Page 8

8

F innegan, Skip, and I crouched in the narrow center aisle of the van, wire shelves loaded with fancy canapes, mini-quiches, and tubs of fruit flanking both sides of us as we balanced on the balls of our feet. The van rocked, throwing us off balance every time Ma hit a pothole.

We’d come into town taking back roads to old Route 28 to cross the North Branch of the Potomac. Ridgely to the blue bridge would’ve spilled us into the downtown mall and, barring that, the Canal Parkway would’ve been a more direct shot into the city’s center than navigating South Cumberland’s residential streets, but we blended better in local traffic. Hunter teams monitored the major thoroughfares packed with cars and big rigs entering and exiting the highway. Best to use the side streets.

My heart thudded like a war drum.

Jae…was somewhere. Not in the van, but close. I sensed the tenuous link stretching between us, stronger than the thread connecting us at night when he left me to spy on demons who’d descended on Cumberland to kill him if they could. Ma concentrated on her driving, even the residential sections busy with cars of folk headed to work.

No kids streamed down the sidewalks to school, though. Allegany had gone remote this week, the entire week. Everyone expected me to travel through the magical ghetto of South Cumberland to the community center in the downtown mall. Fighting would focus there. No mundane cared about magical children caught in the crossfire, but demons fly. Their battles could range anywhere, including areas precious mundane kiddos could get hurt. They cared about that.

“Coming up on Park Street Martins, David. So far so good,” Ma said.

Skip, unbelievably, snacked on a tray of canapes while Finnegan tapped away on his phone.

Finnegan had accepted the role of commanding general in this fucked-up plan to sherpa me through the hunter teams to retest. His strategy was simple. Ma would drive us as close to the downtown mall as she could, past Chik Fil-A and the post office. Once we reached the Chinese place, we’d exit the van to make a mad dash for the underground tunnel for pedestrian traffic crossing Industrial Boulevard. As far as I knew, nobody except the homeless and addicts used what locals called the murder tunnel. Not that any murders had occurred inside it, but the narrow stretch of graffiti-covered white tile and mildew-stained cement looked the part. It’d stopped appearing on city maps years ago. Townies considered sprinting across five lanes of traffic safer. We banked on the idea that hunter teams who had traveled into Cumberland wouldn’t know the pedestrian underpass existed—We’d enter the cramped cluster of high-rise buildings downtown unnoticed.

Then, safety was only a matter of sticking to winding alleys with bountiful dumpsters and debris for cover. Just a few blocks, easy peasy.

Easy if a dozen or more demons hadn’t gathered to target you, I reckoned.

What galled me was abducting and killing me wasn’t even the point.

The gathered demons wanted Jae dead or gone and they didn’t much care which result they achieved. If they couldn’t kill him this morning, they’d use me to lure him into an ambush. If that didn’t work, they’d end me, sure, but I was a tool to them. Bait. They didn’t care what power I had, who I was, what I could do. To the hunter teams, that mattered only insofar as the human partner my demon had begun binding with might be more difficult to abduct.

To Griffith, it mattered because of the possibility whoever had murdered my dad could take advantage of the chaos to remove me as a new potential threat, which was why he’d called in the troops and salted his guildies throughout downtown Cumberland. More than a decade later, he hadn’t given up on catching my father’s killers.

I had. For a long time.

Not anymore.

“Out!” Mom yelled over her shoulder as the van slid to a stop. “Everybody, out!”

Poised at the rear panel doors, Finnegan pushed one side open. He scrambled out. Skip pushed me toward the opening and I hopped clear, booted feet planting in the postage-stamp-sized parking lot of my favorite takeout place. Skip landed with a grunt behind me, his hand going to my hip. “Go,” he said.

We didn’t run. That would have called too much attention to us. Instead, I followed Finnegan’s casual stroll between a pair of sedans in the lot and scrambled over a low retaining wall to a narrow alley skirting a line of decaying row houses. Rather than strolling down the alley to the railroad crossing, Finnegan headed toward a door held open by a beefy fire mage I remembered occasionally seeing with my roomie over the past years. His mentor, had to be. “You’re making excellent time,” the fire mage said, closing the door to usher us into a galley kitchen smaller than most closets. He pushed through us and led us down a hall to a living room.

Someone had punched a hole large enough to crawl through into the drywall and brick on the north side wall abutting the next house in the row. “After you.” He waved to the crude exit.

