Fiery Edge of Steel (A NOON ONYX NOVEL) (43 page)

But then, life and Luck are funny partners. I guess they give you the life they think you can handle, not the one you necessarily wanted. Deep down, I knew I was doing the right thing (there was no way I was going to allow a demon to continue preying on these people if I could prevent it) but that didn’t make what I was doing any less frightening.

We elected to enter the lower level through one of its largest openings. If the Angels were thinking along the same lines as me, it was because we all wanted our escape hatch to be as big as possible. Despite the fact that it was midsummer, the water in the moat was cold. As soon as I stepped into it, it rose to midcalf, completely covering my already soaked boots. As careful as we were, a certain amount of splashing was unavoidable. The opaque water made me uneasy. It was impossible to see what was in it. The changing patterns looked like a giant thumbprint, a whorl of swirling browns, coated with a shiny, reflective egg wash. Every foot or so, I stumbled over a fallen stone from the crumbling keep or a large river rock that the Blandjan’s current had probably washed into the moat during a flood. I sheathed Burr’s knife and ducked under the crumbling stone archway of the opening, gritting my teeth against the cold as the water level rose to my waist. Inside, the floor kept sloping downward. We were going to have to swim.

Once in, we all lit lights. After a deep focusing breath, I lit a fireball and was momentarily happy to see a well-controlled, flickering yellow fireball light in my hand. Rafe and Fara cast Angel light, which was more silver and steady than my flame. We used the light to take our first peek at the watery bowels of the Stone Pointe keep.

I wished I hadn’t had to look.

The walls were plastered, top to bottom, with huge skulls. Not human skulls—they were far too large for that. And yet, they had human features, not demon ones.
Giants,
I thought, pushing out into the water as I reached the end of the area within which I could stand.
They were giant skulls.
I kicked in the water with my boots, careful to keep my right hand, the one that held the fireball, above the surface. I gazed at the skulls—there were hundreds of them—with a sense of macabre wonder. And then it occurred to me that these walls weren’t the walls of subterranean catacombs, but rather were the walls of floors of the house that were once aboveground.
Huh.
Well, magic or no, I guess those ancient giants knew a thing or two about intimidation.
Nothing like receiving visitors in rooms decorated with the skulls of your conquered. Or the skulls of your loved ones. Either way . . .
I shuddered and my hand dipped beneath the surface of the water, extinguishing my light.

“Noon?” Rafe called. He was only a few feet behind me. I could see the angles in his face, all oddly lit by his silvery light.

“I’m all right,” I said, relighting the fireball. Every now and then (although it was odd when it happened), I found my fire comforting.
This
was one of those times.

The next three hundred seconds felt like three hundred years. Rafe, Fara, and I explored the flooded keep bottom, searching for any sign of the demon presence Rafe had sensed with his magic. His sense of it grew stronger the farther in we got, which made continuing that much harder. I knew this was supposed to be my job (tracking down errant demons, even if it meant crawling into their hidey-holes) but that didn’t make it any easier. Every instinct told me to turn around and start swimming
out
before it was too late.

Navigating the area was like navigating a labyrinth. There were just as many turns to recall as there had been when we’d been out in the swamp navigating the boardwalks, but unlike the swamp, this semi-subterranean space felt quite claustrophobic. Instead of a sky above us, there was a huge stone keep, and in some of the areas we had to half crawl, half swim through, the stone ceiling was only inches above our heads. And the twists and turns were infinitely closer together. We’d no sooner make a turn from one narrow twisty passage, than we’d find ourselves facing another. As we’d continued in, I realized that not all of the walls had been plastered with skulls. It seemed that, over the years, additional walls had been added. Whether to serve as support for the collapsing keep above or to confuse anyone seeking to find what was hidden here, I had no idea.

