Good Intentions 3: Personal Demons (20 page)

None of it surprised her. She concentrated on his neck with her first slashes, but as soon as she had a sense of how tough this would be, she opted for something more decisive. Lorelei seized Sammael’s head with both hands and plunged her taloned thumbs into his eyes.

Though stunned by the power of so many bullets against his skull, Sammael screamed in agony. Lorelei pressed on, tearing into the flesh of his neck behind and under his jaw while her thumbs dug deeply. Blood poured from his wounds as his scream intensified.

His merciless fists slammed into her sides. Sammael pummeled her with blows that would shatter mortal bone, robbing her of the strength she needed to hold on. He grabbed her wrists and forced her off, looking up at her with split, bleeding eyes. “You wretched—!”

Roaring flames from Lorelei’s mouth drowned out whatever he intended to say. Sammael cried out again, thrashing in pain under her fiery breath.

It was enough to break her free. Lorelei fell back onto the foot of the bed, unharmed by the flames but still shaken and wounded. She glanced left and right, having only a split second to decide between escape or a continued assault. The outcome of the latter didn’t look promising. Not if she hadn’t caused him decisive harm already. Lorelei shifted to the left, thinking to go straight through the window—and felt Sammael’s iron grip on her arm.

“Idiot!” he raged, punching her in the jaw with a strength that would have taken the head off the shoulders of a lesser being. A similar blow to her stomach left her crumpled in pain.

Sammael stood on the bed, heedless of the flames that now ignited his clothes. He held her up by her arm, all but dangling her so she might see his broad black angel’s wings and his bloody, angry visage. “You could have had—”

She spat in his face.

Equally shocked and enraged, Sammael threw her across the room. Lorelei crashed through the door, breaking it into pieces as the doorframe held firm. She collapsed in the hallway, dimly aware now of a ringing fire alarm and the shouts of familiar voices.

Sammael approached, wreathed in the flames of his burning clothes. He stopped only a few steps away, looking up at something above and behind her. Hands gripped her and pulled her back. Someone stepped between Lorelei and her foe. She heard a challenge. Bright light flashed in front of Drew’s silhouette. Sammael turned and fled through the burning room while its sprinklers raining water down on the flames.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Taylor asked as she and Jason dragged her away from the door.

Lorelei’s eyes swept the hallway as she tried to catch her breath. A handful of hotel guests ran out of their rooms as the alarm bells continued, but at this hour, most of the rooms were still unoccupied. They had only a moment to regroup. “Wade,” she coughed. “Your gun is inside, by the doorway.”

“I’ve got it,” Drew said. He emerged from the room holding both the weapon and his own jacket, now soaking wet but still in one piece. Drew put the jacket around her shoulders. “He went through the window without breaking it. Straight through like a fuckin’ ghost.”

“Not a ghost,” Lorelei corrected with ragged breath. “He is an archangel. A corrupt and powerful archangel.”

“Then why’d he run away from us?” asked Wade. He reloaded his pistol with a fresh magazine from inside his jacket.

“He did not run from you. He ran from
your
angels. We must find the others and escape. This gathering is not what we thought. It is far worse than any of us expected.”

* * *

“Actually, no,” Onyx murmured to Alex. “This is exactly as bad as I expected.”

They leaned together and spoke in low tones, though it wasn’t too tough to speak without disrupting anything. Practitioners at the other tables shouted across the room enough to cover quieter exchanges.

“Are we even gonna get to the point of this thing?” asked Alex. “We came here to talk about specific stuff, right?”

“Oh God, did we? I’ve forgotten already.”

The young man watched the bickering with a frown. Molly remained engaged, along with Hector seated beside her, but Onyx didn’t have much to add and Alex wasn’t supposed to speak at all. Though he tried to keep track of the factions and their arguments, Alex kept most of his attention on Evelyn, still seated at the Light’s table. She seemed to be the only one enjoying this. “If it wasn’t for the demon lady, I’d say we should just bounce,” Alex grumbled.

“Yeah, I hear you,” Onyx agreed. “But we gotta know what’s going on.”

