Hammer Down: Children of the Undying: Book 2 (32 page)

It had to be enough. Zel lifted the handheld. “Trip, disable our anti-demon signal.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Devindra. Wake up.”

Devi heard the voice, pleasant and carefully modulated, but she couldn’t respond. Her head pounded, and her leaden limbs refused all commands to move.

“The discomfort is in your head. Tell yourself that you feel better, and you will.”

As if it could be that easy. She willed her eyes open and blinked to focus. Sweeping stone arches formed a high ceiling over her, and she forgot her discomfort as she bolted upright.

The Temple.

Beside her, Cache moaned, creaky as a rusty door. “Dev?”

She almost sagged back to the floor with relief. Instead, she struggled to her feet and pulled Cache up beside her. “I think we did it.”

Cache swayed, then shook herself like a giant cat, blinking away confusion. “Christ. I feel worse than I did when I almost died.”

The guardian stood before them, his sword once again balanced tip-down against the floor with his hands on the pommel. “You did die, and were reborn. Worthy. Your genetic code has been added to the records. The secrets of the Templars are yours to access, when and as you will.”

There was only one thing she wanted to know—the answer she’d been sent to seek. “How do we send them back? The demons?”

“First you must understand your own history.” He turned both hands palm up, though eerily enough, his sword continued to balance perfectly on its tip. “Celestials.” He lifted one hand. “Undying.” The other. “You call them wings and skins. They come from the same world, but they are not the same creatures. They’ve been crossing between worlds for generations, mingling their bloodlines with that of humanity. It altered the balance between worlds so gradually that no one realized what was happening until the last pure human died.”

“You’re talking about the Fall.” It seemed inconceivable that a single moment could make such a difference. “They no longer have to be summoned, I know. But if they can come here freely, why did Aton talk as though they can’t go home again?”

“Before the…” The man hesitated, then seemed to adapt their word. “
Fall
. Before the veil weakened, undying could only cross the barrier when ordered. Summoned. Then the last human died, enabling both sets of creatures to cross the barrier at will.”

And that was when they’d coordinated and attacked.
One mighty blow against the humans,
Devi thought.

“Yes,” he confirmed, as though she’d spoken aloud. “Too many crossings in too short a time upset the balance once more. The barrier snapped back into place, trapping those who had crossed in both directions.”

Devi ran a hand through her hair. “So where do the summoners fit in?”

“In its normal state, the barrier is navigable only by undying who have been commanded to cross by a child of the Choir, or by the Choir themselves.”

Cache grew impossibly pale. She’d been raised devoutly Catholic, and everything the AI was saying bordered on heresy. “Choir…like angels?”

“A subset of the celestials.” His voice gentled, as if reacting to Cache’s clear distress. “We have written extensive histories to separate myth and mythology from fact, and you are welcome to peruse those at your leisure. For now, it is only important that you understand that the Choir have the power to command their own kind, as well as the undying. Mated with humans, the Choir produce what you call summoners.”

Like Juliet. “How much Choir blood does a human need in order to summon?”

“Twenty-five to thirty percent. To safely control what has been summoned, forty percent is best.”

Devi wondered how much Juliet had, then remembered that Cache didn’t even know about her. So much had happened, too fast, and she had no hope of processing it. “I need to get back so I can talk to Zel and Aton. You said Cache and I can access the archives whenever we want?”

The guardian nodded, returning his hands to his sword. “Of course. But I assumed you wanted to know the answer to your question?”

She had, before he’d started rambling about things more likely to break her head than not. “The answer seemed to be a bit more complicated than I anticipated.”

A tiny smile. “Perhaps. You want to reclaim your world from the undying and the celestials?”

“Is it possible?”

“You cannot send them home, but you can defeat them.” He waved his arm in a sweeping gesture and the room spun in a gut-wrenching blur. The walls turned into streaks of color, then jolted to an abrupt halt.

They stood in the center of a vast library. The guardian’s tunic and sword were gone, replaced by nondescript brown robes. “When you come here in the future, this is what you will find. Our library.” He strode to a large, sturdy table and dropped his hand to a heavy, leather-bound book. “And this. The original
Book of Summoning
. This is what the Templars fight to protect. In the hands of a daughter or son of the Choir, this book can help turn the tide of battle.”

