The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) (9 page)

Down the hall, Sam cried out. That was my first real hope that my friend was alive. I plunged deeper into the inferno toward Sam’s office and Key’s trap.

Key knew what he was doing.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Not then.

Chapter 15

As I approached Sam’s office, black oily smoke rolled above me and forced me to crouch. Sweat ran down my forehead and into my eyes as the temperature rose. In a few minutes, I’d have to crawl out of Castille. To survive, I’d have to hold my breath a long time. The blinding smoke would force me to find my way to safety by feel and memory.

Of course, I was headed in the wrong direction for safety. It occurred to me then that if I had taken up Key on his offer, I’d be heading back to Iowa to await D-Day with Mama. I’m no coward. However, I can see why cowardice is such an attractive option.

Sam was on her back, stretched across her desk. She was bound at her hands and feet with thick green rope. My cowardly thoughts evaporated in the heat of rage. Then all thoughts left my head when the battle demon rose out of the smoke behind me and bashed the back of my head with the pommel of his sword.

Lesson 121: In sword fighting, using the pommel as a hammer is the
Mordstreich technique. It is also called the murder blow — thunder strike, if you’re fancy. You can tell by the fact that I’m sharing that nugget of trivia that Key didn’t kill me. He might have made me dumber with that hit, but I didn’t drop dead. I dropped dazed.

Lesson 122: Here’s the one advantage every singer in the Choir Invisible possesses when in combat with demons: they’re sadists. They enjoy keeping us alive so they can torture us longer before the death stroke. They like to tenderize their meat. So…um…yay?

There is a state the best fighters attain in the midst of battle. It is called the Empty Mind. When you fight in this rare state of consciousness, you don’t think. You flow. You attack. You parry. You do everything you are supposed to do but you do not think about it. A fight to the death can be a moving meditation in which every movement slows. There is no gap between opportunity and action, move and countermove.

That’s optimum. I was working at sub-optimum.

As I fell to my knees, I fell into the other kind of empty mind. I went brainless. Barely gripping my weapon, I lunged feebly at Key. He laughed as he batted the point of my blade away easily.

The monster pulled me up by my hair and wrenched my sword from my grasp. Effortlessly, he threw it like a javelin. It stuck in Sam’s desk, a few inches below her head. Key could have killed her if he wanted to. He was making the agony last. (See Lesson 122 above.)

I was like a child fighting a grown man, if the grown man is armored, has muscles on top of muscles and antlers.

When a monster pulls you into the air by your hair, it’s quite a waker-upper. I pulled a blade from the sheath at my forearm. Key shook me up and down as he pulled it from my hand. Then the monster backhanded me across the face as I attempted to pull the second blade.

The point of my short blade scratched the finish of his gorget, but the steel made no progress into the demon’s throat.

He threw me to the floor and grabbed my arm as I tried for the short, serrated knife hidden beneath my belt. Key wrenched my arm straight and, with one blow, broke my left forearm so badly it was curved.

The elbow is much easier to break, but I think he was making a point about how helpless I was. I screamed as he turned me toward him. Then I was on my back. He pinned me to the floor by my throat.

The burning office was a furnace. I heard Sam whimper. The black smoke seeped behind the masks, choking me. The demon smiled.
 

No matter who you are, I hope you never see a demon smile.

The roof exploded above us. Key took the brunt of the blast. The hole in the roof acted like a chimney and, though the flames leapt higher, the smoke rose from the room.

I think I managed a smile. I was sure I was saved. The Choir had arrived. Or NYPD’s best SWAT was bursting through. I would have settled for a bunch of hunky firefighters armed only with a firehose. I was confident that, at any moment, I’d be saved by a dozen blessed sword singers or Key would retreat in a hail of bullets and teargas. A blast of water peeling off the monster’s face at 500 pounds of pressure per square inch would have been satisfactory, too.

Choir, cops or firefighters. Whatever. I was saved.

It was a nice thought while it lasted. There was no deus ex machina cavalry riding to the rescue on armored horse that night.