Though the place was dark and watery—nearly the opposite of a sunlit garden in every possible way—I couldn’t help feeling like we were climbing through a giant spiderweb. These narrow passageways were the webbing and we were slowly making our way to the center. The murkiness of the water, which in some places reached my chin, continued to unnerve me. I hadn’t felt the signature of the hellcnight who’d masqueraded as Ebony until he’d been right under us. Until seconds before he’d snatched Burr right off of
Cnawlece
’s ladder and into the water. What if we were attacked again in the same way?

Finally, we reached a turn that took us into a room, not just another passage. The walls here were also lined with skulls—and something else I’d never expected to find.

Bodies.

But they didn’t look dead. They looked like they were sleeping. I took a chance and increased the glow of my fire. In its flickering light, we counted twelve of them. One of them was a young girl.
Athalie.
It had to be her.

I splashed over to the body that was closest to me, oblivious to the noise. It was a man, probably around thirty years of age, although it was hard to tell in this light. He, and the others, were resting on narrow shelves that had been cut out around the room. Had this place once been used for burial? Maybe by Vodnik and his early settlers? But these people hadn’t been buried. Or rather, they hadn’t been buried in any traditional way.

They’d been entombed down here—alive.

I felt for a pulse at the man’s neck but couldn’t feel anything. Still, he wasn’t stiff and the room didn’t stink of death. Instead it just smelled dank, almost like dirt, which was weird since the whole room was full of water.
Ugh.
I wondered when I was going to get the assignment that didn’t involve a deep, dark hole in the ground that some demon had dragged people into. I peeled back the man’s shirt so I could see more of his upper torso. Sure enough, there was a hellcnight bite just beneath his left collarbone.

“He’s been bitten by a hellcnight,” I said. No need to speak loudly in here. Every sound echoed.

Fara and Rafe, who’d moved away to check other bodies, confirmed bite marks on three others. My guess was they’d all been bitten somewhere. While the Angels continued examining bodies, I surveyed the room. The splashing from our movement and the drips from the walls and ceiling barely drowned out the sound of my breathing. I was scared.

“It’s in here,” Rafe murmured.

I fought the urge to shout or to spin around shining the light every which way. Panicking now would only get everyone killed. Slowly, I turned around, shining the light of my fireball into the dark areas of the room. At the same time, I opened up my signature as wide as I possibly could. My body shook, as did my magic. The fireball sputtered and my signature wavered.

Just before my fireball went out, I saw it.

It wasn’t underneath us, in the water; it was on top of us, on the ceiling.

It was the most hideously frightening thing I’d ever seen. The hellcnight had Ebony’s shape, but the black serpent body now had hundreds of tiny claws that anchored its massive weight into the stone ceiling above us. Its eyes were as big as my fireball had been and suddenly just as glowing. The sight of it flushed my magic like water spilling from a slashed water pouch. It didn’t matter that Rafe and Fara had cast me up with no fewer than seven spells between them; I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

Couldn’t see.

My light had gone out.

“Raf—!” I managed to squawk before the thing jumped at me.

The water and the weight of the thing crashed down on me. Claws pierced my arms and legs. Water covered my head, pouring into my ears and mouth as I was pressed beneath the water. In the second it took me to react, I finished calling Rafe’s name. But it came out as a string of shouted bubbles. I thrashed and twisted in the water, trying to break free. My arms and legs felt like someone had driven nails into them. Every attempt to wrench myself out of the thing’s clutches just drove the nails deeper into my flesh. My eyes watered, but little difference it made.

Finally, just as my head slammed into a stone, I threw a blast of magic at the beast. It shrieked, the high burble of it sounding positively unholy in the water, and squeezed me tighter.

Where were Rafe and Fara? Could they not hear all my splashing and thrashing?!

I felt woozy and slightly numb, surely the effects of hitting my head. I had an unfortunate history of blacking out at inopportune moments such as these. This time, I
refused
to succumb.

Even though I was still underwater and likely bleeding from a hundred tiny holes by now, I willed myself to be calm. I stilled . . . and concentrated. I shaped my magic like Burr’s filleting knife and plunged it into the beast’s belly. Instantly the claws withdrew and the weight that had been pressing me into the water lifted.

