Hexed

Chapter 24

The Sisters of the Three Auroras came down from their tower quickly and met us in the underground parking garage. They walked briskly in their pointy boots toward a line of slinky two-seat sports cars. Malina and Klaudia stepped lively to an Audi TT Roadster; Bogumila and Roksana made for a Mercedes SLR McLaren; and Kazimiera and Berta, something of a mismatched pair, looked as if they were going to squeeze themselves improbably into a Pontiac Solstice. Unlike the German hexen, they knew what decade it was and how to properly dress in black. Bogumila had actually pulled her hair back into a practical ponytail, and I was mildly disappointed that the previously hidden side of her face was perfectly pleasant, no hideous scarring or missing chunks of flesh or gaping ocular cavity with a worm wriggling around inside.

“Time is of the essence,” Malina explained as their cars’ security systems chirped at them. “I think we’ve shielded ourselves from divination, but if they somehow penetrate it and know we’re unprotected now, they may have time to repeat the hex that killed Waclawa and wipe us out all at once. I’m sure they have demons ready and waiting to aid them.”

“The clock is ticking, eh? How long do we have?” I wasn’t worried about being found through divination; no one but the Morrigan could find me that way, thanks to my amulet. And Leif had nothing to worry about either, because it’s tough to divine dead guys, and they’d have to know he was involved ahead of time before trying.

“Once they begin the ritual, perhaps as little as twenty minutes. Follow us and we’ll talk on the phone.”

Leif became a little bit envious as he watched the witches pull out in front of him. “Those are very nice toys. What do they do for a living?”

“Consulting.”

“Really? What sort of consulting?”

“Magical, I guess, in the sense that they magically draw a salary without truly consulting anyone.”

“How very clever of them. Though I suppose it is not all that different from real consultants.”

“Malina made the same observation,” I said as we turned left onto Rio Salado and headed for Rural Road to catch the 202 east. My cell phone began to play “Witchy Woman,” and I said, “Speaking of whom, she probably wants to consult with me on our plan of attack.” I flipped open my phone and cooed, “Hel-loooo,” with my voice gliding up into an interrogative tone at the end.

“You’re sounding remarkably cavalier about this confrontation,” Malina said, her Polish accent pronounced. She was already getting herself into a snit.

“I’m simply living in the moment and enjoying it. The near future holds a kill-or-be-killed situation, so I am sucking all the marrow out of life while I can. Leif has a crush on your car, by the way.”

Malina ignored all this and said, “We are traveling to Gilbert and Pecos, so we’ll be heading south on the 101 right after we get on the 202. They’re on the top floor of a vacant three-story building. Something’s waiting for us on the bottom two floors, but we couldn’t see what it is.”

“So you and your sisters are going in while Leif and I wait outside?”

A cold silence greeted me for a few beats, then Malina said, “No, it’s going to be the other way around.” I could almost picture her grinding her teeth as she said it.

“Oh, that’s too bad, because we were going to stop off at Starbucks and get a couple of lattes while you took care of this.”

“That’s the famous vampire Helgarson you’re riding with, isn’t it? Is he fond of lattes?”

“I don’t know.” I looked over at Leif, who was grinning—he was hearing both sides of the conversation, of course—and said, “Malina wants to know if you like lattes, and I want to know if you’re famous.”

“No to both,” he said, as we screamed onto the 202 on-ramp.

“Sorry, Malina,” I said to the phone. “He’s not famous.”

“Perhaps it would be better to call him infamous. It is irrelevant at this point. What is relevant is that my sisters and I are not great warriors. Were the odds even and they did not cheat with modern weapons, I would say, yes, we could walk in and win a magical battle against most opponents. But we are outnumbered more than three to one.”

“How many are there?”

“Twenty-two. Some of them have firearms, but they are not great warriors either. And while they may be expecting you, Mr. O’Sullivan, they will not be expecting Mr. Helgarson to get involved. I imagine the two of you together will be quite formidable.”

“She’s complimenting our martial prowess, Leif,” I said to him.

“I feel more manly already,” he said. The short distance on the 202 was already covered and we were merging onto the southbound 101.

“Hey, Malina, tell me how much you want to see us play with our swords.”

Leif threw back his head and laughed. Malina’s accent thickened to the point that her English was nearly indecipherable. “Mr. O’Sullivan! You will stop this unseemly innuendo immediately! How someone so old can be so immature and inappropriate is beyond me. Try to refocus your attention on our goal, please.”

“Oh, right, right. My apologies.” I grinned, completely unrepentant. One day I’d get her so mad she’d give up on English entirely and just cuss me out in Polish. “I suppose you were going to explain what you and your sisters will be doing once we arrive.”

“We will be setting up an illusion around the perimeter of the building so that it will appear to ordinary citizens that nothing unusual is happening, even if there are gunshots and explosions and hexen being tossed out the windows. We will also prevent any of them from escaping, should they take it into their heads to flee your … giant, mighty swords.”