Above us, a strange, white light shone down. I saw a dozen faces peering back. Some faces were grotesque, split by rows of teeth filed to points. Others were smooth, somber faces with high cheekbones, eerie gold eyes and short horns that poked out from long dark hair. Those ones looked eerily close to human. Maybe even beautiful.

It was a rift, a window to Ra. I stared through an interdimensional hole into another world. It was my first glimpse of the Darkness Visible in their natural habitat. They didn’t look like the battle demons nor were they the red monsters that had attacked the Keep. They weren’t as large as the big blue winged demons, Gog and Magog. Some of the little creatures had bald heads, scarred and bloated. Their skin was translucent in places and where it was more solid, it was gray.

The shock of reality ripping apart almost made me forget the pain searing through my arm. To me, it was slightly more shocking than suddenly finding yourself in zero gravity, staring down at Earth from the International Space Station.

“The little ones. Are they children?” I whispered. They seemed small enough. I wondered dimly if I was part of a sick field trip for demon elementary school kids.

“Yes. Their blood is poisoned. They are among the unlucky.” Key stood. “The others are part of Ba’al’s council. It is they for whom soldiers like me were bred to fight. You call us monsters and demons, but we are no worse than your warriors. We do what we do because that is war.”

The monster reached for me and pulled me to my feet by my broken arm. I shrieked again and collapsed. He caught me and scooped me up into his arms with surprising gentleness.

He looked up at the rift. “Live or die?”

The circle of faces watching me through the portal now looked to each other. One of the little ones laughed. At least, I think it was laughter. To approximate the sound, run your bicycle chain backward as fast as you can. The little bastard looked pretty happy to me, anyway.

My head ached. My arm throbbed. The blades in my boots were too far away. The mace in my pocket may as well have been on the moon.

I was beginning to pass out, so it wasn’t altogether brave of me to say, “Get on with it.” I’d imagined writing more books about the Choir, documenting our triumphs and educating noobs to the ways of interdimensional warfare with psychotic creatures. But, in that moment, I was indifferent about their decision. Dying would have been a relief and saved me a lot of typing and bad reviews. Death is like going to sleep if you’ve been battered enough in life.

Key knelt and slammed me into the floor again. I hardly cared about my death, but I was very concerned about how much longer Key would make the pain last.

The monster squeezed my throat. One quick thrust of a blade would do the job, but he was choking me in the slowest way possible. Pretty stupid to kill anyone slow when you’re doing the deed in a burning building. Like I said, they’re sadists.

Hint: remember? When administering a choke, think about cutting off blood to the brain, not air to the lungs.

I heard sirens, but I was sure they were coming too late. I heard no angels sing, which I hadn’t really expected but would have welcomed. I felt too tired to fight. However, when the air went away, a survival instinct outside my conscious control kicked in and I clawed at Key’s arm uselessly.

I looked to Sam to save my life again. She was still tied up, too busy writhing in the heat and choking on smoke.

When the cavalry came to my aid, it wasn’t the savior I wanted.

“Hold!” a man’s voice commanded.

Key looked up into the window on the alien world and snarled at the interruption. But he let go.

When I finished gasping for air, I looked up, too. Then I snarled, too. The man who stopped Key from killing me was the man who murdered the love of my life. It was Peter Smythe, the man Mama referred to as, “That man.”

I’d called him Daddy once, before he abandoned us and became a founder of the Choir. More important, he was a traitor to the Choir and everything human.

Yeah, the human versus demon war is all very soap operatic. However, the TV soaps never had so much blood and swordplay.

“Tammy?” my father called. “Be wise. Know when to quit. You’ve already lost, so surrender.
Please!
”

I raised my unbroken arm and flipped him my middle finger. “I am Iowa, Castrator of Demons. I am sworn to defend my home — ”

“As I’m sworn to escape mine,” Key said.

“And I’m supposed to defend the innocent.”

Key nodded and smiled. “So you shall.”

I was about to say something about his lack of innocence when the monster smashed me across my left temple with his fist.

The fires went out and the cold came, at least for me.

