A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) (12 page)

“I have noted that you are each very devoted to the others on your team. And
you are even now trying to help a world fix their mistake. Can you not
understand my devotion to my family? Or if you would not help them, would you
not defeat the Wolf to stop the demon attacks and save many other lives?”

Liv and Jordan exchanged a glance. He turned to Elachai. “When you put it
that way…”

“What do you want, exactly?” Liv asked.

“Your help. Convince your team to go to the Demon World—”

“Hell,” Liv said flatly.

“Hell,” Elachai agreed, “and defeat the Wolf. And release my family,” he
finished in a small voice.

Liv turned to Jordan. “Would stopping their leader stop the rest of the
demons?”

“Maybe. It certainly might derail any conquest plans they have. I mean,
we’ve never had this kind of trouble from them before.”

“Woolfe is…an ambitious leader,” Elachai said.

Jordan asked, “How do we defeat them?”

Elachai slumped slightly. “I do not know. That is why I need you.”

“Do you know anything?” Liv asked. “Where are they? What are their numbers?”

“They are many thousands. But the Wolf is the one you need concern yourself
with. He keeps my family with him in his capital city. I do not know where it
is in relation to your world, but I have come here to Desolatia from that
city.”

“Are there any identifying features in…Desolatia…to let us know where you
were?” Jordan asked.

“There is a large rock formation near a bog, where some greenery exists. It
is the only place I have ever seen animals; there are some tiny swimming things
in the salt pond below.”

“The rock looks like a tiger if you see it from the west?” Jordan asked.

Elachai looked bewildered. “Tiger?”

Jordan looked to Liv for help. “It’s a sort of…big cat, orange and black
stripes.”

Elachai brightened. “Yes, and it appears to have a tail, which is the path
to the top.”

“I know exactly where that is,” Jordan said.

Liv looked sideways at him. “You do?”

He nodded. “I came here a lot when I was younger.”

She frowned at him. With all the places in the multiverse that a Traveler
could go, why would he pick here? “Why?”

His gaze on hers sharpened. “I didn’t have backup like you. If I got into
trouble, I had to have somewhere to escape to. This was it.”

She felt a little ashamed that she had pressed him. Ben had always been her
backup, and she forgot that other Travelers had grown up in this all alone. “Sorry.
So where’s this rock?”

“Teotihuacán.”

Liv turned back to Elachai. “Where in the city?”

“You will help me?”

Jordan said, “We’ll bring it to our leader.”

“My thanks. The Wolf’s palace is the only stone building in his city. You
could not miss it.”

“We’ll see what we can do.”

Elachai bowed. “You, Jordan, may Travel at will.”

He dissolved into swirling atoms and vanished.

Liv turned to Jordan. “We need to get back to base, now.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he just pushed us again. Both of us. I need the data on what our
brains are doing. Now.”

“What about the others? We left them in the middle of a firestorm,
remember?”

“Of course I remember, Jordan! But this is important.” She bit her lip. What
if their team was in trouble? “They could Travel out if they had to. They’re
fine.”

Jordan relaxed. “Probably. Con wouldn’t let anything happen. There isn’t
much we could do anyway. Bullets had no effect against those jets.”

“So here’s what we do. Get to Home World, radio for immediate pickup, then
jump back to Demon Rift to pitch in there.”

“You got it.”

“On mark.” Liv counted down, relieved to see Jordan fly apart when she said
mark. She reached for the void and disappeared.

*
         
*
         
*

“This is Dr. Greenwood of T36 calling for immediate pickup. ASAP.”

“Acknowledged. Is this an emergency evac?”

Liv glanced at Jordan, who gave her a one-shouldered shrug. “Yes, but no
danger on landing. Just hurry.”

“Acknowledged. Out.”

*
         
*
         
*

Liv arrived in Demon Rift already moving, in case the demon attack was still
ongoing. It wasn’t. Although smoke danced in ballet pirouettes and flames
flickered through wrecked plane windows like Jack-o-lantern fire, there were no
demons in sight.

She tapped Jordan’s arm and pointed to a pile of refuse that would provide
some cover. There, they took a minute to inspect their surroundings. Crashed
and smoking jet wrecks hulked all around, but there was no movement beyond the
dancing smoke and fire.