Leif and I both had a good laugh at that, and I could almost see Malina rolling her eyes as she sighed noisily into the phone, signaling that she hoped we would get the silliness out of our systems soon, now that she’d thrown us a bone.

“We will also take care of the blond one when we get there,” Malina added, when she felt we’d wound down sufficiently to understand her.

“Oh? Why didn’t you do it already?”

“Because then they’d know you gave her hair to us. It is better they not know for sure we are working in concert until it’s too late for them to plan around it.”

“All right. Then we’ll be responsible for twenty-one witches. Plus whatever demons they have hanging around.”

“Correct. All of whom you must kill quickly. They will almost certainly begin Die Einberufung der verzehrenden Flammen as soon as they know we are below, counting on their defenses on the bottom floors to hold until they’re finished.”

“You’re talking about the infernal hex that killed Waclawa. They call it, what—The Summoning of Consuming Flames?”

“Yes.”

“Could they target Leif with this ritual?”

“Absolutely. The demon involved in the ceremony provides the targeting. They don’t need hair or blood or anything else to find someone. It’s why I’m a bit uncertain about our shielding from divination.”

I looked soberly over at Leif. “That trinket I gave you won’t save you from that,” I said. “It’s only good for hellfire attacks thrown at you using line of sight. So the bell tolls for thee, my friend, if we let it toll at all. You’ll go up like a Roman candle.”

“Then our best defense lies in the speed with which we dispatch them?” Leif asked.

“That’s right.”

“Is the Roman-candle expression accurate? What happens if they are successful?”

I relayed the question to Malina, begging her pardon for asking her details of Waclawa’s death.

“I cannot help you there,” she replied. “We didn’t see it happen—I’ve never seen it happen. We see only the aftermath. In this case, we got the report from Detective Geffert.”

“Geffert!” I exclaimed. “I knew I’d heard his name somewhere before! He visited you in your condo, didn’t he?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“He’s the one who’s been pestering me recently. You have his hair in a jar, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Malina confirmed.

“Very interesting. That might come in handy later. But look, for now, we’ll move fast once we get there. We’ll put a couple of grenades through their windows and maybe take out a few if we’re lucky, then we’ll move in downstairs.”

“Did you say grenades?”

“Yeah, we have a couple of RPGs, so we’ll be starting out with a bang. Hope your illusion can contain explosions.”

“Where on earth did you get RPGs?”

“Garage sale across the street,” I said. We rang off so that Malina could share the news with her sisters. Leif put in a call to Antoine, the leader of the local flesh-eating ghouls, as we exited onto the Santan Freeway and headed east to Gilbert Road.

“Antoine. I have an all-you can-eat buffet coming up real soon. Load the boys into the truck. It is a three-story building on Gilbert and Pecos. Twenty-two witches on the menu, some of them carrying demon spawn.”

I didn’t have the same quality hearing that Leif did to pick out the individual words, but by his tone Antoine sounded pleased.

After exiting the freeway, the building soon towered above us on the south side of Pecos, as much as any building in Gilbert could be said to tower over anything. The Phoenix metro area tended to sprawl instead of build up, and three-story buildings in these suburbs meant a fairly ritzy office address. This building had been meant to house multiple businesses, but once the recession hit, it never scored a single tenant. Architecturally, it sported large glass walls with periodic steel-reinforced columns of cement blocks; some attached wedgelike structures of painted, textured Sheetrock provided just a wee bit of rakish modernity and broke up its boxlike sterility. Streetlights revealed that it was painted largely in beige, gray, and sage green along its solid parts, while the wedges were the color of sun-dried tomatoes.

The building sat right on the edge of the street, with a large empty lot to the south. We parked there, and they surely saw us if they had the most rudimentary watch set. The single entrance faced the parking lot, to the left of center. Leif and I mounted the RPGs to our shoulders and cautioned the Polish ladies to stand away from the breeches in the rear. Malina said not to worry; they were going to spread out and surround the building as best they could right now. We should just aim high so they wouldn’t be in the line of fire. I chose the top left corner of the building, where a lookout was most likely to be watching us, and Leif chose a wall of glass on the third floor to the right of center. We carefully aimed through the optical sights, then pulled the triggers on the count of three. The rocket trails hissed above the witches’ heads and hit at first with a dull thunk, followed shortly by the sound of shattered glass and the concussive shock wave. That would get their attention.

“Clock is running now. They’re going to come after us with that hex for sure.”

I groped for the two swords in the trunk and figured out by touch which one was Fragarach. I slung it across my back and handed Moralltach to Leif.

“Let’s keep them camouflaged for a surprise. Once they’re covered in blood they’ll be visible, but the first couple of critters we run through will wonder where the swords came from.”

Leif chuckled, slipped his arm through the strap, and said, “Oo-rah.” We had about a sixty-yard dash to make it to the building, since we had parked some distance away. We both drew our swords and advanced, and I took a grenade out of my pocket too. I could feel the battle madness coming on as I ran, a cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone and a heightening of my senses. In the old days, Celts used to charge into battle naked, wearing nothing but a torc around their necks. I’d fought my share of battles like that—very recently, in fact—but I’d long since found I could run faster when my goodies weren’t flapping around between my legs. Now I even wore shoes, because there was no way I’d be able to connect to the earth here anyway. The sum of my magical power was stored in my bear charm, and I hoped I’d have little occasion to draw on it. Fragarach would have to do my work for me.