Finnegan went through first, then I ducked to a crouch to shadow him. I emerged into a dining room of the neighboring unit. A wide table tipped on its side blocked a pair of windows, a pile of brick from the demolition bracing the table. Finnegan didn’t stop, nor did I. We walked around a clump of chairs to that unit’s living room.

Another hole.

I didn’t want to think about how much the demo must have cost the Towpath or what I’d owe Griffith. A lot. My trust fund was fat enough to pay off the landlord and tenants for the damage a hundred times over, but debts weren’t always money. The shortcut through the row houses equaled hundreds of yards I wouldn’t have to walk on the street, where demons circling overhead could spot me.

I owed Griffith my life.

“Four more until we reach the Union Rescue Mission. Watch the wiring through here,” Finnegan said before, adjusting his glasses, he crawled through another gap torn into somebody’s living room.

In the last row house, we met a group of five. “Mages from the guild. This is Bryce, Aaron, Mike, Tracy, and Leona,” Finnegan said, reaching for a bundle of clothes one of them passed to him. “Change into the hoodies. You can keep your jeans. Griffith instructed everyone to dress in these otherwise.” He yanked a plain black hoodie over his head. “Pull the hood up. We need to look as much like each other as possible.”

Already dressed alike, the mages handed a hoodie to each of us. They also gave my roomies hiking boots similar to the pair I’d worn to work at the botanical garden a few days ago and since the mages already had them on, once Skip and Finnegan had dressed, we all looked basically the same after Finnegan removed his glasses and tucked them in the hoodie’s front pocket. Our blue jeans differed, some more worn and faded. Finnegan stood several inches shorter than my six foot two, but from the sky, where demons flew in search of me, the resemblance would be close enough.

A mage strode to the front door, hand lifting to nudge a curtain veiling the window next to it aside to peer out. “The entrance to the pedestrian underpass is across the road from the Union Rescue Mission. We’ll leave in pairs every five minutes. David, you and your partner will be next to last. Once you are on the other side of Industrial Boulevard, each mage will guide his or her partner on a different route to the community center.” He glanced over his shoulder, mouth pressed to a hard line. “Don’t run. We only need to make it a few blocks.”

“No magic,” another mage said. “They won’t know which one of us is David unless our magical defenses show we aren’t a druid.” He smiled grimly. “Let’s not narrow the field of potential Davids for them. Conventional weapons only.”

“If it goes tits up, then you can run. At the first sounds of a demon attacking, race like hell for the community center. Any idea where your demon is?”

I shook my head as the last mage passed machetes to Finnegan, Skip, and me. “Nearby”

“Ask him to create a diversion once you’re halfway across the downtown mall.”

“The link isn’t that strong yet,” I said, though the binding had been steady enough for Jae and me to connect mentally once. But only once. “He doesn’t listen to me, anyway. Does what he wants.”

“The demon will protect him.” Skip assessed the weight of the machete in his grip. “Let’s get this party started.”

Squinting, Finnegan and a guild mage left first. I lost sight of them as they made their way past the brick behemoth that offered a room and thrice daily meals to homeless men, but I spotted the pair again when they approached the stone edifice marking the entrance of the murder tunnel. Once they’d disappeared underground, a pair of mages from our group followed them out the door and down the side street, across to the underpass entrance.

“Ready?” my mage partner who’d identified himself as Bryce asked. At my nod, he twisted the front doorknob. “Remember, slow. Casual.”

Pulse roaring in my ears, I walked side by side with the mage, one hand stuffed in the pocket of my hoodie while the other squeezed the hilt of my machete in a death grip down the line of my thigh. Across Industrial Boulevard, the first pair of hooded Davids emerged from the stone exit of the tunnel and crossed Baltimore Street, veering toward the Sav-A-Lot parking lot to our right.

An hour past dawn, we were a full two hours before the appointed time for my retest. We could have sneaked into town overnight. The storefront for the Towpath Guild, a cafe, was only two blocks from the community center. We could’ve waited for morning there, but Jae had nixed that idea. While the nigh impenetrable warding around the regional headquarters of our magical community would have protected me, the council barred the doors until the sun crept over the mountain ridges. If the circling demon had sussed me out before dawn, the battle would’ve raged all night and they would have been watching the Towpath. Even bringing in every member of the guild to fight, we wouldn’t have stood against so many demons for long. No one could. So. The run at dawn.

