of his button-up used to be a crisp white; now it was smeared all over with grease and grime and what must have been her own blood.
A bruise was starting to form on his chin from where the demon had hit him.
There was a dark stain on his tie, rendering the classy geometric pattern into something more avant-garde.
His once-coiffed hair had lost all of its careful structure, even going so far as to curl slightly where sweat had dampened his temples.
Before Pippa could question why she was staring, and why she was enjoying the staring, the broken elevator lurched down several feet.
Compelled by a million years of evolutionary instinct, Pippa grabbed for the closest solid object, which happened to be Maxim’s thigh.
When she realized the car wasn’t continuing to fall, she snatched her hand back as if his thigh (firm, muscled, large, Pippa, NO) had burned her, though thankfully he appeared to be too distracted with his own wild grab for the nearest handrail to notice what she’d done.
“We have to get out of here,” Maxim said.
“In a minute.”
He shot her a look of confused exasperation, which Pippa ignored. In addition to the failing elevator, there was a nearly intact demon body she had to destroy first. She pulled herself over to the corpse and wrenched the knife out with a squelch. This was hers now.
She had to destroy this body, but without magic, there wasn’t any ready way to do so. If she had a source of flame and a lot of time, that could work.
“We have to get out of here now,” Maxim said before she could ask if he had a lighter, and ignoring her garbled protests, he grabbed her upper arms and pulled her to her feet. “I think you destroyed the brakes.”
One look at the structure above the elevator reinforced his theory: several cables had already snapped, and what must have once been the brakes were now twisted clumps of metal.
Pippa’s head spun with the effort to remain upright. She slumped against one of the walls and chose to simply watch Maxim as he struggled with prying the doors open. “Oh, I destroy your clothes. I destroy the elevator.”
A long, miserable groan came from the twisted metal above them.
Pippa’s alarm at the sound was much stronger than the exhaustion brought on by the dual loss of both magic and blood.
The latter really seemed to be going for it, if the growing dampness of Maxim’s improvised bandage told her anything.
Like hell was she going to spend her last moments trapped in an elevator with Maxim Sheppard and a dead demon.
Newly energized, Pippa swayed toward the doors and helped Maxim grapple with them. With a grunt of effort on Maxim’s part, and what surely must have been straining muscles unfairly hidden by shirt sleeves, the elevator opened.
The car had settled between floors; the lobby’s doors were halfway visible through the opening they had just made.
Maxim wrenched on one, and as it slid into the wall to reveal an empty lobby, the elevator shuddered and jerked down another foot.
If one of them tried to climb out and was caught halfway between the lobby and the car when the elevator decided to plummet— No, best not to think about bisections today.
Pippa probably could have pulled herself up, if given enough time and also probably a stool; Maxim didn’t leave her with the option.
Grabbing her around the waist, he lifted her and tossed her into the elevator lobby like she was a professionally dressed and unprofessionally bloodied sack of potatoes.
She tumbled onto tiles hard enough to make new bruises blossom on her knees and elbows.
The knife flew from her hand and slid across the floor.
Halfway to grabbing it, Pippa turned and watched as Maxim pulled himself into the lobby, tucking his legs and rolling out of the way right as the elevator gave one last groan and disappeared from view.
Maxim’s breath rushed from him in a gasping laugh. That “alive” Maxim Sheppard had returned, seemingly high from everything that had just happened.
A rumbling crash echoed up from the elevator shaft and startled Pippa out of her stare. She really had to stop doing that, no matter how alluring the unexpected rumpledness was on him.
She grabbed the knife, heaved her battered body upright, and limped toward the stairwell door. After a noise like that, the lobby wouldn’t stay empty for long, and she needed to leave before someone ran in and asked questions; she wasn’t in any state to fib convincingly.
What happened to the elevator? How did you get hurt? Why does Maxim look like he’s just crawled through an air vent in pursuit of Alan Rickman?
Questions that would end in stammering and, truth be told, a good solid faint, which would then lead to hospitals, and that would not work for Pippa.
On the bright side, maybe a crashed elevator would be a decent substitute for burning the demon corpse.
She would be optimistic about that part, she decided as she wiggled the knife into the impromptu swaddling around her thigh.
Maybe it would all be fine. A seam ripped somewhere in the mass, and Pippa felt a little guilty, not that Maxim would want to wear the jacket anyway after all the damage she’d already done to it.
When she reached the stairwell door, she glanced back. Maxim didn’t seem to be thinking about anything except the daring escape; he was grinning and looked a second away from letting out a joyful whoop.