When we arrived at the entrance—two very large glass doors with brushed-metal handles—we saw nothing but an empty lobby faced in dark granite and two hallways near the back, one of which presumably led to the stairwell and the other to the elevators. Leif was going to drive his fist through the glass, a dramatic announcement of our arrival, no doubt, but I asked him to wait. With a little concentration and a little expenditure of magic, I was able to unlock the door by binding the bolt to the open position. I then tore out the pin of the grenade with my teeth, opened the door silently, and tossed the grenade to the back hallway on the right-hand side, where I assumed the elevators were, along with anyone (or anything) waiting in ambush. It rebounded off the back wall and, thanks to the angle, disappeared down the hall so that we would be safe from shrapnel when it went off.

It exploded satisfactorily, but we heard no screams of dismay. We entered and shuffled forward, swords raised defensively, and I asked Leif, “You smell anyone?”

The vampire shook his head and said, “Not on this floor. Only dust.”

That relaxed me somewhat, and I almost got squashed to Druid marmalade because of it. A huge column of basalt fell from above as I squared with the dust-clouded hallway, and only my peripheral vision and reflexes allowed me to roll out of the way in time. It crashed loudly onto the floor of the lobby, shattering the tile and sending aloft a small spray of ceramic shrapnel. But then the column of basalt didn’t lie still, the way stone should. It moved, back and up, until I saw that it was attached to something much larger looming in the cloud of hallway debris—namely, the torso of a very large basalt golem, with eyes like pilot lights set deep in a boulder it used for a head.

“Another behind you!” Leif shouted, and I rolled again as a second massive arm smashed the tile where I’d been lying into ceramic tortilla chips. This one had been waiting in the opposite hallway, guarding the entrance to the stairwell. I was back up against another glass wall with a single door in it. Beyond was a large, undeveloped office space, with a bare concrete foundation, no dividing walls, open ductwork in the ceiling, and plenty of room to dodge a couple of golems.

“We need space!” I said, and I scrambled to my feet and tried the glass door that led into the interior. It was unlocked—there was nothing to steal in there. Leif dashed through it right behind me, and the basalt golems promptly smashed through the entire wall in pursuit. I felt some shards tug at the flak jacket and one cut the back of my left arm, but I ignored them for the moment as we sprinted to put some space between us and the golems. The building gave us plenty of room to run; I guessed there was about twenty thousand square feet in there.

“These stone guardians may pose a problem,” Leif said wryly. They moved with all the grace and silence of a landslide, the chalky scrapes of their joints heralding the thunderous impacts of every step they took. “They don’t have any juicy veins for me to tear out, swords won’t cut them, and they won’t stop unless we leave.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Golems are nothing more than Kabbalistic enchantments—” I stopped, realizing I might literally have the magic touch where they were concerned. I could laboriously unbind the rock into its component elements, but that would take time I didn’t have and energy I didn’t want to waste; a simpler solution was available, thanks to Rabbi Yosef. “Hey, I want to try something,” I said. “Pick one and charge it—just climb up its face or something so it isn’t watching me. I’ll follow up.”

“How much time do you need?” Leif frowned. We were fast approaching the east end of the building, and soon we’d have to turn and face them anyway.

“I need only a second or two,” I explained as the golems rumbled behind us. “Don’t let it grab you or anything. If you can do the same with the other one afterward, even better.”

“Okay,” Leif said, “here I go.” He pivoted on his right foot and leapt at the nearest golem, spitting out one of those hoarse, hissing vampire cries that signal to victims they’re nothing more than a walking package of Go-Gurt. He stepped neatly on the golem’s knee and leapt up to its head, ramming an elbow into its nose and actually chipping off a few pebbles, before using its half-raised arm to launch himself over the head. Leif hung by a single hand off the golem’s pitted volcanic skull, until it tried to flail at him with its arms. This distracted the second golem too, which veered to take a swipe at Leif dangling off its brother’s back, and that was my chance. I darted forward and rested my palm upon the thigh of the first golem, and after a moment its struggles ceased, its eyes flamed out. The Kabbalistic enchantment had been snuffed by the wards bound up in my aura, and it fell heavily backward as Leif leapt away. The second golem was still focused on Leif, and it was a simple matter to dash behind it and repeat the process, a brief touch on the rocky hamstring sufficing to end its animation and send it tumbling on top of its brother.

“Hecate’s frosty tits, how did you do that?” Leif demanded. “I thought we were going to spend all our time dodging them.”

“A better question is, how did the hexen manage to create them?” I asked. “They’re not Kabbalists. In fact, they used to kill them during the war—oh. That’s how. They stole the spells off their victims.”

“Fill me in later,” Leif said. “The clock is ticking.”