An attack against one guild member was an attack against all, though. A member of the Towpath, also wearing a black hoodie, waited among litter piled like snowdrifts at the tunnel entrance when we reached it. He tapped graffiti canvasing the white tile between gap-toothed voids where vagrants had popped several tiles free inside the entrance and my senses zinged. A hidden sigil activated. “Put these on.” He passed a gold bangle to me and Bryce both.

When I slid the bracelet over my hand and onto my wrist, the tingle of another spell deadened the edge of power that had only begun recharging inside me.

“Tamps down your magical signature.” The guild member said. “Your talent isn’t common, so you present less of a target if they can’t get a solid read on you.”

But if the demons searching for us couldn’t sense me, neither could Jae. Alarm shot through me, stiffening my spine. “Jae—”

“Can take care of himself. Keep going.” Bryce pushed me down the trash-strewn stairs and into the tunnel below.

Nose wrinkling at the stench, I made my way down the stairs. The smell was hideous, urine mixed with mold and damp laced through it. I’d been in outhouses that weren’t as odious, and the city should fire whoever thought yellow LED tubes in caged overhead lights was a swell idea because the glow made the white tile—what wasn’t covered in graffiti, anyway—that much more dingy and sad. Mildew spotted the cement underfoot, signs of water damage stretching the entire length of the creepy as fuck murder tunnel that run underneath the lanes of traffic above us. I skidded a little, the surface slick with God only knew what. The echo of our steps in the grit stirred the fine hairs at my nape.

“Don’t talk once we reach street level. Not a word, not even a grunt. They’ll have trouble identifying you visually, but they’ll have listened to whatever recordings of you they could scrape off the Internet. They can pinpoint you by your voice,” Bryce said.

Great.

I nodded.

“Keep your head down to hide your face.” Another pair of guildies met us at the top of the stairs on the other end of the tunnel, dressed in the same jeans, hiking boots, and basic bitch hoodie. They nodded, but Bryce didn’t pause, so neither did I. He climbed the trash-strewn stairs. Exiting the tunnel, he marched down Baltimore Street to the first intersection and there, he turned left toward the Ramada.

At this early hour, light traffic fed into the parking garage across from the hotel, but Bryce made a right before we reached it. We edged between the cars to cross to an alley at Central United Methodist, which the church had retrofitted with an aluminum wheelchair ramp down the line of the alley. I shivered with dread when the alley spilled into a parking lot for church members attending services because the sky opened to reveal the demons hunting me. Bryce hugged shops marching down the other side of the alley, a witch’s apothecary, a pawnshop, and a bakery. Lights glowed inside the barred windows. Though my glance didn’t pick up any movement inside, a pair of guildies in black hoodies exited the apothecary once we passed it. They followed us down the alley to Liberty Street. where another strip of shops opened for the business day.

The buildings here stretched higher overhead, blocking the flight path of searching demons. Floor upon floor of apartments packed with magical tenants—Allegany County had restricted where we could live to downtown and South Cumberland— dotted my horizon. Most of the windows were dark, marking apartments of Towpath guildies already on the streets, but when I glanced up, a few faces stared down.

Almost lost in the overcast gloom of the morning sky, enormous dark red blotches with outstretched wings circled. These demons were bigger than Jae by a lot, but that bulk required a wider wingspan to achieve flight. That prevented them from flying near each other or the buildings downtown. They soared at varying elevations, but the distance left gaps in their surveillance, thank Anand. I jerked my stare down and forward, our steps echoing in the dim canyon of high-rises as we quickly but casually made our way to the squat gray building of the Allegany Museum on the corner.

We weren’t far.

Before I’d been born, the magical community had selected an old Shriners’ club as the community center for the Cumberland Metro region. Safety was only a few blocks down, near police headquarters. A block to the stoplight at the Baltimore Street bridge, then a straight shot down a couple more blocks to the center. I could run there in a stingy minute or less, but Bryce jaywalked, dodging commuters heading to work. My breath stuttered in my chest, but I followed the mage to the parking lot skirting the Times-News. Resisting the urge to look up, I crossed to the C&O Canal Museum, hurrying past a fountain spraying water in a geyser reaching overhead.