After a long rest that, for all I knew, might have been several centuries, I opened my right eye. The left one didn’t want to open just yet. Pinpoint stars moved above while red, white and blue lights flashed and strobed through the looming silhouettes of trees. Snowflakes delivered cool kisses.

Far away, I heard shouts. Someone bellowed orders in the night. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized the tone.

My head rolled back and, through upside down tombstones, I saw the ruins of Castille beneath towers of flames and roiling smoke. The inferno and the fire engines seemed to be the only lights in all of New York.

I was dragged by the feet through the graveyard behind Castille toward the church next door. The snow slipping under my shirt and up my back chilled and woke me. “S-sam?”

“Ha! No.” It was Key.

Burning alive was my greatest fear. Now I worried the monster planned my second-worst death: burying me alive. Burning or burying, no one’s alive for long, but dying can
feel
like a very long time.

In moments like these, a list of regrets runs through your head. You wish you’d eaten more cheesecake, traveled more and worked less. You wish you’d made different choices, read more widely and gone to more theater. You wish you had more time and hadn’t wasted time on bad television.

With the end so near, I wished I’d read all of Kurt Vonnegut’s books. I’d come close, but I hadn’t really given
Galapagos
a chance and abandoned the book too soon. I wished I’d slept with more people. I regretted not surrendering. I never learned when to quit.

I wished I’d killed my father.
 

Chapter 16

The monster picked me up and kept walking. He was almost gentle but his breath was fetid. “Warrior,” Key said. “You call us the Darkness Visible. Why?” He tossed a nod toward the police and firefighters behind us. “They never suspected I was there, so maybe your Choir Invisible should call us invisible, too.”

“If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.” My good arm was pinned between my body and his chest. If not for that, I would have tried to poke out his eyes.

The monster squeezed until I gasped in pain.

“Okay!”

He eased his grip, but just enough for me to talk.

“We call ourselves the Choir Invisible. We may die but we leave a better world — ”

He squeezed again, a warning. “Do not tell me what I already know.”

“I liked you better when you were a harmless old dead lady strapped to a gurney in the back of my bus.”

The monster chuckled. “In another life, I would enjoy you. Speak to my question.”

“You’re evil, stupid! I mean, hey, stupid. You’re evil! You’re so evil, you’re like…
cartoon
evil. Do you know what that is?”

“I am informed of your world. I have to be. Soon we will share it.”

“You eat people, man. You aren’t going to be welcome in the apartment next door.”

“You live with animals. Unless you share your world, that is how we shall live with you. You imagine we hate you and you aren’t all wrong…but it’s envy, more than hate, that drives us.”

“What?”

“You’ve fallen for Victor Fuentes’ propaganda. You do not know your enemy.”

I tried to struggle but my breath came too short, too fast. Escape was a useless hope.

“If the Ra get into our world, you’ll treat us like we treat cattle. It’ll be baby burgers, breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Key’s laughter sounded metallic. “Perhaps, if you’re lucky, you will make an entertaining pet, Iowa. Once your spirit is broken, of course.”

“Won’t happen.”

“Said bravely, but meaningless. Even now, you allow me to carry you like a child.”

“You’re like…what? Seven feet tall and I’m…not. What’s the plan? You gonna take me home and feed me kibble?” I was actually kind of hoping for that. Monster or not, I assumed he had to sleep sometime. Then I’d make my move.

“We are not the Darkness Visible,” Key said. “We are the Ra.”

“Then why do you work so hard to keep yourselves a secret? You’re as undercover as we are.”

“Strategies are best when secret, little one. We won’t hide our existence for much longer.”

“What are you doing? What is Peter Smythe doing in Ra?”

Key ignored my question. “He ordered me to spare you and so I did. I suspect you will both regret such false mercy. You fought well tonight, considering the circumstances. I saw what you did for your friend. Well done. I would have killed him myself, but I was busy with Samantha Biggs and the fire, of course.”

Getting praise from Key for killing Clyde made me tear up. If Key liked what I’d done, it had to be wrong.

“There is no dishonor in this.” He nodded at my broken arm. “Go, and heal. Someday soon you’ll need to be able to fight and you won’t be fighting my kind. You’ll be fighting what you once defended.”