Chapter 16 #2
There was a squelching sound from the cab. Even through the wall, she could smell the sulfurous stench of the now undisguised Boe demon.
“Hate this,” the Boe demon shouted from behind the wheel. “Hate it.” There came some garbled snarling and the ambulance lurched hard to the left, followed by more garbled snarling.
Pippa reached out and closed her fingers around Maxim’s wrist. His eyes focused and connected with hers. The hair at the edge of one of his temples shone dark and damp with blood. Not a lot, but the fact that he didn’t seem to be able to stay focused on her was worrisome.
The demon in the back of the ambulance with them barked out a grating laugh. The Tro’grath, then. It rolled its head as if stretching, and the fake skin separated around the neck and began to slough to the floor.
“You were hired for it,” the Tro’grath said. “Think it matters if you hate it?” Skin, hair, and navy uniform fell off as if it had all been a fragile shell. “The family gave you money to bring them, and if it means you have to drive, then it means you have to drive.”
So they were to be brought to the family of the prince. As revenge? As a meal? Both?
This Tro’grath was an older demon than the one Pippa had killed in the warehouse.
Two sets of horns swooped back from its forehead and its pale skin was covered in scars.
It still wore the uniform pants and the heavy black boots.
The demon raised long arms over its head in a stretch, then brushed off a scrap of skin and blue fabric that clung to one shoulder.
The gems in its forehead, laid out like a mockery of a coronet, glowed a soft pink.
The ambulance squealed around a corner, hurling Maxim into a cabinet and hurling Pippa into Maxim.
His arms came up reflexively to wrap around her.
Even though they were captured by demons inside a death box barreling along what felt to be the Autobahn, she breathed deeply and buried herself in the homey, thyme-y savory feel of his aura and felt safe. They would be all right. Somehow.
A glance behind her showed that the Tro’grath hadn’t been bothered at all by the rapid swaying of the ambulance. It had kept its footing, shifting its weight easily.
Pippa prodded gently at Maxim’s head. “Are you okay?” she whispered.
Maxim let out a short breath. “Yeah.” He winced as the ambulance rattled over a bump in the road. “I wouldn’t be offended if you offered some of that healing magic, though.”
Bitterness pooled in Pippa’s stomach. “They jabbed me with that poison earlier. I don’t— I can’t do anything.”
Maxim closed his eyes and tipped his head against hers. His exhale stuttered as pain mixed with despair.
She remembered their conversation days before.
What will you do next time?
She’d had the opportunity to figure out what she’d do if she was attacked again, and instead of accepting the help offered to her, she’d made the decision to shoulder it on her own.
Accepting help was as bad as asking for help, and if she had asked for help, that would mean she wasn’t able to handle everything she was trying to do: protect the city, earn her place in the coven, prove herself to a bunch of people who—shockingly—didn’t give a fuck what she did.
Frustration and fury twisted about inside Pippa’s chest. She could have done a lot of things differently. Should have done a lot of things differently. But none of that mattered, because right now she was without her magic, and no amount of self-pity would fix that.
The Reaper magic twitched inside her, wriggling and impatient.
Maybe it could help. She’d only used it once though, twice if she counted the accidental familiar creation, and she was hardly able to say with any confidence that she could control it.
And what if it exploded out of her control?
What if she hurt Maxim again? No. She’d find a way without it.
There were plenty of drawers nearby; one of them must have something sharp enough to use as a weapon.
Before she could slide herself over to the wall and surreptitiously pilfer, the ambulance slammed on its brakes and she and Maxim were thrown around once more. The sudden stillness felt simultaneously like a relief and a menace.
The driver’s door slammed shut, and a second later the back doors squealed open. Humid night air filled the ambulance.
She’d expected chaos, sirens, some sort of uneasiness that represented the situation they were now in, but all she heard was the unnerving normalcy of crickets and the calming rush of distant traffic.
The Boe cracked its neck and gave Pippa and Maxim a disgusted sneer. “Let’s just kill them now, save ourselves the trouble. Bring the bodies.”
Pippa’s spine grew cold and her fingers dug into Maxim’s arm. She’d use anything she could find to defend them: a roll of gauze, a pen, a needle.