I rose up out of the water gasping. Above the water, all was a cacophony of sound. I realized only a few seconds had passed. Rafe and Fara hadn’t been ignoring me; they’d been casting spells at the demon. I hadn’t worked with either of them long enough to recognize what they were throwing, but it was impressive. The Angel army at Armageddon must have been formidable. The air was alight with sparks of magic, spitting bursts of fiery electric blasts, frantic splashing, and incomprehensible shouting. I rubbed my head where I’d hit it on the rock and looked around to see where the demon had gone.

It had disappeared.

“Noon, are you all right?” Rafe asked, rushing over to me. He motioned to Fara to follow. She did, but kept a wary eye out for another attack.

“Did you see where it went?” I asked.

“No,” Rafe murmured, distracted. He was looking at my injuries. He put his hand behind my head, cradling it. At once I felt stronger, less light-headed. He’d cast a healing spell. My arms and legs still throbbed and I felt the trickle of blood oozing out of too many cuts to count. But I pushed Rafe’s hand away and started walking toward the center of the room. There would be plenty of time for healing later.

Again, I lit a fireball, but this time I let it grow as large as the giant skulls we’d passed on the way in here. The room was now nearly as light as the Angel restaurant Empyr with its thousands and thousands of candles. I looked around the room, taking care to inspect the ceiling carefully. Behind me, Rafe and Fara were still. Looking. Listening.

Nothing.

I swallowed.

It was still here. I felt it still, hiding, lurking, waiting.

I glanced around at the bodies again. Wait—!

There were thirteen of them now. Hadn’t there been twelve before?

But which one was the hellcnight?

The hellcnight was doing what hellcnights did best, masking its signature. Demon Net must have only told Rafe that it was in this room because he was still searching the ceiling.

I caught Rafe’s eye and pointed toward the bodies. I held up one finger, then three, then put my finger on my mouth and started walking toward one of them. The flaming knife I’d shaped with my magic was still holding strong so I felt only slightly unhinged at the thought of examining these bodies yet again, knowing this time one of them didn’t belong and it was really a demon that wanted to kill me . . . Or bite me and feed off of my sleeping form later.

As it was, it didn’t take long to focus in on the demon we were looking for. As soon as I approached the young man in the corner farthest from where we came in, it sat up.

It was Ari.

I switched my flaming knife from hand to hand, suddenly nervous in a whole different way than I had been before.

“It’s not him,” Fara hissed. “It’s the hellcnight.” She readied a sparking, electric bolt of blue and held it in her hand, looking at me, waiting for my okay. Rafe did the same.

There I was, flanked by two Angels, their blue Angel light contrasting sharply with the orange red glow of my fire, facing a demon that had to be put down . . . and I wavered. My fire flickered.

“You don’t really want to kill me, do you?” Ari said.

I gritted my teeth. How could the voice be the same too?

“Let’s go outside,” I said. “We can talk up there.”

“Noon . . .” Rafe growled, his voice a low warning. “You
know
that’s not Ari.”

“Who are you?” I said to the demon. “Who are you really? Are you Grimasca?”

“Grimasca!” The thing shifted again and stood before us as the other hellcnight had, a pale, blue-veined, sharp-toothed demon with glowing red eyes. But now it had a scorpion-like tail that whipped around behind it like a snake. “Grimasca is just a name for all hellcnights, like the Legion is the name for all demons. Grimasca is a romantic legend for those of us who like
dark
tales.” The hellcnight took a step toward me. “Where is my partner, the hellcnight who was impersonating Vodnik?”

“Dead,” I said. The hellcnight looked angry, but also frustrated and possibly the least little bit scared. It had to be a trick. Everything about hellcnights was a trick. I glanced at the end of the hellcnight’s tail and raised my flaming knife.
Best to go for the end of the tail first and then its belly,
I thought, marveling at my own thoughts.