Darkest Night - Smoke And Ashes Part 28

Eyes watering, he scrawled a very quick go home and threw it.

Blue sparks on impact.

Blue sparks, purple blotches. It's like demonic Lucky Charms.

A sound like wet sneaker tread dragged against tile. A giant wet sneaker tread.

"What have you done?"

"I told it to go home!" He grabbed Leah's hand and dragged her with him as he rose to his feet.

"It didn't work!"

"I know!" Rapid blinking brought the street into partial focus. The demon still looked a little blurry around the edges, but Tony had a bad feeling that wasn't his eyes.

"I told you it wouldn't work!"

"You're not helping! Just stay behind me and..." He squinted. "I must've done some damage, it's..." Running seemed as close a description as he was going to get. "... running away."

Leah grabbed for his sleeve as he started moving. "Where are you going?"

"After it. To stop it from killing people who aren't you," he added when she didn't seem to understand. "Come on. It's not going that fast." Mostly because bits of it seemed to be moving in opposite directions.

Her fingers tightened to the edge of pain. "What part of 'if I die the world ends' are you still missing?"

"The part where it's not after you." When attempting to jerk free only proved that Leah was stronger than she looked, he waved his free hand toward the demon. "h.e.l.lo! You're here, it's there!"

She frowned. "Right." And let go. And smiled. Well, showed teeth. "Come on!"

They were no more than three meters behind it as they rounded the corner onto the section of Alexandra that curved to meet up with Alderbridge Way. The demon turned an eyestalk toward then, put on a surprising burst of speed, and crashed through a poster-covered door into the only lit building on that end of the street.

Ginger Joe's. "Raise your hand everyone who's surprised by this," Tony grunted as they ran after it.

"According to Chekhov," Leah panted, "you should never hang a coffee shop on the wall unless you plan on using it."

"Chekhov? The navigator with the bad wig on cla.s.sic Trek?"

Leah took a moment to sneer. "Read a book." She paused as they reached Ginger Joe's. "Didn't this used to be the Cafe Cats Escape?"

"How would I know?" Tony asked her. "For that matter, how do you know?"

Inside the coffee shop, cymbals crashed and someone screamed.

"Never mind."

They jumped the debris of the door together and skidded to a stop. The demon had gotten tangled in a drum kit left on the small stage when the night's live music had ended and lay half sprawled across two tables-although since it still had two legs on the floor, it wasn't exactly lying. Just past the wreckage a young man crouched, leather-kilted b.u.t.t in the air, head to the floor, hands over his head, the chrome studs on his heavy leather wristbands gleaming in the dim light. Tony could just barely make out two more pale faces up against the back wall, their terror lending the whole Goth look a certain authenticity.

It took him another agonizingly long moment to find Amy because the demon's bulk blocked his view. A meaty squelch gave her position away just before she danced into sight, black-rimmed eyes locked on the enemy, the hand holding the skull shaped candle holder raised to land another blow.

"Enough staring already!" Leah snapped, racing by him. Seemed that the relief of not being the target was making her a little reckless. "Make with the runes!"

Tony pulled the papers out of his jacket pocket as Leah went up and over the demon, planting her hands between the spikes and flipping in the air to land on her feet on the coffin shaped bar. Possibly not just coffin shaped...

The first rune formed as Amy smacked the demon again while Leah kicked it in the head.

It roared, lunged at Leah, got tangled in the snare drum stand, and stumbled, allowing her to leap over the clawed tentacle whipped around toward her.

The world rearranged itself in Leah's favor.

Amy wasn't so protected.

As Tony threw the last loop on the second rune, it wrapped a hand-or whatever the h.e.l.l it was on the end of its arm-around Amy's neck and squeezed.

Screw the runes!

One more Powershot probably wouldn't kill him.

As he pulled his right arm back, Amy reached behind her, scrambled amid the debris, grabbed a full cup of coffee, and threw it in the demon's eyes.

It shrieked.

Dropped her.

And charged for the door.One meaty appendage smacked Tony in the chest, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the side wall. He spent a moment really, really hoping the crack was one of the fixtures and not a rib, then spent the moment after that trying not to scream.

He could sort of hear Amy yelling that the demon had broken into the wrong d.a.m.ned coffee shop as he raised his left hand and sucked the two runes he'd finished back into his body. It wasn't exactly hard to find his place in the universe now given how well pain seemed to be defining it.

This is me.

This is everything else.

Everything else doesn't hurt.

I do.

Turned out the crack hadn't come from one of the fixtures.

Breathing shallowly, he focused his attention on the broken ribs, smoothing the jagged halves. Pain exploded into a thousand razor- edged shards.

When he regained consciousness, Leah was kneeling beside him and frowning down into his face. "When you heal yourself," she said softly-not kindly, but softly, "you still experience the same amount of pain you would have had the injury healed normally."

"I do?"

"Every last bit of it. All at once."

He supposed he was glad of the explanation. "That totally sucks."

