Brimstone Angels (44 page)

“No,” Lorcan said. “Being dominated is like a dream. You’re watching yourself act. You’re aware, you just can’t do a thing about it. If Havi doesn’t remember, she was possessed.” He regarded Farideh soberly. “Which means Rohini is even more dangerous than I previously supposed, and our problem is growing rapidly.”

Possessed
. Farideh kept the rod pointed at Lorcan, clinging tightly to it as if the implement were holding her up and not the other way around. Lorcan couldn’t hurt her under the amulet’s compulsion, but she could hurt him. She wanted to hurt him.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, and she wanted him to stumble, to lie, to give her more reasons not to trust him. She wanted to hurt him—some part of her wanted to
obliterate
him.

Give me a reason, she thought. Give me an excuse to reduce you to ashes and bones. Give me a reason to shove these stupid hopes aside and get rid of you before you hurt me again.

But then he sighed. “Normally, you
shouldn’t
. You know that and I know that, and I’m not foolish enough to pretend otherwise with that rod pointed at my heart.” There was no bravado, no threat, no wheedling, coaxing tone in his voice. “But this time, darling, if you don’t trust me you are going to die. Havilar is going to die. Mehen is certainly going to die.”

“You’re just repeating your threats,” she said. That was reason enough wasn’t it?

“Farideh,” he said. “Farideh, look at her. Look at the blood. Rohini did that. Rohini slaughtered an army in Havilar’s body and left her to answer for it. You know why she did that.”

“Stop it,” Farideh said, as Havilar—her brash, brave, reckless sister—started to shake again. She could not hold the rod on Lorcan and comfort Havilar. “Stop it.”

“Farideh, please,” he said. “Listen. That was supposed to be
you
. Why else put the rod in Havilar’s hand? Rohini took the wrong twin. My darling, you’re supposed to be dead, because we are both mixed into this now.”

Do not trust him, she thought. Do not.

“If she realizes you’re alive, she will make certain it’s not for long.” He shuddered. “Or worse. Much worse. You have to leave. You cannot get tied up in her plans. Let her think you’re dead.”

“What is she planning?” And how do I know you’re not a part of that plan too? she thought. Or some worse, greater plan?

How could she claim innocence if Lorcan held her reins?

“Get out of the street,” Lorcan pleaded. “I will tell you everything I know, just come out of the open. It’s not safe.”

Farideh shook her head. “Nowhere is safe with you.”

Lorcan started to retort but his eyes caught on something over her shoulder. “Shit and ashes.”

Farideh heard Havilar’s sharp intake of breath. Heard Brin’s whispered prayer. She turned back the way she and Havilar had come to see two creatures heading toward them, as unstoppable and imminent as a thunderstorm on the horizon.

T
HE CREATURES TOWERED OVER
F
ARIDEH ON HOOVED FEET THAT
threatened to crack the cobblestones. Their skin was red as hot irons, and their eyes were black as Lorcan’s. Their armor sucked in what remained of the light and their swords gleamed in the dim. Crowned by rows of cruel horns, one was whip-thin and red-haired, the other black-tressed, with a thick scar running down her throat and across her breastbone, down under the armor plate.

As Farideh stared—the splinters of seconds—they closed.

Lorcan grabbed hold of her arm, and in her terror and rage, Farideh started to draw up the powers to cast a spell—but even before she could, he had pulled her behind him and out of harm’s way. His eyes locked on the creatures.

“Go!” he said. “Run, darling, fast and far.”

Farideh wanted to ask what they were. She wanted to ask what they wanted. She wanted to call him out, to be suspicious of these sudden heroics that didn’t so much as agitate the amulet’s magic. But the only words that left her mouth were those that cast a bolt of fire that turned into a torrent of hellfire. It crashed against the raven-haired monster and splashed flames onto her sister.

Both flinched. Neither cried out as the flames burnt them.

The redhead sneered. “Rohini hasn’t caught your little pet yet?”

