The remaining four hounds started forward and black tendrils of magic burst from Mary as she started chanting. Behind us, on the bridge, the hound started to squeal, only to stop abruptly as a snapping, tearing sound announced its death.
Awasos, who had hunkered down uncertainly at the sight of the hounds, roared and rushed forward to meet them, Arkady running alongside him, while Lydia fired three fast shots from her semi-auto twelve gauge. It was still loaded with explosive rounds and while she missed the dogs, her shots blew craters in the surface of the bridge, showering Mary and Colin with shards of black stone. She suddenly dropped the shotgun, which was slung around her neck and grabbed her own throat. My hand-thrown quarter hit Mary in her upraised hand, the same one that was pointing at Lydia. The streak of silver took off her thumb and broke her concentration.
I pulled another quarter from my belt, threw it up, and clapped, the rushing plasma hitting a hound in the head and chest. It faltered and tumbled, then Arkady was chopping its head off with his sword.
The first hound reached ‘Sos as he reared up and it received a crushing paw strike to the head, knocking it flat. The hound behind it used it as a springboard and leaped between ‘Sos’s outstretched paws, knocking my bear back and down. They kept rolling and finally came up apart, then slammed together in battle.
The flattened hound came up in time to catch a tomahawk in the face, then receive Nika’s spearhead under its left front leg. The dog snarled and spun, flinging Nika and her assegai ten feet, but left its back open in the process. A muscled mass of white-furred tooth and claw pounced on it and started tearing at the wound left by the spear. Nika jumped forward and jabbed her short spear into its neck while it tried to dislodge the werewolf on its back. Then a white paw grabbed the tactical tomahawk buried in the dog’s face, pulled it free, and split the heavy black skull with one swift, werewolf-powered blow.
Tanya took off from beside me, but in the opposite direction, running from the fight with the witches and hounds and straight at the massive demon. I followed her, part of me thinking about my brief lesson with Barbiel after another fight with a big boss demon, wondering if now was the time to use what he’d taught me and wondering if it would even work. The Grim part of me just focused on the immediate battle at hand.
Tanya reached the giant, ducking his hammer swipe, jumping toward the side of the bridge, bouncing off the bridge wall and landing on the monster’s neck, one hand on its neck and the other stabbing her sword. Immediately, she screamed in pain and leaped away, holding her blackened left hand up. I felt her pain through our bond, felt the burn on her white skin. The demon turned toward her and I unleashed three explosively formed quarters at its massive back. The superhot molten plasma blasts hit him in a line across his back and… did almost nothing. Hello, demon that climbed out of magma river… a little thing like plasma wasn’t going to bother him much.
It did cause him to turn back toward me, just as I was tossing two fifty cent pieces into the air. I clapped twice and both shot out and hit my targets. The demon smirked as the twin blasts of metal struck the basalt wall on either side of the bridge, completely missing him, but blasting big chunks of heavy stone loose. A particularly large piece fell off the bridge toward the molten river below. I caught it up with aura and flung it at the demon’s head while simultaneously grabbing more rock from the now numerous pieces of rubble I’d created.
He dodged the big rock, but two smaller pieces hit him in the back of his head and then the big one circled back around and hit him anyway. Tanya threw me her sword, drawing her other one with her good hand, holding the burned hand behind her back.
Shaking off the rocky missiles, lava boy roared and charged me. I dodged and struck his massive tree-trunk leg as he passed. The heat from his body was immense and my tungsten sword instantly became painfully hot from its brief contact with his skin. I wrapped aura around the handle, insulating it and followed his lumbering form, striking a second and third time before he could turn. When he did, I slipped under his guard, striking again and again while directing small boulders to leave the ground and slam into his body. Tanya came at him from the other side, her sword a silver blur that bit him over and over.
Yet none of it did any real damage. His red, red skin just healed itself of all wounds, which was more than could be said for us, or at least our hands. Tungsten carbide has the highest melting point of any alloy currently used by man, actually almost twice as high as most rock. It also has one of the highest thermal conductivity ratings, which allowed the monstrous heat of the demon to reach our hands. Mine was somewhat protected by the aura, but I was still burning. Tanya had no such protection and the scrap of her sleeve that she’d wrapped around the hilt had already burned up. Now both her hands were horribly burned and when the demon advanced on her, she chose to throw the blade like an oversized knife. The point dug into the monster’s face, but it brushed the blade aside and raised its hammer to crush her. I had tried roping it with aura, but there was no effect, the violet energy sliding off the thing uselessly. I too threw my sword, the blade biting into its neck, but it never faltered.
Desperately, I began to do what Barbiel had taught me. Or I tried. But let’s see
you
find a pocket dimension for the second time in your life while standing in the middle of a battle watching your girlfriend face death. I missed the first try—and the second—the third as well.
Tanya backed away, taking a deep breath and yelling a discordant note that rocked the demon, doing more damage than anything else we had done so far. It shook its huge head, horns twitching from side to side, then continued on. She did it again and again. I had a thought, even as I failed my fourth attempt. She picked up on my thought through the link and sang a note at the hammer haft. It shattered, the massive hammerhead falling and smashing the demon’s own foot. It roared in pain, then raised both massive fists over its head, crowding her against the edge of the railing.
My fifth try worked and the pocket opened, blinding white light flashing forth and stopping almost all action on the bridge, even the fights behind me. I reached into the light and pulled forth the object inside, its handle fitting my hand like a glove.
The Sword emerged into Hell and its actinic light dimmed to merely retina-searing, its size diminishing in the oppressive atmosphere of Lucifer’s domain, shrinking from a four-foot broadsword to a two-foot gladius form that still shone too bright to look directly at. It also sang—a pure crystal tone that changed the feel of the space around the blade from despair to hope.