It made sense that only a summoner could banish the demons from their realm, but the rest of it… Devi glanced at Cache, who looked just as confused as she felt. “The battle against humans, or something between the wi—the celestials and the undying?”

“All of it.” His fingers caressed the cover with a devotion that seemed odd in an artificial intelligence, but this was clearly his purpose. “With this book, you can do what has never been done before. Summon the Choir to take up their flaming swords and lead humanity’s armies against the undying.”

“Aton won’t be happy to hear that.” It was an understatement, but it was all she could force through numb lips.

The guardian tilted his head. “Aton made his choice. He fights for humanity. He fights for his son. Perhaps it is time you joined them.”

“Fight?” Devi took a step and fell as a jolt shook her, the gut-tugging sensation of dropping out of the network.

Hands framed her face, small hands, trying to hold her still. “Tanner, she’s waking up.”

“
Finally
. Boss, you okay?”

Her disconnection had been disorienting, and it took her a moment to center herself and focus on Juliet and Tanner. “Where’s Zel?”

Tanner’s jaw tightened. “We’re in the middle of a goddamned war. Nicollet launched a full-scale attack.”

She struggled upright and winced when a sharp bolt of pain splintered through her chest. “Christ, I feel like I got kicked.”

“CPR.” Juliet brushed her blonde hair back with a shaking hand. “They almost lost you on the way here.”

“Here?” She recognized the interior of the trailer, but they could be anywhere. “Rochester?”

“Just outside.” The voice came from the end of the trailer, where the halfblood who’d bonded himself to Juliet crouched, one of her largest guns held easily in competent hands. “Zel ordered me to stay here, but he’s joined the fight. So have all the demons who were holding us.”

Anger and fear bloomed, warring for dominance. “Are you supposed to protect me?”

His gaze jumped to Juliet, quick but telling, before he looked away. “Yes.”

“Then get me a gun. We’re going out there.” She wasn’t sure if he would leave his new bondmate—if he even
could
—so she added, “We’re all going. This is our home now, no matter for how long. We fight.”

Tanner’s face split into a wide, ruthless grin. “Ruiz? Break out the good stuff. Time to show these folks how it’s done.”

She returned the grin with something akin to relief. “Way ahead of you. Jai and I loaded a whole footlocker full of the best shit we could find.”

Devi took the rifle Jai passed to her and checked it automatically as Tanner did the same. The pain in her chest had already faded to a bruised sort of ache, nothing she couldn’t fight through.

There were things Tanner and Juliet didn’t know, that no one else knew, that would blur the lines of what they all believed. Of their conceptions of demon and human, righteous and evil. This could be their only clear, clean fight for a while, the last one where they didn’t have to stop and question what to do.

They only had to protect what was theirs, and the people they knew and loved.

In all his life, Zel had never imagined there’d come a time when he fought beside a demon against humans.

One
demon, because Aton had deployed his men to flank the enemy, putting them far away from the residents of Rochester. In the chaos of battle, Zel couldn’t trust unfamiliar demons to tell one human from another, and he wasn’t willing to risk losing any people to miscommunication.

Even now the feel of the fight was changing as Nicollet’s soldiers began to falter under a small but devastating strike at the back of their lines. It made it easier for Zel to cut a path through the fighting with Aton at his back.

He found Drake first. The halfblood roared as he swung the flat of his blade, knocking aside the barrel of a rifle. He followed through the motion with a spin and drove the point of his sword into the human’s chest.

Blood ran, rousing an answering swell of primal satisfaction. Guns were useful, but coldly unsatisfying. His darker half reveled in the terror he inspired when he cut through a swath of high-tech weapons wielding naked steel. “Drake, report!”

The warrior didn’t hesitate, and he kept fighting as he answered. “They were coming on stronger a little while ago. A couple of platoons, maybe a whole fucking company. I thought they might overrun us, but they’re weakening.”

