Demon Accords 6: Forced Ascent (34 page)

“Yes, yes it did,” I answered.  “So the center of this big street pentagram, designed deliberately or not, in the city where more deals have been made with the devil than even LA, will open with a gateway.  Can we have cars lined up, and will the police let us get there?” 

“The cars are already waiting and we’ll actually have a police escort,” Tanya said.

“Ah, what?” I asked.  “Police escort?”

“It’s kind of like the Pennsylvania troopers back there.  People aren’t dumb, Chris.  They know their best bet is you,” she said.

“
Us. 
Their best bet is
us
,” I said, waving at the whole group.  She smiled and nodded.  The jet was lifting off, so we all either quieted down for the ride or got busy with minor details.

The return trip was maybe even a bit faster and before ‘Sos and I could finish emptying the galley’s food supply, we were on the ground and taxiing up to our vehicles.  Sure enough, two police cars and two motorcycle units were waiting to whisk us through the streets to a hotel on 16
^th
Street whose name I missed because I was too busy staring at the mass of official cars and SUVs around its entrance.  Wondering at our reception, I stepped out of the Toyota Tahoe pickup truck as ‘Sos jumped down from the truck’s bed.  Then I breathed a tiny breath of relief as I recognized the white-haired man moving forward to greet me, a young teen girl by his side.

“Hi, Nathan. What brings you to this part of town?” I greeted Director Stewart.  He walked briskly despite a slight limp.  His leg had been bitten by a wereverine in Alaska during the same attack that had resulted in his assistant, Adine, becoming infected as well.  Adine’s father was a tribal shaman and had used his skills to try and arrest the virus.  He had been successful with Nathan, but not his own daughter.  The result was that Adine was a wereverine, but she was stable with the help of Nathan, and
he
was the only individual I had ever met or heard of who was living with the LV virus inside him but had never changed or died from the bite.  I think a bond had been formed between them, and it allowed her to keep from going rogue and him from Changing. 

“This young lady here.  Ariel, meet Chris Gordon.  Chris, this is Ariel, whom I might have mentioned to you a time or two,” Stewart said.  The young, brown-haired girl beside him shot him a glance before looking back at me and accepting my hand for a shake. 

“Ah, Ariel, it’s nice to meet you.  This is Awasos, Tanya, Lydia, Stacia, Nika, and Arkady,” I said, listing them as they arrived behind me.  Ariel looked younger than sixteen, slender, and maybe a bit below average height.  She had enormous brown eyes that were her best feature, large pools the color of milk chocolate.  She was dressed in jeans, calf-high boots, and a leather jacket.  Eyes wide, she was visibly overawed by our group and kept looking at the ground—or maybe at all the designer shoes the women were wearing—mumbling quiet little hellos with each shake.

“So what’s happening inside?” I asked Nathan.

“There’s an open Gate in the floor of the lobby.  We’re going to close it with our new tech.  Nothing’s come through yet,” he said.

Someone screamed inside the hotel, a full auto weapon fired two short bursts then suddenly stopped, and a wereverine screeched in anger.  I was inside the door and standing in the lobby before Nathan had processed the sounds.

A six-foot-tall monster of fur and muscle wearing Adine Benally’s torn clothes flew past me and slammed into the registration desk of the hotel.  A uniformed body lay in several parts in a gigantic pool of blood, and a six-legged insectile horror was climbing toward a trio of technicians clustered around a squat high-tech-looking piece of machinery with a digital panel that showed numbers counting down. 

Grim whipped a braided lash of twisted aura and vampire energy around the bug demon’s thorax and yanked it back. It had a vaguely antlike body, but the head was human-shaped and the front two legs had hands with claws instead of just claws. My aura had little chance of hurting the demon while it was wearing its own form, but the mix of vampire energies, a churning unstable blend of Cling, Push, and Pull varieties twisted, tore, and crushed its black and red flesh.  The demon screamed in anger and pain, spinning in mid-air to bring its six clawed feet around to meet me.  I wasn’t there.  The beauty of a skillfully used whip is that the wielder gets to control what goes where.  I got to step aside while the demon was still turning around, letting its sulfurous form flash by and getting a wicked left hook into the back of its neck as it went by.

