I looked at the demon with my palm open flat.
A small frown crossed his face. “Right, your mom. Never mind.” He ran his hand over his head and pushed forward.
My shoulder was crushed in an iron grip. I turned to find Zola at my side.
“Keep your head boy. That fire in your gut may help with some arts, but it’ll bite you in the ass.”
She patted my shoulder gently and moved to walk beside Edgar. They exchanged hushed words before Edgar nodded and broke off to the left with Mike. She moved back between me and Sam and whispered again.
“Edgar, Vik, and Mike are sweeping the top floor. You, Foster, and Sam take the bottom floor, mirror their movements.”
“And Dad?” Sam asked with a glance at our father.
“With me,” Zola said as she tucked my staff into her cloak at an angle across her back.
Sam nodded.
Dad jammed a bomb lance into his cannon and scooted off into the shadows behind Zola. They didn’t wait for us as we reached the first courtyard, instead moving quickly ahead of us to the right.
“Wait up,” I said to Sam in the quiet. I pointed up the escalator as Mike and Edgar reached the top. Vik was already out of sight. Mike tried the gates on the first few shops, to no avail.
“Who could’ve locked this place down?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s too quiet,” Foster said as he unsheathed his sword.
The squeak from Sam’s shoe a moment later sounded like a gunshot. “It’s so quiet.”
I nodded as I moved underneath our companions on the second floor. “Try the gates on that side.”
We tried them all between the first courtyard and the center courtyard. Nothing. Every silver- grated wall was locked down, from the clothing stores to the artists’ gallery. We slid around and hugged the left wall, bunching together again as the carousel loomed into view, dominating the area around us. A shadow jumped across the top of the double-decker ride and vanished, leaving a chill down my spine.
“What was that?” I asked.
“On it,” Foster said as he took wing. He landed on the carousel top a moment later with a light thump. His head snapped back and forth before slowly strafing around the top. He pointed toward Mike and Edgar above us.
I glanced up at them as Mike leaned over the railing.
Mike was frowning. “Demon,” was all he said.
I took a deep breath and started to nod. The lights flickered and the color seemed to leech out of the mall, leaving a gray pallor over the entire scene as the sulfuric stench of brimstone washed over us. I felt a small vibration in the floor beneath my feet.
“Belphegor,” Mike hissed from above us.
“I’m a little behind on my demonology,” I hissed back, narrowly keeping my voice from shaking.
Sam grabbed my arm. “The room’s getting darker. What the hell is happening?”
The tiles beside me cracked open as Mike leapt down from the second story. “It’s not an illusion. He’s trying to open a gate.”
“What?” I said, all thoughts of whispering gone as I tried to imagine a hellgate opening in the middle of suburbia.
“Foster!” Mike said. “Find him!”
The fairy flashed up to the ceiling, sweeping across the hollows of the skylights. “Left, now!” He shouted.
Mike’s weapon burst into life, exploding into a fiery war hammer. The flaming head swept in an overhand arc, dispelling the shadows around it. The large floor tiles shattered when the hammer struck. Laughter rumbled out from the shadowy murk floating toward us. It started low and rose into the stuttering giggles of a young girl.
“Oh, brother mine.” The voice was a discordant harmony, a deep growl and a sinewy girl’s soprano. It felt like a metal file on my teeth.
“Belphegor,” Mike growled. “You are not my brother.” He swung the hammer in a lateral strike and the darkening murk flew backwards with another jarring laugh.
I raised my Sight and saw … nothing. Barely a red smear in a sea of darkness. It told me where the demon was, but nothing more.
I started as Edgar pulled Sam away from me. “Call Vicky, now,” he whispered, and there was an undeniable authority to his words.
I nodded and backpedaled, crouching behind a kiosk. I could see the cloud and Mike’s hammer striking in the dim gray, but everything else was blurring into blackness.
At Vicky’s request, I’d been practicing calling the bear. The two were inseparable, the Guardian and his … his what? His student? I frowned and closed my eyes, latching my necromancy onto the nearest ley line. I sent my consciousness racing east, hunting for my friends. I was aware of the passing landmarks, the hospital, another mall, and finally Forest Park exploded into my senses.
Happy’s head rose the instant he felt my presence.
“Chesterfield Mall. Bring Vicky,” was all I voiced before the gray cloud began choking my connection to the ley line.
