Fallen Stars (The Demon Accords) (38 page)

“Mr. Chris!” Toni cried.  My hand tore the cage door and most of its frame away, the steel stretching and tearing like taffy.  I threw the twisted metal away and scoped up my goddaughter so fast, the teens had no time to react.

Toni buried her face in my shoulder while the two kids tried to grasp the situation.  The boy was maybe seventeen and tall, several inches taller than me.  Skinny, in the manner of late teen boys who still have to grow into their frames.  Shaggy black hair and blue eyes that were a little wide right now.

The girl was average height or maybe a little shorter but compactly built, like an athlete.  Brown hair and brown eyes, olive-tone skin, kinda cute in an every-girl kind of way.  Except she was very serious, and she smelled funny.  Not a stinky, forgot-to-shower-for-a-week funny, but a musky wild animal funny.

In a combat situation, Grim flicks through vision modes like he’s changing channels on a slow television night.  He stopped on Sight, eyes focused on the boy—who had flecks of black mixed with his blue aura.  The girl’s aura was blue with greenish tinges here and there about her body.  Not were, but something else.

“You a witch, kid?” I asked the boy.  He frowned.

“Declan, Mr. Chris.  His name is Declan and she is Caeco, and they’re my friends!” Toni declared. “They saved me from that lady there,” she continued, pointing at the body before ducking back into my shoulder.  “Declan can do stuff with electricity and Caeco is
fast
, at least for a normal girl,” she mumbled from the safety of my tee shirt.

The boy, Declan, was rubbing the fingers of his right hand.  They made a crackling sound as he did it.  He stopped, though, when the girl, Caeco, touched his arm.

“You’re the godfather,” she said to me, her voice even and almost calm, but her heartbeat was accelerated and I noticed tensing muscles in her neck and shoulder.

“Yup.  What happened?” I asked, pointing at the dead blonde lady on the floor.

“I think your arrival caught them off guard. 
She
came to get Toni and we… interfered."

Most high school kids would be a bit more upset by a dead body, especially one that they had helped make dead.  These were so not the average kid.  Then again, they were being held captive in an AIR base, so maybe I shouldn’t expect that they would be average.

“Mr. Chris, there’s a Darkken man down thataway, and a wolf guy, too,” Toni said, pointing further down the row of cell doors.  I hadn’t paid a lot of attention once I locked onto Toni.

The ground trembled and a shocking roar came from the ripped doorway behind me.  The kids jumped back and separated, the boy’s hands now crackling with blue sparks. The girl had cleared a free-standing fifteen-foot jump—backward.  Interesting.  Toni squirmed to get down but I held her, instead turning and lifting her up and onto the giant back of the incredibly worried Kodiak bear that was now standing behind me. 'Sos snuffled her, his head bigger than her whole body.  Assured she was okay, he swiveled back to watch the kids.

“Declan, don’t do anything sparky okay?  You’ll just make him mad,” Toni said to the boy, from her perch high atop her grizzly steed.

“Yo?  Everyone alright?” a pretty voice asked.  I turned to find Stacia cradling an Auto Assault shotgun, wearing black cargo pants, boots, and a snug black tee shirt. Her combat pants must have been tailored because they didn’t fit like most soldiers’ pants do.

I raised an eyebrow. 

“I’m with the relief force.  We found the mess you left all through this place, so I headed here.  Heard fur face here announcing himself,” she said with a casual nod at the massive bear. “Hey, Toni, you okay?”

“Yes, Miss Stacia.  I told them that they would be sorry.  That Mr. Chris and Miss Tanya would come and 'Sos and everyone and it would be real bad.  I told them that Mr. Chris would be angry,” she said with an anxious look in my direction.

I turned to the beast by my side and grabbed his muzzle.  “You—get her out of here.  Do not stop to fight with anything—got it?  Just kill anything in your way, but head straight out,” I told my bear.  “You—stay on the bear!  Hang on tight, both fists full of fur!” I told Toni.

“You two: follow them and get out.  There will be people upstairs that’ll help you get home,” I told the two shocked teens who were anything but ordinary.