“Tonight is just a power play by Jin and Kate!” asserted Hypatia from across the room. She pointed for effect at the two hosts still standing at the front and center of the arc of tables. “They came up with all this. They carried the ‘invitations’ and chose the time and place.”

“That’s what hosts do, Hypatia,” Kate responded, clearly biting back a more sarcastic reply. “This is no power play. We stated our hopes for this meeting from the beginning. All we want is to agree on some neutral grounds as a first step to assure peace among—”

“A peace established
after
the Brotherhood was destroyed,” pointed out Archimedes. “Not one that includes them.”

“Them folks were never interested in peace to begin with,” said Hector. “It ain’t just the Brotherhood missin’ here. There ought’a be more loners and little circles, too. Only they all got swallowed up or killed by the same people you’re cryin’ about now.”

“Do you have any proof of that?” asked Archimedes. “More than just isolated incidents? The other circles here faced no such pressure,” he argued, gesturing to the Evergreeners and the Grecians. He turned to Leon and the Light to further his point. “Did you?”

“You’re an idiot,” Leon answered. Archimedes blinked in shock, but Leon ignored it to turn his sneer on the rest of the gathering. “Of course the Brotherhood meant to absorb or crush every other faction in the region. We saw it coming years ago. We tried to warn your
queen
, Elizabeth, but she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t face them.”

“Elizabeth was no queen,” Kate countered.

“But everybody bought all her
Kumbaya
bullshit,” scoffed another man seated near Leon. He looked younger than most, but wore similarly rugged clothes and the same scowl under his USMC ball cap. “She didn’t want to face the danger. We prepared for it. Did you? Or did she tell you everything would be fine?”

Molly stood from her seat. “You might wanna keep Elizabeth’s name out of your mouth, Aaron. She’s dead and she’s still got more friends here than anyone in your crew.”

Alex felt a hand on his wrist. “One of them cast a spell,” Onyx warned in a hushed tone. “The guy to Leon’s left. Coot. The demon lady’s holding his hand.”

He’d hardly taken his eyes off Evelyn, but now that Onyx pointed it out, Alex saw she was right. Beside Evelyn sat another bearded man in a red ball cap advertising Coot’s Towing and Garage. He was the only one not wearing sunglasses of some sort, and seemed to be sweeping the room with an intense glare.

Aaron asked again, “Were any of you prepared to defend yourselves? Are you now?”

“Oh shit,” Onyx grunted. “It’s a probe. The demon’s empowering the other guy while Aaron there asks the questions.”

“No,” said Coot. “Most of ‘em ain’t prepared at all.”

“Get ready,” Onyx warned, shifting in her seat. “Molly! Trouble!”

Most of the people in the room heard her. They looked around with open worry, apparently unsure how to react. The Evergreeners, the Grecians, even Archimedes and Hypatia seemed glued to their seats.

Others were more decisive. The Light quickly got to their feet. Jin raised one hand. His circle stood from their seats as if they’d rehearsed it, moving all at once to reveal wands, daggers, and other tools of magic all held low but still shown openly. Members of the Light reached into their jackets or behind their backs. Kate’s circle stood, too. Most backed away from the gathering while a couple closed ranks with their spokeswoman.

Alex rose from his seat but stayed low. He tried to keep track of Evelyn while the scene unfolded. In the background beyond the blonde and her rough-looking associates, he saw Sierra silently move in from the other end of the ballroom. She made good use of the other tables and chairs for cover. He didn’t see a weapon, but from her posture, she clearly carried something.

“Your man is mistaken,” said Jin. “Test us, and you will find us quite prepared.”

Leon’s lip rose in another sneer. “I doubt that.”

“We should all reconsider this,” Kate warned. “We all came here to talk. Peacefully.”

“Not everyone did,” said Hector. He stayed in his chair but leaned forward with both hands hidden under the table.

“It’s true,” Evelyn agreed, breaking the silence with quiet words ultimately meant only for her companions. “You didn’t get all dressed up tonight for nothing.”

