Blind Salvage (15 page)

D
aniels, my nemesis
from London, stood slack-jawed in front of an open pit that looked to go straight into the heart of the mountain. Or, more accurately, the gods-be-damned big ass, half awake volcano. A deep rotten egg, gag-inducing, tongue-coating scent of sulfur lay heavy in the air. Being deep in the mud up top must have kept the smell from us. Because there was no way we could miss it where we stood.

“Couldn’t you have picked a place that didn’t smell like goblin shit? Seriously.” I sidled toward Calliope, huddled in the corner. Not that I didn’t want to run Daniels through, but my main objective was the foal, bringing her home to her parents and freeing Eve. Priorities, and Daniels was low on the list right now.

She lifted her hands, her voice deepening as she intoned something I’d heard before. “It is the heart of the mountains that we will prick, and the land will know Orion’s fury for being condemned to the seventh veil. He shall cleanse the land with fire for his coming.”

Wait … that was what Agent Valley had asked us about, before we’d left London. I was an idiot. Why hadn’t I listened? Too bloody ready to run away, to hide from the prophecies … and now I was paying the price, as would Calliope if I didn’t get her out of here.

Daniels smiled at us, her eyes wild with the power she’d been given. We had to take her out. Possession might seem like a good idea at first, a demon giving their vessel fantastic abilities, but it wouldn’t be long before Daniels found out that she’d gotten the raw end of the deal.

Liam lunged for her first, and with a flick of her hand, she wove her magic around him and lifted him into the air. I hit her hard, tackling her to the ground, but she didn’t release Liam. She kept talking as if we were having a pleasant conversation.

I moved to cover her hands with mine, take away her magic and let Liam go.

“Rylee don’t!” He yelled and I looked up. Daniels had shifted him over the middle of the pit. If I used my Immunity to block her magic … .

“FUCK!” I scrambled off Daniels, and she stood back up, brushing off her brown cloak.

“Rylee, you are the last person I expected to see here. I take it Milly did not slow you down at the castle? Orion said that she was weakening, but I’d hoped to use her a little longer.”

Fuck, shit, damn it all to hell and back. Of course it was Milly. Yet, if she had laid the trap and Giselle was right, then Milly had tried to help us too. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, she’d been telling the truth at the coffee shop. But that was for another time, when we weren’t dealing with a psycho druid, a pit of lava, and a demon. Like some sort of twisted riddle, I had to get us all out of here. Right now, the only thing I could think about was keeping the ex-druid talking.

“Daniels, how did you get away from the Beast?”

She paused, her left eye twitching as she smiled at me. “I killed him. My master gave me the strength and now I cannot be stopped.”

Liam shook his head. “Impossible.”

“I don’t think you should take that tone with me, wolf. You will be far easier for my master to kill than the Beast was.” Her voice was off, and it took me a moment to realize what was different about her.

“What happened to your accent?” I stepped sideways so I could get a better look at her face.

Her whole body gave a shiver and Liam dropped a few inches. My heart lurched upward. “Daniels, I’ll give you what you want, just don’t drop him.”

She turned to face me and when she did, she seemed to inadvertently bring Liam with her. While he wasn’t out of danger, he was closer to the edge of the pit then he had been.

“I want your head on a pike on London bridge, I want you to suffer as I have suffered, to see your innards twisted around a stick and removed from your body inch by inch while you scream for mercy that will never come,” she whispered, her lips not moving in tandem with her words. Like a poorly dubbed old school Kung Fu movie. Freaky-ass demon possession.

And then she wasn’t really Daniels anymore, or at least her voice wasn’t.

“Tracker.” Male, and a lower octave that she should have been able to hit, the voice rumbled out of her mouth. “Do you remember me?”

I blinked at her, and a cold sweat popped out all over my body. A memory buried deep flickered to life.

The barest whisper of a snake, Milly, and my first understanding of what I was. And then it was gone as if it had never been. I shook my head. “No. But I know who you are you nasty motherfucking piece of shit. You’re the demon I’m going to wipe off the face of the world.”