Liv tried the radio. “Connor, come in, this is Liv.”

“Go ahead.”

Relief washed through her. She’d been worried they’d ditched to another
world, or worse, been injured. “What’s your situation?”

“Secure.”

“Then we need to get back to base now.”

“Explain.”

“Not over the radio. Jordan and I need testing. Immediately.”

There was a brief silence before Connor answered. “Affirmative. Home World
now. We’ll meet you there.”

“Thanks, Connor.”

“Out.”

*
         
*
         
*

Liv and Jordan arrived in a field filled with morning sunlight. Within
seconds, their locators marked the rest of their team’s location as they
arrived in Home World. “They’re only about half a mile away,” Liv said.

Her radio staticked to life. “Liv? Jordan?”

“We’re here.”

“We’re coming to you.”

“Acknowledged.”

Liv and Jordan sat in the long grass—wheat, Liv thought, although she
wasn’t very sure about that.

Jordan said with studied casualness, “So what was that back there?”

“Back where?”

“In Safe World.”

Her stomach turned to a little ball of lead, but she turned to look at him,
staring fixedly at the blade of grass he was stripping the seed head from. “You’ll
have to be a little more specific, Jordan.”

He continued stripping the grass stem as if he hadn’t heard her, then
suddenly turned and looked right at her. In the slanting golden sunlight, his
eyes seemed to glow with blue flame. “I mean, why did you come after me?”

Liv sat back, startled. She had thought he was going to make her talk about
the Wolf. “What are you talking about? You’re my partner. Of course I came
after you.”

“I wasn’t in danger. I could have Traveled out at any time.”

“As it turns out, no, you couldn’t.”

“Oh. Right.” He dropped his eyes back to his grass stem. “Well, it was
dangerous for you.”

“And you! That’s the job. We’re in danger every day. That doesn’t mean we
don’t stand behind one another.”

Jordan nodded. “The job. Absolutely.”

Liv felt obscurely like she’d failed some kind of test, but she couldn’t
figure out how it had gone wrong. She felt like something monstrous was approaching,
and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see what the world looked like after she’d
seen what made those gargantuan stomping footsteps.

Connor stepped out of the trees edging the field, the rest of their team
tramping through the knee-high grass after him.

“Hey guys!” Ben called with a wave. “Thanks for skipping out on us during a
demon air raid!”

Liv glared. “It wasn’t Jordan’s fault, and I had to follow.” She cut her
eyes to Connor, waiting to see if this excuse was going to be accepted. Maybe
they were really facing disciplinary action.

Connor’s face was impassive, glacier-green eyes icy as usual. “We saw enough
to know you had no choice. Either of you.”

Jordan said, “Con, Elachai gave us some intel.”

“Why?”

Jordan launched into the story, but before he could finish, the SM appeared
overhead. They trooped in, and Jordan finished his report.

Connor sat quietly in thought. Probably weighing the pros and cons of going
to Hell, Liv thought. If she didn’t get them tested soon, there’d be no way to
figure out what Elachai had done. But if she had that data, she might actually
get her machine working, and they’d stand a chance. Mentally, she pushed the
jet to go faster.

“So what happened to you guys?” Jordan asked.

Liv perked up to listen to the answer.

“We were attacked,” Ben said with a perfectly straight face. “By demons.”

Liv rolled her eyes at him, and he grinned.

“Gin and I saw Jordan disappear and you follow. We were too far away,
obviously, and there was no way to follow you.”

Gin said, “Which we may not have been able to do anyway, because the instant
you guys left, the demons started firing on us.”

Liv looked from one to the other. “I didn’t think those aircraft had
weapons.”

Ben smiled grimly. “They do now. So anyway, we had to get under cover to
avoid all the building chunks that were coming down on top of us. Connor and
Trent tried to protect the laser, but they had no choice but to leave it when
half a building façade fell down on them.”

Liv nearly leapt out of her seat. “The laser wasn’t damaged, was it?”

“Hang on, I’m getting there,” Ben said, clearly enjoying the suspense he was
creating. “We tried firing on the jets—”

“We’d have had more luck throwing water balloons,” Gin groused.