“How amusing,” the other said. “Won’t she be livid when we do it for her, Aornos?”

“Let’s bring her the head,” Aornos said.

Her sister’s cold black eyes flicked over Farideh. “No, no: the hands.”

Aornos chuckled. “Oh, Nemea, how clever.”

Lorcan reached back and pushed Farideh away. “Run, damn it.” He cast his own bolt of flames, but the devils closed in on him. And Farideh.

Fear held her reins now, a wild thing urging her to kick and strike and cast with abandon. But the devils were stronger, faster. Wilder. Their swords were graceful and quick, the lightning strikes of their relentless storm.

She saw the trail of blood along her arm before she felt the searing pain of the blade, and as she noticed it, the sword bit again slicing through the robe and the leather of her shirt and into her wounded hip. The nearer one grinned down at her, her black eyes cold and malevolent.

Lorcan was right, Farideh thought. I’m going to die.

She had forgotten, as the devils had in their fervor to kill Lorcan, that there were more than the two of them in this fight.

They hadn’t counted on Havilar, that blanched and shivering girl, to shake loose her shock, take up her glaive, and become a blur of metal and blood, her blade as good as her right hand.

Havilar dived across the courtyard, throwing herself behind the weight of the polearm. With a crack, the blade—aimed just so—split the Hell-forged armor of the black-haired devil standing over Farideh, and buried itself in her back. Nemea’s eyes widened as the blade plunged so deeply Farideh heard a rib bone snap. As swiftly as she’d struck, Havilar twisted, planting her foot on the back of the devil’s thigh, just above her knee. She yanked loose the glaive and buckled Nemea’s knee in one motion. Then she spun the glaive’s spike-capped end upward as Nemea fell and Aornos turned, and smashed it into the redhead’s unprotected nose and cheek. The strike was imperfect—the bone didn’t shatter as it had when she’d hit the Ashmadi cultist—but it startled Aornos and bloodied her nose with viscous, black fluids.

Nemea’s sword sliced toward Havilar’s knees. Havilar moved to block with the haft of the glaive—it will snap, Farideh thought, and then snap Havilar as well.

“
Assulam
!” The word flowed out of her mouth on a stream of foul magic that engulfed Nemea’s sword and shattered it into a cloud of rust.

Another cry overtook Farideh’s curse, a fierce, wordless war cry chased by the sound of a sword unsheathing. Brin. Brin, but his voice was no half-grown boy’s, but a voice buoyed by the force of a god. Farideh remembered him yelling in the forest as he attacked Lorcan, his pitiful war cry, all the more pitiful next to this towering bellow.

The devils froze—as if they did not know the sound, as if they did not know what was happening. Lorcan’s sword lashed out, slashing Aornos’s sword arm. She stood the pain well enough to parry his following strike, but Brin’s sword drove forward, sliding under her pauldron. Aornos shrieked and kicked backward, catching Brin’s legs and throwing him backward and across the cobbles. Brin rolled and came to his feet—

Nemea’s hoof slammed into Farideh like a charging bull, knocking her to the ground and pinning her by Farideh’s right shoulder. Nemea reached down and pulled Farideh’s short sword from her belt. She tested the weight of it with a sneer. No match, it seemed, for her shattered sword.

Match enough to take Farideh’s hands off.

The butt of Havilar’s glaive cracked across Nemea’s face, rocking her back onto her other foot long enough for Farideh to roll away. Enraged, the devil swung her shield out to knock Havilar back, but the tiefling was too quick. As she clambered to her feet, Farideh caught a glimpse of Havilar’s flushed face, concentration and unbridled eagerness warring in her features, before Farideh cast another of the shimmering bolts of energy into Nemea’s chest.

Swords clashed. Aornos pressed Lorcan back. He parried and blocked, his swordwork nearly as clean as the devil’s, but one glance at Aornos showed she was hardly making an effort. Lorcan, on the other hand, looked as if a gnat across his field of vision would break his concentration, make him slip, and kill him.

