Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel (20 page)

A black-clouded storm swept over the hellscape, its scorching wind driving the fire across the sinner’s naked bodies and into the chamber where the Devil confronted the three men. He stood without moving, the flames curling around his arms and shoulders. The burning light glinted in his eyes as he smiled.

In the distance behind, they could see a horde of demons rushing toward them, hooved feet striking the skulls of the damned, leathery black wings beating the ignited air. Their faces, alight with hideous glee, were shielded by helmets split by the sword blades of the angels who had once defeated them. Broken armor pieces clanked against their chitinous ridged chests as they swung the implements of an ancient armory above their heads, spiked balls on chains catching sparks against notch-bladed spears and scimitars.

“Look out!” Hank shouted the warning through the demons’ shrieking cries as the first of them swarmed through the flames surrounding the Devil. Cradling Ren-Lei tighter against his chest, he grabbed Nathaniel’s arm and pulled him back out of harm’s way.

The snarling creature at the head of the charge swung a hooked pikestaff at Blake’s head; he caught the weapon’s staff in both hands, straining to throw the demon back against the others coming after it.

Nathaniel shook off the giant hit man’s grasp. With the demon horde only a yard away, he braced himself with one leg angled behind him, the forward one bent low. He stretched both hands before himself, palms outward—

And closed his eyes.

The demons shrieked higher, seeing the first of their prey so close, so easy to grab and rip apart.

Then there was silence.

Hank looked over the baby’s head, exchanging glances with Blake. The demons stood frozen in place—as did the Devil, still with the thin, cruel smile on his sharp-angled face, where he had been watching from the opposite side of the stone chamber.

“Nathaniel…” The pikestaff remained angled in midswing as Blake slowly let go of its shaft and stepped back from it and the immobile demon who wielded it. Both he and Hank stepped to either side of him. “Are you okay?”

A moment passed before Nathaniel responded. He remained in the same outstretched pose, as though pushing against an invisible tide that threatened to engulf them. He nodded slowly, then spoke, eyes still closed: “Get out of here … Quick!”

Baffled, Hank looked from him to the stilled demons, then back again. “Did the kid do this?”

“Yeah,” said Blake. “But I don’t think he can keep it up for long.”

“Hurry!” Nathaniel spoke again, a line of sweat beginning to trickle down the corner of his brow. His lips were pressed bloodless. “Get the baby out of here … I’ll follow when I can.”

Leaving Nathaniel behind them, Hank and Blake scrambled up the sloping pile of rubble. At its crest, Blake halted and pointed up the shaft, still lined with the wreckage of the shattered staircase. “I’ll go ahead and try out every hold first,” he said. “To see if it’s secure.”

“And I’ll follow on with Ren-Lei.” Hank gazed upward at the climb ahead of them. “At least there are still a few torches left on the walls, to give us a bit of light.”

Holding Ren-Lei in the crook of one arm, Hank followed Blake up the shaft as quickly as he could. By the time he had followed Blake several yards upward, he gave in to the temptation to look back down. He could see the torch-lit chamber, with Nathaniel still poised at one side, hands stretched out in front of himself, holding back the flow of Time and the demons that would be carried on it like a tidal wave when the kid’s strength gave out.

Another couple of yards up, he found himself stuck. The next handhold was too far above him to reach while still holding Ren-Lei.

“Hey!” He shouted up to Blake. “Need some help here—”

The soldier looked back down and saw immediately what the problem was. With lightning-quick agility, he lowered himself toward Hank.

“Give her to me.” Blake reached down. “I’ll hold her until you get your next grip.”

“Okay. But be careful—” He drew Ren-Lei away from his chest and held her up toward Blake’s outstretched hand.

The infant’s eyes widened in fear as the overcoat’s blackened sleeve came close to her. She let out a terrified wail, as though the approach of the heavy cloth had scalded her with a searing flame.

Her cry made Hank move even faster. Within seconds, he had climbed farther up the shaft. He reached out one of his massive hands. “Quick—”

As soon as she was back in the giant’s grasp, Ren-Lei quieted herself. She cooed up toward Hank’s face as she snuggled against his chest.

“She
definitely
likes you,” said Blake as he looked down at the mismatched pair below him.