I turned to Stacia, who was watching me and the others with that damned big shotgun braced on one cocked hip.  The boy’s eyes were about to jump straight out of his head at the picture she presented.  “Stewart upstairs?”  She nodded.  “Follow this crew and make sure they all get out all right.  Stewart should meet these guys,” I said, sweeping a hand at the kids who were moving quickly around and away from me.  “I’m gonna find Tanya and have a chat with whoever took Toni,” I said, Grim pulling my voice deeper at the end of my sentence.

“Time to go, everybody.  Grimmy’s gonna smack somebody,” Stacia said, shooing everyone in front of her but still watching me.  She gave me a sharp nod, then followed her charges out.

I turned and went back out to the main corridor, following the bond that pulled me to my vampire.

Chapter 42

I found her at the end of the corridor, near the elevator.  A wall of transparent glass or Lexan or something sealed us off from the people on the other side.  It was like a big box of glass, only one story tall, but its top was sealed with more thick glass, like a big rectangle of aquarium material. The elevator shaft came down from above and opened into the glass room.

A man and a woman stood inside the box, staring at my vampire. Tanya was trying to figure out how to get in.  The glass nearest her was battered and chipped, but intact.  The man was in his early fifties, bald but for a crown of gray hair, sporting a van dyke mustache and beard—the pointy kind that only skinny-faced men can pull off.  He had the right face for it, thin like a hatchet blade.  He was average height and looked fit for his age, wearing an immaculate two-thousand dollar suit.  The jacket was off, showing his white shirt, snappy suspenders, and a paisley tie.

The woman was blonde, taller than Tanya by a couple of inches, and dressed like a Fed in a pantsuit, complete with holstered gun.

“Ahh, Chris.  I wondered when I would see you,” the blonde greeted me with a nasty smile, her voice issuing from a speaker mounted high above us.  She was standing in front of a big spray-painted pentagram, the center of which was missing and replaced by the greasy black of Hell.  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked, her smile widening.  “Wow, that sniper I hired did a better job than I thought.  I’m Briana Duclair.  We’ve got some history, you and I. From before I came to work for Director Hosta here.  It’s a good gig.  Great toys, lots better pay, and not so many pesky rules and procedures.” 

“Agent Gulliotine, please introduce me to our guest,” the man said, his eyes never leaving me.  Despite his calm voice, a bead of sweat had formed on his brow.  The two-inch-deep sword gashes and starred impact damage in the thick plastic glass might have been the cause of that.

“I found them here, locking themselves in,” Tanya said.“Bullet-resistant glass, nine inches thick.  Even the door,” she said with a nod at the only visible way into the room besides the elevator.  She was completely focused on the task of getting at the two behind the glass.

“As I told you, Hosta, the woman is a rather special vampire and
he
is her… mate?  Boytoy?  Lunch?” Duclair said, her tone snarky but her eyes showing just a hint of worry. “If you recall, I think I was pretty clear that if you drew him in, you’d get her, too.”

“Well, yes, it seems that this whole project was more… involved than we imagined,” Hosta replied, still watching us but darting quick glances at the Hellgate.  I noticed a smear of dried reddish material on one wall.  Blood?

“You’re standing next to an open portal to Hell,” I said.

“Yes, well, not an ideal saferoom, but one makes do when one has to.  I’m now thankful that we had the foresight to build this containment room so well.  Sometimes, one avenue of research provides a benefit for others.”

“We’re not here to listen to any monologuing.  Christian, please cut through this stuff,” Tanya asked.

Aura-formed mono-edge flickered on my right arm.  I speared through the Lexan with one really hard strike.  Man this stuff was tough, but it
would
cut with the right edge. 

Hosta and Duclair jumped backward, both thoroughly alarmed. 

“I told you this was gonna go down the shitter!” Duclair said, turning to her cell phone.  She opened an app while I began to open the wall.  Looking highly stressed, her fingers fluttered over the app.  Something whirred to life overhead.  I looked up.  So did Tanya.  Damn!  Why didn’t I look up sooner?  Just like the patrol in the woods, I had forgotten to check above.

