The demons approach, wading through patches of flame, and with each step, the screaming gets louder.
A gunshot rings through the air. The noise, violent and painful from only ten feet away, is still clean, ice water when I’m boiling, or scalding flame when I am freezing.
I’m aware of a figure in the door. When I look, my eyes won’t focus. My world spins around me, and I’m afraid at the core of my being that it will never right itself again. That, with a word, this demon has taken my reason and nothing can ever get it back.
The person in the door is female, athletic, not wearing a coat. She aims, and she fires again, and I want her to keep firing, to keep making my ears hurt and my vision swim, because it is better than what the demon is doing.
She says my name, and the sound is unfamiliar. She says something else, saying it to me, and for an instant, she is meat, venting sounds in odd pattern and cadence, and I know that she is a person, and I know that she is saying words, and even what those words are, but I am too far removed from everything to put it all together.
I try to move, but I very nearly slip on ground slick with blood.
I’ve just been given the ability to care, and now I’m left to watch and process it all as the demons have their way with us.
I can’t.
I can look at the lawyers, the ones that are still capable of standing after the fire are now a distance away, observing, utterly still.
The demons, on the other side of the street and steadily approaching.
I can’t face it. Nobody here can.
I think about using the Sight, looking inward, and following my counterpart as far as I can.
But this would be running. Admitting defeat.
Strange, how hard it is to ask.
Help, she asks.
The rummaging through my memories and experiences stops.
Where he once withdrew from what I saw and felt and heard, he now takes those stations again. He takes her eyes and ears and senses and equilibrium.
Rose blinked her eyes, once, twice, thrice. By the third time, they were no longer hers.
The world around her wasn’t bloody. It was icy, her foot had skidded on a spot where snow had been made too smooth and flat. The world was twisting, the gaps opening, things periodically stirring in those gaps, but that was something else altogether.
The scenery had been a trick of the senses, hallucination. An extension of the scream. It meant she still didn’t know what the she-demon with the great cubes of metal intersecting her body was capable of, but things at least made a degree of sense.
She could feel Blake’s pain and disorientation. Where she’d once clung for dear life to her reason and awareness, he was now weathering the storm. He was a filter, a barrier against the outside assault, in her eyes, her ears, and across her skin. Her face crawled, her skin felt like something moved beneath the surface, so many fingers sliding between epidermis and muscle. Like bruises or ink bleeding from a pen, patterns emerged on her wrists, between the sleeve of her coat and the bottom of her glove.
Branches and birds.
Just minutes ago, she’d outlined the benefits that the Barber had from possessing Johannes, that possession afforded one protections and the ability to blur the lines. If a demon possessed a human, it could dwell within and be largely human when dealing with that which would harm the demon, and emerge to be demon when it faced threats that would harm the human.
Blake exercised the same idea here.
“Rose!” Eva shouted, not for the first time. The witch hunter held a rifle.
Rose’s head snapped around. She wavered, a little disoriented.
Eva, Briar Girl, Roxanne, and the High Priest seemed to be the only ones who were weathering this onslaught. The demonic howling had brought everyone else to their knees. Even the sphinx lay on her side by the door.
The demons were so close. Right here.
“How do we stop them!?” Eva shouted. Somehow, Blake found the wherewithal to let the voice reach Rose, enduring the noise alone. Not even taking the respite of another sound to break up the terrible howling.
Rose hadn’t yet shaken the nausea that came with the original visions, or the sheer feeling of hopelessness. At the same time, she felt relieved, freed of the howl’s effect, almost giddy.
Blake’s efforts had helped, but she still lacked equilibrium. She wanted to laugh at Eva’s question.
How were they supposed to stop the demons?
She could remember an excerpt from the texts. It was framed like a joke, but not the sort anyone laughed at.
“The choir of darkness is the worst choir to deal with, because you can’t cast the light to banish them without also casting deeper shadows. You can’t use creation against them when you can’t even see.
“The choir of madness is the worst choir to deal with, because they’re opposed by symbols, symbols are subjective, and they steal all subjectivity from the subject.
“The choir of ruin is the worst choir to deal with, because they’re opposed by structure, and how was one supposed to construct when the foundation was ruined?”
And so on, all of the way through the various choirs. The Barber had proved that last point when it had destroyed Alister’s circle-in-progress.
The demons crashed into a crowd of Briar Girl’s feorgbold.
The female demon with the great iron cubes replacing much of her head, part of her torso, and the entirety of one hand and forearm swung the hand-cube into the crowd. Where flesh met iron, there was a mingling of bloodstains, scabbing, and rust. Sometimes the rust touched flesh, and sometimes it was the cube that was stained with scabs.
Briar Girl dropped, hard and fast enough that her hands didn’t even move to catch her or soften the blow as she met the floor.
Rose could see the Briar Girl’s familiar, a distance away, hunched over, rippling between forms, unable to settle, becoming more nightmarish by the second. It had been doing that since the howling started.
Now it calmed, and Briar Girl, lying prostrate, drew herself into a fetal position, nails biting into her arms as the howling assaulted her.
As Blake was doing, the spirit had absorbed the howling, initially. Now it was making the Briar Girl do the same, freeing it to act.
It flew at the demons like an eagle, with all the mass and ferocity of a bear, and the savagery of a mad wolf.
It evaded the swinging iron cube, and it tackled the howling demon, clawing deep.
Physical wounds wouldn’t do, but it tried.
“We need symbols!” Rose shouted. “Symbols for the howling one!”
“Can’t hear you!” Eva shouted, barely audible over the howling, even with Blake trying to dampen the noise, absorbing it himself.
The howling demon seized its attacker, and the nature spirit vibrated, screaming transmitted along the demon’s arms to its captive. The spirit moved at a speed and manner that made it distort.
There might be an answer in the midst of all of it, but Rose was still reeling. At her best, she could plan ahead a step, each step along the way. The problem was when she missed a step, as she had when the howling had been underway. Stride broken, she was scrambling to even begin finding an answer, and Blake was too preoccupied to supply one.
Only a few on the Jacob’s Bell side were still standing. Why?