Chapter Five
Angie
Londyn turned sharply and stormed up the street.
“Ojos, stop,” Walter said. “Back ten seconds and play forward at one-half speed.”
On the screen Londyn turned, her coat billowing. He pointed to a faint smear on the screen, and said, “Ojos, repeat camera three, last five seconds, quarter speed.”
The smear was too blurred to identify anything clearly, but it appeared Londyn had dropped something.
“Stay here,” Walter demanded. He was suddenly gone, moving at vamp speed, his motion so fast that air was displaced with a soft pop as the doorway to the stairwell was flung open and he vanished into the hall. He was long gone when the door closed.
“Ojos,” I said. “Copy feed from all cameras for the time currently being viewed and save to a file with today’s date and time. File name, ‘Vid Cams Outside’ and today’s date.”
“Copied and saved,” Ojos said, sounding as if it found that activity sexually arousing. It had changed its voice into some sex-goddess film star of the previous century. I hated it when Ojos did something without telling us. It was disconcerting.
“Show current feed from camera three,” I said.
“Camera three, current view,” Ojos purred.
The outer door opened slowly, and Walter stepped through it into the cold.
He moved like the predator he was, stalking, slow, his eyes searching up and down the street, high into the buildings across the way, and to either side.
He was fully vamped out again, in protector warrior mode.
Pacing to the side of the door, he studied the small pot that held flowers in season.
It was currently holding wilted frozen pansies I had forgotten to bring inside today when the weather turned.
Walter leaned in to get a different angle of the dead plant.
He stripped off his T-shirt, revealing just enough of himself to make me smile.
We weren’t each other’s type, and even if we were, I’d never get involved with a vamp again—but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the view of dark skin, rippling muscles, and warrior grace.
Wrapping the shirt around his left hand, Walter touched something with it, then lifted whatever it was from the pot. He returned inside, sealed the door, and headed for the staircase. On the cam, he was smiling. He looked…happy.
“Shit!” I whispered.
I met him at the top of the stairs outside the workout room. Before I even processed what I was seeing, I said, “Walter. Stop.”
He didn’t argue, instead ceasing motion with that preternatural vampire efficiency and grace.
Dark energies surrounded the thing in his T-shirt, smutty orange and sickly green.
My precog kicked in with a single warning. Demon energies.
“Slowly, very slowly,” I said, “set that thing down.”
Walter blinked several times, took a slow breath as if waking up for the night. Gently, with utmost delicacy, he bent and placed the T-shirt with its burden on the top step. It settled, no bobbling, no wobbling.
A demon in post–Witch War parlance wasn’t like demons in religious history, because they didn’t flee from people of faith, didn’t claim to be angels, fallen or otherwise, and couldn’t be banished like scriptural demons could.
But they were similar to demons in the sense that they could and did possess other creatures, which never ended well for anyone.
In reality, all so-called demons used by enemy witches in the war, were extraterrestrial, extradimensional beings—the military called them EEBs.
I waved Walter inside and shut the door.
Raced to the weapons wall, where I removed my staff.
I had made it myself when I learned how to create and manipulate null energies.
Most people had null sticks. I had a null staff, like Merlin, except my staff negated magical energies instead of containing and utilizing them for workings.
And it had a little somethin’-somethin’ extra.
Pain shot through my left thumb and up my arm when I touched the staff.
There was always a cost.
I rested my thumb on the innocuous-looking, steel-and-silver-wrapped blue tigereye stone.
The thing hidden beneath the tigereye was a yellowish bit of material, neither stone nor resin, full of blood-tinted impurities, and surrounding and trapping a tiny bit of utter darkness that might be a pocket universe.
I had “borrowed” the thing from my Aunt Jane when I was eight. And no one but me, until now, had known about my theft. I was giving it all away. If the staff worked.
My fingers curled, gripping into the carved shape of my hand on the wide end of the staff. Pain spread up my wrist.
I didn’t know if I could use the darkness of the pocket universe in the thing. I had never been around a demon to test it. “Hell’s hounds,” I whispered.
From the same wall, I took my cloak and slung it around my shoulders. It was neon blue velvet Agric on one side and what looked like black leather on the other. The faux leather was Dyneema, with an inner Kevlar mesh resting between the outer layers.
The outer blue velvet was made from surplus agricultural products and was imbued with null energies. Like handling the staff, it hurt to wear for any length of time. Just as it protected me from the magics of others, it constrained my own energies, like tying a tourniquet around my throat.