The standoff held for a moment longer. No one spoke or made any sudden moves. Alex wondered what could possibly dial back the tension. He hoped a few more moments to breathe and think would calm things down.

The sudden, jarring clang and flashing lights of the fire alarms up on the walls ended that hope.

“Bill!” Leon barked over the din. A man beside him in a dark green camouflage coat snapped his arms up high. The overhead lights all across the ballroom shattered in a burst of glass and sparks, plunging the room into shadow.

Alex had one hand on Onyx and the other on the collar of Molly’s leather jacket before the first gunshots erupted. He pulled them both down behind their table as muzzles flashed and people screamed. Lightning, fire, and the intermittent blinking of the fire alarms on the walls cut through the darkness, but the unpredictable strobe effects only made things more confusing.

Things got uglier in seconds. Alex saw people around the other tables fall to the floor as if shot or cut down by all the sorcery flying through the air. As Coot suggested, many of those present either didn’t come prepared for a fight or weren’t the fighting type at all.

Alex thought fast about their situation and the layout of the ballroom. The boom of a shotgun close by drew his attention to Hector, crouched behind an overturned chair with his weapon up and firing. He seemed inclined to stay and fight rather than bail out, and he focused entirely on the Light rather than Alex or his friends. Others engaged with the Light, too. Some even got into close combat, but Alex couldn’t track how that played out.

“We’re between them and the main exit,” he barked over the noise. “Can you hold this spot?”

“I’m already blocking spells,” said Onyx. She had her wand up at an angle toward the ceiling and a strained look on her face. Whatever effect she created or prevented, Alex couldn’t see it.

Molly’s answer came with more visible action. She whipped her wand around over her head while shouting words in Greek. The air swirled around them in a sudden, powerful rush until she pointed her wand directly at someone in the dark mob. With all the inconsistent flashes of light, Alex saw either silhouettes or brief glimpses of color depending on when he blinked, but he caught sight of Molly’s target as her spell blasted a man with a sub-machinegun off his feet.

The shooter fell onto his back near two others who caught Alex’s eye. One of the Light knelt on the floor, waving his arms in circular motions. Evelyn crouched behind him with her hands on his shoulders. Fire trailed in the wake of the man’s hands, creating a large circle in the air that seemed to grow wider as his frenzied gestures continued. Alex couldn’t hear the words he shouted, but the fiery circle came to rest on the floor, seeming to follow a normal path dictated by gravity…and then nothing in the circle obeyed normal physics at all.

The first demon to come through the unnatural hole in the floor rose on broad wings sprouting from his back. His face was taken up mostly by a grin of countless sharp teeth with no lips to cover them. A pair of blades rested in his hands, though the sharp talon at the end of his tail and the claws on his fingertips suggested he didn’t need swords to be deadly. He hovered in the air looking for targets while more monsters emerged.

A stockier demon leaped out of the hole in an arc, his body tucked in tight and his little wings seeming to be for show rather than effect. He landed at the edge and unfolded himself with a roar from his ugly snout. Then Alex saw a red forearm the size of a bathtub hook over the edge of the fiery portal, followed by a second hand of matching enormity.

Gunfire continued. So did flashes of sorcery. Hector’s shotgun boomed as the much bigger demon’s head emerged, sending a burst of sparks across its ugly crimson skull. The monster roared in pain and anger, its skin showing a dozen ugly bloody cuts, but it hardly seemed deterred. A blast of lightning struck its shoulder, seeming to hurt and anger it further, but the thing kept climbing.

“Can you shut that hole or get rid of it somehow?” Alex asked.

Onyx seemed to be casting some sort of spell away from the fight, perhaps to protect one of the other smaller groups staying clear. “I can try, but not if whoever made it keeps holding it open,” she answered. “I’d need to get close, too.”

The flying demon swooped down at its first target. The brawler dove into the scrum. Alex still couldn’t make out much given the flashing lights and the shadows of bodies in combat, but he heard the screams. Grimacing, he reached over his shoulder to draw the gladius hidden behind his back under his jacket. “I’ll see what I can do,” he grunted before leaping over the table.