“Right. Think you could toss one of the golems’ heads through the ceiling and make us a hole to get to the second floor? I don’t fancy walking back there,” I gestured to the west end of the building, “and climbing up a booby-trapped stairwell.”

“Neither do I. Let me see how much they weigh.” I could match Leif’s strength if I had access to the earth—we’d tested it once with an arm-wrestling match in a park—but right now he had to play the Herculean one, with my magic in short supply. He lifted the second golem’s head, which must have weighed a good half ton or more, and hefted it experimentally in one hand. It appeared to strain him as much as a juggler might handle a grapefruit.

“Throw it at an angle, perhaps, then follow up with one of your grenades?” he asked.

“An excellent plan,” I agreed, taking out one of the grenades, “but you’ll need to throw me through the hole afterward. Druids can’t jump.”

Without another word, Leif chucked the boulder up through the ceiling with a magnificent concussion and a cry of twisted steel, and it almost plowed through to the third floor as well. I was glad it didn’t: The idea of the hexen taking pot shots at us from above held little savor for me.

I tore out the pin and lobbed a grenade through the hole, in the direction of the elevator shafts and the stairwell to the west, where I figured the floor’s defenses would be concentrated. In such an open area, the grenade ought to do plenty of damage.

Unfortunately, its explosion killed only a single one of the creatures waiting for us. Leif tossed me through the hole, sword drawn, and I landed somewhat ungracefully to face the charge of seven bloodied and enraged demon rams coming from the stairwell entrance. Goat-headed, curly-horned, and cloven-hoofed, they had the torso and arms of the Spartans in 300, and no amount of Visine would ever get the red out of their eyes. They were armed with spears, but I noticed that they also had long knives hanging from their right sides. They were undisciplined; they should have charged me in a wedge. Cold Fire was out of the question, since none of us was touching the earth. They’d all have to be dispatched the old-fashioned way.

As I charged them, a quick count gave me eight—seven, plus one melting into goo by the stairwell—and it had been eight demons, by our earlier count, who had impregnated die Töchter des dritten Hauses.

“Come on, you horny bastards!” I cried as I slapped away the tip of the vanguard’s spear and then slashed through his throat, which his bulging eyes seemed to think was unfair; he thought he’d been charging an unarmed man. I danced away to the left to force them to turn and break their momentum. The next two chuffed balls of hellfire into their left hands and threw them at me as they tried to change direction.

I lunged right through them, heedless of the flames from which my amulet protected me, and beheaded them both with one stroke. The others now realized I was armed and slowed their approach, moving more cautiously and trying to surround me as I backpedaled away from their spear tips. Leif leapt up through the hole behind them and cut down two more. The remaining two divided their attention between us. One of them threw his spear at me as he charged. I ducked under it and then he was on me, his long knife drawn, and we each grabbed the other’s sword arm as he bowled me to the floor. We rolled around, each trying to gain advantage.

His breath was hot in my face—fiery, as a matter of fact—and those bulging muscles weren’t an illusion. I had to draw on some power from my bear charm to keep him at bay.

“You killed my father,” he snorted in a basso profundo rumble. “Prepare to die!”

“Inigo Montoya? Is that you?” For a moment I had no idea who he was talking about, then I realized he must have been referring to the large ram that escaped during the battle at Tony Cabin. “Oh, I know who you mean now,” I said as we grappled. “Hey, I didn’t kill him. That was Flidais, I swear. You can find her in Tír na nÓg, or I could send her a message if you like. No?”

Moralltach hacked through his spine before he could answer, and he fell lifeless on top of me.

“Oof. Thanks,” I said to Leif as the vampire kicked its corpse off me; the demon had already begun to soften and dissolve into sludge. Leif had sent the other ram back to hell as well.

“Well, get up,” my lawyer said impatiently. “Remember the clock.”

“It might not be ticking anymore,” I said. “I think these fellas were the demons necessary for the ritual. Look along the wall there.” I pointed to some dimly glowing runes around the stairwell. “And check out these markings on the floor. These rams were bound here, and judging by the amount of filth, they’ve been here for some time.”

“There could be more of them upstairs,” Leif pointed out.

“You’re right. Better safe than dead.”

“How many grenades do you have left?”

“Three.”

“Very well, we will follow the same procedure as before,” Leif said, sheathing Moralltach and walking over to where the golem’s head had fallen, sagging dangerously into the floor, “but do not hold anything back this time.”

He was about to pitch it from where he stood, near the center of the building, but I cautioned him that perhaps we should move back to the far eastern edge and proceed from there. “I’ll toss my grenades all toward the elevators and stairs, clearing out the middle of the floor, and when we go up, we make sure to clear out these back edges first so we can’t get taken from behind. If they’re smart, they will have stationed someone there at the corners.”

“I am chill with that,” the vampire said stiffly, tossing the half-ton boulder up and down like it was a tennis ball as he walked to the far edge of the building with me.

“You’re trying to be cool now, Leif? Seriously?”

“I am the shit, home slice, straight up,” he replied.

