“I will always have the dead!” the Wizard cried, holding out his arms to his zombies.
“No. You will not.” It was Asha. He’d come. My shoulders slumped with relief as he swept into the room. I handed him the bone. He held it up. “This is the ohm of Delir Kazimi. Let it hold all his power forevermore.” The Wizard fell to his knees as a black cloud that buzzed like an angry nest of wasps swirled out of his mouth and into the ohm. For a moment the room filled with pressure. So much that my ears popped. Asha folded the bone into his large hand. Squeezed. And when he opened it, all that was left filtered onto the carpet as harmless white powder. The pressure released. The Wizard’s zombies fell to the floor, finally truly dead. And we all stared as Asha laid his hand on Kazimi’s forehead.
“I am the Amanha Szeya, and I say you are still too dangerous to live.”
“Asha” — I pointed to the windows — “the mahghul.” If they were at the glass, they were also trying to find another way in. It wouldn’t be long until they joined us in this room.
“Be ready to fight,” he told me. I drew Grief and prepped it to fire. Looked to Vayl and the team.
Do you see them?
Vayl nodded, but the others shook their heads. They’d be visible soon enough, however. As soon, in fact, as we made one of them bleed.
“Don’t freak when a bunch of nasty little spikey-faced gargoyles seem to appear out of nowhere,” I told them. “Just kill them. Okay?”
They nodded.
Asha drew a long crystalline blade from his robe. It looked otherworldly, none too sharp, and I briefly considered offering my bolo for the job. But Asha had started murmuring some ceremonial-sounding words and I hesitated to interrupt.
In the few moments since Vayl and I had stripped him of his veneer and Asha had rescinded his powers, Kazimi seemed to have shriveled. He knelt, unmoving, at Asha’s feet, shoulders bowed, eyes staring off into the distance. That look never changed. Not when Asha’s chant gained power and he grabbed Delir by the hair. Not when he set the tip of the blade against Kazimi’s face five separate times, drawing a sort of star across it. Not even when he cut his throat.
As soon as the body dropped the mahghul came pouring through the doorway. I had just enough time to take a deep, calming breath before they were on me.
I fired both clips and half of a third before I could no longer see. One of the little bastards had covered my face. Remembering how the hanged woman had gone to her death, I holstered Grief, grabbed the mahghul with both hands, and yanked as hard as I could. I lost some hair off the back of my head, but I could see again.
I threw the mahghul against the wall. Heard its neck snap as I pulled my bolo. I skewered the mahghul attached to my right leg, stabbed the one on my left through the side, and then Vayl was there. Pulling them off me. His face a frenzied mask of blood and gore.
“I thought they had you,” he gasped as he broke a mahghul’s back.
“Me too.”
We went to help Asha, whose entire torso was a writhing mass of mahghul. Stabbing, slashing, sometimes just grabbing and punching, we worked him free. On the other side of the room I could see our guys were faring much better. The mahghul didn’t appreciate Bergman’s weapons a bit. In fact, the Manxes seemed to repel them. They’d leap at Cam or Cole, but as soon as they touched that new alloy they’d jump away, as if singed.
“Asha,” I said as the last of his mahghul hit the ground. “Look.”
We watched as one of the monsters charged Natchez from the right. He was shooting off to his left, so by the time he swung the Manx around the mahghul was nearly on him. It jumped up, touched the gun barrel, and somersaulted backward.
“What is that?” Asha asked.
“Bergman will never tell you,” I said. “But I’ll bet I can have him make you some armor out of it.”
Asha’s eyes gleamed. “How soon?”
“How about right after his vacation?”
“Excellent.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
F
inally. Celebration. We were all back in that cheery yellow kitchen, drinking tea and wishing it was beer, but happy nonetheless. Somehow fighting the mahghul together had negated their ability to drain us emotionally. Dave and Cassandra stood arm in arm, gazing into each other’s eyes every few minutes as if they’d found the world’s greatest treasure. And in between we related our adventures.
Dave and Jet had overcome the reavers easily. One of them had been asleep. The other was so engrossed in the movie they were airing he didn’t hear them until it was far too late.
“So we duct taped them to some chairs,” Jet said. “And man, they did not want to cooperate. But we kept asking them questions, and their third eyes kept straying right to the spots we needed. You could tell they really wanted to bang their heads against the wall before it was all over. It was hilarious!”
As Cole began relating their tales I thought about those eyes. They’d been designed to entrap the souls of a reaver’s victim until it could be transported to hell. Where I’d been myself, and had seen another pair of eyes quite unlike those of the reavers. They’d haunted me from the shadows of my psyche for so long, I’d all but given up on identifying their source. But maybe, if I replayed that scene in my head one more time . . .
Just before the demons had seen us, they’d been talking about Samos trying to make a deal with the Magistrate so he could watch the pound-of-flesh ceremony. But he hadn’t been willing to sign the contract allowing him temporary-visitation rights, because it would’ve required him to give up something precious. I was just getting an image of that something when the demons identified us. All I’d seen were its eyes, glowing, as if in the lights of a vehicle.
Forget about the eyes for a second, Jaz. You’re so damn fixated it’s nauseating. What else was there? Anything? At all?
I thought hard. It had all happened so fast, it was tough to remember. Just a split second really.
I closed my own eyes. Relaxed.
Don’t create anything. Don’t try to see. Just be in that moment one more time.
Demons talking. Gossiping, really.
Did you hear? No, you’re kidding!
Their words creating images, like a movie, right in front of me. Yeah, yeah, there were the eyes. And . . . something more. A rough outline, darker than the dark, of a furry body. Four legs. A tail.
“Holy crap!” I opened my eyes, realized the room had gone silent.
“Jasmine?” Vayl crooked an are-you-all-right eyebrow at me.
“I just figured it out! The reason I was willing to go to hell with Raoul. Give up shuffling cards. It was for the chance to find out what is more precious to Samos than anything in the world now that his
avhar
’s dead.”
Vayl’s eyes glittered with excitement. He knew what this could mean. Leverage of the best kind against our worst enemy. “What is it?” he asked.
“His dog. He wouldn’t give it up. Not even to come to hell. Meet with the Magistrate. Maybe arrange himself a real power play.” And we all knew how much Samos adored power.
Vayl rubbed his hands together. “How do you put it? This is major. This is . . . this is very exciting, Jasmine. We could really get to him with this.”
“Yeah. So start thinking.”
Everybody began talking at once, which gave me the cover I needed to slip out of the room. Asha had offered to take care of the reavers for me, but I felt like I should be the one to deal with them. My actions had brought them to this place, after all. In a roundabout way, okay, but still. As I suited up for one last job, I thought back to my farewell with the Amanha Szeya. He’d come such a long way in the short time I’d known him. The sad-dog look had fallen from his face, to be replaced with a quiet, proud courage. He stood taller, smiled wider, spoke surer than I’d ever known him to before.