“Ah, I see your foul, unimaginative mouth hasn’t improved since last we spoke,” the voice said, and Daniels stepped toward me, and then snapped her fingers without turning around. Liam dropped like a stone, down below the lip of the pit.

“NO!” I launched myself at Daniels, and when she flicked a hand at me, her magic slid off. Only it wasn’t magic the way Daniels had. It was a heavy thump of power that grasped me, and the snowflake on my chest burned, pushing the power aside.

A snarl twisted her features as the demon’s taint slid away from me. What the hell had just happened? Didn’t matter, I would figure it out later.

He roared a wordless bellow as I body slammed Daniels to the ground for a second time. The back of her head connected with the hard rock and I thought she would be out cold.

No such luck.

She rolled and pinned me below her with a strength that was far beyond her own. And it wasn’t Daniels’ eyes that stared down at me. No, these eyes were not the muddy brown I recalled. A swirling dark red fog covered the brown irises up, swallowed what was left of Daniels. I’d never seen it, but I knew it from Giselle’s teachings what I was looking at. Daniels had been well and truly possessed. There was no coming back from it, no magical ceremony that would save her from Orion. He had taken her in one fell swoop. Which, considering she had been the one tangling with him, she deserved, in my eyes.

Once a demon had you, that was it. Say good night to everything you ever knew and loved.

“You, I let you live once. Because I didn’t think you could be the one to stand between me and this world. There were others and I wiped them out one by one. Yet here you are; though I must say, your attempt is, at best, pitiful.” His strength was beyond anything I could fight against, and he held me easily. He leaned in closer, eyes wide. “You don’t even know what you truly are, do you? Even I know where I come from, you don’t even have that.”

“Go fuck a troll, you ass hat. You aren’t going to win.”

I tried to flip him off me, bucking my hips, straining against his hands with everything I had. It wasn’t enough. He was too strong. I couldn’t reach my weapons, and Liam … gods, let him have been able to reach the edge of the pit.

Orion lowered his face to mine, his voice frosting over me, stilling my efforts. “You will belong to me; I will have to thank Milly. She tried to do me a disservice, sending the Hoarfrost demon to build your immunity to a demon’s taint, but then she so kindly sends you here to me. Truly, she is a sly one.”

His words hit me and the past seemed to swallow me up. The black coven of witches and the Hoarfrost demon. Milly had engineered it all? So that I would be immune to a demon that I would one day have to kill … .

“Now you will witness firsthand my rebirth into this world. And then I will eat your soul.”

Okay, panic wasn’t even close to what spun up through me. Blind with the fear that he could actually do what he said he could, I flailed, all my training going out the window. Demons were bad enough, but a soul-eater … motherfucking pus buckets. I’d read about them, in the black-skinned book. They were at the top of the demon food chain, for good reason.

This was who Milly was bound to.

This was who I was supposed to stop.

A demon—who when he was only just possessing a body—held me down without breaking a sweat. If he came through the veils, physically came through, all his powers would be intact. I had to stop him now. This was the only chance I had.

He threw his head back, laughing, the sound bouncing off the walls. “Oh, please do struggle, I love to play rough.” He jerked me up and then slammed my upper body back into the ground.

Three times he used me like an oversized fly swatter. I curled my head to my chest, to keep my skull from being cracked open wide, but it was the best I could do. Even so, the warm spread of blood trickled down the back of my neck, as he twisted me to the side, catching me off guard, smashing me into a protruding rock.

A soft nicker floated across to me. I turned my head to see Calliope struggling to her feet, one front leg hanging at a bad angle, snapped at the top of her black sock. Her violet eyes gazed at me, her would-be rescuer. Hope flared between her and I, the belief that I would save her as real and solid as the mountain below us.

Fuck, if I couldn’t get him off me, I wasn’t going to be saving anyone.