“No. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is a great effort, but you still need to use more contractions. And your tone is so formal, it’s like you’re complimenting the pudding at a duke’s dinner party. No one’s ever going to believe you’re from the hood. But let’s work on it later. Right now there are some witches up there in dire need of just deserts.”

“Fucking H!” the vampire shouted, shaking his free left fist. He enunciated the g very clearly and projected his voice from his diaphragm, like a trained opera singer.

“It’s fuckin’ A, not H, but yeah, Leif, go ahead, let’s throw down.”

Leif paused and frowned. “Do you not mean we should throw up?”

“No. See, when you throw up you’re vomiting, but when you throw down you’re starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet.”

“Ohhhh,” he said. “I thought you were speaking literally.”

“I do beg your pardon. Let’s literally throw up, but figuratively throw down.”

Leif threw up. He hurled the boulder through the ceiling with so much force that it plowed not only through the third floor but also through the roof. I don’t know where it landed. I lobbed my three grenades after it to the left, center, and right and waited for them to explode. Once they did—and this time we heard screams, along with more shattering glass—Leif chucked me through the hole and I faced the northeast corner.

A witch was standing there, as I predicted—and it was the brunette who’d killed Perry, whose nose I had broken at the widow’s house. There was no attempt to sling any spells my way; she had a handgun pointed at me and proceeded to fire without ceremony, her teeth bared in a feral snarl as she did her best to kill me. I dropped and curled my legs tight, arms up to protect my head, and let my flak jacket take the punishment, but the whip of a bullet on the left side of my head and a sharp sting told me she’d winged me good. Hot blood dribbled down my neck and sharp blows punished my back, and then a slug tore through the outside of my left thigh before she had to reload. I blocked the pain there and started to close up that wound with some of my stored power, enduring the throbbing in my back and the sting on the side of my head as I got to my feet. I put up a hand to check the wound and realized with horror that she’d shot off my left ear, and in my adrenaline rush I hadn’t realized how bad the wound was.

“The gods damn you, look what you’ve done!” I cried as she fumbled with her second clip and I charged, drawing Fragarach. “If I want to grow this back I’ll have to endure the most terrifying sex imaginable! Gaahhhhh!”

She was frantically trying to get her gun reloaded, but the crazed Irish lad coming at her with a blade covered in black demon’s blood had a deleterious effect on her fine motor skills. With as little ceremony as she’d afforded me, I ran Fragarach through her abdomen and out her back until the point scraped against the glass wall. The gun and ammunition dropped from her hands, and a soft, keening sigh escaped her lips. I twisted the blade, and a more satisfying scream gurgled forth. I’m not the type to say, “That’s for so-and-so!” as I deliver well-deserved punishment unto an enemy, but I was sorely tempted to say something in this case. Still, why bother? She knew what she’d done. She aged before my eyes as the life left her and her cosmetic façade sloughed away. I yanked Fragarach loose and beheaded her to make sure she wouldn’t rise again.

Off to my right, Leif had already ascended and was engaged with someone in the southeast corner. I hoped they were still ignorant of what he was and would try slapping him with that necrotic spell. Perhaps, before he cut them down, they’d have time to realize they couldn’t stop the heart of a man who was already dead.

Nothing had come after us yet from the direction of the grenade explosions, but as I turned to check, I saw there was an awful lot of dust and debris floating around right now, and there was no telling what awaited us on the other side of the cloud. Flashes of violet light drew my attention to the street below. Bogumila was busy doing magical battle with a heavily bearded man in Hasidic garb; she was the source of light, a torus of purples and lavenders whirling around her right hand, which was raised above her head and casting a bright cone of protection around her. The light illuminated the man’s face—it was the Rabbi Yosef Bialik, sure enough, and he had finally tracked down a witch. Problem was, he was fighting the wrong one. His absolute definitions of black and white were causing him to take down friends as well as foes.

Much as I might have wished it, I was in no position to help Bogumila, and I couldn’t get into position without clearing this floor first. I had to start my count: The brunette was one down, twenty to go. I reluctantly left the window to see if I could help Leif and clear our backs before we advanced. I’d taken only a few steps when I saw him slice a woman clean in half with Moralltach. As her torso slid greasily off her hips and the two halves crumpled to the floor, he whipped around at my approach and grinned when he saw me. “Nice ear,” he said. “Would you like me to lick your wounds?”

“Shut up. How many did you get here?”

“Two,” he said, gesturing to another still form, now wrinkled and gray, lying behind him.

“Okay, three down. Let’s go. We need to count and make sure we get them all.”

I turned on my faerie specs and peered west into the dust cloud. There were figures moving on the far side near the stairwell, barely perceptible through the choking haze. A crosswind through the shattered walls of glass to the north and south was clearing some of it out, but full visibility was still a few minutes away.

“Shadowy figures,” the Morrigan had said. I’d do battle with shadowy figures. Well, one of the figures wasn’t human; it had a distinctly demonic aura. I realized that, where they were located, they probably would have had shelter from both the RPGs we launched and a very good chance of taking cover from the grenades I’d tossed if they heard them clatter on the floor. I crouched low, took a deep breath, and kept Fragarach in front of me as I stepped into the gunk, depending on Leif to follow.