I wore the cloak to events where armor wasn’t practical and attack was possible.
Like now. I adjusted and secured the cloak, velvet side out.
My magic stilled. My bones ached. Nausea boiled in me and climbed up my throat like oily poison.
Suffocating. Any benefit I had from battle magic was lost when I wore the cloak. Even my precog died.
I was aware of Walter, half naked, watching me. He was also sending video out to someone. It had to be to the queen’s security team at HQ. Probably also to my parents. Damn it.
I’d deal with that later.
I rushed to the door and opened it a crack.
The gray disk lay on top of the black T-shirt.
The energies that had been pale had darkened, whirling like a mini-tornado.
Using the cloak and the steel fire door as protection, I leaned out, gripping the staff, the labradorite capstone facing me.
My thumb carefully rested on the blue tigereye trigger stone.
Gently, I stretched the staff’s narrow tip toward the disk.
The staff bucked. Green and blue energies, the colors of emerald, peridot, apatite, and labradorite, flared from it. Darker energies rose from the disk, smutty orange and sickly green EEB energies. Demon. Maybe a chort.
A trapped demon was officially called a демон в коробке in Russian, or demon in a box. This was a demon bomb. Just like in the war.
I pressed the tigereye, activating the amulet beneath. But I wasn’t quite fast enough.
As my thumb tightened, the chort growled a wyrd of power in a language so twisted, the sound was little more than a vibration of filth and hate. The demon wyrd iced the walls of the stairwell. An obscene wailing came from nowhere and everywhere, rising in pitch until my ears ached.
It had air magic like EJ’s. He’d hear it from his ice bath and come running.
It was taking longer than I had anticipated for the staff’s trigger to initiate.
The chort was smarter and stronger than I had expected. Maybe it was a Bes, instead, a middle-sized, middle-powerful, extradimensional demon.
Its energies snaked up my staff, not quite touching it. Smart. Yes. A Bes. The Bes wrapped around the exposed flesh of my hand.
The staff reacted. The pocket universe beneath my thumb opened.
My exposed hand went white with frostbite from its power. Nausea and a headache hit all at once. Gorge rose.
The Bes energies snapped tight against the wood of the staff.
The sound of demon anguish rose and fell. A wyrd that cursed and damned.
The wyrd was vicious. The staff bucked again.
Orange-black coils of power, heavy with motes of hellfire, curled up from the disk on the top step.
It sparked against the vibrant deep blue and green power of my staff.
The energies were knotted, perverse, warped.
The Bes shrieked. Heaved into the staff. Into the pocket universe.
The thing in the staff sucked the screaming demon into itself, pulling it into the single dark hole of nothingness beneath my frozen thumb. As the last of the demon wailed into the darkness, the disk exploded.
I woke up on the floor of the gym, the lights overhead glaring.
I blinked, but my vision was fuzzy. Not good.
I might have a concussion. Walter was standing over me.
Two Walters. And two EJs. The Walters looked really mad.
The EJs looked really distressed. And naked.
I closed my eyes. I did not need to see EJ naked.
When I spoke, my speech slurred, my mouth desert dry. “I shee two Waltersh and two EJsh. EJ. Pu’ on pan’s,” I begged. The world spun. Nausea rose. “I migh’ have a concusshon.”
“Open your eyes,” Walter commanded.
“EJ be’er have pants on.” I opened my eyes and the nausea receded a little.
In each of his two left hands, Walter held up a tiny, flat screen. On each, my mother’s face glared down at me.
“Oh shi’,” I said to myself. “I migh’ have a concusshon,” I told her.
“I would not be surprised,” Molly Everhart-Trueblood snapped. “Where in the name of all that’s holy did you get a staff that would do…that?”
“I’m in sho mush ’rouble.” But that thought skittered away. “I migh’ have a conshusshe…concusshon,” I said.
“Which is the only thing keeping me from driving up there and strangling you,” Mama lied.
“Don’ be upshet, Mama. I migh’ have a concusshon,” I said.
On the screens, Molly closed her eyes and prayed. If Mama was praying, shit musta really hit the fan. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what shit or which fan.
EJ
On the floor above him, Walter was dressing in his super ninja clothes. In his own apartment, EJ also changed. Yet again. Third time today? He was losing count.