Fallen Reign (Sins of the Father 1)

I craned my neck to look for signs of the interlopers. My blood ran cold. “Oh. That sure as hell isn’t night security.”

There was a group of people headed directly for us, maybe seven of them at a quick count, unless they had more hiding out in the trees for an ambush. That was the sneaky kind of shit demons loved to pull. How did I know they were demons, you ask? Because that last woman from back at the alley – the one who’d pelted me with fireballs – was leading their charge, like the tip of a flaming arrowhead.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “No way we can outrun them. They’ve got us cornered. We’ll have to fight our way out.”

Florian cracked his knuckles, making a sound halfway between the popping of joints and the creaking of dried tree bark. “Bring it,” he growled.

Good thing we had a goddess on our side. I turned around to ask Artemis for her help, but all that remained was a puddle of moonlight. Artemis and all of her moving boxes were gone.

See what I mean? Goddamn entities.

14

It wasn’t even a question of how friendly or close you were to entities. Everyone I knew in the arcane underground had told me that the entities returned loyalty despite how flighty and fickle they could be. I’d seen what Artemis could do in a fight. She could have dropped these demon fools in seconds.

And yet, there we were, two against seven. Wait, nope, nine. There were two shorter ones mixed in with the group. Great. Just great.

“I don’t like these odds,” I murmured to Florian as I began to tap into the energies of the Vestments.

“We can take ’em,” he said, scratching the end of his nose, looking just a little too relaxed for my taste.

That was the good thing about having friends to count on, an actual support group. We had people to fill different roles. The nine demons slowly approached us in a semicircle. What we could have used was someone who could blast their asses back to hell with a few dozen fireballs. I could fight up close with the Vestments, and Florian was sturdy enough to punch several lights out, maybe even break some spines. We could handle the melee. We needed ranged specialists. Covering fire, essentially, but our artillery had already skipped off in a beam of goddamn moonlight.

Ugh. Entities. I held my hand out just as a golden sword materialized between my fingers. No maces this time, in spite of how much I enjoyed using them. There were too many enemies here to risk leaving anyone alive.

The first fireball came whistling towards us, aimed directly between me and Florian.

“Scatter,” he shouted, diving out of the way as the fireball exploded into a massive wave of flames. Clever. The fire-woman was trying to divide us. Sure enough, their pack split into two. Four of them, fire-woman included, chased after Florian. The other five closed in on me.

“Not fair,” I shouted, beating a hasty retreat.

I hit the outer wall of a hedge maze. Maybe that was a good thing. I had to fight with my back against something, to avoid being surrounded. Of course, that also meant a better chance of being cornered, then captured. I cursed under my breath, turning to face the five as I stopped short of the enormous hedge looming above us.

Where the hell was Raziel when you needed him? Wouldn’t he have special angel powers he could use to drive the demons off? And who was it that kept sending these assholes after us?

I flourished my sword at the demons. “How many more of your brimstone-smelling asses do I have to send back to hell?”

If one of them had taunted me back, I would have gotten pissed. But none of them answered, even as I grunted further threats, and that just drove me over the edge. Everyone has their limits, and not knowing who or what I was up against was making my blood boil. How many years did nephilim even live? How many more of these demons would I encounter in my lifetime? Under my breath, I cursed Artemis, and Beatrice Rex, and my father.

Two of the demons wielded weapons, if you could call them that, their baseball bats gleaming in the moonlight. The other three were unarmed, which always made me so much more cautious. That meant that they were potentially armed with spells. Someone who knows magic is a walking, loaded gun, after all. But the three demons brandished their hands, lifting them into the air, fingers pointed up. Their nails grew longer, and longer, until they had sprouted into slick, enormous claws.

Damn it. I knew I was right. If the thing that wants to kill you isn’t holding a weapon, it’s got something much worse in store. Always.

The five demons closed in on me, bats and bare hands tipped with kitchen knives at the ready. One demon got too close, swiping at my chest with long, sharp talons. I slashed in an outward crescent, severing the demon’s head from his body in a single blow. The armaments of the Vestments were lightweight, and beautiful, and elegant, but they could probably cut through anything. And I was fighting with the weight of my own anger driving each of my strikes. I was furious, the glyphs on my skin burning hot in response, my torso lighting up the gardens like a firefly. The other demons staggered away from me as the headless body of their former friend toppled onto the grass.

“Give me the name of your prince,” I roared.

Silence. Pure silence. My blood rushed to my temples. Around me, the trees and their leaves glowed gold from the light of my sigils. Something like blind rage overtook me, and I fell upon the demons, hacking, slashing, razing through them with my sword. One demon fell, then another, the stink of their disintegrating husks corrupting the perfect floral freshness of the arboretum.

Emboldened by my kills, I bulldozed forward, closing in on the last of the demons, lifting my sword overhead with both hands. But before I could bring the blade down, something red flashed before my eyes. I cried out as a white-hot pain ripped into my skin, followed by a quickly cooling wetness. One of the claws had caught me in the chest. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a gleam of horrible crimson drawn in an ugly gash across my torso, seeping into the dark of my torn jacket. My fingers tightened even harder around my sword. I was going to make this bastard pay.

But I didn’t reach him in time, with either a fist or my sword. The demon launched into the air, lifted by some bizarre force. I caught the shape of the thing looped around his leg, as long and as huge around as an elephant’s trunk, only green, the color of new saplings. Then another vine snaked out of the bushes, then another, until four tendrils had restrained each of the demon’s four limbs.

The vines pulled, all at the same time.

The man screamed. So did I. Frankly, I was shocked. I’d never see a man ripped into four pieces before, even if it was just a demon’s husk. I backed away as more vines reached for the last of the demons, snaking around his torso, then squeezing hard enough to snap his spine. I shouldn’t have looked. I should have covered my ears. I knew I was going to have nightmares.

I brandished my sword in front of me, wary, bordering on terrified by this new threat, until I found the source of the sentient vines. Florian walked towards me calmly, the grass around him wavering and bending as if dozens upon dozens of snakes were slithering through. His shoes were gone, his feet bare, his eyes glowing bright green. This was him. This was all him.