Bryce pushed through a group of four guildies wearing black hoodies. I did, too. With less overhead obstacles here, the demons sank lower in the sky, closer to us, but the jumble of black hooded figures must have confounded them. While operating as a sort of camouflage, the ploy had also cued the demons that the time had come and I numbered among the milling posse of black hooded figures moving through the narrow downtown streets.

Maybe I wouldn’t have made it those three blocks, after all.

Bryce led me past the Canal Museum and up narrow stairs lined in the same white tile as the murder tunnel, sans graffiti and urine-scum on the cement. We emerged on the crowded platform for the excursion train.

A big honking engine had pulled into the station, the cacophonous roar of releasing steam making speech impossible. Tourists milled around the platform by the dozens, adult instead of little kids, so maybe an early leaf peepers tour. I spotted many black hooded figures among them. The crowd animal gathered, some in lines inside a rope maze to board the train, others cradling tall beverage cups and pastries.

Why hadn’t the city council canceled this morning’s excursions? When they knew a battle between magicals was almost certain?

Greed.

Not just city officials, either. Tourists had bought their tickets to ride the rails, but clusters of them edged past the roofline of the pavilions lining the platform to protect against inclement weather. They stared up at the hunting demons. Many had likely never seen one in their lives. Demons picked a territory after they portaled and seldom ventured far from their home base. They didn’t gather like this. Demons avoided one another as much as practicable. They’d ventured to Cumberland now only to eliminate Jae and me.

Tourists had shown up, despite the danger, to see a show—my grisly death or my demon fighting tooth and claw with the hoard.

Hell, the excursion company had probably charged them extra to watch the action.

Bryce meandered down the uneven brick of the platform and I followed him through tourists dotted with guildies. I shuddered when the cover of the pavilions ended a hundred yards before this side of the Baltimore Street bridge cut across Will’s Creek. More guildies concentrated in a keyhole park tucked against the Times-News building at the base of the bridge. En masse, the group shifted across the side street to join and surround us at the crosswalk. Dozens of guildies in black hoodies waited in the parking lot on the other side of the street, too.

I lost sight of Bryce as our two groups merged.

“Here,” he said as I ripped my stare around, searching for him.

Above us, a demon jerked in flight.

Damn it.

Several other guildies echoed Bryce’s “here,” but the damage was done. If the demon had pinpointed Bryce, they’d pinpoint me, too…if I rejoined Bryce.

Not a chance.

As though someone had blown a whistle, the herd scattered. Some headed across the bridge and farther down Baltimore Street. Others marched downtown. Several pivoted to return to the train station. A few chose a direct route to the community center nearby.

Shaking, fear spiking through me, I joined two other guildies taking a smaller pedestrian bridge crossing Wills Creek since they were closest. Passing padlocks threaded onto fencing that topped the wooden sides, the three of us walked onto the Great Allegheny Passage as another demon joined the first flying above us. The pair of them dipped low into the uncluttered air space over the parking lot. More black hooded figures repeated Bryce’s “here,” a chorus I dared not take part in—they’d know my voice—but one of the two I was with said it and raised a machete identical to the weapon vised in my grip. The sleeve of his hoodie slipped down and gold glittered—a bangle like the one dampening my magical signature.

Griffith must have called in every guild member and worked his alchemists to the bone to outfit so many with the magicked bracelets to best hide me among the crowd downtown. To pull this off.

We made it across the trail bridge, though, away from the searching demons. Another flew low a few hundred feet ahead, but I walked the gravel path, resisting every instinct inside me to run as if my life depended on it. Where was Jae? Ahead of me? Behind? The hunting demons hadn’t spotted him. That much I knew. Loud and bloodthirsty battle would have raged if they’d identified him.

If he hadn’t taken to the skies and had scrounged a black hoodie to blend with the guild members, he’d be fine. My demon hadn’t lived this long by making stupid choices. At least that’s what I kept telling myself, but as the trail lead me away from the downtown mall, anxiety churned my gut.

The Passage here was a little weird. Thick stands of trees separated the trail from densely packed residential buildings and single-family homes, but a perk to living on this side of Wills Creek was ready access to the Great Alleghany Passage so residents had intersected the woodland barrier with narrow paths to access the GAP. The pair of guildies ahead of me darted to our left, exiting the Passage on one of those unofficial access points, which left me alone on the gravel path. But only for a minute, because as soon as I passed a dirt path leading to the rear of another line of row houses, a trio of guildies spilled onto the Passage from another path ahead and two more walked onto the trail behind me.