There were broken, bloody bodies on the floor, withered arms and knobby knees twisted unnaturally; all their glamour was gone in death. I would count them later. There were ten figures ahead that I could see, grouped in a loose circle, some of them seated on the floor chanting something in low tones, and nearly all of them showing the telltale signs of hell. As soon as I processed that, it set me to sprinting: The seated ones were in the midst of a ritual and the others were guarding them, because they were close to completing it. I had no idea who their target was, but I didn’t want anyone on our side to die because I exercised undue caution.

I hurriedly cast camouflage on myself, remembering that they hadn’t been able to see through it during the war. After that, my thinking self practically disappeared and I became an extension of my endocrine system.

One of the standing figures—a female silhouette—had an automatic weapon of some sort and heard me coming across the rubble. She sprayed a dozen rounds or so in my general direction; I saw the muzzle flashes at the same time that the slugs knocked me back on my ass, gasping for breath and counting my lucky stars that my neighbor was an arms dealer. She saw Leif coming next and turned the gun on him, but bullets bothered him about as much as bee stings, and many of them pinged off his steel breastplate anyway. I’d let him worry about the guards; it was the seated figures in the ritual that had to die right now.

I got up on my knees, gripped Fragarach’s hilt in both hands, raised it over my head, then threw it at the nearest skull in sight. It flew true, crunching messily through the back of the head and out the witch’s mouth before the guard halted its progress through her pate. Leif decapitated the machine gunner almost simultaneously and was amputating another guardian’s arm at the elbow when a small piece of hell busted loose.

Halting a demonic ritual in progress is usually disastrous for those involved, and so it was for the hexen. Instead of completing the hex intended for Malina or some other Sister of the Three Auroras, the two remaining witches—one of them on her back with her legs spread wide—were instantly immolated in the consuming flames they’d been trying to summon. Out of those flames rose a very large demon ram, bigger than those we’d seen on the second floor. It was laughing heartily, because we’d caught him in flagrante delicto and the death of the witches had unbound him, setting him free on this plane. Everyone, including Leif, stopped what they were doing to see what he would do. The ram regarded us evenly for a moment—he wasn’t fooled by my camouflage—and decided he had no desire to take us on; there was so much more fun to be had elsewhere, with people who couldn’t fight him. He turned his head north and lowered it as he charged, punching yet another hole in the glass wall and plunging into the street below, extending his hooves as he fell to absorb the shock in his powerful haunches.

Such an escape attempt was precisely what the Polish coven was waiting for. I scrambled to the edge to look below; Malina had stationed herself at the northwest corner, and though she had seen that Bogumila was under assault at the northeast corner, she hadn’t abandoned her post, lest something like the ram get away.

She attacked it fiercely, and all the faster so that she could run to help Bogumila. She shouted something indistinct in Polish, shot her empty right hand up into the air, and seemed to pull out of it a sort of red neon whip. She cracked it expertly before slinging it around the ram’s legs as it tried to disappear into the night. The ram bellowed and gasped fire as it fell onto the asphalt of Pecos Road, but Malina wasn’t finished. With another exclamation in Polish, she snapped the whip handle all the way down to the ground, sending a massive sine wave along its length. When it reached the ram’s legs, the wave tossed it shrieking up into the air by its feet, as if it weighed no more than a hummingbird. Malina flicked her wrist and let the whip handle go, and it spiraled up, following the ram, until it wrapped itself crushingly around the creature like a constrictor. The ram bleated desperately for a heartbeat before it exploded above the street in an impressive corona of orange and green fire.

The ram’s doom fell at our eye level, three stories up, and I heard shocked gasps behind me at this demonstration of Malina’s power. I laughed, looking back at the remaining German witches, and said to them in their language, “I can’t believe you started shit with her when you had only one fancy trick in your bag. She can pull exploding hell-whips out of the fucking air.” I’d always suspected Malina’s coven had serious mojo up their fancy designer sleeves, but until now they’d never had the chance to show it. The rotten apples in their bunch had been faced with werewolves at Tony Cabin, and nothing they could have pulled out of the air would have helped against the Tempe Pack, unless it was silver.

The hexen appeared unsure of where my voice was coming from, so I spared one more fleeting glance for Bogumila and Rabbi Yosef before finishing up what we’d come to do. The rabbi’s beard looked significantly larger than it had before, moving with much more animation as well, but Bogumila’s purple whorl of protection seemed to be keeping her safe for the moment.

I have heard people in weight-loss programs say that the last five pounds are always the hardest to lose. It turns out, in one of life’s enigmas that vex the wise and white-bearded, that the last five witches are also always the hardest to kill.

