curses or, just as often, loud wails and streams of tears. I wasn’t sure how much longer it would take before the spell was complete, but I doubted we had more than a few moments at this point. No time left for subtlety.
I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out what appeared to be an empty glass vial sealed with a black rubber stopper. “Cover your ears,” I warned Devona and Varney, and then I hurled the vial toward the mass of magic-users. It struck the ground at the feet of an Arcane woman who appeared to be wearing a gown made of shifting multicolored mist. She held her hands raised above her head and was chanting along with rest of the Arcane, but the moment the vial burst her voice – along with the voices of her fellow magikers – was drowned out by a high-pitched shrieking. The sound rapidly grew in volume until it seemed to fill the entire world, and the Arcane broke off their chanting and clapped their hands over their ears to block the deafening noise. It didn’t bother me – no nerveendings, remember? – but Devona pressed her palms tight against her ears to muffle the sound.
Given her sensitive vampire hearing, the noise must’ve been incredibly painful for her, but the only reaction she showed was a slight tightening of her lips. A tough gal, my Devona.
Varney didn’t bother to protect his ears. Maybe he was even tougher than Devona, or maybe his ears also had cyber implants and he was able to mentally turn down the volume on them. Either way, he simply watched and recorded the action unfolding before him.
The shrieking only lasted a few seconds, and when it was over, the Arcane slowly removed their hands from their ears and turned to look at us, confused.
“That was a gift from a friend of mine named Scream Queen,” I said, shouting so that they could hear me over the ringing in their ears. “She was nice enough to bottle a bit of her voice for me. It probably didn’t do too much permanent damage to your hearing, but it did manage to shut you all up long enough for us to get your attention.” Scream Queen was a banshee and lead singer of Kakaphonie, one of Nekropolis’ hottest pop bands.
Devona and I, along with the rest of the Midnight Watch, had helped her out once, and she’d been so grateful that – after paying Devona her fee – she gave me a few of her screams. How the banshee had managed to store them in a glass vial was beyond me, but I was grateful that it had worked. Up until the vial had shattered, I hadn’t been a hundred percent sure that it would.
A middle-aged Arcane man – dressed as an Elizabethan nobleman in doublet and breeches, complete with a broad ruffled collar – stepped forward and scowled at me.
“This is none of your business, Richter,” he said, speaking with an accent that sounded more Brooklyn than English. “This is between us and the hellrats.”
The demons, who had begun recovering from the effects of the binding spell the moment the Arcane stopped chanting, had risen to their feet. They snarled upon hearing the derogatory term and fixed baleful gazes on the Arcane man, many of which were literally smoldering with hate.
I was mildly surprised he knew who I was, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Even for Nekropolis, I’m a one-of-a-kind monster. And I had garnered a certain amount of fame over the last few months.
A demon spokesperson stepped forward then.
The creature appeared to be formed from lumpy mounds of yellowish fat, making its gender impossible to determine, but when an orifice opened in its rough approximation of a head, the voice that came out was distinctly female, if a bit liquidy.
“You don’t speak for us, wand-waver,” she snarled.
“Now, now, children,” I said. “Name-calling isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
“They started it!” the Elizabethan warlock said.
“We were minding our business in the club when a group of them came in and told us that we were no longer welcome in the Sprawl.”
“No, your people started it!” the lumpy demon said. “Several of you materialized inside our club and enchanted the music system so that instead of disco it began playing chamber music!” She shuddered at the thought, and a number of her fellow demons did likewise. I thought both types of music sounded equally horrid, but then there’s no accounting for taste, especially when it comes to demons.
I glanced back at Shamika and Scorch. The demoness had shaken off the effects of the binding spell, but she remained standing on the sidewalk next to the girl. It wasn’t like Scorch to hang back when there was trouble, and I guessed she was suppressing her more violent urges because she didn’t want to leave Shamika unprotected. When it comes down to it, Scorch is a pretty decent sort for a demon, not that I’d ever tell her that. She’d probably set me on fire for insulting her.
“All right, so you guys don’t like each other,” I said. “Now that we’ve established that, why don’t you return to your respective clubs and get back to boogieing down or whatever the hell it is you people do for fun that doesn’t involve trying to kill each other.”
Lumpy looked at me. At least, I think she did. It was hard to tell since she had a complete absence of facial features. “Don’t you keep up with current events, zombie? Their people destroyed both of the Sprawl’s bridges!”
The warlock sneered at her. “Only because your people have been kidnapping magic-users!”
“I know you Darkfolk are only too happy to have an excuse to tear into one another, but are you really this stupid?” I asked. “The Weyward Sisters destroyed the bridges. I ought to know: I was on one of them when they did it. And as for the disappearances, so far there’s no proof who’s behind them. But I can tell you this much: whoever’s behind this, all Demonkin didn’t abduct the magic-users, and all Arcane didn’t destroy the bridges. So why fight with each other?”
Lumpy and the Elizabethan warlock looked at me for a moment and then looked at each other.
“He makes a lot of sense, doesn’t he?” the warlock said.
“That he does,” Lumpy agreed.
They fell silent for a moment.
“I hate people who make sense,” Lumpy said.
“Me too.” The warlock pointed a finger at me, and a beam of white energy shot forth and struck me on the chest. At the same instant the warlock spoke a single word: “ Discerpo! ”
I didn’t feel anything, but I suddenly found myself unable to support my own weight. My legs fell out from under me, and I tumbled to the ground. My head hit the asphalt and bounced a couple times before coming to a stop. My face was pointed toward the rest of my body, which lay in a haphazard pile, but I could see that my hands and feet were no longer connected to their corresponding limbs.
Both the Arcane and Demonkin laughed at my predicament, and I supposed I should be grateful that I’d managed to unify them, if only for a moment and not exactly in the way that I’d hoped to.
Devona knelt by my head. “Are you OK, darling?”
“I’m fine.” I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “After all, it’s not like this is the first time I’ve lost my head.”
The warlock grinned in delight. “Did you like that? It’s a spell of my own devising, one designed to split a person apart. While it’s nothing more than an inconvenience for you, it’s usually fatal – not to mention a hell of a lot messier – for living folks.”
His grin took on a nasty edge. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
He pointed his finger at Devona and shouted, “ Discerpo! ”
As before, a beam of light lanced forth from his finger, and even if I hadn’t fallen to pieces, I knew I wouldn’t have been fast enough to get Devona out of the way in time. But just as he had at the Bridge of Nine Sorrows, Varney moved with incredible speed, grabbed hold of Devona’s shoulders, and snatched her out of the beam’s path before it could strike her. With nothing to stop it, the beam of mystic power continued streaking through the air toward the section of sidewalk where Scorch and Shamika stood. Scorch tried to get the girl out of the way, but the beam was moving too fast and it struck Shamika. She was momentarily wreathed in sparkling light, and then she fell in upon herself, collapsing onto the ground in what appeared to be hundreds of small pieces.
I didn’t have time to wonder why the spell had affected her differently than it had me. Scorch howled with a mixture of fury and sorrow, and she spun to face the warlock. She began running toward him, her teenage girl guise fading as she assumed her true fire demon form, her clothes vanishing as her body outgrew them. The warlock looked momentarily taken aback – the sight of a fully grown and enraged fire demon coming at you tends to do that – but then he pointed his finger (which was only shaking a little) at Scorch, readying to use his separation magic on her.
Varney still had hold of Devona, and though she struggled to free herself of his grip – no doubt so she could