We come,
he said as my vision of his black-and-white fur faded to nothing.
I tried to release the ley line, expecting the tile and stone of the mall to come back into focus, but it didn’t. The power buzzing across me felt like honey, stretching and adhering as I tried to release it. Everything started to dim, my vision narrowing as the blue lines of power began to pulse with a sickly red glow. Panic clawed at the back of my throat and tried to overcome my senses. Something was pulling on my necromancy. I could feel it distending my aura, and I had no control of it.
I screamed as the power turned into knives, like alcohol poured over a fresh wound. My body burned and seared as fire cut into me. My first instinct was a soulart, but I couldn’t focus well enough to think of one that would help. My next thought was an aural blade. My right hand curled into a fist and I forced my aura through the circle my thumb and forefinger made. A dim red blade sprang to life. It was short and inconsistent, but it was still a blade. I ground my teeth together and hacked at the pulsing web of red ley lines, scraping them from my arms and legs. The power fractured and fell away, brittle as a long-dead branch.
I gasped as my consciousness fully snapped back into my own body. The lights were brighter now, but changed. A red glow pulsed at the heart of the cloud, close to the carousel. The creature within was growing, no longer an obscured smear of red.
Belphegor walked upright, on human legs, but thin snake-like whips pulsed and writhed where his arms should have been. He was nude from the waist down, and there was no doubt it was a he. His skin was blacker than the pages of a burned book. I shivered as I looked at that face, for there was no true face. A row of metallic teeth gleamed in his elongated head where a man’s nose would have been. Two glowing red coals sat in the void of his eyes.
“Come, Smith,” Belphegor growled. “Let me taste your hammer.” His arms snapped skyward, nearly reaching the top of the double-decker carousel.
Sam moved forward and Mike put his hand out. “No, this is my fight.” Much more quietly, he said, “Find your mother.”
“Can you match him?” Edgar asked, teetering on the balls of his feet.
Mike’s lack of an answer was all I needed to hear. Christ, he was just buying us time.
“Foster, Vik!” Edgar said. “Warn Dimitry.”
The fairy saluted and flashed into his smaller size, following Vik’s blur of motion.
Mike strode out to meet Belphegor in the pulsing cloud of darkness. Mike the demon, the Smith of legend and lore, a man I was proud to call my friend.
“Kick his ass!” I said as I grabbed Sam’s arm and pulled her toward the food court off to our left.
“I’ll watch for Ezekiel,” Edgar said. A moment later he added, “As we look for your mother, of course.”
“Will you step in if that fight gets out of hand?” Sam asked as we began to move faster.
Edgar nodded. “Yes, but Belphegor is powerful.”
“How powerful?” I asked.
“Very.”
As if on cue, Belphegor struck. He moved fast, near-vampiric speeds dragging the cloud with him as he moved. His right arm rolled out to the side and forward, a mass of reptilian tentacles spiraling out towards Mike. Mike dove to the left and a scythe of fire leapt from his arms. A small pile of Belphegor’s tentacles fell off, but his left arm was already in motion. I could see the grimace on Mike’s face as the mass of Belphegor’s arm hit him squarely in the chest. He flew into a bubble tea stand closer to us, shattering glass and plywood as he landed. The hammer fell from his grip and went dark. Belphegor took a step back and inspected his burned tentacles.
“Mike!” Sam said.
He pulled himself up and glared at her. “Get your ass moving! I can’t keep this up all night.”
I ran over to him while Belphegor was still distracted. “Vicky’s coming.”
He grunted and nodded, his hammer springing into burning life once more as he scooped it up and charged into the cloud. Tentacles and flames flew as the demons started hacking away at each other in a nauseating blur of motion.
Next thing I knew I was over Sam’s shoulder and we shot up the unmoving escalator.
“Someone else is up here,” she said as she set me down.
I stumbled a couple steps and nodded. I didn’t need to raise my Sight.
“Necromancers,” I said. I could feel the waves and the pulsing pressure of the dead against my senses. “They have something with them.”
“Yeah, a demon opening a bloody hellgate,” Sam said.
I nodded, but I also noticed my vision was clearer with Mike drawing the attention of the other demon. I prayed he was slowing that thing down. The pulsing red and black presence of the demon was far less pronounced as we moved across the second floor. The pepperbox was in my hand without so much as a second thought.