While I was worrying about someone else’s ass besides my own, one of the witches snuck up on me and delivered a sucker punch to my jaw, in the fashion of Pantera’s album cover for Vulgar Display of Power. Clearly, my camouflage had been compromised. I lost several teeth and tasted blood in my mouth as my head hit the glass and I dropped to the floor. I was treated to a couple of vicious kicks to the abdomen before I had time to fully appreciate the pain in my skull and assess the damage done. The flak jacket probably saved me from broken ribs, because the impacts were loud enough to remind me of the sound effects in Shaw Brothers’ films. My vision swam as I took a frenzied glance up at my assailant. Her face might as well have been one of those little yellow signs people used to put in their cars; hers said DEMON ON BOARD. Red glowing eyes and hot dung breath steamed visibly and promised there would be no light banter while she tried to slay me. She got another kick in while I turned off the pain in my head and ramped up my speed, a quickening of neuromuscular function I always used to keep up with Leif in our sparring sessions. It didn’t leave much magic in my bear charm, but I hoped it would get me out of the spot I was in.

As she aimed another kick at my head, I set my arms underneath me and whipped my foot around to sweep her plant foot from under her. I leapt up and fought off a spell of dizziness as she collapsed, howling. I backpedaled to the west as she scrambled to her feet, and I took the few seconds I’d bought to assess the new tactical situation.

These five hexen were still months away from squeezing a demon child through their pelvis, but apparently they were now enjoying all the perks associated with carrying a casting ram to term—abilities awakened, perhaps, by the abrupt deaths of their brethren. They had increased strength and speed, senses that could penetrate my camouflage, and a newfound talent for throwing hellfire. The other four were busy hurling angry orange balls of it at Leif, and he cringed away from them instinctively, retreating back east, unable to recall or trust in the face of so much flame that the talisman I’d given him should render him fireproof.

Fragarach was still lodged in the brain of a dead witch, and if I was allowed the time, I could have created a binding between the leather on the hilt and the skin of my palm, causing it to fly to my hand in one of those sweet Skywalker moves. My attacker, however, had no intention of affording me the opportunity. She charged at me with a cry of apeshit rage, her hands extended and her fingers transforming visibly into blackened claws. Said claws raked at my belly, and I was glad I’d stepped back instead of counting on my flak vest to stop them, because they caught the first couple of layers of it and shredded it as if it were no more substantial than crepe paper. I’d hate to see what they’d do to intestines—especially mine.

I couldn’t counter weapons like that with nothing but my bare hands available. She wasn’t wearing leather like many of the others; her clothes were all synthetic fibers, dead and removed from nature, so I couldn’t pull or push her around with any bindings. My best option was to get out of her way and hope I could retrieve my sword.

She circled around to the center, though, cutting me off. The west end of the building loomed at my back, and a dangerous drop yawned to my left now as I pulled even with the broken glass wall through which the demon ram had plunged. The witch lunged at me, grinning evilly. She took a swipe at my head that forced me to dance back toward the window ledge, then another that I ducked under before scooting to the right, heading for the west wall. She was quick enough to shoot out a foot and catch me square on my bloodied left ear, though, and the detonation of pain sent me reeling into the corner. Through a ringing and buzzing haze, I dimly heard her cackling; apparently she had me where she wanted me—on the ground with nowhere to go.

Flames engulfed me, billowing sheets of it like hellish laundry waving in a dry wind, and I began to laugh too, as I struggled painfully to my feet in the midst of it. It was hot, no doubt, but my amulet protected me. I centered myself—quite a trick with my brains scrambled as they were—and peered through the fire at my target. She was only five feet away, her hands throwing fire and a demonic rictus painted on her face. I shuffled closer, set my left foot carefully—and winced at the bullet wound in my thigh—then I lashed out with a textbook karate kick to her gut, right where the demon grew in her center of gravity. She staggered back, snarling, and her hands quit gushing flame. She didn’t go down but instead stood still for a few seconds, dumbfounded that I didn’t look the least bit crispy or melty by now. I slid to my right, heading in the direction of my sword, and by the time she finally processed that, I already had a decent lead. Just as she tensed to spring after me, however, a familiar red hellwhip sailed through the open glass wall and wrapped itself around her hips. It yanked her screaming from the building, and I didn’t bother to go over and watch; I knew that Malina would finish her off, and there were still four more hexen to worry about.

They were giving Leif all he could handle—probably more, to be fair. He’d run away from their hellfire all the way around the building, circling the great hole in the floor where he’d thrown the golem’s head, and now, as I pulled Fragarach out of the witch’s skull with a loud schluck, the hexen had tacked about to come at him from several angles. Hellfire blazed at Leif from four different directions, and this time he could not dodge it. His inhuman scream ran cold fingers down my spine as I lost sight of him briefly in the conflagration. He came out of it shortly afterward, and while most of him was still untouched, the poufy sleeves of his linen shirt had ignited outside the thin skin of his talisman’s protection. The sleeves were now giving him trouble, as the flames licked up his arms and began to eat away at his pale, undead, and highly combustible flesh. I didn’t see Moralltach in either hand; he must have dropped it somewhere. He ran north, straight toward the massive hole in the wall where a grenade had blown out the glass, and I saw what he intended.