The demon reached the end of my energy whip and the lash tightened against its form as I Posted in place, the two braided energies cutting deep into Hell flesh.  One of its six limbs was completely severed, falling twitching and kicking to the floor of the lobby.

I released my Post and started toward the violently screeching monster, my glance to the side finding the rest of my team lined up and watching. 

Even Grim makes mistakes.  Taking my eyes off the demon was one.  Not Clinging or Posting to the floor was number two.  With a final scream, the monster shot sideways across the room faster than a middle-aged vampire and dove into the Gate.  That was okay, but the energy leash I had wrapped around it and left connected to my body wasn’t.  My feet left the ground as the whip yanked.  Spinning through the air, Grim simultaneously reached out with power, attempting to Push or Pull me away from the hole I was now over while releasing the aural energy whip.  Nothing connected.  It was like I was in a different place, that spot directly over the Hell gate, a place where the physics of this world ceased and another’s began.  The demon disappeared through the inky blackness of the gate and I hung for a brief moment above it, just a tiny millisecond.  Long enough to see Tanya’s horrified expression and see them all begin to move.  To see the red digital numbers on Stewart’s machine go from double digits to singles.

Then the hole rushed up at me and the blackness sucked me in, closing over my head and sealing off all the faces coming my way and all light disappeared as I fell into Hell.

Chapter 29

Red.  Everything was lit by reddish light.  That’s my first impression of Hell.  That and heat.

Like Arizona… in July… times ten.  I shot out of the hole upside down, my feet pointed at the churning, blood-hued sky, my hair brushing the side of the gate as I shot up.  Flipping forward was reflex, so I landed on my feet, not my head, sulfurous dust billowing up around my boots.

The once six-legged demon, now five, was screeching and scurrying at the same time, heading out of the roofless, broken-walled structure I found myself in.  I was in Hell, and Hell appeared to be modeled after Earth, just with less maintenance. Because who needs a ceiling to the second floor or a roof, or furniture, or even complete walls?  The doorway was doorless and the bug demon shot outside, moving pretty fast on five legs.  It made it out the doorframe and into what should be the street when a flash of red and black snatched it up and its awful screeching ceased at the same moment that a harsh ripping, tearing sound announced a pattering rain of black blood.

No roof—check.  Front door bad—check.  Temperature hot as Hell—check.  Time to leave—yup.  At least it was only me here, I thought.

Then a furry black and tan wolf shot out the black gate and landed on all four feet beside me.  Before I could blink, five more figures came flashing up out of the pentagonal opening at the center of the pentagram that had been burned deep into the blackened concrete of the floor.

The whole damn team had just literally followed me to Hell.  Right through the gate—the gate that was suddenly shrinking, like a puddle of oil draining away.  The grungy concrete that replaced it looked like it had been there forever.  The last drop of black sucked itself into the concrete and there was nothing left but pitted cement in the middle of a pentagram.  Oracle’s experimental gate closer had worked.  Fucking fantastic.

“Damn,” I said softly, looking at each of my companions.  They had landed combat ready, weapons in hand and looking around wildly.

“This is Hell?” Lydia asked, clearly disappointed.

“The economy must be down… no money for decorators,” Stacia answered. 

“Shhhhhh,” I said.  “Big, big demon outside the door,” I whispered, pointing at the splatters of black demon blood around the doorframe.  I could feel it outside the door, waiting.

Everyone nodded, looking from me to the door.  It was quiet outside.  Till something screamed in the distance.  A building-shaking roar answered it from just outside and something thundered away with ground-shaking steps.

“You followed me?” I asked into the stretch of quiet that descended after the giant demon had left.

“Ah, yeah, no shit, Captain Obvious,” Lydia said. 