Orion turned his head to follow my gaze. “Ah, the innocent. They are made to suffer. They are made to be taken, and broken, and used.”

“Not as long as we’re around.” Liam’s hand wrapped around Orion’s neck and yanked him off me.

Orion’s howl was cut short as Liam snapped his neck, the crunch of bone the most heartwarming sound I’d ever heard. With a casual thrust of his arm, Liam tossed the body away from him, and bent over me.

“You okay?”

I reached up, my hand hovering over an ugly burn on his forearms, the skin black and weeping. “I’m fine, but—”

He grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet. “It’s all good. I’ve had worse frying bacon.”

Calliope let out a sharp, blasting neigh, what could only be the equivalent of a scream.

Orion wasn’t done yet. Head flopped to the side, wobbling with each step, he stumbled toward the filly, mumbling under his breath. A spell cloaked in the darkness of the demon’s power, I could feel it gathering around us. The lava bubbled upward, the sulfurous air quickly choking out what oxygen there was.

No time for insults, much as I wanted to hurl one of the Triplets’ epithets at Orion. I pulled a sword free, ran and leapt in the air. As I came down, I used my weight to leverage the bite of the blade, slicing through Orion’s stolen body from his left shoulder, through his torso, and out through the lower right side of his ribs.

He gasped, red swirling eyes turning to me, filled with hatred.

“Yeah, I feel the same about you, bitch.” I kicked his body with my foot, the two halves sliding apart to the ground.

To be sure, I bent, grabbed a still twitching leg and hauled it to the edge of the pit. With a heave, I threw the lower half in, the lava swallowing up the legs in two gulping burps of bubbles.

Liam followed my lead and held up the upper half of the body. Though Orion still gazed at us, he seemed to have lost any ability to actually control the body.

“Any last words?” I smiled at him, feeling pretty damn good. Prophecies fulfilled, we’d killed Orion. I could rest easy; the foal was alive, Eve would be fine.

Life was looking up. Please, gods, let it be.

“This isn’t over.” The words were slurred, hard to hear, and strangely didn’t surprise me. Not from a demon.

“Pitiful last words,” Liam said as he threw what was left of Daniels and Orion into the pit. I blinked as the body slid below, eaten by the lava in seconds.

From the pocket inside my jacket, I pulled out the small brown bag Milly had given me. I opened it and poured the spiked demon stone into my hand.

“Lava should do the trick, don’t you think?” I held it up, the spikes pressing into the flesh of my palm. I rolled it to get a better look at it, wondered if I would ever know if Milly really had been enthralled.

Liam bumped my hand and the demon stone fell, landing with a hiss and a gulp as thick lava swallowed it up.

We stared down, the heat curling up around us, drying the sticky mud on our clothes. Thirty seconds passed and Liam stepped back, but I continued to stare, my throat tightening up.

“Does that seem higher than before?” I pointed at the lava as it freaking well surged upward. We fell back, the blast of heat singeing my eyelashes and eyebrows.

“Okay, time to go.” I ran for Calliope. There was no way to set her leg; she’d have to be carried. “Liam!”

“I’ll do it.” The voice was not Liam’s. I looked up at the lip of the overhang, a grey-skinned ogre staring down at us. “You don’t really have a choice, Tracker. You’re going to have to trust me.”

From behind him came a voice I did recognize. Dox.

“Rylee, just let him help!”

Liam scooped up the foal. “I’ll carry her as far as I can.” She rested her chin on his shoulder, trust shining through the threads I still held onto. Keeping pace with Liam, we ran for the stairs, bolting up them as the lava spilled over the lip of the pit, eating up the ground where we’d stood only moments before.

The grey ogre didn’t ask, just took Calliope from Liam’s arms, and she didn’t fight either of them. Fatigue washed through her and I finally let her threads go. I didn’t need to feel that; I was tired enough as it was without her adding to it.

The grey-skinned ogre spoke to Liam. “We have to move fast, and you may have to carry the Tracker.”