It would be easy, she thought. Call out his name, and he’d look over. Long enough for the devil to break his defense.

She could lose him. She could let the pact go.

Her chest squeezed and the powers of the Hells churned her stomach sick.

Aornos swung her sword into Lorcan’s, catching the blade on his guard. One swift, savage thrust and the force of her blade broke his grip. His sword clattered to the ground. Aornos bashed her shield into his chest and he fell, splayed out on the ground like a sacrifice. She raised her sword again.

There was no place for thought. Farideh shouted the words of a spell she’d used only once, when Lorcan had shown it to her some other dark night in some other crumbling town. Screamed them with everything left in her. The ground beneath Aornos turned molten and swallowed her hooves. Then the fire that should have leaped out of the ground like a fountain instead burst forth like a waking volcano.

Aornos’s screams pierced Farideh to her very marrow. Still she readied the next spell, the blast of energy that she’d first learned. When the fires fell away, she cast it, and the crackling light enveloped the devil. Her screams broke off and she collapsed in a heap.

Only for a moment though—the body suddenly burst into greasy flames and within seconds, the fire had devoured Aornos.

Farideh spared the slightest, most secretive glance at Lorcan as he pulled himself to his feet and snatched up his sword, before turning her rod toward the remaining devil. But she wasn’t needed.

Nemea collapsed across the broken cobbles with a noisy clatter and Havilar’s glaive planted in her ribs. She groaned once and burst into flames as Aornos before her had done.

Havilar wrenched her glaive free and planted it in the scorched and ruined cobbles.

“Devilslayer,” she said with relish. She looked over at Brin, who still held his bloodied sword in a shaking hand. “Are you going to be sick again?”

“No,” Brin said, looking gray. To his credit, he kept his dinner down. Havilar patted his back.

The square was quiet—alarmingly so after the clamor of the devils and the clash of weapons. There was only the soft patter of the drizzling rain, which served to mute things further and wash away the smells of blood and brimstone. If anyone had heard them, they’d stayed well away. Lorcan crept up beside her.

“What in the Hells were those?” Farideh demanded.

“Erinyes,” Lorcan said, his voice taut and clipped. “The archduchess’s enforcers.”

“Are there more?”

“Not now. They were only supposed to take me.” He shifted. “There will be more if we wait much longer.”

“We need to get out of the street.” She started to walk, but the light, tentative touch of Lorcan’s hand stopped her.

“You could have let her kill me,” he pointed out.

“I could have.”

He waited, agitated, as if he expected her to say more. “You’re not terribly skilled at being a cold-blooded killer, are you? First you can’t blow my head off, then you can’t even let someone else’s sword take me.”

“You’re right,” Farideh said. “We need to get out of the street.”

There had been a building between the square and the temple, not yet demolished and partly swallowed by the last creeping edge of a lava flow that had obliterated the nearby street. Silent as a winter night, and empty. Brin and Havilar followed her as she strode briskly toward it.

There was a gust of flapping wings, and Lorcan landed in front of her. “
Why
did you stop her?”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Afraid your ‘sword’ would be ruined?” he said.

Farideh paused and looked him in the eye. “I’m not like you.” She pressed past him and farther up the street. The amulet would still hold for a good part of an hour; let him rage at her all he liked.

But she heard nothing but footsteps as she reached the broken building.

They climbed over the vein of rock and in through a window. The stairs had long since rotted or burned away. Lorcan flew to the upper story and disappeared, while the other three helped one another climb the crumbling stones of the walls. The floor above was mostly intact, although it, like the whole building, leaned.

Brin led Havi over to the lowest corner of the floor where she finally admitted her ankle was hurting and the bloody patch growing on her sleeve was a deep cut on her arm.

Lorcan stood by the window, scanning the streets below. For all that had happened in the street, it gave her a kick of terror to see him
standing there, where Havi and Brin could see him—these two parts of her life weren’t meant to interact.

“You knew them,” she said.

“My sisters,” he said. “My half-sisters. Nemea and Aornos.”