“No,” I breathed, knowing he couldn’t hear me. “That’s hard-packed clay.” He leapt from the third floor, shrouded in spreading flame, his shriek falling with him to the street below in search of earth to smother the fire. I hoped he’d find some in the landscaping between the building and the street; the fight wasn’t supposed to have driven him to such desperate measures. He’d have to dig through dry, clay-based dirt to quench those flames, and I didn’t like his odds.

Neither did I like mine. I was one Druid with a possibly fractured jaw, a missing ear, a wounded thigh, and very little magic against four hexen jazzed on demon energies. They turned as one and hissed at me, understanding that I’d eliminated one of their sisters somehow. They looked a whole lot stronger and faster than I felt.

Well, I thought wryly as I hefted Fragarach and prepared myself for their charge, at least I have my giant, mighty sword.

Inchoate battle cries erupted from their throats as they sprinted at me from maybe thirty yards away. Klaudia chose that moment to burst through the stairwell door, armed with a silver dagger in her left hand and looking like she’d just had fabulous sex somehow on her way up. She raised her right arm above her head—a gesture that seemed to precede most of the spells her coven cast in combat—and said, “Zorya Vechernyaya chroń mnie od zł a.” The immediate effect was a cone of purple light sheathing her form, much like Bogumila’s, but perhaps a bit more solid looking. The charging hexen pulled up and redirected their attention to Klaudia, whom they recognized as one of their old enemies. Two of them let loose with hellfire that bloomed from their arms like time-lapse orchids, and Klaudia calmly ignored them as it washed up against the purple light and found no passage through. The other two kept coming with a physical attack, and those received her special attention.

Her languid manner sloughed off, and suddenly she moved with liquid grace, crouching and then pivoting on her right foot as she swept the blade of her dagger across the eyes of the leader. She crossed her left foot in front of her right, then spun on it and leapt around in a sort of Chun-Li move, delivering first a right boot, then a left to the head of the second witch. Both hexen were down inside of two seconds, though I doubted they were dead. Their demon spawn would heal them up in no time.

Still, I admit that I gawked; I gaped, even. Malina had told me that her coven wasn’t trained for combat, yet Klaudia had just displayed stark evidence to the contrary. But then I thought she must be the exception to the rule; if the dark side of her coven had fought so well at Tony Cabin, more than two werewolves would have perished that night.

Shaking off my astonishment, I advanced to help, as the two downed hexen clambered to their feet and the flamethrowers were finally registering that nothing was burning inside that purple cone.

The answer to enemies who heal annoyingly fast is always, always decapitation. That is why swords will never go out of style. Fragarach sang through the neck of one of the flamethrowers, and I added a stab for Junior in the gut before the body fell. That reminded the remaining three that I was still around. Their minds and their jaws became unhinged as they bellowed hot roars of red ass-breath and charged me all at once, forgetting entirely about Klaudia. She hadn’t killed any of them yet, after all, while I’d been responsible for quite a number so far.

These last three had very little of their humanity left. They were old, old witches, and they’d been selling wee parcels of their souls to hell for so long that nothing but a single forlorn box of humanity was left in what was once a full warehouse. Something else occupied their skins now, something that made their eyes burn in their heads and black claws grow from their fingers.

I gave ground before the charge, whirling the blade in front of me in a defensive pattern. One, then two of their cursed faces dropped out of my vision, due no doubt to some guerrilla effort of Klaudia’s, but I still had one more to deal with—and she was faster than me.

Perhaps I’d slowed down. The pain of my injuries was building, for I’d done no real healing to any of them; I’d just continued fighting and probably exacerbated them in the process. The witch lost her left hand to Fragarach in order to get a good shot at me with her right. Her claws tore down through my flak vest at my left shoulder, ripping not only through it but also through my pectoralis muscles. I fell backward and she clung to me on the way down, trying to dig in farther with her nails, attempting to turn the claws up under my rib cage and do serious damage to my organs. Her left side, however, was unguarded and vulnerable. I shoved Fragarach sideways through her guts as she straddled me, twisting it madly to make sure the demon felt the blade. She convulsed spastically and vomited blood before her eyes finally cooled and she fell still. On top of me.

My left arm didn’t want to move. I tried and it hammered me with pain. I used the last of my stored magic to shut it off; I couldn’t think in a cloud of agony. I yanked Fragarach out of the witch—a messy business—then put it down long enough to shove her off me with my right hand. I sat up to see if any hexen were left.

There weren’t. Klaudia had eviscerated the last two, killing the demon spawn first, and then she’d slashed their throats for good measure. Now that the battle was over, her purple wards were gone and her waifish charisma was back. We were the only living creatures on a floor strewn with bodies, and yet she made it all cool somehow just by standing there. Even covered in blood, her expression had the sleepy, languid sensuality of an underwear model.

“Thanks for the assist,” I said. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”

She shrugged. “Vietnam.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

She grinned and her eyes sparkled mischievously.

“Yeah, I am.”

I shuddered as I came down off my adrenaline high and exhaustion set in. But when we heard a thin scream and the pale lavender glow outside the northeast windows abruptly winked out, we bolted for the stairs and hoped we wouldn’t be too late.