rest of the team follow them in. Meera and I bring up the rear, Antoine and Pip ahead of us. The bloodshed sickens me. I don’t mind slaughtering demons, but these are
Cool inside. Air-conditioned. Brightly lit. Liam and Terry are already at the end of the room and halfway through the door to the next room or corridor. No sign of anybody else. These are living quarters. Bunks, cabinets, racks for clothes, photos of models and relatives pinned to the walls. Those we hit outside must have been relaxing. They wouldn’t have been expecting an attack. I wish they hadn’t reacted so swiftly. If we’d caught them in here, we wouldn’t have had to kill so many.
“You OK?” Meera asks as we wait for the call to advance.
“Not really,” I groan.
“I know it’s hard,” she says quietly. “Try not to think of them as humans but as demonic assistants.”
“But they probably know nothing about the Demonata,” I protest.
“They knew about the seventeen Lambs they killed,” Meera snaps. “These aren’t innocents.”
“But they’re still people. I don’t feel comfortable killing like this.”
Meera smiles wanly. “That’s a good thing. Try and hold on to that attitude. The world’s packed with too many trigger-happy goons.”
“Like Shark?” I grin shakily.
Meera’s face puckers into something between a scowl and a smirk. Before she can answer, one of the soldiers—I think it’s Spenser—shouts affirmatively and we’re moving forward again, further into the heart of the compound.
We don’t encounter much resistance. The occasional guard or two. We’re able to overpower most of them and leave them handcuffed, alive. We only face one real obstacle, when several guards block a long corridor and fill it with furniture. They have a great vantage point. If we try to rush them, we’ll be cut down before we get halfway. But Shark isn’t fazed. He calls Pip forward. She studies the piled-up furniture, makes a few calculations, then takes off her rucksack and roots through it. Produces a small round object. It looks like a thick CD.
“Who’s good with Frisbees?” Pip asks.
“Here,” Liam says. He takes the disc, aims, then glances at Pip. “Do I need to press anything?”
“No. But if you don’t throw it quickly, you’ll lose an arm.
Liam yelps, then sends the disc skimming down the corridor. It hits the mound of furniture near the base and explodes on contact. The desks, chairs and cabinets fly backwards, obliterating the guards behind them. We’re on the scene seconds later, Shark’s troops handcuffing any survivors. Stephen bends over a seriously wounded man. Starts to cuff him, then pauses, studies his injuries, sets him down and presses the barrel of his gun to the man’s head. I look away but I can’t drown out the retort of the muffled shot.
We push on, the air thick with the stench of scorched wood, blood and whatever was in Pip’s bomb. Antoine’s still praying. I almost feel like joining in.
The corridors and rooms all look the same to me, but the soldiers know exactly where they’re going. A couple of minutes later, we’re at the door of Prae Athim’s office. There are no markings to confirm that, but Timas is certain. He steps ahead of us and raps softly. “Knock, knock,” he calls. “Anybody home?”
He pushes the door open and we spill in.
A large room. Grey walls. Harsh fluorescent lights. A single bed. A black, high-backed leather chair in the centre of the floor. Someone’s sitting in it, facing away from us. I can only see the person’s lower legs, but I’m sure it’s Prae Athim.
“Hey!” Shark barks. No answer. He looks at us. Nods at Pip to advance and check for explosives. She creeps forward, skirting the chair, pistol trained on the person in it. As she angles to the front, she pauses, face crinkling. Shaking her head, she stoops, checks the chair for wires and devices, then puts her hand on one of the arms and swivels it around.
I was right. It’s Prae Athim. But, to my bewilderment, she’s strapped down, a strip of tape across her mouth, incapable of movement or sound.
We gawp at the sight. Prae Athim glares at us. Shark gulps, then strides forward and grabs hold of one end of the tape over her mouth. Before he can tear it free, somebody shouts a weird word. Whipping round, I spot Antoine Horwitzer, arms wide, grinning crazily. He yells a couple more words and the air shimmers behind him. Too late, I realise the nature of the trap we’ve walked into. I start to roar a warning, but the window opens before I can.
It’s an enormous dark window. As I stare at it, horrified, a deformed, miserable-looking creature slithers through. It has the general shape of a woman, but her flesh is bubbling with sores and boils. Pus and blood seep from wounds all over her body. There’s a rancid stink. The eyes are swimming bowls of madness in a ruined face. The mouth is a jagged gash. I know who this abomination is from Dervish’s description, but I would have recognised her anyway.
“Hello, Grubbs,” the thing that was once Juni Swan gurgles. “Have you missed me?”
There’s no time to answer. Right behind Juni, dozens of guards file in three abreast, weapons cradled to their chests. Spreading out, they take aim. Before a stunned Shark and his team can react, an officer bellows a command and the air around us is ripped apart by a lethal hail of bullets.
OPEN SEASON
Without magic we’d have perished instantly. But magical energy streams through the window, as it always does when a passageway between universes is opened. Tapping into that instinctively, I throw up a barrier between us and the guards. The bullets mushroom against it and drop harmlessly to the floor. As more troops flood into the room, I strengthen the barrier and start thinking about ways to make it a one-way shield, so that we can fire at them.
Before I can do that, Juni barks a short command. The window pulses, then snaps out of existence. The flow of magic stops, and though a strong residue is left in the air, I now have to work off a dwindling supply. Altering the shield would take a lot out of me. Too much.
“How long can you hold that?” Shark yells.
“A couple of minutes,” I guess.
“Pip!” he roars.
“On it,” she mutters, darting to the rear of the wall to my right. There’s a corridor on the other side which bypasses the section of the building we came through. Shark was keeping it in reserve in case we needed an escape route.
As Meera frees Prae Athim, the guards on the other side of the shield part to allow Juni Swan and a smirking Antoine Horwitzer to advance. They come to within a couple of centimetres of the barrier. Juni smiles crookedly at the shield, then at me.
“Nice work, Grubbs,” she gurgles, her voice a hoarse mockery of what it once was. “But what more can you do in the absence of demonic energy?”
“As much as you,” I snarl.
“Possibly,” she chuckles. “But I don’t have to do anything. Not with so many finely armed humans to depend on.”
“Did you pay them much?” Shark sneers.
“Antoine recruited them on my behalf,” she says.
“Most humans have a price,” Antoine chuckles. “I’ve always been adept at calculating such sums.”
“I’ll have your head for this, Horwitzer!” Prae Athim screams, ripping the tape from her mouth and thrusting a finger at Antoine. “You’re finished!”
“Don’t be silly,” he coos. “You can’t do anything to me. Your reign has come to its natural end. I run the Lambs now.”
“Why this way?” she snarls. “You were always power-hungry, but you’d have squeezed me out eventually. Why betray us to monstrous fiends like this?”
“Careful,” Juni growls. “You don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