"It's why most wizards don't do it."

"Most wizards," he muttered, pus.h.i.+ng himself up into something close to a sitting position. "Right. Why don't we get some of those f.u.c.kers to help?"

"Can you stand?"

Since there was only one way to find out, Tony let her help him to his feet. It was a little lopsided, but it was standing. Except that Amy's date was now having hysterics on a chair instead of the floor, nothing looked like it had changed. "How long was I out?"

"Couple of minutes."

"You really..." It wasn't as easy to mime jumping a demon as he'd expected. "You know, went after it."

"You destroyed the rune that would have let it damage me back there on the street when you burned go home right across it. After that, I was safe enough. Although," she added pointedly, "it didn't go home. We need to get back to the studio."

"Hang on." He shuffled toward Amy who left her date to meet him halfway. The hug nearly knocked him on his a.s.s, but he appreciated the sentiment. "You okay?" he asked as they pulled apart.

"Not really, but I'm faking it well."

"This is going to need a creative explanation."

Her eyes regained a bit of sparkle. "I'm all about creative explanations." "Good, 'cause we've gotta..."

"Go. I know." She waved a shaking hand in the general direction of the door. "So go! Kick a.s.s."

The demon was nowhere in sight as they emerged onto the sidewalk. There was a taxi pulling into the hotel on the corner but no other people in sight. After what had just happened, the whole area seemed strangely quiet. Strangely normal.

Totally devoid of demon.

"We'll never catch it."

"We don't have to," Leah reminded him. "We just have to get to the soundstage." She took him by the shoulders and leaned him up against the side of the nearest building. "I'll go get the car. You wait here."

As she ran off, Tony concentrated on staying upright. He knew why the go home hadn't worked-it had come to him just before he healed himself. Standing out on the street, blinking away the aftereffects of the demon's entry, he hadn't been connected to the universe. Well, no more than usual anyway; not in a round peg/round hole kind of way. Back in the parking lot, panic had pushed him into place. Here, just now, it had been pain. Actually, there'd been pain in the parking lot, too. Pain seemed to be compulsory.

I bleed therefore I am.

To bleed or not to bleed, that is the question.

Ultimate cosmic power! Itty bitty bandages!

This could be the beginning of a beautiful laceration.

Man, I really need a coffee...

Chapter Nine.

"CLOSED COURSE. Professional driver. Do not try this at home."

"What are you muttering about?" Leah demanded as, with a screech of rubber against pavement, she deftly maneuvered the car around a corner at significantly more than the posted speed.

"Nothing." The best part about the level of exhaustion Tony'd reached; he just didn't care. He didn't care when Leah ran two stop signs and a red light. He didn't care when she pa.s.sed on the right using four empty parking s.p.a.ces. He didn't care when she ignored a detour and took a shortcut through some roadwork, fighting the car through six blocks of chewed-up pavement and sc.r.a.ping the undercarriage on an exposed sewer grate. Actually, he cared about the last bit since he'd be the one paying for repairs but not enough to do anything about it.

Licking the last of the chocolate donut crumbs off his fingers, he watched the streetlights go by so quickly they were very nearly a continuous blur. If he turned to look through the driver's side window, the cracks in the gla.s.s refracted them into a thousand flares of moving light. "When you said before you were a stunt driver... you went to stunt driving school, right?"

"Top of my cla.s.s."

"Because you knew you couldn't be hurt?"

"That, and because I really like to drive fast."

Previous Contents NextFor a Thursday night not long after midnight, the streets were unusually empty. Tony wondered if that was Ryne Cyratane's spell helping to keep his Demongate from dying in a fiery car crash. "So that was a wicked move you made, back in the coffee shop when you used the demon like a vault and flipped up over its head. Where'd you learn to do that?"

"I played second bull dancer in a Greek production of The Minotaur once. Except that I wasn't in a loincloth and the demon wasn't tranked out of its little bovine mind, it was essentially the same stunt. With less ouzo, of course."

"I thought you said the bull was tranked."

"Him, too."

That probably made sense in a world where he wasn't so tired his eyes kept crossing. "Do you think we can beat the demon to the studio?"

She snorted. "In this car?"

"Since it's the car we're in, yeah."

"There's a chance. After all, it's not a speed demon." Snickering, she flashed him a smile. "Speed demon. Get it."

"Yes." The chance to fight back had put her in an interesting mood. Using the may you live in interesting times definition of the word. "Please watch the road."

With a cop's nose for contraband, Jack had found the deck of cards shoved in the back of a drawer over in the carpentry shop.

Wiping the sawdust off them, he whistled softly.

"Now these," he said, returning to the chaise, cards in hand, "are hard core. You wouldn't be interested," he added as Henry stood, "it's all man/woman action."

"Why wouldn't I be interested?"

"I thought you and Tony were... You know."

"We were. That doesn't prevent me from being interested in women."

"I thought not being interested in women was the point?"

"For some men. Not for me."