“Right.” Ben shot a frown at her. She smiled and batted her eyes innocently.

Trent said, “Some of the Rifters were killed by the demon fire and the rock
fall. The others got mad and started chucking rocks up at the jets, which gave
me an idea.”

“He threw a star right through one of their engine intakes,” Gin said.

“The jet came down,” Ben said, “and the Rifters got the idea. Those intakes
sucked in rocks and choked.”

Trent grinned. “Explosively.”

“So what about the Rift?” Liv asked.

Ben put up a hand. “I’m getting there. Gin saw the laser was fully charged
at that point—”

“And I
pressed
the
button
,” she said with melodramatically
wide eyes.

“And?” Liv asked.

Gin sat back. “And the laser shot a green beam at the Rift. The color swirl
froze, and it started to swell.”

Trent said, “I was sure it was going to explode, rip into another world,
something horrible.”

“’Course you were, Nagano.” Ben threw a grin in Trent’s direction. “That’s
why you’re the group optimist.”

“But then the Rift shrank,” Gin said. “It took, like, thirty seconds. And it
was totally silent. Very weird.”

“Try cool. The demons who were still in the air took off across the city
when they saw they were trapped,” Ben said. “The Rifters went after them.”

“But you didn’t?” Jordan asked.

Ben shook his head. “Mallet asked us not to. They wanted to finish it.”

“So they’re all dead?” Liv asked.

“Well…” Ben shifted in his seat.

“No,” Connor said.

Liv hadn’t even thought he was listening, he was so clearly deep in his own
head.

Ben glanced at Connor to see if he was going to continue the story and
apparently decided he wasn’t. “As we were standing there, one of the downed
jets’ fuselages blew open.”

“And a demon threw itself out.” Gin scowled at the memory.

“It survived a jet crash?” Liv asked.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ben said, “it looked like a victim of the zombie apocalypse.
Its wings were burned down to bare bone, it was completely covered with soot,
or maybe its skin was that burned.”

“So they can be hurt, at least,” Liv said.

“It still moved creepy-fast.” Gin shuddered. “We didn’t even get a chance to
fire on it before it scuttled around the building and out of sight.”

“But you just left them there.” Jordan glared at Connor.

Connor lifted his head and met Jordan’s eyes with icy impassiveness. “Yes,
Jordan. Because we did our job. The Rift is closed. Even if all the demons
survived, they can’t get reinforcements, can’t get weapons. They can’t leave.
Those people had better weapons technology than we do, and they have access to
their own weapons again now. We can’t kill the demons. Maybe they can. All they
have to do is hunt them down.”

Jordan reluctantly accepted Connor’s logic.

“So then what?” Liv asked.

Ben looked steadily at her. “Then we had to stand there and wait for you
guys to come back. You could have been anywhere, and there was no way to find
you.”

She should have known he’d been worried. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

The jet flew into darkness and touched down silently.

Liv was getting sick of bursting into Medical demanding testing, but Dr.
Brown had refused to give her more tubes so she could draw her own blood again.
She wanted to “examine her patient.” It had to be done. “Come on, Jordan, let’s
run.”

*
         
*
         
*

After another joyful trip through Medical, Liv and Jordan debriefed with
General Mace and the rest of T36.

They finished their respective reports, and Connor said, “Sir? I know that
you said you wouldn’t send anyone to Hell, but I think we need to mount an
offensive here.”

Liv nodded. “We have the intel from Elachai about how to get to the Wolf’s
city.”

General Mace was already shaking his head. “Sorry, Commander Bryant. You
have no way to defend yourselves against demons. As far as we know, they can’t
be killed. What good could you possibly do?”

“We could rescue Elachai’s family,” Jordan said.

“Or be captured and held there yourselves,” General Mace countered. “Request
denied.”

“What about the Wolf?” Liv asked in a quiet voice.

The general’s voice was gentle. “Liv, I know that you think you have some
unfinished business there, but
our
Wolf is dead. You helped put him away. Case closed. It might be a decent thing
to do in the cosmic scheme, but Dr. Jameson has proved time and again that if
you remove one tyrannical dictator, another will surface.”