“Because there are demons disrupting their lines. Demons fighting for us.” Gravel crunched to his left, and Zel peered around the corner of the old parking garage to see four human soldiers edging along the wall. One burst of semi-automatic fire from the gun he’d grabbed from Ruiz on the way from the truck sent them scrambling back behind a concrete pillar.

A messy, chaotic way to fight a war, but he imagined Nicollet had never intended this to
be
a real fight.

“If they have demons at their backs, it won’t be long before they break and run.”

Not long at all. No soldier would risk being touched by a demon when it would mean summary exile from his home and life, even if he survived. Humanity’s rules were too strict, and just this once it would work in Zel’s favor.

Or that’s what he thought, until he heard the first explosion.

“Fuck.” Drake knocked two attackers off their feet and cocked his head. “Sounds like they’re looking for another way in.”

Holding the line wouldn’t mean a damn thing if it was the wrong line. Zel pivoted and shot toward the sound of the second explosion, blood turning to rage-laced fire when he caught a glimpse of smoke curling up from a plain brick building with chipped plaster siding.

It was an ugly, uninteresting building filled with spare bedding and row after row of refurbished washing machines. Unimportant tactically, unless you knew what sat two stories beneath it—a sprawling warren of rooms three times the size of the structure itself.

The nursery.

The
children
.

His boots crunched over rough gravel as he shot past the side of the building and out into the open, vaguely aware that Drake was only a few paces behind, an anger building inside him that matched Zel’s own.

The main attacking force had already begun to break, but pockets of fighting remained. Zel hopped a curb and lifted his gun as a Nicollet soldier rushed to intercept them. His finger squeezed down on the trigger before he’d decided to fire, one bullet between the eyes.

His attacker hit the ground and Zel jumped over him, his heart lurching painfully when a familiar battle cry rose on the other side of the brick building.

Jai. Who was supposed to be watching Devi, damn it, and if he’d left her unprotected—

Zel spilled around the corner and nearly slammed into Ruiz, who was expertly reloading a high-tech scattershot rifle. When she looked up, she jerked her head toward the dusty hole in the faded red brick. “Go. She went in already.”

She. Devi.

Triumph that she was safely out of the network lasted until he scrambled over the rubble and caught the sound of fighting drifting up from below. The narrow hallways closed around him as he slammed through a door hard enough to take it off the hinges, then jumped six stairs to the landing between floors. “
Devi!
”

A man tipped over the railing and tumbled down the stairwell. A moment later, Devi peered up, her face streaked with dust and blood. “Zel, look out!”

A gun went off behind him, so loud he hit the ground and wasn’t sure if he’d been struck. Not until plaster exploded from the wall a half-foot behind where his head had been. Zel rolled and came up to face a hard-eyed soldier already lifting his gun again while a second hopped the final two stairs.

A harsh, inhuman cry split the air, and Aton sprang down over the railing, his blade ready. He landed on the second soldier, driving him to the floor. With one sweep of his arm, he cut the man’s throat.

Blood splattered the walls. Time slowed, too many heartbeats passing in the time it took the gun leveled at Zel’s head to spin away. Basic, gut instinct on the soldier’s behalf, a reaction to the soul-deep terror of having a demon at his unprotected back.

Aton made it only halfway to his feet before the thunder of a discharging weapon shredded the air.

Shredded his body.

He hit the floor in pieces, and the world snapped back around Zel in too-clear focus. Explosions above. Hoarse shouts below. Aton’s rattling breath as he bled, his body so broken no miracle could restore it.

The Nicollet soldier started to turn, and Zel lunged, bearing him to the floor so hard that his knee crushed the man’s spine. A quick twist cracked his neck, and Zel snatched up the gun and scrambled over the blood-slicked floor to Aton’s side. “Devi, we need a medic—”

“Hush,” Aton rasped. One dark eye stared up at him, glazed with a pain no human or halfblood would have survived. His hand groped across the floor, fingers leaving red smears on concrete as he dragged them through the pool of his blood. “There’s not enough time. Devindra…”

“The medic, Aton.” Her words were low and firm, and she wrapped her fingers around his bloody hand. “Let us do that much. You have to.”