He took off, and in the doing, he stirred sparks and flame.
Fire poured off him in a steady stream, splashing out onto snow and street.
A hundred feet away, they could still hear the deep, powerful laughter.
Ms. Lewis gestured, and Rose’s Sight could see the connections forming, snapping out, lashing around Evan.
He slipped free as if he were oiled, turned, and let the fire spill down over top of the lawyers and the one female demon toward the front. It fell on and around Ms. Lewis.
The Elder Sister was right behind, gesturing, extinguishing the fire just past the door.
The Sphinx and Briar Girl were the next ones out. Briar Girl gestured, and hands reached out of the snow, figures raising themselves up and out. Her familiar perched on her shoulder, then leaped down, swelling in size, taking on feral qualities.
Evan’s laugh rang through the town. Where the effect that kept the city dark still lingered, his movements created light, parting clouds as he rose higher, wings spread.
He flew past them again. Flames dropped, pouring over another rank of practitioners and devils. A second attempt at binding him failed.
Rose felt Blake stir, warning.
Can’t let him go out in flames, she thought.
She joined the next group out through the doors.
Have to find a gap. Or make one.
Enemy practitioners burned and continued to burn, staggering or crawling away from the fire. Here and there, an enemy practitioner simply burned, and the fires kept them burning, locking them in place.
But the demons – the thin one with the clothes struggled, backing away, but the others remained unaffected.
The one with the cloak of flesh opened its mouth wider, and it screamed.
All rational thought and sanity fled Rose’s mind at the sound, and she wasn’t alone in that. Nowhere close to alone. Even Evan the firebird plummeted from the sky.
The last coherent thought she had was a realization. She’d anticipated that the lawyers would make them turn back, breaking the charge before crushing the residents of Toronto and Jacob’s Bell underfoot.
Her mistake had been assuming that the lawyers would make it a choice in any way, shape or form.
16.05
Cannot truly think, can only observe. Detached, while my body staggers, hands on a person’s back, as they kneel with bare fingers of their one hand clutching snow. A table for me to lean on.
The streets run with blood. Horizon to horizon, land to sky. I watch, we watch, a broken portion of my Self and I, and we see it flow and spurt from cracks in between things. From the places where tree meets snow and sidewalk meets snowbank. Between clouds and sky. Not clean blood, not fresh. Something rank and clotted, oozing from the cracks. Where it flows, the gaps are getting wider.
It assaults the eyes like the demon’s howl assaults the ears and mind. The howl pulls, tugs me from sense and reality, makes me ever more detached, my grip on things slipping, one metaphorical finger after another losing its hold. The scene of a town’s streets literally running with clotted blood makes the world a place I don’t want to be.
That shattered part of me that scrapes me raw inside has withdrawn from my eyes and ears and awareness, leaving me alone to fight this. Pulled away from the world by the ears and pushed away by the eyes.
One demon burns, still. Another two advance, while their enemy is insensate. One to split the head in two, its sound like axe blades striking each ear, cutting deep enough to touch grey matter. Another to break the world around us.
The imps have taken to the air. Circling overhead, unwilling to get between their betters and us.
The demons come, and with every movement they promise that whatever torment we experience now, we’ll experience worse when they have us.
Everyone who stepped outside the church has fallen. Even the powerful ones. They kneel and lie face down in viscera and old blood.
When I move my head, my hair gets in the way, and my mind can’t keep up with the way things move as my eyes travel, stuck one step behind.
Cold wind touches tracks of tears I hadn’t realized existed.
I hear voices. Some inside the church, where people are still protected. Even with that protection, they are struggling, protesting, joining their screams to the howls.
The smell is so foul it fills my nose and lungs. I’m certain that if I swallow, I will vomit. If I breathe too deep, or look too closely at anything, I will lose it.
Can’t think, only observe, can’t gather my faculties to move. No help is being offered, though I can feel my other inside, rummaging, getting more frantic with every passing moment. Emotionless, dead, it is still more lively than I am.