I wished I could nurture a sense of relief from being surrounded by my guildmates again, but I didn’t have a plan. I sorely needed one. The crowd at the Baltimore Street bridge had swallowed Bryce, who was supposed to guide me through our furtive, circuitous route to the community center. If I made it there now, that’d be on me. I was on my own.

Will’s Creek gurgled muddy brown beyond a pair of train tracks to my right and thanks to the flood control channel built in the 30s, there was no way to cross the rushing water without diving down a steep concrete embankment. The back of the community center hugged the shore on the other side, less than a football field separating me from safety. If the center’s wards had stretched over Will’s Creek, I would’ve said to hell with it. Jumped. Ten feet down the cement walls of the channel wouldn’t kill me, but I was confident their wards stopped at the creek’s edge.

I didn’t stare at the hive of activity at the rear of the center, delivery trucks offloading food and supplies for today’s events, although my heart lifted with unwelcome relief to see Ma’s white catering van in the mess. I didn’t pause, just kept walking. A smaller, neighborhood bridge up ahead at Market Street was the better bet. That route took me farther from the center than I liked and I’d be forced to double back, approach the center from the opposite direction. But was that so bad? No one would expect me coming into town from the Narrows. Surprise would be on my side.

That the GAP had no exit point to town for another half mile was just my sad luck. Train tracks hemmed the passage in through this section of trail, too.

Fuck it. I’d forge my own path. If the excursion train had pulled into the station behind me, no other trains would be on the tracks. I’d make it across. Hurdling wide black tubing on the other side might be a challenge, but I wouldn’t end as a greasy spot under a train. My best chance would be cutting across at the stone support columns for the Market Street bridge ahead.

I trudged, my pace not slackening when another demon dipped low, then lower. A shiver of dread shot through me when the demon dropped to glide only a few yards above me.

Had he marked me?

I tightened my grip on the machete. My muscles coiled.

Behind me, the pair of guildies split, sprinting on either side of the trail. One zoomed across the tracks. My jaw gaping, I froze, hardly heeding the sound of the other guy racing into the trees separating this part of the trail from houses shoehorned into a residential section of the city marching uphill and out of the old flood zone. The guildie who made for the train tracks dove on top of black piping on the other side, bundled cable and power lines, what the fuck did I know, but the ginormous tubing protected something. Taller than I expected, the guy hit it chest high and struggled to haul himself over the top.

The demon overhead peeled off my tail to go for the guildie, who had swung a leg over the black tube.

Yanking myself out of my shocked freeze, I turned my back on them both and crouching, I zipped across the train tracks closer to the bridge abutments. I ignored the shouted incantations. The spells were gibberish to me. I’d never learned Latin, but whatever attack the dude who’d run up the hill had prompted him to break this battle’s rules of engagement—no magic—simplified the demon’s choices. That mage wasn’t me. Therefore, among the available options, I could be the dude climbing over the black tubing…or me.

I hurried across the train tracks on the underside of the bridge, hoping the demon checked tube guy first.

Nope.

The demon swung toward me as I jumped across the rusting steel of the rails.

“Go, go, go!” One of the guildies that had been ahead of me on the trail shoved at my shoulder as he yelled.

I ran like hell, my thudding footsteps echoed by the shouter and another guildie with him. The three of us reached the tubes, crashing into them at chest level a yard apart as we leaped to climb atop the barrier. My heart stuttered as the demon dove, its claws digging into the torso of the guy to my left, who screamed. He slashed at the demon’s legs with a machete identical to mine, but the demon ripped him off the tubing and took him aloft, mindless to the slashes the blade tore into beefy legs as wide as tree trunks. The guildie shrieked in pain from the demon’s claws piercing his torso, then his cry threaded with fear as the demon released him ten feet in the air.

The dude crashed to the ground as I hurdled the tubing and, legs spread, I thudded to the packed earth on the other side. I bent—just in time. The demon swooped again and the other guildie, who had yet to swing over the top of the black tubing, jerked skyward. The demon soared aloft with the guy clutched in its clawed feet.

Shaking, terror zinging through me, I dug my feet into the dirt to launch myself to the creek section of the Market Street bridge where a group of black hooded guildies raced toward me from the other side. We blended together, some guildies continuing past me and up the hill toward Founders Square, while the rest pivoted to mill around me as we walked to the street corner to make a right.