“Just climb, okay…”

The bottom of the shaft was a long way down, no more than a smokily glowing dot from this height. With his free hand, Hank dug his nails into the narrow ledge that was all that kept him from falling.

They kept going. Time might have been frozen down below, but Hank could still feel it in the ache of his muscles and the burning of his fingertips, scraped raw by the crevices into which he forced them. Blood trickled down his wrists. Beating the city’s armies of thugs to death had been easy work compared to this.

“Okay—” Blake’s voice floated back down in the darkness. “I can see it. We’re almost there—”

Enough dim torchlight filtered up through the staircase shaft for Hank to just about see the ragged hem of Blake’s overcoat. Dust drifted into his face as the other man got an elbow onto the floor of the abandoned town house. Hank stopped in place and watched, head tilted back, as Blake angled his chest over the edge, then scrabbled himself free of the shaft. Lying flat, Blake reached back down.

“Give me your hand—”

Rearing back onto his knees, Blake dragged Hank halfway up into the town house’s empty space. Hank got a hand on the floor’s edge and with one muscle-straining effort, flopped himself on his back beside the other man, his own legs dangling across the shaft opening. He sat up, arm crossed over his chest, cradling Ren-Lei’s small weight.

Less than a minute later, the two men burst from the town house’s front door. From its sagging porch, they could see the black silhouette of the Devil’s office tower reaching up into the storm clouds.

“Look—” Blake pointed to a crooked finger of lightning that had been caught streaking down from the sky. “The kid still has Time frozen. Even up here.”

They hurried toward the garden square at the tower’s base. Ren-Lei clapped her small hands together, enjoying the bouncing motion of Hank’s lumbering stride.

The crowd surrounding the peach tree was stilled and silent, just as the demonic legions had been, down below the earth’s surface. But not for long. Hank pointed to a bee that was hovering near one of the tree’s last blossoms. The slow-motion buzz of the insect’s wings could be seen. “Damn! Looks like Nathaniel’s giving out—”

Blake cocked his head, listening. Below the silence in which the garden was caught, a barely audible vibration could be sensed, moving from the infrasonic to the limit of human hearing. The crowd’s mingled breaths and voices signaled Time’s coursing approach.

16.

He opened his eyes. That was a mistake.

Past the frozen horde of demons, Nathaniel could see the Devil, cruel smile immobile on that harshly formed visage.
Keep it going,
he told himself.
You can do it.
Inside the bubble of stilled Time into which he had cast the stone chamber, there was no way of telling how many minutes or hours had passed in the world beyond. Maybe Blake and Hank had managed by now to carry the infant to safety, or they might have managed to struggle only a little way up the shaft leading to the surface. If they were still there, and he wasn’t able to keep his spell going, the furious, pursuing demons would stir to life again, then swarm up the shaft and annihilate the three human beings, like molten rock surging from the center of the earth.

All Nathaniel could do was hold the spell for as long as he could. Palms thrust out, he gritted his teeth, summoning every resource he possessed. He had already pushed beyond his previous limits, keeping Time frozen for longer than he ever had before. Or so it seemed—all those other times, he had been in the city’s night air, sour-smelling as garbage strewn in back alleys, but still freely available to draw down into his lungs.
I’m on the Devil’s turf now,
thought Nathaniel. Things might work differently down here, as though Time and gravity and existence itself were weakened and rendered threadbare.

That worry was what had caused him to open his eyes, just to keep from being swallowed up by the darkness inside himself. He could feel the sweat trickling down his forehead, the chamber’s heat evaporating it to pure salt before it could reach the corners of his eyes. Just before him, he saw his upraised fingers trembling, the tension from his locked arms spreading through his hands. Farther away, where the walls had opened with a cascade of tiny skeletons, stood his enemy.

The Devil’s eyes did not meet his. Instead, he’d had his sulphurous gaze narrowed upon the infant in Hank’s arms, as Nathaniel had summoned up the spell to stop Time. The Devil, frozen in place, was still looking a few degrees to the side of him, long after the two men had escaped with Ren-Lei.

Nathaniel’s pulse inched forward a beat as he watched the pupils at the center of the Devil’s eyes. The small dark spaces suddenly contracted almost to pin-points, as though the mind behind them had finally perceived the other figures’ disappearance.