The Tro’grath rumbled a snarl. “They want her fresh. You’d like to be the one who brings them cold meat?”
Well that was . . . not quite a relief, but it gave them more time.
Since the poison was injected this time, it might not wear off as fast as what had been on the knife, but she just needed to wait for her body to break it down.
If they could stall the Tro’grath family for long enough, then they might make it out of this.
The Tro’grath bent over and grabbed Pippa, wrenching her arms behind her back as it heaved her out of the ambulance.
She lashed out with her feet and struck the demon’s shin with the back of her heel.
Shoes. Shoes would have been nice. The demon hissed in pain at the same time Pippa did, then grabbed her ankles and slung her over its shoulders as if she were a deer being brought to a hunter’s table.
Perhaps it was too accurate of a metaphor.
The Boe grabbed Maxim by one leg and dragged him out of the ambulance toward a large sewer grate, not pausing when Maxim thudded onto the ground with a shout.
He swung at the demon, but his movements weren’t as snappy and quick as she’d seen before, and it almost seemed as if he had to move his limbs through syrup.
Pippa squeezed her eyes shut and threw herself against the thick, greasy walls blocking her from magic. Was there a crack? A gap? Could she feel a tickle against her fingers, or was it just her imagination?
She snapped her eyes open as the world grew suddenly weightless.
The Tro’grath had jumped into the sewer entrance, and above her, she saw the Boe holding the grate with one hand and Maxim’s leg with the other.
With a quick movement, it slung Maxim over one of its shoulders, then climbed down the metal ladder and set the grate back in place.
The tunnels were cleaner than she’d expected.
Although she was loath to admit it, Pippa had been inside her fair share of sewers.
This, by far, was the least disgusting. It smelled as if it had been constructed for a subdivision that had not yet been built.
In the darkness, she felt a damp cave-like chill, and smelled concrete and animal droppings and a bitter musk that hinted at some sort of habitation, but nothing close to the nose-singeing rankness of wastewater.
Small things to be grateful for. If she were to die, at least it wouldn’t be alongside the scent of excrement.
Something clanged down the tunnel, and the Boe growled.
The Tro’grath chuckled. “Watch your head.”
Another growl, though this one sounded far more irritated.
Information trickled back to Pippa from some of her reading after the first Boe attack.
Their night vision was about as good as a human’s, so it would have just as much difficulty seeing in this tunnel as her.
Since she could barely make out glints of metal and puddles of watery moonlight, the Boe must have been following them by sound.
She’d read other things, too, but they were somewhere in her head, locked away behind adrenaline and panic and fear.
Together, they reached a larger open area.
The Boe let out a frustrated snarl, to which the Tro’grath carrying Pippa called out a few words she couldn’t understand.
There was a scuffling, the drag of something heavy, and then little electric lights came on around the perimeter of the area: a sizable space that would have served as a junction for multiple tunnels.
The demons had dug into some of the side walls to expand it into a larger place to gather.
Pippa hardly had time to take in her surroundings before the Tro’grath swung her down onto the concrete. Gasping in pain, she was unable to do more than roll when the demon shoved her into a corner with one clawed foot. Maxim thudded beside her with a grunt.
His face was twisted into a grimace, and dirt puffed in front of his face as he coughed. Pippa pulled herself over to him and grabbed at his wrist, his arm.
“Maxim,” she whispered. “Are you—”
The Tro’grath let out a shrill cry as more demons emerged, their skin pale in the dim yellow light.
A ring of softly-glowing stones were on each of their foreheads.
One of them seemed more frail than the others, and it put most of its weight on a crooked cane.
It had three sets of horns, all long and twisted, as if they had been growing for centuries.
One thin arm held a book bound in mottled, dark leather.
Pippa made a quick count of the demons milling about. Six Tro’grath demons and a Boe. Still overwhelming for a witch without her magic and a mildly concussed lawyer, but not so overwhelming as to be utterly and completely impossible. Just mostly impossible.
The demons circled each other, then began to lunge in play fights and shriek like a pack of jackals after a successful hunt. None of them paid any attention to Pippa or Maxim. The two of them were the meat left in the corner.