The demon overhead screeched in frustration. Instead of presenting myself as a lone target, half a dozen black hooded figures marched toward the community center now only a couple blocks away and, returning to the streets, buildings blocked the demon’s swooping hunt.

Surprise mixed with the terror that made me quake because I might make it.

I could reach the center in minutes.

Adrenaline fueled my every step. The soles of my hiking boots pounded against cracked and crumbling sidewalk, the thud of my heartbeat drowned out by the chaos surrounding me. The roar of steam escaping the steam engine on the train platform. A distant scream. The dull thwap of the demon’s wings beating above us to keep the beast in flight. Sirens resounded, fire trucks exiting the station a few blocks behind us going Gods knew where, but in the cacophony and anarchy of the dawn, my pulse still thundered in my ears.

I only made it half a block.

Across the street, the sky opened up over the parking lot of a hardware store and to my left, an even narrower lot for customers of a now-defunct Mom and Pop pharmacy gave the demon a sliver of room to dive. Luck, chance, the favor of the gods, whatever kind fate nudged the demon to snatch the guildie beside me still worked in my favor, but not by much—the air pressure of the demon’s wings swept me off my feet and the impact of some part of it, probably his leg, tumbled me ass over teakettle across dull gray pavement spider-webbed with green weeds poking through a multitude of cracks. Only the security fencing lined with tarp at the rear of the lot saved my clumsy tumble from carrying me back to the black tubing edging the railroad tracks. I hit the tarp-shrouded chain link with a thump that robbed the breath from my lungs.

I crumpled to the cement, too dazed to do anything except wheeze. Shaking, I struggled to lift to all fours, despite the pebbles and grit. The pained grunt of the guildie who’d been snatched next to me as the demon dropped him to the street echoed in my ears.

I was so dead.

Ferociously quaking or nah, I pushed upright and managed a few lurching steps toward the safety of the mob of guildies on the street only yards away when the piercing roar of a demon— my demon—shattered the lightening dawn. Though the hunter who had decimated my group streaked through the air toward me, my nuts didn’t shrivel and draw up close to my body because I feared what that demon would do to me.

My spit dried up in my mouth because of what that demon might do to Jae.

Heart thumping, I crouched lower and sprinted across the parking lot, toward the street. With the stretched expanse of his wing span canting to the left, the demon bore down on me and my life narrowed to sporadic snapshots flashing into my awareness in uncontrolled bursts. The massive bulk of my predator blacking out my horizon, dark and malignant. The trickle of sweat sliding from my temple. My hiking boots crunched dirt and random bits of loose gravel on the cement as I ran, that sound joining the echoes of Jae’s outraged scream in my ears and the discordant scent of wisteria smothering the side of the defunct pharmacy blew over me so strongly I almost gagged.

Several guildies on the street shot to me, but the hunting demon had a bead on me now. A group of David camouflage would not distract him again.

My ticket was up. I saw that certainty in the determined set of the demon’s jaw as he soared closer, ever closer, and in the triumphant glint in his blood-red eyes as he stared, unblinking, at the juicy morsel of prey I represented. I recognized my failure, my doom, in the subtle curl of the demon’s reaching claws, the rising sun glimmering off the razor-honed edge of each signaling my probable death.

Still, I ran.

Toward the street and the demon rocketing to me. He dropped lower into the parking lot of the hardware store. Only seconds now. Any moment, his claws would pierce my body and sink deep into my flesh. My nostrils flared at a familiar scent of sulfur and iron, the tangy sweat of the demon damn near overwhelming me as the toe of my boot finally breached the brittle line of the sidewalk. Soaring only a few feet over the narrow street now, the demon’s arms reached for me —

My breath left me in a startled woof, my ribs cracking ominously as something dark and vicious barreled into me from my left. I flew through the air, senses whirling and chaotic, my shout of denial locked in my throat without a lung full of oxygen to set it free. I crashed into a crumbling doorstep half a block ahead, dizzy head spinning as I watched Jae pivot, his claws outstretched, to clinch with the demon hunting me.

Blood arced in a scarlet splash, falling to the street like rain and misting over the guildies gathered to disguise me. While I struggled to force my gelatinous limbs to push up from the cement steps of the building I’d careened into, Jae used the hunter’s forward momentum to slide underneath, claws sunk into the demon’s gut to tear a ragged wound into his vulnerable belly. I gagged as viscera spilled, the tang of coppery blood overwhelming the scent of the overgrown wisteria.