Then the Devil’s gaze shifted, agonizingly slow, the way a marksman might carefully adjust the angle of his weapon, bringing a helpless target into the crosshairs of his scope. Until he was finally looking straight into Nathaniel’s eyes …

An invisible spark passed between the two of them.

He knows,
realized Nathaniel.
He knows what I’ve done
.

A deep basso rumble traveled through the ground, as though the world’s tectonic plates were shifting. In the same stilled moment, he saw the Devil’s shoulders swell and rise, straining against the burden that weighed him in place.

Like a fragile crystal sphere, the spell began to crack at its edges. At the periphery of his vision, he could see dust sift from the chamber’s arched ceiling, and the smoke curl and writhe upon itself. The Devil’s gaze tautened to slits, dagger points aimed into the center of his skull. Nathaniel squeezed his hands into trembling fists, desperately holding onto the spell’s unraveling cords.

They snapped, and were gone from his grasp. All around him, Time roared back into full motion. The mounting howls of the demons pummeled his hearing, the sudden shock wave dizzying him with the blood bursting at his inner ear, the chamber tilting as he lost his balance. He stumbled backward, as though struck by an invisible tidal wave. He had only a fragmented glimpse of the Devil’s eyes widening in delighted triumph as the spell’s broken shackles were shrugged off.

His spine struck the floor hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. Gasping for air, he felt himself borne upward, the chamber’s ceiling hurtling toward him. He turned his face to the side and saw that the Devil’s legions had grabbed hold of his arms and legs, lifting their prize above their heads, the blades of their archaic weapons clashing sparks over the crests and dents of their helmets. Beyond them, he could just discern the Devil commanding his horned army with an upraised hand, bidding them onward in their maddened rush.

Suddenly, he felt himself torn free of the demons’ clawed grasp, as the Devil flung one arm even higher above his head. An unseen force sent Nathaniel hurtling through the chamber’s smoke-darkened air.

A searing blast of heat rolled over him from behind. He managed to twist himself onto one side and saw one of the wall’s openings rushing toward him.

But nothing could halt his helpless trajectory. The flames roiled upward from the craters beyond as he was pitched into Hell.

*   *   *

“You hear that?”

Blake grabbed Hank’s arm, halting him just yards away from the garden square. He brought both their gazes back toward the abandoned town house from which they had fled, carrying Ren-Lei with them.

“What is it?” Hank peered toward the building’s dark silhouette. From somewhere below it, a raucous chorus of mingled screams and cries could be heard. “What’s going on—”

“Time’s started up again.” The soldier’s dirt-stained face turned even grimmer. “They’re coming for us…”

Even as he spoke, the town house trembled on its foundations, as though struck by seismic tremors from deep in the earth. Slates snapped and slid from the eaves, exposing the attic’s sagging timbers. The demonic war cries swelled loud enough to peel the wooden planks away from the boarded-up windows, the dust-clouded glass shivering in the frames, then bursting into shards glittering through the night’s shadows.

The town house’s walls bowed outward, as though a slow-motion bomb had been ignited inside. The chimneys crumbled, raining down fragments of brick and mortar. As though it were a toy box’s lid, the roof separated from the walls, shoved upward by a billow of smoke laced with churning fire.

Hank pressed Ren-Lei tighter to his chest, covering the other side of her head with his broad hand, keeping the bloodcurdling shrieks from her tiny ears.

Churning flames exploded from the town house’s windows and doors, the red tongues separating every piece of the structure. Blackened framing timbers spun end over end before plowing into the dry weeds surrounding the building. Blake shielded his eyes just enough to see the demonic figures spiraling upward in the gout of fire, slashing and jabbing the burning magnesium blades of their weapons in all directions.

Screams rose from the garden square as the people gathered there now saw the armored demons racing toward them, the ones on the ground howling as they ran, those aloft blotting out the night sky with the unfurling of their leathery wings. The adults scooped up the children who had been laughing and playing before Time had stopped, shielding them with their bodies as they huddled against the base of the office tower, or running with them toward the unlit alleys beyond. Their panicked escape was cut off by the shouting, grimacing horde that ran into the streets ahead of them, then turned and swept their weapons like scythes, to drive the people back to the square.