The massive metal Spider had at least twelve legs and hung upside down from the metal superstructure two stories above our heads.  Four feet long, it had at least six long gun-barrel-like tubes sprouting from its back, and all six were swiveling to lock onto Tanya and me.

I yanked my arm from the wall while Tanya whipped a silver spike at the metal tarantula.  The guns began to fire, and six inch bolts of silver or dull gray flashed at both of us simultaneously.

Tanys’s spike hit and stuck but didn’t stop the metal beast.  I was racing clockwise around the wall, a string of mini-arrows appearing in the thick plastic millimeters behind me.  The Spider shuffled its dozen legs as it twisted in an effort to keep both targets locked under its sights.

The gun barrels moved on tiny mounts that only had to change millimeters to reap the benefit of several feet of adjustment.  The barrels were some variation of stacked munition, firing at electronically fast speeds.  The combined result was computer-controlled targeting at a speed that actually threatened our survival.  In fact, if Tanya’s spike hadn’t blocked one of the gun tubes, it might have already hit one or both of us.

My vampire is not patient with attackers, be they flesh or metal.  She doesn’t subscribe to the run-away-and-fight-again club.  She threw another spike and followed it with herself, tungsten sword swinging for the Spider’s body.

Her first spike, the blocking one, fell free from the hole it had punched, and the guntube, previously hindered, now swung around toward the attacking vampire.  My vampire. I didn’t think, I didn’t plan.  I just leapt. I used every bit of power in me, every Push and Pull of vampire energy I could manipulate, to physically impose myself between her and the burst of high-velocity bolts.

My free-flying body passed over hers.  Our eyes locked as I went by and she kept flying straight in.  They stayed locked as pain flared across my back and across my left shoulder.  They stayed glued as her sword continued its swing and as I hit the opposite wall.  Then my eyes shut and I fell in an awkward clump to the ground. 

I heard the spider’s demise as I worked to get one arm under me and sit up.  I couldn’t seem to get my left arm to work properly, but my ears heard her gasp as she landed softly behind me.  Strong arms turned me over and our eyes met again, but just for a second.  Then hers broke away to look at my chest.  They widened in fear.  I looked down at myself.  The dull gray point protruding from my sternum was covered with dark red blood, and since I could no longer hear any beating in my chest, I imagined that must be the color of heart blood. So red.  I looked back into her eyes one final time before my eyes fell shut.  I died.

There was no dark tunnel with a light at the end. I was just simply there—in a great, beautiful place of sunlight and music.  My Brothers were lined up in two rows to either side of me, glorious beings of gold and silver, almost too bright to look upon.  They welcomed me with song, a song without sound, but rather of vibration.  It was felt not heard, flowing from everywhere and nowhere. It told a story of battle and war.  The never-ending conflict, the Forever War.  I was home, where I belonged, where I had never thought to be again. 

“Be welcomed, Malahidael!  You have returned to us.”  The Brother who spoke to me was more gold than silver, more gold than the others. 

After a moment, I knew his name.  “Michael!”

“Yes, Brother, but we have much to discuss and little time.  And you must know that you cannot stay. This is not your time.”

Confused, I glanced behind me, but I couldn’t see where I had come from.  Still, I knew that She was there, somewhere back there.  I understood. I nodded.  “But when I go back, may I ask a boon?” 

He raised one golden eyebrow then laughed and nodded, even as he understood my need. He began to talk.

I gasped and sat bolt upright, then gasped again at the searing pain. My chest felt like liquid fire, every breath acid. Any further attempt at movement was blocked by bands of fleshy steel.  “Stop it, you idiot! Stop moving,” she said, her voice trembling.

Tanya’s worried face met mine, her harsh words negated by her tear-streaked cheeks.  Her hands were bloody, as was my chest where my tee shirt had been ripped open.  A small pile of silver and gray arrow-shaped rods lay in a pool of blood by my side.  A tiny wound on Tanya’s wrist healed itself as I watched. I looked down at the bonfire on my chest, expecting ruin and horror.  But the flesh was smooth, yet covered in blood.