“Up.” A black hoodied figure yanked at my shoulder, pulling me upright. “C’mon, move!”

“The rest of them will come.” I stumbled, shaky, body aching everywhere. “They’ll know where he is.”

When I turned to join my demon in the fight, the guildie jerked me around and pushed me down the street, toward the community center. “Don’t waste his sacrifice to get you to safety. Go!”

I went, but not because of any sense of self-preservation or because my rebellious feet took to flight. I headed down the block because a second guildie joined the first and, grappling me under on arm on each side, they dragged me away.

I roared in stuttering protest, my ribs a misery that forbid me to take a proper breath. Injured or not, though, I fought the pair muscling me from the battle as a second demon spiraled from the sky to join the first, who Jae circled on blood-smeared asphalt.

My iron grip on my magic slipped.

First, the wisteria grew explosively, overtaking the abandoned pharmacy in a matter of seconds. The fragrant vines had already covered most of one wall, but moments later, thick green dripping heavy purple blooms spread across the peaked roof and threaded through the chain link fence separating downtown from the railroad tracks. The building groaned, a window shattering. Soon, wisteria crackled and then shattered the street-facing picture window and sprouting vines slithered up.

Power exploded inside me, despite the hurried pace of the guildies forcing me away, wisteria vines racing toward us across decaying concrete. “Let me go,” I said, voice lowering to a threatening growl as birds scrambled to flight and acorns pelted us in an artillery-like volley.

Someone screamed.

When I glanced over my shoulder, flowers bloomed in a riotous flood, seedlings popping up from the street, cracking the sidewalk. The weight of the wisteria crumbled a corner of the pharmacy with a puff of choking dust that became a thick cloud when Jae tossed the second attacking demon into the magically quickened decay.

Most of the building collapsed.

Seedlings became saplings growing into young oaks.

Run to the wards. My eyes rounded as a third and fourth demon dove from above, teeth and claws slashing as Jae streaked through the burgeoning forest my magic had created of Mechanic Street. Jae used the growing trees to deflect their attack, dodging around the rapidly maturing tree trunks. I’ll follow…when you are safe.

The power unloosed inside me swamped my senses, consumed me. I couldn’t fight, even if I wanted to, but since Jae reaching the sanctuary of the community center hinged on my arriving there first, my singular goal laser-focused on crossing the center’s wards as quickly as I could. So my demon would return to me, where he belonged. Instead of struggling against the iron grip of the guildies, I sprang forward,

That one of the magical partners of the demons battling Jae found me first was just typical.

The cement beneath my boots cracked.

Then sheeted with ice.

My panting breaths plumed in the abrupt and frigid cold, transforming my surprised shout to a pained grunt as the sweat slicking me frosted my skin. The guildies hauling me to the community center and I skidded on slick ice. The one on my right pinwheeled and crashed to the pavement. Although he’d released me, my balance shifted, and I plummeted to the cement as well, bringing the other guildie down with me. We tangled on the sidewalk in a shivering, shuddering clump of arms and legs.

Water mage. A very, very advanced water mage if he or she could manipulate temps in battle, a level ten like me…and a smart one. My magic could use water, feed off it, manipulate it.

Ice, not so much. What grew from frozen earth? Nothing this ground would hold seeds for. Nothing I could awaken and force into rapid growth. I swept the street with my frantic gaze for any sign of a demon’s magical partner and finally settled on a short, blue-haired woman on the corner of the police department, just outside the center’s protective warding. She stared at me, unblinking, the pupils of her eyes gone neon blue to match the pixie cut of her hair, which stood on end with the vibrant unleashing of her power.

I imagined my eyes also glinted with magic, druid green instead of her mage blue, as I met her power with my own. My fingers clenching to fists, I sought and found seeds in the thin strip of earth between the police headquarters and the sidewalk upon which she stood. Just flowers from the cultivated beds circling the building and a few that had blown from trees in the public square on the other side of the station. Too much concrete and asphalt here, a hedge of barren soil that acted as a firebreak for the community center. It wasn’t enough for me to launch a genuine fight, and the creeping numbness of hypothermia steadily sank into me.

If I didn’t unleash my secondary power, I was doomed. I’d die here, in a jumbled ice-locked tangle with my guildies half a block from the protection of the community center wards.