The eighteen-foot monster whose skin was too hot to touch and whose body had ignored all damage actually cringed for a moment. Tanya was forgotten as it whirled around to face the Heaven Sword.
Barbiel had taught me to find it, told me that it had always been there, waiting for the time when I was ready to wield it. It had been my Sword before… before I fell. The Sword and I had been formed together, created at the same time, two parts of the whole. That’s the way it was for those who were fated to God’s armies.
He’d shown me how to find its sheath, the pocket universe or dimension where it waited for my touch. And I had touched it exactly one time, after an hour of effort that left me weak and hungry, its feel in my hand like replacing a missing part of my body. Like I was whole and almost like I had been before—before I had fallen from Heaven and placed myself on Earth.
The Sword continued to sing, and everything around took note. The massive bridge guardian removed its hands from its ears and hefted a big rock, throwing it like a skipping stone. I stepped sideways, grabbing the missile as it went thrumming by me with my mind and aura. I used the tremendous energy of the throw, turning and whipping the rock around behind me as if it were on a purple chain. The rock arced around and came right back at the monster, slamming it in the chest and bursting to shards.
Behind it, Tanya stood still, head tilted to one side, listening, her eyes locked on the Sword. She opened her mouth and sang, her notes exactly matching those of the Heaven blade. It brightened. And grew longer—maybe five inches more.
A projectile flew past me, its screams marking it as the red-leather-clad Colin. He slammed into the chest of the massive demon and immediately started to burn and sizzle, his scream changing from fear to pain. The giant toll keeper brushed the seared and still screaming body from its chest, looking up in time to find me rushing past it, Sword carving through the stone-like skin of its left leg without much resistance. It turned, awkwardly and in pain, too slow to stop me from carving the Achilles tendon on its other leg. The Sword bit through the massive, cable-like tendon and continued through most of the giant ankle that was as big as my thigh. The bridge guardian fell sideways, one massive arm slamming out to brace its body. That brought its neck in range and my next swing cut through the upraised wrist that attempted to block me. It went right on through the massive neck.
A second later, the head slid free and thumped to the ground while the body remained in a side lean, black blood jetting from the stump. I had an immediate flashback of Tanya standing, covered in blood, a huge, headless body at her feet in the same side lean, stacks of shipping containers all around us. The massive demon fell on its back, shaking the entire bridge and snapping my memory closed.
The fight behind us looked over, an observation that the witch, Mary, had arrived at on her own. She turned to run but Lydia leaned into her Saiga shotgun and fired one shell that blew the red witch to pieces.
“Nice shot,” Tanya said.
The Hellhounds were all dead and my team was victorious. Beat to Hell, but victorious.
Chapter 31
I put the Sword away, finding its extra-dimensional sheath on the first try. The song stopped and the light was gone, leaving me sweating in the horrid heat of Hell. But my people were in rough shape.
Arkady’s left arm was shredded, the resulting of stuffing it down a Hound’s throat while eviscerating it with his blade. Nika had a severe bite on her left calf, her jeans stained with blood. Both of Tanya’s hands were burned and Awasos was limping on three paws. Even Stacia, who had thrown Colin into the frying pan as it were, had a black knife sticking out of her shoulder. The wounds were all bad, but the part that got me was that none of them were healing, or at least, not healing at normal speed. Hell was not conducive to weres and vampires.
I ripped my wrist open and put it to Tanya’s lips. She drank for an even six gulps then pushed my hand away, holding up her own palms to show the blackened flesh peeling off, pink skin formed underneath.
“Christian, you must feed the others,” she said. She had, in my very limited memory, never allowed any other vampire to as much as sniff my blood.
“You sure?” I asked.
“You must if they are to survive.”
So I fed them, starting with Nika, then Arkady. Lydia wasn’t badly wounded, just scraped and bumped, but I had her lick my wrist clean and that was enough to put a bounce back in her step and fix her little cuts. When I motioned to Stacia, she stood stock still, still in beast form, towering over me.
“Noo waay. Noo blood,” she growled, trying to form words around her massive teeth. So I went to her, too fast for her to get away. Yanking the nasty-looking, rune-covered black dagger from her shoulder, I put my barely bleeding hand over her wound, put my other hand on the back side of her shoulder, and poured aura through from one hand to the other.
It had two instant effects; first closing and healing the knife wound and the other was to Change her back to human form in a rush of popping joints and squirming flesh. One moment she was taller and heavier than me, covered in thick, white fur; the next she was human. Naked and human. She looked me in the eye, panting from the sudden Change, only to get hit in the face with her own panties and bra.
“Get your damned clothes on, wolf,” Tanya said, tossing the rest of the neatly folded clothes to land in a rumpled pile. “And
you
, fix your bear,” she said to me.
I did the same aura flow through ‘Sos’s wounded paw, trying to ignore the way Arkady was smiling as he watched Stacia get dressed behind me.
Standing, I reeled for a second, suddenly dizzy with hunger. Tanya’s steel-hard fingers grabbed my arm and held me upright.
“We need to get this over with and get out of here. Christian is starving to death,” she said to the others.
Nika immediately turned and led the way across the bridge, ‘Sos moving up to point, still in his massive bear form. The rest of us followed, with me trying to walk like I wasn’t dizzy. I fooled no one. Immediately Stacia took up the space on my left side and Tanya held my hand on the right. Lydia prowled just ahead, a fresh magazine of regular shells in place in her shotgun. Regular in that they were just a mixture of iron buckshot and salt. Arkady brought up the rear, his sword resting on his shoulder as he walked.
We crossed the rest of the bridge without incident, but when we got to the other side, a few demons immediately approached us. They were too few and too small to survive first contact with my bear, who instantly smashed them down. But their aggressiveness was a new behavior. Most smaller demons had run at the sight of us. It was odd.