Wade jumped out of the car to retrieve his gun. “Nothin’ better than timely air support,” he muttered.
* * *
His arm was gone. It was severed at the shoulder, cast aside in a mess of ash and soot. It lay lifeless against one wall of the hallway.
She had clawed out his eyes, pounded his chest until his ribs were a shattered mess, and slashed him open a dozen times. He screamed, or at least did until she tore his throat open, but that wasn’t the end of her assault. Baal should have had every advantage, but in the end could not match her. He was naturally more powerful, while Lorelei was already battered and weary. Yet her rage and ferocity were too great to overcome.
Lorelei didn’t stop. As long as he moved, as long as there was any sign of life in the body, some vestige of Baal remained within. If there was anything left of him in the body, then even that small portion could feel pain.
When the body finally stopped reacting, Lorelei pushed herself to her feet. She breathed heavily, trying to maintain the energy that had brought her this far. All she wanted to do now was collapse. Instead, she had to find Alex and get him far from here.
The hand that gripped her leg from behind was much too large to be any man’s. Too large and far too powerful. Lorelei stumbled and fell, twisting as she was dragged back.
Where there should have been a long, empty hallway, she found flames and smoke and the overwhelming stench of sulfur. She saw dozens of pairs of bright red eyes, near and far, gathered around the hall of a castle built from burnt bone and rotting flesh. In front of them all rose a tall, vaguely humanoid monstrosity with great horns, black wings and a tail. Tight muscles rippled across its body. Its baleful red eyes promised eternal pain.
Atop Baal’s head, as always, sat his iron crown. “I told you that you would come back with me, Lorelei,” Baal said with ashen breath.
Lorelei slashed at the hand, finding the strength in her terror to fight on.
* * *
“Gnrgh,” Molly grunted. She stood frozen in place by Woods’s spell.
“Make a move and she dies,” he snapped at Onyx. It stopped her from throwing a spell of her own. The components were already in hand, but she couldn’t risk him moving faster.
Smoke hung everywhere. Vampires, members of the Brotherhood, and now even the servants scrambled to escape the building. Many opted for the front entrance, only to find a fierce battle going on outside between demons and someone around a pick-up truck. Others wanted to avoid the panicked crowd.
Those who didn’t flee fought every visible enemy. Beneath the stairway, the two heavy-set vampires in the antebellum dresses hunched over a suit-wearing man whose cries for mercy had been reduced to garbled, burbling noises as they feasted upon his blood. Stefan and Blackthorne struggled up on the landing. Molly and Onyx could still hear the noises of combat directly above them that were likely from Lorelei doing her best to kill Baal.
“Hurt her and you die,” Onyx replied.
“Then we’re at an impasse.”
“Not really,” Onyx said. “You kill her and then I kill you, or you let her go and we let you walk. Either way, I walk out of here. Only I should warn you that if I have to kill you, I’ll spend the rest of my life performing every fucked up necromantic experiment I can think of on your ghost.”
“You’re bluffing,” Woods sneered. “You two couldn’t even stand to let one of the servants here die.”
“That was Molly,” Onyx reminded him darkly. “Not me.” Inside, she felt rising fear for her lover, but their earlier spells of deception still held.
Woods hesitated. He blinked, glancing at Onyx, and then back again, but it was all Onyx needed. She pitched a handful of sea salt at him. It was more than enough to disrupt his spell and throw all of his energies momentarily out of whack.
Molly staggered and fell, dazed by the effect of Woods’s spell. Onyx rushed to her side, hurriedly working another cantrip as she moved, but Woods had other tools at hand besides magic.
He pulled a gun from his jacket and leveled it at the two. Onyx threw herself in front of Molly to shield her. She heard a loud racket that seemed completely out of place for his gun.
Blood and bone erupted from all over Woods as bullets ripped through him.
Alex stood across the foyer just past the burning SUV with a Thompson in his hands. Blood covered his shirt and neck. A ragged woman in jeans and a flannel shirt followed behind him. “What the hell are you two doing here?” he yelled.
“We came here to rescue you!” Onyx called back. “Your-Lorelei is upstairs!”
Alex started to run to her, but then stopped. He convulsed sharply. Then he raised the gun and pointed it directly at the two witches. “Alex, no!” Onyx yelled.
“It’s not me!” he grunted. Onyx looked up to see Stefan on the landing of the stairway, watching Alex with his hands out as if controlling a marionette. Blackthorne lay at his feet, a wooden wand shoved through his heart like a stake.
Alex fired, screaming out in vain defiance of the control over his body. Wind rushed in, so strong that it whistled deafeningly through the mansion’s foyer and blew out the flames of the SUV and everything it had set alight. Alex fell to the floor, as did Onyx and even Stefan. The bullets never landed. Molly sat upright, blowing hard and releasing leaves into the air.
Onyx pulled an ebony wand from her knee-high boot and pointed it at Stefan as he rose. She winced with reluctance and regret, but there was nothing for it; he was too powerful for half-measures. There was no incantation, nor any flash of lightning or blast of flame. There was simply Onyx, her wand, and her will.
Blood spurt from his ears. More came from his nose. Stefan’s eyes went wide. He stumbled, coughed once with a release of even more blood, and then collapsed.
Alex got to his feet as the wind quickly died off. “Oh thank God,” he sighed when he saw they were both okay. He rushed to their sides. “You’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
“As do you!” demanded the woman beside him.
“Oh fuck off!” he snapped.
“Who’s this?” Onyx asked. Molly was on her feet then, checking Alex’s neck and shoulders.
“Just another prisoner.” He looked at the woman, then at the giant hole in the entrance. “Think you can probably get away now,” he grunted.
Then Harrow came falling through the ceiling to land with a crash on the SUV. Rachel dropped through the hole he had made to drive her flaming sword straight into the demon’s gut.
Alex looked up to call to her, but interrupted himself with a yelp of pain. “Gah! What was that?” he asked.
“You’re healed,” Molly said. She pulled her hand off his neck. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to be gentle.”
Alex blinked. The pain in his neck and shoulders vanished. “You two are witches or something?!”
Onyx opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted by an awful scream from upstairs. Alex didn’t wait for an answer to his question. He vaulted up the staircase. “Help Rachel!” he barked.
“What?!” Rachel yelled to him. Harrow used the distraction to grab at her arms, but she stomped her foot down on his snout right where Drew had punched him. The demon let out a pained and exasperated cry, but it continued to fight.
Molly and Onyx ran after Alex.
“Good luck to you, then,” Diana murmured. She threw off her flannel shirt as she rushed for the doorway. Soon she was in wolf form, running out into the night.
Harrow wrapped his tail around Rachel’s leg. It tugged her off-balance, allowing him to swat her roughly across the head and shoulders with his long arm. “You know how this ends,” the wounded demon hissed. “There is no victory here. There is only a span of recovery for one of us, be it in Heaven or the Pit.”
Rachel swung her blade at him again, only to be blocked at her wrist by Harrow’s hand. His other hand punched her, sending her falling off of the SUV. Battered but not finished, the demon crawled off its back, crouching on the vehicle as if to pounce. “It is a lesson this city’s protector has learned well.”