Fortunately, my guildie escorts were not so reckless as I was. One of them mumbled and a ball of fire exploded inches above, the wash of burning heat innervating. My blood pumped to my freezing extremities in a painful snap as the fireball hovered above us for a moment, then streaked like a comet toward the attacking water mage. “Come on!” The guildie to my right scrambled to his feet, skidding on the frozen sidewalk as he grabbed my arm to haul me upright. “Move!”

Sliding on the ice, heart rabbiting in my chest, I sprinted for the wards I could feel humming short yards away. Ahead of me, the mage drew humidity from the air to form a wall of crystalline ice. Thin. I could see through it, as could the trio of figures streaking from the community center, Griffith first among them. Irritated relief exploded inside me that he numbered among my reinforcements, but as fast as my legs pumped, the mage’s desperate Hail Mary maneuver to block me from the wards wouldn’t have stopped or even slowed me much. If she’d had more time, maybe, but I punched through the sheet of ice, discomfort at shards prickling my face and hands as I crashed into the barrier only a minor inconvenience. Goddess knew I’d suffered worse.

I still tumbled as soon as my pounding boots crossed from slick ice to the barren sidewalk on the other side of the wards, though. Cement stripped skin from my palms as I skidded, coming to a painful stop inches from more hiking boots.

Ow.

Inching my gaze up long legs encased in denim and the infernal hoodies I hoped to never, ever see again, I met Griffith’s quizzical gaze. He arched an eyebrow. “Testing is insid e, kiddo.”

“The ice. Jae—” I wheezed, my heart thumping in frantic alarm.

“The battle’s shifted around back, across Will’s Creek.” Griffith shook his head. “Smart, your demon.” He rolled his eyes. “Smarter than you.”

Palms stinging, I pushed up from the sidewalk. “I made it, didn’t I?” Then I cringed at my mother’s shriek preceding her frantic rush from the rear delivery zone of the community center. “Oh, fuck me. This is not my life.”

Griffith laughed, waving at the defeated water mage who watched us—and ridiculously saluted the guild boss in sly acknowledgment as he reached down to pull me to my feet. “Next time, Clara,” Griffith said with the tip of his head. “Ice. That’s new, isn’t it?”

The woman chuckled. “Menolac’s been working with me.” With a flick of her hand, the ice barrier I’d shattered melted to a spreading puddle and the frigid cold still rattling my chest vanished. I could breathe again. “He enjoys Pittsburgh. We even came to terms with the dragon, but Menolac still considered us too close to your nexus, dormant or not.” She shrugged dainty shoulders. “Guess he was right.”

Griffith slung an arm around my neck. “Well, stop trying to kill my druid.”

She rolled her eyes. “Was worth a shot, anyway.”

“Come by the Towpath later. Coffee’s on me.”

“You got it.”

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Ma screeched once she reached me, ignoring Griffith and the other gathering guildies altogether. She reached for my biceps, lifting my arm to examine my scraped palm. “I knew it.” She glared at Griffith. “You said you had this covered.”

“Ma. Stop.” I tried to jerk my throbbing hand away, but Goddess forbid my mother pass up any opportunity to embarrass me. She held on tight. “Where’s Jae?” I winced at the scream of demons filtering from the back of the center. At least the cries of pain weren’t Jae’s.

“On his way. How’s the rest of you?” Griffith asked, pivoting to guide me down the road that led to the rear of the building. “You seem all right, but we have healers on standby.”

“Cracked ribs and I think I wrenched a knee running across and through that ice,” I said, favoring my right leg as we walked, but only a little. “Nothing Jae can’t handle.” I flinched at an infuriated roar that was definitely my demon’s as we approached the hive of activity in the back of the center. “How many is he fighting?” He’d be tired after battling, perhaps wounded himself. Maybe taking up the offer of healers wasn’t such a bad idea.

“Not enough.” Griffith cackled. “These hunters are no match for him. They’d need a unified strategy and portaled demons are too accustomed to avoiding others of their kind to present a legitimate threat.” When we reached the delivery area of the building, the ongoing battle across Wills Creek spread out before us and I choked back a gag as Jae gutted another demon, entrails spilling from the split belly in a wet plop. “Tell him to quit messing around. We need to clean you both up before making introductions.”

“Politics.” I scowled. “Honestly, I’d rather the demon hunt.”

The guild boss grinned. “Wouldn’t we all.”