I was looking at Sam when it happened. Saw Edgar’s mouth open in what I can only assume was a curse as my vision was turned into a searing ball of red and orange light that sent a blast of scorched air past us. The earth shook and I fell, knowing I was screaming, but hearing nothing but a basso roar I believed was nothing less than the end of the world.
The entire southern wing of the mall vanished in one enormous explosion. Deafening doesn’t cover it. Neither does terrifying. Fire and rubble and shrapnel came at us faster than I could think. I rolled over, throwing myself on top of Sam to protect her, only later realizing how stupid that was. She clutched me and buried her face in my shoulder until the crash of debris and the roar of the fireball subsided.
“What was that?” Sam screamed into my ear.
I could feel her shaking as we stood up, brushing away dust and chunks of the old mall. My hands showed cuts and blood. My back stung where something’d hit it. I winced and stared at the gun still in my hand, surprised I’d held on.
“Not magic,” I said as I stared at the gaping maw of the inferno before us. A series of small collapses and gouts of flame rose from the rubble.
“Fucking hell, what are they thinking?” Edgar said as he stepped up beside us. A gash across his forehead was bleeding badly.
“You’re cut,” I said.
“I’ll be fine. The necromancers?”
I took a shaky breath and pushed my own necromancy out before nodding and pointing toward the west wing by Macy’s.
“Madness, this is madness,” Edgar said as he snapped his wrist forward and a piercing ball of light spun on his palm. “We kill on sight.”
I nodded and followed Sam along the edge of the glass railing, as far as we could get from the jagged cliff of steel and concrete hanging over what used to be the southern wing. The dying sun lit the sky between columns of smoke and dust. And death. I stumbled as the deaths hit me, falling to a knee as a hundred voices screamed at once.
“Damian!” Sam said as she hauled me up from the floor.
“Christ, so many,” I whispered. “Wing wasn’t empty.”
Some part of me registered Edgar staring at the ruined stretch of shops. I heard him curse and then he was propping me up with Sam.
Almost there.
I stumbled again as Happy’s voice echoed in my head, unbidden. “How in the—”
“What?” Sam asked as she started moving faster.
“Happy, he just spoke to me, but I didn’t make the connection.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Edgar said. “Focus, get through this.”
Edgar was right. I put it out of my mind and clamped down on my necromancy, focusing on everything but my overwhelmed senses. Then I noticed the surge of power around us. I stopped and Edgar and Sam let go. I focused on the surges of necromancy around us again. It didn’t take much to follow those black-and-white bands of power back to the cluster of zombies waiting in ambush.
“There!” I shouted as I leveled the pepperbox at the shadowy stairwell beside Macy’s.
Edgar didn’t fuck around. He flicked his wrist and the small ball of light in his palm rocketed into the stairwell. I saw seven or eight unnervingly fresh corpses staring at us, eyes blank, waiting for the command of the man screaming behind them. The ball of light flashed out like a supernova. It was there, then huge, and then gone. I could see the ghost of the necromancer in the charred hall, still screaming, his aura a slowly churning ribbon of black and white.
I lowered my gun and glanced at Edgar.
“Move,” was all he said, his voice strained.
And we moved.
Sam reached the gate first. She ripped it out of the wall and it fell in a clatter of steel and drywall.
“I can smell her,” she said as she stared intently into the darkness beyond.
“Mom?” I asked.
Sam nodded as she closed her eyes. They flew open a moment later and Sam vanished. She reappeared by the railing in the center of the store. Edgar and I ran after her.
Someone screamed and it cut me to the bone. Mom.
Sam leapt the railing as we reached it. I watched as her coat snapped in the air once before a necromancer’s bones shattered when she landed on him. Sam curled up around him and jammed her fangs into his neck. A violent twist tore his head off. She held on to the gory thing by its jaw as its cloaked body fell silent.
“Behind you!” Edgar said.
Three men moved up behind her. Shots rang out. Sam jerked backwards, grabbing her waist before she fell to a knee. I didn’t think. I jumped. Three stories straight down. The air felt dead around me, my resolve iron. Three feet from one of the bastards I screamed,
“Impadda!”
He had time to raise his eyes before he broke like a deer on the front of a semi.