Tanya just shrugged. “Of course.  Wouldn’t you have followed one of us?”

“Oh.  Yeah, I guess that’s what would of happened,” I said.

“You guess?” Lydia asked, eyebrows raising.

“He has never thought about it, but when he does, the answer is obvious, Lydia,” Nika said over her shoulder, most of her attention on watching her side of the room.

“Okay, here we are, in Hell, which is as hot as itself by the way, and our passage home is gone.  What now, fearless leaders?” Stacia asked.

“We find another gate,” I said, having had all of about seven seconds longer than the rest of them to think about it.  “It’s Halloween—Samhain—the easiest night of the year to open gates between the worlds.  This looks like a rough proxy for the hotel, exploded and bombed out, but still Hell’s version.  I think we should look outside and see if the rest of Washington is copied here,” I said.

“Because if our world is replicated here—in Retro Apocalypse décor—then another gate might present itself?” Lydia asked.

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

“Holy shit, it happened.  Chris thinking—the day is finally here,” Lydia quipped, her eyes darting around the room, her heart not really into the insult.

Arkady moved silently across the floor, pausing by one wall to scoop up a piece of broken mirror and then to the door.  He used the shard of reflective glass to check either side of the doorway and when he was satisfied, he poked his head out for a quick glance all around, then pulled back inside.

A moment later, he was back in front of us, reporting.

“Structures and buildings roughly anomalous with our Washington, but all ruins.  No sign of any demons,” he said.

“There are a few, scattered about,” I said.  The others all looked at me, questioning.

“What?  I can feel them,” I said.  Lydia and Tanya shared a glance.

“Where do you feel them, Chris?” Lydia asked, serious as… well, where we were.  “In your head or… elsewhere?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but sudden understanding came to me.  My blood—they were worried about my tainted blood.  I analyzed the feelings I was getting.  Normally if a demon is nearby, I feel it in my head like a pressure against my aura.  Like a camper’s tarp with a rock in the middle weighing it down.  That was definitely present now, but the knowledge of where they were was coming from elsewhere.  Like I could feel them on my skin, the way the heat of a campfire is warm on your face and arms while the back of your neck is cold from the cool night air.  The skin on my left arm, biceps area, was telling me a large demon was directly through the wall by the door but getting farther away.  The skin on the back of my right leg was feeling the
heat
of a minor demon in the building directly behind us, and my right shoulder could sense a small demon approaching it from another direction.

“Um, both?” I said.  The bleak look on their faces caused me to rush out an explanation of what I was feeling.

“Why is that important?” Stacia asked.

“They’re worried about my demon-tainted blood… here… in Hell,” I said.

“What?  That you’ll go over to the red side?” she asked.  I nodded.

She snorted.  “Ain’t happening,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.

“You can’t know that,” Lydia said.

“I can.  There’s no way
I’m
going to let him slide that far and I wouldn’t think
you
would either, unless you’re giving up,” Stacia said, directing most of her words to Tanya.  An instant growl thrummed the air as Tanya eyed the werewolf with murder in her eyes.  Stacia just stared back at her, arms still folded.

“She’s right, Tanya.  Between the two of you, each with your own bond…” Nika began but cut off when Tanya whipped around to glare at her.  “Well it’s the truth, even if it hurts,” Nika finished.  “You have your Chosen bond and she has… something else.  Some freaky thing, and not as strong, but it’s there nonetheless.  The two of you should be able to ground him.”

“Okay, I’ve got some Hell issues and you two can keep me from flipping out.  Let’s move on. 
Where
do we look for the next gate?” I asked, trying to ignore the glaring.

Nika jumped on my opening.  “When I was researching the occult aspects of D.C. and found out about that street pentagram, there was another manmade object that all the conspiracy types talked about as well.”

“What?  What was it?” Lydia demanded impatiently.

Nika turned and pointed at the carved pentagram on the floor.  “What is the functional part of that gate?” she asked.